Both sides do it

Having torn into an anti-animal-rights article a few posts down, I should note that pro-animal-rights authors are hardly free from fuzzy thinking and unoriginal arguments. Such is the effort by Jan Deckers (subscription req.) in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. Deckers' theme is to deny that vegans are "sentimental" by showing that there are good reasons to hold the vegan position. The reasons he surveys are well-known ones -- harm to human and environmental health, causing pain to animals, and the wrongness of killing animals. On the first point he cites the most up-to-date research in support, but adds nothing new philosophically. On the second, he plays with some nuance that he feels Peter Singer misses, but again there's no major new claims there. The abstract would have us believe that his challenge to Tom Regan's views on the third point is a major contribution of the article. Unfortunately, his challenge consists largely of a perfunctory citation of Whitehead to call into question Regan's assumption that plants lack awareness. I'd like to argue against this view, since what little Whiteheadian philosophy I've come across has always struck me as unfounded speculation and playing up the way its conclusions sound more radical than they really are. But Deckers barely explains what Whitehead says, much less why he says it. And in any event, the practical implications are dulled by Deckers' supposition that animals have a stronger dislike for death than plants and thus it's still reasonable to be more concerned about killing the former.

Another too-brief bit in Deckers' article is his exploration of why many people suppress their feelings of sympathy for animals. I think it would be interesting and useful to read a detailed ethnographic study of how children's feelings toward animals develop, and how they incorporate understandings of pets vs wild animals vs food animals vs pests and any cognitive dissonance between categories, and how this manifests differently in different places and cultures (perhaps such a study has been written and I just haven't run across it). Unfortunately, Deckers' exploration consists mostly of briefly recalling how he and another author were urged, against their inclinations, to kill animals to prove they were real men. This exploration is overhung by a not-quite-stated presumption that children naturally see the wrongness of killing animals but are twisted by the patriarchy etc. This approach seems to be to be both based on a psychologically/anthropologically false romanticism, as well as highly ineffective at swaying anyone who doesn't already think non-vegans are morally corrupt.

The moral basis of legality

Amanda Marcotte approvingly cites a claim by maha that's quite popular among liberals:

the purpose of law is to maintain conditions that allow civilizations and societies to exist and function, not to enforce morality.

I agree with the implication that while morality and (ideal) legality overlap, there are things that are illegal but not immoral and things which are immoral but not illegal, and with the substantive point of Marcotte and maha's posts that abortion should be considered both moral and legal. But I think the connection between morality and legality is closer than the standard liberal view lets on.

By maha's standard, I don't see any way to justify a legal rule about abortion -- the topic of the post -- one way or the other without bringing in morality. Neither allowing abortions under all circumstances, nor banning all abortions, nor anything in between strikes me as likely to cause societal collapse. Indeed, we have examples of societies with various policies on abortion, and none of them seem poised to collapse into anarchy or extinction as a result of how accessible abortion is. (It is in one sense unfortunate that societies are capable of continuing to exist indefinitely despite enormous grinding injustices, since that means survival of the fittest hasn't pushed us quicker toward social justice.) So then we have to ask about "functioning." If functioning is to mean anything more than "managing to continue to exist," it requires some sort of ideal of what a well-functioning society looks like. But deciding on any such ideal is necessarily a *moral* question. A society in which abortion is banned is functioning quite well if you think that one of the important things a society should accomplish is to maintain gender roles that subordinate women to men. But it functions quite poorly if you think that what a society is for is to enable its members to pursue happiness on an equal basis. Neither of these ideals is the "real" meaning of social functioning, and it would be a fallacious essentializing reification to claim so. So the only way to choose between them is to make moral arguments, which hold that freedom is a more valuable way of organizing human interactions than adherence to gender roles or vice-versa. (I'm being noncommittal on the substantive questions for the sake of focusing on my argument, but my position is not an inherently relativist one -- I think there are good reasons that freedom really is better, and that enforcement of gender roles is a bad moral position.)

Law and morality are not identical. Many things that are immoral would be too impossible, inefficient, abuse-prone, or unintended-consequence-producing to outlaw. And some things that are moral should nonetheless be illegal because it's necessary, and costs little enough, in order to enable enforcement of illegal-immoral acts. But the law still has an unavoidable moral basis.

(I would speculate that the appeal of the strict separation between morality and legality is a legacy of Christianity. Christianity has traditionally encouraged a view of morality as arbitrary rules. So when some law has a deeper justification -- e.g. "it promotes the pursuit of happiness," as opposed to "because I/God said so!" -- it seems like we're no longer talking about morality.)

Sloppy thinking on animal rights

I've written before that philosophical arguments against animal rights* strike me as surprisingly weak, putting a fancy-sounding veneer on a basic refusal to take the idea of strong moral status for animals seriously. Richard L. Cupp's recent article is no exception.

Before I get to the negative part, I will say that Cupp makes an effective argument against animal rights proponents using corporate personhood and the personhood of ships to show that the law can easily extend personhood beyond individual adult humans, and thus to animals. In brief, he points out that all theories defending corporate and ship personhood ultimately rest on defending the interests of individual adult humans (e.g. corporate shareholders or those who wish to sue a company or ship for harms done by it). If the article had focused on this point, I would have been happy.

However, Cupp goes on to try to rebut the argument from marginal cases, which holds that infants and mentally impaired adults are in the same boat as animals according to any standard of personhood (aside from raw species favoritism) and thus animals deserve the same rights as these non-paradigmatic humans. In passing, he references the argument that such animal-human comparisons are unhelpful because they are detrimental to, and attempt to appropriate the still-shaky victories of, other progressives -- an argument I think has merit. But his real interest is in addressing the human-animal comparisons on their own terms by showing that animals and non-paradigmatic humans are not in fact analogous.

To do so, he rattles off the standard humanist arguments -- infants and mentally impaired humans are still humans, and only moral agents or those similar to them (by some poorly defined standard of similarity that places heavy emphasis on species membership) can be moral patients because morality is based on a social contract. My problem here is not just that I think these arguments are wrong, it's that he barely acknowledges that anyone has considered or tried to rebut them. Countless pages have been written by animal rights theorists rebutting these contractualist arguments. Maybe they were all making philosophical mistakes. But if you want to write an anti-animal rights philosophy article in 2009, you have to at least show that you recognize those counter-arguments have been made, and preferably address and rebut them. His reliance on standard, pre-animal-rights-movement contractualist arguments is quite at odds with the paper's title's claim to be going "beyond animal rights."

Cupp attempts to give some justification for taking this contractualist approach by pointing out that this view is widely held in the US. That it is -- but pointing it out just begs the question. Animal rights advocates are well aware they are asking people to change their way of thinking and acting in a fairly significant way. And the idea that animals are fair game to be raised in factory farm conditions is arguably deeper-rooted in US culture than any formal Rawlsian contract analysis that might be drawn on to justify it.

He finishes up the article's substantive content by invoking yet another fundamentally conservative principle -- giving you rights makes me less special. He massages this idea around into a semi-respectable point: if we argue that animals deserve rights because of characteristic X (sentience, practical autonomy, etc), then that opens the door to denying rights to humans who lack X. There's some truth to that -- but stating the case this way makes a question-begging move to presuppose the importance of humanness vs non-humanness. But humanness is just another possible characteristic on the basis of which rights can be assigned, another value that could be substituted in for X. So let's rewrite the claim in a more neutral way: If we argue that beings deserve rights because of characteristic X, then some beings may be denied rights because they lack X. Confronted with any being or class of beings that has been denied rights on the basis of their lack of X despite seeming prima facie eligible, we can then see that there are two possible responses. First, we may realize that these beings did not deserve rights after all, since X clearly encapsulates all of our reasons for wanting or needing to confer rights. This conclusion can in fact be drawn about a Homo sapiens by someone not that interested in animal rights -- consider Ampersand's view of Terri Schiavo. Or second, the fact that we don't like that these beings are being denied rights can prompt us to decide that there's some other factor instead of or in addition to X that provides a basis for conferring rights. Such an additional factor -- call it Y -- may invite into the circle of rights-bearers the target group as well as additional Y-holding beings who lacked X but differ from the target group in holding some third characteristic that has not (yet) been assigned any moral significance -- e.g. starting with "current sentience" (X) and then adding "past or future sentience" (Y) would admit humans in comas, but also chimpanzees in comas. Cupp argues that the only factor that can effectively work on this second path, the only factor that can fill the role of Y (and Z, etc) in bringing in all the beings that he can't bear to exclude from rights-holding, is "membership in Homo sapiens." That may be so, but that just throws us back to the argument about speciesism and whether species membership itself is a relevant moral criterion. But this detour through considering whether any X other than species membership might turn out to be too narrow has raised an additional difficulty for Cupp's argument -- it's now clear that he must not only defend the relevance of species membership, but also defend its uniqueness, i.e. why can't the criterion for rights be "sentience (or whatever X a given animal rights philosopher wants to use) AND/OR membership in the human species," or "membership in any species whose paradigmatic members are sentient" (which would include, but not necessarily be limited to, humans)**.

The article ends with a flurry of question-begging flourishes, mostly centering around the economic cost of ending violations of animals' alleged rights (the economic costs of ending human slavery are not a counterexample, we're told, because ending human slavery was morally justified) and the fact that promoting animal rights would require us to say, even to the faces of starving Rwandans, that animals have rights (no s***, Sherlock). I assume he means these to be the coup de gras to animal rights theories, but they work better as the coup de gras to his claims to be taken seriously as a critic of animal rights philosophy.

The article's conclusion argues that a focus on human responsibility, rather than animal rights, would be both more successful and better for animals. Unfortunately he does effectively nothing to flesh out what the basis or scope of this responsibility would be, leaving the claim sounding more like a way of avoiding being labeled an apologist for extreme animal abuses like dog fighting (he approvingly cites the outrage at Michael Vick) without compromising his assertion of the unique importance of humanness.

*I use the term in a broad sense to encompass all positions that assert a strong moral considerability for animals for their own sakes, including both "rights" theories in a narrow sense (e.g. Tom Regan) as well as utilitarianism, feminist care ethics, etc. In the article this post discusses, the author talks a lot about rights in the narrower sense, but I see no reason any of his arguments wouldn't extend to other considerability-for-their-own-sake views that fall under the broader definition.

**Basing the rights of one being on the characteristics of that group's paradigmatic members is highly problematic, and Cupp does raise this concern against crude extensionist uses of the argument from marginal cases. But his ability to press this claim is undercut by his heavy reliance on it in attempting to show why infants and mentally impaired people deserve rights whereas animals with similar capacities don't -- he argues that infants get rights because they can turn into typical adults later, and mentally impaired people get rights because typical adults can turn into mentally impaired people later. Giving up this reliance on relating marginal cases to paradigmatic people would require either resort to raw speciesism (which is what the argument was meant to support), or losing the ability to declare the kind of difference between human and animal cases that he seeks. (My own view is that if a being cares about how its life goes, that care counts -- and if it doesn't or can't care, then there's nothing there to count. Considerations of practical autonomy and moral agency factor in on a practical level to how beings' caring is actualized, but they don't make typical adult individual humans a paradigm or fullest case, since infants etc. care about their lives just like supposed paradigm people.)

Save the Earth with cookies

Looking at this chart from a recent paper by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews in Environmental Science and Technology, the obvious lessons are that cutting back (through personal choice as well as policy instruments like altered subsidies) on red meat and dairy is important from a climate standpoint. Vegans hoping to leverage climate concerns will lose traction due to chicken, fish, and eggs being in the same ballpark as vegetables and cereals -- though I think non-climate environmental concerns like lagoons of chicken poop and collapsing fisheries could be brought in on those points. More interesting, especially to the 4-to-12-year-old crowd, is the clear climate advantage of sweets over vegetables.