h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>What it amounts to is that I cannot provide a "reasonable" answer to an unrealistic hypothetical situation.

Ah, right. So what you're saying. in effect, is that we don't need to take moral positions on situations we haven't personally experienced?

I myself have never experienced third world debt, risk of HIV, having a child who needs an urgent blood transfusion, watching an animal have its head cut open...etc.

Isn't it maybe reasonable that we have a collective moral framework which which sanctions the active prevention of wrongdoing, even in situations which don't affect us personally? If so - how do we decide what that framework is, without drawing on experience - real or hypothetical - beyond our own? Kind of like lawmakers do.

Or should we just make it up as we go along?

But I still don't understand how "collectively favoring" humans to animals should extend to *deliberately* causing unnecessary suffering for animals, up to and including slaughtering them for food (food which isn't good for us to begin with, to boot)?

OK I have a reformulation of Ed's Darfur/rats example. Suppose the situation was as Ed described it, but you knew that if you let things be, the rats would eat all the food and then the enraged humans would kill all the rats. Now your options are:

(1) Drive on by with your poison, knowing that both rats and humans are gonna die.
(2) Kill the rats, save the people.
(3) Kill the people, save the rats.

These are your only options (sorry!) and as Ed says - the question is do the numbers ever change our decisions? If so - what is the price? How many people to animals, etc. Surely if there were one rat and a refugee camp with tens of thousands of people in it, but that the one rat was diseased in some way so that if it got into the food stores all of the food would be destroyed - you'd choose the people over the rat?

Also, PC, sorry for aiming all these questions at you. Hope you don't mind.

Because it establishes, in principle, our willingness to trade human benefit against animal suffering. From there on in, it's a matter of how much suffering for how much benefit. This is where there is a range of opinion on where the balance lies.

Eg - you have decided that nearly all animal suffering is unjustifiable, and the benefits of meat eating are doubtful. Others have decided that steaks are so damned tasty, even if it's bad for health, that they're willing to tolerate cattle slaughter. Amongst meat eaters, opinion varies on how well cattle have to be treated beforehand. (And, indeed, on the quality of the meat they're prepared to risk.)

BUT: compare and contrast the above example, where the benefit is to the meat eater, and the slaughter is (usually) out of their view with the neurosurgeon who is personally prepared to develop therapies on primates for the benefit of others rather than personal gain. (apart from money, fame, etc).

>>Also, PC, sorry for aiming all these questions at you. Hope you don't mind.

"Socrates was deliberately irritating"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

Hi Eddie ,

Godwin's Law ? Googling... aha, well I didn't know that one, thanks Eddie. For those others here:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Is it:
- Morally acceptable to deny medical treatment to an enemy combatant?
No! As an ex-serviceman I can tell you that were trained in the rules regarding this. Only swine leave the enemy's wounded to die. Generally it is a quid pro quo situation.
- Morally acceptable to refuse to allow gay couples to stay in your B&B?
No! An anyone who does should have their licence or whatever revoked.
- Morally acceptable to refuse consent for your child to have a life-saving blood transfusion?
No! We've done this one to death elsewhere methinks.
- Morally acceptable not to support condom use in Africa?
No!! It is just genocide in a fancy hat.

"Some people (unfortunately) have strong ethical positions on all of these."

As demonstrated above.

"My point is that I don't even trust my own moral leanings, so why would I trust yours or anyone else's? We need justifications."

Strange, I trust mine. I even display them on my personal space for all to see who they are dealing with. OK... I'm odd.

"Now, I can see your point. All of the above would be a priori ethical because people declare them as such. But they don't conform to any type of ethics I'd want to be a part of. I think we'd be entitled to oppose them vigorously."

Agreed there Eddie.

"Point taken on the practicality issue. I take it that you've now proposed a practical compromise with which you would personally find far from ideal? That's not a criticism. I think it's where we need to aim."

Indeed it is. Social cooperation is based upon compromise. The alternative is war.

"Would you, then, consider it ethical for someone like Dr Tipu Aziz to carry out experiments on monkey brains which would (presumably) continue within such a framework?"

I wouldn't, but I am willing to compromise my principles so that suffering can be gradually reduced until we are down to the bare minimum. The alternative is me screaming through a chain link fence and it going on anyway.

"BUT: It still blows your fatuous Auschwitz comparison out of the water. ."

Only from a dominant human perspective.

"Yes, yes, animals die in slaughterhouses, people died in Auschwitz."

But the similarity is that neither need/needed to die. The end to which these means are/were put is ethically wrong. We don't need meat, Germany didn't need the final solution.

"Germany voted for Hitler, but that doesn't mean that doctors who see a moral imperative in carrying out animal experiments under democratic oversight are remotely comparable to Nazis."

I don't think that I said that they were. You drew the comparison when you said:

"Is a slaughterhouse *really* equivalent to Auschwitz?"

And I replied:
"Tell me the differences that make it more acceptable? The confinement, inhumane conditions, experimentation on selected individuals, transport in 'cattle trucks', the fear, the overcrowding, the seldomly quick death [whatever the industry may claim], the butchery, the eventual cannibalism...(mammals eating mammals)?"

Any body who has authority over a ethically ot morally difficult area of public behaviour, however well chosen or trained, must be accountable to the people they are representing. In our country this is often best served through Parliamentary oversight by elected representatives. It isn't perfect, but it is what we have got.

As for Germany voting for Hitler, yeah democracy is wonderful ain't it? America voted for Gore and got Bush, go figure.

Blessings,
Matholwch .

Math,

From a philosophical perspective, rather than as part of a rhetoric contest, I feel you have one interesting point above:

>>>>"BUT: It still blows your fatuous Auschwitz comparison out of the water. ."

>>Only from a dominant human perspective.


OK. Now demonstrate to me why a dominant human perspective is wrong in principle. Preferably with reference to the Darfur/rats example. I'm not saying it *isn't* wrong. But according to what principle is it wrong?

Hi Dogster ,

The basic problem with such moral choice examples is that they are nearly always plucked out of context and twisted to present unrealistic choices.

Rats in Darfur are presently a delicacy, if enough turned up to raid the Granary the people would kill them and make rattie patties.

I digress, in the situation in Darfur it is mostly human-led degradation of the environment, added to which we have political and religious persecution, not to mention Western greed, that has made these people starve. The moral issue of man vs. rat in this situation is irrelevant.

Why not use a more realistic example. Poor farmer vs. elephant in southern Africa? How do we balance the needs of both in a difficult and unforgiving environment?

This is why I think that Harvard's Moral Sense test is total baloney. The situations they describe are so extreme and beyond normal human experience that their results are utterly skewed.

Blessings,
Matholwch .

Or to translate...I don't have an answer so let's change the subject.

(I'm fluent in druidish. )

>>Poor farmer vs. elephant in southern Africa? How do we balance the needs of both in a difficult and unforgiving environment?

That's an easy one: If elephants are important to us, we'd damned well netter provite a means of support for the farmers competing with them for land. We cannot judge the saving of elephants to be a net moral good if it entails simply turfing farmers off their land.

(tourism? licensing culls to hunters?)

Hi Eddie ,

"OK. Now demonstrate to me why a dominant human perspective is wrong in principle. Preferably with reference to the Darfur/rats example. I'm not saying it *isn't* wrong. But according to what principle is it wrong?"

As I have explained to Dogster above the Darfur/Rats example is of no use in illuminating these ethical/moral choices.

I didn't say that the dominant human perspective was either right or wrong. Just that it is from that perspective that you can argue that the needless slaughter of billions of animals, often in conditions that resemble the worst and most mechanical of our own genocides, is perfectly acceptable.

To the dominant human perspective these means justify the ends - a burger on your plate, no matter the cost in real suffering.

Blessings,
Matholwch .

Signing off for the evening, see you all tomorrow...

>>To the dominant human perspective these means justify the ends - a burger on your plate, no matter the cost in real suffering.

Nah. You're treating it as all-or-nothing. It's part of a trade-off. Few people would eat them if they personally had to go steal the cow's foodstuff off a starving African. Admittedly, more would tolerate keeping it in uncomfortable conditions and slaughtering it themselves. But heroes like Tipu Aziz are willing to say openly that they can compartmentalise normally unpalateable monkey suffering for the benefit to others.

>>As I have explained to Dogster above the Darfur/Rats example is of no use in illuminating these ethical/moral choices.

Translation: It's all to complicated to think about clearly.

>Ah, right. So what you're saying. in effect, is that we don't need to take moral positions on situations we haven't personally experienced?<

Nope. I'm saying I don't think I can or should take a moral position on a situation that would *never* happen.

Dogster,

>OK I have a reformulation of Ed's Darfur/rats example. Suppose the situation was as Ed described it, but you knew that if you let things be, the rats would eat all the food and then the enraged humans would kill all the rats. Now your options are:

(1) Drive on by with your poison, knowing that both rats and humans are gonna die.
(2) Kill the rats, save the people.
(3) Kill the people, save the rats.<

Given *only* those three options? And given that the scenario is a completely unrealistic one... My preferred option would be (1).

>>
Nope. I'm saying I don't think I can or should take a moral position on a situation that would *never* happen.

OK...so are you saying it's possible to define subsets of:

a) Those things that could never happen and about which no opinions are necessary.

b) those things which might happen and its useful to have a basis for forming an opinion about?

For example...I can't think of a situation where I'd ever have to choose between my children. But Sophie's Choice was not, sadly, entirely fantastic.

OK - it's an artificial example. But isn't it a useful tool for getting to the bottom of what we really think and why?

That said...

Someone once said to me,
"OK - you're vegetarian. But a sponge is halfway between an animal and a plant. Would you eat a sponge?"
I replied,
"No. Would you?"

>OK...so are you saying it's possible to define subsets of:

a) Those things that could never happen and about which no opinions are necessary.

b) those things which might happen and its useful to have a basis for forming an opinion about?<

Possibly not exactly, but more or less.

Sophie's Choice is possibly a good example (though I can't say I liked the film), and perhaps useful for getting to bottom of what we think. Isn't it still a near impossible question to answer? I mean, which kid *would* you choose? Could you? Wouldn't some parents find it impossible to say how they'd choose until actually faced with the choice?

There's been more than one instance where what I actually had to do was a bit different than what I would, ideally, have wanted to do. Does that mean it's wrong (or unreasonable) to have ideals, and to strive to create "ideal" situations?

>>I mean, which kid *would* you choose?

Indeed! That's a question for which there is no acceptable answer. (and that's why Meryl Steep cracked up). That might also be the case for the monkey vs the kid with a neurological disorder. It's a good illustration of our ethical limitations.

BUT: We have two options - to act randomly ("if you can't be just, be arbitrary" - William S Burroughs) - or to make a conscious choice.

To get back to the Darfur/rats example...could one really justify saving human or rat lives on the flip of a coin?

And could we really flip a coin over whether the kid with the neurological disorder croaks it?

Also...

>>Possibly not exactly, but more or less.

I'm sceptical. 50 years ago, could anyone have confidently laid down what should be the principles surrounding human embryology and fertilisation? In the UK, the Warnock Commitee made a spectacular hash of it in the late 80's - in my opinion due to a lack of moral clarity and lack of imagination. At very turn the legislation they guided has turned out to be thoroughly wrongheaded.