If animals are not things, we should probably renounce the selling, buying, and eating of them. Would that not lead to the complete disappearance of all animals that are not wild? Is this really what we wish for?
THE LIFE RAFT AND THE CHIMPANZEES
A life raft caught in a storm on the open sea is full to the brim.
It is occupied by some humans—adults who are comatose or who are senile—and by an equivalent number of young chimpanzees, who are lively and in perfect health.
1All will die if the raft is not rid of its excess weight.
Would it be right to throw overboard one or several chimpanzees, even if they are more reasonable or sociable than the comatose and senile old people, simply because they are not human, without any further argument?
We talk of “limit” or “marginal” cases in describing this kind of particularly shocking scenario.
2These “limit cases,” which we must obviously accord the status of thought experiment, without any political implication, serve in fact to illustrate the following reasoning:
1. There exist properties and capacities that serve as criteria for belonging to the moral community, that is, the class of beings that we cannot treat simply as things that are merely good to eat, to exploit, and to throw away once they have outlived their usefulness. Among these criteria, the most frequently advanced are self-consciousness and the capacity to plan and to anticipate, to deliberate and to choose, to feel sensations such as pleasure and pain and emotions such as fear, joy, and anger, and so on.
2. Now certain nonhuman animals possess these properties and capacities more than certain human animals do. Thus, according to Jeremy Bentham, “a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal, than an infant, of a day, or a week, or even a month, old.”
33. The argument from marginal cases consists in asking ourselves whether there exists a moral justification for the fact of according, in case of conflict, our preference to the human who possesses these properties and these capacities to a lesser degree than the nonhuman.
4. Those who are called “speciesists” assert that, even in these cases, the preference should go to the humans, while those who are called “antispeciesists” dispute the moral legitimacy of this choice.
In actual fact, the speciesists opt for a sort of positive discrimination toward humans.
Positive discrimination consists in according a systematic preference to certain people (as regards university entrance, in public life, and so on) not because their individual (intellectual or physical) qualities are superior, but because they belong to a certain category (the poor, ethnic minorities, and so on)
By the same token, the speciesists accord a preference to the members of the human species, from the moral point of view, among others, even when their individual capacities are inferior to those of animals.
The whole question, of course, is that of knowing what justifies this “positive discrimination” toward the members of the human species.
The antispeciesist argument of the “limit cases” is
continuist. It disallows any moral abyss between human and nonhuman animals. Each individual is judged according to certain qualities (such as the capacity to suffer or to understand) that may be common to the members of the two species.
For certain philosophers, the continuist argument is a mystification pure and simple. It rests upon criteria of distinction between humans and animals that are readily used to establish continuity between the two, such as the faculty of experiencing pleasure and pain or of living in company. But, they say, in order to reinstate the abyss between human and animal you merely have to alter the criteria. Some justify this abyss on the basis of the Kantian opposition between beings of nature and beings of liberty. Others highlight the criteria of the “normal characteristics of the species,” bodily form or social belonging.
None of the above criteria is conclusive.
“NATURE” AND “LIBERTY”
Luc Ferry: “In the name of what rational or even merely reasonable criterion could we claim in every scenario to be obliged to respect humans more than animals? Why sacrifice a chimpanzee in good health for a human being reduced to a vegetable? If we adopted a criterion according to which there is continuity between men and beasts, Singer would perhaps be right to regard as ‘speciesist’ the preference accorded to a human vegetable. If, on the other hand, we embrace the criterion of liberty, it is not unreasonable to admit that we should respect humanity, even in those who only manifest residual signs of it.”
4What Luc Ferry calls “liberty” is the possibility of positing actions that are disinterested, irreducible to selfish interests or to the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain, things that nonhuman animals are incapable of.
But his sarcastic illustration of this point completely misses its mark. He writes that we “have already seen men sacrifice themselves for whales,” whereas the converse is rarer.
5 Now, examples of altruistic, disinterested acts are really not lacking in the animal world, sometimes even between members of different species,
6 including acts for the benefit of humans. Does Luc Ferry think that dogs sacrificing themselves for their masters is a thing that only happens in cartoon strips?
Alberto Bondolfi proposes that we replace the criterion of actual individual capacities with that of potential individual capacities and of the capacities of the species to which an individual belongs.
His arguments go as follows: “The first [difficulty] is linked to what are called ‘marginal cases.’ Let us recall that man is ‘in general’ endowed with reason and free will but that these faculties are not to be found in all the members of the species. There are newborn babies, embryos, the mentally handicapped, or those who are asleep or in a coma, and no one wants to exclude them from the human species. For what reason, then, do we respect their right to life? We must review the overhasty speciesist arguments and advance a more compelling criterion.”
7According to Bondolfi, this criterion should be the principle of the potentiality of the members of a species: “It does not rest so much on the qualities and capacities to experience pain on an ad hoc basis in man or in the animal but on the habitually admitted capacities and qualities.”
8It is hard to see how this criterion could not be applied to human embryos and to the incurably and terminally ill, thereby wresting all legitimacy from voluntary interruptions of pregnancy and from medically assisted dying. But it is a conclusion that is too much at odds with numerous reasonable convictions to be readily accepted.
SOCIAL BELONGING AND BODILY FORM
Jean-Luc Guichet seeks to show that antispeciesism rests upon the forgetting of several criteria, such as social belonging and bodily form.
9Social belonging: “Marginal human cases are really not so marginal as all that: they do not come out of nowhere, they are linked to other humans by parental and familial attachments, they have a surname, and so on. Dealing with such-and-such a man, even one who is mentally handicapped, is therefore a matter of dealing not simply with him, but also with his kin, and more broadly with the particular communities (ethnic, regional, socioprofessional, national, and so on) with which he has some relations of belonging and which may stand in for him and hold me to account.”
Bodily form: “The overall form of the human body is not irrelevant to us, but serves us as a veritable ethical signal. We do not in fact have the time to ascertain that the humans we encounter daily are indeed human, and we are therefore forever habituated to considering them to be such, simply on the basis of their bodies, being thus conditioned to a veritable reflex of ethical recognition. The human body as such, without speech, naked, without expression, even entirely divested and minimal, that is, even purely “animal,” retains in our eyes something that transcends animality: an ethical value that it has attained for us since our own acceding to consciousness.”
But, as Jean-Luc Guichet himself points out: “What is to be done with regard to a human being so monstrous that we could not intuitively recognize him as such on the basis of his body?”
Besides, we may wonder just how the fact of invoking ties of belonging to human groups could morally justify speciesism. Mafiosi likewise invoke belonging to a group in order to justify preferential treatment. But they find it very difficult to convince others of the moral value of this criterion.
In other words, the criterion of bodily form is neither necessary nor sufficient, since there exist disfigured and mutilated monsters whom we still judge to be “human.” As for the criterion of social belonging, its moral value is doubtful.
In actual fact, it is hard to find good arguments that could justify the existence of a moral abyss between humans and animals. But the attempts to completely align the status of nonhuman animals with that of humans seem likewise doomed to failure. They culminate in paradoxical conclusions, at best.
If we were to treat nonhuman animals as we should treat humans, by absolutely excluding all forms of exploitation and instrumentalization and by completely abrogating their status as property, we would end up not with the liberation of nonwild animals but with their disappearance pure and simple, through extinction, liquidation, or sterilization.
10 Under these conditions, we cannot help but ask ourselves the following question, no matter how we view the fate to which animals are subjected: can we find the means to avoid the paradox that consists in causing the disappearance of all the individuals belonging to certain classes of nonhuman animals in the name of their liberation?
The fact that the question can be put for animals marks a huge difference between the animal liberation movement and the movements for the liberation of women, slaves, gays, and other minorities. To militate for the liberation of women from masculine domination may ultimately bring about the disappearance of certain traits that characterize women in societies with a high degree of sexual segregation, such as submissiveness or prudishness. But if militating for the liberation of women should bring about the disappearance of women
as individuals, the project would certainly be judged quite differently.
WHAT CRITERIA?
There is no criterion that could serve to justify the moral abyss between humans and animals without arousing controversy.
Does there exist a criterion that would enable us to establish moral continuity between humans and animals in an incontestable fashion?
Bentham has proposed such a criterion, namely, sentience, at the end of a famous argument that I have already evoked and that deserves to be cited in full: “The day
may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the
os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal, than an infant, of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they
reason? nor, Can they
talk? but, Can they
suffer?”11Is this criterion incontrovertible?
IS THE CRITERION OF SUFFERING SUFFICIENT?
For Bentham, the only moral question that we should ask ourselves with regard to animals is not “Can they
reason? nor, Can they
talk? but, Can they
suffer?”12Is this really the only question that we should ask ourselves?
We may reckon that the criterion of suffering is necessary. But it seems to me that the idea that it is sufficient can be ruled out, for the following three reasons:
1. It does not allow us to draw a clear distinction between harm (meaning “moral wrong,” a setback to another’s interests or rights) and injury (meaning physical, psychological, or economic pain).
2. It rules out all moral debate on the massive but painless slaughter of animals (supposing of course that industrial slaughter without suffering is conceivable, which is doubtful).
3. It does not really take into account the possibility that a short and mediocre life may be preferable to no life at all.
INJURIES AND HARM
The simple fact of causing physical suffering or of helping through our actions to cause the scales of pleasure and pain to tip to the side of pain does not in itself yet serve to establish that an injustice has been committed. Why? Simply because not every infringement of another’s integrity, not every suffering that has been inflicted upon him, is constitutive of a harm.
The routine physical injuries occasioned in violent sports such as Thai boxing or rugby football, or even in a surgical intervention to which one has agreed and which has proceeded according to the normal medical protocol, are not considered to be wrongs or harms.
A wrong or a harm is a kind of injury about which we must be able to say that it is unjust in one or another important respect.
13 By marrying someone, for example, you deprive all the other suitors of this possibility, and you certainly do them an injury thereby. But can we for all that speak of “harm”? It is hard to see what there is that is unjust in the fact of uniting your life with that of another, of privileging him in this fashion.
Besides, for there to be “injury,” the state in which the person who is supposed to have suffered it must be worse than that in which they were before. A one-legged person who demanded, after an accident, to be compensated for the leg that he did not have prior to the accident could not expect to be taken seriously.
In certain cases, the prior state is difficult to establish. Let us suppose that a child were born with a handicap against the wishes of its parents, who had been deceived by a reactionary doctor clandestinely combating a woman’s right to interrupt a pregnancy voluntarily. In order to assess the injury that the child has suffered, must we compare his state with the state that
would have been his if he had not been born (as his parents had wished)? But what kind of state is the state of “one who has not been born”?
The question obviously arises for animals consumed as food and serving as pets. The choice for them could well be between a short and painful life and no life at all. Which is preferable? In short, the passage from pain to harm raises complicated problems.
A final example: We admit that, in certain cases at any rate, consent cancels out a wrong: injuries suffered in combat sports are the most striking examples (if I can put it like that). But if animals are incapable of consenting in a sufficiently clear and explicit fashion, they cannot cancel out any wrong that is done to them. Must we conclude from this that the class of actions that can inflict wrongs upon animals is potentially much larger than the class of actions that can inflict wrongs upon humans?
This is the approach we take toward children. We can inflict many more wrongs on children than upon adults, for the simple reason that they can in no way consent to the injuries they suffer.
This is certainly a paradoxical conclusion for animals, for we tend rather to think that we cannot inflict as many wrongs upon them as upon humans, from the fact of the question of consent not arising at all so far as they are concerned.
We tend rather, it seems to me, to align the status of animals with that of fetuses than with that of newborn infants. Even those most opposed to abortion consider it to be a more serious thing intentionally to wound or to mutilate a fetus than to cause it to disappear altogether.
14And everyone seems to reckon that, even if it is better, in every case, not to do harm to a newborn child, it is less grave, on the scale of crimes, to wound it intentionally than to kill it.
One could say that, for animals as for fetuses, we consider it to be less grave to kill them than to cause them to suffer or to mutilate them while alive. The right to kill animals for certain ends presumed to be useful is, for the time being, broadly accepted. But the right to mutilate gratuitously, and to cause animals to suffer pointlessly, is less and less conceded.
A SHORT AND MEDIOCRE LIFE OR NO LIFE AT ALL
Suppose we admit that the existence of moral limit or marginal cases is sufficient to establish a certain moral continuity between human and nonhuman animals. We could draw two contradictory normative conclusions from this:
1. We must treat humans like animals.
2. We must treat animals like humans.
If spelled out, the first conclusion would mean that it is not illegitimate to treat humans as we treat animals today, that is, as beings whose exploitation knows no limits, whom we can kill, cause to suffer, ridicule, reduce to the state of an object for a scientific experiment if we have the means to do so and if it suits us. Conceding this principle would anyway only be putting right in accordance with the facts, and not conceding it would be purely hypocritical.
The second conclusion states that we must treat animals as we recognize that humans must be treated today, that is, positively by taking their interests into account and negatively by excluding all forms of exploitation or instrumentalization, and by abrogating their status as property. Humans should not be treated as slaves or as objects of consumption or experimentation. Animals should not be so treated either.
The first conclusion is unacceptable from the moral point of view: no moral conception, even one entirely at odds with the one to which we are accustomed, recommends this sort of conduct.
The second conclusion, though apparently more sympathetic, likewise poses problems.
If we treat nonhuman animals exactly as we should treat humans, positively by taking their interests into account and negatively by excluding all forms of exploitation or instrumentalization, and by abrogating their status as property, we will end up not with the liberation of domestic animals, be it their purpose to be consumed or to amuse, but with their disappearance pure and simple through extinction or liquidation.
EXTINCTION
According to the utilitarian philosopher Richard Hare, if we stop consuming animals, the meat market will collapse. There will be fewer and fewer animals bred for the purposes of consumption.
15 They could still be reared and exploited, because they produce milk and eggs, but in fewer numbers. Among those who will reproduce themselves, certain will become wild or domestic animals: they will lose the characteristics by which we know them.
Thus, cows, chickens, and pigs will gradually disappear, which will reduce the quantity of personal happiness of all those who appreciate them aesthetically and gastronomically, and also the sum of animal well-being.
For Hare, the moral argument “based on the wrongness of
killing animals collapses completely in the face of the objection that by accepting it we should in practice
reduce the number of animals, and thus the total amount of animal welfare.”
16For the argument to be acceptable, the sole criterion of animal wellbeing would have to be pleasure or the absence of pain, and we would have to be prepared to endorse what Parfit calls the “repugnant conclusion.”
17THE CRITERION OF PLEASURE AND PAIN
It is only if the slaughter of animals is completely painless that their consumption post mortem will not diminish too much the sum total of their well-being. This is how Bentham argued. Invoking reasons of general utility, he did not see any obstacle to the painless slaughter of animals: “we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have.”
18It is the same reasoning that today allows utilitarians committed to the animal cause such as Peter Singer to justify scientific experimentation on animals. It should be permitted, they say, if its advantages in terms of general well-being are incontestably greater than the suffering it causes, and if it is impossible to substitute another, equally effective procedure for it.
What the utilitarian excludes, on the other hand, is every act resulting in wounding or
gratuitously distressing an animal, which seems to be the case in cock fights, the corrida, recreational hunting and fishing, zoos, circuses with animals, and the testing of makeup. The pleasures or advantages we derive from them would then be out of all proportion to the bundle of sufferings thereby engendered.
19On the basis of these utilitarian premises, Richard Hare offers us a thought experiment that might agree with the idea that the breeding of animals for consumption is not necessarily an evil: “And if we put ourselves in the place of farmed trout?” Hare reckons that it cannot be so unpleasant for a trout to live in the waters of English fish farms, even if it is hardly a thrilling existence. He adds that, as a trout, he would not find it unfair to then be killed in order to be eaten, provided that he had been stunned beforehand: “I am fairly certain that, if given the choice, I would prefer the life, all told, of such a fish to that of almost any fish in the wild, and to non-existence.”
20 In this thought experiment, Hare seems to endorse the “repugnant conclusion.” What does it consist of?
THE REPUGNANT CONCLUSION
According to Parfit, an enormous quantity of short and miserable lives could have the same value in the calculation of the sum total of happiness as a small quantity of long and happy lives.
21 Such at least is the
repugnant conclusion that a utilitarian ought perforce to sustain, and this is why his overall conception should be judged to be morally defective. Without going so far, Hare asserts that it is better, for an animal, to have a life that is short and in the end fairly mediocre (because it ends on a human’s plate) than no life at all.
LIQUIDATION
The jurist Gary Francione reckons that what is wrong with our way of treating animals to be eaten, to be used for research, to keep us company, to work, or to amuse is the fact that we accord them the status of property.
22According to him, “our moral and legal acceptance of the importance of sentience has not resulted in any paradigm shift in our treatment of non-humans.”
23We admit, he says, that animals can suffer and, from this point of view, the contribution of the utilitarians is of inestimable value.
But if the utilitarians have shown that nonhuman beings deserve to be accorded the same consideration as human beings because they are, as much as humans, liable to suffer, they have not furnished any argument serving to abrogate the legislative provisions entitling us to sell, buy, hire, or destroy them.
24Now, it is their status as property that is at the origin of a great number of shocking treatments we inflict upon animals.
This is why, Francione asserts, “the efforts of animal advocates ought to be directed at promoting veganism and the incremental eradication of the property status of nonhumans.”
25In the end, he formulates the following radical claim: “If we took animals seriously and if we recognised the obligation we were under not to treat them as things, we would cease to produce domestic animals but also to facilitate their production. It would then be up to us to take care of those we have today, but we would cease to breed them for human consumption and we would leave domestic animals in peace. We would stop eating animals, making clothes out of them or using products of animal origin. We would consider vegetalism (veganism) to be beyond dispute the fundamental principle of morality.”
26 But this proposition, the logic of which is impeccable, would have the disadvantage of causing the complete disappearance of all animals, with the exception of wild animals. Pets would have no future if it were impossible to get hold of them.
Francione is not content simply to recognize this implication of his argument. He
embraces it. For him, it is not a question of simply letting domestic animals reproduce by themselves: “We should quite simply sterilise all living domestic animals, in order to ensure that every last one disappears: the only means of putting an end to their slavery. The extinction of domestic animals—with no distinction made between species serving as pets and those used for food—would be the sole remedy for our crimes.”
27 That is a state of affairs which we might well hesitate to promote. We should not forget that, if we can talk of progress in our moral relationship with animals, it is not simply because more and more humans today think that we should treat animals far better than we are treating them at present. It is also because we have stopped trying to treat them as humans, as responsible beings, answerable for their actions.
Apart from certain characters in Monty Python, no one seems any longer to regret the fact that nowadays we no longer stage grand trials of animals charged with breaches of public order, following due legal process and imposing the death penalty should the occasion arise, such as were held in the Middle Ages. This is the same process as has occurred in the case of children, whose interests and needs have been recognized, at the same time as limits have been set on their responsibility.
There are normative reasons for not treating animals as humans, even if, from the moral point of view, it does not seem possible to justify any radical difference.
Is it possible to envisage a certain type of relationship with nonwild animals that would exclude the right to own them, but that would not stop them flourishing?
