Amartya Sen, an economist/philosopher, was born in November 1933 and he is still with us. He may be the single most important philosopher alive. One of his works is COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. Or, perhaps, you might count this as two of his works. The first book of that title was published in 1970, then a much expanded and re-written version appeared in 2017. I'd like today to quote a bit from the 2017 edition, in which Sen is with some sympathy discussing the work of John Rawls. He says (this is a footnote): A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others often runs like this: Why confine placing oneself in the position of other human beings only, why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing a rule of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on notion...
An alien recently landed his UFO in Vatican City. Pope Leo went out to meet him personally. Leo, "I just want to know one thing. Does your world know Jesus Christ as Savior?" Alien, "Oh, yes. He visits us about once every seven years. We throw a big party when he arrives, then he preaches and heals amongst us. When Jesus has decided it is time to leave, our leaders declare a national holiday and there is a big send-off parade. We tell him we look forward to the next visit" Leo, "Really? He only visited this planet once, more than two thousand years ago." Alien, "Hmmm. Did you give him a nice send-off?"