A Signal from the Rabbit Hole

Edition three

Jan 25, 2023

Hello all,

Welcome to the third edition of my newsletter, a glimpse into my current interests and a curated short-list of the things I’ve found most noteworthy and valuable. Please feel free to forward this along to friends.

Science Can Answer Moral Questions

In this talk, Sam Harris delivers a compelling argument for the role of science in navigating and defining answers to moral questions. He challenges the notion that science can help us get what we value, but not tell us what we ought to value. If you want to dive deeper, his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is a must-read.

If Fish Could Scream

A question that I encounter surprisingly often upon disclosing that I am vegetarian is "Do you eat fish?"

I recently stumbled upon a visceral thought experiment from Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer that illustrates the reasoning behind my emphatic “no.”

"If Fish Could Scream" proposes a scenario where fish, have the ability to scream when caught or killed. The question is, would this change our moral obligations towards them?

Singer argues that our moral obligations towards other sentient beings should be based on their capacity to experience pain and suffering. If fish could scream, it would be impossible to ignore their suffering and would oblige us to consider their moral status as sentient beings.

It would be reassuring to believe that killing one trillion fish per year does not matter, because fish do not feel pain. But the nervous systems of fish are sufficiently similar to those of birds and mammals to suggest that they do.
— Peter Singer (Sep 13, 2010) If Fish Could Scream. Project Syndicate.

It may be that I’m encountering people who are confused about what it means to be a vegetarian: a person who does not consume meat. Short of that, I’m perplexed by the intuition that fish are somehow lesser beings than other commonly consumed animals.

The assumption that certain animals, in this case fish, are not sentient and do not experience pain or suffering is morally unjustifiable. I don’t need to hear their screams to know that.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest in-depth examination of adult life ever conducted. Starting just after the Great Depression and continuing to this day, the study began by following 724 men from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, then expanded to include their spouses and children with data spanning over four generations and eight decades.

The study provides valuable insight into human flourishing across the lifespan focusing on participants’ physical and mental health including their close relationships, lifestyle habits, and sense of purpose in life. It addresses questions around what makes for a happy and meaningful life, how lifestyle choices are linked with how long we live, what experiences in childhood are more predictive of midlife health, if parents’ thriving marriages predict thriving marriages among their children, the impact of major societal events such as WWII and the upheaval of the 1960s on adult development and more.

An exploration of the data has recently been published in a wise and beautifully written book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Study on Happiness by Robert Waldinger and Marc Shulz. I would highly recommend adding it to your reading list. It is excellent.

Thanks for reading. Replies are welcome. If you do, make it thoughtful.