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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So the goal of the episode today is to track the changes in the ethical views of the philosopher Peter Singer throughout the different stages of his career. Peter Singer, being a man who's considered to be one of the most influential philosophers talking about ethics today. He's written books that have sold millions of copies on everything from animal rights to end-of-life care to effective altruism.
But one of the most interesting things about Peter Singer as a philosopher is just how much his views have changed over the years. What I mean is, at the beginning of his career, Peter Singer was somebody who didn't believe in moral facts. Morality was the kind of thing to him where it couldn't possibly be true or false, no matter how hard you tried. Whereas these days, as a 78-year-old man, after 50 years of thinking and writing about this kind of stuff, he's gotten to a place today where he thinks that morality is actually something that is objectively true.
Now, how did that whole transformation take place? Today's episode is the story of it. And by the end of this story, hopefully along the way, I'm going to do my best to do three things. One, the story of his moral evolution will be a great excuse for us to talk about several different important modern ethical approaches that people are holding these days. It'll allow you to see if any of these align with you.
Second thing is, I hope by talking about these different types of meta-ethics and normative ethics and how they combine together to make up an approach to morality, my hope is that it'll allow you to have a frame of reference to understand your own ethical evolution better, whatever that's going to look like in your case.
And the last thing I hope this episode can do is to serve as an inspiration. For anybody out there who's truly curious about knowing this world around them, people that want to honor this world they live in, the true complexity of it, the type of person whose set of beliefs is not just some extension of their own ego, not just something they have so they can win a debate, if you're not a sophist, in other words, but instead someone who's truly seeking a better understanding of the world, then The Life of Peter Singer is the story of a man who is not scared to change his mind, no matter how long he's been holding a position,
And it's the story of a man who's not scared to hold a position if it's the one he thinks is worth defending.
It's a level of maturity that we could definitely use more of in this world we're living in. Because I mean, along the lines of the solutions we've been talking about lately on this podcast, and these philosophers that aren't calling for a total revolution of the system, but think there's hope from within the system we have, in that world, Peter Singer represents a philosopher that has dedicated his life to raising people's awareness of these ethical issues, and then giving people practical ways of engaging with them on the other side of it. He's an important case study in living a more examined life.
So on that note, I'm just going to get started. The story we're talking about begins with Peter Singer when he's a graduate student at Oxford all the way back in the year 1969.
And it's important to note, just because this is the beginning of the story, that by this point in his life, Peter Singer is not a baby to this kind of moral discussion. I mean, to be fair, by this point in his life, he had already put in more thinking into his ethics and the rationality of his moral choices than most people probably do in their entire lives. And I mean, it's not like he's a, you know, he's not a hero for doing that. He had to think about this stuff or he would have gotten cut from the school. You know, who wants to go back living with your parents, mowing their lawn until you're, you know, 50?
The point that I'm making though is that already here at the beginning of our story, Peter Singer is holding what would be to many people a pretty sophisticated set of ethical positions. He's what's known at the time as an emotivist, hedonistic utilitarian.
And I get it, a lot of philosophical lingo to throw your way without an explanation there. As we do on this show, we're going to be breaking these terms down one by one and what is meant by them. Again, hopefully shedding some light on how your own views plug into all this. And the first thing I want to do in the interest of breaking them down is separating them into two distinct parts. So for the title, Emotivist Hedonistic Utilitarian,
Think of hedonistic utilitarian as Peter Singer's normative ethical position, that is, the criteria he uses to determine which things are good or bad and why they're good or bad. And think of emotivist as Peter Singer's meta-ethical position, it's called, or the part of Peter Singer's ethics that describes the details of what he thinks we're even doing when we talk about moral claims whatsoever.
Because it's his meta-ethical position, and your meta-ethical position for that matter, that will change the implications of everything that goes on in this other space of your normative ethical position. To explain why meta-ethics is so important, and specifically why Peter Singer is this emotivist kind of thing in the first place, I think it's worth doing a quick recap of one of the most important insights from the work of the philosopher David Hume, which we talked about more in the series we did on him, but I think it sets up this conversation here today pretty well.
If you remember, one of Hume's big points is responding to a really common way that people think about morality that he thinks is fundamentally wrong. A lot of people, if you were to ask them, "Why is murder wrong?" something like that, they'd respond back with something like, "Well, murder is wrong because there's a lot of good reasons I can cite that make it something that's wrong." For example, people have a right to their own bodily autonomy. Murder takes away that autonomy. Therefore, murder is wrong.
But what David Hume might ask back to this kind of person is, is murder wrong because there's some objective moral fact of the universe that murder's wrong and that these reasons he just gave me have uncovered that fact? Or is what makes something seem wrong to you that you feel that it's wrong in the first place? And then these reasons are arguments you've come up with after the fact to justify why it's wrong to you.
This is a subtle change in perspective, but it has radical consequences to David Hume. To David Hume, moral judgments are fundamentally things that are made at the level of feeling or preference, not because of some reasonable argument that you may have about them.
And don't get them wrong, reason to Hume is absolutely important. It is a set of tools to gather new information, refine your ethical views, work out contradictions in the ways you're looking at things. Reason is massively important to the process of ethical development, no doubt about it. But it is not reason or the facts of the world that make something good or bad. It's the way you feel about it.
the deepest moral conviction that you have right now is really just the moral preference that you're aligned with, that you then use reason to organize and defend. Or as David Hume famously put it, reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. All of this leading to the position that there are no objective moral facts to the universe, there are just different degrees of refinement to people's moral preferences.
Now, this whole idea from David Hume gives rise to a branch of ethics called Moral Anti-Realism, where the belief begins at this point: that there are no moral facts to the universe. But one of the first questions you've got to answer if you're a moral anti-realist, or Peter Singer very early on in his career, is if there are no moral facts that our feelings about things are pointing towards, then why does it seem to us to be so clear that there are moral positions that are just objectively better or worse than others?
Like, why does it seem so obvious that there is some kind of moral difference between a Nazi and you? Why does it seem so obvious that spending your life counting blades of grass in a field with absolutely zero purpose to doing any of it seems objectively worse than living a life doing things you care about? These don't seem like just subjective preferences that we're talking about here. Well, to answer that question, we're going to need to turn to metaethics.
And as you can imagine, there's a million different answers someone could give to this kind of question. But one of the most common ones you'll run into in modern ethical discussions is some version of what's called non-cognitivism. Think of non-cognitivism as a branch of meta-ethics within moral anti-realism, where the answer to this problem of why moral questions seem to have such factual answers to them, despite there being no moral facts to the universe, comes down to the specific language we use when we talk about morality.
Let me explain where they're coming from with some examples.
A lot of different kinds of statements someone can make when they do that thing. They make the noises that come out of their mouth. They talk, right? And when a non-cognitive philosopher pays attention to the different kinds of statements people make, they notice that moral statements turn out to be a very different kind of thing than a factual statement about reality. Despite them often looking to us on the surface like they're very similar things. For example, I can make a descriptive statement about some state of affairs in the world. I can say something like, "...the door is shut."
And consider the fact that when I say the door is shut, I'm saying something there that can have truth content, meaning the door can either be shut or not. A statement like the door is shut can potentially be proven true or false. It is a descriptive statement. But if I said another kind of statement, this time I say shut the door, that is what a noncognitivist would call an imperative statement, which is a totally different thing that doesn't have any truth content.
Meaning when I say shut the door, there's nothing about that kind of statement that can be proven true or false. I mean, if I were to sit here and try to prove to you, you know, shut the door, you'd look at me like I was insane. And for good reason. Imperative statements have no truth content.
But then beyond imperative statements, there's another kind of statement a noncognitivist says we make, and that is an emotive statement. An example of this would be something like "Open doors are for losers." Now that kind of statement just starts to sound a lot like a personal preference, an opinion. Again, it's not really something you could say has content that could be proven true or false, it's just a different kind of statement altogether. Now the question for a noncognitivist is this: where do moral statements fit into this whole picture?
When I say something like "stealing is bad," is that a descriptive statement? Well, no, it can't be that, because non-cognitivists believe there are no moral facts. Is it an imperative statement? A command, like "shut the door"? Well, some non-cognitivists think so, and we'll get into that in a second.
But if you haven't already guessed, this is where we arrive at the emotivist position of Peter Singer at the beginning of his graduate years at Oxford. When Peter Singer says he is an emotivist, what he means is that moral statements like saying "stealing is bad" is really just an emotive statement where we're simply expressing a preference or a taste and nothing more. In fact, to say "stealing is bad," despite the fact it can look a lot like a descriptive statement on the surface, in terms of the actual content of what you're uttering there,
Stealing is bad. It's really just the equivalent of saying, meaning there is no truth claim you're making there. There's no command it's making. To a certain kind of emotivist early on in emotivism, a moral statement is just an expression of a preference that at bottom is not too far off the level of you saying, yay, chocolate ice cream, my favorite.
Now, just to be clear here, emotivism quickly evolves into more than this and it starts to involve imperative statements as well. And none of this is saying that to an emotivist, morality isn't important because, you know, it's just people's preferences after all. No, in fact, in my experience, emotivists are often people that think we need to be talking more about our moral preferences than we already do. I mean, if you believe that morality was just a matter of people's preferences, then maybe that's something you think can be a bit fickle at times. Maybe it's something we need to stay more on top of.
So nobody's saying that an emotivist doesn't care about morality. And just to be doubly clear here, emotivism is not saying anything yet about what is specifically good or bad. Emotivism is just a theory about moral language and what we're doing when we talk about whether things are good or bad. It is Peter Singer's meta-ethical position that, again, will go on to have effects on his normative ethical views at this point in his career.
which, if you remember, his normative ethical position was that he was a hedonistic utilitarian. Now, what does that mean? So we can tie all this together. Hedonistic utilitarianism, in the most entry-level way you could talk about it, is the belief that the right thing to do in a given situation is whatever maximizes the pleasure and minimizes the pain for the greatest number of people that are being affected by it.
pain and pleasure being the hedonistic side of this, maximizing something impartially being the utilitarian side of it.
So, for something like the trolley car problem, just to illustrate this, if you were to pull the lever and choose to kill the one person to save the five, that's the classic example where this could be someone using a hedonistic utilitarian style of ethical reasoning to decide what the right thing to do is. After all, it could be argued by them, you're trading one person's life for the sake of five people's lives. That's a utilitarian style of calculation.
So now that we've traced as basic a picture as we can of what an emotivist, hedonistic utilitarian is, it's time to start talking about the problems in these individual positions that lead Peter Singer to change his ethical views over the years.
It's also time to start talking about utilitarianism in the level of depth that it deserves. See, because as a graduate student, while these are certainly the positions he believes in at the time, and while there's good reasons to believe in them, with each one of these, he has this thing in the back of his mind at the time that's just eating at him, where something just doesn't seem quite complete about these as ethical positions.
You can probably relate to this. Any position you hold as a person that you're not absolutely certain of, any position you haven't just decided, this is what I believe in, and now it's time for me to defend it. It's not like there's a point in life where you can't find any potential issues with your positions. It's just the set of things I'm arguing for the time being in the interest of moving a bit closer to the truth. So let's go through Peter Singer's at this early stage of his career.
When it comes to the emotivism side of things, while expanding his understanding of emotivism, his views eventually evolve into something else, influenced by the work of C.L. Stevenson and many others in this area. I mean, it seems like a pretty compelling argument that moral claims are expressions of emotions.
But one thing that doesn't seem quite right to Peter Singer is, is that all that moral claims are? Like, are all moral claims just expressions of emotions on the level of your love of chocolate ice cream over vanilla? Maybe a light persuasion to get people to come over to team triple fudge chocolate with you? I mean, this just seems to be incomplete at some level. If you wanted a full description of what moral talk really is among people, the Nazi example, the counting blades of grass example, could it be?
Could it be, to Peter Singer and many emotivists before him, that when I say murder is wrong, that's not merely an expression of a preference or a taste?
Murder is wrong is fundamentally action-guiding, as it's called. Meaning built in to every moral statement is the unspoken imperative that you should follow my moral advice. In other words, part of saying murder is wrong is not only that I think you should also think murder is wrong, but more importantly what I'm saying there is do not murder. In other words, it is action-guiding when I say it.
And to try to separate that imperative from what a moral statement is doing misses something important about moral statements. So maybe the more accurate way of thinking about them is that moral statements are actually imperative statements. We're thinking back to our examples from before. These would be statements that are more similar to the imperative, shut the door, than they are to the emotive statement, open doors are for losers.
And to Singer, this line of thinking is starting to get us closer to what our experience is of moral arguments. This still makes him a non-cognitivist. There still are no moral facts to Peter Singer. But to him, the reality of our situation is that people are not just sitting around arguing over what flavor of ice cream they like more. This isn't the level of urgency we feel about it. This isn't the flavor of these conversations when we're in them.
So, by acknowledging the action-guiding nature of moral statements, this is a great thing for Singer because it starts to give us more room for being able to argue for certain moral positions over others using this capacity to reason that we have. Rationality can now start to play a bigger role in it. Because think about it, if somebody has a preference, like I love chocolate ice cream, that's my preference. You can't really make an argument for why that preference of theirs is irrational, but
But if somebody tells you to shut the door, that may not be the kind of statement that can be proved by rational argument or facts, but it is a kind of statement that can be supported by rational argument and facts. I can all of a sudden give you reasons for why it is better or worse for you to shut the door. All of a sudden, the Nazi example and the Blades of Grass example don't seem to hold up so well when it's not merely a preference. And for Peter Singer, that seems to correspond better, he thinks, with our reality.
So the seed of doubt is planted in his head. He's still an emotivist for now. He's not moving. But as this seed of doubt is planted, and he's moving more in the direction of rationality playing a bigger role in all this, this shift in his meta-ethics is going on at the same exact time that he's starting to question the normative ethical side of things as well, and his hedonistic utilitarianism. Yeah, turns out that starts to look to him like it has some pretty considerable problems with it too that need to be looked at.
And he says one of the examples that really made him realize this during this period in his life was a thought experiment put out by the philosopher Robert Nozick in his famous book called Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We did an episode on it back in the day.
The thought experiment was called the experience machine. And if you're a hedonistic utilitarian that's never heard it before, it's one that really forces you to think about your limitations when it comes to hedonism. Nozick makes the argument in the book that if the undeniable best thing we should be doing morally is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain,
Then, hypothetically, if there was a machine that we could hook people up to, and from here on out it would alter the limbic system of their brain, and all they would ever experience from here on out was pleasure in the maximum dose possible, should we be forcing people to get hooked up to these types of machines? Another interesting layer to this thought experiment is if this kind of machine really existed, do you think people would choose to be hooked up to that kind of machine voluntarily? Well, no doubt some people would, but Nozick thinks most people wouldn't.
And why? Well, because to Nozick, there's something to be said for being able to live in the real world and have genuine experiences, even if they sometimes come with a certain level of pain and struggle. Robert Nozick says most people, if you really pressed them on it, value things like authenticity, personal freedom, the ability to live a life that isn't being artificially manipulated. They value this stuff far more than they value just being able to feel good all the time or never feel any pain.
So for Peter Singer, this makes him take a step back, consider his moral outlook a bit more. I mean, at this point in his career, he's already having some doubts about hedonistic utilitarianism, because as he says, he thought it sometimes leads to these weird conclusions that seem to him to be a little paternalistic.
Reason he thought this was because, for example, if you're always trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, sometimes the solutions you arrive at involve telling people how to live their lives. I mean, you can imagine policies coming down from on high where there's a ban on sugary drinks or soda or the prohibition of a substance or vaccine mandates or
All of these are things that can be theoretically justified under the banner of hedonistic utilitarianism. But again, these are things that seem to Peter Singer to be a bit too paternalistic at times.
But he thinks regardless of these problems, maybe we don't got to throw everything out here, he says. Because maybe the problem lies more in the hedonistic side to all this. In other words, if what's meant by utilitarianism is often that we're going to maximize for some specific consequence or set of consequences in the world, then maybe what needs to change is just what we're maximizing for. And in light of these concerns that Nozick and many others have brought up, maybe the better thing to be maximizing for, he thinks, are people's individual preferences.
And this is going to be the transition of Peter Singer from an emotivist, hedonistic utilitarian to now a prescriptivist, preference utilitarian. Again, still a utilitarian, but now we're going to maximize for the satisfaction of people's preferences and we're going to minimize the amount that people's preferences are not satisfied.
This seems like a better moral theory to him at the time. Because look, if the reason you were a hedonistic utilitarian in the first place is because he wanted to increase well-being and decrease suffering in the world, well then people's preferences, it turns out, often involve them wanting greater levels of well-being and lower levels of suffering. The thinking is, maximize people's preferences and you'll likely be maximizing their well-being.
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Hare was also a prescriptivist preference utilitarian, and he was the guy to popularize a lot of thinkers moving on from these earlier forms of emotivism to a new idea in the 50s that he was now calling prescriptivism. To put it briefly, to Hare, he didn't really like what he called the irrationality of the earlier emotivists.
In the sense that these were people that to him were denying the ability for rationality to play a greater role in determining what a valid moral statement was. He certainly would disagree with the idea that counting blades of grass is just as good a life as any other. And he'd think that any meta-ethical theory that can't account for that obvious fact is needlessly irrational.
As he said, quote, my main task was to find a rationalist kind of nondescriptivism, and this led me to establish that imperatives, the simplest kinds of prescriptions, could be subject to logical constraints while not being descriptive, end quote.
To R.M. Hare, moral statements like stealing is wrong, this is not a preference. This is not a form of mild persuasion. This is a prescription for ourselves and for other people. That is the true content of this moral language, again, despite how it may look to people on the surface. More than that for him, because of the prescriptive nature of these moral statements, in order to be logically consistent,
anyone who makes a moral judgment to Hare has to be committed to that same moral judgment in any situation that has the same facts at hand. Or as Peter Singer gives as an example, if I want to take the position that it's okay for you to be my slave, then I need to also think it's okay for me to be a slave myself. To be a prescriptivist, you have to be able to put yourself into the shoes of all the others that are affected by your actions and ask yourself if you can still accept your choice. Or
Or as Peter Singer says, summarizing the views of the later work of R.M. Hare, quote, But did you see the movie just made there? To Peter Singer, if you accept Hare's argument that moral statements are universal prescriptions like this,
then it requires you to be someone who's committed to maximizing the preferences of all parties involved, which would then make you, by default, a prescriptivist preference utilitarian.
For Peter Singer, this was huge. This seems to solve the problem with the experience machine from Nozick. And I mean, by this point in his career, Singer's already started considering animal rights, and he thought that this constraint of moral language needing to be universal made it absolutely necessary for us to be considering the experiences not only of other human beings, but of all sentient creatures in general, including animals.
Another thing this universalizability also accomplishes for him was that it seemed to give a foundation rooted in logic that making impartial decisions, not favoring one person over another, impartial decisions were a crucial piece of sound moral reasoning. And as it went, Peter Singer remained a preference utilitarian throughout most of his career beyond this point. That is, until just a few years ago when he underwent yet another massive change in his thinking.
It should be said, similar to when he was an emotivist or a hedonist, it's not like Peter Singer couldn't possibly find any problems with prescriptivism or preference utilitarianism. Again, he was just holding the viewpoint that seemed difficult for him to deny at the time, and he was paying as much respect to it as he could in the ethical conversations that were going on. Well, same thing's about to happen to him again in our story here. Peter Singer was friends and colleagues with a philosopher named Derek Parfit. Now, Derek Parfit...
was an interesting fellow, God rest his soul, because he decided that part of his life's mission when he was on this planet was going to be to prove the existence of objective morality. He was going to engage with every argument against it, every position, and he was going to write a book making his case for it. The book is called On What Matters, published in 2011. Now, Peter Singer was an extremely lucky guy at the time because he was one of the few people that Parfit trusted to read his book beforehand and to give him notes on how to make it better. And
And as Peter Singer reads the arguments presented in the book, he finds himself being more and more convinced of them the more that he reads of it. Now, many of these were arguments that Singer had already heard before throughout his long career, critiques of preference utilitarianism, prescriptivism, but Parfit just puts them in a way that is undeniably brilliant to Singer. It really impacts him. For example, if you said the best moral choice is to be maximizing someone's preferences, like a good preference utilitarian,
Consider Derek Parfit's thought experiment of the altruistic drug dealer. Imagine there's a drug dealer. They create a drug, they get someone addicted to it, and they have an unlimited supply of this drug, and they will always happily give more of the drug to the person who is now addicted to it. Parfit says, well, as long as that person is addicted, they will always have a preference to get more of the drug. But would it actually be morally better for them to always get more of this drug?
For what it's worth, consider the parallel here between chemical drugs and things like social media. Well, as Parfit says, clearly this would not be in the best interest of the person who's addicted to it. And yet it would always be satisfying their preferences. Interesting to consider alongside preference utilitarianism. Now to pile on to this point and give Parfit's wider critique a little more shape here, consider another thought experiment of his, the Random Tuesday thought experiment.
He says to imagine a person, and in general, this is a person that wants to avoid pain overall. But for some reason, they have a very specific, particular desire to avoid pain on random Tuesdays going into the future. Now, this person has no particular reason to fear pain on those days more than any other day. But nonetheless, this is their preference, to especially avoid pain on random Tuesdays. Parfit's question is, does the satisfaction of that desire make this person better off?
If you're a preference utilitarian, satisfying preferences is what brings about a better world. And yet when it comes to this one, it doesn't seem to change anything for the better.
The point for him is that not everyone's preferences are equally worth trying to maximize. For example, do I have a moral obligation to maximize the preferences of people who are completely irrational or misinformed? How about people who are extremely angry and acting in a rash way? How about people that are not in very good mental health and they have a preference that they wouldn't otherwise have if they were feeling better?
As Peter Singer points out, if you found a Roman tomb from a couple thousand years ago and on the wall of this tomb the dead person wrote, "In death my preference is to have a candle burning at my side for all eternity." Is that a preference that we need to honor? What Peter Singer starts to realize is that preference utilitarianism smuggles in a lot of assumptions about the mindset of the people whose preferences we need to honor. Usually the assumption is that someone needs to be calm, well-informed, and rational.
But when he's reading the work of another philosopher, who we'll talk more about here in a second, he starts to notice a deep flaw in the premise of preference utilitarianism altogether. And that is, if preferences need to be rational in order to be something that's worth maximizing, then this philosopher he's reading says, what if the rational set of preferences that people end up arriving at starts to just look a lot like maximizing well-being and minimizing suffering?
In other words, if you reflected on the nature of rationality and on the moral concepts themselves and eventually arrived at a conclusion that looked a lot like hedonistic utilitarianism, if rational preferences are just hedonistic ones, then the entire position of preference utilitarianism would just consume itself. It would become unnecessary. And the philosopher he's reading when he comes across this argument, written all the way back in the 1800s, is a guy by the name of Henry Sidgwick.
Sidgwick was a classical utilitarian philosopher. I mean, you think of classical utilitarians, you think of people like John Stuart Mill, you think of Bentham. But to Peter Singer, you can't sleep on Sidgwick just because he's lesser known than these other two. In his opinion, Sidgwick's work is the best of all of them. He says his engagement with the arguments against him was so extensive that he almost starts to sound like a modern day philosopher when you read him.
So it's around 2013 when Singer's working on a book with his philosophical counterpart in Catergina de Lazzari-Raddick. The two of them are working on a book where they are, one, trying to bring a greater level of awareness to the work of Henry Sedgwick, and two, they're trying to critique and defend his ideas and see to what extent they hold up to philosophical scrutiny.
And it's when Peter Singer's doing this deep dive on Sidgwick's work that the possibility of objective morality starts to become more plausible to him than he had ever really considered before in his entire life.
I mean, remember, this is a man that spent his entire career as a non-cognitivist, not believing in moral facts. And here he is facing arguments from Sidgwick that, along with the points he's considering from Derek Parfit recently, it hits him with a type of force that gets him to question all of it. He is actually on the verge here of going from an emotivist to a prescriptivist to an objectivist meta-ethics all in the course of one lifetime. So what were these arguments that he heard from Sidgwick that changed his mind?
Well, the first thing that needs to be said, a mistake to avoid when hearing this, is don't confuse someone saying that they believe in objective morality with them being certain about their position.
I mean, at first glance, it can seem like that has to go along with it. And dare I say, most versions of objective morality that you will hear about will be someone that appeals to a God that guarantees that objective morality. And dare I say, most of those people in practice need their God to be the God that guarantees it. So the picture of what that objective morality is going to look like usually is a very specific thing for them.
But Peter Singer is not a religious man, he does not believe in God, and he'd be the first to say that he is not certain about this objectivism. He'd absolutely welcome anyone to critique his set of positions, that's what moral progress takes.
And that much like all the other positions he's held throughout his career that we've talked about on this episode, this objectivism just represents the best position he's come across so far that he has a very difficult time denying that he's chosen to argue on behalf of because it's one that's worth defending to him. In other words, he's a philosopher and he's going to defend the best position he knows.
Now, another common mistake to avoid here when you hear the words objective morality is to assume that what that must mean is that I have an entire book of things I've written down on the whole way you should approach every aspect of your life and these things are objective. No, the type of objective morality that Singer is advocating for here is much less ambitious. It's not one where there are these objective values floating around in the universe somewhere. That's the wrong way to be thinking about it, he says. The better way to think about it
is that it's a set of rational axioms that are similar to the axioms of mathematics. To Peter Singer, obviously there are objective truths that are possible in things like logic and mathematics. 1+1=2. That's just true. To deny that fact is to have a misunderstanding of the concepts that are being discussed there. More than that though to him,
It's important to remember that 1+1=2 does not require you to empirically verify it in order for it to be true. You don't need to get one rock and put it next to another rock and see two rocks literally with your senses for 1+1=2. You can get there simply by rationally analyzing the concepts themselves.
Well, consider this: in the same way it requires the existence of some sort of being, and once that being reaches a certain capacity to arrive at these sorts of mathematical truths, and then if it's directed properly will move in the direction of these truths, what if the same thing is true for axioms of value derived by using nothing but reason as well?
Well, here's one of the first things he might say in regards to this: "If that was possible." There's no guarantee that an axiom that was derived with pure rationality would be useful for human society in any way. The question here is not, "Is there an objective morality we can arrive at that would appeal to homo sapiens and the kinds of values they've evolved to prioritize?" But nonetheless, if there was even one of these objective, rational axioms that we could arrive at, that pointed to the existence of objective morality, then
then, I don't know, seems like something you'd want to know about. Like, it would have pretty radical implications on moral philosophy if that was a thing.
So what would these axioms look like if they did exist? Well, interestingly for Peter Singer, probably because we're in part rational beings that try to rationally organize our lives, these axioms do end up being things that may be useful to us in certain cases. He gives three examples, all proposed originally in the work of Henry Sidgwick. The first of these, he says, is that there's no reason to prefer one moment of our existence to another in and of itself.
And what's meant by that in practice, Peter Singer thinks, is that it can be so easy for us to discount the future for the sake of enjoying the present, right? But if you were to look back at history and all the different moments that have ever occurred, are any of these moments more or less important than this one right now? Is the future going to be any less important than this moment right here? This temporal neutrality, as it's called, is for Peter Singer the type of ethical principle that may be able to be derived from rational reflection like this.
The second axiom from Sidgwick, he says, is if something is right for someone in a particular situation, then that thing is right independent of the identity of the people involved in the situation. Meaning if something is right, it doesn't matter if it's your biggest enemy or your mom or the next door neighbor's dog. A purely rational ethics would presume this type of impartiality. And along those same lines, the third axiom he gives is that the interests of one individual are no more important than the interests of another.
Now, if any of these three seem to you to be very easily deniable the second that you hear them, I think Peter Singer would say really try to reflect on them for a while and give them a fair chance. He obviously understands we're living during a time that's not far away from logical positivism and seeing metaphysics as unverifiable speculation. He also obviously understands that if somebody's committed enough, absolute skepticism is something you can apply at any moment. And in that case, how can we even know that we exist?
I think the ask for Peter Singer would be that we're at least trying to have a good faith conversation when we're talking about this. And he thinks if you reflect on these axioms closely, they become very difficult to deny from a rationalist perspective.
Something to notice about them too is that in a lot of cases where people claim to have access to an objective form of morality, oftentimes that's people trying to universalize a particular type of experience and then call it objective. Whereas with these three axioms, as unambitious as they are, it's almost like they're trying to remove subjective bias from the equation and move more towards us being impartial. And no doubt, Peter Singer would say a lot more work needs to be done in this area,
But you could do worse than starting with these three axioms from Henry Sedgwick. The deeper question for him to consider here is: in the same way people have wondered if we came into contact with an alien species from a different galaxy, and people have asked would that alien species have arrived at similar mathematical axioms because they too would have made their mathematics to correspond with the rational structure of reality, the same way people ask that, Singer is asking: are there rational axioms of value?
that any being with sufficient rational capability and free time on their hands might also arrive at no matter what their evolutionary history is. Because for Peter Singer, take any one of these three axioms we just talked about, take the one that says that no individual's interests are more important than the interests of any other.
That, at its core, is not something that evolution and survival would lead us to value. And yet, he says, across thousands of years, in completely different cultures and times, there's a convergence of thinkers arriving at a similar sort of moral truth. Now does that in any way pique your interest? That this may actually just be a truth of reason, derived from reflecting on the concepts themselves on the level of a 1 plus 1 equals 2?
In fact, there's actually a lot of moral insight you can get for Peter Singer simply by rationally analyzing moral concepts. And it's going to lead to an expansion in his views of what he thinks may constitute what an objective moral fact may be.
What I mean is, he's obviously not just done with all things morality because he's discovered these axioms that he thinks are interesting. And as you can understand, being somebody who now believes in the possibility of objective morality, he's going to be somebody that's looking for that in a more applied ethics space as well. To him, there's a whole new potential world out there of objective ethics that he's never really spent that much effort exploring the boundaries of. And the way to do that, he thinks, is to be thinking about these moral concepts very carefully.
Following the work of Derek Parfit, I think Peter Singer would be open to the exercise of rationally examining the concept of something like suffering, for example. Meaning if we're going to do that right now, let's get any specific empirical examples of suffering out of your head for a second. Let's just try to reflect on suffering as a concept. Well, built into the concept of suffering, he might say, is that it's an undesirable state for a conscious being to experience.
Conscious beings exist in the universe. It's a fact. Suffering is a type of experience they can have. Fact. And suffering as a concept implies that a conscious being wouldn't want to be in it or else it wouldn't in fact be true suffering.
In other words, it's not a subjective preference that suffering is bad. This is not a cultural viewpoint. This doesn't rely on specific examples of suffering that you can point to in the world around you. This is a rational insight for Peter Singer. It's a priori. Suffering is distinct as a thing because of its undesirability. Hey, but let's be careful. Notice how close we're getting there to deriving normative values that seem to be built in in some way to a purely descriptive state of affairs.
But wait, that would be directly against Hume's is-ought distinction, and the idea from Hume that Peter Singer began his career with, that what makes something good or bad is how we feel about it, and reason's just there to justify it and to think clearly.
But if careful rational reflection of what concepts are can heavily imply what you ought to be doing about them, it's not that Parfit or Singer think that this refutes Hume's is-ought distinction outright, but it definitely, they think, calls into question how clear-cut that divide really is between is and ought.
We could do an entire episode on Derek Parfit and go into it deeper if people ask for it. But to Peter Singer today, the takeaway is this. When you reflect on what suffering or well-being even is, you realize that it is self-evident that we should be promoting well-being and reducing suffering. This to him is a basic self-evident fact that is maybe on the level of the self-evidence of the rational coherence of the universe or the continuity of existence from moment to moment.
Meaning, it's not that you can't question why things are rationally coherent, why does 1 plus 1 equals 2, it's just that at a certain point, even if you don't have answers as to why it's that way, with something like rational coherence, all you can really do at a certain point is just look at it and say, I believe it because, look, it's self-evident that rationality is rational.
So after this decades-long journey out of Peter Singer, the position he's holding for now, if we had to give a name to it, would be along the lines of the views of Henry Sidgwick. You could call him an objectivist, hedonistic utilitarian, moving back to hedonistic utilitarian after preference utilitarianism collapses for him.
Or as Sidgwick describes a position in his work, it's a quote that Peter Singer likes to use to describe what the goals are of his moral outlook now. He says, aiming for, quote, universal happiness, desirable consciousness or feeling for the innumerable multitude of sentient beings present and to come seems an end that satisfies our imagination by its vastness, end quote.
Notice the axioms of Henry Sidgwick represented there. This is a moral position that seeks desirable consciousness or feeling for all sentient life, whether that's an animal, a human, an alien species, an artificial intelligence. And it's a position that values this sentient life, regardless of whether they're alive right now or are yet to be born. And again, acknowledging that Peter Singer knows there's a lot of work to be done on the other side of declaring this goal.
we can at least understand why a philosopher would take this position as one that's worth defending and one that, again, satisfies our imagination by its vastness. I'll be interviewing Peter Singer and Catergina de Lazzari-Raddick here in a couple days. If you have any burning questions for him, you can always send them my way over the comments or over Patreon. I can't promise I'll ask yours, but I'll definitely pick a few that seem valuable to the whole conversation as it's going on. I hope this was helpful at clarifying what some of these ethical terms mean, at understanding Peter Singer.
And hopefully, as the goal always is with this podcast, hopefully it gives you something to sit around and think about for a bit, to get to know where you stand on things better, something to talk about to the people you love in your life, all that stuff. It's all I'm ever going for here. You know, aside from just trying to give to you what philosophy has given to me so graciously over all these years. As always, though, thank you for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.
