The Moral Menagerie: PHILOSOPHY AND ANIMAL RIGHTS - Softcover

Fellenz, Marc R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252073606 ISBN 13: 9780252073601

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2007

Synopsis

The Moral Menagerie offers a broad philosophical analysis of the recent debate over animal rights. Marc Fellenz locates the debate in its historical and social contexts, traces its roots in the history of Western philosophy, and analyzes the most important arguments that have been offered on both sides. 

Fellenz argues that the debate has been philosophically valuable for focusing attention on fundamental problems in ethics and other areas of philosophy, and for raising issues of concern to both Anglo-American and continental thinkers. More provocatively, he also argues that the form the debate often takes--attempting to extend our traditional human-centered moral categories to cover other animals--is ultimately inadequate. Making use of the critical perspectives found in environmentalism, feminism and post-modernism, he concludes that taking animals seriously requires a more radical reassessment our moral framework than the concept of ‘animal rights’ implies.

About this title

About the Author

Marc Fellenz is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, Suffolk Community College, as well as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Philosophy at Nassau Community College and in the Department of Social Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Moral Menagerie

PHILOSOPHY AND ANIMAL RIGHTSBy MARC R. FELLENZ

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07360-1

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

Why Care about Animals?

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 their own must always shadow the exploitation. That the animals we use must therefore be other-than-human but also similar-to-human is seen in many examples that underscore how thoroughly ambiguous our relationship with animals is. As philosopher Mary Midgley notes concerning the domestication of animals, exploitation requires sympathy: one cannot successfully elicit the desired compliance of another animal without recognizing and exploiting its innate sociality and subjectivity. Critic Ren Girard sees this complex emotional connection between humans and domesticates as pointing toward an improbable explanation of the institution of animal domestication itself: namely, that it arose not out of material necessity, but rather the psychological requirements of religious sacrifice. For a sacrifice to be effective, the sacrificial victims must be similar to the sacrificer, and so the animals to be offered first had to spend time assimilating with the human tribe. If this explanation is highly speculative, Girard's point nonetheless finds resonance in the modern sacrifice of animals for the sake of science: medical-especially psychiatric-research involving animals is dogged by the inherent dilemma that the validity of its results and the moral questionableness of its practice are both proportional to the physiological and psychological proximity of the research animals to human beings.

Whether sacrificed or made to perform, subjected to our noblest experiments or our whims, animals are thus not simply used as material media but also as institutionalized victims-the workhorse, the scapegoat, the guinea pig-a role they can fill only if they are capable of being victimized. Witness such spectacles as the bullfight, the rodeo, and the circus: the sense of conquest humans feel in the death, defeat, or dispiriting of the animal depends on the prospect that the animal can feel our victory and its own loss. But if it is possible in this way to assimilate the animal with our own emotional experiences, then our use of the animal-both practically and psychologically-can never be one-dimensional, but must reflect the full complexity of our own affective lives. The human hunter tracks the animal as prey, but is also known to respect the animal as a compeer; in totemic cultures animals are sacrificed and eaten, even while they are considered ancestral kin worthy of piety; and if the farmer perceives the wild animal as an enemy to be vanquished, it is only in the context of domestication that there arises the institution of companion animals that are treated as objects of affection. In the animal world we find metaphors for the full range of human emotion.

Functioning in this capacity as emotional metaphor-and being both related to us yet different-the animal emerges as an empathetic object. As cognitive ethologist Donald Griffin argues: "We are challenged by the very difficulties of putting oneself in the skin of another animal, but we are also searching for empathy, a consideration that has not received nearly the attention it deserves. We like and admire other animals to a considerable extent because we enjoy trying to imagine what their lives are like to them ... This curiosity forms a continuum with the desire to understand people of different cultures whose lives differ from ours. In both cases it is a fundamental, and I believe significant, impulse to try to put ourselves in other shoes, or skin."

But such curiosity is not simply a matter of idle enjoyment. Just as the different lives led by other humans shed light on the contingencies of our own, the different reality occupied by the animal provides a valuable mirror in which to view our humanity. In addition to fulfilling our material desires and emotional needs, the ability of animals to illuminate human reality and its relationship to the broader world underlies our inter-specific connection. As Scholtmeijer argues, animals can cement this link because they "provide a stance outside of culture from which culture may look at itself." Art critic Steve Baker adds that animals-especially wild animals-being in themselves free of mythology and ideology, exist in "unmeaning thereness": an objective and unmediated perspective on reality that operates independently of the meanings with which culture is comfortable. Thus, while the otherness of animals is often cited to justify their material exploitation, the most philosophically interesting uses of animals take advantage of their objective, extra-cultural nature as the means to human self-understanding.

The Ambiguous Mirror

At first, the suggestion that the animal can offer "objective" insight into our human selves may elicit a skeptical response. If Scholtmeijer and Baker are correct in identifying the animal's proper domain as a kind of extra-cultural space, will culturally constituted human beings be able to appreciate that reality? When we stare into the eyes of the wild animal, are we capable of deciphering what is reflected back without corrupting its message? Rather than functioning as a reflective mirror, is it not inevitable that the animal must serve as a receptive canvas on which humans will inscribe their own meanings? If so, in the animal we are likely to find confirmation of our established self-concepts, and not a source of new truths. Consider, for example, the depiction of animals in myths, fables, and cartoons: enmeshed in thoroughly human situations, living out human anxieties and hopes. There the concerns of human civilization are projected onto the nonhuman world, and the animal-far from providing a critical view of culture-is exploited precisely as the vehicle for naturalizing culture. The same may be said of our treatment of real animals: witness circus animals trained to caricature human behaviors, or the spectacle of pets sporting coiffed hair and clothing. Such absurd situations have the effect of ascribing to animals desires and attitudes that simply reinforce those of their human spectators, and are only infrequently appreciated for the satirical perspective they might provide (as, for example, in the photography of William Wegman).

While these objections dovetail with the preceding discussion of the psychological usefulness of the animal, it does not follow from them that for human beings the animal can never be more than a domesticated construct. Such a conclusion is militated against by the fact that, in addition to occupying a place outside of culture, animals (at least some) may also be said to occupy a perspective-a consciousness, a way of life, a form of subjectivity that contrasts with our own-and this renders them more resistant than other natural entities to the meanings that human beings may project upon them. Although the recognition of this fact by no means guarantees that humans can leap out of culture and assume the animal's perspective as a source of objective insight, history demonstrates that cultural institutions have embodied varying degrees of receptivity to that possibility. Griffin's analogy to human cultural interaction is instructive: some cultures are overtly racist (leading to genocide), some are more mildly xenophobic (emphasizing assimilation), and some embrace diversity as a source of enrichment; likewise, some cultures overtly practice misothery (leading to extinction), some are more mildly anthropocentric (emphasizing domestication), and some embrace the animal as a source of enrichment-creating institutions that honor the animal's perspective on the broader reality beyond the confines of human culture, and the insight into human existence it can make possible.

Thus, we find that the reflexive quality to our experience of the animal has been institutionalized in various ways as a source of human self-understanding. Historically, the most animal-embracing institutions are found in pre-agricultural societies. For example, in totemic cultures the animal is institutionalized as ancestral kin, and different clans identify with different totem species; in this way, human self-identity is effected precisely by means of identification with the animal world. Likewise, in various hunting cultures, assuming the animal's perspective is made a lived experience through the religious ritual of metamorphosis. During the sun dance of the Oglala of North America, for example, the ecstatic participants cut and impale themselves while dressed as various animals: the hunters thereby embody the vulnerability of their prey, a bond that forcibly alerts them to their own animality and the physical mortality that it includes. Moving beyond simple empathy, such metamorphic ecstasis suggests an inter-specific example of the type of radical objectivity that anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes in this way: "To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Moral Menagerieby MARC R. FELLENZ Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252073606
• ISBN 13: 9780252073601
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312