Metaethical Concerns

What obliges one to participate in an ethical system?

I've had quite a number of conversations about ethics on campus and there seems to be about three popular reasons why one should act morally. By far the most often heard is because one doesn't want to get into trouble, which is no ethical reason at all. Another I heard once or twice was when discussing why one wouldn't trust a person who didn't believe in God: a person who doesn't believe wouldn't have any reason to act morally  That one is the most scary because it implies that that believer is only acting morally for fear of punishment by God, not because they want to act morally.

Only occasionally do people appeal to a humanist ethical system. I can't help but feel that there is a grain of truth to the theists supposition that it is hard for those not coerced by a god-figure to act morally. Maybe also some of the blame lies in alienating justice from morality, as if it could be a separate entity.

I want to figure out how to diffuse this disconnect in a way that everyone can see and understand. If morality is fundamentally constructed off the starting point of the necessity of satisfying basic human needs then morality is fundamental to the DNA of human sharing and reciprocity. Since we are fundamentally social creatures it is impossible to ignore morality as it is the fundamental understanding informing all our actions.

Having a SOAL is Important

The subject of a life (SOAL) criteria is vital for any humanist or post-absolutist system of natural rights above and beyond the issue of animal rights. Our nation's founding documents list our rights as natural and 'God given,' but what happens when there is no God? There is no such thing as a morality derived from nature, or else you could argue that homosexuality was immoral because it makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective (also false). How then do we talk of 'rights,' insinuating duties to individuals above and beyond arbitrarily ascribed law, when there seems to be no absolute basis to put rights on?

That's where the SOAL criteria comes in. While it is true that the universe is fundamentally meaningless and valueless we still tend to seek meaning and value things. The key is that value is not external or intrinsic to the metaphysical objects of the world around the conscious subject, but rather it is the capacity in the subject's mind to value that creates value! A conscious being with the ability to value likely values itself and objects related to it. Moral value is thus constructed, but it is absolutely constructed (1) in that a subject values itself and certain metaphysical objects around it, so therefore the subject itself has inherent moral value created a priori from being a thing that values.

Talk of rights should then be fundamentally informed by the SOAL criteria, which provide the epistemological mechanism for deciding if a being possesses natural rights. Relying on a document as the basis for rights is dangerous and fundamentally fallacious because that document needs to refer elsewhere to guarantee rights. It would be fantastic if the popular concept of rights considered them as something naturally beyond the reach of government or societal regulation.

(1) That is, not haphazardly constructed in any way the conscious mind wants like some would argue.

My Course Take Away

Animals and Ethics has served to strengthen my resolve on issues relating to animal rights and clarified a key issue I was still on the fence about. Animal testing seems to be in the category of ill-gotten gains, those sort of gains you cannot ever resort to because they are fundamentally morally wrong. Thus, like it is wrong for doctors to experient on a human without their consent for no other reason than humans are enSOALed beings with a right to not be killed and tortured against their will, animals have a similar right because they are similarly enSOALed.

Moving into the future I plan on becoming fully vegan, following my younger brother who at 16 has been vegan for almost two years proving it's not as hard as I used to assume. Aramark is terrible though  and I hope to get off the meal plan next year so I can design my own more healthy and balanced diet for the next year.

I really hope everyone has come to a similar realisation that the case for animal rights is pressing and requires action.

Changing Attitudes on Animal Rights

In response to Sebastian's post here

While this is not a strictly philosophical post, it is fascinating to reflect on the history of various social movements that have achieved (to some degree) success nationally and internationally. Some movements that have succeeded are the international movement's for women's rights, to abolish slavery, and now gay rights may have moved into the category of successful movements. On not one of these issues has there been a perfect victory(1), but at the very least the legitimate powers-that-be recognise the issue and at least make lip service to fighting against these various transgressions against certain groups natural rights.

The victory for animal rights, if it comes, will be far more complete and satisfying than any of these other victories, except perhaps that victory over legal slavery, because of the shear scope and horror of animal suffering under our current system of systematic murder and torture. Naturally this movement is different because it is inherently a liberal movement not a radical one, despite political radicals often being the first to support animal rights. It's a fundamentally liberal movement because animals cannot rise up and advocate for themselves, thus the movement falls into the liberal model of the socially and economically included advocating for the expansion of legal rights to those groups that were previously excluded.

Hopefully the day will come where 'speciesist' is as much an insult as 'homophobe' or 'racist,' but animal rights being accepted by society is by no means inevitable  Our species seems to have an uncanny ability to rationalise, and despite the economic conditions being right, we have been owning and eating animals for millennia. It's going to be a hard habit to break, but we must try, if only in our own lives.

(1) Even slavery still needs work http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/

Wild v Domestic Animals

In response to Brandon - full post here

I think it is perhaps pressing to discern which animals should be marked as under guardianship and those who take care of themselves. It seems that those animals that are domesticated are the ones most in need of paternalistic guidance as they navigate the complicated social realities of living as part of human society.

What I'm worried about is weather this takes away some essential dignity, not to say that we can say pets have a sense of dignity. These are rights bearing animals with consciousnesses and memories so they certainly require being treated with some respect.

I'm not sure if wild animals count as those under guardianship. Our relationship with animals in the wild is much less straightforward than our relationship with our domesticated animals, especially considering our various and sundry failures to positively intervene in the affairs of the larger ecosystem. If anything we have a responsibility to wild animals, but we are not their guardians because they don't need us. They simply need us not to interfere in their natural habitats so they can get on with their lives.'

In short, it seems we have positive duties to those animals we are guardians of (i.e. providing shelter and guidance in human society) and only negative duties to wild animals (i.e. to not utterly destroy their environment or otherwise unreasonably intervene in their lives).

Q&A Ten Question Two

Q: What is it about subjecthood that makes it immoral to own [a subject]?

A: I said in my Q&A that it is immoral to own a being that was a subject of a life (SOALs) because it is immoral to interfere with a SOALs interests. That's sort of hard to defend because we need to figure out what is in an animal's interest. Do most animals have anything more than immediate interests? Does this mean that we can't ever constrain an animal because that animal would presumably always be interested in escaping from those constraints?

There is a difference between conscious interests and psychological and physical interests. The conscious interests of animals aim at satisfying those psychological and physical interests which the conscious mind of the animal might not be equipped to properly provide for, especially if the animal is a member of human society. Thus it is not morally wrong to stop a pig consciously in pursuit of food from walking over a cliff because it's conscious mind is not able to attend to the pigs fundamental interests. Similarly, restraining a dog in the appropriate social situations may be necessary because it relies on it's participation in human society for it's psychological and physiological needs.

Q&A Ten Question One

Q: Is ownership an appropriate model for human relationships to objects?

A: Ownership does not appear to be an appropriate model for human interaction with animals and has related practical, if not moral, pitfalls. As I argued for before, animals cannot be owned as Subjects of a Life, which is the moral difference between them and objects. An object can only have instrumental moral value since the object is not a valuer in itself and thus, if it is to have any moral value at all, that value must be derived from it's instrumental value to a SOAL.

Then the only reason that a the property relationship would be morally inappropriate is if it causes harm to SOALs. We can clearly point out cases where property ownership causes harm to humans, such as the ownership of the means of production by a capitalist class. There is the technical skill and material wealth available to eliminate extreme poverty, but because of ownership there are vast amounts of humans and nonhumans harmed by the mechanisms of an irrational capitalism.

This doesn't invalidate little Johnny's ownership of his teddy bear, and it doesn't give us a clear picture of a post-ownership relationship with objects, but it does point out that the property relationship is in often a morally inappropriate way for a society to structure it's material culture in regards to the creation and distribution of wealth.