Peter Singer – Ethics, Uncertainty & Moral Progress

In this short interview, Peter Singer, a renowned philosopher and ethicist widely recognized for his thought-provoking ideas about universal ethics, discusses the value of life, moral progress, population ethics (aka population axiology), the far future, the uncertainties inherent in philosophical reasoning, moral realism (objective normative truths) and ‘alternative facts’.

Points covered:
0:00 Intro
0:08 Moral progress & the future
1:15 The value of future life (as yet unrealised)
3:27 Dealing with uncertainty & cluelessness
4:29 Parfit’s thought experiment on the value of merely possible lives
6:35 Population ethics: The person affecting view & the total view
7:37 The ‘overwhelming’ importance of the far future – On What Matters
9:36 How to account for uncertainty – tractable uncertainty
11:12 Future directions in dealing with uncertainty
12:07 Climate change (and pessimism about our ability to deal with it)
13:30 Optimism
14:58 Moral realism: values as objective normative truths
15:53 Abandoning prescriptivist view
17:02 Public ethics in the Trump era – dealing with ‘alternative truths’

Audio of full interview here.

Peter Singer’s reflections serve as a clarion call for humanity to address ethical challenges with a balanced approach, combining immediate action with long-term vision. By expanding our circle of moral concern, tackling climate change, and embracing objective truths, we can work towards a more equitable and sustainable future.

Bio: Peter Singer, is an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues in favor of vegetarianism, and his essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” in which he argues in favor of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he announced in The Point of View of the Universe (2014) that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.

Also see our interview with Peter Singer on the Point Of View of the Universe