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Peter Singer has a pretty simple mission: minimize the suffering of all living creatures. But a seemingly straightforward objective can lead to some surprisingly thorny questions. As a philosopher and professor, he’s spent decades pondering the ethical dilemmas that come with living in the modern world. His books have ignited movements — from animal rights to wealth equality — but his deeply personal work, confronting family, legacy, and inherited pain, also resonates. I’ve admired Peter’s work for years (it’s a huge part of why I stopped eating meat in college) and I was honored to sit down with such a brilliant thinker.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Speaker 1, Peter Singer, Speaker 2, David Duchovny

David Duchovny  00:28

I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher. Right up until he retired last year, he’d been working as a professor for decades, including a long tenure at Princeton University, my alma mater, so I feel a special connection to him. Peter’s philosophy focuses on ethics and what’s called the utilitarian perspective. Another big area of Peter’s work is the suffering of animals, very important to me as well. His book animal liberation is a cornerstone of modern thinking about animal abuse and vegetarianism, as it was for me, Peter has a pretty big reach for a modern philosopher, a profession that can feel frozen in time, you know, like BC, time reserved for people like Socrates and Peter definitely shows that he has some Socratic influences. But with a modern twist, I was very excited to talk to him about many of the issues of today’s world. So without further, ado, professor and philosopher Peter Singer.

 

David Duchovny  02:07

Hello Peter,

 

Peter Singer  02:08

Hello David. Nice to meet you.

 

Speaker 1  02:10

Pleasure to see you and to meet you. I want to thank you for coming on this, you know, this type of podcast, or whatever, whatever it is I think I’m doing, I know it’s always, it must be a difficult proposition to take, you know, difficult concepts or ideas that are normally ones that you want to kind of speak about for hours on end, and to kind of distill it into sound bites and things like that. And I want to try to avoid that, but it’s, it’s kind of unavoidable as well, and something like this. So I want to apologize up front.

 

Peter Singer  02:47

No apologies needed.

 

David Duchovny  02:48

For asking for Cliff Notes, versions of certain things. But before we get into specifics, you know, like, like animal liberation, I guess I wanted to kind of start by asking you about your your process as a philosopher, as a thinker, who your your mentors were past, you know, past and present as others teachers, or obviously in the history of philosophy, but how you found yourself getting into, you know this, I guess, this label of utilitarianism, or whatever we want to call it, at this point, this is where we’re just talking about concepts. But how you, how you see yourself in that tradition, and what, maybe, what you might think you might have added to that tradition.

 

Peter Singer  03:37

All right, okay, well, I got into it in a somewhat curious way, but it’s, in a way, it’s characteristic of philosophy. That is the very first course in ethics that I took as an undergraduate of the University of Melbourne was taught by a man called HJ McCloskey, John McCloskey, who was opposed to utilitarianism. He he was an intuitionist. He thought that we have intuitions, that there are certain things that are intrinsically right, and they include things like honesty, gratitude, certainly benevolence as well and not harming people, non maleficence. But he thought that it was a mistake to try to think that you could just have one principle, like the idea of maximizing well being or happiness and minimizing pain and suffering, because he thought that left out a lot of other things. And he produced an example which he became quite well known for, which was supposed to refute utilitarianism. You have to remember that this is in the early 60s, and so his example was that you imagined you’re a sheriff in a racist southern small town and a white woman had been raped, and said that the rapist was a black man and a Lynch mob had turned out and rounded up six black men and were about to lynch them from from a tree. And you were the sheriff, but you know this, this mob had had guns. You couldn’t actually physically stop them doing what they were doing. The only way you could make any difference would be if you said you had evidence that one of those six men was actually the rapist, and then you could persuade them to lynch that guy, and the other five, they were let free. So McCloskey said the utilitarian would say the sheriff should frame this black man. But from mccloskey’s view, that was just obviously wrong. How could an officer of the law frame a person when they say they’re guilty, when they have no evidence, and cause this innocent man to die? And I, you know, even as an undergraduate, I was doubtful about that. I thought, Look, if there’s really nothing else you can do, it’s surely better that only one person should die rather than six people should die. You know, assuming that they’re probably they’re all innocent. So I wrote an essay, sort of criticizing mccloskey’s idea that this refuted utilitarianism. And he, you know, was fair minded enough to say this was a good essay, and encouraged me to go on with philosophy. And so I thought, Well, that isn’t a conclusive objection to utilitarianism. What about the other objections? And I looked at them, and I didn’t find any that I thought were really conclusive, really knock down objections. So I was, yeah, I was attracted the idea, and went on with it.

 

David Duchovny  06:34

Well, it’s very interesting that the example that you give of his example is in the same vein as many of the questions that you like to ask. You know, in terms of you give this kind of awful selfies choice to people where you know you’re you have to choose this thing or this other thing. Neither of them are wonderful. Usually, there’s always a great loss involved on one side or the other. I guess it’s Socratic in nature, isn’t? It doesn’t go back to the origins of just this questioning philosophy. Is philosophy being a series of difficult questions?

 

Peter Singer  07:10

I think that’s right, yes, if you look at what Socrates was doing, certainly as as Plato presents him, he asked people difficult questions that he you know, they think they know something. So yes, it’s it is a tradition of questioning people, asking people if they’re justified in being confident in their beliefs, the things that they know. And I think that’s important in ethics, because we also have a lot of beliefs that we don’t really question or take for granted. And philosophy does try to raise those questions, undermine them, perhaps undermine your certainty.

 

David Duchovny  07:46

Well, I think to get back to your your initial story about your teacher, if he was speaking about intuition, that’s another way of saying accepted ethics or feelings, you know, ideas or feelings that we like, or something like that, you know where you’re really questioning our even the idea that our intuition may be an ethical assumption of some kind. Is that fair?

 

Peter Singer  08:11

That’s completely fair. Yes a lot of people somehow think that we have a conscience which is an infallible guide to what is right or wrong. Some people, I suppose even maybe think it’s the voice of God, but clearly it’s formed by our culture, backgrounds, how we were brought up, and probably to some extent, by our evolutionary history, that there are certain things that we evolved to do or not to do that helped us to survive and reproduce in those times, and maybe still do, but maybe maybe don’t, times change. So I think that we have to be prepared to have a critical attitude to those intuitions, whatever their origins are.

 

David Duchovny  08:53

And just just to stay for a moment on the mind that pursues philosophy, or the philosophical mind, or your mind, specifically today. How did you get into the contemplative state of asking that question, of getting to that point where you saw it as a philosophical question, as something that could sustain long years of inquiry, and is it a state that you pursue? Do you see it as a creative state? Because I see it as creative the kinds of questions that you ask as being creative, and not, not just coming from a rational part of your brain, but also being somewhat intuitive, you know, going back to your teacher as well. So I’m wondering if you if, when you when you were younger, or even now, is there kind of a state of mind that you try to attain before you start asking these questions, they just come to you out of the blue.

 

Peter Singer  09:50

So I agree with you that it’s a creative state, but I’m going to disagree use the word contemplative,, and I don’t think that’s the state that I’m in. And I think I got into philosophy because I actually enjoy having a good argument. I was originally planning to be a lawyer. I was planning to do law, but I got into philosophy, and I realized that in philosophy, you can have good arguments and you don’t have to argue for the side that is paying you. The great advantage is you can really try to argue for the side that you think is right, so to me, it’s a kind of, it’s yeah, it’s a state of, if somebody says something, thinking, is that really right? Why should we think that? How do we you know? How do we know that is that? Is that a justifiable, defensible thing to say. And particularly if there is something that is very widely accepted, then there’s something in me that says, I really want to, want to puncture that, you know, there’s a kind of a complacency there and and I want to, you know, that’s kind of like a balloon. I want to pick a pin prick with a pin. So, so that’s the kind of state that I’m in, and that that leads to the creative state in which I’m thinking of reasons why that might be wrong, thinking of how people might respond objections to my views, and how I might reply to those objections. So that’s, that’s the kind of state of mind that I get into when I start thinking about an ethical issue where there’s something that I want to question.

 

David Duchovny  11:29

Do you feel like, do you always kind of take the devil’s advocate, uh, approach to yourself in that case, or to the reductio ad absurdum when you have, when you have the argument? Do you try and take it to an absurd to try to question your own belief or your own supposition to an absurd degree.

 

Peter Singer  11:47

Yes, I think I do. I like to be self critical, and I obviously am aware that people will say, people have always said that about the things that I say about animals. You know the idea of, well, if you say animals have rights, then do we have to stop the lion killing the antelope? You know, does the antelope have a right to life and the lion is violating it? So, you know.

 

David Duchovny  12:11

Well, I think, well, that’s, you know, that’s an absurd kind of cry against you, because you’re not saying that the antelope has a right to life. You’re saying it has a right not to sell. To suffer. I think that’s what your point of view is. It’s not really about right to life. It’s about right not to suffer.

 

Peter Singer  12:29

You’re absolutely correct about that. I am more concerned about that. But of course, somebody could still say, well, the lion is causing the antelope to suffer. It’s not like the lion has a humane way of killing the antelope.

 

David Duchovny  12:40

No but, I mean, that’s that is always a well that that gets into more discussion of vegetarianism versus just or veganism versus meat eating. You know that it’s clear that nature has a different ethic than than you or me or somebody who who is vegetarian, because nature is not vegetarian. It’s not set up that way, so you don’t have recourse to the argument that this is the natural way.

 

Peter Singer  13:05

No, I certainly don’t. But then, when we understand how nature works, that it’s evolved, that things evolve because they reproduce and their offspring survive, there’s no reason to think that nature provides an ethical guide to how we should live.

 

David Duchovny  13:20

Well, that’s very interesting, isn’t it, though, because a lot of people try to, and this is another question I wanted to get into with you that I find fascinating. Is when I was growing up, you know, the the domain of ethics was religion, and that was, that was where one learned ethics, supposedly. And now we are trying, you know, I always wanted to take ethics back, in a way, and say, you know, ethics is the domain of any thinking individual, of any feeling individual, and I see that you are doing that as well. And yet, I can see that you want to speak and I want you to I see a lot of my this will be my misinformed view. So forgive me, but you know, there’s a lot of humility in your ethicism. You know, when you’re saying my suffering or my affluence is not more important than anyone else, it’s a puncture of egotism and the humility that I kind of associate with the Judeo Christian tradition, you know. So it’s very interesting to me that I see a lot of your ethics, much of it, being infused with the very the very same believers who are going to attack you, who are going to attack your ethics.

 

Peter Singer  14:37

Well, there is a concern for if you like those who are worse off, and Jesus has reported in the Gospel, certainly had a concern for the poor and the suffering. And if you could see, what I’m doing is extending that to non human animals who certainly had our hands if they’re being badly treated, are among the poorest and most suffering. And most powerless, they’re really.

 

David Duchovny  15:03

Extended to people as well, not just animals.

 

Peter Singer  15:05

Oh yes, absolutely. I’m concerned about the fact that there are still something like 700 million people living in extreme poverty in the world. And although that’s a lower figure than it has been in the past, and given the extent of affluence in the world, it’s completely unnecessary. We could do something about this, and we ought to be doing something about this, I think.

 

David Duchovny  15:27

Yeah, but to get back to the kind of nexus between humility or egolessness and your see, it’s not your intuition. I feel like you, you, you rationally came to these views. That’s how you view your your maturation as a thinker, right? It wasn’t, a flash of inspiration or intuition. It was more like a step by step rational questioning.

 

Peter Singer  15:56

I think that’s right. Yes, it was an examining of different ethical views. And because I was studying philosophy, I could look at ethical views from Aristotle to Kant to the 19th century utilitarians. And of course, as I said, my original teacher, McCloskey, who took his ethics from a early 20th century English professor called David Ross. So yes, I had a lot of literature to look at and to sort of try to see where I think ethics comes from. And you mentioned a moment ago that you associated with with religion. Obviously, religion has major influences on ethics, and in our culture, it’s, it is the Judeo Christian tradition. But of course, there are other cultures with different ones. And in fact, I, you know, my views on animals, I think rather closer to Buddhist views than to Christian views because.

 

David Duchovny  16:54

How’s that?

 

Peter Singer  16:56

Well, because there’s, in the Judeo Christian tradition, there’s this sharp separation between humans and non human animals, and particularly in a Christian view, because of the idea that we have immortal souls. But in general, it’s also in the Jewish tradition that we are made in the image of God, and other animals are not. So we’re special in that sense. And the Buddhist view is rather different. There isn’t such a sharp separation. Many Buddhist, not all, believe in reincarnation that, you know, we get reincarnated as a non human or may get reincarnated as a non human animal. And the idea of compassion for all sentient beings is a is a basic principle of Buddhism in the way that it’s not in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

 

David Duchovny  17:43

Yeah, I’m sure I’m not an expert in any way, but I want to talk about speciesism for a moment, because I find that to be such a fascinating perception, if that is in the same kind of bad thinking that where racism goes, or misogyny or religious bigotry or nationalism, or any of these isms that separate us, rather than see us as all one.

 

Peter Singer  18:14

Yes, I think there is this analogy, and that’s what the term speciesism is really intended to draw at that a dominant, powerful group develops an ideology that it thinks justifies the use of others, and we, at least, you know, most people and enlightened people see through that. Now, in terms of racism and sexism, we reject those ideas, but when it comes to animals, they are still the predominant view. They are now being challenged and questioned by quite a lot of people, but they still govern the way we treat the vast majority of non human animals. Maybe for dogs and cats, we make exceptions, maybe horses, but for the chickens and pigs and cows and laboratory rats and mice that we produced by the by the millions and billions, that is still the way they thought of

 

David Duchovny  19:10

And I guess the question, the pushback that you’ll get is, this is, this is efficient. This this American farm factory system. This is, I’m playing devil’s advocate. I’m sure it’s not, but this is efficient. It it creates cheap food for people that are hungry. If we don’t do this, they will go hungry. They will not be able to afford it. It will increase human suffering. Therefore, this animal suffering, of which we’re not sure, because they can’t speak to us. I agree with you that they are suffering, but we can’t prove it. Is this the kind of pushback that you get?

 

Peter Singer  19:48

That is one form of pushback that I get, but that in terms of feeding hungry people, it’s completely the opposite. And around the time that I was writing animal liberation in the. 70s, Frances Moore Lappe wrote a book called diet for a small planet, where she made the case that we should be eating more plant foods rather than less animal products. And she made it not on the basis of concern for animal suffering, but entirely on the basis of the waste of food that is involved when we grow grains and soybeans and feed them to animals, and this is now the majority of the world’s soybean crop, which is a very high protein crop, is fed to animals, and a very large proportion of the world’s grain to especially, say US corn and wheat in other countries. So if we really are concerned to feed hungry people. This is a very inefficient way of doing it, and wasteful of land and wasteful of resources, and of course, a contribution to climate change too.

 

David Duchovny  25:06

Kind of go back to the origin of of that kind of thinking that you got into it, I’m thinking it began, or at least in my mind, it begins with that first question you ask about you’ve got a new suit on. You look out your window. How does it go? Exactly? There’s somebody drowning there.

 

Peter Singer  25:29

Yeah, you’re walking past a pond. You walk past a shallow pond, and you see there’s a child drowning in the pond. And you put on your best clothes, because you’re going somewhere important, but there’s nobody else around. The small child somehow has got away from their parents, and if you don’t jump into rush into the pond, there’s no danger. You won’t drown. It’s shallow, but too deep for the child. So if you don’t rush and jump into the pond, the child will drown. And I ask my audiences. I’ve done it with many groups of students, including at Princeton. So what would you think of somebody who said, Oh, it’s not my child. I’m not responsible for that child. I don’t want to ruin my new clothes, so I’ll just pretend I never saw the child and walk on and everybody or, you know, there’s always one contrarian if you have a big enough audience, especially at universities, but you know, 99.9% probably have said, Oh, that would be terrible. You can’t do that. You know, it will be a really awful person to just ignore, let the child drown because you didn’t want to ruin your nice clothes. And then, of course, I say, Well, fine. I’m glad you would jump into the pond and save the child, even, even though you would have to spend some money on new clothes. But, but how about children and adults who are dying in low income countries in the world who you could help. You could provide bed nets so that they don’t die of malaria. You could provide safe drinking water so they don’t die from diarrhea. And I think we are in that situation. And I think if we’re not doing something, of course, again, there’s, there’s, you’ve mentioned that reductio ad absurdum, before you can ask, where is the limit? But certainly, I’d say if we’re not doing something, quite significant, if we’re not poor ourselves, if we have more than we need ourselves, when we can buy those nice clothes, you I think really ought to be doing something to find the best organizations, helping people and supporting them so they can extend their work to reach more people.

 

Speaker 1  27:37

There’s something about the proximity, though, that seems to be a barrier for humans. You know, there’s something about and it could be the way, you know, we evolved. We didn’t evolve. Think, as you said earlier, we didn’t evolve thinking of people halfway around the world, or a very special person would have had to exactly, well, how do we bridge that gap? Then, how do we how do we make you feel? How do we get someone, how do we reason someone to feeling as much for somebody that they have to imagine as for somebody who’s right in front of their eyes?

 

Peter Singer  28:13

Yeah. I mean, there’s some interesting research that people are doing on that now as to, as to, what does work giving people identifiable individuals who can who they can help. And of course, because we have the internet, we can actually right people who we’re helping, or very, very similar situations. So I think, I think that can make a difference.

 

David Duchovny  28:37

I think I’ve been trying to think about positive effects of the internet. And finally.

 

Peter Singer  28:43

There are definitely some, yes, that’s right, and that’s one of them. And also the Internet has helped in terms of building communities of people who think like that. So this idea that I’ve been talking about, that we all ought to be helping people in extreme poverty, people that people had said to me when I started, you just go, Well, you know, I was interested to read your article, because I think like that, but I’ve never met anybody else who thinks like that. And I thought it was just me. There was something wrong with me that I thought like that. But I’m glad to know that, that you think like that, and others do, and you can be in contact with a lot of other people, and you can see what they’re doing, so you get this sort of support, the sense that I’m not an odd one at that there are other people. And I think building a community of people who think ethically in ways similar to us is really an important factor in reinforcing us and continuing in that path we’ve taken.

 

David Duchovny  29:41

Yes, but I think that, because I come back to I’m probably a less rational person than you, I’m still kind of gobsmacked by the fact that you wrote that book about your your grandfather, David Oppenheim, you know, because I to you. Who? I mean, nobody. Most people don’t know this, but your your grandfather was actually there at the birth of psychoanalysis. I mean, it’s a ridiculous story. He’s there with Freud. He writes a paper with Freud. Yeah, and I think not that you’re an anti Freudian, but that is not where your philosophical mind seems to have gone in your life, and it’s so interesting for me to think of you writing that book, learning those things about your grandfather. But also I wonder, I wonder about that, you know, in terms of when I think of, okay, I’ve just asked, what is it about proximity that seems to affect us psychologically? Or what is it about egotism that seems to have we? You know? What is this about? Like this fear of scarcity that we have so even if we have enough for more than enough, there’s a certain almost innate or psychological fear of there not being enough, or famine time, or whatever. So there are, to me, there are psychological issues that can possibly make cracks in your in your rational stepping forward and I wonder. I also had a mother who was suffered from dementia, and I spent a lot of money that might have gone as, as you say, in as when you’ve spoken about caring for your mother that you you know you’re what I got out of that discussion was that you’re recognizing how difficult this can be. You may be rationally able to convince somebody to give away this amount of money to somebody that they don’t know, but I found that to be very human that you were acknowledging. Sometimes it’s tough, you know, because you do, you do want to use your money for personal reasons. Sometimes you do want to use your money to help your mother, as opposed to helping 100 kids across the world. You know, it’s a tough one when you put it like that. But there’s something in human nature that you acknowledge the difficulty of this ethical reasoning can run into sometimes.

 

Peter Singer  32:05

Yes, I think that’s right, and I think we shouldn’t be too strict about these lines. I think we should be all trying to do something, as I said, something significant, to help others who are suffering. But you know, we don’t have to castigate ourselves for not being 100% all down the line, we have to recognize that we are human and that we will have our own biases, and we need to be somewhat tolerant about those things, not not completely tolerant about anything, but somewhat tolerant about some of those deeper concerns that we have.

 

Speaker 1  32:38

Yeah, and another question I wanted to ask, you know, not just about the experience of writing that book, which must have been profound to you, the book about my grandfather, yeah, pushing time away. Yeah, pushing time away. You know, the the the podcast is, is called fail better. And, you know, failure and suffering are kind of, kind of brothers or cousins or something. And I’m wondering just what it is to be human and to suffer mentally, to suffer existentially, philosophically, to suffer romantically, and that to suffer in these states often makes us, quote, unquote, better people that we often say, no pain, no gain, something like that, that suffering is actually an important process that we have to undergo as humans. And I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on that?

 

Peter Singer  33:33

Yes, so I’ve been fortunate in not having had enormous serious suffering. But my parents did. My parents were Jewish people living in Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis took over and they managed to get out and leave and come to Australia, but their parents did not, and my grandparents were all sent to camps, and only one of them survived. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, is the only grandparent I ever knew. The others were murdered by the Nazis, and she managed to survive and to come out to Australia after the war. So I knew her when I was small. But my, you know, there was a lot of suffering my parents, my my parents dealt with it rather differently. My mother was very optimistic person. Maybe I have a bit from her, but my father really grieved at the fact that he had not been able to save his parents. He tried to try to get them, actually got them a visa to come to Australia, but they then couldn’t get out in time, for various reasons that I go into in that book pushing time away, which is about my grandparents. And so he was sad about about that he used to, you know, he had photos of his parents and other relatives in the family all murdered by the Nazis. And he would, sometimes, on Sunday morning, I would get up and I would find him for looking at those photos with tears in his eyes. So there was a lot of suffering there, and maybe that had some effect on me and trying to work for reducing suffering everywhere that I see it. I don’t know. It’s hard to trace these.

 

David Duchovny  35:14

Yes, well, that’s what I appreciate about your your your response to not only my questions about psychology or psychoanalysis, but what I when I’ve read your responses to such inquiries into your method or whatever is like, yes, these are interesting ideas to talk about, but we can’t know. Like, we can’t know whether Freud is right about repressed sexual desire or Adler is right because of inferior inferiority complexes. These are interesting things to talk about, but we’ll never know. So let’s talk about something else that we might be able to know at some point.

 

Peter Singer  35:49

Yeah, and, you know, maybe there’s a bit of truth in both of those, you know, right? I certainly don’t think Freud had the whole truth that I don’t think all of the neuroses related to sort of sexual repression, but and a sense of inferiority that you mentioned Alfred Adler, who my grandfather was also very closely associated with. Yes, I think sense of inferiority is a cause of some problems and neuroties. But again, there’s, there’s more going on than than just those things.

 

Speaker 2  37:00

I do want to talk a little about, about Effective Altruism. I’m sure it’s, it’s, it’s a pain in the ass for you to be associated with certain concepts.

 

Peter Singer  38:42

I know what you’re asking.

 

David Duchovny  38:45

But no, I mean, I may ask about musk, but  what I wanted to couch it as, firstly, before we get into the the nuts and bolts of what Effective Altruism might be, to ask you the personal question, not personal, but perhaps personal. You decided at some point you obviously are a man of great compassion in the Buddhist sense. You care about the suffering, not only of other people, but of animals. You have a huge heart, some people might say with a different vocabulary, you chose to go into teaching, and you chose to go into to be a public philosopher, or at least that was your fate. And within the system that you continue to work, which was higher education or remain in society, you pivoted towards charity and the kind of magnanimity of of affluent people to try and help people that have less, rather than saying, becoming a Marxist or somebody try to change the system to work more fairly for more people, I wonder if that was a if that was ever in your. Mind is like, should I actually go and attack the system, or should I try and work within the system to make it more fair?

 

Peter Singer  40:08

That was in my mind when I was much younger, when I was an undergraduate during the Vietnam War era, and Australia was an ally of the United States in Vietnam, we sent Australia sent troops to fight alongside American troops in Vietnam, and I was as a student. I was active in the anti war movement and in the movement against conscription, against introducing the draft to send more Australians to fight in Vietnam. And so I moved in circles where there certainly were people who were Marxist. And I was interested in that for a while, but I was never really accepting of Marxist ideas myself. There seemed to me something sort of almost messianic about it, that somehow, you know, you had to do these things, that history was going in this direction where this ideal communist society was going to emerge. And some of the Marxists, not all of them, of course, thought that the Soviet Union was this ideal society. Seems to be completely obvious that that was not the case at all. But even among those more enlightened Marxists who said, No, you know, the Soviet Union isn’t what Marx wanted. And I think they were right. Marx would have detested the Soviet Union. But even among that, I still thought that the basic idea that somehow we could history was moving in this direction of a more utopian communism was just false, and the idea that we are moving inevitably in the direction of a classless revolution. That’s wrong. Marx completely ignored one of the things we were talking about, and that is the fact that we have an evolved human nature. Marx thought that once you change the economic basis of society, you will change human nature. Well, I think the Soviet Union showed very clearly that that was completely wrong, and people didn’t stop being selfish and greedy because communism was there and they didn’t own private property. They just wanted to dominate through their role in the party and the political structure. So I think you know there are serious mistakes, and if you understand evolution and its influence on human nature, you can’t really accept what Marx said.

 

David Duchovny  42:27

But you didn’t give up the idea of having real world effects through your work, is what I’m saying.

 

Peter Singer  42:33

No, not real world effects, but eventually, I mean your questions about why I’ve worked within the system rather than trying to overthrow the system. Seemed to me that capitalism is incredibly resilient. It’s resisted all sorts of that’s another thing about Marx. Marx predicted that capitalism would collapse, and every time there was a big depression, even in his own life, he thought, Oh, this is going to happen now, and it never happened, and it didn’t happen in the 1930s either, capitalism didn’t collapse. You know, more recent things, like the Occupy movement, had pretty much zero effect on capitalism. So I just don’t think we can. We can we know how to change the system as a whole. We can. We can modify it. We can reform it. We can make it more humane and more compassionate. And some countries have done that. I think some European countries have done that better than the United States. Think we do it actually better in a here in Australia, than in the United States. But you have to work within the system if you want to achieve a positive effect.

 

David Duchovny  43:32

Well, that, I think that segues nicely into Effective Altruism, because that, in my mind, that is a way to or I see it as an attempt to redress the excesses of and the efficiency of capitalism through charity. Again, going back to, you know, an earlier type of Christian vector as well the idea of charity. But how did your thinking around that? How did you cultivate that idea in your own mind? What was there an aha moment? Or was it just you mentioned tithing, which is fascinating to me as well, because, like, you know, I’m not saying that you’re a church father, but you know, the originally they 10% of your income was tied to the church. Who knows what the church did with it? But the idea is, is early church as well. And I’m wondering where, because I think in your Effective Altruism arguments, you do talk about 10% of your income going towards.

 

Peter Singer  44:34

I have it. I did it one time. I now I have a book called The life you can save the same that’s what gave rise to the organization with the same title. And in the life you can save, I have a different kind of table where the percentage that you give increases as your income increases, which is similar to tax tables, yes, but so I think that we can each give a certain amount. I recommend, depending on how much we have, depending, to some extent, on our liabilities and responsibilities as well. So I think it’s it’s less than 10% for people who are still don’t have much to spare, but it’s significantly more than 10% for people who are multi millionaires, or far more than they ever need. Yeah, so that, I mean all of that for me, grew out of that article, famine, affluent and morality, in which the drowning child in the shallow pond appears. And that was published in 1972 it’s one of my really early works. And then it’s sort of, you know, yes, people took some notice of it, but outside philosophy, it didn’t really get discussed for decades. But a lot of philosophy students read it because it was put in anthologies of ethics readers for undergraduate ethics courses, and eventually, then some of those philosophers in the early 2000s started saying, Well, you know, really, singer is right about this, and we should be doing more, and we should start some sort of organization that encourages people to do more and makes helps them to realize how easily they can do a lot of good in the world and no sacrifice for themselves. And to do that, we need to find out which of the charities that are best, that are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck do the most good with what you donate. And so that’s why the Effective Altruism movement arose. And I was not directly involved at first. You know, some of these graduate students at the University of Oxford were among the first to do that, and they developed, they chose the name Effective Altruism. But certainly, I mean, I support those ideas. I think we ought to be altruistic, as we’ve been saying. We ought to share with people in extreme poverty. We ought to try to reduce animal suffering. And it makes perfect sense that if you’re going to do that, and you’ve got some resources to do that, whether you’re volunteering your time or whether you’ve got money. You want to do it as effectively as possible. You know, why would you waste that effort and not do the most good you can within your chosen cause? So I think the idea of the Effective Altruism movement in to that extent makes perfect sense.

 

David Duchovny  47:17

I do too, but then it the reverse engineer aspect of it is I’m going to go into this capitalist system that is rigged in a certain way, and I’m going to I’m going to score huge because then I’m going to give it back. Then it kind of justifies whatever you do to make that money. And I see it with Musk now, you know, it’s like you people are going to feel a little pain now, but don’t worry, I’m going to give it back. I’ll give it back. I know what I’m doing.

 

Peter Singer  47:46

Yeah, I must talked about Effective Altruism a lot earlier on, and attended some meetings of effective altruists. It’s hard for me to see now that he can look at what he’s doing in terms of Effective Altruism, because, I mean, what he and the Trump administration have done to USAID, I think, is just absolutely unpardonable. Yes, it’s fine to review USAID, yes, it’s fine to say you’ve not always been using the dollars in the most effective way.

 

David Duchovny  48:23

Maybe it’s not been as effective. Yes, exactly.

 

Peter Singer  48:25

That’s right. But to just stop the programs dead, you know, this 90 day freeze, which I see now a judge’s audit has to be undone, but, but a lot of damage will have been done. I mean, that’s crazy, you know? Firstly, you can’t review all the US aid programs in 90 days. There’s too many of them. You can’t have a serious review. Secondly, you know, why stop them before you got the results of the review? Because if the review says, Oh, yes, this was a good program. You know, after 90 days the program has stopped. A lot of the people working have had to leave because they need to earn money somewhere else, particularly if they’re in developing countries. So you’re doing immense damage to the program before you’ve reviewed them, and before you know whether they’re good programs or bad programs.

 

David Duchovny  49:06

Well, it’s shoot ready, aim, right? It’s, it’s the way that Trump likes to move, you know?

 

Peter Singer  49:14

Yeah, and musk, I think, to his credit, seems to, seems to go along with that, and is not thinking as a, as an effective altruist anymore, but is maybe thinking about, you know, I have the power to do this, let’s do it.

 

Speaker 1  49:27

Well, I think, I think, I think the word effective is, is maybe the problem there, because when, when people get into government, which is a hybrid of the system, which is business, but also humanity, humanitarian. When you start looking at government as just a business, then you’re going to make cuts that create suffering, because you’re not, you know, you’re just looking at numbers. You’re not looking at the human aspect of anything. And I also think that it gets into one last kind of you. You should see my desk. It’s a mess. One last issue I kind of wanted to get into with you was, you know, long term ism, which was not a phrase I’d heard until I started, you know, kind of reading more to get ready to talk to you. And you know, Musk is a guy who kind of made his name on long termism, you know, I have two Tesla cars. I can’t stand the guy. He made a good car. I bought it because I believe that climate change is a huge problem. I believe it is the problem facing the human race. And, you know, I had an electric car 1520, years ago, and then when Tesla started making good cars. And so I’m gonna, I’m gonna quandary there in terms of decoupling too, which is, there’s two last things I wanted to talk to you about, in terms of ethics, long termism and decoupling. So just full disclosure, I have Tesla vehicles. They’re already paid for, you know. I mean, Should I, should I just make a big show of pushing them off a cliff? Or do I use the resources that have already been used in making these things and keep on driving them on the power of the sun?

 

Peter Singer  51:18

Yeah? No, there’s no point in, you know, you’ve got them. There’s no point in destroying them or not using them. It’s like when I, when I became a vegetarian, I had a pair of leather hiking boots that I was very fond of. Should I throw them out? You know, I’m not going to buy leather anymore. But no, you know, I wore them at they lasted some years, and I was pleased to have them. And there would have been, I would have done no good at all if I just thrown the mat. So I think it’s the same with the teslas. I had a more difficult decoupling decision because I was on x and I had a lot of followers on x, but I decided, relatively recently, I suppose, that I could not be involved with something that Musk was running and that in some way was helping to enrich and empower musk. So I’ve shifted to blue sky, and I’ve got a small fraction of the followers on blue sky that I that I had on X, but I think I still have to, have to do it. So that’s, that’s my bit of decoupling the long termism stuff. I think you know that came from, from will McCaskill, really, who wrote and Toby Ord, again, two of these people at Oxford who are at the beginnings of Effective Altruism, Toby ord wrote a book called the precipice, and will MacAskill wrote one called what we owe the future. And they are both good and interesting books. But you know, you can take us too far. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future. And I think if we simply focus on the long term future and talk about reducing the risks of our species becoming extinct. And I think Musk was doing some of that. The reason he’s interested in Mars space stuff and then going to Mars, is his idea that if we could have a self sustaining colony on Mars, then if there were a catastrophe, a nuclear war or a pandemic that wiped us all out on this planet. It wouldn’t mean the extinction of our species. And yes, you know, I mean, there’s something to that, but the chances of having a self sufficient colony on Mars in the near future seem to be pretty remote. And there’s, you know, if we really sort of harden ourselves and say, Oh well, yes, you know, doesn’t matter if people are starving on this planet, or it doesn’t matter if you know, as you say, other terrible things are happening. As long as we have this colony on Mars, then it’s not going to be a good outcome. Either we’re going to be become heartless, heartless people. So I think that we have to, we have to foster concern for people here and now, and animals here and now, all sentient beings and sure, try to reduce the risks of our species becoming extinct. I think that’s a valuable thing to do, but it’s not an overwhelming priority. That means we should stop doing other things here and now.

 

Speaker 1  53:57

I think to go back to the reductio ad absurdum. As I was walking around, thinking of coming in to talk to you, I feel like I did that with some of your thought around suffering, which is, this is, it’s very dark, I mean, but these are the kind of discussions that I think were led to, which is, you know, we humans are the source of so much suffering, not just for other humans, but obviously, as your work has shown, for animals all over, billions of animals would not extinction create less suffering. Would not our species extinction create less suffering. And yet you argue for the I believe you argue for the innate worth of sentient and conscious life.

 

Peter Singer  54:55

So I don’t exactly think that conscious life has. An innate worth, but I think I hope for a positive balance of happiness or joy over suffering. I mean, if there were conscious life, but it was going to be full of suffering, and that was going to continue indefinitely, and you know, there was clearly going to be far more suffering than there was going to be pleasure or happiness. I would think, then extinction is better, but, but the reason that I don’t want our species to become extinct despite all the suffering that they’re causing to other animals at the moment, you know, so I kind of agree that if we became extinct now, there would be less suffering in total on our planet, than than there is. But in the long term, I suppose, well, this is a kind of optimism, and given what we’ve been saying, it may not be justified, but, but I think that we will improve and become more rational and be able to control these baser instincts, and that eventually the outlook is positive. And I wrote a book called The expanding circle that talks about the way in which we’ve expanded the circle of morality over 1000s of years.

 

David Duchovny  56:17

Can you, give me a thumbnail history of that expansion, so that people know what you’re talking about?

 

Peter Singer  56:22

Right, so you know, if you look at early humans, we lived in groups of a couple of 100, and there are still some parts of the world, and have been until quite recently, where that is still the way in which people are organized, and generally speaking, their morality has been limited to their own group. And so we’ve expanded beyond that. We expanded that to kind of other members of my ethnic group, of my country, my ethnic group, maybe my religious group. And in the 20th century, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at least at that level of rhetoric and accepted beliefs of what we should be doing, we expanded rights to all human beings and said that there are universal human rights. We’ve started expanding it to some extent, again, more at an intellectual level, to non human animals, and we, increasingly, I think, are recognizing in laws the concern for animals, and even for found animals in some countries and in California in the United States, because of a referendum in the European Union, because of more political support for animal causes. So I feel that that circle is expanding, and I’m hopeful that that will, in the long run, continue. It’s a little bit like Martin Luther King’s famous remark that, you know, the arc of justice bends towards the arc of history bends towards justice, probably garbled the quote, sorry.

 

David Duchovny  58:00

Yeah, so we can feel that our present moment is, is a contrarian contraction against a larger trend of expansion.

 

Peter Singer  58:09

That’s my hope, yes, that’s right, that it’s just, you know, it’s not smooth progress. It’s up and down. And we’re not in a great place now. We’re in a better place, it seemed, in the early 1990s than we are now, but that will go that way. So that’s why I don’t want that species to become extinct, because there is still a lot of suffering in nature. As we said, nature is not a ethical process in itself. And you know, maybe one day we will humans will be better to animals, not only in terms of not making them suffer in the way we do when we raise them for food or experiment on them, but also in terms of finding ways to reduce suffering in nature. So I think they can be good things

 

David Duchovny  58:53

Well, thank you so much, Peter for putting up with my questions, and I really I’m an admirer of you and your your thought, and I’m happy that you’re that you’re here alleviating suffering as you can.

 

Peter Singer  59:09

Thanks so much, David, it’s been, it’s been great talking to you. Thank you so much.

 

David Duchovny  59:13

Thank you for the time. Thank you.

 

David Duchovny  59:28

Good morning. Getting down my thoughts for the post Peter Singer conversation. I feel like we covered so much, and there was so much we didn’t get to. I mean, obviously, when you’re talking about a distinguished thinker’s entire career, off top my head, what I didn’t get to was the fact that there is an AI Peter Singer chat bot. I guess I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know what the kids are calling it these days. Well anyway, there is a chat bot or an AI version of Peter Singer, which you can come to with your ethical questions, I suppose. And Peter is, I’ve seen him interviewed, heard him interviewed, and he’s cool with it, you know. And he kind of is, I think, tickled that that it would remain even as he shuffles off this mortal coil at some point. So I can understand that that’s kind of cool. I can ask Dr, singer like Dear Abby, you know, like a futuristic, ethical version. Well, Dear Abby was ethical, wasn’t she? That was about ethics. Does anybody remember Dear Abby? Google it? I guess I sound like a curmudgeon this morning, but I’m not feeling that way. I’m feeling quite optimistic.

 

CREDITS  1:01:09

Thanks so much for listening to Fail Better if you haven’t yet, now is a great time to subscribe to lemonade premium. You’ll get bonus content, like my thoughts on conversations with guests including Alec Baldwin and Rob Lowe, just hit the subscribe button on Apple podcasts, or for all other podcast apps, head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe. That’s lemonadapremium.com. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby.  It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo.  Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neel.  Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Brad Davidson, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer and me, David Duchovny.  The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […].  You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny.  Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.