I get the objection to factory farming of pigs and chickens, which really does seem terrible, but what about cows and fish?
When driving through rural America, it is common to come across cattle grazing in pastures. It doesn't look like torture, and I see no signs of suffering. In fact, it looks to me like the cows are living idyllic cow lives. I'm sure the trip to the slaughterhouse isn't fun for them, but even then, they are killed instantly and painlessly. Is this just a very non-representative picture of how most cows are raised? Are most cows actually in less visible factory farms where they really are tortured? Because just based on appearance, I don't see how to square this with the claim that they are being subjected to extreme pain and suffering.
The same goes for fish. Many fish are caught in their natural habitats, not in factory farms, right? And even in fish farms, why would we accuse them of inflicting extreme pain and suffering? It is true that the waters in fish farms are very crowded with fish, but that alone doesn't seem like enough to conclude that the fish are suffering.
Your jump from factory-farming-bad to becoming vegetarian is a nonsequitor. Instead of trying to convert people why not begin publishing a price at which farmers can support free-range-grazing of livestock ?
Then I can easily opt for ethical meat consumption based on choosing a meat at that price or more.
In other words, your fight is against cheap shoppers not meat eaters.
Most of the cited arguments in favor of factory farming seem very weak. I want to consider the strongest argument, that based on morality, rights, and responsibilities further, and reply to the objection about lunatics, infants, and adult invalids.
Distinguish three relevant moral categories: moral agents, moral patients, and moral non-entities.
Moral non-entities have no significance to moral decisions, other than as means to an end.
Moral agents have both rights and obligations. They are able and willing to engage in social cooperation with others on the basis of legal and moral norms. Whatever else one views as the source of rights, reciprocity demands that persons with obligations have corresponding rights. This counts as libertarian because it gives agents a choice - social cooperation (self-restraint in exchange for the self-restraint of others) or self-isolation. An arrangement that gave agents additional obligations beyond those corresponding to their rights seems authoritarian, or at least busybodyish.
Entities that cannot conceivably fulfill moral obligations can’t qualify as moral agents. They may still count as moral patients, entities that have rights but no obligations.
How can they acquire such rights? One way is for a moral agent to take responsibility for them, and authority over them, as in the case of a parent taking responsibility for a child. Such a relationship implies obligations on the part of the moral agent, who must at least make sure that the moral patient does not act to violate the obligations they would have if they were moral agents. If this is a libertarian arrangement, a third party cannot compel a moral agent to take on such responsibility; the responsibility must be accepted freely. So this would explain why we cannot torture babies or other persons' pets: they have rights derived from the moral agents responsible for them.
The obvious objection here would be, does that mean it is okay to torture orphans, or for parents to torture their own infants? So long as other moral agents are willing to adopt the babies involved, the obvious answer is that the prospective adoptive parents could sue for custody on grounds of abuse (or just take custody if the orphan has no one claiming guardianship) and prevent the torture. So the objection only applies in circumstance where no one wishes to take custody of the orphan. But if this is literally true, then there is no alternative. To prohibit baby torture tout court is to give the state (or someone else?) custody of the child. But if literally no one wants custody, that includes the state, and various churches that used to run orphanages, etc. So as a logical matter, this is possible; but as a practical matter it is not.
This is analogous to the factory farm. To prohibit factory farming would assign partial responsibility for the animals to some third party. But that third party is not offering to take full responsibility and care for the animals. They are simply commanding the factory farmers to stop. There is no one that can truthfully say, “this factory farming uses me, or my property, or moral patients that are my responsibility without my permission.”
This account would not condemn the operation of a factory farm, unless moral agents were willing and able to take custody and responsibility for the animals involved; and if they did, it would not prevent the operators from acquiring more animals. The practical limit on the ability of bystanders to care for factory farm animals seems more restrictive than the limit on the ability of the factory operators to acquire new animals. So on this view, there is a relevant moral difference between infants, adult invalids, and pets on one hand and factory farm animals on the other.
Factory farming could end in two ways (at least). It could be prohibited legally, or people could stop buying the products. One way imposes the will of one group on another; the other consists of the world adapting freely to changing attitudes. So while libertarians might be able to end factory farming voluntarily, this is a good reason for impatient factory farm critics to make an exception to their libertarian sentiments. Or it might provide a motive for further reflection on the significance of the suffering of chickens.
Or someone might develop vat-grown meat, I suppose.
My thoughts about moral agents and moral patients are similar to yours. However, I base the rights of moral patients on neurological development. Specifically, to be a moral patient, one must be sentient or at least have the capacity to be conscious (as one would have under the effect of anesthesia). Sentience, or conscious capacity, comes in degrees, so there are degrees of moral patient-hood.
Although your comment is thoughtful, I'm the only one who has responded to it. I've gradually come to the conclusion that leaving comments is a waste of time. I've written a 27-page paper on the subject, but there seems to be no point in posting any part of it.
Well, I was slow in commenting, so it is understandable that few persons are still paying attention.
Moral agents require capabilities based on neurological development, but the status of moral patient seems unrelated to capacity. Would it make sense to say that babies who can never fully develop neurologically can be tortured?
And neurological development as the criterion for moral patient status would deny this status to pets. If someone tortures someone else’s pet, should this be morally irrelevant because the pet cannot develop neurologically?
Adults owe it to each other to respect each others' rights as a matter of reciprocity. But babies cannot reciprocate. One way to explain why babies should not be tortured is as a derivative of the rights of their guardians. If this results purely from their capacity for development, then animals and babies with developmental defects would not be protected, so neurological capacity seems inadequate to explain the relevant difference.
Huemer's post takes the ability to suffer as a sufficient reason for norms, obligations, and rights. This seems too broad. We are not sure which species can suffer, or what sort of suffering is relevant. It demands that we respect the rights of a group that is too large to take seriously if we do not all plan to convert to Jainism.
My opinion that it's a waste of time to leave comments isn't based on the fact that I'm the only person to respond to your comment. As I said, I've gradually come to the conclusion that it's a waste of time to leave comments. That implies that, as a result of considerable experience, I've come to that conclusion. If required to do so, I could present the evidence of my experience, but I prefer not to do so because I regard these comments as a waste of time. If you don't think it's a waste of your time, that's fine with me. But I have more important things to do with my time.
Either you misunderstand my position or you're putting words in my mouth in order to present a strawman argument. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you misunderstand. I said I base rights on neurological development. I didn't say a moral patient had to be fully developed neurologically. As I said, sentience, or conscious capacity, comes in degrees. Sentience is ordinarily understood to mean, at minimum, the ability to feel sensations. Either you think that a neurologically under-developed baby and a pet can feel sensations or you don't. If you don't, given that torture is normally understood to mean the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering, then it's difficult to see how they could be tortured. If you do think they can feel sensations (as I do, and I assume you do), then clearly, I'd regard torturing such babies or pets as rights violations—whereas on your theory such acts wouldn't be unjust if no one were willing to assume guardianship for them. As a beginning philosophy student, I learned the principle of charity, according to which propositions and arguments should be understood in the most reasonable possible way. That's a principle worth adopting. In my paper, I answer other objections you raise, but as I said, I think it's pointless to post them. I don't care whether you continue to accept your current theory or not.
The motives for my reply to your comment were three: First, to praise your work. Second, To show you that a modification to your theory can enable you to avoid the objection you, yourself, raise to it. Third, to relieve you of the disappointment of receiving no “likes” or replies. Your misrepresentation of my position confirms my opinion that leaving comments on blogs is a waste of time. I don't intend to make that mistake again.
Thanks for the praise, thanks for clarifying, and sorry for misinterpreting you. I am also sorry you seem uninterested in further discussion.
Now I take your position to be that an amoeba has an insufficiently developed ability to sense things to qualify as a moral patient, but that a rat probably qualifies as a moral patient.
At the risk of making further mistakes, I guess that means that it is a general moral principle that all moral agents should respect rats as moral patients, whether or not they feel compassion for the suffering of rats. Or is a trade off allowed, where the decision regarding the treatment of rats as moral patients can be based both on their potential to suffer and the harm they may cause?
And this position does not consider insects also to be moral patients, because their ability to sense the world is insufficiently developed.
Your argument here is as strong as its premises. For me, the fact that you can reason so solidly from deontological (agent-centered) libertarianism to the conclusion that the unnecessary horrific torture of billions yearly is morally fine, counts as a strong reductio against deontological libertarianism.
A reductio is essentially a tension between premises and conclusion in a valid argument. In a logical argument, it will hinge on the conclusion being logically impossible. In an empirical argument, it may hinge on the conclusion having lots of independent evidence against it. In a moral argument, it's going to hinge on the conclusion being vastly morally worse than the denial of at least premise. The idea that the unnecessary torture of billions would only be wrong insofar as it infringed upon property rights of agents with status as owners, is grotesquely evil, morally worse by far than the rejection of the premise that moral patienthood rightly depends upon some kind of reciprocity between agents.
Libertarianism has a firm consequentialist foundation, in the solution to calculation and incentive problems provided by markets. This is of course spared.
I happen to believe that there are no moral (as opposed to, e.g., contractual) obligations, i.e. that consequentialism is scalar per Norcross. But I don't think this distinction from other consequentialisms is relevant to my argument that your reasonably derived conclusion is damning of deontology.
I don’t know anything about Norcross or scalarity. But if there are no moral obligations, why would anyone worry about factory farming? Somehow moral scalars justify legal obligations? Isn’t that the same thing, with a bit of indirectness? Or are there no legal obligations?
Perhaps there is an opportunity to improve things. Why should one person's scalar ranking be the same as others'? How are they reconciled when they differ? Is there somehow a universal objective scalar evaluation derived from the facts? How does it escape Hume's is-ought problem? And if it did, no one is obligated to conform to it or amend laws based on it, since there are no moral obligations.
To your first question: the same way that we’re able to reason well about the importance of wealth and the undesirability of extreme poverty without believing there’s a categorical threshold between the statuses “poor” and “rich”. Similarly for fitness, beauty, intelligence and a bunch of other phenomena.
To your second: yes, there are legal obligations, in the sense that law prescribes punishments based upon many kinds of categorical distinction. But this doesn’t entail that the rightness or wrongness of a particular choice of law is morally categorical rather than scalar. If the legal speed limit in a school zone is 25mph, then 27mph is breaking it, whereas if the legal limit is 30mph, then 27mph isn’t breaking it. But in setting the law, the extreme stupidity of a 1mph limit and a 100mph limit in school zones don’t look like they result from any categorical moral threshold; the choice of legal limit becomes progressively crazIER as it approaches those values.
> the same way that we’re able to reason well about the importance of wealth and the undesirability of extreme poverty without believing there’s a categorical threshold between the statuses “poor” and “rich”. Similarly for fitness, beauty, intelligence and a bunch of other phenomena.
That doesn’t respond in a way I can understand. Is moral obligation replaced by something else, or simply discarded as unnecessary?
The question was about the nonexistence of a category, not about how to deal with it being on a spectrum (scalar?). Is obligation is a matter of degree? I can’t get a grip on that. If it is a matter of degree, it still exists, doesn't it? If a person is obligated and fails their obligation, others have recourse against them. If they fulfill their obligation, no recourse is needed. We could turn it into a spectrum by saying that one can fulfill an obligation well or poorly, but in practice that cashes out to it being worthwhile to seek recourse or not. The action is disputed or not. The dispute is resolved or not. The resolution involves actions that are either taken or not taken, and mi*t be big or little in proportion to the violation. But they happen or they don't. When one person harms another without consent, the person who did the harm is responsible for trying to fix things, or someone else is, or no one is. Who should it be?
> this doesn’t entail that the rightness or wrongness of a particular choice of law is morally categorical rather than scalar. If the legal speed limit in a school zone is 25mph, then 27mph is breaking it, whereas if the legal limit is 30mph, then 27mph isn’t breaking it. But in setting the law, the extreme stupidity of a 1mph limit and a 100mph limit in school zones don’t look like they result from any categorical moral threshold; the choice of legal limit becomes progressively crazIER as it approaches those values.
I think this missed my point, or I stated it badly. Certainly traffic laws are pragmatic and have no inherent moral significance. But the legal system is supposed to deliver justice. If there are no moral obligations, what is justice? Can we have a legal obligation against murder, if there were no moral obligation against it? Traffic laws have a purpose, which is to make traffic flow safely and efficiently. Is a law against murder just the same, a question of efficiency? And if a law is unjust, why should anyone care? They have no moral obligation.
If moral principles are never cashed out in terms of rights and obligations, they are never cashed out in terms of action. Consequentialism has principles, but these can’t be expressed in terms of rights and obligations, or rather, it needs something more to combine different persons' guesses about what will result from their actions into something that allows them to coordinate their actions and know what is expected of them.
Are we morally obligated to obey just laws, or are we simply subject to punishment if we disobey, whether or not they are just?
The answer I usually see to this question is yes, because a much smaller number of plants are consumed when you eat plant-sourced food than when you eat animal-sourced food, once you count all the plants eaten by the animals.
(It’s more efficient to eat plants directly than to process plants through animals’ bodies. Much of the food energy that animals take in is used up by the animals’ breathing and moving around.)
Michael, I love your writing! It's so clear and concise.
On the final point of market sensitivity to individual reduction, I'm not convinced by the argument from expected reduction.
Say there was a lottery, where instead of winning a jackpot, the prize was that a billion lives are saved. And say that the odds of winning are one in a billion. Thus, the expected value of a two dollar ticket is one life saved. Am I obligated to spend all my money on tickets? (Assuming that in general there's a moral obligation to save a life if it only costs two dollars.) Something about the argument from expected reduction doesn't intuitively work in my mind.
Disclaimer: I am a vegan, and that's not changing.
Irrelevant to the topic: What is your take on the view defended by Kevin McCain in his book Appearance and Explanation: Phenomenal Explanationism in Epistemology? He argues that Phenomenal Explanationism "delivers the promises of Phenomenal Conservatism while avoiding its pitfalls." Does the problem that Phenomenal Conservatism is not a complete theory of justification bother you? Or do you disagree with this description of your theory?
I get the objection to factory farming of pigs and chickens, which really does seem terrible, but what about cows and fish?
When driving through rural America, it is common to come across cattle grazing in pastures. It doesn't look like torture, and I see no signs of suffering. In fact, it looks to me like the cows are living idyllic cow lives. I'm sure the trip to the slaughterhouse isn't fun for them, but even then, they are killed instantly and painlessly. Is this just a very non-representative picture of how most cows are raised? Are most cows actually in less visible factory farms where they really are tortured? Because just based on appearance, I don't see how to square this with the claim that they are being subjected to extreme pain and suffering.
The same goes for fish. Many fish are caught in their natural habitats, not in factory farms, right? And even in fish farms, why would we accuse them of inflicting extreme pain and suffering? It is true that the waters in fish farms are very crowded with fish, but that alone doesn't seem like enough to conclude that the fish are suffering.
Here's some information about fish farms (from an exposé on the relatively higher welfare farms!):
"We found some of the most painful scenes of suffering anywhere in the animal agriculture
industry: fish eaten alive by lice then boiled alive to remove the lice so their flesh can be sold in supermarkets." Page 28 (PDF) https://www.animalrising.org/_files/ugd/ead451_3e9d75f915814cae8cf9ebb298ee9ba1.pdf
RSPCA Assured cruelty at Scottish salmon farm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOuQ6QHAxn8
RSPCA salmon farm footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqMSW9NT3vI
Your jump from factory-farming-bad to becoming vegetarian is a nonsequitor. Instead of trying to convert people why not begin publishing a price at which farmers can support free-range-grazing of livestock ?
Then I can easily opt for ethical meat consumption based on choosing a meat at that price or more.
In other words, your fight is against cheap shoppers not meat eaters.
Most of the cited arguments in favor of factory farming seem very weak. I want to consider the strongest argument, that based on morality, rights, and responsibilities further, and reply to the objection about lunatics, infants, and adult invalids.
Distinguish three relevant moral categories: moral agents, moral patients, and moral non-entities.
Moral non-entities have no significance to moral decisions, other than as means to an end.
Moral agents have both rights and obligations. They are able and willing to engage in social cooperation with others on the basis of legal and moral norms. Whatever else one views as the source of rights, reciprocity demands that persons with obligations have corresponding rights. This counts as libertarian because it gives agents a choice - social cooperation (self-restraint in exchange for the self-restraint of others) or self-isolation. An arrangement that gave agents additional obligations beyond those corresponding to their rights seems authoritarian, or at least busybodyish.
Entities that cannot conceivably fulfill moral obligations can’t qualify as moral agents. They may still count as moral patients, entities that have rights but no obligations.
How can they acquire such rights? One way is for a moral agent to take responsibility for them, and authority over them, as in the case of a parent taking responsibility for a child. Such a relationship implies obligations on the part of the moral agent, who must at least make sure that the moral patient does not act to violate the obligations they would have if they were moral agents. If this is a libertarian arrangement, a third party cannot compel a moral agent to take on such responsibility; the responsibility must be accepted freely. So this would explain why we cannot torture babies or other persons' pets: they have rights derived from the moral agents responsible for them.
The obvious objection here would be, does that mean it is okay to torture orphans, or for parents to torture their own infants? So long as other moral agents are willing to adopt the babies involved, the obvious answer is that the prospective adoptive parents could sue for custody on grounds of abuse (or just take custody if the orphan has no one claiming guardianship) and prevent the torture. So the objection only applies in circumstance where no one wishes to take custody of the orphan. But if this is literally true, then there is no alternative. To prohibit baby torture tout court is to give the state (or someone else?) custody of the child. But if literally no one wants custody, that includes the state, and various churches that used to run orphanages, etc. So as a logical matter, this is possible; but as a practical matter it is not.
This is analogous to the factory farm. To prohibit factory farming would assign partial responsibility for the animals to some third party. But that third party is not offering to take full responsibility and care for the animals. They are simply commanding the factory farmers to stop. There is no one that can truthfully say, “this factory farming uses me, or my property, or moral patients that are my responsibility without my permission.”
This account would not condemn the operation of a factory farm, unless moral agents were willing and able to take custody and responsibility for the animals involved; and if they did, it would not prevent the operators from acquiring more animals. The practical limit on the ability of bystanders to care for factory farm animals seems more restrictive than the limit on the ability of the factory operators to acquire new animals. So on this view, there is a relevant moral difference between infants, adult invalids, and pets on one hand and factory farm animals on the other.
Factory farming could end in two ways (at least). It could be prohibited legally, or people could stop buying the products. One way imposes the will of one group on another; the other consists of the world adapting freely to changing attitudes. So while libertarians might be able to end factory farming voluntarily, this is a good reason for impatient factory farm critics to make an exception to their libertarian sentiments. Or it might provide a motive for further reflection on the significance of the suffering of chickens.
Or someone might develop vat-grown meat, I suppose.
My thoughts about moral agents and moral patients are similar to yours. However, I base the rights of moral patients on neurological development. Specifically, to be a moral patient, one must be sentient or at least have the capacity to be conscious (as one would have under the effect of anesthesia). Sentience, or conscious capacity, comes in degrees, so there are degrees of moral patient-hood.
Although your comment is thoughtful, I'm the only one who has responded to it. I've gradually come to the conclusion that leaving comments is a waste of time. I've written a 27-page paper on the subject, but there seems to be no point in posting any part of it.
Well, I was slow in commenting, so it is understandable that few persons are still paying attention.
Moral agents require capabilities based on neurological development, but the status of moral patient seems unrelated to capacity. Would it make sense to say that babies who can never fully develop neurologically can be tortured?
And neurological development as the criterion for moral patient status would deny this status to pets. If someone tortures someone else’s pet, should this be morally irrelevant because the pet cannot develop neurologically?
Adults owe it to each other to respect each others' rights as a matter of reciprocity. But babies cannot reciprocate. One way to explain why babies should not be tortured is as a derivative of the rights of their guardians. If this results purely from their capacity for development, then animals and babies with developmental defects would not be protected, so neurological capacity seems inadequate to explain the relevant difference.
Huemer's post takes the ability to suffer as a sufficient reason for norms, obligations, and rights. This seems too broad. We are not sure which species can suffer, or what sort of suffering is relevant. It demands that we respect the rights of a group that is too large to take seriously if we do not all plan to convert to Jainism.
My opinion that it's a waste of time to leave comments isn't based on the fact that I'm the only person to respond to your comment. As I said, I've gradually come to the conclusion that it's a waste of time to leave comments. That implies that, as a result of considerable experience, I've come to that conclusion. If required to do so, I could present the evidence of my experience, but I prefer not to do so because I regard these comments as a waste of time. If you don't think it's a waste of your time, that's fine with me. But I have more important things to do with my time.
Either you misunderstand my position or you're putting words in my mouth in order to present a strawman argument. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you misunderstand. I said I base rights on neurological development. I didn't say a moral patient had to be fully developed neurologically. As I said, sentience, or conscious capacity, comes in degrees. Sentience is ordinarily understood to mean, at minimum, the ability to feel sensations. Either you think that a neurologically under-developed baby and a pet can feel sensations or you don't. If you don't, given that torture is normally understood to mean the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering, then it's difficult to see how they could be tortured. If you do think they can feel sensations (as I do, and I assume you do), then clearly, I'd regard torturing such babies or pets as rights violations—whereas on your theory such acts wouldn't be unjust if no one were willing to assume guardianship for them. As a beginning philosophy student, I learned the principle of charity, according to which propositions and arguments should be understood in the most reasonable possible way. That's a principle worth adopting. In my paper, I answer other objections you raise, but as I said, I think it's pointless to post them. I don't care whether you continue to accept your current theory or not.
The motives for my reply to your comment were three: First, to praise your work. Second, To show you that a modification to your theory can enable you to avoid the objection you, yourself, raise to it. Third, to relieve you of the disappointment of receiving no “likes” or replies. Your misrepresentation of my position confirms my opinion that leaving comments on blogs is a waste of time. I don't intend to make that mistake again.
Thanks for the praise, thanks for clarifying, and sorry for misinterpreting you. I am also sorry you seem uninterested in further discussion.
Now I take your position to be that an amoeba has an insufficiently developed ability to sense things to qualify as a moral patient, but that a rat probably qualifies as a moral patient.
At the risk of making further mistakes, I guess that means that it is a general moral principle that all moral agents should respect rats as moral patients, whether or not they feel compassion for the suffering of rats. Or is a trade off allowed, where the decision regarding the treatment of rats as moral patients can be based both on their potential to suffer and the harm they may cause?
And this position does not consider insects also to be moral patients, because their ability to sense the world is insufficiently developed.
Your argument here is as strong as its premises. For me, the fact that you can reason so solidly from deontological (agent-centered) libertarianism to the conclusion that the unnecessary horrific torture of billions yearly is morally fine, counts as a strong reductio against deontological libertarianism.
“reductio against deontological libertarianism.”
Is utilitarianism spared? Or non-libertarianism? Perhaps if it entails that no one has any obligations.
There is a difference between logical or physical impossibilities on one hand and conclusions that are unpleasant.
A reductio is essentially a tension between premises and conclusion in a valid argument. In a logical argument, it will hinge on the conclusion being logically impossible. In an empirical argument, it may hinge on the conclusion having lots of independent evidence against it. In a moral argument, it's going to hinge on the conclusion being vastly morally worse than the denial of at least premise. The idea that the unnecessary torture of billions would only be wrong insofar as it infringed upon property rights of agents with status as owners, is grotesquely evil, morally worse by far than the rejection of the premise that moral patienthood rightly depends upon some kind of reciprocity between agents.
Libertarianism has a firm consequentialist foundation, in the solution to calculation and incentive problems provided by markets. This is of course spared.
I happen to believe that there are no moral (as opposed to, e.g., contractual) obligations, i.e. that consequentialism is scalar per Norcross. But I don't think this distinction from other consequentialisms is relevant to my argument that your reasonably derived conclusion is damning of deontology.
I don’t know anything about Norcross or scalarity. But if there are no moral obligations, why would anyone worry about factory farming? Somehow moral scalars justify legal obligations? Isn’t that the same thing, with a bit of indirectness? Or are there no legal obligations?
Perhaps there is an opportunity to improve things. Why should one person's scalar ranking be the same as others'? How are they reconciled when they differ? Is there somehow a universal objective scalar evaluation derived from the facts? How does it escape Hume's is-ought problem? And if it did, no one is obligated to conform to it or amend laws based on it, since there are no moral obligations.
To your first question: the same way that we’re able to reason well about the importance of wealth and the undesirability of extreme poverty without believing there’s a categorical threshold between the statuses “poor” and “rich”. Similarly for fitness, beauty, intelligence and a bunch of other phenomena.
To your second: yes, there are legal obligations, in the sense that law prescribes punishments based upon many kinds of categorical distinction. But this doesn’t entail that the rightness or wrongness of a particular choice of law is morally categorical rather than scalar. If the legal speed limit in a school zone is 25mph, then 27mph is breaking it, whereas if the legal limit is 30mph, then 27mph isn’t breaking it. But in setting the law, the extreme stupidity of a 1mph limit and a 100mph limit in school zones don’t look like they result from any categorical moral threshold; the choice of legal limit becomes progressively crazIER as it approaches those values.
> the same way that we’re able to reason well about the importance of wealth and the undesirability of extreme poverty without believing there’s a categorical threshold between the statuses “poor” and “rich”. Similarly for fitness, beauty, intelligence and a bunch of other phenomena.
That doesn’t respond in a way I can understand. Is moral obligation replaced by something else, or simply discarded as unnecessary?
The question was about the nonexistence of a category, not about how to deal with it being on a spectrum (scalar?). Is obligation is a matter of degree? I can’t get a grip on that. If it is a matter of degree, it still exists, doesn't it? If a person is obligated and fails their obligation, others have recourse against them. If they fulfill their obligation, no recourse is needed. We could turn it into a spectrum by saying that one can fulfill an obligation well or poorly, but in practice that cashes out to it being worthwhile to seek recourse or not. The action is disputed or not. The dispute is resolved or not. The resolution involves actions that are either taken or not taken, and mi*t be big or little in proportion to the violation. But they happen or they don't. When one person harms another without consent, the person who did the harm is responsible for trying to fix things, or someone else is, or no one is. Who should it be?
> this doesn’t entail that the rightness or wrongness of a particular choice of law is morally categorical rather than scalar. If the legal speed limit in a school zone is 25mph, then 27mph is breaking it, whereas if the legal limit is 30mph, then 27mph isn’t breaking it. But in setting the law, the extreme stupidity of a 1mph limit and a 100mph limit in school zones don’t look like they result from any categorical moral threshold; the choice of legal limit becomes progressively crazIER as it approaches those values.
I think this missed my point, or I stated it badly. Certainly traffic laws are pragmatic and have no inherent moral significance. But the legal system is supposed to deliver justice. If there are no moral obligations, what is justice? Can we have a legal obligation against murder, if there were no moral obligation against it? Traffic laws have a purpose, which is to make traffic flow safely and efficiently. Is a law against murder just the same, a question of efficiency? And if a law is unjust, why should anyone care? They have no moral obligation.
If moral principles are never cashed out in terms of rights and obligations, they are never cashed out in terms of action. Consequentialism has principles, but these can’t be expressed in terms of rights and obligations, or rather, it needs something more to combine different persons' guesses about what will result from their actions into something that allows them to coordinate their actions and know what is expected of them.
Are we morally obligated to obey just laws, or are we simply subject to punishment if we disobey, whether or not they are just?
It is wonderful news that you are revising the book for a second edition. I sincerely hope that it will also be translated into Spanish.
So, if it's discovered eventually that plants have consciousness and feel pain, therefore, would the argument for veganism still hold?
The answer I usually see to this question is yes, because a much smaller number of plants are consumed when you eat plant-sourced food than when you eat animal-sourced food, once you count all the plants eaten by the animals.
(It’s more efficient to eat plants directly than to process plants through animals’ bodies. Much of the food energy that animals take in is used up by the animals’ breathing and moving around.)
Michael, I love your writing! It's so clear and concise.
On the final point of market sensitivity to individual reduction, I'm not convinced by the argument from expected reduction.
Say there was a lottery, where instead of winning a jackpot, the prize was that a billion lives are saved. And say that the odds of winning are one in a billion. Thus, the expected value of a two dollar ticket is one life saved. Am I obligated to spend all my money on tickets? (Assuming that in general there's a moral obligation to save a life if it only costs two dollars.) Something about the argument from expected reduction doesn't intuitively work in my mind.
Disclaimer: I am a vegan, and that's not changing.
Irrelevant to the topic: What is your take on the view defended by Kevin McCain in his book Appearance and Explanation: Phenomenal Explanationism in Epistemology? He argues that Phenomenal Explanationism "delivers the promises of Phenomenal Conservatism while avoiding its pitfalls." Does the problem that Phenomenal Conservatism is not a complete theory of justification bother you? Or do you disagree with this description of your theory?