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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, I mean, as you say, assuming that the existence of some sentient life isn't going to regenerate and repopulate the universe, that's a reason why extinction is worse than the loss of most of our species. But otherwise, no.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then the extinction of our species is still just the same loss, right? It's a loss of a certain amount of happiness and the fact that it's less of a proportion of happiness or well-being or sentience in the universe doesn't mean that it isn't the same loss.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the idea is that then these intelligent and sentient aliens might populate our planet or take out there. Speed of light.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't think you have to be completely agnostic about all these issues. I think there are some cases, and again, I would instance factory farming, where we can be very confident that what we're doing is causing more pain and suffering than it's doing good to us. But that's not to say that there aren't a lot of other questions, including that question you asked about, is it good that humans colonized North America, where it's harder to make those decisions because they are involving comparisons. And some of these decisions are quite practical too, for example, even within the animal movement, if you say, well, should we focus on trying to get people not to eat chicken because chickens are so intensively farmed and there's so many of them, it takes less of a chicken to make a meal than it does of a cow. So should we do that? Then we're trying to compare the suffering of more chickens with fewer cows or fewer pigs. I agree those questions still ones that we can't really get a grip on.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're incomplete, certainly. Are they flawed in the sense that would lead us astray in terms of making those decisions based on sentience? I'm not convinced of that.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You may be that will depend on your own nature as to whether you think you're going to be led astray if you're not intuition driven. Or you may think that you can be aware of, self-aware about the risks that you're going to go wrong and you're not exactly intuition driven, but you're driven by the thought that I could be mistaken here and it's probably going to have more value if I don't just directly think about how to produce the most utility.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would program it to produce the best consequences that would not be prohibited by the government or the manufacturer. So I'm all in favor of making compromises if you have to to produce the most good that you possibly can in the circumstances in which you are.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it can be a complex question in the sense that it may be that we don't want to directly aim at utility because we likely get things wrong. So I think normally if we can be confident in our calculations that we are doing the right thing, then I think the obligations that we have are to maximize utility. But it's been argued that we're more likely to make mistakes if we do that, and rather that our obligations should be to conform to certain principles or rules. And I think that depends on how confident you are in your ability. I certainly think we should follow rules of thumb sometimes when we can't be sure of what's the right outcome and we should do what generally is accepted. And you go back to Sam Bankman Fried, obviously I think that was his mistake. He was too confident that he could get things right and fix things and didn't follow basic rules, or at least it's alleged that he didn't follow basic rules, like, don't steal your client's money.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not about a football team, right? You can give your loyalty to a football team and support them even though you don't really think that they're somehow more morally worthy of winning than their opponents. But this is not a game like this. There's everything at stake.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the setting. I don't know if that doesn't exist, but you said they're happier than we are, which suggests that 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 don't really 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”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you're using the kind of language that Bernard Williams used when he says, you know, whose side are you on, right? You said you're selling out your fellow humans as if I owe loyalty to members of my species above loyalty to good in general. That is to maximizing happiness and well-being for all of those affected by it. And I don't claim to have any particular loyalty for my species rather than the general good.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not. I mean, 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, I'm on their side.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the hypothesis is like that, that the aliens are wiser than we are, they know how to make the world a better place for everyone. They're giving full weight to human interests, but they say even though we're giving full weight to human interests, not discounting your interests because you're not a member of our species as you do with animals. But unfortunately, it just works out that to produce a better world, you have to go. I'll say, okay, if your calculations are right, if that's all right, I'm on your side.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't understand why you're seeing this paradox as relating to partiality. I mean, it's just as true if we completely impartial about universal good, right? I don't understand why you think that it shows that we inevitably are going to be partial.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it says more about gambling than it does about being a utilitarian. I agree it's a paradox, and you could say it's a paradox particularly for maximizing utilitarians who normally will talk about maximizing expected utility. And this seems to be a case where you don't want to maximize expected utility. Although, of course, there are arguments that would say, well, your expected utility is actually low, given that you can't infinitely long keep doubling utility, I assume. But you had a hypothesis where you have a twin earth, right? And if you could just create a twin earth, I guess you could. But for the real world, we can't keep doubling utility. And so we shouldn't do double or nothing. I'm not claiming to solve this paradox, by the way. I think it is an interesting and somewhat baffling problem with maximizing expected utility.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there certainly can be, and I think there is for some people some of the time. The question would be Is everybody capable of that? Or even if not everybody, are we capable of getting a dominant group who do follow reason in general universal directions, who use it to develop a more universal ethic that applies to a wider group of beings than their own kin and family and those that they're in cooperative relationships with? I think there's evidence that that is possible, and we don't yet know to what extent that can spread and start to dominate humans in future generations.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm still a hundred percent Darwinian. I don't think there's an alternative explanation of how we exist and of the biological elements of our nature. But I also think it's compatible with being a Darwinian to say we are a being whose evolved the capacity to reason, and reason can lead us to conclusions which”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would think, yes, there's a real question as to whether it would have been better if people had not had the prosperity and the ability to raise animals in that way”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Confident about the long term outcome. I still hope that it's there, but the fact that there's been relatively little progress in terms of treating animals better over the 48 years since the first version of animal liberation appeared does make me concerned that we're not going to be going in that right direction or not for a long time.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view over the long term has generally been that countries will have to pass through this stage where they've got wealthier, they can purchase more meat, they raise animals in fact farms to do that. But then eventually they'll go on to become more humane and more civilized and they'll see that that's the wrong thing to do and they'll treat animals much better and the outcome will be better on the whole than it was before they became prosperous when there were a lot of people in extreme poverty. And they also weren't treating animals well, although they didn't have the power to raise so many of them, but still because they were using them for food and because if your own survival is at stake or that of your family, you need to eat more than you'll do anything to animals to do so. It was not a good situation. So in other words, what I'm saying is I was prepared to swallow the short term negatives for the long-term outcome. I have to admit that I've become less”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see Well, I'm certainly prepared to say that clearly the suffering we inflict on animals in factory farms is indefensible, we cause far more suffering than any good we do for humans, arguably actually it's a negative for humans as well. So that's what my focus is in animal liberation now. And in fact, in a lot of my work has been aimed at that, it's been aimed at what we should do about people in extreme poverty. It's been aimed at things like should we have the right to say we've had enough of life and we want to die if we're terminally ill and in pain. So in a way the big picture questions that you're asking I find them interesting theoretical questions and I can give you the answer that a utilitarian would give if you want that answer. But in practice I do think that I can't really make a lot of headway with that.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think you can say it's too many or it's too few unless you make assumptions about the kind of technology that we have available to live in a sustainable way on the planet and to allow non-human animals to live as well. But also in that question, of course, there's the issue of how do we compare the value of human lives, and let's assume that they're human lives that are lived positively, that they are rich in fulfilling human lives, with the lives of non-human animals. I mean, I totally agree that they're different, and I think it's reasonable to argue that a rich and fulfilling human life contains more happiness than the life of, I don't know, a cow or a sheep. I'm not going to deny that. I don't think animals are equal in the sense that their lives contain equal value with that of humans.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't wish that I agree that the question is intractable, I'm not sure whether it's intractable in a philosophical sense because we can't sum up the values or whether there's just so much factual information that we don't have, including how do we make comparisons between the well being of the bison, let's say, that we're here more numerously as compared with the well-being of the humans.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's harder than I thought it might be, and that begins, I think, with the fact that humans eat animals, and it seems like we're very conservative about what we eat. Relatively few people are prepared to really think ethically and openly about what they eat. They're worried about having to change that, eat something different, maybe stand out from their friends and family by not eating meat and therefore implicitly criticizing those people when they do eat meat. I think there's a whole lot of factors that just make it hard for people to make that fundamental change about what they eat. And without that, they're not really going to fundamentally change what they think about animals.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not very nothing very positive, that's for sure, because a lot of dolphins have been caught in nets for catching tuna and impaled to stop the meating fish that people want in some parts of the world. I don't think they'll think too well of us.”
2023-06-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source