Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I mentioned "effective altruism" in one of my posts about Michael Lewis. I'm going to circle back on that now.  What the heck is it?  In essence, it is a theory that has branched off of the strict utilitarianism, of Peter Singer, under the slogan (not Singer's) of "earn to give."   The idea: people with the skill to take very high earning jobs, (to run hedge funds) and who have utilitarian convictions, should take those jobs. They would waste their efforts and utilitarian convictions caring for the ill or digging water wells in parts of the underdeveloped world.  No: they should do the Wall Street wheeling and dealing, earn lots of money, and then use it altruistically. They can PAY people to dig water wells.     Further: effective altruism (EA) has tended to take a very long-term view of things. The utility of people who won't be born for another 500 years is as important as that of people alive today. This argument is key to the work of William ...

To resume discussion of the question I raised yesterday: is any living thinker with academic cred a cognitivist and intuitionist in meta-ethics, as well as a teleologist and  pluralist in substantive ethics. I did receive one answer from my various postings of this question that deserves further inquiry: Amartya Sen (1933-). I looked into it a bit further. Sen is the author of COMMODITIES AND CAPABILITIES (1985); ETHICS AND ECONOMICS (1987); DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM (1999). In the first of these books, Sen looked at empirical evidence on gross national product per capita in various countries, and asked whether it correlates with other sensible-seeming measures of the well being of a country: life expectancy and infant mortality. Brazil and Mexico, he found, had more than SEVEN TIMES the per capita production of Sri Lanka, India, or China. But does that extra money buy them happiness? Sri Lanka does better than any of the other countries just listed by longevity and child mort...