Peter Singer Australian philosopher born in 1946. Singer is an ethicist whose Practical Ethics (1979) emphasizes the application of consequentialist moral principles to matters of personal and social concern. He is most widely admired for Animal Liberation (1975), in which Singer shows that, since a difference of species entails no moral distinction between sentient beings, it is wrong to mistreat non-human animals; it follows that animal experimentation and the eating of animal flesh are morally indefensible. In "Do Animals Feel Pain?, Singer argues for the moral relevance of animal pain. Recommended Reading: Peter Singer, How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest (Prometheus, 1995); Peter Singer, Rethinking Life & Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (St. Martin's 1996); Peter Singer, Ethics Into Action (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (Ecco, 2000); and Singer and His Critics, ed. by Dale Jamieson (Blackwell, 1999).
My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues
Animal Liberation
Chapter 5 Man's Dominion ... a short history of speciesism To end tyranny we must first understand it. As a practical mat-ter, the rule of the human animal over other animals expresses it-self in the manner we have seen in Chapters 2 and 3, and in re-lated practices like the slaughter of wild animals for sport or for their furs. These practices should not be seen as isolated aberra-tions. They can be properly understood only as the manifesta-tions of the ideology of our species - that is, the attitudes which we, as the dominant animal, have toward the other animals. In this chapter we shall see how, at different periods, outstand-ing Western thinkers formulated and defended the attitudes to animals that we have inherited. I concentrate on the "West" not because other cultures are inferior - the reverse is true, so far as attitudes to animals are concerned - but because Western ideas have, over the past two or three centuries, spread out from Eu-rope until today they set the mode of thought for most human so-cieties, whether capitalist or communist. Though the material that follows is historical, my aim in pre-senting it is not. When an attitude is so deeply ingrained in our thought that we take
it as an unquestioned truth, a serious and consistent challenge to that -attitude runs the risk of ridicule. It may be possible to shatter the complacency with which the atti-tude is held by a frontal attack. This is what I have tried to do in the preceding chapters. An alternative strategy is to attempt to undermine the plausibility of the prevailing attitude by revealing its historical origins. _The attitudes toward animals of previous generations are no longer convincing because they draw on presuppositions - reli-gious, moral, metaphysical - that are now obsolete. Because we do not defend our attitudes to animals in the way that Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, defended his attitudes to animals, we may be ready to accept that Aquinas used the religious, moral, and metaphysical ideas of his time to mask the naked self-interest of human dealings with other animals. If we can see that past generations accepted as right and natural attitudes that we recognize as ideological camouflages for self-serving practices- and if, at the same time, it cannot be denied that we continue to use animals to further our own minor interests in violation of their major interests-we may be persuaded to take a more skep-tical view of those justifications of our own practices that we our-selves have taken to be right and natural. Western attitudes to animals have roots in two traditions: Ju-daism and Greek antiquity. These roots unite in Christianity, and it is through Christianity that they came to prevail in Europe. A more enlightened view of our relations with animals emerges only gradually, as thinkers begin to take positions that are rela-tively independent of the church; and in fundamental respects we still have not broken free of the attitudes that were unques-tioningly accepted in Europe until the eighteenth century. We may divide our historical discussion, therefore, into three parts: pre-Christian, Christian, and the Enlightenment and after. Pre-Christian Thought The creation of the universe seems a fit starting point. The bibli-cal story of the creation sets out very clearly the nature of the re-lationship between man and animal as the Hebrew people con-ceived it to be. It is a superb example of myth echoing reality: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruit-ful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 1 The Bible tells us that God made man in His own image. We may regard this as man making God in his own image. Either way, it allots human beings a special position in the universe, as beings that, alone of all living things, are God-like. Moreover, God is explicitly said to have given man dominion over every liv-ing thing. It is true that, in the Garden of Eden, this dominion may not have involved killing other animals for food. Genesis 1:29 suggests that at first human beings lived off the herbs and fruits of the trees, and Eden has often been pictured as a scene of perfect peace, in which killing of any kind would have been out of place. Man ruled/but in this earthly paradise his was a benev-olent despotism. After the fall of man (for which the Bible holds a woman and an animal responsible), killing animals clearly was permissible. God himself clothed Adam and Eve in animal skins before driv-ing them out of the Garden of Eden. Their son Abel was a keeper of sheep and made offerings of his flock to the Lord. Then came the flood, when the rest of creation was nearly wiped out to pun-ish man for his wickedness. When the waters subsided Noah thanked God by making burnt
offerings "of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl." In return, God blessed Noah and gave the final seal to man's dominion: And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes - of the sea; into your hands are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. 2 This is the basic position of the ancient Hebrew writings to-ward nonhumans. There is again an intriguing hint that in the original state of innocence we were vegetarian, eating only "the green herb," but that after the fall, the wickedness that followed it, and the flood, we were given permission to add animals to our diet. Beneath the assumption of human dominion that this per-mission implies, a more compassionate vein of thought still occa-sionally emerges. The prophet Isaiah condemned animal sacri-fices, and the book of Isaiah contains a lovely vision of the time when the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the lion will eat straw like the ox, and "they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain." This, however, is a Utopian vision, not a command to be followed immediately. Other scattered passages in the Old Testament encourage some degree of kindliness toward animals, so that it is possible to argue that wanton cruelty was prohibited, and that "dominion" is really more like a "stewardship," in which we are responsible to God for the care and well-being of those placed under our rule. Nevertheless there is no serious challenge to the overall view, laid down in Genesis, that the human species is the pinnacle of creation and has God's permis-sion to kill and eat other animals. The second ancient tradition of Western thought is that of Greece. Here we find, at first, conflicting tendencies. Greek thought was not uniform, but divided into rival schools, each taking its basic doctrines from some great founder. One of these, Pythagoras, was a vegetarian and encouraged his followers to treat animals with respect, apparently because he believed that the souls of dead men migrated to animals. But the most impor-tant school was that of Plato and his pupil, Aristotle. Aristotle's support for slavery is well known; he thought that some men are slaves by nature and that slavery is both right and expedient for them. I mention this not in order to discredit Aris-totle, but because it is essential for understanding his attitude to animals. Aristotle holds that animals exist to serve the purposes of human beings, although, unlike the author of Genesis, he does not drive any deep gulf between human beings and the rest of the animal world. Aristotle does not deny that man is an animal; in fact he de-fines man as a rational animal. Sharing a common animal nature, however, is not enough to justify equal consideration. For Aris totle the man who is by nature a slave is undoubtedly a human being, and is as capable of feeling pleasure and pain as any other human being; yet because he is supposed to be inferior to the free man in his reasoning powers, Aristotle regards him as a "living instrument." Quite openly, Aristotle juxtaposes the two elements in a single sentence: the slave is one who "though remaining a human being, is also an article of property."3 If the difference in reasoning powers between human beings is enough to make some masters and others their property, Aris-totle must have thought the rights of human beings to rule over other animals too obvious to require much argument. Nature, he held, is essentially a hierarchy in which those with less reasoning ability exist for the sake of those with more: Plants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake of man-domestic animals for his use and food, wild ones (or at any rate most of them) for food and other acces-sories of life, such as clothing and various tools. Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man. 4 It was the views of Aristotle, rather than those of Pythagoras, that were to become part of the later Western tradition.
Christian Thought ristianity was in time to unite Jewish and Greek ideas about .mals. But Christianity was founded and became powerful der the Roman Empire, and we can see its initial effect best if compare Christian attitudes with those they replaced. Fhe Roman Empire was built by wars of conquest, and needed devote much of its energy and revenue to the military forces it defended and extended its vast territory. These conditions 1 not foster sentiments of sympathy for the weak. The martial tues set the tone of the society. Within Rome itself, far from i fighting on the frontiers, the character of Roman citizens was ^posedly toughened by the so-called games. Although every toolboy knows how Christians were thrown to the lions in the Colosseum, the significance of the games as an indication of the possible limits of sympathy and compassion of apparently-and in other respects genuinely-civilized people is rarely appreci-ated. Men and women looked upon the slaughter of both human beings and other animals as a normal source of entertainment; and this continued for centuries with scarcely a protest. The nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky gives the fol-lowing account of the development of the Roman games from their beginning as a combat between two gladiators: The simple combat became at last insipid, and every variety of atrocity was devised to stimulate the flagging interest. At one time a bear and a bull, chained together, rolled in fierce combat across the sand; at another, criminals dressed in the skins of wild beasts were thrown to bulls, which were mad-dened by red-hot irons, or by darts tipped with burning pitch. Four hundred bears were killed on a single day under Caligula.... Under Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants. In a single day, at the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus, five thousand animals perished. Under Trajan, the games continued for one hundred and twenty-three successive days. Lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles and ser-pents were employed to give novelty to the spectacle. Nor was any form of human suffering wanting.... Ten thousand men fought during the games of Trajan. Nero illumined his gardens during the night by Christians burning in their pitchy shirts. Under Domitian, an army of feeble dwarfs was compelled to fight.... So intense was the craving for blood, that a prince was less unpopular if he neglected the distribu-tion of corn than if he neglected the games. 5 The Romans were not without any moral feelings. They showed a high regard for justice, public duty, and even kindness to others. What the games show, with hideous clarity, is that there was a sharp limit to these moral feelings. If a being came within this limit, activities comparable to what occurred at the games would have been an intolerable outrage; when a being was outside the sphere of moral concern, however, the infliction of suffering was merely entertaining. Some human beings-crim inals and military captives especially-and all animals fell out-side this sphere. It is against this background that the impact of Christianity must be assessed. Christianity brought into the Roman world the idea of the uniqueness of the human species, which it in-herited from the Jewish tradition but insisted upon with still greater emphasis because of the importance it placed on the human being's immortal soul. Human beings, alone of all beings living on earth, were destined for life after bodily death. With this came the distinctively Christian idea of the sanctity of all human life. There have been religions, especially in the East, which have taught that all life is sacred; and there have been many others that have held it gravely wrong to kill members of one's own so-cial, religious, or ethnic group; but Christianity spread the idea that every human life-and only human life-is sacred. Even the newborn infant and the fetus in the womb have immortal souls, and so their lives are as sacred as those of adults. In its application to human beings, the new doctrine was in many ways progressive, and led to an enormous expansion of the limited moral sphere of the Romans; so far as other species are concerned, however, this same doctrine served to confirm and further depress the lowly position nonhumans had in the Old Testament. While it asserted human
dominion over other species, the Old Testament did at least show flickers of con-cern for their sufferings. The New Testament" is completely lacking in any injunction against cruelty to animals, or any rec-ommendation to consider their interests. Jesus himself is de-scribed as showing apparent indifference to the fate of non-humans when he induced two thousand swine to hurl them-selves into the sea-an act which was apparently quite unnec-essary, since Jesus was well able to cast out devils without in-flicting them upon any other creature. 6 Saint Paul insisted on reinterpreting the old Mosaic law that forbade muzzling the ox that trod out the corn: "Doth God care for oxen?" Paul asks scornfully. No, he answered, the law was intended "altogether for our sakes."7 The example given by Jesus was not lost on later Christians. Referring to the incident of the swine and the episode in which Jesus cursed a fig tree, Saint Augustine wrote: Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of ani-mals and the destroying of plants is the height of supersti-tion, for judging that there are no common rights between us and the beasts and trees, he sent the devils into a herd of swine and with a curse withered the tree on which he found no fruit.... Surely the swine had not sinned, nor had the tree. Jesus was, according to Augustine, trying to show us that we need not govern our behavior toward animals by the moral rules that govern our behavior toward humans. That is why he trans-ferred the devils to swine instead of destroying them as he could easily have done. 8 On this basis the outcome of the interaction of Christian and Roman attitudes is not difficult to guess. It can be seen most clearly by looking at what happened to the Roman games after the conversion of the empire to Christianity. Christian teaching was implacably opposed to gladiatorial combats. The gladiator who survived by killing his opponent was regarded as a mur-derer. Mere attendance at these combats made the Christian li-able to excommunication, and by the end of the fourth century combats between human beings had been suppressed altogether. On the other hand, the moral status of killing or torturing any nonhuman remained unchanged. Combats with wild animals continued into the Christian era, and apparently declined only because the declining wealth and extent of the empire made wild animals more difficult to obtain. Indeed, these combats may still be seen, in the modern form of the bullfight, in Spain and Latin America. What is true of the Roman games is also true more generally. Christianity left nonhumans as decidedly outside the pale of sympathy as they ever were in Roman times. Consequently, while attitudes to human beings were softened and improved beyond recognition, attitudes to other animals remained as cal-lous and brutal as they were in Roman times. Indeed, not only did Christianity fail to temper the worst of Roman attitudes to-ward other animals; it unfortunately succeeded in extinguishing for a long, long time the spark of a wider compassion that had been kept alight by a tiny number of more gentle people. There had been just a few Romans who had shown compassion for suffering, whatever the being who suffered, and repulsion at the use of sentient creatures for human pleasure, whether at the gourmet's table or in the arena. Ovid, Seneca, Porphyry, and Plutarch all wrote along these lines, Plutarch having the honor, according to Lecky, of being the first to advocate strongly the kind treatment of animals on the ground of universal benevo-lence, independently of any belief in the transmigration of souls. 9 We have to wait nearly sixteen hundred years, however, before any Christian writer attacks cruelty to animals with similar em-phasis and detail on any ground other than that it may encourage a tendency toward cruelty to humans. A few Christians expressed some concern for animals. There is a prayer written by Saint Basil that urges kindness to animals, a remark by Saint John Chrysostom to the same effect, and a teach-ing of Saint Isaac the Syrian. There were even some saints who, like Saint Neot, sabotaged hunts by rescuing stags and hares from the hunters. 10 But these figures failed to divert mainstream Christian thinking from its
exclusively speciesist preoccupation. To demonstrate this lack of influence, instead of tracing the de-velopment of Christian views on animals through the early Church Fathers to the medieval scholastics-a tedious process, since there is more repetition than development-it will be better to consider in more detail than would otherwise be possible the position of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas's enormous Summa Theologica was an attempt to grasp the sum of theological knowledge and reconcile it with the worldly wisdom of the philosophers, though for Aquinas, Aristotle was so preeminent in his field that he is referred to simply as "the Philosopher." If any single writer may be taken as representative of Christian philosophy prior to the Ref-ormation, and of Roman Catholic philosophy to this day, it is Aquinas. We may begin by asking whether, according to Aquinas, the Christian prohibition on killing applies to creatures other than humans, and if not, why not. Aquinas answers: There is no sin in using a thing for the purpose for which it is. Now the order of things is such that the imperfect are for the perfect.... Things, like plants which merely have life, are all alike for animals, and all animals are for man. Wherefore it is not unlawful if men use plants for the good of animals, and animals for the good of man, as the Philosopher states (Politics I, 3). Now the most necessary use would seem to consist in the fact that animals use plants, and men use animals, for food, and this cannot be done unless these be deprived of life, wherefore it is lawful both to take life from plants for the use of animals, and from animals for the use of men. In fact this is in keeping with the commandment of God himself (Genesis i, 29, 30 and Genesis ix, 3).11 For Aquinas the point is not that killing for food is in itself nec-essary and therefore justifiable (since Aquinas knew of sects like the Manichees in which the killing of animals was forbidden, he could not have been entirely ignorant of the fact that human be-ings can live without killing animals, but we shall overlook this for the moment); it is only the "more perfect" who are entitled to kill for this reason. Animals that kill human beings for food are in a quite different category: Savagery and brutality take their names from a likeness to wild beasts. For animals of this kind attack man that they may feed on his body, and not for some motive of justice, the consideration of which belongs to reason alone. 12 Human beings, of course, would not kill for food unless they had first considered the justice of so doing! So human beings may kill other animals and use them for food; but are there perhaps other things that we may not do to them? Is the suffering of other creatures in itself an evil? If so would it not for that reason be wrong to make them suffer, or at least to make them suffer unnecessarily? Aquinas does not say that cruelty to "irrational animals" is wrong in itself. He has no room for wrongs of this kind in his moral schema, for he divides sins into those against God, those against oneself, and those against one's neighbor. So the limits of morality once again exclude nonhumans. There is no category for sins against them. 13 Perhaps although it is not a sin to be cruel to nonhumans, it is charitable to be kind to them? No, Aquinas explicitly excludes this possibility as well. Charity, he says, does not extend to irrational creatures for three reasons: they are "not competent, prop-erly speaking, to possess good, this being proper to rational crea-tures"; we have no fellow-feeling with them; and, finally, "char-ity is based on the fellowship of everlasting happiness, to which the irrational creature cannot attain." It is only possible to love these creatures, we are told, "if we regard them as the good things that we desire for others," that is, "to God's honor and man's use." In other words, we cannot lovingly give food to turkeys because they are hungry, but only if we think of them as someone's Christmas dinner. 14 All this might lead us to suspect that Aquinas simply doesn't believe that animals other than human beings are capable of suf-fering at all. This view has been held by other philosophers and, for all its apparent absurdity, to attribute it to Aquinas would at least excuse him of the charge of indifference to suffering. This interpretation, however, is ruled out by his own words. In the course of a discussion of some of the mild injunctions against
cruelty to animals in the Old Testament, Aquinas proposes that we distinguish reason and passion. So far as reason is concerned, he tells us: It matters not how man behaves to animals, because God has subjected all things to man's power and it is in this sense that the Apostle says that God has no care for oxen, because God does not ask of man what he does with oxen or other animals. On the other hand, where passion is concerned, our pity is aroused by animals, because "even irrational animals are sensible to pain"; nevertheless, Aquinas regards the pain that animals suf-fer as insufficient reason to justify the Old Testament injunctions, and therefore adds: Now it is evident that if a man practice a pitiable affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to take pity on his fellow-men, wherefore it is written (Proverbs xii, 10) "The just regardeth the life of his beast."15 So Aquinas arrives at the often to be repeated view that the only reason against cruelty to animals is that it may lead to cruelty to human beings. No argument could reveal the essence of speciesism more clearly. Aquinas's influence has lasted. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, Pope Pius IX refused to allow a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to be established in Rome, on the grounds that to do so would imply that human beings have duties toward animals. 16 And we can bring this account right up to the second half of the twentieth century without find-ing significant modifications in the official position of the Roman Catholic Church. The following passage, from an American Roman Catholic text, makes an instructive comparison with the passage written seven hundred years ago, and quoted above, from Aquinas: In the order of nature, the imperfect is for the sake of the per-fect, the irrational is to serve the rational. Man, as a rational animal, is permitted to use things below him in this order of nature for his proper needs. He needs to eat plants and ani-mals to maintain his life and strength. To eat plants and animals, they must be killed. So killing is not, of itself, an im-moral or unjust act. 17 The point to notice about this text is that the author sticks so closely to Aquinas that he even repeats the assertion that it is necessary for human beings to eat plants and animals. The igno-rance of Aquinas in this respect was surprising, but excusable given the state of scientific knowledge in his time; that a modern author, who would only need to look up a standard work on nu-trition or take note of the existence of healthy vegetarians, should carry on the same error is incredible. It was only in 1988 that an authoritative statement from the Roman Catholic Church indicated that the environmental move-ment is beginning to affect Catholic teachings. In his encyclical Solicitudo Rei Socialis ("On Social Concerns")/ Pope John Paul II urged that human development should include "respect for the beings which constitute the natural world" and added: The dominion granted to man by the Creator is not an abso-lute power, nor can one speak of a freedom to "use and misuse," or to dispose of things as one pleases.... When it comes to the natural world, we are subject not only to biological laws, but also to moral ones, which cannot be violated with impunity. 18 That a Pope should so clearly reject the absolute dominion view is very promising, but it is too early to say if it signals a historic and much-needed change of direction in Catholic teaching about animals and the environment. There have, of course, been many humane Catholics who have done their best to ameliorate the position of their church with re-gard to animals, and they have had occasional successes. By stressing the degrading tendency of cruelty, some Catholic writ-ers have felt themselves able to condemn the worst of human practices toward other animals. Yet most remain limited by the basic outlook of their religion. The case of Saint Francis of Assisi illustrates this. Saint Francis is the outstanding exception to the rule that Catholicism discourages concern for the welfare of nonhuman beings. "If I could only be presented to the emperor," he is re-ported as saying, "I would pray him, for the love of God, and of me, to issue an edict prohibiting anyone from catching or impris-oning my sisters the larks, and ordering that all who have oxen or asses should at Christmas feed them particularly well." Many legends tell of his compassion, and
the story of how he preached to the birds certainly seems to imply that the gap between them and humans was less than other Christians supposed. But a misleading impression of the views of Saint Francis may be gained if one looks only at his attitude to larks and the other animals. It was not only sentient creatures whom Saint Francis addressed as his sisters: the sun, the moon, wind, fire, all were brothers and sisters to him. His contemporaries described him as taking "inward and outward delight in almost every creature, and when he handled or looked at them his spirit seemed to be in heaven rather than on earth." This delight extended to water, rocks, flowers, and trees. This is a description of a person in a state of religious ecstasy, deeply moved by a feeling of oneness with all of nature. People from a variety of religious and mystical traditions appear to have had such' experiences, and have ex-pressed similar feelings of universal love. Seeing Francis in this light makes the breadth of his love and compassion more readily comprehensible. It also enables us to see how his love for all crea-tures could coexist with a theological position that was quite orthodox in its speciesism. Saint Francis affirmed that "every creature proclaims: 'God made me for your sake, O man!'" The sun itself, he thought, shines for man. These beliefs were part of a cosmology that he never questioned; the force of his love for all creation, however, was not to be bound by such considerations. While this kind of ecstatic universal love can be a wonderful source of compassion and goodness, the lack of rational reflec-tion can also do much to counteract its beneficial consequences. If we love rocks, trees, plants, larks, and oxen equally, we may lose sight of the essential differences between them, most impor-tantly, the differences in degree of sentience. We may then think that since we have to eat to survive, and since we cannot eat without killing something we love, it does not matter which we kill. Possibly it was for this reason that Saint Francis's love for birds and oxen appears not to have led him to cease eating them; and when he drew up the rules for the conduct of the friars in the order he founded, he gave no instruction that they were to ab-stain from meat, except on certain fast days. 19 It may seem that the period of the Renaissance, with the rise of humanist thought in opposition to medieval scholasticism, would have shattered the medieval picture of the universe and brought down with it earlier ideas about the status of humans vis-a-vis the other animals. But Renaissance humanism was, after all, humanism; and the meaning of this term has nothing to do with humanitarianism, the tendency to act humanely. The central feature of Renaissance humanism is its insistence on the value and dignity of human beings, and on the central place of human beings in the universe. "Man is the measure of all things," a phrase revived in Renaissance times from the ancient Greeks, is the theme of the period. Instead of a somewhat de-pressing concentration on original sin and the weakness of human beings in comparison to the infinite power of God, the Renaissance humanists emphasized the uniqueness of human be-ings, their free will, their potential, and their dignity; and they contrasted all this with the limited nature of the "lower animals." Like the original Christian insistence on the sanctity of human life, this was in some ways a valuable advance in attitudes to human beings, but it left nonhumans as far below humans as they had ever been. So the Renaissance writers wrote self-indulgent essays in which they said that "nothing in the world can be found that is more worthy of admiration than man"20 and described humans as "the center of nature, the middle of the universe, the chain of the world."21 If the Renaissance marks in some respect the beginning of modern thought, so far as attitudes to ani-mals were concerned earlier modes of thought still maintained their hold. Around this time, however, we may notice the first genuine dissenters: Leonardo da Vinci was teased by his friends for being so concerned about the sufferings of animals that he became a vegetarian; 22 and Giordano Bruno, influenced by the new Coper -nican astronomy, which allowed for the possibility of other plan-ets, some of which could be inhabited, ventured to assert that "man is no more than an ant in the
presence of the infinite." Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for refusing to recant his heresies. Michel de Montaigne's favorite author was Plutarch, and his attack on the humanist assumptions of his age would have met with the approval of that gentle Roman: Presumption is our natural and original disease.... Tis by the same vanity of imagination that [man] equals himself to God, attributes to himself divine qualities, and withdraws and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures. 23 It is surely not a coincidence that the writer who rejects such self-exaltation should also, in his essay "On Cruelty," be among the very few writers since Roman times to assert that cruelty to ani-mals is wrong in itself, quite apart from its tendency to lead to cruelty to human beings. Perhaps, then, from this point in the development of Western thought the status of nonhumans was bound to improve? The old concept of the universe, and of the central place of human beings in it, was slowly giving ground; modern science was about to set forth on its now-famous rise; and, after all, the status of non-humans was so low that one might reasonably think it could only improve. But the absolute nadir was still to come. The last, most bizarre, and-for the animals-most painful outcome of Christian doc-trines emerged in the first half of the seventeenth century, in the philosophy of Rene Descartes. Descartes was a distinctively mod-ern thinker. He is regarded as the father of modern philosophy, and also of analytic geometry, in which a good deal of modern mathematics has its origins. But he was also a Christian, and his beliefs about animals arose from the combination of these two as-pects of his thought. Under the influence of the new and exciting science of me-chanics, Descartes held that everything that consisted of matter was governed by mechanistic principles, like those that governed a clock. An obvious problem with this view was our own nature. The human body is composed of matter, and is part of the physi-cal universe. So it would seem that human beings must also be machines, whose behavior is determined by the laws of science. Descartes was able to escape the unpalatable and heretical view that humans are machines by bringing in the idea of the soul. There are, Descartes said, not one but two kinds of things in the universe, things of the spirit or soul as well as things of a physical or material nature. Human beings are conscious, and consciousness cannot have its origin in matter. Descartes identi-fied consciousness with the immortal soul, which survives the decomposition of the physical body, and asserted that the soul was specially created by God. Of all material beings, Descartes said, only human beings have a soul. (Angels and other immate-rial beings have consciousness and nothing else.) Thus in the philosophy of Descartes the Christian doctrine that animals do not have immortal souls has the extraordinary conse-quence that they do not have consciousness either. They are, he said, mere machines, automata. They experience neither pleasure nor pain, nor anything else. Although they may squeal when cut with a knife, or writhe in their efforts to escape contact with a hot iron, this does not, Descartes said, mean that they feel pain in these situations. They are governed by the same principles as a clock, and if their actions are more complex than those of a clock, it is because the clock is a machine made by humans, while ani-mals are infinitely more complex machines, made by God. 24 This "solution" of the problem of locating consciousness in a materialistic world seems paradoxical to us, as it did to many of Descartes's contemporaries, but at the time it was also thought to have important advantages. It provided a reason for believing in a life after death, something which Descartes thought "of great importance" since "the idea that the souls of animals are of the same nature as our own, and that we have no more to fear or to hope for after this life than have the flies and ants" was an error that was apt to lead to immoral conduct. It also eliminated the ancient and vexing theological puzzle of why a just God would allow animals-who neither inherited Adam's sin, nor are rec-ompensed in an afterlife-to suffer. 25 Descartes was also aware of more practical advantages: My opinion is not so much cruel to animals as indulgent to men-at least to those who
are not given to the superstitions of Pythagoras-since it absolves them from the suspicion of crime when they eat or kill animals. 26 For Descartes the scientist the doctrine had still another fortunate result. It was at this time that the practice of experimenting on live animals became widespread in Europe. Since there were no anesthetics then, these experiments must have caused the ani-mals to behave in a way that would indicate, to most of us, that they were suffering extreme pain. Descartes's theory allowed the experimenters to dismiss any qualms they might feel under these circumstances. Descartes himself dissected living animals in order to advance his knowledge of anatomy, and many of the leading physiologists of the period declared themselves Carte-sians and mechanists. The following eyewitness account of some of these experimenters, working at the Jansenist seminary of Port-Royal in the late seventeenth century, makes clear the con-venience of Descartes's theory: They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indiffer-ence, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation. 27 From this point, it really was true that the status of animals could only improve. , The Enlightenment and After The new vogue for experimenting on animals may itself have been partly responsible for a change in attitudes toward animals, for the experiments revealed a remarkable similarity between the physiology of human beings and other animals. Strictly, this was not inconsistent with what Descartes had said, but it made his views less plausible. Voltaire put it well: There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so greatly sur-passes man in fidelity and friendship, and nail him down to a table and dissect him alive, to show you the mesaraic veins! You discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, mechanist, has Nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feell28 Although no radical change took place, a variety of influences combined to improve attitudes to animals. There was a gradual recognition that other animals do suffer and are entitled to some consideration. It was not thought that they had any rights, and their interests were overridden by human interests; nevertheless the Scottish philosopher David Hume was expressing a common enough sentiment when he said that we are "bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures."29 "Gentle usage" is, indeed, a phrase that nicely sums up the at-titude that began to spread in this period: we were entitled to use animals, but we ought to do so gently. The tendency of the age was for greater refinement and civility, more benevolence and less brutality, and animals benefited from this tendency along with humans. The eighteenth century was also the period in which we re-discovered "Nature": Jean-Jacques Rousseau's noble savage, strolling naked through the woods, picking fruits and nuts as he went, was the culmination of this idealization of nature. By see-ing ourselves as part of nature, we regained a sense of kinship with "the beasts." This kinship, however, was in no sense egali-tarian. At best, man was seen in the role of benevolent father of the family of animals. Religious ideas of the special status of human beings did not disappear. They were interwoven with the newer, more benevo-lent attitude. Alexander Pope, for example, opposed the practice of cutting open fully conscious dogs by arguing that although "the inferior creation" has been "submitted to our power" we are answerable for the "mismanagement" of it. 30 Finally, and especially in France, the growth of anticlerical feeling was favorable to the status of animals. Voltaire, who de-lighted in fighting dogmas of all kinds, compared Christian prac-tices unfavorably with those of the Hindu. He went further than the contemporary English advocates of kind treatment when he referred to the barbarous custom of supporting ourselves upon the flesh and blood of beings like ourselves," although appar-ently he
continued to practice this custom himself. 31 Rousseau, too, seems to have recognized the strength of the arguments for vegetarianism without actually adopting the practice; his treatise on education, Emile, contains a long and mostly irrelevant pas-sage from Plutarch that attacks the use of animals for food as un-natural, unnecessary, bloody murder. 32 The Enlightenment did not affect all thinkers equally in their attitudes toward animals. Immanuel Kant, in his lectures on ethics, still told his students: So far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious, and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man. 33 But in the same year that Kant gave these lectures-1780- Jeremy Bentham completed his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, and in it, in a passage I have already quoted in the first chapter of this book, he gave the definitive an- -swer to Kant: "The question is not, Can they reason?_nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" In comparing the position of animals with that of black slaves, and looking forward to the day "when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny/' Bentham was perhaps the first to de-nounce "man's dominion" as tyranny rather than legitimate government. The intellectual progress made in the eighteenth century was followed, in the nineteenth century, by some practical improve-ments in the conditions of animals. These took the form of laws against wanton cruelty to animals. The first battles for legal rights for animals were fought in Britain, and the initial reaction of the British Parliament indicates that Bentham's ideas had had little impact on his countrymen. The first proposal for a law to prevent abuse of animals was a bill to prohibit the "sport" of bull-baiting. It was introduced into the House of Commons in 1800. George Canning, the foreign sec-retary, described it as "absurd" and asked rhetorically: "What could be more innocent than bull-baiting, boxing, or dancing?" Since no attempt was being made to prohibit boxing or dancing, it appears that this astute statesman had missed the point of the bill he was opposing-he thought it an attempt to outlaw gather-ings of "the rabble" that might lead to immoral conduct. 34 The presupposition that made this mistake possible was that conduct that injures only an animal cannot possibly be worth legislating about-a presupposition shared by The Times, which devoted an editorial to the principle that "whatever meddles with the private personal disposition of man's time or property is tyranny. Till an-other person is injured there is no room for power to interpose." The bill was defeated. In 1821 Richard Martin, an Irish gentleman-landowner and a member of Parliament for Galway, proposed a law to prevent the ill-treatment of horses. The following account conveys the tone of the ensuing debate: When Alderman C. Smith suggested that protection should be given to asses, there were such howls of laughter that The Times reporter could hear little of what was said. When the Chairman repeated this proposal, the laughter was intensi-fied. Another member said Martin would be legislating for dogs next, which caused a further roar of mirth, and a cry "And cats!" sent the House into convulsions. 35 This bill failed too, but in the following year Martin succeeded with a bill that made it an offense "wantonly" to mistreat certain domestic animals, "the property of any other person or persons." For the first time, cruelty to animals was a punishable offense. Despite the mirth of the previous year, asses were included; dogs and cats, however, were still beyond the pale. More significantly, Martin had had to frame his bill so that it resembled a measure to protect items of private property, for the benefit of the owner, rather than for the sake of the animals themselves. 36 The bill was now law, but it still had to be enforced. Since the victims could not make a complaint, Martin and a number of other notable humanitarians formed a society to gather evidence and bring prosecutions. So began the first animal welfare organi-zation, later to become the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A few years after the passage of this first, modest statutory prohibition of cruelty to animals, Charles Darwin wrote in his diary: "Man in his
arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and, I believe, true, to consider him created from animals."37 Another twenty years were to pass before, in 1859, Darwin considered that he had accu-mulated enough evidence in support of his theory to make it public. Even then, in The Or gin of Species, Darwin carefully avoided any discussion of the extent to which his theory of the evolution of one species from another could be applied to hu-mans, saying only that the work would illuminate "the origin of man and his history." In fact, Darwin already had extensive notes on the theory that Homo sapiens had descended from other ani-mals, but he decided that publishing this material would "only add to the prejudices against my views."38 Only in 1871, when many scientists had accepted the general theory of evolution, did Darwin publish The Descent of Man, thus making explicit what had been concealed in a single sentence of his earlier work. So began a revolution in human understanding of the relation-ship between ourselves and the nonhuman animals ... or did it? One would expect the intellectual upheaval sparked by the publi-cation of the theory of evolution to have made a marked differ-ence in human attitudes to animals. Once the weight of scientific evidence in favor of the theory became apparent, practically every earlier justification of our supreme place in creation and our dominion over the animals had to be reconsidered. Intellec-tually the Darwinian revolution was genuinely revolutionary. Human beings now knew that they were not the special creation of God, made in the divine image and set apart from the animals; on the contrary, human beings came to realize that they were ani-mals themselves. Moreover, in support of his theory of evolution, Darwin pointed out that the differences between human beings and animals were not so great as was generally supposed. Chap-ter 3 of The Descent of Man is devoted to a comparison of the mental powers of humans and the "lower animals," and Darwin summarizes the results of this comparison as follows: We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason etc., of which man boasts, may he found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-devel-oped condition, in the lower animals. 39 The fourth chapter of the same work goes still further, affirming that the human moral sense can also be traced back to social in-stincts in animals that lead them to take pleasure in each other's company, feel sympathy for each other, and perform services of mutual assistance. And in a subsequent work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin provided additional evi-dence of extensive parallels between the emotional life of human beings and that of other animals. The storm of resistance that met the theory of evolution and of the descent of the human species from animals-a story too well known to need retelling here-is an indication of the extent to which speciesist ideas had come to dominate Western thought. The idea that we are the product of a special act of creation, and that the other animals were created to serve us, was not to be given up without resistance. The scientific evidence for a com-mon origin of the human and other species was, however, over-whelming. With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and di-vine permission to kill them. When we add this intellectual revolution to the growth of hu-manitarian feeling that preceded it, we might think that all will now be well. Yet, as I hope the preceding chapters have made plain, the human "hand of tyranny" is still clamped down on other species, and we probably inflict more pain on animals now than at any other time in history. What went wrong? If we look at what relatively advanced thinkers wrote about animals from the time when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the right of animals to some degree of
consideration was beginning to be accepted, we may notice an interesting fact. With very rare exceptions these writers, even the best of them, stop short of the point at which their arguments would lead them to face the choice between breaking the deeply ingrained habit of eating the flesh of other animals or admitting that they do not live up to the conclusions of their own moral arguments. This is an often-repeated pattern. When reading among sources from the late eighteenth century onward, one frequently comes across pas-sages in which the author urges the wrongness of our treatment of other animals in such strong terms that one feels sure that here, at last, is someone who has freed himself altogether from speciesist ideas-and hence, has freed himself too from the most widespread of all speciesist practices, the practice of eating other animals. With one or two notable exceptions (in the nineteenth century Lewis Gompertz and Henry Salt),40 one is always disap-pointed. Suddenly a qualification is made, or some new consider-ation introduced, and the author spares himself the qualms over his diet that his argument seemed sure to create. When the his-tory of the Animal Liberation movement comes to be written, the era that began with Bentham will be known as the era of excuses. The excuses used vary, and some of them show a certain inge-nuity. It is worthwhile examining specimens of the main types, for they are still encountered today. First, and this should come as no surprise, there is the Divine Excuse. It may be illustrated by the following passage from William Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). In setting out "the General Rights of Mankind" Paley asks whether we have a right to the flesh of animals: Some excuse seems necessary for the pain and loss which we occasion to brutes, by restraining them of their liberty, muti-lating their bodies, and at last, putting an end to their lives (which we suppose to be the whole of their existence) for our pleasure or convenience. [It is] alleged in vindication of this practice... that the sev-eral species of brutes being created to prey upon one an-other affords a kind of analogy to prove that the human species were intended to feed upon them ... [but] the anal-ogy contended for is extremely lame; since brutes have no power to support life by any other means, and since we have; for the whole human species might subsist entirely upon fruits, pulse, herbs and roots, as many tribes of Hin-doos actually do.... It seems to me that it would be difficult to defend this right by any arguments which the light and order of nature afford; and that we are beholden for it to the permission recorded in Scripture, Genesis ix, 1, 2, 3.41 Paley is only'one of many who have appealed to revelation when they found themselves unable to give a rational justification of a diet consisting of other animals. Henry Salt in his autobiogra-phy Seventy Years Amongst Savages (an account of his life in Eng-land) records a conversation he had when he was a master at Eton College. He had recently become a vegetarian; now for the first time he was to discuss his practice with a colleague, a distinguished science teacher. With some trepidation he awaited the verdict of the scientific mind on his new beliefs; when it came, it was: "But don't you think that animals were sent to us for food?"42 Another writer, Lord Chesterfield, appealed to nature, instead of God: My scruples remained unreconciled to the committing of so horrid a meal, till upon serious reflection I became con-vinced of its legality from the general order of nature, which has instituted the universal preying upon the weaker as one of her first principles. 43 Whether Lord Chesterfield thought this justified cannibalism is not recorded. Benjamin Franklin used the same argument-the weakness of which Paley exposed-as a justification for returning to a flesh _ diet after some years as a vegetarian. In his Autobiography he re-counts how he was watching some friends fishing, and noticed that some of the fish they caught had eaten other fish. He there-fore concluded, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we may not eat you." Franklin, however, was at least more honest than some who use this argument, for he admits that he reached this conclusion only after the fish was in the frying-pan and had begun to smell "admirably well"; and he adds that one of
the ad-vantages of being a "reasonable creature" is that one can find a reason for whatever one wants to do. 44 It is also possible for a deep thinker to avoid confronting the troublesome issue of diet by regarding it as altogether too pro- found for the human mind to comprehend. As Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby wrote: ...-,-- The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery that I dare not approach it. 45 This attitude was shared by the French historian Michelet; being French, he expressed it less prosaically: Animal Life, somber mystery! Immense world of thoughts and of dumb sufferings. All nature protests against the bar-barity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren. Life, death! The daily murder which feeding upon animals implies-those hard and bitter problems sternly placed themselves before my mind. Miser-able contradiction. Let us hope that there may be another sphere in which the base, the cruel fatalities of this may be spared to us. 46 Michelet seems to have believed that we cannot live without killing; if so, his anguish at this "miserable contradiction" must have been in inverse proportion to the amount of time he gave to examining it. Another to accept the comfortable error that we must kill to live was Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer was influential in introducing Eastern ideas to the West, and in several passages he contrasted the "revoltingly crude" attitudes to animals prevalent in Western philosophy and religion with those of Buddhists and Hindus. His prose is sharp and scornful, and many of his acute criticisms of Western attitudes are still appropriate today. After one particularly biting passage, however, Schopenhauer briefly considers the question of killing for food. He can hardly deny that human beings can live without killing-he knows too much about the Hindus for that-but he claims that "without animal food the human race could not even exist in the North." Schopen-hauer gives no basis for this geographical distinction, although he does add that the death of the animal should be made "even easier" by means of chloroform. 47 Even Bentham, who stated so clearly the need to extend rights to nonhumans, flinched at this point: There is very good reason why we should be suffered to eat such of them as we like to eat; we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature. One cannot help feeling that in these passages Schopenhauer and Bentham lowered their normal standards of argument. Quite apart from the question of the morality of painless killing, neither Schopenhauer nor Bentham considers the suffering necessarily involved in rearing and slaughtering animals on a commercial basis. Whatever the purely theoretical possibilities of painless killing may be, the large-scale killing of animals for food is not and never has been painless. When Schopenhauer and Bentham wrote, slaughter was an even more horrific affair than it is today. The animals were forced to cover long distances on foot, driven to slaughter by drovers who had no concern but to complete the journey as quickly as possible; they might then spend two or three days in the slaughteryards,, without food, perhaps without water; they were then slaughtered by barbaric methods, with-out any form of prior stunning. 48 Despite what Bentham says, they did have some form of anticipation of what was in store for them, at least from the time they entered the slaughteryard and smelled the blood of their fellows. Bentham and Schopenhauer would not, of course, have approved of this, yet they continued to support the process by consuming its products, and justifying the general practice of which it was part. In this respect Paley seems to have had a more accurate conception of what was involved in eating flesh. He, however, could safely look the facts in the face, because he had divine permission to fall back upon; Schopenhauer and Bentham could not have availed them-selves of this excuse, and so had to turn their gaze away from the ugly reality. As for Darwin himself, he too retained the moral attitudes to animals of earlier generations, though he had
demolished the in-tellectual foundations of those attitudes. He continued to dine on the flesh of those beings who, he had said, were capable of love, memory, curiosity, reason, and sympathy for each other; and he refused to sign a petition urging the RSPCA to press for legisla-tive control of experiments on animals. 49 His followers went out of their way to emphasize that although we were a part of nature and descended from animals, our status had not been altered. In reply to the accusation that Darwin's ideas undermined the dig-nity of man, T. H. Huxley, Darwin's greatest champion, said: No-one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; our rever-ence for the nobility of mankind will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is, in substance and in structure, one with the brutes. 50 Huxley is a true representative of modern attitudes; he knows perfectly well that the old reasons for assuming a vast gulf be-tween "man" and "brute" no longer stand up, but continues to believe in the existence of such a gulf nevertheless. Here we see most clearly the ideological nature of our justifica-tions of the use of animals. It is a distinctive characteristic of an ideology that it resists refutation. If the foundations of an ideo-logical position are knocked out from under it, new foundations will be found, or else the ideological position will just hang there, defying the logical equivalent of the laws of gravity. In the case of attitudes to animals, the latter seems to have happened. While the modern view of our place in the world differs enormously from all the earlier views we studied, in the practical matter of how we act toward other animals little has changed. If animals are no longer quite outside the moral sphere, they are still in a special section near the outer rim. Their interests are allowed to count only when they do not clash with human interests. If there is a clash-even a clash between a lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preference -of a human being-the interests of the nonhuman are disregarded. The moral attitudes of the past are too deeply embedded in our thought and our practices to be upset by a mere change in our knowledge of ourselves and of other animals.
ECO BOOKS
Animal Liberation
por Peter Singer
352 páginas, paperback, Ecco, 2001
Desde a sua publicação original em 1975, Libertação Animal tem inspirado um movimento mundial para dar mais direitos aos animais. Nesta edição revista e ampliada, Singer inclui novas informações sobre fazendas-fábricas de hoje e do produto de teste de procedimentos. Um apelo importante e convincente à consciência, justiça, decência e justiça.
Elogios para Libertação Animal
"Este livro é uma obrigação para todos os leitores civilizados...." - Cleveland Amory
"Documentação de Singer é unrhetorical e sem emoção, seus argumentos apertado e formidável, pois ele baseia seu caso em nem pessoal, nem religioso, nem muito abstrato princípios filosóficos, mas em posições morais a maioria de nós já aceita." - The New York Times Book Review
Sobre Peter Singer
Citações de Libertação Animal
"Este livro é sobre a tirania dos humanos sobre os animais não-humanos. Essa tirania causou e hoje ainda está causando uma quantidade de dor e sofrimento que só pode ser comparada com a que resultou de séculos de tirania por seres humanos brancos sobre os humanos negros. A luta contra esta tirania é uma luta tão importante quanto qualquer uma das questões morais e sociais que têm sido travadas nos últimos anos. "
"Este livro é uma tentativa de pensar, com cuidado e de forma consistente, a questão de como devemos tratar os animais não-humanos. No processo ele expõe os preconceitos que estão por trás de nossas atitudes presentes e comportamento."
"Este livro não é sobre animais de estimação. Não é provável que seja a leitura confortável para aqueles que pensam que o amor pelos animais não envolve mais do que afagar um gato ou alimentar os pássaros no jardim. Pretende-se sim para pessoas que estão preocupadas sobre o fim a opressão ea exploração onde quer que ocorram, e em ver que o princípio moral básico da igual consideração de interesses não sejam arbitrariamente restringidas aos membros de nossa própria espécie. A suposição de que, a fim de estar interessado em tais questões é preciso ser um "amante dos animais" é em si uma indicação da ausência do menor indício de que os padrões morais que aplicamos entre os seres humanos podem se estender a outros animais. "
"Observando que se fôssemos todos vegetarianos, haveria muito menos porcos, gado, galinhas e ovelhas, alguns comedores de carne têm afirmado que eles estão realmente fazendo os animais comem um favor, uma vez, mas por seu desejo de comer carne, os animais nunca teria vindo à existência a todos!
"Na primeira edição deste livro, eu rejeitou este ponto de vista sobre os motivos que nos obriga a pensar que trazer um ser à existência atribua um benefício que ser - e para manter isso, devemos acreditar que é possível beneficiar um ser inexistente. Isso eu pensava, era um absurdo. Mas agora eu não tenho tanta certeza. (Minha rejeição inequívoca dessa visão é, de fato, o único ponto filosófico feito na edição anterior em que eu mudei minha mente.) Após tudo, a maioria de nós concordaria que seria errado para trazer uma criança ao mundo se soubéssemos, antes que a criança foi concebida de que teria um defeito genético que faria sua vida breve e miserável. Para conceber uma criança é para causar-lhe dano. Assim podemos realmente negar que para trazer ao mundo um ser que terá uma vida agradável é para conferir a esse ser um benefício? Para negar isso, seria preciso explicar por que os dois casos são diferentes e eu não pode encontrar uma maneira satisfatória de fazer isso.
"O argumento de que estamos considerando agora levanta a questão de o erro de matar -.... Uma questão que, porque é muito mais complicado do que o errado em infligir sofrimento, eu tenho guardado no fundo até este ponto Mas na ausência de alguma forma de continuidade mental não é fácil explicar por que a perda do animal morto não é, do ponto de vista imparcial, fez boa pela criação de um novo animal que levará uma vida igualmente agradável. "
"Em um nível puramente prático, pode-se dizer o seguinte:... Matar animais para alimento (exceto quando necessário para a sobrevivência pura) nos faz pensar neles como objetos que podemos usar casualmente para nossos próprios fins não-essenciais Este argumento contra a matança de alimentos depende em uma previsão sobre as conseqüências da exploração de uma atitude.... Se esta previsão não é convincente, porém, o argumento que estamos considerando ainda permanece muito limitada na sua aplicação. Certamente não justifica comer carne de fábrica produziu animais, por eles sofrem a vida de tédio e privação, incapaz de satisfazer suas necessidades básicas para se virar, noivo, esticar, exercício, ou tomar parte nas interações sociais normais para a espécie. Para trazê-los para a existência de uma vida desse tipo é nenhum benefício para eles, mas sim um grande dano. No máximo, o argumento do benefício de trazer um ser à existência poderia justificar continuar a comer animais free-range (de uma espécie incapaz de ter desejos para o futuro), que têm uma agradável existência é um grupo social adequado às suas necessidades comportamentais, e são, então, matou de forma rápida e sem dor. "
Índice de Libertação Animal
Todos os animais são iguais
Ferramentas de Pesquisa
Down on the Farm Fábrica
Se tornar um vegetariano
Dominion homem
Especismo hoje
Animal Liberation
by Peter Singer
352 pages, paperback, Ecco, 2001
Since its original publication in 1975, Animal Liberation has inspired a worldwide movement to give increased rights to animals. In this revised and expanded edition, Singer includes new information about today's factory farms and product-testing procedures. An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency and justice.
Praise for Animal Liberation
"This book is a must . . . for every civilized reader."-- Cleveland Amory
"Singer's documentation is unrhetorical and unemotional, his arguments tight and formidable, for he bases his case on neither personal nor religious nor highly abstract philosophical principles, but on moral positions most of us already accept."-- The New York Times Book Review
About Peter Singer
Quotes from Animal Liberation
"This book is about the tyranny of human over nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans. The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought in recent years."
"This book is an attempt to think through, carefully and consistently, the question of how we ought to treat nonhuman animals. In the process it exposes the prejudices that lie behind our present attitudes and behavior."
"This book is not about pets. It is not likely to be comfortable reading for those who think that love for animals involves no more than stroking a cat or feeding the birds in the garden. It is intended rather for people who are concerned about ending oppression and exploitation wherever they occur, and in seeing that the basic moral principle of equal consideration of interests is not arbitrarily restricted to members of our own species. The assumption that in order to be interested in such matters one must be an 'animal lover' is itself an indication of the absence of the slightest inkling that the moral standards that we apply among human beings might extend to other animals."
"Noting that if we were all vegetarians there would be far fewer pigs, cattle, chickens and sheep, a few meat-eaters have claimed that they are actually doing the animals they eat a favor, since but for their desire to eat meat, those animals would never have come into existence at all!
"In the first edition of this book, I rejected this view on the grounds that it requires us to think that bringing a being into existence confers a benefit on that being--and to hold this, we must believe that it is possible to benefit a nonexistent being. This I thought, was nonsense. But now I am not so sure. (My unequivocal rejection of this view is, in fact, the only philosophical point made in the earlier edition on which I have changed my mind.) After all, most of us would agree that it would be wrong to bring a child into the world if we knew, before the child was conceived that it would have a genetic defect that would make its life brief and miserable. To conceive such a child is to cause it harm. So can we really deny that to bring into the world a being who will have a pleasant life is to confer on that being a benefit? To deny this, we would need to explain why the two cases are different and I cannot find a satisfactory way of doing that.
"The argument we are now considering raises the issue of the wrongness of killing--an issue which, because it is so much more complicated than the wrongness of inflicting suffering, I have kept in the background up to this point. . . . But in the absence of some form of mental continuity it is not easy to explain why the loss to the animal killed is not, from an impartial point of view, made good by the creation of a new animal who will lead an equally pleasant life."
"On a purely practical level, one can say this: killing animals for food (except when necessary for sheer survival) makes us think of them as objects we can use casually for our own nonessential purposes. . . This argument against killing for food relies on a prediction about the consequences of holding an attitude. . . . If this prediction is not persuasive, though, the argument we are considering still remains very limited in its application. It certainly does not justify eating meat from factory-produced animals, for they suffer lives of boredom and deprivation, unable to satisfy their basic needs to turn around, groom, stretch, exercise, or take part in the social interactions normal for their species. To bring them into existence for a life of that kind is no benefit to them, but rather a great harm. At the most, the argument from the benefit of bringing a being into existence could justify continuing to eat free-range animals (of a species incapable of having desires for the future), who have a pleasant existence is a social group suited to their behavioral needs, and are then killed quickly and without pain."
Table of Contents of Animal Liberation
All Animals Are Equal
Tools for Research
Down on the Factory Farm
Becoming a Vegetarian
Man's Dominion
Speciesism Today
