Johann Frick “Singer Without Utilitarianism: On Ecumenicalism and Esotericism in Practical Ethics”

40 Replies to “Johann Frick “Singer Without Utilitarianism: On Ecumenicalism and Esotericism in Practical Ethics””

1. I am very pleased that Johann has allowed Pea Soup to publish the text of his talk at the conference that Princeton’s University Center for Human Values hosted on my retirement from the university. Johann’s talk was just what a talk at a retirement conference for a philosopher should be: kind words blended with probing questions. Fortunately, Johann’s questions will now be available for others to ponder, and perhaps to help me in finding a convincing response.
   Johann explores the tension between the roles of philosopher and a public campaigner – a tension I have felt all my life, not only in regard to my views on global poverty, on which Johann focuses, but also in my work on the ethics of our relations with animals, and in bioethics as well. The tension exists when I teach, as well as when I am writing, but to keep this comment brief, I shall confine my remarks to my role in doing research and writing. I will give only a brief response to Johann’s comments on my philosophical ecumenicalism and say more about his comments regarding esoteric morality.
   1. Ecumenicalism
   Johann’s aim, in what he says about ecumenicalism in philosophy, is to persuade us that “there are sometimes tradeoffs between explanatory depth and generality, on the one hand, and the breadth of appeal that comes from an ecumenical approach, on the other.” I agree. The way to handle this, I believe, is to write different works for different purposes. I wanted “Famine, Affluence and Morality” to influence as many readers as possible, and that precluded deriving its conclusions from utilitarian premises, let alone seeking to establish those premises. It owes much of its success to its brevity and to the fact that it makes an argument that is straightforward yet challenging. These virtues led to it being reprinted in many anthologies used in teaching practical ethics, so it reached many undergraduate students. Eventually the drowning child in the shallow pond became iconic, like the trolley problem, and was discussed by people who had never studied philosophy.
   I attempted several times to show how one might argue for utilitarianism. The version I am most satisfied with is The Point of View of the Universe, (Oxford University Press, 2014), which I co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. It is a substantial book, and unsurprisingly, it has reached far fewer readers, and had much less influence, than “Famine, Affluence and Morality.”
   My view, then, is that although the tension between a broad appeal, and explanatory depth, may be impossible to overcome in a single piece of writing, it can be overcome through a larger corpus of work.

   2. Esotericism
   Johann rightly notes that in my recent public advocacy, my standard for what people ought to give to help those in extreme poverty is lower than the standard I argued for in “Famine, Affluence and Morality.” (More precisely, it is lower than either the standard required by either the strong or the moderate version of the argument I put forward in that article.) Johann notes that I have, with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, defended Sidgwick’s view that esoteric morality is defensible, and sees my advocacy of a lower standard to be a form of esoteric morality. Yet he also comments that I am quite open about what I am doing – especially in The Life You Can Save – and that, despite this, I have had some success in persuading people to give to effective charities. (Though to say that my success has been “spectacular” is too generous, given the huge and still largely untapped potential for effective giving in wealthy countries.)
   Johann offers two possible conclusions we could draw from this situation: that I have “understood something about public messaging that the rest of us have not, and [have] somehow pulled off the trick of being at once a fearless philosophical truth-teller and an effective esoteric campaigner” or that I have been “ too pessimistic in [my] assumption that most people would be put off charitable giving altogether by hearing how demanding our duties of beneficence can become in the face of grinding and pervasive global poverty.”
   Here’s what I came to believe, in the more than 30 years of talking to people about giving that followed “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” but preceded The Life You Can Save. If you tell people that unless they meet some highly demanding standard, they are failing to do their duty, and are bad people, all but a tiny number of heroic people will be unresponsive to appeals to give. If, however, you tell them that, although there is some sense in which they should be giving to a very demanding standard, if they meet a less demanding standard – but one still clearly above what most people are giving – I and others will praise them for the good they are doing, rather than blame them for not doing more, then they will meet or exceed that less demanding standard. I’ve seen that happen many times.
   Have I, then, pulled off the trick Johann is referring to? Perhaps I have been able to combine philosophical truth-telling and effective campaigning because I have not really been practicing esoteric morality. As Johann notes, in The Life You Can Save (the revised edition of which, incidentally, you can download free from http://www.thelifeyoucan save.org), I do spell out the arguments for a demanding standard, but then the reader reaches Chapter, 9, entitled “Asking too much?” and Chapter 10, “A realistic standard.” In these two chapters I address the problem with demanding standards, explain the dilemma that Johann sets out, and say why I am proposing the standard that permits them to donate a modest proportion of their income and feel OK about that – but, of course, allows and even encourages him to do more.
   In thus differentiating between whether an action is right or wrong, and whether we should praise or blame the agent, I am following Sidgwick’s suggestion that we can best promote moral progress by “praising acts that are above the level of ordinary practice and confining our censure … to acts that fall clearly below this standard.” (The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., p.221; see also The Point of View of the Universe, pp.320-21.) I extend Sidgwick’s suggestion to cover also the idea that those who give at a level clearly above common standards practice need not suffer from feelings of guilt, because their giving does not meet the right, extremely demanding, standard.
   Behind this approach to praise and blame, both for others and for oneself, lies a consequentialist view of morality, in which we are more likely to ask a question like “Of all the good I could have done, how much have I done?” rather than “Have I fulfilled my duties of beneficence?” This is not exactly scalar morality (see Alastair Norcross, Morality By Degrees, Oxford University Press, 2020), but it is more sympathetic to that view than a deontological morality is likely to be.

2. I’m delighted to take part in this discussion involving two former—and much missed!—colleagues, Johann Frick and Peter Singer. And I very much appreciate the invitation to do so. Although I agree with almost everything in Johann’s excellent (and philosophically stimulating!) tribute to Peter, I want to begin by noting one of the few things that I think is potentially misleading, at least by way of omission. From Johann’s tribute, one might easily get the idea that the persuasiveness of Peter’s great paper “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is due more or less entirely to the immense plausibility of ‘Singer’s Principle,’ viz. “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” This is, as Johann says “a mid-level principle.” As such, it contrasts both with (on the one hand) judgments about particular cases and with even more general and fundamental principles, such as the uber act utilitarianism principle, viz. that one is morally required to act so as to maximize expected utility (or something in that neighborhood). In his paper, Johann picks up on the interesting contrast between Peter’s commitment to act utilitarianism and his willingness to make use of mid-level principles in his work in applied ethics. (For the record, I join both Peter and Johann in finding ‘Singer’s Principle’ immensely plausible, while I join with Johann and depart from Peter in rejecting act utilitarianism.) As far as I recall, nothing in Johann’s paper picks up on the contrast between either mid-level level principles or fundamental moral principles (on the one hand) and judgments about particular cases (on the other hand). *BUT* I believe (although this is of course an empirical question) that the great persuasiveness of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” was due in large part not only to the great plausibility of Singer’s Principle but also to the great plausibility of even less abstract and more concrete judgments—for example, the judgment that one is morally obligated to save the child from drowning (even at the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy), or the judgments with which Peter provocatively opens the paper, that we are morally obligated (in November 1971) to contribute more to relieve the tremendous suffering then taking place in East Bengal. I think that the fact that much of the persuasiveness of Peter’s work in applied ethics (not just in this paper, but elsewhere as well) depends on the intuitive plausibility of various judgments about cases, notwithstanding his own act utilitarianism, raises a number of interesting questions about how various things in Peter’s work fit together that are at a minimum quite similar to the kinds of issues that Johann raises. I will spell this out in a follow-up comment.

3. Here is (part of!) the promised follow-up to my earlier comment—in his piece, Johann is concerned with not only (or even primarily) the rational power of Peter’s arguments, but their psychological potency—their ability to actually persuade people of their conclusions. (I assume that, although these things are of course not unrelated, in Peter’s work or elsewhere, the rational potency of arguments and their psychological potency can come apart, and in both directions: an argument might be rationally compelling, but not psychologically compelling, or vice versa.) Suppose that someone who had never read “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” and who was unfamiliar with its tremendous influence, and the history of critical discussions of it (etc.) simply read Johann’s tribute. Such a reader might easily get the impression that the psychological potency of the argument is due more or less entirely to the plausibility of Singer’s Principle. And in fact, that way of thinking about it is entirely faithful to the way that Peter presents the rational structure of the argument in the original paper. But of course, the original paper opens not with a presentation of Singer’s Principle but with a description of the tragedy that was then taking place in East Bengal. (The paper’s opening sentence: “As I write this, in November 197I, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care”). We are then invited to agree with a moral judgment: that we are acting morally wrongly in not giving far more than we currently are to relieve this terrible suffering (or something in that neighborhood). Notice that this moral judgment is neither a judgment that a fundamental moral principle is true, nor that a mid-level moral principle is true; indeed, it is not even “a judgment about a particular case,” as ethicists and epistemologists standardly use that expression. (As Shelly Kagan points out in “Thinking About Cases,” a judgment about a hypothetical case such as the Trolley Problem or the Organ Harvesting case is actually a judgment about a *type* of event, and so already has some generality.) In contrast,to all of those, the judgment from which Peter begins is a judgment about a *token* event (in this case, a token omission)—one’s failure to respond in a certain way to what is actually taking place in East Bengal. It is only after this immensely plausible judgment has been offered to us that Singer’s Principle is brought on the scene, as a way of accounting for what many readers will already be thinking is true. I suggested that much of the psychological potency of the paper depends on this way of proceeding. I also suspect—although here as elsewhere, Peter should correct me if I’m wrong!—that Peter himself must surely have been aware of this—after all, just as it’s no accident that Peter didn’t begin the paper by appealing to act utilitarianism, for the reasons that both he and Johann rehearse, surely it’s also no accident that he began the paper by talking about the concrete case of East Bengal, given his concern with actually moving his readers in a desired direction. In my previous comment, I also suggested that this leads to some interesting tensions between various aspects of Peter’s work (or at least, questions about how various aspects of how Peter’s work fits together). These mirror some of the issues raised by Johann. But I will once again put them off to a further comment…

4. I have one little remark about ecumenicalism. When I was teaching “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, one of my students brilliantly asked why we need the argument for the conclusion Singer was advocating for, when many systems of belief (religious or otherwise) already incorporated the conclusion into their practice. For instance, Islam has one of its fundamental pillars ‘zakat’, which requires the wealthy (which can easily be translated into the ‘disposable outcome’ in Singer’s argument) distribute 1/40 of their wealth to the worst off. My response at the time to the student was twofold: (i) even if we are unwaveringly subscribing to the conclusion, we need to understand where the conclusion comes from, be it for stability of behavior or generalization to the behavior to like-circumstances and (ii) ecumenicalism–we want not only Muslims, but everyone to subscribe to the conclusion or, in other words, we want those who are not subscribing to the conclusion to be compelled to do so.

   So not only do I agree with Frick that ecumenicalism is one of the most important features of Singer’s arguments, but also that it has to be that way, if we want to achieve the conclusion, which again may be shared by utilitarians, deontologist and religiously-driven morals.

   I also thank Frick and others who made this post available. Truly a wonderful talk and a writeup!

5. Many thanks to Peter for this generous and illuminating reply.

   Since I don’t disagree with anything that Peter says in response to my remarks about his philosophical ecumenicalism, I will focus on the second part of his reply, about the tension between being a philosopher and what I called an “esoteric campaigner”.

   IS IT ‘ESOTERIC MORALITY’?
   First, let me speak briefly to a conceptual question. Is what Peter is engaged in in the final chapter of The Life You Can Save a form of esotericism about morality? I suggested that it is, albeit a non-standard one, whereas in his response to me Peter disputes that label (though elsewhere, e.g. in his article with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, “Secrecy in Consequentialism: A Defence of Esoteric Morality”, Peter seems more ready to describe strategically moderating one’s message regarding how much people ought to give to charity as a form of esotericism about morality. See in particular pp. 37-38 of that piece).

   The disagreement may stem from which of two typical characteristics of esoteric morality one chooses to treat as *essential*:

   (1) One publicly promotes a moral standard that is different from what one believes to be true, because this is what one believes will have the best consequences.
   (2) One hides or dissembles one’s beliefs about what morality actually requires.

   Of these two characteristics, the former seemed to me more central than the latter, which is why I made it part of my definition of the esoteric campaigner; the latter, it seems to me, is a claim about what it would take to do esoteric morality *as effectively as possible*, but perhaps not a necessary condition for being engaged in esoteric morality itself.

   Peter and I both agree that he’s *not* doing (2). Even in his later work, Peter is admirably upfront that he continues to believe in Singer’s Principle, which is far more demanding than the “new standard of giving” that The Life You Can Save advocates for.

   Is he doing (1)? I was inclined to say “yes”. But Peter’s response suggests that he may deny this as well. Peter might deny that he is doing (1), because, as he sees it, in offering up his “new standard”, he isn’t really answering the same question as Singer’s Principle. He isn’t answering the question “What does morality demand of me?” but rather “How must I act so that I should be praised rather than blamed for my behavior?”.

   What is really off-putting to people, Peter suggests, is not so much the thought that morality is very demanding, but rather that they should be *blamed* for not meeting that exacting standard, even if they are doing far more than the vast majority of people around them.

   QUESTIONS ABOUT BLAME AND BLAMEWORTHINESS
   Peter’s response depends on drawing a fairly sharp distinction between the question “how much would it be morally *right* for me to give to charity?” and the question “how much must I give to charity so that I am not to be *blamed* for not giving more?”.

   He further expands on this in The Life You Can Save: “We use praise and blame to influence behavior, and the appropriate standard is relative to what we can reasonably expect most people to do. Hence praise and blame, at least when they are given publicly, should follow the standard that we publicly advocate—that is, the standard, public advocacy of which can be expected to have the best consequences, not the higher standard that we might apply to our own conduct. We should praise people for doing significantly better than most people in their circumstances do, and blame them for doing significantly worse. If you have done more than your fair share, that must at least lessen the blame you deserve. If you have gone beyond the usual moral standards, we should praise you for doing so, rather than blame you for not doing even more.” (The Life You Can Save, Kinde Edition, p. 212).

   This reply raises several further questions for me. Let me make a couple of points:

   1. Peter’s response focusses on the instrumental effects of praising or blaming people. We should praise people for acting better than most, and thereby encourage more such behavior; we should blame people for doing the opposite, and thereby discourage such behavior.

   While I agree that questions about the instrumental effects of expressing praise and blame are important, I don’t think that this is all there is to blame and blameworthiness.

   Blaming someone is not reducible to public censure. While in some cases, I may express blame by publicly rebuking a person, I can also blame someone “in foro interno”, without communicating or expressing my blame to them or to others. This “internal” sense of blame refers not to a communicative act, but to an attitude or judgment. Moreover, since the mere holding of such attitudes need not have any effect on other people, it is unclear whether its moral appropriateness could be a function of its instrumental effects – it may have none.

   2. Even in cases where blame is publicly expressed, I don’t believe that the question whether the blame is *appropriate* can be reduced to forward-looking questions about the instrumental effects of *expressing* blame. Whether blame is appropriate, to my mind, is primarily a backward-looking question, which concerns the *fittingness* of this response to what the agent did (e.g. their culpable wrongdoing) or the attitudes they expressed (e.g. a lack of concern or respect). There could be good consequentialist reasons not to public express blame in cases where doing so risks being counterproductive. But that is no reason to think that such blame could not nonetheless be fitting or justified.

   3. Now that we have the distinction between the fittingness of blame and the consequences of publicly expressing blame clearly in view, I have a few questions for Peter:

   Suppose that I am currently donating 10% of my pre-tax income to charity, which is more than the “new standard of giving” asks me to give. Still, I could be giving *considerably* more and could thereby do a huge amount of good in the world, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance. Would it really be inappropriate for a member of the global poor to blame me for not doing more? Of course, it may be counterproductive, and hence imprudent, for them to publicly *express* their blame. And of course it will be true that others, who are doing far less than me, are much more to blame than I. Nonetheless, if we reject (as you do) ‘fair share’ views, like Liam Murphy’s, or views on which morality is a lot less demanding than Singer’s Principle assumes, then can we really deny that their blame would be justified?

   By the same token, were I to feel guilty about not doing more, can we really say that such feelings of guilt would be inappropriate or unjustified? (Granted, such feelings may not be especially *helpful*, if they don’t move me to do more but instead sap my morale. And perhaps, for that reason, it would be wrong and counterproductive for others to try and induce such feelings of guilt in me). But can we really deny that I am seeing things aright if I blame myself for not doing more?

   4. Suppose you agree that we must answer these questions in the negative. Then I do wonder whether there isn’t some amount of strategic obfuscation in telling others that “although there is some sense in which they should be giving to a very demanding standard, if they meet a less demanding standard – but one still clearly above what most people are giving – I and others will praise them for the good they are doing, rather than blame them for not doing more.” To many people, this will sound like you’re saying that if they simply meet the less demanding standard of giving, then they will be *blameless* for not doing more. But if you answer the question in 3) in the negative, then this *isn’t* what you are really saying. And this strategic obfuscation is psychologically quite significant: while people care about not being publicly rebuked by others, this isn’t all that most of us care about: we also care about behaving in a way that others couldn’t *justifiably blame* us for, whether they public express this or not.

   A (shorter!) response to Tom Kelly is next…

6. Tom, thanks so much for your kind words about my post! You’ll be glad to hear that I entirely agree with you about the force of intuitive judgments about concrete cases – both the historical realities of the East Bengal Famine and Peter’s famous Pond Case – and the crucial work that they do in making Peter’s paper so compelling. Indeed, whenever I teach “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, I begin with a fairly detailed recounting of the events of 1971, accompanied by newspaper photographs of the time. By the time we get to the philosophical substance of Peter’s arguments, the students are usually *more than ready* to agree that we citizens of affluent countries ought to be doing far more than we currently are to alleviate the effects of comparable disasters in the present. Moreover, I always make the point that there are at least two different ways of reading Peter’s argument: Either, as a deductive argument with Singer’s Principle as its major premise, or as an argument by analogy, which first has the reader register how *obviously* wrong it would be to fail to rescue the drowning child, and then challenges them to come up with any morally relevant difference between this and failing to save the life of a distant stranger by not donating to charity.

   And what is true of Peter’s work on our duties of aid is, for me, even more true of his work on animal ethics. Indeed, I left the Princeton Farewell Conference (which included a number of tributes by animal rights activists, including a very powerful talk by Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA) thinking that while Peter’s moral case for the more humane treatment of animals was intellectually cogent, what moved me even more was the eloquence of the empirical facts that he marshals – e.g. about the horrific conditions in factory farms or in animal laboratories. One feels very strongly that — whatever the exact philosophical explanation — there simply *has* to be something wrong with these practices. And more psychological powerful even than that were the images of animals that Ingrid and others showed; both of their suffering but also of their enormous capacity for joy, for community, etc.

   Like you, I’d be very curious to hear Peter speak to the role that our intuitive reactions to such concrete cases play for him, and how they fit into his philosophical method and moral epistemology.

7. Johann, thanks for your reply! I’m glad to hear that we agree about the force of intuitive judgments about concrete cases – both the historical realities of the East Bengal Famine and Peter’s famous Pond Case – and the crucial work that they do in making Peter’s paper so compelling. Like you, my sense is that this is every bit as important if not more so when it comes to the influence of Peter’s work on animal ethics.

   OK, as promised, and following up on my two earlier posts, here is where I think there is some tension (I’m not sure if that’s exactly the right word) between the way in which some of Peter’s most influential work in applied ethics derives a great deal of its persuasive force from intuitive judgments about particular cases and his more theoretical work in ethics. [I’m just going to speak to this issue, and then later make clear how I think it relates to Johann’s paper.]

   I think it’s notable here that another persistent theme in Peter’s work has been *skepticism* about giving significant weight to relatively low level, intuitive judgments about cases. Indeed, this skepticism is very much in play in a paper published two years after “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972), his “Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium” (1974). There, Peter is concerned to among other things defend utilitarianism from the charge that it must be incorrect because it simply gives the wrong answers in some particular cases. He argues that the method of reflective equilibrium is not the correct methodology for doing ethics, in part because it’s overly conservative, and in effect loads the dice in favor of our pre-theoretical intuitions. (Of course, this paper is published just a few years after a Theory of Justice, where Rawls popularized the method of RE among moral and political philosophers. To my knowledge, Peter was the first person to raise the ‘conservatism’ charge against the method although certainly not the last. And interestingly, its putative conservatism was considered a virtue by some of its proponents, notably our late and much missed colleague Gil Harman, who had learned from his teacher Quine that belief revision, when done correctly, should be conservative! OK, end of digression…)

   In any case, in that paper, the correct method is, according to Peter…. Sidgwick’s! At least, as he understands Sidgwick’s method: roughly, reason from self-evident first principles, overturning ordinary intuitions as necessary. On Peter’s suggested methodological picture, we should privilege our judgments about what he calls “moral axioms” over our particular moral judgments. This is because our particular moral judgments are more likely to be artifacts of various cultural and psychological biases. (I critically discuss some of these ideas about methodology, along with more recent echoes from other writers, in my book Bias, pp.193-195.)

   But this theme—that we should give less weight to intuitive judgments about cases than many philosophers would give—is certainly not limited to this early paper. For example, it reappears in a big way 35 years later, in “Ethics and Intuitions” (2005). Now, it’s not surprising that a committed act utilitarian like Peter would not want us to give too much weight to our intuitive judgments about cases. For some of us, the best version of the Organ Harvesting Case is just a straight *counterexample* to act utilitarianism. (I confess that I’m in this camp.) So it will be tempting for the act utilitarian to accuse those of us who think such things as being in the grips of a bad methodology. (I should note here that despite the fact that it’s the target of the earlier paper, one doesn’t have to be employing ‘the method of RE’ here—indeed, although I don’t share Peter’s act utilitarianism, like him I am skeptical of the idea that the method of RE can supply a comprehensive epistemology or methodology for ethics, as some of its proponents claim—my own doubts are contained in a 2010 paper co-authored with Sarah McGrath, “Is Reflective Equilibrium Enough?”

   So the tension—or maybe better, the irony—that I see for Peter is this. On the one hand, it’s plausible that much of his great influence, and his success in moving people where he wants them to go with respect to first-order morality, depends on their giving a great deal of weight to their intuitive judgments about cases. But on the other hand, Peter’s corpus also purports to provide reasons for not giving so much weight to our intuitive judgments about cases, which is at a minimum a practice we should view with suspicion. So perhaps if people followed Peter’s teachings about privileging their very general and abstract judgments about morality, they *wouldn’t* be moved in the way that they have been by his work in applied ethics. Now, I expect that Peter would say that you can get to the same (correct!) place by reasoning in a top-down way, from the act utilitarian principle. But of course, this doesn’t speak to the psychological question, which is largely empirical—if people gave up on or at least sharply discounted their intuitions about particular cases, maybe they would *not* in fact be moved as much as they are by Peter’s work in applied ethics, given the way in which much of that work relies on our reactions to cases (even if they would be so moved if they were fully rational).

   I trust the connections with Johann’s paper are clear here. Here is one of them: perhaps Peter’s teachings about the general untrustworthiness of our moral intuitions (at least, when they are not derived from a moral axiom) is itself a candidate for being part of ‘esoteric morality.’ Perhaps if it became widely accepted that we should give less weight to our intuitive reactions to animal suffering, or instances of famine, etc., this might have morally bad psychological effects, when judged from the perspective of the true moral theory.

8. Thanks very much to Johann for a fascinating discussion of Peter’s work, and to everyone, especially Peter, for the discussion.

   I had a brief comment about blame, in the light of Johann’s most recent response to Peter. Like Johann, I was struck by Peter’s suggestion that if morality demands that X gives n, most people give, m, which is much less than n, but X gives more than m but less than m, X should be praised. As Johann suggests, we might distinguish whether praise is instrumentally effective or good, or warranted. Perhaps X warrants blame for violating the duty to give n, but should be praised, because praising X will encourage others to do better than they currently do, for example.

   In contrast, though, I think that we sometimes warrant praise even when we fail to do what morality demands. Suppose that Johann only committed one very minor wrong in the whole of his life. Other than that, he never violated a moral requirement. I think he warrants praise for living a life almost completely unblemished by wrongdoing. I also think that X might warrant praise for doing better than m, given how tempting it might be to give even less. They at least warrant praise for not giving into the temptation to give less.

   Even in failing to meet a moral demand, then, I think that people might warrant praise for the character or fortitude that it took to do better than expected. So I don’t find Peter’s view that we should praise people for doing better than others as problematic as I think Johann suggests.

   Some might disagree, suggesting that blame is always warranted whenever a person fails to do what they are required to do without justification or complete excuse. Clearly, something is warranted in the light of such failure – some kind of acknowledgement that the person failed to do what was required of them. But perhaps blame is not always apt in such cases.

9. I have a suggestion in a similar spirit to Victor Tadros’s remarks.

   Peter Singer’s reply to Johann Frick’s concerns about esotericism appeals to a distinction between right and wrong, on the one hand, and praise and blame, on the other. Donating (say) 10% of one’s pretax income is wrong, since it falls short of the true moral standard set by Singer’s Principle. But we should praise such donation.

   Frick raises the worry that even if praise of 10% donation has good effects, it is fitting to blame, rather than praise, such donation, since it falls short of a moral requirement. Here Frick draws a plausible distinction between whether it is good to praise or blame and whether praise or blame is fitting (or appropriate).

   I wonder though whether Singer’s final remark might suggest a reply to this worry. Suppose we adopt a view along the lines of scalar consequentialism, attaching less significance to rightness and wrongness and more significance to goodness and badness. Given this view, it may be natural to say that like goodness and badness, the fittingness of praise and blame comes in degrees. If you do something good, praise is fitting. If you do something really great, even greater praise is fitting. This does not conflate praise that has good consequences with praise that is fitting: it maintains that the standards for fitting praise come in degrees, corresponding to the goodness of the act being praised.

10. Johann, thank you for these excellent, thought-provoking reflections, and thank you, Peter, for the great inspiration you’ve provided to so many philosophically inclined campaigners and campaigning philosophers!

    I very much appreciate the invitation to contribute to this discussion. Here are some of my reactions to your thoughts, Johann:

    You write that what many of us are ultimately after in doing philosophy is a form of understanding: “We want to understand, at the deepest and most fundamental level, the nature of reality […].” This is certainly one of my objectives, but I’m not sure I do or should value mid-level understanding much less than fundamental understanding, whether in philosophy or in the natural and social sciences. For one thing, mid-level insights can be more fundamental in terms of the order of discovery (as you note). It’s not obvious to me that fundamentality in terms of the order of explanation matters more as far as the value of understanding is concerned.

    Moreover, fundamental moral understanding seems harder to attain than mid-level moral understanding, which may provide instrumental epistemic reason to prioritize mid-level moral investigations. Practical reasons may thus favor prioritizing mid-level investigations too: If mid-level investigations tend to produce more certain conclusions, we may be able to make greater progress in terms of knowing-what-to-do-and-actually-doing-it by prioritizing them over fundamental investigations.

    You note that “Whatever else philosophy is, it consists in a good-faith pursuit of the truth […].” Indeed, the philosopher is a lover of theoretical, contemplative wisdom. I think the philosopher is also, in equal measure, a lover of practical wisdom. Practical wisdom, one may argue, involves a commitment to actually doing what matters, and to doing what matters the most in case of trade-offs. Relatedly, your remark that “Being an esoteric campaigner may be honorable and even praiseworthy” perhaps underestimates the strength of the practical reasons we have to be (potentially esoteric) campaigners. Singer’s Principle applies to how we allocate our time as philosophers too. In a world where thousands of children and billions of animals suffer and die needlessly every day, and where astronomical future suffering may be on the line, the moral stakes seem very high indeed. (Thoroughgoing nonaggregationists deny this, of course, which allows them to avoid the many troubling conclusions that arguably result from “scope-sensitive” ethics.) If being an esoteric campaigner is what it takes to effectively counteract the ongoing and expected catastrophes in this world, it is unclear that we sacrifice anything of comparable importance by engaging in esoteric campaigning (despite the many objections to it). In other words, our reasons to act against ongoing and expected catastrophes may outweigh the reasons to avoid esotericism. (Cf. David Enoch’s recent paper, “Politics and Suffering,” Analytic Philosophy, 2023, which makes an argument that may often apply outside of politics too. David claims: “[…] in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high stakes carry most political decisions across the thresholds of the relevant deontological constraints.”)

    However, I don’t think much esotericism (if any) is called for in practice. Normative uncertainty, as well as peer disagreement, should temper our confidence in highly revisionary views about what constitutes a sacrifice of comparable practical importance. If public audiences still find our proposed imperatives “offputtingly demanding,” say, that provides us with some evidence that they would not agree with us on their best reflection. We should not be so confident that we are right. (People who self-select into moral philosophy may have particular pretheoretical inclinations that drive their work.) In any case, though, we can argue that while we personally lean towards a more radical view, we think more moderate views may still entail that one should take impartial beneficence more seriously than most people currently do. The literature in the social psychology of persuasion and the lived experience of moral activists do not, in general, support concealing one’s more radical views on strategic grounds (quite the opposite, I think). But even if they did support esotericism, we should still plausibly comply with norms of truthfulness in both academic and public discourse. In addition to being of great intrinsic importance, such norms are extremely instrumentally important, given our fallibility and the urgent need for moral error correction.

11. Responding to Victor and Milan above:

    Thanks to both Victor and Milan for your excellent comments. I think they point to a way in which what I said in my initial response to Peter may have given the wrong impression.

    I didn’t mean to suggest that “blame is always warranted whenever a person fails to do what they are required to do without justification or complete excuse”. That view is certainly too strong, for the reasons Victor spells out. I agree that “even in failing to meet a moral demand, people might warrant praise for the character or fortitude that it took to do better than expected.”

    What I do want to insist on is that when a person falls short of what they are morally required to do, without justification or excuse, there is at least an *open question* whether this warrants blame. And this question, I maintain, is not answered simply by pointing out that they are doing better than most, or that praising them would have consequences that are strongly socially beneficial, whereas blaming them would be counterproductive. Those may be good reasons not to engage in public criticism; but it seems like the wrong kind of reason to think that blame couldn’t be warranted.

    This distinction seems to me particularly important in cases like those of billionaire philanthropists, such as the Gateses or Warren Buffets of the world, which Peter discusses in Chapter 10 of The Life We Can Save. In absolute terms, these individuals have given very large sums of money to charity, and have pledged to give yet more in the future. Yet, relative to their gargantuan fortunes, it is clear that they could be doing vastly more and are falling very far short of the demands of Singer’s Principle. As Peter himself writes: “it is obvious that the Gateses, for all their generosity, don’t live by the idea of the equal value of human life.” (p. 214). About this case, Peter writes further: “So should we praise the Gateses for exceeding, by a very long way, what most people, including most of the super-rich, give, or should we blame them for living in luxury while others still die from preventable diseases? (…) I think we should praise them for giving as much as they have, and for setting an example for other billionaires.” (p. 214)

    I’m entirely with Peter, as long as we’re clear that what we’re talking about here is the act of *publicly praising* the billionaires, ‘pour encourager les autres’.

    As for my private judgment about whether this truly constitutes a level of generosity that deserves our praise and admiration, and that would make it inappropriate for the global poor to (privately!) blame these super-wealthy for not doing more, you can probably imagine what my answer would be. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe that the factors that can sometimes make a morally deficient action nonetheless praiseworthy – e.g. that it took a lot of character or fortitude or personal risk or sacrifice to do as much as one did – are especially pertinent here.

12. This is a really fertile exchange, and my primary remark is gratitude to all. But I’m inclined to echo Johann’s thoughts about esotericism. Really, the worry I have reflects a deep form of mistrust that enters my mind when I start thinking about utilitarian reasons for saying (writing) anything.

    On the generous side, I’d like to read Peter the way Milan Mosse does above. That is, rather than drawing a sharp deontological line around what one is obliged to do, and then saying that all actions that fail to live up to that standard are failures, we should read him as saying that giving until more giving would be counterproductive would be the Best way to live, but that there’s a spectrum of better-than-normal behavior, and anything substantially above the baseline deserves praise. That seems to allow Peter to make his points without any real tension. (As a matter of substance, I’m fairly convinced by Angus Deaton’s critique of Peter’s work, and I think that this focus on individual giving in highly complicated political and economic systems is misguided and counter-productive of the good. But let’s put that to the side.)

    On the other hand, on the mistrustful side, I find myself worried that Peter, like any good utilitarian, is always assessing his statements not with an eye to truth, but with an eye to effectiveness. If that’s the case, then I quickly fall into a deep well of mistrust with regard to anything he says. That’s not a problem insofar as one can decide for oneself whether the inferences they make seem valid; it is a problem insofar as they are making factual assertions that we are to take on trust. What brings me out of it are two things: (a) I’ve met him and he just doesn’t seem that duplicitous or manipulative (he’d have to be uncannily good at it); and (b) there’s the Milan reading that allows us to make sense of his position on praise and blame in a way that seems much less manipulative than Johann’s interpretation. But it’s a least an unfortunate side-effect of utilitarianism that a level of distrust with regard to any argument a self-identified utilitarian makes (and undermines confidence in general, as it provides one more basis to worry that those one might be dealing with are liars).

13. Alec, thanks for joining the discussion! Since you comment favorably on Milan’s positive proposal above, which I hadn’t yet explicitly responded to, let me stay for a moment with that part of the dialectic. Adriano, thanks so much for your comment as well – I promise to come back to it!

    Milan makes the following proposal: “Suppose we adopt a view along the lines of scalar consequentialism, attaching less significance to rightness and wrongness and more significance to goodness and badness. Given this view, it may be natural to say that like goodness and badness, the fittingness of praise and blame comes in degrees. If you do something good, praise is fitting. If you do something really great, even greater praise is fitting. This does not conflate praise that has good consequences with praise that is fitting: it maintains that the standards for fitting praise come in degrees, corresponding to the goodness of the act being praised.”

    I think this is an interesting proposal, and I agree with Milan that praise- and blameworthiness come in degrees. Nonetheless, I think the proposal will require pretty significant qualifications. As I suggested in my response to Victor, while I agree that an action may be praiseworthy even if it falls short of some non-scalar standard of moral rightness, I don’t believe that determining whether the action is praiseworthy or blameworthy (and if yes *how* praiseworthy or blameworthy it is) could be as simple as seeing how much good it does, as a simple scalar view might have it (– not that I take it that this is what Victor was suggesting!).

    My example of the billionaire, who donates a large absolute amount to charity but which amount only to a tiny fraction of his overall wealth, already makes this point quite effectively, I think. However, for an even clearer example, consider a modified version of one of Peter’s own cases.

    Suppose there are 10 children drowning in a shallow pond. I am standing by the edge of the pond, along with nine other potential rescuers. The nine others simply walk away, leaving me to deal with the situation by myself. Suppose I rescue five of the children (assume, perhaps unrealistically, that there is a small but *constant* marginal cost to rescuing each extra child); but then I decide to call it quits, leaving the remaining five children to drown.

    I have done a lot of good here – five children are alive that, but for my efforts, would have drowned! Yet, it seems to me, my behavior is clearly *not* praiseworthy but rather quite blameworthy, *despite* the fact that I did a lot of good. I really ought to have saved all 10 children. Unlike the types of cases that Victor was concerned with, this really isn’t the kind of case where my doing less than I ought to have (or less than the best) might nonetheless be praiseworthy because it required exceptional character or fortitude in the face of temptation or the assumption of significant risk or sacrifice.

    I’m also a quite leery about using statistical averages about “the way people usually behave” to set a baseline for praise and blame, and to say that anything substantially better than the baseline deserves praise (that’s one way of reading what Alec was suggesting). Social psychology teaches us that, given the right situational cues, even psychologically normal people can behave pretty awfully. In Stanley Milgram’s experiments, 65% of participants administered (what they believed to be) the maximum (fatal) shock. To my mind, this behavior is no less horrifying and blameworthy for being so common. I think it would be setting the bar too low to praise someone for simply having done “better than average” in such a case.

14. Thanks to everyone for the fantastic discussion so far! I want to first express my own gratitude to Peter for being a wonderful teacher, mentor, and landlord (he didn’t unexpectedly raise my rent even once)!

    I just want to pick up on one strand of the discussion, which has to do with the question how Peter could be “at once a fearless philosophical truth-teller and an effective esoteric campaigner.”

    Suppose we understand what Peter is up to in his role as a philosopher-cum-campaigner in the following way: Peter is *telling* people the truth that what they ought to give is governed by the Singer’s Principle. But he is also *advising* people, based on his understanding of people’s psychological propensities, that they give 10% of their income.

    This position looks to me consistent, and it need not draw any support from claims about the praiseworthiness/blameworthiness of individuals. All Peter needs to say is that it is sometimes better to advise people to do what which deviates from morality. Importantly, *advising* someone to do something that deviates from morality need to commit the advisor to *lying* about the facts of morality. If someone seeks my advise about whether to break a promise for no good reason, and I know that by advising her to keep her promise, it will cause her to do something even more horrendous, then I can consistently say: “The truth of the matter is that it is wrong to break your promise. But given your weird psychological propensities, I advise you to break it.”

15. What a wonderful discussion!

    Peter kindly suggested that I might flag my current book project, *Beyond Right and Wrong*, which I take to be emblematic of (as he put it) “a consequentialist view of morality… [that] is not exactly scalar” but tending in that direction. I outline the project here:
    https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/beyond-right-and-wrong

    It’s relevant to several threads in the ongoing discussion here. For example, re: ecumenicalism, my fourth chapter introduces *beneficentrism* as a convenient label for the moderate (“utilitarian-lite”) position that gives significant weight to (aggregate) impartial welfare, *without* necessarily committing to rejection either options or constraints. So it’s a view that many non-utilitarians should be happy to get on board with. But it’s also sufficient to establish most of the really important practical implications that utilitarians care about (e.g. strong reasons to engage in effective altruism).

    re: esotericism, Part I of my book argues that we should focus less moral and philosophical attention on questions of duty (or the precise location of deontic boundaries), and more on telic questions about what is most worth aiming at. And here I don’t think there’s anything esoteric about Singer’s work. He’s very clear about what he thinks is most important, or worth prioritizing. He encourages people to take moderate steps towards achieving that, because demanding more could be counterproductive. I don’t see this as esoteric in the slightest. To think otherwise, it seems you must interpret this encouragement as expressing implicit deontic commitments (e.g. as to the permissibility of the encouraged act). But I see no reason to read in such implicit deontic commitments. As I read Singer here, he is encouraging his readers to take various beneficial actions, and to adopt associated beneficial attitudes (e.g. avoiding counterproductive guilt), without being too concerned about whether the beneficial actions and attitudes are objectively fitting. And that makes sense — it’s a fitting choice of focus — because saving lives is much more important than having fitting attitudes.

    (I do fully agree with Johann, though, that instrumental expressions of praise and blame are an entirely different matter from adjudicating when these attitudes are truly fitting.)

    A de-emphasis on the deontic also ties in with Tom’s interesting observations about methodology. I think a promising way for Singerians to thread the needle here is not to claim that intuitions about principles are more reliable than intuitions about cases, but to instead argue (as I do in my book) that *telic* intuitions are more reliable than *deontic* ones. When we judge that it’s *really important* to stop kids from starving or drowning, or to prevent torture to animals, these are excellent intuitions that we should not want to downgrade in the slightest. Are we *obliged* to help them? *shrug*, who cares? Nobody seeing a kid drowning in a pond should respond by asking, “But do I have to?” It’s clearly what we have *most reason* to do, whether or not it strictly qualifies as a “duty”. Ask less about duty, and more about what’s worthwhile, is the general gist of my project.

    P.S. In case anyone’s interested, I previously shared some reflections on Singer’s career and retirement conference, on my blog: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/reflections-on-peter-singer

16. re: Alec Walen’s suspicions that self-identified utilitarians are all “liars”: Wouldn’t it make more sense to be suspicious of those who *don’t* so self-identify? Those of us willing to take the PR hit clearly have a strong commitment to honesty! Any truly Machiavellian consequentialists will presumably be masquerading as deontologists.

    More seriously, as Adriano attributes to David Enoch, often the stakes are sufficiently high that moderate deontology makes no practical difference. If anyone is to justifiably abide by commonsense moral constraints, it will have to be because such norms are instrumentally warranted. Cf. ‘Stakes can be high’: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/stakes-can-be-high

17. Hi Richard, good of you to chime in!

    Without wanting to pronounce on the merits of the ‘scalar-ish’ consequentialist project that you’re pursuing, just two quick points of Singer-exegesis:

    It is likely (given what he says at the end of his response) that Peter’s views have evolved in a more scalar direction since the publication of “Secrecy in Consequentialism: A Defence of Esoteric Morality”, which came out in 2010. But at least in that paper, Peter and Kasia seem happy enough to traffic in explicitly non-scalar deontic categories. See the passage that I quoted in my talk:

    “It would not be right to advocate openly that people ought to give everything they can spare to the poor, because that would be counterproductive. The right level of giving to advocate openly is [say] 10%. On the other hand, assuming that I have no other relevant obligations that constrain me from giving more than 10%, I ought to give more, and in not giving more, *I am doing something wrong*.” (Secrecy in Consequentialism, p. 38).

    Perhaps this is no longer Peter’s current view – it would be great to have confirmation from the horse’s mouth! – but I don’t think one can deny that this is a view that he once explicitly endorsed.

    Regarding your contention that you don’t ‘see anything esoteric in the slightest’ in Peter’s project: Again, Peter’s response suggests that his own view of his project may have shifted in that direction, but it would be quite wrong to say that Peter never drew a connection estoric morality and the strategic moderation of his public advocacy regarding charitable giving. Indeed, the example of deliberately toning down the demandingness of one’s public exhortations to charitable giving is precisely one of the four illustrations that Peter and Kasia, in “Secrecy in Consequentialism” use to argue in support of Sidgwickian esoteric morality! The sentence immediately preceding the passage I quoted above reads: “Now Sidgwick’s first element of esoteric morality applies [namely, that it ‘it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly’]. It would not be right to advocate openly that people ought to give everything they can spare to the poor, because that would be counterproductive. …”

18. P.S. @Richard: These points of Singer-exegesis aside (which are anyway orthogonal to your own work), your project sounds super interesting and I’ll definitely check out the texts you linked to.

19. Thanks Johann! Just to clarify, I make no claims about whether Singer *described* his work as involving an esoteric element in this way. I’m just disagreeing (perhaps with past-Singer, among others) that such a description is apt! 🙂

    Note that even in the passage you quote, Singer writes: “The right level of giving to advocate openly is [say] 10%,” NOT: “The right moral proposition to advocate openly is that *the right amount to give* is [say] 10%.” Advocating that people give 10% is not the same as telling them that 10% is the morally right amount to give. My thought is that the attribution of esotericism rests on conflating these.

20. This is in response to Adriano’s earlier comment:

    Adriano, sorry that’s it’s taken so long to get to your comment. Thanks for engaging so thoughtfully with my text!

    I’ll take the two halves of your comment in turn, beginning with your remarks about ecumenicalism, understanding and fundamentality.

    I entirely agree with you – and said so in my text – that, depending on the type of philosophical project one is engaged in, there can be excellent practical reasons to pursue an ecumenical strategy that seeks to construct arguments on the basis of broadly appealing mid-level principles, while setting aside (at least on that occasion) the search for the more fundamental and general – but possibly more controversial – principles that ultimately ground their truth. I suggested that doing so was especially well-advised when the issue under discussion was both especially practically important and non-obvious – as was indeed the case for so many of Peter’s contributions to practical ethics. To this, you add an important further consideration, namely that fundamental moral understanding is often much harder to arrive at, so that we may make more rapid progress if we stick to mid-level principles. I’m happy to take that on board as well.

    I do want to push back slightly on what you say in the following passage: “I’m not sure I do or should value mid-level understanding much less than fundamental understanding, whether in philosophy or in the natural and social sciences. For one thing, mid-level insights can be more fundamental in terms of the order of discovery (as you note). It’s not obvious to me that fundamentality in terms of the order of explanation matters more as far as the value of understanding is concerned.”

    Allow me a brief digression before I respond directly to your point. One of the best obituaries I ever read was for the algebraic geometer Alexander Grothendiek, one of the true giants of 20th century mathematics. In the obituary, the writer (I can’t recall who) gave the following metaphor for two quite different approaches to solving a mathematical problem: Picture the problem as a walnut. One kind of approach consists in finding just the right spot in the walnut to place the chisel; then, with one tap of the hammer, the problem is cracked. But Grothendiek typically pursued a very different strategy. He would put the walnut in the ocean for a month, until the salt water had so softened up the shell that you could effortlessly peel it off, like the skin of a ripe avocado. The point of the metaphor was this: some approaches to solving mathematical problems are very targeted. They exploit some elegant trick to solve the problem, with a perfect economy of effort. But the insight they yield is often relatively circumscribed. Grothendiek’s approach, by contrast, consisted in trying to deeply understand and theorize the whole surrounding area of mathematics, until the solution to the problem fell into his lap effortlessly, as an almost trivial lemma of the deeper and more fundamental understanding he had won.

    Though there’s always a danger in making such comparisons, I think that there’s at least a passing similarity between this metaphor and the contrast I’ve been drawing between the ‘ecumenical’ strategy in philosophy and one aimed at deeper and more general understanding. Both approaches have their strong and weak points: the ecumenical strategy is maximally targeted. It establishes its conclusion with a perfect economy of means, by taking on argumentative commitments that are no stronger or more controversial than necessary. The trade-off is that the reach of such arguments is often shorter, and the explanation they offer less deep. The strategy of ‘generality and depth’, by contrast, usually consist in developing a wider and more complete theory of the area of inquiry of which this concrete problem is a part. This is very hard, for all the reasons you mention. But the potential payoff is a deeper and more systematic understanding.

    Which brings me back to your point. You wonder why, even if it is understanding we are after, ‘we should value mid-level understanding less than fundamental understanding’. My answer is that ‘understanding’ and ‘explanation’ are very tightly linked. I submit that, very roughly speaking, the extent to which you understand why p usually *is* the extent to which you grasp the explanation why p (even if you couldn’t, perhaps, articulate it well yourself). If that’s right, then being able to explain, to a deeper level, why p is true usually entails a greater level of understanding, all else equal. Thus, someone who can explain that objects fall because of gravity, which results from the curvature of spacetime caused by mass as explained by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, has a deeper understanding of why objects fall than someone who can explain that objects fall because of gravity, but can’t go any deeper than that. By the same token, someone who is in possession of a complete theory of beneficence, which explains and justifies Singer’s principle, has a deeper and more complete understanding of why we ought to help distant strangers in need than someone who hasn’t gone beyond this mid-level principle.

    However, just so we don’t lose track of the main point, let me reiterate: while developing a complete philosophical account of beneficence would indeed have the value of deepening our philosophical understanding, I think that Peter’s reasons for instead choosing the ecumenical strategy in writing “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” were compelling and decisive. The moral importance of persuading the largest possible number of people of the moral imperative simply trumped the value of trying, on that occasion, to persuade people of some deeper but more controversial theory of beneficence.

    I can be a lot briefer in responding to the second half of your comments, about esoteric morality, for it seems to me that there isn’t much we disagree on here. I just want to push back on one point, namely when you write: “‘Being an esoteric campaigner may be honorable and even praiseworthy’ perhaps underestimates the strength of the practical reasons we have to be (potentially esoteric) campaigners.” I simply wasn’t putting forward any claim about the relative importance of “being an esoteric campaigner” and “doing philosophy”; I was merely pointing out that these are two activities that seem in tension with one another. For all I have said, the right way of striking the balance may often tilt in favor of being an esoteric campaigner, even if there are principled objections to doing so. (As you point out, these objections are plausibly only objections ‘pro tanto’, and could potentially be outweighed if the stakes become sufficiently large).

    Having said that, I do also very much agree with the various reasons for being cautious about the esoteric project that you go on to articulate in the final paragraph of your remarks.

21. I’m going to sign off for tonight, but I’m excited to continuing the discussion tomorrow!

22. Thanks everyone for your contributions to this discussion, and apologies for this partial and inadequate response. I may have retired from Princeton, but so far it doesn’t seem to have prevented me having plenty to do!
    Johann is right to say that in our 2010 Ratio article, Katarzyna and I treat the topic we are now discussing – publicly advocating a level of giving that is less demanding than the level that we believe is morally required – as an example of esoteric morality. We repeat that four years later, in our discussion of esoteric morality in The Point of View of the Universe, pp.293-296. I still think that esoteric morality can be defended, and indeed that there are circumstances in which a utilitarian must defend it, but I now think that it was a mistake to include this advocacy of a more moderate level of giving as an example of esoteric morality. I prefer Richard Chappell’s view that such advocacy should not be read “as expressing implicit deontic commitments (e.g. as to the permissibility of the encouraged act).” I like Richard’s suggestion that we should focus on saving lives rather than on whether the people I am encouraging to give have objectively fitting attitudes.
    Erik Zhang makes a similar point when he notes that I may advise someone to do something that is wrong, because if I do not do so, they will do something even worse. That doesn’t imply that it is right for them to do the less wrong act. The comments by Victor Tadros and Milan Mosse on these issues are also helpful.
    Both Johann and Thomas Kelly invite me to say something about the role, in my approach to ethical argument, of intuitive judgments about concrete cases. I am quite skeptical of such judgments, because many of them have specific religious or cultural underpinnings. Even if they do not, these intuitions may be an innate reaction that evolved because it helped those who had that response to survive and reproduce, but possibly was helpful in circumstances that are no longer applicable, or today motivates us against doing as much good as we can.
    Richard’s suggestion that telic intuitions are more reliable than deontic ones is interesting, but calls for more explanation, as well as an examination of different telic intuitions. Johann is correct when he writes that “Famine, Affluence and Morality” can be read as a deductive argument from a plausible principle, or “as an argument by analogy, which first has the reader register how *obviously* wrong it would be to fail to rescue the drowning child, and then challenges them to come up with any morally relevant difference between this and failing to save the life of a distant stranger by not donating to charity.”
    The point is that we have a strong telic intuition regarding the identifiable child drowning in front of us, but we are less likely to have the corresponding – but no less telic – intuition about saving an unidentifiable child who will die from malaria unless we provide a donation that will enable the Against Malaria Foundation’s local bednet distributor to reach the child’s village.
    For those who base their moral judgments on intuitions, this situation might appear to be justified by the common intuition – one that people often share with me – that we ought to give to the homeless person we pass on the street, rather than to distant strangers. People suggest this, even though they do not dispute that their money is likely to go more good if given to an effective charity helping people in a low income country. So intuitions about concrete cases, useful as they may be, need to be examined critically. Unless they withstand that examination, they cannot provide an adequate basis for our moral judgments.

23. Thanks, Johann, for the illuminating reply, and everyone for a fantastic discussion!

    Johann, I took your reflections to carry the implicature that while an ecumenical strategy that seeks to have maximally broad appeal is the right call on some occasions, it’s the wrong call on many other occasions (for the reasons you mention, to do with the value of fundamental understanding). My apologies in case I misinterpreted you. In any event, I meant to express the following worry: In a world of ongoing and expected moral catastrophes, Singer’s Principle may entail that aiming at fundamental understanding is almost never permissible. Given the large amount of very serious suffering and injustice you can likely prevent by almost always prioritizing broadly appealing mid-level and casuistic over more fundamental philosophical work, it’s not clear that you’re sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance by almost completely foregoing the latter. (It’s also unclear that you’re sacrificing the philosopher’s love of wisdom by doing so, even if your mid-level and casuistic work involves esotericism, if wisdom is partly constituted by aiming to actually do what matters the most. But sure, prioritizing mid-level and casuistic work involves a trade-off, and doing so esoterically involves an even greater trade-off.) Threshold deontology may well force you to give up your quest for fundamental understanding, moral or otherwise, as long as the world contains ongoing or expected moral catastrophes. This is part of why I’ve become more sympathetic to thoroughgoingly nonaggregationist and absolutist deontologies.

    Separately, I remain uncertain that fundamental/explanatory moral understanding is in general more epistemically valuable than mid-level or case-based understanding. To be sure, explanatory understanding is more propositionally comprehensive than mid-level or case-based understanding. But is it more epistemically valuable? That depends, in part, on what the explanations provide. It seems to me that, sometimes, moral explanations are just (or mostly) efficient summaries of mid-level and case-based moral insights. (They are also often wrong, precisely because mid-level and case-based insights are hard to efficiently summarize.) Mid-level and case-based insights can be more epistemically load-bearing, which may ground their sometimes greater epistemic value. You write that a fundamental theory of beneficence would “explain and justify” Singer’s Principle, but I’m not sure it would do more to justify it than its intrinsic plausibility or my overwhelmingly compelling case intuitions about the Drowning Child, East Bengal, or Factory Farms. As Tom noted, the psychological and the rational potency of moral arguments can come apart in principle, but I’m not sure we can distinguish between (good-faith) psychological potency and rational potency from our inescapably participant point of view.

24. Hi Adriano,

    You write: “Given the large amount of very serious suffering and injustice you can likely prevent by almost always prioritizing broadly appealing mid-level and casuistic over more fundamental philosophical work…”

    That’s a pretty extraordinary claim and as such would seem to require pretty extraordinary evidence. I’m a big believer in the importance and power of philosophy, but what’s your evidence for saying that it’s *likely* that we can prevent a large amount of very serious suffering and injustice, simply by doing ‘mid-level’ philosophical work?

    (This isn’t at all to deny that some philosophical work has indeed had a large positive impact in the ‘real world’, and Peter is clearly in the first rank of such philosophers. I’m just not sure that there’s some kind of readily repeatable recipe here that we only have to apply to reliably get similar results).

25. What an interesting discussion! Thanks to Johann for a very stimulating post.

    I agree with Johann that there can be tensions between aiming to garner broad assent and aiming to achieve philosophical understanding, but I’m skeptical that Singer’s Principle exemplifies this tension.

    This is because, I think, explanations that appeal to midlevel principles can be deeper – and thereby provide more understanding – than those that appeal to more fundamental principles (at least on one important conception of explanatory depth that is relevant to understanding). This picks up on some points from Adriano.

    An analogy from the sciences will illustrate the idea. Imagine I have a mole of gas confined in a cylinder with a moveable piston. I push in the piston, changing the volume, all the while maintaining a constant temperature through a heat source. Say that I want to understand why the pressure of an enclosed gas changes after pushing in the piston.

    One explanation might appeal to the most fundamental laws of nature, plus a precise description of the initial microstate. I might carefully record the position and momentum of each of the 6*10^24 molecules in the cylinder immediately before pushing in the piston and then describe the successive collisions that those molecules undergo. Finally, I might then explain the new pressure by aggregating the energy and momentum transferred by each molecule to the walls of the cylinder.

    Another explanation might appeal to a “midlevel” law like the ideal gas law (PV=nRT), plus a description of the macro-states of the system (the temperature, pressure, volume) at different times.

    There is one sense in which the first explanation is “deeper” – it appeals to comparatively more fundamental and general laws.

    However, there is also a sense in which the second explanation is “deeper” (and better). This is because the explanation reveals something about the dependence structure that is lacking in the first explanation. One downside of the first explanation is that by focusing on a very precise description of the system, it suggests that features described at this level of precision make a difference to the change in pressure. But they don’t. Almost all of the initial positions and momenta compatible with the initial macro-state will yield a set of trajectories that result in the second macro-state, so it doesn’t matter which particular microstate the system was in.

    The second explanation is “deeper” in that it abstracts away from these more concrete features that don’t matter to the outcome, much as explanations of political outcomes are deeper that abstract away from the day-to-day gossip of political campaigns. A sophisticated understanding of thermodynamics (and politics) requires understanding such points and in grasping the relevant “midlevel” laws and explanations.

    It seems to me that something similar is true in ethics. When we want to understand why we ought to use some of our resources to address global poverty, we’re trying to figure out what normative commitments this *depends on*. As Johann notes, it seems like it does not depend on the truth of act utilitarianism. Rather, it depends on the truth of certain midlevel principles, like Singer’s Principle. You’d be missing something (theoretically) if you thought Singer’s conclusion turned on act utilitarianism. In particular, you’d be missing a grasp of the normative dependence structure at higher levels, structure that a single-minded focus on fundamental principles will overlook. Analogous to the scientific case, deeper understanding here involves abstracting away from unnecessarily strong normative commitments and grasping which commitments are crucial to the conclusion.

    If this is right, then calling investigation into the normative dependence structure at the midlevel level “ecumenicalism” strikes me as misleading, as it suggests some expedient attempt at coalition-building rather than a crucial aspect of sophisticated theoretical analysis.

    In sum, my thought is that the appearance of tension between understanding and breadth of appeal arises from an ambiguity surrounding the concept of “depth” – one notion of depth is tied to the fundamentality and another tied to dependence. In this instance, the desire for broad assent and the desire for understanding go hand in hand. Sometimes we are able to have it all.

26. Thanks to everyone for this really interesting exchange! This question is prompted by Johann’s distinction between mid-level and fundamental principles, and I’m curious what he (or anyone else) has to say.

    Johann argues that Singer’s Principle is a mid-level principle because it is indeterminate in a lot of cases. For example, it doesn’t settle whether any actions are wrong in themselves, or whether optimific actions are always morally required. In contrast, utilitarianism is a candidate for being a more fundamental principle because it gives determinate answers to these questions.

    However, even utilitarianism doesn’t seem to give us fully determinate answers in all cases. If we’re physicalists, then there are most likely some animals for which it’s indeterminate whether the animal is in a state of pain when you squish it (perhaps, e.g. worms), and consequentially indeterminate whether it’s bad to squish that animal by utilitarian lights (I got this example from chapter 4 of Dan Greco’s new book on idealization.). So utilitarianism is not fully determinate, and cannot be the most fundamental explanation of moral reality.

    For what it’s worth, I also think that it can be indeterminate whether some possibility is an option for an agent, and so all normative theories that tell an agent what to do, given some set of options, will be at least somewhat indeterminate, whatever criteria they use to assess those options.

    Johann, do you think that a fundamental moral theory will be fully determinate, or have I misunderstand your understanding of fundamentality? And do you think that the aim of normative ethics should be to understand morality at the most fundamental level, or just to keep searching for more and more fundamental explanations, even if we are always giving mere approximations of fundamental moral reality?

27. I also had a thought about Singer’s Principle, and understanding. Suppose that although Singer’s Principle is true, some much more demanding principle, such as Act Utilitarianism, is also true. Singer’s principle is true because Act Utilitarianism is true, but Singer’s Principle is also badly incomplete. If we get people to believe Singer’s Principle because we can’t get them to believe Act Utilitarianism, and getting them to believe Singer’s principle gets people as close to what they are required to do as possible, might we nevertheless have acted wrongly because they fail to understand why Singer’s Principle is true, and that at least what they have done is required?

    Well, if Act Utilitarianism is true, that depends on whether our conduct satisfies Act Utilitarianism. But Johann’s comments, I think, suggest an argument why Act Utilitarianism is false – because it is morally important that we get people to understand what morality requires of them, and Act Utilitarianism has no place for this. Act Consequentialism might nevertheless be true, where understanding is part of the best consequences. I find it Act Consequentialism that can accommodate the significance of understanding much more appealing than Act Utilitarianism (though I also think it clearly false).

    Now suppose that Act Consequentialism of this kind is true. If Act Consequentialists just try to persuade people of the truth of Act Consequentialism, a few more people will become Act Consequentialists, but many will violate Singer’s Principle and keep their cash. If they just try to persuade people of the truth of Singer’s Principle, many people will believe it, and abide by it, but far fewer people will be Act Consequentialists. What ought they to do if Act Consequentialism is true? that depends on several variables:

    1) how many people the Act Consequentialist believers will save,
    2) the importance of the fact that they understand the moral truth
    3) how many people would be saved by more people adopting Singer’s Principle
    4) the badness of some people failing even to believe Singer’s principle and keeping their cash.

    Without knowing more about these variables, it’s hard to know which approach is better.

    But these two extreme views: try to persuade people of Act Consequentialism or try to persuade them of Singer’s Principle, are not the only options. Act Consequentialists could go for a mixed strategy, and that is one way of vindicating something like Peter’s approach: write some work trying to persuade people of Act Consequentialism, knowing that this will often fail to persuade people. But then, as a backup, point out that a very wide range of sensible and moderate non-consequentialists who reject Act Consequentialism, because they make room for agent-relative prerogatives, nevertheless endorse Singer’s Principle.

    This mixed strategy might have good results, for it might increase the numbers in categories 1) and 2) above, and have better results with respect to 3) and 4). Furthermore, it might perform better with respect to understanding. People who adopt Singer’s Principle might not understand the whole truth if Act Consequentialism is true, but they do nevertheless understand the reasons why they should bear costs for the sake of others. They just don’t understand the whole picture. Furthermore, their understanding of morality, while incomplete, is surely better than the libertarian who rejects even Singer’s Principle. And finally, there is a kind of understanding involved in showing people that a wide range of plausible moral views converge on the truth of Singer’s Principle. We can be confident of its truth even if we are unsure about agent-relative prerogatives. So this mixed strategy, again depending on the empirics, might perform better than the more extreme alternatives.

28. Responding to Al Prescott-Couch’s comment above:

    Hi Al, it’s great that you were able to join the discussion! I knew that what this conversation was lacking was the rigor of a proper philosopher of science 

    The challenge you present is extremely interesting and it’s going to take me a bit of time to fully think it through.

    I do, however, want to offer one immediate response to one of the things you say. You write:

    “When we want to understand why we ought to use some of our resources to address global poverty, we’re trying to figure out what normative commitments this *depends on*. As Johann notes, it seems like it does not depend on the truth of act utilitarianism. Rather, it depends on the truth of certain midlevel principles, like Singer’s Principle. You’d be missing something (theoretically) if you thought Singer’s conclusion turned on act utilitarianism. In particular, you’d be missing a grasp of the normative dependence structure at higher levels, structure that a single-minded focus on fundamental principles will overlook. Analogous to the scientific case, deeper understanding here involves abstracting away from unnecessarily strong normative commitments and grasping which commitments are crucial to the conclusion.”

    You’re here suggesting a relationship between the depth of understanding that we have of our normative commitments and knowing what these normative commitments *depend on*. Let’s suppose that’s true.

    As you correctly point out, there’s a sense in which someone who believes that they have a duty to rescue the drowning child because act-utilitarianism is true, without realizing that the same conclusion would also be supported by a logically weaker principle like Singer’s Principle, is missing something. As you nicely put it, by failing to abstract away from unnecessarily strong normative commitments, they don’t fully grasp the ‘normative dependence structure’.

    But I want to put it to you that the very same considerations also support the conclusion that someone who merely believed Singer’s Principle, while being completely in the dark about which more fundamental and general theory of beneficence grounds its truth, would likewise have an incomplete understanding.

    To see this, consider the various qualifications that Peter builds into Singer’s Principle: “without sacrificing anything of *comparable* moral importance”; “without doing anything that is wrong in itself”, etc.

    These qualifications restrict the principle’s scope of application. But do they also ‘carve moral reality at its joints’? That depends on which underlying theory of beneficence is true.

    Suppose that the true fundamental theory of beneficence is act-utilitarianism. In this case, these qualifications do not carve reality at its joints.

    The act-utilitarian believes that I ought to make any sacrifice s, in order to prevent some bad thing b, just in case s < b. It doesn’t matter whether s is *considerably* smaller than b (as in Peter’s Pond Case) or whether s is ‘of comparable moral importance’ as b, but just *slightly* smaller. Thus, by the lights of act-utilitarianism, restricting the scope of Singer’s Principle to cases where I need not sacrifice anything of *comparable* moral importance is an artificial constraint. It does not correspond to a distinction that has genuine moral significance.

    Likewise, according to act-utilitarianism, no action is “wrong in itself”. So this qualification on Singer’s Principle is empty, according to act-utilitarianism.

    Things look rather different if the true underlying theory of beneficence is one on which there are agent-centered prerogatives and side-constraints.

    If the true theory of beneficence contains agent-centered prerogatives
    (which on the classic Schefflerian way of modeling them can be understood as a permission to attach a multiplier ‘m’ of a certain size to your self-interest, so that you only have a duty to help if m x b < s), then the qualification “without sacrificing anything of *comparable* moral importance” has a substantive rationale. It does carve moral reality at its joints (or at least comes closer to doing so than a principle that requires you to help whenever b < s). For it only posits a duty of rescue in cases where – for any *plausible* value of m – it is nonetheless the case that m x b < s, since b and s are not even in the same ballpark of moral seriousness.

    Mutatis mutandis if the true theory of beneficence contains side-constraints. In that case, the qualifier ‘without doing anything that is wrong in itself’ has genuine bite, because it corresponds to a distinction that has genuine moral significance.

    The upshot of all this is that if, as you suggest, there is a close relationship between the
    depth of understanding that we have of our normative commitments and knowing what these normative commitments *depend on*, being able to abstract away from unnecessary features of the view, then someone who knows only Singer’s Principle, but not the deeper theory of beneficence that grounds its truth, will have a less deep understanding of her concrete obligations of beneficence. They will know that they ought to pull the drowning child from the pond. But they won’t be in a position to tell you whether they would have likewise had a duty to do so at a great risk to their own life, or by very seriously injuring some innocent bystander as a means of doing so.

29. Replying to Sam Fullhart:

    Hi Sam, great that you were able to join the conversation!

    Regarding the Dan Greco example: I agree that there may be uncertainty or indeterminacy about whether squishing the worm is wrong by utilitarian lights. But the source of this uncertainty or indeterminacy, it seems to me, is not some gap or indeterminacy in our *moral* theory, but rather uncertainty or indeterminacy regarding some empirical fact, namely whether the worm has the capacity to feel pain.

    I was intrigued by your suggestion that “it can be indeterminate whether some possibility is an option for an agent”. Could you expand on that?

    Replying to the more general question at the end of your comment: No, I don’t think that ethical theory, even at the most fundamental level, need be fully determinate. I agree with Derek Parfit and others in thinking that some moral propositions need not be either determinately true or false. At least this seems to me a possibility that (absent the resolution of ongoing debates about the nature of vagueness) we cannot rule out.

    As a possible illustration (I’m not saying I definitely believe this) consider agent-centered prerogatives, which I wrote about in my preceding response to Al.

    I believe in agent-centered prerogatives, and I think it is determinately true that my agent-centered prerogative is sufficiently strong that I am not morally required to accept full-body paralysis in order to save the life of a stranger, even though this would maximize utility.

    I also think it is determinately false that my agent-centered prerogative is sufficiently strong that I am not required to get my shoes dirty in order to save the life of a stranger.

    But what about sacrifices between these poles? Must it be either determinately true or determinately false that I am required to accept the loss of a hand in order to save the life of a stranger? I’m not sure it has to be. (We can of course debate the precise choice of example, but you get the point).

30. Response to Victor Tadros:

    Hi Victor, that’s a characteristically ingenious way of putting things, and I agree with you that what you call a “mixed strategy” would be best and is close to what Peter has in fact pursued in his work (as he pointed out, in so many words, in his initial response to me): Make an ecumenical case for Singer Principle in some writings, make a case for a more fundamental principle of beneficence in others, and hope that you’ll persuade as many people in both endeavors.

    One residual question might concern possible interaction effects between these two projects. Since act-consequentialism entails Singer’s Principle, it’s clear that if you succeed in persuading people of the former, you’re getting the latter for free. What if you try to convince people of the truth of act-consequentialism, but fail (suppose they find it implausibly demanding)? Might this risk undermining people’s confidence in Singer’s Principle as well? I suppose it *might*. (Someone might say: “Singer believes that his principle is true because he believes that act-consequentialism is true. But act-consequentialism seems crazy demanding to me! So now I have doubts about Singer’s principle.”).

    But, as we’ve stressed at various points in our discussion, that would be neither a particularly rational response, nor a psychologically very likely one. The great strength of Singer’s Principle *is* precisely its ecumenical character. Because Singer’s Principle is compatible with such a broad swath of plausible theories of beneficence, you can lose faith in the theory of act-consequentialism (or whatever non-consequentialist alternative you endorse), while still holding fast to Singer’s Principle itself.

    There’s also the point about “order of discovery” vs “order of explanation” that I touched on in my talk, and which Adriano has been highlighting in his comments. Many people, I submit, will find Singer’s Principle intuitively much more compelling and harder to deny than whatever fully fleshed-out theory of beneficence grounds its truth. It will function, for them, as a “theoretical fixed point”, which constrains the set of more ultimate theories that will seem acceptable to them. This also means, for Moore-type reasons, that were they to settle on any particular ultimate theory, their confidence in Singer’s Principle probably wouldn’t go up by much. They’ll have a better and fuller understanding of why it’s true; but that needn’t equate to raising their level of confidence in the principle (which may already be close to maximal). Conversely, were someone to *lose* confidence in whatever more fundamental theory of beneficence they once accepted, this is unlikely to do much to shake their confidence in Singer’s Principle.

31. Thanks, Johann, for sharing this talk!

    I agree with your three theses: (1) that esoteric campaigning is not doing philosophy, (2) that speaking as a philosopher risks undermining your work as esoteric campaigner, and (3) that esoteric campaigners must wear a mask. And I agree that Singer has been astoundingly successful in his philosophical work and his esoteric campaigning work (though, as Singer notes, there is still an astonishing amount of ineffective charitable giving in wealthy countries). But I think that this “double-act” is more common, and perhaps more innocuous, than you suggest. In fact, I think most of us pull off this double-act when we teach courses in philosophy!

    For example, suppose that I am teaching a course in philosophy of mind and that I believe functionalism is false. While teaching the students about functionalism, I should obscure my actual beliefs about functionalism, at least temporarily. I should be an esoteric campaigner for functionalism. I should act more like a defense attorney for functionalism, presenting the very strongest case for functionalism, even if I think the arguments I’m giving are mistaken. Whether I ever point out those mistakes to the students will depend on how advanced the students are and how philosophically sophisticated the correction of the mistake is. If the students are advanced and could learn from me pointing out the mistake, I should point it out. But if the students are beginners and the mistake is highly technical, it would be better for the students’ education for me to keep my thoughts to myself. We should speak to students differently from how we speak to experts. Teaching philosophy is sometimes different from doing philosophy, but, as academics, we have different jobs.

    Esotericism is a phenomenon not peculiar to morality or even to philosophy. I think esotericism arises with nearly any outcome-oriented activity where one population instructs another. Take tennis. The goal of tennis is to win the game by scoring more points than one’s opponent. There are experts in tennis and there are beginners. A tennis instructor should have a different message for each of these audiences. There is a difference between “shop talk” between experts and the didactic advice an instructor gives to beginners. You might tell a beginner “Always keep your eye on the ball” or “Always hold your racquet like so,” where you might give an expert more nuanced or demanding advice. The simple advice will help the beginning tennis player score more points than would the more accurate, but more nuanced and demanding, advice.

    Similarly, you might tell a beginning piano player, “Always use the index finger to play C,” or a beginning arithmetician, “Never subtract a larger number from a smaller number,” or a beginning writer, “Never use the passive voice,” though you would give experts different advice. Beginners need to practice using simple, easy-to-follow maxims before they move on to more nuanced or demanding maxims. (Or they may forever stick to the simple, easy-to-follow maxims, if they prefer to pursue the activity casually.) This is an elitist idea, insofar as it suggests tennis, piano, and arithmetic instructors treat beginners and experts differently. But that elitism is appropriate, given that there are elite populations of tennis players, pianists, etc.

    Now, the idea that there is a moral elite will be more controversial, especially if it is philosophers proclaiming themselves to be the moral elite. Here, I think we can help ourselves to the distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom about practical wisdom. Moral philosophers may be experts about the latter, but not necessarily the former. Moral philosophers should not be shy about the fact that they are in the elite with respect to knowledge of morality, if not with respect to the practice or morality. (“The elite” are defined relative to the general level of expertise. Moral philosophers can be in the elite with respect to knowledge of morality while not knowing all that much about morality. So moral philosophers should also be humble about how much they know. That’s a difficult balance to strike!) If we are realists about morality and modestly optimistic about our moral epistemology, that’s the view we should endorse.

32. Hi Johann,

    Thanks for the helpful reply! A few thoughts. You write:

    “But I want to put it to you that the very same considerations also support the conclusion that someone who merely believed Singer’s Principle, while being completely in the dark about which more fundamental and general theory of beneficence grounds its truth, would likewise have an incomplete understanding.”

    I definitely agree with this, for what it is worth. Again, I think the science analogy is helpful. Someone could improve their understanding of thermodynamics by acquiring a grasp of more fundamental physical theories that might explain the midlevel laws, as well as explain why they don’t hold in certain instances. I didn’t mean to suggest that we need to choose between grasping midlevel principles and grasping more fundamental ones, or that investigating more fundamental principles is pointless once one has identified the appropriate midlevel ones. When it comes to understanding, often more is more.

    My claim was a more restricted one – we shouldn’t think the search for midlevel principles need only be motivated by practical, coalition-building considerations. I take this to be an intuitive idea. For instance, when assessing student work, we often assume it is a mark against a student’s essay if the conclusion could be arrived secured through weaker assumptions than the student is making. Philosophy Q&As often revolve around whether a speaker needs to make certain assumptions to secure his or her conclusion. In these cases, the interest in finding weaker assumptions is not that such assumptions will be more effective at persuasion – e.g. who is the student trying to persuade? There is rather a more theoretical motivation – philosophical understanding is advanced by seeing which premises the student or speaker *needs* for the conclusion.

    The reason this point is important in this context, I take it, is that it is relevant to solving the puzzle that you set up the talk with – how is Singer able to be both an effective public advocate and respected academic philosopher? Your suggestion, as I understand it, was that he has found the right balance between two competing roles. My thought was that there is no competition to begin with, at least in this case.

    Needless to say, that point does not mitigate against the project of increasing our moral understanding even more by identifying more fundamental moral principles. Some of my best friends are looking for such principles…

33. Johann, thanks for your response!

    I’m not entirely sure what to say about your first point. However, it does seem like an important choice point for moral theorists whether we state our principles in terms of more or less fundamental features of reality. We can imagine a moral principle that eschews all talk of pain and pleasure and talks instead in terms of the promotion of (say) certain C-fibers firing over others. I think, for the reason that Alexander gave above, that this principle would provide a worse explanation in many cases, but it could be more determinate than traditional utilitarianism.

    On your question about options, my thought is that for some possibility to count as one of your options, it has to be *sufficiently* under your control. But control comes in degrees, so there will be borderline cases where it’s indeterminate whether the agent has sufficient control. For example, performing a somersault is clearly an option for Simone Biles under most conditions. Performing a quintuple backflip is not. But between these two cases, we can imagine all sorts of physical movements that require varying degrees of strength, coordination, etc. In some cases, it will be indeterminate whether she has sufficient control for that movement to be one of her options.

    Your example of agent-centered prerogatives is helpful, and seems quite plausible to me. It does raise a more general question, though, about how much indeterminacy is ok in a theory (or how much indeterminacy we should expect in a theory of fundamental moral reality). I suspect that one reason why scalar consequentialism appeals to some people is deontic categories such as permissions and duties generate much more indeterminacy than telic categories like better and worse (I wanted to check if Richard address this point in the page he linked to, but I can’t load it for some reason.).

34. Replying to Al Prescott-Couch above:

    Thanks, Al, that’s helpful! I completely take your point that identifying logically parsimonious mid-level principles that various more fundamental, but more involved, theories converge on is a form of genuine philosophical understanding worthy of that name, and not *merely* a pragmatic exercise in coalition building. I, too, believe that identifying the least controversial premises from which a given position can be defended is a matter of genuine philosophical and not merely practical interest. So I agree with you that as far as *this* part of Peter’s oeuvre is concerned, there really isn’t any trade-off between Peter’s work *as a philosopher* and his effective public advocacy. They are of one piece.

    The potential trade-off that I did see concerned the ‘esoteric’ streak in some of Peter’s more recent writing, in particular in his recent books for a more popular audience, such as The Life You Can Save. But to be clear, I *don’t* think that Peter was being in any way ‘esoteric’ when he wrote “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and I didn’t intend to suggest that this paper is any less ‘philosophy’ for pursuing an ecumenical strategy.

    At the same time, you seem to agree with me that there are clearly other forms of understanding that we’re also after in doing philosophy – one of which, I claimed, aims at grasping, at the deepest level possible, *why* the things we hold to be true are true. That’s the kind of understanding, we both seem to agree, which would be furthered by inquiring into what deeper theory of beneficence most plausibly grounds a mid-level principle like Singer’s Principle.

    I feel like we’ve made some genuine progress in our own understanding. 🙂 Do we still disagree about anything?

35. Thanks to everyone for an interesting discussion, and to Johann for sharing this talk and these replies.

    I wanted to follow up on a point at the end of Russ McIntosh’s remarks above about esotericism, to make a point about ecumenicalism.

    One kind of understanding consists in knowledge of fundamental facts, or of dependence relations between facts. A different kind of understanding consists in practical knowledge or know-how. These kinds of understanding are often complementary: knowing the explanation of a particular ethical claim can help you to deploy it in sound ethical reasoning, understanding the scope of its application, how to spell out a confusing clause it contains, and so on.

    But sometimes we have a trade-off between these two kinds of understanding. As Russ suggests, giving a novice tennis player a ton of accurate but highly technical advice may give them understanding, in the first sense (propositional knowledge). But simpler, less accurate advice would give them better understanding in the second sense (know-how).

    The same trade-off may appear in ethics. Convinced of Singer’s principle, a person engages in sound practical reasoning and donates a lot of money to charity. Later, reflecting on various fundamental theories of beneficence, they become prone to dwelling on distant variations of cases for the sake of theoretical precision, and as a result are led over-complicate decision-making which should be very simple.

    Of course, the trade-off is likely not inescapable. Reflecting on fundamental questions can be confusing, but will (one hopes) eventually lead to insight that makes our decision-making better. That said, perhaps a case can be made that sometimes, the ecumenical approach offers greater moral understanding, in the sense of know-how, by focusing on straightforward application of simple, focused principles—even if it offers less moral understanding, in the sense of propositional knowledge of fundamental facts or dependence relations. Some of the improvements to decision-making afforded by fundamental reflection might be gained through practice or by other, complementary mid-level principles. And it is not implausible that mid-level principles are better candidates for premises in much of our practical reasoning than first principles, even if the latter explain the former.

36. Johann,

    That’s a fair question, though I don’t think it should come as a surprise that Singer’s Principle may have some radical things to say about how a philosopher should allocate their time: We know that the principle may have radical implications for how we should allocate our resources across the board, given the ongoing and expected moral catastrophes in this world. If the principle is true, affluent people should perhaps give most of our money away, take up a career that we wouldn’t otherwise have chosen, be campaigners in our free time (or professionally, if that’s our most effective career option), forgo having children (cf. Stuart Rachels’s Famine Relief Argument against Having Children), etc.

    We should expect that some kinds of intellectual labor – including some kinds of philosophical work – can make a much greater contribution against the catastrophes out there than most other kinds. It would be an anomaly if this weren’t so, given what we know about other domains. As was noted above, Peter’s more theoretical work is much less well-known and much more controversial than his more applied and ecumenical work. One doesn’t have to expect one’s work to be anywhere near as impactful as Singer’s to believe that there is a sufficiently clear and repeatable recipe here (it has indeed been successfully repeated): Everyone’s applied ecumenical work is likely to reach, persuade, and motivate orders of magnitude more people than their more theoretical work, if real effort is put into making it available to the general public, to philanthropists, journalists, policymakers, etc. Hence, it seems reasonable to expect that the following kind of philosophical career will do best, perhaps by far, in terms of reducing moral catastrophes or the risk thereof: Use your philosophical powers to construct maximally broadly appealing and compelling arguments to motivate effective action against every ongoing and expected moral catastrophe out there, and disseminate the results widely. The arguments will almost always be of a mid-level or casuistic kind, given that fundamental theory is highly controversial and much less accessible.

    This project could absorb all of one’s working hours. Would one make a sacrifice of comparable moral importance by strictly deprioritizing more fundamental philosophical pursuits (as long as the catastrophes persist)? Threshold deontologists will have a hard time answering in the affirmative. Even if one is no Singer, one can reach tens of thousands of potentially receptive people over the course of one’s career (with sufficient efforts at public dissemination). If one persuades on the order of a hundred people to donate about 10% of their income or 2% of their wealth, this will translate into thousands of human lives saved; if one persuades on the order of ten, it will translate into hundreds of lives saved. (I’ve researched the numbers entering this calculation quite extensively over the years; they are conservative estimates based on GiveWell-style research and data about the effectiveness of public outreach.)

    Perhaps, like Alec (and myself), you’re sympathetic to Deaton’s and similar critiques of this approach. Fair, but on views like Deaton’s, there are important institutional measures to advocate for. Also, proponents of the institutional critique seldom deny, for good reason, that some GiveWell-style interventions really work.

    Finally, perhaps you disagree that your (or all) fundamental philosophical work makes a much lesser expected difference than the best applied ecumenical work, or you think we’re too clueless about what kinds of philosophical work (plus dissemination) will make a greater difference, or too clueless about what measures to advocate for, etc. Even if I grant this, my worry persists: If, hypothetically, you were not clueless and knew that giving up your fundamental philosophical work would allow you to save thousands more than you otherwise would have, Singer’s Principle will likely require you to do so if you’re a threshold deontologist. This is troubling enough.

    The takeaway, perhaps, is that other forms of deontology are more promising. The more plausible ones among them are still a lot more demanding than current common-sense morality, I think, and they put some pressure on philosophers to rethink our priorities. But they avoid the “tyranny of the large numbers” built into consequentialism and threshold deontology.

37. Replying to Russ McIntosh above and also, in passing, to Milan’s latest comment:

    Hi Russ, thanks a lot for this really interesting and thoughtful set of reflections.

    I agree that there are interesting similarities between “esoteric morality” and the various examples you discuss in your comment. Yet, on reflection, I think it would be a stretch to call these practices “esoteric” in Sidgwick’s sense. And I don’t think the fact that we find these practices morally innocuous should lead us to conclude that a practice of ‘esoteric campaigning’ is necessarily similarly benign. (Though, as I said in my talk, I’m trying not to take sides on this issue here).

    You’re right that in teaching philosophy we often try not to advertise our own views to our students. You’re also right that we’ll often temporarily play the role of “spokesperson” for the view under discussion, trying to give it it’s most cogent and charitable articulation, even if we privately believe it to be false.

    Calling this a form of ‘esoteric campaigning’, however, seems to me inaccurate. The rationale and aims of what we’re doing are quite different. The reason I try to be relatively self-effacing about my own views when I teach philosophy is so as not to let the students be unduly influenced by the fact that their teacher happens to hold certain views, and to encourage them to think independently. Likewise, the reason we try to give the views we discuss, even the one’s we disagree with, their strongest possible hearing is the familiar Millian thought that our students are most likely to arrive at justified views about a topic if the relevant contenders are given a fair and charitable hearing. The aim of such pedagogical practices is *not* to get the students to endorse a set of views, or inculcate in them a behavioral code, that we believe to be false or misleading, because doing so would have optimal consequences.

    Likewise, the most common criticisms of esoteric campaigning simply don’t seem to apply here. For instance, there clearly isn’t anything ‘deceptive’ or ‘manipulative’ about these common pedagogical techniques. It is well understood by our students that in teaching we are sometimes not speaking “in our own voice” but rather acting as ventriloquists for the view we’re discussing. No-one is being misled here. And, far from trying to steer our students towards a certain view (which moreover we believe to be false), the aim is precisely to get them to think for themselves. In contrast, esoteric campaigning typically involves a deliberate element of strategic obfuscation with the goal of optimizing certain outcomes, even if this means promoting a view one does not fully endorse.

    Many of your other examples – the tennis instructor, the piano teacher, the writing coach – involve agents who employ what we might call “strategic simplification” as a pedagogical tool. Following a very complex rule is often too difficult for the beginner, so we give them a simpler rule of thumb to follow. We usually think of these rules of thumb as stepping-stones on the path towards greater mastery, even if, as you point out, some students never progress that far beyond the beginner stages.

    Again, unlike a practice of “esoteric campaigning”, which often requires some degree of mask wearing to be successful, there is usually nothing deceptive or manipulative here. Students are often well-aware that their instructors are giving them deliberately simplified rules to follow, because more complex and accurate rules would be too much to handle at first.

    Finally, there seems to me also the following important difference: The value of the knowledge that a tennis instructor imparts to you when he gives you a simplified rule of thumb, or the knowledge he withholds from you when he refrains from giving you the more accurate but more complex and cognitively demanding rule, is primarily, perhaps even wholly, *instrumental*. Knowing the rule is only valuable insofar as it enables you to perform better as a tennis player; and not being told the more complex rule only sets back your interests insofar as it harms your capacity to play tennis. In Milan’s helpful terminology, the value of “propositional knowledge” is largely a matter of what “know-how” it enables. Thus, if a tennis instructor strategically refrains from imparting certain rules to her student because she correctly believes that doing so will worsen the student’s performance, there is no loss, not even pro tanto.

    By contrast, the value of moral knowledge is not purely instrumental, but also intrinsic, I submit. Having a clear-eyed and accurate understanding of what morality requires of me matters in its own right, and not just insofar as it enables me to act better. I know that this claim would require much further defense, which I’m not prepared to give on this occasion. But suppose I’m right. Then, even if, by teaching me simplified but ultimately inaccurate moral rules you could get me to act better on the whole, there *is* a morally significant price being paid here (even if, all things considered, it might be worth paying).

38. Adriano, thanks so much for taking the time to respond in such detail to my earlier query. It’s a fascinating window into your thinking! Forgive me that I’m not able to respond in detail to what you’re written here. Let’s discuss it further over a beer once you’re back in Berkeley!

39. Before comments close, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has participated in this discussion over the past two days. It’s been extremely stimulating and I’ve learned a great deal from all your comments. I’m very grateful to Victor, Samuel, and the PEA Soup staff for hosting our conversation. My biggest thank you goes to Peter, for gamely taking part, but much more importantly, for his trailblazing and inspiring work, and for all the good it has done in the world.

40. What exactly *is* the content of the compelling mid-level principle that Singer defends in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”?

    The principle focuses on cases in which it is “in our power to prevent something bad from happening”. But what is meant in this context by ‘bad’? Linguists and semanticists all agree that terms like ‘bad’ are extremely context-sensitive, expressing different concepts in different contexts. Many moral philosophers agree: when G. H. von Wright speaks of “The Varieties of Goodness”, it is obviously plausible that, if he is right about the many varieties of goodness, there are equally many varieties of badness.

    Readers who are sympathetic to consequentialism probably read Singer as using about a Moorean notion of “badness” – as what makes the world impersonally a less good place, all things considered. But lots of other theorists – from Judith Thomson on down – have raised serious doubts about whether we really can understand a Moorean notion of “badness” of this kind.

    I suspect that most readers probably just read Singer’s principle in the light of his famous example, of the child who is in danger of drowning in a pond – interpreting it to focus on cases where it is in our power to prevent anything that is bad in *that* sort of way from happening. (Indeed, what readers like Scanlon seem to have found really compelling about Singer’s argument is just the claim that, in any case that is *exactly* like this, in all natural or non-moral properties, we are morally required to save the child, even at a non-trivial cost to ourselves.) However, since it is not 100% clear what it is for something to be “bad in *that* sort of way”, the scope of the principle is also unclear.

    Even more severe problems afflict the notion of what has “comparable moral importance”. The explanations that Singer gives just do not seem to me clear enough to help us to know what to make of this phrase….

    In the end, the only clear and compelling principle that I can find in the vicinity of Singer’s formulation is this:

    When it is in our power to prevent something that we have a reason to prevent, we have overriding reason to prevent it from happening unless we have a weightier reason to do something else instead.

    I agree that this principle is compelling. I have to confess, however, that I don’t find it particularly surprising or illuminating…