The Good of Religion
Follow up to: But Religion is Useful!
Every once in awhile, especially when I have less free time than usual, I like to take a break from structured blogging and do a bit more freeform, unedited rambling. This lets you see a bit more of my unfiltered voice, and lets you get a window into things I write before they’re edited or made thorough. Some of you probably won’t like it, but I write four substantive essays a week, so I think you can get over it.
The Harms of Religion
Anyways, the point of this essay is that I want to make one thing clear: I do not think that religion, on a whole, is bad. I don’t think religion is evil, and I don’t see a high priority in getting people to stop being religious.
Sure, I still stand by what I wrote in “But Religion is Useful!” — the existence of religious beliefs have lead to direct deaths, bigotry, science suppression, freedom suppression, health suppression, bad thinking, and abuse of power.
Add to that list this ceremonial Halal/Kosher stuff I just learned about; that’s a pretty sad way to treat those nonhuman animals. (Here’s a disgusting and shocking video to the effect, if you want it. But be warned! And remember, it’s not that different from normal slaughtering methods for meat production, complete with another super shocking video.)
I do think the general lack of a reality check is problematic for religion, and makes it unstable and potentially dangerous.
Sympathy for Religion
But on the flipside, I do have sympathy for religion. I don’t know any fundamantalist wackjobs, though they obviously exist somewhere. I live in the northern part of the United States at a fairly secular and very liberal / socially progressive university, so all the religion I encounter is cheerful, welcoming, and ecumenical. There certainly isn’t any direct deaths, bigotry, science suppression, freedom suppression, or power abuse around here. All the religious people are very nice, sincere, caring, compassionate people.
Generally, I find ritual and community to be an important part of affirming purpose and meaning in my life, especially when they go together, and I can see how getting easy access to that via religion is important. Lastly, I see religious stories as often being meaningful, though I’m not personally a fan of narrative literature. I can see the Bible being a culturally important and significant book.
Charity
I do think that the Vatican does leave much to be desired in its staunch opposition to safe sex and the dispersion of condoms even though doing so would probably prevent a lot of suffering for little cost, covering up a pretty aggressive sex abuse scandal, and in its unwillingness to, as Sarah Silverman humorously and half-jokingly suggests, “Sell the Vatican, Feed the World”.
But I also admire the spirit of charity within Catholicism, and many other religions, to be inspiring. I find the idealized popular culture Jesus as this fellow who endorsed an ascetic lifestyle of frugality and devotion to helping the less fortunate to be greatly admirable, and fit very well with my broadly utilitarian and aretaic personal values; being the kind of lifestyle I want to live, and I see some religions (not just Christianity) as offering access to that.
Equality
I think a robust freedom of religion is important for allowing everyone to express themselves the way they want, as long as they… you know… aren’t bigoting or suppressing people and/or things, which luckily most religious people I encounter are not doing. Thus when I learned from a Wiccan friend of mine that the state of Virigina was arbitrarally denying a Wiccan preistess(?) the ability to marry people, I was upset, and gave him a quote for his blog, saying on his essay “Equality Part 2″:
Despite being an atheist, I don’t have anything against religious ceremonies — I really want people to be able to get married in the way they choose, as long as they aren’t causing harm in the process. And I think it’s pretty clear that Pagan weddings don’t cause significant harm to anything.
The restriction [Virginia has] put in place (you have to own a building?) is extensively arbitrary, and seems to do nothing but oppress minority religions with insufficient resources and prevent people from marrying the way they want. Not only do I not like this because of the freedom of religion enshrined in First Amendment, but I want people to be able to fully express themselves, especially in something to them as important as their marriage.
It’s Not Just Religion…
Indeed, I think the enemy is intellectual recklessness, not religion itself. And I think that the so-called “New Atheists” often make a mistake in making sweeping generalizations about the harms of religion that only extend to a minority of it. I think we should fight harm where harm is found, not fight religion and ignore the harm that comes out of other philosophies, even atheist philosophies that take an all-or-nothing hatchet-job approach to religion.
But on the flipside, I don’t think we can ignore the legitimate harms that religion does bring when it is intellectually reckless. Thus I agree with Alonzo Fyfe on wanting to be between New Atheism and accomodationism.
The True, The False, The Good, The Bad
However, I think it’s very important to separate the idea of religion being true or false from religion being nice or mean. No matter how terrible religious people are or harmful for society religion might be, that wouldn’t do anything to mean that a god doesn’t exist, unless that deity is supposed to have nice followers by definition, or something.
Likewise, the niceness and cheerfulness of religious people doesn’t mean anything for religion being true, unless the only way they could be so nice is if God made them, which seems extensively unlikely. If you can be good without God OR good with God, God isn’t factoring much into the picture. I could say a lot more here, but my main point is that saying more isn’t relevant, so I’m going to stop. If you want to advance some sort of moral argument for God’s existence, I suppose we can work it out in the comments section or something.
Stupid?
The reason I don’t want to be religious is that religion entails false claims about how the world works, as I have argued too many places to list. However, I don’t think this means that religious people are stupid — often, people don’t have the time to investigate these issues thoroughly, and even if they do, I don’t think either atheism or theism is intuitively obvious.
While I do think that theists would do better epistemically to become atheists, I don’t think the situation is such that they would do better practically, nor do I even think they are making a serious mistake. It’s a bit hard to sort through it all without the proper philosophical training, though I do think that may be in part because some apologists are intentionally misleading.
The Bottom Line
Basically, I don’t think religion is all that big of a deal, really. I don’t think your average non-homophobic, non-fundamentalist, mostly-progressive religious person is any harm at all. Sure, I’d like fundamentalism and all those bad things to go away, and I’d like atheists to have safe communities of their own. I’d even love to see a way to get things like ritual, and stories about the importance of compassion, and community without having to endorse a series of faulty facts about how the world works.
My essays here intend to argue that religions are false and that gods do not exist. I do believe that sincerely and confidentlyk though I remain open to arguments to persuade me otherwise, and even actively seek them out. But the reason why I argue against religion is largely as an academic exercise, not for thinking that people need to be argued out of their religions.
If you’re honestly seeking for an answer on the issue, I think it’s possible to be just fine without a religion, and if you agree with my arguments, I think you should err on the side of reality and go with atheism. I’ve said as much in “But Religion is Useful!” — religion may be useful, but not irreplaceably so.
That being said, if you’re beholden to your religion and not looking to see the atheist side, I think you may be unjustifiably close-minded, but not harmful to others. It’s only intellectual recklessness as applied to other areas that would do that. Stay away from the direct deaths, bigotry, science suppression, freedom suppression, health suppression, and abuse of power, and you’ll have nothing to hear from me.
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I now blog at EverydayUtilitarian.com. I hope you'll join me at my new blog! This page has been left as an archive.
On 12 Jul 2012 in All, Atheism, Christianity, Community Building. 72 Comments.
12 Jul 2012, 11:03 pm
Maybe Internet fundamentalists are all sockpuppets.
13 Jul 2012, 10:44 pm
There are lots of interesting questions about the short term impact that religion has on society and people’s happiness but it seams to me that a much bigger deal is the long term impacts that it has, in terms of affecting what society prioritizes. You mentioned the potential effects it has on science, etc., but it also has significant effects on how society views morality: as long as most people believe that morality is written in a 2000 year old book of fairy tales it seems really unlikely to me that society is going to be able to think rationally about what long term morality should be (i.e. become utilitarian); there’s an interesting series of discussions over at felicifia about what the future should and will look like, questions which, too me, seem much more important than whether people feel more comfortable with or without a god right now. And these seem like questions that society would be much better equipped to handle if it didn’t believe in god.
14 Jul 2012, 12:31 am
I definitely see where you’re coming from and it sounds plausible, but I think what generates utilitarians is so poorly understood that we can’t reasonably draw these conclusions yet. Even if religion doesn’t create utilitarians, it might cause people to act in a more utilitarian manner indirectly, by propagating values of charity, even if that charity is less than optimal.
14 Jul 2012, 12:36 am
That’s definitely possible–it’s not clear what exactly will generate more utilitarians–but as a first order approximation it definitely seems like religion hurts; for instance, I’d guess that almost all utilitarians are atheists (i.e. almost no religious people are utilitarians). Also, I’d guess that there charity is quite less than optimal: among other things, it’s likely that almost all forms of charity not related to animals or to long-term rationality of society are going to be dwarfed just because of the shear number of animals (both in and out of farms).
14 Jul 2012, 12:55 am
Indeed. I don’t think religion incompatible with utilitarianism (except in so far as utilitarianism would require they put their religion to objective tests and see it fail), but I do find it very interesting and persuasive that so many utilitarians are atheists.
I think the most relevant question here is whether one would do better with regard to promoting these utilitarian causes by promoting atheism (as I have on my site in my places) or by promoting the causes directly (or some other strategy).
For instance, I don’t think first-order approximation would suggest that one need to undergo a conversion to atheism before veganism/vegetarianism sounds persuasive (with regard to utilitarianism or just emotional response).
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I’d guess it quite less than optimal too, though the relevant comparison for the common person might not be the rather-suboptimal donation versus the utilitarian one, but the rather-suboptimal donation versus no donation at all (or even less suboptimal donation).
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I think that likely to be true, though I’d be skeptical of rationality-of-society donations. One common mistake in philanthropy is to confuse the cause with the organization — there might be a great cause (eliminating wild animal suffering or risk from AI), but no organization working in that area with sufficient chances of helping that cause along.
I know some good debate ensues at Felecifia about which donation is most likely to be the optimal target given current information (and values).
14 Jul 2012, 1:02 am
Yeah, that’s a good point, and I think you’re probably right that promoting atheism, rationality, and utilitarianism is in some sense more important now than in promoting the specific issues, thought the issues are useful, if nothing else, in convincing people that the first things need to be promoted.
Totally true.
It sounds like we’re mostly in agreement. I guess my position is that it’s complicated to determine the immediate effects of religion on current world utility, but almost certainly true that in the long term religion is going to decrease utility–do you agree?
14 Jul 2012, 1:13 am
I’m less sure. I agree with you that this is all guesswork (not that guesswork is irrelevant, but it’s important to call it when you see it), even the long-term parts. It’s hard to know in the future, especially far future, what utility will be like. I’d personally expect religion to slowly die out the way it has been (see Europe) and increasingly liberalize to the point where it has little to no effect on utility.
One of the things I was advocating in this essay was finding some ways to capture the good religion does (the utility it provides), like rituals, community, positive cultural norms like charity, etc. and find some way to create more of it without needing to be beholden to a false set of beliefs.
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I guess I wasn’t clear; I had meant to express that I wasn’t sure which was the best approach in the here-and-now. Yes, the vast majority of utilitarians are atheist, but the vast amount of atheists are not utilitarian (at least not in their revealed actions). So there’s some sort of disconnect here, and if we want more utilitarians (I do!), then I’d have to figure out what’s wrong.
One thing is a simple understanding of specieism. I think religion reinforces humans as vastly superior to animals (we have souls, y’know, and didn’t evolve from damn apes!), so it may be a harm there. But lots of atheists don’t care much about animals too.
14 Jul 2012, 6:05 am
The issue of animal slaughter is a huge one. Please note stunning, captive-bolt, electric, or otherwise, can definitely go wrong. Bolts can lack the penetrative power for big bills, electrodes can be misapplied. You could produce videos of this too, and the lay audience would consider it equally horrific. A lecturer of mine commented that though he disliked the idea of hallal and kosher slaughter, in practice it’s adherents performed it…well religiously, as opposed to the somewhat sloppy and haphazard approach he saw by disenchanted (or worse) employees of the worse abattoirs in the U.K.
My only direct experience was working a week in an abattoir that dealt with pigs and few cattle. Suffocation with carbon dioxide seems the kindest option, though it too, has it’s opponents.
14 Jul 2012, 8:24 pm
Why is something wrong? There’d be something wrong if it could be shown that utilitarianism is the true moral standard, objectively superior to its competitors. But you’ve recently admitted that’s not the case. What reason do you have to expect atheists to tend toward utilitarianism? Just because utilitarians are atheists? The explanation of that is easy: religious morality isn’t utilitarian. But why should secular morality tend toward utilitarianism?
Also, why do you want other people to be utilitarian? If you adopt utilitarian “principles of integrity” (as I call conscientious standards), then it stands to reason you’d want more utility in the world. But it doesn’t follow that a world of utilitarians will tend to create the greatest utility. (Or even the more modest claim that we “need” more utilitarians at the margin.) It might be, as I think, that utilitarian moralities create neurotic, guilt-prone personalities. More significantly, the inference seems a perfect example of the fallacy of composition. [It would seem you might realize this, insofar as you seek to temper your own utilitarianism with a dose of virtue ethics.]
14 Jul 2012, 9:12 pm
I should preface this reply by stating that I am a utilitarian.
This argument strikes me as too-cute-by-a-half; it’s like saying that a Christian god would want fewer Christians, or that perhaps in order to further its goals the Democratic party should try to convince people to become Republicans. it’s possible, of course, that utilitarians could decrease utility, but a pretty sound first order approximation seems to me that they’d increase it. (For instance, many utilitarians don’t eat meat–much greater than the general population–and that alone way more than makes up for their neuroticism.)
14 Jul 2012, 9:49 pm
Nobody I know of has given reasons to think more Republicans would benefit the Democrats. I don’t think it even makes sense to ask what a “Christian god” would do.
I don’t think neuroticism is the only adverse result of utilitarianism. But let’s stick with that one. I don’t think it’s any easy task comparing the utility of, say 1 billion more utilitarians for the sake 100,000 fewer meat eaters–or whatever the statistic is. Frankly, I don’t think the comparison even makes sense, but even assuming it does, I haven’t the vaguest idea of how to go about scaling the utilities of animal deaths compared to human guilt. Now, let me admit that by my order of values, human guilt is qualitatively more important than animal suffering, but if they’re commensurable, I don’t know how you would go about making the comparison.
To say the argument is in itself “too-cute-by-half” is, I think, just not to understand the fallacy of composition.
14 Jul 2012, 10:00 pm
One the fallacy of composition–
Consider the Democrat Republican question. If someone said: I have evidence that excessive advertising backfires and results in more people voting for the other party. Would you call that argument “too-cute-by-half.” (Actually this isn’t so much a fallacy of composition argument as a less-can-be-more argument, but both are applicable to the assumption that more utilitarians produce more utility.) The argument may be false, but it’s not prima facie implausible (except perhaps in the present political climate. You have to consider the specifics. In the case of Democrats and Republicans’ election results show otherwise, mostly. But when you have opposed tendencies (guilt versus animal suffering), there’s nothing natural about the compositional answer.
14 Jul 2012, 10:03 pm
One more point. Sorry. I have to wonder whether your claim about utilitarians not eating animals, compared to deontologists. What about people professing Hinduism? Turn them into utilitarians, and I bet they’d eat a lot more meat.
If so, there’s a counter-example on your own terms.
14 Jul 2012, 10:36 pm
To say the argument is in itself “too-cute-by-half” is, I think, just not to understand the fallacy of composition.
So, I completely agree that by your value system making more utilitarians might not be good but that’s not the claim you made and that’s not the claim I’m refuting. The claim you made was that more utilitarians would decrease a utilitarian’s valuation of the world’s utility. You then go on to say that different pains are incomparable–something that is a meaningless statement to a utilitarian. You also say that you’re not sure how much you value animal suffering–again, a statement about your value system, not mine. I might believe that more utilitarians would make the world a worse place according to your belief system, but your arguments do not support the claim that it makes it a less utilitarian place; in fact your arguments don’t really seem to care much about belief system you’re making claims about.
First of all assuming that making more people want to increase X increases X is a good first order approximation. It’s not of course a proof but there is definitely a correlation between the two, and absent other information it’s a pretty good guess. But of course as you point out we have other information. The thing is, according to a utilitarian, that other information also points towards utilitarians increasing utility: the magnitude of animal suffering is much much much greater than that of neuroticism. There are about 1.5 billion animals in the US alone at any given time being tortured and many many more than that in the wild suffering. Again you might not think that’s a big deal but it does decrease utility significantly, which is what we’re arguing about.
Of course not every utilitarian eats less meat than every nonutilitarian, but the average utilitarian eats less meat than the average similarly-demographiced nonutilitarian, and point to outliers doesn’t change that.
14 Jul 2012, 10:37 pm
Man apparently I suck at using blockquotes…
14 Jul 2012, 11:45 pm
Fixed it for you.
Interesting argument going on here. I look forward to weighing in soon.
15 Jul 2012, 2:57 am
Ah thanks. (Hopefully this comment won’t be meta by misusing blockquotes…
20 Jul 2012, 2:47 am
OK, that’s why I detest utilitarianism. You’re an intellectual—or an aspiring one—yet confronted with a massive fraud on humanity, you can’t even oppose it wholeheartedly. Why? Because you can’t find a way to add up the pluses and the minuses.
20 Jul 2012, 6:26 am
FWIW, I think it’s not completely fair to blame this on utilitarianism: I’m a utilitarian and think quite critically of religion. I think that, in the end, opinions from atheists on religion depend largely on things like squeamishness on insulting massive swaths of the population and ease with which you dismiss the wisdom of the crowds; I know people who are and aren’t utilitarians on both sides of the (whether religion is really bad) issue.
20 Jul 2012, 6:56 am
i guess, on general terms , utilitarians has no trouble with a lie of sufficient utility.
20 Jul 2012, 1:45 pm
That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that this particular lie has positive net utility. Utilitarians still care about the utility the world loses from making bad decisions based on lies, and from the stunted progress of a world stuck in 1 BC, and from the bad decisions resulting from a fundamentally anti-intellectual attitudes.
20 Jul 2012, 2:23 pm
Peter Hurford,
Sorry I’ve just noted you did in fact produce videos of standard slaughter, as sad as it makes me, I have to say well done for showing that western slaughter methods are by no means a perfect art that guarrantee a kind death. Many atheists miss that.
An odd question, as a meat eater, that I often as myself, if we as a society, are going to eat animals, is it kinder to farm or hunt.
How also, to stop abattoir workers from developing detachment from animal suffering?
Also is eating mechanically recovered ammonia treated meat horrific, or does it show more respect to the life of the animal, by at least using it efficiently?
20 Jul 2012, 8:00 pm
western slaughter methods are by no means a perfect art that guarrantee a kind death
(Not Peter, but found the questions interesting.)
If you’re worried about suffering from caused by eating meat, weeks of shitty lives of farm animals are probably going to be a much bigger issue than the seconds to minutes of death.
Right now hunting is almost certainly kinder, but it’s kinder for exactly the reasons that it’s impractical: the mechanisms used to efficiently pack animals into farms and raise them en mass without needed to hire many workers are precisely those that lead to their unpleasant lives.
20 Jul 2012, 10:00 pm
Sam,
I think you’re right that the methods that could lead utilitarians to equivocate on religion aren’t peculiar or necessary to utilitarianism. The equivocation results from trying to apply an ethical perspective too directly, that is, without a mediating social theory. But utilitarianism provides a particular temptation to such thinking, perhaps, because of its quantitative character.
21 Jul 2012, 1:34 am
The How and Why of More Utilitarians
It’s more specific than that — there’s something wrong relative to utilitarian standards, which I was speaking from. I agree that other standards may find nothing wrong with this.
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Atheism definitely doesn’t logically imply utilitarianism, I agree. But I do wonder what causes people to become utilitarians — what makes them find utilitarianism intuitive or obvious, what makes them want to continue on with it, and then even act within it to the detriment of their own (perhaps immediate/narrow?) self-interest (especially with Singer-style large scale donations and veganism/vegetarianism). And I see that atheism is an important correlate (perhaps even partial cause) here to be investigated further.
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I agree with Sam here that while it isn’t necessarily true that more utilitarians would create greater utility, it seems ostensibly very plausible. Unless utilitarians are thoroughgoingly inept at utilitarianism, or some Smith-esque “individual self-interest is best for collective interest” theory is true, the average utilitarian should be better at generating utility than the average non-utilitarian, and thus more utilitarians would be generally better (from a utilitarian standpoint).
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I don’t understand what you mean here. Also, my virtue ethics are not really a “tempering” of utilitarianism, but rather an extension of the personal motivations behind it.
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Again, I’m not sure why you’d suggest they’d do so, if they already see nonhuman animals of deserving moral worth. A conversion to utilitarianism gives no reason to abandon or backpedal this commitment; I think the utilitarians who don’t extend consideration to the suffering of nonhuman animals are actually irrational with regard to utilitarianism or ignorant on nonmoral facts.
And it might be worth their conversion for other reasons, such as increasing their level of donations to effective causes. And if it isn’t; say the deontologist or the Hindu is by coincidence doing just as well or better than he or she would do as a fallible utilitarian, then obviously utilitarianism would say its best that this deontologist/Hindu stay unconverted.
In short, I don’t think these “what if people who convert to utilitarianism mess it up?” objections are that valid.
21 Jul 2012, 1:34 am
Neuroticism, Vegetarianism, and Commensurate Utilities
It might be. But I also think it might easily not be. While I do know neurotic utilitarians, it hasn’t been my personal experience that neuroticism appears more frequently in utilitarians than in non-utilitarians, or that utilitarianism was the cause of their neuroticism. (The neurotic utilitarians I know were neurotic before being utilitarian, so perhaps the alleged causation is backwards.)
So I’d have to ask for more evidence before thinking that utilitarianism generates neuroticism.
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So, now assuming for the sake of argument that utilitarianism does generate neuroticism, how do we compare the utility? Well, the utilitarian thesis is that you look at the amount of suffering caused by this guilt multiplied by the number of people suffering from it, and then all the added effects of that guilt that manifests itself in other ways, and then compare it to the amount of animals who don’t suffer in factory farms multiplied by the amount of suffering they would have had if not for the decreased demand caused by the vegan/vegetarian.
Current research in nonhuman animal neurology shows they do have analogous minds and thus similar capacity for suffering (pain plus conscious awareness of that pain) as humans, and the revealed behavior of these nonhumans show the same.
Current conditions in factory farms seem to show considerable suffering, analogous to torture, and this suffering continues for the weeks of their existence. The suffering due to guilt seems very negligible in comparison, if it even exists at all.
Though utilitarianism would give us an admittedly intractable way of actually calculating the answer, we are left with mere intuition. And yes, even at intuitive levels would need to be worked out at more detail than this, but hopefully this lays out the general idea.
Just as you’d, I think, see a stubbed toe as less suffering than getting your toe cut off, we can stretch this to see factory farming as worse than guilt (though this does require crossing the species barrier and comparing two very different kinds of suffering).
21 Jul 2012, 1:35 am
The Utilitarian Bad/Good of Religion
No, I’m capable of sufficiently adding up the pluses and the minuses. It’s just that when I do, I find that there are benefits to religion that need to be preserved in some secular form, and that the average liberal religious person isn’t doing that much harm.
I agree with Sam, this is a disagreement about the nonmoral facts (what benefits and costs does religion generate and how should we deal with it); not a fault of utilitarianism.
And fraud is too strong — that involves an intentional knowledge that the religion is false, but the desire to perpetuate it anyway for personal gain. I’m not cynical enough to think that’s true of most religions, though I do acknowledge the obvious duplicity of some (Scientology, William Lane Craig, etc.).
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Perhaps this is true, but I’m not squeamish in that way, nor do I have much hope for the wisdom of the crowds or other democratic epistemologies. I just disagree with you and Stephen on the actual facts — I think you two overestimate the costs, underestimate the benefits, and overgeneralize the problems to religion as a whole, rather than certain (common and repugnant) aspects of it.
21 Jul 2012, 1:35 am
@Joseph:
I think utilitarians would have a trouble in that it’s sad to see that a lie was necessary and that lies do create disutility, but that this utility is outweighed by the indirect benefit of the lie.
If this seems implausible to you, think of a Nazi soldier in World War II coming to the doorstep of someone who is hiding Jews, and then asking “Are you hiding any Jews?”. Most people find a lie in this situation to be of negligible trouble.
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Indeed, yes. I didn’t want to draw too much attention to them, though.
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It depends on the farming and hunting. Current factory farming practices cause extended suffering to the farmed animal through small spaces, overfeeding, and disfiguration. Hunting doesn’t do that, thus it causes less suffering to the animals. It’s also much smaller scale.
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I don’t know, and I agree this is an (utilitarian) issue.
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I’m not really familiar with the process. I think the answer is both, though — all else being equal, it is (utilitarian) better to use more of the animal than less, yet it would be even better to not consume factory farmed animals at all.
21 Jul 2012, 6:30 am
I think it’s fair to show slaughter, I am a meat eater, I tried vegetarianism for a short period but never found a meat substitute. I would like everyone to spend a short time working on a farm, and in an abattoir, to see and understand that meat is not a nicely presented piece of muscle, sitting in a nitrogen enriched, polystyrene package, offensive juices removed by an absorbent pad, but an animal that lived, breathed, was conscious to a degree, and in the case of chickens was a little bastard. Eating bacon is probably the one I feel most guilty about, where I currently live substitutes are rare, pigs are so human.
As for hunting causing less suffering, well a few points:
1/ death by gunshot is more messy, less meat is recoverable.
2/ risk of dying by peritonitis
3/ more impact on the ecosystem due to decreased efficiency
4/ life in the wild not necessarily any better than life in captivity.
Thinking of becoming a piscitarian (?).
21 Jul 2012, 3:11 pm
I agree. But I didn’t want to draw much attention to it in this essay, because I didn’t think it well related to my point. Though the degree to which religion encourages or discourages meat eating would be a very relevant impact of it, and I’d like to encourage general concern for nonhuman animal impacts too, which is why I brought it up.
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What have you tried? I’ve been a vegetarian for eight months now, and I’ve never really looked for or wanted meat substitutes, though I know friends who have some they like (Boca burgers). I’m personally fine with breads, cheeses, salads, fruits, beans, etc. (I try to avoid egg.)
I’m sympathetic to those who have tried vegetarianism and failed, but I don’t understand their failure.
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Those are good points, and definitely more research would be needed to get past our first-pass intuitions. (No one said that these empirical questions would be easy…)
From what little I know though, I’d dispute 4 (I agree it’s not necessarily better, but it often is, just given the harsh conditions of factory farming (PDF) where most captive animals are) and dispute 3 (there are major environmental impacts from all the meat production and transportation that aren’t present in small-scale hunting).
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“Pescetarian”; one who refrains from eating all non-seafood meat. I think that’s a fine start, though I worry that fish are sufficiently conscious; fishing is sufficiently painful and harmful of the environment; and that many fish are used to produce just a small quantity of fish that I’m not sure replacing non-fish meat with fish meat is doing better.
I think just from a size point of view, you may want to focus on eating beef as your only meat and refraining/reducing from fish/pig/chicken/etc (and eggs if you can), just because so much beef can come from a single cow.
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(And just as a perennial reminder mostly directed at Stephen, all instances of “better” or “oughtness” or whatever you may want to do here are spoken within a utilitarian reference frame, and if you don’t care about the suffering of other nonhumans to any degree, then this won’t have much sway with you.)
21 Jul 2012, 3:45 pm
I care about the suffering of nonhumans (Freudian slip by Peter, “other nonhumans,” entailing that I’m nonhuman :)). I just think any healthy human longing counts for more than any amount of animal suffering. (Healthy human longing doesn’t include sadistic desires to inflict suffering.)
On a purely subjective note–and I hope without giving offense–I am bothered by the natural reality of animal suffering: I think of things like one animal consuming its prey while it’s alive and kicking; but human imposed suffering being a minor part of this picture, an overweaning concern for it strikes me as merely self-righteous. I mean, even by some utilitarian calculi, farm animals might serve to raise the hedonic quality of life of the average animals; even better conditions for farm animals could have paradoxical effects if they cause a larger part of the general animal population to live in the wild rather than on farms.
While I’m thinking about this–I think a general exaltation of humans over animals furthers the project of greater human solidarity. But you might argue that a general concern for suffering heightens the concern for human suffering. I think you would probably be right there. So it’s a question of whether social progress (whatever we might mean by that) can best be achieved by solidarity (appeal to the loyalty instinct) or by altruism (appeal to the empathy instinct). That’s the axis on which a moral nihilist would analyze the question.
21 Jul 2012, 5:34 pm
Adamoriens has a clarifying and well-written essay on the significance of religious disagreement at http://adamoriens.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/the-warfare-is-mental-on-religious-disagreement
21 Jul 2012, 6:36 pm
Sure. And there are weights you can give to humans that would make the benefits from eating meat (the extra tastiness and the not worrying about nonhuman suffering) outweigh the costs (in terms of nonhuman suffering). This would be “specieism” (a non-impartial favoring of humans over nonhumans), somewhat analogous to “racism” or “sexism”, but not like against the moral reality or anything. It’s all internally consistent; just not utilitarian.
(I still also deny that vegetarianism causes neutroticism or suffering by guilt at least by personal experience.)
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Indeed, so am I. This is a problem frequently raised by us Felicifia bunch (see here, here, here, and here), but it doesn’t get much treatment in mainstraeam utilitarianism. I suspect that’s because solving the problem is so intractable with current knowledge and resources.
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I think this is wrong on two counts.
First, yes, I agree that by total quantity of suffering in the wild is vastly more than the total quantity of suffering in factory farms, because there are just that many more nonhuman animals in the wild.
That being said, I disagree first that the suffering of the average wild nonhuman is more than the suffering of the average factory farmed nonhuman. Factory farming conditions seem considerably worse per animal.
Secondly, I disagree that factory pleasures can outweigh wild sufferings in this paradoxical way, because the wild sufferings aren’t necessary for the factory pleasures to continue. (I also deny that there are much factory pleasures; I doubt that factory farmed animals have lives worth living.)
But the question on the action level is what we (given utilitarianism) can do to lessen this suffering. I don’t know what I can do to lessen wild animal suffering besides make sure it is talked about; the problem is too intractable at the present moment. It needs more research, and I want to see that this research is done.
But I can lessen a great deal of suffering by not consuming animal products as much as possible, thus lessening the demand for these products, and thus lessening the amount of animals that are factory farmed. Thus, vegetarianism/veganism, to the best I can manage, and working more to manage it better.
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I do care for greater human solidarity, but it isn’t my end goal. Likewise, I care for more than just human suffering. Thus, I want a general concern for all suffering to, well tautologically, heighten the concern for all suffering.
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If you take social progress to mean progress toward a world with more total happiness, then yes, this is a very interesting empirical question from a utilitarian standpoint. I’d love to research it / see it researched. (My current priors favor altruism.)
21 Jul 2012, 6:39 pm
Indeed, it is a good response (by my personal standards for an enjoyable essay and one of significance and relevance to philosophy of religion). I also look forward to replying to Cl’s point soon.
I personally have advanced the Argument from Religious Disagreement in “Where is God?” (two parts) and “There Are No Religious Facts”. I’m not sure why you brought this up in this discussion, though.
21 Jul 2012, 7:35 pm
I forgot that you have a curator’s interest in seeing these things properly “filed.” I just posted it where it might get interested readers’ attention.
21 Jul 2012, 8:15 pm
I don’t mind being called a speciesist; in fact, I think I’d glory in the label. Racist or sexist, no thanks. (“Homophobic”? That’s for me a subtler question.)
But I have to wonder whether utilitarians couldn’t make a principled distinction. Say you go the way of J.S. Mill and distinguish grades of happiness. Mightn’t you then have a plausible argument that human happiness is of a higher grade because of its nature in humans, rather than just because it happens to humans? For example, if humans have a unique capacity among animals for offline thinking, could a utilitarian not argue that the ability to reflect on experience gives human happiness a higher quality, like J.S. Mill argued that a form of happiness every agrees shouldn’t be traded for an other (lower) form is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, superior?
I think you’re saying you use a different utilitarian calculus–perhaps minimization of total suffering. I don’t think ignoring pleasure is a very attractive utilitarian option (if that’s what you’re doing). I used the view of some utilitarians that raising the happiness of the average human is the goal. If you take literally the greatest happiness for the greatest number, the question depends on the zero point: the “life worth living.” Here, I see a problem that’s perhaps insuperable for utilitarianism, comparing the utility of being alive and being dead. Seems to me they’re incommensurable.
Why do you care so much about minimizing pain as opposed to maximizing pleasure?
My claim was about utilitarian ethics, not any specific decisions grounded in utilitarianism such as vegetarianism.
22 Jul 2012, 1:38 am
Short and Sweet,
1/ Were I to focus on size I would eat Whale.
2/ Animals in the wild are slaughtered less humanely than say, the kosher method
3/ Animal disease in the wild is untreated.
4/ Why the focus on factory farming? In England I had the options of buying R.S.P.C.A. certified “freedom foods”, and would buy barn eggs (there are arguments that make me think they are probably kinder than free range.
5/ On an emotional level, after working with cattle I find them harder to eat than sheep, poultry, fish etc.
22 Jul 2012, 1:43 am
Why did I fail as a vegetarian?
I don’t know, I anticipate eating meat with excitement, I am satiated by eat. Vegetables by comparison bore me, were I to eat a vegetable curry for instance, I feel as though I have punished myself. Probably success would require mental reconditioning; focusing my distaste for slaughr and farming methods) , learning to like the unmeatlike texture of quorn.
22 Jul 2012, 1:44 am
1) Whale is actually probably a pretty ethical animal to eat.
2) True, though the slaughtering is probably less important than the rest of the life, and animals in factories have really shitty lives (though, to be fair, some wild animals might too).
3) True.
4) Because almost all US meat comes from factory farms.
5) It’s worth noting that a chicken’s suffering is independent from the emotions you do or don’t feel about it. I don’t feel much empathy towards any animals, but that doesn’t give me the right to subject them to torture.
22 Jul 2012, 1:47 am
http://www.rspca.org.uk/freedomfood/aboutus/-/article/FF_AboutUs
Wow your response was fast today
22 Jul 2012, 1:53 am
On 5, I could argue that my lack of empathy to fleas provides no basis for torturing them with fipronil, selamectin etc.
I need to develop, or see if i can develop, this argument, but I guess I am using my empathy as an intuitive guide to how a humans suffering compares with animal suffering. To develop the argument further I think I’d have to further study piscine, avian nervous systems, pain receptors and structures that are thought to give rise to consciousness in humans.
22 Jul 2012, 1:55 am
Do you USians have farmer’s markets?
22 Jul 2012, 1:56 am
Yeah, it’s easy to fall back on using empathy as a proxy for suffering, and it’s often a good proxy.
But it breaks down when you’re dealing with things very different from yourself or that you’ve built up an empathetic immunity to–that’s how half of a country managed to convince itself that the suffering of slaves didn’t matter.
22 Jul 2012, 1:56 am
(And yes, we do have farmers’ markets.)
22 Jul 2012, 1:56 am
Last time I checked Whale slaughter is via a kind of explosive harpoon…
22 Jul 2012, 1:59 am
Yes, good point. Octopuses are an example of a creature that managed (in the UK at least) to escape it’s “otherness”, quite strong restrictions are in place on their use in research.
22 Jul 2012, 2:04 am
Yeah, there are odd examples of particular animals that have overcome otherness. Dogs and cats, obviously, are much more strongly controlled than other animals, for instance.
22 Jul 2012, 2:10 am
I read a short article once comparing canine basic social structure and hunting methods (using endurance to run prey into the ground), with those of humans. Made some intetesting points.
22 Jul 2012, 2:14 am
Yeah, there are a number of similarities between nonhuman animals and humans, and also a number of differences; generally, though, the literature has shown that chickens, pigs, and cows feel pain the same way humans do. (The literature on fish is slightly more complicated.)
22 Jul 2012, 4:18 am
Short answer: I do care about maximizing pleasure.
Longer answer: I’m not really sure there is a real distinction between pleasure and suffering, except that they’re inverses — minimizing suffering automatically creates an increase in total happiness. I have found it much easier to create happiness by reducing suffering than taking those already happy and trying to make them happier, which is often why my focus is often on suffering.
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Sure, a utilitarian could do this, but I’d still think it a bit odd. I’ve never understood what it means for a pleasure to be qualitatively better, nor do I know that many current utilitarians who are beholden to Mill’s argument. Where does the separation of categories come from, if not a difference in quantity?
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I take the utilitarian goal to be the maximization of *total* happiness, not *average* happiness. Not many people use average happiness anymore, because they often don’t like being committed to painlessly and secretly killing those of below average utility.
But even if we were evaluating on average utility, we could still raise the average by eliminating factory farming, because factory farmed animals are, I’d argue, probably the most negative utility beings on the planet.
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The question of the zero point is indeed important and deserves a far more detailed treatment than I can provide in this comment. But I don’t think it’s about an impossible utility comparison, but rather distinguishing utility from disutility and/or looking for whether people would prefer to die (or have died) versus live their life.
22 Jul 2012, 4:27 am
Joseph, I agree with what Sam wrote in response, but I wanted to add these things:
Are there any non-meat foods you enjoy, like sandwiches or soups?
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Looks pretty promising; I’d probably eat food from there. I know a farm nearby my house that raises wild turkeys and ensures they have good lives, and then kills them pretty much painlessly, and I eat those on occasion.
The point is not vegetarianism for the sake of not eating meat, but for the sake of ensuring the well-being of nonhumans.
(Though I could be convinced that nonhumans would be better served with a general taboo on thinking of eating them, kind of like how {at least in the US} we shudder at thinking about eating a dog or a cat, even if it were raised very well {perhaps a painlessly killed pet}.)
22 Jul 2012, 5:07 am
Peter Hurford,
You are supposed to be on holiday!
You prefer whaling to farming?
Another quick related note, farmed animals (belgian blue crosses, aberdeen angii, hereford, breeds of sheep and pigs I’ve forgotten [I can only remember texels and tamworth]) have considerably more muscle mass and provide muscle for less food than there wild brethren.
Any non-meat foods I enjoy…many but to a far lesser extent than meat.
Any thoughts of Carbon Dioxide pre-slaughter? My opinion is it’s the closest that will be alliwed to an anaesthetic pre-slaughter.
One trouble with freedom foods is that a lot of us Brits will swear to buy the stuff when taking part in an opinion poll, but very few actually do when we see it costs a few pounds more per kilo. We aldo have the “red tractor mark” but awareness is low.
22 Jul 2012, 7:40 pm
Sam’s concern for animals is the product of his utilitarianism, whereas Peter’s utilitarianism is a generalization of his empathic concern for suffering, including animal suffering.
Sam’s a Benthamite, and his views follow from his moral realism combined with the latest science of suffering. I at least understood how his views emerge from his theorizing. But I don’t really understand how a commitment to explicit utilitarian values arises from the experience of compassion. That is, why would someone strongly motivated by compassionate feelings seek to systematize his affect? It makes more sense for someone like Sam, who doesn’t feel compassion for animals, to develop a view recognizing animals as having rights than for Peter, who spontaneously wants to alleviate suffering should reinforce that concern with dogma.
In other words, a rigorous utilitarianism seems only to make sense if you believe it’s objectively true. Then you should pursue its truth like any other scientific or philosophical truth, striving for elegance and parsimony, etc. That kind of rigor makes sense in a scientific context. But why would someone who is compassionate want to regiment that compassion in a rigorous philosophical system? I can’t at the moment discover a possible rationale.
My humble opinion: Peter really is a utilitarian but can’t see a way to defend it. So what? He should say he’s a utilitarian and set out to prove its truth. There’s nothing saying strong intuitions should never override logic and reason.
22 Jul 2012, 9:00 pm
I’m back a bit early. Hopefully that’s not a problem. :) I have to have time to start writing the essays for the upcoming week anyway.
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Not necessarily; I know very little about whaling, and the choice to eat whale has never been an option for me. But while whaling does seem to involve harmful environmental effects and considerable pain to the whale, I don’t think it causes as much suffering as factory farming. Remember, it’s not just the pain of slaughter that’s in question.
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Fair enough. No love for some meatless sandwiches? I don’t know what you Brits eat…
And remember that vegetarianism need not be an all-or-nothing proposition. A reduction in meat consumption is certainly better. I wouldn’t want perfection to get in the way of just doing better.
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I’d definitely be in favor of it. I don’t see it as a full solution to the problem of factory farming, but it’s a start.
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Right. I suppose it would have to be subsidized and/or animal cruelty better publicized. My guess is that there are a fair amount of people who would be motivated to vegetarianism/veganism/Freedom Foods (conscientious omnivorism) just with better knowledge of the animal cruelty involved.
23 Jul 2012, 8:53 am
Another problem with ethically raised meat is it’s not generally practical: it works if you’re cooking for yourself and willing to pay a little more, but you can’t eat ethical meat (generally) at a restaurant, or if you go to someone else’s house to eat, etc.
23 Jul 2012, 12:54 pm
I usually pick lamb when dining out, sheep don’t lend themselves to factory farming…
29 Jul 2012, 6:33 pm
I’ll let Sam speak for himself, but to the best of my knowledge, he isn’t a moral realist.
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I think they arrive from that and taking a non-discriminatory stance — once you care about suffering and all suffering counts equally, utilitarianism automatically follows.
Sure, in practice, I still end up with discrimination — I’m not a perfect utilitarian, and I don’t even really want to be. I do care more about myself, my family, my friends, and my local community than nonhumans or strangers suffering from malaria. I’m just not going to pretend that such behavior is what I want to consider “moral”, and I’m still going to lean against this discrimination to some degree.
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29 Jul 2012, 6:37 pm
That’s a good call, I think. While sheep still aren’t treated well and still have negative environmental impact, they do seem considerably less worse than other factory farmed animals.
29 Jul 2012, 7:16 pm
But how do compassionate impulses issue forth in a nondiscriminatory stance? Compassion, as an instinctive proclivity, is highly discriminatory: the sense of fairness is a separate ethical imperative.
My alternative hypothesis is that you first adopted utilitarian principles, tacitly at first, I suppose, and those principles drove your compassion and fairness. That’s what I think explicit moral principles are for. But since you say you don’t really want to be a perfect utilitarian, probably utilitarianism is an imperfect fit. Why not fashion a moral code that uniquely matches what you want to be?
29 Jul 2012, 7:22 pm
Here’s why I think he’s a moral realist.
1. He said he’s a Benthamite, and Bentham was a moral realist. (Maybe you disagree.)
2. He his exposition of utilitarianism will probably consist mainly of solutions to moral puzzles because the principles of utilitarianism are so obvious (my parsing, “so obviously true).
Do you think he’s not a moral realist because of what he said or because of what he didn’t? (That is, didn’t explicitly endorse moral realism.)
29 Jul 2012, 7:29 pm
If you ignore the fact that at the deepest level I’m a nihilist who doesn’t believe that the words “should” or “good” or “bad” have any meaning endowed by the universe, and only look at the level beyond that where I’m a Benthamite, then yes, I’m a moral realist.
29 Jul 2012, 7:49 pm
It doesn’t. You need both compassion + non-discrimination.
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I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t see compassion as intrinsically discriminatory or non-discriminatory. It just depends on who/what you choose to care about.
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It’s hard to trace back; I don’t have good memories or good documentation of my earlier views. I know that in April 2011 I had adopted desirism, then by July 2011 I had been argued out of desirism and went to Richard Carrier’s system.
Then, by September 2011, I had switched to Garren’s system, which I currently hold. My decision to be utilitarian came in December 2011, after reading Peter Singer’s “How Are We To Live”.
My ethical views prior to April 2011 are too hazy, but I don’t recall at any point being a moral realist or having particularly well-formed views. Eventually you’ll date back to November 2010, where before that I had no involvement with philosophy, and was operating off of standard-fare socially progressive moral intuition.
I was marginally Christian for most of 2010 before encountering philosophy, but I don’t think it influenced my ethics even during the time.
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I see no reason to define a supermorality to accomodate my self-interest. I’m fine just navigating being pulled in both moral and self-interested directions. When I need to answer a question from a moral point of view, utilitarianism seems to work great for me.
29 Jul 2012, 7:54 pm
I agree. Sometimes when we don’t follow our morality it doesn’t mean our morality is wrong–it means what we’re doing is wrong.
29 Jul 2012, 8:37 pm
I’m here talking psychology rather than philosophy. That is, compassion isn’t conceptually nondiscriminatory, but as an instinctual impulse, it’s highly discriminatory.
I don’t think Sam is really agreeing. Sam is saying we should always follow our morality, although we don’t; Peter is saying it is quite OK to sometimes not follow our morality. Both agree that it isn’t problematic for the moral system, but you disagree on whether it’s OK morally.
And again, I understand Sam but not Peter. Unless there’s some moral reality, why would one want some moral code that doesn’t encompass one’s self-interested perspective. If there’s no moral reality, morality ought (prudential ought)to be be subordinated to your self-interest. What is morality, given that it’s not real, but an adaptive tool. This is the thrust of my “Why do what you ought?-A habit theory of explicit morality.” – http://tinyurl.com/7dcbt7y
More concretely, if you utilize your morality only when you recognize a moral question, you will miss what should be moral questions from a self-interested perspective. (And what other perspective can a rational person possibly have?)
I take that to mean you’re a moral realist but not a moral Platonist. Few realists are these days.
29 Jul 2012, 8:59 pm
Well, there’s the source of your compassion/fairness moral principles–and, I’d contend, of most of what you term compassion or empathy.
29 Jul 2012, 9:57 pm
Well, what we’re doing is morally wrong, yes. (I don’t think there’s a such thing as wrong simpliciter.)
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That’s interesting. I’d love to explore the relevant psychological literature. Do you have any references? …Are you aware of Joshua Greene’s research in moral psychology? It’s really interesting.
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Well, I don’t think it’s morally okay to not follow our morality, though often times it’s pragmatic to do so.
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My self-interested perspective already covers my self-interested perspective perfectly, so I don’t need my morality to catch up.
I think one conceptual hurdle we might be having is the difference between moral externalism and moral internalism — does saying something is moral automatically and overridingly compel one to do it, as the internalist would say? I think not.
I can endorse something, say donating all income beyond what I need to survive, as the moral thing to do from an externalist standpoint, yet not feel compelled to do so.
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Indeed, it prudentially ought to be subordinated to one’s self-interest, but it morally ought not be.
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Morality is, meta-ethically at least, a standard that things can be evaluated against. I suppose you could adopt a pragmatic-morality hybrid that measures action, but I’d wonder if that counts as morality, or if it’s really just dressing up self-interest with a moral valence.
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I suppose it depends on how you define rational. Being wary of smuggling connotations, I’d suggest that while the rational person might be self-interested by definition, my definition of a rational person is one who (1) never makes a logically invalid deduction and (2) makes all logically valid deductions from the set of facts the person possesses.
This kind of rational person can have all sorts of perspectives — self-interested ones, moral ones, legal ones, epistemological ones, social ones, etc.
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Indeed. I don’t think that poses a problem for me; my values have to come from somewhere. Terminal values don’t appear on rational reflection.
29 Jul 2012, 11:08 pm
If you were a moral realist, it would make sense to worry about whether a particular principle is or isn’t of a “moral” character. But in your view, it’s a completely conventional distinction (as it is in mine). Why would you want to separate your “moral” principles from your self-interested principles? Doing so implies moral principles should be treated differently, but since the distinction is purely conventional, what reason is there to separate them? “Moral principles” don’t comprise a “natural kind.”
Highly unlikely.
That’s part of what’s called theoretical rationality or, often today, epistemic rationality. But there’s also practical rationality or, often today, instrumental rationality. In other words, your list is awfully short. You leave out part of theoretical rationality: making good inductions. But, here relevant, you leave out practical rationality entirely, that is behaving in a way that maximizes achieving your goals. One way that helps conceptualize practical rationality, although I don’t think it’s 100% veridical, is to conceive of each person as having a utility function. You’re rational to the extent that you maximize its value. Almost by definition, everyone wants to maximize his utility function.
Anyway, a rational person wants to maximize his or her utility function or whatever best expresses this idea. So, there’s really only one perspective from which you judge anything, but taking that perspective involves subroutines in which you take others’ perspectives. Moral principles are the tools by which you optimize your concern for others’ perspectives to maximize your own utility function.
But they should! (In practical reasoning.) But they most people don’t reflect rationally on “terminal values.” That’s because most people are moral realists.
Maybe you begin to see why I say you’re a closet moral realist. :) “Terminal values” are the mark of the moral realist, who accepts (regardless of what he says philosophically) that there are ultimate ends, at least for him. Ultimate ends, terminal values, are just watered-down categorical imperatives.
There are no terminal values. Our moral principles change, and we can help change them in a desirable direction (from a self-interested, rational perspective) through adopting explicit moral principles at variance with our moral intuitions. But people who think in terms of terminal values are precluded from effecting this kind of rational adjustment in their principles. Consciously, they wouldn’t consider it: because they really think their moral principles are somehow “right.”
29 Jul 2012, 11:45 pm
The distinction isn’t conventional, it’s conceptual. There’s a difference between what I ought to do in order to most satisfy my own immediate and future desires (pragmatic) and what I ought to do in order to maximize the well-being of all conscious creatures (moral).
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Right. But instrumental rationality doesn’t presuppose any particular goal, it’s just about maximizing a goal given the goal that you have.
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Terminal values are the name for things I want to intrinsically do — I do for the sake of that thing, in and of itself. I can’t explain why I care about these things, because your reason for caring is to appeal to a value, and these are the values for which the buck stops. I just care about them, point blank. Further investigation would require neuroscience, not philosophy.
They aren’t categorical imperatives. Categorical imperatives take the form more of “Well, drat, I don’t really want to do this, but I have to because it’s an imperative, and I simply cannot override it, no matter how much I wish I could.” These terminal values are the form of “this is what I most want to do, above all other non-terminally-valued things, and I only value other things because of this”.
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If you’re doing practical reasoning, you’re already cooking the books for self-interest, because what you practically ought to do precludes all other possible ends you could consider. So it’s no wonder that self-interest appears as the relevant end.
But if you’re doing deliberative reason, and there’s no ought simpliciter or ought all-things-considered, there’s no “correct” terminal end. All ends are fair play.
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I’m beginning to think that you’re the closet moral realist, except the moral imperative is self-interest, and anything that deviates from self-interest is just plain wrong — though you wouldn’t call it morally wrong, you seem to argue for the wrongness of deviating from self-interest with the same fervor.
You’re right that I could decrease my allegiance to moral ends and subordinate it in favor of my self-interest. But you miss that I don’t want to. There’s more to what I care about than just me, and I don’t care about others for the sake of me, I care about others for the sake of them.
6 Aug 2012, 11:00 pm
That’s not showing there’s a conceptual distinction beyond convention. If your “terminal values” can equally apply to your interests or others interests, you haven’t shown any reason to distinguish them in your mental economy.
The last is just a dogmatic statement. You can’t know in advance what might yield to philosophical investigation: which of your ideas might be incoherent, hence not empirically investigatable.
As a utilitarian, why won’t you speak of utilities? We have terminal utilities, but it seems clear that’s not what you’re talking about. You mean more than than by “values,” in that you include principles. A terminal principle is a categorical imperative, regardless of whether you experience it as oppressive or fully identify with the principles.
This is crucial. Deliberative reasoning can only result in endorsing principles if morality is real. What are you “deliberating” when you put all ends up for grab. You are trying to find the “true” ends. Only a moral realist would think he could arrive at principles by “deliberative reasoning,” unless that reasoning is a form of practical reasoning. The questions I put to you here are 1) what is the criterion for successful or valid deliberative reasoning; and 2) why would you want to accept principles that meet that criterion? You should see, this is just the “Open Question.”
Don’t worry Peter; I’m not trying to rid you of morality. I would if I could, it’s true–out of basic human compassion, but if I succeeded I would refute my own theories that nobody who’s a victim of moralism can be rescued by direct assault.
It’s quite true that self-interest can be moralized. That results in the misbegotten “philosophy” of “Objectivism.” But you mistake intellectual fervor for moral fervor, perhaps because you only experience them together. My interest in pursuing this is that I’m startled by your denial that self-interest lies at the basis for your choices; your ability to retain your Christian illusions that people can be metaphysically altruistic. I find it astounding that you’ve read Fyfe and Carrier (even) and accepted utilitarianism partway–and yet you have avoided a basic understanding of what utility means. It follows elegantly from my theory that moral realists (which is to say practically everyone but me :)) will never allow themselves to comprehend–just comprehend–ideas that undermine their “moral values.” If you intend to sum utilities over beings, you must first admit that these beings have utilities. But what does it mean to have utilities? It means to want them, to prefer them in direct relationship to their measure. So, if you accept the concept of utility–which it seems you must, as a practical utilitiarian–you accept that you necessarily act in your self-interest: your exclusive ultimate preference is your utility function.
You see why it’s ridiculous to think I advocate a morality based on self-interest. Self-interest is a fundamental principle of metapsychology. It isn’t something you can or need be urged to do; it is what you do. So, when I criticize altruistic illusions, I’m not urging egoism, only truthfulness with oneself. Your utility function is what drives you, and that’s what it means to act in one’s self-interest.
No verbal trick, if that’s what you’re thinking. The point is, acting in accordance with your own utility function is the only meaning acting in self-interest could have. And denying acting according to your utility function is the only meaning your claim to sometimes acting outside your utility function could have. But it’s so deep a confusion that I would be quite surprised if you got the point.
6 Aug 2012, 11:05 pm
“And denying acting according to your utility function is the only meaning your claim to sometimes acting outside your utility function could have.”
Should be: is the only meaning your claim to sometimes acting outside your self-interest could have.
6 Aug 2012, 11:11 pm
Maybe Sam should weigh in.
6 Aug 2012, 11:28 pm
One more thought. It’s possible that this confusion runs deeper in utilitarianism than I had realized when I put all the blame on Peter. You could make this argument. If people are utility maximizers, how can utilitarians meaningfully advocate that people should strive to create the greatest good for the greatest number?
I’d be interested in how utilitarians respond, but here’s my guess. One factor in a person’s utility calculation is their conscience. The utilitarian would advocate socialization practices that create a strong utilitarian conscience, figuring maximally in each person’s utility calculation.
Sam?