Animals, Rights and Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics

Stephen T. Newmyer

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135130589
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Ancient History

This groundbreaking volume explores Plutarch's unique survival in the argument that animals are rational and sentient, and that we, as humans, must take notice of their interests.

Exploring Plutarch's three animal-related treatises, as well as passages from his ethical treatises, Stephen Newmyer examines arguments that, strikingly, foreshadow those found in the works of such prominent animal rights philosophers as Peter Singer and Tom Regan.

Unique in viewing Plutarch's opinions not only in the context of ancient philosophical and ethical through, but also in its place in the history of animal rights speculation, Animals Rights and Reasons points out how remarkably Plutarch differs from such anti-animal thinkers as the Stoics.

Classicists, philosophers, animal-welfare students and interested readers will all find this book an invaluable and informative addition to their reading.

1

INTRODUCTION
The ancients and the moderns

Like all movements, the animal rights movement has its predecessors.

Charles R. Magel, Keyguide to Information Sources in Animal Rights

In his work Animal Minds and Human Morals, philosopher of mind Richard Sorabji analyzes a number of aspects of the ancient debate over the mental capacities of animals, a debate in which Aristotelian and Stoic notions of the nature of animalkind and humankind figure prominently.¹ As Sorabji makes clear, the issue central to this debate was that of animal rationality, a question on which virtually every school of philosophy in classical antiquity took a stand. In his investigation of the extraordinarily complex issue of animal mentation, Sorabji combines a thorough command of classical sources with a familiarity with the literature of the modern animal rights movement, using that literature, especially in the final sections of his book, to demonstrate the extent to which arguments developed by modern philosophers who grapple with the question of man’s potential moral obligations toward other species have precedents in ancient formulations of these issues.² In the course of his work, Sorabji occasionally cites the animal-related treatises of Plutarch (ca. 50–120 CE), sometimes noting that Plutarch differs in opinion from other ancient writers on animal issues, in particular from the Stoics, but he seldom comments at length on Plutarch’s views and rarely cites him for independent testimony on any issue.³ In his enlightening discussion of whether the Greeks had any conception of “animal rights,” for example, Sorabji cites Porphyry (ca. 234–305 CE) but ignores Plutarch, from whom Porphyry borrowed extensively on the questions under discussion.⁴ While Sorabji is unusual, among modern scholars who discuss ancient attitudes toward animals, in acknowledging a continuity between ancient and modern philosophers, the reader does not come away from Sorabji’s book with the impression that Plutarch had much to contribute to the ancient debate on animal rationality, or that his ideas on animals live on in any meaningful sense as do those of Aristotle and of the Stoics, as Sorabj i so ably demonstrates.

Even among specialists in Plutarchan studies, his animal-related treatises remain relatively unknown. A number of general works on Plutarch and his literary legacy slight this side of their subject’s oeuvre. C. J. Giankaris, for example, comments in passing on the “humanistic” side of Plutarch’s personality, but ignores totally the humanity of Plutarch’s pronouncements on animals.⁵ D. A. Russell limits his comments on this aspect of Plutarch’s work to a content summary of his treatise De sollertia animalium (On the Cleverness of Animals), which interests him primarily for the light it throws on Plutarch’s teaching activities and on his circle of friends.⁶ This tendency to undervalue or ignore this side of Plutarch’s literary production led Francesco Becchi, an enthusiastic student of Plutarch’s animal treatises, to conclude, with justification, that Plutarch’s writings on animal psychology have to date attracted little critical attention.⁷ In the course of Becchi’s attempt to isolate the philosophical sources upon which Plutarch’s writings on animals are based, he observes that Plutarch often does not seem to stand completely in the tradition of accepted notions about animals that can be traced from Aristotle down through Porphyry, and that where structural comparisons can be made among extant works, he often does not reflect structural similarities traceable among other works.⁸

The degree of neglect which Plutarch’s treatises on animals have encountered, even among Plutarchan scholars, is the more remarkable when we take into account the fascination which animals held for Plutarch and the comparatively large presence which animals enjoy in his literary production. Not surprisingly, animals do not figure prominently in the Lives,⁹ but among the extant treatises that constitute that vast collection of philosophical, religious and antiquarian essays called the Moralia, three deal exclusively with questions relating to animals. The most extensive of these, De sollertia animalium, purports to record a debate on the question of whether land animals or marine animals are more clever. No conclusion is reached, and the reader is left with the realization that Plutarch intended to show that in fact all animals possess “cleverness” and other positive intellectual attributes that cause them to be entitled to respectful treatment from human beings. While the majority of examples cited by Aristotimus and Phaedimus, Plutarch’s debaters in this dialogue, are stock illustrations of animal skills familiar to readers of the Greek naturalists and of ancient catalogers of animal wonders, the thesis that underlies Plutarch’s presentation is that all animals, to a greater or lesser degree, possess reason.¹⁰ More lighthearted is the brief dialogue Bruta animalia ratione uti (Whether Beasts Are Rational), also known as Gryllus (“Grunter,” “Oinker”) from the name of one of the speakers, a comrade of Odysseus transformed into a pig by Circe. The dialogue is a parody of Odyssey X in which the Ithacan asks Circe to reconvert his comrades into men. In Plutarch’s reworking, she suggests that he first ask them whether they in fact wish to be men again. The contented Gryllus serves as their “spokespig,” rebuffing the hero’s efforts and arguing that animals possess all the standard ancient virtues without any of the vices that render human life miserable.¹¹ Finally, in De esu carnium (On the Eating of Flesh), the second part of which survives in a mutilated state, Plutarch offers a number of arguments, moral, hygienic and religious, in support of a vegetarian lifestyle.¹²

Animals figure prominently as well in Plutarch’s work De amore prolis (On theLove of Offspring), wherein he maintains, in apparent contradiction to his position in De esu carnium, that the sense of justice is less well developed in animals than in humans, although he does concede there that animals love their offspring tenderly, and that animals mate only for procreation, unlike humans who are excessively devoted to bodily pleasures.¹³ Animals, he argues in De amore prolis, are on the whole closer to Nature (physis) in their behavior than are humans, whose actions are at times corrupted by artifice and excess. In De tuenda sanitatepraecepta (On Precepts for Maintaining Health) and in the Quaestionum ConvivaliumLibri (Table Talk), he raises many of the same issues touched on at greater length in De esu carnium. Animals appear in passing in a number of other Plutarchan treatises, frequently as examples of creatures exhibiting lifestyles superior to (or inferior to) those of their human counterparts.

In recent years, Plutarch’s treatises on animals have been the subject of critical studies by a number of Italian scholars who have done much to rescue these works from the obscurity into which they had fallen.¹⁴ These authors have made a careful attempt to isolate those concepts that contribute to what might be called Plutarch’s “animal psychology.” Although these scholars do not attempt to explore in any depth the topic of possible continuity between ancient thought on animal issues and the arguments of philosophers of the modern animal rights movement, a feature of Sorabji’s work that renders his analysis so intriguing, their work effectively reminds us that Plutarch occupies an important position in the ancient tradition of thought on the role of animals in the sphere of man’s moral concern. The thesis that underlies the present volume is that Plutarch’s treatises on animals have an interest and value that has largely been overlooked in the scholarly tradition outlined above. Sorabji’s contention that the ancient debate over animal rationality set the stage for many of the controversies that currently engage animal rights advocates and their opponents is certainly valid, but it can be argued that Plutarch’s animal treatises shed more light on the ancient contribution to this debate than emerges from Sorabji’s treatment of these works. In setting forth his case for animal rationality, Plutarch has recourse to arguments, examples and illustrations that will have a familiar ring to readers conversant with the literature of the animal rights movement.

A word of caution is in order at this point. As Sorabji argues so convincingly, it would be erroneous and anachronistic to maintain that any ancient philosopher held a position that could justifiably be termed “animal rightist.”¹⁵ At the same time, many of the arguments and concepts with which the modern animal rights debate is waged have ancient precedents. Plutarch’s treatises on animals seem to illustrate some of these with particular clarity. He betrays a remarkably “modern” sensitivity to animals as feeling and suffering creatures that distinguishes much of the literature of the contemporary animal rights movement but which is largely absent from extant ancient works on animal issues, with the notable exception of the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s treatise Deabstinentia (On Abstinence from Animal Food).

It will be obvious to anyone who pays attention to the media that issues relating to the treatment of animals¹⁶ by human beings constituted the subject of one of the central intellectual debates of the closing years of the twentieth century that shows no sign of abating in the twenty-first. One does not need to consult the sophisticated and abstractly argued treatises of ethical philosophers and ethologists, those scientists whose work entails the systematic study of animal behavioral patterns,¹⁷ to be aware that the questions of whether animals possess “rights,” what those “rights” might be, and what impact such rights possession might have upon human behavior, have far-reaching implications for the lives of all persons, and that those questions are currently the topic of lively debate. Feature stories on abuse and neglect of companion animals, poaching, endangered species, appalling conditions on factory farms, and misuse and overuse of animals in the laboratories of governments and cosmetic companies, confront readers daily. Hunters find their activities disrupted by protesters who employ more or less violent methods, and furriers find their business undermined by animal activists who bring the practices of fur production to the notice of the public. While such activities and the abuses they presently entail lay largely outside the experience of classical antiquity, the intellectual assumptions that underlie the activities of animal activists often have ancient precedents.¹⁸ In many cases, however, the philosophers of the contemporary animal rights movement seem barely cognizant of the ancient contribution to the debate on the moral status of animals.¹⁹

Philosophers of the animal rights movement, and historians who chronicle its development, are virtually united in stressing its modernity. While Richard D. Ryder, whose book Animal Revolution traces the historical development of the concept of “speciesism,” the tendency of human beings to favor human interests and to draw justification therefrom to oppress other species, may note “the gradual triumph of reason and compassion over habit, vested interest and convenience,”²⁰ an achievement, he observes, in which our present age can take pride, he clearly judges a philosophical concern for animals as feeling and possibly thinking creatures to be a distinctly modern phenomenon whose nineteenth-century precedents seem to him to constitute the ancient history of that idea. Ryder does devote a few pages to the classical heritage of thinking on animals, stressing the combination of reverence and cruelty that marked the curiously ambivalent ancient attitude toward animals, and he allows that Plutarch’s somewhat atypical position on vegetarianism suggested belief in “a general duty of kindness to human and nonhuman alike.”²¹ Nevertheless, Ryder does not hesitate to proclaim the “powerful moral concern” of the animal rights movement to be a consequence of the heightened awareness of the wrongness of speciesism that accompanied the crusade for civil rights for disadvantaged classes of humans in the 1960s.²²

A more extreme example of the historical myopia that colors Ryder’s work can be seen in Peter Singer’s work Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for OurTreatment of Animals, published in 1975 and widely regarded as the “bible of the animal liberation movement.”²³ The very subtitle of Singer’s work hints at the author’s perception that a serious concern for animals expressed in carefully reasoned argument is a recent phenomenon. The historical sketch which opens Singer’s work traces the phrase “animal rights” to the eighteenth-century Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor, whose treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes was intended in fact as an ironic riposte to Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatise Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and while he later cites another philosopher’s observation that Plutarch deserves the honor of being considered “the first to advocate strongly the kind treatment of animals on the grounds of universal benevolence,” one gets the impression that for Singer, ancient thinking on animals was more quaint curiosity than valuable foundation for later debate.²⁴ In his Preface to the modern edition of British social activist Henry S. Salt’s work Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress, a treatise originally published in 1892, Singer makes the telling comment, “I marvel at how he anticipates almost every point discussed in the contemporary debate over animal rights.”²⁵ Similarly, Ryder had asserted that the “moral basis” for the animal liberation movement was laid with the publication, in 1965, of the short essay entitled “The Rights of Animals” by British novelist and essayist Brigid Brophy.²⁶ Brophy herself could claim in that essay, “My views are shared by only a smallish (but probably not so small as you think) part of the citizenry – as yet.”²⁷ The implication of Brophy’s words is clear: a serious concern for animals is a distinctly modern phenomenon.

In fairness to the philosophers of the animal rights movement, the observations of their historians, including Ryder, relate, strictly speaking, to the consequences of the heightened awareness of animal suffering that arose almost as a corollary to the crusade for the betterment of oppressed classes of humans. Just as it came to be realized that denial of rights to persons on the basis of color or gender was a type of discrimination, so too could denial of rights to creatures on the basis of species be condemned as...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the ancients and the moderns
• 2 The nature of the beast: the search for animal rationality
• 3 Just beasts: animal morality and human justice
• 4 Feeling beastly: pain, pleasure and the animal estate
• 5 Beauty in the beast: cooperation, altruism and philanthropy among animals
• 6 Animal appetites: vegetarianism and human morality
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index locorum
• Index