by Todd May
Although I do not like pets—and moreover natural environments are, to my mind, mostly to be avoided—I am mostly a vegetarian. At home I am strictly vegetarian, although when we go out I’ll make the moral descent into eating fish. It took me many years to become vegetarian. I tried to do so times without number during my twenties, thirties, and forties. I think my metabolism finally slowed down enough so that I could lose the meat cravings and just retain a soft nostalgia for the taste of a cheeseburger. So I find myself to be someone who is largely a vegetarian but really doesn’t like nonhuman animals (which should not be taken to mean that I like all human ones).
I have been asked about this. To some it seems, if not quite a contradiction, at least a bit puzzling that someone who has no real sense of connection with other animals is still committed to avoiding eating them. My more or less snarky response to this is that there are a lot of people I don’t like, but I have no desire to eat any of them either. But more to the point, my reasons for vegetarianism are pretty much of the usual stock: cruelty to animals, especially in the practices of factory farming, effects on the environment, and a certain revulsion to the idea of killing a being that could have a flourishing life. I don’t proselytize about vegetarianism. Nobody who has failed at being one as often as I have is in a position to do that. For me it is just a matter of trying to live decently. Even among beings I don’t really like.
The question of decency regarding nonhuman animals is a vexed one. There are, to be sure, some ideals. Many more of us should probably be not only vegetarians but indeed vegans. At least as many of us as could end the practice of factory farming. With animals raised for meat in more humane circumstances the situation is more complicated. On the one hand, if we were all vegetarians such animals would never come into existence and therefore would not have had what seems to be a pleasant life for them. On the other hand, once such an animal is brought into existence, the idea of killing it for the pleasure of eating its flesh becomes more difficult to justify. But for many the idea of vegetarianism, much more veganism, while morally attractive in theory, is often hard to practice.1 And as I mentioned a moment ago, I can relate, not only as a person who has struggled with vegetarianism but also as someone who recognizes that eating eggs and cheese from places that deal with factory farms is morally compromising by my own standards.
How then can we frame a decent if not altruistic way of conceiving our moral relationships with nonhuman animals? If we—or at least many of us—find veganism or even vegetarianism a bridge too far, how might we conceive our relationships with and duties toward nonhuman animals in a way that does not require adherence to moral standards beyond our reach while recognizing the fact that other animals have lives to live, that they are not merely machines? Is vegetarianism the only way to fully respect other animals, or can there be different paths?
Before we grapple with these questions, we should pause a moment to recognize how much unlike machines many animals are. Recent research suggests that a lot of nonhuman animals have complex emotional and intellectual capacities, capacities that would compare favorably with some of the capacities we pride ourselves on possessing. Elephants exhibit deep grief when one of their own dies, and in fact have what seem to be funeral rituals for them. When a chimpanzee falls out of a tree it will often look around to see whether anyone else has noticed—a display of embarrassment. Birds can have extraordinary memories; some birds can remember numerous places where they have placed their food for storage. And dolphins seem to have a spoken language that some scientists are trying to decode.
Moral Individualism
Given this, the most prominent position taken in philosophical discussions of our moral relations to animals asks us to take each animal, both human and nonhuman, at its own emotional and particularly intellectual level and treat it accordingly. This view has come to be called “moral individualism.”2 To see the idea, we can start by taking two different human beings. Suppose you are interacting with two people, someone of great intelligence and someone with brain damage whose intellectual level is currently that of a five-year-old. Surely you would not treat the two the same way. You wouldn’t ask the brain-damaged person to do calculus or challenge them to a chess match; and you wouldn’t offer to play a simple card game with the person of great intelligence. It wouldn’t make sense. These are people of vastly different capabilities and in engaging with them those capabilities need to be taken into account. Our relationship, moral and otherwise, to each is distinct and is dictated by the emotional and intellectual capacities each possesses.
If, for example, we forced the person of great intelligence to exist in an environment that allowed for no intellectual stimulation beyond that of a kindergarten class, we would be doing them a moral disservice. For the brain-damaged person, placing them in such an environment might be about right, but putting them in a university classroom would only be confusing and disorienting and probably frightening for them. Moral individualism would counsel us to take our moral cues from the capacities of each individual.
But now compare the brain-damaged person with an intelligent nonhuman animal, say, a chimpanzee. On the one hand their lives are sure to have differences: things that interest chimpanzees might not be the same as things that interest the brain-damaged person. On the other hand, though, there will be a lot of overlap. They might both like playing with building blocks, for example. Neither of them can talk, although both of them can communicate. And, more to the point, the level of richness of their emotional and intellectual lives would likely be similar. They will have similar capacities, and the richness of their experience will likely be similar as well. Moreover, that richness will be at a lower level than that of the person with greater intelligence. Their emotional and intellectual lives are simpler.
If their lives are similar in this way, though, what would justify treating them differently morally? What, for instance, would justify doing painful experiments on the chimpanzee but not on the brain-damaged person (leaving aside issues like effects on the family of the brain-damaged person)? Wouldn’t the chimpanzee likely suffer just as much as the person? Or, to put the point in its sharpest form, shouldn’t we be willing to do to the brain-damaged person what we’re willing to do to the chimpanzee?
If there is a difference here, it would be, according to moral individualism, not between the two people and the chimpanzee but instead between the person of greater intelligence and the other two. The chimpanzee and the brain-damaged person have a greater similarity of experience and of capacities than either of them have with the really intelligent person. So shouldn’t the chimpanzee and the brain-damaged person be on the same moral level, and shouldn’t our moral relationships with both be the same, or at least very similar?
Here our temptation is to say that there is a huge moral difference between the two. After all, the brain-damaged person and the person of great intelligence are both human and the chimpanzee is not. Doesn’t that count for something morally? Doesn’t the fact that the brain-damaged person is one of us matter for our moral relationship to them? After all, didn’t we see in the previous chapter that those who are distant from us don’t require the same moral treatment as those who are closer to us? And isn’t being in a different species another way of being distant from us?
Moral individualists flip the issue over. As we saw in the last chapter, for thinkers like Peter Singer physical distance does not matter. We are just as obliged to someone far away from us in distance as we are to someone standing next to us. For moral individualists, then, of which Singer is also one, any analogy with physical distance may not apply because physical distance doesn’t matter morally. But still, that leaves the question of whether the fact that the brain-damaged person is a fellow human being should matter for our moral relationship to them. And here the moral individualist says that it should not. Claiming the brain-damaged person to be one of us and so more worthy of our moral regard than the chimpanzee is what they designate with the unlovely n
ame of speciesism.
If speciesism sounds like racism or sexism, it is meant to. Just as most of us find racism and sexism to be abhorrent, so the moral individualists tell us we should find speciesism to be just as abhorrent. But what is it about racism and sexism that makes them anathema to us (or those of us to whom they are anathema)? Racism and sexism call for different moral relationships toward others based on arbitrary criteria regarding who is one of us. For the racist, being of the same race, however defined, makes a person one of us and therefore deserving of full moral regard. For the sexist, being male makes a person one of us and therefore someone who merits full moral standing. However, as many of us have come to understand, race and sex (or gender) are arbitrary moral criteria. Those of different races and sexes or genders (as well as different sexual orientations, economic classes, physical abilities) are all one of us and therefore deserve our full moral regard.
This is not to say that we should treat everyone the same way. To deserve full moral regard isn’t always to deserve the same treatment. There are numerous reasons that might lead me to treat people differently. If I have two aspirin and encounter two people, one of whom has a headache and the other does not, I am not really treating them with the same moral regard if I give one aspirin to each. After all, the person with the headache needs the aspirin and the other person doesn’t. Similarly, if one person has mistreated another person and a second person has not, it is not a matter of full moral regard to punish both of them. Similarly, the brain-damaged person and the person of superior intelligence might be treated differently and still have the same moral regard—although, as we will see in a moment, there is a complication here.
If race and sex or gender are arbitrary criteria for saying who is one of us, however, why isn’t species? Why isn’t the fact of biology just as arbitrary as that of skin color or sex or gender? If a creature of another species is capable of a full and rich life, why does it deserve less regard than a brain-damaged person who is capable of more or less the same full and rich life? So, argue the moral individualists, recognizing the arbitrary character of species is an extension of the same idea that challenged racism and sexism. This does not mean, as we have just seen, that we need to treat chimpanzees just as we treat people of superior intelligence. We don’t show full moral regard to a chimpanzee by allowing it to run for public office or even to vote. Instead we show it full moral regard in recognizing its capabilities and responding to those, which in this case will involve similar treatment to the brain-damaged person.
But here someone might ask whether knowing what species a creature occupies matters for understanding what those capabilities are. If I know that the animal in front of me is a chimpanzee or a dog or (okay, then) a cat, doesn’t that give me some guidance as to how to treat it? Members of a particular species typically have similar abilities and needs, so shouldn’t knowing their species matter for my moral approach to them?
The key word in the previous sentence is the word typically. Members of particular species typically or usually share certain traits and abilities which would have some bearing on our moral response to or relationship with them. However, not all members of a species are typical, and when they aren’t we often find ourselves needing to respond to them differently from how we typically would. We have already seen this with the brain-damaged person, who cannot be treated as a typical adult member of our species. If a chimpanzee, for instance, happened to display particular intellectual curiosity or a dog offered more than the usual level of loyalty, we might also feel compelled to treat that chimpanzee or that dog differently. For the moral individualist, then, what is typical might be used as a rule of thumb in our moral relationships with others, but ultimately it is the character and capacities of a particular animal that should determine that relationship.
At this point, however, someone might complain about the reliance on the richness of experience that seems to substitute itself in the moral individualist’s view for the idea of species. If species is an arbitrary way to determine the treatment of others or our moral relationships to them, why isn’t richness of experience? Isn’t that just as capricious as species membership? Why should the fact that one being has a richer experience than another be our benchmark for approaching moral relationships? In particular, and more disturbing, why should it be a guide for which beings get better treatment or worse treatment?
There is an answer to this question, one that will lead us to the most unsettling aspect of the moral individualist view. Richness of experience tells us what a being is capable of and therefore how most appropriately to respond to it. It is useless to respond to the brain-damaged person as we would to a person of superior intelligence, since the former is not capable of the richness of experience of the latter. They cannot engage in or take pleasure in many of the activities that would enhance the significance of the life of the person of greater intelligence. Relatedly, they cannot suffer some of the disappointments associated with those activities—their failure or frustration—that the latter person can. Their experience is simpler and should be treated as such. It is not that they are incapable of suffering. Both a brain-damaged person and a chimpanzee are capable of suffering. Rather, it is that they are capable of certain types of suffering and not others, whereas the person of greater intelligence, who is capable of a greater richness of experience, is also and for that reason open to greater suffering.
Here is where moral individualism begins to have bite. It not so very controversial to say that our moral relationship to other creatures should be grounded in their traits and capacities. It is more controversial to say that creatures of greater richness of experience are capable of a greater range of suffering, although that does seem to follow from the fact that they are capable of a greater range of pleasures and significances. It is more controversial still, although within the framework of moral individualism, to say that we should use greater or less capacities for suffering as a guide for who gets better and worse moral treatment. Or, to put the point in its bluntest terms, whatever we are willing to do to the chimpanzee we ought to be willing to do to the brain-damaged person but not necessarily to the person of superior intelligence, whether it be medical testing, sacrifice for a greater social goal, neglect, or whatever.
This contentious position follows from a combination of the moral individualist view and the very pedestrian idea that suffering is bad and more suffering is worse. Surely it is part of our moral relationship to others that we should seek to prevent their suffering, although we have seen some of the limits of that seeking over the past couple of chapters. If we are in a position where we must choose between two courses of action, one of which will lead to more suffering and another to less, in general we should opt for the latter. (Of course, there are plenty of exceptions.) And so suppose that we are faced with a situation where one being will suffer more than the other and yet we must sacrifice one of the two. All other things equal, we should probably sacrifice the being that will suffer less. If, for instance, our two unfortunate candidates for medical testing are the brain-damaged person and the person of greater intelligence, and if the brain-damaged person will mostly suffer from physical pain and whatever emotional pain goes along with it while the person of greater intelligence will suffer physical pain but also suffer from the loss of projects they might otherwise engage in and the anxiety about their long-term future life trajectory, there seems at least some reason to choose the brain-damaged person for experimentation (again, leaving issues of family, etc., aside).3
For many of us, this is difficult to accept. That the suffering of the person of superior intelligence matters more than that of a brain-damaged person runs counter to what many of us would like to think. Moreover, that we should be willing to do medical tests on such a person as readily as we would on a chimpanzee runs deeply counter to our moral instincts. Why would we want to subject a helpless person to medical testing just because they have brain damage or some other mental incapacity? All of this see
ms profoundly unfair.
There is a way to address this, however, from the standpoint of the moral individualist. So far, the way we have put the matter is that whatever you’re willing to do to the chimpanzee you should be willing to do to the brain-damaged person. We could instead say it the other way around. Whatever you’re not willing to do to the brain-damaged person you shouldn’t be willing to do to the chimpanzee. And that is much closer to the view of most moral individualists. They don’t commend medical experimentation on brain-damaged people but instead the ending of medical testing on chimpanzees. Peter Singer, for instance, is one of the creators of the Great Ape Project, which seeks laws to protect the life, liberty, and freedom from torture of the great apes—gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans.4
Moral individualism, moreover, is about more than just apes and brain-damaged people and more than medical experimentation. Take the principle that we ought to prevent suffering and in situations where we have to choose we ought to choose to cause less suffering rather than more. What bearing does this have on our eating habits? If we choose to eat meat, we are contributing to immense suffering of animals, particularly animals that are raised on factory farms. (As we saw in the last chapter, we are also contributing to climate change. We will return to that issue in a different guise in a bit.) How much will we suffer if we cannot eat meat? Not much. People can learn to become vegetarians, and especially over the past half dozen years there has been a proliferation of meat substitutes that are remarkably tasty. (Thank goodness.) On the moral individualist view, there is simply no justification for eating meat, particularly factory-farmed meat. The suffering of carnivores who do not have access to meat is in no way proportional to the suffering of the animals they eat.
