Ethics on George's Blog

Animal Liberation

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:55 -0500

Summary

Written in 1975, this book is considered one of the fundamental texts that started the animal rights movement, which is only gaining in momentum. Singer popularized the term speciesism, which plays a central role in his argument. He likens speciesism to all the other nasty “isms” sexism, racism etc. His main points to support this are that humans are animals as well, and there is no significant difference innate in humans that sets us apart from the natural world. An often-used metric of difference between animals and humans is intelligence. To this he would reply that there are plenty of babies, and mentally handicapped patients that show less signs of intelligence than some animals, yet no one would find it morally justifiable to eat them or conduct cruel tests on them. He challenges anyone to justify speciesism, and if not, then they must deal with the consequences. From there he does an overview of testing conducted on animals and factory farming, the two most egregious forms of mass animal cruelty. From there he feels the only justifiable choice is to remove meat from your meals. He provides arguments in support of this as well as providing practical information for those interested in making the switch from a meat-based diet. He ends the book with a brief discussion on western man’s relationship with animals. He breaks up the history into Jewish, Greek, Christian, and Enlightenment eras with his major claim being that any justification of speciesism is either metaphysical or untenable. He quotes Bentham “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Fear and Trembling

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:43 -0500

Umph old baby Kierkegaard really stops you in your tracks and makes you look closely at a story you’ve heard a million times but points out that you’ve never actually understood it. As you can probably tell from the cover the story is of Abraham and Isaac. The main question of the book is what makes Abraham the “Father of Faith” and not a murderer? That question is so obvious but why has it never been talked about in any sermon other than the cursory “God said so?”. Kierkegaard wonders this as well. He spends the first section of the book elaborating on the insanity of request. He then describes his version of what faith is and why he’s never found anyone (including himself) that has it. Clearly, I can’t convey an accurate picture of what he was trying to explain in a couple lines but the gist of it (as I understood it) is that true faith requires a dual movement of the soul. The first movement is that of infinite resignation. That is to say releasing attachments that you have. The second movement is the infinite expectation by means of the absurd. This sort of reminds me of Schrodinger’s cat situation. In which one has given something up but at the same time has complete confidence that they will get it back, but that expectation never gets old or inhibits the resignation. Needless to say, it’s a complex idea which I am sure that I am bungling. The book then continues in a short investigation on the ethics of what Abraham did. In the epilogue of the book, he wraps up things nicely where he is talking about his belief that faith is “the highest passion of man” and that perhaps like love is an end to itself. Thus moving past faith, he thinks is part of the human tendency to always ask “what’s next?”. He illustrates this with this story at the very end of the book that has really stuck in my head:

Ethics

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:57 -0500

So, Spinoza is an interesting guy. He was brought up Jewish but ended up coming up with his own philosophy of God which didn’t really agree with anyone that was around him at the time. This book wasn’t published during his life but shortly after his death by his friends. He did this because there were a lot of “burn the witch” things going on so I guess he didn’t want his beans burned. The book itself reads like a mathematical book of proofs where he lays out his Axioms, Propositions, Lemmas and proofs. Due to this it was sometimes difficult to keep up, but there were still many interesting ideas picked up. His two cornerstone ideas (IMO) were his definition of “Substance” and his idea of “God”. To him substance was something that can be explained independent of anything else. With this definition it is really difficult to figure out even one thing that can have this label. (This is a fun mental exercise). His definition of God is linked to his idea of substance in that God is absolute infinite substance. He expands on this idea throughout the whole book as a foundation to his ethics. This could be viewed as a form or inspiration for the following transcendentalism movement.