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It is almost Thanksgiving.  Most of us will spend Thanksgiving in comfort – perhaps a warm fire, certainly a large meal (the kind of meal where you have to undo the top button of your pants in order to make room for pumpkin pie dessert).  Well, chew on this while you gorge yourself:

Singer’s argument about our moral obligations to the poor (by the way, of all of his work, I think this is his best argument)

Singer makes 2 assumptions, both of them look like REALLY safe assumptions.

1) Suffering and death from lack of food, water, shelter, and medical care are bad

 2) If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing something of comparable moral importance, then we ought morally to do it.

Since it is in our power to prevent people from starving to death (by giving more $ to the poor), then we ought to do it.  But notice how radical this is.  His strongest version is that we ought to give up to the point that any further gift would make us worse off than the one to whom we are giving.  Even his weakest version is incredibly challenging: If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening (someone from starving to death), without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, then we morally ought to.

Morally significant things would include education, so I think it would be morally permissible to spend money (or save money) for college expenses.  But, on this view, any and all trivial spending would constitute a failure to live up to our moral obligation to prevent bad things from happening to other people.  

No more movies, no more dinners out, no more unnecessary food at home (pumpkin pie with cool whip, garish holiday feasts).  No spending money on clothes for the sake of being fashionable.  No spending on frivolities of any kind!  

Many in my Social Ethics course this semester agreed to try this for 7 days.  All have reported it to be extremely difficult.

It isn’t everyday that you see a fairly substantive philosophical argument make its way into the mainstream media.  But Peter Singer has an article on animal rights in Newsweek.  Students who have taken the PHIL 1120 Social Ethics course will be very familiar with his argument.

To motivate the argument a bit:

Forget for a moment about the moral status of animals.  Everyone thinks child abuse is wrong.  But why is it wrong, what makes it wrong?  I suspect that most people answer that question by saying something like: ‘Well, it is wrong because the child suffers’.  It is noteworthy that they do NOT say ‘It is wrong because it stunts the child’s rationality’ or ‘It is wrong because it stunts the child’s language’.  In other words, our gut reaction to the wrongness of something (in this case, child abuse) has to do with suffering.  We might then conclude that it is the capacity to suffer (and the interest in avoiding pain) which makes someone a member of a moral community (rather than an appeal to some special feature of humanity, like intellect or language).

So far probably nothing too controversial, right?  But … animals have a capacity to suffer too.

… I saw this NYT article. Apparently, for the low low price of $10 mil, scientists think they could gradually introduce woolly mammoth DNA into an elephant fetus, and eventually give rise to a critter a whole lot like a woolly mammoth. (I don’t know whether the critter would ACTUALLY BE a woolly mammoth, vs. a weird woolly elephant, vs. something-we-have-yet-to-name. Actually, I think the example pretty much obliterates rigid species-bound thinking. But I digress.)

That’s nuthin’, however, compared to what these scientists also think they could do: give rise to a critter a whole lot like Neanderthal. The article says that ethical considerations would keep that experiment from taking place. Here I am torn. Yes, I feel that it is wrong to ‘monkey’ with human DNA (har, har), unless there are compelling medical reasons to do so. I think the threat of a slippery slope is very real. On the other hand, would it not be exceedingly interesting — nay, totally friggin’ awesome — to have a Neanderthal around? to see what cognitive skills they possessed? to be able possibly to talk to (some version of) a non-human?

Actually, the article raises another possibility. Perhaps the Neanderthal DNA could be spliced into a chimp’s DNA, and the fetus could be brought to term in a chimp mother. Does that satisfy the ethical qualms, or introduce new ones?

Let’s vote. How do you feel about the possibility of manufacturing a quasi-Neanderthal?

This was a philosophy professor you should know about. His book, The Practice of Philosophy, is the best short introduction to the subject I know. It is clear he lived a full and rich life, worthy of emulation. I have copied his obituary here. His webpage is well worth exploring.

Father Laurence Paul Hemming will be leading a discussion on “Faith and Reason”  tomorrow Nov. 18th from 2-3  in TSC  336.

Check his info here.