Zoopolis (3)

Final post. This is the book that everyone in animal ethics ought to be talking about, and no doubt will be talking about in the fullness of time. You need to read it, if you're interested in the moral status of animals. 

The plot, if you haven't been reading my posts on the book:  Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that all animals have basic rights, but that they also have further rights, depending on which of three categories they fall into.  The very original suggestion of the book is that the crucial categories are political, not merely moral. Animal companions are entitled to full citizenship within their "home" country.  Wild animals should be treated like separate and sovereign nations.  Then there are "liminal" animals who depend on humans, but aren't in a cooperative, mutual relationship with them. They're the resident aliens, akin to migrant workers. They're entitled to denizenship, but not citizenship.

Are they serious? Do they think dogs should be citizens, or are they just a bit like citizens?  Should we regard Grizzly Bear Nation as really another nation, or just analogous to Cherokee Nation (for example)?  Are rats really resident aliens, or is this just a metaphor?  The authors opt for "really" in all these cases. I think this is where the book is most vulnerable.  They have a very detailed and perceptive discussion of the human side of each parallel--human citizenship, sovereignty, and denizenship are discussed with great detail and subtlety.  They also discuss animals, and the animal-human relationship, in enormous and fascinating detail. What's not so convincingly defended is the idea that the categories are more than metaphorical--that they're literally a good fit.

For example, it seems like no more than a metaphor to say that people are engaged in "ethnic cleansing" when they exterminate rats (liminal animals).  I can sort of see the connection between rats and squirrels and resident aliens -- it's not so off base that I'm utterly baffled.  But still ... Ethnic cleansing, literally? When rats are removed from a basement, they become refugees, they say.  Or do they just become like refugees? To get from "like refugees" to "refugees" seems to require some pretty heavy-duty anthropomorphizing.

There's lots of anthropomorphizing in this book, as much as I hate making that tired charge. For example, when they're making their case for wild animal sovereignty, the authors frequently talk about animal "communities".  We are to respect the autonomy of elephants in the way European colonizers should have respected the autonomy of first peoples.  But "community" is a bit loaded.  A human community conceives itself as a community and aims to preserve itself as a community.  A herd of elephants, or school of fish, of flock of flamingos--these are all cohesive groups, to be sure. But are they really "communities", exactly?  Are they communities in the sense that would be needed to conceptualize the duty to respect elephant autonomy just as we conceptualize the duty to respect native American autonomy?

The very long discussion of animals fit for citizenship is rather anthromorphic too.  When we have rules prohibiting companion animals in restaurants, that's demeaning to the animals, they say, like it's demeaning keeping blacks out of restaurants.  It makes dogs second class when they have to be tied up outside.  Sort of!  But exactly?  In a discussion of sterilizing dogs, they talk about animals wanting to have families. Do dogs ever really want to have families--if you use that phrase literally? Do dogs even have families, in the sense that people have families?  Sure, they reproduce.  But do they have families?

The are lots and lots of examples like this.  My sense is that the authors have achieved a very high degree of clarity and precision, in their account of our duties to animals. Once we see elephants as members of Elephant Nation, we much better understand what we should and shouldn't do. Once rats are thought of as being like migrant workers, our duties toward them are much clarified.  If dogs are citizens, that tells us a great deal about how we must treat them.  But this is a bit like the maneuver of pro-lifers. Instead of having an ethics for what a fetus really is (an intermediate entity that truly is in a grey zone), they say a fetus is straightforwardly a person, from conception onwards. Then the ethics of abortion becomes a whole lot more manageable. But (ahem) who really thinks a fetus is a person?  I wonder if anyone really does, in their heart of hearts.  Likewise, everything will be much clearer if we can convince ourselves that whales comprise Whale Nation, or that our cats are fellow citizens.

Regardless of my worries, I really enjoyed this book. It's extremely well written and carefully argued, and stuffed with fascinating observations about humans, animals, and the relations between them.  Another reason I enjoyed it is that it felt a bit like science fiction--as I read, I was able to imagine a completely different world from ours, one in which animals are seen as fellow citizens, resident aliens, and "foreigners".  Dream novel:  Margaret Atwood reads Zoopolis and creates a fictional world like that.  Question: is it a utopia or a dystopia?  Would it be all to the good to alter reality in this way, or in some ways bad?

I'll just end with an excerpt which I found lovely and insightful--

The Dead Have Rights

I was amazed to learn this morning, from a coroner's report, that Whitney Houston was wearing a wig and dentures when she died, and that she had breast implants.    I was even more amazed to realize that a government coroner's office will tell the whole world private information like this, even though it has no connection at all to what they're supposed to be investigating--the cause of her death.  Once you are a dead body, you have no secrets.  Not only can the state take your clothes off and dissect your body--that part's understandable--but they can broadcast anything they discover to the entire world, without having to justify specific disclosures in terms of the public's rights to know about them.  Everything's out in the open, if you have the misfortune of being dead.

Surely laws could be written to protect the privacy of the dead.  How about it?  The Whitney Houston Privacy Act--in all 50 states?  Of course, the Supreme Court might strike it down--obviously privacy means nothing to the brilliant dudes who recently upheld strip searches for people held on the most minor charges.  But it's worth a try. I can't see any earthly reason why Whitney Houston shouldn't have been able to take her most personal secrets to the grave.

Exciting Day in Dallas

It's amazing how calm this guy's voice is! 

Joy of Weird

Those Crazy Philosophers

In the last week I've read an amazing amount of stuff by philosophers that the ordinary person would regard as stark raving mad.  I wonder about this. Is that the job of philosophy--to take seriously what nobody else takes seriously?  Or do academics suffer from boredom, and need to find ever more outrageous things to say? Or does the pressure to publish favor positions that no one else has ever taken?  OK, here's my parade of horribles (stealing the phrase from this week's Supreme Court hearings)--

1. Our thoughts are not about anything. You can't possibly think about Paris. Since you can't think about Paris, you also can't make a plan to go to Paris.  It can't be your purpose to go to Paris. Theists don't think about God (that he exists), atheists don't think about God (that he doesn't exist). Biologists don't think about evolution. Nobody thinks about anything.  (Source: Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality).
2. Dogs should be citizens, cats should be citizens. There should be chicken citizens and cow citizens.  Animal citizens would have not only negative rights (they can't be eaten or used for medical research) but also positive rights.  We have to give them the same freedom of movement that humans have.  Not allowing cats in restaurants is treating them as if they were second class. It's like not letting black people in restaurants. They're entitled to medical care, like humans are.  They're entitled to political representation.  Excluding them is like excluding people with disabilities. (Source: Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis).
3. To solve the problem of climate change, it would be a good idea to encourage people to have smaller children.  They could do this by having children using IVF, and using pre-implantation diagnosis, or by giving their kids growth-retarding hormones.  People who had smaller children would have smaller ecological footprints. If you could shrink your kids enough, you might be entitled to have three children instead of two. (Source:  Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebeca Roache, "Human Engineering and Climate Change," forthcoming in Ethics, Policy and the Environment.)

I have some other items for the parade of horribles, but that's enough for now. Some day in the far future, some descendant of mine may have a large family of tiny children--six inches tall at most, a tiny citizen chicken living in the spare bedroom, and a commitment to never presume to be having thoughts about anything.  When one of the tiny kids says "I'm thinking about our tiny chicken" he will be scolded for stupidity, like today's theists are scolded by atheists.  Call me old-fashioned, but this doesn't sound good to me.

Role Reversal

Isn't it odd how the debate on the individual mandate makes conservatives forget to be conservatives?  There's a good conservative argument for the mandate.  People without insurance benefit from emergency rooms that are required to give them care.  Even if they never visit the ER in the next year, its existence puts them at lower risk of a medical disaster. If they don't pay for their unused care, and people with insurance do pay, the non-payers are freeloaders.   Conservatives should be saying "hell no!"  But in fact, it's liberals who want the mandate.  They want it not so much to catch freeloaders, but because they think everyone should have all the benefits of medical insurance.  I want the individual mandate for both reasons, being a liberal with a conservative impulse or two.  It's tiresome hearing uninsured people on the radio saying they're healthy and don't want to visit doctors. Of course they'll go to the emergency room if they have a problem, and of course it's good for them that it exists, however much they use it.  Pay-as-you-go makes about as much sense as charging trapeze artists for a safety net only after they fall. Or charging people for the fire department, only if they have a fire.

p.s.  Good stuff here.  Sigh.

p.p.s. Via Brian Leiter.  Super clear and convincing.

Zoopolis (2) - Animal Citizens

This morning's New York Times has two horrifying stories about the treatment of animals -- one about horse racing in America, and the other about dog-dumping in Puerto Rico.  In the US, the report says, 24 horses die in horse races every week, mostly as a result of the use of pain medication to mask injuries.  In Puerto Rico, there's a place called Dead Dog Beach, where people abandon surplus puppies.  Nice.  Against that background, it feels a little academic to dive into a discussion of whether domesticated animals should be granted citizenship.  This is the kind of thing people argue about furiously, but only in vegan restaurants.

Speaking of which, there is a really good new vegan restaurant in Dallas--the V Spot, on Henderson, just east of The Pearl Cup. This is the type of vegan restaurant it's really hard to find -- elegant and upscale, and with no faux meat or tofu to be seen.  The wild mushroom risotto is excellent, and the chocolate cake is to-die-for!  Expect a few bumps in the service, though.  This is a new restaurant, and they were inundated with guests when we went on a Friday night.  As a result, they kept running out of things.  Go with a flexible attitude, and I bet you will like it.

Anyhow.  Citizenship for animals.  Good idea?

***

Donaldson & Kymlicka argue that all sentient animals, everywhere, have negative rights.  They may not be eaten or worn or used in medical experiments.  As far as that goes, they are in the same camp as the ur-animal-rights philosopher Tom Regan, "abolitionist" Gary Francione, and other ARTists (animal rights theorists).

As I said in my last post, I'm skeptical about applying this sort of very strong rights talk to animals.  It presupposes that the whole foundation of strong rights (or "inviolability", as D&K put it) is a very minimal subjective point of view -- being a someone, as opposed to a something. I think that's implausible, and rights are not actually intrinsic, but "constructed" out of much more varied and heterogeneous materials than simple subjectivity.  NB:  we have lots of strong reasons to take animals seriously, even if we don't go along with heavy-duty rights talk.

But never mind.  Suppose that all sentient animals do have strong negative rights.  D&K argue that we must go much further.  The domesticated animals of the US should be granted citizenship here, and the domesticated animals of Canada should be granted citizenship there, etc.  Other animals, wild (lions, deer) and semi-wild (rats, squirrels) just have negative rights, and aren't entitled to citizenship.  They put the citizenship view forward as a competitor to the abolitionist view that the relationship between humans and domesticated animals is irredeemable.  The "enemy" in this book is the view that it would be best for domesticated animals to go extinct, and for a chasm to separate humans from the rest of animals, living independent, dignified lives "out there" beyond us.

Animal citizenship would benefit animals in lots of ways. For example, dogs would have much more  freedom of movement.  Which brings me back to the V Spot.  Throughout our meal, we could hear a dog barking behind the restaurant.  After dinner, we saw the dog was tethered to a short leash attached to a rail.  This restriction of animal movement keeps animals second class and less visible, say the authors. In France, they claim, you see dogs in restaurants all the time, and there's no public health disaster as a result. Greater freedom of movement would also involve changes in these kinds of restrictions, abolishing leash laws, additional dog parks, etc..

Another difference is that domesticated animals would receive whatever government-mandated medical care exists in the country where they are citizens.  I take it the idea is that if there's national health care, it would have a veterinary wing. If there's mandatory health insurance, as under Obama's new health care system, somehow animals would have to receive health insurance too. In natural disasters, emergency workers would rescue domesticated animals along with people.  There wouldn't be any prioritizing of human victims.

The idea is not that animals would get to vote, via human proxies (or some such), but that there would be human representatives for animal interests, who would exercise their right to have input into public affairs for them.

 ***
One could take some of these items out of the "animal citizen" package and implement them, probably with wide public support. But what about the whole package--the idea that domesticated animals ought to be reclassified as full and equal citizens?  A less sympathetic reader will find this book comical, I think.  Talking about chicken citizens and cow citizens (they do talk this way) will just seem ludicrous.  I find it not so much ludicrous as deeply unrealistic.  But ... why?

Here's one worry I have:  any society can only incorporate so many dependent, non-contributing citizens.  We certainly incorporate dependent children as citizens, but down the line, we gain independent, contributing citizens as a result.  The better care we give to children as children, the more independent and contributing they are, later on.

D&K practically insure that their animal citizens will be non-contributing by placing major limits on their being put to work or used for resources.  Here they're talking about whether dogs and donkeys could be put to work in a place they call "Sheepville"--

We would need safeguards in place to ensure dogs or donkeys were not exploited in Sheepville.  For example, only dogs and donkeys who enjoy the work, and who enjoy the company of sheep (and of other working dogs and donkeys), would be considered. These animals would need to have the option of other activities (staying in bed, hanging out with humans, or sticking to a pasture with their own species, etc.) as a way of assessing their preference for guarding the sheep. And in any case, the hours of work would need to be strictly limited so the donkey or dog didn't feel that they were always on call.  With all these provisos in place, we an imagine that a life involving a limited number of hours of guard duty could be a deeply satisfying life--offering variety, the satisfactions of directed activity, and plenty of social contacts.

Animal citizens have to be pampered to this degree because we have only two real choices: pampering them and exploiting them.  There's no way to tell a dog he has to earn a living, help him make his own career choices, and encourage him to rationally come to terms with the fact that it can be pretty miserable and dull to work a 40-hour week.  If exploitation is ruled out, then we are talking about adding largely non-contributing citizens to the rolls.

Now, for people with dogs, of course dogs do contribute--they are wonderful companions, and people with pets happily take care of them. The question is whether other citizens, who don't get the benefit of this companionship, ought to have the amount of responsibility for animals that comes with elevating then to citizen status. Dogs and cats contribute little or nothing to them.

The inevitable interjection from D&K will be something about people with severe disabilities.  They can be virtually non-contributing too, but no one doubts they should be citizens, and that the public should collectively accommodate and provide for them.  The thing is, though, that people with severe disabilities are the parents, children, siblings, future selves, and past selves, of human citizens.  To draw an analogy between people with disabilities and animals, you've got to think none of these relationships make any moral difference. Most people think they do.

***

Despite these misgivings, I think this this book is thoughtful, clear, original, and interesting. It's a must read for anyone who "does" animal ethics, and would make a great reading in a course on animal rights.  It's a great question whether we just have obligations to animals, or they also have full-blown rights; and if they do have rights, whether it makes sense to elevate some animals to full citizenship.  Two more chapters to go--on wild and semi-wild animals.

Trayvon Martin

So heart-breaking.  I have a teenage son who goes around wearing hoodies and walks to the convenience store for snacks. I've never worried that he'd be shot by the local neighborhood watch patroller.  Should I mention that he's white? Newt Gingrich recently said it was "disgraceful" for President Obama to mention that Trayvon Martin was black. Now that (Gingrich, that is) is disgraceful.  Here's a touching report (from ABC news) on how black mothers prepare their sons for the real world.

Across the country Trayvon Martin’s death has touched a raw nerve in the African American community. It was stunning when a young, black, unarmed teenager was gunned down, having committed no crime other than walking through a gated community to get Skittles and iced tea.

Concern has spread across the country from ordinary citizens, to celebrities, even the president of the United States. President Obama said on Thursday, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Although this story has exploded onto the national scene, for women with African American sons, it is a conversation all too familiar.

“I don’t want to be like Trayvon Martin’s mom, burying my child,” said Racine Tucker-Hamilton, a suburban mom with two teenage sons.

Tucker-Hamilton and fellow suburban mom, LeGreta Dennis, told ABC News that they have given their sons specific instructions for survival even though they are honor roll students.

“Basically, once they started looking like men, which is about 14 or 15, even though they’re children, I basically told them, now you’re perceived as a black man in society,” said Dennis. “You know how they say, ‘buyers beware,’ it’s like young men beware.”

This conversation in many black households is a non-negotiable. Even a simple trip to the grocery store is not routine.

“I tell them, always you have to keep your hands out of your pocket because people perceive that as threatening or they may think that you’ve stolen something,” said Tucker-Hamilton. “And if you are in public, and the noise level starts getting a little high and a little loud, you need to tone it down.”

Both women are keenly aware of how their sons could be perceived in public, advising their children on nuanced aspects of their dress and behavior. They have to remember that some view them as “under suspicion.”

“If you walk in a building and you have your hood on from being outside, take that hood off. If you’re in a store and you buy something, always put your item, even if it’s a pack of gum, get it in a bag and get your receipt so they’ll be no issue there,” said Dennis.

The moms say to always remember to smile and don’t stand too close to people, particularly woman. They  caution their sons to be aware of their behavior around police officers if they are pulled over while driving.

Dennis said, “Don’t reach for anything, roll down the window, be respectful, ask the officer if you could please call your parents. I want to be on the phone to hear the conversation.”

The teenage boys also feel the pressure.

Adam, Tucker-Hamilton’s son, said, “Sometimes when I’m riding in the Metro, I’ll walk right by somebody and they’ll kinda tighten up.”

“You do become conscious of it when you realize that employees of the store start looking at you a certain way,” said Marcus, Dennis’ 16-year-old son.

Dennis’ older son, Brandon, a 17-year-old wearing glasses and a polo shirt said, “It is frustrating. I get kinda angry, I’ve got to admit.”

The mothers’ concerns are supported by research. A Justice Department study found that black males were three to four times more likely to have police threaten or use force against them than their white counterparts.

Until something changes, Tucker-Hamilton admits, “It’s painful, but it is our reality. The bottom line is, at the end of the day, I want my sons to come home alive.”

NYT: Why is it ethical to eat meat?

The New York Times is running a contest for people who think they have the answer, with a "veritable murderer's row of judges" assessing the submissions, including Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. What fun, and this should be interesting, but did all five judges have to be men?  There are lots of appropriate women who could have been on that panel, including (dare I say?) me!

Free Will Free-for-all

The online debate about free will is heating up, thanks to high profile author Sam Harris's new book on the subject. The Chronicle of Higher Education had a nice forum on free will yesterday, starting with an essay by Jerry Coyne. Hilary Bok and Al Mele write in defense of compatibilism, but not in response to Coyne.  His argument is very simple. Restating a bit, the idea is that any mental event, M, must be identical to some brain event N.  Brain events lawfully necessitate further events in the brain and body.  So whatever thought or behavior actually happens after M, nothing else could have happened. So at least in one important sense, the owner of M isn't free.

If we can't rebut this argument (wouldn't it be nice?), maybe we can get more comfortable with it than it first appears.  If I know my daughter is thinking if p then q, and p, then I can predict fairly confidently that she will think q. Why? Because the mental has a certain sort of  lawfulness, independent of the underlying physical stuff that makes it up.  Like you can know things about a sphere, regardless of what it's made out of, you can know things about thoughts, without knowing anything about their physical composition. If you want to feel free from something, you can feel free from your brain, like a ball could feel free from being made of plastic or mud or ice (if balls could think).  It's going to have the same geometry, regardless.

Hey, it's something ...

How is it that the laws of neuroscience, and ultimately physics, govern what happens in our brains, but the laws of thought do as well?  Why do these two sets of laws mesh with each other?  When you say mental states are brain states, it's not time to retire, because everything's now nice and clear.  You actually wind up with a lot of new and difficult things to think about.

Zoopolis (1)

It's been a while since I've read anything on animal ethics that's new and different, but Zoopolis, the new book by Sue Donaldson and political philosopher Will Kymlicka, is new and different -- and well worth reading.  I'm going to "live blog" the book a bit, as in: write about it as I continue to read it (I'm about 1/3 of the way through).

Zoopolis is a work in the rights tradition of thought about animals--the tradition that says animals have the type of inviolability ordinarily assigned just to human beings. Animals are not just morally considerable. It's not enough to say their interests deserve equal consideration.  According to ART (animal rights theory), they are not to be sacrificed even if that would be for the general good. All this is really the starting point of the book, though the authors do devote a chapter to supporting the claim that animals have robust rights.

The main point of the book is that fully characterizing the rights of animals requires putting them in the same political categories we use for human beings.  When people step off a plane in some country (their example), they are treated very differently depending on whether they're citizens of that country, or citizens of a different sovereign country, or resident aliens. D&K propose that domesticated animals like dogs and cats have rights based on their being our fellow citizens.  Wild animals have rights based on their being like citizens of a different sovereign country.  And "liminal" animals (like rats and squirrels) have rights based on being akin to resident aliens. (What rights?  I don't know yet--that's the topic of the chapters I haven't gotten to.)

The authors are parting company here with abolitionist author Gary Francione, who argues that domesticated animals are in a condition of slavery, and would go extinct in an ethically ideal world.  D&K criticize him for not recognizing that domestication is partly a result of animal agency.  Animals like wolves gravitated toward our world for what it offered them.  They naturally evolved toward dependency and neoteny.  Those are not inherently bad things, and not inconsistent with living a good life--D&K argue.  They complain that Francione sees indignity in dependency, thereby also denigrating people who are dependent on others due to a disability.  Furthermore, they point out that "liminal" animals are dependent on us too, without our deliberate intervention.  So a full account of animal rights needs to be a nuanced account of the animals among us, and should not idealize a complete separation between humans and animals "out there," flourishing apart from us.

**

All the stuff on domesticated animals in this book is interesting and very persuasively argued, but let's back up.  As much as the authors want the reader to buy into basic rights for animals, and move on to their topic of political categories, I can't help but focus on step one.  The first chapter is a very useful statement of the case for animal rights, which starts by making it clear what's at stake.  The issue is not just whether animals "count," or they're morally considerable, or their equal interests should receive equal consideration. The AR theorist says something much stronger: that animals are inviolable--their good cannot be dispensed with even if doing so would be for the general good.  Rights are precisely protections against that sort of subordination to the general good.

It is a huge deal to grant that anyone has rights, in this sense of a shield that makes the individual inviolable.  One individual's rights put limits on the behavior of everyone else. These could be limits that are life-changing or even life-costing.  Because of these enormous ramifications, I find it striking -- in fact, amazing -- how little it takes for an individual to have rights, on D&K's view.  All it takes, they say, is selfhood. Here's one way they put it --

"...[W]e believe that respecting inviolability is, first and foremost, a process of intersubjective recognition -- that is, the first question is simply whether there is a 'subject' there, whether there is 'someone home'. This process of intersubjective recognition precedes any attempt to enumerate his or her capacities or interests. Once we know there is someone home, we know we are dealing with a vulnerable self, a being with subjective experience whose life can go better or worse as experienced from the inside. And so we know we should respect their inviolable rights, even before we know their variable capacities such as intelligence or moral agency."

As soon as "we know we are dealing with a vulnerable self" we also "know we should respect their inviolable rights."  Self, therefore inviolable rights.  It's incredibly simple. And of course, this secures animal rights, since we do experience intersubjective recognition with animals.

Setting aside the question of animals, does this "self --> rights" story really make sense?  Take the classic situation rights are supposed to resolve.  Five people need organ transplants.  Another person, Frank, walks into the hospital at just the right time.  Can we dismantle him and distribute his organs, to save five?  Here's the situation, as D&K see it--

Alice 
Bob
Carol
Dan 
Ellen  
Frank (SELF)

We look at Frank, intuit a subject, a self, and so realize we must respect his inviolable rights.  We can't remove his organs to save Alice, Bob, Carol, Dan, and Ellen. The problem is that the real situation is this--

Alice (SELF) 
Bob (SELF) 
Carol (SELF) 
Dan (SELF) 
Ellen (SELF)  
Frank (SELF)

All the potential beneficiaries of the transplant are selves too.  I don't see how it can be the selfhood of Frank, all on its own, that reveals to us that we must grant him an inviolable right, thereby forcing us (effectively) to side with him against the other five. Doesn't the selfhood of the others also make a bid for our concern?  If we really focus intently on selfhood and set aside all our preconceptions about what's permissible here, couldn't the selfhood of Alice give her a competing right--for example, a right to equal consideration of her interests?

The personhood account of rights is the only alternative D&K consider. This view is also supposed to account for why Frank can't be dismantled, but bars at least most animals from having rights. I'm not questioning the selfhood view because I support the personhood view. In fact, it strikes me as being just as hopeless.  The personhood of Frank makes a bid for our concern, tempting us to say he has rights and should be considered inviolable, but the personhood of the others makes a competing bid as well--again, maybe they all have a right to equal consideration of their interests.

Alice (PERSON) 
Bob (PERSON) 
Carol (PERSON) 
Dan (PERSON) 
Ellen (PERSON)   
Frank (PERSON) 

So -- why does Frank have rights, and do animals have them too?  I don't find the book's answer promising.  Nevertheless, even if rights are actually nonsense upon stilts, and nobody has them ... or humans have them but animals don't ... animals are still morally considerable, and I find it plausible that the exact sort of consideration they're owed depends on the categories D&K proposes.  So I will keep reading. Stay tuned for more on the guts of the book -- the views on animal citizenship, etc.

Give and Take

Some very good philosophers accept money from the Templeton Foundation, which makes me pay attention to arguments why this is a bad thing to do.  One type of argument puzzles me ... a lot.  The argument for not taking their money is that the Templeton Foundation, or at least the family, supports nefarious causes like Rick Santorum's presidential campaign.  Here's how Jerry Coyne suspects Templeton Takers will defend themselves--

But of course money-hungry scientists will just dismiss this as an irrelevant side effect: a mere peccadillo of the Foundation’s boss that doesn’t have anything to do with their science fiefdom. “Our money,” they will say, “is used just to do science, and there are no strings attached.”

But no, the best response is much better than that.   If I gave money to the Templeton Foundation, I'd be supporting Rick Santorum.  But  taking from the Foundation has the opposite effect--it surely means they have less to give to Rick Santorum and other bad causes. If you take from people who are prone to support bad causes, you actually take away from bad causes.  This obvious point seems to be ignored whenever the topic of Templeton funding comes up.

Think about it. Suppose the Templeton Foundation is inclined to spend millions of dollars torturing kittens, and suddenly they decide they'll fund torturing kittens OR the study of free will, depending on who applies for grants.  The kitten matter is not a good reason to avoid their money--it's just the opposite.  If I get a free will grant from Templeton, it's double good--I both get to do some free will research and get to save some kittens.  What a deal!

Now, you might say if I put a Templeton credit in the footnotes of my free will papers, I will thus confer credibility on the torturing of kittens, for anyone who knows what Templeton is up to.  People all over the place will think the practice is not so bad after all, since it's supported by a foundation that also funds top of the line free will research. Or .... will they?  I don't know that these associations are such a strong factor in influencing how people think, and besides, however harmful the associations are, it seems even worse to let the kitty torturers have all of the foundation's vast funds.  If you think about this in consequentialist terms, it could even come out that philosophers have an obligation to take Templeton money!

The Bazaarness of Philosophy

Colin McGinn writes in The Stone that "philosophy" is a bad word for philosophy.  It brings to mind someone who works on "unearthing and explicating the 'meaning of life' and what the ultimate goods are" - but philosophers may do nothing of the kind.

I do get this - back in the days when I "did" philosophy of mind and language it annoyed me no end to sit next to someone on a train or plane and get asked about the meaning of life, just because I said I studied philosophy.  People don't understand that most of philosophy is not that sort of thing.

But it's not just being taken for a meaning-ologist that bothers McGinn. He wants to be seen as a scientist.

Our current name is harmful because it posits a big gap between the sciences and philosophy; we do something that is not a science. Thus we do not share in the intellectual prestige associated with that thoroughly modern word. We are accordingly not covered by the media that cover the sciences, and what we do remains a mystery to most people. But it is really quite clear that academic philosophy is a science. The dictionary defines a science as “a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject.” This is a very broad definition, which includes not just subjects like physics and chemistry but also psychology, economics, mathematics and even “library science.”

Okay .... I'd sure like to be seen as a scientist, but here's the thing.  If you're around philosophy for a long time, you can't help but notice that philosophers don't seem much like scientists.  Top level philosophy sometimes does seem to reveal what is simply true.  There are genuine insights--discoveries that everyone simply has to bow down to.  (Like... what?  Hilary Putnam's famous article "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" comes to mind.) But much of the time, philosophy makes me think of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul--lots and lots of stalls, people selling different things at every stall.  They sell with the tools of logic, making "arguments", but something funny's going on when "arguments" support contradictory conclusions.

Each of the arguers in the philosophical Bazaar certainly feels like a scientist--a systematic, rationally-guided knower. The focus of each philosopher is on reality-- philosophers are not making stuff up, as in writing fiction or composing music.  But there's just no ignoring the people shouting in the other stalls.  Their existence calls into question whether what's produced at each stall is really very science-like at all.

Because of all this fragmentation, you get a phrase in philosophy that's really strange, when you think about it.  If you're describing what a philosopher thinks, it's common to say "For X, _____."  As in, "For Hume, the self is a bundle."  What does this even mean?  Either the self is a bundle or it is not. How can it be that "for Hume" the self is a bundle?  This locution raises a disconcerting possibility.  What philosophy offers is not discovery of truths, but ways of thinking about things.  Hume thought of the self as a bundle: that was his way of thinking of the self.  Thus, "for him" the self was a bundle. Perhaps we'd like to adopt that way of thinking too.  Then for us too, the self would be a bundle.  But that's not to say it would be a bundle. If you wanted philosophy to be a science, you'd have to somehow overcome the Grand Bazaar tendency, and get rid of all that "for X"-ing.

McGinn doesn't seem to notice the Bazaarness of philosophy. He writes--

Academic philosophy obviously falls under this capacious meaning. Moreover, most of the marks of science as commonly understood are shared by academic philosophy: the subject is systematic, rigorous, replete with technical vocabulary, often in conflict with common sense, capable of refutation, produces hypotheses, uses symbolic notation, is about the natural world, is institutionalized, peer-reviewed, tenure-granting, etc. We may as well recognize that we are a science, even if not one that makes empirical observations or uses much mathematics. Once we do this officially, we can expect to be treated like scientists.

Can it really be true that 10 people are being "systematic and rigorous", if they arrive at 10 different conclusions on the same subject?  Not really, and that's why we're stuck with the word "philosophy."  McGinn says it's "faintly shameful" but so is the whole business of selling views as if they were rationally supported, when the guy or gal at the next stall is selling something else. 

Whole World Goodness

Some people are using their February 29th to do something exotic--maybe hot air ballooning in the desert or visiting sea turtles on the black sand beaches of Hawaii or ... well, dream on. I'm spending it scratching my head about population puzzles. 

Suppose the world had a small, happy population--10,000 people perhaps. Generation after generation, they replace themselves. Their way of life is sustainable into the far future.  All's well, right?  But suppose they could have been much more numerous, and equally happy.  Another 10,000 could have existed, just as happy as the first.  That would have been better ... maybe. 

Derek Parfit's famous "repugnant conclusion" envisions something even more perplexing.  If these people had been twice as numerous, but a little less happy, that would have been better ... surely. 20,000 of the slightly less happy would contain more good than 10,000 of the very happy.  But then, 40,000 of the still less happy would contain even more good.  A gigantic number of the just slightly happy would contain more good than the initial 10,000. Is a world stuffed with tons of slightly happy people really a better world?

Better world, worse world.   It occurs to me to wonder if the world as a whole is even up for evaluation.  Somebody or other once said "the world is all that is the case."  Actually, someone specific--Wittgenstein. If the world is simply all that is the case, it's not the kind of thing that can be good or bad.

Then again, maybe it can be good or bad, but the goodness or badness is in the eye of the beholder. Although it's intrinsic to a headache to be bad, it's not really intrinsic to an awful world to be bad.  In any event, it does seem a tad strange to get into the world-evaluating business.

If you do, things get strange pretty fast.  The world is a bit like a collection of books, as opposed to the books themselves, or an art collection, as opposed to the paintings.  If you add another Picasso to an art collection, the amount of aesthetic good has to go up, but the collection doesn't necessarily get any better. It might just get Picasso-heavy.  If you add another happy person to the world, the amount of good goes up, but the world--the "collection"--doesn't necessarily get any better.  Likewise, the repugnant conclusion might be seen as presenting us with a bigger pile of good, but a no better world.  The reason being that worlds are evaluated in a more diffuse, pluralistic way than piles of people.

But then, what are we thinking about, when we have these reactions to different worlds? I have the feeling our reactions to worlds straddle ethics and aesthetics and sheer personal preference in a problematic way.

All Dead Mormons are Now Gay

You have to admit, this is a brilliant project.  I converted someone by the name of Donna Thomson this morning.

It's touching how it says "no converting Holocaust victims" at the bottom. Of course, that's how all this got started. Apparently Mormons have been converting dead Holocaust victims for years--to Mormonism, of course.

Funniest thing ever--Steven Colbert converting dead Mormons to Judaism, courtesy of a guillotine and a hotdog (um).  (Off point entirely, but he's hilarious on the subject of Wheat Thins too.)

What I wonder is--what about that giant bathtub on a pedestal of oxen?  Do these things actually exist in Mormon temples?  Is that really what they use for proxy conversions?  Or is this the product of Steven Colbert's fevered imagination?

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The Antlers

 Beautiful. Excruciating. Beautiful and excruciating.

Don't miss ...

... this funny business in the land of philosophy. I s'pose I shouldn't be laughing quite so hard, what with the specter of total public humiliation. But. Really.  Or would anyone like to step up to the plate and defend the studly logician?

Freedom to Coerce

"Victims of rape?  Who cares?  Religion is under assault in this country!  Wahhhhh!" (loose paraphrase of both Romney and Santorum last night.)

I've always been puzzled by my university's instructions to students in the event of rape--they are to go to the emergency rooms of specific hospitals.  Why not just any hospital--perhaps the closest one, or one they've been to before?

Last night's Republican presidential debate shed some light. You see, at most Catholic-run hospitals, they won't offer rape victims a morning-after pill.  If you you want to avoid bearing your rapist's child, you're going to have to make a second trip, to another emergency room.  And it turns out (this was in The New York Times the other day), there are a lot of Catholic hospitals, and a lot of other hospitals with Catholic rules, because they are affiliated with Catholic hospitals. One in six people in the US will visit a Catholic hospital this year.

Now, why were the Republican gentlemen talking about this?  Because, according to Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney did not sufficiently protect the freedoms of Catholics when he was governor of Massachusetts.  He signed a bill that required Catholic hospitals to give rape victims the option of the morning after pill. Santorum, and then Romney, made a huge show of compassion.  For the rape victims?  Ha!  No, for those poor, tormented bishops who didn't get their way in Massachusetts hospitals.  Imagine the torture--of being forced to allow emergency room doctors to dispense morning after pills to rape victims!

I waited, and waited ... for some sign of compassion for, you know, the woman who is completely traumatized by rape, and then winds up in a hospital where she's essentially told "Tough luck, have the baby, because that's what 'the church' believes you should do."  What about her emotional and physical health? What about her right to follow her own conscience? But no, the gentlemen did not say a word about her predicament. It was all about the poor compromised bishop.

Whatever you think about whether freedom of religion covers how medical care is dispensed in hospital emergency rooms (I think it doesn't), it says a lot when the main concern is for distant male clergy, not rape victims.  Not one word of sympathy. Nothing about the fact that women have a conscience too. Nothing about who's conscience should prevail, in a matter as personal as continuing or ending a pregnancy. Nothing about the rape itself.  Not one word from any of them.  That's... revolting.

Love, Death, and Powerpoint

A couple of nights ago I gave a talk about love and death at SMU's secular humanist club, with many in attendance from the Dallas Fellowship of Freethought. I'm posting the powerpoint here (HERE), but first, a quick rant. It ought to be possible to convert this to a You Tube video, retaining all the embedded video, sound, and animations, but you can't do that on a Mac.  You can do it if you have Powerpoint for Windows (2010), according to the Powerpoint for Windows website.  So. That's. Annoying.

My presentation starts with the song "Everlasting Everything," by Wilco, which succinctly captures a worry about death and impermanence you find in many philosophers -- over the centuries and today.  Jeff Tweedy "solves" the problem with "everlasting love." I talk about other possible solutions--the God solution (Tolstoy) and the anti-Love solution (the Stoics), and about how the love solution is found not only in a Wilco song, but in philosophers, like Richard Taylor and Harry Frankfurt.  How satisfying is it? How much does it console? I like the way the song hints at only partial consolation--the tone of it is tragic, brave, and beautiful, not cheerful or tranquil. At the talk I enjoyed the discussion afterwards about levels of consolation--what works, what doesn't, for whom and when, for what purposes, etc.

Just possibly on Monday I'll be able to convert the Powerpoint to the full glory of a You Tube video, with functioning embedded videos and sound. If so, it will be here.

Universal Veganism?

A student in my Animal Rights class asked me several years ago whether I thought humanity would ever be 100% vegan.  Over the years, I've found myself thinking about this, but thinking about it in evolving ways.  One of the reasons my thoughts are in flux is that I've added a course on Environmental Ethics to my repertory.  This makes me focus less on the micro-level, and more on the macro-level.

On the micro-level, you focus on one person deciding between an all-plant diet and a part-animal diet.  The all-plant diet will nourish them, but they find the part-animal diet tastier.  Can they justify the harm they impose on animals in terms of the taste-delta, so to speak?  No, it seems clear they cannot.  Next issue: will all humans ever recognize this fact and switch over to an all-plant diet?  The issue seems entirely about self-involvement vs. altruism.  Are we good enough to all become vegans?  The more optimistic among us say Yes.  The less optimistic say No.

But now start on the macro-level, and think about oceans.  71% of earth is covered with ocean, and seafood provides 20% of animal protein, world wide -- 50% in some countries.  In a vegan world, the ocean simply stops being used as source of nutrition.  Land gets wasted too. Only 10% of the earth's land surface is arable--used to grow for crops.  26% of the land surface is used as grazing land.  Most of that grazing land is not convertible to cropland, so if animals weren't being raised on it, it would simply be lost to food production.  The total lost to food production: about 79% of the planet's surface.

Now, a vegan earth is also a planet where the cropland is used more efficiently. As it is, a third of cropland is used to feed confined animals (the ones not on grazing land).  So the cropland will feed far more people, in a vegan world.  Maybe -- I'm not sure -- everyone will still get fed. But by not consuming animals raised on grazing land or living in oceans, a vegan world leaves a great deal of the earth's surface unused for food--the oceans plus all the grazing land that couldn't be used to grow crops.  To make up for this, there has to be lots of importing-exporting, and lots of local people stop being self-sufficient food producers.

It seems to me there's got to be some law of biology or economics (er ... what is it?) that says no to this.  It just can't be that a species decides that a vast amount of its habitat is off limits, as far as obtaining food is concerned. Now, we don't want to make the mistake of thinking "natural, therefore good," or anything so crude, but there are some aspects to nature that just aren't going to be transcended, no matter what. For example, people will keep having sex and reproducing.  And more to the point, they will keep spreading out all over the globe, using every acre of it for food production.

I know what someone's going to say. If we're inevitably going to use every acre for food production, would it be OK to use every acre of Manhattan for food production? May we round up New Yorkers, and turn them into hamburgers?  Well, no. And we're not going to eat chunks of the Grand Canyon either.  But -- perhaps you still see the point.  Manhattan is tiny.  We can pass up Manhattan Burgers, but can we really let 79% of the earth be non-food territory?

Things look very different when you switch from the micro-level to the macro-level.  On the micro-level, the person who eats meat seems to prioritize their taste-delta over the well-being of animals. Selfish jerk!  But now think about humanity collectively, on the macro-level.  We use the whole earth for food production, which must mean we eat other animals. It's not a matter of selfish pursuit of pleasure, but of the basic laws of biology and economics.  The pleasure people get from eating meat isn't an ultimate end, looking at in the grand scheme of things, but actually nature's way of getting them to obey those basic laws.

A vegan world violates the very most basic laws of biology and economics, whereas an omnivorous world does not.  So--to hell with worrying about the treatment of "food" animals? No, no, no.  It's just a starting point to recognize that we're not heading for a vegan world. There's a lot that's wrong with our omnivorous world.  We use every bit of the earth for food (fine) but over-use it (not fine).  We use resources inefficiently.  That's particularly so with respect to the confined animal sector.  Confined animals are fed through the inefficient use of valuable cropland.  That makes no economic sense. These operations also pollute air, water, and land.  There are also issues about the over-use of grazing land--too many animals means too much methane--a greenhouse gas. Finally, and very importantly, there are issues about the horrifying cruelty of these operations.

If you think we're heading for a vegan world, you'll think it's trivial, and even retrograde, to bring about small reforms, like two on the horizon right now:

Federal legislation introduced - bigger cages for laying hens
McDonalds ending use of gestational crates

But we're not.  So we should be for these reforms and support the organizations working for them.  I keep hearing Wayne Pacelle of HSUS on the radio, and think he's the cat's pajamas. If you're abolitionist Gary Francione, you hate the guy, because he's making life incrementally better for animals, while leading everyone a little further away from a vegan world. But I think we're not heading to a vegan world, period. It's not a question of human selfishness, but a simple matter of biology and economics. We just can't let that much of the earth's surface be labelled "not for food."

Grammy Highlights (says me)

Best thing, this Chipotle commercial. If a big restaurant chain wants to run commercials decrying factory farming, I'm all for it.  What a great commercial, on every level.

Nick Minaj's diabolical exorcism thing. C'mon, Catholic pundits, where's the outrage? I'm hoping to hear some today.

Bon Iver winning best new artist. I love the music, and this was a big win for the nerdy disheveled guy -- often overlooked in the glitzy music business.

Bon Iver Wins Best New Artist

Last but not least, Adele's final acceptance speech--the one where she moans a lot and talks about snot.  Hey, she's great (though the music doesn't speak to me personally), and I love seeing a win for the unskinny, "real" girl.   

It's Contraception for God's Sake!

So--the Obama administration is struggling to explain why it's reasonable to require Catholic hospitals and schools to cover contraception in insurance policies for their employees.  Why should Catholics  have to spend their money in ways that run counter to their religious beliefs?  Isn't that a violation of their religious freedom? Romney and Santorum want to think so.

Background fact:  we have a strange healthcare system in this country, where we get insurance coverage through employment.  So private businesses have to function partly like public entities, covering whatever types of health care are currently considered standard and mainstream.  Health coverage comes to be somewhat government managed, though not government run. 

This crazy public/private system can lead to problems for religious institutions that decide to go into business.  Consider the poor Schmatholics.  Their religous belief is that the body is a sacred vessel.  It is an abomination for a surgeon to cut into it, they think.  So they're fine with various kinds of medical care, but surgery, no.  Thou shalt not perform surgery!

The Schmatholics happen to like to run businesses. They have bookstores, bowling alleys, golf courses, lots of businesses.  Given the way health care works in this country, can they really be permitted to provide their employees with their weird, surgery-free insurance policies?  Why no, they can't.  The health care system we have makes it impossible to grant total religious freedom to Schmatholics who run businesses.

Is that ... awful? Is it an infringement on freedom of religion? No, not really. Schmatholics don't have to run businesses. Surely that's not intrinsic to their religion.  They can practice their religion with complete freedom, but when they enter the sphere of business, they have to comply with the rules.  In fact, there are lots of rules.  If their religion requires swindling people, well too bad, the rules of the business world apply.

Oh but wait, surgery is obviously moral, those Schmatholics are simply insane.  Contraception, on the other hand, is debatable.

But no, it isn't.  Not even Catholics disagree about it ... not really. Or you wouldn't have the lowest birthrates in the world in mostly Catholic countries like Italy. Surveys show that almost all Catholics disagree with the official position of the church on contraception. If the Catholic church weren't so hierarchical, we'd have to say that Catholics believe in contraception.  Because they do. When you go and ask them, they say they believe in it and use it.

What if a procedure really were debatable? Like sex change surgery, for example, or abortion?  I can see that it would be overreaching for the government to insist that every insurance policy in the land must cover these procedures.  But just like every policy must cover surgery, whatever the Schmatholics think about it, it seems equally straightforward that every policy must cover contraception, whatever Catholic priests think about it.  It is simply standard medical care--not controversial at all, except for within a certain (frankly) lunatic fringe.

Nobody seems to be saying that, but it needs to be said. 

Is this Opposites Day?

I hope democrats aren't going to let Mitt Romney get away with this.  It seems he finds it a terrible assault on freedom of conscience that the Obama administration will be requiring religious hospitals to include contraception coverage in insurance for their employees.  What, is this opposites day?  If there were no one trying to purchase contraceptives, there would be no issue here.  Employees at these hospitals disagree with Catholic doctrine, and wish to use contraceptives.  (Duh-the doctrine is sheer lunacy.) The church wants to get in their way--or at least slow them down.  People siding with these institutions shouldn't be allowed to pose as defenders of conscience when they actually don't want to empower individual employees to think for themselves and make their own decisions.  They're not defenders of conscience, their defenders of church power over private decision making!

Atheism in America

Julian Baggini traveled around the US interviewing atheists for this article in the Financial Times.  The general picture: not pleasant.  If you live in small town America, you'll most likely want to keep your non-belief to yourself.  Being unreligious will make it hard for you to be part of the community, since so much socializing and volunteer work is organized around religion.

Academic city dwellers, particularly if they're philosophers, will find it hard to relate to all of this.  70% of philosophers are atheists, so (seriously) I think it's harder to be a Christian in philosophy than to be an atheist.  On the other hand, as an inhabitant of a north Dallas suburb (we're just a few blocks from Plano, the hideously conservative suburb mentioned in the article), I do have just a little experience with anti-atheist prejudice--enough to know it's a reality.

The article ought to make anyone empathize with maligned American atheists, but it should probably also make maligned American atheists ponder their own agenda a bit.  Consider what many of Julian's informants told him--being gay or even a crack addict creates less of a problem than being an atheist.  Why is that?  Probably part of the difference lies in the thought that you can't be good without God.  Atheists really need to overcome that belief.  But there's another element to this.  If you're gay, you're not attacking heterosexuality, and you're not trying to make others gay.  In the public mind, an "atheist" isn't simply someone who believes there is no God.  An atheist is a promoter of godlessness.

At least, that's the impression I've gotten in many conversations. People will confess disbelief and then turn around and say "But I'm not an atheist, or anything like that."  What is an atheist, or anything like that?  An opponent of religion, I think, not merely someone who believes there is no god. So--part of the problem with atheists winning acceptance is that many don't position themselves like members of other religions.  Christians can accept Jews because Jews aren't anti-Christian, and vice versa. It could work the same way between theists and atheists, but it calls for overt "live-and-let-live" attitudes on both sides.

Of course, some atheists really are anti-religious, and don't plan on giving that up, even if it would help atheists gain more acceptance.  They think the goal of defeating religion is so important that it's worth the temporary marginalization of atheists out there in middle America.  OK, fine, but let's be honest about how atheists present themselves to others, and what role that self-presentation plays in the stigma associated with the word.

Cosmogony

So good, so weird, so beautiful....

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The whole album is cool. Next thing--must have the app that goes with it.