THE VERY INTERESTING question that now arises is this: How does ethical change in individuals, subgroups of society, and society as a whole occur? As is well known, moral judgments are not verified or falsified by reference to experiment or to new data gathered about the world—indeed, recognition of this fact has led twentieth-century science to conclude erroneously that science is “value-free” in general and “ethics-free” in particular. In any event, the knowledge that ethics is not validated by gathering empirical information has led some people to conclude that the only way to change anyone’s (or any society’s) ethical beliefs is by emotion and propaganda—and that reason has no role.
The best account of the subtle way in which ethical change occurs in a rational manner is given by Plato in the dialogue Meno. Plato explicitly states that people who are attempting to deal with ethical matters rationally cannot teach rational adults, they can only remind them. Whereas one can teach one’s veterinary students the various parasites of the dog and demand that they spit back the relevant answers on a quiz, one cannot do that with matters of ethics, except insofar as one is testing their knowledge of the social ethic as objectified in law—what they may not do with drugs, for example. (Children, of course, are taught ethics.)
Some years ago I experienced an amusing incident that underscores this point. That year I had a class of particularly obstreperous veterinary students. Throughout the course they complained incessantly that I was only raising ethical questions, not giving them “answers.” One morning I came to class an hour early and filled the blackboard with a variety of maxims, such as, “Never euthanize a healthy animal”; “Always tell the whole truth to clients”; “Don’t castrate without anesthesia”; “Don’t dock tails or crop ears”; and so on. When the students filed into class, I told them to copy down these maxims and memorize them. “What are they?” they asked. “These are the answers,” I replied. “You’ve been badgering me all semester to give you answers; there they are.” “Who the hell are you to give us answers?” they immediately chorused.
This illustrates the first part of Plato’s point, that one cannot teach ethics to rational adults the same way one teaches state capitals. But what of his claim that though one cannot teach, one can remind?
In answering this question, I always appeal to a metaphor from the martial arts. One can, when talking about physical combat, distinguish between sumo and judo. Sumo involves two large men trying to push each other out of a circle. If a one-hundred-pound man is engaging a four-hundred-pound man in a sumo contest, the result is a foregone conclusion. In other words, if one is simply pitting force against force, the greater force will prevail. On the other hand, a one-hundred-pound man can fare quite well against a four-hundred-pound man if the former uses judo, that is, turns the opponent’s force against him. For example, you can throw much larger opponents simply by “helping them along” in the direction of their attack on you.
When you are trying to change people’s ethical views, you accomplish nothing by clashing your views against theirs—all you get is a counterthrust. Far better to show that the conclusion you wish them to draw is implicit in what they already believe, albeit unnoticed. This is the sense in which Plato talked about “reminding.”
As one who spends a good deal of my time attempting to explicate the new ethic for animals to people whose initial impulse is to reject it, I can attest to the futility of ethical sumo and the efficacy of moral judo. One excellent example leaps to mind. Some years ago I was asked to speak at the Colorado State University Rodeo Club about the new ethic in relation to rodeo. When I entered the room, I found some two dozen cowboys seated as far back as possible, cowboy hats over their eyes, booted feet up, arms folded defiantly, arrogantly smirking at me. With the quick-wittedness for which I am known, I immediately sized up the situation as a hostile one.
“Why am I here?” I began by asking. No response. I repeated the question. “Seriously, why am I here? You ought to know, you invited me.”
One brave soul ventured, “You’re here to tell us what is wrong with rodeo.”
“Would you listen?” said I.
“Hell no!” they chorused.
“Well, in that case I would be stupid to try, and I’m not stupid.”
A long silence followed. Finally someone suggested, “Are you here to help us think about rodeo?”
“Is that what you want?” I asked.
“Yes,” they said.
“Okay,” I replied, “I can do that.”
For the next hour, without mentioning rodeo, I discussed many aspects of ethics: the nature of social morality and individual morality, the relationship between law and ethics, the need for an ethic for how we treat animals. I queried the cowboys as to their position on the latter question. After some dialogue they all agreed that, as a minimal ethical principle, one should not hurt animals for trivial reasons. “Okay,” I said. “In the face of our discussion, take a fifteen-minute break, go out in the hall, talk among yourselves, and come back and tell me what you guys think is wrong with rodeo—if anything—from the point of view of your own animal ethics.”
Fifteen minutes later they came back. All took seats in the front, not the back. One man, the president of the club, stood nervously at the front of the room, hat in hand. “Well,” I said, not knowing what to expect, nor what the change in attitude betokened, “what did you guys agree is wrong with rodeo?”
The president looked at me and quietly spoke: “Everything, Doc.”
“Beg your pardon?” I said.
“Everything,” he repeated. “When we started to think about it, we realized that what we do violates our own ethic about animals, namely, that you don’t hurt an animal unless you must.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ve done my job. I can go.”
“Please don’t go,” he said. “We want to think this through. Rodeo means a lot to us. Will you help us think through how we can hold on to rodeo and yet not violate our ethic?”
To me this incident represents an archetypal example of successful ethical dialogue, using recollection, and judo rather than sumo.
This example has been drawn from an instance that involved people’s personal ethics; the social ethic (and the law that mirrors it) has essentially hitherto ignored rodeo. But it is crucial to understand that the logic governing this particular case is precisely the same logic that governs changes in the social ethic as well. Here also, as Plato was aware, lasting change occurs by drawing out unnoticed implications of universally accepted ethical assumptions.
An excellent example of this point is provided by the civil rights movement in general, and more particularly by Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson’s shepherding of the thinking and political activity that led to the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964. As an astute politician, and particularly as an astute southern politician, Johnson had his finger on the pulse of how American segregationists were thinking. He realized that the social zeitgeist had progressed to the point that most Americans, even most southerners, accepted two fundamental premises, one ethical and one factual. The ethical assumption was that all humans should be treated equally in society, and the factual assumption was that blacks are humans. The problem was that many people had never bothered to put the two premises together and draw the inevitable conclusion, namely, that blacks should be treated equally. Johnson believed that if this simple deduction were put into law at that particular time, most people would “remember” and be prepared to bow to the inevitable conclusion. Had he been wrong, the Civil Rights Act would have been as meaningless as Prohibition, where a small subgroup of society attempted to force (sumo) its ethic on everyone else.
We have, in fact, over the last sixty years, lived through a good deal of Platonic ethical recollection regarding the ignored consequences of our accepted social ethic. We have seen that ethic rightfully extended not only to blacks but to women and other disenfranchised minorities when there was no morally relevant basis for withholding it. To deny an otherwise qualified woman admission into veterinary school, for example, on the grounds that she is a woman (a practice that was rife in these schools until the late 1970s) is as much a violation of the implications of our social ethic as is segregation. Nonetheless, getting people to recollect is a long, hard process, despite the simplicity of the argument on paper. But, still and all, social recollection has occurred, and we have become very much sensitized to remembering those groups of people hitherto disenfranchised and ignored.
The importance of judo—or recollection—cannot be overestimated. Too often we clash like linemen over ethical matters. We forget that, as remarked earlier, our ethical similarities, like our anatomical ones, are far greater than our differences. We are all brought up under the same laws and the same Judeo-Christian ethic; we watch the same movies and television programs, read the same newspapers and magazines, and share major portions of a culture. It is thus reasonable to assume that, if I detect something morally problematic, you will as well—if the problem is presented to you in such a way that you willingly, reflectively examine your own moral response rather than erect defenses. Thus social-ethical change as well as personal-ethical change proceeds optimally by recollection.
In fact, most of the ethical revolutions I alluded to as taking place over the last half century have also, like civil rights, depended on creating social recollection. In part because of the ingression of large numbers of women into the workforce during World War II as key players in the defense industry, society was better prepared than it had traditionally been to see women as humans protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. A very similar realization helped drive the extending of protections to disabled Americans by the Americans with Disabilities Act. As a society, we began to realize that just because someone is confined to a wheelchair does not mean that they cannot function as a physician, or a lawyer, or a computer programmer, or, as in the famous World War II case of the legless wing commander Douglas Bader, who was strapped into a plane, a fighter pilot.
What does the foregoing have to do with creating a higher moral status for animals than they have historically enjoyed? If people do seek expansion of traditional limited ethics for animals, they are far more likely to look to our extant ethic for people than to generate a totally new ethic out of whole cloth. Although risking being called anthropomorphic, ordinary people who see animals confined in tiny cages will respond by saying, “How would you like to live under those kinds of conditions?”—implicitly applying ethical notions for people to animals. Obviously, much of the societal ethic will fail or fall short when exported to animals, but a good deal will not insofar as humans share a fair number of needs and desires with other animals, such as the need for security, food, water, companionship, stimulation, exercise, avoidance of pain, and myriad others. And so the fundamental question for anyone attempting to extend all or part of our social-ethical concerns to other creatures is this: Are there any morally relevant differences between people and animals that compel us to withhold the full range of our moral machinery from animals?
Answering this question occupied most of the thinkers who were trying to raise the moral status of animals during the 1970s and 1980s. While most philosophers working on this question did not affirm that there is no moral difference between the lives of animals and the lives of humans, there was a general consensus among them that the treatment of animals by humans needs to be weighed and measured by the same moral standards by which we judge the moral treatment of humans. Thus, for example, more and more people today judge severe agricultural confinement systems applied to animals more or less the way we would judge very severe confinement systems utilized to incarcerate humans: as constituting torture. If we are more comfortable with euthanizing suffering animals than euthanizing suffering people, it is very likely because we realize that death means something quite different to an animal than to a human. For animals, life exists more in the “now” than it does for people since animals generally lack future “projects,” whereas such projects define “the meaning of life” for people, including things like “finishing my novel,” “visiting Ireland one last time,” and “seeing my grandchildren graduate college.” The difference in future perspectives makes us far more hesitant to euthanize people to alleviate suffering, as does our poorly defined but widely believed notion that humans have free will while animals do not. It also makes us more willing to kill animals for food, provided the animals have had a good life. In the case of humans, Aristotle’s dictum “Count no man happy until he is dead” seems more appropriate because we see human lives as far more complex than a series of “nows.”
On the other hand, there are a considerable number of thinkers who have tried to deny a continuum of moral relevance across humans and animals and have presented arguments and criteria that support the concept of moral cleavage between the two. Many of these claims are theologically based. Most famous, perhaps, is the Catholic view that humans have immortal souls and animals do not, omnipresent across the Catholic tradition but with major exceptions that have been chronicled very deftly in the writings of Rod Preece. My own first book on the moral status of animals, Animal Rights and Human Morality (2006), originally published in 1982, devotes a good deal of attention to refuting such claims, including the notions that humans are more powerful than animals, are “superior” to animals, are higher on the evolutionary ladder than animals, are capable of reason and language while animals are not, are moral agents while animals are not, even that humans feel pain while animals do not. These fundamentally theologically based arguments draw a hard and fast line between humans, who have thoughts and feelings, and animals, who do not. (Regarding the claims about animals’ lacking mind and the ability to feel pain, see my 1989 book The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science.) Mirabile dictu, it was not until the summer of 2012, at an international conference in Cambridge, England, that the scientific community stated that animals are conscious, a proposition by no means universally accepted by all scientific fields and individual scientists even today. We will shortly discuss the ideology in which the skeptical view of animal mind is embedded.