I can’t get over how fantastic Plato’s reasoning and writing is. Book II of the Republic is where he makes his case for the inherent worth of virtue, the idea expressed in the view I posted above for him. It’s the passage that the well-known Ring of Gyges argument is from, and it’s widely held to be one of the earliest systematic expositions of a philosophical argument.

He moves from point to point with clarity and intensity, making his case with such force that it set the tone for the whole history of moral theory to come. So many of the questions that philosophers have grappled with in the intervening 2300 years had their first hearing in this little passage: what is the meaning of justice, why ‘ought’ we to be good instead of evil, how do we come by moral knowledge, what’s the difference between the moral obligations of a person in isolation and a person in community, what’s the relationship between law and justice ….

Good, good stuff.

I can’t wait for Sophia and Josiah to be old enough to talk about this stuff with me. Of course, they’ll probably be strict utilitarianists just to rebel.

I’ll be very interested to see the class comments.

Second, Singer is not some nut-job. He’s a distinguished professor of Bioethics at Princeton.[/quote]

You of all people should know being a distinguished professor has no influence on anybody being a nut-job.

The difference between the two is in the ultimate ends. Plato was interested in what it means to be a virtuous person, and saw societal structures as a means toward creating a just person (that’s the whole driving force of his Republic) where Singer, I think, says just the opposite. He says that the individual is important only so far as their actions contribute to a maximally happy society. He takes this to the extent of saying that a person has no rights or privileges as a person until they are rationally capable (say, around 6 months old). He would be perfectly willing to let parents abandon children prior to the age of reason, as long as it didn’t cause greater unhappiness in the surrounding community. The only rights of the pre-rational person are the rights that adhere to them because of the happiness it brings others to establish those rights.

I should say two things. First, Singer’s use of happiness is subtle and sophisticated, not simply “kid has lollipop” kind of happiness. Much closer to the Greek idea of ‘full contentment and self-realization’.

Second, Singer is not some nut-job. He’s a distinguished professor of Bioethics at Princeton. The guy who attaches more rights to a full-grown ape than to a 3-month old child is a distinguished professor at Princeton.