Peter Singer: belief

Transcript context

…But one might start seeing, in Darwinian fashion, that the evolution of rationality is just far more selective than what we might wish for. There are people who are very reasonable, and then, in another context, they’ll do terrible things. They could be a prison guard. It could be animals. You’ve written plenty about many, many other examples. Is there really this general faculty of reason that overrides those evolved intuitions? I think there certainly can be, and I think there is for some people some of the time. The question would be, is everybody capable of that? Or even if not everybody, are we capable of getting a dominant group who do follow reason in general, universal directions, who use it to develop a more universal ethic that applies to a wider group of beings than their own kin and family and those that they’re in cooperative relationships with? I think there’s evidence that that is possible, and we don’t yet know to what extent that can spread and start to dominate humans in future generations. I wonder sometimes how much we can have an ethics that truly separates morality from partiality. Here’s a question I gave to Sam Bankman-Fried. I said, “As a utilitarian, let’s say a super being offered you a gamble where we would, in essence, double the population on Earth, create a dual Earth somewhere, equally happy, with 51 percent; and 49 percent, we wipe out the Earth we have now. That would represent an increase in expected value.” And furthermore, I asked Sam, “Would you keep on playing this game, double or nothing?” As Sam being Sam, he just said, “Yes.” Indeed, in his own life, he did continue playing the game, double or nothing.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.