I am reading, reading, reading. Essays, papers and books. I'm not sure how much I follow, how much I agree or disagree, how much I even think some of it seems worthwhile...
Oh dear.
Nonetheless, I keep thinking too which is a good thing. Well, it may be a good thing according to some theories of well-being. More likely if the thinking is pleasurable (I'm not sure) or fulfilling a desire (maybe) and certainly if an objective list theory that incorporates thinking about ethics as one of the things on the list turns out, counter-intuitively, to be true.
Confused? Me too.
One of the things that 'gets me' is this given assumption on the part of many that there are 'oughts' in the fabric of the universe. There may be. But why on earth - or rather, why in the universe - should the subjective experience of pleasure and pain for sentient beings on the third rock from the sun feature in any grand plan? Isn't this idea that there are moral 'truths' that exist in the same way as 'numbers' kind of weird? And even were it to be the case, why should those truths bear any relation to one goddamn species in the back of beyond? It seems like more crazy anthropocentrism. As insane as that a God specially created precious us.
I just can't see how morality can be anything other than a human construct. And as such there are no truths. There's no foundational good, just foundational goods as far as our experience is concerned. And - hooray! - we have recognised that other animals also feel pleasure and pain so we expand the framework of morality to encompass them.
Now, if we were genuinely seeking to 'find' moral laws, why should we not assume that they were based not on 'sentience' but on 'life'? Why should it be more important that we can 'feel' injury than that a tree, for example, can be injured? For sure, it's horrible to us to feel pain, but we are judging 'badness' from the perspective of something that can be in some way conscious of it... yet, a tree has to adapt to its injury... while it may not 'experience pain' something still happens. What makes consciousness so special? I mean aren't we just assuming that because we experience it?
As for the wounded tree, it has to rebalance if a big branch comes off. It has to express sap to 'heal'. Its ability to flourish may be harmed. Its well being may well be diminished - well, it is diminished by its standards and to it that is more salient than what happens to us, whether we are consciously aware of pain or not. Why this presumption that just because the tree does not experience pain that it cannot be harmed in terms that are relevant to it if not to us? I mean, if you cut my branch off under anaesthetic so that I didn't feel it, you'd still think it was a bad thing. And besides, maybe the tree though not conscious still, in some as yet undefined way, experiences. I mean, we don't know. Just like we once didn't know that dogs felt pain.
And this leads me to question how we look at 'the environment'. Because as far as the environment is concerned, there really is no better or worse. The environment just is. It is not alive. It is a system. Like a cloud. Whether it's 4 degrees hotter or no, the environment goes on. It changes, but there is no one in charge to care one way or the other. It does not have a preferred state - as a tree does (being alive). The state of the environment matters for the different life forms. There may be some which would be better off on a hot planet. And many that would not. But new life would evolve for which the standards of better and worse would be different.
The environment only matters to us instrumentally to the extent that it harms or helps our survival. As it does not have a preferred state, we are choosing what we want its state to be for our purposes.
Yet we can grant non instrumental mattering to other animals, which is a good thing for them, but why the hell not to trees? I'll tell you why: because we have to stop somewhere. Because we are the ones deciding and we only want trees for what they do for us and any other creatures that we have chosen to care about. It is all arbitrary. There is no moral truth saying what 'ought' to be cared for. We make the 'oughts'.
But what the theorists do is try to claim that their 'ought' has more truth value than someone else's 'ought'. And they do this by basing it on various intuitions they have, arguments that have persuaded them and things that they want to be true at a foundational level. They construct these incredible, complicated, involved and absurd arguments to explain things like why adequate parents should be allowed to parent their biological babies and why the congenitally cognitively impaired are not unfortunate and why parents ought to genetically modify their children to make them smarter. And then someone else argues the reverse and then a host of other people leap in on the one side or on the other or by coming up with a third, fourth, twenty-eighth way of seeing it.
And here's what I think: you're all so damn clever and rational and on the whole well meaning and you can't agree on things despite all your best efforts and you know why? Because there isn't a God-given 'ought' out there to find!
All there are are the best options we can find to complicated (and complex) problems which meet general approval given the standards and mores of the day. All we can do is to try to care about more beings and cause less harm and what we do now may in a century's time look like the most brutal injustice because they may have better answers.
Or they may have decided to prioritise trees over humans.
コメント