So I went to see Peter Singer at the White Dog Cafe last night.
I was pleasantly suprised by the talk, because I had gone into it thinking of him only as the author of Animal Libereration but not as an ethicist.
He has an interesting philosophy of ethics, which is based in the basic assumptions that pain and suffering are bad, and that an individual is responsible for both their actions and inactions. All of his ethical assertions seem to follow from this basic assumptions, and seem relatively reasonable when viewed from this perspective.
I was taken especially by the fact that he was almost wholly uninterested in the concept of "rights," mainly because while convenient in a discussion of a legal nature, they are not as supportable as an ethical framework.
The big suprise of the evening was a brigade of protesters in wheelchairs, whom I originally thought were protesting the White Dog Cafe's relatively wheelchair unfriendly layout (they do have an accessible entrance in the rear, however) but they just wanted us to know that Peter Singer was a nazi bioethicist and that they were not dead yet.
They were soaked, however.
Posted by illovich at June 25, 2002 10:33 AM