351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures

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Personal Journey

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Mindscape Podcast Introduction

1:29Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We all, in life, struggle with the question of, what is the right thing to do? How do you behave like a good person? What is the moral thing to do, the ethical thing to do? Once you get into the professional philosophy sphere, you start asking, what do you mean by the right thing to do? Is there something called the right thing to do? Is that an objective truth about the universe? Do people just make it up? And if it's out there, whether we make it up or not,

2:00how do we find it? How do we calculate? How do we decide what is the right thing to do under various conditions? Probably, although there are many different approaches, the most popular current approach is utilitarianism, some version of saying that there is some quantity, the utility, the greatest good, the total happiness or pleasure or well-being of conscious creatures, human beings, however you want to slice it, that we should try to maximize.

2:31The more people are happy, the more their well-being is fulfilled, etc., the better off, the more moral we're going to be. And probably the most prominent proponent of utilitarianism in modern philosophy is today's guest, Peter Singer. Peter Singer has been a very active voice in both developing utilitarian philosophy but also in implementing it. He has had an impact on the real world, more than most philosophers have had. He's both been very, very careful in thinking about

3:02what it means to increase the total happiness of humanity, and he's famously willing to follow the implications of his reasoning wherever they may lead. He believes that we all have moral intuitions or feelings. Some of them are not right. And so sometimes if you're careful about doing moral philosophy, you're going to be led to conclusions that are a little bit surprising or counterintuitive at first. But if you trust your logic, you should nevertheless accept them. Among the areas in which he's had influence on

3:35our effective altruism, the idea that we shouldn't just be philanthropic and give money to good causes, but we should sort of target our giving to the most impactful causes. Also, animal rights and fights against factory farming. He wrote a very influential early book called Animal Liberation, which basically makes the argument that if animals have feelings, if they have preferences or happiness or well-being, then they should count for how we should increase the total happiness of conscious creatures

4:07here on Earth. He continues to be super active in both philosophizing and fighting for these causes, especially against poverty worldwide. And nowadays, he has expanded his efforts into podcasting. He and Kasia de Lazari-Radek have started a podcast called Lives Well Lived. And so he has a wonderful microphone set up, which makes him a great podcast guest, right? So we're very happy to have Peter Singer on today's podcast to think about all of these questions,

4:39how to be a good person, why this approach is better than the others, and what it means for the real world. So let's go.

Conversation with Peter Singer

4:56Peter Singer, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thank you, Sean. Great to be with you. So obviously, a lot of what we're going to talk about falls under the umbrella of ethics. But as you know, being a professional philosopher, there's also meta-ethics. There's this issue of like, how do we even know how to justify a story of how to behave ethically.

5:27I mean, what are your general feelings here? We'll start very broad and work in. Do you think that morality is something objective and real? Or are you of this school where we kind of make it up? I do think that there is something objective and real, although obviously, a lot of our moral intuitions are evolved intuitions that have helped our ancestors to survive. So I don't really trust those moral intuitions. But I think that reason

5:58has something to say about ethics. And that's where the objectivity or reality comes in. This is not a view that I've always held. I started out as what philosophers call a non-cognitivist. So something that basically holds that there's nothing to be known, that there's no knowledge. Um, initially, you know, the view that I held that was quite popular when I was an undergraduate in the 60s was that moral judgments are expressions of our emotions,

6:29our feelings. I moved a little bit more when I got to Oxford and studied with RM Hare, who thought that moral judgments are prescriptions, that's like commands, but also that they are governed by, when you think ethically, by the need to make those prescriptions universalizable. That is, essentially, that's something like the golden rule. So it's something like, well, if you say that this is the right moral thing to do, and perhaps on this occasion

6:59you benefit from it, you're telling somebody not to harm you, but if you're actually in the reverse of the roles, so you also have to stick to the same moral judgment. Your moral judgments can't just say, well, because I'm Peter Singer, I can do this to you, but because you're Sean Carroll, you can't do that to me. So that brought in an element of reason, but for Hare, it was kind of something just part of the grammar of the moral language, and that wasn't really enough for me.

7:29So after struggling with that for a few years, I came to a view that I took from the late 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick, really, that there are rational judgments, that we are capable of looking at things from a broader point of view than our own. He called it the point of view of the universe, although he wasn't saying that the universe is a being with a point of view, and that produces an element of reasoning,

8:00I think, objectivity and moral judgments. I guess there is a distinction maybe we should be careful about between moral realism and moral objectivity, right? Like moral realism gives us the impression that there's something out there, some morality stuff that we can experiment on or something like that, whereas objectivity just means it's independent of our personal subjective point of view. Yes, I think that's right. The term moral realism suggests that in some way

8:31this is like part of the furniture of the universe, that we could discover it in some way as we can discover other galaxies, and clearly that's not the case, but I think that it's objective in the sense that any being capable of reasoning could understand the reasons that we give for acting in the ways that we say are the way you ought to act, so that's what makes it larger than just ourselves or even our species.

9:02So what do you say to people who just say they disagree with you? Like maybe I do think that the morally right thing to do is whatever Sean Carroll wants and there's nothing you can say about it. I do think that if you say that you're denying the fact that others are like you, that I'm like you, and that you are justified in ignoring that fact. So you're

9:32missing some fact about the situation or you're not giving it attention or weight. and if we are going to talk ethically I think that's not justifiable. So what I'm saying is, you know, yes, there's a selfish way of reasoning that you can engage in, but you are just looking at it from that perspective and that's a narrower perspective, one that, you know, again, maybe we, our ancestors evolved and survived because they took that perspective,

10:03but we can look at things from a broader perspective, this point of view of the universe and say, well, is it a bad thing that somebody is suffering? And I think when we do that and we understand what suffering is, then we can say, yes, that is a bad thing and that's something that you're ignoring when you only look at Sean Carroll's suffering and not at the suffering of others that you're causing. So I think it sounds like, and this will come up later,

10:33a crucially important role is being played here by a kind of equivalence that different agents have, right? That there's no higher moral standing that one agent has than another and sort of given that, I don't want to say assumption, but at least starting point, you can go pretty far. Yes, there's some sense in which some moral agents may have a higher status. They may be able to suffer more for example,

11:04so there are some non-human animals who may be, we may decide that they are also, well, they're certainly agents, we may even say that they're moral agents in some cases, but maybe they have a more limited perspective on the world, more limited cognitive capacities, and possibly they're not capable of suffering as much or enjoying life as much, and there's one sense then in which they matter less than we do. So, I'm not saying that every moral

11:35agent is of equal worth in some deep sense, but I am saying that any being capable of having conscious experience matters and ought not to be ignored. And so, that's very helpful, thank you. I know what your answer to this is, but could you maybe explain to the audience there is a traditional division of approaches to ethics into consequentialists

12:06point of view, deontology, where you care about the rules that you're given, and maybe virtue ethics, where you're trying to be virtuous as a process in life rather than following a set of rules. Which one of these are you? Okay. Well, I'm a consequentialist. Ah, I guessed. You guessed, yes. Not a secret. I have been for my entire career.

12:33A consequentialist is somebody who thinks that the right actions are those that have the best consequences, whereas a deontologist essentially denies that, says sometimes an action is right even though it will have all things considered and for everybody affected worse consequences than some other action.

12:54And a virtue ethicist, I think actually virtue ethics is compatible in some form with consequentialism, perhaps also with deontology, because virtue ethics simply says you should be the kind of being who has a character of virtue, that is virtuous. And then, of course, we have to define what virtuous means, and that's fairly open. But a consequentialist will say, well, the virtues one should have are those that, in the

13:24long run, will tend to produce the best consequences. Yeah. So, I do find virtue ethics... Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, I don't really see that as a completely independent moral view. I do think that virtue ethics is sort of frustratingly vague, and yet I do find myself growing in sympathy toward it over time. So, I'm glad that I can talk to a dyed-in-the-wool consequentialist, which is what I used to be, but I'm sort of backsliding a little bit. So, utilitarianism is a particular

13:55way of being consequentialist? That's right. You can think of consequentialism as the genus and utilitarianism as the species. So, consequentialists might value a wide range of things. They might say, for example, that freedom or autonomy or knowledge or justice are independent goods, that they are things of intrinsic value, even if they don't produce more happiness and less suffering for

14:26sentient beings. Whereas utilitarians say, no, the only thing that is really of intrinsic value is the well-being of sentient beings, conscious, desirable, conscious states, if you want to put it that way. And all of these other things are very important, you know, I didn't deny that they're important, but they're important instrumentally as a means to producing in the long run a

14:56society that does lead to more happiness for all sentient beings. So, that's the difference between non-utilitarian consequentialists, of whom there are some who think that there are these other independent goods and utilitarians like myself. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month.

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Utilitarianism Discussion

16:15And of course, among utilitarians, there are subspecies and factions. Do you have a specific brand that you like to appeal to? Yes, I'm now a classic hedonist, hedonistic utilitarian. That means I regard happiness and pleasure, again, desirable states of consciousness, we call them, the kinds of states of consciousness that you like to have for their own sake.

16:46I regard them as good and undesirable states, obviously, pain, misery, suffering, as bad. Again, for some years I was a preference utilitarian. I'll confess, that's what I thought, so this is news to me, yeah, thanks. Right, yeah, yeah, okay. So I was a preference utilitarian, again, somewhat under the influence of R.M. Hare, because Hare's view was, as I said before, that moral

17:17judgments have to be universalizable, and that means we have to put ourselves in the position of others, and when we put ourselves in the position of others, Hare said, we take on their preferences. So we take on what it is that they want, and how much they want it, and that's what we should be maximizing, giving, satisfying their preferences. But of course there's a problem with that, and that problem is that they may be misinformed about a whole lot of things in their

17:48preferences, and they may want something and not realize that it's actually not going to be nearly as good as they imagined it was, might in fact be quite bad. So Hare then adjusted that to say, well, it's the preferences that you would have if you were fully informed, and also if you were thinking calmly, for example, and not, you know, like you might have a preference in a rage, somebody has insulted you and you want to strike them in the face, and that will have terrible consequences if

18:19you do that, but, you know, because you're in a rage, that's your preference. And again, Hare said, well, you have to be what you would want if you thought calmly and rationally about this.

18:32And actually, Sidgwick kind of anticipated all of this, you know, in the 19th century, and pointed out that if you're talking about the preferences you would have if you were rational, then you have to think, well, is there some reason for thinking that happiness is good and that some other preferences are not good? and Sidgwick argued that there are reasons for thinking that happiness is good and that other things that people might prefer, even intrinsically,

19:03are actually not good, nor not good in themselves. So, you know, that was one reason why I then shifted to a hedonistic viewpoint.

19:16And another was, I suppose, that I moved away from that universal prescriptivism, as I said before, to the idea of a more objective ethic. So I made that change in roughly in the early teens of this century, and the most definitive statement of it is a book that I co-authored with the Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Rudyk called The Point of View of the Universe. Again, that's that phrase from Sidgwick. And it is really kind of an account of Sidgwick's views

19:47and a defense of Sidgwick's views in the context of contemporary philosophy. One of the things that I always worried about with utilitarianism was the apparent need to say that there was this thing called utility that, whether or not I could accurately measure it, it existed, and I could somehow add up the utility caused by someone being happy and compare it to the utility from someone else being happy or sad or whatever. That seemed

20:18like wishful thinking and not really reflective of true human experience. Am I right to think that that's what a utilitarian has to believe? A utilitarian doesn't have to believe that we actually can measure it in any precise way. But it exists, yes. That's right. A utilitarian would have to believe that there is some state of happiness that you're in that I cannot directly access or measure and that it might be greater or

20:48lesser than mine. But I think that's something that we all have to do anyway. I'm a little puzzled by this objection. Suppose that you and a few other people are going out for dinner and you say, well, which restaurant should we go to? And you say, I really love Chinese food, especially that spicy Sichuan food. Let's go to that. And two other people say, yeah, I enjoy Sichuan. And then someone else says, I'm sorry, I really hate spicy food. I just can't take it. So you have

21:18to decide now, is your preference and that of the others who enjoyed that Sichuan food going to outweigh that of the other person who will have to order the plain boiled rice and maybe some vegetables with not much flavor in them if they go along, right? And we do that kind of thing all the time in deciding those kinds of group choices. So I don't think the utilitarian has to say more than, well, yeah,

21:49you know, we try to do that as accurately as we can. Maybe we're getting some techniques for assessing it a little bit better than we used to, but that's the situation we're in. I mean, I do think, I hear that response very clearly. I would say that human beings act as if something is real and true all the time without it being real and true. So it's not really a definitive.

22:16And it gets us into sort of the classic worries about utilitarianism. I apologize, because I'm sure that you've had these conversations many times over the decades, but if you're a straightforward utilitarian, there's all sorts of puzzles you run into of the form, would it be okay to make one person much, much, much less happy if we could just make a lot of people a little bit happier and the totals outweighed? Yes, you're right. There are many such objections

22:47put to utilitarianism. I tend to think that the answer to those objections is if you specify that this is a hypothetical example and we know that the slight happiness of the many is going to outweigh the greater unhappiness of the few or the one and we know there are no further bad consequences from this, then that could well be the thing that we ought to do. Now, let me just add

23:18that we need in order to decide that that slight happiness of the many outweighs the greater happiness of the one, we need to have a scale on which we compare suffering or unhappiness with happiness and it's not obvious that that scale is one that runs in equal, you know, thinking about it spatially, runs an equal distance from the neutral point in both directions. In other words, you know, I sometimes ask my, I've asked my

23:49audiences this question. Suppose that a fairy says, I can grant you an hour of the greatest pleasure that you have ever experienced, but the price you have to pay for that is that you will also have an hour of the greatest pain that you have ever experienced. Would you like me to grant you that wish? And most of the audience says no. And I conclude from the fact that most of the audience says no, that we think that the worst pains we suffer actually are

24:21further from the neutral point than the greatest pleasures that we suffer. Sorry, the greatest pleasures that we enjoy.

24:30So we have to be careful with these things about making one person miserable because maybe if we make them really miserable, that's going to outweigh a very large amount of mild enjoyments that the many are going to experience. I'll confess I haven't read a lot of the technical literature on utilitarianism but knowing philosophers as we both do, I'm sure that someone has tried to make this fearsomely mathematical. I'm wondering

25:00is it necessarily the case that if there's a certain amount of utility garnered by increasing two people's happiness by a certain amount, does utilitarianism have to assume that you get twice as much utility if four people get that increase in happiness? Is there some linearity or addition kind of assumption being made? Yes, I think that is the standard view. There are some people who've toyed with the idea of a sort of declining

25:30marginal utility