I’ve been following the response to Granville’s essay on medical testing for a while now, and started thinking about this. Should we value animals? If so, why? I suspect that many people who do value animals will think this is starting in the wrong place. Why not value animals, they ask. Why should value be restricted to people? If you thought this, I would ask you to hold off your judgement for the moment, as I don’t intend to bypass these questions at all. What I plan to do is consider the strongest argument for caring about animals, and then propose some alternate theory of value. To let you in on the punchline my answer will be this: animals should not enter our moral considerations as moral agents, but might need to be considered because of the human implications of actions toward them.
The view I refered to above is this: we should value animals because they have the ability to suffer. This may be phrased in an unfamiliar way, but I’m sure you have encountered the notion before. Animals respond in the same way that we do when something painful happens to them: with great distress and in such a way as to alleviate the pain. The extent to which animals will go to avoid pain has been exploited in various experiments over the years (‘Pavlov’s dogs’ spring to mind), and appears to give huge support to the notion that animals can “suffer” in a manner relatively similar to the way that we do. I plan to accept as a premise than animals do indeed suffer.
As an argument toward right action, this could do with some clarification. Underlying it is a utilitarian argument: that we should act in ways which minimise suffering and maximise pleasure. The argument is therefore that because animals can suffer, we should avoid actions which lead to their suffering (such as medical testing). The main proponent of what might be called animal ethics, Peter Singer1, puts this as “equal consideration of interests”. Wikipedia gives this example: A mouse and a man both have an interest in not being kicked down the street, because both would suffer if so kicked, and there are no moral or logical grounds, Singer argues, for failing to accord their interests in not being kicked equal weight.2
I take it then that the argument is fairly clear. Animals share the moral characteristics in consideration (suffering) and therefore should be considered equally.
There are a number of ways one could respond to this. Firstly, it is premised upon a form of utilitarianism, which is not immune to attack as a philosophical theory. This is not the approach I will take. Secondly, one could argue the morality of current actions within the utilitarian framework, which I take it is something like what Granville did. I will not be following this approach either. Thirdly, this argument assumes a certain type of value theory: where the “bad” is objective, as opposed to relative. What I mean by this is that Singer (and most of you?) argues that animal-suffering is just as relevant as human-suffering, because they are both suffering. This is where I am going to clash. I argue that animal-suffering and human-suffering and not equally important, because animals are animals and humans are humans.
I think that, rather than acting under a strict utilitarian maxim to always minimise suffering, we create our morality when we come together to form a society. This is the view of morality as a social contract, made between agents who recognise that they have common goals and would benefit from mutual non-aggression. We might picture this coming about, as Hobbes did3, from a State of Nature. In such a state humans have no morals, but are just like animals. Suppose they are not pack animals, but rather individuals like certain hyenas. They compete, fight, murder and steal in all the same ways as rival animals do.
In such a state they might come to understand certain things: that no one human is overwhelmingly more powerful than the others, so that she might not be destroyed by the concerted effort of a few. That their interests are much the same: similar food, similar predators to protect against. Similar desires in terms of the behaviour of other humans: not murdering or stealing. So over time they come together to form a community, setting aside some of their former behaviour in favour of cooperation. Instead of stealing each other’s food they hunt together. Instead of killing over potential mates they stylise their battles.
It is not hard to see how this process, combined with our inherent rationality, can lead (over many generations) to the society we have today. That aside is important, however: it requires our rationality. At the beginning of my scenario I excluded pack animals to dodge the obvious counter that many animals (of our genus, in particular) aren’t solitary. My point is this: their cooperation, and the success they derive from it, is limited by their capabilities. Chimps will cooperate, pick fleas off one another, share food, and so on. But there appears to be no evidence that they will devise distribution of labour systems, which would allow them to more efficiently gather food. Basic specialisation occurs in terms of security with many animals (from meerkats to macaques) but these systems are constrained and limited by one factor in all instances: rationality. Nowhere is the project of commonwealth-formation so successful as in humanity, which I believe is the morally significant consideration.
How does all this relate back to animal rights in the here-and-now? Well, let’s start with rights. Firstly, we allocate rights within our moral community based on membership thereof. All people get rights (in theory) and it is only when they other themselves from the group that these are removed. We remove the right to free movement from thieves, and sometimes even the right to life from our most heinous offenders. Secondly, with rights come duties. A fundamental part of being in a moral community is the ability to self-restrict. We all have the right not to be killed, and the duty not to kill. When moral agents show that they reject their duties, they put themselves outside our moral community.
Where do animals fall in all this? It seems clear to me that they are not part of our social contract. Animals have different sets of goals, different success-criteria, than humans. They do not take on duties, whether they are allocated rights or not. And all this because they lack the rationality required to have derived such a contract in the first place.
I now turn to considering some responses:
Dogs often take on duties, like protecting small children.
This is true, and I don’t seek to deny it. Dogs often display characteristics that lead us to label them “loyal”. However, I think that this is an instance of dangerous anthropomorphism. We like dogs, and so we want to see human characteristics in them. How often do we hear someone refer to a dog as “murderous”, “evil” or “cruel”? It happens, but I warrant it is far rarer. We certainly don’t bother labelling a dog as “dishonest” if it tricks us in some manner. Nor do we feel the desire to stop a cat from hunting a bird just because it is “murder”. We don’t hold animals to the same standards in any negative regard, because it would require actions we aren’t willing to take: like intervening in hunting methods. It is an act of laziness when we attribute positive moral virtues to animals.
We give rights to humans who fail your standard of rationality.
This response is a good one. We do indeed worry about the rights of mentally-handicapped people, and don’t grade rights according to intelligence. Beginning with mental retardation, I think there are two things to say in response to this. (1) We recognise that this is an instance of impaired rationality, that these are people like us who suffer a disability. (2) Their impaired rationality is a morally significant characteristic. When it comes to making certain decisions and taking certain acts, mentally handicapped people are not accorded the same agency as others. Parents are allowed to choose to sterilise their mentally-handicapped children, for fear that they cannot make the decision to have children adequately.
We feel we should care about animal-suffering, much as we do with people.
This is true, as an empirical claim. Many people do have a gut-feel that hurting animals is bad. I put it to you that it may well be bad, but not because we should care about animals. I think there are two things going on here: (1) We have a gut-response due to an analogy with the self. We feel sickly witnessing animal cruelty because we think “Gosh, what if that were me!” This analogy is, however, flawed. We are analogising with something outside our moral community. This does not demean the intensity of the response, it simply argues that we should react to our response differently. (2) It may be that cruelty to animals should be avoided because it is likely to lead to cruelty to humans. I have already accepted that the analogy happens, so it seems only logical that it can go both ways. A child who tortures squirrels is more likely to torture people, and that would be a bad thing. This is a strong reason to avoid cruelty to animals, without necessarily granting them value.
The intuition that some are “outside the community” has been used to justify denying civil rights.
This argument goes something like this: in the past we erroneously asserted a moral difference between people of different kinds. We later realised we were wrong, and their rights status changed accordingly. The animal situation is the same – once we realise our folly we will see the light and grant animals rights. This, however, is based on a fallacy. Just because some distinctions were faulty does not mean that all are. This argument is prior to the social contract analysis above and I think falls to it.
In conclusion I have this to say. I am not against preventing wanton cruelty to animals; I have the same gut-reaction as you do. I am against anthropomorphising animals in a lazy manner, however. I am also for open discussion of all our moral intuitions, and I hope that nobody who was bothered to read this far will respond with drivel along the “how dare you!” lines.
1. See, for example http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/singer02.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights
3. If anyone is at all interested I will lend you my copy of Leviathan.
Four Days. These Bare Walls.
1 day ago
