A Little History of Philosophy
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A Modern Gadfly
,
Peter Singer
"You’re in a garden where you know there is a pond. There’s a
splash and some shouting. You realize that a young child has
fallen in and may be drowning. What do you do? Do you walk
by? Even if you’d promised to meet a friend and stopping would
make you late, you’d surely treat the child’s life as more impor-
tant than being on time. The pond is quite shallow, but very
muddy. You’ll ruin your best shoes if you help. But don’t expect
other people to understand if you don’t jump in. This is about
being human and valuing life. A child’s life is so much more
valuable than any pair of shoes, even a very expensive pair.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of monster. You’d
jump into the water, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. But
then you’re also probably rich enough to prevent a child in
Africa from dying of hunger or of a curable tropical disease.
That probably wouldn’t take much more than the price of the
shoes you’d be prepared to ruin by saving the child in the pond."
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The Death of God
,
Friedrich Nietzsche
‘God is dead’.
"These are the most famous words that the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote. But how
could God die? God is supposed to be immortal. Immortal
beings don’t die. They live for ever. In a way, though, that’s the
point. That’s why God’s death sounds so odd: it’s meant to.
Nietzsche was deliberately playing on the idea that God couldn’t
die. He wasn’t literally saying that God had been alive at one
time and now wasn’t; rather that belief in God had stopped
being reasonable. In his book Joyful Wisdom (1882) Nietzsche
put the line ‘God is dead’ in the mouth of a character who holds
a lantern and looks everywhere for God, but can’t find him. The
villagers think he is crazy."
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Can Computers Think?
/
Alan Turing and John Searle
"You’re sitting in a room. There is a door into the room with a
letterbox. Every now and then a piece of card with a squiggle
shape drawn on it comes through the door and drops on your
doormat. Your task is to look up the squiggle in a book that
is on the table in the room. Each squiggle is paired with
another symbol in the book. You have to find your squiggle in
the book, look at the symbol it is paired with, and then find
a bit of card with a symbol that matches it from a pack in the
room. You then carefully push that bit of card out through your
letterbox. That’s it. You do this for a while and wonder what’s
going on."
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"You are out for a walk one day and see a runaway train hurtling
down the tracks towards five workers. The driver is uncon-
scious, possibly as the result of a heart attack. If nothing is done,
all will die. The train will squash them. It’s travelling much too
fast for them to get out of the way. There is, however, one hope.
There is a fork in the tracks just before the five men, and on the
other line there is only one worker. You are close enough to
the points to flick the switch and make the train veer away
from the five and kill the single worker. Is killing this innocent
man the right thing to do? In terms of numbers it clearly is: you
save five people by killing just one. That must maximize happi-
ness. To most people this seems the right thing to do. In real life
it would be very difficult to flick that switch and watch someone
die as a result, but it would be even worse to hold back and
watch five times as many people die."
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Fairness through Ignorance
,
John Rawls
"Perhaps you’re wealthy. Perhaps you’re super-rich. But most of
us aren’t, and some people are very poor, so poor that they
spend most of their short lives hungry and sick. This doesn’t
seem fair or right – and it surely isn’t. If there were true justice
in the world no children would starve while others have so
much money that they don’t know what to do with it. Everyone
who is sick would have access to good medical treatment. The
poor of Africa wouldn’t be so much worse off than the poor in
the USA and Britain. The rich of the West wouldn’t be so many
thousand times as rich as those who through no fault of their
own were born into disadvantage. Justice is about treating
people fairly. There are people around us whose lives are filled
with good things, and others who, through no fault of their
own, get few choices about how they survive: they can’t choose
the job they do, or even the town where they live. Some people
who think about these inequalities will just say, ‘Oh well, life’s not fair’ and shrug their shoulders. These are usually the ones
who have been particularly lucky; others will spend time
thinking about how society could be better organized and
perhaps try to change it to make it fairer."
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