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Why It's OK: The Ethics and Aesthetics of How We Live
Why It's OK to Mind Your Own Business
Every year, millions of students in the United States and around the world graduate from high school and college. Commencement speakers—often distilling the hopes of parents and four years of messaging from educators—tell graduates that they must do something grand, ambitious, or far-reaching. Change the world. Disrupt the status quo. Every problem in the world is your problem, awaiting your solutions.
This book is an antidote to that advice. It provides a clear-eyed assessment of three types of people who tend to believe and promote a commencement speaker’s view of the the moralizer, who imposes unnecessary social costs by inappropriately enforcing morality; the busybody, who thinks the stranger and close friend merit equal shares of our benevolent attention; and the pure hearted, who equates acting with good intentions with just outcomes. The book also provides a bold defense of living an ordinary life by putting down roots, creating a good home, and living in solitude. A quiet, peaceful life can be generous and noble. It’s OK to mind your own business.
This book is an antidote to that advice. It provides a clear-eyed assessment of three types of people who tend to believe and promote a commencement speaker’s view of the the moralizer, who imposes unnecessary social costs by inappropriately enforcing morality; the busybody, who thinks the stranger and close friend merit equal shares of our benevolent attention; and the pure hearted, who equates acting with good intentions with just outcomes. The book also provides a bold defense of living an ordinary life by putting down roots, creating a good home, and living in solitude. A quiet, peaceful life can be generous and noble. It’s OK to mind your own business.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
182 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 30, 2023
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April 6, 2024
This is a short, easy to read book attempting to argue why minding your own business is fine. Tosi first starts by laying out the difference between "commencement speech morality", where you should constantly try to think big and make the world a better place (as commencement speakers will tell students to do), and "ordinary morality" (the position he is arguing for), where you mind your own business.
Problems with Commencement Speech Morality
The first half of the book discusses issues with practicing "commencement speech morality", which is similar to utilitarianism. For instance, he goes over Peter Singer's drowning child thought experiment. This asks you to imagine a situation where in front you there is a drowning child, and you can jump in to save the child even though it would ruin our expensive suit we're wearing. Almost everyone would think that we are morally obligated to save a child drowning in a pond in front of us, because the life of the child is simply worth more than the money we paid for the suit. While the author agrees that you should save the child, he objects that Singer takes this too far in demanding we donate a significant amount of money to charity, which Singer says is a way we can give comparatively trivial amounts of money to save countless lives across the world. To object to Singer, Tosi gives the thought experiment of being at pool party, where the adults are inattentive and thus their children keep jumping in the pool and start drowning. You see this and obviously go save these children. Because of this, the adults call their friends and tell them to bring their kids, and this cycle continues on indefinitely where you are constantly saving others kids. The author asks how long this should go on, because it surely seems wrong to expect that you spend your whole life at this swimming pool saving children, since while saving children is a noble thing, it seems that taken to an extreme it is too demanding to ask on you as an individual. I thought this objection was interesting as it seems to point out the problem of Singer's morality, which is that taken to it's extreme, seems to necessitate everyone living their lives as moral saints, not spending one cent more than we need on food to donate it or spending all our free time rescuing children. With this, Tosi sets some interesting boundaries for how good we should be: we should surely save one drowning child in front of us for minimal cost to ourselves, but doing this every second of our life seems to be too much.
This was probably the only part of the book I found interesting, the rest of the review will mostly be criticism. First off, in the pool example made up by the authors, this part where the adults call more of their friends because there is a lifeguard is pretty odd. It carries the implication that when people do good things, other people see this and do bad things because of it. This is a very silly to imply, especially since that part is never brought up in the analysis of the hypothetical. A better hypothetical would probably just be to leave this part out, and just make it an infinitely large lake of drowning children, asking what one should do here.
Moralizers and Busybodies
The first 2 chapters are on the "moralizer" and "busybody", which the author says are bad because they wrongly interject themselves into others business trying to push their unreasonably high standards on others. He gives some reasons why this is bad with examples. For instance, a doctor giving you health advice is fine, but the author thinks a random person on the street stopping you to give their health advice is an annoying moralizer, even if what they say is true, or even if they happen to be a doctor. This is because our role in society and some level of context plays part in how much we can moralize. Another example given is if you hear your coworker is lying to their wife on the phone. The author thinks that because you don't know enough about their relationship, interjecting here would make you a moralizing busybody since this is between them. However, he says that there are obvious examples where stepping in is permissible, like "those that protect people from serious and immediate harm, for instance".
The main issue I had with the "moralizer" and "busybody" chapters was that the author seems to see these sort of boundaries laid out above, between the drowning child and pool hypotheticals. But the book doesn't offer much in navigating between these boundaries, which is stated by the author: "we don't have a general theory of what features of a situation grant someone standing to apply their moral judgements to others". But as above, he does give an examples of times when moralizing goes too far. But in my opinion, the problem is he only points out cultural ideas of what moralizing and busybody are, rather than philosophical ones. Basically, he doesn't really make a distinction between philosophical intuitions, like the drowning child example, and cultural ones, like that I don't like that someone on the street tells me to eat healthy. The issue is that there does seem to be a difference between the two. Saving another persons life at little cost to yourself might be something we agree should be morally obligatory, while not liking someone on the street telling you smoking is bad is likely a cultural attitude which might even change in the next few years or so.
Basically, the book never properly makes a distinction between cultural attitudes and philosophy. We can take an example of moralizing that might differ due to cultural change over time to see the problem. The author gives the example of you seeing a mother unnecessarily yelling at her child at a grocery store as being an inappropriate time to butt in, since we're not part of their relationship. But lets change this slightly, and have it so you witness a mother unnecessarily and very violently beating her child. At some point in history 200 years ago this might have been seen as normal parental behavior. If the author lived in this point in history, he would argue that it would be wrong to step in here, because we don't know enough about the context, we shouldn't think we know more about parenting than the mother, we shouldn't put our own moral judgement on others, etc., and those activists who step in here are moralizers and busybodies. However, luckily for us this cultural attitude has changed, and in present day we would find those who step in to this situation as the top post on reddit for the day with people calling them a hero. This example makes it obvious these objections used here, as is with most of the objections brought up in these chapters, are just trivial cultural ones.
Interestingly, he actually does gloss over one way to navigate between the two moral extremes mentioned above. He says the error of moralizers is "turning an activity that is morally admirable into something obligatory. A colleague who accuses you of not sufficiently helping the poor because you only donate 10 percent of your income to charity might be moralizing in this sense." Here, the author seems to point to the fact that there is a difference between actions that are just admirable, and others that are obligatory. While he thinks that donating more than 10% of your income is only admirable, an example of something he thinks is an obligatory action seems to be the following: "We grant that some moral requirements should be enforceable by all--arguably those that protect people from serious and immediate harm, for instance". In my opinion, this distinction makes most of this book somewhat pointless. This is because the real distinction isn't really about whether someone who tells you to donate more to charity is an annoying moralizer or not as the author is writing about, but rather if this act in itself obligatory or not. The moralizer telling you to donate probably tells you this because they think it is obligatory. Thus, the more important disagreement here seems to be which actions are obligatory and which are not. Because if donating to charity is obligatory, then the person telling you to do it isn't really a moralizer or busybody, they are just doing something obligatory, similar to how the author thinks doing actions that prevent people from serious and immediate harm are obligatory and that doing these wouldn't make you a moralizer or busybody. In fact, people donating to charities probably think that this achieves the goal of preventing people from serious and immediate harm, which makes it easy to see why they think it is obligatory.
The author seems to try to get around this by saying that he isn't actually trying to present when one should intervene, but doing the humble work pointing out there are some costs associated with any intervention: "nor will we present any criteria for determining when the costs of moral intervention are worth it. The important thing is to understand is that there are costs". That's great, but also somewhat pointless for the reasons discussed above. It seems trivial to point out the costs of protecting someone from "serious and immediate harm" as this book does. Lets say you do protect someone from harm by pulling them out of the way of traffic and saving their life, but then the person thinks you are a moralizing busybody. Who cares? The cost was trivial compared to what was gained by protecting them. Once again, the important point seems to be if the action is good or not, rather than the small costs associated with it.
These were my main problems with the book, which is that what it seems to offer is a cultural understanding of trivial costs associated with moralizing and busybodying. But there were a couple of other small problems I had that added up to making me like the book a lot less.
Circular Definition
For instance, at one point the author uses the connotation of the word busybody to try explain why busybodying-like behavior is bad: "Yet the term itself connotates something negative... Nobody advices others to be a busybody". So the author has chosen the word busybody as the title of the chapter, and then uses circular reasoning to point out the reason being busybody is bad is because the word (that he chose) has a negative connotation.
Strawmans
I also feel like he strawmans many reasons people are moralizers or busybodies. He implies that those who practice commencement speech morality do so out of selfishness: "commencement speech morality promises... notoriety, fame, reputation, and glory... By appealing to your self-love, the Commencement Speech Moralist moves us to tackle the world's problems, for there's something in it for us". Surely characterizing people trying to do good as doing it for selfish reasons without any evidence is very dubious. He also thinks that when someone tells you that something you are doing is wrong "they are attempting to wield a kind of authority over you" and "acceding to someone's moral demands seems to grant them the authority to direct your behavior". In both these cases, he strawmans the moralist by giving them bad intentions, such as moralizing for their own ego or to control other people. I think arguments like this exist because there are people (possibly including the author) who don't really believe that other people can care about things other than themselves. Therefore, when somebody else does something good, the reason they are doing it must be because they want glory and to dominate, not because they actually care about helping others.
Another example of strawmanning would be his critique of moralizers not using empirical evidence: "often without empirical evidence, [moralizers] claim that the things they hate are the cause of all the world's problems, and the things they morally approve of are the solution". He then goes into an example of where people are attempting to something they think is morally virtuous, but are wrong due to incorrect evidence. But I'm not really sure what the critique is here, since it basically boils down to "sometimes moralizers are wrong" wrapped up in fancy language. Obviously if someone is wrong, they shouldn't moralize, and maybe people can be careful to make sure they are correct before moralizing.
Bad Evidence
But ironically, after claiming that moralizers are the ones making claims without evidence, this is what he does for most of the claims in this book. This is especially true in the second half of the book, which reads more like spiritual self help than philosophy (I'm not going to go into it here, but it didn't find it very interesting). For instance, in explaining why it's better to care about your local community than think globally, he says "You're more likely to hit upon a beneficial solution to a problem and do good at lower levels of social complexity. Chances are, you'll do better at maintaining your local library or improving municipal snow removal than devoting your time to national political causes, let alone international ones". But like, is this true? I don't know. One the same page he says, "One continually fascinating feature of contemporary political life is that many people advocate for policies they would never dream of subjecting themselves to", which of course is also not sourced. In my opinion, using the authors own words, it seems like "often without empirical evidence, [the authors of this book] claim that the things they hate are the cause of all the world's problems, and the things they morally approve of are the solution". These are just two examples, but there are too many claims made without evidence to list here.
He also makes many likely factually incorrect claims throughout the book. For instance, he claims "the World Health Organization's standard for average male height in a healthy population is 176.5 centimeters (about 5 feet 9 inches)" and uses it as evidence that Indians (who are shorter) are not a healthy population. This statistic was not given a source, and I'd never heard anything like it before so I looked it up, but wasn't able to find it (not great).
Contradictory stuff
He disagrees that meaning well is necessary for doing good. He cites John Rawls as the view he opposes, who claims "it seems safe to assume that if a regime does not try to realize certain political values... it will not in fact do so" (basically, if a government doesn't try to achieve some goal, it wont happen). The author disagrees with this, claiming that often society is too complex to predict the outcome of your action, so your good intention isn't doing much. But in the very next chapter, the author then seems to completely agree with Rawls that we must intentionally try to preserve certain institutions: "without preservation and upkeep, local institutions are as liable to erosion as local habitats" and "the key point is that our habitats and institutions do not preserve themselves. People must do it. This might seem like a trivial observation". These point to the fact that the author wants to us to intentionally preserve our institutions, and he sees this as a trivial observation. It seems the author thinks that often good intentions fail because society is too complex, except of course when it is the author's good intentions to preserve local institutions, in which case we obviously need good intentions.
Conclusion
In the conclusion, the author decides to end with a self pat on the back: "it's true we've decided to defend the commonplace, the traditional, the low-profile life... such truths sometimes need to be said. It's easy to be drawn to the novel, the radical, the surprising, and there is no shortage of voices preaching such a life". But this is wrong, the majority of people already agree with his more conservative stance on ethics (that's why it's the commonplace), which makes it laughable he frames himself as being the one bravely defending an unpopular position.
Honestly there were more issues I had that I cut out because this has already taken too long. Overall this book is easy to read and I at least found his pool example discussed above interesting. It also gave me an interesting way of understanding certain people I know who actually are moralizers or busybodies, and why I dislike their actions. Other than this, the points made by this book are trivial at best, though written in a way that makes them seem more important than they actually are.
Problems with Commencement Speech Morality
The first half of the book discusses issues with practicing "commencement speech morality", which is similar to utilitarianism. For instance, he goes over Peter Singer's drowning child thought experiment. This asks you to imagine a situation where in front you there is a drowning child, and you can jump in to save the child even though it would ruin our expensive suit we're wearing. Almost everyone would think that we are morally obligated to save a child drowning in a pond in front of us, because the life of the child is simply worth more than the money we paid for the suit. While the author agrees that you should save the child, he objects that Singer takes this too far in demanding we donate a significant amount of money to charity, which Singer says is a way we can give comparatively trivial amounts of money to save countless lives across the world. To object to Singer, Tosi gives the thought experiment of being at pool party, where the adults are inattentive and thus their children keep jumping in the pool and start drowning. You see this and obviously go save these children. Because of this, the adults call their friends and tell them to bring their kids, and this cycle continues on indefinitely where you are constantly saving others kids. The author asks how long this should go on, because it surely seems wrong to expect that you spend your whole life at this swimming pool saving children, since while saving children is a noble thing, it seems that taken to an extreme it is too demanding to ask on you as an individual. I thought this objection was interesting as it seems to point out the problem of Singer's morality, which is that taken to it's extreme, seems to necessitate everyone living their lives as moral saints, not spending one cent more than we need on food to donate it or spending all our free time rescuing children. With this, Tosi sets some interesting boundaries for how good we should be: we should surely save one drowning child in front of us for minimal cost to ourselves, but doing this every second of our life seems to be too much.
This was probably the only part of the book I found interesting, the rest of the review will mostly be criticism. First off, in the pool example made up by the authors, this part where the adults call more of their friends because there is a lifeguard is pretty odd. It carries the implication that when people do good things, other people see this and do bad things because of it. This is a very silly to imply, especially since that part is never brought up in the analysis of the hypothetical. A better hypothetical would probably just be to leave this part out, and just make it an infinitely large lake of drowning children, asking what one should do here.
Moralizers and Busybodies
The first 2 chapters are on the "moralizer" and "busybody", which the author says are bad because they wrongly interject themselves into others business trying to push their unreasonably high standards on others. He gives some reasons why this is bad with examples. For instance, a doctor giving you health advice is fine, but the author thinks a random person on the street stopping you to give their health advice is an annoying moralizer, even if what they say is true, or even if they happen to be a doctor. This is because our role in society and some level of context plays part in how much we can moralize. Another example given is if you hear your coworker is lying to their wife on the phone. The author thinks that because you don't know enough about their relationship, interjecting here would make you a moralizing busybody since this is between them. However, he says that there are obvious examples where stepping in is permissible, like "those that protect people from serious and immediate harm, for instance".
The main issue I had with the "moralizer" and "busybody" chapters was that the author seems to see these sort of boundaries laid out above, between the drowning child and pool hypotheticals. But the book doesn't offer much in navigating between these boundaries, which is stated by the author: "we don't have a general theory of what features of a situation grant someone standing to apply their moral judgements to others". But as above, he does give an examples of times when moralizing goes too far. But in my opinion, the problem is he only points out cultural ideas of what moralizing and busybody are, rather than philosophical ones. Basically, he doesn't really make a distinction between philosophical intuitions, like the drowning child example, and cultural ones, like that I don't like that someone on the street tells me to eat healthy. The issue is that there does seem to be a difference between the two. Saving another persons life at little cost to yourself might be something we agree should be morally obligatory, while not liking someone on the street telling you smoking is bad is likely a cultural attitude which might even change in the next few years or so.
Basically, the book never properly makes a distinction between cultural attitudes and philosophy. We can take an example of moralizing that might differ due to cultural change over time to see the problem. The author gives the example of you seeing a mother unnecessarily yelling at her child at a grocery store as being an inappropriate time to butt in, since we're not part of their relationship. But lets change this slightly, and have it so you witness a mother unnecessarily and very violently beating her child. At some point in history 200 years ago this might have been seen as normal parental behavior. If the author lived in this point in history, he would argue that it would be wrong to step in here, because we don't know enough about the context, we shouldn't think we know more about parenting than the mother, we shouldn't put our own moral judgement on others, etc., and those activists who step in here are moralizers and busybodies. However, luckily for us this cultural attitude has changed, and in present day we would find those who step in to this situation as the top post on reddit for the day with people calling them a hero. This example makes it obvious these objections used here, as is with most of the objections brought up in these chapters, are just trivial cultural ones.
Interestingly, he actually does gloss over one way to navigate between the two moral extremes mentioned above. He says the error of moralizers is "turning an activity that is morally admirable into something obligatory. A colleague who accuses you of not sufficiently helping the poor because you only donate 10 percent of your income to charity might be moralizing in this sense." Here, the author seems to point to the fact that there is a difference between actions that are just admirable, and others that are obligatory. While he thinks that donating more than 10% of your income is only admirable, an example of something he thinks is an obligatory action seems to be the following: "We grant that some moral requirements should be enforceable by all--arguably those that protect people from serious and immediate harm, for instance". In my opinion, this distinction makes most of this book somewhat pointless. This is because the real distinction isn't really about whether someone who tells you to donate more to charity is an annoying moralizer or not as the author is writing about, but rather if this act in itself obligatory or not. The moralizer telling you to donate probably tells you this because they think it is obligatory. Thus, the more important disagreement here seems to be which actions are obligatory and which are not. Because if donating to charity is obligatory, then the person telling you to do it isn't really a moralizer or busybody, they are just doing something obligatory, similar to how the author thinks doing actions that prevent people from serious and immediate harm are obligatory and that doing these wouldn't make you a moralizer or busybody. In fact, people donating to charities probably think that this achieves the goal of preventing people from serious and immediate harm, which makes it easy to see why they think it is obligatory.
The author seems to try to get around this by saying that he isn't actually trying to present when one should intervene, but doing the humble work pointing out there are some costs associated with any intervention: "nor will we present any criteria for determining when the costs of moral intervention are worth it. The important thing is to understand is that there are costs". That's great, but also somewhat pointless for the reasons discussed above. It seems trivial to point out the costs of protecting someone from "serious and immediate harm" as this book does. Lets say you do protect someone from harm by pulling them out of the way of traffic and saving their life, but then the person thinks you are a moralizing busybody. Who cares? The cost was trivial compared to what was gained by protecting them. Once again, the important point seems to be if the action is good or not, rather than the small costs associated with it.
These were my main problems with the book, which is that what it seems to offer is a cultural understanding of trivial costs associated with moralizing and busybodying. But there were a couple of other small problems I had that added up to making me like the book a lot less.
Circular Definition
For instance, at one point the author uses the connotation of the word busybody to try explain why busybodying-like behavior is bad: "Yet the term itself connotates something negative... Nobody advices others to be a busybody". So the author has chosen the word busybody as the title of the chapter, and then uses circular reasoning to point out the reason being busybody is bad is because the word (that he chose) has a negative connotation.
Strawmans
I also feel like he strawmans many reasons people are moralizers or busybodies. He implies that those who practice commencement speech morality do so out of selfishness: "commencement speech morality promises... notoriety, fame, reputation, and glory... By appealing to your self-love, the Commencement Speech Moralist moves us to tackle the world's problems, for there's something in it for us". Surely characterizing people trying to do good as doing it for selfish reasons without any evidence is very dubious. He also thinks that when someone tells you that something you are doing is wrong "they are attempting to wield a kind of authority over you" and "acceding to someone's moral demands seems to grant them the authority to direct your behavior". In both these cases, he strawmans the moralist by giving them bad intentions, such as moralizing for their own ego or to control other people. I think arguments like this exist because there are people (possibly including the author) who don't really believe that other people can care about things other than themselves. Therefore, when somebody else does something good, the reason they are doing it must be because they want glory and to dominate, not because they actually care about helping others.
Another example of strawmanning would be his critique of moralizers not using empirical evidence: "often without empirical evidence, [moralizers] claim that the things they hate are the cause of all the world's problems, and the things they morally approve of are the solution". He then goes into an example of where people are attempting to something they think is morally virtuous, but are wrong due to incorrect evidence. But I'm not really sure what the critique is here, since it basically boils down to "sometimes moralizers are wrong" wrapped up in fancy language. Obviously if someone is wrong, they shouldn't moralize, and maybe people can be careful to make sure they are correct before moralizing.
Bad Evidence
But ironically, after claiming that moralizers are the ones making claims without evidence, this is what he does for most of the claims in this book. This is especially true in the second half of the book, which reads more like spiritual self help than philosophy (I'm not going to go into it here, but it didn't find it very interesting). For instance, in explaining why it's better to care about your local community than think globally, he says "You're more likely to hit upon a beneficial solution to a problem and do good at lower levels of social complexity. Chances are, you'll do better at maintaining your local library or improving municipal snow removal than devoting your time to national political causes, let alone international ones". But like, is this true? I don't know. One the same page he says, "One continually fascinating feature of contemporary political life is that many people advocate for policies they would never dream of subjecting themselves to", which of course is also not sourced. In my opinion, using the authors own words, it seems like "often without empirical evidence, [the authors of this book] claim that the things they hate are the cause of all the world's problems, and the things they morally approve of are the solution". These are just two examples, but there are too many claims made without evidence to list here.
He also makes many likely factually incorrect claims throughout the book. For instance, he claims "the World Health Organization's standard for average male height in a healthy population is 176.5 centimeters (about 5 feet 9 inches)" and uses it as evidence that Indians (who are shorter) are not a healthy population. This statistic was not given a source, and I'd never heard anything like it before so I looked it up, but wasn't able to find it (not great).
Contradictory stuff
He disagrees that meaning well is necessary for doing good. He cites John Rawls as the view he opposes, who claims "it seems safe to assume that if a regime does not try to realize certain political values... it will not in fact do so" (basically, if a government doesn't try to achieve some goal, it wont happen). The author disagrees with this, claiming that often society is too complex to predict the outcome of your action, so your good intention isn't doing much. But in the very next chapter, the author then seems to completely agree with Rawls that we must intentionally try to preserve certain institutions: "without preservation and upkeep, local institutions are as liable to erosion as local habitats" and "the key point is that our habitats and institutions do not preserve themselves. People must do it. This might seem like a trivial observation". These point to the fact that the author wants to us to intentionally preserve our institutions, and he sees this as a trivial observation. It seems the author thinks that often good intentions fail because society is too complex, except of course when it is the author's good intentions to preserve local institutions, in which case we obviously need good intentions.
Conclusion
In the conclusion, the author decides to end with a self pat on the back: "it's true we've decided to defend the commonplace, the traditional, the low-profile life... such truths sometimes need to be said. It's easy to be drawn to the novel, the radical, the surprising, and there is no shortage of voices preaching such a life". But this is wrong, the majority of people already agree with his more conservative stance on ethics (that's why it's the commonplace), which makes it laughable he frames himself as being the one bravely defending an unpopular position.
Honestly there were more issues I had that I cut out because this has already taken too long. Overall this book is easy to read and I at least found his pool example discussed above interesting. It also gave me an interesting way of understanding certain people I know who actually are moralizers or busybodies, and why I dislike their actions. Other than this, the points made by this book are trivial at best, though written in a way that makes them seem more important than they actually are.
May 22, 2024
A worthwhile read - the book is a common sense reminder about staying in your lane, minding your own business, and actually becoming competent. In a world inundated with virtue signaling busybodies and “change the world” moralizing protesters, Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke remind us that it’s fine to first sort yourself out by calmly and quietly becoming competent and striving to be virtuous. Then, perhaps you can help family, friends, neighbors, etc. The authors debunk this crazy idea that every problem in the world is your problem, awaiting your solutions. Get your own house in order before taking on problems halfway around the world, as routinely encouraged by countless Commencement speakers.
Read
May 28, 2024What the book claims is badly articulated and even worse defended.
What is it exactly that they're arguing for? Given that their arguments are aimed at the moral permissibility of dedicating an amount of time to what they present as instances of minding one's own business, mentioning Peter Singer and commencement speakers is a bad way to set out the stage. There seems to be no contradiction in believing, at the same time, in the worthiness of one's home, and that you are morally obliged to abstain from buying luxuries in order to help the unfortunate, or that one should live a life pursuing great ideals.
If what they intend is actually attacking Singer's claims (or those of commencement speakers'), their arguments are highly unsatisfying. Reciting the goods derived from caring for one's roots, home, and solitude and the bads caused by instances of minding others' businesses is an ineffective refutal method. One could argue that, despite the importance of roots, world hunger is simply more significant. Their arguments for their minor claims were also not as powerful as they could have been, and their intuition on the pool party case was disturbingly shocking.
Yet, it's unfair not to mention the informative observations the authors make. I noticed I may sometimes have been a moralizer myself.
What is it exactly that they're arguing for? Given that their arguments are aimed at the moral permissibility of dedicating an amount of time to what they present as instances of minding one's own business, mentioning Peter Singer and commencement speakers is a bad way to set out the stage. There seems to be no contradiction in believing, at the same time, in the worthiness of one's home, and that you are morally obliged to abstain from buying luxuries in order to help the unfortunate, or that one should live a life pursuing great ideals.
If what they intend is actually attacking Singer's claims (or those of commencement speakers'), their arguments are highly unsatisfying. Reciting the goods derived from caring for one's roots, home, and solitude and the bads caused by instances of minding others' businesses is an ineffective refutal method. One could argue that, despite the importance of roots, world hunger is simply more significant. Their arguments for their minor claims were also not as powerful as they could have been, and their intuition on the pool party case was disturbingly shocking.
Yet, it's unfair not to mention the informative observations the authors make. I noticed I may sometimes have been a moralizer myself.
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