Diamond on Eating People

Diamond, like Singer and Regan, wants to argue for vegetarianism.  She notes that the arguments of Singer and Regan focus on the interests and capacities of individual animals as a basis for why we should not eat meat.  For Singer, eating meat is wrong because it contributes to the pain of animals.  For Regan, it is this capacity to experience pain that is the basis of animal rights.  Diamond says that such arguments are failing to recognize the significant issue.  Such arguments usually rely on some sort of analogy between animals and non-rational human beings.  E.g., because animals and non-rational humans are both capable of experiencing pain, it is wrong to eat both animals and non-rational humans.    This is not the relevant analogy, Diamond says. 

The proper analogy is not to talk about eating animals and people but to talk about the death rituals for animals and people.  Diamond says that the reason why we don't eat dead people is because humans are not the kind of thing to be eaten.  Our concept of what counts as a kind of thing to be eaten changes over time.  We tend not to eat or treat badly entities that we consider to be 'fellow creatures'.  Humans, Diamond says, are the kind of things that we honor in death with ceremony; they are also the kind of things to be named rather than numbered.  Clearly there are many examples where humans have numbered other humans or where humans have been disrespectful towards other humans in life and in death.  Again, the notion about who we count as a 'fellow' creature or 'fellow' human changes over time.  Diamond says that we should extend the notion of fellow creature to non-human animals.

Regan on Animal Rights

Like Singer, Regan wants to provide an argument for vegetarianism.  Unlike Singer, Regan does not want to base his argument on utilitarianism.  Instead, Regan thinks that animal rights are the way to defend vegetarianism.  We can think of rights in three ways.  A legal right is a right granted by a legal authority.  A natural right is what people talk about when they think that there is a naturally given right that people (or animals) ought to have.  A moral right is just the other side of a moral obligation or duty.  If someone has a duty to do X for you, then you have a right to have them do X.  Regan is concerned with rights of the second and third kind.  Regean claims that Singer's strongest arguments in favor of vegetarianism are arguments based on animals rights.  Specifically, it seems that animals have a right to life.

Why might we think that animals have a right to life?  Regan thinks that although Singer is wrong to base his arguments in utilitarianism, there is something right about focusing on an animal's capacity for pain.  Regan says that the capacity for suffering is the basis of a right to life, or a right to live.  He notes  even though some humans are non-rational, they still have similar capacities for suffering as non-human animals.  Regan says that the reasons why we don't eat non-rational human beings apply to animals as well.  Namely, we don't eat non-rational human beings because they have the capacity to suffer.  This capacity to suffer is the basis of a right to life.  Regan notes that a rights-based approach is better equipped to explain why we do not kill and eat non-rational humans better than utilitarianism, Kantian ethics and egoism (self-interest). 

Singer on Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism

Singer argues that if one accepts utilitarianism, then one must also accept vegetarianism.  Basically, if you accept that pain is morally bad, then eating meat is bad on the grounds that is causes pain to animals. 

1. If Utilitarianism is true, then pain and pleasure are the basis of all moral value.

2.  Animals experience pleasure and pain.

3.  If pleasure and pain are the basis of all moral value, then animals are morally significant.

4.  So, if utilitarianism is true, then animals are morally significant.

Singer notes that there are three ways that this kind of argument seems to fall short of supporting full-fledged vegetarianism.  First, it seems like utilitarianism gives good reason only to avoid certain kinds of sourcing meat.  Specifically, it seems like factory farming should be avoided but that free-range organic methods of raising animals are morally neutral or good.  Singer replies by reminding the reader that A) most meat on the market is from factory farms and B) even if we raise livestock in humane ways before we kill and eat it, even the mere act of killing animals puts us on a slippery slope towards further harm towards animals.  Second, someone might object that the consequences of abolishing factory farming are worse than the consequences of business as usual.  Singer notes that many things must be taken into account: the potential loss of happiness of vegetarians, the loss of livelihood of producers of factory-farmed products, environmental consequences, global and individual health concerns and the suffering of animals.  Even if the loss to those employed by the industrial livestock industry were greater than the suffering animals are caused now, Singer notes that this would be a one-time loss of happiness, whereas business as usual means the continued suffering of animals.  Third, Singer note that some people may think that consequentialist analysis cannot lead to the conclusion of vegetarianism.  Consider, for example, that it may take ten thousand vegetarians to save the lives of twenty thousand chickens.  Unless you are the ten thousandth vegetarian, then you will not meet a threshold needed to save those chickens.  But Singers says that consequentialists act based on likely outcomes, so being certain that I save ten chickens is just as good as being the single vegetarian responsible for saving twenty thousand chickens.  Perhaps this is not his best point.  But he notes that refusing to consume meat is the most straightforward and practical step to limit meat consumption.  Also, by refusing to eat meat, one expresses condemnation for a practice that causes animals to suffer.  Either way, Singer thinks that utilitarianism will lead to vegetarianism

Nietzsche on Ascetic Ideals

In the third essay, Nietzsche discusses the role of ascetic ideals in European society.  Ascetic ideals are those that deny worldly pleasures such as food, drink and sex.  This is a way of turning the ressentiment felt towards the masters back on oneself.  An ascetic will often identify his or her own self as the source of suffering--bad experiences are only bad because of how we choose to experience them.  This should remind us of Epictetus, who was an ascetic and a slave.  An ascetic life can then be thought of as an escape from torture.  Just as an ascetic denies worldly pleasures, she also denies worldly pains.  By accepting herself as the source of her own pain, an ascetic attempts to shield herself from the world.  By dominating her own suffering, an ascetic is able to assert a will to power. 

But Nietzsche notes that the will to power of ascetic ideals is inherently self-contradictory because the ideals of asceticism encourage a weakening of our strength and power.  The only way that ascetic ideals serve to improve human beings is to improve their capacity to be dominated, to be physically weakened through diminished nourishment and to become more refined.  The logical consequence of ascetic ideals, Nietszsche thinks, is atheism.  As Nietzsche conceives of it at this point in his career, atheism means nothing more than to abandon all other ideals than the truth.  Nietzsche thinks that the long process of the development of Judeo-Christian ideals is to lead to 'Christian truthfulness'.  Remember that capacities for calculation, measuring and analyzing cause and effect are all an important part of moral development (such as with the development of Schuld (guilt or bad conscience) and the sovereign individual's ability to make promises).  As such, ascetic ideals can only be overcome by atheistic ideals which deny all other ideals than the truth. 

Nietzsche's Second Essay of The Genealogy of Morality

In the second essay in The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche begins by noting how the development of morality seems to be leading towards some final end.  The paradoxical task that humanity has set for itself is to keep promises.  Promising requires making a memory of the will.  But humans have an active capacity for forgetting, which hinders our ability to make promises.  The person who can make and keep promises is the sovereign individual.  The sovereign individual is someone who lives a life with a certain organization or order.  This allows him to know what promises he can make and keep.  He also knows himself well enough to predict whether he will be able to keep a promise.  In addition, the sovereign individual can identify causes and effects, allowing him to perform calculations necessary for making and keeping promises.  He also judges himself according to no standards other than his own.  In other words, he is his own measure. 

The sovereign individual calls his own dominating instinct his 'conscience'.  Guilt, or what Nietzsche calls 'bad conscience' has another origin: the creditor-debtor relationship.  Nietzsche says that in earlier societies, sacrifices were made to ancestors in order to attempt to repay a debt.  We owe our forefathers something because they created the society in which we live.  The more powerful a society gets, the larger this feeling of debt becomes.  Eventually, ancestors are thought to be so powerful that they are given some kind of divine status.  This reaches a peak with the conception of an all-powerful, perfect god of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  The debt owed to an all-powerful God can never be repaid; this is why the debt gets internalized as a feeling a guilt.  Nietzsche notes that in German, Schuld is the word for both guilt and for debt. If you think about it, both conscience and bad conscience are ways of calculating and measuring ourselves in comparison to others or to ourselves. 

Nietzsche's Genaology: Master Morality vs. Slave Morality

Master Morality was established by a spontaneous creation of values. According to Nietzsche, the origin of moral good is just the origin about judgments about what is 'good'. He asserts that it is most likely that the noble, high-born people in power first took up a pathos of distance, or dominating attitude, towards the low-born, weak people. By claiming what is 'good' for themselves, they decided that everything opposite of them was 'bad'.

Slave Morality was established as a reaction to master morality. The lower classes, having experienced years of ressentiment (resentment and thirst for revenge) towards the upper classes, decided that those in power were 'evil'. First defining what is evil with characteristics opposite of their own characteristics, they then defined 'good' with the characteristics that they themselves possessed.

GOOD powerful noble aristocratic high-born strong light-haired slave owners BAD meek, humble common poor low-born weak dark slaves

EVIL powerful noble aristocratic high-born strong light slave owners GOOD meek, humble common poor low-born weak dark slaves, former slaves

Proof of the Greatest Happiness Principle

Mill's Proof of the Greatest Happiness Principle.
(1) if you see something, this proves that it is visible.
(2) Similarly, desiring something proves that it is desirable.
(3) The only thing that each person truly desires is happiness.
(4) The only thing that is truly desirable for a person is his or her own happiness.
(5) Hence each person should perform the actions that promote the greatest happiness.

Three Problems with this Argument:
First,  (2) does not follow from (1).  Visibility and desirability are not the same kinds of things.
Second,  (4) does not follow from (3).  To assume that we can derive an "ought" from an "is" is to make the naturalistic fallacy, which is a point made by David Hume.
Third,  (5) does not follow from (4).  Just because your own happiness is desirable does not mean that the happiness of other people is also desirable.

Further Objections to Utilitarianism:
(1) We cannot always predict what the consequences of our actions will be.  It is difficult if not impossible to judge the morality of an action based on what the predicted consequences will be.
(2) It is difficult to quantify pleasures.  In other words, it is hard to represent pleasures with numbers in order to determine if happiness will be maximized by an action. Cost-benefit analysis is difficult if not impossible.
(3) Also, the process of trying to determine if an action will maximize happiness is time-consuming and difficult.  It is not practical that we will be able to do such a calculation before we perform an action.
(4) Utilitarianism cannot explain special duties or obligations that we have to people like our friends, family and neighbors.
(5) If we only care about sum total happiness, then there will be actions that are good while these actions do cause a great amount of pain for some people.  For example, say that six of the seven dwarves decide to torture, beat and murder the Dopey for fun.  Even though Dopey experiences a lot of pain, utility is still maximized because the other dwarves are so happy.  Thus a utilitarian must say that it is good for the dwarves to murder Dopey.
(6) Utilitarianism fails to respect individual rights.  The rights of a single person can be violated as long as the greatest good is still maximized.
(7) Utilitarianism does not address the question of what kind of a person we should be.  The focus is entirely on consequences rather than the character of people.  For example, if I am offered a job as an assassin, I might think that killing people for a job would be OK because even if I do not take the job, someone else will.  This means that whether or not I am an assassin, the consequences are the same, hence the moral value of either choice is equal.
(8)  Pain is either entirely subjective (meaning that it does not exist) or perhaps pain is a good thing itself.

The first three objections do not attack the theory but rather the practice of the theory.  Objections (1), (2) and (3) are all objections that the theory is impractical and difficult (if not impossible) to use as a way of making moral decisions.  Objections (4), (5), (6), (7) and (8) object on the grounds that the results of utilitarian theory will conflict with strong moral intuitions or other reasons to consider when deciding if an action is good or bad.