MetaMonday #5: Reviewing Peter Singer's endorsement of moral realism

This week I'll be reviewing a discussion with Peter Singer. Singer describes how he changed his metaethical views changed over time. Singer initially endorsed moral antirealism, but eventually came to endorse moral realism. Here is the original video:
• Peter Singer on Becomi...
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[@davidjacquemotte6850]

I’ve always find the way he describes truth as something any rational person would believe as troublesome. It presupposes that anyone or a large number of people are rational.

[@Arcanis200488]

The audio cutouts are really annoying but i gladly suffer through it because your content is gold.

[@lanceindependent]

I am so tired of it. I really don't know how to fix it.

[@Arcanis200488]

​@@lanceindependent hard to tell but maybe instable internet connection, not enough processing power or out of sync youtube/encoder software settings.

[@lanceindependent]

@@Arcanis200488 It's not my internet connection and it only happens in Streamyard.

[@Arcanis200488]

@@lanceindependent what browser are you using and did you try different ones? Extensions can also interfere

[@lanceindependent]

@@Arcanis200488 It happens in Firefox and Chrome. Extensions don't seem to be causing it, happens even without them.

[@Oskar1000]

Common cents is really good

[@lanceindependent]

I'm not so sure. It reminds me of early new atheism and seems a little pretentious.

[@Oskar1000]

@@lanceindependent I take it I should call you a "bright" then?

[@lanceindependent]

@@Oskar1000 Noooooo! I'm a Luminosopher.

[@anzov1n]

One additional issue might be effeciency of speech by a given person. They may have some kind of arguments but they are unable to articulate them in a conversational context. Honestly i was never sold on Singer, even with Animal liberation (which is supposed to be an incredibly persuasive book) he lost me in the first chapter with a lack of justification/sloppy semantics. Maybe he can be a careful thinker and communicator but seems to be no stranger to taking shortcuts as well.

[@BurntCookiesYT]

When you say "never sold on Singer, even with Animal liberation" do you mean you weren't convinced by his arguments against speciesism, or weren't convinced of his ethical positions unrelated to speciesism? Oscar Horta makes a much better case against speciesism, see "Making a Stand for Animals". Here's an excerpt. "There are other reasons to deny that we should respect only those who belong to the species Homo sapiens. In fact, there is nothing magical that makes belonging to a certain species, by itself, something special. Consider the following. Imagine a row representing your ancestors on the maternal side. Your mother is in the first position. Just behind her is your grandmother and behind her your great-grandmother, followed by your great-great-grandmother, and so on. If we continue going backwards for only a few hundred generations we will reach the Paleolithic. Now, if we keep traveling back through time, we will find the ancestor that humans have in common with animals of other species. We will reach a point where an ancestor of ours will also be the ancestor of other animals, such as chimpanzees and bonobos. In other words, suppose that next to the row with our ancestry, there is another row with the ancestry of chimpanzees, and the two rows will merge into one. ... Now, think about all those ancestors of ours who we would pass in that hour and a half(it's a 90mile long/150km line when ancestors are lined up) as we make our way along the row. They would be, so to speak, halfway between humans and other animals. Imagine that they still existed. Would we discriminate against them because they are not totally human? If so, at which point in the row would we do so? Would we draw a line somewhere dividing the row in two and say, "we will respect those before this point but not those who come after"? The truth is that doing this would be quite arbitrary. In that row, there are no clear divisions at any particular point, only very small gradual differences from mothers to daughters. At present, different species are distinguished in a very marked way because the animals that once existed between each of them are no longer here. If they continued to exist, then there would be no clear point to make such a distinction." If you bring up something irrelevant to how these beings' suffer, similar to how humans suffer, like intelligence, would you do the same for echolocation, if *only* humans had echolocation? I guarantee that if you're currently in favor of speciesism, you would say something along the likes of "Nonhuman animals don't matter, why, it's absurd to give them rights! They don't have echolocation!!!" in that world.

[@anzov1n]

@@BurntCookiesYT @BurntCookiesYT first it is not a binary - care vs don't care, rather a sort of fuzzy gradient. Sorites paradox style arguments also have the problem that they can be extended to absurdity. If you have a problem drawing the line between species somewhere then you may need to concern yourself with the ongoing genocides against bacteria etc. No idea what's with the attitude in last paragraph. Some properties/abilities' relevance to suffering is reasonably debatable. Sentience, abstract thought, theory of mind etc may not be required for suffering but can certainly factor into it. If you think no aspect of the potentially unique subjective experience of homo sapiens can possibly have a bearing on how we compare suffering and thus all suffering is identical, full stop, then you've flattened all nuance. As for putting words in the mouths of others... Congratulations on winning an argument with yourself, I guess?

[@BurntCookiesYT]

@@anzov1n ​ To your first paragraph, "it is not a binary - care vs don't care, rather a sort of fuzzy gradient.". Do you mean sort of like what a racist may say, concerning darker and lighter color of skin, except replaced with the vague property of being "human"? Also, "you may need to concern yourself with the ongoing genocides against bacteria", I base my ethics off of the capacity to experience emotions. I have not seen compelling evidence that bacteria have that (though I give a non-zero degree of moral weight). I'm sure you agree with my reasoning for humans, as in, you would find it fine if a human was punched if they had no conscious experience or feelings, (and won't in the future) or if a (unconscious, but living) person in a coma who had no chance of waking up had the plug pulled. Sentience is the ability to experience feelings or sensations, so by definition one would need to be sentient to experience suffering (here I define suffering as an experience the being' experiencing the experience would desire to stop; those with pain asymbolia aren't physically suffering, for instance). >>" If you think no aspect of the potentially unique subjective experience of homo sapiens can possibly have a bearing on how we compare suffering and thus all suffering is identical, full stop, then you've flattened all nuance." That's not what I think, however we can infer that our states of suffering are quite similar to nonhuman animals, from looking at the reactions prelinguistic toddlers, and the profoundly intellectually disabled have to experiences that would be painful to adult humans, such as similar aversive reactions to stimuli that would be painful to the adults, grimacing, the activation of pain receptors, etc. Extending this to nonhuman animals, which we evolved from, who have a brain, central nervous system, pain receptors, and similar reactions to aversive stimuli as in humans, seems the most reasonable option here. I'm sure there's also a nonzero difference in capacity to suffer from those nonhuman animals with echolocation too. On my last paragraph, I said that as speciesists are motivated by accepting speciesism, then looking at what differentiates humans from nonhuman animals to then justify that speciesism. For instance, I was talking to my brother about why he found consumption of meat acceptable, and he said that the "lack of maternal bond in nonhuman animals to their offspring, since they're in the womb for a short-period of time". After I mentioned how cows have a similar maternal bond time to humans, he just moved to "they're not human". He obviously didn't care about the maternal bond in the first place, then. If I had to guess, when first presented to nonhuman animals and ethics, you found that the arguments against speciesism would result in a lifestyle change, then reasoned backwards in this case too, to justify your current habits. I brought up echolocation and intelligence, as they're both irrelevant to how we should be treated, besides for instrumental purposes. It's clear we shouldn't have IQ tests in court to determine if hitting someone was *that* bad or not, for instance. In the echolocation scenario, you would use echolocation as a reason to justify ignoring nonhuman animals' welfare too; same motivations.

[@Androide323]

Starts at 22:15

[@moxie.6832]

i think part of the tendency to call people bad faith or disingenuous has to do with the combative culture of online debates

[@DaKoopaKing]

I think it's just pop debate terminology being misapplied by people who don't understand the distinctions being drawn, like when people call any insult an ad hominem or an appeal to a relevant authority a fallacy.

[@lanceindependent]

@@DaKoopaKing Oh yea well that's just a straw herring!

[@kevinnavarro402]

Bush bucks?

[@lanceindependent]

That is the best worst suggestion ever.

[@kevinnavarro402]

@@lanceindependent Haha. Thanks. That was my intention.

[@davidjacquemotte6850]

“This seems to be colored jongly to me” Colorblind person: “what’s your evidence it is jongly?”

[@lanceindependent]

What is this in reference to?

[@davidjacquemotte6850]

@@lanceindependent The strange appeal to seemings as strong evidence when it doesn’t seem that way to others.

[@aaronclarke1434]

Good name for your currency: Lancian Lucre

[@aaronclarke1434]

🤔 you don’t like your name. Moral moolah?

[@zephyrjmilnes]

Hey Lance, sorry for posting comments designed to attack rather than praise and build you up. I appreciate what you do and you are obviously very intelligent.

[@lanceindependent]

Criticism is good. I just don't like when people are rude. No worries, if you feel inclined to focus on "attack," as long as it's not nasty I not only don't mind but would be very happy to see some critiques and objections.