Environmental Ethics

One important issue in environmental ethics, brought to the fore of our social consciousness by the BP oil spill, is the question of responsibility in response to disasters. This question can be asked in a different ways. First, one could focus on who is to blame and argue that those people have the duty to repair their disaster. Or, one could focus on the government as an agency with a duty to protect its citizens. Examples of these lines of thought are presented in the following articles:

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/02/opinion/la-ed-bp-20100602

This opinion piece from the LA Times argues that the government bears a responsibility to solve the crisis in order to protect its citizens from harm. The editorial board obviously believes that the duty of response lies on government in such large scale disasters, even though BP might be at fault for the spill itself. They obviously believe the government is the party with the most responsibility (after the scale of the disaster was known) for clean-up and relief because the citizens depend on its protection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/us/25liability.html?scp=6&sq=bp%20responsibility&st=cse

This story brings to light the legal issues of liability, showing that, according to our current system of law, BP may only be responsible for a limited financial amount. The other companies involved--Anadarko, Mitsui, and Transocean--have all tried to place legal liability on BP or limit their own. Andarko claims BP was “gross[ly] negligent,” which would remove their own liability. Mitusi promised all of their revenues would go to relief efforts, which this article suggests may be in an effort to “shield it[self] from liability.” And Transocean claims, simply, that BP is contractually obligated to assume all liability for pollution and contamination by their drilling agreement. The legal battle this article lays out displays the implicit ideas of responsibility and blame acting in our legal system right now. We should investigate these ideas by asking whether or liability should be reliant on who is blame, or if it is determined by who profits from the risk, or if it can be determined by contracts. This is further explored in the issue of shareholder blame, as discussed here:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/can-the-u-s-punish-bps-shareholders/

The various views offered in this piece all discuss whether or not the shareholders of BP, the legal owners and those who profit from BP's activities can be held financially responsible for the spill. The arguments offered vary widely. One writer claims that shareholders risk their investments when they buy stock, and can therefore be penalized by the loss of those investments when the company’s actions lead to a disaster. Another claims that we cannot punish BP by more than the $75 million they are limited to paying by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, even though the cost of clean-up will be far greater, because doing so would do too much damage to the rule of law. Another argues that not paying dividends to its shareholders would demonstrate BP’s good intent to the public. Another asserts that BP should pay those harmed by the spill because they have an ethical duty to do so. All of these arguments, as well as the rest in the piece, demonstrate various ideas on responsibility. We must ask ourselves whether or not those who caused the disaster should be made to undertake the response, or if those who profit from the enterprise, such as the shareholders, are the ones who are responsible for that effort. Or, we must decide whether the government’s duty to protect its citizens places the burden of response of it, and the issue of blame is only secondary, with no impact on how the clean-up is done. The way in which we respond to the BP oil spill demonstrates our thinking on these issues.

Opt-Out Organ Donation?

The New York State Assembly is considering a radical new policy regarding organ donation in an effort address the needs of the more than 8,000 New Yorkers in need of life-saving organs: make everyone an organ donor unless they explicitly opt out.

The new "presumed consent" law would automatically enroll everyone who applies for a driver license into the state's organ and tissue donation registry unless the applicant declines to be registered. Read the actual bill here.

There are a number of interesting questions here, not the least of which involves the significant paternalistic overtones of the proposed policy. Then there are questions of socio-economic equity: it is easy to think that those with poorer and/or less-educated backgrounds will be less likely to know about opting out and therefore less able to do so.

Regardless of whether this bill makes it to law, it is sure to raise consciousness about the severe need for donor organs, so it's pleasing to see both supporters and detractors discussing ways to increase organ donation.

The Philosopher's Stone

NYTimes.com has launched a feature focused entirely on philosophy. It's in their "Opinionator" section along with Stanley Fish, Olivia Judson, and Robert Wright. Simon Critchley is to be the editor of The Stone.

Baby Justice

Paul Bloom writes about the moral judgments babies make.

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.

But the morality babies have is, according to Bloom, shot through with in-group preferences.

... 3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own groups in their attitudes and their actions...

And, as Blooms says:

The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology.

So:

The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Nixon for The New York Times

"Second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate."

Here's the New York Times article.

A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.

Photo credit: Bryce Vickmark for the New York Times

More Philosophy on TV!

Moral philosopher Jonathan Dancy on Craig Ferguson's show. If it's not fitting then watch it on youtube.

The Economist Reports on Survey of Philosophers

Anthony Gottlieb at the Economist reports on PhilPapers.org's survey of philosopher's philosophical positions and beliefs.

With regards to aesthetics and ethics:

By a fairly narrow margin, today’s philosophers believe that judgments of artistic value are not merely matters of individual taste: 41% said aesthetic values are objective, 34% say subjective, and a quarter gave some other answer. They were not asked directly whether moral values are objective, but the responses to related questions suggest that most philosophers believe they are. Some 56% incline towards “moral realism”, which has no precise definition but implies that ethical questions have objectively right (and wrong) answers, and nearly two-thirds endorsed moral “cognitivism”, which suggests that they believe there are moral facts or truths.

And:

When asked which dead philosopher they most identified with, a clear winner emerged, with 21% of the votes: David Hume, the 18th-century thinker, historian, sceptic and agnostic who was a close friend of the economist Adam Smith. Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein took second, third and fourth places. The next six spots went to philosophers from the 20th century, most recently Donald Davidson, an American who died in 2003. Plato made 13th place and Socrates limped in at 21st.

Science and Human Values

Sam Harris at TED talks about science and human values.

I am going to speak today about the relation between science and human values. Now, it is generally understood that questions of morality, questions about good and evil and right and wrong, are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And consequently, most people... think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life, questions like: "What is worth living for?", "What is worth dying for?" and "What constitutes a good life?". I am going to argue that this is an illusion - that the separation between science and human values is an illusion and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.

Art Evolved Like Ethics Did and Vice Versa

At the USA Today there's an article about the evolution of morality. The journalist, Cathy Lynn Grossman, attended the....

Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion where the ideas are flying among scientists, theologians, philosophers and the reporters who cover them.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala...

... traced humanity's evolutionary development and linked the capacity for ethics to advanced intelligence, the development of language and the unique-to-humans concept of self-awareness.

He thinks ethics -- which can also exist apart from religion in his view -- evolved at the same time as aesthetics, the awareness of beauty. Art and aesthetics, like human altruism, require value judgments and the ability to compare.

Hitchens Revises the Ten Commandments

If the video doesn't seem to fit try watching it directly at YouTube.

The Vanity Fair article.

Who Do You Think Possesses 'Moral Authority' in America?

The question, "Who Do You Think Possesses 'Moral Authority' in America?" is being considered on a popular blog at The Atlantic magazine edited by Andrew Sullivan, with a hat tip to Mark Kleiman.

The excerpt below gives an idea of what they are taking "moral authority" to mean.

“Who in contemporary America has moral authority?”... I took this to mean both “moral authority you are prepared to accept” and “enough public standing to be an actual force....”

who

...has the intellectual force, the moral clarity, and the nerve...

but does not lack the necessary...

... notoriety, nor the impulse to seek it out... I could come up with only one name: Barack Obama. Could it really be true that there is no other political leader, journalist, academic, religious figure, business leader, trade unionist currently active with the stature to summon people to action based on moral authority as opposed to self-interest?

It seems to me that the field wasn’t always so empty.

And then he lists:
Martin Luther King Jr.
Adlai Stevenson
Edward R. Murrow
Walter Cronkite


So, who do you think has moral authority today?

Please post your nominations in the comments section. Let's keep it to living persons.

Author of "Rediscovering Values" Rev. Jim Wallis

Transcript.

Morality and Mortgages

Last week in the New York Times, Roger Lowenstein asked whether there are moral implications of failing to pay one's mortgage.

C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association... said... homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.”

Indeed it is sometimes thought to be a moral obligation to live up to your end of a contract you've signed; and maybe therefore people should not walk away from their mortgages. And yet, as Lowenstein points out, corporations will walk away from their debts if it can be calculated the economically rational thing to do.

... the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with.

What do readers of the Parr Center blog, Ethics in the News, think?

Matthew Yglesias (a Harvard philosophy B.A.) at Think Progress writes:

[Imagine] my friend says he wants to meet for a drink at 8PM, and I say “are you going to show up 15 minutes late as usual?” Then he says “No way. If I’m late, drinks are on me.” [If] he shows up 20 minutes late, but follows through on his promise to pay the tab I think it’s fair to say that he’s still open to moral criticism. Similarly, a person who drives all around town blocking fire hydrants is doing something wrong even if he willingly pays all applicable fines in a prompt manner.

While this is a nice example, Yglesias shows that there is a difference:

... my mortgage is an agreement I’ve made with Bank of America which is a publicly traded for-profit corporation. Companies like that, unlike people ... or other kinds of institutions, don’t recognize any kind of goals other than monetary ones. Under the circumstances, any relationship you might have with Bank of America is a purely transactional, purely commercial one and if you treat it as anything other than that you’re being a sucker.

... families that think it serves their interests to default on mortgage payments shouldn’t feel morally obligated to avoid default.

Comments?

The Ethics of Food

Here's an interesting New York Times piece called
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too:

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Read it for yourself. In an earlier New York Times piece, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued that...

...people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” ... avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,”... [an] “eternal Treblinka.”

These articles are a mix of "is" and "ought". By "is" I mean the articles describe facts and make empirical claims about the nature of plants and animals that we may not have thought about before. Just what we ought to do in light of this information is a problem for philosophical ethics and ethical reasoning.

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

February 23rd, 2010 the Parr Center for Ethics is conducting a panel discussion:

How Should We Eat? Policy and Ethics. Factory farms. Immigrant labor. Sustainability. Food democracy. World Hunger. Access. Environmental impacts. Nutrition. Genetic modification. Organic vs. Conventional. How do we navigate the food industry and make ethical choices about our food consumption? How do we prioritize our ethical concerns? Join a panel of food experts to discuss these questions and determine the issues at stake. This event is free and open to the public. Location: TBA, 6:30 pm.