Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

“[W]hen The New Yorker called him out on how he can say that other people’s aging mothers should be put down like old horses but that his own should receive only the very best care in an expensive nursing home, [bioethicist Peter] Singer replied, ‘Perhaps it’s more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it is your mother.’ So my grand pronouncements apply to everyone else but not me! There’s a word for this.” Gregg Easterbrook

—Greatest Good for the Greatest NumberWashington Monthly)

Easterbrook enjoys picturing Singer as a nut, but also praises him for rejecting some of the poorly understood anti-globalization stances that have become part of a leftist mantra. “He notes, for example, that you can’t complain that nationalism is bad and then also complain that the World Trade Organization erodes national sovereignty. And he notes that the main effect of NAFTA, denounced by the anti-globalization left as a tool of corporate oligarchs, has been the creation of relatively high-paying jobs in Mexico. Half the point of NAFTA was to ship American jobs to Mexico, which is bad for American labor but great for Mexicans.”