Comment by monkeycantype
2 years ago
I've enjoyed what I've read of Singer, I agree with a lot of what I read, but Utilitarianism misses something essential - we experience the world as an individual, all our eggs in this one irreplaceable basket. To feel safe, to be able to trust and cooperate, we need to feel that we have a unique spot in this great sea of people, that we uniquely matter to someone, that there are people who value and care about us specifically, that to someone we are irreplaceable. Any argument that weighs the cost of a life support machine for loved one, against a thousand vaccines for strangers is completely missing the point that it is billions of individual ties of love for specific individual people that knot this whole thing together. The commitments that we make to our loved ones, that we stick to beyond logic or hope, these are the hyphae of the great mycelium of our civilisation.
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