For the last four years of my career I had to teach Environmental Ethics.
This was not an area of ethics that used to inspire me. But I always do a lot of additional reading for any topic as stumbling across an additional idea or perspective that is not in any of the A level textbooks can advantage students if it finds its way into their examination answering. Time and again, I have seen the evidence that they get additional credit and sometimes higher grades, as you can get their scripts back from the board.
Had a very bright student who was involved with ER from the outset. In one of her essays she took Roger Scruton apart, specifically his book Green Philosophy. I even thought of trying to get this piece of work published as an article in Philosophy Now magazine.
Unsurprisingly, she ended up at Oxford. But this was well before the time when ER started to glue themselves to things, prevent people from getting to see their dying relatives in a hospital, pouring shit over statues and so on, all the things that are alienating people from their cause.
I would be amazed if she had remained as an activist. The only reason that I am mentioning her is to correct the impression that all those who are concerned about climate change are militantly stupid.
As a result of all that reading, I have also come to the conclusion the - after the Ukraine-Russia conflict - climate change is the biggest problem facing humanity. Again that doesn't mean that I sympathise with ER. In fact, this thread is all about how counter-productive their methods are proving to be in terms of getting people onside with this.
It's a shame, as going back several years, there were protesters who went about things differently. Unfortunately, Cheat Neutral no longer exists. But they found an amusing, non-confrontational way to get across their objections to Emissions Trading.
As far as animal rights are concerned, well I am still a carnivore. But also almost certainly a moral hypocrite. You end up like that after you read Peter Singer.
Singer is especially famous for championing the cause of animal rights and the claim that we are speciesists in our treatment of animals. Speciesism for Singer happens when we allow the frequently trivial preferences of our own species to override the more weighty preferences of another species.
For example, when shopping for food, most of us would prefer to buy cheap food that tastes good. But if that food is an animal product, in making our purchase we have not taken into account the preference an animal may have for not suffering when they are alive (as often happens as a result of intensive farming) and dying prematurely.
For Jeremy Bentham (a pre-Victorian thinker who was one of the first Western philosophers to suggest that animals were morally significant significance, as he put it, “The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?”
Singer is very much a part of the tradition of utilitarianism and agrees with Bentham’s view. He also introduces the notion of personhood into his version of utilitarianism. For Singer, a person is a being that can value its own existence and knows that it has a future. He argues that many animals are persons in this sense, and research into animal awareness suggests that he is right. For example, chimpanzees have been taught ASL (American Sign Language) and have exhibited linguistic skills that approximate to those of a human child of around two years of age.
Singer is controversial for several reasons:
Anyway, I think I have probably typed enough by now to give readers of this post something to think about.
- He regards speciesism as being as immoral as racism. For example, in old American south, a white slave owner’s preference for profit and cheap labour were allowed to override the preference of black slaves to be free. For Singer, this example is morally equivalent to the example of the food shopper given above.
- He considers unborn foetuses and young babies to lack personhood, which makes abortion and even infanticide morally acceptable for him in some cases. He has even suggested that it may therefore be preferable to carry out medical experiments on orphaned human infants rather than animals because infants are less aware than many species of animals and do not acquire a sense of being a person until they are older.
- Personhood is also something that can be lost (as when someone becomes ‘brain dead’ following a serious accident). This makes euthanasia morally acceptable for Singer.
So will finish with a picture of another lot that got things a bit wrong.
Great pic