My favorite line in this excellent piece: “sitting at the table of deeply kind, deeply thoughtful, deeply inspiring people can itself be a kind of supernatural experience”. I have found this to be true.
It seems to me the key disagreement here is over the question of what EQ is *for*. We know that deepening bonds with people is a big part of human flourishing and that shared emotional and spiritual experiences can help with that. But it does not follow that EQ is any good at all for determining what is true. And if it isn't, we ignore that incapacity at our peril when trying to seek the truth, because cold physical reality does not care about our good vibes.
I see Singer as making the point, through the sort of provocation beloved of tenured philosophers, that there is no such thing as the wisdom of repugnance: that "ew, gross" is not an epistemically valid argument, and by extension, neither is "I like the people who [say they] believe X better than the people who [say they] don't". Most attempts to defend the emotional/communal path to belief against this critique either fall prey to circular logic or to non sequiturs: you can certainly show that "pure" principled reason is fallible, but that does not show that vibes and gut feelings are an epistemic improvement, even if you really, really like the people you share those things with.
My favorite line in this excellent piece: “sitting at the table of deeply kind, deeply thoughtful, deeply inspiring people can itself be a kind of supernatural experience”. I have found this to be true.
It seems to me the key disagreement here is over the question of what EQ is *for*. We know that deepening bonds with people is a big part of human flourishing and that shared emotional and spiritual experiences can help with that. But it does not follow that EQ is any good at all for determining what is true. And if it isn't, we ignore that incapacity at our peril when trying to seek the truth, because cold physical reality does not care about our good vibes.
I see Singer as making the point, through the sort of provocation beloved of tenured philosophers, that there is no such thing as the wisdom of repugnance: that "ew, gross" is not an epistemically valid argument, and by extension, neither is "I like the people who [say they] believe X better than the people who [say they] don't". Most attempts to defend the emotional/communal path to belief against this critique either fall prey to circular logic or to non sequiturs: you can certainly show that "pure" principled reason is fallible, but that does not show that vibes and gut feelings are an epistemic improvement, even if you really, really like the people you share those things with.