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Coetzee and Alternative Animal EthicsElisa Aaltola |
Animal ethics has become a valuable part of philosophy. The main elements include criticism of anthropocentric assumptions and emphasis on experientialism (a view that centralizes the capacity to experience).1 Hence, nonhuman animals can also have moral value. The analytic approach,2 which has applied standard moral theories to other animals, has been accompanied by the postmodern approach,3 which emphasizes matters such as plurality and contextuality.
Most of animal ethics has been preoccupied with theory or principles. This has meant that the issue of persuasion has often been overlooked: how to communicate the theory and principles to the hamburger-loving folk?4 The age-old question of rhetoric has remained untouched. This is where J. M. Coetzee becomes relevant. His novels present ethical views related to nonhuman animals, constantly underpinned by the issue of how to communicate such views to others. On a more concrete level, the novels are a form of persuasion in themselves. The differences between Coetzee’s approach and standard animal ethics do not stop here. He reminds us of not only persuasion but also other valuable factors often overlooked in ethics. Whereas animal ethics has tended to emphasize theory, principles, reason, and speaking for the animal, Coetzee emphasizes poetry, virtues, emotion, and letting the animal speak to us.
This essay explores Coetzee’s “alternative animal ethics.” It will concentrate on three crucial elements: the differences from standard philosophy, the priority of the animal, and poetry as a form of persuasion. Most of the references are to The Lives of Animals. In this novel, Coetzee brings to life Elizabeth Costello, a novelist, who via public lectures explores the relationship between humans and other animals. Disgrace is also referred to. Before moving further, it has to be noted that some are skeptical about whether Costello represents Coetzee’s personal sentiments, and some maintain that Coetzee is not talking of animals to begin with.5 Evidence suggests that Coetzee does, indeed, have strong pro-animal views that coincide with those of his characters. However, the interest here does not lie with what Coetzee may intend to say but what his characters are in fact proposing.
The first key to Coetzee’s “alternative animal ethics” is its relation to standard animal ethics. Here three dichotomies come to play: theory-poetry, principles-virtues, and reason-emotion.
Via Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee repeats the two main elements of animal ethics. First of all, perfectionism is criticized and the capacity to experience brought forward.6 Costello argues that reason and other such qualities are not relevant from the viewpoint of value—even if animals did lack reason, this would not justify using them as mere instruments. What matters is the animal’s capacity to have experiences. Second, anthropocentrism is attacked without mercy. Costello stipulates that emphasis on human reason is biased, for such reason has no objective value. It is a mistake to value only that which is human.
However, a third common theme in the theories of animal ethics is entirely missing. It forms a central point of differentiation between standard animal ethics and Coetzee’s approach. Costello insists that she is a poet rather than a philosopher. She states that although the audience may expect a lecture that is “cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats” (The Lives of Animals, 22), she cannot fulfill this expectation. The implication is that, if anything, she will be involving herself in polemic persuasion rather than theory. Costello dryly remarks that if you want philosophy, don’t ask a novelist to give you a talk. She can only do philosophy in the “unoriginal, secondhand manner” (22), by repeating what she has read.
Costello’s unwillingness to follow theory causes doubt in the audience. Her son states: “Not her metier, argumentation. She should not be here” (36). It also causes doubt in Costello, as later on her son describes her as “confused” and unable to answer a question. However, this does not get her down. Costello offers direct criticism of standard philosophy by describing central mistakes made in the history of philosophy and by having little regard for the “classics.” The message is clear. Costello may do badly in theory, but the expectations of standard philosophy should be forsaken altogether in favor of poetry. For Costello, principles are uninteresting. We need to know what lies behind them. It is this that poetry gains its impetus from. It is implied that poetry opens up perspectives for criticism of standard cultural meanings (such as rationalism or speciesism) and for clarification of sentiments (such as emotion and equality) muddled and forgotten under the weight of those meanings. Therefore, philosophy is replaced with poetry, which persuades by polemics and revelations. The theme of persuasion is especially evident in Costello’s relation to the academic audience: the question of how to communicate ethics to others is constantly present.
This is where Coetzee introduces a further theme: listening. In her self-aware lecture, Costello tells the story of Kafka’s Red Peter, an ape that has to address an academic audience and describe his alteration from an animal to a human being (or an animal disguised as a human being). She goes on to make the correlation between Red Peter and herself. Both Costello and Red Peter “gibber and emote” (23) rather than reason. The audience understands neither. However, perhaps it is the audience’s fault, if apes and novelists seem to merely gibber, for perhaps they are not listening in the right way. Costello maintains that animals are our silent captives who “refuse to speak to us” (25). It is implied that they remain mute because the anthropocentric audience is deaf. The society will not listen to the language of animals, and animals refuse to change their language to suit the purposes of the meat-eating society. The same applies to poets, whose language the academic audience will not pay attention to. Costello sees the animals’ refusal as “heroic,” thus suggesting that the refusal of the poet to be theoretical could be equally heroic. The ape may be forced into a human disguise, and the poet may be forced into an academic disguise, but their true nature will soon resurface.
For both the poet and the animal, the inability to be heard causes grief. Costello talks of the branded and wounded Red Peter, who has to defend himself in front of academics, and states that she, too, is not a philosopher but “an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word that I speak” (26). The insistence on humanity and theory may give cause to deafness, which harms those who remain unheard. The true identity of the animal and the poet is dismissed and devalued: they will only be accepted when disguised in the humanistic, academic veil.
Thus, it is suggested that theory be replaced with poetry and persuasion and that new ways of listening be adopted. These form significant challenges to standard animal ethics, which relies on analytical arguments and tends to “speak for” the animals.
Costello maintains that her vegetarianism is based on “a desire to save [her own] soul” (43). Coetzee seems to be leaning back toward virtue ethics and its emphasis on personal character rather than detached principles. With some exceptions,7 animal ethics has paid little attention to human nature, and thus Coetzee is offering a needed reminder.
This reading is offered support by the fact that much emphasis is placed on the notions of “goodness,” “human nature,” and “personal responsibility.” Coetzee explores the question whether being good to animals is practically possible. A member of the audience suggests that we would have to live in a totalitarian society in order to live without any cruelty or exploitation and states that perhaps we should accept our “humanity” and eat meat. Costello replies that humans are not biological carnivores—thus, eating other animals is not a necessary aspect of human nature but rather a choice. This choice is the stumbling block that prevents most from being “good people.” Costello mentions the limits of her own moral character. She wears leather, which she understands to be one form of “obscenity” (meat-eating being another) (44). Time and again she implies that there is a touch of monstrosity in the manner in which animals are treated. It seems that we could better our characters but choose not to. Real monsters are not those who cannot understand the implications of their actions but those who not only understand them but rejoice in them. The person who eats meat is bound to be aware that the inevitable price of her culinary pleasure is the suffering and death of another creature. It is this combination of pleasure and awareness of its price that is at the root of obscenity and does justice to the choice of terminology.8 Costello is shocked at her own incapacity to come above such banality. She is a seemingly good person, yet she is taking part in what to her is murder.
One way to avoid the implications is to deny personal responsibility by resorting to ignorance. Coetzee draws an analogy between animal industries and the Holocaust. Costello claims that: “The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka . . . said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in general they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake” (19). She goes on to point out that this ignorance is constant in relation to nonhuman animals. She describes how she wanders through an ordinary town, not seeing any animal suffering but knowing it is hidden all around her: “They are all around us as I speak, only we do not, in a certain sense, know about them” (21). It is not practical limitations but self-oriented unwillingness to pay attention, to be aware, that prevents respectful treatment of other animals. For Costello, ignorance is a moral vice. When it comes to the ordinary Germans and others following the Nazi rule, she says: “They lost their humanity,” what they committed was a “sin,” they became “polluted.” She argues: “It was and is inconceivable that people who did not know . . . about the camps can be fully human” (21). Our whole humanity is destroyed by ignorance. Whereas typically ignorance is positioned outside moral responsibility (we are not responsible for what we do not know), Coetzee’s character claims that we are, in fact, responsible for not knowing. Here Coetzee presents us with the concept of “denial,” which combines knowledge with ignorance: we seek not to know something that we do know.9 Denial is a choice, and as such an act that we can be held responsible for.
Costello’s choice of terminology (“curse,” “sin”) implies that we will be punished for our actions. If, indeed, “meat is murder,” then those who scarf down hamburgers should face a penalty for their actions. However, she also notes that no immediate punishment is offered. People seem to “come away clean” from their everyday life, which constantly presents them with a “fresh holocaust.” They do not feel responsibility or guilt; they remain untouched. “We can do anything and get away with it . . . there is no punishment” (35). The world is filled with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”: evil is found in the mundane and thus goes unpunished. It may be the inability to feel shame or guilt that is at the root of Coetzee’s virtue ethics. Costello wants the punishment to be guilt, but people feel none. One could argue that it is precisely this inability that marks the decline of humanity: we have lost touch with human nature when we cannot feel shame for taking part in a global society that ignores the lives and interests of tens of billions of animals each year.
Hence, human nature is tarnished when people make the choice to kill unnecessarily. Furthermore, we cannot avoid personal responsibility by pleading ignorance. Meat eaters are obscene monsters whose humanity is under doubt. They would deserve a punishment. These are heavy terms, and they are not met on the pages of animal ethics books. The difference between a poet and a philosopher is becoming clear. Whereas the standard animal ethicists would be presenting a calm and neutral argument, Coetzee (and, living up to her own promise, Costello) offers strong polemics to cut to the point. Moreover, whereas standard animal ethics is concerned with principles, Coetzee is underlining a more personal element: be a good person. In a sense he is personalizing ethics: ethics is not detached theory but something to be found from our personal lives, something that we are to be held personally accountable for.
One of the basic anthropocentric claims is that reason sides with humans and emotion with animals. Therefore (following a rather illogical leap), valuing animals has to be sentimental rather than rational. The response in animal ethics has been to reject emotion and build pro-animal arguments on reason alone.10 Only a few have suggested that we should, in fact, criticize the role of reason.11
Coetzee is not blind to the matter. Costello’s son calls her beliefs “propaganda,” while his wife, Norma, calls ethical beliefs “opinions” and emphasizes their supposed “sentimentality” (The Lives of Animals, 17). However, Costello does not adopt the typical animal ethics route but rather responds by criticizing reason. For Costello, reason is not the “being of universe,” but only one aspect of human thinking and thus a mere fragment of our reality (23). Moreover, she takes a strong position in favor of emotion. She maintains that instead of principles, we ought to listen to our “hearts”: “If principles are what you want to take away from this talk, I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says” (37). Hence, an emphasis on emotion is a further diversion from standard animal ethics.
It can be claimed that emotions are an elemental part of human behavior, and coincide with reason. Martha Nussbaum has argued that emotions are needed for “understanding”: only purely factual and fragmented knowledge can be void of emotion. For something to be understood, it needs to strike a chord in us, lead to some type of affective response. Nussbaum further maintains that emotion is a way of knowing, as it can form the perspective from which to make things meaningful.12 These ideas are reflected in Coetzee’s work. A substantial part of his animal ethics is based on emotion: the lives of animals are to have an emotive impact on human beings. We can understand other animals, and our relation with them, only by taking emotions into account. Therefore, Coetzee is replacing theory, principles, and reason with poetry, virtues, and emotion. This enables him to try and understand the animal from a new perspective.
Here we come to the second theme of Coetzee’s work: the priority of the animal viewpoint. Costello places great emphasis on sympathy, which she calls the capacity to “share the being of another,” and which she links with imagination (she talks of “sympathetic imagination”) (34–35). Identification (perhaps a better term for what Costello is describing) and imagination form an integral part of Coetzee’s animal ethics. Human beings are to imagine the animal point of view. The claim is radical to those who maintain that animal minds are inevitably alien to us. This attitude is reflected in Wittgenstein’s argument, according to which even if a lion did talk, we could not understand him. Such skepticism is common not only in standard analytical philosophy but also in postmodern philosophy.13 Costello argues the opposite. As seen, she thinks that the lion can talk but remains silent only because humans do not listen in the right way. Animals have minds, and the inability to understand them is a fault of human reluctance. Costello is familiar with the famous paper on philosophy of mind entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,” and she criticizes its author, Thomas Nagel, for positioning the bat as a “fundamentally alien form of life” (31). We can understand other animals. All we need is a new way of listening.
Costello states that we ought to try and see the animal’s world via its bodily, living experiences. She criticizes the claim “cogito ergo sum” and maintains that existence is not based on “a ghostly reasoning machine” but rather on experience. Experience consists of “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation . . . of being alive to the world” (33). Thus, Coetzee pays attention to the element that Nagel highlights in his paper: consciousness in the phenomenal sense. It is “qualia” that matters, the stuff of “what it is like.” This is where the key to understanding animality lies—an understanding that Costello describes as being without limit. We can identify because we, too, are experiencing beings. Costello argues that “to be a living bat is to be full of being” and maintains that the task is not about knowing each specific sensation of the animal but rather about experiencing the sense of their “full being” (33). We can do this, for being human, too, is to be full of being; we, too, have qualia.
In identification, imagination is necessary. We are to jump outside anthropocentric frameworks and explore new meanings. Most importantly, we are to jump outside human presumptions and seek ways of understanding the animal perspective. Costello tells the tale of primate experiments in which the animals had to figure out complicated ways of getting to their food. According to her, it is only in the technological mind of humans that ways of reaching food would be at the forefront. Perhaps for these social animals, entirely different questions were more prominent (why are their captors suddenly making things so difficult for them, what has changed in their status?).14 Costello argues that scientific models for measuring animal intelligence are “imbecile.” She suggests that perhaps the experimenters are not far from philosophers. Both concentrate so thoroughly on technical issues (“can the ape use tools?”; “what are rights?”) that they forget the more meaningful questions (“what is it like to be an animal?”). Costello says: “This is where a poet might have commenced with a feel for the ape’s experiences” (30). Thus, Coetzee is centralizing the animal. Understanding animality is the basis for his take on ethics: it is not principles or experiments but the animal and her perspective that are to be prioritized.
This view has been endorsed elsewhere. Eileen Crist has maintained that the standard approach to researching animal minds has been fixated on “mechanomorphic” claims: animals are explained via external, mechanical descriptions not internal descriptions that refer to a subject. Research rests on “technical language,” while “ordinary language” (which gives room for animal subjectivity) is falsely ignored as unscientific.15 The conceptual framework that is chosen to describe other animals is built on normative and political views (if we want to instrumentalize animals, it makes little sense to describe them as individuals) and will lead to expected results (a mechanical framework will offer us a mechanical animal).16 Thus, Costello’s scientist will see what he wants to see, and the speciesist society does the same. However, intellectual honesty requires that if we are to understand other animals, they should be placed at the center of our efforts. Ethologist Marc Bekoff has argued, in a Coetzeean manner, that “there are no substitutes for listening to, and having direct experiences with, other animals.”17 For him, “animals are a way of knowing.”18 Indeed, it is time to listen to the lion speak.
Therefore, we are to explore the animal viewpoint via both similarities and differences. Similarity gives basis for identification, whereas differences require imagination—we ought to identify with what we can easily hear but also use imagination to capture that which escapes human language. In both, it is crucial that the animal herself be made the central point of our attention.
The argument could be brought forward by maintaining that we remain blind to aspects of our own selves as long as we refuse to see the animal. First, some argue that animals affect our minds and meanings. The “externalist” view is that the body and the environment (including relations with other animals) shape minds.19 Raimond Gaita repeats this claim as he reminds us that our “creatureliness” affects the meanings we have. Human-animal relations have an impact on conceptual schemes.20 Second, some claim that animals have a bearing on human personhood. Interaction is especially relevant here. Juan Carlos Gómez argues that personhood is based on experienced interaction: “The idea is that subjects . . . can coordinate their ‘subjectivities’ . . . with other creatures’ subjectivities.”21 Gómez states that, thus, personhood requires seeing others as persons: “I am a person in so far as I and another perceive and treat each other as persons.”22 The ethologist Barbara Smuts, specifically in relation to Coetzee’s thoughts, has explored these themes beautifully in the light of her vast experience in animal behavior. She says of animals:
If they relate to us as individuals, and we relate to them as individuals, it is possible for us to have a personal relationship. . . . Thus while we normally think of personhood as an essential quality that we can “discover” or “fail to find’ in another, in the view espoused here personhood connotes a way of being in relation to others . . . when a human being relates to an individual nonhuman being as an anonymous object, rather than as a being with its own subjectivity, it is the human, and not the other animal, who relinquishes personhood.23
Therefore, our minds, meanings, and even personhood are constructed in relation to other animals. When insisting that the animal be brought forward, Coetzee is, literally, saving our humanity. This sheds further light on his claim that the killing of animals destroys human souls: we cease to be not only good people, but people altogether when we refuse to recognize the value of other animals.
Thus, it is little surprise that the relation between humans and other animals is crucial for Coetzee. The animals whose worlds we are to imagine have lives that are deeply affected by human actions. Here lies another valuable point in Coetzee’s animal ethic. Most invitations to understand other animals concentrate on the wild animal. Poets pay heed to the lions, deer, and wolves, not the piglets born in farrowing crates or the chicken cramped to battery cages (a matter Costello ironically points toward). Coetzee exemplifies this via the perspective of Costello’s son: “Jaguar poems are all very well, he thinks, but you won’t get a bunch of Australians standing around a sheep, listening to its silly baa, writing poems about it” (The Lives of Animals, 55). This understanding penetrates the whole of the society, as we are fixated on cultural taboo animals, such as lions and pandas, while ignoring domesticated animals. The value difference is at times explicated in philosophy. Postmodern philosophy has seen a deep aversion toward domesticated animals. Even their ontological status is seen as “less” in comparison to the wild animals. In fact, they may not be “real” animals at all, but human artifacts.24
The importance of paying attention to domesticated animals cannot be overemphasized. If we are to start exploring our moral relation with other animals, it is surely those animals that we have the deepest effect on that ought to be given the priority. In fact, it strikes as deceitful to place all emphasis on the wild animals, who are relatively independent from us. The moral message seems to be: We have nothing to worry about: animals are doing fine; they are roaming free instead of being cramped to small cages. Coetzee forces us to look at a reality we would rather not pay attention to. Even the ape Costello talks of is not a wild creature, but one tormented by humans. Via Costello, Coetzee asks us to imagine not independent animal existence but the lives of animals under human rule.
Coetzee suggests that we can persuade others by poetry. One way to discover how poetry works is to look at his novels Disgrace and The Lives of Animals. The main character in Disgrace, David Lurie, has personal relations with two women (one of them his daughter), who work in animal welfare. The women have relatively strong views on animals: “Yes, we eat up a lot of animals in this country, it doesn’t seem to do us much good. I’m not sure how we will justify it to them” (Disgrace, 82) and thus introduce Lurie to the problematic nature of our relation with other animals. They echo the rejection of anthropocentrism present in The Lives of Animals: “There is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals” (74). Lurie, on the other hand, has a standard, anthropocentric view on the matter. He first describes the women as “animal lovers,” and although he sees no harm in their work, he finds it “hard to whip up an interest in the subject” (72–73). Later Lurie, when enticed to work in the animal shelter, protests: “All right, I’ll do it. But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself” (77). He states that the Church Fathers don’t believe in the souls of animals, thus dryly acknowledging the historical roots of his own anthropocentrism. When asked if he likes animals, Lurie brings forward a crude, instrumentalizing view: “I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them” (81). Up until here, Lurie is the speciesist Costello is referring to. Unwilling to change his character for the better, ignorant and uninterested, willing to stereotype animal advocates as “sentimentalists,” and willing to consume the anthropocentric meanings and animal body parts fed to him by the culture.
Then Lurie comes across sheep meant for slaughter. He first reiterates the speciesist agenda: “Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used” (123). However, as Lurie helps the sheep to graze, a more critical attitude starts to emerge. He complains to his daughter that the sheep should not have been introduced to the people (meaning himself) who are about to eat them. When she inquires whether he would prefer for the slaughtering to happen in an abattoir so that he wouldn’t have to think of it, he says simply: “Yes.” He is pleading to remain ignorant, thus explicitly taking part in the denial that Costello talks of in The Lives of Animals. However, Lurie is in a situation where ignorance becomes impossible: the sheep are not whisked away to an abattoir but rather remain under his very eyes. The lives of these animals cannot be hidden. Instead, the relationship with the sheep deepens, and suddenly Lurie describes the countryside treatment of animals as “indifferent” and “hardhearted” (125). The change is becoming evident: Lurie is no longer in the speciesist club. He is starting to grasp his own ignorance.
All this happens after interaction with sheep. It becomes evident that Lurie has experienced sympathetic imagination in relation to these animals (ironically, the very species that Costello’s son claims is not worthy of imagination). The domesticated animals have “spoken” to Lurie. Lurie even contemplates buying the sheep in order to rescue them from death, but realizes that the owner would simply get new sheep to kill. Coetzee describes this new situation as follows: “A bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two Persians, he does not know how . . . suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him” (126). Hence, quite literally, emotion is taking over reason, and Lurie is identifying with the sheep to the extent that their fate matters to him greatly. Consequently, Lurie hesitates to go to the party where the dead sheep are being served, feeling that the sheep’s lot has “disturbed” him. He thinks of the possibility of communicating with animals and asks himself whether he has to change, become like the women. He says: “I never imagined I would end up talking this way” (127). Lurie has found new ways of thinking, literally beyond his imagination, that have enabled him to recognize the animal viewpoint. Hence, he is faced with Costello’s question: Should I become a better person?
Lurie starts to go over to the shelter as often as possible. He helps with the killing of unwanted dogs, but it has a significant effect on him. He cries when leaving the shelter, his hands shake, he feels the animals can sense his shame. Finally Lurie explicitly realizes that he is changing: “He does not understand what is happening to him. Until now he has been more or less indifferent to animals.” (143) The fate of the animals is “gripping” his whole being. Lurie is feeling the guilt that Costello wishes all meat eaters felt. He has been altered by the encounters with animals, and indifference has been replaced by a strong sense of identification—Lurie is becoming “a better person.”
Lurie’s respect for the dogs extends beyond their death. He does not want the bodies of the dogs to be “dishonoured” by being mangled together with waste (although he does doubt whether the concept makes sense in relation to animals). So he takes it upon himself to personally process the dogs through the incinerator. He does question his concern for dead dogs and wonders if he is becoming “stupid, daft, wrongheaded” (146). However, for Lurie, the bags of dead dogs contain “a body and a soul inside,” and thus he is explicitly abandoning the speciesist beliefs of the church fathers. He states that he finally knows the proper name for the feeling toward animals he before had difficulty stipulating: “Love” (219). He has gone through a complete change: he is now one of the people he would have labeled and even laughed at before, and he is no longer embarrassed to admit that he has strong emotions toward animals. Lurie has become “an animal lover.”
The book has a rather stark ending. Lurie is faced with a dilemma of whether to save a young dog for another week or to take part in its killing. Ultimately, he chooses the latter. He did not save the sheep, and here he decides not to save the dog. There are many interpretations for this surprising conclusion. The first concerns one of the general themes of the book: Lurie is a rather helpless character who struggles to actively have a positive effect on events and people around him, and the inability to help animals intertwines with this theme. A second interpretation is more directly animal related. Lurie rejects saving the sheep because they would be replaced by others, and a similar approach applies to his view on dogs—regardless of his actions now, the dog will ultimately be killed. Perhaps Coetzee is asking us to look at the sinister consequences of our actions and to do something about their causes. We cannot help all the animals suffering as a result of speciesist attitudes, but we can do something about speciesism itself. A third option is that Coetzee does not want to offer us a feel-good ending, for the holocaust is still ongoing. Ending the book in the saving of one dog might delude us from remembering that animals are being killed in huge numbers every day (the term “Lösung” is used repeatedly in the book). The frustration of not being able to help brings to light the massive scale of the problem.
So what is the poetics of Disgrace? The novel explores the human-animal relation via the main character’s personal experiences. The reader is invited to identify with the character who is coming to terms with the viewpoint of other animals. Through this two-level identification, the reader is perhaps asked to examine her own animal ethics. Disgrace does not make explicit claims but rather offers the reader a lived perspective through which to contest anthropocentric meanings. Here Coetzee is again following the virtue ethics account. It is via the personal journey of Lurie that meanings are contested. Like a character from a Greek tragedy, Lurie finds himself facing a battle, going through a catharsis, and finally achieving virtue and humanity. Like the viewer of a tragedy, the reader lives through the same catharsis—she is not reading ethics but living ethics. Persuasion gains its footing here: when we are invited to enter the world of Lurie, we are also invited to see animals how he sees them and (however briefly) to adopt his moral alteration.
Therefore, Coetzee is offering an animal ethic via the standard form of literary identification, which entices the reader to try on different viewpoints. Such an approach is alien to animal ethics, which follows the standard form of philosophical argumentation and, if anything, asks the reader to remain detached and neutral. In the context of persuasion, Coetzee’s stance seems rather inevitably more effective. Detachment allows a reader to hold on to her own viewpoint and to give up on the text when needed. It does not offer (in any other than a metaphorical sense) new viewpoints or play with that of the reader or invite the reader to keep up with the text even when uncomfortable problems emerge. Literature succeeds not only in such play and lure but also in the contextualization of ethics, which makes it lived and thus both makes it seem plausible and offers a basis from which to make a judgment on its practical merits. Standard philosophy offers ethics, which is abstract and remains outside the reader, whereas Coetzee’s approach makes the reader and ethics intertwine by bringing ethics inside the reader and the reader inside ethics. These elements allow Lurie to literally lure us to his world of ethics.
The Lives of Animals, on the other hand, uses a different approach. Whereas Disgrace lures and implies, The Lives of Animals accuses and polemicizes. More specifically, the difference consists of two elements. First, in The Lives of Animals, the ethics is made explicit as Costello’s collected rage sweeps though the audience. In Disgrace, moral reflection is minimal, whereas here, such reflection takes center stage. Thus, ethics is not so much a part of a narrative, as an entity in itself. Second, ethics is no longer something that another person confronts but rather something that the reader is confronted with. There is no “living with” the ethics but rather being interrogated by it. Lurie shows us how an ethics can be adopted, whereas Costello asks us to justify our ethics—one happens in third person, the other in second person. The reader is the audience that Costello is addressing.
In The Lives of Animals Coetzee pays little attention to describing the concrete treatment of animals. Costello states: “I will pay you the honour of skipping a recital of horrors of their lives and deaths. . . . will take it that you concede me the rhetorical power to evoke these horrors and bring them home to you with adequate force, and leave it at that, reminding you only that the horrors I here omit are nevertheless at the centre of this lecture” (The Lives of Animals, 19). Her omission has a strong, harrowing impact. It is stated that the reality of domesticated animals is that of horror and that this horror should gain our full attention. By not giving the horror any detailed attention, Costello sparks imagination. The reader is given the task of envisioning “what it is like.” This imagination is at the center of The Lives of Animals, and it gives priority to the animal.
A further important element in the book is shock via juxtaposition—the rhetoric of The Lives of Animals. Costello’s oddity in front of the academic audience (she is a self-doubting female novelist with open arguments who hungers for emotion, facing self-assured, mainly male academics who hunger for logics and reason) is in itself a juxtaposition. However, the more challenging juxtaposition takes place when Costello makes the “dreaded comparison” between the Holocaust and animal industries: “Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (21). She not only makes the comparison but indeed describes animal industries as the greater atrocity. The Holocaust was about killing with an end: an annihilation. Animal industries do not have such an end; for them death itself is a sought-after product—they constantly need new bodies and lives to turn into death.
The comparison is radical in the context of anthropocentric meanings. The most obvious sign of discomfort comes from Abraham Stern, one of the academics, who accuses Costello of “blasphemy” and of insulting the dead (50). However, Costello stands by her comparison. Both animal industries and the Holocaust rest on rendering other beings alien and insignificant. It could be that, in fact, the oppressive treatment of other animals enables the similar treatment of given groups of humans (this could be the “curse” that Costello refers to). As long as experiencing beings are treated hierarchically and instrumentally, the future of humanity does not look bright (therefore, Costello also argues that speciesists are similar to racists). It is the whole mechanism of relating to other beings (humans or animals) that needs to change. The best that Stern’s argument does is exemplify the cause of our problems: the dualistic divisions into “us” and “them,” inside which respect for another is an insult to oneself and the value of one’s own kind is built upon difference in relation to others.25
Therefore, Coetzee is introducing ethics via perhaps the most shocking comparison available. However, what remains unclear is whether this method of persuasion works. When Stern refuses to attend Costello’s second lecture, he is choosing to become deaf to her arguments. The unwillingness to listen reflects a typical response: as Costello is aware, most people prefer to remain ignorant. Coetzee is offering shock tactics to an anthropocentric culture in denial. The more obvious the horror, the greater the need to deny. This leads to an important question: Can the poet be effective if the society is unwilling to listen?
Costello’s son asks: “Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?” Her reply is “No.” He goes on: “It seems to me the level of behaviour you want to change is too elementary, too elemental, to be reached by talk” (Disgrace, 58). He claims that humans like meat; they don’t want to change. Hence, it is argued that poetry is too weak in the face of denial based on self-interest. Costello’s own attitude is that of frustration: “John, I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent” (59). For her, the inadequacies of poetic persuasion are secondary in relation to the need to speak out. The society may be deaf, but silence is not an option. Again, Costello is favoring virtue ethics at the expense of utilitarianism: it may be her desire to do the right thing and be “a good person” that drives her to wage a war against the Goliath of the hamburger culture. Advocating care for others is important even when it seems to bear little effect. It is not only shock tactics that may fail, but also mediating animality per se. Costello states: “If I do not convince you, that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal’s being” (65). Words can only go so far. However, like the animal, the poet has to keep to her own language, regardless of its failings. Costello may be tired, but she is not about to give up.
So how, to continue with persuasion, can deafness be overcome? It is important to note the third possibility besides philosophy and poetry: activism. One interpretation is that, like animal ethics and poetry, activism explores the normative aspects of the animal-human relationship. The basic claim behind it is that animals are active, independent beings who should not be treated as passive instruments. This claim is supported by various acts of “liberation,” which force us to reexamine the basis of the named relationship. It can be maintained that direct actions—rather than being mindless and sporadic—contest meaning. They form “fractures” to the anthropocentric worldview that force us to reexamine understandings concerning other animals.
Maxwell Schnurer has argued that atrocities are enabled by a state of mindlessness, in which the reality is made meaningful via simple categories that remain outside any questions or criticism. Efforts to challenge these categories remain unsuccessful as long as they rely on “information” alone, for such information is analyzed on the basis of the same categories it is supposed to contest and thus remains simply insignificant or without meaning. (More important, since the categories are perceived to be beyond the reach of criticism, criticism does not make sense.) Schnurer offers the Holocaust underground resistance as an example of a more successful route toward challenging mindlessness. According to him, direct actions are not mere events but rather arguments that contest what is considered important: they “communicate value.” An active, fighting, self-valuing Jew contested the stereotype of passive, incapable “others” empty of value. Schnurer argues that animal activism follows the same formula. In the speciesist society, animals are seen as valueless objects that humans have the right to use.26 An activist turns this structure on its head: animals are of so much value that humans have the duty to risk their own skin in order to save them. The belief that “animals have no value and humans have rights over them” is replaced with the belief that “animals have great value and humans have duties toward them.” Schnurer points out how social movements “can help people re-interpret everyday life and make new meaning from it” and maintains that this is what activism is all about. Actions “call upon audiences to consider their own ethical role in relationship to animals.”27 Thus, actions challenge mindless meanings. They may initially be read in a negative way, but what matters is that even then the observer is forced to pause and reflect, for a speciesist meaning has suffered a blow. As such reflections accumulate, change in cultural values begins. Schnurer’s view makes sense. Direct actions are communicative, and their sheer radicality forces people to reflect upon meanings that usually are placed outside criticism. The meat eater is taken by surprise, and in order to make sense of the unusual and radical, he has to (even if for just a moment) open the door for new possibilities and values.
Costello, too, causes fractures via her juxtapositions. She omits “information” that would simply remain insignificant when read via anthropocentric meanings and instead uses radical juxtapositions to contest those meanings. Humans are not creatures of goodness but rather monsters; killing animals is not acceptable but rather obscene; animal industries are not morally justified but rather a form of holocaust. Such juxtapositions have a much greater effect than merely stating that “killing animals is morally wrong.” If Costello feels uncomfortable, she is causing even more discomfort in the audience. Costello is taking part in activism: she does not seek to convince us by thinking but rather to shock us into thinking. She is a fracture in the academic bone. Costello has forced people to reflect on the “mindless” meanings by turning those meanings around. It may be that a society wanting to live in denial can only be alerted to challenge their meanings by these types of radical juxtapositions or other forms of radical rhetoric.
Disgrace, with its gentle persuasion, may only hit a chord with somebody who is already willing to listen. Those with a willingness to ignore need a louder wake-up call. The Lives of Animals offers us such a call.
Coetzee’s approach depends on altering and replacing animal-related meanings. However, there is one objection to this. Those with a Wittgensteinian understanding may maintain that meanings cannot be altered and replaced that easily. Meanings lead to ethics; in the construction of normative views, their power is far greater than that of moral theory. Thus, they cannot be altered on the basis of such theory. Despite her pro-animal attitudes, Cora Diamond has criticized Tom Regan and Peter Singer on these grounds.28 She claims that dualism between humans and animals is a basic meaning (“a central concept for human life”), which the theories in animal ethics will struggle to contest. In her opinion, meanings are to be given priority not only over moral arguments but also over factual considerations. Mental capacities are irrelevant, as are other factual similarities: “We form the idea of this difference, create the concept of the difference, knowing perfectly well overwhelmingly obvious similarities.”29 Diamond goes so far as to suggest that suffering, too, is secondary to meaning. She maintains that standard animal ethics “attacks” the “significance of human life” if it concentrates on suffering, interests, and other mental capacities instead of giving priority to meaning. Meanings may go against facts and moral theory, but so be it.
Gaita, who quotes Coetzee in length, maintains the same position (again, despite offering some pro-animal views). For him, claims of human-animal equality are a form of “meaning-blindness.” Some notions are absurd—not because they are factually false but because they make no sense in relation to our language games. One example is the slogan “meat is murder.” On these grounds, Gaita criticizes The Lives of Animals. He argues that there are “radical differences” between the Holocaust and animal industries that “deprive the comparison of power to shed light.” For him, the comparison is “foolish and also offensive,” for “we do not and cannot respond to what happens in the abattoir as we respond to murder.”30 Therefore, Coetzee’s juxtapositions would be both powerless and meaningless.
The account faces problems. According to Gaita, claims of animal equality remain superficial to a degree that even those who present them are not true believers: “I have heard people say that meat is murder, but I have not met anyone whom I credit with believing it. No one I know or have even heard of treats people who eat meat as though they are murderers or accomplices to murder.”31 However, Coetzee is presenting us with precisely a person who very much believes that meat is murder (and that it is, indeed, comparable to the Holocaust). Costello is perplexed about how to relate to the animal murder all around her. She says:
Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participating in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidence. . . . It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say: ‘Yes, it’s nice isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.’ And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, ‘Treblinka—100% human stearate.’ Am I dreaming, I say to myself? . . . Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?
(The Lives of Animals, 69)
Costello’s reality is at odds with the reality of those surrounding her; the latter is like a bad dream for her. The difference is so great that she cannot even relate to it as a “reality.” Her meanings are different; she is different. Whereas Gaita would want us to believe that nobody truly grasps the meaning of “animal murder,” Coetzee shows us the acute sense in which some do indeed have it. The meaning is so vivid that it causes suffering and forces Costello to wish she could abandon it—however, at the same time it is so integral to her being that rejecting it is an impossibility. If anything, this is a real, lived meaning of elemental importance.
Therefore, it needs to be acknowledged that alternative meanings do exist, that anthropocentrism does not have a monopoly on meanings. Coetzee’s take on the matter is deeper than that of Gaita. Whereas Gaita is pointing out that animal rights supporters do not gun down people who eat burgers, Coetzee is interested in the more relevant question: What does this mean? He brings forward the difficulty of relating to both a society that lives off an atrocity and an atrocity that is approved by the society, and he implies that the issue boils down to the difference between minority and majority meanings. Gunning down meat eaters is a futile option, for what is needed is not eradication of certain individuals but reflection on meanings. It is this heterogeneity of meanings that Diamond and Gaita risk overlooking. Moreover, the division into animal ethics and meanings has to be questioned. Animal ethics is a product of the times, firmly grounded on the societal meanings that emphasize similarity, suffering, equality, nonprejudice, consistency, and so forth. Even the factors that Diamond criticizes—mental abilities, interests, and emphasis on suffering—are basic meanings of the contemporary society, not abstract elements without relevance. Therefore, animal ethics is not an alien construction but part of our lived reality, a meaning in itself.
What about the human-animal dichotomy emphasized by Diamond? Cary Wolfe has talked of a Wittgensteinian “ethnocentrism” in this context. As a critical voice he brings forward Derrida, according to whom we do not own concepts (this includes the concept of “the human”). Moreover, animals cannot be placed in the conceptual order (such as a dichotomy). Rather, the animal renders us vulnerable and limited in conceptuality: we wake up outside language, completely open to any possibility. Wolfe suggests that it is here that we find both Lurie and Costello: wondering what has happened to them.32 Wolfe’s reminder is needed. Whereas for Diamond humanity is the starting point for ethics, one could argue that, in fact, the collapse of humanity is the starting point. We do not become exposed as long as we are lulled in a strong sense of human identity and dualism. Instead, we need a push into the unknown before we can see other beings in themselves and become exposed to their presence.
More recently, Diamond has written a sympathetic essay that directly explores The Lives of Animals. In this essay, she centralizes the ideas of “exposure” and “the difficulty of reality.” Costello serves as an example of both. She has become exposed to the horror faced by other animals and is haunted by the difficulty of relating to a society that lives with this horror (she also finds haunting her own limitations in coming to terms with it all). Exposure and understanding the difficulty of reality have caused her to become an open wound.33 The implication is that we all would do better by becoming similarly exposed. These claims strike a chord. As suggested above, the ontology of Costello is very different from the ontology of “normality”: the latter seeks security, whereas the former has become open to the horror faced by billions on this earth. Diamond’s terminology fits the situation beautifully.
Diamond warns us of “deflection” (a term borrowed from Stanley Cavell), within which appreciation of the difficulty of reality turns into solving that difficulty. She argues that Singer (and presumably others working within analytical animal ethics) need to take part in this deflection. It is expressed in the reluctance to accept the limitations of thought: “Is there any difficulty in seeing why we should not prefer to return to moral debate, in which the livingness and death of animals enter as facts that we treat as relevant in this or that way, not as presences that may unseat our reason?”34 Diamond argues that for Costello, it is problematic to treat the fate of animals as a point of normative debate, as it would be problematic to meet the arguments of Holocaust deniers as a source of serious moral debate. The suffering of animals is, it exists, and we should remain open to it rather than deflecting it via linguistic displays or prolonged debate. Diamond asks: “But what kind of beings are we for whom this is an ‘issue’?”35 Diamond also emphasizes the notion of “fellow-creature.” Instead of deducting from given traits given types of value, justice should rather start with a recognition of “our own vulnerability,” which we ultimately share with other animals.36 Diamond argues that moral theory “pushes apart justice, on the one hand, and compassion, love, pity, and tenderness, on the other,” without recognition that “loving attention” toward others is needed for us to understand “evil.”37 Fellow-creatureliness, by contrast, enables us to become exposed to other animals and to see in them the same finitude that we see in ourselves.38
However, perhaps Diamond is too quick to judge animal ethics. In a response to Diamond’s essay, Ian Hacking maintains that Singerian philosophy persuades people and offers forensic reasons to respect animals. Thus, in its functionality it has practical value: it pushes us toward social and legal change. Hacking argues: “Don’t knock deflection.”39 Hacking has a point. First, the practical power of given works in animal ethics is something that Diamond unduly ignores. Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) has played a part in the evolution of the animal rights movement and the growth of vegetarianism, and the same can be said about works by Tom Regan, Mary Midgley, and so forth. Second, these works are needed to convince the diehards, who have been so affected by instrumentalizing views (“pigs are bacon”) that they will never feel sympathy toward animals. For these broken people, animals will always remain distant beings; however, they, too, can review the effects their actions have on the lives of animals if convinced by something other than references to fellow-creatureliness. In these instances moral arguments are a manifestation of loving attention: they are calling for a being to change so that others may be recognized and suffer less. Ultimately, reliance on nothing but exposure works only in the perfect world—the world of people capable of responding to exposure. However, our difficult reality is colored by cultural conceptions that muddle exposure by telling us that animals are food or instinctual mechanisms. In such a reality, we need not only exposure but also reasons and arguments that trigger us to become exposed. Hence, animal ethics may not always be deflection but rather an invitation to look more carefully where one has previously been blinded by presumptions that equate living beings with steak and sausages.
One of the elements in animal ethics criticized by Diamond is the emphasis on mental abilities. However, if we ignore the mental abilities, interests, and suffering of other animals, we also ignore the animal perspective. Sentient beings make sense of the world on the basis of experiences. Get rid of these, and you delete the animal. This is perhaps the most important criticism of the Wittgensteinian emphasis on meaning: it tends to exclude the meanings of animals. All that is seen is the human reality, the human constructions, and human vulnerability, while the animal remains a passive object of a war over meaning. One option is to argue that animals do not have meanings, at least in the second-order sense (something implied by Gaita). Costello has an answer ready. She remarks of a philosopher who excludes animals from the moral sphere on the grounds that they cannot contemplate on “death” and thus do not have “meanings”: “It awoke in me a quite Swiftian response. If this is the best that human philosophy can offer, I said to myself, I would rather go and live among horses” (The Lives of Animals, 65). Now, cognitive ethology shows that not only experiences but also beliefs, concepts, and intentions are common in the animal world.40 More important, our own exposure to animals suggests that animals are not without minds. These minds give grounds for meanings. No matter how Mary may want to make hunting meaningful, its meaning to the hunted animals remains that of stress, fear, and pain. Hence, if we are to become exposed to the animal, we need to become aware of their mental abilities and the meanings that are born out of these abilities. Perhaps at times different capacities are given too much emphasis in animal ethics, but the opposite (giving them no room) will not do either.
This leads to an altogether different problem. Costello points out that we can imagine the points of view of fictional characters. Although her remark is meant to prove that surely imagining the perspectives of animals cannot thus be such a difficult task, it actually reveals a basic problem: imagination can be purely fictional and depend on nothing but the author. Does this make Coetzee’s approach vulnerable to anthropomorphism? Singer argues that Coetzee goes wrong with his example of imagining fictional characters. We can imagine them because they are human—it is altogether a different matter to imagine the experiences of other species (“Reflections,” in The Lives of Animals).41
Claims of anthropomorphism are usually based on the “problem of other minds,” which demands full evidence for the existence of a mind of another being. However, the issue of evidence is not relevant to Coetzee—he is not interested in scientific proof of the standard kind but instead urges the reader to find alternative ways of understanding minds. A reoccurring theme for Coetzee is an encounter with an animal. The animal reveals herself to us and (against all our standard demands for evidence) changes the way we view her: the animal becomes a somebody, a being with a mind. Here imagination may play an important role, as we recognize animals as someones as soon as we seek to imagine their lived viewpoints. However, even more elemental seems to be the simple openness to the animal and her presence. After having encountered the animal, there can no longer be doubt, and there is no more room for skeptical arguments.
Dale Jamieson maintains that we should replace the “inferential view,” which will only acknowledge that another being has a mind after evidence, with an “affective stance,” which approaches the other being as a being with a mind.42 A mind is not a conclusion but the starting point. Coetzee is offering a similar claim: animals are to be approached as beings who have minds. His criticism of technical explanations neatly follows Wittgenstein’s claim: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.”43 Unsurprisingly, Wittgensteinian philosophers have emphasized the need to forsake the skeptical approach. John McDowell refers to Wittgenstein’s analyses of the sentence, “Someone else cannot know it is this that I am feeling,” and argues that the mistaken or “deflected” way of interpreting it is to see it as addressing the difficulty of knowing other minds. Rather, it is about being “unhinged” by the realization that language—and hence one’s special nature as a speaking animal—is failing oneself.44 Hence, maybe we should not reject other minds because of lingual difficulties related to explaining them—rather, we should reject the demand for lingual evidence and embrace the minds of others (a matter manifested beautifully in Costello’s account of the rather ridiculous scientific studies on apes). Diamond argues that skepticism of other minds is a “tragedy”: it involves blindness to others and their impact on our very reality and being (Stanley Cavell uses the term “soul-blindness” to define skepticism).45 Language is seen as the tool with which to gain knowledge of other beings, whereas in fact it may deter us further away from them.
Anthropomorphism can be avoided by actively taking the animal into account. As argued above, rather than starting with humanity, we ought to start by focusing on the animal and by letting the animal “speak.” Most of all, the capacity to experience is crucial. I catch glimpses of what it is like to be a pig because both the pig and I make the world meaningful via experiences. In Costello’s opinion, for example, identification and imagination are possible, for “full being” forms a point of continuation between humans and other animals: “To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. . . . To be full of being is to live as a body-soul” (33). Costello also emphasizes embodiedness. The experience of full being is linked to having “a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world” (33). This links “full being” with the capacity to experience: “being alive to the world” is precisely the stuff of “what it is like,” of having a viewpoint to existence. Hence, animals are not aliens but our embodied, experiencing cousins. We can imagine what it is like not being able to move in a crowded cage or being injected with toxins in a laboratory. It could even be questioned whether it makes sense to maintain that we categorically cannot imagine what it is like to be a pig or a bat—where is the grounds for such a complete denial when taking into account the similarities? Another element worthy of attention is interaction—a theme, which runs through Coetzee’s animal ethics. By interacting with animals, we start to gain a sense of their being, their particularity, and their value—as Lurie gains a new understanding of animals via his dealings with them, we may gain new glimpses of what it is to be an animal by going closer to them.
There is one aspect that is largely missing from Coetzee’s approach. Although identification and interaction are emphasized, there is a lack of animal particularity. We get to know animals as “sheep” and “dogs” but not as specific individuals with their specific histories. This forms a slight problem. For instance, Jacques Derrida maintains that generic categories impose anthropocentric attitudes on animals: generalizations erase identities and thus enable human beings to convert animals into property (an act that Derrida calls a “crime”).46 Derrida emphasizes the particular animal, “that animal.” Generalizations are so fundamental to anthropocentrism that he even suggests that the current way of conceptualizing reality would collapse if the generic term “animal” was abandoned and replaced with a term that emphasizes specificity. Although Coetzee does not present us with complete generalizations (we do get to learn some details of some of the animals), he would benefit from placing more attention on animal particularity. This applies not only because such particularity is crucial if we are to start viewing animals as independent beings with their own identities but also if imagination and identification are to take flight. We cannot identify with the faceless, generic being, and for the animal truly to step on the central stage, she needs to be given an identity.
Coetzee’s alternative animal ethics centers around three main themes: resistance to theory, priority of the animal perspective, and poetics as a form of persuasion. In essence, he is suggesting that we adopt a new way of looking at the human-animal relation. Instead of theory and its concentration on principles and reason, poetry, virtues, emotion, and imagination should be prioritized. Virtues remind us of personal responsibility rather than abstract principles; emotions can reveal new meanings; and imagination together with identification may enable us to see the animal perspective. Poetry can communicate these factors, persuade in a way that theory cannot. The animal speaks to us, if we perceive her with emotion and imagination. Poetry may convince us to listen. The value of Coetzee’s approach lies here.
Notes
1. See M. H. Bernstein, On Moral Considerability: An Essay on Who Morally Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
2. P. Singer, T. Regan, M. Midgley, E. Pluhar, D. DeGrazia, B. Rollin, and many others have been prominent authors.
3. The postmodern approach has been influenced by continental and feminist philosophy. V. Plumwood and D. Haraway are a couple of examples—even J. Derrida has presented strong pro-animal views.
4. Of course, books like P. Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Random House, 1975), have been highly influential, important, and persuasive (also G. Francione and T. Regan are among those who have sought to publicize their ethics more widely). However, the issue of persuasion per se is rarely discussed.
5. See P. Singer and M. Garber, “Reflections” in The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 73–84, 85–92.
6. Perfectionism links the value of an individual with a perfectable, highly esteemed quality, such as “rationality.” See again Bernstein, On Moral Considerability.
7. B. E. Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality, rev. ed. (New York: Prometheus Books, 1992); S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). S. R. L. Clark, Animals and Their Moral Standing (London: Routledge, 1997).
8. As will be seen later, comparisons between killing humans and killing animals are often understood to be “obscene.” For Coetzee, it is not the correlation but the lack thereof that is obscene.
9. On denial, see S. Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
10. See R. C. Solomon, “Peter Singer’s Expanding Circle: Compassion and the Liberation of Ethics,” in Singer and His Critics, ed. D. Jamieson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 64–85.
11. Including B. Luke, “Taming Ourselves of Going Feral? Toward a Nonpatriarchal Metaethic of Animal Liberation,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. C. J. Adams and J. Donovan (London: Duke University Press, 1995), 290–319.
12. M. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
13. For analytical philosophy, see P. Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For postmodern philosophy, see M. Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); C. Wolfe, “Exposures,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, by S. Cavell et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1–42; C. Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–57.
14. Another example is the monkey who, when offered the choice of two images, chooses the image of a human being rather than that of a monkey—for Costello, the monkey does not wish to be human per se but rather one of those beings who can come and go as they please instead of being locked in a cage.
15. E. Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropocentrism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1999). See also L. Birke, Feminism, Animals, and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (London: Open University Press, 1994); J. Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (Derwood, Md.: Ryce Publishing, 2001).
16. D. Jamieson, “Science, Knowledge, and Animal Minds,” in Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature, ed. D. Jamieson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 52–70.
17. M. Bekoff, “Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures,” BioScience 50, no. 10 (2000): 869.
18. M. Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9.
19. M. Rowlands, Externalism (Durham, U.K.: Acumen Publishing, 2003).
20. R. Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog (London: Routledge, 2002).
21. J. C. Gómez, “Are Apes Persons? The Case for Primate Intersubjectivity,” in The Animal Ethics Reader, ed. S. Armstrong and R. Botzler (London: Routledge, 2003), 139.
22. Ibid., 142.
23. B. Smuts, “Reflections,” in The Lives of Animals, ed. A. Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 118.
24. See S. Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). It has to be noted that analytical animal ethics is not guilty of such odd favoritism, as it has largely concentrated on domestic animals. Most notably Singer, Animal Liberation, explores the plight of domestic animals in great detail.
25. A book that similarly compares animal industries to the Holocaust, Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), argues that many human atrocities have been partly enabled by the instrumentalizing attitude humans have toward other animals.
26. Schnurer (Jewish himself) first felt uncomfortable about the comparison between animal industries and the Holocaust—however, after a visit to Birkenau he saw the comparison to be apt.
27. M. Schnurer, “At the Gates of Hell: The ALF and the Legacy of Holocaust Resistance,” in Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals, ed. S. Best and A. Nocella (New York: Lantern Books, 2004), 114.
28. C. Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. C. Sunstein and M. Nussbaum (London: Routledge, 2004), 93–107.
29. Ibid., 98.
30. Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog, 210–11.
31. Ibid., 198.
32. Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion.”
33. C. Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Reading Cavell, ed. A. Crary (London: Routledge, 2006), reprint, in Philosophy and Animal Life, by S. Cavell et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 43–90.
34. Ibid., 74.
35. Ibid., 51.
36. C. Diamond, “Injustice and Animals,” in Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics, ed. C. Elliot (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 121.
37. Ibid., 131.
38. For Diamond, the term emphasizes sympathy, imagination, and respect for the independence of animals and rejects instrumentalization (see Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People”).
39. I. Hacking, “Deflections,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, by S. Cavell et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 164.
40. Bekoff, “Animal Emotions”; M. S. Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only? The Search for Animal Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); L. Rogers, Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997).
41. Another issue is where to draw the line: if we are to accept Coetzee’s proposal, are we to take into account the lives of oysters or snails, too? Descartes famously excluded oysters, and with them (in the name of consistency) all animals from the moral sphere. However, Coetzee maintains that we can imagine the perspective of an oyster, for we “share the substrate of life” with it. I may not know what it is like to sit inside a shell in the bottom of a sea, but I can imagine the pain of such a creature.
42. Jamieson, “Science, Knowledge, and Animal Minds.”
43. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. In this vein, Gaita maintains that “almost all philosophical and scientific work about animals is based on the assumption that Wittgenstein threw into doubt—that we are justified in attributing various ‘states of consciousness’ to animals only to the degree that we have evidence for them” (Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog, 52).
44. J. McDowell, “Comment on Stanley Cavell’s ‘Companionable Thinking,’” in Philosophy and Animal Life, by S. Cavell et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 127–38.
45. Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality”; see Cavell et al., Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
46. J. Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, ed. P. Atterton and M. Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), 113–28.
References
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
——. “Exposing the Beast: Factory Farming Must Be Called to the Slaughterhouse.” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 2007.
——. The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.