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In news that went mostly unnoticed at the time but has since picked up some steam, Peter Singer was sued pro se by a woman who alleged they had an affair twenty years ago and that he's had affairs with many other women, including many co-authors, over his career. Her lawsuit was pretty transparently weak due to statute of limitations issues and the affair being consensual--the "damages" she claimed were the loss of the house her ex-fiance bought as he was breaking up with her due to the affair--but the claims in it are nothing short of a terrible look for Singer: propositioning and sleeping with married and unmarried women in his field over a long period of time, giving career benefits (eg coauthorship) to affair partners, misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife and lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs, and more. It was dismissed after a demurrer claiming no actionable claims was granted: that is, no facts were actually discovered or litigated.
In terms of hard evidence, she included several emails between Singer and her in the filing, one of which included him confessing to her that he had multiple other apparent affair partners. They collaborated on at least four op-eds during the affair or its immediate aftermath, and she contributed a chapter to a book he wrote, so it does appear that her portrayal of career benefits for affair partners has some substance.
I read the court filings and have contacted the parties involved; I'm working on a more detailed article about the whole thing. If you'd like to see the court files yourself, the relevant court is here. Search for case number 22CV01792. The accuser also wrote a shorter essay about it on her website.
While she should not be viewed as a fully reliable narrator, the evidence suggests the truth of her claims that they had an affair, that he admitted to her he was having other affairs, and that she got career benefits from the affair. It's a bit mysterious to me that nobody has touched the story, but at least until a somewhat obscure December YouTube video, about the only place I can find the allegations having been discussed is a quiet EA forum thread.
It caught my attention because of that lack of attention despite its clear newsworthiness. It's the sort of thing I think is easy, but incorrect, to dismiss as mere gossip: Peter Singer is one of the leading ethicists of our time, and I believe his behavior follows from his ethics in visible, important ways. More specifically, I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights.
I don't think it's the sort of thing that should, or will, define Singer. I do, however, think that it's the sort of thing that should be part of his life story and so far has conspicuously not been.
There is something ironic about an ethicist cheating on his wife, but I do think it's mostly gossip; Peter Singer is well known, but I don't think that he's actually that influential- EA's might pay attention to him, sure, I'll buy that, but it seems like outside of that bubble, he's mostly known as one of those guys who publishes ethics papers which are straight nuts. Like Walter Block, just on the other side of the coin.
I have no idea who Walter Block is without looking him up. Singer is one of a small handful of living philosophers to make it into standard intro to philosophy courses. He is the only living person in the lede of Wikipedia’s article on utilitarianism and is, I would guess, virtually universally considered the greatest living utilitarian. He’s made Time top 100 lists and received a long list of public honors.
By any measure, he is one of the most influential ethicists of all time, certainly one of the most influential living ones. Few people’s ideas have shaped and shifted the public idea of morality as his have. He is almost singularly influential in his field.
I absolutely agree.
Direct quote from Singer: "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".
This is why contemporary academic philosophy is bankrupt. The most influential living ethicist has concocted a pseudo-formal structure that result in infanticide being on the table, and no one has stopped to say, "Hey, that's fucking bananas."
I'm a big fan of engaging with potentially "dangerous" ideas. Not to try and figure out how to prove them actually valid, but as a means of understand the limits, logical extremes, and unforseen weaknesses in one's own argument or viewpoint. When you end up holding one of these crazy ideas, however, that's when you have to go back to the first draft and try to unravel the bad thread.
Singer, instead, sits in supreme comfort in his abstracted-away EA fantasy world where an affair isn't an affair per se and when a living human isn't really human-y enough.
There are legitimate reasons to deny personhood to infants. Some scientists have determined that babies do not achieve sapience until several months after birth; and some moral frameworks attribute little or no moral value to beings that have never achieved sapience, regardless of their status as humans or as probable future sapients.
I think someone else in these threads recently mentioned that, for most people, sapience is not the only factor in personhood, and humanness is a major factor as well. Those moral frameworks are reasonable as well. Holders of frameworks in that second set should not denigrate holders of moral frameworks in the first set as "crazy" or "monstrous" ( @ChickenOverlord )—at least in the view of this forum's censors.
How do you objectively measure "sapience"?
If it is discrete, what's the dividing line?
If is is continuous, this leads to the conclusion that the "less sapient" are less human than the more sapient.
If this is your position, exactly where is the cutoff point for disenfranchising already living humans from their right to remain alive?
If you can identify that point, where is the point (necessarily further upstream) wherein we disenfranchise humans in a democracy from being able to vote because of their substandard sapience?
tl;dr Eugenics and explicit genetic tyranny all the way down.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? (I know you consider that to be the case, this was a rhetorical question)
Modus ponens and modus tollens applies. I can answer each of those questions, I have internally satisfactory cutoffs (and I do not consider it a failing if they're not universally popular, merely saddening), and I am okay with arbitrary cutoffs, at least where a more principled cost-benefit analysis isn't worth it.
Someone born a meter away over the border from the US is a Mexican citizen, and nobody I know claims that they should be considered 50:50 each for that reason alone. Arbitrariness, while ideally avoided, is acceptable.
I will bite every bullet I must bite, and not one more or less (while lead poisoning is less of a concern, I wish to retain my teeth). You have no recourse to someone who does that, short of force of arms, and that's a symmetrical weapon and deprecated by civilized society for good reason.
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