There is a story of a wolf that lived in Gubbio, Italy, and his encounter with St Francis of Assisi. The wolf had been terrorizing the villagers and St Francis was asked to persuade him to desist. The wolf and the saint met one day outside the city walls and came to an agreement – a contract duly notarized by the city’s appropriate official. The wolf agreed to stop terrorizing the townsfolk and to leave their cattle alone. The residents of Gubbio, in turn, promised to feed the wolf and allow him to wander at will through the town. This story amuses me, because I had come – quite independently – to pretty much the same arrangement with Brenin. Specifically, the version of the contract I had reached with the young Brenin went something like this:
OK, Brenin. I will take you everywhere I go: to my lectures, to the rugby training after the lectures, and to the matches at the weekend, whether they are home or away. If I go shopping you can come too, but you’ll have to stay in the car (I’ll be quick!). And, no, I won’t leave you in the car during the heat of the day, and it’s therefore lucky we have a twenty-four-hour supermarket just down the road. I shall make sure you have a long and interesting walk every day, and if I go running, you can come too. You will have a good nutritional meal every day. And when you turn in for the night you will be suitably exhausted from yet another wondrous day of enjoyment and novelty. And here’s another one – I don’t realize it yet, but it will become painfully apparent as the years wear on: every house I ever buy will cost me at least fifty grand more than it otherwise would have just because it must have a decent-size garden for you to run around in. You, on the other, have to not destroy that house. That’s all I ask really. Sometimes, I realize, you might be uncontrollably tempted by a Hungry Man meal I have imprudently left within your reach. Shit happens. I’m not going to dwell on it, or give you a lot of grief over that sort of thing. What I do ask is that you leave the bloody house alone. That means no destruction of items contained therein. And while I understand that you are a young wolf and accidents may sometimes happen, particularly at night, please try not to pee on the carpets.
If you replace my house with the town of Gubbio and me with St Francis, the two stories replicate each other almost perfectly. But, unlike St Francis, I broke the contract – and even now, more than a decade later, it still bothers me.
Alabama was essentially a seven-year party. I’ve been fortunate in my life in many ways. And one of those ways was to have the opportunity to live, in all essentials (i.e. the parties, the drinking, the sport of various stripes), the life of an undergraduate twice. It was much more fun the second time around – perhaps because I had money this time. Or perhaps, just as youth is wasted on the young, the life of a student is wasted on students. Who knows?
Our wild days changed irrevocably when Brenin was four and I was thirty. The truth be told, we were probably both getting a little old for that life anyway. I was twenty-four when I first took up the job in Alabama. Living the life of a student when you are twenty-four is one thing, but there is only so long you can keep going to student rugby parties before it gets, first, a little sad and, after that, a little creepy. But the immediate cause of our move was not my increasing age but my father’s. One bout of pneumonia followed another. Increasingly, I suspected that he was going to die – and thought that I should be closer to home. Of course, the old bastard actually made a full recovery. He’s still around today. But by then it was too late: my days of keg parties and scantily clad rugger huggers were behind me.
But it was the best thing I ever did – even if it didn’t seem like it at the time. I had unfinished business with philosophy. The dissolute but highly enjoyable life I was living in Alabama had resulted in my writing and publishing drying up completely. Clearly, I wasn’t disciplined enough to ignore the obvious temptations of the life around me, so I had to change that life. Therefore, for my move back across the Atlantic, I decided to go somewhere really quiet. I needed somewhere out in the countryside for Brenin. And crucially, I needed a place where there was absolutely, positively nothing for me to do except write. So we moved to Ireland and I took up a job as college lecturer at University College Cork. Oh, and the other somewhat significant factor influencing my decision to go there: this was the only place desperate enough to actually offer me a job. That’s what happens when you’ve been to a party for the last seven years.
The problem was that Brenin had to spend six months at the pleasure of the Irish government, at the Lissadell detention centre in Swords, just north of Dublin. These were the days before pet passports and Brenin had to go into quarantine for six months. This was an unspeakably stupid and evil system. It was devised before the invention of a rabies vaccine, and it took both Britain and Ireland the best part of a century to catch up with this ‘recent’ medical development. Brenin had been receiving annual rabies vaccinations since he was a cub and the antibodies were demonstrably present in his blood. Nevertheless, in common with thousands of other dogs in a similar situation, he had to do his time.
I don’t know about Brenin, but this was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. And I spent many nights of those six months crying myself to sleep. I still don’t know if I did the right thing by him: six months is a very long time in the life of a wolf. But one thing about Brenin that separated him from the average dog was that he was a very together animal. He always was – even as a cub. Nothing really fazed him. You’ve seen that already in his encounters with Rugger the pit bull. He could, I suspect, have done his time standing on his head. He in fact did it with aplomb, and without any of the obvious psychological difficulties that scar many dogs put in quarantine.
It was actually a fairly soft regime in Lissadell. Majella, the governor, loved Brenin: quite understandably, since he was far and away the best-looking ‘dog’ ever to grace Ireland with its presence. He was, at this time, masquerading as a malamute – that’s what I put on the import form – since the legal status of wolves in Ireland is dubious. Malamutes were at the time unknown in Ireland, and even the vets were not sure what they were supposed to look like. Because of his stunning good looks and his pleasant, courteous manner, Majella accorded him various privileges. The most important of these was the run of the entire facility for most of the morning. He used this time, apparently, to stamp his authority over the other inmates, largely in the form of urinating all over the front of their runs. I used to go up there once a week – in those days, a ten-hour round trip on those crappy Irish roads – and we would walk around the complex together for a few hours. His privileges were eventually curtailed after a surreptitious but nonetheless ill-advised rooting through Majella’s shopping bag and rapid devouring of her frozen chicken. But, by then, he was nearly out anyway.
When he was released, I did my best to make things up to Brenin. This meant long runs every day. We spent the summer of his release – he was released in June – in west Wales, at my parents’ house. Actually, it wasn’t quite in their house. We had to live in the mobile home at the bottom of the garden, since Brenin had taken an immediate dislike to my parents’ Great Danes, Bonnie and Blue. In fact, within a few hours of arriving he had tried to kill Blue on several different occasions. The days we spent running on, and near, the magnificent beaches of Freshwater West, Broadhaven South and, his favourite, Barafundle. There were a gazillion rabbits in the dunes behind Barafundle, and here Brenin started to learn something I could not, because of the snakes, let him do in Alabama: to hunt.
At the end of the summer, we moved over to Ireland. For our first year there, we lived in Bishopstown, a suburb on the western fringes of Cork City. I tried to make Brenin’s life as much like Alabama as possible. So we would go running every day – usually to the Lee Valley Park and its adjoining fields. Or we would go to Powdermills Park in Ballincollig. At weekends, we would head out to various places: the beach at Inchydoney, Glengarra Woods up past Mitchelstown on the road to Dublin, the cliff walk at Ballycotton and many more. I started surfing around this time, and a couple of days a week, surf permitting, we would head down to windswept Garrettstown beach, where Brenin would splash around in the water while I tried to stand up on my board. Quarantine may have been tough, but this was a much better place for him than Alabama – and, thanks to St Patrick, we didn’t have to worry about snakes.
The fact that something is inevitable does not necessarily make it any less unpleasant. I knew that I had to move back across the Atlantic. I knew that Brenin would have to go into quarantine. I knew that he would have a much better life over there, in a climate and countryside far better suited to him. But I still can’t quite shake the horror of that day in early December when I drove him to Atlanta to put him on a plane. I still have a recurring nightmare about it, and I wake up to double crushing blows. Initially, I am sad because in my dream I am betraying Brenin. And then I remember he is dead. The story of St Francis and the wolf of Gubbio is a happy story about a contract with a wolf. It is a happy story because the contract is kept. But there is a far darker story of a wolf and a contract, a story about the dire consequences of breaking the contract.
Fenrisulfr was a giant wolf of Norse mythology. He grew up in unhappy filial circumstances. His brother, Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent, was cast into the sea by Odin for no good reason, at least nothing that would stand up in court. His sister, Hel, was banished to the land of the dead merely on the word of a crone of dubious sanity but demonstrable malice. So, presumably the first lesson we should learn about the gods is a simple one: you can’t trust them. And, indeed, it’s not as if Fenrisulfr had ever given the gods any specific reason to distrust him. On the contrary, bearing in mind that he was a giant wolf whose rumoured destiny – on the day of Ragnarok, the end of the world – was to swallow the sun, he had hitherto led a life of the most remarkable restraint. But as he grew larger, the gods began to fear him, and their solution – characteristically devoid of imagination – was to chain him up and forget about him. First they made a chain called Loedingr. But that didn’t hold him for long. Then they made Dromi, another iron chain, but twice as strong as Loedingr. He smashed through that one too. So then they had their dwarves fashion another chain. It was made from the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the spirit of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird.
Here, then, is the second lesson we should learn about the gods – a lesson that, in a reasonably straightforward way, explains the first. It’s not that the gods are particularly stupid, though some of them, let’s face it, are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Nor are they necessarily vicious and malignant, although many of them are. Rather, they are characterized by a certain incapacity to understand the minds of others. The gods have no theory of mind; they have a congenital inability to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. They have no empathy. To put it bluntly, probably the safest characterization of the gods is that they are all sociopaths.
Did they really think that Fenrisulfr would fall for this? He had given no indication of being an especially unintelligent wolf. But they try him out on two chains, the heaviest and thickest iron chains ever forged. These don’t work, so they present him with something that looks like a silk ribbon. And they don’t think that he’s going to realize something’s up? So, Fenrisulfr called them on this. No, no, they assured him. There’s no trick. On my mother’s life, Odin is alleged to have said, perhaps thinking he was engaging in a subtle in-joke (which would merely confirm the vast body of textual evidence suggesting that subtlety was never Odin’s forte).
At this point, the official version of events goes something like this. Tyr, the bravest of the gods, volunteered to put his hand in Fenrisulfr’s mouth, as a gesture of good faith, thus nobly sacrificing his own appendage for the greater good. But mythology is, of course, written by the winners. Perhaps I have spent too much time with a wolf, but this official version of the story never did really ring true for me. Indeed, I think it bears all the hallmarks of a version subsequently invented and stubbornly championed by Tyr. One can’t help suspect that Tyr was not the bravest but the most degenerately cruel and vicious of the gods. And given the widely acknowledged but largely unexplained interest he had taken in the raising of Fenrisulfr, it is, sadly, possible that much of Fenrisulfr’s early life, from the time he was a cub, had been spent suffering, in one way or another, at the hands of Tyr. And, if so, Fenrisulfr would have put him high on his list of things to bite. One can’t also help suspect that Tyr didn’t volunteer to put his hand in the giant wolf’s mouth. Rather, Odin ordered him to do so – on pain of severe and protracted suffering should he refuse. In which case, one can imagine the look on Tyr’s face when he actually worked up the courage to do as Odin commanded, or rather worked up the courage to not resist the other gods forcing his hand in Fenrisulfr’s mouth. Fenrisulfr gives Tyr a little wink and the bravest of the gods almost certainly proceeds to soil his breeches.
Perhaps Tyr’s hand was worth it. Perhaps Fenrisulfr was quite willing to play the gods’ game. It wasn’t yet his time, nor would it be for many years. When his time did come, at Ragnarok, legend has it that he was so large that his upper jaw touched the sky while his lower one touched the earth. Still, that was a while off yet. And he was a very together wolf. He could do the time – he could do the time standing on his head. He, in fact, spent it chained to a rock called ‘scream’, on the island of Lyngvi. Of course, Tyr wanted revenge. So, not content with chaining Fenrisulfr until the end of time, for his pièce de résistance he drove a sword into the wolf’s mouth. This caused slaver to run from his jaws and it formed a river. The river was called ‘hope’. And the chain that bound Fenrisulfr until Ragnarok was called Gleipnir: the deceiver.
The tragedy of this story, of course, is that no one really knows how Fenrisulfr would have behaved had he not been treated in this appalling fashion. On the day of Ragnarok, he famously sided with the giants against the gods, taking his revenge on Odin by disembowelling him. But who knows what side he would have taken had the gods not reneged on their contract with him. And after they had broken this contract, what right did they have to even expect Fenrisulfr’s support?
The horror of that drive to Atlanta lay not in the knowledge that I would miss Brenin so much. It lay in the fact that I did not know what side he would take when he got out. Would he be on the side of gods or giants? And what right did the gods – if I might modestly, and I assure you sarcastically, put it – have to expect his support after their betrayal?
In some versions of the myth, the gods understand the inevitability of their actions. They know that they have no choice in the binding of Fenrisulfr. They know that they must be defeated at Ragnarok – the time of the gods will have passed and must be replaced by an age of giants. They know that the chaining of Fenrisulfr and his taking the side of giants are required for their defeat. They know that what they do must be done. But to know that what you do is necessary does not release you from the crushing burden of actually doing it.
Saying goodbye to Brenin that day in Atlanta broke my heart because I didn’t know if he – Brenin, my Buffalo Boy – would still be there when I saw him again; or whether he would have been replaced by another wolf living inside his pelt.
With hindsight, I suppose it’s natural – and maybe depressingly predictable – for a philosopher to think of the formation of our little nation of two in contractual terms. The notion of a social contract has played a prominent role in the history of Western thought. Its principal progenitor was a seventeenth-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.
For Hobbes nature was unpleasant – red in tooth and claw (as Tennyson would later put it). Humans once lived in a state of nature, which basically meant a war of each against all. No one was safe; no one could be trusted. Neither friendship nor cooperation was possible. We lived like animals, or like Hobbes thought animals lived, and consequently our lives were, generally, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
And so, Hobbes claimed, we formed a contract, an agreement. The agreement, in all essentials, went like this: you agree to respect the life, liberty and property of other people on the condition that they in turn agree to respect your life, liberty and property. So, you agree not to kill other people and they agree not to kill you. You agree not to make other people into slaves and they agree not to make you into a slave. You agree not to steal other people’s homes and possessions and they agree not to steal your home and possessions. Society is founded on a principle of ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ Or, at the very least, ‘You refrain from sticking a knife in my back and I’ll refrain from sticking one in yours.’
Hobbes was talking about a transformation from wildness – as he understood wildness to be – to civilization. The contract is what facilitates this transformation. If you accept the contract, then you accept certain limitations on your freedom. And the reason you do this is because your life becomes better as a result. That is the purpose and justification of society; that is the purpose and justification of morality.
Unfortunately, Hobbes’s story about how we elevated ourselves above nature red and raw, and so became civilized instead of wild, has holes a fully grown 150-pound Brenin could have strolled comfortably through. Before the contract, so Hobbes’s story goes, we were wild: we were nature red and raw, and our lives were solitary, poor, etc. After the contract, we were civilized and our lives were, consequently, much better.
One question that apparently never occurred to Hobbes was: how can those who are genuinely red in tooth and claw be brought to the negotiating table? And even more importantly: what would happen when you got them there? If, prior to the contract, we were all as nasty and brutish as Hobbes claimed, then wouldn’t we use the sort of gathering necessary for making a contract as a golden opportunity to massacre a rival or two, or otherwise stamp our authority over the competition? The contractual situation would be a disaster, a bloodbath. Lives would become poorer and more solitary, nastier and more brutish, and, without a shadow of a doubt, shorter. That’s the rub: contracts are only possible between civilized people. A contract, therefore, cannot be what made people civilized in the first place.
Despite the obvious truth that human civilization could never have been founded on a contract, some philosophers claim that it is useful to think of civilization as if it had been created in this way. The idea is that we can work out what a fair society – a just civilization – would look like by imagining that people had chosen to live by the rules of a contract, then working out what those rules would be. I used to think this way too, but not any more. The importance of the contract, I now think, lies in what it reveals about us – and, once again, this is a deeply unflattering facet of human nature.
Sometimes it is not what a theory says but what it shows that is important. Any theory will always be based on certain assumptions. Some of these may be explicit – the author of the theory may be aware of and acknowledge them. But there are always some assumptions that are not made explicit. Some assumptions may never be made explicit. The task of the philosopher is then, in essence, an archaeological one. Instead of digging into the soil, he digs deeper into the theory, uncovering, as far as his talent and persistence will allow, the hidden assumptions on which the theory has been based. This is what the theory shows, which is sometimes far more important than what it says.
What does the theory of the social contract show? It is supposed to be a story about the foundations and legitimacy of morality and civilization. The question is: what is it really about? The answer is: two things. One is more obvious than the other, but neither is flattering.
The first thing the theory of the social contract shows is our peculiarly human – or, more accurately, simian – obsession with power. The theory has a glaring consequence: you have no moral obligations to anyone significantly weaker than you. You contract with people for one of two reasons: because they can help you or because they can hurt you. You need some help? No worries: someone else will help you if you agree to help them when they need it. You want to safeguard yourself against murder, attack and enslavement? No problem: others will agree not to do this to you if you agree not to do it to them. But this means that you have reason to contract only with people who can help you or hurt you. The whole idea of a contract makes sense only if we assume at least a rough equality of power between contractors. This is an idea on which just about everyone who believes in the contract agrees. The consequence is that anyone significantly weaker than you – anyone who can neither help nor hurt you – falls outside the scope of the contract.
But remember that the contract is supposed to provide the justification for civilization, society and morality. Those who fall outside the scope of the contract fall outside the scope of civilization. They lie outside the boundaries of morality. You have no moral obligations to those who are significantly weaker than you. That is the consequence of the contractual view of civilization. The purpose of morality is to garner more power: that is the first thing the theory of the social contract shows – the first assumption on which the theory is based. Wildness or civilization: which is really red in tooth and claw?
If we dig deeper, we find the second unacknowledged assumption. The contract is based on a deliberate sacrifice for an anticipated gain. You give up something only because you anticipate getting something better in return. You sell your freedom for protection, because for you protection is superior to freedom. To be afforded the protection of the contract, to have others protect your interests, you have to be willing to protect theirs. And this can cost you – time, energy, money, your safety, perhaps even your life. The sacrifices you make to be afforded the protection of the contract are not always minimal; sometimes they are significant. You make them only because you believe you will get more in return.
But here is the critical loophole. You don’t really have to sell your freedom. You don’t really have to make these sacrifices. What is crucial is not that you make your sacrifices, but that other people believe that you do. I’ll watch your back, you say, if you’ll watch mine. But it doesn’t matter whether you really watch their back. What matters is that they believe you are watching it. The truth of your sacrifice is irrelevant. In the contract, image is everything. If you can acquire the rewards of the contract without making the requisite sacrifices, then you will, clearly, be at an advantage over the poor schmuck who actually does sacrifice their time, energy, money and safety. The contract – by its very nature – rewards deception. This is a deep, structural feature of the contract. If you can deceive, you garner the benefits of the contract while accruing none of the costs.
Cheaters never prosper, we tell ourselves. But the ape in us knows it’s not true. Clumsy, untutored, cheats never prosper. They are discovered and suffer the consequences. They are ostracized, excluded, despised. But what we apes despise is the clumsiness of their efforts, the ineptness, the gaucherie. The ape in us does not despise the cheating itself; on the contrary, it admires it. The contract does not reward deception; it rewards skilful deception.
The contract is supposedly what makes us civilized human beings. But the contract also supplies an unvarying pressure towards deception. That which made us civilized turned us also into deceivers. But, at the same time, the contract can work only if deception is the exception rather than the rule. If everyone was always successfully deceiving everybody else, any possibility of social order or cohesion would break down. So the contract turned us also into detectors of deception. The drive to become ever more skilful deceivers is accompanied by the ability to become ever more skilful detectors of deception. Human civilization, and ultimately human intelligence, are the products of an arms race – and the primary warheads are lies. If you are civilized and you are not a liar, then it is probably because you are not a good liar.
What does this say about us? What sort of animal would think of its most prized asset, morality, as grounded in a contract? What sort of animal would think that we can work out what a just or fair society would be like by thinking of it in terms of a hypothetical contract agreed to by its members? To a wolf, but apparently not an ape, the answer would be obvious: a deceiver.
I once wrote a book about the social contract. The inspiration was supplied by Brenin doing what he did best. On our first Christmas together in Ireland, we were travelling back to Wales to see my parents. Brenin always enjoyed going to Wales, despite some deep differences of opinion with Bonnie and Blue. My mother indulged him in ways I didn’t; and it was here that he first discovered the wonders of cheese. Cheese, I found, was far and away his favourite thing to eat, easily eclipsing the beef I had been buying for him. When my mother would cook something that required cheese, Brenin’s presence in the kitchen was non-negotiable. He would sit there, making a sound that is difficult to describe since no dog makes it. It was a short, sharp sequence of something midway between a bark and a howl. Wolves don’t bark – a bark is puppy behaviour and basically means, ‘Come and back me up. There’s something going on here that I’m really not too sure about.’ Brenin didn’t bark, though he did, every now and then, howl. But when he got excited – and cheese would set him off every time – he would emit a staccato series of ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa …’ This would be accompanied by the occasional bounce, and by something I had never seen him do before, and never imagined that he ever would: he sat up and begged. Eventually, my mother would toss him a piece of cheese and the whole process would begin again. This would entertain him for hours, if the meal took long enough to prepare. Eventually, meal preparation became tangential to the issue. Her presence in the vicinity of the refrigerator was enough to set him off.
This Christmas, we were travelling by Irish Ferries, from Rosslare to Pembroke. The ferry trip generally took around four hours. I had left Brenin in the car, since it was either that or the cages on the car deck – he wasn’t allowed upstairs with me. This was something I had done several times before, with no adverse consequences. I would generally take him for a long walk on the beach at Rosslare before we boarded, to tire him out a bit. On this occasion, however, about ten minutes or so before we docked in Pembroke, as we were heading up the Milford Haven waterway, I looked up from my book and there was Brenin, trotting happily through the upper passenger lounge, in the general direction of the restaurant. Several employees of Irish Ferries trailed in his wake, pretending they were trying to catch him, but in reality keeping a safe distance. I called out his name and, as with the notorious Hungry Man incident of five years earlier, he froze in mid-stride and looked over towards me with, slowly dawning on his face, the Wile E. comprehension that he was busted.
I had left the window of the car open just a little to give Brenin some air. At some point during the crossing, he had forced the window down, and climbed out. The car deck was supposedly locked, but I figured they must have opened it as we were travelling up the waterway, which allowed Brenin to escape. There he managed to navigate his way up four flights of stairs to the upper passenger lounge, perhaps looking for me, or, more likely, following the smell of food. I dread to think what might have happened had he actually made it to the restaurant. I remembered all too well what could happen in classes if a student was carrying food in a backpack they had neglected to fasten securely. I could picture diners running screaming from the ferry restaurant, with Brenin, paws on table, cheerfully devouring their abandoned food, beginning with the cheese-based dishes, of course.
On the way back after Christmas, I decided to forestall any possibility of carnage at the restaurant by making sure that the windows of the car were, this time, open only a fraction. As it turned out, this was a serious error of judgement on my part. Brenin tore the car apart, quite literally. By the time he had finished, and I had been alerted to what was happening, there was nothing left inside that was recognizably a car. The seats were torn to pieces, the seat belts were all chewed through and he had ripped down the padding on the ceiling with the result that it was almost impossible to see out. In addition, he had slashed open a big bag of dog food and spread its contents into every nook and cranny.
I was called down to the car deck by the desperately amused ferry employees, and stared incredulously at the inside of my car – or what remained of it – for a few minutes. I noticed that the attendant on the car deck was carrying a knife and I asked him if I could borrow it. I needed to cut down the dangling shreds of the ceiling if I was going to have any hope of seeing out on the attempted drive back home. The attendant seemed strangely reluctant to part with his knife and on examination it turned out that he thought I was going to kill Brenin. As if! I explained – apparently shock causes me to switch to lecturer mode – that while I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the way events had transpired, it was not something for which I could hold Brenin responsible. Brenin was not the sort of creature who could be morally responsible, I told the smirking car-deck guy. He was what’s known as a moral patient, but not a moral agent. Brenin didn’t understand what he was doing and so didn’t understand that it was wrong. He just wanted out. Brenin, like other animals, is the sort of creature that has rights – a right to a certain kind of treatment and lifestyle – but he does not have concomitant responsibilities. Then I did the only thing a self-respecting philosopher could do in these circumstances: I went home and wrote a book about it.
The basic idea was finding a way to get animals included in the social contract by making the contract fairer. Imagine there is a group of you and you have just ordered a pizza. How do you make sure everyone gets a fair slice? Here’s an easy way. Let one person slice it, but also make sure that he or she gets their slice last. If they don’t know which slice they are going to get, then they can’t arrange things in their favour. They have no option but to slice the pizza fairly. Now imagine the pizza is society. How do you ensure that the society you live in is a fair one? Just as we ensured a fair slicing of the pizza by making sure that the person who sliced it didn’t know which slice they were going to get, so we could ensure a fair society by allowing a person to choose how it is to be organized, but by making sure that when they choose this they don’t know who they are going to be in this society. This imaginative device was originally developed by the Harvard philosopher the late John Rawls. He called it the ‘original position’.
Rawls uses the original position as a way of making the contract fairer: for Rawls, social justice reduces to fairness. My argument was that Rawls had overlooked a source of unfairness in his development of the original position. Rawls insists on excluding knowledge of who you are and what you value when you choose how society is to be organized. You don’t know if you are going to be male or female, black or white, rich or poor, intelligent or stupid, and so on. Nor do you know f you are a religious person or an atheist, selfish or altruistic, etc. But he still allows that you know what you are and what you can do – you know you are human and you know you are rational. My argument was, in effect, that if you wanted to make the contract truly fair you had to exclude this latter sort of knowledge also. Moreover, I argued that Rawls was implicitly committed to excluding this sort of knowledge, even though he thought he wasn’t. So the upshot was the development of a form of Rawlsian contractarianism that Rawls would have hated. The benefits, however, involved not just including animals in the contract but also the sorts of humans that traditional versions of the contract excluded: infants, the senile, the insane, etc. In short: the weak.
The resulting book was Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence. If you can find a first edition, you’ll see Brenin on the cover. Though not my first book, it was the one that really got my career back on track after my seven-year party in Alabama. And the only price I had to pay was a worthless car and a lifetime without meat.
That was the real sting in the tail of Brenin’s appetite for destruction that day. Of course, the lesson wouldn’t have sunk in unless I was already thinking about social-contract views of morality – in fact I was teaching a graduate course on them at the time. But this unfortunate confluence of events entailed a rather bleak future as a vegetarian. If I was in the original position – my newer, fairer version of the original position – I wouldn’t choose a world in which animals are bred and raised for meat. They live miserable lives and die horrible deaths. And, since knowledge of species has to be excluded behind the veil of ignorance, for all I know in the original position I could be one of those animals. If you are in the original position it would be irrational to choose such a world. Therefore such a world is immoral. This was rather unfortunate, from my point of view, since I miss juicy steaks and fried chicken. But morality sometimes has a tendency to be inconvenient.
I was even a vegan for a while and, morally speaking, I really should still be one: it’s the only consistent moral position on animals. But while I’m not as bad a person as I might be, I’m really not as good a person as I should be. I did try to exact revenge on Brenin by making him become a vegetarian too; but he wasn’t having any of it. He refused, point blank, to eat the vegetarian dog meal I presented to him if it was on its own – and who can blame him? If I had mixed it up with a can of Pedigree Chum things would have been different, but that, of course, would have defeated the object of the exercise. In the end, we compromised: I became a vegetarian; he became a piscetarian. I would mix up vegetarian dry meal with a can of tuna – dolphin-friendly, obviously, and not yellowfin because of the mercury levels – and, sometimes, a few lumps of cheese. I hope he didn’t miss meat as much as I did – and, in fact, still do. I suspect he actually preferred his new diet – especially on those days I added in the cheese. If not, well, perhaps he should have thought about that when he was eating my car – and to hell with whatever I said to the car-deck guy.
Was it immoral of me to impose a diet on him? Some have told me it was. But consider the alternative. A couple of cups of meat-based dog meal plus a can of meat a day must have added up to several cows during the course of the rest of his life – even allowing for the fact that dry dog meal probably doesn’t contain anything like the amount of meat it claims. Brenin seemed to enjoy his new food, devouring it in much the same way as before, and I’m pretty sure a can of tuna tastes far better than a can of dog meat anyway. So, the new diet could be adopted at minimal, if any, inconvenience to him and didn’t require the death of several cows. If Brenin had refused to eat, or eaten less, or lost weight or become sick, then that would have been a very different matter. But, in short, the choice was between balancing some relatively trivial interests of Brenin against a vital interest of the cows. And that, in essence, is the moral case for vegetarianism: the vital interests animals have in avoiding miserable lives and horrible deaths outweighs the relatively trivial interests humans have in the pleasures of their palate. Of course, given that he was a piscetarian rather than a vegetarian, the new regime was a little harsh on the tuna. But they have much better lives than cows – or, at least, so I told myself.
The contract, I tried to show earlier, is really about two things: power and deception. My book, like pretty much everything else written about the contract in recent years, is about how to minimize the impact of disparities of power on moral decision-making. But this leaves the real problem untouched. You can’t address what is really wrong with the contract simply by trying to make it fairer. The real problem is deception and what underlies it: calculation. The contract, I now think, is a device invented by apes to regulate the interactions between apes.
Thinking about what is right and wrong through the prism of the contract gives us, in essence, a vision of morality as designed for strangers – the purpose of morality is to regulate the interactions between people who barely know each other and don’t particularly like each other. And if we think of morality in this way, of course we are going to arrive at the idea that justice – fairness – is the primary moral virtue: the ‘first virtue’, as Rawls put it, of social institutions. Morally speaking, how should strangers act to each other except with fairness?
However, in addition to a morality for strangers there is also a morality for those of the pack. Hobbes thought of nature as red in tooth and claw. When I think of nature, I think of six-week-old Brenin, the day I brought him back to my house for the first time: like a big, brown, cuddly, destructive teddy bear. For that is how he was prior to our mutual accommodation; before he was brought into my civilization. Nature is no more red and raw than what we call civilization; and there is no war of each against all. The lives of wolves can be short, but so too can ours. They are not solitary and are poor only in the way we measure things.
By the time Brenin and I had spent an hour or so together in the house on that May afternoon, I already loved the cuddly little nemesis of curtains and air-conditioning systems. I always would. He was not, of course, in any position to help me, and he could hurt me – as he already had – only in the pocket; and there was nothing I could do to change that. If there ever was a contract between us, then it was peripheral, and based on a morality that was more basic and more visceral. This morality preached not justice but loyalty.
When I made Brenin become a piscetarian, the decision was unusual in this respect. It was one of the few occasions on which I would put the interests of animals that I had never met and would never meet over and above the interests of my wolf. In this instance, I placed justice over loyalty. Admittedly I did so only because I decided that the demands of loyalty in this case were so attenuated – Brenin could adopt this new diet at little, if any, inconvenience to him – and the demands of justice were so unequivocal. But this, as I said, was rare. As I like to tell my students when we discuss moral dilemmas, if you had ever found yourself in a lifeboat situation with me and Brenin, you would have been s**t out of luck. They think I’m joking.
One of the hardest tasks in morality is to balance the demands of strangers with the demands of the pack: the requirements of justice with the insistent tug of loyalty. It is clear that philosophy, throughout much of its history, has emphasized that morality is for strangers. This, I think, is no accident but stems from our simian pedigree. When you think of society as a collection of strangers, then you will think of morality as a form of calculation whereby we try and work out what is the best outcome – by some standard of ‘best’ – for all concerned. And calculation is what the ape in us does best. We don’t look at our fellow apes; we watch them. We scheme, we conspire, we compute probabilities, we gauge possibilities; and all the while we wait for an opportunity to take advantage. The most important relationships in our lives are gauged in terms of surplus and deficit, profit and loss. What have you done for me lately? Do you fulfil me? What do I gain from being with you, and what do I lose? Can I do better? Calculation directed at society as a whole – moral rather than prudential calculation – is simply an extension of this basic skill. For us apes, it is natural to think in contractual terms, because the contract is nothing but a deliberate sacrifice for an anticipated gain. The idea of the contract is just a codification – a making explicit – of something that lies deep within us. Calculation runs to the core of the contract and to the heart of the ape in us. The contract is an invention by apes for apes – it can say nothing at all about the relationship between an ape and a wolf.
Why do we, at least some of us, love our dogs? Why did I love Brenin? I would like to think – and here I must lapse again into metaphor – that our dogs call out to something in the deepest recesses of a long-forgotten part of our soul. Here there dwells an older us – a part of us that was there before we became apes. This is the wolf that we once were. This wolf understands that happiness cannot be found in calculation. It understands that no truly significant relationship can ever be based on a contract. First there is loyalty. And this we must respect though the heavens fall. Calculation and contracts always come afterwards – as the simian part of our soul follows on from the lupine.