Animal Liberation Theology
PETA's new "Animal Liberation Project" begins with the assertion, "We are all animals." PETA doesn't mean this statement to reflect a biological truth, but rather, to create a moral equivalency between animals and humans. Animal rights/liberation ideology is dangerous in my view, precisely because it denies human exceptionalism, a philosophical belief that not only gives humans special rights, but also unique responsibilities. I expound on this more deeply in this piece published today on National Review Online.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:28 AM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
Cattle-ranch-as-Auschwitz? Consider the rights of bacteria, and then think of penicillin in a petri dish. The horror!
Thank you for this important article.
Like most moral relativists, the animal liberationists appear to be selective relativists. That they attempt to persuade others that it is right to accept their outrageous analogies of fast food to the Holocaust shows that they understand that human beings are unique in their moral agency. And yet they persist with equating humans with non-human animals.
In the end, I think your diagnosis is correct: the radical animal rights movement is DEEPLY misanthropic.
Animal liberationists primarily aim their advocacy at the young. The young have been raised in a "whatever" culture of relativism. Plus, they have been taught to "feel" rather than think. Hence, the hyper-emotionalism of the liberationist advocacy. Finally, it offers a true belief system of absolutes, which can be appealing to those raised to believe in nothing much at all.
The primary issue in animal liberation is not about selected statements and actions of organizations and individuals as they respond to an ethically controversial state of affairs. Some of those are praiseworthy and some are not. The latter are understandable, if not always excusable, given ordinary human differences in education, worldview, temperaments, etc. Foolish statements and wrong actions in any moral controversy are not hard to find on either side, if one insists on highlighting them.
But is that any way to proceed? I think not. The primary issue in animal liberation is what is necessary, permissible, and good in the human treatment of animals. Why not engage the best thinking when trying to come to a conclusion about that, rather than sniping at particular cases that one disagrees with from the start? How is ethical progress to be made if one is never accurately exposed to challenges from another position?
The National Review article repeatedly distorts the issue with common misrepresentations that animal liberation philosophers have answered time and again. Mr. Bottum's opinion, for example, that liberationists uniformly fail to recognize moral distinctions between humans and non-humans is enormously false, and a simple request for documentation would reveal it as such. The same goes for Mr. Smith's claim that a difference between moral patients and moral agents (e.g., zebras and humans) has never been articulated.
I am not better off for having read the National Review article. It has not clarified the issue or fortified an opposing side such that I would need to reconsider my own position. I am not enlightened by propaganda pieces. I need to see evidence of a scholarly approach in order for that to happen; simply mocking PETA's kind of activism won't do the trick.
It is not propaganda to criticize an ideology that explicitly calls for human/animal equality. Nor to criticize creating moral equivalencies between the worst actions taken by humans against each other and normal animal husbandry.
I support the principle of human exceptionalism, for among many reasons, I deem it necessary to maintaining societal decency and universal human rights. Animal liberationists, unlike animal welfarists, are frontally attacking human exceptionalism. There is no doubting this fact.
It is perfectly valid, indeed, it is important, for animal welfarists to point us towards ever-improving methods of using animals more humanely. This becomes a question of case-by-case reasoning and debate, that should also include the extent of human benefit in the equation.
But animal liberation, while sometimes hiding behind animal welfare actions, seeks to erradicate all use of animals by humans, to great human detriment. And it seeks to destroy human exceptionalism, which would be even worse.
The National Review article criticizes particular actions of PETA. But since PETA speaks for . . . well, PETA, the criticism is not applicable to liberationists who are not aligned with PETA and do not necessarily agree with how they operate. PETA is a small activist slice of the world of AR, and they in fact receive a fair amount of internal criticism. But note carefully: finding fault with PETA and disinterest in being represented by them is not a guarantee that a rights stance has diminished to the weaker welfarist position. Many maintain a strong rights position on the basis of conviction that was neither created nor sustained by PETA, so if PETA disappeared tomorrow their lifestyle and outlook would be completely unaltered. If one wants to do sociology, then maybe a collection of PETA stories is a good place to start. But if the aim is moral philosophy, then PETA stories are irrelevant.
Is absolute equivalence between humans and non-humans an essential element in the moral philosophy? It may or may not be PETA's stance, but one is hard pressed to find that suggested or defended in the scholarly liberationist literature.
There are clearly aspects in which humans are unique. What is not so clear is that this fact gives a green light to factory farming and experimentation, for example.
Of course the so-called humane use of animals is defended by welfarists; that is, after all, what epitomizes their position. But it is also precisely where abolitionists part company with them. Indeed, let debate proceed, and when it does, contrary to caricatures, it will center on factory farming, experimentation, and an ethical diet, not on having a pet in the house.
PETA is the largest animal liberationist organization in the world, with the biggest budget, and an international reach. They are hardly irrelevant.
They are not the entire world of animal liberation, it is true. I have respect for Gary Francione, for example, whom I have debated on television. But I completely disagree with his philosophy that would even prevent seeing eye dogs and would result in no domesticated animals of any kind.
It is the animal liberation philosophy, not just PETA, which seeks to destroy the belief in human exceptionalism. As such, I believe the movement must be resisted at all turns, while certainly acquiescing in animal welfare improvements on a case-by-case basis.
Thanks for your input to this blog, arkvelo.
And thank you, Mr. Smith, for a marked improvement in tone. The sweeping generalizations, such as "animal liberationists are corrupting our youth," were silly, and I am happy to leave them behind.
I would like to sum up, for the benefit of any who may be reading. The complaint that I registered was that, having criticized a particular PETA campaign tactic, Smith has not touched the moral philosophy of animal liberation. The most that follows from the National Review article is that PETA's Holocaust comparison is a bad argument for animal liberation. However, since there are a number of arguments for animal liberation that are not easily dismissed, a sweeping statement such as "animal liberation philosophy is dangerous" is unwarranted.
Let us, however, examine the weaker PETA argument to see if it is actually as objectionable as Smith makes it out to be. Note first that, since the people at PETA are not a bunch of professional/academic moral philosophers, we should not expect a polished piece of ethical reasoning from them. We will need to do some work to try to grasp PETA's claim in this instance. I have not looked at PETA's Holocaust comparison. Regardless, Smith reads PETA's background argument as something like this:
P1: Animals are harmed by institutional practices.
P2: Jews are harmed by institutional practices.
C1: Therefore, Jews are (morally equivalent to) animals.
The conclusion is repugnant, but since it is extracted from a formally invalid argument we are glad to throw it away.
Presumably there is another way to read PETA's background argument. I take it that it goes something like this:
P3: Natural human moral sensitivity reliably indicates that something is wrong in the Nazi treatment of Holocaust victims.
P4: Natural human moral sensitivity is triggered by circumstances in which animals are subjected to similar treatment (e.g., placed in overcrowded housing, exposed to temperature extremes, and denied food and water).
C2: Therefore, there is warrant for thinking that there is something wrong in institutional practices that treat animals in this way (e.g., factory farming).
Now of course implications of C2 need further analysis. When they are taken apart, abolitionists will disagree with welfarists about justifiable overrides to C2's moral intuition (e.g., greater goods that may be derived by treating animals in this manner).
The point here is that the second argument is not rightly hustled off the stage like the first argument. The second argument does not conclude to a human-nonhuman moral equivalence, yet it may still have the strong result of the abolition of all institutional practices covered; there is no prima facie reason to stop at the weaker welfarist position.
I believe these considerations greatly undermine two of Smith's primary ideas, namely:
1) Successful criticism of PETA tactics brings down animal liberation philosophy as a whole.
2) Strong animal liberation philosophy is an obvious looming menace to a rightly ordered society.
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