Thursday, September 26, 2013

Two Minor Points

Finally I've found some time to write again.  Since Adam and I discussed fishing (see my post and his response), I have come to realize that if I'm even able to, it's going to take me some time to formulate a cogent response to Adam's remarks about the most fundamental issue we discussed in our exchange (whether or not one can justify killing and otherwise using fish and other animals under normal--that is, not extreme--circumstances).  So I don't think I'll post anything directly addressing that issue for a while.  In the meantime, though, I do want to respond to a few of the more minor points he makes in his post before I move on to some non-fishing topics.

At one point in his post, Adam says the following:
So while I do think that you’ve hit on, and usefully emphasized, an important idea with that of the ‘moral remainder’ of killing fish (and presumably, animals in general), I would argue that, rather than search for ways we might offset or discharge this remainder, the truly admirable thing would be to simply not incur it in the first place. 
I think Adam's last sentence bespeaks a misconstrual of my remarks about moral remainders--an understandable one, to be sure, but a misconstrual nevertheless.  I think he's taking it that one incurs a moral remainder only when one does something wrong, and that to discharge a moral remainder is something like atoning for a sin or doing penance.  But, I take it, we have here two distinct cases, and moreover ones that are worth keeping distinct. As I'm understanding this notion, when one discharges a remainder, one fills out the picture of what one did in the first place in such a way that one’s act merits a positive assessment where it was impossible to assess it before. Before I used the example of a promise:  when one makes a promise, one incurs an obligation to fulfill it.  That obligation is the remainder; until one fulfills the promise, the act of making it is neither right nor wrong.  By contrast, when one atones for a sin or does penance, one attempts to offset prior wrongs that have that status regardless of what one does subsequently. When, for example, a former criminal does some sort of community service as a way of making things right with the community he harmed, he's already done something wrong (assuming, for the sake of argument, that the laws he broke were good ones).  When he does this, he doesn't discharge a remainder because there is no remainder in this case; instead, he does penance.  So--and this is the most important point--the fact that, by doing something, one incurs a remainder is no reason not to do it.  Otherwise it would be the case that we always have good reason not to make promises.  Rather, one might say that when one incurs a remainder, one acquires reason to do whatever it takes to discharge it.

In another place, Adam writes:
You...discuss the pleasures of feeling engrossed with nature, of escaping the frenzy of urban climes for the serenity and peace of just being out on the river, and so forth. [...] you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m not inclined to view this as having any justificatory force whatsoever; again, the simple reason being that this just is not something whose attainment requires killing animals (hiking, canoeing, and nature photography are probably the most obvious alternatives that spring to mind).
I won't argue with Adam that, at least to some extent, one can experience the pleasures he mentions in other ways than by fishing, perhaps, as he suggests, by  hiking, canoeing, and taking photos.  But there is one pleasure of fishing regarding which this is much less clear to me.  In my first post I let Michael Pollan, who obviously had a similar experience while hunting wild pigs, describe this experience for me.  This time I'll give it a shot in my own voice.

That day on the Gunpowder, I found, all of a sudden, that I was more engrossed in what I was doing, more rapt with attention, than I have ever been in anything.  I found myself absolutely absorbed by and hyper-aware of every detail of my situation--the cold water against my legs, the movements of the fish near the opposite bank, the sun on my neck, the weight of the rod in my hand and of the line at its end, the way my fly landed in the water, and a hundred other things.  I was, to use a phrase I can't resist borrowing from John McPhee, a "panoptic glaze of attention," and I stayed that way for a while--probably at least twenty minutes.  This was the experience that I found so calming, and that made my trip so rewarding.

Me hiking on the Appalachian Trail  in western Maryland, March 2012.
My experiences lead me to doubt very much that one might have the experience I just described while  hiking, canoeing, or taking photos in nature.  For while I've only canoed once, I've hiked and backpacked more than almost anyone else I know and taken pictures consistently while doing so.  And after all of that I have to say that I have never had anything close to the experience I just described while doing any of those things.

I suppose it could be that I've just been unlucky, and that others have had precisely the same sort of experience while canoeing or hiking or taking photos.  But I doubt it.   I doubt it because when I was fishing, I was doing something I wouldn't be doing were I doing any of those other things:  I was pursuing something.  The difficulty of not spooking the fish, and of getting one's fly to drift through the water in such a way as to trick the fish into thinking it's food--both necessary if the pursuit is to come to anything--demands the kind of awareness I brought to the river that day.  That is not true of the activities Adam mentions.

Given just this much, one might suggest that merely sneaking up on or waiting for wildlife (birdwatching, for example) would bring with it the same demands and so might sometimes involve the same sort of awareness.  I've never been birdwatching and so can't say for sure whether or not this is right, but it strikes me a plausible suggestion.  Still, I have my doubts about it.  The simple fact that, when fishing, my plan if I caught anything was to kill and to eat it makes fishing so different from birdwatching that it's hard for me to imagine experiencing the two activities in the same way.  Just consider that when birdwatching, one looks forward to the delight of witnessing the sought-after bird, a tiny testament to the beauty and striking perfection of form of which nature is capable.  When fishing, by contrast, I look forward to something very different, something much more somber:  the moment when I destroy another such testament.  Consider too that this somber rite--stalking, killing, and eating the fish--is one that humans have performed probably as long as they have been around.  When I fish I feel connected to that heritage, and so to something bigger than myself.  Both the gravitas of the activity and the connection with our common heritage as human beings are completely absent when watching birds.

In any case, I'm no longer sure it even makes much of a difference whether or not the sort of experience I had while fishing can be had in other ways.  In my original post, I brought up this experience in the course of an attempt to show that the "exchange" (as I was then thinking of it) that takes place between oneself and a fish when one catches it is a fair one.  I'm no longer convinced that this is the right tack to take.  I don't mean that I think the exchange unfair to the fish.  I'm not sure now what I think about that.  I just mean that I'm less confident now than I was at the time that that one is a very promising way to defend fishing or, for that matter, meat-eating more generally.  So in spite of my protestations here, and for different reasons, I'm inclined to agree with Adam that my experience has no justificatory force, or at least none of the sort I previously took it to have.