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Octopi and Moral Circle Expansion

photograph of octopus in water

Washington State is now on the cusp of passing the world’s first ban on octopus farming. The bill – which passed the State House of Representatives and Senate earlier this month – now only needs to be signed by the Governor in order to become law. The legislation is intended to halt a developing practice that leads to widespread death and suffering for octopi – not to mention other serious environmental harms.

This development marks yet another step in what is often referred to as “moral circle expansion.” What do we mean by this? Well, there are things that are worthy of moral consideration, and there are things that are not. My family, my friends, my students – indeed, all other humans – are, we assume, worthy of moral consideration. What this means, essentially, is that when making a decision, I need to factor in how the interests of those individuals might be affected. If, for example, I am about to do something that will cause severe pain to a number of those people, this will be a morally relevant consideration – and may, in fact, be sufficient to render my action morally impermissible..

There are, however, many things that are clearly not worthy of moral consideration. Most inanimate objects are like this. That’s why when my computer is slow to boot up first thing in the morning, there’s nothing morally problematic with me responding by striking it and delivering a tirade of verbal abuse. The story would, however, be much different if I treated another human in this way.

Sadly, our history is rife with examples of our “moral circle” being limited so as to exclude certain portions of the human population. Disenfranchisement, gender- and sexuality-based oppression, and the widespread suffering of ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples have all, to some extent, resulted from a failure to understand how far our moral circle should expand.

In 1975, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation opened a brave new world of moral circle expansion by arguing that non-human animals are also worthy of moral consideration. His argument was elegantly simple, and started from the observation that most non-human animals are sentient – that is, able to feel pleasure and pain. According to Singer, sentience is all that’s required in order for something to have interests. Why? Because if something can feel pleasure then it has an interest in gaining pleasure, and if something can feel pain then it has an interest in avoiding pain. Once these interests are on the table, they must factor into our moral decision-making processes.

Almost fifty years on, Singer’s assertion might now seem rather uncontroversial. Most would probably agree that my cat has interests, and is therefore worthy of moral consideration. So too are the birds currently at the feeder outside of my window. The upshot of this is that there are many ways in which I could act towards these animals that would be clearly morally impermissible.

But, as humans, we’re rather inconsistent in our approach to moral circle expansion. While we happily include the animals with which we are most familiar – like household pets – we tend to omit vast populations of other animals – like those we farm. Many try to justify this distinction based on the perceived intelligence of the creatures in question. But this is a bad approach. Firstly, our perceptions are often mistaken. Pigs, for example, are smarter than dogs. Secondly, implying that something is less worthy of moral consideration just because it is less intelligent creates all kinds of problematic implications for how we treat very young children and those with diminished mental capacity.

Moral circle expansion gets even trickier once we start considering creatures more far-removed from humans. Recent developments suggest that our moral circle might need to be expanded to include things like fish and maybe even insects – but this is (predictably) being met with serious resistance. Something similar is now happening in Washington with octopi.

Interestingly, in 2021, the United Kingdom passed legislation recognizing decapod crustaceans (lobsters and crabs) and cephalopod molluscs (squid and octopi) as sentient beings. This recognition did not, however, automatically halt practices that would be considered morally reprehensible if perpetuated against other sentient beings. Washington State’s bill goes one step further than this, with California and Hawai’i now considering similar legislation. And such a move makes sense. Octopi are among the smartest non-human animals – able to use tools, recognize people, complete puzzles, and even open toddler proof cases that are impervious to young humans. At the very least, such abilities put them (cognitively) leaps-and-bounds ahead of many other non-human animals that we readily afford moral consideration. My cat, for example, isn’t capable of half of what an octopus can manage. So – if sentience and intelligence are what matter to moral circle expansion – cephalopods should be afforded at least as much consideration as our feline companions – if not more.

Yet they’re not. Spanish multinational Nueva Pescanova is currently planning to open the world’s first intensive octopus farm in the Canary Islands (a development that partially motivated Washington State’s new bill). And it’s this inconsistency that’s most concerning. There is, we must assume, an objective standard for what should be included in the moral circle. What’s more, most of us seem in agreement that the circle should be expanded to include many non-human animals – especially those we share our homes with. Yet, whatever standard we adopt to ensure this happens (be it sentience, intelligence, or a combination of both) there are many more non-human animals that fulfil this criteria – octopi chief among them. What this means, then, is that we must either abandon any notion of expanding our moral circle to include non-human animals in the first place; or – better yet – begin to think more carefully (and inclusively) about the range of animals that rightfully deserve moral consideration.

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The Painful Truth About Insects

closeup photograph of mosquito

In a recent study, scientists from the Queen Mary University of London argue that insects possess central nervous control of ‘noiception’ – that is, the ability to detect painful stimuli. Put simply, this discovery makes it plausible that insects are capable of feeling pain in much the same way as humans and other animals. It’s worth considering, then, how this finding might be relevant to our moral considerations of insects.

Generally, we tend to think of humans as being equal. But what do we mean by this? Clearly it’s not that all humans are, in fact, equal. Humans differ enormously in their interests and capabilities. Some students want to become rock stars, others want to be mathematicians, while others might suffer from disabilities that make both of those options more difficult to pursue. Nor do we mean that all humans should receive equal treatment – since different humans have vastly different needs. The aspiring rock star needs a guitar, while the math-whiz needs access to quality education. The person suffering from a disability, on the other hand, might need extra assistance that would be unnecessary for their more able-bodied classmates.

It seems, then, that when we say that all humans are equal, we mean to say that the interests of all humans should be given equal consideration.

Put another way: we should care equally about all people – no person is of greater value than another. It’s this very notion that grounds the case against various types of bigotry like racism and sexism. To prioritize the interests of one person over another based purely on their ethnicity or gender is to deny the principle of equality.

In his seminal book, Animal Liberation, Peter Singer considers how the principle of equality might be extended beyond humans. If it’s wrong to prioritize the interests of certain beings based on their ethnicity or gender, then shouldn’t it also be wrong to prioritize them based on their species?

If animals have interests, how can we justify prioritizing our interests above theirs without, essentially, being speciest?

But this raises a very important question: do animals even have interests? It’s certainly clear that humans do. As noted above, some humans have an interest in becoming rock stars, while others have an interest in becoming mathematicians. And then there are those interests that are almost universally held by humans, such as interests in being healthy, safe, financially secure, and loved. But what about animals? It’s not obvious that there are goats who aspire to be rock stars, nor pigs that aspire to be mathematicians. Nor do any animals seem to show concern for things like financial security or love.

According to Singer, however, the only prerequisite for having interests is the capacity to experience pleasure and pain – or what we might call “sentience.” Why? Well, if something can experience pleasure, then it has an interest in pursuing pleasure. Likewise, if something can experience pain, then it has an interest in avoiding pain.

If some living being experiences suffering, then there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into account. And, if we adopt the principle of equality, then that suffering must be counted equally with the same amount of suffering when experienced by any other being.

So if kicking a person and causing them X amount of pain is morally wrong, then kicking a dog and causing that same amount of pain is just as wrong. Likewise, if it would be morally wrong to inflict Y amount of pain on a human in order to test the safety of a new cosmetic, then it will be just as morally wrong to inflict this same amount of pain on an animal for the same purpose.

Singer’s argument has huge ramifications for many of the ways in which we treat animals. Consider the animal suffering that goes into the production of a single cheeseburger – and how terrible we would consider that same suffering if it was experienced by a human. What’s more, this suffering is offset by only a small benefit to the human who eats the burger – a benefit that could just as easily be achieved via non-meat and non-dairy alternatives. In fact, much – if not all – of the animal products and by-products we consume start to become morally questionable when seen in this light.

Of course, one simple solution would be to discount – or disqualify entirely – the suffering of animals on the basis that they aren’t as intelligent as humans. But this is to go against the very principle of equality that many of us hold dear. When thinking about humans, we would consider it reprehensible to say that someone’s pain and suffering is less important simply because they are less intelligent than someone else. So we must take the same approach to animals.

The only consistent way to justify the suffering we inflict on animals is to say that their suffering counts for less simply because they are animals. But that’s speciesism – and it shares precisely the same (very bad) rationale that justifies racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.

Indeed, Singer’s observations have motivated many people to adopt vegetarian or vegan lifestyles. But what are we to make of this new research that suggests insects might also be sentient? If an ant can feel pleasure and pain, then an ant has interests. And if an ant has interests, then the principle of equality demands that that suffering be counted equally with the same amount of suffering when experienced by any other being. Suppose, for example, that swatting a mosquito causes that mosquito to feel Z amount of pain. Suppose, then, that – for a human – that same amount of pain would be the equivalent of a hard slap to the face. If we believe that slapping a human is morally wrong, then the principle of equality would require us to reach the same moral judgement about inflicting the same amount of pain on a mosquito. This would mean, then, that swatting a mosquito was morally wrong.

It’s a strange conclusion, and one that is still very much open to debate. For one, we would need to establish that insects do in fact experience pain in the same morally relevant way as humans and other non-human animals. We would then need some way of measuring this pain in order to form reasonable moral judgements. It might, for example, turn out that the suffering experienced by a swatted mosquito is minuscule – much less, in fact, than the bite it gives to the next human it encounters. In such a case, we could possibly make a case for the moral permissibility of swatting that mosquito.

But in the absence of better information about whether – and to what extent – insects experience pain, what should we do? There’s a chance that there’s nothing problematic about causing insects to suffer. But there’s also a chance that we’ve been horribly wrong. Until only recently we were still unsure about whether non-human animals experienced pain, with veterinarians trained before 1989 taught to ignore animal suffering. In fact, doctors up until that decade were still skeptical that human babies experienced pain, with many infant surgeries routinely carried out without anesthesia. Given our poor track record of understanding pain in other living beings, the mere possibility that insects suffer should give us reason to pause and reconsider how we treat them.

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Living in the Hinge of History

photograph of telescope pointed above the lights of the city

Consider three things. First: technological development means that there are many more people in the world than there used to be. This means that, if we survive far into the future, the number of future people could be really, really big. Perhaps the overwhelming majority of us have not yet been born.

Second: the future could be really good, or really bad, or a big disappointment. Perhaps our very many descendants will live amazing lives, improved by new technologies, and will ultimately spread throughout the universe. Perhaps they will reengineer nature to end the suffering of wild animals, and do many other impressive things we cannot even imagine now. That would be really good. On the other hand, perhaps some horrific totalitarian government will use new technologies to not only take over humanity, but also ensure that it can never be overthrown. Or perhaps humanity will somehow annihilate itself. Or perhaps some moral catastrophe that is hard to imagine at present will play out: perhaps, say, we will create vast numbers of sentient computer programs, but treat them in ways that cause serious suffering. Those would be really bad. Or, again, perhaps something will happen that causes us to permanently stagnate in some way. That would be a big disappointment. All our future potential would be squandered.

Third: we may be living in a time that is uniquely important in determining which future plays out. That is, we may be living in what the philosopher Derek Parfit called the “hinge of history.” Think, for instance, of the possibility that we will annihilate ourselves. That was not possible until very recently. In a few centuries, it may no longer be possible: perhaps by then we will have begun spreading out among the stars, and will have escaped the danger of being wiped out. So maybe technology raised this threat, and technology will ultimately remove it.

But then we are living in the dangerous middle, and what happens in the comparatively near future may determine whether our story ends here, or instead lasts until the end of the universe.

And the same may be true of other possibilities. Developments in artificial intelligence or in biotechnology, say, may make the future go either very well or very poorly, depending on whether we discover how to safely harness them.

These three propositions, taken together, would seem to imply that how our actions affect the future is extremely morally important. This is a view known as longtermism. The release of a new book on longtermism, What We Owe the Future by Will MacAskill, has resulted in it getting some media coverage.

If we take longtermism seriously, what should we do? It seems that at least some people should work directly on things which increase the chances that the long-term future will be good. For instance, they might work on AI safety or biotech safety, to reduce the chances that these technologies will destroy us and to increase the chances that they will be used in good rather than bad ways. And these people ought to be given some resources to do this. (The organization 80,000 Hours, for example, contains career advice that may be helpful for people looking to do work like this.)

However, there is only so much that can productively be done on these fronts, and some of us do not have the talents to contribute much to them anyway. Accordingly, for many people, the best way to make the long-term future better may be to try to make the world better today.

By spreading good values, building more just societies, and helping people to realize their potential, we may increase the ability of future people to respond appropriately to crises, as well as the probability that they will choose to do so.

To large extent, Peter Singer may be correct in saying that

If we are at the hinge of history, enabling people to escape poverty and get an education is as likely to move things in the right direction as almost anything else we might do; and if we are not at that critical point, it will have been a good thing to do anyway.

This also helps us respond to a common criticism of longtermism, namely, that it might lead to a kind of fanaticism. If the long-term future is so important, it might seem that nothing that happens now matters at all in comparison. Many people would find it troubling if longtermism implies that, say, we should redirect all of our efforts to help the global poor into reducing the chance that a future AI will destroy us, or that terrible atrocities could be justified in the name of making it slightly more likely that we will one day successfully colonize space.

There are real philosophical questions here, including ones related to the nature of our obligations to future generations and our ability to anticipate future outcomes. But if I’m right that in practice, much of what we should do to improve the long-term future aligns with what we should do to improve the world now, our answers to these philosophical questions may not have troubling real-world implications. Indeed, longtermism may well imply that efforts to help the world today are more important than we realized, since they may help, not only people today, but countless people who do not yet exist.

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Fair Shares and COVID-19 Booster Shots

photograph of COVID vaccination in outdoor tent

Arguments abound regarding the moral importance of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. Beyond the obvious health benefits for the vaccinated individual, herd immunity remains the most effective way to stop the spread of the virus, limit the development of more deadly variants, and – most  importantly – save lives. In fact, it may very well be the case that these reasons go so far as to provide us with a moral duty to get vaccinated so as not to treat others unfairly and, therefore, immorally. Given all of this, it would seem then that the morality of receiving a third ‘booster’ dose of the vaccine is simple. Unfortunately, ethics is rarely that straight-forward.

Currently, 7.54 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered globally, with 52.2% of the world’s population having now received at least one dose. In the U.S., close to 60% of the population have been fortunate enough to receive two doses of the vaccine, with the CDC now recommending a third dose for certain vulnerable portions of the population. Colorado, California, New Mexico, New York, and Arkansas have gone further than this by approving booster doses for all residents over the age of 18.

Yet, at the same time, only 4.6% of people in low-income countries have received their first dose of the vaccine, with this number dropping to less than one percent in countries such as Chad and Haiti. The reasons for this are many, but one of the largest contributing factors has been affluent countries pre-ordering more doses than they require to fully vaccinate their population. The U.S., for example, has pre-ordered twice as many vaccines as they need, the U.K. has purchased four times as many, and Canada has secured a whopping five times as many doses as would be required to provide a double dose of the vaccine to every one of their residents. These orders are still being filled, and – until they are – many poorer nations are left to wait to receive even their first dose of the vaccine. As a result, the World Health Organization has called on countries to issue a moratorium on providing COVID-19 booster shots until every country is able to vaccinate at least 10% of its population.

Essentially, this matter boils down to the unjust distribution of limited resources – with some countries taking far more than their ‘fair share’ of the vaccine, and leaving others without nearly enough. This has become a fairly common moral issue lately – underpinning problems surrounding everything from toilet paper, to gasoline, to carbon emissions.

There are many reasons why it’s wrong to take more than your fair share of a limited resource. On top of these more general concerns with just allocations, there are ethical issues specific to the case of vaccines. For one, we might claim that we have strong moral reasons to maximize the good. While an initial vaccine dose will grant around 90% immunity to the recipient, using that same dose as a booster will instead grant only a 10% increase in protection. Put simply, a single COVID-19 vaccine dose will do far more good given to an unvaccinated individual than to someone who has already received two previous doses. There are pragmatic concerns too. Unvaccinated populations provide opportunities for the virus to mutate into more virulent strains – strains that undercut vaccination efforts everywhere else in the world.

So let’s suppose that there’s a good case to be made for the fact that countries have done something wrong by taking far more than their fair share of the COVID-19 vaccine, and that the vaccine stock used by affluent nations to provide third booster shots is what we might call an “ill-gotten gain.” What does this mean for us, as individuals? Do we have a moral obligation to refrain from receiving a booster shot until more people – especially those in poorer nations – have managed to at least receive their first dose?

If we think that our resources should go where they’ll do the most good, then the answer may very well be “yes.” This approach is precisely the same as a very famous argument for our moral obligation to donate money to the poor. While buying that Starbucks Double Chocolaty Chip Crème Frappuccino might bring me a modicum of joy, donating that same amount of money could do far more for someone living in absolute destitution. In the same way, while an additional COVID-19 vaccine – used as a booster – will bring me a small benefit, it could do far more for someone else if used as an initial vaccine.

Of course, this argument assumes that by refusing a booster shot, my vaccine dose will instead be sent where it’s more needed. But it turns out it’s notoriously difficult to donate unused COVID vaccines, with some U.S. states already throwing away tens of thousands of unused doses. Suppose, then, that these booster shots are bought-and-paid-for, and that refusing these boosters will not see them go to those who are more in need. What, then, are our obligations regarding these ill-gotten gains?

A thought experiment may help in this situation. Suppose that we were currently suffering through a severe water shortage, and that the government sent out a limited supply of water tankers to alleviate people’s suffering. Your town’s tanker arrives, and everyone receives a reasonable allowance of water. In a shockingly unscrupulous turn of events, however, your town’s local officials hijack and claim the tanker destined for the next town over, parking it on the main street and telling residents to come and help themselves. Whatever water isn’t taken, they claim, will merely be dumped. What should you do? You don’t agree with how this water was obtained, but you also know that if you don’t use it, it’ll only go to waste anyway. You already have enough water to survive, but your plants are looking a little brown and your car could really use a good wash. It seems that, in a circumstance like this, you have every reason to make use of this ill-gotten gain. We have an obligation to maximize the good, and since the harm (depriving others of this vital resource) has already been done, some good might as well come of it, no?

Perhaps. But it is in cases like this that it becomes important to distinguish between maximizing the good in a particular case, and maximizing the good over the long run. While I may have everything to gain from enjoying this stolen water, I don’t stand to benefit from a society in which one town steals vital resources from another. And the same may be true of vaccine booster shots. A global society in which affluent nations overbuy and hoard life-saving resources is one that, in the long-run, will create more harm than good – particularly where this kind of behavior only serves to prolong and worsen a crisis (like the pandemic) for the entire global population. By refraining from taking the COVID-19 booster – at least until those in poorer nations have had the opportunity to receive their initial vaccine – we send a clear message to our governments that we will not partake in ill-gotten gains.

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Intuitions and the Duty to Aid

photograph of a cluster of traffic lights sending mixed signals

Many philosophers have considered whether folks who are better off have a moral obligation to help those who are desperately poor through no fault of their own. This issue is especially salient at the moment due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing lockdowns across the globe. The result is that the global poor are hardest hit, and the trend of eradicating poverty over the past few decades is reversing. We are thus left to wonder what, if anything, we owe the global poor.

Here enters the work of perhaps the most famous contemporary philosopher, Peter Singer, who argues that many folks in rich countries — like the USA, Japan, and Germany — have a moral obligation to donate a large amount of their income to the global poor because they can afford to without falling into poverty themselves. He motivates this position by an appeal to a simple thought experiment:

“On your way to work, you pass a small pond. … [You] are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond […] it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. […] The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy.”

Singer thinks we have a moral obligation to save the child based on the strong intuition that it just seems like the right thing to do — it wouldn’t cost us much to save the child, but it would benefit the child significantly. We can formulate Singer’s argument like this:

  1. Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad.
  2. If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
  3. By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.
  4. Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong.

The first step of the argument seems obvious: the pain that comes from failing to have your basic needs met is obviously bad. We wouldn’t go to such lengths to try to prevent these things in our own lives if we thought otherwise. And we will grant, for the sake of argument, Singer’s third step: donating to trustworthy and competent aid agencies allows us to mitigate the harm that comes from people being unable to meet their basic needs.

Our focus here is on the second step of the argument. Do we actually have a moral obligation to the poor; or does it merely seem like that? Should we trust our intuition to save the child? Based on recent experimental evidence from psychology and economics, we should be skeptical of our intuition to save the child. Allow me to make the case.

We have solid experimental evidence from psychology and economics that people care how they look to others. As a species, humans are highly cooperative and social, and depend on help from others to survive — so much so that the ancients believed banishment from society worse than death, as it entailed not only death, but prolonged suffering as well. But relying on cooperation from others makes us susceptible to free-riders: individuals who enjoy the fruits of everyone else’s labor, while contributing less than their fair share. We thus use reputations to distinguish the trustworthy from the untrustworthy; we don’t want to cooperate with someone who might defect, especially in situations with high stakes — e.g., it matters who we choose to have children with. And since we cannot read the minds of others, we must rely on a high-fidelity signal of trustworthiness.

Here we need an example of a high-fidelity signal. The classic example is peacocks: their colorful feathery display is a costly signal to prospective mates that even with amplified risk of predation, he can still thrive — a signal that indicates fitness and is hard to fake. Or consider the ability to lift two-hundred pounds over one’s head as a reliable signal of strength: one cannot lift that much weight without possessing enough strength. Colorful features on a peacock would be a fatal liability if the bird weren’t healthy enough; someone simply wouldn’t be able to lift that much weight if they lacked sufficient strength. If we are to rightly trust others, we need a signal of trustworthiness that would be hard to fake by those who are untrustworthy.

One way to signal trustworthiness and communicate that one is a suitable partner for collaboration is through uncalculating cooperation: helping someone without waiting to consider whether the benefits of helping exceed the costs of doing so. By not calculating the advantages and disadvantages of pitching in, we signal to others that we can be trusted as a potential cooperator: we aren’t participating simply because we’ve determined that it’s in our interests. When we cooperate without doing the cost-benefit analysis, we signal we’re committed to the joint venture not merely because it would benefit us. As the authors of a recent study explain:

“To provide empirical support for this account, we experimentally test the hypothesis that people avoid calculating the costs of cooperation because of reputational concerns. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that when people’s decision-making processes are observable to others, they behave in a less calculating way. This observation suggests that they use uncalculating cooperation to gain reputational benefits.”

We often cooperate with others without calculating the cost. We grant friends’ requests without making inquiries about the time and trouble the request might take; we come to the aid of strangers in distress; we adhere to strict moral and religious precepts that are other-regarding, whatever the costs and benefits. These types of behaviors make sense once we frame them in terms of reputation: we cooperate without calculating because of how it makes us look to others. So it looks like we might have the intuition to save the drowning child because it makes us look good to others — consider the social pressure one would feel refusing to help a drowning child in the presence of onlookers. Just the thought of refusing to help seems unconscionable.

The strong intuition to save the drowning child looks like a product of our evolutionary history as a social, cooperative species and the need to look good to others for the sake of our survival. This should make us doubt that our intuitions in the drowning child case track the moral facts; it looks like we have these intuitions for evolutionary reasons rather than anything having to do with any moral obligations — we may only have such intuitions because they aid in our survive and reproduction, not because there is actually a moral obligation to save the child.

Someone may, of course, reply that we could have a strong intuition to save the drowning child both because it is morally required, as well as for reputational and evolutionary reasons. The trouble here though is that we simply cannot rule out that we have the intuition only because it helps us survive and reproduce. By example: it could be that the lottery ticket you hold in your hand is a winner or a loser; you simply do not know, even though it is highly likely the ticket is a loser given the odds. However, since you cannot rule out that the ticket is a winner — this is a distinct possibility — you don’t know the ticket is a loser. By similar logic: we cannot rule out that our drowning child intuitions are only an evolutionary by-product, so we should doubt we know that we have a moral obligation to save the child — and, of course, by extension, that we have a moral obligation to donate to the poor.

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How Many Children Must We Save?

photograph of boys filling water jugs from a ditch in Kenya

The economic slowdown from the coronavirus pandemic is likely to reverse a global trend of poverty reduction. This crisis should renew interest in our moral obligations to the poor. And there is no better place to begin thinking about those obligations than the work of Peter Singer. He argues we are morally required to give a lot more expendable income to the poor:

“On your way to work, you pass a small pond. … [You] are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond […] it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. […] The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy.”

Clearly, we should save the child. And we could save many people from sickness and death from lack of food, medicine, and shelter by donating a lot more of our expendable income to the poor: you could live a happy life, visit Starbucks less often, and donate the money instead to the poor. Singer argues not donating is morally no different than letting the child drown. Much of our spending on goodies doesn’t contribute to our well-being: we would likely be as happy, going to fewer movies, and buying fewer fancy coffees (and perhaps none). The goods and services we buy with our expendable income don’t compare morally to the lives we could save.

Up to this point, Singer makes a good case. But it doesn’t end there: Singer argues that we are morally required to give substantially more than we (likely) do:

“Suppose you have just sent $200 to an agency that can, for that amount, save the life of a child in a developing country who would otherwise have died. […] But don’t celebrate your good deed by opening a bottle of champagne, or even going to a movie. […] You must keep cutting back on unnecessary spending, and donating what you save, until you have reduced yourself to the point where if you give any more, you will be sacrificing something nearly as important as a child’s life.”

Here Singer is stressing the extent of our moral obligations to the poor: when we decide to go to a movie, or buy a fancy coffee, we could have instead donated that money to save the life of a poor person dying from lack of food, medicine, and shelter. When comparing something trivial, like a caramel macchiato, to a life we could save, we should part with the money. But this line of thinking may lead to overly demanding moral requirements.

We should take a step back to think about moral overdemandingness. Moral requirements can be hard — admitting we lied to a friend may be hard, but morally required — but they can’t be too demanding. Suppose Nathan has a few beers during Monday night football. He does nothing obviously wrong. Any moral theory that says otherwise is too demanding; we should be leery of any moral theory or view that demands too much. Unfortunately, it looks like Singer’s argument may do that. We can explore this with a sorites paradox.

We should first introduce sorites paradoxes. And like with most philosophical ideas, they sound more complicated than they are. An example of a sorites paradox would help. Consider a heap of sand. Taking one grain of sand won’t destroy a heap. And that’s true of every individual grain of sand. If we apply this rule over and over, we will eventually destroy the heap. But if taking a single grain of sand doesn’t destroy the heap, we could take a single grain of sand, over and over, and on this rule, and we would still have a heap — but we know taking one grain at a time, over and over, will eventually destroy the heap. We can formulate this paradox as follows:

(1) A pile of one trillion grains of sand is a heap.

(2) A single grain of sand isn’t a heap.

(3) Taking one single grain of sand won’t create/destroy a heap.

This is a paradox: a set of individual statements that seem right, but taken together cannot be true. If we took a single grain of sand from a heap over and over, according to (3) we wouldn’t destroy the heap. But we intuitively know that isn’t right: if we took enough individual grains of sand, over and over, until a single grain remained, it wouldn’t be a heap.

We can frame Singer’s argument as a sorites paradox:

(4) Saving an innocent person, with a modest donation, isn’t morally too demanding.

(5) There are millions of people we could save with a modest donation.

(6) A moral requirement to save everyone we can with a modest donation is too demanding.

Consider a defense of (4): a cup of coffee or a new pair of shoes doesn’t morally compare to the life of an innocent person; if we could save them, by not buying goodies, and instead donating the money, then we’re morally required to do that. This isn’t morally too demanding: it is as reasonable as saving a child drowning in a shallow pond. However, there are millions of poor folks who need saving, and could be saved by a few modest donations. And individually, these acts of sacrifice wouldn’t rise to the level of overdemandingness; in each case, we could argue the life of a child is morally more important than watching a football game buzzed.

However, if we apply this line of argument over and over, there will eventually come a point where we won’t be able to watch a football game with a few beers because it would be wrong. We could work overtime instead and donate that money to charity. This isn’t to say Singer thinks we should never rest and recover, or earn money to pay our bills. We can still do those things, but only if they have comparable moral worth to the life we might otherwise save. And that looks like it demands too much of us; if a moral claim is overly demanding, we should be suspicious of that claim. This overdemandingness calls attention to an implicit assumption: that moral reasons trump other kinds of reasons — like, say, the value of enjoying a football game with a few beers — to act. And while moral reasons should be weighty in our rational deliberation, it isn’t obvious they override other kinds of reasons, such that those reasons don’t count.

How many poor folks are we morally required to save before it becomes too demanding? Most of us could, and likely should, do more to help the poor than we do, up to the point where it’s too demanding. But where exactly that point is located remains fuzzy.

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The Good Place and the Good Life

Warning: This article contains spoilers.

Students all across the country have recently found new motivation to be interested in philosophy—NBC’s The Good Place, which aired its final episode on January 30, 2020. The series explicitly engages with philosophy through the storyline of one of the central characters—Chidi Adagonye—who was, in life, a philosophy professor. In the afterlife, Chidi teaches ethics to a group of wayward souls who, as the show progresses, become the best of friends. Chidi provides a useful narrative vehicle for direct discussion of philosophy. Even in the absence of Chidi’s philosophical explanations, the show is inherently philosophical. It demonstrates that, rather than being an exclusively scholarly pursuit, living philosophically is part of what it is to be a flourishing person.

On the face of it, the series appears to be about death. It begins with Eleanor Shellstrop’s arrival in what appears to be heaven, where she meets an angelic architect named Michael. As the show progresses, however, it becomes clear that, far from being about death, the series is actually about what it is to live a good life. Throughout, the audience is left wondering “what makes heaven heavenly?” And, by contrast, what would make hell torture? Fundamentally these are questions about what kinds of things are worth avoiding and what kinds of things are really worth pursuing.

By the end of the first season, the cast of characters come to the realization that they were not, as they had been told, in “The Good Place.” Instead, they are in “The Bad Place.” Michael is not an angelic architect after all, but a fire demon conducting an experiment. Instead of setting people on fire or feeding them to swarms of insects, Michael is attempting to torture departed humans using the particulars of individual personalities and exposure to other people.

One of the reasons that this storyline is surprising is that the people involved seem to be pretty good people. They certainly have their faults, but none of them are the kind of person that we might think deserves to be tortured for all eternity. As David Lewis argues in his paper, Divine Evil, infinite punishment may be unjust for any finite crime. Even so, if we picture anyone in hell, it tends to be people like Hitler rather than childlike petty criminals like Jason Mendoza. At this stage, the cast of friends is put in a position to analyze their own behavior. They become reflective agents, considering their virtues and vices. They learn lessons in Aristotelian moderation. Eleanor learns to be less selfish, Chidi less indecisive, and Tahani less concerned with what other people think of her. Interestingly, Jason’s personality is such that he might be largely forgiven for his bad actions in life, so it seems somewhat unfair that he’s in The Bad Place at all.

The group also learns that it is not possible to live a flawless human life. As this storyline unfolds, the series gently ribs Peter Singer and the Effective Altruism movement (which turns out to be for the best—Kristen Bell contributed her voice to the free audiobook of Singer’s The Life You Can Save, which you can find here). A character based roughly on Singer (or at least his philosophy), Doug Forcett, is celebrated in the afterlife because, during a drug-induced hallucination, he guessed exactly what the structure of life after death is like. To do well on the cosmic scorecard, he spends his entire life avoiding doing any harm and actively trying to do the most good he can do. Nevertheless, in our global culture in which every consumer choice we make has implications far beyond what we can see, Forcett’s scorecard is still insufficient to get into The Good Place. The lesson we are left with is that we should do the most good we can do, in full recognition that we’ll never be perfect. We can live meaningful lives by actively doing as much good for others as we reasonably can.

In many ways, the series is about living a meaningful life by living a morally good life. Some people understand life’s meaning by appeal to a grand plan set into motion before any being lived on earth, perhaps by a divine authority like God. One interesting feature about The Good Place is that, despite the fact that it is, on its face, a show about the afterlife, it remains remarkably agnostic about religion. We encounter angels and demons, but not God or the Devil. The Good Place is a show about persons; it is a story about moral beings that make choices, act for reasons, have weaknesses, grow, and change. Like Sartre’s No Exit, the afterlife is about interactions with other persons. The Good Place does not conclude, like Sartre, that “hell is other people.” Instead, the message is quite the opposite: it is our interactions with other people that allow us to grow into the best possible versions of ourselves.

The penultimate episode of the show includes a surprising twist. The group of friends, including Janet and Michael, all make it to The Good Place. Chidi looks forward to meeting the philosophers he is sure he will find there, but he learns that, for various reasons, many of his favorite historical thinkers didn’t make it. He does find Hypatia, an Ancient Greek female philosopher played by Lisa Kudrow. The group of friends learns from Hypatia that heaven is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Infinite pleasure for eternity is boring, and it changes one’s mind to mush. As the new architect of The Good Place, Michael comes up with a solution—when they’re satisfied with the experiences they’ve had, a person can walk through a door and fade into non-existence. The idea that conscious experience can end lends meaning to existence.

This storyline tracks a classic debate in philosophy: what makes death bad for the person who dies? On the other side of the coin, would immortality be desirable? In philosopher Bernard William’s famous paper, The Makropolus Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality, he argues that death is bad for the person that no longer exists because their desires go unsatisfied. The things they wanted in life can no longer be achieved. That said, according to Williams, immortality is not desirable. If we lived forever, we would either change so much that our future identity would be, from our current perspective, unrecognizable to us, or we would become bored.

The final episode of The Good Place takes some lessons from Williams. Most people desire existence to come to an end. The real Good Place is a place where you can try everything and perfect every skill. Unlike in William’s paper, the desire to bring an end to existence is not motivated by boredom—not exactly. Final departure from The Good Place comes with a sense of peaceful satisfaction. Chidi describes a metaphor from Buddhist philosophy—the person is a wave returning to the ocean.

Though generally held in very high esteem, some viewers struggled with what they thought of as a dark ending to an otherwise light-hearted comedy. After all, most of the main characters cease to exist! In many ways, there is no more fitting way for the show to end. The show was never about heaven or hell; it was always about living a good life with the help of good friends. Crucially, it was about living a philosophical life, which is incomplete without coming to terms with death.

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Pacific Islands Forum: Climate War in the Pacific

photograph of shoreline

The fight to mitigate full-blown climate catastrophe last week suffered a blow thanks to Australia’s intransigence at a meeting of Pacific leaders, which culminated in a plea from the president of Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific country already being inundated by rising seas, to the world: “We ask, please understand this, our people are dying.”

We should not be in the grip of moral uncertainty here. There is no more time to dispute the science – or to try to argue that it is in dispute. The science is in and evidence of the rapidly worsening climate crisis is all around us. 

Consider this analogy: Imagine you are walking past a pond, you hear someone pleading for help and you see a drowning child.1 You have the capacity to save the child’s life, at some cost to yourself. The cost may be something relatively minor or it may be something more serious – perhaps you will be late for a class, or miss an important meeting; ruin an expensive suit, or even lose your job. None of these things, even losing your job is (without serious qualification) morally equivalent to the child’s life. It should be uncontroversial that you are morally required to save the child. 

Now imagine that you are a large wealthy country strolling past a small poor nation being inundated by water as the seas rise from the effects of climate change. Imagine you hear that country pleading with you to help, to save it from drowning. Your help would of course require some sacrifice, but it will not threaten your life, or even your livelihood. It may be a major inconvenience to you, but it is a matter of life and death to the other. It should be equally uncontroversial that you are morally required to do whatever you can to come to its aid. 

Something like this happened last week in the tiny Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu where leaders from a host of smaller nations along with Australia met for the annual Pacific Islands Forum. The most pressing topic of the summit was the climate emergency, as the Pacific islands are on the front line, and Tuvalu, like many other low-lying, small Pacific Island nations is facing immediate peril from rising seas. Many regional leaders had their sights set on Australia, which is becoming a notorious laggard on efforts to combat climate change and honor its commitments made in the Paris agreement. It was hoped that an agreement could be reached at the leaders summit that would reflect the urgency of the crisis and forge a cooperative strategy to address the emergency. 

However, this is what those Pacific Island leaders were up against: just two years ago Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, (then federal treasurer) stood up in parliament brandishing a lump of coal and shouting that coal is nothing to be afraid of, to the guffaws of other government ministers. Morrison fronted the forum this week with his guile fully intact. Australia’s current conservative government (Liberal-National Party), now in its third term, began its tenure by repealing the previous government’s progressive and effective carbon tax, and has been defined by its ideological and pecuniary resistance to weaning Australia’s economy from its reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal, towards the many great opportunities the country affords for clean renewable energy generated by solar and wind. 

Australia is one of the richest nations per capita, owing to its vast fossil fuel resources and relatively small population; Australians also have one of the highest carbon footprints per head of population and Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. Because of Australia’s massive coal exports, the country is a major contributor of carbon heavy fuels and bears responsibility for its own carbon output as well as that of the nations to whom its coal is exported. Australia’s lack of action on climate change, together with its plans to continue to open up new coal mining prospects is having direct impact on the imminent existential crisis faced by Tuvalu and other Pacific nations. 

In his opening speech Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama said: “I appeal to Australia to do everything possible to achieve a rapid transition from coal to energy sources that do not contribute to climate change,” he said, adding that coal posed an “existential threat” to Pacific countries.

In an effort to head off criticism the Morrison government announced $500m in climate resilience and adaptation for the Pacific region. In response Tuvalu’s prime minister, Enele Sopoaga said: 

“No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse to not to do the right thing, which is to cut down on your emissions, including not opening your coalmines.”

During the leaders’ retreat where a communiqué was debated which will be used as the basis of regional decision-making, Australia refused to budge on certain ‘red lines’ – including insisting on the removal of mentions of coal, limiting warming to under 1.5C, and setting a plan for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, to the grief and frustration of the other nations. 

The Fijian prime minister expressed his anger with the difficulties in negotiating with Australia during the leaders’ retreat, telling The Guardian that Morrison had been “very insulting and condescending.”

So, to return to the drowning child scenario, it is meant to help us see that where it is in our power to help someone whose life is in danger “without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” Australia has failed the test. It has walked past the child, refusing to help on the basis of reasons which are not morally equivalent – as Sopoaga said he told Morrison at one point during discussions: “You are trying to save your economy, I am trying to save my people.”

But there is another stratum of moral bankruptcy to how the broader conversation in Australia went. Australia’s deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, offering his own commentary back home from a business function as the forum was underway in Tuvalu, told an audience 

“I also get a little bit annoyed when we have people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive,” 

The current Australian government not only doesn’t understand its moral obligations or isn’t prepared to meet them, but has no compunction about flouting its preference for its resource sector (lets say its expensive suit) over the survival of its neighbors (the drowning child).

1 I am here borrowing, and adapting an analogy used by Peter Singer in his paper Famine, Affluence and Morality, published in 1972.

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The Moral Quandary of Testing on Animals

Photo of three rats in a cage with a little red house and food and water available

The topic of testing on animals as a form of scientific research has been contentious for quite some time. In most cases, the discussion tends to focus on whether it is morally permissible to test various products and procedures on animals in order to determine whether they would be safe and beneficial for human use. Animal experimentation is not always conducted simply for the benefit of human beings—sometimes the parties that stand to benefit from the research are other non-human animals, often including other members of the same species as the animals being tested.

Defenders of the practice of testing on animals for the benefit of humans argue that the benefits for humans substantially outweigh the harms incurred by animals. Some argue that our moral obligations extend only to other members of the moral community. Among other things, members of the moral community can recognize the nature of rights and obligations and are capable of being motivated to act on the basis of moral reasons. Non-human animals, because they are not capable of these kinds of reflections, are not members of the moral community. As such, defenders of animals testing argue, they don’t have rights. In response, critics argue that if we only have obligations to beings that can recognize the nature of moral obligations, then we don’t have obligations to very young children or to permanently mentally disabled humans, and this idea is morally indefensible.

Other defenders of animal testing argue that it is both natural and proper for human beings to exercise dominion over animals. These arguments take more than one form. Some people who make this argument are motivated by passages from the Bible. Genesis 1:26 reads, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Some argue that this passage suggests that humans have divine permission to use animals as they see fit. The use of animals for the benefit of humans seems morally defensible to these people for this reason.

Others argue human dominion over other animals is appropriate because human beings have demonstrated their superiority over non-human animals. We are no different from other animals in the sense that we use our natural skills to climb as high on the food chain as our circumstance permit. As rational creatures, our needs extend farther than the needs of non-human animals. As a result, we can use non-human animals to solve a wider range of problems. We can use them not only for protein, but to make our lives longer, better, more beautiful, and more convenient. Critics of such a view argue that might doesn’t make right. What’s more, our enhanced rational capacities also give us the ability to make moral judgments, and these moral judgments should extend to compassion for the suffering of all living creatures.

Arguments against research on animals also come in a variety of forms. One approach focuses on suffering. Famously, Peter Singer argued that what makes a being deserving of moral consideration is their capacity to suffer. If we treat equal amounts of suffering unequally simply because of the species to which the animal happens to belong, our behavior is speciesist—we are taking seriously considerations that are morally irrelevant. Rights based approaches, like the one argued by Tom Regan point out that non-human animals are subjects of lives. There is something it is like for them to experience the world in the unique way that they do. In light of this, we should recognize that non-human animals have intrinsic value and they should not be used as objects to be manipulated for the benefit of human beings.

How should we assess the situation when the research done on non-human animals is done, not for the benefit of human beings, but for the benefit of other non-human animals? In these cases, one major criticism of testing disappears—researchers can’t be accused of failing to take the interests of non-human animals seriously. After all, concern for the interests of non-human animals is what motivates this research to begin with. Vaccines for rabies, canine parvovirus, distemper, and feline leukemia virus have been developed through the use of animal research. These critical procedures improve and even save the lives of non-human animals. When we engage in a consequentialist assessment of the practice, testing on non-human animals for the benefit of other non-human animals seems justified.

On the other hand, it may be that speciesism is rearing its ugly head again in this case. Consider a parallel case in which research was being conducted for the good of human beings. Imagine that a tremendous amount of good could be done for human beings at large if we tested a particular product on a human being. The testing of this product would cause tremendous physical pain to the human being, and may even cause their death. Presumably, we would not think that it is justified to experiment on the human. The ends do not justify the means.  

One might think that one major difference between the case of testing on humans and the case of testing on animals is that humans are capable of giving consent and animals are not. So, on this view, if we kidnap a human for the purposes of experimenting on her to achieve some greater good, what we have done wrong, is, in part, violating the autonomy of the individual. Animals aren’t capable of giving consent, so it is not possible to violate their autonomy in this way.  

Under the microscope, this way of carving up the situation doesn’t track our ordinary discourse about consent. It is, of course, true, that humans are free to use freely (within limits) certain things that are incapable of giving consent. For example, humans can use grain and stone and so on without fear of violating any important moral principle. In other cases in which consent is not possible, we tend to have very different intuitions. Very young children, for example, aren’t capable of consent, and for that very reason we tend to think it is not morally permissible for us to use them as mere means to our own ends. Beings that are conscious but are incapable of giving consent seem worthy of special protection. So it seems wrong to test on them even if it is for the good of their own species. Is it speciesist to think that the ends can’t justify the means in the case of the unwilling human subject but not in the case of the unwilling non-human animal?

Testing on non-human animals for the sake of other non-human animals also raises other sets of unique moral concerns and questions. What is the proper rank ordering of moral obligations when the stakeholders are abstractions? Imagine that we are considering doing an experiment on Coco the chimpanzee. The experiment that we do on Coco might have implications for future chimpanzees with Coco’s condition. The research might, then, have a beneficial impact for Coco’s species—the species “chimpanzee.” Can the moral obligations that we have to concrete, suffering beings ever be outweighed by obligations that we have to abstractions like “future generations” or “survival of the species”?

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When Men Dominate the Film Industry, What’s the Problem?

Watching the Oscars recently, I was struck by the fact that, for all the emphasis on women over the last year because of the #metoo movement, the winners were still mostly a parade of men. Greta Gerwig did not win for her wonderful movie Lady Bird; Guillermo Del Toro won for the overly contrived movie The Shape of Water. Yes, there were female winners in the acting categories, but there have to be: those categories are gender-segregated.

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The Puppy and the Snapping Turtle

An image of a snapping turtle's mouth

On March 8, 2018, an abandoned, terminally ill puppy was brought into the classroom of Idaho high school science teacher Robert Crosland.  Crosland, known for taking in sick animals, could tell that the puppy was beyond saving.  After school, in front of a handful of his students, Crosland placed the sick puppy inside the tank of his snapping turtle.  It drowned and was then eaten by the turtle. Crosland was reported for animal cruelty. The snapping turtle, a member of an invasive species, was confiscated and euthanized by the Department of Agriculture.

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Moral Obligations in Hurricane Conditions

Photo of a hurricane from space.

On August 25, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas.  The storm devastated the state, destroying homes and business and claiming many lives.   Faced with such dire circumstances, many people living in Texas found and continue to find themselves in need of assistance from others. Many have stepped up to provide support.   At least two prominent donors faced public criticism for their donation efforts.  Popular television cook Rachel Ray donated $1 million specifically to shelters providing disaster relief to animals.  Actress Ruby Rose took to Twitter to announce her intention to match donations up to $10,000 for relief to the Montrose LGBT center in Houston.

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South Sudan’s Famine and the Moral Relevance of Distance

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, as well as South Sudan’s National Bureau of Statistics, recently declared that certain area of South Sudan are no longer in famine, but “but almost two million people are [still] on the brink of starvation.” According to an April 4, 2017 BBC article, the famine in South Sudan started in February 2017, during which 100,000 people faced starvation. This was reportedly the first time in six years that a famine had been declared in any part of the world. The main reason for the South Sudan famine is the current violence precipitated by political disagreements between the president and vice president of the country. The president fired the vice president in July 2013, who he later accused of wanting to take power, and forces loyal to both sides escalated the political dispute into armed conflict.

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Peter Singer and the Ethics of Effective Altruism

In the first part of this two-part series, we explored the views of Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer and whether they count as “eugenics.” Although his possibly eugenicist views are what drew protestors to Singer’s recent talk at the University of Victoria, Singer wasn’t there to discuss bioethics. Instead, he had been invited by the Effective Altruism club, and the event included a screening of Singer’s 2013 TED talk on Effective Altruism.

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Moral Philosophy Doesn’t Need a License to Cause Harm

Philosophers Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan recently wrote a very controversial op-ed in The Stone (a blog published by The New York Times) arguing that Anna Stubblefield may have been unjustly treated in her sexual assault conviction. Stubblefield engaged in multiple sexual acts with a person who was severely cognitively impaired. Continue reading “Moral Philosophy Doesn’t Need a License to Cause Harm”

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Peter Singer and the Ethics of Eugenics

Recently, students at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, gathered to protest a talk given by Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer. First and foremost, Singer is a utilitarian who believes that the rightness of actions depends on their maximizing pleasure for sentient creatures. He is well known for his provocative utilitarian views on infanticide, animal welfare, and charitable obligations.

The UVic protestors claimed that “giving Singer a platform was implicitly supporting the murder of disabled people, and that his views supported eugenics.” Their complaint is only the most recent in a long history of protests to the work of Singer. Though questions about academic freedom and freedom of speech more generally are relevant, let’s set them aside for a moment and consider the charge head-on: what is eugenics? Who counts as a eugenicist?

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The Moral Consequences of Protecting American Jobs

One of President-elect Donald Trump’s key campaign promises was to stop companies from shipping American jobs overseas. Since his election in November, he has already claimed credit for making progress on this promise. The President-elect has claimed credit for stopping Carrier from moving jobs in Indiana to Mexico. More recently, Ford announced that it had cancelled plans to build a new car manufacturing facility in Mexico. The January 3 New York Times article linked to above suggests that Ford’s decision was partially a response to Trump’s plans on trade policy.

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Demographics, Refugees, and Immigration: What of the Expanding Moral Circle?

Anxieties over changing demographics, immigration, and refugees have been a key theme in Western politics over the past couple of years. A central flashpoint in the political debates leading up to the Brexit vote was a controversial poster from the “Leave” Campaign, depicting a line of Syrian refugees. In the United States, reports of racist taunting and vandalism have increased since the recent election. France will vote in presidential elections in 2017, and the National Front’s candidate Marine Le Pen is projected to have a strong showing. The National Front has also been associated primarily with its opposition to immigration, specifically immigration from Islamic countries. More generally, political sentiments that reject multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, in favor of nationalism and isolationism, have grown in popularity in both the United States and Western Europe.

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