Just to be clear, I'm agreeing with you, not criticizing you. PEPFAR is by a wide margin the best thing the US has done since the Marshall Plan, and possibly ever, and it drives me actually insane that it was George W. Bush's project--yes, him personally, not everyone around him.
Nah, he was a shitbag who had a few decent ideas in spite of himself. But his stance on immigration alone puts him head and shoulders above the stain currently occupying the office.
Compassionate conservatism. It should be noted though that Fauci played a key role in developing it. Thus once again the professional bureaucrats deliver.
Utility is based on value over replacement, no? I presume Gore would have done something like PEPFAR, and without the side effect of steering half of the DC establishment into the ground and thus putting us on the path to Trump.
It's honestly surreal. I was studying development shortly after it was implemented, and despite all the wonky birth control riders, basically all the NGOs working on HIV were just like "yeah, thank G-d for W." PEPFAR was monumental, and basically all W, politically.
I know a bunch of folks like him here in Houston. Most were lifelong Republicans before 2016 and sincere believers in "compassionate conservatism"; almost all are now anti-Trump (either politically disengaged or actively democratic now). They are all heavily involved in humanitarian projects. 1/3
The disconnect is that they (naively/optimistically) believed a persuasive speech could convince all their fellow rich anglos to join them in dedicating their life and funds to social uplift, making government actions irrelevant. 2/3
Now a bunch have woken up to the general selfishness of their fellows, and how it's much easier to talk them into saying others deserve their problems than into helping others, so govt needs to step in instead.
It's basically the political history of the Episcopal Church the last fifty years. 3/3
And if you believe Kissinger's account of one night where Nixon got shit faced and ordered NFU (questionable, but good enough for a thought experiment), Kissinger might be the greatest human being in global history.
That’s not what utilitarianism is. It’s not based on the person but on the actions more specifically. Any person who is not a utilitarian scare me, because it means they would be okay with creating or allowing more avoidable human misery solely to adhere to a set of abstract rigid moral claims.
I guess that depends whether or not you count Kennedy standing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the lives FDR saved by winning WWII? But otherwise yeah, I’m hard pressed to think of another humanitarian program that did more good. Maybe food aid that’s averted mass famines?
So what you are saying is that Hoover is the best person to ever become president (he saved countless millions of lives through humanitarian projects before he became president, eg the Russian Famine of 1921-22).
Worse—considering the number of potential dead human beings, the greatest utilitarian human being might actually be Reagan, despite everything else (and I mean everything else), because of his idiosyncratic personal desire for nuclear zero that was caused by watching a TV movie about nuclear war.
(Though by this measure, because he shared the nuclear zero goal and had several other laudable goals as well, unlike Reagan, the actual answer to greatest utilitarian human being is probably Gorbachev)
If "without Lincoln, another 50 years of chattel slavery" or if "without FDR, a stable fascist Japanese empire over Japan and Indonesia"... Then those two give GWB a run for the money.
Comments
None. The answer should be none. AND YET.
It's basically the political history of the Episcopal Church the last fifty years. 3/3
Adobe alone has killed tens of thousands of aggregate lifetimes.
And I think he's referring to this:
https://www.military.com/history/time-drunk-richard-nixon-tried-nuke-north-korea.html
but atrocity and compassion are not fungible
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov