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feotakahari“I know probably better than you, given that it’s clear half the people reblogging this have no grounding in environmental ethics (sorry to be mean but jesus christ y’all at least read aldo leopold or SOMETHING).”
There’s a certain amount of salt from ethics majors who’re mad that their discipline isn’t taken as seriously as math or physics majors, but a discipline in which you can say “read this specific author or collection of authors, and you’ll understand” is flat-out worse than a discipline in which you say “read more of the latest research.” You see the same thing in economics—an order of followers builds up around a few leaders, and their research becomes attempts to prove the point of those leaders, and the leaders are wrong and the followers become wrong-squared. (Contrast evolutionary theory, another topic that produces weird fringes, but one in which researchers are overjoyed to proclaim the ways in which they think Darwin was wrong. I maintain that evolutionary theory is better in this sense than economics is.)
Yes, I realize the hypocrisy of saying this on a blog that also proclaims itself “buddies with Bentham.” The most I can say in my defense is that I will never tell you the reason you disagree with Utilitarianism is that you haven’t read enough Bentham. Ultimately, my points are my own, and if you think I’m wrong, maybe it’s because I’m wrong.
There’s a certain amount of salt from ethics majors who’re mad that their discipline isn’t taken as seriously as math or physics majors, but a discipline in which you can say “read this specific author or collection of authors, and you’ll understand” is flat-out worse than a discipline in which you say “read more of the latest research.” You see the same thing in economics—an order of followers builds up around a few leaders, and their research becomes attempts to prove the point of those leaders, and the leaders are wrong and the followers become wrong-squared. (Contrast evolutionary theory, another topic that produces weird fringes, but one in which researchers are overjoyed to proclaim the ways in which they think Darwin was wrong. I maintain that evolutionary theory is better in this sense than economics is.)
Yes, I realize the hypocrisy of saying this on a blog that also proclaims itself “buddies with Bentham.” The most I can say in my defense is that I will never tell you the reason you disagree with Utilitarianism is that you haven’t read enough Bentham. Ultimately, my points are my own, and if you think I’m wrong, maybe it’s because I’m wrong.
