by Huss, John
Both individual and institutionalized acts of speciesism fundamentally aim at preserving superiority, as a matter of religious specialness, objective value, or social privileges. When these non-moral drives push people to be blind to evidence that some beings deserve our moral concern or consideration, they are speciesist in the bad sense of the term. These people are guilty of immoral speciesism, that is, of favoring their own species for no good reason.
A Third Way
There is certainly much truth to Peter Singer’s contention that when we set our own species apart, we are merely rationalizing—and clinging to—an irrational prejudice. However, these rationalizing strategies are not the whole truth.
Some forms of partiality toward our own species are morally justified. For instance, there is value to a community whose members are in solidarity with one another, and the fact that this attachment is made possible by the capacities of the members becomes relevant. However, these capacities are then only valuable insofar as they make this valuable attachment possible. This attachment makes it morally okay to give preference to our own species, though it doesn’t license mistreating other species in the ways that human beings often do.
A key flaw in the arguments of both anti- and pro-speciesist thinkers is their exclusive focus on intrinsic, individual capacities at the expense of relational aspects of morality, one example being solidarity. When these individual capacities (sentience, consciousness, rationality, speech, and so forth) are put on a pedestal, we forget that they do not matter intrinsically. We start to think of them as a sort of magical property which infuses the beings possessing them with value.
Consider the mutant human telepaths in Beneath the Planet of the Apes who find the capacity for speech “primitive” and communicate telepathically and have associated speech with more primitive cultures. They may come to consider the capacity for telepathic communication as a necessary condition to merit respect and be valued—but this would miss the simpler idea that telepathy is like speech: they are both ways that different beings use to communicate and create social bonds within their respective forms of life. The relational aspects of speciesism allow us to understand why speciesism, rather than being a mere prejudice, sometimes tracks morally relevant differences.
Are All Speciesisms Created Equal?
Speciesism, when it is arbitrary, can imply that another species’s very existence is of negative value. This is the case, for instance, when an “inferior” species is seen as a threat to another more valuable species, or when the members of a wicked species inflict so much harm on one another that it would even be better for them to be dead.
Consider the radical ending to the sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Taylor has been shot by an ape during the final battle between apes and human mutants and he asks Dr. Zaius, an orangutan, for help. Zaius answers: “You ask me to help you? Man is evil. It is capable of nothing but destruction!” Dr. Zaius deems the elimination of Taylor, and of all humans, to be an intrinsically good thing. Taylor’s lover, Nova, has just been killed by apes, and Taylor was previously held captive by the human mutants, who forced him to fight his best friend in a dual to death. Dr. Zaius’s refusal to show compassion is the last straw. Taylor believes that these apes and mutants are two wicked species whose existence should be eradicated and, confirming Dr. Zaius’s low opinion of humans, triggers the bomb, wiping all life off the face of the Earth. Dr. Zaius’s statement is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had he acted more humanely toward Taylor, Taylor would not have triggered the bomb.
The belief that it’s a valuable thing for the universe if the negative value of another species were wiped out is speciesism at its most extreme. However, it is not necessarily arbitrary. It could be a radical position to hold, but an impartial one. For instance, in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the US president does not think it would be fair to kill Cornelius and Zira’s baby any more than it would be fair to kill Hitler before he has committed his crimes. Besides, he’s not sure that it would be such a bad thing if apes would eventually take control of the world if they are indeed better creatures than we are.
His advisor, Dr. Otto Hasslein, wants to have Cornelius, Zira and their unborn son, Caesar, dead, or at least neutered, and asks “Do you want these apes’ progeny to dominate the world, sir?” The president answers that if the progeny turns out as well as the parents (gentle Zira and Cornelius), “they may do a better job of it than we have.” The president cannot be said to be a speciesist in the sense of preferring his own species. Peter Singer would find his impartiality incompatible with speciesism.
However I have associated bad speciesism not only with immoral partiality, but also with a mistaken attribution of greater “cosmic value.” In another sense, therefore, the president’s view is speciesist because it reflects the belief that another species is superior (even if in this case it’s not his own). This goes to show that non-speciesists can be as unwise as speciesists when they fail to appreciate the importance of relations within and between species. For instance, is the president thinking morally about his grandchildren who will be enslaved or eliminated by the future dominating apes?
Bernard Williams, in his essay “The Human Prejudice,” writes about the science-fiction movie Independence Day:
. . . aliens . . . want to destroy us . . . we try to defend ourselves. . . . But should we? Perhaps this is just another irrational, visceral, human reaction. The benevolent and fair-minded and far-sighted aliens may know a great deal about us and our history, and understand that our prejudices are unreformable.
Extremely similar to Dr. Zaius’s statements! Williams uses this example to show where “the project of trying to transcend altogether the ways in which human beings understand themselves and make sense of their practices” could end up. In posing this rhetorical question, he does not suspect that a sort of Singerian anti-speciesist saint would bite this bullet instead of finding the theory underlying it absurd. Williams thinks that this harsh self-judgment is likely to lead to self-delusion or self-hatred. That may be true. I, for one, think that relational aspects of human lives are part of how “human beings understand themselves and make sense of their practices.” But I also think that these relationships are morally significant and that moral saints ought not to transcend them. On the contrary, they are some of the most valuable things we humans know.
Is There Such a Thing as a Good Speciesist?
Speciesism sounds wicked from the get-go. After all, it’s analogous to racism, and how could racism ever be good? It can’t. But the properties of the members of a different species are very different from the properties of the members of a different race. Differences like skin color are of no moral significance.
The most important moral dimension ignored by the anti-speciesist camp is the relational dimension of morality. This is because they generally consider that what truly matters are the properties that individuals personally have, regardless of the relationships in which they take part. Given that these relationships are a deeply anchored fact of human life, it’s not at all obvious why we should build a morality for beings who seek to morally transcend whatever pull these relations have on them—and this pull may sometimes be moral. Some aspects of species membership not only do matter, but should matter morally.
Consider reproductive capacities. Taylor is aware that some apes may be closer to him in terms of some capacities (such as speech), yet he still sees that he can only reproduce with the mute, primitive Nova. He says, “You’re not as smart as Stewart [the fellow astronaut who died during the trip], but you’re the only gal in town.” He actually develops true feelings for her. They become lovers and companions and their companionship is different from a pet-companionship even though, as anti-speciesists would mistakenly emphasize, she would have lesser intellectual capacities than a pet (on some suspiciously narrow account of intellectual capacities).
Some relationships are not based on the many capacities that speciesists and anti-speciesists focus on: m
any relationships typical to the human form of life have little or nothing to do with rationality, self-awareness, or autonomy. Take two kinds of relationships central to human life: love and care. Taylor loves Nova, and we understand that he is not debasing himself because he sees that, even though she’s primitive, she has human ways to respond to him. He can detect her personality, even without speech. At one point he contemplates the possibility that the speechless form of life of her “tribe” may be better than his. A speechless lifestyle may bring humans closer to happiness.
We can seriously doubt that language has brought more harm than good to humans (remember, Taylor has misanthropic tendencies), but the point is that they do not need this capacity to be attached to one another. Therefore, Nova’s sexual compatibility is not the only explanation for Taylor’s attachment to her, but it is still an important component. It is one of many biological facts that may be contingent, but are nonetheless inherent to human life and affect the sort of relationships that we will have with one another. We value procreation and family life. These things enrich our lives.
What if apes and humans could mate? Would that remove any moral case for species preference? In that case we would ask more questions. Regarding the value of the loving relation, we would wonder whether an ape and a human can find happiness as a couple. Would they be loyal to one another, for instance? What sort of parents would they be? Would they really partake in the good of family life? And so on. It is perhaps tempting to answer: no, no, and no. However, we may sometimes answer in the negative out of prejudice.
The apes in Planet of the Apes are humanoid: their form of life is essentially human. For all practical purposes, they are humans with a monkey mask. If they could procreate with humans, it seems that they could have a happy family life. But many more subtle questions surface. For instance, is it part and parcel of a caring relation to recognize oneself physically in one’s caregiver? (Are white children disoriented when raised in an all-black family?) Or is it part of a valuable romantic relation to be sexually attracted to some being that resembles us?
Cornelius mentions that Taylor looks dumber when he shaves. Bernard Williams suggests that aliens might be so ugly that we just couldn’t overcome our visceral revulsion. These issues are complex, notably because many of these criteria are socially constructed—and even though collectively sharing some social beliefs may in itself be valuable, the province of social construction is where prejudices breed. Morality is faced with the complex task of rooting out the arbitrary prejudices while preserving social constructions which actually serve valuable relationships.
However in some cases, the limitations to the special relationships we have with animals are not purely a matter of socially constructed prejudices but arise because of natural differences. No amount of social effort will avoid them because, contrary to what some think, truth is not a cultural construct all the way down. In the 1970s, some psychologists tried to raise chimpanzees in a human environment and teach them human sign language. “Project Nim,” among similar projects, failed, but it was not for lack of trying to have “nurture” supplant “nature.” Nim, because of the form of life that chimpanzees have, was limited in the way he could be integrated into a human family. And his limitations were due to his own form of life. It doesn’t make sense to try to understand Nim’s limitations in abstraction from his being a chimpanzee.
To say of Nim Chimpsky that he was like a mentally disabled human would be misguided. He is neither disabled by the standards of his species, nor human. The types of relationships he could have with humans were inherently limited. And the particularities of his form of life cannot be made light of. Nim disfigured and nearly killed a few human beings who acted as his primary caregivers, in a way that no mentally disabled children would (or at least, not so commonly as apes in Nim’s situation would). This fact is to be taken into account when we think about the capacity that Nim has to respond to caring and to participate in a relationship of care, just as we must take other facts about Nim’s form of life (such as needs, fears, and relational skills) when we reflect upon how fitting it is to enter into some kind of a relationship with him.
Some relations that depend on species-specific characteristics do matter to human life, and they are not just because of psychological preferences. They are morally warranted goals or pursuits and are part of what we humans need to be individually happy. Morality should make room for this happiness, our own and that of “others.” and justice should facilitate this goal at a collective level. These “others” may include non-humans, and balancing the obligations of the various roles we occupy within different relations will be a difficult moral exercise, but one that needs to be undertaken as well as we can.
Let’s Keep This Between the Species
We can have many sorts of relations with animals, including relations of companionship, which come with moral frames of their own. Yet it’s a mistake to suppose that the biological facts about those animals are irrelevant. For instance, I may have a duty to preserve the natural environment so that certain wild animals can survive. I will still think it is the best moral choice to kill a lion if this means saving a baby’s life, unless there is another way of saving this baby’s life. My duty toward the lions would be outweighed by my particular duty of care toward a vulnerable member of my community—a ground that only extreme anti-speciesists would challenge, thinking it preferable to sacrifice a human baby with little cognitive capacities and no family than to starve a (smarter) animal who needs to feed her own offspring. This is the same extreme form of anti-speciesism that would have us, as Williams suggests, surrender to invading aliens if we thought that they had capacities that made them superior to us.
We should distinguish among human-to-human relations, within-species relations in other species, and relations between humans and non-humans. We can well recognize that a relation has value even if we do not personally take part in it, and may wish to preserve it. For instance, when Taylor realizes his friend has been lobotomized, he shouts, “You cut up his head, you bloody baboon!” and rushes Dr. Zaius in anger. Zira looks at this scene, saddened and sorry for Taylor, rather than worried for the ape he will try in vain to attack. She understands the great value of the private relation Taylor had with his friend and the fairness of his reaction. In such cases, apes and humans recognize the moral significance of relationships.
We can also realize this importance impartially, which should disarm the anti-speciesist worry about arbitrariness. Dr. Zira has done experimental brain surgery on humans, and is not judgmental of another society where apes are the ones experimented on. The problem remains that Zira or other impartial judges are still mistaken about what is acceptable to do to others, even if we’re willing to do it to ourselves if we were placed in the other’s situation.
A Planet to Share
As Charlton Heston tells his fellow astronauts when they paddle out of the sinking spaceship, “we’re here to stay.” There is no running away from this planet, no other community to join. Confronted with other species and limited resources (and other species are part of these resources) how should we act?
In all of the movies in the series, there are characters who are sympathetic to members of the dominated group—Zira and Cornelius in the two first movies, Stephanie and Lewis in the third, MacDonald in the fourth, Caesar in the final one. This is the moral stance that we must adopt to overcome the immoral type of speciesism. What conditions are necessary to acquire such a concern for other species?
These considerate characters acting as moral models are scientists trained to think objectively and humane, compassionate people. Caesar says: “MacDonald, I believe that when you grow to truly know and trust a person, you cannot help but like him. When we grow to know and trust your people, we will be equals until the end of time.” This tells us that we need a certain level of security to afford empathy, compassion, or genuine concern. At the same time, we cannot give all moral concern to our own species and none to oth
ers.
In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Dr. Zaius refuses to let humans live because they bring only death. Similarly, in the third installment, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Hasslein, the president’s science advisor, is worried that intelligent apes, given their tendency to brutality, will eventually enslave humans. It is out of solidarity for their respective groups and the relations they have with them that they need to eliminate a group of beings that has become a threat, regardless of the gravity of this threat. This utter disregard for the interests of other species will antagonize the two groups further, rather than reconcile them. It is morality’s task to distinguish when, and to what extent, our relationships require that we give (only a partial and justified) priority to our own species, and when we are merely giving priority to our own species out of an arbitrary preference for “our own” and a callous indifference to others.
The Planet of the Apes franchise is, but for the last installment, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, very bleak. These films reflect two deep fears simmering in the American psyche at the time of their production. First, the fear of a great nuclear catastrophe that would end it all, wipe out all life on the planet or create mutants (a key theme of Beneath the Planet of the Apes). Second, the fear of descendants of slaves uniting and rising against the white oppressors (a key theme in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes).
It displays the tragedy of man’s inability to react before it’s too late to avoid ethnic wars or destroy the world and begs the question of whether men are so rotten—mainly because of their penchant for destroying other beings—that they ought to be wiped out. The movies show us humans and apes destroying one another but, thanks to time travel, bring us back to a hopeful but insecure future that looks a lot like the conflict-ridden world in which we now live. Read as a cautionary tale, they warn us we must learn to strike a proper balance between our various affiliations, loyalties, and relationships with other humans and non-humans if we are to survive.
