There’s a picture of an animal’s life that’s just about standard, and even favored by many animal advocates: an animal’s life is all choppy. Your dog lives moment to moment, without the moments being connected together into “wholes.” By contrast, there is lots of connection in the life of a human being. This difference (people assume) has relevance to the value of animal lives, the badness of animal deaths, and the ethics of killing.

To wit: this sort of contrast is made especially starkly in Jeff McMahan’s book The Ethics of Killing. He has a rich notion of the “wholes” that matter in the lives of people. For one, there’s the whole formed when you anticipate a later time and wish it to be a certain way–you want to lie on the beach in Hawaii in three months. All signs are that animals don’t have thoughts like that. But that’s not the only sort of continuity that counts.

McMahan attaches importance to the “complex narrative unity” of a life (or parts of a life). That unity can be tragically ruined by death. The bride dies right before the wedding, the student is killed in a car accident on the way to graduation, the author doesn’t get to see her book posthumously published. He writes–

As an animal continues to live, goods may continue to accumulate in sequence, but the effect is merely additive. There is no scope for tragedy–for hopes passing unrealized, projects unwillingly aborted, mistakes or misunderstandings left uncorrected, or apologies left unmade.

But surely the lives of animals are full of premature endings. For example, last year Eight Belles collapsed moments after coming in second at the Kentucky Derby, because of two broken ankles. That broke off a story before it was over. Are we really to think that a horse that races madly to a finish line is not engaged in a “project,” that no project has been “aborted” if the horse falls to the ground?

I have the feeling we spend too much time around denatured pets and farm animals to realize that animal lives don’t just consist of a series of moments. Beavers work for months to build dams. Rutting season doesn’t end as it’s supposed to if the animals are shot by hunters before there’s any mating. Emperor penguins spend weeks trudging back from the sea to feed their young–an effort that ends badly if the chicks have died in the meantime.

I know what some people are going to say. The animals don’t think about the future–Eight Belles wasn’t looking forward to her victory lap; the deer aren’t thinking about copulating; the penguins don’t desire a reunion with their young. But narrative unity is supposed to be a further factor affecting the significance of a death, one that goes beyond the issue whether death prevents desires from being fulfilled. In the human case, it does not seem true that an incomplete project is only tragic to the extent that the agent had a particular set of desires and thoughts. All that adds to the tragedy, but isn’t all there is to it.

Thinking of an animal’s life as a series of discrete moments makes its death matter less, and so makes it easier for us to kill with a clear conscience. We need to think about the lives of animals without so much eagerness to find the sharpest possible differences.

Another postcard from the dense jungle that is Jeff McMahan’s book The Ehics of Killing.  Having fun, wish you were here!

As I said in my last post, what I really want out of this book is illumination about the killing of animals, and how it’s the same or different from the killing of people. The beauty of this book is that it’s a comprehensive, ground-up examination of the ethics and “metaphysics” of killing.  If you want to think about fundamentals, this book is extremely helpful.

Anyhow, as I was saying in the last post, McMahan thinks the badness of dying is not just a function of what someone loses by dying (the good in the rest of their life), but of their “time relative interest” in going on living (and other things–this book is anything but simple).  And that depends on the strength of the psychological connections between their present self and their later selves.   See the previous post for details.

So, before we get to the beasts…what does this analysis say about babies? It says it is not as bad for a baby to die as it is for an adult.  Suppose a 30-year-old woman has just had a baby.  Both she and the baby have a life-threatening illness and there’s only enough of a drug to save one.  So it must be asked which death would be worse–practically, and not just for philosophical entertainment.  McMahan would say that if we think about it clearly, we have to say the woman’s death would be worse.  She should receive the drug.

A passage, for your reading pleasure:

Consider again the death of a newborn infant.  Intuitively, it is the vast psychological distance that there would have been between the infant and itself later as a person that explains our sense that the death is a less serious misfortune than the death of an older child or adult–despite the greater magnitude of the good it loses.  An infant is unaware of itself, unaware that it has a future; it therefore has no future-directed mental states: no desires or intentions for its future.  Because its mental life is so limited, there would be very few continuities of character or belief between itself now and itself as a person [later]. And if it had lived to become a person, it would then remember nothing of its life as an infant. It is, in short, almost completely severed psychologically from itself as it would have been in the future This is the principle reason why its time-relative interest in continuing to live is so weak. It is almost as if the future it loses might just as well have belonged to someone else. (pg. 170)

Obviously, people are devastated when they lose an infant.  Don’t think McMahan is denying that!  But if we must judge which is worse, the death of the baby or the mother in my example, is he right that the mother’s death would be worse?

Ground rules–don’t think about the impact on others.  The question is just about the badness of these two possible deaths, taken on their own.  Next up:  how serious it is when an animal dies?

All 300,000 pigs in Egypt are in the process of being slaughtered today—an awfully peculiar strategy for preventing swine flu.  Apart from the sheer irrationality of it all, it makes you think about killing animals.  Is each and every pig being wronged—to be precise, having its (his, her) interest in going on living violated?  Do animals have an interest in going on living?

I write about this in my forthcoming book, but there’s never time to read everything, and now that I’m done, I’m doing some remedial reading—to wit, I’m reading Jeff McMahan’s very thick and detailed book The Ethics of Killing.  I’m only part way through, so can’t say yet how the story is going to turn out, but here are some gleanings from part one.

The interest in going on living that you have at a particular point in your life (your “time relative interest” in going on living) depends—says McMahan—on the “prudential unity relations” between you at that time of your life and you*  or you** at later times.  He says it’s a question of degree—the more continuities (of the right sort) between you and you* (etc) the stronger your interest in going on living.   But animals, he says, are connected to their later selves by only a fraction of these required continuities.

The continuities that make you (now) have a stake in the welfare of you* (later) are all “mental,” says McMahan.  You have certain beliefs, and they persist in you*.  You have certain desires about your future, and they get satisfied by you*.  You are searching for something, and you* completes the search.  The more continuities there would have been between you, you*, you** etc., the worse it is for you if something bad happens, and you die before you get to be you* or you**.   The argument about animals, then, is that their past and future selves are united more loosely; there are fewer of these continuities.  So they have a weaker stake in going on living.

I’m going to save the issue of animals for a later post, but there’s something puzzling about this view of the interest in living.  It implies that certain kinds of people have a weaker interest in going on living than the rest of us.  To wit–

The convert. If you lose your religion, going from belief to disbelief, or the other way around, then there’s less continuity between your present self and your future selves.

The Buddhist. You’ve taken heed of Buddhist wisdom that desire is the root of all suffering, so you “live in the present” and limit your desires about the future as much as possible. Again, this is going to make for weaker “prudential unity relations.”

The “flow”er (to use the language of the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi).  This is someone who frequently loses herself in intense activity, losing awareness of the past and the future.  Bear in mind–this is supposed to be a desirable psychological state. Once again, this person’s past and future selves are going to more weakly united, compared to a person who constantly obsesses about the future.

It would be awfully odd to think these three types of people had a weaker stake in going on living, considering that there’s nothing undesirable about the states of mind they’re in (perhaps just the opposite).  Should we really take it on board that mental continuities are the basis for having a stake in going on living?

—–

A few footnotes: (1)   There’s a lot of hairy stuff in this book about identity.  For you (now) to have an interest in the welfare of you* (later), must you (now) be identical to you* (later)?  Let’s ignore that question.  I’m not taking a stand on it by multiplying names (“you”, “you*” etc.) ike this—they’re just a convenient shorthand.  (2) Don’t jump to the conclusion that McMahan thinks it’s not so bad to kill these three types of people.  The issue (so far) is just about the level of their interest in going on living, not about the ethics of killing them.  (3)  McMahan does have things to say about some of these cases–pages 81-82–but in the interest of spurring discussion, I’m not revealing his “solution.”

A final post about Singer’s book.

This book is really meant to get you to give, so responding with deep philosophical angst is sort of missing the point.  So let me say right off the bat–yes, I should give much more.  Singer is right.

But now for the angst.  Let’s have a little thought experiment. For the next hundred years we do everything right, so that affluence increases for all.   There’s a high standard of living and a social safety net that protects the old and incapacitated.  This is the case everywhere on earth. Poverty is a thing of the past.  The whole human race is just as fortunate as the affluent are today.

And then it is revealed.  Space probes discover a very distant planet.  While earth has become all-affluent, the other planet is all-poor.  (Inspiration for this scenario:  the creepy but excellent novel Under the Skin, by Michel Faber.)  it turns out there’s no less misery in the universe than before, but instead all the affluence is concentrated on earth, and all the misery on The Miserable Planet.

Let’s not be distracted by the species on that planet. They’re human beings, and they’re good and bad just like us. Their problems are due to many of the factors that cause problems in the poorest countries today.  The population of the planet is about the same as ours.

Question:  Must we send off rocket-loads full of aid to The Miserable Planet?  Are we obliged to give up (say) half our affluence in order to lift them out of poverty?

Two questions here, best taken in order.  (1)  Must we give up our affluence to aid The Miserable Planet?  (2) If the answer is No, does that tell us anthing at all about our obligations in the real world, where both affluence and misery coexist on the same planet?