Amazing what a career in academia can do to your mind.
Peter Singer was in Oxford last week. The bestselling advocate of utilitarianism was the star contributor to a conference in which he talked with a group of Christian ethicists. Given Singer’s inflammatory views on matters such as euthanasia and infanticide, the dialogue was striking for its agreements, particularly the common cause that can be made between Christians and utilitarians when tackling global poverty, animal exploitation and climate change.
However, it was on the last issue that the conference demonstrated real philosophical interest too. Singer admitted that his brand of utilitarianism – preference utilitarianism – struggles to get to grips with the vastness of the problem of climate change. Further, there is an element that comes naturally to Christian ethics which his ethics might need in order to do so. It has to do with whether there are moral imperatives that can be held as objectively true.
Climate change is a challenge to utilitarianism on at least two accounts. First, the problem of reducing the carbon output of humanity is tied to the problem of rising human populations. The more people there are, the greater becomes the difficulty of tackling climate change. This fact sits uneasily for a preference utilitarian, who would be inclined to argue that the existence of more and more sentient beings enjoying their lives – realising their preferences – is a good thing. As Singer puts it in the new edition of his book, Practical Ethics: “I have found myself unable to maintain with any confidence that the position I took in the previous edition – based solely on preference utilitarianism – offers a satisfactory answer to these quandaries.”
Second, preference utilitarianism also runs into problems because climate change requires that we consider the preferences not only of existing human beings, but of those yet to come. And we can have no confidence about that, when it comes to generations far into the future. Perhaps they won’t much care about Earth because the consumptive delights of life on other planets will be even greater. Perhaps they won’t much care because a virtual life, with its brilliant fantasies, will seem far more preferable than a real one. What this adds up to is that preference utilitarianism can provide good arguments not to worry about climate change, as well as arguments to do so.
Humor!!!!!!
How delightful!!!!!
Humor ?
I though it was solipsism, and “Wired” magazine philosophy.
Certainly laughable.
I blame Plato…there should be some punishment for whomever tries to explain philosophy in a convoluted way…
Anyway…they are saying something interesting. Singer’s views are that “good”=”whatever somebody likes” and “bad”=”whatever somebody doesn’t like”. So humanity should be doing things that are “liked” when summed up across the whole of humanity.
On that basis, “tackling climate change” is arguably “bad”, as it involves doing something that nobody likes to do now, in order to change the future. First of all, tackling climate change by reducing the number of births means doing something none of the un-borns will like.
Secondly, we have no clue if our “tackling of climate change” now will be liked by our descendants, or if they will care at all. And if they don’t like it or don’t care, why exactly are we tackling climate change?
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All of the above can be summed up as “carpe diem” or, for people with a Christian mindset, to Mt 6:34.
Nice to see the Guardian acknowledge that the only way to “tackle climate change” is to force people to do it….
The man lost me somewhere along the way.
Just thought I’d mention that the videos from the conference are now available:
http://mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/resources/peter-singer-conference/