In Defense of Animals, page 4
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? (1988 [1823]: 1988: 310–11)
The principle of equal consideration of interests requires we count the interests of any individual equally with the like interests of any other. The racist violates this rule by giving greater weight to the interests of members of her own race. The sexist violates this rule by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own sex. Similarly, the speciesist violates this rule by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own species.
If an animal is sentient and if sentience is a sufficient condition for having interests, then we should consider that animal’s interests equal to our own when making ethical decisions. The essays in this book by James Mason and Mary Finelli, by Richard Ryder, and by Miyun Park show that we fall far short. Animals are used in a wide range of human activities, including agriculture, product testing, medical and scientific research, entertainment, hunting and fishing, the manufacture of clothing, and as our pets. In most of these activities, we treat animals in ways that do not show proper regard for their interests and thereby are unethical. I will limit discussion here to our treatment of animals in agriculture, laboratories, and the wild.
Food
Other essays in this book discusses factory farming practices in detail. It is difficult, however, to convey these conditions in print, so I encourage you either to visit a factory farm or to watch video footage from these facilities at the website listed at the end of this essay. Factory farm conditions are believed by many to be so inhumane that it would be better if animals living in these facilities had not existed. Deciding what makes a life worth living is no simple matter, but we can think how we consider whether or not to euthanize a hopelessly sick dog or cat.
The pain experienced by animals in factory farms is likely greater than that experienced by many of those sick dogs and cats we choose to euthanize, as factory-farmed animals often experience an entire lifetime of pain, compared with a few weeks or months. If, for instance, we knew that our dog or cat would have no choice but to be confined in a cage so restrictive that turning around or freely stretching limbs is difficult if not impossible; live in his own excrement; be castrated or have her teeth, tail, or toes sliced off without anesthesia, I suspect most of us would believe that euthanizing the animal is the humane choice. It would be better, then, if farmed animals who endure these conditions did not exist.
One is hard-pressed to find, even among philosophers, any attempt to justify these conditions or the practice of eating factory-farmed animals. We have no nutritional need for animal products. In fact, vegetarians are, on average, healthier than those who eat meat. The overriding interest we have in eating animals is the pleasure we get from the taste of their flesh. However, there are a variety of vegetarian foods available, including ones that taste like animal products, from meat to eggs to milk, cheese, and yogurt. So, in order to justify eating animals, we would have to show that the pleasure gained from consuming them minus the pleasure gained from eating a vegetarian meal is greater than the pain caused by eating animals.
Whatever pleasure we gain from eating animals cannot be discounted. However, equal consideration of interests requires that we put ourselves in the place of a farmed animal as well as in the place of a meat-eater. Does the pleasure we enjoy from eating a chicken outweigh the pain we would endure were we to be raised and killed for that meal? We would probably conclude that our substantial interest in not being raised in a factory farm and slaughtered is stronger than our trivial interest in eating a chicken instead of chickpeas. There is, after all, no shortage of foods that we can eat that don’t require an animal to suffer in a factory farm or slaughterhouse. That our trivial interest in the taste of meat now trumps the pain endured by 17 billion farmed animals may be some measure of how far we are from considering their interests equally.
Accordingly, equal consideration of interests requires that we abstain, at a minimum, from eating factory-farmed products – particularly poultry and eggs, products that seem to cause the most pain per unit of food. Ideally, we should not consume products from any animal that we believe is sentient. This is the least we can do to have any real regard for the pain felt by other animals. Eating animals is a habit for most of us and, like other habits, can be challenging to break. But millions of people have made the switch to a vegetarian diet and, as a result, have enjoyed better health and a clearer conscience.
The use of animals for food is by far the largest direct cause of animal abuse in North America and Europe; and our consumption of animal flesh, eggs, and milk probably causes more pain than any other action for which each of us is responsible. The average North American or European eats somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 factory-farmed animals in his or her lifetime. If we ended our discussion here and all became vegans, we would effectively abolish 99 percent of the present use of animals. Still, there are other ways in which animals are abused that deserve discussion. The use of animals in laboratories, in particular, provides a testing ground for the principle of equal consideration of interests.
Laboratories
Somewhere between 50 and 100 million animals are killed each year in North American and European laboratories. As Richard Ryder describes in his essay in this book, these include animals used in testing new products, formulations, and drugs as well as those used in medical and scientific research. U.S. law does not require research or testing facilities to report numbers of most of these animals – primarily rats, mice, and birds – so there is considerable uncertainty about the statistics.
There are potentially non-trivial benefits to human beings and other animals in using nonhuman animals for testing and in medical and veterinary research. That being so, utilitarianism cannot provide as simple an objection to the use of animals in experiments as it did to the use of animals for food. It can, however, provide a yardstick by which to judge whether a particular experiment is ethical.
We should first ask whether the experiment is worth conducting. Most product tests on animals involve household or personal care products that are only superficially different from existing products. How many different formulations of laundry detergent or shampoo does the world need? And much basic research involving animals may answer intellectually interesting questions but promise few benefits to either human or nonhuman animals. Do we need to know what happens to kittens after their eyes are removed at birth, or to monkeys when deprived of all maternal contact from infancy? In every case, we should ask if the pain prevented by an experiment is greater than the pain caused by that experiment. As experiments routinely involve thousands of animals with an uncertain benefit to any human or nonhuman animal, in most cases these experiments are not justified. It is difficult to imagine that the pain experienced by 100 million animals each year is averting an equivalent amount of pain.
However, if we believe that an experiment is justified on utilitarian grounds, there is another question we should ask to check our prejudices. Most adult mammals used in lab research – dogs, cats, mice, rabbits, rats, and primates – are more aware of what is happening to them than and at least as sensitive to pain as any human infant. Would researchers contemplating an animal experiment be willing, then, to place an orphaned human infant in the animal’s place? If they are not, then their use of an animal is simple discrimination on the basis of species, which, as we found above, is morally unjustifiable. If the researchers are willing to place an infant in the animal’s place, then they are at least morally consistent. Perhaps there are cases in which researchers believe an experiment is so valuable as to be worth an infant’s life, but I doubt that many would make this claim.
Wildlife
Except for those hunted and fished, wild animals are often ignored in discussions of animal protection and seen as the domain of environmental protection. Part of this neglect is probably justified. I would certainly choose to be an animal in the wild over being an animal in a factory farm. Nevertheless, animals in the wild deserve as much moral consideration as do those animals in farms or laboratories. Likewise, wild animals raise important questions for those interested, as we are, in the proper moral consideration of animals’ interests.
There are few human activities that do not affect the welfare of wild animals. Particularly in developed countries, humans consume a tremendous amount of energy, water, land, timber, minerals, and other resources whose extraction or use damages natural habitats – killing or preventing from existing untold billions of wild animals. Many of these activities may well be justified. Nevertheless, most of us can take steps to reduce the impact we have on wild animals without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance.
Most of these steps are familiar ones encouraged by environmental protection groups. We should drive less, use public transit more, adopt a vegetarian or preferably vegan diet, reduce our purchases of luxury goods, buy used rather than new items, and so on. For decades, environmentalists in Europe and North America have also encouraged couples to have smaller families. In Europe, it is not uncommon to find one-child families, and the same is beginning to be true in North America. Smaller families not only carry many social and economic advantages to parents and nations, they also significantly reduce the resources used and the number of animals threatened by human consumption. Of course, most of these measures help humans, too. Investments in family planning, for instance, are probably the most cost-effective measures to reduce global warming.
Conclusions
I have argued that utilitarianism is a reasonable ethical theory, that this theory includes animals in its moral consideration, and that it obliges us to make dramatic changes in our institutions and habits – most immediately, that we become vegetarian or preferably vegan. While my aim here has been to present a utilitarian argument, similar arguments regarding our mistreatment of animals have been put forward on the basis of all of the major secular and religious ethical theories (cited below). But even less ambitious ethical arguments should convince us that much of our present treatment of animals is unethical.
Take, for instance, what I will call the “weak principle” of equal consideration of interests. Under the weak principle, we will consider the interests of nonhuman animals to be equal only to the like interests of other nonhuman animals. I don’t believe there is any good reason to adopt the weak principle in place of the strong one discussed earlier. But, even if we were to adopt the weak principle, we would reach many of the same conclusions.
Almost all of us agree that we should treat dogs and cats humanely. There are few opponents, for instance, of current anti-cruelty laws aimed at protecting pets from abuse, neglect, or sport fighting. And therein lies a bizarre contradiction. For if these anti-cruelty laws applied to animals in factory farms or laboratories, the ways in which these animals are treated would be illegal throughout North America and Europe. Do we believe dogs and cats are so different from apes, pigs, cows, chickens, and rabbits that one group of animals – pets – deserve legal protection from human abuse, while the other group – animals in factory farms and in labs – deserve to have their abuse institutionalized? We cannot justify this contradiction by claiming that the abuse of farmed animals, for example, serves a purpose, whereas the abuse of pets does not. Arguably, the satisfaction enjoyed by someone who fights or otherwise abuses dogs and cats is just as great as that enjoyed by someone who eats meat.
What separates pets from the animals we abuse in factory farms and in labs is physical proximity. Our disregard for “food” or “lab” animals persists because we don’t see them. Few people are aware of the ways in which they are mistreated and even fewer actually see the abuse. When people become aware, they are typically appalled – not because they have adopted a new ethical theory, but because they believe animals feel pain and they believe morally decent people should want to prevent pain whenever possible. The utilitarian argument for considering animals helps us to return to this common-sense view.
There are remarkably few contemporary defenses of our traditional treatment of animals. This may suggest that the principal obstacles to improving the treatment of animals are not philosophical uncertainties about their proper treatment but, rather, our ignorance about their current abuse and our reluctance to change deeply ingrained habits. Even the most reasonable among us is not invulnerable to the pressures of habit. Many moral philosophers who believe that eating animals is unethical continue to eat meat. This reflects the limits of reasoned argument in changing behavior. While I can’t overcome those limits here, I encourage you, as you read this book, to replace in your mind the animals being discussed with an animal familiar to you, such as a dog or cat, or, better yet, a human infant. If you do this, you are taking to heart the principle of equal consideration of interests and giving animals the consideration they deserve.
Reference
Bentham, Jeremy (1988 [1828]) The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus.
Further Reading
William Shaw’s Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) provides an excellent introduction to utilitarian theory. Arguments for the moral consideration of animals have been advanced from a wide range of ethical perspectives, including utilitarianism (Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd edn, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), rights-based deontology (Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), contractarianism (Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), common-sense morality (Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, New York: HarperCollins, 2001; David DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Mylan Engel, “The Immorality of Eating Meat,” in L. Pojman (ed.), The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and religious moralities (Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan (eds), Animals and Christianity: A Book of Readings, New York: Crossroads, 1988). The reader is encouraged to watch video footage from factory farms such as Meet Your Meat. www.goveg.com/meetmeat.html.
2
The Scientific Basis for Assessing Suffering in Animals
Marian Stamp Dawkins
“As far as our feelings are concerned, we are locked within our own skins.” I have always found B. F. Skinner’s words to be a particularly succinct and dramatic statement of the problem of attributing feelings to anyone but ourselves. I have also been impressed by the fact that although almost everyone acknowledges that this difficulty exists, we go about our daily lives, and particularly our interactions with other people, as though it did not. We all pay lip service to the idea that subjective feelings are private but respond to the people around us as though experiences of pain and pleasure were as public as the fact that it is raining. Thank goodness that we do. Someone who stuck rigidly to the idea that all subjective experiences were essentially private and that there was not, and never could be, evidence that other people experienced anything at all would be frightening indeed. He or she would be without what is, for most of us, perhaps the most important curb on inflicting damage on another person: the belief that the damage would cause pain or suffering and that it is morally wrong to cause those experiences in other people. This is one of the cornerstones of our ideas about what is right and what is wrong. And yet this suffering we are so concerned to avoid is, if we are strictly logical about it, essentially private, an unpleasant subjective state that only we ourselves can know about, experienced by the particular person who inhabits our own skin.
Much of our behavior towards other people is thus based on the unverifiable belief that they have subjective experiences at least somewhat like our own. It seems a reasonable belief to hold. There is enough common ground between people, despite their obvious differences of taste and upbringing, that we can attempt to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and to empathize with their feelings. The fact that we can then often successfully predict what they will do or say next, and above all the fact that they may tell us that we have been successful in understanding them, suggests that the empathy has not been entirely inaccurate. We can begin to unlock them from their skins. We assume that they suffer, and decide, largely on this basis, that it is “wrong” to do certain things to them and “right” to do other things.
Then we come to the boundary of our own species. No longer do we have words. No longer do we have the high degree of similarity of anatomy, physiology, and behavior. But that is no reason to assume that they are any more locked inside their skins than are members of our species. Even in the case of other people, understanding feelings is not always easy. Different people find pleasure or lack of it in many different ways. It takes an effort to listen and understand and to see the world from their point of view. With other species, we certainly have additional difficulties, such as the fact that some animals live all their lives submerged in water or in the intestines of bigger animals. But those difficulties are not insuperable – merely greater. We know what most humans like to eat, what makes them comfortable, what is frightening, from our own experience. With other species we may have to make an effort to find out. The purpose of this essay is to set down the sorts of things we should be finding out if we really want to know whether other animals are suffering or not. I shall argue that it is possible to build up a reasonably convincing picture of what animals experience if the right facts about them are accumulated. This is not in any sense to deny the essentially private nature of subjective feelings, or to make any claims about the nature of mental events. It is simply to say that, just as we think we can understand other people’s experiences of pleasure, pain, suffering, and happiness, so, in some of the same ways, we may begin to understand the feelings of animals – if, that is, we are prepared to make an effort to study their biology. Of course, we cannot know what they are feeling, but then nor can we know with other people. That lack of absolute certainty does not stop us from making assumptions about feelings in other people. And, suitably equipped with certain biological facts about the particular species we are concerned with, nor should it with other animals either.
