Forms Of Argument And Moral Change
Obviously no one is going to give me lots of money to examine why people don’t become vegeterian. But can we think up a project that examines something crucial to why people do or don’t become vegetarian but is housed inside a more general question. Something like what forms of argument and forms of representation have been influential in changing mass opinion and/or getting some kind of response about key moral issues - the holocaust, slavery, more recent wars, refugees. This project could use a linguist who can analyse forms of argument in text, talk and image, and a philosopher/ mathetmatician who can analyse those as well as talk about how people consume representations ini numbers and manipulate those - eg when thinking about how many pigs lives a human life is worth (if they ever get that far), or eg how many civilian casulties regime change is worth (if goverenments ever admit that they do this calculation) etc. It might also be useful to have someone like Annabelle who has media discourse experience, and someone like Peter Singer or perhaps a slightly tamer person, or someone working directly in history of ideas and social movements (there’s a guy at mu who might be good, Sean someone).
I think this is a fantastic idea.
I don’t think it needs any analytic philosophy, only political philosophy (maybe Sue?) and ethics.
Peter Singer is tame enough. Of course he’s very busy and probably couldn’t give it much time, but I bet you $10 he’d be interested in being involved in some way.
We might want to include Mary Crotty, in Law at USyd, who works on refugees (which could fit into your framework) and who’s a friend of Singer’s. We could also get advice from Andrew Bartlett. OK if I CC Andrew and Claire on this conversation?
Two key things i can think of right now that would need to be built in would be a) an account of the kinds of ‘meaning potential’ available at the time (in history). E.g. moving pictures were available to mass audiences during the holocaust but not during the campaign against slavery (and even stills not readily available or as ‘mass’)
Yes, except that we’d better stick to the present day, or at least the late 20th century, because it’s already such a horrifyingly broad project. I realise that we’ll narrow it as we go along in various ways, but I think we’d better start by narrowing it chronologically.
- need to cf mass opinion/ response from causes for individuals changing practice or changing mind (lots of potentially interesting theoretical stuff from areas like smoking cessation, general diet, religious and political change??)
Smoking — great idea because there’s so much research there and we can get at it via Claire Hooker, and via her friend Stacey Carter who I see is now working at VELIM and who is very friendly.
- how the different kinds of meaning potential likely to change opinion/ practice might (or might not) vary with the issue, the ‘level’ (population/ individual/ household), and the extent of change (e.g. vegetarian but not vegan, eg. war’s ok but this war’s not, etc.) and if so why.
Yes, good.
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I think we might also get some good value out of Lesley Rogers (UNE) and/or Gisela Kaplan (also UNE) who work on animal intelligence, and maybe we could slice the project a bit differently so that it asks about changing ideas about animals in the sciences, public life and private life… (which then brings opportunities to use the Kanzi/ Panbanisha material etc etc) Maybe not though, because it seems important for funding to tackle or compare issues that people are disposed towards funding critique of, like smoking and even war. Agree with you about 20th C, but the slavery debate and history is really the closest I can think of to the sort of thing we’d like to see. ie we want a case study of at least one almost complete flip in the thinking of large populations from ‘x is normal’ to ‘x is abhorrent and unjustifiable’. Perhaps the holocaust would do for this (where the analogy is racial discrimination to the point of inhuman treatment was tolerated across the world, then changed drastically, but of course the change is not as complete or as widespread as with slavery - or is my history just crap?). Maybe an even better analogy to use is women’s suffrage - we wouldn’t need to go back further than the 20th Century but it has that “how could we possibly have not let women vote - it’s ridiculous” factor that I’m after.
