Cruelty-Free Baseball and Softball

Khursh Mian Acevedo sent a link to this interesting site.

John Rawls (1921-2002) on the Moral Status of Animals

Last of all, we should recall here the limits of a theory of justice. Not only are many aspects of morality left aside, but no account is given of right conduct in regard to animals and the rest of nature. A conception of justice is but one part of a moral view. While I have not maintained that the capacity for a sense of justice is necessary in order to be owed the duties of justice, it does seem that we are not required to give strict justice anyway to creatures lacking this capacity. But it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to them, nor in our relations with the natural order. Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life of which animals are capable clearly imposes duties of compassion and humanity in their case. I shall not attempt to explain these considered beliefs. They are outside the scope of the theory of justice, and it does not seem possible to extend the contract doctrine so as to include them in a natural way. A correct conception of our relations to animals and to nature would seem to depend upon a theory of the natural order and our place in it. One of the tasks of metaphysics is to work out a view of the world which is suited for this purpose; it should identify and systematize the truths decisive for these questions. How far justice as fairness will have to be revised to fit into this larger theory it is impossible to say. But it seems reasonable to hope that if it is sound as an account of justice among persons, it cannot be too far wrong when these broader relationships are taken into consideration.

(John Rawls, A Theory of Justice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971], 512)

George F. Will

See here for my column about conservatism and animal rights.

New Harvest

Joanna Lucas sent a link to this interesting site. See here as well. And if you have an inexplicable craving for human flesh, see here.

Animal Rights

Can animals have rights? Not do they have rights, but can they have rights? If they can, then it's an open question whether they do. If they can't, then they don't. See here.

Happy Birthday, Peter

Peter Singer—“the dangerous philosopher”—is 59 years old today. He has been writing at a furious pace since at least 1970, when his first philosophical publication (on determinism) appeared. I have always had a love-hate relationship with Singer. I detest his leftist politics. I reject his consequentialism. I even disagree with him about the nature of philosophy. Singer thinks the aim of philosophy is to change the world. I think the aim of philosophy is to understand the world—specifically, its logical structure. To the extent that Singer advocates change, he is acting not as a philosopher but as what Richard A. Posner calls a “moral entrepreneur.”

But I love Singer’s concern for nonhuman animals. Reading his book Animal Liberation (1975) during law school changed my life. It is one of the most important books ever written. Singer says he’s an animal liberationist because he’s a utilitarian, but his argument for changing our treatment of animals—as he admitted to me in correspondence—doesn’t presuppose utilitarianism or any other normative ethical theory. All it presupposes is a principle of equal consideration of interests. Animals have interests. Disregarding or discounting these interests, while giving full weight to the like interests of humans, is irrational, a kind of self-contradiction. What would you say of someone who accorded full weight to the interests of whites, or men, but disregarded or discounted the interests of nonwhites, or women? Speciesism has the same logical structure, and hence the same moral status, as racism and sexism. That we put animals in a separate moral category doesn’t make it right, any more than our putting blacks or women in a separate moral category would make it right.

Even when I disagree with Singer, I admire his courage, his honesty, his adherence to principle (the principle of utility), and his decency. He has been badly treated over the years, and yet he keeps working. Six years ago, in correspondence with the late James Rachels, I mentioned the controversy surrounding Singer’s recent hiring by Princeton University. Rachels wrote back: “Hi Keith, thanks for forwarding the item about Peter. He’s catching a lot of flack, which is a tribute to his stature—no one cares much what the rest of the crazy philosophers think! But it’s too bad that he is having to endure this sort of press, since he’s about the most admirable human being I know.” I agree. Happy birthday, Peter! May you have many more “dangerous” years.

Addendum: Here is a column I wrote about Singer almost two years ago.

Addendum 2: Here is my review of Dale Jamieson's book Singer and His Critics.

Animal-Centered History

Khursh Mian Acevedo sent a link to this interesting story about the history of nonhuman animals. I wrote a history of wolf legislation when I was in law school. The title was "The Legal Status of the Wolf (Canis Lupus) in Michigan, 1805-1982." I also wrote a philosophical essay entitled "Do Plants Have Rights?" A year later, I wrote an historical essay entitled "Hunting in Colonial America: An Essay on Nationalism and Popular Culture." More recently, I have written about the moral status of animal companions. See here.

Mercy for Animals

Here is a website devoted to compassionate, respectful living.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re "Face to Face With the Foie Gras Problem," by Lawrence Downes (Editorial Observer, June 26):

If it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. And so, too, I would argue that if a duck is force-fed by shoving a tube down its throat three times a day until its liver grows to as much as 10 times its normal size, you have animal cruelty.

Farmed animals deserve to lead their brief, often tortured lives as animals, not units of production unable to experience their natural instincts.

Although Mr. Downes suggests that there were no signs of suffering at the foie gras farm, polls show that the public rejects the practice. New York should make foie gras production illegal.

Brad Goldberg
President, Animal Welfare Trust
Mamaroneck, N.Y., June 27, 2005

To the Editor:

"Face to Face With the Foie Gras Problem," by Lawrence Downes, is a clarion call to do nothing.

Because billions of chickens and millions of pigs and cows are slaughtered in this country each year, should we not try to end the suffering of some? Should we stop trying to alleviate poverty in Africa because millions are in poverty in Asia and South America?

Will stopping foie gras production end the suffering of the billions of other animals we torture in factory farms and slaughterhouses each year? No, but it is a step in the right direction, and that is better than standing still.

Rebecca Wittman
Waterville, N.Y., June 27, 2005

Another Reason Not to Be a Consequentialist

Russ Shafer-Landau is a philosopher at The University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at The University of Kansas for many years. Russ and I went to graduate school together at The University of Arizona in the 1980s. In January 1994, Russ published an essay entitled “Vegetarianism, Causation and Ethical Theory” in Public Affairs Quarterly. I read it in April of that year and then again today, because I’ve been grappling with the question he takes up. The question is whether buying (and consuming) meat causes harm to animals. Russ thinks it doesn’t, and since two of the three main normative ethical theories—consequentialism and deontology—require the causation of harm in order for an action to be wrong, neither of them grounds an obligation to abstain from meat.

Russ concedes that the third main normative ethical theory—virtue ethics—has the resources to ground such an obligation, but he doesn’t make the case here. As for deontology, I’m not convinced by Russ’s claim that it lacks the theoretical resources to condemn meat-eating. He himself provides a plausible deontological principle (to wit: “one must refuse (even symbolic) support of essentially cruel practices, if a comparably costly alternative that is not tied to essentially cruel practices is readily available”), but then, puzzlingly, he makes a wholesale attack on deontological principles. This (pardon the metaphor) is using a cannon to kill an ant. And he missed!—for reasons I give in my essay “Deontological Egoism.”

But Russ may be right that consequentialism lacks the resources to condemn meat-eating. (Consequentialism is the theory that the rightness or wrongness of an action is a function solely of its consequences. That an act is of a certain type, such as killing an innocent person, lying, or torturing, is morally irrelevant. Consequentialism requires that the good be maximized, and it insists that in calculating the amount of good, everyone’s interests—including those of the agent—be considered equally. Consequentialists hold that we are as responsible for what we allow as for what we bring about. Hence, each of us, at all times, is to make the world the best place it can be, remaining strictly impartial as we do so.) Here is the suspect inference:

1. Factory farming is wrong.
Therefore,
2. It is wrong to purchase and eat (factory-farmed) meat.

Russ accepts the premise for the sake of argument. What he denies is that the conclusion follows from it. Here is Russ’s criticism of this argument (he calls his criticism “the inefficacy argument”):

[O]ne cannot, in one’s purchase and eating of meat, have any direct influence on the amount of cruelty and harm inflicted on the animals in a factory farm. Whether one purchases a steak, or several steaks, for personal or family consumption will have no influence whatever on the amount of cruelty perpetrated on today’s farms. One’s meat-purchasing habits essentially make no difference at all to the total amount of suffering experienced by the billions of animals currently maltreated. The ordinary consumer of meat is so remote in the causal nexus of animal suffering, that one cannot properly attribute to any such consumer any causal, hence moral, responsibility for the admittedly wretched fates suffered by farm animals. One is morally free to do as one likes so long as one does no harm. Meat purchases do no harm. Therefore one is morally free to make them. (page 85)

If Russ is right, then one cannot consistently (1) be a consequentialist and (2) believe that meat-eating is wrong. Consequentialism, he says, implies nothing about the wrongness of eating meat.

I’m not as sure as Russ appears to be that consequentialism lacks the theoretical resources to condemn meat-eating. But suppose he’s right. It doesn’t follow that one must accept the moral permissibility of meat-eating. What follows is a disjunction: Either one accepts the moral permissibility of meat-eating or one rejects consequentialism. What Russ has done, perhaps unwittingly, is give a knock-down, drag-out argument against consequentialism. Any theory that has an unacceptable implication is unacceptable. Meat-eating is wrong; therefore, since consequentialism implies that it’s not wrong, consequentialism is to be rejected.

Let me put it differently. There are two ways to preserve consistency if Russ is right. The first is to bite the bullet and believe that meat-eating is morally permissible. (A bullet-biter is someone who sticks with a theory even though—even when—it gives counterintuitive results.) The second is to continue believing that meat-eating is morally impermissible (you do believe that, don’t you?) and to reject consequentialism for entailing the denial of this belief. Nor is this the only case in which consequentialism gives the wrong result. It gives the wrong result in so many cases of so many different types that you wonder why anyone, much less a philosopher, endorses it. Russ has simply added another nail to the consequentialist coffin.

From the Mailbag

Hello Dr. Burgess-Jackson,

Good analysis of [Roger] Scruton's article. I know you've mentioned [Matthew] Scully a few times recently, but have you read Dominion? Scully does quite a job on Scruton. I count Dominion among the best non-fiction books I've ever read. As one reviewer put it, "A master of language, he leaves a memorable phrase on virtually every page." (Nichols Fox, Washington Post Book World)

Regarding Scruton: I think that many people (probably most of them) form their beliefs on a gut level and then proceed to look around for a logical justification for those beliefs (even if the resulting arguments don't really hold water). Scruton, in his heart of hearts, seems not to respect animals—so he cobbles together a rationalization that would justify his prejudice.

What I found most appalling about Scruton's article is his utter misinterpretation of Richard Dawkins's elegant theories. I suspect that Scruton never even read The Selfish Gene and simply judged it by its title. I'll have more to say about Dawkins in my next e-mail message.

On another note: What is your secret to time management? You seem to engage in an awful lot of activities: teaching, publishing academic papers, writing your blogs, walking your dogs, exercising, participating in bike rallies, watching movies and sports events, etc. How do you do it?

Regards,

Alex Chernavsky
Rochester, NY

Note from KBJ: No children.

Scruton on Animal Rights

See here.

Scully on the Radio

Longtime reader Khursh Mian Acevedo sent a link to a radio interview with animal-rights advocate Matthew Scully, who happens (like me) to be a conservative. See here. Thinking that animals matter, morally, is not a liberal cause. How it came to be seen as a liberal cause puzzles me. Was the abolition of slavery a liberal cause? Must one be a liberal to think that making sentient beings suffer for trivial reasons is wrong? And by the way, not all liberals have been proponents of animal rights. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), one of history's great liberals, was decidedly not a proponent of animal rights. Indeed, he thought animals had the moral status of inanimate objects.

Animal Rights

Many people have a visceral response to the idea of animal rights. They say it’s impossible, nonsensical, absurd. But why? To say that an animal has a particular right, such as a right not to be harmed, isn’t to say that it has any other particular right, such as a right to vote, much less that it has all rights. We know that children, for example, have certain rights but not others. Why can’t the same be true of animals?

Another important distinction, often ignored, is that between positive and negative rights. A positive right is a right to do or have something. If there is a right to health care, as liberals claim, it is a positive right. Voting is a positive right. But many rights are negative. I have a right not to be killed, battered, robbed, stolen from, or defamed. Why can’t animals have negative rights? Perhaps animals have only one right: a negative right not to be made to suffer.

Yet another confusion is between absolute and defeasible rights. An absolute right may not be infringed; a defeasible right may be infringed under certain circumstances. Most of our rights are defeasible. There is a right to speak, but not to yell fire in a crowded theater. There is a right to exercise your religion, but not if it requires human sacrifice. Rights are defeasible because there is more than one valuable thing. Even the right to life is defeasible, which is why execution of murderers is not a violation of it.

There are many other important distinctions to be made in the realm of rights. Let me mention just one more: between legal rights and moral rights. Legal rights are conferred by government and would not exist without government. Moral rights exist independently of government. Indeed, they set limits on what government may do. Read Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to see an example of moral (often called “natural”) rights. There are two sorts of argument one can have about legal rights. The first is whether a particular legal right exists. Lawyers are expert in answering this question. The second is whether a particular legal right should exist. Everyone is competent to answer this question, since it’s a moral question. (There are no moral experts.) Even if animals had no legal rights, it could be true that they should.

When I say that I’m a proponent of animal rights, all I mean is that I believe that animals have moral status. They’re not nothing, morally speaking. There are moral limits to what we can do to them. We can wrong them. They have (valid) claims on us. They’re entitled to be treated a certain way. There’s nothing mysterious about any of these claims. Indeed, we say such things all the time about humans.

By the way, utilitarians don’t believe in rights (even for humans), but this doesn’t prevent them from using the language of rights. Here is Peter Singer:

In misguided attempts to refute the arguments of this book, some philosophers have gone to much trouble developing arguments to show that animals do not have rights. They have claimed that to have rights a being must be autonomous, or must be a member of a community, or must have the ability to respect the rights of others, or must possess a sense of justice. These claims are irrelevant to the case for Animal Liberation. The language of rights is a convenient political shorthand. It is even more valuable in the era of thirty-second TV news clips than it was in [Jeremy] Bentham’s day; but in the argument for a radical change in our attitude to animals, it is in no way necessary. (Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed. [New York: The New York Review of Books, 1990], 8 [endnote omitted])

The question is not whether animals can have rights, or even whether they do in fact have rights, but which rights they have. I submit to you that they have one basic right: the right to have their suffering taken into consideration in our deliberations. If that right were respected, it would change the world.

Frum on Scully on Animals

Here is David Frum's review of Matthew Scully's book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. I suspect most people think of animal rights as a liberal cause. It has nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism.

Scully

Here are some essays by Matthew Scully, who, like me, is both a conservative and a proponent of animal rights.

Addendum: Here is the PDF version of "Fear Factories." Please read it.

Wayne Pacelle on the Future of the Animal-Protection Movement

We are now at a new and strange juncture in human experience. Never has there been such massive exploitation of animals—from the puppy mills to the canned hunting ranches to the laboratories to the billions of animals raised on factory farms. At the same time, never have there been so many people determined to stop this exploitation. One force or the other has to prevail, and it is the goal of the animal protection movement to see the forces of kindness and mercy triumph over custom, complaisance, and selfishness, and to usher in a new era of respect and concern for animals.

The means of effecting these sweeping changes take many forms. There is enlightenment and education, and the personal transformation that occurs when people of conscience become aware of abuse and misconduct. There is direct care and relief, and the humane movement has spent the bulk of its resources during the last century and a half providing shelter, sanctuary, food and water, and other animal care services to creatures in need.

In a market-oriented economy—in which many animals are treated only as commodities—the humane movement must influence corporate practices and policies. We vote for or against animal cruelty with our dollars in the marketplace, and our ability to spur corporate policy changes has enormous implications for animals. When major corporations halted animal testing, or when fast food giants stipulated that producers had to observe basic welfare standards, these decisions affected the lives of millions of creatures.

And then there is the matter of the law. When it comes to animals, the law must speak, and set a standard in society for personal, corporate, and government conduct. Matters dealing with the treatment of animals cannot be left entirely to personal choice or conscience, since many people would knowingly flout society’s voluntary proscriptions. As elsewhere in the law, people must be held to clear standards of conduct, and those standards must be enforceable.

(Wayne Pacelle, “Law and Public Policy: Future Directions for the Animal Protection Movement,” Animal Law 11 [2005]: 1-6, at 1-2)

Hubris

This says it all about human arrogance. (Thanks to Michael W. Gross for the link.)

Addendum: Two faithful readers have pointed out to me that The Onion is a satirical site. I know that. I've been reading it for years. This satirical story makes fun of human arrogance. It wouldn't be funny if we didn't see the awful truth in it.

Whole Foods

Here is a bizarre column about Peter Singer and Whole Foods Market.

Humans and Animals

Why is it acceptable to treat nonhuman animals as mere means to human ends? Why are we deontologists with respect to humans but consequentialists with respect to animals? Why are humans morally special? Are whites morally special? Are men morally special? See here for disturbing video footage. (See here as well.) If it doesn't enrage you, then you aren't wired properly. (Thanks to Khursh Mian Acevedo, a tireless animal advocate, for the links.)