79. "Animal Rights"

"When you tell me I should treat animals in a humane way I have a pretty clear idea of what you mean. If I have doubts I can ask you. But when you tell me I should give them rights I have no clear idea, and I don't think it will do any good to ask you. Nobody seems to have a clear idea of what 'rights' means when applied to animals."

I am talking to Peter Singer, who once again has called for inclusion of animals "within the sphere of beings with rights" (NYRB, 10-13-11). I am doing so after reviewing my every source on the meaning of "rights." There are natural rights and legal rights and social rights and ethical rights, which break down into claim rights and liberty rights and negative rights and positive rights and economic rights and cultural rights and a few others. It's the most complicated subject you ever saw.

Reading more of Singer I construct his response: "You're letting the broad view obscure the narrow point. If animals have legal rights there will be a penalty for not treating them humanely. Fewer animals will be abused. You can't count on a change in human behavior without a penalty."

That's clear. And its implications are clear. The penalty of disapproval — by my society or (maybe) my own conscience — is not enough. You can't trust that disapproval or see it working. Not the way you can with the government that fines you.

The realism in that makes its humanity convincing, but I think I make Singer's aim too narrow. He certainly wants all of society to disapprove of cruelty to animals. And in that aim he obviously intends his word "rights" to do more than it does in a law book, just as he intended "liberation" in his first book title (Animal Liberation) to do more than it does in a pet-care book. Like any good orator speaking in a good cause he's taking advantage of whatever attraction his words have gained.

For me that move ends the clarity. I'm thrown into the noisiest of controversies. "Animals can't enter into a social contract. They can't make moral choices. They don't recognize obligations and responsibilities. You can't make any contract with them, much less a social contract." It appears, indeed, that with animals you can't have any of the reciprocal relationships within which our term "rights" has gotten its meaning. The concepts don't fit.

So what's the attraction in that word? It's good as oratory — salesmanship, spin. Like "liberation" it has (or had) a lot of pull with educated audiences. And that's good to have in a cause as good as this one, obtaining a penalty for the mistreatment of animals. The question is, Is it worth throwing the whole subject into conceptual disorder?

What would keep order? Using terms that fit the order we already have in our legal system. In that system, animals don't have rights; humans have constraints. Could you get what you want for animals simply by constraining humans, in the law's customary language?

Maybe you could. I think you could. But could you sell it that way? That's another question.

78. Know-it-all Cyber Busybodies

Does anyone have a program nanny as irritating as mine? I type in "word" as a label for a post on this blog. On the screen "complaint word" appears. I had entered it as a label earlier. My subject can never be "philosophy" now; it has to be "continental philosophy."

I have the feeling this nanny has watched over me before. "Roland, this is what you want, this is what you need, this is what you are interested in, this is what your choices are." But worst of all, "This is what you mean." At the speed of light that wagging finger appears. I want to bite it. Am I alone?

77. "My culture's better than yours."

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A lot of people, citing cultural anthropologists, tell me that I can't say that my culture is better than somebody else's. I am expressing an ethnocentric prejudice.

Yet cultural anthropologists, if the summary of their position in my History of the Modern World is correct, actually do let me say such a thing.  To them, according to Palmer, Colton, and Kramer, "no culture or society was 'better' than any other, all being adaptations to an environment." The permission taken away in the first part of the sentence is restored in the second. I can say, "This culture has adapted better than that one." Better.

For support I point to Chinese culture. Its emphasis on education has filled the awards lists of American high schools with the names of its young. Note the number of graduates high in Silicon Valley. The Chinese have adapted better than anybody to the California environment.

So, we have another reminder (after Post #56) that as soon as we contemplate a particular end, as soon as we abandon categorical assertion, we are entitled to, we are obliged to, discriminate among means. (See Post # 8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.) Here cultures provide the means. And with all the other ends people may have in a mixed society we may do the same.

All right, I move through a mixed society — the U.S., and more and more the world — with a permit to use the words "better" and "worse" with respect to cultures. Holding the permit is not enough, though. You've got to get somebody to honor it. And in today's universities you'll have a devil of a time. "Value judgment" is still a put-down word in science lounges. Look as if you're going to make such a judgment and a sociologist will snort like a spooked horse. You've violated an axiom: "There are or can be no value judgments that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures."

So with many of my colleagues listening I still can't say what I want to say to people who force women to have clitorectomies. What do I want to say? This: "You stink. Your culture stinks. Any culture that encourages doing this to little girls stinks."

There was once a way of placing that statement (tempered, of course) under an acceptable category: possible truth. If mankind were one, if sympathies were universal, and if some sympathies were so beneficial that, if shared, they improved the life of all mankind, then there was the chance that any individual, at any time, might express one. If history showed that life was indeed improved when the displayed sympathy was shared then the statement had all the verification needed to be called a "truth."

That way of placing value statements was developed in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, a period now in bad repute. Its universalism has not stood up under the poundings of relativism. And verification of its "truths"? That comes so far in the future. You have to believe in "progress."

Oh that we Enlightenment types could live for that verification. Oh to be there to see relativists put down. Oh that the Enlightenment had a God who could bring us all together after time has run its course.

I see a representative of the offending culture, surveying the full sweep, seeing where it ended, reflecting for a while and saying, "Clitorectomy, you know. That really did stink."

But God has arranged it so that we're still human. The enlightened offender reproaches me: "Why didn't you tell me?"

And I, savoring my revenge, say, "Because the cultural relativists wouldn't let me."

76, "Reasonable doubt"

A man can't be executed in the United States unless a jury finds him guilty of a capital crime "beyond a reasonable doubt." That tells us that his living or dying is going to depend on what his jurors take the word "reasonable" to mean.

What's to guide them? The word "beyond" suggests that there's a line. Up to it, reasonable; past it, no. How unrealistic. We're in the human world, not geometry class.

Law dictionaries pretend to help. A few tell us that "beyond a reasonable doubt" means "moral certainty." Oh yes, that's where you find clear lines, in morality. All us jurors are going to know when answers to moral questions are certain.

There's no escape. We're stuck with individual differences. Everybody's stuck. If you do away with juries and go with a judge (or a lord, or an apparatchik) you're stuck with his individual difference.

And aren't we, in philosophy class, stuck with relativism? There's no absolute, no objective judgment, no line-drawing machine. You use words that make it sound as if there is such a thing but my, look where they leave you. "Preponderance of the evidence." "Preponderance": superiority in weight. You look to see which side the balance falls on. Yes, and who's doing the weighing? And how heavy is each thing that goes into the pan? Weights are assigned, not discovered.

Even the expression that supports all this, there in the Constitution, "due process," is infected by subjectivity. "Due": owed. What does a man having coming to him? You can specify the procedures in legal statute and establish them in court practice but still, might he deserve more? or less? We differ, friend.

The more we are convinced of our differences, though, the closer we come to that most dangerous of convictions: that everything in the moral sphere is subjective, or relative. Though possibly true, that belief is dangerous because it invites a slide into two really destructive convictions, that one moral belief is as good as an another, and that there is no good guidance.

You have to leave it to experience to counter the first belief, which it usually does soon enough, but to counter the second all you have to do is look at a Supreme Court opinion on the very expression we're most worried about, "beyond a reasonable doubt." In 1970 the Court said (in re Winship) that this standard of proof is grounded on "a fundamental value determination of our society." There you are, juror. Find out what values your society has determined to be fundamental and apply them to the case before you.

The values are many and about some there may be respectable differences but about the one that brought forth the Court's opinion there is, I think, likely to be difference only among those who haven't learned it. It's that "it is far worse to convict an innocent man than to let a guilty man go free."

That's easy guidance. Hard guidance is guidance in society's values that are not so clear or are still at issue. Here's where teachers come in. Let them get young citizens' values straightened out in school, say in civics class, before they get to a jury room. Get them started, at least, on the meaning of words like "reasonable" and "due."

75. What a Teacher Substitutes for Reality

Why do teachers have to find a substitute for reality? Because relativists have taken it away from them. (See Post #73.) No more real world, no more objective truth. Only representations and constructions.

What can they substitute? I, dealing in words, suggest "resistance." It's a word they can use without claiming any of that knowledge they're not supposed to have. All they claim to know is that there's something out there that has to be overcome before a student, or anybody, can reach his goals.

That's their expertise. Want to fly a kite? Run with it into the wind. Tie the bridle this way. Want to design kites? Here are the laws of aerodynamics. Want to read poems? Start by construing the sentences.

They don't need a name for the something out there that makes all this necessary. All they need is consistency in the resistance it offers. It does no good to teach kite-flying if aerodynamics varies from day to day.

Do they need to know why there is consistency? It doesn't appear so, yet such knowledge would be helpful — in the way that knowing why there is consistency in an aerodynamic resistance would be helpful (it lets you generalize at a higher level). But in teaching you always have to think about time constraints. Can we acquire this in a quarter? Ask that question about what's ultimately behind the consistency, or ultimately behind anything, and experience, university-wide, tells you no.

The criterion of helpfulness reduces the discussion-time for many subjects (metaphysics, theology) in our utilitarian courses. And it removes from the discussion those relativists who think that their choice of a representation or construction is unconstrained by reality — to use the old word for resistances. Those who think one representation of reality is as good as another are outside the circle. There's no point in their taking the course.

Note: I see that leaves me with a definition of reality. It's what relativists have to measure their representations and constructions against.

74. What "Class Warfare" Conjures.

First "conjure": to call up a spirit or devil. "Class warfare" calls up communism. That devil, Congressional Republicans want us to remember, would have had the citizens of every nation, divided into classes, at each other's throats. That's what you, President Obama, would have Americans do when you agitate for higher taxes on the rich.

What you need, Mr. President, is a counter-expression, conjuring up a good spirit, one you'll be acting in the name of. But not acting gently. We've had enough of that. Acting forcefully, like a Crusader. Get the word "war" into your expression.

I know. A lot of people hate war, or at least blood. So you've got to avoid conjuring that. Nothing that can be pictured as a target, nothing that will bleed. But people don't mind wars against abstractions (poverty, terror), and may in fact love them. So, let's find an abstraction that fits what you're doing and sock the Republicans with it.

Not so easy, is it. The best I can come up with is "War on Inequity." I know that "inequity" is a little on the egghead side, which I know you want to get off of, but it is abstract and it does identify your target. It certainly won't bleed. The only hazard I can see is in the typing. If you come out with "War on Iniquity" you're on the religious right's ground and the gotcha humorists will make you bleed.

73. Attention to Words as a Response to Relativism

Oh those conversations in the eighties and nineties. You could hear Richard Rorty quoted ("Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences") in half the disciplines in the humanities. In the English Department the appeals were to Jacques Derrida ("There are only differences") and Chaim Perelman ("There are only audiences") — in addition to Rorty. Imply a claim for objective truth and you'd get one of them. Then you're in a troubling philosophical argument — and all you wanted to do, usually, was clear up a few problems in the Interpretation of Poetry course.

Get into trouble often enough and you'll figure out a way to get out. Here's my way. Say you're a scientist. You're accused of believing in the existence of a real world that can be objectively known. You say, "No, I just believe in the existence of a group of people who call each other 'scientists.' I take 'scientist' to be a compliment-word and I want them to apply it to me.

"What do I do to get the compliment? The same things I have been doing to discover objective reality. I examine nature, declare what I have discovered in a journal, and wait for the compliment. If readers of the journal, replicating my examination, get the same results I got I get the compliment. They were persuaded. That's all I'm doing, persuading people. Just as Aristotle's orator did.

"Except that there's a difference in our audiences. Mine isn't persuaded until the needles on their dials are in the same place I reported my needles to be. There's my rhetoric. When I work day and night in my lab I don't say I'm seeking the truth about the world, I say I'm working on a speech, the only kind that will persuade these people."

The scientist has something quieting to say, then, to each relativist. To Rorty: "With 'scientist' I merely take your compliment a step further, from sentence to sentence-maker." To Derrida: "I too deal only in difference; here it's the difference between language that gets me the compliment and language that doesn't." To Perelman: "I never go beyond the needs of my audience."

That's a scientist's response but it's not so different from mine. In my poetry class my audience needs reports on how English speakers form sentences and give meanings to words. Those reports they get from me, drawing on grammar book and dictionary. Without them they, with relatively little experience in the reading of English, can't construe sentences, the first operation in the reading of a poem.

It's to satisfy this need that I try to keep relativists quiet. Half my work is the work of a scientist, providing reports which, if believed, will allow my audience to proceed to the really rewarding part of their work, letting their imaginations go where the poet points them. In the first half of the job relativistic statements of the type we heard in the last century, are inadmissible. They are admissible in the second half, where differences in what's imagined are all the fun.

Keeping the two straight is one of the hardest jobs in the English classroom, if not in all of the humanities. You can convince beginning students — natural, self-protecting subjectivists — that scientific standards govern part of poetry-reading but it takes a lot of class time. Quarters are too short, life is too short, to allow relativists to lengthen it.