From the Editor James Garvey
Editorial
Like the philosophical equivalent of Madonna or Jack White, The Philosophers’ Magazine is not above a little reinvention every few years. We keep pace with the times, and as we are now on final approach to our twentieth year, shaking up the look of the magazine seems entirely appropriate. Many thanks to the remarkable efforts of Esther McManus, who has attempted to save us, as she put it, from “looking like an economics magazine”.
The content will change too. We’re still aiming to publish the best, thought-provoking writing from the largest names in philosophy, but we’re going to hang looser when it comes to both format and content. We’ll try new things. Watch this space.
But we’ll always have a symposium in the middle of the magazine, and this issue is no exception. We’ve asked philosophers to take up the demands of morality, writing around the issues raised by Peter Singer in his famous paper “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. In terms of real action on the philosophical ground, it would difficult to think of a more influential contemporary paper. Indeed, The Open Syllabus Project (opensyllabusproject. org) has collated one million syllabi from university and departmental websites and ranked the works that appear most often on them. Singer’s paper checks in at 30, beaten out by the likes of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Plato’s Republic, but among living authors the article ranks first.
Part of the reason has to be that, like the problem of evil, you can get the argument up and running quickly, and the conclusion gets you where you live. Here it is in half a paragraph. Suffering from a lack of food, shelter and medical care is bad. If you can do something about suffering without sacrificing much, you ought to do it. If you saw a child drowning in a pond you ought to wade in and help, even if it means some small cost to you, like ruining your shoes. Right? Well, a lot of people, right now, are without food, shelter and medical care, and you could do something about it without sacrificing much, say giving the cost of a new pair of shoes to charity. The fact that the people in trouble are not right in front of you seems irrelevant. So you ought to do something, but what? That and more is the subject of this issue’s forum, introduced, I’m pleased to say, by Peter Singer himself.
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