Lecture 2

George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant

1. The essential point of the essay:

To offer the audience a glimpse of the intrinsic brutality of colonialism

• Colonialism involves harsh domination and coercive control of the ‘native’ society
• Colonialism involves extensive violence
• Policing the British colonies was difficult and harsh for both natives and colonial police

Orwell’s sub-texts:

• Colonization brutally and completely destroys the native society
• The elephant is Orwell’s literary image:
• The elephant, much like the native society, suffers a painful death after a life of brutal domination

‘A mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant…’

‘He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without knocking him down’

‘In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away.’

• Colonization also transforms the colonizer

The literary image:

Orwell’s personal transformation

The colonizer ‘wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it’

‘As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him’

‘I did not want to shoot the elephant’

‘It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do’

‘Suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all’

‘I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle’

‘The crowd would laugh at me’

Looking deeper:

For what reason was Orwell “perfectly certain” that it was wrong, at that moment, to shoot rampaging elephant?

Orwell offers two types of answer:

• The monetary value to the elephant’s handler/owner (the ‘mahout’)

‘Comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery’

• Duty to protect human life (minimizing the risk of injury/death)

‘I decided that I should watch him for a little while to make sure he didn’t turn savage again…’

Two types of answer not considered by Orwell:

• The ‘duty’ to prevent unnecessary death to another living creature

(call this the sanctity of life view)

• Duty to alleviate pain and suffering

(call this the anti-suffering view)

Key concepts and distinctions:

• Moral claim vs. factual claim
• Instrumental value vs. intrinsic value
• Holistic perspective vs. atomistic perspective
• Personal virtues vs. firm obligations

Moral claims vs. factual claims

Factual claims are always true and/or false based exclusively on evidence

Moral claims involve concepts that fall within the ‘universal language of morality’

(Examples; should, shouldn’t, ought, right, wrong, fair, decent, legitimate …)

Factual claim or moral claim?

• Harvesting tress for lumber is completely wrong
• There are more than two hundred million trees on Canadian soil that could easily be harvested for lumber
• Harvesting tress for lumber should be curtailed, unless doing so is 100% certain to be ecologically sound
• The number of stars in the sky is infinite
• Eating a vegetarian diet makes people healthy and happy
• Eating a vegetarian diet is simply the right thing to do, whether it increases your health or not
• Animals are conscious in exactly the same way humans are
• If animals are conscious in the way humans are, then we should treat them in exactly the same way we treat our fellow human beings

Instrumental value vs. intrinsic value

Something has instrumental value when it has value to something else
Something has intrinsic value when it has valuable in itself, regardless of its value to anything else

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The money in your pocket has instrumental value

We say that human beings are intrinsically valuable, meaning that they are deserving of a special status regardless of ‘usefulness’ to others

Some people say higher education has intrinsic value

Some philosophers make the argument that human happiness/well-being is all that truly has intrinsic value

Holistic perspective vs. atomistic perspective

Trying to understand a given entity, we must choose between one of the two major vantage points

The atomistic perspective gives priority to the basic parts and how they are connected

• How does the follow sentence get its meaning?
• The cat is on the mat.
• Atomism: ‹The› ‹cat› ‹is› ‹on› ‹the› ‹mat›.
• The atomistic perspective prioritizes individuals, and makes the “whole” secondary

The holistic perspective gives priority to the whole

• The cat is on the mat.
• Holism: ‹ The cat is on the mat ›.
• The holistic perspective begins with the whole, and ‘arrives at’ the smaller atoms

Personal virtues versus firm obligations

Look at this descending schema of ‘duties’:

• Non-obligations
• Personal virtues -->
• Firm obligation -->
• Legal obligation

Fox’s Arguments for Vegetarianism

Fox’s purposes in the article:

• To convince the audience to adopt a vegetarian diet/lifestyle
• Fox thinks you should make different dietary choices.
• You should not eat meat.

The article’s method / style:

• Fox works with clear, analytic arguments
• No metaphors and literary devices
• Carefully building a ‘platform’ of arguments that has various components

According to Fox’s method, arguments are judged good or bad on the basis of the reasons they give..

• What reasons is Fox giving?
• Are they good reasons?

Types of support given:

• Factual evidence
• Moral arguments

The four arguments:

1. The human health argument

2. The animal suffering argument

3. The environmental damage argument

4. The global injustice argument

Each argument corresponds to one major philosophical perspective:

Human health anthropocentrism

Animal suffering bio-centrism

Environmental damage eco-centrism

Global injustice political ecology

Anthropocentrism

• Human beings are the centre of moral concern
• Human beings are "the measure of all things"

Bio-centrism

• Living things other than humans are deserving of moral concern. We have duties to preserve life, alleviate suffering, etc.
• “Reverence for all life”

Eco-centrism

• Ecosystems and land communities are the centre of moral concern
• “It is wrong to interfere with the stability, integrity and beauty of the land community”

Political ecology

• The origin of the environmental crisis is social and political
• To understand this crisis, or seek to find its solutions, we must focus on social/political factors

Fifteen minute essay

• Take out a piece of lined paper
• Plan to write roughly ¾ of a page in paragraph/essay form
• Begin with one clear proposition
• Add two or three clear propositions to explain and/or support it

Answer two questions:

1. Which one of Fox's four arguments do you find the most convincing?

2. Why did you choose this argument?