The Struggle for Recognition : On Animal Rights — part one
‘The animal organism is the microcosm, the centre of nature which has become for itself. Within it, the whole of inorganic nature has recapitulated itself, and is idealized, and it is this that has to be demonstrated by the more detailed exposition of it. As the animal organism is the process of subjectivity which is self-relating in the midst of externality, the rest of nature is present here, for the first time, as something external, for animal being preserves itself in this relationship with that which is external to it. For the plant however, which is drawn outwards without really preserving itself in this relation with an other, the rest of nature is not yet present as something external. As animal life is its own product and purpose, it is simultaneously both end and means’.
- Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, (1770–1831), ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Do animals have rights? What is the question even asking? We know that at least one species of animal has rights, Homo sapiens, because it invented them, (well done to us then), legal rights that is, the right to vote for instance, an example that demonstrates that of course such rights are grounded upon a society’s customs and statutes and which are dependent upon societal context for their meaning and hence are culturally and politically relative. But what of natural rights? Rights grounded upon nature, (human nature?), and are universal, inalienable, (they cannot be taken away), such as the right to life. Jeremy Bentham, (1748–1832), had this to say about natural rights: ‘That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle’.
I have always found it ironic, Bentham resorting to rhetoric to decry ‘rhetorical nonsense’. Natural rights are rights that are natural in the sense of not human-made, as in rights deriving from human nature or from the edicts of a God. Thomas Aquinas, (1225–1274), came at the problem with the presupposition (did Thomas ever have an argument not grounded upon an unproven presupposition?) that natural law is an aspect of divine providence, in effect he affirms a fundamental thesis that natural law is a participation in eternal law and eternal law is that rational plan by which all creation is ordered, natural law being the way that the human being participates in eternal law. While non-rational beings have a share in eternal law only by being determined by it their action non freely results from their determinate natures, natures the existence of which results from God’s will in accordance with God’s eternal plan, rational beings such as ourselves are able to grasp our share in eternal law and freely act upon it.
It is this aspect of the natural law that warrants on Thomas’ view our designating the natural law as law, for law as Thomas defines it is a rule of action put into place by one who has care of the community, and as God has care of the entire universe God’s choosing to bring into existence beings who can act freely and in accordance with principles of reason is sufficient to justify our thinking of those principles of reason as law. Thomas allows for the insight of Aristotle, (384–322 BC), that the particulars of the situation always outstrip one’s rules so that one will always need the moral and intellectual virtues in order to act well, (which seems to me to undermine his whole point … well, particulars of the situation do tend to put the spanner in the works of a good moral theory). But he denies that this means that there are no principles of right conduct that hold everywhere and always, and some even absolutely. On Thomas’ view, killing of the innocent is always wrong, as is lying, adultery, sodomy, and blasphemy, and that they are always wrong is a matter of natural law, such being only examples and not an exhaustive list of absolutely forbidden actions, (a list which is of course seemingly endless as well as quite arbitrary. Sodomy? Why is that on the list? Not that I have ever tried it, but how much of this has to do with personal disgust and preferences?)
Well we can learn from philosophers being wrong because of why they are wrong, and one may be seduced by Thomas’ substantive natural law ethic given that it apparently does not fall into the neat contemporary categories for moral theories in virtue of the fact that his natural law perspective understands principles of right to be grounded upon principles of good, and on this Aquinas sides with utilitarians, (never a good move), and consequentialists generally, (leaving motives out of the picture, not a good at all), and in opposition to Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), and yet Aquinas would deny that the principles of the right enjoin us to maximize the good while he grants that considerations of the greater good have a role in practical reasoning, action can be irremediably flawed merely through, for instance, badness of intention, flawed such that no good consequences that flow from the action would be sufficient to justify it, and in this Aquinas seems to be siding with Kant, his moral theorising is a bit of a muddle, and against the utilitarians and consequentialists assuming a different hue from that of Kant. Aquinas was of course very much an Aristotelian who believed that virtue will forever be necessary in order to hit the target in a situation of choice but he dismisses the view commonly ascribed to Aristotle though it is disputed if it is his view that there are no universally true general principles of right, that is to say, the natural law view dispenses with indisputable particularism, the exclusive or special devotion to a particular interest (which we see much of today).
Thomas Aquinas, as you will know if you have read my series of articles A Bellowing Ox and a Roaring Lion — parts one to six, objected to the presenting of terrible philosophical arguments to prove God as they can make the Christian faith look ridiculous giving the infidel cause to scoff. He would not approve of Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig, (1949 -), advocate for the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, the universe has a cause, therefore God, (Craig has written a whole book on that which I have not read, life is too short and as far as I know this may be the only life I have). Similarly, advocates for animal rights, such as myself, should not be presenting terrible arguments in support of their position thereby making it look ridiculous and giving anyone the occasion to scoff, the cause is too important. And there are terrible arguments for animal rights presented by philosophers who should know better, as we shall see because in this series I intend to expose some of them before presenting what I think is a strong case for animal rights albeit from a rather unlikely source, namely Hegel, and if you do not think it is a strong case at least it will not be so obviously flawed as to be vulnerable to scornful dismissal but will require some serious thinking to demonstrate what is wrong with it.
Where to start? Speciesism? Peter Singer, (1946 — ), author of ‘Animal Liberation’, defines speciesism as ‘a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species’. It would also be speciesist to treat one animal’s life as more valuable than another’s. Is speciesism morally wrong? Speciesism is condemned as being of the same kind of bigotry as racism or sexism, and people who oppose speciesism contend that giving human beings greater rights than non-human animals is as arbitrary (and as morally wrong) as giving white people greater rights than non-white people. The analogy is deeply flawed of course. Let us consider the evolution of skin colour for instance. Darker skins tend to aggregate around the equator due to ultraviolet light saturation, the amount of ultraviolet light hitting the surface of the globe at any given moment. Ultraviolet light can degrade folate and folic acid (vitamin B9) as it penetrates the skin, and melanin is the chemical that makes skin dark to block out ultraviolet light. Therefore, populations living where there is the most of it have dark skin loaded with melanin to protect the developing embryo in the womb, pregnant women as you may know take prenatal vitamins including folate, spina bifida can be the result of folate deficiency in pregnancy and ultraviolet light destroys folate.
And so it was that as our ancestors went up North and down South there was not so much ultraviolet light, but ultraviolet light also causes photo-chemical reactions in the skin, it interacts with certain chemicals to produce vitamin D, which is very important, produced upon ultraviolet light interacting with certain kinds of cholesterol in the skin. Vitamin D is a hormone playing its part in mood stabilisation, it makes us feel content if not quite euphoric, and it is also important for bone development, without enough of it bones become rubbery impeding proper walking and causing rickets. Northerners and Southerners of the Earth therefore (it is amazing how Nature works, no wonder the notion of a Mind behind it is so seductive) have lighter skin for the sake of stronger bones. The point here is that the so-called racial characteristics have an evolutionary history and they vary independently of each other just like height, hair colour, and so on, and the very things that we use to identify races all vary in this way, on a sliding scale, marked out by arbitrary lines that we endeavour to draw between racial characteristics. Biologically speaking race is not a thing, there are no sub-categories of humans for different kinds of races, race is a (well I usually avoid this phrase but in this case it is applicable) social construct and racial ideologies stem from a time when people did try to separate people into different sub-species and problematic categories. Racism is a junk notion founded upon the belief that races exist and they do not. Different so-called racial characteristics are extraordinary adaptations to delight over and celebrate for we have much more in common than we do in what separates us so figuratively and literally we are all one family.
You see the problem, racism is a junk notion, introduction of the term speciesism is supposed to evoke in our minds racism, so speciesism is a junk notion. And yet races do not exist, but species do. Although there was once more than one species of human, so some of you may be asking, Homo sapiens belong to the genus Homo and are the only extant species, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and so on having been wiped out (hopefully we had nothing to do with it but I would guess that we did). So, what if they still existed? Racism is grounded upon ignorance of the facts of biological evolution, but what if we, Homo sapiens, favoured our own species of Homo? Discrimination certainly but founded upon a fact of biological evolution, species exist. If we say that discriminating against neanderthals were they still here would be wrong because speciesism, well that opens a can of worms does it not? If we should not discriminate because of species of human, then what of other species of animal? This is what I mean by terrible arguments, (well in this case not so much an argument but a futile attempt to draw an analogy where there isn’t one), opening up animal rights advocates to dismissal and mockery. We must think more deeply and creatively as we argue upon rational grounds in defence of animal rights.
So what should we focus upon? Do we have an obligation to animals? That is certainly an ancient notion.
‘A righteous man regards the life of his animal, But the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel’.
- ‘Proverbs’ 12.10
‘Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds’.
- ‘Proverbs’ 27.23
An obligation to animals is found in Western and Eastern religions generally, albeit the focus is upon cruelty to animals while allowing the consumption of animal flesh and requiring there to be animal sacrifice. Philosophers of classical antiquity, including Pythagoras, (570 — c. 495 BC), Theophrastus, (c. 371 — c. 287 BC), Plutarch, (c. AD 46 — c. AD 119), and Porphyry, (,c. 234 — c. 305 AD), did however focus upon vegetarianism as well as temple sacrifices:
‘Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?’
‘Or would everyone declare that the reason for those who first instituted flesh-eating was the necessity of their poverty? … But you who live now, what madness, what frenzy drives you to the pollution of shedding blood, you who have such a superfluity of necessities? Why slander the earth by implying that she cannot support you? Why impiously offend law-giving Demeter and bring shame upon Dionysus, lord of the cultivated vine, the gracious one, as if you did not receive enough from their hands? Are you not ashamed to mingle domestic crops with blood and gore? You call serpents and panthers and lions savage, but you yourselves, by your own foul slaughters, leave them no room to outdo you in cruelty; for their slaughter is their living, yours is a mere appetizer’.
‘It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defence; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace’.
‘ … it is absurd … to say that the practice of flesh-eating is based on Nature. For that man is not naturally carnivorous is, in the first place, obvious from the structure of his body. A man’s frame is in no way similar to those creatures who were made for flesh-eating: he has no hooked beak or sharp nails or jagged teeth, no strong stomach or warmth of vital fluids able to digest and assimilate a heavy diet of flesh. It is from this very fact, the evenness of our teeth, the smallness of our mouths, the softness of our tongues, our possession of vital fluids too inert to digest meat that Nature disavows our eating of flesh. If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of axe’.
- Plutarch, ‘Moralia: De Esu Carnium’ (‘On Meat Eating’), c. 100 AD
However, these doctrines tend to be incomplete as they stand and fail to deal with many of the issues that would now be taken up in the consideration of animal rights, and most assuredly none of them, not even the classical philosophers themselves, systematically develop the obligations of humans to animals from philosophical foundations.
A shortcoming having been to some extent put right in modern times, apparently. There are at least three positions one could adopt to defend the notion that animals are entitled to equal respect with humans in a systematic and comprehensively developed manner. Utilitarianism. Virtue Ethics. Kantianism, (Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804)). Having already evoked Bentham and Singer (the latter a leading exponent of utilitarianism as it applies to respect for animals and an initiator of the modern animal rights movement) I will begin with utilitarianism albeit it is a moral theory undeserving of much attention however formulated. I will get on thing out of the way first because I will have to bring it up at some point:
‘And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast’.
‘And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them’.
- ‘Leviticus’ 20:15–16
Atheist Christopher Hitchens, (1949–2011), while in debate with William Lane Craig was asked by a member of the audience if he would label bestiality as an immoral act, but he refused to do so, while Craig of course thought the question posed to Hitchens a good one and it helped demonstrate that atheism cannot offer objective moral standards. Perhaps Hitchens thought he was being led into a trap, if he said bestiality was an immoral act then there you have it, there are objective moral values and there it is in the Bible too, a declaration of an objective moral value. Had Hitchens, (who I believe has done atheism a disservice as much as Craig has done for Christianity and for the same reason, offering bad arguments in its defence, or sometimes no arguments at all but mere assertions expressive of his own personal preferences about how things ought to be), been better read in philosophy then the answer he could have given is that, regardless of whether he thinks bestiality is an immoral act, not everyone would agree (as you would expect if it was an objective moral value) indeed philosophical arguments have been presented in its favour. By Peter Singer the utilitarian for instance. See his article ‘Heavy Petting’. This is the measure of the soundness of a moral theory, if it leads you to conclusions that offend our moral intuitions then so much the worse for the theory:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/heavypetting
So utilitarianism is here the basis for his argument that our revulsion at human-animal coupling is as irrational as the old prohibitions on homosexuality and that the persistence of this taboo attests to ‘our desire to differentiate ourselves … from animals’ whereas we have no unique spiritual nature or moral stature and as we are animals interspecies sex ‘ceases to be an offense to our status and dignity as human beings’ and is not wrong unless it involves violence to the animal.
With Singer on our side what need have we of adversaries? Anyway I shall continue with my discussion of utilitarianism however distasteful I find the subject.
Animal rights or animal liberation extends further than animal welfare and humanitarianism as usually understood and displaying kindness to animals and protecting them from cruelty are indeed good things to do but no longer sufficient, the radical point here being that, with regard to the notion of animal liberation, animal interests have to be accorded the amount of respect as that granted to human beings, who are animals anyway. I know it is easy enough to fall into talking about ourselves as though we weren’t part of the animal kingdom but take it is read that when I say animals I mean the animal kingdom apart from ourselves.
Utilitarianism, in brief, is the notion that pleasure is the only good and pain is the only evil:
‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do … By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government’.
- Jeremy Bentham, ‘Of The Principle of Utility’
And the litmus test of an act being moral or not is whether the consequences of the act, once all the pains and pleasures that the act causes to those affected by it are calculated and totted up, produce the greatest aggregate of well-being or happiness as compared to any other course of action that might have been undertaken instead. And once it is allowed that all sentient beings can suffer pain and feel pleasure they also must be incorporated into the reckoning, for if animals no less than humans feel sensations then their pains and pleasures no less than that of human beings have to count.
Curiously, given his opinion on natural rights, that apparently was the view of the founder of modern utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham:
‘The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which could never have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable, animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’
- ‘An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’
But why should suffering be the basis of rights? What is it that grants rights anyhow? And it was hardly worth Bentham’s while to come up with a principle and then refuse to be led by it to its evident logical conclusion, for instance, the eating of animal flesh must be ruled out, completely, instead he argues merely for humane methods to be applied when slaughtering animals. But upon Singer taking up the issue, so the story goes, the climate of general opinion became more favourable to more broader considerations and with his systematic (?) pursuit of greater extensive possibilities there was initiated an entirely new stage (so the story goes) in the movement for animal equality through a radicalization of Bentham’s suggestion. After exposing the atrocities of factory farming and the heartlessly indifferent waste of animal lives in biomedical testing and experimentation Singer contends that the consumption of animal flesh under present circumstances is morally wrong and so to is biomedical experimentation at least as it is now currently practiced. Furthermore Singer has been a radical philosophical champion in his own mind for his relentless exposure of the sophistries and fantasies that empower even putative sensitive and thoughtful folk to carry on with their speciesism (see above … he fights sophistry with sophistry … how does that work?)
It would appear that any serious utilitarian (if that is not an oxymoron) could have no doubt that animals of necessity must be included in the calculation of aggregate happiness, but this is utilitarianism and so of course there is another utilitarian who is certain that we should not include animals in the calculation of aggregate happiness. Raymond G. Frey, (1941–2012), refutes on utilitarian grounds claims of equal respect for animals. His reasoning is as follows. There is no need for hungry humans to worry about sensations of pain in animals when considering their dietary preferences, and so vegetarianism in all its forms is nonsense (nonsense on stilts?) and there is no difficulty arising in the conscience of a meat eater even if he or she is also a committed utilitarian consequentialist for merely eating the meat of animals has nothing to do with actually killing them or causing them to suffer and the human carnivore who merely buys and eats the meat bears no responsibility for what the factory farmer or the butcher did. If my neighbour shoots and kills a turkey even if it was wrong of him or her to kill it is it wrong for me to eat it? It is not obvious how the argument from killing or indeed the other arguments can demonstrate that it is when the person who does the eating is different from the person who does the killing which of course is the case with meat that we purchase in the supermarket, for after all where killing or violating rights or inflicting suffering is concerned it is usually the person who commits these things who is morally suspect (oh really? So a mere spectator of child abuse who him or herself does not partake in the actual abuse is not morally suspect?) And even if we grant that most abattoirs would not exist if most people did not eat meat it does not follow that the wrongness if wrong indeed it is of the slaughterer’s act of killing in some mystical manner transfers to the consumer’s act of eating, for it is true that animals are killed in order to be eaten but it is killing not eating which carries the moral force in the argument from killing and which is being denounced.
This is the same shallow and nonsensical reasoning as Singer’s who said, as you will have read if you could get through the whole article, that of men using hens as sexual objects: ‘This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it really worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in a wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time’. I feel like I may be losing IQ points just by going through this stuff but it has to be done, and if you think Frey’s terrible arguments exposes the position that he is advocating for to ridicule remember that Craig’s arguments for God without whom there are no objective moral values strike many who already are believers as so compelling, Craig the most brilliant defender of Christianity who ‘seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists’, said Sam Harris, (1967 -), probably just to humour him.
Strict utilitarians do not consider death an evil to the individual who suffers it so long as it is painless and unsuspected in advance and Frey in this respect is a strict utilitarian going by his reasoning against animal rights albeit he is aware that the killing of animals as now practiced is inseparable from suffering, and he relieves the eater of meat from any anxiety in so far as that goes. And yet the decisive point is the argument that the eater of meat bears no responsibility for the death and suffering of the animal eaten, it is none of his or her concern, and one should not be surprised for a utilitarian can always with consistency be indifferent to the consequences of his or her actions on utilitarian grounds, self-contradictory as that sounds. What if Frey is a utility monster? ‘Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater gains in utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose’ said Robert Nozick, (1938–2002). ‘For, unacceptably, the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster’s maw, in order to increase total utility’. Nozick is asking what if there is someone or thing capable of much greater happiness than anybody else? Suppose Frey is a utility monster who gets a million times more happiness out of consuming meat than I and every other vegetarian gets out of consuming fruit and vegetables. Utilitarians are obligated to provide Frey with all the meat he demands for the sake of maximizing total happiness.
Even if such demands are generating suffering elsewhere but never enough to tip the ethical scales, as a utilitarian understands ethics. What does this mean for utilitarianism as a moral theory? Indeed if some people are utility monsters getting so much happiness from consumption should we all be transferring our income to them because the sum-total of utilitarian social happiness rises when they consume more? Singer accepts that if there were utility monsters they may pose a problem for utilitarianism, but he finds the idea far-fetched and poses the problem in the context of a billionaire owning a superyacht rather than donating money to fund medical treatments: ‘We would have to assume that Larry Ellison [American business magnate] actually has capacities for happiness that are vastly greater than anyone else’s. Ellison’s yacht cost $200 million, and if we assume that $400 can repair an obstetric fistula, that means that the suffering relieved by 500,000 obstetric fistula repairs is not greater than the happiness that Ellison gets from his yacht. That, I think, is not physically possible’.
Utility monsters may be far-fetched (we can grasp the idea of somebody who gets more out of something than we do, we are capable of imagining somebody who is happier than we are, but is the idea of a creature getting a million times more happiness out of things possible to imagine in a meaningful way? How would it interact with the world?) but there is no need to invoke them. We have utilitarian monsters. One of the best objections to utilitarianism is Singer himself. Subscribing to a particular moral theory is one thing (accepting it at the theoretical level). Taking it seriously to actually allow it to impact on your thinking and doing is another (accepting it at the practical level). Singer (for whom humans, as animals, have no unique spiritual nature or moral stature) argues that the infanticide of newborn human infants is ethically acceptable (understood by a utilitarian) because they are not persons, whereas the killing of certain animals who are persons is not:
‘Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the foetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many non-human animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel pain (sentience), and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week, a month, or even a year old. If the foetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee’.
- Peter Singer, ‘Taking life: abortion’, in ‘Practical Ethics’
Well, Singer is secure in his presenting his case in such things because he knows it will never be put into practice and so he will never need face the consequences of what he is advocating for. Back to Frey, though it is hardly worth it. Let us suppose a poacher kills some rabbits not for food but for the pleasure of it. We can all agree it is wrong for so many reasons. It is against the law, unlawfully taking or destroying any game on any land, open or enclosed, including public roads and paths, so its consequences for society in general are bad. Poachers have a paltry consideration for the countryside and none at all for wildlife and the farmer’s land that they despoil. Killing animals just for pleasure, well that is just inherently wrong, who would argue for it? And suppose a poacher having had his or her fun decides he may as well profit out of it and sells the rabbits yo you with you knowing the rabbits were poached. A man is know by the company he keeps, said Aesop, (c. 620–564 BC), and wrote a fable about an ass to illustrate the point. I suggest you keep better company. Are you not thereby guilty of encouraging a wrong doing which remember is wrong for so many reasons by profiting from it? Furthermore suppose you make it known to the poacher through words or through repeated purchase of successive spoils that you are a good prospect for the disposition of his or her future thefts, are you not just so much more involved in his or her crimes? Have you not done wrong not simply under statutory law but under moral law as well and by any totting up of the utilities involved? How does the case of an all above board legally speaking eater of meat differ from a moral perspective with that of the consumer of the poached rabbit?
Especially so if the meat eater is fully cognizant of the fact that the process of farming, transporting, and slaughtering animals is neither humane nor without pain and suffering, but then Frey also resorts to the tack of how little difference a single person can make, a single vegetarian would have a mere negligible effect if he or she were acting alone and had not attained a sizeable body of support for a boycott of meat by the eating public. Abattoirs would not go out of business as a consequence of the abstention of a lone vegetarian to which a simple retort might be that abstention continued over a period of time could at some point result in one less animal living a painful life and dying a painful death. That should register with a consequentialist should it not? But for Frey there are alternate ways of battling the suffering connected with meat eating other than vegetarianism, and further what about the pain that would be suffered humans losing their jobs and businesses if eating meat were widely abandoned. Suppose this were to happen, meat eating was outlawed at a stroke, well, Frey as a utilitarian would need to calculate the amount of pain caused to who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of animals annually and weighed that against the possible future inconveniences that would be suffered in the course of re-employing people connected with the meat industry. That is how utilitarianism operates, is it really a moral theory at all? A vegetarian could argue the case for an increase in productivity of agriculture rendered a possibility through the eradication of large-scale animal husbandry contending that it is a wasteful way of processing grain into food, a utilitarian could hardly discount the increased well-being then maybe resulting for the vast number of people the world over now suffer malnutrition.
But then utilitarians can argue continually among themselves about which consequences are to be preferred over others, with are the most conducive to the dispensation of animal happiness. Isn’t the ultimate happiness not to have been born in the first place? Or to die soon? According to the wisdom of Silenus anyway, as reported by Aristotle in the surviving ‘Eudemus’ fragment:
‘You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you, and thus you may consider it unlawful, indeed blasphemous, to speak anything ill or false of them, since they now have been transformed into a better and more refined nature. This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony. Pertinently to this they say that Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind. At first he could offer no response, and was obstinately silent. At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: ‘you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.’ It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living.
– ‘Eudemus’ (c. 354 BC)
Utilitarianism ‘correctly’ understood is committed to take the suffering of animals seriously. Or perhaps not. Utilitarianism ‘correctly’ understood is not committed to take the suffering of animals seriously. It depends which utilitarian you talk to but perhaps with its being a consequentialist doctrine it is assumed that the first of those statements is true and utilitarianism is afforded a great deal more respect than it warrants. It does nothing for the cause of animal rights other than set them back. Its presuppositions are hopelessly defective. Killing is not an evil if the death is painless to the victim, if it does not establish a bad precedent, if it does not cause pain to those who cared about the victim. And further the aggregate well-being of a group may be raised by enlarging the number of its members albeit each individual is made worse off in the process. Let us suppose there is such a thing as a utility index, not a ridiculous supposition for a utilitarian who believes happiness can be measured. All 100 members of a group have a utility index of 10 so the aggregate utility of the group is 1,000. Upon lowering each individual’s utility index to 8 and increasing the size of the group to 150 the aggregate utility index is now 1,200. An increase in total happiness indeed and with everyone worse off (well this is considered in the abstract although there may be concrete instances where such an outcome is actually desirable). Some utilitarians might replace aggregate utility with average utility whereby in the example given the first arrangement is to be preferred in virtue of the index of average utility being 10 and not 8 as in the second arrangement. But then in any group with a range of indices, for instance a group of ten where the individual members have utilities ranging from 1 to 10 in order, the aggregate utility is then 55 (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 = 55) and the average utility index is 5.5 (55 ÷ 10). If we humanely kill the member whose average utility index is the lowest, that is to say, 1, the aggregate utility goes down to 54 whereas the average utility index goes up to 6 and will continue to increase every time a member with the lowest index of utility is done away with. The average utility will eventually go up to 10 while the aggregate utility will fall to 10 albeit membership of the group is down to one member with a utility index of 10 thereby maximizing average utility, the logical consequence of whichever criterion of utility is adopted.
And let us not even mention utility monsters.
Such objections to utilitarianism could do on forever given its need to calculate and compare quantities of pleasure and pain and what constitutes a pleasure or a pain in any case? (If you are wondering why I ask that of pain think of schadenfreude which is of course a pleasure, by definition). Are some pleasures better than others, more refined, more exalted? How might units of utility be assigned absolutely to each pleasure of an individual in order to calculate the utility index of a given individual? How might we compare the utility index of one individual with that of another? Such calculations and comparisons are required in order to get a reckoning of the consequences of an act, and the difficulties are the same whether one is interested in aggregates or averages of utility. And yet it is evident enough that different people have different sensibilities that are without any common denominator albeit such quandaries can be fudged via the expediency of broad definitions and rough estimates and a utilitarian will protest that mathematical precision in calculations of utility is not necessary. But alas there is always the inconvenience of moral intuition that moral theories continually rub up against (I won’t evoke the notion of common sense as is commonly done for common sense has been shown often enough to be an unreliable guide to what is true). Fairness, however we define it, is something we intuit, and how might utilitarianism introduce considerations of fairness into the distribution of pains and pleasures? If we are calculating the aggregate or average utility of a group we will frequently have to sacrifice the interests of one or more innocent however you define the term individuals in order to maximize the result that we are after, and so, take our group of ten individuals each of whom has a utility index of 10, the aggregate utility is 100, the average utility is 10, and suppose three individuals chosen at random to avoid implications of unfairness are given a utility index of 20 at the cost of reducing the utility indices of the remaining seven to 6, the aggregate utility now goes up to 10, the average utility goes up to 10.2. Each individual has been accorded equal respect in that there has been no discrimination and a utilitarian would be happy, would get pleasure, with the sacrifice of the interests of the six to the three in order to maximize utility. Indeed he or she would wish to go further with such sacrifices for the utilitarian cause and impose a really extreme sacrifice upon a small minority to attain a higher aggregate or average utility index from which only the majority benefit. This is good Vulcan philosophy. ‘Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’, said Mr. Spock. (Have you noticed how an alien race or rather species has committed itself to total logic without understanding what logic is? How did they ever survive?)
Of course intuitively this is unjust, a term forbidden in the utilitarian lexicon for unjust to a utilitarian is simply that which public legislation renders verboten through its edicts but aside from fear of the law a utilitarian is committed to maximization of the good that has little to do with commonly held notions of fairness. Justice is a value existing independently of maximizing utility and at bottom is concerned with the equal treatment of people equally placed, but then, it may be objected, the concerns so far expressed are directed at so-called act utilitarianism in its classic Benthamite form whereby the consequences of each act must be calculated, and yet various amendments of classical act utilitarianism have been put forward to avoid its unfortunate and defective consequences, rule utilitarianism, for instance, that replaces the utility of each individual act with the overall utility of obeying a rule. The poaching of a rabbit may be justified by act utilitarianism given that the owner of the land where the rabbit was poached suffers less from the loss of a rabbit than the poacher will gain by poaching it. But once we reflect that the rule against poaching benefits the countryside indeed society too in the long run then we can see that maximizing utility requires following that rule and thus the rules of fairness are rescued given their role in the enhancement of aggregate utility.
Alas how might a rule strictly founded upon utility bind the individual actor if the act even though against the rule would increase overall utility if taken alone? During these pandemic times I lock myself away and desist in my partying in accordance with the rule stipulated by Boris Johnson, (1964 — ), who we may suppose is a good utilitarian for he sees that following his own rule may not advance and may even reduce (this is all in his own mind of course) the aggregate utility of all, indeed by the principle of Bentham’s act utilitarianism it would actually be wrong for Boris to isolate himself and give up his role as party animal. But the general rule that we should isolate ourselves in times of a pandemic will almost always advance well-being in the long run (that’s the theory anyway) if everyone observes it and so we ought to isolate ourselves out of consideration for the rule albeit the economy is wrecked in the process not to mention our mental health. Suppose that I can avoid isolating myself and not be detected (a far-fetched supposition in these Orwellian times I know) and suppose also that my evasion will advance my own utility (which it would) and the overall utility also upon the aggregation of all individual utilities and dis-utilities (which it would because my isolating myself is a deprivation to society as a whole, though there are of course plenty of people who by isolating themselves are increasing the well-being of society, teachers and civil servants for instance). Upon aggregating the deprivation I will undergo as an individual with the benefit to the public that would follow from my isolating myself it may transpire that I could increase the aggregate utility of the whole society by not isolating unless of course I set a bad example to other people who really ought to isolate themselves (but who looks upon me as a role model?) Would it not, then be my duty if I were a proper utilitarian not to isolate myself? For if I am able to conceal what I am doing I am not setting a bad example and I maximize the aggregate of utility, but if I may, and indeed have to, make that calculation as must everyone else and so we find ourselves back with act utilitarianism.
Rule utilitarianism it may be argued us useful as a rule of thumb, that is to say it is usually better to isolate ourselves in time of a pandemic but from within a theoretical perspective rule utilitarianism collapses back into act utilitarianism in the absence of bringing in extraneous elements of obligation, that is to say that one is simply obliged to follow the established rule without calculating individual circumstances. Singer refuses to be fazed by the distributive paradoxes emerging out of utility maximization and the logic of utilitarianism where it leads regardless of issues of distributive justice. Simple enough in practice as opposed to in abstraction given that the scandalous outcomes that utility allows in principle hardly ever come to pass (well we can argue about that one). Slavery is technically allowed if it pays off in aggregate utility and yet it does so rarely and yet utilitarians baulk at relinquishing a simple and powerful tool of ethical evaluation simply to to evade avoid what are principally hypothetical reasons for unease and awkwardness.
However, returning to the issue of respect for animals, we may want to ask whether or not death is a dis-utility in itself or whether or not it is evil only in the collateral pain or fear it causes others. Is the death of a human any more serious an evil than the death of an animal? One brings in here the doctrine of collateral effects to resolve the problem, whereby the death of a human may cause others to suffer from loss or fear for themselves whereas the humane that is to say painless killing of a chicken or a rabbit normally does not. Singer opts for not having to rely upon something as secondary to the calculation of aggregate utility as peripheral effects and directs his attention instead to preference utilitarianism for a solution whereby factor to be considered in measuring the well-being of an individual is not felt pleasure or pain but rather the satisfaction or frustration of his or her preferences. Humans being endowed with self-consciousness as they are can alone have a conscious preference for life as such and so it is that humans and humans alone suffer loss from death even if that death is painless.
Kill a rabbit is permissible if the death is painless, that is to say, and there is no loss of aggregate utility from the act if you replace the rabbit you have killed with another rabbit having the same utility index, hence to permit the killing of animals for food under special conditions cannot be used to justify killing innocent humans and replacing them. But then there are further implications of preference utilitarianism, for rabbits cannot be said to have a conscious preference for life, and infanticide, accordingly, is permissible if the infant killed is replaced by another with roughly the same utility index, indeed it would be obligatory in that replacement of a deformed child with a healthy one may be a gain in utility, and anyway if a deformed child is permitted to live it might not find positive utility in its future existence. Preference utilitarianism is an horrendous concept as well as being practically absurd. Together with a preference for life an individual will have many desires for self-realization in the future and a question arises as to whether we are we pledged to honour these given the individual dying suddenly of a natural cause, and further animals indicate a fear of death and a preference for life by their cries and behavior, they moan while being led to the slaughter, more is involved here than simple fear of pain. And upon the death of a human individual it is no easy matter to comprehend how he or she can experience the disappointment of a preference for life now that the life is over.
‘Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy’.
- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, (1813–1855), ‘Either/Or’
If you hang yourself how can you regret it afterwards? That is to say, why might one entity with a preference for life not be replaced by another entity which also has a roughly similar preference for life? As with rabbits so with people. But with an approach to respect for animals that incorporates rights the principal consideration is justice and so the theoretical differences between any version of utilitarianism and a rights approach are fundamental, and yet the differences between the likes of Tom Regan, (1938–2017), very well known proponent of animal rights, and Singer do not always manifest themselves in their practical recommendations. For Regan eating the flesh of animals clearly violates their rights and Singer too arrives at a vegetarian position (which of course I find rather disturbing to find myself associated with him at least on that score but I won’t stoop so low as to mention that Adolf Hitler, (1889–1945), who would have approved of many of Singer’s recommendations, was a vegetarian).
There may be nothing amiss with eating meat if the animals are killed painlessly but painless killing Singer observes is all but impossible to realize in practice, and where the number of consumers is great some kind of factory farming will inevitably be introduced to accommodate supply to the demand, hence in practice a strict utilitarian should not eat meat. One may suppose a utilitarian would justify eating meat if the cost to animals in suffering were less than the cost to human beings in relinquishing the pleasures of the table and in economic disorientation but given the vast number of animals who endure many kinds of pain before they suffer a painful death aggregate utility no less than the theory of rights points towards vegetarianism, and yet on some points the differences between utilitarianism and a theory of animal rights are clear-cut albeit not always spelled out.
Utilitarianism cannot rule out various common forms of animal suffering that Singer no less than a rights theorist would one suppose regard as cruel. Bull fighting gives much pleasure to a great number of people so that the aggregate of pleasure for the humans is surely greater than the total of pain caused to relatively few animals. (It may be a good place here to bring in Ernest Hemingway’s, (1899–1961), moral ‘theory’: ‘What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after’). With the same reasoning one could argue in favour of zoos. Singer indeed despite his misgivings concedes albeit reluctantly that experimentation on animals cannot be placed out of the question altogether. He is strongly opposed to what a utilitarian may designate a waste of pain for instance when too many animals are used for too many useless experiments and tests, and he holds that there ought to be much greater control over the treatment of laboratory animals if their use is to be legitimate, and yet would professional associations demur over this without challenging the practice of experimentation on animals as such. And Singer (I am happy myself not to be so heavily intoxicated by a particular theory) insists that mentally defective humans who in addition have no loved ones who would suffer collaterally can be used in experiments and tests as freely as higher mammals like primates. His purpose is to demonstrate that admitting such a possibility may lead to circumspection in experimentation on animals in general, but Singer is in any case committed to the position that the cost in suffering inflicted upon a small number of humanely housed animals by carefully designed experiments and evidently needed tests would be legitimate if the pain were offset by reasonably expected benefits to other individuals, animal as well as human, from the useful knowledge thus attained (the assumption here is that animal testing attains the desired results anyway. Wan’t thalidomide tested on animals?)
Such are the limitations of utilitarianism that an intellectual contortionist may find ways to circumvent cannot be circumvented but were that even done utilitarians give us no reason to accept their position that is built upon adequate philosophical principles as the case for animal rights ought to be. So forget utilitarianism as a doctrine of respect for animals, and let us try for an alternative theory of animal rights going into the whole issue so much more deeply. Well, alternative systematic theories have been advanced, initially by Tom Regan, author of ‘The Case for Animal Rights’, 1983. He begins with a critique of René Descartes, (1596–1650), and particular neo-Cartesians of the current age in order to remove any persisting doubts that animals are conscious and have feelings and that they may also possess a significant degree of subjectivity (Descartes has been misrepresented on this point but I will get to that later). Regan is particular concerned with ‘normal mammalians, aged one or more’ that are most like human beings that have passed the stage of infancy. Individuals are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires, perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future, an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain, preference interests and welfare interests, the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals, a psycho-physical identity over time, and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares.
The issue of extending our ethical duties and obligations to the rest of the animal kingdom is one of great philosophical interest for me. As with ethics genuinely it is difficult to theorise about moral oughts and moral ought nots while successfully deflecting the accusation of emotivism, the notion that moral judgments do not operate as statements of fact but rather as expressions of the speaker’s or writer’s feelings, which could certainly be levelled at Plutarch (see above). And furthermore you cannot argue an ought from an is, claimed David Hume, (1711–1776), and which I hear oft repeated as though it were a self-evident and incontrovertible fact. See my article On Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’: Music at Midnight — part three for why Hegel thought it was wrong. We can argue for moral oughts from what is the case which is good to know and I will not go through all that again here and in any case the challenge remains to produce an intellectually rigorous and rationally robust argument or set of arguments to establish something that is of the utmost importance, the rights of animals, and a recourse to Hegelianism is the way forward. Animals have most assuredly continued to be the focus of certain forms of rights but the issue of extending moral consideration to animals remains as a bone of contention to be chewed over which may be an unfortunate metaphor in this context but it is about time we got to the marrow. Sturdier ethical foundations for the extension of ethical obligation and rights for protecting the welfare of animals can be grounded within the approach to ethical life as set out by Hegel, in particular through his concept of recognition whereby animals possess certain traits and characteristics that endow them with recognitive status and as a consequence are also constitutive of our own ethical life and ethical self-understanding.
Permitting the harm, abuse, misuse or exploitation of animals is constitutive of a distorting in our relations of recognition not merely with animals but with ourselves and with other human beings in addition, as a consequence of which there is a deviation away from a healthy and harmonious ethical life that corrodes at our ethical concepts and sensibilities, from which it follows that the infliction of pain and suffering upon animals lessens and cheapens the ethical capacities as well as the ethical status of human agents themselves and therefore the recognition of their protection from unnecessary, (a qualifier I will just place there for now but within the discussion of course at some point the issue of whether inflicting pain or suffering upon animals or indeed upon human beings is ever necessary or at least unavoidable has to be addressed), harm and suffering ought, (not a moral ought, we are not going around in circles here), to be defended upon those grounds. And maybe of more pressing importance is the issue of the legitimacy of extending our ethical obligations to animals, guaranteeing that ethical duty, and generating a cogent rationale for the legal protection of animals from cruelty and abuse. Within such a perspective as this an ethics that is reflexive in nature can deliver to us a more cogent perspective that can rationalize and make good the case for the ethical treatment of animals but in addition can be extended to other areas of ethics.
Hegel in the ‘Philosophy of Right’ presents a thesis the source of much of which is discernible in his earlier ideas concerning ethical life and rational agents whereby he argues that the very existence of unhealthy and distorted forms of social relations corrupts and deteriorates not merely an agent subjected to domination or degradation but the very status of humanity itself, of individuals who dominate and and of individuals who are dominated. An argument is adduced concerning the manner by which ethical subjects are constituted through the process of recognition, a glorious insight that can quite felicitously be developed in an alternative direction through an expansion of the notion of recognition. More precisely an Hegelian conception of morality is important in virtue of it capturing something that a good deal of contemporary accounts of ethics, in particular views associated with utilitarianism as we have just seen and deontological approaches, Kantian and otherwise, as we will see, fail to do for the mechanisms of ethical constitution are relational in nature and not simply emergent from subjective rationality. In contrast to such approaches the existence of degraded and less wholesome forms of morality is detrimental to the moral status of humanity itself, therefore the harm, the abuse, the wrongful killing inflicted upon animals is not to be seen as an unethical act in virtue of the fact that animals should be treated as moral subjects but rather in virtue of the fact that such acts degrade the ethical capacities of human beings, and whatever similarities you may think this bears towards Kantianism know that for Kant his arguments have the habit of running aground on the reef that is the nature of subjective idealism and its limitations.
From out of Hegel’s astute insights there emerges an approach whereby it can be demonstrated that abusing animals not only does animals wrong but inflicts harm to human beings in terms of the very fibre of their ethical life in general wherein the very power to constitute ethical subjects is contained. ‘Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man’, blithely asserts Arthur Schopenhauer, (1788–1860). ‘Moreover, this compassion manifestly flows from the same source whence arise the virtues of justice and loving-kindness towards men’. But where is his argument? Hegel provides it. And on such an approach animals are deserving of ethical consideration and protection by the law in a state because of the profoundly unwholesome consequences animal abuse has upon the nature of our shared ethical life, and given that to a degree animals share with us the possession of certain human traits of course they discover themselves within the sphere of recognition hence having implications for our own ethical development from which a more morally cogent argument for justifying the legal protection of animals from mistreatment and for the extension of our ethical obligations toward animals can be developed.
‘The Sending of the Animals’
by Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt (1851–1939)
The Animals, you say, were ‘sent’
For man’s free use and nutriment.
Pray, then, inform me, and be candid,
Why came they aeons before Man did,
To spend long centuries on earth,
Awaiting their Devourer’s birth?
Those ill-timed chattels, sent from Heaven,
Were, sure, the maddest gift e’er given —
‘Sent’ for Man’s usage (can Man believe it?)
When there was no Man to receive it!
To be continued …
