Book review: Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief

This is a bad book: one-sided, not honest, more akin to propaganda than philosophy... unless you're familiar with The Republic, of course. And also wrong². So this "review" is more me filling in the other side. As to why I should bother with something so bad: I blame E for owning it; and the boundaries of rights is an interesting subject.

Context: Goodreads; Wiki. As far as I can tell, their project has been a total failure. One reason for that is that law is custom; this doesn't seem to be a concept that they are familiar with, despite their reliance on the common law.

To get a few snarks out of the way: the intro tells us that the authors are "renowned philosophers" - how modest of them - who "consider" the issues. But they are lying: most of them are associate professors, a lowly form of USAnian academic life. And this is no open-minded consideration of the issue: these people have made their minds up on the pro-animal-rights side, and will not consider arguments against. They also have an irritating tendency to quote someone saying something they agree with, and then treat that as a settled point in their favour. This is also a good place to say that they made so many errors that I cannot even mention them all.

Their argument proceeds under four heads: species membership; social contract; community membership; and capacities.

Under species membership they make the apparently sensible argument that biological categories can't provide a rational basis for rights moral or legal or matters of that ilk. They don't do a good job of distinguishing morality from legality. Legally, they notice that entities can only be persons or things, and appear to dislike this; they have a third category to propose, but they don't mention it until the end of the book. They apply for habeus corpus on behalf of some chimps, which is rejected, but - in my view - vitiate their own argument by applying for HC to move them from captivity by individuals into a "sanctuary" - which is to say, captivity somewhere else (p 94 belatedly admits this; and also admits that the court noticed). This implicitly admits the obvious: chimps can't live freely as part of human society.

Why is species membership a sensible legal definition of personhood? Because it works⁴; because it is custom; and because it is an easily applied test. Our Authors do their best to obscure that last point, wurbling around about how problematic the concept of race is blah blah blah but it won't work: "is this a human?" is far too easily answered a question for their equivocation to do away with.

One day, perhaps, we will meet space aliens and have to rethink this. But the method of rethink is fairly obvious and to all appearances not needed in the near future, so we don't need to worry about it. Rather sooner, perhaps, we will meet AI and have to rethink this. But I doubt that will help the chimps.

Species membership pretty well exhausts the legal matters, but OA quotes the courts discussing reciprocity of rights and responsibilities; and so we come to social contract, which is a perfectly sensible thing to discuss in this context. OA immeadiately bring up the distinction - vital in their eyes - between persons and citizens; the latter being persons participating in the social contract. They need to do this because chimps can't - are not able to - participate, obvs; in my view this is good evidence against chimp personhood. This is the point to note that we allow personhood to humans who aren't able to participate - natural fooles; infants; the mad or demented. Partly this is due to natural sympathy; partly to avoid having to deal with the inevitable edge cases³. OA then attempt to reverse this: if you can "bear rights"¹ then you are a person, even if you cannot bear responsibilities. They then, straining mightly, use Rawls's broken "Veil of Ignorance" stuff to argue that perhaps we would agree under said VoI to extend the contract and thus rights to non-human non-rational entities. I don't think we would. But if we did consider this, unfortunately for OA, this proves too much: that argument extends the contract to stoats, weasels and ferrets, as well as OA's favourite charismatic megafauna.

Next, community membership. The idea put forward is that being a person is being a part of the community of persons (this is slightly circular, but you get their idea); in their words "We all come to be persons through embeddedness in interpersonal relationships of interdependency, meaning, and belonging". This is pretty vague. Does it help their cause? Not obviously. Their original complaint is that the chimps are being held in inhumane conditions, so they aren't part of the community. They deal with this by saying "ah, but they are capable of being part" - but is this true? I doubt putting a free chimp into a human community would end happily. Further, this would cover all house pets as well, and (due to the "are capable") clause, a great deal of other animals. Really, this attempt doesn't differ significantly from the previous.

Fourthly, we come to "capacities": things like sentience, emotion, autonomy, self-awareness, sociality. Do you need all of these, some, or shifting combinations to make you a person? In fact the list is arbitrary, and really is just a list of things that people do, retro-fitted. But never mind, because OA decide to pick "autonomy" and declare personhood based solely on autonomy (p 94). This doesn't work: autonomy is too vague, and too widely shared; indeed, on its widest fringes it is practically synonymous with life, and OA make no attempt to bound it; their efforts are all in the other direction, to stretch the category far enough to include chimps.

Under conclusions, they note that they don't have a positive account of personhood to propose. This is a fundamental problem for them, and leads them into "lawyers philosophy". "We don't know what a person is, but surely this makes you a person, and so...". As noted at the start, the law makes entities persons or things, and at last we get a thought of a third category (though they don't seem terribly enthusiastic about it and are careful not to endorse it): "sentient being". But the problem is that the simple creation of this category gives you no idea of what "rights" a member has. For example (p 105) they note a Mexican law obliging respect for the life of nonhuman animals, but as we all know that "respect" doesn't include not killing them; this is the kind of double-think you end up with when cute fluffy words run up against custom.

In my humble opinion

Enough of their wrongness. What is the right answer? The obvious answer is that personhood invloves being (capable of being) part of the social contract; and we extend that to cover natural fooles, etc., as noted earlier. What defence do chimps - or other things capable of suffering - get, from our moral or legal systems? Essentially the "repugnance" defence; see eating-a-dog bit from my review of The Righteous Mind: being cuuel damages ourselves.

Notes

1. "bear rights" is strange language; I can't tel if they really mean it, or if this is intended to be equivalent to "have rights".

2. Fundamentally, OA are nice, caring people who have allowed their compassion for chimps to override their reason.

3. On p 56 OA quote Carruthers saying exactly this. But somehow they fail to understand him; they cannot understand that there is an edge-case problem with "degree of rationality", which is a continuuos variable, but not with "degree of being human", which is binary.

4. If you object to "works" as grubby practicality that has no place in a philosophical discussion, I remind you that this is also a legal discussion; indeed primarily legal at this point.

Refs

* The paradox of American multiculturalism.

* Firm Functionalism.

* Climate Change: The World’s Most Overrated Problem.

* Were the Nazis Socialist? Only in Part. The Nazis were similar to socialists supporting economic statism, but different in other key aspects of their ideology.

Book review: The Evolution of Morality

The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce: Goodreads; his website. This is only a partial review, as I DNF'd in chapter 2 because... well, for reasons I find somewhat hard to concretise. He is an academic (wiki²) and whilst the book is not a dry academic tome it does have all the whiffling and qualifications leading to pointless digressions and obscurations you expect from academia (see-also this review). Furthermore, he doesn't actually know what morality is, which is a bit of an issue for him; even more of an issue is that he attempts to get around this bijou problemette by nibbling around at the edges⁸; unfortunately this leads him into pointless digressions about moral judgements, which seemed like his main interest; at least, that's when I gave up.

So I should explain why I'm bothering to review this: it is because I had thoughts that interested me while reading it, which I deem worth writing down.

Before I go on, you should read my review of The Foundations of Morality to make sure we're on the same page; and I should read it, to make sure I don't contradict myself... right, I'm back.

I see that there, I didn't commit myself to any comment on "evolution". In reviewing Reason and Morality I explictly said "those rules bind because they have "evolved" to"; by writing in that fashion - putting evolved into quotes - I meant to be ambiguous about whether they had genetically or culturally evolved. But clearly they have evolved, in that they were not simply imposed by fiat of law or god at some single time. Whether we imagine that people have some "moral organ" perhaps in analogy to a "language organ", or that it is all cultural, or some mixture, doesn't particularly bother me at the moment¹. Our Author is in favour of morality having evolved³, but perhaps somewhat weirdly or so it seems to me, it doesn't seem to be a major preoccupation of the book; perhaps it is in the bits I skipped.

Let's get to the shite bits. If you read his wiki page, there's a section on "Moral error theory" (this says OA is one), which contains "the moral error theorist maintains that moral judgments are truth-evaluable assertions... but that the world doesn't contain the properties (e.g., moral goodness, evil, moral obligation) needed to render moral judgments true". It is indeed true that the physical world doesn't contain moral goodness or evil; these are meta-properties imposed on it by humans⁴. Just as a story doesn't exist in the real world: in the real physical world, there exist books which are leaves of paper with squiggly black marks on them grouped into "words" and "sentences" and "chapters", but none of these things physically exist, they are organisational concepts; see also [[Popper's three worlds]] if these ideas are unfamiliar to you. But OA's problem is letting this language confuse his discourse: because he doesn't know what morality is, he gets lost in discussing "moral judgements" as an attempt to get close to saying something about morality - I think - but then goes all philosophy about moral judgements presuming a moral object to judge, which of course doesn't exist, objectively⁷. Moral judgements are the workings of our moral sense; they are the states-of-mind of people who have considered from a moral viewpoint a given situation.

In order to confuse things further, he then discusses Moore's paradox, which is a new one on me. It may be new to you, too, so go skim it; try to avoid your revulsion at the blatant philosophical wank. So the situation is of someone saying "P; but I do not believe P". And the gloss is that this is absurd, but not contradictory, because "It can be true at a particular time both that P, and that I do not believe that P". But the problem is that the setup is someone saying "P"; not the fact-of P. And saying P (in the course of honest discourse, which this is assumed to be) is equivalent to "I believe P". Because everyone knows that stating P does not make P happen and is not ironclad evidence for P, because everyone makes mistakes; by saying P you are merely expressing your belief in P⁶. And so the situation is equivalent to "I believe P; but I do not believe P"; which is not a paradox, it is merely a contradiction¹¹.

From a Goodreads review: A brilliant analogy Joyce uses is with the way we see color: I see my walls as red, even though the 'redness' is actually not as much in the wall as in the way lightwaves from the wall interact with my eye. But: the redness really is in the wall: the wall has physical properties that affect the way light interacts with it⁹. Compare: two men indulge in homosexual relations and are seen by a third, who "sees" immorality and judges it so: where is the immorality? It isn't in the real physical world, because we enlightened people of the cold west know that homosexuality is not immoral in our culture; but we are so enlightened we know that people of other cultures may say it is in theirs⁵.

A niggle: Kant [says] that actions motivated by prosocial emotions cannot be considered morally admirable... I am more than happy to side with common sense against Kant on this point... In fact, I am willing to endorse the view that on occasions a per-son whose motivations derive from explicit moral calculation rather than direct sympathy is manifesting a kind of moral vice. This is weird. We have, so to speak, two sorts of "moral organ": the quick instinctive moral judgements that we use constantly without really thinking about for everyday matters and is governed by the hypothesised "moral instincts"; and a slower harder thoughtful consideration of more difficult, less common issues; this you might say is governed by our general-purpose thinking engine. Most people are inclined to go with the quick results, even in situations where they really should be using the slow; certainly, the slow should be more reliable, and give better results, whenever it is invoked honestly and carefully. Why OA should consider this "moral vice" I don't know; he provides no explanation or example.

I think that's enough.

Refs

* Justice Kavanaugh turns down request from Missouri to use congressional map expected to aid Republicans.

* No Doing, No Learning.

* State of Oregon v. Trump.

Notes

1. Should I care? Do tell me why. OA spends some time explaining why even if we were sure morality was genetic, we shouldn't be bothered for free will type reasons, and I'm fine with that.

2. Which all turns up as a big blob by one user who does little else. I deduce either a fanboi, or the man himself. Either way, I'm going to treat it as accurate.

3. Minor aside: in the wiki article on Evolution of morality he gets barely a look in.

4. Or other moral beings.

5. Ours is better; obvs; but that's another post.

6. When discussing contingent properties of the real world.

7. Maybe he thinks morality is objective, and therefore there must exist moral objects? Probably not... actually I think that's one of my problems with the book, he presents many thoughts but rarely endorses any^7a. Moral objects seem weird to me, but then I'm not a theist, so I have no source for any desired objective morality. It is obvious that different cultures have non-identical moralities - indeed different people do. We observe that all cultures contain some shared morality - mostly, do no harm - but this is because cultures that don't put that into their morality fail to thrive. I've said this before, somewhere.

7a. This is, in my view, unhelpful, at least in the area of philosophy. There are zillions of different views, and philosophers are skilled at generating new ones, much in the way that Sabine Hossenfelder criticises mathematical physicists for pointlessly inventing new "possible" particles. The need is to eliminate old wrong views by considering them carefully; to clear away the deadwood that the philosophes so love.

8. The "nibbling at the edges" issue is interetsing, in that it reminds me of Popper's theory of knowledge: Conjectures and Refutations. You acquire knowledge of a thing by guessing, then trying to see if you're wrong. Not by doing what OA does, trying to understand tiny bits of it at a time.

9. This confusion about intrinsic vs accidental properties of things has been around since the antient Greeks. Descartes (see esp footnote 4) for example was not alone in thinking that the fundamental property of matter was extension and everything else was an accident¹⁰; but we now know about mass, charge, spin and so on.

10. Gemini agrees. But rather weirdly thinks this a good thing, ffs.

11. Apparently M'sP was a fave of Wittgenstein, which is a bit of a hint that it is a purely linguistic issue, not a real problem.

Checking up on Hazlitt with Gemini

While writing this, I had a terrible fear that my fanboi adulation of Hazlitt was vulnerable to some brilliant philosophical debunking that would point out his obvious crass errors. So I Googled it, and Gemini told me, and I paste it below. I feel that Gemini has done a fair job, and am happy with the answer, because all these criticisms are stupid. I'm also moderately sure that at least one of my commentators would have been happy to jump on any flaws.

Henry Hazlitt’s moral philosophy—primarily outlined in his 1964 book The Foundations of Morality—is considered "wrong" or heavily criticized by certain philosophers and economists primarily because it reduces all ethical systems to a form of rule utilitarianism centered entirely on social cooperation. [1] (https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/03/question-to-the-non-ideal-theorists-of-justice-what-do-you-think-of-henry-hazlitt/)

Critics, including academic reviewers and rival political theorists, argue that his framework fails for several key reasons:

* Rejection of Natural Rights: Hazlitt dismisses objective natural rights or moral intuitionism, arguing that moral rules are merely utilitarian conventions hammered out over centuries to foster social utility. Critics who believe in inherent human rights argue this makes justice subordinate to collective cooperation.

* Economic Reductionism: Reviewers have chided Hazlitt (a renowned free-market economist) for tailoring his ethics to justify private property orders and classical liberal market frameworks, making morality look like an extension of abstract economics rather than an independent philosophical truth. (https://www.libertarianism.org/essays/review-foundations-of-morality)

* Overly Optimistic Harmony: Hazlitt claims that an individual's rightly-conceived long-term self-interest always neatly aligns with social cooperation. Critics argue this harmony is naive and fails to account for real-world scenarios where brutal exploitation or systemic injustice can genuinely benefit a ruling individual or group at the direct expense of others. (https://fee.org/articles/hazlitts-the-foundations-of-morality/)

* Dismissal of Metaethics: Hazlitt openly criticized modern moral philosophers for getting bogged down in linguistic and metaethical analysis, leading strict academic ethicists to view his approach as overly simplistic or evasive of deep philosophical complexities. (https://www.hazlitt.org/e-texts/morality/ch23.html)

If you would like to explore this further, let me know if you want to compare Hazlitt's view with Kant's deontology or look more closely at his defense of rule utilitarianism.