This is an essential book for anyone who wishes to defend a political philosophy based upon the doctrine of natural rights. I frequently debate politics, abortion, the morality of war, and other ethical positions. Many of my “sparring partners” employ thought experiments to refute rights-based ethics. A common example is Ellen Goodman’s thought experiment in which an IVF clinic is on fire. You can save either a a test tube with an embryo, or a small child. Who do you choose?

Moral Theory by David Oderberg is the perfect rebuttal. Study the mechanics of natural rights ethics, particularly the Acts/Omission distinction and the Principle of Double Effect. The Principle of Double Effect is particularly important. It resolves conflicts of rights while still upholding the moral worth, dignity, and rights-bearing status of the “losing” side. Utilitarianism cannot do this. Even though it starts from the premise that everyone’s interests get equal consideration, the hard fact remains that a leading cancer researcher had a greater ability to benefit the interests of society than a homeless man.

Natural rights ethics avoid this problem because it takes into account more than your ability to benefit the rest of society. Natural rights ethics lead to the principle that “the ends do not justify means.” Natural rights ethics also factor in the importance of intention - actions that are taken with selfish intent are not considered to be morally good even if the outcome is good. For example, giving money to charity to impress people is not a morally good act (it is not necessarily bad either - it may be indifferent).
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More than a half century after being published, A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell remains one of the most popular introductions to philosophy. I was excited when I first bought this book, but ultimately I was dissapointed. The good news is that after 800 pages, I wanted to learn more philosophy. The bad news is that I still knew very little.

The first problem is that the book has too much breadth for a beginner. You do not need to spend 100 pages on Greek philosophy before even coming to Plato. For those that are interested in purchasing the book, I would suggest trimming the list of philosophers to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Locke, Leibniz, Hegel, and then everything from Schopenhauer onwards.

The second problem is that the book is dated. Russell wrote it during World War II and there have been huge developments in philosophy since then. Some examples include the decline of the logicst program and logical positivism, the development of ordinary language philosophy, the later Wittgenstein, more development of pragmatism beyond William James (such as Quine), and a rebirth of Christian philosophy from within the analytic and empirical traditions that Russell advanced and used as a basis for his atheism. This includes the works of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig. Most introductory philosophy books cover most of these later developments (although introductory philosophy books by atheists tend to ignore recent developments in Christian philosophy).
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Inside American Education is the swarm of facts and statistics that you expect of Thomas Sowell’s books. They make an irrefutable case for the decline of American education as the curriculum has been dumbed down since the 1960’s.

Declining Test Scores

SAT scores have fallen from 980 in 1963 to 900 in 1990 (page 3). Note that while ‘Inside American Education’ was published in 1992, it recently made the news that SAT scores had their largest one year drop in 31 years. A common rebuttal to declining test scores is that more people are graduating high school and going to college, so the pool of SAT takers is less selective than before. But that does not withstand scrutiny because in absolute terms the number of high achievers on the SAT’s have declined. For example, 116,000 students scored over 600 on the verbal SAT in 1972, but only 71,000 scored that high ten years later (page 9). Furthermore, SAT scores have declined across the board at elite colleges, and their applicant pool should be just as selective as in the past (page 9). Meanwhile, other nations with lower dropout rates than America have scored higher on standardized tests (page 9), and the top 5% of Americans also fail to measure up to their counterparts abroad (page 9). This gap in test scores is magnified by the fact that black and hispanic test scores are rising, which means that the decline among suburban middle class schools is more severe.

You can’t blame lack of spending. In real terms spending increased 58% in the 1960’s, 27% in the 1970’s, and 29% in the 1980’s. The United States has an average class size of 26, compared to 41 in Japan, but Japan has higher scores (page 12).
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“Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy.” Benjamin Disraeli was speaking of the nations of the rich and the poor, but in his book The Marriage Problem, sociologist James Q. Wilson sees underlying causes. One nation is married, reasonably affluent, educated, and invests heavily in their children. The other nation is fatherless, poor, and does not invest in their children. On page 11 he quotes a study by William Galston, a former advisor to President Clinton. Galston shows that you only have to do three simple things to avoid being poor: finish high school, marry before having a child, and wait until age 20 to have a child. Only 8% of people who do these three things are poor, compared to 79% for those who do not.
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In his book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, Marvin Harris made a strong case for the beneficial role of the Hindu religion’s belief that cows are sacred. The reason is because male draft animals are needed to plow the fields for next year’s harvest, and cows are needed to breed the draft animals. Succumbing to temptation during a famine and killing your cow is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Harris was not as convincing describing the “pig love” of the Maring tribe. They are a polygamous society in which women do all the work, both gardening and raising pigs. The pigs are beloved and wander freely. But after eight or ten years there are too many adult pigs. They cause too much destruction in the gardens, and they consume too much food. So the men agree to hold a grand feast, or kaiko, in which most of the pigs are slaughtered and eaten. Then the men go to war with the neighboring tribe.

This is a strange arrangement. If the Maring wanted to be efficient, they should pen the pigs. That way they won’t damage the gardens. They should also slaughter the pigs as soon as they reach their adult size. Continuing to feed them for another eight years after they’ve already reached their adult size is a waste of food. That is not adaptive! Of course, Harris has an explanation. The reason why the Maring behave in their seemingly counter-productive way is that by being inefficient they can keep their population in check. Maximizing their pig production would take them dangerously close to the carrying capacity of their environment. The ritual warfare after the periodic feasts and the female infanticide also contribute to keep the size of the Maring population in harmony with the environment.
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Philosophers of all stripes agree that the essence of ethics is that they are universal. For example, the Golden Rule grants other people the same ethical status that you give yourself. Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative is similar. In ‘Practical Ethics’ Peter Singer claims that his version of utilitarianism does a better job of capturing the universal nature of ethics than these other approaches. His reasoning begins with the observation that ethics demands considering more than one’s own self-interest. Therefore a truly universal system of ethics demands that we give equal consideration to everyone’s interests. This principle of equal consideration of interests is the heart of Singer’s utilitarian ethics.

There are two methods for refuting a system of ethics. The first is to find a logical inconsistency. The second is to appeal to the lack of intrinsic beauty and goodness of an ethical system. As Bertrand Russell observed, Nietzsche had a logically consistent ethics, but they were reprehensible. Peter Singer’s ethics fail both of these tests.
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The basic argument of What’s the Matter With Kansas is this: working class people in Kansas are voting against their own economic self-interest by voting for Republicans because of abortion. I disagree with about every premise. The evidence shows that (1) it is the middle class, not the working class, that are voting Republican, (2) even if they were, it is not against their economic self-interest, and (3) people do not have misplaced priorities if they put morality aissues ahead of economics.
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