Human equality means either that any two humans have the same value for some purpose or else that they represent the same object with respect to that purpose.
Thus in cutting up a cake, human equality could mean giving an equal share to all the humans present. Alternatively, it could mean that, with respect to the actual cutting and sharing of the cake, it is a matter of indifference as to which human cuts the cake. Thus if the cake cutting procedure has the following protocol- 'the order in which people cut out the slice they want must be the reverse of the order in which slices of the cut cake are selected'- then there is a different sort of equality which has been asserted which, under certain ideal circumstances, would yield the same outcome.
Human life consists of far more complex sharing arrangements than cutting up a tangible cake. It is tempting to say that some value inheres in every human being and that this value attracts the good things in the world. By equalising this value, surely all human beings will get an equal share in those good things?
The answer to this question is that value has no power to attract what is good. Rather, it may attract what seeks to loot or defile it. It is sheer magical thinking to assert that equalising the notional value of human beings will result in equalising the good they receive in this world. Only an occassionalist God could work this miracle, but in that case even the assertion by which notional value was equalised was His doing, not our own.
The objection might be made that Just Institutions could do the work of an Occassionalist god. However, as Ralf Dahrendorf quipped, men are equal before the Law, not after it. I suppose, one way out would be what the Greeks called 'antidosis' where a person charged with a liturgical duty might ask to swap estates with some other named party. This is rather like the solution to the cake cutting problem where the one who slices the cake gets the last pick. However, the same purpose would be served by a stare decisis judicial process such that Judges themselves would be bound by the Law they hand down. Here, 'equality' means substitutability without changing the outcome. Thus a ratio concerning Richard Roe uttered by Justice John Doe would, if the Judge commits the same crime as Roe, apply equally to him. A little thought will show that the judicial process is not concerned with the value of actual human beings- Roe may be worthless and Doe a Saint- but rather with a notional value arising out of the judicial process. It is a separate matter that equitable considerations or a statutory provision for leniency alters the quantum of punishment arising out of the same judgment.
Since judicial processes only arise when some human takes up a matter as justiciable, it can't be the case that institutionalised Justice, by itself, endows actual human beings with equal value. Rather it does so only with respect to its own protocol bound judicial processes. Still, we may hope that if access to Justice is cheap then Schelling focal solutions to coordination or concurrency or cake cutting problems will approach some ideal of equality we might have. The problem here is that the existence of a coordination game militates for hedging on discoordination games if Knightian Uncertainty obtains. This in turn means that arbitrageurs gain a niche and rent contestation is likely to occur in a manner which would always threaten to reduce effective equality.
In view of this scandal- which Economic research over the last four decades has more and more clearly delineated- it is tempting for philosophers to espouse an 'intrinsic value' type fallacy and to engage in hand waving pi jaw.
This, it seems, is what has happened with Prof. Jeremy Waldron, who deserves praise for resisting the mania for judicial review, but who has now written a book on Human Equality which, on the evidence of Amia Srinivasan's comments in the NYRB, appears wholly fallacious, indeed mischievously so.
Srinivasan, who fails to spot Waldron's fundamental fallacy, adopts it in a ludicrous manner. It is good to see that young philosophers can be sillier than the old.
Let us now savour her essay- (my comments are in bold)
A helpful way of thinking about basic equality, Waldron says, is that it denies that there are fundamental differences of kind between humans.How is this helpful? There are no fundamental differences of kind between integers yet some are bigger than others. By contrast, there are fundamental differences of kind between the microwave ready-meals in my freezer- one is 'Indian', the other is 'Chinese', a third is 'Italian' and so forth. Yet they all taste the same and are equal in terms of the number of calories they contain.
Integers are of the same kind but not equal to each other. My calorie controlled ready meals- designed to give me the illusion of gastronomic cosmopolitanism- are different in kind but equal in every other way for my purposes or those of their vendor.
There is no reason why equality should be based on some supposed homogeneity. The Law may grant legal personality- and thus an equal status with respect to some due process or Hohfeldian bundle of rights- to a Corporation or even, in India, to a God. No great scandal arises thereby.
Equality is either a purely ontological postulate or it is a Jurisprudential program embodied in a widening range of justiciable Hohfeldian rights and access to due process remedies.
While there are humans in different conditions—children and adults, the married and unmarried, citizens and aliens—there are not humans of different sorts, demanding fundamentally different forms of moral attention.How do we know they are not of different sorts? Suppose my neighbour is discovered to be a humanoid alien from the Planet X, whose ancestors settled here and underwent gene therapy so as to appear indistinguishable from the rest of us, would it really be the case that he would cease to enjoy the protection of the law? Would he suddenly become our inferior?
Consider what sort of precedent would be set if we decided this humanoid alien was not our equal. A lot of people would try to wriggle out of their contractual obligations or criminal convictions by arguing that the injured party was, to their knowledge, not human.
Of course much turns on what we mean by “fundamentally” here. Clearly, the particular vulnerability of children means that they demand certain kinds of moral treatment that adults do not. More controversially, we might think that distinguishing between citizens and aliens involves treating some humans as if they were more deserving of our moral consideration than others. (How much of a consolation is it to tell a Syrian refugee that, while the border is closed to her, we are all created equal?)The word 'fundamentally', as used by Waldron, is either mere hand waving or it means that Corporations or Indian Gods or other entities with legal personality, which are of a different kind to human beings, ought not to stand in a relationship of equality with us in terms of due process or justiciability.
But Waldron thinks that in neither case are we drawing fundamental distinctions of kind between humans: being a child or an alien is (in principle) a contingent condition, one that justifies different forms of moral treatment, but that does not speak of fundamental differences in moral worth.So, Waldron says there are no fundamental differences in moral worth but this does not matter in the slightest. We must treat people differently anyway. So, fundamentally, this equality of moral worth is utterly worthless. It changes nothing.
Or, to put it another way, insofar as our differential treatment of children and adults, or citizens and aliens, is justified, it is only because we can show how it is mandated by a principle that applies equally to everyone, including children and aliens.But we can always find a principle that will mandate any action no matter how outrageous by saying we would apply it equally to everyone. I may kill and eat your children on the principle that all children should be killed and eaten. You may point out that I have spared my own obese offspring. My reply is that I will get round to eating them eventually.
So what kind of “fundamental” distinction between humans does a commitment to basic equality rule out? According to Waldron it is the sort of distinction that has historically been drawn between free men and natural slaves, civilized people and barbarians, noblemen and serfs, white people and black people, and men and women. On the one side of each of these divides we have people who have been taken to simply count more or be worth more, who have been thought to demand a moral consideration and respect that would be simply inappropriate if shown to those on the other side.History shows that it has always been perfectly possible to believe no fundamental distinctions between humans, or indeed any sentient beings, exist while also practicing slavery, misogyny, xenophobia, untouchability, and so on.
A commitment to 'basic equality' is perfectly compatible with the nomenklatura living high on the hog while the proletariat, whose supposed Dictatorship they enforce, quietly starves.
Waldron says that we, thankfully, do not draw such distinctions anymore.Why did we phase out such distinctions? The answer is that they imposed large dynamic costs and deadweight losses on the economy. The thing wasn't worth doing. We saved money by getting rid of these distinctions and denying tenure to the sort of savant who was wont to pontificate about their Divine origin.
(The recent rise of right-wing nationalism in the United States and Europe, however, suggests we should not be too optimistic about how encompassing this “we” really is.)Why? Amia Srinivasan is of Indian origin. India, like other Developing countries, discourages illegal migration and accords superior rights and entitlements to its own citizens as compared to those who may be merely domiciled there. Thus, certain types of land and certain offices of influence can only be held by Indian citizens.
Or, rather, we no longer draw distinctions of fundamental worth among humans.Really? How is it that Obama had to get the permission of the National Security Council to kill al-Awlaki, who was an American citizen and thus entitled to due process, but did not need any such permission to kill Osama? It appears that we do draw distinctions of fundamental worth among humans if there is a vinculum juris, a bond of law, enforceable against us.
For most of us do draw a fundamental distinction in worth between humans and nonhuman animals: while we cannot treat animals any which way, they are not generally thought to be our fundamental equals.We treat some animals very well just as we treat some other humans very well. In general we prefer to injure another human rather than suffer him to injure an animal we are fond off.
Proponents of this view often say that humans are possessed of a “dignity” lacked by nonhuman animals.But this view does not correspond to the facts. We are certainly entitled to ascribe dignity to some pedo getting his rectum wrecked in prison. But why stop there? Let us also speak of the dignity of the young bicyclist who fell under the wheels of a bus and who screamed and screamed as her entrails were smeared over quarter of a mile of motorway. That was a very dignified way to go.
What about the lady on the Graham Norton show who confessed that she had come home in a drunken state, taken off her clothes and then crawled to the loo to vomit. Her dog, seeing her naked rump, mounted her. This wasn't humiliating for her at all. She was human and thus had great dignity. It was the dog who looked a fool.
They endorse not only the thesis that Waldron calls “continuous equality,” that there are no differences in fundamental moral worth among humans, but also the thesis of “distinctive equality,” that there really are such differences between humans and nonhuman animals.Neither humans nor animals greatly care about what some silly Professor says about 'fundamental worth'. The thing is fundamentally worthless.
Waldron is a believer in not just continuous but also distinctive equality: all humans count equally, and they count significantly more than animals. He does not propose to offer a proof of either claim. Only someone who is already committed to basic equality, Waldron says, will find what he has to say about it persuasive.So, he is only interested in preaching to the choir. But, if I come along and say 'all humans count equally because my neighbor's cat told me so', will my argument be equally persuasive? This is the crux of the matter when it comes to persuasive speech. What additional baggage is one getting saddled with? We know very well that the person who starts talking about Equality or Justice or Universal Peace will turn out to be recruiting for some cult or cabal or else ultimately reveal himself as a virtue signalling windbag championing some fashionable nostrum du jour which, if adopted, is bound to work a great mischief upon the commonwealth.
For the opponent of basic equality will invariably see the differences between humans—in intelligence, ability, race, sex, character, culture—as justifying different kinds of moral concern.Why bother opposing something entirely vacuous? Who in their right mind is going to stand up and say 'Down with Equality', 'We demand Injustice', 'Hate thy Neighbour' and so forth?
Why pretend any such people exist? What is the point of telling so stupid a lie?
For example, a sexist will see the differences between men and women as legitimate grounds for excluding women from various social and political goods.While still canting on about the 'basic equality' of the various genders.
Only the egalitarian will be able to recognize these differences as mere differences.Nonsense! An elitist seeking to maximise economic output would arrive at the same conclusion and what's more put in place a mechanism to reduce exclusion so as to improve allocative efficiency.
Seeing humans as equal, we might say, requires us to first believe in their equality, rather than the other way around.Why might we say that? Seeing Spiderman as Wonderwoman does not require us to first believe anything at all. A hypnotist could plant this suggestion in our minds. Alternatively, we could be subjected to some type of conditioning so that every time we see the gorgeous Gal Gadot, we think we are looking at a skinny dude wearing our kid's pajamas.
No beliefs are involved in seeing something as something else unless the belief also caused us to condition or hypnotise ourselves in a particular way.
Still, Waldron proposes to “bolster” our antecedent commitment to basic equality, first by showing that it guides our political decision-making in substantive and demanding ways, and second by explaining how it is grounded in certain facts about the kinds of creatures we humans are.Why would this 'bolster' an antecedent commitment? Nobody thinks our political decision-making is rightly guided at the moment. Moreover, both Biology and History tells us we are the kind of creatures who are wholly unconstrained by any notion of 'basic equality' which is why human societies are highly diverse across space and time.
Showing that basic equality makes serious demands on our politics is important if Waldron is going to answer the skeptic’s accusation that acknowledging the principle of “basic equality” does little to limit real, material inequality. One straightforward way of refuting this charge is to show that a genuine commitment to basic equality severely constrains the permissible political arrangements in a society—for example, by requiring an equal distribution of goods and benefits, or a distribution according to need, or a strict, state-enforced ceiling on material and social inequality. If so, then the dramatic economic and social inequality we witness today is inconsistent with our commitment to basic equality—and defenders of gross social or material inequality who say they are committed to basic equality would turn out to be mistaken.We know that there is no Society anywhere, or which existed at any time, where the phrase 'permissible political arrangements' meant anything at all. Why? There is no supernatural force which permits or forbids things. That is why Constitutions don't matter. They can be interpreted any which way. or be abrogated in whole or in part, or otherwise simply disregarded.
There is no point pretending otherwise.
But Waldron does not take this route. Instead he says that a genuine commitment to basic equality is compatible with various political arrangements regarding distribution, entitlements, and rights. This is because, in Waldron’s view, basic equality is not a first-order moral principle—a principle we can apply directly to questions about how to treat one another—but instead a second-order principle that constrains how we must apply any particular first-order moral principle. Basic equality tells us that, when it comes to applying the principles of utilitarianism, or libertarianism, or socialism, we must do so in a way that is disciplined by the logic, as Bentham said, of “everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.”In which case Utilitarianism will never be implemented. Bentham's Social Choice rule is either Dictatorial (in which case at least one person's vote counts for more than that of others) or can only be applied in a Society where there are only two choices.
If we are making decisions on the basis of a utilitarian calculus, we cannot discount the happiness of some people while weighing the happiness of others. If we are allocating resources according to need, we cannot, consistent with basic equality, count one person’s needs as greater than another person’s.Nonsense! A utilitarian calculus must have some system of weighting to account for dynamic effects. The need of a ninety year old for medical treatment which might prolong her life by a month should get less weighting than a similar need on the part of a nine year old whose life span might be increased by eighty years. The sort of actuarial calculation which must be made for this sort of calculus yields, as the dual of its constrained optimization, 'shadow prices' which serve as a weighting index.
This characterization of basic equality as a second-order principle, compatible with various sorts of political arrangements, leaves Waldron vulnerable to the skeptic’s charge that basic equality doesn’t amount to much. Consider the principle that societies should distribute goods strictly according to natural talents.Why consider it? Natural talent is unknown and unknowable.
It’s possible to apply this principle in a way that respects basic equality as a constraining second-order principle, so long as we apply the principle consistently across all people, talented or not.It isn't possible at all. Suppose I possessed the ability to judge how much natural talent any given individual had. I would make millions in sports betting which the uncannily prescient hedge fund managers I hire will soon turn into billions. My political party will sweep the polls and all over the globe my handpicked candidates will be installed as Presidents or Prime Ministers.
No one possesses this ability otherwise this outcome would have materialised by now.
And yet this principle, so constrained, would lead to serious inequality, since the distribution of natural talents is far from uniform. Indeed one might think that such a distribution was moreover plainly unjust, in that it would allocate resources to people simply on the basis of the luck of their natural endowments.Why say luck? Why not 'karma' or 'Divine favour'? Better yet, why say anything at all? We are talking about impossibilities. Society can't do any of the things being described. Why speak of the injustice of an incompossible outcome? I might say 'you are very unjust because you are Spiderman and yet you don't look anything at all like Gal Gadot. I've been catfished!' You should simply get up and walk away. There is no point in talking to an idiot.
I suspect that Waldron would say that such a “meritocratic” principle is in fact inconsistent with the demands of basic equality. But it remains something of a mystery just why. (Early on in the book Waldron says that “basic equality sometimes has distributive implications all by itself,” but he doesn’t tell us what those concrete implications might be, or how they follow from basic equality.) How does a principle that merely constrains how we apply our favored political ideals ensure that we do not select manifestly unjust and unequal ideals, like distribution according to talents, birth, or beauty? And if a commitment to basic equality does not rule out such ideals, in what sense does it really amount to a commitment to equality, except in the thinnest, most procedural sense?In no sense, because the thing is nonsense.
Waldron is insistent that basic equality, despite its status as a second-order principle, is morally demanding. It requires us, he writes, to “insist unflinchingly that the benefit of basic principles of human worth and human dignity accrues equally to every human being.” His central example is a decision made by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2005 on targeted killings of Palestinians, including those not directly involved in terrorist activities. In his opinion, Supreme Court President Emeritus Aharon Barak argued that a ruling on the question had to respect the fact that “unlawful combatants are not beyond the law. They are not ‘outlaws.’ God created them as well in his image. Their human dignity as well is to be honored.” Barak went on to argue for an expanded notion of what counts as “direct participation” in terrorist activity, so as to make Israel’s killings compatible with international customary law. The other justices concurred. Waldron finds Barak’s invocation of basic equality moving, a sign of “the hard and desperately difficult work” that the principle does. A skeptic might think it a prime example of how talk of basic human equality can be used to dignify profound inhumanity.
Israel is a booming knowledge economy. It has an interest in promoting the Rule of Law. No 'hard and desperately difficult' work was done in this case. Rather, a judicious signal was sent. This had nothing to do with 'basic human equality' and everything to do with Hohfeldian rights- including those of investors or customers of Israel- including countries like Saudi Arabia.
Related to but distinct from the worry that basic equality is an empty notion is the worry that it is a redundant one. (“Be nice to your sister” isn’t empty, but it’s redundant if you’ve already said “be nice to your siblings.”)Imperative statements are not alethic. There is no redundancy here because the imperative force has been doubled.
For Waldron, basic equality tells us to apply our moral principles to people irrespective of their race, sex, class, and so on. But is this not just to say that we ought to apply our moral principles consistently—something that follows from their very nature as principles?No. Waldron's statement is imperative. Suppose he had said 'irrespective of their race, testicle size, gender, or being a bit fat Ozzie pooftah with ginormous balls' then the informational content of this statement would be greatly modified.
Consider, for example, Marx’s dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” So long as we apply that principle consistently, we will find ourselves attending to everyone’s needs, regardless of race or sex, caste or creed—just as the egalitarian wants us to. What is gained by saying, in addition, that all humans are equal?WTF? Our needs are known to us and have great plasticity- they are potentially infinite. The abilities of others can only be elicited by incentive mechanisms. Thus, the only principle here is 'from each according to some unknown criteria, and to each according to a criteria only I know with respect to myself'. It is not actionable. Nobody can act consistently on it.
Suppose all needs and abilities were known in advance. Marx's dictum would still not mean that 'we will find ourselves attending to everyone's needs'- because we have no such ability.
Waldron’s response to the redundancy challenge is twofold. First, he argues that the invocation of basic equality is essential when it comes to matters of comparative justice. Consider a case in which we are more confident that two people who have committed similar crimes should get a similar sentence than we are confident of what that sentence would be. Here it seems that we cannot simply consider how each person, in turn, ought to be treated; we must make interpersonal comparisons in order to bring our treatment of both into alignment. An appeal to equality is required.Waldron is speaking of 'horizontal equity'- treating people in like circumstances alike- but this does not require any interpersonal comparisons at all which is lucky because we have no Momus window into their soul.
But as Waldron admits, comparative justice covers a fairly small range of cases. His second response to the redundancy challenge is meant to apply more broadly. “You can ditch the word ‘equality’ if you like,” he writes, but insofar as you want to signal your “steadfast opposition” to racism, sexism, and other such forms of discrimination, “the use of the word ‘equality’ is as good a strategy as any.” This is a pragmatic rather than principled argument, one that may be truer in some political moments than others. No doubt calls for equality have been vital in historical battles against oppression, most obviously the feminist and civil rights movements. Whether such invocations are still helpful today is less clear. Online, the term “egalitarianism” is increasingly used to signal opposition to feminism. (The subreddit r/Egalitarianism features posts by men’s rights activists on false rape accusations, the “myth” of the wage gap, and “female privilege.”) On the other hand, the rise of white supremacism, with its proud embrace of natural hierarchy, might mean that it’s too soon to give up on talking about equality.
Does Amia think that White Supremacists will soil their pants and run away if you talk about equality? If not, what is the point of doing so? Equality could mean putting an end to affirmative action, gender quotas, Title IX actions and so forth. It could also mean that if Blacks use the N word, Whites too can use it.
The second part of Waldron’s project to bolster our commitment to basic equality involves explaining the particular qualities of human beings that provide grounding for this principle. His task here is to identify a property that reveals our equal, deep, and distinctive worth—a worth that extends to all humans “but not to teapots or tadpoles.”
Humans form relationships and enter into contracts precisely because they want something more than 'first come first served' basic equality. Scarcity is at the root of economic activity. Opportunity cost is what gives rise to the stable marriage problem. Thus to identify human qualities as founding that which those qualities evolved to get away from is wholly foolish.
Waldron is most taken by the human capacities for personal autonomy, reason, moral thought and action, and love. He urges us not to choose among them, saying that basic equality might well be grounded in a complex combination of all of them. Of course, each of these capacities can be found to varying degrees in different humans. Thus Waldron appeals to Rawls’s notion of a “range property”: what matters, at least for the purposes of basic equality, is whether a given creature falls within the “ordinary range” of each human capacity, not the degree to which he or she has it.If a human capacity has an 'ordinary range' then it must also be subject to selection pressure in which case, the regret minimizing strategy would be to depart most steeply from 'Justice as fairness' at precisely those points on the fitness landscape where the selection pressure is most intense.
Waldron’s proposal to ground equality in the “ordinary range” of certain human capacities threatens to leave out not just teapots and tadpoles but many humans too: babies and young children who have not yet developed capacities for autonomy, reason, morality, and love; and also those humans with cognitive impairments (chronic or as a result of old age) so severe as to deprive them of these capacities.That isn't a big problem. Evolution has taken care of it for us. Not even the Nazis could get away with killing off the elderly or disabled as a matter of principle.
(Waldron uses the term “profoundly disabled” to refer to the latter group, and means it to indicate “a relatively narrow range of cases”; for “many people who are regarded as disabled,” he writes, “there is no question but that they fit within the ordinary range of human functioning.”) The case of the very young and the very old is easier to deal with, since in the usual course of things they go on to develop these capacities or once possessed them. Thus Waldron tells us that the subject of basic equality is not a particular human at a particular time, but “whole human lives.”There is no need for it. Even the Scandinavians have given up eugenic programs of this repugnant sort. We no more need a theory of Justice to vindicate the rights of the disabled than we need Gad Gadot to admit she is Spiderman.
The case of those profoundly disabled from birth is more pressing. Waldron agrees with philosophers like Eva Kittay and Lawrence Becker who insist that any good theory of justice must vindicate the rights of people who are profoundly disabled.
He is thus not open to, as philosophers like to say, “biting the bullet” and concluding that those who are profoundly disabled are not our equals after all. Nonetheless, one might worry that Waldron has needlessly put himself on unstable ground. In an encyclical, Pope John Paul II warned against any attempt to ground human worth in capacities that are not shared by the most vulnerable among us; we owe one another equal care and love, he said, because God entrusts us to one another. Such a view is of course not available to someone of a strictly secular bent. But one need not appeal to the divine in order to assert that equality is simply a foundational commitment, ungrounded in any natural human attribute. Thus the philosopher Margaret MacDonald argued that to declare a conviction in human equality “is not to state a fact but to choose a side.” To ask why this side rather than the other, she went on, was “a bit like asking somebody why do they love their child, or why do they love their spouse or partner. They just do.”So, abortion is wrong. So is euthanasia. We must prolong the suffering of anyone at the point of death as much as we can because to be able to suffer is to have value if kept alive. At the margin, if I see some young sprig about to engage in an activity which risks his life, I should be entitled to confine him to a hospital bed and stick needles into him to make him cry day after day of a life I will artificially prolong.
Waldron does not want to give this sort of answer to the question of why the principle of basic equality extends to profoundly disabled humans. This is not because of a lack of religiosity. Waldron’s Christian perspective is “hinted at throughout,” as he says, and is the topic of one of the book’s chapters. (The book is based on Waldron’s 2015 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, a lecture series dedicated to “the study of Natural Theology.”)
In that chapter he suggests that a religious foundation for basic human equality might well be needed—a thesis he first advanced in his 2002 book God, Locke, and Equality—to explain why the human capacities for reason, morality, autonomy, and love have the power they do to ground human equality. For these capacities, Waldron suggests, take on a deeper and different significance when they are seen for their place in a story of free will, sin, repentance, forgiveness, communion, and salvation. Here Waldron departs from the philosophical mainstream; as he wrote in God, Locke, and Equality, articulating a nontheological foundation for equality is a “maneuver on which modern secular liberalism…depends absolutely.” Waldron’s implication is that if we really want to be egalitarian liberals, we might have to give up on our secularism.
But whether speaking in a secular or religious register, Waldron thinks we must be able to explain why profoundly disabled humans are our equals: it’s not enough to say they just are. His preferred account is that profoundly disabled humans have bodies, whatever their impairments, that exhibit a natural teleology, one that means that profoundly disabled humans potentially have the capacities that ground human equality. Whether or not a child is ultimately able to speak, Waldron says, her body’s organic structure—tongue, larynx, the neural pathways of the brain—are “unintelligible except on the assumption that they are developing for speech.” Likewise, a profoundly disabled person’s body has an organic structure that is similarly unintelligible except on the assumption that this is a creature meant for human reason, autonomy, morality, and love.
How cool is that! Also, it is wrong to cremate dead people. Who knows? Maybe there is some way to reanimate their corpses. We need to cryogenically freeze any corpse that has not specifically refused the procedure while of sound mind.
Waldron does not mean to be invoking any spooky metaphysics: the “underlying account here is evolutionary, not theological.” His point is underscored by the fact that biologists often explain physiology with reference to evolutionary function: eyes evolved so that we can see, wings evolved so that birds can fly, and so on. But it is not entirely clear how such talk should come into our ethics. If a profoundly disabled human is in some significant sense “meant” to be able to reason or be autonomous, is a deaf person also “meant” to be able to hear? Or for that matter, is a gay person “meant” to be a straight one? Is a happily childless woman “meant” to procreate? Disability theorists, among others, have taught us to recognize multiple forms of flourishing human life, a vision that Waldron very much shares and endorses. But holding faith with that vision might be in tension with the view that biological function carries ethical weight.Ethical weight? This is a theory that justifies zombies! What ethical weight can it have?
In offering his account of what makes profoundly disabled humans our equals, Waldron also means to “confront and refute” an argument famously made by the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer notes that most of us would be instinctively horrified by the idea of treating a human with severe cognitive impairments in the ways we routinely treat animals with similar cognitive capacities. But this, Singer says, is inconsistent; if profoundly disabled humans are our equals, then surely chimps, dolphins, pigs, and elephants are too.Singer is assuming that we treat equals as we would ourselves wish to be treated. This is never the case where scarcity exists. We are horrified by the thought of treating a human with severe cognitive impairments in the same manner that we treat someone equal to us in mental capacity. Neither Singer nor Waldron would wish to come and debate Ethics with me precisely because they don't think I am their equal. I don't either. They make money out of their stupidity. I merely advertise mine by highlighting theirs.
As a believer in distinctive equality—the idea that humans have significantly more worth than animals—Waldron must resist Singer’s conclusion. This is why Waldron does not simply expand what counts as the “ordinary” range of human capacities to include those capacities actually possessed by profoundly disabled humans. By instead locating the grounds of equality in a profoundly disabled human’s potential capacities, he hopes to defend the thesis of basic human equality without granting equality to non-human animals.My sperm has potential capacities. But eggs are scarce. As a result of a complex socio-economic mechanism, it is likely that a globally 'regret minimizing' number of my sperm got to inseminate eggs.
There is a mathematical theory which can describe this mechanism. What's more this mathematical theory can yield very useful results in a variety of applied fields.
What can Waldron or Singer's ignorant babble achieve? Nothing, save to further lower the prestige of the subject they profess.
Waldron calls Singer’s disability-based argument for animal rights “opportunistic,” since “it takes the difficulty that theories of human equality face in dealing with profound human disability as an opportunity for rethinking the separate question of the rights of animals.” Another way of putting it is that Singer’s analogy is as likely to get people to treat disabled persons worse as it is to get them to treat animals better. (The impression that Singer is not merely interested in elevating the status of animals is not helped by the fact that he defends the permissibility of euthanizing disabled infants, including those with relatively mild disabilities.) It is a moral disappointment that defenders of animal rights sometimes try to make their case by leveraging the rights so precariously afforded disabled humans.* That Singer chooses to make his case in this way is especially disappointing as the case for animal rights can be persuasively made on the basis of what is special about animals: instinct and intelligence, practices of community and caretaking, susceptibility to emotional and physical suffering, and the capacity for affection, love, and joy.What is special about a lot of animals is that they taste good or are useful in some way. What is special about humans is that we can make other humans with them. We know that the humans we make will have better life-chances and greater inclusive fitness if they form emotional bonds with at least some humans unable to care for themselves.
One gets the impression, reading One Another’s Equals, that Waldron does not think there is anything terribly special about animals. Humans appear to outstrip their animal counterparts in every way. (God’s command in Genesis to make man after his own image is immediately followed by God’s gift to man of dominion over “every creeping thing.”) We are told by Waldron that there is not much point trying to teach a cat, but little is said about the extraordinary capacity for learning evinced by chimps, dolphins, crows, or octopuses.All of whom would teach Amia philosophy- if only there were Justice in the World.
Waldron speaks about the universal human concern with death rituals but does not remark on the complex cultural practices of grieving elephants.Naughty Waldron! Why are you being so mean to bereaved pachyderms? Is it coz they laughed when they saw you naked and asked 'how do you manage to pick up anything with that tiny trunk of yours?'
He celebrates the human capacity for moral deliberation, without celebrating the capacity of some species for unthinking sacrifice and service. Most of all, he does not dwell on animals’ vulnerability to suffering and death, a vulnerability that we humans not only share, but that so often feels like the most important thing about us.Nonsense! Life would be unbearable if this vulnerability had any great salience save in terms of precautionary measures and the exercise of forethought.
A thought central to Waldron’s book is that basic equality neither presupposes that all humans are identical nor requires that we receive identical treatment. Equality is consistent with tremendous individual difference. Once we have such a thought in hand, why must we insist that animals are not our equals?Many animals have pecking orders- social hierarchies- as do we. Treat your dog as an equal and he may sodomise you when, like the lady on the Graham Norton show, you are naked and vomiting into the toilet bowl.
Amia does not see that Waldron is wrong to think equality arises from some fundamental homogeneity or identity of worth. This is not the case. Equality arises only with respect to a process- like due process of Law. A Corporation may be treated identically with a Human Person even though the two are not alike in kind.
Animals are not identical to us, and they do not demand or permit identical treatment. Lions do not have the right to education any more than we have the right to hunt gazelle on the open plains.Humans have always had, till very recently, an absolute right to hunt gazelle on the open plains. Neither Lions nor Humans have any right to education save under a vinculum juris.
And yet it might be that animals deserve equal, if different, concern and respect. Of course Waldron does not see it this way: when he compares a human with an animal he sees two creatures of fundamentally different moral status. But here we might say what Waldron himself says of those who deny human equality, that seeing equality requires that you first believe it.Waldron wrote a silly book. Amia can't see why his book is silly. Instead she says something sillier yet- viz. that if you believe animals are equal to humans then the World you see around you would be like a Disney cartoon. The crow will descend to give you legal advise. The cat will prescribe an ointment for your haemorrhoids. The dog will get its own permanent guest slot on the Graham Norton show. That strange orange fur-ball which sits atop the Donald's head will abandon him at his impeachment hearing and set up on its own as a purveyor of ethically sourced scented candles.
Come to think of it, I do need some scented candles for the bathroom. Perhaps I should give Amia's philosophy a try. Go thou and do likewise.
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