1/8/09

Lost in Translation?

Now this is fun. Here's the cover of my book,The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life, translated into Korean, and with a new English title: Think of Life on a Philosophic Bench. Hmm! Interesting how the author has no role in this. They could have called my book Life Sucks, and I couldn't have complained.

The cover looks really nice, but would it be inappropriate to point out a difference from the Blackwell cover, to the right? That cover features a painting by the artist Caroline Jennings--to wit, a colorful panorama of life. Indeed, the book is full of colorful people, and contains only a smidgen of lonely-bench style existential angst.

Something does seem to have been lost in translation on a Korean book website. First you've got the book being translated from English to Korean. Then the Korean on the website is translated, courtesy of Google, back into English. Here's the resulting author description:

Kajejeu drink (Jean Kazez) - Arizona State University and obtained a doctorate in the philosophy of the Amnesty International Organization (emneseuti International) in the human rights movement pyeolchimyeo had a deep interest in the world of philosophical values. Philosophy at the University of Southern destroyer in the U.S. mail, and active teaching and writing and speech.

I don't mean to be picky, but...University of Southern destroyer in the U. S. mail? As for the rest...well, it really would be picky to say I went to University of Arizona, and did not study the philosophy of Amnesty International.

Truth is, I feel honored, and I appreciate the work of the book translator.

1/3/09

Ants for the New Year


What better way to begin the new year than by reading about ants? I spent New Year's Eve parked in front of the fireplace with The Superorganism, by Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson, while my husband and kids and some of their friends played tennis, courtesy of our new Nintendo Wii. Though a little technical, the book is wonderfully thought-provoking.

Lately I've been pondering what you might call "the paradox of animal rights"--if you were in a pretentious mood. You start out wanting to think and act morally toward animals. You want to give them no less than the status they deserve. This ethical starting point leads you to start doubting the way we have traditionally drawn lines between humans and other animals. You start seeing similarities, where before you only saw differences. This elevates animals in your eyes.

Soon, though, you start wondering about human morality and its animal analogues and precursors. Morality starts seeming less like a fixed part of reality, and more just a feature of "the way we are" as one particular species. But then fairness, respect, compassion, individual rights, and their ilk, start seeming less necessary, more contingent. They are elements of our phenotype, like upright posture, and possibly not suitable for our dealings with other species. This line of thought threatens to lower animals in our eyes.

As for ants. If Holldobler and Wilson are correct, an ant society is a superorganism, with individual ants related to the whole in the way that the organs of our bodies are related to our whole bodies. Worker ants know their place. They have various functions in the colony, and don't compete with each other to become a reproducing queen. By contrast, humans do compete with each other. We each expect to have a full life, complete with mating and child-rearing. We are unlike ants, and also unlike wolves--who leave reproduction to an alpha-male and alpha-female.

Part of human morality (at least post-enlightenment) is the idea that each individual counts. Martha Nussbaum, for example, offers the principle of each individual as an end. A society can't give subservient roles to women, or lower classes, or particular castes, in the name of the overall good of society. Every individual must have access to a life that's good in itself. In the animal chapter of Frontiers of Justice, she seems to extrapolate the same idea into the world of animals. Every animal counts, every animal must have a chance to live a good life.

That idea is to found in all the leading pro-animal philosophers. Every individual counts. There are no animal castes--the cows don't exist to be our food, the horses don't exist to carry us into battle or entertain us. Fair enough. The roles we assign to animals are obviously self-serving. But in thinking of each individual animal as an end, are we actually exporting a peculiarly human morality beyond the realm where it makes sense?

There are ant castes. There are wolf castes. Should we nevertheless view every individual ant and every individual wolf as an end, insisting on a good and complete life for every individual? Should we think every individual animal counts in just the way every human counts, or should we see each species as having its own built-in morality?