Peter Singer

And it matters.

It's a better universe if...

Most of the people, and I should say sentient beings, not only humans, do not have the really bad states, the states that are intrinsically bad, like states of agony.

And it's good if they have the positive states of happiness, well-being, fulfillment.

So that's why we should care about them.

If we don't, if we say, for example, well, they're far away and I'm only going to care about those who are close to me,

we are using a distinction that may have some practical value.

People often say, well, I know better what they want and I can help them better.

And that, again, used to be the case very clearly before we really could know what was happening to people on the other side of the world.

But it's less so now, though it's not entirely disappeared that we know better what people want when they're close to us.

But we would be invoking this difference of distance when it's not really relevant to what is intrinsically good and bad, which are the states of consciousness that sentient beings can have.

Yes, it does if that's going to be positive in its consequences.

I mean, if they're just going to get angry with us and completely, let's say, it'll end the friendship that we have and they're not going to listen to us at all, then obviously that's not a good thing to do.

And there is this idea of somebody being a busy body and interfering in other people's business and often people do that wrongly and don't really know what's good for another person.

John Stuart Mill, a famous utilitarian, said something like that everybody is the best judge and guardian of their own interests.

I don't actually think that that's right and Mill would have opposed some of the laws that we now take for granted like laws that require people to wear seatbelts when they're in cars.

So I think that you can go too far in interfering with people but some forms of intervention are clearly justified as in the seatbelts example which tends to be done by legislation but

But if you were in a car and you noticed that the passenger was not wearing a seatbelt, nowadays, of course, you would just say, look, there's this annoying beep going on in the car.

Would you mind putting on your seatbelt?

But there were times when cars did not beep if passengers didn't wear seatbelts.