Tiro Strikes Back

You know you've hit the big time when you become both an object of derision and a paradigm of philosophical obtuseness in the international blogging scene. That's what has happened to me, albeit both references are restricted to the Italian blog Cantor, one of the few blogs to get even less traffic than An Examined Life. I'm not sure what the name "Cantor" is supposed to conjure up, although after reading around in it I'm fairly certain it's not Georg, whose reasoning skills were markedly better. I will say this, however: I looked long and hard for something to make fun of as payback, but in the end I found myself agreeing with much of what is written there. Maybe if my Italian were better I would have had better luck, but them's the breaks....

I suppose the problem might be that this Stephano fellow, who appears to be the owner of the blog, is something of a conservative/classical liberal, and so our politics tend to run fairly close. But there is a trend among some classical liberals to look at issues such as abortion, human cloning, stem cell research, and other issues connected to medical ethics and scientific research, in a markedly utilitarian way. Regular readers of An Examined Life are already familiar with my views about utilitarianism, but I'm happy to admit that many conservatives are also utilitarians, as are many Libertarians and other classical liberals, and I make it a point not to judge the intentions of such folks. Indeed, in some ways utilitarianism seems quite apt for the classical liberal approach to things, and one can't expect everyone to have the same respect for the posizioni dogmatiche di filosofi, especially in a country where the last genuine philosopher was Cicero.

In the spirit of international cooperation, I've decided to include Cantor in my blogroll, if for no other reason than to make it easier to keep an eye on him.