To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need...

>ALL SUFFERING IS BAD
>YOU NEED TO BE COMPASSIONATE TO EVERYONE
Is liberalism basically Christianity?

As far as I'm aware Stirner isn't a crude egoist. He distrusts the ideas of 'self' or 'the I' which you'd assume as the basics of vanilla egoism.

Yeah. People are bringing up Stirner and Nietzsche since they were some of the earliest to diagnose this.

Virtue Ethics are the only fun ethics

In a certain sense.
It takes the morality of Christianity, abstracting it from its context (whereas Christianity had abstracted the idea of morality and law from its context), and discards the two things that had been Christianity's bane:
1. Its scientific arbitrarity, if not falsity.
2. The idea of God being good even though He plainly is not.
But without this mythological system, progressivism utterly lacks any explanation for its ethical commands (aside from the idea of progress itself, which explains why these commands are made but not why they are valid). As such, it's both obviously dubious ("you can give no reason to follow your ethics") but also seductive, being impossible to refute- their morality is claimed to be UTTERLY obvious and common sense.

All ethical theory is redundant when it comes to the refugee question. The answer to the crisis is simple and intuitive - third worlders (especially blacks and muslims) are incompatible with the western way of life and they must not be allowed to invade our countries. I don't want lazy niggers and towelheads on welfare to take over my town. Third world trash brings destruction wherever they come - there's a good reason why their countries are absolute shitholes, and contrary to the insane leftist belief, the fundamental cause of their misery isn't exploatation, colonisation or whatever but their genetical and cultural inferiority.

Just buy your used books from Oxfam jesus.

>not Egoist Virtue Ethics

>To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to think about the anal canon. The anal cannon is loaded when a funnel is placed into an asshole, and the 2nd whore pukes into it. After the ass is filled with puke, a cock then fucks it until the pressure is all built up. After the asshole has been fucked hard enough, the cock is pulled out and the anal cannon explodes! To top it all off, ass to mouth occurs, with both ladies licking off the fresh mix of vomit and ass for the ultimate anal dessert for people in need!

He's not wrong at all.

They all blindly assume they have an obligation they don't have.
He then proceeds with a false comparison.

>Rescuing a child from drowning
>somehow the same as giving money to corrupt organizations and governments

This post is characteristic of the "reactionary" short-sightedness.

He is unaware that only the insecure and weak feel threatened by those forces. And fails to realise that 1. exploitation and colonisation have happened, and are not bad things 2. that these things are intertwined with genetic and cultural inferiority, the nature-nurture dichotomy is pointless.

Kiss me.

no homo

You didn't even understand what I said. Nothing that you attached to me can be inferred from my post.

Cowardice toward the weak is cowardice at its most subtle, and, indeed, its most deadly.

Can you give an example?

...

The European refugee crisis, illegal immigration into the United States, the Ferguson effect, Islam and Sweden...

Suppose some guy is throwing kids in the pond everyday and you then rescue the kid everyday and drop from college altogether to just keep saving this kid instead of killing that one guy.

By buying Starbucks coffee, part of my money goes to saving the rain forest or some shit like that, but at the same time, Starbucks profit (profit = gains more than loses) and the bank that holds Starbucks money profits too and the guy who is destroying the rain forest profits from that bank profitting too.

Instead of starting with a bland and neutral walk to university to which nothing would happen on a normal day, let's start with a chaotic situation in which kids are drowning every five steps, which is more suiting to how things are today. And instead of imagining a world in which no kids would drown, picture that there is no such utopic scenario and also that your very walk to university would trigger a pull that would drop kids in ponds. This is how it is with the flow of our money and our actions.

I say it is much better to study and to think of actual strategies to alternatives of this situation, than to stay home and buy some kid a chance to survive at the expense of making the guy who throws kids in ponds to profit from it.

We are all responsible for our world, I don't deny that. But if I take this world on my shoulders, I won't have time to actually gather together with people and actually plot to change this scenario. A soldier is not brave for going against an armed enemy with a pocket knife, he must use of strategy to win the war. It doesn't matter to score some goal in some game, we must change the game altogether.

All those occurrences help US to stay on top, at the expense of the weak and the reactionaries.

They are examples of the cowardly and oblivious strong giving their power to the weak

The best piece of wisdom in this thread though my God man check that spelling.

Peter Singer should be made into that time the Green Lantern was some spirit of vengeance type deal and he should appear before you when you eat meat and punch you in the fucking kidneys

It's quite sad to know that people go to the institutions of higher education to be indocrinated by retards like this

Saving somebody isn't slave morality, feeling inclined to save somebody because it is 'the right thing to do' according to others is slave morality.

Nietzsche also disliked master morality, you know. The master moralist is the person demanding others do what they want (save others.) Singer is one of grand master moralists of the age, but his so-called challenges are nothing of the sort.
That's not Christian morality, that's humanist morality which is a perversion of Christian morality.
>atheists actually believe this
>We are all responsible for our world,
why

He is misleading in implying that help can and should be constant and consistent in its application. If every morning there was a new child drowning and every morning I stopped and helped him and dirtied my clothes and missed my class his scenario would likely still produce a justifiable obligation to act but it would eventually begin to appear in a different light.

But if we play his own game and push the logic of the scenario to the limit - and in doing so move closer to the reality of the countries far away - then every time I walked by the pond there would be another child drowning. Since the pond is on my way to school I would either never, even after saving 15 kids in a day, make it to school or would be forced to show up day after day wet and with shit smeared clothes.

And that is the endpoint of his logic. Be willing to leave perpetually in wet shit smeared clothes or end in a state of slavery to an increasingly meaningless - because endless - moral obligation.

What can you expect? He's a master morality preaching slave morality. I know Singer donates money, but it is only I think a 5th of his cushy ivy-league salary and I doubt the fucker has ever himself acted on his spiel.

>We are all responsible for our world,
>why

Because we respond to it. We are not omnipotent to change it at our will, while we are also not totally incapable of changing it. We can respond in several ways to the drowning child, including the response to ignore it. What we can't do is not respond to it.

He fell for the altruism meme
If saving Africa was as simple as damping your clothes then theyd already be a world superpower. That example and its comparison are so dumb that he should be expelled and decapitated.

Ps: I still wouldnt ruin my fine clothes and lose a class for a drowning child.

>do you have any obligation to rescue the child?
Fucking no. I rescue a child because my morality dictates that it's a right thing to do, not because I was obliged or forced to action. If you remove my agency from the decision, it's no longer an ethical issue

>atheists actually believe this
Nice counterargument, mi athleta Christi.

The fallacy lies in the fact that while pulling the kid out of the pond is a sure way to save his life, donating to a charity is something full of uncertainties. Contrary to what people believe, most third worlders could pull themselves out of their misery if they worked hard enough. Paying their expenses is just a temporary solution to a cultural problem that has roots too deep to be solved in less than a few centuries.

Underrated post.

>we respond
not an answer
>arguments are good because i said so
How does it feel to be a slave to the Will to System?

Beats believing in a sky daddy to appropriate shit Platonist memes.

haha memes i saw on reddit

Christianity is anti-platonist.

It's hard to convey this through a thoroughly fucked context, but in no way I'm I being a snarky asshole when I ask: please explain to me how is it not?

Really want the counterargument. I don't feel as if I have to posit Christianity as shit Platonism seeing as how everyone's accepted this since the Rationalists blew the door open on it for Nietzsche to BTFO.

What if the kid who was drowning was a nigger, and you were a nigger, why would you want you and the kid to drown instead of just the kid?

because of this

youtube.com/watch?v=9bM2r3qTeCk

Platonism is a form of humanism in the truest sense. Platonism is adopted by those that believe in memes such as 'human nature' and 'the limitless capacity of humanity' as well as a handful hermetics that tried to turn Christianity into glorified Pantheism (which is actual Platonism.)

Christianity makes nothing of human achievement and 'wisdom'. Christianity laughs at the man that thinks his 'wisdom' makes him worthy to rule above all else.

Christianity humbles all equally, while Platonism deludes. The Platonic soul certainly existed before Plato, and Neoplatonism was a heretic movement.

Well, for one thing, I think he is performing a quite radical simplification when he says that a starving child in Africa is analogous to one which is immediately in front of us, regardless of the commendable services of Oxfam and similar organizations.

But putting that aside, I'm afraid I just cannot accept the dismissal of human dignity implicit in the idea that we must all be equally wretched before we can even think about higher things. I can certainly use Singer's reasoning to say that we who are more fortunate, and therefore given a greater opportunity to appreciate the fine things, are under an obligation to use our surplus wealth on only the worthiest cultural endeavors--instead of going to a concert of your favorite pop musician, buy a print of Goya, for example, or a well-bound book that you cherish. It is quite clear to me that my being able to appreciate higher things is actually worth rather more than the precarious continuation of a few wretched lives. Singer thinks he is most humane for what he says, and in a way I suppose he is, but his idea of the proper state of humanity is as a vast throng of comfortable beasts. And I am not even sure if that state would be better than total extinction. No art and philosophy, no humanity.

>Plato
>Humanism
You're being anachronistic in the purest sense, both in this green text comparison, and the on account of equivocating "human nature" with Platonism. The latter is, indeed, a meme derived from repeated shit readings of the Rationalists. But your invoking of that meme to interpret Platonism is just an extension of that meme.

My critique merely points at the fact that the ground on which you are presenting your arguments are bad grounds. I'm saying nothing of the actual hypothetical argument originally posed.

Also, in your final statement, you're assuming the argument you've set out to prove. Coincidentally, you happen to be right that Platonism is a delusion (in fact, Plato is aware of that in the very text he lays out his claims). But that is not derived from your argument, but an actual analysis of the arguments of Platonists.

Point being: come back when you have a real argument. Also, I get the sense that you're one of those Christians who claim a distate in wisdom, but then hold their positions as true wisdom in the condescending sense. It seems ironic to me to claim that wisdom doesn't make one worthy to rule above else when intellectualy you assume your form of wisdom allows you to affectively rule over me, intellectually that is. Read Aquinas.

This guy's got it. /thread/

>arguments are good because i said so
*makes up a city to demonstrate what happens to people that don't worship me as their king because im the smarterest*

No, arguments are good because they're founded on reason, not shitty assmuptions and equivocations. Really don't know why I'm responding to you when it is evident you have never read the Republic, at least in a way that expresses the most basic philosophical discipline.

please explain how the against malaria foundation is a corrupt organization

>reason is good because i said so
>discipline is good because i said so
Did a bunch of reddits come to Veeky Forums while I was gone or is it just you?

>study and to think of actual strategies to alternatives of this situation
My god, it's so simple! Why hasn't anyone already done this?

>most third worlders could pull themselves out of their misery if they worked hard enough

You got me there, Neech. I take my road, you take yours (except your road invalidates everyone's argument, including your own).

Do you have autism or something

Oh go fuck yourself, mate.

m8 u go fuk urself m8 ya fukin cunt

Too lazy to look if anyone has said this already but sam harris has a podcast about this issue exactly.
itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/waking-up-with-sam-harris/id733163012?mt=2&i=1000374718739

Faulty link, title is Being good and doing good: a conversation with william macaskill

Less people are doing it than you think. Most people are for an easy route to clean their consciousness, that's all. Look at how easy people accept charity and how hard it is for them to actually read on history.

not many people give a substantial part of their income to effective charities

But the point is that charity is not effective at all. It's not the point. If not many people give to "effective charities", which, in my opinion, do not exist, than even less give a second thought to effective emancipatory strategies, revolutions, new ideas politically or economically that would in some way change the state of things in an actual substantial way.

Rich people work on charities all the time, it's common place to go to charity events, give a million here, a million there, but it's all for profit. That is to say, the financial help they give is less valuable than the marketing help they receive back (not to mention outright corruption). In other words, the ones in need will never gain more than the rich people who are giving to them and therefore, they'll never "catch up", they'll never sit together or something like that.

It's like a guy who gives a bit more rope to his dog's leash. The dog is not becoming more free for it. More happy momentarily, perhaps, but also less conscious that it is on a leash.

>Under the Agricultural Act of 2014 and the Cargo Preference Act of 1954, food aid must be purchased in the United States, and at least half of it must be transported on U.S.-flagged vessels. No other major donor has such onerous and outdated restrictions. . .The reasons for the current system are pretty simple. Since Food for Peace was put in place, the so-called iron triangle of special interests — shipping firms, agribusiness and development groups — has held the status quo in place

Really gets my thinking cap in place

>actually read on history
>thought to effective emancipatory strategies, revolutions, new ideas politically or economically that would in some way change

>It's like a guy who gives a bit more rope to his dog's leash. The dog is not becoming more free for it.
Yeah being dead from malaria compared to being cured is exactly like that.

Yes, precisely if you look at it locally and ahistorically, it's great. That one individual himself is saved from malaria, fantastic.

But then again, the process that brought him that charity money that cured that particular illness, is the same process that allows some people (perhaps even the same people) to sabotage his weak government to get the legislation in their favour and keep his people poor enough so they can't study, so there are no doctors or infrastructure around, so that malaria can spread and the rich people can send their doctors for charity.

It might or might not be a direct link (ie if that group of people is the one that explores that person's social situation), but if you have the power to send doctors to that guy's country, you have the power to stop others from exploiting them. You don't see charity about that. Because there can't be, it's against the very logic that makes rich people rich and poor people poor.

If you profit over someone, you are taking from that person. Don't fall for the idea that anything is actually being given in charity.

please explain how the against malaria foundation sabotages governments

Again, it might or might not be a direct link. The point is, if that foundation would work on help that government not be sabotaged (by others), they would be doing much more.

But that's impossible though, I don't expect them too. That's why we need to think.

too bad the thinking tax makes it impossible to give to charity as well
fucking EU man

did he ded?

This is a misleading analogy. A more accurate scenario would be...

>Imagine you are walking along your typical route to school and on the way you suddenly find the scene changed; before you now are millions of small pools with millions of drowning children in them. Other people are walking by as well, all quite perplexed. You observe how some of them wade into the muck and commendably save a child, but you also observe while they do so -- other children stray into other pools. Bewildered you remain transfixed and shortly you realize that many of these children were saved many times before, yet they defiantly return and return and plant themselves face first in these puddles. You realize this situation is beyond you and quickly run to gather help at your university. As you progress past the seemingly interminable and bizarre landscape dotted with drowning destitutes you notice something else. In the distance, on the very periphery of this demented scene there are is also a vastness of swarthy peoples, engaged in the process of producing more and more children seemingly with the sole intent of thrusting them towards the mire betwixt you and them. You hurry to warn them of the horror they are party to but upon finally arriving at their debauched coast you recognize the dejected faces of some of scholastic peers, regrettably they inform you that it would be fundamentally wrong to limit the doings of these folk and that even thinking to suggest such to them is a gross undermining of human decency likable to the barbarous customs of our ignorant predecessors and a proof of how far we have yet to go as a society. Panic seizes you. Your farsighted fellows inform you all is not lost, that the tribe is not without leadership and the low cost of 5$ a month is more than enough for Okonkwo and his ilk to be able pull out children and raise them on this side of the pools fulltime. Relieved you hand your wallet to the first fornicating coolie you see and return with your classmates hoping you're not late for your midday lecture.

Well, Veeky Forums?

everyone is obligated to save the child, however, if those nearest to the child are not doing their job, it is their fault, not ours

kek

You write like a pastiche of a 1930's fascist, which I guess you're already kind of aware of?

Good until "mismanagement, corruption, ignorance, etc." That's introducing unnecessary new variables into the model. You had it right first, proximity. We are a hundred times more powerful to save the child in front of us than an ocean away. Our ability to express our will decreases with distance.

In fact to actually go to those countries to save those children would directly contradict Singer, it may put us in great peril to do so.

Basically this. Also there's nothing about the edge train that stops you from saving the drowning kid.

>if Singer is so good then why doesn't he subsist on bread and water while giving away the rest of his money, hmmmm?

No you idiots, you don't have to sacrifice all of your wealth in order to save the world. It's simply not necessary. Just do your part.

>a world in which everybody gives ten percent of their income to charity is a world where about seven trillion dollars go to charity a year. Solving global poverty forever is estimated to cost about $100 billion a year for the couple-decade length of the project. That’s about two percent of the money that would suddenly become available. If charity got seven trillion dollars a year, the first year would give us enough to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, permamently save every rainforest in the world, and have enough left over to launch five or six different manned missions to Mars.

Just 10% is enough. Anything else is supererogatory.

>Just 10% is enough
that's not what Singer believes though

If the kids parents aren't willing to save him why should I?

Charity CEOs would get a nice pay rise also

Anyone who thinks you can "end world poverty" is a retard who has no understanding of human nature
There will always be people so irresponsible and helpless that despite all the help you could offer them they'll stay in poverty

I already pay tax

I'm doing good enough

>humanities scholar reduces a difficult question to such a tiny size where his tiny pool of knowledge can properly 'solve' it.

Sounds right. This one's for the garbage bin.

it's a complicated question for sure, but i feel like he isn't trying to explain how to solve the worlds problems so much as he's trying to argue that people should be altruistic towards those in need

Well he's fucking wrong. Charity is evil, you're propping up people and behavior that is not sustainable. You need to let nature takes its course otherwise you're just creating a slave-master dynamic.

don't cut yourself etc

You might feel good about yourself for saving the drowning child but that's the limit of your interaction with him. In reality he has absentee parents and such subpar socio-economic standards he is bound to follow in their footsteps perpetuating a cycle of scant and misery, full of violence and criminality. You subsidize this system, for some brief sense of validation in yourself as a good person.

>all people from unfortunate circumstances wish they were dead
sure thing

>evil
>>uses nietzschean dichotomy

you haven't got a fucking clue

Their wishes are meaningless in the face of their actuality.

What a well reasoned and substantiated refutation. Truly, I am undone.

>I AM THE GOD OF DEATH

i don't give a shit about what you think because your idiocy bleeds through the very language you use to express your pee-brained thoughts, which, by the way, can't even really be said to be yours, because they are so common-sensical and complicit in dominant power dynamics that it is no stretch to say they were pre-thought for you before you were even born.

Reddit memes are not an argument.