Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas

0:04Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis .org. For full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithT Tyler .com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with Peter Singer of Princeton University. Peter is one of our most important and influential intellectuals. For our purposes what is new, there is a new and very much revised edition of Peter's Classic Book Animal Liberation. It is now titled Animal Liberation Now, the Definitive Classic Renewed, and by my estimate it's about two -thirds to three -quarters new material.

0:54Peter, welcome. Thanks very much, Tyler. It's good to be with you. When large language models make it possible for us to speak with dolphins, what will be the first question you ask? Ah, what do you think of humans, maybe? And what do you think they will say? Not very... nothing very positive, that's for sure, because a lot of dolphins have been caught in nets for catching tuna and impaled to stop the meeting fish that people one in some parts of the world. I don't think they'll think too well of us. And what do you expect the dolphin to ask you? So we explain to the dolphin that you're Peter Singer, right?

1:28Right. What's the question? Why have you failed? Why have you failed to stop humans treating animals so badly? So I'll ask you the dolphin question. Why have you failed? It's harder than I thought it might be. And that begins I think with the fact that humans eat animals and it seems like we're very conservative about what we eat. Relatively few people are prepared to really think ethically and openly about what they eat. They're worried about having to change that, eat something different, maybe stand out from their friends and family by not eating meat and therefore implicitly criticizing those people when they do eat meat.

2:06I think there's a whole lot of factors that just make it hard for people to make that fundamental change about what they eat, and without that they're not really going to fundamentally change what they think about animals. I have a general question about how totalizing ethics can be, or how totalizing utilitarianism can be. So if someone says to me, as you likely would, well, if the margin we should treat animals better, much better, I would agree. But if someone asks the question, say, do we wish that human beings had never settled the New World? And there would then be many more intelligent mammals alive in the New World today.

2:39I simply think that question is intractable and that the limits of utilitarian reasoning are fairly tight around marginal changes, small events. So I'll ask you, do you wish that human beings had never settled the New World or New Zealand? No, I don't wish that. I agree that the question is intractable. I'm not sure whether it's intractable in a philosophical sense because we can't sum up the values or whether there's just so much factual information that we don't have, including how do we make comparisons between the well -being of the bison, let's say, that we're here more numerously as compared with the well -being of the humans.

3:18If you think so about the Earth's current population, which is what about 8 billion human beings, can we conclude that it's too many because it's too much pressure on animals, or is that also an intractable comparison in the same way? Yeah, I don't think you can say it's too many or it's too few unless you make assumptions about the kind of technology that we have available to live in a sustainable way on the planet and to allow non -human animals to live as well. But also in that question of course there's the issue of how do we compare the value of human lives and let's assume that they're human lives that are lived positively, that they're rich and fulfilling human lives, with the lives of non -human animals.

3:57I mean, I totally agree that they're different. And I think it's reasonable to argue that a rich and fulfilling human life contains more happiness than the life of, I don't know, a cow or a sheep. I'm not going to deny that. I don't think animals are equal in the sense that their lives contain equal value without of humans. But you still think in principle we should be trying to do these total comparisons of one state of affairs against another. Or those just big picture questions that we need to set aside. we should be content with marginal comparisons. Because you're sounding like more of a marginalist than what I was expecting.

4:31I see. Well, I'm certainly prepared to say that clearly the suffering we inflict on animals in factory farms is indefensible. We cause far more suffering than any good we do for humans, arguably actually it's a negative for humans as well. So that's what my focus is in animal liberation now. And in fact, a lot of my work has been aimed at that, it's been aimed at what we should do about people in extreme poverty. It's been aimed at things like should we have the right to say we've had enough of life and we want to die if we're terminally ill and in pain. So in a way the big picture questions that you're asking, I find them interesting theoretical questions and I can give you the answer that a utilitarian would give if you want that answer.

5:14But in practice I do think that I can't really make a lot of headway with that. How do you think about what is sometimes called the meat eater problem? So most countries, probably all countries, as they become richer, they start eating more meat. At some point they start treating the animals less well, if not factory farms. There's just more mass production of animal meat. Do we need to calculate a trade -off for those countries to become wealthier? Or do we just root for the wealth and figure we'll sort it out later? My view over the long term has generally been that countries will have to pass through this stage where they've got wealthier, they can purchase more meat, they raise animals in factory farms to do that.

5:55But then eventually they'll go on to become more humane and more civilized and they'll see that that's the wrong thing to do and they'll treat animals much better and the outcome will be better on the whole than it was before they became prosperous when there are a lot of people in extreme poverty and they also went treating animals well although they didn't have the power to raise so many of them but still because they were using them for food and because if your own survival is at stake or that of your family you need to eat more that you'll do anything to animals to do so it was not a good situation.

6:28So in other words what I'm saying is I was prepared to swallow the short term negatives for the long term outcome. I have to admit that I've become less confident about the long term outcome. I still hope that it's there but the fact that there's been relatively little progress in terms of treating animals better over the 48 years since the first version of animal liberation appeared, does make me concerned that we're not going to be going in that right direction or not for a long time. I'd say you could peer ahead in other 70 years, 80 years, and things basically didn't get better compared to now.

7:05Would you then think the meat eaters problem is a real dilemma? Moral dilemma, if it seems it's not a stage, people will just keep on eating meat through factory farms, more or less forever. And I would think yes, there's a real question as to whether it would have been better if people had not had the prosperity and the ability to rise animals in that way. You once wrote a book entitled Darwinian Left. Do you think you're becoming more or less Darwinian over time? My Darwinian intuition is people won't ever get much better because they evolved to eat animals, not to have factory farms, but to kill them in painful ways and simply not worry about it.

7:39What's your current view on how Darwinian you are? I'm still 100 % Darwinian. I don't think there's an alternative explanation of how we exist and of the biological elements of our nature. But I also think it's compatible with being a Darwinian to say we are a being who's evolved the capacity to reason, and reason can lead us to conclusions which can influence our behavior. I don't see that as being anti -D Darwinian or non -D Darwinian. I just see it as a realistic appreciation of the fact that we have evolved as rational beings and that leads us to certain conclusions we wouldn't have reached otherwise.

8:15But one might start seeing in Darwinian fashion that the evolution of rationality is just far more selective than what we might wish for, right? So these people who are very reasonable and then in other contexts they'll do terrible things. They could be a prison guard, it could be animals, you've written plenty about many many other examples. Is there really this general faculty of reason that overrides those evolved intuitions? I think there certainly can be and I think there is for some people some of the time. The question would be, is everybody capable of that or even if not everybody, are we capable of getting a dominant group who do follow reason in general, universal directions who use it to develop a more universal ethic that applies to a wider group of beings than their own kin and family and those that they're in cooperative relationships with?

9:05I think there's evidence that that is possible, and we don't yet know, to what extent that can spread and start to dominate humans in future generations. I wonder sometimes how much we can have an ethics that truly separates morality from partiality. So here's a question I gave to Sandbankman Fried. I said, as a utilitarian, let's say a super -being offered you a gamble, where we would, in essence, double the population on Earth, create a dual Earth somewhere equally happy with 51%, and 49%, we wipe out the Earth we have now. That would represent an increase in expected value, and furthermore, I .S.

9:42Sam, would you keep on playing this game double or nothing? Now, Sam being Sam, he just said yes, and indeed in his own life, he did continue playing the game double or nothing. And he ended up with nothing, oh, worse than nothing. But doesn't a thought example like that mean we can't really be utilitarians in the big picture of things We need to be more loyal to the earth we have and not consider gambling it away for these extra earths I think it says more about gambling than it does about being a utilitarian I agree it's a paradox and you could say it's a paradox particularly for maximizing utilitarians who normally will talk about Maximizing expected utility and this seems to be a case where you don't want to maximize expected utility Although, of course, there are arguments that would say, well, your expected utility is actually low, given that you can't infinitely long keep doubling utility, I assume.

10:33But you know, you had our hypothesis where you have a twin earth, right? And if you could just create a twin earth, I guess you could. But for the real world, we can't keep doubling utility. And so we shouldn't do double or nothing. I'm not claiming to solve this paradox, by the way. I think it is an interesting and somewhat baffling problem with maximizing expected to utility. But does the question show not only that it's some unusual paradox in a corner of the moral universe, but that in all our choices, that assessments of utility are within some framework that is pre -assuming a certain amount of partiality, and that there's no escape from that partiality, no fully objective outside viewpoint?

11:11I don't understand why you're seeing this paradox as relating to partiality. I mean, it's just as true if we're completely impartial about universal good, right? I don't understand why you think that it shows that we inevitably are going to be partial. Well, take the Bernard Williams question, which I think you've written about. Let's say that aliens are coming to the earth and they may do away with us and we may have reason to believe they could be happier here on earth than what we can do with earth. I don't think I know any utilitarians who would sign up to fight with the aliens, no matter what their moral theory would be.

11:43Okay, you've just met one. I've just met one. So you would sign up to fight with the aliens. If the hypothesis is like that, that the aliens are wiser than we are, they know how to make the world a better place for everyone. They're giving full weight to human interests, but they say even though we're giving full weight to human interests, not discounting your interest because you're not a member of our species as you do with animals, but unfortunately it just works out that to produce a better world, you have to go. I'll say, okay, if your calculations are right, if that's all right, I'm on your side.

12:14And you're making them a little nice, you're calling them wise, they may or may not be wise, they're just happier than we are. They have less stress, less depression, so if they could rule over the earth, they would do a better go of it than we would. So I would still side with the humans. I would not. I mean, what you've shown now is that their interest happened to coincide with the universal good. That's the way to produce more happiness full stop, not just more happiness for them. And if that's the case, I'm on their side. How do we know there is a universal good? You're selling out your fellow humans based on this belief in a universal good, which is quite abstract, right?

12:48The other smart humans you know mostly don't agree with you, I think, I hope. But you're using the kind of language that Bernard Williams used when he says, you know, who's side you on? Right? You said you're selling out your fellow humans as if I owe loyalty to members of my species above loyalty to good in general. That is to maximizing happiness and well -being for all of those affected by it. And I don't claim to have any particular loyalty for my species rather than the general good. But if there's not this common metric between us and the aliens, what you just measure, you hook people up to a scale, you measure, they have more of it than we do, let them come in.

13:26If that doesn't exist, what is the common good or universal good in this setting? I don't know if that doesn't exist, but you said they're happier than we are, which suggests that there's a common metric of happiness. And that was the basis on which I answered your question. If there's no common metric, I don't really have an answer. I would try to use the metric of overall happiness. And I'm not sure why I wouldn't be able to use that. But if we assume that I couldn't, then I would just not know what to do. So you wouldn't fight for our side even then. You'd throw up your hands or just not be able to do it.

13:56This is not about a football team, right? You can give your loyalty to a football team and support them even though you don't really think that they're somehow more morally worthy of winning than their opponents. But this is not a game like this, there's everything at stake. To what extent for you is utilitarianism, not only a good theory of outcomes, but also a theory of obligation? I'm sure you know the Donald Reagan literature, there's, oh, you prefer the outcome with more utility. Yeah. But what should I do? Can still be a complex question? Well, it can be a complex question in the sense that it may be that we don't want If we can be confident in our calculations that we are doing the right thing, then I think the obligations that we have are to maximize utility.

14:42But it's been argued that we're more likely to make mistakes if we do that and rather that our obligations should be to conform to certain principles or rules. And I think that depends on how confident you are in your ability. I certainly think we should follow rules of thumb sometimes when we can't be sure of what's the right outcome and we should do what generally is accepted. and you go back to San Bankman Freed, obviously, I think that was his mistake. He was too confident that he could get things right and fix things and didn't follow basic rules. Or at least it's alleged that he didn't follow basic rules.

15:13Like, don't steal your clients' money. But isn't there a dilemma above and beyond the epistemic dilemma? So say, you, Peter Singer, you're programming a driverless car and you're in charge. Ideally, you would like to program the car to be a utilitarian and benhamite car. that if it has to swerve, it would sooner kill, you know, one older person than two younger people and so on. But let's say you also knew that if you programmed the driverless car to be bent on my, basically the law would shut it down, public opinion would rebel, you'd get in trouble, the automaker would get in trouble, how then would you program the car?

15:45Yeah, I would program it to produce the best consequences that would not be prohibited by the government or the manufacturer. So I'm all in favor of making compromises if you have to to produce the most good that you possibly can in the circumstances in which you are. But doesn't that then mean individuals should hold on to some moral theory that may be quite far from utilitarianism? Well, as such as a compromise, you need to be very intuition driven, non -utilitarian, just to get people to trust you, to work with you, to not so utilitarian at all. You may be, that will depend on your own nature as to whether you think you're going to be led astray if you're not intuition driven, or you may think that you can be aware of, you know, self -aware about the risks that you're going to go wrong, and you're not exactly intuition driven, but you're driven by the thought that I could be mistaken here, and it's probably, you know, going to have more value if I don't just directly think about how to produce the most utility.

16:46Let me continue with the number of the easy questions. If you take current AIs, large language models, you would agree they're not sentient, they're not beings. Right. I would agree with that. So they don't count, I agree with that too. So there's something about sentience that is essential for a being to count. But we actually know very little about consciousness. You can read philosophy of mind. You can look at neuroscience. science, it seems to me one of the most mysterious and baffling areas in all of human knowledge. We have introspection, I'm not sure how much to trust introspection. So does it worry you to be erecting a moral theory based on sentience, some notion of utility happiness, when all of our scientific inroads toward that concept seemed to be at least for the moment very, very badly flawed?

17:33So they're incomplete. Certainly. Are they flawed in the sense that would lead us astray in terms of making those decisions based on sentience? I'm not convinced of that. But say you're trying to compare human animal welfare to non -human animal welfare. We have a sense many of these other animals were sentient, that's pretty much certain, they feel pain, but we don't know how to compare them to us. We don't really know even where in science to look for such a unit of comparison. How do we know they don't just overwhelm our well -being? Derek Parfitt -like conclusions, doesn't want to just become a radical agnostic.

18:09If all of our judgments rely on this utility thing, which to me is somewhat mysterious. So I don't think you have to be completely agnostic about all these issues. I think there are some cases, and again, I would instance factory farming, where we can be very confident that what we're doing is causing more pain and suffering than it's doing good to us. But that's not to say that there aren't a lot of other questions, including that question you asked about, is it good that humans colonize North America? Where it's harder to make those decisions because they are involving comparisons. And some of these decisions are quite practical too, for example, even within the animal movement, if you say, well, should we focus on trying to get people not to eat chicken because chickens are so intensively farmed and there's so many of them, it takes less of a chicken to make a meal than it does of a cow.

18:57So should we do that? Or then we're trying to compare the suffering of more chickens with fewer cows or fewer pigs. I agree those questions still ones that we can't really get a grip on, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing we can do that is based on sentience, happiness, suffering and so on. If there are many intelligent and sentient space aliens, would that make the extinction of the human race less of a tragedy? If the idea is that then these intelligent and sentient aliens might populate our planet or take Yeah, they're just out there. They're just out there. So speed of light is too fast.

19:34We'll never catch them. Vice versa. So then the extinction of our species is still just the same loss, right? It's a loss of a certain amount of happiness and the fact that it's less of a proportion of happiness or well -being or sentience in the universe doesn't mean that it isn't the same loss. So it's linear and separable? Yes. So the notion of a universe empty of sentient and intelligent life, there's nothing special about the zero point. No, I mean, as you say, assuming that the existence of some sendient life isn't going to regenerate and repopulate the universe, that's a reason why extinction is worse than the loss of most of us species, but otherwise, no.

20:14What is the margin at which you wish to police nature? So I've argued, for instance, we should not subsidize carnivores per se. There may be some other reason to do so, but the idea, oh, we're going to introduce wolves back into this national park, should not be an especially desirable prospect. What's your view on that and where should we stop? Yes, that was an interesting pioneering article that you wrote, I think, Policing Nature, and I tend to agree with it. So I think it's reasonable to raise a question about why we should reintroduce predators. And as you said, there may be effects on other animals and plants in the area we're reintroducing them.

20:49But to do so just for its own sake, just because they were once here and were once part of the ecology is not to my view a sufficient reason for introducing them if we know that is going to increase the suffering of some prey animals. But how much should we spend trying to thwart predators? I think that's difficult because again you would have to take into account the consequences on not having predators and what are you going to do with the prey population? Are they going to overpopulate and maybe staff or destroy the environment for other sentient beings. So it's hard to say how much we should spend trying to thwart them.

21:25I think there are questions about reducing the suffering of wild animals that are easier than that, and that that's a question that may be at some stage you will grapple with when we've reduced the amount of suffering we inflict on animals generally. But it's not knowing near the top of the list for how to reduce animal suffering. What do you think of the fairly common fear that if we mix the morality of human beings and the morality of nature? That the morality of nature will win out. Nature is so large and numerous and populace and fierce, human beings are relatively small in number and fragile, and if the prevailing ethic becomes the ethic of nature, that the blending is itself dangerous, that human beings end up thinking, well, predation is just fine, it's the way of nature.

22:07Therefore they do terrible things to each other. Is that what you meant by the morality of nature? I wasn't sure what the phrase meant. Do you mean the morality that we imply that we attribute to nature? Red in tooth and claw. If we think that's a matter that is our business, do we not end up with that morality, trumping ours, we become subordinate to that morality? And a lot of very nasty people in history have actually cited nature. Well nature works this way. I'm just doing that. It's a part of nature. It's more or less okay. How do we avoid those series of moves? Right, it's a bad argument and we try and explain why it's a bad argument that we don't want to follow nature.

22:46That the fact that nature does something is not something that we ought to imitate, but maybe in fact we ought to combat. And of course we do combat nature in many ways. Maybe war between humans is part of nature, but nevertheless we regret when wars break out, we try to have institutions to prevent wars breaking out. I think a lot of the activities combating nature's way of doing things rather than regarding it as a model to follow. But if humans are a part of nature flat out and if our optimal policing of nature leaves 99 .9999 % of all predation in place, we just can't stop most of it. Is it then so irrational to conclude?

23:27Well, this predation must be okay. It's the natural state of the world, our optimal best outcome leaves 99 .999999 % of it in place. How do we avoid that mindset? I think we're going to avoid that mindset because if we don't have any option about leaving it in place, we just regret it. I do regret the way nature works. I mean, I think it's a very powerful argument against the idea that this world was created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipotent creator. That just seems to be impossible because of the way nature works, but you know that's the world we live in. Given low fertility rates in virtually every wealthy nation, is there something self -defeating about secularism as a philosophy?

24:09Is secularism responsible for the low fertility rates? I mean I think Roman Catholic couples in some of these countries have birth rates that are as low as secular people. Well as these countries have all secularized, right? Israel is somewhat an exception. there above replacement. I don't know of any other wealthy countries. It's not only secularism, but it's secularism plus birth control, plus a number of other features of modernity. Does that mean this whole enterprise is just self -defeating? I hope that it's not self -defeating, and I hope that birth rates will drop in less secular countries as well, or that those countries will become more secular.

24:46I think that project of secularism is is San and right, and I certainly hope that we won't see a world in which secular people are future children and religious people have more children and therefore secularism disappears. I accept that there's a possibility that that could happen. I think that would be a very bad outcome. But why be so loyal to a project that is so poor at producing utility? Babies being utility, right? Happiness, well being something. Well, I think one reason for supporting secularism is that it seems to me to be true. I mean, I don't think that there is a divine being. So I can't simply say, let's adopt the idea of a divine being and fool ourselves that there is one.

25:27I would rather say, given that there isn't, let's find ways of having enough children to produce good long term outcomes. But you do have this piece. I think it's titled, Secrecy and Consequentialism, where you say a true consequentialist should be willing to entertain or even advocate ideas, just because they will help the world. So why not move away from secularism? Become a kind of religious drowsy and the Amish have more kids. We all need to have more kids and that would be one of the false ideas that you would at least publicly embrace. Yes, the article secrecy and consequentialism, and I should acknowledge my co -author, Katerjina Delazariratic, is more about acting in certain ways that you keep secret, like when it might be right to lie, but bad if your lie became known publicly, then it's about fostering general ideas like becoming religious.