In the tread following the announcement of my book, I had a brief discussion with our reader ccc about the fact that my book doesn’t engage with non-human animals. In their second comment, ccc wrote the following:
Political philosophy in general has a big problem though. It seems most authors can find some perfectly non-malicious, workload-related reason for giving non-human animals the excluded-via-footnote treatment. But the aggregate effect of all such cases is ongoing marginalization of the topic of non-humans from political philosophy. (The near complete absence of that topic on Crooked Timber over the years is a good illustration.)
Gladly there are some signs of (slow) change now, thanks in part to the “political turn” in animal ethics pioneered by among others Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson.
This type of critique is not specific to political philosophy, and should be taken seriously, so let’s discuss it outside the context of that particular book.
My first reaction to ccc’s critique is this: Doesn’t the same hold for the place of non-western ways of living, or for the disabled, or for neurodiverse people, or for children, or for stateless people – to mention just some groups that also are relegated to the margins of political philosophy (or, worse, are entirely absent)? And these groups are also, in terms of absolute numbers, huge. Or take care work (which is highly gendered): the place it has in political philosophy is better now than it was a while ago, but this is in the first place thanks to 40 years of work by scholars such as Joan Tronto, Eva Kittay, Daniel Engster, and others, who have kept on writing about questions of care (and justice and/or disability).
Suppose X, Y and Z are all ‘marginalised’ topics in discipline A. Is there not something paradoxical about the situation in which those who believe that not enough is written on X start critiquing those who have not written on X but have written on Y and/or Z, if it is the case that the former have written a lot on X, but nothing on Y or Z? What should we make of a situation in which, say, those who have written on animal ethics have not written anything on disabilities, or on indigenous worldviews, or on African political philosophy (etc etc.)?
Given time constraints (which are real, and even more pressing for those of us having considerable care responsibilities or are working in systems where there is effectively little time to actually do research), I think it is not a fair critique that a certain person has not done work on topics X, Y and Z. It is impossible to do everything. But one could claim that there is insufficient effort being made to counter forms of domination, if one does not try to expand one’s discipline into areas that have remain underdeveloped, or where the voices/interests of some groups have been marginalised in the development of scholarship. If all of us who are working in disciplines that concern the interests of living creatures would try to educate ourselves, and do some research, on at least one of those dominated topics, then those disciplines would become more balanced, more inclusive, and, possibly, intellectually richer. If that limited expectation were generally agreed upon, then expectations and standards wouldn’t become unfeasible, yet marginalisation would drastically be reduced.
The question then remains how to deal with the aggregate effects of those individual choices. What if we all were to commit to work on at least one marginalised topic, but a few of those topics would be taken up by almost no-one? I don’t see a solution for this. But perhaps this is a problem with very low statistical likelihood? Perhaps problems of marginalisation at the aggregate level get solved if we all start working on, or are able to properly teach, at least one of the marginalised topics? Since we haven’t yet tried this strategy, it’s hard to say what the outcome would be.
{ 54 comments }
Ingrid Robeyns 12.20.17 at 9:40 am
ccc: I tried to email you before posting this, but the email address you gave is not a genuine one. Please check our comments policy – we are respecting the privacy of those who comment on our blog, but you have to use a genuine email addresses. Why would you want to be fully anonymous if you want to engage in a conversation with someone who is not? (me, that is). I don’t quite understand this, to put it mildly.
Z 12.20.17 at 9:55 am
If all of us who are working in disciplines that concern the interests of living creatures would try to educate ourselves
For me that’s the key word. One should try. But converting this endeavor towards self-education into actual realization is hard. Incredibly hard. As is any work, even seemingly trivial ones like writing a blog post or inserting a casual reference in a speech. So when someone is not doing any work about X, Y or Z – in fact never mentions X, Y or Z – the default presumption should be that this someone does not feel prepared yet to make any valuable contribution to X, Y or Z. That’s not something anybody should feel ashamed of or worthy of legitimate criticism.
ph 12.20.17 at 10:44 am
Ingrid, I’m not sure if you linked elsewhere to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on capability theory, which I found helpful, and which happens to have been updated by you. Isn’t the core of your current argument in this post: “doing nothing is not the same as doing something, and doing something is not the same as doing everything?”
You’re doing something.
Let others follow your example and up tools.
J-D 12.20.17 at 12:05 pm
kidneystones writes
with hyperlink, but
Fake Dave 12.20.17 at 1:25 pm
I do find it fascinating that everyone from Hobbes to Marx has sought to ground their ideas in “nature,” but so much theory about the human animal gives such little thought to what every other animal experiences as nature and so much of what we say about animals is just wrong.
People love to use animal analogies in politics, but crabs are perfectly capable of escaping from buckets, frogs don’t stay in boiling pots, sheep aren’t actually that easy to lead to the slaughter, packs don’t have to have a “top dog” or an “alpha wolf,” and lemmings don’t jump off of cliffs. If we want to use animals to define ourselves (and it’s clear we always have), then we should at least try to understand them.
ccc 12.20.17 at 1:45 pm
Ingrid #0: “My first reaction to ccc’s critique is this: Doesn’t the same hold for the place of non-western ways of living, or for the disabled, or for neurodiverse people, or for children, or for stateless people – to mention just some groups that also are relegated to the margins of political philosophy (or, worse, are entirely absent)?”
If the status of marginalized is a binary, yes. But there are degrees. Several of the above groups seem less marginalized than non-humans in political philosophy.
“And these groups are also, in terms of absolute numbers, huge.”
Their large numbers are still much, much smaller than the number of non-humans exploited by humans.
“Is there not something paradoxical about the situation in which those who believe that not enough is written on X start critiquing those who have not written on X but have written on Y and/or Z, if it is the case that the former have written a lot on X, but nothing on Y or Z?”
No formal paradox. You may mean inconsistent or unfair? In either case: Not necessarily. It depends on differences in relative urgency of cause X Y Z, which in turn depend on how bad/wrong X Y Z problems are in the world and what can be done about them. To answer that takes substantive normative arguments.
If X (human on non-humans exploitation) is a both bigger and more marginalized problem then replying “I worked on Y Z instead” is not enough.
To say more requires un-marginalizing non-humans to test arguments about their urgency. But catch 22.
All the above said given your setup of the problem as a disjunctive X or Y or Z choice. But I reject that setup. Several of these oppressions and marginalizations are related. Some of the best recent work on non-humans is conjunctive and interrelated. In Zoopolis (2011) Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka constructively connect the dots between the topics of disability, citizenship and non-humans in political philosophy. As does, though less deeply, Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice. The field of critical human-animal studies is strongly intersectional. See for example recent work by Sunara Taylor, briefed here
https://www.animalliberationcurrents.com/cripping-animal-ethics/
https://www.animalliberationcurrents.com/disability-animals-environment/
Ingrid #1: “Why would you want to be fully anonymous if you want to engage in a conversation with someone who is not?”
The topics and arguments do not care about names. If ccc is not ok, so be it. It is your house to rule. But if it helps: I’ve never met you or anyone here and have no position in academia.
Harry 12.20.17 at 2:06 pm
You’re right that there isn’t really a solution. But senior people with influence can have an effect in various ways. One is just by devoting themselves to working on what has been a marginal topic and bearing the costs of that. If Arneson, or Anderson, or Shelby, or Robeyns work on something then graduate students notice that and become interested in it, or, if they are already interested, feel assured that it is a legitimate thing to work on. The other thing is that senior people have access to resources with which they can create incentives for others to work on an issue (that’s what a group of people, including Wikler, Brock, Daniels, Buchanan, did around the philosophy of health policy in the late seventies and eighties, and what I and others have been trying to do with respect to education the past decade or so).
engels 12.20.17 at 3:22 pm
I don’t wish to seem facetious but I strongly suspect if you’d made it about non-human animals someone would have popped up to ask why you weren’t talking about plants (books looks great btw). Doesn’t this discussion assume that everybody knows which topics are (objectively, undeservedly) marginalised—not sure if that’s true…
LFC 12.20.17 at 3:29 pm
Just to alert the moderators that I have comments in another thread (“Moon of Alabama”) languishing in moderation. Thanks.
Harry 12.20.17 at 4:29 pm
Re engels’ point: there’s a book by Christopher Stone called Do Trees Have Standing? (its old! And he concludes that they do).
engels 12.20.17 at 4:43 pm
Interesting (although I don’t agree)—someone here was arguing it recently, don’t think they referred to him
Sebastian H 12.20.17 at 5:05 pm
My first response: yes, is that a bad thing?
There seem to be a large number of unexamined assumptions before you can get to a yes.
I’m not suggesting it is impossible, but it isn’t clear that any of the normal assumptions lead to yes either.
My second response is something like: who gets to speak for them? Who ever does will be very tempted to use it as a power play to leverage for other political means. I.e. anyone who claims to speak and vote for ‘animals’ is going to have to explain why their arguments don’t work for say ‘fetuses’…
CarlD 12.20.17 at 6:45 pm
“All the above said given your setup of the problem as a disjunctive X or Y or Z choice.”
This is the critical point. The fields X, Y, and Z are conventionally separated for relative ease of handling, not because they’re actually separate. In the wild, relationships are the rule, and not just ‘intersection’ but structural interpenetration and dynamic interdependence.
In scholarship, fields with margins and centers are 100% artifactual. Even if we accept the benefits of expertise this confers, treating knowledge as a series of distinct silos is otherwise so bizarrely disfunctional that making it a norm is clearly a mistake.
Practically speaking, this means we ought to be able to absorb ccc’s challenge without batting an eye and with some excitement, simply by turning to the integrative dimension of our routine practice, the one where we all think (or we delegate colleagues to think) early and often about how all our little pieces fit together and open out into bigger worlds still. That instead we’re fumbling around about maybe learning a little something about a silo other than our own is disappointing.
Tom Hurka 12.20.17 at 10:35 pm
Obviously political philosophers have had more important things to do in the last 40 years than work on topics X, Y, and Z — like write 10,000 articles on Rawls.
Ingrid Robeyns 12.20.17 at 11:02 pm
I’m not sure this is going to be fruitful, but I’ll give it one more try. Scholarship is not the same as activism or journalism, and within scholarship there are also varieties of quality (or am I not allowed to say this?) Apart from those who are able to devote their entire days to scholarship (perhaps research professors without children and other dependents or those who do not need to teach and be soaked in admin in order to earn a living), you cannot read everything and cannot be sufficiently knowledgeable in order to feel comfortable to say something, as a scholar, on all topics (what Z @ #2 said). From that it does not follow that one endorses the ontological assumption that X Y and Z are not connected; it is a different point that science forces us to make choices in what to become more knowledgeable about so that one can contribute to pushing the boundaries of knowledge. IN other words, science and scholarship most of the time requires that one zooms in. Most of the intersectionalist work I’ve seen connects two or three dimensions, and not all, say, 27 (e.g. one works on gender, race, ethnicity and class, but does not mention the status of nonhuman animals nor ecosystems, nor the disabled, nor future generations, nor neurodiverse people, nor the status of children, nor those of oppressed religions, nor the indigenous peoples, nor those in the geopolitical periferie, nor those who have suffered from an oppressive colonialist legacy or from systematic forms of humiliation and violence and dehumanisation, nor those who are trapped within the boundaries of states, nor those who are stateless, etcetera etcetera etcetera). If scholars try to connect all these things (have we seen anyone doing this?) I would expect that it is done in a very superficially way, and scholarship, how I understand it, is the opposite of doing something superficially.
So, to sum up, I am not (pace who some say in this thread), making ontological claims, but rather making the very practical claim that if one wants to do things well, one can’t do everything (and I know from practice what I’m talking about, since I have worked on way too many topics and issues, almost all related to issues of injustice and institutions and frameworks that could help us to reduce injustices, and often feel that the price I pay for broadening my scope is a decrease in the quality of my work). But since I agree with ccc that there are some interests/voices dominated in various disciplines, we should try to work out strategies to find solutions. I don’t think that “let’s all start to work on everything” is a viable solution, and I am not convinced that vast numbers of political philosophers should drop what they are doing and turn to animal ethics, since I am not convinced that non-human animals are the group/issue that is the one that is most oppressed or most suffering (you can fill in your criterium of moral badness here) and hence in most urgent need of our scholarly attention.
Ingrid Robeyns 12.20.17 at 11:10 pm
Tom Hurka: we agree on this. There is something about the (discipline-specific social) norms of what valuable scholarship is that needs to change, since those norms influence what new generations choose to specialise in.
Layman 12.20.17 at 11:12 pm
If someone responds to your work by saying that they wish you were doing some other work, how is that different than concern trolling? You can’t do _all_ work, as you say, so no matter what you do, you’re still open to this challenge. And your interlocutor could stop complaining about what you’re doing and spend her/his time doing the work they think is more important; otherwise someone will surely ask them why they’re wasting their time looking at your work rather than doing what they say is the important stuff.
engels 12.21.17 at 1:01 am
I do find it odd that post-Rawlsian political philosophers have not, après Trump and Brexit, undergone the same kind of public reckoning that neoclassical economists did after the financial crisis. Are they completely aloof from our mundane reality? Or does noone outside of the academy know they exist?
Harry 12.21.17 at 2:26 am
Whatever our other disagreements, engels, it seems we’re at one on the status of trees…..
Harry 12.21.17 at 2:33 am
Well, obviously no-one outside the academy knows we exist (I’m not sure what post-Rawlsian includes, but I’m not Rawlsian, and I assume it includes me). But why should we have undergone the same kind of public reckoning as neo-classical economists. We don’t, eg, control the Fed, or whatever the analogue would be…. (I;m not being snarky, just want to know what we’ve done peculiarly wrong).
engels 12.21.17 at 3:34 am
It wasn’t aimed at you personally, Harry. With the caveat that I haven’t been at all seriously engaged with it for a long time, is it inappropriate to hope that political philosophy should illuminate real-world political ideologies and developments? I’m not aware that anything in Rawls’ or his disciples’ work does this. It seems mostly to be an idealisation of a political order, American post-war welfare state capitalism, which has been dying for some time and is now rapidly falling apart.
Whirrlaway 12.21.17 at 3:37 am
science and scholarship most of the time requires that one zooms in.
Forests also have standing.
Anarcissie 12.21.17 at 4:53 am
@20 — Depends on whether you’re working the is or the ought side of the street.
ph 12.21.17 at 5:56 am
@4 Thx. From the mirror site, should work:
https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/entries/capability-approach/
Ingrid Robeyns 12.21.17 at 7:48 am
Harry – many thanks for the reference to Stone’s book which I didn’t know – that looks like a fascinating book (printed in third edition in 2010 by Oxford University Press, so shouldn’t be too difficult to get hold on it).
faustusnotes 12.21.17 at 8:03 am
I’m intrigued as to why people would waste their time philosophizing about something that they kill and eat. I mean, is there any way to put anything further down the chain of concern than to kill it and eat it? Sure, there’s philosophy about whether we have the right to put things that down the chain of concern, but that has been handled by Peter Singer already. Given that most philosophers use animals for meat and clothing, it’s hard to conceive of why they would bother themselves wondering what these things think or what they have to tell us about how we think. As well philosophize about what rocks can tell us about our own souls.
I would say that if ccc wants philosophers to care about the inner life of animals, he or she first has to convince philosophers to stop killing them and eating them. Until the latter happens, it should go without saying that the former won’t.
Matt 12.21.17 at 8:17 am
There have been a number of books on plants recently. See, for example, the book reviewed here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plant-minds-a-philosophical-defense/ I’ve not found any of them at all plausible, but it’s a good example of how people should feel free to work on what they find interesting and try to show its relevance.
This seems like the right answer in general (which I think Ingrid mostly agrees with – please correct me if I’m wrong.) No one can work on everything, but people will generally do better work if they work on what interests them (even if it doesn’t interest Tom Hurka or engels!) Given this, people should generally work on what interests them. But, if someone else can show that a new project is relevant for the ones that interest you, you should be open to considering that, too. (I think that’s the best reading with what happened the public health and justice literature Harry mentions above. Buchanan, Daniels, Brocke, etc. got interested in that, and worked on it because they were interested in it. They showed that it’s relevant to broader issues in distributive justice, and now people interested in distributive justice more broadly have to at least notice questions about health if they are to have a good account – but first, people independently interested in these issues had to make the case that they were relevant. Some good people have been trying to do this with animals and other topics, such as Nussbaum in _Frontiers of Justice_, though with less success, I think.)
dilbert dogbert 12.21.17 at 5:46 pm
MMMMM??? Question:
Why is Crooked Timber tasked with this? Considering all the shit that goes down in this world of the human animal. I be think’n you are dealing with a troll.
john c. halasz 12.21.17 at 6:38 pm
Do trees have standing if they fall in the forest and no one is there to hear them? How about this: do eco-systems have standing?
SusanC 12.21.17 at 7:57 pm
I’m in two minds about this.
On the one hand, as you say, you can’t do everything. Both the journal’s page limit on article length and ones own time places sharp limits on what can be said.
On the other had, I think there’s an idea in academic writing (as opposed to, for example, journalism) that one is obliged to address the objections of one’s critics. Particularly the ones that get chosen by the journal editor to referee the paper, but in general you’re supposed to say something. (It is quite likely to be regarded as a flaw in the journal’s editorial process if the editors choose referees that let you get away with something contentious with no comment).
There’s a question as to how much one should say in this regard, and whether you need to just address “local” criticisms about the specific detail of your argument, or whether you also need to address critics that think the entire problem domain you’re working in is total nonsense. I’d tend to address the “global” criticisms with a quick paragraph in the introduction and an accompanying citation to the most prominent counterarguments. e.g. if, heaven forbid, I was going to talk about trolley problems, a paragraph in the introduction saying (in a more polite turn of phrase) that many people think they’re nonse nse(with accompanying citations) might be in order.
In the rights context, something along the lines of blah blah Peter Singer blah blah might do the trick.
SusanC 12.21.17 at 8:05 pm
To follow up on that, there is a difference (though it may be hard to discern in the edge cases) between a suggestion that you should be working on something completely different – which can be safely ignored – versus a criticism that your work is fatally flawed because it’s ignoring the obvious related issue of X. e.g. if (hypothetically, not intending to refer to something you actually wrote) you’re taking the position that only human animals have rights, this is clearly controversial and in need of some amount of justification.
(And, if, e.g. you’re going to go full Nietzschian on the question of non-human animals, this might affect the stance you take on human animals).
engels 12.21.17 at 11:35 pm
I’m intrigued as to why people would waste their time philosophizing about something that they kill and eat.
Same reason they theorise about capitalism or imperialism without giving away their property or renouncing their citizenship
M Caswell 12.21.17 at 11:42 pm
Two great, philosophical books I’ve learned from on plants:
Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants
Goethe, Metamorphosis of Plants
faustusnotes 12.22.17 at 7:13 am
That doesn’t seem the right comparison engels. When you philosophize about capitalism you do so as a part of it, whether victim or participant, and you do so with the intent (often) to make it better for you and for those suffering. But if you are someone who kills and eats animals, there is no intention to make this better and you are not a part of it in any sense except that yes you are doing it. So why would you philosophize about something like that?
I guess you might have a point if you said “Same reason the Koch brothers don’t philosophize about their workers,” or some such thing. But I think that makes my point – they don’t care about us and they only think about us as a tool or an obstacle. Same for us with animals. You don’t philosophize about something you kill and eat, unless philosophizing makes it taste better.
maidhc 12.22.17 at 9:23 am
I philosophize about animals I eat. We buy animals directly from farmers and sometimes we even know their names and something of their history. We don’t kill them ourselves because they are professionally butchered. We’re glad to know they had a comfortable life and we’re grateful that we get to eat them. If it wasn’t for people raising them they wouldn’t be around at all.
If you get to know people involved in small-scale organic animal rearing or even sustenance hunting I think you would hear some similar opinions.
Collin Street 12.22.17 at 11:53 am
I’m intrigued as to why people would waste their time philosophizing about something that they kill and eat.
… Arnold Schwartzenegger fighting aristotle the predator.
Man is a delicious animal.
harry b 12.22.17 at 2:21 pm
I think its fair enough to expect some of that engels. I don’t think ‘disciples’ is the right word any more, though, despite Tom Hurka’s correct observation that there are too many articles about Rawls (and I know I have written some of them). Anyway, among the not-really-disciples — theres a lot of genuinely illuminating work about global justice/injustice (a very concrete example: Michael Blake and Gillian Brock’s debate book about the brain drain, but also Dick Miller, Darrell Moellendorf, plenty of others), migration (see CB’s forthcoming book, but again there’s plenty more), health and health policy (lots of it), employer/employee relations; the welfare state, higher education; k-12 education; gender relations (soon-to-join CTer Gina Schouten has a great book in the latter stages of progress on the gendered division of labor, Clare Chambers’, Steve Macedo’s and Elizabeth Brake’s books on marriage), misogyny (Kate Manne’s new book which I haven’t yet read), education (there’s even a cluster of papers on why higher ed should be free recently come out). This work is all highly attentive to, and disciplined by, empirical evidence, and speaks to problems that we face in the world today. I would say things have changed a lot since around 1990, and most of the most interesting work in analytical political philosophy really is connected to and illuminates real world political developments.
ccc 12.22.17 at 2:46 pm
Tom Hurka #14: Indeed!
Ingrid #15: “I am not … making ontological claims, but rather making the very practical claim that if one wants to do things well, one can’t do everything”
Sounds plausible.
“I am not convinced that vast numbers of political philosophers should drop what they are doing and turn to animal ethics”
Wait, now it sounds like you do assume non-human animals in political philosophy is necessarily something strongly separated from everything else, like some satellite.
My view on conjunction/interrelation is that including non-humans can also improve work on core components of political philosophy. To give one more example Kymlicka’s recent article “Human Rights Without Human Supremacism” show shortcomings in HR work by e.g. Waldron of relevance to the practical use of HR to protect some at risk groups of humans. Compare: feminist work on vulnerability is no mere satellite to justice theory. It reshapes and improves the core.
But sure, one work/author cannot do everything.
To pin down what one work/author can plausible be held to do your #0 argued that since political philosophy marginalize many groups X Y Z it is ok for one work/author to exclude X if including Y Z. (Interpersonally put: it’s “paradoxical” for Y Z excluders to object to X excluders.)
I replied: depends, since how X Y Z differ in degree of moral urgency and marginalization also matters.
You don’t seem to object to that reply as a matter of principle. You only doubt non-human animal urgency:
“I am not convinced that non-human animals are the group/issue that is the one that is most oppressed or most suffering (you can fill in your criterium of moral badness here) and hence in most urgent need of our scholarly attention.”
I take oppression claims to be one extra normative step up from suffering claims. E.g. some could say, yeah we cause millions of pigs to suffer but that’s not (much) oppression since pig suffering doesn’t matter (much). In the quote above you seem to assert both that
(S) the sum of human on non-human animal suffering is smaller than the suffering of some marginalized human group, and
(O) the sum of oppression that such human on non-human animal suffering amount to is smaller than the sum of oppression of some marginalized human group.
(Talk of “sums” here of course hides complexity, but some such comparative judgments about sums, sizes, magnitudes, … are needed in any system of norms so I’ll assume it can be worked out roughly. I also assume the number of suffering individuals in a group affects the group’s “sum” of suffering/oppression.)
I doubt both S and O. I’ll only target S for now though.
I take these to be well established facts: Animal industries is they actually operate routinely induce suffering on their captives. The number of land animals killed yearly by animal industries is at least 56 billion ( http://www.animalequality.net/food ).
The sum of suffering from combining those two facts is enourmous. I then pass the ball to you: what group of marginalized humans do you claim suffer in sum more? Remember: there are only 7.6 billion humans in total on earth.
(Note that if we also count fish netted and killed the number of animal victims rise to trillions , http://www.animal-ethics.org/animal-exploitation-section/animals-used-food-introduction/fishing/ . The evidence for conscious pain in fish is growing but still not as strong as for land animals killed by animal industries. But even if we adjust down for uncertainty the likely sum of suffering is still staggering.)
engels 12.22.17 at 3:05 pm
Thanks for the pointers, which I agree look very different from Rawls and similar. However, I wasn’t really talking about a pure/applied distinction but the seeming lack of anything that speaks to the collapse of the technocratic centre (in which judging by that list political philosophy remains very much embedded) and the rise of the populist Left and Right (other than possibly dismissing them all as bigots).
SusanC 12.22.17 at 3:09 pm
There’s also the issue of what the institutional, as opposed to individual, response should be to observed gaps in the literature.
I can think of some examples at institutions I’m familiar with where, when it became clear that there was some research that ought to be done by someone, but no-one on staff had the background/skills/inclination to follow it up it, the institutional response was to shake some more funding out of the government and hire some promising young postdoctoral researchers who were interested in it. (This sort of policy can be justified on purely cynical grounds such as maximising the number of high-ranked publications in the Research Excellence Framework obtained relative to money expended, but one could also argue that it is scientifically worthwhile).
Paul 12.22.17 at 3:59 pm
Academics write about the things they find interesting. If ccc finds a capability approach to the rights of animals interesting, (s)he should take it.
And yes, academics are a small group of people who are paid for by others to study what we want (subject to many constraints, but fewer than those who work for Ford or McDonalds). Is the world a better place for our existence? I’d like to think so, but maybe we’re just parasites.
ccc might think Ingrid, and me, and many others are moral monsters for not being more interested in the rights of animals. But that’s really a judgement on our souls, not our profession.
ccc 12.22.17 at 5:01 pm
To various other comments:
I could reply straight up. But then again you can with minimal effort find the particular replies to your gut. Even replies to that sweet, smoothingly distracting fantasy about plants. There are introductory textbooks on animal ethics. Maybe read one?
Harry 12.22.17 at 5:12 pm
And I forgot to mention Tommie Shelby’s excellent Dark Ghettos
!
engels 12.22.17 at 6:48 pm
Am I right in thinking that apart from Chambers they’re all American (and, certainly by non-professorial standards, wealthy and, excepting Shelby, white)? Glad that none of the shine has come off the city on the hill…
Harry 12.22.17 at 7:23 pm
Yes of course (apart from CB). Well, all have by non-professorial standards high incomes; I can’t speak to their wealth or how much they give away. Would any of that be relevant if they did work that you approved of? And why expect anything different?. The conditions and environment needed to do good academic work in capitalist societies involve relatively high incomes. That said, I could name plenty of pretentious professors who think they are declasse… but they are as bourgeois as any I named, and more bourgeois than some.
When you go into these snarky ad hominems I sometimes wonder what your income is and what you do for a living.
Harry 12.22.17 at 9:38 pm
On the actual topic, your comment at 39, making the distinction between pure/applied on the one hand and technocratic centre/radical on the other made me wonder about something that I’d be curious what others think. Maybe the move toward applied political philosophy (which has been widespread) actually exacerbates a tendency not to offer radical critique. Because to do the interesting work at the applied level one has to define parameters, and the more distant the parameters are from the societal framework one knows something about the more airy-fairy one’s theorising about the applied issue seems. I don’t have a lot to say in detail about how education would be organized or distributed in a very egalitarian society; much more about what principles we should act under in the unjustly in-egalitarian society we inhabit. Or suppose one thought that, ideally, borders would be open. Well, one can argue for that, but if you want to have an impact on how people think about specific restrictions on migration one will set that aside and argue about the specific restrictions adopting, for the sake of argument, assumptions shared by one’s interlocutors.
I disagree with your characterisation of Rawls by the way — the theory in A Theory of Justice is neither intended to justify anything like a 1950s-70s status quo, nor does it justify anything like that.
Final thing. I’m not sure what ‘speaks to’ means (that’s not snarky, I assume that you were being deliberately expansive). But political philosophy is the wrong place to look for any sort of explanations of the rise of populism, and I’m not sure its the right place to look for critiques of any sophistication. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but whereas the crash might indicate to economists that they got something empirically wrong, I don’t see how the rise of populism indicates that political philosophers have got anything normatively wrong. (Not saying we’re not wrong, just that the rise of populism doesn’t indicate that we are).
Harry 12.22.17 at 9:39 pm
Finally — that discourse about applied/pure etc wasn’t a justification of anything, just a musing about something that hadn’t occurred to me before.
anon 12.22.17 at 9:59 pm
“I think it is not a fair critique that a certain person has not done work on topics X, Y and Z.”
I agree. But by the same logic it is also not a fair critique that a certain person has not done work on any of those topics at all. You aren’t explicitly saying it, but it would be entirely reasonable to produce something in discipline A without addressing ANY marginalized issue/population/topic. The work can be judged on according to its value with regard to its desired topic.
And, similarly, it is reasonable to construct a class that addresses issues in discipline A, WITHOUT addressing any popularly considered marginalized issue X, Y, or Z. If a professor doesn’t want to address homosexuality in class, he doesn’t have to. No colonial rights? Fine. And so on.
When I was in graduate school, I encountered the politically correct inclusivity argument with regards to The Plague. The professor critiqued the book on the basis that it had no major black (or North African) characters. My own thought was, well it had no major characters who were firemen, either. So what? Its a good book regardless.
anon
Lurker 12.23.17 at 12:54 am
Well Engels, Henry, et al: In his book “The Hidden Life of Trees” Peter Wohlleben makes the scientific case that trees are both sentient and capable of reason!
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Steve 12.23.17 at 10:18 am
Re 39 Nuti and Badano have an excellent paper on right-wing populism coming out in Journal of Political Philosophy; ironically, given your claims, it uses a lot of Rawlsian ideas (later Rawls, but, still…)
engels 12.23.17 at 3:12 pm
Nuti and Badano have an excellent paper on right-wing populism coming out in Journal of Political Philosophy
Great, and not a moment too soon!
nastywoman 12.23.17 at 5:47 pm
– at ccc that she doesn’t engage with rocks – and faust about the idea that we don’t ”philosophize about what rocks can tell us about our own souls”.
Political philosophy in general has a big problem though. It seems most authors can find some perfectly non-malicious, workload-related reason for giving rocks the excluded-via-footnote treatment. But the aggregate effect of all such cases is ongoing marginalization of the topic of ”rocks” from political philosophy. (The near complete absence of that topic on Crooked Timber over the years is a good illustration.)
Gladly there are some signs of (slow) change now, thanks in part to the “political turn†in rocks ethics pioneered by among others – Michael Heizer.
And in my imagination Michael Heizers rock is ”floating” – which is as ”non-human” as it gets!
ccc 12.23.17 at 9:01 pm
Nastywoman #52: Sarcasm can be irresistible. But try watching some undercover footage from animal industries at https://www.mercyforanimals.org/investigations .
nastywoman 12.24.17 at 2:11 pm
@53
– watching not only ”undercover” footage from animal industries always moves me to tears and so it wasn’t ”Sarcasm” – it was more – if one believe that it all should be connected -(the ”human” with the ”non-human” ethics) – why stop at ”non-human” ethics since ”artists” -(like for example Michael Heizer) – might offer in their work such a relief from… oppression?
And as I believe that everything is connected and artists -(and NOT Philosophers) – currently offer the most awesome answers and ”emotional relief” – I’m like Mrs. Robeyns not convinced that vast numbers of political philosophers should drop what they are doing and focus their scholarly attention on non-human ethics.
And Buon Natale from ”the city of love” Verona.
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