Even less so since he, a supposed lover of liberty, acquiesced, during the Covid emergency to what Justice Neil Gorsuch rightfully termed "The greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country." A few days ago he made himself look good by comparison by debating the high priest of animal rights and hedonistic utilitarianism, Peter Singer.
Who decides what is "Happiness" or the "Universal" or "General good" in a society? Is it true that "Rationality" is coterminous with knowing, or that rationality is the only true path to happiness and moral improvement? Or, for that matter, who exactly is it that has decided that general happiness, however defined, is the supreme moral good? Billions of Christians and Buddhists around the world, to take just two examples, with their belief in the fundamental value and importance of human suffering, might oppose that notion rather strenuously.
When Cowen challenges the difficulties of firmly establishing an idea of the common or general good in society, Singer simply changes the subject and repeats his belief in the concept.
COWEN: How do we know there is a universal good? You're selling out your fellow humans based on this belief in a universal good, which is quite abstract, right? The other smart humans you know mostly don't agree with you, I think, I hope.
SINGER: But you're using the kind of language that Bernard Williams used when he says, "Whose side are you on?" You said, "You're selling out your fellow humans," as if I owe loyalty to members of my species above loyalty to good in general, that is, to maximizing happiness and well-being for all of those affected by it.
Do you really think someone, a supposedly really smart someone, who immediately admits, in the example of the extraterrestrials he and Cowen used, the inoperability of his theory of the common good in the absence of a common metric of happiness, is incapable of seeing the enormous question it begs about his vaunted theories about the same thing when applied to the immense cultural, and therefore value diversity of the human species? I don't for a moment think he's incapable of seeing this obvious point.
The question would be, is everybody capable of that? Or even if not everybody, are we capable of getting a dominant group who do follow reason in general, universal directions, who use it to develop a more universal ethic that applies to a wider group of beings than their own kin and family and those that they're in cooperative relationships with? I think there's evidence that that is possible, and we don't yet know to what extent that can spread and start to dominate humans in future generations.
Therefore it is important for me and others in my enlightened caste to withhold a lot of details which would just get balled up in their convoluted minds, and instead keep the repeated rhetorical emphasis on vague and deeply compelling notions like increased happiness and the general good which will appeal to their less developed brains that will, in time, eventually allow them to be herded into "Our" superior castle of ethics.
These same people just ran a very successful 3-year experiment in conditioning us to accept more debasement of our individual rights in the name of at best unprovable, and at worst, flat-out false ideas of the "Common good." And given that so few rebelled and spoke out during this experiment in the name of the concrete individual human being with a name, a mortgage, and a pesky sense of his own dignity and destiny before the unfathomable complexity of creation, they'll be back for more.
Eventually the campaign to change society in the name of abstract notions of the common good engineered by those avid for power will touch on something that the one-time cheerleaders for the Covid mob and now the Trans and Climate mobs deeply cherish as part of their essential humanity and they will once again have the choice of fighting or acquiescing.
Maybe they'll simply go along with the stealthy extirpation of that thing they once cherished about their individual humanity without a fight and, after ceding to the messaging of self-anointed rational and moral clairvoyants like Peter Singer, convince themselves it was all necessary for guaranteeing the "March of progress" that will end in more happiness for all.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-cunning-tyranny-of-abstract-notions-of-the-common-good/
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