My heart surgery cost about 1000 African children.

Oh well, I guess is should've just died. My bad.

And let’s be honest, corporate and government inaction leads to the vast majority of, to borrow their metaphor, dead children.

I mean, at a local level, you can try to be as conscientious as possible, but at the end of the day, the changes you as a consumer make, when an individual or even small collective, is a drop in the bucket compared to the real source of global change needed to resolve any of this.

Basically the article wants people who are already aware of the problems that plague the world right now to feel even more hopeless.

I look at it like being stuck on a speeding train as a passenger. Sure you could probably get the train to stop if you get every passenger to help stop the train, but the conductor is locked in the engine, with the throttle on full, complaining that the passengers aren’t doing enough, and telling them that they need to do more to slow the train down. And to make matters worse, they’ve got other people on the train convincing majorities of the passengers that either nothing is wrong, nothing can be done, or that they themselves are the sole blame holder.

You seem to be trying to argue that if an appeal to emotion is effective, it isn't a fallacy.

This is incorrect.

Fallacies are actually quite effective as far as rhetorical techniques go. The entire premise of "we should price coffees in fractions of a childs life" is blatantly an appeal to emotion, so much so that even in your attempt to defend it, you gave up on finding a way to word what it is other than calling it an appeal to emotion.

I suppose you could attempt to argue that the author is merely claiming that OTHER PEOPLE should employ the fallacy FOR THEM, but that's pretty absurd. If the author convinces some other person to actually do the appeal to emotion, they still were advocating for the use of the fallacy.

You're addressing arguments that I haven't made. Clearly, the author is making assumptions here, you can take issue with them if you wish. I'm simply pointing out that no appeal to emotion fallacy has been committed.

As I see it, the main assumptions the author makes are: A) that saving more childrens' lives is preferable to saving fewer, B) that redirecting more wealth to children's charities will save the lives of more children, and C) that using appeals to emotion can be an effective way to convince people to redirect more wealth to children's charities.

If all of these assumptions are true, then one can logically conclude that appeals to emotion can be used effectively to achieve preferable outcomes. That's the argument the author is making; you can agree or disagree with the premises, but there's no logical fallacy present there.

It’s not. Singer’s argument is fundamentally sound, this is just an application of it

Does anyone know the difference between circumspection and comportment in Heidegger's B&T? Because they are slightly phonetically similar too, I find myself not even differentiating the two terms when I read them, until I question it after the fact. Heidegger really seems to use them interchangeably, but I probably am just not familiar enough yet with the jargon to understand the difference. Could anyone please help me make sense of this distinction?

the number of children who die due to human selfishness is very large. It’s not that infinite wealth would save them, but less indifference (as expressed in part through a reduction in selfish consumerism) obviously would

So damn corny but it’s a good point

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I haven't read the proposal yet but it sounds like it would just become A Modest Proposal once we fix the value of a child's life to the amount of people its flesh would feed.

Edit: Or worse, the highest bid a cannibalistic gourmet would pay. The higher the price, the less appealing the number of children saved/sacrificed would be, since the high value would lower the number.

Okay so take the second example they provide. "Saving polar bears would cost X children's lives".

It is absolutely amazing to me that anyone could write this article, include this example, and then continue on to publish it.

They literally rebut themselves, with their own example.

Measuring every good act as a cost in children's lives does not "properly capture the externalities" or whatever hoohah term you want to use. It's literally a weaponized guilt trip to force shortsightedness.

You can follow the logic. Saving a polar bear is obviously worse than saving a child. So is saving an acre of rainforest. So is saving any individual hive of bees. So is preventing any one small impact of global warming.

But writ large, those impacts add up to a world where saving children is more and more and more expensive. Children's lives being worth 4k is not a fixed fact of the universe. It's literally market price. When the world is burning and the only place you can grow corn is northern Siberia, it won't cost us $4k to save a child any more.

Though conveniently for us of course, there will be many fewer children left to save.

Your cruise ship is not powered by the souls of screaming children. Your coffee was not heated with 100% organic child suffering.

Pushing back on individual consumers as though their morning latte is murdering children in Africa is every bit as sick and stupid as blaming individual commuters for global warming. The systems that are ruining the world are not vulnerable to individual action - by design!

No amount of you ordering less coffee will make manipulating impovershed countries less appealing to governments and corporations.

This article is just another in a long list of attempts to pass the buck - to argue that you may not have ruined the world but by golly if you are drinking a coffee right now, you can't complain about a major corporation making children sew t-shirts for pennies!

Classic blame the consumer rather than blame the producer nonsense.

> Really. It corrects this gap?

Perhaps the author was writing somewhat colloquially.

Two can play at that your game:

> The author is presuming a problem, in terms of child's lives that could be saved. There's no indication that a single child's life could have been saved and wasn't due to someone not donating to charity, at least in terms of quantifiable evidence.

Really? There's literally zero evidence in existence in the world? Not just none that you know of, but at all? How did you determine this to be perfectly true?

> So we're riding right past the part where we justify the metric of "child lives not saved" and presuming that children are dying FOR ONLY THE REASON OF people not giving money to the right sources.

When you say "we" are you referring to me? Because I am not engaged in hyperbolic presumption, and I suspect I am not the only one.

> Couching things in this nature, is appeal to emotion. Literally, "think of the children!"

Would that be so bad? If you were in need of help (now, or when you were a child), would you not prefer that some of your fellow humans came to your aid?

How about this: what's your stance on vaccines, and explicitly, what is your reasoning for that stance?

> As I see it, anyway.

Why should we respect this when you didn't respect the qualifying language in the author's piece (did you even see it)?

It is that, but saying it is "just" that is misinformative.

> In philosophy, we call this a false dichotomy.

Technically, you are calling it that. You do not know what other people think.

I would like to hear some opinions on The Republic and of the substance of the Republic. Socrates started debating with a rich man. And the issue that came up was is it better to be a good person or better to be a seeming good person but take every opportunity to cheat and get ahead. Basically the premise of the rich man was you want to seem good to make friends, but also be realistic ("be evil") to get ahead. Whereas Socrates argues that you should be good, and from what I remember he then justifies it by saying "good people" know both good and evil. Whereas an evil person only knows evil. It's been some time for the exact arguments, plainly.
But when I attempted to read it again a couple years ago, I was feeling the rich man was making better points than Socrates and I actually didn't get past the first 20 pages because of it. Are you able to flesh out the argument of particularly Socrates better than myself to kind of defend him?
And also, if you don't lie to yourself, I think a lot of people definitely try to "seem to be good" to make friends, it's one of the most natural things we do. And when opportunities arise, we make crude survival based decisions, like "that's a pretty girl" I'm going to try to go out with her. Or "that's a pretty girl, oh she is limping? I think I'll pass, let's not tell my conscious self I just made that really cold analysis." Once we have the Mighty Seat of "might makes right" equation, I think our feeble minds take it much more times than we suppose, conscious of it or not.
Maybe there is a spiritual element to "doing what we would want others to do unto us" - which is essentially what Socrates defines as "good people" Anyhow, I would like the Socrates part of the argument to win, but I want to be cautious of using the childish argument, of "because it's good" and "good beats bad", and so Socrates has a better argument.
Because right now, I think I'm more in the camp of the rich man, because I think it is the more realistic conservative opinion. I might try behave differently or "properly" because it's what I prefer, but maybe I'm not being very rational about that. If you happen to support the rich man, then, I can't blame you.

I said that it is ALMOST impossible.

"Blow up the earth", whoever has the power to do this will most likely not do it to destroy the entire human race and end suffering, in fact they will want to generate more suffering. Those who have this power are the powerful and they don't want it.

If you're talking about everyone stopping having kids, it's also almost impossible. People will continue to have children for a variety of reasons. The only way for everyone to stop is to force them not to.

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What in the utilitarian....

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