E.G.

In America,

(a) there are 10 billion livestock animals and about 330 million humans,

which is to say that

(b) almost all Americans who are alive at this moment (>97% of the population) will soon be brutally killed so that members of the dominant human class (<3% of the population) can make meals of their bodies.

What we are doing to the animals in our care is horrifically unjust, and obviously so. Outside observers (say, time travelers from the distant future) would be surprised that we have been doing this for so long and have no plan to stop.

Carnism's stubborn persistence is mysterious. There was a time when it might've made sense to say that (i) carnism is an American tradition and (ii) the American people are very strongly attached to their traditions. But (ii) seems no longer true, if it ever was. For example, Americans with voting privileges seem not to care very much anymore about preserving America's traditional system of government. Broadly, America seems to think of itself as very open to "change" in the present moment, so one might think that a shift away from our catastrophically wrong system of animal agriculture would at least be under consideration, but (except in rare quarters) it is not. 

***

When you are considering whether to do something to somone, the first question to ask is often this: How well off would they be if I were to proceed, and how well off would they be if I were to refrain? This is the counterfactual welfare question.

For example, suppose you are considering whether to take your sick dog to the vet. You might first think about whether your dog will be better off if you do this than if you don't. If you determine that they'll be better off if you take them to the vet, then that will usually look like a reason to take them to the vet. And once you've got that reason in front of you, your next step should normally be to ask whether that reason is decisive.

By contrast, when you are considering whether to bring someone into existence, the counterfactual welfare question can't be usefully asked. For example, suppose you are considering whether to have a child. You can meaningfully ask how well off the child will be if you choose to bring them into existence. But you cannot meaningfully ask how well off they will be if you choose not to do so. The latter question is a nonsense question, like asking your calculator to divide zero by zero.

This is what I'm calling the procreation muddle. When we approach moral problems concerning bringing others into existence, we cannot ask the counterfactual welfare question, which (I'm suggesting) is the first question we would normally want to ask when making a decision about whether to do something to someone; so we might not see how to even get started with such problems, i.e., we may find ourselves muddled.

Philosophers have proposed and considered a bunch of different ideas about how we might unmuddle ourselves with regard to these sorts of procreation problems. In my book project with Rob, we'll have a new unmuddling strategy to offer.

My point here is only that people can find themselves muddled like this. I'm not saying there's no way out of the muddle (I feel sure there is a way) nor am I saying that people always (or ever) need philosophers' help to get unmuddled. After all, people do manage, somehow, to decide whether and when to have children, and people often seem able to engage in moral reasoning about such decisions. 

***

If you are at the grocery store and you have to decide whether to buy a pound of chicken or a pound of tofu, you might find yourself in a procreation muddle.

You're aware, of course, that the pound of chicken meat in front of you is an animal's body. And you may consider it likely that that animal died horribly. But the animal is already dead. Buying a pound of their flesh won't change that.

You might just stop your thinking at that point, and buy the chicken meat without any further moral thought. Or you might continue.

It might occur to you that purchasing decisions that you make today could influence producers' decisions in the future. In particular, purchasing chicken meat might cause economic demand for chicken to rise, which might cause producers to raise more chickens than they would do otherwise. In that case, your decision to purchase a pound of chicken would cause some number of chickens who otherwise wouldn't exist at all to be brought into existence, live for a while, and then finally be killed.

Via economic channels of supply and demand, your purchase causes, or has some chance of causing, some number of animals who otherwise wouldn't exist to be born. So, purchasing a pound of chicken is, in effect, a procreative act. If you see the matter in that way, you may decide: It's okay for me to buy that pound of chicken if, and only if, it's okay for me to cause chickens who otherwise wouldn't exist at all to come into existence. Having got that far, your next step will or ought to be to ask whether, and under what circumstances, it's okay to cause chickens to come into existence.

This is the point where you might find yourself in a procreation muddle. You might find yourself unable to meaningfully ask whether those future chickens will be better off or worse off than they'd be if you didn't bring about their existence; so you might not see how to even get started in wrestling with the question of whether a choice that causes them to exist is right or wrong.

***

Consider the following psychological hypothesis:

Carnism persists because people are procreation-muddled: When people consider the moral problem about whether it's okay to purchase animal products, they soon encounter a procreation muddle, and they don't see how to get out of it, so they just abandon (rather than continue trying to answer) the moral problem. And in this situation, without having reached any clear moral judgment that purchasing animal products isn't okay, they default to what they're accustomed to, which is to just keep eating animals.

I think something like this might really be what is going on in the heads of many ordinary people.

If this hypothesis is true, or if there is a good chance that it is true, then that might mean that anti-carnist public argumentation should center consumers' causal responsibility for farmed animals' existence, and should explore, and try to clarify, the moral dimensions of that causal responsibility.

I've never been particularly thoughtful or knowledgeable about what's called "alienation" in Marxian circles, but I've been teaching Philosophy of Work this term, and in the course of that I've been reading a bit and thinking about this topic. I take it that people in the Marxian tradition generally say that alienation is important, widespread, and problematic. I don't know if they are right. But here I'll see if I can home in on something about alienation that might count as a good worry, a worry worth having.

***

What is (allegedly) being alienated from what? What does this (alleged) alienation amount to? Different users of alienation talk will answer these questions differently.

On the first question, I think Marxians will commonly answer that it is a worker, or consumer, or citizen, or more broadly, either a conscious individual subject X or collective subject X (e.g., the working class), which is being alienated from some object Y, where Y is some thing or process.

Sometimes Y is X's own body; sometimes Y is X's labor; sometimes Y is a product of X's labor (here Y might be a tangible artifact or something intangible, like knowledge); sometimes Y is the stuff that X consumes, purchases, or finds in her immediate environment; sometimes Y is the society in which X lives; sometimes Y is just the world.

On the second question, I seem to have noticed a number of different conceptions of alienation in circulation, including these:

Legal alienation: X is legally alienated from Y when the law of X's society does not recognize an expansive right on the part of X to use and dispose of Y as X sees fit.

Humanity alienation: X is humanity alienated from Y when (a) X has produced Y (or participated in producing Y) but (b) in a manner that does not make use of X's specifically human capacities (e.g., X's human rationality or autonomy) in such a way that (c) it is as if X were a "mere machine" or "mere animal."

Emotional alienation: X is emotionally alienated from Y when certain emotional links between X and Y are lacking (say, X doesn't love or care about Y, or vice versa).

Expression alienation: X is expression alienated from Y when (a) X has produced Y (or participated in producing Y) but (b) Y is not an expression of X, which is to say that Y is does not represent or capture anything about X as a unique individual, in the way that, e.g., an artwork produced by X would typically do.

Familiarity alienation: X is familiarity alienated from Y when Y is in some important way foreign or strange to X. X and Y are, as is sometimes said, estranged.

I think these different conceptions, and various blends of them, are all in use. The common thread, I suppose, is that when X is said to be "alienated" from Y, there is supposed to be some literal or metaphorical distance or disconnection between X and Y.

***

The cause of alienation is said to be capitalism, or social and economic phenomena that are integral to capitalism (e.g., marketplaces), or cultural and technological developments that are correlated with capitalism (e.g., industrialization).

I think it is probably true that as a matter of historical and social fact, capitalism is causally responsible for workers being alienated in their workplaces, in various senses of 'alienation.' For example, workers in a factory owned by a capitalist in, say, the early 20th century United States, would typically have been alienated from their labor and from the products of their labor in all five of the senses delineated above (and more besides). Their alienation in that circumstance would be an effect of capitalism.

But I think it is a mistake for philosophers, activists, and others to make much of this capitalism/alienation link. For one thing, as many have observed, non-capitalist systems are similar to capitalist systems in the present respect. Factory workers and farm workers in the USSR, for example, were alienated in their work in many (all?) of the same ways that workers were alienated in the USA during the same historical period.

Relatedly, alternatives to capitalism envisioned by some Marxian thinkers seem just as likely as standard-issue capitalism to cause workplace alienation. For example, I doubt that David Schweickart's proposal to replace capitalism with what he calls "economic democracy" (in which workers in a firm have democratic control of the firm) would be a remedy for workplace alienation. If economic democracy is a good idea, it is not because it would eliminate alienation. On the contrary, alienation (in many or all of the senses above) is typical in democratically governed systems. The USA is a democracy in 2025 but many (arguably, all) American voters are in a state of political alienation. This being so I do not see that a democratically governed workplace would always, or even usually, be less alienating than workplaces governed in what are today the more standard ways (e.g., government-by-corporations).

It seems probable to me that there is no feasible alternative to capitalism that would eliminate or even appreciably reduce the forms of workplace alienation that people find problematic.

Also, barring certain kinds of catastrophic scenarios, capitalism is evidently entrenched and unavoidable.

And capitalism is highly diverse, i.e., there are many different ways to have a capitalist system, some of which are terrible for people and some of which are not.

My opinion is that people who think alienation is bad should be pushing for forms of capitalism in which alienation is reduced. But they should not be pushing for the abolition of capitalism. That is a lost cause, and in part for that reason, it is not a good cause.

***

What's the opposite of alienation? Maybe we should call it intimacy. Should we want to be intimately connected with our work? Some of us, I think, should want this, but some of us shouldn't.

***

Recently I watched the old 90s movie Clockwatchers for free on Youtube.

The main character, Iris, takes a temp job in an office. I think it is fair to say that she and all her coworkers are alienated from their work in most or all of the various senses of 'alienation' that I outlined above. And perhaps because of this, at the beginning of the story, Iris is miserable.

But then Iris meets Margaret (played by Parker Posey). I think Margaret can be characterized as joyfully alienated at work. She finds amusement in the meaninglessness of her job and camaraderie with others who are in the same boat with her.

Iris, Margaret, and a few others form a friend group, and all is well for a while. Iris seems to have found some kind of happiness. But then someone in the office starts stealing things, and everyone begins to suspect everyone, and no one can identify the culprit. Friendships disintegrate and by the end of the movie, everyone is miserable again.

The moral of the story, I think, is that people do not always feel or have a need to have an intimate connection with their work. I think it is more common for people to want an intimate connection with the people they work with. I am not sure whether alienation from one's work needs to be a significant obstacle to having the friendships and other relationships that we want to have with the people we work with.

***

Many academics care a lot about, and identify closely with, the projects we're working on. If a project succeeds, it's wonderful, but if a project fails, it's like a part of you has died. I have known many academics who have expressed some degree of envy for people who feel no strong connection with their work, though I also generally have the impression that most academics would not trade their work for anyone else's.

***

We spend many hours at work (the famous claim is that we spend 80,000 hours at work per lifetime) and so it matters a great deal whether our work life is good for us. And I am sympathetic to the idea that we should not simply say that one's work life is going well as long as one is enjoying it. I am drawn to the idea that our work should be meaningful to us, as well as (or even, in some cases, instead of being) enjoyable. If talk of alienation is a way to get at the sort of meaning that one should have in mind here, then maybe that is the respect in which it makes sense to worry about alienation. That said, it seems to me that one can take a work project to be meaningful even if one feels (or has) no intimate connection with it, i.e., even if one is alienated from it.

You can correctly say of an undocumented person that she is not a legal citizen, i.e., isn't considered a citizen by the US government, doesn't have a US passport, isn't allowed to vote, can't run for political office (or most political offices, anyway), might be deported, etc. But most undocumented people are citizens, I think, despite a lack of legal recognition of their citizenship.

***

If you want to argue against my view, I think your best strategy will be via some version of the following theory of citizenship:

Citizenship is a mere legal construction: An individual S is a citizen of a given country if and only if and because S is a legal citizen.

If this theory were true, then it would follow immediately that undocumented people aren't citizens.

However, consider the following argument:

Citizenship isn't a mere legal construction
(1) If citizenship is a mere legal construction, then citizenship is not morally significant in itself.
(2) Citizenship is morally significant in itself.
Therefore, citizenship is not a mere legal construction.

In my opinion, (2) is true. Here is an argument. We have certain cooperative obligations to our fellow citizens. In particular, we owe it to our fellow citizens to work together with them to create, maintain, and steer a political system that governs us as equals and serves certain important interests that we have in common. These cooperative obligations, I think, spring from the relationships that fellow citizens have to one another as fellow citizens. And this, I think, requires that the relationship of one fellow citizen to another has the moral power to generate these sorts of cooperative obligations. And I don't think that that relationship would have that moral power if citizenship weren't morally significant in itself. So, I conclude, citizenship is morally significant in itself.

I also believe that (1) is true. In general, mere legal constructions are not morally significant in themselves. True, we often have good reasons to care about mere legal constructions (e.g., you should usually pay attention to which areas are no-parking zones; and facts about no-parking zones are mere legal constructions) but the moral significance of mere legal constructions is always derivative and never intrinsic.

So, I think, the theory of citizenship according to which it is merely a legal construction is not true.

What I would say instead is that legal citizenship is a mere legal construction. And I do not think that legal citizenship is unimportant. Legal citizenship is the way that the state recognizes and affirms the independent reality of a person's citizenship. When someone goes through the naturalization process, for instance, and there is a ceremony where they are declared a citizen, etc., this does not have the effect of turning a non-citizen into a citizen, but it still does have an effect: it turns a citizen who lacks legal recognition of her citizenship into a legal citizen.

***

I think the best theory of citizenship will be along these lines:

Citizenship is membership in a political society: An individual S is a citizen of a given country if and only if and because S is a member of that country's political society.

This view makes sense of the intrinsic moral significance of fellow citizenship. The fact that you and I are both members of the same political society seems like the sort of fact that could explain why, and make it the case that, I have certain cooperative obligations to you that I don't have to others.

Further, I think it is the case that most undocumented people are members of our political society. This, I think, is obviously true. But I will mention two objections that someone might make.

***

First objection: You might say that undocumented people aren't members of our political society because (i) in order to become part of a country's political society, one must be invited by that country's government to join; and (ii) because undocumented people haven't gone through the naturalization process, they have not been invited by the American government to join; so, undocumented people aren't members of American political society.

But people who are born in the USA are not usually invited (formally or otherwise) by the American government to join our political society, but they are members of our political society nonetheless. So, (i) is false. And in general, it is not plausible that one must be invited to join a society in order to be a member of that society. Consider a household, which I take to be a kind of small, non-political society. If someone has been living in your house for years, doing things that members of a household do (e.g., they do chores, pay rent, sleep in one of the bedrooms, park their car in the driveway,…), then they are a member of your household, even if no invitation to join the household was ever made.

***

Second objection: You might say that undocumented people aren't members of our political society because (i) in order to be part of a political society, one must be actively involved, politically, in that society; and (ii) undocumented people do not vote and do not participate in public political discourse; and (iii) voting and participating in public political discourse are the only ways for someone to be actively involved politically in America's political society; so, undocumented people aren't members of American political society.

But first of all, (i) is false. If (i) were true, then babies and politically apathetic adults who don't vote wouldn't be part of our political society, but they are. Also, (ii) is false. True, undocumented people don't vote, but many are participants in public political discourse (e.g.). Also, (iii) is false. One can be politically involved without ever saying a word and without ever casting a vote. For example, undocumented people are used as pawns by politicians (e.g., Trump stokes irrational fear of undocumented people to manipulate people into voting for him) and this is a form of conscripted political involvement in America's political society.

***

Broadly, I don't know of any good reason to deny that most undocumented people in America are part of America's political society. Also, I don't know of any good alternative to the view that a citizen just is a member of a political society. So, it seems to me, we should just say that most undocumented people in America are American citizens.

My thinking on these issues is largely derivative of and indebted to the ideas of Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka in their book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, although it is not clear to me whether they would affirm the theory of citizenship given above or endorse the argument I've given, though I do believe they endorse a closely related view (I will need to go back and check what exactly they say).

Consider:

The forever view: Each moment of your life is, was, and always will be happening locally, at its particular time and place.

This view has long been a comfort to me. I feel it is a somewhat satisfying substitute for afterlife, though far less satisfying than hope of heavenly life after death would be, were I able to sustain such hope.

Recently, I noticed a paper on this idea, written from a Christian perspective, by Mikel Burley entitled "Eternal Life as an Exclusively Present Possession: Perspectives from Theology and the Philosophy of Time." Burley's paper is very helpful, and I want to add a few points to what Burley says. But before I say what I think, I'll say a bit about my understanding of (what I'm calling) the forever view.

***

I take it that the forever view is neutral with regard to a certain dispute about the nature of ordinary things, which Katherine Hawley explains as follows:

The two most popular accounts of persistence are perdurance theory (perdurantism) and endurance theory (endurantism). Perdurantists believe that ordinary things like animals, boats and planets have temporal parts (things persist by ‘perduring’). Endurantists believe that ordinary things do not have temporal parts; instead, things are wholly present whenever they exist (things persist by ‘enduring’).

It seems to me that, whether you are wholly present at each moment of your life (as endurantists say) or smeared out across time (as perdurantists say), it can be the case that each moment of your life hangs permanently in the aether of the world (which is what the forever view needs to be true).

The forever view requires us to reject presentism (the view that only the present moment is real) and seems to require some kind of temporal/spatial equality thesis (a B-theory) according to which the past and future are as real as the present.

Moreover, rejection of presentism and adoption of a temporal/spatial equality thesis aren't enough to get us all the way to the forever view. For example it is possible to have a so-called "moving spotlight" view according to which (a) there is a kind of cosmic timeline in which all times are real, but (b) we are moving along this timeline, such that (c) the only moment in the cosmic timeline that is ever happening is whichever moment is now present. This sort of view says, for example, that if you're turning 47 years old today, then your 47th birthday is happening, but your 48th birthday isn't happening, though it will happen (knock on wood). Nor is your 46th birthday happening; it's already happened.

The forever view, by contrast, says that your 47th birthday is happening today; your 48th birthday is happening one year from today; your 46th birthday is happening one year ago; etc. All of these birthdays are happening locally in their particular times and places, though of course only one of those birthdays is happening today. Likewise, if somebody in China is having a birthday party today, their party isn't happening here, but it's still well and truly happening.

***

My purpose here isn't to argue for the forever view. My purpose is to ask: If the forever view turns out to be right, should we be glad about that?

Think about the people you've loved who have died, the friendships you've had, the times when you felt a great connection with someone, your biggest victories, your Spalding Grey perfect moments. All of that good stuff isn't gone. It's still right where you left it. It's all elsewhen. That's what the forever view promises.

The view isn't all roses. All of the horrible things that have ever happened to you are eternally happening, too, like the "always on, always suffering" scenario from Black Mirror Season 4, Episode 6. And as Burley says:

Worst of all would be to imagine the most wretched of lives, the lives of abused children, for instance, who have no opportunity to flourish, permanently etched into the structure of the cosmos.

I think it is the case that many people have ample reason to hope the forever view is false. Still, if you (like me) feel that the good outweighs the bad in your life, then I think you might find significant comfort in getting yourself into a forever view mindset.

***

I think the forever view is at least more comforting than the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence. The forever view implies that all of my life's joyful moments are permanent and eternal. The thesis of eternal recurrence might seem to have the same implication. But the thesis of eternal recurrence is not as comforting to me because, even if (as the thesis says) the story of the universe is eternally cyclical, I am not at all sure that future recurrences of my story will involve me. It seems arguable that if, as the eternal recurrence view says, there is a person in the distant future who will live a life just like mine, this person will be a copy of me but will not be me. These sorts of worries do not arise for the forever view.

***

Burley discusses the ideas of a Christian theologian named Karl Rahner who seems to have tried to turn something like the forever view into a Christian vision of eternal life. Here is what Burley writes about Rahner's thinking:

This unity, says Rahner, may be thought of as the ‘resurrection of the dead’, not because it is a further life that takes place after the earthly one, but because it is this very earthly life contemplated in its concrete bodiliness (Rahner 1986a, p. 240). The original life and the resurrected life are not two stages along a single trajectory, as though we merely switched horses and journeyed on (Rahner 1966, p. 347; cf. Feuerbach 1980, p. 19); they are the life as lived in time and the life—the same life—as a determinate stretch of the eternal history of the universe.

I have no idea if the views of Rahner summarized by Burley are sound Christian theology. But it's puzzling to me that any believing Christian would have such interest in the kind of cheap substitute for an afterlife that may be given by views like the forever view. Christianity comes pretty close to straightforwardly entailing that we go to heaven after we die; and having heaven to look forward to seems way better than just securing permanence for the moments of one's mundane earthly life; so I do not understand why a Christian would feel the need to find solace in the very modest kind of eternality that we can squeeze out of the forever view.

Certain weird statements recently made by Donald Trump have created renewed interest in the scenario where

America metastasizes: Each of the world's countries become states of the USA, one by one, until finally the whole world is under a world-encompassing government that is either continuous with or a descendent of the current American federal government.

I don't know whether it is likely for America to metastasize in this way, and I don't know whether we should try to make it happen.

I suppose the first thing to say is that the current world order is bad in a bunch of ways.

In the current world order, there's a few strong political entities (e.g., USA, EU, UK, China, Russia, a number of others) and then there's a large number of weak political entities. The strong ones share control; the weak ones have to submit to whatever the strong ones agree to amongst themselves.

If you are (i) a citizen of a strong entity that (ii) has a democratic government (in the weak sense that the government is responsive to its citizens' interests and desires) then that's great for you and you'll have a number of big advantages in life, relative to those who are not so fortunate. Many, perhaps most, of the people who live in territories controlled by internationally weak political entities either struggle just to have the bare minimum required for day-to-day survival, or simply do not have the bare minimum. And this is so, at least in significant part, because they live in a world controlled by strong foreign governments that are not responsive to their interests.

Also, even if (i) and (ii) hold for you, the current situation is not ideal for you. For one thing, you are not able to move about in the world as freely as you might if things were different. You're seen as, and treated as, a foreigner everywhere you go, except in your home country. And if you want to trade or do business with, or collaborate in any way with, people who are outside of your home country, you'll need to pay attention to at least two sets of laws and practices, etc.

The natural idea about how to improve this situation of power-imbalanced international fragmentation is to set up a completely new government that would have jurisdiction over the whole world. But this approach is unlikely to work. Any new world-spanning government that anyone tries to set up will always be immediately smothered by already-existing strong political entities who see the new government as a threat and competitor.

So, if one likes the idea of a one-world government, one should consider the idea that one of the already-existing strong political entities might take on the job via metastasis. And I suppose that all of the already-existing strong entities should be considered as candidates for that role, but the United States seems to have at least two distinctive features that might make it uniquely qualified, or so fans of this idea might argue.

First, unlike most of the other already-existing strong political entities, the USA has a mechanism for, and track record of, welcoming foreign territories as new states. And states of the USA, whether they are among the original 13 states or recent additions, seem generally to be treated as approximate equals of each of the other states. Granted, there are not-insignificant inequalities between American states (e.g., inequalities baked into the Electoral College system) but on the whole it seems that these interstate inequalities are less severe than the inequalities that exist between, e.g., Nebraska and Mozambique.

Second, the USA is already the closest thing in existence to a world-spanning government. The USA is today running a kind of empire in which countries outside of the empire's "home country" are subordinated in varying degrees, without being properly represented in the policy-making processes of the home country's government. A metastasizing America would basically be a reform of this already-existing empire, where presently subordinated countries would each, one by one, achieve the status of states of the empire's home country. By contrast, in order for the EU or UK or China or Russia to metastasize, the already-existing American empire would first need to be disassembled and defeated, which could be costly and bloody.

I suppose it is useful to distinguish two main questions. (1) Considered in itself, would America's metastasis be a good thing? Is a possible futureworld in which America has already metastasized likely to be better than the world we've presently got, or better than the world we're likely to end up with, etc.? (2) Even if the answer to (1) is yes, are the transition costs too high? How much danger, and how much injustice, would be involved in America's metastasis?

I'm a fan of the idea that we have moral obligations to ourselves, for two main reasons:

Feelings of guilt: I feel guilty when I let myself down, and I feel guilty when I let others down. The feelings do not seem dramatically different to me. And in general, when I let someone down and feel guilty about that, I take this as a sign that I've violated an obligation of some sort.

Consistency: I am similar in all sorts of morally relevant respects to others. And I can have moral obligations to others. So, it stands to reason that I can have moral obligations to myself, too. 

I am aware that many people believe that morality is always and only other-directed and thus doubt that we can have moral obligations to ourselves. I suspect that this type of view at least sometimes rests on an argument like the following:

(1) If someone has a moral obligation to do something, then it is always appropriate for others to blame and/or punish them if they fail to do it.
(2) It is rarely appropriate for others to blame and/or punish someone for failing to fulfill any purported moral obligation to themself.
Therefore, we do not have any moral obligations to ourselves.

However, I think we should reject the first premise of this argument. When you let yourself down, I agree that it is usually (and perhaps always) inappropriate for others to blame and/or punish you for that. But I don't see that this means you have not violated any obligation to yourself in letting yourself down.

***

Although I think it is true that we have moral obligations to ourselves, it seems to me that the sorts of obligations that I have to myself are very different from the obligations that I have to most other people.

In some ways, the obligations that I have to myself seem more demanding than the obligations that I have to others. For example, it seems to me that I have an obligation to myself to provide myself with the things I need in order to be creative and productive. I do not think I have such an obligation to a stranger sitting next to me on the bus.

Yet it also seems to me that I might have certain moral liberties with myself that I do not have in relation to others. For example, if I want to take an uncomfortable seat on the bus in order to let the stranger have the better seat, this seems fine. But it seems wrong, in at least some versions of this scenario, for me to grab the better seat and thus force the stranger to have the worse seat.

Those of us who think we have obligations to ourselves need to either (i) explain why our obligations to ourselves seem different in various ways from our obligations to others, or (ii) explain away the sense that that difference exists. I think (i) is the better option.

***

It seems to me that we might be able to make significant progress on (i) by getting clear about the nature of one's relationship to oneself.

In general, our obligations seem to be affected by our relationships. Your obligations to your friends differ from your obligations to strangers, for example. So, maybe we can say that your obligations to yourself differ from your obligations to others because your relationship with yourself is different from your relationship to others.

***

What sort of relationship do you have with yourself? It's possible that this relationship is fundamentally different from any relationship that you have to anyone else. But I am somewhat attracted to the idea that the relationship you have to yourself is highly similar in many respects to the relationship of a parent to a child.

You aren't literally your own parent, of course, but it seems to me that the role that you ought to play in your own life is similar to the role that your parents would normally have played in your life when you were younger. As an adult, you've got the job of making yourself into what you'll become next, and this, it seems to me, is also the job of a parent in relation to her child, at least when the child is young.

I have recently heard people talk about "self re-parenting," an idea that seems to have originated in the world of psychotherapy and then seeped out into the general culture. I think that what I'm talking about here is similar, although I get the impression that people who talk about "self re-parenting" often take it to be about repairing damage done by mistakes their parents made. The idea I'm floating here by contrast is that everyone, even people who had perfect childhoods, should think of their relationship with themselves as similar to the relationship of a parent to a child.

***

This idea might help us to understand some of the intuitions that I mentioned above. I have an obligation to myself to enable myself to be creative and productive, because I am like a parent to myself, and parents in general owe such things to their children. I have no such obligation to the stranger on the bus, because I don't have anything like a parent-child relationship with her. It's OK for me to take the uncomfortable seat so that the stranger can have the comfy seat, because an uncomfortable seat is the sort of burden that a parent would typically be able to justifiably foist on her child. It's at least sometimes not OK for me to take the comfy seat and thus deprive the stranger of comfort, because it's also at least sometimes wrong to provide those sorts of benefits to one's child at strangers' expense. And so on.

According to a view I'm attracted to, we should think there are precisely two realms of reality: the natural world and morality. We can learn about the truths of the natural world with scientific methods, but that's not the case for moral truths. Morality is entirely separate from the natural world, and for that reason, science cannot reveal moral truths to us. So our moral beliefs amount to a kind of faith. Faith in moral reality is the only kind of faith that we should have. This faith amounts to a certain kind of religion, but an exceedingly spare one.

In a nutshell, my view is that we should take it on faith that, e.g., pointless cruelty really is morally wrong. But we should not take it on faith that, e.g., God exists, or that there is an afterlife, or any of that sort of thing. 

This spare religion has certain advantages. For one thing, it is aesthetically pleasing. Traditional religions are metaphysically bloated in ways that make them unbeautiful, in my opinion.

I do not know whether such aesthetic considerations provide anything like reasons for belief. It is not clear to me whether an idea's elegance can be rightly regarded as an epistemic count in its favor. Anyway, even if elegance is not an epistemically relevant consideration, I think it is still some kind of an advantage.

One of the disadvantages of this spare religion is that it requires us to take the sort of leap of faith that is forbidden by thoroughgoing methodological naturalism. Insofar as methodological naturalism is appealing, rejecting it is a cost.

In willingly paying this cost, the spare religion that I favor resembles bloated religions such as Christianity. But in exchange for that cost, Christians get quite a lot in the way of comfort and solace, whereas the spare religion that I favor is not particularly comforting at all.

While I was listening to NPR in the car the other day, I heard the story of Alex Yurkiv, a young musician who wrote this joyful Christian song which promises a familiar kind of Christian salvation. Unfortunately, there seems to be nothing in the natural world, and nothing in morality, that can save us in the way that Christians like Alex Yurkiv think we can be saved. And people who share Yurkiv's religion can find a certain kind of meaning in his death (he died very young in a tragic accident). My spare religion does not equip us to see such meaning. I think many will see all of this as a disadvantage of the spare religion I am recommending.

Another disadvantage of this spare religion is that it may require us to resist various kinds of pressure toward expansion. That is, there may be pressure toward admitting articles of faith that go beyond bare faith in morality. Containing this sort of pressure will require some effort, I think. But it will be necessary to contain it, because giving in to this pressure will rob the worldview that I'm sketching here of its distinctive feature and chief selling point: namely, its spareness.

I see two possible sources of such pressure: analogical and transcendental.

Analogical: One may argue that if we are willing to take it on faith that moral facts exist, then we should also be willing to take it on faith that various other things, e.g., divine beings, exist. Resisting this kind of analogical pressure toward expansion will require us to argue that faith in morality is somehow uniquely justifiable, or rational, or in some other way special, relative to other kinds of faith.

Transcendental: One may argue that the existence of moral facts somehow requires the existence of further sorts of non-natural entities or realities, and therefore, if we take it on faith that moral facts exist, then we thereby commit ourselves to also having faith in those further things. The best way to resist this kind of transcendental pressure toward expansion, I think, will be to develop and defend a clear picture of the resultance relation between moral facts and natural facts.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is informed by the Tralfamadorians that

their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. … Billy couldn’t possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.

The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on. (pp. 114-115)

How would we revise our views about the moral aspects of parenthood if we were to learn that the Trafalmadorian account of human procreation is true? I think the question is at least amusing and maybe also productive. Of course, much would depend on the details, and different versions of the account would cause us to revise our views in different ways. 

There is a widely felt Deadbeat Dad Intuition according to which, if you are the biological father of a given child, then you have a moral obligation to do quite a lot to aid the child (e.g., you have to provide financial support, etc.), even if you have no emotional connection with the child and even if you have never met the child.

If the Deadbeat Dad Intuition is (as I think) true, this might conceivably be because (i) in general, being causally responsible for someone's existence is a way of coming to owe them aid, and (ii) if you are someone's biological father then you are causally responsible for their existence.

However, as many have noticed and said, there are many ways of being causally responsible for someone's existence, and it's not obvious that they generally come with the same sorts of obligations that deadbeat dads have. For example, Sean Rad, the founder of Tinder, has a kind of causal responsibility for the existence of a very large number of children, but it's not at all clear that he owes those children anything in virtue of that.

In view of this, we might say that what's special about deadbeat dads is not just that they have any generic form of causal responsibility for the existence of their offspring, but that they are causally responsible in the specific way that biological parents are causally responsible for the existence of the offspring. We might use 'sexual responsibility' to refer to that specific form of causal responsibility.

If we say that (iii) in general, being sexually responsible for someone's existence is a way of coming to owe them aid, and (iv) if you are someone's biological father then you are sexually responsible for their existence, then we can explain the Deadbeat Dad Intuition without assigning a huge number of obligations to Sean Rad. It seems possible to me that many people implicitly accept the combination of (iii) and (iv), and that this is why the Deadbeat Dad Intuition is broadly attractive to people.

The Tralfamadorian account seems to imply not just that seven people are causally responsible for any given child, but that seven people are sexually responsible for any given child. So, if it is true that people implicitly accept (iii) and (iv), then perhaps we should expect that, if we were to learn that the Trafalmadorian account of human procreation is true, then we would come to think that, for any given child, there are seven people, not just two, who have obligations to ensure that that child is provided for. And if those seven people were somehow identifiable, then we might expect our society to create legal mechanisms for ensuring that such obligations are fulfilled.

There are muckety-mucks, and then there are regular people.

Muckety-mucks are the ones with a lot of influence, visibility, perceived authority, etc. Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was recently assassinated, is an example of a muckety-muck.

I am an example of a regular person. Most or all of the people who might read these words are, I assume, regular people, too.

It's generally agreed that many or all major problems afflicting our society are caused by complex interactions involving both regular people and muckety-mucks. For example, insofar as our health care system is unjust, this is so not only because of decisions made by various muckety-mucks, but also because large numbers of regular people swallow bad ideas, reject good ideas, vote for corrupt politicians, etc.

But when we are looking for someone to blame for our society's ills, we seem to strongly prefer to point our fingers at muckety-mucks rather than regular people. I suppose this is why Brian Thompson's killer has so many supporters.

That's a mistake, I think. When it comes to large-scale social problems, I think that regular people usually deserve at least as much blame as muckety-mucks do.

***

Some people say that regular people are in effect brainwashed because they get most of their information from misleading sources. They know not what they do, and therefore they do not deserve to be blamed for their contributions to the injustices of the world.

But first of all, muckety-mucks can be brainwashed too. Brian Thompson, for instance, spent twenty years of his life working in the insurance industry. As many have said and seen, workplaces can be sites of cult-like indoctrination, and people in leadership positions are often the ones who have drunk more of the company Kool-Aid than anybody else.

And second, I think this sort of talk of brainwashing is usually overblown. I think muckety-mucks and regular people alike usually have enough rational autonomy to be morally responsible for their decisions; I don't think watching Fox News or working in the insurance industry are typically enough to really brainwash you. So, I think few if any of the relevant agents have a legitimate brainwashing excuse.

***

When muckety-mucks do bad things that make the world worse, they're often either pursuing some major benefit (like advancing their career) or trying to avoid some major loss (like being fired). By contrast, when regular people do bad things that make the world worse, e.g., when they cast a vote for a corrupt politician, they often do it for free, or even at personal cost, and for no real reason.

Ceteris paribus, when you do something that somehow props up an unjust state of affairs, you deserve relatively harsher blame if you do it for no reason, and relatively milder blame if you do it for some reason, even a self-interested reason.

Also, the present point bears on the efficacy of blame. In general, if someone has no reason to φ, but they know that φ-ing is regarded as condemnable, then they might be very unlikely to φ. But if someone has a strong incentive to φ, then the the fact that others regard φ-ing as condemnable might be very unlikely to deter them.

***

The practice of heaping blame on muckety-mucks rather than regular people reflects a view that muckety-mucks are the ones with all the real power and are therefore the ones who are most responsible when things go wrong. But how much power to address major social ills does a muckety-muck really have?

Suppose Brian Thompson had woken up one morning with a new conscience and had decided to do everything in his power to reshape UnitedHealthcare into a company that sacrifices profit wherever necessary in order to do right by people. That would have been a very interesting experiment, but I think we can say what the result would have been. He'd have been immediately blocked in his efforts by other key decision-makers in the company, and eventually he'd have been forced to relent or resign.

It is not at all clear to me that there was much of anything Brian Thompson could have done in his capacity as CEO to make UnitedHealthcare into a more ethical company.

Meanwhile, regular people have quite a lot more power than they often seem to think they've got. For example, if all of the regular people in the US were to come together and make a clear demand for proper health care reform, and were to withhold support from any politician who stands in the way, etc., then it would happen.

Once we recognize that regular people—at least collectively, if not individually—have much more power than is commonly recognized, then we should be willing to blame regular people when they choose to use their power to make the world worse rather than better. We're the baddies.

We do not treat all speech equally. We have classes of privileged speakers who enjoy special tolerances, protections, and advantages.

That's as it should be.

It's good that journalists and only journalists are allowed into the White House briefing room. It's good that the money in your town's Local Arts Fund goes to support artists and only artists. It's good that academics and only academics are allowed to teach philosophy classes at universities. And so on.

There's only so much attention to go around, only so much money to go around, etc. Given such finitudes, there's no feasible way to treat all speech equally. So, we have to have classes of privileged speakers. And if we're going to have classes of privileged speakers, it's good that journalists, artists, and academics are among those classes.

***

In a system involving classes of privileged speakers, you need some way to determine who's in and who's out. Who gets to claim to be a journalist? Who gets to claim to be an artist? Who gets to claim to be an academic?

It seems to me that we generally allow institutions to do the sorting. You get to claim to be an academic/journalist/artist, and thus have access to various speech privileges associated with being an academic/journalist/artist, if there is an institution (a university/newspaper/museum) that counts you as an academic/journalist/artist.

This system of institutional sorting has at least one big advantage. It means that we have a way to separate journalists from non-journalists, artists from non-artists, and academics from non-academics without ever having to define journalism, art, or academic research. That's great because it's really hard to satisfactorily define any of those things.

***

Suppose people are marching together down the middle of a major road at rush hour, disrupting traffic, making people late for work, etc. Take four cases: (1) the marchers are activists who are involved in a street protest; (2) the marchers are pranksters who are doing some kind of "flash mob" kind of thing; (3) the marchers are engaged in some sort of a religious ritual; (4) the marchers are out there playing some kind of weird sport.

It seems to me that we typically should and typically would want to be especially tolerant of the marchers in the first case. It's probably fine for authorities to make the marchers leave in cases (2), (3), and (4). But in case (1), we should probably let the marchers do their thing.

So I think that activists should be, and probably already are, a privileged class of speaker, alongside journalists, artists, and academics.

But if activists are going to be a privileged class of speaker, then we need some way to separate activists from non-activists. And here I think we can't or shouldn't rely on institutional sorting. This is partly because there aren't any institutions that seem up to the job. Broadly, universities and other academic institutions are pretty good, I think, at plausibly distinguishing academics from non-academics. Similarly, I think we have institutions that do a good job of separating artists from non-artists, and journalists from non-journalists. But it's unclear to me whether there are any institutions that we should entrust with the task of deciding who's an activist and who isn't.

The only reasonable alternative to institutional sorting that I can think of would be definitional sorting. We should come up with a definition of activism, show that this definition is correct, and then we should reserve certain special privileges for all and only those who meet the definition. This is a task for philosophers, I think.