<< BTW, think Berkowitz teaches law at Georgetown, and has authored a book
entitled, Nietzsche, the Mind Of A Immoralist, " that received good reviews.
>>
That would explain a lot. In my experience, law schools are filled with half-educated philosophers manque who are reasonably bright--often very smaert--but lacking actual training in philosophy rediscovcer the wheel and stumble across "brilliant" insights that they would have avoided if they had been driven through several years of philosophy grad school. Judge Richard Posner, one of the better philosophers manque, and a really extraordinarily brilliant man, commits philosophical writing that is like this all the time.
Berkowitz has determined through his reading of Singer that utilitarianism runs against the grain of our ordinary moral intuitions and leads to unpalatable results--quite right. Not news, either. But he commits all sorts of crudities in setting this out and failks to deal with obvious utilitarian replies and generally carries on as if he was the first to notice this problem, when in fact it is a hoary one that utilitarians and their opponents have been debating for a long time.
--jks (a lawyer and former philosophy prof)