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The Moral Menagerie

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................ixIntroduction........................................................................1PART I: FOUNDATIONS OF THE RECENT DEBATE1. Why Care about Animals?..........................................................112. Broader Philosophical Considerations.............................................33PART II: SURVEY OF EXTENSIONIST ARGUMENTS3. Utilitarian Arguments: The Value of Animal Experience............................574. Deontological Arguments: Do Animals Have Natural Rights?.........................735. Aristotelian Arguments: Animal Telos and Human Aretem............................896. Contractarian Arguments: Animals outside the State of Nature.....................104PART III: THE ANIMAL OR THE GOOD?7. Extensionism and Its Limits......................................................1218. The Call and the Circle: The Animal in Postmodern Thought........................1389. Ecophilosophy: Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism......................................158PART IV: THE HUMAN ANIMALS IN THE MENAGERIE10. Sacrifice and Self-Overcoming...................................................18911. The Child, the Hunter, and the Artist...........................................211Conclusion..........................................................................233Notes...............................................................................237Bibliography........................................................................285Index...............................................................................291

Chapter One

The Uses of the Animal

As outlined in the Introduction, this work is an analysis of the attention Western philosophy has paid to the issue of the moral standing of animals. In this chapter, I address the question of why the nature of animals and their possible claim to our moral attention constitute a topic worthy of philosophical exploration. The path to answering this question begins with an intriguing thought experiment proposed by medievalist Dorothy Yamamoto: "Suppose (in a parallel universe) Homo sapiens was the only animate species on a planet. What sense of their 'humanity' would the people on that planet have?"

Yamamoto's query brings attention to the fact that interaction with other animals has been a constitutive part of the human species' entire history, in spite of some persistent efforts to stress the distance between humans and nonhumans. Worked, farmed, and hunted, the animal has always provided human beings with material benefits. But as recorded culture bears witness-from Paleolithic cave art to twenty-first-century science-the animal also has always fascinated the human mind. The world's mythological, religious, and literary traditions are steeped in our ancestors' attempts to understand and define this mysterious other. To this day, human iconography is pervaded by animal themes: we see them in the constellations, inscribe them on our children's toys, invoke them in the names of our athletic teams and social clubs, and use them for hundreds of idioms in every language. Invariably, throughout its various cultural manifestations, humanity has incorporated its relationships with other species into its understanding of itself and the world. Thus, while Yamamoto terms her question "unanswerable," one plausible response (to be defended later in this chapter) is that a humanity unconnected to other animate life would not be recognizably human.

Understanding why humans are so bound to other animals proves to be challenging. An appeal to biological need will not settle the matter. Strictly speaking, few humans in the developed world today need to use animals for sustenance; indeed, in the Information Age it seems anachronistic to rely upon animals for material goods. Nonetheless, in the West alone billions of animals are still slaughtered every year for food, the fur and leather industries are booming, and hunting and fishing (and other blood-sports, such as cock-fighting) continue to attract a following. Even allowing that the exploitation of animals is still a material necessity in some societies, the relationships between humans and other animals are rarely comparable to those exhibited between other species. In the modern world there are very few extant hunting cultures, so the human/animal dynamic is only infrequently analogous to a predator's pursuit of prey. Likewise, scavenging and parasitism are occasionally practiced by humans (carrion is in some quarters an accepted food source, and some herding peoples bleed rather than slaughter their stock), but they are not typical of human beings' general comportment toward the animals they use.

The uniquely human manner of relating to other animals through domestication-the context in which much of our contact with other animals occurs today-is occasionally analogized to symbiosis, inasmuch as most domesticated animals receive their sustenance from the humans who use them. But in truly symbiotic relationships there is a roughly equal exchange of benefit, which is something either impossible to assess or clearly lacking in our use of draught animals, pets, and agricultural livestock. Indeed, the very nature of domestication-the attempt to make the animal our own, to transmute animal reality into a creature of our own design-is emblematic of the fact that something more than material need and desire is at work in our use of animals. The exploitation of the animal provides a perennial source of meaning for human cultures, where the animal functions as an object with as much symbolic psychological value as material use-value.

For example, when Native American peoples fight against environmentalists and government bureaucrats for the right to hunt whales or other endangered species, doubtless they are seeking something more than an efficient means of meeting their protein requirements. Likewise, one suspects that the derision with which animal advocates are often met indicates something besides the preference most persons have for the taste of beef over soy, or the feel of fur over polyester. Human beings certainly desire the various material goods that animals provide, but the use of animals as the means to these pleasures is itself enjoyed as a good. As literary critic Marian Scholtmeijer argues, human exploitation of the animal "is in all likelihood foundational to culture and civilization"; as a result, the continued use of the animal gives expression to drives that are deeply embedded in culture and perhaps human consciousness itself, and which therefore will resist both pragmatic and morally based efforts to displace them.

The author and critic Maureen Duffy explains this phenomenon by asserting that "we have always used animals not simply for practical purposes but as metaphors for our own emotional requirements, and it's this that we are unwilling to give up by considering them as creatures with rights and lives of their own." However, while we may try to justify the practical use of animals by noting their otherness, the exploitation of the animal cannot be psychologically effective in the way Duffy describes if its existence is completely alien; the consideration that animals do have lives of...