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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Johann Hari finds himself unsettled from a meeting with Peter Singer:"Now that whole tradition, the whole edifice of Judaeo-Christian morality, is terminally ill. I am trying to formulate an alternative... Singer's moral system is called preference utilitarianism... It has one basic idea: to be moral, you must do whatever will most satisfy the preferences of most living things. Morality doesn't come from heaven or the stars; it comes from giving as many of us as possible what we want and need...
"You shouldn't say animals," he says in a level tone when I raise the topic, "to distinguish between humans and non-humans. We are all animals." This objection captures Singer's thoughts in a neat sound bite. He thinks there is nothing special about being human. "Every living thing has preferences, and those preferences need to be taken into account," he says. "Non-human animals can't be left out of utilitarian equation." For Singer, this isn't so radical. "All we are doing is catching up with Darwin," he explains. "He showed in the 19th century that we are simply animals. Humans had imagined we were a separate part of Creation, that there was some magical line between Us and Them. Darwin's theory undermined the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking about the place of our species in the universe. "
To a large extent, most of Singer's thoughts are indeed a clear continuation of the secularisation of morality begun by JS Mill, wherein quality of life becomes more important than a stress on all life being equally sacred. Most of his ideas concerning selective euthanasia are likely to be less and less challenging in a post-traditional society. The difficulty is with the involvement of animal rights and Darwinism. These are not usual views at present. For example, here is John Gray:"If natural selection had been discovered in India, China or Japan, it is hard to imagine it making much of a stir. Darwin's discovery signalled a major advance in human knowledge, but its cultural impact came from the fact that it was made in a milieu permeated by the Judaeo-Christian belief in human uniqueness. If – along with hundreds of millions of Hindus and Buddhists – you have never believed that humans differ from everything else in the natural world in having an immortal soul, you will find it hard to get worked up by a theory that shows how much we have in common with other animals. Among us, in contrast, it has triggered savage and unending controversy. In the 19th century, the conflict was waged between Darwinists and Christians. Now, the controversy is played out between Darwinism and humanists, who seek to defend a revised version of Western ideas about the special nature of humans."
The worst aspect of this description is that the putative characterisation of oriental cultures as viewing mankind as part of a unity of nature makes it rather unlikely that such cultures could have formulated a theory that stressing the division of nature, red in tooth and claw, wherein each species is solely concerned for its own survival. Beyond that, both Gray and Singer use Darwinism to argue that mankind has no special place in the universe (something that can be argued for more convincingly with evidence concerning the intelligence of apes, cetaceans and other species), but their environmental views all appear to assume that every species on earth apart from man has an implicit special place in the universe. A thoroughgoing Darwinian perspective would not be overly bothered about the success of one particular virus at the expense of other; that is rather the point of natural selection. The arguments being elaborated belong to Gaia, not to Darwin.
As such, any ethical basis for relations between humans and other animals has to be a product of human ethical systems and cannot be derived from Darwin. In which case, problems with Singer's philosophy remain that have to be addressed. In particular, if the basis for ethics becomes a matter of consensus and preference, how are other animals to express such preference in relation to a human ethical system? My feeling remains that ethics in this area essentially remains a matter of human obligation and that the entire concept of rights, an inherently reciprocal concept, are wholly inapplicable. Equally, if we decide that rights are something that are bequeathed and not demanded, then there are other questions that persist.
posted by Richard 2:39 pm
