Edit to add a preface:
Shortly after publishing this post, I wrote this comment:
Thank you for the thoughts. My team was pretty uncertain about whether to post this, and I could have done some things better. It seems helpful to clarify some of my intentions behind the original post:
- Various people had mentioned that they were concerned about this in casual conversation. It felt useful to link to a specific reference point for the already- existing discussion rather than have rumours escalate or warp.
- Given Peter Singer is someone with a significant influence in EA, and with the context of recent events in our community, I expected many people in EA would want to be aware if concerns had been raised about him, provided they were appropriately hedged.
- Given those conversations and considerations happening in private, making it public was the action that felt the most integrity-driven to me at the time.
- I could have done better at framing the post. I do think it can be valuable from a community health perspective to link post to things of interest before we have all the facts in, but there’s a balance to get right here.
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This is a linkpost for https://dawnwatch.com/petersingeressay/.
There is some criticism of Singer’s approach to animal welfare; effective altruism; appropriating women’s voices; and discussion of a sexual harassment claim.
This was a hard read, and CEA/EV haven’t investigated these claims, but I thought it was of interest to the community to share.
If you’d like to talk through any concerns about this, or other similar situations, you can contact me or other members of the Community Health Team via our form.
Here are some resources that may be useful
https://www.respectatwork.gov.au/
https://leanin.org/sexual-harassment/individuals
https://www.rainn.org/
https://247sexualabusesupport.org.uk/
While Dawn claims it is "important" that Singer filed a demurrer rather than contesting factual allegations in court, no one should update on that legal strategy. Almost any rational litigant would have done the same thing given the procedural posture.
For background at the 10,000 foot level, at the very early stages of litigation, you can file a demurrer ("motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim" in federal court) claiming that even if everything in the complaint is true, it doesn't give rise to liability. You generally cannot ask the court to dismiss the case at that point because the alleged facts aren't true. The reason is that if the plaintiff's legal theory is sound, she should ordinarily have an opportunity to develop the facts through discovery (document production, depositions, etc.) before the court addresses factual issues.
Discovery is time consuming and expensive, so if you have an argument that "even if everything you say is true, there's no liability here" and an argument that "what you say isn't true," it is almost always better to present only the former argument at the demurrer stage. If you start disputing alleged facts, you're implicitly telling the court that there needs to be discovery of the facts before the legal sufficiency of the complaint can be determined. Most people would rather not pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, have to turn over documents, have to sit for a deposition, etc. Thus, they would file the demurrer even if they also think they could prove factual allegations in the complaint to be untrue.