Peter Singer on Ethics and Intuitions

In his 2005 paper “Ethics and Intuitions” (The Journal of Ethics 9: 331-352), which I recently reread, the Australian philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer sets out to “argue that recent research in neuroscience gives us new and powerful reasons for taking a critical stance toward common intuitions” (332). The argument follows an argumentative pattern that I have noticed is increasingly being used by ethicists today, especially those of a broadly utilitarian persuasion: some science or another is said to present us with indubitable facts that clearly show some of our commonly held moral convictions to be wrong, unfounded, or simply not worth holding on to. In Singer’s case, the scientific findings that he builds his case on are the results of measuring test subjects’ brain activity through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while confronting them with trolley problems and asking them what the right thing to do in such situations was. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that people are generally more reluctant to get involved in “personal violations” than in “impersonal violations” in order to achieve a certain morally desirable outcome. If all that needs to be done to save five people on a railroad track who are about to be crushed by an oncoming trolley is to throw a switch that redirects the trolley to a different track where it will kill only one person (who would otherwise remain unharmed), most people are prepared to say that one should do it. If, however, the five people can only be saved by pushing a stranger with sufficient mass and weight to stop the trolley on the track, then most test subjects say that this would be wrong, even though the outcome (one life is sacrificed to save five others) is exactly the same. So in the first case they judge like good utilitarians, while in the second they don’t. The question is why. Neuroscience provides the answer: while in the first, “impersonal”, case those areas in the brain that are associated with the emotions show less activity than the areas associated with cognition, the opposite happens in the second, “personal”, case. Also, those few people who thought it was right to push the stranger onto the tracks showed more cognitive brain activity than emotional brain activity. It did, however, take them longer to come to a decision, indicating that they, too, first had to overcome an instinctive negative emotional reaction to the idea of personally harming people.

But what do those findings tell us about what is right and wrong, and more specifically whether it is right or wrong to kill people, either personally or impersonally, in order to save a larger number of lives? It seems to me that they don’t tell us anything at all about this. Singer, however, believes otherwise. The very fact that anti-utilitarian judgements are apparently due to strong instinctive emotional reactions rather than an emotion-free process of reasoning provides sufficient grounds for rejecting those judgements as unfounded. Although admittedly those neuroscientific findings in and of themselves “cannot prove any normative view right or wrong” (347), they should ultimately lead us to embrace utilitarianism as the best normative ethical theory if we consider them in the context of what we know about our own evolutionary history. For what we know is this: for a long time humans lived in small groups, and in these groups “violence could only be inflicted in an up-close and personal way – by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club. To deal with such situations, we have developed immediate, emotionally based responses to questions involving close, personal interactions with others” (347-8). Knowing this, we can understand why “pushing the stranger off the footbridge elicits these emotionally based responses” (348), while merely throwing a switch to kill someone from a distance does not, namely because that kind of situation simply did not arise when those responses were developed. This means that our current emotional response to personal violations is a mere accident of our evolutionary history and hence without normative significance. We should therefore disregard those responses and conclude there is no morally relevant difference between the impersonal violation (throwing the switch and thereby causing a person’s death) and the personal violation (pushing somebody to their death). Moreover, we should also conclude that the way most people react to the thought of impersonal violations, judging them as justifiable when they are required to bring about a greater good (i.e., in this case, more lives being saved), is the right way to react, simply because it is clearly the rational answer: “The death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five people. That reasoning leads us to throw the switch in the standard trolley case, and it should also lead us to push the stranger in the footbridge” (350). Of course believing that the death of anyone is a tragedy (and hence ought to be prevented) may be said to be based on a moral intuition, but if it is, then it is a “rational intuition” (351) which derives from an impartial, objective consideration of the situation and not from the accidental circumstances of our evolutionary past. To support this view, Singer approvingly cites Sigdwick’s third ethical axiom according to which “the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.” (351)

Now I can see at least three problems with this argument. First, contrary to what Singer suggests, the fact that humans used to live in small groups and that because of the short range of their weapons all killing was necessarily personal does nothing at all to explain why most people in our society are reluctant to regard personally killing someone as morally permissible. Especially not when it comes to strangers. On the contrary, if it is correct that all violence had to be up-close and personal (i.e. “by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club”), and if we can assume, which I think we can, that such violence was not uncommon, especially between those small groups who, after all, had to compete for scarce resources, then believing in the formative power of our evolutionary heritage should lead us to expect people to be rather unconcerned about inflicting mortal harm on strangers. It is hard to see what evolutionary purpose a reluctance to kill strangers could have had 50,000 years ago. So the whole evolutionary explanation of our emotional reaction in the trolley case scenario is nothing but pseudo-scientific hogwash.

Secondly, it may be true that “from the point of the Universe” nobody’s good is of more importance than the good of any other, but that is because from the point of the Universe nobody’s good is of any importance at all. This is the perfectly reasonable conclusion drawn by the psychopath who entirely lacks the instinctive emotional responses that ordinary people have to inflicting harm on others. Singer mentions the psychopath in passing when he describes the reaction of those who judged that pushing the stranger off the bridge was the right thing to do.  Even those more rational test subjects, he points out, had to struggle with their emotions and ultimately judged the case “in spite of their emotions”. Anyone would, “unless they were psychopaths” (341). But since Singer argues that those emotional inhibitions, and indeed all non-rational moral intuitions, are misplaced and ought to be ignored or discarded, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ideal moral reasoner is in their mental constitution rather like a psychopath. Singer seems to sense this himself when, in a curious move towards the end of his paper, he, once again citing Sidgwick in his support, warns us from praising “people who are capable of pushing someone off a footbridge in these circumstances” (350) because that might encourage them to “do it on other occasions when it does not save more lives than it costs”. This is clearly a form of the slippery slope argument that is occasionally employed by utilitarians, but I find it difficult to get my head around it. The slippery slope argument may have some plausibility when we consider acts that are just a bit wrong or bad and that may easily pave the way for acts that gradually become worse. You start with one little theft or lie or act of bullying, add another, and soon you have created a habit that runs out of control, especially if you receive some encouragement. But why on earth should we expect that being encouraged to do the right thing (and praise surely is a form of encouragement) should lead people to do bad things (such as morally unjustified killing sprees)? Unless of course there is something already deeply wrong with someone who is capable of doing that supposedly right thing.

Finally, even though Singer briefly addresses the genetic fallacy in his paper, denying that he commits one, his argument seems to me a paradigmatic case of such a fallacy. The fact that the specific way we look at the world and judge what is good and bad, right and wrong, has its origin in our human nature - which has been shaped by our evolutionary history and generally circumstances beyond our control that conceivably might have been different and, if they had, might have left us with a different nature - in no way discredits it. If it did, then we would be left with nothing at all that we could rely on, because the way we reason is just as much rooted in what we have grown to be as the way we feel. There is no view from nowhere, and the universe couldn’t care less whether we live or die, or how many live or die. Singer claims that a normative ethical theory may reject all of our moral intuitions “and still be superior to other normative theories that better matched our moral judgments” (345). I don’t think such a theory would be desirable, or useful, or indeed possible. Ethical theory cannot ignore who and what we are. It must refer back to our nature, which includes our moral nature. For better or worse, there is no escape from our way of looking at the world. Trying to get away from this, to leave our human perspective behind, is not “a way forward” (349), but a fool’s errand. For what leads to moral scepticism is not, as Singer claims (351), the acknowledgment of our grown nature, but on the contrary its denial.

Are Ethicists an Obstacle to Progress?

When people who don’t know me ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a philosopher. When they ask me what I specialise in, I tell them that I am mostly, even though I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that label, an ethicist. This used to be a good thing, or at least not a bad one, but things are changing. People like me are now increasingly being described as at best a nuisance, and at worst a threat to human well-being and possibly even survival.

In this vein, Steven Pinker, the well-known psychologist and bestselling author, has recently (1 August 2015) published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe, entitled “The moral imperative for bioethics,” in which he chides ethicists for hindering the progress of our species. According to Pinker, biotechnology could do amazing things for us if we only stopped hampering research by raising flimsy ethical concerns about it, which is not helpful at all. Scientific and technological progress is already slow enough as it is, and given the “vast increases in life, health, and flourishing” that biomedical research promises, every day we lose worrying about the ethics of the matter is one day too many. While biotechnological research is urgently needed to rid us of all sorts of terrible diseases, what we most certainly do not need are professional worriers who call themselves ethicists second-guessing every promising new development and thus stalling scientific and technological progress by throwing “nebulous but sweeping principles such as ‘dignity’, ‘sacredness’, or ‘social justice’” in its way. A true ethicist, Pinker decrees, would realize that there is in fact only one valid moral imperative they should promote and follow, namely to “get out of the way”.

For Pinker and others like him ethics is a luxury that we cannot afford. People are dying, people are suffering. The biotech industry is attempting to do something about it, working very hard to succeed, while the “so-called ethicists” are attempting to prevent this from happening. Humanity is painfully pushing a rock up a hill, while all that ethicists are doing is help push it back down again. For Pinker it is as simple as that. Except of course it is not. Surprising as it may be, it is in fact not the primary goal of us ethicists to make life difficult for those who want nothing but make the world a better place. Ethics is not about issuing “red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution” (although ethical reflection may occasionally give rise to all that). Instead, ethics is about making sure that we know what we are doing and why we are doing it, that the path we are following is really the path we want to be following and that the place where this path is likely to lead us is really the place where we want to end up being.

We all, naturally, want things to be better than they are, if that is possible. We all want progress. But just as nothing is ever better as such, but only ever in certain respects, there is no such thing as progress as such, or in the abstract. We are not sitting in an evolutionary elevator that has only two directions: up and down. Instead, there are many different ways of going up and going forward, many different ways of going down and backwards, and many different ways of going sideways, or around in circles, or of moving without any clear direction at all. Moreover, the ways that lead upwards in some way may also lead downwards in some other way. Things are usually more complex than we would like, and for this very reason also more complex than we may care to acknowledge. In order to progress, to step forward, you need to have a goal, or at least have made up your mind about a direction. Spending a thought or two on the reasons for choosing that particular goal or direction before you start running doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. And that is all we are doing when we are engaging in ethical reflection. The one question that ethicists keep asking is whether the things we do or propose to do are actually good for us, all things considered. Would we really prefer that this question be no longer asked?

It is highly naïve to assume that all biomedical research will necessarily benefit some of us, let alone humanity as a whole. What is powerful enough to save us is also powerful enough to harm us. To demand that such research not be regulated in any way because some of it might eventually help us find a cure for Alzheimer's and other diseases is like saying that politicians in government should be granted unlimited legislative, judiciary and executive power and not be checked in any way because some politicians might actually use that power for the good of the people: we just need to trust that they know best and that they want only what is best for us. But why should we believe that?

I suppose most people would agree that granting such unlimited powers to politicians would be a singularly bad idea, and that, even if scientists and biotech firms were generally smarter and more trustworthy than politicians, they are certainly not trustworthy enough that we could afford not putting any regulations and safeguards in place and thereby retaining some measure of control. Ethical reflection helps us determine the nature and extent of those necessary safeguards. Ideas such as human dignity, sacredness, and social justice may strike tough-minded empiricists like Pinker as decidedly airy-fairy and not worth serious consideration, but even though they are a bit airy-fairy, for many of us they do capture something that is both elusive and very real, a sense perhaps that living disease-free and surviving as long as possible is not all that matters, that sometimes more is at stake, that there are other dimensions of our life and experience that are important to us and for us, whatever they may be. Ethicists are the ones who try to figure out what those dimensions are and why they matter to us. They are not the professional doomsayers that some like to depict them as. Their role is more that of psychopomps who guide us from the present to the future, providing safe passage and making sure that we get there safe and sound.

Je suis un migrant

The migrants are coming. They want in. Europe is their Promised Land, a safe haven from war, hunger and persecution. They are desperate and brave, crossing oceans to get here. But the waves are not parting for them. Many drown. We watch them approach with trepidation. There are so many of them. A horde, a “swarm” of migrants, climbing over fences, hiding in lorries, sleeping on the streets, crowding into train stations, trying to break through our defences. But we don’t want them. We slam our doors into their faces. Hungary even considered building a wall to keep migrants out. Go away, we say, we have already given you lots of money, what more do you want? A life, they say. A future. But we do not care. Not much anyway. Our compassion is, before it can prompt us act, curtailed by our presumed self-interest and self-righteousness. We are worried about murderous Muslims sneaking in undetected. We are worried about limited resources that we would have to share with them. We are worried about so many strangers living in our country. But mostly we feel that they are coming for what is rightfully ours and that they have no right to it. After all, we tell ourselves, it is not our fault that their country lies in tatters. We have simply done a much better job of holding it all together. They should do the same rather than come here and make claims on the fruits of our hard work and good sense, which we alone deserve to consume because it is we who planted the trees from which they have sprung. 

Except, of course, we didn’t. Most of us have actually contributed very little, if anything, to the wealth, comfort, and peace that we have become used to enjoy as a matter of course. And what we have contributed we have been able to contribute only because we were fortunate enough to be born into a country where such a contribution was possible. We benefit from what others have done before us. It is largely the fruits of their labour that we eat. We are the lucky ones. None of us deserves what we have got, at least not more than those who had the misfortune of being born into the wrong area of the world. We are the lucky ones. If we deserve anything, we deserve it by virtue of being human, that is, by virtue of having certain human needs: which is in the first instance the need for food and safety, but then also for recognition and dignity. And we are all migrants. We have all come to the place where we live now at some time. Some came there when they were born, others later. It makes no difference. We don’t own our places. 

We should also keep in mind that the situation in which we find ourselves can change anytime. A war, an epidemic, a natural disaster, an economic crisis can easily take it all away from us. Soon it may be we who seek refuge in other parts of the world. We may not always remain the lucky ones. Let us hope the world will then not close its doors on us.

Why Do We Care About Doomsday?

In his book Death and the Afterlife (Oxford 2013), Samuel Scheffler speculates that the prospect of humanity’s imminent extinction shortly after our own death (“doomsday”) would affect us more than the knowledge of our own mortality currently does. If we knew that all human life would disappear from the face of the earth 30 days after we die, then this would render much of what we do today meaningless. We would react with ennui and despair, which, Scheffler believes, shows “the limits of egoism” or in other words that we not only care for things that do not directly affect us (we won’t, after all, be there to experience the end of humanity), but also that we actually care more for what happens to humanity than for what happens to ourselves as individuals (in the sense that we find the idea of all human life coming to an end in the foreseeable future more disturbing and more destructive of life’s meaning than the idea of our own certain death).

I don’t want to go into the details of the argument (which relies rather heavily on the plausibility of Scheffler’s prediction of certain reactions to hypothetical situations such as the doomsday scenario), nor the problems that it faces. John Danaher has already, as usual, done an excellent job at analysing the logical structure of the argument and also discussing some of the objections raised: http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/meaning-value-and-collective-afterlife.html Suffice it to say that what I take to be the core of Scheffler’s “afterlife conjecture”, namely that we do care about the ongoing existence of humanity (what Scheffler calls the “collective afterlife”), rather persuasive. It may of course be difficult to predict how exactly we would react if we knew that the human world would definitely come to an end very soon after our death. Some people might despair, some might rediscover the value of human solidarity, some might feel licensed to live even more ruthlessly (freed of any concern for the well-being of future generations), some might remain largely unaffected and continue to enjoy their life, ignoring what they cannot change and what doesn’t directly affect them, and some might even positively welcome the eradication of human life as an opportunity for Mother Earth to heal her wounds or something to that effect. But I think whatever our reactions may be, it is pretty clear that few of us are entirely indifferent to the fate of humanity. We do care about the collective afterlife. The question is why.

Now it may be the case that when contemplating the doomsday scenario and feeling disturbed by it, we are actually suffering from a delusion that is similar to the one that Epicurus thought was responsible for our fear of death. Just as we may fear death mostly because we imagine ourselves being dead and somehow experiencing our own state of being dead (lying in our coffins, in the dark and cold, for all eternity), which of course we won’t, we may also fear doomsday because we imagine ourselves still being there when it occurs, and either being destroyed in the process or, perhaps even more disturbingly, being the sole survivor, the one who witnesses it all and is left all alone in an empty world. However, even though such a confusion may play a role here, I don’t think that is all there is to it. It seems to me that by emphasising the “limits of egoism” in the context of his afterlife conjecture, Scheffler really is on to something. We not only care for ourselves, for our loved ones, and perhaps for particular people that we happen to know. We also care for people in general. To a certain degree we tend to identify with humanity as a whole, tend to see ourselves in others. We tend to perceive humanity as a project that we all take part in. 

At least that is how I feel, and since I have no reason to think that I’m unique in this respect, I am assuming that many others share those feelings. When I look at my seven-year old son, I see myself in him, as I was when I was a boy, and it gives me comfort to think that he still has his whole life ahead of him, with all its opportunities, its rich fabric of experience, its joys and wonders. And although I’m aware that there will also be suffering, that there will be real losses and frustrations and disappointments, I cannot help feeling that on balance life is well worth living, an adventure well worth having, and that it is imperative that it continue (as Hans Jonas has argued in his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility). And it seems to me, when I look at my son, that in him I’m getting another opportunity at life, that he will be living life for me, that in him I will have a part in the future of the world. Now this feeling is not restricted to my son or my children in general. I also have it, though perhaps less poignantly, when I see other children at play, or lovers embracing, people chatting and laughing, students engaging with new ideas, and old couple walking along the street hand in hand, my dog chasing a ball, fully immersed in the sheer joy of running, of being alive. I identify with all of them, in the sense that I feel my own life extended in and through them. I feel that, in some way that I cannot fully understand, they are me. Even my dog. Or any other dog. Or other animal. So perhaps it is not humanity alone that we feel connected with and in whose survival we take an interest. Perhaps the project of humanity is itself part of an even larger project, the project of life. And if we imagine another doomsday scenario, one in which not only humanity vanished from the face of the earth, but all living creatures, so that not only the history of humanity came to an end, but the history of life itself, then we may find this even more disconcerting, even more destructive of meaning than if it were only humanity that came to an end. 

So why do we care about doomsday? I think it may be because we realize that with the extinction of humanity (or even more so life itself), we would die all over again, and this time for good.