Unconditional love

This post over at Practical Ethics brought to mind a few ideas that have been loitering without much intent in my mind lately. One is that there is something to be said for G. K. Chesterton's idea of cosmic patriotism, which I think is very similar to an idea of Nietzsche's. The other is that quite a bit of conservative thinking (or talking or bumper stickers) can be understood best if one thinks of it as an expression of a kind of love. This is often the jingoism of "my country right or wrong," but it is sometimes narrower than that, being limited to a region or demographic (the South, the military, Christians, etc.).

There are two dangers that go with this kind of love. One is that it will have the wrong focus (white people, e.g.). The other is that it is too extreme, too indiscriminate, too unconditional. At least some partial love has to be all right, I think, since it's very difficult to love without specificity. How can it be wrong to love my family more than others? If I cannot love my wife more than other women, then I cannot really love my wife at all. "Love" means different things in "I love my wife" and "I love all people." I suppose this isn't quite the same thing, but love of one's home town and/or country seems like a good thing to me. What kind of person doesn't love their home? But this love needs to be free of any contaminating hatred or contempt for others. It has no place for comparison. It is love of this, not love of this but not that or this as opposed to that. So it's OK (and even good) to love this place or these people, but not qua these-people-rather-than-those.

What about unconditional love, love of my country right or wrong? This too can be OK, I think, depending on what exactly is meant. Marriage vows talk about loving through thick and thin but not, as far as I can remember, with get-out clauses in case of serious wrong-doing. And it would be weird to want to insert such clauses. There should be more optimism and trust going in to a marriage than that. In that sense, love should be unconditional: there should be no need felt for reservations. If I were a lawyer I would disagree, but as a believer in marriage (whether same-sex or other-sex) I would say there should be no pre-nups. It's maybe slightly weird to think of love of one's children as unconditional, but that's surely better than being conscious of its conditionality. As I understand it, love involves a certain kind of commitment, similar to the commitment one might have to, or feel for, some moral principles, such as never framing an innocent person, never torturing someone, etc.

Must such commitment be unconditional in fact, objectively rather than subjectively, so to speak? No. It's important that we not frame innocent people. It's important that we feel absolutely committed to this principle. Is it conceivable that there might be a situation in which framing someone was the least bad thing one could do? Yes it is. Just as it is conceivable that the next cute baby you see might grow up to be a serial killer. But it does no good to conceive of this possibility and it is probably unhealthy to do so. Absent reason to think that you might need to change your attitude, your attitude should be one of unconditional, unreserved commitment to and love of what is good (this person, that place, that principle).

It's this same kind of health that's involved in the Nietzschean/Chestertonian love of the world. This love is not rational, since we can never evaluate the world objectively, but a patriotic, loving attitude is surely more conducive to well-being and good behavior than a jaundiced view.

But what if there is reason to think you might need to change your attitude? Well, then it's time for a re-think.

But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind. (G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy, 1958, p. 17)

This is easy to misunderstand. What Anscombe means, I take it, is that some things are rightly out of the question for decent people. Framing someone in a capital case would be one such thing. Not loving one's child might be another (this is my example, not hers). But even these things can come into the question in the right (i.e. very bad) circumstances. That is not to say that they should ever be done, only to recognize that they might have to be considered if things got bad enough. What's wrong with bad forms of right-wing politics (the forms based on love anyway) is that they either love in the wrong, contrastive way, or else they love in a way that is willfully blind to some bad aspects of reality (or both, of course). This is the difference that Wittgenstein refers to in part II of the Philosophical Investigations (on p. 236 of the new edition) when he contrasts shutting one's eyes in the face of doubt (bad) with having them closed (OK). Love is blind, that's why I see this as an issue, but sometimes to be stubbornly blind is a crime. Determining when those times are, though, is certainly tricky.

Perhaps what I mean is that love of good principles and good places and good people should be unconditional, but not unconditionally unconditional. This sounds ridiculous, but the part about "absent reason to think otherwise" is important. Do I doubt the ground outside my building? No. And to do so would be crazy. In saying this, though, am I denying that people make mistakes, that natural disasters can happen, etc? No. But to have doubts constantly about such things would be insane. So in normal circumstances such doubts are out of the question. They only come into question when we do philosophy (or when an earthquake strikes, e.g.).

And I want to turn this into a sort of conservative principle: if it ain't disastrous, don't doubt it. Combined with a healthy primal loyalty to the world, this gives us something like an account of why McMahan is wrong. But perhaps we've had enough and better of those already.

Make it real

David Sosa does a nice job of explaining at least one reason why happiness is not pleasure (involving Nozick's experience machine, etc.). But what exactly is the difference between merely feeling that you are having desirable experiences and actually having them? The unreal experience is not really bad. It's just not very significant, as Sosa points out. Happiness, he seems to think, has a significance that comes from reality. So dreams and drug-induced feelings might be pleasant, but they don't make someone happy. And that sounds about right.

It would be nice to be able to give an account, though, of why this is so. What exactly is significance? What exactly is its connection with reality? And how much, or what kind of, difference does it make if we manipulate reality to make it provide the kind of experiences we want to have?

Examples might help make clearer what I have in mind. The pleasure of winning a race seems real, and better (not necessarily more pleasurable) than the pleasure of 'winning' a virtual race on a computer. The same would go for winning fairly rather than winning by bribing a referee to disqualify a rival. But what about winning because of steroid (ab)use? Shooting fish in a barrel has go to be less of an accomplishment than catching a fish the normal way, even if the shooter is unconcerned and gets great pleasure from shooting fish. A friendship with a real person seems much more valuable than a 'friendship' with a robot companion that has been trained to be friendly.

But a) is what seems to be better really better in all these cases, b) how can we know (Mill's test of asking those who appreciate both pleasures?), c) why is the better one better? I don't think the answer to that is only that the inferior pleasure is gained immorally or by cheating. Reality is at stake as well as ethics.

Somehow it seems to me that reality itself has a kind of value, and this relates to what I was trying to get at here. It also relates (if only in my imagination) to something wrong with McMahan's expressed desire to radically re-design reality.

Slightly relevant but ridiculous video:

Is religion avoidable?

It's hard to say what religion is, but there's no more orthodox account of world religions than Huston Smith's The World's Religions, and Smith identifies six aspects of religion: authority, ritual, speculation, tradition, grace, and mystery. I don't think we can really learn anything much without accepting for the most part the authority of people such as our parents and teachers. Everyone has rituals of some kind, standard ways of doing things, if only to do with disposing of dead bodies. Perhaps we could get rid of rituals, but it would certainly (uncontroversially) be bad to do so. By 'speculation' I think Smith means something like metaphysics--the Buddha and Confucius were not big fans of metaphysical speculation, but they did seem to have metaphysical beliefs (e.g. in reincarnation or in heaven). It's hard to avoid both metaphysical belief and metaphysical speculation (what happens when we die?, is there a God?, are possible worlds real?, etc.). There are always traditions, whether we like them all or not. Some can be changed, but not all at once. Mystery is hard to avoid too. No one (not even Daniel Dennett, who has explained consciousness) claims to have all the answers.

That's too quick to be proof, of course, but I also think it's mostly too obvious to be worth spending more time on. The aspect that interests me is what Smith calls "grace." Grace is "the belief ... that Reality is ultimately on our side." I wonder whether something like this isn't inevitable. Of course it's possible to be unhappy, but there are limits. The truth of Silenus (that it is best never to have been born, and second best to die quickly) is a joke. It's a thought that is literally unbelievable except in the act of suicide. So life has to seem more good than bad.

Or is that right? Could you really wish you were dead but lack the will to die? Maybe, but I think it would be sort of crippling--would you take lots of drugs?, join the army and hope to be blown up?, just mope about all day? Lots of people wish their lives were better, but it's hard to imagine that many, if any, really want to be dead. Not that the limits of my imagination are much of an argument.

Aristotle has a kind of argument that life has to be believed to have a purpose or goal. In Book I chapter 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics he writes that:

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.

Is he just assuming that our desire is not all empty and vain? Maybe he is, but this seems at least reasonable if not necessary for life.

So, however rough this sketch might be, it looks to me as though most people (perhaps everyone) is going to (perhaps necessarily) think that life is basically good and/or have some purpose to it, a goal that is not merely instrumental. Many people deny knowing what this goal is, of course, but then there's your mystery along with your grace. If only in Smith's sense, then, everyone not actively committing suicide is (or seems likely to be) religious. This means they think that the world is on their side, is fundamentally good.

And to think that the world is basically good is to think (isn't it?) that the world is basically good as it is. Which is a presumption against any argument that wholesale changes would be good. Which is something like a hint of an argument in favour of a kind of humble conservatism.

Or not an argument, I suppose. An argument against McMahan would more obviously lead to a belief of the form: if you do that things will be worse. My idea is more along the lines of: you literally cannot believe that. It would be an accusation of bad faith.

So, is this a (very) rough sketch of an idea with some promise, or what G. K. Chesterton called "a bewildering welter of fallacies"?

Tigers all the way down

McMahan has an interesting response to his critics here. He responds to four kinds of criticism:

1. If predators were to disappear from a certain geographical region, herbivore populations in that area would rapidly expand, depleting edible vegetation, and thereby ultimately producing more deaths of among herbivores from starvation or disease than would otherwise have been caused by predators. And starvation and disease normally involve more suffering than being quickly dispatched by a predator.

2. Should human beings be the first to go?

3. What about the suffering of plants?

4. What about bacteria, viruses, and insects?

With the exception of a concern with insects, the last three objections are (it seems to me) stupid. But apparently they have been made often, so McMahan is probably right to respond to them. His response to the first objection is that he already addressed this and argued, basically, that we should phase out carnivores only if we can do so without doing more harm than good. Saying that we cannot do so does not prove him wrong. It does potentially make the whole exercise a bit pointless, but McMahan has a response to this. Speaking of people who make this objection, he writes:

If they are right, my article may present an interesting thought experiment that might have prompted us to reflect on our values (though it didn’t), but it is essentially devoid of practical significance.

So, how does the article make us reflect on our values? Or rather, what do we see when we reflect? McMahan's values seem to be both anthropocentric (I think he would accept this) and utilitarian in a pretty straightforward, Benthamite sense (I think he would accept this too). Mine, I find, are much less anthropocentric and more religious/aesthetic/Nietzschean. So perhaps his article has value because of the clarificatory role it can play.

At the end of this new article he writes:

What’s particularly disheartening is that their comments are greatly outnumbered by those that make no reference to my arguments and never touch on a point of substance, but instead consist entirely of insults and invective. If you take your own moral beliefs seriously, the way to respond to a challenge to them is to make sure you understand the challenge and then to try to refute the arguments for it. If you can’t answer the challenge except by mocking the challenger, how can you retain your confidence in your own beliefs?

This sounds like the kind of thing that Cora Diamond responded to in her paper "Anything but Argument?" It also reminds me of the question of foundationalism. McMahan seems to want rational justification of our moral beliefs all the way down. But that's not possible. Arguments start with premises, and these cannot all be proved by yet more arguments whose premises are in turn supported by sound arguments, etc. So we have to start somewhere. McMahan seems to start with the ideas that pain is bad and pleasure is good, although in this case his focus is on the badness of pain. But it's very hard to say what pain is, or what pleasure is. And all sorts of bad things seem to exist that are not pain (grief, despair, loneliness, regret, itching, frustration, anger, injury, insult, etc. etc.). If we define 'pain' as 'bad feeling' then many of these things might count as pains, but the word 'bad' is surely hard to define. And do we really have a good understanding of what exactly a feeling is? I'm sure that attempts to reduce the concept of pain to something that fits a naturalistic ontology (such as the opposite of preference satisfaction) have been made, but it seems like a hopeless project to me. (I realize that I should do some reading before making a final verdict on the matter.) If the goodness of the natural world more or less as it is is as obvious to someone as the badness of pain is to McMahan, then how can that person respond to his arguments without insults and invective? What can be said except: "Are you blind?" We could try taking him to a zoo, or giving him some good books to read, but I wouldn't have much hope that such things would make a difference to him.

So he's disheartened and I'm disheartened. Maybe it's time to talk about something else.

Against nature

It won't die! Matt has some good comments there, especially this one:

if someone said to me that it should not be pursued because it was "against nature," I certainly would not find it obvious that this was wrong. I would want to know a lot more about what was being claimed before I would say whether I agreed, of course, just like with any other ethical slogan.

The post to which Matt is responding says that McMahan considers various objections to his argument and that:

Among the weakest of these are the idea that implementing his proposal - even with the specific provisos he gives - would mean “playing God”, or acting “against nature”. Such lines of argument have a host of absurd implications: for instance, one might just as well use them to condemn morally innocuous practices like contraception or vaccination. They are therefore quite easily dismissed.

It is not charitable to interpret reference to "playing God" as meaning some argument that implies the wrongness of vaccinations. What is going on here?

It's partly cultural, I think. A lot of philosophy, especially in England, is done by people who are openly contemptuous of religion and who have (or display) little to no understanding of it in any but its crudest forms.

It's also partly a matter of the superficiality of most contemporary moral philosophy. Although this too might be more a question of fashion than depth. Suggest that a world without tigers might be a good thing and you are provocative. Suggest that a world without contraception might be a good thing and you are an idiot. The two are connected. It is because of the perceived miraculousness of life that contraception (and all sex that excludes this miracle by design) is regarded by some as wrong. It is my perception of tigers as miraculous that makes me incapable of taking McMahan's argument seriously. In fact, taking it seriously (which seems to be what has to be done in order to get others to stop agreeing with it) can itself be regarded as an insult to nature, in the same way that taking racist arguments seriously is an insult to humanity in general and racial minorities in particular.

Two things: 1. I am not myself against contraception, but I think the argument that Anscombe makes against it (e.g. here) is interesting (and need not be Catholic or Christian--I think a Nietzschean version could be developed). 2. There is an awful lot of misunderstanding of the idea that wrong things are against nature.

Breyers ice cream advertises itself as "all natural," seemingly presupposing that this is a good thing. One might infer that artificial, or partly artificial ice cream, is not so good. You would be right, but is the point generalizable? Is opera singing morally bad? I suspect that much of it is (consider the word 'diva'--and, of course, there are male equivalents), but not because it is a form of art. Laptops are not evil just because they don't grow on trees. But no one thinks they are. Anscombe thinks contraception is evil because it is an insult to the value of life. Laptops and opera are no such thing. Is phasing out tigers? Well, it isn't an insult to the value of human life, but it does seem somewhat unappreciative of the work of the immortal hand and eye that framed the tiger's fearful symmetry. The seeming impossibility of appreciating Blake's poem while taking McMahan's argument seriously (combined, I suppose, with the obvious goodness of Blake's poem) is the kind of thing that makes me reject the argument and be depressed by it.

What does respect for life require? What is due? What is called for? Those are hard questions. But answering them requires appreciation of good things, and sensitivity. And they are not distinct from the questions, "What is life?" and "What is the value of life?", just as the question "Is torture ever all right?" quickly became "What is torture?" Ontology requires sensitivity too. And, as I've hinted, I don't trust people who can't appreciate a poem or a tiger to think well about value.

Does New Jersey moral philosophy corrupt youth?

There's an interesting sense of tension in the part of Hans-Johann Glock's What is Analytic Philosophy? that deals with ethics. This is not Glock's fault: for one thing, he's largely reporting on the views of others; for another, the tension is simply there among the phenomena that philosophers should try to make sense of; and for yet another, Glock is well aware that matters are not straightforward here. But he doesn't get into what might appear to be a paradox to which he draws attention, so I will try to say something about it here.

On p. 197 Glock writes that:

A German philosopher, it seems, is not expected to muster nine arguments for and ten against any given position, but to utter profound wisdoms, preferably wisdoms which are in line with a shared communal ethos.

This might well sound like mockery, and I think it is intended to. But Glock cuts the laughter short. The ridiculous German philosopher is contrasted with Peter Singer who, according to Glock's account, favors killing hemophiliac infants even though, as adults, they are likely to "find life definitely worth living," because they will be a burden to their parents and because the parents could probably have a healthier and happier child instead if they decided to 'replace' the hemophiliac one. I take it that Singer does not support killing sick babies against their parents' wishes, but that he thinks (or thought once upon a time) that parents who decided to kill a sick child in order to replace it with a healthier one were making a wise decision, assuming that doing so would be possible, legal, etc.

Glock identifies such a view, whether or not Singer still holds it (or even if he never did), as "a particular failure of rationality." The failure in question is:

the failure to reconsider one's premises in the light of unpalatable consequences, and the tendency to seek refuge instead in self-serving animadversions against 'orthodox' or 'conventional' morality and 'lay' intuitions. [p. 198]

Glock goes on to contrast "the characteristically serious air of Germanophone moral philosophy" with the "gung-ho spirit," "cavalier spirit," and "exquisitely bad taste" of "some analytic philosophers working in applied ethics."

He then gives a fictional example to illustrate the kind of far-fetched thought experiment favored by such ethicists, and remarks:

There may be a place for casuistry; but that place is in the consideration of genuine moral dilemmas, dilemmas that could confront minimally decent and sane human agents. In this kind of casuistry, by contrast, moral problems seem to be treated mainly as an excuse for trying out one's pet theory or showing how clever one is.

So is the profound German moral philosopher all right after all? Apparently not: "a philosophy the methods and results of which are predetermined by prior practical commitments is wishful thinking at best, and deceitful rhetoric at worst."

So our moral commitments should not be so fixed that they are immune to rational criticism, but if reasoning about morals leads to "unpalatable" conclusions, then we have reasoned badly. What is and is not palatable, I take it, is to be determined by what lies within the sphere of minimal decency and sanity.

This is far from rigid or specific, so I can easily imagine many philosophers refusing to take it seriously. But it seems quite right to me. The problem is that proving this kind of position right seems to be impossible, and it is not universally accepted. People like Singer and McMahan, it seems to me, sometimes stray beyond the limits of the sane and the minimally decent. And instead of a universal outcry, or a (bored, embarrassed, or angry) refusal to engage with their work, they are given attention, money, honors, etc.

Is it their work that is changing the general sense of what is decent and sane, or is it because this sense is already changing that we pay so much respectful attention to their work?

All the heavy metal in the world

There seems to be something I'm not getting that everyone else gets. Matt at The Consternation of Philosophy (which looks like a good blog) writes:

McMahan’s piece is rich and challenging, raising a lot of important issues. He questions, for example, whether ‘species’ is a morally relevant category: “The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species.” With this, I agree; we talk about animal species as a convenient way of carving up nature and organizing our biological knowledge, but it doesn’t seem terribly important to morality. (This isn’t to deny anything about human exceptionalism; I would think that if anything makes humans special morally, it’s not something that depends essentially on our species membership. That is, you can still think humans have intrinsic dignity even if you don’t think that that dignity depends on our being a member of Homo sapiens.)

Why doesn't species, kind, or type count for morality? The idea seems to be that members of the species homo sapiens might have special dignity, but they have this because of their individual properties, not because they are members of that species. Is that it? But then it becomes hard to argue for human rights rather than, say, the rights of rational beings. And what if all the heavy metal in the world disappeared, or all the late medieval art? Wouldn't that be a shame, and not only because this song and that song and this painting had gone? Wouldn't the loss of the kinds be a bad thing? If the Welsh language disappears, is that not a shame just because the line between Welsh and,say, Cornish is blurry or somewhat arbitrary? Some French people look French. Is it irrational to think it would be a shame if that kind of face disappeared? For that matter, is the identity of an individual (a complete set of rabbit parts, for instance) not just as arbitrary as the identity of a species? I don't get it.

No lions, no tigers, no bears, Oh joy!

This first point is likely to seem irrelevant, but I wonder if it isn't revealing. McMahan writes that: "some of us, for reasons I have never understood, do go to the trouble to paint their vestigial claws a sanguinary hue." I.e. some people, overwhelmingly women, paint their nails. Am I alone in being annoyed by this? It seems to combine patronizing sexism with a failed attempt at Gradgrind-as-Socrates humour. The robot that does not understand human ways points out, with a kindly laugh, how foolish we all are. Are we really expected to laugh? Is anyone alive really mystified by decoration?

Later, McMahan writes that: "There is no reason to suppose that a species has special sanctity simply because it arose in the natural process of evolution." Yes there is. Evolution takes a long time. This time can be regarded as a kind of investment, an investment that will be wasted if the species in question is killed off or allowed to die out. That is, as Ronald Dworkin puts it, a cosmic shame. A species designed and created in a lab can be re-designed and re-created just as easily. This might not be much of an argument, but Dworkin is trying to capture widespread intuitions. I think he is at least partly successful. McMahan is here basically rejecting these intuitions, but moral dialogue becomes impossible if too many such intuitions are rejected or not shared in the first place.

Wisely, McMahan brings up the likely objection that our choosing which species get to survive and which die out would be "playing God." He has two responses to this:

One is that it singles out deliberate, morally-motivated action for special condemnation, while implicitly sanctioning morally neutral action that foreseeably has the same effects as long as those effects are not intended. One plays God, for example, if one administers a lethal injection to a patient at her own request in order to end her agony, but not if one gives her a largely ineffective analgesic only to mitigate the agony, though knowing that it will kill her as a side effect. But it is hard to believe that any self-respecting deity would be impressed by the distinction. If the first act encroaches on divine prerogatives, the second does as well.

I think this is wrong. A kidnapper who toys with his prisoner, reveling in the power to kill or not, plays God. The doing-and-allowing distinction need not come into it. To play God is, it seems to me, to make decisions that one has no right to make. Another example would be the Nazi officer played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List who enjoys shooting prisoners in his camp, deciding who lives a bit longer and who dies right away. This is playing God. Anyway, what about McMahan’s example?

Lethal injections are opposed by many religious believers because they believe that God has forbidden killing the innocent. Giving a lethal injection for reasons unrelated to its lethality would likely be frowned upon by such people too. McMahan seems to have the doctrine of double effect in mind here, so perhaps I should spell out what this doctrine says: First, do nothing that is forbidden. Secondly, allowed actions (such as giving an anesthetic) that have the same effects as forbidden actions are not necessarily forbidden so long as: a) neither the means nor the end is forbidden, b) the likely good effects outweigh the likely bad effects. Giving an anesthetic is usually allowed as a means, and relieving suffering is usually considered OK as an end, but whether the good of ending a patient’s suffering outweighs the bad of that patient’s dying is controversial. It is not clear to me what a theist should say about such a case. What they do say varies, of course. What any of this has to do with playing God or engineering the extinction of tigers is another matter. Let me try to figure it out.

The proposal, I take it, is that we choose between carrying on destroying species willy nilly and destroying them in a more thoughtful way. The obvious falseness of this dichotomy suggests that McMahan is kidding (and there can be no doubt that he is against the current destruction), but let’s assume for the sake of argument, or for the sake of his joke, that he is not. If someone opposes the targeted extinction on the grounds that this would be playing God in a way that falls foul of the doctrine of double effect, would they be right? Is logging, for instance, forbidden? No. Is the reason why people cut down trees (profit) considered evil by most religions? No. Does the rationally expected good outweigh the rationally expected bad? No. So according to the doctrine of double effect, it looks as though destroying the environment by cutting down lots of trees is not allowed. Willy nilly extinction is no better than targeted extinction. It is not the case, therefore, that targeted extinction is wrong on account of its involving playing God as McMahan understands this idea (as I understand his understanding of it). Targeted extinction and willy nilly extinction are wrong for the same reason.

It looks as though McMahan needs his second response, therefore, which he regards as: "simple and decisive. It is that there is no deity whose prerogatives we might usurp. To the extent that these matters are up to anyone, they are up to us alone."

I agree that there is no deity. But it does not follow (that I am right or) that there are no limits on what we may do or on what decisions we may take. So if we reject the concept of playing God on the ground that there is no God, we can always instead use the concept of "what used to be called ‘playing God’" and get the same results. My argument for this concept is an appeal to intuitions. Not a strong argument, but ultimately the best we can ever do in ethics. Or so it seems to me.

Back to McMahan:

Another equally unpersuasive objection to the suggestion that we ought to eliminate carnivorism if we could do so without major ecological disruption is that this would be “against Nature.” This slogan also has a long history of deployment in crusades to ensure that human cultures remain primitive. And like the appeal to the sovereignty of a deity, it too presupposes an indefensible metaphysics. Nature is not a purposive agent, much less a wise one.

This is obscure. McMahan’s apparent meaning is that people who complain that this or that is against nature (or Nature) believe that nature is a wise and purposive agent. But no one believes this. Some believe that nature expresses God’s will, and that God is a wise and purposive agent. If we take this idea to have been refuted by McMahan’s assertion that it is false, then we are left with some speculation to do as to what people might mean when they say that something is against nature. Some just mean they don’t like it, some mean it is artificial (and they don’t like artificial things, perhaps because they don’t trust them), and some mean simply that it is wrong. For some people, “against nature” means “contrary to human nature,” which means “in violation of the laws governing how human beings ought to live,” which means “wrong.” It is hard to see what the metaphysics here is supposed to be, let alone why it would be indefensible.

Finally, McMahan’s conclusion:

Here, then, is where matters stand thus far. It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation. There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation. The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species. I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.

The key sentence here is this: “The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species.” Where we draw the line between lions and tigers is arbitrary, so (?) lions and tigers as such cannot be sacred. I’m not at all sure that this is what he means, but it’s what he seems to be getting at here:

the idea that individual animal species have value in themselves is less obvious. What, after all, are species? According to Darwin, they “are merely artificial combinations made for convenience.” They are collections of individuals distinguished by biologists that shade into one another over time and sometimes blur together even among contemporaneous individuals, as in the case of ring species. There are no universally agreed criteria for their individuation. In practice, the most commonly invoked criterion is the capacity for interbreeding, yet this is well known to be imperfect and to entail intransitivities of classification when applied to ring species. Nor has it ever been satisfactorily explained why a special sort of value should inhere in a collection of individuals simply by virtue of their ability to produce fertile offspring. If it is good, as I think it is, that animal life should continue, then it is instrumentally good that some animals can breed with one another. But I can see no reason to suppose that donkeys, as a group, have a special impersonal value that mules lack.

(The superiority of donkeys over mules is evident to me, and I do not mean that I prefer donkeys (although of course I do). But I should leave that aside.)

Artificial combinations made for convenience can still be convenient, so I see no reason to discount them. And then why can’t we regard such a grouping as sacred, especially since ‘sacred’ is being used here to express an intuition, not in a very technical or literal sense? Is it irrational to love donkeys but not mules? Why can’t the members of an artificial category be sacred (in Dworkin’s sense of the word)? Indeed, Dworkin counts works of art as sacred, and that is a notoriously tricky category.

Three points in conclusion: 1. McMahan seems to want to be impersonal (his preferred term for ‘sacredness’ is ‘impersonal value’, he claims not to get nail polish, he is dismissive of great literature and religious impulses, etc.), 2. He makes some arguments that seem rather weak, 3. His article has the potential to be a great work of satire, but it seems not to be intended this way. The second point is neither here nor there, since both bad arguments and disagreement about which arguments are bad are very common. What interests me are the first and third points, which make me feel that McMahan and I are almost members of different species. Disconcerting and depressing. But if it is satire, then I applaud the idea, if not the execution.

The argument from tigers

[UPDATE: This isn't a defense of theism or religion. If that's what you're looking for, you've got the wrong argument from tigers. Feel free to look around while you're here though. For more on my views on religion, click on the "religion" label to the right. In brief, I'm an atheist but not an evangelical one.

UPDATE: This isn't an argument for vegetarianism either. Roughly speaking, it's an argument for tigers. And it's an argument from tigers. Basically: tigers, therefore tigers, or: tigers are awesome, therefore it is good that there should be tigers. This probably sounds silly, but it's a response to an argument to the effect that it might be good if tigers did not exist. My response is that this is absurd, and evidently so to anyone with a proper understanding of what tigers are. For more, read on below.]

Jeff McMahan has an article in which he argues "that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species." Spiros calls it "terrific and provocative." It is not terrific, and what it provokes in me is a kind of grinding despair. It would be all too easy to have an animated, "Ah, but that's precisely where you're wrong!" kind of discussion of this piece. It would be impossible to have what I would consider a serious discussion of it, except as pathological. Stephen Mulhall might offer a very insightful analysis of just what is wrong with this kind of thinking (in fact I think he has already addressed McMahan's work in The Wounded Animal), but I don't see how it could be taken seriously as a piece of thinking. This (i.e. what I have just written) is not an argument, of course, but I'm not sure how to argue with something like this.

Early analytic philosophy was connected with modernism. I wonder whether it has degenerated into a form of post-modernism, something essentially playful (see the jokey end of McMahan's essay: "I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment"), essentially unserious.