Peter Singer

So you're perhaps familiar with the examples that we mostly did Derek Parfitt about the idea that for any world which has, let's say...

one billion people who are extremely happy, having wonderful lives, you could imagine a world of a much larger world in which everybody is just barely above the level at which life is worth living.

Derek Parfit called it a life of music and potatoes.

So you only get to eat potatoes.

They're okay, but you don't love them.

And you only listen to no Mozart, only music, the stuff that comes out of the elevators at you.

So, some people have said, well, if you have very large populations, then the value of the additional utility falls away in some way.

But it's not entirely clear why it falls away or what the discount rate is for that.

So I think it's better just to say, yes, you know, if happiness is good and the happiness of two people is good, then the happiness of four people, the same level of happiness is twice as good.

Yes, that's accurate.

And the underlying reason for that is that, as I briefly mentioned earlier, I think our intuitions have arisen in various ways that suggest that they are not likely to be tracking moral truth or the best impartial objective truth.

views because so our intuitions arise from various sources some of them of course are cultural that may be that we were brought up in a certain ethic that ethic may have been influenced by the religion that was dominant in our society or in our group and that is not a trustworthy source in my view I'm an atheist so I don't think any religious teachings have any authority as such some of them might be wise and some of them might not be wise and very often

They have solidified centuries ago in circumstances that are quite different from our own.

So I don't think they're something to be relied upon.

And then some people say, oh, but there are these more or less universal judgments that everybody has.

For example, that incest is wrong.

Right.

And then you say, well, yes, but that may be an evolved intuition and that's why it's universal because incestuous relationships might lead to inferior children and so maybe those groups that practiced incestuous relationships and reproduction didn't survive and so the ones that had an inhibition against that did better.

So that also...

is not, at least today, a reason against incest because we have reliable contraception and if that fails, we have abortion.