Peter Singer

Thank you.

I do think that there is something objective and real, although obviously a lot of our moral intuitions are evolved intuitions that have helped our ancestors to survive.

So I don't really trust those moral intuitions.

But I think that reason has something to say about ethics, and that's where the objectivity or reality comes in.

This is not a view that I've always held.

I started out as what philosophers call a non-cognitivist, so something that basically holds that there's nothing to be known, that there's no knowledge.

Initially, the view that I held that was quite popular when I was an undergraduate in the 60s was that moral judgments are expressions of our emotions, our feelings.

i moved a little bit more when i got to oxford and studied with aram hare who thought that moral judgments are prescriptions that's like commands but also that they are governed by when you think ethically by the need to make those prescriptions universalizable that is essentially that's something like the golden rule so it's something like well if you say that this is the right moral thing to do

And perhaps on this occasion, you benefit from it.

You're telling somebody not to harm you.

But if you're actually in the reverse of the roles, so you also have to stick to the same moral judgment.

Your moral judgments can't just say, well, because I'm Peter Singer, I can do this to you.

But because you're Sean Carroll, you can't do that to me.

So that brought in an element of reason.

But for Hare, it was kind of something just part of the grammar of the moral language, and that wasn't really enough for me.

So after struggling with that for a few years, I came to a view that I took from the late 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick, really, that there are rational judgments, that we are capable of looking at things from a broader point of view than our own,

He called it the point of view of the universe, although he wasn't saying that the universe is a being with a point of view.

And that produces an element of reasoning, I think, objectivity in moral judgments.

Yes, I think that's right.

The term moral realism suggests that in some way this is like part of the furniture of the universe, that we could discover it in some way as we can discover other galaxies.