Actually, this sort of reminds me of a recent Williams or Sowell column.
By extending your logic, we can ask, WHY SPEND MONEY ON ANYTHING AT ALL EXCEPT HUMAN HEALTH RESEARCH?
So you spending money on a TV entertainment system is money taken from helping save a human.
;-)
"By extending your logic, we can ask..."
No, by *unreasonably* extending his logic to an extreme neither intended nor necessary, you can ask...
This is another misapplication of the reductio ad absurdum.
"By extending your logic, we can ask..."
No, by *unreasonably* extending his logic to an extreme neither intended nor necessary, you can ask...
This is another misapplication of the reductio ad absurdum.
"So you spending money on a TV entertainment system is money taken from helping save a human."
This form of argumentation is all too common. I wish we'd become more sensitive to and less tolerant of it.
In a world where there is an area of things that are clearly okay, a gray area of hard calls, and an area of things that are clearly not okay, people cite instances that fall into one of the first two groups in an effort to deny the existence of the third group.
Morality does not require that we all take a vow of povery and give everything above mere subsistence to the poor. However, it does require that we be as generous as we are able, given the constraints of living in the world. We will answer to God if we are less generous than we should be.
The guideline has traditionally been the tithe, the tenth part. Some give less. Bill Gates could wipe out AIDS with a tithe properly applied. If I had that much money, I could relegate leftism once again to the lunatic fringe where it belongs, which would be an act of charity.
At some point, each person deals with his own conscience. However, that third category, that category of things that are clearly not okay, stubbornly remains.