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Response to Thought Experiment 73: Being a Bat

11/30/2016

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Picture
Upside down bats should really become a meme. They're awesome.
In the book American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, the entry on Evolution builds toward its end with the following passage, which means very much to me:

Daniel Dennet has assumed the mantle of the early pragmatists in drawing out the philosophical implications of Darwinian evolution, and advocating an evolutionary perspective in addressing traditional philosophical topics. In his 1995 Darwin's Dangerous Idea he calls evolution a "universal acid" (echoing Dewey's "greatest dissolvement") because of its power to break down ideas to their more basic elements. Dennett argues for the need to apply this acid test to our accumulated wisdom in order to better assess that wisdom and to free it from historical distortions and errors.

Applying this "acid test" is essentially what I am trying to do with this website and all my other writings. And I have consistently found that having such an evolutionary perspective provides a clear and interlocking set of beliefs that consistently come together to help solve the most fundamental questions of philosophy (in as much as any of them have a final answer). This week's thought experiment is another great example of the power of having that broad perspective. It is based on Thomas Nagel's paper "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" and it explores the mind-body problem through what Daniel Dennett called, "The most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness." Let's take a look.

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     What is it like to be a bat? Try imagining it. Perhaps you see yourself being very small, bat-shaped, and hanging upside down inside a cave with hundreds of your friends. But that isn't even coming close. What you really seem to be imagining is you inhabiting the body of a bat, not being a bat. Try again.
     If you're finding it hard, one reason is that, as a bat, you have no language, or if we are a little more generous, only a primitive language of squeaks and cries. It is not just that you have no public language to articulate your thoughts, you have no inner thoughts—at least not any that employ any linguistic concepts.
     Another reason, perhaps the hardest part of all, is that bats find their way around by echolocation. The squeaks they emit work a little like radar, letting them know what objects are in the world by how the sounds rebound off objects and back to them. What is it like to experience the world in this way? It could conceivably be that the perceptions the bat has are just like our visual ones, but that would be very unlikely. A third reason, even more outlandish, is that the bat sees a kind of radar screen, like that in an aeroplane cockpit.
     No, the most likely explanation is that to perceive the world through echolocation is to have a kind of sense experience totally different from that of a human being. Can you even begin to imagine that?

Source: "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel, as republished in Mortal Questions, 1979.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 217.
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This might all seem pretty innocuous just to claim that one can't imagine being a bat. Big deal! But Nagel used this observation to argue that "materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing." In other words, he thinks that the materialist's general claim that minds only come from bodies, which only come from physical / material processes, is a claim that cannot be accepted without an objective materialist explanation that makes sense of what it's like to inhabit another mind, in particulal the mind of a bat.

This is another tactic that's very similar to Mary's Knowledge Problem, which aimed to establish that conscious experience must involve non-physical properties because Mary, who had been raised in a black and white environent, was taught "everything there was to physically know about seeing red" but still learned something new when she saw red for the first time. In the case of the bat, we can learn all there is to know about how echolocation works, how bats live in close colonies, and how they spend most of their lives hanging upside down, but we still don't know what it feels like to be a bat. Nagel thinks that proves consciousness is outside of the explanatory power of physicalist worldviews. In 
the original paper from Nagel, he writes:

I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. ... If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.

What Nagel is saying is that our only understanding of what it feels like "to be something" is the subjective first-person point of view that we all feel inside our own minds. But physical descriptions of all other things in the universe are only ever known or presented from an objective third-person point of view. If the physicalist's third-person point of view can't explain the first-person point of view, then how can we say the first-person point of view is physical?

If you confine yourself to only considering the mind-body problem on its own, then Nagel's arguement is difficult to find a way around. But this is where having a broad evolutionary perspective can help by leading us to take consistent positions on other philosophy problems that in turn help to solve the problem at hand. In this case, I'm talking about the epistemological debate over where knowledge can come from at all. For that problem, the main contenders are empiricism and rationalism. As a reminder from my Philosophy 101 page, definitions for those two schools of epistemology are:

Empiricism - a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. Empiricism emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.

Rationalism - any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification. In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive. Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderate position that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge, to the more extreme position that reason is the unique path to knowledge.

The debate between these schools of thought is ancient, but once one takes a modern evolutionary lens to these two options, extreme rationalism no longer makes any sense at all. How can knowledge only come from reason when our ability to reason developed incrementally over billions of years of evolution? Do no other animals have knowledge? Did none of our "more primitve" ancestors have knowledge? Who had the first knowledge then? Will future descendents think we have no knowledge? None of those questions are answerable for a rationalist, and so the school of empiricism becomes the obvious choice for an evolutionary philosopher.

Now back to the problem of the bat. If our epistemological stance is that knowledge can only ever come after sensory experience, then of course it would be impossible to know what it is like to be a bat becasue we do not share the sensory experiences of a bat. Nagel may have realised this, but he ducked the question. Buried in footnote number 8 in his original paper, there is this:

My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat...one must take up the bat's point of view.​

But that's exactly the problem! The epistemological problem Nagel didn't want to raise explains the entire difficulty that his mind-body thought experiment supposedly raises. The same thing I wrote in A Physicalist Response to Mary's Knowledge Problem works here too. I said:

Mary "knows everything" there is to know about red but has never seen red. Once she does, she learns something new, which supposedly shows there must be something beyond the physical world. But this is hogwash because Mary does not have "all the physical information" and cannot know "all there is to know" about this subject without having experienced it firsthand. Why? Precisely because we live in a physical universe where mental imaginings are not enough to move the physical atoms that make up the nerves in our eyes and the synapses in our brains. In philosophical terms, there is a real epistemic barrier to what we can learn no matter how much we sit in our rooms and read and think. ...
 All over the world and all throughout history, people have experienced new things for the first time and learned what that feels like. At no time did that create a non-physical entity in the universe. Our mental world is composed from different brain states, which a cursory study of neuroscience will readily explain. ... If the experience of seeing red was truly separable from the knowledge of what it feels like to see red, then not only could Mary know what it feels like to see red without having the actual experience (which she couldn't), but someone else could have the experience of seeing red without then knowing what it feels like to see red, and that cannot be done either. The physical experience is directly tied to the mental state of feeling the experience, and vice versa. This is because they are both formed from physical stuff and tied together by physical stuff.

So to me, the fact that we can't know what it feels like to be a bat is actually an argument that bolsters physicalism, rather than questions it. While it's true for now that a full physicalist explanation of consciousness hasn't been accepted yet, that open question appears more and more likely with every advance in neuroscience to be a location of ignorance a la the "god of the gaps" rather than a location for non-physical mysterianism to emerge.
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Thought Experiment 73: Being a Bat

11/28/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
How can we know what it's like to be a bat, when just flipping their pictures upside down is this surprising?
Hello again! I'm back from a brief hiatus for Thanksgiving and am excited to finally tackle the famous thought experiment that we have on tap for this week. Let's get right to it.

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     What is it like to be a bat? Try imagining it. Perhaps you see yourself being very small, bat-shaped, and hanging upside down inside a cave with hundreds of your friends. But that isn't even coming close. What you really seem to be imagining is you inhabiting the body of a bat, not being a bat. Try again.
     If you're finding it hard, one reason is that, as a bat, you have no language, or if we are a little more generous, only a primitive language of squeaks and cries. It is not just that you have no public language to articulate your thoughts, you have no inner thoughts—at least not any that employ any linguistic concepts.
     Another reason, perhaps the hardest part of all, is that bats find their way around by echolocation. The squeaks they emit work a little like radar, letting them know what objects are in the world by how the sounds rebound off objects and back to them. What is it like to experience the world in this way? It could conceivably be that the perceptions the bat has are just like our visual ones, but that would be very unlikely. A third reason, even more outlandish, is that the bat sees a kind of radar screen, like that in an aeroplane cockpit.
     No, the most likely explanation is that to perceive the world through echolocation is to have a kind of sense experience totally different from that of a human being. Can you even begin to imagine that?

Source: "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel, as republished in Mortal Questions, 1979.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 217.
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If you haven't come across this issue before, a little more explanation from Baggini will help you understand why this question matters at all. Here's how he framed the issues that are brought up by Nagel's bat:

     The scientific study of the mind is really still, if not in its infancy, then certainly pre-pubescent. In many ways we now understand a great deal. In particular, there is no doubt that the mind depends upon a functioning brain and we have come a long way in "mapping" the brain: identifying which regions are responsible for which functions of the mind.
     But despite this, somthing called the mind-body problem still remains. That is to say, we know there is some kind of very intimate relation between the mind and the brain, but it still seems mysterious how something physical such as the brain can give rise to the subjective experiences of minds.
     Nagel's bat helps to crystallize the problem. We could come to understand completely how the bat's brain works and how it perceives through echolocation, but this complete physical and neural explanation would still leave us with no idea of what it feels like to be a bat. Thus in an important sense we would be unable to enter the mind of the bat, even though we understood everything about how its brain worked. But how can this be, if minds depend on nothing more for their existence than functioning brains?
     ... What does all this show? Is it that the mind will always elude a scientific explanation, because the points of view of consciousness and science are totally different? Or is it that we just haven't yet devised a framework for understanding the world scientifically that captures both first- and third-person points of view? Or is it that the mind simply isn't part of the physical world at all? The first possibility seems prematurely pessimistic; the second leaves us hoping for a way forward we cannot even begin to comprehend; and the third seems to fly in the face of all we know about the close connection of mind and brain. Finding a way forward seems to be as difficult as thinking your way into the mind of a bat.


So what do you think? What does this inability to be a bat say about the mind-body problem? Send me your thoughts by email, or leave them in the comment section below. I'll be back on Friday to share my own thoughts on this, but if you've been reading my blog closely, you can probably already get inside my mind and know what I'm likely to say...
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Review of "What Happened to Tom", a novella by Peg Tittle

11/14/2016

5 Comments

 
(Note: While I have been blogging about philosophical thought experiments, I was given a copy of a novella to review that is based upon a thought experiment. I decided to share my review on the blog this week because I have family visiting soon for Thanksgiving and I don't have time to do justice to the next thought experiment in my queue — it's a big one. I'm taking next week off, but then I'll be back to my usual blogging routine. Until then, try to enjoy the holiday all you Americans! I'm sure all of the regular family political fights will be much worse than usual this year...)

PicturePublished May 25, 2016 by Inanna Publications, 130 Pages, ISBN: 978-1-77133-293-4.
The humble thought experiment—usually a short, vivid, hypothetical scenario—has been used by philosophers since the dawn of the field to liven up their otherwise cold, logical arguments. From Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to Derek Parfit asking readers to imagine themselves entering a teletransporter from Star Trek, thousands and thousands of thought experiments have been written in an attempt to tap into the emotional intuitions of readers, and ground philosophers’ abstract theoretical arguments into the concrete realm of the real world. On their own, these thought experiments have certainly been very useful little devices, and collections of them can make for some of the best introductions to the enduring issues in philosophy. In 2004, the feminist, writer, and philosopher Peg Tittle showed her command of the subject with the publication of What If... Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy. Now, in 2016, Tittle has plucked one of the most famous modern thought experiments from that book—known as “The Violinist”—and used that short piece of microfiction as the basis for a full blown work of literature in the form of a novella. In general, as a writer of both fiction and philosophy, I think this is a very intriguing idea suffused with potential for both instruction and entertainment. This particular project, however, is faced with some significant difficulties because of the specific thought experiment that Tittle has chosen to use. A short history about it will help explain why this is the case.
 
In the fall of 1971, just a few months before Roe v. Wade was first argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson published a paper titled, “A Defense of Abortion,” which would go on to become perhaps “the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy.” (Parent, W., “Editor’s introduction” to Thomson, J. Rights, Restitution, and Risk, 1986.) The entire paper filled twenty pages in the original journal publication, but a 166-word thought experiment is surely the most discussed excerpt from it, as well as the one that formed the basis for Tittle’s novella. It’s such a quick read that it’s worth reprinting here in its entirety. (Note: I’ve added underlines to four sections for later discussion.)

“You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”
 
For this book review, I don’t want to wade into the arguments for or against abortion, but there are obviously several problems with this thought experiment if you were to try to consider it on its own as completely analogous to a pregnancy. As I have written in a blog post about the thought experiment, “the expected commitment isn't the same—9 months vs. a lifetime of responsibility (or wonder in the case of adoption)—and neither is the personal bond you can expect to develop. The thought experiment also seems highly dependent on the known quality of the person you are being hooked up to, rather than the (somewhat) unknown future of a child. The burden of costs are completely different, the support from family and society wouldn't be the same, the question of when life begins has been thrown out, the infringement on your own freedom is different by type and degree, etc., etc.” Other standard criticisms of Thomson's thought experiment include “the tacit consent objection” (kidnapping is not the same as consensual sex), “the responsibility objection” (women “invite” babies in with their actions), “the stranger versus offspring objection” (parents have legal duties to care for their children), and “the killing versus letting die objection” (abortions kill directly, whereas unplugging is only an indirect means).
 
These may sound like a damning list of criticisms, but all of them were addressed elsewhere in Thomson’s twenty-page paper. The thought experiment is actually just one element taken from a comprehensive set of arguments that Thomson made against the various points that are usually offered by the pro-Life side. “The Violinist” is therefore not meant to stand on its own, although it is often taken out of context and treated as if it were meant to be. This misunderstood flaw, however, could have been rectified in Tittle’s novella-length treatment of the thought experiment. From an artistic point of view, this is such a difficult scenario to dramatize because the protagonists are literally bound to one another for nine months with very little mobility available to them. Finding ways to add interest and tension to scene after scene after scene—which collectively stretch out over quite a long period of time but take place almost entirely within a single room—would be an extremely difficult task for any author. By addressing all of the standard criticisms listed above, What Happened to Tom could have overcome that problem by providing readers with a chance to hear many good conversations between smart people on both sides of the abortion issue. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case here.
 
In her novella, Tittle adds little from outside the very narrow scope of the thought experiment. For reasons I can only speculate about, she doesn’t fully explore the nuances of Thomsons’ whole paper. As such, the novella struggles as a work of fiction. What Happened to Tom is only 122 pages long and it’s a very quick read filled with lots of simple dialogue in short punchy sentences, but none of the many characters who flit through the book could be described as philosophically-sophisticated thinkers. In fact, Tom (the kidney donor), Simon (the violinist), all of Tom’s friends and co-workers, and all of the doctors, cops, and lawyers we meet, each turn out to be completely heartless and unhelpful. This might have been done in an effort to make Tom’s continued imprisonment seem plausible, but the result is that What Happened to Tom presents the reader with an incredibly bleak world where every single character is inept, juvenile, and unbelievably rude.
 
A few pages in, when Tom first wakes up from being drugged at a bar to find that he has been surgically attached to Simon, the doctor matter-of-factly explains the procedure to him, lets Tom rage a bit, and then just says, “Tom, you should be happy,” before she walks out. Shortly thereafter, Tom calls 9-1-1 and gets the brush off because his life’s not in “immediate danger.” The dispatcher says the cops will come see him the next day, even though he’s essentially been kidnapped. And when Tom finally talks to his girlfriend Beth for the first time after the ordeal, she doesn’t make a fuss about this extraordinary situation. She just says, “So what, you expect me to be your office assistant for nine months?” These interactions are intended to be equivalent to what happens to a pregnant woman, but here, for Tom’s highly unusual situation, the reactions continually ring false. I kept saying to myself as I read this that human beings just wouldn’t act this way.
 
Finally, near the very end of the book, we get one of the (surprisingly) rare dialogues between Tom and the man he’s attached to for nine months. When Simon asks why Tom didn’t explain this whole situation to his boss (who fired him, in another false equivalency), Tom tells Simon it’s none of his business. Simon responds by saying, “You still don’t know what makes you tick. … You’re a coward then.” After a little more back and forth, Tom says “Oh, shut up then! Just shut the fuck up!” The doctor entered the room at that time and upon hearing this outburst explains, “He’s lost control. Actually, that’s not quite right either. Lots of men lose control and it’s quite respectable. It’s called rage. He’s had control taken from him. And not only that. It’s been taken from him by a woman.” We’re told that Tom realized she was right and then said, “So? What’s wrong with that?” The doctor asked him, “Don’t you see how insulting that is?” “To who?” Tom replied. And the doctor finished with, “I rest my case.” After an entire novella full of such piling on top of Tom, this seems to be where Tittle rests her case too, but it is an unsatisfying climax.
 
While Tittle did decide to confine herself to the narrow issues contained in the thought experiment, we can see from these passages I’ve shared that Tittle also decided to make some substantial deviations from “The Violinist” when compared to the underlined portions of the experiment copied above. Tittle’s Tom was chosen at random, rather than carefully and as a good match. Tittle’s doctor was never sorry, and rather than blocking the Society of Music Lovers from operating on Tom, her doctor drugged him and did the operation without his consent. And at the end of the novella, we are told that Tom will not be obligated “only for nine months,” but that he’ll have to come back to help Simon for a few hours every day for the next several years. We might guess at why Tittle made such changes, but no matter the reason for them or the outcome of the debate over whether these were morally relevant changes or not, we can definitively state that What Happened to Tom is not perfectly faithful to the original thought experiment.
 
Because of the extreme scenarios in the story that just don’t ring true to life—which are not surprising, given they were based on an imperfect analogy to pregnancy to begin with--What Happened to Tom is not a work of fiction that can be read out of context. It is just too unbelievable. Additionally, just as “The Violinist” thought experiment did not stand on its own in its original philosophy paper, this novella also does not stand on its own as a thoroughly persuasive case for abortion rights. It is certainly an interesting artistic and philosophic endeavor, but because of its inherent flaws and authorial choices, the novella can only be recommended for philosophy teachers using it to provoke classroom discussion, or possibly for readers who enjoy revelling in extreme arguments against either pro-life advocates or any man who treats pregnant women with disdain. As someone who is outside of these target groups, I found What Happened to Tom to be a frustrating experience, albeit a thought-provoking one. Your experience may differ.
 
Disclosure: I was given a free copy of this book by its publisher Inanna Publication and Education Inc. for the purposes of a review.

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Response to Thought Experiment 72: Free Percy

11/11/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Imprisoned, so children can have something to point at on weekends.
I've already written quite a lot about the subject of this week's thought experiment, so I'll try to keep this post concise with just some links to more reading in case you missed the originals. If you're like America's new vice president who doesn't believe in evolution, then there's no way you'll agree with my stance, and we'll have to go back to the beginning tenets of philosophy. But If you've already absorbed the lessons of evolutionary history into your personal philosophy, then the conclusions you will reach about this thought experiment are pretty clear. Since you're reading this at all, I'm guessing you'll see eye to eye with me so there's not much need to keep preaching to the choir. But sometimes it's nice to practice just to help stay in tune...

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     "Today, I have initiated proceedings against my so-called owner, Mr. Polly, under article 4(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which declares that 'No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.'
     "Since Mr. Polly captured me in Venezuela, I have been held against my will, with no money or possessions to call my own. How can this be right? I am a person just like you. I feel pain. I have plans. I have dreams. I can talk, reason, and feel. You would not treat your own this way. So why do you allow me to be abused so blatantly?
     "The answer I hear is, 'Because you're a parrot, Percy.' Yes, I am indeed a parrot. But although your convention is on human rights, throughout it talks of 'everyone' and by everyone it means 'all people.' What is a person? It used to be thought that only white people were truly persons. That prejudice at least has been defeated. Surely a person is any thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself. I am such a being, I am a person. To deny me my freedom purely on the grounds of my species is a prejudice no more justifiable than racism."

Source: Book two, chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, 1706.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 214.
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Back in my response to thought experiment 32: Free Simone, I discussed the concepts of rights, human rights, and animal rights as a lead up to the discussion about potentially granting rights to conscious computers. Now that we're just discussing animal rights, what I said in that post is perfectly applicable. For starters, I think like Jeremy Bentham that the independent existence of rights is "nonsense on stilts," but we as members of a society can agree to grant them to one another, as in the widely accepted European Convention on Human Rights. We can also agree to grant rights to non-human animals and plants even though these forms of life cannot now recognise or reciprocate such agreements. The abstract concept of rights requires higher-level symbolic thinking that non-humans have yet to develop, but rights have mostly been put in place to protect the much more basic-level fundamentals of being alive: freedom to live, find shelter, and avoid unnecessary harm. Evolutionary history shows that all life shares these fundamental desires—we didn't suddenly gain them with the first theoretical homo sapiens sapiens—so to exclude the rest of life from having such rights just because they don't yet have the capacity to understand or express them to us is undeniably speciesist.

In my cover article for Humanist magazine, When the Human in Humanism Isn't Enough, I thoroughly explained the history and dangers of our speciesism. Such acts are arrogant, ignorant, divisive, and short-sighted. For alternatives, I've argued in a Patheos blog essay for a sacred respect for the sublimity of nature (even by atheists), and in another Humanist magazine article I explained why I feel the call of the rewild to give back non-human animals the habitats they need to survive. These are three of my best publications and they all have to do with kindness and respect towards other forms of life. I'm proud of that.

If you've already read my own work on this subject, then let me suggest two great pieces written by others. The first is the recent acceptance speech by Jared Diamond after receiving the "Humanist of the Year" award in 2016. The speech was titled, 
Science & Religion in the Rough: Why human evolution and the multitude of extrasolar planets complicate the idea that we are special. The short answer to that subtitle is that we aren't special. But finally, to drive that point home in a way that is particularly relevant to the non-human animal in this week's thought experiment, check out the article "What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?" in order to see how "an unexpected bond between damaged birds and traumatized veterans could reveal surprising insights into animal intelligence."

If you've already read all these links, then there's nothing else I need to add about treating animas with dignity. If you haven't yet, then get reading! In this fractious time of history for our nations, the billion-year-bonds we share with other forms of life are precisely what we need more of to help us recognise that the selfishness of human tribes is inane. If we love and respect the Percy's of the world, then we can't help but love and respect each other more too. Don't you want that Polly?
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Thought Experiment 72: Free Percy

11/7/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
Hey Polly, quit treating me like a trinket.
Ah, now here's a good thought experiment where an evolutionary perspective will be helpful. See what you think of this:

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     "Today, I have initiated proceedings against my so-called owner, Mr. Polly, under article 4(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which declares that 'No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.'
     "Since Mr. Polly captured me in Venezuela, I have been held against my will, with no money or possessions to call my own. How can this be right? I am a person just like you. I feel pain. I have plans. I have dreams. I can talk, reason, and feel. You would not treat your own this way. So why do you allow me to be abused so blatantly?
     "The answer I hear is, 'Because you're a parrot, Percy.' Yes, I am indeed a parrot. But although your convention is on human rights, throughout it talks of 'everyone' and by everyone it means 'all people.' What is a person? It used to be thought that only white people were truly persons. That prejudice at least has been defeated. Surely a person is any thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself. I am such a being, I am a person. To deny me my freedom purely on the grounds of my species is a prejudice no more justifiable than racism."

Source: Book two, chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, 1706.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 214.
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When I return on Friday to write about this, you may not be surprised to hear that I will argue for more, not less, consideration for non-human animal rights. But what about you? Do you agree with Percy? Why or why not? I look froward to talking more about this soon.
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Response to Thought Experiment 71: Life Support

11/4/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
Sometimes doing nothing is good, but...
It was only a few months ago in my response to thought experiment 53 that I tackled the topic of voluntary euthanasia. I wrote that it was okay, as long as the "conditions required for voluntary euthanasia to be allowed" were met. If you already agree with that, then this week's thought experiment is a bit unnecessary, but it does bring up one specific new issue to wrestle with so let's take a look and see what that is.

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     Dr. Grey was depressed. One of his terminally ill patients was being kept on a life-support machine. Before she lost consciousness for the last time, she had repeatedly asked that the machine be switched off. But the hospital ethics committee had ruled that it would be wrong to take any action intended to shorten the life of a patient.
     Grey disagreed with the committee and was disturbed that the wishes of the patient had been ignored. He also thought that holding off death with the machine was merely prolonging the agony of her friends and relations.
     Grey stood looking mournfully at his patient. But then something odd happened. A hospital cleaner caught the power cable that led to the life-support machine and pulled it out from the socket. The machine emitted some warning bleeps. The cleaner, disturbed by the sound, looked at the nearby doctor for guidance.
     "Don't worry," said Grey without hesitation. "Just carry on. It's all right."
     And indeed for Grey it was now all right. For no one had taken any deliberate action to shorten the life of the patient. All he was doing by leaving the accidentally unplugged machine turned off was not taking any action to prolong it. He now had the result he desired without breaking the instructions of the ethics committee.

Source: Causing Death and Saving Lives by Jonathan Glover, 1977.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 211.
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As I said, I think the ethics committee is wrong to have such restrictive rules about voluntary euthanasia in the first place, and that is driving hospital staff to look for compassionate ways around the rules. By taking this fictional world as it is written, however, the thought experiment is asking us to look at something known as the "acts/omissions doctrine." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy explains that this is...:

"The doctrine that it makes an ethical difference whether an agent actively intervenes to bring about a result, or omits to act in circumstances in which it is foreseen that as a result of the omission the same result occurs. ... Critics reply that omissions can be as deliberate and immoral as commissions: if I am responsible for your food and fail to feed you, my omission is surely a killing. ‘Doing nothing’ can be a way of doing something, or in other words, absence of bodily movement can also constitute acting negligently, or deliberately, and depending on the context may be a way of deceiving, betraying, or killing. ... The question is whether the difference, if there is one, between acting and omitting to act can be described or defined in a way that bears general moral weight."

I could have addressed this topic before when I wrote a post about the thought experiment known as The Violinist, but I neglected to delve into that detail. If you recall, that experiment was a part of Judith Jarvis Thomson's paper called "A Defense Against Abortion," and it laid out the scenario of a man being hooked up to a famous violinist as a sort of human dialysis machine and he had to remain connected to the violinist for 9 months or the violinist would die. Critics of that thought experiment claimed that it wasn't a persuasive case for abortion because there is a moral difference between directly killing a fetus and indirectly letting someone die by unplugging a life support system. Those critics obviously hadn't read Thomson's original paper and only took the violinist experiment out of context because she actually did a thorough job of preemptively arguing against such concerns. That's partly why I didn't talk about this before. But now we're faced with the criticism that even unplugging the machine is too much of a direct act. These critics have moved the goalposts and now say that watching the plug get accidentally yanked out of the socket is okay, but really, where does such hair splitting end in the question of what is direct action vs. indirect inaction?

It's no surprise that the field of medical ethics has considered this issue in great detail, so we should consider their previous discussions. As seen above, the source for this week's thought experiment is a book by Jonathan Glover called Causing Death and Saving Lives. This book was reviewed in the Journal of Medical Ethics, where it was noted that one of Glover's chapters is "especially powerful" in arguing against "the doctrine that acts with bad consequences are always worse than omissions with the same consequences." But perhaps some of that power should be attributed to the philosopher James Rachels, who published a paper called "Active and Passive Euthanasia," in The New England Journal of Medicine two years earlier. Rachels' paper (excerpted in a BBC Ethics Guide) argued that:

"The distinction between acts and omissions is not as helpful as it looks. Consider these two cases:
  1. Smith will inherit a fortune if his 6 year old cousin dies. One evening Smith sneaks into the bathroom where the child is having his bath and drowns the boy. Smith then arranges the evidence so that it looks like an accident.
  2. Jones will inherit a fortune if his 6 year old cousin dies. One evening Jones sneaks into the bathroom where the child is having his bath. As he enters the bathroom he sees the boy fall over, hit his head on the side of the bath, and slide face-down under the water. Jones is delighted; he doesn't rescue the child but stands by the bath, and watches as the child drowns.
According to the doctrine of acts and omissions Smith is morally guiltier than Jones, since he actively killed the child, while Jones just allowed the boy to die. In law Smith is guilty of murder and Jones isn't guilty of anything. However, most people would regard any distinction between their moral guilt as splitting hairs. ... The Smith/Jones case partly depends on us paying no attention to the intentions of Smith and Jones. But in most cases of right and wrong we do think that intention matters, and if we were asked, we would probably say that Smith was a worse person than Jones, because he intended to kill."

Nine years later, in an editorial in the Journal of Medical Ethics titled "Acts and Omissions: killing and letting die," we see that Rachels went even further and was still being discussed.

"Rachels supports his claim that the use of the kiling-letting die distinction can lead to cruelty by citing a paediatrician's account of what happens when it is decided to let a severely handicapped infant die. The doctor "must try to keep the infant from suffering while natural forces sap the baby's life away" — it is a "terrible ordeal" to stand by "and watch as dehydration and infection wither a tiny being over hours and days." Having quoted this harrowing account, Rachels writes, "The doctrine that says that a baby may be allowed to dehydrate and wither, but may not be given an injection that would end its life without suffering, seems so patently cruel as to require no further refutation.

One common argument in support of the doctrine is that in letting a patient die a doctor does not do anything to cause the patient's death — it is the disease process which causes the patient's death — it is nature taking its course. There are at least two problems with this line of argument. The first concerns the nature of action. While it may be arguable that if a person does not move he is not acting in the sense of being active (and even that claim is dubious), a person who intentionally takes no action may nonetheless be acting, in the morally important sense of human agency. The action he takes in that sense of action, and under one description, is intentionally to allow his patient to die. The fact that he did so by avoiding certain physical actions is not in itself morally exonerating — there are countless situations in which it is clearly morally reprehensible to take no action with the intention of allowing another person to die, particularly so if that person is one's patient."

Agreed. Such counterintuitive examples that seemingly exonerate cruelty or damn compassion are always possible to invent when faced with hairsplitting philosophers who insist on cleaving the past, present, or the future from its full context. As I described in my response to thought experiment 60:

"Deontological moral rules are not sufficient. Consequentialism shows that results matter too. And virtue ethics says intentions also count. Together, these three schools of thought make up the three main camps of moral philosophy. However, as is often the case with thorny philosophical issues, the best position on morality isn't an "either/or" decision from among these three choices, it's an "all/and" decision which considers the three of them. For any morally-considered human behaviour, there is an intention, an action, and a result. That's the way an event is described prior to, during, and after it occurs. It's the way the past, present, and future are bound together by causality yet allowed to be looked at separately across time. Virtue ethics concerns itself with the intention. Deontology focuses on the action. Consequentialism focuses on the result. But all three may be evaluated individually for moral purposes. ... We can hold all three of these judgments in our head at the same time and use them to guide future decisions accordingly with respect to blame, praise, imitation, or change."

In the case of this week's thought experiment, we see the confusion that occurs when such a holistic view of morality is not taken. The ethics committee imposed a deontological rule in which "it would be wrong to take any action intended to shorten the life of a patient." But by insisting upon the letter of this law, one action is deemed unvirtuous, while another inaction is deemed virtuous, even though both "actors" had the same (virtuous) intent and the same consequence was the result. Since that is an obvious contradiction, we see the breakdown in any morally meaningful hierarchy between acts and omissions. Either one could be more praise- or blame-worthy than the other when looked at in full context. The fact that people do hide behind such fallacious distinctions in real life examples such as this one is due to their need to find ways around faulty deontological rules. It would be far better to just abolish such strictures.
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