Peter Singer

And that means we have to put ourselves in the position of others.

And when we put ourselves in the position of others, Hare said, we take on their preferences.

So we take on what it is that they want and how much they want it.

And that's what we should be maximizing, giving, satisfying their preferences.

But of course, there's a problem with that.

And that problem is that they may be misinformed about a whole lot of things in their preferences.

And they may want something and not realize that it's actually not going to be nearly as good as they imagined it was, might in fact be quite bad.

So Hare then adjusted that to say, well, it's the preferences that you would have if you were fully informed and also if you were thinking calmly, for example, and not, you know, like you might have a preference in a rage, somebody has insulted you and you want to strike them in the face and that will have terrible consequences if you do that.

But, you know, because you're in a rage, that's your preference.

And again, Hare said, well, you have to be what you would want

What if you thought calmly and rationally about this?

And actually, Sidgwick kind of anticipated all of this in the 19th century and pointed out that if you're talking about the preferences you would have if you were rational, then you have to think, well...

Is there some reason for thinking that happiness is good and that some other preferences are not good?

And Sidgwick argued that there are reasons for thinking that happiness is good and that other things that people might prefer, even intrinsically, are actually not good.

No, not good in themselves.

So that was one reason why I then shifted to a hedonistic viewpoint.

And another was, I suppose, that I moved away from that universal prescriptivism, as I said before, to the idea of a more objective ethic.

I made that change in roughly in the early teens of this century.

The most definitive statement of it is a book that I co-authored with the Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Rudyk called The Point of View of the Universe.

Again, that's that phrase from Sidgwick.