A Thinking Reed

Category: Philosophy

  • Causal impotence and reasons for vegetarianism

    Scu at Critical Animal says:

    I think a lot of people spend time explaining why we shouldn’t (or should!) kill animals and/or treat them as property. But where are explanations on the justification for vegetarianism/veganism as a necessary component of opposition, besides arguments about economic boycott?

    If you define an economic boycott as something intended to effect actual change in the practices of using animals, then there are good reasons to think that personal vegetarianism/veganism is not a particularly good way of bringing about such change. The reason is that the market for animal products is nowhere near sensitive enough to register one person’s abstention. So, while everyone going veggie would presumably have the desired effect, it’s hard to see how my (or your) avoidance of animal products can be justified on those grounds.

    Some philosophers, while accepting (at least arguendo) that personal vegetarianism won’t “make a difference” in the sense described above, have tried to offer alternative justifications.

    One that I came across just recently is this paper by Nathan Nobis, a philosopher at Morehouse College in Atlanta. In it, he tires to marry consequentialism and virtue ethics to provide a justification for personal vegetarianism. A moral person, he contends, will exhibit virtues such as compassion, sensitivity to suffering, and a sense of fairness–all of which point to vegetarianism. But, he says, virtue ethics has a hard time explaining why the virtues are good–is this just a brute fact about the world? A better strategy, he says, is to ground the virtuous life as a whole in the consequences that it has for overall happiness. A virtuous person’s life is likely, all else being equal, to increase the sum total of happiness (or goodness more broadly). Thus, you end up with an indirect consequentialist case for personal vegetarianism even if it doesn’t directly reduce animal suffering.

    Another approach, offered by Tzachi Zamir, whose book Ethics and the Beast I’ve blogged about before, is to argue that buying and/or consuming meat is, essentially, the completion of an act of wrongness. An animal would only be raised and killed for meat if someone was willing to buy and eat it at the other end of the chain of events. Thus, Zamir says, we are, in a sense, “commissioning” the killing and “completing a temporally extended wrong through consumption” (p. 48). A version of Zamir’s argument can be found here.

  • Addendum on personhood

    Just to further clarify what I think is wrong with Margaret Somerville’s “personhood” argument discussed below: she essentially wants to evacuate the notion of person of any substantive content and make it coterminous with human being. Thus, saying that a human animal is a person isn’t a factually informative statement; it becomes a tautology.

    Note, though, that once this move is made, the possession of personhood can no longer function as a reason for according special moral status to human beings. “Being a person” and “being a human being” are, on this view, just two different expressions for the same status.

    But this is surely not what traditional moral philosophers (e.g., Kant) had in mind when they distinguished between persons and non-persons. For them, persons had special moral worth because of some property that persons–and only persons–possessed such as the ability to follow the moral law. This is why, on the traditional view, it makes sense to ask whether there can be non-human persons, whether terrestrial (e.g., dolphins) or extra-terrestrial (e.g., space aliens or angels). On Somerville’s view, it would literally be nonsensical to ask if there could be non-human persons.

    Now, personally, I’m not sure personhood is even a particularly important concept for morality, but that’s a whole other post.

  • Personhood, human and animal

    Well, since we’re on the topic of the personhood of non-human entities, here’s an article by Margaret Somerville, a Canadian law professor, arguing that we shouldn’t apply the concept of “person” to non-human animals (via the First Things blog):

    My reasons for rejecting personhood for animals include that it would undermine the idea that humans are “special” relative to other animals and, therefore, deserve “special respect.”

    Professor Somerville cites the views of Peter Singer, among others, to show that attributing “personhood” to animals would blur the boundary between humans and non-human animals which would lead to bad consequences, such as euthanasia. This is because Singer, et al. understand personhood to be a category that is tied to having certain capabilities (e.g., for self-reflection). By this criterion, some animals would count as persons, but not all humans will (e.g., infants, the severely mentally disabled).

    Prof. Somerville rejects this capabilities approach to defining personhood and says that the category should be restricted to only (and all) human beings:

    The contrasting approach, which I believe is the one we should continue to uphold, is that all humans are persons (at least, as the law stands at present, those humans who have been born) and only humans are persons. This accounts for using the words “human being” and “person” interchangeably. Universal human personhood means that every human being has an “intrinsic dignity” that must be respected that comes simply with being human; having that dignity does not depend on having any other attribute or functional capacity. This is a status approach to who is a person.

    The closest Prof. Somerville comes in identifying any substantial human characteristic that justifies ascribing personhood to (only) us is to say that “we humans have a ‘human spirit,’ a metaphysical, although not necessarily supernatural, element as part of the essence of our humanness.” But without further specification, this is either a reversion to some variant of the capabilities definition or essentially an arbitrary decision to confine the label “person” only to humans. After all, traditional philosophy and theology typically defined the “human spirit” precisely in terms of the sort of capabilities (rationality, free will, etc.) that Prof. Somerville earlier rejected as necessary conditions for personhood. It seems that what she’s advocating is a kind of metaphysical fiction–that we act “as if” human beings have an essentially undefinable metaphysical spark that confers personhood.

    For my money, if we want to say that humans, qua humans, are more valuable than non-human animlas, then we’d do well to drop “person” as a moral category altogether. There is just no non-question-begging bright line to be drawn between persons and non-persons that includes all and only humans in the category of persons. If you say that “person” means an entity with properties x, y, and z, then you simply can’t rule out the possibility that some animals will end up counting as persons and some humans won’t. But if, on the other hand, you’re just going to restrict “person” to human beings by fiat, then why do you need the concept of person in the first place? What philosophical or moral work is it doing?

  • Free speech and corporate personhood

    I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t make an informed comment on the legal aspects of yesterday’s SCOTUS campaign-finance ruling (though I know plenty of lawyers who are likely disgusted with it, including some former Supreme Court clerks). But what I find wrong with it is that it contradicts the heart of one of the most compelling argument for free speech.

    J.S. Mill, the grand-daddy of liberalism, argued for freedom of speech on many grounds, but one of the most important was that we can only arrive at the truth if all points of view get a vigorous airing. We need to be able to change course, to correct our views, by being exposed to a variety of competing truth-claims. This is an inherent part of what it means to be a human being realizing our nature as what Mill called “progressive beings.” By engaging in dialogue and argument with competing views, we may come to see that we were mistaken, or that we had overlooked part of the truth. At the very least, we’ll be strengthened in our own views by testing them against counter-arguments.

    However, given this view of why free speech matters, the absurdity of treating corporations as “persons” with free speech rights becomes readily apparent. A corporation is not a “progressive being” that can correct its errors and come to a greater comprehension of the truth. It is an entity driven entirely by the profit motive. A corporation will propagate a particular message only to the extent that the message serves that interest: it’s not concerned with the truth.

    You might say by way of rejoinder that it doesn’t matter whether corporations are interested in pursuing the truth. All that matters is that people are exposed to the widest possible range of ideas, regardless of their provenance. But this ignores that fact that, with unlimited corporate political “speech” we are no longer working with the model of a conversation aimed at truth, but with an attempt to overwhelm and drown competing points of view with a sheer volume of ads, propaganda, etc. The ideal of rational discussion is pretty much explicitly repudiated by allowing corporations to flood the airwaves with whatever “truths” best serve their interests. Free speech, by its very nature, presupposes something like reasoned dialogue; that’s what distinguishes it from propaganda, advertising, and similar endeavors, which are not good-faith arguments, but are aimed at bypassing rational dialogue.

    Corporations aren’t persons: they’re money-making enterprises. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but their interests should be subordinated to and circumscribed by those of actual persons.

  • Jean Kazez’s philosophy and animal ethics blog

    I just came across the solo blog of philospher Jean Kazez, whose posts at Talking Philosophy I’ve always enjoyed greatly. Prof. Kazez also has a new book on animal ethics that looks to be well worth reading.

    Germane to some recent discussions here, she has two posts on the vegetarianism vs. veganism debate that are worth your time.

  • “Speciesism”: a red herring?

    There have been some great comments on the “veganism versus vegetarianism” post below, which you should check out if you’re interested. But I thought I’d shift gears and look at some of the other arguments in Tzachi Zamir’s book.

    A major concern of Zamir’s is arguing that “speciesism” is a red herring in arguments over animal liberation. He’s not out to defend speciesism per se but wants to argue that moral principles already firmly in place call for radical changes in the way we treat non-human animals.

    I found one of the key points he made a bit difficult to grasp at first, maybe because once you do grasp it, it’s actually rather blindingly obvious. You can hold, he says, that humans are more important than animals, in the sense that human interests have priority over non-humans. However, it in no way follows that it’s permissible to harm animals for the sake of non-survival-related human interests:

    Say that I believe that A’s interests take priority over B’s in the sense that they are overriding when in conflict. This can mean that I am obligated to help A or to promote any of A’s interests before I assist B (if I see myself as obliged to assist B at all). This is far from supposing that I am entitled to hurt B or curtail any of B’s interests so as to benefit A. This distinction is routinely recognized in human contexts: my commitment to assist my child does not extend to a vindication of me actively harming other children in order to advance my own. While aiding my child can be detrimental to other children, as long as I did nothing actively and directly against them, there is nothing immoral in my actions. (p. 9)

    Even though we make this distinction all the time in intra-human contexts, it tends to be neglected in debates about animal ethics. Usually the argument focuses on whether human “superiority” can be established in some sense, with the implication that, if it can, then humans have a license to do basically whatever they want to animals.

    But even if, according to Zamir, you’re a speciesist in the sense of believing that human interests always take priority over the interests of non-humans whenever they conflict and that we are obligated to help humans and promote their interests before helping animals, it still doesn’t follow that it’s okay to actively harm the interests of animals.

    Zamir goes further: even an animal liberationist may agree that it’s sometimes permissible to actively thwart minor animal interests when they conflict with human interests and to thwart the survival interests of non-humans when they conflict with human survival interests (the “lifeboat” scenario). The only form of speciesism that is actually opposed to a robust liberationist agenda is one which holds that any human interest, no matter how trivial, trumps any non-human animal’s interest, no matter how significant. So, even if speciesism in some sense can be justified (which Zamir remains agnostic about), the only form of speciesism that is actually opposed to the liberationist agenda is this very strong, and correspondingly very shaky, version.

  • Vegan versus vegetarian utopia

    In his book Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes an interesting “speciesist” case for animal liberation. But for the purposes of this post I want to focus on his argument in favor of moral vegetarianism, and against veganism. That he makes this argument is surprising since most liberationists, I think it’s safe to say, regard veganism as the ideal even if they recognize that practice will often fall short. (This seems to be Peter Singer’s view, for instance.)

    To make his case, Zamir distinguishes between veganism, “tentative” veganism, and moral vegetarianism and argues that the last position is superior to the first two. He defines vegans as those who are opposed to all uses of animals period, including using them for milk or eggs. Tentative vegans are those who allow that egg and milk production might, in theory, be carried out in non-exploitative ways, but believe that under current conditions, liberationists should boycott all such products. Moral vegetarians oppose the killing of animals for their flesh, but not the use of milk and eggs under at least some current conditions.

    As the first step in his argument against veganism, Zamir makes the case for a distinction between exploitation and the permissible use of animals. The hard-core vegan recognizes no such distinction and insists on a strictly “hands off” approach to animals, at least as the ideal. But, Zamir argues, all use is not necessarily exploitation. It’s possible to be involved in a give-and-take relationship with animals that is not exploitative. X exploits Y only when the relationship is substantially detrimental to Y’s interests, or Y is unable to fully consent to the relationship, or under some combination of these conditions. While the line between exploitative and non-exploitative relationships can be a fuzzy one, there are clear-cut cases on both sides of it. “Generally, you are clearly exploiting someone if your relationship predictably benefits you and harms the person involved” (p. 92).

    As an example of a non-exploitative human-animal relationship, Zamir discusses the case of well-cared-for pets. Cats and dogs that could not flourish on their own and are well fed, well housed, and have their medical and other needs seen to are being used by humans (pets give us great pleasure), but not necessarily exploited. “Well-kept pets are a source of joy to their owners, live a much better life than they would have lived in the wild, and, as far as I can tell, pay a small price for such conditions” (p. 97). Note that this only applies to domesticated or quasi-domesticated animals like dogs or cats; keeping genuinely wild animals as pets is pretty clearly detrimental to their interests because it usually involves frustrating deep-seated desires and preventing those animals from engaging in characteristic behaviors.

    If this is right, then we have at least one case of non-exploitative animal use. Thus, the strong vegan position–that animal use is always wrong–can’t be right. But what about the use of animals for milk and eggs? (Remember, we’re only dealing here with the narrower vegan-vegetarian debate; Zamir has argued earlier in the book that killing animals for their flesh when other nutritionally adequate food sources are available is wrong.) If pet-keeping can be justified, roughly, by its overall utility to the animals, then a similar justification for raising animals for eggs and milk is potentially available. Zamir contends that it is theoretically possible to provide dairy cows and laying hens with overall good lives and without the “collateral damage” that the dairy and eggs industries currently inflict (e.g., the fates of veal calves and male chicks). And this ideal is superior to the vegan ideal in which these animals cease to exist in significant numbers. If, like pets, these animals can be allowed to live good lives and die natural deaths, then our use of them for eggs and milk wouldn’t be morally problematic and would be superior to the envisaged alternative vegan ideal. If the lives of pets can be an overall good, so can the lives of farm animals, under the right circumstances. A mutually beneficial relationship is possible.

    Zamir recognizes that current practice in the egg and dairy industries falls far short of even his vegetarian ideal. This is where the “tentative vegan” position–that absent reform, it’s morally mandatory to boycott the products of these industries–comes in. Tentative vegans don’t oppose the use of animals for eggs and dairy in principle, but nevertheless believe that the current egg and dairy industries are so morally compromised that it’s wrong to buy their products. The moral vegetarian, on the other hand, believes that encouraging reform by purchasing the products of relatively more progressive producers (e.g., cage-free eggs) can be a step toward a better world, even if it falls short of the vegetarian ideal: wholly non-exploitative animal use.

    Deciding in principle whether a particular producer is “good enough” to merit buying from, Zamir says, is probably impossible. Instead, he argues for the political superiority of the vegetarian position to that of the tentative vegan. He says that “step-by-step cooperation with partial improvements [can pave] the way to radical reform” (p. 109).

    To conclude, against the tentative vegan’s claim that vegetarians participate in an exploitative practice when they eat products that are derived from free-roaming animals, vegetarians first that nothing in the consumption makes the vegan description of it more reasonable than the vegetarian one. Second, political considerations make the vegetarian description of selective-consumption-as-promoting-progress preferable to the overly purist stance of the vegan. (p. 109)

    I should admit up front that this argument appeals to me for what are no doubt partly self-serving reasons. I’m a lacto-ovo vegetarian with something of a guilty conscience for not being vegan. So I’m probably predisposed to like the idea that the vegetarian actually occupies the moral high ground. Nevertheless, I do think that Zamir is probably right that use is not necessarily exploitation. (I think the case of pet ownership shows that this is at least a live possibility.) And if dairy and egg production is not wrong per se, then supporting incremental steps toward reform makes sense.

    My sense, however, is that most people who buy “free range” eggs or organic milk are under the impression that the animals lead largely pleasant lives. How many of them (us) see these as just one small step on a long road toward a wholly different model of egg and dairy production? To 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.

  • Rights-talk and some distinctions

    I think I unhelpfully ran a few ideas together in the post on libertarianism that should be more clearly distinguished. First, there is the distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights. That is, I asserted that, in practical political terms, this distinction is fuzzier than often imagined because the protection of any right–positive or negative–requires dedicated resources. For example, my right to life isn’t a mere claim against others not to kill me, but something that we think society is obliged to take positive steps to protect (via laws, police, courts, etc.). Similarly with other rights. So, the distinction between a “negative” right to life and a “positive” right to, say, welfare does less work than libertarians sometimes suppose.

    The second issue, which I didn’t adequately distinguish, is how rights are justified in the first place. A consequentialist justification would be that, all things considered, having a society that protects certain rights will, over the long run, result in a balance of good over evil consequences (bracketing the question of what “the good” consists in). As Mill said, they are the precondition of our pursuing any worthwhile projects. A deontological justification, on the other hand, would be that people (and possibly other animals) have rights simply in virtue of the kinds of beings they are. Specifically, they cannot be used merely as means for the benefit of others. Or one might say that they have the right to freedom and well-being, independently of any value they may contribute to others.

    I’m more amenable to deontological arguments than the post made it sound. Indeed, I think my main point–that strict (anarcho-) libertarianism has unacceptable consequences–could be couched in more deontological terms. If human beings have certain rights in virtue of the kinds of beings they are, then a just society is one, at least, in which those rights are adequately protected. My claim was that the anarcho-libertarian utopia will not adequately protect rights because, inter alia, the rights of the weak and dependent would be dependent on either their ability to pay or on the charity of others. Moreover, if one of the rights that people have is access to the basic goods which are the precondition of any meaningful life, there are good reasons to think that a thoroughgoing laissez-faire regime would also fail miserably at securing those rights.

  • “The very groundwork of our existence”: Mill on rights

    Relevant to the post below; from Utilitarianism, chapter five:

    To have a right, then, is, I conceive to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation, not to account for the peculiar energy of the feeling, it is because there goes to the composition of the sentiment, not a rational only, but also an animal element, the thirst for retaliation; and this thirst derives its intensity, as well as its moral justification, from the extraordinary important and impressive kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of security, to every one’s feelings the most vital of all interests. All other earthly benefits are needed by one person, not needed by another; and many of them can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone, or replaced by something else; but security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment; since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us, if we could be deprived of anything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of all necessaries, after physical nutriment, cannot be had, unless the machinery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play. Our notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility, that the difference in degree (as is often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. That claim assumes the character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity, and incommensurability with all other considerations, which constitute the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency. The feelings concerned are so powerful, and we count so positively on finding a responsive feeling in others (all being alike interested), that ought and should grow into must, and recognised indispensability becomes a moral necessity, analogous to physical, and often not inferior to it in binding force.

    The argument here is fairly straightforward: we need our basic interest in security to be protected because it is the precondition of pursuing any other interest whatsoever. Thus, simply on utilitarian grounds, it makes sense to assign a higher status to this interest to ensure that it’s protected. Otherwise, no one could pursue any worthwhile projects without constantly looking over their shoulder and having to be on guard against their fellow man. (There are shades of a social contract account here.) Mill can, he thinks, account for the importance we attach to certain rights without needing to ground them in anything other than the principle of utility. I’m not 100% convinced that he’s correct here, but I do think there’s something persuasive about the idea that rights are grounded in the protection they provide to certain vital interests.

  • Libertarianism re-visited

    William Bradford has a good write-up of Robert Nozick’s classic Anarchy, State & Utopia, which William just finished reading for the first time.

    I’ll admit that reading Nozick (and following it up with Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, etc.) turned me into a libertarian for a while. But the problem with Nozick’s view, as nearly every critic has pointed out, is that he doesn’t attempt to justify his intuition that people have Lockean-style natural rights. He just assumes it. Others, like Rothbard, have attempted to justify it, though I think without success. What Rothbard is, perhaps, more successful at is arguing that if you accept natural rights, then you are logically committed to anarchism, since, contra Nozick, no state can exist that doesn’t violate someone’s rights, so defined.

    Now, I’m inclined to see Rothbard’s conclusion as a reductio ad absurdum of rights-based libertarianism. It just seems clear that the consequences of anarchism would be so terrible that there must be something wrong with the argument that gets you there. In this case, that would be the premise that there are libertarian-style natural rights.

    If, instead of confining yourself to a natural rights position, you begin with a more consequentialist starting point, the justification of the state is pretty straightforward: everyone (or nearly everyone) would be a lot better off with a government than without it. Particularly, one might add, those who are weak or dependent in some way. Even supposing that the system of competing “protection agencies” beloved of anarcho-libertarian speculation could actually work, does anyone really want to live in a society in which your entitlement to not being killed, enslaved, or otherwise exploited was dependent upon your ability to pay?

    This is where John Stuart Mill, incidentally, is better than some of his libertarian acolytes. Mill recognizes that the security provided by society is what later theorists would call a “positive” freedom rather than a sheerly “negative” one. Security of life, liberty, and property isn’t merely a matter of being “left alone,” but requires the state to take positive steps, devote resources, etc. And Mill is likewise clear that these basic rights ultimately have a consequentialist justification: a society that protects these basic rights is one that gives its citizens a better shot at flourishing.

    The consequentialist justification of basic rights seems stronger to me than most natural-rights-style views, which often lean heavily on appeals to intuition. But once the distinction between positive and negative freedom is undermined, it’s hard to see why the government’s duties must be limited to those of a libertarian “night-watchman” state. All rights are positive rights in a sense, so why can’t rights to welfare, or health care, or what have you can, potentially, be justified on similar consequentialist grounds?