Singer and Posner: African economies, ivory and the elephants

Both the slaughter of the African elephant and the Bluefin Tuna have direct ties to Japanese culture and the arguments for tradition (equally so for South Asia and the fate of rhinceros and sharks.)

The hermeneutical trend in theistic political philosophy has no clear reply when a tradition within a culture represents a threat to a mere non-human species.  Consider hermeneutically-oriented  political discourse in Africa or churches funding African missions: no tradition which places the hominids as "disclosing" Being with their speech, poetry, theatre or religion is going to have an easy time of balancing the economics requirements for funding faith-based universities in African countries with elephant herds (or at least with ivory stockpiles) and undermining the ivory trade.  Mutual respect for traditions here encounters imperatives: man-made species extinction ranks among our most immoral acts when viewed as one self-aware species among others (elephants are now known to be self-aware and appear to suffer grief reactions not unlike those of primates) - there is a clear imperative not to treat these species as only means to our ends but as ends in their own right.

The classic sophomoric issue would be posed as follows: choose to place funding in medical research which has a high probability of providing a medical treatment permitting your congenitally ill child to live significantly past age 18 - say to age 40-45 - or significantly improve the probability that we will succeed in preserving elephant populations and habitat.  Now flip the setting to where the ill child is that of an ivory poacher - a female child for whom he will have to provide a dowry.

Matters would only be worse if a significant human group, say a  group with Bushman tribes, were in a region dependent on ivory or in a region likely to be the final viable choice for an elephant reserve but clearly incompatible with the Bushman way of life.

Prior to the utter relativizing of all values to traditions, we might have had a prospect for a "Copernican" displacement of our species-centrism.  Open misanthropy aside, ( and such misanthropy, in my experience, is not as foreign to animal rights proponents as you might suppose ) we should be able to recognize that our populations now exceed what one might reasonably expect for our species in the natural environs of this planet.  This view, however, is not acceptable to most Catholic, Protestant or Islamic theologians.

If it is true that some million elephants (some number on that order) were slaughtered for ivory in a single decade in the late 20th Century and if in that same century, the elephant went from being a dominant species in its range to being a rare and endangered species often absence from its former range, then we could apply the "American Bison" precedent: allow extinction to proceed and then later reintroduce a subspecies or another species in tiny herds in tiny numbers and declare the outcome to have been inevitable.  A similar rule could be applied to Bluefin tuna, only with the prospect being of aquaculture, in which the tuna are fewer rather as are todays domestic cattle as the result of our selective breeding to suit our needs.  What we can argue is that this sequence is a well-understood economic transition and point to the thriving economies in the prairies states of the American Midwest.

Has this not already become the case with large elephant herds in Africa and large schools of giant tuna in the open ocean?

That the Japanese nation should not have entitlement to quality sushi that is not from their own domestic waters does not sit well with our acceptance that nations with vast petroleum resources are permitted to be major consumers of foreign petroleum resources.  How could the economics of sushi (presumed to be somehow central to Nihon-jin culture in a manner rather more significant than, say, whale-meat) - an economy embedded in tradition - be compared to petroleum?

The history of petroleum is interesting in this regard because of paraffin.  Whale oil lamps were smoky and smelly.  But we now know that the white waxy petroleum product was carcinogenic!  White paraffin, like translucent petroleum jelly, is one of the more fascinating transformations on the black ooze of rotting plant and animal matter that we politely refer to as crude oil.  That drawing up crude oil from pockets in underground shale is possibly the most disgusting practice in which the human beings have ever engaged in, is a perspective which must be left for future generations.  The building of cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix to draw down the water of the Colorado River could be viewed as technical miscalculations rather like permitting intense smog in flood-prone Los Angeles: these were technical problems.

The hermeneutical view in social science is thought to alert us to discourse which has been preverted by the view that there are technical problems that we face and not problems in our very understanding of our situation and the relations of power and domination.  At the moment this hermeneutical view is most common in America and in Europe, but imagine that it had arisen in parallel in Africa and in Japan: what hope would we have of addressing the future of elephant and tuna in the face of an over-populated Japan and an over-populated eastern and southern Africa?

One view is to trust the demographics of economic advance: the population growth will peak, enter decline and then we can resort to frozen DNA to reintroduce small populations to ensure the survival of these species.

Quite another view would suggest that the hominids have always been eliminating other species and that it is both historically and economically naive to protest the fate of North Atlantic cod or Bluefin tuna or orangs or elephants.  Consider the Asian Elephant.  The most often brutal "taming" of these animals has a clear parallel in our taming of horses, dogs and oxen.  Asian elephants will survive as domestic beasts of burden.

Given the fate of Neanderthal, what reason could be given for the protection of primates which are not robust enough to adapt to their changing environments?  The red fox and the common raccoon have no such problem in America.

There are of course distinct issues: elephant species versus elephant populations.  Perhaps here there could be a trade-off between nations: Borneo could pay Rwanda to protect gorillas as the price for the extinction of orang habitat and naturally occurring orang populations.  There appear to be precedents in law in the form of trading pollution credits.  Variant: no species lasts forever, our own has had but a brief run, so perhaps a case can be made that the older pachyderm species should make way for the newer hominid just as some reptilian marine carnivores gave way to major marine mammals.

Lonergan's ad hominem

Bernard Lonergan's "Insight - A Study of Human Understanding" appeared in 1958, too late to benefit from the first printing of "Mental Acts" by P.T. Geach in 1957.  Geach and Austin are the two principal links of the British philosophical community to that of Munich, Gottingen and Freiburg associated with phenomenology.  The link should have been through Russell, Goedel, Cantor and Hilbert - but it was not - perhaps due to Russell being paralyzed by his sessions listening to Wittgenstein.  The irony is that Russell had Wittgenstein rather as Husserl had Heidegger: both of the latter were to  be the triumph of the "everyday" over mathesis.

In Husserl's case, he may have himself to blame (although without consulting manuscripts it is not possible to say what comes from his shorthand and what from his assistants and later editors).  Consider this, from the "Crisis" volume, Section 53:
"the essence of the incipient philosophy of this phenomenological-transcendental radicalism is that ... [its] beginning course [...] is necessarily one of experiencing and thinking in naïve self-evidence"
This is almost a sketch of Sartre at work after his ever so brief apprenticeship.

But then consider Lonergan's project - not on Intuition (Anschauung), but Insight (Einsicht).  Husserl repeatedly resorted to ad hominem in dismissing scholastic disputations à la Thomas in spite of his debt to Brentano.  Had Lonergan read these, one might understand his ready dismissal of Husserl regardless of Husserl's status with the mathematical community at Göttingen. Here is Lonergan's insight:
"In brief, phenomenology is a highly purified empiricism. and it did not take long for it to topple over into an existentialism that describes, not the abstract possibility of description, but men as they are."[p. 415]

There are fascinating threads in Lonergan and Husserl on the immanent and on judgment and on reason - but Lonergan's possible ignorance of the direction of Reinach and Ingarden make this difficult to pursue with much sympathy.  In this regard, Geach could be the corrective.  Both Geach and Husserl reject the destination reached by Hume and for very similar reasons.  But to do justice to Lonergan is so very difficult due to how clear it is that his ultimate concern is to preclude a heresy concerning "immanent" ( a concern that can also be seen in some conservative political insights, for example, in Voegelin), the rational within man in his likeness to the one true God and sin in the fallen world.

There is a parallel in Husserl's rhetoric concerning science and infinite approximations - in the Krisis Husserl's provides a caricature of Galileo in spite of his express intent:  Galileo is forced to serve his purposes contra Hume.  The Krisis has no mention of Hermann Weyl, whose Zeit, Raum u. Materie had already gone through 5 editions between 1918 and 1922 (Husserl left Göttingen in 1916 to assume Rickert's chair in Freiburg.)  Perhaps Husserl did not think he could assume familiarity with his mathematical background or the physics of the day - and it may have further impeded his pulling a definitive text together (see MacIntyre on Edith Stein's observations) - as it was, Erfahrung u. Urteil (Experience and Judgment) was pulled together by his students in the year after his death - but their work was cut short in 1939 and may even have been over-hasty.

A persistent worry is that Husserl's bogeyman of "empiricist psychology" is comparable to Charles Taylor's "behaviourist psychology" and in this regard Lonergan is of interest in his view of how one limited view can very naturally inspire its own equally limited inversion.  The key difference is that Husserl was a "foundationalist" with regard to Logic, Mathematics and Exact Philosophy (with regard to which, see the volume reassessing the work of the young Rudolph Carnap.)  Nothing in Husserl should undermine formal foundations for linguistics anymore than anything in Geach.  Both could provide a corrective to a naive empiricism at various points.  The deeper concern is revealed in Heidegger, where the price exacted is a disregard for linguistic niceties, for mere factual linguistic truths.

I have not looked through the latest re-edition of Geach Mental Acts (mine dates to 1971) to know if he removed his mentions of "the brutes" - or, in my reading, the "les abrutis".  Something similar can be read in Lonergan, who goes so far as to refer to "the very stupid".  Lonergan's target is "mere apprehension" and the tension with the pre-given of Husserl is quite immediate (no pun intended.)  I imagine a follower of Geach issuing a revised version with a chapter on the seeming insight of pigs, corvids, dolphins, elephants, octopuses, apes and perhaps even a parrot.  Pigs are the real challenge: it is hard to imagine anything more apt to offend in Rome than any consideration of whether something approximating "judgment" could evolve in a troupe of pigs in the wild.  But note how pigs in the wild are treated with so much more respect by their hunting adversaries ...

Missing in Husserl is a profitable confrontation with that other Thomas, Thomas Reid.  Had Reinach survived, we might have had just such a textual dialog or at least a dialectical tangle.

It often seems to me that Taylor takes some combination of Habermas-Gadamer to have provided a corrective to Heidegger - but Taylor's student readers find no repudiation of Heidegger - quite the opposite.  Heidegger remains there only to be pardoned as memory fades.  My corrective: that in November 1938 each Mesusah be restored to each preserved house in Marburg where Jews lived in 1927.  Taylor avoids these issues of Heidegger's abandonment of Husserl's concern with reason and judgment - all that he takes from Jaspers - or acknowledges - is the phrase "axial age".  Hans Jonas passes without mention, his sin being more difficult to pardon.

The attack on scientific psychology in Husserl is not based on "insight" - but the flanking attack on "modernity" and the "science of the Enlightenment" found in Taylor has its ground in Husserl's own attack on naturalism in science - not autobiographically, but in terms of its ready recognition by young readers.  Husserl's own remarks on technology serve that project ( Galileo's great practical contribution was to ensure the greatest range for artillery in war - perhaps one of the most immoral practices of warfare and yet now accepted as truly the most natural - his telescope was a great boon to artillery - only the calculus became more significant - and in our day, computing comes to us directly from naval gunnery.)

But at what price such insight?  It is not the "experience" of war to which we turn, but our "judgment" of what can be just in confrontations with utter violence and unbridled force.  Consider our ready use of "the brutes" in our practice of warfare - even preventive, in the use of rats and monkeys to clear minefields - pigs are too heavy and the loss of dogs too traumatic for their handlers.  And what of courage in the face of impending death on a battlefield bereft of fairness, respect or any consideration of a common humanity?

For Husserl prior to the loss of his son in war, the fundamental was undeniably mathematics.  Years later the entire project of mathesis is brought into question and the fundamental concern becomes the origin of possible and realized true and adequate judgments.  The usual ad hominem is that this transition occurs along a trail of failures where Husserl appears as something of a "last Mohican" as the frontier vanishes - vanishes not in the face of an endless reach of deforested lands, unmechanized farms and muddy towns, but in the face of impending total war.

To return to Husserl's project at a time when a concerted attack on science is underway - an attack proceeding a several fronts - an attack against which philosophers embracing substance dualism will provide no serious obstacle - an attack which while enshrining the soul is utterly inimical to insight, science, knowledge and fruitful debate regarding mind, respect and values.  The attack proceeds by an appeal to recall the maligned merits of a battered tradition.  It is best confronted with its own failure to engender science and to provide a defensible theory of experience and judgment in the light of that science.  The tradition which cannot allow that pigs have souls cannot be - must not be - the one we embrace.