Animal Rights and Issues – Page 13

A follow up on rights for apes

Christopher wonders what I think about the Spanish Parliament’s recent move toward granting “the right to life, the freedom from arbitrary deprivation of liberty, and protection from torture” to great apes.

I touched on this briefly here, but that was mainly in the course of responding to William Saletan’s contention that animal equality of the sort supposedly favored by animal liberationists would be undermined by what he sees as a kind of creeping equality between humans and our nearest animal kin as a result of scientific discoveries. My point there was that “equality” in the sense favored by animal liberationists means the equal right of animals to have their interests –precisely as the kind of beings they are–taken into account. It doesn’t mean that animals all have the same interests, much less that human beings and animals would, in an animal liberationist utopia, have “equal rights.”

That said, I am broadly sympathetic to the aims of the Great Ape Project, if a little fuzzy on how these rights would be specified in law. As I read it, the underlying principle is that, with regard to these creatures, our general rule of thumb ought to be to do no harm and to enshrine a more or less hands-off policy. That makes sense to me: there’s really no good reason for us to keep great apes in captivity, to experiment on them, or to kill them (at least in so far as they don’t threaten vital human interests; at the margin there are always bound to be some conflicts between humans and animals, even if just in competition for resources).

There is arguably a case to be made for using apes in certain medical experiments given their similarity to human beings. But, in my judgment, the elimination or amelioration of some human diseases isn’t sufficient to justify imprisoning and experimenting on our cousins. This is where the much-discussed “argument from marginal cases” comes into play: we wouldn’t think it’s ok to use infants, or the severely mentally disabled as subjects in medical experiments, but great apes meet or exceed the mental capacity of at least some of these human subjects. So what makes it ok to use them? At the very least, the burden of proof is on would-be experimenters to show that there are no available alternatives.

The most common counterargument is usually that humans just count for more. But it’s possible to concede this and yet deny that our greater value gives us license to turn other creatures–particularly intelligent, social ones–into tools for use. If we really are worth more, than maybe the best way to show it is by being merciful to those over whom we have such great power. Incidentally, lest I be accused of diminishing the value of human life in order to raise the value of (non-human) animal life, I’d apply the same general principles to things like experimenting on human embryos. To use them as resources for experiments and medical treatment is, essentially, to deny them any non-instrumental value.

I am a little puzzled, along with the writer of the article Christopher links to, why Spain of all places would make this a priority since, it seems, there currently are no experiments being performed on apes there. After all, their national sport involves the bloody and pointless killing of bulls. Why not outlaw that?

July 13, 2008

The limits of Pollanism

UPDATE: Now with links!

The current issue of the American Conservative, in addition to featuring John‘s very cool cover story on “conservative cuisine” (which I may blog about later), carries Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan. This passage, where Dreher tries to draw a connection between Pollan’s “organic” conception of the environment and an organic conception of human society, caught my attention:

DREHER: What about human society as an organism? Many people think of Wendell Berry as a man of the Left because he criticizes humankind’s unnatural exploitative relationship to agriculture and the environment, but Berry has argued on similar grounds against the indvidualist sexual ethic pervasive in contemporary culture. Is he on to something?

POLLAN: Berry’s on to a lot of things. He’s a very wise man. Is he Right or Left? Those categories don’t fit him. He is a fierce critic of capitalism because he sees it destroying community, destroying traditional sexual relationships, destroying family. I agree with a lot of that, but not all.

There is a blind spot in a lot of contemporary conservatism–not understanding that while capitalism can be a very constructive force, it can also be very destructive of things that conservatives value.

DREHER: It’s also a blind spot of contemporary liberalism to fail to see how pursuing a sort of autonomous individualism when it comes to social forms undermines a community in the same way that capitalism does.

POLLAN: That’s right. The Left can be blind to that possibility also.

Now Pollan, being a good liberal, backs away somewhat from this idea, and with good reason – excessively “organic” conceptions of society tend to be quite illiberal. While everyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher agrees that our well-being is intimately tied up with our social context, traditional organic conceptions of society go much further than this.

The question, in essence, is whether individuals exist for the sake of society or whether societies exist for the benefit of their members. The former tended to be the pre-modern view, while the latter is more a result of a post-Enlightenment outlook. While any society may, under certain circumstances, call upon members to make sacrifices for its well-being (in times of war, say), a strong “social holism” sees the value of individuals as being entirely, or almost entirely, constituted by the contribution they make to the whole. This, in turn, has justified routinely sacrificing the interests of some group for the putative sake of the the well-being of the whole. For instance, keeping a permanent class of slaves might be justified on the grounds that it enabled a society to reach an otherwise unattainable level of art and culture.

Meanwhile, moderns generally see society as something that can, and should, be reformed in the interests of its members. Slavery is wrong, we think, because it permanently subordinates the interests of one group of people to others, regardless of what social goods it may or may not be conducive to. Likewise, over the centuries, the institution of marriage has been modified in light of widespread beliefs that it was hampering the well-being and happiness of various groups of people. Marriage based on property interest was challenged by marriage based on personal happiness. Patriarchial marriage was challenged by feminists. Exclusively heterosexual marriage is being challenged by gays and lesbians. And so on.

The underlying idea here is that social institutions exist in order to allow people to flourish and can be modified accordingly; people don’t exist for the sake of social institutions. You might even say that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

But, as Dreher suggests, an “organicist” way of thinking isn’t entirely foreign to Pollan’s outlook. Take, for instance, his discussion of animal rights in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan complains about the “individualism” of an animal rights movement that is concerned exclusively about the suffering and well-being of individual animals:

[T]he animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals. […] [Peter] Singer [insists] that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests–in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat–just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animal rights’ exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in nature? Is the individual animal the proper focus of our moral concern when we are trying to save an endangered species or restore a habitat? (p. 323)

Now, I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that “surely a species has interests” looks to me like it’s stealing a few argumentative bases. In fact, it’s far from obvious to me that a species has interests and I have a hard time seeing why the goods Pollan refers to couldn’t be secured by focusing on indvidual animals. After all, don’t individual animals have interests in survival and in the health of their habitat? What is gained, exactly, by positing an additional entity – the species – that has interests over and above the interests of its members?

Pollan here seems to be expressing sympahty with the ecological analogue of social holism, a view usually traced back to Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” where an action is right when “it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” This ecological holism, like its social counterpart, locates value in the whole, with the value of individuals playing a subordinate role.

In my view, the problem with ecological holism, like social holism, is that it can all too easily justify the sacrifice of sentient creatures for the alleged benefit of the whole. After all, if the value of individuals consists in their contribution to the whole, their interests don’t carry any weight apart from whatever contribution they may or may not make. Instead of being concerned with individuals, it gives overriding precedence to the whole. This is why Tom Regan dubbed ecological holism – perhaps unfairly – “eco fascism.”

Fortunately, hardly anyone actually adheres to the strong versions of social or ecological holism that would deny any intrinsic value to individuals, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Pollan does. Nevertheless, there is a real opposition between pre-modern social organicism and ecological holism on the one hand, and post-Enlightenement social ethics and animal liberation on the other which focus on the well-being of individuals. The former give precedence to the “stability” and “integrity” of the whole, while the latter focus on the interests of individuals. Both the traditional pre-modern conservative and the ecological holist can tend toward the affirmation that “Whatever is, is right.” We see Pollan doing this when he justifies meat-eating as “natural,” as though morality doesn’t often require us to do things that are “unnatural.”

I don’t think it’ll come as a shock to anyone if I put my cards on the table and say that, at least in this case, I’m with the small-l liberals, animal rightists, and other post-Enlightenment philosophies. Which is not to say that there aren’t legitimate critiques of these philosophies – especially in their more extreme individualist forms. Certainly, part of an individual’s value lies in her role in community and the good of the whole can, in particular instances, trump the good of an individual, but, overall, a community has to be judged by the extent to which it enables its members to lead flourishing, satisfying lives.

July 6, 2008

What kind of equality?

Following up a bit on this post, in his book Morals, Reason, and Animals, philosopher S.F. Sapontzis has a helpfully clear discussion of just what animal liberationists are and are not claiming when they talk about “equal rights” for animals.

First, animal liberationists do not claim that animals do, or should, have all the same rights as human beings. This would be absurd, because animals don’t have an interest in, say, the right to an education or freedom of religion. “Recognizing that rights are tied to interests and that animals do not have all the interests we do (e.g., in religion and education), animal liberationists recognize that it would be nonsensical to seek for animals all the rights we require” (p. 79). Sapontzis identifies three broad rights that liberationists might agree they are seeking for animals: 1) the “right to live their lives according to their nature, interests and intelligence,” 2) the “right to live in a habitat ecologically sufficient for normal existence,” and 3) the “right to be free from exploitation” (p. 79). This is pretty radical stuff, but hardly the same thing as granting animals the same rights as human beings.

Second, liberationists aren’t committed to saying that the rights of animals do, or should, enjoy equal priority with the rights of human beings. He quotes Peter Singer to this effect:

A rejection of speciesism does not imply that all lives are of equal worth.[…] It is not arbitrary to hold that the life of a self-aware being, capable of abstract thought, of planning for the future, of complex acts of communication, and so on, is more valuable than the life of a being without these capacities. (quoted on p. 79)

And, lest this be thought a particular quirk of Singer’s utilitarianism, Tom Regan takes a similiar position in his The Case for Animal Rights.

In cases of genuine conlfict, then, such as so-called lifeboat scenarios, there is nothing irrational about holding that animals have the sort of basic rights listed above and that human rights should take precedence. As Sapontzis puts it,

We cannot infer from the principles used when we are forced to choose the lesser of two evils to the principles of moral status in force when such a hard choice is not required. Such emergency principles are invoked not as extensions of common moral principles but as auxiliaries needed because those common principles do not provide satisfactory guidance in these uncommon situations. Consequently, it is not self-contradictory to say that when we can fulfill both human interests (e.g., in food) and animal interests (e.g., in life), we ought (morally) to do so, but when we cannot fulfill the interests of both, we ought (morally) to give preference, within the bounds of fairness, to fulfilling the interests of those beings capable of the greater range of moral actions. (p. 80)

Talking about “equality” for animals, then, means allowing that they have an equal right, other things being equal, to have their particular interests respected:

Thus, animal liberation seeks neither to extend to animals the same set of rights enjoyed by humans nor to deny that normal human life–assuming that we ordinarily have a greater range of capacities for making the world a morally better place and will put these capacities into action–can have a greater moral worth than animal life. Rather, animal liberationists contend that just as it would be immoral to follow Swift’s “modest proposal” routinely (and avoidably) to sacrifice some people’s interest in life in order to fulfill others’ interest in food, so it should be immoral routinely (and avoidably) to sacrifice animals’ interest in life for such purposes. (p. 81)

Sapontzis concedes that what is or is not “avoidable” is an empirical question, and something to be determined on a case-by-case basis. But what is incontestable, I think, is that, by and large, we scarcely give that question any consideration. That’s the difference between animal liberation and anti-cruelty movements, laudable as those might be. Anti-cruelty movements accept the routine use of animals for human purposes as a given; meanwhile, the whole point of animal liberation is to challenge it.

July 3, 2008

Of great apes and red herrings

William Saletan reports on a movement afoot in Spain to grant “basic rights” to great apes – a group that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. A resolution approved by a Spanish parliamentary committe would “commit the government to ending involuntary use of apes in circuses, TV ads, and dangerous experiments.”

The resolution is based on the work of the Great Ape Project, a group co-founded by Peter Singer, whose goal is to extend “the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans” and to extend to them the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.

Saletan, however, makes a somewhat strange claim. Since, he says, GAP’s argument for the extension of basic rights to great apes is based on certain “morally significant qualities” that scientific research has shown them to possess, the animal rights argument for the equality of all animals is thereby undermined:

These are appeals to discrimination, not universal equality. Most animals don’t have a rich cultural life. They can’t make tools. They don’t teach languages. Singer even points out that “chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have long-term relationships, not only between mothers and children, but also between unrelated apes.” Special rights for animals in committed relationships! It sounds like a Moral Majority for vegans.

Opening your mind to science-based animal rights doesn’t eliminate inequality. It just makes the inequality more scientific. A rat can’t match a pig, much less a boy. In fact, as a GAP board member points out, “We are closer genetically to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.”

George Orwell wrote the cruel finale to this tale 63 years ago in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” That wasn’t how the egalitarian uprising in the book was supposed to turn out. It wasn’t how the animal rights movement was supposed to turn out, either.

Asserting a level of basic rights for animals doesn’t depend on the kind of empirical equality that Saletan seems to think. Just as human rights don’t vary according to people’s intelligence, usefulness, artistic skill, personal charm, or physical attractiveness it’s quite possible to contend for a basic level of moral consideration for animals that isn’t tied to things like having a cultural life, making tools, etc. As Jeremy Bentham memorably put it, the question is not “Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Or, to put it more precisely, the morally significant fact about animals, at least the higher ones, is that they are beings for whom things can go better or worse, they have interests, and experience life from a particular point of view.

Even before I read Tzachi Zamir’s fine book, I thought that the whole debate about “speciesism” was a bit of a red herring. Even allowing that human beings are superior to animals in whatever way you like, it doesn’t follow that we can simply treat them anyway we want to. An animal doesn’t have to be morally equal to a human being to deserve not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The reasoning for this conclusion proceeds from basic notions of justice, fairness, and compassion and doesn’t, as Zamir argues, require a radical revision in our concepts of human worth. Most of us already accept the idea that we shouldn’t inflict unnecessary suffering on animals; it’s just that we have a very low threshold for what we consider to be “necessary.” If we were more consistent in our application of this principle, we’d be well on the road to a full-throated program of animal liberation, or so I would argue.

In fact, it may the very differences between animals that help ground a program of animal rights. It’s living a life befitting an ape – and not being imprisoned, experimented on, or used for human entertainment – that constitutes an ape’s well-being. We don’t need to try and make apes equal with humans, but we might want to think about letting them be apes.

[UPDATE: Edited slightly for clairty]

July 1, 2008

An ethic of sustainable use

I got an e-mail with a link to this interview with Michael Pollan (You too can subscribe to the Michael Pollan e-mail list!) at this new site sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Three points stood out for me. One, the primary distinction between food systems is fossil fuel-based vs. solar energy based. Two, food is inherently a political issue because “your health is inseparable from the health of whole food chain that you’re a part of.” Three, there is a tension between the “wildnerness ethic” of classical environmetnalism and the “sustainability ethic” that is more focused on how we should live in the world which we inevitably change by being here. Bill McKibben describes this as the tension between the Edward Abbey outlook and the Wendell Berry outlook. Both are necessary, he says, but one emphasizes a “hands off” approach to nature while the other emphasizes the notion of good stewardship in the ways that we cultivate nature.

Pollan thinks that we’re living in a time when we need more emphasis on the sustainability ethic:

We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. You know, eight percent of the American landmass we’ve kind of locked up and thrown away the key. That’s a wonderful achievement and has given us things like the wilderness park.

This is one of our great contributions to world culture, this idea of wilderness. On the other hand, it’s had nothing to say of any value for the ninety-two percent of the landscape that we cannot help but change because this is where we live. This is where we grow our food, this is where we work. Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development — parking lot, lawn.

That seems right to me. As I mentioned in my previous post, Tzachi Zamir distinguishes between using and exploiting animals, where the former is sometimes permissible. We can, he says, enter into reciprocal relationships with animals that we benefit from, but which the animals also benefit from in a way that makes them better off than they would’ve been in the wild. Keeping some kinds of pets, he argues, are examples of this kind of relationship. Exploitation, on the other hand, is when the animal is made worse off than it would’ve been otherwise – we benefit at the animal’s expense.

I’m not sure this distinction is completely generalizable, but it might help in thinking about what an ethic of sustainability (vs. one of exploitation) would look like. Organic farming vs. farming that sucks the nutrients out of land and requires chemical fertilizers to keep it arable might be an example of “use” vs. “exploitation.”

UPDATE: Thinking about this a bit more – obviously there’s a sense in which it’s difficult to think of “the land” as having interests in the same way that animals do, nevertheless it still seems reasonable to say that it can be made better or worse off in an objective, if not subjective sense. What I mean is that the land, understood as an ecosystem, has a certain telos that can be frustrated by things we do to it. The more interesting question is whether the land can actually be made better off by us than it would’ve been if we’d simply left it alone. Or is any development simply a concession to our needs? From a theological perspective, there are reasons for thinking that the cultivated garden is superior to sheer wilderness, but there are also reasons for thinking that the wilderness is as God intended it to be. Worth thinking about some more…

June 27, 2008

Eating local vs. going meatless

An interesting, though longish, post at the “Ethicurean” reporting on a new study that contends that how food is produced is more important than how far it has traveled (“food miles”) as far as greenhouse gas emissions go. Specifically, reducing your meat consumption can go further than buying local toward reducing your footprint. Not that there aren’t other good reasons for buying local, as the post points out.

My hunch, though, is that, as far as individual consumers go, this all remains largely guesswork until we put a price on greenhouse emissions, whether through a tax or some cap-and-trade scheme. Not least because it’s often difficult if not impossible for individuals to know how their food was produced or how far it traveled to get to their plate.

June 25, 2008

Humane California

As far as California ballot initiatives go this year, all eyes will undoubtedly be on the one to overturn the state supreme court’s recent decision on same-sex marriage. But allow me to draw your attention to another ballot intitiative of potentially far-reaching consequence: the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which would phase out phase out veal crates, gestation crates, and battery cages. As Erik Marcus puts it, “There’s probably never been a more important campaign in the animal protection movement’s history, both in terms of the number of animals affected and the precedent it will set for outlawing factory farming cruelties elsewhere in the United States.” Unsurprisingly, an industry group–called, ironically, Calfornians for Safe Food–is raising funds to defeat the measure. Wayne Pacell of the Humane Society details those efforts here.

Opposition to the most egregious practices of factory farming is something that I think pretty much all people of good will can get behind. You don’t need to be a vegan or vegetarian to think that the animals we raise for food shouldn’t be subjected to extreme confinement and their attendant cruelties. Not to mention the fact that factory farms are huge contributers to environmental despoilation and, arguably, the destruction of rural communities.

I’m not much of a proselytizer, but if you’re a resident of the Golden State, you might want to consider voting yes on this measure. The rest of us can, if we’re so inclined, contribute to the effort here.

June 24, 2008

“Food nannyism” and animal cruelty

Jim Henley offers the obvious, but no less sound for that, rebuttle to worries that lump things like banning trans fats and foie gras into the category of “food nannysim”:

In a video bemoaning food nannies, Baylen Linnekin, who is a good guy and whose writing I enjoy, begs a question. He declares NYC’s bans on trans fats and foie gras to be the same kind of lamentable “Nanny State” restriction. This is surely true if geese are like lipids and smearing pans or mixing foodstuffs with fats is like forcing food down the throats of living birds. But if they’re not, we have issues.

A lot of anti-animal rights arguments, especially those produced by (ahem, industry funded) think tanks, make much hay out of “nanny statism” and the supposed infringement on consumer freedom that would result from serious animal welfare measures. But, as Mr. Henley makes plain, the equation changes once sentient creatures are involved. Whatever we might think of paternalistic measures like trans fat bans, animal abuse is not a victimless crime.

June 20, 2008

Sanctuary cities

There was a nice article in today’s Washington Post about a trip to an animal sanctuary in New York state. Sometimes the question is posed to vegetarians whether farm animals wouldn’t die out if we all abandoned meat-eating, since the reason that so many cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals exist in the first place is because we raise them for food. As a defense of factory farming this is incredibly weak; after all, merely bringing a creature into existence hardly licenses treating that creature any way you like. But as a defense of animal agriculture (suitably reformed) it may seem to have more weight since it does seem like the world would lose something if those animals were to become extinct. However, I wonder if something like these farm animal sanctuaries provide an alternative model for how a “post-meat” society might choose to keep them around.

In his book Animals Like Us the philosopher Mark Rowlands addresses this issue:

One of the consequences of widespread vegetarianism would be a massive reduction in the numbers of these animals. But what’s wrong with this? If, say, there are only 400 cows in the world instead of, say, 400 million, why should this matter? Answer: it does not. Whether it harms any of these cows depends on the individual interests of each cow, and there is no reason to suppose that the interests of an individual cow in any way involve the numbers of others of its kind, at least not as long as there are enough of these others around to provide it with companionship in a normal social setting. The welfare of each individual cow is completely unaffected by whether there are 400 or 400 million others of its kind. Vain and complex species that we are, we tend to worry about things like “the future of the human race.” So, it might be in our interests to have large numbers of humans around, because we worry about such things, and our (overinflated) view of our role in the universal scheme of things demands our continuation. But cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep certainly do not worry about the size of their species. As long as there are enough of them to form a normal social group, they’re happy.

It might be true that the elimination of a species or sub-species is a cause for regret, even if that species has been artificially created by a eugenic selective-breeding regime. But vegetarianism does not require the elimination of species. If we are worried about this, then we can always turn over areas of land — maintained by public funds — for grazing by animals that we currently eat. In a vegetarian world, perhaps we might want to do this anyway, as a living memorial to the morally bankrupt ways of our forbears. (p. 120)

I’m more concerned than Rowlands appears to be that the extinction of species — even an “aritificial” one — might be a bad in itself, despite not affecting the interests of individual animals beyond their need for a sufficiently large social group. Each species is good in its kind and makes up a valuable part of the whole, which would seem to me to tell against its wanton elimination. I also think it might be possible for humans to have benign relationships with farm animals, as both the Post article, much farm writing (e.g. John Katz’s articles), and countless people’s experiences attest. So, preserving the possibility of those unique kinds of relationships might be another reason for making sure farm animal species don’t go extinct, in the unlikely event of widespread vegetarianism. Which is why the farm sanctuary is an intriguing model for post-animal husbandry arrangements.