If your heart's in the right place

Anything goes. Theodore Dalrymple on the charitable pornographers of F**k for Forest.

More than 50 years ago, Freidrich Hayek wrote that a social conscience might be but a mask for individual selfishness and license: one’s own personal conduct, after all, can scarcely compete in importance with the fate of the world. Ellingsen turns Hayek’s proposition inside out, complaining that his public sex act worried more people than did the destruction of the rain forests. In other words, either one favors Ellingsen having sex in public, or one favors the destruction of the rain forests: no other possibility exists. By this rhetorical blackmail, it is possible to push back the frontiers of the permissible indefinitely, for once a man has declared himself to be doing something for the sake of a good cause, his actions are beyond criticism.