by Todd May
Unfortunately for me, what goes for meat eating also goes for many dairy products. If I were to conform to the moral individualist view, I should really go vegan. And, although I’m not a moral individualist—although, as we will see, there is much to be gained from that perspective—I do count my dairy consumption as a moral failure.
Now if we were to be strictly philosophically minded about this, we might take issue with the principle that we ought always to cause less suffering rather than more. Here’s an example. Suppose I could cause a small amount of suffering to a large number of people, say, the suffering associated with a hangnail, or instead cause a large amount of suffering to one person, say, on the order of a kidney stone. (I once had a kidney stone. I don’t believe I understood what pain was before then.) Suppose further that the sum total of the hangnail sufferers was greater than the sum total of the kidney stone sufferer. Should I really cause the one person kidney stone levels of suffering? Clearly not. The principle of causing less suffering, then, does not always apply. However, in our case it’s not really relevant. We’re not facing situations like that, so we can go with the principle as a rule of thumb.5
If the moral individualist is right, then, we are obliged to become vegans and also to stop much of the medical testing we are currently engaged in. There may be forms of medical testing on certain animals that are justified by the suffering they might prevent, but far fewer of them than are currently performed. The moral individualist view would, then, lead us to a more nearly altruistic relationship with many nonhuman animals. Should we become moral individualists?
Does Decency Require Moral Individualism?
There are several reasons to think that we shouldn’t become moral individualists, some philosophical and one practical. I don’t think, though, that any of these reasons should turn us away from the core insight of moral individualism, that many animals have lives to live and that they are capable of suffering when those lives are frustrated in various ways. To see this, let’s pause a moment over the criticisms.
One criticism is that in our practices we treat people differently from animals and that there are things that we might do to an animal of a different species that we would find offensive if done to a human at a much more constrained level of experience. This need not have anything to do with inflicting suffering or killing someone.6 We would not, for instance, make someone who is brain damaged or has severe Alzheimer’s eat from a bowl on the floor, even if that person would not think of this as an insult or a problem. It somehow feels undignified to treat another human this way, regardless of whether they recognize it as such. One might complain here that such treatment is against their interests, but that complaint isn’t open to the moral individualist. In the case of severe brain damage or advanced Alzheimer’s, as long as it would not lead to others’ making them suffer it would not be against their particular interests to be treated this way. They would not be suffering from such treatment. They would not even recognize it as a humiliation. But for the rest of us it seems a humiliation of that person to make them eat from a bowl on the floor. It would be an affront to what might properly be called their “human dignity.”
Or take another, starker example—that of a corpse. We do not generally treat a corpse with disrespect, even though the person that once occupied that corpse is no longer there. There is nobody to be disrespected or to suffer in the case of a corpse, but we still think it should not be treated like just any other material entity, perhaps just thrown away since it is no longer useful. If moral individualism were true, some folks argue, we could not make sense of having an obligation to treat a corpse with a certain amount of deference.
How seriously should we take these examples? Some individualists argue that, at least in the case of the corpse, treating it a particular way is a cultural hangover rather than an indication of any deep moral duty we have to the corpse. There are, for instance, other cultures that don’t share the Western attitude toward corpses.7 We might also argue that our treatment of corpses is based on the illusion that the person is somehow still there and that disrespecting the corpse is also somehow a disrespect for the person. The situation with the brain-damaged person and the person with Alzheimer’s is different, and perhaps more challenging to the moral individualist. However, we might ask how challenging it really is.
Suppose that we accept that there are certain ways of treating animals that would not befit other humans, even humans who cannot recognize that ill-befittingness. As a strictly philosophical matter, this would certainly undermine moral individualism as an absolute doctrine. However, it does not do anything to undermine the core idea that other animals have lives to live and that they should not be made to suffer in those lives.8 It seems more a nibbling around the edges of moral individualism than a full-on attack on its core view. For instance, take the case of medical testing. Moral individualists argue that we should not be willing to do to a chimpanzee what we would not be willing to do to a person of a similar level of intelligence or richness of experience. Does the idea of “human dignity” separate the person from the chimpanzee here? Can we really just import the idea of human dignity from those examples and use it to distinguish chimpanzees from brain-damaged humans when it comes to medical testing? The moral individualist would not, I think, be impressed by such an importation.
There is another objection to moral individualism, one that also doesn’t undermine its core insight but is worth recognizing, in part because it’s probably already occurred to many of you reading this book. I can’t have the same moral relationship to all animals of the same richness of experience, because I must have some extra obligations to animals that are my technical possession. My cat, unfortunately for me, is a being with whom I have a different moral relationship from other cats. I need to feed him and, well, I need to feed him. I have no obligation to feed the other cats in the neighborhood, although at times they seem to think differently about this matter.
This different moral relationship is not just a legal one. I actually don’t know what the legal requirement is regarding feeding a cat one is said to own. Maybe there’s something about cruelty or neglect that has legal foundations. Nevertheless, that is not the issue. Even if there weren’t such legal obligations—and my ignorance about this is evidence—I would feel as though I engaged in moral indecency if I just stopped feeding our cat. Or at least stopped feeding it when there’s nobody else around to do so. Although I hate to admit this, I would feel guilty toward the cat.
The idea here is that the existence of certain relationships with animals has moral implications.9 It can’t be, then, that my moral relationship with all animals of the same richness of experience must be the same. And this is true not only of animals that I “own,” but also other animals that I form relationships with. For instance, there was a feral cat that took a liking to our back porch and with it, our food, which we always left outside for Sammy. After a while, it seemed to become a resident of the outside of the house. It did not horn in on Sammy’s space. It ate after Sammy was finished—Sammy made sure of that—and generally deferred to Sammy in all important matters of where to lie in the sun and when to play. At some point in all this it would have become a matter of moral neglect on our part if we just put out enough food for our cat. There would seem to be something mean-spirited in it, something morally indecent, if not profoundly so. After all, it costs us practically nothing to feed this other cat, and we had allowed it to develop a set of expectations by putting out enough food for it to eat. I would have felt wrong if I failed to put that extra bit of food in the bowl.
To be sure, this moral relationship is one that could be changed by circumstances, and in fact was. A second feral cat, one with kittens in tow, showed up on our porch a few months after the first cat. This second cat, however, was not as keen on recognizing the hierarchy necessary for communal feeding. It would chase Sammy away from the food bowl and hog the food for itself and its kittens. We could see that Sammy started losing wei
ght. Although it is unquestionable that a diet would not have hurt our cat, this did not seem the most promising weight-loss regimen. So we had to switch our feeding practices. Now we have the feeding bowl inside the house and only Sammy can come in and eat. We can’t let any other cats in, for the obvious reason that it would just repeat the problem we encountered with the outside bowl. This means we no longer feed the first feral cat, who went through a period of disappointment before wandering off to feed at the neighbors’ house. But, given the new circumstances, I think our moral relationship to that cat was altered. In philosophy speak, the obligation to the feral cat was trumped by the obligation to ensure the feeding of our own cat.
Just as with human beings, then, personal relationships with other animals create moral relationships as well. And as this is true, moral individualism—the idea that the framework for how we should treat each animal solely according to its richness of experience—has its limits. (I say “the framework” here to indicate that we needn’t treat all animals exactly the same way. Recall the example of the two aspirins and the person with the headache.) Moreover, these limits are not simply obligations that arise out of legal or legal-type bonds. They can arise in the course of our interaction with other animals.
Where does this leave moral individualism? As with the previous objection, I don’t think it is deeply damaging to its core insight. It may be that we have different moral relationships with animals with which we have or have developed personal relationships. But that leaves intact the idea that all animals have lives to live and that if they can suffer we need to take that into account. It also leaves intact the idea that we should not cause needless suffering among animals, and that, barring special circumstances, those moral relationships are on par with the moral relationships we have with other human beings of the same richness of experience. Suppose, then, with these certain exceptions, we sought to follow moral individualism. Where would that lead us?
There are debates about the role of animals in medical testing, debates that are beyond my competence to address. Surely there would be less testing of animals if we allowed ourselves to become more aware of their experience and intelligence. Moral individualism would apply a stricter standard, though. It would appear that testing chimpanzees and some of the more intelligent animals would be out, since we wouldn’t do the testing on babies and severely brain-damaged people. I suspect that there would be very little admissible testing on the standard set by moral individualism. Whether this is a good thing I will leave to the side, since I want to focus more on how it would affect our daily living.
There are two areas where moral individualism would impinge directly on our lives. First, if we were to become moral individualists, we would likely also have to become vegans, or at least restrict our meat consumption to well-treated adult animals. It’s hard to square the pleasure we get out of eating meat with the misery factory-farmed animals endure and the terror many of them feel before being slaughtered in assembly-line fashion in accordance with the practice of corporate agriculture. Moreover, and to my chagrin, it is hard to square the pleasure of eating eggs and cheese, or anything made with dairy products, with the way chickens and cows are raised in corporate dairy conglomerates. Those places are equally cruel to the animals they raise and exploit.
The exception here might be meat and dairy from animals that were well-treated on farms and allowed to live a flourishing life, whatever that might be for a cow, a pig, a chicken, or whatever. The argument in favor of killing the animal, as we have seen, is that without the intention eventually to kill the animal it would never have come into existence in the first place. Therefore, it is better off to have been raised for meat than not to have come into existence. (Of course, this argument doesn’t even need to be raised in the case of dairy animals. We’re free and clear there.) Does the counterargument that once the animal exists it becomes morally forbidden to kill it apply in the case of well-raised animals? That is an issue that is debated among philosophers, and I will, as they say, leave that as an exercise for the reader. As a practical matter, there are very few such animals and so most of us who embrace moral individualism would likely have to become vegans.
The other area where moral individualism would impinge on us is in our treatment of the environment. In the previous chapter we saw that there are strong reasons to be protective of the environment, but these reasons concerned the sake of other human beings. Moral individualism would apply its standards to animals as well and ask us to consider whether the enjoyment we get out of an act of environmental degradation is greater than the suffering it causes among those animals who live in that environment. This is a more restrictive standard than the one from the previous chapter. Following this standard, we would have to take into account not only the environmental effects of our actions on other human beings but also their effects on other animals. It seems that those effects are widespread and deleterious. A recent scientific study reported in the New York Times suggests that numerous animal populations are shrinking and at risk of annihilation and that this is at least partly due to our activity, particularly with regard to climate change and shrinking habitats.10 Moral individualism would then counsel a much more restricted range of human activity than we are currently engaged in. Among other things we would need to lower the human birth rate to something below replacement levels, severely restrict flying and driving, once again stop eating factory-farmed meat (because of the methane released on such farms), live in smaller houses, eliminate the use of plastics that contaminate the oceans, and generally be aware of the effects of our activities on a variety of natural habitats.
Moral individualism, as we can see, is a very altruistic approach to moral behavior. Here is where our practical question arises: can we—or most of us—reasonably embrace it?
Here I should—admittedly not for the first time—speak personally. As I mentioned, I tried to be a vegetarian many times in my life, and failed until I was in my mid-fifties. I tried different ways, from cold turkey to allowing myself meat once a month to visualizing what the animals I might be eating go through. Nothing seemed to work. I had meat cravings and often dreamed about meat. I think the only reason I was successful later on was that my metabolism had slowed down enough that the cravings went away. Now I have lost the taste for meat, with one exception: cheeseburgers. I still find them difficult to resist, although with a degree of resolve I have not fallen prey to temptation over the past eight or nine years. (Okay, true confession: there have been a few times when one of my offspring has left a bite or two of cheeseburger on their plate and I thought to myself, “Well, I can’t help the cow now.”)
And in case this sounds as though I’ve overcome temptation to rise to the level of my principles, I haven’t. I am still not vegan, even though I know I should be. When I go out to restaurants, I allow myself to eat fish, and at home I eat dairy. And even though we try to buy free-range eggs, I understand that I should investigate what’s behind that label more thoroughly and take more time to see where my cheese is coming from. And I further understand that my failing to do so probably results in cruelty to animals, cruelty that I can envision because I’ve studied the issue.
Moreover, I occasionally do things that I know will harm the environment for nonhuman animals. I sometimes buy plastic bottles that I don’t recycle or drive my old minivan farther than I need to. And I’m not entirely sure that the carbon offsets I buy really offset all my air travel. In short, I am hardly a model for how to treat nonhuman animals.
In this I don’t think I’m exceptional. Although I’m hardly the most disciplined person in the world, I am fairly good at setting and meeting goals. I don’t know exactly where I fall on the range of moral self-control, but I’m probably not outside the hump of the bell curve. In that sense I’m probably representative enough, and my own anecdotal research seems to stand as a breezy type of confirmation.
If this is right, then moral individualism would be a stretch for most of us. It would
be difficult for us to achieve what the moral individualists ask of us. (I have a philosopher friend who is a committed moral individualist but who, once at a restaurant, ordered the rice that had been cooked in chicken broth rather than the white rice.) And in fact I know others who are as sympathetic with many of the claims of moral individualism as I am—perhaps more so—who think of it as an ideal rather than a moral requirement. In thinking of how we might live decently, moral individualism is probably, like other moral ideals we have encountered, a bridge too far.
But then, what use might it be for us? Is it simply an ideal that we can glimpse in the distance without having the means to achieve? Should we think of it, as utilitarians and Kantians and others seek to do with their views of morality generally, as a framework for how to think about our moral relationship to nonhuman animals? And if it is to be a framework, how might we use a framework that ultimately cannot frame our behavior—or at least the behavior of most of us?
Rather than taking it as an unrealizable ideal or a framework that cannot match what it frames, we can go in another direction, taking the central insight from moral individualism and asking how best to integrate it into our daily lives. That insight, or perhaps two-fold insight, is that many nonhuman animals have lives to live and that those lives expose them to suffering.
In a very broad sense, the first part of that insight would be true of any living being. Trees have lives to live, as do amoebas. Moral individualism does not suggest that we need to take them morally into account. As we have seen in the previous chapter and this one, we might have to take them into account for the sake of other humans and nonhuman animals, but we don’t have to take them into account for their own sake, which is what the individualism in moral individualism is all about. So the mere fact of having a life to live is not enough to elicit our moral concern.
