Customer Reviews

Philosophizing about animals - By: Ralph Blumenau, 06 Mar 2005
Mary Midgley examines the general principles that ought to guide our attitude to animals. Midgley quotes a large number of philosophers whoin the past have philosophized about animals. Some of them have considered the question of what obligations, if any, we have towards animals. Their answers have depended both on what they take an animal to be & on what they consider to be the cause, the nature & the range of obligations. Descartes, for example, considered that, because animals lacked souls and, more importantly, reasoning faculties, they are mere machines. Evenin Descartes' day, such a conclusion must have seemed very odd to anyone who had much to do with animals: for even if one agreed that they did lack souls & reasoning faculties, any farmer or hunter could have told Descartes that relationships with animals are radically different from relationships with machines. But even writers of our own time, while not thinking of animals as machines, still deny them the capacity of thought: R.G.Frey because thought requires language & animals cannot speak; Stuart Hampshire becausein the absence of language they cannot have concepts. Yet the simplest observations of how animals communicate with each other & even with humans would seem to suggest that thought, concepts & reasoning do not depend totally on a human language.

Behaviourists go even further: we cannot even be sure that animals have feelings. The denial of thought & feelings to animals serve to erect such a strong barrier between the human & the animal species that we can exclude the animal species from the obligations we feel towards our fellow human beings. One of the most striking part of Midgley's book is her demonstration how easily past generations were able to overlook even other humans as belonging to a group towards which they had obligations. Thus the Athenians, who prided themselves on civic equality, & the Americans who proclaimed that all men were created equal, simply assumed that slaves did not count as humans: indeed Aristotle described slaves as being merely "living instruments". The Chartists demanded universal suffrage for men, but either did not even think of extending that demand to women or, if they did, found some rationalization for excluding them. The excluded groups were,in Midgley's words, consigned to the outer darkness, beyond the outer periphery of a group towards the members of which certain obligations were recognized. In the 20th century, denials of full membership of the group & the discrimination which this entails have been condemned under the name of various kinds of "-isms": racism for denying membership to other races, sexism for denying it to women, ageism for denying it to the old - & now speciesism for denying it to animals. Midgley's book is a sign that the time has come to widen the periphery of our obligations to include animals.

Midgley admits that it is natural to be more concerned with those who are closest to us, & she has a diagram of concentric circles to illustrate that we are concerned most immediately with our family, then with our tribe, then with our nation, then with our species, & only then with non-human species. We often treat appallingly badly & cast into the "outer darkness" human groups that are outside the smaller circles; but any ethically sensitive person has to condemn such behaviour: charity, as the proverb has it, begins at home, but it ought not to stop there. This is the principle that should also apply when we consider the outer circle of the non-human species.

Midgley's tone is always moderate & she never takes up the position of radical or extreme zoophiles who would want us to give to all animals exactly the same rights as we give to humans. She accepts that there must be some priority of considerations & that there can be situations where it is reasonable for us to put the interests of humans before those of animals, though she says that such cases are much fewer than is often supposed. They would include, for example, dealing with locusts & other pests. She does not go into specific details about killing animals for food; but one can deduce from her text that she would accept that Eskimoes cannot be vegetarians & are therefore justified to kill for food, & that she does not condemn pastoral societies who treat their animals well prior to slaughtering them. On the other hand she clearly abhors stuffing geese to produce paté de foie gras. She states the general principle that great suffering inflicted on animals on the outer periphery ought to weigh against the minor advantage that this might bring to those within the inner circles.

One would like to think that at the end of her examination, Midgley had arrived at positions which most sensitive people would have reached without all that philosophizing, guided merely by their humanity & common sense. Most of them would understand instinctively why animals matter; but unfortunately many people give this understanding such a low priority that as citizens they do not do enough to take on the vested interests & those who are too apathetic to care very much. Perhaps this well-written & wise little book would stir them into action.