Ask any PAWS member and they’ll tell you straight up that it’s wrong to torture and kill animals for food. Ask any Anscombe member whether it’s OK to have homosexual sex and they’ll tell you it’s not. The majority of people on this campus reject both of these claims. As someone who subscribes to a quite marginal belief, I struggle with how to regard the Anscombe Society. On the one hand, I find many of their positions offensive and downright ridiculous. I don’t want someone telling me when and with whom I can have sex. But then again, most Princeton students also don’t want to be told whether to eat animals. And so I find myself in the strange position of both commiserating with members of the Anscombe Society and yet disagreeing with what they advocate.
Brandon wrote that the University has a responsibility to teach us right from wrong. He advocates for the University to bring back “moral education” in a way similar to the senior seminar on ethics which used to be taught by the president of the University. But I think we’ve come a long way since then — I don’t think President Tilghman would be so bold as to say that she could teach a class on what it is to be good. Nor do I think it’s the University’s place to teach morality. It offers an array of courses and extracurricular activities which allow us to engage with ethics, but refrains from taking moral stands on most things. This is the appropriate course for the University to take.
Ethics is different than other fields. And this complicates things for ethical disagreements. In a non-ethical disagreement, say one about the number of jellybeans in a jar, we might be inclined to suspend belief until more evidence is available (counting the jellybeans). But what happens when you’re in a domain with disputed evidence? For that matter, what is moral evidence anyway? If we’re to claim to know things about morality, then we claim to have a justified true belief about morality. But who’s to say what kind of evidence justifies an ethical belief? Does feeling it in the pit of your stomach count? Does the Bible count? If one disputant is a utilitarian and the other a virtue ethicist, how do they even weigh evidence? One would say that X promotes the greater good, and the other would say he doesn’t give a damn about the greater good. But both disputants might say that their belief in respective systems of value is irreducible. So how do you disagree intelligibly about irreducible principles?
In an influential ethics paper, philosopher George Sher argues that given the confluence of ethical disagreement and the contingency of ethical beliefs on upbringing, it’s questionable “whether I ever have good grounds for believing that I am right and you are wrong.” He concludes his argument with a paradox that allows that we are justified in using our ethical beliefs in our decision-making even though we don’t have very good reason for trusting our ethical beliefs in the first place. And perhaps this is the pragmatic way to proceed: We ought to retain our beliefs but do so humbly, because we know that they are unreliable in the first place.
This is what college has taught me: to be humble in my ethical beliefs. As a member of PAWS and a three-year vegan, I have strong views about the way we treat animals. And when I make an ethical claim like it’s wrong to torture animals for food, I support that with arguments about how meat-eating is inconsistent with views most of us hold — like it’s wrong to torture animals. But I do so with the acknowledgement that many people smarter than me disagree.
Brandon encourages people to discover the moral truth, and while I wouldn’t use the same phrase, I agree that Princeton is the place to test your most deeply held beliefs. I have been guilty of too quickly dismissing the arguments of the Anscombe Society the same way people dismiss considerations for animals. So I challenge people to engage with the Anscombe Society and PAWS. Find out that Anscombe Society members aren’t bigots and that vegans aren’t all crazy grass-eaters. And when you’ve critically engaged with radically different ethical beliefs, you may change your mind. After humbling myself a bit and considering Anscombe’s and related arguments, I’m more convinced than ever that the universe doesn’t care where we put our penises.
Sam Fox Krauss is a philosophy major from Havertown, Pa. He can be reached at samfox@princeton.edu.
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