A Thinking Reed

Month: April 2009

  • Call of the wild

    Here’s a good review of what sounds like a fascinating book–philosopher Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf, in which Rowlands tells the story of his relationship with his pet wolf Brenin.

    Rowlands’s unusual book — part autobiography, part philosophical discourse; harshly cynical yet somehow also inspirational — is above all a meditation on the nature of friendship, and on the human/animal bond, which is a remarkable but precarious and overlooked thing. This is not the sole province of the philosopher (Rowlands’s profession); but philosophers, from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer to Tom Regan, have a long and uncommon history of treating animals as a subject worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Rowlands’s own method is to intersperse autobiographical chapters with philosophical explorations of subjects like happiness, grief, and time, especially insofar as his life with Brenin helped him find answers. The book has much to teach us about our relationship to animals, and even more to teach us about ourselves.

    Rowlands’ other book, Animals Like Us, is an excellent introduction to animal rights.

  • Ah, sweet freedom

    I’m not sure precisely what rights the Founders intended to protect with the Second Amendment, but I’m pretty sure they don’t include the right to sell AK-47s to Mexican drug cartels.

  • The Life You Can Save 2

    In part 2 of The Life You Can Save, Singer considers some of the psychological obstacles to giving more, as well as some ways they might be overcome.

    Chapter 4 reviews some research that provides a measure of insight into our reluctance to give to strangers living in extreme poverty. For instance, people are less likely to give more generously if they

    don’t think it’s going to an identifiable individual;

    are being asked to give to foreigners rather than their compatriots, even if, impartially considered, the foreigners are far worse off (Singer compares the response to victims of Hurricane Katrina to the response to victims of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia; Americans gave $6.5 billion to victims of Katrina, which claimed 1,600 lives and gave $1.54 billion to victims of the tsunami, which killed 220,000 people);

    perceive the effort as futile (the “drop in the ocean” effect);

    responsibility is diffused–people are less likely to step forward when others are around and not doing anything;

    don’t believe that others are giving too–that is, people don’t like to fee like suckers or have their sense of fairness violated; or

    associate giving with a monetary reward–studies indicate that a society built around the “cash nexus” reduces people’s sense of connection to others in the community.

    Singer then goes on to discuss some recent theorizing about the connection between ethics and evolution and how our evolutionary history might have conditioned us to be less giving to distant strangers. Some of the psychological obstacles to giving discussed above reflect what philosophers sometimes call our moral intuitions–our reflexive judgments about right and wrong. And to some extent, evolutionary theory can shed light on these intuitions. For instance, since for most of history human beings lived in small tight-knit groups, it makes sense that people with an innate preference for the interests of members of the group (versus the interests of outsiders) would flourish.

    However, as Singer points out, intuitions that may be the legacy of our evolutionary history are subject to reasoned criticism. Preference for kith and kin and or the sense that I ought only to help those I can individually identify might have served our ancestors well, but they don’t necessarily provide sufficient moral guidance for our very different world:

    Patterns of behavior that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce may, in today’s very different circumstances, be of no benefit to us or our descendants. Even if some evolved intuition or way of acting were still conducive to our survival and reproduction, however, that would not, as Darwin himself recognized, make it right. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than those far away; but it does not justify those feelings. (pp. 60-61)

    But Singer isn’t so naive as to suppose that we are all going to be guided by impartial reason rather than feeling. In fact, following a tradition in moral philosophy that goes back to David Hume (and includes Adam Smith and Darwin himself), Singer sees feelings–or “moral sentiments”–as an important part of ethics. Contrary to some accounts of evolution as producing creatures that are purely egoistic and competitive, a more complex and accurate picture reveals a mix of self-regarding and other-regarding elements in our psychological make up. The trick is to encourage the latter and to try to bring them into closer alignment with an impartial evaluation of the interests of all people.

    Creating this “culture of giving” is the topic of chapter 5. Singer explores various ways in which a higher standard for giving away one’s wealth has become a norm in certain communities. For example, a group of philanthropists started a group several years ago called the 50% League, which was dedicated in supporting members in giving away at least half of their wealth. Much of what we consider normal or adequate is defined by our peer group, so changing the expectations of that group (or joining another one) can make a real difference in terms of how much we feel comfortable giving away.

    Along the same lines, Singer identifies some other factors that can help people give more, such as (1) being open about what we and others give; if we think others are doing it, we’re more likely to do it too; (2) linking giving with identifiable recipients, as with some programs that ask donors to “sponsor” a child in another country, even if their donations aren’t going exclusively or directly to that child; (3) “nudging” people in the right direction as some corporations have done by making giving to a charitable cause something that employees must opt out of instead of opting in to; and (4) challenging the norm of self-interest.

    The last is one of the more interesting discussions in the book so far. Singer argues that we are actually prone to describing our actions in terms of self-interest even when we’re acting generously and to over-estimate the degree to which self-interest motivates other people. One study, for instance, found that people vastly overestimated the extent to which men would oppose increased medical funding for women’s health issues. Singer also discusses an experiment which showed that students were less likely to return a lost envelope containing $100 after taking a semester of economics! Having to some degree internalized the axiom, common to so much economics, that people act purely out of self-interest, they changed their behavior accordingly! Even though there is ample evidence that people often act from motives other than self-interest, we seem intent on unmasking apparent altruism to reveal darker motives beneath. But the evidence seems to be that motives can be encouraged or discouraged, at least to some extent, by social and cultural norms.

    However, even if giving is the right thing to do, and psychological obstacles to giving more can be overcome, will it actually do any good? The next part will look at the many questions surrounding the effectiveness of giving to people in extreme poverty.

  • NRCAT statement on the torture memos

    The National Religious Campaign Against Torture is calling for a “commission of inquiry” in light of the Office of Legal Counsel memos released this week by the Obama Justice Department:

    We must, as a nation, address the fact that high-ranking officials in our government authorized torture and that agents representing our country carried out acts of torture in our name.

    Read more here.

  • An essay on atonement and theodicy

    Note: this is a re-worked version of a series of posts I did back in 2004 on the Atonement and the Problem of Evil. There were a lot of broken links among them, and, since I think the material holds up pretty well, I thought it might be worth slightly re-working the series and combining the posts into a single essay.

    If I was re-writing it from scratch I think I would have to deal explicitly with the problem of “natural” evil and how it relates to God’s work of Incarnation and Atonement. And I think I would want to address in more detail how different accounts of the Atonement can be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Comments and feedback, as always, are welcome!

    Theodicy–justifying the ways of God to man in Milton’s phrase–is an inherently presumptuous endeavor. But it also seems like a necessary one. However much we think we ought not set ourselves up as judges of God, we can’t help but wonder why God permits so much apparently pointless suffering in the world, especially that inflicted by human beings.

    Various philosophical theories have been proposed to deal with this problem, such as those that appeal to the importance of free will, but Christian theology has other resources that than can, and should, be brought to bear on it. I suggest that any answer to the problem of evil, from a Christian perspective at least, will give pride of place to the story about what God has done to defeat evil in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Christians believe that, somehow, God set the world to rights through this redemptive act.

    This is what is asserted by the doctrine of the Atonement. The problem is, although there’s broad agreement among Christians on what the Atonement accomplishes (i.e. the defeat of sin, death, and evil), there’s much less agreement on how it accomplishes it. As C.S. Lewis said, what’s indispensable from Christianity is the fact of the Atonement, not any particular theory about it.

    One way of looking at theories of the Atonement is as complementing each other rather than as mutually exclusive and as corresponding to different human needs (e.g., for forgiveness or liberation). Any language about divine action is necessarily going to be metaphorical and speculative, even if grounded in concrete experience. Each theory could then be seen as describing, or trying to picture, one aspect of what is ultimately a mystery beyond human comprehension. With that in mind, let me suggest that there are (at least) three dimensions to the Atonement that are relevant here, each corresponding roughly to one of the major traditional theories. The Atonement is

    revelatory – it shows us what God is like (this aspect corresponds roughly to Peter Abelard’s “moral exemplar” account of the Atonement);

    reconciling – it effects the forgiveness of sins and the possibility of a new relationship with God (e.g. an Anselmian “satisfaction” theory); and

    redemptive – it rescues us from the power of sin and death (“classic,” Christus Victor, or “ransom” theory)

    I’m contending that these aspects of the Atonement are all interrelated – or at least not mutually exclusive — and I separate them here solely for analytical reasons. In addition, the incarnation is an act by which God enters into solidarity with us, showing that human life–despite the world’s evil–is worth living.

    Revelation

    “Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.’” (John 14:9-10)

    Christians believe that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God revealed himself to humanity. What does this mean? One way to think of it is to say that Jesus’ life was the very life of God lived out under the conditions of human life. This is affirmed by the doctrine of the Incarnation: Jesus is true man and true God. In everything he said and did, Jesus displayed the character of God.

    What is that character? As biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, Jesus exemplified in his life and teachings a “pattern of obedience and self-giving love.” The God revealed in Jesus is one who gives from the depths of his own being to his creation, and who loves his creatures even when they’ve gone astray. Like the Good Shepherd, God seeks out the lost, the outcast, and the sinner in order to bring them back into the fold. It is a central Christian belief that the nature of God’s love is disclosed most fully in the life of Jesus, and pre-eminently in his submission to death—“even death on a cross.”

    But what does all this have to do with the problem of evil? It shows that the way we would choose to deal with evil is not necessarily the way God chooses to deal with evil. We prefer to eradicate or at least avoid sinners; God prefers to love and embrace them.

    This seems unjust, scandalous even. Why should God let evildoers off the hook? Until we recall that we’re evildoers too. That “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The God of Christianity, as revealed in Jesus, takes evil upon himself, accepts its brutal effects, and suffers under its weight, instead of retaliating, of returning evil for evil. This is what is revealed on the cross, the “crucified God” as Jurgen Moltmann put it.

    The good news, then, is that God loves sinners (that is, us) and takes the effects of sin upon himself. We, who have done evil, are loved by the creator and sustainer of the entire cosmos. This is the truth about God that Christians believe has been revealed in Jesus.

    But this doesn’t seem quite right. God may love sinners, but has he left them to their own devices, allowed sin’s effects to run rampant in the world? Has the Atonement made any difference in terms of actually putting an end to sin and evil? Yes, because God’s work in Jesus goes beyond a revelation of the divine character to include humanity’s reconciliation with God and redemption from the powers that enslave us.

    Reconciliation

    To deal with evil requires understanding and dealing with the sources of evil. Christians believe that human evil is rooted in a primal turning away from God. In rejecting God, we set the stage for all kinds of evil (cf. Romans 1). For instance, if I no longer find security in my relationship with the divine, I may try to create a sense of security by hoarding possessions. Or, if my sense of self-worth no longer comes from my status as a child of God, I might try to find it in a series of sexual conquests. The idea is that alienation from God is the root sin from which all other sins flow. The entire sordid human history of hatred, envy, domination, resentment, and conflict is simply the outworking of humanity’s rejection of our proper end, which is union with God.

    If this is the case, then the solution to human evil will have to be radical in the etymological sense – it will need to get to the root of the problem. This is precisely what Christians believe God has done in the Incarnation and Atonement (which are really two aspects of a single divine action). In Christ, God has come into the world to heal the broken relationship between God and humanity.

    This is the dimension of the Atonement captured in the famous (and controversial) “satisfaction” theory propounded by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. In a nutshell, according to Anselm, human sin has disrupted the moral order of the universe created by God; by failing to offer God the obedience that is his due, we have alienated ourselves from him. Human beings are unable to make reparation (or satisfaction) for this disruption because we already owe everything we have to God and are therefore unable to offer any kind of supererogatory obedience. Thus, Christ the God-man comes to fill this gap by living a life of perfect obedience to the Father and going to his death on the cross. This heals the breach between God and humanity and makes a new relationship possible.

    Let’s clear away a couple of common misconceptions about this account. First, it is often claimed that it paints an unflattering portrait of God the Father as a petty despot who insists that his honor be satisfied before he will save sinful humanity. Why can’t God simply overlook sin and let us off the hook? Wouldn’t this be the mark of a truly gracious God of the kind we meet in the teachings of Jesus?

    It’s important to remember that for Anselm, “honor” doesn’t mean anything like personal vanity. Living in a feudal society, Anselm would have seen honor as key pillar of a stable social order. Giving one’s lord his due was a key requirement for ensuring that the lord would fulfill his duty to maintain law and order. So, in these terms, God’s honor might better be seen as the justice that God upholds in the cosmos. For God to simply ignore sin would be to fail to treat it with the seriousness it requires. More, it would be to treat us with less than full seriousness. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “God does not ‘overlook’ sin; that would mean not taking human beings seriously as personal beings in their very culpability.” God does better than overlook sin; he does something about it.

    Another way of thinking about it is to replace the concept of honor with the biblical idea of “holiness.” Since God is completely holy no sin can exist in his presence. This is not simply a matter of God being personally offended, but is due to the very nature of things. In order for us to approach God, we have to be cleansed of our sin. By living a holy life for our sake, Christ makes it possible for us to approach God in a renewed relationship.

    The second mistake to avoid is seeing the crucifixion as something that God the Father inflicts on God the Son. This has given rise to accusations that Atonement theology provides a kind of divine sanction for child abuse. But this concern can be defused by recognizing that there is no division in wills between the Father and the Son. It is God himself, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who becomes incarnate in Jesus and willingly lives out a life of perfect obedience “even unto death on a cross.” The cross is not a punishment inflicted by the Father on the Son, but the inexorable outcome of a perfect human life being lived out under the conditions of sin.

    What God accomplishes in the life and death of Jesus, according to Christianity, is nothing less than a reconstruction of human nature. Human beings have strayed off course; Christ comes and lives human life as it was meant to be lived. And in his Resurrection he offers the definitive blow to the powers of sin and death. In doing so, he opens to us the path of genuine humanity lived in fellowship with God and each other. By uniting ourselves with Christ in faith, we can begin to be healed of our sin and set back on our proper course toward union with God. In the Atonement, God begins the process of pulling out evil by the roots.

    Redemption

    In addition to being a revelation of God’s love and a sacrifice that effects reconciliation between humanity and God, Christians have always seen the Atonement as the act whereby God redeems us from the powers of sin and evil. In ancient times, redemption meant literally to purchase someone’s freedom. According to Christianity, we are enslaved to the powers of sin and death, and on the cross God “purchases” our liberation.

    This is perhaps the point at which Christianity departs most sharply from the view of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thought sees human beings as fundamentally rational and capable of being good on their own. At most the life of Jesus may provide a kind of supreme moral example, but this is only an accidental, not essential, condition for spurring us on to virtue.

    Christianity, by contrast, sees humanity as deeply enmeshed in sins, both personal and corporate, sins from which we cannot free ourselves. Whatever else we might mean by the “principalities and powers,” the phrase at least refers to social, political, and economic systems of violence and exploitation in which we are all deeply implicated. We often benefit from unjust systems, and the structures of those systems often make it nearly impossible for us to avoid evil. For instance, a CEO may find it nearly irresistible to exploit third-world workers, not from personal greed, but because if he doesn’t take advantage of such an opportunity, his competitors will.

    And within each of us, we find a nearly irresistible pull toward sin – toward taking the easy path, the path of self rather than self-giving. St. Paul himself was no stranger to this struggle:

    I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:15-20)

    Sin here is not just making the wrong decision, but something like a sickness, an alien power that infects us and creates a fundamental orientation whereby the self is “curved in on itself” in Luther’s fine phrase. In order to be good, we need a fundamental re-orientation of the self, something that’s outside of our power to secure.

    Added to this is the fact that humanity and creation as a whole suffer from decay and ultimately death. Christian tradition has always seen a connection between sin and death, even though our modern ways of thinking treat death as completely “natural.” Death may be “natural,” but it is not part of God’s original intention for his creation.

    The Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection are the means by which God enters human history and disables the powers of sin and death, liberating us for lives of genuine freedom, which is orientation of the self toward God.

    How is this accomplished? First of all, Jesus lives a perfect life of self-giving under the conditions of sin. The “powers” are unable to defeat his intention to live in perfect obedience to the Father’s will, even unto death. Rather than lashing back and feeding the cycle of violence, Jesus takes the world’s violence onto himself, ultimately defeating the powers on the cross. The cross is a victory precisely because the powers were not able to coerce Jesus into sinning.

    The Resurrection is the vindication of Jesus’ life and the sign that the period of the powers’ dominion over human life is at an end. It is also, most dramatically, the defeat of death and the demonstration that God’s love is more powerful than the forces of decay and dissolution.

    Jesus’ Resurrection inaugurates a new age; his perfect self-offering elicits the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which becomes the agent that empowers the new community formed around him to live a life of resistance to the powers of sin and death. The Church becomes the first fruits and sign of the redeemed creation where sin and death no longer hold sway. The consummation of this redemption takes place only at the second coming, but in the “age between the ages” we can be taken up, if only partially, into the life of the Trinity, which is one of eternal blessedness and mutual self-giving love.

    Solidarity

    Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts toanswering the fundamental question of philosophy. – Albert Camus

    Camus may not have had theodicy in mind when he wrote those words, but it’s not hard to see their application to the problem of evil. At root, the question we face is whether an all-good God is justified in creating a world such as ours with its manifest suffering and evil. Is life as we know it, with its sorrows, disappointments, betrayals, and pain worth living?

    My reason for writing this series of posts has been my hunch that the best answer available to this question lies not in philosophical theories about God’s nature in the abstract (however necessary those might be), but in the concrete, historical narrative of God’s activity in history. Christians believe that God has acted in history to deal with the problem of evil. That human life if worth living is confirmed by the fact that God has gone to such great lengths to redeem it.

    According to Christian belief, God has, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, revealed his love for us, provided a means of reconciliation, and won the decisive victory over the powers of sin, evil and death in this world, beginning the process of the redemption of all creation.

    But in addition to this, God, in becoming incarnate in a human being, has entered into our human predicament. He is “Immanuel,” “God with us.” As the creeds teach, he became “fully human.” That means that God shared in human life with all its joys and its trials. Indeed, the life God chose to live was one of suffering at the hands of his enemies, betrayal and desertion by his closest friends, and finally dying the excruciating death of a criminal and blasphemer.

    This means that in all our sufferings, God is with us. He has entered into and identified with us. As philosopher Richard Swinburne argues in his book The Resurrection of God Incarnate, this would be a good thing for God to do even if the world’s evils are ultimately balanced out by its goods. This is because we often can’t see how certain evils will be taken up into or balanced by some greater good, and so we are tempted to despair. But by living a fully human life in solidarity with us, God reassures us that it is somehow worth it. He is like the general who vows never to ask his troops to do anything he wouldn’t be willing to do himself.

    So, whatever else we say about God’s atoning work, we can affirm that he found human life worth living. Obviously, he also found it in need of serious repair; that’s what the work of Incarnation and Atonement is all about. But he continues to affirm the pronouncement made in Genesis that creation is “very good” and that the lost sheep is worth saving. If God himself makes this judgment, can we do any less?

  • Links on animals and such

    A profile of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of The Face on Your Plate (via).

    A short Q&A with Peter Singer on dog shows and PETA.

    A really interesting interview with Jane Goodall in which she talks about, among other things, her “mystical experiences” in the jungle.

  • Friday metal – Kylesa-fest

    I’ve really been digging the new album Static Tensions by Georgia natives Kylesa. The band is an odd amalgam of doom metal, hardcore, and psychedelic rock. And they have two drummers!

    Here are a couple of clips from their previous album, Time Will Fuse Its Worth:

    Listen to more here.

  • The Life You Can Save 1

    I finally got my hands on a copy of Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty, courtesy of the DC city library, and have been working my way through it. Like most of what Singer writes, it’s extremely clear and accessible, filled with facts as much as philosophical arguments.

    Chapter 1     begins with what the late philosopher Robert Nozick would call an intuition-pump: a thought-experiment designed to prompt a certain moral response. Singer asks us to imagine passing by a shallow pond and seeing a drowning child in it. If we can save the child at very little cost to ourselves (muddy shoes, a ruined suit, being late to work say), isn’t that the right thing to do? Moreover, wouldn’t be be guilty of a serious wrong if we didn’t wade in and save the child?

    But this, Singer maintains, is analogous to the situation we (that is, we in the rich parts of the world) are in with respect to people elsewhere in the world who live in extreme poverty. We routinely spend money on things that are, by any reasonable definition, luxuries, especially when you consider the situation of extremely poor people living on the equivalent of $1.25 per day.

    And he’s not just talking about the ultra-rich here. He’s talking about those of us who routinely spend money on bottled water, iTunes downloads, nice vacations, dinners out, and so on. The money we spend on these luxuries could be going to help desperately poor people elsewhere in the world without any significant blow to our well-being. So, aren’t we just as guilty as we would be if we refused to pull the drowning child out of the pond?

    In chapter 2, Singer provides a more formal version of the argument:

    1. Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.

    2. If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

    3. By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

    Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong. (See pp. 15-16.)

    Singer points out (correctly, I think) that premises 1 and 2 of this argument are pretty difficult to object to. Premise 3 looks like the most controversial, and Singer will spend much of the book defending the notion that giving to aid agencies can make a difference. But, bracketing that issue for the moment, it looks like a pretty solid argument based on fairly uncontroversial premises.

    But this deceptively innocuous argument, Singer says, would have radical implications for how we live our lives. It would require us, at a minimum, to consider giving away much of what we now spend on luxuries (as defined above; we’re not just talking about giving up our private jets and jewel-encrusted Rolexes here) to agencies dedicated to helping people living in extreme poverty.

    Chapter 2 concludes with a review of traditional religious attitudes to giving charity. Traditional Christian, Jewish, and Muslim authorities, Singer says, are united in insisting on the duty of charity. To cite one example, St. Thomas Aquinas maintained that “whatever we have in ‘superabundance’–that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and foreseeable future–‘is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance’” (p. 20).

    In chapter 3, Singer considers some common objections to the argument above. Not all of these are equally compelling (e.g., an appeal to relativism, that there’s no universal moral code for everyone), but he does consider a serious challenge from libertarian philosopher Jan Narveson. Narveson says

    We are certainly responsible for evils we inflict on others, no matter where, and we owe those people compensation … Nevertheless, I have seen no plausible argument that we owe something, as a matter general duty, to those to whom we have done nothing wrong. (quoted on p. 28, ellipses in Singer’s text)

    Singer has a two-part response to this. First, he appeals to the general implausibility of libertarianism as a political philosophy which would require abolishing “all state-supported welfare schemes for those who can’t get a job or are ill or disabled, and all state-funded health care for the aged and for those who are too poor to pay for their own health insurance” (pp. 28-9). Even many libertarians balk at such conclusions and thus, implicitly at least, reject the principle that we owe nothing to those whom we haven’t previously wronged.

    But even if you do accept that principle, Singer says, there is still ample reason to believe that we have obligations to the world’s poor because we have wronged them in various ways. Singer offers the examples of overfishing by Europe, China, and Russia in African coastal waters, which has devastated the livelihood of subsistence fishermen; the extraction of oil and minerals from poor countries, which, at best, enriches a tiny minority and essentially constitutes stealing those nation’s wealth; and the rich nations’ use of our shared atmosphere as a carbon sink, leading to global warming that will disproportionately harm very poor people. Even by the strictest libertarian standards, rich nations have committed aggression in various forms against the world’s poor.

    Singer also debunks some other common myths about aid, including that the U.S. is excessively generous with foreign aid. Interestingly, surveys find that people frequently support cutting foreign aid, but they also drastically overestimate how much the U.S. actually gives in aid. For instance, one survey found that a majority of people think the U.S. gives too much in aid. However, the median respondent estimate of what the U.S. gives was 20% of the federal budget! (The actual figure is about 1%.) Meanwhile, the median preferred amount was 10%, ten times the actual amount!

    Singer considers other objections, but toward the end of the chapter bumps up against what he sees as a crucial issue: it just seems to go against human nature to extend our circle of concern beyond our immediate family and personal relations, community, and perhaps our nation. Singer takes up this question of “human nature” in part 2, which I’ll talk about in the next post.

  • He is risen!

    272px-resurreccion_prado

  • Holy Saturday

    harrowing_of_hell