The most famous thought-experiment of contemporary philosophy, first described by Philippa Foot, goes roughly as follows: Suppose a runaway train is hurtling down a track headed toward five innocent people who will surely be killed if the train is not stopped or diverted. The brakes on the train have failed and there is no other way of stopping it, but the driver can divert the train on to a side-track, where one innocent person is standing. This person will surely die if the train is diverted. Should the driver divert the train on to the side-track? In the last decade…
The religion of capitalist economics
In earlier posts we mentioned the Oxfam report entitled “The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all,” which outlined how the annual income of richest 100 people is enough to end global poverty four times over (i.e. while the annual net income of the world’s richest 100 billionaires is about $240 billion, the estimated cost of raising everyone worldwide above the $1.25 a day poverty line is about $66 billion). Recently Oxfam released another report, “Working for the Few: Political capture and economic inequality,” which maps the the general distribution of wealth on a global level.…
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