Should Academics Brainwash their Students? and Other Professional-Ethical Dilemmas

Related to my discussion a couple of weeks ago of the problems and responsibilities of philosophers engaging with non-academics, you might be interested to look at Simon Caney’s latest article (or, for that matter, the rest of the latest issue of Ethics & International Affairs). Caney’s paper addresses the question of what academics can contribute to the struggles against global poverty and climate change. I think he makes a persuasive case that academics have a lot to offer, and there’s little of substance that I disagree with. However, I think it’s interesting to focus on a question that he doesn’t dwell on.

 

Caney seems to accept that academics should be bound by a norm of ‘neutrality’ or non-partisanship in their teaching responsibilities, and that this means that their anti-poverty activities should be kept away from students: “it seems reasonable to think that academics should not use the classroom to convert people to the goal of eradicating poverty”. It is certainly a reasonable view, but is it right? I certainly don’t think it’s obvious that teaching is ‘off limits’ in this way.

First, it is important to see what academics give up if they refuse to use their influence as teachers as part of their armoury. Like all teachers, they have the capacity to strongly direct the thoughts and opinions of their students, many of whom will go on to be powerful and influential, especially at elite universities. For example, Caney teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford, which has produced five members of the current British cabinet. If he were to persuade just a handful of his students of the significance and desirability of action on poverty and climate change, many of them are likely to take up positions (like senior government roles) where they can make significant contributions to these causes.

I can see why Caney wants to rule out such influence. There are obvious concerns about violating dignity and autonomy that arise with the prospect of brainwashing vulnerable youths. Some people might think these are sufficient to ensure that deviations from academic neutrality in the classroom are always immoral.

I think this position has a couple of weaknesses. First, not all deviations from neutrality are the same. The idea of ‘brainwashing’ suggests that students are passive receptacles, powerless to resist the propaganda they are fed. But influence doesn’t just mean telling people what to think. It can take the form of setting agendas. For example, tutors might develop optional courses on climate change or global poverty. They might go a step further, and make these courses compulsory. But notice that the influence is procedural, not substantive: students are not told what to think, only what to think about. They can still conclude that climate change and global poverty are not morally problematic. Thus I don’t think that these forms of influence are all that controversial. 

I guess what worries people more is the prospect that lecturers might push certain substantive views. Again, this needn’t mean dictating a worldview. It could just be a matter of framing questions in a non-neutral way, or pressing objections to certain positions a little harder. As I have suggested before, the ideal of neutrality here, merely helping others to better understand their own positions and exerting no external influence, is rather unrealistic. I don’t think it is psychologically possible to slough off your biases in favour of the things you believe.

But just because some non-neutrality is inevitable doesn’t mean we should actively seek it. The most important argument for abandoning neutrality is the potential benefits. I think most people would accept that sometimes it is acceptable to thwart or violate autonomy if the stakes are high enough. For example, if I believe it will prevent you from committing a murder, most would agree it is morally justified, indeed obligatory, to lie to you, trick you, physically restrain you. Thomas Pogge and Luis Cabrera argue that we should see the problem of global poverty as a calamity demanding exceptional measures – like the ones academics were willing to take during the Second World War. If things are that serious, if the stakes are that high, and non-neutrality can have a positive effect, then that is surely a strong argument in its favour.

This argument is particularly interesting because I think it might be a particular instance of a general phenomenon - a clash between professional ethics and general moral demands. Or, to put it another way, a contradiction between the duties attending to a certain role and duties arising from humanity. Another interesting example might be a person who hires new employees for their firm. While their professional obligation is to find the best qualified applicant for the position, they might think that morally they ought to discriminate in favour of disadvantaged applicants. Just like the non-neutral academic, doing the right thing seems to involve behaving unprofessionally.

Of course, there may be prudential or pragmatic reasons to follow your professional code – in both cases, there is nothing to be gained from losing your job. However, assume that this is not an issue – in either case, we can imagine that detection might be impossible.

Notice that in neither case are the job or the professional injunction themselves immoral. Indeed, we would think that neutrality in the classroom and picking the best candidate for the job are generally morally good things to do. This suggests that there might be epistemic reasons to follow a generally morally good professional code rather than your own ethics. The circumstances where departure from the professional code is morally right are likely to be extremely rare, and most people are likely to have difficulty judging them, so we should never depart from professional ethics, even if we think it is the right thing to do. (This is reminiscent of an argument for split-level consequentialism).

I’ve only scratched the surface of the issues around conflicts between professional and global ethics, but when the stakes are as high as they are with global poverty and climate change, it certainly seems a question worth pursuing.

Why isn’t John Terry ashamed of himself?

In yesterday’s FA Cup semi-final, Chelsea were mistakenly awarded a goal despite the ball not crossing the goal line. John Terry, the closest Chelsea player to the incident (he was literally sprawled on the line at the time), has basically admitted that he knew the decision was mistaken.

Why isn’t this scandalous? Why does Terry not appear remotely contrite or remorseful? He has effectively admitted cheating and deception on the most public of stages.

Now, if you look closely at what he said, Terry expresses a measure of doubt. Maybe he genuinely thought the referee was in a better position to judge. But surely the incensed reaction of the Tottenham players would have cleared that up? Terry certainly wasn’t going to help the officials, as is commonplace in sports like cricket.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: sportsmen will only live up to our expectations of them. If they know that they can behave like Terry’s, and face no judgement or condemnation, then they face little incentive not to. And if we want higher standards, we have to make that clear and unambiguous.

Can deontologists defend punishment?

27 years ago, Michael Philips set deontologists a challenge – to show how their principles could be reconciled with the institution of punishment. It’s an interesting paper, and I wonder if anyone has satisfactorily met that challenge yet.

A common objection to consequentialism is that it sometimes appears to justify punishing innocent people. This objection is vividly presented by H.J. McCloskey’s thought experiment, which invites us to imagine a scenario in which framing an innocent person for an atrocious crime will help to calm a furious mob and avert a riot. Utilitarians, fearing the possibility of death and destruction, are supposed to accept that punishing the innocent person might be the right thing to do. This apparent perversion of justice is often seen as grounds for rejecting consequentialism.

Yet as Philips points out, deontologists who accept the criminal justice system are in many ways in the same boat. It is a consequence of imperfect human institutions that the police and courts will make mistakes, and wrongly convict innocent people. This is more or less inevitable and predictable. A famous legal principle is that  it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” But how can it be justified for even a single innocent to suffer? The deontologists who condemn consequentialism for countenancing the possibility of punishing the innocent are (presumably) willing to defend a justice system that does exactly that – punish the innocent.

The obvious line of defence for the deontologist is to invoke the doctrine of double effect – the punishment of the innocent is permissible because it is a foreseen but unintended consequence of the institution of punishment. I have a couple of problems with this response. First, the problem that what is taken to be foreseen or intended seems to depend greatly on how an act is described. Insofar as the deontologist supports a policy that they know will result in punishing innocent people, they can be said to intend the punishment of the innocent. Alternatively, the consequentialist’s punishment of an innocent person can be taken as a side effect of averting a riot. Second, if I were an innocent person wrongly convicted of a crime I don’t think that the intentions of the person or system that punished me would make me feel any less wronged.

Another possibility is that the wrongness of letting guilty people escape unpunished is bad enough to justify occasionally punishing innocent people – perhaps not 1:1, but maybe in the 10:1 ratio suggested above. I don’t see how anybody who held this position could still criticise consequentialists with a straight face. Effectively what they’d be saying is that death and injury of those caught up in McCloskey’s riots is not of sufficient moral weight to count against punishing the innocent, but that punishing people is. Causing harm is more morally significant than preventing harm.

Maybe there are other ways out of the dilemma, but if it is a real one, which side should deontologists choose? Philips suggests that they should give up their objection to punishing the innocent, but Michael Zimmerman uses a similar argument (alongside a number of others) to urge us to relinquish the notion that punishment can ever be morally justified. Are there other options I’ve missed?

Kant, Singer and Digital Piracy

Jacob Williamson observes that a strong argument against digital piracy evokes the Kantian claim that it is wrong to act in a way that you wouldn’t want to be universalised. At the same time, Peter Singer offers a consequentialist account of the ethics of piracy, suggesting that individual acts of piracy are not morally culpable, but create a collective action problem that ought to be resolved through measures like a public lending right for the internet. This seems to be an excellent illustration of one of the major fault lines between consequentialism and Kantianism, and that our views on that dispute may be highly salient to the moral evaluation of piracy.

A couple of caveats. First, this is far from the only frame through which to view the question of digital piracy. Other plausible arguments may draw on ideas of fair recognition of desert, or the importance of respecting property rights (as in a libertarian theory). Second, the version of Kantianism discussed here is only one possible interpretation, and not necessarily the most defensible. While Kant’s ‘formula of the universal law’ (FUL) is most relevant here, it has been suggested that this principle is less significant and helpful to understanding his ethical theory than other principles.

Kant’s FUL states that we are to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. In other words, morally permissible acts must be universalisable – we would not mind if everybody acted in this way.[1] The intuition captured by this principle is reflected by the familiar admonition ‘What if everybody did that?’ The central point is that morality requires us to live up to the same standards we expect of others. If we act in a way that we would not be happy for everyone else to emulate, then we are acting as if we are special and superior to others, and this is immoral.

The logic of the FUL is most persuasive in cases like internet piracy, where it is quite clear that everybody adopting a certain course of action would be disastrous, even if individuals can do it without few ill effects. If nobody bought books, CDs, TV licenses and subscriptions, then there would be no reward for those producing these goods, and they would disappear. Thus the pirates are free riding on the contributions of those paying, violating moral equality. They are acting as if they are special and above the rules.

The consequentialist accepts that collective action problems can occur, and condemns individual acts insofar as they contribute to collective action problems. However, they will insist that universalisation is only appropriate where it is likely that many people will follow my lead. The consequentialist objects that it might be terrible if everybody left for work at 7.30 – there would be awful traffic jams, and almost everybody would start work late and grumpy - but this doesn’t mean that leaving for work at that time is morally impermissible. The act of leaving for work at 7.30 might not be universalisable, but this is irrelevant, because excessive numbers of people are unlikely to perform this act together.

This line of response only works when piracy is relatively small scale, and does minimal damage to the media industry. Yet when many people are performing the same act, which we would not want universalised, the consequentialist has to take a different tack.

For the consequentialist, all that matters is the direct causal responsibility that each individual bears for the emergence of the collective action problem. The pertinent question is what would happen if I chose not to commit piracy. As Singer observes, the consequences are often minimal. (Though for an interesting discussion of additive harms and consequentialism, see Shelly Kagan)

From a consequentialist perspective, digital piracy is only bad because it undermines the media industry, but each individual act of piracy makes little impact on the media industry. It would be very good for me to have access to the pirated material, but in many cases it would do nobody else any good for me to forgo it – piracy will continue or not whatever I do – so there is no sense in choosing not to pirate.

Does making this claim violate moral equality and assert my superiority, as rejection of the universalisation principle would seem to suggest? There is no double standard because piracy is not immoral for anybody. At the very least, it is not immoral for anybody in a position similar to mine. (It is possible that those who are particularly influential might have more significant actions and ought not to participate in piracy. But even so, there is still no double standard: if I were in their positions it would be as wrong for me to pirate as it is for them).

The Kantian position seems to require us to take a stand in the full knowledge it will have no effect, while the consequentialist position seems to suggest what it is individually moral is collectively immoral. And indeed, this exposes Kantianism’s fetishism – its blind obedience to the rules, no matter what. It also demonstrates consequentialism’s essential individualism, its difficulty with dealing with collective challenges.

[1] Notice that I have slipped from talking about ‘maxims’ to talking about ‘acts’. I do this to avoid the tricky question of what constitutes a maxim.

Living for Others

I’ve always been sympathetic to the socialist argument that fulfilling and enjoyable work is crucial to human wellbeing, part of our ‘species-being’, as Marx calls it. It’s a line of thought found in the work of those like William Morris, who believe that among capitalism’s most perverse effects is to turn labour, through which we should learn about ourselves and realise our potential, into drudgery which we seek to escape. Similarly, Oscar Wilde claimed that “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others”.

Today, as in Wilde’s time, most people live for others. They have a limited set of marketable skills, and so spend their working lives providing whatever service the market requires, regardless of how they would choose to spend their time. I have always felt incredibly fortunate to have a wide range of options open to me, to know that my career was a matter of choice, rather than something I had to do to get by. I have always felt lucky to be working as much for myself as for others, and that I should value this freedom because it is so unusual.

The concept of professional philanthropy turns this reasoning on its head. It suggests that as long as we live in a world so unequal that genuine career choice is a luxury, it is immoral to take advantage of it. For as long as we live in a world where money has the capacity to do such good – in terms of reducing inequality, preventing disease, providing education – it is self-indulgent to turn your back on it.

The uneasiness I feel about giving up my freedom to work only for myself reminds me of the argument my mother made to me as a child when I refused to finish my dinner (I’m sure many of you had similar conversations). ‘Think of all the starving people who are desperate for that food you’re about to throw away’, she would say. Her point, of course, was that if other people value it so much, so should I. To do otherwise would show a lack of respect and humility. My response was that if they wanted the food so much, they should have it – my eating it wouldn’t make them any better off.

As long as it was impossible for the food to be given to the impoverished my mother’s argument was valid, and mine invalid – the best way to respect the destitute would be to acknowledge my good fortune. But if (as was probably the case when we lived in Kolkata, come to think of it), it would be viable to transfer the food to the poor, then my argument surely makes more sense – it would surely show them more respect to feed them than to eat food in their honour.

I think a similar argument applies to luxury of career choice. For as long as we think that self-realisation is bound to be limited to a lucky few, then the appropriate response is to savour it. But if there is hope of extending it to others, then the best use of our good fortune is to sacrifice it.

How much should act-consequentialists pay for a Radiohead album?

An old objection to act consequentialism is that it conflicts with honesty. The basic structure of the argument runs like this:

(1) An honest person must accept certain constraints on their behaviour – there are certain actions which are off-limits to them, such as telling a lie or breaking a promise.

(2) Act consequentialists cannot accept such constraints, since they must be open to performing any act which has the best consequences. It may well be the case that telling a lie or breaking a promise has the best consequences.

Therefore: (3) Act consequentialists may be morally obligated to act dishonestly.

Act consequentialists usually respond by demonstrating two forms of bad consequences that flow from dishonesty. Firstly, they object that dishonesty undermines important social institutions, such as promising. Being able to trust one another is a necessary requirement for cooperation, and without cooperation, we would lose many important benefits. Yet if people regularly lie to one another and break their promises, trust breaks down, and these benefits are lost. Therefore, we ought to be honest in order to preserve trust and social cooperation.

The trouble with this argument is that while it rules out regular dishonesty, it seems insufficient to ensure that dishonesty is never the best policy. One lie or broken promise is unlikely to make that much difference. As we see, people lie and break promises all the time, and yet trust still exists. The key is that they do not do so too often. The only constraint that this argument places on the act consequentialist is that they must choose their exceptions carefully – they ought not to be dishonest all the time, but only when it is really necessary.

The second type of consequence brought forward by act consequentialists are the effects of a loss of personal reputation. Even if I lie all the time, it is unlikely to have a significant effect on how much other people trust each other. Yet all it takes is a few lies to greatly reduce people’s trust in me. Thus act consequentialists have a good reason to be honest because of the need to maintain their own reputations for integrity.

Of course, this raises the question of whether act consequentialists still have any reason to act honestly in cases where their reputation is not on the line. The increasingly popular phenomenon of ‘honesty boxes’ puts this to the test. Under an honesty box system, payment for a good or service is not enforced, but depends on the conscience of the consumer. Yet this neglects the possibility that the consequentialist’s conscience might tell them something entirely at odds with common-sense morality. Since honesty boxes are anonymous, and so consequentialists need not worry about their reputations, what other reason do they have to respect them?

In the case of small-scale institutions, the non-compliance of even a single individual may undermine the whole project. For example, if an office operates a coffee machine where everybody is expected to pay a set amount for every coffee they consume, the failure of even one person to pay up could make the scheme unviable. Nobody would know whose fault it is, but the consequentialist’s actions would ruin mutually beneficial arrangement for everyone.

Other honesty box systems involve making a promise, and so consequentialist objections to breaking a promise become relevant. For example, last week I found a copy of Paul Story’s novel Dreamwords left at a bus stop, with a note from its author attached. The note asked people to people to take the book only if they promise to pay its full price if they enjoyed the, and only £1 if they did not. Essentially, this sort of promise is a novel form of the ‘desert island problem’, which has exercised many moral philosophers - a case where a person makes a promise to a person who has no way of knowing if the obligation is discharged. Interestingly, Story labels the scheme ‘An experiment in honesty’, which means that breaking this promise is likely to be more consequential than breaking your average promise. The results from ‘experiments’ like these are likely to receive a fair amount of attention, and to feed back into people’s perceptions about how trustworthy their society is. Therefore consequentialists have a stronger reason to fulfil these sorts of promises, as their social consequences are greater than average.

It is harder to justify contributing to large anonymous honesty boxes that don’t involve promising, like Radiohead’s famous ‘pay what you like’ policy for the album In Rainbows. In these cases, the only consideration I can think of in favour is that if we believe that this is a good model for others writers and publishers to follow, then consequentialists should contribute to its success by paying money that will support it an encourage its extension.

While all of these are possible reasons in favour of paying into an honesty box, good act consequentialists need to consider the other side of the equation: possible alternative uses of the money. Inevitably (this is the consequentialist response to so many moral dilemmas), the best way to spend your money is almost certainly to donate it to an anti-poverty charity.

This conclusion, that we should donate all our money to charity, with its implication that this dilemma is an essentially frivolous one where we try to choose between two equally sinful alternatives, is unsatisfying. It shows the limitations of absolutist, as opposed to scalar, consequentialism. Consequentialist ought to have the resources to explain that ideally we should give our money to charity, but that if we don’t it may be better to contribute to honesty boxes than to spend money on our selves.

A (cautious) defence of ‘fattism’

Modern Western societies condemn the obese as monstrous, but the truly deplorable are those complicit in the bullying of the overweight. That’s the conclusion of David Haslam’s recent condemnation of contemporary attitudes to fat people. He doesn’t explicitly draw the link, but it is clear that Haslam intends his article to make us recognise discrimination against the obese alongside more commonly acknowledged forms of prejudice, like racism and sexism. The most alarming piece of evidence that he produces is the way that the overweight, like victims of sexism and racism often internalise the contempt in which they are held, coming to see themselves as sub-standard and worthless:

researchers have found that children as young as six years old, even those who are overweight themselves, use words like “lazy,” “stupid,” “cheats,” “liars,” “sloppy,” “naughty,” “mean,” and “ugly” to describe their obese peers.

Haslam doesn’t seem to be arguing directly for any legal intervention. Rather, he seems to want us to reconsider our social attitudes. However, I am not sure that a social norm of condemning the obese is necessarily a bad or a wrong one. I think it would be unquestionably a good thing if racism and sexism were to end, but I’m not so sure about ‘fattism’. This is because of two crucial ways in which being obese can differ from being black or a woman:

(1) The obese have some capacity to change the relevant feature i.e. to lose weight

(2) Being obese is almost certainly worse than not being obese.

In other words, a big part of the reason why racism is bad is because it is unproductive – a black person cannot stop being black – and arbitrary – there is no reason to single out black people for condemnation rather than white people, because black people are no worse than white people. My suggestion is that the social humiliation of the obese is neither unproductive nor arbitrary, because it exhorts fat people to take an action that they are capable of taking, and which it would be good for them to take.

Both of these premises need some argument. Premise (1) is likely to be controversial because it appears to suggest that fat people are responsible for their own plight. This is explicitly rejected by Haslam who emphasises the significance of childhood and upbringing, over which a person has little control. However, premise (1) does not depend on the assumption that a fat person must be fat out of any fault of their own. Rather, all it claims is that however they got into this position, they have the ability to do something to get out of it. For sure, it is likely to be easier for some than others. But it seems to me extremely unlikely that there are many people who are literally incapable of losing any weight.

The second premise is less obvious to me, even though Haslam appears to concede it. He lists the problems of obesity: “a dysfunctional metabolism, insulin resistance, chronic illness, and a shortened life”, as if to acknowledge how much worse off the overweight are. Yet it could be argued that obesity is a valid lifestyle choice – that there is a legitimate question over whether avoiding unhealthy food and taking regular exercise are genuinely worth the health payoffs. If we think this, then the obese have not erred or failed in any way, they just have different values or preferences to thin people. But if obesity is seen as a legitimate lifestyle choice this has radical implications – it means we can no longer treat obesity like a public health problem, that government campaigns against it are illegitimate. It means granting real license to be fat.

If we accept, however, that the obese can and ought to alter their situation, this suggests that the stigmatisation of fat people isn’t all bad. For obesity to be fully socially acceptable would mean that people lose a powerful incentive to lose weight and make their lives better. Yet even if this the case, it does not imply that the current situation, which angers Haslam so much, is justified. Even if fattism has some beneficial consequences, there are three big reasons why we might still want to oppose it.

The first is that it might be disproportionate. It is perfectly plausible and consistent to think that fat people should not be treated the same as everybody else, but that they should be treated better than they are at present, and that current practices go too far.

The second is that fattism might be counterproductive as a strategy for combatting obesity. It might increase a person’s sense of powerlessness and induce fatalism. It might cut them off from support networks which might otherwise aid them in losing weight. It could foster low self-esteem, and lead to comfort eating. Rather than incentivising weight loss, picking on fat people might make them even fatter.

Finally, there is the possibility that there are far more effective and efficient ways of getting people to lose weight. For example, it is likely to dietary norms or the relative cost of different foods contributes more to obesity than the social acceptability of being overweight. In that case, it is likely to be better to focus on those levers than the ones that depend on cruelty and hurt feelings.

Writing in other places

I've just realised I've only posted to this blog twice in the last three months, which is certainly not the sort of discipline it was meant to impose on my writing. And of course, I realise how disappointing my absence must be to my legions of fans. I've not been totally lazy, though - I've written a couple of articles for other websites which might be of interest:

The first is a piece co-written with Puneet Dhaliwal for Ceasefire in which I argue in favour of 'professional philanthropy' - seeking out high earning careers (such as, controversially, banking) in order to donate large amounts of money to charity - as a strategy for fighting poverty. Find it here.

The second is a book review for the Oxford Left Review discussing Jonathan Wolff's book Ethics and Public Policy, and more generally, whether political philosophy ought to be concerned with practical questions of policy at all. Find it here (on page 79).

Peter Singer & the False Consciousness of Smokers

A blogpost is probably an inadequate forum for arguing for something as radical as the prohibition of cigarettes, but I’m not sure if a lack of space is sufficient excuse for the weakness of Peter Singer’s argument on Project Syndicate. It’s made even more peculiar by the fact that this week Singer also signed a letter for calling for the liberalisation of drug law, or at least of their enforcement.

There seem to me to be two obvious objections to the idea of outlawing tobacco. The first is the practical one – banning such a popular activity is counterproductive. The second is the principled one – such paternalism is illegitimate. Interestingly, Singer gives essentially the same response to both objections: most smokers don’t really want to smoke – they’ve just made a mistake somewhere along the way.

This is pretty implausible as a claim about the efficacy of banning cigarettes. Even if “many smokers would actually like to see cigarettes banned because, like Obama, they want to quit”, the remaining stubborn few are likely to constitute a problem as great as the current narcotics trade. If Singer can see that the war on drugs isn’t working, why does he want to add another front to it?

Singer’s strategy in response to the paternalism objection is more intriguing. His response to those who question the state’s legitimacy to carry out such proscriptions is unpersuasive – “For those who recognize the state’s right to ban recreational drugs like marijuana and ecstasy, a ban on cigarettes should be easy to accept”. But many of those who question the state’s right to ban cigarettes will be equally sceptical of its right to ban other recreational drugs. Nevertheless, most people do accept paternalism in one form or another, the classic case being the enforcement of seatbelt wearing.

I think the reason that some forms of paternalism are seen as relatively uncontroversial is because most accept that they are genuinely in people’s interests. I think very few people would think it is plausible that the discomfort of wearing a seatbelt is worse than the risk of death and injury it protects us from. With smoking, it is not so clear. People do claim to derive such pleasure from smoking that they would be willing to sacrifice a few extra years of health to keep the habit.

Singer appears to be denying either that people do think in such a way, or that if they did, it would be a rational way to look at things. Like all claims of false consciousness, it’s difficult to prove. Singer’s problem is that it seems like he’s denying that smoking can be enjoyable at all. He presents smokers as if they’re all addicts or dupes of peer pressure and advertising, which is clearly only part of the story.

Yet it could well be that the pleasure people enjoy from smoking is almost never enough to outweigh the harm that it causes them, and that almost everybody who smokes is therefore irrational. Of course, this brings us into the philosophically thorny area of what constitutes rationality. However, the simplest (and least contentious) way to show irrationality is to demonstrate that people who take up smoking will come to regret it. This is what Singer seems to do when he suggests “most smokers take up the habit as teenagers and later want to quit”. In the context of Singer’s argument this looks a bit ad hoc, but perhaps he is aware of the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey, which found that nearly 70% of American smokers want to quit, and over half had attempted to do so in the past year.

This is quite a striking finding, and I wonder what proportion of those wish that they had never started smoking. If there is an activity that over half of people regret undertaking with hindsight, is that enough to make the probabilistic claim that it is irrational to pursue it? It certainly doesn’t address the practical issues, but if Singer can convince people that it is almost always irrational to take up smoking, he will be a lot closer to his goal of banning smoking.

Should we abandon moralism?

One of the most interesting aspects of philosophy is its ability to provoke a variety of responses, and to be utilised for a wide variety of functions. It can be diverting and entertaining – hence the success of hit movies based more or less explicitly on thought experiments. It can be a practical tool to help us decide what to do – this is the aim of those who do practical ethics (clue’s in the name, guys). It can be pressed into little motivational or comforting soundbites (c.f. anything by Alain de Botton)

But often (and I think this is less commonly recognised or discussed), philosophy can be terrifying. It can challenge the very foundations of our existence, undermining the values and commitments we have based our lives around. Discussing Descartes’ scepticism, Mark Steel advises his viewers not to allow the thought to linger for more than 20 seconds because otherwise “it will start to drive you mental”. The same is probably true of the claims of pessimists, nihilists and determinists.

What’s always most troubled me, though, the philosophical Pandora’s box I have been desperate to keep shut, are the challenges of meta-ethics. What is morality? What do the concepts of right and wrong even mean? Why should we care about it? In most of my moral thinking, I have been content to assume that there is an answer to this question, and to get on with the substantive questions of how we should act – firmer ground where I felt more comfortable. I don’t think this is an unusual policy – in my first graduate class in Ethics, we were advised not to worry too much about meta-ethics, and assured that it is entirely separable from practical ethics.

This attitude infuriates Joel Marks, who urged moral philosophers to out themselves as amoralists in a pair of New York Times articles last month. Appealing to luminaries such as Hume, Nietzsche, Ayer, Sartre, Mackie and Rorty, Marks argues that morality does not exist. Moreover:

“This, odd as it may sound to say so, is relatively uncontroversial in modern ethical philosophy; for what I mean by morality here is its metaphysical conception as a truth or command that comes to us from “on high.” Very few well-known philosophical moralists have believed in such a thing since a century and more.

But precisely my gripe is that you wouldn’t know it from the way they speak! And even if they can communicate clearly with one another, the lay person is left to think otherwise.”

Most philosophers, according to Marks, have been doing what I have done: treating meta-ethics as though it has no bearing on practical ethics. However, Marks thinks that this common meta-ethical position has radical implications for how we think about moral problems – he calls for the abolition of moral language altogether. His point is so obvious, it seems bizarre that it should even need stating: if most philosophers do not believe that such a thing as morality exists, why should they still keep talking as though it does?

I think the meta-ethical position that Marks sets out is more or less similar to my own. Moral ‘beliefs’ are nothing more than statements of preference. So when I say that it is morally wrong that anybody should live in poverty, all I am saying is that I would really like it if poverty were eradicated. This is fundamentally no different in kind from my desire that the sun stays out, or my desire to eat cake.

Though I agree that moral claims are nothing more than preferences, I am wary of making this explicit for a couple of reasons. The first is pragmatic – to abandon moralistic argument is to lose one of the most powerful means of persuasion. Suppose it is my desire that poverty be eradicated. I am far more likely to convince people to do their bit to reduce poverty if I can couch my arguments in objective moral terms – if I can portray it as being your duty, rather than just in line with my whims. Of course, if everybody were what Marks calls a ‘desirist’, then what we once called ‘moral’ argument could be carried out in amoral terms. But for as long as moral realists exist, it is worth giving our arguments moral dressing so that they appeal to as many people as possible.

Undeniably, there is something underhanded about reasoning in this way. Should we really be using moral argument in such a manipulative way? But this thought itself shows the dangers and difficulties of trying to purge our reasoning of moral content. The idea that we shouldn’t manipulate others so that they act in accordance with our desires is itself a moral notion – it is just another preference. If we try to cleanse our language of explicitly moral terms, there is a danger that moral ideas may still sneak in through the back door.

We are so used to thinking in moral terms that we need to remind ourselves that our values are just preferences – we are liable to forget our meta-ethical commitments. Keeping our moral premises explicit ensures we compare like-for-like, and don’t mistake a preference for something more forceful, like an objective moral command. For example, a natural response to the idea that there are no objective moral values is to conclude that all moral commitments are equally valid, and so we ought to unquestioningly tolerate the views of others. Yet this, of course, ignores the fact that tolerance is a moral value itself – and so we should only care about it insofar as we have a preference for tolerance.

Peculiarly, given that he believes it to be the only novel aspect of his argument, Marks offers only a solitary paragraph towards the end of his second article to making a positive case against moralistic language. Essentially his objection is that “The most horrific acts of humanity have been done not in spite of morality but because of it”. Even putting aside the moralistic assumptions that underpin this statement, this isn’t much of an argument. The question of whether morality has been a force for good is as tiresome and irresolvable as whether religion has been beneficial or not. Some people have been motivated to do good things by morality, others have been led to commit terrible acts. And just as atheists have their fair share of atrocities on their hands, it is hardly as if no evil has come from people pursuing their own desires.

When Marks says that most philosophers do not believe in morality, what he really means is that they do not believe in an objective, transcendental set of moral truths. But this is not enough reason to abandon the language of morality altogether. Ultimately, Marks fails to make a convincing case against conceiving of morality as a special type of subjective desire.

The Ian Bell incident and the 'spirit of cricket'

I’ve already written a little bit about the position of ethics in sport. About a year ago, I contrasted the football and cycling communities’ reactions to moral dilemmas faced by sportsmen in their field. While nobody raised an eyebrow at German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer’s refusal to admit he had seen the ball cross his goal line in the World Cup match against England, cycling was shocked by Alberto Contador’s willingness to profit from a rival’s slipped bike chain in the Tour de France.

Both incidents were similar in that they tested the limits of what kind of behaviour is acceptable in pursuit of victory. However, reflecting on the controversy at Trent Bridge yesterday, I now see that there is a significant difference between them.

Neuer’s action was worse than Contador’s because he was complicit in the misapplication of the rules of football. From a formal, legalistic perspective, England were wronged by his actions, since they were denied a legitimate goal. By contrast, in the Contador incident, no rules were broken, and nobody was disadvantaged according to the letter of the law. Rather, it was the more vague ‘spirit of the game’ that had been violated.

In this sense, Contador’s dilemma was rather like M.S. Dhoni’s yesterday. The Indian cricket captain was at the centre of a bizarre episode when his team ran out the English batsman Ian Bell as he walked off, thinking play had ended for tea. India, like Contador, had received what was perceived to be an unfair advantage within the rules of the game. However, Dhoni, unlike Contador, was willing to forfeit this advantage, withdrawing his appeal.

Most people seem to agree that there would have been something wrong about exploiting the Ian Bell incident, and I share the intuition that Dhoni was right to make the decision he made. But what exactly would have been unfair about it?

One possibility is that it is about luck. Bell suffered a freakish stroke of misfortune, and it would have been wrong to profit from it. The ‘spirit of the game’ of cricket demands that teams seek to win in ‘the right way’. That is, by virtue of their superior skill and not as a result of brute luck. Perhaps what troubles us about the Ian Bell incident is that the Indian team failed to dismiss him as a result of their own efforts, and so to get him out as the result of a fluke would have been a hollow victory.

The idea that there is something problematic about gaining a lucky advantage is common to a number of sports. Convention dictates that snooker players should apologise for flukes, and tennis players should say sorry when they benefit from deflections off the net. But of course, in neither sport would the points actually be forfeited, meaning that the apologies often look like meaningless formalities.

In any case, the eradication of luck from sport is both impossibled and undesirable. A huge part of the unpredictability of sport which makes it worth watching sport in the first place is down to the randomness of the ‘run of the ball(s)’. There are so many variables that determine the result of a sporting contest that they could never all be neutralised. Why is capitalising on the Bell incident any worse than taking advantage of winning the coin toss, or helpful weather conditions, which India also did over the course of same the match?

In any case, it is a mistake to chalk the Ian Bell incident up purely to luck. Whether or not it was right to exploit it, Bell - as he himself acknowledges - made a mistake. Young sportsmen are regularly told to ‘play to the whistle’: to maintain full intensity until there is a confirmed break in play. Bell should not have assumed that play was over until it was confirmed by the umpire: he suffered from a culpable lapse in concentration.

Perhaps the problem with the Bell dismissal was the element of deception involved. India got Bell out because they acted as though the ball was dead, and so convinced Bell that it was not in play. However, it seems unlikely that India were actually trying to mislead Bell, rather than just failing to alert him to his error. It is surely demanding too much to expect cricketers to warn their opponents before they make a mistake like Bell’s.

Then again, there is a precedent for such a system of warning in cricket. It is generally agreed that it is against the spirit of the game to ‘Mankad’ a batsman – to run them out if they back up too far – without prior warning. However, there is ample opportunity to warn someone you are about to ‘Mankad’ someone, as this occurs in the middle of a natural break in the game. The Bell incident occurred while the game was in full flow, so it is far from clear how or when it would have been appropriate to tip Bell off.

Moreover, deception is often an essential part of sporting tactics. If misleading your opponent is cheating, this renders a large number of strategies unfair. Maybe it’s that deception about tactics and mental states are legitimate, but about the state of the game are unfair?

I still have the sense that Dhoni was right to call Bell back to the crease. But the difficulty I’m having in pinning down why suggests that it is far from clear what exactly the ‘spirit of cricket’ requires and why.

‘If the truth offends, it’s our job to offend’?

This past week there’s been a bit of a furore over the work of LSE psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. Last Monday, Kanazawa used his Psychology Today blog to speculate about the reasons why black women were ‘objectively’ less attractive than women from other races. Unsurprisingly, this sparked outrage, with the student union voting unanimously to campaign for his dismissal. The response was predictable, but what, if anything, did Kanazawa do to deserve it? Was the objection to his flawed methodology, or is it the case that some questions are off limits? If it is the latter, then how can we respond to Kanzawa’s own argument that ‘If the truth offends, it’s our job to offend’?

As it happens, there are strong reasons to think that Kanazawa was nowhere near the truth – the past week has seen his methodology savaged by his peers. Moreover, there is reason to be suspicious of Kanazawa’s motives. His past work – from linking the poor health to poor to low intelligence to asking ‘Are all women essentially prostitutes?’ – shows that Kanazawa has form when it comes to seeking out outrageous conclusions. Numerous people have accused Kanazawa of hiding behind statistics to justify his own prejudices. Indeed, the speed with which he moves from the proposition ‘black women are perceived to be less attractive than other races’ to the proposition ‘black women are objectively less attractive than other races’ is definitely grounds for suspicion.

Imagine, though, another scientist –a better one than Kanazawa – who was interested in the same subject. Suppose we can know that they harbour no racial prejudices whatsoever (the fact that this is the sort of thing we can only know in thought experiments is a bit of a problem for this argument). They are simply pursuing their academic curiosity wherever it takes them. Suppose doing a similar, but better designed experiment, they discover one race is commonly perceived to be less attractive than the others. They are not so stupid as to presume this is of any objective significance, but still see this subjective tendency as a fact worthy of explanation. Is this research still objectionable?

Some people may dogmatically resist the idea that there can be such natural differences between races. This seems to me mistaken. However implausible we find an idea, it is a betrayal of the scientific method to prevent other people investigating it. The notion that it is in our interests to allow others to try and falsify what we are certain is true is as compelling an argument today as when John Stuart Mill first made it in 1859.

However, one of the criticisms that could be levelled against Mill is that his faith that the open competition of ideas is always beneficial, because it will always tend to truth, is naïve. This argument is suspect on two grounds. First, it is not obvious that truth always will triumph in market place of ideas – when the rich and powerful seek to mislead, it is difficult to resist. The second problem is that certain truths may cause great harm.

If it were the truth that one race is inferior to another (which, for the record, I don’t think is the case), this might be just such a truth. In the first place this would cause great harm to the self-esteem of members of that race. This could make them less confident, and so reluctant to push themselves forward in the public sphere. It would also likely poison interracial relations. It seems likely that many people would not appreciate that just because a racial difference holds on average, nothing can be inferred about the attributes of any given member of that race. While this is of course less likely with a feature like attractiveness, where individuals can be evaluated rapidly on their own merits, it is a deeper worry for things like intelligence.

Of course, the deeper objection is that norms of beauty are socially and culturally contingent. It seems absurd, as Kanazawa comes perilously close to suggesting, that there can be such a thing as ‘objectively attractive’. It is, of course, an objective fact that some people are perceived to be more attractive by more people than others. However, it could be argued that research that takes these perceptions for given, and does not seek to challenge them, only perpetuates and legitimates these beauty norms. The scientist is supposed to be a detached observer – when their research impacts upon the things they study in such a significant way, it certainly means that there are ethical considerations in play. As soon as scientific research has these sorts of effects, I believe, we can no longer just presume that there are no questions off limits.

At the end of the day, while we should be reluctant to restrict the questions it is permissible for the scientist to ask, it does not seem unreasonable to wonder whether certain questions are worth asking. In morally and politically charged issues like these it is imperative that research is exceptionally well-designed, and conclusions drawn from exceedingly powerful evidence. It seems to me that probing racial differences involves a degree of effort and rigour that far outstrips the scientific interest of the questions.

Virtue Ethics: Substitute or Complement for your preferred moral theory?

Virtue ethics has often seemed to me to be at cross purposes with other ethical theories. While most moral systems look to set out the rightness of different actions, virtue ethics investigates the moral status of different characters and dispositions. Virtue ethics is usually set out as an alternative to doctrines such as consequentialism or Kantianism. Yet while these rivals to virtue ethics are quite clearly geared towards guiding our action, its proponents find it difficult to participate in the usual philosophical activities of resolving moral dilemmas and thought experiments. The response has usually been either to manipulate virtue ethics so that it can give determinate guidance to action, or to reject the conventional paradigm and to deny that a moral theory should seek to influence actions. However, it seems to me that virtue ethics may not in fact be inconsistent with other moral theories, but complementary to them.

The trouble with virtue ethics is not just its difficulty in influencing our actions, but the fact that it is not clear how it should influence us at all. The reason for this is that the subject matter of virtue ethics consists of things that we do not have much control over. The virtue theorist suggests that we should not agonise too much about individual actions, but seek to reform our character so as to exhibit virtues. The real question of ethics, on this view, is not ‘What should I do?’, but rather ‘What sort of person should I be?’. So, for example, if courage is a virtue, then I should seek to be courageous. The problem is that the sort of person we are is something we cannot do much to change. Courage is mostly something you are born with. The same goes for many other typical virtues, like wisdom and even temper. Indeed, Aristotle describes virtuous acts as springing from “a fixed and permanent disposition of character”, which definitely doesn’t sound like the sort of thing we can control.

To be fair to Aristotle, he does specify that nature only determines our capacity for virtue, and that we have choice over the extent to which we develop these capacities. However, this is the bit of virtue ethics that I have always found a bit unconvincing – the limits set by our capacity for virtue seems far more significant than our conscious efforts at self-improvement.

If we ignore what many take to be the crucial element of virtue ethics – the demand that we maximise our potential for virtue – and take it as a descriptive rather than a normative theory, it seems more plausible to me. The reason that virtue ethics has such difficulty accounting for thought experiments and dilemmas, on my version, is that it is not concerned with informing conscious decisions, but with understanding our unreflective actions.

My spin on virtue ethics suggests that conventional moral theories account for only a fraction of morally significant acts – those that we consciously decide to perform. Virtue theories complement these by observing and evaluating the myriad things that we do without thinking. For example, the tone of voice we use or our body language may not be deliberate, but could still raise someone’s spirits or darken their mood. These are not the sort of things that normative ethics can legislate for, and yet they seem closely related to it.

The interesting question is how these two domains of ethics interact. One plausible virtue[1] is something we might call sensitivity – an ability to pick up on other peoples’ moods and feelings and respond to them. When my father tells me that a good host can always anticipate their guests’ needs so that they do not need to ask for anything, it seems like its sensitivity that he is on about. When my 14-year old brother says everything with an off-putting layer of sarcasm and condescension, it is because he, like many adolescents, lacks sensitivity.

Sensitivity seems to be intimately related to our moral capacity. A sensitive person will simply see more opportunities for good; an insensitive person is likely to harm people without realising it. Both the sensitive and the insensitive person might agree in the abstract that it is good to hold doors open for people or to help them with heavy bags. But in the actual event, it will only occur to the sensitive person to do those things.

Perhaps developing and maintaining virtues is not the object of morality. Maybe virtues are more like the framework that normative moral theory must work around.

[1] A problem with virtue ethics is that there is no clear determinate list of virtues, and whether a given disposition is virtuous or not is always up for debate.

How much weight should we give to Ethics?

One of the major points of contention between consequentialism and deontology is the proper domain of ethics. Both, in contrast to virtue ethics, hold that ethics is about guiding and evaluating actions, but they disagree as to which actions are morally significant acts. Deontology, as a system of rules, implies that the only relevant actions are those that contravene these injunctions. So, for example, if you believe the Ten Commandments exhaust the demands of morality, the question of morality only arises if you consider killing, stealing, committing adultery etc. If you steer clear of these proscribed activities, you needn’t think about morality any longer.

Consequentialism, by contrast, insists that doing the right thing involves taking the actions with the best consequences. If you are a utilitarian, your every act must be optimal with respect to maximising happiness. Theoretically, it is possible that a consequentialist theory could allow for a large domain of morally indifferent action. For example, if the ‘good’ to be maximised were gold production, the finite resources of gold on the planet would mean that many people could act without having any bearing on gold production. More conventional consequential goods, such as happiness, are much more demanding to maximise. If we are serious utilitarians, we must face up to the fact that everything we do (and equally significantly, fail to do) impacts on someone’s happiness. This implies that every act is morally significant, and so that the domain of ethics covers all action. Indeed, this colonisation of all domains of life by ethics is one of the strongest motivations for rejecting consequentialism.

However, the mere recognition that there are moral considerations pertinent to all actions needn’t mean that these are the only considerations that guide our action, and therefore that we must be moral saints. What Bernard Williams and so many other critics of consequentialism assume is that moral considerations must trump all others. Indeed, this is what most conventional consequentialists believe.

This perspective is suited to deontological systems of thought with a restricted ethical domain. It seems appropriate that moral considerations outweigh all others in the case of murder. But once we expand the sphere of ethics, it begins to be more plausible that other motivations and projects can weigh against ethical ones. For example, if we already donate a substantial proportion of our income to charity, we may feel we have ‘done our bit’, and that even though it would be morally desirable to give away more, aesthetic (e.g. good food, pleasant surroundings) or intellectual (books, courses) considerations also make strong demands on the rest of our money.

The idea that moral demands need not be absolute, but may be weighed against other reasons for action raises another question, orthogonal to the one about the domain of ethics – how much weight should we give ethical considerations?

This is of a matter of concern to all but the most saintly of consequentialists, anyone who fails to maximise the good in all their actions. It also has significance for deontologists who buy into the idea of supererogation. If there are actions that are morally good but not required (i.e. open to being overweighed by other considerations), how much weight should we give these moral claims?

For a concrete example, take the question of career choice. Within the deontological framework, outright harmful careers, like career criminal, are immoral. Saintly careers, like civil rights martyr are supererogatory. But the vast majority of careers are morally indifferent, simply not the subject matter of ethics. This seems bizarre – how can anyone claim it is morally indifferent whether a brilliant lawyer uses their talents to benefit rich (but morally neutral) corporations or to secure justice for the impoverished? Indeed, the increasing interest in the idea of ‘ethical careers’ reflects the fact that moral concerns are salient to many people’s career choices. But for most people they are just one concern among many.

Most conventional ethical systems will just dig their heels in and insist that ethical duties trump all others. On the other hand, if the moral considerations are supererogatory, orthodox systems give us no guidance. Either way, most moral philosophy has nothing to say about what appears to be a common dilemma: how should I weigh moral and non-moral considerations? Perhaps this silence is because this is not a problem for ethics at all, but an exercise in practical reason. Perhaps the presence of moral considerations doesn’t essentially change the process of weighing up different courses of actions with different advantages and disadvantages, a process that we go through every day. We can choose between healthy-but-boring and unhealthy-but-delicious food; is choosing between careers with different moral implications analogous?

If so, this seems to be a matter of grave concern for ethics. What it implies is that people can give little or no weight to moral considerations because that is what is practically rational for them to do. Just as some people (smokers, for example?) may decide that they have other interests which take priority over being healthy, what can we say about people who decide they don’t care very much about ethics?

Not very much, I think. We can try and convince them that they do care about ethics really. So we might try to persuade our lawyer by demonstrating the good they can do, or inspiring them with tales of the sacrifices of others. But if a person doesn’t care very much about ethics, I’m not sure how this is wrong (as opposed to being bad). It’s not illogical or irrational. This isn’t to say we have to like it – indeed, the fact that someone doesn’t care very much about ethics seems an excellent reason to dislike them and to not be their friend, maybe even to coerce them. But is that enough?

Why give aid to countries with space programmes?

The British government’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) aid budget for the next five years, released last week, has received predictable criticism from a xenophobic rightwing press. While the outrage that foreigners should be getting more money at a time of domestic budget cuts was to be expected, the focus has narrowed on India’s position as an aid recipient. The argument is that a country with nuclear arms, a space programme, more billionaires than Britain and a growth rate approaching 10% doesn’t need or deserve British aid. Stephen Glover’s article in the Daily Mail is fairly typical of the kind of the concerns raised.

The argument that India is too rich to need British aid is either disingenuous or incredibly stupid. Glover claims it is likely “there is an outdated sense that it is our duty to disburse funds to the supposedly less fortunate — rather like an impoverished parent continuing to subsidise children who have grown much wealthier, and are more than capable of getting by on their own” (I’m going to be charitable and assume that Glover doesn’t mean that the notion of helping the actually less fortunate – as opposed to the merely ‘supposedly’ less fortunate – is outdated). Yet India’s growth rate is clearly from a relatively low base: if my income of £10 000 is growing at 10% per year, and your £100 000 income is stagnating, it’s still going to be a long time before my income catches yours (25 years if my maths is correct).

Glover makes a lot of the fact that “According to one measure used by the World Bank, in 2009 India was the fourth- largest economy in the world, significantly bigger than the United Kingdom, which was in sixth place”. I can’t be bothered to go check where he gets this from, but in terms of 2009 GDP, the World Bank has India in 11th place, comfortably behind the UK. Even if the two economies are of comparable size, India’s wealth is shared between a population over twenty times that of Britain’s. Accounting for the size of each country by using the more relevant index of GDP per capita, most measures have India outside the world’s hundred wealthiest nations. Glover does acknowledge this, but continuing to refer to the country as the “fourth- largest economy in the world” hardly presses this point.

More interesting, though, is the apparent claim that since “Arguably India should be spending less on defence, and nothing on its space programme, and be diverting more funds to the alleviation of poverty”, it should not receive British aid. I think this is a serious challenge to those who favour giving aid to India, and as such needs to be addressed. The best I can come up with is this analogy:

Suppose you see your poverty-stricken neighbour’s children going about undernourished and badly clothed. You have the means and the will to help them, and so resolve to buy them some clothes and food. However, you notice that your neighbour, despite struggling to look after the kids, is still paying for a satellite TV subscription. Should you still offer the aid?

There are a number of relevant considerations here. Obviously there is a need for sensitivity. You wouldn’t want to embarrass your neighbour or make them feel inadequate. But suppose you know they would be grateful. Most people would disapprove of the decision to maintain the TV subscription. But surely it would be unfair to penalise the children for the irresponsibility of their parents.

We might believe that if the neighbour doesn’t receive help they will be so embarrassed by the state of their children that they will cancel the subscription. If this is the case, then we are not actually doing the children any favours by giving them the gifts. Rather, their parents will continue to keep up their satellite subscription with the money they would otherwise have been shamed into spending on their kids. In effect, we are paying for the satellite subscription.

In development parlance, this is the problem of fungibility: even if aid is targeted directly at the poor, it may simply allow the government to divert the money they would otherwise have spent on the poor to other projects, like a space programme. Fungibility seems to me to be the only argument against giving the aid, either to the TV watching family, or to the Indian government.

I’m sceptical as to whether fungibility genuinely is a problem in this case, as it suggests there is a minimum threshold of poverty relief that the Indian government is motivated to supply, and that if this is met, however it is met, they do not care about poverty any longer. Given the uncertainty, I suspect it is best to just take the risk.

An objection to this analogy is that India is a democracy. Its citizens aren’t therefore ruled in the same way as children are by their parents. The situation is more like an impoverished group of adults communally agreeing to put satellite TV above nourishing food. We should therefore respect their decisions. As Glover says, “the country is a democracy, and its government will be held to account for the decisions it makes. It is hardly our business if India wants to spend so much money on a space programme”. Even if this were so, there would still be a case for paternalistic intervention.

However, this seems to take the mandate conception of democracy too literally. This view implies that either by voting for a government proposing a certain set of policies or by having the ability to eject a government whose policies they disapprove of, an electorate consents and is responsible for all that government does. This is simplistic at the best of times, given the lack of choice, vagaries of electoral mechanisms, absence of full information, and profusion of cross-cutting issues. In this case it implies something absurd: that the Indian people, so many of whom are desperately poor, given the choice between reducing poverty and starting a space programme, opted for the latter.

Admittedly, this isn’t Glover’s view – he acknowledges that the government’s choice may well be out of step with popular opinion. Hence his emphasis on the government being held ‘accountable’. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t understand why this is an argument against giving aid to India. It could take the same form as the ‘mandate’ argument, which his talk of ‘India’ as a unified actor deciding to pursue a space programme implies. Or it could be the claim that British aid could lead to the Indian government not being held accountable for its decisions. I don’t see how this follows. Surely the Indian people will see that the money spent on a space programme could have been directed towards poverty relief, and cast their votes accordingly, independent of what DFID does. If the suggestion is that DFID will do so well in fighting Indian poverty that the space programme will then seem reasonable, that is clearly preposterous.

I’m not sure if this deals with all the problems of giving aid to India, but I think it might be a helpful way of thinking about the problem.

What are the ethical implications of eating meat?

An essay I wrote for Ethics about a year ago that you might find interesting

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Few, if any, ethical issues polarise views the way vegetarianism does. There are certainly other questions that are more vociferously debated – but this is exactly the point. What is unusual about this debate (and perhaps the question of ‘animal rights’ in general) is that only one side consider it a debate at all.

The majority of people appear to believe that deciding what to eat simply isn’t an ethical consideration. Yet many of those who favour vegetarianism insist that eating meat is as abhorrent as condoning racism or slavery in past centuries. Indeed, the parallel of speciesism to racism is commonly drawn in the course of discussions about our treatment of animals, the implication being that future generations will look upon our actions with the same distaste and incomprehension we feel towards slave-owners and racists. To take just one example of this view that our moral progress is far from complete, W.E.H. Lecky writes:

“At one time the benevolent affects embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world”.[1]


The purpose of this essay is not to argue directly either for or against vegetarianism. Rather, it is to examine the accusation that we are morally inconsistent in failing to consider the ethical claims of animals, and its corollary, that this implies we ought to change the things we eat.

This is a two stage process. The first stage is identifying and sketching out different moral positions that advocates of vegetarianism might appeal to. The second stage is to draw out and evaluate the arguments defending and rejecting the consumption of meat for each ethical position. However, because many of these arguments are applicable to multiple positions, they are grouped together in the second section to avoid repetition. The first section of this essay therefore describes the four moral positions discussed: contractarianism, Kantian deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics, and gives a summary of the pertinent considerations of these philosophies relevant to animals. The second stage assesses different arguments in turn, examining the salience and persuasiveness to the different doctrines.

A. Theories

Contract Theories

“The moral theory of contractarianism claims that moral norms derive their normative force from the idea of contract or mutual agreement”.[2] In other words, contractarians believe that our moral duties are nothing more and nothing less that the obligations that rationally self-interested beings would agree to. Contractarianism is usually traced back to Hobbes, who argued that the only way for man to escape the state of nature, an anarchic situation of brutal war of each against all, was for such moral norms to develop.

On this conception of ethics, then, the only reason we have for avoiding wrongdoing is the tacit understanding that this will ensure others do not wrong us either. So, for example, we do not think it is morally permissible to murder another person, because we would not like to live in a society where people are free to murder one another. Similarly, we have a moral reason not to make false promises to one another, because a society where we could not trust people to keep their promises would be a society where it would be considerably more difficult to engage in cooperative activities.

Animals cannot participate in the social contract. They are not capable of making such explicit reciprocal agreements, and are not bound by moral convention in the same way that humans are. The contractarian is only interested in extending moral consideration where it is mutually beneficial, and so has no reason to confer moral status on aminals. As Regan puts it, “As for animals, since they cannot understand contracts, they obviously cannot sign, and since they cannot sign. Like children, however, some animals are the object of the sentimental interest of others”.[3] Contractarians may agree that we are morally obliged not to harm pets, as in doing so, we indirectly harm their owners. But given that the owners of farmed animals willingly give them up for slaughter, this point does not seem relevant here.

Contractualism, in contrast with contractarianism, requires a degree of impartiality: it is grounded in moral equality, rather than self-interest. “According to contractualism, morality consists in what would result if we were to make binding agreements from a point of view that respects our equal moral importance as rational autonomous agents”.[4]

Contractualism, like contractarianism, has been conventionally wary of granting moral status to animals, simply because they are not the sort of rational autonomous agents capable of forming a contract. In Rawls’ words, “It does seem that we are not required to give strict justice to creatures lacking the capacity (for a sense of justice)”.[5]

Nevertheless, there are a couple of reasons why contractualists may be more amenable to the idea of animal rights than contractarians. Firstly, Rawls’ work is primarily a work of political, not moral philosophy, focusing on just one of many ethical considerations, justice. Therefore, it is plausible that contractualists may believe that animals are outwith the scope of justice, but not that they have no ethical significance.

The second thing to remember is that Rawls’ ‘original position’ thought experiment is intended to abstract away from ‘morally arbitrary’ characteristics. Therefore, if we believe that our species is a morally arbitrary attribute, we can use a Rawlsian framework while rejecting Rawls’ own intuition about the moral status of animals.[6]

Kantian/Deontological Theories

Kantian theories do not traditionally admit we have any duties to animals, either. According to Kant, the moral law is binding on all rational creatures. However, since he refused to credit animals with rationality, they exist outwith the scope of Kantian morality. Kant explicitly argues “so far as animals are concerned, we do not have any direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man”.[7]

However, this perspective has been rejected within the Kantian framework by philosophers who disagree with the claim that rationality is a prerequisite for moral consideration. Most notably Tom Regan has argued that all ‘experiencing subjects of life’ are due certain moral rights. The issue of what (if anything) separates humans from animals will be discussed below, but what is important to grasp here is what achieving moral status means within a deontological moral philosophy.

Deontological ethical theories, of which Kant’s is the most prominent, conceptualise ethics as the process of determining the moral rules which set out our obligations and the restrictions on our action. Depending on the theory in question, the rights secured by having moral status may differ, but it seems unlikely that on any deontological conception, it is morally permissible to slaughter and consume a moral agent. For example, the Kantian notion of never treating a moral agent as a means, but always respecting them as an end in itself would seem to preclude eating meat.

The central issue at stake seems therefore to be whether animals are worthy of moral respect, and if so, does the concept of moral respect entail non-consumption.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the most conceptually simple of ethical theories. The rightness of an action depends solely on its consequences, by which is meant the net change in pain or pleasure it brings about. The right action is the one which maximises utility.

Unlike Kantians, utilitarians make only one consideration in determining the moral status of a being: its ability to feel pain or pleasure. Consequently, utilitarians have traditionally always been sympathetic to the moral claims of animals. This attitude can be traced as far back as Bentham, who used utilitarianism to argue for ‘animal rights’ (in the loosest sense): “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”.[8]

This may appear to be a rhetorical question, but a surprising number of people have sought to deny that animals feel pain, or at least in the same way that humans do. If it were true that animals were incapable of suffering, this would of course mean that they carry no weight in utilitarian moral calculation. Singer responds to this suggestion with the observation that “Nearly all the external signals that lead us to infer pain in other humans can be seen in other species”: writhing, facial contortions, moaning, yelping, attempts to avoid the source of the pain and the appearance of fear.[9] Moreover, they have nearly identical nervous systems to ours, with the same evolutionary function. Singer quotes pain expert Richard Sarjeant as insisting, “Every particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own”.[10]

Of course, it is absurd to class all animals as alike, and it seems possible that mammals, birds and fish all have different capacities for pain. But this does not imply that their pain is incommensurable. The only animals that are plausibly incapable of feeling pain are some molluscs, such as oysters and scallops (but not squid and octopi). In the name of consistency, Singer accepts that may be morally acceptable to eat them.[11]

Once utilitarians have admitted that animals are worthy of moral consideration, the issue is then whether the action of eating meat on balance increases or decreases aggregate utility. Initially, this seems clear-cut. The utility from eating meat is relatively small. Many humans do get a lot of pleasure from eating meat, but it is far from an essential interest. We can certainly survive without eating meat, and indeed it is often suggested that a vegetarian diet is healthier. On the other hand, there is a large degree of suffering involved in (most) processes of meat production. Farmed animals are herded into cramped, unsanitary conditions, which lead to psychotic, neurotic and repetitive behaviour from madness to cannibalism. To avoid the death and disease such awful conditions would usually entail, they are force fed growth hormones and antibiotics. A number of painful surgical procedures are performed on them without anaesthetic to stop them harming themselves or others (usually out of frustration at their unnatural environs): beaks, toes, tails and teeth are removed, they are castrated and branded without a second thought. Of course, not all farms are as cruel as this, depending on legal restrictions and the type of meat. Yet even the best meat can still be criticised on humanitarian grounds: for example, the legal requirement to stun all chickens before slaughter involves a process that is only 95% successful.[12] Thus, at first blush, at least, it seems the utilitarian ought to be committed to vegetarianism.

Virtue Ethics

The doctrine of virtue ethics posits that ethics ought not to be about judging action, but rather that we should focus on characters. Living a moral life, on this conception, is not a case necessarily of performing right acts, but rather of developing virtuous tendencies and dispositions. The definition of virtue is controversial, but it is usually conceived of in one of two ways. Virtues can either be seen as character traits necessary for a flourishing, eudaimonic life, or as attributes which are generally aretaic (admirable).

When debating the rightness of actions, such as eating meat, virtue ethics usually conceptualises the problem thus: “An action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would do in the circumstances”.[13] The question a follower of virtue ethics needs to ask themselves is whether eating meat is a virtuous or vicious act. Gruen suggests that vegetarianism displays virtue: “in eating animals or using them in other harmful ways, we do not display the traits of character that kind, sensitive, compassionate, mature, and thoughtful members of a moral community should display”.[14] Similarly, Shafer-Landau appeals to aretaic conceptions of virtue: “seeking and deriving satisfaction from ‘products’ that are known to derive from cruel practices diminishes one’s admirability”.[15]

Initially then, virtue ethics and utilitarianism seem to favour vegetarianism, which deontology and contract theories do not.

B. Arguments against eating meat

Arbitrariness of human-animal distinctions

The first line of argument against eating meat questions why we are justified in eating non-human animals, but not humans (assuming, of course, that it is morally repugnant to eat humans). What feature of humanity justifies granting humans greater moral status? It cannot merely be the fact of being human, since this is as morally arbitrary as the feature of being black, or of being a woman. We cannot consistently condemn racism and sexism, and embrace speciesism.

A number of candidates have been proposed, but none of the characteristics have been uncontroversially human. Humans are not the only animal to develop familial ties: for instance, orang-utan mothers stay with their young for eight years, and maintain relationships after parting. Most animals are capable of social coordination, from packs of dogs to birds with their ‘pecking order’. Any dog owner will be able to tell you that humans are not alone in expressing emotions.

As we have seen, both social contract theorists and Kantians honed in on rationality as the key trait of human beings. Yet this argument draws the marginal cases objection, spotted by Bentham when he wrote:

“What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old”.[16]

Bentham’s point was that for every suggested distinguishing feature between human and non-human animal (such as reason), there are some members of the human species, namely babies, that do not possess that trait. While it may be objected that babies have the potential to develop reason, this is not the case of certain severely disabled individuals.

Cohen attempts to wriggle out of the marginal cases objection by insisting that “The capacity for moral judgement that distinguishes humans from animals is not a test to be administered to human beings one by one…What humans retain when disabled, animals never had”.[17] This does not seem plausible – it is stereotyping of crudest form. It is analogous to preventing a woman from taking a manual job because in general men are stronger than women. If rationality is so important a distinction, why should the distinction not be made on an individual basis, but across the generalities of species?

Some may accept this criticism, and pull up the moral drawbridge. Moral status is not a question of humanity, on this conception, but a question of personhood, where person is defined as a “rational and self-conscious being”.[18] By contrast, a human is a biological member of the species homo sapiens. Those humans who have not reached a rational and self-conscious state have no greater moral status than animals.

However, in the same way as Kant grants that we have indirect duties to the owners of pets, it could be argued that we have stronger obligations not to harm human non-persons because of the affection their families feel for them. This is a tenable philosophical position, but it seems terribly callous. In effect, what it implies is that a person who sets a cat on fire, or who rapes a coma victim does no wrong to the being they harm, but rather the wrong is to the people who care about them. And if the cat is a stray and the coma victim has no family, then apparently it is morally permissible. Clark damns the paradoxical nature of this position: “We are absolutely better than the animals because we are able to give their interests some consideration: so we won’t”.[19]

Deontologists and contractualists are therefore forced into a position where they must choose between affording equal moral status to animals (which would presumably render eating them immoral) or reducing non-persons to the status of animals. Of course, reducing non-persons to the status of animals could also be interpreted as raising the moral status of animals to that of non-persons. The pertinent question is whether this status substantively rules out being eaten. The indirect duties we have to the families and loved ones of non-persons seems to account for why we should not eat humans that are non-persons. However, given that the farmers who raise animals voluntarily give them up for food, the same argument seems to work for relatively few animals.

Hardening of Emotions

There is another argument which may persuade the deontologist not to eat non-persons. It is an argument used by Kant to promote consideration towards animals:

“If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men”.[20]

The point is that if we treat animals cruelly, than this cruelty will inevitably begin to show in our dealings with humans. It is for this reason that the citizens in Thomas More’s Utopia are vegetarian: “Killing, unless it is done as a merciful act, must involve a deliberate withholding of sympathy from the victim. Done repeatedly, it results in a hardening of the emotions”.[21]

Notice that this is almost identical to the virtue ethics argument in favour of vegetarianism: “Becoming caring and compassionate about animals invariably seems to have ‘trickle down’ positive effects for the rest of one’s life”.[22] The difference is that virtue ethicists are interested in the virtues humans develop in their dealings with animals intrinsically for their own sake, whereas Kantians are only interested in them insofar as they indirectly influence the agent’s dealings with humans.

How plausible is this connection between hardness of emotions towards animals and a dereliction of moral duty to humans? It assumes that we see animal suffering and human suffering in the same way, such that if we can make an animal suffer we can do the same to a human. This is not obviously true, in the same way that people who enjoy hitting balls with bats have no necessary predilection towards hitting people with bats. A Welsh farmer, on leaving to fight in Spanish Civil war is reported to have said “If I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists”. But the words seem naïve and hollow. There is a world of difference between being a farmer and a soldier, and the latter are far more likely to be negatively affected in their dealings with humans.

The causal connection is even weaker in the case of ordinary people whose only encounter with meat is on the supermarket shelves. They do not kill their own meat, they probably barely think if it as ever having lived, so it seems implausible to suggest there is any heartlessness being displayed. However, the virtue ethicist can object to a person who, understanding the cruelty involved in farming practices, persists in eating meat.

C. Arguments in defence of eating meat

Why stop at animals?

One response to the arguments for the extension of moral status to animals is to ask why these arguments are not applicable to plants, attempting to drive the argument to absurd conclusions. The onus is then on the advocate of animal rights to explain the morally relevant difference between plants and animals.

The utilitarian has a ready-made answer. The morally relevant quality is just the one Bentham identified: the ability to feel pain. However, it has been suggested that some plants can feel pain. Clark observes that some plants emit ‘galvanic twitches’, which have been interpreted as a sign of distress. The evidence for this interpretation is sketchy, and given that plants lack a central nervous system, it is certainly not pain in any recognisable sense. Even if it is demonstrated that plants are capable of feeling pain, this need not be a persuasive point for the utilitarian. The absurd consequence the line of reasoning is supposed to lead us to is that we cannot eat any once-living thing. But this would only be implied if the utilitarian were committed not to eating the produce of processes involving pain. This is not the case – the utilitarian’s only moral commitment is to maximising utility. So if it were to be demonstrated that plants do have the capacity to feel pain, utilitarians would have to seek out food sources that involved minimal suffering – most likely to be plants, which probably feel less pain than animals.

Deontologists, such as Regan, employ slightly different terminology for a similar notion. While denying pleasure and pain have the moral significance granted to them by the utilitarian, Regan holds that the true condition of moral equality is to be an ‘experiencing subject of life’. According to Regan’s definition, subjects of life:

“want and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and frustration, our continued existence or our untimely death—all make a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as experienced, by us as individuals. As the same is true of … animals … they too must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with inherent value of their own”.[23]

While this is a definition which may well lead to problem marginal cases within the animal world, it seems highly unlikely that any plants will fit Regan’s definition of a subject of life. Consequently, Regan can escape the absurd consequences objection.

‘If we were all Jews, there would be no pigs’

Another objection to vegetarianism points out that farming leads to the creation and continued existence of numerous animals, who would not have been alive otherwise. If we believe that life is a good thing, the argument runs, surely farming is good because it brings into existence animals that would not otherwise be.

The force of this argument for the utilitarian depends on whether they agree that a farmed animal’s life is better than not existing. The utilitarian has no a priori commitment to the sanctity of life. If a life, on balance, involves more pain than pleasure, the utilitarian is perfectly consistent in arguing it would be better had it never happened. Given the extreme suffering involved in many farming processes, it seems highly likely that many animals would (on the utilitarian conception) be better off never having been born.

Deontological, rights based arguments here enter the murky world of the rights of unborn creatures. It seems most plausible to say that potential creatures have no rights, at the very least until the point of conception. Otherwise, we risked being dragged into absurdity, with every sperm and egg having rights and moral claims.

The more general claim, that species are better off under farming, is highly contentious. As Clark observes, “Species have vanished in historical time, but few have done so because man did not interfere with them”.[24] In any case, if the conservation of species were the real aim of farming, it seems that there are far more humane ways of achieving the same goal.

Causal Impotence

Another major objection to vegetarianism is what Norcross calls ‘causal impotence’.[25] This is the claim that, even if we agree that the treatment of animals in meat production is morally wrong, there is no point in adopting vegetarianism, since the actions of one individual will have no effect on the overall quantities of meat being produced. This objection holds with equal force for both the utilitarian and the deontologist, since it claims that forgoing meat will prevent neither the suffering of animals nor the loss of their lives.

Norcross admits that incremental conversions will have no impact on meat production, but argues that large shifts in demand will.[26] So, for example, if it takes 10 000 people stopping eating meat to save 100 000 chickens a year, there is a 1 in 10 000 chance that you will be the individual whose conversion crosses that threshold. Thus, the expected effect of your decision is to save 10 chickens a year, and so from either the utilitarian or the deontological standpoint, the decision is a rational one. The numbers are, of course, illustrative, but the point holds.

The causal impotence objection does not appear to have any force against virtue ethical arguments for vegetarianism, which argue that vice is shown merely by association with meat production. Nobis argues that to continue to eat meat simply because you believe your actions will not influence the farming industry is as distasteful as buying a lamp carved from the bones of concentration camp victims, and defending yourself with the knowledge that there is nothing you could have done about the holocaust.[27]

D. Arguments for Demi-vegetarianism

There is one final position which we ought to consider before concluding our discussion. We have looked at arguments suggesting we give up meat entirely, and arguments insisting there is nothing wrong with the status quo, but what about the third alternative? Hare’s response to the arguments for and against vegetarianism is to propose a diet which involves reduced and carefully selected meat consumption.[28]

Hare’s argument is premised on the belief that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the consumption of meat. This would seem to put him at odds with absolutist deontological theories which, if they accept the moral status of animals, would see their slaughter as morally repugnant. Hare, on the other hand, believes that if farm animals are reared in comfortable conditions, and slaughtered humanely, it is permissible to eat them. Indeed, Hare argues that such an existence is even better than the animals would enjoy in nature, and so it would increase overall utility to have more, rather than fewer, of these ‘ethical’ farms. He points out that the only way to encourage such farming methods is with the consumer’s market power: the power that vegetarians relinquish. Consequently, Hare concludes that the optimal action is to eat only ethically produced meat.

Hare’s case is impeccably argued and perfectly consistent with the utilitarian perspective. It may also have appeal for those virtue ethicists who agree that to ensure farm animals have a good life and to slaughter them humanely is to act compassionately. However, Hare’s empirical claim that such ethically produced meat is available is a debatable point. This appears to be Singer’s objection to demi-vegetarianism: “the important question is not whether animal flesh could be produced without suffering, but whether the flesh we are considering buying was produced without suffering”.[29]


E. Conclusion

The question posed at the start of this essay was whether it is morally consistent for us to eat meat. The answer, unsurprisingly, depends on your moral convictions. Contractarians have little reason, on their conception of morality, to give any thought to the suffering of animals, and so are not inconsistent in eating meat. However, such a nakedly egoistic moral philosophy seems unpalatably callous and selfish. The verdict contractualism, if it is a complete moral theory (and not just a political philosophy), rests on the question of whether animals are to be considered moral agents. Given its focus on rationality, this seems unlikely. However, if it were possible that you might emerge from the veil of ignorance an animal, it seems unlikely that you would be willing to undergo the present-day farm experience, so a few contractualists may be amenable to vegetarianism.

Deontologists must also resolve the issue of the moral status of animals. The problem of marginal cases makes it difficult for the deontologist to reject the moral claims of animals, and deontology makes it difficult to countenance the eating of a moral agent (this seems the epitome of using them as a means, not an end in themselves). However, a few deontologists may be comfortable with the belief that certain non-rational humans are of lower moral status, and equivalent to animals. These few are consistent in their consumption of meat.

The position of utilitarians seems to rest decisively on the empirical question of whether any current farming methods are humane enough to ensure that farmed animals are better off than had they never been born. If they are, it seems the utilitarian’s duty to support such farms. Yet environmental concerns would seem to suggest that excessive consumption of meat is also bad. If farming methods do not reach this standard, the utilitarian ought to be a vegetarian.

It is difficult to make out the virtue ethics position in all this. It seems compassion is the chief virtue at stake. Insofar as virtue ethics has anything to say on this, it is that it is probably better to support more humane farms. The idea that the consumption of meat in itself is an act of vice seems rather implausible.

[1] Quoted in Singer (ed.), In Defence of Animals, 9.
[2] Cudd, Ann, "Contractarianism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
[3] Regan, ‘The Case for Animal Rights’, in Singer (ed.), op. cit.
[4] Ashford, Elizabeth, Mulgan, Tim, "Contractualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
[5] Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 512.
[6] See Clark, The Moral Status of Animals.
[7] Quoted in Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals, 75.
[8] Quoted in Singer, op. cit., 5.
[9] Singer, Animal Liberation.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Singer and Mason, Eating.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Hursthouse, ‘Virtue theory and abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1991, 225.
[14] Gruen, Lori, "The Moral Status of Animals", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
[15] Quoted in Nobis, ‘Vegetarianism and Virtue: Does Consequentialism Demand Too Little?’, Social Theory and Practice 2002.
[16] Quoted Singer (ed.), op. cit., 5.
[17] Quoted in Norcross, ‘Puppies, Pigs and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases’, Philosophical Perspective 2004.
[18] Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals, 51.
[19] Clark, op. cit., 108.
[20] Quoted in Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and Other Animals, 75.
[21] Quoted Schliefer, ‘Images of Death and Life: Food Animal Production and the Vegetarian Option’, in Singer, In Defence of Animals, 67.
[22] Nobis, op. cit.
[23] Regan, ‘The Case for Animal Rights’, in Singer, In Defence of Animals.
[24] Clark, op. cit., 48.
[25] Norcross, op. cit.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Nobis, op. cit.
[28] Hare, ‘Why I am only a Demi-vegetarian’, in Jamieson (ed.), Singer and his critics
[29] Quoted in Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans and other Animals.