Thread by @EPoe187

1) Peter Singer is an intellectual colossus, a philosopher who is well known inside and outside the academy. And he's spectacularly wrong.

aporiamagazine.com/p/against-sing…

2) Singerism, as I see it, consists of three core commitments: utilitarianism, cosmopolitanism, and rationalism. Each is wrong or incomplete. Of these, utilitarianism is the most crucial.

3) Utilitarianism teaches that only pleasure and pain have intrinsic value. Nothing else matters morally. The right action is whatever increases pleasure and reduces suffering overall.

4) In my view, the original sin of utilitarianism is the premise that pain and pleasure are intrinsic and not instrumental goods. This leads to implausible consequences that violate intuitive notions of morality.

5) To begin, consider somebody who gets pleasure from watching animated torture pornography. Is that pleasure good? Or somebody who gets pleasure from watching kids fall and cry on a playground? Most of us consider such pleasure perverse and wrong.

6) But worse for utilitarianism, the claim that pleasure and pain are intrinsic goods undermines the view that people should be treated impartially. This is because pain and pleasure motivate moral behavior. Some people are thus more valuable than others.

7) In this framework, pleasure and pain take precedence over the person. The individual becomes merely a vessel for sensations. The human is morally dwarfed by the calculus of feeling.

8) Other objections to utilitarianism are obvious, but have not been answered satisfactorily in my view. Perhaps the most interesting is that it might not be possible to compare pleasures and pains. A felicity calculus is not just unimaginable; it is impossible.

9) Singerism’s next commitment is cosmopolitanism: the view that all humans should be morally equal, regardless of how near or far they are to us. Physical or relational distance, he argues, has no moral significance.

10) Singer illustrates this with his most famous thought experiment about a boy drowning in a pond. The idea is that you can save the boy but you will ruin nice clothes. We all think you should. Well, says Singer, we're always in this situation! We could always save children.

11) Like many thought experiments, this one is better at manipulating the mind than exhibiting important logic. One can tweak the example in many ways to make it show the opposite of its intended point.

12) I think moral cosmopolitanism is wrong both in theory and in practice. In the real world, we have different obligations to different people and communities. What we owe our kid, our wife, or our neighbor is greater than what we owe a stranger.

13) I don't think there is a single ethical system that can grasp the world. Instead, we have multiple, sometimes competing and sometimes consilient obligations. Great art often wrestles with the contradictions, e.g., Antigone, The Third Man, Godfather, and so on.

14) In my view, we should care more about a daughter or a fellow in our community than about a stranger. We should care more about our country than another country. And so on. (And of course, people in another country should feel the same about us!)

15) The third commitment is rationalism: the belief that human reason is our chief moral tool, capable of uncovering new ethical truths that were previously hidden or misunderstood.

16) To consider rationalism in practice, we should consider a famous vignette from Haidt about consensual incest. Nobody is harmed. The brother and sister enjoyed it. Was it wrong?

17) The rationalist seems to take a perverse delight in playing Socrates to the moral dogmatist here. "Well nobody was harmed! How can it be wrong?" Most people run out of endurance for the dialectic and give an exasperated "It just is!"

18) But the rationalist, being a rationalist, is not content with "It just is." So the rationalist often claims that the consensual incest was not wrong--and that it might be some kind of social bigotry to prohibit love between brother and sister.

19) Moral rationalism is wrong and generally doomed to failure for the same reason that aesthetic rationalism is. There is no truth of the matter beyond our intuitions. That doesn't mean that reason plays no role in moral or aesthetic philosophy of course. But it is limited.

20) Supposed moral truths that defy deeply held intuitions will be rejected as wrong no matter how "rational" they seem. I do not think morality is entirely subjective however. Community flourishing seems objective and worth aiming for.

21) But importantly the path to community flourishing is not always obvious and many carefully considered philosophical ideas prove pernicious in the real world. Reason, like man himself, is fallible. We should be cautious about defying long-lasting customs.

22) Singer is, as I said at the beginning, an intellectual giant. He deserves his status. His writing is clear. He champions free speech. And he is always willing to discuss and debate. But he is wrong. Spectacularly wrong.