Yeah but Ahmed is a prick

Highly recommended for a dissenting view, against the greatness of Sidgwick, is from another great (and personal fave) Bernard Williams, who has a longish essay criticising Sidgwick in particular (his critiques of utilitarianism and kantianism in general are much better known)

It’s very easy to get the impression reading the more surface material that Sidgwick is universally admired, even where his reasoning may go awry. Williams corrects that misapprehension.

There’s nothing ipso facto wrong with thinking that a country to which you don’t belong should adopt a particular policy, whether it regards rights for pastafarians, the promotion of secular society, or more aptly rights for gay people. Gay people are the obvious point: I would hope that you think on some important level that Russian law should not discriminate against gay people. To be authentically in favour of democracy is to be in favour of democracy’s good, not to reify democratic process as an end in itself - and indeed one should want Russia to be democratic, which is not the case as things currently stand, but only on grounds of democratic good, not of process as an end in itself.

One reason to limit one’s criticisms of a country’s internal democratic politics is lack of understanding, and that seems to be the closest thing to what you’re shooting for here that isn’t what I would bluntly call an inauthentic pro-democracy stance. That’s a reason for being cautious, and it’s closely related to good arguments against particular interventions by outsiders in the internal affairs of a polity: a bunch of Westerners get up in arms that Indonesia, for example, introduces a law which negatively affects or appears to negatively affect gay people, but their failure to understand Indonesia’s highly complex politics means that their outraged arguments don’t even touch on what the effects of the new law actually are. Their hearts were, so to speak, “in the right place”, but in the worst way, and they only ended up making things worse.

In a sense these situations do touch on a right that members of a polity have which outsiders don’t, which is the right to “have a say” in the management of their affairs. If outsiders begin to “have a say” and the polity begins to lose some of its democratic character as a consequence, then there is a genuine concern that self-determination is at risk, not to mention the intelligent management of things by people who actually understand how things work locally. But this is not absolute, and indeed cannot be absolute, otherwise we would be left with a political world in which the only rights we gave people were those they got from the polity of which they happen to be a member, and Russia would be off the hook - there is clearly another order beyond the locally political by which people deserve morally good treatment, and outsiders to a polity cannot be denied a say in the nature of that order.

The fossil fuel companies thing is a metaphor run wild. It makes some sense in its own context as a characterisation of the way economic ‘forces’ (or ‘capital’) are able to go on operating and eating everything no matter what human beings collectively try to do about it. It does not make sense when you transfer the metaphor over to a new domain by holding onto one word (for example: “machine”) and behaving as if it continues to mean the same thing in a new context.

It isn’t a parsimonious way of thinking, it’s a rhetorical move he’s making.

I don’t really get the sneer here, he mentions population control at a time when it was widely believed that overpopulation was a looming problem

I don’t see how this works.

On one point:

The utilitarian argument construes the relevant ethical concerns, unsurprisingly, as utilitarian: the starting point doesn’t matter so long as the right results get over the line. This can be both one of utilitarianism’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses, and in this case the strength is that utilitarianism is highly accommodating of the fact that some but not all people are employees of Oxfam (or indeed any relevant charity or similar organisation). The obvious point to make is that If you’re not an employee of Oxfam then the utilitarian argument goes through, because giving to Oxfam is your means of getting those results over the line. If you are an employee of Oxfam, then perhaps you don’t need to give, because working for Oxfam is your means.

On another:

The sentence “his argument only allows for money going from non-Oxfam taxpayers to Oxfam employees” doesn’t include the important premise “the role of an Oxfam employee is to convert that money into good deeds done for the poor, for example by using it to pay for food in a famine”. The intended result is the same whether you are an employee of Oxfam or not (viz. paying for food in a famine). You want us to quibble about the wording (or rather: the wording as you have summarised it here) on grounds (which you leave implicit, so correct me if I’m wrong) that it is incoherent to say “everybody” when some people are already employees of Oxfam.

This seems to drastically confuse Singer’s actual aim (to convince the vast majority of people who are not Oxfam employees to give to Oxfam) for something not only very odd but plainly non-utilitarian, something like: “it is a deontological requirement that everybody give money to Oxfam”.

Right, his fuckin’ AGI thing, whatever, bunch of fuckin’ rubes