I imagine Twitter as a vast desert blighted by a dust storm of incessant chatter, in which you might come across the occasional oasis but are more likely to fail into a cesspool. I stay on it mainly because I think I know my way around enough to avoid most of the bad bits. Another incentive is that every now again you read something that makes you stop and think, usually due to bewilderment. If you want to understand the strange ways of the human mind, just spend some time on social media.
I has just such an experience recently when the philosopher Jason Stanley tweeted,‘In the future they are going to cancel meat eaters (like me) and some idiots are going to argue, “they were products of their time and couldn’t have known better”.’
It’s always hard to detect layers of irony in tweets so let me say straight away that I don’t know what Stanley meant by this. But it seems to me that he was saying two things. The first is that future generations will view meat-eating as we now do practices like slavery. That seems to me implausible, but it’s certainly not a weird belief for anyone to hold today. The second is that, although Stanley believes this, he still eats meat, and that anyone from the future who excuses him would be wrong to do so. If that’s right, it’s an odd confession. It’s like someone in the seventeenth century saying that they really believe slavery is awful but they’re going to buy a few slaves anyway.
I replied, ‘Deeply weird. If you agreed with yourself you surely wouldn’t still be a meat-eater. Unless some idiot just says “weakness of will”.’ The last sentence was obviously put provocatively to echo Stanley’s ‘idiot’ phrase. My point was that it’s lame to explain the dissonance between Stanley’s expressed view and his actions on the basis of weakness of will. Weakness of will explains why we don’t follow through on our beliefs when we are less than 100% certain, are ambivalent, or face very string temptations. It means we eat too many pains au chocolat and don’t exercise enough. But I’m sorry, a steak shouldn’t be tempting enough to make someone commit what they believe is murder to get it. We are not so weak-willed that we routinely do serious wrongs because we want trivial rewards. Except, it seems, when it comes to eating meat.
That’s why I was not impressed by Leigh Beadon‘s objection, ‘You think it’s weird to know you shouldn’t do something, but continue doing it? No man, that’s just a part of being human. What’s deeply weird is having beliefs that just so happen to fit with every single contour of your own behaviour, as if you think you’re perfect.’
It would indeed be weird if I thought my or anyone’s beliefs were totally consistent and perfectly matched their behaviours. But some contradictions are just too big to wave away as ordinary human inconsistency. ‘It’s not weird to do things you think are wrong,’ I wrote. ‘But there is something weird about genuinely believing something is seriously wrong and continuing to do it systematically, when it’s easy not to. I was vegetarian for years. It’s not difficult.’
That last bit is true. In my late teens I was struggling with the issue of animal rights. I didn’t even come to a clear conclusion that eating animals was wrong but I figured that since I worried it really could be and I didn’t have to do it, why eat them? The seriousness of the potential wrong was enough to make me not wait around for proof of it.
To see how weird Stanley’s claim is, imagine a similar tweet defending racism, misogyny or homophobia: ‘In the future they are going to cancel racists (like me) and some idiots are going to argue, “they were products of their time and couldn’t have known better”.’ If anyone said, ‘I know racism is wrong but, hey, I’m just weak-willed and give in to my bigoted impulses’ we would think them obscene. Yet if someone says I know eating meat is wrong but, hey, I’m just weak-willed and give in to my murderous impulses’, some think that’s understandable.
If that person were also a philosopher, we’d be rightly dismayed. And yet Stanley is far from the first philosopher I’ve heard say that they are both utterly convinced by the arguments that eating meat is wrong and that they still do it anyway. If weakness of will doesn’t explain this, what does?
One part of the answer is psychologist Dan Sperber’s distinction between ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ beliefs. We believe intuitive beliefs in our bones and act accordingly: fire burns, water quenches thirst, chocolate brownies are really tasty. Reflective beliefs, in contrast, are asserted without being felt. We sincerely, genuinely believe that we believe something, but it just doesn’t move us. For example, if you intuitively believed that your families and friends will be tormented forever in hell you’d surely have a nervous breakdown. Yet people do believe this, reflectively, and carry on with their lives as though it were untrue.
It seems to me that when people say they accept that eating meat is wrong but do it anyway they are revealing that their beliefs are merely reflective. This probably isn’t the case with their beliefs about race, for example, where they really feel repulsed at a gut level at bigotry.
If this is true it raises worrying questions about the power of reason. Whatever might be general be needed for reflective beliefs to become intuitive, it’s worrying that many philosophers are so unmoved by what they judge to be compelling arguments, even their own. If philosophising generally only gives rise to reflective beliefs, isn’t it just a kind of intellectual game? The point of moral philosophy is surely to help guide conduct. But if it is a purely reflective dispute, it seems it doesn’t have the power to do that.
It’s tempting to think that the problem here is purely one of psychology and human nature. Arguments don’t move people, philosophers are people, therefore arguments don’t move them. But that is too quick. Some arguments do move people. I did become a vegetarian. And the reason I’m no longer one is that arguments made me realise that a dairy-product eating vegetarian who claimed to be minimising animal suffering was a hypocrite and that the only two consistent options were veganism or only buying high-welfare meat and dairy. (I opted for the latter.)
So why do some arguments move some people and not others? I suspect that a large part of the answer lies in the motivations of the thinker. Bernard Williams argued that the quest for truth requires not just a mastery of critical thinking skills and intelligence. It required what he called the two virtue of truth: sincerity and accuracy. You’ve got to be genuinely interested in getting at the truth and committed to the facts as they are, not as you’d wish them to be.
So when people become ‘convinced’ by arguments for vegetarianism or veganism but don’t change their minds, their problem is not a lack of intelligence or simple weakness of will. It’s that they are not engaging with the arguments in a spirit of sincerity. As a result, everything in their minds is going on at the reflective level, as though it were an intellectual puzzle. They’re not engaging as people seeking the truth, they’re engaging as people who are fascinated by the logic of arguments.
I admit this is speculative. And I also repeat that I’m really not sure what Jason Stanley meant in his tweet. But it does seem to me that philosophers can become so focused on the form and content of arguments that they don’t pay enough attention to the characters and motivations of the arguers, including themselves. If you were thinking about a moral issue because you were sincerely interested in working out what the right thing to do is, you wouldn’t be able to ignore your conclusions so easily. A philosopher who accepts the moral case against eating meat and eats it anyway is not, in my book, as sincere thinker.
Bargain Book of the Week
None this week as I haven’t sent off last week’s orders yet, nor checked what I have in stock. If you have ordered I’ve packed them all up so they will go out soon, I promise. Although I’m out of How the World Think paperbacks if you’d like to take up either of the other two previous offers, they still stand.
New at JulianBaggini.com
The latest episode of the microphilosophy podcast is based around Jonathan Rée’s excellent history of philosophy in English, Witcraft. He’s in conversation with me and Andrew Pyle from Bristol University. Note if you get your podcasts via Apple, the old feed which is not updating comes up top on searches. Please switch to this one.
I was also a guest on the CIPD’s What if? podcast, which asked, What If…there was no hierarchy at work? H And I was also on the pilot of a new podcast called Philosophy Takes On The News, which does what it says.
The next online Café Philosophique discussion will be on Sunday March 13, at 8pm UK time. These are exclusively for supporters but as I have said before, at £5 per month, that’s less than the price of a ticket to similar online events I have done during the pandemic.
A reminder that if you buy books online, you can avoid tax-dodging giant and by through my affiliate shop which gives 10% to independent bookshops and 10% to me.
On my radar
While views of the Royal Institute of Philosophy London Lecture series videos online have been rising, live audiences are increasingly decreasing. This was especially disappointing for Chike Jeffers’s talk ‘What Counts as a Collective Gift? Culture & Value in Du Bois’ The Gift of Black Folk’. Until recently I knew so little about Du Bois that I didn’t even know how to say his name. (It’s ‘do boys’.) Jeffers’s talk was a thought-provoking eye-opener and we had a great discussion afterwards. You can also watch all talks from the series on YouTube.
One of the most striking things I came across this week was wordless: this photo of a dying gorilla in the arms of the ranger who saved her as she clung to her own dead mother 14 years before. A remarkable image and a fascinating story to accompany it.
Obviously Ukraine has been on my mind. Philosophy may seem to have little to offer but take a look at French philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff’s piece for the Guardian. Eltchaninoff wrote an eerily prescient book Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin a few years ago which I reviewed at the time. It shows the value of really trying to understand the ideals and philosophies that motivate people and not just fall back on cod psychological explanations.
That’s it for this week. Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.