Peter Singer AMA (July 30th)

Please could you outline your views on moral realism? In particular your recent-ish transition from anti-realist to realist. What triggered this? Has it had any impacts on the way you live your life?

What are the most critical mistakes the animal advocacy movement risks making during the next 10 years?

Animal Liberation and Famine, Affluence, and Morality are two of the most influential texts that I have ever read. Which texts have had the most influence on you?

If you were in your twenties now, with your career ahead of you, with the aim of trying to help the world in a big way, what would you do? In particular, what would you do differently to what you did in your twenties and why?

Was Parfit right when he said that 'If there were no such normative truths, nothing would matter, and we would have no reasons to try to decide how to live'?

What is EA getting the most wrong?

Is there a principled place to disembark the crazy train?

To elaborate, if we take EV-maximization seriously, this appears to have non-intuitive implications about e.g. small animals being of overwhelming moral importance in aggregate, the astronomical value of X-risk reduction, the possibility of infinite amounts of (dis)value, suffering in fundamental physics (in roughly ascending order of intuitive craziness to me).

But rejecting EV maximization also seems problematic.

What areas would you like to see EAs dedicate more of their human capital to? 

How do you think about the trade-offs (or "moral weights") between species, including humans? If you believe that what matters is primarily hedonistic pleasure/pain and you believe anything on the order of magnitude of the rethink priorities weights (e.g. humans have merely twice the capacity of suffering as pigs and three times that of chickens), then it seems issues like the "poor meat eater problem" or even just opportunity costs make human poverty alleviation efforts actively bad. It also leaves open the possibility that, say, shrimp or insects should actually be the top priority and our concern for their welfare should overwhelm all concerns for human welfare. If you believe that animals matter, but humans matter much more (say, orders of magnitude more than the rethink weights), then it seems like that might undermine some of your positions on factory farming. Do you have any rough relative moral weights in mind? If not, do you think developing such weights is a top priority?

Given the backlash it has caused to your personal widespread credibility, do you believe that making your views known on the treatment of severely disabled infants was a mistake?

What beings are inside and outside of your moral circle these days? If your views (e.g. on insects) have meaningfully changed recently, why?

In your interviews, you tend to offer bullet-biting, pure utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. What do you think about the concept of moral uncertainty, and how does it affect your decision-making? Do you sometimes consider providing answers that give credence to other moral theories in your responses?

Why shouldn't one be a moral satisficer? I'm a satisficer in most things. I'd do better on the piano if I practiced longer and more regularly, but I'm happy with late intermediate/early advanced, etc. And I'm satisfied with the results of my satisficing in most things. And I'm satisfied with roughly a B- goodness rating--which given grade inflation is about average. Why should being being moral be any different from working at the piano or anything else in this regard? Or do you agree that moral satisficing is satisfactory?

Do you think that artificial sentience is possible? Is it likely and/or inevitable in the next, say, 10 years of AI development?

What keeps you going when you are at your lowest?

What are your thoughts about the position of existential risk—and more specifically AI x-risk, as a key concern of Effective Altruism?

I have a sense that while it is a significant and important concern, I'm not sure it falls into the category of "altruism" as opposed to "self-preservation", and considering its current popularity, is there a risk of this concern crowding-out other core altruistic causes around the immediate well-being of those less fortunate or less empowered?

What strategies do you think are most effective for animal liberation? Which charities do you donate to and why! Thanks for all your work.

What’s the best (ie. influenced you the most) criticism or development of your ‘key ideas’?

Specific papers/references/links would be ideal!

(By ‘key ideas’ I’m thinking things like speciesism, your concept of persons or drowning child argument, but answer based on whatever you would yourself put in this category)

You are both an academic philosopher and a public advocate for several causes. How do you balance the requirements of these two roles? Academic philosophy requires one to follow the arguments to their conclusions, no matter how controversial they are. This must affect advocacy work to some extent. What are the rules of thumb you follow?

How do you generally respond to evolutionary debunking arguments and the epistemological problem for moral realism (how we acquire facts about the moral truth), especially considering that, unlike mathematics, there are no empirical feedback loops to work off of (i.e. you can't go out and check if the facts fit with the external world)? It seems to me like we wouldn't think our mathematical intuitions if 1) we didn't have the empirical feedback loops or 2) the world told us that math didn't work sometimes. 

What's your production function?

Do you currently think non-human animals are replaceable in a way humans aren't? Can a hedonist argue for that claim consistently?

In your previous writing on Animal Liberation, you state:

"With the benefit of hindsight, I regret that I did allow the concept of a right to intrude into my work so unnecessarily at this point; it would have avoided misunderstanding if I had not made this concession to popular moral rhetoric."

What do you currently think about using rights and justice jargon when advocating for animals? John Stuart Mill is currently regarded as an early proponent of several movements for rights without much controversy. He often made use of the terms "right" and "liberty" in his writings. On the other hand the word "right" is very loaded in animal advocacy world, with some insisting on a very specific, strictly deontological interpretation of the word. Should people who care about animal welfare dispense with the term "rights" or should they push for a more generic understanding of the term(e.g. fundamental interests that should be protected by the state) and keep using it? 

Do you know about your cameo in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong? What probability would you have placed on you shifting career paths from academia to more like your Unsong character if, in the 1970s, your younger self and everyone you knew witnessed the sky shattering?

John S Wentworth wrote a 1 minute post considering whether individual innovators cause major discoveries to happen many decades or even centuries earlier than they would have without that one person, or whether they only accelerate the discovery by a few months or years before someone else would have made the advancement. Based on your impact on the philosophy scene in the 1970s and EA's emergence decades later (the counterculture movement is considered by many to have died down during the mid-1970s which notably is around the time when some of your most famous works came out), what does your life indicate about Wentworth's models of innovation, particularly conceptual and philosophical innovation?

What do you think about the current state of introductory philosophy education, with the ancient texts (Greek, kant, etc) being Schelling points that work great in low-trust environments, but still follow the literary traditions of the times? Do you think undergrads and intellectuals outside contemporary philosophy culture (e.g. engineers, historians, anthropologists, etc) would prefer introductory philosophy classes be restructured to produce a more logical foundations to produce innovators and reductionists like your 1970s self and less literary-analysis-minded thinking?

What are the parts of EA that you are most proud of? What are the parts that you have more criticism towards? 

I’ve heard of some investors allocating a small percentage of their portfolio towards highly speculative “moonshot” style investments. The logic being that it’s impossible to ever accurately forecast how some types of investment, such as start-up companies, will perform in the longer term, but that they carry the potential to offer outsized returns.

What are your thoughts on treating charitable donations similarly? For example, giving ~95% of your donations to charities for which there is a strong evidence base to back up their efficacy and giving the remaining ~5% to “speculative” style charities for which there is less objective evidence?

If you had to choose a “speculative” charitable cause, what would it be?

Thanks for everything you do! We wouldn't be here without you.
 

What do you think is the most neglected, potentially high-impact career opportunity that could make significant progress for farmed animals.

written about my Richard Chappell 

Minor stuff: Is this meant to be "written about by Richard Chappell "?

When you wrote The Life You Can Save, how did you determine your recommendations for the percent of income to donate to charity? I have personally found it very difficult to determine how much I should give up for others, but believe almost all above the poverty line in the west can give tremendously more than you recommend. For someone seeking to maximize their impact, but also optimize their own enjoyment of life, what advice could you give for how to strike a balance with giving. Should the line be drawn where one would be giving up something they hope the world can afford to all people? What is meaningful enough non-necessary use of $1 if its opportunity cost is a bit more than 4 days of someone else's life? This question gives me trouble when I buy anything not strictly necessary.

You have individually had a greater impact on my personal ethics and the way I live my life than anyone else. Thank you.

Bonus question if you have time: Is there any research that could answer the question as to whether the cost to save a life grows at greater than 5.5% per year after adjusting for inflation? I ask because the math suggests investing beats immediate donation if the cost to save a life does not grow at a greater rate than 5.5% per year on average.

Hi Peter, 

In Famine, Affluence, and Morality, you put forth a position that it should not matter if we help the child who is a neighbor or the child ten thousand miles away.  Is this a strongly held conclusion or a position you want people to continue to debate?

You mentioned you were fortunate enough that Princeton allows you to teach one semester a year and so you have 8 months to spend with your grandkids.  One could argue there are many more children in Trenton, NJ that would benefit from your mentorship.  This is where I disagree with consequentialism.  I believe we should care a lot about the people close to us and collectively we can make sure everyone is cared for.

Thanks for your hard work!

Hi, thanks so much for being here! Could you please talk me through the rationale for assigning moral value to non-human animals?

After the public issues around earn to give, some of us have come to the conclusion that the core failure was a missing account for the path dependent nature of the self, and of our iterative normalization of our environment.

This implies a more continuous space of how to position ourselves to best contribute over our lives, balancing both manifesting the means to contribute and protecting the will to do so. It seems at least impractical to discard all participation in the economy, so the problem seems to be unavoidable.

Given the scarcity and competitiveness of EA funding, some recommend getting experience outside of EA first and then coming back to work on issues. Others say altruism sharpens altruism and accepting non-altruistic environments is corrupting. They both make good points, and seem to really reflect a continuum of balancing alignment with social good and capital.

As someone who has navigated this problem gracefully, do you have any advice for those trying to be thoughtful in navigating this balance for themselves?

What do you believe is the most important or valuable insight that your work on animal rights has brought to the world?

What is your biggest regret?