Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

by Huss, John

  At this point, you might want to say “Okay, Travis, you’ve made some interesting arguments about why speciesism is bad, but aren’t you forgetting that God created the world with humans at the top?” Maybe your idea is that one species is more morally important because God gave them special rights. John Locke’s Essays on the Laws of Nature is often cited as one argument for God-given rights grounded in the will of a superior authority. While Locke spoke of rights in terms of humans and human nature, he did argue in Some Thoughts Concerning Education that it would be morally wrong to treat non-human animals in an unnecessarily cruel way. Although many people still believe that rights depend upon God’s will in some way, the majority of philosophers, both religious and secular, reject the idea of God-given rights. We’ll see why shortly.

  Let’s begin by looking at an analogous case in Planet of the Apes. Dr. Zaius is a believer in God-given ape rights, appealing to their existence to justify his discrimination against humans. Now, the viewer is not expected to be convinced by this claim because, in the movie, the apes’ religion is supposed to be nothing more than a myth. The broader lesson that we ought to draw from this is that in order to make the case that God-given rights exist, the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate:

  1.that the deity in question actually exists,

  2.that it commanded or willed that one species is more morally important than another,

  and

  3.that the moral importance of creatures depends upon this deity’s commands or will.

  This can be difficult to do for any religion, imaginary or not. Fortunately, we can sidestep the issues of God’s existence by considering a point first made two and a half thousand years ago by Plato.

  Appearing in the sky, God bellows “Any human interest is more important than any ape interest! Also, the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes is by far the worst in the series. Seriously, I am omniscient, but even I didn’t see that train wreck coming from an otherwise talented filmmaker.” In light of this revelation from God, we can ask why all human interests are more important than ape interests. Either . . .

  1.Human interests are of greater moral importance because God says they are

  or

  2.God says that human interests are more important than ape interests because of some other fact independent of God’s will.

  Here’s the problem. If it is option 1, then moral importance seems to be the product of an arbitrary choice by God—He could just as easily have said ape interests, or shrimp interests, etc. were of greater moral importance. Each of these hypothetical moral rules seems obviously false and most people do not want the moral rules they accept to be ones that were arbitrarily selected.

  Some theists might protest, arguing that their “God is perfectly, morally wise (indeed, omniscient) and anything He says about a groups’ moral importance, He says for good reason.” Fair enough. But if God says human interests take precedence over ape interests, then this would be because all humans have some morally relevant properties that all apes lack. Alternatively, if God endorses the principle of equal consideration of interests, this would be because He has some independent reason to do so. Whichever view is correct, we can cut straight to the chase and look to the reasons for the view. It is these reasons, not God’s say-so, that make a given view right.

  The Quality of Non-Human Animal Life

  In 1729, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal was published. In one of the greatest pieces of satire ever written (think of it as an Onion article from the eighteenth century), Swift proposes that the problem of poverty and overpopulation could be solved by having poor adults eat their own children. Swift was happy to point out that

  a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and . . . will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

  The readers, as they were supposed to, found Swift’s so-called “modest proposal” horrifying. Hopefully it didn’t make anyone hungry. It was clear to Swift’s audience that any benefit that would result from eating poor Irish children was far less important than saving the children from undue suffering or harm. A similar satirical piece could be written using non-human animals, such as infant apes, instead of infant humans. If species membership is not morally relevant, we should find the idea of sacrificing stronger ape interests to satisfy weaker human interests horrifying for the same reasons.

  The lives of non-human animals in factory farms and most labs are lives that are not worth living. It’s a life of almost constant suffering, with little or no pleasure. The USDA statistics reveal that between nine and ten billion non-human animals are slaughtered each year in the United States alone. Philosopher Gary Francione describes life on a factory farm, writing that these non-human animals

  are raised under horrendous intensive conditions . . . mutilated in various ways without pain relief, transported long distances in cramped, filthy containers, and finally slaughtered amid the stench, noise, and squalor of the abattoir.

  This should make you as hungry as reading A Modest Proposal does. Millions more non-human animals are tortured and killed in labs each year, often to test components of unnecessary luxuries, such as chemicals for a new cosmetic product. No more details are needed here. These should more than suffice to establish that it would be wrong to subject severely cognitively disabled humans to the same conditions. Once we reject speciesism, these should also suffice to establish that it is just as wrong to treat non-human animals in the same manner.

  Are We Required to Change Our Attitudes and Actions?

  Should we change our attitudes and actions? I think that the short answer is a resolute “Yes.” We could accept the idea that speciesism is morally wrong, which could take our moral beliefs and actions in one of two directions. We could, with complete consistency, treat cognitively disabled humans in the same way that we currently treat non-human animals on factory farms and in labs, or we could grant non-human animals the same respectful treatment we currently afford the severely cognitively disabled, neither eating them nor experimenting on them.

  If you think it would be wrong to raise and kill any human, even if it lived a good life before it was slaughtered (akin to free-range animals), then consistency would require not eating meat from any farm, even if it had free-range animals. That is, you should become a vegetarian (or perhaps a vegan).

  Another interesting anti-speciesist message is contained in Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Caesar, the ape leader, is portrayed as possessing great moral wisdom. Among his wise decisions as the leader, he influences all apes, gorillas, and orangutans to become vegetarians.

  You might still deny that speciesism is morally wrong. But there are serious costs to maintaining this view. If you hold on to the idea that all human interests outweigh the interests of non-human animals of any kind, then you must think that the humans never wronged Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. If we endorse this speciesist view, then it would have been perfectly morally permissible to keep Caesar locked in a tiny cage in the primate “shelter” and even kill him in the lab. Likewise, we would have to believe that it was morally permissible to kill Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

  Anyone taking this line should also have no problem with the enslavement of apes and the brutally violent training methods employed by humans in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. All of these acts in the film series seemed morally wrong for the simple reason that the apes had the same interests as the humans had and all similar interests should be given equal weight in our moral deliberations. Endorsing speciesism requires biting a very large bullet and accepting what seems to be an absurd view about the permissibility of killing apes in the movie series and other imagined cases.

  The list of examples from the movie series and the literature on the subject could go on much longer. But I won’t write everything out for the reader. Instead, I will leave it to you to think about the issue more
on your own. I found that watching the Planet of the Apes movies through the lens of the speciesism debate adds a whole new level of complexity to a great science fiction saga. I’ll end this chapter with a humble suggestion that the reader do the same.1

  ________

  1 I thank Amanda Lynn O’Neil Timmerman, Monis Rose, Yishai Cohen, Andrew Clapham and Kurt Blankschaen for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I want to especially thank John Huss for the invaluable feedback he provided at several stages.

  7

  Of Apes and Men

  JONAS-SÉBASTIEN BEAUDRY

  Four astronauts land on a strange planet where apes treat humans the way humans treat animals in our world. The tables have been turned. One of the astronauts has died during the two-thousand-year trip and the apes kill and lobotomize two other astronauts, leaving only Taylor, the hero. Taylor will discover by the movie’s end that he is in fact on Earth, many years in the future from the viewpoint of the Earth he left.

  What sort of hero is Taylor? There are two ways to react to the apes’ domination and understand Taylor’s situation. Now that humans have become the dominated species, Taylor (and the audience) can appreciate how callous humans have been toward animals,. Alternatively, Taylor can think, “Humans being ruled by disgusting brutes! How monstrous!”

  Being hunted and caged does not give Taylor much of an opportunity to detach himself from his situation sufficiently to reflect upon its irony or learn from it. Maybe, below a certain threshold of comfort or peace between two groups, it’s not possible for members of those groups to think in conciliatory, compassionate, or friendly terms. It may well be a vicious circle, but there’s just too much at stake if they lower their guards.

  That Taylor considers most apes enemies is not irrational given the circumstances. He has been shot in the neck and cannot speak until halfway through the movie, when he is captured by gorillas and snarls “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” No love lost there. Much of Taylor’s effort is directed at fighting apes and stating how humans are better, how everything apes have, they inherited from a superior species, how it is apes, not humans, who are supposed to smell bad and carry diseases like vermin. This human chauvinism is one form of a general type of discrimination known as speciesism.

  What is speciesism? Think of racism. The term “speciesism” has been strategically used by animal rights activists from the 1970s onward precisely because of its closeness to “racism” and its nasty ring. To be speciesist is to believe that belonging to a species is in itself morally meaningful, and that the members of one species (generally, the human one) are superior to members of other species.

  Speciesism can also refer to the arbitrary moral prioritization of members of one’s own species. Arbitrary is the key word. Philosophers in the “anti-speciesist” camp like Peter Singer will say that a preference for one’s own species is arbitrary (in the sense of gratuitous or grounded on morally irrelevant considerations, like skin color). “Pro-speciesist” philosophers like Carl Cohen, Peter Carruthers, Tibor Machan, and Bernard Williams will claim that this preference is morally justified rather than arbitrary.

  Although most speciesists insist that members of their own species are intrinsically better, I don’t agree. Instead I think that a moderate speciesism simply recognizes that certain within-species relationships are valuable for distinctive and justifiable reasons. This is why, in addition to the obvious value of Taylor’s relationship with Zira (a chimp), Taylor’s relationship with Nova (a primitive human) is also valuable. As the movies show, there’s something about relations within a species that is distinctively and justifiably valuable. This is a modest and moderate speciesism that can be defended.

  Taken as a whole, the entire Planet of the Apes franchise may be viewed as a story of moral progress, one in which the characters come to realize what’s valuable about speciesism and what isn’t—when belonging to a particular species matters morally and when it doesn’t. Taylor can’t overcome the bad aspects of speciesism and his part in the moral tale is to show us what can go wrong. In particular, his story shows us that overcoming speciesism is not an individual moral feat because of the collective and institutional dimensions that speciesism—which here becomes a symbol for racism and vicious nationalism—takes.

  The movie series lays bare the individual and collective dimensions of speciesism. The moral tale continues after Taylor’s death, with Cornelius and Zira traveling back in time to the 1970s, where they are the only talking apes, and their son, Caesar leading the simian uprising in the two last installments of the series, which concludes with a promising interspecies mutual respect.

  Simian Superiority Is Self-Evident

  The belief in simian superiority is part of the apes’ “first article of faith” written in their sacred scrolls, as recited in the first movie during Taylor’s “trial”:

  That the almighty created the ape in his own image, that he gave him a soul and a mind, that he set him apart from the beasts of the jungle and made him the lord of the planet. These sacred truths are evident.

  This reveals what the apes take to be an “evident” corollary of superior value: ape dominion over Earth. The self-evidence of these sacred truths alludes to the American Declaration of Independence which, like many other national and international legal instruments stating and protecting human rights, asserts that human beings are naturally endowed with fundamental rights such as “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The ideas (generally attributed to Aristotle or to the book of Genesis) of dominion over and stewardship of lesser species has been used repeatedly by dominating groups who construe their domination as paternalistic and morally desirable rather than as a mere act of force.

  Animal liberation gained momentum in the Western post-religious world when the notion of the “sacredness” of human life came under attack. Speciesist assumptions were scrutinized. Why is it “evident” that we’re superior? And why would this superiority confer on us the right to infringe in such extreme ways on the welfare of non-humans?

  Short of answering “because God made us so” and “because God said so,” speciesists need to roll up their sleeves and start reflecting upon what exactly justifies the preferential treatment of their own species. Instead of referring to the very property of “being human,” pro-speciesists refer to the great value of some capacities possessed exclusively by humans: we can speak, we are intelligent, we are moral, and so on. In other words, instead of putting a value on species in itself, these theorists give a high ranking to some particular human capacities or properties.

  All Animals Are Created Equal

  Peter Singer, the intellectual figurehead of the anti-speciesist movement (who, along with Paola Cavalieri, spearheaded the Great Ape Project) has a good response to the speciesist. For any capacity you show me that justifies human chauvinism, he says, I will either show you some humans who don’t have it, or some animals who do have it. This goes for sentience, consciousness, sociality, perhaps even language. And yet, Peter Singer continues, you still respect humans lacking this capacity, and still mistreat animals endowed with it. What’s more, your very attempts to find an exclusively human capacity reveal that you are partial to your own species: if I can prove to you that other animals are able to communicate, or are intelligent, or share some traits that we consider “moral,” you will simply work harder at finding some traits that they do not have, as though the one premise that is non-negotiable is that humans are exceptionally valuable, which is precisely what is at issue. According to Singer, when people are attached to their own kind for partial, non-moral reasons, they will always try to come up with what looks like an objective, impartial ground for it.

  Dr. Zaius and many other denizens of Ape City are no better in this regard. Consider Taylor’s trial. The trial becomes part of just such an ideological process to rationalize and legitimize the mistreatment of humans. To start with, the President of the Assembly orders that Taylor be st
ripped of his clothes, like the beast he is. He says: “These rags he’s wearing give off a stench that’s offensive to the dignity of this tribunal.” In fact, what is offensive to the dignity of apes is that an inferior species starts looking disturbingly like them by wearing clothes.

  When Taylor speaks, the judge says, “Dr. Zira, would you tell Bright Eyes to be silent?” Taylor objects: “My name is Taylor.” The judge orders: “Bailiff! Silence the animal.” With these few orders, Taylor has been deprived of his clothes, his name, and his entitlement to speak—the first things that we give babies to welcome them into our ethical community and treat them as one of us. We immediately name them, dress them, and address them as though they could communicate even when it is unclear whether they can communicate, and even if they could not care less about being naked and nameless. We do it because some forms of treatment are symbols of community membership.

  The trial turns out not to be a real trial at all: the accused is a non-ape and therefore has no rights under ape law. That he is being tried at all is “scientific heresy.” Taylor is not being tried, he is being disposed of. The three judges imitate the three “wise monkeys” and block their respective eyes, ears, and mouth to highlight the obscurantist aspect of this legal masquerade: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

  Later, Taylor will be threatened with lobotomy and castration if he does not co-operate. Lobotomy would deprive him of the capacities that would make him a fitting subject of solidarity and respect. Castration not only ensures that he won’t propagate his kind, but also bars him symbolically from ever becoming part of a dominating elite. And of course, both treatments are degrading and would confirm that he is the sort of being not owed more respect.

  Any proofs adduced by Zira, Cornelius, and Taylor are “profane,” “irrelevant,” and “heretical” and the artifacts found in the “forbidden zone” proving that there was a more advanced human civilization pre-existing Ape City are sealed into a cave.