LISTEN. We close Warburton's Little History today and tomorrow in CoPhi, with Peter Singer's utilitarian urgency about expanding the circle of our moral concern beyond narrow speciesism and parochial self-interest.
In The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, he says "one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage... one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?” g'r
One does want that, notwithstanding Paul Bloom's thesis that some "chosen suffering" enriches life. (The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning). A good life, a life of well-being, involves more than hedonistic self-indulgence. Of course. The effort to minimize the suffering of others must inevitably incur a measure of pain. Humanists like Vonnegut and Pullman ("there is a meaning, and it is to make things better & to work for greater good and greater wisdom") get that. Humanism is not a hedonism. Nor is it a variety of existentialism that treats meaning as a strictly personal object of manufacture. The greater wisdom does pursue the greater good... (continues)
I've seen that world poverty book around! It's crazy how our currency scales.
ReplyDelete