Monday, May 4, 2015

(PD) Critique of Singer

The current New York Review of Books has a fairly pointed critique by John Gray of Peter Singer's recent work on effective altruism. Gray comes close to affirming a form of multicriterial incrementalism as an answer to Singer's preference utilitarianism, though he doesn't develop it. I'd post the link, but this article is behind a paywall. You might try going to the library and reading it in hard copy (I think they still subscribe), or ask the Reference people if you can access it through the library site.

2 comments:

Deven Philbrick said...

I am tremendously surprised to hear that Gray is advocating for something akin to multicriterial value incrementalism, as from what I've heard of him, he is notoriously reductivist and rejects free will. I would be interested in seeing how one would go about reconciling those views with the theory. I really should just get a subscription to the New York Review of Books for myself.

Matt Silliman said...

Perhaps I overstated the case. More cautiously, what he says seems to me consistent with MVI, but he frames it more as a common intuition than a developed hypothesis.

And yes, perhaps you need your own subscription.