Comment by airgapstopgap
2 years ago
The most important of Singer's writings, in my opinion, is "Secrecy in Consequentialism"[0], mentioned in this podcast too, though not the crucial part, which I will present without further comment except that this paper should make any utterance from Singer or any of his followers (for example, SBF) inherently untrustworthy.
> There are acts which are right only if no one – or virtually no one – will get to know about them. The rightness of an act, in other words, may depend on its secrecy. This can have implications for how often, and in what circumstances, such an act may be done.
> Some people know better, or can learn better, than others what it is right to do in certain circumstances.
> There are at least two different sets of instruction, or moral codes, suitable for the different categories of people. This raises the question whether there are also different standards by which we should judge what people do.
> Though the consequentialist believes that acts are right only if they have consequences at least as good as anything else the agent could have done, the consequentialist may need to discourage others from embracing consequentialism. …
> The idea that it is better if some moral views are not widely known was not invented by Sidgwick. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes that ordinary people be brought up to believe that everyone is born ‘from the earth’ into one of three classes, gold, silver or bronze, and living justly consists in doing what is in their nature. Only the philosopher-rulers will know that this is really a myth, a ‘noble lie’. …
> Esoteric morality is a necessary part of a consequentialist theory, and all of the points above can be defended. …
> One of the most common objections to consequentialism is based on a hypothetical situation in which a surgeon has to do a delicate brain operation on a patient who happens to be the ideal organ donor for four other patients in the hospital, each of whom will die shortly unless they receive, respectively, a heart, a liver, and – for two of them – a kidney. The doctor is highly skilled, and is confident of her ability to carry out the brain surgery successfully. If she does, her patient will lead a more or less normal life.
> But because the operation is a delicate one, no one could blame her, or have any reason to suspect anything, if the patient were to die on the operating table. Moreover, the hospital is experienced in organ transplantation, and the surgeon knows that if the patient were to die, the recipients of the patient’s organs would soon be able to go home and lead a more or less normal life. The surgeon knows no other details about her patient or the other patients, such as whether they are married, have children, or are about to discover a cure for cancer. In these circumstances, critics of consequentialism say, the consequentialist must think that the doctor ought to kill her patient, since in that way four lives will be saved, and only one lost, and this must be better than four dying and only one being saved. But, so the objection runs, it is obviously morally wrong for the surgeon to kill her patient, and any moral theory that says the contrary must be rejected.
> We agree that the consequentialist must accept that, in these circumstances, the right thing for the surgeon to do would be to kill the one to save the four, but we do not agree that this means that consequentialism should be rejected. We think, on the contrary, that the appearance of unacceptability here comes from the fact that this is one of those rare cases in which the action is right only if perfect secrecy can be expected. Moreover, it is not an action that should be recommended to others.
0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9329....
I thought this was interesting and it didn't make me distrust him at all. I can't really tell why it should.
It's literally just the trolley problem, which is valuable and interesting only so far as it shows the limits and practical undecidability of thought experiments like this.
Which, morally sophisticated people inevitably find is almost comically sensitive to details of the scenario or context, and that's it's virtually impossible to find a satisfying generalizable solution. And then singer is just like "no. u simply pull the lever." It's not interesting.
Well, I think his position is more, "u simply pull the lever if you're sure you won't get caught", which logically might require telling other people you wouldn't pull the lever. So in that sense, one can speculate all kinds of things that he would do without telling others. I suspect his idea of proper obfuscation is more in a sense of double meanings - philosophers love those, and I think it was the basis of the 'noble lie' cited upthread.
It was interesting, sorry
A simple answer to such thought experiments is that actual consequentialism has to operate in the real world, not on carefully constructed hypotheticals.
So for instance, in the real world you can't guarantee you will get away with it. Real surgeons operate in teams, not alone, and are surrounded by other well trained professionals. Real people have loved ones that may press for an investigation of what happened, especially if the patient's death was suspiciously convenient.
So now the real calculus is more complicated. Your calculus isn't nearly as simple as "1 patient vs 4 recipients". You could get caught. The organs might be unusable. The transplant might get rejected. Investigations may result in enormous negative consequences. Etc.
That's just another version of The Trolley Problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
If you were the conductor, what choice would you make?
just going from your own quotes here, he describes the cases in which one might "apparently unacceptably" as "rare", and the example he gives has lots of conditions. and he believes you could never recommend the action to others.
so I don't think "any utterance" of his or his followers is inherently untrustworthy no.
This is comically naive and literal. Have you read any moral philosophy before?
The point of his argument is not that under certain exceptional conditions surgeons should kill people to harvest their organs to save more lives, but precisely that any sort of formal pledge or personal obligation or non-utilitarian moral code can be betrayed if that leads to higher expected utility; and that it is prudent to lie about your true intentions and convictions if you think that is a precondition to achieving greater total utility. It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset, and not just specifically on the issue of saving lives – like the trolley problem, this is only an illustration. This applies to utility in general, and thus to all instrumental preconditions for creating it: to money, power, anything; therefore, any act of a Singerian should be suspected as part of an instrumentally useful scheme to secure a position to achieve more utility. This applies the most to pretenses of having integrity, valuing promises or even some kind of sentimental loyalty.
People who profess to believe in Singerian doctrine can not be trusted to mean what they are saying, because you cannot know what sort of a convoluted scheme to maximize total utility they have imagined that could necessitate deception in a particular case.
Again, his follower Sam Bankman-Fried has demonstrated this very clearly by defrauding his clients and appropriating money for the purposes of Effective Altruism and AI Alignment movements, and then by piling an absurd lie on an absurd lie. Singer defends the teaching by claiming, contrary to his somewhat more sophisticated argument, that "honesty is the best policy"[0]. This is what he, in his article, describes as morality for children – that is, the immature people who cannot be trusted to make consequentialist decisions and should be taught deontology.
> and he believes you could never recommend the action to others
Oh. Okay, so he says that it is the morally correct course of action logically following from moral philosophy he has been advancing and propagandizing all his life, but [generic] you should not recommend it to others. How is that very claim not such a recommendation? What is the meaning of this sophistry?
Perhaps it serves to separate those who can practice the shallowest Straussian reading from those who are effectively children.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/24/giving-goo...
> It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset
That's a misreading of the paper and a misrepresentation of the position that Singer holds. It is also a misrepresentation of what utilitarians more generally think about practical ethics and the virtue of truth-telling. The following text is in my experience fairly representative of the views held by real world utilitarian philosophers: https://www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/virtues-for-real...
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> Have you read any moral philosophy before?
yes a fair bit, thanks for showing an interest in me!
> Again, his follower Sam Bankman-Fried has demonstrated this very clearly
I think it's much clearer that Bankman-Fried had absolutely no expectation that his rule-breaking would meet Singers requirements and, you know, he was just lying for the many normal reasons people lie.
> People who profess to believe in Singerian doctrine can not be trusted to mean what they are saying
in which case, nobody who believes in (this) Singerian doctrine should reveal that they do so.
Anyone telling you they follow this doctrine severely compromises their ability to actually execute on it. The rational thing for a Singerian secrecy advocate to do would be to publicly attack the doctrine, as you are doing.