A Thinking Reed

Category: Philosophy

  • A very brief argument for animal liberation

    From philosopher Steve Sapontzis:

    Very briefly, the argument for [animal liberation] runs as follows. Morality is goal-directed activity which aims at making the world a better place in terms of reduced suffering and frustration, increased happiness and fulfilment, a wider reign of fairness and respect for others, and enhanced presence and effectiveness of such virtues as kindness and impartiality. Through our exploitation of nonhuman animals we detract from all of these moral goals. Factory farming, fur trapping and other exploitations of nonhuman animals increase the suffering and frustration in the world and reduce happiness and fulfilment – the exact opposite of our moral goals. In using our vast power over nonhuman animals to make them bear burdens and suffer losses so that we may be comfortable and prosperous, we extend and enforce a reign of tyranny and disregard, verging on contempt, for others – again, the exact opposite of our moral goals. Finally, by giving revulsion at and compassion for the suffering of nonhuman animals the demeaning labels of ‘squeamishness’ and ‘sentimentality’ and by conditioning children to disregard such feelings as they learn to hunt, butcher or vivisect nonhuman animals, we limit and inhibit the virtues of which we are capable — again, just the opposite of our moral goals. Consequently, in all these ways our goal of making the world a morally better place will be more effectively pursued by liberating from human exploitation all those capable of suffering and happiness and of being treated fairly and virtuously.

    This extract comes from an article found here.

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract from the phenomena of experience in order to provide a more precise mapping or modeling of certain aspects of reality for various purposes; the error of reductionism is to mistake those abstract models for the whole of reality itself. (Huston Smith once compared it to thinking that an increasingly detailed map of Illinois will–eventually–result in a map of the entire United States.)

    Physicalism and reductionism are frequently seen as threats to religious belief. This can be for a variety of reasons, such as that they seem to undermine belief in an immaterial (and possibly immortal) soul, or that they deny the “specialness” of human beings. However, I do think it’s possible for a Christian to affirm a non-reductive version of physicalism. This would mean that human beings are physical beings with consciousness, feeling, and rationality. These are genuinely “emergent” features of the world–features that appeared over the course of evolutionary history and which we share with other animals, but they are not reducible to the physico-chemical aspect of reality. They are not simply the outworking of their underlying material substrate but exert a genuine causal influence on the world. Philosophers and theologians have characterized how this might work in a variety of ways, such as “whole-part” or “top-down” causation. But the point is that the mental introduces genuine novelty into the world and is capable of affecting the course of events. Moreover, if something like this is right, it seems possible that God could, at death, preserve whatever it is that constitutes each person’s unique selfhood (e.g., memories, character traits) and “translate” them into some other medium, whether embodied or not.

  • Varieties of atheism

    Brandon points out the problem with lumping all contemporary atheist thinkers together as “new atheists.” He highlights the work of philosopher Owen Flanagan, whose work I’m not particularly familiar with, as an atheist who doesn’t necessarily fit the new atheist paradigm.

    It sounds to me–at least from Brandon’s description–that Flanagan is what I would call a non-reductive atheist. That is, anyone who’s willing to countenance a “naturalized spirituality” isn’t likely to have much sympathy with the view that all things that exist can be explained by reducing them to their most basic elements (genes or fundamental physical particles, depending on what science you want to use as your master-discourse). I’ve often thought it strange that people who consider themselves “humanists” could be comfortable with the reductionist perspective characteristic of some of the “new” atheists.

  • Vegan versus vegetarian utopia revisited

    Jean Kazez and Scu of Critical Animal both have critical posts on this essay on veganism by philosopher Tzachi Zamir. The argument appears in a slightly different form in his book Ethics and the Beast, and I discussed it a bit here.

    While I, as a “moral vegetarian” (to use his terms) find Zamir’s argument appealing, at least in a self-serving way, I thought he was a little too quick to assume that modest “humane” reforms of the dairy and egg industries would lead eventually to an ethically acceptable result. Even if we accept the terms of the debate as Zamir has laid them out, to demonstrate the superiority of the moral vegetarian position, we would need a viable model of non-exploitative, institutional animal use that could be sustained on a large-scale basis (as distinguished from the ad hoc procurement of animal products, for instance, eggs from backyard chickens) and a path for realizing it. My conclusion was that “[t]o make good on their commitment to non-exploitative animal use, vegetarians need to articulate more clearly what the end goal is and describe a plausible path there from the status quo. Otherwise, the vegan critique will continue to have significant bite.”

  • Property and justice

    My earlier post wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive critique of libertarianism, but one interesting issue that came up in the comment thread was the justice of initial property acquisition.

    Libertarianism, at least in its natural-rights form, says that holdings in property are just if they are the result of just initial acquisition and voluntary exchange. So, if someone justly acquires some property, and that property is transferred by means of voluntarily entered-into contracts, then the resulting pattern of distribution is just.

    One problem that vexes this account is how property can be justly acquired in the first place. The main tradition, going back at least to John Locke, is that one acquires a right to some piece of property when one removes some resource (e.g., a portion of land) from the “state of nature.” One does this by “mixing” one’s labor with it. Determining what adequately counts as “mixing” in this scenario is notoriously difficult, and, it should be noted, Locke held that such initial acquisition is only just if one leaves “as much and as good” for others (the so-called Lockean proviso).

    But beyond this question, we might also ask whether it’s correct to say that natural resources start out unowned in the first place. Why suppose that the earth belongs to no one and that, therefore, anyone may remove resources from the common pool and take them as their own private property? Does everything start out unowned, without anyone else having claims upon it? At the very least, this assumption requires defense, since it’s not obviously true.

    An equally plausible assumption might be this: every person (or maybe even every living, or at least sentient, creature) has a prima facie claim on an adequate portion of the earth’s resources to enable it to live a good life according to its capabilities. In other words, the earth is held in common by all living creatures to support their needs.

    The plausibility of this assumption can, I think, be buttressed by considering the alternatives: if no one has such a claim, then how can anyone be expected to survive and flourish? Alternatively, if only some have such a claim, then there must be some morally relevant difference between those who have this claim and those who don’t. But what could this be?

    The assumption that all sentient creatures have a prima facie claim to some portion of the earth’s goods is, at least, not obviously false, and it strikes me as having equal or greater plausibility as the assumption that material resources start out as unowned and open to unlimited private appropriation.

    Even, however, if there is a theoretically possible immaculate conception of private property along the lines proposed by natural-rights libertarians, once we turn to the real world, we’re faced with the fact that very little of the existing pattern of property distribution is traceable to a pure origin. As philosopher Peter Vallentyne, a “left”-libertarian puts it:

    According to libertarianism, the justice of the current distribution of legal rights over resources depends on what the past was like. Given that the history of the world is full of systematic violence (genocide, invasion, murder, assault, theft, etc.), we can be sure that the current distribution of legal rights over resources did not come about justly and that adequate reparations have not been made. At the same time, however, we have little knowledge of the specific rights violations that took place in the past (e.g., we have little knowledge of all but the most egregious rights violations that took place more than one hundred years ago). Thus, we have little knowledge of what justice today requires.

    To treat the current distribution as a just baseline, then, would require ignoring the very principles of justice that natural-rights libertarians want to uphold in the first place. At the very least, this calls into question the usefulness of this ideology in providing clear-cut answers to problems facing us in the real world. By contrast, the alternative proposed above: that everyone has a prima facie claim on adequate resources, could provide concrete guidance in assessing the justice of currently existing arrangements.

  • “Reason” vs. reasons

    I want to zero in further on one small part of the John Polkinghorne interview excerpted below:

    I think that the fundamental question about something, whether science or religion, is not, “Is it reasonable?” as if we know beforehand what is reasonable, or what shape rationality has. The better question is, “What makes you think that might be the case?” If you are going to propose something surprising and counterintuitive to me, then you need to produce evidence, something to persuade me that that might be the case, perhaps experiments. That is motivated belief.

    I think this is important. Too often “reason” is used as a cudgel to whack positions that are deemed “irrational.” But reason, in this abstract sense, is pretty hard to pin down. How can we say a priori what counts as “reasonable”? It’s hard to see how we can, at least with any great specificity.

    A more promising route is to look for reasons for believing something. What counts as a good reason will depend largely on the subject matter and context. As Aristotle pointed out, it’s foolish to expect the same kind of proof in ethics as you would in mathematics.

    Much contemporary Christian theology has criticized “Enlightenment reason,” sometimes excessively. But there is a legitimate point to be made. I think if you take, for example, Descartes’ criteria of absolute certainty (or indubitability) as something that any belief must meet to count as knowledge, you’re going to end up drawing the circle of knowledge very narrowly. That’s because he takes a criteria that may be appropriate to one subject area (mathematics, say) and tries to make it the foundation of all knowledge.

    But repudiating a one-size-fits-all account of knowledge doesn’t mean that we can’t offer reasons for accepting particular religious truth-claims. Rejecting Cartesian foundationalism doesn’t imply that all bets are off epistemically speaking. In making the case for Christianity, for example, you could make an appeal to a variety of reasons: historical plausibility, logical consistency, moral attractiveness, experiential confirmation, etc. You’re never going to get to an air-tight, irrefutable case, but you’re also not going to be left with a sheer leap of faith. This is the zone in which most of our believing–including that with the most existential import–takes place. There’s no particular reason to demand that religion meet a bar of certainty that we wouldn’t expect in other areas of life.

  • Another thought on religion and values

    In thinking about the relation between ethics and theology, it helps to distinguish the metaphysical aspects of this problem from the epistemological ones. Or, as St. Thomas would say, the order of being from the order of knowing. Value, or ethics, may depend metaphysically on the existence of God, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that knowing moral truths requires knowing (or believing) that God exists.

    It seems to me that, difficult moral dilemmas aside, I have no particular difficulty discerning my day-to-day moral duties to family and friends, co-workers, strangers, etc. (I may have difficulty doing my duty, but that’s a separate issue.) Likewise, I have no great difficulty in telling good apart from bad, at least in the normal run of things. By contrast, I have very little idea of how to tie these perceptions and duties together into some grand unified theory of ethics or how such a theory is, or should be, grounded in an overall metaphysical view of the world.

    Since at least some moral truths are far more obvious than God’s existence, it’s odd to suggest that you can’t have ethics without God. After all, that would imply that the more certain has to be based on the less certain. (Well, maybe there are people for whom the existence of God is more self-evident than their normal moral duites, but I’m not one of them.) In fact, it’s plausible to think that if God created us and wants us to be good, he would make it possible for us to know moral truths even without believing in him.

  • Gary Steiner on the moral status of animals and the “intellectualist” bias

    Marilyn tipped me off to this very interesting-looking book by philosopher Gary Steiner: Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. Looks like the book came out in 2008, but I wasn’t previously aware of it. Steiner provides a summary of the book’s argument here .

    Interestingly, Steiner takes a tack that is opposed to that of at least some animal advocates. These advocates have argued that, contrary to what we’ve previously thought, animals really do have capacities for complex thought, reasoning, self-awareness, etc., and that we should attribute moral status to them accordingly. Steiner maintains, however, that these capacities are morally irrelevant and it’s enough that animals have “rich inner lives”–lives of their own that are entitled to respect regardless of how closely they approximate human lives.

    Steiner isn’t the first to make this sort of argument. In his contribution to the anthology The Great Ape Project, which promotes extending basic rights to the great apes, philosopher Steven Sapontzis contends that the bias toward the intellectually sophisticated is just one aspect of our species bias:

    Rejecting our species bias–overcoming speciesism–requires that we also reject our bias in favor of the intellectual (at least as a criterion of the value of life or of personhood in the evaluative sense). Overcoming speciesism requires going beyond the modest extension of our moral horizons to include intellectually sophisticated, nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees and whales. It requires recognizing not only that the origin of value does not lie in anything that is peculiarly human; it also requires recognizing that the origin of value does not lie in anything that is human-like or that humans may be assured they have the most of (because they are the most intellectually sophisticated beings around). (“Aping Persons – Pro and Con,” The Great Ape Project, p. 271)

    Using intellectual sophistication as a criterion of moral worth can have uncomfortable consequences even apart from the question of animal rights. For one, wouldn’t it introduce a hierarchical ranking among human beings such that the more intellectually sophisticated, reflective, etc. people were worth more, morally speaking, than others? And wouldn’t it also imply that an extraterrestrial species far exceeding us in intellectual sophistication would be morally more valuable than us, and perhaps even justified in using us the way we use nonhuman animals?

    Steiner’s book also tries to reconcile liberal rights and individualism with the apparently heavy demands that the recognition of animals’ moral status would make on us. He offers what he calls an “Ideal of Cosmic Holism” in which human beings are understood as “a special form of life—a form of life that is capable of reflecting on its own nature, and hence of taking on moral responsibilities, but whose capacities for critical reflection do not render it morally superior to non-human nature.”

    Human beings are in the unique position of being able to recognize and act on moral obligations toward animals (and perhaps toward non-sentient nature as well), even though non-human beings lack the capacity for reflection and hence lack the ability to take on reciprocal obligations toward humanity. Our moral relationship to animals is one of stewardship: we have obligations to protect animals and to refrain from interfering with their efforts to flourish according to their natures, even though animals have no corresponding obligations toward us. The fact that for millennia we have exploited animals with little if any self-restraint is a sign not that we have any right to do so but simply that we have failed to acknowledge our place within a cosmic whole of which we are merely a part.

    I don’t know what religious affiliation, if any, Steiner has, but this is remarkably consonant with the Christian view of humanity’s place in the cosmos (or at least the Christian view, properly understood), so I’m very interested in seeing the details of how he works this out. Unfortunately, the book is a bit on the pricey side, so unless CUP wants to send me a review copy, you may have to wait a while for my take on his argument, dear reader. 😉

  • Carnival of the animals

    Jean Kazez is hosting a philosophy “blog-carnival” (i.e., a collection of posts) focusing on philosophy and animals. Lots of interesting-looking entries (most of which, alas, I haven’t had time to dig into).

  • Creaturely goods and theistic ethics

    In comments to this post, Gaius asked some incisive questions about how a theist who accepts the general evolutionary picture of the world can avoid falling back on some form of divine command theory (also known as theological voluntarism).

    The problem arises because, post-Darwin, it’s difficult to attribute inherent purposive-ness to natural processes. But the old natural law ethics, which has probably been the chief alternative to divine command ethics in Christian history, rested on a teleological view of nature that no longer seems tenable: the good life consisted in realizing one’s essential nature.

    Maybe it’s my Platonistic inclinations, but I’ve never been particularly happy with this choice. I think a full understanding of value will inevitably make reference to the divine, but I don’t think moral rules are simply the arbitrary dictates of God. They are, I believe, rooted in the nature of things, but not properly accounted for by the “biologism” of some versions of natural law.

    My general view is that each individual creature is an expression of (or resembles, or participates in) the divine. The Catholic theologian Denis Edwards, following St. Bonaventure, puts it like this:

    In the life of the Trinity, everything flows from the fecundity of the Source of All, whom Bonaventure calls the Fountain Fullness (fontalis plenitude). He sees the eternal Word of Wisdom of God as the Exemplar, the image of Fountain Fullness. When God freely chooses to create, the fruitfulness of Trinitarian life finds wonderful expression in the diversity of creatures. Each different kind of creature is a reflection and image of the eternal Word. (Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith, p. 71)

    Creation, we can say, is a form of God’s self-expression. Thus, each creature, because it reflects the divine, has inherent value. Further, at least some of these creatures—human beings and many other animals—have an experiential welfare, or, to put it another way, their lives can go better or worse for them. And because these creatures have inherent value (being a reflection of the divine), their well-being matters, not just from their own point of view, but from a universal, or impartial, point of view.

    It’s clearly a matter of controversy what constitutes a good human life—that is, what it means for a human life to go better or worse for the one living it. But there do seem to be some universals. Pleasure, happiness, knowledge, freedom, and companionship seem to be among the goods universally prized by human beings. Likewise, all humans seek, other things being equal, to avoid pain, suffering, frustration, ignorance, bondage, and enmity. (A modified, though not wholly dissimilar, list could be provided for other animals.)

    So, it’s not merely a matter of God’s preference or whim that, say, happiness is preferable to misery. This is a fact rooted in the constitution of the world (which, of course, theists believe is ultimately traceable back to God). And for Christians at least, ultimate happiness consists in greater knowledge of and union with God or the Good. Nothing less will truly satisfy us (and this fulfillment only comes to complete fruition in the life to come).

    While this general picture makes reference to the nature of things, note that we’re not talking about “reading value off of biological processes” here. Clearly the kinds of goods that contribute to a human animal’s well-being are rooted in our biology, but biological processes as such don’t have the same status in this account as they do in some versions of natural law ethics. To take an obvious example, most of us no longer regard it as wrong per se to interfere with the process by which intercourse (sometimes) leads to conception. We need an independent moral criterion to decide when that may or may not be a good idea. And this will involve reference to the kinds of goods that make for a well-lived human life.