The Friesian School of Thought
I am pleased with the two principles of animal welfare I came up with in the previous section. One thing that particularly pleases me about them both is that they seem deontological rather than consequentialist. Part of the reason for this is that eating meat seems indefensible on a consequentialist rationale. It has poor consequences for the animals in many circumstances, poor consequences for the environment and poor consequences for the health of the meat eater. Yet for all that, it just doesn't look immoral. Nor could it look immoral to the vast majority of people who do it, or else they simply wouldn't do it, and there would be as many McDonald'ses around as there are vegetarian restaurants today.
This is not to suggest that we have no duty of care for animals or the environment either. But it would be nice to have a theory of ethics that did not simply dissolve into yet another banal form of altruism, a la Peter Singer. Singer's preference utilitarianism has any number of problems. First, it's yet another theory of ethics that ordinary people simply cannot be expected to take seriously as worth living up to. Second, it's irrational as such, because of the enormous self-sacrifice necessary to practise it consistently. Third, it does not take into account supererogation at any point, because any way in which one can help others worse off than oneself becomes an imperative. Fourth, it recognises no special obligations a person may have, such as towards one's children, or obligations of contract. Fifth, it is parternalistic, because it requires the agent to second-guess what is good for the beneficiary in order to help them. (See "Singerian Moral Reasoning: Difficulty 1" for an elaboration of this point.) Nor do I want simply to go to the opposite extreme and become a Randian Egoist. Indeed, the major difficulty that I have with Ayn Rand's egoism is precisely because I think that it recognises no obligations whatsoever that we have towards the welfare of animals.
How, then, do we uncover an ethics that actually balances concerns of self and others effectively? Well, sometimes a man just happens to have some good fortune. I was looking for an appropriate language to describe duties to do things and duties not to do things and one of the likely sets of candidate phrases I had was "duties of commission and omission". I looked up "duties of omission" on Google. The top-ranking web page turned out to be a philosophical paper called, "The Fallacies of Egoism and Altruism, and the Fundamental Principle of Morality". I was intrigued by the title, as well as the text that confirmed that "duties of commission and omission" was a viable choice of phrase, so I decided to read the whole essay. I was so inspired by what I was reading that I bothered to check out the whole site. It is devoted to the Friesian school of philosophy, based primarily on the works of Kant, Schopenhauer and Fries. So far, this Friesian school is proving to be the most sensible and well-thought-out philosophy I have yet seen. It has obviously impressed a fair few other people, because the PageRank of its home page is a full 7 out of 10! The ramifications of this site will be so numerous and complex that I will not even try to enter them here, but will instead focus on specific issues raised by the site in the days (weeks?) to come.
This is not to suggest that we have no duty of care for animals or the environment either. But it would be nice to have a theory of ethics that did not simply dissolve into yet another banal form of altruism, a la Peter Singer. Singer's preference utilitarianism has any number of problems. First, it's yet another theory of ethics that ordinary people simply cannot be expected to take seriously as worth living up to. Second, it's irrational as such, because of the enormous self-sacrifice necessary to practise it consistently. Third, it does not take into account supererogation at any point, because any way in which one can help others worse off than oneself becomes an imperative. Fourth, it recognises no special obligations a person may have, such as towards one's children, or obligations of contract. Fifth, it is parternalistic, because it requires the agent to second-guess what is good for the beneficiary in order to help them. (See "Singerian Moral Reasoning: Difficulty 1" for an elaboration of this point.) Nor do I want simply to go to the opposite extreme and become a Randian Egoist. Indeed, the major difficulty that I have with Ayn Rand's egoism is precisely because I think that it recognises no obligations whatsoever that we have towards the welfare of animals.
How, then, do we uncover an ethics that actually balances concerns of self and others effectively? Well, sometimes a man just happens to have some good fortune. I was looking for an appropriate language to describe duties to do things and duties not to do things and one of the likely sets of candidate phrases I had was "duties of commission and omission". I looked up "duties of omission" on Google. The top-ranking web page turned out to be a philosophical paper called, "The Fallacies of Egoism and Altruism, and the Fundamental Principle of Morality". I was intrigued by the title, as well as the text that confirmed that "duties of commission and omission" was a viable choice of phrase, so I decided to read the whole essay. I was so inspired by what I was reading that I bothered to check out the whole site. It is devoted to the Friesian school of philosophy, based primarily on the works of Kant, Schopenhauer and Fries. So far, this Friesian school is proving to be the most sensible and well-thought-out philosophy I have yet seen. It has obviously impressed a fair few other people, because the PageRank of its home page is a full 7 out of 10! The ramifications of this site will be so numerous and complex that I will not even try to enter them here, but will instead focus on specific issues raised by the site in the days (weeks?) to come.
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