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Conversations with Coleman
Thinking About Morality with Peter Singer (Ep.12)
00:57:53
For exclusive member-only content become a CwC subscriber via https://colemanhughes.org/ In this episode, Coleman interviews Peter Singer, an Australian moral philosopher, professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. Peter is known for his book, ‘Animal Liberation’ in which he argues in favor of veganism, and his essay ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ in which he argues in favor of donating to the global poor. During this episode they talk about whether moral obligations depend on where you happen to be in the world, whether human happiness is comparative or absolute, Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments, hedonic adaptations and whether the human race is happier now than it was a thousand years ago, and more.
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- [00:00]
Coleman Hughes
SA welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Before I introduce today's guest, I just.
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Coleman Hughes (Podcast Intro)
Want to thank everyone who's supporting the podcast. Thanks to you, I'm now able to outsource the grunt work and focus on preparing for guests.
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Coleman Hughes
If you'd like to support the podcast.
- [01:17]
Coleman Hughes (Podcast Intro)
Go to my website ColemanHughes.org my guest today is Peter Singer. Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher. He's a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and a laureate professor at the center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He's known in particular for his book Animal Liberation, in which he argues in favor of veganism, and his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which he argues in favor of donating to help the global poor. We talk about whether moral obligations depend on where you happen to be in the world. Talk about whether human happiness is comparative or absolute. Talk about Tyler Cowen's book Stubborn Attachments. We talk about hedonic adaptation and whether the human race is happier now than it was a thousand years ago. We talk about judging figures from the past and taking down statues. And I drag Peter into American politics by asking him how a consequentialist should view a problem with such a small body count, such as unarmed Americans killed by the police. So, without further ado, Peter Singer, welcome.
- [02:50]
Coleman Hughes
To another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Peter Singer. Peter, thanks so much for coming on the show.
- [02:57]
Peter Singer
You're very welcome, Coleman. Happy to be on your show.
- [03:00]
Coleman Hughes
Yes, we spoke about a week ago on the comedy Seller podcast about a wide range of issues, and I want to go over a few of those without boring you by rehashing all the same topics. But just to start, can you give people who may not know you a quick summary of who you are and how you describe what you do?
- [03:22]
Peter Singer
Yeah, sure. I'm a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. I've held that position for just over 20 years. As your listeners can probably tell from my accent, I'm Australian by background. I grew up in Australia, studied at Oxford University and taught at NYU for a little while, went back to Australia and then came to Princeton. As I said about 20 years ago, I'm probably best known for my book Animal Liberation, which some people credit with having triggered the modern animal rights movement. And certainly that's continued to be one of my major interests in trying to get better treatment for animals, particularly for farm animals, since that's the vast majority of the animals we abuse. But also quite early in my career I wrote an article called Famine, Affluence and Morality, which is about what we people living in affluent countries, at least those of us who have some money to spare for things that we don't really need ought to be doing to help people in extreme poverty in low income countries. And that article got reprinted a lot and has had some influence in the effective altruism movement, which is a more recent movement. And as part of that I wrote a book called the Life youe Can Save, which led to the starting of a charity with the same name that recommends the most effective organizations helping people in extreme poverty.
- [04:47]
Coleman Hughes
You give a very understated account of your own feats. I think, as I told you last week, your book Animal Liberation had a big influence on me when I was maybe 16 or 17. I would say it's one of the three or four books that persuaded me to pursue a philosophy degree because just the style of reasoning, you know, it just became clear to me that there are, there are two types of people. There are people who assume that their base gut instinct about right and wrong is worth respecting completely and not challenging. And then there's there are people who distrust their initial gut reaction and want to reason things through. And I remember in particular the argument from Animal Liberation that seemed, you know, it's one of those arguments that just seems obvious the moment you hear it, but you wouldn't necessarily think, unless it's said explicitly, is that the ability to reason on the part of an animal should make relatively little if any difference to our ability or the requirement that we care about its well being. It's really the capacity to suffer and flourish that should matter. And anyway, that's just to say I think that style of reasoning about right and wrong was very important to me as a young budding philosophy major. So thank you for that.
- [06:14]
Peter Singer
Great. I'm very happy if I had an influence in bringing You. To philosophy. That's. That's terrific. And it's always encouraging to me, actually, to hear that people do respond to arguments, as you say, not everybody does. But when people respond to a philosophical argument to the point of actually changing something that's very close and personal, like what we eat, which affects us every day more than once a day, I think that's a tremendous testament to the power of philosophy and the importance of the subject.
- [06:42]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about the other half of your most prominent parts of your legacy that you mentioned, your argument about giving money to charity from famine, affluence and morality. Can you briefly describe that? I'm sure you've done it a thousand times.
- [07:04]
Peter Singer
Yeah. So in this original article that I mentioned famine, affluence and morality, I was concerned with a particular crisis that was unfolding then. This was. I wrote it in 1971, the crisis that led to the formation of the nation of Bangladesh, which, previous to that was East Pakistan, part of Pakistan. And there had been an autonomy movement which democratically elected party in favor of more autonomy. And the Pakistani army brutally repressed that movement so brutally that 9 million people from East Pakistan fled across the border into India. And India, which was a much poorer country then than it is today, was faced with an enormous task of housing, feeding, providing sanitation for 9 million refugees. And of course, they appealed to the Western nations for assistance. And some assistance was forthcoming, but not nearly enough. So it was in that context that I want to ask myself the question, what do we. What. What should we be doing? Is it okay for us to just go on with our normal lives while There are these 9 million people who may not be able to get the necessities of life? And of course, it's true that neither I nor my other friends were in any way responsible for this situation. But still, that didn't answer the question of whether we ought to be helping. And to illustrate that, I use this little story of walking past a pond and seeing that a child has fallen into the pond. It's not your child. You're not responsible for the child in any way, but you seem to be the only person close enough to rescue the child and prevent the child drowning. Now, there's no danger to you here because you know that this is a shallow pond and you can stand up in it. But there is some inconvenience and some expense because you're going to ruin your clothes. You just happen to be wearing really nice clothes to go somewhere important. So. So you'll be up for a couple of hundred dollars anyway. And then I asked the reader, and I've subsequently asked many audiences, so would it be okay to just say, this child is not my responsibility and I don't want to be up for the expense of replacing my clothes, so I'm going to ignore the child? And pretty much everybody that I pose that question to says, that would definitely not be okay. In fact, that would be completely wrong. An awful thing to do to put the cost of your clothes above a child's life. But then, if that's true, if that would be an awful thing to do, does the fact that the child is not in front of us, but is in another country far away, the fact that we have to use some organization to help that, donate to, to help the child, do those factors themselves mean that we don't have the same moral obligation? Or that it's not an awful thing to do to ignore the plight of children who are, or adults for that matter, who are dying far away, who we could help? And my answer is, well, none of those factors really make a crucial moral difference. So I think that we ought to be doing something, something significant to help people in extreme poverty. Of course, you can ask, well, how much? That's a further question. But certainly it's not enough to just wash our hands of it and say, that's not my responsibility.
- [10:29]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I've encountered one kind of critique of this argument from a professor of a class I recently took, and I wonder if you've encountered it. It's more of an attitude than a specific argument, but it's just the sense that the injunction to give in far away places where you can't see is just a way of avoiding your more immediate responsibilities to your local neighborhood. Say, if you know, if there are problems in your city that you could donate to, the very fact that you live in that city gives you a special obligation to donate there. And, you know, the desire to just send a check to some place far away where you don't have to think about it somehow represents a. A failing? Have you ever encountered that? And what do you think of it?
- [11:19]
Peter Singer
If so, I don't think I've encountered the argument that it's a failing. I've encountered the argument that we ought to be doing something locally as well. But I don't see, you know, even if, let's, let's say for the moment we accept that we ought to be doing something locally, I don't see that that absolves you from also doing something further away. I don't see why it replaces that obligation. Now, if the people locally were just as needy and if you could help them just as effectively, by which I mean that a dollar given locally would go just as far as a dollar given in a low income country far away, then I would accept this. But I wouldn't see it as an obligation to give locally. I would just see it as an obligation to give where you can give most effectively. And if it is most effective to give locally, sure, give locally. But I think the facts are very different from that. If you're living in the United States, then in fact your dollars don't go very far because essentially it costs more for people to feed and house themselves than it does the poverty line in the United States for a family of four, I think, if I remember rightly, is around $23,000, which you know, is not very much to live on in the United States. But the World Bank's extreme poverty line is about $2 a day. So let's say $750 a year. So obviously if, if you're helping somebody on $750 a year and you give them, let's say, $750 a year, $750, you've made a huge difference to them. You've doubled their annual income, you've enabled them to buy things now that they couldn't possibly afford previously because can't save very much if you're just living on $2 a day. Whereas if you gave $750 to a family living in poverty in the United States, it really wouldn't make a huge difference, certainly not a life transforming difference for them as it can in other countries. So to me that fact overrides any particular obligations that you have to give locally.
- [13:35]
Coleman Hughes
How does inequality factor into all of this? Because implicit in your argument is the idea that to some extent poverty correlates with unhappiness in some kind of causal way, such that giving money moves the needle on some deeper principle that we care about, like happiness or well being or whatever you might want to call it. And how inequality might affect that deeper principle is something I often think about because there's, I think, a huge literature that sort of argues over the question of whether a person's happiness is a function of their relative status and whether that's their relative status to their people in their immediate surroundings or their country or the world, or whether it's a function of their absolute status. And depending on which one is right and in what ways they're right, that would seem to have implications for how you would want to give charitably. Does that question make sense? And if so, do you have a position on that?
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Peter Singer
The question certainly makes sense.
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Coleman Hughes
So.
- [14:52]
Peter Singer
I'm not really interested in inequality per se. That is, I think that inequality can have many bad consequences, including perhaps the fact that even people who are relatively poor in a wealthy society, although they have enough to have all of the necessities of life, may be less happy than they would be if the society were more egalitarian. So I think that's relevant, and that's a good reason for making the society more equal. Also, of course, if you have vast discrepancies of wealth, as we do in the United States, and if you have laws that allow money to be used politically, as again, the United States has, then you get tremendous inequalities of power as well, which is very damaging for democracy, I think. So there are good reasons why a more equal society is better, but not just in itself. For example, I don't think that leveling down, which would be another way of producing equality, is in itself a good thing. Now, do I think that relative poverty or absolute poverty is more important for happiness? Well, I think they're both relevant, but I think that it's absolute poverty. That is the World Bank's definition of extreme poverty, which really means not having enough income to reliably be able to meet your basic needs, needs for food, shelter, limited amount of medical care. I think that that's more crucial, particularly to suffering. Right. When you talk about happiness, I tend to focus on the negative, on suffering and reducing suffering more than on increasing happiness, partly because I think we have a better handle on how to do that and we can do it less expensively than it takes to increase happiness. So when you're talking about reducing suffering, then I think helping people who don't have enough to meet their basic needs is the best, the most provable, and certainly the most cost effective way of doing that.
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Coleman Hughes
So this gets into some interesting trade offs. And I mentioned Tyler Cowen's book on our last podcast, the Comedy Seller Podcast. But I want to sort of re ask that question and ask it slightly differently. But let me just first give a summary of what I'm talking about for the audience. Tyler Cowen wrote a book called Stubborn Attachments, in which he argues that we have a moral obligation to increase GDP as much as possible without violating human rights and while also mitigating the effects of climate change and trying to prevent nuclear war. But the bulk of the book is dedicated to arguing why GDP growth is important. And the way he does that is by essentially doing what you did in famine, affluence, and morality. With regard to the dimension of space, which is to say your argument was that the number of miles between you and another person shouldn't diminish your obligation to them. What Cowan does in this book is, you know, the number of years away that you are from a person, a person who's yet unborn, also doesn't diminish your obligation to them. And so, given that GDP functions in terms of compound growth, a 0.1% change in the GDP rate will mean over the course of 100 years that the world is much, much wealthier 100 years from now than it would have been with a slightly lower rate. And so what he ends up arguing is that if given a trade off between reducing inequality, for example, through a welfare program, that has a negative effect on GDP and maximizing gdp, we actually have a moral obligation to do this. Second, because we are, we would essentially, you know, if we didn't, we would be sacrificing many the wealth of many, many future people for the poverty of smaller number of people that are alive today. So I'm curious with regard to your reflections on inequality just now, if you think that argument makes sense at all and how you view that issue, the issue of long time spans in general.
- [19:36]
Peter Singer
I agree with Tyler Cowan that we should not discount the future per se. Of course, the future may be uncertain and we may not know what effect will have on the future. So we can discount that. For example, Nicholas Stern, the English economist who wrote about climate change some years ago, discounted the future by a very small amount on the basis of the fact that there may not be a future, that there may be a nuclear war or a large asteroid may collide with our planet or something like that. There's a chance, but only a very small one, that there just won't be any people around in 100 years. And then, of course, if we sacrifice the poor today for the benefit of the future, tomorrow will have sacrificed in vain. So I think his discount was something like a quarter of 1% per annum, much less than economists often discount the future by. And I think that's reasonable. But you shouldn't discount the future just because of the future. And Cohen is right about that. Just as we should care equally about people wherever they are, so we should care equally about people whenever they are, as long as we know that they are, and as long as we know that we can make a difference to their lives. Now, the other Question that's raised by Karen's argument, of course, is does an increase in GDP make people happier or better off? And if so, how does that compare with how the welfare program that you mentioned in your example makes people happier and better off? I suppose it would be possible to argue that if people are really poor now, you make a bigger difference to their well being than increasing the GDP of people who are already wealthy. Because we assume that GDP is increasing, people in 100 years will be far wealthier than we are. Then I suppose you can raise the question and suppose that the GDP was, did increase, as you say, by that 0.1% and over a century that made a large difference. Would they still be that much happier off? In other words, would having. I'm not sure what the figures are, but would having a GDP that was 10 times ours make. When I say hours, I mean that of affluent countries make people happier than having one that was five times higher than ours? So I think you need to ask all of those questions. But it's possible that the answers come out in the way that Karen suggests. And if it does, then there's a powerful case for saying that's what we ought to do. But I just think you ought to be pretty rigorous in scrutinizing those assumptions, because obviously there are assumptions that are going to hurt people, the people who don't get the welfare program. And before you hurt the concrete people living now, you need to be very sure that you're going to benefit, although there's a very high probability that you'll benefit people in the future. We've had a lot of long term planning that has come unstuck in some economies and some parts over the past century or so. So we want to be forewarned about that possibility.
- [22:47]
Coleman Hughes
So I want to talk a little bit more about happiness and happiness over long time spans. I think one important piece to put in here is the idea of hedonic adaptation, which, you know, basically says that, you know, one becomes, as one becomes accustomed to new circumstances, one's expectations rise to meet those better circumstances. And you know what? You don't end up getting as much pleasure from the same amount of whatever it is, whether it's an activity or food or drugs or sex, you know, whatever, just insert the pleasurable activity as you do more of it, your expectations for what you expect rise in lockstep with your reality, or at least rise to some extent with your reality. And if you really take that idea seriously, I think there's no doubt that to some extent this is a fact of human psychology. Our minds do work this way with regard to many pleasures, including the pleasures that come from increased wealth. It's possible to leave, as someone like Yuval Noah Harari does, that the typical human was happier a hunter gatherer tribe than they are today. And that, you know, doubling the world's wealth, even if that wealth spread fairly evenly, you know, wouldn't necessarily double the world's happiness or may not even increase it very much. It's possible to lapse into a kind of nihilism about the possibility for humanity as a species to become much happier, short of avoiding the worst possible kinds of suffering like, well, like famine and war. So do you, how do you think about hedonic adaptation and its effect on the possibility of making progress in human flourishing on a global scale?
- [24:54]
Peter Singer
Well, hedonic adaptation, I agree, is a fact and it's one of the things that I had in mind when I said in response to your question about Tyler Cowan, that it's not so clear to me that people 100 years now are living on 10 times our per capita GDP rather than five times our per capita GDP. They're going to be all that much happier. So I think that's true. But I don't agree with Harari's claim about hunter gatherer societies. They may have been happy in many ways at many times, no doubt when they were well fed, no doubt they enjoyed sex as much as we do, although they couldn't avoid the consequences of pregnancy. But I think the negatives, the suffering that they had that they could not alleviate must have been much worse. So if they injured themselves and broke a bone, then they might be in great pain that couldn't be relieved and might, you know, the injury might fester and go grand grinous and they might die a slow and horrible death. And well, I just mentioned childbirth or pregnancy in the relation to sex. So again, women must have suffered a lot more in childbirth when that went wrong. We know that maternal mortality rates were of course, very high. So I think that they had a lot of things went wrong that we have better solutions for. So I think what our greater wealth and scientific knowledge, technology does is to enable us to avoid some of the worst forms of suffering that people used to experience. And not just hunter gatherer societies, but even in the 19th century suffered horribly from simple things like toothache, which we can generally get attended to pretty rapidly. So I think that we can make people happier, that I think increasing GDP and spreading it around the world does make people happier by reducing severe suffering. And that's not something that we ever adapt to. In other words, there isn't the negative of hedonic adaptation, that suffering stops hurting after a while. So I'm not nihilistic. I think that we can make progress in improving the world and bringing everybody up to a certain level. Whether there's then a ceiling on this level because of hedonic adaptation, that's possible. I couldn't confidently say that that's wrong. But no doubt we'll learn more about that as we get to the situation where we've got everybody, all most people up to that level and we don't have to worry about extreme suffering anymore. And we're only thinking about can we increase people's happiness.
- [27:54]
Coleman Hughes
Is there anything that, well, let me put it this way is, you know, your famine affluence and morality argument about the, you know, saving the drowning child. What it does is uses a simple thought experiment to show why you as an individual plausibly have a strong moral obligation to do something. Is there anything similar to that that doesn't operate at the scale of an individual but operates at the scale of a nation in terms of public policy, like a policy that nations plausibly have a very strong obligation to adopt where the moral logic of it is not extremely difficult or complicated?
- [28:43]
Peter Singer
Well, I do think that countries have moral obligations and they're not always fulfilling them. I think that's particularly for cases where individual actions don't or aren't likely to be sufficiently effective to achieve the goal. And the example that springs to mind as you were talking is climate change. So I think that individuals can and should do things to reduce their carbon footprint, but I don't think that's going to be enough. I don't think we'll get enough people in the present situation reducing their carbon footprint to avoid catastrophic climate change. And the way to do that is to have governments provide incentives like carbon tax for avoiding carbon or cap and trade scheme. And if governments don't do that, then I think we are going to get into a situation where a lot of bad things will happen. You talked about parallel to the drowning child in the pond. Well, we'll have drowning people perhaps as sea levels rise and low lying regions are inundated. Poor countries have quite a lot of those low lying regions because they tend to farm river deltas very intensively. River deltas of course have very fertile land, but they're low lying. So the Mekong delta is one example. In Bangladesh, the deltas of the great rivers that flow to the sea in the Gulf of Bengal, low lying areas, the Nile in Egypt, and I think rising sea levels are going to inundate these areas, bring salt into them, which will make them unsuitable for farming. So it's just one example of how the wealthy nations with their high levels of greenhouse gas emissions are harming poorer people. We could multiply the examples in many different ways, of course. And yes, I think that rich countries have obligations which they are currently not fulfilling, perhaps a couple of exceptions to rapidly phase out their greenhouse gas emissions and stop harming the nations that they are, the other countries that they're harming at present.
- [31:01]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so I want to pivot a little bit and steer you into some topics that relate to current events and politics. First off, you've written, I think I've written, I've read an essay of yours where you talk about judging figures from the past and taking down statues, particularly with regard to Stalin. And perhaps you remember the essay.
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Peter Singer
I think I talked about studies of Hitler as well.
- [31:32]
Coleman Hughes
That's right, yeah. So, you know, obviously in America we're having, we've been having a perpetual argument about, you know, the easiest version of the tough conversation is with Confederate statues and whether they should come down. And then the harder version of the hard conversation is with founding fathers who owned slaves to, you know, many of whom owned slaves and to different extents felt either proving or ambivalent or hypocritically disapproving of slavery. And this is obviously a symbolic issue. It's not an issue on which lives actually turn. So I guess I have two questions. The first is just what do you think about the value of symbols to begin with? You're famously a consequentialist philosopher, and I am too, which means I try to base my reasoning about right wrong on the consequences of actions as concretely as possible. So when I think about symbolic issues, sometimes I'm tempted to just not have an opinion because, you know, we're not talking about anyone's concrete well being, or if we are, it's a kind of psychological well being that I feel. You know, some, some folks like a statue, some folks don't. And how. Who am I to weigh one over the other? So first off, what do you think about the value of symbols, morally speaking, when we talk about statues like you.
- [33:18]
Peter Singer
I tend to look at future consequences and I think it depends on to what extent people notice and they're affected by the symbols. And one of the ironies of the movement to look at these symbols is that people notice them more. No doubt there Are people in Southern cities maybe African Americans whose ancestors were slaves, who walked past these statues of Confederate generals without noticing and thinking about who they were. Now they think, hey, wait a minute. My city's got a statue up of somebody who was trying to defend the enslavement of my ancestors. And I don't like that. Makes me feel bad when I walk past. That same thing happened, actually, at Princeton with Woodrow Wilson, because I'd been at Princeton for many years before the Black Lives Matter movement brought up the fact that Princeton, that Wilson was a racist who reintroduced segregation into the federal civil service after it had been abandoned 20 or 30 years after it had gone from the civil service. So I imagine there were many African. There's a college called Wilson College at Princeton, at which I happen to be an honorary fellow. And I sometimes eat in their dining room. There was a huge picture, like a wall poster of Woodrow Wilson on that dining room. And I'm sure many people walked past it and had no idea, as I had no idea, that we were walking past a picture of somebody who was a racist who reintroduced segregation into the federal civil service. Then black lives come along and tell us all this information. Now we can't feel the same about walking past this photo of Wilson to get our lunch. And so then you guess once people are aware of that and they're offended and troubled by it and feel, hey, why is this university honoring somebody who wouldn't have wanted me to even be a student at this university, then I can understand that there's a reason for taking this down. So it's kind of irony that you point to the symbols and they become more relevant because than they were when they just were part of the background.
- [35:29]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I think that's a very interesting observation, one that I've also had. And it's possible to take two different attitudes towards it. You might say it's always good to become educated about the ugly parts of a person's legacy, even if what comes along with that is a kind of mental suffering. And I personally, I have no problem with the status quo being a statue of someone who has skeletons in their closet that nobody knows about and nobody particularly cares about. But, you know, I've always been fascinated by circumstances where, you know, for example, the group that should be offended, in fact, isn't, but the group that should be offended or you wouldn't expect to be offended is offended. And I think recently of the fact that the Washington Redskins, an American football team, is finally changing their name after roughly two decades of being asked by A small group of people in the media and journalists and activism circles to do so. But the Washington Post did at least two polls of the Native American community to see what percentage wanted the Redskins to change their name. And both times it was on the order of 10% and on the order of 90% saying they should keep the name the same. And I was always fascinated by that because at face value, when I was first told about the Washington Redskins name being problematic, my first reaction was, yeah, that's bad. That must be enormously offensive to Native Americans, not knowing any Native Americans myself. But then to learn that the majority of people in the community don't care and it's really just a small minority that end up on the op ed pages making actually fairly compelling arguments, but nevertheless a very small minority. How does that. In a situation like that, what is the right move to do? Is it to side with the minority over the majority because the majority is rather apathetic about the issue or doesn't come up in defense as much or to just change?
- [37:56]
Peter Singer
If it's apathy on behalf of the majority, that is, if the Native Americans were saying, I don't care either way, then it's reasonable to say, well, look, there's a small group who really do care, and if there's nobody particularly is going to mind us getting a new name, maybe getting a new name is the best thing to do. If, on the other hand, the majority of the community said, hey, we like them being called Redskins, we don't find that an offensive term and we're proud to have, you know, people of our ethnic group remembered as thought of as part of a football team. You know, maybe they think it's shows that we're strong or athletic or something, because presumably football teams don't name themselves after groups that they think would not be athletic, vigorous, competitive players. You know, if that were the case, then I would say we should go with the majority, if the majority actually going to be upset at the change. But if the, you know, if the 90% are just don't care either way and 10% care quite intensely, I would give that weight to that 10% who care intensively.
- [39:08]
Coleman Hughes
Let's talk a little bit more about. Let me steer you into a little different territory, which is my hobby horse on this podcast and a topic that has been very much in the American media and global media in the past two months, which is the problem of police killings of unarmed civilians. So I'm among the few people that have tried to make the point that without downplaying the injustice of a policeman or woman killing an unarmed American, that it makes sense to calibrate, at least to some degree, our outrage in proportion to the number of people that are harmed. And I actually, you know, it reminds me, I recently had Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the podcast, and a few months ago, I believe he got into hot water for in the wake of a school shooting that we had, I think it was a school shooting where he, he observed how many problems that we don't tend to think about as important claim more lives per year than school shootings. Many, many more lives. And he was, as they say, ratioed on Twitter for making this point and ended up, I think, apologizing, if not for the content, then for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or being tone deaf or something. So I'm among the people that has been routinely tone deaf, I suppose, about the point about police killings of unarmed Americans, which claim on the order of 40 to 50 lives per year. And again, it's not that there's no reason to care about that. That is a problem. I want to underscore that. But the global protest that this has inspired, when we live in a context where we have many problems that claim, you know, that's on the order of a lightning strike kind of a problem where I often try to point to the problem of homicide as a problem that just claims thousands of lives a year and that we have, that represents a similar public policy failure to our public policy failure on shooting of unarmed police, but a public policy failure that just claims many more lives in America at least. This is not true where you live, I believe, and not true in most of Europe. But so you know, all that. To say the way I think about this issue is a straightforward result of consequentialist reasoning. And I wonder to what extent you think about this when you read the news and to what extent you calibrate your outrage on an issue like police killings of unarmed civilians. By the numbers.
- [42:25]
Peter Singer
I do think the numbers are relevant, certainly. And you know, the example that I most often talk about in terms of numbers goes back to the animal movement, where, if you ask, where do most of the donations people make to help animals go? The answer is to shelters and pounds and rescue operations for dogs and cats. Something like maybe 80 to 90% of the money the public gives goes to those organizations. And where is most of the animal suffering? And the answer clearly is farmed animals, particularly obviously animals in factory farms, in intensive farms, where in the United States we're talking about billions of animals that live their lives indoors in intensive farms every year. And we're talking about a few million abused dogs and cats. So it's a huge difference. And I think people get outraged by photos of an abused dog or cat because they care about dogs and cats, they love them, and they don't care that much about pigs or chickens. But I think we should be more outraged by the immense amount of suffering that we inflict on billions of chickens and pigs in particular, and give much more weight to that than we do to the abuse of dogs and cats. So the question is, is something similar, appropriate, something similar going on in the case of the outrage about police killings? And I think possibly it is. And I think here the explanation is not so much that we, you know, as with dogs and cats, that there are certain species that we live with and care about more. It's more that we've had such dramatic and horrifying videos of this happening. I mean, the death of George Floyd was one example where we see that on video. We see it going on for a long time. We hear him saying he can't breathe, see the police officer maintaining his knee on the neck. And that's just outrageous. And then we have these other videos of, was it Rayla Brooks in Atlanta who was running away and when shot in the back by police after a clearly non violent encounter. And you see those videos and you think, my God, how can people do this? This is horrendous. And that's why people want to do something about it. They want to join in the march. And we have these identifiable victims. We can say, you know, George Floyd, Rayla Brooks and the various others. Raven Martin, go back there. And when you talk about homicides, which I agree is obviously a much larger problem, we don't usually have those videos. Obviously, you know, general, murderers don't carry body cams to record what they're doing or they don't do it in public where other people are videoing. And you know, you say it's, it's a, it is a bigger problem, which I think is true. But is it an equally tractable problem? Is it something that we know what to do about now? To some extent, I think the answer that is yes. What we need to do about that is get guns off out of the hands of civilians in America. But you know, we were on that comedy seller program and Noam there said something like, yeah, well, good luck with that, as if to say, you know, that's politically impossible in the United States now. I don't know enough about us Politics to say, is that politically impossible? Over what time period is it politically impossible? It is an extraordinary fact about the United States that so many people carry guns. And that's completely unlike where I'm speaking from now in Australia. It's completely unlike Europe and the United Kingdom and most other places that I'm familiar with. And that's reflected in the homicide rates, of course, and in the rates of other deaths by shooting, including accidental deaths of children. So that seems to me to be something that is definitely worth campaigning about. And it looked like, you know, after the school shooting, what's the name? I forget the name of the school. But, you know, that started this big movement and people were getting out on the streets, and I kind of wish that that had built, gone on and achieved the momentum and the influence that the current Black Lives Matter movement has after the death of George Floyd, because that would have, I think, been a much better thing. It would have actually not only reduced general homicides, but would have reduced police shootings as well, because the police would have had less reason to believe that anybody that they stop is likely to be carrying a gun. So, to that extent, I agree with you. But, you know, I do also want to say that I think those videos do demonstrate something really, really sickening that goes on with the culture in some police forces. And I can well understand that people are outraged by that and they want to stop it.
- [47:19]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I definitely think the videos are a huge. Probably the main cause of the upswelling concern about this issue and the rise of smartphones and social media. I just want to say, I think you may have said Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, who got shot, shot in the back. I don't think he was shot in the back. He was the one that was turning and pointing his Taser at the cop as he got shot. Right.
- [47:47]
Peter Singer
Yeah, you're right. But he was some distance from the cop, and I think the cop knew that the Taser actually wasn't going to work anymore. As I said what I read, the Tasers only can be used twice, and the cop had already used that Taser twice, so the copy should have known anyway that the Taser was no threat to him.
- [48:06]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. In any event, I think it is. You know, in addition to being a result of the videos, I think it's also a result of ideas, because, you know, the. In the smartphone era, we not only have videos of cops doing awful things to black people, there are those that circulate once every few months. You know, as you mentioned, there are, you know, just as many videos of cops doing those to white people that don't get circulated. There are videos of just horrible. You know, I saw a video on Twitter the other day of just a drive by shooting in a neighborhood. A guy just walks up, drives up. This man is walking, holding his young daughter's hand. She doesn't look like she can be older than five. And a car pulls up next to him, shoots him dead. This is the kind of thing that happens with regularity in high crime pockets of America, which happen to be predominantly black. And there is video of all of this stuff, but the video that ends up going viral, I think reflects a preexisting attitude that people have to care about certain things more than others. Because there's just an infinity of video of anything you want, you can fill your whole day up with any particular cause for concern in the modern era. So I think there still is a burden of explaining why this issue is the one that has so deeply rattled the American and I guess, frankly, global moral conscious. And I don't think it's all a bad thing. I think much of what will come out of this is necessary police reforms that have been delayed for decades and opposed by very powerful police unions. But I worry about the underlying biases that caused those concerns, preventing us from ever coming to grips with the problem of violent crime and homicide in neighborhoods where the number one cause of death for black men in their 20s is homicide. And well over 50%, upwards of 80 or 90% of them, go unsolved. So you have this internecine violence where your brother gets killed and you feel.
- [50:38]
Peter Singer
Like.
- [50:40]
Coleman Hughes
You have to get the person back because you're living in a condition where the state monopoly on violence basically doesn't obtain. So I worry about the underlying bias preventing us from having a serious national movement around that issue. The way that we, for example, had one about drunk driving in the 80s.
- [51:01]
Peter Singer
Yeah, I suppose what's going on there is that if these are killings by American, African Americans, of African Americans, and you start focusing on them, you're pointing to something bad happening in that community. And people will feel, you know, well, particularly white people will feel, well, you know, should I, as a white person be holding up bad things that black people are doing to each other, basically. I think that was certainly been an issue here in Australia with indigenous communities where there was a lot of domestic violence going on. Not necessarily, but there were a lot of problems, particularly when people were influenced by alcohol in terms of domestic violence. And for a long time that was not publicized as much as it should be for exactly those reasons. People didn't want to pick on those who are already a disadvantaged minority. But in fact, when it did start to come out, then many of the indigenous women in particular were spoke up and we're glad that something had been said about that and things were being done about it.
- [52:09]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I think there's a, you know, around every topic like this, whether it's indigenous communities in Australia or black Americans, there is, I think, on the part of many people a profound discomfort in broaching the topic. And that's, you know, I think it goes back to what I said at the beginning where, you know, either we trust our discomfort about a subject and just bar off any subject that that elicits discomfort, or we distrust the feeling, you know, your initial gut reaction to a conversation and go deeper and actually find reasons or look for reasons why you should care more or less about something. I think that in a nutshell describes a lot of what you've been concerned with in your career, not about these specific topics, but about not just obeying your first emotional impulse about what it means to be a good person and, you know, which issues deserve your attention. And I do see what we're going through now as a kind of crisis of obeying the first emotional impulse. And to the extent that that causes good things, I think it causes those good things sort of by accident. And so I worry about the long term health of a society that is afraid to look at the uncomfortable issues.
- [53:42]
Peter Singer
Yeah, I agree. I think we should be looking at uncomfortable issues. We should be prepared to do that. And that's one of the things that worries me about the kind of online culture of harassment and abuse that occurs when people dare to raise issues that leave them open to, you know, possibly quite unjustifiable attacks of, against what they're doing, being hostile or racist or homophobic or against trans people or something of that sort. And there are too many cases of people who have suffered from that. And actually that's one of the reasons why I, together with a couple of colleagues establishing a journal called the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which will be an academic peer reviewed journal. So it's not going to accept any kinds of grants that don't have lots of evidence and argument. But it will enable people who are worried about being harassed for having controversial views to publish under a pseudonym if they wish to do so, which other academic journals generally don't do. So we're trying to ensure that there is a space for controversial ideas that people can publish. As I say, good well argued arguments with evidence without the risk of sacrificing their career or being personally abused for doing so.
- [55:02]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I actually remember seeing that one or two years ago reading about that idea being in the works. Is that still in the works? What's the timeline?
- [55:12]
Peter Singer
Yeah, it's actually, it's taken a little longer for us to get it established than we hoped because we want it to be an open access journal so that people can access it without having a library subscription or paying a lot of money. And we found a way of doing that now. And we now have a call for papers out. So we're accepting papers and we've got 20 or 30 papers that are currently being submitted and are under review. None of them have completed the review process as yet, but we're hoping that that will happen within the next couple of months and we'll start to put some papers out on the website.
- [55:49]
Coleman Hughes
That's awesome. I really look forward to that. Before I let you go, Peter, can you point people to your latest book or the book you're most recently advertising and tell people where they can find you on the Internet?
- [56:07]
Peter Singer
So the next book that will come out is going to be a book called why Vegan? Which is a collection of some of my past essays. It'll be published by Norton in October. And that will restate some of the things that I've written over the years with also something recent about the connection between factory farming and pandemics and wet markets and pandemics prior to that. So the other thing that I've been doing is working on effective altruism. And with this charity, the Life youe Can Save, I did a 10th anniversary edition of the Life youe Can Save, a new edition, and again, we've made that completely free as well. So if you go to thelifeyoucansave.org you can download a digital copy of the book free. You can also get an audio copy free. And the audio has been done by a number of well known people who've freely donated their time because they support the ideas of the book. So people like Kristen Bell, the actress, Paul Simon, the singer, songwriter, Stephen Fry, BBC host. Actually, one of the things I like about the audio is that we have a number of different ways of speaking English in it. We have. I read a chapter in my Australian accent. Stephen Fry has a beautiful English accent. We have Americans, we have Shabana Azmi, who's a very famous Indian actress. We have Winnie Alma, who's an African American woman reading. So I really like the globalism of the audio edition of the life you can save.
- [57:42]
Coleman Hughes
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's been a true pleasure to have you on and hope to see you again.
- [57:50]
Peter Singer
Great, thanks. Been glad to have the opportunity of talking to you.