“One way you can get people to switch their positions is to force them to recognize that the policy they’re advocating for, or the behaviors they’re chasing, are inconsistent with their stated values,” says Hoffman. He points to Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer and the effective altruism movement as a good example.
“He’s saying, ‘Look, it’s kind of ridiculous that you would go out and buy a latte when there are people across the globe starving to death, and those $4 for the latte could help,’” Hoffman says.
Put another way, if you’d readily ruin a pair of $400 shoes to jump in a lake and save a drowning child, why aren’t you willing to forgo your daily $4 latte? There’s something inconsistent about that behavior.
Ok, this is a bit of a long reply, but first I will talk about Singer, then offer my 2c on the topic as a whole.
I would caution against Singer´s style of argument, and will offer some of Singer´s publicly held philosophical viewpoints to back this up. I am lazy, so in doing this I am going reduce some lengthier arguments and quotes from a separate article about Peter Singer.
He is a preference utilitarian and has fails to discriminate context and preferences between subsets of life. For example, he believes an animal´s preference against pain is equal to a human´s preference against pain, therefore if both creatures encounter a situation where they will be exposed to pain, and a third party intervenes and can only help one of them, the third party has no greater moral responsibility to help the human nor the animal. This is different to the the generic utilitarian idea that “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” which counts all people as equal, because Singer deals in equality of preferences completely separate from the beings in question.
Peter Singer also holds the opinion that infanticide of crippled or perfectly healthy month-old babies is morally justifiable, that they do not have a right to live.
“Similarly, the preference utilitarian reason for respecting the life of a person cannot apply to a newborn baby. A newborn baby cannot see itself as a being which might or might not have a future, and so cannot have a desire to continue living … If there were to be legislation on this matter, it probably should deny a full legal right to life to babies only for a short period after birth—perhaps a month … If these conclusions seem too shocking to take seriously, it may be worth remembering that our present absolute protection of the lives of infants is a distinctively Judaeo-Christian attitude … We should certainly put very strict conditions on permissible infanticide; but these restrictions might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.”
No doubt the disabled community have an issue with this man´s philosophy, one instance where a protestor chained them self to his editorial door, because they realised if their parents believed what he believes, they would be likely be dead.
In terms of what he says about the $4 latte being able to save the children, he is able to make this jump with his viewpoint on utilitarian preferences. Discarding how much of that $4 you are actually going to get to that child in Africa after being funnelled through one of the worldwide charity organizations´ coffers (after yearly salaries, advertising, etc.), will that 25c (a generous estimation) that the child might receive be able to be planted in the ground and grow an acre of corn or wheat in his village? OR will it be taken from him and given to the leaders of his tribe for drugs, alcohol and KFC? No matter! What he is saying here that you can convince people to give up their own viewpoint by showing inconsistencies in their own arguments. Ok.
Well that is only the case if you are capable of perceiving the child drowning right in-front of you as having exactly the same level of preference for not drowning as a starving person in Africa has for gaining the financial equivalent of 100 days of lattes (let alone 25 lattes after the trickle-down rate of 25c per 4 dollars). If you set out to convince others of this, I would consider you to be either ignorant, or a morally reprehensible person.
Ok, enough of Singer. My question is, why does one want to win those family fights? I think trying to convince other people can be a complete waste of time, and the thought of trying to win family members over to my points of view sounds like an exercise in extreme futility.
This article presents the holiday argument as a chance to flex the muscles of manipulation through discourse. What is the point in arguing with someone if you can seemingly make them capitulate to your viewpoint? They might just be bored with arguing with you and will not have anything worthwhile to bring to the table. But if they just agree with you, you can go along happily for the next twelve months feeling good about yourself.
For me the whole point of the family argument is to prod someone else´s opinions with a ten foot pole just to see what interesting things flow from their mouth. Your argument does not need to convince anyone of anything, and the feeling of accomplishment after a genuine argument with someone that brings out more information to you about a certain topic clearly outweighs the feeling of forcing the hand of someone who does not know enough about a topic. And even if you have heard their viewpoint a million times, you gain more of an understanding about the level of contagion that certain version of ´truth´ has out there.
Jackinov 4 years, 1 month ago.
