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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.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Peter Singer and Richard Posner have been debating the subject of animal rights. The results aren't especially impressive:"I do not agree that we have a duty to (the other) animals that arises from their being the equal members of a community composed of all those creatures in the universe that can feel pain, and that it is merely "prejudice" in a disreputable sense akin to racial prejudice or sexism that makes us "discriminate" in favor of our own species... I start from the bottom up, with the brute fact that we, like other animals, prefer our own—our own family, the "pack" that we happen to run with (being a social animal), and the larger sodalities constructed on the model of the smaller ones, of which the largest for most of us is our nation.
I do not feel obliged to defend this reaction; it is a moral intuition deeper than any reason that could be given for it and impervious to any reason that you or anyone could give against it. Membership in the human species is not a "morally irrelevant fact," as the race and sex of human beings has come to seem."
The problem with this argument from Posner, as Singer is quick to point out, is that that the construction of these sodalities is historically, not biologically contingent; in the past exactly the same arguments could have been used to defend the notions that race and sex justify the social inferiority of certain groups. Equally, Posner may well be correct to note that what has altered that was more easily attributable to socio-economic forces that debate, but that does seem little more than a counsel of despair; a case could very easily be made that the collapse of communism was entirely due to such forces rather than the actions of any individuals like Vaclav Havel, but I am less than convinced that Posner is likely to cleave unswervingly to such a notion of realpolitik.
What suprises me is that Posner fails to advance the simple point that the notion of any 'transhuman' community is heavily limited by the fact that only certain beings (i.e. humans) could possibly fully participate in it, with all others having rights assigned to them. It seems rather unlikely that discrimination can be overcome without figures like Luther-King or Pankhurst demanding, rather than passively, receiving rights. Given that, the more moderate reforms Posner suggests (in anys like farming conditions) seem a rather more practical way forward than any vision of the future based on the view that rights are simply something Big Brother hands out.
posted by Richard 1:23 pm
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
Monday, July 28, 2003
One of the more interesting discussions of the Brights concept was the claim that a naturalistic ethics is not possible on the grounds of the naturalistic fallacy; namely the view originally derived from Hume that there is a form of inference barrier between is and ought. Or as David Stove put it "For any factual statement e and any ethical statement h, h is not deducible from e." In this context then, naturalism is an acceptance of what is, and ethics is the domain of what should be. There is accordingly no way, in this view, to bridge the is/ought gap without referencing an extra-natural source. Heedless to add, I do not admit the possibility of anything extra-natural being able to fill that gap (a ghost in the machine); like Nietzsche, I take the view that any such noumenal matter would certainly be unintelligible to us even if it was perceptible to us. That said, surely Kierkegaard was correct to suggest that such a source would have precedence over such phenomenal matters as ethics, as with the tale of Abraham and Isaac? In which case, such sources hardly appear a suitable basis for ethics.
Certainly, utilitarianism, whether Singer's recently discussed preference utilitarianism or Mill's liberal utilitarianism, represents means of bridging precisely that gap, by establihging the pursuit of happiness for the greatest majority as an ethical goal, something that appeals to out social nature. Though such models might lack a model of virtue (it might be more accurate to say lack any need for such a model) I am not sure what to call them if not naturalistic.
However, it is, I suspect, a good deal easier to put this debate into perspective by inverting it and establishing how the inference barrier functions in religious ethics where the extra-natural source posits an ought irrespective of an is. One way to do this might be to distinguish between morals and ethics. Morals can be considered to be “inherited” and tend to refer to sets of ingrained traditions, while ethics are considered and less dependent on any particular cultural or religious perspective. Since morals are frequently regarded as a given due to perceived divine injunction, they have a disturbing tendency to be self-validating (a condition that is arguably little more than an abdication of personal responsibility in favour of group norms). Accordingly, these morals are alarmingly arbitrary even when said morals have long since ceased to be applicable. The crudest example is the notion of halal and kosher foods, but sexuality is another obvious area where religious ethics are an ought in flagrant contradiction of naturalistic views; sexual behaviour may indiscriminately be described as immoral; for it to be unethical requires a significantly greater degree of precision. As Bertrand Russell put it, in Why I am Not a Christian; "moral rules are broadly of two kinds; there are those which have no basis except in a religious creed, and there are those which have an obvious basis in social utility."
The most important form of naturalistic ethics, to my mind, was that established by George Eliot. Eliot established empathy as the centre of such ethics; "deeply awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with the difficulty of the human lot." Eliot took the view that religion was deeply invidious to morality, writing that "I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness."" Accordingly, the principal consideration of creating a secular ethics was the overcoming of egoism likely to suppress natural sympathies towards others. As such, her novels see her characters progressing from egotism to empathy through their interactions with others. Without god it is suggested, the need for duty and sympathy can only be stronger. Given that much evolutionary psychology has confirmed the co-operative trends in our nature (something Eliot, as an early exponent of Darwin would have appreciated) as well as some studies suggesting that sociopathy and the lack of an emotional centre are closely related, I suspect Eliot's particular ethics have weathered the years remarkably well.
posted by Richard 7:53 pm
