While I was running today I was thinking a little more about animal ethics. Not much surprise there.
As I mentioned, I am listening to Frans de Waal’s book about animal intelligence. Here’s the thing: for us intelligence is all about thinking rationally and conceptually and using language. But when we apply the idea that what matters is life and extending life, perhaps we need to address the contention that while our specialised survival strategies demand conceptual thinking and cooperation (which requires communication), then our intelligence is just one way of dealing with what matters. For a cheetah, speed is far more important than communication. That is critical to her survival. Many other animals employ intelligence, communication and cooperation - but unlike us - they rely more heavily on other attributes. Often physical or sensory skills which we are incredibly poor at or of which we have no conception. Thus, to create a hierarchy of other animals based on intelligence is a category error. What I mean is that intelligence is what our survival depends upon, but for many of them, it's only part of what is important. What is morally significant to protect for a cheetah is her speed. Her ability to think about logic doesn't matter. Why should the hierarchy be anthropocentric? Why should what matters to us determine what matters full stop?
What one might wish to do, instead, if one is fixated on hierarchies, is to consider whether the life or death of this being contributes more to the profusion or richness of life per se. I am not at all sure of this… but say that the death of an antelope will impede the progress of other antelopes less than it will benefit the progress of a cheetah and her cubs who would otherwise die… For us, the deaths of animals do not render an otherwise unfulfillable benefit. We could eat soya… we could wear cotton… On the other hand, a traditional Inuit in the nineteenth century would had died without eating seals.
This is not satisfactory. I am not happy with this as a ladder of significance. Yet the idea that life is all does seem to lead to impractical consequences - we all need to be Jains. And then there are the carrots to worry about.
Certainly with wild animals, I would like to say that they do not, given appropriate habitats, require morality to intervene. We require morality to intervene because what might have worked in the long distant past to enable small groups to function does not apply effectively to a globally dominant species with so much power. We have outgrown amoral natural balances. We have mutated beyond what a kind of evolutionary allostasis could cope with. We are manmade – humanmade, to be non-gender specific - and need similarly humanmade rules to contain our ambition and power.
When we were just one animal among other animals, we could be like other animals. Eat antelope like the cheetah does. But we have created the pedestal of power and knowledge on which we sit and that changes everything. When we, like they, were a vulnerable and dependent creature, we could see them as equal and treat them as equal. They threatened us as we threatened them. But that’s just not how it is now.
Now we are like aliens. A different proposition entirely. We are not vulnerable to them as a rule - though we are to the diseases that our treatment of them causes - and we are not dependent on them (apart, perhaps, from pollinating insects). We are outside their domain.
If an alien species came to earth, how would we want them to treat us? Not, surely, how we treat pigs.
留言