Category: Theology & Faith

(This post actually started out short. Honest!)

Christopher (at his new blog) directs our attention to this article by Andrew Linzey on the connection between violence against animals and violence against humans.

Clearly it’s not a matter of cruelty to animals causing violence against human beings in a straightforward way. Rather, as Linzey says, “cruelty to animals is one of a cluster of potential or actual characteristics held in common by those who commit violence or seriously anti-social acts.”

This raises the question of how animal liberation and human liberation might be connected. Animal liberationists are often faced with the objection that human oppression is so severe and widespread that to divert efforts and resources to injustices against animals would be irresponsible at best and misanthropic at worst.

In this article philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark suggests, however, that while some proponents of animal welfare and liberation have neglected issues of human oppression, the two causes are actually integrally connected. In his words, “[a]s long as we live, as human beings, in hierarchical, class and caste-divided societies, we must expect us to be cruel,” and a “genuinely humane endeavour on behalf of the non-human cannot be separated from a similarly humane endeavour on behalf of humans.” The idea being, I think, that as long as we have the mindset which takes domination and exploitation as natural and inevitable, neither animals nor weaker and more vulnerable humans are safe.

At the level of our general view of the world, at least, there is a significant connection between our view of other human beings and our view of other animals. If God creates all this is out of love, then, to the extent that we share in or imitate the divine love, we will see other beings as having a value and integrity and mystery that is independent of whatever benefits we might get from them. As Clark says “[i]n love, we attend to things as being beautiful. Willing their good, we come to know what ‘good’ is in their case. False love imposes burdens, fantasizes, and grows angry when the ‘beloved’ is not as we wish. True love puts aside concupiscence.”

Love isn’t just a sentiment; it’s the most truthful and accurate perception of reality there is. Our typical perception of reality is in terms of how things affect us. This is natural and probably inevitable to a great degree, but moral progress largely consists in moving beyond this egocentric perspective and recognizing the independent reality and value of beings other than ourselves. “Love is the recognition, the realization, of a creature chosen from eternity by God, who ‘hates nothing that He has made (why else would He have made it?)’…What God has chosen is not only what is, literally, human: every thing is a message of love, which we misread or miss entirely as long as we suppose that we are ourselves the only centre of the universe.”

Consequently, when we perpetrate violence against others, or exploit them for our own gain, we are denying their independent reality and treating them as mere means to our ends. Humanism and most traditional forms of Christianity agree in holding that only human beings are genuinely ends-in-themselves. But unlike humanism, Christianity has a certain built in trajectory toward a wider apprehension of the value of all created being.

The worry, of course, is that a greater appreciation of the value of non-human creatures will somehow downgrade the moral status of human beings. Though rarely is actual evidence offered to back this up, critics can point to thinkers like Peter Singer who simultaneously advocate for better treatment of animals and argue for the permissibility of killing “defective” or “unwanted” infants. Thus in the minds of the critics any blurring of the line between the value of human and non-human life seems inextricably tied to a diminished appreciation of the dignity of human beings.

But I don’t see why this has to be the case. Singer is a bit of a unique case because, as an ultra-consistent consequentialist, he is willing to follow the premises of his arguments to the bitter end where someone else might balk at his conclusions, many of which are highly counterintuitive to say the least! But it by no means follows that someone arriving at similar conclusions about our treatment of animals by a different route needs to embrace the same conclusions as Singer regarding, e.g. abortion or infanticide. Andrew Linzey, for instance, not only argues for a paradigm shift in the way we look at animals, he has also argued against using human embryos as experimental subjects on the similar grounds that life is not simply ours to do with what we will as long as it seems to serve our interests.

In other words, concern for animals isn’t properly understood as an attempt to downgrade the moral status of human beings but as an attempt to upgrade the status of other animals. No one (well not no one) thinks that feminism must necessarily result in downgrading the moral worth of men. As the somewhat sardonic bumper sticker puts it, “Feminism is the radical idea that women are people.” We might say, less pithily, that animal liberation is the radical idea that living, sentient creatures are more than mere objects or material to be used in whatever way we see fit. Human beings should feel threatened by that assertion only to the extent that our present lifestyles are premised upon its denial.

This doesn’t mean that genuine human and animal interests won’t ever conflict (though I’d argue far less so than some anti-animal liberation polemicists would lead you to believe). But to the extent that the moral life is about learning to see others as independent realities having their own worth and goods proper to their nature, I don’t think we can, at least on religious grounds, set the limits of our moral concern at the boundary of the human kingdom.

But even if that’s right it doesn’t resolve the question of priorities. Even if we agree in principle that animals are beings whose welfare and dignity ought, in an ideal world, to be safeguarded and that concern for animal well-being and human well-being is part of the same view of created being as intrinsically valuable, how can we justify attending to animals when there is so much human misery in the world? Shouldn’t we focus on the most important issues first?

I think the response to this objection has at least three parts. First, much of our mistreatment of animals would be abated merely by ceasing to do certain things. This doesn’t require us to dedicate new resources to the well-being of animals, but merely to stop harming them. I’m not going to claim that, say, vegetarianism is morally obligatory, but the greatest source of human-inflicted animal suffering, both quantitatively and qualitatively, is almost certainly animal agriculture. Virtually all of us (meaning those of us in the industrialized West, the kind of people with reliable internet connections. ;-)) have it in our power to stop contributing to this by, at least, seeking alternatives to factory farmed meat.

Secondly, in allocating our resources dedicated to alleviating suffering or improving the lot of others, very few of us adhere to a strict utilitarian ordering by focusing all our efforts on the single most serious problem currently facing the world. For instance, you could argue that nuclear disarmament is the most serious moral problem there is because it alone has the potential to result in the utter destruction of the human race (and most other life for that matter). By this standard, pretty much every other problem pales in comparison. And yet many people feel eminently justified in dedicating time and resources to causes other than nuclear disarmament.

Why is this? I think it’s partly because we don’t order our priorities in quite that rationalistic a fashion. Different people feel drawn to different issues or causes for a variety of reasons that often have more to do with personal experience than a dispassionate ordering of priorities. And this applies to people who’ve dedicated part of their lives to working toward improving the lot of animals. Is someone who works on behalf of animals to be criticized for spending that much less time working to alleviate poverty or fight illiteracy if the person who has taken up those causes isn’t to be criticized for failing to dedicate all their efforts toward eradicating war or disease? There is properly a kind of division of labor, it seems, based on interest, personality, experience, and sympathy that doesn’t admit of a simple hirearchical ordering.

Third, it can be argued that we have, by our assertion of dominion over other living creatures, incurred special obligations toward them. Our obligations, for instance, to animals in the wild may largely be to “do no harm,” but our obligations toward domesticated animals may well be stronger precisely in light of the fact that we have taken them into our service. Just as a man has obligations to his own children that he doesn’t have to the children of strangers, we may well have special duties of care to “our” animals as a consequence of the rights we have asserted over them and the use we make of them.

We also often recognize special duties to the weak and vulnerable; contrary to some theories of morality, moral considerability isn’t directly dependent to one’s abilities as a free, independent agent capable of discharging duties and entering into agreements. In fact, our moral sentiments often point in quite the opposite direction: those who are weak and unable to fend for themselves call for greater care just because they are at our mercy.

It’s also worth pointing out that some of the most important efforts on behalf of animals were undertaken by those with impressive humanitarian records. William Wilberforce, not exactly a slouch in the area of human rights, co-founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It may be that widening the circle of moral concern, far from being some kind of zero-sum game where some can benefit only at the expense of others, actually reinforces benign attitudes, making people more sensitive to suffering and injustice wherever it’s found. And it may even be that proper attention to the rightful claims of humans and animals will only be acheived together.

[Note: this post has been slightly edited for clarity.]