The Reprehensible Peter Singer

Liberals value harm avoidance (harmlessness) and equality. Conservatives can agree that harmlessness and equality are good things, but also value loyalty, sanctity, and authority as complements. These are five moral foundations that Jonathan Haidt identifies as governing human action and nature. For a community to survive, especially amidst groups hostile to it, it has to be high in positive and negative ethnocentrism. Care for the group (positive) and hostility to outgroups (negative). The left wing tends to identify with the loser, the downtrodden, the failure, and thus the outgroup. Being high in neuroticism—that is, feeling negative feelings strongly­—many of them are fearful and convinced that they cannot succeed by directly challenging their competitors. Instead, they try to virtue signal their way up the hierarchy by expressing sympathy for the outgroup. They want power to control what they find to be a fear-provoking environment. Some of them, influenced by Foucault and post-modernism, even claim that everything is about power and not truth. Good luck trying to deal with such a Machiavellian schemer. Their true character is demonstrated by the fact that they do not care if the proposed courses of action help the outgroup or not. What matters is whether their neuroticism is assuaged by their own thought and action. Utilitarianism is the ultimate endpoint of liberalism with a hatred of humanity and love of abstraction to boot!

In the podcast Conversations with Tyler, Tyler Cowen’s guest is the Australian-born utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Utilitarians are supposed to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, where one is to choose the course of action with the best outcome, judged by this standard. We know from experiments that psychopaths, schizophrenics, and persons on the autism spectrum are consequentialists too, assessing the morality of different courses of action by their imagined consequences. All these people have trouble accessing the right hemisphere of their brains and, consequently, their left hemispheres are too prominent in their thinking. The left hemisphere deals with inanimate objects, not living beings, and has no access to emotion or intuition. Since moral truths such as the truth of the goodness of reciprocity are intuitively known, they are unavailable to them, and such people cannot be relied upon for moral insight. If transcranial stimulation is used to turn off first one hemisphere, then the other, in the same person, the right hemisphere gives the correct moral answer while the left hemisphere just looks at the outcome, regardless of intent or how this was achieved. Subjects, in one experiment, were asked whether it is morally worse to try to kill someone by putting rat poison in their tea, but to accidentally put harmless sugar, or if intending to put sugar in someone’s tea, but accidentally putting rat poison, killing them. When their right hemispheres were allowed to function, they gave the correct answer. When their right hemispheres were inhibited, the very same person turns into a consequentialist and answers that accidentally killing someone is morally worse than trying to kill them and failing. Intent becomes irrelevant to them and only the outcome is salient to them.

Damage to the right hemisphere tends to result in a utilitarian stance. Without its input, as Iain McGilchrist reminds us, one gets a “reduced aversion to harming others,” “higher psychoticism with reduced empathy and emotional blunting,” “a greater sense of the meaninglessness of life,” “greater Machiavellianism,” and “the behavior typical of the psychopath and schizophrenic. In general, experimenters found an association between utilitarianism and anti-social, self-centered traits. Little children tend to focus on the quantitative in making moral assessments while older adults tend to include qualitative matters too. Children are less able to take another person’s perspective and in general one would expect a more simplistic approach to every complicated problem. Consequentialists do not even distinguish between killing and letting die, making an actual murderer equivalent to someone who fails to assist another person. One utilitarian student said that to him, the person torturing someone is on the same moral level as the person being tortured. To him, it was a sheer numbers game. Who is doing the torturing is irrelevant since the same number of people are being harmed. When asked if he would feel better about himself as the torture victim rather than the torturer, he said that he does not believe in the concepts of “guilt” and “innocence,” so it would make no difference to his self-conception which position he occupied. That is not someone with a normally functioning moral sense.

Cowen offers a scenario to Singer in their conversation where “aliens come to earth and they may do away with us. We have reason to believe that they could be happier here on earth than what we could 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.” Singer responds, “OK. You just met one.” Cowen: “So, you would sign up to fight for the aliens?” Singer, “If the hypothesis is like that. The aliens are wiser than we are. They know how to make the world a better place for everyone. Then, giving full weight to human interests, they say, “Even though we are giving full weight to human interests, not discarding your interests because you’re not a member of our species as you do with animals, unfortunately, it just works out that to produce a better world you have to go.” (Sniffs/inhales). “I’ll say, OK, if your calculations are right, if that’s all right, [Singer is asking permission from the hypothetical exterminators of the human race to join in their efforts to annihilate humanity, which is very polite of him] then I’m on your side.”

Cowen: “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 make a better go of it than we would.” “I [Cowen] would still side with the humans.” Singer: “I would not. What you’ve shown now is that their interests happen 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. Then, I’m on their side.”

Cowen: “How do we know there is a universal good? You’re selling out your fellow humans based on this belief in a universal good. It’s quite abstract. Right? The other smart humans you know mostly don’t agree with you. I think. I hope.” Singer: “You’re using the kind of language Bernard Williams used when he said, “Whose side are you on?” You said, “You’re selling out your fellow humans as though I owe loyalty to members of my species above loyalty to good in general. Maximizing happiness and well-being for all of those affected by it. I don’t claim to have any particular loyalty for my species other than the general good.”

This is why positive and negative ethnocentrism are necessary for the survival of any group. A society of Peter Singers cannot exist. Peter Singer has a wife and three daughters whom he is also throwing, hypothetically, to the wolves. The current explicit hatred of Western civilization being espoused by the elite is also inconsistent with its survival.

Cowen: “But, if there’s not this common metric between us and the aliens, what you just measure. [sic]You hook people up to a scale, you measure, they have more of it than we do, we let them come in. If that doesn’t exist, what is the common or universal good?”

Singer: “I don’t know, if that doesn’t exist. But, you said, they’re happier than we are. So, there is a common metric of happiness and that was the basis on which I answered your question. If there’s no common metric, I won’t really be able to 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.”

Funnily enough, Singer would be more prepared to support a football team than the human race. He says, “You can have your loyalty to a football team even though you don’t really think that they are more morally worthy of winning than their opponents. But this is not a game like that. It has everything at stake!”

Precisely! Everything is at stake. To hell with the football team. Support humanity! With, quote, “everything at stake,” that is exactly when Peter Singer is going to sell every single human being down the river because of some abstraction that cannot be measured; something called “overall happiness.” With his offer to help exterminate humanity, will he start with his wife and daughters? If he evinces an inability or unwillingness to do so, he would demonstrate just a little bit of humanity and loyalty hiding inside him. Opposed as he is to speciesism, it seems likely that he would regard it as a matter of principle not to have any such hesitations to sacrifice humanity for whatever he deems as bringing “overall happiness.” His honesty does not merit the accolades he receives. He is, in fact, a reprehensible totalitarian whose ideas could fuel the worst crimes against humanity ever seen.

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