My colleague Joshua McNutt has written a blog post on a topic in animal ethics, which you can view here (and probably should, if you want this post to make any sense). Those of you who know me well are aware that this is a topic of personal and scholarly interest to me, and my comment on Josh's post was rejected by Google for going way over the character limit. So, I've decided to completely restart my blog and post the comment here (I deleted all earlier posts, since they are from over two years ago and I don't especially like them). A thank you to Josh for giving me the opportunity to think about this topic and speak my mind.
Update: please see below Josh's response to this post.
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Rather than frame the structure of my reply, I figure I'll dive right in and address the various points and issues that struck me in your post (unsurprisingly, all of what I have to say is in reply to the omnivore).
The first concerns the value of a human life, and whether our value justifies our eating meat. On the difference between a human life and the life of a chicken, Omnivore writes the following:
First, there is the fact that it is (presumably) quite a different thing to be a human being and to be--for example--a chicken. In particular, there is the (apparent) fact that a human being can reflect on her life, can imagine her life being different than it is, and decide she'd rather it be that way, and so can set goals for herself and experience the satisfaction that comes with achieving them, whereas chickens and (I take it) all or at least most other animals can't do any of this.
I'm not sure I see in this distinction (between a human life and an animal's) the same moral relevance that Omnivore sees. With regard to the satisfaction of achieving goals: perhaps chickens (and other animals) do not determine ends for themselves in the way that we humans do, but still they do experience the satisfactions that come with realizing those ends that have been determined by their nature—eating bugs, mothering chicks, and roosting with each other, for instance. Certainly the capacity to set one's goals is not a necessary condition of being satisfied when they are realized.
Maybe we could modify Omnivore's argument as follows: Yes, animals do take satisfaction in realizing their ends. But end-satisfaction is not morally relevant unless it is reflectively determined by a practical reasoner, a human (bracketing the question whether animals can engage in practical reason). Then we might say that the satisfactions of reflectively-determined goals are the only kinds of satisfactions that matter morally.
But why is this the case? Why is reflectiveness the criterion that makes our satisfactions morally relevant? More argument is needed here. As I see it, the ability to reflectively set one's goals is just the unique way in which we humans live the kind of life that is good for a human, just as hardwired drives and innate propensities determine the kind of life that is good for a chicken. And let's not forget that, although the notion of a good human life is not as determinate as the notion of a good chicken-life, the goals that we set are still constrained by our biological and psychological drives—we must sleep, eat, seek out affection, and so on. We do not have full say in the type of life we want to live, in the goals that we set. Still, there is no reason to think that the satisfactions gained by living that life are morally irrelevant or unimportant.
If my assumption here about the mental lives of animals is right, then it seems fair to say that the life of a human being is much, much richer than that of any animal.
I'll withhold comment on just how wide the disparity in "richness" between humans and nonhuman animals really is, suffice to say that I don't take their qualitative lives to be as impoverished as I think Omnivore does. Nevertheless, that there is a disparity between the richness of an animal life and a human life does not change the fact that animals are capable of living good lives—lives that are good for them—and that those lives may very well contain a robust array of pleasures and satisfactions.
And second, there's the fact that animals just can't do many if not all of the most impressive things humans can do. For instance, animals can't write plays, novels, poems, and dialogues, can't do open-heart surgery, and can't do scientific experiments.
Surely, killing any human doesn't automatically foreclose the opportunity to do things like this; most humans cannot do these things either (or they choose not to pursue them, simply because they don't want to—perhaps someone who could make a great novelist is happier pursuing a career as a divorce-lawyer). And if all humans could do these things, I should think that they would cease to be as impressive and valuable as they are. Moreover, consider those with intellectual disabilities, for whom these kinds of accomplishments are thoroughly impossible. Judging the value of a life based on the ability to be excellent in art, literature, or science risks bringing in a sort of pernicious elitism, since it suggests not only that the lives of people who can do these things are more valuable, but that a comparative lack of excellence, somewhere down the line, precludes a right to not be killed...
Since an animal, if allowed to continue living, will never do anything of much moment, and since a human being, if it kills that animal and uses it in some way, might, it's possible that a person might make better use of an animal's life (or, in the case of, say, keeping chickens for their eggs) its freedom than it ever could.
The strength of this argument depends on whether or not it's necessary to eat meat to do momentous things. To me, it obviously isn't. George Bernard Shaw, Henry David Thoreau, and Alice Walker, for instance, were all vegetarians who produced great works of literature. If moment is what's at stake here, then Peter Singer, a vegetarian, certainly qualifies, since he helped ignite the contemporary animal rights movement, unarguably a momentous thing.
Let me turn to Omnivore's remarks on consent. AUH states that "animals do not ever consent to being killed or otherwise having their lives interfered with in any way or for any reason." In response, Omnivore writes that
It seems reasonable to say that John cannot consent that Mary do something to him if John cannot consider how his life would be were Mary to do whatever she's proposing and judge that way for his life to be acceptable.
Omnivore goes on to explain how animals like chickens cannot reflect on what happens to them in the way humans like John can. On this point, I do not share Omnivore's intuition. The capacity to refuse consent strikes me as neither necessary nor sufficient for being non-consenting, i.e., for having things done to you without your consent. I hate to bring up the example of rape victims who have been drugged, yet it strikes me as a paradigmatic example of why the ability to refuse consent isn't what makes an individual non-consenting. Indeed, the fact that one cannot refuse consent is what's crucially at issue in this sort of case.
Now, in fairness, Omnivore attempts to meet this sort of challenge: he considers the example of an infant, who cannot refuse consent. In response, Omnivore explains that since "babies will one day be able to consent or refuse to consent to have certain things done to or with them, we are obligated to respect the decisions we can expect them to make." But this, I feel, shifts the goal-posts and doesn't meet the challenge: the fact still remains that an infant cannot consent to the things that are done to him, even if one day he may be able to retrospectively approve or disapprove of them. Consent, I take it, is prospective, not retrospective; to consent to something, one must do so before it happens.
Moreover, consider, again, an infant who has a severe mental handicap—so severe that he will not have the decision-making abilities to govern his future life. The argument from potentiality, if I may call it that, doesn't meet this challenge. We can't respect the decisions that we will one day expect him to make, because he won't be able to make those decisions. I raise this example to push against Omnivore's intuition that consent plays the sort of role he takes it to in our dealings with others, i.e., that how we treat others is necessarily a function of whether they consent or would consent to x. (Certainly, I do agree that consent is morally relevant if we're talking about a being for whom consent matters, whose teleology includes things like autonomy and self-governance.)
Of course, I'm also not prepared to concede that animals cannot consent, and for that matter, we haven't worked out exactly what the notion of consent involves. One might perhaps identify different levels of consent—for instance, I know that in the literature on medical ethics, a distinction is drawn between simple and valid consent. Valid consent, roughly, is the highest standard of consent one can demand: that a patient be fully informed about a procedure, including all the risks, and has signed her name to a document. Simple consent is much more rough-and-ready, involving much less information and forethought than valid consent—asking permission to take someone's blood pressure, for example. Why is it so far off to think that animals are incapable of something like simple consent? If my dog excitedly brings me his leash wanting to go for a walk, is it false to say that by putting the leash on him and taking him for a walk, I have satisfied his wishes? For that matter, why assume that animals are incapable of refusal—though they are not capable of language, still they can object to things in other ways.
But the important point is this: I do not see why the ability to refuse consent—or the future ability to refuse consent, in the case of an infant—is a necessary condition of ever being non-consenting. The logical connection is just not obvious at all.
Regarding the chicken who can reflect on whether she should be eaten: the chicken has the following to say, and I do not share her conclusions:
I suppose that under certain conditions, I could make myself amenable to being made into fajitas. Certainly I want to be allowed to live a full life, where that means growing into adulthood, laying a bunch of eggs, spending a good deal of time pecking for grubs and such in fields, roosting in a comfortable environment, raising a few chicks, hanging around other chickens, and generally living well. But I realize that once I've done all of those things, there's really not that much more to a chicken life. More life would just mean more of the same. And while I'm sure I would enjoy it, I realize that it's possible that if I allow my life to be cut short, my life might be made to serve purposes toward the achievement of which it wouldn't otherwise have contributed. In particular, I could help to make it possible that some people (those who eat me) live lives more enjoyable than mine could ever be, that they live good, admirable lives, or that they accomplish something great. And besides, fajitas are delicious, so at the very least they enjoy eating me. So I suppose that, after I've gotten my fill of chicken life, and so long as the people who eat me make it a point to make their lives live up to the sacrifice I've made and are sufficiently appreciative of that sacrifice, and I am killed in the least painful way possible, I could become fajitas.
Reflective Chicken says of her life that "once I've done all of those things, there's really not that much more to a chicken life. More life would just mean more of the same." But here, Reflective Chicken is appraising her life from the point of view of Reflective Chicken. From the point of view of Unreflective Chicken, "more of the same" is a good thing, something that she desires to have more of. Reflective Chicken ought to be appraising the value of her life qua Unreflective Chicken, in which case I think she would reach a different conclusion: that Unreflective Chicken wishes to continue living, and that "more of the same" would be a good life for her. Once again, I also ask whether the experiential life of a chicken is as impoverished as the omnivore takes it to be. And finally, let me add that there are plenty of humans who are content with lives of relative monotony. Regarding the rest of what Reflective Chicken has to say, I've already argued that we don't need to eat chicken to accomplish "great" things, and voiced my disagreement with the sort of perfectionist ethic that that argument seems to presuppose.
The above pretty much covers all my major thoughts on all this. Thank you again, Josh, for the interesting post.
Update: please see below Josh's response to this post.
___
Rather than frame the structure of my reply, I figure I'll dive right in and address the various points and issues that struck me in your post (unsurprisingly, all of what I have to say is in reply to the omnivore).
The first concerns the value of a human life, and whether our value justifies our eating meat. On the difference between a human life and the life of a chicken, Omnivore writes the following:
First, there is the fact that it is (presumably) quite a different thing to be a human being and to be--for example--a chicken. In particular, there is the (apparent) fact that a human being can reflect on her life, can imagine her life being different than it is, and decide she'd rather it be that way, and so can set goals for herself and experience the satisfaction that comes with achieving them, whereas chickens and (I take it) all or at least most other animals can't do any of this.
I'm not sure I see in this distinction (between a human life and an animal's) the same moral relevance that Omnivore sees. With regard to the satisfaction of achieving goals: perhaps chickens (and other animals) do not determine ends for themselves in the way that we humans do, but still they do experience the satisfactions that come with realizing those ends that have been determined by their nature—eating bugs, mothering chicks, and roosting with each other, for instance. Certainly the capacity to set one's goals is not a necessary condition of being satisfied when they are realized.
Maybe we could modify Omnivore's argument as follows: Yes, animals do take satisfaction in realizing their ends. But end-satisfaction is not morally relevant unless it is reflectively determined by a practical reasoner, a human (bracketing the question whether animals can engage in practical reason). Then we might say that the satisfactions of reflectively-determined goals are the only kinds of satisfactions that matter morally.
But why is this the case? Why is reflectiveness the criterion that makes our satisfactions morally relevant? More argument is needed here. As I see it, the ability to reflectively set one's goals is just the unique way in which we humans live the kind of life that is good for a human, just as hardwired drives and innate propensities determine the kind of life that is good for a chicken. And let's not forget that, although the notion of a good human life is not as determinate as the notion of a good chicken-life, the goals that we set are still constrained by our biological and psychological drives—we must sleep, eat, seek out affection, and so on. We do not have full say in the type of life we want to live, in the goals that we set. Still, there is no reason to think that the satisfactions gained by living that life are morally irrelevant or unimportant.
If my assumption here about the mental lives of animals is right, then it seems fair to say that the life of a human being is much, much richer than that of any animal.
I'll withhold comment on just how wide the disparity in "richness" between humans and nonhuman animals really is, suffice to say that I don't take their qualitative lives to be as impoverished as I think Omnivore does. Nevertheless, that there is a disparity between the richness of an animal life and a human life does not change the fact that animals are capable of living good lives—lives that are good for them—and that those lives may very well contain a robust array of pleasures and satisfactions.
And second, there's the fact that animals just can't do many if not all of the most impressive things humans can do. For instance, animals can't write plays, novels, poems, and dialogues, can't do open-heart surgery, and can't do scientific experiments.
Surely, killing any human doesn't automatically foreclose the opportunity to do things like this; most humans cannot do these things either (or they choose not to pursue them, simply because they don't want to—perhaps someone who could make a great novelist is happier pursuing a career as a divorce-lawyer). And if all humans could do these things, I should think that they would cease to be as impressive and valuable as they are. Moreover, consider those with intellectual disabilities, for whom these kinds of accomplishments are thoroughly impossible. Judging the value of a life based on the ability to be excellent in art, literature, or science risks bringing in a sort of pernicious elitism, since it suggests not only that the lives of people who can do these things are more valuable, but that a comparative lack of excellence, somewhere down the line, precludes a right to not be killed...
Since an animal, if allowed to continue living, will never do anything of much moment, and since a human being, if it kills that animal and uses it in some way, might, it's possible that a person might make better use of an animal's life (or, in the case of, say, keeping chickens for their eggs) its freedom than it ever could.
The strength of this argument depends on whether or not it's necessary to eat meat to do momentous things. To me, it obviously isn't. George Bernard Shaw, Henry David Thoreau, and Alice Walker, for instance, were all vegetarians who produced great works of literature. If moment is what's at stake here, then Peter Singer, a vegetarian, certainly qualifies, since he helped ignite the contemporary animal rights movement, unarguably a momentous thing.
Let me turn to Omnivore's remarks on consent. AUH states that "animals do not ever consent to being killed or otherwise having their lives interfered with in any way or for any reason." In response, Omnivore writes that
It seems reasonable to say that John cannot consent that Mary do something to him if John cannot consider how his life would be were Mary to do whatever she's proposing and judge that way for his life to be acceptable.
Omnivore goes on to explain how animals like chickens cannot reflect on what happens to them in the way humans like John can. On this point, I do not share Omnivore's intuition. The capacity to refuse consent strikes me as neither necessary nor sufficient for being non-consenting, i.e., for having things done to you without your consent. I hate to bring up the example of rape victims who have been drugged, yet it strikes me as a paradigmatic example of why the ability to refuse consent isn't what makes an individual non-consenting. Indeed, the fact that one cannot refuse consent is what's crucially at issue in this sort of case.
Now, in fairness, Omnivore attempts to meet this sort of challenge: he considers the example of an infant, who cannot refuse consent. In response, Omnivore explains that since "babies will one day be able to consent or refuse to consent to have certain things done to or with them, we are obligated to respect the decisions we can expect them to make." But this, I feel, shifts the goal-posts and doesn't meet the challenge: the fact still remains that an infant cannot consent to the things that are done to him, even if one day he may be able to retrospectively approve or disapprove of them. Consent, I take it, is prospective, not retrospective; to consent to something, one must do so before it happens.
Moreover, consider, again, an infant who has a severe mental handicap—so severe that he will not have the decision-making abilities to govern his future life. The argument from potentiality, if I may call it that, doesn't meet this challenge. We can't respect the decisions that we will one day expect him to make, because he won't be able to make those decisions. I raise this example to push against Omnivore's intuition that consent plays the sort of role he takes it to in our dealings with others, i.e., that how we treat others is necessarily a function of whether they consent or would consent to x. (Certainly, I do agree that consent is morally relevant if we're talking about a being for whom consent matters, whose teleology includes things like autonomy and self-governance.)
Of course, I'm also not prepared to concede that animals cannot consent, and for that matter, we haven't worked out exactly what the notion of consent involves. One might perhaps identify different levels of consent—for instance, I know that in the literature on medical ethics, a distinction is drawn between simple and valid consent. Valid consent, roughly, is the highest standard of consent one can demand: that a patient be fully informed about a procedure, including all the risks, and has signed her name to a document. Simple consent is much more rough-and-ready, involving much less information and forethought than valid consent—asking permission to take someone's blood pressure, for example. Why is it so far off to think that animals are incapable of something like simple consent? If my dog excitedly brings me his leash wanting to go for a walk, is it false to say that by putting the leash on him and taking him for a walk, I have satisfied his wishes? For that matter, why assume that animals are incapable of refusal—though they are not capable of language, still they can object to things in other ways.
But the important point is this: I do not see why the ability to refuse consent—or the future ability to refuse consent, in the case of an infant—is a necessary condition of ever being non-consenting. The logical connection is just not obvious at all.
Regarding the chicken who can reflect on whether she should be eaten: the chicken has the following to say, and I do not share her conclusions:
I suppose that under certain conditions, I could make myself amenable to being made into fajitas. Certainly I want to be allowed to live a full life, where that means growing into adulthood, laying a bunch of eggs, spending a good deal of time pecking for grubs and such in fields, roosting in a comfortable environment, raising a few chicks, hanging around other chickens, and generally living well. But I realize that once I've done all of those things, there's really not that much more to a chicken life. More life would just mean more of the same. And while I'm sure I would enjoy it, I realize that it's possible that if I allow my life to be cut short, my life might be made to serve purposes toward the achievement of which it wouldn't otherwise have contributed. In particular, I could help to make it possible that some people (those who eat me) live lives more enjoyable than mine could ever be, that they live good, admirable lives, or that they accomplish something great. And besides, fajitas are delicious, so at the very least they enjoy eating me. So I suppose that, after I've gotten my fill of chicken life, and so long as the people who eat me make it a point to make their lives live up to the sacrifice I've made and are sufficiently appreciative of that sacrifice, and I am killed in the least painful way possible, I could become fajitas.
Reflective Chicken says of her life that "once I've done all of those things, there's really not that much more to a chicken life. More life would just mean more of the same." But here, Reflective Chicken is appraising her life from the point of view of Reflective Chicken. From the point of view of Unreflective Chicken, "more of the same" is a good thing, something that she desires to have more of. Reflective Chicken ought to be appraising the value of her life qua Unreflective Chicken, in which case I think she would reach a different conclusion: that Unreflective Chicken wishes to continue living, and that "more of the same" would be a good life for her. Once again, I also ask whether the experiential life of a chicken is as impoverished as the omnivore takes it to be. And finally, let me add that there are plenty of humans who are content with lives of relative monotony. Regarding the rest of what Reflective Chicken has to say, I've already argued that we don't need to eat chicken to accomplish "great" things, and voiced my disagreement with the sort of perfectionist ethic that that argument seems to presuppose.
The above pretty much covers all my major thoughts on all this. Thank you again, Josh, for the interesting post.
