The Point of View of the Universe – Peter Singer

Peter Singer discusses the new book ‘The Point Of View Of The Universe – Sidgwick & Contemporary Ethics’ (By Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer) He also discusses his reasons for changing his mind about preference utilitarianism.

Buy the book here: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/97… Bart Schultz’s (University of Chicago) Review of the book: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/49215-he-poin… “Restoring Sidgwick to his rightful place of philosophical honor and cogently defending his central positions are obviously no small tasks, but the authors are remarkably successful in pulling them off, in a defense that, in the case of Singer at least, means candidly acknowledging that previous defenses of Hare’s universal prescriptivism and of a desire or preference satisfaction theory of the good were not in the end advances on the hedonistic utilitarianism set out by Sidgwick. But if struggles with Singer’s earlier selves run throughout the book, they are intertwined with struggles to come to terms with the work of Derek Parfit, both Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984) and On What Matters (Oxford, 2011), works that have virtually defined the field of analytical rehabilitations of Sidgwick’s arguments. The real task of The Point of View of the Universe — the title being an expression that Sidgwick used to refer to the impartial moral point of view — is to defend the effort to be even more Sidgwickian than Parfit, and, intriguingly enough, even more Sidgwickian than Sidgwick himself.”