The Struggle for Recognition : On Animal Rights — part two
‘The Greek god is the object of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination. His shape is, therefore, the bodily shape of man. The circle of his power and of his being is individual and individually limited. In relation with the subject, he is, therefore, an essence and a power with which the subject’s inner being is merely in latent unity, not itself possessing this unity as inward subjective knowledge. Now the higher stage is the knowledge of this latent unity, which as latent is the import of the classical form of art, and capable of perfect representation in bodily shape. The elevation of the latent or potential into self-conscious knowledge produces an enormous difference. It is the infinite difference which, e.g., separates man as such from the animals. Man is animal, but even in his animal functions he is not confined within the latent and potential as the animal is, but becomes conscious of them, learns to know them, and raises them — as, for instance, the process of digestion — into self-conscious science. By this means Man breaks the boundary of merely potential and immediate consciousness, so that just for the reason that he knows himself to be animal, he ceases to be animal, and, as mind, attains to self-knowledge’.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), ‘Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics’
Is there anything distinctive about human beings that justifies the notion of them having a moral status that is denied to non-humans?
Delivering some kind of convincing response to such a question has become more and more important among philosophers in addition to those outside of philosophy who are attentive to how we treat non-human animals (as everyone should be).
I will lay my cards on the table at the outset though my readers or reader will have picked up on this anyway if they have read the first part of this series. I believe it to be completely the wrong question to be asking and that the case for animal rights is much better served by leaving out the moralizing. My suggestion to vegetarians too, of which I am one, it does the cause more harm than good to make a moral issue out of it. It always opens you up to charges of hypocrisy for one thing. Think of the times you attend conferences where food and drink is provided, expenses paid, one of the perks of the academic life, there will be a vegetarian option, and you sit down with your salad next to someone munching away on a pork chop. How can you abide it, being in the presence of such a depraved moral reprobate? It must ruin your appetite. And yet, philosophers and others persist with the belief that the above question needs an answer and that once it is forthcoming it will facilitate a better understanding of human nature and the proper scope of our moral obligations.
There are of course many ways of distinguishing human beings from the rest of the natural world, Hegel does it in the passage above while pointing out that we are animals (which you would have thought hardly needed stating but you would be surprised, (‘we are not animals’ is a common response to pointing out for instance that homosexual behaviour has been observed in 1,500 different animal species so it could hardly be said to be unnatural or immoral unless you admit non-human animals into the moral community but then as for it being unnatural, being part of nature we could never do anything unnatural unless you think of it as interfering with nature’s way in which case using toothpaste to prevent tooth decay is unnatural but I digress), and one demonstration you could perhaps resort to in order to conince those who deny our animal status is point to a pair of human mammaries should any be at hand and ask what they think those are for, although perhaps it is best not to, it may backfire. Human breasts are unique you know .. this is one thing that distinguishes human animals for non-human animals, if you look closely at a female gorilla after child-bearing although I wouldn’t recommend it she is hardly distinguishable from a male gorilla, thereby suggesting that the human female breast evolved not just for the suckling of the young but to make the human male horny.
As Hegel said: ‘Man is animal, but even in his animal functions he is not confined within the latent and potential as the animal is, but becomes conscious of them, learns to know them, and raises them’. Yes of course there are plenty of things we could find that make us different from non-human animals without even bringing in speech, poetry, art. But there are those take the differences and justify particular human practices towards non-humans, practices causing pain, discomfort, suffering and death. That is to say that by answering the question of our differences in a certain way human beings are thereby justified in granting moral consideration to other humans that is neither needed nor justified when considering non-human animals, and in opposition to that an increasing number of philosophers have contended that while humans are different in a variety of ways from each other and other animals these differences do not provide a philosophical defense for denying non-human animals moral consideration, but of course what the basis of moral consideration is and what it amounts to has been the source of considerable disagreement.
Utilitarianism as I took pains to explain in the previous part is useless as a doctrine of respect for animals so we must look elsewhere perhaps not so much for a moral theory that can be extended to include animals but rather for a theory of animal rights. Tom Regan, (1938–2017), was a modern moral philosopher among the first to systematically advance such a theory in ‘The Case for Animal Rights’, 1983. Regan gets the ball rolling with a critique of René Descartes, (1596–1650), and certain neo-Cartesians of the age time in order to eliminate any persisting doubts that animals are conscious and have feelings and that they may also possess a significant degree of subjectivity (now there’s a notion in need of some serious work to clarify, it will be central to the Hegelian case for animal rights once I get around to presenting it). So before proceeding further it is best to be clear about what Descartes actually said.
Descartes regarded animals as merely mechanisms or automata, complex physical machines without experiences, and that as a consequence they were the same type of thing as less complex machines like a cuckoo clock. Thoughts and minds are properties of an immaterial soul and hence only human beings have subjective experience because only human beings have immaterial souls inhering in their physical bodies whereas animals indicate no signs of being inhabited by rational souls for they neither speak nor philosophise and hence insofar as we can tell they lack souls, and minds and are not much different from this laptop I am working on albeit they don’t frustrate or annoy me as much as this piece of junk. Animals are mechanical objects and not living subjects as Descartes explains:
‘Now by these two means one can also know the difference between men and beasts. For it is rather remarkable that there are no men so dull and so stupid (excluding not even the insane), that they are incapable of arranging various words together and of composing from them a discourse by means of which they might make their thoughts understood, and that, on the other hand, there is no other animal at all, however perfect and pedigreed it may be, that does the like. This does not happen because they lack the organs, for one sees that magpies and parrots can utter words just as we can, and yet they cannot speak as we do, that is to say, by testifying to the fact that they are thinking about what they are saying; on the other hand, men born deaf and dumb, who are deprived of the organs that aid others in speaking just as much as, or more than beasts, are wont to invent for themselves various signs by means of which they make themselves understood to those who, being with them on a regular basis, have the time to learn their language. And this attests not merely to the fact that beasts have less reason than men but that they have none at all. For it is obvious it does not need much to know how to speak; and since we notice as much inequality among animals of the same species as among men, and that some are easier to train than others, it is unbelievable that a monkey or a parrot that is the most perfect of its species would not equal in this respect one of the most stupid children or at least a child with a disordered brain, if their soul were not of a nature entirely different from our own. And we should not confuse words with the natural movements that attest to the passions and can be imitated by machines as well as by animals. Nor should we think, as did some of the ancients, that beasts speak, although we do not understand their language, for if that were true, since they have many organs corresponding to our own, they could make themselves as well understood by us as they are by their fellow creatures. It is also a very remarkable phenomenon that, although there are many animals that show more skill than we do in some of their actions, we nevertheless see that they show none at all in many other actions. Consequently, the fact that they do something better than we do does not prove that they have any intelligence, for, were that the case, they would have more of it than any of us and would excel us in everything. But rather it proves that they have no intelligence at all, and that it is nature that acts in them, according to the disposition of their organs just as we see that a clock composed exclusively of wheels and springs can count the hours and measure time more accurately than we can with all our carefulness’.
- ‘Discourse on Method’, 1637
Of course this was Descartes the philosopher happily theorising but in practice he evidently did not believe in such a rigid separation between man and beast. He had a dog after all, Monsieur Grat, that he will have loved. Who does not love their dog? And elsewhere Descartes speaks of animals having sensations and even feeling emotions like anger and happiness albeit a strict adherence to his dualism (mind and body are two distinct substances) would demand that they could only do so if they possessed an immaterial soul. So apparently Descartes is conceding that an animal differed in a meaningful way from my laptop, and yet it is incontrovertible that he did set up a strict dichotomy between the immaterial, experiencing, thinking life of a human being, and the material, mechanical, mindless existence of animals, and if w’e take that seriously just think of the implications for how we should treat animals
Descartes was of course smart enough to see how it might absolved us of moral responsibility towards animals and in a letter to theologian and philosopher Henry More, (1614–1687), he contends: ‘[My] view is not so much cruel to beasts but respectful to human beings .. whom it absolves from any suspicion of crime whenever they kill or eat animals’. So there we have it, be nice to animals (why though if Descartes is correct about them?) but have a clear conscience while chewing into a lovely juicy steak. Regan’s response to Cartesianism is the notion of subjects-of-a-life though for reasons I have never quite been able to figure out he was primarily concerned with normal mammalians, aged one or more as most like human beings who have passed the stage of infancy. Individuals, he says, are subjects-of-a-life:
‘To be the subject-of-a-life, in the sense in which this expression will be used, involves more than merely being alive and more than merely being conscious. To be the subject-of-a-life is to be an individual whose life is characterized by those features explored in the opening chapters of the present work: that is, 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 and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiental life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. Those who satisfy the subject-of-a-life criterion themselves have a distinctive kind of value — inherent value — and are not to be viewed or treated as mere receptacles’.
- The Case for Animal Rights’
All seems a bit arbitrary to me, subjectivity is a subject in need of going into a bit more deeply but let us run with it for now. There is Regan concedes a much greater range of beings that can feel pain and appreciate release therefrom, indeed all beings that are sentient might well be considered but for the moment the issue can be put to one side for no matter how the line is drawn there will be many species of animals whose members have a strong claim to rights, and Regan’s discussion of animal consciousness and related questions of what constitutes a satisfactory life for animals concludes with an observation he takes to be self-evident: ‘no serious moral thinker accepts the view that animals may be treated in just any way we please’. But this does not necessarily nor even normally mean that all serious moral thinkers concur that animals have rights in the sense that we are directly obligated to respect them, many thinkers who recognize a duty to animals believe this duty to be only indirect. One could cite to illustrate this point Jan Narveson’s, (1936 — ), rational egoism, John Rawls’, (1921–2002), contractualism, and Immanuel Kant’s, (1724–1804), categorical imperative, all of which are designed to apply to humans only, to moral agents t, who can act by understanding rules and making agreements but not to animals or moral patients who cannot. And yet all the theorists mentioned concur that this rule could be detrimental to the interests of the human species and at least indirect consideration must be granted to animals because cruelty to them, who do not count intrinsically, may encourage cruelty to humans, who do: ‘Common to … [all such] views’, says Regan, ‘is the proposition that we have no direct duties to animals; rather, animals are a sort of medium through which we may either succeed or fail to discharge those direct duties we owe to nonanimals, either ourselves, or other human beings, or, as in some views, God’.
Such a manner of excluding animals from direct obligation and yet somehow managing to give them some sort of moral standing Regan now proposes to demonstrate to be arbitrary rather than rationally grounded (good luck with that, I have already accused Regan of arbitrariness, grounding is a huge topic that Hegel of course deals with in great depth, I may publish a series of articles on it). Either the mistreatment of animals is wrong because it is inherently immoral, contends Regan, or such mistreatment has no necessary moral consequences for how we behave toward humans, and there may be an emotional carryover from one to the other. A person who beats a dog is not likely to be a paragon of kindness to subordinates in his office (what about footballer Kirt Happy Zouma, (1994 — ), yes that is his name, so much for nominative determinism, kicking his cat around and putting a video of it on YouTube thereby demonstrating in a really remarkable way that he sees nothing wrong at all with it indeed that we will share in the humour of the moment?) And yet the connection here is best explained as psychological rather than rational for it is a mental association not a duty and therefore the idea of indirect duty to animals turns out to be fundamentally incoherent and that puts the kibosh as a solution to the problem of animals in moral theory. Duty to animals in the strict sense must follow from the basic principle directly and this leads one to suspect that there is something profoundly amiss with the doctrine of the writers that Regan cites. All must be discarded at least in the present form of their positions given that the failure of these thinkers to encompass animal rights directly betrays fundamental problems in their moral theories.
Regan believes he has now cleared the way (just as I am clearing the way including Regan) to consider theories that hold that there is a clear duty of humans toward animals and that this duty is direct. He rejects utilitarianism for the usual reasons anyone would reject it but puts particular stress upon the difficulty of inter-individual comparisons of pleasure and pain. Without a standard measure for comparison Peter Singer, (1946 — ), is bereft of an adequate basis for claiming that all humans never mind all animals shall count as one when the aggregate of utility is added up. Well we could get stuck in a loop with these sorts of discussions forever, your pleasure in music may be difficult to measure against mine, and when I assign a utility index number to each of us I know that I am making only a rough estimate. Could it still however make sense to get an aggregate of utility by adding up the numbers? I could count our pleasure in music as having the same place for each of us on each of our complex scales of marginal utility and then, in totting up utilities to get an aggregate I would incorporate differences between us by discounting your or my utilities by a certain percentage according to my estimate of our relative and complex efficiencies as hedonistic machines and the results would be the same by either procedure. Either way this is but one great difficulty in utilitarianism, even were it set aside, the others are more than sufficient to rule it out as a moral principle.
Regan then makes it clear that there is only one other theory of duty that qualifies as direct, namely his own which comes at the issue from a rights perspective. He starts by laying down a rule that he refers to as the harm principle whereby we have ‘a direct prima facie duty not to harm individuals’ a rule that unquestionably (?) applies to moral agents and he calls it a principle rather than a reflective intuition or considered belief because it sums up or, better, unifies a number of intuitions that constrain us from doing harm to moral agents. That the rule is qualified as prima facie points to possible exceptions such as the use of force in self-defense. The basic rule appears to follow from the consideration that no one acting in any sort of moral universe whatever can inflict harm without alleging that there is some reason for it other than mere whim, and the core meaning of the rule is later described as prohibiting the infliction of ‘gratuitous suffering’ (‘gratuitous’ indeed, well I may do something, mock Peter Singer for instance (Regan seems to have been too nice a guy for me to do it to him) and you may say that was uncalled for. What are you actually saying there?)
Having demonstrated that mammals of one year or more in age can suffer pain and frustration Regan extends the harm principle to cover animals with an appeal to a pre-reflective intuition … a move which puts me in mind of this:
… anyway, a pre-reflective intuition that it is wrong on principle to inflict gratuitous suffering on other animals too albeit he does not insist that a harm done to a moral patient is necessarily equal to the same harm inflicted on a moral agent, his point being merely that we have a direct duty, of a kind taken to be obligatory on what we know until or unless proven otherwise, not to harm moral patients without reference to any comparisons of the magnitude of wrong:
‘The question at issue is not whether, say, killing a moral agent and a moral patient are, other things being equal, equally harmful. The question is whether we have any direct duties to moral patients. This question is logically distinct from the question about the comparative magnitude of harming a moral agent in a given way, on the one hand, and harming a moral patient in a similar way, on the other. For it may be true that harming either is directly wrong and yet the wrong done when we do some things to a moral agent (e.g., kill one) is a greater harm than the harm done when we do the same to a moral patient. Just because my harming you in one way (say I lock you in a closet for two days) is, though wrong, less wrong than my harming you in another way (say I torture you to death over a period of many weeks), it does not follow that only in the latter case do I violate a direct duty I have to you. The comparative harm done by two acts does not settle anything whatever about whether the duties I violate in the two cases are direct or indirect duties. That is the truth the reply under discussion fails to recognize’.
- ‘The Case for Animal Rights’
Nonetheless the harm principle applies still for as far as gratuitously inflicted suffering is concerned all animals are equal, which is to say that all mammals of one year or more in age have inherent value which by its very nature is the same for all, albeit animals cannot be moral agents because they cannot be held responsible for following rules they must be considered moral patients because they can suffer unjustified harm from moral agents. And thus we arrive at an essential oft contested part of Regan’s argument. Having rejected utilitarianism he is of course within his rights to reject the utilitarian view of the individual as a mere receptacle for feelings of pleasure and pain which can then be aggregated. An alternative that is grounded in rights on the other hand can to treat the very subjectivity of the individual entity as inherently valuable in itself, and it is valued not because it has fared, or will fare, well or ill, but simply for its own sake, because it has a life that is its own, a principle that Regan begins by expounding as it applies to moral agents:
‘The inherent value of individual moral agents is to be understood as being conceptually distinct from the intrinsic value that attaches to the experiences they have (e.g., their pleasures or preference satisfactions), as not being reducible to values of this latter kind, and as being incommensurate with these values. To say that inherent value is not reducible to the intrinsic values of an individual’s experiences means that we cannot determine the inherent value of individual moral agents by totaling the intrinsic values of their experiences. Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy. Nor do those who have more ‘cultivated’ preferences (say, for arts and letters) therefore have greater inherent value. To say that the inherent value of individual moral agents is incommensurate with the intrinsic value of their (or anyone else’s) experiences means that the two kinds of value are not comparable and cannot be exchanged one for the other. Like proverbial apples and oranges, the two kinds of value do not fall within the same scale of comparison. One cannot ask, How much intrinsic value is the inherent value of this individual worth — how much is it equal to? The inherent value of any given moral agent isn’t equal to any sum of intrinsic values, neither the intrinsic value of that individual’s experiences nor the total of the intrinsic value of the experiences of all other moral agents. To view moral agents as having inherent value is thus to view them as something different from, and something more than, mere receptacles of what has intrinsic value. They have value in their own right, a value that is distinct from, not reducible to, and incommensurate with the values of those experiences which, as receptacles, they have or undergo’.
- ‘The Case for Animal Rights’
According to the postulate of inherent value individual moral agents themselves have a distinctive kind of value as opposed to the receptacle view to which utilitarians are committed whereby it is the cup not just what goes into it that is valuable: ‘On the receptacle view of value, it is what goes into the cup (the pleasures or preference-satisfactions, for example) that has value; what does not have value is the cup itself (i.e., the individual himself or herself)’. And in addition animals also according to the harm principle are not mere receptacles of units of utility, and upon this thought Regan makes his critical move to establish his case for animal rights. By its very nature and definition inherent value is independent of the pleasures and pains that the subject has or will feel, it lies simply in the fact of subjectivity, in being that which can and does have feelings, therefore inherent value is equal and the same in all who have it and this means that it is the same in moral patients as it is in moral agents:
‘Some might concede that moral patients must be viewed as having some inherent value, if we postulate inherent value in the case of moral agents, but deny that the inherent value of moral patients is equal to that possessed by moral agents. But the grounds on which this could be argued will inevitably confuse the inherent value of individuals with (a) the comparative value of their experiences, (b) their possession of certain favored virtues (e.g., intellectual or artistic excellences), © their utility relative to the interests of others, or (d) their being the object of another’s interests. And this confusion will prove fatal to any attempt to defend the view that moral patients have less inherent value than moral agents. … Morality will not tolerate the use of double standards when cases are relevantly similar. If we postulate inherent value in the case of moral agents and recognize the need to view their possession of it as being equal, then we will be rationally obliged to do the same in the case of moral patients. All who have inherent value thus have it equally, whether they be moral agents or moral patients. All animals are equal, when the notions of ‘animal’ and ‘equality’ are properly understood, ‘animal’ referring to all (terrestrial, at least) moral agents and patients, and ‘equality’ referring to their equal possession of inherent value. Inherent value is thus a categorical concept. One either has it, or one does not. There are no in-betweens. Moreover, all those who have it, have it equally. It does not come in degrees’.
- ‘The Case for Animal Rights’
To express this principle somewhat differently the life of every sentient being is as important to that individual as our own life is to ourselves and it is not a question of anything like better or richer so that the life of a dog or of a beetle or of a Liberal Democrat is the only life it will ever have (well former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, (1970 — ), is a Christian so maybe not for him, he who resigned claiming remaining faithful to Christ was incompatible with being party leader after repeated questions over his faith, well, namely his believing homosexuality to be sinful (inherently immoral as we may put it in the terms of this present discussion), because of course being a Christian is no obstacle to a political career in the West but just the opposite. All of us having equal inherent value my a***). Life, we may suppose, is inevitably finite, and once it is over it is over for an infinite amount of time, and in that sense all sentient lives have an inherent equal value (although some are more equal than others, ask Tim Farron). Hence this principle of equal inherent value confirms Regan’s prior earlier application of the rule of formal justice to the harm principle:
‘While granting that some of the ways moral agents can be harmed are peculiar to moral agents, we are right to insist that some of the ways they can be harmed are common to moral patients. When these common harms are at issue, to affirm that we have a direct duty to moral agents not to harm them but deny this in the case of moral patients is to flaunt the requirement of formal justice or impartiality, requiring, as it does, that similar cases be treated dissimilarly. And that is to fall far short of making an ideal moral judgment’.
- ‘A Case for Animal Rights’
Regan thereby adopts an egalitarian view of formal justice wherein the mere subjectivity of individuals requires that they be treated equally, but formal justice means treating equals equally and hence it is subject to another problem in that it is at the very least logically consistent with perfectionism or the kind of hierarchy of values of the kind to be found in Aristotle, (384–322 BC), who thought it worthwhile to realize the personal goal but more beautiful and nobler to realize the goal of the nation or that of the city state and it was this goal that we studied scientifically which was in a sense what politics pursued and it is more worthwhile and more valuable to do good things for the nation or the state than to do good things for an individual etc. But more relevant for present purposes he thought that for human beings the ultimate good or happiness (eudaimonia) consists in perfection, the full attainment of their natural function, which he analyzed as the activity of the soul according to reason (or not without reason), that is to say, activity in accordance with the most perfect virtue or excellence. Upon such a basis the principle of formal justice does not necessarily lead to equal treatment for one individual might be justly subordinated to another. Regan, however, rules out perfectionism as he does utilitarianism although from a different angle as it too is counterintuitive in virtue of its violation of so many of our considered beliefs that it must be discarded as a unifying principle of morals, and yet with the abandonment of both utilitarianism and perfectionism all that remains is to treat all animals as having equal value.
Within this context Regan turns his attention to a possible objection based upon Kant whereby one could say that rationality alone is valuable so that the harm principle applies only to rational beings although he has already provided an implicit answer to this by demonstrating that the idea of an indirect duty to animals is not sustainable. Kant’s restriction of equality to humans presupposes that animals are things but there is a difference between a rock and a dog that philosophy cannot simply pass over (well i suppose we can’t argue about that). A acolyte of Albert Schweitzer, (1875–1965), however, may well protest that the scope of inherent value in Regan is too narrow for it ought to be extended to include all that is included in Schweitzer’s ‘reverence for life’:
‘Reverence for life, veneratio vitæ, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live … In reverence for life my knowledge passes into experience. The simple world- and life-affirmation which is within me just because I am will-to-live has, therefore, no need to enter into controversy with itself, if my will-to-live learns to think and yet does not understand the meaning of the world. In spite of the negative results of knowledge, I have to hold fast to world- and life-affirmation and deepen it. My life carries its own meaning in itself. This meaning lies in my living out the highest idea which shows itself in my will-to-live, the idea of reverence for life. With that for a starting-point I give value to my own life and to all the will-to-live which surrounds me, I persevere in activity, and I produce values. … Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil’.
- ‘Kulturphilosophie’
Regan baulks at the idea of being that inclusive however (probably because he intuits what is wrong at bottom with inherent value anyway as I will spell out below). He acknowledges that his notion of inherent value has much in common with Schweitzer’s reverence for life which he believes to be potentially too broad:
‘It is not clear why we have, or how we reasonably could be said to have, direct duties to, say, individual blades of grass, potatoes, or cancer cells. Yet all are alive, and so all should be owed direct duties if all have inherent value. Nor is it clear why we have, or how we reasonably could be said to have, direct duties to collections of such individuals — to lawns, potato fields, or cancerous tumors. If, in reply to these difficulties, we are told that we have direct duties only to some, but not to all, living things, and that it is this subclass of living things whose members have inherent value, then not only will we stand in need of a way to distinguish those living things that have this value from those that do not but more importantly for present purposes, the view that being-alive is a sufficient condition of having such value will have to be abandoned’.
- ‘The Case for Animal Rights’
Simply being alive appears not to be enough for inherent value to be ascribed. What does being alive mean anyhow? Is the covid-19 virus alive? I believe the answer to be no to that as a virus does not complete all of the seven life processes, movement, respiration, sensitivity, nutrition, excretion, reproduction, growth. Anyhow, be that as it may, Regan conveniently for himself refrains from entering into disputing over how broadly the notion of inherent value should be extended.
Regan is now ready to spring upon us his final move whereby he connects together his complete set of reasonings and adduces his respect principle, which he says is a principle of justice, stating that individuals having equal inherent value are entitled to treatment respectful of that value::
‘The view that moral agents and moral patients have equal inherent value is not itself a moral principle since it does not itself enjoin us to treat these individuals in one way or another. In particular, the postulate of inherent value does not itself provide us with an interpretation of the formal principle of justice, the principle, it will be recalled, that requires that we give each individual his or her due. Still, that postulate does provide us with a basis for offering such an interpretation. If individuals have equal inherent value, then any principle that declares what treatment is due them as a matter of justice must take their equal value into account. The following principle (the respect principle) does this: We are to treat those individuals who have inherent value in ways that respect their inherent value. Now, the respect principle sets forth an egalitarian, non-perfectionist interpretation of formal justice. The principle does not apply only to how we are to treat some individuals having inherent value (e.g., those with artistic or intellectual virtues). It enjoins us to treat all those individuals having inherent value in ways that respect their value, and thus it requires respectful treatment of all who satisfy the subject-of-a-life criterion. Whether they are moral agents or patients, we must treat them in ways that respect their equal inherent value. In its present form, however, the respect principle lacks the precision it is reasonable to require of a moral principle. It does not specify what respect for such value requires’.
- ‘The Case for Animal Rights’
Regan’s principle conclusion at this stage is that individuals may not be harmed as they can in utilitarianism in order to bring about the best aggregate consequences: ‘To borrow part of a phrase from Kant, individuals who have inherent value must never be treated merely as a means to securing the best aggregate consequences’. His discussion of the respect principle then finishes with the consideration that it requires assistance to animals as well as respect. One may raise an objection with regard to Regan’s criterion as to what range of animals is entitled to moral consideration. Gary Lawrence Francione, (1954 -), has contended that there is no reason why every animal that can feel pain and experience pleasure does not have as much prima facie right as any other according to the harm principle and the same prima facie claim to inherent value and respect. We do wrong if we go out of our way to crush an innocuous beetle that happens to cross our path, indeed if that beetle were drowning in a pool of water near us and we were able to reach it with a branch or pole we would do wrong not to give it assistance. (Ahimsā, a fundamental principle in Jainism that forms the cornerstone of its ethics and doctrine, non-violence and non-injury and absence of desire to harm any life forms).
Regan concedes that the line between those individuals who are subjects of a life and those who are not is hard to draw and that in any case he considers the subject-of-a-life criterion as a sufficient but not a necessary condition for inclusion in the protective scope of the harm principle. Furthermore his argument does not logically preclude the possibility that those humans and animals who fail to meet the subject-of-a-life criterion nonetheless have inherent value, given that the claim is made simply that meeting this criterion is a sufficient condition of making the attribution of inherent value intelligible and non-arbitrary (?) it remains possible that animals that are conscious and not capable of acting intentionally, or permanently comatose human beings for that matter, may nonetheless be viewed as having inherent value. There are numerous ways
This limitation in Regan may be resolved in numerous ways but the basic argument from inherent value depends upon somewhat dubious or vague assumptions. He has rejected utilitarianism and perfectionism as counterintuitive, he dismisses Kant and Rawls because the indirect duty concept of regard for animals is a failure. The rule of formal justice, that individuals must be treated equally insofar as they are similar, is the consequence of rejecting utilitarianism, and the rule of equal formal justice, that individuals have an equal right not to be harmed, is the consequence of rejecting perfectionism. That all human individuals have inherent value follows from the rejection of the utilitarian view that the value of individuals is measured by their feelings of pain or pleasure and having rejected any version of indirect duty upon the assumption that we owe at least some duty to all mammals of a year or more in age we must conclude that these latter have inherent value also. An individual either has inherent value or does not, there is no middle ground, and so all mammals are equal in inherent value, and recognition of inherent value requires us to respect it, and this respect principle is now demonstrated to underlie the harm principle which prima facie forbids harming any individual.
This structure of reasoning depends upon the initial observation that ‘[n]o serious moral thinker accepts the view that animals may be treated in just any way we please’, an observation leading us to rejection the idea of indirect duty and thence to eveything else Regan presents as part of his case but is not the initial observation no more than an empirical generalization as to what serious thinkers say, do we not need a categorical requirement, albeit Regan may think of it that way anyway? What about a hypothetical theorist not caring one whit for the suffering of animals, human infants, or human mental defectives, who is interested solely in moral agents. (Note: moral agents, any person or collective entity with the capacity to exercise moral agency. It has been suggested that rational thought and deliberation are prerequisite skills for any agent. In this way, moral agents can discern between right and wrong and be held accountable for the consequences of their actions. Moral patients, subjects of moral concern or consideration, those to whom moral agents have moral duties. Humans and other animals are all moral patients, regardless of their capacities and traits, and some of them are also moral agents).
A Rawlsian in particular could have a real soft spot for animals, (in his or heart I mean, not a bog to swallow them in), and even acknowledge that many other human beings do too, while consistently maintaining that humans owe them nothing. It would not surprise me if somewhere in the history of philosophy someone made such a case, after all moral theorists have said some quite abominable things, but even so we can still consider the possibility of such a theorist in abstraction. So what might be a fundamental ground for Regan’s case? Perhaps it is to be found in Kant whom Regan has already dismissed. Might not Kant’s exclusion of animals from direct moral standing on an equal basis with humans be an error in his moral theory? The range of beings to which the categorical imperative applies cannot be limited to humans and other rational beings, if it is not to fall into inner inconsistency it must also apply to animals, human infants, and mental defectives as well. One may take some liberties with the second form of the categorical imperative and reword it thus: Treat sentience in yourself as well as others never as a means only but at the same time also as an end.
Peter Carruthers, (1952 — ), in ‘The Animals Issue’, 1992, objects to Regan’s claim that animals have rights because of what he calls Regan’s intuitionism whereby Regan is at bottom an intuitionist in his view of animal rights albeit he does not make much use of the term referring instead of ‘reflective equilibrium’, and Carruthers objects that any argument from moral intuitionism is ‘unacceptable’ and presents his reasons arranged in sequence as if in a legal brief. The moral values we supposedly intuit in objects do not exist in the natural world. They do not explain the behavior of the beings to which they are applied. They do not explain differences in assigning degrees of value (as for example between animals and humans). If moral values do not exist in nature, how can they affect our minds? Even if moral values could affect our minds, what survival advantage would explain their selection in the course of the evolution of the human species? Our intuition of moral values in an object might at least be unreliable. Not everybody’s intuition would be the same.
To which the response may be: No one (that I know of) has claimed that moral values must exist naturally in Carruthers’s sense. The value in a piece of gold is in our valuation of it. The value of an animal, friend, or spouse lies in objective qualities that we value. In the case of animals even aside from pets the cause of valuing is our empathy with the pain or joy they feel. No one ever supposed that value explains the behavior of the object valued. Diamonds are valuable because they sparkle, they do not sparkle because they are valuable. Regan does not attribute prima facie differences of value to the sentient beings with which his theory is concerned. There may be relevant differences of value where a conflict of otherwise legitimate interests occurs between the beings he has in mind. But apart from that very carefully delimited exception, all the human and nonhuman animals covered have ‘equal inherent value’ a point repeats often enough. The moral values do not affect our minds, the pains or joys of animals external to us do. Since moral valuation is not directly a cognitive issue, there is no reason why it should not be reliable. We usually make some reasonable estimate as to whether an animal is suffering pain or enjoying pleasure. The evolutionary advantage of such sensibility is evident enough. There is a great difference between immediate intuitive response, which is what Carruthers takes to be the issue, and reflective intuition. The first is pre-reflective and can vary widely in different individuals, the second is not an immediate response to an individual or individual situation, it is the outcome of careful reflection upon a principle which pre-reflective intuition recommends.
As for the objection to the rights approach that it is not really a proper theory since it does not explain morality or tell us why we should be moral:
‘[W]e need to be told what it is about morality that enables it to claim such a central place in our lives…. We can say … that there are two main requirements that a moral theory must meet, if it is to be rationally acceptable. The first is that its governing conception must give a plausible picture of the source of morality, and of the origins of moral motivation. This is where Regan fails altogether. The second is less deeply theoretical, but equally important. It is that the basic normative principle or principles of the theory should yield intuitively acceptable consequences. … It is simply that a good moral theory must entail at least a fair proportion of our considered moral beliefs, at the cost, otherwise, of becoming unbelievable. Any moral theory that could justify arbitrary killings of innocents, for example, is going to be unacceptable, no matter how satisfying it may seem in respect of its governing conception. … [My] next chapter will be occupied with exploring the relative strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism and contractualism along each of these two dimensions’.
- ‘The Animals Issue’
Regan it is true does not provide a proper ‘governing conception of morality’. Might this be remedied? Well even could it be how satisfactory is the respect principle and its implications for the treatment of inherent value? Much hangs upon the role of intuition (whatever that is) in our lives. Is it simply wrong to do what root intuition that can be sustained upon due reflection tells us it is wrong to do? Evelyn B. Pluhar, in ‘Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals’, 1996, also objects to Regan’s appeal to intuition while perhaps overlooking his distinction between an intuition as a pre-reflective gut reaction and as a reflectively justified principle, but her more important point is the apparent movement of Regan’s argument from our human concern for fellow humans who are mentally deficient to concern for animal subjects-of- a-life upon the grounds that both are indistinguishable as ‘moral patients’. Hence if we are bound to refrain from killing infants we do not particularly want or mental defectives who are a burden, then we must also be restrained from killing unwanted animals since they too are moral patients. Their reactions to pain and their level of intelligent awareness are no less than those of infants and defectives and at times are even greater.
In the literature on animal welfare as the ‘Argument from Marginal Cases’, (an argument hat attempts to demonstrate that if animals do not have direct moral status, then neither do such human beings as infants, the senile, the severely cognitively disabled, Liberal Democrats, and other such ‘marginal cases’ of humanity), and Pluhar looks into it closely first by demonstrating that the argument from marginal cases cannot be deflated by denying the transition from human to animal moral patients. One deflationary strategy is to invoke the slippery slope, animals and marginal humans can indeed be compared, this argument concedes, but in principle neither is entitled to moral standing and the only reason to grant moral standing to human moral patients is the fear that we will not be able to draw the line between the normal and the sub-normal.
Once we were at liberty to exploit marginal case humans there would be no stopping point (history furnishes the proof of that), and humans who are simply dull rather than marginal cases would be at risk, therefore we grant moral standing to all humans, marginal or otherwise but deny it to animals. Much the same kind of argument can be derived from what might be designated benevolent speciesism (see the previous part for what I think about speciesism), the idea that can take a variety of forms, that living individuals having the shape of a human being are entitled to the respect we generally owe to our species, otherwise, we would again face the allegedly insoluble problem of drawing the line of marginality. Pluhar retorts that many societies have practiced infanticide and/or the euthanasia of the old or deformed without consequence for social stability in other respects and many people do not object but are rather on board with the idea of getting rid of a deformed child or adult as a burden of no use to society and were one to start from the premise that the test of morality is the treatment of the normal human being then one cannot avoid a unsavoury consequence. Marginal case human beings could be treated as callously as animals
‘No morally relevant difference between marginal humans and sentient nonhumans has been found to legitimize the very different ways in which these beings are standardly treated. .. One must either give up the belief that autonomous moral agents are the primary subjects of moral concern and respect, or one must accept the full, ghastly (for marginal humans and sentient nonhumans alike) implications of that view’.
- ‘Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Anima
Furthermore Regan’s case for animal rights ultimately depends upon his respect principle, upon the principle that all subjects-of-a-life must be given equal consideration, an equation that many rationalists would baulk at for the test of moral considerability is surely almost always rational capacity and neither animals nor marginal humans have that capacity. Therefore, Pluhar, by the criterion of rationality, neither group qualifies as objects of our moral obligations. So where do we go from here? Let us concede we must treat marginal case humans and animals in the same way, that is to say, with respect, but how are competing norms which also pass the Regan test to be excluded? What is so amiss with claiming that the interests of both marginal case humans and animals can be set aside? Pluhar formulates Regan’s dilemma thus:
‘He is absolutely correct in pointing out that arguments are wanting that give primacy to moral agency, to higher degrees of intelligence related capacities, to the agent’s self-interest, or to units of non-moral good as opposed to individuals. Followers of such views would counter, of course, that his rights view is no less arbitrary. Once one’s reflective intuitions agree with Regan’s claim that we owe direct duties to humans who are not moral agents, the rest falls into place: we cannot accept this contention and consistently deny that relevantly similar nonhumans are owed no direct duties. But that initial agreement need never occur -unless we can find an argument to support it’.
Regan, according to Pluhar, has not and cannot find such an argument, whereas she has found a purely rationalist argument that can deliver a sure foundation for the conclusion Regan aspires to reach. I may take up that argument later but for now the point to consider is whether or not the argument from marginal cases is as decisive for Regan’s position as she supposes. He does repeat the argument frequently in all of his subsequent arguments for animal rights and it features prominently in his criticisms of Kant who is most evidently vulnerable to the concursus horribilium that is hot on the tail of the treatment of any sub-rational entity as a thing, and it is in this context he endorses the marginal cases argument in the defence of animal rights but he does not make it pivotal to his theory but rather begins with the pre-reflective intuition that animals cannot be treated in just any way at all and then moves on to the idea of inherent value and the respect principle. I do agree with Pluhar, though, that this starting position is not yet adequately justified.
Is his starting position adequately justified? No, but then maybe moral positions don’t need adequate grounding, we have our intuitions after all. Francione came to a similar conclusion to Regan albeit from a different starting point. Well he is a jurist and proceeds from a critique of the fateful ambiguity, in law as well as common speech, as to what is humane and permissible in the treatment of animals. The infliction of unnecessary (howsoever you think of that term) suffering is considered wrong by most people and is often prohibited by law and yet in public opinion and in jurisprudence animals are taken to be property and Francione contends that so long as animals continue to be regarded by the law as property all the rules against unnecessary pain will be construed by the courts in favor of the property owner and against the interest of the animals.
They will forever be treated as research animals, food animals, and so on, which is to say, as Francione puts it, animals are not taken by the law to be sensitive entities whose deepest interest, no different from our own, is to avoid suffering, they are forever regarded as means to human ends. Regan’s argument from inherent value may be more fundamental and complete than Francione’s but an appeal to the principle of equal consideration has its place in the issue of animal rights though not for the reasons Regan and Francione suppose, but I will get to that latter in this series. However, the notion persists that Regan’s argument have not been refuted or replaced and it is right approach to the rights approach to animal interests, his ‘compelling’ argument simply need to be more fundamentally grounded.
The appeal to values, morals, respect, is certainly not the right approach, in my view, albeit I am all in favour of decent morals and I do at least make the effort to be a good person, but moralising and appealing to moral intuitionism is a terrible way to approach the case for animal rights. David McNaughton in ‘Moral Vision’ argued for moral realism whereby moral virtue is found not in the following of correct moral principles but rather in the development of moral sensitivity. What a horrible pernicious doctrine that is. Moral rightness and wrongness is there to be seen in the world (moral vision) by the morally sensitive (which we need to develop, presumably then what is morally right or wrong is already a given). Suppose I don’t see it? What a bad and terrible person I must be, I need to be taken away and worked upon until I see things aright, or perhaps to save time I should just simply be cancelled.
Respect. What a word. Signifying something of an entitlement these days, whether deserved or not. Isn’t respect something to be earned? A word that features 432 times in ‘The Case for Animal Rights’, the kind of information we literally have at our finger tips in this information age. Well all right, that includes ‘in this respect … ‘ and ‘respectively … ‘, but I have scoured the pages to find where he defines the term as we are supposed to understand it in the principle of respect. And it is taken for granted that it will be understood what is meant by respect.
‘With deference, with respect’
(Anonymous)
With deference, with respect
I bow and lower myself
To such a perfect man of wisdom,
Of whom there is no equal in the world.
And [his] equal will not come.
(Through pride and ignorance,
Through great brutality.)
‘Con ossequio, con rispetto’
Con ossequio, con rispetto
Io m’inchino e mi profondo
A un sapiente sì perfetto,
Che l’ugual non v’è nel mondo.
E l’eguale non verrà.
(Per l’orgoglio, e l’ignoranza,
Per la gran bestialità).
And as for ‘principles’, never a wise move in philosophy to formulate a ‘principle’ or ‘principles’ and then hang your whole theory upon it or them. As Hegel has pointed out:
‘… knowledge is only actual, and can only be expounded, as Science or as system; and furthermore, that a so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just because it is only a principle. It is, therefore, easy to refute it. The refutation consists in pointing out its defect; and it is defective because it is only the universal or principle, is only the beginning. If the refutation is thorough, it is derived and developed from the principle itself, not accomplished by counter-assertions and random thoughts from outside. The refutation would, therefore, properly consist in the further development of the principle, and in thus remedying the defectiveness, if it did not mistakenly pay attention solely to its negative action, without awareness of its progress and result on their positive side too — The genuinely positive exposition of the beginning is thus also, conversely, just as much a negative attitude towards it, viz. towards its initially one-sided form of being immediate or purpose. It can therefore be taken equally well as a refutation of the principle that constitutes the basis of the system, but it is more correct to regard it as a demonstration that the basis or principle of the system is, in fact, only its beginning’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
And justice? Giving everyone their due? Flocculence, is the word for that:
‘The respect principle, as a principle of justice, requires more than that we not harm some so that optimific results may be produced for all affected by the outcome; it also imposes the prima facie duty to assist those who are the victims of injustice at the hands of others. This is not peculiar to the present interpretation of formal justice. All initially plausible ethical theories recognize both the duty not to act unjustly oneself as well as the duty to assist those who are the victims of injustice at the hands of others. Justice, that is, not only imposes duties of non-harm; it also imposes duties of assistance, understood as the duty to aid those who suffer from injustice. All individuals who have inherent value are to be given their due, and sometimes what they are due is our assistance’.
- ‘The Case for Animal Rights’
‘God’s bodykins man … Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?’
- William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’, Act 2, Scene 2
Perhaps I should remind my readers or reader of a point I made in the first part of the series, about Christian apologists presenting terrible philosophical arguments to prove God thereby making the Christian faith look ridiculous giving the infidel cause to scoff and animal rights advocates doing the same thing which is even more serious given the utmost importance of the cause, the protection of animals from abuse and exploitation. I am here simply getting the bad arguments out of the way before presenting the compelling arguments for animal rights, not that Regan’s arguments are all that bad for undergraduate level philosophy especially compared to those of the utilitarians and the great service that utilitarians have done for philosophy is that they make the rest of us look good by comparison. My main point here is that the Regan kind of approach to defending animal rights is just wrong-headed, that is, his arguing for animals to be granted status as full members of the moral community, especially given that moral philosophy itself is such a mare’s nest. The arguments I will be presenting will not be moral arguments, which make them much less vulnerable to scorn and attack.
I do not know if Regan was religious at all but his mode of thinking betrays a kind of Christian sensibility whereby a notion such as love is taken to such a high level of abstraction that is reduced to meaningless, what is it to love God, what is it to love our neighbour. We cannot love everybody, it is a preposterous notion. Similarly with Schweitzer and all life is to be revered, easy to say and sounding very noble, but empty of content. ‘Everything that Lives is Holy’, said William Blake, (1757–1827). Does that mean anything to you? Similarly with Regan’s subject-of-a-life criterion granting us all a distinctive kind of value,inherent value, what kind of thoughts does that notion conjure up in you? For me, nothing. Plus, we are complex creatures, and emotions (for that is what we are dealing with here) are judgements or at least have a judging component about the way the world ought to be? But what are they? How do we know when bestowing ‘value’ upon a living creature which emotion is in operation anyway?
Let us take pity to bring the point home and here consult Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), always the astute one for dissecting morals and what we may take to be virtue is really not so and is concealing rather murky thoughts and attitudes.
‘But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd’.
- ‘Matthew’ 9:36
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, (1821–1881), believed pity to be the essence of Christianity. Well, perhaps so, and so much the worse for Christianity, as Nietzsche explains:
‘Christianity is called the religion of pity. — Pity is opposed to the tonic passions which enhance the energy of the feeling of life: its action is depressing. A man loses power when he pities. By means of pity the drain on strength which suffering itself already introduces into the world is multiplied a thousandfold. Through pity, suffering itself becomes infectious; in certain circumstances it may lead to a total loss of life and vital energy, which is absurdly put of proportion to the magnitude of the cause (- the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first standpoint; but there is a still more important one. Supposing one measures pity according to the value of the reactions it usually stimulates, its danger to life appears in a much more telling light On the whole, pity thwarts the law of development which is the law of selection. It preserves that which is ripe for death, it fights in favour of the disinherited and the condemned of life; thanks to the multitude of abortions of all kinds which it maintains in life, it lends life itself a sombre and questionable aspect. People have dared to call pity a virtue (- in every noble culture it is considered as a weakness -); people went still further, they exalted it to the virtue, the root and origin of all virtues,- but, of course, what must never be forgotten is the fact that this was done from the standpoint of a philosophy which was nihilistic, and on whose shield the device The Denial of Life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this respect: by means of pity, life is denied and made more worthy of denial,- pity is the praxis of Nihilism. I repeat, this depressing and infectious instinct thwarts those instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the value life: by multiplying misery quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable, it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,- pity exhorts people to nothing, to nonentity! But they do not say ‘nonentity’ they say ‘Beyond’, or God’, or the ‘true life’; or Nirvana, or Salvation, or Blessedness, instead. This innocent rhetoric, which belongs to the realm of the religio-moral idiosyncrasy, immediately appears to be very much less innocent if one realises what the tendency is which here tries to drape itself in the mantle of sublime expressions — the tendency of hostility to life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why he elevated pity to a virtue…. Aristotle, as you know, recognised in pity a morbid and dangerous state, of which it was wise to rid one’s self from time to time by a purgative: he regarded tragedy as a purgative. For the sake of the instinct of life, it would certainly seem necessary to find some means of lancing any such morbid and dangerous accumulation of pity, as that which possessed Schopenhauer (and unfortunately the whole of our literary and artistic decadence as well, from St Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner), if only to make it burst…. Nothing is more unhealthy in the midst of our unhealthy modernity, than Christian pity. To be doctors here, to be inexorable here, to wield the knife effectively here,- all this is our business, all this is our kind of love to our fellows, this is what makes us philosophers, us hyperboreans! -
- ‘Twilight of the Idols’
Compassion, concern or sympathy for others, all right, but what of when it degenerates into pity. Who wants to be pitied? Christianity is the religion of pity is not a good selling point for the religion. Indeed for Nietzsche pity had a depressive effect, a quality very much in opposition to those emotions and attitudes that lead to the promotion of life.
‘This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you’.
- ‘John’ 15:12
‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’.
- Luke 6:31
(It is probably better if I do not. ‘Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same’, said George Bernard Shaw, (1856–1950)).
‘Do everything in love’.
- Corinthians 16:14
‘Love and do what you will’.
- St. Augustine (354–430 AD)
Will do.
If I knew what it meant.
‘Sympathy for all’ — would be harshness and tyranny for thee, my good neighbour’, said Nietzsche in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’:
‘As long as the utility which determines moral estimates is only gregarious utility, as long as the preservation of the community is only kept in view, and the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the maintenance of the community, there can be no ‘morality of love to one’s neighbour’…. ‘love to our neighbour’ is always a secondary matter, partly conventional and arbitrarily manifested in relation to our fear of our neighbour. After the fabric of society seems on the whole established and secured against external dangers, it is this fear of our neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation’.
Perhaps I am labouring the point. I say no more. For now.
‘As soon as the chaos’
by Thomas d’Urfey (1653–1723)
As soon as the chaos was turn’d into Form,
And the first Race of Men knew a good from a harm,
They quickly did joyn,
In a knowledge Divine,
That the chiefest of Blessings were Women and Wine;
Since when by example Improving Delights,
Wine Governs our Days, Love and Beauty our Nights.
Then Love on and Drink,
’Tis a Folly to think
Of a Mystery out of our reaches;
Be moral in Thought
To be Merry’s no Fault,
Tho’ an Elder the contrary Preaches.
For never, my Friends, was an Age of more Vice,
Than when Knaves would seem Pious, and Fools would seem Wise.
What is needed is a case for animal rights that is free of moralizing and judging..
To be continued ….
