Peter Singer and the trap of logic: Part III
[NOTE: To make sense of this post, it would help to have read Part I and Part II.]
In Parts I and II I wrote about Peter Singer’s strange and ultra-“logical” ideas about the value of human life and of animal life, and about how to make decisions involving both. This article has pointed out something I’ve been thinking [emphasis mine]:
Critics say that his moral certainty is one of Singer’s most significant flaws – that he is too demanding, too impersonal, and too dismissive of the way people actually relate to one another. In its rawest form, Singer’s philosophy condemns people for caring more about their families than about strangers. “People do have special relationships with their families, their communities, and their countries,” Alan Ryan, the warden of New College, Oxford, told me. Ryan has written extensively on John Stuart Mill and he taught for many years at Princeton. “This is the standard equipment of humanity, and most people, in all of human history, have seen nothing wrong with it…[H]uman beings just aren’t put together the way that [Singer] wishes they were.”
But that’s not the only criticism of Singer’s ideas:
Other philosophers criticize Singer more for the logical consequences of his beliefs than for his refusal to acknowledge that emotion plays an essential role in the narrative of life. For example, if we could take an action today that would benefit many people in three thousand years, Singer would tell us to do it. It wouldn’t matter that we would never see the benefits – or that the action might even cause us some harm. Yet predicting the long-term effects of something is like guessing how the winds passing over the Sahara this summer will affect the world’s weather in fifty years.
The speaker in this next quote is a disabled woman who has been friendly with Singer:
“Peter is a perfectly sincere man,” McDonald told me. “But he thinks real life is not as important as intellectual life. So he can be very compelling when he talks about the intelligence and the feelings of a pig. But he is somehow not as quick to understand what our problems and possibilities might be. He has all these big ideas, but he has never really gotten his hands dirty. Peter needs to get a little more involved in life if he wants to understand it.”
In recent years, Singer got a little more “involved in life.” It has had some interesting repercussions:
When Singer’s mother became too ill to live alone, Singer and his sister hired a team of home health-care aides to look after her. Singer’s mother has lost her ability to reason, to be a person, as he defines the term. So I asked him how a man who has written that we ought to do what is morally right without regard to proximity or family relationships could possibly spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for private care for his mother. He replied that it was “probably not the best use you could make of my money. That is true. But it does provide employment for a number of people who find something worthwhile in what they’re doing.”
…Singer has responded to his mother’s illness in the way most caring people would. The irony is that his humane actions clash so profoundly with the chords of his utilitarian ethic.
That doesn’t surprise Bernard Williams. “You can’t make these calculations and comparisons in real life. It’s bluff.” Williams told me, “One of the reasons his approach is so popular is that it reduces all moral puzzlement to a formula. You remove puzzlement and doubt and conflict of values, and it’s in the scientific spirit. People seem to think it will all add up, but it never does, because humans never do.”
Singer may be learning that. We were sitting in his living room one day, and the trolley traffic was noisy on the street outside his window. Singer has spent his career trying to lay down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion and intuition. His is a world that makes no provision for private aides to look after addled, dying old women. Yet he can’t help himself. “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”
“It is different when it’s your mother.” Duh.
Singer’s ethics is an ethics for robots. And you better be careful, even when you design an ethics for robots, that you don’t end up creating something that makes things worse.
Here’s a quote that encapsulates the problem with what I have referred to in the title of this series on Singer as “the trap of logic”:
The problem with a madman, Chesterton wrote, is not that he is not logical; the problem is that he is only logical. Taking no offense, Prof. Singer seemed pleased that I thought him logical, mistakenly equating logical with reasonable.
Logic is a valuable tool, but it is only one tool in the human bag. Elevating that one tool to a position too high, and jettisoning the rest, leads to a kind of madness.
Bear with me on the rest of this post, which may seem to be a digression but is not.
When I was a child of about twelve years old, I came across (I think it was in an encyclopedia) a Goya etching entitled “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” Here it is:
At the time, I was puzzled by the title. Did it mean that when reason goes to sleep, bad things happen? Or did it mean that when reason gets free reign, bad things happen? Since then, I’d always seen it interpreted the first way; after all, Goya himself wrote “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters.” But that’s not the full quote, which adds, “united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.”
I’d add to “imagination” something like “emotion,” or perhaps “the eternal and ancient human truths.”
Here’s more:
Kearney (2003) suggests two different meanings based on the dream/sleep debate. Firstly, “reason must govern the imagination”, it must be watchful, otherwise the “forces of darkness”, will be “unleashed on humanity.” Alternatively, a more romantic approach is that the “rationalist dreams” promoted by the “Enlightenment” are just as capable of producing their own “monstrous aberrations.”
Reading about Peter Singer immediately made me think of that Goya etching. His seemingly-logical ethics is ultimately a monstrous one, as he himself may be beginning to discover. But I doubt that he—or any of the people who consider him a genius, with a theory that is not only worthwhile but that should guide our decision-making process—will ever abandon it.
“But he [Singer] thinks real life is not as important as intellectual life.”
The intellectual life, through its premises and theories has killed off more human beings than the genuine proletariat’s life; and has killed off more souls to boot.
academics were taught about the world putting on airs of beig clinical, and so, they think clinically, which to them is dispassionately and without emotion.. after all, re-breaking a bone is nasty, but its better after the job is done… and that applies to everything. they hate the negative in their plans and think those that help by pointing out things to be addressed are enemies, not facilitators or improvers. and if they do this well enough that there is no one around them that limits them, they get a simniar sicnkess that one could see caligula having… which is, in the absence of a push back, everything they do is ok and great and not to be questioned.
then they come out and have a solution for something, like marx final solution stuff, and implement it, and find out that the world is not like them, and that the world cares and is not clinical.
but absent that, they can repeat any horror, and not think it was a horror cause they think that they are special not the same, and that everyone is the same and not special.
so they dont see that they do the same thing as joseph mengele, cause they think themselves not like that monster and that they imagine his aims to be personal selfish and their aims to be impersonal and selfless… (making the sacrifice of the painful decisions for others)
they are tyrants until they experience the life they are proposing on others… in academia they can be really interesting tyrants as their tenure prevents push back in any meaningful way until they feel that what they have is an entitlement, not to be questioned, and that if only the state was powerful enough to treat everyone like them
and listen to their every “someone must do X” statements that dot research all over to the point that its a custom in publication to make some sort of mass suggestion that requires a totalitarian state to even try
academics think that their books show them the world… that being clinical gives them superior views and being neutral is a superior thing.
that is until their own family gets sick
or the state is kicking down their doors
or that the reaction and outcome is conmpletely outside their comprhension…
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, has written to Professor Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University, in Virginia, requesting that he release all relevant documents pertaining to his activities as head of a non-profit organization called the Institute of Global Environment And Society.
the man above wanted global warming deniers as he puts it to be put in jail, lose their jobs, etc.
now they are looking at his agency which is not for profit and should not be taking political sides and how he has accepted millios of dollars had high salaries and barely produced paper.
a perfect tiny less complicated situation that the series neo points out and discusses but pretty much the same…
people who dont understand the world and their fellow men because they are raised in a box being told erronously how the world is for self serving reasons, and so when they get to be adults they cant screw in a lightbulb or do much of anything, but they sure can tell us how to remake society.. as if there is a totalitarian willing to shift everythign, kill undesireables, and so on and so on.
just scan research papers… they are dotted with “we must”, the “government must”, the “parents should” – all hoping stalin will pick them and make them great for doing what they say (and they cant imagine it not working or having bad outcomes as they never look that far ahead in their plan)
From CS Lewis’s “Priestesses In The Church?”
“I should like Balls infinitely better,” said Caroline Bingley, “if they were carried on in a different manner … It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.”
“Much more rational, I dare say,” replied her brother, “but it would not be near so much like a Ball.” We are told that the lady was silenced: yet it could be maintained that Jane Austen has not allowed Bingley to put forward the full strength of his position. He ought to have replied with a distinguo. In one, sense conversation is more rational for conversation may exercise the reason alone, dancing does not. But there is nothing irrational in exercising other powers than our reason. On certain occasions and for certain purposes the real irrationality is with those who will not do so. The man who would try to break a horse or write a poem or beget a child by pure syllogizing would be an irrational man; though at the same time syllogizing is in itself a more rational activity than the activities demanded by these achievements. It is rational not to reason, or not to limit oneself to reason, in the wrong place; and the more rational a man is the better he knows this.
****
It is good for reason to rule, but reason is not the only element of humanity. For a similar about-face to Singer’s regard concerning his mother, look at Picasso’s drawings of his children: no Cubism or Surrealism – no ugliness there. Gentle, tender drawings.
A man may live the truth without knowing the truth or professing the truth. Singer cares for his mother. That is the truth, regardless of what the man says. If only he would open his eyes. His reason has its eyes shut and has produced monsters.
“Obama the Repo Man” shows the idiocy of Singer’s ideas:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090916233421/http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/obama_the_repo_man.html
Singer might not even have exempted his mother from the rigor of his cold logic — see this 2000 article written about another interview with him which said this:
After Newton produced his Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica the leading thinkers of his day deceived themselves into the belief that human reason was everything. Although none of the philosophes were worthy to tie Newton’s show laces, they wrapped themselves in Newton’s discoveries to draw radically different conclusions from Newton’s work than Newton himself drew. Newton was a devout Christian throughout his lifetime who believed that his physics established the existence of the Biblical creator God. The philosophes believed the exact opposite, that Newton’s laws proved that God is no longer necessary and that human reason alone is capable of explaining everything. This unbounded faith in reason was the basis of what they called the Enlightenment.
So far as I know Newton never debated them over the issue and may have never learned how the philosophes who followed him misused his work. That is too bad since the philosophes’ theories seem to have carried the day almost unopposed. What did Newton see that they missed? One thing is that Newton knew that his physics pushed the mystery back a layer but did not explain much of anything. In fact, Newton’s theory of gravity may have owed much to his interest in alchemy in which mysterious forces operate in nature which seem to follow mathematical rules but which remain unexplained. Incidentally, Einstein redefined the mystery by ascribing gravity to curved space, but that is simply restating the same mystery in different words.
The universe that Newton saw was a universe still infused with God’s power and still as mysterious as ever. All he did is to demonstrate some laws of nature which he believed were instituted by the same God who we find in the Bible, the God of the Torah, the God of law.
I make the translation “The dream of reason creates monsters” E.g. the “rational” French Revolution”, the “Logic” of Marxism-Leninism, &c.
This reminds me of David Mamet’s conversion story, when he realized he was politically advocating for values and a lifestyle he would never accept for himself or his own family.
* * *
What’s upsetting is that someone like Singer has influenced so many others, who will carry on his legacy long after he’s quietly acknowledged doubts when his logic is applied to his own mother.
“Singer’s ethics is an ethics for robots.”
Singer’s wiki bio says he subscribes to ‘classical or hedonistic utilitarian’ ethics. It seems like he’s following through.
The basic truth that he overlooked in constructing his logical house of cards is that everyone is someone’s mother, father, son or daughter. The logic that can’t work for him, can’t work for anyone, and down falls the whole structure.
Singer is a shallow thinker whose inadequacies are balanced by self indulgences.
Just who was it that put this pontificator on a throne ?
Millennia after Moses, Buddha and Jesus — we get him ?
Set this fool down in front of King Lear (1983) (Olivier’s production)
Blindfold him so that he may see. It worked for Gloucester !
This unbounded faith in reason was the basis of what they called the Enlightenment.
No, not the basis, merely one school of the Enlightenment, namely the Hume, Marxist, Dark Enlightenment.
Singer is why PProfit feels no guilt for making Bhaal worship, death cults, and abortions profitable. They see no particular reason why live births shouldn’t be sold for a bag of cash and terminated. Neither does Singer, in fact, see an issue with it. Give these people power and wealth, and watch what happens.
I agree with blert, how did this mental midget get a fan club???
I dare say his Alzheimer’s afflicted mother has
more cognitive function than this loser.
Molly, money laundering from government sources and PProfit can go a long way.
In my experience, logic is often used to rationalize action that has deeper roots in emotion. Even in a subject as logical as mathematics, I think that proofs are often a formalization of insight. Important, yes, but not fundamental. I do wonder what Singer’s deeper motivations may be.
Peter Singer is what you get when you exchange “Man is made in the image of God” to “man is nothing but an animal (and animals can be culled)”.
The first statement may be a fiction but it makes possible the notion of right and wrong.
The second is the underlying principle of every atheistic system and its propensity to do mass murder.
Btw, I don’t think Peter Singer considers himself to be a nazi, and certainly he isn’t considered to be nazi by his admirers but he most certainly is like a nazi. But also like a Pol Pot, a Kim, a Trotsky, a Stalin…
People like Peter Singer only have influence because it’s the nazi crimes that are remembered, not the even greater crimes of communism.
>I don’t think Peter Singer considers himself to be a nazi
He is a utilitarian. I think all people who seek to found ethics and morality on an objective logical basis end up as utilitarians. There really isn’t any other set of axioms that satisfies, and one could argue that even utilitarianism does not have an objective basis, but depends on a subjective assignment of value. But perhaps it minimizes the number of subjective assumptions. Personally, I think that utilitarians likely suffer a deficit in their ability to understand people and society, a not uncommon trait of intellectual sorts.
Where someone’s logic goes depends on his starting word. The starting word depends on his character. His character depends on his faith, and every man has a faith. Faith depends on what a man thinks he knows, or on knowing what he does not.
Wonderful post and thread. Dennis @ 6:40 PM, love the Newton point.
Some stuff from Arcadia by Stoppard:
* “The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”
* “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”
* “Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”
* “Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore.
Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?”
* “The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.”
“Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”
Uhm . . . a few years ago I attended a panel discussion where Singer publicly admitted he went along because his sister pressured him to.
He may call it “reason”; I call it “BS”.
Fausta:
To tell you the truth, I don’t think Singer really has a clue why he went along with it. He doesn’t strike me as a person who’s very in tune with his own emotions, whatever they may be 🙂 .
He may say he did it because of his sister; that would be a convenient way for him to deflect the criticism that he’s a hypocrite. Actually, it still makes him a hypocrite for being so weak as to succumb to his sister’s silly emotional and non-utilitarian reactions (that’s by his definition of her, not mine).
People like Peter Singer only have influence because it’s the nazi crimes that are remembered, not the even greater crimes of communism.
The Nazis betrayed the pact with Stalin and Communism. The Commies weren’t ever going to forget about that, so they, due to fear and hatred, had to demonize the Nazis above and beyond the norm for enemies.
The reason why current modern Western culture hates and despises the Nazis so much is not because they themselves suffered from the Nazi regime, that may have a rational explanation then. No, it’s because the entirety of Western culture has pushed towards that end, so it is amazing what uniformity of cultural propaganda can do.
Imagine what the US would look like if every Democrat was a loyal opponent and patriot, everyone pulling for the same domestic and foreign goal without dissent or treason.
neo-neocon
My general standard when it comes to heroes (allies of justice) vs villains (evil masterminds) is whether they can follow their own rules.
For example, the villain is the villain because the villain doesn’t follow his own rules, if he was ever put in a situation where he is treated like he treats people weaker than him, he would be in trouble.
The hero, however, is fine with obeying his own rules, no matter which side of the coin he is on, because his rules were made to guarantee justice.
It’s what happens when the Meta Golden Rule is applied. How people treat their boss and how they treat their equal or subordinate is different. A villain would not be able to survive if people more powerful than him acted with the villain’s rules or behavior. A hero would survive merely because the rules of justice applies to the survival of itself.
This standard of hypocrisy is easy to use to judge people like Singer. But it ends up more complicated than it seems.
This unbounded faith in reason was the basis of what they called the Enlightenment.
No, not the basis, merely one school of the Enlightenment, namely the Hume, Marxist, Dark Enlightenment.
Hume, of course, famously thought that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” and Marxism equally famously reduces rational thought to a mere epiphenomenon of culture and class interests.
The Enlightenment-era philosophes liked to say they were all about reason, but the more I study of philosophy both before and after the 18th century, the less justification I can see for their claim.
It’s hard for a simpleton like me to understand how the ‘work’ of Singer can be regarded as a genius. His ‘formula(s)’ simply ignore all the complexities (variables) associated with the problem, making the solutions bogus. He just omits, doesn’t consider, or claims whatever information is inconvenient or complicating as irrelevant.
Were a theoretical physicist to simply disregard all the variables needed to solve a complex equation except for the one or two he wanted to include, the solution would be rubbish. The problem left over after it’s been stripped of variables is easy enough to solve, but crap nonetheless.
Trying to defend this approach to solving a problem as logic or science, seems so dumb it’s not even worthy of debate.
Why are people like this taken seriously by academics, who surely know that problems this complex can’t be simplified in a way that would result in anything more than a grossly unsupported opinion?
According to this article, Singer’s sister is “a lawyer whose career has involved strident advocacy for people with significant disabilities”. How different siblings can be!
Why are people like this taken seriously by academics, who surely know that problems this complex can’t be simplified in a way that would result in anything more than a grossly unsupported opinion?
They get boat loads of cash for it.
Ann
He’ll get rid of her next if there’s a dispute over family inheritance.
“The Enlightenment-era philosophers liked to say they were all about reason, but the more I study of philosophy both before and after the 18th century, the less justification I can see for their claim.”
“Fides et Ratio” (*), it’s not a panacea but it is a necessity.
(“that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”)
(*) It depends of course on the kind of religion. The Aztek faith wont do, nor for that matter the Moloch faith
Ymarsakar:
“The Nazis betrayed the pact with Stalin and Communism. The Commies weren’t ever going to forget about that, so they, due to fear and hatred, had to demonize the Nazis above and beyond the norm for enemies.”
Can’t say I agree with that. Stalin demonized nazism (though I believe it was under the name of “fascism”) until the Hitler-Stalin Pact of august 1939, and again after the attack on the USSR in 6/1941. The demonizing was built in and only put on a slow burner during the period of the pact.
As for Hitler attacking Russia, he only got his shot in first. While Stalin didn’t expect the attack he also didn’t think he would suffer the defeat he did. I’m not a strategist but I believe the USSR army wasn’t positioned for defense (that would be away from the frontier) but more for attack. The army wasn’t weak (wiki mentions 11.000 tanks many of superior quality as the German ones), and it was growing. As far as I can see Stalin was planning to do to Germany what he effectively did on 9 august 1945 to Japan. He was just waiting for the right moment.
Of course, I agree with the rest of your analyses.
The demonizing was built in and only put on a slow burner during the period of the pact.
If you consider the NKVD propaganda that the fascists are communist’s best friend against the capitalists Westerners to be a “slow burn” at least.
There were some sources that said Stalin was scared witless of the Nazi war machine. The Soviets needed American material to build those tanks, without the Americans shipping boat loads of cash and equivalent of gold/silver to the Russians via Lend Lease, Stalin knows very well what his logistical situation would have been against the German war machine.
If he refused to figure this out, maybe that’s why he purged so many military officers, getting rid of the people who recognized the reality of things later on.
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I am reminded of a line near the end of Camelot, “Let her die your life is over. Let her live your life’s a fraud.” Because of his actions, Singer’s entire philosophy is false. Should he not repudiate said philosophy he is a fraud and a liar!
Nobody expects the Inquisition! But as a Christian, I’m just here to offer my perspective, not to preach, nor torture…
Jesus distilled the meaning of the Old Testament for one of his questioners: Love the Lord with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. I don’t recall Jesus ever saying a kind word for logic, and Paul himself, though quite skilled at argumentation, warned Christians not to stray too close to philosophy, in so many words: the Greeks (i.e., philosophers) will always see us as fools.
Because, in too many cases, what it gets you is Peter Singer.
You’re right, Neo: logic is just a tool. You can go even further and say that logic is utterly amoral. Logic can help you achieve your goals; it cannot tell you whether those goals are good. Dennis Prager points out that infanticide was practiced in rational Greece, but prohibited in faithful Israel.
Leave it to the Nazis to devise efficient systems for killing mass numbers of people. The concentration camps and the rounding up of European Jews was quite logically done. At every step of the way, they kept refining their processes. At first, they just rounded up the Jews in a particular town, marched them out to the woods, and shot them. They had to stop doing that because they discovered that soldiers who shot unarmed civilians were no good for soldiering after that. The concentration camps were then born. How much work can you get out of condemned Jew without feeding him? Let’s find that out. If you want to find out how long it takes for a person to die tossed into a snowbank naked, let’s take a clipboard and a stopwatch out to the nearest snowbank and, oh, bring a few naked Jews. Adolph Eichmann instructed the SS who were marching Hungarian Jews to their concentration camps that, when they crossed the bridge over the Danube, throw the small children into the water. Why? Because the parents will throw themselves in after them and die of drowning or hypothermia.
During this entire descent into Hell, logical decisions were being made all the way down.
Peter’s singing another tune when it’s his own mom? Hey Pete, that’s your conscience calling. Now would be a great time to repent.
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