A Thinking Reed

Category: Philosophy

  • WASM 4: Linzey vs. Singer

    (Previous posts are here, here, and here.)

    In his concluding chapter to Why Animal Suffering Matters, Linzey does address one of the concerns I raised in my previous post in the course of taking some pains to distinguish his program from that of utilitarians like Peter Singer. While appreciating Singer’s contribution to the cause of animal liberation, Linzey thinks that Singer’s utilitarian outlook has unfortunate consequences—both moral and practical—in its assessment of the status of children. As is well known, Singer has argued that infants could be justly killed up to perhaps the age of one month. His reasoning is that, lacking self-awareness, the painless death of a very young infant would not count as harming him or her. Similarly, Singer thinks—consistent with his utilitarianism—that painlessly killing animals isn’t wrong, other things being equal, if they are replaced with another animal living a satisfactory life.

    Singer’s reason for thinking this is rooted in his particular version of utilitarianism, namely preference utilitarianism. Unlike classic utilitarianism, such as that of Jeremy Bentham, which seeks to minimize suffering and maximize pleasure, Singer’s version seeks to maximize the satisfaction of preferences. Thus, the right action is the one that, on balance, satisfies the most preferences, irrespective of whose they are. This accounts for Singer’s egalitarianism with respect to human and animal suffering.

    However, Singer has argued that having a preference to go on living requires a level of self-awareness not possessed by (at least) most non-human animals or by human infants. Consequently, assuming that the killing didn’t involve suffering, there is nothing inherently wrong with killing a very young human or an animal if doing so will lead to a greater balance of preference satisfaction over preference frustration.

    The most common case where this comes up is in Singer’s (in)famous defense of euthanasia for disabled infants. Singer says that killing such an infant is permissible if it would result in a net balance of good (defined in terms of preference satisfaction) for all parties concerned (parents, etc.). Since—lacking the necessary self-awareness—the infant can have no preference as such to go on living, painlessly killing him or her would not frustrate any of the child’s preferences.

    There are many objections to Singer’s position, even from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint. For example, it’s been pointed out that Singer doesn’t seem to have a particularly good grasp on the quality of life that is actually available to people with disabilities and tends to assume that such lives aren’t worth living. But experience shows that people with even quite serious disabilities can have very fulfilling lives, both in terms of the satisfactions available to them and the contributions they make to the lives of others.

    Moreover, as Linzey argues, there are good grounds for rejecting a purely preference-based account of what’s wrong with killing (either a human or an animal). As Linzey says, taking the life of a sentient being is robbing it of its future, whether or not that being has a conscious preference to go on living as such. There may be cases, he admits, where the balance of suffering over pleasure is so lopsided that ending life may be the most merciful choice, but this is surely the exception, not the rule.

    Linzey is concerned to distinguish his position from Singer’s because he believes that movements for better treatment for animals have historically gone hand-in-hand with campaigns for human rights and should continue to do so. He rejects any misanthropic inferences that animal liberationists might draw from their stance and fears that Singer’s defense of infanticide reinforces the image of animal rightists as anti-human. In Linzey’s terms, very young children share the same qualities that ought to prompt greater moral solicitude for animals: the inability to give or withhold consent, the inability to represent their interests to others linguistically, and moral innocence or blamelessness. Linzey rejects Singer’s privileging of self-awareness as a necessary condition for full moral protection, emphasizing the duties that the innocence and relative vulnerability of both childern and animals place on us.

    In the next–and last–post in this series, I’ll look at some objections Linzey considers and try to tie some thoughts together on the book as a whole.

  • Bloggingheads theodicy

    Here’s an interesting “diavlog” on Leibniz and the problem of evil featuring philosophers Michael Murray and Jan Cover (who is a former professor of mine and a very cool guy).

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    I’m not sure you’d say this makes for “fun” viewing: I have undying respect for Jan, but he’s not exactly going out of his way to make this stuff accessible to the non-specialist here.

    p.s. On the first day of my first graduate seminar (on Leibniz, as it happens) Cover asked me if I was a theist. My response, as I recall, was “sometimes.”

  • Coming attractions

    Last week I received my copy of Andrew Linzey’s new book, Why Animal Suffering Matters. I’ve only just started it, but it looks like Linzey develops in more detail an argument that he’s deployed in some of his other works: the differences between animals and humans, instead of justifying a lower moral status for animals, actually justifiy a radical revision in the way we treat them. This is because those characteristic differences (e.g., moral innocence, relativie helplessness) are such that they call for a response of mercy and compassion on our part. I expect to do some more in-depth blogging on this as time allows.

  • Book recommendation: James Garvey’s Ethics of Climate Change

    During my mini-vacation I read philosopher James Garvey’s book, The Ethics of Climate Change, which I highly recommend. It very lucidly lays out the moral issues and the kinds of responses they call for. I thought his discussion of what we know about the impact of climate change and how we should act in the face of different types and degrees of uncertainty to be particularly persuasive. Prof. Garvey, along with others, blogs here.

  • John Gray on Isaiah Berlin

    Berlin is remembered by philosophers for defending ethical pluralism – the claim that human values make conflicting claims that cannot always be rationally reconciled – and arguing that this pluralism is the true basis of a liberal society. The argument is hardly demonstrative – if values can conflict in ways that have no rational solution, what reason can there be for favouring individual choice over other goods? But Berlin’s achievement was not to give liberalism a watertight foundation. It was to present liberalism as an attractive vision of life, and one that is not tied to a quasi-religious belief in progress. Though Berlin was solidly committed to the values of the liberal Enlightenment, he never shared the faith of Enlightenment thinkers that growing knowledge could resolve fundamental conflicts of value. For him such conflicts were part of what it means to be human, and any philosophy that offered to deliver us from them was both deluded and illiberal.

    Read the rest here (via the American Conservative).

    I don’t know how much Gray is over-reading Berlin here, but this certainly seems to aptly characterize Gray’s views. He’s been on a jihad against progressivist utopian delusions over the last few years, from taking on humanism in his provocative Straw Dogs (see my thoughts here) to critiquing apocalyptic religion and crusading neoconservatism in Black Mass.

    Gray’s pluralistic, anti-progressivist liberalism definitely resonates with me. I’m deeply suspicious of narratives of historical progress and claims to basing society on a unified conception of the good. But I also have my reservations. Anti-progressivism can easily slide into complacency about rectifiable injustices. Sometimes we need the zeal of the radical.

  • Problems of omnipotence, omniscience, and temporality

    In his book Pascal’s Fire, Keith Ward writes:

    …ultimate mind is the actual basis of all possible states. It is the only being that must be actual, if anything at all is possible. It is thus uniquely self-existent, not deriving its existence from any other being. Its nature is necessarily what it is–there are no possible alternatives to it, since it is the basis of every possibility. It can be spoken of as omniscient, in the sense that it conceives or generates all possible states, knows what they are and knows that there are no more than it conceives. It can be spoken of as omnipotent, in the sense that it brings whatever is actual into existence from the realm of possibility, or it generates actual beings with a derivative power to make some possible states actual. Nothing that comes into being can have more power than ultimate mind has, since the latter is the source of all actuality.

    It might well be as well to note that these definitions of omniscience and omnipotence are not exactly the same as the ones classical philosophers have often given. Many philosophers define omniscience as knowledge of absolutely everything, possible, actual, past, present and future. They define omnipotence as the power to do absolutely anything that is not self-contradictory. The definitions I have given are more restricted than that. They do not entail that God knows what will be actual in the future. Perhaps God leaves the future open for radical freedom. And they do not entail that God can do absolutely anything. Perhaps God leaves, or even must leave, finite reality to follow its own inherent laws of development.

    Yet we can still say that God knows everything that is possible and actual (the future may not be actual yet) and that God is the most powerful being there could possibly be and the ultimate source of all things that come into being. This leaves open the question of exactly which possible states can be made actual adn whether there are restrictions on what possible states can be actual. Though such an ultimate mind can sensibly be called omniscient and omnipotent, this may not be enough to satisfy some religious believers. It is enough, however, to satisfy the requirements of being an ultimate explanation of the universe. (pp. 132-3)

    Elsewhere Ward speaks of God’s “temporality,” as the divine experience of a succession of states. God is still trans-temporal in the sense of transcending the multiple processes of temporal succession posited by relativity theory. But Ward argues, contra the classical view, that it is a perfection, not an imperfection, for God to experience the flow of new experiences and new possibilities for creativity, in response to real relationships with creatures.

    God can enter into many different times, acting and responding in them, while also existing in a trans-temporal way. We cannot imagine this trans-temporality of God, but it should not be conceived as a totally immutable and static existence. It might be better conceived as a transcendent agency that acts incessantly in many temporal streams, manifesting its changeless perfection in continual creative activity, sensitive awareness, and overflowing goodness. (p. 216)

    Obviously a lot of argument would be required to establish this position with any confidence, but I think there are two root insights that motivate it. The first is that, if God does not experience temporality in some sense, then God’s knowledge is, paradoxically, limited. That is, there’s a mode of experience that God has no knowledge of. The second is that God, according to the Bible and much religious experience, exists in responsive relationship with God’s creatures. For this to be a genuine relationship and not an illusory one, God must be able to actually enter into the flow of time and, potentially, be affected by it. Classical Christian thought limited this to the Incarnation, but Ward goes further than that here.

    So, if there is a temporal aspect to God’s existence, then we can begin to see why omniscience might still allow that God doesn’t know certain things. If there are genuinely undetermined events (and there may be quite few for all we know), then even God would only have probably knowledge of how they are going to turn out. As Ward says, God knows all possible states and all actual states, but non-actual future states would not necessarily be part of God’s knowledge.

    I always feel a bit impious even speculating about this stuff.

  • Doubting Dawkins

    An excerpt from Keith Ward’s Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, a response to Richard Dawkins. (In Ward’s defense, he’s been debating Dawkins for years, so this isn’t cheap bandwagon jumping.)

    The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one philosophical view that has the agreement of all competent philosophers. But in this world there are very few materialists, who think we can know that mind is reducible to electrochemical activity in the brain, or is a surprising and unexpected product of purely material processes.

    In the world of modern philosophy, there are idealists, theists, phenomenalists, common sense pragmatists, scientific realists, sceptics and materialists. These are all going concerns, living philosophical theories of what is ultimately real. This observation does not settle any arguments. But it puts Dawkins’ ‘alternative hypothesis’ in perspective. He is setting out to defend a very recent, highly contentious, minority philosophical world-view. Good. That is the sort of thing we like to see in philosophy! But it will take a lot of sophisticated argument to make it convincing. It is not at all obvious.

    Though this is only an excerpt, I think the objection an atheist would naturally raise is that, even if most of history’s great philosophers have been idealists (in the sense of believing that reality has something mind-like as at least one of its most fundamental constituents), we now think that many things can be explained without appealing to consciousness or purpose. Not that I think that’s a knock-down argument by any means, but it’s a challenge that needs to be addressed (and I assume Ward addresses it in the book).

  • The Life You Can Save 5

    So, where have we traveled so far? Singer has argued that 1) we have a moral obligation to help those who lack access to sufficient food, shelter, and medical care and 2) that we can do this by donating to aid agencies. Assuming we agree with him, how much should we give? Part 4 tries to tease out an answer in detail.

    On its face, the book’s argument seems to imply a pretty demanding level of giving. After all, I could deprive myself of a lot of luxuries (and donate the money saved to aid agencies) before being in danger of not having enough to adequately meet my own needs and those of my family. Are we then obliged to sacrifice everything beyond what we need to live more or less comfortably for the sake of helping the very poorest people of the world? Singer admits that the logic of his argument seems to point in this direction, but he also knows that many (perhaps most) of us would balk at such an extreme conclusion and, human nature being what it is, maybe decide not to give anything at all. If such seemingly onerous sacrifices are called for, we might say, then there must be some flaw in Singer’s reasoning.

    Singer presumably doesn’t think his own reasoning is flawed, but he offers a kind of compromise position as a public standard that he thinks most people can aspire to, but which can still make a huge difference. To this end, he proposes percentages that people in the top ten percent of the U.S. income distribution should give to aid. Those making more than about $105,000 a year should give 5% of their income away; those making over $148,000 should give 10%; more than $383,000, 15%; over $600,000, 20%; and over $1.9 million, 25%. To avoid dis-incentives to move to a higher bracket, this standard could be made more progressive – e.g., someone making $500,000 would give away 5% of the first $148,000; 10% of the next $235,000; and 15% of the remainder.

    The amount of money this would raise–from affluent, or at least comfortable, people in the U.S. alone–is about $471 billion a year. For comparison’s sake, Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty, estimates that it would cost $189 billion a year to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. (Bracketing for the moment the question of how effective the MDGs themselves are.) Singer adds that there’s no reason to think that people in the bottom 90% of the income scale can’t also give something; if they gave just an average of 1% of their income, this would add about another $40 billion. While it’s obviously difficult to generalize about how much any of us can give, which will depend a lot on circumstances, when I did the math it was pretty clear that I could give according to Singer’s scheme without being seriously deprived.

    As is often the case with Singer, there’s a tension between what consequentialist morality seems to require of us and what our own particular attachments–to our family, friends, compatriots, etc.–seem to demand. This isn’t to say that Singer opposes all particular attachments; he thinks there are good (consequentialist!) reasons for preferring that parents raise their own children rather than society trying to institute some kind of communal parenting arrangement. But many of us will balk at this rather cold-blooded argument. It just seems right, we say, that we should prefer our own children to the children of others.

    But you don’t need to buy completely into Singer’s utilitarianism to feel the force of his argument. Even granted that we have special duties to our own kith and kin, isn’t there some point at which showering them with luxuries seems grotesque given the magnitude of human suffering in the world? Is it really OK to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send your kid to a fancy private school, or to buy him a new car for his 16th birthday, or send him on a European vacation when there are millions of children in the world who lack access to the basic necessities of life? Surely our particular duties to those we love don’t trump all claims that others might have on us.

    The book ends with a consideration of how giving to others can be a way of finding meaning in one’s own life. He cites ancient wisdom and modern research to suggest that helping others is actually a source of deep satisfaction. It almost goes without saying that, from a Christian perspective, it’s well-attested that it is better to give than to receive.

    Whatever else Singer has accomplished here, I think he has, at the very least, put the burden of proof on those who deny that we have obligations to do a lot more than we currently are to alleviate world poverty. The fact that this often barely registers as a blip on our political or personal radar screens is a scandal. There are groups doing good work that make a difference in people’s lives, even if it’s sometimes difficult to say how much difference they’re making. And the sacrifice required for most of us to make a significant difference would be comparatively small.

  • Call of the wild

    Here’s a good review of what sounds like a fascinating book–philosopher Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf, in which Rowlands tells the story of his relationship with his pet wolf Brenin.

    Rowlands’s unusual book — part autobiography, part philosophical discourse; harshly cynical yet somehow also inspirational — is above all a meditation on the nature of friendship, and on the human/animal bond, which is a remarkable but precarious and overlooked thing. This is not the sole province of the philosopher (Rowlands’s profession); but philosophers, from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer to Tom Regan, have a long and uncommon history of treating animals as a subject worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Rowlands’s own method is to intersperse autobiographical chapters with philosophical explorations of subjects like happiness, grief, and time, especially insofar as his life with Brenin helped him find answers. The book has much to teach us about our relationship to animals, and even more to teach us about ourselves.

    Rowlands’ other book, Animals Like Us, is an excellent introduction to animal rights.

  • Rawls’ religious roots

    Try saying that three times fast! And then read this fascinating essay about philosopher John Rawls’ early writings on religion (which have only recently been published) and the continuity of the ideas expressed there with his mature (and completely secular) political philosophy. It seems that the young Rawls considered entering the priesthood of the Episcopal Church but lost his faith after his experiences in World War II. Nevertheless, based on this piece, Rawls’ earlier religious ideas–particularly a highly personalistic and communitarian understanding of Christian ethics–continued to have analogues in his later work.