Rationality

In a fitting follow-up to the previous post, I will explain something that is surprising (even to me) – why I am going vegetarian.

First a qualification; I am currently still open to eating certain kinds of seafood (and potentially small-time-farm-raised animals).  So this qualification amounts to me not being a vegetarian, but I will still be mostly vegetarian – a vegetarian with some vestiges of meat eating culture.  That is to say, I will miss the taste of certain kinds of animal flesh, but I think that is a small concession on my part given the consequences of that culture.

So why?  I’ll start by asking the question: What makes it wrong to harm an innocent person?  It’s a simple question, but harder to answer than one might think.  I think most would find it undeniably wrong to cause harm unless there is some (rare) overriding obligation to the contrary.  But why is it wrong?  I think it’s easier for us to say why we generally choose not to harm others: we know what it feels like to suffer and we (most of us) don’t wish that feeling for anyone.  This doesn’t show that harming others is intrinsically wrong (I’m not sure anything could show that), but it points at a reason for our actions.  The question is if these and other reasons are sufficient to keep us from harming other people, why are they insufficient reasons for us not to harm non-human animals?  The challenge for the carnivore here is to find a difference between humans and non-human animals that allows us to consistently believe that it’s morally impermissible to harm human beings, but morally permissible to harm non-human animals.

The most obvious response is to say that non-human animals lack rationality, that they lack sufficient intelligence and awareness to be worthy of our moral consideration.  But this argument quickly falls apart.  First of all, there is a patent resemblance between this argument (used to justify the mistreatment of non-human animals) and arguments that were not so long ago used to justify the enslavement of other human beings (and again to deny women equal rights).  This comparison will strike most as incredible, or even wrong – but the point is not to say that animals deserve exactly the same rights and consideration as human beings, but that a lack of intellect is not a reason to deny them all consideration.  The argument that slaves were less intelligent and so not deserving of any rights or moral consideration was wrong, but not because slaves were in fact intelligent (whether they were or not was completely beside the point).  Babies, infants up to a certain age, and some mentally disabled persons are no more intelligent than certain non-human animals.  We do not infer from this that the well-being of babies, infants, and the mentally disabled may be disregarded.  It is not okay by anyone’s standards to cause harm to an innocent baby, even though the baby lacks intelligence.

One might claim that it would be wrong to harm a baby because it is a potential person.  But this, again, seems to be an unfounded claim.  If we knew that a baby would die in one week from an inevitably fatal disease, we would not thereby think it okay to cause the baby harm for no good reason.  Or if there is a mentally disabled person with no hope whatever of reaching a level of intelligence or awareness beyond that of an infant, therefore having no further potential as a person, we still would not think it morally permissible to cause that person undue harm.  A being’s intelligence and potential as a person, therefore, are not reasons we can rationally hold as sufficient to justify our belief that causing harm is wrong.

What it comes down to, from the utilitarian view (which I think has got it right), is the capacity to suffer.  If a being can feel pain and endure suffering, then it is wrong to cause that being harm.  Anyone who has read Peter Singer will know that I’m pretty much echoing his arguments.  I’ve found his arguments convincing from the first time I read them.  As I revisit his work again and again every semester (as I teach it), I find myself more and more compelled to act on these beliefs.  I began to see how the consumption of animals is merely habitual – nothing more than a social norm (it is certainly not required for good health, and maybe even detrimental at that) – and at some point the pull of (what I take to be) my better judgment started to outweigh habit, and here I am.

Singer [in]famously has a sort of psychological explanation for why people tend to find it acceptable to harm animals (for food, experimentation, etc.).  In a nutshell, people’s mindset is that it is okay to harm animals and not okay to harm human beings because human life is sacred.  His explanation of this mindset is that we are “speciesists” – just as those who are racist are prejudiced against those who are not of their race, those who are speciesist are prejudiced against those who are not of their species.  In other words, homo sapiens are species-centric; we think we have a right to treat other species however we see fit and even to harm them with impunity.

But what is important to realize is that the reason why it is wrong to harm an innocent person is not that they are of the species homo-sapiens.  For example, if we discovered Martians who were like us in every way (with every mental capacity for reason, emotion, etc., that we have) but who were not homo-sapiens, we would not therefore think it morally acceptable to harm them or kill them (say, for food – at least, I hope we wouldn’t).  It would be just as wrong to harm them since they, like us, have a capacity to feel pain, a desire for happiness, a self-awareness of themselves as individuals, families that would be pained to see them suffer, etc.

The point is, of course, that some animals have all of those capacities to some degree and many that are commonly mistreated (like cows, pigs, chickens, etc.) have, at the very least, the capacity to suffer.  If it is wrong to harm a person for those reasons, then it is equally wrong to harm a non-human animal that has the same capacities for suffering.  Since we all agree that it is wrong, for example, to harm a newborn baby because it can suffer, then it is equally wrong to harm a pig which has an equivalent ability to suffer (not to mention, by all rights, a greater self-awareness, an ability not only to feel pain but to fear it, etc.).

By the same token, if it is right (or morally permissible) to harm non-human animals in spite of these reasons (in favor of others), then it is equally right to harm human beings – but while one might think it permissible to inflict harm on a pig (say, in a factory farm), no one would think it permissible to inflict similar harm on an infant.  What I take to be the conclusion here is not that we treat babies, infants, and mentally disabled persons too well, but that we treat non-human animals too poorly.

Singer’s positions lead to other more startling conclusions as well, most of which I accept.  But this one, that we have an obligation not to harm others, because it is so basic and so clearly right in my eyes, is the reason that I’m going veggie.

I recently stumbled across a version of the problem of evil (given by Peter Singer – though he is not the first to point it out, it is an especially important matter for him) that strikes me as especially problematic for the Judeo-Christian concept of God.  In case you don’t know the basic version, it may be presented as follows:

1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omni-benevolent.
3. God is omniscient.
4. Evil exists.

The problem is that while each of these propositions are individually acceptable, they appear to be inconsistent – that is, it appears that they cannot all be true at the same time.  Virtually no one will deny (4), that evil exists in the world.  However, if (1)-(3) are also true, then God knows about the evil, he has the power to do away with it, and being all-good he should want to do away with it – yet evil still exists.

Of course, as I said, it may be argued that these propositions merely appear to be inconsistent and that, in fact, they are not.  Some of the typical (and most effective) Christian responses are that evil is the result of (i) free-will, (ii) original sin, or (iii) the fact that evil is necessary in order for us to learn life-lessons but for which evil we are eventually repaid in the afterlife.  I find these answers to be prima facie plausible and consistent with Christian teachings.

The problem of animal suffering, however, cannot be resolved by any of the typical responses.  We can take the same set of propositions as before, but replace (4) with (4a): Animals suffer needlessly.  Once again, God knows about their suffering, he could stop it, and he should want to stop it – yet they still suffer.  Virtually no one will deny (4a); it seems clear that animals feel pain.  Animals have nervous systems conducive to their feeling pain and they clearly behave as if they feel pain.  Anyone who has had a dog , cat, or other animal as a friend surely believes animals can suffer and that we, as moral beings, have some kind of obligation to prevent their suffering.

However, the typical Christian responses to the problem of evil will no longer apply.  As for (i), Christianity clearly does not teach that animals have free-will, since free-will is a unique gift afforded to human beings.  Regarding (ii), it is equally clear that animals do not suffer due to original sin, since they have no relation to Adam and Eve (and it’s called the fall of man after all, not the fall of animals [although I suppose by this reasoning women would not suffer due to original sin either, so let's call it the fall of humankind {and don't you hate it when I start using nested parentheses!  I blame this on my spending too many hours playing with logic proofs}]).  Last, it cannot be the case that, as in (iii), animals suffer in order to teach human beings life-lessons; this is evinced by the fact that animals have endured much suffering over the many millions of years that they existed on an Earth devoid of human life.  But even today, animals face all kinds of suffering that has nothing to do with human activities (regular things like drought, famine, or being eaten by a tiger); and to top it all off, the animals would get no recompense in an afterlife (since, sadly, all dogs don’t go to heaven).  Without appealing to ‘mysterious ways’, the ‘best possible world’ argument, or pleading ignorance in some other fashion, I’m at a loss as to what a reasonable response would be.

Contextualists are skeptics who choose to defend the ways in which we use ordinary language.  Against whom are they mounting a defense?  They take themselves to be refuting, or minimizing the impact of, skepticism, but I would argue that they merely do so against a straw-man of skepticism – an odd view that perhaps needs to be given a new label.  I think the so-called problem of skepticism is the fall-out of the contemporary philosopher’s deep-seated beliefs in metaphysical realism and a correspondence theory of truth.  The problem, as I conceive it, is that philosophers have (wrongly) projected these beliefs onto ordinary folk, and consequently attribute unjustifiable metaphysical beliefs to the masses.  The (illusory) unjustifiable beliefs, however, merely reflect the incoherence of metaphysical realism.  But I digress; the cause of this recent strain of epistemology-as-a-reaction-to-‘skepticism’ is perhaps beyond my ability to diagnose, but it is abundantly clear to me that skepticism and contextualism need not be opposed.

The contextualist’s first step is to grant the skeptical premise that we cannot know that we are not brains-in-vats (i.e., we cannot know that any well-formed skeptical hypothesis does not obtain), but the contextualist goes on to argue that elimination of such possibilities is not a necessary condition for ordinary knowledge (or for ordinary knowledge claims to be truly asserted).  They argue that most propositions of which we claim knowledge do not include any reference to an external world.  Ordinary knowledge claims are just that – ordinary – and we virtually never mean to assert knowledge of anything metaphysical.

The contextualist’s thesis is entirely compatible with skepticism.  The skeptic’s thesis is that all hypotheses regarding the nature of the external world are equally unsupported by our evidence (it’s important to note that ‘unsupported’ does not mean ‘proven false’), where evidence consists in one’s conscious awareness of one’s own mental states (in other words, how things seem).  The skeptic has never had any dispute with the ways in which we ordinarily use language and epistemic terms like ‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘justified’, and the like.  The skeptic most certainly does not think that most of our beliefs are false, since this would amount to denying her own thesis (as we have no evidence that metaphysical beliefs are false, and the skeptic does not dispute non-metaphysical beliefs).

It seems reasonable to think that ordinary folk do not consider their perceptions or languages as representing an external reality; rather, they assume that seeing that something is so constitutes knowing that it is so and that a sentence is true given that one has had the appropriate sensory experiences – not that one’s experiences must match up with something external.  Thus when I claim to know that the cat is on the mat, I certainly do not mean that I perceived a cat on a mat and that my perception correctly mirrors the objectively true state of affairs.  More likely I would (roughly) mean that I saw the cat on the mat, that I have no reason to believe I am mistaken about the cat’s location, and that all of the pragmatic implications are true (i.e., one should take care not to step on the cat!).  The contextualist need not defend such beliefs from the skeptic, since the skeptic has no qualms about them.  If, on the other hand, I were to claim, “I know the cat is on the mat – and by that I mean that my perception of the cat’s spatial disposition accurately corresponds to said cat’s actual spatial disposition in an external mind-independent reality,” then and only then would the skeptic cry foul.  But here the contextualist agrees; such claims are wholly unwarranted.

If the alleged dispute between the skeptic and contextualist now seems trivial, that’s because it is trivial if there is even a dispute at all.  The skeptic says that we cannot know anything about the external world and the contextualist says that ordinarily we do not claim to know anything about the external world.  I see no conflict in these views – if anything they compliment each other well.  If the skeptical-contextualist’s thesis is that ordinary folk usually do not claim to know the unknowable, then who of us is not a skeptical-contextualist?

aka: Stop beating the dead straw-man!

Skepticism has to be one of the most widely misunderstood views in all of philosophy.  It is understandable that the folk-concept of skepticism (i.e., the average everyday person’s concept) is somewhat vague and generally wrong.  However, I recently came across a journal article (that was actually published) which summarized arguments (from a book by the same author) that allegedly refute skepticism, but the arguments only serve to knock down the folk-concept-derived straw-man of skepticism.  What bothers me is not that the average person may think about skepticism along these lines, but that someone published a book on it!  Needless to say the author is not a philosopher, but when you go out of your way to get your ideas published you should at least run it by someone who works in the relevant field.  Anyways, I thought I’d present the bad arguments and explain what’s wrong with them because, well, someone should.

Before “refuting” skepticism the author explains his position:

“critical realism”: a world exists independently of human minds (realism), but sifting, judging, and discerning (critical) are often required in the knowledge process.  This sifting enables us to discern between appearances (mirages, optical illusions, dreams) and the way things are, between truth and falsehood.

I take this to be almost everyone’s metaphysical position, I have only heard it referred to as “direct” or “naive” realism.  We all believe that there is a real world and that our perceptions are generally reliable.  This position (as presented by the author) is question-begging; to say that we have knowledge about reality because we can discern between appearances and reality is already to presuppose that there is a difference between the two (i.e., that there is such a thing as ‘objective reality’).  Anyway, the author presumably has an argument for realism and that is a fine position to take.  But problems arise as soon as he attempts to describe skepticism. He writes:

[T]he skeptic often wrongly assumes that if another alternative is even logically possible, then you should question your beliefs, no matter how well-grounded. But this just doesn’t logically follow at all! How is it the case that if it’s possible I’m wrong, therefore I am wrong?

The “logically possible” alternatives to which the author refers are things like Descartes’ evil demon scenario, or the possibility that you are really in the Matrix, etc.  However the skeptic does not use these possibilities in order to make you question your beliefs, nor do they claim that since you could be wrong, you are wrong.  The skeptic has all of the same beliefs that you do regarding regular everyday things.  The possibility that you could be wrong only shows that you may not, in fact, know what you think you know.

[The skeptic argues that] we can’t distinguish between plausible and ridiculous views, but that position is clearly silly. [...] there’s no reason to reject what seems so obvious to us in favor of less-obvious alternatives.

This passage is where the author comes closest to getting skepticism right, and naturally he misses the point entirely.  The skeptic’s claim simply is that all of our evidence is compatible with an infinite number of possible metaphysical explanations about reality.  One possibility is that our perceptions correspond to reality – that when we see a chair, there really is a chair that exists in roughly the way we believe that it does.  Another possibility is that an all-powerful evil demon is toying with our minds and there is no chair at all.  One view seems plausible to us while the other seems ridiculous – but can we distinguish between the two?  Obviously not; there is no way to check for evil-demons and there is no way to check for ‘actual’ chairs.  All we have in the way of evidence is the conscious awareness of our own perceptual states; the whole point of the skeptical scenarios is that they are 100% compatible with the whole of our evidence.  Yes, it would be silly to believe that the demon-possibility is not only possible but actual, but no one believes this (skeptics included).

[S]kepticism tends to eliminate personal or moral responsibility since it systematically ignores or evades truth, which is a crucial component of knowledge.

Here, again, the author nearly makes a good point.  The skeptic never claims that our beliefs about reality are false, only that it is impossible for us to know that they are true.  This is the fundamental problem that the skeptics are trying to point out: truth is indeed a crucial component of knowledge, yet it is the one evading us (not the other way around)!  The skeptic neither ignores nor evades the truth (whatever that would mean), since we do not have access to anything resembling objective truth.  As for the odd claim about skeptics being immoral, I have never known a skeptic to make any claims beyond the realm of epistemology, so I’m not sure where the author is coming from on this point (unless he takes skepticism to entail moral relativism).  I will just say that one does not need to be certain that they know appearances correspond to reality in order to believe in and act according to some concept of moral responsibility.

At the bridal shower, one of the games was “how well does the bride know the groom?”  And Nicole had to answer a bunch of questions about my favorite things (she passed with flying colors!).  Anyway, I randomly remembered Blake’s poem, which is easily my historical if not all time favorite:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I probably first liked this poem just because it’s about tigers, but it really is something special.  There is, of course, also another version of it, which I believe was created by Sam: “Tiger, tiger burning bright / Burning forests down at night”.  Less artful, yes, but vastly superior in comedic value.  I picture this particular tiger as Smokey the Bear’s sworn arch-enemy.  But Smokey was kind of overweight, if I recall correctly, so he’d better just let the tiger keep on burning.