Sublime

Peter Singer, Australian moral philosopher

Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share.

money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.

Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), that it might in fact be the savage and not – as everyone had grown used to thinking – the modern worker who was the better off of the pair?

Human indifference to cruelty is limitless. So also are the struggles against such indifference.

Allowing Homo economicus to do as he wants, to give Ayn Rand– style freedom to let the market reign, will, by Becker’s measurements, increase welfare.

Sen is the father of the Capability Approach, a critical contribution to welfare economics which has been hugely influential since the 1980s. Instead of crude financial measures or naive hedonism, Sen argued that the highest good was the freedom to choose a life one has reason to value—to have options, and thus be able to live deliberately.

A few examples include: Greed is good. Maximizing pleasure from consumption is the goal. A billion acts of selfishness will lead to a prosperous society. The social duty of business is just to maximize its profits. There’s no such thing as society, only individuals—that was Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote. Markets are efficient; other institutions