Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (40 page)

The key idea of “basic chauvinism” or anthropocentrism is that only humans are inherently or intrinsically valuable, since humans have special features that put them apart from the rest of all living things. These may be features like consciousness, rationality, high intelligence—or even, in the traditional Christian view, that humans are made in the image of God. Once it's granted that humans have special value, then the value of everything else is to be measured in terms of its contribution (or failure to contribute) to securing the desires and ambitions of humans. If only human beings have moral value, then no wrong is done by wiping out all the non-humans once there are no more human interests to be served.

Routley's ‘last man' examples aim to show something wrong with this view. We're meant to find it absurd to think that no wrong is done by wiping out non-human things, but to see instead that it is monstrous for the last human being to destroy the planet and all the nonhuman beings and things on it. The last man argument immediately became one of the most widely cited arguments in the new environmental philosophy, a
defense of a new, non-human-centered conception of value. For the non-anthropocentrist, there is intrinsic value in much else besides human life, certainly in the lives of many things that are not human.

Suppose that Taylor's final act of destruction was mad. One way of thinking about the madness is that in triggering the doomsday device, he commits the ultimate folly of those whose thinking is dominated by anthropocentrism. Being human-centered is a kind of racism towards other species (sometimes called ‘speciesism'), and there are plenty of things in the movies that show Taylor is under the influence of just such racist-like thinking. Think of the first words ever spoken by humans to the talking apes: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” These are typical of the words a racist might use, and Taylor's outburst would seem to confirm that he is profoundly anthropocentric in his prejudices.

In general, other living things do not get much prominence in the first two movies. Perhaps this is in keeping with the focus on human-simian relationships, so that, with the exception of horses, other animal species do not feature much. The bond between horse and rider is well-known to elicit deep feelings, but the movie makers avoid including any sequences in which the ape riders are shown as having any fondness for their horses. The horses are simply transport mechanisms. Ape City is a bleak place, lacking cats, dogs, or rats, hence neither pest nor companion animals are seen in streets or houses.

Travelers in south-east Asia are familiar with the way primates of various kinds seem to get on well with cats, sometimes grooming street kittens, sometimes even seeming to adopt them as companions. Koko, one of the famous signing gorillas, who is credited with a greater mastery of sign language that either Nim or Washoe, had such a well-documented relationship with a number of cat “pets” that Francine Patterson wrote a book about it:
Koko's Kittens.

There were no doubt good reasons for not adding to production costs in the
Planet of the Apes
series by introducing the theme of other species and companion animals. Still, the absence of human-animal and ape-animal relationships helps the viewer to perceive Taylor's final deed as less destructive than it would have seemed against a more
fully-fleshed depiction of interspecies relations. No one left the theater regretting the loss of a splendid horse, or the ending of a beautiful friendship between a warrior gorilla and a cute kitten.

If Routley's argument is accepted, then Taylor's supposed madness is no different from the madness of contemporary industrial societies. In them, massive changes to ecosystems and huge destruction of other species are all carried out in the name of economic growth, the short-term profits of hungry shareholders and a utopian industrial fantasy in which all human beings will—one day—live lives of comfortable satisfaction in healthy and rewarding surroundings. Meanwhile, the very fabric of planetary life-support systems is under attack by those who are the strongest purveyors of the utopian fantasy itself.

At the heart of the utopian industrial project is lip service to the idea that human existence has intrinsic value. Even as populations are displaced through development and pollution, the companies driving environmental and climate change insist that they aim to bring better lives to everyone on Earth, and that—at some indefinite future time—poverty and disease will be conquered so that everyone, and not just the rich and privileged, can live long, happy, healthy, and prosperous lives.

Meanwhile, two features mark contemporary industrial capitalism. First, nearly all the attempts to improve what is valuable in human life and human presence have been carried out in a way that reduces immense amounts of non-human presence over the face of the earth. And, as is made abundantly clear in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
(2011), the project of improving human health and welfare is carried out at the cost of immense cruelty and suffering to animals used in biomedical research. The expansion of human value, in other words, means loss of other value on a huge scale, the very value that Routley demands we do not overlook.

In an additional twist to the story of utopia, there is a second often-neglected aspect of contemporary capitalism. This is that its impact on human beings themselves is uneven. Those who are rich and well-to-do have relatively little to fear in the
immediate future from climate change and the other challenges of a depleted planet. In
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, Will Rodman raises Caesar, the ape destined to spearhead the revolt against humans that will lead to the future dominance of the talking apes. Caesar himself was born to an experimental animal, his mother having become super intelligent as a result of being inoculated with a modified virus developed to treat Alzheimer's disease in human beings. Rodman's father is an Alzheimer's sufferer, and Will makes sure that his father receives treatment with the new drug long before the question of human trials is raised.

Those who are well-connected, like those who are rich, receive the benefits of new technologies, new medicines and other new opportunities long before they trickle down—if ever—to those who are poor, weak, or vulnerable. As with medicine and technology, so it is more generally with environmental issues. The loss of freshwater resources, scarcity of food, loss of low-lying lands and a whole host of other environmental changes will generally impact on those who are poor long before they affect the wealthy and well-insured.

The first two
Planet of the Apes
movies were produced against a background of Cold War tension, the fear of nuclear annihilation, and increasing cynicism about the United States' involvement in Vietnam. Politically, strategically, and morally the situation of contemporary Western society has not changed so much. Worries about nuclear proliferation are still to the fore, and the fear of global climate change and loss of natural resources to sustain our way of life increases daily as information about accumulating risks becomes ever more available. As humankind pursues the project of human self-realization, it seems that the very fabric of planetary support systems is in danger of collapse (as we argue in our book
Understanding Environmental Philosophy
).

So we face a multitude of problems. On the anthropocentric view, human beings are special and require that every effort be made to enhance their lives, improve medical care, develop their societies so that they can flourish, develop and prosper, even at the cost of increasing damage to other animals and other living things. But what right have we as a species to inflict such damage and ask other valuable living things to pay the price for human development?

Good people feel frustration and despair when they think about how the lofty desire to spread value leads inevitably to its loss, how business even when conducted with humane intent, and the desire to make human life better, leads to human displacement and impoverishment, animal suffering, species loss and reduction in the planet's ecological viability.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
encourages us to be skeptical about the humane intentions of drug companies who claim to be seeking ways to improve the lives of the sick and infirm even as they answer to the demands of their shareholders as their first priority. Reflecting on these problems, contemporary thinkers are likely to be not much different in their mindset from that of Taylor the cynical and angry space voyager, wondering with declining conviction whether somewhere there is something better than humankind.

Forty-five years on from the first
Planet of the Apes
movie, the future of humanity is still under threat, not just from nuclear Armageddon but also from environmental catastrophe. There is a difference between the two threats. While nuclear Armageddon threatens many kinds of life on Earth, climate change, declining biodiversity, and ecosystem changes pose a particular threat to the survival of contemporary industrial society and the human race itself. While we cannot survive without the planet's support systems, many other species and systems can survive without us. A contemporary, more ecologically inspired version of Taylor might still wander the galaxy searching for something better than man, and might be a character with whose anger and cynical despair many could sympathize. But such a voyager would not destroy the world in his own dying moments, even if he were the last human being in the universe.

So we return to the puzzling questions: Was Taylor mad? Was he evil? In terms of the moral evaluation of his deeds, not character, it can be argued that Taylor's final actions are wrong in three ways.

Suppose, first of all, that we agree with the intuitions prompted by Routley's last man example. That means we give up the human-centered way of thinking about value, and regard other living things as beings of value in their own right.
The action of incinerating the planet destroys immense numbers of valuable beings. Apes, mutants, Nova's people, the horses, all the other animals and the plants on Earth have value that is wiped out by exploding the doomsday device. From the non-anthropocentric point of view, incinerating the planet shows no respect for life and is clearly an evil deed.

From the human-centered viewpoint, Taylor's last act is evil too. The anthropocentrist thinks that only humans have inherent value. But what is it to be human? If rationality evidenced by the power of speech is the criterion for being human, as Taylor himself seems to assume, then the mutants are clearly human and so are the apes. Some writers make a distinction between being a human being (biological category) and being a person (moral category). John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher, introduced the idea that persons are morally special through their self-conscious rationality. A rational parrot, for example, would be a very special being, and Locke accordingly devotes some time in his famous
Essay
to discussing the question of whether a parrot might aspire to rationality and be a parrot person (Book 2, Chapter 27). The anthropocentrist who values rationality, and sees it as the essence of being a person, would regard Taylor as having wiped out morally significant beings, since both mutants and ape-persons are clearly rational. Hence the act is a great wrong.

Many people regard our being members of the biologically human species as the morally important thing. Think of how we protect infants and young children, and treat them with special care, long before they show rationality or linguistic skills. Also think of how many people advocate for the human rights of those who are born mentally impaired. But the species view is anthropocentric in that it takes membership of the biological species as something that confers a special dignity and value on people, and so takes human beings as special in this regard. For this kind of species anthropocentrist, it may be that Taylor does no wrong in wiping out the apes, for they are not biologically human. But Nova's people, and arguably the mutants too, would clearly count as human on biological criteria. So yet again, Taylor is wrong to commit the final destructive act.

In short, Taylor's last action is morally wrong from both the anthropocentric and the non-anthropocentric perspectives. He
seems to behave rather like one of the ancient emperors in China who would have his household, concubines and slaves entombed alive with him after he dies, hence condemning all of them to death. Is Taylor taking an imperial attitude to the whole planet, as if once he is dead it matters little if anything else remains alive? This would be an evil stance indeed.

Perhaps a kinder view is to regard him as becoming unhinged with grief at the death of Nova. As he and Brent fight in the cell in which the mutants had confined them, he is reunited suddenly with Nova when she calls his name. That single utterance from the previously mute girl, breaks the telepathic control by a mutant that is locking the two men in conflict, and they are able to break free. Yet within moments of being reunited with Nova, Taylor loses her when a gorilla warrior shoots her. Just seconds before that happens, Taylor learns from Brent that the mutants worship a missile which Taylor recognizes as a doomsday device. He describes it with irony as “a lovely souvenir from the twentieth century.”

While Brent is openly horrified at the thought of the cobalt bomb burning the planet to a cinder, the cynical Taylor, with a smirk, comments: “How's that for your ultimate weapon?” Once Nova has been killed, Taylor's irony is replaced by something else, a self-centered anger and grief that overcomes any awareness of the moral significance of others: