philosophy – A Jumbled Little World

Eggs for Vegans

What I will call the “radical vegan” position holds that it is in-principle immoral to eat animal products in all cases. Animals are widely mistreated in the production of animal products, but even keeping the most well-treated animals would be immoral. Contrast this with the “moderate vegan” position that takes the poor treatment of animals in actual agricultural settings as the source of the wrongness of using those products. The moderate vegan concedes that some hypothetical agricultural settings, where animals are treated well and have full lives of worth, may be moral but that (almost) no real life agricultural settings are this way. It is the moderate position that I think is the most interesting foil for what I will call the “Whole Foods Omnivore.” I will get there, but first I will show why the radical veganism runs into trouble.

Well cared for domestic pet species are perhaps the best example of a human-animal relationship in which the animal comes out for the better, and which even most radical vegans are forced to consider ethical. The example of domestic pets is one that I will return to often, because it is an example in which the moral intuitions of the vegan are coherent whereas the omnivore’s are not. The vegan asks us to treat domesticated agricultural animals like we do domesticated pets and challenges the omnivore to point to a morally significant difference between those species. However, the seeming permissibility of keeping pets turns out to be a problem for the radical vegan.

My neighbor has two chickens and a dog. The chickens live in a well outfitted coop in his backyard and have access to his entire backyard during most of the day. They are well-fed, protected from predators, and generally looked after on equal footing with his dog. In fact, much of the time his chickens and (small) dog can be seen playing with each other in his backyard. They have names, just like his dog, and when one of his earlier chickens became ill suddenly and died he was sad about it. When he thought about getting another chicken after the first one died, he expressed concern about his existing chicken having an appropriate companion. It certainly seems that these chickens are in fact pets. However, the reason my neighbor has the chickens at all is that they also produce eggs on a regular basis. Contrary to what the radical vegan would be forced to say, it is hard to imagine that my neighbor is acting wrongly by collecting and eating these eggs.

My neighbor has two chickens because they produce about as many eggs as he can eat by himself. Nothing changes, it would seem, if he instead had four chickens to feed himself and his spouse. But what if he instead agrees on keeping the extra two chickens in order to sell them to me? Ignoring the legality of him crossing into commercial egg production, it isn’t obvious that we find anything wrong with this arrangement if the chickens are treated in the same way as in the scenario where he has two chickens. Of course, the chickens will not produce eggs for their entire lives, but let’s assume that our neighbor will take care of these chickens for their entire natural lives.

Now imagine that our egg example is repeated throughout the neighborhood. Each pair of neighbors has an agreement whereby one keeps four chickens and the other neighbor buys half of those eggs. The scale of the production itself wouldn’t seem to matter morally as long as the chickens are treated in the same way as the first (two chicken) example I introduced. But what happens when we start combining operations? Perhaps every fourth neighbor keeps eight chickens and sells eggs to the other three. Or every 16th neighbor sells to the other 15. At what point does our permissible backyard (pet) chicken operation become an impermissible animal agricultural operation?

The moderate vegan has a response. At some point the scale of the egg production will bring about impermissible animal treatment. The chickens will no longer be treated as individuals to be interacted with and cared for and will become anonymous egg producers. These individuals will be treated as a mere means to produce eggs. This provides a starting point to consider what sort of treatment animals deserve, and can inform what might be permissible production and uses of animal products. It is not the mere consumption of animal products that is unethical, but rather the source of those products and how those animals were treated.

A New Series: Animal Rights

I’ve used this space for a number of different topics in the past from general philosophy, to cappuccino reviews, and even a covid diary. Over the next year I’d like to spend time exploring a topic that has come to interest me over the past few years.

To what extent is the raising, use, and killing of animals in agricultural settings unethical?

In order to address this I’ll also explore what we might owe wild animals that we encounter in our daily lives, and how this question relates to our treatment of animals in agriculture.

Most vegans, and to a lesser extent vegetarians and pescatarians, see the typical treatment of animals in agricultural settings to be an atrocious moral wrong that most of us ignore. In fact our society spends a great deal of energy keeping the treatment of animals in agriculture out of sight from the consumers of animal products. If we had to live next to a slaughterhouse or a high-intensity animal feed lot we would likely eat much less meat. Hunting itself is considered uncouth by urbanites even as they enjoy meat on a daily basis. There certainly is a misalignment between the emotions many of us experience when encountered with the harm and killing of animals and our attitudes towards the abstract idea of animal agriculture.

I’m going to start by exploring a possible middle way, but one that many animal rights advocates will think a delusion. I’ll call this the “Whole Foods Omnivore.” This is a person who recognizes the moral wrong in widespread mistreatment of animals in much of animal agriculture, but believes that animal product consumption can be made ethical through the improved treatment of those animals. I think this view is important both because it seems particularly common among a set of individuals who are otherwise quite concerned with animal welfare (at least among pet species) and because it touches on a number of different aspects of animal ethics. For instance, it isn’t obvious whether pasture-raised animals who are treated relatively well have worse lives than similar (non-domesticated) animals in the wild. Is that relevant? Does the condition of wild animals set a baseline above which any domestication project is ethical, even if those animals are systematically slaughtered?

The ethical evaluation of the so called “Whole Foods Omnivore” will touch on a number of important topics in animal ethics. Next I will motivate why this position is appealing and why it seems to overcome some initial objections. Contrary to what an ethical vegan or vegetarian might claim there may be limits on the sorts of lives we owe animals. Or at least that is where I will start. It turns out, I think, that the Whole Foods Omnivore is ultimately benefiting from uses of animals that they would never permit for other domesticated species like dogs and cats, and threatens their own ethical consistency.

Three Types of Politics: Interests, Ideas, and Grievances

The political system in a democratic society allows a diverse group of people to make collective decisions. Here I define politics as the content of deliberations and decisions within such a system, rather than institutions and mechanisms used to bring about decisions. Of course, institutions do affect the content of politics, but that won’t be my focus here. Rather I will focus on different types of political content.

The content of our political discussions, arguments, and bargaining can be categorized into a number of incompatible types. They are about different subjects. These types of politics are all utilized by the major political parties, but we are often unaware of how their incompatibility thwarts political compromise and decisions. And they each leads to unique problems when any one begins to dominate the politics of a country or political party.

One of the basic problems we are seeing with politics today is a transition from a politics of ideas and interests to one primarily of grievance. Although the politics of grievance is perhaps best exemplified by Donald Trump and his followers, grievance is also becoming a dominant political theme on the left.

There is nothing particularly wrong with the inclusion of grievances within our politics. Many grievances are valid and must be addressed by any successful political system. However, when grievance dominates politics, much as when it dominates personal relationships and other social relations, it fosters a bitterness and anger that makes compromise and cooperation difficult.

I do not think that the answer to this problem is a politics dominated by either interests or ideas. A politics dominated by interests lacks any direction or justice and will tend to promote the narrow interests of whatever groups are in the best bargaining position. Likewise a politics dominated by ideas, where we attempt to transform government and society according to some coherent ideology, leads society to ignore the interests of various groups. History also tells us that a politics guided by ideology often justifies dispossession of property and violence in order to bring about the radical social change in line with that ideology.

My primary purpose here is to describe these three types of politics. However, I think that such a discussion provides reason to prefer a politics that mixes interests and ideas, and attempts to limit the inclusion of grievances.

Interests

A view traditionally held by political scientists (for instance, see Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics) states that democratic politics allow the interests of the public to be expressed in political decisions. Voters will tend to vote according to their interests, and so a widespread franchise that weighs voters roughly equally will tend to create politics that reflect the interests of voters equally as well. Modern western thinkers tend to reduce “interests” to economic interests, though we probably shouldn’t do this. People also have an interest in living within an environment that allows the to act according to their non-economic values as well.

The politics of interests is a politics of negotiation. When people are guided by their interests, they tend to support tax codes in which they pay the least and budgets in which they gain the most. They expect their political representatives to act similarly. The rich, who benefit more from lower taxes more than generous social welfare programs will advocate for lower taxes, whereas the poor will advocate for higher taxes on the wealthy and more generous social welfare programs. Communities will pursue funds for their own roads and infrastructure projects, even when it puts other communities at a disadvantage. Farmers pursue farm subsidies, corporations that need large numbers of workers pursue free trade and open boarders, and labor unions pursue tariffs and closed borders.

Politics from interests tend to be both stable and, given a universal franchise, serve the interests of the most people. There are also ways of creating institutions so that political decisions take into account the interests of minority groups that might be largely ignored within large societies. One of the more powerful tools is the promotion of political localism in which many decisions are left to community governments. This has the effect of allowing national minorities with shared interests to possess majorities or significant minorities within local governments. It also allows for a safety valve, so to speak, so that minorities who believe that their interests are not being respected by local politics can move to a place where they are respected. For all of these reasons politics from interests serve as the stabilizing backbone of a thriving political system.

However, politics from interests are also shallow and myopic. They lack any vision or wider direction that can guide a state or community to become better, and will often promote outcomes that seem unjust. We feel a strong need for political decisions to tend toward some notion of fairness, even when it may disadvantage certain groups that have historically had various advantages. For this reason systems that are dominated by interests will also tend to be unstable in their own way, as people are unwilling to accept immediate personal and regional costs that promote the greater good. Therefore, it is important that political systems are also guided by ideas about what a good society looks like and what is just. They allow people to see how certain political policies will promote larger social goals that they support. A politics of ideas also allows politics to promote a sense of justice, something that binds people together within the society.

Ideas

When politics is too focused on individual and group interests it is very difficult for us to provide arguments for our favored policies that can be accepted as valid by others. Discussions about politics of interests begin and end with the bargaining power of the various groups. Good arguments show others how the result will benefit them and why they couldn’t hope to get a better result. These are politics in the mud.

Arguments about political ideas, on the other hand, allow us to discuss the merits of various political policies abstracted away from the particular bargaining context. Ideas allow us to paint a picture for others about a possible ideal society and describe how various policies might get us there. If politics of interests is fought in the mud, politics from ideas soars through the air.

The libertarian reformation of American economic policy during the 1980s (whatever we may think of it) would have been impossible without a clear vision of its ideals and goals. Free-market advocates did not just argue that their preferred policies would advantage the interests of voters (although they did do this), they also argued that they would create a system in which people were better able to get what they deserved. When taxes were redistributed, in the form of social welfare programs, some people were given things by the government that they had not earned and so did not deserve. Under this view, eliminating redistributive policies makes the system more just. Of course, they also offered an argument from interests (the high taxation required for redistribution is inefficient and so makes us all poorer), but the libertarian ideas were crucial for gaining widespread support even among those who benefited from redistributive policies.

The politics of ideas is important for understanding why people often vote against their interests. Some have wondered “what is wrong with Kanasas” where scores of people of modest means vote against the very redistributive policies that would likely benefit them. One could similarly wonder “what is wrong with California” where scores of rich people vote for redistributive policies and higher taxes that are unlikely to benefit them. They do so because of their political ideals, based upon ideas of what a just and good society is like. They believe that certain types of policies are just, even though those policies don’t benefit them.

It is the very ability of political ideas to support policies not in people’s direct interests that also make them dangerous. Although the politics from interests tend to by myopic, they also keep people grounded. It is rarely in anyone’s direct interests to commit acts of violence, disturb the peace of society, or radically alter important government programs. On the other hand, politics from ideas often call for radical actions and radical shifts in policy. If we are concerned about justice, and we see that a certain group of people are supporting an unjust system, then we may be able to justify violence against them.

Not only do ideas more easily justify radical actions, but they are also more susceptible to manipulation. The ideas that we have are more malleable than our own interests, and few people are any good at examining their own ideas or those provided by others. It was shocking to many how easily a large portion of the Republican party was made to believe that Trump rightly won the 2020 election. I don’t think that this should come as too much of a surprise. Political elites can easily manipulate the political ideas of those who already follow them – it is much more difficult for those leaders to alter the interests of their followers.

Grievance

Politics of interests and ideas are both forward-looking. When people are guided by them they seek the best possible future outcome. The past and present are only relevant in what they say about those future outcomes. However, people also often demand responses to their grievances over what they view as past wrongs. Many grievances are able to be resolved within the judicial system. If someone causes you a demonstrable harm, then in many cases you can file a lawsuit that is meant to resolve that grievance. However, many perceived harms are not subject to intervention by the judicial system; this is the role of a politics of grievance.

Politics of grievance is concerned with those grievances that are not in the purview of the existing judicial system. Those with grievances seek to use the political system to obtain restitution for the harms done to them, sometimes directly from the people who they believe harmed them and other times from society at large. Often times these grievances are valid and the target is indeed responsible, but other times grievances are largely invented (there was never a corresponding harm) or the target is incorrect. Ultimately the burden of differentiating valid and invalid grievances is placed on the political system.

Western political systems are generally good at handling both politics of interests (through bargaining) and politics of ideas (through deliberation), but have more difficulty handling grievances without creating conflict. Conflict is inherent to grievances, because they typically make demands on others without offering them anything in exchange. This is because grievances are backward looking; the perceived harm has already occurred and only compensation for that harm can resolve the grievance.

Grievances can still be worth pursuing, but these politics often require that the aggrieved group (or its allies) are in a position to coerce the group that supposedly committed the harm. For instance, after the Civil War, the north was in a position to resolve grievances of enslaved people in the south only by first destroying the ability of southern whites to resist. And of course, coercing groups who do not believe that they have done anything wrong will often cause them to create grievances of their own. This sets up a bitter cycle of grievance, and if coercion is not continually applied (just as it was ended after Reconstruction) the originally harmed group can find itself once again the subject of the perpetrators’ violence. Alternatively, the perpetrating group can be convinced of the wrongness of the harm they caused (as with Germans after WW2). However, this often requires a dramatic social change that is beyond the immediate coercive abilities of a state.

Interests, Ideas, and Grievances

A healthy political system will support both politics of interests and ideas. Interests ground political decisions in a concrete world of actual people, whereas ideas allow a political society to develop into something better and more coherent. A politics of grievances is important in providing recourse to those who were harmed when there is no recourse to be had through current law. However, this form of politics can quickly grow contentious and bitter. A political system that is characterized by grievance will tend to devolve as conflict interferes with a society’s ability to come to reasonable political agreements. After observing the events of the past year, it is hard not to conclude that American society may be devolving in just this way. Grievances are crowding out interests and ideas.

Psychological disorder and the dream of Utopia

The view of humanity that we get from the ancients (and by extension the Abrahamic religions) is both deeply deceptive and very influential. If people are the creation of beings of (more or less) perfection, then it is reasonable to expect that humans are naturally orderly creatures. Or, at the very least, we are disordered in some sort of systematic way. According to this view, the psychological and social disorder experienced by all people and societies to varying degrees is a shortcoming. The behavior and lived experiences of humans fall short of some meaningful ideal, because they fail in some way to reach their full potentials. Of course, we might think that humans cannot reaching their full potentials without the grace of God or unadulterated contemplation of the good — or perhaps humans cannot possibly reach such a point of perfection — but all of this presumes that there is some sense to the idea of human perfection.

Certainly, we can conceive of what a “perfect” human might look like, but this has little to do with humans as they actually are. Evolutionary theory in fact is able to provide us with a simple yet profound insight in this regard: the natural state of a human is to be a jumbled mess that gets the job done better than the next local competitor. The same goes for a community. We all know this to some degree, but we typically ignore what this means for our lives and society. The human body and psychology has certainly been “finely tuned” by various evolutionary forces, so that individuals can produce offspring and provide them with various advantages. We have also been made naturally cooperative in certain ways, so that we can more easily form societies of individuals to provide mutual advantages to each other, but this in no way guarantees healthy psychologies or societies of peace and happiness.

In fact, it is reasonable to think that a society of perpetually unsatisfied humans, who continually seek to compete with one another, will have an advantage over those containing people who have reached a state of inner peace and unconditional love for their neighbors. This matters, because it seems to call into question the widely lauded goal of promoting universal happiness and social tranquility. Not only does such a goal take a too optimistic view of the power of social reform, but it also promotes a false vision of human nature.

Many of us also think that finally getting our psychological act together would make us happier. If we could only take account of all of our disparate (and often maladaptive) motivations and feelings and put them into proper order, then we would finally be living in a virtuous and happy way. Social reformers often take a similar view of our social ills; if only our institutions were made to function well enough (providing all of the needed resources and incentives) to bring about virtuous and happy lives among the populous, then social order and prosperity would also be achieved. They of course recognize that such a utopia is not likely in our messy world, but they still think that the ideal is meaningful.

I think we should doubt that the ideal of utopia is meaningful. This is not simply because humans are deeply flawed. Rather, it is because human psychology is not the sort of thing that is likely to achieve either internal (psychological) harmony nor external (social) harmony. Again, this is nothing new, but it is largely ignored by optimistic social theorists and reformers who hope to create environments and education that promotes pro-social motivations and subsequent behaviors. This includes both social theorists on the left as well as the right. Some socialists, for instance, think that once the capitalist power structure is removed (or at least substantially weakened) then the motivations of people will be transformed, becoming more pro-social. An extreme version of this comes form Marx and Engels, but a somewhat weaker one persists among many modern socialists and social-democrats; something about the current economic paradigm makes us slavish and vicious consumers, that once removed will free us from that sort of behavior.

On the right, libertarians have a similar utopian ideals. They think that when people are left alone to live, create, and trade, they will live cooperative and virtuous lives, because it will be prudent to do so. When the government’s only role is to provide for public goods and a system of public justice, and it does so rather effectively, then the only way for someone to get by is to be productive. Cheating and stealing are promptly punished, and begging for subsidies does no good. Many libertarians seem to have an idea that such a society would be a rather happy place to be, where people are able to safely pursue their own interests.

If people are naturally disordered, then there is little reason to think that non-coercive social systems will bring about a happy and peaceful world. It cannot be assumed that more just social institutions can automatically lead to a more just and well-functioning public. It leads us to a social theory more in line with Thomas Hobbes and “classical” conservatives like Edmund Burke than the modern social muses of Locke and Marx. Cultural norms certainly provide a form of internal control, but these forms of control are typically inadequate, especially in pluralistic societies with weaker cultural norms. And if many people experience a great deal of psychological disorder, disorder that will never be fully resolved, then their ability to internalize and behave according to a complex set of social norms with any consistency may be limited. Ultimately, greater levels of social organization may require greater levels of external coercion, or at least the threat of it. This coercion may be subtle, though nonetheless real and backed by state violence. It may even be subconscious, like that which comes from messaging and marketing. Those in marketing have long known that you often need to trick people to buy a product; likewise, you may need to trick people to bring about a good society.

In societies (like the U.S.) with relatively weak social control through culture, promoting greater levels of the public good may require greater degrees of social coercion. I’m not sure what we should conclude from this. It may, of course, mean that there are limits to how well the public good can be promoted in free societies. Some people will always choose private violence in order to settle disputes. Others will make poor choices about when to start a family or what purchases to make. Still others will adopt hateful attitudes toward their fellow citizens because of prejudice. What we can do to get people to change their behaviors on their own may be far more limited that we would hope. However, it may also mean that we should be open to greater levels of social coercion, at least if we are serious about improving human lives. I’m not sure which we should choose, but it seems that the disordered character of human nature pits freedom and well-being against one another.

Skinner vs Jacobs: a project

I admit, this has a horrible title. But I wanted to get something written about a project that I would like to work a little more on…and creating good titles is not one of my strengths.

Anyone who has encountered a manifestation of B.F. Skinner’s utopian dreams (Walden II as a prime example) is made instantly aware of a certain view of public policy. Under this view, public policy is formulated by experts who mold the behaviors of citizens in such a way to lead to the most happiness possible. We should never have to ask people what sort of policies are good, we assume that certain results are desirable (pleasure, happiness, fulfillment, or whatever) and formulate policy with those as our end. This is the technocratic idea; it presupposes that people generally do not know how to achieve the outcomes we want and that experts can do so better. This is obviously undemocratic, but we do just this sort of thing for engineering problems. We don’t generally question how the engineers decide to build a bridge, for instance, once we have set the parameters. One might argue that we should aim for the same ideal in public policy; this would require an extensive understanding of sociology and psychology (which we don’t currently have) but we might still think that this is the sort of way we should develop public policy.

On the other end we find theorists such as Jane Jacobs, who thought that planners should generally leave people to their own devices and listen to their preferences. During New York City’s highway wars of the 1960s, Jacobs was one of the principal opponents of the technocrats (Robert Moses, most prominent among them) who had a vision of New York that stressed easy vehicular transportation. Such plans, however, typically involved the destruction of urban neighborhoods. Jacobs advocated mostly democratic (and localist) procedures that centered around the involvement of community members in the formation of public policy related to that community. This is similar to the messy process that is common today; there may be (and often are) grand, all encompassing plans for policy or urban design but these plans rarely see the light of day without a good deal of public debate. Of course, this approach is nearly as problematic as that advocated by the technocrats. Many questions arise as to how such a process actually works. How do we know what the goal of public policy should be? It is likely the case that what is actually better for people (what they will prefer in the end) is different from their current preferences. So, it seems that people may not even know what they want (as paradoxical as that may seem). Also, how do we make any cohesive plans if we have to listen to the chaotic preferences of the public? How do we find any commonalities or order among these preferences? It also often seems to be the case that political power overcomes truth in the formation of public policy. If political power is the determining factor of our public policy using the democratic process, such a process seems just as tyrannical as the technocratic solution.

I have a few more thoughts on this topic but I won’t share those today. I simply wanted to get some questions about this topic written down. I’ll certainly write more about it in the future.

However, perhaps I’ll post some coffee reviews next.

A Psychological Interpretation of Hume’s Standard of Taste

We should treat aesthetic evaluations in the fashion of psychological phenomena.

In Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste”¹, we are presented with a sometimes confusing picture of the aesthetic world. On one hand, Hume is quite explicit in saying that aesthetic properties are dependent upon beliefs of aesthetic agents; they are parasitic on sentiment. However, Hume argues that there are nevertheless clear standards of taste, which dictate the correctness of our various aesthetic judgments. Here I wish to present a loose interpretation of Hume that takes the psychological nature of aesthetic judgments seriously. Following work by Jerrold Levinson, I claim that aesthetic standards can only be understood from the perspective of prediction; we want to have an aesthetic standard of taste so that we can predict which works will bring us the most aesthetic pleasure. Furthermore, if we consider this issue from such a perspective, the more troubling issues of Hume’s view fall away. Continue reading “A Psychological Interpretation of Hume’s Standard of Taste”

Activism and truth

You shouldn’t trust an activist with truth.

I simply don’t trust activists. The reason for this is probably quite clear; activists have stopped searching for truth (whatever sort of thing that might be) and simply focus on how they can argue for some given view. Philosophers who deal with topics that interface directly with the world have the difficult task of straddling the line between simple neutrality and activism. Rhetorical skills are extremely important when dealing with those not familiar with a topic; too often clear, valid but dull arguments fall flat when posed to the general public, and this makes such illuminations of truth completely useless if one wants to make a difference. Some topics are simply too complicated to be comprehensible (all at once and quickly) and therefore need to be distilled down to more simplistic elements that might appeal to a general audience. I don’t want to make any big claim here about any of this, but I do want to elucidate the problem for the philosopher of practical problems.

So how do we stay neutral and yet be effective? It certainly requires good faith; we need to approach these issues with as much neutrality as possible and with truth as our goal. But I think this is often ignored. If we decide for some pre-reflective reason (or after some sort of preliminary reflection) that something is true then it is far to common for us to find cleaver ways to argue for that given view. We can simply feel that healthcare is a right or that urbanity is good without any deep understanding of why. Then it is quite easy to practice a little sophistry and make plausible arguments even though we might ignore a good deal of facts. Or we take facts that exist within some sort of complex context as simple (or straight forward) facts without qualification, even though most facts require a great deal of contextualization. I fear that most of the information you hear from activists is of this simplified sort and it seems obvious that this strategy likely leads to a great deal of deception and confusion.

But I (like most people) have social views that are not totally elucidate and vetted. Does such a high mandate for truth-seeking require me to sit on the sidelines until I am very sure that my views at least approach truth in some meaningful way? (of course I don’t require that we are absolutely sure of the truth, just reasonably so) I hope not; however, it seems as though the unthinking mode of politics (in which we never question our lower level assumptions about how to bring about good) would be in direct conflict with the truth-seeking (or modeling of regularities, if one is going to be difficult) of philosophers, scientists, and any other serious theorists.

How do we deny someone a good?

David Chalmers has coined the term “hard problem” to describe the issue of consciousness; science has had great success solving “easy” problems related to the functional roles of mental states but has had little (and perhaps no) success solving the deeper questions regarding consciousness itself. Although, the existence of some consciousness problem beyond the functional (and scientifically testable) issues of mind is extremely controversial, I think a similar language might be useful when talking about ethics.

We can imagine a case in which someone desires some good (something that they desire to do, that gives them pleasure); perhaps they want to witness animals fight each other to the death. Society, however, might prohibit this; if a person does do this sort of thing they will be put in jail. That would certainly leave the person worse off as far as experiencing goods. So, simply put, society has decided to deprive this person of some good.

There could be an “easy” solution to this problem. If the person reasons morally within a similar moral context as the rest of society then we can show them that setting up animal fights is inconsistent with other moral views that they have. Notice that if this works we are guaranteed a solution that is satisfactory for both society and the thwarted animal killer. It is a matter of logic whether a given moral belief follows from others. Of course, making our moral outlook internally consistent is a lengthy process, but at least we know the process by which this can be achieved.

However, there is another possibility that seems to be “hard”. Imagine the person who wants the spectacle of animal slaughter simply says that they consider animals to have no moral rights whatsoever. They may have metaphysical (or similarly, religious) views that allow them to do anything they want to animals just as we do with machines. As Descartes believed, this person might think that animals are simply automatons; therefore, under their view, to protect animals from needless pain and death is as pointless as protecting robots from a similar threat (and we do watch robots destroy each other without feeling guilty).

This is a “hard” problem because we can not reason this person out of the wish to watch animals suffer. Their view is, at some basic level, incompatible with our own and there is no reason for anyone to choose one view over the other unless they refer to their pre-existing moral views. We can try to find some moral common ground with the person so that they will come around to our point of view, but this attempt may very well fail. So, we must simply deny the person the pleasure they seek. What gives us the right to do this? At this point the process completely falls apart; we must reference yet more moral beliefs of ours (perhaps about how we have the right to protect creatures from harm) in order to justify any action we take. For these cases there can not be any more moral argumentation, only conflict. This makes the problem quite “hard” indeed.

The difference between trains and buses

Some people feel buses are the answer to all our mass transit needs. They will, of course, admit that big expensive commuter rail systems are more pleasant than a fleet of buses (anyone who has ridden on both can attest to this), but they will simply point to the price tag as the major issue at hand. How can we afford such large transit systems?

In fact, if you look at the issue from a certain perspective rail systems seem simply fascist. Whereas bus networks can be easily adapted to meet the ever changing demands of the customers (we must keep them happy!) , rail systems dictate what the customer behavior should be. It is very easy to change a bus route to accommodate a new population distribution (for example, the construction of a new subdivision); it is extremely difficult to change a rail system.

A rail system has the remarkable effect of change the area around it. Transit stops usually become hubs of development; property values go up around them and people try to move as close by as possible. In the Washington DC area, for example, real estate prices are largely a function of distance to a metro stop; people want to use the metro and thus want to be near a stop. But it is not clear how we should feel about this trend. On the one hand, a rail system can have an incredible stabilizing effect on a community. It supports clear neighborhood centers and a maximization of space (i.e. higher density) around the stops of the metro. This in turn greatly decreases the dependence of residents on cars and thus decreases energy consumption; if you live near a metro station/neighborhood center, you have all your basic needs met within walking distance and you can take the train to anywhere else you need to go.

However, the flip side of stability is restrictiveness. The rail will stay where it is for a great while and therefore people are forced to live where that system exists if they want the high quality mass transit that their tax dollars helped build. People must, in effect, react to what the government has provided and are not as free when choosing where to live. The government can, in effect, coerce people to live in a specified pattern. The ethical implications of all this are rather interesting, and when I have time I’ll post about my take on it. However, for now this is an issue about which I am still starting to form a view.

Update about my real life

The last few months have been quite hectic, so I haven’t really updated this much. There are a few coffee shop reviews that I have yet to write up, but those should be coming soon. Also, I’m moving to the Washington D.C area by the end of summer where I’ll be starting in the philosophy PhD program at the University of Maryland. So, the entire admissions process is over for me and I’m quite happy with how it turned out in the end. However, the waiting process was probably the most stressful period in my life and I’m very glad for it to be over with! I’ll probably post more about my experiences later; I did learn a few things as I went through this admissions cycle and perhaps it may be of some (limited) help to others. And maybe I’ll have some thoughts about philosophy eventually…who knows.