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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
Saturday, October 25, 2003
The Age had a somewhat interesting discussion of rights recently, written from a hostile communitarian and christian perspective:"Society is more than a collection of individuals. The atomistic view cannot survive the important and pervasive distinction between matters that are "for me and for you", on one hand, and those that are "for us" on the other... The atomistic tendency is so strong we may want to put it in individual mind states: now I know he is attending and he knows I am attending, and he knows I know, and so on. But just adding these individual states doesn't get us to the shared condition where we in fact are... Liberalism can give only a reductionist account for this because the state is merely an aggregation of individuals who must preserve their autonomy against threatened encroachments... Someone living utterly alone has no need of rights; it is in society that rights become important.
Alasdair MacIntyre, who has done much to restore the idea of virtue as central to ethics, objects on Aristotelian grounds. He thinks rights discourse is not really a moral language at all, but an ideological club wielded to defend self-interest and secure concession. In After Virtue, he writes: "There are no (natural) rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns" - and for the same reason, every attempt to give good reasons for believing there are such rights has failed. Though not a relativist, MacIntyre sees morality as a "practice" learnt in a community with a tradition. The idea of universal rights ignores these historical and communal dimensions and relies again on the Hobbsian pre-social isolated individual. It leads to an individualistic understanding of morality. Another philosophical school identifies a different problem with the dominance of rights talk: often it is simply inadequate to capture what is at stake. French thinker Simone Weil, who described rights as a mediocre concept, said such talk made it difficult to see the real problem. "If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 'What you are doing to me is not just', you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love." But words such as "I have a right to" awaken the spirit of contention. Putting rights at the centre of social conflict inhibits any possible impulse of charity on both sides. "
As it happens I'm not averse to the idea that there is no such thing as a natural right. Hobbes described only one natural right, that of self defence, since it was the only form of right that would not be alienated in a state of nature (and although the idea of such a body as a government having it within its power to bestow or deprive populaces of rights may be unpalatable, the fact is that they do indeed have this capability). By the same token, association of the term natural rights with Locke is somewhat awkward, since Locke assumes that the subject of said rights is not in a state of nature, but rather that concepts such as property exist and that this creates a requirement for some form of reciprocal contract. This is why much of Locke's theories are analogous to an idea of market exchange (i.e. freedom from any relations other than those one enters with a view to her or his own interest. Society is a series of relations between proprietors. Political society is a contractual device for the protection of proprietors and the orderly regulation of their relations.)
Equally, there are certainly a set of rights that have been established by tradition, but in practice these vary considerably between states, which makes it rather difficult to speak of them as being 'natural.' The most glaring example if one alluded to above; that the US constitution in permitting the formation of militias has led to the notion of a right to bear arms, a right few (or none even?) other states happen to recognise. As such, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that rights are established by popular sovereignty; it seems equally difficult to avoid the conclusion that this does indeed run the risk of tyranny of the majority or of the state. But the possibility of tyranny of the majority is precisely why the christian and communitarian critique fails; for example, it cannot account for such bodies as the inquisition, and assumes that society is essentially benign in character. There may be no such thing as natural rights but there are certainly necessary rights. To illustrate this, the most obvious example would be Isaiah Berlin's distinction between positive and negative rights:"Rousseau does not mean by liberty the ‘negative’ freedom of the individual not to be interfered with within a defined area, but the possession by all, and not merely by some, of the fully qualified members of a society of a share in the public power which is entitled to interfere with every aspect of every citizen’s life. The liberals of the first half of the nineteenth century correctly foresaw that liberty in this ‘positive’ sense could easily destroy too many of the ‘negative’ liberties that they held sacred."
While I am not quite as sceptical about positive rights as Berlin (or for that matter Hayek), it is difficult to deny some of the implications of this, particularly when we consider the Uk government policy of conditionality; tenants in council houses being evicted if they are convicted of anti-social behaviour when they supposedly had a right to housing, patients being charged for missing appointments and so on. Positive rights do seem to have a habit of being inverted (and as the article notes are frequently asymmetrical; "Though more government money goes to business than to people on the dole, no enforceable obligations are set for business, yet individuals face harsh penalties.") and becoming demands, a form of coercion.
Finally, the point in the article I am least impressed by is that rights tend to conflict. One might argue that is what they are there for; to contend between competing claims. In that sense they are certainly not a substitute for forms of trust but nopr are they to blame for the decay of trust, something Onora O'Neill observed in her Reith lectures:"One standard contemporary answer is that the political conditions for placing trust must be achieved, and that these include human rights and democracy... human rights and democracy are not the basis of trust: on the contrary, trust is the basis for human rights and democracy. "
posted by Richard 4:18 pm
