Animal Ethics and Theology

The Lens of the Good Samaritan

Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136490194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

In this book, Daniel K. Miller articulates a new vision of human and animal relationships based on the foundational love ethic within Christianity. Framed around Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, Animal Ethics and Theology thoughtfully examines the shortcomings of utilitarian and rights-based approaches to animal ethics. By considering the question of animals within the Christian concept of neighbourly love, Miller provides an alternative narrative for understanding the complex relationships that humans have with other animals.

This book addresses significant theological questions such as: Does being created in the image of God present a meaningful distinction between humans and other animals? What does it mean for humans to have dominion (Gen. 1: 28) over animals? Is meat eating a moral problem for Christians? In addition to drawing out the significance of Christian theology for field of animal ethics this book also engages environmental and feminist ethics. Miller brings a theological perspective to such questions as: Should care for animals be distinguished from care for the environment, and what role should human emotions play in our ethical dealings with other animals? As the title suggests, this book provides fresh insight into the theological significance of human relationships with other animals.

1 Responsibility, Imago Dei, and Animal Neighbors

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” (Luke 10:30)

Roughly thirty years after its establishment as a U.S. national park in 1872, Yellowstone documented its first human fatality due to grizzly bear attack. A male tourist chased a grizzly cub up a tree. The cub’s mother “attacked the man and, in doing so, ripped out his breastbone and one lung.”¹ On another occasion in 1961, a three-year-old male grizzly gradually lost his shyness of humans after spending time near a park crew’s encampment. He unearthed the remains of buried lunch trash and even accepted food scraps thrown to him by humans. Two years later “this thoroughly manconditioned grizzly was shot in June 1963 by Park rangers after molesting visitors camped in wilderness country near Lewis Lake.”² Although grizzly bear attacks are extremely rare in national parks, and fatalities even rarer,³ these cases do pose an interesting question: To what degree, if any, may we hold nonhuman animals morally accountable for the injuries they inflict on humans? If in our parable, for example, bears rather than men had left the traveler for dead along the side of the road, would we proceed to label these animals “robbers” (λησταῖς)—a title possessing a clearly negative moral connotation?

As we saw in the Introduction, we can readily extend the Good Samaritan love ethic to animals as neighbors; yet, because of important differences between humans and other animals, this human neighborly relationship with animals will possess a certain unequal or one-sided quality. I argue in this chapter⁴ that the answer to the above question is a qualified “No.” Using modern ethological and philosophical evidence and the theological insight of Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, I demonstrate that humans represent the only creature, as far as we can know,⁵ to possess true responsibility before God, other humans, and other animals. My argument proceeds in two stages. In the first section I investigate the degree to which, if any, we may assign moral responsibility to nonhuman animals. I begin this inquiry by noting the medieval practice of putting animals on trial for criminal offenses. The justifications for these trials prove skeptical or at best ambiguous with regard to animal moral responsibility. I then review modern ethological studies to show that, although animals are not biological automata as Descartes famously argued,⁶ they do not ultimately possess the level of intentionality and understanding of right and wrong necessary for truly responsible action. As environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston claims, “Animals are not morally deficient, much less immoral; they are amoral.”⁷ In making the argument that animals lack moral responsibility, I do not doubt the goodness of animal creation (Gen. 1:21, 25), or that animals do pursue their own goods or even the divine in their own species-specific ways (Ps. 104; Eph. 1:10). I only doubt that moral responsibility, as far as humans can know, is one of those goods. In the second section I argue that, although we may find incipient morality in some animal species, it is only in humans, as created in the image of God, or imago Dei, that true moral responsibility exists. Here I follow the thinking of Brunner and Barth in contending that human responsibility derives from our existence as those creatures that exist in a relationship of free “call” and “response” to God and other creatures. The argument, in this way, is teleologically rather than biologically driven. The human capacity for moral responsibility derives from our unique destiny as the divine “counterpart”⁸ capable of giving a truly free response to the call of the other.

1.1 Animal Responsibility?

1.1a Medieval Animal Trials

Before I discuss modern arguments regarding the question of animal morality, it is worthwhile to note the peculiar medieval practice of putting animals on trial for their supposed crimes against human communities and individuals. On the surface the existence of these trials seems to indicate that medievals believed animals could be held morally culpable for their offenses against humans. As Kathryn Shevelow writes, “The prosecution, conviction (or exoneration), and execution of beasts implicitly endowed animals with humanlike characteristics, assigning them legal and moral responsibility for their actions.”⁹ I argue in this subsection, however, that a belief in animals as morally responsible agents need not necessarily follow from their presence in criminal trials. There are indications from the trials themselves and among medieval writers, particularly Thomas Aquinas, that medievals were aware of the logical ambiguity and inconsistencies inherent in these trials.

A survey of the relevant literature on medieval animal trials uncovers at least five reasons for their existence. First, there is the possibility that the people truly believed animals were morally responsible, and thus culpable, for their “crimes” against humans. Shevelow lists two examples that point in this direction. In one instance a male dog was tried and executed for bestiality; in another a female donkey was acquitted for the same crime. She claims that these contrasting examples clearly demonstrate an anthropomorphic blurring of the line between humans and other animals. These animals were attributed the same gender stereotypes as their human counterparts: “criminal male lust and honest female virtue. The male dog was presumably a willing, active partner, the she-ass presumably an unwilling, passive victim.”¹⁰ In a similar manner, those animals that killed humans were thought to have homicidal intent similar to that of human murderers. Yet, as philosopher J.J. Finkelstein argues, “however crude the popular perception of the condemned animal as having killed with homicidal intent may have been, the learned sector of society, largely ecclesiastical, was under no such delusion.”¹¹ A look at the defense tactics of some medieval animal lawyers and the writings of prominent medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas proves Finkelstein’s assessment correct. If criminal intent was anthropomorphized to animals at a folk level, it was also challenged by more learned members of medieval society. In Berne in 1666 an insane human man was tried for murder. The prosecutor attempted to prove the man’s liability by appealing to the biblical law of the goring ox (Ex. 21:28– 32). The absence of moral responsibility, the prosecutor argued, failed to acquit the offending animal from the charge of capital punishment. “In short,” Finkelstein observes, “the court clearly perceived that the execution of the ox is not grounded on any idea that the animal was ‘morally’ guilty or that it committed a crime in the normal legal sense, since as an unreasoning being it was incapable of doing so.”¹² The ox was to be executed because the act of killing a human had rendered it “an object of public horror.” Furthermore Thomas Aquinas writes that “to curse irrational beings, considered as creatures of God, is a sin of blasphemy; while to curse them considered in themselves is idle and vain and consequently unlawful.”¹³ The first instance, cursing an animal as a creature of God, is blasphemy because it is possible that the animal is simply an instrument of God for delivering punishment upon human sin. Thus to condemn the animal is to condemn God. The second instance, cursing an animal in itself, is vain and unlawful because “benediction and malediction, properly speaking, regard things to which good or evil may happen, viz. rational creatures.”¹⁴ Aquinas believes that because animals lack reason, they also lack moral responsibility.

This logic leads us to the second rationale for animal prosecution in the middle ages. In killing or injuring a human, the animal did not act of its own volition, but as the instrument of a divine or demonic agent. Of the latter, “the commonest were pigs, which freely ran the streets of medieval towns, and which, following the example of their ancestors from Gadara [Matt. 8:28–32], seemed most attractive to the devil and most easily possessed.”¹⁵ In this case, the condemnation of the animal was really a condemnation of the devil. E.P. Evans proposes a third possible reason for animal trials. He claims criminal proceedings were used by the Church to strengthen its influence in people’s lives by extending its authority even to animals and insects.¹⁶ As a collector of records of medieval animal trials, Evans’s work is invaluable; yet, as an interpreter of the reasoning behind these trials, his explanations leave much to be desired. Finkelstein, for example, makes a more convincing case for the ecclesiastical proceedings against “infesting pests” like snakes, mice, and locusts as “ritual appeals for non-human intervention to rescue a helpless society from an enemy beyond human reach.”¹⁷ Furthermore, Evans’s explanation accounts for only the ecclesiastical trials that had the authority merely to curse or banish offending animals. Yet, it was in the secular, civil courts where the more serious capital punishments were issued against animals.

Our fourth and fifth explanations come from Finkelstein. He argues that the killing of an animal that had fatally wounded a human was done not on the suspicion that the animal was guilty of any wrong but rather because “it had violated the hierarchical order of the universe.”¹⁸ This explanation accords with the hierarchical thinking of Aquinas, who teaches that the lower creatures exist for the service of the higher. Aquinas writes, “The plants make use of the earth for their nourishment, and animals make use of plants, and man makes use of both plants and animals. Therefore it is in keeping with the order of nature, that man should be master over animals.”¹⁹ Human were permitted to kill and use the “lower” animals, but animals were not permitted to use humans. The animal that killed a human, therefore, was not executed because it was morally culpable; rather, it was executed in order to preserve the “the divinely-ordained hierarchy of God’s creation.”²⁰ Lastly, the existence of animal trials can be explained as a vivid form of instruction and warning to the human public. For example, in 1386 a tribunal in Falaise sentenced a sow to be hanged for the killing of a human child. The sow was dressed in human clothing and executed in the public square by the civil executioner.²¹ Finkelstein claims that such pageantry served “as a kind of drama, in certain respects not so far removed from the simple morality plays enacted in medieval Europe for the unlettered folk on other occasions.”²² The animal was executed as a vivid representation and reminder of the gravity of murder rather than as a truly guilty criminal. Another scholar adds that such trials might have served to “intimidate those who were responsible for an offending animal’s dangerous actions.”²³ In either case, the trials served more of a cautionary than punishing role.

As we have seen, many explanations have been offered for the existence of medieval animal trials. In reality, no single theory is likely to fully explain this phenomenon. Different classes of society may have had different rationales for these trials at different times. It is also possible for them to have entertained more than one of these explanations at once. For example, it is not inconceivable for a homicidal animal to be executed both as an instrument of the devil and a deterrent to potential anthropogenic homicides. The significant point to draw out for my purposes in this chapter is that the existence of animal criminal trials does not unequivocally indicate that humans believed animals to be morally responsible for their actions against humans. Although criminal animal trials have largely become an historical relic, humans often still speak of animals, especially carnivores, with morally charged language.²⁴ Everyday, vernacular language about animals, then as now, is not above ambiguities or inconsistencies. Animals are still described as evil, vicious, or even virtuous. Philosopher Mary Midgley argues that this tendency is more than simply a case of confusing the use of animals as symbols for vice and actually attributing vice to them. For example, she lists a documentary that describes sharks as “the world’s most vicious killers” and a crocodile hunter who speaks of a baby crocodile as having “the morality of a laser beam” because it snaps at anything that moves, from a leach to a human leg.²⁵ This morally charged language is common despite the absurdity of expecting crocodiles to distinguish between the legs of humans or other creatures because for crocodiles, “as for all carnivores, prey is simply food, not an enemy or a victim.”²⁶ In the following two subsections I consider modern philosophical and ethological evaluations of animals in an attempt to speak clearly about animals as neither moral nor immoral, but rather as amoral agents. In section two I then consider a rich theological resource for distinguishing human moral responsibility.

1.1b Animal Intentionality

As we saw above, part of our problem is linguistic—what do we mean when we say animals are or are not “moral”? In a recent book, ethologist Marc Bekoff and philosopher Jessica Pierce argue for the appropriateness of the term “moral” in describing certain nonhuman animal behaviors. In making their case they acknowledge that their definition of morality is somewhat novel. They are “quite explicit that the meaning of morality is itself under consideration, and we’re suggesting a shift in meaning. How we define morality will, or course, determine whether and to what extent animals have it.”²⁷ Yet in order to include animals within this concept, they are f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Responsibility, Imago Dei, and Animal Neighbors
• 2. “Caring” for Animal Neighbors, Part I
• 3. “Caring” for Animal Neighbors, Part II
• 4. Drawing Near to Animal Neighbors
• 5. Human Dominion and Animal Neighbors
• 6. Christian Eating and Animal Neighbors
• Conclusion: Naming the Animals
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index