Fisking gems
Posted by Joshua Claybourn on 12 March 2005 | 3 responses
I’ve ran into several good “fisks” and critical pieces recently, so I thought I’d link to them all in one post. Scott Scheule pens a healthy, educational and fun response to Robert Locke’s latest article in The American Conservative. It’s probably the best fisk I’ve read in quite some time. Next we head over to The Right Coast, where Tom Smith takes wacko Princeton professor Peter Singer to task for explaining how killing a newborn baby is not killing a person. Finally, Jesika Sanders offers a stern, necessary rebuke of Daniel Dunbar’s pitifully pointless inaugural C&P column.
The Scheule post really is delightful, and I appreciate your drawing it to our attention.
The Smith one, however, isn’t really a fisk, and much more importantly it commits an error that is all too common when people respond to Singer: he completely fails to take seriously the rather extensive & thoroughly argued philosophical structure that his views stand upon. You don’t have to agree with Singer — I certainly don’t — but it really bugs the hell out of me when people just dismiss his really outstanding work as “wacko” or “stupid”. He’s wrestling with the hardest issues that are in front of us, and we can get tremendous value out of his discussions if we engage them, and try to take the time to see where his careful arguments go wrong. If we disagree with Singer, we can choose to learn from him by engaging his arguments, or we can choose to indulge in easy smug self-satisfaction that, well, at least we don’t hold such views. Smith makes the lazy, and wrong, choice.
(I would note further that Singer would grant that, if Smith is right and infants do have a relevant sense of their future, then that would indeed add to the wrongness of killing an infant. Despite the lampoons of those like Smith, it’s not like Singer just likes the idea of going around killing babies and is willing to say anything to justify it.)
Note that I said “‘fisks’ and critical pieces,” because I knew not all of them were fisks.
Fair enough — I think I was probably paying too much attention to the title of the post, and read right past that (quite clearly stated) conjunction. My bad.