Bernard Williams: Human Prejudice

once upon a time there was an outlook called humanism the time i've got in mind is that of the renaissance the term at that time applied in the first place to new schemes of education emphasizing the latin classics and the tradition of rhetoric but it came to apply more broadly to a variety of philosophical movements there was an increased and intensified interest in human nature one form of this was a new tradition inaugurated perhaps by petrarch of writings about the dignity and excellence of human beings or as the tradition inevitably put it of man these ideas were certainly not original with the renaissance many of the arguments were already familiar for instance the christian argument that the superiority of man or human beings was shown by the choice of a human being to be the vehicle of the incarnation or an older idea which goes back at least to protagoras as he is presented by plato that humans have fewer natural advantages fewer defenses for instance than other animals but that they are more than compensated for this by the gift of reason and cognition others of course took a gloomier view of human powers and potentialities montan wondered how peculiar human beings were and he was a lot less enthusiastic about the peculiarities that they had but whether the views were positive and celebratory or more skeptical and pessimistic there was one characteristic that almost all those views shared with each other and they shared it too with traditional christianity and this was hardly surprising since virtually everyone in their renaissance influenced by humanism was some sort of christian for a start almost everyone believed that human beings were literally at the center of the universe with the exceptions perhaps of nicolas of kuza and giordano bruno who thought there was no center to the universe besides that purely topographical belief however there was a more basic assumption that in cosmic terms human beings had a definite measure of importance in most of these outlooks the assumption was that that measure of human beings importance was high that humans were particularly important in relation to the scheme of things well that's most obviously true of the more celebratory versions of humanism according to which human beings are the most perfect beings in creation but it's also present in fact in outlooks that assign human beings a wretched and imperfect condition luther's vision for instance in which man is hideously fallen and can do nothing about it simply by his own efforts the assumption is still there indeed it's hardly an assumption it's a central belief in the structure that that fact itself is of absolute importance the cosmos may not be looking at human beings with much admiration but it's certainly looking at them the human condition is a central concern to god so central in fact that it led to the incarnation which in the reformation context too plays his traditional role the signaling man's special role in the scheme of things if man's fate is a very special concern to god there's nothing more absolute than that it's a central concern period well now overtly anthropocentric views of the cosmos are certainly less common today than they were then leaving aside the distribution of concerns on earth itself which i'm going to come back to people for a long time now have been impressed by the mere topographical rearrangement of the universe by which we're not in the center of anything interesting our location in the galaxy just for starters seems almost extravagantly non-committal moreover many people suppose that there are other living creatures on planets in this galaxy in other galaxies perhaps in other universes it seems hubristic or merely silly to suppose that this enterprise has any special interest in us even christians or many of them are less impressed by the idea that god must be more concerned with human beings than he is with any other creature i'm afraid i don't know what the current state of thought is about the incarnation the idea of the absolute importance of human beings seems firmly dead or at least only well on the way out however we need to go a little carefully here the assumption i'm considering as i put it is that in cosmic terms human beings have a definite measure of importance the most common application of that idea naturally enough has been that they have a high degree of importance and i suggested that that itself can take two different forms the petrarchan or celebratory form in which man is splendidly important and what we may call the lutheran form that what is of ultimate significance is the fact that man is wretchedly fallen but there's another and less obvious application of the same assumption that human beings do have a definite measure of importance in the scheme of things but that it's very low on this view the significance of human beings to the cosmos is vanishingly small now this may not be a very exciting truth about the cosmos as contrasted with those other outlooks i mentioned but it's still meant to be a truth about the cosmos moreover it's meant to be an exciting or at least a significant truth about human beings i think this may have been what bertrand russell was thinking when for instance in an essay significantly called a free man's worship he went on about the transitories of human beings the tininess of the earth the vast and pitiless expanses of the universe and so on in a style of self-pitying and at the same time self-glorifying rhetoric that made frank ramsey remark that he himself was much less impressed than some of his friends were by the size of the universe perhaps because he weighed 240 pounds now this outlook can make people feel that human activities are absurd because we invest them with an importance which they don't really possess now if someone feels about human activities in this way there's never much point it must be said in telling him that his feelings involve a muddle the feelings probably come from some place which that comment won't reach at the same time they do involve a model it's a muddle between thinking that our activities fail some tests of cosmic significance and as contrasted with that recognizing that there is no test of cosmic significance if there's no such thing as the cosmic point of view if the idea of absolute importance in the scheme of things is an illusion a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted then there is no other point of view except ours in which our activities can have or lack of significance and perhaps in a way that's what russell wanted to say but his journey through the pathos of loneliness and insignificance as experienced from a non-existent point of view could only generate the kind of muddle that is called sentimentality nietzsche by contrast got it right when he said something to the effect that once upon a time there was a star in a certain corner of the universe and the planet circling that star and in it some clever animals who invented knowledge and then they died and the star went out and it was as though nothing had happened now of course there is in principle a third possibility between a cosmic point of view on the one hand and our point of view on the other and that's a possibility familiar from science fiction that one day we encountered other creatures who would have a point of view on our activities the point of view which it's quite vital to add we could respect well perhaps science fiction hasn't made very interesting use of this fantasy but there may be something to learn from it and i'm going to come back to it at the end of these remarks well now suppose we accept that there is no question of human beings and their activities being important or failing to be important from a cosmic point of view well that doesn't mean that there's no point of view from which they're important there's certainly one point of view from which they're important namely ours unsurprisingly so since the we in question the we who raise this question and discuss it with others who we hope will listen and reply are indeed human beings now it's just as unsurprising that this we often shows up within the content of our values whether a creature is a human being or not makes a large difference a lot of the time to the ways in which we treat that creature or at least think that we should treat that creature let's leave aside for the moment distinctions of this kind that are strongly contested by some people such as the matter of what we're prepared to eat less contentiously we speak for instance of human rights and that means rights that are possessed by certain creatures because they're human beings in virtue of their being human we speak of human values indeed you have here a distinguished university center for human values of course that phrase could mean no more than the values in question are possessed by human beings but in that purely possessive sense the term would hardly be adding much since on this planet at least there isn't any other creature that has values or certainly a center to study and promote them human values aren't just values that we have but values that express our humanity and to study them as the center does is to study what we value in as much as we are what we are that is to say human beings now there are some people who suppose that if in any way we privilege human beings in our ethical thought if we think that what happens to human beings is more important than what happens to other creatures if we think that human beings as such have a claim on our attention and care in all sorts of situations in which other animals have less or no claim on us they think that we're implicitly reverting to a belief in the absolute importance of human beings they suppose that we are in effect saying when we exercise these distinctions between human beings and other creatures that human beings are more important period than those other creatures well that objection is simply a mistake we don't have to be saying anything of that sort at all we don't have to be referring to cosmic importance these actions and attitudes need expressed no more than the fact that human beings are more important to us and that fact is hardly surprising well that mistaken objection takes the form of claiming that in privileging human beings in our ethical thought we're saying more than we should we're claiming their absolute importance that's the mistaken objection one other is a different objection which might be put by claiming that we're saying less than we need to say let us say that we need a reason for these preferences in favor of human beings without a reason this objection goes that preference the preference for human beings will just be a prejudice if we've given any reason at all so far for these preferences it's simply the one we express by saying it's a human being or they're human or she's one of us and that the objectives say isn't a reason they'll remind us of the paradigm prejudices racism and sexism because he's white because he's male and no good in themselves as reasons though they can be relevant in very special circumstances for instance gender in the case of employing a bathroom attendant though even that might be thought in some circles to involve a further prejudice if the supposed reasons of race or gender are offered without support he's a man he's white the answer they elicit is quite rightly what's that got to do with it those supposed reasons are equally of the form he's one of us for a narrower us well the objectives say the human privilege is itself just another prejudice like racism or sexism and they have a suitably unlovely name for it speciesism well now how good is this objection and how exactly does it work well i'm afraid it'll take a little while to answer those questions because they require us to try to get a bit clearer about the relations between our humanity on the one hand and our giving and understanding reasons on the other and the route to that involves several stops a good place to start i think is this not many racists or sexists have actually supposed that a bear appeal to race or gender merely saying he's black or she's a woman did constitute a reason they were to so to speak the stage either earlier or later than that it was earlier if they simply had a barely articulated practice of discrimination they just went on like that and they didn't need to say anything to their like-minded companions in the way of justification of their practices well the day came when they did have to say something in justification to those discriminated against if they couldn't simply go on telling them to shut up to outsiders or to radicals or to themselves in those moments when they started to wonder how defensible it might be and then they had to say some more mere references to race or gender wouldn't meet what was by then the need equally references to supernatural sources which said the same thing wouldn't hold up for long something which at least seemed relevant to the matter at hand job opportunities the franchise or whatever it might be something would have to be brought out about the supposed intellectual and moral weakness say of blacks or women well these were reasons in the sense that they're at least to some degree of the right shape to be reasoned they were caused they were very bad reasons both because they were untrue and because they were the products of false consciousness working to hold up the system and it didn't need any very elaborate social or psychological theory to show that they were well now with the case of the supposed human prejudice it doesn't seem to be quite like this on the one hand it isn't simply a matter of inarticulate or unexpressed discrimination there's no secret that we're in favor of human rights for instance on the other hand it's a human being does seem to operate as a reason but it doesn't seem to be helped out by some further reach of supposedly more relevant reasons of the kind which in the other cases of prejudice turned out to be rationalizations or false consciousness we're all aware of some notable differences between human beings and other creatures on earth there's a whole range of cases in which we cite or rely on the fact that a certain creature is a human being but where those differences between us and other animals don't seem to figure in our thought as justifications for going on as we do in fact in many cases it's hard to see how they could uniquely on earth human beings use highly articulated languages they've developed to an unparalleled extent non-genetic learning through culture they possess literatures and historically cumulative technologies and so on well now of course there's quite a lot of dispute about the exact nature and extent of these differences between our own and other species there's discussions for instance of how far some other primates transmit learn skills and whether they have local traditions in this but this isn't the point there isn't any showing a sharp and spectacular behavioral gap between ourselves and our nearest primate relatives and that's no doubt because other hominid species have disappeared doubtless with our assistance but why should considerations about those differences true as they are about culture and technology and language and all that why should those differences play any role at all in an argument about vegetarianism for instance what's all that stuff about language and culture and so on got to do with human beings eating some other animals but not human beings it's hard to see any argument in that direction which won't turn out to say something like this that it's simply better that culture intelligence and technology should flourish as opposed presumably to all those other amazing things that are done by other species which are on the menu or consider if you like not the case of meat eating but of insecticides if we have reason to use insecticides must we claim that it's simply better that we should flourish at the expense of the insect if any evolutionary development is spectacular and amazing it's the proliferation and diversification of insects some of them are harmful to human beings their food or their artifacts but they are truly wonderful what these last points show is that even if we could get hold of the idea that it was just better that one sort of animal should flourish rather than another it's not in the least clear why it should be us but the basic point of course is that we can't get hold of that idea at all that's simply another recurrence of the notion we saw off a little while ago absolute importance that last relic of the still enchanted world of course we can say rightly that we're in favor of cultural development and so on and think it's very important but that itself is just another expression of the human prejudice we're supposed to be wrestling with so there's something obscure about the relations between the moral consideration it's a human being and the characteristics that distinguish human beings and other creatures if there's a human prejudice it's structurally rather different from those other prejudices racism and sexism well now this doesn't necessarily show it isn't a prejudice some critics will say on the contrary it shows what a deep prejudice it is to the extent that we can't even articulate reasons that are supposed to underlie it and if as i said we seem very ready to profess it the critic will say but this shows how shamelessly prejudiced we are and we that we can express it we profess it because very significantly there's no one we have to justify it to except a few reformers who are fellow human beings well that's certainly a significant fact and we have to bear it in mind other animals on this planet are good at many things but not at asking for or understanding justifications oppressed humans women and minorities come of age in the search for emancipation when they speak for themselves and no longer through reforming members of the oppressing group but the other animals will never come of age human beings will always act as their trustees and that's connected to a point which i'll come back to that in relation to those other animals the only moral question for us is how we should treat them a point but i say i shall come back to now someone who speaks vigorously against speciesism and the human prejudice is of course professor peter singer the irw decamp professor of bioethics in this very university and i'm sorry as i gather that he's away at this time and can't be with us indeed as you don't need telling here he holds his chair at the said university center for human values at least i believe he does and which i've already mentioned i have wondered i must say what he makes of that name in the purely possessive or limp sense of the expression it's presumably all right but in the richer sense of the expression human values which must surely be its intention i thought it would have sounded to him rather like a center for aryan values well whatever exactly may be the structure of the human prejudice if it is a prejudice singer's work has brought out very clearly some important consequences of rejecting it consequences which he's been prepared to advocate in a robust style now a central idea involved in the supposed human prejudice is that there are certain respects in which creatures are treated in one way rather than another simply because they belong to a certain category the human species we don't at this basic initial level need to know any more about them told that there are human beings trapped in a burning building on the strength of that fact alone we mobilize as many resources as we can to rescue them when the human prejudice is rejected two things follow the singer has made clear one is that some more substantial set of properties supposedly better fitted to give reasons are substituted the second is that the criteria based on those properties the criteria which determine what you can properly do to a creature are applied to examples one at a time it's always a question whether a particular individual satisfies the criteria well now let's consider the question not of protecting but of killing singer thinks that our reasons for being less ready to kill human beings that we are to kill other animals the quote greater seriousness of killing them as he puts it are based on and i quote our superior mental powers our self-awareness our rationality our moral sense our autonomy or some combination of these they are the kinds of things we're inclined to say which make us uniquely human to be more precise they're the kind of thing that make us persons end of quotation elsewhere he cites with approval michael tully's definition of persons as quote those beings who are capable of seeing themselves as continuing cells that is as self-aware beings existing over time end of quotation it's these characteristics that we should refer to when we're deciding what to do and in principle we should refer to them on a case-by-case basis quote if we're considering whether it's wrong to destroy something surely we need to look at its actual characteristics not just the species to which it belongs unquote and actual here is taken in a way that leaves no room for potentiality you can't say that an embryo gets special protection because it's potentially a person it's not yet a person and therefore it's a non-person just as in tully's perhaps rather unlovely terminology someone suffering from acute senile dementia is an ex-person well as i've said singer brings out very clearly these two consequences of his view namely that we rely on some properties other than belonging to the human race some substantial properties roughly those are personhood and so we secondly apply them case to case and he relies on those consequences in arriving at various controversial conclusions when i am concerned with the view itself the rejection of the human prejudice rather than particular details of singer's own position but there are a couple of points which i should mention in order to make clear what's at issue first what singer rejects isn't quite the form of the human prejudice to which i and many other people are attached singer considers the following familiar syllogism every human being has a right to life a human embryo is a human being therefore the human embryo has a right to life well it's certainly a valid argument we better agree that conclusions follow from the premises those who oppose abortion and destructive mbo research people who are particularly in the united states are sometimes called pro-lifers think both those premises are true and therefore they accept the conclusion those who defend abortion and embryo experiment under certain circumstances have to reject one of the premises they typically deny the second premise namely a human embryo is a human being but singer denies the first premise namely every human being has a right to life more strictly he thinks that the first premise every human being has a right to life is correct only if human being means person every person has a right to life but in that sense the second premise is false the human embryo is a human being because the human embryo isn't yet a person there is he says a sense in which the second premise is true because the embryo belongs to the species but in that sense of human being it's not true that every human being has a right to life now i mentioned this perhaps rather fiddly consideration because it distinguishes singer from those such as most moderate pro-choice campaigners who accept obviously enough that the embryo is human in the sense that it's a human embryo but don't yet accept that it's a human being or rather don't accept it yet a human being any more than a bovine embryo is a cow my colleague jonathan glover once calls nearly terminal fury in a distinguished pro-life advocate in england but what seemed to me the entirely reasonable remark that if this gentleman had been promised a chicken dinner and was served with an omelet made of fertilized eggs he'd have a complaint now the point is an important one the standard view the view which singer attacks is that human being is a morally relevant notion where human being indeed means an animal belonging to a particular species our species but those who hold that view are not committed to thinking that a fertilized opium is already such an animal in more so than the case of any other species well singer sets up then the principle that the idea relevant to these moral questions is not the species term human being but the term person where that brings in notions of self-awareness over time and so on well it must be said and this is the second detail point that he notably fails to apply this principle in a very thorough going way singer has become notorious for defending infanticide in certain circumstances he does so because i quote new porn infants are in most morally relevant respects more like fetuses than like older children or adults unquote as he cheerfully puts it i quote neither a fetus nor infant has the conceptual wherewithal to contemplate a future or to want or value that future end of quotation he then argues a case for possible infanticide in the case of seriously disabled infants but why the restriction to seriously disabled infants if the objection to killing human beings is the objection to killing persons that infants aren't persons what's the objection to killing any infants if you do it painlessly and there aren't other objections such as distressed parents if for instance they're simply a nuisance now i think the peculiarities of singer's position come in part from his concern with one kind of controversy he's trying to cumber conservative policies based on a particular notion the sanctity of human life this helps to explain why his position on abortion infanticide is the same as the pro-life position but the other way up he and the pro-life as both argue if abortion then infanticide but they take that as an objection and he takes it as an encouragement against all this it's very important to say that one can believe as i believe that notion of a human being as a member of a species is central to our moral thought without being committed to the entire set of rules that go under the label the sanctity of human life now the most basic question however is that raised by the general structure of singer's position rather than these details and it's the same kind of question we've encountered already why are the fancy properties which are grouped under the label of personhood quote morally relevant to issues of destroying a certain kind of animal while the property of being a human being isn't well one answer might be we favor and esteem these properties we encourage their development we hate and resent it if they are frustrated and that's hardly surprising since our whole life and not only our values but our having any values at all involve our having these properties ourselves well that's a fine answer but it doesn't answer this question since we also and in complex relation to all that do what singer complains of namely use the idea of a human being in our moral thought and draw a line around the class of human beings with regard to various things that we're ethically prepared to do a different answer would be that it's simply better that the world should contain instances of the fancy properties of personhood but it's not simply better that the world should contain human beings as such but that's once more our now familiar friend absolute importance that survivor from the enchanted world bringing with it the equally familiar and encouraging thought that the properties we possess well most of us not counting the infants the alzheimer patients and a few others those properties have been cheered on by the universe well now i should say once that this isn't singer's own answer to the question he's a utilitarian and he thinks very roughly speaking that the only thing that ultimately matters is how much suffering there is to the extent that we should give special attention to persons this is supposedly explained by the fact that persons are capable of suffering in some special ways that other animals can't suffer because they can foresee the future and so on now i don't want to argue over the familiar territory of whether that is a reasonable helpful explanation of all the things we care about in relation to persons namely whether the only thing that makes a difference is the various ways in which they can suffer i want to ask something else which leads back to my central question our moral conceptions ourselves as human beings living among other creatures my question is not does the utilitarian view make sense of our other concerns in terms of our concern with suffering my question is rather how far does the utilitarian view make sense of our concern with suffering itself now many utilitarians including singer are happy to use a model of an ideal or impartial observer the idea the model the images of an imaginary figure who knows everything is equally impartial about everything can take on board as it were all the suffering in the world a philosopher proposing one version of such a model 50 years ago memory described this figure as quote omniscient disinterested dispassionate but otherwise normal well the model comes in various versions in many of which the figure isn't exactly dispassionate rather he's benevolent well that can mean several different things itself but let's concentrate on the simplest application of the idea that the ideal observer is against suffering and he wants it to be as little of it as possible with his omniscience and impartiality he so to speak takes on all suffering however exactly we're to conceive of that and he takes it all on equally well now because he does begin to look a lot like a slimmed down surrogate of the christian god and this might suggest that he represents yet another enactment of the cosmic point of view suffering or its absence is what has absolute importance but i assume that utilitarian such a singer hope that the model can be spelled out in more disenchanted terms they deploy the model against what they see as prejudice in particular the human prejudice and the idea behind this is that there is a sentiment or disposition or conviction which we do have namely compassion or sympathy or the belief that suffering is a bad thing but they claim we express these sentiments in an irrationally restricted way the way in which our sentiments of sympathy or compassion for suffering work is governed by the notorious inverse square law that is the further away the less you feel it roughly where the distances involved can of course be of all kinds spatial they're on the other side of the world familial national remember there's always a headline in the oxford paper when there's a vast earthquake somewhere on the other side of the world oxford man injured in earthquake racial of course notoriously or governed by species membership now the model of the ideal observer is supposed to be a corrective if we could take on all suffering as he does we wouldn't be liable to these parochial biases and would feel and act in better ways well no doubt the history of the device does lie in fact in a kind of secularized imitation christie and i suspect that some of the sentiments in mobilizers are connected with that but the utilitarians hope to present it as independent of that as a device expressing an extensive rational correction of the kind of thing we indeed feel so i want to take the model seriously in a secular way perhaps more seriously from a certain point of view than those who use it well i've got two problems with it one is very familiar actually and concerns the relations between the model and human action even if we thought that the ideal observers outlook was a reliable guide to what would be a better state of affairs how's that connected with what we each of us should be trying to do with regard to animal suffering a form of the problem a form that goes back to the 19th century is the question of policing nature even though much suffering to animals is caused directly or indirectly by human beings it's also true that an immense amount of it is caused by other animals this suffering must form a significant part of what is on the ideal observer's screen where we're certainly in the business of reducing the harm caused by other animals to ourselves we seek in some degree to reduce the harm we cause to other animals the question arises whether we should be in the business of reducing the harm that other animals cause to each other and generally in the business of reducing the suffering that goes on in nature well utilitarians do offer some arguments to suggest that we shouldn't bother with that arguments which about saving our energy and time and so on but i ever find it hard to avoid the feeling those answers are pallid and unconvincing rationalizations of a more basic reaction there's something altogether crazy about the idea that it misrepresents our relations to nature some environmentalists of course think that we shouldn't try to improve nature in this respect because nature is sacred and we should interfere with it as little as possible anyway but they certainly aren't governed simply by the model of the ideal observer and his concern for suffering well now this leads to a more fundamental point those who see our selective sympathies as a biased and prejudiced filtering of the suffering in the world who think in terms of our shadowing as far as we can the consciousness of the ideal observer and guiding our actions by reflection on what the ideal observer takes on i wonder whether they ever consider what it would really be like to take on what the ideal observer supposedly takes on whatever exactly it takes on may mean it's supposed to imply this that the sufferings of other people of all other creatures should be as vividly present to us in some sense as closely connected with our reasons for action as our own sufferings of those of people we care for who are immediately at hand that's how the model is supposed to correct for buyers but what would it conceivably be like for this but it's so even for a few seconds what would it be like to take on every piece of suffering that a given moment any creature is undergoing it would be an ultimate horror an unendurable nightmare and what would be the connection of that nightmare to our actions in the model the ideal observer is supposed just to be an observer he can't do anything but our action the idea is supposed to shadow or be guided by reflection on what he and his omniscience and impartiality is taking on and if for a moment we got anything like an adequate idea of what that is and really guided our actions by it then surely we would annihilate the planet if we could and if other planets containing conscious creatures are similar to ours in the suffering they contain we would annihilate them as well this model has got things totally inside out we indeed have reasons to listen to our sympathies and extend them not only to wider groups of human beings but into a concern for other animals so far as they are in our power that's already a human disposition the oxford english dictionary definition of the word humane reads marked by sympathy within consideration for the needs and distresses of others feeling or showing compassion and tenderness towards human beings and the lower animals now we can act intelligibly from these concerns only if we see them as aspects of human life it's not an accident or limitation or a prejudice that we can't care equally about all the suffering in the world it's the condition of our existence and of our sanity equally it's not a demand the demands of the moral consciousness require us to leave human life altogether and then come back to regulate the distribution of concerns including our own by criteria derived from nowhere we're surrounded by a world which we can regard with a very large range of reactions wonder joy sympathy disgust horror we can being as they as we are reflect on these reactions and modify them to some extent we can think about how this human estate or settlement should be run and about its impact on its surroundings but it's a total illusion to think that this enterprise can be licensed in some respects and condemned in others by credentials that come from another source a source that's not already involved in the peculiarities of human enterprise and it's an irony that this illusion even when it takes the form of rejecting so-called speciesism and the human prejudice actually shares a structure with older illusions about there being a cosmic scale of importance in terms of which human beings should understand themselves if we look at it in the light of those old illusions this outlook namely the opposition to the human prejudice will be closer in spirit to what i call the lutheran version rather than the celebratory version in virtue of its insistence that human beings are twisted by their selfishness it's unlike the lutheran outlook of course precisely in its anti-humanism luther thought that it did matter the universe what happened to mankind but this view thinks that all that matters to the universe is roughly speaking how much suffering it contained but there's another difference as well luther thought that human beings couldn't redeem themselves unaided but the opponents of the human prejudice typically think that with the help of rationality and these theories they may be able to do so now i said that it's itself part of a human or humane outlook to be concerned with how animals should be treated and there's nothing in what i've said to suggest that we shouldn't be concerned with that but i do want to repeat something that i've said elsewhere that very significantly the only question for us is how those animals should be treated that's not true of our relations to other human beings and that already shows that we're not dealing with a prejudice like racism or sexism some white male who thinks that the only question about the relations between us as he puts it white males and other human beings namely women and people of color is how we should treat them that person is already prejudiced prejudiced but in the case of other animals that's the only question there could be well that's how it is here on this planet now it's a consequence of the fact that i've already mentioned that in terms of a range of abilities that control action we happen to live on an evolutionary plateau human beings don't have to deal with any creature that in terms of argument principle worldview or whatever can answer back but it might be otherwise and it may be helpful in closing to imagine something different well let's suppose that in the well-known way of science fiction creatures arrive with whom to some extent we can communicate who are intelligent and technologically advanced they got here after all they have relations with each other that are mediated by understood rules and so on and so forth now there's an altogether new sort of question for the human prejudice if these culturally ordered creatures arrived the human being who thought that it was just a question of how we should treat them has seriously underestimated the problem both ethically and probably prudentially well the late robert nozick once gave it as an argument for vegetarianism that if we claim the right to eat animals less smart than ourselves we'd have to concede the right to such visitors to eat us if they were smarter than us to the degree that we're smarter than the animals we eat in fact i don't think that it is an argument for vegetarianism it's rather an objection to one argument through meat eating and i'm not too sure how good it is even as that but the main point is that if they propose to eat us it'd be quite crazy to debate their rights at all the 19th century egoist philosopher max diana said the tiger that assails me is in the right and i who strike him down i'm also in the right i defend against him not my right but myself but still has remark concerned a tiger and it's a matter of life and death well now much science fiction such as the pure isle independence day defines the issue in those terms from the beginning and so makes the issues fairly easy it's fairly easy to if the aliens are just here to help in terms that we can recognize as hell the standard codings of science fiction particularly in movies are designed to make such questions simple the hostile and nasty aliens tend to be either slimy and disgusting or rigid and metallic in one brilliant early example welles's war of the worlds they're both at once the nice and cooperative on the other hand a furry like the co-pilot in star wars or cute like e.t or ethereal fairies like those little things in the bright light at the end of close encounters of a third kind however we can imagine situation in which things would be harder the arrivals might be very disgusting indeed their faces for instance if those are faces are seething with what seem to be worms but if we wait long enough to find out what they're at we may gather that they're quite benevolent they just want to live with us rather closely with us what should we make of that proposal some philosophers may be at hand to remind us about distinguishing between moral and non-moral values and to tell us that their benevolence and helpfulness are morally significant whereas the fact that they are unforgettably disgusting is not but suppose their aim in their unaggressive way is to make the world more as we would put it disgusting and what if their disgustingness is really truly unforgettable or we could turn things around in a different direction the aliens in terms of our preferences are moderately good looking and they are again extremely benevolent and reasonable and they've had much more successful experience than we have in running peaceable societies but they have found that they do need to run them and the too much species self-assertion or indeed cultural autonomy prove to be destabilizing and destructive so painlessly they will rid us certainly of our prejudices and to the required extent of some of our cultural and other peculiarities but what should we make of that would the opponents of speciesism want us to join them join them indeed not on the ground that we couldn't beat them which might be sensible if not very heroic but on principle well the situation this fantasy presents is in some ways familiar it's like that of a human group defending its cultural possibly ethnic identity against some other human group which claims to dominate or assimilate them with this very large difference however that since we're dealing here with another and indeed non-terrestrial species there's no question of cultural or ethnic variation being eroded by sexual fusion indeed from the perspective of sex it must be said the idea that speciesism racism and yet again gender prejudice or all alike does look extremely peculiar anyway the fantasy situation with the aliens will resemble a familiar political situation in some ways for one thing there may well be a disagreement among the threatened group in this case human beings in part an ethical disagreement between those who think that the invaders are right and we all decide with them let's call them the collaborationists and those who are resistors it looks as though the utilitarianism will be committed to joining the collaborationist now in this fantasy case the resistors will be organizing under the banner defend humanity or stand up for human beings well that's an ethical appeal in an ethical dispute of course this doesn't make human being into an ethical concept any more than the cause of masked separatism and ethical causes past separatists see it makes bask into an ethical concept the relevant ethical concept is something like loyalty to or identity with one's ethnical cultural grouping and in the fantasy case the ethical concept is loyalty to one species moreover and this is the significant lesson of this fantasy this is an ethical concept we have already it's the one we're using implicitly all the time when for instance in the context of our ethical thought we appeal to the fact that a creature is a human being it's simply that as things are in real life because we live on this evolutionary plateau we don't spell it out because there is no other creature who could use or be motivated by that same consideration but with a different application that is to say there's no creature belonging to some other species that can articulate reflect on or be motivated by reasons appealing to their species membership so the idea of there being an ethical concept that appeals to our species membership is entirely coherent it's shown by the fantasy case and it's an actual uses familiar in the actual case now of course there may be ethical arguments about the value or merits of any such concept namely a concept that appeals to something like loyalty to a group membership or identity with it some people in the spirits of those who'd be collaborationists in the fantasy case are against all such ideas it's notable in the political morality of the present time that some people seem to be opposed to such attitudes in dominant groups but very much in favor of them for subordinate groups others again may be respectful of the energizing power of such conceptions that of the sense they can give of a life that has a rich and particular character has contrasted at the extreme with the utilitarian ideal of the itinerant welfare worker who with his bad lines of the ideal observer goes around turning on and off the taps of benevolence at the same time however those who respect these conceptions of loyalty and identity may be rightly skeptical about the coercive rhetoric the lies about differences and the sheer violence that are often associated with such ideas and with the movements that express them some of those objections no doubt carry over to ways in which we express species identity and loyalty as things actually are that's why the opponents of so-called speciesism and the human prejudice quite often have a point about particular policies and attitudes even though they're quite mistaken about the framework of ideas with when which they condemn those things well should we conclude that the human prejudice if one wants to call it that must ultimately be inescapable well let's go back one last time to the fantasy of the arrival of the benevolent managerial aliens and the consequent debate among human beings between the collaborationists who want to join them and the resistors who want to run the human independence movement in that debate even the collaborationists have to use a humanly intelligible discourse argument which their fellow human beings can recognize if that meant that their arguments had to be peculiar to human beings then their situation would indeed be paradoxical it would be as though in the familiar political discussions about the cultural identity of the basques even the assimilationists had to use arguments peculiar to vast culture so let's suppose that it doesn't mean that that is that although they have to use arguments which are comprehensible to their other human beings then arguments peculiar to as it were the separatists or the uh resisters the relevant alternative i think in the fantasy case is that the collaborationists use arguments that they share not only with the other human beings but they share with the benevolent invaders indeed many moral philosophers think that the correct moral principles are ones that could be shared with any rational or reflective agents whatever they were otherwise like now even if this was so those principles wouldn't necessarily tell us some of these creatures how to share a life together maybe we and they would be too different in other respects for that to be possible remember the disgusting benevolent aliens and the best we could do is to establish a non-aggression pact with them and coexist at a distance well that would leave our prejudices of their prejudices where they were but suppose that we are to live together there's no reason to suppose that the universal principles we share with the aliens will justify our prejudices we can't even be sure that they'll justify our being allowed to have our prejudices as a matter of toleration as i said in setting up the fantasy the long experience and benevolent understanding possessed by the aliens may enable them to see that tolerating our kinds of prejudice leads to instability and injustice so they'll want to usher our prejudices out and on these assumptions we should agree the collaborationists must be right it seems because their moral conceptions transcend the local peculiarities but if that's so doesn't something even stronger follow i said in setting up these space fiction fantasies that the independence day scenario in which the aliens are manifestly hostile and want to destroy us is for us an ethically easy case we defend ourselves well no doubt we shall try but should we try perhaps the critics will say this is just another irrational visceral human reaction to defend ourselves in this situation the benevolent and fair-minded and far-sighted aliens may know a great deal about us and our history and understand that our prejudices are unreformable that things will never be better in this part of the universe until we are removed now i'm not saying this is necessarily what such aliens would think i'm not saying that the universal moralists the potential collaborationists would necessarily agree with them but i don't see that if they disagree that they could be certain that it was just not another self-serving prejudice this it seems to me is the place to which the project of trying to transcend altogether the ways in which human beings understand themselves and make sense of their practices could in principle end up and here i think i can only ask we can only ask at this stage what side are you on in many more limited connections hopes for self-improvement lie very close to the risk of self-hatred when the hope is to improve humanity to a point of which every aspect of its hold on the world can be justified before a higher court when that aim the result is likely to be either self-deception if you think you succeeded or misanthropy when you recognize that you will always fail personally i think that while there are many things to loathe about human beings their sense of their ethical identity as a species isn't one of them thank you very much professor williams will be happy to answer questions this one there if you can wait for the microphone i agree completely with your idea of uh i you know it's the microphone you can't hear him but i agree completely with your idea of uh specism in the sense that it might be a unique prejudice in which both parties seems to acquiesce this prejudice i'm willing to eat a crocodile and a crocodile is going to eat me and neither party had to be rather hungry to do this act but on the other hand when we study the evolution of our own civilization i think it's quite apparent that over the last few thousand years that we've changed from uh i i for an eye society to more of uh turn the other cheek society and from what kind of society sorry from my eye for an eye so from old testament to new testament at least in western civilization in which case we try to create a more gentle and kinder world and i think this kind of philosophy has worked out quite well for us you've mentioned several times your remarks that animals lacked the mental facilities to have like the same mental facilities as us and but when i think about practicing uh turning the other cheek in many instances in that circum does in some circumstances you have to turn the other cheek even knowing that your opponent does not share the same mental facilities that you do so could we practice the same approach with animals and would this lift us from the other species and would this be the first act that would show that we are truly different from other animals and in that sense important well i'm not quite sure which point we're making i mean first [Music] the idea that both parties to a system of prejudice acquiescing it is not peculiar of course to the animal case because the um the same thing in a certain sense was true of other forms of intra-human prejudice and that's what's called false consciousness but of course the point is that precisely in the case of human beings you can transcend it because the beliefs of the oppressed parties change now the first point i made was simply that's not possible in the case of animal now really the point you're making i think is in terms of a rather spectacular alleged phenomenon of the widening circle as singer and others have put it namely that our sympathies have extended i should say it's a small detail in what you said that someone sees with the same point as the point about an eye for an eye the question about whether you are vengeful or keen on retribution is a different question from what body of persons you regard as part of the society to which these principles apply and i must say if your view is that there's a uniform tendency towards more liberal or less retributive views of punishment that seems to me historically remarkably optimistic but that's uh well depending on what your view is i don't think it has to be necessarily uh yeah retributive punishment um i think it's okay well you just mentioned eye for an eye on the in particular i mean the question is can we be nicer to animals than we have been in the past yeah sure i mean as we become technologically more powerful we have more leisure we have more elbow room we're not threatened by saber type truth tigers and things yeah we've done quite well at that it's been done rather as we did with the other hominids i mean many of the immediate threateners have actually been removed it's also true that our most constant battles are with animals that don't actually get much of a vote from the animal rights lobby namely bacteria uh who on the whole have been doing rather well i mean if you're looking at the general history of evolution uh on the whole i put my money on bacteria to be here when larger animals have disappeared i i don't think it's i think one last remark about evolution though it is an absolutely extraordinary phenomenon the treatment of this subject by evolutionary psychologists i name in particular pinker pinker first tells us that a large number of our liberal policies are based of neglect of the psychology we've inherited from the conditions of our earlier ancestors in which our psychology was selected for that's true for instance of various egalitarian policies and also interestingly of modernist architecture and a few other things he happens to dislike at the same time he tells us that we shall join in fully in singer's widening circle when i asked pinker personally whether he thought that a sympathy with other animals as such was part of our hereditary genetic inheritance of our psychology from our early ancestors he said well we could transcend it and there is actually an absolutely elementary factual psychology of transcendence which is grafted on top of the alleged quasi-determiners of evolutionary psychology and that doesn't even start as it were i'm not saying you said that well i just make very well i'll get that contact yeah okay it's on uh you said that um where our relationship to animals is concerned the only relevant question is how we should treat them i think that's probably true since um but you didn't really address in your talk i didn't hear uh how exactly we should treat them that was sort of a question that was left out which is fine um um i mean people who think we should treat animals badly or at least don't aren't that concerned about how we stream generally make use of an argument that you move past quickly also i think rightly which is this which is that they they point to um you know uh um irrationality ability to use language technology art music sort of thing um i talk about just meat eaters you know but also um development of wilderness areas um energy policy all sorts of things where we build how we build that kind of thing i mean do you really think that that kind of argument is more or less baseless can you move past it very quickly do you think there's more substance to it than so i'm not quite sure which argument it is i mean the argument about i did mention one argument in this area it is of course true that we can think about how to treat animals in a way that other animals can't think about how to treat us that's true that's agreed right yeah that doesn't tell us yet what to think about how to treat other animals now it may well be that we have to that we have good reason i'm wasn't even involved in these arguments there are i believe probably some rather good arguments for vegetarianism i don't actually share them but i think there are some rather good arguments vegetarians and one of them obviously is that producing meat is an astonishingly inefficient way of using sunlight that actually seems to be quite a good argument now other arguments i'm merely suggesting that you might get on the wrong track if you thought that the fact we possessed this moral consciousness unlike other animals also meant that um that unlike other animals we weren't predators maybe we are predators with a moral conscience so what we do is organize our predations in a way that other predators don't organize their predation now would that make sense in your view or do you think the fact that we have moral consciousness with other animals don't means that we must be completely unlike other animals in not being predators i think it's um i would have uh i think it's a question of priority um a lot of animal rights advocates myself among them i think would say that what's more important to look at is our emotional capacities um our social abilities this sort of thing creativity which other animals we're finding out more and more um these are goods they participate in a lot and sure in very rich ways um i don't have an answer to your question do you think that that particular approach to animal rights is also a wrong track or no well i think that it doesn't deliver the right answer i mean the more we can know about other animals the better partly because other animals are limitlessly fascinating we have very false views about them i said that what i do think is that there is a kind of potential contradiction in some lines of animal the right thought on the one hand they say we've got to remember that we're part of nature we share the world with other species we are one species among others we weren't seen here as dominators of the world secondly we're totally different from any other animals because we have moral consciousness and therefore we can make ourselves into vegetarians now there's an inherent tension between those two things that is the old domination story is wrong but so is a story that our quotes moral consciousness enables us to transcend all our other animal characteristics i think we are one species among others there seems to be some rather evidence that we're a carnivorous one there's certainly a great deal of evidence that we're a predatory one and maybe that is one of the limitations or facts about the kind of species we are that our moral consciousness has to deal with thank you on a slightly different line when someone acts inhuman in when someone acts inhumanly what is it that they've lost or what is it that they've become because they have not become an animal and they've not become an alien that's right that's a very very good question and i think there are a lot of complex answers to it um and when they behave inhumanly interesting as you absolutely rightly say it doesn't mean that they act like an animal for instance they don't destroy something in rage typically if they act inhumanly what they typically do is that they behave either like a machine or just or a disembodied intelligence and one way of acting inhumanly is to act on certain kinds of principles [Applause] any other questions cornell and i mean once the christian backdrop is is is lessened you may end up with a check off even but you have a humanist who's opening these kind of arguments but then one wonders and i think this is part of singer's concern are there any conditions you could imagine in which you would give up the kind of humanism that you're committed to well colonel i think

Channel: Peripatetic Pilgrim

Views: 8,675

Keywords:

Id: SqQ4Dv_0984

Length: 72min 46sec (4366 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021