Interview of Peter Singer

It seems to me Peter Singer is bringing 'up' the status of animals to that of the human or bringing 'down' the level of human to that of the animals. Except for speciation, there don't seem to be any philosophical difference between human and animal.

But I also admire his sincerity when he admits that he is not able to fully carry though the logical demands of his ethical view. But I wonder if he struggles with guilt then. And how much of that haunts him.

Do the Dead Ones Have Rights?

There is a news item that appeared on 24th October, 2015 in the Times of India that says that a dead woman was dug out from out grave and 'sexual exploitation' was performed on the corpse. The policemen say that 'rape' charge could not be applied yet until medical examination is done on the corpse. But the fact that she has been disrobed confirmed some sort of sexual exploitation on the corpse. Is this a wrong action? Is the one who did this doing something that is morally wrong? 

But what is moral wrongdoing? Moral wrongdoing is to harm someone, one may say. But harming a criminal in the form of putting him to jail by the state is not moral wrongdoing; in fact, not harming the criminal that way can be construed as moral wrongdoing upon other citizens when the possibly of this criminal harming other citizens persist. So harming others is not necessarily moral wrongdoing. I would say moral wrongdoing is depriving others of their due right; and when there is a contest of rights, then the one who deserves more or whose rights should take precedence over other's right claims must get what is due. So moral wrongdoing is depriving others of their right. 

So is sexual exploitation of a corpse morally wrong? Yes. I guess that most people will say intuitively that it is wrong. But when we say that it is wrong, then it has to imply that there is a right claim being violated upon by a moral agent. Because without a right claim being violated by a moral agent, moral wrongdoing cannot be accounted for. But the implication of such idea  then underscores that the dead ones too have certain sort of right-claims. It is not only the living ones that bear right, but the dead ones too bear right. And moral wrongdoing can be done even to the dead ones as well, not just to the ones alive at present.

The sort of rights the dead ones have would include the right not to harm their good legacy with lies and not to sexually exploit their corpse. 

The Victims Called the Kashmiri Pandits

Oftentimes when people protested against the thuggish violence perpetrated by right wing Saffron brigades -- RSS and its sister organisations -- there is a question raised: Where were you when the Kashmiri Pandits, who are Hindu, were threatened, killed and expelled from their homes in Kashmir by terrorists from the Kashmir valley? 

In the Kashmir valley, the crime was committed by the gun wielding militant groups. They may call themselves freedom fighters, but because of the way they deliberately and systematically terrorize civilians they have to be labelled terrorist. So the crime against the Kashmiri pandits were committed by these terrorists. 

But what about the thuggish violence committed by the Saffron brigades? What about murdering a Muslim based on rumour that this man consumed beef, when later reported says that what he ate was mutton? This crime was not committed by terrorists. They targeted an innocent men, but they were not using guns to commit the crime. 

In the former case, it's the army that must do the fighting. In the latter case, it is the police that must do the fighting. In the former case, people support the fight by paying taxation to the government that supports the army to do the fighting. The government was fighting against the terrorists, and therefore there was no point of raising voice to urge the government to do much more. In the latter case, those thuggish violence are being committed by those who apparently has the tacit support of the political leadership. This is the reason voices are being raised to rein in such criminal actions. This is the reason why the government is being urged to stop this violence. This is the reason the government is being asked to respect the Constitution. 

On both counts --exodus of Hindu Kashmiri Pandits and Dadri murder of a Muslim -- certain people are victimised. The difference lies in the one who victimises the smaller community. And since the parties that committed the crime are different, voices are being raised differently. In the former case, the crime is being committed by the terrorist and the response to that is to let the army fight; in the latter case, the saffron brigades are responsible and therefore the government is urged to restrain them. In the former case, it is the action of paying taxation that is being done to protest; in the latter case, it is verbal expression that is being made to protest. 

Journey Toward Justice 30 & 31

The title of chapter 30 is 'Hope' and that of chapter 31 'Recap'. Since chapter 31 is the last chapter and it is a summary of the previous chapters, chapters 30 and 31 and put together in this post. So this post is mainly about chapter 30. But chapter 30 is similar to an essay that appeared in a different book some years back. I have summarized that essay here in 2011. 

Faith, hope and love -- says Paul. Hope is very close to Christian thought. Christians idea of  hope is different from optimism  that sometimes say that we humans through our own effort will bring 'utopia' to realisation. Christians work for justice and that must continue. But final justice is to be brought about by God through his son Jesus Christ. Since God will accomplish it, one need not despair. But a question emerges that says if God is going to do the job, why must we participate in seeking justice now? Well, because God is inviting us to participate in righting injustice, and not just remain standing as a distant spectator to what he is doing. 

While seeking justice, it is important to remember that God is working mysteriously. And sometimes we have to name injustice, and then pray for justice to prevail. And when justice prevails, we have to give thanks to God. When we do this we are identifying God's hand working in human history. Well, this could be read wrongly; so one must be careful  in identifying God's hand in history. But identifying injustice and giving glory to God for unjust practices/systems that have been rectified must be part of Christian effort while loving and seeking justice. 

Journey Toward Justice 29

This chapter is titled 'Justice and Beauty'. In this chapter Nick makes two important points. First, about the nature of beauty; second, connection between justice and beauty. Nick tells about a poet who spoke about his poetry. This poet says that at one point he scribbled a line of the poetry as ' a dog wagging its tail'; later the poet refined his poetry to say 'a dog swinging its tail'. Why so? Well, 'swinging' is better than using 'wagging'. Nick then makes a philosophical point that beauty does not always lie in the eye of the beholder; it is rather the other way round i.e because it is beautiful, it gives delight to the beholder. There is something called beautiful philosophy paper, beautiful sunset. beautiful music, beautiful painting etc. 

Given that there is something called beautiful, is it injustice if some people are forced to live in a condition where sensory delight that comes from experiencing beautiful object are not present? Yes, argues Nick. Humans are by nature a creature that requires certain amount of autonomy to be truly human. Similarly, human are by nature a creature that requires certain amount of beauty in one's life to be living a truly human life. Justice requires that 'aesthetic decency' is present in a human life. 

Journey Toward Justice 28

This chapter is titled 'Justice, Forgiveness and Punishment'. This is a chapter where the ideas expressed here are not entirely new and yet must be stressed and restated again and again across time and space is there. Without repentance and forgiveness, reconciliation cannot take place in a broken world. With repentance, forgiveness is possible. Of course, forgiveness is not always easy specially when one has faced deliberate and systematic injustice over a long period of time. For example, a person who has been sent to Siberia with all his family members and had to see one member after another dying over the years will find it very difficult to forgive Stalin even when, say, Stalin apologised. Yet forgiveness is good for the soul when the culprit has repented of his wrongdoings. 

Can we forgive someone who refuses to say sorry? No. But didn't Jesus forgive the soldiers on the cross who did not say that they were sorry? Well, Jesus 'forgave' those soldiers because they did not know what they were doing. But is wronging someone without knowing that it was actually wronging them right to be called wronging someone? Yes and no. In a way it is wronging the victim because you were harming the victim even when you did not know that you were wronging him. But in a way it is not wronging him because it was a mistake. And conceptually one has to make a distinction between wronging someone knowingly and wronging someone unknowingly. Wronging someone knowingly is 'wronger' than wronging someone unknowingly. Jesus was using 'forgive' for the latter kind. And this Greek word that Jesus used for this latter kind may be translated as 'let go', not bearing resentment against those who unknowingly harmed him. 

So conceptually, can we forgive someone who harmed us knowingly and who refused to apologize? No. But can we forgive/let go of someone who harmed us unknowingly and who therefore did not apologize? Yes. 

Aristotle and Eugenics

In chapter VII section xvi of The Politics, Aristotle talks about marriage and eugenics. He writes that if one marries too young or too old, children are not healthy. And therefore one should get married at the right age to beget good children. For female, the appropriate age to get married is 18 and for male, it's 37. Aristotle think that this is also good particularly because by the time the man gets weak and old at around 70, the child, if born as planned, would be of marriageable age. 

Aristotle also writes, ' with regard to the choice between abandoning an infant or rearing it, let there be a law that no cripple child be reared.' Aristotle society was not in a position to rear deformed child. They would leave deformed child out in the open to die. To control population, they would even sometimes leave a healthy child to die. Unlike Plato who fixed an exact number for an ideal state,  Aristotle does put an exact number for an idea state. But he says that it should be large enough to be self sustaining and yet not too large that the state cannot 'survey' the number.

This reminds me of a dialogue in a movie called The Mission. One can find the plot of the movie here. A wonderful movie! In this movie, before the transfer of the land where the mission work was being undertaken, from Spanish control to Portuguese control, there was a debate for and against this transfer of land. The one defending the transfer of the land from the Spanish to the Portuguese wanted to capture the native people and sell them as slave. There is handsome money involved in slave trading and under Portuguese law slavery was okay then.  But the one arguing against the transfer, the Christian Priest, feared that such transfer would enslave the native people; and since Spanish law did not allow slave trading, he wanted the land to be under Spanish control. The one defending the transfer says something to the effect that the Guarani people are not fully human; they are rather like animal; they even killed their children... and therefore using them as slave was fine. To this the priest retorted that they had to keep their population under control... and to run away from slave traders, they could not even raise so many children because that made it difficult form them to escape being caught and then sold as slave.

But the point is that leaving deformed children to die was not uncommon in the past. That was there in the Roman society too. And we read of Christians in the first century picking up discarded children from dung heaps and raising them. There might have been other social/religious/ethnic communities having done similar thing; maybe my reading is limited and therefore I am not aware of such stories. But the point is that discarding deformed children was common then. Today all sorts of societies have made such thing illegal. Though we read stories of female foeticide specially in certain part of the world, and the stories are being confirmed through skewed sex ratio, but there is possibly no state/kingdom that does not prohibit such thing officially. Let alone discarding disabled people, the world today strives to invent new machines/tools to enhance their capability to perform different activities as live as normal life as far as possible.

Is the fact that discarding the deformed and the weak  being acceptable in the ancient society but not acceptable now one aspect of moral progress?  I think it is! 

Journey Toward Justice 27

This chapter is titled 'What Paul Said about the Task and Authority of the State'. This chapter is connected to the previous chapter. And in this chapter Nick discusses what Paul meant by the idea that Christians are to obey the state. Pay your tax, Paul would say. But why? 

Nick says that traditionally Paul's words have been understood to mean that God is the one who instituted the state and therefore state should be obeyed. Given this understanding, many Christians obeyed the state even when the state's laws are bad. For example, when the state says that white and black cannot intermarry, they obeyed the state. Nick argues that this kind of understanding is incomplete. Nick goes on to argue that what Paul says is that God instituted the state to punish the wrongdoer -- or put it differently -- to do justice and therefore state should be obeyed. Thus when the state is doing justice, everybody should obey the state. 

But what if the state is doing injustice? If the state is doing injustice, then it will be time to pray that the state changes its law or that the present government is voted. Or putting it differently, this is a time 'not to obey' the state. This is justifiable because the purpose for which the state was instituted  by God is not being carried out by the state. And when the state is not carrying out its role, then it is justifiable to pray for its downfall. 

Murdered For Supposedly Consuming Beef at Dadri, Near Delhi!

The other day a Muslim man was killed and his son thrashed by a mob for supposedly eating beef. The family of the deceased says he did not eat beef; it was rather mutton. But suppose it was beef, what's the problem? There is no law against beef consumption in Uttar Pradesh, newspaper reports say. You can read an article on beef consumption by the Hindus in the past here; another article on the controversy on beef consumption can be read here, written by a fine political thinker in India. 

In this post I want to respond to one the of the arguments coming from RSS-BJP supporters which goes like this: If pork was not allowed in Saudi Arabia, why should beef be allowed in India? Well, to put it simply: India is not another version of Saudi Arabia; that's why even if pork is banned in Saudi Arabi, beef cannot be banned in India. 

Saudi Arabia's history is different from India's history. Modern India that came to be established in 1947, after getting independence from the British empire, is made up of different religious communities. When such people were invited to be part of India and the idea of India was framed, the idea of a Hindu state was rejected. The people chose not to create another version of Pakistan. Pakistan went on to become a Muslim state; India chose to be a secular state, having no state religion. My ancestors were never ever Hindu and so were the ancestors of the Mizos or the Khasis (of Meghalaya) or most Arunachalis. So how can India be a Hindu state? 

India cannot be a theocratic state. just as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are.  

Journey Toward Justice 26

The title of this chapter is 'St. Paul's Rejection of Retributive Punishment'. In this chapter Nick comments on what St. Paul says about the role of the government as one reads in the book of Romans (or rather Paul's letter to the Christians at Rome.) Then he combines this Pauline idea with the idea of punishment. Nick's comment on punishment is illuminating, moving away from the traditional discourse on punishment. 

So what does Paul say about the role of the government when he says that government is the servant of God to execute... wrath on the wrongdoer. 'Vengeance is mine' says our English translation of the Bible. The Greek word for 'vengeance' there is 'ekdikesis'. And Paul is saying that if there is to be vengeance, it's God's job; not ours. But is 'vengeance' government's job? Is government the 'servant' to execute...wrath on the wrongdoer? Nick argues that the idea that God executes vengeance is different from the idea that says that government who is the 'servant'  executes the wrath on the wrongdoer. The state does not execute vengeance; only God does. But what the state does is to punish; not vengeance. But what's the difference between the two?

Vengeance is to pay back evil with evil; it's an eye for an eye kind of thing. Whereas punishment is not quite so. Punishment is to give hard measure but with the intention that includes deterrence, security and reforms. Deterrence so that others will not repeat similar wrongdoing. Reform because such hard measure may serve as a lesson to the wrongdoer and elicit character change. Security because sometimes the person may harm other people if allowed to go on with his usual life. St. Paul does not give a synopsis on a theory of punishment, but understanding punishment with these elements -- deterrence, reform and security -- seems to be a more accurate interpretation than the so called traditional idea that government can punish as if it is exercising vengeance.