Against Animal Liberation? Peter Singer and His Critics

This article explores Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation thesis and examines the arguments against his work, particularly from certain moral philosophers in the late 1970s and 1980s who seriously engaged with his ideas. This article argues that due to the straightforward, minimalist nature of Singer’s preference utilitarianism, his arguments have remained highly defensible and persuasive. By advancing sentience, above characteristics like intelligence or rationality, as a sufficient criterion for possessing interests, Singer provides a justifiable principle for morally considering animal interests equal to those of humans. Numerous moral philosophers have challenged Singer, but they have struggled to seriously counter his core principle and to resolve the argument of ‘marginal cases’—that is, why do infants and intellectually disabled humans have moral status and animals do not. Ultimately, Singer broadly challenged prevailing anthropocentric views of animals and, in some instances, persuaded some of his most intransigent opponents.     

Against Global Egalitarianism

This article attacks the view that global justice should be understood in terms of a global principle of equality. The principle mainly discussed is global equality of opportunity – the idea that people of similar talent and motivation should have equivalent opportunity sets no matter to which society they belong. I argue first that in a culturally plural world we have no neutral way of measuring opportunity sets. I then suggest that the most commonly offered defences of global egalitarianism – the cosmopolitan claim that human lives have equal value, the argument that a persons nationality is a morally arbitrary characteristic, and the more empirical claim that relationships among fellow-nationals are no longer special in a way that matters for justice – are all defective. If we fall back on the idea of equality as a default principle, then we have to recognize that pursuing global equality of opportunity systematically would leave no space for national self-determination. Finally, I ask whether global inequality might be objectionable for reasons independent of justice, and argue that the main reason for concern is the inequalities of power that are likely to emerge in a radically unequal world.I am very grateful to Gillian Brock and Kok-Chor Tan for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.     

Equality in Education – Why We Must Go All the Way

In this paper I present and defend a highly demanding principle of justice in education that has not been seriously discussed thus far. According to the suggested approach, “all the way equality”, justice in education requires nothing short of equal educational outcome between all individual students. This means not merely between equally able children, or between children from different groups and classes, but rather between all children, regardless of social background, race, sex and ability. This approach may seem implausible at first, due to the far-reaching implications it entails, primarily its requirement to deny better-off children their advantage for the sake of equality. However the paper argues that all-the-way-equality, in fact, does a better job realizing the goals of justice in education than alternative conceptions of justice. It is further argued that at least some of the principle’s most radical consequences, those that make it seem counterintuitive, can be mitigated by balancing all-the-way-equality with competing interests.     

Interspecific Justice

This essay supposes that the question of what treatment of animals is morally acceptable cannot be decided in any straightforward way by appeals to ‘equal consideration of interests’ or to animal rights. Instead it seeks to survey a variety of proposals as to how we ought to adjudicate interspecific conflicts of interests ‐ proposals that are both ‘speciesist’ and ‘non‐speciesist’ in nature. In the end one proposal is defended as the most reasonable one, and is claimed to provide a partial basis for developing an adequate theory of interspecific justice. In the course of this argument the challenge posed by radical critics of current treatment of animals (e.g. Tom Regan and Peter Singer) is considered. The schema of a theory developed here partly supports and partly conflicts with positions they have defended. Regarding the latter point it proposes a non‐anthropocentric basis for discounting the interests of sentient animals.     

Cosmopolitan Justice and Equalizing Opportunities

This paper defends a global principle of equality of opportunity, which states that it is unfair if some have worse opportunities because of their national or civic identity. It begins by outlining the reasoning underpinning this principle. It then considers three objections to global equality of opportunity. The first argues that global equality of opportunity is an inappropriate ideal given the great cultural diversity that exists in the world. The second maintains that equality of opportunity applies only to people who are interconnected in some way and infers from this that it should not be implemented at the global level. The third, inspired by Rawls's The Law of Peoples , maintains that it is inappropriate to thrust liberal ideals (like global equality of opportunity) on nonliberal peoples. Each of these challenges, I argue, is unpersuasive.     

Egalitarians,sufficientarians, and mathematicians: a critical notice of Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality

This critical notice provides an overview of Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality and assesses whether Frankfurt is right to argue that equality is merely formal and empty. I counter-argue that egalitarianism, properly tweaked and circumscribed, can be defended against Frankfurt’s repudiation. After surveying the main arguments in Frankfurt’s book, I argue that whatever plausibility the ‘doctrine of sufficiency’ defended by Frankfurt may have, it does not strike a fatal blow against egalitarianism. There is nothing in egalitarianism that forbids acceptance of the moral platitude expressed in sufficientarianism's positive thesis, (viz., it is morally important that everyone have enough). Nor is there anything in egalitarianism as such that makes it impossible to recognize the banal truth that there are many important things besides equality, and that many dimensions of human affairs are improperly appraised from a relational or comparative point of view. The fact that a relational or comparative point of view is sometimes out of place, however, surely does not mean that it always is. I conclude with the suggestion that egalitarianism is most compelling when it is understood as a normative conception of social relations (rather than, as Frankfurt seems to assume throughout his book, a thesis about the equal distribution of something) and thus presides over precisely those aspects of human affairs for which that relational or comparative point of view is germane.     

Is there a Rawlsian Argument for Animal Rights?

Mark Rowlands defends a Rawlsian argument for animal rights, according to which animals have rights because we would assign them rights when deciding on the principles of morality from behind a veil of ignorance. Rowlands’s argument depends on a non-standard interpretation of the veil of ignorance, according to which we cannot know whether we are human or non-human on the other side of the veil. Rowlands claims that his interpretation of the veil is more consistent with a core commitment of Rawlsian justice—the intuitive equality principle—than either Rawls or his critics realize. Here I argue that Rawls is not committed to the intuitive equality principle, as Rowlands articulates it, and hence Rowlands’s argument is in fact only superficially Rawlsian. Furthermore, Rowlands’s intuitive equality principle is dubious on its own terms, and thus a poor principle on which to base a case for animal rights.     

Can Infants Have Interests in Continued Life?

The philosophers Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan hold variations of the view that infant interests in continued life are suspect because infants lack the cognitive complexity to anticipate the future. Since infants cannot see themselves as having a future, Singer argues that the future cannot have value for them, and McMahan argues that the future can only have minimal value for an infant. This paper critically analyzes these arguments and defends the view that infants can have interests in continuing to live. Even though infants themselves lack a strong psychological connection to the future, others who are involved in an infant’s life can anticipate, on an infant’s behalf, the kind of future that awaits the infant, and on the basis of this insight judge that continuing to live would be in the infant’s interests. After defending this position, I argue that this position on the interests of infants in continued life does not commit one to opposing abortion, and it does not commit one to the view that our ethical obligations to protect the lives of sentient animals are the same as our ethical obligations to protect infant lives.     

罗尔斯“分配的正义观”与诺齐克“持有的正义观”对照研究

分配正当性的根据是什么 ?人的基本权利与平等的要件如何分配才是符合正义的 ?罗尔斯和诺齐克从两个向度上对此作了深入研究。罗尔斯从平等的权利出发 ,主张用“公平正义的两个原则”来取代功利主义 ,认为除非有充足理由证明应当不平等 ,否则就应当平等。并要求依据“公平的正义原则”分配公共资源和自由体系 ;诺齐克从人的不可剥夺的权利出发 ,认为除非有充足理由证明应当平等 ,否则就应当不平等 ,通过“资格”理论确立“持有”的正当性。在功利主义、财产权、国家的作用、自由平等、分配模式和社会稳定的意义等方面 ,罗尔斯与诺齐克的观点也各有契合与对立。     

Gain–loss-frame in outcome-interdependence: does it influence equality or equity considerations?

Research suggests that framing outcomes as gains produces stronger concern for distributive justice than framing outcomes as losses. Unfortunately, however, this prior research manipulated own and other's outcomes only (and not own and other's input). Hence, it remained unclear whether framing affects concern with equality—everyone gets an equal share regardless whether one ‘deserves’ it or not—and/or equity—the share one gets is a function of the proportionality of one's own, and the other parties' inputs. The current experiment addressed this problem. Subjects (N = 94) read a scenario manipulating own and some co-workers' inputs, and subsequently rated satisfaction with pairs of outcomes providing themselves with more, equal or less outcomes than their co-worker. Outcomes to oneself exceeded expectation (gain-frame) or remained below it (loss-frame). Corroborating and expanding prior research, results showed that people are more concerned with both equality and equity when they have a gain- rather than loss-frame. In addition, results revealed evidence for a self-serving bias, in that people prefer equity or equality, depending on what serves best their own interests. It is concluded that frame affects the degree to which people are concerned about distributive justice.     

Definability of Leibniz Equality

Given a structure for a first-order language L, two objects of its domain can be indiscernible relative to the properties expressible in L, without using the equality symbol, and without actually being the same. It is this relation that interests us in this paper. It is called Leibniz equality. In the paper we study systematically the problem of its definibility mainly for classes of structures that are the models of some equality-free universal Horn class in an infinitary language L_κκ, where κ is an infinite regular cardinal. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Feminist Radical Empiricism,Values, and Evidence

Feminist epistemologies consider ways in which gender (among other social factors) influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist radical empiricism (where the empiricism, not the feminism, is radical). I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as objective facts: not just whether we have achieved said equality in our society, but whether we are, in fact, all equal. I will raise the concern that the way in which they model the role of values in epistemology may be a problematic idealization of the open‐mindedness of human agents. In some cases, resistance to value‐change cannot be diagnosed as a failure to respond adequately to evidence. If so, the strategy of empirically testing our values that some feminist radical empiricists suggest may not be as useful a tool for social change as they think.     

The Irrationality of Choosing Egoism—A Reply to Eshelman

Despite the vast literature on Rawls's work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy. When his arguments have been discussed, they have received staunch criticism. Some critics have charged that Rawls's arguments are not deeply democratic. Others have gone further, claiming that Rawls's arguments denigrate democracy. These criticisms are unsurprising, since Rawls's arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete. In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil liberties, Rawls does not say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties.

In this paper, I complete some of Rawls's arguments and show that he has grounds for including political liberties, particularly those of a democratic nature, in the principle of equal basic liberty. In doing so, I make some beginning steps toward illustrating the genuinely democratic nature of Rawls's arguments. Rawls believes that a few different arguments can be given for democratic institutions and that these arguments work together to support the value of democracy. In this paper, I focus on Rawls's arguments relating to self-respect. I focus on this set of arguments because they are among the strongest of Rawls's arguments for equal political liberty and its fair value.     

Why Speciesism is Wrong: A Response to Kagan

In Animal Liberation I argued that we commonly ignore or discount the interests of sentient members of other species merely because they are not human, and that this bias in favour of members of our own species is, in important respects, parallel to the biases that lie behind racism and sexism. Shelly Kagan, in ‘What's Wrong With Speciesism’ misconstrues this argument, as well as the principle of equal consideration of interests, which I offer as an alternative to speciesism. Kagan also offers, as an alternative explanation of, and possible justification for, our discounting the interests of nonhuman animals, the suggestion that your interests count more if you are a member of a species whose typical adult members are persons. Although this view is not a form of speciesism, Kagan seems not to be aware of the fact that it is a view commonly defended by advocates of natural law ethics, on which there is already an extensive critical literature.     

The EM algorithm for latent class analysis with equality constraints

The EM algorithm is a popular iterative method for estimating parameters in the latent class model where at each step the unknown parameters can be estimated simply as weighted sums of some latent proportions. The algorithm may also be used when some parameters are constrained to equal given constants or each other. It is shown that in the general case with equality constraints, the EM algorithm is not simple to apply because a nonlinear equation has to be solved. This problem arises, mainly, when equality constrints are defined over probabilities indifferent combinations of variables and latent classes. A simple condition is given in which, although probabilities in different variable-latent class combinations are constrained to be equal, the EM algorithm is still simple to apply.The authors are grateful to the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. C. C. Clogg and R. Luijkx are also acknowledged for verifying our results with their computer programs MLLSA and LCAG, respectively.     

Commentary: is collaboration a viable target for family therapists?

It is hoped that this commentary might serve to begin a discussion regarding collaboration, what is meant by it and whether it is a worthy goal for family therapists. I present the varying and sometimes contradictory meanings of the word, ‘collaboration’, as it is used in the therapy literature. Many of these meanings incorrectly imply an equality of the therapist–client relationship that only obscures the power differential that exists in the therapeutic relationship. A linguistic analysis of the primary meaning of ‘collaboration’ as ‘work with’ is presented. It is argued that equality between therapist and client cannot be achieved and need not be strived for. Therapists are encouraged to focus on the quality rather than the equality of their relationships.     

Intrinsic Explanation and Field’s Dispensabilist Strategy

Abstract

Hartry Field defended the importance of his nominalist reformulation of Newtonian Gravitational Theory, as a response to the indispensability argument, on the basis of a general principle of intrinsic explanation. In this paper, I argue that this principle is not sufficiently defensible, and can not do the work for which Field uses it. I argue first that the model for Field’s reformulation, Hilbert’s axiomatization of Euclidean geometry, can be understood without appealing to the principle. Second, I argue that our desires to unify our theories and explanations undermines Field’s principle. Third, the claim that extrinsic theories seem like magic is, in this case, really just a demand for an account of the applications of mathematics in science. Finally, even if we were to accept the principle, it would not favor the fictionalism that motivates Field’s argument, since the indispensabilist’s mathematical objects are actually intrinsic to scientific theory.     

What’s Wrong with the Online Echo Chamber: A Motivated Reasoning Account

In this ‘age of information’, some worry that we get our news from online ‘echo chambers’, news feeds on our social media accounts that contain information from like-minded sources. Filtering our information in this way seems prima facie problematic from an epistemic perspective. I vindicate this intuition by offering an explanation of what is wrong with online echo chambers that appeals to a particular kind of motivated reasoning, or bias due to one’s interests. This sort of bias affects, not which evidence one is exposed to, but how one makes use of the evidence that one has, on the basis of one’s interests. I argue that consulting an online echo chamber often facilitates and amplifies this bias. I then draw some general conclusions about the potential downside of having ready access to so much information.     

‘Incommensurability’ and Vagueness: Is the Vagueness View Defensible?

The vagueness view holds that when evaluative comparisons are hard, there is indeterminacy about which comparative relation holds. It is sceptical about whether there are any incommensurate items (in some domain). The sceptical element of John Broome’s version of this view rests on a controversial principle. Robert Sugden advances a similar view which does not depend on this principle. Sugden’s argument fails as a vagueness view because it assumes rather than shows that there are no incommensurate items (in some domain). Nonetheless, I argue that an interpretation of his argument constitutes a defensible vagueness view which is supported by intuition about examples. On this interpretation Sugden’s view can be mapped onto Broome’s application of a supervaluationist view of vagueness. It is also (on this reading) a close relative of James Griffin’s ‘rough equality’ view when this is interpreted in terms of vagueness. On an alternative interpretation Sugden’s view is not sceptical about incommensurateness. On this interpretation he does not defend a vagueness view and is ‘sceptical’ about the contribution of the philosophical literature to our understanding of rational choice.     

Political Inequality and the ‘Super-Rich’: Their Money or (some of) Their Political Rights

The ability of very wealthy individuals (or, as I will call them, the ‘super-rich’) to turn their economic power into political power has been—and remains—an important cause of political inequality. In response, this paper advocates an original solution. Rather than solving the problem through implementing a comprehensive conception of political equality, or through enforcing complex rules about financial disclosure etc., I argue that we should impose a choice on the super-rich. The super-rich must choose between (i) forfeiting the things that make them super-rich, i.e., pay a 100 % tax on their wealth above a certain level, or, (ii) they must forfeit some of their political rights. These rights include entitlements to fund political parties; to stand for office; and to work or volunteer for political parties. The right to vote, though, is not limited. I defend my proposal against non-consequentialist and consequentialist objections. I also argue that it avoids two problems that many attempts to reduce political inequality face; these are the political egalitarian’s dilemma and the problem of political equality’s relative moral importance.