A Political Ecology Lesson for Ronald Bailey

I'm not terribly impressed with Jeremy Rifkin's recent article The Risks of Too Much City. His recitation of the usual list of environmentalist concerns is noteworthy only for its failure to mention climate change (even though that issue sometimes seems like the only thing environmentalists care about). And despite his title and the accompanying "hook", he never talks about the risks caused by urbanization -- rather, his problem is with industrialization and population growth.

Nevertheless, Ronald Bailey's attempted rebuttal is even worse. Bailey focuses on Rifkin's final paragraph, in which he laments humanity's failed attempt at domination of nature, and calls for "reintegration" instead. Bailey counters that "integration" with nature is a recipe for disease and famine, while urban isolation has brought longer lifespans and greater riches. Bailey insists, contrary to Rifkin's vague and wishy-washy policy advice, that this is a question of urbanization versus rural life.

Bailey says we need look no farther than how people have voted with their feet: "While some people may be pushed by war or drought, or poverty into cities, most people today are pulled in by the prospect of reinventing themselves, escaping from the narrow strictures of family, class and community, and a shot at really making it." But this description of urban migration patterns is largely inaccurate. In the first world, migration out of rural (i.e. farming) areas is driven as much by economic necessity as it is by a desire to escape the cultural constraints of rural life. Meanwhile the cities themselves are emptying out as people flee high rents and dark-skinned neighbors. These urban emigrants -- who constitute the largest population movement at present -- are moving in search of precisely the two things Bailey claims they're rejecting: rural life and nature. Many relocate to the suburbs, looking for a mythic rural-small-town-idyll, a cozy village with strong "strictures of family, class and community" in which to raise their children. Others seek a closer connection to nature, making their homes among the (dangerously flammable) pines and chaparral of exurban areas.

In the Third World, there is a strong rural-to-urban migration stream. Yet here Bailey misses the mark too, both by stressing the primacy of "pull" factors and by assuming that urban immigrants want and achieve freedom from "strictures of family, class and community." Largely external forces of worsening market conditions, lack of capital, environmental degradation, government policies that range from misguided to exploitative, population growth, and the legacy of colonial dispossession make it nearly impossible for many rural residents to make ends meet. Migration to urban areas (as well as international migration) typically begins as a way to support the rest of the family, clan, or village who remain in the rural area. One or a few individuals (usually young men) migrate to the city in search of work, then send generous remittances back home, honoring rather than escaping their family and community ties. And the jobs in question can only be described as "really making it" by contrasting them to the unemployment and poverty that these migrants faced in their original villages. Migrants to third world cities often end up living in illegal and unsanitary shantytowns, working in the "informal" (black market) economy -- hardly a recipe for escaping the depredations of disease and other "natural checks" that Bailey claims urbanization has freed us from.

Bailey claims that urbanization (actually economic globalization, but he seems to have as much trouble as Rifkin in keeping his eye on the ostensible topic) has helped us to escape the vagaries of nature. For exampple, a famine in one place can be offset by movement of food from an area less hard-hit. This is one possible effect of globalization -- but to cite only this is to ignore the potential for globalization to create famine and poverty, by (for example) encouraging the easy movement of food out of areas with low purchasing power.

But in any event, the fact that people choose a certain way of life, and that it makes them better off, misses the point of the environmentalist critique. Had Bailey not dismissed the idea of "sustainability" as a subject for platitudes, he would perhaps have realized that the core of environmentalism is pointing out that what benefits us in the short-term is setting us up for problems down the road (and that what benefits one person ends up harming others).

Bailey claims that "nothing is more destructive of nature than poverty stricken subsistence farmers." This statement can perhaps be forgiven due to Rifkin's failure to mention climate change, but it bears pointing out that it is not "poverty stricken subsistence farmers" who are projected to double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And even on the question of habitat destruction, subsistence farmers vie for the title with industrialized logging and corporate plantations. Yet Bailey's solution is not to rectify the conditions that make subsistence farming a poverty-stricken lifestyle, but rather to hustle those farmers off to the big city and replace them with industrial plantations. He is here buying into one of the most potent environmentalist myths: the wilderness myth. He asserts that the only way to save nature is to keep people out of it. An intensive use of one fraction of the earth, he says, will allow us to leave the rest alone.

This "wall it off" solution is bad science, bad political economy, and unnecessary. It's bad science because it presumes that we're capable of creating a self-contained and carefully managed ecosystem, thus detaching the human habitat from the rest of the earth. Yet such a feat is clearly beyond us -- even industrial agriculture, whose efficiency Bailey extols, is only made possible by constant infusion of petrochemical fertilizers and poisons to prop up its dangerously impoverished ecology. And of course human habitat and wild nature share the same atmosphere.

Walling us off from nature is bad political economy, because it presumes that increasing efficiency will lead to using less. In reality, it would lead to using the same amount of resources, but getting more out of it, making us richer before we crash. Does Bailey -- who, remember, writes for a libertarian magazine -- really imagine that, absent major changes in our culture and economic structure, corporations and governments would simply allow 90% of the world's resources to go unused simply because the remaining 10% can provide a first-world-middle-class-in-2006 standard of living? Even the small amounts of protected land we already have are currently under sustained assault from those who would exploit their resources.

Luckily, walling off nature is also unnecessary, because we have another option -- the "reintegration" with nature that Rifkin advocates. Contrary to the earnest strawmen promoted by libertarians and corporatists, this does not mean a movement backwards to the middle ages (or completely away from urbanization). Rather, it means finding ways to use nature without destroying it (e.g. organic rather than industrial farming), and realigning our cultural and political-economic system to encourage such use. This is not to say that protected areas are not important, but rather to re-envision them as serving an integrated function in upholding the workings of the overall system, rather than as chunks of self-sufficient nature rescued from, and set away from, humanity.

Utilitarianism By The Scenic Route

Continuing to read Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights, I'm having trouble understanding why it's considered one of the classics of environmental ethics. Many of his arguments just don't seem to hold up.

One of the main themes of the book is to propose an alternative to utilitarian theories of animal "rights." But as far as I can tell, a bit of work with Occam's Razor would reduce his theory to utilitarianism at its core. Besides the strange equality-based objection I discussed in my previous post, Regan has two main issues with utilitarianism. First, he says that utilitarianism treats persons* as merely containers for welfare. So what's valuable is your welfare, not you yourself. Second, utilitarianism cannot justify a strict rule against harming others, since it's always possible that the factual circumstances will be such that harming another person would maximize utility.

Regan's alternative begins with a claimed denial of the container view. All persons, he says, have equal inherent value that is independent of how much welfare they contain. Our primary moral duty is to "respect" that inherent value. "Respecting" a person's inherent value prohibits treating them as solely a container for the welfare we seek to promote. Rather, "respecting" a person's inherent value consists in ... promoting their welfare. Stated in this blunt (albeit, so far as I can tell, accurate) fashion, Regan's postulation of inherent value has no practical effect. We get to the same result, but with an added rhetorical gambit that makes his theory sound nicer than his description of utilitarianism.

Turning to the question of strict rules against harming persons, Regan's theory also fails to make an improvement over utilitarianism. He (correctly) avoids trying to narrowly circumscribe what harms actually count as real harms in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of clashes between different persons' welfares. But in allowing situations in which a choice must be made between the welfares of persons, Regan's theory ends up once again as utilitarianism-by-the-scenic-route. A utilitarian says to the person who gets the short end of the stick "I'm reducing your welfare in order to make an improvement to the welfare of someone else." Whereas Regan says "I'm disrespecting your inherent value by reducing your welfare in order to respect the inherent value of someone else by making an improvement in their welfare." Once again, the concept of inherent value does no philosophical work (though it does a lot of rhetorical work), because respecting inherent value merely consists in promoting welfare.

Nevertheless, I do think the tendency of Regan's anti-container view to collapse into utilitarianism suggests the weakness of the "container" objection to utilitarianism. The container objection's plausibility rests on thinking of welfare as a substance (a la money) that exists independently of the container. But in fact welfare is a relational property, that is in part defined by the container. And for both Regan and utilitarians, what makes the container morally important is its ability to contain welfare. So respecting the welfare-holder and filling it with welfare are not really separate ideas.

This is not to say that Regan's theory is identical to utilitarianism -- they differ in two key respects, though these are not differences that allow his theory to evade the criticisms he makes of utilitarianism. One is their definition of welfare. Utilitarians of all stripes are united in adhering to a subjectivist account of welfare -- that is, what's good for a person is defined by that person's viewpoint, e.g. the preferences they express or the pleasure and pain they experience. But Regan proposes a partly objective view of welfare, in which it's possible to ask if what a person prefers or enjoys is in fact really in their interest (though it's unclear how one would go about finding an answer). The second big difference is the rule for dealing with conflicts among different persons' welfare. While, as noted above, Regan admits the necessity at times of sacrificing a person, he proposes to make such choices in accordance with a variety of priority rules rather than on the basis of a utilitarian maximization rule.

*I'm using "person" in the philosophical sense, by which both Regan and a utilitarian would count animals as persons.

Using Semantics to Maximize Utility

I thought I'd heard all of the basic arguments against utilitarianism, but reading Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights, I came across the most bizarre one I've seen yet*. He claims that there's an inconsistency between the principle of utility ("maximize utility") and the utilitarian principle of equality ("count equal utilities of different individuals equally"). He writes:

For the utility of counting A's and B's interests as equal can vary from case to case, even if their interests themselves do not. Thus, if utility is our guide, we are permitted to count the same interests as equal in one case and as unequal in another.

If I'm reading Regan right, what he's proposing is -- while perhaps technically feasible -- truly bizarre. To make an analogy, it's like saying that it's inconsistent to say both "buy the biggest house you can find" and "count equal numbers of square feet in different houses equally." So sure, you could end up buying a bungalow while claiming to have bought the biggest house by declaring that ten square feet of bungalow is worth 100 square feet of mansion. But that seems like using a definitional move to evsicerate the substance of the actual goal.

There is a certain plausibility to counting equal things unequally if the measurement in question does not completely exhaust the meaning of the goal. So in the house example, if by "bigness" we mean a feeling of spaciousness, then we might be justified in counting equal square footages unequally, since square footage is not the only thing that contributes to a feeling of spaciousness -- a house with light-colored walls, for example, will feel more spacious than an identical house with dark walls. One may be forgiven for making this kind of conclusion in the case of utilitarianism as Regan defines it, since he draws a verbal distinction between the "utility" that is being maximized and the "interests" that are being counted equally. However, in utilitarianism, the thing that is being counted equally between individuals and the thing that is to be maximized (regardless of what we choose to call them) are by definition identical.

An alternate reading of Regan's passage is that his complaint is simply that if A wants one thing and B does not, we might sometimes give A what he wants but other times give B what she wants because of the preferences of additional individuals (hence the overall utility of satisfying A vs B changes between the situations even though A and B themselves remain the same). For example, say in the first case C is also affected by our action (and his preferences align with A's), while in the second case C is absent but D is affected (and her preferences align with B's). It is true that utilitarianism would advocate such an "inconsistency" in treatment between A and B. But I fail to see how that violates any moral principle or even intuition. Nobody would say it's unfair that while my dad voted for Rick Santorum in his last two elections but I voted for the Democratic challenger both times, in 2000 my dad got his way but in 2006 I got my way** simply due to the fact that there were more other Santorum-supporters in the picture in 2000. The voting example should further illustrate that even when a different side wins, it's not because any individual's interests have been counted differently the second time. It's a matter of having a different total set of people whose interests must be balanced.

* Which is perhaps not surprising, since if it was any good, lots of other people would have repeated it in the two decades since Regan's book was published.
** I actually voted in Arizona this year, but this is what would have happened if I'd stayed in Pennsylvania.

They're Not Even Trying To Hide It Anymore

The EPA has sold out to industry:

EPA eases rules for industry In a move protested by lawmakers, residents and even the agency's own scientific advisers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has quadrupled the amount of toxic chemicals that companies can release into the environment without having to report how much they've emitted. ... "(The Toxics Release Inventory) makes all of your chemical usage available to the public and your neighbors and everyone who wants to know, so I'd say its pretty intrusive," said Jeff Homer, chairman of the environment, health and safety committee for the Arizona Association of Industries.

But having someone put poison in your lungs is not intrusive at all. It's funny how corporations get more rights than actual human beings.

Hollow Victory

Wow, it's a good thing the Democrats won the election, so that we can make sure that at least the House Energy Committee will be chaired by a car-worshipping climate change denialist who has a "D" after his name (and with a bonus streak of sexist troglodyte, too!).

"That's what hate does"

Some anti-marriage protesters were holding a rally in my old hometown of Worcester, so some pro-marriage counterprotesters showed up. My friend Sarah Loy was among them, and she decided to get up close to the anti-marriage podium with her sign. A nominal Christian by the name of Larry Cirignano wasn't too happy about that, so he pushed her to the ground.

Now Cirignano is claiming that Sarah is a professional actress who faked being pushed. That is a crock of santorum. I know of no reason to question Sarah's version of events. More tellingly, I can say with complete confidence that if she's a professional actress, then she's done an amazing job of hiding her move career from me over the past five years that I've known her. I'm really shocked at the shamelessness of Cirignano's claim. But perhaps I shouldn't be. The whole ideology of the anti-marriage movement is based on trying to portray a powerful and privileged class as victims.

Why More Than Half Of Us Are Above Average

Hugo Schwyzer mentions a survey that found that 94% of the faculty at the University of Nebraska consider themselves above average teachers. This resembles the oft-mentioned fact that most people consider themselves to be above-average drivers. These sorts of statistics are usually treated as self-evidently ridiculous -- after all, how can well over half of people be above average? But I think there's a rational explanation.

The apparent absurdity of the statistic depends on the assumption that being a good teacher or a good driver is a single, universal quality. If everyone is measured on the same scale, then yes, only half of us can be above average*. But things look much different if people define "good teacher" or "good driver" differently.

Take the "good driver" example. I consider myself to be an above-average driver**. And to me, being a good driver is defined by things such as "comes to a complete stop at stop signs" and "waits for a break in traffic before making a left turn." However, there is a large contingent of my fellow Arizonans who define good driving by such features as "goes as fast as they are physically capable of" and "doesn't bother with silly things like turn signals." Since those two definitions of "good driver" are not highly correlated, but people's definitions of "good driver" are highly correlated with their own driving habits, it's easy to find well over half of the population claiming to be a "good driver."

* Assume we're talking about medians here, since nearly everyone can be above the mean if the distribution is skewed enough.
** Not actually true, but let's assume it is for the sake of argument.

Deliberation and Ignorance

Fernando Teson charges that greater public deliberation in policymaking will -- contrary to the claims of much of the current social science literature -- lead to worse policy outcomes. This is, he says, because the public is ignorant about social theory. Teson's argument is a restatement in the context of social policy (e.g. taxation) of the standard technocratic argument with respect to policies relying on the natural sciences (e.g. pollution control). And it's wrong for the same reasons.

First, the public is not as ignorant as Teson thinks. Certainly the public has not mastered the social theories of the experts. But the public knows lots of things that the experts do not -- things about how policies and conditions materially impact them and interact with other aspects of their lives (the classic example is Brian Wynne's research on how post-Chernobyl British government policy hurt sheep farmers because it failed to account for how sheep farming is actually done). The public and the experts have complementary blind spots.

Second, the ignorance level of the public (and of the experts) is not fixed. Teson's argument may carry some weight with respect to holding referenda on policy issues. But that is clearly not what proponents of deliberation are proposing -- indeed, they are fierce critics of that kind of preference-aggregation model. Deliberation involves an intensive process of evidence examination and debate, set up in such a way as to give the deliberators responsibility for crafting policy. Effective deliberation is what happens in institutions like Community Advisory Groups and citizens' juries. Time after time, social scientists have documented laypeople's ability to master complex topics and make critical use of experts' input. In a world controlled by technocrats, it may be rational to be ignorant. But when one enters into a deliberative process, it becomes rational to understand the issues in detail -- and so people do.

Deliberation is not a panacea, and it's difficult to do it well. But I had hoped we had moved beyond objecting to it on the basis of public ignorance.

Who Owns Language?

There's some interesting discussion going on over the Mapuche tribe's suit against Microsoft, which asserts the tribe's sovereignty over its language (Mapudungan) and therefore denies Microsoft the right to produce versions of its software in Mapudungan.

This may be partly a case where a procedural violation -- the Mapuche were not consulted directly by Microsoft in the process of producing the Mapudungan versions of the software -- is being fought on the territory of the substantive outcome. But I think there's also something to the substantive case. (Indeed, here it's difficult to disentangle the two, since the Mapuche's objection seems to be not so much to the very idea of a Mapudungan version of Word as it is to Microsoft making a Mapudungan version of Word.)

Defenders of Microsoft make both deontological and consequentialist claims. Deontologically, they point out that the idea of group ownership of language is absurd within our Western system. The usual rebuttal is to argue that rights (or at least some rights, of which property rights would be the clearest case) are culturally relative. I'm more interested here in the consequentialist case* -- how does Microsoft making a Mapudungan version of Word hurt the Mapuche? Or more generally, how does an outsider's use of an element of a culture harm insiders?

My answer depends on three main concepts: structuration, diversity of values, and power. Structuration refers to the fact that social institutions evolve through use. A language is thus not a fixed object that can be picked up, used, and put back the way it was. The popular descriptivist position in linguistics -- words and grammatical structures mean whatever people use them to mean -- is a correct structurationist position**. By diversity of values, I mean that different people have different ideas about what society should be like. Ceteris paribus, it's better for a given person's values to be realized than not. One's pursuit of those values will be constrained by the available institutions, but they will also shape how one uses those institutions, and hence what those institutions look like when one is done with them.

Finally, power refers to the fact that different people and groups have different abilities to reshape institutions in accordance with their use of them. Problems arise when inequalities of power align with (real or potential) differences in values. The minority (in power, and often numerically as well) then finds their ability to achieve their values limited, because they have limited influence over the social instutions available to them. This is a problem even when the difference is merely numerical -- while it may be fair in each instance taken in isolation for the larger group to get its way, when taken as a whole a persistent minority will end up getting outvoted every time. The solution here is autonomy -- to separate the institutions used by the majority and the minority, so that the majority's use of their version does not affect the version used by the minority. This goes some way toward explaining the emergence of subcultures and the fierce defense of existing cultural diversity.

Thus, when Microsoft makes a Spanish version of Word, it's little threat to most of the Spanish-speaking community for two reasons. On the one hand, Microsoft's values with respect to the Spanish language are not likely to be that divergent from those of most Spanish-speakers. Second, Microsoft's power vis-a-vis the 400 million Spanish speakers is comparatively limited -- indeed, Microsoft is largely at the mercy of the general public's usage and the prounouncements of Spanish grammarians. But both of those factors tilt against the Mapuche. It's far more likely that Microsoft will have different values from the Mapuche, and it's reasonable for an oppressed group to be especially suspicious of one of the world's biggest corporations on this count. And Microsoft's power to define Mapudungan is greatly exaggerated vis-a-vis a small and disempowered group like the Mapuche. Thus group rights to language sovereignty (and by similar arguments, rights to sovereignty over other cultural products) are absurd in the case of "big" languages like English and Spanish, but may be a legitimate defense mechanism in the case of "small" languages like Mapudungan.

Bringing the question of power into the discussion, however, raises yet another difficult problem -- establishing the legitimacy of the Mapuche's desire to limit outsiders' use of their language. We want to let the Mapuche decide when and how their language may be used, rather than presume to decide on their behalf what would be good for them. But this presents us with a Scylla and Charybdis situation. On the one hand, in recognition of our own limited understanding of the situation and our disproportionate power, we want to avoid an imperialistic use of our own ideals of legitimacy to judge claims made by Mapuche individuals or groups. But on the other hand, we also want to avoid a naive assumption that Mapuche views on this issue are internally uncontested or that we can treat the traditional leadership of the tribe as legitimately speaking for everyone (assuming we can even rely on our own understanding of what that traditional distribution of authority is).

*Since I think any assertion of a right must have an underlying consequentialist justification, though of course the relativistic argument could be used to deny the relevance of the sort of utilitarianism I'll apply.

**Though this should not be taken to the extreme of denying the validity of debate over the proper use of language. While Platonic sorts of arguments about the transcendental correctness of certain meanings are invalid, pragmatic arguments -- "we should use these words in this way because it allows us to make certain useful distinctions" -- are still fine. Indeed, such pragmatic arguments merely articulate what structuration tells us will be happening inevitably.

Scrooge Is Still A Bad Guy

Ilya Somin argues that rather than criticizing him for being a miser, we should praise Ebeneezer Scrooge for being an environmentalist. After all, in his miserliness -- skimping on coal and candles and food -- he limited his use of the world's resources.

This defense, I think, misses the point by focusing too much on Scrooge's personal habits. As a miser, Scrooge spent little money on himself as well as little money on others. The main moral focus of criticism of Scrooge is his miserliness toward others, particularly the Cratchit family. He not only paid Bob Cratchit too little and made him work in poor conditions, but he was also nasty for the sake of nastiness, snapping at people and going out of his way to disparage their holiday spirit.

Yet there is no necessary connection between Scrooge's personal frugality and his meanness toward others. He could easily continue living in a cold, dark house, eating nothing but gruel, while paying Bob Cratchit a living wage and being pleasant to him.

Problems With Transpersonal Ecology

Deep Ecology argues for a transpersonal orientation -- in brief, expanding one's sense of self such that one identifies with all other things in the universe*. A transpersonal orientation is said to imply two consequences: first, that one will care for the environment, and second, that morality in the sense of rules for action will be superfluous. I think both claims are mistaken.

Deep Ecologists argue that once you identify with the environment, you would no more destroy it than you would chop off your own hand. Rebuttals on this point tend to focus on situations where it would be rational to "harm" one's own self, e.g. getting a tattoo. But I think a more serious objection comes from the other end of the self-care spectrum -- the moral permissibility, and even desirability, of self-improvement. While things like plastic surgery are controversial, we clearly recognize the virtue of moderate exercise, practicing new skills, or education. Yet the idea of improving our nature-self would run counter to the kind of policy prescriptions that Deep Ecologists advocate. Indeed, the idea that nature is raw and wild and must be improved by humans is resoundly criticized by Deep Ecologists and other environmentalists. Yet that is exactly what a transpersonal orientation seems to entail, unless we graft on the questionable empirical claim that the world outside our skin is already close to perfect and therefore there's no room to improve it. In short, Hugo Schwyzer would make the most anti-environmental Deep Ecologist ever.

There is also a surface plausibility to the idea that identification with nature will lead us to spontaneously care for it, and that therefore rigid rules instructing us to care for nature become obsolete. The problem here is framing the role of moral rules as strictly restraints on selfish impulses**. Certainly rules-as-constraints are made superfluous by a desire to pursue the prescribed ends for their own sake. However, rules also act as guides. That is, they help us to overcome uncertainty and ignorance as well as selfishness and weakness of will. One could have the purest desire to care for another being, yet still be stumped (or worse, falsely confident) as to what acts would constitute care. Unless identification with the universe somehow also brings extensive empirical knowledge (an obviously untenable assumption), it can't make morality superfluous.

* This is in contrast to ordinary ecocentrism, in which nonhuman entities are to be protected as -- and indeed, precisely because they are -- independent beings.
** A very Enlightenment way of framing the issue, I might add.

Utilitarianism and The Lesser of Two Evils

Vegankid has a post arguing that if veganism is a philosophy rather than a lifestyle, then the principles underlying it entail concern for oppressed humans as well. But in the process of making this quite accurate point, she makes some inaccurate comments about utilitarianism. She writes:

Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, has been on my shit list for some time now. But now this ethics professor and “founding father of modern animal liberation” is officially on my list of people to be forgotten. In a recent interview, Singer argued that “HIV research would be more useful if it were carried out on brain-damaged humans rather than chimps.” If you are familiar with Singer’s academic work, such a statement will come as no surprise. It is not so much because Singer is a misanthrope (as it would seem at first glance), but because he approaches ethics from a utilitarian standpoint (choosing the lesser of two evils). It is the same reason why Singer recently gave his approval on a new research lab that has been targeted by animal rights organizations for its subjection of monkeys to Parkinson’s Disease. This provides a good example of why veganism must be based on core principles. Otherwise, false notions of utilitarianism allow us to become ethically bankrupt and veganism means nothing. Once again, veganism becomes relegated to the dinner table and self-congratulatory practices of guilt relief. If, however, veganism is based on a notion of compassion, we could no more sentence a persyn with a mental disability to a life of torture than we could a monkey (and vice versa). In fact, if we are to base our veganism on compassion and non-violence, then the causes of disability rights, workers rights, hell, humyn liberation as a whole becomes an extension of veganism.

First, utilitarianism is not opposed to "core principles," and adhering to a utilitarian justification does not make one's actions "mean nothing." And it certainly doesn't justify treating veganism as a mere exercise in "guilt relief." Utilitarianism is a core principle, a foundational-level basis for ethics. It may be the wrong core principle, but it's clearly in the class of prima facie candidates. And utilitarianism clearly directs us to reach out beyond our personal habits and fight for the disabled, workers, and other oppressed people -- mere personal guilt relief is in fact not very utilitarian. Indeed, utilitarianism does not even conflict with one of vegankid's stated core principles, compassion*. The very basis of utilitarianism is to show compassion for, and attempt to alleviate, the suffering of any being that one can meaningfully have compassion for.

The real issue, I think, is not so much the fundamental basis of utilitarianism, but rather how a utilitarian's compassion is expressed -- the maximizing rule, and the particular conclusions Peter Singer draws. As I see it, the concerns raised by vegankid and other anti-utilitarians who make similar arguments are either positive points about utilitarianism, or failings by Peter Singer.

Vegankid says that utilitarianism requires "choosing the lesser of two evils." This is true, and it's a good thing. Utilitarianism says that when the only possible outcomes are evil, and one's actions can affect which will happen, we are obligated to favor the lesser evil. The alternative is to invoke the act-omission distinction and attempt (insofar as it's actually possible) not to influence the decision one way or another. This alternative is more expressive of compassion, in that a person choosing it makes a show of his or her compassion by refusing to actively endorse any evil. However, I think choosing the lesser of two evils is actually the more compassionate act, because it by definition leads to the least suffering possible. The act-omission distinction, on the other hand, puts a premium on self-righteousness -- "I'm not responsible for that evil."

That being said, there's a serious problem with people who take a utilitarian outlook thinking that our choice is between two evils when it's not. In philosophical thought experiements, your menu of options is given by the premises of the question. But real life is far more complex. There is a lot more room than people realize for finding creative non-evil options. However, a willingness to accept the lesser of two evils when necessary can sometimes turn into a lack of motivation to seek additional non-evil possibilities.

Indeed, some people -- Peter Singer included -- go from being willing to choose the lesser evil to being happy about choosing the lesser evil. While excessive self-flagellation is unproductive, we can never forget that the lesser of two evils is still evil, and still produces suffering, which is a bad thing despite its unavoidability. Someone who is too blase about choosing the lesser evil communicates -- to her- or himself as well as to the victim and bystanders -- a lack of compassion for the choice's evil. It is thus incompatible with the utilitarian directive to show full and equal compassion for all.

At times Singer seems to go even further, seeking out and obessing over "lesser of two evil" situations rather than cases where there's a good option. He especially likes cases where -- as vegankid points out about the testing on a monkey versus a human -- one choice is at best only very marginally less evil than the other. This isn't an entirely surprising trait to find in a philosophy professor, but it's not an admirable one to have in public life. There is so much needless oppression in the world that social justice movements won't have to worry over the hard choices for quite some time.

*Her other princple, nonviolence, is not so easily meshed with utilitarianism -- while I think a good utilitarian would oppose violence in nearly all cases, that conclusion is partially dependent on empirical facts and thus there could be situations in which utilitarianism would entail accepting violence.

Beetles and Fire

This would be very interesting if it's true (I haven't had a chance to look at the actual study yet), since it runs so much against the conventional wisdom:

Study: Beetles may reduce wildfire risk The infestation of tree-killing bugs sweeping through millions of acres of forests in the West might help prevent wildfires rather than fuel them as feared, according to a new study. The outbreak of beetles that burrow under the bark, eventually killing the tree, might reduce wildfire risk by naturally thinning forests, according to the report released Tuesday by researchers from Colorado State University, the University of Colorado and the University of Idaho.

But I really hope the AP's contrarian viewpoint is taken out of context, because it's so ridiculous:

Wayne Shepperd is a silviculturist, an expert in the care and development of forests, with the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins. He said he disagrees with the report's thrust, calling it "selective science." "This tends to support the no-management alternative," he said. "I would submit there are valid situations where well-planned management can maintain the forests how we want."

Not having read the actual study yet, I can't vouch for the policy implications that the authors claim. But no responsible interpretation of the report's conclusions would hold that it supports a blanket hands-off policy. Indeed, I've yet to meet anyone knowledgeable about fire who would disagree with Shepperd's last sentence. The question that this study speaks to is when, how, and for what purpose we implement "well-planned management."

It is true that revising our view of the effects of beetle infestations would remove a major argument in the arsenal of the extreme hands-on management faction that promotes large-scale logging in the name of fire safety. Perhaps that's the real issue -- those with a commitment to logging find it in their interest to create a false dichotomy between hands-on and hands-off management, obscuring the fact that there is a great range (qualitatively and quantitatively) of hands-on policies.