Singer's Utilitarianism on Parade
It is interesting that Peter Singer's approval of a monkey brain experiment is big news in the UK, but virtually ignored here. In this piece, the Independent points out (correctly) that Singer's approval of the monkey experiment is not really a change, but a different expression of his amoral utilitarianism.
Singer believes in policies that maximize the "interests" of the most parties. I say parties because he believes that the interests of animals (as humans determine them to be, since animals don't even understand the concept) should be given equal consideration to those of people. Thus, rather than use chimps in hepatitis vaccine experiments, Singer once suggested using cognitively disabled people who have lower capacities. That would mean that the interests of those who have greater worth depending on capacities would be better served (e.g., the chimps and potential hepatitis victims).
When the researcher told Singer that the sacrifice of 100 monkeys may have benefited 40,000 patients, it hit Singer's sweet spot, and he approved. But he would have approved also if those experimented upon had been infants--who he denigrates as non persons--fetuses, a collection of cognitively disabled patients like Terri Schiavo, pigs, or monkeys. This would work out fine for the powerful, but woe betide the weakest and most vulnerable humans among us.
Society must never follow the amoral "ethics" of Peter Singer. Applying such starke utilitarian precepts as official policy would lead ultimately to terrible oppression and exploitation of the most defenseless human beings among us.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:53 AM
13 Comments
13 Comments:
There is an air of crudity to the philosophy of utilitarianism in general it seems to me, and in Singer it becomes exceedingly crude.
Raskolnikov: Worse than cruelty. Read Joseph Fletcher or John Harris or Jonathan Glover. Then try sleeping at night.
I too find Singer somewhat crude but probably for different reasons that you do.
Never heard of the writers you mention, but Googling around reveals that Glover "Argued that to call a foetus a human person was to stretch the term beyond its natural boundaries." Which is exactly what I've been saying.
Fletcher seems to advocate "situational ethics", which seems to me (based on 15 minutes of reading) to be just acknowledging the reality that moral decisions are the business of each of us and the laws of what's right are not handed down from on high.
I've yet to see an actual argument as to why Singer is wrong. Labelling him "amoral" is just name-calling, clearly he has a moral viewpoint which happens to be different from yours.
Speaking of crude, calls to massacre atheists and utilitarians is offensive and stupid, even in jest. This is especially true in light of the murder and terrorism practiced by the more radical wing of the pro-life movement. Are you endorsing this?
mtraven: Here is a quote from Glover justifying infanticide based his presumption that a baby is not a person and hence has no autonomy rights: "the objection to infanticide is at most no stronger than the objection to frustrating a baby's current set of desires, say by leaving him to cry unattended for a longish period." !!! Source: Causing Death and Saving Life, p. 158.
And of course, personhood theory would allow live experimentation on fetuses, which we permitted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, based on their "potential person" category.
Fletcher was the crassest of utilitarians. In a sense, he launched personhood theory by writing an essay "Criteria for Humanhood" in the Hastings Center Report back in around 1972. He once urged, for example, the creation of a primate/human slave caste.
I have argued extensively as to why Singer et al are wrong, in Culture of Death and Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World. I have also argued the issue extensively here, you just choose to see the arguments as assertions.
I guess it boils down to first principles doesn't it? I assert that human life has to have intrinsic value or none of us is safe. I support the philosophy of the United States, as set forth in Jefferon's beautiful "We hold these truths to be self evident" sentence in the Declaration.
You assert that we are, in essence, merely meat on the hoof like the rest of the fauna on the planet, and thus we should each be judged by our capacities at the moment, and that human non persons are not part of the moral community. I say that this leads to the potential for tremendous brutality and oppression and exploitation--which is UNDENIABLE given the calls to harvest the PVS for their organs and use them in experiments.
Calling Singer's beliefs amoral isn't name calling, it is definitional. Indeed, that is the very point of Fletcher's situational ethics, there is no right and wrong, only judgments based on potential outcomes.
And why in the world should animals be given equal consideration to humans?
I agree there should be no calls to massacre anyone, even in jest.
mtraven:
Nice to see you again! I've enjoyed our conversations this weekend and I'm always happy to see you on.
Now -
"I've yet to see an actual argument as to why Singer is wrong. Labelling him "amoral" is just name-calling, clearly he has a moral viewpoint which happens to be different from yours."
1. According to Singer's theory, only those who exhibit certain traits qualify as persons.
2. The other half of Singer's theory is that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few or the one. (Sorry, Trekkie fans, I never liked that line, and was happy to see Spock refuted by his mother in ST IV)
3. Therefore, those who qualify as "the many" would be those who met certain criteria that defined them as persons, whereas those who are "the few" are those who are considered non-persons.
4. During World War II (no, I'm not going to mention what you think I'm about to mention), Japanese scientists performed a series of horrifying experiments on captured American soldiers on par with and, in some cases, more vile than the experiments performed in Germany (I recall reading about a scientist vivisecting a live soldier without anesthetic, but I don't know how much stock I put in that without further data).
5. In this case, the many were the Japanese, who fit the criteria of being persons, and the few were the American soliders, who, instead of being treated properly as captured enemy soliders, were considered non-persons and thus were subjected to horrid situations.
6. The United States, in an act of pure evil, did not present the evidence of this (which they had in plenty) at the war crimes trial against Japan in exchange for the information the Japanese scientists had gathered from our fallen brethren.
7. In this case, the deceased were considered the few, and the many were the scientists in America who felt they could benefit from the information. Instead of giving respect to our fallen, they were treated as un-persons.
8. Singer's view would find nothing wrong with either of these situations. The American soldiers, by the way, were in full control of their faculties, and not PVS patients.
9. One more thing that a friend of mine brought up - under this "good of the many/good of the one" and "personhood theory" scenario, one can say that a man who falls under the classification of person can change classifications if his physical state changes. What's to prevent someone from taking a person and strangling him, hitting him, or injecting him with dangerous chemicals, with the intent to make him an un-person, and then saying that since he's a veggie-man anyway, why not just operate on him? It's a possibility.
Jason Rennie:
Hey, man, the rain falls on the just and the unjust. It's easy to love your friends and hate your enemies, but that's not in keeping with what we've been taught. I know where you're coming from, but that wasn't right. Mtraven, Royale, and the others who post here are as much my brothers as you are.
It's frustrating to have to deal with people who oppose you on these issues, I know, but don't joke about wishing harm on someone. It's easy to get past the point where it's a joke and start really feeling hate.
Tabitha
Wesley:
Singer is most definitely not amoral and if you say he is you are deliberately evading the issues he raises. An amoral person does not believe in right and wrong. Singer definitely does have such beliefs, but his principles for arriving at right and wrong are just different from yours.
I am not an advocate of Singer's position so I don't want to spend much energy defending him, but this is pretty basic stuff. You can't do moral philosophy if you won't engage your opponents on honest terms.
Then you distort my own position by saying "You assert that we are, in essence, merely meat on the hoof like the rest of the fauna on the planet", something I have never said. On the contrary, I have been consistently saying that humans are qualitatively different from other animals by virtue of their cognitive abilities. Where we differ is what should be the status of humans that lack these cognitive abilities. You want to grant full-fledged personhood to anything with 46 chromosomes. I want to draw the line elsewhere. I have yet to hear a coherent argument as to why genetics rather than human awareness should be the distinguishing mark of personhood.
Jefferson and Locke are not around to clarify their views, but I suspect they would laugh at the attempt to extend universal human rights to clumps of cells that lack even a nervous system, let alone self-awareness.
TE:
I'm not an advocate of Singerism so I agree with your points 1-8, it is not legitimate to sacrifice the rights of the few for the many, even if total utility is increased. As for your point 9, obviously it is wrong to assault someone against their will, so I don't see your point. If you assault someone leaving them brain-dead, you've essentially committed murder even if the body is still alive, because the person is dead. At least, that's what I believe personhood theory has to say about the situation.
I disagree, mtraven. Singer can't tell you right from wrong until and unless he hears the scenario so he can determine the likely interests to be served or abused by the outcome. He establishes criteria that he thinks should be used for judging utilitarian outcomes, but that is not the same thing as having moral views about right and wrong.
Case in point: Gary Francione has a moral view about the use of animals in research. It is wrong. Period. I disagree, but it is a distinctly moral view. Singer doesn't. He claims that whether an action is right or wrong depends on the circumstances and utilitarian outcomes resulting from that action. Thus, he can't tell you whether it is wrong to kill a baby. He can't tell you whether it is wrong to take the organs from a cognitively disabled patient before they are dead. It all depends on the interests being served by those acts.
When the scientist told him 100 monkeys were sacrificed to help 40,000 people, that satisfied his utilitarian criteria for judging conduct. Yet in a different scenario, he would castigate the killing of the same monkeys, in the same manner. That is amoral.
As I understand it, personhood for Singer distinguishes a heirarchy for judging outcomes. But there is nothing in his views of which I am aware, that would not also permit the sacrifice of 10 persons to benefit 1500 persons. It would all depend.
According to philosophy.lander.edu . on ethics, "Amoral actions or events: those areas of interest exhibiting indifference to and not abiding by the moral rules or codes of society."
That seems apt to Singer. He doesn't believe in moral rules or codes of conduct. Nothing is written in stone and no one is sacrosanct. He doesn't believe in rights, per se. It all depends on the circumstances.
I don't care if a human being is a person or not. I don't believe in using personhood criteria at all to protect the intrinsic value of human life--at least not as it is being used in contemporary society. A corporation is a person, for example. To me, this is ridiculous since it permits a juridical entity to have rights. Only people should have rights. (There's an argument that is really spitting into the wind!)
Personhood is being used as an excuse to transform some human beings into killable commodities and exploitable resources. It is the instrumentalization of human life. To me, that is immoral for it turns the value of life into a matter of raw politics and the power to decide. Today, non persons are out. Tomorrow, it could be anyone over 70, or people with low societal utility.
It seems to me that making intrinsic value a matter of subjective meaasurement opens the door to tremendous injustice and oppression. Whick is immoral in my view.
Earlier in this thread you mentioned Jefferson's "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and I thought it was interesting to read recently in First Things that originally Jefferson wrote "We hold these truths to be sacred" but that Benjamin Franklin suggested he use the more secular "self-evident". I wonder if there is not something key reflected in this. By assuming we must have a secular basis to agree about our morals I wonder if we are setting up an impossible situation. It is said of Kant that even he could find no grounding for garden variety morals except in the transcendent. I think much of Singer's power of persuasion depends on there first being widespread "secular" materialist assumptions which, as long as they are lodged create a deafness to the protests against his crudity. I agree with mtraven that many (while meekly staying within in the game that is stacked for materialists, protest but having undercut the ground for our logic or struggling greatly in the difficult bind of modern epistemology) myself included tend to protest Singer and to see where it is leading (having not forgotten the Shoah that quickly) but raise as yet ineffectual arguments because of the solidifcation of a materialist dullardness over the face of the West. I apologize for thinking out loud in a kind of meandering way but thank you for this forum for valuable thought and I do agree that yyou have been raising arguments against Singer and it seems these are increasingly important and good arguments are desperately needed because the stakes are very high.
mtraven:
Ah, I apologize. I misread your position. As to point 9, that was something that came up in a conversation with a friend and I posted it to generate conversation possibilities.
Actually... I think I lean in your direction concerning whether Singer is amoral or not.
Wesley, I agree with your feelings toward him, but I'd be more inclined to believe that Singer has a warped morality rather than saying he's completely amoral.
You wrote, "Singer can't tell you right from wrong until and unless he hears the scenario so he can determine the likely interests to be served or abused by the outcome. He establishes criteria that he thinks should be used for judging utilitarian outcomes, but that is not the same thing as having moral views about right and wrong."
Looking back over my list I'm not so sure. As I said, he's very, "good of the many outweighs the good of the few" in his ideology. Doesn't Singer use judgement calls to determine who the many and who the few are? In that case one could say he firmly comes down on the side of "putting the good of the many ahead of the good of the few is right, and doing otherwise is wrong."
As I said, I think Singer has it totally wrong, but I can see where mtraven's coming from.
I still don't like the guy's view. And if that's the case then he's a hypocrite, as well, because he spends so much money taking care of his mother, the "one," rather than letting her die and giving the money he spends to charities to aid "the many."
A moral code is any system that purports to tell right from wrong actions. In Singer's case, his is more abstract than the usual "thou shalt not kill/steal/whatever", it's "thou shalt maximize utility". Now, I agree with you that this is not a very good system, if only in that it is not practical to do the utilitarian calculation. But it still is a "thou shalt [not]"-type framework and thus a moral code of sorts.
Raskolnikov:
I hope we can find a secular basis for morality because grounding it in religion is just a prelude to religious warfare, in my view. The genius of our country is to dispense with divine dispensation. God can't tell us how to behave. It's up to us.
mtraven: Which brings me to my big bugaboo: Universal human equality is a secular, non sectarian value system that I used to think was the Lingua Franka of the West. I think you agree with that, you just agree that it should be universal HUMAN equality, but rather universal PERSON equality. And to me, that destroys the whole thing because it excludes those most in need of protection.
mtraven:
"God can't tell us how to behave. It's up to us."
I don't know about that. Every religion I've encountered has some variation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Christianity expressly forbids hating your enemy and demands that you love everyone, even those who have wronged you, and offer forgiveness. Hinduism proposes that the wrongs you do in this life will be redressed in future lives until you give up the bad habits that got you in trouble in the first place. Even most Native American religions firmly believe that every action you take, positive or negative, affects not only yourself and those directly involved with you, but the entire environment around you and even the entire tribe.
I'm more inclined to believe that people will take what they want from religion and ignore the stuff that's inconvinent to them. Like I said, every time we try to idiot-proof the system we breed better idiots.
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