I've made six trips since February to visit my father in Pennsylvania. This means my thoughts have been interrupted a lot. I get on the plane, read a book about something I'm working on, keep the topic on my mind for several days, and by the time I'm on the return flight, I've lost the thread. Blogging is further down the list of my priorities, so it's even more difficult to hang on to potential topics.
So here we go--a bunch of topics I started to think about in the last few months, but didn't get to pursue. I'm giving myself just a few sentences for each topic!
Caregiving drones
Drones are useful for hunting and killing enemies, but why not use them peacefully? When my father can't find his hearing aids, I'd love to be able to send in a little hornet-sized drone to have a look.
Must we be vegans?
I'm not sure about the idea that we must always justify harm by citing a more serious benefit. In sports and business, competition doesn't work that way--you can cause a competitor harm without being able to cite a compensatory benefit. Does this tell us anything about using animals for food? Is Finding Food competitive, like engaging in sports and business competition?
Must we be vegans?
In the debate about food ethics, people seem too puritanical about food enjoyment, making it seem trivial. For most people, oddly enough, food pleasure is one of the greatest pleasures. Does it make any sense to assert a right to nutritious and delicious food?
Latest atheist battle
I see nothing very wrong with Ron Lindsay's speech at the recent Women in Secularism conference. It seems like a very, very bad sign that such an innocuous speech could generate so much controversy.
Priming
There's some fascinating research that seems to show we are affected unconsciously by tiny cues--if you see words like "old" and "geriatric" on a screen, you'll walk away more slowly than if you see words like "young" and "teenager". This makes me wonder about the impact of spending many days in a row at a senior home Is there a "dose-response" effect, so I should worry about being seriously infected with elderly attitudes and behaviors? (If not, why not?)
Where's the hot sauce?
It wouldn't be so bad to live in a senior home, if you could just hang onto your own lifestyle. Why must the food be so bland? How will I survive without hot-hot-hot Mexican and Indian food, if I ever wind up in such a place?
Stoicism can be useful
When dealing with stressful situations, do I get any use out of the Stoic philosophy I cover in my classes? Well yes, a little. I like Epictetus's advice that you should remind yourself that you do possess the character traits that will be needed, come what may.
Stoicism isn't all that useful
Stoicism is all about mind-control--handling a situation by thinking about it the right way. Unfortunately, when you have dementia, you can wind up with lots of problems that you can't think your way out of. Stoicism is for the intellectually advantaged.
When life begins
I almost have it figured out:-) I am making progress on a book chapter (hurray!).
The Grim Reader
Everything I'm reading these days seems to be grotesquely depressing. That's the topic of my next TPM column.
5/23/13
5/9/13
The Badness of Death
What makes death bad for someone who dies? This is on my mind for lots of different reasons--so here goes, some thinking aloud.
The question is puzzling if you even just think about the death of one individual, of one age and species, but let's be masochists and thinking about lots of deaths.
Death of a zygote after 2 days development
Death of a newborn baby
Death of a healthy young adult
Death of a very, very old unhealthy adult
Death of a healthy young cat
My gut feeling is that there's a certain Basic Badness to death (caps do so much to dignify ideas!). The Basic Badness consists of the fact that a certain conscious vantage point on the world existed for some time and then came to an end. It seems to me this is a yes/no matter. Either the basic badness is present or it's absent. And it's present whenever there exists a conscious vantage point. It's present in four of the cases, but not the first. A zygote has no conscious vantage point, so the Basic Badness of death is not present. It might be sad and bad or even tragic in some way for a zygote to die--think about the miscarriage of a much wanted pregnancy. But there is not the awfulness of termination of consciousness.
It would be foolish to say that all deaths are equally bad, just because they involve termination of consciousness. They have a certain type of badness to an equal degree, but there are other types of badness besides Basic Badness. There are two further types of badness (at least!) that make different deaths bad to different degrees. Death doesn't just bring an end to consciousness; it also takes away future life, and that future life can vary in quantity and quality. So in addition to the Basic Badness of death, there is also some degree of Deprivation. A very old unhealthy adult is deprived of less, by death, than a healthy young adult.
More "compare and contrast": I would say the deprivation involved when a cat dies is less than when a newborn baby or health human adult dies--both in light of quantity and quality. There are different "goods" possible in different lives, and not as much good in the average hour of a cat's life. (NB: no less an animal advocate than Peter Singer says exactly the same thing.)
Next: the Basic Badness of death is compounded also by the degree to which death Interrupts. It's one thing to take away future years that would have been good. It's another to interrupt a project that's already under way. Both are bad, but they're bad in different ways. In one case, precious days are lost, in the other, someone dies with "unfinished business."
Death interrupts very little for a baby, a great deal for a healthy adult, and once again, quite a bit less for a very old unhealthy adult. Does death interrupt for a cat, or is a cat's life lived day after day after day, with no possibility of "unfinished business"? There isn't much chance of "unfinished business" for most house cats, but many animals can die with unfinished business. Think of a salmon killed in the middle of its journey upstream, or a beaver killed while building a dam. But yes, on average, there's bound to be less interruption than when a healthy human adult dies.
Now let's do the math ... but how should we do it? A zygote's death is not bad as far as Basic Badness goes, but it's maximally depriving. Should we (1) simply add the numbers together? Is death, for a zygote, pretty damned bad, because of the deprivation? Or should we say (2) that only deaths that are Basically Bad can be even more bad, because of additional bad-making factors?
I say (2). I cannot make myself think the death of a zygote is bad in anything at all like the death of the other four individuals is bad. The badness of deprivation doesn't "kick in" because there's no basic badness to the death of a zygote.
The Basic Badness of death can be worsened by deprivation and interruption, but where there is no Basic Badness, there's nothing to worsen. The way that death brings consciousness to an end is a privileged part of the picture, with everything else playing a secondary, "compounding" role. Why is termination of consciousness the primary thing? Perhaps--bottom line--death is not really death, unless it terminates a consciousness. So deprivation doesn't make a zygote's death extra bad, because it's not really a death, in the funeral sense, to begin with, however much (nevertheless) it can be a grievous thing to lose a pregnancy.
At least--that's how things appear at the moment! Back to reading the death literature (I'm currently reading Death, by Shelly Kagan).
The question is puzzling if you even just think about the death of one individual, of one age and species, but let's be masochists and thinking about lots of deaths.
Death of a zygote after 2 days development
Death of a newborn baby
Death of a healthy young adult
Death of a very, very old unhealthy adult
Death of a healthy young cat
My gut feeling is that there's a certain Basic Badness to death (caps do so much to dignify ideas!). The Basic Badness consists of the fact that a certain conscious vantage point on the world existed for some time and then came to an end. It seems to me this is a yes/no matter. Either the basic badness is present or it's absent. And it's present whenever there exists a conscious vantage point. It's present in four of the cases, but not the first. A zygote has no conscious vantage point, so the Basic Badness of death is not present. It might be sad and bad or even tragic in some way for a zygote to die--think about the miscarriage of a much wanted pregnancy. But there is not the awfulness of termination of consciousness.
It would be foolish to say that all deaths are equally bad, just because they involve termination of consciousness. They have a certain type of badness to an equal degree, but there are other types of badness besides Basic Badness. There are two further types of badness (at least!) that make different deaths bad to different degrees. Death doesn't just bring an end to consciousness; it also takes away future life, and that future life can vary in quantity and quality. So in addition to the Basic Badness of death, there is also some degree of Deprivation. A very old unhealthy adult is deprived of less, by death, than a healthy young adult.
More "compare and contrast": I would say the deprivation involved when a cat dies is less than when a newborn baby or health human adult dies--both in light of quantity and quality. There are different "goods" possible in different lives, and not as much good in the average hour of a cat's life. (NB: no less an animal advocate than Peter Singer says exactly the same thing.)
Next: the Basic Badness of death is compounded also by the degree to which death Interrupts. It's one thing to take away future years that would have been good. It's another to interrupt a project that's already under way. Both are bad, but they're bad in different ways. In one case, precious days are lost, in the other, someone dies with "unfinished business."
Death interrupts very little for a baby, a great deal for a healthy adult, and once again, quite a bit less for a very old unhealthy adult. Does death interrupt for a cat, or is a cat's life lived day after day after day, with no possibility of "unfinished business"? There isn't much chance of "unfinished business" for most house cats, but many animals can die with unfinished business. Think of a salmon killed in the middle of its journey upstream, or a beaver killed while building a dam. But yes, on average, there's bound to be less interruption than when a healthy human adult dies.
Now let's do the math ... but how should we do it? A zygote's death is not bad as far as Basic Badness goes, but it's maximally depriving. Should we (1) simply add the numbers together? Is death, for a zygote, pretty damned bad, because of the deprivation? Or should we say (2) that only deaths that are Basically Bad can be even more bad, because of additional bad-making factors?
I say (2). I cannot make myself think the death of a zygote is bad in anything at all like the death of the other four individuals is bad. The badness of deprivation doesn't "kick in" because there's no basic badness to the death of a zygote.
The Basic Badness of death can be worsened by deprivation and interruption, but where there is no Basic Badness, there's nothing to worsen. The way that death brings consciousness to an end is a privileged part of the picture, with everything else playing a secondary, "compounding" role. Why is termination of consciousness the primary thing? Perhaps--bottom line--death is not really death, unless it terminates a consciousness. So deprivation doesn't make a zygote's death extra bad, because it's not really a death, in the funeral sense, to begin with, however much (nevertheless) it can be a grievous thing to lose a pregnancy.
At least--that's how things appear at the moment! Back to reading the death literature (I'm currently reading Death, by Shelly Kagan).
5/2/13
Selling Justice
Via Leiter, I see the San Jose philosophy department is complaining in an open letter to Michael Sandel that an MIT/Harvard-affiliated company proposed that the department pilot Sandel's "blended online" course, Justice. I'm intrigued, since I used his book, Justice, to teach Contemporary Moral Problems this semester. I had to miss several classes, so I also had my class watch one of his online lectures (and I watched others).
The subtext to the letter is a cogent thought: "This kind of thing is a threat to our jobs and to students taking real world, interactive courses." Fair enough. Professors need jobs, and students are usually better off taking courses with real world instructors. On the other hand (let's admit), there's got to be a cash-strapped school somewhere that would serve its students well by showing them the Justice lecture series. And the quality concerns expressed in the letter are really quite groundless.
Let's see, there's the worry that the series isn't current. That could become true some day, but for the moment, the series/book is very current. Sandel talks about all of the issues that are typical in a Contemporary Moral Problems course, and then some. He also talks about "markets and morals" (the topic of his latest book)--which involves all sorts of very topical and colorful questions. He talks about all of these issues using far more ethical and political theory than is typical in a course like this, and with a single, unifying voice (as opposed to the multitude of voices and styles you get in a typical anthology). Certainly Harvard students are lucky to be able to take Sandel's course.
Another worry is that a lecture series "does not provide anything over and above assigning a book to read." What a strange thing to say, just a paragraph after the authors note Sandel's excellent skill at lecturing and his lively interactions with students. No, watching a lively lecture and debate is not just like reading a book. More specifically, Justice the book is much more dense than Justice the lecture series. One is not at all equivalent to the other.
Then there's the point that Sandel and his students at Harvard are a bunch of white people--there isn't the diversity you could find in a real, live classroom. But wait--I thought the idea was to show this in a real, live classroom. If there were teaching assistants facilitating discussion, I think students would hear diverse points of view. And besides, the Harvard classroom isn't that uniform. In the lecture my students watched, students actually drew on their rather different life experiences.
I can imagine situations in which this course would be a good purchase for a college or school district. So why protest (to Sandel) the mere selling of it? Should a department not only decline the series for itself, but work to make it unavailable to others? Strange!
Postscript. Not to be too zealous. I do have one complaint about Justice (the book): Sandel blurs together questions about ethics (what should I do?) and questions about justice (what is fair in this society?). All moral questions, for him, come under the murky term "justice", leaving students without tools to think clearly about distinct topics and questions. That's a fairly serious negative, but still... I find it hard to complain too much about a book so well written and so stuffed with interesting, colorful examples.
Update: article on the issue in today's NYT.
Interrupting and Depriving
A murderer who can foresee the future concocts two nefarious plans.
Plan A: he will murder Natasha in 2025, just as she's about to embark on a trip to Alaska that she's been planning and looking forward to since 2020.
Plan B: he will interfere with events in 2020, so Natasha doesn't develop her hankering to go to Alaska. This will actually be very simple, because it all started when she bought a book about Alaska. All the murderer's got to do is misshelve the bookstore's only copy. In 2025, he goes through with the killing.
Plan A and Plan B are both evil, but in different ways. Plan A interrupts more, but Plan B deprives Natasha of the meaningful activity that Plan A would have interrupted.
Hypothesis: when the harms of two killings are balanced in this way, the killings are morally equivalent. If interrupting activities through killing is bad, depriving someone of those activities, to reduce the interruption, is equally bad.
This strikes me as clearly correct, but I'll submit it to the court of public opinion. Thoughts?
Plan A: he will murder Natasha in 2025, just as she's about to embark on a trip to Alaska that she's been planning and looking forward to since 2020.
Plan B: he will interfere with events in 2020, so Natasha doesn't develop her hankering to go to Alaska. This will actually be very simple, because it all started when she bought a book about Alaska. All the murderer's got to do is misshelve the bookstore's only copy. In 2025, he goes through with the killing.
Plan A and Plan B are both evil, but in different ways. Plan A interrupts more, but Plan B deprives Natasha of the meaningful activity that Plan A would have interrupted.
Hypothesis: when the harms of two killings are balanced in this way, the killings are morally equivalent. If interrupting activities through killing is bad, depriving someone of those activities, to reduce the interruption, is equally bad.
This strikes me as clearly correct, but I'll submit it to the court of public opinion. Thoughts?
4/26/13
Can men be feminists?
Different factions of the abolitionist community are arguing about this question (here and here), which surprises me. You'd think the answer was obvious: of course men can be feminists. In fact, you'd think advocates for animals would reach that conclusion especially quickly, and in unison.
Background: I like to use the word "animalist" as a term for animal advocates who challenge traditional views about the moral status of non-human animals--whether they're utilitarian, rights-oriented, abolitionist, feminist care-oriented, etc. I think of the word "animalist" on the model of "feminist". Like feminists are strong advocates for women, aiming to lift women out of their traditional inferior role, animalists aim to raise the status of non-human animals. The parallel makes it particularly perplexing that anyone would doubt that men can be feminists. Human animals aren't just capable of being animalists--i.e. advocating strongly for non-human animals; they're the only animalists. Non-human animals obviously can't advocate for themselves, in any articulate and effective way. Humans' being members of the "oppressor class" clearly doesn't stop them from adopting an animalist mission and perspective. Sure, there are some limits on our ability to imagine what it is like to be a captive chicken, but that doesn't stop us humans from trying, and from being adamantly pro-chicken.
Likewise, surely, the man who advocates for women. A man can't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, but he's in no worse position (surely) than someone who tries to understand and advocate for chickens. If there are no male feminists, then there are no human animalists. All animalists should therefore immediately agree: since there are (obviously) human animalists, there can also be male feminists. I only wish there were more of them!
Background: I like to use the word "animalist" as a term for animal advocates who challenge traditional views about the moral status of non-human animals--whether they're utilitarian, rights-oriented, abolitionist, feminist care-oriented, etc. I think of the word "animalist" on the model of "feminist". Like feminists are strong advocates for women, aiming to lift women out of their traditional inferior role, animalists aim to raise the status of non-human animals. The parallel makes it particularly perplexing that anyone would doubt that men can be feminists. Human animals aren't just capable of being animalists--i.e. advocating strongly for non-human animals; they're the only animalists. Non-human animals obviously can't advocate for themselves, in any articulate and effective way. Humans' being members of the "oppressor class" clearly doesn't stop them from adopting an animalist mission and perspective. Sure, there are some limits on our ability to imagine what it is like to be a captive chicken, but that doesn't stop us humans from trying, and from being adamantly pro-chicken.
Likewise, surely, the man who advocates for women. A man can't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, but he's in no worse position (surely) than someone who tries to understand and advocate for chickens. If there are no male feminists, then there are no human animalists. All animalists should therefore immediately agree: since there are (obviously) human animalists, there can also be male feminists. I only wish there were more of them!
4/25/13
Was I once an egg?
Short recap of the Marquis argument I was responding to in my last post: Marquis says killing one of us is wrong because it takes away a FLO (future like ours). But abortion takes a FLO from a fetus. So abortion is wrong too.
Here's a response to Marquis I find intriguing/bewildering. Eugene Mills says if I was once a zygote, I was also once an egg. I wasn't also once a sperm. No, I was just once an egg. So if it's wrong to take the FLO from a zygote, it's also got to be wrong take the FLO from an egg. We have to be deeply concerned about using contraception to block conception. That's (surely) absurd, so there must be something wrong with Marquis's stance on abortion.
Was I really once an egg? An editorial in the New York Times last summer, written by a biologist (so he should know!) says yes, I really was. Greg Hampikian writes (here)
***
Now, here's why I'm bewildered: Mills and Hampikian say I was once an egg, but when I look closely at the "facts of life" it doesn't look to me like this is true. Watch the crucial clip of this video, which was made by what appears to be a reliable medical media company. Sperm penetrates egg. As a result, the sperm generates a haploid pronucleus and so does the egg. Each pronucleus appears to be a separate entity--EP and SP, let's call them. They then fuse, forming the diploid cell, Z. If EP and SP are two distinct entities, and they fuse, the logic of identity precludes saying that Z=EP. No, EP and SP go out of existence; Z is a third and new entity.
Here are the crucial frames. There are two separate entities, EP and SP; they are pulled together by "threads" and fuse.
In this clip, the egg is just the site in which EP and SP fuse, forming the new entity Z. Z is inside of the egg, not identical to the egg. We are invited to think Z is the start of a new human being, not the containing egg. In fact, the narrator calls the newly formed single cell a "zygote", instead of using that term to refer to the whole fertilized egg.
Another video tells the same story. Here's the crucial clip of that video with the key frames below. Again, separate pronuclei exist inside the egg and fuse.
Once again, this diagram of fertilization tells a story that suggests two entities fusing to generate a third--
If I was never a 5-day old zygote, then I was never anything that existed before the 5-day old zygote existed. For example, I was never an egg in my mother's ovary. QED!
Bottom line: I was never an egg. No, condemning the killing of a fetus does not drive us to the absurdity that we mustn't block the fertilization of an egg. You can say a fetus has a FLO but an egg doesn't, because it's not true that we were once eggs. There is no continuous entity that starts off existing before fertilization and continues for the first 14 days and then for the duration of pregnancy, and then through ordinary life, so that it has a FLO. If you want to refute Marquis, you need something else besides the idea that his reasoning turns contraception into murder.
Here's a response to Marquis I find intriguing/bewildering. Eugene Mills says if I was once a zygote, I was also once an egg. I wasn't also once a sperm. No, I was just once an egg. So if it's wrong to take the FLO from a zygote, it's also got to be wrong take the FLO from an egg. We have to be deeply concerned about using contraception to block conception. That's (surely) absurd, so there must be something wrong with Marquis's stance on abortion.
Was I really once an egg? An editorial in the New York Times last summer, written by a biologist (so he should know!) says yes, I really was. Greg Hampikian writes (here)
Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.So (says Hampikian/Mills) I go back a long way--to child-me, to baby-me, to fetal-me, to zygote-me, to egg-me. There is one continuous entity there, though picked out by different terms at different stages (child, baby, fetus, zygote, egg). The sperm is crucial for making me go on from being an egg to being a zygote, but there is no symmetry here. I was once an egg but I was never a sperm. Importantly, the sperm does not induce "substantial change". The sperm does not make one thing go out of existence (the egg) and a second thing come into existence (the zygote). One thing is prodded to continue existing, because of the sperm, instead of a new entity coming into being.
After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of your mother’s prepubescent ovary. Then, sometime between 12 and 50 years after the two of you left your grandmother, you burst forth and were sucked by her fimbriae into the fallopian tube. You glided along the oviduct, surviving happily on the stored nutrients and genetic messages that Mom packed for you.Then, at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells that he had shed. They did not merge with you, or give you any cell membranes or nutrients — just an infinitesimally small packet of DNA, less than one-millionth of your mass.
***
Now, here's why I'm bewildered: Mills and Hampikian say I was once an egg, but when I look closely at the "facts of life" it doesn't look to me like this is true. Watch the crucial clip of this video, which was made by what appears to be a reliable medical media company. Sperm penetrates egg. As a result, the sperm generates a haploid pronucleus and so does the egg. Each pronucleus appears to be a separate entity--EP and SP, let's call them. They then fuse, forming the diploid cell, Z. If EP and SP are two distinct entities, and they fuse, the logic of identity precludes saying that Z=EP. No, EP and SP go out of existence; Z is a third and new entity.
Here are the crucial frames. There are two separate entities, EP and SP; they are pulled together by "threads" and fuse.
In this clip, the egg is just the site in which EP and SP fuse, forming the new entity Z. Z is inside of the egg, not identical to the egg. We are invited to think Z is the start of a new human being, not the containing egg. In fact, the narrator calls the newly formed single cell a "zygote", instead of using that term to refer to the whole fertilized egg.
Another video tells the same story. Here's the crucial clip of that video with the key frames below. Again, separate pronuclei exist inside the egg and fuse.
Once again, this diagram of fertilization tells a story that suggests two entities fusing to generate a third--
From what I can see, Story (1) is true: EP and SP fuse to become the diploid cell Z, a whole new thing. Z develops inside the egg, using some materials from the egg. If you were once any entity in this complex, you were once Z, not the larger, containing egg.
Can you read things any other way? I guess the eggcentrists see it this way:
Story (2): The egg lives on, after fertilization, just altered profoundly. Both EP and SP go out of existence, after forming Z, but the egg keeps growing. Getting Z as its nucleus does not cause substantial change in the egg, making a new entity come into existence. No, it's the same ol' egg, just doing some amazing new stuff. If you were once any entity in this complex, you were once the egg, with EP, SP, and Z just very important parts of you.
At the very least, I think Story (1) is coherent. Nobody has to read the biological facts as Story (2) has them. I can reasonably think my earliest life was as Z, not as an egg in my mother's ovary.
***
There's another way to block the idea that I was once an egg in my mother's ovary. Marquis actually says it may not be true that I was once a zygote--the entity that exists in the first 14 days after fertilization. He doesn't explain the basis for his doubts, but I would speculate he may be drawing on the very interesting book When Did I Begin? by Norman Ford.
Ford argues that in the first days, a zygote is a collection of separate things, not a unified, single entity. In the first few days, it's so ununified that each cell can develop into a separate entity (making for identical twins, quadruplets, or octuplets).
It's also significant that the early zygote contains the makings of a placenta, umbilical chord, and amniotic fluid. If I was once a 5-day old zygote, then it's also true that my placenta was once a 5-day old zygote. By the logic of identity, it follows I was once a placenta! Not just absurd, but yucky-absurd! Conclusion: I was not once a 5-day old zygote.
Bottom line: I was never an egg. No, condemning the killing of a fetus does not drive us to the absurdity that we mustn't block the fertilization of an egg. You can say a fetus has a FLO but an egg doesn't, because it's not true that we were once eggs. There is no continuous entity that starts off existing before fertilization and continues for the first 14 days and then for the duration of pregnancy, and then through ordinary life, so that it has a FLO. If you want to refute Marquis, you need something else besides the idea that his reasoning turns contraception into murder.
4/18/13
Is it wrong to take the future from a fetus?
Don Marquis's argument against abortion (in "Why Abortion is Immoral") is pleasingly simple. He says the wrongness of killing one of us (folks like you and me who are obvious members of the "moral community") is due to the fact that killing deprives an individual of their entire future, a valuable "Future Like Ours" (FLO) in most cases. But abortion deprives a fetus of a FLO as well. So abortion is presumptively wrong, for the same reason any other killing is presumptively wrong.
What should we say? Since Marquis first made this argument in the 1980s, it's spawned a vast literature. I'm certainly not going to saying anything new and different here. I'm just going to think aloud a bit about how I would respond.
PIFF!
First, a response I would not make. Let's call this "Personal Identity Fancy Footwork" (PIFF!). What you might say is that an entity with my future didn't start to exist when I was conceived, but quite a bit later. Perhaps that entity (J, for short) came into being very late in my mother's pregnancy, or after she had given birth. That, afterall, is when a thing with my conscious mentality came into being. Nothing with my conscious mentality existed at conception, or a month into my gestation, or three months into it. Had my mother contemplated abortion when she was one month pregnant, she would have destroyed F ("my" fetus--so to speak) but not J. J didn't exist yet. F didn't have J's future, if F was not the same entity as J. Abortion certainly would have taken a future from F, but that was a non-conscious future with no special value. F was merely deprived of the next couple of months, months before F gave way to J.
PIFF advocates will have to answer someone who says, understandably enough, "If you take a future from F, then J's future is gone too, right?" The PIFF-er has a coherent response: F exists to be deprived of its future. But once F is gone, because of an abortion, J never comes into existence. So J never exists to be deprived of her future. After an abortion, J will be a merely possible entity. Doing things that eliminate merely possible entities and their futures can't be at all like killing. Otherwise, we're all murderers for not doing our utmost to conceive as many children as we possibly can. If F is non-identical to J, surely that does undermine Marquis's indictment of abortion.
So...PIFF?
I think not. I lean strongly to the view that F is identical to J. So destroying F does take a FLO away from F. Of course it's true that during the course of gestation and growth, F will come to have new properties (like being conscious, feeling pain, having preferences). And I think some of these properties are morally important. But I'm not prepared to say any of these new properties are "existentially" important--that they make for the end of one entity and the beginning of another. The idea that a new entity pops into being once consciousness emerges strikes me as a vestige of dualism. But that's a long story....
Suppose you agree that F is identical to J. You could avail yourself of identity considerations of another kind to construct a reductio ad absurdum of Marquis's argument. You could argue that F is identical to J, but F is also identical to an entity that exists prior to conception. F, you might say, is identical to the egg (E) that's fertilized at conception. If you can make a case for that, then you'll wind up saying that killing F is as bad as killing J; but also having to say (absurdly) that preventing E from being fertilized is as bad as killing F or J. Women who avoid intercourse during ovulation will have to be equated with murderers!
Is that the best available response to Marquis? I think the identity considerations underlying that response are also implausible. No, E is not identical to F. Again, long story.
A TALE OF FOUR BOOKSTORES
The reponse I'm inclined to give to Marquis grants that a new entity comes into existence at conception (or shortly thereafter--there are good reasons to date this just a little later than conception) and continues to exist throughout pregnancy, after birth, and into childhood and adulthood. Abortion therefore does deprive an entity of its whole future--a FLO, if it's going to be a typical future.
What I think we should balk at is the notion that killing is wrong purely because it deprives an entity of its future. No, it's wrong because it deprives an entity of a future to which it is entitled. I don't think you can speak of entitlement in the case of a one-month-old fetus. Just because a fetus is innocent or guiltless, it does not follow that it is entitled to anything.
It's easy to see that it's not always wrong to cause an entity to be deprived of something valuable, but rather wrong only when the entity is entitled to that thing. Take, for example, this tale of four bookstores. Once we had a store called Bookstop in Dallas, but Borders came to town, and people preferred Borders. Bookstop's owners were no doubt deprived of a huge amount of wealth and pleasure. Then Barnes and Noble came to town and all the Borders stores eventually closed. Poor Borders owners! They were also deprived of a huge amount of wealth and pleasure. Now Amazon is making the local Barnes and Noble stores look awfully empty. B&N's owners may be on the verge of being deprived. The winners in these business competitions did nothing wrong. They caused deprivations, but didn't cause weaker businesses to be deprived of anything they were entitled to.
Likewise, if Mary flirts with Margo's boyfriend Mark, and Mark starts to prefer Mary, Margo winds up deprived, but not deprived of anything she was entitled to. If two people are in a race, and the one behind gets in front, the early favorite winds up deprived of winning, but not deprived of anything she was entitled to. And on and on and on. Generally speaking, it's not causing a deprivation that's wrong, but causing someone to be deprived of something they're entitled to.
Is there a difference between what a one month old fetus is entitled to and what folks like us are entitled to? Yes. Why? Because though a fetus is the very same entity as the later infant, child, and adult it will become, it doesn't yet have the morally relevant properties of the later infant, child, or adult. It is not entitled to its future in the way that you or I are entitled to our futures. So abortion is nothing at all like murder. It has some of the elements (the individual killed is deprived) but not all of the elements (the individual killed is not entitled to its future). So Marquis's argument is unsound.
Unsound, but not completely devoid of insight. If a fetus does have a FLO (though one it's not entitled to) that explains why women are not confused at all when they take abortion seriously or have later mixed feelings. That makes very good sense, because abortion does cause a deprivation. It does take the future from an entity, and I think it's not incoherent at all to find that at least somewhat disturbing.
What should we say? Since Marquis first made this argument in the 1980s, it's spawned a vast literature. I'm certainly not going to saying anything new and different here. I'm just going to think aloud a bit about how I would respond.
PIFF!
First, a response I would not make. Let's call this "Personal Identity Fancy Footwork" (PIFF!). What you might say is that an entity with my future didn't start to exist when I was conceived, but quite a bit later. Perhaps that entity (J, for short) came into being very late in my mother's pregnancy, or after she had given birth. That, afterall, is when a thing with my conscious mentality came into being. Nothing with my conscious mentality existed at conception, or a month into my gestation, or three months into it. Had my mother contemplated abortion when she was one month pregnant, she would have destroyed F ("my" fetus--so to speak) but not J. J didn't exist yet. F didn't have J's future, if F was not the same entity as J. Abortion certainly would have taken a future from F, but that was a non-conscious future with no special value. F was merely deprived of the next couple of months, months before F gave way to J.
PIFF advocates will have to answer someone who says, understandably enough, "If you take a future from F, then J's future is gone too, right?" The PIFF-er has a coherent response: F exists to be deprived of its future. But once F is gone, because of an abortion, J never comes into existence. So J never exists to be deprived of her future. After an abortion, J will be a merely possible entity. Doing things that eliminate merely possible entities and their futures can't be at all like killing. Otherwise, we're all murderers for not doing our utmost to conceive as many children as we possibly can. If F is non-identical to J, surely that does undermine Marquis's indictment of abortion.
So...PIFF?
I think not. I lean strongly to the view that F is identical to J. So destroying F does take a FLO away from F. Of course it's true that during the course of gestation and growth, F will come to have new properties (like being conscious, feeling pain, having preferences). And I think some of these properties are morally important. But I'm not prepared to say any of these new properties are "existentially" important--that they make for the end of one entity and the beginning of another. The idea that a new entity pops into being once consciousness emerges strikes me as a vestige of dualism. But that's a long story....
Suppose you agree that F is identical to J. You could avail yourself of identity considerations of another kind to construct a reductio ad absurdum of Marquis's argument. You could argue that F is identical to J, but F is also identical to an entity that exists prior to conception. F, you might say, is identical to the egg (E) that's fertilized at conception. If you can make a case for that, then you'll wind up saying that killing F is as bad as killing J; but also having to say (absurdly) that preventing E from being fertilized is as bad as killing F or J. Women who avoid intercourse during ovulation will have to be equated with murderers!
Is that the best available response to Marquis? I think the identity considerations underlying that response are also implausible. No, E is not identical to F. Again, long story.
A TALE OF FOUR BOOKSTORES
The reponse I'm inclined to give to Marquis grants that a new entity comes into existence at conception (or shortly thereafter--there are good reasons to date this just a little later than conception) and continues to exist throughout pregnancy, after birth, and into childhood and adulthood. Abortion therefore does deprive an entity of its whole future--a FLO, if it's going to be a typical future.
What I think we should balk at is the notion that killing is wrong purely because it deprives an entity of its future. No, it's wrong because it deprives an entity of a future to which it is entitled. I don't think you can speak of entitlement in the case of a one-month-old fetus. Just because a fetus is innocent or guiltless, it does not follow that it is entitled to anything.
It's easy to see that it's not always wrong to cause an entity to be deprived of something valuable, but rather wrong only when the entity is entitled to that thing. Take, for example, this tale of four bookstores. Once we had a store called Bookstop in Dallas, but Borders came to town, and people preferred Borders. Bookstop's owners were no doubt deprived of a huge amount of wealth and pleasure. Then Barnes and Noble came to town and all the Borders stores eventually closed. Poor Borders owners! They were also deprived of a huge amount of wealth and pleasure. Now Amazon is making the local Barnes and Noble stores look awfully empty. B&N's owners may be on the verge of being deprived. The winners in these business competitions did nothing wrong. They caused deprivations, but didn't cause weaker businesses to be deprived of anything they were entitled to.
Likewise, if Mary flirts with Margo's boyfriend Mark, and Mark starts to prefer Mary, Margo winds up deprived, but not deprived of anything she was entitled to. If two people are in a race, and the one behind gets in front, the early favorite winds up deprived of winning, but not deprived of anything she was entitled to. And on and on and on. Generally speaking, it's not causing a deprivation that's wrong, but causing someone to be deprived of something they're entitled to.
Is there a difference between what a one month old fetus is entitled to and what folks like us are entitled to? Yes. Why? Because though a fetus is the very same entity as the later infant, child, and adult it will become, it doesn't yet have the morally relevant properties of the later infant, child, or adult. It is not entitled to its future in the way that you or I are entitled to our futures. So abortion is nothing at all like murder. It has some of the elements (the individual killed is deprived) but not all of the elements (the individual killed is not entitled to its future). So Marquis's argument is unsound.
Unsound, but not completely devoid of insight. If a fetus does have a FLO (though one it's not entitled to) that explains why women are not confused at all when they take abortion seriously or have later mixed feelings. That makes very good sense, because abortion does cause a deprivation. It does take the future from an entity, and I think it's not incoherent at all to find that at least somewhat disturbing.
4/6/13
How to argue against gay marriage (part III)
And now for the rebuttal. In the last post I said that if I had to make an argument against gay marriage--in a debate club setting, or some such--then perhaps I'd say this:
Even if a sizable and certain risk could be established, we'd have to explain why procreative dangers ought to stop us from letting same sex couples marry, while we allow very old men to marry young women (danger: offspring who quickly lose their fathers); and we allow "little people" to marry (danger: high risk of progeny with dwarfism), etc. etc. We grant everyone the legal right to marry who they wish, and normally take it as a private moral question who should procreate, and how.
Well, it was the best I could do. In the comments to the last two posts people suggested some other bad arguments against gay marriage--bad arguments better than some of the usual fare. At least none of our suggestions involve the idea that once you allow gay marriage, you've got to let people marry their cats. The opponents of gay marriage typically seem not to be satisfied with making bad arguments; they like to go for completely atrocious.
- There's a great deal of value in knowing both of your biological parents and being raised by them (other things being equal--of course there are exceptions).
- The normal way of procreating for same sex couples involves a gamete donor, so that the child knows and is raised by at most one biological parent.
- If same sex couples are permitted to marry, their normal way of procreating will be elevated to parity with the heterosexual way of procreating.
- Because of that elevation to parity, we will all gradually lose sight of the value of knowing both of your biological parents and being raised by them.
- Losing sight of a kind of value tends to cause that sort of value to be less pursued and less protected. Possible sequelae: couples (straight or gay) buying gametes to have the type of child they prefer (an intellectual, an athlete, or whatever); rights of biological parents being less protected.
- There isn't the same problem with infertile heterosexual couples being able to marry, since using a gamete donor is not their normal way of procreating, but usually a last resort chosen after years of medical intervention. THEREFORE,
- Same sex marriage should be prohibited (but marriage of heterosexuals who may turn out to be infertile should be allowed).
It is not good enough just to say "gay marriage might be bad for someone else, therefore all these gay people don't have it." In fact, every life is important, and those gay lives must be weighed in the balance.There's no quick step from procreative risks to denial of marriage rights. The risks, even if they were considerable, would have to be weighed against the rights and legitimate preferences of gay people themselves.
Even if a sizable and certain risk could be established, we'd have to explain why procreative dangers ought to stop us from letting same sex couples marry, while we allow very old men to marry young women (danger: offspring who quickly lose their fathers); and we allow "little people" to marry (danger: high risk of progeny with dwarfism), etc. etc. We grant everyone the legal right to marry who they wish, and normally take it as a private moral question who should procreate, and how.
Well, it was the best I could do. In the comments to the last two posts people suggested some other bad arguments against gay marriage--bad arguments better than some of the usual fare. At least none of our suggestions involve the idea that once you allow gay marriage, you've got to let people marry their cats. The opponents of gay marriage typically seem not to be satisfied with making bad arguments; they like to go for completely atrocious.
4/4/13
How to argue against gay marriage (part II)
This is certainly a diabolical exercise. I am for marriage equality, and I think most reasonable people are for marriage equality. But what if a college debate society were staging a debate, and you got assigned the "against" side? What could you say? Most of the stuff normally said on that side is extremely silly. Is there anything even half-way reasonable to say against gay marriage? In yesterday's post, I gave it my best shot. Let's see if I can spell out that argument more precisely.
- There's a great deal of value in knowing both of your biological parents and being raised by them (other things being equal--of course there are exceptions).
- The normal way of procreating for same sex couples involves a gamete donor, so that the child knows and is raised by at most one biological parent.
- If same sex couples are permitted to marry, their normal way of procreating will be elevated to parity with the heterosexual way of procreating.
- Because of that elevation to parity, we will all gradually lose sight of the value of knowing both of your biological parents and being raised by them.
- Losing sight of a kind of value tends to cause that sort of value to be less pursued and less protected. Possible sequelae: couples (straight or gay) buying gametes to have the type of child they prefer (an intellectual, an athlete, or whatever); rights of biological parents being less protected.
- There isn't the same problem with infertile heterosexual couples being able to marry, since using a gamete donor is not their normal way of procreating, but usually a last resort chosen after years of medical intervention. THEREFORE,
- Same sex marriage should be prohibited (but marriage of heterosexuals who may turn out to be infertile should be allowed).
4/3/13
How to argue against same sex marriage (part I)
In my contemporary moral problems class this semester we've been discussing same sex marriage. We paid close attention to the Supreme Court oral arguments on Prop. 8 and DOMA last week. We've been reading articles "pro" and "con"...and, honestly, it seems to me that all the best arguments are "pro". I'm definitely in favor of legalizing gay marriage. That said, lately I keep wondering: what if I were in a debate club, and I were assigned the "con" side? What would I say? What's the best argument you could construct for marriage inequality? Perhaps it's mischievous of me (since I do support same sex marriage), but I find this an interesting question. So, here goes: the best I can do on the "con" side.
The best case I think you could make against gay marriage has to do with procreative issues. The problem, in a nutshell, is that same sex marriage normalizes donor-assisted reproduction. Marriage goes hand in hand with creating a family, and same sex couples can't procreate without a sperm donor or egg donor. Now, dependence on gamete donors doesn't make same sex couples unique. In some situations, infertile heterosexual couples use donor-assisted reproduction too. But there's a difference: when heterosexual couples resort to gamete donation, they almost always regard their situation as abnormal--like having a broken leg. Infertile heterosexual couples will typically spend years pursuing medical remedies, so they can avoided donor gametes. When they do go the donor route, it's fair to say they see that as second best, not at all as normal. By contrast, for a same sex couple it's completely normal to need donor gametes. It's in the nature of a gay or lesbian relationship--the only route same sex couples have to making a baby with a biological connection to either partner. If gay marriage puts same sex couples on an equal footing with opposite sex couples, donor-assisted reproduction is also going to wind up on an equal footing with ordinary reproduction.
Now, you may ask, would that be bad? Is there anything really wrong with donor-assisted reproduction? Where's the problem? I think we can point to a problem, so long as we don't think of "problem" in some medical sense. Problems don't have to involve a patient--someone in need of pain relief, medical care, psychiatric treatment, or what not. Donor assisted reproduction doesn't yield people who are badly off in the "now we have a patient" sense. It just creates children who don't have the usual connection to both parents. Donor-origin children have to live with the thought that the parent they came from, in the biological sense, was a mere egg or sperm donor. That gives the child an existential problem, not a medical problem. It's not the biggest problem in the world, but we wouldn't want to head toward a future in which lots and lots of children have that problem. And, the argument goes, creating a class of married couples who by nature must reproduce that way will lead us in that direction. This is not just because of their donor-origin children existing, but because of the message that same sex marrying sends: "this way of coupling and creating a family is perfectly normal and no worse than the heterosexual way."
Now, is the procreative message really inevitable? Could the message be, more simply, "this way of coupling is perfectly normal and no worse than the heterosexual way?" (That's surely a perfectly good message.) Could gay marriage normalize the coupling, but leave it open whether donor-assisted reproduction is just fine, or not just fine? Easier said than done. Once you normalize the coupling, it's hard to hang onto the idea that there's something not entirely good about the procreating that often results from that sort of coupling. It's hard to say that the marriages of same-sex couples are fine, but their only means of biological procreation is at all problematic. Again, this is not so when it comes to heterosexual infertile couples. They know that donor-assisted reproduction is problematic. They don't want it, as evidenced by the vast amount of money and time they typically put into avoiding it. So you can't "reductio" the present argument by saying it leads to a prohibition on the marriage of infertile couples: it doesn't.
Bottom line: we're heading for a revolution in our thinking about reproduction when donor-assisted reproduction is the norm in an identifiable group of married couples. Solution: don't let them be married couples. Keep their coupling second class, precisely to avoid normalizing their approach to procreation.
There you go. That's the best I can do. Since I'm for marriage equality, I can't possibly accept all of this. I find it interesting to ponder the argument, though, to the extent that I also don't reject all of it. I think there's some truth in the argument. There are true premises and there are also false premises. All to be teased out in part II of this post...coming soon.
The best case I think you could make against gay marriage has to do with procreative issues. The problem, in a nutshell, is that same sex marriage normalizes donor-assisted reproduction. Marriage goes hand in hand with creating a family, and same sex couples can't procreate without a sperm donor or egg donor. Now, dependence on gamete donors doesn't make same sex couples unique. In some situations, infertile heterosexual couples use donor-assisted reproduction too. But there's a difference: when heterosexual couples resort to gamete donation, they almost always regard their situation as abnormal--like having a broken leg. Infertile heterosexual couples will typically spend years pursuing medical remedies, so they can avoided donor gametes. When they do go the donor route, it's fair to say they see that as second best, not at all as normal. By contrast, for a same sex couple it's completely normal to need donor gametes. It's in the nature of a gay or lesbian relationship--the only route same sex couples have to making a baby with a biological connection to either partner. If gay marriage puts same sex couples on an equal footing with opposite sex couples, donor-assisted reproduction is also going to wind up on an equal footing with ordinary reproduction.
Now, you may ask, would that be bad? Is there anything really wrong with donor-assisted reproduction? Where's the problem? I think we can point to a problem, so long as we don't think of "problem" in some medical sense. Problems don't have to involve a patient--someone in need of pain relief, medical care, psychiatric treatment, or what not. Donor assisted reproduction doesn't yield people who are badly off in the "now we have a patient" sense. It just creates children who don't have the usual connection to both parents. Donor-origin children have to live with the thought that the parent they came from, in the biological sense, was a mere egg or sperm donor. That gives the child an existential problem, not a medical problem. It's not the biggest problem in the world, but we wouldn't want to head toward a future in which lots and lots of children have that problem. And, the argument goes, creating a class of married couples who by nature must reproduce that way will lead us in that direction. This is not just because of their donor-origin children existing, but because of the message that same sex marrying sends: "this way of coupling and creating a family is perfectly normal and no worse than the heterosexual way."
Now, is the procreative message really inevitable? Could the message be, more simply, "this way of coupling is perfectly normal and no worse than the heterosexual way?" (That's surely a perfectly good message.) Could gay marriage normalize the coupling, but leave it open whether donor-assisted reproduction is just fine, or not just fine? Easier said than done. Once you normalize the coupling, it's hard to hang onto the idea that there's something not entirely good about the procreating that often results from that sort of coupling. It's hard to say that the marriages of same-sex couples are fine, but their only means of biological procreation is at all problematic. Again, this is not so when it comes to heterosexual infertile couples. They know that donor-assisted reproduction is problematic. They don't want it, as evidenced by the vast amount of money and time they typically put into avoiding it. So you can't "reductio" the present argument by saying it leads to a prohibition on the marriage of infertile couples: it doesn't.
Bottom line: we're heading for a revolution in our thinking about reproduction when donor-assisted reproduction is the norm in an identifiable group of married couples. Solution: don't let them be married couples. Keep their coupling second class, precisely to avoid normalizing their approach to procreation.
There you go. That's the best I can do. Since I'm for marriage equality, I can't possibly accept all of this. I find it interesting to ponder the argument, though, to the extent that I also don't reject all of it. I think there's some truth in the argument. There are true premises and there are also false premises. All to be teased out in part II of this post...coming soon.
3/6/13
Old, Old Age
I've been spending a lot of time in the land of the very, very old lately--my father has just recently been admitted to a "senior center". Perhaps soon I'll have a chance to write more about these things, but at the moment I just have one observation to make: it's really hard to see how best to manage old age (duh). If you arrest one aging process with drugs or technology, you open the door to other types of deterioration. A pacemaker stops heart disease from killing someone, but sometimes at the cost of letting dementia become their primary problem. Fix, fix, fix ... and eventually you'll wind up dying of the thing medicine can do least about, regardless of whether that's the best way to go. And yet, how else to do things? If you have a medical problem and there's a way to fix it, it's nearly impossible to look far into the future and say "I'd rather this death than that." Nobody actually wants any death at all! So: puzzling. More later, if time permits.
2/20/13
Meat, Meat, Meat
Last night at SMU I was part of a panel discussion following a screening of the new movie American Meat. What a meaty movie! You see meat cooking, meat sitting in grocery stores, meat being eaten, live animals being turned into meat, meat on the hoof... Lots and lots of meat. Not really enjoyable viewing, I have to say, for a vegetarian.
The movie's message is that the US should transform animal agriculture, replacing all the factory farming with sustainable, compassionate, grass-based farming on the model of Joel Salatin's Polyface farm (already famous due to its starring role in Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma). Good message? From an animal rights point of view, certainly not. But set that aside. The movie is also problematic from an environmental standpoint. It conveys the impression that American demand for meat is a given, and perfectly fine.
The narrator observes that Americans eat 190 pounds of meat per year (1/2 pound a day) ... without a trace of horror. But there should be horror. Even if you set aside concerns about animal welfare and animal rights, that level of consumption is environmentally unacceptable. The immense amount of land involved in meat production crowds out wild animals. The ruminants produce greenhouse gases. It takes a huge amount of water and gasoline to produce meat. Plant farming is far more environmentally benign, in every respect.
It's all gonna be okay, the movie suggests, if we shift to a different style of farming. But wait! Grass-fed ruminants will still produce greenhouse gases. Animal farming will still use an immense amount of land. In fact, it stands to reason that it will take more land, if hogs and chickens aren't squeezed into containment facilities, and cattle aren't "finished" in feedlots. Joel Salatin and his adherents want us to think that's not so, because they're going to rotate more than one species on a given chunk of land. There are statistics in American Meat saying it will take far less land to produce all US meat in the Polyface fashion (286 million acres) than the amount of land currently used for animal grazing (600 million acres, which doesn't include the land used to grow feedcrops--the figure is from USDA statistics, not the movie). So we're going to liberate the factory farmed hogs and chickens, the feedlot cattle, and use half as much land for meat production.
Maybe .... not. If you liberate the confinement animals, it's awfully hard to believe you're going to squeeze them all onto existing grazing land, but completely strains credulity to say you could cut the amount of grazing land in half. And if you somehow did achieve that (repeat after me: it's not gonna happen), wouldn't the grazing land be used much more intensively, with more soil erosion, more damage to ecosystems, more interference with wildlife and biodiversity?
I don't believe that Polyface style farming is ever going to make it "green" for Americans to continue being voracious 1/2 pound per day meat eaters. Michael Pollan has a much more credible message when he talks about Polyface farm in The Omnivore's Dilemma. The message is that we must both change our style of animal farming and reduce meat consumption. If you set aside animal welfare and rights problems (no, Polyface farm does not solve all of the problems), that's the right message.
Granted, we all do things that are not environmentally responsible. My car is too big (though it's a hybrid). Perhaps what especially annoys me about the Polyface meat-loving crowd is their tone of moral rectitude. (I'm not self-righteous about my car!) They think they've got it all figured out, environmentally. But they don't--not if they're still eating half a pound of meat per day.
As for their strategies for dismissing moral issues about killing animals for food, I must merely smile. They resort to the silliest justifications. God made animals for us to eat (even the bible says no such thing). Death comes from life. Well, very nice. Next time a cannibal wants to eat you for dinner, tell yourself death comes from life. I'm afraid we just can't justify killing animals for food with such platitudes!
Maybe I'm being too negative. Anyone spending more money to buy Polyface-type meat has to have their heart at least somewhat in the right place. They'd certainly doing better than the totally indifferent carnivore.
FYI--I will be out of computer contact for the next couple of days. Comments appreciated as always, but I won't be able to respond to any of them. Apologies for non-responsiveness in the last couple of weeks. I have been dealing with a family emergency and time has been in very short supply.
2/12/13
Intergenerational Amnesia
Suppose a 10 year old child had a life-threatening illness that could only be cured at the cost of amnesia. She would lose all memory of her first 10 years, but go on living. It would be bad to forget her early years, but surely worth it to stay alive. I think we should say roughly the same thing about the practice of saving babies' lives by placing "baby boxes" hear hospitals. When a desperate mother abandons her baby, the baby loses all chance of knowing her origins, but gets to go on living (infanticide is prevented), and will hopefully be adopted by a loving family. There's a loss, but it's worth it. Given that characterization, it makes sense to try to change attitudes, so that mothers don't feel compelled to furtively abandon their babies, but instead either keep them or relinquish them in open adoptions. That would be better for the children, it seems to me.
Charlotte Witt takes a different position on baby boxes here. She contests Article 8 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been invoked against baby boxes: "States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations." To my ear, "undertakes to respect" is rather mild. You could "undertake to respect" the right in question, and still have a system of baby boxes, justifying it by saying in that particular case, saving lives takes priority. But Article 8 does postulate a right to know about one's origins (in so many words), and Witt objects. The alleged ground of the right, she says, is that knowing your family of origin is "central to the healthy formation of identity." So (this is her gloss) one needs to know one's family of origin to form a health sense of identity. But that's not so, she argues. To the extent that we gain a sense of identity by knowing what we got from our parents and grandparents, they could equally well be custodial, not genetic, parents and grandparents.
I don't know about the idea that there's a psychological need to know one's origins. Do mental health experts really think we're impaired by not knowing anything about our biological parents? But most people do deeply care about their origins. This is not a matter of just caring about our genes. You couldn't get a genome map of yourself, and thereby dispense with the need to know who your parents and grandparents are. In caring about our origins we care about our ... origins. Where we came from, who our progenitors were. This is like wanting to know who created a painting, or who was the author of a novel. Knowing origins can tell you more about the person, painting, or novel, but is also of independent interest. We want to know where things came from. Period. This seems like a fundamental and not irrational desire.
The person who starts life in a baby box will, like most of us, have a desire to know her own origins. Now "knowing my origins" is a sufficiently elastic concept that we could know a lot by knowing about our custodial parents, grandparents, teachers, nannies, or whoever was closely involved in our lives. But most of us also want to know our origins in the strictly biological sense. We'd be missing an important piece of the puzzle about ourselves if we didn't know who our biological parents (and grandparents) were. It's unfortunate, then, to start life in a baby box--not worse than not living at all, but worse than starting life in a position to know about one's biological origins. Or so it seems to me.
Is this position "bionormative" in some pernicious sense? That seems to be Witt's view. She seems to think attaching value to knowledge of origins gives some sort of special status to families formed in the standard, biology-based fashion. But I think biology is normative in some ways. We all really think so, as evidenced by our intuitions about the following two puzzles.
Charlotte Witt takes a different position on baby boxes here. She contests Article 8 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been invoked against baby boxes: "States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations." To my ear, "undertakes to respect" is rather mild. You could "undertake to respect" the right in question, and still have a system of baby boxes, justifying it by saying in that particular case, saving lives takes priority. But Article 8 does postulate a right to know about one's origins (in so many words), and Witt objects. The alleged ground of the right, she says, is that knowing your family of origin is "central to the healthy formation of identity." So (this is her gloss) one needs to know one's family of origin to form a health sense of identity. But that's not so, she argues. To the extent that we gain a sense of identity by knowing what we got from our parents and grandparents, they could equally well be custodial, not genetic, parents and grandparents.
I don't know about the idea that there's a psychological need to know one's origins. Do mental health experts really think we're impaired by not knowing anything about our biological parents? But most people do deeply care about their origins. This is not a matter of just caring about our genes. You couldn't get a genome map of yourself, and thereby dispense with the need to know who your parents and grandparents are. In caring about our origins we care about our ... origins. Where we came from, who our progenitors were. This is like wanting to know who created a painting, or who was the author of a novel. Knowing origins can tell you more about the person, painting, or novel, but is also of independent interest. We want to know where things came from. Period. This seems like a fundamental and not irrational desire.
The person who starts life in a baby box will, like most of us, have a desire to know her own origins. Now "knowing my origins" is a sufficiently elastic concept that we could know a lot by knowing about our custodial parents, grandparents, teachers, nannies, or whoever was closely involved in our lives. But most of us also want to know our origins in the strictly biological sense. We'd be missing an important piece of the puzzle about ourselves if we didn't know who our biological parents (and grandparents) were. It's unfortunate, then, to start life in a baby box--not worse than not living at all, but worse than starting life in a position to know about one's biological origins. Or so it seems to me.
Is this position "bionormative" in some pernicious sense? That seems to be Witt's view. She seems to think attaching value to knowledge of origins gives some sort of special status to families formed in the standard, biology-based fashion. But I think biology is normative in some ways. We all really think so, as evidenced by our intuitions about the following two puzzles.
Puzzle #1 When a child is born, the biological parents are entitled to custody even if they have vastly worse potential to give her a good life than candidates for adoption. Imagine a refugee camp in Chad, where babies are born in abysmal conditions. Child mortality rates are high. People can easily live in the camps for decades. International Rescue Committee workers visit the camp regularly and could take babies home with them, to raise in western health and affluence. If it's "bionormative" to say refugees are entitled to keep their children, then bionormativity is not to be dispensed with. Biology does in fact enter into determining which adult is entitled to custody of which child.Norms are sometimes rooted in biology, so it's not an automatic demerit for a position to be "bionormative". Bionormative as this judgment may be, it does seem unfortunate to start off in life with "intergenerational amnesia"--permanently unable to know anything about our biological origins.
Puzzle #2 Now imagine a biological parent in that refugee camp who does decide to give up her child for adoption to one of the visiting workers. There are several candidates, and from a detached, objective standpoint, it's pretty clear who would be better able to provide the child with a good home. Does the biological parent get to decide between them? The answer, surely, is yes. And that's "bionormative"--again, the biological facts enter into who is entitled to decide between the candidates.
2/2/13
The Right to Self Defense
This semester I'm teaching an introductory course on contemporary moral problems, and this past week has been gun control week. It's an exhausting subject, since emotions run high in the aftermath of Newtown and Aurora. Phew!
When all is said and done, what seems interesting in the ethical debate about gun control is the right to self defense. What is it, and what does it encompass? This seems clear enough, on a first pass. If I am attacked, then I may do what's necessary to defend myself, with whatever means are at my disposal. The critical question is whether I'm entitled to have the most effective means at my disposal--for example, a gun.
Some people are inclined to take a "nightmare scenario" approach to that question. They imagine a scenario in which someone is under horrendous attack. They imagine no gun in the victim's hands, and they think that would be tragically unfair. For example, I think Sam Harris takes the "nightmare scenario" approach in this passage of a much-discussed editorial--
But wait. A world without guns is a whole world, not a single scenario. What we are really comparing, when we think of worlds with and without guns, are worlds very far apart and very different. The contrast is roughly like this--
Gun World (ours) -- vastly more violent deaths, assaults, rapes, robberies; vastly more accidental deaths (guns often aren't stored safely); vastly more successful suicides; vastly more lethal domestic violence; vastly weakened police (I owe that last point to Jeff McMahan--my class has been discussing his recent Stone editorial).
No-Gun World -- vastly less of of all of the violence in world one. Let's suppose, just to put a number on it, the world without guns has 90% less violence than our world. (See the statistics on this page for evidence the disparity would at least be great).
How could anyone possibly prefer Gun World? What the "nightmare scenario" approach asks us to do is imagine that in No-Gun World, violent rape/murders would still occur. Now, if you approach this from a utilitarian perspective you'll certainly be unmoved. You won't dwell on the horrors of Harris's scenario, because you'll be mindful of the vast amount of violence that doesn't occur in No-Gun world and does occur in ours. Yes, the woman got raped and murdered at knife-point in No-Gun world, and the dozen witnesses couldn't help (I'm still scratching my head about why not), but think concretely about all the horrendous scenarios that are in Gun World (our world) and not in No-Gun World--the massacre of little children in Newtown, the massacre of movie-goers in Aurora, and so on. Harris says "only someone who doesn't understand violence" could wish for No-Gun World, but in fact it seems as if only someone utterly irrational could wish for Gun World. Or ... someone thinking very unclearly about the right to self-defense.
I think that's the heart of the matter, really. Harris must be thinking that for all the overall reduction in violence in No-Gun World, something really terrible goes on there--the woman can't defend herself; the onlookers can't offer her "proxy" self-defense (if that makes any sense). The right to self-defense has been violated. And one rights violation is worse than a 90% reduction in violence? That's got to be the idea. No-Gun World, in his estimation, is worse, for all its lower total quantity of murder, rape, suicide, accidental death, etc, because of that one black mark. What about -- you may wonder -- the defenselessness of the people murdered, raped, etc., in Gun World? I can only guess what Harris must be thinking. The defenselessness of the woman in No-Gun World is singularly pernicious, because there's a systemic denial of rights there--nobody's allowed to have guns. In Gun World, there are a whole lot more murder and rape victims, more accidentally dead children, etc., but that's all at the hands of bad guys. There isn't the same systemic denial of rights. So (I surmise) he must be thinking, in utterly non-utilitarian fashion (what happened to the utilitarian Sam Harris of The Moral Landscape?)
But this makes no sense, even if you're prepared to take rights very, very seriously. One problem is with the way Harris is playing with scenarios. If the nightmare scenario had happened in Gun World, he's apparently thinking, the woman (or the witnesses) might have had a gun. But (duh) the bad guy might have had a gun too. And I think guns are more useful offensively than defensively: bad guys can focus all their attention on carrying out crimes, while their victims are busy ... going to school, watching a movie, shopping in a mall, or whatever. If you imagine the scenario playing out in Gun World, and imagine guns all around, things don't really go any better for the woman.
But never mind that. Let's allow Harris his fantasy scenario. Let's suppose the knife-wielding rapist/murderer would have still used a knife in Gun World, and the woman would have had a gun. Should we suppose the right to self defense entitles her to that gun, despite the vast difference between the two worlds? Are we entitled to a means of self defense that comes only at the cost of there being vastly higher overall levels of violence? I think the answer is obvious: no.
We need to not confuse the right to self defense (the right to protect yourself) with the right to have the most effective means at your disposal. When we decide what means people are permitted to have, we obviously do need to think about society as a whole, and the costs and benefits of the various means. The idea that the woman in the nightmare scenario is entitled to have a gun strikes me as being as silly as saying that everyone's entitled to drive at 90 miles per hour, just because in one conceivable scenario, this would get someone to the emergency room on time to save a passenger's life. We choose speed limits in light of the overall impact on society, not to optimize the outcome in one rare type of scenario. The right to mobility (there's presumably such a right) doesn't entitle us to move at any speeds we like in potentially lethal vehicles.
Likewise, weaponry. In some imaginable scenario, a potential victim has a better chance of self-defense if she has a machine gun, but we don't allow people to have machine guns. A rocket grenade launcher would be helpful in some conceivable situation, but no--we don't get to have them. Denying people machine guns and rocket grenade launchers is not a violation of the right to self-defense, if you think about the right clearly, and neither is wholesale prohibiting guns.
I'm reminded of a point Judith Jarvis Thomson makes in her famous article "A Defense of Abortion": we too quickly (and illicitly) move from assigning someone a right to life to assigning them the right to anything they need to hold onto life. This has to be a mistake, as we see from simple examples: I have the right to life, but not the right to have Tom Cruise (her example was Henry Fonda!) put his hand on my fevered brow, if that's what it would take for me to stay alive. Likewise, we too quickly move from the right to self defense to the erroneous notion that people have the right to whatever means would be necessary for effective self-defense, in any particular situation, without regard to the general impact of making that means available. The right to self defense is just the right to protect yourself, not to have any and every weapon.
When all is said and done, what seems interesting in the ethical debate about gun control is the right to self defense. What is it, and what does it encompass? This seems clear enough, on a first pass. If I am attacked, then I may do what's necessary to defend myself, with whatever means are at my disposal. The critical question is whether I'm entitled to have the most effective means at my disposal--for example, a gun.
Some people are inclined to take a "nightmare scenario" approach to that question. They imagine a scenario in which someone is under horrendous attack. They imagine no gun in the victim's hands, and they think that would be tragically unfair. For example, I think Sam Harris takes the "nightmare scenario" approach in this passage of a much-discussed editorial--
In my view, only someone who doesn't understand violence could wish for a world without guns. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of SEAL Team Six, can expect to prevail over more than one attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive.Think about that horrible scene--the woman is raped and murdered in front of a dozen witnesses, and for lack of a gun, nobody intervenes. (Actually, I wonder why not. I should think a dozen people actually could overcome a man with a knife!) If you keep your mind trained on that one scenario, then you might agree with Harris and not "wish for a world without guns."
But wait. A world without guns is a whole world, not a single scenario. What we are really comparing, when we think of worlds with and without guns, are worlds very far apart and very different. The contrast is roughly like this--
 |
| Gun World (ours) and No-Gun World (imaginary) |
No-Gun World -- vastly less of of all of the violence in world one. Let's suppose, just to put a number on it, the world without guns has 90% less violence than our world. (See the statistics on this page for evidence the disparity would at least be great).
How could anyone possibly prefer Gun World? What the "nightmare scenario" approach asks us to do is imagine that in No-Gun World, violent rape/murders would still occur. Now, if you approach this from a utilitarian perspective you'll certainly be unmoved. You won't dwell on the horrors of Harris's scenario, because you'll be mindful of the vast amount of violence that doesn't occur in No-Gun world and does occur in ours. Yes, the woman got raped and murdered at knife-point in No-Gun world, and the dozen witnesses couldn't help (I'm still scratching my head about why not), but think concretely about all the horrendous scenarios that are in Gun World (our world) and not in No-Gun World--the massacre of little children in Newtown, the massacre of movie-goers in Aurora, and so on. Harris says "only someone who doesn't understand violence" could wish for No-Gun World, but in fact it seems as if only someone utterly irrational could wish for Gun World. Or ... someone thinking very unclearly about the right to self-defense.
I think that's the heart of the matter, really. Harris must be thinking that for all the overall reduction in violence in No-Gun World, something really terrible goes on there--the woman can't defend herself; the onlookers can't offer her "proxy" self-defense (if that makes any sense). The right to self-defense has been violated. And one rights violation is worse than a 90% reduction in violence? That's got to be the idea. No-Gun World, in his estimation, is worse, for all its lower total quantity of murder, rape, suicide, accidental death, etc, because of that one black mark. What about -- you may wonder -- the defenselessness of the people murdered, raped, etc., in Gun World? I can only guess what Harris must be thinking. The defenselessness of the woman in No-Gun World is singularly pernicious, because there's a systemic denial of rights there--nobody's allowed to have guns. In Gun World, there are a whole lot more murder and rape victims, more accidentally dead children, etc., but that's all at the hands of bad guys. There isn't the same systemic denial of rights. So (I surmise) he must be thinking, in utterly non-utilitarian fashion (what happened to the utilitarian Sam Harris of The Moral Landscape?)
But this makes no sense, even if you're prepared to take rights very, very seriously. One problem is with the way Harris is playing with scenarios. If the nightmare scenario had happened in Gun World, he's apparently thinking, the woman (or the witnesses) might have had a gun. But (duh) the bad guy might have had a gun too. And I think guns are more useful offensively than defensively: bad guys can focus all their attention on carrying out crimes, while their victims are busy ... going to school, watching a movie, shopping in a mall, or whatever. If you imagine the scenario playing out in Gun World, and imagine guns all around, things don't really go any better for the woman.
But never mind that. Let's allow Harris his fantasy scenario. Let's suppose the knife-wielding rapist/murderer would have still used a knife in Gun World, and the woman would have had a gun. Should we suppose the right to self defense entitles her to that gun, despite the vast difference between the two worlds? Are we entitled to a means of self defense that comes only at the cost of there being vastly higher overall levels of violence? I think the answer is obvious: no.
We need to not confuse the right to self defense (the right to protect yourself) with the right to have the most effective means at your disposal. When we decide what means people are permitted to have, we obviously do need to think about society as a whole, and the costs and benefits of the various means. The idea that the woman in the nightmare scenario is entitled to have a gun strikes me as being as silly as saying that everyone's entitled to drive at 90 miles per hour, just because in one conceivable scenario, this would get someone to the emergency room on time to save a passenger's life. We choose speed limits in light of the overall impact on society, not to optimize the outcome in one rare type of scenario. The right to mobility (there's presumably such a right) doesn't entitle us to move at any speeds we like in potentially lethal vehicles.
Likewise, weaponry. In some imaginable scenario, a potential victim has a better chance of self-defense if she has a machine gun, but we don't allow people to have machine guns. A rocket grenade launcher would be helpful in some conceivable situation, but no--we don't get to have them. Denying people machine guns and rocket grenade launchers is not a violation of the right to self-defense, if you think about the right clearly, and neither is wholesale prohibiting guns.
I'm reminded of a point Judith Jarvis Thomson makes in her famous article "A Defense of Abortion": we too quickly (and illicitly) move from assigning someone a right to life to assigning them the right to anything they need to hold onto life. This has to be a mistake, as we see from simple examples: I have the right to life, but not the right to have Tom Cruise (her example was Henry Fonda!) put his hand on my fevered brow, if that's what it would take for me to stay alive. Likewise, we too quickly move from the right to self defense to the erroneous notion that people have the right to whatever means would be necessary for effective self-defense, in any particular situation, without regard to the general impact of making that means available. The right to self defense is just the right to protect yourself, not to have any and every weapon.
1/26/13
"Life begins at conception"
Mary Elizabeth Williams declares herself a pro-choice liberal, but wants to concede that "life begins at conception". To her, this is undeniable common sense. But in fact, there is actually a very solid reason to doubt that any human's lifespan starts as early as conception. At conception, what exists is a single-celled zygote. That zygote contains the makings of not just the embryo (fetus, etc.), but of all the structures that will support the embryo (fetus, etc.)--the placenta, amniotic fluid, etc. Imagine (only somewhat analogously) a very full box you take off the shelf at Ikea (with great effort!). The box contains the makings of a bed, but also instructions, tools, packaging, styrofoam, etc. You take it home and put together the bed, discarding everything else. Would you say the bed started its lifespan as the full box? No, of course not. There is no bed until a bed has started to take form and become separate from everything else that was in the box. And at the point, it really makes no sense to say "the bed was once the full box."
Likewise, once an embryo has become differentiated, a few weeks into gestation, it would make no sense to say it started its lifespan back when there was just a zygote. The zygote is analogous (somewhat--this is not a perfect analogy) to the full bed-box. It's a forerunner of the embryo and all the support structures. I think the very common idea that life could start at conception stems from ignorance about what a zygote is. It's not an embyronic human being yet. It's a kit for making a human being, including components for housing, protecting, feeding, etc. You might be able to convince yourself that you were once an embryo (I think this is an intelligible position), but it really makes no sense to think you were once a zygote--a people-kit. No you weren't! You came from a people-kit, but you weren't one. It's much like in the bed/box example: the Ikea bed came from the box, but beds don't start their careers being boxes. No equal sign would make sense up there, between the box and the bed, and no equal sign would make sense between a zygote and an embryo (or fetus or baby).
1/22/13
Beyonce Lip Synced Anthem?
Uh oh, it seems Beyonce lip-synced the national anthem yesterday. Here's what USA Today is reporting--
Master Sgt. Kristin DuBois, spokeswoman for the President's Own United States Marine Band, confirms to USA TODAY's Maria Puente that Beyoncé was lip-syncing.Somehow this next part makes it worse--
It's standard operating procedure for musicians to pre-record crucial music such as Hail to the Chief and The Star-Spangled Banner. "You can't have a presidential inauguration and not have Hail to the Chief and Star-Spangled Banner," she says.
And it's not unprecedented to use the pre-recorded track, as Yo-Yo Ma did last time, classical instruments being delicate in cold weather. But the band performed live for the entire ceremony, except for Beyoncé.
Washingtonian's Sophie Gilbert writes, "To press seated just below the podium, in front of the 'President's Own' Marine Corps Band, it was evident that the band wasn't actually playing during the song — even though band director Colonel Michael J. Colburn was conducting energetically and the band members mimicked blowing into their instruments."Fake conducting? Fake trumpet playing? It so happens my class on contemporary moral problems is discussing deception and when/whether/why it's morally problematic. Looks like we have another interesting example to discuss.
PS: It gets worse! "Sources also tell Fox News that Beyonce was a no-show at the inauguration performance rehearsal on the Capitol steps." This is a little sad, considering that the crowd around us was mad about Beyonce. They groaned with disappointment every time someone else talked or performed (apart from Obama). They wanted Beyonce! Singing, I think, not just appearing to sing.
50 Years Later
50 years ago I went to the March on Washington with my family. I am told I was there for Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. So when my son said he should get to see Barack Obama inaugurated on Martin Luther King day, I could see his point.
Standing for hours in the cold with a million Obamaphiles turned out to be wildly fun. Who knew? What exultation and camaraderie! Here are some sample screams--first is for Joe Biden, second for Barack Obama, third for Michelle.
Standing for hours in the cold with a million Obamaphiles turned out to be wildly fun. Who knew? What exultation and camaraderie! Here are some sample screams--first is for Joe Biden, second for Barack Obama, third for Michelle.
1/13/13
What is a placenta? (And why does it matter?)
 |
| credit: www.birthingfromwithin.com |
A single-celled zygote (on day one of fetal development) is the precursor of a baby and the precursor of the placenta that will support fetal development. Thus, if we say the single-celled zygote is identical to the much later baby, we'd have equal reason to say the zygote is identical to the later placenta. But then, because of the transitivity of identity, we'd have to say baby and placenta are identical. So each of us was once a placenta! But no--that's surely absurd. So it cannot be true after all that the single-celled zygote is identical to the later baby (or placenta). The earliest that an individual (like you or me) comes into existence is when sufficient differentiation has taken place so that an entity exists that's the precursor of a baby and not the placenta. That time is at least several days after conception--when a blastocyst has become differentiated from the rest of the cellular material.
The logic here certainly makes sense. If a certain block of wood is a precursor of both a toy duck and a toy dog, it's not true that the duck is the same entity as the block of wood. You can't assert that identity, since there's equal reason to say the dog is the block of wood, and then you're faced with the absurd conclusion that the duck is the dog.
If it worked, the placenta argument would have some very important real-world implications, like forcing Catholic hospitals to change their policies on the morning-after pill for rape victims. They would have to admit that, for the first few days of development, the zygote is an entity in the same category as an egg or a sperm--a precursor of a baby but not the same entity as any future baby. Catholics will want to resists mightily, of course. They might say ... what?
What you might say is that a placenta is just a part of a fetus--essentially an organ, but one that happens to be (a) external and (b) temporary. A zygote is a precursor of a whole baby, but (of course!) also the precursor of the baby's parts. If we said the zygote is identical to a certain baby, we certainly wouldn't have equal reason to say the zygote is identical to the baby's liver, or heart...or whatever. The part-whole relationship between individual organs and whole baby blocks those identities. Likewise, arguably, for the placenta. It's just another organ, you might say, so a part (though external and temporary).
If we gave that response, would we just be making things up? Does it really make sense to think of the placenta as a part of a fetus? Is it more aptly thought of as a part of the mother? What is a placenta, really? It's curious that such an arcane biological-metaphysical question could have any bearing at all on what hospitals should permit rape victims to do. Surely there are many far more important ethical considerations. I certainly think so, so I'm talking about this issue merely "ad hominem" (in the technical sense, not the "street" sense), i.e. as relevant just to those who do oppose abortion on grounds that a baby starts to exist at conception.
If a placenta is a separate entity from a fetus, and not a fetal part, then thoughts about zygotes, placentas, and identity could show, quite decisively, that the very earliest conceivable start to any individual human being's existence is a little bit later--at least a few days after conception.
1/5/13
Big Exit
Ironically, it happens my current favorite song sounds like what must be playing in Sam Harris's head this week. Wish I had time to say more about his gun screed, but I don't. Suffice it to say, I actually think the New York Times is quite a bit more "enlightened" than the NRA on the topic of guns. Funny that he thinks otherwise, and yet further proof (as if more was needed) that just because you're right about atheism doesn't mean you can think cogently about everything.
1/3/13
Life Extension? No Thanks
Would it be good if the average human life-span were not 75 to 80, but 150? 500? 1000? Peter Singer raises the question in this online editorial. To get the ball rolling, let's ponder three mini-worlds. The first world is more or less like ours, while the second and third involve longer life-spans. In "30-90" people on average have a child at 30 and die at 90 (couples have two children). So, starting with two people, A and B, here's how things look over time--
30-90 WORLD
year people
0 A B
30 A B C D (A and B have C and D)
60 A B C D E F (C and D have E and F)
90A B C D E F G H (E and F have G and H; A and B die)
120A B C D E F G H I J (etc)
150A B C D E F G H I J K L
180A B C D E F G H I J K L M N
210A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P
240A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
Population density stabilizes at: 6
Total people who exist in 240 years: 18
Now picture a world with longer average lifespans--say, 150 years--but the same average age of reproduction.
30-150 WORLD
year people
0 A B
30 A B C D
60 A B C D E F
90 A B C D E F G H
120 A B C D E F G H I J
150A B C D E F G H I J K L
180A B C D E F G H I J K L M N
210A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P
240A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
Population density stabilizes at: 10
Total people who exist in 240 years: 18
In 30-90, people are replaced by their great-grandchildren. In 30-150, by contrast, they're replaced by their great-great-great-grandchildren. You can picture this vividly by imagining someone on their deathbed. In 30-90, at most there will be two generations of descendants on hand. In 30-150 there could be 5 generations of descendants.
30-150 is an environmentally problematic departure from our world. The increased population density means greater strain on resources. We get something--longer life--but at a high cost. For this reason (I imagine) Singer adds delayed child-bearing to the picture. Now suppose people give birth at 90 and die at 150 (these mini-worlds are my invention, not his)--
90-150 WORLD
year people
0 A B
30 A B
60 A B
90 A B C D
120 A B C D E F
150A B C D E F G H
180 A B C D E F G H I J
210A B C D E F G H I J K L
240A B C D E F G H I J K L M N
Population density stabilizes at: 6
Total people who exist in 240 years: 14
90-150 is no more environmentally burdensome than 30-90, since population density stabilizes at the same level. But fewer people exist in 240 years--4 fewer than in the other two worlds.
1/22 Thanks to a commenter I see I've made a mistake here. I've got only the first generation reproducing at age 90. Will fix when I have a moment....
1/23 Upon further reflection--to maintain the same population density, we just need to maintain the same ratios. People need to reproduce 1/3 of the way into their lives, as in 30-90. So we need to look at a 50-150 world. (If people lived to 900, they'd have to reproduce at 300, etc. etc.)
50-150 WORLD
year people
0 A B
50 A B C D
100 A B C D E F
150A B C D E F G H
200A B C D E F G H I J
240 no change
Population density stabilizes at: 6
Total people who exist in 240 years: 10
Will make changes below so that I'm comparing 30-90 to 50-150.
So which is the best world? Singer seems to be open to the possibility that 50-150 could be best. There are fewer deaths from old age per unit time. People spend less time fearing death, since the end of life is further in the future. One downside he mentions is "the missing people"--O, P, Q, and R in my mini-model. They exist in both 30-90 and 30-150, but not in 50-150. We shouldn't be concerned about them, Singer seems to say--
But first, a word about delayed reproduction. Singer and other life-extension advocates seem to think delayed reproduction might be in the cards. He writes--
But OK, suppose we undertake both. So we are biologically able to shift from 30-90 to 50-150. Would we really want to? I have three misgivings--
(1) Delaying child-bearing until 50 sounds about like putting off sex until age 50, or romance, or reading novels, or drinking coffee. The good stuff in life shouldn't get postponed 50 years! I don't see the proposed trade here (early reproduction for delayed death) as a terribly attractive one.
(2) I think life extension advocates are mistaken about the psychology of death in old age. They see 50-150 as preferable because, though there's just as much living going on in 50-150 (there are just as many person-hours) as in 30-90, there are fewer deaths in 50-150, and fewer hours of apprehending death. But how do people feel as they approach death? Surprisingly unbad. It's intriguing that positive psychology shows, quite consistently, and all around the world, that happiness over time fits a U-shaped curve. We are happier as we leave middle age and get closer to the end of life. My experience spending time with very old people is that they're remarkably cheerful. They are masters of black humor, and don't worry over much about impending death. So 50-150 solves a problem that may not really exist to begin with.
(3) My most serious worry is about the lower total population of 50-150. 10 people wind up existing in 240 years, in contrast with 18 in 30-90. The reason this troubles me is not because I'm concerned about the four missing people. They are not harmed by not coming into existence. The reason why 30-90 seems better is because it has greater human richness. It's more diverse because eight more people come into the world, and that diversity has advantages for the people who exist in that world. Greater human diversity goes along with more intellectual and technological progress, or so it's been hypothesized by authors as diverse as Matt Ridley (the Rational Optimist), Toby Ord (see this short post, watch this video, and Cass Sunstein (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge). They hypothesize that the huge current population of the world is one reason why we are at a point of unprecedented development in many areas. More people means more specialization, more minds working on problems. The crucial thing here is not just how many people exist at a time, but how many exist over time. Arguably, 30-90 is better than 50-150 for the reason that more people are around to contribute to the human enterprise in 30-90 (though the same number exist at one moment in time).
Now, the progress we get from large populations comes at an environmental cost. So nobody's saying "the more the merrier (period)". But the extra diversity of 30-90, compared to 50-150, has no environmental cost at all. The population density of the two worlds, at any moment in time, is identical. So by transitioning to 50-150 we'd be giving up human diversity (with probably loss of progress), and gaining nothing, environmentally speaking.
People do fear death and want more years of life, of course, so there's something attractive to most of us in the idea of anti-aging research. The talk of human diversity and progress doesn't have any power to help us face death. It's all abstraction and speculation, no consolation. Or is it? I actually do find some consolation in the notion that new people make the world a better place. It would not have been for the best if our ancestors in 1500 had discovered a longevity pill, allowing them to live for 1000 years. The cast of characters on the human stage would have been much reduced and that would have been for the worse. I think we can take comfort in the idea of a new cast of characters coming into existence, especially if we live in such a way that we identify strongly with future people. That way we will one day be out with the old, but we'll also (in various attenuated senses) still be in with the new (see Mark Johnston's interesting book Surviving Death for thoughts along those lines). I think 30-90 is OK, if not perfect, and possibly quite a bit better than 50-150.
30-90 WORLD
year people
0 A B
30 A B C D (A and B have C and D)
60 A B C D E F (C and D have E and F)
90
120
150
180
210
240
Population density stabilizes at: 6
Total people who exist in 240 years: 18
Now picture a world with longer average lifespans--say, 150 years--but the same average age of reproduction.
30-150 WORLD
year people
0 A B
30 A B C D
60 A B C D E F
90 A B C D E F G H
120 A B C D E F G H I J
150
180
210
240
Population density stabilizes at: 10
Total people who exist in 240 years: 18
In 30-90, people are replaced by their great-grandchildren. In 30-150, by contrast, they're replaced by their great-great-great-grandchildren. You can picture this vividly by imagining someone on their deathbed. In 30-90, at most there will be two generations of descendants on hand. In 30-150 there could be 5 generations of descendants.
30-150 is an environmentally problematic departure from our world. The increased population density means greater strain on resources. We get something--longer life--but at a high cost. For this reason (I imagine) Singer adds delayed child-bearing to the picture. Now suppose people give birth at 90 and die at 150 (these mini-worlds are my invention, not his)--
90-150 WORLD
year people
0 A B
30 A B
60 A B
90 A B C D
120 A B C D E F
150
180
210
240
Population density stabilizes at: 6
Total people who exist in 240 years: 14
90-150 is no more environmentally burdensome than 30-90, since population density stabilizes at the same level. But fewer people exist in 240 years--4 fewer than in the other two worlds.
1/22 Thanks to a commenter I see I've made a mistake here. I've got only the first generation reproducing at age 90. Will fix when I have a moment....
1/23 Upon further reflection--to maintain the same population density, we just need to maintain the same ratios. People need to reproduce 1/3 of the way into their lives, as in 30-90. So we need to look at a 50-150 world. (If people lived to 900, they'd have to reproduce at 300, etc. etc.)
50-150 WORLD
year people
0 A B
50 A B C D
100 A B C D E F
150
200
240 no change
Population density stabilizes at: 6
Total people who exist in 240 years: 10
Will make changes below so that I'm comparing 30-90 to 50-150.
So which is the best world? Singer seems to be open to the possibility that 50-150 could be best. There are fewer deaths from old age per unit time. People spend less time fearing death, since the end of life is further in the future. One downside he mentions is "the missing people"--O, P, Q, and R in my mini-model. They exist in both 30-90 and 30-150, but not in 50-150. We shouldn't be concerned about them, Singer seems to say--
One reason for thinking it better to have fewer people living longer lives is that only those who are born know what death deprives them of; those who do not exist cannot know what they are missing.I'll buy that we haven't mistreated O, P, Q, and R by not creating them. We haven't done them any personal harm, since they aren't around to harm. But that's not the worry I would have about the 50-150 world. My worry is about the people in 50-150, not the people left out.
But first, a word about delayed reproduction. Singer and other life-extension advocates seem to think delayed reproduction might be in the cards. He writes--
contrary to what most people assume, success in overcoming aging could itself give us breathing space to find solutions to the population problem, because it would also delay or eliminate menopause, enabling women to have their first children much later than they can now.I don't really understand this. In what sense would people in 50-150 be better positioned than people in 30-90 to solve the population problem? (Indeed, what population problem? Population density is no greater in 50-150 than in 30-90.) In any event, my understanding is that menopause is not a product of aging. A fascinating article Jared Diamond published a couple of years ago says menopause is actually adaptive. Women go through menopause because it helps them have more descendants if they function as grandmothers instead of adding to their existing offspring. So anti-aging research isn't going to eliminate or delay menopause. Only anti-menopause research is going to eliminate or delay menopause.
But OK, suppose we undertake both. So we are biologically able to shift from 30-90 to 50-150. Would we really want to? I have three misgivings--
(1) Delaying child-bearing until 50 sounds about like putting off sex until age 50, or romance, or reading novels, or drinking coffee. The good stuff in life shouldn't get postponed 50 years! I don't see the proposed trade here (early reproduction for delayed death) as a terribly attractive one.
(2) I think life extension advocates are mistaken about the psychology of death in old age. They see 50-150 as preferable because, though there's just as much living going on in 50-150 (there are just as many person-hours) as in 30-90, there are fewer deaths in 50-150, and fewer hours of apprehending death. But how do people feel as they approach death? Surprisingly unbad. It's intriguing that positive psychology shows, quite consistently, and all around the world, that happiness over time fits a U-shaped curve. We are happier as we leave middle age and get closer to the end of life. My experience spending time with very old people is that they're remarkably cheerful. They are masters of black humor, and don't worry over much about impending death. So 50-150 solves a problem that may not really exist to begin with.
(3) My most serious worry is about the lower total population of 50-150. 10 people wind up existing in 240 years, in contrast with 18 in 30-90. The reason this troubles me is not because I'm concerned about the four missing people. They are not harmed by not coming into existence. The reason why 30-90 seems better is because it has greater human richness. It's more diverse because eight more people come into the world, and that diversity has advantages for the people who exist in that world. Greater human diversity goes along with more intellectual and technological progress, or so it's been hypothesized by authors as diverse as Matt Ridley (the Rational Optimist), Toby Ord (see this short post, watch this video, and Cass Sunstein (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge). They hypothesize that the huge current population of the world is one reason why we are at a point of unprecedented development in many areas. More people means more specialization, more minds working on problems. The crucial thing here is not just how many people exist at a time, but how many exist over time. Arguably, 30-90 is better than 50-150 for the reason that more people are around to contribute to the human enterprise in 30-90 (though the same number exist at one moment in time).
Now, the progress we get from large populations comes at an environmental cost. So nobody's saying "the more the merrier (period)". But the extra diversity of 30-90, compared to 50-150, has no environmental cost at all. The population density of the two worlds, at any moment in time, is identical. So by transitioning to 50-150 we'd be giving up human diversity (with probably loss of progress), and gaining nothing, environmentally speaking.
People do fear death and want more years of life, of course, so there's something attractive to most of us in the idea of anti-aging research. The talk of human diversity and progress doesn't have any power to help us face death. It's all abstraction and speculation, no consolation. Or is it? I actually do find some consolation in the notion that new people make the world a better place. It would not have been for the best if our ancestors in 1500 had discovered a longevity pill, allowing them to live for 1000 years. The cast of characters on the human stage would have been much reduced and that would have been for the worse. I think we can take comfort in the idea of a new cast of characters coming into existence, especially if we live in such a way that we identify strongly with future people. That way we will one day be out with the old, but we'll also (in various attenuated senses) still be in with the new (see Mark Johnston's interesting book Surviving Death for thoughts along those lines). I think 30-90 is OK, if not perfect, and possibly quite a bit better than 50-150.
1/2/13
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)