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In the realm of environmental ethics, virtue ethics can help to understand the normative aspects of everyday actions of the sort that are often advocated when people are talking about “going green.” Sometimes people criticize these efforts, like bringing your own bag to the grocery, as being too small to make a big difference. Others criticize them on grounds of being all show but requiring little effort or commitment.
From the perspective of virtue ethics, though, it’s not only the size of the individual contribution that matters, since the sum of such contributions can motivate a community to resolve a problem of collective action. For many people, doing these little things shows that they care, and that their heart is in the right place. Though green slogans can seem trite, they can also support and express community values. And for many people, doing small things are only initial steps and the little things increase awareness of what else can be done.
At RIT, the smaller actions of groups like SEAL to organize electronic recycling helped show the university administration that there was campus support for larger projects, such as the building of the LEED-certified CAST building and Innovation Center.
As we discussed in class, sometimes technology can play an important role in providing people with the options and the knowledge to act in accordance with their values (which is another way of expressing ‘virtue’). Here’s an example:
Smart Meter
Some studies have shown that a household monitor that shows people (in an easy-to-understand way) what their energy usage is and a website that gives them ideas for cutting it makes a real difference in how much energy people use. One obstacle has been that some power companies are reluctant to give people this kind of information. It’s not in their interests for people to use less power–it would reduce their revenues. On the other hand, the smart meter can be used so that power companies can encourage people to use energy at non-peak times, making their production costs lower and the business more efficient. Some governments are encouraging the technology. In the U.S., the technology is being prototyped in California and in Austin, Texas.
According to the BBC:
The government should require power companies to provide clear visual displays when they install smart meters in homes, says a report.
Here’s a report about how so-called “energy dashboards” give people information that they can and do use to change their energy-use habits. It says:
just knowing what one’s energy consumption is can reduce that consumption by around 15%.
Argument Outline 2: Topic #3 — Organic vs. Genetically Modified
The organic community has soundly rejected the use of genetically modified crops, and current organic standards do not permit genetically modified crops to be marketed as organic, even if they are grown without harmful pesticides or artificial fertilizers.
The reasons include the fact that genetic modification can come with unknown risks to the environment and that genetic modification alters plants in ways that many people feel are more extreme or unnatural than alterations that are brought about through selective breeding. I would put this in terms of “purity,” a concept like “natural” or “disgusting” which seems to relate entirely to the eye of the beholder.
In addition, genetically modified crops are tied to patents and commercialization which threatens the economic well-being and independence of subsistence farmers.
However, genetic modification also opens up opportunities which can contribute to long-term sustainable agriculture, according to the authors of Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. For instance, if a variety of rice were genetically modified to make it flood tolerant, then instead of using herbicides that might have negative health consequences, farmers could flood fields to kill weeds. There might also be the possibility of genetically modifying crops so that they are tolerant of marginal growing conditions, permitting them to be grown without the use of high levels of artificial fertilizers.
What should be the ethical considerations in attempting to respond to the problems that genetic modification and organic farming raise? This is a creative question that has no clear answer but could probably be productively examined from a utilitarian position–or maybe from a virtue perspective.
Argument Outline 2: Food Ethics
Due Friday, April 30
Eating is something that we all do several times each day. We eat not just for sustenance, but also as a source of pleasure and, often, as a time of companionship.
Collectively, the choices we make about food have a major impact on our lives, on the lives of others, and on the economy. Until the last decade, farming was the largest industry on a global scale. Agriculture still makes up about 36% of the global economy. In spite of the central place of food in our lives, we tend not to think about what we eat, where it comes from, how it was made, or why we’ve chosen to eat it. Even philosophers have perhaps not paid as much attention to the role of food in human life as they ought.
You have a choice from among 3 topics:
Topic 1
Are some foods better (or more ethical or more virtuous) than others? What are some criteria for picking one kind of diet or one kind of food rather than another? Is choosing food just a matter of health or of identifying which foods pack the most nutrition for the least cost? What is an ethical justification for buying local foods? Why should we be concerned about where our food is produced, or how far it travels, or whether it is in season? Why do some people choose “slow food” rather than “fast food”? Some food is considered healthy and some not: is some food better and some worse–not as a matter of its taste but for some other reason? What ethical framework supports any of these choices, and how?
Topic 2
Is vegetarianism/veganism a choice that people make on ethical grounds? Why? What ethical framework supports a choice to be vegetarian/vegan, and how?
Topic 3
Currently, organic certification for organic farming in the United States prohibits organic crops from being genetically modified. Some people argue that genetic modifications are risky and threaten food purity. Other people argue that the most sustainable form of agriculture might include organic cultivation of crops that have been genetically modified to suit them to specific environments. Do you support this policy or not? On what ethical grounds? (Links in my next post.)
As always, the purpose of this assignment is to practice constructing clear, straightforward, and focused ethical arguments. Grading is based on how strong your arguments are and how well they illustrate one of the ethical frameworks we have studied up to now (deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics). I think topics 1 and 2 lend themselves well to arguing from the perspective of virtue ethics. To do that, you can name a virtue that motivates an action, or you could relate your position to the principle of the mean, or you can discuss a choice in relation to moral character.
In addition, this is an opportunity to explore the justification for a position that you may not have thought through before. For instance, you may choose to defend vegetarianism even though you are not yourself a committed vegetarian.
You are responsible for doing any necessary web research. But do not copy anyone else’s words off the Internet—express the ideas in your own way. Cite your sources, please—and I hope you find the assignment thought-provoking!
Here are some additional links. I don’t myself advocate the sometimes polarized views in these linked articles, but they do show what some of the issues are:
— vegetarianism
— buying local agricultural products, reducing food miles, and slow food
— organic farming
— farm subsidies
— food security (including access to food, control over pathogens, and control over toxics)
— fair trade (here’s Peter Singer’s view)
— overview of agricultural ethics
— treatment of farm animals
I can announce one more extra credit opportunity–and likely this will be the last.
The RIT Undergraduate Philosophy Conference takes place this coming Friday, April 30. It will be our first such conference but hopefully not our last. It’s possible that one of you will want to submit a paper in coming years!
The same deal holds on this as on previous opportunities: if you attend one of the sessions, then I will move your lowest homework or quiz score up a letter grade, and if your lowest (non-dropped) grade is a zero, then I will change it to a D. How will I know that you have attended? If you see me there and make sure I write myself a note about seeing you there, then that is good enough. I plan to attend about half the talks scattered throughout the day. If I’m not there, then you can write me a note by e-mail describing in a few sentences the talk you attended.
I am guessing that the talks at 1:10 and at 2:30 will be the ones most closely related to our class material, but any session is eligible for extra credit. Be aware that by the end of the day, the conference will likely be running later than this agenda, with the keynote address starting around 4. Here’s the full schedule:
RIT Undergraduate Philosophy Conference
Location: Conference Room: 7A-1440
10:00 – 10:15 Opening Remarks
Professor John Capps (Rochester Institute of Technology)
10:20-11:00 “St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge and Vedic Philosophy as Described in Bhagavad Gita.” Leigh Oates (Frostburg University) Commentator: Erika Strickland (RIT)
11:00-11:40 “Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Punk Aesthetics” Alan Barton (Hartwick College) Commentator: Alex Stubberfield (SUNY Brockport)
Coffee Break
11:50-12:30 “Confronting the Crisis: A Philosophical Examination of the Benefits and Detriments of Education.” (Nora Burleigh, Nazareth College) Commentator:Ashley Aberg (Rochester Institute of Technology)
12:30-1:30 Lunch Break
1:30-2:10 “Hearing the ‘Fat Lady’s’ Call: The Meaning of Vocation” Joshua Hine (Nazareth College) Commentator: Dana Melchior (Rochester Institute of Technology)
2:10-2:50 “Emotions…Remember Those?” David Whitehead (Buffalo State College) Commentator: Sam Owen (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Coffee Break
3:30 Keynote: “Voices, Oracles, and the Social Body” Professor Fred Evans (Duquesne University)
This week we’re talking about virtue ethics, the ethical framework that guides moral actions based on evaluations of moral character. Right moral action is based in virtue, and wrong moral action is based in vice.
In contrast to modern theories, it asks not what we should do, but what should we be. Of course, a virtuous character is based in good acts. One can’t be virtuous merely by believing the right thing. But by calling this the “morality of being,” we are highlighting that how you act is constitutive of the kind of person you are. If you say you believe in charity for the poor, but never give of your own time or money, then we would not say that you are a charitable person.
- Aristotle
By contrast, modern theories focus on (crisis) decision-making. A utilitarian sizes up a problematic moral situation, calculates the total harms and benefits that would be produced by different courses of action, and picks the one that produces the greatest overall good. Then the utilitarian’s moral faculty can go on holiday until the next crisis of decision arises. Not so for the virtue ethicist. She recognizes that ethics has to do with how we live our lives–every single day. She sees virtue as a potential that has to be actualized over the course of a whole life. This is a theory of moral development.
The scope of morality includes these questions:
How do you choose your friends?
What do you do on the weekends?
What books do you read?
How have you chosen to live your life?
Is it an admirable life?
Some modern ethical and political theories influenced by virtue ethics are “the capabilities approach” to ethics, care ethics, and communitarianism.
Virtue ethics also dissolves the conflict between individual and society that we saw in utilitarianism because individuals and their communities can be seen as interdependent. Virtuous individuals value friendships and build strong communities; at the same time, resilient, trusting, creative communities help us to reach our potential as individuals. Virtue theorists believe that the point of ethics is to guide us in living well, with virtue, and in building communities at all levels (families, friends, communities, nations) which support the people that make them up.
I received an immediate request in my inbox to develop extra credit options. No problem! As long as it supports your learning, I’m happy to let extra work positively affect your grade. Don’t hesitate to let me know if you have your own ideas for extra credit. Indeed, if you develop a more involved project, I can arrange to give more significant extra credit. (My only caveat is to point out that doing extra work is never as worthwhile as doing required work!)
So, here are two options. You can do Option 1 and, if you wish, either Option 2A or Option 2B (but not both 2A and 2B). Completed extra credit will raise your grade on a comment one full letter grade, e.g. from a √- to a √, which is like raising it from a C to a B. I count a zero to a D as one letter grade, so if you’ve missed more than your two drop grades, this can make a real difference.
Option 1
The Philosophy Club will meet this coming Friday, 16 April, from 3:00 to 5:00 in room 3214 of the College of Liberal Arts. Max Herrera will lead discussion on help for the impoverished world. Max writes: “The case for donating to help the impoverished world has been tackled by many great thinkers. Peter Singer creates the case for why the third world should be given aid in his last few books, most recently being the Life You Can Save. The philosophical issues of global poverty are immense, but my hope is not to discuss the myriad of problems that come with agency, paternalism, and other philosophical baggage. I have but two questions to ask, should we be donating to the impoverished world? And if so, how would we help mitigate global poverty?”
For extra credit, just attend. (It’s fun, actually.)
Option 2. You may get credit for either but not both of these. It is due in Friday’s class.
2A: Write a typical reading comment on the short reading assigned for Friday.
2B: Write a modified argument outline which reconstructs one of Onora O’Neill’s arguments. Instructions: Pick one of the numbered sections and use the format I assigned to put her argument in your own words. Skip writing the ‘issue’ (background information). For ‘position’ write the main (philosophical) point she’s arguing in that section. For ‘argument’ fill in her reasons (in your own words). For ‘objection,’ write the objection she considers. For ‘response,’ describe how she responds to the objection. Finally, write one sentence with any additional evaluative thoughts which you couldn’t fit into the outline format. This should work for pretty much any of her arguments. If it doesn’t, then see if you can modify the format to make it fit what she’s doing.
Both Peter Singer and Onora O’Neill argue strongly in support of duties to provide aid to starving people.
But the reasons that support their arguments are quite different. Peter Singer is a utilitarian, so his ethical concern is to prevent outcomes that increase the amount of suffering in the world. Suffering that can be prevented at a relatively minor cost becomes a moral duty. (You can probably see that this position shares a form of logic with economists who argue for economic efficiency. Singer wants to get the largest amount of moral “bang for his buck.”)
Onora O’Neill is a Kantian, so outcomes are not themselves of concern for her. What is of concern is that people not be used as mere means and that people be able to fulfill their capacity to act as autonomous moral agents. When people are starving or when they are under the threat of violence, then they are vulnerable to being treated as mere means. Thus, she provides a Kantian justification for aiding the starving, for fighting preventable diseases, and for providing educational opportunities.
This difference in their arguments makes me wonder if there would be a difference in where these thinkers would direct aid and what aid activities they would prioritize.
For Singer, I would infer that he would prioritize saving those lives which are the cheapest to save. That is, if you can save one person’s life with $10 worth of peanut butter and some clean water but it would cost $100 to build roads and provide technology to save another’s, he would direct aid to the cheapest first–because the same amount of money would save more lives.
Most of the challenges that we throw out don’t concern him at all: is some of the money we give being funneled to corrupt administrators? He only cares about the bottom line: how much good it is doing. Do the people that are being helped “deserve” our aid? Are they responsible and hard-working? Have they done bad things in the past? Again, all that matters is lives saved and whether these considerations can or should be counted only in the terms of preventing misery.
For O’Neill, though, she would worry about corruption–not because it cuts down on efficiency but because it is wrong in itself. Also, it’s doubtful that she would rank harms. Any situation that prevents people from operating as moral agents is equally bad, whether that is due to starvation and disease or whether it is because they are oppressed and enslaved.
O’Neill’s moral priorities remind me of a charity that has been getting a lot of attention lately–the International Justice Mission. It is run by Gary Haugen, a lawyer and evangelical Christian, and the organization’s activities include fighting human trafficking and fighting corruption in legal systems. A New Yorker article describes it like this:
In 1997, he created the International Justice Mission to offer legal services to the poor in developing countries. Haugen believes that the biggest problem on earth is not too little democracy, or too much poverty, or too few anti-retroviral AIDS medicines, but, rather, an absence of proper law enforcement.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_power#ixzz0kzama66r
Utilitarians claim that ethics boils down to happiness. Not your happiness but total happiness.
Happiness is… -fill in the blank.
If happiness is so fundamental, why can it seem like such a mystery? The Barnes & Noble stocks shelves of self-help books largely because we know we want it, but we don’t know how to get it.
Although Bentham claimed that utilitarianism would give us a “moral calculus,” the science of happiness really got going in the last couple of decades, largely due, initially, to the finding that drugs like SSRI’s (fairly) reliably help people get out of depressions. Psychologists began to think more seriously about happiness as a chemical brain state–but as a brain state that is incredibly sensitive to many factors of experience.
For instance, one’s happiness is relative to perceived social standing. People with the same level of income and material comfort but living among others who are wealthier than they are, tend to be less happy than if they compare themselves to people less well-off than they.
Another unexpected finding is that people are not very adept at predicting which events or states of affairs will make them happy. (Perhaps that’s why we think those self-help books will provide guidance.)
One finding on happiness is especially relevant to our readings: below the poverty-level, happiness tracks wealth. It is very rare to be happy if one is hungry, subject to violence, or worried about survival. On the other hand, once a population becomes middle-class, the effects of increased wealth have less and less of an effect on happiness.
This gets well out of the realm of philosophy and into the realm of psychology. However, since utilitarians depend on getting the facts right, this science could change their beliefs. Here are some links for further reading/watching:
Economists now agree: ‘You can’t buy happiness’
Buying ‘stuff’ doesn’t do it, survey shows (Associated Press article)
Time Magazine interview with happiness researcher Dan Gilbert
TED talks: Dan Gilbert and Nancy Etcoff
Peter Singer argues that we ought to contribute to charities whose work is to increase the standard of living of those people, globally, who are worst off.
His argument relies on several assumptions:
1. That suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medicine are bad.
2. That people are equal in their ability to suffer, and so it is logically irrelevant whether they live in one country or another country, and whether you have a personal connection with them or not.
3. That a large percentage of Americans are capable of using some portion of their wealth to effectively prevent suffering without putting themselves at risk of starvation, disease, etc.
Though none of these are explicitly utilitarian, his view has a consequentialist orientation to it. He argues from these assumptions that most Americans have a moral duty to contribute most of their wealth to the global poor. Failing that, even if everyone in the US who is able to afford luxuries gave a small portion of their wealth to the global poor, it would prevent massive amounts of needless, preventable suffering. In order to disagree with his conclusions, it’s necessary to show either which of the above assumptions is wrong or how the logic fails. (Some people today took aim at Premise 2.)
One interesting implication of Singer’s view is that the cause of people’s suffering is pretty much irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if they are caught in a civil war, if there was a natural disaster or crop failure, if their government made bad decisions, if they personally made poor financial (or reproductive) decisions, if they were good or bad students, good or bad workers, if they are old or young.
In spite of the fact that this position is built entirely from a logical basis, it seems to gain the most emotional traction when raised with reference to the preventable deaths of innocent children. According to the World Health Organization, about 6 million of the young children
who die each year could be saved by low-tech, evidence-based, cost-effective measures such as vaccines, antibiotics, micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated bed nets and improved family care and breastfeeding practices. (UNICEF)
Peter Singer wrote a postscript (at the bottom of this page) which deals with a few key objections. Due to copyright restrictions (and your attention spans), I can’t reprint the whole thing, but here are excerpts:
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, we are more aware now of the limits of our global natural resources.
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