YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Singer

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-06-07
most recent: 2023-06-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh, I'm gonna relax a little bit from what I've been doing. I'm gonna be teaching my final semester at Princeton because I'm retiring from Princeton at the end of the fall semester. And I'll want to put some time into doing that. And then I'm going to stop and think, are there still other things that I'm really keen to write and do? I'm sure I'm going to be speaking, doing short form writing about the issues that are important to me. Do I still have a major book in me? At this stage, I must admit I'm not sure what that would be, but I've been working hard on animal liberation now and more recently been trying to promote it and publicize it. So I think I need to take a break and take stock and think.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, firstly, we can stop eating non-human animals, and particularly, I would say, stop eating animal products from factory farms. That seems really important. Secondly, we can support the organizations that are trying to combat factory farming. And if you want to find the best ones, you can go to animalcharity evaluators, which is like an effective altruism site for animal charities. And thirdly, you can get political about this. You can tell your political representatives at all levels of government that animals matter and that you're going to be more likely to vote for people who have strong policies on animal welfare.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am very concerned with happiness, and the advice I would give is to think about making your life fulfilling and meaningful, not to think it that it's just about earning more money, buying more consumer goods, having a richer lifestyle, but contributing to making the world a better place. So this is obviously the goal of effective altruism, but there's a lot of psychology research showing that people who are generous and are thinking of values and their lives are in harmony with values do actually find their lives more rewarding and more satisfying.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, got harder to get them to do the reading, I think. When I first came to Princeton, I was very pleasantly surprised by you could set students reading and you would find that when you talk to them about it, they nearly all had read it. I think they're reading less now. That's disappointing. So that's one difference. Otherwise, I still find, always found that there's a reasonable level of idealism. I think that fluctuates. But I find American students, again, this is particularly a Princeton experience. There are some of them who are just wanting to get through the course and get a decent grade and get on with the degree. But there are quite a few who come to philosophy courses, and particularly ethics courses like mine, really wanting to think about what they're going to do with their lives. How are they going to live? And I find that refreshing. I don't think that's changed dramatically in any direction, either up or down over the...”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's not enough, but I worry that people with controversial ideas would simply get fired by deans when people on Twitter start criticizing them. I've really been disappointed in some of these recent controversies where people have been criticized for saying things to which university administrations have not stood up to this Twitter storm and have instead suspended or in some cases people who were not on tenure, dismissed or not reappointed, people for controversial ideas. And I think tenure has provided protection for some people. So that's why I'm still reluctant to get rid of tenure. But I'm not sure. Maybe giving students more of a role in appointments would be a reasonable factor because they would be interested in things that the professional philosophers might not see as part of philosophy, but they would.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are a lot of options. I'm reluctant to get rid of Tenya. It has been a protection for people to have different and controversial.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lifeblood of the subject, it's aiming for the capillaries of the subject in a way. It's the smaller things that you can get right and you can get articles published in good journals.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't really challenge your premise, although I do think there's a lot of good work being done in philosophy. Sure. But I think there's obviously immense competition for jobs and for particularly for tenured jobs. And you're going to be reviewed your case for appointment or for tenure is going to be reviewed by your peers, other philosophers, and they are going to look for work that is the kind of work that gets published in a highly rated journal, which is going to tend to be work that reviews, criticizes, builds on work that is already going on in those journals. So I think it's difficult for young people to break away and say, here's a different area that I want to work in, or here's something that is broader, less narrow that I want to work in. And so we tend to get articles which say, well, here's a theory that some philosopher holds. I've got an objection to one part of this theory, and maybe I've got an alternative to that. And so, in a sense, instead of aiming for the really the...”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't think Freud was a great philosopher. I think that if he were a great philosopher, he would have been more open to different ideas. And clearly he was highly authoritarian in his thinking. He had a set of ideas and wasn't really prepared to brook opposition to them. And that's why my grandfather broke with him, along with Alfred Adler when the split between Freud and Adler occurred. grandfather, this is what my mother and aunt told me, my grandfather acknowledged that Freud was in the field. I just really didn't like the way he behaved and how authoritarian he was and therefore sided with Adler. And I think if Freud had been more open to ideas, he wouldn't have treated dissent, whether Adlerians or other forms of dissent in the way he did.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so at a theoretical, philosophical level, I'm going to say no, it's all explicable in terms of the utility. But as I say, that doesn't mean that I don't have non-utilitarian intuitions about it.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So I'm happy to say that what they did was wrong and they should be punished for it at a level that is compatible with utilitarianism, but also compatible with a lot of other views. Is that enough for you?”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we want to punish people who do great evil as a way of indicating that it's got an expressivist function, that this was a terrible thing, that they did, and so this is a kind of ultimate condemnation that people should learn from, be educated from, and also a deterrent function if other people think that they're going to get away with that.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the things that utilitarianism has no control over, like better climate, it's not sort of hot and sticky and humid like it is in Singapore all the time. Australia has great beaches. Natural assets will play a role in how happy the population is.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's quite possible. I think the Australian governments are actually reasonably utilitarian, and I'm more familiar with them than I am with the governments of Singapore, but Singapore is a strong candidate.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, do you? I mean, again, you know, yes, there were some wonderful works of culture and art produced, but the working class had a very rough life, and maybe they would have had a better life if there'd been more utilitarian thinking.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't thought about Vienna's heyday. No, certainly they were not utilitarians. But then utilitarianism is a relatively new theory. And I say in terms of spreading to non-English speaking cultures, that's happened much later too. So it's not surprising that people were not utilitarians in late 19th century, early 20th century, Vienna.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right, because we'll all have to be looking after the preferences of all of those in the past. But anyway, I'm now a hedonistic utilitarian, so on that view, no, the only reason to pay attention to the wishes of the dead is that the living will have more confidence that their wishes will be respected.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, perhaps that's true. You know, I've held different forms of utilitarianism throughout my career, and for quite a long time I was a preference utilitarian, and a preference utilitarian thinks that the good you should maximize is the satisfaction of preferences. And there's a question then about whether the preferences of the dead can't. And my supervisor at Oxford, RM Hare, thought that they did. So he thought, in fact, that if there was some ancient Roman, you stumbled across his tombstone and he engraved on it, I want an oil lamp to be burning on my gravestone forever, that gave you a reason, not necessarily an overriding reason, to put an oil lamp on his gravestone and to watch that it kept burning. I wasn't totally convinced of that, I must admit, but it's”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. And I had that feeling in writing this book, because for those who don't know, this book is about my maternal grandfather, who was a victim of the Holocaust. I was born after the Second World War, so of course I never knew him. He left a lot of papers, a lot of writings, and I wanted to read them. And in a sense, I suppose I thought in reading them and then subsequently when I decided to write about him that I was bringing him back and undoing the terrible crime that the Nazis committed against him and so many others, but did I really think that I had an obligation to do that because of he might have wished it? I toyed with that idea, but I never fully convinced myself of it.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, okay, as a younger philosopher, and I must admit he was one of my students, I greatly admire Richard Chapel. He's somebody who has a fairly popular substake mod now and has a little book on Parfit, in fact, we're talking about, does a lot of interesting work.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've used to say that Sidgwick is an underrated philosopher because he's the best of the utilitarians of the 19th century. And he certainly was neglected. And that's why Katagena and I wrote the point of view of the universe to try to show that he is a great philosopher and that his ethics is still relevant. But other people like Parfit have also praised him. So I'm not sure to what extent he's still neglected.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really matter which originally Parfit was going to reply to in the volume, but then his reply characteristically for Parfit grew so long that it had to be a third volume and that's really why there's a third volume. So yeah, so I think that there are And he doesn't really address act consequentialism, it's rude consequentialism that he's reconciling with the others. And so I don't think he succeeds in producing reconciliation between the major ethical theories. I think that part of it is a failure. Why did he fail? I would say he became so committed to the idea that he had to show that morality is objective that otherwise nihilism is true, nothing matters, and his whole life would be a waste, that influenced his acceptance of arguments that otherwise he would not have accepted.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the fact that you think the project is too hard and you started off by asking me about whether it was a good thing that humans settled North America. So I think I see the project as making a case for the idea that there are objective values, that things matter objectively. And I think it makes a significant contribution to that project. So I don't think of it as a failure. There are some parts of it that may be a failure, maybe the attempt to reconcile the three theories, a form of consequentialism, a form of Kantianism, and a form of contractualism. Maybe that's a failure, certainly the proponents of those other theories, the non-consequential theories, don't really approve of it. And in fact, I don't like the form of consequentialism that he ends up with as part of the triple theory. And I talked to him about that. And the third volume, to some extent, grapples with that. And in the volume, I edited this collection of papers called Does Does Anything?”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have written a very short book about Marx as well, yes. But yeah, I'm still interested in the English utilitarians, but I'm interested in the roots of utilitarianism as it goes back further. So I'm not sure. David Humes certainly a favorite philosopher and in some sense an early utilitarian. I suppose if I had free time to write, Hume would certainly be a candidate.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you think it's a good book. I think what I learned from Hegel was that the nature of society at a time, including its economic interests, does influence people's ideas. And, of course, that's an idea that a lot of people will associate with Marx. But Marx really, I think, took that from Hegel. So I'm going to say that that's an insight that I learned from Hegel rather than from Marx.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely not a utilitarian, and let me just say firstly that book was written a long time ago, I think in the early 1980s. Secondly, it's a very slim book. It's a 100-page book for what was then called Past Masters series by Oxford University Press.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not an expert on that risk, but yes, I think there is too much of an emphasis. And I think perhaps that has something to do with a lot of the people in EA, people who like these kinds of problems. How are you going to align super intelligent AGI with human values? And that's a really interesting problem. And in some ways it's a more interesting problem than how you're going to reduce the suffering of animals in factory farms or even how are you going to help people in extreme poverty. So I think that's perhaps why there's been more of a tendency to talk about that and focus on it than is really justified”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“May become more callous and that may actually contribute to making the world a worse place. So my advice is not to forget about the present and to continue to have really major focus on things like reducing extreme poverty, reducing animal suffering, protecting the environment from climate change right now. I'd like to see effective altruism with more of a focus, not an exclusive focus, but more of a focus on those issues.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had concerns about the extent to which effective altruism has moved in the direction of very long-term thinking about the future. So thinking not just about the present or even the next century or two, but thinking about the next million years or Wilmer Caskill, I think, has talked about the next billion years. I understand why he's doing that. He's talking about the possible loss that could exist if we become extinct and if in fact there is no other intelligent life in this corner of the universe so we're not replaced by others so yeah I can understand why he wants to emphasize the importance of preventing extinction but I think there's there are a number of concerns one is uncertainty about whether we can actually make a positive difference in this direction and also whether if you encourage people to ignore present suffering you're actually going to have a long-term drawback in that people”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's making progress. I think it's a good forum for ideas, and I think it's had significant influence. So on the whole, I view it positively, which is not to say that I view every aspect of it positively.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and we say that in our call for papers, that articles must be controversial in some sense. And we tell our reviewers that, and occasionally they write back and say, yeah, this is a reasonable article, but I don't see why it couldn't get published in any other journal. So we don't publish it then.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a possibility, actually. I must admit that's when I hadn't thought of. It could be a worry. I don't know whether maybe we'll get an AI that will be able to mix people's writing style so that they're harder to identify.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of hostility about it. So there's two things about a journal. One is, as I say, that we are prepared to publish controversial ideas that other places are not prepared to publish. The other is we're prepared to publish under a pseudonym if the authors don't wish to be identified with the article. And so roughly, I'd say about a third of the articles in each issue, authors prefer to publish under a pseudonym. And in the area of transgender studies, that's because many academics have been severely abused and harassed and their lives made quite difficult if they have published things that were seen as transphobic, although I think that term is used far too broadly. We could simply say they were not accepting the idea that a person's identification as a gender is necessarily the last word as to what their gender is.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is free open access. That's right. We are supported by donors. Anybody who would like to donate to us, please do so. But yeah, we're managing.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was told that they wouldn't publish it because it might be harmful to some people. And I think they shopped it around to another couple of journalists. And it was published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. It was written about in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. We've had 100,000 views in the month since we published that issue, which for a peer-reviewed academic journal is pretty unusual.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learnt that there is a need for our journal, actually. I guess I suppose I thought that when we began, but I wasn't really sure. But one of the interesting things is that we have published a number of interesting papers, not necessarily saying I agree with them, but papers that have worthwhile ideas that should be out there, which would not have got published otherwise, which were being rejected. And that happened in the most recent issue, which we just published at the end of April this year with an article called Merit in Science, which actually had 29 co-authors. I think two of them were Nobel laureates, and was objecting to the fact that, as the authors claimed, positions, research jobs, and also research grants were not simply going to those with the best qualifications or the greatest merit in scientific terms, but were going also on the criteria of maximizing diversity and inclusion. And the authors of that paper, say distinguished group of scientists submitted”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but you're probably going to get enough of a population increase by doing the ones that involve more conception rather than more pregnancy termination.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it would make a difference if the world were underpopulated. There's one question whether you would make it illegal. Another question is whether you would discourage it or think that individual women who had abortions were doing something wrong. I think they are relevant factors. But if what you want, if population falls and you want to have more people, then I think there would be better ways of doing that than prohibiting abortion. You would give baby bonuses as right?”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, but I mean, you're assuming that having more children in the world today is a net positive, which may be the case, but there are also negatives to it in terms of that child and then adult will continue to use products that consume energy and produce more greenhouse gases and deprive wildlife of habitat. So there's a whole lot more involved than just simply saying having another child is a plus.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possibly it will on average, but those babies would be born to mothers who did not want to have them at that particular time. Maybe their circumstances were ones that would have made it difficult for them to bring up the child well, and so the child might be a less happy child and the mother or the parents might also be much more stressed because they had to rear a child at a time that wasn't suitable for them. So the fact that yes, there'll be an extra being in the world and we can hope that being is going to have a positive life still doesn't mean that abortion actually is maximizing utility.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a start, not all abortions reduce the number of children who will be born, often abortions terminate a pregnancy that is poorly timed, but the couple have a plan to have ex children and they will have ex-children. But surely on average.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, the article secrecy and consequentialism, and I should acknowledge my co-author, Katajina de Lazari Raddick, is more about acting in certain ways that you keep secret, like when it might be right to lie, but bad if your lie became known publicly than it's about fostering general ideas like becoming religious. And I would think that there would be sufficient negative consequences to that particular idea that we wouldn't want to do it anyway.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think one reason for supporting secularism is that it seems to me to be true. I mean, I don't think that there is a divine being, so I can't simply say let's adopt the idea of a divine being and fool ourselves that there is one. I would rather say given that there isn't, let's find ways of having enough children to produce good long-term outcomes.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope that it's not self defeating, and I hope that both rates will drop in less secular countries as well, or that those countries will become more secular. I think that project of secularism is sand and right, and I certainly hope that we won't see a world in which secular people have few children and religious people have more children, and therefore secularism disappears. I accept that there's a possibility that that could happen. I think that would be a very bad outcome.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is secularism responsible for the low fertility rates? I mean, I think Roman Catholic couples in some of these countries have birth rates that are as low as secular people”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we can avoid that mindset because if we don't have any option about leaving it in place, we just regret it. And I do regret the way nature works. I mean, I think it's a very powerful argument against the idea that this world was created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator. That just seems to me impossible because of the way nature works. You know, that's the world we live in”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bad argument, and we try and explain why it's a bad argument, that we don't want to follow nature, that the fact that nature does something is not something that we ought to imitate, but maybe in fact we ought to combat. And of course, we do combat nature in many ways. Maybe war between humans is part of nature, but nevertheless, we remember. Prevent wars breaking out. I think a lot of our activities combating nature's way of doing things rather than regarding it as a model to follow.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that what you meant by the moralities of nature? I wasn't sure what the phrase meant. Do you mean the morality that we imply that we attribute to nature?”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's difficult because, again, you would have to take into account the consequences on not having predators and what are you going to do with the prey population? Are they going to overpopulate and maybe starve or destroy the environment for other sentient beings? So it's hard to say how much we should spend trying to thwart them. I think there are questions about reducing the suffering of wild animals that are easier than that and that that's a question that maybe at some stage we'll grapple with when we've reduced the amount of suffering we inflict on animals generally. But it's not nowhere near the top of the list for how to reduce animal suffering.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that was an interesting pioneering article that you wrote, I think, policing nature. And I tend to agree with it. So I think it's reasonable to raise a question about why we should reintroduce predators. And as you said, there may be effects on other animals and plants in the area where we're introducing them. But to do so just for its own sake, just because they were once here and were once part of the ecology is not, to my view, a sufficient reason for introducing them if we know that is going to increase the suffering of some prey animals.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source