Complete Record

The complete written record of our debate, presented in chronological order, and with annotations and formatting cues for clarity and readability.

Each item is shown under a heading to indicate author and date. In some places quoted Townsend text is shown in blue text for clarity. Also, some obvious typographical errors by both correspondents have been corrected.

In the case of emails, replies are usually set to include the text of the previous email. Thus a sequence of emails, if listed verbatim, rapidly becomes burdened with a large amount of redundant text, as each new email appears along with repetition of all previous text in the thread. In the following record only the new reply portion of each email is shown, with the redundant previous email text omitted. Email header information is also omitted for the sake of brevity.

For original emails with full text and header information, see the verbatim source documents.

An abbreviated version is also available, comprising two principal documents: Louise Townsend's arguments in favour of animal experimentation, followed by my arguments against.

Townsend email 10/21/2002

Hi, Andrew.

I have a friend in another book group and we're both kind of
wearying of the lack of analysis and lackluster discussions that we
have had recently in that group. So I started to tell her about our
group and how lively and interesting the discussion can be and how I
really like what we read, the people, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I think this friend (Karen) would be a good fit. She's a
scientist, smart and thoughtful, and really loves to be challenged.

So, might I bring her as a guest to the White Teeth discussion and
see if she might come on a regular basis? I wasn't sure if you had
a specific policy on membership (I remember you grilling me on the
phone!). Karen would be happy to call and talk to you if you wanted
to hear more about her reading experiences and interests, etc.

Thanks, Andrew.

Louise

Hammoude email 10/24/2002

Hi Louise,

You're right -- your friend Karen is indeed smart and thoughtful; we just had a great conversation.

But not quite smart and thoughtful enough, and I'm vetoing her membership in book group. She has been, and continues to be, involved in animal experimentation, something I find morally repugnant, and I prefer not to have to associate with the perpetrators.

If she truly loves to be challenged, then I believe she must have been delighted by our conversation.

Regrets,
Andrew

Hammoude email 10/27/02

Hello Louise,

Following our recent conversation, I have put down some notes in
writing.

I have written a more complete account and commentary of my
discussion with Karen, a more complete statement of exactly what my
position is, and some challenges to the position you seem to be
taking.

I wrote this mostly for my own purposes; among other things I am
accumulating a body of such writings that at some point I intend to
publish.

But nevertheless you are the person to whom the notes are addressed,
and I'd like to let you read and comment on them, if you wish.

Let me know if interested, and I'll get you a copy.

Andrew

Townsend email 10/27/02

Yes, I would be interested to read your notes.

Townsend email 10/29/2002

Hi, Andrew. Sorry I missed your call last night. Can you send me your writings electronically or are you worried about privacy issues (in which case, I suppose I could pick them up, or you could mail them to me or drop them off -- let me know what works).

I am very interested in this issue and have become more so because of recent reading (did you see the review in the NYT of a book on animal rights by a former Bush speech writer?), so I look forward to reading your material, and I suspect I will learn a lot from it.

That said, even if I begin to feel the kind of moral repugnance you describe (and I think I already feel it to a certain extent), I doubt it would persuade me that Karen should be barred from the group because of what she does for a living. The issue here (for me) was finding a congenial and smart addition to the group. As I pointed out to you the other day, we don't know everything about everybody who is already in the group, their politics, their vices, the possible ramifications of the work they do on the environment, the world at large, etc. (or do you?).

To compare Karen to Mengele is to be absurdly reductionist, it seems to me, but perhaps after reading your material, I will see things differently.

Louise

Hammoude email 10/30/2002

Hi Louise,

I dropped my writings in the mail this afternoon; should get to you in a day or two.

A few things:

Though I said it on the phone I want to put this in writing: beyond a certain obvious point in my notes I move from a general analysis to one directed specifically at you. But I freely acknowledge that I don't know all the facts, and I'm making a lot of assumptions. If I'm out of line, I'll apologize and back down.

Also, a minor comment on something you wrote: I don't believe I have said anywhere that "Karen should be barred from the group because of what she does for a living."

Regarding the possible charge about me being less than perfectly courteous with Karen, or speaking in a condescending manner at times. Suppose Josef Mengele says, "Well look, if you're going to cop an attitude, I'm just not going to have this conversation with you." This would seem to make him pretty much safe from any reproach at all.

Finally, though I said this on the phone I want to document this in writing too: If at the end of this (or even before) if you disagree with my veto action, I think it is perfectly reasonable for you to challenge it. It's clearly not right for a single person to dictate who may or may not be a member, if others disagree with his decisions. We could let the group know about the situation, and resolve it by a simple democratic process. (Well I understand that Karen is now completely put off, but still, in principle.)

--Andrew

Hammoude notes 10/30/2002

(Notes made following telephone conversation with Louise Townsend, 10/25/02)

Opening Challenge

Imagine that we are having three simultaneous debates: one with a slave trader, one with a child prostitutionist, and one with your friend Karen.

Each of them, clearly, is involved in something inhumane. It is inhumane to enslave a human being; it is inhumane to compel a child to have sex with an adult; and it is inhumane to cause severe harm to a living, sentient being.

So coming out of the gate, we would appear to have a basic prosecutorial case against all three. The only question is, at the end of the day will Karen come out smelling like a rose, while leaving only the others as legitimate targets of our censure?

But at the outset there can be no question that Karen is involved in something quite nasty. If there is any dissent regarding this, I can produce videotapes of animals undergoing medical experiments, including toxicological ones, that I believe will dispel any doubt. This is your friend, whom you have offered to me as a book group candidate. This is who she is; this is what she is about.

Here is another way of thinking of my initial assertion. If Karen were to cause equivalent harm to a human being, she would go to prison, and she would face a multi-million-dollar civil lawsuit. I don’t say if she did the same thing, I say if she caused equivalent harm. I am willing to concede that the subjective experience of an animal being poisoned may differ from that of a human being. However, there is some level of offense against a human that offers parity in terms of suffering: perhaps being kidnapped for a certain period of time; being subjected to certain psychological stresses; being mutilated in a certain way; and finally being released.

Such an action would cause outrage in most people, and I believe you would be unlikely to propose the perpetrator as a book group member, or speak of her in the positive terms you did.

And if any of the defenses that you and she have offered to me: “it’s what I do,” “it’s important work,” “it’s a necessary evil,” were to be offered in court of law, I believe they would receive a very unsympathetic hearing.

So why the huge disconnect, both societally and in your own mind, between Karen’s history of crimes against animals, and equivalent ones against persons? Is it that:

1. My assertion that Karen’s actions are equivalent to serious harm to a person is false? Would equivalent harm, rather than kidnapping, stress and mutilation, be something much milder? Say, armed robbery? Date rape? Stealing a wallet? I would be interested to hear your estimate, and hers. Set aside the benefits for the moment. What crime against a person would you consider subjectively equivalent to Karen’s against animals?
2. Or are our criminal and civil laws just completely screwy? Should it really be the case that you ought to be allowed to do grotesquely unpleasant things to someone else without having to go to prison, provided you consider it to be “important”?
3. Or is my initial charge in fact correct: that at the outset Karen’s actions are as nasty as those of a slaver or child pimp?

These three alternatives would appear to span the universe of possibility. I invite you to pick one and justify it, or suggest an different theory.

First Defense: Avoidance of Responsibility; Rebuttal

When initially challenged by me, Karen’s first response was so say that this was what she did as a career, and this career necessarily involves animal experimentation. As if the fact that one’s career mandates a particular action absolves one of all responsibility for it. If this were the case, then a mafia hit man, for example, would be entirely off the hook—after all, his career requires that he do reprehensible things. The point is, we can make choices about our careers, and we are responsible for those choices. This particular defensive move buys Karen perhaps 30 seconds, the time it takes for me to reply that this only shifts our focus from her reprehensible actions taken as an unavoidable part of her career, to her reprehensible action in choosing that career in the first place. It buys her 30 seconds, but those seconds come at a price: it is an early indication that she can not necessarily be trusted to be straightforward in debate.

Second Defense: Benefits; Rebuttal

Her second response was to point out that there are benefits to what she does, which she described well and accurately.

But in terms of distancing herself from her co-defendants, this gets her nowhere. I pointed out to her that every act of depredation has its beneficiaries. Her two companions can claim exactly the same thing; the benefits of their actions are absolutely beyond dispute. Indeed, if benefits are the key to redemption, then on this score they may easily have her beaten. The slaver can point to the enormous economic benefits of his trade; while the sex trader can say that, in contrast to the indirect and speculative benefits of Karen’s work, the benefits of his business are immediate and irrefutable: the pleasure of ejaculating into a child is heady and exquisite beyond description. Now that’s what I call a benefit.

Thus at this early stage, we have yet to establish any moral distinctions among our three antagonists.

Third Defense: Qualitative Differences; Rebuttal

Karen’s next move was the wearisomely perennial one of claiming that, well, her situation is different. She seems to imagine that somehow this puts her ahead, but of course it doesn’t, because her two companions simultaneously make exactly the same claim. And all three are right; every one of their situations truly is different from the others. Analogous situations are always different; otherwise, they’d be identical situations.

And while all three of our subjects may be quick to claim that their particular case is different and unique, it is clear that they have this much in common: each involves a perpetrator committing a coercive action against a victim, in which the perpetrator benefits at the victim’s expense. This is the heart of the analogy, and in this respect the three cases are incontrovertibly identical.

Being different is one thing; being better is another. The three situations may be different in qualitative terms, but so what? Any one of our antagonists can exploit the qualitative differences to put up a specious defense. The slaver can say, “Hey man, I don’t physically hurt my slaves! I don’t poison them, I don’t murder them! Sure, I buy and sell them as property, but I don’t deliberately corrupt their fundamental life processes,” and, pointing his finger self-righteously at Karen, he can say, “she’s way the hell worse than me!”

And on that basis, he’s quite right: she really is worse than him. But the problem is, this is a fragmentary and a dishonest analysis. He has chosen to focus on precisely the differences, and precisely the criteria, that make him look good. He is acting like a politician. He has put the cart before the horse; rather than reasoning with integrity, he has constructed an argument specifically to lead to the conclusion he desires. This is not honest debate; this is political pseudo-reasoning that relies upon the dim-wittedness of the audience for its success.

And regrettably, this is precisely what Karen began to offer me. To her credit, I must say that she quickly abandoned this particular line of argument as it became clear that I could readily block it. But whether this is because she recognized that it is fundamentally bogus, or whether it was because she realized she was faced with an intelligent opponent and just couldn’t get away with it, I cannot say.

Fourth Defense: Re-Labelling of Benefits; Rebuttal

The remainder of our conversation consisted, essentially, of Karen re-stating that her work has benefits, though this was re-stated in various indirect forms and guises. For example, towards the end of our talk she said that she felt that she was doing “important work.” But this is no more than semantic sleight of hand, tedious and wearisome to have to answer. Why is it important? What makes anything important? Answer: because it is what we want, in turn because it benefits us greatly. Back to the benefits, freely acknowledged 40 minutes ago. Benefits may be big, and benefits may be small, but despite Karen’s attempt to relabel them with lofty phrases such as “important work,” that is all that they remain.

Current Status of the Debate

But in any event, at the end of several rounds of argument, our three subjects remain on exactly the same footing. All three are doing something harmful to others; all three can claim substantial benefits; all three can generate specious defensive arguments on the basis of qualitative differences; and all three can use semantics to re-label what they do to make it sound like something loftier than what it really is: expedience, pure and simple.

At this point in the debate, I think we may agree, Karen has yet to distance herself from moral equivalence to a slave trader, or a child prostitutionist.

And this, essentially, is where the debate remains. My logic appears to be quite sound, and though Karen and I continued our debate at some length, she proved quite unable to refute this simple assertion of mine, as do you. I have yet to hear any coherent rebuttal to this. If either of you has one, I’d like to hear it.

Some other nonsense: at one point she asserted her intention to continue what she was doing. As if this, in and of itself, makes everything all right. Have you ever heard a politician, defensively cornered, declaim emphatically, “I’m proud of my record regarding such and such”? There is a word for this; the word is bluster. Must I really explain how empty this kind of statement is?

Final Extrication

Here is how things came to an end. I had made a simple, clear challenge to her position, which she had been unable to rebut effectively. Instead, she had moved from one weak defensive position to another, every one of which I had been able to confute. So how does she extricate herself from this uncomfortable position? She sweeps all the pieces off the board by saying, “Well, you know, we’re never going to agree. It’s just one of those hopelessly insoluble arguments, like Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice.”

So faced with an intelligent, articulate and relentless challenge, her ultimate refuge is this: to discredit debate as a worthwhile endeavor. It’s just one of the great mysteries of life; nobody’s wrong, nobody’s right; we don’t see eye to eye; that’s just the way it is; go figure.

Meta-Challenges

If Karen thinks this puts an end to my challenge to her, she is mistaken. I now have to ask two things. First, why did she engage me in debate in the first place? Why not say at the outset, “No matter what arguments you present, no matter with what extraordinary skill you present them, I will not budge from my position. I don’t function on the basis of dialectic at all; I am utterly wedded to my ideas regardless of outside influence. So save yourself the 40 minutes.”

The answer, of course, is that this is what people almost always do. They indulge in debate until it becomes clear that things are going very badly, then they abandon it in favour of some other strategic option. Clearly, you can do very well in debate if you simply ignore the difficult or troublesome elements of your opponent’s argument. And if you are faced with someone particularly difficult, your best option is to ignore his argument in its entirety.

“She's a scientist, smart and thoughtful, and really loves to be challenged.”

Oh really. Genuinely smart and thoughtful people do not offer bogus arguments, and they do not abandon debate when it goes against them. And people who are living their lives in humane ways have no need to.

Second, I have to wonder if Karen extends this same generous indulgence to all controversy. Apartheid? Purdah? Female clitorectomy? Does she regard all of these things as insoluble arguments, with no right or wrong answers? Is everything ultimately immune to reasoned analysis and debate? Or just those arguments that she cannot win?

Clearly, this cop-out of hers is bullshit. There are things that are undeniably vile and obscene, despite the efforts of their apologists. Slavery is one. Child prostitution is another. Vivisection is a third. These and other evil institutions can be, and are, defended. And when the defenders of such institutions come up against an intractable argument, they are inclined to sigh and say, “Well, you know, it’s complicated.” Perhaps. But complicated is one thing; insoluble is another. These things can still be analyzed truthfully and objectively, and honest conclusions can be reached.

I suggest that Karen must make a decision and live by it. Does she respect the power and validity of dialectic, or not? If so, then she must answer my argument. If not, then she must forbear to offer a dialectical challenge to anyone, about anything, ever.

Meta-Challenges: Conflict of Interest

It is not surprising that the most persistent defenders of any institution, good or bad, are those who profit from it personally. And Karen unquestionably profits greatly from the institution that she defends. Consider all that she is getting:

• Deep intellectual gratification. The processes of life are wonderfully complex, and it is a great privilege to explore its endless grace and beauty. She loves her work.
• Prestige, respect, self-image. We are social animals, and are greatly influenced by how other perceive us; by how we see ourselves in the eyes of others. Karen has a self-image that is as important to her as the rest of us: wife and mother, an enlightened woman of the millennium who does important work in the day and reads Harry Potter to her children at night. Like the rest of us, she craves the respect and validation of others, and the badge of her scientific work helps her to get it. For sure she gets it from you.
• The feeling of complacent well-being that derives from idea that she is helping others. As social creatures we can feel warm and fuzzy about ourselves if we see ourselves as doing something important and beneficial to society at large. (And though it is true that at a certain time and place she is helping others, the fact that at another time and place she is greatly harming others, somehow doesn’t factor into the equation. This is the sort of creative moral bookkeeping that keeps her bottom line looking good. It isn’t just the Enron accountants that cook the books.)
• The paycheck.

That’s quite a package. It is clear that Karen profits richly from the suffering of her victims. And this leads to two more challenges.

First, it reveals that she has a massive conflict of interest. So massive, in fact, that it is preposterous to trust that anything she says about the matter is necessarily honest or objective. In any other context—business, legal, financial—the idea that someone with such a huge vested interest can provide fair stewardship would be considered laughable. Allowing Karen to formulate her own policy and then act upon it, really, is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

And second, it reveals the staggering hypocrisy of her assertion that she is doing this for external, altruistic reasons—not to benefit herself, she claims, but to benefit others. You may choose to believe this ludicrous statement but I most certainly do not: it is clear to me that she is doing it to please herself.

If someone is doing something ugly, no matter who, or what, or where, and you challenge them, something will come out of their mouth. Always. A politician, a despot, a tobacco company CEO, a vivisectionist, no matter. I challenged Karen, and something came out of her mouth. I invite you to challenge her yourself, and listen carefully to what she has to say.

Someday, perhaps, as they discover painful knowledge about the world, one of her children may ask, “Mom, have you ever participated in experiments upon animals?” And at that time too something will come out of her mouth, to which her own child will be witness. My expectation is that she will reel off the same trite justifications that she offered me, against which her daughter, unlike myself, will be powerless.

Challenges for Louise

Well, enough about Karen. But since you have also engaged me in debate, I have some challenges for you too.

It seems that you are very willing to countenance and justify Karen’s work. In support of her activities you characterized them to me as a “necessary evil.” Let me begin by asking you, necessary for what? Necessity isn’t an absolute; things are always necessary in reference to other things. Animal experimentation is not an absolute necessity; if we didn’t do it the Earth would surely continue in its orbit. Here is what we can say for sure: animal experimentation is necessary for us to get certain things that we want, and we want those things because they benefit us. In the same way we may correctly say that child prostitution is necessary—it is necessary in order for men to have sex with children. Phrases like “important work,” and “necessary evil,” are no more than indirect ways of saying “this is something we really, really want.”

We are surrounded by evil, and all of this evil is considered to be “necessary” by its proponents. Let us take the current evil du jour: the recent bombing in Bali. I haven’t the slightest idea what this bombing was about, but sight unseen I can tell you this: the perpetrators viewed it as necessary. They knew damn well that their actions would cause distress, but there is an outcome that they felt was sufficiently “important” and “necessary” to justify it.

In fact, the generic terrorist bomber is such a morally interesting figure, that let’s put him in the dock with the others. He remains in perfect lockstep with the others thus far, and provides us with much to think about. For example, if anyone can claim “importance,” he can—what could be more important than the struggle to free an entire people from tyranny? Benefits, necessity? Man, this guy’s got it in spades. And when it comes to relabelling he has everyone beat; he can use the phrase “noble cause,” which surely trumps Karen’s “important work.” So, Louise, are you equally ready to apply your tag of “necessary evil” to his offenses? And if not, why not? This is Question 1 for you to consider.

Next, consider this. For any particular animal—fish, mouse, chimpanzee—there is a stage of infanthood or childhood that corresponds to this in terms of our subjective experience of trauma, and our ability to express such trauma. Between conception and adulthood, we must pass through fish, mouse, chimpanzee equivalency; perhaps inside the womb, perhaps outside it. So for whatever animal Karen chooses to experiment upon, there is a stage of human development that rationally, logically, corresponds to it. So how do you feel about toxicological experimentation on such a human being? Would you still use the glib phrase “necessary evil”? And if not, why not? This is Question 2 for you.

Finally, you made the observation that a person’s moral value is one thing, but her contribution to book group is another. You observed that would be a pity not to have her in the group, if she is going to be a good contributor. And my response was, well, what about Josef Mengele? What if he wants to be in book group? Given your position, then I assume his moral shortcomings would not be problem for you, and you would base your welcome purely and exclusively on his contribution to the discussion. After all, as you say, it would be a pity not to have him in the group. Do I describe your position correctly? Or if not, why not? This is Question 3.

The Resolution

In seeking to shift someone out of an entrenched view of something, it isn’t enough to tell them why you are right. You also have to tell them why they are wrong. You have to take their mind, and you have to focus it directly upon the precise element of their position that is false. Otherwise, they are just going to get confused.

So what is really going on here? What is the fundamental point of disconnection between you and me? Why can I make this apparently reasonable case, but still you won’t accept it? What is the missing piece of the puzzle, which will suddenly bring complete clarity to everything?

Well, of course, I don’t know. We haven’t properly discussed any of this; I haven’t heard how you will answer the questions I have asked; and so on; so I cannot know for sure exactly what your position is. But on the basis of several revealing things you have said, I can make a very good guess.

So I will take the liberty of telling you what I think the answer is. But at this point the tone of these notes must change; from the confident and assertive attitude taken so far, to something much more diffident and uncertain. We will mark this point of division with a line of asterisks.

********************************

What follows is an intelligent guess based on our limited telephone exchange, and some other input. But I have also made assumptions and extrapolations, and I could be way off target. So if I have completely misconstrued, please correct me.

I suspect that there are three major things wrong with your current mental construct. I’ll present two here, and the third on demand. I suggest that you are thinking inside two boxes:

• You feel organically different about human and animal suffering, even when the suffering is completely equivalent, factoring in the differing abilities of humans and animals to experience it.

  You are familiar with the prejudices of racism, but you have moved beyond them. We are all fundamentally xenophobic; it is an inherent aspect of human nature. It is just so hard to believe that those little brown wogs can love their children the same way we do; but our inherent human perceptions are wrong: the fact is, they do. You have resolved this issue for yourself; you are educated, enlightened, you have had it explained to you; and as a result you have transcended your own nature; you have come to understand that your prejudices are wrong: the black and the brown of this world really do deserve the same consideration as the white.

  But you remain benighted when it comes to animals. You discount the validity or importance of their experience, just as the Southern Redneck discounts the validity or importance of the nigger. He is stuck in a box; and so are you.

  Suffering is suffering; and equivalent suffering is equivalent suffering, regardless of whether black, white or animal is experiencing it.

• You derive your values, not from first principles, but from the values of the environment that surrounds you. What is the difference between a slave owner 200 years ago, and someone who might consider owning a slave today? I’ll tell you the difference: 200 years ago such a person was surrounded by a value system that supported his decision; whereas today he would be surrounded by a value system that violently opposes it. For most of us, that’s pretty much all there is to it.

  You and Karen exist in a society that accepts and condones animal experimentation, much as other societies have cheerfully accepted slavery, human sacrifice, and rodeo. And you accept those implied values, without troubling to question them.

I suggest that this is the fundamental disconnect between you and me; that this is where you are mentally hung up and I’m not: you are organically biased so as to discount the experiences of other species, and you are letting yourself be overly influenced by the values that surround you. On the other hand I am thinking from first principles, and I am thinking for myself.

You have learned to overcome your innate bias against other races, but not against other species. All living things are exquisitely complex and sophisticated, and beyond a certain point of development are capable of subjective experience. And to the extent that any entity is capable of subjective experience, to that same extent it is worthy of our consideration. Though other races may seem like little wind-up toys with their gabbling language, strange customs, and chronic famines, the fact is that if we separate them from their children, they feel grief. And though our prejudices may lead us to view animals as part of our dominion to do with as we wish, the fact is that if we subject them to prolonged and unendurable stress, they go mad.

This is the point of my three questions to you: to compel you to confront the fact of your own bias. In every question you are presented with a pair of highly analogous situations, yet your reactions in each case are revealingly different: on the one hand disapproval, on the other tolerance. In each case the situations are essentially the same, except for a single crucial difference, and that difference is sufficient to tell us reliably, predictably, what your reaction will be. (Well, I haven’t heard your answers yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.)

It is the fact that you exist within these two boxes that enables you to use the glib and disgusting phrase, “necessary evil” in reference to animal experimentation, when you would surely hesitate to apply this phrase to the Bali bombing, or toxicological experiments upon a human infant. It is the fact that you exist within these boxes that causes you to regard Josef Mengele’s crimes as colossally obscene, while you regard Karen’s as really, after all, not that big of a deal.

The point of my questions is to reveal to you the stark fact that you view the exact same degree of suffering differently, depending on what is experiencing it. In the case of grievous harm to a human, you consider it to be wrong and there is little more to be said about it—you would give short shrift to talk of benefits, necessity or importance. You would be quick to challenge any suggestion that terrorist bombings might have a justification. “Nothing,” you might say, “can justify this horror.” But in the case of equivalent insult to an animal, well now that’s different, hold on a minute, let’s just think about our options here.

You may think of yourself as considerate to others, but clearly, your consideration is heavily qualified. It is a rare human being who is totally without consideration for others. The most hideous of our tyrants are solicitous towards those close to them. But in other directions their consideration is stunted—as, it seems, is yours.

Andrew Attitude

I am dismayed by your reaction to this. We have encountered something truly ugly, and among this ugliness, somebody, somewhere, is acting like an asshole; no question. But incredibly, you have chosen to offer a reproach to me. From my perspective, your reproach is spectacularly misdirected.

Let me tell you that it has been a difficult thing to engage the two of you in this grotesque dialogue. It is clear that I have a coherent, well-thought-through, explicit set of constructs in my head; it is equally clear that you do not. In its place you have a patchwork quilt of emotional responses, in which some things elicit organic feelings of moral disturbance, while similar things leave you quite unruffled. It’s hardly surprising I can run rings around you. From my point of view the discussion is rather like playing a game with a child; the moves are painfully predictable, and all can be understood, processed, and responded to swiftly and easily.

It is a painful thing to have to listen to the usual fatuous claptrap coming from you. In offering such claptrap you may think you are making a point but you are not; you are merely betraying the unexamined notions that bind you. When you use the phrase “necessary evil,” I know instantly where this comes from and what it says about you. Applying this label to something is not an argument; rather, it is a clear and ringing announcement of your organic indifference to a huge body of suffering. Used to justify the practices we are discussing, it is a revolting phrase. Shame on you for using it.

I understand that in discussion with you and Karen, no matter what my feelings, I must conduct myself with courtesy. But know that there are moments at which this can be difficult.

As I have indicated in two separate places above, most of us derive our values and validation from those around us. And so if Karen is allowed to feel comfortable doing what she does, then those of us who make her comfortable must take some responsibility for what we allow her to do. Karen is able to do what she does because her environment sanctions it, and we are responsible for that environment—you, me, everyone.

As societal animals, it is our responsibility to keep one another honest. It is difficult today for someone to own a slave, and this is not simply because it is against the law; it is also because the rest of us would make him exceedingly uncomfortable. Inviting him to join a book group would create a storm of protest, and rightly so.

If we witness evil and say nothing, then we are complicitous. We tend to think of evil as something strident and noisy, but of course it isn’t; it is something soft, and quiet, and easy. It is at your shoulder, my friend. By your friendship with Karen, by your tacit approval, by your frank admiration, you accept and validate her. You participate, indirectly, in what she does.

Those of us who think of ourselves as intelligent and moral creatures have a responsibility to challenge others who may be less so. I am not wrong to make my disapproval clear; it is the rest of you who are wrong not to.

I can understand you thinking I might enjoy discussing literature with your friend; by now I hope it is clear to you why I would not. But shame on you for knowing what she does, and remaining silent.

Townsend email 11/1/2002

Thanks, Andrew. Received your notes which I read with interest. There's
a lot of thinking I need to do about this, and it's frustrating because I
don't really have the time (work pressures being what they are). But I
will respond to your notes soon, once I've had more time to reflect and
fashion a coherent response. In the meantime, my responses to your
e-mail are below.

> Also, a minor comment on something you wrote: I don't believe I have
> said anywhere that "Karen should be barred from the group because of
> what she does for a living."

SEMANTICS, SEMANTICS. Why split hairs here? No, you didn't specifically
say she should be "barred from the group because of what she does for a
living." You said you were vetoing her membership because you prefer not
to have to associate with people involved in animal experimentation. I
fail to see how these two statements differ substantially.

> Regarding the possible charge about me being less than perfectly
> courteous with Karen, or speaking in a condescending manner at
> times. Suppose Josef Mengele says, "Well look, if you're going to
> cop an attitude, I'm just not going to have this conversation with
> you." This would seem to make him pretty much safe from any
> reproach at all.

AS I NOTED to you in our telephone conversation the other day, if one
hopes to convince or persuade in debate, a courteous tone can often be
more effective than an angrily passionate, snide, and condescending one.
Words like "bullshit," "bogus," and "claptrap," and imprecations like
"shame on you" detract from the persuasiveness of your argument, if only
because they _distract_ the reader's attention from your many valid
points. You're angry, Andrew, and it shows, and on a certain level, I
respect that. But I think at many points your tone in the notes is
downright inappropriate and, at times, crosses the border into offensive.

But your tone is not the point here (unless you personally meant to hurt
me?) and what I really want to respond to is your carefully reasoned
arguments, when, like I say, I have a chance to think my own position
through more carefully.

Hammoude email 11/8/2002

Hello Louise,

Thanks for your e-mail, and sorry about the slow acknowledgement -- like yourself I am very busy and feeling the pressures of work.

I'm glad you read my notes and found them interesting. And though I would be interested in hearing your response, please don't feel that you are under any obligation to respond to them. I understand that it takes a lot of time to articulate things clearly, and I know that there are other pressing demands on your time. Also, two of my major motivations in writing the notes have already been met: I wanted to create a point of record for myself, and I wanted to give you a clear answer to your questioning of my veto decision. Both of those goals I think have been met. Whether or not you agree with the veto, I think my reasons must now be very clear to you. So from my point of view we have already reached a very reasonable stopping point, and if we were to just leave things at that, this would be completely fine with me.

There is a great deal I could say about your last e-mail. The discussion inevitably broadens, as we encounter the deeper underpinnings of my philosophy and yours, and discover further layers of disconnect. But it just takes too much time and energy. So I will limit myself to various place-holder comments below, but leave most of the supporting argument unsaid.

> > Also, a minor comment on something you wrote: I don't believe I have
> > said anywhere that "Karen should be barred from the group because of
> > what she does for a living."
>
> SEMANTICS, SEMANTICS. Why split hairs here? No, you didn't specifically
> say she should be "barred from the group because of what she does for a
> living." You said you were vetoing her membership because you prefer not
> to have to associate with people involved in animal experimentation. I
> fail to see how these two statements differ substantially.

But they do. The two statements "I want Karen to be in the group" and "Karen should not be barred from the group" are wildly different. The first is a purely personal statement. The second is an appeal to an *external* principle; it pushes the issue up to some higher plane, above and beyond a simple desire for personal fulfilment. You may fail to see how these two statements differ, but I can assure you that they do.

Why does this matter? It matters because people talk out of the side of their mouths constantly, and they use precisely these sorts of semantic devices to muddy the waters. Though your use of "should be" instead of "I want" is inconsequential in this particular case, it is a toe dipped into an ocean of sophistry. The statement "I want K in the group" is absolutely truthful, and absolutely clean. The statement "K should not be barred" is just a tiny bit, ever so slightly, slippery.

When I am drawing your attention to semantic negligence on your part, it does you no good to shout semantics at me.

> > Regarding the possible charge about me being less than perfectly
> > courteous with Karen, or speaking in a condescending manner at
> > times. Suppose Josef Mengele says, "Well look, if you're going to
> > cop an attitude, I'm just not going to have this conversation with
> > you." This would seem to make him pretty much safe from any
> > reproach at all.
>
> AS I NOTED to you in our telephone conversation the other day, if one
> hopes to convince or persuade in debate, a courteous tone can often be
> more effective than an angrily passionate, snide, and condescending one.
> Words like "bullshit," "bogus," and "claptrap," and imprecations like
> "shame on you" detract from the persuasiveness of your argument, if only
> because they _distract_ the reader's attention from your many valid
> points.

Again, I have much to say about this general topic, but life is too short, so just a few observations.

In one respect you are right of course: angry ad hominem attacks are counterproductive. But there are two other things to think about when considering the tone of my presentation. First, as I have indicated above, our human misbehaviour is almost always supported by some form of intellectual sophistry -- it has to be, otherwise it would be impossible to proceed. And since our words are the mirror of our thoughts, our misbehaviour is supported by verbal sophistry too. The world is awash in such sophistry -- just listen to our political leaders for five minutes.

And for this reason I have enormous resistance to any tinkering with plain and truthful expression whatsoever. For anything one wants to say there is a way to say it that is neither over-stated nor under-stated; just the simple, unvarnished facts of the matter. On the far side of that there is exaggeration and insult. On the near side there is euphemism and double-speak. But the slightest step we take away from accuracy of expression, in either direction, represents compromise to the clarity and honesty of our thinking. And this is too high a price to pay.

You say to me, "Andrew, you are on the far side of plain speaking, and you are alienating your audience." All right -- I take your point, and I'll try to do better. But in return, you cannot tug me over onto the near side of plain speaking, and ask me to water things down to make them more palatable for you.

When you challenge my choice of words, the only concern for me is: are these the correct words or not? With regard to "bullshit" and "bogus," these two words are right on the money. They are common words with a very well-understood meaning, and they are absolutely on target in the context in which I used them. In the teeth of your objection, I stand behind these words as truthful and accurate. Sure, I could have used out-of-control irrational terms, or I could have used mealy-mouthed diplomatic ones. You can demand that I not do the one, but you cannot ask that I do the other.

With regard to "claptrap" (and it's accompanying adjective "fatuous"), my reaction is quite different -- these are clearly the wrong words. What you have said to me may be questionable (oooh...a little diplomacy after all...) but it doesn't meet the definition of claptrap. And your presentation is nowhere near being fatuous. That canned expression rolled off my fingers in a glib fashion without me stopping to think about it. I was wrong, the allegation is withdrawn, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon.

But in no way am I catering to your sensitivities in not wanting to hear strong words like these -- it is just that they are incorrect. Claptrap certainly exists, as does fatuity, and when I see those things I will use those words and none other to describe them.

"Shame on you" is worth parsing out. First, there is no way this can be considered in imprecation; either you mis-spoke or you are misunderstanding the meaning of the word. But more interestingly, this phrase carries at least three informational payloads, one intellectual and two personal. The intellectual payload is the simple statement of fact that I consider your apologizing for Karen to be a shameful thing. This is my reasoned view of the situation, and I'm not going to mince words about it. Whether you agree or not, and whether you care for this phrase or not, is neither here nor there; it's the unvarnished truth, and I stand by it.

And one personal payload is that I am striking you with the force of my disapproval, and I intend you to feel it. What you do with this is up to you. You can ignore it completely; you can dismiss me as a deranged fanatic; there are many ways in which you can dispose of this. But at the end of the day you will be left with this fact: an educated, articulate, intelligent, otherwise reasonable, and otherwise friendly man said this to your face. I think this is a salutary thing for you to have to dispose of.

But the other personal payload is that there is also an essential gentleness in this phrase -- can you not hear it? When you use this phrase to someone, you are saying that though you may be genuinely dismayed, your friendly and open disposition towards the other is not compromised.

This phrase says everything I want to say, and the more I think about it the more I like it.

> You're angry, Andrew, and it shows, and on a certain level, I
> respect that. But I think at many points your tone in the notes is
> downright inappropriate and, at times, crosses the border
> into offensive.

You are not angry, Louise, and it shows. And whether or not I respect this depends on the reasons why you are not angry. If you never get angry about anything; if you can calmly debate with Josef Mengele; if you can answer his slippery self-serving arguments and fully maintain your courtesy and composure; if all of these things are true then your position is truly consistent. You are a better person than I am, and you fully deserve my respect.

But if not, then your position is not consistent. In this case your comments are just another manifestation of your double standard. You say my tone is inappropriate; I say on the contrary, it is entirely appropriate. Your friend is doing something harmful, and you are making excuses. The one fact is ugly, and the other shameful. I have presented an argument in support of these statements, which remains unrefuted. My tone fully reflects the nature of these facts, and how I feel about them. Tell me my analysis is wrong, and then you may tell me my tone is inappropriate.

Someone who isn't angry finds it easy to debate with courtesy. But someone who isn't angry is not inclined to provoke debate in the first place. You certainly enjoy the luxury of not being angry; that much is plain. Unfortunately, Karen could wait a thousand years to hear a peep out of you.

> But your tone is not the point here (unless you personally
> meant to hurt
> me?) and what I really want to respond to is your carefully reasoned
> arguments, when, like I say, I have a chance to think my own position
> through more carefully.

No, of course didn't mean to hurt you -- in fact the suggestion comes as a surprise to me. But I will admit to this: in addition to presenting a purely rational argument, I also mean to shock and perturb you; I mean to cause you difficulties. As long as my shock tactics are overt and have rational support, I think this is perfectly fair.

OK, it's late, I've got to wrap this up. Two final placeholders:

1. Why do you invoke the "but where do you draw the line" argument in reference to Karen, but this abruptly goes out the window in reference to Josef? Where did that argument disappear to? What does this mean?

2. What does it mean that, as you feel the intellectual noose tightening, you try to pop the discussion into a different dimension by saying, "but where is there room in this for how people feel about things?" but as soon as you see how this objection applies to Josef, you abandon it instantly? What was that all about?

--Andrew

Townsend letter 11/8/2002

(11/8/02 -- Letter to Andrew Hammoude in response to his notes of 10/25/02)

I am specie-ist.

Despite the fact that you never responded to my e-mail, I have been thinking a lot about the notes you sent me. I would like to respond to some of the points you raised:

You describe the portion of Karen’s work that involves animal experimentation as the moral equivalent of slave trading and child prostitution. Once again, I’m going to use the words absurdly reductionist to characterize your contention here, because, quite simply, it is absurdly reductionist. Are you a complete moral relativist? Is there not a spectrum of good and evil along which you range people?

To put it another way, let me respond to your “Second Defense” regarding benefits. Again, do we not acknowledge a moral continuum here? I guess I do. There is good and evil in this world and it does a disservice to intelligent discourse to engage in the kind of sophistry that equates Karen’s work with that of a sex trader because both could be justified in terms of the benefits they bring. “Benefits may be big, and benefits may be small, but despite Karen’s attempt to relabel them with lofty phrases such as ‘important work,’ that is all that they remain.” I can’t agree with this statement. Put quite simply, the environmentally conscious work that Karen does causes pain to fish but ultimately is done to effect positive ecological change, something many people can agree is a “good” worth the pain caused. I haven’t done a poll or anything, but I suspect most people whom we identify as moral and ethical beings would agree that the harm caused to a child prostitute far outweighs the benefit produced. It doesn’t matter if the john can try to justify raping a child on the basis of the physical thrill (and he wouldn’t in any case). The point is that in our moral community, such as it is, we are capable of distinguishing between these two examples and seeing one as “worse” than the other.

Why is this? Well, I guess I have had to look into my heart and face the (ugly, in your view) truth that, quite simply, I see animals as lower than humans in the pecking order of our moral community. I am specie-ist. What’s the big difference for me among the three examples you cite -- slave trading, child prostitution, and experimenting on fish? The first two involve people; the final one involves animals. But I won’t leave it at that. I would describe myself as anti-vivisectionist regarding animal testing that could be described as “frivolous.” Is there no difference between using rabbits to test cosmetics and subjecting fish to toxins in an effort to better understand and improve our natural environment? And what about the fact that the vast improvement in the general health of Western populations in the last two centuries is due almost entirely to research which involved animal experimentation. Are you willing to give up vaccines, antibiotics, general anesthesia, complex operative techniques, heart/blood pressure medication or cancer treatments?

So you would say, who decides what is “frivolous”? And I would answer, we do, as a society. We weigh the benefits (not whether they are big or small, but qualitatively) and we make a decision. And we do this a thousand times a day. So to answer your challenge to me: no, I don’t describe the terrorist bomber’s actions as a “necessary evil.” Again, we have a spectrum of behavior here. Clearly killing people to publicize your cause is the wrong path to take. But interestingly enough, like the work that Karen does, the terrorist bombing happens precisely because the group -- whether Palestinians or white supremacists -- feels there is no alternative. But we both know there are alternatives for these groups. They can lobby for their cause, they can appeal to the international community. You don’t like the work that Karen does and you think that she should stop doing it, so her alternative you would say, is to cease doing it. No, we don’t have to know what toxins kill which fish in our environment (or how to stop HIV from killing off Africa’s populations). But we want to know, not just for our own benefit, but for our environment (including the fishes’) benefit.

So, to respond to your Question 2, it would follow from what I’ve argued, that no, I would not “use the glib phrase ‘necessary evil’” regarding toxicological experimentation on a human being. But fish are not human beings.

As for Question 3, again, absurdly reductionist. Nobody’s hands are entirely clean in this world. John Franco may not be in favor of a woman’s right to choose (though I doubt this); Ursula may defend the scum of the earth (I don’t know what kind of lawyer she is); Scott Shaw actually told me that he had been involved in toxicological research on fish in the past and that he had told you about that.* But I think you would describe him as a friend. Shall we kick him out of the book group because of it? What about me? Now that you know my views will you kick me out too? I’ve heard you occasionally eat meat but I still respect your right to call yourself a vegetarian. We both know there is a world of difference between Joseph Mengele and Karen or any of the other people I have mentioned. Again, it is a matter of the qualitative differences that you so breezily dismissed on page 2. Karen causes pain to fish to produce a benefit that many would agree is a good benefit. Mengele experimented on Jews to produce a benefit that in moral terms can only be described as “bad.” Can you not see the difference here?

Why are we able to make these judgements? Because we are an evolving moral community. Maybe one day we will have evolved sufficiently to find specieism and animal experimentation unacceptable. But until the time comes that we have figured out how to train heart surgeons without having them experiment first on dogs (and I pray that day comes soon) I know what my choice is going to be every time between saving my dad’s life and a dog’s.

You know I just re-read what I have taken to calling your “manifesto,” and I have to pause here in my notes and just tell you how upsetting and insulting I found your tone to be. I considered you a friend, but friends do not write things like “I can run rings around you. From my point of view the discussion is rather like playing a game with a child...Shame on you...When you use the phrase ‘necessary evil,’ I know instantly where this comes from and what it says about you.” Shame on you, Andrew! You don’t know the first thing about me. I attempt to engage you in polite debate and you reply with sneering contempt and anger and I really don’t deserve that.

It is not that I don’t think there are valid reasons to be anti-vivesectionist. And we could debate this until the cows come home (or get killed off by the fastfood industry). You know my position now. I am specieist. I believe that we are more important than animals. So, yes, I am a product of my time and values. But what, I wonder, gives you the right to attack me and Karen so vehemently? Look at yourself. Are you entirely morally consistent? Where are the microchips made that you use in your computer work? If I learn that they are made by people in bad conditions working for peanuts does that give me the right to compare you to Adolph Hitler? You would be right to think such a comparison laughable.

I wanted to learn of your views and appreciate that you took the time to write them out for me. But I find your tone and approach profoundly alienating. I don’t want to bring this up at the book group for a vote, because first of all, Karen does not want to have anything to do with you and I can’t say I blame her. But I wish you hadn’t taken the arrogant, condescending, and frequently insulting tone that you did. As I mentioned in my e-mail, even in a passionate debate such as this, there is room for courtesy and I have rarely seen you be discourteous in the book group. In fact, I have always liked you a lot. But your manifesto showed me a side of you that I really don’t like. And it is a shame, because I have really enjoyed participating in the group, and I had considered you a friend.

* Because I was deeply upset about this, I talked to Scott about our exchange and he mentioned that he had told you about this when you and Bonnie were learning to scuba dive -- that he himself had learned how when catching fish for cancer experiments at Fred Hutchinson laboratories.

Hammoude email 6/8/2003

Hello Louise,

I just wanted to let you know that this evening I dropped off my response to your letter of last November -- or at least most of it. I have responded to most of the points you made, but there are still some important things remaining. I will provide those shortly.

But I have taken a disgracefully long time to respond, and I feel embarrassed at every book group meeting. So rather than let another meeting go by with no reply, I am giving you what I've written so far, so you can start thinking about it if you wish.

I have spent quite a bit of time these last two weekends putting my responses down in writing, and it will take me a couple more hours at least to organize my remaining thoughts. But I expect that I will do that and send them to you this week some time.

Hoping this leads to clarity and honesty,
Andrew

Townsend email 6/26/2003

Hi, Andrew.

I have only skimmed and hope to read and respond to your letter, but I am guessing it won't happen anytime soon. I am swamped with work, my husband is away in L.A. on a research fellowship most weekdays, and I have just resumed full-time status at the company I work for. I still find these issues of great importance, but alas, more mundane matters intervene. Once I find a hole in my schedule, I will take the time to write a reasoned response.

Louise

Hammoude email 6/30/2003

Hello Louise,

Glad you have had a chance to skim my letter.

I had intended to write the remainder of the letter soon after dropping it off, but I have let a few weeks slip by -- sorry. But today I did manage to sit down and write my remaining thoughts, and I think I have covered everything important I wanted to say.

But I have asked a friend to look it over before sending it to you. I have written in my usual, very blunt and uncompromising style, and I think it wise to have a third party comment before committing myself.

But I'll send it to you soon.

--Andrew

Hammoude email 7/14/2003

Hello Louise,

I dropped the complete version of my response to your letter in the mail today -- it should get to you in a day or two.

Sorry I've taken so very long to give you a coherent response. As I said before I asked a friend for review and critique -- I got some valuable feedback, but then it took me another week or so to sit down and implement the recommended changes. This final version supercedes the partial version I gave you a few weeks ago.

Could you let me know by e-mail that you have received the letter, and also when you have given it an initial reading? This small courtesy will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Andrew

Townsend email 7/16/2003

I received and read your letter. If you can send me an electronic version,
I can respond point by point, but not right away.

Hammoude email 7/19/2003

Hello Louise,

Sorry about the slow response--these days it seems that everything non-work related gets put off until the weekend.

Thank you for your acknowledgment of my letter, and for taking the time to read it--both of these things are greatly appreciated.

As you requested, here is the letter in electronic format. I originally created it in FrameMaker format, and have exported it to RTF format, and as a result a few things got screwed up -- all the quotes and bullet symbols are appearing as weird characters. But all the text is OK. Let me know if you have any problems opening and reading the file.

I understand that you are not able to respond right away, but I look forward to hearing your eventual responses.

Thanks,
Andrew

Hammoude letter 7/13/2003

July 13, 2003

Hello Louise,

Please excuse the very long time it has taken me to respond to your letter, written November 8, 2002. I have been very stressed, working in three major directions all at once, and there has been almost no time for anything else. And, of course, once something gets put on the back burner, it can be very hard to move it back to the front burner.

But I haven’t forgotten about our interactions, and at last I have some time to make a response.

What follows consists of two major pieces: the impersonal, followed by the personal. The impersonal piece is under the heading The Thing Itself, below. In this section I address the external, material component of our dispute.

The personal piece appears later, under the heading Personal Liabilities. In this section I address the personal elements of our dispute; specifically your complaints about my disrespectfulness, and my response to this.

The Thing Itself

I will answer your points in the same order you made them. You are in Arial; I am in Times Roman.

[Editorial note: In the original document quoted Townsend text is shown in a contrasting font. For website display, quoted Townsend text is shown in blue text.]

1. “You describe the portion of Karen’s work that involves animal experimentation as the moral equivalent of slave trading and child prostitution. Once again, I’m going to use the words absurdly reductionist to characterize your contention here, because, quite simply, it is absurdly reductionist. Are you a complete moral relativist? Is there not a spectrum of good and evil along which you range people?”

But why is my contention absurdly reductionist? Merely repeating your assertion, with the word “is” italicized for emphasis, is no argument at all.

I have indeed made the assertion that Karen can be compared to a slave trader or a child prostitutionist. But I have done much more than this: I have actually presented a case. My case has several elements, but the essential heart of the matter is this:

Karen is the perpetrator of a coercive action against a victim, in which the perpetrator benefits at the victim’s expense.

This is very abstract and general, but we can add some specifics: Karen is involved in something exceedingly inhumane. She causes prolonged suffering to sentient creatures. And she has a history of doing this, throughout her professional career.

Every single one of these statements, both the abstract distillation and the specific details, applies with equal force to the slaver, the prostitutionist, and Karen. Therefore on this basis, they are all morally equivalent.

This, Louise, is an argument. I have made a statement, but I have also supported it with facts and reasoning. The claimed facts can be examined for truth or falsehood; the reasoning can be examined for logical integrity. My argument is right there on the page, in black and white. Where is yours? Which of my claimed facts do you dispute? At which point does my reasoning fail?

(By the way, if you need to review the entire argument, I can return a copy of my notes for you to look at.)

There is a second dialectical principle that needs to be established at this point. Note that what I actually said is slightly different from the characterization you have given. What I said in fact was this: “At this point in the debate, I think we may agree, Karen has yet to distance herself from moral equivalence to a slave trader, or a child prostitutionist.”

The key phrase is “at this point in the debate,” and, four paragraphs up in this letter, “on this basis.” What is my point here? My point is that I understand that my argument is not complete. But nothing we have said so far is complete. I start off by saying:

Karen causes harm and suffering to others

This is the opening challenge in virtually all moral arguments; it is the white pawn-to-king-four of almost every moral debate. But is this conclusively damning? No, of course not, because in this case it is open to the response:

But there are significant benefits

This is the black pawn-to-king-four of this particular debate; it is the pat answer that trips out of the mouth of every vivisectionist—and every supporter of vivisection, like yourself. Is this sufficient for conclusive redemption? No, because it is open to my white knight-to-queen’s-bishop-three:

But all acts of depredation have their beneficiaries

Every one of the above statements is simplistic, but they become progressively less so. Each adds a little more complexity, and thus approaches the ultimate truth a little more closely. But these are only the opening moves in a lengthy debate.

Karen says what she does is OK because there are benefits; I then set out to destroy this particular defense as stated. And my tactic is to point out that if we are talking about benefits pure and simple, then Karen is morally equivalent to a slaver or a child prostitutionist. My argument may be simplistic or it may not; that is up to you to demonstrate. But its purpose is to destroy an even more simplistic argument: vivisection is OK because there are benefits. And in this, it succeeds.

I am well aware that my argument is not complete. I know that it is open to various possible rebuttals; indeed it is deliberately structured that way. My problem is that there are many ways in which you could answer; there many specious arguments you can come up with. I do not know which ones you will try, and I cannot possibly answer them all in advance.

Like a game of chess, this proceeds a move at a time. When I see your next move, then I will block it. When I hear your answers, then I will discredit them, or expand on my own case, or whatever is necessary. But I need to hear a coherent argument from you. The use of italics, the repetition of an assertion with vehemence, is worthless.

So I must ask you once again: why is my assertion absurdly reductionist? Is Karen doing something inhumane, yes or no? Is she, or is she not, the perpetrator of a coercive action against a victim, in which the perpetrator benefits at the victim’s expense? Yes or no?

Two other loose ends from your opening paragraph. First, you ask, “Are you a complete moral relativist?” I will base my answer on the following definition which you gave in one of your e-mails:

What I meant by "moral relativist" was one who in a blanket assessment views all evils in the world as morally equivalent because "it's all relative."

I’m still not sure what this really means, and in any case this definition is ambiguous, because the basis for moral equivalence has not been defined—in other words, we have not stated the criteria for equivalence. But my answer is that according to my personal morality, I do not view all evils in the world as morally equivalent, therefore according to your definition I would not be a moral relativist.

Second, you ask, “Is there not a spectrum of good and evil along which you range people?” The answer to your question is: Yes, there is a spectrum of good and evil along which I range people. If there is a point to be made here I’ll leave you to make it; in any event, those are my answers.

2. “Again, do we not acknowledge a moral continuum here? I guess I do. There is good and evil in this world and it does a disservice to intelligent discourse to engage in the kind of sophistry that equates Karen’s work with that of a sex trader because both could be justified in terms of the benefits they bring.”

Yes, like you, I do acknowledge a moral continuum. Again, your question is asked and answered, but you’ll have to spell out where you are going with this.

Regarding your second sentence, several things. First, you do not accurately capture the crux of my argument when you say “...equates Karen’s work with that of a sex trader because both could be justified in terms of the benefits they bring.” This phrasing is a bit garbled, so let’s be absolutely clear on what I am saying. I am saying two key things: first, that both Karen and the child prostitutionist are the perpetrators of a coercive action against a victim, in which the perpetrator benefits at the victim’s expense. And second, that in each case the injury to the victim is far from trivial, that both Karen and the child prostitutionist cause severe harm to their victims.

These two considerations are the heart of the analogy, and in these respects the two situations are identical. Forgive me if I am being repetitive, but if you fail to address the main thrust of my argument, you leave me little choice to repeat it.

Next, you have labelled my assertion as sophistry. But where is the sophistry in this? Is my fundamental assertion above, that in these respects the two situations are identical, true or isn’t it?

One way of countering my assertion would be to say something like “Well, that’s all true, but there is more to it than that.” But you are not saying this. You are not saying “true, but incomplete”; you are saying “not true at all.” When you characterize something as sophistry, you are claiming that the argument is inherently false.

So, why is my assertion sophistical? Why is it “a disservice to intelligent discourse”? Merely using these words and phrases without any supporting argument tells me nothing—it is as worthless as your use of italics. You must provide an explanation, otherwise the discussion is useless.

Your letter to me is riddled with, if not exactly sophistry, at least intellectual confusion. But it is hardly sufficient for me just to assert this without support. It is my responsibility to put my finger precisely on the confusion, and address it with clarity. The same is true for you. If you are going to contend sophistry, then you must support this contention with a coherent argument.

3. In response to my statement, “Benefits may be big, and benefits may be small, but despite Karen’s attempt to relabel them with lofty phrases such as ‘important work,’ that is all that they remain,” your reply is, “I can’t agree with this statement.”

You can’t agree, or you don’t agree? Or, as in the case of “I want” versus “should be,” are you unable to tell the difference?

This statement of mine, that ultimately Karen’s work is motivated by a desire for benefits, is a fundamental underpinning of my entire argument, so I will be defending it strongly. Though you state flatly that you disagree with this statement, you present no valid counter-argument. I assume that your follow-on sentence to this (quoted below as the first sentence of your point 4), is intended to be your counter-argument. But this follow-on sentence appears to be no more than yet another re-statement of the fact the Karen’s work has benefits—in other words, it does nothing to negate my statement.

So let me ask you directly: If the positive consequences of Karen’s work are not benefits, then what are they? When you categorically disagree with my statement that her work is ultimately about benefits, I take it that you consider that her work somehow transcends the realm of benefits, and enters into some other realm, perhaps one more pure and lofty. So what is this other realm, and how, exactly, does Karen’s work achieve transcendence into it?

4. “Put quite simply, the environmentally conscious work that Karen does causes pain to fish but ultimately is done to effect positive ecological change, something many people can agree is a “good” worth the pain caused. I haven’t done a poll or anything, but I suspect most people whom we identify as moral and ethical beings would agree that the harm caused to a child prostitute far outweighs the benefit produced. ... The point is that in our moral community ... we are capable of distinguishing between these two examples and seeing one as “worse” than the other.”

There is a great deal wrong with this paragraph.

(a) First, your statement that Karen’s work is “done to effect positive ecological change” is very simplistic. Yes, this is part of the truth, but it is only a small part, and a complete accounting of all the personal and societal motivations behind Karen’s work encompasses much more than this.

What was the reason for the war with Iraq? Was it to disarm a brutal dictator? Well, sure, this was part of the reason. But anyone who thinks that this was the principal motivation is completely clueless.

Like national foreign policy, animal experimentation is driven by many vested interests, most of which have nothing to with the superficially apparent objective. I do not have the time or the space to justify this here, so for the moment let me just state that I strongly dispute your assertion that Karen’s work “ultimately is done to effect positive ecological change.” This is only one among a more complex set of motivations, such as money, prestige, and other factors.

(This is a relatively minor point at this stage of the debate, but it will become extremely important later. Thus far I have been focussing on the debit side of the ledger, and pointing out the very considerable harm that Karen does to her victims. Later I will be turning to the credit side of the ledger, and pointing out that the benefits of her work are far less than I think you imagine. I suspect that you are carrying around in your mind an image of pure air and crystal-clear waters, free from our manufactured poisons, supporting a happy and healthy ecosystem, and all of this directly attributable to Karen’s work. But this is, of course, a complete fantasy. But I’m anticipating a stage of the debate we haven’t reached yet—for the moment, you may continue to keep this image in mind.)

(b) But by far the biggest problem, implicit throughout your paragraph above, is this. In considering any issue, one can address the merits of The Thing Itself, or one can address the merits of Some Other Thing, that may, or may not, be related to The Thing Itself.

Animal experimentation is one thing. Societal attitude towards animal experimentation is a different thing, and it is important to distinguish clearly between these two things. I am challenging you about the first thing; but in the above paragraph you are addressing yourself entirely to the second thing.

I am not particularly interested in
(A) whether most people would agree that the harm caused to a child prostitute outweighs the benefit produced;
rather, what I am interested in is
(B) whether the harm caused to a child prostitute outweighs the benefit produced.

Likewise, I am not challenging you on the basis of
(A) whether most people consider that Karen’s work is justified;
rather, I am challenging you on the basis of
(B) whether Karen’s work is justified, in any given frame of reference.

Though you seem to think otherwise, the answers to questions like (A) tell us very little about the answers to questions like (B).

In any society there will be some sort of consensus, and the society will act upon that consensus. This was true of the Taliban; it was true of white South African apartheid; and it is true of our own Western liberal democracy. (In this context I am of course speaking of the society in which power is vested, such as the religious patriarchy, or the white minority—not the broader society which may also include a large disfranchised component.)

If this societal consensus and action were a reflection of true moral integrity, if it were a manifestation of genuine societal accountability based on frank and earnest self-examination, then you would have a point. But it isn’t, and you don’t.

Throughout history, human societies have behaved appallingly—not human individuals, I emphasize, but human societies. Slavery, horrific colonial exploitation, the destruction of numerous indigenous peoples, the tyrannical repression of women—the list goes on. As a student of history, you surely know that societies are notoriously negligent in analyzing the true and complete consequences of their actions. If you think that our own society is any different; if you feel that our society can be relied upon to act with wisdom and humanity, then you are living in a dreamworld.

We can either think for ourselves, or we can simply adopt the beliefs of those around us. Unlike yourself, I am unwilling to place my faith in the values, beliefs and actions of my society.

I am not just challenging the moral legitimacy of vivisection. Since vivisection is overwhelmingly supported by our society, I am therefore in the same breath also challenging the moral integrity of the society that supports it. Maybe I didn’t make this clear before; let me make it clear now. Not only am I saying that Karen is morally corrupt, I am saying that so are you, and so are the legions of others who share your mentality.

It is true, as you say above, that “many people can agree,” and “most people...would agree,” and so on. But as a man who can think for himself, what is that to me? The society that reaches this consensus, and that countenances animal experimentation, is nothing more than multiple copies of Louise.

(c) Finally, in your ending sentence “...we are capable of distinguishing between these two examples...,” I object to your use of the word “capable.” I will grant you this: our society does distinguish between those two things. But your use of the word “capable” implies that this distinguishing represents an intellectual success; whereas I am saying it represents a failure.

You are conflating two things: societal action, and societal accountability. You seem to think that because our society acts in a certain way, this means that this action is based on well-founded principles—the result, perhaps, of lengthy and difficult intellectual birthing.

I see the action all right, but I don’t see the accountability. It is misleading to say that our society is “capable” of distinguishing between human and animal suffering, just as it is misleading to say that the Taliban were “capable” of distinguishing between the value of a man and a woman.

A small point, perhaps. But one more example of a pervasive lack of clarity in your thinking—in this case a failure to distinguish clearly between societal action, and genuine societal accountability.

5. “I have had to look into my heart and face the (ugly, in your view) truth that, quite simply, I see animals as lower than humans in the pecking order of our moral community. I am speciesist.”

Ah, now we come to the real heart of the matter.

This, of course, has been the fundamental truth all along, and everything else you have said has been smoke screen. The simple fact is, you are organically constructed to react to suffering with widely differing degrees of concern or indifference, depending on your sense of affinity with the subject.

Note that nothing in your letter so far (and the rest is no different) stands up to close scrutiny. You can produce a string of specious justifications: it’s OK because there are benefits; it’s OK because of the qualitative nature of these benefits; it’s OK because society implicitly sanctions it.

But these are all ad hoc rationalizations, selected a posteriori to support a predetermined conclusion. Faced with a sustained challenge, eventually you are compelled to make the above confession.

This is progress Louise; congratulations on reaching this understanding of yourself.

The good news for you is that this is the truth, and is therefore completely unassailable by me.

But there is also some bad news for you. First, note that personal inclination is most emphatically not a moral justification. If it were, every perpetrator of harm to others, who simply felt that his victims were of lesser account, would have an instant moral defense.

Second, this statement about yourself places you in the same class as every person who simply feels differently about different constituencies of victim. You are suddenly aligned with every racist, every sexist, every homophobe on Earth.

The racist feels that blacks (let’s say) are of lesser account. Why? Well, the real reason is that this is genetically hard-wired into him—it is a fundamental part of human nature to exercise lesser consideration towards those with whom we feel lesser affinity. But he doesn’t understand this in these terms; he doesn’t understand that evolution has wound him up like a little clockwork toy and let him go; he isn’t capable of understanding his own nature and transcending it. He just knows that blacks are different; other; less deserving of consideration. He knows this.

The racist exists inside an intellectual box. And inside this box he is perfectly comfortable. While those of us outside the box can see how benighted and ugly a person he really is, he sees none of this. On the contrary, despite his mistreatment of blacks, he continues to think of himself as a moral and compassionate person. How does he accomplish this amazing trick? It’s really quite simple: it is axiomatic to him that blacks are (to use your repugnant phrase) “lower in the pecking order,” and so his personal morality is in no way compromised.

All of this applies, mutatis mutandis, to you. Just as it applies with little change of wording to the sexist; to the member of a patriarchal society which strips women’s lives of almost all meaning and fulfillment; to the man who is willing to murder his sister as an honor killing, and think himself the better person for it. Just as it applies to a thousand other examples of people who countenance the oppression, exploitation or injury of others because they see them as “lower in the pecking order.”

They have their axioms; you have yours. The vivisectionist/racist/sexist simply sees the animal/black/woman as being worthy of lesser consideration than some other group, with whom he identifies more closely. And to each, clutching their articles of faith within their respective boxes, this all makes complete sense.

So, is this an ugly truth about yourself? Since ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, let me assure you that it is.

6. “What’s the big difference for me among the three examples you cite—slave trading, child prostitution, and experimenting on fish? The first two involve people; the final one involves animals.”

But the real thrust of my questioning, that you have left unanswered is this: why does this make any moral difference? You have correctly identified a factual difference between the things you oppose and the thing you support, but anyone can do this, about anything. The slaver and prostitutionist can do exactly the same thing; it is trivially easy to identify factual differences between one thing and another. Yes, agreed, animals are not people; blacks are not whites; children are not adults. But to all three of you, and to the proponent of any form of exploitation, I ask the same question: why does this make any difference? How does this factual difference constitute a moral justification?

7. “I would describe myself as anti-vivisectionist regarding animal testing that could be described as “frivolous.” Is there no difference between using rabbits to test cosmetics and subjecting fish to toxins in an effort to better understand and improve our natural environment?”

Yes, there is a difference. What is your point?

8. “And what about the fact that the vast improvement in the general health of Western populations in the last two centuries is due almost entirely to research which involved animal experimentation. Are you willing to give up vaccines, antibiotics, general anesthesia, complex operative techniques, heart/blood pressure medication or cancer treatments?”

It is true that historically, the benefits you describe have largely been the result of research involving animal experimentation. However, this does not mean that animal experimentation is/was necessary for those benefits. Historical causality is one thing; logical necessity is another. You are conflating those two things.

Regarding your question, my answer is this. To the extent that the alleviation of suffering in one constituency is accomplished by the imposition of greater suffering on another constituency, I am ready to prohibit the alleviation of suffering by such means. So in this case, yes, I am willing to give up everything you mentioned.

Question asked, question answered. What is your point?

9. “So you would say, who decides what is “frivolous”? And I would answer, we do, as a society. We weigh the benefits (not whether they are big or small, but qualitatively) and we make a decision. And we do this a thousand times a day.”

(a) No, I would not ask such a weak question. What you are saying here is not much more than a variation on your point 4 above. In point 4 you were talking about societal consensus; here, you are talking about societal decision-making, but these are practically the same thing. In point 4 you observed that societal consensus backs you up; agreed. Here you are pointing out that societal action is the result of societal decision-making; also agreed.

But again, so what? In any society there are decision-making mechanisms, and those mechanisms will result in societal action. Example: a whole bunch of complicated things happened; the cogs turned, the cams lifted, and we went to war with Iraq. All quite clear and straightforward.

Your implication of course, is that societal decision-making mechanisms can be relied upon to result in wise and humane action. Your use of the phrase “we weigh the benefits,” implies that societal decision-making is a careful, thoughtful, deliberative process, in which every affected constituency receives full representation and consideration.

But Louise, it is time you learned that it just isn’t so. The real functioning of society is this: the people who are running the show do whatever they want. Sure, there will be fine talk of accountability, and responsibility, and justice, and all the rest of it. But the reality is this: with few exceptions, the people in charge will act in their own self-interests.

Even the word “decision” itself is misleading in this context—the truth is that societies do not “decide” in any formal sense at all; they simply do. The counterexamples to your idealized notion of societal decision-making are glaring and abundant. I have already cited the Taliban and South African apartheid; both of these societies “weighed” and “decided,” and we have seen the decisions they came to. These are now defunct societies; among extant ones we see that today Saudi Arabia “weighs” and “decides” that women are to be strictly oppressed; that our own society “weighs” and “decides” to go to war with Iraq; that our own society “weighs” and “decides” that we will use Draize tests to ensure the safety of women’s cosmetics. I could readily give you a dozen more examples; with research I could give you limitless others.

So let me ask you this: do you have complete confidence that all these “weighings” and “decidings” are wise and honorable? If you were thinking clearly, Louise, you wouldn’t state your opposition to Draize testing in point 7, then in point 9 espouse a principle according to which you must support it.

If societal decision-making were a process of intellectual integrity and egalitarianism across all constituencies, then your point 9 might actually mean something. But it isn’t, and your point 9 tells us nothing.

(b) In describing our societal weighing of benefits, you use the phrase “not whether they are big or small, but qualitatively,” to describe the basis for this weighing. Let’s be quite clear on what you are saying here. You are introducing the qualitative nature of the benefits as an important consideration, and, you are saying, it is the qualitative nature of the benefits of Karen’s work that provides its moral justification. A qualitative assessment of benefits—this is the crucial thing that Andrew has overlooked throughout his entire analysis.

Here is what has happened. I left our simplistic opening exchange at white’s second move, which I repeat and expand upon here:

But all acts of depredation have their beneficiaries. On this basis alone Karen is no different from any other perpetrator of harm which results in benefits, such as the slaver, the child prostitutionist, or the terrorist.

Both you and Karen at this point elected to make the following black second move:

But the benefits of Karen’s work are qualitatively different from the other benefits you mention.

Which I then promptly countered with white’s third:

But the same can be said of all the perpetrators—each of them can claim that their benefits are qualitatively different from all the others.

So in this early board position, all of our protagonists remain on the same footing. All are doing something harmful to others; all can claim benefits; all can state that their benefits are qualitatively different to all others. This was all laid out very clearly in my notes to you.

This now presents you with the following problem. What you must now do, is demonstrate not just that Karen’s benefits are different, but that they are different in a way which provides moral justification.

You know that if the justification for Karen’s work reduces to benefits pure and simple, then on this basis alone she cannot readily be distanced from her co-protagonists. She is then revealed as just another perpetrator of exploitation and injury, motivated by nothing more than the pursuit of benefit.

Your challenge, therefore, is to find some distinguishing consideration, some vital difference, that can be inserted like a shim between Karen and all the others. But what can this difference possibly be? You know there must be one—you know this. You know it, because you know that Karen’s work is OK, but those other unpleasant things are not. So you must grope for a definition, an explicit expression of this crucial difference. But the true nature of the difference you are groping for is this: Louise feels that one thing is OK, but not the others. That elusive difference you are looking for does indeed exist, but it exists as an organic predisposition within yourself.

Your problem is to take a personal inclination, and elevate it to something external, definable, and defensible. But this problem is insoluble, because there is nothing external, definable, and defensible. The best you can do is say, without any support whatsoever, “the qualitative nature of the benefits makes one thing OK, but not the others.”

But then, of course, I will be demanding a full and complete explanation of why the qualitative nature of one thing justifies it, but the qualitative nature of another does not. I will be demanding explicit principles and definitions, not just your say-so.

Hmm ... another problem. You know that the qualitative nature of Karen’s work justifies it, but for the life of you, you cannot state why. So what do you do? Well, you just say society will make those decisions. But all you are doing here is replacing your own predispositions, with those of a society consisting of multiple clones of yourself.

Essentially, your point 9 amounts to this: “The qualitative nature of the benefits determines what is justifiable and what is not, and society will make that call.” But my question is this: how is that different from society simply acting upon its predispositions?

This is what it looks like when a society weighs the benefits (qualitatively, of course) and makes a decision: we have our Draize tests, the Spanish have their bullfighting, and the French their foie gras. It is not obvious to me why the qualitative nature of the benefit of foie gras—the enjoyment of that rich, delicious silky-smooth pate—justifies the grotesque cruelty involved, but as you have explained, the society in question has weighed the benefits (qualitatively, of course) and decided that it does. This society has had ample time to consider the issue carefully, so we may have confidence in their decision.

As you say, Louise, we do this a thousand times a day.

You have latched onto the qualitative nature of the benefits as the key redemptive factor, but you are just not thinking clearly. So let me ask you point-blank: In any act of depredation, what relevance does the qualitative nature of the benefit have? Why, exactly, is Karen’s work justified on this basis? I ask you to state your answer clearly, explicitly, and in writing, if you please.

(As I read your answer, I will be watching closely for a single key word, or one of its synonyms. And as soon as I see that word I will tug on it, and your argument will fall apart. Do you know what the word is?)

10. “...no, I don’t describe the terrorist bomber’s actions as a “necessary evil.” Again, we have a spectrum of behavior here. Clearly killing people to publicize your cause is the wrong path to take. But interestingly enough, like the work that Karen does, the terrorist bombing happens precisely because the group ... feels there is no alternative. But we both know there are alternatives for these groups. They can lobby for their cause, they can appeal to the international community. You don’t like the work that Karen does and you think that she should stop doing it, so her alternative you would say, is to cease doing it. No, we don’t have to know what toxins kill which fish in our environment... But we want to know, not just for our own benefit, but for our environment (including the fishes’) benefit.”

Many things wrong here.

First, why do you not apply the same tag of “necessary evil” to the terrorist bomber’s actions, that you apply so readily to Karen’s work? His actions appear to satisfy everything cited so far as justification for Karen’s work:

• The benefits this man is pursuing are among the most lofty and honorable imaginable: he is working to free his people from tyranny. So in common with Karen’s, his work is allegedly done to effect positive change. Furthermore:
• it is supported by societal consensus (of the oppressed society that creates terrorist bombers);
• the perpetrators presumably see their victims as “lower in the pecking order”;
• it is the result of societal weighing and decision-making (as always, by a societal constituency that does not include the victims);
• and finally, although you have yet to define the criteria for assessing benefits on a qualitative basis, the qualitative nature of freedom would seem to have a good chance of meeting your criteria when you eventually do define them.

So everything you have cited so far that justifies applying the tag “necessary evil” to Karen’s work also applies to the terrorist bomber—so why doesn’t he get this tag too? Why does all this work for Karen, but not for him?

“Clearly killing people to publicize your cause is the wrong path to take.”
Two things here. First, terrorist bombings are about much more than publicity. They are driven by several agendas, one of which is publicity, but this is typically not the central motivation. A much more important motivation is to make the oppressors share some of the pain of the oppression, so that they are compelled to take this into account as a consequence of their oppressive behavior. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn’t. Second, why, exactly, is this the wrong path to take? Despite your adverb this is not clear to me; please explain.

“we both know there are alternatives for these groups”
We know nothing of the sort. Oppressed peoples are facing the most grim, perilous and hopeless situation imaginable: other people. Other people who want something, that comes at their expense.

They are facing the Karens and Louises of this world, and God help them.

Your suggestion that oppressed peoples can solve their problem by lobbying, and appealing to the international community, is utterly preposterous.

We recently read Dark Star. Do you think that the German Jews could have escaped their fate by lobbying and appealing? Could the North American Indian have escaped cultural destruction by lobbying and appealing? The only thing that could possibly have saved these people would have been to organize and fight. Different times and different rules, perhaps. Very well, then consider some more contemporary situations—the Cambodians under Pol Pot, the Chileans under Pinochet, and today, the Kurds, the Palestinians, the Chechens, the Tibetans, the citizens of China, North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe—do you seriously imagine that they are likely to get anywhere by lobbying and appealing? I beg you, read some history.

You have the notion in your head that oppressed peoples can escape oppression by means of rational discourse, and the amount of energy it would take for me to dislodge this notion is huge. I’m not even going to try. Let me just say this: this notion of yours is breathtakingly naive, overwhelmingly contradicted by historical experience, and I dispute it strenuously.

“so her alternative you would say, is to cease doing it”
That is one alternative, certainly, and an entirely practical one. There are also other alternatives; I leave it to you to think what they might be. If you are completely stumped, let me know.

If you are trying to imply here that the essential difference that sets Karen apart from the terrorist bomber is that one has alternatives while the other does not, this doesn’t stand up to honest scrutiny. The only thing we can take for granted is that each of them has at least one clear-cut alternative: that of forbearing to harm others. Beyond that, we must analyze the merits of whatever other alternatives may be available. You seem to imply that Karen is in much more of a bind than the terrorist; he has a wide range of simple, easy, productive alternatives you suggest; whereas she has none at all. But this is just not true. From my understanding of the facts, the terrorist faces far, far more dire circumstances than does Karen. Karen merely faces an indifferent universe that may or may not give up its secrets easily. The terrorist faces the active, directed, wilful actions of a clever and powerful opponent. No question at all who faces the greater challenge.

So I repeat my question: why does Karen’s work receive your indulgence as a “necessary evil” but the terrorist does not? Clearly, explicitly, and in writing, if you please.

“No, we don’t have to know what toxins kill which fish in our environment... But we want to know”
Well of course we want to know. But every perpetrator of every act of depredation wants the resulting benefit. What is your point here—that moral justification is provided by the mere fact of wanting? I rather think not. If I have missed your point, please explain.

11. “I would not use the glib phrase ‘necessary evil’ regarding toxicological experimentation on a human being. But fish are not human beings.”

But why would you not use this phrase for experimentation on a human being? Look, Louise, I know damn well that you would not; this is not news to me. The really important part of my question, that you left unanswered, is this: ‘And if not, why not?’ The Socratic payoff comes when you are compelled to express your reasons, and we both get to take a good long look at them—this is when we can really come to grips with things.

“But fish are not human beings.”
While true, this statement appears to be completely lacking in relevance. I understand that fish are not human beings. I also understand that blacks are not whites, and that women are not men. To you, and to the racist and the sexist, I ask the same question: what does this have to do with anything? What difference does it make, that your victim is in one group, and you are in another?

12. As for Question 3, again, absurdly reductionist. Nobody’s hands are entirely clean in this world. John Franco may not be in favor of a woman’s right to choose ... Ursula may defend the scum of the earth ... Scott actually told me that he had been involved in toxicological research on fish in the past ... I have heard you occasionally eat meat ... We both know there is a world of difference between Joseph Mengele and Karen or any of the other people I have mentioned. Again, it is a matter of the qualitative differences that you so breezily dismissed on page 2. Karen causes pain to fish to produce a benefit that many would agree is a good benefit. Mengele experimented on Jews to produce a benefit that in moral terms can only be described as “bad.”

Why is my question absurdly reductionist? The context in which my question is posed is this: You say that a person’s moral value is one thing, but her contribution to book group is another. You say it is a pity not to have someone in the group, if they are going to be a good contributor. You made both of these statements quite clearly, so my understanding is that for you personally, moral considerations have no bearing on book group membership. Did I not understand you correctly? Is that not what these statements mean?

Very well then, I ask, if moral considerations play no role for you, then why may we not have Joseph Mengele in book group?

So what is reductionist about this question? Your mind seems to have latched onto the notion that I consider all misbehavior to be morally equivalent, from littering to genocide. But I never said this—this is just something you have mentally glommed onto.

You have completely missed the thrust of my question. You make the assertion that on principle, it is inappropriate to apply moral considerations to book group membership. I then set out to discredit this principle. Joseph Mengele does the job very nicely. My potential vetoing of Karen’s membership may be inappropriate on some other grounds; that is up to you to demonstrate. But it is not inappropriate on the basis of your implied principle. Get it?

“We both know there is a world of difference between Joseph Mengele and Karen”
No, we don’t know this; this is what we are arguing. My argument is that in fact there is not a world of difference between them, an argument which still has its legs. In the briefest of nutshells: they are both doing something vile and unnatural to their victims. This would appear to be an irrefutable point of similarity. When you have defeated this assertion, then you may make this statement, and not before.

“Again, it is a matter of the qualitative differences that you so breezily dismissed on page 2.”
Again, you refer to qualitative differences as the essential, differentiating, and redemptive factor. But you have not given a clear explanation or justification for this. In fact, as I argue in my response (b) to your point 9, the qualitative nature of the benefits is a complete red herring. I repeat my question to you: what relevance does the qualitative nature of the benefit have?

“Karen causes pain to fish to produce a benefit that many would agree is a good benefit.”
Well, even I would agree that the benefit is a good benefit. All benefits are good benefits; a benefit is something good by definition. If you meant to say “... that many would agree is morally justifiable,” then you are right again. But this is a repetition of your point 4, already rebutted comprehensively.

Mengele experimented on Jews to produce a benefit that in moral terms can only be described as “bad.”
In a letter characterized by confusion, this may be the highlight. How can a benefit possibly be bad? This would appear to be a contradiction in terms. I don’t know very much about the Nazis’ human experiments, but I know that in some of them the alleged purpose was to understand the body’s physiological reactions to hypothermia—how long it took for people to die from cold, how best they could be resuscitated, and so on. Their soldiers, their airmen, were dying of exposure, and they wanted to save their lives. How is it a bad thing to save the lives of ones countrymen? Please explain what you mean by a “bad” benefit.

(It occurs to me that you may be conflating two things: the benefits to the perpetrators, and the costs to the victims. Possibly you are investing the one with the characteristics of the other. But surely, no one could be so hopelessly muddled.

Or could they? Bonnie got wind of our dispute, and a couple of times asked me, “But wouldn’t the experiments actually benefit the fish?” Bonnie does not seem to be able to distinguish between two sets of fish: those who are the victims, and those who are the beneficiaries. I have no problem at all with the fish who benefit; indeed, I have no problem with any of the benefits we have mentioned: the clean environment, the orgasms, the free labor, the alleviation of male insecurity, the freedom from oppression, the pate. This is all wonderful stuff. The problem I have in every case is with the victim who must pay the price for this. Someone like Bonnie, who cannot distinguish between victims and beneficiaries, is obviously not worth talking to.)

13. “until the time comes that we have figured out how to train heart surgeons without having them experiment on dogs ... I know what my choice is going to be every time between saving my dad’s life and a dog’s.”

Two things here. First, you are very seriously misrepresenting exactly what benefit is purchased, and at what cost. The dog’s life does not buy your father’s life. The cost for the dog truly is its life; it will die with certainty. But if the dog is spared, your father will not die with certainty. The benefit from the dog’s death is an incremental change in the probability of surgical success—your father’s chances of survival might improve from 99.8% say, to 99.82%, or some other minuscule improvement. By characterizing the benefit as life versus death for your father, you overstate the benefit enormously. Also, you understate the cost to the dog. Dying is one thing. But the animal’s experiences up to the moment of death are something else altogether. The typical laboratory animal undergoes a lifetime of sensory deprivation, fear, intrusive procedures, and other highly unnatural experiences up to its death. This is as true for dogs used for surgical experimentation as for any other laboratory animal.

Thus you overstate the benefit, and you understate the cost. This is not an honest analysis on your part. Here we have a very clear example of intellectual bias, that I can easily point out. But your letter is pervaded throughout by similar kinds of bias, that require much more work on my part to expose.

Second, all you are doing here is stating that you want something, and that given the power, you will take it. You want your father to have slightly better odds, and so you will take the thing you want, despite the price that must be paid by the victim. My response to this parallels my response to your announced speciesism in point 5. Like your speciesism, your wanting, and your choosing on the basis of wanting, do not constitute a moral justification. If they did, all forms of exploitation would become instantly permissible. In every one of the examples of exploitation I have mentioned, without exception, the perpetrator wants, and he can say the same thing that you did: he knows what his choice is going to be every time.

Your statement 13 has absolutely no moral content whatsoever; it is merely a statement of how you can be expected to act when faced with a conflict of interest. My own father’s health is failing, and he suffers greatly from his ailments. His welfare means more to me, I can assure you, than your father’s, or any member of your family. Suppose I announce to you that I am ready to sacrifice the lives of your husband and daughter to make my father more comfortable. What does this tell you about me? Only that given the opportunity, I will act with ruthless self-interest.

Your statement says more than you may realize. Essentially it says that you are willing to sanction cruelty, exploitation, injury and death to others in the pursuit of your own interests. That is what it says, isn’t it? That you, Louise, wife and mother, Seattleite, book group member, are ruthlessly self-serving when your own interests are at stake?

14. “You know my position now. I am speciesist. I believe that we are more important than animals. So, yes, I am a product of my time and values.”

This is more or less a re-statement of your point 5 above, and everything I said there also applies here. But let me add one thing here, that may sharpen your thinking a bit. You say “we are more important.” My question is, more important to what? Importance is not an absolute; things are important or not in reference to something; in some context. So why are we more important, exactly?

(Of course, I’m pretty sure I know what answers you are going to give. But honesty and clarity require that your answers be explicitly stated, on the page in black and white, where we can take a good look at them.)

15. “But what, I wonder, gives you the right to attack me and Karen so vehemently?”

This is very easy: I am claiming no such right. What are you suggesting—that we need rights to do things? Whatever gave you that idea?

If you are going to adopt the principle that we need formal, explicit rights in order to do things, I believe this will come back to bite you in the ass. You may want to think carefully, before declaring this as one of your personal principles.

16. “Look at yourself. Are you entirely morally consistent? Where are the microchips made that you use in your computer work? If I learn that they are made by people in bad conditions working for peanuts does that give me the right to compare you to Adolph Hitler? You would be right to think such a comparison laughable.”

I try to be morally consistent to the best of my understanding and abilities. This does not mean that I truly am morally consistent, because (1) I am not omniscient, and (2) I have intellectual limitations. This means that I cannot know with certainty the true and complete consequences of all my actions. But on the basis of whatever understanding and intellectual capabilities I do have, I do the best I can to live my life humanely. If you or anyone else can draw my attention to any shortcomings in this regard, I am willing to consider the matter, and modify my behavior accordingly.

Regarding the microchips used in my computer work, it is true that I exist in a complex world in which everything is connected to everything else, and almost anything one does may cause harm somewhere. If you were to demonstrate to me that my use of computers causes severe harm to others, in a direct and connected way, then this is something I would be willing to take seriously. If you can make this case please do; I will be happy to listen.

“...compare you to Adolph Hitler? You would be right to think such a comparison laughable.”
No Louise, you are quite mistaken to characterize my thinking this way. I would not necessarily consider such a comparison laughable—it would depend entirely on the case you made. Either the comparison would be valid, or it would not. If the comparison were valid I would acknowledge it; if it were invalid I would argue against it. But I ask you to note this very well: if the comparison were invalid, I wouldn’t simply tell you it was laughable, or reductionist, or sophistry, or a disservice to intelligent discourse, and leave it at that. I would do more than this—I would give you a reasoned and coherent explanation of why the comparison was invalid.

Personal Liabilities

The above completes my response to everything you had to say about the impersonal, external issue—i.e. the moral characteristics of Karen’s work. I believe I have answered all your points—if I overlooked anything, please let me know.

In this section I will address the personal dimension of this matter; specifically our very negative reactions to one another as individuals. There are a couple of things to make clear at the outset. First, I have some harsh things to say to you, and I am not going to mince words. You have reproached me about my bad attitude; my response is that your values and presentation are so hugely offensive that it is unrealistic of you to expect anything else. To get you to understand this, I am going to speak plainly. It is not my intention to be gratuitously insulting, but neither will I be euphemistic. The facts are unpleasant; it requires unpleasant language to describe them. I intend to give full expression to the dismay, disappointment, anger, repugnance and contempt I have experienced throughout my interactions with you.

You do not have to hear any of this if you do not want to. I am going into it because you have challenged me on the basis of my attitude; very well, here is my answer. But it is not essential to me that we go into any of this. What matters to me most is the impersonal, analytical discussion under The Thing Itself, and I am less interested in whose feathers got ruffled, or why.

From my point of view it will be sufficient for me to acknowledge your reproaches, to tell you that I have very little sympathy for you, and to let you know that your own offensiveness is a mountain to my molehill. If you wish, we can simply leave it at that, and abandon this component of our dispute altogether. If so you may skip this entire section, and at this point jump straight to Moving Forward on page 25.

Second, throughout this section I will not be taking the same closely reasoned analytical approach that I took in The Thing Itself. It takes too long, and besides, to some extent we are talking about our individual perceptions here, which are less amenable to this form of presentation. So at certain points I will simply make assertions without formal logical support—this is just how I see things.

You have complained rather bitterly about my lack of courtesy and respect. I believe the following excerpts accurately capture the sense of your grievance:

“I have to ... tell you how upsetting and insulting I found your tone to be.”
“I find your tone and approach profoundly alienating.”
“I wish you hadn’t taken the arrogant, condescending, and frequently insulting tone that you did.”

Let me begin by accepting responsibility for my own liabilities. There is no doubt that at times I can be all the things you describe: arrogant, condescending, insulting, and all the rest of it. As I review the parts of my notes that caused you such indignation, I can see the characteristics you describe, though not nearly to an extent sufficient to cause your degree of upset—by my reading everything is mostly within appropriate bounds, given the context in which it was written.

But it is always easier to understand sins against oneself, than ones own sins against others; so let me not quibble with you. I am willing to concede that my attitude is everything you have said it is; and that this is not helpful in debate. I am willing to concede that my inappropriate aggression is a failing and a liability, and this is my own responsibility. To the extent that my attitude is a consequence of my own liabilities, I take full responsibility for it.

But my attitude is not only a consequence of my own failings. You have enormous liabilities of your own, and the attitude you see in me is also a consequence and a reflection of these liabilities, and their extreme offensiveness to me. On your side your liabilities are these: you are morally corrupt, you have clear intellectual limitations, and you are intellectually fraudulent. When you put this triple liability on display in the way you have, you cannot be surprised when the results are (respectively) disgust, condescension, and contempt.

Your feathers have been ruffled, and true to your human nature, you want to blame me for this. But the far greater part of the blame lies with you. You can blame me for my less than perfect conduct in dealing with you and Karen. But you must take full responsibility for the ugly vices of your own that result in the strong reaction you see in me.

First Liability: Moral Corruption

You stand in support of something of the utmost vileness. The obscenity of animal experimentation is quite obvious—it is abundantly, glaringly obvious to anyone who is willing to look at it squarely for a single second. Of the various nasty things we have considered—the slavery, the child prostitution, the terrorism—there is not one that comes even remotely close to matching the horrific cruelty that is visited upon laboratory animals every day, by people who function the way you do. Read the books, watch the videotapes. Educate yourself, then come back and tell me it isn’t so.

If you are going to support this, then you must accept responsibility for the disgust that this causes in others. You must understand that your position causes exactly the same feelings of repugnance that you feel in contemplating any of the other examples of exploitation we have mentioned. Of course, you want a special dispensation for your particular form of exploitation, your particular vested interest. But so does everyone else. Please understand that from where I’m standing, you are just one of the crowd.

Second Liability: Intellectual Incompetence

Take a look at the clarity and intelligence of what you have written. As I review your letter paragraph by paragraph, this is what I see:

• You apply the label “absurdly reductionist” without any explanation or support.
• You make allegations of “sophistry,” and “disservice to intelligent discourse,” again without explanation or support.
• In response to my assertion that Karen’s work is about benefits and no more, you flatly disagree, yet provide no explanation of how her work transcends the realm of benefits, and enters into some other realm.
• You cite societal consensus, and later societal action, as clearly being in support of animal experimentation; your implication, presumably, is that this provides moral justification. But not only does societal consensus/action provide no such assurance, this also represents an absolving of your responsibility to think for yourself, instead of blindly accepting the values of your society.
• You state frankly that you are speciesist—that you simply see animals as “lower on the pecking order.” Not only does this provide no moral justification whatsoever, it also aligns you with every other -ist, who simply sees the victims of his exploitation as “lower on the pecking order.”
• You have observed that there is a factual difference between animals and people, but given no explanation of why this provides moral justification for harming one but not the other.
• You point out that, historically, animal experimentation has yielded enormous benefits. But you do not explain why this provides moral justification for Karen’s work.
• You assert that it is the qualitative nature of the benefits that provides moral justification, but you provide no explanation or support for this.
• In seeking to pardon Karen while maintaining condemnation for the terrorist bomber, you suggest that one has an abundance of easy alternatives, while the other has none; a suggestion that doesn’t stand up to even the simplest examination. As part of this suggestion you come up with the stunningly facile advice to oppressed peoples of “lobbying and appealing.”
• When I ask you if we may have Josef Mengele in book group, you label the question as “absurdly reductionist,” but you provide no explanation as to why the question is absurdly reductionist. You refer to the qualitative differences between Karen’s benefits and Josef’s, but again, you provide no explanation of why the qualitative differences make any moral difference.
• You come up with the apparently self-contradictory, and completely unexplained, notion of a “bad benefit.”
• You state that given a choice between exploitation and forbearance, you will choose exploitation every time. As in the case of your speciesism, not only does this provide no moral justification whatsoever, it also aligns you with every other -ist who likewise knows what his choice will be, every time.
• You suggest that I may be morally inconsistent myself, but without making any clear or coherent case for this.

As far as I can see, that pretty much sums it up. Thus from your entire letter, only two solid things remain: the fact of your speciesism, and the fact that you will act on it. Everything else has been discredited, or remains unexplained, or has no dialectical content at all.

During our conversation outside Sarah’s house, you announced to me with some complacency that you had “managed to poke a few holes” in my argument. I am stunned that you consider any of the above to poke any kind of hole in anything. Everything in my notes still stands; you have refuted nothing. Where are these holes of which you speak? Please give me one clear, unambiguous example of something in my notes that you have conclusively refuted. If you have poked the holes you say you have, this should be quite easy for you.

Whether you know it or not, your letter has been demolished. I ask you to read both letters again very carefully, and see if you do not agree. If you still don’t see this, I suggest that you recruit the assistance of one or two trusted friends. Seek out the most ferociously intelligent, relentlessly questioning people you know, and ask them to review your letter and mine. Perhaps they may be willing to be gentle and diplomatic with you, in a way in which I am not.

As I review your letter and the bullet-point summary above, I inevitably make an assessment of the person whose thoughts they represent. And the assessment I make is that this is ... how can I put this politely ... someone who is not very good at analytical thinking.

In and of itself, this in no way makes you deserving of condescension—on the contrary, it makes you more deserving of patience. But when this incompetence is flanked by, and acts in the service of, your moral corruption and intellectual fraudulence, you cannot be surprised when a little condescension shows through the cracks.

Third Liability: Intellectual Fraudulence

The above shows that you are befuddled; that you have difficulty following an argument, and constructing a coherent one your own. Still, no great crime in that—we can’t all be geniuses, and shame on me for even mentioning it.

But you are displaying something much, much worse than simple befuddlement.

There are two entirely different ways of conducting oneself in a discussion. In one you seek the truth. In the other you have an agenda, a pre-defined conclusion, which you then try to justify by any means available. These two approaches are as different as night and day, and each of them is instantly recognizable for what it is. One of them has integrity; the other does not.

If you are seeking the truth you do certain things: (i) you consider the totality of the facts; (ii) you address the facts honestly; (iii) you provide clear support for your assertions; (iv) you establish your principles first, and only then do you apply them to the case at hand. And many other things besides, all in the spirit of genuine discovery.

But if you are seeking to justify an agenda you do things very differently. Here (i) you consider only those facts that support your case and ignore the rest; (ii) you address the facts with bias and misrepresentation; (iii) you make assertions and apply labels without providing any support; (iv) you fix your eye on the desired conclusion first, and then tailor your principles to support that conclusion. Any many other things, all in the spirit of justifying a pre-established agenda.

Your letter is shot through with all of these forms of misrepresentation. I can readily provide clear examples of every one, and will gladly do so if challenged. Anyone with decent LSAT scores could do the same thing. But right now I will limit myself to the fourth thing: the glaring difference between (a) principle leading to conclusion, and (b) conclusion leading to principle.

Note that frequently, when someone makes what they think is a “point,” they are basing the point on an implied principle—though the speaker may be quite unaware of this.

When you ask, “what gives you the right to attack me and Karen so vehemently?” the implied principle is that, in general, a formal right is required in order to challenge someone. When you cite societal consensus/decision making/action as justification for Karen’s work, the implied principle is that societal action is a reliable indicator of moral rectitude.

If you are thinking honestly, you establish principles without reference to any special case. You ask yourself the abstract question: What do we think about the exploitation of one constituency by another constituency? Under what circumstances is this or is this not justified? Only when you have a well-defined principle, established without influence by any conflict of interest, do you apply it to any particular case. This, Louise, is genuine personal and societal accountability.

But if you are thinking dishonestly, then you first establish the desired conclusion clearly in your mind, and then you select your principles on the basis of the desired conclusion. You don’t much care for my ferocious attack on you and Karen, and you would like to conclude that this is inappropriate. You need a principle that will support this conclusion, so you espouse the principle that I need an explicit right to do this. But this principle has not been established a priori—it has been conjured up a posteriori to suit your purpose.

You wish to conclude that Karen’s work is morally justifiable, while the actions of the slaver, the terrorist and so on, are not. You need a principle to support this. So you take a look at the two things you want to distinguish, and you look for a factual difference between them. Here’s an obvious one: society sanctions Karen’s work, but condemns those other things. Excellent. Now, having identified a factual difference, you then invent a principle based on that factual difference: you conjure up the principle that societal action demonstrates moral justification. Finally, you apply this principle to Karen and the others, and voila—Karen’s work is justified, but the others are not.

Louise, you are cheating. You don’t realize you are doing this, because your conflict of interest, your speciesism, your certainty, are so strong, that for you they are indistinguishable from reasoned, external truth. But the fact is that in almost every sentence, you have your thumb on the scale. You know what conclusion you want, so at every turn you select a principle that will support this conclusion, without bothering to think whether the principle is valid or not. To a tough-minded interlocutor like myself, this is glaringly obvious. Both of the above-mentioned principles are false, as anyone with half a brain can see in a second.

For purposes of exposition I have drawn a distinction between your intellectual incompetence and your intellectual fraudulence; but this an artificial distinction, because these are really both sides of the same coin. I am not saying that you are knowingly and deliberately making misrepresentations to me—that’s not it at all. It is more accurate to say that the fraudulence is just another manifestation of the incompetence. You start off with certainty, but you lack the intellectual rigor to examine the soundness of your certainty—you simply accept it as equivalent coinage to truth. Then you support your certainty with whatever argument comes most readily to hand, regardless of whether the argument has any integrity or not. This is intellectual fraudulence, but you have insufficient mental acuity to examine your own arguments and recognize them for what they are.

Nevertheless, this all makes me very, very angry. Throughout everything you have said to me, verbally and in writing, you have been guilty not merely of simple intellectual negligence, but also of this constant, fraudulent, self-serving partiality. This is a shameful abuse of the unique gift that most truly set us apart: our ability to reason with honesty. As a man who is fully committed to intellectual integrity, this is exceedingly offensive to me. When you offend me so greatly, you must understand that there is a price to be paid for this.

“I considered you a friend...”
“You don’t know the first thing about me.”

You considered me a friend, but I don’t know the first thing about you? Not only a silly statement, but also plainly incorrect. I know you the same way you know me: partially. I have had many discussions with you, literary and otherwise. I know you opposed the war in Iraq; this says something about a person. Let me take a couple of wild guesses: You don’t own a gun. You have never considered breast augmentation.

I know you support Karen’s work, and this says something monumentally significant about you. I heard your opening arguments, and like a blood sample this contains a universe of information; it reveals your character in every syllable.

Consider this: as you found yourself repeatedly blocked in your initial discussion with me, at a certain point you asked, by way of defense for the choices that Karen has made, “but where is there room in this for how people feel about things?” But moments later, as soon as you saw how this would apply to Josef Mengele, you abandoned the implied argument instantly. Why? Why did you invoke this argument, then immediately drop it? I’ll tell you why: like a glittering bauble, this argument was initially attractive to you as a means to defend Karen’s choices; a moment later, in reference to Josef, it suddenly lost its luster.

This simple exchange, long since forgotten by you, immediately tells me how you function intellectually: you function on the basis of conclusion leading to principle. You pick up whatever argument looks appealing on this basis; if it doesn’t work, you drop it.

You don’t much care for me writing things like, “When you use the phrase “necessary evil,” I know instantly where this comes from and what it says about you.” You may not like this statement, but I stand upon its accuracy. I believe I have you quite well characterized in this matter. I have just re-read the two paragraphs from my notes that offended you so much, and though it may have been ill-considered for me to write those paragraphs, and my words ill-chosen, nevertheless I stand upon their underlying factual accuracy.

“But where do you draw the line?”

When you first challenged me about this on the phone, almost the first thing out of your mouth, in reference to my potential vetoing of Karen’s membership, was “But where do you draw the line?”

The “where do you draw the line” argument is very, very common. It is also almost always fallacious. This argument is invoked whenever some sort of boundary, or limitation, or constraint is proposed, which someone doesn’t like. Here the implied principle is, that once we impose any sort of limitation, then we must of necessity impose that same limitation up to its most extreme extent. (Or perhaps the implication is that establishing the precise placement of the limit is going to be insolubly problematic. Typically, the speaker doesn’t even know himself.)

Your use of this argument is absolutely classic. I say I am ready to veto Karen on moral grounds, and you don’t like it. You want to conclude that this is inappropriate, so you need a principle that will support this conclusion. You promptly adopt the principle that exercising any form of moral discrimination is completely impractical. Establishing the location of any kind of discriminatory boundary is going to be impossible; so if we apply moral considerations to anyone, then we must apply them to everyone, and since none of us is without sin, then none of us may be in book group. We cannot possibly apply moral considerations to membership, you seem to be saying, because then no one would qualify. Am I understanding you correctly? Is that not your point here?

But notice that lines get drawn, quite successfully, all the time. On most stretches of Interstate highway the speed limit is 55 miles per hour. The drinking age is 21. The annual limit on 401(k) contributions is $12,000. Every one of these things is a line, a boundary between acceptable and unacceptable.

When it was first proposed to impose some limit on the speed of automobiles, I can well imagine some nitwit piping up with, “But where do you draw the line?” His implication being, of course, that if we impose any speed limit at all, then we must impose it all the way down to zero mph.

The notion that lines must always be at their extreme limit, or their precise placement rigorously defensible, is simply false. In general there are three choices:

1. There is no limit imposed at all (drive as fast as you want, drink at any age you want, contribute as much as you want).
2. The limit is placed at some intermediate position, somewhat arbitrary to be sure, but still representing an educated-estimate trade-off between desirable and undesirable.
3. The limit is imposed up to its maximum extent (speed limit is zero, you may not drink at any age, contribution is zero).

When someone invokes “where do you draw the line,” the truth is that they don’t want any kind of limit; in other words what they really want is choice # 1. Somebody comes along and proposes choice # 2, and the knee-jerk reaction is to assert that any choice # 2 will be impractical or arbitrary, and so must inevitably lead to choice # 3. But our speed limits and tax laws demonstrate that this isn’t so.

When I say I am ready to veto Karen, the fact is that you don’t like it. The conclusion you seek is that this is unreasonable or impossible, so you pluck out of thin air a principle that will lead to this conclusion. And a principle that will do the job is that choice # 2 is logically equivalent to choice # 3.

When you ask me, “where do you draw the line,” at that moment you place an unfortunate stamp on your forehead. Whenever you hear this from anyone, right off the bat you know that you are dealing with someone who is either young, or inexperienced, or not very smart, or dishonest. One of those things, for sure. People of intelligence and integrity do not reflexively pose this question, because they know it is worthless.

Why am I going into this so exhaustively? Because you have complained bitterly about my treatment of you, and I want you to begin to understand your own responsibility for this. The reason I became so aggressive with you so quickly when we began discussing this, is because you trotted out a string of fraudulent arguments just like this one. When I hear these kinds of arguments I become instantly hostile. An unfortunate reaction on my part, agreed. But one for which we are both responsible.

This is not quite the end of this particular thread.

When someone invokes an ad hoc principle to support a desired conclusion, one way of dealing with this is to carefully explain to them what is wrong with this in general, dialectical terms, as I have tried to do for you. But this takes an enormous amount of time and energy, and most people are not capable of thinking in these abstract terms in any case.

So instead, the classic maneuver is to take the implied principle, and immediately apply it to some other situation that clearly demonstrates its falsehood. Some bonehead is defending the Texas anti-sodomy laws. Desired conclusion: sodomy is depraved and wrong. So he says, “it isn’t natural—animals don’t sodomize one another.” Implied principle: doing things that animals naturally don’t do is depraved. So you retort, “animals don’t go to the cinema.” Boom. Principle invalidated; ring run around redneck.

So when you say “where do you draw the line,” in order to demonstrate the invalidity of your implied principle, I immediately retort “So then may we have Josef Mengele in book group?” My expectation is that you will put two and two together, and recognize that if drawing the line really is impossibly problematic, then we cannot object to Josef. Either Josef is in, or your principle is no damn good; figure it out for yourself.

Unfortunately, by this time you have completely forgotten the statement of yours that this was said in response to; it flew out of your head the moment you said. The only thing that gets through to you is “Josef Mengele,” and you immediately latch on to the idea that I am saying that Karen and Josef are morally equivalent, and moreover, that all misbehavior is morally equivalent. And you have been clamped onto this idea like a bulldog ever since.

When you say things based on immediate ad hoc expedience; when you don’t stop to think whether your comments well-founded or not; when you forget what you have said the moment you say it; when you are unable to relate what I say to what you said ten seconds previously; when you completely misunderstand my point—when you do all of these things, Louise, you must allow me to draw the obvious conclusions.

Andrew Attitude

If we were discussing calculus, say, and there were some abstract subtlety that you were having difficulty grasping, I can assure you I would be endlessly patient with you. But under those circumstances we would be engaged in a genuine quest for understanding—no agendas, no politics, no duplicity of any kind. Just a straightforward and honest seeking to understand what’s what.

But that is not what is going on here. Throughout our entire discussion you have shown pervasive intellectual prejudice. I know you are unaware of this. Blair or Bush are unaware of this in themselves also, but as I think you can see quite clearly, neither one of them is capable of stringing together two honest sentences. But for each of them, the conclusion they seek is so clear and compelling, that the desired conclusion becomes its own form of truth. The same is true of you. You have a certainty, and this certainty is so strong that you are not really doing any analysis at all—you know what’s what, so there is no need for analysis. Instead of analysis, you simply pick up whatever comes most conveniently to hand in support of your certainty, and you lob it at me. This is not what a genuine analysis looks like.

“I attempt to engage you in polite debate and you reply with sneering contempt and anger and I really don’t deserve that.”

You do deserve it, Madam. You stand in support of something monstrous, and you are using intellectual fraudulence to justify this. These are offensive, repulsive things, and they are fully deserving of anger and contempt.

If all we had were your incompetence, but this were accompanied by a basic humanity, by an instinctive compassion for all living things, and by an integrity of thought and word, then you would be quite right to berate me for my lack of respect. Under those circumstances you would be fully deserving of my patience and courtesy.

But your incompetence is accompanied by neither of those virtues. Instead it exists in concert with, and in the service of, a readiness to exploit others, and a readiness to justify this with whatever form of shoddy pseudo-reasoning comes most easily to hand. Under these circumstances your incompetence, multipled many times over, is as deadly and dangerous as George Bush’s, and it deserves to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

Your willingness to sanction the vile exploitation of others, and your self-serving duplicity, are colossally offensive to me. You didn’t understand this; perhaps now you do. If you are going to adopt this position and manner of presentation you must accept responsibility for the consequences, including the disgust and contempt that this engenders in others.

Others may be willing to shield you from their more caustic judgements, and in different circumstances, so am I. But not when you are using massively offensive intellectual fraudulence to defend something monstrous. At that point my willingness to safeguard your feelings evaporates.

We are very good at understanding when we have been sinned against; but we are very poor at understanding when we have sinned against others. The 9/11 attacks were exceedingly nasty, and they loom large in the minds of the American public. But these attacks were made in response to things that were far nastier still, but which do not loom in the American mind at all. Like Louise, the blissfully unaware public complains that “we didn’t do anything to provoke this.” But they are wrong, and so are you.

In our e-mail exchange I made the following observations, to which you never responded:

You are not angry, Louise, and it shows. And whether or not I respect this depends on the reasons why you are not angry. If you never get angry about anything; if you can calmly debate with Josef Mengele; if you can answer his slippery self-serving arguments and fully maintain your courtesy and composure; if all of these things are true then your position is truly consistent. You are a better person than I am, and you fully deserve my respect.

But if not, then your position is not consistent. In this case your comments are just another manifestation of your double standard. You say my tone is inappropriate; I say on the contrary, it is entirely appropriate. Your friend is doing something harmful, and you are making excuses. The one fact is ugly, and the other shameful. I have presented an argument in support of these statements, which remains unrefuted. My tone fully reflects the nature of these facts, and how I feel about them. Tell me my analysis is wrong, and then you may tell me my tone is inappropriate.

Someone who isn't angry finds it easy to debate with courtesy. But someone who isn't angry is not inclined to provoke debate in the first place. You certainly enjoy the luxury of not being angry; that much is plain. Unfortunately, Karen could wait a thousand years to hear a peep out of you.

I’d like to request that you respond now. Specifically, let me ask you this: if you were in debate with Josef Mengele, and he gave you the sort of expedient arguments you’ve given me, what sort of a tone would you take?

I began by apologizing for my very slow response, and I cited having been stressed and busy; but this is only part of the reason. The rest is that every time I look at what you have written I am both repelled and overwhelmed. I am repelled by the boldfaced I am speciesist declaration at the top of your letter, and by your many frank declarations of your readiness to sanction cruelty and exploitation. These may be honest statements, but this makes them no less repugnant.

And I am overwhelmed by just what a hopeless muddle your letter is, and the enormous task I face in bringing clarity to this. It is very easy for the clumsy, thoughtless person to create chaos with simplistic phrases and specious arguments; it is far more difficult to create clarity. You just toss off “where do you draw the line,” or “lobbying and appealing,” or “bad benefits,” and you’re all done for the day. Then you can sit back complacently, fully satisfied that you’ve actually said something worthwhile.

But all you have done is make a gigantic mess for me to sort out. It takes just a second to come up with these things, but it takes work, and thought, and commitment to analyze and explain carefully what is wrong with every one of these empty, thoughtless phrases.

I can well understand that I have touched some kind of nerve—as you explained to me during our conversation outside Sarah’s house you have spent your life struggling to be taken seriously by assertive men. But given what you have shown to me, it is hardly surprising you haven’t been taken seriously. We all want respect; the problem is we want it whether we deserve it or not. Obviously, Louise, I respect neither your humanity nor your intelligence. But I am not responsible for this; you are.

Moving Forward

In the first part of this letter, under the heading The Thing Itself, I have given a complete response to everything you said on the impersonal side of our dispute. I have read through your letter many times, thought about it carefully, and done my best to give coherent and reasoned responses to everything. If I missed anything it is a genuine oversight on my part; if so let me know, and I will address it promptly.

I expect the same kind of diligence and commitment from you.

Let me remind you that you initiated this debate with me. I responded to our initial discussion by providing you with a set of notes which set out the basic elements of my case against your friend Karen. In your letter to me you have simply ignored much of what I said in those notes. You have left questions unanswered; important observations unacknowledged or unchallenged.

This is not acceptable. Integrity of debate requires that you respond to the totality of my challenge; you do not get to pick and choose which of my arguments and questions you will answer. Clearly I have considered it an obligation to address the totality of what you have said to me; I consider you to be under the same obligation to me.

In the current letter, you are free to ignore everything under Personal Liabilities if you wish. However, I expect a complete response to everything under The Thing Itself. I have challenged you with many questions throughout that section; except when obvious, none of them is rhetorical; all require a formal answer from you. Even when I do not ask a specific question, all my arguments require some form of response; an acknowledgment of their validity, a rebuttal, whatever; but they may not be ignored.

To the extent that you are willing to do this, you can simply concede that I am right. But to the extent that you wish to persist in defending your position, a comprehensible rebuttal is required on your side. Completeness, openness, and genuineness of debate require that you do no less than this.

If this would make it any easier, I can provide you with this letter in electronic format.

Given my extreme tardiness, I am in no position to demand a quick response. So by all means take your time. But I think it is reasonable to ask for the following two things reasonably soon:

1. That you take the time to give this at least one complete and careful initial reading, and let me know that you have done so.
2. That you let me know what your eventual intention is—if you have no intention of making the sort of comprehensive written response I am demanding, I would like to know this right away.

Thank you.

Hammoude letter 3/20/2004

March 20, 2004

Hello Louise,

It is now over eight months since I sent you my letter of July 13 2003, comprehensively answering your previous one of November 8 2002. Since I took eight months to answer your letter I am in no position to complain about your tardiness. However at this point I think it is not inappropriate for me to remind you that I am still patiently awaiting your responses.

We all live very busy lives, and I understand that it can be hard to find time for things that are not immediately pressing. However, you have now had ample time in which to think about all the points I made, and formulate your responses, at least mentally.

We are now well into a new year, with the busy holiday season well behind us. Perhaps now might be a good time for you to put your answers down on paper.

****************************************

Let me remind you of the current status of our debate.

Your friend Karen deliberately poisons living creatures. This is the ugly fact at the center of our debate. And well over a year after your crude apology was first offered to me, the abhorrent ugliness of this fact remains wholly undiminished.

Instead, you have responded to me, first verbally, and then in writing, by offering up a string of ill-conceived, miserably specious justifications, none of which stands up to the most elementary examination. Every single one of the statements in your responding letter has been fully addressed, and shown conclusively to be either fraudulent, irrelevant, unsupported, or vacuous.

You have introduced a secondary issue into our debate: that of my attitude, and the distress this has caused you. This too I have taken the time to answer comprehensively. I have demonstrated that this notion you have, of having been mistreated by me, is merely a second layer of wrongness on your part, based entirely upon the first. I have patiently and carefully spelled out to you the great insult you have subjected me to, by thrusting your moral and intellectual corruption into my face in the way you have. I have explicated to you in clear and precise terms the nature of your own liabilities. I have shown that my anger is entirely justified, and that the terms in which I have expressed it are fully commensurate with your own offenses against me.

But despite any inclination you may have to re-characterize the nature of our dispute, the central issue before us remains the morality of Karen’s work. The dominoes fall one way or another based ultimately on this.

If my assertions about Karen’s work are correct, then she is indulging in something unspeakably vile. In this case, she is a criminal, and you are an accessory. In this case, your spoken and written words to me are everything I say they are: intellectually incompetent, fraudulent, morally corrupt, and a gross insult to me. In this case, my outrage is fully justified. In this case, my challenge to you emerges, not as a wildly inappropriate personal diatribe, but as a model of patient exposition in the face of intellectual fraudulence. In this case, your gripes about my attitude are completely wrong and irrelevant. In this case, your bringing this matter to book group, and the extremely non-transparent manner in which you did it, are highly questionable. In this case, my condemnation in absentia by certain book group members, though based on laudable instincts, was wrong and misguided. In this case, my effective banishment from the group, and your remaining in it, is shamefully unjust.

This is the direct, linear, logical thread through everything.

On the other hand, if you demonstrate that my fundamental assertion is false, then the dominoes fall in an altogether different direction. In this case, it will turn out that Karen is doing something truly good and worthwhile. In this case, it will turn out that the things that she does to her victims (though still unquestionably sickening) are a miserable burden that she takes upon herself, performed as a genuinely selfless act of self-sacrifice for the good of others. In this case I am simply not understanding the big picture; my viewpoint is short-sighted, simplistic and wrong. In this case your support for your vivisectionist friend is completely right and proper, and my attack on you is indeed wildly inappropriate. My anger is infantile and misdirected, and your indignation is fully justified. In this case, you are quite right to feel wronged, and book group was perfectly correct to banish me.

In this case I will be the one wearing the dunce cap. I will be the one compelled to face up to extremely difficult truths about myself. I will be the one obliged to make a mortifyingly embarrassing apology, not just to my immediate interlocutor, but also to book group, for having caused them to witness such unbelievably crass idiocy. If proven wrong, I stand ready to issue precisely this public apology. Do you, Louise? (Like all my questions to you this is non-rhetorical; having been posed in writing, it now requires an answer in writing.)

But the heart of the matter, the essential pivot around which everything else turns, is this: is your friend doing something good, or something bad? This is the crucial issue that will lead to vindication for one of us, and denunciation for the other. This is what must be resolved first, before we can determine who, really, deserves our condemnation.

Though people who are on the losing end of arguments may wish to muddy the waters, such resolution is really not hard to achieve. All we have to do is answer each other’s challenges fully, and the truth of the matter will soon become clear enough.

But in order to reach this resolution, it is essential that we hear a coherent response from you.

****************************************

I have done everything I can to make your task easy for you. I have presented my arguments to you with extraordinary clarity. They are in written form, and in plain English. They are well-organized, lucid, and easily comprehensible. There is no confusion or mystery about any of my points; in all cases my reasoning is completely transparent; fully exposed for your examination. To understand my arguments precisely, all you have to do is read them attentively. If there is any part of my letter that you find in the least bit opaque please let me know, and I will gladly provide you with swift clarification.

Furthermore, you enjoy overwhelming moral support on all sides. You have the comfort and validation of friends, family, colleagues, book group; all of whom support your position fully. If you should encounter difficulty in refuting any of my arguments, you have a wealth of resources available to assist you in finding the perfect, adroit rebuttal. If you wish you can easily bring a team of a dozen minds to bear upon my letter, all working hard to defeat it. In addition to this technical support, you also have an abundance of emotional validation, reassuring you that in your face-off with me, you are the blameless victim of an unprovoked and irrational attack.

Please note that on my side, I have none of these luxuries. I must constantly swim upstream, exhaustingly, against the vast current of societal attitude, on which you simply float complacently along. My position, like that of any person who speaks out against entrenched societal wrongdoing, requires integrity, commitment and courage. Your position requires only the simplest and easiest attribute of all: conformism.

If, in addition to all the other advantages you enjoy, you are also right on the basis of the fundamental issues, then it should be trivially easy for you to make your case.

****************************************

You will forgive me if I have some doubts about your enthusiasm for this process.

You find yourself in a desperately embarrassing position. You are trying to defend a profoundly corrupt position against an intelligent, educated, articulate opponent. You are being forced into painful self-examination, bringing your grim culpability into increasingly sharp focus. I can well imagine that you really wish this could all just be quietly forgotten.

The typical behaviour of human beings in your position is to attempt to subvert the discussion on some pretext or other. “Look, I really don’t have time for this,” they might say, or, “There’s no point, we’re never going to agree.” (Though they were quite willing to argue their case before it became hopeless.) Or they might attempt (as you already have) the more blustery, “What right do you have to take me to task?” And of course there is the always popular appeal to legality: “Look, I’m not breaking any laws, OK?”

Or something that I believe you may find tempting as a possible mode of avoidance: “Frankly, I find your attitude quite disagreeable.” This can almost always be used by offenders when confronted directly by their plaintiffs, since plaintiffs tend to be disagreeably angry, as I am. No one wants to listen to that, least of all the offender herself. By means of this manoeuver, the very fact of having caused injury to others, generates the pretext for avoiding responsibility for it.

Or some other such manoeuver. There are many ways in which people try to slither away from genuine accountability. Those with a genuine grievance seek publicity, accountability, openness, discourse, clarity. Those at fault would much rather avoid all of those things. What is your preference, Louise?

In any event, I certainly hope you will not be attempting any of these shabby manoeuvers with me. Given all that has gone before, I think I may insist that you reply to me properly. On a point-by-point basis, you must either admit to me forthrightly that you are abjectly wrong; or you must give me a genuine, reasoned explanation of why you are right. I am demanding a proper response from you, and if your answers are in any way lacking in integrity, I will continue to challenge them.

I believe there is only one valid reason for continued delay or avoidance: a proper response takes time and energy. I acknowledge that it will require some work to address the totality of my challenges to you. But if this would make things any easier, I would be quite happy to receive your responses in installments. I have broken down your letter and presented my responses in the form of 16 major points, plus a number of sub-points, thereby making our debate quite amenable to this sort of piece-by-piece approach.

While answering everything may take some time, surely you could write a response to just one of my points in an hour or less. And this amount of time is required only for those points where you feel you have a valid rebuttal. For those points of yours which have been conclusively refuted, all you have to do is acknowledge this forthrightly. Humbling perhaps, but something that takes mere seconds to accomplish.

If you can take anything from a few seconds to an hour to answer just one of my points each week—something easily manageable—I could have your entire response in my hands by the summer.

****************************************

Finally, allow me to remind you once again that you initiated this debate with me.

In response, I have given clear and complete answers to everything you have said. I have diligently addressed every single one of the points you have raised, and given a coherent and reasoned response to each.

I expect the kind of same diligence from you. If you have any pretensions at all to intellectual integrity, then I believe you are obligated to answer me with thoughtfulness and honesty. Please fulfil this obligation.

On three separate occasions you have let me know, in writing, that you would be responding to my arguments. I expect you to be as good as your word. Can you let me know when I can expect to receive a response from you, if only a first installment?

Thank you.

Hammoude letter 5/2/2004

May 2, 2004

Hello Louise,

Over a month ago I sent you a letter—can you please confirm for me that you received it? Possibly the letter went astray; if so I can send you another copy.

But assuming you did receive it, can you let me know when I might expect to hear a response from you?

Please feel free to respond to me in the medium of your choice—by mail, e-mail or phone, whatever is most convenient for you.

Thank you.

Townsend email 5/6/2004

I will not be responding.

Hammoude email 5/9/2004

You will not be responding?

Well, I didn't see that coming.

This appears to be a total reneging on your thrice-repeated assurances to me that you would be responding.

This now presents us with a couple of glaringly obtrusive questions.

First, why will you not be responding? Given your announced intention of not responding, the next minimum level of honorability you can meet, or not, is to provide a clear and forthright statement as to exactly why you will not be responding.

Second, at what point during the past nine months, during which time I have been patiently waiting for you to honor your word, did you come to this decision?

Hammoude email 7/11/2004

Hello Louise,

Several weeks have gone by with no reply to my previous e-mail, in which I posed a pair of sharply pertinent questions about your behaviour.

I take it that what this means is that not only will you not be responding on the basis of The Thing Itself (i.e. the objective, external component of our dispute), you will also not be responding to the meta-level question of why you are not responding.

And, I assume, if I were next to present a meta-meta-level question to you, by demanding an explanation of why you will not be responding to my demand for an explanation of why you will not be responding, you will not be responding to that either.

And so on, ad infinitum.

In other words, you are stifling all possible discourse with me, on every conceivable level, about the important moral and intellectual issues I have raised.

Is this correct?

This appears obvious, but to remove all possible ambiguity, let me present it to you this way: if this is not correct, please let me know. Please let me know how far up the ladder of meta-questions I must go before you are willing to give a response, and how soon I might expect to receive such a response. And please let me know these things within a reasonably short time frame, say within a couple of weeks of this e-mail.

Otherwise I think I may reasonably assume that as far as communication with me is concerned, you have shut yourself up as tight as an oyster.

Thank you,
Andrew

Hammoude letter 1/28/2020

January 28, 2020

Hello Louise,

I am writing to you for two reasons. First, to bring our discussion to a conclusion on my own terms. In particular, I want to present my criticism of your refusal to answer my arguments. And second, to request your permission to publish our written interaction for unrestricted distribution and readership by anyone.

You must excuse me for continuing our interaction so long after the fact. It was my intention to follow up at some point after your last email on 5/6/2004, but sad to say just two days later my father died quite suddenly, on 5/8/2004. (So as it turns out I will not be needing to vivisect your own family members after all.) I had to travel to England immediately to be with my mother and make funeral arrangements, then make another more extended trip later in the year to deal with various other matters following his death. So much of my attention in the months following our last communication was taken up with these matters.

Thus my intention to follow up got set aside for the moment, then further postponed, then eventually consigned to the future projects folder, where things can remain for quite some time.

At the start of our interaction I mentioned that I was working on a body of writing, concerning animal rights and moral philosophy in general, with the intention of publishing this at some point. I have continued to add to this at various times, and am now at a point where I want to move forward actively with the publication of this material.

The record of our interaction fits into this very appropriately, so I would like to make use of this in the context of this broader philosophical writing. Your written and verbal statements illustrate many of the points I make in general, philosophical terms. In particular they aptly demonstrate the sort of mentality and intellectual laxity that supports, not just the ugliness of vivisection, but the institutionalized abuse and exploitation of others in any context. Your position, and the arguments you’ve presented in support, can thus be used as the basis for a highly illustrative and revealing case study.

Later in this letter I’ll provide an overview description of this philosophical construct, to give you an idea of the general context for my request.

1. Reminder of unresolved debate

As you may remember, some time ago we presented to each other our opposing views regarding toxicological experiments upon animals—you in favour, me against.

Let me remind you of the key facts of our dispute. You stand in support of something monstrous. This friend of yours, whom you admire so much, conducts abhorrent experiments upon living creatures. This places her on common ground with the slave trader, or the sex trafficker, in the following specific respect: all three cause suffering to their victims, and all three do so in order to garner benefits. Like the others she is guilty of Crimes Against Life, and by your frank support, you are an accomplice to this.

If you are inclined to make even the slightest murmur of dissent to these allegations, I have videos of animals undergoing toxicological experiments, or you can readily find them online. I invite you to view these, and see for yourself.

It is an indisputable fact that your friend causes harm to others, and this is sufficient to establish a prima facie case of moral criminality; nothing more than this is needed. The burden then shifts to her, and you, to demonstrate that despite initial appearances, her harmful practices are somehow justified. You have both had the opportunity to put forward your best arguments, yet you have conclusively failed to meet this burden. Instead, you have trotted out a string of ill-considered, facile arguments, none of which stands up to proper examination.

Your letter of 11/8/2002, presenting your main arguments, is kind of a mess. There is no clear delineation of individual points, but rather a medley of arguments are scattered and intermingled together. It’s as if you dashed this thing off in an hour. Nevertheless, I took the time to plough through it all and do the delineation for you, parsing it out into a series of distinct points, if we may call them that, and addressing each individually.

I have given clear and complete answers to all your arguments, and conclusively refuted all of them. Each has been fully addressed, and shown to be factually incorrect, or logically false, or irrelevant, or just plain nonsense. Every single one of your arguments is fundamentally invalid, ultimately contributing nothing towards your burden of moral justification. They are all weak, bogus arguments, that any thoughtful, intelligent person can see through in a minute.

You have provided no answers to any of this, neither acknowledging forthrightly that your arguments are false, nor offering further support or counterargument. Instead you made no reply at all, then in response to my follow-up enquiries, finally sent a five-word email, refusing to discuss the matter any further. Thus faced with rational opposition, your response is to abandon the discussion altogether.

1.1 What remains at the end

At the end of all this only two solid things remain: your speciesism, and your will to act upon it. After all the bogus argument and irrelevance is stripped away, this is what remains as the true basis for your position.

But note that this is the same for all widespread, institutional programmes of depredation; after their bogus arguments are stripped away, this is their residual basis too. To be sure the specifics are different; some wish to victimize another race, or ethnicity, or culture, or gender; to each their own. But in each case the paradigm is the same. The key elements of the paradigm are that the perpetrators have an “-ism,” an innate sense of exceptionalism, or privilege, as do you; in your own blandly arrogant words: “I believe that we are more important.” And as corollary to this a belief that the victim constituency is of lesser account, meet to be exploited, to benefit the more privileged constituency. As do you; again in your own words: “quite simply, I see animals as lower than humans in the pecking order.” And they have a firmness of resolve, a will, an appetite to carry out their depredation; once again, as do you: “I know what my choice is going to be every time.”

Of course these are all engrained subjective perspectives, with no objective basis whatever. From slavery to wartime comfort women, and countless other examples of repugnant human exploitation, the simple fact is the perpetrators are in a position to take advantage, and so they do. As do you.

2. Criticism of abandonment of debate

I am greatly disappointed that you have declined to bring our debate to a natural conclusion.

2.1 Ability to reach valid conclusions

Such a conclusion is well within our reach. I grant we might not ever come to a complete meeting of the minds, but many specific elements of our disagreement can be resolved—the figurative trees, if not the forest. We have each put forward multiple conflicting arguments; however, none is particularly complex. Our various points and counterpoints are straightforward enough, and readily amenable to clear-minded analysis.

For example a central theme of your argument is that societal decision-making and action, and so by implication societal consensus, clearly supports animal experimentation; your own implication being that this affirms its moral propriety. I say on the contrary that societal consensus provides no assurance of moral propriety, and have cited multiple counterexamples to demonstrate this. This is not a difficult issue to resolve. If you can somehow show that societal consensus does indeed assure moral correctness, and somehow negate my counterexamples, then you may be right; otherwise your argument is defeated.

Either way, one element of our dispute is now resolved. And furthermore we have a data point; an item of circumstantial evidence about which one of us is thinking with integrity, and which of us isn’t really thinking at all.

A central element of my own argument is my assertion that benefits may be big, and benefits may be small, but in the end they remain benefits, and no more. You have flatly contradicted this, indicating that there is some additional consideration, aside from differing magnitudes of benefits, that must be taken into account, though you have not stated what this further consideration might be. Again, this would seem a straightforward matter to deal with. If you can explain this additional consideration then I may have to reconsider my position; otherwise your unsupported contradiction counts for nothing.

And so on. As I review our arguments point-by-point, I see nothing that cannot be clarified, or resolved definitively, by open discussion.

2.2 A broader holistic truth

Though in fact I believe a much broader, holistic truth will emerge from this.

One of us is hopelessly wrong in our analysis of the situation. If my assessment is correct you are morally criminal, advocating cruelty to animals in order to get benefits. If you are correct then I’m seeing things in narrow simplistic terms, just not seeing the big picture.

One of these is the truth; or at least, carries more truth than the other. And the way to establish this, is by means of open discussion. All we need do is answer each other’s points fully, and as this dialogue proceeds the essential truth of the matter, I believe, will simply become obvious.

And this, of course, is precisely the problem for you. In anticipation of your dereliction I previously had this to say:

The typical behaviour of human beings in your position is to attempt to subvert the discussion on some pretext or other... Those with a genuine grievance seek publicity, accountability, openness, discourse, clarity. Those at fault would much rather avoid all of those things. What is your preference, Louise?

Well you have certainly made it clear what your preference is. As I have noted, wrongdoers seek to avoid exposure, and true to form, this is exactly what you have done.

2.3 True reasons for avoidance of debate

Your position is completely indefensible, and I think perhaps you know this. Perhaps not with the same detailed clarity that I do, but what you do know is that you cannot articulate any valid support for your own position, or give any good answers to my own arguments. Either you are unable to formulate coherent answers at all, or to the extent that you are able, you know that the answers are damning. You know that if you provide genuine responses the fundamental truth of the matter will become plainly evident: that you are in principle no different from any other agent of harm, who is willing to impose unmeasured suffering upon unknown others in order to cash in on the benefits.

This is an uncomfortable position to be in, but there is a right way to deal with it. And that is to face up to the situation squarely, provide authentic responses to my arguments, and accept responsibility for your words and actions. But this is not part of your character. Your preference is to take the low road, and avoid the situation altogether.

Genuine debate is problematic to you because it reveals the truth, and this is the last thing you want. And therefore your chosen maneuver is to quash the debate entirely. I must say madam, this is a marked change of tune from how things were at the outset, when you were certainly eager enough to expound your views to me.

There may be good reasons for avoiding debate with someone, but this one is wretchedly bad. Upon receiving your email announcing that you would not be responding, I immediately demanded to know why. But you gave no reason. And the reason you gave no reason is because this would reveal the shabbiness of your motive: it’s a craven cover-up. So not only must you obstruct the debate, you must also obstruct any examination of the reason for this. Your refusal to discuss thus has the same rigid, uncompromising totality as any other obstruction of this nature.

2.4 Same as other forms of suppression of discourse

Note that this is no different in principle from any other kind of uncompromising cover-up. Our human affairs, past and present, are dense with examples of the suppression of discourse, carried out essentially for this same reason. The political banning of books and movies, state-controlled censorship, suppression of the press, control of access to the Internet and other media, the imprisonment or murder of dissidents, and of journalists—these, and many other examples, are all situations in which information, or speech, or the free expression of ideas, are rigidly suppressed.

And they all have this in common: somebody, somewhere, would be made extremely uncomfortable by free and open discourse. Some activity, circumstance or status quo is shameful and corrupt, and its shamefulness would be plainly exposed by such discourse. Transparency is a liability to someone, and transparency, therefore, must be prevented.

The right way to deal with our debate is to bring it to a natural conclusion: I address your arguments fully and properly, and you address mine. Instead you stifle the debate, for the sake of cheap personal expedience. How many times have you seen some wretched culprit cornered by a persistent investigative journalist? Faced with damnatory questions they give a terse “no comment” and quickly scurry away. Just as you have done.

Am I wrong in all this? You can prove me so very easily: simply provide authentic responses to my arguments. In the end the fact remains that I am willing to present my arguments forthrightly, and you are not.

2.5 My final assessment

I will tell you I have complete contempt for everything you have presented to me, from beginning to end. Starting with your readiness to countenance the appalling cruelty of toxicological experimentation upon animals in the first place, followed by your crass presumption in phoning me at my place of work and, with self-assured complacency, attempting to impose your repugnant value system upon me. Then in the face of my strong resistance, followed by the string of thoughtless, bogus arguments you trotted out to justify yourself. And finally, faced with well-articulated and reasoned opposition, your smothering of the discussion altogether.

At every turn it seems you make the shabbiest and least intelligent choice possible. Let me ask you, do you consider your conduct virtuous? I say this: claimed virtue is no virtue at all, unless it can prove itself when called upon.

Throughout all this you have transgressed massively against my own value system. Yet when called on this you refuse to accept responsibility and face the consequences. You make a gigantic, blundering mess of things, then when things become problematic, just walk away and leave it all behind. Like the worst possible lowlife tenants, who leave a rental property filthy and trashed, then skip out without paying the rent.

3. Broader philosophical context

I mentioned that I have been writing a general treatise, concerning animal rights and moral philosophy in general, and would like to publish our exchange in connection with this work. I’ll provide an overview description of this broader philosophical writing, to give you an idea of the context for my request.

3.1 Major unresolved issues

As lead-in, let me begin by pointing out some major unresolved issues in our dispute.

3.1.1 Fundamental conflict: large benefits versus large costs

First there is the immediately obvious issue that we are putting forward different sets of considerations that are in total conflict. On the one hand there are tremendous benefits to be gained from vivisection, as you have correctly pointed out. On the other hand the costs paid by the victims are horrendous, in terms of the vast scale of suffering imposed upon them. This is the fundamental conflict at the heart of our dispute, and any complete analysis must fully address and resolve this conflict.

3.1.2 Undefinedness of terms

Second, note that some of the essential terms of our argument are undefined. Throughout your own presentation you have used phrases such as “moral and ethical beings,” and “moral community.” But note that these terms are completely undefined. What exactly is a “moral being”? And what on Earth is a “moral community”? I doubt very much that you can provide any sort of coherent definition for these terms. Here you are again, simply stringing words together without troubling to consider what they mean, or if they even mean anything.

On my side I have used terms such as “moral criminality” and “moral justification”; again without providing any definition. An academic philosopher could look at our argument and say, Well they’re both idiots. They are having this argument without defining the most essential and fundamental terms of the argument. (Though I can tell you that on my side I know exactly what I mean when I use these terms.)

A complete analysis must address this issue too; must provide a clear definition of terms, not leave them up in the air and subject to unknown interpretation.

3.1.3 Lack of basis

More broadly, neither of us has presented a formal basis for our position—that is to say, an explicit set of principles as foundation for our position. Our exchange thus far has been largely fragmentary: you make a series of ad hoc points; I pick them off one by one and make a series of points of my own. This is all quite interesting, and we can certainly look at this and see which of these individual points are valid and which are not.

But neither of us has presented a consistent set of principles to establish when it is, or is not, justifiable to victimize others. Is it always, because there are benefits to be gained by the perpetrators? Or is it never, because of the suffering caused to the victims? Or is it sometimes, based on the merits of each particular case? And if it is sometimes, then what are the principles that govern whether any particular case of exploitation is permissible, or impermissible? What are the rules, so to speak, to discriminate in a logical, defensible way between forms of deliberate cruelty we consider acceptable, and those we do not?

3.2 A general philosophical theory

What is needed, and thus far absent, is some kind of general philosophical theory to resolve these various issues. The body of writing I have been working on represents just such a theory.

I have formulated a general philosophical theory that I believe is quite original, providing a new lens through which to look at moral questions. Among other elements this comprises a uniform theoretical framework for looking at moralities in general, the derivation of a canonical moral formula based on formal reason and logic, and a rational analysis of human moral functioning.

The overall construct is complete, wholly self-consistent, accounts for all relevant empirical facts, and leaves behind no puzzle or paradox. This provides the benefits of all generalized theories, providing a uniform way of looking at a multiplicity of disparate situations under the same set of principles. I make the assertion that this construct can, in principle, be used to analyze and resolve any moral dilemma.

In particular, this construct addresses and resolves every aspect of our own argument, including all the above mentioned issues. It provides an unambiguous definition of terms, including that of the central, and elusive, notion of “morality.” It addresses everything either of us has said, and provides a rational resolution to our various points of contention. This construct also presents the basis for my own position; that is, the explicit principles that form the logical foundation for my position.

I am presenting this work in the form of a series of essays, each presenting a specific conceptual component. Each essay can be read and understood individually, and together they form a complete and coherent philosophical treatise. Initially I am web publishing these for unrestricted readership by anyone. On completion of the constituent essays I also expect to publish the complete set in the form of a self-published book.

If nothing else, I believe others may find this interesting. Beyond that, others may find this a useful framework in thinking about their own moral choices. And possibly this may eventually affect society at large, influencing our decisions about the sorts of actions we take collectively.

3.3 Pointers to more information

If you would like to know more, a brief overview is available at:
http://andrew.1.hammoude.byname.net/MoralPhilosophy

In addition the first essay to be published, titled, Moral Philosophy: An Abstract Approach, is available for review at: http://andrew.1.hammoude.byname.net/PLPC/150020

This essay presents one of the basic conceptual building blocks: an abstract modelling of human moral functioning. If you are interested this will give you an idea of the general style of this work, and how I begin to create a generalized framework for thinking about and analyzing moral questions.

A much more comprehensive description is available in another document, a formal project outline I have written, which I am using to solicit endorsement and support for this work. This provides a detailed description of the major conceptual components of this construct, and how they fit together into a coherent whole. This is a private document and not available online, but I can provide you a copy if you wish. If you are interested this will give you a clear picture of the overall composition of this construct and its various component pieces. I think you will also see how this relates to our own debate, and why I am interested in using it as source material. Please let me know if you would like me to provide this additional document.

4. Publication

Our written exchange provides a good example of the sorts of arguments typically presented in support of vivisection, and how they are answered by those in opposition. I would like to publish the complete record of our interaction for readership by anyone, so that any interested person can review our respective arguments and draw their own conclusions. Aside from the objective arguments I believe our exchange also provides some insight into the mentality and character of people on both sides; again, readers are free to make their own judgement.

4.1 Format & distribution

I propose to present the totality of our written exchange, both the emails and letters, including this concluding one. I will present things in chronological order as a single narrative thread, with annotations and formatting cues so the reader can readily understand the sequence and progress of our interaction. I will also provide each individual item in verbatim source form, so anyone can verify the integrity of the narrative format.

Our exchange represents a minuscule addition to a much larger debate; nevertheless, my intention is for it to be readily available and referenceable by any interested person or organization. To this end I propose to distribute notice of the publication widely on social media, and will also submit notice to various relevant organizations, either for republishing on their own website, or to be linked to as an external resource. My intention is to encourage open readership of our debate, and for anyone researching either of us to find it easily among the search results.

4.2 Supplementary analysis essay

To a large extent our exchange speaks for itself. However I also propose to supplement this with an explicit analysis of our debate, in the form of a separate essay.

This will not be part of the treatise proper, which is wholly general in nature, but rather one of a series of follow-on or adjunct essays I anticipate writing. Note that with the general theory in place, this sets the stage for examining any number of specific examples, and I think your written statements and my responses make an illustrative case study.

4.2.1 Objective analysis

As noted, our written exchange as it stands is fragmentary in nature, comprising your somewhat disconnected collection of points followed by my answers, but with none of this connected to any underlying basis. The essay will remedy this by providing a systematic analysis of our various objective arguments, in the context of my own theoretical basis principles. I believe this will dispose definitively of the objective elements of our dispute.

4.2.2 Subjective analysis

In addition to the objective component the essay will also include a comprehensive ad hominem analysis, though I am using this term without its usual antagonistic meaning—I simply mean a rational analysis of the individual characteristics that give rise to our differing viewpoints.

In my mind this is an essential component of the broader debate. We may ask, why do you and I, looking at the same facts and circumstances, maintain these radically different viewpoints? Clearly, something is amiss somewhere. A complete analysis must provide a clear accounting for this discrepancy, and the accounting resides in the differing moral and intellectual characteristics of the participants. In the briefest of nutshells: in moral terms, one of us is speciesist while the other is not; and in intellectual terms, one of us is functioning on the basis of thought, while the other is functioning on the basis of non-thought.

As mentioned, my general philosophical writing includes my own critical analysis of human moral functioning. I believe that your own personal characteristics are systemic throughout humanity—as a species we are innately speciesist, and as a species we have a natural propensity to formulate glib self-justifications on the basis of non-thought. And since these characteristics are systemic, reflected back at everyone by everyone, they go largely unrecognized and unexamined.

I make the case that the endless tyranny, depredation, injustice, and cruelty pervasive throughout our human affairs is a consequence of a set of very basic human characteristics, and in my general analysis I identify these explicitly. Some of these are quite obvious; others I believe are more subtle and not well appreciated. These include a general willingness to cause harm to others in the pursuit of self-interest; a general insensibility and indifference to the full measure of costs imposed on victims; a psychopathic lack of empathy for those considered of lesser account; and a systemic intellectual negligence in failing to conceptualize these factors explicitly.

I believe all these things are clearly on display throughout your written statements. Indeed, had you deliberately set out to present yourself in an unfavourable light, I believe you could scarcely have achieved a finer success. Essentially you state your self-interest and lack of empathy quite explicitly, and the intellectual negligence is apparent to any attentive reader.

4.3 Result: a complete holistic understanding

I think you can see how all this fits together. My philosophical theory provides a general framework for thinking about moral issues; our interaction represents a fitting case in point; and the accompanying essay ties these together, placing our interaction in a general context. At the end of this we have a complete understanding of every aspect of our disagreement, both objective and subjective. Objectively, we can see plainly enough that your various arguments are dialectically false. And subjectively, we understand the underlying mindset that causes you to maintain your position with such firm commitment, despite lack of any valid logical support.

In particular, we understand our disagreement as proceeding from two radically different mental frameworks. Yours, comprising a set of unexamined organic predilections married to self-interest; and mine, based on clear principles and analysis. Within the confines of your speciesism you perceive your own form of exploitation in purely intuitive terms, and you perceive it in isolation, with no connection to all those other instances of unspeakable human atrocity. But in the context of our general theory we look at things analytically, and here we see your exploitation as just one particular instance of a general pattern of human depravity, different in the specifics, but conforming to the same underlying paradigm. It goes from something unique and privileged as under your viewpoint, to something generic as under mine, and ultimately driven by precisely the same elements of mindless, psychopathic human self-interest.

4.3.1 Influence on thinking of others

This reasoned analysis may go some way towards influencing the thinking of others. For those who abhor animal experimentation but are outnumbered and outvoiced by the majority, this will provide some solid, clear-minded validation of their position. For the many more who share your own biological prejudices, but who also respect rational argument, this may perhaps induce them to take a step beyond the limits of their own innate speciesism.

4.4 Request for consent to publish

The supplementary analysis essay is not yet ready for publication. However, publication of our interaction record can be accomplished very expeditiously, so I’d like to proceed with this immediately, then follow with the essay some time later.

May I have your consent to publish our written communication as I have described? Of course, I don’t seriously expect any sort of response from you, and truly, I’d prefer it that way. But I wanted to give you the opportunity to respond if you wish, and thus forestall any complaint you might make, that I published our exchange without allowing you an opportunity to voice any objections.

Since our debate took place freely and with no confidentiality attached, I believe there is nothing improper in making it public. And therefore this is to advise you that absent any objection from you I will proceed with the publication in two weeks from the date of this letter.

Note that the Internet is permanent, and once it’s out there it’s out there for good. After you and I are gone this will remain as part of the record of our time on this Earth, so if you do wish to comment, now is the time.

4.4.1 Additional materials

I can provide some additional materials if these would be helpful. I have already mentioned the detailed project outline for my general philosophical treatise. In addition I can provide our interaction record in the annotated narrative form I intend to present it, and also my draft notes for the accompanying essay. Please let me know if you would like me to provide any of these items.

4.5 Personal information & biography

Regarding our personal information, identifying and contact information for myself is available on my website. As for yourself I will provide your name, but no contact information.

However I would also like to include a brief biography by way of background. I have written a draft biography, included for your review. But this is based on my own very limited information, and may well be out of date or inaccurate, so please make corrections or edits as necessary. In particular it would be helpful for you to correct or expand on your education and professional work, where I have scant information.

Again, I don’t seriously expect any follow up from you, and my realistic purpose is only to present the opportunity, for you to act upon or not as you wish. So absent any corrections from you, I will just go with what I have.

4.5.1 End of correspondence

This now brings our interaction to a conclusion, from my point of view as well as yours, and I expect no further communication between us.

Andrew Hammoude

Townsend letter 2/5/2020

February 5, 2020

Andrew Hammoude
314 East Thomas St., Apt. A
Seattle, WA 98102-5224

Andrew,

1. My views on what constitutes a moral community here on earth have changed a lot over time such that I'm guessing they are much more similar to yours than when we engaged about this many years ago.

2. Therefore, I would prefer you not to post online an email exchange that is more than 17 years old and use me as a straw person espousing views I no longer hold. But, as you point out, I have no control over what you do.

3. I did not disengage from debate with you because I am a coward or because I knew I was wrong and turned away. In fact, I believed at the time and still believe now that your arguments are really convincing. I disengaged, as I believe I may have stated at the time but it bears repeating, because you deployed the same nasty and demeaning language and sneering attitude toward me when making your arguments back then that you are using now.

4. Please do not contact me again.

Louise Townsend

Hammoude letter 7/18/2020

July 18, 2020

Louise,

I take issue with a number of items in your letter. But first on a positive note: I’m glad to hear your views have shifted towards mine; perhaps I may claim some credit for this. I also appreciate your acknowledgment that you found my arguments convincing; thank you for this.

You made the comment “as you point out, I have no control over what you do.” But I made no statement along those lines, and do not know what you are referring to. You may not have any direct control over my actions, but if you have any substantive comments to offer I’m willing to give them due consideration.

1. Mischaracterization as straw person

You are most certainly not a straw person. I did not create you, nor put words in your mouth. You are the one who made your blaring assertion of speciesism; you are the one who made the arrogant statements of exceptionalism and privilege I have quoted back at you. You are the one who trotted out your string of woolly-minded arguments, riddled with logical fallacy that a high-school student could see through. I invented none of this; there is no straw here.

You may wish to imply that your previously stated views are now obsolete, but within the context of our interaction this is nowhere documented. Your emphatic declaration of speciesism remains unchanged; you have said nothing to repudiate or moderate this in any way, nor shown the slightest indication of shame about this declaration. Nor have you made any response to the many arguments I have made against your position. On the contrary despite abundant opportunity and my repeated solicitations you have consistently refused to answer my arguments, and continue to do so.

What we have before us is the record of a dialogue in which you presented your views, I answered them, and you made no further reply. This remains the status quo. If you now wish to modify your views, or otherwise extend our debate, then by all means do so. Otherwise we have a concluded exchange that represents your views exactly as you asserted them, with not one single word of misrepresentation.

1.1 Available remedy: present revised views

I can well imagine you being embarrassed by your previous statements. In this case your remedy is to present a revision of your formerly held beliefs. You have the option to do this either within the context of our interaction, or outside it. Within context, you remain free to address my arguments and present your updated thinking. On a point-by-point basis you can indicate which of your various pro-vivisection arguments you continue to maintain are valid, and which you have now come to understand are not. In the first case you can present your defense or counterargument. In the second you can acknowledge forthrightly that your previous argument was colossally wrong and stupid, and make suitable apology.

You are free to do this at any time, and demand that I publish your writing as a continuation of our debate; a demand I would clearly be obligated to fulfil. Alternatively you can accomplish the same result independently and self-publish, and have nothing further to do with me.

Either way, if you are concerned about being misrepresented by your past statements, this is your means to assert your new-found integrity, morality and intelligence.

1.2 Debate remains fully relevant

But in any case, whatever changes may have occurred in your views is really beside the point. Even if you were to become a committed champion of animal rights issues, our debate remains fully relevant today. You may perhaps have achieved some glimmering enlightenment, but there remain many who have not—indeed the great majority, as you have referenced repeatedly.

What I am doing goes beyond our particular debate, and I hope your thinking is now clear enough for you to understand that. I am addressing a much broader human criminality, not just yours. There are seven billion, just like you. All with the same mentality, the same innate speciesism, the same axiomatic sense of exceptionalism, the same expedient, self-serving intellectual incompetence. The result is a vast, horrific holocaust, with victims in the trillions. If you think this is any way an exaggeration, once again, I urge you to educate yourself.

You indicate you’ve been influenced by our debate; perhaps others may be influenced similarly. In any case I believe this is a worthy cause, acting towards the welfare of all living things, and I’m willing to make the effort. Your preference for me not to post online is duly noted, and I understand your wish to keep this debacle hidden. But I see your expressed views as a bright, shining example of precisely the sort of moral depravity I discuss in general philosophical terms, and I believe this is relevant to publish for all the reasons I’ve stated.

2. Abandonment of debate: no reason given

In giving the reason you are now citing for abandoning our debate, you included the clause, “as I believe I may have stated at the time.”

This belief is absolutely incorrect; you did nothing of the kind. You abandoned our debate with no explanation whatever, and when I explicitly demanded your reason, you provided none.

The major objective elements of our dispute are in two letters: yours of 11/8/02 setting forth your arguments in favour of vivisection, and mine of 7/13/03 presenting my counterarguments. I gave clear and comprehensive answers to each of your arguments, in my opinion conclusively refuting them all.

At this point clearly the obligation was upon you to respond to this, either conceding that your arguments were false, or providing further support or defense. And indeed you acknowledged as much, stating several times that you would be responding in due course. Furthermore, I specifically asked what your intentions were. Given my demolition of your arguments, I was well aware that you might wish to obstruct further debate. Therefore I concluded my letter with the following explicit request:

That you let me know what your eventual intention is—if you have no intention of making the sort of comprehensive written response I am demanding, I would like to know this right away.

It’s right there in plain black and white, and the meaning and purpose of this could hardly be clearer. Yet despite all this you made no reply at all, neither at the time, nor at any time since. Nor did you trouble to advise me that in fact, you had no intention of responding.

Instead, you simply left me to wait for a reply that would never come. After several months with no reply I sent a follow-up letter on 3/20/04; you ignored that also. After a few more weeks I made a further follow-up enquiry on 5/2/04, and finally you sent a five-word email: “I will not be responding.” I immediately sent you an email, explicitly demanding to know why you would not be responding, but you made no reply to this either. Thus not only were you avoiding all objective debate, you were also avoiding any disclosure of the reason for this.

So please Louise, do not try to tell me you stated your reason for disengaging, when I know damn well, and the written record plainly shows, that you did exactly the opposite.

2.1 Hallmark of a cover-up

From my perspective this is an important point.

Given my systematic destruction of your arguments, and the extreme discomfort for you of providing genuine responses, I anticipated that you might try to avoid transparency on some pretext or other. And so in my letter of 3/20/04 I addressed this explicitly:

The typical behaviour of human beings in your position is to attempt to subvert the discussion on some pretext or other. “Look, I really don’t have time for this,” they might say, or, “There’s no point, we’re never going to agree.” (Though they were quite willing to argue their case before it became hopeless.) Or they might attempt (as you already have) the more blustery, “What right do you have to take me to task?” And of course there is the always popular appeal to legality: “Look, I’m not breaking any laws, OK?”

Or something that I believe you may find tempting as a possible mode of avoidance: “Frankly, I find your attitude quite disagreeable.” This can almost always be used by offenders when confronted directly by their plaintiffs, since plaintiffs tend to be disagreeably angry, as I am. No one wants to listen to that, least of all the offender herself. By means of this manoeuver, the very fact of having caused injury to others, generates the pretext for avoiding responsibility for it.

Again, it’s all there in black and white, and the significance of this could not be more clear. I was quite ready to shoot down any one of these pretexts, including the one you are now citing, either by discrediting the pretext as a valid reason for avoiding debate, or by presenting a suitable remedy. In particular, if my bad attitude is indeed the problem, I have an effective solution readily at hand.

But for me to address your reason, I need to hear your reason. By obstructing both the debate, and any examination of the reason for this, all possible paths towards transparency are blocked. This is the hallmark of a cover-up: a complete refusal to permit discussion on any level, including the meta-level of why you are refusing to permit discussion. It may indeed be a valid reason to discontinue engagement with someone because of abusive language. But there appears no good reason at all not to state this reason.

3. Mischaracterization of my language

I take issue with your characterization of my language and attitude, in particular the words “nasty” and “sneering.” These are your words, not mine; neither is accurate.

I have already addressed your complaints about my attitude very thoroughly. Your complaints are based on the supposition that my attitude is somehow inappropriate; this supposition is incorrect. In my letter of 7/13/03 I presented a detailed account of your own forms of personal unpleasantness: the moral criminality and intellectual slovenliness, plainly evident throughout your arguments. The fact is that your position is contemptible in every regard. Your willingness to impose unmeasured suffering upon others for the sake of incremental benefit is morally repugnant, and the string of arguments you have presented to justify this is an inept assemblage of expedient, self-serving non-thought.

My attitude and language in condemning all this is entirely appropriate.

It is true that I have been merciless in my dismantling of you, repeatedly showing how empty and foolish your arguments are. But this is not nasty or sneering; it is a well-founded, cogent exposition of your own personal liabilities. There is no profanity anywhere in my writing, nor is there any overt insult. You may not care for my style of presentation, but everything I am saying is factually correct. And if necessary can be solidly backed up, chapter and verse.

It is the underlying facts that are nasty; your inhumanity that is truly nasty. Let me ask you, who is the nastier: someone who advocates the deliberate poisoning of living creatures, or someone who writes an angry letter of condemnation? I understand that my caustic criticisms may make you squirmingly uncomfortable. But I submit that it is the substance of my criticism, not the phrasing, that is the true cause of your discomfort.

Your use of terms like “nasty” and “sneering” is empty semantic labelling; a shifting of the focus onto form rather than content, while avoiding addressing any of the substantive issues presented. Just like Trump, who uses the same word that you do, calling a reporter’s pointed query a “nasty question,” to avoid dealing with the question at all. This is spin, nothing more. This sort of thing may work within your own disordered mind, but I can tell you it doesn’t work within mine.

3.1 Challenge to cite specific examples

Throughout my writing I have backed up my allegations by quoting your own self-incriminating words back at you. I invite you to do the same to me.

I challenge you to cite some specific examples of what you consider nasty or sneering language, and let us look at them together. I believe in every case we will find that the statement is fundamentally accurate; that in every case I can provide real, objective support for the underlying allegation.

It is true that there is wording of mine, engineered to cause you discomfort. But what you call nasty, I call an accurate skewering of your human iniquity and folly, punishing to you because it hits its mark precisely. Certainly there is something nasty here, but it is the target, not the skewer.

In any case I stand behind everything I’ve said, both the form and the substance. In terms of substance, I believe I’ve presented a good, well-reasoned analysis of every aspect of our dispute. And in terms of form, I believe my language is appropriate under the circumstances. In condemning acts of ugly atrocity against others, we do not mince words, nor trouble ourselves to spare the sensibilities of the accused. I have done no more than this with you.

4. Proposed remedy: conclude debate via intermediary

You are now telling me that you disengaged, not for the craven reasons I have said, but for a more presentable reason: you don’t like my nasty language and attitude.

I wish you had stated this when I very explicitly asked, but in any case now you have disclosed your reason, and better late than never. If this is truly the reason then I take it that but for this impediment you were, and presumably still are, willing in principle to conclude our debate.

In this case my proposed remedy is that I turn over my side of our debate to an intermediary: a third party who can stand between us and enable the objective component of our dispute, while eliminating the bad language you find objectionable.

4.1 A suitable candidate

I have a number of acquaintances who could play this role. One of these is called Cynthia, whom I believe would be a suitable candidate. She is fully aligned with me philosophically, and so can fulfil my basic requirement of conveying my arguments correctly. But she also has the trick of speaking courteously to people whom she despises, and so can also fulfil yours, of being spoken to pleasantly. Thus she can bridge the divide between my cogent argument and your personal sensibility, successfully accommodating both.

As things stand the burden remains on you to respond to my challenges to your position. I propose that you provide your responses directly to Cynthia, who will then relay them to me. I will answer or follow up as necessary in my usual uncompromising style, and submit my replies back to her. She will then edit or rewrite my text, eliminating any language or phrasing you might consider disagreeable, and finally pass the sanitized version on to you—still with full dialectical strength, but now linguistically benign.

Behind the scenes you will still be dealing with the iron fist of Andrew intellectuality, but now in the velvet glove of Cynthia diplomacy. But most importantly, from your perspective I will disappear completely, and permanently. You will never hear from me again, or be distressed by my nasty language; it will be as if I no longer exist.

Instead Cynthia will take my place, and you will find her a congenial correspondent. The truth is that she is just as disgusted and angry I am, but you will have no awareness of this; like an undercover cop she will hide this reality from you undetectably. You will find her friendly and humourous, able to debate this exceedingly unpleasant subject matter with the same ease as say, a book discussion. She’s quick-witted, sharp, articulate—you’ll love her.

4.2 An ideal solution

This would appear to address your issue ideally. You are indicating you have more than sufficient integrity and strength of character to answer my arguments; it’s me personally you don’t want to deal with. It’s not my incisive reasoning you have a problem with; it’s all that bad language and sneering. By the means I am proposing you get all the good stuff and none of the bad.

I am quite ready and willing to move forward on this basis. If you are agreeable I can make email introductions and we can begin immediately.

So my question to you now is: will this arrangement be acceptable to you? Or will you now manufacture another excuse, hitherto unmentioned?

5. A clear path forward

I have violated your injunction against contacting you again. However, please note that I previously advised you as follows:

if your answers are in any way lacking in integrity, I will continue to challenge them.

I will gladly comply with your no-contact order, but not as long as you make statements I object to. As noted there are several items I consider mischaracterizations, or disingenuous, and will not let these go unanswered.

In particular regarding your identification of my bad language as a barrier to dialogue: I consider this nothing more than a conveniently expedient excuse, and your true motive something else entirely. My answer is to strip this pretext away, and leave you to find some other excuse to hide behind.

I have presented a practical remedy to this obstacle: an intermediary to eliminate my attitude completely. With this obstacle removed there is now a clear path forward for you to present your responses and bring our debate to a logical conclusion.

There would seem to be every reason to do this, and no good reason not to. If nothing else we can bring our various points of contention to a clear resolution; the figurative trees as I have put it. This alone will bring a significant measure of clarity and closure to our presently inconclusive dispute. You have presented your points in favour of vivisection; I have presented my counterpoints. For anyone interested in this issue, residing on either side of the debate, I think it will be of great interest to see how you now proceed to defend your points.

Beyond this as I’ve noted I think the broader, holistic truth will become evident: which of us is truly the nasty one. If we are people of integrity, genuinely interested in such things as truth and accountability, this determination is something I assume we would both welcome.

However despite these worthy goals, I don’t see any of this happening. My confident expectation is that one way or another you will continue to avoid transparency, and you will do so for precisely the reasons I’ve stated: open debate will reveal the essential truth of the matter, and this is something you would much rather keep hidden.

Again, you can prove me wrong very easily: simply provide your answers to my arguments. In the end the fact remains that I am willing to present my arguments for consideration by anyone. You, no matter what the circumstances, are not.

If against expectation you are willing to accept my proposal then I look forward to hearing your answers. On the other hand if you still refuse to make any response then your implied claims of courage and integrity are not to be taken seriously, and our interaction is now surely at an end.

 

Andrew Hammoude