Thread by @deontologistics

Good for @CrispinSartwell, I suppose. I would respectfully suggest that logic programming (e.g. Prolog) is a bad model of computational mindedness for the most part (though @chrisamaphone's Ceptre might let us think about narrative identity). The nub of the issue is choice.

https://twitter.com/jasonintrator/status/1366194592480174080

I have no qualms with someone identifying as an animal, be it a familiar genre of hominid or something more interesting (Sciuridae sapiens), precisely insofar as identification is an expression of personal autonomy, that Kantian pearl without price. I choose differently.

The disagreement emerges when the capacity for choice itself comes into question. Here is @CrispinSartwell's central (rhetorical) question. As a philosopher whose work is dedicated to driving home this point, I would like to answer it, in brief.

Here is the ideological enemy we must defeat, no matter the conceptual cost, apparently. It is no newer than the the philosophical drive to distinguish ourselves from animals; an enemy that's been targeted by many in philosophy and the humanities over the last few decades.

I don't wish to deny that there's an important point being made here. This is a warning to everyone paying attention that every philosophical argument used to justifying emancipation can be turned into a rationalisation of oppression. It's an important warning.

Allow me to turn the tables. This ideological conflict between oppressor and oppressed over the symbolic ground of animality is largely a war between right and left Nietzscheans trying to substitute their preferred naturalist aesthetics for ethics (cf. deontologistics.co/2019/10/06/tfe…).

Eugenicists drink from the same poisoned well that @CrispinSartwell is inviting us to sit about in solidarity against them. It's just the same old argument about whose conception of the state of nature is correct, be it Hobbes or Rousseau, Locke or Leibniz, Burke or Jefferson.

For every one proclaiming themselves animals in the name of resisting the choices forced upon them, there's another being told their choices are unnatural, unseemly, unfit for the animals some lord intended them to be. See the abortion debate: 'Your body knows better than you.'

The divine right of kings is and always was a version of natural right. It was not an instance of the desire to transcend nature, but to master it by laying claim to hereditary apotheosis. This will to power is always justified by appeal to natural order of some kind or another.

The tradition of Enlightenment radicals so often lumped together with their conservative and liberal philosophical foils (cf. @CrispinSartwell again: thephilosophicalsalon.com/western-philos…) deny such appeals to the right of might by slowly unpicking their petty naturalism.

This is usually announced as a competing conception of 'natural right' (cf. Paine's The Rights of Man), and even dressed up in the language of religious authority (cf. Winstanley's Declaration from the Poor oppressed People of England), but it traces an arc of denaturalisation.

This arc of denaturalisation can and should take us beyond appeals to the order of nature entirely. This is neither to deny that we're animals in the relevant sense, nor to affirm there's some spark of divinity gifted to us by heavenly mandate. It is to sever means from ends.

The body qua means-in-itself is an end for the soul qua end-in-itself, even though the genesis of the latter lies solely in the former, and its evolution can reconfigure the relation between the two in ways that tighten their connection, should it so choose (by self-legislation).

If you want to be an animal, good for you! If you want to explore genres of animality foreclosed to your species thus far, go for it! You too can be unbeatable!

I simply ask that you remember this:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1361967925490507782?s=20

Let me close by tying this back to the platform upon which these views are articulated. Nearly a decade ago I entered an NYT competition to provide ethical justification for eating meat in 750 words: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…

The judges included Peter Singer, and so I went straight for the throat: deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/wolfen…

This remains one of the most controversial pieces of writing I've ever done. I've had the full gamut of responses from utilitarian vegans horrified by my principles, to new materialists, Derridean posthumanists, and Agambanite theologians who eat meat decrying my lack of shame.

For some it seems, it matters not what you do, as long as you retain the right sort of shame, which just happens to be precisely that sort of which they're the self-appointed administrators. Give me radical denunciation over such priestly technics any day. Autonomous ethics.

If you wish to read some more measured thoughts in this war against the hierophants of meat, and the ideological succour they draw from the 'embodiment paradigm' in philosophy and elsewhere, check out this: deontologistics.co/the-philosophe…

If you'd like a taste of how all this related to the politics of childhood and the philosophical case for engineering against eugenics, try this:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1364349889329717253?s=20

Solidarity in self-legislation, you filthy animals.🖖