Peter Singer: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I have a general question about how totalizing ethics can be, or how totalizing utilitarianism can be. If someone says to me, as you likely would, “Well, at the margin, we should treat animals better, much better,” I would agree. But if someone asks the question, say, “Do we wish that human beings had never settled the New World, and there would then be many more intelligent mammals alive in the New World today?” I simply think that question is intractable and that the limits of utilitarian reasoning are fairly tight around marginal changes, small events. So, I’ll ask you, do you wish that human beings had never settled the New World or New Zealand? No, I don’t wish that. I agree that the question is intractable. I’m not sure whether it’s intractable in a philosophical sense because we can’t sum up the values, or whether there’s just so much factual information that we don’t have, including how do we make comparisons between the well-being of the bison, let’s say, that were here more numerously, as compared with the well-being of the humans. If you think, say, about Earth’s current population — which is, what, about 8 billion human beings — can we conclude that it’s too many because it’s too much pressure on animals? Or is that also an intractable comparison in the same way?…

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