Embedded Files
Next Meeting: October 22nd, 5:30pm-7:00pm (over Zoom)
Next Meeting: October 22nd, 5:30pm-7:00pm (over Zoom)
Should you give away all of your money?
Should you give away all of your money?
Clearly, it would be evil to watch a child drown and do nothing. But aren't we watching millions of children die from starvation and malaria every day without doing anything?
What does global poverty demand of us? Some things about our world remain the same today as when Singer wrote this classic 1972 essay -- most notably, many people in the US live in luxury and amid plenty while people in other parts of the world live with far fewer resources. What, if anything, do the affluent owe to the poor? What difference does it make if we are separated by thousands of miles and/or geopolitical borders?
Note: Feel free to join even if you didn't finish the reading or only read the study guide!
Reading Guide:
Reading Guide:
Singer builds a radical conclusion from three premises that seem commonsensical.
P1. Suffering is bad. Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.
P2. If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to do it. A weaker version: if we can prevent something very bad without sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought to. (After all, if you see a child drowning, you should wade in, even if it ruins your clothes.)
P3. We can save lives by making donations to effective charities.
Conclusion: Giving to famine relief is a duty, not charity. Spending money on clothes to look stylish, instead of giving it away, is wrong.
Next meeting... 'The Madness of Reality'
Next meeting... 'The Madness of Reality'
Abstract: What happens when we encounter the real? One of the central and most appealing ideas in Iris Murdoch’s ethics is her invitation to return to reality and ‘stay’ with it. Murdoch the psychologist also knows how extremely difficult it is. But why should encountering the real feel so difficult? Not only difficult; at times—perhaps essentially?—maddening. In Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), some of the sharpest minds of the past century struggle with a loss of sanity the closer they get to its sub-atomic dimension, as if encountering the finest structure of the world loosened their grip on what they used to call reality. In this paper, the author identifies a sense of resistance that emerges when we come to a close and still encounter with a reality that we find we cannot grasp, interpreted as a felt conflict between the self and the real. Through a series of dichotomies found in Murdoch’s philosophy (real and unreal, movement and stillness, ordinary and strange) the author explores the possible reasons for this resistance, and suggests that Murdoch’s own thought, while calling for a form of intense attention to the real, is better suited at explaining forms of attention where the real is experienced through joy and the possibility of progressive understanding. The difference in affective response... has moral and metaphysical roots.
Get the reading here.
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