Peter Singer: belief

Transcript context

…I’ll ask you the dolphin question. Why have you failed? It’s harder than I thought it might be. That begins, I think, with the fact that humans eat animals, and it seems like we’re very conservative about what we eat. Relatively few people are prepared to really think ethically and openly about what they eat. They’re worried about having to change that, eat something different, maybe stand out from their friends and family by not eating meat and, therefore, implicitly criticizing those people when they do eat meat. I think there are a whole lot of factors that just make it hard for people to make that fundamental change about what they eat. Without that, they’re not really going to fundamentally change what they think about animals. 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?…

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