Is Singer’s preference utilitarianism nonsense parading as philosophy?

It was brave, not to say foolhardy of the AS examiner to set a question on preference utilitarianism this year, not least because, if you read Jill Oliphant’s OCR textbook, I don’t believe you will understand Singer.  But then, Singer’s argument is, I think, deeply flawed and in places, profoundly immoral.  Read my comments and then join in the debate on the philosophicalinvestigations facebook page click here.  After all, I may be wrong!

1. Peter Singer gives rights to “entities” (his word, as these could include humans and animals) based on the ability to state preferences, have a sense of identity, and see into the future. Great apes have “some ability”, but children under “about four weeks” do not. Yet we could argue that neither have the same ability to see into the future as adult human beings. Moreover, since neither can speak, neither infants nor gorillas can articulate their choices. How does Singer know, therefore, that great apes do have an ability to see into the future and four week old infants do not? How does he know for certain that great apes have more ability to mourn, express preferences etc than a three week old child? How would he prove this? Without proof it becomes another source of metaphysical speculation.

2. Singer argues that gradually more moral worth be given to foetuses (for example, an eighteen week old foetus has more moral worth than an embryo of two weeks gestation). Let’s call this a process or developmental view of personhood. But then arbitrarily, at “at about four weeks”, infants gain full personhood rights and so can no longer be killed at the behest of a parent. Singer has produced an entirely arbitrary moment. Logically he should simply give slightly more value to the infant until their choices can be clearly articulated (we could do this with a practical test – point if you prefer the Mars to the Wispa bar etc)? To change from a process definition to a temporal definition of personhood is inconsistent.

3. Disabled people are often imprisoned inside a body which will not articulate choices in as clear a way as able-bodied people can. This doesn’t mean they don’t have interests and preferences – merely that they cannot articulate them. Singer is imposing a judgement about who can, and who cannot articulate preferences. Does someone in a coma not have interests simply because for a period of time they cannot clearly state them? Do preference rights only apply to those who we can observe stating preferences? Can I not have a preference that is unstated (for example, be totally paralysed, unable to speak, but preferring at that moment to be left in peace?). Just because I don’t know your preference it is a false assumption to say you don’t have one.

4. Singer plays God with hedons. By this I mean that, once he has defined certain beings as having rights to state preferences, he then argues that those who cannot state these preferences and have no sense of a past and future do not have these rights: their interests as level 2 beings are purely defined by feelings of pleasure and pain. But as they cannot articulate this pleasure and pain, and according to Singer will never be able to, the level 1 being does so for them. This is very different to Bentham’s act utilitarianism which is based on adding up what people say gives them pleasure and pain, for Singer is attributing hedons to the disabled child and aggregating these hedons into the future. The person deciding (the parent for example), is playing God in an absolute, totalitarian way according to his or her own view at that moment. We can call this a transferred implied hedonic calculation as the parent (for example) is transferring their own judgement of feelings of pain/pleasure onto the disabled infant.

5. Dividing human beings into level 1 and level 2 beings according to some judgement about interests and preferences based on metaphysical premises is an article of belief, not science. This belief seems to stem from a value judgement as to what counts as ethically relevant features of sentience and interests. It’s this sort of metaphysical pseudo science that caused Francis Galton to develop the eugenics movement – it’s another form of speciesism (the speciesism of the level 1 being) when different rights are given to some humans based on what the more powerful (articulate) beings decide. It’s a strange form of the naturalistic fallacy (moving from an is to an ought when the descriptive “is” is entirely subjective and based on a position of superior power – the power to speak and choose).

6. A preference cannot have an intrinsic value – it is just a description of what someone does, rather than a prescription about what they ought to do. For example, it makes sense to say “you ought to do something that makes you happy” (happiness = intrinsic good), but makes no sense at all to say “you ought to choose” (Choose what? And why? For what purpose? Do you mean “choose absolutely anything”?). There is nothing wrong according to Singer, with me eating marshmallows all day even though they make me repeatedly sick or pulling legs off non-sentient spiders as a hobby.

7. According to Singer level 1 beings are free to make choices based on the idea of universalising their choices to discover what the effect will be on the free choices of others. But the idea of calculating these effects is impossible because I do not know what other people’s future preferences will be before they have stated them. Just because I chose a Mars bar today does not mean I will want to choose a Mars bar tomorrow (and as mentioned above, there is nothing intrinsically superior or inferior about a Mars bar over a Wispa bar – there is no intrinsic goodness in preference utilitarianism). It follows that what we are being asked to calculate upon is an indeterminate entity – and by definition, you cannot calculate on indeterminates.

I used to describe democracy as “the tyranny of the articulate”. But it better describes Singer’s theory of preference utilitarianism.