Cruelty to animals

In cases of animal cruelty at home, where the home has small children, the RSPCA automatically notifies the NSPCC, as people who are wilfully cruel to animals are very often cruel to children too. As for adapting theories, well you’re academics so I suppose that’s what you do.

Thinking before posting, I guess a theory isn’t such a bad thing, as it might give guidance in marginal cases, lobsters etc. But I hope there remains sufficient cultural homogeneity here to demonstrate severe disapproval of people cutting up horses.

Animals very clearly suffer. Causing needless suffering is bad; ask anyone but a psycho. It’s not hard to justify laws against causing suffering.

Which standard theories were you thinking of? Rawlsian theories seem to work just fine, if the veil of ignorance hides wether or not you will be a human…

More seriously, if you start with Aristotle’s two ingredient account of what makes us human, isn’t it reasonable to say that it is being animals that make our suffering count, and being rational that imposes duties of care on us? And Asimov’s laws for robots are only a step away!

I would not even attempt to construct a liberal theory that can justify bans of animal cruelty.

“Prevention of suffering” won’t work because it would lead to a ban on meat consumption, even on the part of other animals. Good luck enforcing that.

“Cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to humans” won’t work because it depends on social science, which as we all know has the shelf life of a banana.

The only liberal principle that can be consistently applied here is that of democracy. We’ll enact those laws that are produced by the usual representative democratic processes. It’s not philosophically satisfying, but it has the advantage of being practical.

Universally accepted? For hundreds of years, it was not universally accepted that blacks were more than 60% human. It is still not accepted in some fringe circles. Should we therefore not afford them rights?

“Cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to humans” won’t work because it depends on social science, which as we all know has the shelf life of a banana.

Uh oh. Kieran isn’t going to read this, is he?

On these issues I tend towards the deep ecological. I think people like Holmes Rolston make a decent case that something like animal rights in general doesn’t make sense — it can’t apply to animals in the wild. What happens to those animals (even through humans, as long as they are respectful of the values of ecosystems) should be judged by values that are appropriate to ecosystems (that is, whether it was ecologically necessary).

But to the extent that animals are removed from the wild I vote for Adam Smith’s empathy as a reason for unnecessary hurt to animals. And unnecessary here would mean unnecessary ecologically, and unnecessary for in the human world.

But empathy of a different kind that recognises the species differences.

But I can’t say I have thought this one through.

Chris, I don’t understand what you mean by “fit to the case – what’s really wrong with cruelty to animals”… it feels to me like the case that it is bad for people is exactly what’s wrong with it. Our empathy for suffering animals as such is too partial and inconsequential to be much of anything – wildlife film crews don’t, for example, get criticized for letting the lions eat the zebras although I’ve no doubt the latter die horribly.

Hm. So why *don’t* you go and intervene in the life-and-death struggles in your nearest nature reserve to prevent suffering of prey animals, starving predators, etc etc? I think if you were morally serious about animal suffering you would want to do at least *something* about the vast amount of non-human-caused animal suffering, just as anyone who is morally serious about human suffering wants to do something (a tenner to Oxfam or whatever) about it.

I think that ‘prevention of suffering’ needs the qualifier ‘at the hands of humans’. What we want to regulate is human behavior because humans have recourse to change the system of regulation.

Granting legal standing to trees and the like goes too far. How can we assume that a tree has the same concept of self as property as humans do? Going by the guideline of ‘rights as gifts by the strong’, we can say that natural objects have rights but they don’t really.

To the extent that humans are capable of understanding the freedom / destiny of plants and animals we can restrict our own behavior consistently with plant and animal ‘interest’. But that implies that we understand, species by species, what animals do to put their own kind out of misery when they suffer. Still, it is out of this human understanding of ecological systems that we adopt a kind of enlightened laissez-faire. We can say things like ‘this forest needs to burn every 50 years or so’.

Chris, I don’t think legislation against cruelty to animals can be justified under liberal – or at least libertarian – premises. Also, I don’t think you can so easily dismiss the “immoral for lions to eat zebras argument,” considering that you just declared yesterday your support for depraved indifference rules. I have a post on Catallarchy fleshing out this seeming contradiction: Depraved Indifference and Animal Cruelty

I think Joel has it right, here. Why must every law have a “theory” behind it? A majority of people in this country are disturbed by cockfighting and dogfighting, for more-or-less purely emotional reasons, so they have the right to act through their legislatures to ban the practice. That’s really all you need.

This need to treat the law as some kind of mathematical system wherein every component derives from some “first principal” comes from the modern tendency to see every legal question as a matter for some “wise” judge to decide. Can’t have those nasty people just go out and decide things for themselves by voting, y’know – why, they might get it wrong!

(Reminds me of the scene in “Meaning of Life” when the woman having a baby asks the doctors what she should do: “Nothing, you’re not QUALIFIED!”)

But on every occasion? Aren’t there at least some kinds of laws that are merely the codification of popular preferences?

The liquor stores are closed on Sunday in my state. I would prefer that they were open, and I would vote likewise, but thus far the good people of the Commonwealth have not agreed with me. Is there a “theory” of why I have a “right” to get a sixpack on Sunday (or not)? Should a federal judge order them open?

Chris,

It is not at all clear why sentience, self-awareness, rationality, or moral agency is the necessary prerequisite for rights and similar claims deserving of moral treatment. Is a severely retarded person who lacks these attributes undeserving of the same protections we would grant healthy people? Aren’t we simply trying to justify our prejudice against animals by focusing on what separates “us from them” rather than focusing on what we have in common? For the record, Peter Singer is also guilty of arbitrary line drawing when he claims that the important distinction is the ability to suffer, ignoring the possible claims of other living beings like plants and trees, or perhaps even non-living things like rocks and viruses.

But Singer does make a good argument against the rationality distinction by pointing to our intuitions regarding racism. His argument is as follows:

* If racism is clearly wrong, then either it’s factually clear that all races have equal abilities or it’s morally clear that similar interests of all beings ought to be given equal consideration.

* It’s not factually clear that all races have equal abilities.

* If it’s morally clear that similar interests of all beings ought to be given equal consideration, then it’s clear that similar interests of animals and humans ought to be given equal consideration.

* Therefore, if racism is clearly wrong, then it’s clear that similar interests of animals and humans ought to be given equal consideration.

I don’t feel like getting in to the distinctions between moral and legal obligations; I’m just trying to focus on the moral issues and whether the theories justifying them are consistent with our other moral beliefs.

As for my own opinion, I place animal torture in the same category as other “Yuk Factors” such as adult incest, eating one’s own placenta, and animal necrophilia, among others. Not immoral, but gross enough that I would disassociate myself from those who engage in such activities.

Actually, this discussion has been far freer of the crap that usually _instantly_ infects any animal rights discussion, anywhere, in any context. I’m not sure why it is, but people really get worked up about this. (I don’t just mean on the pro-animal-rights side, that’s expected. But I usually see a lot of instant virulence from the anti side.) So, good on ya.

It seems to me that the moral philosophical principles necessary are at hand. We’re just disinclined to use them because we’re wedded to our anthropocentric exceptionalism.

Libertarians argue on the basis of natural rights, but they are willing to agree (when pressed) that rights come into conflict and that a heirarchy of rights is a practical necessity. In that context, a libertarian rationale against cruelty toward animals is possible, and the problematic excesses people worry about will be answered by some sort of adjudication of competing claims.

A liberal moral philosophy that is not explicitly natural rights based will presumably root itself either in utilitarianism or something Kantian (or others, but those seem like the most likely to me). Here, too, I fail to see a large problem other than the necessity of abandoning exceptionalist anthropocentricism.

Chris, I disagree with you that the prohibition against torturing babies is rooted in a completely different reasoning than is preventing their drowning. I’m sorry, but our moral reasoning is mostly built–rightly or wrongly–around empathy, not around a valuation of a rational (or potentially rational) agent. That this is deeply true is easily demonstrated by people’s intuitive sense of the morality of AI. They have difficulty conjuring up empathy for an AI, even though they apparently have no difficulty whatsoever imagining such a creature being highly intelligent and willfull.

“On subject: I don’t think a libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws is possible without first deciding the tricky question of what exact property of humans gives them rights, and then if that property applies to animals. If it is life, then all animals should have complete rights, so there goes eating meat. If that property is conscious thought, than we’ve got to figure out exactly what animals truly think, which is also a hard question. And if the property is rational thought, we’ve eliminated all animal rights, and justified the wanton murder of the insane and the retarded to boot.”

This is exactly what I was going to say, only put better than I probably would. I am re-posting it because I think it needs to be emphasized as the correct answer to Chris’s question, at least in terms of libertarians.

As for liberals, I do not know how Chris defines them, but my concept of liberal theory is that it is grounded in the social contract. A contractarian should *at least* include in the contract as citizens every individual capable of consenting to the contract. If bright line rules are to be drawn for convience, they should be drawn broadly enough to include all who are capable of consenting, even if it includes some individuals who can not consent. Deciding on a case-by-case basis who is SO psychotic or retarded as to not be able to consent would lead to inevitable injustices: better to simply give citizenship to all humans. Futher, is individuals of certain other species are shown empirically capable of consent (great apes?, bottle-nosed dolphins?), then all members of those species should be granted citizenship, as a good bright line rule.

As for cruelty to other animals from a contractarian standpoint, I would vote to ban it in most circumstances, but I am unsure of a justification.

Micha: ah, but that’s the difference that makes all the difference. I mean, the attraction of the racial argument is that it lends scientific credibility to some sort of quantifiable differentiation that could be theoretically connected to moral capacity. In this sense it perpetuates the essential lie of racism and is deeply unfortunate, not to say irresponsible. In contrast, while no one denies that there is significant variation in human behavior and capacity, and that these variations arguably relate to moral capacity, it’s understood that we understand and are able to measure these variations so poorly as to make them irrelevant to any policy discussion that deals with _classes_ and not _individuals_. In any event, in my opinion, there’s a big problem right off the bat:

“If racism is clearly wrong, then either it’s factually clear that all races have equal abilities or it’s morally clear that similar interests of all beings ought to be given equal consideration.”

What’s this fallacy called? This is a false dilemma. And even if we assume this is a correct dilemma, then Singer still hasn’t established the mutually exclusive and sufficient nature of each of his conditions that he is assuming. For example, if hanging is clearly deadly, then it’s factually clear that falling through a trapdoor is deadly, or it’s factually clear that wearing a noose is deadly. But that’s not true. Hanging _is_ clearly deadly, and those two conditions are together sufficient for a deadly hanging, yet neither is sufficient alone. It seems to me that racism can be clearly wrong because, taken together, the uncertainty of the differentiation of ability and the similiar validity of similar interests make a compelling case for the injustice of racism. And once you do away with this bivalent logic, you’re left with a great variety of other measurements of “differing ability” and “similarity of interests” that produce different results for the “clear” appropriateness of discrimination of opportunity. We do not insist that all people have equal opportunity to play in the NBA, or to model women’s bikinis. _Clearly_, as abilities more reliably diverge, the more sanguine we are about discriminating against people with similar interests. And since it is also _clear_ that animals diverge more strongly from humans in regard to ability than humans do among themselves, then less are we required to weight our argument on the side of similar interests.

Surely Singer can do better than this.

At the very least he should argue on the basis of male/female differences, which are increasingly being shown to be quantifiable and significant. But that would be inconvenient, wouldn’t it?, since we are willing to tolerate limited sexism in a way that we are not willing to tolerate a limited racism. (I don’t mean to imply that _I’m_ sanguine about sexism; I most certainly am not.)

“That’s all well and good, until the good people of your Commonwealth decide to be “disturbed” by the sight of women not covered head-to-toe. ”

Woe, there – it’s a pretty far leap to go from closing liquor stores on Sunday (or outlawing cockfighting) to all-out Shar’ia…

Frankly, I’m kind of disturbed by some of what I read here. What I’m getting is that a majority essentially has no right to express it’s will in the law – that a “legal theory” (decided on, of course, by Platonic philosopher kings who are always right) is the only proper justification for any and all laws. (Because the people, left to themselves, will run off and start veiling women left and right…)

Sounds more like soft totalitarianism (or maybe “democratic centralism”?) than liberal democracy to me…

On the question of why a moral theory is needed:

It’s a popular thrill, saying ‘We don’t do that here.’ Leon Kass, chair of the Council on Bioethics in the Bush administration, wrote a famous article for The New Republic in 1997, entitled ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance.’ ‘Repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power to express it,’ he said. But this business of repugnance we can’t quite articulate should give us pause – should make us come to a screeching halt, in fact. Why can’t we articulate it? Could it be because there is nothing to articulate? If we have good reasons for doing or not doing a thing, aren’t we normally able to put them in words? ‘Because I said so’ is all right when telling children what to do, because who has time to explain every single thing to a five-year-old, but for an actual official indeed presidential council, one expects a little more. Arm-waving and saying ‘I can’t explain’ don’t really match the job description.

Especially since people have always ‘just somehow known’ in their guts or their hearts or their gluteus maximus, without being able to say why, all sorts of things that the world would be better off if they hadn’t just known. That Africans should be slaves, that Jews were polluting Germany, that women should be kept under house arrest at all times, that witches should be burnt, that the races must never mix. We’re all too adept at thinking what we’re not used to is inherently disgusting. John Ruskin never consummated his marriage because he thought his wife’s pubic hair was disgusting. He’d never seen a living naked woman before, only paintings and statues, and he wasn’t used to it. No doubt he thought it was very wrong of Effie to have it. All sorts of things are disgusting. Slimy wet rotting vegetation is disgusting, pus is disgusting, a swollen decomposing squirrel in the woods is disgusting. But is there any moral content to this disgust? Should the squirrel pull itself together and stop decaying in that nasty way? Should pus take thought and transform itself into peach ice cream?

Habit and familiarity have a great deal (though not everything) to do with what people find disgusting but very little to do with ethics. Cruelty, exploitation, injustice, violence don’t become better with repetition, they only become easier for the perpetrators, such as the regular guys turned obedient Jew-killers of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. Disgust is good clean fun and provides endless amusement for children, but it’s worthless as a moral compass. Saying ‘Ew, ick, yuk, gross,’ and saying ‘That’s wrong’ are two different things. It’s a long-standing confusion, going back to Plato if not farther, to think the beautiful is the good and the good is the beautiful, but it’s not necessarily so.

– Ophelia Benson, “The Yuk-Factor”

This is not to argue in favor of or against the immorality of animal cruelty, just to note the importance of having a theory explaining exactly why (or why not) animal cruelty is wrong, instead of just saying, “because I find it unpleasant.”

“Woe, there – it’s a pretty far leap to go from closing liquor stores on Sunday (or outlawing cockfighting) to all-out Shar’ia…”

I agree, but its not that far-fetched. After all, until less than a century and a half ago this country’s people allowed slavery. And the Nazis came into power in a democratic election. In times of trouble, people can easily be convinced to make dumb choices. Besides, most of my German friends would be hard-pressed to differentiate between no beer on sundays and shar’ia.

“Sounds more like soft totalitarianism (or maybe “democratic centralism”?) than liberal democracy to me…”

On the contrary, it is you who are supporting a dictatorship of the majority. You are saying that denying people the right to decide the affairs of others *just by virtue of being in the majority* is totalitarian. I would ask where that majority got the right to control my life in the first place.

Kass taught at my alma mater, by the way. There was a recent profile of him in the alumni magazine. I find him a little embarassing, actually; but I’m used to it as there’s a contingent of faculty that he’s somewhat representative of. (Hell, the former President of the college from when I was there is now in charge of Iraq’s higher-education system. Being a Bennett/Cheney lackey paid-off for him, I guess.)

Kass is in good company when he rationalizes his intuitive predispositions as a supposedly reliable intellectual roadmap. To me, though, it seems like a pretty absurd argument. In some cases, and in some domains, our intuitive biases have been, in fact, reliable. In others, not at all. My primary (lay, mind you) focus is philosophy and history of science and in that domain one finds a profound tension between the reliability and unreliability of intuition. I think the signal characteristic of the history of western science has been an irresistable, even near-deductive, progression from the deeply intuitive and commonsensical into the deeply counter-intuitive and nonsensical. If we do away with the intuitive and commonsensical, we’d be nowhere with nowhere to go and no way to get there.

It’s perfectly reasonable to start from intuition if for no other reason than the practicalism of the asymmetry of all possibilities versus those intuited. And, as in the case of science, our intuitions can often be abstracted to something more universal and eventually those abstractions will applied in ways that undermine the intution. That’s a history of political liberalism, too. People like Kass are deeply conservative, or perhaps traditionalist, in that they are less interested in how their intuitions illuminate the cosmos than they are in how the cosmos can be shown to validate their intuitions. For them, intellectualism is about shoring up supposed certainties, it’s intellectual building maintainence and groundskeeping.

In my opinion, most people on both sides of the animal rights debate start from an intuitive reaction to the issue that is dominant for them, and then they contruct a rationale to support that intuition. It is generally either an empathic anthropomorphisizing by the animal rights camp, or an anthropocentric chauvinism by the anti-animal rights camp. It seems to me, though, that each of these two intuitions has some validity, within contraints. As I argue earlier, empathy is _not_ an trivial moral principle, it’s deeply involved in even our most sophisticated moral reasoning. Similarly, if empathy is built around a presumption of similarity, then the manifest similarity of humans to ourselves has to have a commensurate moral force, given the assumption of the validity of empathy as a moral principle. Thus, these two views are more complementary than they are in direct opposition.

“Will your response counter his argument? I think not.”

Yeah, but you seem to be assuming that I am necessarily opposed to his argument. I am not. I don’t think that many people are opposed to this way of thinking as a matter of deep principle, but they _do_ have reservations about how such thinking is applied as a practical matter. And because Americans, in particular, are deeply sensitive to abuses by empowered agents on the basis of this sort of discrimination, we are wont to assert an asbolute principle that disallows such thinking where we are most afraid of its misuse. Where we are not afraid of its misuse we, interestingly, argue on the contrary basis—that differences are intrinsic and non-equal outcomes are just.

I meant what I said earlier. For me, the essential issue is the matter of uncertainty. The greater the uncertainty, the more necessary it becomes to appeal to some quasi-absolutist principle that prohibits discrimination. I don’t really believe in such a principle, I just think it’s a good rule of thumb. When confronted by your hypothetical near-racist, were I being intellectually rigorous I would merely question the validity (and accept it were it to survive scrutiny) of the distinction he claims exists. Since I have every reason, however, to believe that _perceived_ generalized differences between classes of people are far more likely to be exagerated than not, and because the track record of attempts to prove such differences is very poor, if I’m feeling lazy or time-constrained I’ll dismiss his argument on the basis of this principle of “rights”.

I’m just not convinced by Singer’s argument. Frankly, as you may already tell, I’m not convinced that we don’t need a finer level of granularity in many current moral theories about human “rights”. Granularity and continua don’t bother me. I’m baffled (sorta) why the debate about animal rights is stalled at an impasse between “all” and “nothing”. I don’t find the problem of domesticated food animals the conundrum that many other (thoughtful) people do. We’ll decide. What’s worse: billions of enslaved and eventually murdered chickens, or chicken extinction? It’s a tough question, but I think we can come up with an answer. The only thing I unequivocably know is wrong is avoiding the question (I mean this generically) because it’s difficult. How the granularity will be, or should be, decided across the whole spectrum of Earth life is far beyond either my ability or my interest to ponder. I concentrate, now, mostly on worrying about where the ambiguity is least and the opportunity for improvement the greatest—the great apes, for example. Certain kinds of generally agreed-upon egregiously cruel and gratuitous animal testing. Organized urban deer hunts are low, low, low on my list. In fact, I think I probably support them.

By the way, I’m not dialectically operating at a level commensurate with either my implicit responsibilities here, or my pretense. I’ve participated heavily in this thread because I think the discussion an interesting one, and because I’m more than a little light-headed from lack of sleep.

But here on Crooked Timber, more than anywhere else I’ve regularly written, I feel intellectually and educationally inadequate and not infrequently like something of a poseur. So, I’d like to apologize if I’ve irritated anyone and to say that these sorts of things are a razor’s edge for many of us to walk, and I don’t do as good a job walking it as I’d like. (The razor’s edge of avoiding being an example of the Peter Principle, or worse.)

Thanks, Mischa, for a nice conversation. I suspect—hope—it would have been very productive had we had it in person. This group, in fact, would be very nice around the seminar table, it seems to me.

“This group, in fact, would be very nice around the seminar table, it seems to me.”

Second that — or around a table at my local pub.

Keith, as regards your feeling like a poseur, please don’t allow that feeling to interfere with your prolific posting — both here and at Calpundit I have found your comments among the most consistently worthy of study.