by Hal Herzog
Regan and Singer differ on some issues. For example, they disagree as to why it would be wrong for me to toss a student and/or a cat out a window. Singer would say it is because they would suffer, not because they have inherent rights. And while Singer is not, at least in principle, opposed to painlessly taking a human or a nonhuman life in some circumstances, Regan is. The two philosophers are, however, in accord on most of the big issues. They both acknowledge that there are important differences between humans and other animals, but they believe that these are not relevant to whether a creature deserves moral consideration. The logical extension of both Regan’s rights argument and Singer’s utilitarian logic is that we should not eat animals, hunt them, or otherwise avoidably cause them to suffer. Practices such as factory farming, using animals for research, caging them in zoos, or trapping them for their fur are immoral under both positions.
CAUGHT IN THE GRIP OF A THEORY:
ANIMAL ETHICS AND THE LIMITS OF LOGIC
Inevitably, ethics involves drawing lines. Singer originally drew the line “somewhere between the shrimp and the oyster” while Regan set the bar at the level of mammals and birds at least one year old. (He bends the rules a bit by saying that basic rights should also extend to human infants.) Singer and Regan both recognize that humans live in the real world, not in an imaginary moral ether. Thus they are willing to make the occasional compromise to accommodate common sense. Both, for example, implicitly recognize that some species warrant more concern than others. Singer has invested more energy into promoting a campaign to gain legal standing for great apes than he has to banning mousetraps. And Regan says that if four normal humans and a golden retriever are in an overloaded lifeboat that can only carry four, the dog goes overboard. He writes, “Death for the dog is not comparable to the harm that death could be for any of the humans.”
But what happens when you refuse to draw moral lines in the sand? Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hob-goblin of little minds.” In animal ethics, foolish consistencies are exemplified by Joan Dunayer, author of the book Speciesism. By insisting on a combination of animal rights literalism and uncompromising adherence to moral consistency, she constructs a set of impossible ethical standards. She also illustrates what happens when you take logic too far.
Dunayer would, of course, consider me a speciesist because I eat meat. More surprising are her vicious attacks on the intellectual elite of the animal liberation movement and on radical animal rights groups that do not measure up to her standards of ideological purity. Dunayer, for example, adamantly opposes any effort to reduce animal suffering by replacing a cruel practice with a less painful alternative. She denounces PETA because they pressured the fast-food industry to make life better for chickens on factory farms. Bigger cages are unacceptable; for Dunayer it is empty cages or nothing. She is mad at Tom Regan for arguing that the dog should be booted out of the hypothetical life raft ahead of any human.
Peter Singer merits a special place on her list of animal rights cop-outs. She disapproves of Singer’s efforts to single out chimpanzees and gorillas as candidates for legal standing. (I assume she would also disapprove of Singer’s statement that he would not have much compunction about swatting a cockroach; insects don’t suffer much, he says.) Dunayer is also unhappy that Singer believes that a human life counts more than the life of a chicken. He argues, for example, that the deaths of 3,000 humans on September 11, 2001, were a much greater tragedy than the deaths of the 38 million chickens killed in American slaughterhouses that day. Dunayer disagrees. In her eyes, chickens deserve even more moral consideration than humans. She writes, “Singer’s disrespect for chickens is inconsistent with his espoused philosophy which values benign individuals more than those who, on balance, cause harm. By that measure, chickens are worthier than most humans, who needlessly cause much suffering and death (for example, by wearing animal-derived products).”
Philosophers have a phrase for what happens when people take logic to bizarre extremes. They say you are “caught in the grip of a theory.” Dunayer falls into the grip by making two assumptions that seem reasonable until you play them out. The first is that all creatures who can experience pleasure and pain should be treated equally. The second is that all it takes to experience pain is the simplest of nervous systems.
In Dunayer’s own words, here are some of the logical consequences of these apparently innocuous assumptions, taken from Speciesism:
“Because all sentient beings are equal, we’re perfectly entitled to save the dog over any of the human beings.” (Chapter 4)
“Wasps need a legal right to life.” (Chapter 5)
“Our moral obligations need to include insects and all other beings with a nervous system…. these animals include comb jellies, cnidarians such as jellyfishes, hydras, sea anemones, and corals.” (Chapter 4)
Joan Dunayer lives in a moral universe that should cause even hard-core animal activists to shudder. Can a reasonable person really believe, as Dunayer apparently does, that one should flip a coin when deciding whether to snatch a puppy or a child from a burning building, or that duck hunters should be imprisoned for life?
The problem for animal liberationists is that Dunayer is right. If you take the charge of speciesism literally, if you refuse to draw any moral lines between species, if you really believe that how we treat creatures should not depend on the size of their brains or the number of their legs, you wind up in a world in which, as Dunayer suggests, termites have the right to eat your house.
HOW SHOULD A GOOD PERSON ACT?
I hate my Inner Lawyer. He usually pops up when I am taking a shower in the morning, or driving mindlessly on some mountain road with the radio turned off. He’s my Jiminy Cricket, my Obi-Wan Kenobi. He asks me inconvenient questions. The neuroscientist Joshua Greene says he lives in a little section of my brain behind my eyebrows called the DLPFC—the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Using a brain-imaging technique called functional MRI, Greene has found that our DLPFC lights up when we try to think logically about tough moral issues. My Inner Lawyer showed up a couple of days ago when I was hiking in the Smokies.
I.L.: Hal, it’s me—your Inner Lawyer.
HAL: Go away.
I.L.: Just listen for a second. Pretend that it is 1939 and you are living in the quaint little village of Dachau outside of Munich. Every day you see the smoke from the chimneys behind the fence of the new “camp” and know that Hitler’s goons are working the ovens overtime to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. Rumor has it that Nazi doctors are even conducting painful medical experiments on some of the prisoners. Your friend Heinz asks you to help him plant a bomb under the SS guards’ barracks. “By killing them we will save lives,” Heinz whispers. “We will send a message to the world.” Hal, do you think you should help Heinz blow up the barracks and perhaps save thousands of people?
HAL: I wouldn’t have the guts.
I.L.: I know. But just pretend you are both a brave and a good person.
HAL: sigh…OK, a good person with courage would be justified in taking direct action to help prevent genocide, even if it meant killing barracks full of Nazis.
I.L.: I agree. Now assume you have read books by the intellectuals of the animal rights movement. They have convinced you that speciesism is the moral equivalent of racism, that the suffering of a monkey in a laboratory is morally no different than the suffering of a human child. You also know that 60,000 monkeys a year are used in research in the United States. And, you agree with Jerry Vlasak of the Animal Liberation Front that killing just one or two primate researchers might put all these studies to a halt.
Now, answer this question. Would a good and brave person like you be justified in firebombing the home of a scientist who was addicting monkeys to cocaine in order to study the brain chemistry of addiction?
HAL: No, it would be against the law.
I.L.: But murder was against the law in Nazi Germany, and you said that was OK.
HA
L: That was different.
I.L.: Why?
HAL: Because keeping monkeys in a lab and even killing them for science is not the same as killing Jews in a concentration camp.
I.L.: But if you believe there is no morally relevant difference between a person and a monkey, wouldn’t you be justified in harming primate researchers?
Hmm…I am thinking that I.L. has me by the balls. But then I am saved by a dim recollection of a lecture I heard years ago on the ethical theory of Immanuel Kant.
HAL: Gotcha. Kant argued that that you should always act in the way that you would want everyone to act in the same situation. I would not want to live in a world where every whacked-out moral crusader with a gun would be allowed to shoot people he thought were doing harm to his pet cause—old-growth forests, fetuses, or frogs. The world would be chaos.
I.L.: But Hal, you did say it would be justified to blow up the Nazi concentration camp guards. How do you know when it is moral to take an illegal action and when it is not?
HAL: You just KNOW. It’s common sense!
I.L.: So, you think that when it comes to killing someone, you should rely on your own common sense, your personal moral intuition? Would Kant go for that?
HAL: Get out of my life, asshole.
IN MATTERS OF MORALS, YOU CAN’T TRUST
YOUR HEAD…. OR YOUR HEART
My Inner Lawyer raises a question at the center of all human morality, not just animal ethics: How do we know what is right? There are two places where we can turn for moral guidance: our head and our heart. The problem is that you can’t rely on either of them.
First, head. Cognitive psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated that human thinking is, in the words of the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, “predictably irrational.” Researchers have identified dozens of types of bias that unconsciously warp the way we think. They have great names: the Lake Woebegone Effect, Myside Bias, the Gambler’s Fallacy, the Barnum Effect, Naïve Realism. The list goes on.
Dunayer’s conclusion that a spider and a human child have the same moral status is both logical and absurd. It illustrates how pure reason can lead us to completely warped ethical standards, that even when we apply the rules of logic, things can go awry when we are making ethical decisions. Rob Bass, my philosopher friend, disagrees. He believes that if you correctly apply formal deductive logic to premises that are true, you will always end up with a correct conclusion. In theory, he may be right. However, psychologists have repeatedly found that humans vary greatly in their ability to think rationally about moral issues. Further, there is abundant evidence that there is almost no relationship between the sophistication of a person’s ethical thinking and how they actually behave.
Even Tom Regan and Peter Singer, both first-class intellects, get into trouble by taking moral consistency too seriously. For example, in his lifeboat scenario, Regan concludes that the dog goes overboard first. Then he takes it a step further and says that you also should toss a million dogs overboard if it would save a single human. But, at the same time, Regan argues that it is wrong to sacrifice a million mice for biomedical research that might ultimately save millions of human children.
Logic also leads Peter Singer to conclusions that most people would find unnerving. In Practical Ethics, he shows that the logical upshot of his utilitarianism is that it might be permissible to euthanize a permanently disabled infant if the child’s mother might subsequently give birth to a healthy child. And Singer has raised the possibility that sexual interactions between humans and animals are not necessarily harmful to man or beast. While his remarks were taken out of context, his comments were met with howls of protests by both the press and animal advocates.
The adherence to cold logic in moral decision making has led some philosophers to conclude that it may be preferable to use impaired human infants rather than monkeys in biomedical experiments, that arson can be a legitimate agent of social change, and that the life of an ant and that of an ape are of equal moral value. So much for relying on our heads when it comes to thinking about animals.
What about our hearts? Is moral intuition better than logic at resolving the moral conundrums in our dealings with other species?
Unfortunately, no. If anything, in matters of morality, our hearts are even more prone to error than our heads. Intuition (and its handmaiden, common sense) are subjected to the whims of a host of morally irrelevant factors—how big an animal’s eyes are, its size, whether it was the mascot of your high school football team—and the evolutionary history of our species. Moral intuition told my friend Sammy Hensley that his hounds did not mind spending their lives chained to a doghouse and tells Japanese fisherman that there is nothing wrong with slaughtering dolphins because they are “fish.” My moral intuition tells me that it is OK to eat meat (particularly if it is labeled “cruelty-free”) but my friend Al’s moral intuition tells him that meat is murder. For thousands of years, it was common sense that slaves were property and that homosexuality was a crime against nature. And moral intuition told the 9/11 airplane hijackers and the arsonists who planted the firebomb under David Jentsch’s car that they had the moral high ground.
WHO HAS THE MORAL HIGH GROUND
I am confused and need another opinion on the “ought to”s of ethics and animals, so I send an email to Gayle Dean, an animal advocate who takes ethics seriously.
Gayle, from an animal liberation perspective, is there any difference between the 9/11 terrorists and “direct action” ALF types who attack scientists? After all, both groups were completely convinced that they have the moral high ground.
She writes back.
There is a big difference between groups that are convinced they have the moral high ground, and the ones that actually have the moral high ground. The difference lies in the truth of the matter. During slavery, many people risked their lives to illegally help slaves because they were convinced they had the moral high ground. In fact, they actually did have the moral high ground. The same for those who helped the Jews escape from the Nazis.
It is after midnight. Tilly has fallen asleep on the rocking chair in my office. I am tired. I write back.
Gayle, I agree with you about Nazis and slavery. But here is my question—how can we be sure what the moral truth is in these matters? Doesn’t it boil down to personal opinion, your own moral intuition?
The next morning she responds:
I agree that is difficult to know the truth of the matter. But moral truth certainly does NOT boil down to personal opinion!
I’d like to think she is right, but the longer I study human-animal interactions, the more I have my doubts.
The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, when push comes to shove, we are all hypocrites. After twenty years of studying how people think about animals, I have come to believe he is right. You do, of course, run into the occasional exceptions. Lisa, for example, is a vegan who does not take antibiotics or let her cat outdoors where it might have fun stalking birds. But the vast majority of us are inconsistent, often wildly so, in our attitudes and behavior toward other species. What are we to make of this?
In the 1950s, the social psychologist Leon Festinger proposed one of the most influential theories in psychology—that when our beliefs, behavior, and attitudes are at odds, we experience a state that he called cognitive dissonance. Because dissonance is uncomfortable, people should be motivated to reduce these psychic conflicts caused by inconsistency. We might, for example, change our beliefs or our behaviors, or we might distort or deny the evidence.
The environmental philosopher Chris Diehm (who is a vegan) is optimistic. He says that when he discusses with people inconsistencies in how they treat animals, they often make an effort to change, or at least they try to justify their behavior. He writes, “We recognize that our relationships to animals take widely disparate, apparently contradictory paths: We have cats in our houses but cows on our plates. When people have this inconsistency pointed out, they try to make sense of it, or remov
e it to the point where they are comfortable with it. The drive for consistency seems to be a good thing, and exposing inconsistencies is a deep motivator for moral reflection and development.”
Chris is a philosopher. He is impressed by the need of humans to achieve logical coherence in their beliefs and behaviors. I am a psychologist. I am more impressed by our ability to ignore even the most blatant examples of moral inconsistency in how we think and behave toward animals. In my experience, most people—be they cockfighters, animal researchers, or pet owners—remain stubbornly oblivious (other than an occasional uncomfortable laugh) when you point out the paradoxes and inconsistencies in our personal and cultural treatment of animals.
So moral consistency is elusive, if not impossible, in the real world, and both head and heart can lead us astray in how we think about the treatment of animals. Perhaps, as shown in the next chapter, we should look to the lives of virtuous individuals rather than abstract philosophical treatises for guidance in our lives with other species.
10
The Carnivorous Yahoo Within Ourselves
DEALING WITH MORAL INCONSISTENCY
The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
—JOHN LE CARRÉ
The central character of the Nobel Prize–winning author J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello is a visiting scholar who delivers a series of lectures on the moral status of animals at a major university. After one of her public talks, an audience member raises her hand: “Are you not expecting too much of humankind when you ask us to live without species exploitation, without cruelty? Is it not more human to accept your own humanity—even if it means embracing the carnivorous yahoo within ourselves?”
