Fire and climate

I haven't written anything yet about the recent devastating bushfires in Victoria. But I did want to flag this post by a prominent Australian climate researcher that gives a nuanced view of what role climate change may have played.

Fred Phelps, inadmissible

I'm generally leery of immigration laws that seek to exclude bad people. Often, they just seem like they shuffle the badness around. For example, if a Mexican has committed assault in the U.S., it's reasonable to think they pose a higher risk of future assaults. But to deport them for it is protective only from a narrow nation-centric view -- it's saying "don't assault any more Americans -- go assault your fellow Mexicans instead!" I don't think it's right to put that kind of differential value on American versus Mexican lives.

The exception would be if there's a good reason to think that the offense in question is more likely to occur in one country than another. Thus, if a Yemeni al-Qaida sympathizer is arrested for planning a terrorist attack in the U.S., it would make sense to deport them, since al-Qaida's ideology does not hold that Yemen is the Great Satan and ought to be attacked, so the deportation will lead to a net decrease in terrorism.

So I was given pause by the news that Britain has banned Fred Phelps and Shirley Phelps-Roper -- of "God hates fags" fame -- from entering the country.

Melissa McEwan says the decision "recognizes the fundamental difference between speech and incitement to hatred." That's part of it -- if there were no incitement to hatred, there would be no grounds for exclusion*. But while incitement is a necessary condition, it's not a sufficient one. If the exclusion were simply on the basis of the Phelps' general propensity to incite hatred, then excluding them just shifts it around. If, say, the Phelps were just coming for a vacation to see Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, then barring them from entering Britain protects British LGBT folks at the expense of those in the Phelps' alternative vacation destination -- say New York City, which doesn't have the power to ban American visitors.

But the Phelps aren't coming to Britain for a vacation incidental to their hate mission. They're coming in order to organize protests against The Laramie Project, a pro-gay play at Queen Mary's College. Presumably nobody in the U.S. is putting on The Laramie Project or any other play comparably offensive to the Phelps -- otherwise they wouldn't have tried to travel to Britain to do their protesting. So in this case, excluding them will result in a net decrease in hatred incited, and thus is justified.

*I generally take a more expansive view of what things should be counted as free speech than most people who otherwise share my political opinions, but I agree that the Phelps frequently cross that line.

Is veganism an act or an omission?

In my previous post I referenced the act-omission distinction. At least in the modern West, this is a powerful moral intuition that holds that it's more significant to do something than to merely let it happen by failing to do something else. So killing someone is worse than standing by while they die, and saving someone is better than declining to take an opportunity to kill them.

One of the more troublesome aspects of this distinction is how you can decide which things are acts and which are omissions. Discussions tend to center on cases where there's consensus about how to describe things -- e.g. pushing a boulder down a hill onto someone is an act, but failing to move a second boulder to block the path of a naturally falling boulder is an omisison. The great variety of explanations that philosophers have come up with to justify the act-omission distinction only complicate the process of boundary-drawing.

One example that occured to me today is veganism. Let's assume for the remainder of the argument that we have some good reason to see not eating animals as better than eating them, and that we're talking about people who are medically and socio-economically able to be vegan without extreme hardship, and that "veganism" in this argument is referring to a dietary choice, not any additional activism for the cause. Is veganism then a praiseworthy act, or merely an omission of animal cruelty? Conversely, is omnivory merely an omission of a higher moral calling, or is it an active violation against animals?

The simplest case for the "act" side is that veganism seems to involve a great deal of conscious effort. People who never put any thought into the idea that there might be some moral issue about eating animals slide easily into omnivory. To be a vegan requires looking up recipes and nutritional information, reading food labels, dealing with temptation, dealing with unsympathetic friends and family, etc. But this effortfulness is not intrinsic to veganism -- rather, it's a product of the social situation that is set up on the assumption that everyone eats meat. In a vegan society, it would be effortless to remain vegan but would require effort to eat meat. Following this line to its logical conclusion, "acts" end up defined as "things that go against prevailing custom" and "omissions" as "conformity." It seems odd that a distinction so allegedly significant to moral action would be so deeply culturally relativistic and conservative.

The most obvious case for the "omission side" notes that veganism is most commonly defined by a negative fact -- vegans are people who don't eat animals, that is, people who decline to commit a wrong. After all, the slogan is "meat is murder," not "meat is manslaughter." However, it would be easily enough to reframe the definition of veganism in positive terms -- "vegans eat only plants and minerals." This suggests that negative facts, which often play such an important role in the act-omission distinction, may often be a matter of framing and linguistic convenience rather than a metaphysical truth about the event being described.