Why Peter Singer is wrong

By -
"What is inherently impossible is not morally binding. This means that when scarce goods are involved, loving your neighbor as yourself cannot always mean loving your neighbor equally with yourself. 'Since you cannot do good to all,' wrote Augustine, 'you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.'" -- John D. Mueller, Redeeming Economics, p. 37

And note the interesting similarity of Augustine's phrasing with Hayek's!

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell11:03 PM

    What did Hayek say?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown1:41 PM

    Thank you for this post, Gene. It still causes me to scratch my head when I hear about people gush about Singer. Gene, you were gentle in your treatment to this fellow; you could just talked about how Singer endorses bestiality (so long as the animal finds it somewhat pleasurable, of course), infanticide (because newborn babies are just as valuable as, say, a cow), etc. Singer is a great example of a "New Rothbard"; someone who abstracts from our experience of morality and then relentlessly applies it everywhere. Rothbard did it with political theory and arrived at absurd conclusions - Singer is just doing it with ethics. Rationalism is alive and well, it seems =\

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ken B2:22 PM

      Singer is popular because if you (pretend to) agree with him you get to call everyone else a moral failure. That's the same heady wine most ideologues pour out, Rothbard no exception.

      Delete
  3. Samson Corwell10:57 AM

    So does this ean libertarian arguments against positive rights are valid?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more