Animals Are People

A chapter from Animals Are People by Peter Morville

Chapter 20

“Your mum and I talked. I heard you want to visit.”

“I want to meet in person. Is that weird?”

“Not at all. But how about I visit you on the farm instead? I’d love to meet your animals, especially Ghost. And I have a friend in Fredericksburg. It’s my last chance to travel.”

“Well, butter my backside, and call me a biscuit!”

“I beg your pardon.”

“It means I’m surprised. Of course I want you to visit. Yes!”

“I’ll get it sorted, Jo. I do apologize for my voice. I know the slurring is getting worse. And, if I talk too much, I’ll have to use this portable ventilator. It helps me to breathe. On the bright side, ALS prevents me from lecturing. Maybe I’ll finally get the hang of the Socratic method.”

“You don’t need to apologize. I understand you just fine.”

“So how do you feel about Tom Regan?”

“I’m a fan. The Case for Animal Rights is a brilliant argument for treating animals with respect. Regan says, since animals are capable of perceptions, memories, desires, goals, beliefs, and choices, they have the same moral rights as humans. It’s not enough to not cause suffering. We must not deprive them of opportunities to pursue interests and live a good life. He says vegetarianism is obligatory and hunting and trapping are wrong. And he calls for ‘the total abolition of the harmful use of animals in science — in education, in toxicity testing, in basic research.’ Regan says, ‘The rights view will not be satisfied with anything less than the total dissolution of the animal industry as we know it,’ and ‘The animal rights movement is not for the faint of heart. Success requires nothing less than a revolution in our culture’s thought and action.’ Inari, count me in!”

“Jo, surely he must agree that it’s okay to experiment on a few rats to save millions of human lives.”

“No. Regan says, ‘the rights view is antagonistic to Utilitarianism.’ You can’t override a right. You can’t justify harm to an individual by claiming the greater good. Morality isn’t subject to math.”

“So, Jo, what is a right?”

“Legal rights depend on laws. They vary by country and change over time. In contrast, moral rights are universal. Moral rights are discovered, not created. And they apply equally to all.”

“In the United States, freedom of speech is a legal right, prescribed by the Constitution, and if necessary, defended by force. The Bill of Rights is a social contract. Thomas Hobbes would be proud. But what of moral rights? Where are they written? And who discovered them? Columbus?”

“As if. I want to say moral rights are obvious.”

“Moral or natural rights are derived from Nature or the edicts of God. In saying ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ our founding fathers claim both: it’s obvious, and God says so. Jo, if you’re not persuaded natural law is a truth revealed by God, why is liberty an obvious right?”

“If I imagine an enslaved human or a monkey in a cage, I know it’s evil. Inari, I can feel the wrongness.”

“Me too. Empathy is a moral instinct, common among social animals. But deriving a right from nature incurs the is-ought problem. All we’re really saying is we feel people ought to be free.”

“Dat feelin’ don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

“Exactly. If words are spells, few are more powerful than the language of rights. The principle of moral rights has inspired countless social movements, including civil rights, women’s rights, and animal rights. But natural rights don’t exist. When push comes to shove, they prove to be nothing more than a comforting illusion. As Bentham says, the notion of unalienable rights is ‘nonsense on stilts,’ since ‘there are no rights without law.’ Jo, natural rights are wishes, nothing more.”

“But, rights make might.”

“Nice turn of phrase, Jo. The word rights is persuasive, yet it’s dishonest. I simply can’t bring myself to use it. Tom Regan is a warrior who wields moral clarity in order to fight the good fight. I can respect that. But it’s not me.”

“All is fair in love and war.”

“Perhaps, Jo, although your axiom proves my point. So, just to clarify, in your view, do all animals have rights?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s not Regan’s argument. In classifying animals as subjects-of-a-life, he draws the line at ‘mentally normal mammals of a year or more.’ To be fair, he says birds and fish may have goals and desires. But in his fight for animal rights, Tom Regan’s moral circle isn’t exactly expansive.”

“I missed that. So I guess I disagree with Regan. It’s not about being smart or normal. All conscious beings have rights. If you think-feel, if you have an umwelt, you count.”

“I’m with you, Jo. Intellect is not the subject of morality. Or, to refashion an old phrase, it’s the sentience, stupid.”

“Copy that!”

“Aristotle defined man as the rational animal. Jo, the language of rights plays into that depiction. Yet Robert Solomon says, ‘we are our emotions, as much as we are our thoughts or actions.’ He claims that compassion is the basis of ethics, and he says that if thoughts are ‘tell-tale symptoms of emotion,’ then morality is how we feel more than what we think. In True To Our Feelings, he writes ‘What characterizes fear and anger and most emotions is their intelligence.’ I find that insight to be very interesting indeed. So, Jo, how does Robert Solomon strike you?”

“In saying, ‘Emotions are more central to rationality than even reason or reasoning, for without them reason has no focus,’ Solomon exposes the false binary of think and feel. I like that. He says folks with certain forms of brain damage ‘suffer enormously from not being able to make rational decisions,’ as ‘they do not really care about consequences or options.’ Good decisions require both reason and emotion. It’s why we say, ‘trust your gut.’”

“Good. Tell me about Jonathan Haidt.”

“He’s an evolutionary psychologist who says morality is based on intuition, which is shaped by instinct and culture. First, we feel. Then, we think. We moralize and rationalize to transform emotion into reason. Haidt says, ‘morality binds and blinds.’ It binds us into ideological tribes and blinds us to the good in others. Based on these ideas, he popularized moral foundations theory.”

“Which is?”

“Over millions of years as tribal hunter-gatherers, we evolved six moral foundations: care/harm, fairness/cheating, authority/subversion, loyalty/betrayal, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. How we prioritize the values explains our differences. Liberals cherish care and fairness, whereas conservatives esteem authority, loyalty, and sanctity. A conservative will do more for his in-group, while a liberal will be more compassionate to outsiders. That tracks.”

“All maps are traps, Jo. Yet it’s a useful guide. And the key is intuition. Morality is a mess reason feigns to make sense of. The philosophical canon is littered with man’s vain attempts to turn feel into think and is into ought. Speaking of which, tell me about The Animal That Therefore I Am.”

“It’s a ten-hour speech by Jacques Derrida on ethics and the ontology of animals. He rambles on and on about feeling shame to be naked in front of his cat, and then asks, ‘Ashamed of what and naked before whom?’ He’s invoking Genesis, obviously. The Bible says, ‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.’ Then God commands, ‘you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’ And, upon eating the apple, ‘the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings.’ So we are the animal who wears clothes to hide shame? I don’t know. Derrida is weird and creepy.”

“He’s playful, that’s for sure. Derrida is deconstructing literature and philosophy by toying with language. He flamboyantly interrogates the relationship between text and meaning. And, in this speech, he toys with Descartes like a cat plays with a mouse, framing ‘I think, therefore I am’ as the ‘discourse of domination,’ and the source of ‘infinite violence’ and ‘the boundless wrong that we inflict on animals.’ Anyhoo, I’m fond of Derrida for giving me a title. He says, ‘Descartes did all he could to avoid being an animal philosopher.’ When I first read that, I got shivers.”

Inari coughs and hacks. Then they use the respirator to breathe. It’s hard to hear or see. I don’t know what to say.

“Sorry. I talk too much. Let’s take a break. See you in ten.”

Ghost and I race out into the morning sun. I want to see our chickens and goats. Ghost runs ahead. So I give chase across the lawn. She feigns fear, sprints away, stops, turns, looks back with wild eyes. I lunge. Ghost sprints again.

There is nothing more joyful than playing with my wolfdog. As we enter the enclosure, the hens gather around, hoping for snacks. The goats aren’t so friendly. Ginsberg tries to headbutt Ghost. But she dances away.

Are they playing or fighting for status? It’s so hard to tell with goats. I wish the alpacas were here. I hate to keep them at Gage’s. But if I bring them home, I’ll get tangled up in lies. It sure ain’t easy being an animal bandit.

“Alright, Jo. Tell me your next idea for animal activism.”

“I was wondering why I believe that animals are people. Is it nature or nurture? And I remembered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Mom read it to me when I was four. The story is ordinary until Lucy enters the wardrobe, pushes aside the soft folds of fur coats, and finds herself in the middle of a wood at night with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air. She walks, crunch-crunch, over the snow and through the wood until she reaches a lamp-post, when a strange person, half man, half goat, steps out and introduces himself as Mr. Tumnus.”

“The magic of one’s discovery of Narnia. There is nothing more wonderful. You’ve taken me back to my childhood.”

“The children encounter all sorts of mythical creatures and talking animals. And then of course they meet Aslan, the King of Beasts, the good, terrible lion with a golden mane and great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes. At the end, Aslan sacrifices himself for Edmund. In service of the White Witch, a great crowd of people — ogres with monstrous teeth, bull-headed men, cruels, wraiths, incubuses, and evil dwarfs — attacks Aslan. They hoist the bound and muzzled Lion onto the Stone Table. And when the Witch slays Aslan with a knife — it’s so sad, I wept.”

“Me too, Jo. Me too.”

“Narnia is a world where animals are people, and the story of those people shaped who I am. Later, Dad read me Watership Down. Well, he made it halfway and got bored. That’s why I learned to read. So I could finish it. I had to know what happens to Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Pipkin.”

“Fiver is my favorite. Jo, he had visions. Just like you.”

“I guess you’re right. I forgot. Fiver could sense the future. Anyway, there’s a time when the rabbits first encounter a road. Hazel looks down in astonishment. The road looks like a river — black, smooth, and straight between its banks. Then Hazel sees and smells gravel embedded in tar, and he says, ‘but that’s not natural.’ Bigwig explains that it’s a dangerous man-thing where the hrududu run. The rabbits notice in the middle of the road, ‘a flattened, bloody mass of brown prickles and white fur, with small, black feet and snout crushed round the edges.’ Inari, seeing the violence of automobiles through the eyes of rabbits — in a story — opened mine to the banality of evil.”

“Jo, how does this relate to animal activism?”

“Stephen King says, ‘writing is telepathy.’ Ursula Le Guin says, ‘The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.’ What I’m saying is that we should turn your book into a novel.”

“What?”

“You told me you don’t plan to finish it, since you’re sick. Inari, Animals Are People is too important to quit. But nobody reads philosophy. So what if we tell a story? What if we tell our story? A farm girl flirts with ecoterrorism after dreaming she’s a goat. Her dying teacher faces the abyss in an existential battle for the girl’s soul. This epic confrontation of philosophers and bandits will define the outcome of the metacrisis. Inari, don’t you want to see what happens? I do. Let’s show the world animals are people. Let’s share our story, because books change lives!”

“Wow! That is rather dramatic. Jo, I’m intrigued. And I’m overwhelmed. It’s a big idea. Can I give it some thought?”“Sure. Let’s talk next class.”

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A chapter from Animals Are People by Peter Morville