Nathan Robinson Cannot be Trusted

Notorious Unprincipled Crackpot Nathan Robinson's Libelous Lies About Singer

One can never have particularly high hopes for articles that argue against Peter Singer. Usually they find out of context quotes from decades ago, strawman him egregiously, and then table pound rather than arguing against any view that he holds. Yet Nathan Robinson’s article is perhaps the most egregious instance of this intellectually bankrupt trend. Robinson’s article is shockingly bad. I’ve had no fewer than four people cite this article to me when arguing against Singer, before walking back the absurd allegations after I pressed them on it. This is because Robinson’s article is so indefensible that even Singer derangement syndrome mixed with confirmation bias is insufficient to salvage it even in the eyes of Singer’s most staunch opposition.

This article should be enough to mark Robinson as the type of person who cannot be believed. Robinson claiming X should not increase anyone’s credence in X. This is because Robinson has no regard for the truth—he would rather get views from sensationalist headlines than avoid claiming that serious, well-respected philosophers are pro rape of disabled people. He embodies the worst stereotypes about journalists—willing to tolerate blatant lies for a catchy headline.

The title of the article is “Now Peter Singer Argues That It Might Be Okay To Rape Disabled People.” This allegation is wholly unsubstantiated in the entire article.

Robinson starts by poisoning the well, saying

Advocates for people with disabilities do not care for utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. This is because Singer has publicly justified killing disabled newborn infants because of their disabilities. In his book Practical Ethics, Singer weighed the moral justifications for taking the lives of disabled babies. He concluded that in severe cases, such as for children with spina bifida, it might well be morally wrong not to take a baby’s life. For less serious conditions, such as hemophilia, Singer concluded that the decision as to whether or not to kill the infant should depend on whether it would make the parents happy, and whether they intended to “replace” the child with another, non-disabled one:

“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.”

One might expect Robinson to argue against this view. After all, Robinson is pro choice, so he thinks that there is a point at which killing a fetus is permissible. Singer, being a utilitarian, thinks that in rare cases that point should be when they are outside of the womb, if that would bring about the best outcomes. Other than asserting that this makes disabled people not like Singer (a wholly unsubstantiated allegation) Robinson has quite literally no argument. Robinson would presumably think that if a child will have a horrific disease like spina bifida it would be good to get an abortion and have another child with a better life. Singer would agree, he just thinks that the line for when killing them is permissible is later. Robinson has no counter-argument—he just wants to poison the well.

For what it’s worth, I haven’t thought much about the issue and don’t have a strong view.

Robinson continues.

Singer’s early statements on euthanizing the disabled led to protests of his talks during the 1990s, and caused controversy when he was appointed Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. In the years since, Singer has done little to repair his reputation among advocates for the disabled, having repeatedly given interviews containing controversial statements about the moral justifications for infanticide. And he has only dug a deeper hole by stating that he wouldn’t be willing to raise a child with Down’s Syndrome because it wouldn’t make him happy (“For me, the knowledge that my [hypothetical Down Syndrome] child would not be likely to develop into a person whom I could treat as an equal… would greatly reduce my joy in raising my child and watching him or her develop), as well as by posing queries like the following:

“Most people think that the life of a dog or a pig is of less value than the life of a normal human being. On what basis, then, could they hold that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being with intellectual capacities inferior to those of a dog or a pig is of equal value to the life of a normal human being?”

This kind of stuff (repeated again and again) has led some disabled people to get the not unreasonable impression that Peter Singer, perhaps the world’s most prominent ethicist, would prefer it if they died. (And unfortunately, Singer’s hideous remarks have undermined the creditable efforts he has made to get people to care more about the suffering of children around the world. For a utilitarian, Singer does not seem to think much about the utility of sabotaging his credibility as an ethicist in order to make callous and inflammatory comments about disabled people.)

The euthenizing the disabled point is a lie. Singer is in favor of legalizing infanticide for severely disabled infants who will live bad lives—and has expressed some support for infanticide being allowed for disabled people who will live worse lives than average, yet not abjectly terrible lives. The point about Singer expressing that he wouldn’t want to have a disabled child is a fact about Singer’s desires. To the extent that one thinks that infanticide is not a serious moral wrong because it won’t have bad consequences, then, much like Robinson presumably supports allowing people to abort down syndrome fetuses, it’s reasonable to hold a similar view about infanticide. Indeed, the position on abortion being permissible for people with down syndrome is supported by the ACLU and is the choice of most parents who discover their baby will have Down syndrome.

The point about comparing severely mentally disabled people to non human animals also misses the mark. Singer argues that any criteria we use to say that animals don’t matter (e.g. they aren’t very intelligent) could also apply to some humans. To the extent that one thinks that saving the lives of people with better lives is more important (which they obviously should) then people who will be unlikely to have good lives possess lives of less moral significance. This is why it would be more important to save my life now than when I’m 50. When I’m 50 I’ll have fewr decades of good life in front of me. Similarly, this explains why it would be more important to save my life as things stand currently than it would be if I was discovered to have some horrific illness that would make my life considerably worse. Better lives are morally more important.

Rather than address the argument raised by Singer, Robinson prefers to gawk at the comparison. I wonder, how does Robinson get out of the argument from marginal cases? What about animals makes it okay to torture them, but not okay to do the same for any human. The common rhetoric about why animals don’t matter very much is explicitly ableist and would exclude taking into accounts the interests of many severely intellectually disabled people.

Robinson then requests that Singer stops saying controversial things because he is embarrassing utilitarians. Well, Singer has influenced lots of people, in part because he’s controversial. It also seems like tarring someone as being pro rape of disabled people would hurt the very important causes which Singer promotes. For someone who is pro ending poverty it doesn’t seem like Robinson is able to control is lying and polemicist impulses—even if it would result in more poverty.

Then Robinson goes on his most eggregious lying spree yet. It truly boggles the mind.

Instead, he decided to give another defense of Stubblefield, and in doing so offer one of his most outrageous arguments yet: it might actually not be bad to rape cognitively impaired people. As Singer and McMahan write:

If we assume that he 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. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. 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; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist.

Consider carefully what is being said here. Here, Singer and McMahan are assuming D.J. is severely impaired. But, they say, that means he is too intellectually inhibited to understand the notion of consent. And because he doesn’t understand consent, he can’t withhold it. And because he didn’t fight back, it’s reasonable to assume he was having a good time, making it unclear why it would be harmful to perform a non-consensual sex act on him.

Again, let’s be clear on what they are saying: if someone is intellectually disabled enough, then it might be okay to rape them, so long as they don’t resist, since a lack of physical struggle justifies an assumption that someone is enjoying being raped. (Singer is also offering a variation on his own prior arguments in favor of bestiality, which work because Singer believes disabled people and animals are the same for purposes of ethical analysis.) Note that his reasoning would also justify sexually molesting infants, who are likewise incapable of understanding the notion of consent.

The New York Times therefore just published a philosophical defense of raping disabled people, and Peter Singer has—somehow—reached a new low on disability issues. (Actually, to be precise, an argument that it’s not clear what the harm is in raping disabled people, along with the implication that non-consensual sex acts against physically and mentally incapacitated people aren’t actually rape anyway if the victims do not know what consent is.)

Notice, this is not what Singer and McMahan say at all. Their point is that if DJ consented, even if he did not understand in total detail the full implications of the act, then it would not be objectionable. After all, 18 year olds are allowed to have sex, even though they often may not appreciate the full extent of the act. If DJ was given a medical surgery, perhaps he wouldn’t appreciate the full extent of the surgery. However, this should not lead us to conclude that it should be illegal to give surgeries to mentally disabled people. Rather, whether we think that inability to understand the full ramifications of an act is disqualifying from whether or not people should be able to partake in the act depends on whether the act will tend to be harmful. Babies don’t consent to being born, getting surgeries, and they often don’t consent to having their diapers changed. However, we shouldn’t ban birth, surgeries, or diapers. We certainly shouldn’t ban 5 year olds from getting willing chemo-therapy because they can’t understand the full ramifications of it!!

Singer agrees that if a person does not want to have sex, they should not be forced to have sex. Singer merely argues that if a person wants to have sex, even if they don’t have a complete understanding of the full ramifications of the act, we shouldn’t ban them from every having sex. A life in which people with IQ’s below 60 never have sex is not merciful to them. It’s merely a perverse subordination of the interests of severely mentally disabled people to our desire to be absolved of potential blame. We wouldn’t, after all, want to be accused of being in favor of raping disabled people.

If a 30 year old with an IQ of 50 says “I would like to have sex,” to a person with an IQ of 100, does Robinson think that it should be illegal for the mentally competent person to accept their request? If so, this is not caused by compassion to disabled people. This is just a sick attempt to treat their situation as a battering ram which Robinson can use to attack his political opponents. The point about struggling to resist was just a piece of evidence that DJ did in fact consent, given that struggling would be more probable if he did not consent. It was not to justify rape.

Added 3/20: (Some extremely badly motivated people have been saying that I am justifying rape here. This is obviously false. Let me be clear. The claim was not that failing to struggle is sufficient to consent. The claim was that when Singer brings up failing to struggle he did so because it was evidence of consent. A is evidence for B if the presence of A makes B more likely. Not struggling is evidence for consent because it’s more likely if there was consent. It is certainly not a sufficient condition for consent. Additionally, if there was not consent then what was done was bad and should be illegal given that consent is obviously a prerequisite to sex being moral!!

Let’s give an example. Suppose we’re deciding whether or not a person rigged a casino. Them getting lucky is evidence that they rigged the die. However, not everyone who gets lucky is rigging things. Thus, while getting very lucky is certainly not sufficient to prove cheating, it is some evidence for cheating.

In this case, we’re using evidence in a bayesian sense. In a bayesian sense, a is evidence for b if the probability of a being the case is higher if b is the case then if b is not the case. So we’re not talking about what proves whether they consented or not. Singer was analyzing a court case and was pointing out one detail that served as some evidence for the claim that there was consent. This does not single handedly mean there was consent but, after finding out about that fact, it does make there having been consent more likely).

When animals like squirrels have sex, presumably they do not understand the full implication. However, we shouldn’t prohibit squirrel sex. This is because squirrels having sex does not make them worse off.

The point about bestiality is absurd. Singer has said that some types of it are fine if they pleasure the animal. If they don’t then they are bad. Singer is a big advocate for animal interests.

The infants point is also a total lie. Singer thinks that sexual acts are bad if they do not increase the total utility in the world. Raping infants causes lots of harm to those infants and so should not be allowed.

Robinson seems to confuse Singer being okay with things in rare cases in which they don’t cause harm with being okay with them across the board.

Then Robinson provides braindead critiques of utilitarianism.

Singer’s casual rationalization of sexual abuse actually offers a useful illustration of why nobody should subscribe to utilitarian philosophy to begin with. Utilitarians are meticulous and Spock-like in their deductions from premises, but their impeccable logic inevitably leads toward utterly horrifying or bizarre conclusions that totally conflict with people’s most basic shared moral values. Utilitarian reasoning can lead you to believe that there’s no such thing as “good” and “bad,” only “better” and “worse” (which means that genocide isn’t inherently bad, and in fact could be fine if it’s the least-worst available option in a certain set of circumstances). It can lead you to believe that it’s less morally justifiable for a couple to remain childless than it it is to murder an elderly homeless person in their sleep (because failing to create a potential happy long life is worse than taking someone’s unhappy short remaining life). It can, as Freddie deBoer has pointed out, lead you to believe that in the Jim Crow South, you should frame an innocent black man for a crime, knowing he will be lynched, if doing so would calm the resentments of the white community and thereby avoid having them perpetrate a wave of far more brutal violence. It can also lead you to be an apologist for sweatshops and factory collapses. Due to the nature of their premises, utilitarians constantly end up endorsing the moral necessity of an endless number of inhumane acts. It’s a terrible philosophy that leads to brutal and perverse conclusions, and at its worst, it turns you into Peter Singer.

Let’s take this one by one.

1 Comparing utilitarians to spock is not an argument—it’s a poor attempt to immitate a high school bully.

2 The horrifying conclusion he cites is the repugnant conclusion, which I’ve addressed here. If Robinson had been able or willing to read his sources he would have found that the source he linked says “However, it has been surprisingly difficult to find a theory that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other equally counterintuitive conclusions. Thus, the question as to how the Repugnant Conclusion should be dealt with and, more generally, what it shows about the nature of ethics has turned the conclusion into one of the cardinal challenges of modern ethics.”

Thus, the RC is not just a challenge for utilitarians. It is a challenge for all ethical theories that intend to have anything to say about population ethics. Robinson just ignores this so he can call utilitarians weird and bad. I’d like to hear Robinson’s conclusion to the RC. I would bet thousands of dollars he could not come up with a good solution. This is because Robinson is a low quality journalist whose ineptitude is revealed when he enters the domain of philosophy. The argument about framing an innocent person is one I’ve already addressed. Besides calling it weird, Robinson once again has no argument.

3 The point about killing elderly people is absurd. The utility gain of having a child is far more ambiguous than the clear utility loss of killing elderly people. Once again, Robinson has no argument.

4 The point about sweatshops and factory collapses is similarly ludicrous and shows that Robinson’s approach to morality is more about signaling virtue than actually helping people. The posts he links argue that factory collapses are a necessary cost of having building codes that don’t crush business in poor countries, leading to mass death and poverty. The sweatshops post argues that purchasing from sweatshops prevents people from going to worse alternatives including unemployment. If these were true empirical claims, then it would be absurd to think utilitarianism delivers the wrong verdict about these cases. Robinson to deny this would have to hold that making people’s lives worse is a price worth paying—so long as the blood on our hands comes from inaction rather than action.

5 The point about good or bad and better and worse is absurd. An action is bad if it makes the world worse. It is more bad if it makes the world more worse. Robinson has no objection here—he just thinks the phrasing sounds strange. This is also just an objection to scalar utilitarianism—not all utilitarianism.

6 The point about genocide is also wrong. Genocide is bad because it decreases utility. If we stipulate strange counterfactual cases, such as ones where the world would end unless one did a genocide, it would not longer be bad. Robinson confuses the strength of the conviction that X is the case with the view that X is intrinsically the case, regardless of the details of X.

Robinson is either a fool or dishonest—and probably both. He flagrantly lies about Singer, butchers philosophy, and then parots his misunderstanding for the whole world to see. Robinson is one of the few people who has intuitions for which I adopt phenomenal abolitionism.

Phenomenal conservatism says that if X seems true this gives us prima facie justification for believing X is true. However, my modified principle when applied to Robinson is that if X seems true to Robinson this gives us prima facie justification for believing X is false.