Flibbertigibbet

Hide Your Women! The Altruists Aren't Raping People Again!

Colin McGinn has a post up on his blog which he believes decisively refutes ethical egoism as a rational system of ethics.

His argument consists of saying that ethical egoism is "rubbish." That sort of argument would never have passed in any of the philosophy classes I've taken, so it's needless to say that those of us who support ethical egoism are left unsatisfied with his ill-founded self-satisfaction.

Diana has been calling him to the mat on the discussion. I threw a tiny comment in there, too.

Impressively, it seems like most of the discussion pretty civil --although some of the comments are really quite ridiculous -- which is more than can be said of most of these sorts of exchanges that I see on the global intarwebs.

Update: In case you're confused, the title of this post refers to the shockingly common strawman that altruists often throw up -- Mr. McGinn does not fail -- that if it weren't for the morality of altruism, people would just go about raping people as it suits them. It frightens me to consider what might happen if these people wake up one day realizing how specious altruistic ethics are.