The Disingenuous Ethics
This essay was originally published by The Radical Capitalist Inserts on March 20, 2002
You are no doubt familiar with the adage, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." This adage implies that the hungry man's benefactor
a) is interested in seeing that the hungry man can care for himself, and
b) knows how to fish.
The odds, then, are against the hungry man's ever learning to feed himself, for the altruist ethic that dominates East and West considers cognitive effort a presumption and condemns self-sufficiency for the self.
It is thus the ethic of that human subspecies which does not think, yet refuses to surrender its moral and social pretensions: it is the ethic of the dilettante.
As if to illustrate this fact, the February 20 edition of the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes II" featured an interview with "bioethicist" Peter Singer of Princeton University. According to the program, Singer has made something of a splash among the dilettantes for concocting a new version of an old practical joke. It consists of a thought experiment, in which Singer asks you to imagine that you have spent most of your retirement money on an expensive automobile. You have just parked it astride a working railroad track and gotten out to stretch, when your tranquility is interrupted by a locomotive headed down the track and at your car. You can easily divert the locomotive by throwing a switch and sending it down another track, but that other track has a child from Bangladesh standing on it. The crisis is honed: do you save your car or a child's life?
According to the program, "Singer thinks that most people would want to save the child, but by the way people live their everyday lives, they are choosing to save the car."
The implication: the dangers threatening the miserable of the world are too immediate to suffer discussions of cause-and-effect, and can be averted easily and obviously by your self-sacrifice.
Singer's hypothetical is thus useless as a guide to individual conduct in the real world, but it is valuable in that it demonstrates to the honest doubter that altruism is indeed the ethic of the dilettante; the ethic of anyone who believes that he can buy, with a mixture of guilt and cash, an exemption from the responsibility to focus his intellect.
And if Singer's hypocrisy is any indication, the dilettante's conscience is of the forgiving variety. Even though the professor believes that everyone should give to the poor all of his property beyond that which he needs for "basic necessities," he admits that he gives away only 20% of his income. It seems he is waiting for the rest of us to match his pace. "Then maybe," he says, "it would be a little easier to keep going down that track."
So, for 20 cents on the dollar, Peter Singer has bought from his conscience the right to ignore, among other considerations, how wealth is created and accumulated, why some societies are able to create and accumulate wealth while others are not, and the moral value of earned luxury.
20 cents on the dollar! He isn't choosing either the car or the child. He's keying the paint job, flipping the switch, and tossing the Bangladeshi an umbrella.
And in spite of the fact that he cannot live by the so-called "ethic" he foists upon others, and in spite of the flaws that riddle his "railroad" hypothetical, he has found an audience. According to "60 Minutes II":
To understand the appeal of the "emergency" hypothetical, one must understand that the appeal of hypotheticals generally is that they help one to focus on an abstract principle by isolating and concretizing it, usually for the purpose of grasping its implications or consequences. The "emergency" hypothetical takes the same form. That is, it appears to focus the process of evaluation, but it in fact alters what is being evaluated.
Characterizing a hypothetical as a "thought experiment" is convenient when considering why the introduction of an emergency misaligns the hypothetical with reality. An experiment must test the change of only one variable, or its results will be ambiguous. The introduction of an emergency represents the change of more than one variable in the same experiment.
Imagine that you are using lab rats in a series of experiments meant to determine the safe dosage of a new drug. If the first rat dies, and you must conduct another experiment, you can change only one of the two variables you know about: the dosage of the drug or the relative health of the lab rat. If you change both and the rat lives, you don't know which changed variable was responsible for the new result. Worse, if you are malicious, you can misrepresent the effectiveness of the drug by manipulating the relative health of the rat and keeping that manipulation out of your report.
This principle applies to all honest experiments, including those that take place in the imagination. There is, for example, a popular thought experiment conducted by minors and that begins with a parent asking: "If your friends asked you to jump in a lake, would you do it?" The parent is altering a single variable; namely, the scope of the demand made by the child's friends. Nothing else - like the identity of those friends, the child's relationship to them, or the reason for the demand - is altered, because the parent wants the child to isolate and assess only the implications and consequences of conformity for conformity's sake.
But imagine a mother who says to her child: "If one of your friends were drowning, and you were the only person nearby who could swim, would you jump in the lake if your friends asked you to?" - She is changing not just the scope of the demand made by the child's friends, but also the conditions under which the demand is made. If the child replies: "Yes, I would jump in the lake," the mother does not know whether she has tested the child's love for his friends or his fear of them.
Now add a perverse twist to the experiment. Imagine that you have told your mother that your peers have been urging you to jump in a lake, but that you have resisted. Your mother has had it "up to here" with your ego, and says: "Proud of ourselves, are we? Well, suppose one of your friends were drowning and you were the only one nearby who could swim. Are you telling me you would stand there like a statue while your other friends begged you to jump in the lake?"
Your mother is not confusing herself by altering two variables in the same experiment; she is attempting to confuse you. In so doing, she is conflating, against reason, the incongruous concepts of conformity and loyalty, for the purpose of whitewashing the former with the meaning of the latter.
Now go back to Singer's hypothetical. His arbitrarily-introduced variable of imminent death for a child if the car-owner does not sacrifice his car is intended to conflate private wealth with manslaughter, for the purpose of condemning the former with the meaning of the latter.
(Without exception, the introduction of an emergency into a hypothetical intended as a guide to everyday conduct always signals an irrational conflation. In the Singer hypothetical, the everyday-life variable is anything with which you can compare the value of a human life. The value Singer applies to this variable is "most of your retirement money." The emergency variable in the hypothetical is the time allotted before action must be taken. The value Singer assigns to this variable is the time it takes a locomotive to travel from within range of vision to a point near the observer. In fact, Singer's hypothetical could have been made into two valid hypotheticals, one testing everyday values and another to test conduct in an emergency. For instance, the everyday hypothetical might have gone something like: "If you've always had your eye on an expensive automobile you can now afford, but you know it is made by the slave labor of Bangladeshi children, would you buy it anyway?" The emergency hypothetical might have been: "You say you would never step in front of an oncoming train? Well, what if a child were on the tracks?"
It isn't until the lecturer attempts to combine these two experiments into one that we cross the boundary separating honest inquiry from swindle.)
By blurring the context within which an individual is supposed to act (i.e., by blurring the causes of action), the emergency makes context per se unimportant. - And this appeals to the moral intrinsicist, who believes that actions have the same moral value in all contexts. Discovering "the answer" in a hypothetical like Singer's means he doesn't have to consider what is moral in the real world, where real luxuries are bought and real Bangladeshis suffer. When it is unimportant to consider how some of the poor acquire wealth and some of the poor stay poor, then the answer to inequity is simple: take from the lucky and give to the hapless. On this view, inquiring after context, cause, and consequence is just an excuse to ignore the obvious, moral answer.
Consider some of the many questions made meaningless by Professor Singer's hypothetical:
How is disposable income created? If everyone consistently applied the professor's "ideal," and gave away everything but that which he needed for "basic necessities," you would not have any money for charity, because you would not have a job. And you would not have a job because anyone who might have given you one is now living at the subsistence level, having given his capital to the Bangladeshis.
Is guilt necessary to charity? If you give assistance to others because it is what you want to do - because the sight of your power effecting some good gives you pleasure - then it is a luxury. But if you gave your money to the first hand that clutched for it - because letting it accumulate in your own pocket made you feel like a bad person - you will have nothing to give when the opportunity to aid a friend, a relative, or a cause presents itself.
What is the source of luxury in a free society? If a car is your luxury item, who designed it, built it, sold it? Why? On whose terms? Do car makers and car salesmen have children? Are their children's stomachs any less real because they are fed by your desires rather than your guilt?
What about the moral value of earned luxury? It may be that buying something for the pleasure of owning it is an advance you pay yourself on a future that is otherwise only plans and promises. When everything else seems tentative, an earned luxury is the certain, concrete assurance of your power to obtain good things. It may also be a reward you pay yourself for goals reached. Again, if your luxury item is a car, perhaps you have wanted it for a long time but were unable to afford it. Once you are able, it invigorates you; it shows you - in concrete terms - that life is not all restricted consumption and delayed gratification. It offers evidence to your senses that your life - the context that gives meaning to all of your values - is good.
If this is true for all individuals, then why don't the Bangladeshis acquire luxuries? Why aren't their altruists urging them to send their money to unfortunate American children? Is there a reason that the average per capita income in Bangladesh is around $1,500.00 per year, while in the United States it is more than twenty times that?
Now you are at the real crossroads. You can either ignore these questions, sell your car, and throw the proceeds into the black hole - and flatter yourself that the portion of your funds not diverted to administration, bribes, and sundries, will buy a barefoot child a bowl of porridge - or you can make the effort to ask yourself why the social system of Bangladesh does not work the way yours does, and how one might replace it with a system like yours; the effort that continues as you ask yourself whether or not it is better to create more capitalist societies, in which most individuals may obtain luxuries, or to denounce luxuries everywhere because they cannot be gotten somewhere.
Bangladesh is a democracy practiced with brutal consistency: its political parties are not limited to non-violent means of making a majority. In 2001, the losers in the national election - the mostly-Hindu supporters of the Awami League - were dislocated, robbed, and their women raped by the winners - the mostly-Muslim supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The preamble to the constitution of Bangladesh states: "Pledging that the ideals of absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah, nationalism, democracy and socialism meaning economic and social justice ... shall be fundamental principles of the Constitution."
Thus, the rights of individual Bangladeshis, including the right to own property, are denied by both democratic practice and constitutional theory. Wealth cannot be accumulated in Bangladesh because those who would create it know that it will be taken from them by force. Large-scale, long-term trade is nearly impossible, so no one benefits from the sale of goods, luxury or otherwise. As a consequence, millions die and millions more barely subsist.
These conditions will not get worse because you buy one car or a fleet of cars, or get better if you sell your house and furs. Your wealth is beside the point.
The moral implications of using self-sacrifice to rationalize intellectual inertia can be observed in the following thought experiment:
There is a concentration camp in your town. One day you walk past the camp and see, through the barbed wire, men, women, and children chained to stakes in the earth. They are otherwise unoccupied, staring blankly at your face and stamping their feet for warmth. Their teeth are rotten. Uniformed men with rifles periodically intimidate them, sometimes with beatings. They are gaunt and their tongues are swollen with thirst.
You walk away, wondering what you can do to help them. You can't get the image of the swollen tongues out of your mind, so you decide to petition the camp commander to let you inside with a pitcher of water. Days later, the commander sees the signatures you've gathered and agrees. You enter the camp grounds and walk from stake to stake, pouring water down each throat you come to, until the pitcher is dry. With regret you leave still-thirsty hundreds as they beg you for water you do not have, and you think: "If only more people gave water!"
This is immoral. And it is immoral - not because you give prisoners water to drink, but because you have fashioned a way to make the fact of their thirst an excuse to ignore the cause of their thirst. You ignore the need to find out what you can do to break their chains, because you expect your brain will be less taxed and your conscience just as flattered by a cheap rationalization. The cognitive effort required to discover the root causes of their misery is a task you will not perform because it portends too many repercussions for your world-view, your personality, the company you keep, and every other sphere of your unexamined life.
So you adopt the disingenuous ethics. You dip your pitcher in the water, leave the miserable behind the barbed wire, and chide those unlike yourself by concocting a fantasy world in which concentration camp inmates are not in chains, but standing in front of oncoming locomotives that no one but you has the good sense to redirect.
Singer's dilettantes are the chumps of a misanthrope. When Singer admits that he cannot live up to his alleged ideal, and is waiting for the rest of the West to sacrifice harder before he worries about his own hypocrisy, he is confessing that his real purpose is not to use self-sacrifice in order to help the starving, but to use the starving as a means to effect self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, self-denial, are the ends, not the means. His goal is, in his own words, "fighting human arrogance and domination of the planet."*
You can help him reach this goal by giving your money to UNICEF and Oxfam - or by burning it up in a big bonfire.
While waiting for the apocalypse, he provides his customers with their own, perverse luxury; namely, the bizarre but uncomplicated belief that your sacrifice will solve my problems.
If his so-called ethics were on a railroad track as starvation crept slowly but inexorably toward them, and the dilettante could choose to save either the ethics or a child from Bangladesh, I would like to think that he would choose to save the child.
But by the way he lives his everyday life, he is choosing to save his disingenuous ethics.
—Dan Roentsch
You are no doubt familiar with the adage, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." This adage implies that the hungry man's benefactor
a) is interested in seeing that the hungry man can care for himself, and
b) knows how to fish.
The odds, then, are against the hungry man's ever learning to feed himself, for the altruist ethic that dominates East and West considers cognitive effort a presumption and condemns self-sufficiency for the self.
It is thus the ethic of that human subspecies which does not think, yet refuses to surrender its moral and social pretensions: it is the ethic of the dilettante.
As if to illustrate this fact, the February 20 edition of the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes II" featured an interview with "bioethicist" Peter Singer of Princeton University. According to the program, Singer has made something of a splash among the dilettantes for concocting a new version of an old practical joke. It consists of a thought experiment, in which Singer asks you to imagine that you have spent most of your retirement money on an expensive automobile. You have just parked it astride a working railroad track and gotten out to stretch, when your tranquility is interrupted by a locomotive headed down the track and at your car. You can easily divert the locomotive by throwing a switch and sending it down another track, but that other track has a child from Bangladesh standing on it. The crisis is honed: do you save your car or a child's life?
According to the program, "Singer thinks that most people would want to save the child, but by the way people live their everyday lives, they are choosing to save the car."
The implication: the dangers threatening the miserable of the world are too immediate to suffer discussions of cause-and-effect, and can be averted easily and obviously by your self-sacrifice.
Singer's hypothetical is thus useless as a guide to individual conduct in the real world, but it is valuable in that it demonstrates to the honest doubter that altruism is indeed the ethic of the dilettante; the ethic of anyone who believes that he can buy, with a mixture of guilt and cash, an exemption from the responsibility to focus his intellect.
And if Singer's hypocrisy is any indication, the dilettante's conscience is of the forgiving variety. Even though the professor believes that everyone should give to the poor all of his property beyond that which he needs for "basic necessities," he admits that he gives away only 20% of his income. It seems he is waiting for the rest of us to match his pace. "Then maybe," he says, "it would be a little easier to keep going down that track."
So, for 20 cents on the dollar, Peter Singer has bought from his conscience the right to ignore, among other considerations, how wealth is created and accumulated, why some societies are able to create and accumulate wealth while others are not, and the moral value of earned luxury.
20 cents on the dollar! He isn't choosing either the car or the child. He's keying the paint job, flipping the switch, and tossing the Bangladeshi an umbrella.
And in spite of the fact that he cannot live by the so-called "ethic" he foists upon others, and in spite of the flaws that riddle his "railroad" hypothetical, he has found an audience. According to "60 Minutes II":
Singer used the example of the car and the child in an article he wrote for the New York Times; it struck a chord with readers. Two charities mentioned in the piece, UNICEF and Oxfam, received donations of about three quarters of a million dollars in response.
To understand the appeal of the "emergency" hypothetical, one must understand that the appeal of hypotheticals generally is that they help one to focus on an abstract principle by isolating and concretizing it, usually for the purpose of grasping its implications or consequences. The "emergency" hypothetical takes the same form. That is, it appears to focus the process of evaluation, but it in fact alters what is being evaluated.
Characterizing a hypothetical as a "thought experiment" is convenient when considering why the introduction of an emergency misaligns the hypothetical with reality. An experiment must test the change of only one variable, or its results will be ambiguous. The introduction of an emergency represents the change of more than one variable in the same experiment.
Imagine that you are using lab rats in a series of experiments meant to determine the safe dosage of a new drug. If the first rat dies, and you must conduct another experiment, you can change only one of the two variables you know about: the dosage of the drug or the relative health of the lab rat. If you change both and the rat lives, you don't know which changed variable was responsible for the new result. Worse, if you are malicious, you can misrepresent the effectiveness of the drug by manipulating the relative health of the rat and keeping that manipulation out of your report.
This principle applies to all honest experiments, including those that take place in the imagination. There is, for example, a popular thought experiment conducted by minors and that begins with a parent asking: "If your friends asked you to jump in a lake, would you do it?" The parent is altering a single variable; namely, the scope of the demand made by the child's friends. Nothing else - like the identity of those friends, the child's relationship to them, or the reason for the demand - is altered, because the parent wants the child to isolate and assess only the implications and consequences of conformity for conformity's sake.
But imagine a mother who says to her child: "If one of your friends were drowning, and you were the only person nearby who could swim, would you jump in the lake if your friends asked you to?" - She is changing not just the scope of the demand made by the child's friends, but also the conditions under which the demand is made. If the child replies: "Yes, I would jump in the lake," the mother does not know whether she has tested the child's love for his friends or his fear of them.
Now add a perverse twist to the experiment. Imagine that you have told your mother that your peers have been urging you to jump in a lake, but that you have resisted. Your mother has had it "up to here" with your ego, and says: "Proud of ourselves, are we? Well, suppose one of your friends were drowning and you were the only one nearby who could swim. Are you telling me you would stand there like a statue while your other friends begged you to jump in the lake?"
Your mother is not confusing herself by altering two variables in the same experiment; she is attempting to confuse you. In so doing, she is conflating, against reason, the incongruous concepts of conformity and loyalty, for the purpose of whitewashing the former with the meaning of the latter.
Now go back to Singer's hypothetical. His arbitrarily-introduced variable of imminent death for a child if the car-owner does not sacrifice his car is intended to conflate private wealth with manslaughter, for the purpose of condemning the former with the meaning of the latter.
(Without exception, the introduction of an emergency into a hypothetical intended as a guide to everyday conduct always signals an irrational conflation. In the Singer hypothetical, the everyday-life variable is anything with which you can compare the value of a human life. The value Singer applies to this variable is "most of your retirement money." The emergency variable in the hypothetical is the time allotted before action must be taken. The value Singer assigns to this variable is the time it takes a locomotive to travel from within range of vision to a point near the observer. In fact, Singer's hypothetical could have been made into two valid hypotheticals, one testing everyday values and another to test conduct in an emergency. For instance, the everyday hypothetical might have gone something like: "If you've always had your eye on an expensive automobile you can now afford, but you know it is made by the slave labor of Bangladeshi children, would you buy it anyway?" The emergency hypothetical might have been: "You say you would never step in front of an oncoming train? Well, what if a child were on the tracks?"
It isn't until the lecturer attempts to combine these two experiments into one that we cross the boundary separating honest inquiry from swindle.)
By blurring the context within which an individual is supposed to act (i.e., by blurring the causes of action), the emergency makes context per se unimportant. - And this appeals to the moral intrinsicist, who believes that actions have the same moral value in all contexts. Discovering "the answer" in a hypothetical like Singer's means he doesn't have to consider what is moral in the real world, where real luxuries are bought and real Bangladeshis suffer. When it is unimportant to consider how some of the poor acquire wealth and some of the poor stay poor, then the answer to inequity is simple: take from the lucky and give to the hapless. On this view, inquiring after context, cause, and consequence is just an excuse to ignore the obvious, moral answer.
Consider some of the many questions made meaningless by Professor Singer's hypothetical:
How is disposable income created? If everyone consistently applied the professor's "ideal," and gave away everything but that which he needed for "basic necessities," you would not have any money for charity, because you would not have a job. And you would not have a job because anyone who might have given you one is now living at the subsistence level, having given his capital to the Bangladeshis.
Is guilt necessary to charity? If you give assistance to others because it is what you want to do - because the sight of your power effecting some good gives you pleasure - then it is a luxury. But if you gave your money to the first hand that clutched for it - because letting it accumulate in your own pocket made you feel like a bad person - you will have nothing to give when the opportunity to aid a friend, a relative, or a cause presents itself.
What is the source of luxury in a free society? If a car is your luxury item, who designed it, built it, sold it? Why? On whose terms? Do car makers and car salesmen have children? Are their children's stomachs any less real because they are fed by your desires rather than your guilt?
What about the moral value of earned luxury? It may be that buying something for the pleasure of owning it is an advance you pay yourself on a future that is otherwise only plans and promises. When everything else seems tentative, an earned luxury is the certain, concrete assurance of your power to obtain good things. It may also be a reward you pay yourself for goals reached. Again, if your luxury item is a car, perhaps you have wanted it for a long time but were unable to afford it. Once you are able, it invigorates you; it shows you - in concrete terms - that life is not all restricted consumption and delayed gratification. It offers evidence to your senses that your life - the context that gives meaning to all of your values - is good.
If this is true for all individuals, then why don't the Bangladeshis acquire luxuries? Why aren't their altruists urging them to send their money to unfortunate American children? Is there a reason that the average per capita income in Bangladesh is around $1,500.00 per year, while in the United States it is more than twenty times that?
Now you are at the real crossroads. You can either ignore these questions, sell your car, and throw the proceeds into the black hole - and flatter yourself that the portion of your funds not diverted to administration, bribes, and sundries, will buy a barefoot child a bowl of porridge - or you can make the effort to ask yourself why the social system of Bangladesh does not work the way yours does, and how one might replace it with a system like yours; the effort that continues as you ask yourself whether or not it is better to create more capitalist societies, in which most individuals may obtain luxuries, or to denounce luxuries everywhere because they cannot be gotten somewhere.
Bangladesh is a democracy practiced with brutal consistency: its political parties are not limited to non-violent means of making a majority. In 2001, the losers in the national election - the mostly-Hindu supporters of the Awami League - were dislocated, robbed, and their women raped by the winners - the mostly-Muslim supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The preamble to the constitution of Bangladesh states: "Pledging that the ideals of absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah, nationalism, democracy and socialism meaning economic and social justice ... shall be fundamental principles of the Constitution."
Thus, the rights of individual Bangladeshis, including the right to own property, are denied by both democratic practice and constitutional theory. Wealth cannot be accumulated in Bangladesh because those who would create it know that it will be taken from them by force. Large-scale, long-term trade is nearly impossible, so no one benefits from the sale of goods, luxury or otherwise. As a consequence, millions die and millions more barely subsist.
These conditions will not get worse because you buy one car or a fleet of cars, or get better if you sell your house and furs. Your wealth is beside the point.
The moral implications of using self-sacrifice to rationalize intellectual inertia can be observed in the following thought experiment:
There is a concentration camp in your town. One day you walk past the camp and see, through the barbed wire, men, women, and children chained to stakes in the earth. They are otherwise unoccupied, staring blankly at your face and stamping their feet for warmth. Their teeth are rotten. Uniformed men with rifles periodically intimidate them, sometimes with beatings. They are gaunt and their tongues are swollen with thirst.
You walk away, wondering what you can do to help them. You can't get the image of the swollen tongues out of your mind, so you decide to petition the camp commander to let you inside with a pitcher of water. Days later, the commander sees the signatures you've gathered and agrees. You enter the camp grounds and walk from stake to stake, pouring water down each throat you come to, until the pitcher is dry. With regret you leave still-thirsty hundreds as they beg you for water you do not have, and you think: "If only more people gave water!"
This is immoral. And it is immoral - not because you give prisoners water to drink, but because you have fashioned a way to make the fact of their thirst an excuse to ignore the cause of their thirst. You ignore the need to find out what you can do to break their chains, because you expect your brain will be less taxed and your conscience just as flattered by a cheap rationalization. The cognitive effort required to discover the root causes of their misery is a task you will not perform because it portends too many repercussions for your world-view, your personality, the company you keep, and every other sphere of your unexamined life.
So you adopt the disingenuous ethics. You dip your pitcher in the water, leave the miserable behind the barbed wire, and chide those unlike yourself by concocting a fantasy world in which concentration camp inmates are not in chains, but standing in front of oncoming locomotives that no one but you has the good sense to redirect.
Singer's dilettantes are the chumps of a misanthrope. When Singer admits that he cannot live up to his alleged ideal, and is waiting for the rest of the West to sacrifice harder before he worries about his own hypocrisy, he is confessing that his real purpose is not to use self-sacrifice in order to help the starving, but to use the starving as a means to effect self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, self-denial, are the ends, not the means. His goal is, in his own words, "fighting human arrogance and domination of the planet."*
You can help him reach this goal by giving your money to UNICEF and Oxfam - or by burning it up in a big bonfire.
While waiting for the apocalypse, he provides his customers with their own, perverse luxury; namely, the bizarre but uncomplicated belief that your sacrifice will solve my problems.
If his so-called ethics were on a railroad track as starvation crept slowly but inexorably toward them, and the dilettante could choose to save either the ethics or a child from Bangladesh, I would like to think that he would choose to save the child.
But by the way he lives his everyday life, he is choosing to save his disingenuous ethics.
—Dan Roentsch
*"20 Questions," an interview with Peter Singer by Vance Lehmkuhl. Citypaper.net, October 7-14, 1999.
Labels: bangladesh, capitalism, charity, economics, emergency hypothetical, libertarian, oxfam, peter singer, rights, Roentsch
posted by Dan Roentsch at
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