Alina’s Reviews > Practical Ethics > Status Update

Though I'm not an utilitarian myself, I have much admiration for Bentham.

Though all interests ought to be considered equal, there are those who express higher needs and to properly attend to all interests requires that we too consider how to respond to such needs. Thus, equal consideration can still lead to differential treatment, without violating the principle of equality.

I find Singer's discussion of Sexual and Racial Difference somewhat roundabout, mainly because he will eventually want to extend the principle of equal consideration of interests to animals, in which case the differences become uncontroversial and unambiguous. I guess he needs to warm up the reader first to get to the case for animals later.

Singer wants to claim that the principle of equal consideration of interests does not rest on any factual statement about a shared quality of the interested parties. Clearly he's wrong. The factual capacity of having interests - which he would likely identify with sentience - is the one doing the work here. It is not clear either that all interests are equal, or even legitimate - some might be illusory or imposed.

Utilitarianism as a minimal ethics is an interesting approach. I believe Ord picks on a similar point when he says that everyone broadly agrees that consequences of actions are important and that, among those, pleasure and suffering are quite significant. Of course, the disagreement comes up in ethical theories that claim that this is not ALL that matters.

Perhaps I ask too much of ethics when I seek for a grounding of values. Such matters have little to do with action and more with frames of intelligibility, as articulated by a shared Mythos