Crisis #3: the Conundrum over Animal Equality

We are in a state of crisis regarding notions of animal equality. Animal liberation implies some kind of animal equality. For Peter Singer, a utilitarian, in his book Animal Liberation it means equal consideration of equivalent interests, such as not suffering. However, for him, different animal lives are of differential value depending on whether they involve self-awareness, planning, advanced communication, complex social relationships, and other characteristics. For Tom Regan, an animal rights theorist whose views are mainly articulated in The Case for Animal Rights, animals who are routinely exploited often may be considered not merely living, but “subjects of a life,” and they each have “equal inherent value.” Yet in dilemmas, if we have to choose between saving a human and a dog, say, in a burning building in which you can only pull one form the fire, Regan would say to save the dog because nonhuman animals supposedly have fewer “opportunities for satisfaction.”

Joan Dunayer, in her book, Speciesism, is more of an absolute egalitarian. She states that it would be perfectly moral to flip a coin in the case of the dog versus the human. She calls Singer and Regan “new speciesists” because they do not take equality of sentient beings all the way down the line, so to speak. Not only this, but she calls for equal rights for insects, as well. Paola Cavalieri, in The Animal Question, also calls for equality of all conscious beings, undermining any appeals to real or supposed cognitive sophistication.

I believe that these debates over equality raise a crisis. David Selby writes:

Do all non-human animals have rights, and if so, do they all possess them to the same extent?….If sentience is the key determinant in the possession of rights, are the rights of species to be graded according to the degree of sentience? Where do the tsetse fly, the malarial mosquito, the locust, the tapeworm and the myriad organisms that invade our bloodstream and make us ill stand in the animal rights landscape?(Selby, Earthkind (1995), pp. 8-9)

And Stephen Wise writes:

Let those who would ridicule the argument that legal rights should not be restricted to human beings link the rights of chimpanzees and mosquitoes. If the link can be forged, it is likely that no nonhuman animal will ever obtain legal rights. (Wise, "Thunder without Rain," Animal Law 3 (1997): 50)

Is this really a crisis? Why not just settle for Dunayer’s and Cavalieri’s simpler view of equality across the board?

I think the crisis is this: most people would view it as highly objectionable to toss a coin between saving a human or a maggot, other things being equal. And they have the sense, however intuitive, that there are sound reasons for such a choice, if only they could be clearly articulated. They do not think they are speciesist. So either we go by the radical egalitarian view of Dunayer and Cavalieri, which seems to lead to this objectionable consequence and to reduce animal liberation to absurdity in most people’s minds, or else we have inequality in certain cases, and then it becomes a question as to whether this inequality should spread across the board, so that animals would enjoy no equal rights whatsoever. That might be an invitation to animal exploitation. Regan does not state what separates a dilemma from a normal situation in The Case for Animal Rights. He just asserts that there is a difference. Moreover, “opportunities for satisfaction” could lead to our saving the rich over the poor. Francione expresses that our intuition tells us that we should save a human over a dog if we know nothing about the individuals except their species, but intuition tells us exactly nothing as to why we should choose this way. Other animal rights philosophers such as Julian Franklin, Mark Rowlands, Bernard Rollin, and others simply do not tell us how to choose in such dilemmas.

In sum, is animal liberation DOOMED? On the one hand, undermining animal equality in any way might doom animal liberation, which seems to be based on some form of egalitarianism. On the other hand, having absolute equality seems to lead to absurdities, and absurd implications of animal liberation might also threaten animal liberation as a whole with possible untenability. A majority of society would not accept such an implication even if some extremists are content to flip a coin between a baby and a flea. The thought that someone might rescue a tiny insect trapped in a droplet of water gives me joy, but someone who says they’d flip a coin between saving a human or such an insect frankly makes me feel a bit sickened.

I believe that we can find principled grounds for distinguishing such cases, and also logical reasons for preferring humans to blow-flies in dilemmas, while still consistently maintaining a broad-based equality. Indeed, my own theory includes a strict duty to refrain from harming, say, insects if that is reasonably avoidable. However, such a theory must withstand objections from Dunayer and Cavalieri, e.g., that humans are not really intellectually superior, that cognitive capacities are morally irrelevant and so forth. I believe that such a theory is possible and my forthcoming book (and a research paper, if I have time to write it; there are so many papers and books that I feel the need to write!) will seek to enunciate this view. Thus it may be possible to transcend the crisis of either human-caterpillar absolute equality on the one hand, and creeping inegalitarianism across the board resulting in routine harming of nonhuman animals, including insects, on the other hand.

Blog Reformat

Sometimes when people read a blog, they want to start with the latest entry. That is the traditional format, and is suitable for more or less regular readers. However, sometimes readers are new to the blog. Especially when items are entered in a series, it makes more sense for such individuals perhaps to read from earliest to latest. Therefore, at my blogsite, I now offer a choice of reading the entries from latest down to earliest, as before, but also from earliest through to the most recent. This should serve to make my blog more user-friendly.

Update Regarding Great Apes Activism

At Brock University in a fourth-year seminar course on animals and the law, we extensively discuss great apes advocacy. On June 10, 2008 I made a blog entry defending such advocacy against Francione's attack on the Great Ape Project, which he used to support but no longer does. Rethinking these issues has occasioned me to revise the earlier entry in that I more clearly outline that the pragmatist approach has four major advantages over Francione's negativist proposal, and shares the advantage that his enjoys of utterly criticizing speciesist arguments that beings should have rights because they have human-like cognitive characteristics.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang

Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Crisis #2: The Crisis of Inconclusive (Animal) Rights Theories

The crisis in rights theories not leading to strong rights, an extraordinary outcome, is somewhat detailed in “The Rights of Animal Persons.” However, since I am doing a series on crises in animal ethics (not all are discussed in the essay just mentioned), expanding on the list posted in September, I will briefly discuss this difficulty. The major approaches to animal rights hitherto duplicate human rights theory in the arena of animal ethics. They are: (1) intuitionism; (2) compassion; (3) tradition; (4) Kant’s theory; (5) Rawls’ theory; and (6) Gewirth’s theory. I actually discuss all of these theories in the last post, so I will not bore the reader with a repetition. Minimally, these rights theories do not entail strong rights, but are compatible with utilitarian vivisection for medical purposes, for example, because: (1) one can have utilitarian intuitions; (2) utilitarianism can claim to be “compassionate”; (3) there are utilitarian traditions; (4) Kant claims we should go by universalizable principles, but we can universalize utilitarianism; (5) we can set utilitarian principles of justice from “the original position” (see last post for details); (6) utilitarianism is compatible with needing freedom and well-being, and the principle of generic consistency, or treating like things alike. I also can show that sado-masochism is compatible with all of these frameworks too. It might seem odd to say that in the case of compassion, but if ethics is based on the compassion that people happen to have—well, sado-masochists might not have much. If compassion is advocated as an ideal because it promotes good, sadism can produce a good. In any event, these rights frameworks are grossly indeterminate. They do not result in what their advocates claim, which is a pity, because even granted the assumptions they wish others to share, their conclusions do not follow. And it is asking a lot to have others simply agree to one’s intuitive assumptions. Last time I showed that all of the frameworks are either intuitionist or crypto-intuitionist as well. Surely it is a crisis in rights theory if they do not even vindicate rights!

Crisis #1: The Poverty of Justification in (Animal) Ethics: Intuitionism

I am sorry I was not able to keep up my blog in the months since my last entry. I was unavoidably detained by a time-sensitive project of (for me) overwhelming magnitude. Therefore, my last blogging was in the fall, and I now write in the bitter cold of the Canadian winter.

Last time I indicated that animal ethics is in crisis, which is no small claim. The first indicator of crisis status was my observation that most of the ethical theories are intuitionist. What does intuitionism mean? Intuitions are rock-bottom beliefs in ethics, and intuitionists claim that it is neither possible nor necessary to justify intuitions. Because they are rock-bottom or foundational, no reason can be given to justify intuitive beliefs. If another belief is introduced to justify an intuition, then the intuition itself is no longer basic to the system. (Note for specialists: “foundational” here does not necessarily mean that someone is committed to what is called a foundationalist epistemology, only that no more basic belief is given to justify the intuition.)

What are some examples of intuitions? First, let it be noted that thinkers can be either explicit or implicit intuitionists. An explicit intuitionist will discuss their intuitions quite openly. We can interpret someone to be a covert intuitionist, though, if they offer beliefs that are seemingly basic to their system, and no attempt is made to justify the belief, or even to indicate that a justification is needed. We can analyze the leading ethical theories, which have been extended to animal ethics, in terms of intuitions. These theories are: utilitarianism, the feminist ethics of care, ethical egoism, and virtue ethics, and right theories.

Utilitarianism is based on the intuitions that: (1) the good can be analyzed into good = pleasure and bad = pain (or else good = preference-satisfaction and bad = preference-frustration); (2) we ought to maximize the good and minimize the bad overall. (This rough-and-ready sketch does not account for the intuitions of rule utilitarianism and indirect utilitarianism, though.) In “The Rights of Animal Persons” I document how utilitarian “animal liberationists” can and do defend medical vivisection, even though that is an affront to animal rights. The feminist ethics of care is based on the intuitions that ethics is based on sympathy, empathy, and/or compassion. However, not only is this ideal intuited, but the way caring is applied is intuited as well. Traditional animal welfarists who still use animals for food, clothing, entertainment, etc. consider themselves compassionate, as do utilitarians who think they “maximize” compassion, whereas those who would abolish all animal exploitation think none could be more compassionate than strong rights advocates. Different intuitive notions of “caring” or compassion therefore compete. Ethical egoism holds that everyone should agree to rules such as not killing, stealing, breaking promises, etc. since it is in everyone’s self-interest to forge such an agreement. It is based on the intuition that people only ought to pursue their own self-interest in the end. Virtue ethics is organized around promoting virtues such as courage, honesty, etc., and avoiding vices such as cruelty, laziness, etc. This last view is based on the intuition that these are the most important or fundamental aspects of ethics. However, every ethical theory also has its own idea as to what is virtuous or vicious: an ethical egoist sees altruism as weak, whereas a utilitarianism sees altruism as noble, for example. So diverse intuitions come to bear against virtue ethics too.

It might be thought odd to claim that the leading rights theories are intuitionist, since only some of them claim to be intuitionist. However, I will illustrate how these other theories are in fact based covertly on intuitions even when they do not claim to be. (Best caring, my own view, is an animal rights theory, but the intention at least is that it not be based on intuitions.) The leading rights views are those based on intuitions, compassion, tradition, Immanuel Kant’s theory, John Rawls’ theory, and Alan Gewirth’s theory. Intutionist rights theories include Tom Regan’s account, elaborated in The Case for Animal Rights (1983), which holds that animals are subjects of a life who have “inherent value,” which means in part that they are not to be treated as a mere means to the ends of others (in contrast to utilitarianism). Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach” is also based on intuitions that individuals have a dignity which (as Rawls says) even the good of society as a whole cannot override. These are self-evidently intuitionist views, but the others evidently are too.

Compassion-based rights (Joan Dunayer bases rights on compassion and justice) are ambiguous, since we have seen, in considering the ethics of care, that people have very different ideas about what caring entails.

Tradition (S. F. Sapontzis and Bernard Rollin rely on this for their version of animal rights) is also amorphous, since traditions exist for virtually every kind of ethical view. So rights based in tradition are intuitively selected among other traditions that do not necessarily involve rights.

Kant posits the ethical principle that forms of action are acceptable if they can be universalized for all moral agents. For example, Kant indicates that we cannot consistently universalize lying, since that would mean that others would lie to us, which we would not find acceptable. Yet we can universalize any ethical principle in theory, so we must find ourselves intuitively favoring some principles over others once again. Julian Franklin extends Kant’s theory to animal rights.

John Rawls asks us to imagine a thought experiment in which we are spirits not yet born, and to frame principles of justice based on the assumption that we do not know if we will be born more or less intelligent, “white” or “black,” rich or poor, etc. He calls this state “the original position.” Therefore, our principles of justice will presumably rule out racism, sexism, classism, and so forth. However, we can frame almost any rules of justice in the original position, so these must be intuitively favored. Also, the original position is rigged so that we will favor strong consideration of individuals. Rawls’ view is based on individualist intuitions rather than utilitarian ones, then. Note that Mark Rowlands and Mark Bernstein use Rawls’ theory of rights to articulate animal rights.

What about the last rights framework, Alan Gewirth’s? He states that we all need freedom and well-being to do anything, so we should claim rights to freedom and well-being. However, this only seems intuitively right to Gewirth, we can surmise, since we can need freedom and well-being without claiming any such rights. Gewirth suggests that we should extend rights to others as well because of the principle of generic consistency. That is, we should treat the same kinds of things in the same ways. However, such a formal principle is compatible with any ethical theory whatsoever, and we are left once again with intuiting which view seems right to us.

Now that we have seen that the ethical scene is apparently intuitionist altogether, what is wrong with relying on intuitions?

First, they free thinkers from the fundamental obligation of justifying one’s views. They are therefore arbitrary, prejudicial, and not fully accountable.

Second, the diversity of intuitions makes ethics totally indeterminate. One cannot truly defend a theory using intuitionism, since it does not fend off any number of other intuited ethical views.

Third, intuitionists cannot resolve conflicts between intuitions without again relying on intuitions, but each will resolve these conflicts differently and along the same lines as what is initially asserted.

There are other problems with intuitionism, but these are certainly a ground-rocking start. Ironically, intuitionism is meant to be used to defend ethical theories. Yet resorting to intuitionism seems to justify skepticism in ethics, or the view that no single view of morality is correct, and people simply offer different assumptions concerning what we ought to do, believe, etc. This is indeed a crisis. The purpose of ethical theory is to justify a view of ethics as correct, and we cannot do this with intuitionism. Animal ethicists are keen to convince others to accept their views, e.g., that we should be vegetarian or vegan in some cases. But we cannot effectively convince others if it is just a case of pitting one set of intuitions against others.

Can we escape the inuition-ridden crisis of justification in ethics? I try to do so with best caring, and how I do so is sketched in “The Rights of Animal Persons,” although I need a forthcoming book to account for this theory in richer detail.

Contemporary Crises in (Animal) Ethics

Animal ethics is really ethics, in some sense. Any fully articulated theory of animal rights, for example, must not only be an account of our ethical stance towards nonhuman animals. Ideally, it should offer a complete system of ideas pertaining to the ethical treatment of human beings too. When I say “animal ethics” in this series, I really mean “ethics,” and only indicate “animal ethics” to let it be known that I take animals seriously, quite unlike most ethicists in my estimation. In my journal article (available on this website under Academic writing), "The Rights of Animal Persons," I begin to articulate an ethical theory to account for our obligations, etc. towards all kinds of sentient beings. However, I did not compose this theory, or perhaps discover it, because I was complacently adding to a philosophical tradition that had it “all figured out.” On the contrary, contemporary ethics is in the midst of important, far-reaching, and deeply seated crises. Here is a listing of these important crises as I see them, which I attempt to address in my forthcoming book:

1. A crisis of justification in ethics, in the midst of which those who assert moral universals generally rely on variants of intuitionism, and those who deny such universals equally point to intuitionism only in a negative way. Widespread cultural skepticism might lead even noble people to become cynical about moral claims. Intuitions result in a stalemate between different ethical theories. The dead heat cannot be settled intuitively, for that just leads in circles. Yet without resolving the intuitive impasse, skepticism about ethics might well be justified. Tom Regan explicitly depends upon “reflective intuitions” in The Case for Animal Rights. Regan intuits that subjects-of-a-life (who are, roughly speaking, animals who might be the subject of rights, although there is controversy as to whether he means all sentient beings) have equal inherent value, which comes intuitively prepackaged with the idea that they must not be subject to utilitarian consideration. Others, such as Peter Singer, who criticize Regan's explicit intuitionism are what I call “crypto-intuitionists” (those who hide their dependence on intuitions) since Singer relies on his own intuitions. Singer is a utilitarian, and as moral skeptic Bernard Williams points out in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, utilitarianism depends on at least two intuitions: an intuited theory of value, and an intuition that we ought to maximize net utility.
   
2. A crisis in rights theories, such that they do not even logically entail protective rights. I write about this in “The Rights of Animal Persons.” There I show that the leading theories of human rights are so logically vacuous that they permit almost any practical ethic whatsoever, although of course such an outcome is at odds with the intentions of various rights theorists. This shows, in fact, that the leading theories of rights that are not explicitly intuitionist are in fact crypto-intuitionist. Since so many practical commitments are possible on the six most popular rights frameworks, it follows that principles such as strong rights are selected merely intuitively. They certainly do not follow logically from the given frameworks.
   
3. A crisis in animal liberationist ideas of equality, which are either vague or else lead to the untoward conclusion that we should flip a coin about whom to save, a baby or a mosquito. Joan Dunayer is a terrific writer, but she suggests that all sentient beings are equal, period. She recommends generally flipping a coin between a human and a dog, and one gets the impression that she would advise the same with a human or an insect from a close reading of her work. This is what leads a lot of people to reject animal rights as “absurd.” We need a coherent way of deciding such dilemmas that is not simply speciesist. Dunayer opens up a world of wonders describing the mental lives of insects and invertebrates of many sorts. Her writing is marvelous on such points. But I do not think such total equality which extends even to life-saving dilemmas is right or defensible. However, there is a crisis in that no account exists that resolves such conflicts nonarbitrarily or without simplying intuiting our way out of the difficulties, which is no help at all.
   
4. A crisis in anti-vivisection theories heretofore, since they not only do not lead to their avowed conclusion, but sometimes even conduce towards vivisectionism. This can be seen with respect to my showing the rights theories are ambiguous as to logically permitting utilitarianism, the #1 framework for rationalizing vivisection. However, I will show how even principles of the leading rights theories that are explicitly brought to bear on vivisection do not logically rule out this practice and may seem to conduce towards rationalizing it as ethically permissible or even required.
   
5. A crisis in critical moral theory, in which case (a) animal ethics theorists do not foresee logical objections to their own views, and (b) highly objectionable (to my mind) ethical theories are often rebuked, but there is a poverty of convincing refutations—a problem which applies to a whole gamut of such theories. This states of affairs constitutes a crisis since we need not only to assert our own ethical claims convincingly but also to rule out contradictory claims with sufficient reasons. We cannot rule out other views by fiat, or in effect, intuitively or with lame objections and expect to be persuasive in the end.
   
6. A crisis of sectarianism in ethics, in which narrow theories battle against each other, and there is no transcendence to a holistic vision which embodies the advantages but not the disadvantages of the competing theories. In “The Rights of Animal Persons,” I hint how best caring ethics may well have reached this level.
   
7. A lack of a coherent defintion of “speciesism” even among thinkers such as Regan and Singer. Dunayer criticizes their concepts ably, but succumbs to equally major logical problems in her own account;
   
8. A lack of recognition that the traditional concept of “animal welfare” is an oppressive euphemism. This means that the whole debate is not between "animal welfare and animal liberation," but rather, "animal illfare and animal liberation";
   
9. Continuing crises of denying animal minds in whole or in parts (although this trend is definitely on the wane, and a great deal of good work has been accomplished on this score); still much convincing argument can be provided to clinch this area of contention, I believe;
   
10. A crisis of widely asserted incompatibility between deep ecology and animal liberation. I will try to show that such an impasse is neither necessary nor desirable;
    
11. A crisis in religious ethics which casually permit violence towards animals. How can religionists be brought towards animal liberation on their own terms?;
    
12. A crisis in personhood theory in which claims are sometimes made for nonhuman personhood that are at once suggestive and unconvincing;
    
13. A crisis of a lack of refutation of the view, underlying so much of our culture, that I call “superiorism.” I will show that this view is so logically powerful that it can best existing animal liberation theories, and does not succumb to any of the prevailing objections to humanism (which I argue to be speciesism); this is a crisis of total impotence of existing animal liberation theory, as well as underdevelopment perhaps of humanistic theorizing. I am reputed by many to have come up with the strongest version of humanism in ethics, the better to refute it by tackling the strongest rather than weaker versions.
    

I will try to substantiate that these crises exist. I will also show that contemporary theory does not nearly meet them but generally allows them to deepen. We can address these “cultural emergencies” neither with denial nor complacency. Rather, we require sound theoretical provisions. There is also a crisis of global capitalism which undermines ethical commitment everywhere, but I intend to address that in a future work on political economy. Whether or to what extent I meet these listed crises in my forthcoming book is left for the reader to decide. Even if I make progress in addressing only one, that would be significant, although my work is more ambitious than that. However that may be, we cannot simply posit “education” as a solution to these crises. We as a culture need to learn better before we can better teach anyone.

Martin Balluch and Fellow Prisoners Now Free!

Thank you for everyone who lent their support. A judge said that the penalties for the crimes in question are not major enough to warrant continued detention in jail. Dr. Balluch is now going to stand as a member of the Green Party in Austria, and I wish him all the best.