A Thinking Reed

Category: Animals

  • All dogs go to heaven

    Well, Luther thought so.

  • Animals in a war zone

    Fascinating article by conservationist Lawrence Anthony about his efforts to protect zoo animals (and others) in Baghdad during the war.

    It’s an interesting question for the ethics of war: has anyone ever considered animals as potential “collateral damage”?

  • Notes on an animal theodicy and soteriology

    Early in my blogging career (on Verbum Ipsum, my Blogspot predecessor to ATR) I, perhaps with delusions of grandeur, wrote a five-part series called “The Atonement and the Problem of Evil” (the series is archived here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V). My reason for writing it was a hunch that the problem of evil is best addressed not just by trying to answer the question “Why is there so much evil in the world?” but also by talking about what God is doing about the evil in the world. Theodicy should not be separated from soteriology, in other words.

    I think it holds up fairly well, but in retrospect I see that I neglected an important topic, the problem of animal suffering. Many thinkers including C.S. Lewis and one of my old teachers, philosopher (and atheist) William Rowe see the problem of animal suffering as one of the most difficult problems for any theodicy. This is because none of the standard responses to human suffering seem available for dealing with non-human suffering. Animals can’t be morally improved by suffering, nor can they be said to deserve their suffering as punishment for sin. It can’t even be chalked up to a necessary consequence of free will, since we don’t think animals have free will, at least not in sense used by traditional “free will” theodicies. In short, much animal suffering seems to be severe, gratuitous, and without redeeming features of any sort. The question, then is whether we have reason to believe that God is a) concerned about animal suffering and b) is going to do something about it.

    I think we do have reasons to believe that God is concerned about animal suffering and will do something about it based on the kind of God that we believe he has revealed himself as. All Christians agree that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reveal the character of God. This character is one of self-giving love that enters into solidarity with us by sharing our human condition. And this love is exemplified on the Cross as nowhere else: Jesus “loved his own to the end” (Jn. 13.1). But does this have any relevance for animal suffering? In his Animal Theology Andrew Linzey suggests that the Cross shows us not only God’s solidarity with human suffering, but God’s solidarity with the suffering of all sentient creatures. “If it is true that God is the Creator and sustainer of the whole world of life, then it is inconceivable that God is not also a co-sufferer in the world of non-human creatures as well” (p. 50).

    If God has entered into solidarity and made a new covenant not only with all human beings, but with “all flesh,” then it might not be too much of a stretch to think that God will raise all flesh, all sentient creatures, to newness of life. If Jesus is the firstfruits of a new creation, why shouldn’t we follow the Bible in anticipating that this will include more than human beings? This seems a more promising approach to theodicy than one that tries to write off animal suffering as necessary to the greater good of the whole. If “not even a sparrow falls” without our Heavenly Father’s knowledge, can we consign billions of sentient creatures to exclusion from his Kingdom?

    Obviously any kind of post-mortem existence for animals raises some difficult questions since we don’t really know what kind of “selves” animals have, especially the lower ones. Then again, there are some difficult questions about post-mortem human existence and I don’t know that we can draw a bright line between human beings and other animls such that only the former are capable of surviving death. Whatever else we know it seems virtually certain that animals have some degree of “subjectivity” which could, in principle, be resurrected or re-embodied in some way.

    If Christians are right that God created the world and called it good and that he entered into that creation in a unique and miraculous way, then I think we can reasonably suppose that God has purposes for his creation that extend beyond his purposes for human beings. Clearly we occupy a pivotal position in those purposes if Christian teaching is to be believed, but we don’t exhaust them. Did God create the natural world and billions of living creatures merely to discard them? Just as we believe that our bodies will, in some way that we can’t really imagine, be raised, I think we can hopefully affirm that our animal kin will be raised to share, in a way appropriate to their natures, in the life of the Blessed Trinity.

  • Ethical seriousness without self-absorption

    Hugo has a reflective post on his journey “further up and further in” to the vegan lifestyle and contemplates the importance of gradual change. And here’s an insightful post on how the quest for moral improvement can become ironically self-absorbed.

    The last point is an important one, I think. In our society, obsessed as it is with “self-help,” ethics can easily get confused with self-improvement. Someone who’s so concerned with their own moral purity is, not unlike the Pharisees in the New Testament, missing the point.

    What I’ve always liked about the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith is that it leads, or ought to lead, to a kind of self-forgetfulness. D.M. Baillie identifies the distinctive teaching of Christianity as the “paradox of grace.” This paradox is that we are most free when God’s grace is acting in and through us, and that, though we are responsible beings, we can’t take credit for our good actions. “Not I…but the grace of God in me” is the proper attitude of the Christian. Luther, in his Freedom of a Christian, points out how justification by faith frees us from concern with our own standing before God and frees us for service to our neighbor.

    That’s the key I think. Service to our neighbor (and I would include all of creation there), not self-betterment, is the test for our ethics. There have been movements within Christianity which have been at times morbidly introspective. But it’s hard to think of something more pointless than constantly taking your spiritual and moral temperature. Not that we should avoid self-examination, confession, and repentance, but that we should sit a bit lightly to our quest for “sanctification.”

    For whatever reason, it seems that people sensitive to animal rights face a particular temptation to self-righteousness and self-preoccupation. This may be a result of what is ultimately an illusory quest for a kind of moral purity. If you have made significant changes in your lifestyle such as giving up animal products you may be inclined to look down your nose at others who haven’t. But, as Andrew Linzey, probably the most well-known Christian advocate of animal rights, has pointed out, there is no “pure land” where we can claim to have extricated ourselves from the system of animal exploitation:

    [W]e need to dispel the myth of absolute consistency or ‘pure land’ theology. ‘Western society is so bound up with the use and abuse of animals in so many fields of human endeavour,’ I have argued elsewhere, ‘that it is impossible for anyone to claim that they are not party, directly or indirectly, to this exploitation either through the products they buy, the food they eat, or the taxes they pay.’ Vegans are right to prick the consciences of those who find some recourse to animal by-products inevitable, but they can mislead us if they claim some absolutely pure land which only they inhabit. Self-righteousness can be a killer not only of moral sense but also of moral encouragement.

    Instead, he says

    [w]hat we need is progressive disengagement from injury to animals. The urgent and essential task is to invite, encourage, support and welcome those who want to take some steps along the road to a more peaceful world with the non-human creation. We do not all have to agree upon the most vital steps, or indeed the most practical ones. What is important is that we all move some way on, if only by one step at a time, however falteringly. If someone is prepared to boycott factory-farmed foods, at least they have made a start. If that is all the humanity that person can muster at least some creatures have been saved from suffering. If someone is prepared to give up only red meat, at least some animals will suffer and die less as a consequence. If someone is prepared to abandon just meat and fish, at least some other creatures have a chance of living in peace. The enemy of progress is the view that everything must be changed before some real gains can be secured. There can be areas of genuine disagreement even among those who are committed to a new world of animal rights. But what is essential for this new world to emerge is the sense that each of us can change our individual worlds, however slightly, to live more peaceably with our non-human neighbours.

    Connecting this with the point above about justification by faith: I don’t need to justify myself in the eyes of God by attaining some level of moral purity, which is impossible anyway. God has justified us by making peace with us through the Cross of his Son. But, this frees me to creatively explore ways in which I might live less violently, not in order to earn God’s favor, but out of gratitude for what he has done.

    And, it’s important to recall, we live in a fallen world. There won’t be an end to suffering, death, predation, competition for resources, and violence until the Lord returns in glory (whatever that’s going to look like!). Moral perfection isn’t an option in such a world. But we can witness to the hope and promise of a new heaven and new earth. What that looks like for each of us will, as Linzey says, vary from person to person. The point is to leave behind our self-preoccupation and to serve others in the liberty of the children of God. We can “sin boldly” knowing that that by God’s grace we are accepted and cherished.

  • Our farm policy: bad for animals, bad for the environment, bad for the poor, bad for our waistlines…

    Michael Pollan writes about how US farm policy keeps the prices of fattening and unhealthy foods artificially low, while allowing prices on things like fruits and vegetables to rise. Why, he asks, would we want to encourage such a situation, especially if we face an “epidemic” of obesity?

    He also points out how this connects to a variety of social and environmental ill: subsidized grain helps make industrial meat production possible (by substituting corn-based feed for more natual grass), artificially low prices provide unfair competition to impoverished foreign growers, it affects the health of the soil by promoting “chemical and feedlot agriculture,” and so on.

    His contention is that farm policy needs to be reworked with the interests of eaters in mind, not just the interests of big producers from a handful of agricultural states. “[M]ost of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues.”

    Since the status quo is far from being the inevitable outworkings of a free market, Pollan suggests that food policy be reworked to “encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies” and “to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.”

  • Animal time travelers

    Here’s a NY Times article on some recent research which seems to indicate that at least some animals have a sense of the past and the future.

    The general trend of research in these areas seems to be toward showing that the mental lives of animals are more complex than has often been thought. This really shouldn’t be surprising considering our shared evolutionary past; what would be surprising is if animal consciousness didn’t anticipate human consciousness in a lot of respects.

  • Look for the label

    The last couple of posts got a bit bogged down in philosophical abstraction (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so I thought I’d offer an example of what I see as a good concrete proposal for changing our treatment of animals.

    The “Certified Humane” label is a program of Humane Farm Animal Care, a non-profit “created to offer a certification and labeling program for meat, eggs, dairy and poultry products from animals raised according to Humane Farm Animal Care’s Animal Care Standards.” Go here for a more deatiled description of what the Certified Humane label means. Go here for a list of participating producers. I’m a fan of Nellie’s Nest Eggs, produced in nearby New Hampshire (giving you a animal-friendly and localist twofer if you live round these parts). See the “Eco-Labels” report card for Certified Humane here.

    Part of the idea with something like this is that given enough demand for humanely-raised animal products, producers will respond with more options like this. This won’t please hard-core animal liberationists who argue that any use of animals, particularly for food, is immoral – and I’m not going to deny that I have some sympathy for that argument – but I think that the widespread adoption of these kinds of humane practices would be a vast improvement over industrial farming. And I think just about anybody can be brought to agree that humane treatment of farm animals is a worthy goal even if they hadn’t previously given much thought to the matter. It’s also impeccably free-market if you’re worried about the heavy hand of state intrusion.

  • God, animals, and rights

    Brandon has a very good post in response to the post below on animal rights. He argues for a view of rights that is grounded in justice and explicitly connected with our status as creatures of God (all of us, that is). He notes that this can be done in a quasi-Lockean manner, seeing all rights as ultimately derived from God, or in terms of natural piety based on relationship and benefits received:

    It is along these two lines, I think, that we can establish the claim that animals have at least a weak form of right. They have rights in virtue of being good creatures of God, and in virtue of being our benefactors, in however weak a sense. The problem with basing animal rights on interests is that the only interests that can establish rights are just rights, so an interest-based account, if it is to work at all, simply reduces to a justice-based one.

    I agree with pretty much all of this. In fact, it’s similar in significant ways to the case that Andrew Linzey has made for animal rights in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel. Linzey taks about “theos-rights” – that is, the rights of God with respect to his creatures. “When we speak of animal rights we conceptualise what is objectively owed to animals as a matter of justice by virtue of their Creator’s right.”

    I think Brandon may be right that an interst-based account, as an account of why some creatures are in the “moral club” so to speak, reduces to a justice based one as he’s laid it out. Interests by themselves don’t show that they must be respected. You need some principles of justice such as equality and desert. Still, having interests – that is, having the capacity for one’s experiential welfare to be affected – seems like a sufficient indication that a creature deserves to be given some moral consideration (I agree with Brandon that it may not be necessary, and that it’s possible, and indeed likely, that inanimate creation has moral claims). It’s often, if not primarily, with respect to experiential welfare that we apply our principles of justice. I think this is why some kind of interest-based account can play a role in filling out the contents of rights. Given that animals are good creations of God, wouldn’t some description of their vital interests be necessary in order to give content to what it means to respect them as creatures of God? An animal has a vital interest in, say, not being confined or killed in virtue of the kind of creature that it is and what it means for that creature’s life to go better or worse for it. And respecting that creature’s nature strikes me as an essential component of what it means to treat it as a good creature of God.

  • No rights without duties?

    A surprisingly common argument against animal rights goes like this: only beings capable of exercising moral choice and reasoning have rights. Animals don’t exercise moral choice and reasoning (i.e. they aren’t “moral agents”). Therefore animals don’t have rights.

    I say that the frequency with which this argument is made is surprising because it implicitly denies something that most of us, I think, believe, namely that there are certain human beings who have moral rights who aren’t necessarily moral agents. Infants, children, the severely mentally handicapped, the brain damaged and comatose, and people with severe Alzheimer’s are, almost certainly in some cases and quite probably in others, incapable of moral reasoning and choice, and yet no one (or hardly anyone) is willing to bite the bullet and say that these classes of human beings have no moral rights. In fact, I suspect that most of us would find the denial of moral rights to any or all of these classes of people to be morally monstrous.

    So, it’s hard to see why being a moral agent should be taken to be a necessary condition for being a moral patient, or an object of moral concern. No one proposes that we can treat, say, an infant any way we wish simply because he or she isn’t capable of moral reasoning and choice. It may be that being a moral agent is a sufficient condition for being a moral patient, but I’m hard pressed to see any reason why it should be necessary.

    I wonder if the roots of this argument lie in a kind of “contractualist” way of thinking about morality. That is, morality is seen as a kind of contract or bargain into which people enter in order to establish mutually beneficial rules of conduct. If that’s what morality was, then you could see the plausibility of holding that only moral agents had moral rights, since they’d be the only ones capable of entering into such a contract.

    But it’s pretty clear that’s not what morality is like, at least if we don’t want to abandon deeply held beliefs about the duties owed to infants, children, the mentally handicapped, etc. Contractualism has a very hard time making sense of moral duties that go beyond what self-interested rational agents have, or would agree to.

    A better criterion of who counts morally, far more plausible than the capacity for moral agency, is the capacity for experience. That is, the possibility that one’s life can go better or worse for oneself. Rocks don’t count morally because things can’t go better or worse for a rock. But things can certainly go better or worse for a chimpanzee, a pig, a chicken, a trout, and quite possibly a grasshopper. There’s no particular reason why the pain of an adult human being considered simply in itself should count for more than the the pain of an infant, or an animal, other things being equal. And there’s certainly no good reason why the fact that a being lacks the capacity for moral reasoning should entail that we can treat it in any way whatsoever, that anything goes.

    It doesn’t follow from this that animals would have all the same rights as human beings (a right to education, say, or health care, or subsidized museums). This is because, as philosopher Mark Rowlands has pointed out, they have no interests in such things. But they do have interests in things like not suffering, not being killed, and so on, and it’s not at all clear why those interests should be utterly disregarded for the mere convenience of human beings, as they often are.

  • Compassionate eating as Christian discipleship

    Here’s a good lecture on our relationship to animals from a Christian perspective by Matthew Halteman, a Calvin College philosopher. He also contributes to a blog on these themes here.

    Prof. Halteman conceptualizes “compassionate eating” as a Christian discipline, which he defines as a repetitive daily practice undertaken to narrow the gap between who we are and who we should be. In terms of diet, compassionate eating is a holistic approach to eating that is sensitive to human, animal, and environmental concerns. Halteman says that there are a continuum of responses to the issue of factory farming, from eating humanely raised meat, to vegetarianism, to veganism, but the baseline is opposition to a system of food production that causes extreme animal suffering, degrades the environment, and fosters inequity and exploitation. While his own preferred position is a vegan one, there’s no reason that anyone can’t take incremental steps toward more compassionate eating without committing to a wholesale vegan lifestyle. (The talk was originally given on Ash Wednesday, and he suggest restricting animal products during Lent as a start.)

    While making more responsible choices doesn’t extricate us from responsibility for all the ills that our system of industrial agriculture contributes to, it can be a “symbolic commitment to seeking authenticity in imitation of Christ as a witness, agent, and evidence of the coming kingdom.” This stance helps us, he thinks, to avoid self-righteousness and a kind of moral utopianism that thinks that we can fix all the ills of a fallen world. That said, he thinks that being more intentional about our food choices can have many practical beneficial effects, like improving our personal health, connecting us with those who produce our food (by, e.g. patronizing farmers’ markets), increasing our sense of compassion for all sentient creatures, etc.