What with Hollywood archetypes of "animal rights activists" coming out of the woodwork lately, Ryan Gregory and Larry Moran pose the following question:
And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between "humans" and "animals", "human rights" and "animal rights", "us" versus "them"? What rational argument do you bring in defense of speciesism? Perhaps you argue that only humans are capable of suffering, or that our intellectual capabilities are of a different kind from those of other animals. As Dawkins has noted, neither is compatible with what we understand about evolutionary history
Philosophers are invited to form opinions on issues when they are studying as undergraduates, which they never later develop. This is one I formed the following opinion on. Worth all you pay for it:
The question is not if there is a sharp dividing line between humans and "animals" (hey, we are animals, OK? Linnaeus knew it, Aristotle knew it, and the writer of Ecclesiastes knew it); there is none. All the morally pertinent properties of humans have been found in some degree in some non-human species. So we have to ask, on what grounds do we include some, but not all non-human animals in moral consideration?
A sorites or slippery slope conclusion is that of the extremists - any animal species is as moral valuable as any other, so humans get no special treatment (and can, on utilitarian grounds, be sacrificed if enough animals are thereby saved). I reject this.
So we are between the human exceptionalist rock, and the sorites hard place. What to do?
It hinges on what the notion of a right is. If rights are universal and natural, or if they come from a universal deity, then they apply where they do, and there's an end to the question, and we either apply it, as the utilitarian animal rights advocates say, to all animals irrespective of species, or we interrogate God about where to draw the line.
But what if rights are not either natural properties or divine commands? What if what counts as a right depends on the best consensus of a society? [I'm not asking how to justify that right in moral terms, only about the source of the right, what makes it a right in the first place.] Then we have a way to answer the question about animals and their rights.
I propose that rights are socially ascribed, and animals get rights just to the extent that they can or do interact as agents in society. Cows don't usually become children's pets, but dogs do (and dogs evolved to do exactly this, to act as agents in human society). Animals not bred for food, like horses, have greater rights than those that are. And the apes, and primates generally, like all small social animals, have the rights of an equivalently endowed human child. Chimps reach the mental and linguistic sophistication of a three to five year old; they should be given the protection due to human children.
I think that we should ascribe rights as if the animal were a human child of equivalent capacity. Hence, animals that do not engage as agents in society are not to be given rights beyond that which any human bearer of a central nervous system would be given (the right to freedom from unnecessary cruelty and pain). There is nothing relevant about species - that much I agree with the animal rightists - but there's no moral claim against eating animals based solely on having that nervous system.
Cruelty is also prohibited for the following good reason - human agents who are cruel to animals often turn into, or already are, sociopaths to humans when they mature. This undercuts the rights of human agents. But this is not, I think, the basic reason; instead cruelty is partially prohibited by society, not by God or nature, just to the extent that the animals are social agents.
Excuse me; I have to go kick the dog now.
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> animals that do not engage as agents in society are not to be
> given rights beyond that which any human bearer of a central
> nervous system would be given (the right to freedom from
> unnecessary cruelty and pain)
OK. Then you can eat meat, in principle. (So can I, in principle, in case you're interested.) But given the way that abattoirs and farms are run in this country, in practice you actually can't, unless you think it's OK for the right to be applied intermittently.
I think this anchors our rights ascription, but it also provides a goal - to kill animals humanely. There was an interesting doco recently entitled "The woman who thinks like a cow", about an autistic woman who was able to see things the way cows do, who has made considerable improvements in the way cattle are treated in abattoirs. That is what I had in mind here.
We should require that animals are treated and killed humanely, with as little fear and pain as possible. That's about it for moral obligations to cattle* species as far as I am concerned.
*"Cattle" is derived from the word "chattel", and applies to all food species.
I don't know if this is really different than what you've already said but I think there is a social impulse toward and value in a shared sense of morality. My impression is that the various SPCAs grew up not so much out of any strictly utilitarian social end of restraining or redirecting sociopaths but out of a desire to jointly feel moral.
There was an interesting doco recently entitled "The woman who thinks like a cow", about an autistic woman who was able to see things the way cows do, who has made considerable improvements in the way cattle are treated in abattoirs.
Temple Grandin
That's her. I sympathise with her take on humans...
I agree that rights are neither ordained by a deity nor properties of the natural world. They are, as you say, "socially ascribed" or social conventions which act as constraints on human behaviour.
When we say that someone has the right to life, we do not mean that their life is somehow guaranteed against any possible threat but only that other human beings are prohibited from taking it without sufficient cause. If someone were killed by a lion we would not ordinarily regard that event as a violation of the victim's right to life; if that person were killed by another human being, on the other hand, it most certainly would be.
It seems to me that rights are rooted in the Golden Rule which is in turn an expression of empathy. We do not want to suffer fear, pain, injury or death, we can imagine animals feeling the same and most of us would no more want to inflict such experiences on a cat or dog than we would on another person.
Plants, although living creatures by any reasonable definition, are not, as far as we can tell, capable of experiencing fear, pain and the anticipation of death as we are.
The more difficult problem is our relationship to those animals that we eat. I enjoy eating meat but let others do the butchering and preparation. I am by no means certain that I could do it myself although extreme hunger is supposed to be a powerful motive.
What I would like is that the animals we use as food are treated humanely. They should be given what is for them a good life and that when the time comes to end it, death comes unanticipated, quickly and without pain.
The fact that it is often not like that is immoral and something we need to change.
"Animals not bred for food, like horses, have greater rights than those that are"
Pigs are more intelligent than dogs and can be kept as pets just as dogs. Does it really make sense to give them less rights just because we in our culture have decided to have dogs as pets and eat pigs? In that case, do you agree that in cultures where apes are eaten they should have little or no rights as well? When it comes to humans, we don't go around counting how much they interact with society before giving them rights, hermits have rights too.
You talk about "all small social animals". Does that include mice and rats? Rats are very social and pretty intelligent, yet usually treated as vermin.
You do seem to assume we have very concrete understandings about which animals have what level of intelligence. That makes me curious. As Thomas said, what becomes of the odd wily cow?
"Cruelty is also prohibited for the following good reason - human agents who are cruel to animals often turn into, or already are, sociopaths to humans when they mature."
I grew up a Kiwi farm kid. My brother and cousin would beat turkeys to death for fun occasionally. It was just something farm kids did when their parents weren't around, cruelty like this is not as rare as we would hope. I really do believe that devaluing an animal's life to the point where it is killable for something as trivial as meat scales the heights of 'socially irresponsible behaviour'.
There seems to be an altruistic aim when conducting animal research, but there seems to be nothing more than greedy, greasy hedonism when eating meat.
It may very well be that rights are determined by the majority, but that leaves us with a very slow, sordid road to trudge - it's bit like the Libertarian dream of 'letting the market decide'. I don't have a better proposal, unfortunately, but however irrational, a little empathy for the odd cow will go long way until we find a few less dubious schools of ethics.
This Mylan Engel Jr. essay is a nice little consistency test in the meantime:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~norcross/Engel_short.htm
so i'm guessing you have absolutely no experience with philosophy whatsoever...
that was one of the most poorly reasoned, shitty arguments i have ever seen here not that i even disagree with you
I'm no philosopher as I'm sure will be readily apparent by the following statements.
When lions eat zebras it isn't immoral. It's predation, and it's speciesism on the part of the lion. When a cat tortures a mouse before eating it, I don't consider it cruelty. And I agree that humans are no special case, we are lions and cats.
"Cattle" is derived from the word "chattel", and applies to all food species.
I'd just like to point out that the first (and most frequent) usage where I've heard the term "chattel" applied is in reference to (female) slaves.
I'd also like to point out that cows, as hamburger, are more "agents in society" than non-food animals like horses/elephants.
I am of the opinion that animal rights are socially ascribed, based primarily on exaggerated sentimentality, rather than intelligence levels or the social complexity of the animals. Ants as well, are "small social animals", their society being highly complex. For the most parts, people are opposed to cruelty of certain animals because we tend to think of them as "cute". Placed in a culture of kitsch, so to speak, we protect animals which the media constantly portray with human-like features.
There is no moral line really involved here. Animal rights activists mostly, I think, arbitrarily choose their favorite animals to protect. The only way animal rights activists can make their case coherently is either to make a moral distinction between the animals they choose to protect, and the animals they do not, or to embrace -all- animals. I have not seen the former being done well before: there are always some exceptions.
The point is this: as long as we protect animals based solely on the "unpleasantness" of killing them as I believe is the case (our society today does not like to image the death of certain animals), protecting animals is no less hedonistic than eating them since all we are trying to do is prevent an unpleasurable experience. Either choice is made based on personal preference, and no one is more moral than the other.
I doubt anyone is ever going to be able to create a fully rational and internally consistent position on animals, unless one becomes a vegan (as opposed to other, lighter forms of vegetarianism). The way we ascribe rights to animals is based, so far as I can tell, on two factors; how like us we perceive them to be (anthropomorphism) and how valuable they are in various roles to society. This changes over time, as with all value judgements.
Though the value of dogs and cats isn't universal, both of these species have long been seen by many societies as playing a beneficial role, and thus have been the only two animals to really have taken on the widespread position as "pets" (thus having conferred upon them some limited form of membership within the greater society). By the same token, other animals like cows, sheep and pigs (the classic livestock species) have been seen more for their work or caloric value (let's remember that pigs, in particular, are the most efficient source of protein of any livestock animal based upon space required and foods needed to raise).
As to the great apes, here a growing realization of kinship along with anthropomorphism play a role. It's becoming increasingly clear as we research these animals that not only are they genetically very closely related to us, but that there are few if any traits found in humans that cannot be found to some degree in them. Thus when we hear of the bush meat "trade", we are not horrified so much for the cruelty and waste of it so much as that these creatures who share so much of what we consider "humanity" are being slaughtered. It's not an entirely rational response, as I'm sure those that partake of bush meat would point out, but I think it demonstrates the way that primate rights are increasingly being viewed in the industrialized world; primates, particularly the "higher" (read: closer to us in genetics and behavior) primates, can be considered near-human or perhaps even, to some degree, human.
We're starting to see more and more interest not just by philosophers, animal behaviorists and anthropologists but by ethicists and legislators in some countries over the issue of *sapient* rights; that is those animals which science is increasingly demonstrating possess behaviors and capacities that resemble that of humans. These are big questions; can we morally use chimpanzees, whose reasoning powers and emotional abilities are very close to that of a 3-5 year old human for medical research? Do not these animals come so close to the human potential that we are not simply experimenting on an animal, but on an animal that comes sufficiently close to the human standard that what we're doing could be described as torture and murder?
I don't personally have an easy answer to the question. My gut instinct, or perhaps one might call my own personal moral compass, tells me that the Great Apes are so close to us in every way that we must offer protections to them as we would to a member of H. sapiens, and anything less is a violation of their human rights. I'm not going to try to claim that is an entirely rational position, because there is a distinctly subjective quality to that belief. Science can tell us how closely any given animal is related to us, or how closely it resembles us in behaviors and capabilities, but ultimately, being morally neutral, it cannot tell us how to treat an animal.
The irrational fact of the matter is that I like hamburgers, love my dog, set mouse traps and feel a close bond of kinship to chimps.
We amateurs need guidance and advice when we fail dismally, douchebag, not your big-headednes.
Temple Grandin is a personal hero of mine. she's done more than any other human to end the unnecessary suffering of animals
Two good reads on this subject are:
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by the anthropologist Frans de Wal, with responses by Robert Wright, Christine Korsgaard, Peter Singer, and Philip Kitcher
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.
In the second, Singer and Mason basically come to the utilitarian conclusion that we all ought to be vegans. I was a bit disappointed in that regard, since earlier in the book they praise efforts to reduce animal suffering in food production. But, apparently, from a philosophical standpoint, that's just not enough--they don't consider it rational to draw a dividing line that allows any animal suffering.
I'm pleasantly surprised at how level-headed almost all of the comments are. John, you've got a great readership!
I think some of the attempts at line-drawing don't carve nature at the moral joints, and there are pretty serious problems with the kind of "social conventionalism" about morality that is suggested.
However, I want to set those aside to ask a simple, and pretty obvious, question: What human child, of whatever level of intelligence, would you consent to eat? What human child, of whatever level of intelligence, would you consent to be raised for slaughter in the equivalent of a factory farm?
If the answer is--as I'm pretty sure it is for most people--"No human child," why doesn't that carry over to the animals typically raised for food? There are human children who are congenitally no more intelligent than the least intelligent of common food animals. If the criterion is that the same rights ought to be extended to animals as to comparably intelligent children, then either we should be prepared to eat the children or prepared to stop eating the animals.
"When lions eat zebras it isn't immoral. It's predation, and it's speciesism on the part of the lion".
A lion which eats a zebra is not indulging in speciesism, it is filling its belly. It does not care about the welfare of lions as a species which is what speciesism is all about, the perception of one's own species as superior to all others and whose interests must always take precedence. This is, as far as I know, a uniquely human concept.
Sorry for the delay in replying - I've been preparing exams and stuff.
Cornelius, I don't pretend there is a "one true line" to draw. My point is, rather, more descriptive than prescriptive. Suppose we ascribe rights arbitrarily? Then our ascriptions of animal rights will be equally arbitrary, and that is just the fact of it. But I think one can use this guide rule as a way to rationalise some of the inconsistencies in the way we give rights to animals.
In other words, we should typically increase the rights given to animals. But I fail to see how that changes the status of food animals as food. We have to eat, and no species is immune under that consideration. We should just make sure we treat them humanely.
And Cornelius, I am not sure that humans privilege our entire species either. Humans naturally give rights typically to only our in-groups, and treat other groups, whether racial, national or cultural, as deserving less rights than our own group. So the argument here is whether we should simply follow our native inclinations or exceed them. It's my view that we should exceed them, because we have a global society now, and trying to build that on the basis of tribalism will fail, and fail badly.
What anchors all moral inference, I believe, is a notion of a viable and healthy society. We live at a time when universalism and cosmopolitanism is necessary, the first such time in human history. Societies that are arbitrary in assigning human rights are unhealthy and inviable.
I do not see how, in the absence of a deity or evidence observed from the natural order of things, that the assignment of rights can be anything other than arbitrary. In fact, even the presumption of divine authority is no defence against an accusation of arbitrariness. How is a god's assignment of rights any less arbitrary than our own?
In my view, if the concept of rights can be said to have any empirical basis it is founded on the observation that human beings generally agree that they have certain shared interests which are entitled to protection in furtherance of the common good. I doubt that you will find many people who reject the idea that they have a right to life, for example. Again, though, this is no defence against an accusation of arbitrariness. Why should our interests be any more important than anyone else's, other than because we say so?
This recognition of common interests also suggests that any society which is not organized around it, such as those where a privileged minority has the power temporarily to enforce its claims but denies the same to the majority, will not be stable for long. To mix metaphors, if the majority are poor and hungry, telling them to eat cake will not cut the mustard.
As far as other animal species are concerned, we could arguably extend to some of them the privilege of certain rights on the grounds that to do so furthers our own interests. Apart from practical concerns such their value to us as food, encouraging a concern for the welfare of other species can help foster respect for the interests of members of your own. Except where cats are concerned. Those of us who worship before the altar of Bast are constantly reminded of how worthless and pathetic are other species like dogs and human beings.
Several people have argued in favor of _Indirect Duty Theories_, that is - animals only have rights, insofar as it benefits humans in some way.
Ian Spedding said: "...we could arguably extend to some of them the privilege of certain rights on the grounds that to do so furthers our own interests."
Here is a link to one of the best articles I've read on this issue; "Undermining Indirect Duty Theories" from the Journal "Between the Species".
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jlynch/06Bassarticle.html
John Wilkins wrote:
I see a couple of problems here. One has to do with treating animals humanely and what that means. To get at this issue, you have to consider whether we are talking about an absolute or a sliding scale of humaneness.
On an absolute scale, certain kinds of treatment would definitely count as inhumane, such as crowding, beating, starving, immobilizing, killing at an early age and so on.
The problem is that these and many more paradigmatically inhumane forms of treatment are entirely routine in the treatment of food animals. It is virtually impossible to raise food animals without inflicting some or many of these forms of inhumane treatment upon them. If we should "make sure we treat them humanely," then we just shouldn't eat them.
Perhaps we'll do better if we appeal to a sliding-scale standard of humaneness. The idea would be that we shouldn't judge inflictions of pain, harm, suffering or death as humane or inhumane in themselves rather than as relative to some justifying purpose and circumstances.
For example, before anesthesia, there was no way to do painless dentistry. Still, some practitioners were no doubt more humane than others. Relative to the justifying purpose (pulling an infected tooth, say) and to the circumstances (no anesthesia), their practice counts as humane. If a dentist today were to use the same methods and techniques, he would count as inhumane, because something better is available. Roughly, the dentist's practice counts as humane or not, depending on its necessity (under the circumstances) to serve a justifying purpose. If the infliction of suffering is necessary, then it's also humane; if not, then not. That's what I mean by a sliding scale.
It may seem that the imposition of suffering and death on food animals could count as humane on a sliding scale. It might be necessary or unavoidable to cause suffering and early death to animals in order to raise them for food. As John says, "We have to eat." The question would be whether we are treating them as well as possible, given the justifying purpose.
But that leads into the second problem. Consider this case:
I'm sure most would object that getting pleasure from tortured animals may be his purpose, but that it is not a justifying purpose. I agree. That purpose does not justify what the sadist does, and his actions are not humane, even on a sliding scale.
But that suggests the further question: What is the justifying purpose behind our treatment of food animals? The standard assumption would be that it is our need to eat--which is right as far as it goes. But we do not need to eat animals. It is entirely feasible, for almost anyone in our circumstances to avoid eating animals and their products. In fact, there is mounting evidence that we can be much better off, both in terms of our health and in terms of our environmental footprint, if we avoid eating them.
That means the sliding-scale defense is not going to work. The harms inflicted on animals are not reasonably necessary to the justifying purpose of providing us with something to eat. Just as the old-fashioned dental practitioner no longer counts as humane once anesthesia is available, we do not count as humane when we have alternatives that are less harmful to the animals.
Whether on an absolute or a sliding scale, raising animals for food is not humane. The choice is not between treating food animals humanely or inhumanely while still raising them for food. The choice is whether we will treat the animals humanely or whether instead we will raise them from food, inhumanely, simply because we like the taste.
And if we take the latter option, how different are we from the sadist who cannot get as much pleasure without torturing animals in his basement?
Daryl said:
"Animal rights activists mostly, I think, arbitrarily choose their favorite animals to protect. The only way animal rights activists can make their case coherently is either to make a moral distinction between the animals they choose to protect, and the animals they do not, or to embrace -all- animals."
This is simply false because those are not the only two alternatives. Most animal advocates do not "make a moral distinction" between humans and other animals at all because they believe that all sentient beings are _morally equal_ in much the same way that Alzheimers' patients and Nobel Prize winners are morally equal.
And if by "all animals" you mean to include lower animals like insects, sponges, and oysters, then those too would be excluded by animal advocates because they are not sentient.
The criterion they use to "choose" animals to protect is based on _sentience_, the ability to experience pleasure and pain. And this is limited to animals with central nervous systems, which scientists seem to agree is necessary for feeling pain. Insects have a rudimentary central nervous system, although the science is not in yet, about whether or not they feel pain.
One thing we know for sure though is that cows, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats, horses, and goats, etc. feel pain. Just because there are some fuzzy cases like insects doesn't mean there aren't clear cases all around us.
Hi John.
Personally I have no gripe with your position. To be quite honest I am something of a fence-sitter re: animal rights, I cannot in all honesty take issue with those who maintain that as non-humans cannot be said to have responsibilities they cannot claim to have rights. I am more concerned with one right that certain people maintain that humans have, the "right" to abuse non-humans indiscriminately. I do not exaggerate, having seen this set down in print. I will not say that this is barbaric, to do so would be totally unfair to barbarians. My comments about speciesism stem from the position taken by those who claim that many non-humans are speciesist because, as in predators, their lifestyles entail some degree of exploitation of other species. This I regard as totally irrational for the reasons given in my original post.
"One thing we know for sure though is that cows, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats, horses, and goats, etc. feel pain. Just because there are some fuzzy cases like insects doesn't mean there aren't clear cases all around us".
Hi Phil.
Believe it or not there are those who would dispute this. I am at the moment engaging in debate with a physicist (and getting my arse roundly kicked because she is much better educated and more articulate than I am). She maintains that because she could program a robot to respond in the same way as, say, a dog which has just had its leg broken we can never be certain that said dog would actually experience pain as such. At least that is what I think she is saying as she is a mistress of obfuscation and often leaves me floundering in my attempts to pin her down (metaphorically, I assure you ;-)).
Hi Cornelius,
You should tell your physicist friend that we have as much reason to believe that animals feel pain as we do that babies feel pain. Does she ignore her babies screaming until the baby learns to talk? I hope not!
If she is really that doubtful about what behavior can show, then she also has no reason to accept that you or I feel pain, just because we might use language to say that we do. Her argument against the dog is that we can program a robot dog to "mimic" dog pain behavior. But we can also program a robot human to mimic human pain behavior, and to mimic the language to tell us about it.
If her point is that in order to feel pain, you must be able to tell someone about it, that's getting the cart before the horse. Rather, in order to tell someone about it, you have to already feel it.
Would she say that Helen Keller did not feel pain until Annie Sullivan came along and taught Keller how to communicate? Of course, that's nonsense.
Cornelius said:
"I cannot...take issue with those who maintain that as non-humans cannot be said to have responsibilities they cannot claim to have rights."
This is a commonly used, but flawed argument. There are many humans who are not responsible, but they still have rights.
People often argue that traits like rationality, reciprocity, or being responsible are _necessary_ conditions for a being to have rights. But that would mean that babies, Alzheimer's patients, and other severely mentally handicapped humans who are not rational, cannot reciprocate, and who are not responsible, do not have rights, which clearly they do.
So these kinds of traits cannot be _necessary_ conditions for rights. They may be _sufficient_ conditions, but that means that other sufficient conditions can exist that include the animals -- along with the babies and severely mentally handicapped.
Animals have rights for the same reason that babies and the mentally impaired do.
What rights you have depends on what rights the legal system in the relevant jurisdiction says you have.
As for what rights should be assigned to you by some legal system, well that's an interesting political issue.
If someone is going to claim that there are "moral rights" or "natural rights" that exist irrespective of what the legal system says, I'm tempted to say, grumpily, "Nonsense on stilts." Admittedly, there are some limited law-like situations, such as when someone makes a promise binding only in honour - with no legal contract formed - where it makes sense to talk about a moral right. But that kind of language is not typically very helpful.
More often than not, it muddies the waters when people insist on discussing morality and issues of what the law should be in rights language. As for the former, just talk about what is morally permissible, morally praiseworthy, morally forbidden, morally virtuous, etc. We need this language anyway, so adding an entire ontology of moral rights creates unnecessary confusion and complexity.
As for what the law should be, it's an interesting political question in any particular case. Sometimes there are various political principles that might be invoked, even if they don't have constitutional force in the relevant jurisdiction. Freedom of speech is a good example. But it's usually misleading to call these "rights" (even when they have constituional force, they may be no more than limitations on legislative power, which is not strictly the same as a right).
I would have thought that the question of whether something can or cannot suffer is highly relevant to the ways in which it is morally permissible to treat that something. There are other questions, such as whether the something can have its hopes for the future dashed, be rendered miserable, feel torn apart emtionally, and so on. That will depend on many things, such as whether it is self-conscious, whether it is aware of the past and future and just how rich its awareness of the future is, whether it has moral motivations, and so.
Moreover, I don't see why the intrinsic properties of something, such as whether it possesses sentience, whether it possesses personhood, whether it possesses moral motivations, and so on, should be the only things relevant to how we may (morally) treat it.
Morality is a human invention. It is there primarily to coordinate, and otherwise serve, human interests. Of course it will be biased towards those interests. We have an interest in not making other sentient things suffer (based on our sympathy for suffering things), and the strength of this should not be underestimated. But we have a lot of other interests as well. We usually have a much greater interest in the survival of human babies than we do in the survival of equivalently-sentient non-human things, so of course morality reflects this fact.
If we bear these points in mind, we can think clearly about most issues of morality and regulatory policy.
"In other words, we should typically increase the rights given to animals. But I fail to see how that changes the status of food animals as food. We have to eat, and no species is immune under that consideration. We should just make sure we treat them humanely."
'We have to eat' does not mean 'We have to eat meat'. I'm not certain how relevant this, but is meat actually a necessity to anyone's diet? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I haven't heard of a case where it is. (Seriously, forgive me, I'm a lowly English Lit. student, not a nutritionalist).
I expect meat is, in fact, necessary to people in undeveloped nations where other sources of protein may be scarce.
I suppose my question is, if we do not need to do it, then what is the point of breeding a piglet, cutting off its tail and tusks without anaesthetic (my old job back home, alongside injecting iodine), keeping it confined, feeding it several years' perfectly edible grain, prodding and terrorising it about its pen or paddock, then killing it, all to get a relatively small number of choice cuts?
It seems to me that the livestock suffer greatly for the fleeting gastronomic pleasure of a few hungry humans. Having lived on a farm my whole youth, I can't even say that I feel a strong emotional empathy for the animals, considering their fate doesn't cause me any pain, but if they are not simply robots, if they think and feel enough, then the fate we offer them seems silly.
We have ideals about humane farming, and what seems a dubious idea of 'humane slaughter', but these bear little or not resemblance to the places we currently get our meat from. I worry that we devalue livestock's emotional existence as well, we recognise that our cats and dogs crave attention and we give it to them, whereas we simply hit and scare cattle when they don't do as we wish.
Do we hold back on conferring animals a right to life simply because A. likes hamburgers and B. "can't live" with a good steak? But alas, I realise the debate is much more complicated than that, and that my opinions are based on scant knowledge, and a degree of sentimental flakiness.
Russell Blackford (Comment #29) makes the point I was thinking about: morality is a human invention, not a universal standard, and, as such, it can only be reasonably applied to humans. Is a lion or grizzly bear that kills and eats a human (it does happen), or a dog that kills a baby, immoral? It's utterly ridiculous to try to apply our standards to animals who can't act according to them, much less understand them. So, our morality and its implications are only for humans. Thus, when a human kills and eats an animal (or tortures it), it's not what happens to the animal what is moraly relevant, but how the action affects the human (and other humans). If the human feels that the action is evil and keeps performing it, then it's morally reprehensible. Otherwise, it isn't.
Being a healthy and well nourished vegan would be viable only to some social groups, and very likely only from the richer countries. Until this situation changes, using animals for food is an unavoidable necessity.
Russel Blackford wrote:
"Is a lion or grizzly bear that kills and eats a human (it does happen), or a dog that kills a baby, immoral? It's utterly ridiculous to try to apply our standards to animals who can't act according to them, much less understand them."
If you think about this for a minute, you'll see that it is not at all "ridiculous" to apply our standards to animals any more than it is ridiculous to apply our standards to human beings who lack the same understanding of moral principles. Babies, the insane, Alzheimer's patients, etc. all lack the same moral understanding that animals lack, but they still have rights and are not held morally responsible for their actions.
When Grandpa with Alzheimer's runs away from the nursing home and steals candy from the corner store, we don't put him in jail; we take him back to the nursing home. For the same reason we don't execute the insane.
Most adult humans are _moral agents_, beings who can understand right from wrong and guide themselves by moral principles. Beings like lions and bears, babies, and mentally deficient humans are _moral patients_, i.e., beings who cannot distinguish right from wrong and therefore cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. However, they can be on the receiving end of wrongful acts done by moral agents - say a parent beating a baby, a nurse abusing an Alzheimer's patient or someone setting a cat on fire.
Only beings who can understand moral principles are bound by them. But that doesn't mean that we are free to torture or kill those beings who cannot understand moral principles.
Russel Blackford wrote:
"Is a lion or grizzly bear that kills and eats a human (it does happen), or a dog that kills a baby, immoral? It's utterly ridiculous to try to apply our standards to animals who can't act according to them, much less understand them."
If you think about this for a minute, you'll see that it is not at all "ridiculous" to apply our standards to animals any more than it is ridiculous to apply our standards to human beings who lack the same understanding of moral principles. Babies, the insane, Alzheimer's patients, etc. all lack the same moral understanding that animals lack, but they still have rights and are not held morally responsible for their actions.
When Grandpa with Alzheimer's runs away from the nursing home and steals candy from the corner store, we don't put him in jail; we take him back to the nursing home. For the same reason we don't execute the insane.
Most adult humans are _moral agents_, beings who can understand right from wrong and guide themselves by moral principles. Beings like lions and bears, babies, and mentally deficient humans are _moral patients_, i.e., beings who cannot distinguish right from wrong and therefore cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. However, they can be on the receiving end of wrongful acts done by moral agents - say a parent beating a baby, a nurse abusing an Alzheimer's patient or someone setting a cat on fire.
Only beings who can understand moral principles are bound by them. But that doesn't mean that we are free to torture or kill those beings who cannot understand moral principles.
Aaron asked:
"...can we morally use chimpanzees, whose reasoning powers and emotional abilities are very close to that of a 3-5 year old human for medical research? Do not these animals come so close to the human potential that we are not simply experimenting on an animal, but on an animal that comes sufficiently close to the human standard that what we're doing could be described as torture and murder?"
There is a simple argument that animal experimentation to gain insight into human health, disease and well-being is either morally or scientifically dubious: The animals must be a great deal like us for the results to be scientifically unproblematic, but very different from us in order to be morally unproblematic.
When we want scientifically useful results, the more like us the animals are, the better. When we want clear consciences over causing disease, suffering and death to innocent creatures, the more like us the animals are, the worse. I don't think we can have it both ways?
Actually, the comment about lions and grizzly bears ascribed to me by Phil Os wasn't mine: it was made by Ribozyme.
That said, I agree with the first bit of Ribozyme's comment. Lions and grizzly bears are not bound by our moral norms and cannot be said to breach them. Our moral norms are not there to provide guidance to their actions. They don't even guide the actions of intelligent but malevolent-to-humans monsters from Mars; those monsters are not immoral; they are evil, which is a different thing.
(I also tend to think that psychopaths are evil, rather than immoral, because there's a sense in which they don't "get" morality and it's unrealistic to expect that they will. Nonetheless they are malevolent and dangerous. Still, this might be a grey area.)
However, it's also true, as Phil Os says, that lions and grizzly bears can be moral patients - i.e. we can have moral norms about how it is permissible, desirable, obligatory, forbidden, etc., to treat them. Those norms may ultimately be based in some human interest or desire, or value, or whatever, but that's okay. Note that it doesn't have to be something merely instrumental: we may desire the continued existence of the Mona Lisa, or the Great Barrier Reef, for its own sake, not because of some additional value that will be furthered by its continued existence (such as the pleasure of all those people who will enjoy it in the future). Again, we may desire the non-suffering of lions and grizzly bears - or at least our non-involvement in ann suffering that they experience - for its own sake.
None of this takes away the fact that morality's point is to further human interests (including interests in furthering desires and values). So again, while we can and do have moral norms about how to treat non-human animals it's not at all surprising that morality is biased in favour of human beings. If Venusians have something like morality it will be biased in favour of Venusians.
Right after I typed my comment (#31), I realized that it fell short of what I wanted to say. Alas, lectures awaited and only now I'm able to clarify what I wanted to say. My opinion is that morality as a human product applies only to human actions, THAT AFFECT OTHER HUMANS. Trying to apply it to animals is what I would call speciecist chauvinism ("my rules are the greatest, the right ones"). After all, morality developed due to its survival value to our species and one of its main foundations is that moral actions need to be reciprocated or the system fails. Alzheimer patients are a reflection of what we might become, and how we treat them reflects how we expect to be treated if we are in a similar situation. The same goes for the babies: we all have been babies (of course, we can't modify the past, but we can find desirable that being treated the way we were as infants was the established moral way) and most of us expect to have babies who have a good life. Animals can't reciprocate with moral actions (as the guy who fancied himself "friend of the grizzlies" found out when one of them devoured both him and his girlfriend while camping). I must insist, it isn't how the human action affects the animal, but how it affects the human that performs it. If a person kills or causes pain to an animal, because she thinks it's necessary and/or unavoidable, although not enjoyable, she's acting morally (or, otherwise, we must immediatly cripple biomedical research by stopping all animal research... even if it harms our species (is that moral?!)). On the other hand, if the person kills or hurts an animal just for the sake of being knowingly mean, with no other justification, then she's being immoral by degrading herself into being mean (as her moral standards define being mean) on purpose.
I like Russell's distinction between patients and agents (with the proviso that all agents are also patients). I don't know how far it goes to resolving the issue of animal rights, but it sets the foundation for the claim that rights of some kind are owed to those who meet certain social criteria whether or not they are also agents in that society.
We ascribe rights, I believe, because some organism plays a role in social exchange (dogs "love" their masters, horses are treated as more than work animals, etc.). This doesn't make them agents, but they are social patients at the least. Food animals are also social patients. Zebras being attacked by lions aren't.
As to psychopaths, or sociopaths, their moral standing comes form the fact that they are expected, socially, to behave in certain ways as agents, and don't. Psychopaths may have an excuse (they cannot judge the rightness of their behaviour) but sociopaths can make these judgments; they just don't care. I think they are evil, while psychopaths are just broken.
Cornelius wrote:
Just call her bluff! An engineer who could build a robot and the programmer who could programme it so that it could convince me as surely that it is suffering pain as my dog can and has done are both in line for a Noble/Fields/Oscar/Knighthood! She is bullshitting neither robotics nor programming is anywhere remotely near being that good!
Phil S. wrote.
Historically babies, the mentally ill and others have been denied rights for exactly these reasons and by historically I mean still within my lifetime. This fact points out, to me at least, that the line that we draw between those that have rights and those that don't has been and is still constantly changing as our awareness of the world and our position within grows and changes. Maybe with time we will all become convinced vegans but I wouldn't bet on it!
Hi Phil.
Sorry for the delayed response, I've been spending so much time debating my "physicist friend" (emphatically NOT!) that I have not had the opportunity to do much else online. Believe it or not, despite my perception of her thoroughly trouncing me in the course of our exchanges, she has of late been resorting to personal insults and snide remarks re. my lack of education so perhaps I am rattling her cage somewhat. I am, of course, in total agreement with your comments in message 27. Regarding message 28 you are quite correct, it is to my shame that I take my own excellent health so much for granted that I tend to forget those less fortunate. You have given me much food for thought and I now feel much better armed, as it were, for my next encounter with those who take the position that I alluded to. Needless to say it was never my position, I simply felt ill-equipped to counter it.
"Just call her bluff! An engineer who could build a robot and the programmer who could programme it so that it could convince me as surely that it is suffering pain as my dog can and has done are both in line for a Noble/Fields/Oscar/Knighthood! She is bullshitting neither robotics nor programming is anywhere remotely near being that good!"
Hi Thony C.
I wish I could do so in person but as she lives in another country it's just not on the cards. As I have remarked to Phil she does not seem nearly as confident as she was at the start of our debate, her latest tack is that as she has never been a dog she cannot say for certainty that an injured dog actually feels pain. It is outdated Cartesian crap, no more, no less and I will back good honest common sense against it any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Here is a very small sample of her more recent arguments:
"Of course, many animals look like/act as if they are suffering in the same situations where we would suffer, but we cannot just assume that commonality of behaviour (which is no surprise in evolutionary terms), means commonality of experience".
"I keep asking the vital question, what does it really mean to try and be compassionate (say) towards a rat? You have first to understand what it means to be a rat (if such a thing can be said), and understand how a rat and a rats experiences are significantly different from what it means to be a human".
"Learning to avoid something that causes pain need not involve consciousness either, you could program a robot to do the same".
"Those who are convinced that all animals/mammals/primates (insert line here) suffer will remain convinced, even if for the worst of reasons".
It all seems to boil down to "I am right and you are wrong".