I’ve got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It’s a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it’s basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn’t really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it’s citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment’s googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it’s an intellectual function. Didn’t this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we’re our brothers’ keepers, and about whether or not it’s an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn’t about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody’s trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They’re trying to force people to do it through the government’s use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don’t believe even that much, but there’s also the factor of private contributions, where you’ll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne’er-do-wells. But that’s obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people’s money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.