|
Ira. W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, University Center for Human Values,
Princeton
University
Excerpted from Animal
Rights and Human Obligations, New Jersey, 1989, pp.
148-162
www.PeterSingerLinks.com
ANIMAL RIGHTS AND HUMAN OBLIGATIONS
an Anthology
In recent
years a number of oppressed groups have campaigned vigorously for equality. The
classic instance is the Black Liberation movement, which demands an end to the
prejudice and discrimination that has made blacks second-class citizens. The
immediate appeal of the black liberation movement and its initial, if limited,
success made it a model for other oppressed groups to follow. We became familiar
with liberation movements for Spanish-Americans, gay people, and a variety of
other minorities. When a majority group—women—began their campaign, some thought
we had come to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has
been said, is the last universally accepted form of discrimination, practiced
without secrecy or pretence even in those liberal circles that have long prided
themselves on their freedom from prejudice against racial
minorities.
One should
always be wary of talking of "the last remaining form of discrimination." If we
have learnt anything from the liberation movements, we should have learnt how
difficult it is to be aware of latent prejudice in our attitudes to particular
groups until this prejudice is forcefully pointed out.
A liberation
movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons and an extension or
reinterpretation of the basic moral principle of equality. Practices that were
previously regarded as natural and inevitable come to be seen as the result of
an unjustifiable prejudice. Who can say with confidence that all his or her
attitudes and practices are beyond criticism? If we wish to avoid being numbered
amongst the oppressors, we must be prepared to re-think even our most
fundamental attitudes. We need to consider them from the point of view of those
most disadvantaged by our attitudes, and the practices that follow from these
attitudes. If we can make this unaccustomed mental switch we may discover a
pattern in our attitudes and practices that consistently operates so as to
benefit one group—usually the one to which we ourselves belong—at the expense of
another. In this way we may come to see that there is a case for a new
liberation movement. My aim is to advocate that we make this mental switch in
respect of our attitudes and practices towards a very large group of beings:
members of species other than our own—or, as we popularly though misleadingly
call them, animals. In other words, I am urging that we extend to other species
the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to
all members of our own species.
All this may
sound a little far-fetched, more like a parody of other liberation movements
than a serious objective. In fact, in the past the idea of "The Rights of
Animals" really has been used to parody the case for women's rights. When Mary
Wollstonecraft, a forerunner of later feminists, published her Vindication
of the Rights of Women in 1792, her ideas were widely regarded as
absurd, and they were satirized in an anonymous publication entitled A
Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. The author of this satire (actually
Thomas Taylor, a distinguished Cambridge philosopher) tried to refute
Wollstonecraft's reasonings by showing that they could be carried one stage
further. If sound when applied to women, why should the arguments not be applied
to dogs, cats, and horses? They seemed to hold equally well for these "brutes";
yet to hold that brutes had rights was manifestly absurd; therefore the
reasoning by which this conclusion had been reached must be unsound, and if
unsound when applied to brutes, it must also be unsound when applied to women,
since the very same arguments had been used in each case.
One way in
which we might reply to this argument is by saying that the case for equality
between men and women cannot validly be extended to nonhuman animals. Women have
a right to vote, for instance, because they are just as capable of making
rational decisions as men are; dogs, on the other hand, are incapable of
understanding the significance of voting, so they cannot have the right to vote.
There are many other obvious ways in which men and women resemble each other
closely, while humans and other animals differ greatly. So, it might be said,
men and women are similar beings and should have equal rights, while humans and
nonhumans are different and should not have equal rights.
The thought
behind this reply to Taylor's analogy is correct up to a point, but it does not
go far enough. There are important differences between humans and other animals,
and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each
have. Recognizing this obvious fact, however, is no barrier to the case for
extending the basic principle of equality to nonhuman animals. The differences
that exist between men and women are equally undeniable, and the supporters of
Women's Liberation are aware that these differences may give rise to different
rights. Many feminists hold that women have the right to an abortion on request.
It does not follow that since these same people are campaigning for equality
between men and women they must support the right of men to have abortions too.
Since a man cannot have an abortion, it is meaningless to talk of his right to
have one. Since a pig can't vote, it is meaningless to talk of its right to
vote. There is no reason why either Women's Liberation or Animal Liberation
should get involved in such nonsense. The extension of the basic principle of
equality from one group to another does not imply that we must treat both groups
in exactly the same way, or grant exactly the same rights to both groups.
Whether we should do so will depend on the nature of the members of the two
groups. The basic principle of equality, I shall argue, is equality of
consideration; and equal consideration for different beings may lead to
different treatment and different rights.
So there is a
different way of replying to Taylor's attempt to parody Wollstonecraft's
arguments, a way which does not deny the differences between humans and
nonhumans, but goes more deeply into the question of equality and concludes by
finding nothing absurd in the idea that the basic principle of equality applies
to so-called "brutes." I believe that we reach this conclusion if we examine the
basis on which our opposition to discrimination on grounds of race or sex
ultimately rests. We will then see that we would be on shaky ground if we were
to demand equality for blacks, women, and other groups of oppressed humans while
denying equal consideration to nonhumans.
When we say
that all human beings, whatever their race, creed, or sex, are equal, what is it
that we are asserting? Those who wish to defend a hierarchical, inegalitarian
society have often pointed out that by whatever test we choose, it simply is not
true that all humans are equal. Like it or not, we must face the fact that
humans come in different shapes and sizes; they come with differing moral
capacities, differing intellectual abilities, differing amounts of benevolent
feeling and sensitivity to the needs of others, differing abilities to
communicate effectively, and differing capacities to experience pleasure and
pain. In short, if the demand for equality were based on the actual equality of
all human beings, we would have to stop demanding equality. It would be an
unjustifiable demand.
Still, one
might cling to the view that the demand for equality among human beings is based
on the actual equality of the different races and sexes. Although humans differ
as individuals in various ways, there are no differences between the races and
sexes as such. From the mere fact that a person is black, or a woman, we cannot
infer anything else about that person. This, it may be said, is what is wrong
with racism and sexism. The white racist claims that whites are superior to
blacks, but this is false—although there are differences between individuals,
some blacks are superior to some whites in all of the capacities and abilities
that could conceivably be relevant. The opponent of sexism would say the same: a
person's sex is no guide to his or her abilities, and this is why it is
unjustifiable to discriminate on the basis of sex.
This is a
possible line of objection to racial and sexual discrimination. It is not,
however, the way that someone really concerned about equality would choose,
because taking this line could, in some circumstances, force one to accept a
most inegalitarian society. The fact that humans differ as individuals, rather
than as races or sexes, is a valid reply to someone who defends a hierarchical
society like, say, South Africa, in which all whites are superior in status to
all blacks. The existence of individual variations that cut across the lines of
race or sex, however, provides us with no defense at all against a more
sophisticated opponent of equality, one who proposes that, say, the interests of
those with I.Q. ratings above 100 be preferred to the interests of those with
I.Q.s below 100. Would a hierarchical society of this sort really be so much
better than one based on race or sex? I think not. But if we tie the moral
principle of equality to the factual equality of the different races or sexes,
taken as a whole, our opposition to racism and sexism does not provide us with
any basis for objecting to this kind of inegalitarianism.
There is a
second important reason why we ought not to base our opposition to racism and
sexism on any kind of factual equality, even the limited kind which asserts that
variations in capacities and abilities are spread evenly between the different
races and sexes: we can have no absolute guarantee that these abilities and
capacities really are distributed evenly, without regard to race or sex, among
human beings. So far as actual abilities are concerned, there do seem to be
certain measurable differences between both races and sexes. These differences
do not, of course, appear in each case, but only when averages are taken. More
important still, we do not yet know how much of these differences is really due
to the different genetic endowments of the various races and sexes, and how much
is due to environmental differences that are the result of past and continuing
discrimination. Perhaps all of the important differences will eventually prove
to be environmental rather than genetic. Anyone opposed to racism and sexism
will certainly hope that this will be so, for it will make the task of ending
discrimination a lot easier; nevertheless it would be dangerous to rest the case
against racism and sexism on the belief that all significant differences are
environmental in origin. The opponent of, say, racism who takes this line will
be unable to avoid conceding that if differences in ability did after all prove
to have some genetic connection with race, racism would in some way be
defensible.
It would be
folly for the opponent of racism to stake his whole case on a dogmatic
commitment to one particular outcome of a difficult scientific issue which is
still a long way from being settled. While attempts to prove that differences in
certain selected abilities between races and sexes are primarily genetic in
origin have certainly not been conclusive, the same must be said of attempts to
prove that these differences are largely the result of environment. At this
stage of the investigation we cannot be certain which view is correct, however
much we may hope it is the latter.
Fortunately,
there is no need to pin the case for equality to one particular outcome of this
scientific investigation. The appropriate response to those who claim to have
found evidence of genetically-based differences in ability between the races or
sexes is not to stick to the belief that the genetic explanation must be wrong,
whatever evidence to the contrary may turn up: instead we should make it quite
clear that the claim to equality does not depend on intelligence, moral
capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of fact. Equality is a moral
ideal, not a simple assertion of fact. There is no logically compelling reason
for assuming that a factual difference in ability between two people justifies
any difference in the amount of consideration we give to satisfying their needs
and interests. The principle of the equality of human beings is not a
description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of
how we should treat humans.
Jeremy
Bentham incorporated the essential basis of moral equality into his
utilitarian system of ethics in the formula: "Each to count for one and none for
more than one." In other words, the interests of every being affected by an
action are to be taken into account and given the same weight as the like
interests of any other being. A later utilitarian, Henry
Sidgwick, put the point in this way: "The good of any one individual is of
no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe,
than the good of any other.'' [1] More recently, the leading figures in
contemporary moral philosophy have shown a great deal of agreement in specifying
as a fundamental presupposition of their moral theories some similar requirement
which operates so as to give everyone's interests equal consideration—although
they cannot agree on how this requirement is best formulated.
[2]
It is an
implication of this principle of equality that our concern for others ought not
to depend on what they are like, or what abilities they possess—although
precisely what this concern requires us to do may vary according to the
characteristics of those affected by what we do. It is on this basis that the
case against racism and the case against sexism must both ultimately rest; and
it is in accordance with this principle that speciesism is also to be condemned.
If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use
another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit
nonhumans?
Many
philosophers have proposed the principle of equal consideration of interests, in
some form or other, as a basic moral principle; but, as we shall see in more
detail shortly, not many of them have recognized that this principle applies to
members of other species as well as to our own. Bentham was one of the few who
did realize this. In a forward-looking passage, written at a time when black
slaves in the British dominions were still being treated much as we now treat
nonhuman animals, Bentham wrote:
The day may
come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never
could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French
have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a
human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor.
It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the
villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons
equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What
else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of
reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is
beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than
an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were
otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?
nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? [3]
In this
passage Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic
that gives a being the right to equal consideration. The capacity for
suffering—or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness—is not
just another characteristic like the capacity for language, or for higher
mathematics. Bentham is not saying that those who try to mark "the insuperable
line" that determines whether the interests of a being should be considered
happen to have selected the wrong characteristic. The capacity for suffering and
enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that
must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It
would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be
kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it
cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference
to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being
tormented, because it will suffer if it is.
If a being
suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering
into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of
equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like
suffering—in so far as rough comparisons can be made—of any other being. If a
being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness,
there is nothing to be taken into account. This is why the limit of sentience
(using the term as a convenient, if not strictly accurate, shorthand for the
capacity to suffer or experience enjoyment or happiness) is the only defensible
boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some
characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an
arbitrary way. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin
color?
The racist
violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of
members of his own race, when there is a clash between their interests and the
interests of those of another race. Similarly the speciesist allows the
interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of
other species. [4] The pattern is the same in each case. Most human beings are
speciesists. l shall now very briefly describe some of the practices that show
this.
For the great
majority of human beings, especially in urban, industrialized societies, the
most direct form of contact with members of other species is at mealtimes: we
eat them. In doing so we treat them purely as means to our ends. We regard their
life and well-being as subordinate to our taste for a particular kind of dish. l
say "taste" deliberately—this is purely a matter of pleasing our palate. There
can be no defense of eating flesh in terms of satisfying nutritional needs,
since it has been established beyond doubt that we could satisfy our need for
protein and other essential nutrients far more efficiently with a diet that
replaced animal flesh by soy beans, or products derived from soy beans, and
other high-protein vegetable products. [5]
It is not
merely the act of killing that indicates what we are ready to do to other
species in order to gratify our tastes. The suffering we inflict on the animals
while they are alive is perhaps an even clearer indication of our speciesism
than the fact that we are prepared to kill them. [6] In order to have meat on
the table at a price that people can afford, our society tolerates methods of
meat production that confine sentient animals in cramped, unsuitable conditions
for the entire durations of their lives. Animals are treated like machines that
convert fodder into flesh, and any innovation that results in a higher
"conversion ratio" is liable to be adopted. As one authority on the subject has
said, "cruelty is acknowledged only when profitability ceases." [7] . .
.
Since, as l
have said, none of these practices cater for anything more than our pleasures of
taste, our practice of rearing and killing other animals in order to eat them is
a clear instance of the sacrifice of the most important interests of other
beings in order to satisfy trivial interests of our own. To avoid speciesism we
must stop this practice, and each of us has a moral obligation to cease
supporting the practice. Our custom is all the support that the meat-industry
needs. The decision to cease giving it that support may be difficult, but it is
no more difficult than it would have been for a white Southerner to go against
the traditions of his society and free his slaves: if we do not change our
dietary habits, how can we censure those slaveholders who would not change their
own way of living?
The same form
of discrimination may be observed in the widespread practice of experimenting on
other species in order to see if certain substances are safe for human beings,
or to test some psychological theory about the effect of severe punishment on
learning, or to try out various new compounds just in case something turns
up....
In the past,
argument about vivisection has often missed the point, because it has been put
in absolutist terms: Would the abolitionist be prepared to let thousands die if
they could be saved by experimenting on a single animal? The way to reply to
this purely hypothetical question is to pose another: Would the experimenter be
prepared to perform his experiment on an orphaned human infant, if that were the
only way to save many lives? (I say "orphan" to avoid the complication of
parental feelings, although in doing so l am being overfair to the experimenter,
since the nonhuman subjects of experiments are not orphans.) If the experimenter
is not prepared to use an orphaned human infant, then his readiness to use
nonhumans is simple discrimination, since adult apes, cats, mice, and other
mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing and, so
far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant. There
seems to be no relevant characteristic that human infants possess that adult
mammals do not have to the same or a higher degree. (Someone might try to argue
that what makes it wrong to experiment on a human infant is that the infant
will, in time and if left alone, develop into more than the nonhuman, but one
would then, to be consistent, have to oppose abortion, since the fetus has the
same potential as the infant—indeed, even contraception and abstinence might be
wrong on this ground, since the egg and sperm, considered jointly, also have the
same potential. In any case, this argument still gives us no reason for
selecting a nonhuman, rather than a human with severe and irreversible brain
damage, as the subject for our experiments).
The
experimenter, then, shows a bias in favor of his own species whenever he carries
out an experiment on a nonhuman for a purpose that he would not think justified
him in using a human being at an equal or lower level of sentience, awareness,
ability to be self-directing, etc. No one familiar with the kind of results
yielded by most experiments on animals can have the slightest doubt that if this
bias were eliminated the number of experiments performed would be a minute
fraction of the number performed today.
Experimenting
on animals, and eating their flesh, are perhaps the two major forms of
speciesism in our society. By comparison, the third and last form of speciesism
is so minor as to be insignificant, but it is perhaps of some special interest
to those for whom this article was written. I am referring to speciesism in
contemporary philosophy.
Philosophy
ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically
and carefully, what most people take for granted is, I believe, the chief task
of philosophy, and it is this task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
Regrettably, philosophy does not always live up to its historic role.
Philosophers are human beings, and they are subject to all the preconceptions of
the society to which they belong. Sometimes they succeed in breaking free of the
prevailing ideology: more often they become its most sophisticated defenders.
So, in this case, philosophy as practiced in the universities today does not
challenge anyone's preconceptions about our relations with other species. By
their writings, those philosophers who tackle problems that touch upon the issue
reveal that they make the same unquestioned assumptions as most other humans,
and what they say tends to confirm the reader in his or her comfortable
speciesist habits.
I could
illustrate this claim by referring to the writings of philosophers in various
fields—for instance, the attempts that have been made by those interested in
rights to draw the boundary of the sphere of rights so that it runs parallel to
the biological boundaries of the species homo sapiens, including infants and
even mental defectives, but excluding those other beings of equal or greater
capacity who are so useful to us at mealtimes and in our laboratories. l think
it would be a more appropriate conclusion to this article, however, if I
concentrated on the problem with which we have been centrally concerned, the
problem of equality.
It is
significant that the problem of equality, in moral and political philosophy, is
invariably formulated in terms of human equality. The effect of this is that the
question of the equality of other animals does not confront the philosopher, or
student, as an issue itself—and this is already an indication of the failure of
philosophy to challenge accepted beliefs. Still, philosophers have found it
difficult to discuss the issue of human equality without raising, in a paragraph
or two, the question of the status of other animals. The reason for this, which
should be apparent from what I have said already, is that if humans are to be
regarded as equal to one another, we need some sense of "equal" that does not
require any actual, descriptive equality of capacities, talents or other
qualities. If equality is to be related to any actual characteristics of humans,
these characteristics must be some lowest common denominator, pitched so low
that no human lacks them—but then the philosopher comes up against the catch
that any such set of characteristics which covers all humans will not be
possessed only by humans. In other words, it turns out that in the only sense in
which we can truly say, as an assertion of fact, that all humans are equal, at
least some members of other species are also equal—equal, that is, to each other
and to humans. If, on the other hand, we regard the statement "All humans are
equal" in some non-factual way, perhaps as a prescription, then, as I have
already argued, it is even more difficult to exclude non-humans from the sphere
of equality.
This result
is not what the egalitarian philosopher originally intended to assert. Instead
of accepting the radical outcome to which their own reasonings naturally point,
however, most philosophers try to reconcile their beliefs in human equality and
animal inequality by arguments that can only be described as
devious.
As a first
example, I take William Frankena's well-known article "The Concept of Social
Justice." Frankena opposes the idea of basing justice on merit, because he sees
that this could lead to highly inegalitarian results. Instead he proposes the
principle that
all men are
to be treated as equals, not because they are equal, in any respect, but
simply because they are human. They are human because they have emotions and
desires, and are able to think, and hence are capable of enjoying a good life
in a sense in which other animals are not. [8]
But what is
this capacity to enjoy the good life which all humans have, but no other
animals? Other animals have emotions and desires and appear to be capable of
enjoying a good life. We may doubt that they can think—although the behavior of
some apes, dolphins, and even dogs suggests that some of them can—but what is
the relevance of thinking? Frankena goes on to admit that by "the good life" he
means "not so much the morally good life as the happy or satisfactory life," so
thought would appear to be unnecessary for enjoying the good life; in fact to
emphasize the need for thought would make difficulties for the egalitarian since
only some people are capable of leading intellectually satisfying lives, or
morally good lives. This makes it difficult to see what Frankena's principle of
equality has to do with simply being human. Surely every sentient being is
capable of leading a life that is happier or less miserable than some
alternative life, and hence has a claim to be taken into account. In this
respect the distinction between humans and nonhumans is not a sharp division,
but rather a continuum along which we move gradually, and with overlaps between
the species, from simple capacities for enjoyment and satisfaction, or pain and
suffering, to more complex ones.
Faced with a
situation in which they see a need for some basis for the moral gulf that is
commonly thought to separate humans and animals, but can find no concrete
difference that will do the job without undermining the equality of humans,
philosophers tend to waffle. They resort to highs sounding phrases like "the
intrinsic dignity of the human individual"; [9] they talk of the "intrinsic
worth of all men" as if men (humans?) had some worth that other beings did not,
[10] or they say that humans, and only humans, are "ends in themselves," while
"everything other than a person can only have value for a person.''
[11]
This idea of
a distinctive human dignity and worth has a long history; it can be traced back
directly to the Renaissance humanists, for instance to Pico
della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of
Man. Pico and other humanists based their estimate of human dignity on the
idea that man possessed the central, pivotal position in the "Great Chain of
Being" that led from the lowliest forms of matter to God himself; this view of
the universe, in turn, goes back to both classical and Judeo-Christian
doctrines. Contemporary philosophers have cast off these metaphysical and
religious shackles and freely invoke the dignity of mankind without needing to
justify the idea at all. Why should we not attribute "intrinsic dignity" or
"intrinsic worth" to ourselves? Fellow-humans are unlikely to reject the
accolades we so generously bestow on them, and those to whom we deny the honor
are unable to object. Indeed, when one thinks only of humans, it can be very
liberal, very progressive, to talk of the dignity of all human beings. In so
doing, we implicitly condemn slavery, racism, and other violations of human
rights. We admit that we ourselves are in some fundamental sense on a par with
the poorest, most ignorant members of our own species. It is only when we think
of humans as no more than a small sub-group of all the beings that inhabit our
planet that we may realize that in elevating our own species we are at the same
time lowering the relative status of all other species.
The truth is
that the appeal to the intrinsic dignity of human beings appears to solve the
egalitarian's problems only as long as it goes unchallenged. Once we ask why it
should be that all humans—including infants, mental defectives, psychopaths,
Hitler, Stalin, and the rest—have some kind of dignity or worth that no
elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as
difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that
justifies the inequality of humans and other animals. In fact, these two
questions are really one: talk of intrinsic dignity or moral worth only takes
the problem back one step, because any satisfactory defence of the claim that
all and only humans have intrinsic dignity would need to refer to some relevant
capacities or characteristics that all and only humans possess. Philosophers
frequently introduce ideas of dignity, respect, and worth at the point at which
other reasons appear to be lacking, but this is hardly good enough. Fine phrases
are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments.
In case there
are those who still think it may be possible to find some relevant
characteristic that distinguishes all humans from all members of other species,
I shall refer again, before I conclude, to the existence of some humans who
quite clearly are below the level of awareness, self-consciousness,
intelligence, and sentience, of many non-humans. l am thinking of humans with
severe and irreparable brain damage, and also of infant humans. To avoid the
complication of the relevance of a being's potential, however, I shall
henceforth concentrate on permanently retarded humans.
Philosophers
who set out to find a characteristic that will distinguish humans from other
animals rarely take the course of abandoning these groups of humans by lumping
them in with the other animals. It is easy to see why they do not. To take this
line without re-thinking our attitudes to other animals would entail that we
have the right to perform painful experiments on retarded humans for trivial
reasons; similarly it would follow that we had the right to rear and kill these
humans for food. To most philosophers these consequences are as unacceptable as
the view that we should stop treating nonhumans in this way.
Of course,
when discussing the problem of equality it is possible to ignore the problem of
mental defectives, or brush it aside as if somehow insignificant. [12] This is
the easiest way out. What else remains? My final example of speciesism in
contemporary philosophy has been selected to show what happens when a writer is
prepared to face the question of human equality and animal inequality without
ignoring the existence of mental defectives, and without resorting to
obscurantist mumbo jumbo. Stanley Benn's clear and honest article
"Egalitarianism and Equal Consideration of Interests'' [13] fits this
description.
Benn, after
noting the usual "evident human inequalities" argues, correctly I think, for
equality of consideration as the only possible basis for egalitarianism. Yet
Benn, like other writers, is thinking only of "equal consideration of human
interests." Benn is quite open in his defence of this restriction of equal
consideration:
. . . not
to possess human shape is a disqualifying condition. However faithful or
intelligent a dog may be, it would be a monstrous sentimentality to attribute
to him interests that could be weighed in an equal balance with those of human
beings . . . if, for instance, one had to decide between feeding a hungry baby
or a hungry dog, anyone who chose the dog would generally be reckoned morally
defective, unable to recognize a fundamental inequality of claims.
This is
what distinguishes our attitude to animals from our attitude to imbeciles. It
would be odd to say that we ought to respect equally the dignity or
personality of the imbecile and of the rational man . . . but there is nothing
odd about saying that we should respect their interests equally, that is, that
we should give to the interests of each the same serious consideration as
claims to considerations necessary for some standard of well-being that we can
recognize and endorse.
Benn's
statement of the basis of the consideration we should have for imbeciles seems
to me correct, but why should there be any fundamental inequality of claims
between a dog and a human imbecile? Benn sees that if equal consideration
depended on rationality, no reason could be given against using imbeciles for
research purposes, as we now use dogs and guinea pigs. This will not do: "But of
course we do distinguish imbeciles from animals in this regard," he says. That
the common distinction is justifiable is something Benn does not question; his
problem is how it is to be justified. The answer he gives is
this:
. . . we
respect the interests of men and give them priority over dogs not
insofar as they are rational, but because rationality is the human
norm. We say it is unfair to exploit the deficiencies of the imbecile
who falls short of the norm, just as it would be unfair, and not just
ordinarily dishonest, to steal from a blind man. If we do not think in this
way about dogs, it is because we do not see the irrationality of the dog as a
deficiency or a handicap, but as normal for the species, The characteristics,
therefore, that distinguish the normal man from the normal dog make it
intelligible for us to talk of other men having interests and capacities, and
therefore claims, of precisely the same kind as we make on our own behalf. But
although these characteristics may provide the point of the distinction
between men and other species, they are not in fact the qualifying conditions
for membership, to the distinguishing criteria of the class of morally
considerable persons; and this is precisely because a man does not become a
member of a different species, with its own standards of normality, by reason
of not possessing these characteristics.
The final
sentence of this passage gives the argument away. An imbecile, Benn concedes,
may have no characteristics superior to those of a dog; nevertheless this does
not make the imbecile a member of "a different species" as the dog is. Therefore
it would be "unfair" to use the imbecile for medical research as we use the dog.
But why? That the imbecile is not rational is just the way things have worked
out, and the same is true of the dog—neither is any more responsible for their
mental level. If it is unfair to take advantage of an isolated defect, why is it
fair to take advantage of a more general limitation? I find it hard to see
anything in this argument except a defense of preferring the interests of
members of our own species because they are members of our own species. To those
who think there might be more to it, I suggest the following mental exercise.
Assume that it has been proven that there is a difference in the average, or
normal, intelligence quotient for two different races, say whites and blacks.
Then substitute the term "white" for every occurrence of "men" and "black" for
every occurrence of "dog" in the passage quoted; and substitute "high l.Q." for
"rationality" and when Benn talks of "imbeciles" replace this term by "dumb
whites"—that is, whites who fall well below the normal white l.Q. score.
Finally, change "species" to "race." Now retread the passage. It has become a
defense of a rigid, no-exceptions division between whites and blacks, based on
l.Q. scores, not withstanding an admitted overlap between whites and blacks in
this respect. The revised passage is, of course, outrageous, and this is not
only because we have made fictitious assumptions in our substitutions. The point
is that in the original passage Benn was defending a rigid division in the
amount of consideration due to members of different species, despite admitted
cases of overlap. If the original did not, at first reading strike us as being
as outrageous as the revised version does, this is largely because although we
are not racists ourselves, most of us are speciesists. Like the other articles,
Benn's stands as a warning of the ease with which the best minds can fall victim
to a prevailing ideology.
* *
*
NOTES
-
The
Methods of Ethics (7th Ed.),
p. 382.
-
For
example, R. M. Hare, Freedom
and Reason (Oxford, 1963) and J. Rawls, A
Theory of Justice (Harvard,
1972); for a brief account of the essential agreement on this issue between
these and other positions, see R. M. Hare, "Rules of War and Moral Reasoning,"
Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 2 (1972).
-
Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII.
-
I owe the
term speciesism to Richard Ryder.
-
In order to
produce 1 lb. of protein in the form of beef or veal, we must feed 21 Ibs. of
protein to the animal. Other forms of livestock are slightly less inefficient,
but the average ratio in the United States is still 1:8. It has been estimated
that the amount of protein lost to humans in this way is equivalent to 90
percent of the annual world protein deficit. For a brief account, see Frances
Moore Lappe, Diet
for a Small Planet (Friends of The Earth/Ballantine, New York 1971),
pp. 4—11.
-
Although
one might think that killing a being is obviously the ultimate wrong one can
do to it, l think that the infliction of suffering is a clearer indication of
speciesism because it might be argued that at least part of what is wrong with
killing a human is that most humans are conscious of their existence over time
and have desires and purposes that extend into the future see, for instance,
M. Tooley, "Abortion and Infanticide," Philosophy and Public Affairs,
vol . 2, no. I (1972). Of course, if one took this view one would have to
hold—as Tooley does—that killing a human infant or mental defective is not in
itself wrong and is less serious than killing certain higher mammals that
probably do have a sense of their own existence over time.
-
Ruth
Harrison, Animal Machines (Stuart, London, 1964). For an account of
farming conditions, see my Animal
Liberation (New York Review Company, 1975) from which "Down on the
Factory Farm," is reprinted in this volume [Animal
Rights and Human Obligations].
-
In R.
Brandt (ed.), Social Justice (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1962),
p. 19.
-
Frankena,
op. cit. p. 23.
-
H. A.
Bedau, "Egalitarianism and the Idea of Equality," in Nomos
IX: Equality, ed. J.
R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman, New York, 1967.
-
C. Vlastos,
"Justice and Equality," in Brandt, Social Justice, p. 48.
-
For
example, Bernard Williams, "The Idea of Equality," in Philosophy,
Politics, and Society (second series), ed. P. Laslett and W. Rundman
(Blackwell, Oxford, 1962), p. 118; J. Rawls, A
Theory of Justice, pp. 509—10.
-
Nomos
IX: Equality; the passages quoted are on p. 62ff.
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