Since I started this Talk page and I get to edit everyone's stuff pretty soon, I have some sort of power over what goes on here. As such, I am going to pretend that whoever else comments will listen to what I say. I find it offensive and counter-productive to our conversation when we malign another person's comments by acting so incredulous as to be demeaning. There is a fine line between when criticism stops being constructive and sometimes we all (including myself) pass it. Eben is the benevolent monarch and he knows what he is doing, even though I question the effectiveness of some of the language he uses with his scary red text. If we are bemoaning the lack of empathy in the way we treat "other living things" we should at least be mindful of the fact that those other living things have feelings. We undermine the very purpose of this class when we scare people into silence, which is why some people never take a stab at joining the conversation. I Will edit your mean comments away. I AM THE MONARCH OF MY TALK PAGES AND MY TALK PAGES ARE FRIENDLY TALK PAGES :).

You're kidding, right? Like this guy? Why is it in our interest to perpetuate an idea of moral difference between ourselves and other living things. Can you sell me that one? The argument should be even easier than just the difference between ourselves and other people. Do you even see why dropping those distinctions might be productive for us?? -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010

You're kidding, right? Like this guy? I'll get to your other absurdities down below in a minute, but for now I'd love to understand why it would be in our interest to perpetuate an idea of moral difference between ourselves and other living things. Can you sell me that one? The argument should be even easier than just the difference between ourselves and other people. Do you even see why dropping those distinctions might be productive for us, or have you never listened to the other side of the debate you think you're in? -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010

How exactly is a lack of ethical difference between humans inconsistent with legal realism? These two things seem perfectly congruent. On the one hand, the law perpetuates arbitrary distinction (property rights, citizenship, etc). On the other hand, the actors themselves are morally indistinguishable - it is only through our lens of perspective that they get imbued with moral significance, or "hats," if you will. The law is what it does. There is no such thing as "Right" in this world, only luck - if we want to understand our surroundings empirically we would do well to acknowledge the actual underlying system. -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010

Once again, I have to know if you're kidding. I actually assume so in this case. If so, what's your point? -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010

I put to you that from our vantage point, we would also think this conjoined life would be lots of other things, many of which aren't subjective. That is to say that from any vantage point, those twins will for example be in different rooms less frequently than they would ceterus paribus as nonconjoined people. In general, make any change and ceterus also wouldn't be paribus. But that's irrelevant. The exercise of the veil is to show that a) There are alternate possible futures, and that b) we probably don't live in the "best" of all possible worlds, even by our own normative lights. It's an attempt to make you ask what we might change to make it better, still by your own subjective conception. -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010

I think the boundaries of ethical concern is a really important topic, and I'm finding this discussion fascinating. So far, the focus here has been on national boundaries. Working on climate change, I find the question of temporal boundaries of concern - intergenerational justice - to also be of great interest.

A quick point about the Veil hypo: I think it's basically the Harvard political science department way of formulating the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Generally speaking most people find this to be a comprehensible and admirable moral precept, and most major religions to my knowledge include it as a central tenet.

Another key point I'd like to add to the current discussion about national boundaries is that I find it a bit ironic that the in the pushback to Eben's comments, the supposedly more deeply felt and "real" national community is being contrasted to "fake," more evanscent familial bonds descending from Mitochondrial Eve.

First, my understanding of Eben's point about mitochondria is that it is a biological reality which can be put to good use in ethical argument. I think it was a just a quick point of political rhetoric, not really an attempt at a general theory of ethics. I don't think the intended point was that, for example, if we discovered Australians had different mitochondria, we would suddenly cease to have ethical obligations to them.

But nationalism - the concept that the boundaries of our familial affection is somehow naturally limited to those within the territories of the same nation-state as us - is to my mind quite implausible as an ethical theory. The nation-state has its origins as a deliberate project by European states to establish more culturally cohesive populations amenable to centralized governing and winning wars. There is nothing natural about it, and certainly there is no inherent link between biological kinship and nationalism.

However, we might be able to make constructive use of nationalism nonetheless, now that we have it. Benedict Arnold's Imagined Communities made the argument, that, inter alia, nationalism can serve to expand one's boundary of concern beyond immediate kin. He worked on Indonesia, and Indonesia is an example of a case where a bunch of essentially separate island communities developed a common national identification in their struggle against their colonial occupiers and cooperated to throw them out.

Elsewhere, and if someone else knows the source for this, I'd be grateful, I read an interesting attempt to explain why the Scandinavian social democracies are so generous with foreign aid. The argument was that the tradition of social democracy there had caused people to expand their circle of concern outside themselves and their family, and that this expansion had continued to encompass people in other countries. Now, I know it's somewhat bad form to cite an argument without knowing the source, but I'm really hoping someone might recognize it and point me to it, and I think it's a thought-provoking hypothesis.

-- DevinMcDougall - 01 Mar 2010

Nona basically most of what I would have said on the issue, albeit, probably more eloquently.

@ Erica: Watched the video. Its OK. Dawkins basically is invoking Sorites' paradox. I accept his argument, that we can't be drawing absolutist bright line rules, but he did not need to pull out evolution to have me on board.

Eben is challenging us to think critically but there is nothing morally consistent about the "we are all kin" theory within the context of this course. I'd suggest it might be cognitively dissonant within a course that spent so much time on legal realism. Of course, I don't actually think for a second that Eben truly believes his "we are all kin theory." I agree with you Erica, he is just trying to "challenge" us. He is staking out the most absolutist position on the issue, because, by doing so it opens our mind and drives us further away from preconceived notions.

@ KayKim? : The "Rawlsian Veil" to me is also utter bullshit. It is a pointless, unexecutable exercise. I will always be me, even when I am pretending not to be me.

(disclosure: I have had the experience of talking to many people who fought recently in the Middle East and have seen multiple disturbing presentations)

To use Eben's tactic: Life in Afghanistan might not be so bad. It's only bad because of who I am, an American. I cannot fathom being an Afghani. Are perpetual Civil Wars bad? I don't know. They seem bad. But then again, they seem bad because I don't have to experience them. Behind the "veil of ignorance" I may reach that conclusion. I may not. It is pointless to think about because it can never happen. Afghans could be quite happy people and we are just getting in the way of ourselves from seeing it.

Daniel Gilbert makes a similar argument illustrating the nonsense of the Rawlsian Veil in a book called Stumbling on Happiness. He looks at adult conjoined twins and asks whether if they could separate, would they? From our vantage point, we would think this life were terrible. Indeed, non-conjoined twins thought that a conjoined condition was absolutely miserable. Yet, the conjoined twins answered that they would not separate if they could. I remember a similar event in my own experience when I once saw a person who was paralyzed from the waist down who said it was "the best thing in his life that had ever happened to him." It is all relative--including the concepts of happiness and justice.

But the "Rawlsian Veil" requires some sort of evaluation on happiness and justice. But "all claims of happiness are claims from someone's point of view — from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn't a view from nowhere." (Gilbert) Nowhere, being the place we would need to be behind the veil of ignorance.

-- MatthewZorn - 01 Mar 2010

"that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned (Rawlsian Veil)."

The problem for me is that (a) we are not behind a veil and (b) most people don't give a crap (this is based on my 18 or so odd years having conversations with others about the blatant injustices of this world and our arbitrary positioning in it). To me, the solution is not convincing everyone they should equally care about all others-- especially because the human condition seeks constructed social identification. While citizenship might be a thin distinction for the purposes of biology, the practical implications of living in a certain country, a shared language, a national narrative, physical boundaries, the creeds, myths, habits, attitudes... add up to a substantial social order to me. In my socially manipulated opinion, the best possibility for justice is that the frameworks of these social constructs (if one agrees that they are an inevitable manifestation of our humanity) move in the direction of valuing the entire human race.

-- NonaFarahnik - 01 Mar 2010