PHI 2397 Quiz #3 Notes (Fall 2020 Prof. Dean Lauer) PDF

Preview

Summary

Quiz #3 notes for PHI 2397 on the lectures that were tested during the Fall 2020 semester....

Description

Garret Hardin (Microbiologist) – “The Tragedy of the Commons”: Prisoner’s Dilemma

The Tragedy of Freedom in The Commons The eighteenth-century commons (public lands) were de-grazed because it was in the personal interest of every herdsman to maximize his or her gain. • One additional sheep in the commons would mean a net utility benefit of +1, I get all the profits. • One additional sheep in the commons would mean a net utility negative of much less than 1, I share the loss. The “remorseless” logic of the commons then locks in. Each social actor is required by the law of self-interest to increasingly deplete the commons. • Consequently, exhausting resources and polluting is built into the game of survival. • Morality is “system sensitive”, meaning that reckless polluting does not harm the public, when there is no public (commons is empty), it is unbearable in the city. o Scarcity is the activating mechanism for the “tragedy”, “war of all against all” (Hobbes) Overpopulation Accelerates the Tragedy by committing us to a race to the bottom of the supply of resources because more consumers mean less supplies, i.e., greater scarcity. Conscience/Guilt As Naïve and Unfair Self-restricting measures are doomed to fail. 1. An individual asked to volunteer will be fighting the innate compulsion to preserve his own interests, creating inner conflict. 2. Voluntary measure will always lose out in the extreme situations of survival. 3. Given the measures are voluntary, those that don’t participate stand to gain even more thus rewarding the selfish and punishing the generous. This incentive system creates the opposite results of what we would like. • Escalates inequality.

Solution – Privatization/Regulation • •

For many issues of justice, we do not make these actions purely ethical or voluntary considerations. We make the actions illegal. We make the regulation exterior, not interior. It is illegal to rob a bank (a kind of commons); illegal to cheat on taxes, etc. Overpopulation (another serious infringements of the commons) needs coercive governing.

Solution – Privatization Privatizing the commons, similar to regulating it, means that there is one central authority of the resource who has a personal interest in its sustainability. • Usually, it would be against the self-interest of this authority to deplete the resource. • Privatization, however, by its own logic does not account for the public good, which regulation addresses. Example: President George Bush Calls For A New Ethic on Wall Street “We've learned of some business leaders obstructing justice and misleading clients, falsifying records, business executives breaching the trust and abusing power. We've learned of C.E.O.'s earning tens of millions of dollars in bonuses just before their companies go bankrupt, leaving employees and retirees and investors to suffer. The business pages of American newspapers should not read like a scandal sheet. …And so again today I'm calling for a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community.” • http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/09/politics/text-bushs-speech-on-wall-street.html “Compensation survey firm Equilar found that TARP recipients with at least $10 billion in assets paid their CEOs $844,229 in salary, on average, and $2.5 million in cash bonuses for 2007, the latest period for which data are available. Total CEO pay in the survey group averaged $11.1 million, the firm said.” • http://archive.fortune.com/2009/02/04/news/obama.exec.pay.fortune/index.htm Who controls Canada’s wealth?

Marc Sagoff – “At the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima; or; Why political questions are not all economic (1981)” Neoclassical economics •

• •

Studies the behavior of individuals, households, and organizations (called economic actors, players, or agents), when they manage or use scarce resources. Agents are assumed to act “rationally” and have limited resources to obtain their ends, a set of stable preferences, a definite overall guiding objective, and the capability of making a choice. Premissed on cost/benefit decisions. The best decision is the one most efficient in bring about utility.

Consumerism taking over politics • •

Sagoff contends that cost/benefit type decision making is becoming more common in the public realm. “The only values we have, on this view, are those which a market can price.” o Pg. 229

Thinking of values in terms of willingness to pay •

Problems: o It makes private thinking, about what I prefer or desire as a consumer public so that questions of right and wrong (ethical/political) become questions of how much we are willing to pay (cost) for the benefit of what is right. o We are not only consumers. The citizen gets ignored here.

Consumer vs. citizen •

•

“We act as consumers to get what we want for ourselves. We act as citizens to achieve what we think is right or best for the community.” o Pg.229 The consumer and the citizen often act in contradictory ways, but this is not irrational. o Why should we be expected to vote for the sort of things we shop for? ▪ Cf. 229

Values, unlike preferences, are ends-in-themselves •

•

The “free” market can take into account and price, or weigh, preferences, wants, desires and inclinations. It cannot deal with absolute values or something with intrinsic worth, which cannot be measured on the cost/benefit scale. o How much would you pay for a cool planet? Replacing values with preferences amounts to replacing the ideas of the good and justice (citizenship) with the psychology of the consumer. o Cf. 232, 233

Kant’s conception of value • •

• •

Immanuel Kant sees the individual as more than a bundle of wants and desires. The individual is a rational decisionmaker and so capable of making absolute determinations of what is right and wrong. The world of obligation, like mathematics is intersubjective and public, so objective (shared) standards of judgment and criticism apply. Thus, moral judgments are either correct or mistaken, not relative to a willingness to pay. Someone who makes a value judgment claims to know what is right, not what is just preferred. This judgment is based on what is believed to be true rather than what is felt. What is right is not relative/subjective. o Cf. 233

Conclusion • • •

Once the consumerized self is made the source of all value, the critical, public self cannot participate in the exercise of power. Because we look after our own self-interests (as consumers) this does not mean that politically we should advocate for a consumer-oriented society. It makes sense individually to put as many animals as possible in the commons while publicly advocating limits on grazing. Both are in my interest.

William Francis Baxter, Jr. – People or Penguins: The Case for Optimal Pollution William Francis Baxter, Jr. • •

• •

1929 – 1998 Career o As Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice Non-human animals have no moral consideration on their own. Any moral consideration of animals is in relation to humans. “Let the market decide.”

A Matter or Principle •

•

Strong moral claims appeal to widely held and self-evident convictions. o Liberty is good so long as it does not harm others, etc. ▪ Liberty is a universal good. ▪ An intrinsic good. Environmental claims usually lack self-evidence and beg the question. o No drilling in the Arctic! ▪ Why?

Position regarding Pollution • •

• •

People should have as much freedom as is compatible with other people's interests (freedoms). o Harm Principle Waste is a bad. This follows necessarily since resources are limited, on the condition of course that those resources are a good thing. o Specific reference made to “human satisfactions”. People should be regarded as ends not as means. People = dignity. o Statement of anthropocentrism. Both the incentive and the opportunity to improve his or her share of satisfactions should be preserved to every individual. And those satisfactions should be redistributed an egalitarian way. o Statement of anthropocentrism and socialism

The Penguin Example •

DDT is causing damage to the penguin population. o It is not self evident that we should stop using DDT (now banned worldwide by the Stockholm Convention, 2001). o People have no rational interest in preserving elements of nature for their own sake. ▪ Anthropocentrism • This is an assumption that corresponds to "reality”. ▪ DDT should be banned only if it disrupts satisfactions enough for people who enjoy seeing penguins.

Not advocating environmental destruction • • •

The author does not claim in any way that harming the environment is a good thing. As beings of the environment what is good for us is more often good for the environment. Baxter has no position on private altruism toward animals or the environment.

Only people deserve moral standing •

•

Claiming that nonhumans are to be counted as ends rather than means (= that they have intrinsic value/moral standing) cannot be fairly operationalized. o We can never truly know what is going on inside the mind of bat or a dog. Questions of ought and should are unique to the human mind. o But why is this so important?

Nature has no normative standing • •

It is meaningless to claim that it is good for a volcano to explode or that it is good for flowers to bloom. Why is it wrong to impair penguins with DDT yet slaughter cattle for beef?

•

If nature has no normative standing, then we are at a loss to say why dirty air is intrinsically bad. o Actually, it is right for our air to have trace amounts of pollution because without some residue in the atmosphere of our industry there would be no economic development as we know it.

Optimal Pollution • •

Pollution and civilization are inversely related. Low levels of pollution contribute to human satisfaction but so do food and shelter and education music. To attain ever lower levels of pollution, we must pay the cost of having less of these things.

Limited Resources • • •

In a hypothetical land of infinite resources all needs can be met. o We can stop using DDT and have an identical quality-of-life. But in the real-world resources are finite. o Ending the use of DDT, which is efficient in modern life, means compromising our own satisfactions somewhere. If our satisfaction for watching penguins is high enough at the margin to offset the costs to society as a whole, then DDT should be banned. o But this will be policy that ultimately privileges the enjoyment of people not the survival of penguins.

Peter Singer – “The Place of Nonhumans in Environment Issues” Peter Singer • • • •

Utilitarian Animal ethicist “All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.” “[T]he continuing failure of philosophers to produce a plausible theory of moral importance of species membership indicates, with increasing probability, that there is no such plausible theory.”

I. Humans and Nonhumans • Should we be concerned about the impact we have on the fate of species or about individual members of those species? • Anthropocentric concern for nonhumans o The effects of our actions on animals are morally significant only if they have consequences for human beings. • Nonanthropocentric concern for nonhumans o Lives and welfare of animals has intrinsic significance, which must count in any moral equation.

Harming Ourselves •

• • •

A 2001-2004 study by the Chicago Police Department "revealed a startling propensity for offenders charged with crimes against animals to commit other violent offenses toward human victims." Of those arrested for animal crimes, 65% had been arrested for battery against people. According to the Ottawa Humane Society in 89 per cent of domestic violence cases, animal abuse is present. Researchers have found that between 71% and 83% of women entering domestic violence shelters reported that their partners also abused or killed the family pet. http://www.google.ca/url?url=http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/abuse_neglect/qa/cru elty_violence_connection_faq.html&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwisvi1paX VAhWJeT4KHayDywQFggUMAA&usg=AFQjCNE3QcsVMNT7ZVt_vsDLq4QQ7Lk wvA

II. Speciesism • •

Anthropocentric views towards animals, that is their moral value is only derivative of human utility is “arbitrary and morally indefensible.” Speciesism o is an attitude of bias against a being because of the species to which it belongs. Typically, humans show speciesism when they give less weight to the interests of nonhuman animals than they give to the similar interests of human beings. o is a prejudice similar to racism or sexism, in that the treatment of individuals is predicated on group membership and morally irrelevant physical differences. o Species membership has no moral significance. o Intelligence, of which humans seem superior to nonhumans, is not a morally significant. ▪ Morality derives from feelings of pleasure and pain, which many nonhumans share with us.

III. Nonhumans have Interests • •

Only a being with subjective experiences can be said to properly have an interest. o Note: utilitarian’s believe all experiences are either pleasurable or painful – meaning that there is a good or bad component to all experience. Animals obviously have subjective experiences. o When Jeremy Bentham says that the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?, he is suggesting that equality in essential features is unimportant. It is sharing the basis for “having and interest” (to avoid pain and enjoy pleasure) that is important.

IV. Equal Consideration of Interests •

Equality is moral ideal, not a relevant matter-of-fact.

•

•

o The important thing is not “that all men are created equal” (“The Declaration of Independence”), which may not be scientifically true, but that we treat all people with principle of equality. ▪ Factual equality should not be the condition for moral equality! Considering interests equally does not mean that we cannot chose the life of a person over that of a rabbit. o In this case, clearly the interests of the person takes precedence because the person is capable of greater suffering due to greater awareness and emotional pain. Suffering is the benchmark – not species – and “the balance of interests favors the human.” The ideal of least suffering also applies between people who are morally equal but economically unequal. o A “wealthy person will suffer less by being taxed at a higher rate than a poor person will gain from the welfare benefits paid for by the tax.”

V. Examples •

•

Pest control o The poisoning and trapping of nonhumans is cheap and has been done with no regard to the pain involved and is the moral equivalent of racism. There may be justification for pest control but the ideal of least suffering maintains that we do this in a humane way. ▪ Developing sterility drugs ▪ ‘Have-a-heart’ traps Clear-cutting o Is cheap and destroys entire habitats of many different species causing dislocation, stress, starvation, and overall homelessness. ▪ Select cutting of mature or dead trees minimizes animal homelessness.

VI. The Meat Industry •

•

An “impartial research by American scientist (and abattoir designer) Temple Grandin reveals extraordinary and unnecessary horrors. She reported "deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis" at 32% of the slaughterhouses she visited in the US: 26% of the chicken-killing facilities had abuses that should have meant immediate closure; chickens scalded to remove their feathers, thrown in the trash and found later, still alive; a worker dismembering a fully conscious cow . . .” o Why cheap meat costs the Earth ▪ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/sep/04/why-cheap-meatcosts-earth Singer concludes that meat-eating as practiced with industrial farming is morally indefensible. o No person, pet, or other animal who has an arbitrary moral exception to such cruelty would be legally allowed to be a party to such wickedness.

Quiz #3: • • • •

Garrett Hardin o Tragedy of the commons, self-interest, the unfairness of ethical actions Mark Sagoff o Consumer vs. citizen (utilitarian vs. Kantian), etc. William F. Baxter o Anthropocentrism, optimal pollution Peter Singer o Speciesism, utilitarian justification...