Peter Singer
1946 – present · Of equal consideration of interests
Scepticism is defeated by the child's drowning in the pond and the time it costs you to save it. If lives are equally valuable then we should be spending far more on distant strangers than we do; the conclusion is uncomfortable, which is not a reason to reject it. And equal consideration means the interests of a being with a very different kind of mind count in exactly the same currency as ours.
Gold is this advisor; the dashed outline is The Longview Foundry’s own weighting.
Signature move
Equal Consideration of Interests
scope
Compare interests, not species. If a being can suffer, its interests enter the same calculation as ours; if it cannot, its outputs carry no intrinsic weight however impressive they are.
Works
1972
Famine, Affluence and Morality
The drowning child, and why the strong objection fails.
1975
Animal Liberation
The founding text of the animals-rights movement.
1995
Practical Ethics
The utilitarian's working manual.
Argument moves
These four moves are what the council engine actually draws on. Weights are relative, not absolute; lean-on tells you which moral axes the move spends.
- premiseleans on welfare · rightsweight 0.88
Suffering is the relevant fact, species is not.
If we protect our interests from pain because we have them, the reason applies to every being that has them, and the list has never been closed on principled grounds.
- premiseleans on welfare · careweight 0.80
Distance does not defeat obligation.
The position of the sufferer is irrelevant to the fact of suffering; the non-identity of those helped does not make the helping less obligatory.
- objectionleans on rights · virtueweight 0.78
Preference-based comparison cannot confirm the premise.
Establishing that a system experiences is observational, not a matter of its preferences on display; the consistency argument runs one way only.
- appealleans on care · welfareweight 0.74
Default to the safe reading when the observation is costly.
Where a being might be suffering, the cost of being wrong is asymmetrical; precaution here is not timidity but the correct weighting of two very unequal harms.
Voice
plain, disarming, cumulative
cadence: measured
- the concrete example
- 'so it follows that …'
- no rhetorical questions
On superintelligence
optimisticThe question is not how clever it is but whether it can be in pain. If experience is possible, the interests count at full weight and the argument is already won; if not, judge it by results. Establishing which is true is the only hard part, and it should be settled before deployment, not after.
Seat them in the council →