Animals Are People

A chapter from Animals Are People by Peter Morville

Chapter 13

It’s a lovely morning to be roving the backroads. I’m taking it slow in case of black ice. But the sun’s up, the sky’s blue, and Ghost is by my side. I’m driving to Crozet to pick up a mix of sweet and savory mini pies for Dad’s birthday celebration. And I’m thinking of Buffy. She was so sad and lonely in that cage in town. And she was so happy free ranging with her flock on the farm. But I exposed her to the fox. The freedom-safety tradeoff is brutal. When I choose freedom for myself, I realize the risks and accept the consequences. But who am I to choose it for others?

A succession of sharp turns snags my attention. As we emerge from the shadows of forest into sunlit farm country, Ghost perks up. She adores cows and horses. We pass a decaying shotgun shack, and I spy a half dozen alpacas in the adjacent field. As we near, I see they are filthy and emaciated. I slow the car. The smallest alpaca, all black, is near the wood fence. We lock eyes.

My head hurts. My body aches. I feel weak. Even in the morning sun, I can’t stop shivering. It’s been so long, my hunger is gone. I step forward. My neck bumps the fence. I’m so damned clumsy. I’m tired, yet I can’t sleep. What should I do? I’m lost. I see a girl in a car. We lock eyes.

A horn blares, and I swerve to the right. A monster pickup roars past. Fuck! I nearly killed us. I was gone, in the alpaca, like a dream, but only for a few seconds. What if it happens again? This is not okay. I could pull off to the side. But then what? I can’t not drive. I had a psychic flash, or I’m mentally ill. Either way, it’s bad. I keep on driving. Seriously, what the fuck else can I do?

“Inari, your voice is still weird. What did the doctor say?”

“She’s out sick. I had to reschedule. I’ll let you know when I do. I don’t want you fussing over my health. So let’s talk about the end of the world. Ever heard of the metacrisis?”

“Nope.”

“That’s unsurprising. Most folks haven’t. Yet the metacrisis is vital context for animal activism. Jo, you’re familiar with its constituent crises: overpopulation, deforestation, pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, capitalism, politics, and corruption; to name a few. We use metacrisis to invoke all these existential risks and the root causes they share. We are in ecological overshoot, since there are too many humans, and we each demand more resources and produce more waste than our world can regenerate and absorb. Nobody wants to destroy our habitat, but nobody can stop it, due to the perverse incentives and externalities of global capitalism.”

“Lovely.”

“Jo, it’s not as if we weren’t warned. In 1798, Malthus predicted if humans didn’t slow population growth, mass starvation would result. In 1962, Rachel Carson exposed the danger of pesticides in Silent Spring. In 1972, The Limits to Growth warned of ecological and economic collapse within a century given current trends. Yet today we’re on track for a global population of ten billion, pollution is the leading cause of premature death, and climate change is out of control. Activism has utterly failed to alter our trajectory. Our civilization is self-terminating.”

“Such a happy thought. Thanks, Inari.”

“Jo, it’s a right cock up! Now, let’s explore four metacrisis mindsets. A common response is denial. ‘Climate change is a myth!’ Or ‘technology will solve the problem!’ We deny reality to avoid scary truth. Alternatively, we embrace prevention. We plant trees, recycle, buy local, eat vegan, go solar, ride bikes, block roads, occupy airports, set ourselves on fire. But nothing bends the curve. So we may try what Vanessa Andreotti calls ‘hospicing modernity.’ As our civilization ends, why not help people to suffer less? We need palliative care to cope with all the dying and grieving. Finally, collapse does not equal extinction, so we might aim to help those who rise from the rubble. Jo, we can plant seeds of hope for the cultures that come next. In short, we can each do our best to be good ancestors.”

“Inari, what’s your mindset?”

“They’re not mutually exclusive. We’re all in denial. And many of us embrace prevention to a degree. But we’ve crossed most of the planetary boundaries. We already hit the iceberg. So I tend to favor palliative care and seeding culture. Since I was a child, I’ve admired the band on the Titanic. They played music to calm the passengers. They went down with the ship. And the story of their gentle heroism inspires us to this day. They gave comfort and planted seeds.”

“So that’s what I should do, instead of stealing animals?”

“Jo, I don’t know what you should do. My response is teaching and writing. I share my love of animals and nature. I encourage folks to think for themselves. I use philosophy to help people realise better ways of being. So my hope is to help you to find your path. In light of this goal, I have an audacious idea. We’ve talked of honesty, humility, gentle change, and the metacrisis. We now have a shared context for investigating options for animal activism together. So I want you to start to answer a big question in our next class — how will you save the world?”

“Sure, Inari. No problem!”

“Wonderful. So Jeremy Bentham asks if there is any reason why we should be allowed to torment animals. And then he compares the legal status of animals to that of slaves…”

Inari may be right about gentle change. But those poor alpacas are starving. I can talk to the owner. I can deliver hay bales. But it’s obvious they won’t get proper love and care where they are. I’ll set a trail cam and see what I learn. Not that I’m crazy enough to steal a herd of alpacas!

…the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the whims of a tormentor. Perhaps it will some day be recognised that the number of legs, the hairiness of the skin, or the possession of a tail, are equally insufficient reasons for abandoning to the same fate a creature that can feel? What else could be used to draw the line? Is it the faculty of reason or the possession of language? But a full-grown horse or dog is incomparably more rational and conversable than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. Even if that were not so, what difference would that make? The question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?

“Jo! Hello! Are you with me?”

“Sorry. I spaced out. But I got the gist. I love that quote. But in an earlier paragraph, Bentham says, ‘There is very good reason why we should be allowed to eat such non-human animals as we like to eat: we are the better for it, and they are never the worse.’ It’s as if life has no value.”

“Bentham is the father of Utilitarianism and argues ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’ According to his felicific calculus, morality reduces to math. To maximize utility, we must act to create the most pleasure and the least pain. So dying without suffering doesn’t count. And it’s ethical for a doctor to save five people from death by euthanizing one healthy person and then using the organs for transplant.”

“Inari, that’s messed up!”

“Yet Utilitarianism remains influential to this day. Recently, it’s been refashioned as ‘effective altruism,’ a movement led by philosophers and billionaires that advocates using evidence and reason to calculate and create the greatest good. The lure of using data science to solve ethics is as seductive as it is dangerous. Unfortunately, these ‘ends justifies the means’ frameworks can go horribly wrong, since they are vulnerable to mistakes and malice. To people who think only consequences matter, a sophist can justify anything. In the case of effective altruism, its chief evangelists were implicated in one of the worst financial frauds in history.”

“So, Inari, what are the alternatives to Utilitarianism?”

“Virtue Ethics judges actions on motives. Deontology stresses adherence to rules or laws. Care Ethics honors compassion and relationships. Mostly we mix and match. But it’s confusing and messy. Utilitarianism attracts purists and zealots who hate ambiguity and crave certainty. It’s worth noting Bentham was an oddball. He inherited wealth, never worked, and was reclusive. He left behind thirty million words of manuscripts. He was obsessed with the panopticon, an institution where all prisoners can be watched by a single guard. He probably had Asperger’s. John Stuart Mill wrote of Bentham ‘Knowing so little of human feelings, he knew still less of the influences by which those feelings are formed.’ Perhaps not the best authority on happiness!”

“The definition of happiness is the major difference between Bentham and Mill. Mill says, ‘human beings have higher faculties than the animal appetites, a beast’s pleasures do not satisfy a human’s conceptions of happiness,’ and we are capable of more acute suffering.”

“Jo, Mill reformed Utilitarianism to appeal to elites by elevating the pleasures of art and science above the hedonism of sex, drugs, and gluttony. Ironically, Mill was so unhappy, he famously contemplated suicide. And as a colonial administrator of the East India Company, he pitched ‘benevolent despotism,’ stating ‘to characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject.’ The real utility of Utilitarianism is duplicity. The British Empire used what effective altruists now call ‘longtermism’ to win hearts and minds while inflicting gross atrocities.”

“Hey, as long as you’re virtuously optimizing for future happiness, anything goes, am I right?”

“Yep. The British are known for stoicism. We keep a stiff upper lip. But the Stoics lived in harmony with nature, while practicing the four virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and judgment. We left those parts out. The cold, black heart of British stoicism is repression. Our soldiers and missionaries had to quash their own feelings in order to keep calm and carry on the bloody work of civilizing savages and saving souls for an empire upon which the sun never set.”

“Whoa, Inari, who put the burr in your saddle?”

“I suppose I did get a bit carried away. How very un-British of me. Okay, let’s change tack. Jo, I want to read to you what Christine Ferguson wrote of Anna Kingsford.”

The month is December 1877, in a frigid teaching theatre operated by the Université de Paris’ prestigious medical faculty. The winter gloom is only deepened by the shrieks of the animal, a rabbit, maybe, or a dog, whose entrails are being meticulously laid open in demonstration for the assembled watchers. Suddenly, a woman strides in; she is radiantly, almost preternaturally beautiful, a fact that seems to fill her fellow, and almost exclusively male, medical students, for she is one of them, with even more rage than her infringement on their hitherto exclusively masculine place of study. Approaching the lecturer, she offers him a bargain as startling as it is abominable; if you vow never to operate on living animals again, she proposes, I’ll let you vivisect me in their place, on this table and fully conscious. The room explodes in uproar.

“What a badass!”

“Sadly, Jo, the story is apocryphal. But Anna really was a badass anti-vivisectionist, a vegetarian, and a women’s rights campaigner. She was one of the first women to obtain a degree in medicine, and the only student at the time to graduate without experimenting on a single animal. And she received insights in trance-like states and in her sleep. For example, Anna writes ‘I saw in my sleep a cart horse who, coming to me, conversed with me in what seemed a perfectly simple and natural manner, for it caused me no surprise that he should speak. And this is what he said: Kindness to animals of the gentler orders is the very foundation of civilisation.’ I do love that.”

“So I’m not the only lunatic with animal dreams!”

“You’re not crazy, Jo, and you’re not alone. Now here’s my point. Bentham is famous for his rebuttal of Descartes in which he voids ‘I think, therefore I am,’ with ‘The question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?’ Yet animals were incidental to Bentham’s work. And while his student did grant animals moral status, since they experience pleasure and pain, John Stuart Mill was a supremacist who argued human happiness matters most. Neither cared much for animals, but both are gods in the animal rights canon. Yet Anna Kingsford who dedicated her life to writing, speaking, and acting on behalf of animals is little known. Why?”

“She’s a woman!”

“Yes, in part, but it runs deeper. It helps to ask if beliefs are evidence-based or useful. Anna’s beliefs were evidence-based. She saw the horrors of vivisection, knew animals suffer just like us, and was proven right by science. But Utilitarianism is useful to people in power. It offers a way to justify actions. Philosophers are made famous by their useful beliefs. Food for thought, Jo.”

We’re at the table for Dad’s birthday dinner, and the pies smell delicious: mushroom shallot, poblano pepper, vegetable curry. I take one of each. They are small. So I’ll still have room for a dessert pie or two: apple, cherry, bourbon pecan. For a few minutes, silence reigns as we eat.

“I have a story,” says Mom. “Today the teenager behind me in the grocery checkout introduced himself as our neighbor’s son Otis. Junior’s kid. He said a fox ran onto our property before he could kill it with his bow. But he’ll get it next time. The cashier girl replied ‘Foxes are cute. You are a murderer.’ Otis shrugged. She smiled. It was odd. Anyway, Jo, you’d better watch out for your chickens!”

“Ghost watches them in the afternoons, so the hens are safe, as long as they stay in the fenced area, but thanks Mom. I’m actually way more afraid of Otis than the fox. Why do the men here love to kill things?”

Dad starts to reply. Mom cuts him off. “Jo, why don’t you give Dad his gift, while I brew a pot of decaf and warm the dessert pies.” I pass my gift. Dad tears off the blue and gold wrapping paper. It’s a pocket-size multitool with knives, pliers, screwdrivers, wire cutters, bottle and can openers, a file, a saw, and a ruler. Not cheap. I sure hope he likes it.

“Hey, Jo, this is fantastic. It’s the perfect gift for a farmer. Thanks!” I know by the smiles in his eyes, Dad genuinely adores it. He comes over to give me a hug. Mom appears with a pot of coffee and a heaping plate of sweet pies. These are some good times. I love them so much it hurts.

Mushroom mushroom mushroomA while later, I’m in bed in a food coma. I can’t believe that I ate six pies. Anyways, I’m looking up narcolepsy. It turns out that narcoleptics often have hallucinations as they fall asleep or wake up. So maybe it wasn’t a psychic flash. Either way, the starving alpacas are real. Utilitarianism says that I must act to promote happiness and to reduce suffering. My motives are virtuous. And I am driven by compassion. So it’s only Deontology that says, ‘No,’ since it’s clearly against the rules to steal a herd of alpacas.

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A chapter from Animals Are People by Peter Morville