"LGBTQI+"?

There has been a steady increase in the number of letters being added to the name “LGBT”: it used to be “gay and lesbian,” then, somewhere along the line, it was decided that bisexuals—or some of them—are, after all, really bisexual (not just halfway-out-of-the-closet-homosexuals), so we added the “B.” Then the “T” for transgender people was added. Because the main reason for the additions was to reflect as accurately as possible the diversity of the queer community, there was a felt need to add more in order to include more: so we have “I” for “Intersex,” and “Q” for “queer” and/or for “questioning.”

            As a side note, depending on what we mean by “queer,” it could be that we might just as well use the “Q” and only the “Q,” in place of the longer acronym, which is a suggestion that Jonathan Rauch makes in “It’s Time to Drop the ‘LGBT’ from ‘LGBTQ’” (The Atlantic, January/February 2019). This is because if it means something like “anything that is not heteronormative” (whatever this means), then it would refer to all the identities we wish to refer to and future ones that we have not yet imagined, as long as they are not heteronormative: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, intersex people, and more. The problem with “Q” is that, despite its tidiness, efficiency, and the ease with which it rolls off the tongue, it does not properly reflect the diversity by referring to each group using its own initial—it fails to recognize each group. It also faces the problem of being too inclusive, depending on how many more identities it includes, which opens the door for perhaps some groups that are not very morally wholesome, even though they are sexual minorities or non-heteronormative.

            So we are left with the daunting possibility that the initials can keep expanding. Consider one such expanded version—LGBTQQIP2SAA, which stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two spirit, asexual, and ally” (mentioned in Rauch’s article and in Jeffry J. Iovannone’s; https://medium.com/queer-history-for-the-people/a-brief-history-of-the-lgbtq-initialism-e89db1cf06e3). This is not only a mouthful, but one with the potential of becoming more of a mouthful given that it can be expanded with new identities, such as another “B” for “bigender” and “GQ” for “genderqueer.”

            Another variation is adding the “+” at the end to arrive at “LGBTQI+.” Although some might see the “+” as a sign of open-ended inclusion, it might as well be seen as a sign of desperation, in effect saying, “We can’t keep up, so we’ll just add the ‘+’ to include whichever identity comes up.” Using the “+,” however, is in effect the same as using only the “Q,” but one put in place after the realization that the addition of more letters had failed in the face of more and more incoming identities. And its problems are the same as those of using just “Q.”

            The problems that plague decisions as to which letters to include in the acronym can be seen as the result of a crucial yet unanswered question: Whom are we trying to group together under this acronym? Is it non-heterosexual sexual orientations? Is it non-cis genders? Is it people whose sex does not belong to the common sex binary? And to answer this question, a more important one is why we want to group together whomever we want to group. Is it because these groups share a common property? Or is it because it is politically advantageous to do so? I will discuss in this post some reasons for joining together these groups, and raise problems with each of them. The discussion, I think, is interesting and leads to fascinating issues.

            One puzzling thing common to all these suggested acronyms is the lumping together of sexual orientations with non-sexual orientations. Consider LGBTQQIP2SAA: the “L,” “G,” “B,” and “P” (and maybe the first “A,” depending on how we understand asexuality) refer to sexual orientations, while “T” and “2S” refer to gender, while “I” refers to sex, while others’ reference is ambiguous (both “Q’s,” the second “A,” and maybe the first “A,” again depending on how we understand asexuality). My concern is specifically with transgender and sexual orientation, and I will approach the acronym in general through these two aspects—sexual orientation and gender—of a person’s being.

            What are some proffered reasons for keeping them together? The website of the Cambridge University Students’ Campaign for LGBT+ (https://www.lgbt.cusu.cam.ac.uk/resources/trans/the-t-within-lgbt/) lists several reasons for why trans people and gay people should be placed together. Let’s briefly examine them. (Reasons [5] and higher on the following list are not from this website but mine.)

            (1) “[M]any trans people are gay, lesbian or bisexual and conversely many gay, lesbian or bisexual people are trans.” But this is not good enough, because by the same token, many trans people are straight, and many straight people are trans, yet this does not give us a reason to include straight people under the umbrella of LGBTQ. Moreover, given this reason, an acronym made up only of initials that refer to sexual orientation identities can still include transgender people who are oriented to members of the same gender or sex. (I am assuming for now that transmen and transwomen are, respectively, men and women in the sense needed for them to be gay and lesbian, given that the concepts of gay and lesbian refer not only to the target of the sexual attraction, but to the sex or gender of the person with the attraction; to wit, a lesbian is a woman who is attracted to women, and a gay man is a man who is attracted to men. However, please note that this is a controversial assumption because the issue is much more complicated owing to the differences between gender and sex, and to whether sexual orientation refers to a person’s sex, gender, or both. So, if sexual orientation refers to the sex of the person with the orientation—if a man is gay because his sex, not his gender, is male—then it’s unclear whether transmen who sexually desire other men are gay or have a different sexual orientation altogether. I shall return to this issue below.)

            (2) Historically speaking, trans people have always been part of the gay community and have played a crucial role in the gay rights movement. This, however, provides merely a historical reason, not a conceptual one. Granted that historically speaking trans people were part of the initial struggle, is there a non-historical reason that trans people and gay people should be grouped together? To see this point better, suppose that, historically speaking, vegans were part of the initial movement of LGBT rights (I am not claiming that this is actual history—I am imagining history to have been different to make a point). This would give us at most a historical reason to put together vegans and LGBT people under the same name, but it would not give us a conceptual reason.

            (3) Learning to accept one’s trans identity can be similar to learning to accept one’s gay identity, including the social pressures one is subjected to when one comes out. However, unless we have a more basic reason to assimilate gender to sexual orientation, this reason is not different from any other process of coming out, such as coming out as non-Zionist to one’s Zionist family and social group. Yet this gives us no reason to include non-Zionists under the LGBT umbrella.

            (4) “We’re stronger together.” But this reason gives us as much reason to include anyone who can make us stronger (the second “A” above for “allies”) or with whom we can both be strong together (e.g., vegans).

            What we need is a reason that combines both sexual orientation and gender using one or more criteria to which sexual orientation and gender are relevant, while reasonably excluding irrelevant features. (The rest of the reasons that I examine are not from the Cambridge website.) So, we might try:

            (5) We share a common history of oppression on the basis of sex or gender. This is a good start. After all, what seems to be common to all the groups joined together under the LGBT+ umbrella is some connection to sex or gender. But we have to be careful. Consider sex: it is an ambiguous concept in that it refers to various things, including gender (which is often used synonymously with “sex”) and sexual desire, the latter of which can include sexual orientation. But this only pushes the question one step back: Given that sex and sexual orientation are different things, why group them together under the auspices of “oppression”? Consider next gender: Given that sexual orientation and gender are very different things, why group them together under the auspices of “oppression”?

            In response, one might argue that the same social systems that oppress people on the basis of gender or sex also oppress them on the basis of sexual orientation, because such systems aim to control various factors related to sex and gender, such as sexual desire and activity, reproduction, and gender roles.

            This is a promising response, but it requires further argument. This is especially true in light of previous feminist arguments in favor of separating sexual orientation oppression from gender oppression (e.g., Cheshire Calhoun’s 1994 essay, “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory” [Ethics 104: 3, 558-581), and in favor of grouping together non-sexual with sexual oppression because, say, patriarchy’s reach is far and near-exhaustive (e.g., Karen Warren’s 1990 essay, “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism” [Environmental Ethics 12: 2, 125-146]). That is, there is no clear consensus one way or another about grouping these issues together. This might be extended to argue that oppression on the basis of binary genders is also different from oppression on the basis of transgender. For instance, there is no reason to believe that the oppression of ciswomen is the same as that of transwomen, and surely transmen face obstacles that cismen do not. My point is that we need better arguments to focus on and identify that precise system of oppression that oppresses on the basis of the sexual in such a way that it includes both sexual orientation and transgender identities. Vague references to patriarchal systems or to sexual minorities might be insufficient given that the mechanisms and bases of oppression can differ in ways that depend precisely on whether the target is sexual orientation or gender.

            (6) An interesting reason for grouping sexual orientation and gender together is anchored in the popular conception of sexual orientation. Some background is necessary before explaining this reason.

            Our current, popular conception of sexual orientation is what I would call “dualist” or (as the philosopher Kathleen Stock calls it), “reflexive” (“Sexual Orientation: What Is It?”; unpublished manuscript in which Stock defends the popular conception of sexual orientation, which she calls “the orthodox view”): it involves not only the sex (or gender) of the object or target of the attraction, but also the sex (or gender) of the person with the attraction. For instance, a lesbian is not only someone who is sexually attracted to women, but is someone who is herself is a woman (hence we often say that lesbians are attracted to other women, with “other” implying the womanhood of the person with the orientation). In general, homosexuals are attracted to members of the same sex, while heterosexuals are attracted to members of the opposite sex. The words “same” and “opposite” imply a reference to the sex (or gender) or the person with the orientation.

            This dualist conception of sexual orientation is different from a monist conception, one which emphasizes only the target of the attraction. (A monist conception could refer to only the person with the orientation, but that would be a mere possibility and utterly pointless.) An example of the monist conception was recently defended by the philosopher Robin Dembroff in “What Is Sexual Orientation?” (Philosophers’ Imprint 16 [3], 1-27), in which Dembroff conceives of sexual orientation only in terms of the sex and gender of the object of the sexual attraction. Dembroff’s conception, that is, has no reference to the sex (or gender) of the person with the orientation. (Dembroff’s view is one example of the monist conception because their view, which Dembroff calls “Bidimensional Dispositionalism,” considers the sex and/or gender as bases of the attraction, whereas monism could elect only one of these two as the basis.)

            On the dualist conception, straight men and lesbians have different sexual orientations, even though they have the same type of object of desire. On the monist conception, they would have the same sexual orientation. The current, popular or orthodox conception of sexual orientation is the dualist or reflexive one, not the monist conception.

            One thing to note about the dualist conception is that not only does it link the sex (or gender) of the person with the sexual orientation to the sex (or gender) of the target of the orientation, but it does so in a very strong way, by making the sex (or gender) of the person with the orientation primary. What does this mean? It means this: if someone’s sexual orientation changes, this does not change the sex (or gender) of the person. But if the person’s sex (or gender) changes, this does change the person’s sexual orientation. For instance, if Rafael used to be straight and, somehow, becomes gay, this would not change Rafael’s sex (or gender), not unless Rafael decides to take the additional step to make the change. But if Omar, who is, let’s say, straight, changes his sex (or gender), he also changes his sexual orientation, without needing to take any additional steps. Omar now becomes a homosexual woman whereas he was once a heterosexual man. It is in this way that the popular or dualist conception of sexual orientation strongly links a person’s object of attraction with their own sex or gender.

            The point is that this popular conception of sexual orientation, by forging a strong link between one’s sex (or gender) and sexual orientation, gives us a crucial reason to group together gender and sexual orientation.

            But despite its being a strong reason, it is not ultimately convincing. This is because the popular conception of sexual orientation makes essential reference to the person’s own sex (or gender) only as far as sexual orientation is concerned. This sounds trivial, but it actually is not. To explain: the popular conception refers to one’s sex (or gender) only to elucidate one’s sexual orientation. When we say that X is attracted to women, we need to know X’s sex (or gender) in order to know X’s sexual orientation. This means that the popular conception is not concerned with someone’s sex (or gender) as such, which means that it gives us no reason to group gender with sexual orientation just because that someone has a particular gender. Thus, if we are trying to group together identities on the basis of sexual orientations or on the basis of gender, it still makes little sense to group transgender people with LGB people using this conception of sexual orientation.

            (7) Another reason for keeping the “T” and the “LGB” together is the following. (I beg your patience because this will be a bit complicated.) I have been writing as if sex and gender are interchangeable for the purposes of sexual orientation. For instance, I have been writing that the popular conception refers to the sex (or gender) of the object of attraction and of the person with the orientation. But some believe that the popular conception refers primarily to the sex, not the gender, of the person with the sexual orientation and of the object of the orientation. (Kathleen Stock, in her essay, defends this claim though she does not explain why sexual orientation works this way—a difficult task by all means. Dembroff, in their essay [p.3], states that the popular conception is a “conceptual jumble” when it comes to a number of points, including lack of clarity as to whether sexual orientation is about sex or gender.) That is, a gay man is gay because his sex is male, and he is attracted to other men because they are sexually male, not merely because their gender is male. Of course, their gender is usually the epistemic entryway to one’s desire: Muhamad, as a gay man, is attracted to Owen (partly) because he perceives Owen to be a man, and he perceives Owen to be a man (partly) on the basis of Owen’s perceptible gender or gender presentation.

            In addition, as Stock explains in her essay, to claim that the concept of sexual orientation primarily refers to sex, not to gender, is to claim that in a large number of cases (and this is of course ultimately an empirical claim), what sustains Muhammad’s desire for other men is Muhammad’s belief and perception that they are male—that their sex and body is male. It is also to claim, as a corollary, that were Muhammad to discover that Owen is a transman, Muhammad’s sexual desire for Owen likely ceases or weakens, and that additional elements have to be present for his desire for Owen to continue. For example, his attraction to Owen on the basis of Owen’s physical looks is so strong that it sidelines his lack of attraction to him on the basis of his belief that Owen’s sex might not be male or typically male (though how far this strong attraction takes Muhammad is unclear: maybe to make out with Owen, but not to engage in sexual activity or certain forms of sexual activity).

            Is it plausible for the popular conception of sexual orientation to primarily refer to sex, not gender? One argument that it is plausible goes as follows: Sex, not gender, is primary in the concept of sexual orientation because the attraction—gay, straight, or other—to other people is sexual, and sexual attraction is strongly tied to the role that the person’s sexed-body and genitalia play in the attraction. Put differently, sexual attraction to others is sex-dependent in that it is tied to what we believe their bodies are like, including their sex organs. This does not mean that people are attracted to each other only after they have seen each naked or seen each other’s genitalia, or that people are attracted only to each other’s genitalia or that when they have sex they focus only on the genitalia. Instead, it means that the belief that the object of one’s sexual attraction is male, female, or a specific configuration of sex and genitalia typically animates and sustains the attraction for the other. It forms the background condition for desiring someone. The other’s body is seen as attractive in light of beliefs about their sex. For instance, imagine seeing a pair of hairless legs but in such a way that you cannot see the rest of the person’s body and are thus unable to form beliefs about their sex. Coming to know or to form beliefs about their sex will likely affect your sexual attraction to the legs: if you are straight and you come to know that they are the legs of someone of the same-sex, this will likely deflate your attraction to them. (I say “likely,” “primarily,” and so on because these are all generalizations and variations in human beings’ sexual attractions are well known.)

            The focus on sex has an explanation likely based in evolution and the role that the sex organs play in procreation. Beliefs and perceptions about the sexual organs and sex of the other are likely crucial in the formation of desire because this would be nature’s way of getting us to copulate heterosexually. It would make little sense, evolutionarily speaking, for us to feel sexual desire regardless of our beliefs of the other’s sex because this would have led to less-than-efficient mating strategies. Again, this does not mean that every time a heterosexual couple desires to have sex they also desire to procreate, let alone that gay couples want to procreate whenever they desire to have sex. Sex to us is crucially a mental matter, and on the surface sexual desire has many goals (primarily sensual and non-sensual pleasure, but also status, conquest, etc.), but the historical formation of sexual desire likely has an evolutionary explanation, and this is what we need in order to explain the role that sex and sex organs play in desire, even when they deviate from heterosexual statistical norms, as they do in same-sex attraction or in cases of attraction to mixed-sex bodies.

            If, then, sexual orientation links the sex of the person who has the orientation to the sex of the object of attraction, it is possible that a new category of sexual orientation (or more than one category, actually) can arise for people whose sex does not conform to the two binaries, for people whose sexual attraction is for those whose sex does not conform to the binaries, or for people who are both. We can add letters as we see fit to the acronym. Here, however, we have to be careful. Consider Ahmad, who is sexually attracted to gender non-conforming individuals. This attraction, on its own, does not usher in a new sexual orientation (if, that is, we keep fixed the concept’s reference to sex and not widen it to include gender) because it does not tell us what Ahmad’s attraction is to, as far as the sex of the object of attraction is concerned: it does not tell us whether Ahmad is attracted to gender non-conforming individuals who are sexually male, female, or other. If Ahmad is attracted to male gender non-conforming individuals, then he would—or should—be classified as gay on the popular conception. If he is attracted to female gender non-conforming individuals, then he would—or should—be classified as heterosexual. (The “should” is important because if the popular conception of sexual orientation refers not only to the sex of the object of attraction, but also to the match between the sex and the corresponding socially accepted gender, Ahmad’s sexual orientation would be in limbo. What makes this issue even more complicated is that “gender” can refer to various things, from basic bodily appearance to comportment to mannerisms to clothes to other things.)

            Going back to adding new letters to the acronym: we can establish the existence of sexual orientations of and to people whose sex does not conform to the usual sex binaries. Because on the popular conception of sexual orientation the sex of the person with the orientation is either the same as or opposite to that of the object of the attraction, and because the sex of non-binary people is neither the same nor opposite to the binary sexes, we will have on our hands new sexual orientations, using the popular conception as our template. We can, then, by going beyond the sex binaries, add sexual orientations on the basis of the non-binary sex of the person with the new orientation or on the basis of the non-binary sex of the person who is the object of the attraction.

            (There might be, however, constraints that such orientations need to meet in order to count as genuine sexual orientations, whatever this means; for instance, that they are numerically large enough to matter, and that they are not variations on the other basic sexual orientations, though how to fix these constraints is a philosophical headache.)

            The point, however, of this discussion is to provide a reason to group transgender people with LGB people. Do we have this reason? We will have it only if we make the following assumption: that people whose sex does not fall into the sex binary are transgender people. It is this assumption that will take us from the new sexual orientations to transgender identities. But, obviously, this is a false assumption because of the crucial differences between sex and gender that allow people of the same sex to have different genders and that allow people of the same gender to have different sexes. Just because someone’s sex is not one of the two sexes does not mean that they will be transgender. So this reason, interesting, fascinating, and instructive as it is, fails.

            (8) One final reason for grouping together sexual orientation and transgender was suggested to me by my colleague and friend, Andy Yang (though he does not necessarily endorse it). It goes as follows: it makes sense to classify transgender people with LGB people because the former were or will at one point be gay or lesbian themselves. How so? Consider a cisman who becomes a woman: if he used to be straight, s/he will become a lesbian upon becoming a woman; if he used to be gay, s/he will become straight upon becoming a woman, but he was at some point gay. Either way, a trans person will have at some point in their life a gay sexual orientation.

            Interesting as this reason is, it faces some difficulties. First, trans people who consider themselves to be members of the LGBTQ+ community need not think of themselves as members of the community because of the above reason. They might think they are members because they are, simply, trans and trans people have always been considered as part of the LGBT community. Now, I admit that this difficulty smuggles in a constraint on what counts as a good reason for the grouping together of transgender and LGB groups, a constraint that I have not yet raised (but that’s because I hadn’t yet needed to), namely, that a good reason for the grouping should cohere with the reasons that the members of the groups themselves have for the grouping. I am, however, unsure of the importance of this constraint because, though it might be important for political cohesion, it is less important for conceptual reasons for the grouping.

            A second difficulty, and one connected to the first, is that the suggestion relies on sexual orientation as a description or property of who one is, whereas the letters in “LGBTQ+” might refer to more than that, to an explicitly adopted or accepted identity, such that one is not merely a homosexual but also gay, with all the cultural and political connotations that come with it. Indeed, given the politics behind the acronym, it is best understood as referring to political identities, not merely to one’s descriptive property of, say, having a same-sex orientation. If so, then what might matter to a trans person is their identity as trans, not their sexual orientation as such, and what matters to a lesbian is her lesbian identity, not merely her same-sex sexual orientation. (More on this below.)

            A third difficulty is that the reason’s convincingness rests on the dualist conception of sexual orientation. If we change this conception to a monist one, we pull the rug from under this reason. Since, however, I have been operating with the popular conception, this difficulty is not severe.

            A fourth difficulty with this reason is that it cherry picks what it wants from the popular conception of sexual orientation. On the one hand, it relies on the popular conception’s reflexivity or dualism to make its point. On the other, it neglects what might be a crucial aspect of the conception, which is its reference to sex, not to gender. (“Might” because this aspect of the conception is debatable.) On the popular view, and given the reference to sex, a straight man who becomes a woman need not become a lesbian because the concept of lesbian is sex-dependent, and much will depend on the transwoman’s body and how many female sex features it has. The point is that it is assuming very much to claim that trans people become lesbians or gay if they used to be straight (or straight if they used to be lesbian or gay). So this last reason should not bank on it.

            I have considered eight reasons for putting together sexual orientation and transgender groups, and I have come up mostly empty-handed. At the least, none of the reasons is straightforwardly convincing. This should not be a surprise, because, in general, sexual orientation and gender are very different kinds of thing. The first is primarily about one’s sexual energies and attractions, and the second is about, well, gender.

            It seems to me that the best reasons for the grouping will have to be political—that is, that being joined at the hip will allow these groups to attain political gains more efficiently, attain more political gains, or (inclusive “or”) attain more political gains more efficiently. But we have to remember that we are now in different times: in the west, gay people have attained their rights, and though they suffer from homophobia and other challenges every now and then and every here and there, their war is almost won. Not so for transgender people. Moreover, there has been some recent fractions among these groups, especially between gender critical feminists and some transgender thinkers and activists, which indicates that we need to get our political ducks in a row before we start speaking of attaining these goals together.

            Indeed, the need to get our political ducks in a row is more evident if we understand the acronym to refer to the political and cultural identities of being gay and trans, as opposed to sexual orientation and gender descriptive aspects of one’s being (e.g., a reference merely to one’s desires for members of the same sex, or merely to one’s feeling of belonging to a different gender). For in the former case, political and cultural identities imply political goals and postures not implied, or not implied so obviously, by a reference to a description of one’s being. Given that the acronym clearly refers to the political and cultural identities of being gay and trans, coming to an agreement to what the respective political and social goals are is a must.

            However, to my mind, political reasons for unity do not themselves have much cache unless they are grounded in something else, something that gives us a good reason to group these groups together but not those. That is, the political reasons themselves must be grounded in something that unifies LGBT groups with each other as opposed to unifying, say, trans people with other groups, if unity with these other groups is better for the hoped-for political and social gains. The closest we have to unify LGBT groups is that they are all sexual minorities, which might be a good enough reason to start with for political purposes, though I worry, as I argued early on in this post, about using the ambiguous concept of sex to justify this grouping.

            I have conducted this discussion on the basis of the popular or dualist conception of sexual orientation. On a monist conception, whether Dembroff’s Bidimensional Dispositionalism or another version of the monist conception, we do not have better reasons to join the two groups together. Monist conceptions focus solely on the sex (or gender) of the object of attraction, so there is no temptation to develop arguments that proceed from a conception of sexual orientation that relies also on the sex (or gender) of the person with the orientation.

            Thus, the acronym “LGBTQ” needs to be seriously re-thought. If we are to keep it intact or if we are to add more letters to it, we should make sure we have a good reason for doing either or both.

Sexual Shallowness?

Sexual Shallowness?

CONTENT WARNING: I liberally and somewhat gratuitously use the word “ass” (meaning “behind,” not “donkey”) in this post.

Consider the following story (inspired, but only inspired, by a true event—many important details have been changed). A bunch of gay men in their forties and fifties are having dinner and reminiscing about their young dating days. One of them—let’s call him Carl—mentions his first dating experience with a guy named Eric. The others ask him what Eric was like, and Carl replies, “I don’t remember much about him. The only thing I clearly remember was his ass. He had a beautiful ass, and I can still see him walking down the street in front of me in tight shorts.” This provokes a mild outcry from some of the members of the dinner, who accuse Carl of shallowness, by reducing Eric to nothing but his ass. (Or is it to nothing but an ass? I mean if you’re going to reduce someone to his ass, you might as well be reducing him to an ass, period. I see no moral difference between the two.)

At that point, someone—Pedro—asks Carl, “Well, do you remember whether Eric was smart or intelligent or talented in some way?” There are supportive cries of, “Yeah, Carl, do you?” presumably thinking that Pedro is pushing Carl to find something loftier than Eric’s ass by which to remember Eric (Pedro, for the record, was doing no such thing). Carl responds, “I’m not sure. I don’t think he was stupid. Maybe he was averagely intelligent.” Pedro then replies, “Well, maybe there isn’t much to remember Eric by other than his ass.”

(Henceforth, I use “ass” as a stand in for a person’s physical qualities, especially those transformed into sexual ones through the desire of another person.)

The outraged friends at the dinner seem to be subscribing to the following principle: Even if X has worthwhile sexual properties (e.g., a nice ass), X should only be remembered (honored, thought of, etc.) by X’s worthwhile nonsexual properties. Eric has a nice ass, yes, but he should be remembered by his wit or his flute-playing skills. And if Carl fails to see that, then that is his fault, his blindness, not Eric’s lacking anything worthwhile.

The above principle is strong (let’s call it “SP”). It’s strong for three reasons. First, it assumes that for any person X, X must have worthwhile nonsexual properties. Second, it assumes that the nonsexual properties trump the sexual ones. Third, it assumes that the nonsexual properties are the only properties by which someone ought to be remembered.

Contrast SP with another, weaker principle (“MP”) that does not share SP’s first assumption. MP states: If X has worthwhile sexual and nonsexual properties, X should be remembered only by the latter. MP is weaker than SP because it does not assume that every person has worthwhile nonsexual properties, only that if they do, they should be remembered by them. It is still a strong principle because it accepts that nonsexual properties trump the sexual ones, and that people should be remembered only by the nonsexual ones.

Here is an even weaker principle (“WP”): If X has worthwhile sexual and nonsexual properties, X should be remembered by the latter (but not necessarily by only the latter). This is a weaker principle because it relaxes the claim that someone should be remembered only by their nonsexual properties.

I am not foolish enough to argue that our worthwhile sexual properties trump our worthwhile nonsexual ones, so I accept WP (or some version of it). I have no difficulty accepting the idea that if Eric had worthwhile sexual and nonsexual properties, then Carl should remember him by both. (I will, however, shortly modify this claim by making room for the type of relationship at stake.) But I am foolish enough to claim that not everyone has worthwhile nonsexual properties (of course, not everyone has worthwhile sexual properties either, but the present post is attempting to rescue sex from the intellectual clutches of non-sex). So here goes.

Why do we always assume that people are better than they are? We should seriously consider the possibility—the reality even—that many people have little that makes them special. Perhaps metaphysically speaking we are all endowed with inherent worth, dignity, a little mirror inside us reflecting God, etc. But if this is true, it does not always wear itself on its sleeve, given that people quite frequently exhibit properties that are, shall we say, the exact opposite of this inherent worth (present company definitely included—I ain’t no goldmine, for sure). People tend to be selfish, self-absorbed, vindictive, envious, jealous, full of unjustified self-importance, manipulative, unforgiving, deceitful, self-deceitful, ridden with anxieties, stubborn, irrational, stupid, uncaring, oblivious, pretentious, arrogant, cowardly, dishonest, self-rationalizing, cruel, insensitive, riddled with illusions, superstitious, shallow, greedy, prejudiced, ignorant, and just overall unwholesome. On top of this sorry heap, they manage the feat of also being self-righteous about who they are and thinking that they are special or unique. Why then presume that the Erics of the world have something about them that is better than their asses?

(Whether the people with these defects are to blame for them is an irrelevant issue, because being blameworthy or not does not negate the fact that they have the defects. For the record, I don’t think that we can say that they are or that they aren’t. A lot depends on the specific situation of each person. But in general, I do think that people are responsible for controlling their wayward emotions and for trying to become better when they have accurate self-assessments.)

Now imagine Carl, with Pedro’s moral and intellectual support, replying to his friends (and, unbeknownst to him, criticizing SP) as follows: “As it so happens, Eric was kind of a mimbo [male bimbo]. He wasn’t that intelligent, he was shallow—always chasing after every new fad—and he had no skills or talents to speak of. Really, he had no worthwhile nonsexual properties by which to remember him.” But his friends berate Carl: “Think, dude. Go back in time. Dig into your memories. Surely you can find something.” Carl says, “Yes, of course. I can find some things. It’s not all gloom and doom. He could be sweet at times. I loved how he used to be absorbed in whatever TV shows he watched. He loved talking about his childhood, and he could be psychologically insightful about people.” The friends chime in, “There you go. We have a few winners! Remember Eric by them!” “No,” Carl replies, “We don’t have winners. These properties are not worthwhile. They are certainly not worthwhile enough to remember Eric by.”

Surely Carl is right. To claim that (most, many, some, a few) people do not have worthwhile nonsexual properties is not to claim that they are utterly and always irrational, shallow, etc. This would be patently false. Instead, it is to claim that what they exhibit is nothing to drool over, it’s nothing so special as to make them stand out. It is to claim that people tend to be average, even sub-average, and if one encounters such a human being, let’s not insist that he must have more than a nice ass (if he’s lucky enough to have one).

So SP is false because it wrongly assumes that people have such worthwhile nonsexual properties.

Here’s an obvious (yet silly) objection to the idea that people might not have worthwhile properties. Being worthwhile is subjective. One can’t just decide that people don’t have such worthwhile properties, because being worthwhile depends on subjective values and a person’s point of view.

Maybe. (Please note that I have a hard time understanding this objection—understanding what it means that such values are subjective.) However, this objection does not help the friends at the dinner, because (and this is why it is silly) by their own lights every person is supposed to have something non-sexually worthwhile. If they go the subjective route, they undermine their own claim because they leave it up to subjectivity to decide whether someone has worthwhile properties. Put slightly differently, those who accept SP must accept the existence of objective worthwhile properties. If they don’t, they cannot fault Carl for not finding any, because he can just say, “Well, such properties are subjectively worthwhile, and I happened not to find any in Eric. So go suck on that.”

Here’s another, more respectable objection (but one that is ultimately also false) to the idea that people might not have worthwhile properties: the property of being worthwhile is a relational property when it comes to remembering (honoring, thinking of, etc.) someone. Whether Eric has a worthwhile property for Carl to remember him by depends on the two of them and their relationship. To see this, consider Zack, who was Eric’s friend. Zack remembers Eric by Eric’s nonsexual properties, specifically two or three of them by which Zack chooses to remember Eric. It is Zack who chooses (in a loose sense of “choose”) which properties by which to remember Eric, just as Carl chooses which other properties (sexual) by which to remember him. In this way, there is no non-relational property of worthwhileness.

This objection is subtler than the first, but it succumbs to a similar response. Although it is true that people choose which properties by which to remember someone, Carl’s friends, in endorsing SP, are not denying this claim. They accept that Carl has chosen Eric’s nice ass as his memorabilia for Eric, but they reject the aptness or correctness of the choice. They are in effect saying to Carl, “You made the wrong choice. You should have chosen a nonsexual worthwhile property.”

(On a side note, people often value choice too much, to the point of thinking that if something is chosen, then it cannot be bad, the idea being that it reflects someone’s autonomy. But this cannot be that simple, given that people often make wrong choices.)

The objection sounds right because it relies on a correct idea, namely, that in many cases a humdrum object becomes valuable because of our relationship to it. A deck of cards is usually an ordinary, almost worthless, object. But this deck of cards is special because my late father gave it to me (on his deathbed, if you want more drama). So it has value in virtue of its history and relationship to me. The objection, then, transfers this correct idea to the Carl-Eric case, and it says that Eric himself has neither worthwhile nor non-worthwhile properties, and that what makes such properties worthwhile is their relation to other people.

But it is in transferring the idea to human beings that the objection goes wrong, because human beings are not decks of cards, so their worthwhile properties are not exhausted or fully explained by the value with which other people endow them (perhaps a religious person would say that they are valuable only because God endowed them with value, but the SP does not need this claim). Thus, Carl’s friends are going to reject this objection. They will fault Carl for latching on the wrong property.

So these two objections fail in denying that people might not have worthwhile properties. In thus failing, they also fail to rescue SP. For all these reasons, Carl can say to his friends, “I prefer to remember Eric by his ass, because at least his ass was not entangled in all the mediocrity of being human. If you insist that I remember him by his average intelligence, you are insisting that I relegate Eric to the multitudes. And I won’t do that.” Carl’s answer gives us something to think about. Eric’s ass has the potential to lift Eric out of the muck of humanity and make him memorable. Carl’s friends, thinking that they are Eric’s allies, are actually the ones dragging him down by insisting that Carl remember him by something utterly mundane. This is an idea worth considering.

So if SP is false, should we accept MP? Recall that MP states, “If X has worthwhile sexual and nonsexual properties, X should be remembered only by the latter.” Is MP true? No.

Let’s assume, in order to evaluate MP, that Eric has worthwhile nonsexual properties (ones that are not drowned out by ugly ones, though perhaps a worthwhile property is one that is good and shines through). Should Carl remember him by those properties? Is Carl at fault if he does not do so?

Suppose that Carl was in a long-term relationship with Micah, who was not only handsome and sexy but also intelligent, honest, witty, insightful, and loving. If Carl were to remember him mostly by his ass, Carl’s friends could, and rightly so, level at Carl the charge of serious unfairness to Micah, on the ground that Micah and he shared much more than mutual sexual desire. So when Carl latches only on Micah’s ass, his friends can legitimately protest, “Hey! He was more than that! By not remembering him by the other properties, you do him and your relationship an injustice. You distort it.”

But with Eric things are different. If Carl and Eric had only or primarily a sexual relationship, Carl’s remembering Eric by his ass seems perfectly fair to both Eric and to their relationship. To insist on other qualities should merit the same objection as that leveled above: it might very well distort the relationship that they had. Carl might have even been cognizant of Eric’s other good qualities, but to insist that he (also) remember or honor Eric by them is to distort not only the nature of the relationship itself, but also how Carl should relate to Eric.

So MP is not true in all cases (and hence not true as stated), because we have no reason to accept it in purely sexual relationships. And for the same reason, WP is also false. To recall, WP states, “If X has worthwhile sexual and nonsexual properties, X should be remembered by the latter (but not necessarily by only the latter).” Moreover, given the reason for rejecting them both, they should be amended to include a clause about the nature of the relationship. Better stated:

MP, amended (MPA): “If X and Y are in a more-than-sexual relationship, and if X has worthwhile sexual and nonsexual properties, Y should remember X by only the latter.”

WP, amended (WPA): “If X and Y are in a more-than-sexual relationship, and if X has worthwhile sexual and nonsexual properties, Y should remember X by the latter (but necessarily by only the latter).”

Which is the true one? The true one is WPA, because MPA denigrates the sexual not only in general, but also when it might be a crucial part of the relationship. X and Y might have had a wonderful relationship, and one crucial reason it was wonderful was the sex, and the sex was wonderful because X had an amazing body after which Y lusted (so Y was focusing on X during the sex, not fantasizing about Justin Trudeau, because, amazing as it is, Y has lost interest in X’s body—time not not only heals all wounds, but flattens all desires as well). MPA allows the parties to remember and honor each other because of both the sexual and the nonsexual.

So is Carl shallow for remembering Eric only by his ass? Not in those cases in which Eric did not have much else to be remembered for or (inclusive “or”) those cases in which Carl and Eric had a purely sexual relationship.

In concluding this post, I note one thing and raise a question. First, nothing I have said licenses the inference that Carl, in remembering Eric by his ass, views Eric as nothing but a body or body parts. That is, Carl’s attitude towards Eric need not, in the present or in the past, be one of viewing him as lacking humanity (no matter how we explicate the idea of this lack). As a matter of fact, in remembering X by whichever property P, Y is remembering X by P, not remembering merely P. In the case of Carl and Eric, it is Eric’s ass that is the window through which Carl remembers him. So there is no rejection or denial of Eric’s humanity. The opposite is what is occurring.

What should we say if Eric were Erica? Should we adopt the same answer? Would the answer differ if Carl were Carla? I leave the answers to another post (though definitely not the next one).

The Limits of the Academic Boycott of Israel

The Limits of the Academic Boycott of Israel

A few months ago, I got into a brief argument with someone on Facebook. The argument was mostly civil (except for another person who decided to jump in and, instead of arguing with me, resorted to name-calling), but it ended with, “Well, we just have to agree to disagree” kind of ending, which is fine, except that I would like to argue more (and better) for my view. (Two close and dear friends of mine [a married couple] who live in Beirut advised me, when I saw them there in January, to post a blog on what happened and to use the occasion to defend my views. I am acting on their advice, so thank you for that, May and Khalil.)

First, here’s what happened: I was on Facebook when I saw that someone had posted a video of a speaker at the American University of Beirut whose talk was momentarily shouted down (I’ll reveal his name in a bit); the video was of the audience members shouting him down. Eventually, I was told, he was able to speak, so that the shouting down was not fully effective. When I saw the video on Facebook, I commented that such actions are terrible and that speakers should be given the right to speak, especially since members of the university should respect the university’s decision (or the decision of whichever part of the university invited the speaker) to invite the person to speak (I have already posted a blog on this issue). I was told that the speaker had connections with Israel, specifically with the Hebrew University, and so it was right that he be prevented from speaking, given the academic boycott against Israeli academic institutions, which itself is part of the larger BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement against Israel. Finally, I was told that if I insist on his right to speak, I am in effect going against the academic boycott of Israel.

Throughout the back and forth, I didn’t know who the speaker was. I actually didn’t care, because I thought that no matter who he was, he should be able to speak, period. Of course, after thinking about it, I was a bit puzzled, because given that the reason for the resistance to him speaking was that he taught or worked at the Hebrew University, and given that if he did, he could not have entered Lebanese soil because no one who visits Israel is allowed in Lebanon (unless they change their passport or there is no Israeli stamp on the one they use to enter Lebanon), I was puzzled as to how he could have entered the country to speak at the AUB. (Note that part of the Hebrew University is on occupied land in east Jerusalem—land occupied in 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. I mention this because it is one example of how Israeli universities have collaborated with their various governments to entrench the occupation and other vile policies, though whether intentionally or not is irrelevant.)

In any case, it turned out that the speaker, who was none other than the famous political philosopher Jeff McMahan, never worked at Hebrew University, and was merely an unpaid advisor for its Center for Moral and Political Philosophy. This raises the question: If someone who has never worked at or for an Israeli academic institution is a permissible target of the academic boycott, has the net been thrown too wide to be acceptable? And if someone defends the right of McMahan to speak once he has been invited, like I did, can they be legitimately accused of being against the boycott of Israeli academic institutions? That is, might one not be able to be for the boycott but still disagree with its scope? Surely the answer is yes. I will claim that individuals should never be the targets of the boycott, even if they are Israelis or have worked at Israeli institutions—indeed, even if they are Zionists or across-the-board Israeli apologists.

It is worth mentioning that the principles of the BDS movement do not call on us to divest from, boycott, or sanction individuals, but to do so against companies and institutions (https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds). Indeed, after an incident with George Galloway, the BDS movement had this to say on its website in 2013: “In its 2005 BDS Call, Palestinian civil society has called for a boycott of Israel, its complicit institutions, international corporations that sustain its occupation, colonization and apartheid, and official representatives of the state of Israel and its complicit institutions. BDS does not call for a boycott of individuals because she or he happens to be Israeli or because they express certain views. Of course, any individual is free to decide who they do and do not engage with” (https://bdsmovement.net/news/bds-movement-position-boycott-individuals).

In any case, my point in this post is not to debate the merits or demerits of the BDS movement, let alone boycott movements in general. I will assume that the BDS movement is right to be doing what it is doing, and I want to ask about the scope of this movement: should it, in the case of academics, target institutions and individuals?

For the record, I am a supporter of the BDS movement; I have, among a few other things, discouraged colleagues from attending conferences in Israel, and I refuse to review articles for Israeli journals, making sure to tell them why. These are my meager attempts at supporting the academic boycott. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is morally abhorrent, and its list of moral crimes against Palestinians covers individuals, institutions, and Palestinian society. That is, Israel’s crimes against Palestinians are not limited to actions against individual Palestinians, such as imprisoning them and shooting them, but extends to undermining the very fabric of their social and political life, including their universities and educational institutions. To my mind, Israel aims to reduce the Palestinians to the same status as that of Native Americans in the United States: not a complete wipe out, but a weakening to the point where they become voiceless, utterly helpless, mired in economic mal-being, and forgotten. Moreover, not only have Israeli academic institutions done little to protest the plight of their Palestinian counterparts, they have actively abetted the actions of their state by, for example, hosting departments and centers for archeological and demographic studies with the clear political aim of arguing that the land has always been Jewish and of finding ways to maintain a particular demographic balance, respectively (for additional examples, see http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=2613; see also http://www.monabaker.org/?p=286). Therefore, targeting such institutions for exclusion seems morally sound, especially since other means have proven futile given the wide and deep support that Israel has in the United States and the international community. So whether one supports the boycott because one thinks it is effective, because it is the fair thing to do, or because one simply does not want to engage with such institutions, the boycott is justified.

However, I disagree that the boycott should extend to individual academics. This stance was taken by my friend and colleague Mohammed Abed in a paper that he presented in 2006 (“Philosophical Arguments for a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions”—to my knowledge, the paper was not published), but I will quote from a modified version of the paper which was published in Dissent (Fall 2007, 83-87), titled “In Defense of Academic Boycotts,” whose main points I accept and wish to reiterate and add to.

Abed argues that the boycott should target academic institutions (for reasons that I will not go into). Instead, we should work to halt all academic activity that takes place in Israeli universities, and to move that activity to Palestinians areas. This is all good and fine. But why not also halt work with individual academics who work at or with Israeli academic institutions?

First, not all academics who work with or at Israeli institutions (henceforth, “Israeli academics” for short) are politically or morally compromised as far as Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are concerned. Many of them are critical of these policies, some are anti-Zionists, etc. Of course, the reply now would be, “All right. The boycott does not extend to them, only to those who are morally and politically compromised.” But then we run into the serious problem of how we determine who is which. I do not mean to refer to the difficulty of accessing their CVs or finding their publications. The difficulty is deeper: because there is a diversity of views about what counts as an acceptable solution or remedies to the conflict among the supporters of the Palestinians, and because various individuals hold different views of what counts as a morally good resolution of the conflict, we will have a difficult time drawing the line between the “good” academics and the “bad” academics. Some support a two-state solution. Is that compromised because it does not give the Palestinians back all their ancestral homeland? Some support a bi-national state. Is that morally compromised because it maintains the state along ethno-religious lines? Some (e.g., I) support a secular state for both people. Is that compromised because it does not address the desire for the state to be specifically Jewish and/or Palestinian? Thus, not boycotting individuals allows us to not have to subject each individual to some sort of “litmus test” (as Abed put it in the presentation version of his paper), task not only time-consuming but one that will not garner universal agreement among the boycott supporters.

Second, by not boycotting Israeli individual academics, we allow for the proper give-and-take that is the stuff of academic discourse. Given that the Palestinian cause is just, such give-and-take would open the door for Israeli academics to help the cause by working from the inside of their institutions. Not boycotting individuals allows us to talk to them, which in turn increases the chances of having them go back and influence their institutions. In other words, working with Israeli academics increases the chance of having them change their minds about various issues, big or small, connected with the conflict. Having Israeli academics return to their institutions and work from the inside helps increase the chance of their institutions making an impact on Israeli policy. As Abed puts it, Israeli academics are influential in this respect because “First, they are the individuals best placed to pressure academic institutions into taking an official stand against the government’s appalling treatment of the Palestinians” (“In Defense of Academic Boycotts,” 86), and “Second, academics are well-respected members of society and thus in a good position to influence public opinion on important issues” (“In Defense,” 86).

Third, and connected to the above point, we need Israeli academics to visit the Arab world, to come to Arab universities, to engage with Arab audiences, especially with Palestinians, in the Palestinian areas, and at Palestinian universities. This allows for a direct contact between both sides and allows Israelis to see Arabs for what they are and to shed many of their stereotypes about them (and vice versa). Some will be upset by this suggestion and scream that this implies normalization with Israel. But I reply that it does not have to: Arab states need not have full and comprehensive peace treaties with Israel in order to allow their academics to enter their countries. Visa exceptions can be made for them.

Fourth, I have argued in another post that universities have an obligation to their students and to their members in general to expose them to views contrary to what the university’s values or dominant discourse is. In the case of universities on Arab campuses, this means inviting, every now and then, someone with a Zionist point of view and have a discussion with them about their beliefs (as presented in a talk, a lecture, a workshop, etc.). This would allow the members of the hosting university to keep their beliefs fresh and alive (this is Mill speaking) and it would allow testing them against what is being presented. And, connected to the above points, it would open up the possibility that the speaker might modify their own views. Of course, we need to exercise moral common sense: If Benjamin Netanyahu retires into an academic position somewhere, this does not mean he should be invited to speak. His policies, political past, and lack of actual academic credentials (though he did write a book on terrorism) would disqualify him from being an invitee (not to mention that his views are not going to change).

Fifth, engaging with individuals allows everyone to keep abreast of what people are writing and thinking regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It would contribute to a pool of knowledge that we can all use and benefit from to advance our thinking and research on this issue.

Sixth, boycotting individuals runs the risk of being charged with a form or racism or anti-Semitism, since it might be perceived as targeting people for who they are instead of for what they believe. (Again, if we reply, “Well then, let’s boycott them for what they believe,” we run into the political litmus test.) Although we cannot be responsible for other people’s perceptions, this issue does raise the question of whether boycotting Israeli academics is done on the proper ground or for the proper reasons. If it is not for who they are that the boycott is, and if we cannot boycott them on the basis of their beliefs (given the problems with the litmus test), on what grounds are we boycotting them? Here, one might argue that they represent their institutions and that this is sufficient ground for boycotting them.

This brings me to the seventh and final reason against boycotting individuals, namely, that the reason that academics represent their institutions is not plausible, because, simply, describing the relationship between academics and their institutions as one of representation is not true, except in a banal sense of “representation” that means “works there” or “the institution is the person’s affiliation.” Normally, academics present their own views on various issues, and as a matter of fact, in all universities (ideally) and in most (actually) universities, there is respect of freedom of thought, belief, and expression. This is one of the main bases of universities. But it is one which would be at odds with understanding academics as representing their institutions in any strong sense. Thus, academics do not represent their universities in the sense that they speak on their behalf. (There could be other pernicious notions of “representation” that I am neglecting; if so, I invite the reader to supply them in the comments section.)

I have provided various reasons for why the academic boycott of Israel should not target Israeli individuals. To my mind, the boycott should target the institutions themselves: no more exchange programs with Israeli universities, no more study trips to Israel, no joint research with Israeli universities, no conferences on Israeli campuses, and so on. But Israeli academics should not be the target.

Peter Singer vs Elizabeth Costello

Peter Singer vs. Elizabeth Costello

I recently finished reading the novel Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee, the South African / Australian contemporary writer. The main character of the novel, Elizabeth Costello, is herself a world renowned fiction writer (in the world of the novel, of course). The novel tackles, through Costello’s voice and the voice of other characters (e.g., her sister’s and her son’s) various important issues, such as the humanities, the problem of evil, the non-Western novel, the role of the writer, and animal ethics (the focus of this post). If a college should ever adopt for its students a list of common novels for summer reading or as a junior or senior year “common experience,” Elizabeth Costello should be on the list (the novel’s worth has as much to do with its form as with its content).

Two crucial chapters in the novel, which originally were Coetzee’s 1997-1998 Tanner Lectures presented at Princeton University, deal with animal ethics; they are titled “The Philosophers and the Animals” and “The Poets and the Animals.” These lectures became (before they made their way into the novel itself) part of a book entitled The Lives of Animals, edited by Amy Gutmann with four essays commenting on the lectures. Gutmann’s introduction opens the book, followed by Coetzee’s lectures, followed first by an essay by Marjorie Garber (a literary critic), by Peter Singer (a philosopher), by Wendy Doniger (a historian of religion), and lastly by Barbara Smuts (an anthropologist and psychologist). The essays are thought-provoking, and Singer’s will be the topic of this post, specifically whether it successfully criticized Costello’s views of our treatment of animals. I will argue that it did not.

First, however, something brief about Costello’s views. I do not assume that they represent Coetzee’s, especially since there are counter, even if sometimes sympathetic, voices to Costello’s. For instance, Norma, a philosopher and Costello’s daughter-in-law, vehemently disagrees with her views, so does Costello’s son (Norma’s husband) to some extent, and so do two professors at Appleton College (where Costello delivers her views on animals in the form of a lecture and a seminar), one of whom is Jewish and who objects to Costello’s use of the Holocaust in an analogy to our treatment of animals. I will thus speak only of Costello’s views, not of Coetzee’s. (Garber’s essay addresses the issue of Costello’s vs. Coetzee’s voice.).

Well, what are Costello’s views? The core view, around which the rest revolve, is that our treatment of animals, especially that which takes place in slaughter houses, is evil: “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed, dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (The Lives of Animals, p. 21).

This treatment of animals is abetted by a failure of empathy on our part to understand their lives, a failure in turn abetted by the idea that we have reason whereas they don’t. This belief in our deep separation from animals has been supported by various luminous philosophers, including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and Thomas Nagel. Costello takes special aim at Nagel’s famous essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” claiming that Nagel was wrong to think that being a bat was an alien life form for us, because both we and bats are full of being: “To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. Bat-being in the first case, human-being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy” (p. 33).

Thus, in “The Philosophers and the Animals,” Costello’s lecture to Appleton College’s English Department, she rejects philosophers’ claims to human beings’ separation from animals. More than that, she raises doubts about our faith in reason, claiming that contrary to what we might believe, reason need not be the universal mechanism by which to understand the universe, and it might be merely “the being of human thought”; indeed, even merely one “tendency” of such thought (p.23). Reason might be our (human beings’) particular mode of understanding the world, nothing more. “Do we really understand the universe better than animals do?” (p. 45).

In “The Poets and the Animals,” Costello chastises scientific experiments that attempt to prove animal intelligence by not only assimilating it to our own way of thinking, but to even downgrading it to that aspect of our thinking that is practical thinking (how to put boxes on top of each other to reach a banana, e.g.). She also takes to task the line of philosophical thinking that tries to show that human life is more valuable than animal life because we have and use concepts whereas they do not, so their lives matter less to them than our lives matter to us. But anyone “who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being of animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh” (p. 65).

When we fail to occupy the consciousness of animals, we fail morally. We fail, according to Costello, just as all the Germans and Poles failed when they did not occupy the consciousness of the people in concentration camps or on trains being shipped to their deaths. In this sense, Costello is not comparing the moral wrongs of the Holocaust to those we inflict on animals, but finding a common element to our silence in both cases. And this is why Costello urges us “to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language; and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner” (p. 65).

Peter Singer is a very famous philosopher, whose work on animal ethics has been seminal and has given shape to the contemporary animal rights movement (though he himself does not subscribe to rights-talk). Singer’s response to Coetzee’s lectures takes the form of a fictional story involving a philosopher called “Peter” in conversation with his daughter Naomi. Peter was pouring over Coetzee’s chapters because he needed to write a response to them when Naomi comes down for breakfast and asks him why he is frowning, which gets the conversation going. (I have to admit that I always cringe a little when philosophers attempt fiction; the fiction is often bad and sounds silly and pretentious. Singer’s attempt is no exception. In his case it is even worse because the story seems to have a slight mocking tone, which falls flat because Singer’s own argument against Costello’s falls short.)

Singer thinks that Costello’s view is too egalitarian to be acceptable. His own egalitarian view is that of equal interests—that, given each species’ interests, animals belonging to that species are entitled to proper consideration. So the equality in question is proportional: we ought to give consideration to a chicken’s interest equal in proportion to the interest of human beings.

To understand this better, consider having to compare the killing of a chicken with that of a human being. If we had to kill one, which ought we choose? Singer’s answer is that it should be the chicken, because a chicken’s interest in continued life is not the same as a human being’s. We have different and more complex interests in existing than do chickens, and equal proportional consideration means that we give each type of interest its due. Human beings’ lives are much more “future-oriented” than chickens, and that gives us much more to lose. So our interests should be given their proper consideration.

At this point, Naomi accuses her father of speciesism in his belief that human interests are more important than animals’, to which Peter replies that killing an animal, such as their dog Max, is not in itself wrong, because even though Max would lose the rest of his life and whatever joys it contains, other dogs can come into existence and “there would be just as much good aspects of dog-existence” (p. 88). Of course, the death of Max would still lead to some negative consequences, because, after all, his human family will feel his loss because they loved Max (p. 89). Peter, using pigs, makes his point as follows: “Let’s assume the pigs are leading a happy life and are then painlessly killed. For each happy pig killed, a new one is bred, who will lead an equally happy life. So killing the pig does not reduce the total amount of porcine happiness in the world” (p. 89). So as long as the total amount of pig-happiness in the world is not reduced, killing pigs is okay, because the individual life of a pig is not very crucial.

The pig example is just an example, and whether killing pigs is indeed intrinsically wrong (wrong in itself, aside from any bad consequences it has) depends on the extent to which pigs are self-aware (it is the complex self-awareness of human beings that makes killing them intrinsically wrong). If it turns out that pigs and dogs have self-awareness, then the more complex it is, the more intrinsically wrong it is to take their lives. In the case of animals that have no self-awareness or whose self-awareness is minimal, killing them is not intrinsically wrong (though causing them to suffer is; we should not confuse the capacity to suffer with that for self-awareness).

Peter grapples with Costello’s view only in one paragraph at the end of the story. He says that Costello would not agree with his views because of her acceptance of the idea of the fullness of being (explained above). Naomi seems to understand Costello better: “I see what she’s getting at. When you kill a bat, you take away everything that the bat has, its entire existence. Killing a human being can’t do more than that” (p. 90). That is, if fullness of being is what’s at stake, then whether you’re killing a human being or a bat, you’re taking that away, period. But Peter disagrees, because what you take away might have a different value in one case than in another: when you kill a human being, you take away more value than when you kill a bat or a chicken or a pig, precisely because human beings have more valuable capacities than the rest (p. 90).

Singer’s story, however, seems more of an excuse to showcase Singer’s own views than to seriously grapple with Costello’s. But since we should not assume that Peter’s views represent Singer’s, I will continue to speak of “Peter’s views.” (At the end of the story, Singer raises doubts about whether Costello’s views are Coetzee’s, saying that Coetzee’s fictional device allows him to distance himself from them. Perhaps Singer is doing the same in using a fictional story. This is good fortune for me because it enables me to not have to wade into all that has been written on Singer’s views to complete this post!) Still, Peter fails to take seriously Costello’s views, even though Naomi gives him a few opportunities to do that. This failure is serious when we remember that Peter is a philosopher, and philosophers are supposed to be charitable in their interpretations of their opponents’ views.

(Note that Peter commits a fallacy when he infers that more value is lost when you take away complex capacities than is lost when you take away less complex ones. The fallacy here is deriving an evaluative claim from a factual one. But since this is a thorny topic in philosophy, including how serious this fallacy is—if we take it seriously most moral discussions to date will have to be fully revised—I set this point aside.)

How does Peter fail to seriously take Costello’s views? The failure hinges on Costello’s idea that reason might merely be our way of understanding the universe, not the way to understand it. Part of what Costello means by “reason” is not just the ability to reason (e.g., making inferences), of course, but the whole gamut of abilities that come with it: self-awareness, self-conception, imagination, future projections, understanding of our finality, and so on. And these are exactly the same kinds of features because of which Peter thinks we have more value than animals. What Costello is proposing, and what Peter does not seriously engage, is the idea that our abilities are different than animals’ but not superior. Costello emphasizes this claim when rejecting, as imbecilic, the experiments we have designed for animals, such as whether animals can get out of a maze: such a program of scientific experimentation ignores “the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week” (p. 62). Costello’s point, by the way, is not new, and previous philosophers have made it (e.g., Paul W. Taylor). What is strange is that Peter the philosopher does not give it a fair airing.

Animals, like us, have their own ways of understanding the world, according to Costello. This is part of what it means for them to be full of being. I was watching recently one of the BBC nature shows narrated by David Attenborough. The episode was about the zebra’s stripes, and why zebras have them given that they make them stand out conspicuously, thereby making them easy prey for predators. One hypothesis has to do with flies. Apparently, and I don’t really understand this, flies have a certain way of seeing the world (of vision) such that having stripes makes it more difficult for them to see the zebras or to identify them as potential “feeding-lots.” This in turn enables the zebras to not be bitten as much as other animals (such as cattle) by dangerous flies, especially by the Tsetse, whose bites can be fatal. The point is not about the zebra’s abilities (having stripes is not as such an ability) but about the way that flies see the world, which is very different from ours. Indeed, nature is full of examples of animals and creatures whose mode of being is utterly different from ours.

What Costello is suggesting is that although these differences in abilities exist, they do not amount to differences in value and they do not prohibit our ability to understand animals’ desire and need to experience the joy and fullness of being.

Moreover, if each animal has its own fullness of being, then we cannot simply replace that fullness of being with another, as long as we have the same amount (or more) of fullness of being. Peter’s view of replacing a dog’s happiness with another neglects that Costello’s idea of fullness of being refers to something of intrinsic value to each animal, not something to be replaced, without any moral loss, by another animal’s fullness of being.

Peter’s view thus neglects to seriously take Costello’s idea of fullness of being.

I have only argued that Singer’s response, with Peter as its mouthpiece, does not seriously engage Costello’s views. I have not argued that Costello’s views are convincing. The idea of fullness of being still needs fleshing out, and there are some potential inconsistencies between viewing animals as possibly capable of theoretical thought (e.g., her discussion of Sultan the monkey) and the idea that their being is different than ours. There is also the additional, serious worry that if reason is merely our way of understanding the world, how we can use it to establish the equality of animals is problematic because it ushers in the possibility that our understanding of them can be utterly wrong.

But Costello is a writer, not a professional philosopher. Peter is. And as a philosopher he should have known better than to cherry-pick points in his intellectual opponent’s views for criticism. He thus provides an example of exhibiting the intellectual vice of being uncharitable to a fellow thinker.