Thursday, June 7, 2012

Volume 7.2


THESISxii

A Philosophical Review

Volume 7 • Number 2

1999

                                     

Inside this Issue:                                                                      

Evelyn B. Pluhar, Kelli Newby, Kathleen O’Malley, David Pixley, and Lori Carrier
ETHICS AND ANIMALS
A Philosophical Exchange                                                                                               

William Hickey
ANIMAL RIGHTS AND RED HERRING                                    

William Taylor
DARWIAN EVOLUTION AND ROGER SCRUTON’S TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD                                                                    

Gerol C. Petruzella
SOCIALISM AND THE MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE                                                                

Anthony D. Annichiarico
THE PERSISTENCE OF SOCIAL DARWINISM        






Ethics and Animals
A Philosophical Exchange

Editor’s note:  The following is an exchange between several MCLA honors students (from this fall’s seminar on Ethics and Animals) and Evelyn B. Pluhar, author of the highly acclaimed book Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals.  Special thanks to Professor Pluhar for her time and thoughtfulness.

Question:  "In your 1997 response to MCLA Honors students, you suggested that you could, in extreme, life-or-death situations, rationally choose to save the life of a gorilla (you mentioned Koko) over an evil person like Adolf Hitler.  Might we also rationally choose to save a particularly good human (say, Mother Teresa) over the gorilla?  Is so, does this imply a kind of moral perfectionism that grants special status to human persons?"


Reply to Students

Evelyn B. Pluhar

In the course of my 1997 reply to the question, "How ought an impartial human decision-maker (with no special acquired moral or legal duties) act when faced with saving the life of but one of two equally morally significant beings, the one human, the other nonhuman?," I said that I would be inclined to save Koko the gorilla rather than rescue Adolf Hitler.  I chose to say “inclined” because, as I said, I have not and had not addressed the question of whether deliberate serious evil without remorse lessens a moral agent's moral significance.  Let us see how answering this question would affect the Mother Teresa (MT)-gorilla dilemma.

Suppose the answer to the question is "yes." In that case, we would have no reason to prefer MT over the gorilla.  I have argued that beings such as MT and the gorilla enter life with full moral significance because each cares about what would happen to her.  The gorilla is, as far as we know, incapable of moral agency; thus she is an innocent, and as such is incapable of forfeiting any measure of moral significance.  From what we know of MT's life, she too had not forfeited any of her initial moral significance.  If deliberate, serious evil by an unrepentant moral agent lessens her moral significance later on – if MT had been Clyde's Bonnie instead of her saintly self – it would be defensible to give the nod to the gorilla.  As it happens, however, this is not the case.  (Note that the forfeiture hypothesis is not a variety of moral perfectionism:  one may lose a measure of moral significance and perhaps also regain it, but one cannot increase it beyond it's initial full measure.)

Now suppose the answer to the question is "no," that we cannot make a good case for the forfeiture hypothesis.  A being with full moral significance would retain it regardless of her actions and attitudes toward those actions.  In that case, once again we must grant the gorilla and MT an equal chance at rescue, since they would be equally morally significant.  (Alas, in that case we would then be required to regard Adolf and Koko as equally deserving of rescue!)  Thus, in either case the conscious good MT has done would not justify saving her over the gorilla.  Moral theories other than the one I have defended would resolve the dilemma differently.  A consequentialist could argue that the greater happiness resulting from MT's continuing good works would mandate her rescue, but I have argued that consequentialism is a mistaken moral theory.  Non-consequentialists who would save her on the ground that her goodness makes her more deserving of rescue would indeed be moral perfectionists.  I have argued that this view is also unjustified.

The identical rescue dilemma could be posed if we replaced the gorilla with a human at the same mental level – e.g., a child or a human who will never be capable of moral agency.  I would answer in the same way.  Moral agents are not justified in favoring full persons over those who are not, be the latter human or nonhuman.  In short, MT and the gorilla each have full moral significance.  An impartial moral agent who can rescue but one of them should (very quickly!) flip that coin!

Evelyn B. Pluhar teaches philosophy at Pennsylvania  State University, Fayette Campus


Kelli Newby

Professor Pluhar suggests that humans must always remain impartial moral agents, especially in extreme situations, such as the one posed to her by the 1997 Animal and Ethics course.  While Pluhar does admit that she would save a drowning human child over a drowning cat, her answer is reluctant:  “When fairness and emotions are at odds, the winner is not automatically the justified winner.”  This time, when questioned about whether she would choose a particularly good person over a gorilla, she responds that one must flip a coin.  Each possesses full moral status and “…moral agents are not justified in favoring full persons over those whoa re not.”  Pluhar’s concern with equality seems to ignore the fact that humans are animals, and that animals have survival instincts.

Darwin’s evolutionary thought caused a great stir by emphasizing the animality of humans.  Most people are no longer offended by the thought of being descended from a “monkey.”  Many, like Evelyn Pluhar, now argue there is no distinction between humans and animals in terms of basic moral rights.  However, we can still make distinctions in moral situations.  At what point, for example, does a human cease to be an animal and start to become an “impartial moral agent?”

How many people would honestly choose saving the life of a gorilla over the life of Mother Theresa?  Beyond carefully worded arguments and stipulations surrounding hypothetical situations, is there something else?  Article after article in Peter Singer’s recent book, The Great Ape Project, underscores the continuity between humans and the other great apes.  If we are so similar, why is following an instinct – to save one’s own species – a terrible or unjust decision?

Purely emotional reactions should not reign over all situations.  Humans are blessed with the gift of reason, but that does not totally counteract that we are, above all, just animals.  Letting emotion “break the tie” of reason is not wrong.  An ape that let emotion reign triumphant in his or her decision would not be accused of ignoring justice; and are we not only a fraction of a gene away from being chimpanzees?  We should  listen to that gut impulse we have to save the human, and we should not feel that there is something wrong with our decision. 


Kathleen O’Malley

Professor Pluhar’s further elaboration on her response to the 1997 Honors students only strengthens her case for “flipping the proverbial coin.”  When deciding to save the life of one of two “maximally morally significant” beings, whether they are human or nonhuman, flipping a coin (or doing something along the same idea of fairness) is the only reasonable way to give both beings an equal opportunity to survive.

The key word in this response is maximum.  If Mother Teresa and the gorilla in our hypothetical life-saving situation have done nothing to reduce their maximal moral value, such as “an evil person like Adolf Hitler has,” then they are still equally morally significant beings.  Their value can decrease but not increase.  Good deeds, like those of Mother Teresa, cannot increase maximal moral value because it is already at the maximum.  Mother Teresa may be a candidate for sainthood in some of our eyes; but in an extreme, life-or-death situation here on earth, she is no more valuable than a gorilla or any other maximally morally significant being.  She is an equal, and her chance of surviving such a hypothetical situation rests solely on the result of that flipped coin.


David Pixley

Flipping a coin is a correct response to our narrowly defined, extreme situation.  However, flipping a coin is only morally permissible when there are no morally important considerations, or when the morally important considerations are equal.  The toughest decision is ironically made easier in the hardest of all possible situations because the impartial decision-maker only has to concentrate on the level of fairness used in the decision process and not on moral correctness.

Professor Pluhar writes in her book, Beyond Prejudice, that “[w]hen two people are drowning and only one can be saved, third parties are morally permitted to rescue those to whom they feel a stronger emotional tie” (p. 286).  In this situation, does morally permitted mean the same thing as morally correct?  As a potential lifesaver, I would prefer to be morally correct rather than just morally permitted to act in a certain way.  In Pluhar’s book, breaking a tie by appeal to emotions is morally permissible.  In answering our question, flipping a coin is fair.  Are these two positions equally justifiable?

In my opinion, Pluhar’s position would have to imply that a fair, morally permissible, and justifiable decision is also maximally morally correct.  However, if we suppose that the two decisions above are not equally justifiable, then it seems to follow that one decision is more morally correct than the other.  This, in turn, would imply that there could be morally significant reasons to allow your initial intuition to save the human baby to be more morally correct than flipping a coin, which is permissible and fair, but, for some, intuitively wrong.


Lori Carrier

In her reply to our question, Evelyn Pluhar does not directly  answer whether she believes that doing deliberate serious evil without remorse lessens a moral agent’s significance.  Instead, she answers the question in two ways; one saying that it does lessen the agent’s significance and one saying that it does not.

In the case where the evil effects the significance of a moral agent, Pluhar answers that there would be no reason to prefer the exceptionally good human being because she and the nonhuman animal enter life with full moral significance, and although one can lose moral significance, one cannot gain it.  This, however, is false.  If by doing evil, one can lose moral significance, it follows that by doing good one can gain it.  The nonhuman animal and the human being both begin life as moral patients.  They have equal moral significance, but where the human being has the potential for good and evil, the nonhuman animal does not.  Therefore, a human being can either gain or lose moral significance while a nonhuman animal’s significance remains steady.  Given Pluhar’s statement that the nonhuman animal and the human have equal full moral significance because both care what happens to him them, then one cannot lose moral significance by doing evil.  The evil human, we assume, still cares what happens to him or her.

In the case where one’s moral significance is not forfeited by evil-doing, Pluhar says that we must toss the proverbial coin again.  This answer is unsatisfactory, even, it seems, to Pluhar, who answered the original question by invoking a  choice between Hitler and Koko.

Kelli Newby, Kathleen O’Malley, David Pixley, and Lori Carrier are students in an honors seminar on Ethics and Animals at MCLA


Animal Rights and Red Herring

William Hickey

Libertarian author L. Neil Smith’s editorial, “Animals Are Property,” published in the March 1996 issue of “The Libertarian Enterprise,” attacks the idea of animals rights, claiming that it is a device used to forward the “obsolete and discredited” socialist agenda.  Smith claims that to advocate for any environmental issue, such as animal rights, is “to abuse individualism and capitalism.”  Smith uses the concept of inflation as a metaphor:  just like inflation dilutes the value of currency, “moral inflation,” as he calls it, dilutes human liberty.

In fact, Smith argues that the proponents of animal rights infringe upon human rights; they limit the human right to do what ever we desire to do to “unclaimed property” – that is, animals.  This limitation strangles capitalism, therefore, promoting the animal rights advocates’ socialist agenda.  The argument is obviously fallacious.

In leading us away from one issue (animal rights) to attack a totally unrelated subject (socialism) Smith commits a textbook red herring fallacy.  Smith does not appear to have a valid argument against animal rights; he simply offers this thought on the moral status of animals:  They are “groceries.”  Like many opponents of animal rights, Smith simply misses the point of the claim that some non-human animals are entitled to basic moral consideration

William Hickey is a student at MCLA

 ~~~


Darwinian Evolution and Roger Scruton’s Teleological Argument for the Existence of God

William Taylor

As is inevitably the case with all such arguments, Scruton’s teleological argument for the existence of God – his argument from purpose or design (goal-seeking) – encounters significant problems in light of Darwinian evolution, and its implications for how the world is.  This is because we must distinguish between the fact of evolution and Creationism fables and their false implications.  Though Scruton acknowledges the difficulty that arises because of evolutionary theory (which he, too, regards as factual), it seems, as I will depict in the paragraphs that follow, that he is guilty of having conceptions of Darwinian evolution that are decidedly inaccurate.  He is then guilty of using this erroneous conception of evolutionary theory to strengthen his argument.

Scruton first constructs a premise for the teleological argument:

The world exhibits an order that is (a) good and (b) the kind of order that manifests design.  Are either of these true?  We do not know.  Sometimes the world seems good, harmonious, beautiful, and full of signs of benevolent power.  But when the bombs rain down, and the death squads force the doors, this impression is apt to disappear (p. 131).

Scruton then contemplates natural theologian William Paley’s famous claim that the presumed design of unmolested nature (that is, “escaped from the world of men”) is analogous to the nature of a perfect watch which we come across ticking in the grass at our feet.  Then the question that follows is “how can we doubt the existence of the watchmaker”?  Scruton dismisses this famous claim as illusion, and this is so, he says, because of evolutionary theory:

The theory of evolution shows how the appearance of design – design more intricate and wonderful than any we could ourselves encompass – may occur in things that were not designed at all, but which came slowly into being, through process of random change and disaster (p. 132). 

It would seem that, in light of this account of evolution, Scruton himself would be able to answer the question of whether the world exhibits an order that is both good and of such a kind that deliberately manifests design.  Although in nature there is competition and struggle for existence among individuals and species, there also exists in nature instinctual altruistic cooperation within and between individuals and species that supports and sustains them.  Darwinian evolution in this regard is a disorder that is neither good nor evil in any conceivable sense that we use these terms.  Though this disorder that we exist in came into being primarily because of the mechanisms of natural selection, this mechanism is merely a product of incremental modification over generations of a species.

If Scruton accurately understood these concepts of Darwinian evolution, he would not need to contemplate such a question regarding these two issues.  Scruton ignores this, however, and instead argues:

It [evolutionary theory] does not refute the [teleological] argument.  There is no reason why God should not choose this way – the way of blind evolution – in order to achieve his inscrutable purpose.  Moreover, there is another and more remarkable design in nature:  the design of consciousness.  Is it not wonderful of facts, that the world knows itself in us?  How could there be consciousness of reality, if consciousness were not the cause of all?  …[w]herever we turn the world yields to our inquiries; its order and system are through and through scrutable… (p. 132).

Supposing that we exist as apart of God’s design, this presumed design – no matter how “inscrutable” --must be seeking some sort of goal, or else it is not a teleological argument.  “Blind evolution,” as Scruton calls it, grows dialectically rather than being systematically designed, and it is itself in no sense aimed at a final goal, and so it is in its very nature at odds with any conceivable teleological argument.  It is also important to mention that most gods (particularly in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions) – in relation to evolution – regard humans as the crowning, teleological achievement of creation.  Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, dictates that a species is successful in terms of its differential reproductive success, and, in this way, the human species is, in contrast, relatively unsuccessful when compared to many other species.

As Scruton points out, the fact that we somehow initially became conscious – like the fact that we became beings that we are, even despite our rather humble, slimy starting point – is, indeed, remarkable, and is not something that evolution – much less any other theory – has entirely explained.  But our knowledge and consciousness that we have, too, seemed to evolve over time in the same way that we have come into being over time.   And it that seems how we have come into being has a direct influence on our consciousness and knowledge.  Scruton, however, neither accounts for or even acknowledges this.  Though it is, indeed, amazing that we can know anything at all about the world, this, too, seems to be a contingency of evolutionary processes.

Since we are contemplating the existence of God in this argument, and since a God is presumably all-powerful, we could not entirely disprove that God is actually seeking some goal through evolution.  However, Scruton does not give any substantive reasons for thinking that this is so.  His teleological argument is not an argument at all, but rather it is merely a fantastical speculation that fails to explain anything that evolutionary theory does not explain more
simply.
References

Scruton, R., Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey, Chapter 11: “God,” p. 121-139, “The Teleological Argument,” p. 131-134, Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1994.

Darwin, C., The Origin of Species, Bantam Books, New York, NY.

William Taylor is a student at MCLA




Socialism and the Meaningfulness of Life

Gerol C. Petruzella

Marx’s conception of the meaningfulness of human life constitutes the essence of his philosophical theory.  Socialism is the realization of human nature, the final actualization of his potential as embodied in our “species-being” – the potential for conscious regulation of one’s own plans and actions. It is this concept of autonomous choice in terms of which Marx defines the intrinsic value of the human condition.       

Socialist theory is both formal and normative; that is, it explains what constitutes the good, and it also supplies some guidelines for achieving this good. It derives much of its teleological character from its dialectical roots in Hegel, taking as a metaphysical base the existence of some final end or goal. This end, namely, individual and collective autonomy, is identified early in Marx’s writing [Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 75 et seq.] and continues as a central theme both in his critique of capitalism’s exploitation and in his development of socialism: it is because capitalism denies the full autonomous expression of human nature that it is exploitative and thus to be rejected, and it is because socialism fully embodies the goal of self-determination that Marx so wholeheartedly supports it.      

It can be objected, however, that Marx, in his development of socialist theory, commits the naturalistic fallacy, arguing from the very existence of circumstances to the ethical value of those circumstances.  For, although it may be true that human nature is best described with Marx as a non-static association of changing proclivities; and even though it may be that our species-being does not realize its potential except through the full expression which socialism affords it; nevertheless, these facts, by themselves, can say nothing about whether they ought to be pursued as choice-worthy goals.

This objection can be suitably answered within the context of the Aristotelian conception of nature which, it seems, Marx shares to a degree. The purpose of a thing’s nature is to further that thing’s goal, or good; when that thing fulfills its nature, it necessarily achieves the good. Thus, the free development of species-being within a socialist system is, in itself, desirable, for it necessarily furthers the final good.              

Gerol C. Petruzella is a student at MCLA




The Persistence of Social Darwinism

Anthony D. Annichiarico

In Man Versus the State, Herbert Spencer argues fervently that principles of biological evolution should be applied to human society.  This is the common misinterpretation of Darwinism aptly called Social Darwinism.  By borrowing a few easily recognizable features of the scientific notion of evolution, Social Darwinists attempt to rationalize objectively a system of subjugation and exploitation.  Spencer used this theory to justify his condemnation of Britain’s lower classes, referring to them as “good-for-nothings” who should be allowed to perish in squalor.

If this phenomenon is examined closely, it becomes apparent that Social Darwinism is alive and well in America today.  Throughout our history, every so-called advance of Democracy has been tainted by a legacy of brutality.  It is obvious that every expansion of territory in the United States was occasioned by the same ethnocentric, racist rhetoric that Spencer espoused. 

Instead of denouncing this as a misuse of scientific theory, Darwin stated that “there is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection” (Descent of Man, p. 179), showing that Darwin himself was not entirely without guilt in promulgating the racist fantasies of the power-elite.               

However brutal, such expansion is necessary to further capitalist enterprise, and the needs of the powerful are reflected in Social Darwinism’s underlying principle:  those who own and control the means of production will use every tool they can to convince the masses that what they are doing is not only justifiable, but in accordance with natural law.

This is one “misinterpretation” of Darwin that permeates every facet of our society, including a neo-liberal foreign policy that makes the whole globe susceptible to our idea of “natural selection,” however misguided or immoral that idea may be.
Anthony D. Annichiarico is a student at MCLA


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