Who Am I and If So How Many? (18 page)

In the fall of 1970, Peter Singer, a young man who had recently arrived in England to begin teaching at the University of Oxford after studying philosophy in Melbourne, sat in the large dining hall digging into a steak. Even as a teenager, Singer had been fascinated by philosophy and ethics. His parents were originally from Vienna, but the persecution of the Jews in Germany and Austria during Nazi rule forced them to leave the country in 1938. They were quite young at the time, and fled from Austria to Australia. Their own parents – Peter Singer’s grandparents – were arrested by the Nazis and murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Singer had taken his studies very seriously, particularly when it came to ethics. He wanted to plumb the nature of good and evil and find out what constitutes a good life. While eating his steak in the stately dining hall, he noticed a student pushing the meat on his plate to the side. Singer asked the student – whose name was Richard Keshen, and who later became a professor of philosophy at Cape Breton University in Canada – what was wrong with his food. Richard replied that he was a vegetarian and would never eat meat, because it was absolutely wrong to eat animals. Singer was astonished by Richard’s resolute attitude. Richard challenged him
to name a single good reason why it would be morally defensible to eat animals. Singer needed to think it over for a while, so they arranged to meet in the dining hall the following day, at which time Singer would give Richard a good reason why animals could be eaten. Then he polished off his steak, unaware as yet that it would be the last steak of his life.

On his way home from the university, Singer began to ponder the question. People had always eaten meat. Back in the days of aurochs and mammoths, humans had hunted and eaten animals. Later, herdsmen and farmers bred sheep and goats, cattle and pigs for the purpose of eating them. People in prehistoric times and in many non-industrialized societies would never have survived if they had not included meat in their diets. But it became clear to Singer that none of those reasons applied to him personally. Eskimos might have to hunt seals to survive, but that was no reason for him, Peter Singer, to eat animals. In a country like England, a meatless diet would be easy to follow and wouldn’t pose a threat to his health. Singer thought about the fact that wolves, lions, and crocodiles also ate meat. He realized that there wasn’t a question of whether they ought to do so, because without meat, they would die. Singer knew that he would not die if he did not eat meat. In contrast to wolves, lions, and crocodiles, he could choose not to eat meat, and in that sense he was superior to them, and to the cattle, pigs, and chickens he ate in the university dining hall. Man is cleverer than animals; he has higher intelligence, a sophisticated language, reason, and understanding. Many philosophers in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era had offered this as the rationale for man to eat animals: people are endowed with reason, and animals are not. Humans are valuable, and animals are not. But can we really say that intelligent life is fundamentally more valuable than less intelligent life? Superior intelligence does not give you carte blanche to do as you like. Singer spent three years engrossed in the subject of how people should treat animals. In 1975, he published
Animal Liberation
, a bestseller that sold more than half a million copies.

The most important criterion for a living being’s right to life, Singer wrote, is not intelligence or reason. A newborn baby is less developed in these faculties than a pig, but we are not entitled to eat a baby or to use it in experiments to test a new shampoo. The crucial reason for respecting a living being and acknowledging its right to live is its ability to feel pleasure or pain. On that point, Singer concurred with Bentham, who in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, had written:

Singer adopted Bentham’s utilitarian view that pleasure is good and pain is bad, not only for humans but for all living creatures that can experience pleasure and pain, because animals, as sentient beings, are in essence identical to people. The question of whether humans may eat the ‘other animals’ is thus easy to decide: the simple human culinary pleasures are ridiculously unimportant when compared to the unspeakable suffering of the animals that had to forfeit their lives.

Singer’s book on liberating animals from human domination caused quite a stir and gave rise to an animal rights movement in England, the United States, and Germany. The goals of
organizations
such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
and Animal Peace extend far beyond the platforms of traditional wildlife conservationists. Animal rights activists protest not only mass animal farming, fur farms, and cruelty to animals, but any exploitation of animals at all, arguing that people should not be allowed to eat any animal products or cage animals in a zoo or the circus or use them for experiments. They insist on the right of animals to a free and content life.

As persuasive as Singer’s views might seem, they were attacked fiercely by many philosophers. If the ability to feel pain, as opposed to the ability to reason and reflect, or, for that matter, simply belonging to the species
Homo sapiens
, forms the moral boundary, they argued, where exactly do we draw the line? Pigs and chickens can suffer – we know that a pig squeals and a chicken squawks if tortured or slaughtered. But what about fish? Can fish feel pain? The latest studies suggest that they can, even if they are unable to express it. And how about invertebrates, such as mussels? We know far too little about their experience of pain to make any claims about it. Actually, we humans do not even know the extent to which plants might suffer. Does lettuce feel pain when we pull it out of the ground?

The perception of pain does not have a clear boundary. And this criterion is problematic because animal states of consciousness are not directly accessible to us. In the chapter about the brain we saw how difficult it is to pinpoint subjective experiences in humans. It is even more difficult to make statements about animals’ subjective experiences. In 1974, when Singer was writing his book about animal liberation, Thomas Nagel, who is currently on the faculty at the NYU School of Law, published a now classic essay called ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Nagel was not particularly interested in animals but rather was making the point that trying to imagine how other living creatures, such as bats, view the world is simply impossible. We can only picture how we would feel if we flew through the night using echolocation to chase insects. But how could we tell whether this image meshes with the actual sensations of a bat? It probably does not. Consciousness – and this is what
mattered to Nagel – always follows from the subjective character of experience and is thus fundamentally inaccessible to others.

Fair enough. But the fact that it is impossible to know exactly what goes through the minds of animals does not undermine Singer’s argument. After all, we don’t necessarily know the inner workings of the minds of our fellow humans, either, but that hardly gives us the right to torture them. No court permits torture, murder, and manslaughter on the grounds that the perpetrator could not have known precisely how the victim would feel during the crime. We ascribe a complex state of consciousness to our fellow humans and respect them on that basis alone. When it comes to animals, however, many scientists explain their psyches on purely biological grounds. But models based on observing animals’ response to stimulus are problematic. Do lions’ dominance and submission rituals occur by accident or design? Who can say with any certainty? Human desire is also grounded in satisfying biological needs – avoiding pain, attaining sexual fulfillment – yet we do not reduce the quality of human experience to mere functional mechanisms, so why do so when considering animal experience? It would of course be naïve to project our own feelings and intentions onto animals, but it is equally naïve to regard animals as purely functional machines. How can we dismiss the possibility that the play instinct of animals goes beyond functionality? And although primate sexual activities and the sensations of pleasure they experience can be explained in functional terms, is that the whole story?

The ancient Chinese realized that it was impossible to know with any certainty what animals experience, but they used analogies to gain a sense of animals’ inner lives, as we see in the following ancient Chinese story: Zhuangzi and Huizi are strolling across a bridge across the Hao River. Zhuangzi looks into the water and says to his friend: ‘Look at the slender fish darting about, so free and easy. That is the happiness of fish.’ ‘You are not a fish,’ Huizi replied. ‘How can you know that the fish are happy?’ ‘You are not me,’ Zhuangzi responded. ‘How can you know that I don’t know that the fish are happy?’

Modern neuroscience also employs analogies of this kind, examining reactions in our vertebrate brains and surmising that similar structures in the brains of other vertebrates are associated with comparable qualities of experience. In addition to
establishing
actual and apparent points of correspondence, they attempt to figure out why we identify more closely with some animals than with others. When we look at dolphins, we read their facial expression as a smile, and our mirror neurons engage. Most of us find dolphins likable. Animals with ‘strange’ faces, by contrast, fail to stimulate our mirror neurons, and we can’t locate a point of familiarity to arouse feelings of empathy. By contrast, we feel as though we can identify with some canine behavior; we enjoy dogs’ playfulness and infer pleasure on their part. But there are limits. ‘We don’t know,’ says Giacomo Rizzolatti, ‘what barking means, so we cannot mirror it. Barking does not figure in the human vocabulary of motor acts. People can imitate ‘barking,’ some of them even quite well, but we cannot really grasp what barking is.’

Even after all this neuroscientific progress, we are still in the dark when it comes to the inner lives of animals, yet we persist in drawing a clear distinction between humans and animals in our legal and philosophical discourse and in everyday usage. In our society, no animal has a moral right to decent treatment. From a legal point of view, chimpanzees and plant lice are more closely related than man and chimpanzee. Humans have a constitution; chimpanzees have only animal welfare legislation with provisions that place them on the same level as moles and fail to take full account of the biological reality.

At the very minimum, highly developed vertebrates, such as primates and dolphins, should not be cast aside without rights. For Peter Singer, as for every preference utilitarian, ‘self-awareness’ is the criterion that makes a life unconditionally worth protecting. That seems like a good basis, although we need to bear in mind that self-awareness cannot be determined neurologically by means of scanners. Some philosophers equate self-awareness with a sense
of self, and conclude that even higher primates lack a morally relevant self-awareness. But neuroscience has shown that ‘sense of self’ is not a hard-and-fast category. The chapter about the self discussed the many forms it can take. Some of them, for example, the corporal self, the locational self, and the perspectivist self, are clearly present in apes – if they weren’t, apes would barely be able to function.

It is obvious that some vertebrates have at least a rudimentary self-awareness, but what moral value should we ascribe to this? Take elephants, for example. When local hunters in Africa kill these highly developed and sensitive animals to sell their ivory, may these ‘poachers’ be shot? In Kenya, it would be perfectly legal to do so. But Singer would argue that they may not, because people have a more highly developed self-awareness than elephants. But what about when someone kills three elephants, or five, or ten? And what if these are female elephants who leave behind calves half-mad with fear? Then, says Singer, the balance tips in favor of the elephants. But what about the hunters’ families? One can evaluate all kinds of variations on this theme and still wind up with arbitrary assessments.

The greatest problem in using self-awareness as the sole yardstick of the worth of a living creature’s life is, however, its
counterintuitive
consequences, as we saw in the chapter about abortion. If the worth of a living creature’s life depends on the complexity of its feelings and behavior, newborns and severely mentally disabled adults are on the same level as or even a lower level than, say, a German shepherd. Singer’s intention is not to belittle the lives of newborns or of severely mentally disabled individuals, but only to raise the status of animals. Still, he has unleashed a storm of controversy, and his philosophy continues to infuriate many disabled-rights-advocacy groups. Self-awareness is an inadequate measure of issues pertaining to animal rights or abortion guidelines. As we can see from the example of the mother who instinctively prefers her infant to a German shepherd, we should not attempt to exclude intuition and instincts from moral philosophy.

The question of how to treat animals thus needs to factor in not only rational considerations, but also instincts. It is a very natural instinct to assess the lives of people differently from those of animals. Mapping our moral feelings is like throwing a stone into the water and watching it form a series of concentric circles. The innermost circle contains our parents, siblings, children, and close friends, the next circle comprises the people we know (and perhaps even our beloved pet), then comes humanity as a whole. Trout and chickens bred for broiling are typically well beyond these circles. While these moral circles do not extend out indefinitely, the fact that so many edible animals are marginalized results not from a law of nature but rather from current practices of displacement and manipulation.