Thursday, June 10, 2010

To be or not to be

Some interesting reading for the end of the week:

In a recent New York Times article, Peter Singer once again offers his debatable take on the ethics of reproduction: TH believes it is better never to have been.

Here, also, is another intriguing NYT article on the moral life of babies that I promised to post a number of weeks ago. It seems that we are, despite all of the rhetoric about rehabilitation, hardwired for retribution.

1 comment:

  1. Singer asks: Is a world with people in it better than a world with no sentient beings at all?

    Can a world in which anybody cares about questions like that be the better one? On the other hand: You do have to discount for all the boredom such a world would be, that's even a pain to think about. Except if there's still bubble wrap.... ahh

    Just goes to show that basing your philosophy on suffering as the central term leads you to boring questions and brain clog with superfluous answers. Still waiting for some serious philosophy making stupidity its central building block...

    Okay, one serious comment: weird thing that suffering is a one-sided scale from 0 to positive infinity. Even economists know better to incorporate losses of things you never had, it's called opportunity cost.

    And yeah, I could feel really bad about writing this right now, totally spoiling our all overall well-being. But I don't. You're welcome.

    ReplyDelete