1) Peter Singer is an intellectual colossus, a philosopher who is well known inside and outside the academy. And he’s spectacularly wrong.

aporiamagazine.com/p/against-sing… **

2) Singerism, as I see it, consists of three core commitments: utilitarianism, cosmopolitanism, and rationalism. Each is wrong or incomplete. Of these, utilitarianism is the most crucial. **

3) Utilitarianism teaches that only pleasure and pain have intrinsic value. Nothing else matters morally. The right action is whatever increases pleasure and reduces suffering overall. **

4) In my view, the original sin of utilitarianism is the premise that pain and pleasure are intrinsic and not instrumental goods. This leads to implausible consequences that violate intuitive notions of morality. **

5) To begin, consider somebody who gets pleasure from watching animated torture pornography. Is that pleasure good? Or somebody who gets pleasure from watching kids fall and cry on a playground? Most of us consider such pleasure perverse and wrong. **

6) But worse for utilitarianism, the claim that pleasure and pain are intrinsic goods undermines the view that people should be treated impartially. This is because pain and pleasure motivate moral behavior. Some people are thus more valuable than others. **

7) In this framework, pleasure and pain take precedence over the person. The individual becomes merely a vessel for sensations. The human is morally dwarfed by the calculus of feeling. **

8) Other objections to utilitarianism are obvious, but have not been answered satisfactorily in my view. Perhaps the most interesting is that it might not be possible to compare pleasures and pains. A felicity calculus is not just unimaginable; it is impossible. **

9) Singerism’s next commitment is cosmopolitanism: the view that all humans should be morally equal, regardless of how near or far they are to us. Physical or relational distance, he argues, has no moral significance. **

10) Singer illustrates this with his most famous thought experiment about a boy drowning in a pond. The idea is that you can save the boy but you will ruin nice clothes. We all think you should. Well, says Singer, we’re always in this situation! We could always save children. **

11) Like many thought experiments, this one is better at manipulating the mind than exhibiting important logic. One can tweak the example in many ways to make it show the opposite of its intended point. **

12) I think moral cosmopolitanism is wrong both in theory and in practice. In the real world, we have different obligations to different people and communities. What we owe our kid, our wife, or our neighbor is greater than what we owe a stranger. **

13) I don’t think there is a single ethical system that can grasp the world. Instead, we have multiple, sometimes competing and sometimes consilient obligations. Great art often wrestles with the contradictions, e.g., Antigone, The Third Man, Godfather, and so on. **

14) In my view, we should care more about a daughter or a fellow in our community than about a stranger. We should care more about our country than another country. And so on. (And of course, people in another country should feel the same about us!) **

15) The third commitment is rationalism: the belief that human reason is our chief moral tool, capable of uncovering new ethical truths that were previously hidden or misunderstood. **

16) To consider rationalism in practice, we should consider a famous vignette from Haidt about consensual incest. Nobody is harmed. The brother and sister enjoyed it. Was it wrong? **

17) The rationalist seems to take a perverse delight in playing Socrates to the moral dogmatist here. “Well nobody was harmed! How can it be wrong?” Most people run out of endurance for the dialectic and give an exasperated “It just is!” **

18) But the rationalist, being a rationalist, is not content with “It just is.” So the rationalist often claims that the consensual incest was not wrong–and that it might be some kind of social bigotry to prohibit love between brother and sister. **

19) Moral rationalism is wrong and generally doomed to failure for the same reason that aesthetic rationalism is. There is no truth of the matter beyond our intuitions. That doesn’t mean that reason plays no role in moral or aesthetic philosophy of course. But it is limited. **

20) Supposed moral truths that defy deeply held intuitions will be rejected as wrong no matter how “rational” they seem. I do not think morality is entirely subjective however. Community flourishing seems objective and worth aiming for. **

21) But importantly the path to community flourishing is not always obvious and many carefully considered philosophical ideas prove pernicious in the real world. Reason, like man himself, is fallible. We should be cautious about defying long-lasting customs. **

22) Singer is, as I said at the beginning, an intellectual giant. He deserves his status. His writing is clear. He champions free speech. And he is always willing to discuss and debate. But he is wrong. Spectacularly wrong. **

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More from @EPoe187

Nov 2

1) Progressives have ruined the humans sciences. The latest example is Nature Reviews Psychology encouraging authors to include a “citation diversity statement.” But the damage was already near total.

aporiamagazine.com/p/progressives…

2) What is a citation diversity statement? Well, it’s essentially a letter confirming the authors’ efforts to cite non-white, non-male, non-Western scholars. For progressives, diversity is a euphemism for “fewer white men.”

3) Science is supposed to be meritocratic, though. Good papers get cited because they are good papers. Not because the authors are black disabled scholars. This policy is thus antithetical to the spirit of science.

Read 15 tweets

Oct 26

1) Feminization may not spell the end of the West, but it is almost certain to erode the traditional values that have long sustained its key institutions. In this essay, I address several objections raised to Helen Andrews’ argument on the feminization of public life.

aporiamagazine.com/p/what-helen-a…

2) In the New York Times, David French attacked Andrews’ piece for heroizing men and denigrating women. He contended that Andrews was ignoring “even a cursory analysis” of history, pointing out that men have often created brutal cancel cultures that suppressed dissent.

3) This is a fallacious argument. That men have created many intolerant institutions is irrelevant to Andrews’ claim. Men have also have created liberal democracies, science, rule of law, and the free press. Women likely cannot create similar institutions; men obviously can.

Read 21 tweets

Jun 23

(1) On average, Black Americans score substantially lower than White Americans on standardized tests of cognitive ability. This finding is well-established and largely uncontested in the academic literature.

aporiamagazine.com/p/sasha-gusev-…

(2) The only major question is about the cause (s) of these persistent disparities. Hereditarians argue that genetic factors play a significant role, while environment-only theorists contend that differences in physical, social, and cultural environments are the primary drivers.

(3) More than anyone else, Arthur Jensen established modern hereditarianism. In his 1969 article, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?,” he argued compellingly that the environment-only hypothesis was implausible and that efforts to raise intelligence had failed.

Read 23 tweets

Jun 12

1. Woke is about race. Without race differences, woke would not exist. Those who write about woke without writing about race differences are like scientists who write about chemical reactions without writing about atoms. Cofnas @nathancofnas is right. aporiamagazine.com/p/woke-is-abou…

2. Michael Shermer recently wrote about the causes of woke, but did not mention race differences. His analysis is therefore misleading. Woke is not primarily a flawed understanding of human nature; it is a flawed understanding of *race*.

3. Shermer forwarded three ultimate causes of woke. Of these, blank slate ideology is the most important. But is the blank slate model really the primary ultimate cause of wokism?

Read 12 tweets

Apr 23

A major problem with the “It’s unseemly to focus on the causes of racial disparities” argument is that the media WILL focus on racial disparities. Endlessly. And we know they have an answer. Racism.

You can’t have it both ways. If focusing on racial disparities is unseemly, then the proposed cause should be irrelevant.

And if it’s reasonable to point to racism, then it’s also reasonable to point to groups differences in relevant traits.

Ultimately people like Yglesias who want to preserve the taboo about race differences end up promoting a double standard. If the cause is racism, we can discuss it. If not, we should be quiet.

Read 4 tweets

Apr 21

1. Matt Yglesias recently argued that we should preserve a taboo on investigating group differences in the United States. He’s wrong.

aporiamagazine.com/p/a-troublesom…

2. He notes that blacks are massively disproportionately represented in the NBA, but so are men from the former Yugoslavia. However, he also notes he has not looked into the causes because it would be “unseemly” to be preoccupied with such a question.

3. We take the taboo against pursuing questions about race differences for granted, but this assertion should astonish us. A smart, curious man (Matt) is embracing ignorance about a compelling question because it is “unseemly.” This is illiberal and anti-intellectual.

Read 18 tweets