September 29, 2010
How to think about…vegetarianism
Self-indulgent long philosophy post of the week. My super-long-term readers have seen this argument before, at my old (now deleted) blog. I am unrepentant in my recycling.
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The other day Andrew wanted to know why I gave up vegetarianism. And as it happens, I was recently listening to Jeff McMahan claiming that we should all be vegetarians. I’ll therefore use McMahan as a stalking horse, by way of answering Andrew.
***
I’m prepared to go easy on McMahan. I won’t make any controversial claims that animal suffering is not necessarily bad (as McMahan simply assumes it to be). So I’ll leave out quasi-Nietzschean thoughts about the suffering of animals enhancing the reasons to eat them.
I’ll also abstain from calling into question some of McMahan’s question-begging manoeuvres. Like assuming that the enjoyment animals experience is straightforwardly commensurable with that of humans.
I’ll even leave off snarking too hard on McMahan’s bizarre remark that his children have been vegetarian since birth “by choice”.
Instead, I’ll focus on a simple argument I take to be final in these matters.
It is a brute fact that the vegetarianism of any individual neither saves any animal lives, nor stops any animal suffering. This is because – given the scales of production involved in modern meat-rearing and processing – the decisions of any single consumer have no appreciable impact on market demand. This demand is so large, being constituted by so many thousands of individual consumers, that the removal of one specific consumer has no appreciable reduction for the net demand for meat, and thus no consequent reduction in supply will follow.
Simple vegetarianism – i.e. abstaining from meat purchase/consumption, but doing nothing else – does not save animal lives (or prevent their suffering). If you want to make a difference in terms of consequences to animals themselves, then do something practically useful. Like buying a herd of cows, putting them in your field, and feeding them until they die of old age. That sort of action affects animal lives. Abstaining from meat in a modern mass-consumer economy does not.
Of course, what we have here is a nasty little Sorites Paradox. If everybody acted in concert to give up meat, then market demand would fall, supply would contract, and fewer animals would be killed or experience suffering (largely because many would never be born in the first place). But here’s another brute fact: any individual considering going vegetarian must face the truth that the vast majority of others won’t follow suit. A mass vegetarian revolution is simply not a realistic prospect. As a consequence, any individual’s decision to abstain from meat can have no appreciable impact on market demand, meaning no fewer animals suffer and die. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
But this isn’t the end of the matter. Integrity is also important for moral agents.
People like McMahan are appalled by the meat industry. The mass suffering – and as they see it, exploitation and murder – of animals is to their minds indefensible. In turn, such people may decide they want to have no association with such an evil (as they see it) industry. They do not want to benefit from, or even enjoy, the products of such processes. Nor do they want to be (even symbolically) complicit in them, say by handing over money for flesh. To do otherwise would cast a stain on their moral character – and they want their characters to be clean.
For people who reason this way, vegetarianism will probably be the right option, insofar as it guarantees of their own personal integrity. But not everybody needs to end-up at that decision.
Let’s grant that what is done to animals, via the meat industry, is highly unpleasant. Animals die and suffer for our pleasure, and yet most of us tend to think that suffering is prima facie a bad thing. However it doesn’t follow that everyone must give up eating meat, even if they condemn animal suffering as morally wrong.
For people like me, the “clean hands”/“not in my name”/“I don’t want to be a beneficiary of nasty processes” type thoughts simply don’t have decisive motivational purchase. Other thoughts carry more weight. Like knowing that life as a vegetarian is considerably more difficult than one as an omnivore. Or believing that being the beneficiary of a process which would go on regardless of whether or not one abstained is no particularly bad thing. Or even just liking the taste of meat more than worrying (with somewhat pointless futility) about how it arrived on one’s plate.
Accordingly, because I don’t feel that my personal integrity is compromised by meat-consumption, there’s simply no reason that I should give it up. Indeed, because my giving-up meat would have no consequences for any animals’ lives, even if I think killing animals (or making them suffer) is wrong, it doesn’t follow that I must go vegetarian.*
McMahan, of course, may disagree. He may find he can’t sleep at night if he eats sentient beings. But that will be a decision for him, about his integrity. The philosophical rub, however, is that vegetarianism turns out to be rather less about the animals, and rather more about McMahan.
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*Note: if I were to fear that others might view my meat-eating as callous and so hold me in disregard, that might be a reason for me to go vegetarian. But what would be doing the motivational work would be a desire to avoid the disapprobation of others, not a concern for the lives and well-being of animals.
Richard Millwood said,
September 29, 2010 at 8:00 am
This post reads as so unworthy. The incremental effect on me, of all my friends and children, who have chosen for reasons of integrity and logic to become vegeterian has been wholly beneficial. Their stand reminds me of the issues on a daily basis, has widened my eating and cooking horizons and has caused me to buy less meat. I respect the decision to go vegetarian in a not dissimilar way to respecting conscientious objectors. I have not been tested by a call to arms, nor to kill an animal (since cluibbing the odd fish as a teenager), and I am glad of not being made to make such decisions. Meanwhile, my bacon (and other meats) addiction remains and grows as a concern for my health. Your post seems to me obtuse and “life as a vegetarian is considerably more difficult than one as an omnivore” seems to me to be hyperbole.
Paul Sagar said,
September 29, 2010 at 8:10 am
Richard, *for me* life as a vegetarian was (for circumstance-specific reasons) more difficult. *for you* it may be different. But notice that the points you’ve given here are about you and your family…not the animals. Like I said, integrity thoughts do the work here, not consequences. And that’s fine. It was never my aim to tell you not to be vegetarian. Whatever floats your character-preserving boat.
Tim Worstall said,
September 29, 2010 at 8:40 am
We could even borrow a bit from Catholic moral philosophy here. Good cannot come from evil deeds.
If the process of raising and slaughtering animals is indeed evil (a highly contentious point I agree) then whatever the ease of life etc the eating of them provides such is still evil.
Note, please, that I’m taking the process of the C. moral philosophy, not saying that it does regard the raising and slaughter of animals as evil.
And if the process is not inherently evil then sure, those other social forces come into play, but if it ain’t evil then you don’t have to go vegetarian because it is.
And yes, the Church really does use this logic. The MMR vaccine is, in stricter circles (it was a monk at my old school who made the determination) not allowable for Catholics, for the R part was made from the foetus of an aborted baby/child/fibroblast/whatever non-judgemental word you want to use.
Abortion is wrong, evil, thus using the proceeds of one to do something, however good that something is, cannot be possible, for good cannot come from evil.
BTW, I’m not saying that this should hold, nor that it does hold, just that it’s one way of approaching the point. If how the meat gets to our plates is evil then we can’t do it, whatever else is going on.
Paul Sagar said,
September 29, 2010 at 8:51 am
Tim, all this shows us is that, as usual, the moral teachings of the Catholic Church are stupid and to be ignored.
The daft over-simplicity of a catch-all principle like “no good can come from evil” is, in a complex world like ours, its own refutation.
Ed said,
September 29, 2010 at 9:32 am
Paul,
As this post is pretty Bernard Williams heavy, I thought you’d appreicate his diagnosis of philosophical vegetarianism:
“In the past white males like Singer and Tooley used to speak up greatly for the rights of women and minorities. Now fortunately women speak up for themselves and minorities speak up for themselves so the white liberal spokespersons are out of a job, but there’s one group that they can still patronize because they can’t speak for themselves and that’s the animals. The animals have this great advantage. …I’ll hear their rights when they express them themselves.”
Left Outside said,
September 29, 2010 at 9:34 am
There’s another interesting point brought up by Alex Tabarrok:
Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today there are about 1.3 billion of your compatriots. It would be a fine thing for cows if all cows were well treated and if none were slaughtered for food. Nevertheless, being a clever cow, you understand that it’s the demand for beef that brings cows to life. How do you regard such a trade off?
If each cow brought to life adds even some small bit of cow utility to the grand total of cow welfare must not beef eaters be lauded, at least if they are hungry enough? Or is the pro beef-eater argument simply repugnant?
Should a cow behind a haystack of ignorance choose the world with the highest expectation of utility? In which case, a world of many cows each destined for slaughter could well be preferable to one with many fewer but happier cows.
Or is it wrong to compare the zero of non-existence with existence? Should a cow philosopher focus on making cows happy or on making happy cows? If the former, would one (or two) supremely happy cows not be best?
Maybe vegetarianism, if effective at lowering demand, would be harmful to cows as a group, because it would reduce the net utility of cows by reducing their number.
Paul Sagar said,
September 29, 2010 at 9:44 am
Ed and Left Outside – both excellent contributions, thanks.
Haystack of Ignorance, indeed.
James A said,
September 29, 2010 at 11:25 am
Good post, but I think you be being too generous in granting that it is straightforwardly a matter of integrity. My view is that it is an error to conflate integrity with a concern for purity. These concepts are not sharp, of course, so I can’t offer anything like a precise definition, but at a minimum I take integrity to be a kind of consistent adherence to a core set of ethical principles or values. Now, I take it that the principle in play here is a concern for animal welfare, and a concomitant commitment to reducing their immense suffering. So integrity in this matter would require a real commitment, consistently acting so as to reduce the suffering of animals.
But, as you pointed out in your post, personally abstaining from eating meat does not in any way prevent the suffering of animals. In fact, to have any chance of having any effect at all on animal welfare, you’d have to really commit yourself to campaigning, organising, raising awareness, in fact, doing all the kinds of things people with integrity and real commitment do when it comes to other moral and political concerns.
If someone abstains from eating meat personally, but is not willing to devote any of their time and effort to these further activities, I wouldn’t say that is integrity; I’d say it’s a concern for purity, for “clean hands”, as you put it.
This is analogous, in my view, to boycotting the products of companies who treat their workforces unethically. Just personally not buying their products is not a sign of integrity. Those with real integrity aren’t the ones who just express revulsion at such activities and wash their hands of it, but rather the ones who devote time and effort to educating people, organising mass boycotts which might actually have an effect, etc. etc.
So like I said, good post, good argument, but perhaps conceding too much?
Paul Sagar said,
September 29, 2010 at 11:42 am
James,
A very strong point – and if we’re being ruthless, one likely to apply to most vegetarians all of the time and all the rest of us some of the time.
Nonetheless, I do want to ease off
a bit and recognise that life is very complicated for many people, with lots of time pressures and demands of commitment in other areas. For those lacking the time/resources to engage in animal liberation, but who would like to, I think vegetarianism can be a none (entirely) self-serving ethical stance and a perfectly respectable one.
Of course, I recognise that most vegetarians can do more than they actually do…hence they are probably guilty of the self-serving egotistical purity motivations you identify. Having said that, we all frequently tell ourselves we are good people for not doing X, even when that not-Xing is actually consequence free and really al about self-congratulation. Which is a) actually a very useful coping devise in a messy and nasty moral world and b) a fittingly Nietzschean conclusion to trail this Williams-esque discussion.
Why be vegtarian? « Pabs said,
September 29, 2010 at 12:53 pm
[...] the reason why I don’t follow the vegetarian logic through to its conclusion. This post – how to think about vegetarianism – helped me to put it simply: I cannot find enough motivational reason to do [...]
Thrasymachus said,
September 29, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Interesting.
My hunch is the point about ‘no negligible impact’ isn’t going to work. We can talk about marginal costs and stuff, and any hint of universalizeability stops us from making judgements like “well, everyone should do it, but we all don’t, so me doing it alone won’t count”. That seems about right to me: ‘integrity’ of moral character entails doing things that are occasionally futile because everyone else lacks it.
Following Left Outside though, there’s a wider issue about whether the meat trade actually gives more animal life than otherwise: a meat market contraction entails less animals living pre-slaughter lives. If we were serious the ideal might be to just make animal reserves everywhere we could, and its very unlikely this take could justify horrendous stuff like battery farming, but perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad overall. The logic extended to humans is repulsive (sandman etc.), but perhaps there’s not so much ‘dignity’ to offend for a cow. Perhaps if we ‘make’ 100 cows, let them live a bit and then kill them, the lives are still net-positive for the cow.
There’s other stuff about meat consumption being really inefficient, etc, but those aren’t really live issues. If you’re really interested in animal welfare, this should motivate first a commitment to environmentalism, and then (possibly) being a vegetarian.
Disclosure: I am a vegetarian. I haven’t noticed any major ill effects from doing so, although I don’t pretend it’s some grand moral crusade.
Barney said,
September 29, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Paul,
Just a quick point: whatever else this is, it’s not a Sorites paradox!
Barney said,
September 29, 2010 at 3:15 pm
And another: I like the distinction between purity and integrity. I take it that the best way to think of the distinction is between the subjunctive conditionals that are true of an agent. Having integrity is not a matter of what you actually do; it is a matter of what you would do in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, you can be a vegetarian out of integrity even if you do nothing more to reduce animal suffering – perhaps you are too busy, or you have other more pressing ethical concerns, or you don’t have the money to help, etc. (I know this doesn’t add anything. Hopefully explicitly thinking in terms of subjunctives clarifies things a little, though!)
I recently faced exactly this dilemma about flying and carbon emissions, incidentally. I resolved it in the same way that Paul resolved the issue of vegetarianism.
Ste For Sure said,
September 29, 2010 at 3:45 pm
“In the past white males like Singer and Tooley used to speak up greatly for the rights of women and minorities. Now fortunately women speak up for themselves and minorities speak up for themselves so the white liberal spokespersons are out of a job, but there’s one group that they can still patronize because they can’t speak for themselves and that’s the animals. The animals have this great advantage. …I’ll hear their rights when they express them themselves.”
I dislike Singer as much as the next guy, but that is a really shit point – and a pointless shitty thing to say. what a prick.
Ste For Sure said,
September 29, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Will Bernard Williams wait until people with profound learning disabilities express their rights themselves until he hears them?
I mean, god-forbid were he to come off patronising by advocating on their behalf.
Surely, he wouldn’t want to be like those horribly patronsisng white people who stood up for black people when their voices were easily ignored.
For some reason that quote really pissed me off.
BenSix said,
September 29, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Presumably, then, he doesn’t hear the rights of, say – the mentally disabled? The newborn? Late-term foetuses?
Andrew said,
September 29, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Paul: “[B]ecause my giving-up meat would have no consequences for any animals’ lives, even if I think killing animals (or making them suffer) is wrong, it doesn’t follow that I must go vegetarian”
Just to be clear, are you claiming that there is no moral imperative to abstain from morally dubious behaviour (or to engage in morally virtuous behaviour) when the effects are small enough?
Barney: “I recently faced exactly this dilemma about flying and carbon emissions, incidentally. I resolved it in the same way that Paul resolved the issue of vegetarianism.”
It seems to me the argument extends to all sorts of things, including recycling and donating to charity. Can it really be the case that any given individual has no moral imperative to recycle (as opposed to throwing everything in general waste), and no moral imperative to donate to charity unless he/she is wealthy enough that his/her individual donation will do measurable good?
“B”(G) is bad (good), but any given person X has no moral imperative to abstain from (engage in) B (G)” seems oxymoronic, or at least highly counterintuitive.
Barney said,
September 29, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Andrew,
“B”(G) is bad (good), but any given person X has no moral imperative to abstain from (engage in) B (G)” seems oxymoronic, or at least highly counterintuitive.
It is highly counterintuitive, but if I read him correctly then Paul isn’t claiming this. I’m certainly not. Paul’s point is that vegetarianism, on an individual level, has *no* effect on the overall amount of animal suffering in the world. Similarly, my point was that refuse to take a single flight has *no* effect on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Someone might abstain from flying or eating meat on the grounds that they can’t bear to profit in any way from a harmful activity, but they are deluding themselves if they think that they are making the world a better place by doing so.
James A said,
September 29, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Barney, the distinction between subjunctive and indicative conditionals doesn’t exist, because there is no such thing as the subjunctive and indicative moods in English. For a convincing argument, go here:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball0888/manifesto/dudman.htm
and download ‘Indicative and Subjunctive’.
James A said,
September 29, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Having said that, I take the point that if one is unable to devote time and energy to doing anything about animal welfare other than not eating meat themselves, then it can’t be a matter of integrity that they do any more than that. As perhaps Barney was getting at, integrity is a kind of disposition to act in a certain way under certain conditions.
However, in reply I’d make two points: (i) I don’t think there is any moral value in, say, someone who has more pressing ethical concerns deciding to refrain from eating meat if they’re going to do nothing else. Their action will not further the aim of reducing animal suffering, so they might as well be a meat-eater (unless, as I say, their concern is not with reducing animal suffering, but having clean hands). And (ii) there is almost always *something* more you can do, especially if – like a lot of vegetarians – you are a student or a middle-class person.
Peter said,
September 29, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Andrew,
Presumably, the point is not that the effect is very small (ie. you save one cow and not a thousand cows). Rather, the point is that the effect is nil. By being a veggie in modern Britain, you save the lives of zero cows.
Tingly Neurons said,
September 29, 2010 at 8:16 pm
You’ve qualified that paragraph with “For people like me”, but that condition needs emphasising. I know there are people for whom a meat-free diet simply isn’t an option. But I know plenty more who eat meat regularly just because that’s the default. There’s this popular belief that it’s the vegetarians who have made a weird life choice, and must be malnourished or dieting or taking a stance. So (at the risk of flaunting unexamined privilege) for people like me, life as a vegetarian is only more difficult than one as an omnivore when eating out in large groups.
And it’s because meat-eating is still seen as the default that every vegan, vegetarian, or part-time meat-abstainer contributes just by being visible. I don’t eat meat regularly, because I’ve learned from the less-meat-dependent people that I work or socialise with that it’s not necessary and I get no ill-effects from going without. Now that there’s a market for meat-free meals, it’s a little bit less difficult to live life as a vegetarian. The chance of that burger being the final straw in even a single meat order is vanishingly small, but it also brings that unrealistic mass vegetarian revolution one step closer.
(Note: I’m not a vegetarian by any modern definition; I was brought up an omnivore, and my current policy is to only eat meat when it’d be impolite, or very inconvenient, not to)
Andrew said,
September 29, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Barney: “Paul’s point is that vegetarianism, on an individual level, has *no* effect on the overall amount of animal suffering in the world.”
Peter: “Presumably, the point is not that the effect is very small (ie. you save one cow and not a thousand cows). Rather, the point is that the effect is nil. By being a veggie in modern Britain, you save the lives of zero cows.”
For flights, I think it’s plausible that one person’s behaviour considered in isolation might have no effect, even over the course of their whole life. (Ignoring for the sake of argument the small increase in fuel consumption due to the extra weight of that person and their luggage.)
For vegetarianism, however, I think the idea of *zero* effect is pretty implausible. A recent Channel 4 documentary estimated the average Briton consumes 4.5 cows, 1,201 chickens, 21 sheep and 15 pigs over the course of their life (http://25by4.channel4.com/chapter_9/article_4). So in order to believe that a given individual’s (lifetime) vegetarianism makes *zero* difference, you have to believe that all those animals will be raised and slaughtered anyway, and the resulting meat thrown away.
Or, thinking about it the other way round, in order for someone’s (lifetime) decision to eat meat to make *zero* difference, we have to assume that *any* meat that they *ever* consume would always have been consumed by someone else, or thrown away. So at no point in their life do they buy the last chicken or the last pack of sausages in a shop, and cause that shop to restock slightly earlier than planned, thereby causing some farmer to kill more animals than he had anticipated killing that week, etc.
So I think it’s safer to assume that we’re in the realm of marginal impacts rather than zero impacts.
Left Outside said,
September 29, 2010 at 11:24 pm
I just thought about the cow some more.
First of all, I think meat eating increases the number of cows who would otherwise be alive.
From the point of view of cow-happiness, I am unsure whether the fact that these cows will die for meat makes the net-utility positive or negative.
However, I forgot the opportunity cost of those cows. The alternatives are not just x cows exist or x + y cows exist; no, in the absence of cows other animals will live in the place not taken up by cows.
What produces more animals? Nature or industrial farming?
I don’t know, but that is what our philosophical cow should consider.
James A said,
September 30, 2010 at 2:03 am
Incidentally, more evidence for my Purity Hypothesis from something I happened to be reading:
“We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2)
Doug Cooper said,
September 30, 2010 at 9:46 am
@Paul,
This is an immense post, for which I plead your indulgence.
SInce you have constructed an argument which you “take to be final in these matters”, I’m not sure why you have retained the comments section (except perhaps for applause?), but here goes.
1/ Direct consequences (amplifying Andrew)
“It is a brute fact that the vegetarianism of any individual neither saves any animal lives, nor stops any animal suffering.”
(i) Over the course of a lifetime, a reasonably affluent omnivorous Westerner is likely to consume thousands of animals (mostly fish and chickens). One UK estimate can be found here: http://www.viva.org.uk/guides/animals/index.html.
(ii) Most of us buy our food at supermarkets. I take the point that, if one adopts a pure consequentialist approach (a big if), then the vegetarian may have lived a life morally frustrated (as it were) unless his renunciation of meat (a) reduced local retailers’ meat orders, and (b) those reduced orders themselves reduced production. Per Andrew, it seem likely that some renounced purchases will delay orders, and/or reduce the size of orders (especially as retailer stock control is more sensitive than ever); it is also likely that slower / smaller orders may, in aggregate, reduce the overall production at the relevant farms or ‘facilities’. There is also the chance (no higher) of renounced purchases triggering a cascade of tipping-point consequences that could actually magnify the causal effect.
(iii) Most important, if one considers industrialised food production to be savage, cruel, and unnecessary for human nutrition (I note you don’t demur from this), which side of the argument should bear the burden of proof? If buying meat stands a reasonable chance of causing real suffering upon real animals, then it follows that vegetarianism throws a real (instead of, as you would have it, merely jejune, vain) moral question our way. You would have to be absolutely certain of your factual position re effects (leave the moral reasoning aside for a second) in order to not then engage with this question (I actually think this point is present to you, hence your statements that vegetarianism can make no “appreciable” difference — meaning what, exactly?). But then you have said your argument is “final”; you must have access to copper-bottomed facts denied the rest of us.
2/ Indirect consequences and social change
“But here’s another brute fact: any individual considering going vegetarian must face the truth that the vast majority of others won’t follow suit. A mass vegetarian revolution is simply not a realistic prospect.”
(i) Again, I think caveats are already eating away at your certitude: “the vast majority”, “mass”. Individual vegetarians don’t believe they can change the entire world, or even a majority of any size, but sometimes (mostly by example and invited explanation) they do alter the eating habits of those with whom they eat. Such changes may be about meat welfare standards as well as vegetarianism. These changes then magnify the consequences of points 1/ (i) – (iii) above. I am not able to name the species of paradox you claim to identify, but the experience of the UK’s move away from caged laying hens shows us there is a way out of it.
3/ Consequentialism and ‘integrity’
As rebuttal, this aspect is gratuitous because I don’t think you have made out the first plank of your argument (cf 1/, 2/ above). But it does go to the heart of something important around all this. For it I assume my points 1/ and 2/ are void and that vegetarianism reduces no suffering and saves no lives.
(i) It is essential to human nature to encounter thresholds when the merely gestural becomes charged with moral force. Imagine (this is analogy and not equivalence) it was a matter of public record that all mahogany furniture was sourced from wood harvested by forced child labour in Brazil. Imagine also you knew for a fact that no renunciation of yours of buying mahogany furniture would affect levels of production or cruelty. Imagine also that no renunciation could ever influence those with whom you spend time (or, for example, those who read your blog). I suggest to you that you would stop buying mahogany furniture immediately. (If you are as morally relaxed as James A, just keep raising the stakes until your conscience is engaged.)
(ii) If, further, I told you this was simply a matter of “floating your character-preserving boat” or “purity” (as you put it), you would disagree and assert that it had independent moral force.
(iii) Your argument above on this aspect repeatedly implies that this is all just a matter of taste and temperament. You baldly state that, for you, “[o]ther thoughts carry more weight” and you don’t “feel” integrity is more important than (to take one of your examples) liking the taste of meat. (To adopt one of your terms, are these criteria “commensurable”?)
(iv) You are assuming/arguing that integrity has no moral content or claim upon you, and can be traded off against pleasure, or indeed, it would appear, any preference-criterion that drifts across one’s sensorium. This could be true, but only if either (a) you can empirically entertain no scenario in which you made a moral decision which you knew to have no linear causal consequences (cf (ii) above), or (b) you had just a priori dismantled all branches of both deontology and virtue ethics.
(v) Assuming neither of these to be the case, you are thrown back to the nitty-gritty of actually weighing up the reality of modern animal production, and making an argument on the merits rather than neutering the moral case, the welfare case, before it can even get its trousers on.
(vi) Such as (for example): “Eating meat from the body of a urine-soaked, debeaked, broken-legged, permanently confined, clumsily slaughtered chicken is not an issue which engages my moral integrity because [insert reasoned argument here]; and by reason of [insert evidence here] I am sufficiently certain that over my lifetime, by way of purchases and social influence, it is impossible for me to have an effect on the number of such animals who live in this way; further, I am sufficiently certain by reason of [insert evidence here] that, despite the evidence of behaviour and comparative neurology, non-human mammals and birds do not experience pain and suffering akin to that which I have known or am capable of”; or “This pain and suffering of animals exists, but it matters less than mine, and below a significant moral threshold which I shall identify, for [insert reason here]“.
If I may say so, your tone of preening conclusiveness, and the rhetoric of imperatives (“[i]f you want to make a difference in terms of consequences to animals themselves, then do something practically useful”), while giving you the pleasure of moralising the moralisers (which I presume to be the pleasure you exact from it) may be best reserved for occasions when you can genuinely lay claim to an ethical imperative, instead of a half-cocked rebuke to people who are (a) trying to reduce suffering, (b) probably effective in the attempt, and (c) harming nobody, least of all you, in the process.
Paul Sagar said,
September 30, 2010 at 10:04 am
Doug, Andrew
I’m in the middle of moving house, so not much time to reply properly – but will try and post a full length reply later.
In short: it is flatly false that your *individual* consumer decisions significantly affect a) market demand and/or b) market supply. To suppose otherwise is either to grossly misunderstand how large scale supply and demand operates, or to willfully overestimate you own importance and impact. As for this stuff about vegetarians not eating the equivalent of X animals over their life time, that’s all very well as a hypothetical summation but it’s elementary to see that it does not follow that such a number of actual animals actually were spared…unless you possess the bizarre (and false) belief that each meat eater corresponds to a private herd on some farm that is spared every time the meat-eater forgoes rump steak for carrots.
Points about social consequence are noble minded, but from the perspective of the individual’s actions by being vegetarian, futile. Your vegetarianism has nil impact on the vast social practice of meat eating. Of course, if you dedicated your life to campaigning – a la Peter Singer – for meat free diets if you influenced enough people *then* you might appreciably reduce market demand and make a consequential difference. But notice that what does the work is public campaigning and other people going veggie -not your vegetarianism. You could, in consequentialist terms, quite consistently campaign for others to give up meat whilst not doing it yourself. You’d be a hypocrite on many people’s estimation – but not (necessarily) incoherent [wherein I recant and confess that I was wrong in the first conversation I ever had with James A, many moons ago].
But I’m, if not glad, then unsurprised, to see Doug getting so annoyed. It’s the kind of reaction we might expect if James A and I are right.
Doug Cooper said,
September 30, 2010 at 10:46 am
Paul, I understood your argument the first time round. Please read mine again more carefully when you have time; ideally this should come before you set about diagnosing its supposed emotional underpinnings. I fail to understand your sense of the word ‘hypocrite’, which I take to mean a person whose behaviour is unjustifiably at odds with his principles.
Barney said,
September 30, 2010 at 11:25 am
Thanks for the pointer on the Dudman article, James – I’ll have a look at it over the weekend. I wasn’t aware that the claim that an important class of English language conditionals should be labelled “subjunctives” and given special semantic treatment was a controversial one. Shows how much I know about the logic of natural language!
Incidentally, perhaps Bob should get out a bit more? His pages on Dudman, though an excellent resource, are, erm, well, a little bit bizarre.
James A said,
September 30, 2010 at 11:31 am
Doug Cooper,
Seeing as much of the above is aimed at me, I hope you don’t mind if I respond? I’ll take your points in the order you made them.
1) I think you (and Andrew) are giving the market too much credit. Yes, the average British person consumes hundreds of animals during their lifetime, but seeing as this is distributed over their entire life the effect on production orders is bound to be close to zero. To take Andrew’s strongest example, chickens, apparently the average Brit consumes about 1200 chickens in their life. Life expectancy is about 80 years, so that is on average 15 chickens a year, which is on average a bit more than one a month. I really think it’s implausible that supermarket production orders are so sensitive they will pick up on this, especially when one considers that these will not all be bought from the same supplier. For the other animals mentioned, the numbers are so tiny that distributed across one’s lifetime they will obviously make no difference at all.
But let’s assume with Andrew that you’re right, and it has a non-null effect at the margins. It still doesn’t follow, as you seem to assert, that you are complicit in “savage” or “cruel” production, as you can still choose to purchase relatively ethically reared meat.
2) Your example of caged laying hens just proves the point I was making. The EU ban on traditional “barren” cages to come into effect in 2012 was not a response to a drop in consumer demand, it was a response to campaigning by animal welfare groups like Compassion in World Farming. This is the way to effect change. Not individual consumption decisions taken in isolation.
3) According to you, then, mere gestures which achieve nothing and do zero to advance your espoused ethical principles have “moral force”. Such a doctrine is worse than “morally relaxed”, because it encourages people to be satisfied with ‘feel-good’ actions and not to worry about whether they’re actually performing ‘do-good’ actions.
To take it concretely, let’s take the real life version of your imagined mahogany example. Namely, soy. The world’s largest exporter of soy is Brazil. Not only do soy plantations in Brazil lead to deforestation, according to the ILO there are about 50,000 slaves in Brazil, many of which work on soy plantations. Now soy is in roughly 75% of all processed foods sold by supermarkets, and nearly 100% of food sold by the fast food industry. So, how should we respond to this state of affairs? According to you, abstaining from eating any food that contains soy, just in case it was produced by Brazilian slave workers, has “moral force”, even if you know for certain that it does absolutely nothing to get Brazilians on soy plantations out of their slavery. I don’t agree with that, and I don’t think the ILO representatives who risk their lives challenging slave-owners in Brazil would be particularly impressed with the “integrity” of your stance.
Tingly Neurons said,
September 30, 2010 at 11:46 am
The key’s in “significantly”. Each individual choice not to eat meat one day makes negligible difference, but of all the customers in a supermarket in that one day, the total number of individuals buying alternatives to meat is a visible fraction of the takings, and does eventually have an effect further up the chain. If all the other customers are somehow different to you, and not subject to the complex circumstances contributing to your decision, then your individual choice almost certainly makes no difference – but if your reasoning is meant to be general-purpose and widely applicable, then the effects of many people subscribing to it should be considered.
Peter said,
September 30, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Tingly Neurons,
But we’re not deciding what *everyone* should do. We don’t have control over that. Paul Sagar decides what Paul Sagar does, he does not decide what all the customers in a supermarket do. And, I think that if Paul was (still) a vegetarian, that would have an almost nil effect on whether other people were vegetarians. Now, if Paul was held up as some great moral example, such that if he were to change his mind it would disillusion lots of people and lead to lots of people changing their consumption habits, then Paul’s actions might have some concrete, non-zero effect on the suffering of animals. But obviously, that’s not the world we live in. Very, very few people give a toss if Paul eats meat or not.
The consequentialist argument for vegetarianism really is useless, in my view. Though that’s not to say that there’s not a consequentialist argument for a stronger position (eg. that one should do a lot more to help animals than merely being a vegetarian), or that there’s not a non-consequentialist argument for vegetarianism.
Doug Cooper said,
October 1, 2010 at 6:58 am
@James,
actually my post wasn’t addressed to you but to Paul. I say this to clarify any ambiguities of sense, not to attempt a brush-off. Thank you (genuinely) for responding to my post and apologies in advance for the length of this.
I really don’t think you have engaged with my argument. I will try to put it more plainly and afresh, in lettered points below. If you would like to respond, I invite you to include a response (or indication of assent/dissent) to each point, in addition to any more general argument.
Rebuttals trail these points in a more free-range fashion. The numbering is altered, hopefully without damage to the sense.
1/ Background (humour me)
a/ Chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep and cattle experience physical pain akin to our own (or if you are really solipsistic, your own).
b/ Such animals also have social needs including flock / herd instincts, nurturing of newborn young, and other species-specific behaviours (eg roosting). The frustration of such needs causes measurable anxiety.
c/ Combining (a) and (b), intensively kept animals routinely suffer physical pain and the deprivation of social needs, because of the conditions forced upon them.
d/ I call this cruel, savage; you term it “cruel”, “savage”; are these the quotation marks of derision or of hedging your bets? Are they safe to remove?
e/ The aims of raising animals intensively are: (i) to reduce producers’ costs and hence increase profitability, and relatedly (ii) to reduce consumers’ expenses.
f/ Meat consumption is not nutritionally necessary for humans, and specifically not in modern western societies, where we have numerous nutritional substitutes; rather, we find meat pleasurable, traditional, and conventional.
g/ Synthesising the above: as a society, we deliberately cause substantial suffering to the bodies and well-being of animals, in aid of our desire for the pleasures of taste and habit, and increased disposable income.
2/ Direct and indirect consequences of vegetarianism
(a) You omit any discussion of my central conceptual claim: Given that industrialised / intensive meat production is cruel, and causes pain and suffering, the burden of proof when determining the consequences to animal production of intensive-meat consumption should rest with those asserting a moral entitlement to do so, rather than vice versa. (I will come to organic / free range shortly.)
(b) Factors making it more likely than not that a vegetarian individual will reduce the rate of intensive-meat production include (inter alia): increasingly sensitive stock-control in supermarkets; the chance (no higher) of renounced purchases triggering a cascade of tipping-point consequences, eg if chicken-raising decisions are made in steps of 5, 20, or 50 (which point I made above but you did not address); the significant chance of example and conversation to influence others to become vegetarian or to reduce their intensive-meat intake (and subsequent influences to further third parties, and so on, which in less ironised and apologetic times we used to call consciousness-raising).
Again, if you had engaged with my argument, you would see that my case rests not on the certainty of reduced production, far less on a one-for-one causal chain, but rather on its reasonable likelihood. At this point, one must then attend to the specifics of intensive-meat production, and try to weigh its cruelty against the likelihood of one’s conduct affecting real animals, adjusted for uncertainty with the doubt going in the animals’ favour (cf reality of their suffering: see Background).
Let’s introduce some numbers. Putting the uncertainty aside momentarily, if I knew that the net effects of my vegetarianism (including influence on third parties) only stopped, say 50 chickens and one pig being intensively ‘reared’ across the entire course of my lifetime, that would suffice for me. Your argument, like Paul’s, depends squarely on the assertion that *none* of the factors at (b) are even capable of affecting real animals’ lives, and I see neither the knowledge nor the experience entitling you to draw this conclusion. Disagree? Itemise them *specifically*.
You brandish the forthcoming EU ban on caged hens as a vindication of both your picture of how social change occurs, and, implicitly, the moral superiority of unrestrained omnivorism (I take this to be your position since you argue no other) and vegetarianism.
Armed with a vision of the naive animal rights campaigner, you caricature my position as one dazzled by the sovereignty of “individual consumption decisions taken in isolation.” In fact it is your position that unrealistically separates out different elements of cultural, legal, and political change. Imagine if no market for free range eggs were in existence; how successful do you think lobbying by CWF would have been? And how do you think this market came about, other than by an accretion of individual decisions, each of which you would presumably seek to pick off and ridicule as futile? How possible would any legally compelled final market transition have been, if the technology, experience, capacity and will had not already developed within the industry, driven by market forces?
You suggest that campaigning is the only way for a vegetarian to rescue his decision from a gauche embarrassment (like those acceptable vegetarians at CWF). But you are like somebody who, after exclaiming that a telescope is broken, holds it up to his eye by the other end in triumph. Because note that, in your world-view, any decision by an individual who actually hears a campaign is futile, since you claim that (a) it has no effect, and (b) personal integrity (aka deontology, or virtue ethics — see below) must be bankrupt or bad faith. So why should anybody listening to CWF change their mind, or their conduct? You haven’t explained why campaigning either will, or should, change an individual’s behaviour, when you are so certain that an identical decision reached without campaigning is irrational or even counter-productive. And what would be the content of such campaigning? Your argument implies that it could contain no normative moral claims. Really, just think about what it could sound like.
You also seem unimpressed by credibility and leadership as drivers of social change. Would you, or anyone, listen to a Compassion in World Farming campaign driven by people who openly ate intensive meat? Why not, if, as you argue, the renunciation of such food is futile? Or might you (or Paul) call such campaigners ‘hypocrites’, since you are on such alert lookout for them? But since, to your mind, legal and cultural change are absolutely separate, and since you regard integrity (properly a fusion of principles and action) not as a precondition to persuasion but a strict alternative, perhaps you think nobody would notice, or mind. Such are the conclusions which your unillusioned realism about human nature drives you.
Since you also assume no continuum between living as a mere vegetarian, affecting nobody, and living as a Singerian ubermensch campaigner, permanently remoulding the lives of every passing mob, will you commit yourself to the latter today? Do you have any substantive moral views on all this, or are you just a picador, throwing darts where you may?
3/ Vegetarianism, free-range/organic meat-eating, or anything goes
(a) The core wrong of our culture’s attitude to animals is intensive animal production (see 1/Background above passim). (Just ride the collectivist wave for a moment.)
(b) Assuming (i) sufficient welfare standards of organic/free-range meat, and (ii) humane, painless slaughter, there is a reasonable disagreement about the moral significance of consuming animals (this is actually what I believe; by contrast your position is that eating intensive, abused animals is actually morally superior to being a non-Singerian vegetarian. Surprised? Re-read your post.).
(c) The production of organic/free-range meat has grown as a direct consequence of increased demand, driven by increased awareness of both the facts, and the moral claims, of animal welfare.
(d) Without vegetarians and the animal rights lobby, there would be fewer organic/free-range animals (cf arguments under 2 above); hence the meat would be less widely available and would be more expensive.
(e) In our culture it is socially impossible to insist to others that one only be served meat raised in accordance with one’s own moral principles; hence:
(f) No omnivore presently exists who would tell their family, friends, dinner party hosts (of whatever degree of acquaintance), and restaurant waiters: “I will eat the meat you serve, but only on the condition it is organic or free-range”.
(g) Hence, whilst conscientious omnivorism is conceptually possible, it is socially inconceivable. (Perhaps, James, you would like to be the trailblazer? Again, though, given your beliefs about consequences and integrity, why would you bother?)
(h) By contrast, vegetarianism is socially acceptable, easily understood in all social contexts, and easy to implement.
4/ Integrity
This is your (and my) point 3. I refuse to remake the case from scratch because you haven’t, apparently, read my argument, which I made at some length. Consider it repeated and go back and read it again. For clarification:
My mahogany furniture exercise is a thought experiment to compel a concession on a point of general principle — namely, that we all could cite or imagine cases of consumption or personal contact which we would shrink from, in moral revulsion, notwithstanding the absence of linear causal consequences. My argument emerged through the specific case but is not, of course, limited to it (I will come to yours).
So, to get the point across, I will raise the stakes (steaks?) as suggested. Imagine that each time a beef cattle is slaughtered, an orphan is drowned in a bucket. By your lights as currently argued, you would have no reason to stop eating steak, since in your assessment renunciation would neither (a) reduce production, nor (b) trouble your conscience (integrity). In fact, by your logic it would actually be morally *worse* to stop eating steak, as this would make you complacent, content with, in your terms, the merely “feel-good” as opposed to the “do-good” (remember you believe you must choose between one or the other, and that reinforcing one’s sense of principle through conduct is incapable of spurring further action).
The point is not whether there is a moral equivalence between slaughtering cattle and drowning orphans (there is not) (or buying Nazi gold? you have the point by now I hope). The point is that we all accept as a generality, given an example that arrests our moral instincts, that we can be morally compelled to an action that has no morally significant linear consequences (I do not accept this to be the case in the matter at hand, but assume it for the purposes of argument) — this is what Paul rightly identified as a branch of ‘integrity’ (and over which his reasoning then evaporated) and you call, without rebuttal or reflection, “mere gestures”. The question then is: which issues properly engage this integrity? My argument against Paul is given in full above; condensed, it was that he actually made no argument at all, but simply assumed it to have no moral content whatsoever. As I think Paul knows, this move is necessary if one is to avoid actually looking empirically at the facts of intensive meat production; as he must if he is to assert his argument to be “final” despite paying no specific regard to the phenomenon under discussion, an extraordinary position in any sphere of applied ethics.
This is why the ‘Background’ at 1/ in this post is pervasively relevant.
I like the audacity of your soy example. Talk about putting your thumb on the scales. You choose the one product potentially present in almost any processed product (and chicken and beef indirectly, I believe), diffuse, dilute and virtually ineradicable from a modern diet, and then presume to imply that this example is on all fours with meat (either cruel or humane), which is largely separable from the rest of one’s diet, and bears its welfare credentials at the point of retail purchase (how did that come about, I wonder?). Staggeringly, you impute to me a preposterous mock-heroic stance, in a bizarre scene of your own invention:
“I don’t think the ILO representatives who risk their lives challenging slave-owners in Brazil would be particularly impressed with the “integrity” of your stance.”
Shall I send them an apology? Could you send me their email address? What is it about the impassioned (usually male) counter-vegetarian that so often tries to not only neutralise the moral argument, but to contend or insinuate that vegetarianism is actually morally suspect?
Or instead of this weird hectoring, please address the integrity issue at the level of general principle. Thanks if you have read this far and by the way, I do take your points on board, and I think they are serious as far as they go.
@Paul,
Hope your move was Ok. I promise this is the end.
Tingly Neurons said,
October 1, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Peter,
True, I may have misunderstood the purpose of posts titled “How to think about…”
Is there a valid consequentialist argument for voting, in your view? Assuming that most food outlets don’t restock based on FPTP, an individual’s choice when buying food is more likely to have an effect than how they vote.
Peter said,
October 1, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Tingly Neurons,
There’s not (to my knowledge) a sound consequentialist argument for every individual to vote. Those that live in very safe seats etc may well have better things to do.
So much the worse for consequentialism in my view.
James A said,
October 1, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Doug,
I mainly agree with point (1). The conditions which we keep animals in are often cruel and savage. But they aren’t always, which is the point I was making.
(2a) doesn’t apply, since neither I nor Paul asserted a moral entitlement to rear animals for meat-consumption.
(2b) Your arguments don’t make much sense to me. Plausibly a purchase might cause a supermarket attendant to restock the shelf, i.e. they might put a few more chickens out as a result. But decisions about production are obviously not made on the basis of whether someone restocked a shelf once.
I don’t understand how the “cascade of tipping-point consequences” thing is supposed to work, but the poultry market in the UK is enormous, selling tens of millions of birds every month. You think the supermarkets which trade in these markets deal in increments of 5, 20 or 50 chickens?
If you don’t want to take my word for it, however, how about Peter Singer’s:
“The loss of one consumer from the millions who buy animal flesh makes so small a difference that it is impossible to say it affects the number of animals reared and killed.”
Or plenty of other ethical philosophers who support moral vegetarianism.
Your argument sounds a little like something I’ve heard of called the Threshold Argument: maybe that is what you’re referring to? In which case, read Gary Chartier, ‘On the Threshold Argument against Consumer Meat Purchases’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 32(2), 233-249, Summer 2006. Which will show you why that argument is hopeless.
On campaigning, you entirely missed my point, which is not that refraining from purchasing meat can *never* have an impact but that it has to be part of a wider effort. Once education, organising, campaigning and so on is broad and effective enough, mass consumption decisions might well have an effect. Which is the reasoning behind boycott movements. This doesn’t affect the argument that Paul and I were making.
To be clear, at no point did I say there is no continuum between simply abstaining from meat and throwing yourself heart and soul into campaigning.
Since you ask, I have my own personal commitments, but they don’t really lie in this area. I’m more concerned about the impact of war and poverty on human beings, and devote my time and energy accordingly. Undoubtedly I could do more, but if I do it will be for humans, and not for animals.
3) Regarding your argument from (a)-(h) (such as it is), I don’t think the conclusion follows. What follows is that in some circumstances, a conscientious omnivore might end up eating meat from animals reared unethically. But it doesn’t mean that being conscientious is impossible. The vast majority of meat that one eats is bought oneself, and can be selected on the grounds that the animals were treated better.
4) As far as I can see, your mahogany thought-experiment is parallel in the relevant respects to my real life soy example. One could avoid products containing soy by purchasing from local, small-scale markets instead of from supermarkets. The real question is: is there any moral value in boycotting food containing soy if your actions have zero effect on slavery in Brazil? In my view, not really. If you helped organise and participated in a mass boycott which made the soy industry tighten monitoring of labour conditions, that would have moral value. Or simply trying to educate others about the plight of Brazilian slaves, seeing what you can do about it, you know, trying different tactics (I don’t know what would work a priori). That would be fine. But abstaining from purchasing unethically produced things is *just* a tactic, which no intrinsic value in itself — it’s only valuable if it works. Same with drowning orphans: you should do what works, not what makes you feel better. This has nothing to do with deontology or virtue ethics vs. consequentialism, it’s just a basic moral truism.
Sorry if I haven’t responded to all your points, they’re rather scatter-shot. I think I’ll leave it there, this debate isn’t especially illuminating.
Paul Sagar said,
October 1, 2010 at 7:11 pm
To paraphrase Gordon Brown: I agree with James.
Larry said,
October 2, 2010 at 12:37 am
How to think about Paul’s post: it’s very much like this page in terms of intent and philosophical content, but infinitely less entertaining.
lukeroelofs said,
October 3, 2010 at 10:22 pm
“The world’s largest exporter of soy is Brazil…according to the ILO there are about 50,000 slaves in Brazil, many of which work on soy plantations. Now soy is in roughly 75% of all processed foods sold by supermarkets, and nearly 100% of food sold by the fast food industry.”
50,000 people is roughly 0.025%, or 1/4000th, of the population of Brazil. So that’s something like 1/1000th or or less of the working population. So 99.9% of work done in brazil is by wage-slaves, not slave-slaves. Since you say ‘many’ work on soy plantations, this percentage may be smaller for soy products, but can’t be much smaller.
By contrast, 0% of meat is made without killing animals.
Paul Sagar said,
October 3, 2010 at 10:49 pm
Luke, the obvious response is: what’s your point?
Average = Total/N | Majestic Equality said,
October 3, 2010 at 11:36 pm
[...] Average = Total/N Posted on October 3, 2010 by lukeroelofs An argument against vegetarianism that I’ve encountered a few times is that any individual’s consumption decisions will have no effect on the actual production of meat, and so are ineffective. In particular, this argument was made recently at Bad Conscience. [...]
lukeroelofs said,
October 3, 2010 at 11:46 pm
My point is it’s perfectly consistent to be against buying the products of an industry where 99.9% of its practices are exceptionally and essentially wrong, and favour buying the products of an industry where 0.01% of its practices are. If we’re to draw any lines at all.
lukeroelofs said,
October 3, 2010 at 11:47 pm
Sorry, more clarity: my point is that the example that was quoted is not a good analogy for the topics under discussion. That’s all.
Paul Sagar said,
October 4, 2010 at 12:25 am
Oh, right. I think your wrong. Not sure I can say much more than that, as James’ reasoning seems to me sound and I’m afraid I can’t see why your points amount to a claim of disanalogy in a presently relevant way.
James A said,
October 4, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Luke,
That doesn’t make sense: 100% of Brazilians don’t work in the soy industry. But I take your point that the amount of soy that is produced by slaves is less than the amount of meat produced by killing animals (i.e. <100%). However, as Paul notes, that isn't really integral to the argument. Just assume for the sake of argument that 100% of soy is produced by slaves: as far as I can see my argument still stands. So your disanalogy isn't relevant.
James
Rob said,
October 4, 2010 at 9:47 pm
Paul
I don’t think you’ve properly characterised worries about integrity here, or why we might care about it (you are of course quite right about any consequentialist argument for individual vegetarianism). The way you characterise worries about integrity, it seems mostly to be about not benefiting from wrongs. But that would have all kinds of very odd implications. It would mean that a police officer catching a fiendishly clever serial killer and getting promoted for it would be compromising their integrity, for example. That seems obviously wrong. I’d suggest that benefiting has nothing to do with it as such, that instead something to do with involvement with practices in ways that are inconsistent with (properly or reasonably) affirmed ideals – which I’m not going to try and cash out here. It’s not part of Jim’s dilemma, for example, that he’d enjoy or otherwise benefit from shooting one of Pedro’s captives. That idea of involvement presumably has some relation to an ideal of oneself as self-legislating or something: that you hold yourself responsible in some sense, call yourself to account at a court of your own devising – and most importantly, in a way you don’t call others to, which is a concession of sorts to the moral difficulty of the world: it’s their business, and not mine, and so I am not in the same way accountable for it. Now, that might be a stupid thing to care about, but it makes more sense as an account of integrity, and I think of non-consequential refusals to participate in injustice. For whatever it’s worth, I’m not a vegetarian, although I make fairly cursory efforts not to eat factory-farmed animals.
Paul Sagar said,
October 5, 2010 at 9:42 am
“But that would have all kinds of very odd implications. It would mean that a police officer catching a fiendishly clever serial killer and getting promoted for it would be compromising their integrity, for example.”
That’s a very bad example, for the obvious reason that catching serial killers is a good thing. But I think I get what you mean, and no doubt better examples could be devised to make the point.
As for Jim and the Indians, I’m not quite sure why you are ruling out the aspect of potential enjoyment. If he *did* enjoy shooting Indians – wouldn’t we conclude that he was a very different sort of man to what we thought he was? And likewise the fact that he *doesn’t like to shoot Indians – indeed abhors the very prospet* tells us a lot about his character…and has implications (needing to be unpacked) about his integrity.
However, that response I think exposes the fairly deep ethical divide that separates us; I’m quite happy to start expounding things in Humean sentimentalist terms, whereas I suspect your Kantian thoughts about properly or reasonably affirmed ideals will make such routes unpassable. I mean, your idea of self-legislation is, to me, deeply flawed – but I suspect you feel exactly the same way about non-cognitivist sentimentalist theories of ethics.
Not sure we can resolve this here (or ever), but just to note that the Jim and the Indians thought experiment is fairly shallow because Williams is forced to move very quickly in that exchange (he was consequently ribbed by Martin Hollis in a funny little article about Jim the Vacuum Cleaner Salesman, which highlights that Williams can’t get as much out of his thought experiment as he claims in the Smart exchange). I think you need to go to places like Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy to see Williams’ full integrity accounts, and I’m not competent to reherse them here. But I suppose my final point is that Williams-thoughts about integrity are more likely to square with my non-cognitivist ethics than your Kantian view, and for obvious reasons.
Rob said,
October 5, 2010 at 10:40 am
Paul,
“That’s a very bad example, for the obvious reason that catching serial killers is a good thing.”
Irrelevant. Plenty of things are good whilst being bad in one way. I see no reason to think that things that compromise integrity should not be like that. As for Jim and the Indians, it probably would make a difference to the example if Jim would enjoy killing one of Pedro’s captives. My point was that we don’t need to know *anything* about whether he would or not to understand the demand that *he* do the killing as an attack on his integrity. So again, it just seems to me that benefit is irrelevant to the question of whether something’s a threat to integrity which again suggests that seeing it as an ideal to characterised in terms of a refusal to benefit from activities you condemn is mistaken.
I suspect that the thing we will continue to disagree about the whether plausible metaethical views, that is, views about the ontology of moral claims, have anything to tell us about first-order normative questions.
Paul Sagar said,
October 5, 2010 at 11:14 am
“My point was that we don’t need to know *anything* about whether he would or not to understand the demand that *he* do the killing as an attack on his integrity. So again, it just seems to me that benefit is irrelevant to the question of whether something’s a threat to integrity which again suggests that seeing it as an ideal to characterised in terms of a refusal to benefit from activities you condemn is mistaken. ”
Oh I see, you are having universalisation thoughts (how typically Kantian!). I resist those thoughts: it seems to me just obvious that *sometimes* benefiting (even indirectly) from some evil can be considered compromising to an individual’s integrity (e.g. the position of some vegetarians) whereas *other times* the moral compass does not swing that way (e.g. your serial killer-catcher example). I’m fine with the moral world – and our emotive moral reactions to it – being messy and complicated. Sometimes benefiting from an evil is integrity-compromising, sometimes it isn’t. It depends on the situation.
Of course, I’d stress that this variance with situation is exhibited by ordinary people, and that universalisation claims a-la-Kant do not sit well with how people *actually* moralise and think about their integrity. I’m sure you may a) dispute this or b) say that what people do isn’t what counts, what they *should do* (as revealed by rational universalisation, perhaps) is what matters. That disagreement will take us into some deep waters, and I doubt either of us will convince the other (though that irreconcilability seems less of a problem for the sentimentalist than for the universalising rationalist I would suggest).
“I suspect that the thing we will continue to disagree about the whether plausible metaethical views, that is, views about the ontology of moral claims, have anything to tell us about first-order normative questions.”
Do you mean “whether”, or “how” in this sentence? Surely the latter? I think views about moral ontology have a big impact on how we think about first order moral life – presumably as a Kantian universalist you think that too – although naturally the foundations will cash out differently in our respective cases.
Rob said,
October 5, 2010 at 10:22 pm
If “universalization” means something like ‘when evaluating whether some Y needs to have features a to n in order to be Y, providing an example where something is Y yet lacks one of the features a to n stands as good evidence that Y does not need to have that feature in order to be Y’, then sign me up. On the other hand, “universalization” would seem to be a feature of any moral view which makes use of thought experiments – like for example Bernard Williams’, who is certainly not a Kantian.
And I really did mean “whether”. Once you’re playing the moral game, its rules apply, including its rules about what its rules are, whatever those turn out to be. Facts themselves, like facts about the ontological basis of moral claims, are normatively inert. Since the issue is whether facts about the ontological basis of moral claims have implications for morality, I’d wager that the values to be invoked are at least in some sense moral values. Hence, metaethics, in and of itself, is irrelevant for first-order moral claims. This is not to take a stand, as Jerry Cohen did, on the *precise* relation between facts and values that makes facts normatively relevant, but merely to point out that they need to have *some* relation or other. The ones we all really ought to hate, after all, are the reductionists.
Paul Sagar said,
October 6, 2010 at 12:27 am
Well I’m not sure about how you’re characterising universalisation. It’s a tricky – and seductive – area, and I don’t feel brushed-up enough on that particular topic to take it any further.
“Facts themselves, like facts about the ontological basis of moral claims, are normatively inert.”
As a good Humean, I agree – mere facts alone are inert, because a passion is always required to motivate, and facts alone are dealt with by the domain of reason. As a consequence, reason alone cannot do the work in moral foundations; after all we are motivated to act morally so it must be passion doing the work. But furthermore, my meta-ethic (a sentimentalist one) is going to have first-order implications: we do the actions that our moral sentiments, properly understood after a good upbringing, propel us to perform.
But I sense you are getting at something different: the idea that once we know the “facts” about moral ontology, we won’t be any the wiser about how to act in the here and now (a claim not necessarily refuted by my brief exposition of Hume above).
But I’m not sure this is right. It seems to me that if your metaethic says “only act upon that maxim which you can will to be a universal law applicable to all rational beings, because the foundation of morality is in pure universalised reason without regard to inclination”, then you do indeed have both a meta-ethic and one which cashes out at the first order level: it tells you to act in whatever way you can universalise via right reason without regard to inclination. This may give you rather different moral conclusions than, say, a sentimentalist account which says “act in sympathy with others” (or something to that effect).
Having said all that, it rather feels like I’m repeating myself and that we’re now just talking past each other. And basically, I’m too tired to get my thoughts straight. Though one more quick try: I’m tempted to deny (as a good Humean) what I take to be your claim that moral values have to rest on some value-free foundation of “facts” that lies beneath them (and that we can all agree upon, say by applying right reason). That to me seems like cognitivist – and especially, Kantian – question begging. A sentimentalist moral theory says “sure, there are no incontrovertible foundational facts upon which values are somehow based – morally is about projection of sentiment not rational universal foundations, but what’s wrong with that?” Indeed, that would be the basic foundation for Hume being able to poke fun at *rationalists* for using unjustified slides from is to ought; it’s *no problem at all* for sentimentalists to move from is to ought – it *is* a problem for rationalists. There’s a puzzle in how to move from fact to value you say? Nope, only for rationalists. And that just shows Hume was right, and that morality is based in sentiment.
Rob said,
October 6, 2010 at 10:44 pm
“A sentimentalist moral theory says “sure, there are no incontrovertible foundational facts upon which values are somehow based – morally is about projection of sentiment not rational universal foundations, but what’s wrong with that?””
To which I say, nothing, necessarily. If there is anything wrong with it, it depends on moves within the first-order moral game, on claims like – claims which I’m neither endorsing nor condemning for the purposes of this argument – “doing what you want is not necessarily the right thing to do” (or more sophisticated versions of the same).
Blogging, Status and Nasty Competitive Animals like You « Bad Conscience said,
November 4, 2010 at 11:18 am
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