Peter Singer

About Peter Singer in the Guardian today:

Singer's argument, as first laid out in an essay in 1971, isn't hard to follow. "If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it ... If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing." As he added, however, the "uncontroversial appearance" of this argument is deceptive. Considerations of distance, or of how many potential rescuers there might be, are irrelevant to Singer: the child you see dying of malnutrition or a preventable disease on the foreign news has as much of a claim on you as the child in the pond. Spending your surplus income on consumer treats rather than efforts to end extreme poverty, he concludes, isn't greatly different morally from leaving the toddler to drown.

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Needless to say, this is a challenging position - "almost impossible to argue with", as the political theorist David Runciman once wrote, "but also very difficult to accept."

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Singer's own approach to ethics, a version of utilitarianism, has deep roots in the English-language tradition, but it's scarcely uncontroversial. One famous criticism, associated with Williams, is that it's implausibly demanding, making people as responsible for the things they fail to do as the things they bring about. Williams's ultimate point was highly technical; Singer, in discussing it, soon brings the argument back to practical outcomes. "I think we can set standards that limit our responsibilities to help people. But I wouldn't want to say, therefore we're only responsible for our acts and not for our omissions.

(As an aside "Things they fail to do" has strong echos for those of us brought up in the C of E:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
And there is no health in us:
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders
Book of Common Prayer

I don't know you'd find much support for that expression ('miserable offenders') nowadays - within the church or without - but, there you go, the money I spend on, say, going to watch football, could have saved lives. How can that make me anything other than a miserable offender?)

But, back to Singer in the Guardian, on why you have to include 'things undone':

If you draw a hard line there, you end up saying that really quite trivial things are wrong because they're violations of my positive responsibility not to cheat or whatever ..." He casts about for an example. "Well, we have it all over the tabloids, don't we: I charged the government £5 for watching porn movies, right? I had the opportunity to save a child's life, either by ruining my shoes in the pond or by giving some spare money I had to Oxfam, but somehow that's not as important to assessing whether I'm a decent person or not as whether I cheated the government out of £5 to watch a porn movie. And I think that's the wrong set of priorities, that sends the wrong sort of message."

This leads into issues of moral equivalence (I don't think that's quite the right term, but it'll do for the moment), and I'd like to explore, for example, fiddling expense against the death of hundreds of thousands. Shame Hazel Blears is implicated in both! But thats for another time.

MP's expenses

Everyone has a view on it. We can easily agree, no-one is going to defend the ducks' island. But, I'm wondering if its Parkinson's Law of Triviality (more time spent on discussing the colour of the bike shed than decisions on a nuclear power plant because everyone can understand the bike shed).

I'm not defending the duck's island either, or the fiddling around with the second homes and the like. But, maybe the hours spent on it - dominating the news for weeks - is out of proportion? Maybe, I don't know, global warming, poverty, injustice, maybe some of these are more important?

It'd be intesting to explore whether there is any correlation between the behaviour of MPs over expenses and how they vote. I was pleased to hear that Hilary Benn was clean over expenses - claimed a total of £140 last year, if I remember correctly. That sort of fits with my simple view of the goodies and baddies. Tony Benn is a goodie, and so to, it seems, is his son.

Technology for blogging

I'm wondering if part of the reason I've never quite felt that I've got going on blogging, is that I don't have the right tools.

I think of things to say when I'm away from the PC, and when I'm at the PC there's usually something else I ought to be doing - like I should be doing assignment monitoring at the moment.

So, perhaps I need something more portable that I can have at the meal table, by the side of my bed, on the train, in a lecture theatre, in church etc etc. Someone's just been showing me their new iPod. Is that what I need? Anyone got any recommendations? (Bearing in mind, 1: my eyesight is not brilliant, 2: that I don't like spending much money on technology...)

The End of Theory

A short trail of links starting from a tweet by Tony Hirst, led me to this article from Wired magazine last year:

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete By Chris Anderson Wired 23/6/08

I think he's suggesting that we can have so much data that we can build a 1:1 map. Maybe, but what's the point?

More or less

I enjoyed listening to More or Less over lunch just now.

Of course, while the programme says it "is devoted to the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers" I would argue that where it gets interesting it is really about information.

Today it included an item on the way that we respond, charitably, better to individual cases than big disasters. That we respond emotionally to the one-child-fallen-down-a-well but analytically, calculating, to thousands drowning in a flood (and give more for the one child). I'm not sure they considered the element of closeness - with the thousands being overseas - but the point is well made.

Maybe this is why it is so easy to say "I still believe that is was the right thing to do" after "despite, you know, that hundreds of thousands of people have died, and that is a tragedy"