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Jayson_Virissimo comments on New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics - Less Wrong
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Right. What I should have said was:
The growth of science has led to a decline in animism. So in one sense, our sphere of concern has narrowed. But within the sphere of sentience, I think Singer and Pinker are broadly correct. Also, utopian technology makes even the weakest forms of benevolence vastly more effective. Consider, say, vaccination. Even if, pessimistically, one doesn't foresee any net growth in empathetic concern, technology increasingly makes the costs of benevolence trivial.
[Once again, I'm not addressing here the prospect of hypothetical paperclippers - just mind-reading humans with a pain-pleasure (dis)value axis.]
Would this be the same Singer who argues that there's nothing wrong with infanticide?
On (indirect) utilitarian grounds, we may make a strong case that enshrining the sanctity of life in law will lead to better consequences than legalising infanticide. So I disagree with Singer here. But I'm not sure Singer's willingness to defend infanticide as (sometimes) the lesser evil is a counterexample to the broad sweep of the generalisation of the expanding circle. We're not talking about some Iron Law of Moral Progress.
If I recall correctly Singer's defense is that it's better to kill infants than have them grow up with disabilities. The logic here relies on excluding infants and to a certain extent people with disabilities from our circle of compassion.
You may want to look at gwern's essay on the subject. By the time you finish taking into account all the counterexamples your generalization looks more like a case of cherry-picking examples.
Eugine, are you doing Peter Singer justice? What motivates Singer's position isn't a range of empathetic concern that's stunted in comparsion to people who favour the universal sanctity of human life. Rather it's a different conception of the threshold below which a life is not worth living. We find similar debates over the so-called "Logic of the Larder" for factory-farmed non-human animals: http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/salt02.htm. Actually, one may agree with Singer - both his utilitarian ethics and bleak diagnosis of some human and nonhuman lives - and still argue against his policy prescriptions on indirect utilitarian grounds. But this would take us far afield.
By this logic most of the people from the past who Singer and Pinker cite as examples of less empathic individuals aren't less empathic either. But seriously, has Singer made any effort to take into account, or even look at, the preferences of any of the people who he claims have lives that aren't worth living?
I disagree with Peter Singer here. So I'm not best placed to argue his position. But Singer is acutely sensitive to the potential risks of any notion of lives not worth living. Recall Singer lost three of his grandparents in the Holocaust. Let's just say it's not obvious that an incurable victim of, say, infantile Tay–Sachs disease, who is going do die around four years old after a chronic pain-ridden existence, is better off alive. We can't ask this question to the victim: the nature of the disorder means s/he is not cognitively competent to understand the question.
Either way, the case for the expanding circle doesn't depend on an alleged growth in empathy per se. If, as I think quite likely, we eventually enlarge our sphere of concern to the well-being of all sentience, this outcome may owe as much to the trait of high-AQ hyper-systematising as any widening or deepening compassion. By way of example, consider the work of Bill Gates in cost-effective investments in global health (vaccinations etc) and indeed in: http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Features/Future-of-Food ("the future of meat is vegan"). Not even his greatest admirers would describe Gates as unusually empathetic. But he is unusually rational - and the growth in secular scientific rationalism looks set to continue.
I'm not sure what you mean by "sensitive", it certainly doesn't stop him from being at the cutting edge pushing in that direction.
You seem to be confusing expanding the circle of beings we care for and being more efficient in providing that caring.
Cruelty-free in vitro meat can potentially replace the flesh of all sentient beings currently used for food. Yes, it's more efficient; it also makes high-tech Jainism less of a pipedream.
As I understand the common arguments for legalizing infanticide, it involves weighting the preferences of the parents and society more - not a complete discounting of the infant's preferences.
Try replacing "infanticide" (and "infant's") in that sentence with "killing Jews" or "enslaving Blacks". Would you also argue that it's not excluding Jews or Blacks from the circle of compassion?
It seems like a silly question. Practically everyone discounts the preferences of the very young. They can't vote, and below some age, are widely agreed to have practically no human rights, and are generally eligible for death on parental whim.
Well the same applies even more strongly to animals, but the people arguing for the "expanding circle of compassion" idea like to site vegetarianism as an example of this phenomenon.
Well, sure, but adult human females have preferences too, and they are quite significant ones. An "expanding circle of compassion" doesn't necessarily imply equal weights for everyone.