How to live a good life

I disagree on nearly all points with Mr Singer.

He seems to have very little experience of real life emanations of the things he so readily promotes.

Maybe once a Maverick, now rather a poster boy of how we like to think about things in an abstract and detached fashion. A synthetic, perfectionist way of viewing the human race, life and society.

I hear nothing about the subject child in the surrogacy debate. Which was appalling.

He seems to be oblivious to the existence of post traumatic growth or resilience brought on by suffering. He seems to have a narrow understanding of a meaningful life. Life is not the absence of illness or suffering. When you walk through an older forest you see all sorts of trees. Many have strange growth, broken twigs, some lie down and still manage to sprout offshoots. It protects other plants, houses animals, micro-climates for all sorts of funghi and other organisms. And we realise it’s beauty. We don’t go and take all the “faulty ones” out. We obviously have higher consciousness and more self-control, but we have not learned yet to deal well with inevitability (and merit) of adversity and decay. We rather not look.

This acceptance of the idea that genetic screening is obviously a good thing as many mothers-to-be now engage in it, is also extremely tenuous. I imagine that if all people today would have been screened for genetic proclivities at embryonic stage, many would have been chucked out. Let’s ask them whether they would have preferred not to have been born, I wonder what the majority would say. It is an intolerable synthetic and sanitised version of life and procreation. It happened to me. I have some genetic issues, brain tumours, complicates life for sure, yet I still lead a full life and have beautiful daughters. I am very glad I wasn’t chucked away with the biological waste 49 years ago.

His trust also in large-scale plans and approaches to problems? Every plan has unintended consequences. Some of them will be negative. The larger the plan, the bigger these unintended consequences will be. We saw it very clearly with the Covid-response, yet he still defends it. The mind boggles.

Finally, I cannot believe that he still advocates the merit of rule by a wise benevolent ruler. He seems to be completely oblivious about human nature and, it’s not as if we don’t have a couple of millenia of history to fall back on. No one is omniscient, there is always a lack of perspective. Also, what is benevolent? And, even if benevolence was present at a certain time it does get corrupted. Always.

The idea with democracies is not that we think people will make the wise decisions. They will make their decisions. Sometimes wise, sometimes less so, and our perspective on the outcome will inevitable change over time. The thing is that with democracy a balance is built in. With rule of law and separation of powers, we take the fallibility of the power of leaders into consideration, we allow for moments of accountability.

He isn’t an ethicist, I don’t know what he sells, maybe convenient narratives for the maker and MBA space, but definitely not ethics though.