December 11, 2010
Reflections on a Riot
In the press reports and police statements surrounding what happened in Parliament Square on Thursday, we’re often told that “violent extremists” ruined it for “peaceful protestors”.
But is it really that simple?
I was stood in the crowd next to Westminster Abbey on Thursday, where I saw riot police striking people with batons after they had fallen to the floor. When a young man trying to help others get away from danger took a baton to the back of the head, and came out streaming blood and unable to walk. When people around me started panicking, running, crushing and screaming in terror – and I turned around to see 15 police horses charging a packed crowd with nowhere to go.
Was I a peaceful protestor, or a violent extremist?
Certainly, I was not one of the people who brought weapons. I didn’t throw missiles at the police horses, or light flares and fireworks. The people who did that (and despite my earlier scepticism, it was true that prepared troublemakers were there on the day) can accurately be classed as violent extremists. Waving red and black flags, dressed in plain black with faces purposefully covered and snooker balls in hand, these were anarchists in the technical sense. I was not with them, or one of them, and I do not defend their actions. It would have been better for all if they had not been there.
But the prepared troublemakers were a very small minority. And yet the images you have seen of the riot in Parliament Square show police battling with thousands of protestors. So what happened?
Quite simply, ordinary people joined in. As I was not on the front row of the protest – or riot, as it quickly became – I stayed clear of the violence. But I’ll be honest: I was swept up along with the enthusiasm of the situation just like the thousands around me. Very quickly it became us versus them; the ordinary people dressed in plain clothes taking batons to the head and facing horse charges, and the masked riot police trying to get at and hurt people like us.
So how and why did the situation deteriorate so quickly? Because it was exhilarating to be part of it.
Insincere apologies for breaking the taboo, but this is a brute truth the pious po-faced tut-tutters of the media and political power dishonestly deny to be the case. Riots happen because they are exciting, because they are fun, because ordinary people who did not come for any violence or trouble suddenly find themselves in the fray and simply do not want to leave. The shackles of society are off, and the animal thrill of conflict is pumping through everybody’s system. And whilst fear and the instinct to run can get the upper hand – like when the horses charge you – adrenaline for the most part takes over. And hence people stand, and they fight.
Those who would now dismiss me as a mindless thug should be aware that this equally applies to the police on the other side. It is simply obvious to anybody who’s seen riot police in action that they enjoy the ruck every bit as much as those they are fighting. And why should that be a surprise? They are only human too; ruled by the same passions and suddenly unleashed animal instincts as the rest of us.
It is true that at 2pm on Thursday 9th November, the anti-cuts demonstration could be accurately divided into violent extremists waiting to strike, and peaceful protestors only there to march and sing. But by 3.30pm, after the batons and the horse charges, the flares and the missiles, such a distinction was spurious. The riot had started, there was violence on both sides, and we were suddenly all in it together.
We can have a simplistic discourse about “violent extremists” and “peaceful protestors”, if we want; an easy narrative in which the Bad Guys ruined it for the Good. But if we stay at that level we’ll never get beyond inaccurate platitudes, and never understand the dynamics of riots as they actually happen in practice. If the police are serious about stopping this sort of thing in future they’ll take this brute truth on board. But that is to assume that they really are interested in stopping this sort of thing in future – and there’s all sorts of reasons to doubt that.
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.
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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.
September 23, 2010
On The Philosophy of Murdering Hamsters
Should I be imprisoned for 9 weeks, the sentence applied retrospectively for a crime committed when I was 13 years old? I speak of the death-by-neglect of my two Russian Dwarf hamsters.
As a somewhat self-involved teenager (la plus ca change, eh?) the pressing concerns of school life commanded my utmost attentions. I correspondingly neglected to notice that the animals in my care had run out of drinking water – until it was too late.
This week, Anthony Parker was jailed for nine weeks after he microwaved his girlfriend’s Syrian hamster during a drunken row. I don’t expect the RSPCA will kick my door down after this post goes up. But in a consistent world, should they?
In his Tanner Lectures [PDF] Jonathan Bennett explored the philosophical foundations of what is known as the acting/omitting (or sometimes: killing/letting die) distinction. A common thought – and one sanctified in, for example, much Catholic teaching – is that it is morally worse to actively kill than to passively let die; that positive action to bring about some end is morally worse than sitting on one’s hands and doing nothing even if the exact same end comes about in either case.
An illustration: imagine there is a microwave that automatically starts when a weight of 100 grammes+ is present inside it, and the door of which closes automatically when the weight-sensor is activated. Now imagine two scenarios:
1. I take Bobby the Hamster, who weighs 150g, and put him inside the microwave (knowing that it will start and he will die).
2. I observe Bobby the Hamster walking into the microwave (knowing that it will start and he will die) and do nothing to stop him even though I could.
Most people want to say that 1) is worse than 2). But Bennett explodes this distinction. When you get down to the philosophical nitty-gritty, so long as everything else is kept constant there is no morally relevant difference between acting to bring about a consequence, and omitting to act when one knows that so-omitting will yield the exact same consequence.*
This is counter-intuitive to many. But Bennett’s reasoning is impeccable; the challenge is to explain why we have collectively developed the acting/omitting distinction and employ it in so much of our intuitive moral thinking even though it is a deep conceptual mistake. We need an error-theory of this common moral practice.
But as it happens, none of this touches the question of whether I should be in jail. Because there is a very important difference between myself and Anthony Parker: whereas he intended to fry Suzie the Hamster, I did not intend for my pets to die. If somebody had said to me “give the poor things some water, you idiot” I would have done so immediately. Telling Parker that Suzie was going to experience her own little Hiroshima would not have stopped him, because that was exactly what he intended to bring about.
Thus, the two cases are asymmetrical: I caused death by negligence but without intention, Parker caused death by design and with intention. That difference of intention – or specifically, the different motivations underlying those different intentions – is what does the moral work here, not any acting/omitting distinction.
Certainly, negligence is morally reprehensible; that’s whynegligence of children by parents can rightly end in criminal prosecution. Negligence reveals a defect of moral motivations insofar as adequate concern for other (dependent) living creatures is lacking. But such callous, overly-self-regarding motivations are of a less heinous order than a cruelty-seeking motivation which issues in the wilful murder-by-microwave of innocent hamsters.
I am a bad and guilty man. But I am not as bad, or guilty, as Anthony Parker. All of which, of course, comes as no surprise to those who’ve been wise enough to read their Hume:
“`Tis evident, that when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs. But these actions are still considered as signs; and the ultimate object of our praise and approbation is the motive, that produc’d them.”
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* Actually, the acting/omitting terminology is itself hopelessly confused at a philosophical level, and Bennett junks it accordingly. I’ve retained it here for ease of exposition.
