Most of us are not like McMahan. We do not follow moral arguments if they lead to uncomfortable conclusions. We prefer to make ethical decisions based on instinct, popular wisdom, and whatever feels like the right response to a particular situation. It’s a mushy process—one that moral philosophers attempt to de-mush by laying out the myriad assumption and implications that are weaved into almost every human action, from how we spend our money to our relationships with family.
Why bother with moral philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong. Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who, as the proverb goes, are the last to discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely unaware of it.
Part of a moral philosopher’s work, then, is to question common sense and reveal our ethical blind spots. “I do think we make moral progress in part by challenging our intuitions,” McMahan said.
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Though McMahan’s philosophical studies focus on clear-cut arguments, it’s impossible to shed personal preferences. Lurking behind this formal discussion of killing humanely-reared animals lies McMahan’s decision to go from being a hunter in South Carolina to a committed vegetarian. He made the choice as a teenager, after he saw a man wound a bird on a dove shoot.
“I remember this man walking in such a leisurely way towards this bird that was flapping across the ground trying to evade him,” he recalled. And so McMahan sold his gun and stopped hunting. A little later, his “first philosophical thought” turned him vegetarian: “I thought that if I wasn’t willing to kill these animals in order to eat them, I shouldn’t pay other people to kill them for me,” he added.
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Our instincts can lead us astray. But nothing would truly matter were it not for our deeply-felt, potentially irrational, emotional responses. The problem that McMahan and moral philosophy must face is how to integrate such intuitions into a solid theory. And for those of us facing ethical decisions in everyday life, we must tackle the same potentially unanswerable questions as McMahan, testing both our intuitions and our logic.
No great ethical conundrum can be answered in a way that appeases all moral philosophers—or all people—easily. But by carefully thinking through the self-doubt, logic, and instinct bound up in morality, it’s certain that, at the very least, the decisions we reach won’t be shallow.
It’s difficult work, and slow. McMahan plans to spend several days working solidly for 12 hours at a time on the question of meat-eating, reading others’ work and writing constantly. That’s just the beginning. “And then,” he said, “you just have to sit and think about it for a terribly long time as hard as you can.”
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Why bother with moral philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong. Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who, as the proverb goes, are the last to discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely unaware of it.
Part of a moral philosopher’s work, then, is to question common sense and reveal our ethical blind spots. “I do think we make moral progress in part by challenging our intuitions,” McMahan said.
[---]
Though McMahan’s philosophical studies focus on clear-cut arguments, it’s impossible to shed personal preferences. Lurking behind this formal discussion of killing humanely-reared animals lies McMahan’s decision to go from being a hunter in South Carolina to a committed vegetarian. He made the choice as a teenager, after he saw a man wound a bird on a dove shoot.
“I remember this man walking in such a leisurely way towards this bird that was flapping across the ground trying to evade him,” he recalled. And so McMahan sold his gun and stopped hunting. A little later, his “first philosophical thought” turned him vegetarian: “I thought that if I wasn’t willing to kill these animals in order to eat them, I shouldn’t pay other people to kill them for me,” he added.
[---]
Our instincts can lead us astray. But nothing would truly matter were it not for our deeply-felt, potentially irrational, emotional responses. The problem that McMahan and moral philosophy must face is how to integrate such intuitions into a solid theory. And for those of us facing ethical decisions in everyday life, we must tackle the same potentially unanswerable questions as McMahan, testing both our intuitions and our logic.
No great ethical conundrum can be answered in a way that appeases all moral philosophers—or all people—easily. But by carefully thinking through the self-doubt, logic, and instinct bound up in morality, it’s certain that, at the very least, the decisions we reach won’t be shallow.
It’s difficult work, and slow. McMahan plans to spend several days working solidly for 12 hours at a time on the question of meat-eating, reading others’ work and writing constantly. That’s just the beginning. “And then,” he said, “you just have to sit and think about it for a terribly long time as hard as you can.”
- More Here
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