A Thinking Reed

Category: Philosophy

  • Subversive slowness

    Here’s a lovely essay by Rebecca Solnit on “slowness [as] an act of resistance” to the cult of efficiency, speed, innovation, and techno-mastery. (Via James Poulos @ the American Scene)

  • Thought for the day

    Sorry for the light blogging – work is v. busy.

    So, in the absence of original content, here’s a quote from an essay by Stephen R.L. Clark called “The Rights of Wild Things,” found in the collection Animals and Their Moral Standing:

    Stoic theory offers us the ideal of the World State in which men have rights just as men, that is as citizens or subjects of the World State (though it is far from clear that Stoics would really have included literally all human beings as equals). But this ideal is far from actual, and it may sometimes be wise to remember the rights we have as, say, Britons, rather than our human rights. Nations which think themselves potential founders of the World State may reasonably be subject to suspicion, for the thought encourages them to interfere in the doings of other communities whenever their moral opinions are sufficiently outraged. It may be that a World State is too high a price to pay for the universal realisation of human rights. (p. 28)

  • Theologians, take heed!

    The medieval philosophy and theology blog Scholasticus has posted a fantastic quote from philosopher Peter Van Inwagen:

    One advantage philosophers bring to theology is that they know too much about philosophy to be overly impressed by the fact that a particular philosopher has said this or that. Philosophers of the present day know what Thomas Aquinas and Professor Bultmann did not know: that no philosopher is an authority. Philosophers know that if you want to pronounce on, say, the project of natural theology, you cannot simply appeal to what Kant has established about natural theology. You cannot do this for the very good reason that Kant has established nothing about natural theology. Kant has only offered arguments, and the cogency of these arguments can be (and is daily) disputed.

    That’s from Van Inwagen’s collection of essays God, Knowledge & Mystery, a real gem that I picked up several years back for a song at Half Price Books in Indianapolis, if I recall correctly.

    When I was in graduate school I took a class on “postmodern concepts of God.” It was good in that I read stuff that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise (Levinas, Marion), but I was continually irritated by the literary deconstructionist types who would appeal to Heidegger or Derrida or whoever as authorities for dismissing large swaths of the philosophical tradition. It just doesn’t work that way!

    There’s a real problem at work here too. Theologians obviously want to make use of philosophical work but don’t necessarily have the time, training, or inclination to work through all the arguments and counterarguments. I’ve noticed, for instance, that Wittgenstein looms large in a lot of contemporary theology, often functioning in a similar appeal to authority kind of way (“As Wittgenstein has shown us…” etc.).

    After all, argument has to stop at some point since you can’t justify every premise in your reasoning – as Aristotle has shown us! 😉 – but philosophers and others are understandably unimpressed by theology that takes controversial philosophical claims as given.

  • Wolterstorff on religion, liberty, and democracy

    The other day I was browsing my iTunes library and came across this talk by Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff on religious grounds for political liberty and democracy that I had apparently downloaded and then promptly forgot about. So I finally listened to it and it’s quite good. One of the points that Wolterstorff makes which, I think, bears repeating, is that “neo-traditionalist” critiques of liberalism (he specifically calls out MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank) often seem to be aiming at a certain theory of liberalism (e.g. Rawls’) and not life as it is actually lived in liberal democratic socieities. Wolterstorff argues that they consequently miss the mark a lot of the time and that a justification for liberal democracy can be given that isn’t committed to a theory like Rawls’.

    It’s a bit long, but also free.

  • God and the evolving universe

    I’m glad to see that First Things made Avery Dulles’ article on God and evolution available as this month’s free article.

    Dulles distinguishes three (non-creationist) approaches to evolution: theistic evolutionism which sees the process of evolution as the outworking of inherent properties of the universe established by God, Intelligent design, which claims that certain particular facets of the evolutionary process are inexplicable without reference to a divine intelligence, and what we might call “holism” which maintains that the behavior of higher existents (such as organisms) isn’t reducible to or fully explicable by the laws governing lower ones (such as the laws of chemistry or physics).

    Dulles cites John Polkinghorne as an example of someone in this third school of thought. In his recent book Exploring Reality Polkinghorne makes that interesting suggestion that the human mind’s access to a realm of intelligible universals such as mathematics and logic, goodness and beauty, could itself be a factor in human evolution. That is, he wants to expand the relevant sense of “environment” to include the non-physical “environment” of the intelligible world.

    Polkinghorne writes:

    Once one accepts the enrichment beyond the merely material of the context within which human life is lived, one is no longer restricted to the notion of Darwinian survival necessity as providing the sole engine driving hominid development. In these noetic realms of rational skill, moral imperative, and aesthetic delight–of encounter with the true, the good and the beautiful–other forces are at work to draw out and enhance distinctive human potentialities. (p. 56)

    Obviously Polkinghorne isn’t suggesting that our cognitive access to the non-material intelligible realm alters the individual genetic structure that is passed on to one’s descendants. Rather, it creates

    a language-based Lamarckian ability to transfer information from one generation to the next through a process whose efficiency vastly exceeded the slow and uncertain Darwinian method of differential propagation. It is in these ways that a recognition of the many-layered character of reality, and the variety of modes of response to it, make intelligible the rapid development of the remarkable distinctiveness of human nature. (p. 57)

    The idea here is that human development is explained, at least in part, by the responses we make to this more comprehensive “environment” that includes the realm of intelligible truth, goodness, and beauty and thus isn’t reducible to more materialistic accounts.

    Dulles cautions against the “God of the gaps” thinking that seems to characterize the Intelligent Design school, but he also warns that “Christian Darwinists run the risk of conceding too much to their atheistic colleagues.”

    They may be over-inclined to grant that the whole process of emergence takes place without the involvement of any higher agency. Theologians must ask whether it is acceptable to banish God from his creation in this ­fashion.

    The kind of holism championed by thinkers like Polkinghorne (I’d also place Keith Ward somewhere in this school) seeks to show how God can influence the process of evolution without resorting to the kind of tinkering that ID theorists seem to imply. Some process thinkers, for instance, describe God as “luring” creation toward certain states of being. Polkinghorne (as well as Ward, I think) wants to say that God intervenes in more direct ways too. But I have to say that I find Polkinghorne’s concept of “downward” causation as the input of information by which he tries to explain God’s action in the world pretty darn obscure, at least as it pertains to action on non-living/non-intelligent things.*

    What Polkinghorne, et al. are up to here, it seems to me, is trying to thread a third way between the deism of the theistic evolution crowd and the God-of-the-gaps tinkering of the ID crowd. They base this partly on the idea that modern science has shown the physical universe to have a “looser” causal structure than that imagined by classic Newtonian physics (and more to the point its philosophical popularizers). If physical events are underdetermined by preceding ones, then there appears to be room for God to exert some kind of influence without “violating” the laws of nature. The trick, or so it seems, is to give some account of how God exerts that influence without conceiving of it in some kind of quasi-physical infusion of energy. That’s what I take Polkinghorne to be getting at in talking about causation by means of “information.”
    —————————————————————————
    *I note that next month the Templeton Foundation Press is reissuing Ward’s Divine Action which seeks to address these questions. That’s one that’s probably worth checking out.

  • The anti-utopian

    Nice profile (from a couple of months ago) of the eclectic and eccentric British political thinker John Gray. I’ve always found Gray’s stuff fascinating, and this piece puts his various ideological twists and turns (from Thatcherite neo-liberal, to skeptic of neo-liberalism, to all-around pessimist) in context.

    (Found here.)

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters.

    Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” is a needlessly abstract and ahistorical way of looking at things. It’s better to think in terms of “historical claims and protections, not with the pre-social rights of self-owners: rights established not by abstract argument, but by the slow discovery of a mutually acceptable forebearance and cooperation–a process, incidentally, that there is no sound reason to limit to human intercourse.”

    The early liberals, he maintains,

    did not appeal to absolute rights of self-ownership (restricted by the equal rights of others). Private property was defended as the likeliest way of enabling a society of freemen to subsist in mutual harmony, and cultivate their virtues: if we each had some portion of the land to tend we would be less likely to fall prey to tyrants, and the land itself would prosper. What we owned, however, was not the land itself, but the lawfully acquired fruits, and we owned these only for their lawful use. “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy” (Locke, ‘Treatises’ 2.31: 1963 p. 332; see Hargrove 1980). Individual liberty rested on the value God placed in every soul, as a unique expression of His glory, such that any despotism, however benevolent in purpose, must issue in a decline of valuable diversity. Each of us has a profound and vital interest in the virtue of our fellow-citizens, and in the continued viability of the ecosystems within which we live.

    Clark brings this classical liberal insight into conversation with recent writing on “deep ecology” with interesting results. The main idea of deep ecology is that, rather than being self-sufficient individuals, we are all parts of the ecosystems to which we belong, the whole which has a certain priority over the parts. This is not to downgrade the value of the individual, but to point out that her flourishing depends on the flourishing of the whole of which she is a part.

    Individualists, and some animal rights proponents like Tom Regan, have been wary of what they call “environmental fascism” that seems to threaten to subordinate the interests of the individual to the collective. We sometimes see this tension between environmentalists and animal rights people: environmentalists are mainly concerned with preserving ecosystems even if that means, for example, culling animal herds.

    Clark, however, sees a “necessary moral synthesis” of libertarian and “zoophile” intuitions in a vision of a kind of cosmic ecology. A reasonable and proper good for individuals depends on the good of the whole: “The living world (which is itself an element or function of the cosmic whole) is like ‘the federation or community of interdependent organs and tissues that go to make up [a physician’s] patient’ (Gregg 1955; see Lovelock 1982). Claiming a spurious advantage for individuals at the price of damage to the whole is simply silly.”

    The whole he sees as the City of God. Invoking Berkeley he identifies this with the whole created universe, each in its own way reflecting an aspect of God’s glory. And each part has a claim to exist, if only for a short time. It’s reasonable that we should protect our own kind against threats to life and limb, but beyond that we ought to be content with our allotted portion. There can be no absolute “right to life” because death comes for us all and is part of the fabric of the universe; but we can aim for a “letting be” of things according to their kind:

    The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organized around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-ourselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all selfowners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature that one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures on whom they prey from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault.

    The libertarian thesis, applied to the terrestrial biosphere, requires that no-one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures that are there can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. Libertarians, by the same token, will not see any general duty to assist people against aggressors. Even aggression, it turns out, is not necessarily unjust, a violation of right, though enslavement is. Even if some acts of aggression are unjust, there is no general duty to defend the victims. Any duty that such libertarians acknowledge to assist the prey will rest upon their sense of solidarity, not on abstract rights of self-ownership.

    Clark calls this a “radically anarchic view of human and extra-human intercourse,” but says that we might be justified in going beyond this by acknowledging the fact that, within the “cosmic democracy,” most of us animals already exist in social groupings, many of them including multiple species. “We can,” he says, “moderate the merely libertarian ethic by the ethic of solidarity: both depend upon our vision of the moral universe, both are necessary.”

    The vision of the cosmic democracy, of a universe in which each thing has its appointed part to play and its own particular dignity, eminently justifies decent treatment of non-humans, and even an extension of sympathy and mercy. “[I]t may also be compatible with justice, even required by a more elevated sense of ‘justice’, that we should give each other more than we have a right to demand: we may construct ‘laws of the nations’, and tacitly agree to assist those who are in need, so long as we may justly do so.” What Clark seems to have in mind here is what I referred to the other day as the “special duties” owed to those creatures that we share our lives with in a particular way, such as pets or other domestic animals. “Emotions of solidarity” combine with and reinforce “contractual justice” as we find our circle of sympathy expanding outward, pushed by the vision of cosmic democracy wherein we are all related as partial reflections of the Creator’s glory.

    This “visionary solidarity” seems a long way from the bare-bones political ethic of libertarianism, and Clark admits that he has pushed the liberal ethic to the point of collapse:

    If ‘we’ are illumined by this vision of the living world, we may request a like forebearance and enthusiasm from our fellow citizens. Those who show that they cannot conceive of the world in its richness, cannot sympathize with their fellow-creatures, may seem to us to be menaces. It is, correspondingly, our ‘natural right’ as self-owners so to organize society to introduce that vision into all with whom we must associate.

    Now this is heady stuff. Though it must be qualified by what Clark says a bit earlier:

    This would be a ‘fascist’ vision only if it implied that there was some elite group entitled to inflict upon an ignorant world the legislation they thought justified, at whatever cost to the ideals and lives of their victims. There is no such implication: on the contrary, it is just those elite groups which most offend against the rules of liberal solidarity.

    So it seems that what he’s getting at is this: we need something like a paradigm shift, a new moral vision that takes in the whole of the living world, not just the human sphere and this vision will naturally impace the way we order our common life. But this isn’t the sort of thing that can be imposed from the top down. So there’s no question of a kind of green fascism.

    Given what I’ve seen elsewhere of Clark’s political views, I would imagine that he would favor this vision being propagated through decentralized and non-hierarchical local communities joined in some kind of loose federation.

    From my earlier post on Clark’s “anarcho-conservatism”:

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.

    Analogously, Clark might say that a change in our evaluation of the moral status of animals can and should develop organically from existing moral traditions. And so he might find Matthew Scully more congenial than Peter Singer on this score. A gradual modification of our moral views, developing in an organic, quasi-Burkean fashion is more likely to take root than some attempted revolution from above.

  • Debating the bomb

    Apparently some people never get tired of arguing about whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Happily, though, there is a link there to G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr Truman’s Degree” in its entriety, which I don’t think I’ve been able to find on the web before now.

    I mean, look: in terms of traditional moral theology Anscombe is absolutely right. The bombings were murder plain and simple. The only way I can see to defeat this is by abandoning deontological considerations and making some kind of consequentialist argument that the bombings were justified, which is what defenders usually do. You also get the rare bird who actually denies that there were any “civilians” in the morally relevant sense at those targets, not seeming to realize that this repugnant doctrine would license virtually any act of terrorism since civilians can always plausibly be held to be “contributing to the war effort” if you define that broadly enough.

  • Could we turn out not to have free will?

    Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a blog post suggesting that some forms of atheism make free will and moral reasoning absurd. Will Wilkinson responded by essentially saying that this is a psuedo-problem (link via Unqualified Offerings).

    I think Wilkinson doesn’t really acknowledge the source of the worry here. He writes:

    Here are two things you know: free will exists (it is obvious: go ahead, touch your nose) and the universe is made of whatever it is made of (obvious, if anything is). Therefore, you know the conjunction of those two things. Therefore, you know that the crazy proposition that says that one of them must be false isn’t true! There’s no need to get hung up on an arbitrary conjecture about the trascendental conditions for the very possibility of the existence of something when things you already know rule it out.

    He seems to want to say that this is a psuedo-problem because we already know that we have free will, so whatever the universe turns out to be like must be compatible with that fact.

    But the whole point of the worry about determinism or physicalism that Ponnuru originally raised was that, if the universe turned out to be a certain way, we might not have free will after all as we originally supposed. In other words, there are possible ways the universe might be that are, on closer inspection, incompatible with free will.

    Wilkinson is certainly right that we can distinguish voluntary from involuntary actions, and that this distinction isn’t threatened by whatever metaphysical account of reality we come up with. But this isn’t the meaning of “free will” that people who worry about determinism and/or physicalism (incompatibilists in the philosophical jargon) usually have in mind.

    There worry is something more like this: if the universe consists entirely of the sorts of things and events described by physics, then it seems that what we take to be actions based on reasoning and choice would turn out to be really explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, these laws make no reference to things like intention or value, so it would appear to be false that the cause of my choosing x was that I believed it to be the best course of action all things considered. Rather the real explanation would make reference to various physical events in my brain, body, and environment.

    Essentially, it boils down to this: free will (in a deeper sense than just voluntary action) appears to be threatened if the real springs of our actions lie in non-rational causes, whether this be some Freudian subconscious motive or the interactions of subatomic particles. It is the question whether rational thought and choice are causally efficacious in virtue of their own unique properties, or whether they are “epiphenomena” generated by other non-rational causes.

  • Respect for life as a communal value

    In yesterday’s Boston Globe, Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel accused President Bush of moral inconsistency with respect to the President’s position on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). According to Sandel, if Bush regards the destruction of embryos as tantamount to killing a full-grown person, then he ought logically call for a total ban on ESCR, since it would be morally equivalent to murder.

    I think there are two problems with Sandel’s argument. First, it assumes that pro-lifers can never engage in piecemeal, pragmatic politics or compromise. Many pro-lifers would like to see abortion banned, but in the interim they’re also quite happy to see policies that limit abortion enacted such as bans on federal funding of abortion, parental notification laws, bans on partial-birth abortion, etc. Bush could well be following a similar tactic, recognizing that a ban on ESCR has no chance of being enacted.

    The second problem, though, is that Sandel doesn’t address the possibility that one can oppose the destruction of embryos for scientific research without conceding that an embryo is morally equivalent to a full-grown person. This isn’t dispositive, but I imagine that most of us, if faced with the choice between rescuing a child from a burning building or a dish with fertilized ova in it, would have no problem deciding to save the child. This suggests that we don’t regard embryos as morally equivalent to human persons.

    But it doesn’t follow from this that embryos have no value, or that it’s unproblematic to use them as raw materials for research. There are several objections one might make to this practice that don’t rely on the supposition that an embryo is morally equivalent to a human person. One is that the use of embryos in research is another step on the road of regarding all of nature and life as a “resource” to be used for our benefit. This denies their intrinsic value and makes human utility the measure of all things. To draw a line and say that certain things mustn’t be done to embryos is a way of affirming the intrinsic value of nascent human life.

    It’s very difficult to make these kinds of arguments in a political culture based on concerns of utility or on rights, since embryos don’t seem at first blush like the sorts of entities that can have their utility diminished or their rights violated. But it’s noteworthy that Sandel, a noted communitarian thinker who has criticized “procedural liberalism”, wouldn’t be more sensitive to ethical concerns that go beyond this rather narrow set of concerns. A polity might, on communitarian grounds, affirm its respect for life by making certain kinds of research off limits. Of course, Bush hasn’t generally made his case in these terms, and one can question whether such a policy reflects the values of our polity considering that it has been maintained only by presidential veto. Still, I would think that Sandel would recognize that such a case could be made since it’s more congenial to his approach to political philosophy.