Vegan Practically

One of the great things (for me) about starting this blog is the steady stream of recommendations people (especially Shelley and Samantha) send my way. This week, it was Lorna Finlayson’s London Review piece, “Let Them Eat Oysters” (thanks, Shelley!). Ostensibly a review essay of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation Now (Harper 2023) and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals (Simon & Schuster 2023), it is really so much more than that. As reviews of philosophy books by philosophers tend to be, Finlayson’s review pushes hard on the assumptions and arguments that support Singer’s and Nussbaum’s respective conclusions.

The result is a piece that itself challenges the foundational theories of the two books — for Singer, utilitarianism and for Nussbaum, an Aristotelian perspective on the capabilities approach — both of which support better treatment for animals (within some constraints). The claim is not that they are wrong to seek the conclusions they do — both philosophers conclude that animals deserve better treatment than they experience at human hands. And both think that the current state of affairs is at the level of crisis. Indeed, the subtitle of Justice for Animals is Our Collective Responsibility and the book is offered on the publisher’s website as “an urgent call to action” and “a manual for change.” And Singer, in updating the empirical evidence about factory farming since the release of the original Animal Liberation in 1975 concludes that “things are (still) almost hellishly bad” in factory farming everywhere. And factory farming produces all but less than 1% of the meat consumed globally.

But Finalyson thinks that, among other things, the authors have difficulty being consistent within their perspectives. As a result, though both Singer and Nussbaum challenge people to do more than most likely do already for the good of animals, they may not always do animals the full measure of justice or moral consideration they deserve.

The review is rich and lengthy, and I’m not going to go into the details of it here when you can (and if you want a great read, should!) read it for yourself. I want to consider one thread that comes up towards the end. Referencing Cora Diamond’s 1978 paper, “Eating Meat and Eating Humans,” Finlayson remarks: “Diamond wants us to ask how we might lead lives that are ‘less hypocritical or richer or better than those in which animals are for us mere things’.”

She draws attention to this after taking issue with Nussbaum over her defence of eating fish (which is very difficult to consistently defend), and after pointing out that despite his utilitarian convictions about the equal moral worth of all sentient beings, Singer has a lot to say about capabilities. He has famously and, as Finlayson points out, dangerously, drawn attention to a conditional claim with respect to animal experimentation: “if you think the superior capacities of humans are what make it inappropriate to experiment on them (but not on animals), you have to allow experimentation on humans who hypothetically lack these capacities.”

Why is it dangerous for someone who explicitly does not claim that the pain or pleasure of human animals is inherently superior to the pain or pleasure of non-human animals to introduce this sort of conditional argument? One need only look around at the cavalier way in which non-human animals are treated as mere things to see the harm. Actually, most people do in fact think humans’ distinctive capacities make them superior and that it’s perfectly okay to treat animals terribly. As Finlayson notes: “The point is that comparisons like Singer’s are not made in a vacuum but in a particular social reality, one in which to make these comparisons serves not to elevate animals but to denigrate disabled people and contribute to a lowering of the social standing, the degree of care and concern, they can expect.”

So now, to Diamond’s challenge — how might we lead lives that are “less hypocritical or richer or better than those in which animals are for us mere things”? It is actually hard to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where the default was that we would treat animals with true respect, not as mere things. Finlayson suggests that in order to appreciate the challenge fully, we need to consider it not just in ethical terms but in political terms. How would such societies even be arranged? This is not to say that the other questions are irrelevant. It matters a lot, for example, whether our animal advocacy and ethical theorizing “serve to advance the condition of animals or lead to the dehumanization of vulnerable human minorities.” But the current political status of animals of all kinds, as mere things here for the use of humans, yields a certain kind of social arrangement that will yield very slow change.

I don’t have an answer to what that would look like, but it would look very different from what we now see. For one thing, it is unlikely that we would consider non-human animals to be food. The temptation to use our own experience, and a certain kind of human experience at that, as the benchmark for moral worth is almost irresistible. That’s why books like An Immense World (which I have blogged about before) have such value, written to inspire awe and wonder about thoroughly unfamiliar and virtually unimaginable (but through metaphor) ways of seeing the world.

Inevitably, both Nussbaum’s and Singer’s books are going to be influential contributions to the literature on animal rights. My intention is to read them both and determine for myself how much value I think they will add to the strategic/ethical project of social change concerning the treatment of non-human animals. I am pleased to have encountered Finlayson’s review first. And her suggestion that there are political, not just ethical, considerations at play has given me a lot to think about as I seek to lead a “less hypocritical or richer or better life.”