http://richarddawkins.net/
Richard Dawkins
A Deeply Religious
Non-Believer
DESERVED RESPECT
The boy lay prone in the
grass, his chin resting on his hands. He
suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a
heightened awareness of the tangled stems and
roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured
world of ants and beetles and even - though he
wouldn't have known the details at the time - of
soil bacteria by the billions, silently and
invisibly shoring up the economy of the
micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the
turf seemed to swell and become one with the
universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy
contemplating it. He interpreted the experience
in religious terms and it led him eventually to
the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican
priest and became a chaplain at my school, a
teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to
decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody
could ever claim that I had religion forced down
my throat.
In another time and place, that boy could have
been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion,
Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the
unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the
night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers
in an African garden. Why the same emotion
should have led my chaplain in one direction and
me in the other is not an easy question to
answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and
the universe is common among scientists and
rationalists. It has no connection with
supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my
chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of
the closing lines of The Origin of Species - the
famous 'entangled bank' passage, 'with birds
singing on the bushes, with various insects
flitting about, and with worms crawling through
the damp earth'. Had he been, he would certainly
have identified with it and, instead of the
priesthood, might have been led to Darwin's view
that all was 'produced by laws acting around
us':
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and
death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of
the higher animals, directly follows. There is
grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a
few forms or into one; and that, whilst this
planet has gone cycling on according to the
fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.
Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
How is it that hardly any major religion has
looked at science and concluded, 'This is better
than we thought! The Universe is much bigger
than our prophets said, grander, more subtle,
more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My
god is a little god, and I want him to stay that
way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the
magnificence of the Universe as revealed by
modern science might be able to draw forth
reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by
the conventional faiths.
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http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/
Peter Singer
I.
Affluence and Poverty
Q. You have said that it is wrong to spend money on luxuries for
ourselves when we could give the money to organizations working to help
the world’s poorest people in developing countries. But shouldn’t we
think of the poor in our own country first?
A. We should give where it will do the most good. There is no sound
moral reason for favoring those who happen to live within the borders of
our own country. Sometimes, just because they are closer to us and
living within the same political system, they may be the people we can
most effectively help. More often they will not be. If we live in a
rich nation like the U.S.A., our money will go much further, and help
more people, if we send it to an organization working in developing
nations. About a sixth of the world’s population survives on the
purchasing power equivalent of less than $US1 per day. For a more
detailed statement of my views on this topic, see ‘The Singer Solution
to World Poverty’ at the New York Times and chapter 5 of One
World.
Q. Are you living a simple life and giving most of your income to the
poor?
A. I’m not living as luxurious a life as I could afford to, but I admit
that I indulge my own desires more than I should. I give about 25% of
what I earn to NGO’s, mostly to organizations helping the poor to live a
better life. I don’t claim that this is as much as I should give.
Since I started giving, about thirty years ago, I’ve gradually increased
the amount I give, and I’m continuing to do so.
Q. To what organizations do you give?
A. I give mostly to members of the Oxfam International group. In the
U.S.A. that means Oxfam America.
Q. How is keeping these people alive going to help, in the long run,
when the basic problem is that the world has too many people?
A. It’s not so clear that the problem really is too many people, rather
than that some people have a lot more than they need, and others not
enough. But that’s a large question that I won’t go into here. I do
agree that continued global population growth will eventually bring
disaster. One proven way of reducing fertility is enabling poor people,
especially women, to get some education. Women with even just a year or
two of primary school education have fewer children than women with no
education. So development aid does slow fertility. But if you want to
do something more directly related to population issues, you could give
to organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation or
DKT International.
II. Animal Liberation
Q. I’ve read that you think humans and animals are equal. Do you
really believe that a human being is no more valuable than an animal?
A. I argued in the opening chapter of Animal Liberation that humans and
animals are equal in the sense that the fact that a being is human does
not mean that we should give the interests of that being preference over
the similar interests of other beings. That would be speciesism, and
wrong for the same reasons that racism and sexism are wrong. Pain is
equally bad, if it is felt by a human being or a mouse. We should treat
beings as individuals, rather than as members of a species. But that
doesn’t mean that all individuals are equally valuable – see my answer
to the next question for more details.
Q. If you had to save either a human being or a mouse from a fire,
with no time to save them both, wouldn’t you save the human being?
A. Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not
because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo
sapiens. Species membership alone isn't morally significant, but equal
consideration for similar interests allows different consideration for
different interests. The qualities that are ethically significant are,
firstly, a capacity to experience something -- that is, a capacity to
feel pain, or to have any kind of feelings. That's really basic, and
it’s something that a mouse shares with us. But when it comes to a
question of taking life, or allowing life to end, it matters whether a
being is the kind of being who can see that he or she actually has a
life -- that is, can see that he or she is the same being who exists
now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future. Such a
being has more to lose than a being incapable of understand this.
Any normal human being past infancy will have such a sense of existing
over time. I’m not sure that mice do, and if they do, their time frame
is probably much more limited. So normally, the death of a human being
is a greater loss to the human than the death of a mouse is to the mouse
– for the human, it cuts off plans for the distant future, for example,
but not in the case of the mouse. And we can add to that the greater
extent of grief and distress that, in most cases, the family of the
human being will experience, as compared with the family of the mouse
(although we should not forget that animals, especially mammals and
birds, can have close ties to their offspring and mates).
That’s why, in general, it would be right to save the human, and not the
mouse, from the burning building, if one could not save both. But this
depends on the qualities and characteristics that the human being has.
If, for example, the human being had suffered brain damage so severe as
to be in an irreversible state of unconsciousness, then it might not be
better to save the human.
Q: Is it true that you have said that an experiment on 100 monkeys
could be justified if it helped thousands of people recover from
Parkinson's disease?
A: I was asked about such an experiment in a discussion with Professor
Tipu Aziz, of Oxford University, as part of a BBC documentary called
Monkeys, "Rats and Me: Animal Testing" that was screened in November
2006. I replied that I was not sufficiently expert in the area to judge
if the facts were as Professor Aziz claimed, but assuming they were,
this experiment could be justified.
This response caused surprised among some people in the animal movement,
but that must be because they had not read what I have written earlier.
Since I judge actions by their consequences, I have never said that no
experiment on an animal can ever be justified. I do insist, however,
that the interests of animals count among those consequences, and that
we cannot justify giving less weight to the interests of nonhuman
animals than we give to the similar interests of human beings.
In Animal Liberation I propose asking experimenters who use animals if
they would be prepared to carry out their experiments on human beings at
a similar mental level — say, those born with irreversible brain damage.
Experimenters who consider their work justified because of the benefits
it brings should declare whether they consider such experiments
justifiable. If they do not, they should be asked to explain why they
think that benefits to a large number of human beings can outweigh
harming animals, but cannot outweigh inflicting similar harm on humans.
In my view, this belief is evidence of speciesism.
Even if some individual experiments may be justified, this does not mean
that the institutional practice of experimenting on animals is
justified. Given the suffering that this routinely inflicts on millions
of animals, and that probably very few of the experiments will be of
significant benefit to humans or to other animals, it is better to put
our resources into other methods of doing research that do not involve
harming animals.
Incidentally, it is important that there be room in the animal movement
for a variety of views about ethics, including views that are
rights-based and views that are consequentialist. Debate over such
issues is a sign of an open and sound movement. On the other hand, it
is also important to focus our energies on attacking speciesism, and not
those who, although opposed to speciesism, do not share the particular
set of moral views we may hold.
Q: I've heard about the possibility of growing meat in a laboratory,
just by cells reproducing. Should this lab reared meat prove
ecologically safe, cost and energy efficient and safe for human
consumption, is this an ethically acceptable way in which animal meat
can be developed and consumed? To avoid discrimination on speciesist
grounds, providing the meat can be sufficiently engineered for safe
human consumption taking into account the accusations aimed at
cannibalism, would it be required that laboratories should also grow
human meat for consumption?
A: Yes, this would be ethically acceptable, because no animals would
suffer or die to produce it. There's nothing wrong with meat in itself.
If people prefer the taste of meat grown from the cell of a cow to meat
grown from the cell of a human, that's fine too. So there's no ethical
requirement to grow human meat for consumption, just because we're
growing meat from other animals.
III. The Sanctity of Human Life
Q. You have been quoted as saying: "Killing a defective infant is not
morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at
all." Is that quote accurate?
A. It is accurate, but can be misleading if read without an
understanding of what I mean by the term “person” (which is discussed in
Practical Ethics, from which that quotation is taken). I use the
term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the
future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in
answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater
wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense
of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own
existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to
killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That
doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It
is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their
parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its
parents.
Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents
think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will
accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby
life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby
dies. My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a
decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a
baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that
decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support – which
can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection
- but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and
humanely.
Q. What about a normal baby? Doesn’t your theory of personhood imply
that parents can kill a healthy, normal baby that they do not want,
because it has no sense of the future?
A. Most parents, fortunately, love their children and would be horrified
by the idea of killing it. And that’s a good thing, of course. We want
to encourage parents to care for their children, and help them to do so.
Moreover, although a normal newborn baby has no sense of the future, and
therefore is not a person, that does not mean that it is all right to
kill such a baby. It only means that the wrong done to the infant is
not as great as the wrong that would be done to a person who was killed.
But in our society there are many couples who would be very happy to
love and care for that child. Hence even if the parents do not want
their own child, it would be wrong to kill it.
Q. Elderly people with dementia, or people who have been injured in
accidents, may also have no sense of the future. Can they also be
killed?
A. When a human being once had a sense of the future, but has now lost
it, we should be guided by what he or she would have wanted to happen in
these circumstances. So if someone would not have wanted to be kept
alive after losing their awareness of their future, we may be justified
in ending their life; but if they would not have wanted to be killed
under these circumstances, that is an important reason why we should not
do so.
Q. What about voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide?
A. I support law reform to allow people to decide to end their lives, if
they are terminally or incurably ill. This is permitted in the
Netherlands, and now in Belgium too. Why should we not be able to
decide for ourselves, in consultation with doctors, when our quality of
life has fallen to the point where we would prefer not to go on living?
Q. What should I read to learn more?
A. You might like to start with one of the two collections of my work in
print, Writings on an Ethical Life, or Unsanctifying Human
Life. After that, your choice should depend on what particular
issues most interest you. For my views about animals, see Animal
Liberation. The fullest statement of my critique of the traditional
doctrine of the sanctity of human life is in Rethinking Life and
Death, and the most elaborated philosophical elaboration of my views
is Practical Ethics.
These books are in many libraries. They can also be ordered from
bookstores, or from online retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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simultaneously, connected over
distance, and with time not existing. But the “classical” world we
perceive is definite, with a flow of time. The boundary or edge (quantum
state reduction, or ‘collapse of the wave function”) between the quantum
and classical worlds somehow involves consciousness. 