Dreaded Comparisons

Duncan Richter has recently raised an eyebrow at the factory-farming/Holocaust analogy, understandably. However, I just today started reading Marjorie Spiegel's The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, which makes a different, possibly offensive comparison, and just got to this paragraph, which seems worth serious consideration:

Comparing the suffering of animals to that of blacks (or any other oppressed group) is offensive only to the speciesist: one who has embraced false notions of what animals are like. Those who are offended by comparison to a fellow sufferer have unquestioningly accepted the biased worldview presented by the masters. To deny our similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power. It is to continue actively struggling to prove to our masters, past or present, that we are similar to those who have abused us, rather than to our fellow victims, those whom our masters have also victimized. (30)

I think that last sentence packs a gut-wrenching punch. But then I think, for example, of "the Elephant Man" (Joseph Merrick) (ignore the end of the clip; punch line of sorts below):



But perhaps even if Spiegel is right, we know well enough what Merrick means.

Animals and Moral Agency: What is the Question?

"Can animals be moral?" Well, as opposed to what? To being immoral? Or simply amoral? Are we asking whether animals sometimes do things that have good consequences for others? (Can animals be good utilitarians?!) Or whether they reflect upon the universalizability of their own principles? Or whether they have principles (utilitarian or otherwise)? Is the question whether other animals can do what’s truly right (or moral)—at least what we take to be the truth? Or just whether other animals have a sense of right and wrong (which might be more or less correct in comparison to the ideal, or our, moral standard)? How different could their sense of right and wrong be from our own before we could no longer recognize their “code of conduct” as a moral system of which they are the agents? Or is any code of conduct that regulates social interactions a moral system (descriptively speaking)? What kind of a grip must their morals (or norms) have upon them, in order for them to count as agents, rather than, say, instruments, of the system? That is, to what extent must they understand what they themselves are doing? How much autonomy is necessary? How much reflection? Is it actions that count, or intentions? Reason or emotions? Does moral agency require a “theory of mind”? Does it require a theory at all? Do we require more of potential animal moral agents than we do of the proverbial virtuous peasant? (Or do the virtuous peasant and some animals happen to share the clearly lamentable fate of not living up to our highest rationalistic conceptions of moral agency?)

That, from a paper I am working on, for this. No wonder philosophers have generally preferred just to say that animals are not "moral agents" or "moral beings," etc. That's just a whole lot easier than trying to answer all (or even some) of those questions!

Animals and Morality: What Is the Question?

"Can animals be moral?" Well, can they be immoral? Is the question: can other animals emulate some of our standards of goodness? (Can animals be utilitarians? Kantians?) Or is it whether they have their own standards on which they can succeed or fail? Do animals have standards? (Certainly, many animals seem to have expectations.) Remember: human morality is not one thing. (At least at the level of anthropological description.) And much within our moral thinking is essentially contestable. (Do other animals have moral disagreements?)

On the study of animals in order to understand "the origins of morality": Which morality? Whose values?

(Thinking about this stuff and reading josh blog has put me in an aphoristic mood...)

The Animals Who...

"One of the things that sets humans apart from other animals is our perennial efforts to establish our distinctiveness from them." -Lori Gruen, "The Morals of Animal Minds," in Bekoff, Allen, & Burghardt, The Cognitive Animal (MIT Press, 2002), 438 (p. 3 in link).

CFP/CFA: Living with Animals (Eastern Kentucky University, March 2013)

Sorry for my blog-absence. Too many pots on the stove. Perhaps some of you might be interested in the CFP (or abstracts) below, or know of someone who would be. I'll be presenting something on genetic modification as a means of reducing suffering in livestock (and why, e.g., Shriver's proposal strikes me as wrong-headed).

***

CALL FOR PAPERS:
“Living with Animals,” including the subthemes, “Teaching with Animals” and “Living with Horses.”

This conference has special relevance to the venue. Eastern Kentucky University, located in Richmond just south of Lexington, ‘The Horse Capital of the World’, began offering the first undergraduate degree in Animal Studies in 2010.

A three-day conference: March 21-23, 2013
Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Margo DeMello/Francine Dolins/Ken Shapiro/Kari Weil

CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS:
Dr. Robert Mitchell and Julia Schlosser
robert.mitchell@eku.edu
julia.a.schlosser@gmail.com

LIVING WITH ANIMALS: Many of us enjoy our lives with animals. We live with them in diverse ways: they are our friends, our enemies, our food, our materials, our helpmates, and our co-inhabitants of the planet. They invade our fields and mythologies, and we invade their habitats and lifeways. They are pervasive in our history, artworks, language and literature. News media contain innumerable references to animals every day: pets unintentionally euthanized, smart and even sexy bonobos, human-killing bears and chimp-saving humans, pigs who save their owners, tigers who maul people who are seeking oneness with them, and ridiculous cat activities swarm YouTube, Fox News, and more intellectual media such as the New York Times. Animals fascinate us. Yet the consequences of our collective actions do not always bode well for animals, whose lives and deaths depend on us. Many studies have concluded, without irony, that the myriad dangers posed to endangered species and the global environment would disappear immediately if human animals ceased to occupy space with nonhuman animals: Humans are truly the “elephant in the room” in any discussion of conservation.

During this conference, we propose to examine our interactions with animals, the ways we live with them and they live with us, the ways they live and die, and the ways that our decisions affect their lives and deaths, as well as practical solutions and philosophical/ethical issues surrounding our lives with animals. We will also examine the ways that literature, art, film, science, and popular culture represent human-animal relationships and the lives and deaths of animals, and the implications of these mediated visions. Dr. Ken Shapiro, cofounder of the Animals & Society Institute, and Dr. Francine Dolins, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, will be keynote speakers. Dr. Shapiro will present an overview of the Animal Studies field and its relationships to the animal protection movement. Dr. Dolins studies behavioral ecology and cognitive processes in non-human primates. Her research mainly investigates spatial cognition and navigational behavior, in addition to decisionmaking processing in spatial behavior. She has conducted fieldwork in Madagascar, Costa Rica and Peru.

TEACHING WITH ANIMALS: In 2005, the “Animals in History” conference held in Cologne, Germany, concluded with a vibrant discussion about the future of the academic discipline of Human/Animals studies. Many participants argued for the continued existence of Animal Studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor. Since that time, courses containing animal subject matter have proliferated across academia. The H-Animal Syllabus Exchange has been a popular on-line resource for faculty since 2006. In 2010, Eastern Kentucky University premiered the first interdisciplinary baccalaureate degree in Animal Studies; other universities have had Anthrozoology degrees, or specializations within Sociology or Psychology. Since the Animal Studies major appeared, EKU has also developed a “Humans, Horses & Health” minor. Bark magazine (Sept. 2012) featured an article on the inclusion of canine subject matter in a variety of curricula. What then are the current issues facing faculty teaching animal subject matter across the disciplines? Is an interdisciplinary approach practical and beneficial? What strategies have you used to convey animal-centric information to your students? How have you navigated the politics of academia to find a “home” for your Animal Studies course? Papers from a diversity of perspectives are sought which discuss experiences teaching animal subject matter, and we hope participants will bring discussion questions about teaching Animal Studies. Anthropologist Dr. Margo DeMello (author of Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies) will be the keynote speaker anchoring the Friday session devoted to teaching animal subject matter. Related activities will include breakout discussion sessions, a voluntary syllabus swap, and a larger discussion session debating the benefits and practicalities of an interdisciplinary approach to teaching animal subject matter. Dr. DeMello is the President and Executive Director of House Rabbit Society, an international rabbit advocacy organization, and the Program Director for Human-Animal Studies at Animals & Society Institute. Her latest book Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing will be out in fall, 2012.

LIVING WITH HORSES: The horse holds a unique place among domesticated animals. Whether as food source or beasts of burden; as objects of worship, sacrifice or study; as tools in science, therapy or agriculture; or as traveling, sporting or battle workers, horses have influenced human societies since the two species came together. Within these interfaces, horses are large, potentially dangerous beings with whom humans can and do develop deep and often reciprocal relationships. The Thursday session focuses on the following questions: How is it that humans and horses have lived together in the ways they have? What makes horses what they are? How do humans conceive of their uses and value across cultures, and how do these conceptions factor into their use and treatment? The session takes an inclusive, multidisciplinary animal studies approach, and seeks presentations from across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, and applied fields. Potential topics include but are not limited to: equestrianism and equestrian sport; equine psychology, sociality and culture; human-horse bonding; perceptions and representations of horses in various human cultures and subcultures, past and present; changing paradigms of training and schooling; considerations of equine agency, rights and welfare; and the ethical implications of the human-horse relationship. The session chair, Dr. Gala Argent, teaches the course “Horse” for EKU’s Animal Studies major and Humans, Horses and Health minor. Our Thursday keynote speaker will be University Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University, Dr. Kari Weil (author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now) whose current project is tentatively titled, ‘The Most Beautiful Conquest of Man’ (sic): Horses, Gender and the Conquest of Animal Nature in Nineteenth-Century France.

ABSTRACTS:
Please send 200-300 word abstracts and CV to Dr. Robert Mitchell, either by email: robert.mitchell@eku.edu; or mail (Department of Psychology, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, 40475, USA) by December 15th, 2012. We are open to receiving late submissions, but we will begin making decisions by the end of December. Individual papers 20 minutes. Panels of up to 3 speakers are welcome. Selected speakers will be notified via email by January 7, 2013.

CONFERENCE WEBPAGE:
http://psychology.eku.edu/insidelook/living-animals-conference-be-held-eku-march-21-23-2013 You can also email Julia Schlosser with questions: julia.a.schlosser@gmail.com
After Dec. 10 the updated web page can be found at livingwithanimals.eku.edu

CONFERENCE LOCATION: Eastern Kentucky University is located in historic Richmond, Kentucky, including many areas of historic and scenic interest. Fort Boonesborough State Park, birthplace of Kentucky, is located 12 miles to the north, and Civil War and many other historical sites are nearby. The university is located just south of Kentucky’s famed Bluegrass Region, internationally recognized for its horse culture. See http://www.eku.edu/about for more information.

Merton on Factory Farming (1965)

This was a surprise find on my visit to the Thomas Merton Center. (And a neat find, since I'm teaching animal ethics right now.) In a display case that had been put together for a recent conference on Merton and ecology, I found this typed statement by Merton:

A STATEMENT ON FACTORY FARMING                                          April 26, 1965

Since factory farming exerts a violent and unnatural force upon the living organisms of animals and birds, in order to increase production and profits, and since it involves callous and cruel exploitation of life, with implicit contempt for nature and for life, I must join the protest which is being uttered against it. It does not seem that these methods have any really justifiable purpose except to increase the quantity of production at the expense of quality: if that can be called a justifiable purpose. However, this is only one aspect of a more general phenomenon: the increasingly destructive and irrational behaviour of technological man. Our society seems to be more and more oriented to overproduction, to waste, and finally to production for destruction. Its orientation to global war is the culminating absurdity of its inner logic, or lack of logic. The mistreatment of animals in “intensive husbandry” is then part of this larger picture of insensitivity to genuine values and indeed to humanity and to life itself— a picture which more and more seems to display the ugly lineaments of what can only be called by its right name: barbarism.

The statement was included in a pamphlet entitled, Unlived life : a manifesto against factory farming, edited by Roger Moody, (Bristol: Campaigners Against Factory Farming, 1965 (or '66)). The statement is also quoted in full here.

On the Farm and In the Lab

In my animal ethics class this week, we're discussing transgenic animals and research. Transgenic animals are genetically modified animals--from the GloFish to the oncomouse (i.e. mice that "model" cancers by getting them), as well as animals, such as rabbits, that express human proteins in their milk which can be used in medical therapies. This stuff makes my head spin a bit. On the one hand, much of the research is interesting, even exciting (does a cancer-resistant mouse bespeak of cancer-resistant people in the future?).

But it's also troubling. Ian Hacking claims of over-bred animals (like turkeys) that "we have created a species that cannot have any dignity" (in Cavell et al, Philosophy & Animal Life, p. 155). Earlier in the essay he discusses oncomice, and I assume that he would say the same of them. Even for comparatively benign transgenic research, animals are killed in the process of creating the transgenic lines: embryo donors, particularly mice, are euthanized; and most viable transgene implantation methods are less than 100% successful--some animals don't exhibit the transgene, and some are born with (unintended) problems. But then millions of (ordinary, industry standard) rats and mice are killed every year in labs already.

So is there a special problem with killing in the context of transgenic research? Only if there's a special problem with transgenic research, it seems. Hacking points to one possible problem, though it perhaps doesn't apply to all transgenic animals. Considerations of dignity probably won't move the interdisciplinary conversation very far--at least, convincing biologists and chemists that rats and mice have a kind of "animal dignity" (as Nussbaum and Elizabeth Anderson use the term) might be a hard row to hoe. Even then, perhaps curing cancer trumps animal dignity--viz. human dignity trumps animal dignity. I have to confess that I'm not sure that it shouldn't. That may seem foul (or, if you're all for this, a moment of clear-headedness), but in cases like the oncomouse, it certainly doesn't seem like you can have it both ways.

I think most people would like to have it both ways. For it to be ok to eat animals as long as they've lived happy, natural lives. For medical (and transgenic) research on animals to be ok as long as they've been housed in sufficiently enriched environments, and been administered the kind of anaesthetics and analgesics we'd use to alleviate human pain in surgeries, and then euthanized painlessly. And I guess it is ok if you're comfortably utilitarian or a certain kind of theist. (It's interesting to find those two groups in the same camp.) Or if you've accepted the idea that in the animal world--of which we are and are not a part--might rules.

In a Nietzschean mood, I would say: and we have to be strong to live! This doesn't mean exercising our strength indiscriminately or foolishly, however. But that just brings us back to the start again...

[I seem to have misplaced my copy of Cora Diamond's essay on animals and experiments (in The Realistic Spirit); I need to find it; perhaps it will help...]

Rousseau on Animals

From the Preface of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754):

Leaving aside therefore all the scientific books which teach us only to see men as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our own well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow man, perish or suffer. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is in a position to make regarding these two principles, without the need for introducing that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right appear to me to flow; rules which reason is later forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature.

In this way one is not obliged to make a man a philosopher before making him a man. His duties toward others are not uniquely dictated to him by the belated lessons of wisdom; and as long as he does not resist the inner impulse of compassion, he will never harm another man or even another sentient being, except in the legitimate instance where, if his preservation were involved, he is obliged to give preference to himself. By this means, an end can also be made to the ancient disputes regarding the participation of animals in the natural law. For it is clear that, lacking intelligence and liberty, they cannot recognize this law; but since they share to some extent in our nature by virtue of the sentient quality with which they are endowed, one will judge that they should also participate in natural right, and that man is subject to some sort of duties toward them. It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged not to do any harm to my fellow man, it is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sentient being: a quality that, since it is common to both animals and men, should at least give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter.

I'd forgotten about this until preparing again to teach Rousseau in my Honors Humanities courses. Since I was at the same time discussing Kant and Bentham in my animal ethics class, I had them look over the paragraphs above as well. The end of the passage anticipates Bentham's remarks, and also helps, I think, in raising questions about Kant (and his grounding moral considerability in rationality).

Of course, there's much else that could be discussed. Rousseau is positing those two principles as our basic moral psychology--and as I understand him, the moral psychology of "original man," prior to life in society, and language (and reason, in any sense above the kind of reasoning other animals are capable of). And so then one might wonder whether Rousseau is attempting to derive an ought (in the second paragraph) from the is of our, as it were, prehistoric psychology. Still, that seems like a fine place to start: what are we "really" like; what has society foisted upon us? Of course, since his "history" of our development is "conjectural," there are problems here. As he allows, perhaps we never existed as solitary beings. (Does that obviously undermine either of the two principles above, self-preservation and pity?)

Another thing that strikes me is what he says about "the participation of animals in the natural law." He says that animals cannot follow the law because they lack freedom, but that we still should not mistreat them. But when he is describing the relationship between humans in (his version of) the state of nature and other animals, he stresses that predators tend not to attack other predators, and that the threat posed to them by robust, self-sufficient human beings would have led such animals not in general to tangle with humans. (And predators do not prey upon more than they need.) So it would seem that such animals participate (if not self-consciously) in at least the first law (of self-preservation). But if there's something that such animals lack that prevents their--natural, instinctual--participation in the second law (pity)--understood as a psychological law--it wouldn't seem to be intelligence or freedom that's relevant, but rather pity. Of course, there are now various studies that suggest that some animals exhibit "empathy" toward other members of their species when those animals are hurt, and so those animals would seem to exhibit both of the traits that Rousseau identifies as fundamental in our own (original, natural) moral psychology. We could then, I suppose, say that such animals are "moral animals"--which is just to say that their moral psychology (or, behavior) is somewhat like our own. And more like us--or some of us--to the extent that the capacity for empathy crosses species lines. We might say that their "participation" in the natural law is merely involuntary (instinctual). But on Rousseau's picture, that would have been true of the original humans, too.

In some sense (and this is perhaps too quick), Rousseau's ethic amounts to something like this: act like an animal (and bear in mind that animals do not have the various false needs that have been engendered by egocentrism and society). Or: act like the kind of animal that you (really) are. Our freedom, it turns out, often gets in the way of that, which is peculiar, since it implies that what we are is the animal that has a hard time acting like itself (or its "true" self).

Thoughts, Propositions, and Animals

I recently read Donald Davidson's "Rational Animals" (after re-reading Norman Malcolm's "Thoughtless Brutes"). Davidson's argument that possessing a single belief requires the possession of many beliefs, and that to be a thinking (rational) being requires language--being a "communicator" in the "full linguistic sense"--is rather impressive. I am not sure, however, what the "full linguistic sense" is, and Davidson's argument doesn't entail that (other) animals don't "think"--but that any thinking animals must be linguistic. (Do Wittgenstein's builder's think?)

Connecting thought to language is tempting. [Clarification: read that as taking thought to depend necessarily upon language.] But it strikes me that this really is a temptation. One reason to think so is that we have high-functioning autistic people like Temple Grandin who, to hear them tell it, insist that they think in non-propositional ways for the most part. And if animals that lack language still think in some sense, it is then not surprising that it would be more like what Grandin describes--and this would also enable us to make sense of why it is that her autism enables her to understand animals (or, see things as they do) better than most people.

Here's the main thing that strikes me about any Davidson-style argument: this whole way of approaching the issue privileges the proposition, and may even assume that all thinking--indeed all intentional states (all forms of thought)--are propositional. As I've seen others suggest, the temptation to think this may have to do with the tendency to begin analyses of intentional states by looking at belief, which seems inherently propositional (or incredibly easy to translate into Propositionalist language) as anything.

But as Alex Grzankowski argues in his forthcoming paper "Not All Attitudes are Propositional," Propositionalism runs into a great amount of trouble when confronted with the task of analyzing other intentional states (like fearing, liking, etc.) in terms of propositions. I'm not well-versed in this area of philosophy, but Grzankowski seems right, or on the right track. We like objects (or individuals), not propositions. (Well, we can like propositions, too, I guess, but the point is that in liking my wife, I like her, not some proposition or other.)

The next question I have (and here I have more reading to do) is how we might make sense of "animal belief" without appealing to propositions. I suspect this is related to why Malcolm talks about his dog "thinking" that the cat is up the tree, rather than of his dog believing it. In these cases it seems ok to say that our beliefs are about objects, but then we will also say that we believe certain propositions about those objects to be true. It might be that we could say that animals don't have beliefs (if we agree with Davidson that belief is inherently bound up with language), but that animals nevertheless make (and have?) observations. Malcolm's dog observes the cat go up the tree. And that observation, combined with a desire to eat the cat (the intentional state here can be non-propositional, the desire is for the cat, not for some relatable proposition), explain why the dog barks up the tree. Of course, we might ask: but is that thinking? Malcolm says, well, sure, my dog thinks the cat is up the tree. (That's why he's still barking, even though the cat isn't in that tree any more.) How do we get from observes the cat up the tree (or going up the tree) to thinks the cat is up the tree without attributing propositional content to the dog? Could we say that the dog continues to affirm a previously observed state of affairs while, not being a linguistic creature, cannot be understood as affirming the corresponding proposition? At any rate (since I'm in over my head here), could it not be that the dog thinks (believes) something about the world without believing any propositions (propositions are about the world, not part of it here)? If intentional states aren't all propositional, then must belief always take a propositional form? (Could that explain why we have thoughts that seem impossible to put correctly into words?)

Saving Lives?

Yesterday, on my drive home, I saw this sticker on someone's car. Does this make any sense? It's not clear to me how spaying and neutering pets "saves" lives. It may prevent unwanted animals from being born, but isn't that different from saving lives? We wouldn't tell sexually active teens to use contraception in order to save lives, would we? Preventing a life from coming into existence is not a way of saving a life. I don't know what sense of "save" the person who designed this sticker could possibly have in mind.

The only way I could make sense of this is if we think that unborn pets live in some kind of pet-heaven, and spaying and neutering is a way of saving unborn pets from being born into circumstances where they will be unwanted, abandoned, or abused. But that's silly, as is this sticker.

If panpsychism is true, then vegans are screwed

I've been thinking about consistency lately in connection with integrity, and Mark Rowland's visit to EKU got me thinking again in a more active way about animals.

On p. 131 of The Philosopher and the Wolf, he says of veganism that "it's the only consistent moral position on animals." This is something I've heard before, and I didn't think to press him on this during his visit, as I was more interested in his views on animals as moral subjects. But I'm not sure that the claim is true. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it's both false and misleading (with all due respect to Mark!).

First, it seems that other views about our relations to, and uses of, animals could be consistent, though the vegan might think those views are unsound. I think of something I overheard a local cattle farmer say at a farmers' market one summer morning: "God put them here for us." Now, this person doesn't think that means that anything goes, and his cattle are locally raised, on pasture (but I think fed some grain), slaughtered locally, and sold locally. From a bioregionalist perspective (as well as the theological one), there's a lot of "consistency" in this kind of agriculture. When I'm in an environmentalist mood, I think I should buy his beef instead of lentils imported from God knows where. But I still buy the lentils; I've been off the beef long enough now that I don't find it appetizing, even though fast food still smells good in the abstract. At any rate, I don't think this farmer is in any obvious way inconsistent. He might be wrong, but that's another matter.

Second, and this connects to the first point, there are going to be different ways of drawing lines between the morally edible and the morally inedible (and the morally instrumentalizable and the morally non-instrumentalizable). Sentience is one way of drawing that line, and I can accept that sentience is morally significant. But being a living thing is arguably a morally significant distinction, but not one we could use in deciding what is and is not morally edible. As my jokey title suggests, if a certain kind of panpsychism were true (so that plants are sentient, too), then we couldn't use sentience to draw that line anymore either. So, there's nothing essential about our drawing the line at sentience. (That doesn't mean it isn't the most reasonable line given the way the world is, of course.) But this gets at a point that others have made, which is that the feasibility of veganism is itself contingent upon one's circumstances and place in the world. Even Rowlands acknowledged that he had to go pescatarian when he moved to southern France; veganism was just not an option. Supposing that bioregionalism represented the most sustainable way of living, then there would likely be bioregions where animal agriculture would be more viable than vegan alternatives. Thus, a hidden assumption of the consistency claim on behalf of veganism is that sentience is the only relevant value at stake in determining the morally edible.

I think the truth in the claim is that if you think you shouldn't be eating cows, for example, then depending upon your reasons for thinking that, you probably shouldn't be wearing cow either, or playing catch with a cow-mitt (or, mutatis mutandis, tossing around a pigskin). Though perhaps a leather jacket would be a nice way to commemorate the years of milk your cow Bessie gave you. Hard to say; that might just be macabre.

Of course, vegans, I take it--at least of a certain sort--forgo all animals and animal products. But the line between animal and non-animal is (a) vague and (b) doesn't obviously track the sentient/non-sentient distinction (and what "sentient" means is up for grabs, too). My wife insists that we eat fish occasionally, though I tend not to go in for it myself (occasional sushi aside), but I will eat boiled shrimp with abandon. But not boiled lobster--too macabre for me. Now these are both crustaceans, and they have similar kinds of nervous systems. They have nervous systems. They produce opioids (which help control pain in us). So maybe I'm being inconsistent. (And I honestly don't know how sustainable shrimp is, but at some point I have to stop deliberating, so that I can eat, so that I can deliberate more later...[UPDATE: the news on shrimp doesn't look good...]) The consistent thing to do might be to be safe rather than sorry.

What did Elizabeth Costello say? "Degrees of obscenity." That's not an excuse. But if we really want to push the limits of moral considerability, then a certain kind of consistency becomes less and less livable. This is why some complain about expansive conceptions of intrinsic value and moral considerability that want to be extremely inclusive. (I think that complaint misses the point.) At the limit, consistency might mean owning up to the fact that some things die so that others may live. Maybe the "only consistent position" is being mindful that you don't cause more death than the continuation of your life, in the whole balance, is worth. And maybe cultivating a kind of mindfulness about our use of animals (and other living and non-living things) that doesn't just add up to a persistent feeling of neurosis and guilt that only destroys you, or makes it impossible for others to live with you. (Cf. Elizabeth Costello.)

Learning about Humanity from a Wolf

Mark Rowlands is coming to town this Thursday to give the final Chautauqua Lecture of the semester. (I've been asked to introduce him, which should be fun, if I recover my voice before then.) He will be speaking on something from his book The Philosopher and the Wolf, which I read over the holiday. (Which is saying something in itself, as I'm generally a slow, easily distracted reader.)

I'm too busy to write anything like a decent mini-review here. But I think it's a good book, entertaining, with some interesting ways of putting some ideas together (about happiness, meaning, and how the wolf shows up some of the pitfalls and not-so-nice aspects of being a simian). I'm not entirely sure I accept his Camus-esque approach to the problem of meaninglessness and/or existential adversity, but I'll have to think more about it. It might also be a good book to give to someone who's interested in philosophy (or who you think should be thus interested) but isn't an academic, or doesn't have patience for academic philosophy.

I'm now greatly looking forward to a forthcoming book of his entitled Can Animals Be Moral? There's a paper of his here that might give some flavor of that project, and suggests that the answer is yes. (I haven't read it yet.)

Not All Animals are Animals (In Case You Forgot)

I've harped on this before, but here you have it, from a tutorial I'm reading as part of my training for EKU's IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee):

The AWA [Animal Welfare Act] applies to all species of warm blooded vertebrate animals used for research, testing, or teaching, except farm animals used for agricultural research. The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 amendments to the regulations that implement the AWA currently also exempt birds, rats of the genus Rattus, and mice of the genus Mus, bred for use in research.

Translation: the Animal Welfare Act does not apply to most of the "animals" used in research.

Use of those non-animal "animals," as I understand it, is regulated by the standards set by the NIH (which doesn't really matter to you if you don't have NIH-backed funding for your research). But more later; back to my education.

Vigdis Broch-Due: "Animal In Mind: People, Cattle and Shared Nature on the African Savannah"

A nice read. This is an interesting charge against progressive Western animal rights/welfare ranging from Bentham to Nussbaum [edit: I should have said something like "a charge that is surprising, perhaps questionable in its purported scope"]:

Here we have to remind ourselves that these discourses, admirable as they are, inevitably uphold the firm species barrier between the human and the animal: the animal remains definitely and completely “other”.

I wonder whether this is quite fair. However, it certainly seems right that the personal attitude toward animals of someone like Singer (as expressed in Animal Liberation where he says that he doesn't in any particular way love animals) is worlds apart from the attitude of Broch-Due's friend Emong, who sacrifices practically everything he had to save his bull.

Hot Off the Press: "Comparing Lives" in Philosophical Investigations 34(3)

Here. The whole issue looks great, and I look forward to reading Mounce's paper on Winch and Anscombe.

(This means, due to copyright agreements, that I'll have to take my penultimate draft offline. However, if you have problems accessing the published version, let me know, and I'll do what I can to assist.)

"They're mine!"

Faulkner's The Bear has a puzzling end. [spoiler alert] Isaac McCaslin has gone back to the woods for perhaps his final hunt in the woods where much of this story takes place. (The land has been leased out to loggers.) He goes to meet Boon Hogganbeck at a tree that sits in a clearing, such that if one sneaks up on it fast enough, one can trap the squirrels in the tree, and pick them off at one's pleasure. Isaac finds Boon sitting beneath the tree, his reliably unreliable pump-action gun in pieces, and Boon beating on the barrel with the stock, trying to fix it. Without looking up, he shouts, "Get away! Get away! Don't touch a one of them! They're mine! They're mine!" This is how the story ends.

I may have to re-read the whole story to make sense of this, but my initial interpretation connects this scene to the long, difficult fourth section of the story, in which Isaac rationalizes his refusal of his inheritance, rejects the notion of ownership. Boon's situation seems desperate and pathetic. (But we should also remember that while Boon's gun has always failed him, he is also the person who killed the bear, Old Ben, with nothing but a knife.) I saw the ending as a commentary on ownership of the wild, and as one participant in a seminar with Faulkner put it,

as a warning to man that he can not in the end conquer nature, that in the end nature will win out, and that in order to lead a good life a man must be at peace with nature rather than trying to constantly conquer it.

Prior to this question, Faulkner had responded to a different question about the ending (concerning what appeared to be Boon's inability to cope with modern machinery):

No, that, to me, was a—a promise of optimism, a belief of mine that—that man, no matter how frail he is, is tougher than anything, that he can stand anything, that Boon, having served his purpose in this—the old bear's saga and Sam Father's finish, was still going on, he was still Boon. If he were needed again by another Old Ben, another Sam Fathers, he would have served again. That he was—that, to me, is a—a sign of—of optimism, that man is pretty good after all, that even his moments of heroism don't necessarily need to destroy.

He then responded to the suggestion that the end contains a warning as follows:

Well, I'm not too certain that man could—can be at peace with nature because nature ain't very peaceful itself. I think, in—in this instance, Boon—he did everything full out. If it was something worthwhile, and he could be convinced by someone he believed in that he should go full out at it, he would. Just as he—he went at the bear and just as he helped Sam Fathers to die. He was hunting squirrels, and he had got the squirrels up that tree, and the gun, as usual, let him down. If anything, that's a—a contemptive commentary on the machine that man thinks he can depend on when he can't. It lets him down. And Boon's machine let him down. But that hadn't frightened Boon. He could fix that thing just as long as somebody else didn't come along with a machine that did work and kill all his squirrels.

These are interesting points about the failure of "the machine that man thinks he can depend on," as well as on the stability of Boon's character (Boon continues to be Boon, as it were). But I'm still not sure about the optimism Faulkner saw in this ending. At least, it would seem that the "contemptive commentary on the machine" cannot avoid also being a commentary on the men who rely upon those machines, and who thereby, perhaps, fall prey to an illusion of control, which seemed to be the concern of the speaker above. The squirrels, as it were, don't belong to Boon (and never did).

More Animals That Are Not (Legally) Animals

This is the definition of animal in the U.S. Animal Welfare Act (revised 1970, with further exceptions added in 2002).

The term 'animal' means any live or dead dog, cat, monkey (nonhuman primate mammal), guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or such other warm-blooded animal, as the Secretary may determine is being used, or is intended for use, for research, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet; but such term excludes (1) birds, rats of the genus Rattus, and mice of the genus Mus, bred for use in research, (2) horses not used for research purposes, and (3) other farm animals, such as but not limited to livestock or poultry used or intended for use for improving animal nutrition, breeding, management, or production efficiency, or for improving the quality of food or fiber

That is: lab rats, lab mice, and lab birds, race horses (e.g.), and farm animals--not to mention all cold-blooded animals--are not (legally) animals. The reasons why should be obvious. (The 2002 revision added the specific exclusion of animals reared specifically for lab use.) But that does not make any of this any less bizarre, and in many ways, devious, and dishonest. At least, it seems the act should be called the U.S. Act on Animals Whose Welfare We Don't Have a Vested Interest in Not Protecting. (I wish I had something else to say, but that will have to wait.)

Vegetarianism & Hypothetical Imperatives

Tomorrow I'm examining in class an argument by Kathryn Paxton George (KPG) which suggests that "Singer-Regan" style arguments for (ideally, strict) vegetarianism may not apply to the vast majority of the world's population. Furthermore, treating veganism as a moral ideal is discriminatory. Here's the abstract:

The vegan ideal is entailed by arguments for ethical veganism based on traditional moral theory (rights and/or utilitarianism) extended to animals. The most ideal lifestyle would abjure the use of animals or their products for food since animals suffer and have rights not to be killed. The ideal is discriminatory because the arguments presuppose a male physiological norm that gives a privileged position to adult, middle-class males living in industrialized countries. Women, children, the aged, and others have substantially different nutritional requirements and would bear a greater burden on vegetarian and vegan diets with respect to health and economic risks, than do these males. The poor and many persons in Third World nations live in circumstances that make the obligatory adoption of such diets, where they are not already a matter of sheer necessity, even more risky.Traditional moral theorists (such as Evelyn Pluhar and Gary Varner whose essays appear in this issue) argue that those who are at risk would be excused from a duty to attain the virtue associated with ethical vegan lifestyles. The routine excuse of nearly everyone in the world besides adult, middle-class males in industrialized countries suggests bias in the perspective from which traditional arguments for animal rights and (utilitarian) animal welfare are formulated.

There are features of this argument that are interesting and important. In a sense, those who argue for "moral vegetarianism" are, as KPG notes, willing to allow for exceptions--people who cannot, or would be unduly burdened in attempting to, obtain vital nutrition from non-animal sources. However, KPG points out the strangeness of treating strict vegetarianism as a moral ideal if the feasability of meeting it is limited to a minority of the world's population--and limited not because of their special moral strength, but because of their particular nutritional needs and socioeconomic place in the world. I've thought of something like this puzzle, too: in some places in the world, a diet that includes meat makes sense (and in certain conditions may be more sustainable, I believe); how are those people to feel about "Singer-Regan" arguments? Are they a moral underclass? That seems wrong.

However, in the excerpt I'm discussing with my class, KPG moves from the claim that many people likely do not have an obligation to abstain from animal products to the claim that no one has such a duty, and that we should not view vegans as going "above and beyond the call of duty." She does acknowledge that, for many reasons, a semivegetarian diet is probably ideal. (Part of the implied point here is, I take it, that people in the U.S. tend to overconsume meat. For the record, I currently find myself a semivegetarian, or pescatarian, though I'd settle for lacto-ovo-shrimpatarian.) Something seems too quick here, though, and I think it's this:

KPG reads the "Singer-Regan" arguments as positing strict vegetarianism as the moral ideal. This is probably truer of Regan than Singer (because Regan views killing itself as a harm in a way that Singer doesn't), so I want to drop Regan for the time being. I think KPG's argument depends on construing the argument for vegetarianism as positing a moral ideal, rather than generating a conditional duty (or, as my title suggests, a hypothetical imperative). As I see it, a Singer-style argument does generate a conditional duty (if the argument is sound) of the form:

If one meets such-and-such conditions, then one has an obligation to abstain from animal products.

We could even qualify this with "as much as possible." Of course, doing so re-inserts the notion of an "imperfect duty" which can be fulfilled to a greater or a lesser degree, but there is some point at which we needn't feel guilty about "not doing more." (E.g. the less privileged cannot sensibly feel guilty for not giving away as much gross income to charity as Bill Gates does.)

KPG acknowledges that in industrialized countries like the U.S. a vegetarian diet is available and safe. She suggests even then that groups with "special" (i.e. non-healthy-young-to-middle-age-white-male) dietary needs, such as growing children, women, and the elderly, will incur a greater burden in giving up animal products. This is probably right. But as alternatives become more available (and free information more readily available), there's a legitimate question about where the variation in burdens becomes negligible. And certainly, the more affluent a person is, the more the varying burdens are arguably negligible when compared to animal suffering. Given that, there might still be a case to be made, which takes KPG's concerns into considerations, that most (and not just male) people in a country like the U.S. do have a conditional duty to abstain as much as possible from animal products in exchange for alternative foods.

One problem with this is that internalizing such a view may tend to make people neurotic about what they eat. But perhaps there's a line to be discovered between neuroticism (and the undue feelings of guilt mentioned above) and simply being more conscientious. This argument assumes that meat-eating cannot be justified on grounds of pleasure alone; the primary considerations should be nutritional needs and probably also ecological sustainability. Importantly, those who do not satisfy the antecedent of the conditional principle cannot be viewed as a "moral underclass" or as doing something morally bad. And so accepting this kind of position would entail that one could not go around universally condemning animal agriculture and slaughter. This is compatible with being troubled by the violence inherent in animal slaughter, and advocating for the most humane methods, and even seeking ways to make transitions when appropriate. But the "duty" to make such a transition at any point would depend upon changing features of the person's social and economic circumstances, so not of the form, "I can now afford to eat ethically," but rather, "The new conditions of my life make a different pattern of food consumption ethically preferable." This would preserve (I think) KPG's view that, at least as things stand, a vegan diet is not "higher" on a moral scale that most people can't reasonably ascend due to factors beyond their control.

But I'm not sure any of this is right. Thoughts? (Maybe my hedge "as much as possible" just means that I basically agree with KPG.)

Human/Animal Similarity & Unwarranted Doom

In Animals and Why They Matter--which I'm finishing up tomorrow in my Animal Ethics class--Midgley discusses the familiar and now generally rejected behaviorist skepticism about animal consciousness. While discussing Donald Griffin as one of the first contemporary psychologists to reject and argue against behaviorism, and to write extensively about animal minds, she reproduces the following quotation from one of Griffin's early books which concerns the perceived moral doom that would result from seeing animals as similar to us--or more specifically, as not categorically different. The quote is from Mortimer J. Adler's (1967) The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes:

If it were to be established by some future investigations that animals differ from men only in degree and not radically in kind, we would then no longer have any moral basis for treating them differently from men, and, conversely, this knowledge would destroy our moral basis for holding that all men have basic rights and an individual dignity.

This seems a nice expression of an idea I've heard and read by others as well. But it doesn't obviously make any sense. Let's consider the two claims it makes separately:

(a) If animals differ from humans only in degree and not radically in kind, then we have no moral basis for treating them differently from humans.

I think there is one sense in which this is true, and while that is presumably terrifying to Adler, it's not a new point. If animals are like humans in ways which, when thinking just about humans, we regard as morally important, then animal lives have similar moral importance. At minimum, that just means we can't treat them as if they are "mere things." And given the social and emotional complexity of many animals, it may mean quite a bit more, morally.

But there's also a sense in which this needn't be true. It certainly doesn't follow that we should treat animals in exactly the same ways we treat humans, and for roughly the same sorts of reasons that we shouldn't treat children in exactly the same ways as we treat adults, or pupils in exactly the same way we treat intellectual peers, and so on. (Edit: I didn't mean to imply anything about paternalism by choosing those examples, but rather that different cases often require different treatment without the difference being inappropriate or unfair.) Another point to be made here is that we may well have some reasons to think that our responsibilities to humans are stronger, in general, than our responsibilities to animals, on the model of the special responsibilities parents have to their own children. But this wouldn't imply that other animals (or other children) make no demands, or that special interests imply that anything goes in the cases which don't involve them (or that special interests always trump other interests, etc.).

(b) If animals differ from humans only in degree and not radically in kind, then there is no moral basis for holding that all humans have basic rights and an individual dignity.

I simply can't see why the consequent of this has any connection to the antecedent. It would follow just as well from the antecedent that animals will have some share of moral rights (depending perhaps on the degree of relevant similarity) and of individual dignity. To state my point formally, I think this is alarmist bullshit, and that the alarm gets sounded because it's so obvious that many animals are treated terribly by systems and institutions from which we derive great comfort and convenience. Because of this, acknowledging the idea of animal dignity would force (rationally speaking) a re-examination of, and in many cases the rejection of, those systems and institutions. (And here, claims about rights need be only pragmatic, not metaphysical.)

I have NO IDEA why the existence of "animal dignity" would impugn the existence of "human dignity." Of course, if animals differ from us only in degree rather than kind, then that means a certain creationist story about the specialness of humans is false. (It also means that a Cartesian story about our specialness as reasoners and language-users is false, or at least misleading.) "Dignity" just means something like having an inherent worth, and comes with overtones of being an end rather than a means, of being an irreplaceable individual, of being an individual which, as Rhees might say, is "something that can be loved." Why should the possession of that by animals mean that humans can't still have their own dignity, too? In short, it doesn't. What it does mean is that we have to be suspicious of the business--which we can roughly blame on Kant--of suggesting that only human beings warrant respect in themselves.

A Salamander is not an Animal

This sort of thing drives me crazy, though it's pretty common in the world of legalese. Here's the definition of "animal" for all Kentucky statutes:

"Animal" includes every warm-blooded living creature except a human being.

Sorry, salamanders, frogs, lizards.

My university's animal care and use policy defines "animal" as any living vertebrate, not including humans. So at least the academy gets it a little more right, but octopi still DEFINITELY aren't animals.

(On the latter, I was told that this is the minimally acceptable definition of animals for federal ethics standards. And the biologists who do research on invertebrates have absolutely no desire for the university's policies to reflect the obvious fact that octopi (or other creatures of that sort) are animals. Paper beats rock. Paperwork trumps truth.)