I know this is contentious territory in this group, but the relationship between "natural" and "ethical" is complicated. There are many things that are natural but unethical. The real question is: what are the criteria that we might use to judge natural things as being ethical or unethical? Singer seems to have some.

There's a bit of a slight of hand here, I think. Above, we were talking about "ethical obligations". Now we are talking about "care". These are different concepts: What I care about and what I might be obligated to do are not coextensive concepts.

I really appreciate this kind of objection. I recently heard this called the tyranny of the easily measureable. There's a serious problem here though. Things that cannot be measured are very hard to reason about. And I think much (maybe not all) of ethics is about reasoning through what is right and wrong. So, not every good should be measurable, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for measurability.

I think at his strongest, this is true. There's so much to be said here though. Related to the last comment, his argument almost forces us to come to some version of this conclusion ourselves, by relying on our intuitions. "Oh, you think it's immoral to let this kid that you don't really know but is proximate to you drown? Why is that different from a kid on the other side of the world that you don't know? That seems like a legitimate question. The assertion that distance matters is not much more than an assertion. If this thought experiment doesn't cause you to completely flatten your concern curve, should cause you to question its derivative...

This may be a minor point, but I sometimes think Singer is more sublte than this. I think he is saying that we have a strong intuition that saving the kid is the moral thing to do, and that intuition is also relevant to saving other kids. I think that's slightly different than saying it's "clearly immoral" not to save the kid. I think if you want to bite that bullet, he doesn't have much more to say (at least the old PS; I hear he's changing his views a bit).

I think I agree with this claim. But doesn't it make sense of what you state as being odd above. Specifically, here, you are claiming that there has always been a component of progress in classical liberalism. I think that is exactly what Gray is claiming with meiorism. But above, you say, "But perhaps the most interesting claim of Gray’s list is that liberalism is 'meliorism.' If you think about it, it is quite odd that a political philosophy founded on freedoms could evolve to the point where its defenders believe its purpose is to make the world better."

I can see how one might go in this direction, and how it leads to neoliberalism. But I think that is part of Fuk's point: liberalism exists on a knfe edge; there are excesses in both directions (left/right). In a liberal society, neither the Catholic church nor racial, ethinc, or gender groups have a claim on the individual.

I don't come to this conclusion at all. For example, the fact that all people are of equal moral status does not imply that all people will have the same outcomes. The fact that everyone has the right to, idk, a k12 education, does not imply that everyone do the same thing with that opportunity--some will rise to the occasion, some just won't have what it takes to achieve, and others will squander the opportunity. I don't think anything Gray is saying here is blocking these different outcomes. .

My view is that there is a relatively clear mapping from Locke to Gray. The list that is given here for Locke is clearly lacking details. For example, who are the bearers of these rights? Locke had an asnwer, but it's not here. Gray gives us an answer: Individuals, not collectives; it's not the case that some get more rights than others; all humans, not just some.