How Am I Doing?

Through the wonders of technology, I'm able to see what search terms bring people to this blog, and here's a pattern I've noticed lately. People seem to be coming here for assistance in writing end-of-semester essays. What other explanation could there be for search terms like "essay on existentialism is a humanism" and "never let me go essay"?

I can only say that I think there's a special place in hell for people who take credit for other people's writing. I can only say it, because unfortunately I don't believe it. The most I can really hope is that plagiarists will find their guilt gnawing away at them for years, and at the most inopportune moments.

Hey, you would-be copyists, stop now, before it's too late! You know it's wrong. Just don't do it. But if you do, despite my admonitions and the academic honesty policies at your academic institutions, do let me know how I'm doing when you get back "your" papers. Am I getting As, Bs, Cs....? My pride and ego notwithstanding, I have to say: I hope not well.

Death Penalty for Pregnant Woman

Horrific story...and a challenge to anyone who thinks that a fetus, early on, has no moral importance whatever.

A pregnant British woman who faces death by firing squad if she is convicted of drug smuggling could go on trial in Laos as early as Monday, a human rights group said Sunday.

Samantha Orobator, 23, has been in jail in Laos since August, when she was accused of trying to smuggle just over half a kilogram (1.1 pounds) of heroin in her luggage.

It seems to me there's an awfulness here, beyond the basic awfulness of the death penalty. But it's tricky. How can it be wrong for a third-party to kill a fetus, as a side effect of killing the mother, yet permissible for the mother to kill it herself? I do think it's permissible; I'm adamantly pro-choice. However the explanation might go, I have the strongest intuition that executing a pregnant woman is appalling.

Pigs, Converts, Buddhists

This post is also here.

All 300,000 pigs in Egypt are in the process of being slaughtered today—an awfully peculiar strategy for preventing swine flu. Apart from the sheer irrationality of it all, it makes you think about killing animals. Is each and every pig being wronged—to be precise, having its (his, her) interest in going on living violated? Do animals have an interest in going on living?

I write about this in my forthcoming book, but there’s never time to read everything, and now that I’m done, I’m doing some remedial reading—to wit, I’m reading Jeff McMahan’s very thick and detailed book The Ethics of Killing. I’m only part way through, so can’t say yet how the story is going to turn out, but here are some gleanings from part one.

The interest in going on living that you have at a particular point in your life (your “time relative interest” in going on living) depends—says McMahan—on the “prudential unity relations” between you at that time of your life and you* or you** at later times. He says it’s a question of degree—the more continuities (of the right sort) between you and you* (etc) the stronger your interest in going on living. But animals, he says, are connected to their later selves by only a fraction of these required continuities.

The continuities that make you (now) have a stake in the welfare of you* (later) are all “mental," says McMahan. You have certain beliefs, and they persist in you*. You have certain desires about your future, and they get satisfied by you*. You are searching for something, and you* completes the search. The more continuities there would have been between you, you*, you** etc., the worse it is for you if something bad happens, and you die before you get to be you* or you**. The argument about animals, then, is that their past and future selves are united more loosely; there are fewer of these continuities. So they have a weaker stake in going on living.

I’m going to save the issue of animals for a later post, but there’s something puzzling about this view of the interest in living. It implies that certain kinds of people have a weaker interest in going on living than the rest of us. To wit--

The convert. If you lose your religion, going from belief to disbelief, or the other way around, then there’s less continuity between your present self and your future selves.

The Buddhist. You’ve taken heed of Buddhist wisdom that desire is the root of all suffering, so you “live in the present” and limit your desires about the future as much as possible. Again, this is going to make for weaker "prudential unity relations."

The "flow"er (to use the language of the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi). This is someone who frequently loses herself in intense activity, losing awareness of the past and the future. Bear in mind--this is supposed to be a desirable psychological state. Once again, this person's past and future selves are going to more weakly united, compared to a person who constantly obsesses about the future.

It would be awfully odd to think these three types of people had a weaker stake in going on living, considering that there's nothing undesirable about the states of mind they're in (perhaps just the opposite). Should we really take it on board that mental continuities are the basis for having a stake in going on living?

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A few footnotes: (1) There’s a lot of hairy stuff in this book about identity. For you (now) to have an interest in the welfare of you* (later), must you (now) be identical to you* (later)? Let’s ignore that question. I’m not taking a stand on it by multiplying names (“you”, “you*” etc.) ike this—they’re just a convenient shorthand. (2) Don't jump to the conclusion that McMahan thinks it's not so bad to kill these three types of people. The issue (so far) is just about the level of their interest in going on living, not about the ethics of killing them. (3) McMahan does have things to say about some of these cases--pages 81-82--but in the interest of spurring discussion, I'm not revealing his "solution."

More Collateral Damage

The ethical issue about meat-eating concerns the treatment of animals--especially in our new-fangled, intensely bizarre factory farms-- but it's amazing how much new evidence keeps coming in that, in harming animals, we also harm ourselves. Here's Jane Brody in today's New York Times--

There was a time when red meat was a luxury for ordinary Americans, or was at least something special: cooking a roast for Sunday dinner, ordering a steak at a restaurant. Not anymore. Meat consumption has more than doubled in the United States in the last 50 years.

Now a new study of more than 500,000 Americans has provided the best evidence yet that our affinity for red meat has exacted a hefty price on our health and limited our longevity.

The study found that, other things being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner, especially from one of our two leading killers, heart disease and cancer, than people who consumed much smaller amounts of these foods.

More here.

Swine Flu

Is factory farming a factor? David Kirby at HuffPo writes--

Officials from the CDC and USDA will likely arrive in Mexico soon to help investigate the deadly new influenza virus that managed to jump from pigs to people in a previously unseen mutated form that can readily spread among humans.

One of the first things they will want to look at are the hundreds of industrial-scale hog facilities that have sprung up around Mexico in recent years, and the thousands of people employed inside the crowded, pathogen-filled confinement buildings and processing plants.

I don't know if it's a factor, but I sure hope someone's looking into it. If so, this is an example of the collateral damage done by factory farming. The essential harm is done to animals, but in the process we accidentally harm ourselves.

Read more here.

Animalkind

Finally, a title!

Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals.

Coming out around January 2010, from Wiley-Blackwell. Illustrated with six pictures by Ruth Kazez, including the one above.

This blog's going to be a mostly-animal-ethics blog in the coming months, starting with some posts about Jeff McMahan's very deep (and long!) book The Ethics of Killing. But I'm also planning on writing about down to earth, everyday stuff, like growing vegetarian kids.

Gays and Pedophiles

Right, they're not at all alike. But you need to make this analogy to understand the defense of Christian colleges that's been put forth by David Hoekema and Mark Murphy.

Think about it. How should pedophile philosophers be protected from discrimination? Very, very weakly. Being a pedophile isn't disqualifying. But doing pedophile stuff surely is. Only the orientation deserves protection, not the behavior.

The defenders say this very, very weak level of protection is all that the APA ever meant to extend to homosexuals, when it passed a provision against discrimination "on the basis of homosexual orientation" in 1989. No protection for the behavior, just for the orientation.

On this interpretation, the APA never meant to weigh in on a philosophy department that's about to hire John Doe, finds out that he has a gay partner, and so withdraws the offer. They didn't mean to take a stand against that kind of thing. Nor did they want to weigh in on a case where Jane Doe is about to get tenure, but her colleagues find out she's living with another woman, and turn her down.

No, the APA didn't care about gays being turned down for jobs and tenure on grounds of their living gayly. What they cared about was gays being turned down on grounds of sheer gayness. In other words, the man or woman who's gay, but does nothing gay, had to be protected.

But why would they have looked at the issues this way? There's more to the story of the APA's thinking, as the defenders of the Christian colleges see it. The APA members themselves didn't necessarily think gays were like pedophiles, or that they deserved only the protection from discrimination that pedophiles are entitled to, but they realized this was the view of people at a handful of extremely conservative Christian colleges.

They were terribly concerned to protect the freedom of these Christians to think that way, so they framed their own discrimination code to accommodate them. They gave gays minimal protection throughout the US, so that the 4-5 colleges that actually prohibit gay behavior would be free and clear.

Ahem. If that's what the APA board members were thinking, how extraordinarily stupid of them. Surely the level of protection from discrimination gays receive in "APA-approved" philosophy departments across the US ought to be based on the view of homosexuality that prevails in the APA. That's not the view that being gay is like being a pedophile.

But what about religious freedom at the 4-5 Christian colleges? If it concerned the APA, it would have been absurd to water down anti-discrimination statutes nationally, just to give these colleges greater freedom. The reasonable course of action would have been to exempt them from the anti-discrimination rule.

I can't imagine the APA board members really had the set of thoughts being attributed to them. Using a principle of charity, I've got to think they had a reasonable set of thoughts. When they passed a rule prohibiting discrimination based on homosexual orientation, they were saying that gay people can't be excluded from jobs, tenure, etc., on grounds of being or acting gay. They didn't make a handful of Christian colleges the arbiter of what should count as discrimination across the land.

As to whether they meant to exempt Christian colleges from the robust policy they had passed, it appears not, if you read the APA policy carefully. But to think they passed an extremely weak provision, giving gays almost no protection nationwide, out of deference to 4-5 Christian colleges, really is an insult to these presumably reasonable people. Surely not. It just can't be so.

Great Egret!

Seen behind my house yesterday.

Philosophy Ends Monday, Back in Business Thursday!

David Brooks' column in the New York Times on Monday had me worried. "The end of philosophy," said the headline. Not good, for those of us who do it for a living.

Surely the headline-writer should have read more carefully. What Brooks heralds is the end of moral philosophy, not the end of philosophy in general. That's the lesson he draws from Jonathan Haidt, who has done some very interesting work to suggest that moral philosophy is in trouble. The trouble is that philosophers take their intuitions extremely seriously, and then try to construct arguments that mesh with them and support them. But Haidt's model of moral psychology suggests that the reasoning is just "confabulation." The intuitions aren't glimpses of the truth, but gut feelings with roots in emotion and culture. The reasoning we do to shore them up is mere rationalization. (See "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail" at Haidt's website.)

I think Jonathan Haidt's work poses a genunine challenge, and it's for good reason that it's getting attention within metaethics, the area of ethics that delves into the nature of moral truth and moral knowledge. But the significance of it shouldn't be exaggerated. One bit of exaggeration is to be found in Brooks' editorial. He's one of these people who's always looking for a weapon to use against the so-called new atheists. It's hard to see how this could make any sense, but he thinks Haidt has somehow demolished reason, giving supremacy to faith.

What? Just curious-- With reason demolished, what approach should we take to building bridges and keeping airplanes aloft? Right. We should still use reason. If we're sometimes fooling ourselves when we think we're using reason, and we're really just rationalizing, it doesn't mean that that's what's always going on. And nothing about Haidt's research suggests that's what's going on any time but in the aftermath of having a strong moral intuition. You think there must be something very wrong with eating dinner off a toilet seat (Haidt's example), so you cast about for the reason why. You have the gut feeling that gay marriage is bad, so you labor for hours to find an explanation. In these post-gut-feeling moments, you're not using reason as much as you think you are. That's Haidt's argument. He's not making a general attack on reason.

As I said, Haidt raises great questions for metaethics. We don't need to cast aside reason because of his research. The new atheists use of reason is not being called into question (and by the way, Haidt is an atheist!). But what's more, we don't need to cast aside moral reasoning either. The thing is, we have lots of moral problems we urgently need to solve, and we've got no way to solve them besides thinking them through.

Thank God for Nicholas Kristof. He resuscitated philosophy--moral philosophy, that is--in his Thursday New York Times column, "Humanity even for animals." We've got a huge problem with the way animals are treated in the contemporary world, and he credits moral philosopher Peter Singer with getting more and more people to see the problem. Singer didn't accomplish that just with photos of forlorn veal calves and unimaginably crowded chicken barns, but with arguments. The arguments are in tension with pre-existing gut feelings ("they're just animals!"), not rationalizations of them. But they make sense, so they convince many people.

While metaethicists and psychologists do the needed work to think through the nature of moral truth and moral knowledge, somebody needs to figure out what we should do about animals, global warming, and extreme poverty. These aren't just factual issues, they're issues about value and responsibility and our obligations. While it makes sense to reflect on what we're doing, when we work on ethical problems, it makes no sense to stop doing it.

The Discrimination Debate

A friend of mine who works at the EEOC sent me this very interesting statistic-- "53 percent of the U.S. population now lives in a jurisdiction with a law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity." 20 states have laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in both public and private employment; another 12 just in public employment. There are 170 municipalities that provide protection at the local level, even though it's lacking at the state level. Plus, most major corporations have policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Indeed, the American Philosophical Association (APA) has a policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and it's been the subject of a huge debate on the blogosphere (fully tracked here). The question being discussed is whether ithe policy is consistent with a practice at a handful of Christian colleges. The colleges expect all faculty to live a "Christian life," which they see as excluding sex outside of marriage. Gay people aren't directly excluded from employment, but are expected to live as if they weren't gay.

These colleges raise (at least) two questions--(1) What does is it mean to prohibit discrimination "on the basis of sexual orientation"? Can a college comply with such a policy, yet prohibit a gay way of life? And (2) is there some sort of exemption from the anti-discrimination policy for religious institutions? The APA's policies are fairly clear on (2) (no exemption) but could be clearer.

But as to (1). Acres and acres of cyberspace have been taken up with scholastic debates about the distinction between sexual orientation and behavior, betweein being gay and living as gay. If the pious Christians at these colleges want to invite the sinner into their midst, but prohibit the sin, are they being discriminatory?

Given the statistics my friend sent me, it occurs to me that this debate shouldn't proceed in such an insular way. Whatever interpretation you give to the APA's policy, it's the interpretation you've got to give to the myriad policies out there. "No discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" can't mean one thing here, another thing there. A very wide range of cases ought to be coming into play.

Here in Dallas, Texas, we have a lot of Christian businesses. You can get a plumber out to fix your toilet, and discover on the side of his truck that he runs a Christian plumbing company. If we had a law against orientation-based discrimination in Texas (as if!), would the company be able to hire gay plumbers, but stop them from bringing their partners to company events? If the law pertained to housing, could a landlord with Christian apartment complex be required to rent to gays and lesbians, but allowed to prohibit gay behavior on the premises?

The insular philosophy debate can't help but be about the whole picture, since the policy reads like all the other policies. Whatever position the APA takes on the meaning of its anti-discrimination policy, it's effectively taking a position on a whole body of anti-discrimination law.

Then again, does the APA actually need to come forth with its own interpretation? These policies are already on the books in all those states, municipalities, and corporations. What do they already mean? Wouldn't it be important to find out?

The issue the APA does need to address is (2). Does its anti-discrimination policy apply in just the same way to religious and non-religious schools, or should there be an exemption for religious schools, or some modification of the policy? In the US, religious institutions are permitted to discriminate. A church can refuse to hire a Jewish choir director. Of course, the APA is not the federal government. There's no "separation of church and APA" like there's a separation of church and state. But the APA could still want to give extra freedom to colleges that have some principled reason for preferring faculty of some stripe (even if the principle is implausible).

But a policy that says "no discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" already has a meaning. The good people at the APA just need to look around and find out what it is.

Fiction and Philosophy

I so thoroughly enjoyed the last novel I read--Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, that I got to thinking about what makes fiction so enjoyable. Or more precisely, I got to thinking what makes it so appealing compared to philosophy.

Ferris's novel is about a seemingly shallow gang of workers at an ad agency. Their shallowness is amply demonstrated by anecdotes that fill up many pages of the book. After they play a shocking prank on a coworker whose 9-year-old daughter was murdered, you especially wonder if they're really all just rotten, or there's more to them. The answer gradually comes into view, but it's shown, not stated. The reader thus gets the pleasure of gathering clues and gradually "getting it."

In philosophy, on the other hand, there's no oblique showing, there's just saying. Any thought you hope to transmit to a reader is supposed to be written down as clearly as possible. This explicitness is taken to the furthest extreme in academic journals. Not only are you to make every point explicitly, but you are to do so in the first couple of paragraphs: "In this paper, I will show x, y, and z." Thus, for the reader there is no gradual pleasure of "getting it." There's no unfolding, no journey to some unexpected place. You know where you're going from the very beginning.

The philosopher who means that p says that p. In fact, in novels there's often no real p. If you read Ferris's book (and you should!) and then try to write down what he "said" in it, you'll find that a hopeless task. What did he say? That the group mentality in a work place has plusses and minusses. That the trivial concerns of daily life are intermingled with the most serious life and death concerns. Anybody who reads the book will find these attempts at "p" pretty pitiful. The truth is, I think, that there is no "p." Ferris talks about group mentality, and the way trviliaties mingle with serious issues. He explores ideas about these things, but he doesn't make claims you could really write down.

In philosophy, on the other hand, there is always an expectation of a clearcut "p." Well, sure. If you're going to write philosophy, you need to have something to say. You're expected to not only say "p" but make an argument for it. The problem is that there are times when a topic is really better explored than resolved. For example, a terribly important issue in ethics is whether morality must always be our first priority. Must we go through life always taking the morally better path at every fork in the road? To really think deeply about this, you really might be better off just exploring it , and not trying to make an explicit, clear-cut claim. This dawned on me when I was trying to write the 8th chapter of my book on the good life, which is about exactly this question. As I was writing it, I was reading Nick Hornby's novel How to be Good. Hornby's main character is a middle aged man who suddenly decides to be as good as can be, with intriguing consquences for everyone around him. So what's the answer: should we do that? Should we not do that? The book explores these questions--fruitfully, deeply, and not without making some progress on them--but says nothing that can reduced to...p.

Truth is, I'm not cut out to write fiction myself. Not only do I lack the skills, but I feel at home with straightforward debate, problem-solving, claim-making, and figuring things out. How appealing, though, to show and not say, to talk about something, without always having to make an explicit claim that's immediately up for debate. To let a reader take a journey into the unknown, and figure something out! I do think there's such a thing as writing philosophy with a bit of the appeal of fiction, but it's tough. There's always the pressure to be more clear, more explicit, more argumentative.

A really good philosophy book with the feel of fiction is The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. It is evocative and allusive in a very lovely way. There are also some interesting claims in there--some "ps" to be batted around. Let's hear it for philosophy that's written just a bit in the key of fiction.

Lost in Translation?

Now this is fun. Here's the cover of my book,The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life, translated into Korean, and with a new English title: Think of Life on a Philosophic Bench. Hmm! Interesting how the author has no role in this. They could have called my book Life Sucks, and I couldn't have complained.

The cover looks really nice, but would it be inappropriate to point out a difference from the Blackwell cover, to the right? That cover features a painting by the artist Caroline Jennings--to wit, a colorful panorama of life. Indeed, the book is full of colorful people, and contains only a smidgen of lonely-bench style existential angst.

Something does seem to have been lost in translation on a Korean book website. First you've got the book being translated from English to Korean. Then the Korean on the website is translated, courtesy of Google, back into English. Here's the resulting author description:

Kajejeu drink (Jean Kazez) - Arizona State University and obtained a doctorate in the philosophy of the Amnesty International Organization (emneseuti International) in the human rights movement pyeolchimyeo had a deep interest in the world of philosophical values. Philosophy at the University of Southern destroyer in the U.S. mail, and active teaching and writing and speech.

I don't mean to be picky, but...University of Southern destroyer in the U. S. mail? As for the rest...well, it really would be picky to say I went to University of Arizona, and did not study the philosophy of Amnesty International.

Truth is, I feel honored, and I appreciate the work of the book translator.

Ants for the New Year

What better way to begin the new year than by reading about ants? I spent New Year's Eve parked in front of the fireplace with The Superorganism, by Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson, while my husband and kids and some of their friends played tennis, courtesy of our new Nintendo Wii. Though a little technical, the book is wonderfully thought-provoking.

Lately I've been pondering what you might call "the paradox of animal rights"--if you were in a pretentious mood. You start out wanting to think and act morally toward animals. You want to give them no less than the status they deserve. This ethical starting point leads you to start doubting the way we have traditionally drawn lines between humans and other animals. You start seeing similarities, where before you only saw differences. This elevates animals in your eyes.

Soon, though, you start wondering about human morality and its animal analogues and precursors. Morality starts seeming less like a fixed part of reality, and more just a feature of "the way we are" as one particular species. But then fairness, respect, compassion, individual rights, and their ilk, start seeming less necessary, more contingent. They are elements of our phenotype, like upright posture, and possibly not suitable for our dealings with other species. This line of thought threatens to lower animals in our eyes.

As for ants. If Holldobler and Wilson are correct, an ant society is a superorganism, with individual ants related to the whole in the way that the organs of our bodies are related to our whole bodies. Worker ants know their place. They have various functions in the colony, and don't compete with each other to become a reproducing queen. By contrast, humans do compete with each other. We each expect to have a full life, complete with mating and child-rearing. We are unlike ants, and also unlike wolves--who leave reproduction to an alpha-male and alpha-female.

Part of human morality (at least post-enlightenment) is the idea that each individual counts. Martha Nussbaum, for example, offers the principle of each individual as an end. A society can't give subservient roles to women, or lower classes, or particular castes, in the name of the overall good of society. Every individual must have access to a life that's good in itself. In the animal chapter of Frontiers of Justice, she seems to extrapolate the same idea into the world of animals. Every animal counts, every animal must have a chance to live a good life.

That idea is to found in all the leading pro-animal philosophers. Every individual counts. There are no animal castes--the cows don't exist to be our food, the horses don't exist to carry us into battle or entertain us. Fair enough. The roles we assign to animals are obviously self-serving. But in thinking of each individual animal as an end, are we actually exporting a peculiarly human morality beyond the realm where it makes sense?

There are ant castes. There are wolf castes. Should we nevertheless view every individual ant and every individual wolf as an end, insisting on a good and complete life for every individual? Should we think every individual animal counts in just the way every human counts, or should we see each species as having its own built-in morality?

Sarah Palin Enjoys the Levity of a Turkey Slaughter

I'm sticking with the vegetable pie. See below.

Free Range Turkey

Another post from the "archive." I originally published this right before last Thanksgiving. It's been getting a lot of hits lately, no doubt because it's that time of year again.

*

So why not get yourself a free range turkey? Maybe you agree with my last post to the extent that you want to avoid supporting cruelty to animals and you're also, like me, something of a traditionalist. But why go to the trouble of making that complicated (but delicious!) vegetable pie? Why not buy yourself a happy free range turkey?

If that's your plan, your intentions are surely excellent. But the "humane meat" alternative isn't really so simple. First of all, you have to consider where you're planning on getting your happy turkey. If you live in the country, maybe you have a small-scale "humane farm" you can buy from. Michael Pollan describes that kind of farm in this excellent article.

Polyface Farm sounds idyllic, but before you buy, think about how much of a life the turkey got to have. For tender flesh, you have to kill when animals are young. How was the slaughter done? If at an abattoir, then not nicely. There are no laws at all regulating the slaughter of poultry in the U.S.. Even if the butchering is done on site, it's not necessarily done with any kindness. In his book The Omnivore's Dilemma (great book!) Pollan describes participating in the killing process at Polyface Farm. Speed seems to be the overriding consideration, not kindness.

More likely, you don't live in the country. Your only option is to purchase a "humane certified" turkey at some place like Whole Foods. By all means this is better than getting the usual "butterball" or whatnot (do have a look at that PETA link if you're not sure). I'm a big fan of Whole Foods and do believe in incremental steps. But when you look into the facts about animal welfare at big organic farms, they're disappointing. Free range chickens and turkeys are stuffed into massive barns. They're not in cages, which is great. If they're "free range," as well as "cage free," then they have access to the out of doors. But this may not be until the bird is many weeks old, and at that point slaughtering day isn't far off. That's the inside story I get from Pollan's book and also from The Ethics of What We Eat, a very informative new book by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.

Small farms that can demonstrate truly humane practices are better than big organic. But must you eat a turkey? I'm all for good food, and wouldn't eat a "tofurkey" in a million years. I'm not 100% sure I think eating meat is inherently wrong no matter what. But 95% of what we do to animals in raising them for food is totally repulsive. I'm much happier staying as clear as I can of the whole ugly business.

The Joy of Change

Can you be blamed for forgetting?

I read an interesting news story recently about a tragic case of a baby dying in a hot car. The mother had forgotten to drop off the baby at a childcare center on the way to work. She spent 8 hours at a school, where she was assistant principal, only to return to her car and find the baby dead.

The mother now travels around speaking out about the risk of leaving children in hot cars—something that people do all too often, with tragic consequences. So she’s not only suffered terribly, but also tried to make something constructive out of her personal tragedy. In an interview the woman sobbed about her child’s death (and you’d be crazy not to feel for her) but she said something I found strange. She said she wasn’t to blame, because she forgot.

Well, you can sort of see it. The fact that her baby was in the car simply never entered her mind. There was nothing deliberate or intentional about it. She hadn’t even done anything overtly reckless, like drinking and driving, or texting while driving. It just didn’t occur to her that the baby was in the car.

It does seem puzzling how a person can be held responsible for forgetting something. Remembering isn’t exactly something we do, but something that happens to us. But on the other hand, there’s a lot a person can do to increase the chances of remembering.

You can write things down on pieces of paper. There’s also a sort of mental writing we do all the time. You maintain mental lists and keep looking at them throughout the day. If you have young children, you do this a lot, asking yourself where your kids are, and under whose care, and what they may need from you, and whether they’re OK.

But (she would say) she forgot to jot, she forgot to check! How can blame get a foothold here? I leave you with that question, but my sense is that there must have been a crossroads. She must have chosen, at some point, to obsess more about her job or whatever was preoccupying her, instead of keeping track of her most important mental list, the one about her baby. Or must there really be a choice, a crossroads, for blame to make sense?

It’s striking what a huge role luck plays in determining the gravity of an error. If only the woman’s car had been parked in a busy parking lot. Somebody would have seen the baby in a short time and saved the day. If that had happened, I imagine the woman would have blamed herself, but for a much lesser mistake—for being dangerously distracted. For imperiling but not harming her baby. It’s understandable that she doesn’t blame herself for the events that actually occurred, considering their enormity, but it doesn’t seem true that forgetting is always innocent. Is it?

And one last thing. Mea culpa. I have sometimes forgotten important things. Fortunately, not with tragic consequences.

Cross-posted here.

Family Ties

Watching American politics today is more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, but enough already. (Or, if you haven’t had enough, I think you’ll enjoy this.)

I’ve been thinking about family ties. It seems as if people do have special obligations to family members. You could reject that entirely, in good utilitarian fashion, but suppose it’s true. It strikes me that there are a couple of ways to think about those obligations.

The obligation of a parent to a child seems particularly clear and understandable. You brought the kid into the world, so the kid is more your responsibility than someone else’s. It’s a parent’s job, more than a neighbor’s job or a stranger’s job, to feed, clothe, educate, etc. the child, and generally to put the child on course to live a good life.

(Note—it strikes me that we have an extra layer of obligation to our offspring, beyond the basic obligations we have to everyone else. I’m not saying we’re entitled to indifference to everyone else.)

If you think about the obligations of parents to children this way, then it turns out that children’s obligations to their parents must have a different basis entirely. It seems to be a matter of reciprocation. “You did all that work to bring me up, so now I owe you something you in return.” Not that we think that way all the time. Parents and children spontaneously like and care for each other, but there’s obligation too, sort of like an extra layer of glue.

So far, pretty good. But if I’ve got the duties between parents and children right, they don’t extend to cousins, grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. All are more or less like old friends, people you share an especially long history with (which makes a difference, but not the same diference.) If that’s too counterintuitive to bear, there’s another way to think about family ties. You could think that sheer kinship generates extra obligations to family, though the closer the kinship the stronger the obligation. On that way of thinking, there are obligations to siblings, cousins, etc., though weaker obligations the more distant the relationship.

It seems dangerous and pernicious to accept sheer kinship as a source of obligation. If it really is a source, then it’s a basis for obligation across the board, and it’s OK for members of the same race to give each other higher priority. Sharing genes just doesn’t seem to have any moral import that you can put your finger on. But it makes good sense to think creating a person engenders special responsibilities, and that we ought to reciprocate to our parents, if they have met them. This is not essentially a matter of genes.

I’m thinking about these things because I’m trying to write some essays about parenthood, but also because they’re relevant to animal issues. Some say we have special obligations to members of our own species like a mother has special obligations to her children. But if parental duties aren’t based on sheer biological relatedness, then that point falls through. My kids are my responsibility because I created them. I no more created all the human beings around me than I created the cats and dogs. So I have no special duties to other humans, as opposed to animals, on a par with my duties to my children.

So what do you think? Do all family ties create special obligations, based on sheer kinship, or is the tie between parent and child a unique one?

The Duties of Parents

Amid all the clamor for and against Sarah Palin, a few doubts have been expressed, sotto voce, about her as a mother. Her five children are supposed to be a plus, but what’s she doing trying to run Alaska and campaign for national office when she has a new infant with Down syndrome and four other kids, including a 6-year-old, a 14-year-old, a pregnant 17-year-old, and a son on his way to Iraq? The McCain-Palin crowd are quick to assert that such a question would never be asked about a male candidate. But is that so obvious?

Before I reveal the dark depths of my judgmental soul, a few general points. I think we do have special duties to our children. I think of it this way—there are bits of the world to which people have special connections of various kinds. The connections make some bits of the world more “my responsibility” than others. The connection in this case, of course, is that parents create their kids. That generates special duties.

Before I get around to examples, I also want to stress that parents needn’t sacrifice themselves to their children. My life counts no less than my two children’s. Furthermore, it’s absurd to “go nuclear” and think of oneself as living inside a family bubble. Yes, I have special responsibilities to my kids, but there are another seven billion people out there who aren’t less worthy, objectively speaking. Finally, when I doubt someone as a parent, that’s just one judgment among many, not necessarily the final verdict “all things considered.”

All that being said, I do find it odd that Sarah Palin wants to turn over such a huge chunk of her time to politics, leaving (presumably) so little time for her newborn and the rest of her kids. But I don’t reserve my skepticism for mothers. Before Sarah Palin burst onto the national stage, I had thought the same thing about Barack Obama. His little daughters cannot have seen a whole lot of their father in the last two years, and if he wins the presidency, they’ll see even less of him.

So yes, I do make these kinds of judgments about fathers as much as mothers. It’s not just political parents who have duties to their kids, of course. An avid reader of books about mountaineering, I wonder about all the parents who venture up Everest, knowing they have a pretty high chance of not coming back down (something like 10%, I think). Rob Hall was one of the climbers who lost his life in the ill-fated climb Jon Krakauer recounts in his book Into Thin Air. He went up the mountain with a wife very pregnant, creating a considerable risk of having fathered a fatherless child. Closer to home, I wonder about academics who drag their children from city to city as they climb the ladder a few rungs at a time to greater prestige and success. I’m not at all convinced they’re doing the right thing by their children.

Would it be dreadful if I worried just a tad more about ambitious mothers? It seems unfair, but maybe it’s simply realistic. If Barack Obama is a semi-absent father, it’s pretty safe to assume his wife makes up for it. That’s what women do. Even in two-career families, 85% of mothers take primary responsibility for children. Is it equally safe to think Sarah Palin’s kids will have a devoted father who fills in for her? It’s possible, but no, it’s not as safe an assumption.

I don’t think doubts about Sarah Palin as a mother are unfair, outrageous, or sexist. Do they loom large though? Should they determine your vote? These things fall very low on my list of criteria by which the candidates ought to be judged. The parenting issue, then, is very small potatoes. Still, not quite nothing. Apparently The New York Times agrees. There’s an article about Sarah Palin as a mother on the front page today. A strong, gutsy, unconventional woman, if you believe the article, but if it’s proper to look into her role as a mother, we can’t be required to think exclusively positive thoughts.

Drowning Puppies

What with fall semester beginning, it’s time to get serious. So, to turn to a serious subject, let’s talk about…drowning puppies. I got this example from Mark Vernon, who knows someone in rural France who actually does the deed. (Incroyable!)

Standard procedure for responsible folk is to spay and neuter dogs, thereby denying them, for life, all the pleasures of sex and reproduction, but probably even more. Without their testicles, boy dogs lose out on all the fun of testosterone, which is probably quite a bit of fun. Why not let animals enjoy their full capacities, and take a more direct approach to population control? In short, kill excess puppies, instead of sterilizing parents?

I find this dilemma an excellent Rorshach test of basic moral attitudes. If you think about the two alternatives, killing vs. sterilizing, and the greater good pulls you in the direction of killing, you’re a consequentialist by temperament. If you think killing is inherently wrong, regardless of good consequences, then you’re a non-consequentialist by temperament. If, like me, you change your mind about the case every hour on the hour, then either you’re hopelessly confused or (best case scenario), you have super-subtle, pluralistic intuitions that make you especially sensitive and deep. Naturally I’m rooting for “sensitive and deep.”

It can’t be that consequences have no relevance to morality. Of course you should drown puppies if doing so will save the whole population of Paris. But should you drown puppies in order to preserve the natural enjoyments of adult dogs? One thing’s for sure, I’m not volunteering for the job. As a kid, I got to be midwife to two litters of puppies. Drown ‘em? Not gonna happen, as my kids like to say.

But maybe this is squeamish, and letting a vet spay or neuter just distances us from what is really the greater wrong. Maybe I should admire Mark’s friend, the frank farmer (so to speak). As you can probably tell, my opinion on the matter is changing by the minute, not even by the hour.

Please, don’t say—“doggy contraceptives.” No such thing, as far as I know, and female dogs would be denied some of the pleasures of life. Anyhow, we have a much more interesting moral quandary here if we restrict ourselves to just two options—sterilize adults or drown puppies? Which should it be?

My Ethical Garden

Michael Pollan's Vegetable Garden

A couple of months ago I decided to plant a vegetable garden with my 11-year old daughter. The Sunday we were to get started, I got a nice motivational boost from “the green issue” of the New York Times Magazine. Michael Pollan was asking an awfully good question about making an effort to reduce your CO2 emissions:

What would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

Pollan goes on to explain why planting a vegetable garden is a very good solution to this problem, for all sorts of reasons you can read about in the article. By the final paragraph, he’s swelled to an extremely inspiring conclusion:

At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.... The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Cool. Off we went to the garden center to buy all the stuff needed to plant a 10’ by 10’ vegetable garden.

After my daughter did the hard work of getting 12 bags of compost to the back of the house in a wheelbarrow that kept tipping over, we started pulling weeds and digging … and soon we were headed back to the garden center. According to my husband, you don’t need a motorized rototiller to prepare a 10' by 10' bed, but I beg to differ. A couple of hours later, we had a garden bed ready for planting. We buried eight kinds of seeds with trepidation, watered, and crossed our fingers. And then of course drove back to the garden center to return the rototiller.

Now, some months later, I have come to see that it is actually necessary to pay attention to a garden, or it becomes a wild, overgrown mess. And yet...the four cucumbers that have emerged from the mess were actually very tasty. The 10 green beans weren’t bad, and I do see one or two tomatoes as a distinct possibility. But considering the ratio of inputs to outputs, my Chinese doppelganger is probably doing better than me where CO2 is concerned.

Sadly, I don’t think this enterprise has done much to “heal the split between what I think and what I do.” In fact, it’s reminded me that some of us like to think, and some of us like to do. Still, I swear on a stack of Michael Pollan’s books that next time I will not under or over water, and I will thin and weed. Maybe I will even skip the rototiller. I want to have an ethical garden, I really do

The Veil (my 100th post!)

I’ve been scratching my head about French secularism, which is several shades more secular than American secularism. A woman in France was recently denied citizenship because she was veiled from head to toe during her application interview, and for no other reason. She lives in France, speaks French fluently, and is married to a French citizen, with whom she has four little citoyens. France takes this sort of approach not just to outsiders, but to citizens as well. A 2004 law banned the wearing of religious symbols, including Islamic veils, yarmulkes, and large Christian crosses, in government-funded schools.

This degree of intrusion into people’s lives makes me very uneasy. I certainly want the right to live my life in accordance with my own thinking…at least as long as I am harming no one. I want to be able to speak out (in words and symbols), instead of keeping my ideas in the dark recesses of my own mind.

The best argument I’ve heard to defend French extreme secularism (“laicite,” as they call it) is that the government is saving women from being coerced by brothers, fathers, and clerics who think they know what’s best for them. But that argument makes me nervous. When someone wants to speak out in an unorthodox way, or live in an unusual way, it’s very often possible to question how free they really are. You can often wonder whether there’s coercion coming from family and friends, whether their choices are really free.

Then there’s the argument that Muslim veiling is divisive and the ban in schools is necessary to avoid violence, but this just doesn’t really compute. If I were a Muslim living in a society where I was told what to wear, it would make me furious. If I were the husband, or brother, or friend of the woman denied citizenship just because of her veil, my feelings for French society and its aggressive secularism would not be warm.

In the US we don’t seem to have the same tensions between Muslims and others, which certainly is surprising, given the way US policy has stirred up anti-American sentiment around the world. But we don’t, and I imagine that does have to do with our First Amendment-driven live-and-let-live approach. Once in a while I see a woman in Dallas wearing a head-to-toe veil, and I certainly do wonder why this woman wants to erase herself, imprison herself, not to mention get very, very hot. To my eyes, the image of a completely veiled woman is creepy. (My reaction to the simple head-covering called “hijab” is quite a bit different.)

But I also tell myself to get a grip and recognize that this is her choice. Yes, yes, it may not be a pure expression of “free will” but it’s very hard to say which choices are and which aren’t. It may even be at the most iffy end of the spectrum. I’d be happy to see people persuade her out of it (Muslim women especially—because they are bound to have much more “cred” with her) but I’m proud of the American civil liberties tradition that keeps government at bay.

Mama PhD

It was awfully nice to get my copy of Mama PhD in the mail today. I have a slightly soul-baring essay in the anthology--"The Long and Winding Road." Yes, do think of the Beatles song, with all the strings. At least, soul-baring for me. It's not on the order of two books that were reviewed in the New York Times on Sunday--101 Nights of Sex and 365 Nights of Sex (or something like that) No, I just explain why I quite my tenure-track job after I had my twins 11 years ago. By my standards, that's very private stuff. Now I get to read all the other essays in the volume. Fun.

Things Fall Apart

What kind of respect is culture owed? Once you decide, then you can wonder what insiders can rightly do to preserve a culture, and what outsiders ought to do, both extremely difficult questions. But first, why even begin to think of culture as a good?

It seems culture must be a good, considering that the story of a culture coming to an end so often reads as a sad story. In The Old Way Elizabeth Marshall Thomas tells a touching story about the way the culture of the San people of the Kalahari desert has all but died away in the last 50 years. The story of the decline of Eskimo culture after first contact with Europeans reads as a tragedy. In Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe doesn't romanticize Nigerian tribal culture, but it's still a loss when missionaries come along and destroy it.

The best answer I can think of is that a culture is a repository of know-how. The Eskimos had made a life in the arctic world by developing an amazing store of knowledge and skills. Same goes for the San people. This was know-how that enabled them to cope with a particular physical environment, but social knowledge as well. These peoples had ways of dealing with all the exigencies of life, from birth to death. Much of this knowledge has been lost. Some of it is still in books, but that's not the same. (I can read a book about how to hunt for whales, but I certainly don't have that know-how.)

Or you could explain the sadness of these stories without assuming that culture is a good. When things fall apart, people are left at the margins of other cultures. There's loss of pride. There are new wants, derived externally, that can't be fulfilled. The old way of life is gone, but a new way of life doesn't necessarily take its place. People lose their anchor and often become destitute.

I suspect loss of culture is the loss of something good, which is not to say that all cultures are equally good or that they shouldn't be judged, or merit absolute deference. And then there are all the additional costs as well when a culture is destroyed.

So what should insiders and outsiders do to prevent the destruction of a culture? Kwame Anthony Appiah's book The Ethics of Identity makes it clear this is a profoundly difficult question. As sad at it is when a culture disappears, it's awfully tricky, ethically speaking, to stop that from happening.

Summertime and the Bloggin' is Easy

The semester is over, my book proposal has vacated the premises...there's time again for some blogging.

How about this, for starters? I enjoyed Emily Gould's long essay about blogging in the New York Times Magazine yesterday. It's a cautionary tale about someone who turned every square inch of her life into fodder for her blog. The beauty of the article is the way it makes that understandable. It's fun to shape events into stories, fun to immediately put them in a public place, fun to get an immediate response. In fact, it's all so fun it's addictive.

I can relate, even though I mostly blog about issues, and only a bit about my own life. I imagine some of what bloggers experience is just what all writers have always experienced, the difference being a matter of quantity and response time. A blogger can post 10 times a day and get immediate reactions from dozens of people within minutes. Plus, there's the factor of commenters being mostly anonymous and therefore being able to slice and dice and sneer without the slightest risk to their own reputations.

There are things to worry about in this brave new world, but I can't see being a teetotaller. Blogs give people a chance to gather their thoughts, put them into reasonably coherent sentences, and attract conversational partners. So I shall proceed (with caution) to blog a little more over the summer.