Given the choice between rescuing a drowning relative or a total stranger in a situation of disaster, which do we go for? Does a thirty-year-old mother of four have more claim on me than my own ageing parent or unmarried sibling? It seems at first sight that a truly disinterested, truly generous love would make no fundamental differentiation between those who happen to be close to us and anyone else, so any decision about which one to give priority to would have to be made on grounds that had nothing to do with accidents of connection or instinct.
.. MacFarquhar frequently discusses the ideas of Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist whose passionate insistence on a fully rational morality based on detailed calculations of the effectiveness of specific acts and policies has had a huge influence on popular movements such as the Oxford-based Giving What We Can network. Many of the people we meet in the book have been deeply marked by Singer and his followers, who offer a lucid and practical programme for maximising the effectiveness of charitable generosity through painstaking research and unsentimental assessment of results
.. Singer and others are clear that the most effective way you might help in – say – relieving global poverty or disease may not be to work as a grassroots development economist or a medical volunteer in South Sudan, but to take a highly paid job in your own country and donate a correspondingly large sum.
.. But what if ‘goodness’ also had something to do with a quality of relation with those who receive help, not just with the long-distance solving of their problems for them? What if morality had more to do with habit and character, with the grace of receiving as well as of giving, rather than being just the sum total of right actions?
5 Books: Nigel Warburton: on Introductions to Philosophy
How should we live? What is the nature of reality? Should pro golfers be allowed to use carts? The philosophy lecturer sets us off down the road of philosophical enquiry with an intriguing reading list
Rubio: Welders make more money than philosophers
“Welders make more money than philosophers,” Mr. Rubio said. “We need more welders and less philosophers.”
American Conservative: René Girard, 1923-2015
“The author’s first draft is a self-justification.” It may either focus on a wicked hero, the writer’s scapegoat, who will be unmasked by the end of the novel; or it may have a good hero, the author’s alter ego, who will be vindicated at novel’s end. If the writer is a good one, he will see “the trashiness of it all” by the time he finishes his first draft—that it’s a “put-up job.” The experience, said Girard, shatters the vanity and pride of the writer. “And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible,” Girard said. The work is no longer a self-justification, and the characters he creates are more than good guys or bad guys.
.. His conclusion: “We must face our neighbors and declare unconditional peace. Even if we are provoked, challenged, we must give up violence once and for all.”