A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • What kind of equality?

    Following up a bit on this post, in his book Morals, Reason, and Animals, philosopher S.F. Sapontzis has a helpfully clear discussion of just what animal liberationists are and are not claiming when they talk about “equal rights” for animals.

    First, animal liberationists do not claim that animals do, or should, have all the same rights as human beings. This would be absurd, because animals don’t have an interest in, say, the right to an education or freedom of religion. “Recognizing that rights are tied to interests and that animals do not have all the interests we do (e.g., in religion and education), animal liberationists recognize that it would be nonsensical to seek for animals all the rights we require” (p. 79). Sapontzis identifies three broad rights that liberationists might agree they are seeking for animals: 1) the “right to live their lives according to their nature, interests and intelligence,” 2) the “right to live in a habitat ecologically sufficient for normal existence,” and 3) the “right to be free from exploitation” (p. 79). This is pretty radical stuff, but hardly the same thing as granting animals the same rights as human beings.

    Second, liberationists aren’t committed to saying that the rights of animals do, or should, enjoy equal priority with the rights of human beings. He quotes Peter Singer to this effect:

    A rejection of speciesism does not imply that all lives are of equal worth.[…] It is not arbitrary to hold that the life of a self-aware being, capable of abstract thought, of planning for the future, of complex acts of communication, and so on, is more valuable than the life of a being without these capacities. (quoted on p. 79)

    And, lest this be thought a particular quirk of Singer’s utilitarianism, Tom Regan takes a similiar position in his The Case for Animal Rights.

    In cases of genuine conlfict, then, such as so-called lifeboat scenarios, there is nothing irrational about holding that animals have the sort of basic rights listed above and that human rights should take precedence. As Sapontzis puts it,

    We cannot infer from the principles used when we are forced to choose the lesser of two evils to the principles of moral status in force when such a hard choice is not required. Such emergency principles are invoked not as extensions of common moral principles but as auxiliaries needed because those common principles do not provide satisfactory guidance in these uncommon situations. Consequently, it is not self-contradictory to say that when we can fulfill both human interests (e.g., in food) and animal interests (e.g., in life), we ought (morally) to do so, but when we cannot fulfill the interests of both, we ought (morally) to give preference, within the bounds of fairness, to fulfilling the interests of those beings capable of the greater range of moral actions. (p. 80)

    Talking about “equality” for animals, then, means allowing that they have an equal right, other things being equal, to have their particular interests respected:

    Thus, animal liberation seeks neither to extend to animals the same set of rights enjoyed by humans nor to deny that normal human life–assuming that we ordinarily have a greater range of capacities for making the world a morally better place and will put these capacities into action–can have a greater moral worth than animal life. Rather, animal liberationists contend that just as it would be immoral to follow Swift’s “modest proposal” routinely (and avoidably) to sacrifice some people’s interest in life in order to fulfill others’ interest in food, so it should be immoral routinely (and avoidably) to sacrifice animals’ interest in life for such purposes. (p. 81)

    Sapontzis concedes that what is or is not “avoidable” is an empirical question, and something to be determined on a case-by-case basis. But what is incontestable, I think, is that, by and large, we scarcely give that question any consideration. That’s the difference between animal liberation and anti-cruelty movements, laudable as those might be. Anti-cruelty movements accept the routine use of animals for human purposes as a given; meanwhile, the whole point of animal liberation is to challenge it.

  • CofE RIP?

    Though I often think of myself as a closeted Episcopalian, I don’t usually comment on Anglican matters. But I thought this piece from the always-interesting Theo Hobson was worth pointing out. Hobson argues that, in trying to hold the Anglican Communion together come hell or high water, Rowan Williams has unwittingly doomed the Church of England.

    Obviously, I’m in sympathy with the “revisionists” here, but it’s worth pointing out that, at least as far as I can tell, the “conservatives” have been proposing a radical revision of their own in the understanding of the Anglican Communion itself. They’ve sought to change it from a loose confederation of autonomous national churches held together by “bonds of affection” into a much more centralized institution with quasi-universalist pretensions. That alone would be enough to get my localist/libertarian hackles up.

  • The green revolution that wasn’t

    The libertarian-liberal quasi fusionist blog The Art of the Possible is rapidly becoming a must-read. And I’m not just saying that because my favorite libertarian blogger Jim Henley linked to one of my posts there. Maybe it’s also because of my own warring inner liberal and libertarian.

    Case in point: where else would you find this exhaustive revisionist account of the “green revolution” written from a distinctly radical, anti-statist perspective, courtesy of Kevin Carson?

    I think I may be coming around the the John Schwenkler view that what we really need is a hands-off policy in agriculture to create a level playing field and see if organic farming can deliver the goods.

  • Put not your trust in princes, the continuing series…

    Andrew Bacevich writes that we need a wholesale repudiation of the Bush legacy in foreign policy – preventive war, “enhanced” interrogation, the metastasizing national security state, the black hole version of the executive that draws all power to itself, etc. McCain, with minor modifications, represents a continuation of the Bush legacy. It falls, then, to Obama to radically change course:

    The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

    By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the election into a referendum on the current administration’s entire national security legacy. By articulating a set of principles that will safeguard the country’s vital interests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while preserving rather than distorting the Constitution, Obama can persuade Americans to repudiate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.

    Of course I don’t think, and I doubt Bacevich thinks, that Obama will actually do this. Most of what he’s said so far indicates a much more cautious revision to the post-9/11 national security consensus.

    I still think Obama is preferable to McCain for a host of reasons, but I’m not going to get my hopes up that he’ll heed Professor Bacevich’s sound advice.

  • Of great apes and red herrings

    William Saletan reports on a movement afoot in Spain to grant “basic rights” to great apes – a group that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. A resolution approved by a Spanish parliamentary committe would “commit the government to ending involuntary use of apes in circuses, TV ads, and dangerous experiments.”

    The resolution is based on the work of the Great Ape Project, a group co-founded by Peter Singer, whose goal is to extend “the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans” and to extend to them the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.

    Saletan, however, makes a somewhat strange claim. Since, he says, GAP’s argument for the extension of basic rights to great apes is based on certain “morally significant qualities” that scientific research has shown them to possess, the animal rights argument for the equality of all animals is thereby undermined:

    These are appeals to discrimination, not universal equality. Most animals don’t have a rich cultural life. They can’t make tools. They don’t teach languages. Singer even points out that “chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have long-term relationships, not only between mothers and children, but also between unrelated apes.” Special rights for animals in committed relationships! It sounds like a Moral Majority for vegans.

    Opening your mind to science-based animal rights doesn’t eliminate inequality. It just makes the inequality more scientific. A rat can’t match a pig, much less a boy. In fact, as a GAP board member points out, “We are closer genetically to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.”

    George Orwell wrote the cruel finale to this tale 63 years ago in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” That wasn’t how the egalitarian uprising in the book was supposed to turn out. It wasn’t how the animal rights movement was supposed to turn out, either.

    Asserting a level of basic rights for animals doesn’t depend on the kind of empirical equality that Saletan seems to think. Just as human rights don’t vary according to people’s intelligence, usefulness, artistic skill, personal charm, or physical attractiveness it’s quite possible to contend for a basic level of moral consideration for animals that isn’t tied to things like having a cultural life, making tools, etc. As Jeremy Bentham memorably put it, the question is not “Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Or, to put it more precisely, the morally significant fact about animals, at least the higher ones, is that they are beings for whom things can go better or worse, they have interests, and experience life from a particular point of view.

    Even before I read Tzachi Zamir’s fine book, I thought that the whole debate about “speciesism” was a bit of a red herring. Even allowing that human beings are superior to animals in whatever way you like, it doesn’t follow that we can simply treat them anyway we want to. An animal doesn’t have to be morally equal to a human being to deserve not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The reasoning for this conclusion proceeds from basic notions of justice, fairness, and compassion and doesn’t, as Zamir argues, require a radical revision in our concepts of human worth. Most of us already accept the idea that we shouldn’t inflict unnecessary suffering on animals; it’s just that we have a very low threshold for what we consider to be “necessary.” If we were more consistent in our application of this principle, we’d be well on the road to a full-throated program of animal liberation, or so I would argue.

    In fact, it may the very differences between animals that help ground a program of animal rights. It’s living a life befitting an ape – and not being imprisoned, experimented on, or used for human entertainment – that constitutes an ape’s well-being. We don’t need to try and make apes equal with humans, but we might want to think about letting them be apes.

    [UPDATE: Edited slightly for clairty]

  • Stimulate me, baby

    I picked up the June issue of Harper’s before a train trip a few weeks ago because of the its interesting-looking cover story on the strife in the Episcopal Church. But only last night, as was I catching up on the rest of the issue, did I come across Jonathan Rowe’s “Our Phony Economy,” which was an abridged version of testimony he gave before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce. Rowe is identified as “codirector of West Marin Commons, a community-organizing group, in California.”

    The points Rowe makes are not unfamiliar ones, but they don’t seem to have sunk in to our collective consciousness, so they probably bear repeating. In essence, he is criticizing the use of GDP to measure economic well-being, making two major points about its limitations: it doesn’t count activities that exist outside of the formal cash economy, and it counts anything within that economy, whether constructive or destructive, as a contribution to well-being. In the guise of being “value neutral” it actually obscures an accurate picture of our economic life and the values it actually serves.

    Like I said, this is a point that has been made before, particularly by ecologically-minded thinkers. It’s reinforced by the fact that the human economy is only one part of what you might call the total earth economy, and any accounting of economic activity that neglects its impact on the ecosystem is partial and misleading.

    Rowe says:

    The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 or 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.

    I read this just a couple of days after receiving my “economic stimulus check” from the Treasury, so this is timely. Purist free-marketeers may accuse Rowe of attacking a straw man here, but I think it’s pretty hard to argue that our policy isn’t to encourage consumption, without much regard for what is consumed.

    What the environmental and resource crunch may require, then, is for us to think about the ends served by our economic life. It’s not enough to simply take whatever desires human beings may happen to have (or have had socialized into them) as given and use the economy as a mechanism for satisfying them, because those desires are essentially infinite, and we live in a finite world. Instead, we might need to start distinguishing more between those desires that lead to beneficial ends and those that lead to destructive ones.

    Again, nothing particularly new. But the question for me is whether this can be done in a way that respects people’s freedom. Apart from obvious physical harms, distinguishing between beneficial and destructive activities is tricky, especially without a shared philosophical framework of some sort. This is the real strength of liberalism: it promises to deliver social peace without taking a stand on controversial questions about the purpose and higher ends of living. However, if unrestrained human desire begins to bump up against very real ecological limits, this kind of neutrality may no longer be possible. Can liberalism provide an argument for self-restraint?

    Or could it be that liberalism doesn’t need to provide this kind of argument? All it needs to do, you might say, is put a price on those “externalities” generated by our economy–environmental, medical, etc.–and let the market do its thing. When it costs to pollute, people will pollute less. QED. This all assumes, of course, that we can put a non-arbitrary price on pollution, not to mention things like species extinction, destruction of wilderness, etc. And, anyway, is the worth of everything else ultimately a function of human preference, or does it have its own intrinsic, objective value? At this point we’re getting into questions that are downright philosophical, if not theological, and my skepticism that we can simply avoid the debate about ends and values returns.

    It may be, then, that democracy–understood not just as sheer majority rule but as a process for deliberating about shared goods–is necessary to fence in an economy that threatens to overturn all limits. But can our actually existing democracy even be said to approximate such a process? The jostling of interest groups and the lies of spinmeisters bear little resemblence to the ideal of a high-minded New England town meeting so beloved of proponents of deliberative democracy. Moreover, can democratic reasoning about ends, expressing itself in communal self-determination, coexist with a generous sphere of liberty for personal action? I have both libertarian and communitarian impulses, but I’m not sure there’s a politics that doesn’t require some kind of tradeoff between them. My thoughts on this are very much in flux at this point…

  • An ethic of sustainable use

    I got an e-mail with a link to this interview with Michael Pollan (You too can subscribe to the Michael Pollan e-mail list!) at this new site sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

    Three points stood out for me. One, the primary distinction between food systems is fossil fuel-based vs. solar energy based. Two, food is inherently a political issue because “your health is inseparable from the health of whole food chain that you’re a part of.” Three, there is a tension between the “wildnerness ethic” of classical environmetnalism and the “sustainability ethic” that is more focused on how we should live in the world which we inevitably change by being here. Bill McKibben describes this as the tension between the Edward Abbey outlook and the Wendell Berry outlook. Both are necessary, he says, but one emphasizes a “hands off” approach to nature while the other emphasizes the notion of good stewardship in the ways that we cultivate nature.

    Pollan thinks that we’re living in a time when we need more emphasis on the sustainability ethic:

    We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. You know, eight percent of the American landmass we’ve kind of locked up and thrown away the key. That’s a wonderful achievement and has given us things like the wilderness park.

    This is one of our great contributions to world culture, this idea of wilderness. On the other hand, it’s had nothing to say of any value for the ninety-two percent of the landscape that we cannot help but change because this is where we live. This is where we grow our food, this is where we work. Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development — parking lot, lawn.

    That seems right to me. As I mentioned in my previous post, Tzachi Zamir distinguishes between using and exploiting animals, where the former is sometimes permissible. We can, he says, enter into reciprocal relationships with animals that we benefit from, but which the animals also benefit from in a way that makes them better off than they would’ve been in the wild. Keeping some kinds of pets, he argues, are examples of this kind of relationship. Exploitation, on the other hand, is when the animal is made worse off than it would’ve been otherwise – we benefit at the animal’s expense.

    I’m not sure this distinction is completely generalizable, but it might help in thinking about what an ethic of sustainability (vs. one of exploitation) would look like. Organic farming vs. farming that sucks the nutrients out of land and requires chemical fertilizers to keep it arable might be an example of “use” vs. “exploitation.”

    UPDATE: Thinking about this a bit more – obviously there’s a sense in which it’s difficult to think of “the land” as having interests in the same way that animals do, nevertheless it still seems reasonable to say that it can be made better or worse off in an objective, if not subjective sense. What I mean is that the land, understood as an ecosystem, has a certain telos that can be frustrated by things we do to it. The more interesting question is whether the land can actually be made better off by us than it would’ve been if we’d simply left it alone. Or is any development simply a concession to our needs? From a theological perspective, there are reasons for thinking that the cultivated garden is superior to sheer wilderness, but there are also reasons for thinking that the wilderness is as God intended it to be. Worth thinking about some more…

  • June reading notes

    In lieu of full-on book blogging, here are capsule reviews of some books I’ve read over the past month or so:

    A Moral Climate, Michael Northcott A theological ethicist and priest of the Episcopal Church of Scotland on climate change. Well-informed by the science (as far as I can judge), but also provides a specifically theological perspective. In particular, he suggests ways in which certain Christian practices (pilgrimage, feasting) can provide alternatives to the way of life encouraged by hyper-industrial capitalism that can both help us live more gently on the world and witness to God’s order of things. I wasn’t, however, convinced by his wholesale denunciation of capitalism and industrialism; he appears to think that changing the way we consume things, particularly energy, is insufficient and at times I got the impression that he thinks we should all return to simple pre-industrial village life. A little too much romanticizing of pre-modern communal subsistence for my taste.

    The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Keith Ward Characterisitically clear and accessible philosophical theology from ATR favorite Ward. Each chapter deals with a particularly knotty issue raised by the science-religion intersection (e.g. creation, the soul, free will), which Ward seeks to untangle in generally pro-religion ways. In essence, he argues that science may require some revision of the way we think about spiritual matters, but the claims of reductionist materialism are vastly overblown. A particular strength of this book is that Ward considers different religious perspectives on science, not just Christian or Western ones. For instance, he discusses how a Buddhist and a Christian might respond differently to questions about the self and its relation to brain science. In this he’s continuing the method he pioneered in his four-volume comparative theology. I’m hard pressed to think of many other contemporary theologians who’ve given such detailed attention to non-Christian faiths.

    Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr There’s not much I could say about this book–a recognized classic–that hasn’t been said elsewhere. I thoroughly enjoyed it though and really appreciated how Niebuhr was able to sympathetically enter into the five perspectives on “Christ and culture.” Personally, I found myself most in sympathy with the “Christ and culture in paradox” and the “Christ above culture” stances, but I can see the reasons for as well as the limitations of all of them. I was reading the 50th anniversary edition, but, with Christians continuing to argue about their witness to the wider culture, this book is still relevant.

    Saving Belief, Austin Farrer I mentioned this book in a post the other day. Farrer’s primer on Christian belief is a small gem of classical Anglican lucidity. Both orthodox and liberal, and reformed and catholic, in the best sense. I found his explanation of the Atonement particularly compelling.

    Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir This brief book by philosopher Zamir makes the case for animal liberation from an explicitly “speciesist” perspective. By this he means that radical reform in our treatment of animals doesn’t require an equally radical rearranging of our conceptual furniture. We can maintain that human beings are superior to non-human animals, but still embrace the goals of animal liberation. He does this by showing that common moral beliefs that in no way contradict our speciesist intuitions lead to unexpectedly radical conclusions about our treatment of animals. Noteworthy too are his discussions of vegetarianism vs. veganism (an animal-friendly utopia, he maintains, will stilll allow for egg and dairy production, suitably reformed) and using vs. exploiting animals.

    Currently reading:

    Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson This is the first book in an award-winning trilogy about human colonists on Mars in the mid-to-late 21st century. It’s what the kids call “hard” SF, I belive. Everything is, at least to me, based on plausible near-future science. Very compelling characters and thematic threads about creating a new society and trying leave some of Earth’s violent baggage behind. As a skeptic about both human nature and space colonization I think it’s doomed to failure, of course. But we’ll see where things go in the second and third books.

    The Message and the Kingdom, Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman My pastor recommended this social history of early Christianity. It tries to put Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement in the socio-political context of the Roman Empire in the 1st century. I have a feeling that the none-too-subtle left-wing politics (the back cover bears blurbs from John Dominic Crossan and John Shelby Spong) may get kind of annoying, but so far I’m finding this an informative read.

    Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind Part music history, part true crime story – this tells the tale of the “black metal” scene centered in Norway in the 1990s. Some of the participants started to take the whole “evil” thing a little too seriously, resulting in church burnings, murder, and various occult activities. Promises to be fascinating.

    Finally, our public library had a nice, two-volume paperback edition of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, which I checked out. I’m not sure I’ll be equal to the task, but I thought it would be good to stretch my mind by spending some time with a bona fide theological classic. Plus, it’s a period of theology I know very little about and I can’t help but think that all the bad press Schleiermacher has gotten in 20th century theology is a bit one-sided.

  • The crunchy libertarian

    While we’re on the subject of food, I’m very much looking forward to John Schwenkler‘s upcoming article on “culinary conservatism” for the American Conservative, which he mentions here. In the same post, John makes the case for what I think it’s fair to call a libertarian approach to food production, the idea being that our current system is the result of excessive government intervention in the form of subsidies, tariffs, foolish regulations, etc. (as amply documented by Michael Pollan and others) and that small, local and organic farms would be in a better position to compete with WalMart and big ag under a more laissez-faire regime. I plead ignorance as to whether this would actually work, and I think that some regulation (at least to limit harm in the form of environmental externalities, animal cruelty, worker exploitation and so forth) is necessary, but I do find the aspiration of attaining green ends by libertarian means an appealing one.

  • Eating local vs. going meatless

    An interesting, though longish, post at the “Ethicurean” reporting on a new study that contends that how food is produced is more important than how far it has traveled (“food miles”) as far as greenhouse gas emissions go. Specifically, reducing your meat consumption can go further than buying local toward reducing your footprint. Not that there aren’t other good reasons for buying local, as the post points out.

    My hunch, though, is that, as far as individual consumers go, this all remains largely guesswork until we put a price on greenhouse emissions, whether through a tax or some cap-and-trade scheme. Not least because it’s often difficult if not impossible for individuals to know how their food was produced or how far it traveled to get to their plate.