The Flimflam of Utilitarian Ethics

THERE ARE A NUMBER of so-called public intellectuals who I think are a lot less intellectual than they are public, Peter Singer is one of those.  I found myself thinking of the phrase "The Davos crowd" when I read this section of the interview that Daniel Gross did with him.   As it turns out for all his talk about the welfare of People in poverty he's mighty comfortable with the way things are in this billionaire ridden age.  Think of this as the just elected fascist leader of his own country blasts Pope Francis as a terrible leftist and ask who are the plutocrats and autocrats more afraid of.  Which one is more likely to advance the equality that Peter Singer goes through some minimal motions about.

Beginning in talking about his young adulthood Singer said:

You couldn’t live through that period without having seen footage of starving children—particularly from the Biafra crisis, when part of Nigeria broke away and was essentially besieged by the rest of Nigeria. We were living in Oxford, which is where Oxfam, the international aid organization, had its headquarters. They seemed to be trying to do things along the right lines, and so we started supporting them.

A lot of people thought that we don’t have to help people in extreme poverty, because we’re not responsible for their poverty. You can say, “Yes, we are responsible because we benefit from an unequal global trading system,” but that’s a complicated debate. I was trying to cut around that by saying, “Look, if you came across a child drowning in a shallow pond, and you could rescue that child at relatively minor cost to yourself, but you just decided not to do it because you didn’t want to ruin your clothes, that would be horrible.” But, then, if you accept that, you are accepting that we have responsibilities for people who are in need.


You seem to be a skeptic of Marx’s ideas in practice. Why did you write a book about Marx?

I was invited to do a book for an Oxford series. I had studied Marx when I was a graduate student, and there was this view of early Marx, largely based on some unpublished writings, that was all about alienation, and that there was a decisive break that came somewhere around 1848—first you had the kind of Hegelian-philosophy Marx, and then you had the different, scientific Marxism, and there wasn’t much of a connection between the two. In studying this, I’d been persuaded that was wrong, that there was continuity, and that you could explain what Marx was on about in his later writings by looking at the early writings—and that this also explained some of the flaws in Marx’s thinking. The idea that history is leading toward this goal, where all the contradictions will be resolved, came straight from Hegel. I think there are some interesting critiques of what’s going on in capitalist societies, but he really thinks that the revolution is inevitable. I think that was clearly wrong.

It seems like one of your least “instructive” books, in terms of how to live.

That’s true. I guess it’s one way in which we ought not to live. And that is still relevant because, very often, when I speak about global poverty, somebody gets up and says, “Well, isn’t the problem really capitalism? And shouldn’t we be doing what we can do to overthrow capitalism?”

I'd like to say that for an "ethical" philosopher to figure that was a situation where the choice was either one or the other of those two atrocities "in practice" is just lazy.  Considering his ease with the idea of going back to infanticide you'd think he'd at least try to come up with something more "ethical" than what he has.  He doesn't even really make a stand for his supposed ethical content within the framework of capitalism but, rather, goes for the easiest targets of the moribund philosophy of Marxism.  Even the Marxists have absolutely no use for Marxism, any more, give or take a few of the more marginal figures in academia and small-media scribblage and online babbleage.  Communism turns out to be just a more oppressive form of capitalism on the steroids of state control, eminently positioned to best the old-fashioned kind in which wealth and control remains outside of the governmental apparatus.  Western capitalists and their academic and lawyerly possessions are in the business of making sure, instead, that the government apparatus is in their hands without any effective democratic involvement from the underclass.  I'm no "public intellectual," media-darling, Princeton "ethicist" but I can see that situation clearly, enough.

It seems to me that the movement that has grown up around your philosophical work has ended up being very compatible with capitalism, in the sense that some of its practitioners are people who set out to earn a lot of money—some of them are billionaires who have decided to give away the money that they’ve amassed. Was that something you expected, for capitalism to almost be incorporated into your philosophical work?

I don’t think capitalism is incorporated into my philosophical work. I think my philosophical work is neutral about what is the best economic system—but it’s also realistic, and I think we’re stuck with capitalism for the foreseeable future. We are going to continue to have billionaires, and it’s much better that we have billionaires like Bill and Melinda Gates or Warren Buffett, who give away most of their fortune thoughtfully and in ways that are highly effective, than billionaires who just build themselves bigger and bigger yachts.

I'd strenuously reject the idea that his philosophical work is neutral (that most absurd and nearly universally claimed of "enlightenment" ersatz virtues) about such preferences in economics.  I distrust anyone who doesn't start out with what is called in modern theology "a preferential option for the poor," which is intentionally not neutral and, over all, opposed to a philosophy of inserting People into a scheme of economic valuation.  As I've demonstrated here rather exhaustively, biological science under natural selection is constantly involved in setting economic value on human beings and, certainly, on animals and plants within an overt economic framing.  That that use of economics may have started to be intended as a metaphor doesn't matter as it has come to completely dominate thinking in it.  Metaphors so often seem to become mistaken for what they characterize in that way.  

That is especially true of most of the social-so-called sciences which built on scientism and its gaudiest area of growth, natural selection, though it started before that.  Economics, the earliest of those and the one which directly infected science.  Malthus was an early example on which Darwin built.  Given the ease with which science was polluted, philosophy was an even easier mark.  I completely reject any claim that any utilitarian philosophy, from Bentham to Mills to Singer is not constantly in the business of estimating economic valuations in exactly the capitalist manner, it is embedded in its most basic procedures, it is all about making premonitory statements of valuation of even human lives.  It's philosophy as a financial prospectus.   The only widely practiced alternative of that is a close and serious reading of the Gospel of Jesus in which such valuation and wealth amassing are presented as wrong.*    While I respect the efforts of using Marx's critique of capitalism, by far his best work, by liberation theology, to go past that on the basis of prescriptive Marxist theory is a mistake.  The history of Marxism in practice proves that it is as dangerous as capitalism.  As can be seen, is work is not only comfortable with capitalism, it's a boon for the most powerful and dangerous class of People in the world, billionaires, in practice.**

In regard to "neutrality," I think more than a majority of the time it's not neutral, as with the American courts it is perfectly willing to go along with the laws that keep both billionaires and the homeless from sleeping under bridges or on air vents and especially in places where the middle-class and even the affluent will see them.  As soon as it comes to applying laws that send the poor and destitute to prison, they will always carve out exceptions for the rich and powerful.  The entire judicial system in most places and certainly the United States demonstrates that cultivated and claimed "neutrality" that claims to not take the condition of People as being at all determinative ALMOST ALWAYS IS WEIGHTED IN FAVOR OF THOSE WITH WEALTH AND POWER.  Allowing the wealthy to pay lawyers to get them off,  as Trump always has, makes that "neutrality" of the law a lie, all up and down the criminal code. And the judges and, especially, "justices" are as in on the scheme as anyone.  The same is true in most other institutions, universities not much less than any others.  

Does that mean you’re not that interested in the question of whether billionaires should exist?

Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which we didn’t have billionaires—but the productivity that billionaires have generated [sic] was still there,  and that money was more equitably distributed. But, really, there hasn’t been a system that has had equity in its distribution and the productivity that capitalism has had. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. If one country starts to tax billionaires so that there can’t be any billionaires, those billionaires are going to go to other countries where they can continue to be billionaires.

In short, the billionaire class, the Davos crowd, and especially those who wouldn't bother going through that exercise in cover-up publicity, have nothing to worry about from the "ethics" of Peter Singer.  Which is, I'm sure, to the economic and publicity and academic benefit of Peter Singer.  That immediately becomes friggin' obvious.   Note his next argument and note he doesn't compare C.E.O. compensation to that of the lowest paid workers, THOSE WHO ACTUAL PRODUCE THAT "PRODUCTIVITY."  As you can read in my masthead, I take the benefits of LEVELING BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE far more seriously than this very famous "ethicist."  It will prove impossible to retain anything like a democracy with billionaires ready to rat fuck it, as almost all of them are.  I go a lot farther and say anything but egalitarian democracy is an unstable, illegitimate government.  The United States lost the vestiges of genuine democracy we finally got under the Voting Rights Act, by court fiat last week in a judiciary bought with billionaire money.  

One thing that surprised me, in “The Life You Can Save,” is that you argue in favor of very high salaries for C.E.O.s. You also write that inequality is a problem only insofar as it leads to oppressive relationships—that inequality in itself is not wrong.

I think my point there was simply that it’s rational for corporations that are doing billions of dollars’ worth of business to be prepared to pay tens of millions of dollars to hire somebody who can maintain that level of profitability. That makes perfect sense. So I don’t think we should be surprised by the way they do it now.

If you’re asking me, “Would it be a better system if no C.E.O. would want to earn fifty million dollars?” Yeah, that would be a better ethos. But I see the difficulties in a real transformation, not only in a culture, but perhaps pushing against some aspects of human nature that a culture has emphasized and that people then come to see as natural. It’s not easy to change that.

And that aspect of the culture, in this case, is self-interest?

Yeah, and a belief in market competitiveness, I guess. And an assessment of worth in terms of how much you earn, rather than the social good that you produce. But there are lots of books that have been pointing this out and have said, “This is not good, and we should change.” But it doesn’t seem that writing books about this actually has a very lasting impact. I suppose I’ve come to think that encouraging people—wealthy people—to give fifty per cent of their income, or all the different sliding percentages that I talk about in “The Life You Can Save, ”that’s more likely to do some good.

This reminds me of Marilynne Robinson's brilliant critique of British social thinking as a country manner weekend party in which everyone is related to everyone else and the favored party game, "Philanthropy," has the goal of ending up in exactly the same place that they all started with everyone in the same place and holding the same wealth they had, anyway.  An intrinsic part of that game is to come up with reasons that all virtuous attempts at improving the lives of those without are really disguised vices. Jeremy Bentham is one of those party guests she names.  It is one of the most spot-on intellectual critiques I've ever read and as true of today as it was for the Georgian and Victorian periods. That it came in her "Mother Country"  the one book of hers which underwent overt suppression in Britain and here by the New York Times' predictably unfavorable review death of a few crucial cuts in the U.S. isn't any real shock.  Its one of the most radical books I've ever read from what turns out to be one of the most radical intellectuals alive today.  The Gospel, indeed, is radical.  So is the Mosaic Law's economic justice.  I'm unaware of any of Peter Singer's books which underwent such a suppression or even a critical critique that affected its publication and distribution.  Marilynne Robinson gets asked a lot more about her novels than about her essays that endanger the economic order and make a Biblical and theological critique on the truth of Scripture.  They are subversive of the current holders of power in ways that those in the next list of academics who I'm familiar with can be counted on not to be.

A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your radar.

That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white generally. I’ve got a project now about the issue of global population, with Alex Ezeh, a demographer of Nigerian origin at Drexel University. I worked with Pascal Kasimba when I was at Monash University, who is of African descent, on a project relating to in-vitro fertilization. I have also co-authored things with people of Asian descent, with Yew-Kwang Ng, for instance. But, I have to say, I want to work with people whose ideas are, you know, at a level of discussion that I’m interested in, and that I’m progressing. If you’re thinking of the work of Africans, for example, I don’t know the work of many of them that is really in the same sort of—I’m not quite sure how to put this—participating in the same discussion as the people you’ve just mentioned.

I was going to hold this passage for another post to make a fuller critique of how conventional academic scribbling is largely done within the same confines that almost all previous intellectual and, especially, academic content comes from, white, male voices on behalf of the existing order.  I would compare the situation in academic philosophy with that within even academic theology in which there are entire schools of theology springing from Women, People of Color, People of many different ethnic and, of course, religious identities.  A book I've cited here several times, Quest For The Living God by Elizabeth A Johnson is about many different theologies from Women of diverse identity, People of Color, People of various ethnicities, and from some white men that are deep and critical and important.  That is to the extent to which something so ill funded and promoted can be said to flourish under the secularist, materialist-atheist-scientistic ruling conformity of academia.  As I said, I realized quite a while ago that I found reading theology was intellectually challenging and stimulating in a way that I almost never find modern philosophy to be.  That they deal with real problems instead of ideological word juggling has a lot to do with it.  They don't start from a pose of impersonal ersatz objectivity, as well. James Cone whose theology comes directly from his knowledge of living under white supremacy is infinitely more important as a thinker than Peter Singer who can't say that about his knowing of his family history under Nazi genocide.   "Neutrality" and "objectivity" is no way to find out much of anything about real life, those don't really mean that the one posing that has not actually made a subjective choice from where they are starting.  If more people in real life find James Cone's theology speaks for them, that's because he did speak for them.  Singer speaks for little to no one.  I think People will be reading Cone when most of those others have gone the way of most of the big-name philosophers of the past and appear nowhere but in obscure academic papers and PhD dissertations and MA theses.  When their work doesn't lead to political and legal and military and financial consequences that make them, rightly, infamous.  

Singer on in-vitro fertilization.  I would like to know what utilitarian equations in regard to performing that very difficult, very expensive first-world medicine Peter Singer has come up with, especially in regard to caring for disabled infants and other currently living People.  In a world where there are so many unwanted, uncared for children who could benefit from adoption it strikes me as at least ethically challenging. Not to mention the medical resources that could be used elsewhere by living People.  Remember, the Nazis' reasoning for why they started their mass murder program with the disabled with the motive of shifting resources for their care to soldiers who would be injured in their "Lebensraum" genocidal invasion of Poland.  How does Singer view the ethics of in-vitro fertilization where the resources are spent on those who don't yet exist?    Maybe I'll look for that but I think someone who looks at it from a different framing would probably come up with a better view of it.  They might come up with a conclusion that arrives in a place they didn't start out from instead of one which I suspect by design informed is by "public intellectuals" self-interest.

*  I would note that there are certain parables which have been read to support capitalism but when I read them as just a using the common experience of those People he was talking to.  The sharp master who give his servants money to invest in his absence isn't, in the end, about God anymore than it's about the proto-capitalist.  Nor than that the judge who is nagged into giving the importunate widow is a picture of the God of Jesus and Moses and the Prophets.  

There's a reason that the founder of utilitarianism who is now a meat-poppet, Jeremy Bentham, rejected the morality of Jesus.  It was the typical British reason, that the Gospel is in the economic disinterest of the aristocrats, the wealthy, the monarchy and the so-called nobility and the power holders of Britian, including those who ran the universities. Just as it was a problem for the financial interests of the Romans who put him to death and the Temple elite who conspired in that. The materialist-atheist-scientistic rejection of Christianity is intimately tied up with British and other class systems for which the Gospel of Jesus is financially costly and making it academically and legally and sociably unfashionable is very desirable from that point of view.  One way to get a leg up in all class ridden societies is to kick down and not up.  That Marx's system which had its own motives in ideological materialism and atheism and scientism, is a pathetically inadequate replacement for the morality of the Jewish tradition and Christianity that takes Jesus seriously, it's little wonder that sharing the secondary motive of the non-Marxist rejection of Christianity, that shared motive would be fatal to implementing something like egalitarian economics or real rule by the People, democracy.  What Marxism shares with capitalism is, as well, the reason that the United States was doomed as a democracy by those "enlightenment" founders who wrote the Constitution and exercised such control from the start.  Especially those who never had to face the voters, the Courts and the Supreme Court who have, from the start, been invested in the same economic scheme.  That is such a ubiquitous scheme that it accounts for much of the most loudly media magnified "Christianity" that rejects the Gospel, if anything, even more soundly than the materialists do.   Mike Johnson, Marjorie T. Greene, the media hallelujah peddlers, "traditional Catholics," . . .

I don't see Peter Singer's philosophy as being even a baby step out of line with that scheme.  

For those who wonder about what I called Bentham, maybe one of the reasons Singer, as an Aussie, was attracted to him was he left provisions in his will to have his hide tanned when he died, as it were.  Lenin at least wanted his corpse buried instead of being turned into a materialist-atheist-scientistic side show spectacle.   I can't say that it inclined me to be less skeptical of his philosophy when I became aware of it.
 
** I may write about a paper I read from, of all People, a conservative Catholic, which shows that even those most arch-conservatives among recent popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI argued out of a far more radical alternative to any philosophical position that holds people as means to an end, something else intrinsic to utilitarianism whether it admits that or not.  And, as I have noted, I didn't like either of those two Popes and have been, if anything, more consistently critical of them than I have ever been to Peter Singer.  I suspect I have little to nothing much in common with the writer of the article, perhaps Singer and I overlap more.  I'll have to look farther into the sources of those quotes to see how consistent their arguments are, though, like Singer, they both were more accommodating to the practice of right wing governments and billionaires and their AstroTurf operation, "traditional Catholics" than are compatible with their personal integrity on those points.  Even conventional Catholic social teaching is radical in comparison to most secular social-thought on most points.  I think Francis has been far more consistent in applying Catholic social teaching as if it really matters.