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.
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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.
I'm very pleased and, moreover, flattered, to see that you took the time to read and respond to my post Kevin. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteBy way of rejoinder, I want to offer a few quick thoughts:
1. The point about the first difference between animals and humans my Omnivore discusses is that, since animals don’t have the relevant capacity, they can’t experience successes or failures AS SUCH, that is AS SUCCESSES and AS FAILURES. Omnivore assumes the experiences of successes as successes are among the most rewarding and failures as failures among the most gut-wrenching experiences a human being can have and that, since animals cannot have such experiences, their lives are less rich. Your response suggested to me that you might not have fully understood this point. (This of course might be my fault—for stylistic reasons, I’m not as consistent in my formulations as I might have been.)
2. Again, I may well not have made presented things clearly enough in the post for this to be obvious, but, if I understand you aright, you've misunderstood my omnivore's suggestion about the ways the differences between animals and humans are morally relevant. Ultimately he suggests they're relevant precisely because those are the differences an animal ought to take into account if able, and that the animal ought to take those considerations into account in that way precisely because to do so would be selfless and so noble. This is perhaps wrong, but so far as I can see your criticisms don't touch that point.
3. You say that “The capacity to refuse consent strikes [you] as neither necessary nor sufficient for being non-consenting, i.e., for having things done to you without your consent.” In fact my Omnivore does not claim that, in general, that capacity is either necessary or sufficient for being non-consenting in your sense. He says, rather, that lack of that capacity in some organism obligates us to think about what it ought to want were it capable of reflection and consent. And because he suggests that, when we consider what a chicken ought to think, we find that it should be all right with becoming fajitas, he suggests it’s okay to eat fajitas under certain very narrowly specified circumstances.
4. Regarding the severely handicapped child and our duties to it: I don’t see how the example pushes against the Omnivore. The Omnivore would just say that since the child can’t consent or refuse consent, we have to think about what it should want for itself, just as with non-disabled babies. And this thought experiment will of course lead to different results in the different cases.
Thank you for reading my post and replying, Josh! Regarding your points 1-3, I concede that, after rereading, I misconstrued some of Omnivore's points. My apologies for this. I guess that my fundamental point of disagreement with Omnivore is his rejection of premise (4): "The fact that the subject of life in question is not a human being is not one of the special cases mentioned in (3)." What his argument seems to come down to is this: first, that the difference does, indeed, constitute a "special case"; second, that it constitutes a special case by virtue of the fact that humans are capable of richer, more admirable lives than animals; third, that eating meat furthers those ends; and finally, that the superior richness of a human life justifies taking the comparatively less rich life of an animal, so long as that animal has reached a certain point in its life (and that an animal gifted with reflective capacities would agree). With these points, I've already voiced my disagreement: first, that not all human lives reach the heights of excellence that Omnivore talks about; second, that placing too much weight on excellence risks inviting a sort of elitism; third, that eating meat is not necessary to achieve those heights of excellence, anyway; and finally, that they don't outweigh or override the value of an animal's life.
ReplyDeleteI hope that I haven't succumbed to any more misreadings, here; my apologies, again, if I have. I am certainly interested in hearing what the Omnivore--or you--have to say in reply to my points of disagreement.