debitage

5.3.08

Species Favoritism

In the comments to my previous post, Joel Monka raises a different sort of justification for speciesism. I made a pretty flip response in the comments, but I decided I ought to pull it out onto the main blog to deal with it at more length. Monka said:

What about speciesism that is not concerned with "moral" worth? I do not consider mankind to be morally superior to other species- but it is MY species, and I will favor it, just as I favor MY wife over other women, or MY family.

I'm not entirely certain what he means by describing this argument -- I'll call it the "favoritism argument" -- as not being "moral." It could be that he thinks favoritism is an irresistable instict that people will follow regardless of moral exhortations -- which I think is empirically false. It could be that he is asserting that in some cases he will simply insist on disregarding the demands of morality -- which takes us deep into "why should I be moral" territory and nihilism. Or, most interestingly from a blog-about-it perspective (and most likely) he means that it is not a moral consideration in the narrow sense by which "morality" refers specifically to universalistic, relatively context-insensitive rules, which are being balanced against particularistic claims. I would call such claims moral as well, but that's just a semantic dispute. The interesting thing here is the substance -- are there particularlistic claims that humans, by being of the same species as the actor, have that override universalistic duties to other species?

Monka provides an example in which the importance of particularistic claims seems obvious -- he will favor "MY wife" over other women. In my response, I raised an example in which I think we'd agree the particularlistic claims do not apply -- favoring people of "MY race" over people of other races. The question, then, is where "MY species" lies on the spectrum defined by those two endpoints.

An important consideration to note is the difficulty of defining which category is relevant in such invocations of favoritism. Take, for example, making a choice between a cow raised on a farm down the street here in Arizona, and a human in New York who wants to eat it. I could favor the human, who is a member of "MY species." But I could also show favoritism to residents of "MY state," regardless of species, and discount beings living far away. After all, while the New York human and I have similar DNA, the Arizonan cow and I have lives that are entangled -- through sharing a local ecosystem -- that in some ways is more similar to the type of closeness by which I would claim justification for favoring "MY wife." One reason that showing favoritism toward "MY wife" seems straightfoward is that the MY-ness of one's spouse is something that's deliberately institutionalized -- we have a whole set of practices by which we pick out a person and commit ourselves to showing favoritism toward them.

The reason that favoritism is often relevant and justified is that there are certain goods that can only be secured through allowing favoritism. Sometimes this is for pragmatic reasons -- for example, I would be justified in working to improve the civic culture of Casa Grande rather than of some other city that may objectively need the help more, because being a resident of Casa Grande gives me access to information and connections and saves on resources as compared to trying to help out another city, whose residents would on the same grounds be justified in helping out their city in preference to Casa Grande. Other times it's because showing favoritism intrinsically produces certain goods. In the spouse example, the kind of closeness and intimacy that makes marriage worthwhile can only be obtained by singling out a small number of other people (most commonly just one) to engage in favoritism with. On the other hand, the benefits produced by favoritism toward one's own race are either intrinsically illegitimate, outweighed by the disbenefits, or quite capable of being shared with all races without being diminished or undermined.

So the question then becomes, are there those sorts of favoritism-dependent goods in the case of speciesism? I don't think there are, but perhaps someone else has an argument for why it's intrinsically good to favor other beings that have a specific degree of genetic similarity.

Another consideration is that particularistic justifications are not absolute. I can favor my wife by buying her diamond earrings* while not buying earrings for any other women. I cannot, however, murder another woman and take her earrings to give to my wife. The justification for favoritism is not strong enough to override the universalistic prohibition on murder. So in the case of favoritism-based speciesism, we would need to establish not just that there is a particular good that can and should only be gained through showing species favoritism, but we would also need to assess that favoritism's strength against universalistic claims of animal rights. It may be that it's OK for humans to show favoritism to other humans if, say, you're in an overloaded lifeboat and have to throw either a human or a dog overboard, but not OK to favor humans if those humans just have a craving for a steak.

*Or I could if she a) wore jewelry often and b) had her ears pierced.

Labels: animals

Stentor Danielson, 22:58, |

4.3.08

Speciesism Hurts Humans Too

Animal rights arguments typically frame themselves as challenges to the prejudice of speciesism -- the improper use of species membership as a marker of moral worth, parallel to sexism, racism, etc. Attempts to justify speciesism tend to be circular or question-begging appeals to the very speciesist intuitions that animal rights arguments are meant to challenge (the equivalent of showing an atheist 2 Timothy 3:16 to prove that the Bible is true).

It's generally accepted that speciesism benefits humans -- it gives us the psychological benefit of being able to feel exalted above other beings, as well as the physical benefits that come from exploiting animals for various purposes, particularly food. What's more, speciesism can specifically benefit those humans whose status within humanity is lower. People of color, women, disabled people, etc. can all demand an end to their oppression by pointing to the fact that they are just as much Homo sapiens as whites, men, and non-disabled people.

But it seems to me that speciesism hurts at least some humans, as well. (I should caution here that I'm not positing "speciesism hurts humans too" as a primary reason to oppose it, any more than "patriarchy hurts men too" is a primary reason to oppose sexism -- indeed, to treat oppression's negative effects on the oppressor as particularly important seems to reproduce that oppression by continuing to make the oppressor's interests and perspective central. This conclusion is mitigated somewhat when the hurt hits different members of the oppressor group in different ways, because then it has as one effect relieving sub-oppressions within the larger oppressor group. So we can contrast the argument that sexism hurts all men by reducing their ability to love (less important) with the argument that sexism hurts men because effeminate men are mistreated (more important, although still not as important as the greater level of mistreatment that sexism causes toward women).)

In order to uphold a moral hierarchy between species, speciesism must homogenize within species. Rather than thinking in terms of individual creatures, speciesism tells us to treat each individual in accordance with the archetype for that species. Thus the "marginal cases" of individuals that deviate from the species norm, on which so many animal rights arguments rest, are ruled morally irrelevant.

Setting up this single archetype of humanness is detrimental to those humans who do not, or do not want to, fit it. They are simultaneously assured of their rights and reminded that they only get them by proxy since they are not individually deserving of them.

This homogenizing aspect of speciesism can persist even when animal rights are granted. For example, Martha Nussbaum advocates greater rights for animals than Western society allows currently. But she also defends speciesism. She asks us to imagine a person with a case of Down's syndrome whose severity places that person's mental functioning on the same level as that of an adult chimpanzee*. She says the human's case is tragic in a way that the chimp's is not, because the human is deprived by the disease of the higher functionings that normal humans have, whereas the chimp has the normal functionings that you would expect from a chimp. The human is thus entitled to interventions that would improve their functioning (such as intensive therapy and classes), whereas the chimp is not.

Nussbaum's conclusion seems wrong to me. In choosing a person with Down's syndrome as her example (as opposed to, say, a person who sustained brain damage in a car crash), she actually weakened her argument. Down's syndrome is a genetic condition, which the person has had since conception. Being a normal human or a normal chimpanzee are, likewise, genetic conditions. So it's unclear how you would support, in a non-question-begging way, the idea that Down's syndrome is a tragic deviation whereas chimp-ness is normal. Indeed, given the huge population of humans as compared to apes, one could say that chimpanzees are tragic deviations from the norm for members of Family Hominidae.

Speciesism is often analogized to racism, but I think an instructive parallel can be drawn with sex. In most cases, having either male or female physical sex characteristics is not tragic, and no-one would think of wanting to change those characteristics. But in some cases -- both male and female -- those sex characteristics are tragic and there is consequently a reason to change them. I'm talking, of course, about the difference between cissexual and transexual people. The point to note here is that the difference between trans and cis is a subject-centered one made by the person themselves ("I feel comfortable/uncomfortable with the sex organs my body has"), not an objective one based on whether their physical condition is deviant or normal for their category.

To take the trans/cis idea back to the Down's syndrome human versus normal chimp scenario, we have to imagine four cases. A person with Down's syndrome who sees themselves as deviant and wants to be normal is tragic, just as Nussbaum says. But imagine if we were dealing with a person with Down's syndrome who is quite happy with their condition, and has found a form of flourishing consistent with it, and would not want to be made normal. What sense would it make to insist to this person that they are deviant and tragic? On the other side, I would assume most chimpanzees don't aspire to normal-human-ness, and thus having a chimp brain is not tragic for them. But we can imagine a creature who is some sort of "chimp-to-human transspeciesist," saddled with a chimp's brain but wanting to be a normal human**. Such a case would be tragic despite the "normalness" of this creature's brain, and I think we would have a prima facie reason to fulfil the desire to be human if it were possible.

* I have no idea whether this would be a normal, severe, or mild case of Down's syndrome, but my future references in the post to Down's syndrome are meant to apply to this particular chimpanzee-type-functioning level of the condition.

** Perhaps because they were raised in a human home, and thus identify with their human foster parents. I seem to recall reading some things that suggest that apes that have been taught language sometimes prefer the company of humans to that of other apes. This raises some potentially interesting ethical issues about pets that "think they're people."

Labels: animals

Stentor Danielson, 23:03, |