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I was struck by this from a short Times piece about Appiah, in which he mentions "the most important questions facing us — gender, the environment, animal rights." Are those the "most important questions facing us"? Discuss.
I'd cast my vote for questions about what we owe to future generations and how best to fulfill those duties. I recently finished a PhD thesis on this topic (www.nickbeckstead.com/research). The basic case I'd make would appeal to the following (more or less debatable) claims: (i) A very small fraction of the people who will ever live have been born, (ii) it's important that these people exist and have good lives, (iii) market and political mechanisms for taking account of the voices of future generations are extremely weak, (iv) a number of different global catastrophic risks (http://blog.givewell.org/2013/05/23/possible-global-catastrophic-risks/) could have profound effects on future generations.
Some of the philosophers interested in effective altruism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism) have been thinking about this question. Here are some links to some of Will McAskill's thoughts: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/05/how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher/, http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/09/how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher-part-ii/.
In the interest of charitable interpretation, perhaps:
1. This is not an exhaustive list.
2. By 'important,' Appiah meant 'presently salient' or 'widely debated and having important consequences.'
After all, the things listed aren't actually questions.
Some of us working on climate ethics are surprised by how few of our fellow philosophers are fully aware of the grave threat posed by climate change. Indeed, since it is not too far-fetched to say that civilization itself could be in for a very rough ride in the next hundred years or so because of climate change, I sometimes wonder how any academic could be thinking about anything else right now. So, I think Appiah is right to list the 'environment' among the most important questions we face.
Those issues surely are important, as is what Nick identified. But I'd vote for how we view work, the connection between work and self-worth, and how our current mindset will have to change as ever-increasing technological advances make more jobs obsolete and make it less necessary for many people to work (at least in the traditional sense). The issues relating from the so-called "post-employment economy."
For many people, their conception of who they are as a person is connected to what they do as a job. But an ever-increasing number of people in our society are unemployed and probably won't be able to find meaningful employment any time soon (if ever). This association between an individual's self-worth and his/her job seems unhealthy in a fairly obvious way. Why do we believe is it necessary for everyone to be employed? What sort of support should we provide to people who do not have jobs, not because they are lazy or stupid, but because there simply aren't enough jobs to go around? etc.
I don't think gender is important, let alone "most important". I used to believe it was, until I became active in the feminist cause and became so disillusioned by the low quality of discourse and the unpleasant culture that I fled. With that on-the-ground experience I revised my previous beliefs.
It's hard to see how animal rights is most important, too, unless of course the prevailing wisdom about the personhood of animals is mistaken. But absent some new arguments along those lines it's going to remain a fringe worry it seems to me.
Appiah is correct about the environment. If we are to trust the scientists (which, of course, we should), climate change is a mammoth threat to political stability, the global economy, and the existential viability of certain human settlements. And apart for those practical worries, there are of course important questions about justice–is it fair that poor nations have to bear the burden of dealing with all these greenhouse gas externalities produced by global powers like Russia, China, and the U.S.? Seems not. Moreover, there are worries about intergenerational justice, as Nick Beckstead alluded to. Somebody's eventually going to have to clean all this up. And it doesn't look like it's going to be our generation, despite having contributed far more than our fair share to the problem.
I suppose it all depends on what Appiah refers to with the pronoun "us": other philosophers, other faculty members, people in the U.S., humanity, all sentient beings?
I'd vote for the environment, since climate change is going to wipe out most of us or of our children, especially the poorest.
Next, I'd put the incredibly unjust distribution of wealth and basic goods, such as healthcare and quality education. That seems priority two after climate change.
I have a colleague who says that climate change through human caused environmental degradation "is THE issue of our time".
I say back to him that that may be so, but we (we humans) are not going to be able to deal with it at all if political dissent (or quality public debate) becomes impossible. I am alluding to the massive collection and processing of data about private citizens through government-corporate partnerships that is going on, as well as the general shifts in culture that have happened over the past 20 years as a result of our way of relating to certain technological change.
So I nominate those two topics as containing "the most important questions". (Some of the questions people have mentioned above fall under the first.)
Most of the sub-disciplines of philosophy, not just ethics or political philosophy, involve expertise useful for answering some of these questions.
If one takes the environment to be a crucial question (which everyone seems to agree on), and also worries about poverty and global justice (which I’d add to Appiah’s list), one can hardly avoid thinking about a third question, because it is so closely interconnected with these (or presents obstacles): how can we organize our economies in ways that are less one-sided, don’t allow the imposition of externalities on others, and are compatible with a sustainable future on a finite planet. Given that the „science“ of economics does not seem to contribute a lot to answering these questions makes them even more salient for practical philosophers.
There is no chance that human beings can re-organize our economies in ways that are less one-sided, and no chance that we will come to include in our accounting the use of public goods like clean oceans and underground aquifers unless the possibility of political dissent remains. And that is under serious pressure right now in more than one democratic country. Philosophers should be working on this, imho.
Gender is the most important issue because it is the out of balance essentially psychotic hard-edged masculinity now being dramatized all over the world and by the psychotics in the USA repugnant party as "personified" by the Texas Taliban and right-wing religionists altogether, that is the generative cause of all of our seemingly intractable problems including the ever-present threat of global warfare, the abuse/destruction of the environment, and of course the global epidemic of violence against wommen.
The all-objectifying patriarchal male gaze.
Males, particularly right-wing patriarchal males are essentially afraid of the female or the feminine principle or woman and what she represents as a presence or force in the world now, and have been for over 2 millenia.
But woman is the very source, the substance, the sign of art, of feeling. She is the key to the regeneration of the Pleasure Dome Principle of life.
To have respect for woman also means or implies respect for the natural world too. Respect for woman and what She represents altogether is respect for the domain of feeling and the senses, to embrace it utterly, to be conformed to it, to be gentled by it, to be enabled to become whole through that association, woman to man, man to woman.
Men are angular. Women are spherical. If you paint women, you paint the entire universe.
Every woman is a particularization of the one thing – the "She", the universal power or cosmic energy.
A woman's body rotating expresses the unity of existence. It is all "She".
When 55 billion innocent creatures are maimed and murdered annually, we have a most serious issue. This is a holocaust of unrivalled proportions(and this comes from someone who lost 5 family members in the Nazi death camps). Appiah is quite on point.
BL COMMENT: I assume this is a reference to the consumption of non-human animals. That "moral" philosophers compare this to the Holocaust is quite telling about the moral triviality (or depravity?) of much contemporary moral philosophy.
Perhaps the claim of incomparability speaks to the height of human chauvinism.
My candidates for the most important questions/problems facing humanity in the foreseeable future would be climate change and economic inequalities. Unfortunately, the resolutions of those two problems (as well as most other problems facing us) seem to have an inextricable political component to them. Halting the impending deleterious effects of climate change, for example, seem to involve cooperation among nations at an international level. (Good luck with that.) To that end, our ethical thinking needs to be less provincial and more global in outlook. Furthermore, a whole set of global catastrophic risks (natural and man-made) looms in our distant, yet still foreseeable, future as well. Richard Posner's _Catastrophe_ and Nick Bostrom's _Global Catastrophic Risks_ are good starters for anyone who is interested in these issues.
I trust that I'm not the only one here who thinks that the task of picking two or three of the "most important issues" facing us is inappropriate at best and pointless at worst. Am I?
Echoing comments made earlier:
(1) Appiah himself should be interpreted charitably in (at least) both of the ways mentioned.
(2) Most important for who? Strikes me as a lemma that should be filled in before one considers answering the question.
Besides this, it is far more reasonable to assume that we can reasonably discern important issues (although with the initial comment concerning gender, even here I wonder) without grasping after superlatives. Though the issue is fun as a bit of pretense, but ultimately probably only fruitful due to the fact that it promotes general conversation about important issues (that definitely ought to be discussed). I'm highly skeptical of the existence, in the majority of cases (concerning 'big' issues), of anything approaching a knock-down argument as to relative importance of one such issue compared to others. I am suspicious that arguments offered to the contrary show more about reasoner, than they do about an alleged 'importance ordering'. But perhaps I'm alone in feeling this way…
For me, the most important issue is the degree to which we should allow economic arguments to influence moral decisions. This comes up in the areas referred to above e.g. vegetarianism, environment, as well as in a diverse array of other issues.
In lieu of a universally agreed-upon moral code, it seems as though the only thing that we have "agreed" upon is that profits need to be maximized. This generally seems to lead to things hitting the proverbial fan in just about any sphere that one could imagine.
I think what Appiah might imply is that the issues of the body and equality towards bodily needs are a central to the problems facing us today. We must value the bodies of animals and others equal to our own to prevent mass extinction. Women working off the land in third-world countries have been leaders in finding effective solutions to problems of environmental degradation (Vandana Shiva has been a valuable resource in this regard). Finding the simplest means to support bodies in an age when technological advance and capitalist solutions have made scarce and contaminated the resources we need for our bodies including water, air, and food. This occurs through the systemic support for industries and inventions that produce toxic waste and an over abundance of non-renewable byproducts that enter into the waste-stream, which through natural processes and cycles that are anomalous to our efforts to contain them, it is impossible to interminably sequester harmful waste from the streams of resources we use for our bodily needs. This sanctioned use of materials that are not bodily supportable technologies must be evaluated with the body as a measure of the quality of scientific "advance." By remaining systemically apologetic to the snowballing effects of the waste stream and byproducts of industry, we put our bodies and the bodies of others at risk, which is causing the so-called environmental holocaust. The body is the key to a necessary paradigm shift which for me, Appiah's list touches upon.
The environment and animal rights are important issues. One reason they are treated as so pressingly important is that they can be adapted to the interests of the wealthy in a way that the obvious moral horrors of poverty, or prisons, or wars of empire, cannot. Making the environment and animals "the most important questions facing us" allows for the production of luxury products that double as moral indulgences (free range eggs, cruelty-free meat, carbon credits, home solar panelling)–a way to buy the high ground in a way that is sure to maintain the present situation exactly as-is: good for you, good for the planet, good for pretending that only wealthy people are capable of moral responsibility.
Brian
I generally like your blog but have been disturbed by a couple of sneering references to the animal rights movement. Why do you think the appalling suffering (not mere death) that we inflict on millions of animals annually is a trivial?
Chris
BL COMMENT: Sorry, I'm approving these in reverse order this AM. See my reply, I think below, to "David."
Well, chances are that the way we treat animals, the way we treat minorities, the way we treat people with different Sex (or race or sexual orientation) are all connected to the way we treat our environment (climate and all); so I think these issues are all important. Whether these issues are the *most* important ones, I dare not say…
The main issue is an epistemic one: We don't know what we don't know. Imagine asking this question to Europeans 100 years ago in 1913. With the events of 1914 in mind, surely what actually turned out to be the most important issue facing them wasn't something they were able to identify.
Oh, and special thanks to Sue for reinforcing LogicFan's first point about feminism. Just as I was done rolling my eyes at LogicFan's sweeping generalization I read Sue's post.
Brian, out of interest, what exactly is your response to the actual arguments that Singer and other people have given in favor of taking the suffering of animals to be morally serious. Is your argument against it simply that its too counter-intuitive when worked out rigorously? Or something else?
Surely it's not coming out a Kantian belief that ethics is about respecting rational personhood!
BL COMMENT: No, it is not. I also wasn't even denying that the suffering of non-human animals is morally serious (though I do not think it is very morally significant). I was reacting to the Holocaust analogy, which occasionally, but fortunately not frequently, comes out of those who write about animal rights. I say a little about Singer at the end of the paper on "The Boundaries of the Moral (and Legal) Community," which is on SSRN.
I like what Chris said in post 4. I got my MA a couple of years ago and have been in work only for about 6 months of that, doing mindless low-level temporary rubbish. I take great pains now to avoid meeting anyone because I am fed up with the reaction to the first question out of everyone's mouths when you meet them: 'And what do you do?' Still, I know there are a great majority of people in worse off positions than me, regarding unemployment, or employment with conditions that are despicable.
I think environment is the biggest issue. To see why, ask yourself which other problem would be more pressing without e.g. an ozone layer.
Tied to this I think the real big issue is faith, of the sort that declares that no amount of contrary evidence (whatever form that may take) will alter a belief supposedly about the way the world is. Aside from the obvious historical and contemporary examples of religious True Believers, I think that blind faith is at the core of many widespread, systematic, destructive isms: racism, sexism, unrestrained capitalism etc.
But I have no idea what to do about this.
i would include wars and hunger at the top the list.
also (in no particular order):
women's rights
religious fundamentalism
immigration
child abuse
nuclear bombs + nuclear reactors
I completely agree with Mark Bernstein's point, and am confused by BL's unsupported attack. Why, exactly, is the comparison between the Holocaust and the treatment of non-human animals on factory farms so "depraved"? While there are obvious differences, both cases involve institutionalized degradation and suffering on an unimaginable scale. That alone makes the comparison sufficiently illustrative. BL's comment seems to imply that the extreme suffering of 55 billion non-human animals cannot even compare to the extreme suffering of 11 million human beings. Discounting the suffering of non-humans to that degree is, in my view, depraved. Perhaps, this is the kind of attitude that Appiah would like to remedy.
BL COMMENT: 11 million human beings, capable of both diachronic and synchronic well-being, were tortured and murdered because of racist hatred is not comparble to the killing of 55 billion creatures capable of only synchronice well-being for purposes of producing food for human consumption. Anyone who degrades the language of the "holocaust" this way is morally depraved. I have no reason to think Appiah's reference to animals was meant to implicate the moral depravity now defended by Kevin Murtagh and Mark Bernstein. But in the interest of not derailing this conversation further, may we drop the question of whether or not the killing of non-human animals is morally equivalent to actual Holocausts, whether by Nazis or others.
I'll comment quickly only to say, in reference to Professor Leiter's parenthetical above, that I believe that the suffering non-human animals to be both morally serious and morally significant. And although I don't think it is depraved to think otherwise, I have a hard time believing that this is is a question on which reasonable people can disagree.
I think this would be the case were non-human animals only capable of synchronic well-being–simply in terms of suffering–but I don't see any argument that animals consumed for food and made (for example) to live in gestation chambers are only so capable.
BL COMMENT: I don't think even Peter Singer believes that (most) non-human animals are capable of diachronic well-being. The synchronic well-being of non-human animals is affected by living in gestation chambers, but only on the assumption that suffering per se is morally significant do we get the conclusion that the use of non-human animals for food is morally significant. Since there are no very good arguments I'm aware of establishing that premise, and since that premise leads to morally heinous conclusions (e.g., regarding the killing of infants, the seriously handicapped, and so on), one might think that a reductio of the premise. In any case, to repeat, the only view that seems to me morally depraved is to equate the killing of non-human animals to provide food for humans with the systematic torture and murder of human beings for reasons of racial and religious hatred.
But…to return to the actual topic: I was really just curious what issues readers think are morally significant ones that require our attention. Thanks to the many readers who have addressed that. And it is fine, of coruse, for readers to agree with Appiah's list, to supplement it, re-rank it, etc. etc.
There is another issue that I fear we are not going to catch onto in its seriousness until it is too late (somewhat like climate change, I fear). This is the fact that we are on the verge of creating autonomous machines capable of doing things like killing people and making ethical choices, and we are not at all ready for the future that that may bring.
I'm not really sure how much value we can get from ranking questions. But I guess I'm of the view that the "most important" question is the question of how to best go about identifying and fighting the oppression of people. Considering issues of gender is obviously important to that project. Insofar as environmental concerns represent both an existential threat and a special economic threat to different human populations, that's up there. The obvious questions missing from Appiah's list are questions involving class and race, but I doubt Appiah really means to marginalize those considerations.
I'm not going to claim that issues concerning non-human animals aren't important. But those issues generally aren't anywhere close to being as central to the project of ending oppression as those other issues.
Wait, so Appiah is going to Abu Dhabi to teach about "the most important questions facing us." To gender, the environment, and animal rights, let me add: indentured servitude, children trafficking, torture, autocracy, stifling of dissent…. all issues with which Abu Dhabi is intimately familiar.
I'm inclined to think that the most important question facing us, where "us" = "citizens of the US," is how to restore sufficient health to our public discourse and political system that there is any hope of facing and dealing with any of the problems listed by Appiah or the previous commenters.
On second thought, I'm not sure the word "restore" belongs in that sentence.
Brian
I find your comment here extraordinary. Surely it is self-evident that suffering is an intrinsic moral evil and that to inflict it unneccessarily on innocent creatures is morally monstrous. I think perhaps your regard for Nietzsche has seriously corrupted your moral responses in this regard.
regards
Chris
BL COMMENT: Suffering may be intrinsically bad, but an "intrinsic moral evil"? Do you even understand the words you're using? My mother suffered horribly at the end of her life, due to misfortune and debility–this was bad, but it wasn't a "moral evil." But the claim that suffering is intrinsically bad is different from the claim that inflicting it unnecessarily on innocent beings is wrongful, which no one actually disputed. Of course, the word "unnecessarily" is doing all the work that argument can't do. Everyone should now go read A.J. Ayer on moral arguments in Language, Truth & Logic, since this whole exchange is a case study: since there are no argument, there is always the charge of "corruption."
I thought that Leiter was interested in having a serious discussion about Appiah's claims. But apparently he would rather use his bully pulpit to debase the discussion, insult Mark Bernstein and I, and call us names. Way to seek the truth!
BL COMMENT: Names have descriptive and referential content, and some have expressive content: "morally depraved" has a bit of both. When you accuse me of not wanting to have a "serious discussion" what you actually mean is that I responded to your challenge and explained why your view is morally appalling. Jews herded into cattle cars and then gassed were capable of both synchronic and diachronic well-being, and were deprived of both because of racial and religious hatred. Chickens that are factory farmed are capable of synchronic well-being, and were deprived of the latter in order to provide food and nutrition for human beings. Only in academic philosophy does one have to explain the distinction between the Holocaust and factory farming. And that will be to the eternal shame of academic philosophy.
And that's the final round.
The air of moral superiority that's coming through in some of this conversation is pretty appalling. The discussion is 'debased' because a holocaust analogy didn't go over well, accusations of moral depravity were thrown around, and a view is being rejected on the basis of a distinction in moral worth that its defenders have, as yet, remained unwilling (or unable) to respond to? Well, color me unconvinced if I'm supposed to draw the conclusion that the interlocutors are having a reasoned conversation that's somehow been 'debased.' If it has, the responsibility is hardly Brian's.
Protip: if you're willing to accuse another person of having a 'seriously corrupted' moral sensibility, be ready to defend the view that purports to justify that accusation. From this observer's perspective the view is dead in the water, and the folks making accusations about the moral corruption of others are themselves a bit debased.
Personally, I find myself more troubled by Sue's comment than anything Leiter has said. Are we supposed to take that seriously? Talk about a blueprint for stifling dissent. Of course, I realize 'she' could be a troll; the comment reads like a mish-mash of stereotypes fit for a certain fanaticism. Still, the fact that such boiler-plate nonsense gets a pass, and is hard to distinguish from satire, is evidence that there's something amiss in feminist discourse.
Brian
I agree that I misspoke when I used the phrase 'intrinsic moral evil' rather than 'intrinsic moral bad'. Still it seems obvious to me that some moral claims must be self-evident if we are to have any moral discourse at all – afterall arguments must have premises- and I take one such claim to be that it is pro tanto a serious moral wrong to inflict suffering on innocent creatures. One can of course envisage circumstances in which one would be justified in so doing e.g. if it really were necessary in order to sustain healthy human lives – but of course most of us can live perfectly healthy lives on a vegetarian diet, and titillation of the taste buds seems to me (to put it mildly) not a good of sufficient weight to outweigh the wrongness of inflicting suffering on an innocent sentient being.
cheers
Chris
BL COMMENT: Consumption of food involves quite a bit more than "titillation of the taste buds." But putting that to one side, I do not doubt that some moral claims strike you as self-evident, but I do not see that as an argument establishing their self-evidence. Again, I do recommend Ayer or Stevenson on "moral discourse."
.
Nick Bostrom (Oxford) has argued that existential risk is the biggest issue of our time. See http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf
He has also written very intelligently on a number of related topics. His Fable of the Dragon Tyrant arguing that ag(e)ing is neglected as a serious problem is also very interesting (http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html.
If I were the power elite in a country which uses drones to murder civilians (including children), operates a torture center (Guantanamo), spies on everyone's conversations, manifestes increasing inequalities in wealth distribution and access to quality healthcare/education, I would be very happy to have philosophers at top educational institutions teach the young that animal rights (I'm a vegetarian in any case) is one of the most important ethical issues facing us. That would take the heat off us folks in the power elite.
Brian, I'm confused by the Ayer citation. Do you think that metaethical doubts like Ayers over the truth-aptness of moral discourse, doubts which I have some sympathy with (I think the decision between modern expressivism and modern Cornell-style naturalist realism turns on delicate semantic rather than metaphysical considerations, and I don't really have an opinion on them), have implications for what sort of first-order views on ethics we should endorse, or what sort of ways we should argue in the first-order case, or what?
Swallerstein: The fact that it's convenient for the powers that be doesn't necessarily make it wrong of course. Although I take it you acknowledge that, given your vegetarianism.
BL REPLY: Ayer points out that when we get down to brute disagreement in attitudes, moral disagreement devolves into abuse–see above.
I do not see how serious concern for the ethics of factory farming and other practices that lead to the intense suffering of non-human animals needs to detract from concern about other atrocities. There is a whiff of “concern trolling” about the claim that it does. Anyhow, to return to my point above: leaving aside how one defines synchronic versus diachronic wellbeing, I do not see how one can fail to see the suffering of animals (pigs raised in gestational cages for example) as a matter of moral significance or how believing this to be so entails the condoning the killing of handicapped infants.
BL COMMENT: Someone earlier asked about Singer. One would have to hear your reasons for the moral significance of raising pigs in gestational cages to know whether it depends on premises that lead to horrific conclusions.
–Maybe so, but what the 'power elite' would want others to most focus on (at the expense of concentration on other, very serious issues) is not directly germane to the topic, no?
I tend to side with Brian on the miniature debate above–although I disagree that taking the opposing position with respect to the commensurability issue constitutes, in and of itself, moral depravity–and, I believe, I am sympathetic to your (swallerstein) implicated viewpoint that, without even considering such things as the Holocaust, we have a lot on our ethical, social, and political plates before we get to animal rights issues. Still, a couple of points.
(1) My guess is that Brian uses certain condemnatory language, e.g., 'moral depravity', because these are really important issues which are linked to very vivid situations in our past and present. With such seriousness at stake, I take it that Brian believes one cannot pull punches and he doesn't. I am sympathetic to this polemical stance, but in the case at hand I wonder if it isn't misapplied. Nothing in the responses I've seen indicated that said individuals aren't/wouldn't be fully concerned with the torture and genocide of a people on the basis of nationalist or racist sentiments (or any sentiments for that matter!). This is going out on a limb (for very many reasons), but I'd guess that such individuals might even act heroically in such circumstances (a la Bonhoeffer). If so, these individuals wouldn't seem to me to be 'morally depraved'– morally 'wrongheaded' or 'strange' (the latter to which I am partial)–but depraved, no. Part of the anger sparked at a suggestion of commeasurability is no doubt to to the feeling that it denigrates a particularly terrible and recent episode of human suffering. But the claims made need not be seen in that light. I also should mention that it seems that the claim Brian's opponents were making concerned not which was worse, Holocaust or factory farming (and related matters), but the claim that the issues involving sufferring were of the same in kind (though perhaps* not degree). Brian appears to have discerned this early on (hence the discussion of synchronic vs. diachronic suffering), but also uses a tone that seems more appropriate (in my mind) towards someone who thought that the respective suffering of the two were similar/same not only in kind but degree.
(2) For some reason, I am reminded of a time early on in high school when a (white) woman and I were engaged in a debate about whether the US was more likely to elect a woman or an African-American (apparently we both felt that electing a black woman was an impossibility). As I recall the discussion got pretty heated, and all sorts of other issues were inchoately tread over (after all, we were only sophmores). We never spoke of it again, but I remember myself afterwards thinking, with regret, that in having the debate that somehow "we both lost at life." Now I don't think that here, but I do take it that these sorts of arguments tend to ensue when we start taking positions as to the relevant worth of big ethical issues. Furthermore, it is not clear that taking such non-pluralist stances (with respect to importance)–as the question presupposes–are all that helpful to dealing with the issues. And dealing with them is what, at the end of the day, makes thinking/discussing them matter.
A.c.S.:
You say that my comment no. 35 is not germane to the topic.
I'll give it a try with an analogy.
Let's say that we're in the Soviet Union in 1937. The peasants are being forcibly collectivized, through massacring so-called kulaks and
anyone who resists. Trotsky has been exiled and there have been a couple of so far unsuccessful attempts to murder him, by Soviet agents. Zinoviev and other revolutionary veterans have been forced to confess to crimes that they never committed in public show trials. Stalin has concentrated all power in his hands and rules arbitrarily. Everyone is spied on.
At this moment an important Soviet philosopher declares in Pravda that animal rights is the most important ethical issue facing Soviet citizens.
What would go through your mind? Maybe that Stalin is very happy to have people thinking that animal rights is the most important ethical issue going. You might wonder how that important Soviet philosopher reached that conclusion and being a skillful philosopher, they undoubtedly could give plausible, although not entirely convincing reasons. You might wonder whether said philosopher was consciously trying to distract people's ethical focus from the crimes of Stalin's regime or whether it was a weird coincidence or whether by some kind of unconscious mechanism, they came up with an ethical theory which would please the powers-that-be, in this case, Stalin.
I myself have always found it incredible how most of us (I think unconsciously) strive to please those in power, often in the most disinterested manner.
Of course, the U.S. is not the Soviet Union: it's a free country and the New York Times is not Pravda and the CIA is not the KGB and Guantanamo is not the Lubianka and and a distinguished U.S. philosopher has nothing in common with an official Soviet intellectual.
So my analogy doesn't work or maybe it works a little……
I've likewise "found it incredible how most of us [probably unconsciously] strive to please those in power, often in the most disinterested manner." I also believe that there are very important issues concerning power and the proliferation of the status quo that face people (in virtually any post-industrial context). And, of course, I find it pretty damn odd (as I suggested above) that philosophers would find animal rights issues as "the most pressing" in our own context (that is, those occupying a certain corner of Western society), let alone that of pre-War Soviet Russia. But that a philosopher would think "animal rights is the most important ethical issue facing Soviet citizens" doesn't (1) in and of itself strike me as necessitating the label 'morally depraved' (for instance, if the philosopher genuinely believed such a thesis after serious reflection, nevertheless also was actively involved in the anti-Stalinist left), and (2) the fact that such a position might comport with the desires of the Stalinist State isn't directly relevant to questions of relative importance (even assuming that there are answers to be had in that area). I do think that such correspondence would/does indicate the need to very carefully examine the (perhaps unconscious) motivations behind such views, but still wouldn't directly bear on the question being asked. Lastly, I wouldn't so much criticize the relevance of the analogy so much as maintain the same stance with respect to the Soviet case as our current situation with regards to opinions about the alleged importance of a certain (rather small) set of ethical concerns over all others.
BL COMMENT: Just to be clear–and let's please keep this straight going forward!–I said it was "morally depraved" to equate the Nazi Holocaust with the killing of non-human animals for food. No one, unless I missed it, has said belief in the moral importance of the treatment of human animals is morally depraved. I will add that I do agree with Mr. Wallerstein's diagnosis, however.
I was clear on that (as evidenced by earlier posts); apologies if my last post suggests that anything other than commeasurability/equation was the point of contention with regards to Brian's attribution of moral depravity.
A snippet of dialogue from the TV show Community that seems relevant to some of the above discussion:
Britta: “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty.”
Shirley: “You can excuse racism?!”
It seems to me that as long as POC (and women, and especially women POC!) are still second class citizens (at best) in our own country, worrying about animal rights should be near the bottom of the list of moral concerns. It certainly isn't one of the most pressing.
I'd echo climate change, about which it seems most people have simply stuck their heads in the sand, and add antibiotic resistance, the increasing prevalence of which could drastically alter not just medicine but our entire lives as, e.g, many workplace risks that we've previously written off, because of modern medicine, will become much more severe (as in the pre-antibiotic era).
1. I'm very surprised nobody has yet mentioned global poverty yet. Has Peter Singer's philosophy really fallen on deaf ears?
See great TED talk by economist Bjorn Lomborg ("global priorities bigger than climate change"):
HINT: it's mostly about global health. Of course, he's talking about issues for policy-makers to decide about, not meaty conceptual issues for philosophers to think over, which is one way you *could* interpret Appiah's comment.
2. Ditto on existential risk, the ethical issues involved with artificial intelligence, and aging (cf. Nick Bostrom's awesome work).
See awesome TED talk by Nick Bostrom: Humanity's biggest problems aren't what you think they are
3. Ditto that needless animal suffering is incredibly important (even if it's just synchronic ill-being, that's a *lot* of unnecessary ill-being).
BL COMMENT: Just to be clear, I agree that "needless animal suffering" is a moral issue, though not one that requires much philosophical attention: it should clearly be avoided.
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