The late Christopher Hitchens was never short of amusing anecdotes. Below is a brief one from 1998.
About four years ago I began to ask the teachers of my own children how it came to be that they could not tell Thomas Jefferson from Thomas the Tank Engine. In the preceding sentence, it is unclear whether I mean that the children didn’t know unless I told them, or that the teachers didn’t know unless I told them. The confusion is intentional.
Source: Christopher Hitchens, “Goodbye To All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1998, p39.
The video below, just under five minutes in length, is worthwhile watching to the end.
Just as Dan Barker in the video believes it is acceptable to rape two million women to save humanity, other utilitarians think likewise. The case reminds me of an example provided by Geoffrey Scarre in his book, Utilitarianism. (Routledge, 1996, p.164):
A tribe believes that the end of the world is nigh unless their god is fed with constant blood sacrifices. This deity happens to be of a sporting turn, and particularly enjoys seeing human beings hunted down by lions. Grimly and regretfully the tribespeople organise a weekly spectacle in a special arena. They know it is a cruel thing that they do, but it is better that some people should die to please the god than that all life should become extinct.
Scarre comments:
The sacrifice… [is] clearly justifiable…. It is a laudable aim to save the world—more laudable even than saving a few individuals, and infinitely more so than enjoying others’ death-agonies. It is not the moral judgement of the tribe that is at fault here, but their empirical beliefs.
One wonders about the mentality of those who would rape two million women, kill six million Jews, or make blood sacrifices to a god, and go to sleep at night believing that they acted morally.
Here is the tale of the ocular tree: Suppose that people are born with empty eye sockets (because a radiation-originating disease destroyed the genes for eyes)… but most, a bare majority, have eyes that fall into their sockets while they pass under the ocular trees, while others, a minority, do ... Continue reading »
