Another Deeply Terrible Article About Singer

How Does Anyone Write an Article This Bad?

Mccarthy wrote an article about Singer and McMahan. This article was less dishonest than the Robinson one. However, it was still very bad. Mccarthy starts the article saying

My purpose in this article is not to examine the evidential case set forth by McMahan and Singer. Instead, I draw your attention to this argument they make:

If we assume that [the alleged victim, D.J.] is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. . . . In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed he may lack the concept of consent altogether.

This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him . . . it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.

In order to see how people come to make such statements, it is worth taking a look at some of the philosophical assumptions guiding both McMahan and Singer.

I covered this in my last article. Singer and McMahan’s statements are being misunderstood. Their point is that if we have reason to think that having sex generally makes people better off, even if people can’t understand in vivid detail the total impacts of having sex, we shouldn’t bar them from ever consenting to sex. However, Mccarthies sexual puritanism leads him to conclude that there is something deeply wrong here—even if we assume Singer et al are right about the facts of the case.

Singer’s Hedonistic Utilitarianism

Peter Singer is, by his own account, a hedonistic utilitarian (he has jettisoned his former embrace of a preference-based account of human well-being). He follows his hero Jeremy Bentham, telling readers that his philosophy “eliminates the direct significance of the distinction between persons—defined as self-conscious beings who are aware of their existence over time—and sentient beings who are not” before adding that he essentially rejects “Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures.”

Singer’s philosophy of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering is so beset with serious problems it is something of a wonder that he still sticks to it. His account of value reduces all notions of “good,” “bad,” “should,” and “should not” to mere measurements of pleasure or pain. But if that’s the case, then how does it make sense to talk of a duty to maximize pleasure that isn’t itself pleasurable? Such an ethic leaves no room for consideration of human flourishing consisting of more than “felt satisfaction” of some kind, to say nothing of intentions and side effects, doing and allowing, character and virtue, and so on. Nor does it have an answer to the fact that pleasure, unlike fundamental goods such as knowledge, life, and justice, can be taken in evil acts (including raping someone incapable of consent) and thus can become evil in itself.

This is a misunderstanding so egregious one would think it would be rooted out in any philosophy 101 seminar. Utilitarianism says that the things that are good and that one should bring about are pleasure and the things that are bad and shouldn’t be brought about are suffering. This explains the duty to maximize pleasure.

I’ve previously argued that flourishing consists only in felt satisfaction. Intentions and side effects are relevant instrumentally but not intrinsically—side effects obviously affect utility and intentions serve to indicate likely future action. Intentions don’t matter , nor do virtues . Pleasure taken in evil acts is still good intrinsically, though it may be instrumentally bad, making it all things considered bad.

Such a system has no place for negative moral absolutes of any kind, nor for the relevance of a human nature that is valuable in itself and grounds moral norms and basic human rights. The whole system seems to rely on the idea of an “objectively good state of affairs,” but it is difficult to make sense of that without reference to some agent, an agent who “should” desire such a state—because it is a state that is virtuous to desire. “Virtue” is thus no less basic than “good,” and particular goods will be virtuous for a particular agent to desire in a special way in some particular role. Singer ignores the role of virtue in understanding what an objectively good state of affairs might mean.

In addition, Singer infamously values the lives of many animals above human infants and the mentally disabled. He endorses infanticide as well as non-voluntary and even involuntary euthanasia. Humanity and human nature and the goods to which it is inherently oriented possess no special value in the eyes of the pleasure-calculating impartial observer who surveys all. To assert that human nature, or any rational nature, has special value is to be guilty of “speciesism.” Despite this, Singer is a professor at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. This position once prompted Bernard Williams to wonder how he feels about such a human-centric title, musing “I should have thought it would have sounded to him rather like a Center for Aryan Values.”

Utilitarianism does have a place for negative moral absolutes. One should never do things that decrease utility. An objectively good state of affairs is one that would be desired by people who were rational and impartial—virtues aren’t needed. The claim about Singer valuing the lives of animals over infants and mentally disabled people is not something that he’s said—he’s said that it’s hard to have a firm distinction in value between them insofar as there are many humans who are mentally comparable to non human animals. Singer does not generally endorse infanticide—he thinks it should be legal in rare cases. Mccarthy has no defense against the charge of specesism—he just mocks it.

Sexual Ethics

Having thus downgraded the human species, its more vulnerable members and pretty much everything about them of value, Singer tells us, in relation to sex,

ethics is not a set of prohibitions particularly concerned with sex . . . sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said about decisions about driving a car.

Showing the same “color-blindness” to questions of sexual ethics, Singer many years later endorsed bestiality as potentially a good moral option, which should cease to be “an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.” It is not clear what Singer now means by status and dignity as they relate to human beings, but I think his position regarding the Stubblefield case gives us some idea.

Jeff McMahan, a highly sophisticated philosopher, rejects Singer’s crude utilitarianism and his account of human “replaceability,” and endorses the importance of the principle of double effect as well as much of traditional just war theory. As far as I know, he has not written on sexual ethics as such. He does, however, endorse positions similar to Singer’s on infanticide and on euthanasia.

I’m not sure how Singer is downgrading the human species—an impresive feat for a single op ed. The bestiality point ignores the caveat that Singer thinks it’s fine only if it benefits the animal—I’m not sure what the objection would be to this. Putting color-blindness in scare quotes is not an argument.

When it comes to sexual matters, it is important to remember that non-consensual sex is not merely consensual sex minus consent. As Susan Brison has pointed out, sex should not be seen as a simple and invariant factor in both rape and consensual sex, any more than we think of theft as coerced gift-giving. If that is correct, then it certainly does not follow that someone who is raped or assaulted (“non-consensual sex”) is any less wronged for the fact that they are unable to appreciate the value and meaning of consensual sex.

Yet, for McMahan and Singer, on the assumption that D.J. was incapable of consent to a sexual act in the sense of being able to understand its normal significance, “it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.”

McMahan and Singer seem unable or unwilling to conceive that pleasure can be taken in something either morally wrong or otherwise inappropriate. If someone—a small child, for example—is incapable of understanding the significance of sex but is pleasurably affected by sexual acts performed upon him or her, then these two philosophers would presumably have difficulty in seeing any way in which the child would be wronged or harmed. On such a view, pedophilia might be permitted. Indeed, for McMahan and Singer, babies and perhaps toddlers (not to mention the seriously intellectually disabled) do not even count as “persons” and can, in certain circumstances, be killed. Why not also say that they can be sexually abused, especially as they might gain some pleasure from such treatment? What, it might be asked, would be the “nature of the wrong” in such cases, especially where there was little resistance?

Of course, McMahan and Singer may point out that they don’t deny that D.J. might have been harmed even if he was incapable of consent. But to understand such harm they would need to understand something about the value and meaning of sex. One is unlikely to be sensitive to that value if one thinks that very young human beings or the intellectually disabled can be classified as non-persons. Human beings, as members of the rational human species who flourish in ways no other animal can flourish, possess a special and intrinsic value. One cannot fully understand the dignity of human beings without attending to the importance of our sexual nature and capacities, which have a significance in human life quite unlike the significance of sex for animals. And the more you minimize the value of humanity itself, the less you will be capable of understanding our fundamental rights, the meaning of our bodies, and the gift of sexuality.

Focus on the “pleasurable” obscures the fact that harm comes in many forms, especially in the complex, rich, and problematic area of sexual behavior. Perhaps it is time that the dignity of the vulnerable received more attention from philosophers generally. As a start, it might be good if Singer and McMahan developed a notion of harm rich enough to include the harm their own article has done to the intellectually disabled.

The point about non consensual sex is not in dispute. Non consensual sex obviously causes lots of harm, which is why all sane utilitarians are against it. No one denies that pleasure can be taken in bad things—however, if all parties are made better off by an action to which people consent, even if they don’t understand the full significance of it, they shouldn’t be prohibited from consenting, unless one would rather severely disabled people die virgins. If ones life is not made worse they are not harmed. Obviously there can be harm to foresee types of harm—that is once again not in dispute. Having sex with small children causes them harm and is thus not supported by utilitarianism. Singer’s view about toddlers is rooted in utilitarian calculus—so raping them would be prohibited given that raping toddlers causes lots of harm. When Singer talks about non-persons, he is not using that phrase in the conventional sense, and he supports respecting the interests of all sentient beings. The claim that Singer’s article harmed the mentally disabled is wholly unsubstantiated.

If anything, it’s the bizarre sexual puritanism that would support barring mentally disabled people from consenting to sex—forcing them to die having never had sex—that harms the mentally disabled. A somber consideration of there interests is far more productive than moralistic fearmongering, while one misrepresents their opponents as being in favor of sexual assault.