PRAGMATISM AND THE MORAL LIFE

Jerry Harkins

God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines

                                                                        –Portuguese Proverb

Many years ago, I was friendly with a young man who was certain that he was a more moral person than I or anyone else he had ever met.  Also smarter although this seems genetically linked to the belief in one's own moral superiority.  He was only a kid, fifteen or so, who was bright and passionately committed to an early and austere form of environmentalism.  His name was Charlie.  In his view of the world, there were no acceptable compromises, no shades of gray and no venial sins.  For example, he supported the most uncompromising positions of the Archdruid, David Brower, but condemned him for not being aggressive enough in defending Glen Canyon.  He accused Brower of being willing to lose that fight in order to use it to preserve the Grand Canyon.  As a committed pragmatist, I tried to explain to Charlie that being intellectually consistent was a luxury not usually available to practical politicians.  In the tenor of the times, Glen Canyon could not have been saved but its inundation could be used effectively to save the more important Grand Canyon.  Charlie disagreed.

I thought of Charlie last week when I read an essay about Danish zoos that have a policy of killing healthy animals who are deemed "surplus," which is to say unnecessary for protecting a threatened gene pool. [1] In selected cases the killings are followed by a public autopsy.  A photograph shows a group of about thirty men, women and children gathered around to witness the dissection of a beautiful two year old giraffe named Marius.  Poor Marius is spread out on a concrete slab set into what looks like the roof of a zoo building.  Another photo shows three women beginning to cut open a dead lion lying on a large butcher block.  There is blood on the floor and large cutting tools hanging on the wall of what looks like a filthy store room.  A third photo shows three young children dissecting two dead rats.  One of the children has a pacifier in her mouth.

The zookeepers, like the heart, have their reasons of which reason knows nothing.  It has nothing to do with the usual purpose of an autopsy which is to determine the cause of death because everybody knows that:  the keepers killed the animals.  They claim that their policy involves a combination of science and public education.  Indeed, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, has officials that make determinations as to which animals are surplus.  The giraffe coordinator is a fellow name Jörg Jebram.  In Marius' case, Jörg determined that his genes were well represented across Europe and he was therefore genetically unnecessary.  The zookeepers know the optics of all this are terrible and they are sensitive to the likelihood that some tender souls are bound to compare their decision-making process to that of other masters of eugenics in recent history.  Indeed, one of their objectives in mounting the public psychodramas is to teach little children and their parents that it is necessary and even noble to sacrifice the lives of individual animals in the interest of the species.

The New Yorker piece strives for objectivity by explaining both sides of the story but the author seems disturbed by the ethical issues.  Or maybe I'm reading my own discomfort into his prose.  My friend Charlie would be outraged if he knew about this policy.  His starting point would be that it is immoral to keep any animals in any zoos in the first place.  If he had been exposed to a little biology in college, he might also argue that the idea that zoos are the last hope of many species of avoiding extinction is fatuous.  Had he been exposed to a little philosophy, I think he might have said the end does not justify the means.  He would never change his mind.  But this essay is not about Charlie.  It is about my own discomfort with the "culling" policy and the manner in which the Danish zoos implement it.

I have no problem with killing animals for what I consider good reasons:  for food, for pest control and, in limited cases, for scientific research.  I would not personally kill an animal as a hunter for the pleasure of the sport and the idea of working in a slaughter house is repellant to me.  At the same time, I am grateful for those who do hunt because, as long as they obey the law, I believe they provide a necessary function in game management.  Similarly, I am not a vegetarian.  I have no quarrel with those who are.  At the same time, I am grateful for the long line of people who bring meat to my table.  I have been known to protect bees who built their hive under the eaves over the window of my study.  I enjoy watching birds but regard pigeons as rats with wings and Canada geese as terrorists.  I am willing to share my home with spiders but I am perfectly prepared to kill cockroaches or mice who invade my space.  In other words, I draw all sorts of fine ethical lines and respect your right to draw them differently unless I think they are clearly anti-social.  The problem is neither my lines or yours are completely logical.

Except for people like my young friend Charlie, making ethical distinctions is an exercise in what used to be called class inclusion/class exclusion logic which attempts to determine the validity of syllogistic propositions through the use of Venn diagrams, a form of mathematical logic.  The problem with this is that in the real world there is no such thing as a "valid" syllogism.  Pace, Aristotle!  It's not that syllogisms are not useful tools.  It's just that they do not express eternal verities.  For example, the major premise that all men are mortal is no more "valid" than the major premise that all pine trees speak French or that all pine trees are green.  More than 90% of all the people who have ever lived are alive right now.  Not one of them has died.  Obviously you don't want to bet that some of them will turn out to be immortal.  The probability of immortality is diminishingly small and the laws of probability clearly state that an event whose probability is "sufficiently" small will not occur.   Neither I nor anyone I know has ever come across a pine tree that speaks French and I am virtually certain that no one ever will.  Every living pine tree I have ever seen has been green.  But…

John Scarne was one of the world's greatest experts on gambling.  He had little formal education but, all by himself, he invented probability theory and the mathematics needed to derive it. [2]  He told the story of being present at a craps table in Havana one evening when a player made 36 or 39 (accounts differ) consecutive passes before crapping out.  The odds against such a thing are enormous but Scarne knew that the laws of probability also state that, given enough time or enough repetitions, an improbable event is sure to occur.  What impressed him was not the number of consecutive passes but the fact that he was present to observe them. [3]

To repeat:  there are no eternal verities, syllogistic or otherwise.  The Law of Gravity does not hold true inside the nucleus of an atom.  Parallel lines do in fact converge in the vastness of spacetime.  Indeed it seems there is an important, inherent and invincible ignorance at the heart of all knowledge which, according to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle cannot be less than h, Planck's Constant.  We are left with probability which is measured on a scale from zero, impossible, to one, certain, but in which there is no absolute zero and no absolute one.  This can seem threatening.  Einstein is reputed to have said that God does not play dice with the universe.  Maybe.  It does sound like him.  But he certainly said Raffiniert is der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht.  God is subtle but not malicious.  Which raises the question:  is there a God?  Every culture has answered yes and each has created a unique idea of its gods' attributes.  In one way or another, these gods serve to explain the inexplicable and make and enforce the rules by which their adherents are supposed to live.  There are similarities and differences among all the divinities but they have tended to share one thing in common.  Until quite recently, they have all been personified.  All have been given names and most have been given images that make it easier to teach our children about them.  The Hindu God Shiva, for example, is depicted in human form but with a third eye and a snake coiled around his neck.  He and other Hindu deities are frequently depicted with multiple arms some of which do not have hands.

Another commonality is that all these gods often do things that seem inconsistent with their own moral precepts.  Zeus arranged a featherbrained beauty pageant which led to the Trojan War.  Wotan entrusted his hoard of magic gold to three flighty Rhine-maidens thereby endangering the entire universe and bringing about sixteen hours of opera so boring that tickets to it should require a five day waiting period.  Our own Judeo-Christian God wreaked misery on the life of his most faithful worshiper, Job, in order to win a trivial bet with Satan.  He tormented Abraham for what seems like the pure pleasure of it and when he went looking for a single moral person to spare from the flood, he picked Noah who was crazy as a bedbug.  Presumably good though for divine laughs.  However it does seem parlous to entrust morality or the social contract which allows us to live in communities to mythical creatures with eccentric senses of humor.

Morality must always begin with unprovable assumptions which is the reason people developed the idea of gods.  God is the easy answer and maybe the only absolute answer to every question.  Even the Enlightenment assertions referenced in the American Declaration of Independence lay out a deist foundation for civic morality.  Human rights are said to be an entitlement and endowment of our "Creator." [4] Once you have widespread agreement on something like this you can proceed to the difficult task of drawing lines between good and evil as long as you also agree that the lines are bound to be porous to one degree or another.  Thou shalt not kill except in a "just" war or in self-defense.  In democratic societies, the process of drawing such lines is called politics and, if we have learned anything about living harmoniously and productively in communities it is that politics works only when ideology is reduced to a bare minimum. 

The principal determinant of secular morality must reside in the act itself and its consequences not in some extraneous belief system.  But this has proven difficult for people to accept.  Thus, in the absence of sacred or secular dogma, societies must seek the broadest possible arbiter of morality.  In this regard, an act's contribution to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is more likely to succeed than its adherence to a preference for small government or Christian doctrine.  This is not logic;  it is pragmatism of a high order.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is, of course, an ideology but one that the founders thought to be self-evident and inalienable.  In other words universal and undebatable – a polite but essential fiction that is, in fact, widely shared in theory if not always in practice.  It is not a perfect recipe for civic comity but it seems to work pretty well.  It arose gradually from the humanism of the Renaissance, always encountering strident dissension and implacable hostility but still becoming the progressive tide of history.

In some precincts, the very word humanism has become a curse and, along with science, its great enabler, is damned as the work of the devil.  It has often seemed in danger from powerful forces, never more so perhaps than today when, all over the world, people are turning away from the imperfections of their institutions.  As it happens, those institutions are failing as they all do periodically but at present they seem to be doing so simultaneously.  Church and state, business and the media seem arrayed in a conspiracy of incompetence, unbridled greed and gross stupidity.  Still, we are not on a forced march back to the dark ages.

The problem with both contemporary conservatives and liberals is that so many of them take comfort in absolutism.  Like Charlie, they are unable to cope with a less-than-perfect world, with shades of gray, with compromise or with uncertainty.  They are simplistic moralists like the pig Snowball, the leader of George Orwell's Animal Farm:  "Four legs good;  two legs bad."  There is nothing more disheartening than a conservative who believes God is one of his own unless it is a liberal who is discontented with pragmatic leaders who are progressive but not liberal enough. 

So I am content with the illogic of drawing a line between giraffes and mosquitoes and with my American willingness to eat a cow but not a horse or a dog.  At the same time, I do not think any the less of the Swiss for their fondness for horsemeat, the Chinese for eating dogmeat, the Russians for their preference for strong central government or the Persians for their acceptance of theocracy.  I hope I never become comfortable with the slaughter of an inoffensive young giraffe but I also hope my discomfort does not make me feel morally superior to those less burdened than I.

Notes

1.  Ian Parker, "The Culling," The New Yorker, January 16, 2017, pp. 42 ff.

2.  Probability theory originated in the sixteenth century and was codified by Pierre Laplace in 1774.  Scarne (1903-1985) did pretty much the same thing a century and a half later.  See Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling, Simon & Schuster, 1974.

3.  Whether 36 or 39, this was not a world record.  The current record seems to be 154 which occurred in Atlantic City on May 23, 2009. The odds against that are a bit more than 1.5 trillion to 1. It is not known whether Scarne's ghost was present.  There was, however, a more incredible aspect of the performance in Havana.  Scarne's gambler, supposedly an American soldier on leave, made every point without interruption.  If his point was five, the next roll was also a five an so on.  I don't know about the lady in Atlantic City but 154 uninterrupted passes beggars the statistical imagination.

4.  A Creator is not necessary for the assertion of an absolute.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does well without one, stating in Article One that, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."  The word endowed may suggest an endower but not necessarily a living being who acts in history or an uncaused first cause.