Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Thursday, February 11. 2010

The value of a life

From the Value of a Life at Ragamuffin Studies:



...as we were speaking, I realized that my friend had wandered into a collectivist view of the value of a life. His value of liberty was not completely based on the principle of individual rights. Because if his values were firmly rooted there, he would realize immediately that the value of a life is not based on how useful to society, or how precious that person is to another.



That friend is a victim of pernicious Utilitarianism - John Dewey's contribution to the totalitarianism of the Left. "The greater good" and all that soul-crushing stuff.


There is no greater earthly good than individual freedom.

Posted by Bird Dog in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 09:59 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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"For an Emersonian, the [pragmatist] Deweyan is likely to seem like an enlightened child, toying with the means of destruction, stinting the means of instruction, of provoking the self to work; for the Deweyan, the Emersonian is apt to look, at best, like a Deweyan...For Dewey the texture of the philosophical text barely exists, except as superstition and resistance to social change."

http://preview.tinyurl.com/yejwnlb

Stanley Cavell Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome
#1 rhhardin (Link) on 2010-02-11 13:35 (Reply)

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