Peter Singer: commitment

Transcript context

…It’s often interesting, but the whole thing, to me, seems a mess. The project is too hard. He’s not thinking marginally enough, and to make all of consequentialism, and maybe Kantianism, compatible — I just don’t think it can be done. I like the fact that you think the project is too hard and you started off by asking me about whether it was a good thing that humans settled North America. [laughs] I see the project as making a case for the idea that there are objective values, that things matter objectively, and I think it makes a significant contribution to that project, so I don’t think of it as a failure. There are some parts of it that may be a failure, maybe the attempt to reconcile the three series — a form of consequentialism, a form of Kantianism, and a form of contractualism — maybe that’s a failure. Certainly, the proponents of those other theories or nonconsequentialist theories don’t really approve of it. In fact, I don’t like the form of consequentialism that he ends up with as part of the triple theory, and I talked to him about that. The third volume, to some extent, grapples with that. I edited this collection of papers called Does Anything Really Matter? Originally, Parfit was going to reply to in the volume, but then his reply — characteristically for Parfit — grew so long that it had to be a third volume. That’s really why there’s a third volume. I think that there are problems with what he says about consequentialism, and he doesn’t really address act consequentialism. It’s rule consequentialism that he’s reconciling with the others. I don’t think he succeeds in producing reconciliation between the major ethical theories. I think that part of it is a failure. Why did he fail? I would say he became so committed to the idea that he had to show that morality is objective — that otherwise nihilism is true, nothing matters, and his whole life would be a waste — that that influenced his acceptance of arguments that otherwise he would not have accepted. Who’s an underrated philosopher that we should be reading more, talking about more, thinking about more?…

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