Animals and Their Moral Standing

Stephen R L Clark, Stephen R. L. Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134779277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Twenty years ago, people thought only cranks or sentimentalists could be seriously concerned about the treatment of non-human animals. However, since then philosophers, scientists and welfarists have raised public awareness of the issue; and they have begun to lay the foundations for an enormous change in human practice. This book is a record of the development of 'animal rights' through the eyes of one highly-respected and well-known thinker.
This book brings together for the first time Stephen R.L. Clark's major essays in one volume. Written with characteristic clarity and persuasion, Animals and Their Moral Standing will be essential reading for both philosophers and scientists, as well as the general reader concerned by the debates over animal rights and treatment.

1
INTRODUCTION

A large part of my published work over the last twenty years has dealt with ways of understanding and treating ‘animals’. My first book on the subject, The Moral Status of Animals, was written in Oxford and in Glasgow, and variously denounced as too extreme, or rude, or insufficiently grounded in clear fundamental principles. The second, The Nature of the Beast, attempted to deal with information from ethologists and animal psychologists about the way ‘beasts’ thought and felt. Chapters in subsequent books (From Athens to Jerusalem, Civil Peace and Sacred Order, A Parliament of Souls, God’s World and the Great Awakening, How to Think about the Earth) made further suggestions about global politics, and about the implications of evolutionary theory for philosophy of mind, and for political theory. I shall soon be attempting, in Biology and Christian Ethics, a larger and more systematic study of the relationship of biological theory, ethics and religion.

I have not included some very recent papers in this volume, notably ‘Enlarging the Community’¹ and ‘Apes and the Idea of Kindred’.² I have also omitted some related work, on environmentalism, on the roots of moral feeling, and on philosophy of biology. The papers I have collected here were written (usually on request) as descants or diversions. They chiefly deal with particular issues about our treatment of animals, or about our understanding of them: in both cases, the animals in question will include the human ones. These papers were composed for many different audiences, and in different styles, but they all belong to a single conversation: with myself, my friends and my opponents. Sometimes I have written sentences with which I don’t agree – and never did agree: they were written as imagined criticisms or suggestions that I went on to rebut or qualify. Sometimes what I have written is only half of what I really think (and thought), and there are unvoiced qualifications lurking in a different paper. Too many modern philosophers (and other readers) neglect the historical moment, and report (with sorrow or with joy) that (for example) Clark says this and also that (which is a contradiction). The truth, most often, is that Clark (perhaps) said this, and on another occasion that. Maybe in neither case did he endorse it; maybe he has changed his mind (for what seemed some good reason, or by inattention). There is no reason why a collection of papers written over twenty years should always be consistent. There is even less reason to expect them all to say exactly the same thing (why bother, then, to publish more than one?).

On the other hand, I do see some consistencies, and some repeated themes. In trying to think about the ‘rights’ of animals I began to view the state rather differently: if ‘rights’ are natural interests such that everyone can count on lawful authority to defend or guarantee them, what might they be once ‘everyone’ is ‘every animal’? In trying to think about the sort of beliefs and practices to be expected of a variety of placental mammal (namely, us), I began to see the attractions and the dangers of a fully naturalised epistemology. The papers printed here will therefore often have links to books and papers other than the ones explicitly about non-human creatures.

When I began thinking and writing about the way we dealt with ‘animals’ I concluded that anyone who wanted to defend that way would have to show that ‘animals’ didn’t mind at all about their treatment. That is indeed the route that many took: they denied, that is, that ‘animals’ could think or feel or wish at all. Some such neo-Cartesians based their claims on biological assumptions: it has been part of the ‘scientific mindset’ for a century that ‘anthropomorphism’ is a deadly sin, and that any ascription to an ‘animal’ of a property possessed by people is ‘anthropomorphic’. The thesis is absurd, and regularly rebutted by biologists themselves. Only creationists could make a plausible case for such a gross dichotomy – and creationists are almost more despised in biological circles than zoophiles! Other neo- Cartesians are philosophers, and found their flat rejection of the moral considerability of ‘animals’ on their ‘not having language’. Because they cannot talk (it is said), they cannot think; because they cannot think, they cannot wish or feel. Oddly, such philosophers rarely conclude that all present legislation about animal welfare should at once be repealed (as pointless): somehow they still think it wrong ‘to be cruel to animals’ while absolutely right to hunt, imprison, experiment upon and kill them. Even more oddly, some neo-Cartesians (or Wittgensteinians) also reject the older philosophical division between natural facts and conventions. What is true is only what ‘we’ will affirm – but ‘we’ (bizarrely) always excludes anyone who gives weight to ‘animal’ experience. Philosophers who write against ‘animals’ also seem quite unwilling to discover what biologists, of any school, could tell them. Biologists who write against them are as unwilling to read philosophers. As a philosopher with an abiding interest in biology (quite apart from my moral interest in the matter) I find this upsetting.

Those who write in the defence of animals, of course, are not united. Some (most obviously, Peter Singer) are utilitarian: others (including me) most certainly are not.³ Some are avowedly secular moralists, rejecting all ‘religious’ contexts: others (including me) write from within a strongly theological tradition.⁴ Some believe that human beings are only animals, and animals in turn are only ‘biological’: others (including me) are ready to reckon that ‘biology’ (as ordinarily defined) is not the whole story, either about mice or men. Most of us are realists: we think, that is, that there really is an external world, and creatures like and unlike us in it. A few (for example, Hearne 1987) have been persuaded into the anti-realist camp, and argue largely about animals ‘as they are for us’. Some are not content merely to write or argue, and have taken to various forms of direct action in defence of ‘animals’. Others (including me) are far too conscious of the fragility of civil peace, and the improbability that our cause would win in open war, to endorse even such actions as do not injure innocents.

Notoriously, argument about ‘animals’ and our treatment of them can (or even must) be heated. The discussion is not of trivialities, nor all one-sided. How we remake our culture to accommodate the old, and modern, insight, that there are no boundaries in nature, and no exact natural kinds, is a serious, and a difficult, issue. ‘Animal rightists’ (so to call us) do not claim – or certainly should not claim – that hunters, vivisectors and the rest are crazed killers. Nor do they deny that all those people may have moral virtues. Whoever supposed, except the terminally stupid, that good men never serve bad causes, or that bad causes cannot have any attractive features? How easy life would be if that were true! The problem ‘animal rightists’ see is not that certain people (but not us) are wicked, but that all of us inherit a way of life, a set of attitudes, that rest in the end on a mistake. Correcting that mistake, and learning better ways, needs courage and courtesy and imagination. We cannot always avoid harsh language – but the harsher the language the more likely it is that we ourselves are in the dock, and know it.

Seeing a creature whole (and not simply as a set of different aspects, tools or meanings) is a difficult moral exercise. Sometimes we manage it by realising our affinity, by seeing it as a creature rather like ourselves, and therefore beginning to treat it rather as we would ourselves wish to be treated. But there is another mode of recognition, movingly described by Roy Willis, in a concluding chapter of Signifying animals: human meaning in the natural world (Routledge 1993). Encountering a – very dangerous – cobra, his ‘overwhelming emotion was awe at its strange beauty’. That too is a moral exercise – to see a thing as Other, and unlike ourselves, and not a creature to be tamed or beaten. Maybe it is easier to meet that moment with a thing we see as ‘wild’: seeing a ‘tame’ creature in that way would be to understand at once that we are wrong to think it merely mutton. Even the creatures we have bred and coached (including people) are not things we have ourselves created, and they are not ours.

One way of testing these intuitions is to ask how those who really strike us as spiritually alive and saintly beings, those most alive to the presence of that Other, treat the natural world.⁵ Saints, of course, come in many guises, and many who have the title for political or ecclesiastical reasons are not convincingly saintly. They also come in many different traditions. If I emphasise the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions in what follows (broadly, the Abrahamic), it is not from any lack of respect for Buddhist or pagan sensibilities.⁶ The most convincing saints characteristically welcome the non-human, greet them as fellow-strugglers and worshippers of the most high, not because they have any naive or sentimental belief about what, say, a skylark believes, but because they see the lark’s fulfilment of its God-given nature as at once a pledge and an example. John the Divine heard

every created thing in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, all that is in them crying: Praise and honour, glory and might, to him that sits upon the throne and to the Lamb for ever and ever.

(Revelation 5. 13)

Too many of us, too much of the time, see the natural world as merely a vast heap of more or less usable material, having no significance until the handyman has arrived to make something of it. The saint understands him-or herself to live within a meaningful and orderly universe, even if its meaning is sometimes simply that our action is needed. To interfere too radically in the natural order, to forget our own nature as terrestrial mammals and demand the right to remake all things only in our own image, for our own purposes, is to corrupt the text.

Saintliness requires that we respect the natures of our fellow creatures, and the order of which we are all a part. Some saints have concluded, in practice, that they should live in complete and open dependence, fitting themselves entirely into the natural order, and so offending the squeamishness of ordinarily decent people. It is a minor irony that Christ’s own sardonic instruction to rely upon the Lord who remembers the falling sparrow, who clothes the anemones and finds the ravens their food, is usually quoted to ‘prove’ that he thought people – or at least his followers – more valuable than sparrows, and so licensed to take unfair advantage of sparrows, anemones and ravens. But saints live within the promised covenant, ‘with the beasts of the field and the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the land’ when God shall have broken the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land and made them to lie down safely (Hosea 2. 18). The beasts will be at peace with us, said an early commentator on the Gospel of Mark, ‘when in the shrine of our souls we tame the clean and unclean animals and lie down with the lions, like Daniel’.⁷

Most religious traditions, unsurprisingly, have found a place not only for these saints but for the mass of pious and more or less well-intentioned persons. How shall we, who do not yet feel called to go out into the wilderness, singly or in groups, think and act toward the natural order? It is, as Aldo Leopold remarked, the temptation of town-dwellers to think that food comes from the grocery store, and heat from the boiler. It is easy to believe that we do not live ‘in nature’ but in human culture, although everything we have and are is a transformation of a natural product. We need above all to remember that we do not live in a human technosphere, surrounded by an ‘environment’ that we may take a casual interest in if we choose. In the Book of Job ‘Yahweh describes himself as the wisdom that makes for the survival of the wild ass, the hamster, the eagle, the ostrich, of all living nature, and the wisdom that uproots mountains and annihilates angels’ (Kallen 1969). The vision of things before which Job at last bowed his head, and repented in dust and ashes, was one that Philo of Alexandria also approved: a sort of cosmic democracy, in which each creature gets its turn, and is allowed its own integrity. So far from dictating that we human beings should think all nature at our own disposal, the Bible constantly insists that humankind is not alone, not privileged above all others, not like God.

Do you not know, have you not heard, were you not told long ago, have you not perceived ever since the world began, that God sits throned on she vaulted roof of earth, whose inhabitants are like grasshoppers? He stretches out the skies like a curtain, he spreads them out like a tent to live in; He reduces the great to nothing and makes all the earth’s princes less than nothing. To whom then will you liken me, who set up as my equal? asks the Holy One.

(Isaiah 40. 21ff)

Where humanist Christianity has borrowed from Stoicism the self-congratulatory notion that ‘nothing irrational is capable of the beatifying friendship with God which is the bond of Christian love of neighbour’,⁸ and thence concluded that ‘the irrational’ is only material for our purposes, the Bible expects us to accept our place within the creation, to live by the rules God imposes, to take what we need, no more, and to give up our demands so that life may go on. Every seventh and fiftieth year the land must be unploughed, and all live together off its natural produce, citizen and stranger and the wild animals of the country (Leviticus 26. 6f). If the law is not kept the people shall be driven from the land, and ‘the land shall enjoy its sabbaths to the full’ (Leviticus 26. 34). None shall eat the life, which is the blood, of any creature, even if in the post-Noahic days meat-eating is allowed. This is not to say that the Bible contains many specific injunctions of a kind to appeal to zoophiles. It was a sterner world than ours, and the animals who shared the Israelites’ land or houses could not have had an easier life than the Israelites themselves. But there was affection there, and acknowledgement of duty. A donkey fallen into a ditch must be hauled out even on the sabbath, and even if it is one’s enemy’s (Deuteronomy 22. 4). The poor man’s pet sheep, whom Nathan the prophet used to shame King David (I Kings 12) was loved as a daughter (and no one had the brass nerve to say that he shouldn’t have wasted good affection on a mere beast).

Northrop Frye, in his attempt to see the Bible whole, concludes that one of its messages is that we shall not regain the world we have lost, the world where we might easily live in nature, with all creatures as our friends, ‘until [we] know thoroughly what hell is, and realise that the pleasure gained by dominating and exploiting, whether of [our] fellow man or of nature itself, is part of that hell-world’.⁹ Things are not wholly at our disposal, and never will be, either in the sense that we can or that we ought to use them with an eye solely to our benefit, and avoid all inconveniences of this mortal life. We cannot by any technical means transform this world into a pleasure garden, nor ought we to try. Nor can we retreat within a denatured city, and imagine that we thereby fulfil the biblical prophecy of a world wholly suffused with humanly significant meaning, ‘when there shall be no more sea’, no more image of the unaccountable. The city that the Bible praises was imagined as part of the land within which it stood, the holy mountain where wolf shall dwell with lamb, leopard lie down with kid (Isaiah 11.6), and the leaves of the trees serve for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22. 2).

No one who reads the Bible can doubt that its human authors were deeply conscious of the natural world, the creation, the land flowing with milk and honey. Where we see ‘nature’, the non-human environment ruled by powers alien to humankind, they saw God’s creation, a world continually offering embodied images of the spiritual values they pursued.

The God of Israel spoke, the Rock of Israel spoke of [David]: He who rules men in justice, who rules in the fear of God, is like the light of morning at sunrise, a morning that is cloudless after rain and makes the grass sparkle from the earth.

(2 Samuel 23. 3f)

In the mouths of poets and prophets this is more than simile, more than a rather strained declaration that a just ruler is like the sun after rain. The prophet sees God’s liberating justice in the light when God sets His rainbow in the sky ‘sign of the covenant between [Himself] and earth’ (Genesis 9. 14). ‘As the hills enfold Jerusalem, so the Lord enfolds His people’ (Psalm 125. 2).

Once the Lord called you an olive-tree, leafy and fair; but now with a great roaring noise you will feel sharp anguish; fire sets its leaves alight and consumes its branches. The Lord of Hosts who planted you has threatened you with disaster.

(Jeremiah 11. 16)

When Babylon the Great has fallen at last,

there no Arab shall pitch his tent, no shepherds fold their flocks. There marmots shall have their lairs, and porcupines shall overrun her houses; there desert owls shall dwell, and there he-goats shall gambol; jackals shall occupy her mansions, and wolves her gorgeous palaces.

(Isaiah 13. 20f)

The whole world has rest and is at peace; it breaks into cries of joy. The pines themselves and the cedars of Lebanon exult over you; since you have been laid low, they say, no man comes up to fell us.

(Isaiah 14. 7f)

The whole world, not merely human history, embodies God’s purposes to the prophetic eye, and no general distinction is drawn between human and non-human. God’s purposes, indeed, may be more fully and obviously embodied in the non-human, and moral examples drawn from them: ‘Mothers, cherish your sons. Rear them joyfully as a dove rears her nestlings’ (2 Esdras 2. 15).

Why, if all this is so, are there so few general injunctions to behave decently to the nonhuman? The word of the Lord to Ezra:

champion the widow, defend the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: HOW TO CALCULATE THE GREATER GOOD
• 3: THE RIGHTS OF WILD THINGS
• 4: AWARENESS AND SELF-AWARENESS
• 5: HUMANS, ANIMALS AND ‘ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR’
• 6: HUME, ANIMALS AND THE OBJECTIVITY OF MORALS
• 7: ANIMALS, ECOSYSTEMS AND THE LIBERAL ETHIC
• 8: THE DESCRIPTION AND EVALUATION OF ANIMAL EMOTION
• 9: UTILITY, RIGHTS AND THE DOMESTIC VIRTUES
• 10: ETHICAL PROBLEMS IN ANIMAL WELFARE
• 11: THE REALITY OF SHARED EMOTION
• 12: THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF ANIMALS
• 13: MODERN ERRORS, ANCIENT VIRTUES
• STEPHEN R. L. CLARK: PUBLICATIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY