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Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
And so presumably the examined life is worth living, and the film Examined Life ought to be worth seeing! It’s a documentary about philosophers and received rave reviews.
The film features Peter Singer discussing the article we read last week, and Slavoj Zizek visiting a garbage dump to talk about environmental responsibility. Here’s the trailer:
We’ll watch a film in class on Wednesday about climate change.
There are many more films relevant to some of the topics that we’ve discussed in class than can possibly be shown in a quarter. But I do want to encourage you to broaden what you know, and film is a convenient medium for doing that.
I’ve given extra credit to various people for critiquing talks that they saw on campus or for taking extra steps to judge some of what we’ve read about, e.g. by extending the work we did on carbon footprints. There is a 5 point limit on extra credit, so it’s possible to do more than one small activity.
One option is to watch a film and write a short critique. The more you write, and the higher the quality, the more credit you receive. This would be an even more valuable activity (and therefore worth more credit), if you watched a film with friends and discussed it afterward.
Here is a list of documentary films on various environmental themes. Ethics is amenable to learning through the film medium because learning to think philosophically is not just about amassing knowledge but about identifying and thinking through problems and observing how others frame ethical problems. There are no doubt more films that I haven’t thought of. I’d love to hear your additional suggestions!
About our energy economy:
Who Killed the Electric Car?
About climate change:
An Inconvenient Truth
About food:
The Future of Food
Super Size Me
King Corn
About industrialization and natural environments:
Manufactured Landscapes
Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi
About the connection between natural and social environments:
Darwin’s Nightmare
Thanks, Chris, for the link to the article’s postscript.
Due to copyright restrictions (and your attention spans), I can’t reprint the whole thing, but here are excerpts that seem to address the objection that James and others raised in class. Peter Singer writes:
There are, however, some matters of emphasis that I might put differently if I were to rewrite the article, and the most important of these concerns the population problem. I still think that, as I wrote then, the view that famine relief merely postpones starvation unless something is done to check population growth is not an argument against aid, it is only an argument against the type of aid that should be given.
I would now, however, have given greater space to the discussion of the population problem; for I now think that there is a serious case for saying that if a country refuses to take any steps to slow the rate of its population growth, we should not give it aid. This is, of course, a very drastic step to take, and the choice it represents is a horrible choice to have to make; but if, after a dispassionate analysis of all the available information, we come to the conclusion that without population control we will not, in the long run, be able to prevent famine or other catastrophes, then it may be more humane in the long run to aid those countries that are prepared to take strong measures to reduce population growth, and to use our aid policy as a means of pressuring other countries to take similar steps.
I should also make it clear that the kind of aid that will slow population growth is not just assistance with the setting up of facilities for dispensing contraceptives and performing sterilizations. It is also necessary to create the conditions under which people do not wish to have so many children. This will involve, among other things, providing greater economic security for people, particularly in their old age, so that they do not need the security of a large family to provide for them.
One other matter that I should now put forward slightly differently is that my argument does, of course, apply to assistance with development, particularly agricultural development, as well as to direct famine relief. Indeed, I think the former is usually the better long-term investment. Although this was my view when I wrote the article, the fact that I started from a famine situation, where the need was for immediate food, has led some readers to suppose that the argument is only about giving food and not about other types of aid. This is quite mistaken, and my view is that the aid should be of whatever type is most effective.
One thing I think is particularly interesting is that this discussion translates so well from 1972 to 2009. Although the fortunes of particular countries have shifted, we remain concerned about famine and about population control, and if anything are more aware now of the limits of our global natural resources.
The section of our syllabus that addresses the ethical problems raised by climate change does not begin until next week. 
However, this week, there are plenty of educational and political activities on campus relevant to the topic. The event calendar is HERE, and the week starts off with opening remarks by President Destler today at 4 in the Innovation Center. Following those remarks will be a panel addressing the question “What can one person do?”
Any of these events is eligible for extra credit. To get extra credit, attend the event, then write a short summary saying what happened and what they point of the activity was, as well as a brief reaction. How does this issue relate to ethics? Was an ethical point communicated well? What do you think the event organizers were trying to achieve? Did they succeed? The more time you put into an extra credit activity, the more credit you can receive.
A fellow philosopher of science just happened to blog about the animal testing issue last Friday. In her post she addresses the ethical status of the tactics used by the animal rights activists in this case. The many comments also address the ethics of animal research itself.
A little over a week ago, our class discussion took a tangent to consider whether Kant would morally condemn cruelty to animals. I argued that he would, but not on the grounds that we have a duty to animals. Rather, he said that kicking a dog was wrong because doing so might lead to further harm to humans by making the cruel person less sensitive to feeling sympathy.
Deserving of good treatment?
The question of how the frameworks we’ve studied typically respond on the question of animal rights has now become relevant because of the outline assignment. (I say that some responses are typical because there may be special applications or unusual but legitimate interpretations.)
In regard to the issue of animal cruelty, Kant built on beliefs established hundreds of years earlier by the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. While Kant believed that unnecessary cruelty to animals was wrong, the reason it’s wrong is that it does harm to a person (to the animals’ owner or to the mental state of the cruel person). He is unconcerned about the harm it does to the animal itself. Aquinas had based his argument on the belief that animals don’t have souls, and Kant’s adjustment to the argument was only to fit it into his secular framework. For Kant, animals can’t have moral rights and duties because they are not rational and therefore are not members of the moral community. His ethical framework only applies to creatures who can reason through it, so it is simply not applicable to animals. Other philosophers during the 17th and 18th century went even farther, arguing that there should be no concern at all about cruelty toward animals because (they believed) animals are incapable of suffering.
“Animals are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.” — Immanuel Kant
In contrast, utilitarians have always supported a higher standard of care toward animals. For Bentham, the criterion of morality is the degree of pleasure and pain. While Kant’s ethical theory is based on the faculty of reason (which humans have but animals don’t), utilitarianism’s criterion of morality is based in being able to suffer (which animals clearly do, even if some earlier philosophers said otherwise).
In the 19th century, the question of whether animals deserved moral consideration was tied up also with the question of whether women and slaves deserved (full, partial, or no) moral consideration. If the criterion of morality is being able to suffer, then animals, babies, and disabled humans all have a claim to good treatment. But if the criterion of morality is being able to reason, then babies and animals don’t qualify for moral obligations. Since women and slaves were somewhere in the middle (they could suffer, surely, and they could even speak, but many people thought that they were unable to use reason to the degree that men could), did they deserve moral consideration but to an incomplete degree? Was it OK to beat a woman some, but not as much as you would beat a horse?
I found two interesting news stories in the NPR archive about Lester Brown and food security. These links have transcripts and downloadable audio.
4/14/08: Aid Groups Target Poor Nations as Food Prices Soar
10/2/09: Could Climate Change Topple Modern Civilization?
From looking at some of the comments, I get the impression that some of you feel like we are doing nothing but talking about gloom and doom and are feeling quite pessimistic about the future.
It’s worth trying to move beyond those thoughts to have some other, richer responses. Some ways to react to these readings:
1. Find out more and evaluate their message: What sorts of evidence have been presented? How does the evidence hang together? Are the doom-and-gloom scenarios realistic? How soon? How will they affect different groups of people?
2. Notice the solutions that are on offer. There are many. Some individual but most policy-based. Many of these solutions build on rather than undermine each other. In hearing the negative examples, we may lose sight of the many places where food aid helped, where population growth rates have slowed, where educational levels and wealth have increased.
3. Focus on the moral arguments, and try to understand the various assignments of responsibility, obligation, and consideration.
Due Wednesday, October 21.
Consider these activities of animal rights activists:
1. There have been several recent firebombings of the homes of research scientists in California. Although no one has claimed responsibility, the police believe that they are the work of animal-rights groups. There have also been cases of threats, harassment, and vandalism of researchers’ private property. For instance, six masked intruders tried to force their way into the home of a UC-Santa Cruz researcher during a birthday party for her young daughter. One of the researchers targeted by a firebomb is a neurobiologist who uses mice in studies of how the mouse’s visual system develops. (See Greenwood et al. editorial.)
2. The anti-whaling organization Sea Shepherd attempts to damage the property of whaling ships which operate in a legal grey zone or illegally because, they say, there is otherwise little enforcement of international agreements. The organization has said, “Yes we have sunk whaling ships, rammed whalers and drift netters, boarded poaching vessels and destroyed equipment used for illegal exploitation of the oceans.”
3. In 2004, animal activists illegally broke into a private egg production facility in Wolcott, NY. The facility housed 750,000 laying hens in battery cages and was similar to other egg farms across the country. The activists filmed the conditions, including dead and sick chickens in unsanitary conditions, and made the film widely available. The animal activists were sued by Wegmans for trespassing, and Wegmans eventually sold the egg farm (though still uses it as a source of eggs).
4. A number of animal rights activists have created alternatives to animal dissections in schools and colleges. These include models, videos, and interactive computer simulations.
Pick one of these activities of animal rights activists and evaluate whether it can be ethically supported. If it cannot be supported, be sure to explain why. If it should be supported, evaluate whether doing so is an obligation or merely a consideration. Depending on the case you pick and your argument supporting it, you might need to distinguish whether your position is in the realm of personal responsibility or public policy. You may support your view with any of these ethical frameworks: Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, or the justice framework.
Keep your position and your support as focused and specific as possible. Also, be realistic about what is at stake and what various parties actually do. Note that the primary topic of the argument is whether the particular activities are defensible and why. I am also open to examining arguments which address animal rights itself, though this is not the central topic.
The outline format is here.
John Rawls was concerned with what we call distributive justice and the question of what we should do about inequalities in society. Should goods be distributed equally to everyone? Should we permit vast differences in social and economic status? How are justice and socioeconomic opportunity tied to each other?
In this class, we’ve talked about issues having to do with the distribution of environmental goods (domestically and globally), and to a smaller extent about the distribution of economic goods. The article we read for tomorrow on food scarcity and security issues will tie these two issues together. (A summary and discussion of the reading can be found here. The original is on library reserve and not otherwise available for free.)
There are at least two ways that social contract theory and a Rawlsian theory of justice are relevant to these issues:
1. First, we can use the justice framework to make the case that our social system (that is, our system of social policy, ethics, and economic exchange) is conventional. We have a certain social/political/economic system and it produces certain results. But we don’t have to have that system. It might be the most just system, or it might undermine justice. If it does not produce the maximum degree of justice, then we should try to change it so that it is more just. In particular, we should always be working to try to improve the status of those that have the least, and we should try to give people equality of opportunity.
2. Second, it is in our best interests to build strong, resilient communities. Although natural resources may have limits, social and human resources are variable. People are more resourceful when they have more education and when they have more freedom to experiment and create. Likewise, the social capital that is made up of community relationships is strengthened by social trust and weakened by fear and competition.
It is also worth noting that although Rawls defends inequality as necessary, some critics argue that equality is more important than he realizes.
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