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ishkah · 4 years ago

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On The Far-Left, Effective Activism & Violence

Introduction to what it means to be on the far-left

So first off, as socialists & anarchists, we know we are far outside the Overton window. We know even if left-wing policy positions are more popular than right-wing, most people are still going to be biased to what they’ve grown up with and what’s familiar to them.

But, we also know we can shift the Overton window from the radical fringe: [1]

The most important thing about the Overton window, however, is that it can be shifted to the left or the right, with the once merely “acceptable” becoming “popular” or even imminent policy, and formerly “unthinkable” positions becoming the open position of a partisan base. The challenge for activists and advocates is to move the window in the direction of their preferred outcomes, so their desired outcome moves closer and closer to “common sense.”

There are two ways to do this: the long, hard way and the short, easy way. The long, hard way is to continue making your actual case persistently and persuasively until your position becomes more politically mainstream, whether it be due to the strength of your rhetoric or a long-term shift in societal values. By contrast, the short, easy way is to amplify and echo the voices of those who take a position a few notches more radical than what you really want.

For example, if what you actually want is a public health care option in the United States, coordinate with and promote those pushing for single-payer, universal health care. If the single-payer approach constitutes the “acceptable left” flank of the discourse, then the public option looks, by comparison, like the conservative option it was once considered back when it was first proposed by Orrin Hatch in 1994.

This is Negotiating 101.

So our hope is that our ideals and passion can be admired by some, like risking prison to sabotage the draft for Vietnam, so some peoples sons aren't conscripted into fighting an evil war. [2] Then any moderate left policies might look reasonable in comparison which makes them the tried and tested policies of the future.

We should also openly acknowledge that the ideal future we would like to see is empirically extremely unlikely to come about in our own lifetimes in the west, as there are still so many hills to climb first in pressuring workplaces over to a more co-operative flattened hierarchy of workplace democracy.

To quickly summarise, the direction the far-left would like to head in, is going from; a two party system, to... a multi-party coalition through preferential voting, to... some local government positions being elected by sortition, to… the majority of society being so content with worker-co-ops and syndicalist unions that we transition from representative democracy to direct democracy. So, a chamber of ministers to federated spokes councils.

Now I might be the minority in the far-left on this, but I would want people to have the option of going back a step if people aren't ready for that level of direct democracy, where the choice is disorganization and suffering or slightly less suffering under a repressive system of governance again. You could relate this to the position Rosa Luxemburg was in in lending support and hoping some good would come of the Spartacist uprising, whilst also wishing they could have been convinced to hold off until they were more prepared.

This is why it’s so important to build the governance model slowly enough to match expertise, so as not to falter with people pushing for ideals before having adequately put them to the test. So as not to cause a whiplash effect, where people desire a reactionary politics of conformity, under more rigid hierarchy of just the few.

As anarchists & socialists who desire a more directly democratic society, what tactics should we use if we want to be effective at moving society in that direction?

Electoral politics - We need to get really well educated on how even the baby step policies toward the left would be an improvement on where we are now, we need to learn the internal politicking of government and get good at having friendly arguments with comedy to appeal to friends and acquaintances basic intuitions.

The goal being that we can talk the latest news and (1) Win over conservatives to obvious empirically better policies on the left, and (2) Win over liberals when centre-left parties are in power to feel dismayed at the slow pace of change, and so acknowlege how much better it would be if there was a market socialist in the position willing to rally people to demonstrate and strike to push through bills.

Mutual aid – We should put the time into helping our neighbours and volunteering, for example on a food not bombs stall, to get people to see the positive benefits of a communalist caring society.

Theory – We should be educating ourselves and helping others know what work and rent union to join, what to keep a record of at work, how to defend yourself from rapists and fascists, how to crack a squat and how to write a press release, etc.

Campaigning – We should look for the easiest squeeze points to rack up small wins, like the picketing of a cafe to reclaim lost wages, so that word spreads and it creates a domino effect.

What tactics should we or shouldn’t we generally avoid in our political campaigns?

Civility as an end in itself

They’re not lies, they’re “falsehoods”; it’s not racism, it’s “racially charged comments”; it’s not torture, it’s “enhanced interrogation.” For years, U.S. media has prioritized, above all else, norms and civility.

Mean words or questioning motives are signs of declining civility and the subject of much lament from our media class. However, op-eds explicitly advocating war, invasion, sanctions, sabotage, bombing and occupation or cutting vital programs and lifelines for the poor are just the cost of doing business. What’s rhetorically out of bounds - and what isn’t - is far more a product of power than any objective sense of "civility" or “decency.”

Where did these so-called norms come from, who do they benefit, and why is their maintenance–-even in the face of overt white nationalism––still the highest priority for many liberals and centrists in U.S. media? [3]

This is so important to challenge, and yet incredibly nuanced. So, it is obviously a great success that the rate at which people would go around hurling racist insults looks to have dropped in favour of more political correctness.

It is also true that in pursuit of political correctness and an ethic of care, we can look for simplistic niceness, to the detriment of being able to identify systems of oppression. We need to be able to refuse the emotional labor of treating our bosses as friends when we have no desire to be friends with them. [4]

Similarly in our everyday interactions, we need to encourage our friends to accept us for who we are or not to accept us at all, so as to create deeper connections which builds stronger communities: [5]

It can be annoying or hurtful when others presume they know everything about you. But rather than assert their wrongness and make them defensive, you can acknowledge it as a common human failing and find creative ways to hold a mirror up to what life experiences they’ve had that lead them to jump to those conclusions.

One way is a kind of playful authenticity, telling a lie about a lie, to get back closer to the truth. So don’t outright challenge the idea, but don’t live up to it either, in fact live down to it. Playfully undermine the idea by failing to live up to the glamour of what it would mean to be that person, then find a way of revealing that it was a misunderstanding all along, so they needn’t worry about it applying to you.

Media Chasing – We shouldn’t chose our actions for the primary purpose of provoking conversations because it is insincere to ones own desires to materially affect change and it’s recognised as such by those who hear about it.

Transparency – We should be transparent with our supporters in all we hope to achieve and how successful we are being at achieving that task, so as not to attract funds for labor we haven’t and aren’t likely to be able to do.

Civil Disobedience – Whether it be breaking the law without causing any damage or economic sabotage and political violence which we’ll talk about later, anarchists hope to chose the right actions to provoke conversations and materially challenge unethical industries and actors, so as to push electoral politics towards direct democracy and eventually consolidate our gains in a revolution.

Fascists will also use tactics from civil disobedience to political violence, and tend toward violence against people for people holding ideas as the things they hate, rather than the lefts systemic critique of material conditions. All in the hopes of pushing society towards a more authoritarian constitutional republic, before seizing power in a palace coup and attempting to rule as a sequence of dictators for life.

It is up to the left to try and counter this violence by doxxing, making their rallies miserable, etc. And it is up to everyone to decide which government to vote in, to enact what degree of punishment to bring down on people breaking the law on either side.

Any direction the society goes in for either not controlling or bowing to which protesters demands is still the moral culpability of the government and those who participated in the party political process.

There simply is an obvious legal and moral difference between for example victimless civil disobedience on the left aimed at all people being treated equally in society like collecting salt from the sea or staying seated on the bus, to the type of violence you see on the right, like Israeli settlers throwing people off their land with arson attacks, stealing another country’s resources against international law.

But again, it is true that to whatever degree anarchists chose bad targets optically, we do to some degree bring the slow pace of change on ourselves by handing the right an advocacy win.

Graffiti & Culture Jamming – Whether it be an artistic masterpiece that no one asked for or altering a billboard to say something funny and political, instead of the advert that was there before pressuring you to consume more and more, most people can be won over by this as a good form of advocacy. Just don’t practice tagging your name a million times over every building in town.

Hacking – Obviously most people agree whistle-blowing war crimes is a yay. Selectively releasing documents to help conservatives win elections however, is a nay.

Sabotage – We should chose targets which have caused people the most amount of misery, for which people can sympathise most, like the sabotaging of draft cards I wrote about at the beginning. So causing economic damage to affect material conditions and make a statement.

We also need to carefully consider the difference between property which is personal, luxury, private, government owned and co-operatively worker owned.

So, it could be seen as ethical to chose material targets of evil actors in order to cause economic damage and make a statement, so long as in the case of personal property, the item has no sentimental value and can be replaced because the person is wealthy. Or is a luxury item that was paid for through the exploitation of others labor. Or is private property, meaning the means of production which should be owned collectively anyway.

It’s an expression of wanting to find an outlet for legitimate anger against that which causes us suffering. For example, if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tires in the dead of night is how you develop stronger bonds with a group of people and gain the confidence to do amazing things like travel the world and learn from other liberation struggles.

Fighting – First off, I think propaganda by the deed, physically hurting people for the purpose of making a political statement is evil, as it runs counter to our philosophy on the left that material conditions create the person and so we should make every peaceful effort to rehabilitate people.

However, to the extent that some current institutions fail to rehabilitate people and the process of seeking justice through these institutions can cause more trauma, then personal violence to get to resolve feelings of helplessness in the face of evil acts can be an ethical act.

For example survivor-led vigilantism: [4]

“I wanted revenge. I wanted to make him feel as out of control, scared and vulnerable as he had made me feel. There is no safety really after a sexual assault, but there can be consequences.” -Angustia Celeste, “Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability”

Two situations in which prominent anarchist men were confronted and attacked by groups of women in New York and Santa Cruz made waves in anarchist circles in 2010. The debates that unfolded across our scenes in response to the actions revealed a widespread sense of frustration with existing methods of addressing sexual assault in anarchist scenes. Physical confrontation isn’t a new strategy; it was one of the ways survivors responded to their abusers before community accountability discourse became widespread in anarchist circles. As accountability strategies developed, many rejected physical confrontation because it hadn’t worked to stop rape or keep people safe. The trend of survivor-led vigilantism accompanied by communiqués critiquing accountability process models reflects the powerlessness and desperation felt by survivors, who are searching for alternatives in the face of the futility of the other available options.

However, survivor-led vigilantism can be a valid response to sexual assault regardless of the existence of alternatives. One doesn’t need to feel powerless or sense the futility of other options to take decisive physical action against one’s abuser. This approach offers several advantages. For one, in stark contrast to many accountability processes, it sets realistic goals and succeeds at them. It can feel more empowering and fulfilling than a long, frequently triggering, overly abstract process. Women can use confrontations to build collective power towards other concerted anti-patriarchal action. Physical confrontation sends an unambiguous message that sexual assault is unacceptable. If sexual violence imprints patriarchy on the bodies of women, taking revenge embodies female resistance.

Other examples we can think of are personally desiring to fight fascists in the street to block them from marching through immigrant communities. To pushing your way through huntsman to save a fox from getting mauled to death by dogs.

Political killing

I’ll work through hypotheticals from circumstances relevant to the past, present and future, then talk through the ethics of each.

Past possibilities

Most people agree anyone who took it upon themselves to assassinate Hitler a day before the break out of WW2 would be seen as committing an ethical act, no matter who follows, because throwing a wrench into the cult of personality spell built around Hitler would be a significant set back for the fascist state’s grip over the people. And given all the evidence pointing to the inevitability of war, such an act could easily be seen as a necessary pre-emptive act.

Present possibilities

Most can sympathise with quick revolutions against dictatorships where the result is a freer society, like the Kurdish uprising in Northern Syria which took power from a regime who had rolled tanks on demonstrators and outlawed teaching of their native language.

But, even there, there are key foundations you need to work from, like the probability you won’t just give an excuse for the oppressor committing even worse horrors as was the case with the Rohingya militants who ambushed a police checkpoint, resulting in army & citizen campaign to burn down many villages, plus murder and rape those that couldn’t get away.

As well as a responsibility to put down arms after winning political freedoms and a majority are in favour of diplomacy through electoral politics, like in Northern Ireland today.

Under representative parliamentary systems, the sentiment of most is that even if it could be argued that a war of terror against the ruling class was the easiest route to produce a better society, that it would still be ethically wrong to be the person who takes another’s life just because it’s the easiest way. Since regardless of manufactured consent or anything else you still could have worked to build a coalition to overcome those obstacles and change the system slowly from within.

And I agree, it would be an act of self-harm to treat life with such disregard when you could have been that same deluded person shrouded in the justificatory trappings of society treating your behaviour normally. I don’t think the way we win today is treating a cold bureaucratic system with equally cold disregard in whose life we had the resources to be able to intimidate this week. Time on earth is the greatest gift people have, to make mistakes and learn from them.

So then, an easy statement to make on life under representative parliamentary systems is; outside of absurdly unrealistic hypotheticals, I could never condone purposefully killing others when campaigning against such monoliths as state and corporate repression today.

Breaking that down though; what do I mean by an unrealistic hypothetical? For example the philosophical thought experiment called the trolley problem, where you have a runaway trolley hurtling towards 5 people tied to a track, and you can pull a leaver so the train changes tracks and only kills 1 person tied to a track. Or you can change it to 7 billion to 1 even. Or 7 billion of your average citizens vs. 1 million unethical politicians, police and bosses, to make it political.

Now what do I mean by purposeful, well we can think of for example the most extreme cases of post-partum psychosis which has mothers killing their babies. But more nuanced than that, the rape victim who gets worn down by their abuser for years until they have a psychological break and kill.

That does still leave a lot of lee way for people knowingly taking risks with others lives, not intending to kill, but who are reckless in their actions, such as with some forms of economic sabotage. And I agree such a reckless act would bring up feelings of revulsion for all kinds of reasons like questioning whether the person was really doing it to help people or for their own ego-aggrandizement. All that can be hoped is a person makes a careful accounting of their ability for human error and weighs it against the outcomes of doing nothing.

Future possibilities

We can hypothesise the unrealistic case of 99% of society desiring a referendum on a shift from parliamentary representative system to a federated spokes council system and the MPs dragging their feet, the same way both parties gerrymander the boundaries to make it easier to win despite it being the one issue most everyone agrees is bad, and people needing to storm the halls of power to force a vote to happen.

More likely though, an opportunity for revolution might arise from such a confluence of events as climate refugees and worker gains forcing the state and corporations into trying to crack down on freedoms in order to preserve their power and enough people resisting that move, who are then able take power and usher in radical policy change, with either the army deciding to stand down or splitting into factions.

References

1. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution - Use your radical fringe to shift the Overton window P. 215.

2. The Camden 28 - The Camden 28 were a group of Catholic left anti-Vietnam War activists who in 1971 planned and executed a raid on a Camden, New Jersey draft board. The raid resulted in a high-profile criminal trial of the activists that was seen by many as a referendum on the Vietnam War and as an example of jury nullification.

3. Citations Needed Podcast - Civility Politics

4. Slavoj Žižek: Political Correctness is a More Dangerous Form of Totalitarianism | Big Think

5. A Love Letter To Failing Upward

6. Accounting for Ourselves - Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes.

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ishkah · 4 years ago

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The bizarre case of vegan Neo-Nazis & deprogramming vegans who glorify violence

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Part 1 – Identifying a problem

Vegan Neo-Nazis

So I’d like to tell you the story about a pair of ex-anarchists, ex-Animal Liberation Front convicts, Walter Bond and Camille Marino who have launched the website 'Vegan Final Solution', a Neo-Nazi platform trying to recruit from the vegan & animal liberation milieu. Here are some of the ideas they promote: [1]

WE ADVOCATE a third position beyond left and right-wing ideology; a third position that encompasses the best of both, and discards the rest.

WE ADVOCATE a hierarchy where those that exercise self-discipline and self-sacrifice for the good of animals and the earth are deemed more deserving of life than the gluttonous, selfish drones that shovel dead animals into their grotesque faces, simply to satiate their lust for rotting meat. With hierarchy, we separate the wheat from the chaff.

WE ADVOCATE a total lack of concern for egalitarian issues. The whole laundry bag of activist, and so called “total liberation” issues, not only seeks to put the focus right back on worthless people, but also undermines the animals’ safety by making society more cohesive and functional.

So classic fascist ideology, plus a bunch of dog whistles to Classical Nazi code-speak: Final Solution, Third Position & Life unworthy of life.

Also, letters he would send from prison had nazi propaganda on the back, so that’s always fun. [Video]

Now the case study of groups who supported or continue to support them

Walter Bond was supported by the group ‘Unnoffensive Animal’ in a hopeful disregard for his fascist leanings, they were convinced by his support group that his early fascist writings were just a short-lived cause of traumatic prison conditions. They encouraged vegans to send letters of support and buy his book. Allowing their respect for his actions to get in the way of transparency and accountability. [2]

He was and still is being promoted by the North America Animal Liberation Press Office, SupportWalter.org & Forward to Eden. [3][4][5]

And finally listed on the website for people they view as ‘friends & allies’ are Gary Yourofsky (ADAPTT) & Black Rose Belarus. [1]

So what commonalities can we find among all these groups?

Well for one, a strong commitment to vandalism as a campaign tactic and potential tolerance for violence which goes further than that.

Now disclaimer; I’m not saying all graffitiing is wrong or all revolutions are bad. I’m not even saying there’s a risk of thousands of die-hard vegan anarchists becoming Neo-Nazis.

I am saying there’s a risk of politically ignorant people who glorify violence (like Gary Yourofsky’s apolitical misanthropy) finding common cause with eco-fascists and not seeing the harm they're doing promoting this shit.

I think the few revolutionary groups who are promoting this Nazi website should be a wake-up call. And so an issue we should work to untangle for how people get duped into first glorifying ‘propaganda by the deed,’ bodily harm and violence, for the animals today - where it would be completely unethical and counter-productive - then find common cause with Nazis.

So I think we need to do a better job of explaining where some direct action goes overboard and becomes both unethical and ineffective. As well as checking in on our friends who look to be going down a bad path and provide them with the support they need.

Part 2 – Solutions

Step 1: Putting social pressure to bear on groups, organisations and content creators

We need to discourage the excuses that could easily lead to this happening again.

People’s appreciation for Gary’s speech turning them and others vegan also got in the way of people condemning him for his support for violence, his wishing rape on people as punishment & calling Palestinians psychopaths and their rights supporters insane. [6]

As well, Anonymous for the Voiceless made a post about the man who took a bunch of people hostage at gunpoint until the President made an online post promoting the movie Earthlings... ‘Just asking the question’ as to whether it was a success or failure for the animals, without clearly condemning his actions. [7]

It's really worrying that 100s of vegans on Facebook would comment in favor of the Ukraine hostage-taker and have their profile public showing police everything about their life. It shows both the level of unethical-ness and the naivety that could likely easily be swayed into promoting an edgy neo-nazi who hides the real outcomes of their politics only slightly.

Finally, it’s important to make people aware of when the person they’re following has far-right leanings, so they aren’t sucked down the rabbit hole of bad justifications without realizing where the end conclusion is leading. I’ll put a link in the endnotes to an article for further reading on racists in the vegan movement. [8]

Step 2: Deprogramming individuals who glorify violence

How does someone begin to take on beliefs which glorify violence?

Some examples we could think of could be obsessively watching animal cruelty videos, being insulted by friends & family over your vegan diet, and not being able to avoid seeing people eat meat.

We could simply do a better job of checking in on newly vegan friends and promoting online spaces for them to find people to talk to.

Remind them they were blindly ignorant once too, so we need to have compassion for the perpetrator too.

How does someone potentially work up to taking unethical violent acts?

Blocking foxes from getting mauled to death, so gaining the confidence to get into stand-offs with fox hunters. Similarly with blocking fascists marching through immigrant neighborhoods.

Disclaimer; I’m very much pro hunt sabbing and protesting fascists, I'm pro people getting active and feeling invested by protecting each other and foxes.

But, I also know people who get obsessed and all I'm saying is don't be afraid to bring up with your friend that they may need to take a break or could be turning people away with their not comprehensible rants on Facebook. Get talking to them about other campaign tactics they can engage with for a time. [9]

Remind them the best advocacy tool we have is just shining a light on their cruelty and defending the victims. The few fox hunters we can annoy into not wanting to go on the hunt again pales in comparison as a goal to the number of people we can get to question their meat-eating by just showcasing their cruelty and showing how a fox or multiple foxes lives were life was saved.

Part 3 – What are the philosophical justifications for violence

1. Self-defence by proxy.

Reasonable grounds that when confronting systemic violence, you are preventing the total number or rate at which animal lives experiencing unjust cruelty stay the same or goes up. Not true of today.

Reasonable grounds that there was no way of avoiding injury to the perpetrator or any potential injury would be less than the well-being gained for the lives saved. Not true of today.

You could grant that in a hypothetical future if we were to get to a place where 99% of the world were vegan and less animal products being produced causes a drop in demand, yet we still hadn’t made meat eating illegal, then; you could risk injury to the perpetrator by citizens arresting them, while you free the animals where there was no other option than risking potential injury because the value for the sentient animals being free to live in a sanctuary is greater.

2. Desire for a war of self-determination

Animals can’t conceptualize a tactical war to achieve rights, so they can’t desire it. We aren’t even able to alleviate their suffering like we could human prisoners with the optimistic notion that direct actions done in other places now, may one day lead to an end to their suffering.

You could grant in the socialist case if 99% of society had been fully socialised and a previous factory owner had locked themself in and was refusing to move for wanting to employ only who they like and keep the profits to themself, some force in picking them up and moving them would be acceptable. Obviously revolutions are a lot more complicated than this hypothetical and I do commend cases like the Kurdish uprising in Northern Syria which took power from a regime who had rolled tanks on demonstrators and outlawed teaching of their native language.

But, even in the human case there are key foundations you need to work from, like the probability you won't just give an excuse for the oppressor committing even worse horrors as was the case with the Rohingya militants who ambushed a police checkpoint, resulting in army & citizen campaign to burn down many villages, plus murder and rape those that couldn't get away.

As well as a responsibility to put down arms after winning political freedoms and a majority are in favour of diplomacy through electoral politics, like in Northern Ireland today.

Much of the problem I think is animal rights activists confusing these two arguments. But what do you think? What other ways can you think of for talking someone down from their beliefs glorifying violence?

Part 4 – Closing Arguments

Time on earth is the greatest gift we have

Even if it could be argued that a war of terror, killing those involved in animal agriculture was the easiest route to reducing the number of animals bred into living horrible lives… I would still say it’s ethically wrong to be the person who takes another's life just because it’s the easiest way. You could have worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature, you could have inspired a 1000 liberators to break every cage.

It’s an act of self-harm to treat life with such disregard when you could have been that same deluded person shrouded in the justificatory trappings of society treating your behaviour normally.

What I see is vegans in mourning for the animals, angry and wanting to find an outlet for that anger. After the vegan activist Regan Russell was killed, many ALF actions happened in response, and if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tires in the dead of night is how you develop stronger bonds with a group of people and gain the confidence to do amazing things like travel the world and learn from other liberation struggles, then I’m all for it…

But, I don’t think the way we win today is treating a cold bureaucratic system with equally cold disregard in whose life we had the resources to be able to intimidate this week. Time on earth is the greatest gift people have, to make mistakes and learn from them, so I could never condone risking injury to people when fighting such a monolith as the animal agriculture industry today.

Let me know your thoughts in a comment down below, all the best, peace.

Endnotes

https://web.archive.org/web/20200729083857/http://veganfinalsolution.com/about/

https://www.facebook.com/liberateordie/photos/a.261410787880915/579192992769358

https://animalliberationpressoffice.org/NAALPO/2020/07/28/vegan-final-solution-com

http://supportwalter.org/SW/index.php/2020/07/25/new-website-created-by-camille-marino-and-walter-bond-officially-launched-today

https://www.facebook.com/forwardtoeden/posts/3118564944864698

http://veganfeministnetwork.com/hero_worship/

https://www.facebook.com/anonymousforthevoiceless/posts/3264530266902514

https://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Racism_in_Veganism

https://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Common_Allies

#vegan #veganism #vegancommunity #animal liberation #animal liberation front #alf #animal rights advocacy #animal rights campaigns #antifa #anti-fascist #anti fascist #anarchist #veganarchist #violence #ethics #philosophy #direct action #anthropology #Youtube

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ishkah · 4 years ago

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Debate On The Definition of Veganism

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Debate Proposition: We should define veganism as “an animal products boycott” which is primarily against animal agriculture, and not “veganism is a way of life that seeks to place the value of animal life, health and liberty above the value of substitutable classes of goods, services and uses derived from animals.”

At the 32:30 mins mark in the video, I gave a rebuttal to Shadow’s definition, on why I think myself and other vegans don’t and shouldn’t have to fit under his definition, but either he didn’t understand it and/or I didn’t explain myself clearly enough.

He views anyone who would ‘substitute meat in their shopping trolley for vegetables’ as what qualifies them as a vegan (fitting under his definition), but I disagree that it has to be because you’re strictly valuing a hypothetical animal that got a chance to live, higher than the one that died to make the animal product which you’re substituting for vegetable products.

I desire to grant guardianship laws to animals to collectively be able to seek refuge in a specific area of wildlife habitat because I can recognize they desire to express their capabilities, having land they can call their territory helps them fulfil this need, and I can recognize if I was born into the world as an animal or severely disabled human I would want access to resources to fulfil my needs.

Another way of saying this could be I place the value of getting to see wildlife in dense wildlife habitat above the value of strip malls, business parks and open cast coal mines.

I don’t think I ought place the value of animal life, health and liberty above the value of substitutable classes of goods, services and uses derived from animals.

So two exceptions to the rule could be:

I don’t think I’m viewing the value for the animal to live in the wild as being higher than the value a sheep would find on a semi-wild farm protected from predators and then turned into a substitutable class of meat towards the end of it’s life. (Even thought I think a fully wild habitat would offer more life for more animals and not slaughtering would offer a more virtuous life for the human).

And I even think that I value the class of goods of carrots above the substitutable class of goods of apples which puts the value of animals' lives lower in some circumstances, like turning over the soil to let seagulls feast on the worms.

My argument is simply that we ought to engineer a set of circumstances in which a much higher number of animals are getting to express their capabilities in wildlife habitat. But I don’t think that necessarily has to be hashed out to ‘doing it for the animals’ or ‘because I’m viewing their life in the wild as universally of higher value to ways you could individually treat them as means to an end substitutable classes of goods or services.’ Because I wouldn’t necessarily.

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Shadow Starshine’s response to the exceptions to the rule (after the debate had ended) was:

Right, let me respond to the second point first. It’s where I’ve admitted that my definition has the highest weakness is that what a “class” is, is vague. I obviously don’t mean specific fruits and meats and whatever to constitute legitimate classes, and I want “food” to be a class of product. or “medicine”, things of that level. I agree that one can sort of twist the wording of class to mean things like you’re implying which is beyond my intention.

The first point is interesting, I may or may not agree with it. I’ll think about it.

#vegan #veganism #vegan definition #animal rights #animal rights advocacy #legal animal rights #animal liberation #philosophy #ethics #animal ethics #comedy #Youtube

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ishkah · 4 years ago

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My Virtue-Existentialist Ethics

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Major Influences

In After Virtue, MacIntyre tries to explain another element of what is missing in modern life through his use of the concept of a practice. He illustrates this with the example of a person wishing to teach a disinterested child how to play chess.

The teaching process may begin with the teacher offering the child candy to play and enough additional candy if the child wins to motivate the child to play. It might be assumed that this is sufficient to motivate the child to learn to play chess well, but as MacIntyre notes, it is sufficient only to motivate the child to learn to win – which may mean cheating if the opportunity arises. However, over time, the child may come to appreciate the unique combination of skills and abilities that chess calls on, and may learn to enjoy exercising and developing those skills and abilities. At this point, the child will be interested in learning to play chess well for its own sake. Cheating to win will, from this point on, be a form of losing, not winning, because the child will be denying themselves the true rewards of chess playing, which are internal to the game. The child will also, it should be noted, enjoy playing chess; there is pleasure associated with developing one’s skills and abilities that cannot come if one cheats in order to win.

MacIntyre concludes that there are two kinds of goods attached to the practice of chess-playing and to practices in general. One kind, external goods, are goods attached to the practice “by the accidents of social circumstance” – in his example, the candy given to the child, but in the real world typically money, power, and fame (After Virtue 188). These can be achieved in any number of ways. Internal goods are the goods that can only be achieved by participating in the practice itself. If you want the benefits to be gained by playing chess, you will have to play chess. And in pursuing them while playing chess, you gain other goods as well – you will get an education in the virtues. The two kinds of goods differ as well in that external goods end up as someone’s property, and the more one person has of any of them the less there is for anyone else (money, power, and fame are often of this nature). Internal goods are competed for as well, “but it is characteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice” (After Virtue 190-191). A well played chess game benefits both the winner and loser, and the community as a whole can learn from the play of the game and develop their own skills and talents by learning from it.

MacIntyre believes that politics should be a practice with internal goods, but as it is now it only leads to external goods. Some win, others lose; there is no good achieved that is good for the whole community; cheating and exploitation are frequent, and this damages the community as a whole.

– Political Philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

One alternative is a prefigurative or practical anarchism, based on a social account of the virtues (based on a revision of MacIntyre’s virtue theory). This identifies goods as being inherent to social practices, which have their own rules, which are negotiable and alter over time. It stresses the immanent values of particular practices rather than on the externally decided (consequentialist) values that will accrue.

Thus, those tactics which are consistent with anarchism are those that are rewarding in their own terms rather than on the basis of external benefits alone. The different approaches to political-social organisation provide an illustration, in which Leninism exemplifies the instrumental approach, whilst a case from contemporary anarchism provides a contrast. Leninism concentrates on the external goods of the disciplined party, its success is primarily judged on its efficiency in reaching the desired goal of revolution. However, a different non-consequentialist approach to political organisation is to view political structures as the manifestation of internal goods, such as enhancing wisdom and the embodiment of social relationships that disperse social power. Standards are generated by, and help to form, anti-hierarchical social practices. For instance the norms required for secretly subverting corporate advertising or state propaganda are not identical to those required to maintain an inclusive, multi-functional social centre. Whilst different, the norms of both are open, to those entering these practices, they are open to critical dialogue and can alter over time.

Each anarchist practice produces their own standards, which overlap with others. The norms by which a successful social centre is run, will be different to, but bear some similarities with an inclusive, participatory website or periodical. Thus the standards for the goods, the types of social relationship that constitute (and are constituted by) non- or anti-hierarchical practice are observable and assessable within a domain – and between adjacent domains. So that the relatively stable, and common, norms of bravery (opposing dominating power), solidarity (reciprocal assistance between those in a subjugated position) and wisdom (coming to understand the structures of oppression and the means by which ‘other values’ can be created) are identifiable within anarchist practices, but are not necessarily universal. Similar practices involving subtly different actors will generate distinctive other goods (or bads).

Like the Stirnerite subject, there is no universal agent of change, but one in constant flux, resisting, challenging or fleeing the changing dominating powers within a given context. Within these radical practices, it produces its own immanent values. Because social practices are not distinct but overlap there are possibilities for links of solidarity across the different domains between different agents, although there is no universal agent who participates in all practices. A narrative of anti-hierarchical liberation, might provide a link between different practices, and provide routes for new social practices (and new agents to develop). The contestation of hierarchy, however, does not represent a new universal value. There are contexts in which goods are immanently developed but a challenge to structures that maintain inequalities of power is not generated – for instance, children playing in a sandbox. Thus, the rejection of hierarchy is not a universal guide to action, though, given the persistence of economic structures and institutions that enforce and legitimise these inequalities of power, it is highly likely that the contestation of hierarchy will remain a core anarchist value.

– Anarchism; Ethics & Meta-Ethics by Benjamin Franks

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Purpose & Meaning

We are born with biological drives and grow up being taught environmental drives we have to grapple with and make sense of.

All attachment or grasping necessarily entails risk of suffering, sometimes very low level suffering mixed in with greater happiness, which is necessary for meaning, but potentially distressing suffering none the less.

We can’t quantify for the individual what level of suffering it is right that they owe themselves to muddle through to achieve some level of happiness later on.

We can only say if a persons reason for ending one’s own life, is to desire to make a meaningful decision, in the face of ‘unfair’ meaninglessness, the sum of one’s existence only becomes more absurd. So, actual suicide or philosophical suicide – in the form of on some level choosing to be piously ignorant to what life entails – being viewed as meaningful, is simply an attempt to deny that meaninglessness or no one stable meaning is the foundation to all life.

So, in terms of the internal value to the practice of learning why we are here, we can say grappling with these biologically and environmentally bestowed drives is a goal in which achieving some headway, brings us happy flourishing.

Moral Luck & Folk Psychological Concepts

The evolution of our material capabilities created values, the ability for things to matter to us.

Everyone has different views as to what percentage of study in the hard sciences vs. soft sciences is the most productive balance for gaining new insights into human behaviour short term and long term. I lean heavily towards if we want to come to a fruitful understanding of what matters to us, our perspectives as agents in the world, we need to look to social science and the very complicated holistic social framework we build up through perceiving what others are thinking and modifying our actions accordingly.

That’s not to say study into ways to alleviate mental conditions like arachnophobia can’t be improved by learning about how natural selection affected our genes. Simply that the character traits that provide us the most meaning in our interconnected world, is not whether someone has a personality trait that can be connected back to their lower primate ancestors, but how that person seeks to deal with the capabilities they’re dealt.

For example, if a person were to win the lottery tomorrow, the character traits they had forged throughout their life would be being put to the test on a massive ethical quandary in such a way that the main character traits that person would be known for is at this social level of description of do they have the ware with all to navigate that road well.

What Constitutes Right And Wrong?

Because human beings are complex, their flourishing takes complex forms: we can flourish intellectually – hence, the “intellectual virtues” (both practical and theoretical); we can flourish as builders and makers and artists – hence, the “virtues of craft” – and we can flourish in terms of our non-technical, social and civic activities – hence, the “moral” virtues. [1]

Now, if you’re a consequentialist, you can simply relate to this philosophy as through pursuing your own happy flourishing, either the goals are related to other people or it’s more easily achieved by helping others, so we have an obligation to be altruistic and achieve a global calculus of happy flourishing.

But, I would simply appeal to what is good for any one person being more complicated than an external calculation of ends:

Virtues and therefore morality can only make sense in the context of a practice: they require a shared end, shared rules, and shared standards of evaluation. The virtues also define the relationships among those who share a practice: “….the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices” (After Virtue 191). We must have the virtues if we are to have healthy practices and healthy communities. [2]

So, if how a person was raised to understand virtue is primarily respecting the shared rule that the dignity of a person must not be violated then, in so far as practicing that virtue is meaningful to that person, it will bring that person happy flourishing.

It goes beyond the contractarian view in its starting point, a basic wonder at living beings, and a wish for their flourishing and for a world in which creatures of many types flourish. It goes beyond the intuitive starting point of utilitarianism because it takes an interest not just in pleasure and pain [and interests], but in complex forms of life. It wants to see each thing flourish as the sort of thing it is. . .[and] that the dignity of living organisms not be violated. [3]

Scaffolding

There are many guide sticks we can use, like narratives of character virtue exemplars who each are near perfect exhibitions of what it means to hold character virtues like wisdom, courage or compassion.

One way I predict this philosophy will be best assimilated by the most amount of people is in scaffolding up one’s ethical biases from the individual, to the community to internationally. So acknowledging how each social layer will ask of the individual a different role.[4]

The Individual

So, starting with conceptualising the individual in near solitude, living very rurally, we can say that by the way this person has chosen to live and so in turn how they would like to interact with other people is with a respect for the fact that what matters to this person is a bias for consequential ends like negative liberties (the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints) before any shared principle or means of acting.

Now scaling that up to every individual in the world, we can acknowledge we all have a bit of that person in us, and so depending on what age a person lives through, for example how much peace there is in the world, we can say increasing negative liberties like not having to be conscripted into war is an ethical good to work towards as a society. Similarly almost universally good actions throughout time like the negative liberty to happen to be gay and want to kiss your boyfriend in public or Emma Goldman’s sentiment ‘it’s not my revolution unless I can fail at dancing to it’s rhythm’. [5][6]

The Community

Next we can think of the ethical practices of a community and how an individuals negative liberty puts a healthy limit on what kind of communitarian principles we develop. For example, we can imagine the principle that what it means to be a good member of the community is working till we drop to maximize the wellbeing of future generations. This neither works in practice because of people’s need to balance work with leisure in order to have a healthy head space to create and do great work, nor in theory, because people desire to hold onto their negative liberties.

So we may not have Kantian obligations which are truths of reason, but for certain there is the intuitional: [7]

I very much like WD Ross’s theory of prima facie duties. Where any felt obligation is a prima facie duty, however it can be overridden depending on the circumstances by another one, however that does not mean that the original obligation disappears, it simply means that its defeasible and it usually continues to operate in the background.

So if I have an obligation to meet you for lunch and on the way to driving to meet you I go pass a car accident and I have to decide whether to save the person inside or meet you for lunch, I’m going to say that the duty to save the person in the car is overriding, but I’m still going to try to make it up to you, I’m going to apologize, I may buy you the lunch next time as a way of making it up to you which shows that the initial obligation still operates in the background even though it was overridden.

One’s Position Internationally

Finally, when conceptualizing one’s place in a larger social fabric than the responsibilities you desire to take on in the communities you’re apart of, we can think to our place internationally and in time. Here I think when encouraging people to respect your individual liberties and communitarian principles fails, we can again be biased towards end goals in our ethics and be Machiavellian in service to the individual and community where the risk of doing nothing would lead to greater harm.

So at it’s most severe, needing to fight a war to defeat fascism where civilians will get caught in the crossfire, or at it’s least severe, we can think of ‘the culture war’, where you feel you’ve put in your two cents of duty with your friends and nothings changing, so you play the jester in order to encourage them to accept you for who you are or not to accept you at all, all in an effort to create deeper connections which builds stronger communities: [8]

Socialist Entailments

Due to the unfair distribution of power in society in the hands of very few, the good any one person can strive to achieve is immense, because one can imagine wielding the kind of power those at the top currently have to do good. But this power is unattainable to many.

So, like how a figure like Bernie Sanders could have harnessed the position of presidency to do lots of good, how he did educate the masses on the positives of socialised government institutions and, if he’d gotten into power, mobilise a grassroots movement to demonstrate and strike to push through bills.

But, most importantly power can be a mirage. It’s the carrot dangled in front just beyond our reach. We need to create opportunities for ourselves, to achieve great acts of good on our own, like the personal heroism of people flying to Syria to fight Islamic Fascism or organising edible gardens in low-income neighbourhoods.

As well, even though we may cherish those opportunities to do great deeds today, counter-intuitively, the goal should be to move to a world where grand feats of good deeds aren’t necessary or possible. So that more people get a chance to strive to do good.

So a move to devolve government power to a multi-party system through preferential voting, to… Some local government positions being elected by sortition, to… The majority of society being so content with worker-co-ops and syndicalist unions that we transition from representative democracy to direct democracy. So, a chamber of ministers to federated spokes councils.

Legal Animal Rights Entailments

If the wonder that we experience in viewing wild animals is not ‘how similar to us they are’, but their ‘real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value’ and one sufficient reason we grant this freedom at least to a basic extent to other people is we have a desire to achieve what we find valuable then; the fact non-human animals experience this desire too means we ought extend these freedoms to non-human animals.

So, a holistic world-view of not wanting to reduce both the quality and quantity of positive experiences humans can have with animals, as well as animals with other animals for low-order pleasures such as taste/texture.

In Summary

Any really good end goal we can achieve, would be good in virtue of it being a a practice that’s replicable on a mass scale, easily understood through shared rules & ends, and gives meaning and pleasure to the individual for the practices internal value.

Therefore, what’s most important is devolving power to a larger body of people to be able to create these practices and set an example for others.

Though the governance model needs to be built up slowly enough to match expertise, so as not to falter with people pushing for ideals before having adequately put them to the test. As well, so as not to cause a whiplash effect, where people desire a reactionary politics of conformity, under more rigid hierarchy of just the few:

Final Thoughts

Here’s a rough diagram for how I relate to various ethical schools of thought:

And here are some of the ideas it attempts to show:

Why some red bars can reach higher than some green bars: People can identify with conservativism as a virtue philosophy and happen to be a virtue exemplar for devolving power to those without it. Like Malcolm X denouncing drug taking, to keep minority communities strong, in response to the flooding of the streets with drugs by the CIA to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Though I would still say co-operation as a virtue provides a more stable foundation for building up institutions with social virtue.

Why some green bars can reach lower than some red bars: Someone can hold the same ideals of co-operative virtue ethics, but through a mistaken practice of over zealously trying to force through their perspective can fail to achieve their goals and fail to win over others to the merits of their ideas, resulting in a painful stultifying.

Why the shorter bars on the graph: Through a careful consideration of required means and desired outcomes, we can find happy flourishing in a character trait that biases one side of the equation over the other (being more means or outcome oriented). So long as we are aware that we’re simply fulfilling something meaningful to us and that it won’t be a character trait that a majority in society can or need replicate. But it must be done with the knowledge that we’re not directly hampering others pursuit of happy flourishing either.

Why the sum of all the green bars add up to an equilateral triangle: The highest amount of happy flourishing we can consistently achieve in society will be a practice that’s replicable and highly aware of the existential grounding that informs which direction a society desires to move in. So, a practice that doesn’t attempt to factor in peoples desire to autonomously search for their own egoist goals and absurdist means would be a practice that is not as easily replicable and so would not produce the highest amount of happy flourishing in society (a smaller equilateral triangle that doesn’t rise as high for not being as wide).

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References

1. Course Notes – G.E.M Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”

2. MacIntyre: Political Philosophy | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

3. Beyond Compassion and Humanity; Justice for Non-human Animals by Martha Nussbaum

4. Fairly similar to this would be threshold deontology, explained further here: Normative Ethics: Rights, Consequentialism, Deontology. My virtue ethical system would bias consequential actions when consequences are the least severe, then turn into a bias for deontology at a certain threshold, then back to consequentialism at another threshold, so I assume it’d look fairly similar to the graph Avi made but more of a zig zag.

5. To be incredibly pedantic, absurd hypotheticals are always lurking in the background to warn against universals like what if kissing your boyfriend in public started world war 3 before the left was ready and ended with a 1000 year Reich, would it still be justified then? But bar fringe absurdly unlikely hypotheticals.

6. I know the more well known slogan is “if I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution”, though Emma never said it, it’s a sentiment attributed to a longer text she wrote, which I plan to write a post on next. As well as how “failing to dance to it” is more accurate and how compassionate comedy for our own failings is something we need to rekindle on the left and spread internationally.

7. Daniel Kaufman On Intuitionism and Folk Psychology

8. A Love Letter To Failing Upward

Further Reading

Egoist

The Politics of Postanarchism by Saul Newman (Preview) (Buy) (Download)

However, can we assume that the possibilities of human freedom lie rooted in the natural order, as a secret waiting to be discovered, as a flower waiting to blossom, to use Bookchin’s metaphor? Can we assume that there is a rational unfolding of possibilities, driven by a certain historical and social logic? This would seem to fall into the trap of essentialism, whereby there is a rational essence or being at the foundation of society whose truth we must perceive. There is an implicit positivism here, in which political and social phenomena are seen as conditioned by natural principles and scientifically observable conditions. Here I think one should reject this view of a social order founded on deep rational principles. In the words of Stirner, ‘The essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom of it – emptiness.’ In other words, rather than there being a rational objectivity at the foundation of society, an immanent wholeness embodying the potential for human freedom, there is a certain void or emptiness, one that produces radical contingency and indeterminacy rather than scientific objectivity. This idea has been elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe, who eschew the idea of society as a rationally intelligible totality, and instead see it as a field of antagonisms which function as its discursive limit. In other words, what gives society its definitional limit at the same time subverts it as a coherent, whole identity. Therefore, they argue, ‘Society never manages fully to be society, because everything in it is penetrated by its limits, which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality.’ Antagonism should not be thought of here in the sense of the Hobbesian state of nature, as a war of everyman against everyman, but rather as a kind of rupturing or displacement of social identities that prevents the closure of society as a coherent identity.

Science, Perception, and Reality by Wilfrid Sellars (Preview) (Buy) (Download)

It’s Just a Feeling: The Philosophy of Desirism by Joel Marks (Buy) (Download)

Demoralizing Moralism the Futility of Fetishized Values by Jason McQuinn (Download)

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Moral Relativism

Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology) by Jerry Gershenhorn (Buy) (Download)

Is a prescriptive position adopted initially by many anthropologists reacting against the ethnocentrism characteristic of the colonial era. Melvelle Herskovits, for instance, affirms that “… in practice, the philosophy of relativism is a philosophy of tolerance” (Cultural Relativism, p. 31).

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Preference Consequentialism

Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality by Douglas W. Portmore (Buy) (Download)

Nonzero: History, Evolution & Human Cooperation: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright (Buy) (Download)

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Hedonistic Utilitarianism

Utiltarianism by John Stuart Mill (Buy) (Download)

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Co-operative Virtue Ethics

Anarchism and Moral Philosophy by Benjamin Franks (Essay) (Buy) (Download)

Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues with James Tully by Robert Nichols and Jakeet Singh (Thesis) (Buy) (Download)

Stoic virtue ethics by Matthew Sharpe (Essay)

Consequentialism and Deontology in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Dean Moyar (Essay)

Feral Children and Clever Animals; Reflections on Human Nature (Download)

Our common way of thinking about the difference between physical and behavioral science, described in Chapter 3, is that the goal of the first is to eliminate variance, while the second accepts variance as the essential characteristic of the subject worthy of study. The physical sciences seek to eliminate variation because variation confounds accuracy of prediction. The behavioral sciences should accept variation as the essential aspect of living beings, and thereby strive to measure variance as a technique of describing the nature of life itself. We often confuse the legitimacy of these different goals, thereby leading us to the conclusion, for example, that the physical sciences are more “scientific” than the behavioral because they strive for accuracy and prediction. Some appear to think that a measure of the applicability of science is accuracy of prediction, but variance, too, is a legitimate interest of the scientific method. Science is a unique method, a method independent of what it studies. Measures of variance can be just as reliable as formulas that strive to eliminate or reduce variance. As always, the meaningful issue is what one wants to know, what one wants to accomplish through the application of the methods of science.

Let us put to rest the notion that there can be no science of living beings or that scientific procedures somehow diminish and degrade the awesomeness of life. The chief characteristic of life forms, as opposed to physical objects, is variation. It is variation that permits evolution, for without variation, there is nothing for natural selection to select. The study of variation may be done in two ways: by study of the unique or by study of the general. In this book, we have examined examples of both, although study of the unique case dominates, to be sure; but what Thorndike, Haggerty, and Hamilton contributed is the importance of general variation. Both ways must be investigated because we cannot know what is unique without knowing what is general. Behavioral science, therefore, proceeds on two fronts: the study of the unusual and the study of the variation characteristic of groups.

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Conservative Virtue Ethics

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre (Review) (Download)

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Intuitionist Deontology

Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle & W. D. Ross (Buy) (Download)

Daniel Kaufman On Intuitionism and Folk Psychology (Video)

Of the Standard of Taste by David Hume (1909) (Essay)

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Absolutist Deontology

The Sources of Normativity by Christine M. Korsgaard (Chapter) (Buy) (Download)

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Absurdism

Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Buy) (Download)

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 by Nick Land (Buy) (Download)

Tiqqun 1: Conscious Organ of The Imaginary Party by Tiqqun (Buy) (Download)

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Liberation Theology

The Selfless Mind; Personality, Consciousness and Nirvana in Early Buddhism by Peter Harvey (Buy) (Download) (Review)

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#ethics #applied ethics #philosophy #virtue ethics #existential ethics #the ethics of ambiguity #veganism #socialism #anarchism #macintyre #saul newman #post-anarchism #liberation theology #deontology #consequentialism #egoism #absurdism

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ishkah · 4 years ago

Text

How to simply explain what veganism is and argue for it

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Script for a two part video series, plus formal syllogisms.

Part One

youtube

Part 2

Coming soon!

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Table of Contents

1. The Vegan Definition 1a. Intro 1b. How to explain what veganism is 1c. Why not other definitions? 1d. What specifically is wrong with other definitions? 1e. Good definitions 1f. Outro

1. The Vegan Definition

1a. Intro

Hello, okay this is going to be the first of two videos, where in this first video I introduce my preferred definition of veganism, explain why I think it’s the best one for advocacy, then in the second video run you through 5 a-mazing arguments for veganism and how best to argue for it. This is mainly for vegans to become better skilled at advocating, but any feedback is more than welcome.

1b. How to explain what veganism is

I define veganism as simply “an animal products boycott.”

I make the point of saying it’s one campaign tactic among many, aimed primarily at achieving the end of animal agriculture.

And that personally I see the principle behind the action as being grounded in the animal rights movement, seeking collective legal rights for animals to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty. In a similar way to how the act of boycotting South African products or the act of boycotting the Montgomery bus company was grounded in a larger civil rights movement.

Other boycotts didn’t have a specific name for the identity one took on when boycotting, the principle for why they boycotted was contained in what it meant to be part of a larger movement e.g. being a civil rights advocate. So I would just encourage people to think of themselves as animal rights advocates first, fighting for the legal protection of animals. Though you could also call yourself an animal liberation advocate fighting to free non-human animals to be able to express their capabilities in managed wildlife habitat or a sanctuary.

As for why someone would arrive at the ethical conclusion to boycott, it could be a million ways, but the three main ethical schools of thought you can draw from are consequentialism, virtue ethics and deontology. I would just be prepared to tailor your arguments to the person you’re standing in front of, as we’ll discuss in the second video. It’s not important for you to know the school you’re arguing from, but I’ll give you them anyway as an introduction to each ethical argument for an animal products boycott.

So, five ways to explain the principle that got you into veganism and what branch of philosophy it may be related to:

Hedonistic Utilitarianism: The principle of not breeding sentient life into the world where you know you will cause more suffering on a global calculus than happiness. Examples: climate change, stress and pain in slaughterhouse than longer happy life in wild with low rates of predation, stress to slaughterhouse workers who are more likely to abuse their family).

Preference Consequentialism: The principle of not breeding sentient life into the world to kill when you know they will have interests to go on living longer than would be profitable. Examples: They have habits for things they’d like to do each day and they show you by their desire not to be loaded onto scary trucks and to a slaughterhouse with screams and smells of death.

Virtue Ethics: The principle of not breeding a sentient life into captivity when you know you could leave room for other animals to enjoy happy flourishing being able to express all their capabilities in wild habitat. Not wanting to parasitically take away life with meaning for low-order pleasure in our hierarchy of needs which we can find elsewhere.

Deontology: The principle of everyone should only act in such a way that it would still be acceptable to them if it were to become universal law. So not breeding sentient life into existence, only to keep them confined, tear families apart and kill them later, as you wouldn’t want it to happen to you.

Nihlist Ethics: The principle that you should be wary of in-authentically acting in a way you don’t believe due to outside social pressures, like that acting un-caringly is necessary to what it means to be a man. So testing out values you were brought up with against new ones as you go and coming to the conclusion that you prefer a society where most have the value of seeing animals flourishing in nature and not in captivity/pain.

1c. Why not use other definitions?

The reason I would encourage people to use the definition “an animal products boycott” and not other definitions is it gets at the root motivation people have for being vegan without being divisive about which ethical system is best.

In 1944 those members of the vegetarian society who were avoiding all use of animal products, created their own vegan society and came up with the word vegan. They did this after a series of debates in which they voiced their concern that we should also be advocating the boycott of the dairy and egg industries.

Now I acknowledge that one problem with defining veganism as an “animal products boycott” is people saying “well would you be okay with hunting wild animals yourself then?” But to that I would answer “implicit in the word boycott is an ethical judgement on the activity that creates the product.”

So, for 99% of people protesting animal farming, it’s going to be hypocritical to go hunting, because you’re desiring to prevent the incentives for the killing from ever happening so you couldn’t then go out and do it yourself. It’s a positive that we get to really easy conceptually tie this to other boycotts where someone boycotting South African products during apartheid wouldn’t feel comfortable with flying over their and joining the police force themselves, more so than in other definitions where you’re just saying you’re abstaining from using the end animal products.

But I am actually fine with my definition being softer on for example subsistence hunters. I’ve got a video on my channel of Penan tribes people in Indonesia explaining how it would be repulsive to them to keep animals in captivity to farm, and I think this is great animal rights advocacy, so again a positive distinction.

So the idea that some tiny 0.001% of people who might boycott animal products, may also feel fine with going out hunting themselves would just be one of a number of fringe groups you already have under many definitions, like neo-nazis desiring to boycott animal products and wanting to commit harms against humans. Which we simply have to denounce or distance ourselves from in our animal rights advocacy anyway.

Another concern people may have is that boycotting sounds like you’re primarily negatively opposed to a thing and trying to reduce your reliance on that thing. But I would argue you have that with every definition and that by creating a distance between the behaviour (veganism) and the principle (animal rights) you allow people to see the action as part of a big tent animal rights movement, where you’re hoping through boycotting, lobbying, starting vegan cafes, food not bombs stalls and foraging groups to create the breathing room necessary for legislation and rewilding where you can get to enjoy a more compassionate local community and see more animals flourishing in wildlife habitat.

To draw attention away from veganism as a political act is to make veganism look simply like an identity one takes on to look cool or be part of a subculture. Whereas people can relate boycott’s to other real world events as great positive coming together moments under a liberation politics. For example car-sharing during the Montgomery bus boycott, students leading the call to stop subsidising Israel and before that South Africa, the widespread boycotting of a reactionary tabloid newspaper in the UK that ran stories saying mass suffocation at a football stadium due to overcrowding and fences were the fans fault. So boycotting to show your real felt ties to the land you stand on. The first boycott was people simply withdrawing their labour from an imperialist landlord in Ireland in a desire to build something greater once he’d left, so I think it is very flexible to positive intention [1]

Now, does this definition leave room for any exceptions to the rule? Well yes in a way, but I would say a positive one, in that it allows for waste animal products to be used if no profit finds its way back to the person who caused the harm. If you can get a supermarket to redirect its 1000 loaves of bread containing whey from going in the dumpster to a food bank, that can only be a benefit to the world.

Also, it doesn’t attempt to include animal entertainment boycotts in what it means to be vegan, and simply leaves that to be included in what it means to be an animal rights advocate. Although it’s so similar one could raise an eyebrow about why someone would boycott animal agriculture and not animal cruelty as entertainment. People already view veganism as simply abstaining from the use of animal products, so we just do have to contend with why awful people like some eco-fascists desire to be vegans and denounce them. To try and pretend that someone boycotting animal products can’t also be an awful person in other ways is wilfully ignorant. In the same way, claiming that ex-vegans could never have been vegan for not having understood the ethical arguments is fallacious and off-putting.

1d. What specifically is wrong with other definitions?

Why not define veganism as reducing suffering which is the consequentialist reason for being vegan? Because ‘reducing suffering’ is too big, too abstract, too idealistic, beyond the capacity of one person to ever achieve, laudable but doomed to failure. Whereas ‘boycotting animal products’ is not. ‘Reducing suffering’ creates the impression of the martyr, the need to live a ridiculously puritan lifestyle, like Jain monks sweeping the floor everywhere they walk. And excludes all other ethical systems.

Why not define veganism as the rule that ‘man should not exploit animal’ which is the deontological reason for being vegan? Because it immediately brings to mind the plenty of ways we can pragmatically rescue animals and improve their circumstances while still less obviously exploitative-ly keeping them captive, e.g. rescuing dogs, chickens or horses. And excludes all other ethical systems.

The debates that lead up to the creation of the vegan society were about the dairy industry. They were raised equally from a concern about well-being and about rights:

Dr. Anna Bonus Kingsford, a member of the Vegetarian Society in 1944 argued for a total boycott of animal products, saying “[the dairy industry] must involve some slaughter I think and some suffering to the cows and calves.”

Why not define veganism as a hodge-podge of the two main ethical systems, consequentialism and deontology, as the modern vegan society tries to do? Because it’s far too convoluted and open to misinterpretation. You get into debates about what does “as far as is possible and practicable” mean, when you could just say veganism is a boycott. If you aren’t capable of participating for being eating disordered for example, that’s ok, you can be ethically on par with or more ethical than a vegan in your own way, but you just aren’t able to participate in the boycott.

1e. Good Definitions

So, In summary, I’ll go over what I think are the best definitions:

What is veganism?

An animal products boycott.

(This is a minimal behavioural commitment, with very little confusion about what it entails. The idea that it’s a protest allows for other priorities to override the idea like the need to take vaccines with egg product, but either way it’s still a strong commitment to a commercial boycott. It’s both the reason the vegan society was created and simply the colloquial understanding of a vegan as ‘a person who does not eat or use animal products’, but leaves room for freeganism.)

And/or…

A way of living which seeks to exclude all use of animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.

(This includes other boycott behaviours like avoiding animals in entertainment, but is vague about whether it entails a weaker or stronger commitment to the act of boycotting itself. Potentially we could move to solely this one definition when we can afford to give more or less equal focus to campaigning against other industries).

What is Animal Rights?

The philosophy which says animals should be granted collective legal rights to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty. With the few exceptions where the law is overridden by right to self-defence or special dispensation from the government for example to practice some scientific testing to cure diseases, as well as breed and keep guide dogs for the blind.

(If a fox kills a rabbit because it’s the only way it can stay strong and pass on it’s genes, it’s part of a wonderfully delicate ecosystem. I have the choice to pick an apple off a tree and enjoy watching the rabbit. So, not wanting to parasitically take away life with instinctual desires to express their high order capabilities for low-order pleasure in our hierarchy of needs which we can find elsewhere.)

What is the Animal Rights Movement?

(Same again, just swapping philosophy for social movement, so…)

A social movement which seeks to gain collective legal rights for animals to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty, etc. Etc.

1f. Outro

Let me know what you think in a comment down below, all the best, peace.

To read the rest of this article click here:

https://activistjourneys.wordpress.com/2020/08/20/how-to-simply-explain-what-veganism-is-and-argue-for-it/

Including:

2. Arguments for Veganism 2a. Intro 2b. General Purpose – Name The Trait 2c. Consequentialist – Marginal cases 2d. Virtue Ethics – Respect for Animal Capabilities 2e. Deontology – The Golden Rule 2f. Nihilist Ethics – Property Rights for Animals 2g. Outro

3. Formal Syllogisms 3a. General Purpose – Name The Trait 3b. Consequentialist – Marginal Cases 3c. Virtue Ethics – Respect for Animal Capabilities 3d. Deontology – The Golden Rule 3e. Nihilist Ethics – Property Rights for Animals

4. References

#vegan #veganism #vegancommunity #animal rights #animal rights advocacy #animal liberation #philosophy #ethics #applied ethics #boycott #campaign #dual power #formal logic #Youtube

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ishkah · 4 years ago

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How To Advocate To Pro-Vegan Leftists (Mock Vaush Debate)

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Full Transcript

[This is the intro to a debate that happened between 2 YouTubers on the topic of veganism and animal rights.

At the 1:10 mins mark Vaush presents an argument, then I jump in to mock debate how I think the conversation could have more ideally gone.]

Vaush: Howdy

AY: So, you currently are not a vegan?

Vaush: That is correct

AY: Now if we replaced all the animals in the factory farms with humans you wouldn’t say it’s morally wrong…

Vaush: We can skip a few steps, I include animals in my ethical system, I agree that meat-eating eating is morally unjustifiable. I’m not… “believes meat-eating is fine,” I’m… “knows veganism is correct and is too much of a moral hypocrite to go forward with it.”

AY: Oh ok, well honestly I don’t know how much I have to say to you then, I’m not like a psychologist who can work your brain.

Vaush: Yeah, no, what we do is unironically monstrous with the factory farming.

My argument here, and this is one of defending hypocrisy, so I recognize my bias in this respect, but the argument I would have here is comparable to the argument I would make for not for example telling people to not buy t-shirts that were made in China. It’s that we live in a system of such unfathomably inhuman production and it’s so convenient to adhere to the ethical modes of production in which we live, that I don’t know if I can condemn a person ethically on an individual level for participating in systems that are so much larger than them. You know?

Ishkah: Okay I can answer that, so it’s important to acknowledge where someone is either unaware of or incapable of following a vegan lifestyle, that they are not individually responsible for the act of eating meat, even though the act itself is still unethical.

But we should be wary of extending that lack of individual responsibility away from extreme situations like being stranded on a desert island, to today where a lot of industry happens to be unethical.

Because even if we grant there’s a better system we can move to such that all consumption under capitalism currently is unethical, there exists a scale of immorality such that we hope once people become aware of particularly bad industries, they will get on board with living a low-impact vegan lifestyle.

So there are two things:

There’s the potential harm in playing down the effectiveness of the vegan boycott because a really important positive attribute to acknowledge about this lifestyle is it’s a broad food category that in its whole food form is easy to distinguish on the shelf. Therefore experimenting with the diet doesn’t need to feel like a burden to take on board in the same way researching and seeking out conflict-free minerals in everything you buy can be for example.

The potential harm in exaggerating exceptions to the rule of individual responsibility.

But yeah you accept buying animal products is unethical, it’s just a case of some of the individual responsibility gets shared more evenly with the collective society for say voting parties that maintain the status quo, which in turn alienates/socially conditions you into not having full agency.

Vaush: Yes, I agree that meat-eating is morally unjustifiable. I’m not… “believes meat-eating is fine,” I’m… “knows veganism is correct and is too much of a moral hypocrite to go forward with it.”

Ishkah: Cool, so yeah, you just have a critique of where activists put their energy?

Vaush: Yes, I just think advocacy is more effective when it’s being done outside of the demand by consumers, I don’t think there’s any likelihood or any possibility of getting the vast majority of people off of their meat diets.

Ishkah: Well I would say existing as a vegan in the world is this really positive step to showing your seriousness and dedication you’re willing to put in, so being better able to find each other and get organized, for example, people’s willingness to start a food not bombs stall or guerrilla garden.

Secondly, It’s not the case that we need to win over everyone to veganism in order to make a massive change, if a large enough minority can create breathing room for legislation and food co-ops on the way to a vegan world, I do think it’s both an obligation to attempt it and to make the transition easier saving humans and wildlife. As well as driving less, buying second-hand, etc.

Thirdly, boycotts have the effect of bringing communities together under a liberation politics. For example, car-sharing during the Montgomery bus boycott, students leading the call to stop subsidizing Israel, and before that South Africa, the widespread boycotting of a reactionary tabloid newspaper in the UK that ran stories saying mass suffocation at a football stadium due to overcrowding and fences were the fans fault. So boycotting to show your real felt ties to the land you stand on as necessary optics for seriousness on the left.

And finally, I’d just say there’s a way you could take this concern for shifting the blame onto individuals too far the other way, in that I think we’d agree if someone was obscenely rich and spent all their money on luxury items, never donating to campaigns or charities that we would need to bring about a better society you would think badly of this person because they would be displaying the same indifferent behavior you’d expect of someone who say participated in systemic racism, for example excluding your generationally low-income black friend with no car from playing on your sports team by never seeing it as your responsibility to offer to drive to pick them up so they can join in.

Vaush: Yes. Look forward to discussing this more.

Ishkah: Great, also if you could look into some animal rights news stories to cover on your stream, I do think there’s a lot of damning political stories which would do the job of bringing people further left as well as hopefully towards veganism. I’ll leave links to some in the description you can take a look at.

Alright, take care.

Vaush: Yes. Have a good one.

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Further Reading

Trump Approves $16 Billion Coronavirus Bailout for Meat and Dairy

Abattoir workers are the forgotten frontline victims at the heart of this crisis – and now they’re spreading coronavirus

A group of indigenous Tahltan people blockading a road to try to reverse over-hunting on their territory

#vaush #vaushv #vegan #veganism #animal rights #animal liberation #veganarchism #vegan leftist #vegan socialist #boycott #liberation #oppression #Youtube

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ishkah · 4 years ago

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Captain Hotknives Greatest Hits

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I created an album of for me what are Chris’s (Captain Hotknives) greatest hits, through finding what I think are the best quality versions out there of 13 well-loved comedy songs, plus mixing and matching a few different versions together.

As well I edited together 3 volumes of folk songs, instrumentals & bonus tracks.

Finally, I copied the automatic transcripts, cleaned them up into lyrics pages and I'm working on building it into an illustrated sleeve notes zine which will contain lyrics, descriptions & more.

Click the links below to see:

Captain Hotknives Greatest Hits on YouTube and available to download on archive.org & bandcamp including:

Vol.1 Comedy Songs

Vol.2 Folk Songs

Vol.3 Instrumentals

Vol.4 Bonus CD

Sleeve Notes Zine - Onscreen Viewing & Print Ready

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Track List

Vol.1 Comedy Songs

Mushrooms

Prejudiced Wildlife

Scuse Me Mate

Glue

The Pigeons Told Me To Shoplift

One Good Thing About Buckfast

Johnny Depp Wi’ Me Bird

Hotknives Are Good For You

I Skanked Me Nanna

Anti-Gravity Cats

I'm In An Anarchist Squat Punk Band

Bob the Amazing Sheepdog

I Hate Babies

Vol.2 Folk Songs

Travelling Free

Hustlers Lament

Into The Valley Of The Timber Wolves

Let The Sorrow Come

Smugglers Bold

Out Of Sight

Vol.3 Instrumentals

Say Farewell

Demented Pixie Music

Manchego

Five Pound Junkie Shades

Walking Through Morecambe

Banjoy Division

Mollys Song

Into The Valley Of The Timberwolves (Instrumental)

Riff for Paco

All The Kings Are Gone

Lying To Your Mum

Coming Down Slow

Vol.4 Bonus CD - Stand Up, Sketches & Stories

Soundchecks & Singbacks

Day 3604 In The Big Tory Workhouse

Steward Skit

Electric Distortion

The Light Side Of Psychosis

The Story of Captain Hotknives

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Rank Your Favourite Captain Hotknives Songs In Order

Let me know your favorite comedy songs and if it's wildly different from the greatest hits list I've collated I can rejig the list of downloads:

Take the poll

View the results

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Captain Hotknives’ Platforms

Watch his new videos on Facebook & YouTube

Donate to him on Bandcamp.

And if you want to book him for a gig his email is [email protected]

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Further Reading

Captain Hotknives Discography

Call out for a collective songwriting tribute to Captain Hotknives

Captain Hotknives Comedy Song Analysis

Comedy Archive Spreadsheet

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#captain hotknives #standup #stand up comedy #bluegrass #gypsy jazz #folk punk #northern england #working class #working class comedy #anarchist music #anarchist comedy #vagabond #vagabonds #punk #punks #animal liberation #veganarchist #hallucinogenics

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ishkah · 4 years ago

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The Unfinished Autobiography of Aileen Wuornos

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Short Summary

A letter correspondence over many years between Aileen and her best friend from childhood Dawn was collated into a book, in the order the letters were sent.

Mixed into the letters were long essays about her life on the road which she asked Dawn to keep safe encase she ever wrote enough that she could start knocking it into an autobiography.

As I was reading it, I found her experiences of the time she lived through so fascinating that I wanted to save each one and see it in perspective to her other memories in the timeline of her life.

So that’s what I’ve done here. And if it’s useful in the future to anyone’s creative pursuits, like writing non-fiction plays or graphic novels, essay reflections on her life, the 70s, or even fictional stories with characters based on Aileen, then all the better.

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Download

Click the hyperlinks below to see The Unfinished Autobiography of Aileen Wuornos:

On Screen Viewing — Portrait

On Screen Viewing — Landscape

Print Ready — Pamphlet

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Support the workers who made this possible

Donate to Dawn & Dave Botkins directly for Dawn’s mental health support of Aileen from childhood to the end & her husband Dave’s efforts in scanning and organizing all the letters and photographs: [Hopefully soon to be added]

Buy a new hard-copy of Dear Dawn to monetarily support the editors and publishers for getting it into print and help justify all the workers they paid to help them along the way, like agents and essayists who contributed to the forward: https://softskull.com/dd-product/dear-dawn/

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Longer Summary

I first discovered Aileen’s story through Nick Broomfield’s documentary ‘The Life And Death Of A Serial Killer’. Which gave an in-depth look into the tortured childhood she came from.

The myopic reason it resonated with me is the very tenuous comparison I saw between myself and Aileen, in that she had set off hitchhiking and began living on communes since the age of 15 with the hope of doing some psychological healing from the circle she was stuck moving in in Troy, Michigan, where she grew up.

And that this was a very romanticized road to take at the time, although I don’t think Aileen bought into all of that, as she was simply homeless from the age of 13, and traveling further afield was a nice break from relying on friends in Troy. But, she loved the hippie music of the era and cherished every commune she stayed at for the people who attempted a new more compassionate way of relating to one another.

So for me, that was activist circles, and it left me with the understanding that you don’t get a choice in the strange situational reasons that different people will be alienated from society enough to join this or that campaign, but you can make the best of the journey all the same.

I’ll include a forward by Hunter S. Thompson on the hippie counter-culture for this reason anyway. Then the rest is almost all Aileen, with just a few excerpts from interviews in the documentary.

Finally here are Aileen’s words on her attempts to write this autobiography from jail:

This is being done like Sound off. But of course like I said, real brief, hitting area’s most important. Like looks and character, on Mom, Dad, Lori, Barry, Keith, then to me, and the life I lead. That’s going to be really hard to be brief. You know how much I’ve seen?! Geez! But, I’ll get through. And must, before I should die soon.

I am really close to God. Read the Bible three times all the way through. And even in my young and road days, I got into God (Jesus) and my heart was as good then it as it is now. Even though I became a pro in being a prostitute I still believed on the road anyway, and always willing to give a helping hand to anyone, even “strangers” because of my experiences from my young days and how I was treated. I cannot elaborate how many times sex was forced upon me, but when I do get some time down the road to get a book out it is going to be about my life, not these crimes. And how people should NOT treat each other like this.

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Disclaimers

Putting this together is not an endorsement of Aileen’s views or actions, she was failed by society and as a result was a danger to that society in return. And even though reading stories of her beating up a homophobe or escaping juvenile detention is heartwarming, the way in which she was a danger was by no means always good. She killed for money, was a hateful racist, a controlling abusive partner, and abused animals through neglect.

So, bear all that in mind when you’re reading & obviously be very skeptical of whether some of the claimed facts & narratives are even true.

I’m not claiming to own the copyright or seeking to earn money from these texts.

I grammar and spell corrected it, as Aileen was not very literate, it would have been a torturous read otherwise for many. But, if you want to see the letters preserved with their original spelling, you can simply read the book Dear Dawn.

And if you’re simply curious to cross-reference where a specific paragraph from a story fit into its original letter, you can copy a rare word or phrase, pull up an e-book of Dear Dawn, hit Ctrl+F, and paste to see.

There are undoubtedly more spelling and grammar errors that could do with correcting, plus excerpts and pictures added. If you want to help towards an improved 2nd edition, you can make corrections additions directly on this google doc, and/or email me at [email protected].

Finally, I don’t know what genre this would fall into, but I think it’s fairly close to arriving at what her autobiography might have looked like, had she desired to or been mentally well enough to finish filling in key moments, with a ghostwriter to help. So, unfinished memoir or biography maybe? You decide.

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Further Reading

Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm, and Transformation (2021) by Kimberly Dark (available to pre-order)

The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys (2003) by Julie Bindel & Harriet Wistrich (Bindel is a TERF, but it’s well worth getting the book used)

Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1976) by Hunter S. Thompson

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ishkah · 4 years ago

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Beyond Compassion and Humanity; Justice for Non-human Animals by Martha Nussbaum

This is a great essay vegans can draw on for a virtue ethics answer to the question of why do we hold the principle that it's almost always wrong to breed sentient life into captivity?

So for myself and this strain of virtue ethicists it would be because you know you could leave room for other animals to enjoy happy flourishing, being able to express all their capabilities in wild habitat.

Therefore not wanting to parasitically take away life with meaning for low-order pleasure in our hierarchy of needs which we can find elsewhere.

The distinction between this philosophy and consequentialism would simply be if you wished to act this way because fundimentally it’s about who you want to be and who you want to let animal be:

Counter-intuitively the author does still cling to a hedonistic view of the right to take life, but hopefully not for much longer:

If animals were really killed in a painless fashion, after a healthy and free-ranging life, what then? Killings of extremely young animals would still be problematic, but it seems unclear that the balance of considerations supports a complete ban on killings for food.

BEYOND “COMPASSION AND HUMANITY”

Justice for Non-human Animals

MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals… The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case. I shall not attempt to explain these considered beliefs. They are outside the scope of the theory of justice, and it does not seem possible to extend the contract doctrine so as to include them in a natural way.

—JOHN RAWLS, A Theory of Justice

In conclusion, we hold that circus animals…are housed in cramped cages, subjected to fear, hunger, pain, not to mention the undignified way of life they have to live, with no respite and the impugned notification has been issued in conformity with the…values of human life, [and] philosophy of the Constitution… Though not homo-sapiens [sic], they are also beings entitled to dignified existence and humane treatment sans cruelty and torture… Therefore, it is not only our fundamental duty to show compassion to our animal friends, but also to recognise and protect their rights…If humans are entitled to fundamental rights, why not animals?

—NAIR V. UNION OF INDIA, Kerala High Court, June 2000

“BEINGS ENTITLED TO DIGNIFIED EXISTENCE”

In 55 B.C. the Roman leader Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants. Surrounded in the arena, the animals perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, they then ―entreated the crowd, trying to win their compassion with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation.‖ The audience, moved to pity and anger by their plight, rose to curse Pompey, feeling, writes Cicero, that the elephants had a relation of commonality (societas) with the human race. [1]

We humans share a world and its scarce resources with other intelligent creatures. These creatures are capable of dignified existence, as the Kerala High Court says. It is difficult to know precisely what we mean by that phrase, but it is rather clear what it does not mean: the conditions of the circus animals in the case, squeezed into cramped, filthy cages, starved, terrorized, and beaten, given only the minimal care that would make them presentable in the ring the following day. The fact that humans act in ways that deny animals a dignified existence appears to be an issue of justice, and an urgent one, although we shall have to say more to those who would deny this claim. There is no obvious reason why notions of basic justice, entitlement, and law cannot be extended across the species barrier, as the Indian court boldly does.

Before we can perform this extension with any hope of success, however, we need to get clear about what theoretical approach is likely to prove most adequate. I shall argue that the capabilities approach as I have developed it—an approach to issues of basic justice and entitlement and to the making of fundamental political principles [2] —provides better theoretical guidance in this area than that supplied by contractarian and utilitarian approaches to the question of animal entitlements, because it is capable of recognizing a wide range of types of animal dignity, and of corresponding needs for flourishing.

KANTIAN CONTRACTARIANISM: INDIRECT DUTIES, DUTIES OF COMPASSION

Kant’s own view about animals is very unpromising. He argues that all duties to animals are merely indirect duties to humanity, in that (as he believes) cruel or kind treatment of animals strengthens tendencies to behave in similar fashion to humans. Thus he rests the case for decent treatment of animals on a fragile empirical claim about psychology. He cannot conceive that beings who (in his view) lack self-consciousness and the capacity for moral reciprocity could possibly be objects of moral duty. More generally, he cannot see that such a being can have dignity, an intrinsic worth.

One may, however, be a contractarian—and indeed, in some sense a Kantian— without espousing these narrow views. John Rawls insists that we have direct moral duties to animals, which he calls ―duties of compassion and humanity. [3] But for Rawls these are not issues of justice, and he is explicit that the contract doctrine cannot be extended to deal with these issues, because animals lack those properties of human beings ―in virtue of which they are to be treated in accordance with the principles of justice‖ (TJ 504). Only moral persons, defined with reference to the ―two moral powers,‖ are subjects of justice.

To some extent, Rawls is led to this conclusion by his Kantian conception of the person, which places great emphasis on rationality and the capacity for moral choice. But it is likely that the very structure of his contractarianism would require such a conclusion, even in the absence of that heavy commitment to rationality. The whole idea of a bargain or contract involving both humans and non-human animals is fantastic, suggesting no clear scenario that would assist our thinking. Although Rawls’s Original Position, like the state of nature in earlier contractarian theories, [4] is not supposed to be an actual historical situation, it is supposed to be a coherent fiction that can help us think well. This means that it has to have realism, at least, concerning the powers and needs of the parties and their basic circumstances. There is no comparable fiction about our decision to make a deal with other animals that would be similarly coherent and helpful. Although we share a world of scarce resources with animals, and although there is in a sense a state of rivalry among species that is comparable to the rivalry in the state of nature, the asymmetry of power between humans and non-human animals is too great to imagine the bargain as a real bargain. Nor can we imagine that the bargain would actually be for mutual advantage, for if we want to protect ourselves from the incursions of wild animals, we can just kill them, as we do. Thus, the Rawlsian condition that no one party to the contract is strong enough to dominate or kill all the others is not met. Thus Rawls’s omission of animals from the theory of justice is deeply woven into the very idea of grounding principles of justice on a bargain struck for mutual advantage (on fair terms) out of a situation of rough equality.

To put it another way, all contractualist views conflate two questions, which might have been kept distinct: Who frames the principles? And for whom are the principles framed? That is how rationality ends up being a criterion of membership in the moral community: because the procedure imagines that people are choosing principles for themselves. But one might imagine things differently, including in the group for whom principles of justice are included many creatures who do not and could not participate in the framing.

We have not yet shown, however, that Rawls’s conclusion is wrong. I have said that the cruel and oppressive treatment of animals raises issues of justice, but I have not really defended that claim against the Rawlsian alternative. What exactly does it mean to say that these are issues of justice, rather than issues of ―compassion and humanity? The emotion of compassion involves the thought that another creature is suffering significantly, and is not (or not mostly) to blame for that suffering. [5] It does not involve the thought that someone is to blame for that suffering. One may have compassion for the victim of a crime, but one may also have compassion for someone who is dying from disease (in a situation where that vulnerability to disease is nobody’s fault). ―Humanity I take to be a similar idea. So compassion omits the essential element of blame for wrongdoing. That is the first problem. But suppose we add that element, saying that duties of compassion involve the thought that it is wrong to cause animals suffering. That is, a duty of compassion would not be just a duty to have compassion, but a duty, as a result of one’s compassion, to refrain from acts that cause the suffering that occasions the compassion. I believe that Rawls would make this addition, although he certainly does not tell us what he takes duties of compassion to be. What is at stake, further, in the decision to say that the mistreatment of animals is not just morally wrong, but morally wrong in a special way, raising questions of justice?

This is a hard question to answer, since justice is a much-disputed notion, and there are many types of justice, political, ethical, and so forth. But it seems that what we most typically mean when we call a bad act unjust is that the creature injured by that act has an entitlement not to be treated in that way, and an entitlement of a particularly urgent or basic type (since we do not believe that all instances of unkindness, thoughtlessness, and so forth are instances of injustice, even if we do believe that people have a right to be treated kindly, and so on). The sphere of justice is the sphere of basic entitlements. When I say that the mistreatment of animals is unjust, I mean to say not only that it is wrong of us to treat them in that way, but also that they have a right, a moral entitlement, not to be treated in that way. It is unfair to them. I believe that thinking of animals as active beings who have a good and who are entitled to pursue it naturally leads us to see important damages done to them as unjust. What is lacking in Rawls’s account, as in Kant’s (though more subtly) is the sense of the animal itself as an agent and a subject, a creature in interaction with whom we live. As we shall see, the capabilities approach does treat animals as agents seeking a flourishing existence; this basic conception, I believe, is one of its greatest strengths.

UTILITARIANISM AND ANIMAL FLOURISHING

Utilitarianism has contributed more than any other ethical theory to the recognition of animal entitlements. Both Bentham and Mill in their time and Peter Singer in our own have courageously taken the lead in freeing ethical thought from the shackles of a narrow species-centered conception of worth and entitlement. No doubt this achievement was connected with the founders’ general radicalism and their skepticism about conventional morality, their willingness to follow the ethical argument wherever it leads. These remain very great virtues in the utilitarian position. Nor does utilitarianism make the mistake of running together the question “who receives justice?” With the question “who frames the principles of justice?” Justice is sought for all sentient beings, many of whom cannot participate in the framing of principles.

Thus it is in a spirit of alliance that those concerned with animal entitlements might address a few criticisms to the utilitarian view. There are some difficulties with the utilitarian view, in both of its forms. As Bernard Williams and Amartya Sen usefully analyze the utilitarian position, it has three independent elements: consequentialism (the right choice is the one that produces the best overall consequences), sum-ranking (the utilities of different people are combined by adding them together to produce a single total), and hedonism, or some other substantive theory of the good (such as preference satisfaction). [6] Consequentialism by itself causes the fewest difficulties, since one may always adjust the account of well-being, or the good, in consequentialism so as to admit many important things that utilitarians typically do not make salient: plural and heterogeneous goods, the protection of rights, even personal commitments or agent-centred goods. More or less any moral theory can be consequentialized, that is, put in a form where the matters valued by that theory appear in the account of consequences to be produced. [7] Although I do have some doubts about a comprehensive consequentialism as the best basis for political principles in a pluralistic liberal society, I shall not comment on them at present, but shall turn to the more evidently problematic aspects of the utilitarian view. [8]

Let us next consider the utilitarian commitment to aggregation, or what is called ―sum-ranking. Views that measure principles of justice by the outcome they produce need not simply add all the relevant goods together. They may weight them in other ways. For example, one may insist that each and every person has an indefeasible entitlement to come up above a threshold on certain key goods. In addition, a view may, like Rawls’s view, focus particularly on the situation of the least well off, refusing to permit inequalities that do not raise that person’s position. These ways of considering well-being insist on treating people as ends: They refuse to allow some people’s extremely high well-being to be purchased, so to speak, through other people’s disadvantage. Even the welfare of society as a whole does not lead us to violate an individual, as Rawls says.

Utilitarianism notoriously refuses such insistence on the separateness and inviolability of persons. Because it is committed to the sum-ranking of all relevant pleasures and pains (or preference satisfactions and frustrations), it has no way of ruling out in advance results that are extremely harsh toward a given class or group. Slavery, the lifelong subordination of some to others, the extremely cruel treatment of some humans or of non-human animals—none of this is ruled out by the theory’s core conception of justice, which treats all satisfactions as fungible in a single system. Such results will be ruled out, if at all, by empirical considerations regarding total or average well-being. These questions are notoriously indeterminate (especially when the number of individuals who will be born is also unclear, a point I shall take up later). Even if they were not, it seems that the best reason to be against slavery, torture, and lifelong subordination is a reason of justice, not an empirical calculation of total or average well-being. Moreover, if we focus on preference satisfaction, we must confront the problem of adaptive preferences. For while some ways of treating people badly always cause pain (torture, starvation), there are ways of subordinating people that creep into their very desires, making allies out of the oppressed. Animals too can learn submissive or fear-induced preferences. Martin Seligman’s experiments, for example, show that dogs who have been conditioned into a mental state of learned helplessness have immense difficulty learning to initiate voluntary movement, if they can ever do so. [9]

There are also problems inherent in the views of the good most prevalent within utilitarianism: hedonism (Bentham) and preference satisfaction (Singer). Pleasure is a notoriously elusive notion. Is it a single feeling, varying only in intensity and duration, or are the different pleasures as qualitatively distinct as the activities with which they are associated? Mill, following Aristotle, believed the latter, but if we once grant that point, we are looking at a view that is very different from standard utilitarianism, which is firmly wedded to the homogeneity of good. [10]

Such a commitment looks like an especially grave error when we consider basic political principles. For each basic entitlement is its own thing, and is not bought off, so to speak, by even a very large amount of another entitlement. Suppose we say to a citizen: We will take away your free speech on Tuesdays between 3 and 4P.M., but in return, we will give you, every single day, a double amount of basic welfare and health care support. This is just the wrong picture of basic political entitlements. What is being said when we make a certain entitlement basic is that it is important always and for everyone, as a matter of basic justice. The only way to make that point sufficiently clearly is to preserve the qualitative separateness of each distinct element within our list of basic entitlements.

Once we ask the hedonist to admit plural goods, not commensurable on a single quantitative scale, it is natural to ask, further, whether pleasure and pain are the only things we ought to be looking at. Even if one thinks of pleasure as closely linked to activity, and not simply as a passive sensation, making it the sole end leaves out much of the value we attach to activities of various types. There seem to be valuable things in an animal’s life other than pleasure, such as free movement and physical achievement, and also altruistic sacrifice for kin and group. The grief of an animal for a dead child or parent, or the suffering of a human friend, also seem to be valuable, a sign of attachments that are intrinsically good. There are also bad pleasures, including some of the pleasures of the circus audience—and it is unclear whether such pleasures should even count positively in the social calculus. Some pleasures of animals in harming other animals may also be bad in this way.

Does preference utilitarianism do better? We have already identified some problems, including the problem of misinformed or malicious preferences and that of adaptive (submissive) preferences. Singer’s preference utilitarianism, moreover, defining preference in terms of conscious awareness, has no room for deprivations that never register in the animal’s consciousness.

But of course animals raised under bad conditions can’t imagine the better way of life they have never known, and so the fact that they are not living a more flourishing life will not figure in their awareness. They may still feel pain, and this the utilitarian can consider. What the view cannot consider is all the deprivation of valuable life activity that they do not feel.

Finally, all utilitarian views are highly vulnerable on the question of numbers. The meat industry brings countless animals into the world who would never have existed but for that. For Singer, these births of new animals are not by themselves a bad thing: Indeed, we can expect new births to add to the total of social utility, from which we would then subtract the pain such animals suffer. It is unclear where this calculation would come out. Apart from this question of indeterminacy, it seems unclear that we should even say that these births of new animals are a good thing, if the animals are brought into the world only as tools of human rapacity.

So utilitarianism has great merits, but also great problems.

TYPES OF DIGNITY, TYPES OF FLOURISHING: EXTENDING THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH

The capabilities approach in its current form starts from the notion of human dignity and a life worthy of it. But I shall now argue that it can be extended to provide a more adequate basis for animal entitlements than the other two theories under consideration. The basic moral intuition behind the approach concerns the dignity of a form of life that possesses both deep needs and abilities; its basic goal is to address the need for a rich plurality of life activities. With Aristotle and Marx, the approach has insisted that there is waste and tragedy when a living creature has the innate, or ―basic,‖ capability for some functions that are evaluated as important and good, but never gets the opportunity to perform those functions. Failures to educate women, failures to provide adequate health care, failures to extend the freedoms of speech and conscience to all citizens—all these are treated as causing a kind of premature death, the death of a form of flourishing that has been judged to be worthy of respect and wonder. The idea that a human being should have a chance to flourish in its own way, provided it does no harm to others, is thus very deep in the account the capabilities approach gives of the justification of basic political entitlements.

The species norm is evaluative, as I have insisted; it does not simply read off norms from the way nature actually is. The difficult questions this valuational exercise raises for the case of non-human animals will be discussed in the following section. But once we have judged that a central human power is one of the good ones, one of the ones whose flourishing defines the good of the creature, we have a strong moral reason for promoting its flourishing and removing obstacles to it.

Dignity and Wonder: The Intuitive Starting Point

The same attitude to natural powers that guides the approach in the case of human beings guides it in the case of all forms of life. For there is a more general attitude behind the respect we have for human powers, and it is very different from the type of respect that animates Kantian ethics. For Kant, only humanity and rationality are worthy of respect and wonder; the rest of nature is just a set of tools. The capabilities approach judges instead, with the biologist Aristotle (who criticized his students’ disdain for the study of animals), that there is something wonderful and wonder-inspiring in all the complex forms of animal life.

Aristotle’s scientific spirit is not the whole of what the capabilities approach embodies, for we need, in addition, an ethical concern that the functions of life not be impeded, that the dignity of living organisms not be violated. And yet, if we feel wonder looking at a complex organism, that wonder at least suggests the idea that it is good for that being to flourish as the kind of thing it is. And this idea is next door to the ethical judgment that it is wrong when the flourishing of a creature is blocked by the harmful agency of another. That more complex idea lies at the heart of the capabilities approach.

So I believe that the capabilities approach is well placed, intuitively, to go beyond both contractarian and utilitarian views. It goes beyond the contractarian view in its starting point, a basic wonder at living beings, and a wish for their flourishing and for a world in which creatures of many types flourish. It goes beyond the intuitive starting point of utilitarianism because it takes an interest not just in pleasure and pain, but in complex forms of life. It wants to see each thing flourish as the sort of thing it is.

By Whom and for Whom? The Purposes of Social Cooperation

For a contractarian, as we have seen, the question ―Who makes the laws and principles? is treated as having, necessarily, the same answer as the question ―For whom are the laws and principles made? That conflation is dictated by the theory’s account of the purposes of social cooperation. But there is obviously no reason at all why these two questions should be put together in this way. The capabilities approach, as so far developed for the human case, looks at the world and asks how to arrange that justice be done in it. Justice is among the intrinsic ends that it pursues. Its parties are imagined looking at all the brutality and misery, the goodness and kindness of the world and trying to think how to make a world in which a core group of very important entitlements, inherent in the notion of human dignity, will be protected. Because they look at the whole of the human world, not just people roughly equal to themselves, they are able to be concerned directly and non-derivatively, as we saw, with the good of the mentally disabled. This feature makes it easy to extend the approach to include human-animal relations.

Let us now begin the extension. The purpose of social cooperation, by analogy and extension, ought to be to live decently together in a world in which many species try to flourish. (Cooperation itself will now assume multiple and complex forms.) The general aim of the capabilities approach in charting political principles to shape the human-animal relationship would be, following the intuitive ideas of the theory, that no animal should be cut off from the chance at a flourishing life and that all animals should enjoy certain positive opportunities to flourish. With due respect for a world that contains many forms of life, we attend with ethical concern to each characteristic type of flourishing and strive that it not be cut off or fruitless.

Such an approach seems superior to contractarianism because it contains direct obligations of justice to animals; it does not make these derivative from or posterior to the duties we have to fellow humans, and it is able to recognize that animals are subjects who have entitlements to flourishing and who thus are subjects of justice, not just objects of compassion. It is superior to utilitarianism because it respects each individual creature, refusing to aggregate the goods of different lives and types of lives. No creature is being used as a means to the ends of others, or of society as a whole. The capabilities approach also refuses to aggregate across the diverse constituents of each life and type of life. Thus, unlike utilitarianism, it can keep in focus the fact that each species has a different form of life and different ends; moreover, within a given species, each life has multiple and heterogeneous ends.

How Comprehensive?

In the human case, the capabilities approach does not operate with a fully comprehensive conception of the good, because of the respect it has for the diverse ways in which people choose to live their lives in a pluralistic society. It aims at securing some core entitlements that are held to be implicit in the idea of a life with dignity, but it aims at capability, not functioning, and it focuses on a small list. In the case of human-animal relations, the need for restraint is even more acute, since animals will not in fact be participating directly in the framing of political principles, and thus they cannot revise them over time should they prove inadequate.

And yet there is a countervailing consideration: Human beings affect animals’ opportunities for flourishing pervasively, and it is hard to think of a species that one could simply leave alone to flourish in its own way. The human species dominates the other species in a way that no human individual or nation has ever dominated other humans. Respect for other species’ opportunities for flourishing suggests, then, that human law must include robust, positive political commitments to the protection of animals, even though, had human beings not so pervasively interfered with animals’ ways of life, the most respectful course might have been simply to leave them alone, living the lives that they make for themselves.

The Species and the Individual

What should the focus of these commitments be? It seems that here, as in the human case, the focus should be the individual creature. The capabilities approach attaches no importance to increased numbers as such; its focus is on the well-being of existing creatures and the harm that is done to them when their powers are blighted.

As for the continuation of species, this would have little moral weight as a consideration of justice (though it might have aesthetic significance or some other sort of ethical significance), if species were just becoming extinct because of factors having nothing to do with human action that affects individual creatures. But species are becoming extinct because human beings are killing their members and damaging their natural environments. Thus, damage to species occurs through damage to individuals, and this individual damage should be the focus of ethical concern within the capabilities approach.

Do Levels of Complexity Matter?

Almost all ethical views of animal entitlements hold that there are morally relevant distinctions among forms of life. Killing a mosquito is not the same sort of thing as killing a chimpanzee. But the question is: What sort of difference is relevant for basic justice? Singer, following Bentham, puts the issue in terms of sentience. Animals of many kinds can suffer bodily pain, and it is always bad to cause pain to a sentient being. If there are non-sentient or barely sentient animals—and it appears that crustaceans, mollusks, sponges, and the other creatures Aristotle called ―stationary animals‖ are such creatures—there is either no harm or only a trivial harm done in killing them. Among the sentient creatures, moreover, there are some who can suffer additional harms through their cognitive capacity: A few animals can foresee and mind their own deaths, and others will have conscious, sentient interests in continuing to live that are frustrated by death. The painless killing of an animal that does not foresee its own death or take a conscious interest in the continuation of its life is, for Singer and Bentham, not bad, for all badness, for them, consists in the frustration of interests, understood as forms of conscious awareness. [11] Singer is not, then, saying that some animals are inherently more worthy of esteem than others. He is simply saying that, if we agree with him that all harms reside in sentience, the creature’s form of life limits the conditions under which it can actually suffer harm.

Similarly, James Rachels, whose view does not focus on sentience alone, holds that the level of complexity of a creature affects what can be a harm for it. [12] What is relevant to the harm of pain is sentience; what is relevant to the harm of a specific type of pain is a specific type of sentience (e.g., the ability to imagine one’s own death). What is relevant to the harm of diminished freedom is a capacity for freedom or autonomy. It would make no sense to complain that a worm is being deprived of autonomy, or a rabbit of the right to vote.

What should the capabilities approach say about this issue? It seems to me that it should not follow Aristotle in saying that there is a natural ranking of forms of life, some being intrinsically more worthy of support and wonder than others. That consideration might have evaluative significance of some other kind, but it seems dubious that it should affect questions of basic justice.

Rachels’s view offers good guidance here. Because the capabilities approach finds ethical significance in the flourishing of basic (innate) capabilities—those that are evaluated as both good and central (see the section on evaluating animal capabilities)—it will also find harm in the thwarting or blighting of those capabilities. More complex forms of life have more and more complex capabilities to be blighted, so they can suffer more and different types of harm. Level of life is relevant not because it gives different species differential worth per se, but because the type and degree of harm a creature can suffer varies with its form of life.

At the same time, I believe that the capabilities approach should admit the wisdom in utilitarianism. Sentience is not the only thing that matters for basic justice, but it seems plausible to consider sentience a threshold condition for membership in the community of beings who have entitlements based on justice. Thus, killing a sponge does not seem to be a matter of basic justice.

Does the Species Matter?

For the utilitarians, and for Rachels, the species to which a creature belongs has no moral relevance. All that is morally relevant are the capacities of the individual creature: Rachels calls this view ―moral individualism.‖ Utilitarian writers are fond of comparing apes to young children and to mentally disabled humans. The capabilities approach, by contrast, with its talk of characteristic functioning and forms of life, seems to attach some significance to species membership as such. What type of significance is this?

We should admit that there is much to be learned from reflection on the continuum of life. Capacities do crisscross and overlap; a chimpanzee may have more capacity for empathy and perspectival thinking than a very young child or an older autistic child. And capacities that humans sometimes arrogantly claim for themselves alone are found very widely in nature. But it seems wrong to conclude from such facts that species membership is morally and politically irrelevant. A mentally disabled child is actually very different from a chimpanzee, though in certain respects some of her capacities may be comparable. Such a child’s life is tragic in a way that the life of a chimpanzee is not tragic: She is cut off from forms of flourishing that, but for the disability, she might have had, disabilities that it is the job of science to prevent or cure, wherever that is possible. There is something blighted and disharmonious in her life, whereas the life of a chimpanzee may be perfectly flourishing. Her social and political functioning is threatened by these disabilities, in a way that the normal functioning of a chimpanzee in the community of chimpanzees is not threatened by its cognitive endowment.

All this is relevant when we consider issues of basic justice. For a child born with Down syndrome, it is crucial that the political culture in which he lives make a big effort to extend to him the fullest benefits of citizenship he can attain, through health benefits, education, and the reeducation of the public culture. That is so because he can only flourish as a human being. He has no option of flourishing as a happy chimpanzee. For a chimpanzee, on the other hand, it seems to me that expensive efforts to teach language, while interesting and revealing, are not matters of basic justice. A chimpanzee flourishes in its own way, communicating with its own community in a perfectly adequate manner that has gone on for ages.

In short, the species norm (duly evaluated) tells us what the appropriate benchmark is for judging whether a given creature has decent opportunities for flourishing.

EVALUATING ANIMAL CAPABILITIES: NO NATURE WORSHIP

In the human case, the capabilities view does not attempt to extract norms directly from some facts about human nature. We should know what we can about the innate capacities of human beings, and this information is valuable, in telling us what our opportunities are and what our dangers might be. But we must begin by evaluating the innate powers of human beings, asking which ones are the good ones, the ones that are central to the notion of a decently flourishing human life, a life with dignity. Thus not only evaluation but also ethical evaluation is put into the approach from the start. Many things that are found in human life are not on the capabilities list.

There is a danger in any theory that alludes to the characteristic flourishing and form of life of a species: the danger of romanticizing nature, or suggesting that things are in order as they are, if only we would stop interfering. This danger looms large when we turn from the human case, where it seems inevitable that we will need to do some moral evaluating, to the animal case, where evaluating is elusive and difficult. Inherent in at least some environmentalist writing is a picture of nature as harmonious and wise, and of humans as wasteful overreachers who would live better were we to get in tune with this fine harmony. This image of nature was already very sensibly attacked by John Stuart Mill in his great essay ―Nature,‖ which pointed out that nature, far from being morally normative, is actually violent, heedless of moral norms, prodigal, full of conflict, harsh to humans and animals both. A similar view lies at the heart of much modern ecological thinking, which now stresses the inconstancy and imbalance of nature, [13] arguing, inter alia, that many of the natural ecosystems that we admire as such actually sustain themselves to the extent that they do only on account of various forms of human intervention.

Thus, a no-evaluation view, which extracts norms directly from observation of animals’ characteristic ways of life, is probably not going to be a helpful way of promoting the good of animals. Instead, we need a careful evaluation of both ―nature‖ and possible changes. Respect for nature should not and cannot mean just leaving nature as it is, and must involve careful normative arguments about what plausible goals might be.

In the case of humans, the primary area in which the political conception inhibits or fails to foster tendencies that are pervasive in human life is the area of harm to others. Animals, of course, pervasively cause harm, both to members of their own species and, far more often, to members of other species.

In both of these cases, the capabilities theorist will have a strong inclination to say that the harm-causing capabilities in question are not among those that should be protected by political and social principles. But if we leave these capabilities off the list, how can we claim to be promoting flourishing lives? Even though the capabilities approach is not utilitarian and does not hold that all good is in sentience, it will still be difficult to maintain that a creature who feels frustration at the inhibition of its predatory capacities is living a flourishing life. A human being can be expected to learn to flourish without homicide and, let us hope, even without most killing of animals. But a lion who is given no exercise for its predatory capacity appears to suffer greatly.

Here the capabilities view may, however, distinguish two aspects of the capability in question. The capability to kill small animals, defined as such, is not valuable, and political principles can omit it (and even inhibit it in some cases, to be discussed in the following section). But the capability to exercise one’s predatory nature so as to avoid the pain of frustration may well have value, if the pain of frustration is considerable. Zoos have learned how to make this distinction. Noticing that they were giving predatory animals insufficient exercise for their predatory capacities, they had to face the question of the harm done to smaller animals by allowing these capabilities to be exercised. Should they give a tiger a tender gazelle to crunch on? The Bronx Zoo has found that it can give the tiger a large ball on a rope, whose resistance and weight symbolize the gazelle. The tiger seems satisfied. Wherever predatory animals are living under direct human support and control, these solutions seem the most ethically sound.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE, CAPABILITY AND FUNCTIONING

In the human case, there is a traditional distinction between positive and negative duties that it seems important to call into question. Traditional moralities hold that we have a strict duty not to commit aggression and fraud, but we have no correspondingly strict duty to stop hunger or disease, nor to give money to promote their cessation. [14]

The capabilities approach calls this distinction into question. All the human capabilities require affirmative support, usually including state action. This is just as true of protecting property and personal security as it is of health care, just as true of the political and civil liberties as it is of providing adequate shelter.

In the case of animals, unlike the human case, there might appear to be some room for a positive-negative distinction that makes some sense. It seems at least coherent to say that the human community has the obligation to refrain from certain egregious harms toward animals, but that it is not obliged to support the welfare of all animals, in the sense of ensuring them adequate food, shelter, and health care. The animals themselves have the rest of the task of ensuring their own flourishing.

There is much plausibility in this contention. And certainly if our political principles simply ruled out the many egregious forms of harm to animals, they would have done quite a lot. But the contention, and the distinction it suggests, cannot be accepted in full. First of all, large numbers of animals live under humans’ direct control: domestic animals, farm animals, and those members of wild species that are in zoos or other forms of captivity. Humans have direct responsibility for the nutrition and health care of these animals, as even our defective current systems of law acknowledge. [15] Animals in the wild appear to go their way unaffected by human beings. But of course that can hardly be so in many cases in today’s world. Human beings pervasively affect the habitats of animals, determining opportunities for nutrition, free movement, and other aspects of flourishing.

Thus, while we may still maintain that one primary area of human responsibility to animals is that of refraining from a whole range of bad acts (to be discussed shortly), we cannot plausibly stop there. The only questions should be how extensive our duties are, and how to balance them against appropriate respect for the autonomy of a species.

In the human case, one way in which the approach respects autonomy is to focus on capability, and not functioning, as the legitimate political goal. But paternalistic treatment (which aims at functioning rather than capability) is warranted wherever the individual’s capacity for choice and autonomy is compromised (thus, for children and the severely mentally disabled). This principle suggests that paternalism is usually appropriate when we are dealing with non-human animals. That conclusion, however, should be qualified by our previous endorsement of the idea that species autonomy, in pursuit of flourishing, is part of the good for non-human animals. How, then, should the two principles be combined, and can they be coherently combined? I believe that they can be combined, if we adopt a type of paternalism that is highly sensitive to the different forms of flourishing that different species pursue. It is no use saying that we should just let tigers flourish in their own way, given that human activity ubiquitously affects the possibilities for tigers to flourish. This being the case, the only decent alternative to complete neglect of tiger flourishing is a policy that thinks carefully about the flourishing of tigers and what habitat that requires, and then tries hard to create such habitats. In the case of domestic animals, an intelligent paternalism would encourage training, discipline, and even, where appropriate, strenuous training focused on special excellences of a breed (such as the border collie or the hunter-jumper). But the animal, like a child, will retain certain entitlements, which they hold regardless of what their human guardian thinks about it. They are not merely objects for human beings’ use and control.

TOWARD BASIC POLITICAL PRINCIPLES: THE CAPABILITIES LIST

It is now time to see whether we can actually use the human basis of the capabilities approach to map out some basic political principles that will guide law and public policy in dealing with animals. The list I have defended as useful in the human case is as follows:

The Central Human Capabilities

Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.

Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.

Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.

Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a ―truly human‖ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.

Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us and to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial to our development.)

Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)

Affiliation. (A) Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.) (B) Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. (This entails provisions of non-discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.)

Other Species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.

Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.

Control over One’s Environment. (A) Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation; protections of free speech and association. (B) Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

Although the entitlements of animals are species specific, the main large categories of the existing list, suitably fleshed out, turn out to be a good basis for a sketch of some basic political principles.

In the capabilities approach, all animals are entitled to continue their lives, whether or not they have such a conscious interest. All sentient animals have a secure entitlement against gratuitous killing for sport. Killing for luxury items such as fur falls in this category, and should be banned. On the other hand, intelligently respectful paternalism supports euthanasia for elderly animals in pain. In the middle are the very difficult cases, such as the question of predation to control populations, and the question of killing for food. The reason these cases are so difficult is that animals will die anyway in nature, and often more painfully. Painless predation might well be preferable to allowing the animal to be torn to bits in the wild or starved through overpopulation. As for food, the capabilities approach agrees with utilitarianism in being most troubled by the torture of living animals. If animals were really killed in a painless fashion, after a healthy and free-ranging life, what then? Killings of extremely young animals would still be problematic, but it seems unclear that the balance of considerations supports a complete ban on killings for food.

Bodily Health. One of the most central entitlements of animals is the entitlement to a healthy life. Where animals are directly under human control, it is relatively clear what policies this entails: laws banning cruel treatment and neglect; laws banning the confinement and ill treatment of animals in the meat and fur industries; laws forbidding harsh or cruel treatment for working animals, including circus animals; laws regulating zoos and aquariums, mandating adequate nutrition and space. Many of these laws already exist, although they are not well enforced. The striking asymmetry in current practice is that animals being raised for food are not protected in the way other animals are protected. This asymmetry must be eliminated.

Bodily Integrity. This goes closely with the preceding. Under the capabilities approach, animals have direct entitlements against violations of their bodily integrity by violence, abuse, and other forms of harmful treatment—whether or not the treatment in question is painful. Thus the declawing of cats would probably be banned under this rubric, on the grounds that it prevents the cat from flourishing in its own characteristic way, even though it may be done in a painfree manner and cause no subsequent pain. On the other hand, forms of training that, though involving discipline, equip the animal to manifest excellences that are part of its characteristic capabilities profile would not be eliminated.

Senses, Imagination, and Thought. For humans, this capability creates a wide range of entitlements: to appropriate education, to free speech and artistic expression, to the freedom of religion. It also includes a more general entitlement to pleasurable experiences and the avoidance of non-beneficial pain. By now it ought to be rather obvious where the latter point takes us in thinking about animals: toward laws banning harsh, cruel, and abusive treatment and ensuring animals’ access to sources of pleasure, such as free movement in an environment that stimulates and pleases the senses. The freedom-related part of this capability has no precise analogue, and yet we can come up with appropriate analogues in the case of each type of animal, by asking what choices and areas of freedom seem most important to each. Clearly this reflection would lead us to reject close confinement and to regulate the places in which animals of all kinds are kept for spaciousness, light and shade, and the variety of opportunities they offer the animals for a range of characteristic activities. Again, the capabilities approach seems superior to utilitarianism in its ability to recognize such entitlements, for few animals will have a conscious interest, as such, in variety and space.

Emotions. Animals have a wide range of emotions. All or almost all sentient animals have fear. Many animals can experience anger, resentment, gratitude, grief, envy, and joy. A small number—those who are capable of perspectival thinking—can experience compassion. [16] Like human beings, they are entitled to lives in which it is open to them to have attachments to others, to love and care for others, and not to have those attachments warped by enforced isolation or the deliberate infliction of fear. We understand well what this means where our cherished domestic animals are in question. Oddly, we do not extend the same consideration to animals we think of as ―wild. Until recently, zoos took no thought for the emotional needs of animals, and animals being used for research were often treated with gross carelessness in this regard, being left in isolation and confinement when they might easily have had decent emotional lives. [17]

Practical Reason. In each case, we need to ask to what extent the creature has a capacity to frame goals and projects and to plan its life. To the extent that this capacity is present, it ought to be supported, and this support requires many of the same policies already suggested by capability 4: plenty of room to move around, opportunities for a variety of activities.

Affiliation. In the human case, this capability has two parts: an interpersonal part (being able to live with and toward others) and a more public part, focused on self-respect and non-humiliation. It seems to me that the same two parts are pertinent for non-human animals. Animals are entitled to opportunities to form attachments (as in capability 5) and to engage in characteristic forms of bonding and interrelationship. They are also entitled to relations with humans, where humans enter the picture, that are rewarding and reciprocal, rather than tyrannical. At the same time, they are entitled to live in a world public culture that respects them and treats them as dignified beings. This entitlement does not just mean protecting them from instances of humiliation that they will feel as painful. The capabilities approach here extends more broadly than utilitarianism, holding that animals are entitled to world policies that grant them political rights and the legal status of dignified beings, whether they understand that status or not.

Other Species. If human beings are entitled to ―be able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature,‖ so too are other animals, in relation to species not their own, including the human species, and the rest of the natural world. This capability, seen from both the human and the animal side, calls for the gradual formation of an interdependent world in which all species will enjoy cooperative and mutually supportive relations with one another. Nature is not that way and never has been. So it calls, in a very general way, for the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just.

Play. This capability is obviously central to the lives of all sentient animals. It calls for many of the same policies we have already discussed: provision of adequate space, light, and sensory stimulation in living places, and, above all, the presence of other species members.

Control over One’s Environment. In the human case, this capability has two prongs, the political and the material. The political is defined in terms of active citizenship and rights of political participation. For non-human animals, the important thing is being part of a political conception that is framed so as to respect them and that is committed to treating them justly. It is important, however, that animals have entitlements directly, so that a human guardian has standing to go to court, as with children, to vindicate those entitlements. On the material side, for non-human animals, the analogue to property rights is respect for the territorial integrity of their habitats, whether domestic or in the wild.

Are there animal capabilities not covered by this list, suitably specified? It seems to me not, although in the spirit of the capabilities approach we should insist that the list is open-ended, subject to supplementation or deletion.

In general, the capabilities approach suggests that it is appropriate for nations to include in their constitutions or other founding statements of principle a commitment to animals as subjects of political justice and a commitment that animals will be treated with dignity. The constitution might also spell out some of the very general principles suggested by this capabilities list. The rest of the work of protecting animal entitlements might be done by suitable legislation and by court cases demanding the enforcement of the law, where it is not enforced. At the same time, many of the issues covered by this approach cannot be dealt with by nations in isolation, but can only be addressed by international cooperation. So we also need international accords committing the world community to the protection of animal habitats and the eradication of cruel practices.

THE INELIMINABILITY OF CONFLICT

In the human case, we often face the question of conflict between one capability and another. But if the capabilities list and its thresholds are suitably designed, we ought to say that the presence of conflict between one capability and another is a sign that society has gone wrong somewhere. [18] We should focus on long-term planning that will create a world in which all the capabilities can be secured to all citizens.

Our world contains persistent and often tragic conflicts between the well-being of human beings and the well-being of animals. Some bad treatment of animals can be eliminated without serious losses in human wellbeing: Such is the case with the use of animals for fur, and the brutal and confining treatment of animals used for food. The use of animals for food in general is a much more difficult case, since nobody really knows what the impact on the world environment would be of a total switch to vegetarian sources of protein, or the extent to which such a diet could be made compatible with the health of all the world’s children. A still more difficult problem is the use of animals in research.

A lot can be done to improve the lives of research animals without stopping useful research. As Steven Wise has shown, primates used in research often live in squalid, lonely conditions while they are used as medical subjects. This of course is totally unnecessary and morally unacceptable and could be ended without ending the research. Some research that is done is unnecessary and can be terminated, for example, the testing of cosmetics on rabbits, which seems to have been bypassed without loss of quality by some cosmetic firms. But much important research with major consequences for the life and health of human beings and other animals will inflict disease, pain, and death on at least some animals, even under the best conditions.

I do not favor stopping all such research. What I do favor is (a) asking whether the research is really necessary for a major human capability; (b) focusing on the use of less-complex sentient animals where possible, on the grounds that they suffer fewer and lesser harms from such research; (c) improving the conditions of research animals, including palliative terminal care when they have contracted a terminal illness, and supportive interactions with both humans and other animals; (d) removing the psychological brutality that is inherent in so much treatment of animals for research; (e) choosing topics cautiously and seriously, so that no animal is harmed for a frivolous reason; and (f) a constant effort to develop experimental methods (for example, computer simulations) that do not have these bad consequences.

Above all, it means constant public discussion of these issues, together with an acknowledgment that such uses of animals in research are tragic, violating basic entitlements. Such public acknowledgments are far from useless. They state what is morally true, and thus acknowledge the dignity of animals and our own culpability toward them. They reaffirm dispositions to behave well toward them where no such urgent exigencies intervene. Finally, they prompt us to seek a world in which the pertinent research could in fact be done in other ways.

TOWARD A TRULY GLOBAL JUSTICE

It has been obvious for a long time that the pursuit of global justice requires the inclusion of many people and groups who were not previously included as fully equal subjects of justice: the poor; members of religious, ethnic, and racial minorities; and more recently women, the disabled, and inhabitants of nations distant from one’s own.

But a truly global justice requires not simply that we look across the world for other fellow species members who are entitled to a decent life. It also requires looking around the world at the other sentient beings with whose lives our own are inextricably and complexly intertwined. Traditional contractarian approaches to the theory of justice did not and, in their very form, could not confront these questions as questions of justice. Utilitarian approaches boldly did so, and they deserve high praise. But in the end, I have argued, utilitarianism is too homogenizing—both across lives and with respect to the heterogeneous constituents of each life—to provide us with an adequate theory of animal justice. The capabilities approach, which begins from an ethically attuned wonder before each form of animal life, offers a model that does justice to the complexity of animal lives and their strivings for flourishing. Such a model seems an important part of a fully global theory of justice.

NOTES

This essay derives from my Tanner Lectures in 2003 and is published by courtesy of the University of Utah Press and the Trustees of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

The incident is discussed in Pliny Nat. Hist. 8.7.20–21, Cicero Ad Fam. 7.1.3; see also Dio Cassius Hist. 39, 38, 2–4. See the discussion in Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 124–125.

For this approach, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and ―Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice, Feminist Economics 9 (2003): 33–59. The approach was pioneered by Amartya Sen within economics, and is used by him in some rather different ways, without a definite commitment to a normative theory of justice.

All references are to John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), hereafter TJ.

Rawls himself makes the comparison at TJ 12; his analogue to the state of nature is the equality of the parties in the Original Position.

See the analysis in Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 6; thus far the analysis is uncontroversial, recapitulating a long tradition of analysis.

See Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, introduction to Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3–4.

See the comment by Nussbaum in Goodness and Advice, Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Tanner Lectures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), discussing work along these lines by Amartya Sen and others.

Briefly put, my worries are those of Rawls in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), who points out that it is illiberal for political principles to contain any comprehensive account of what is best. Instead, political principles should be committed to a partial set of ethical norms endorsed for political purposes, leaving it to citizens to fill out the rest of the ethical picture in accordance with their own comprehensive conceptions of value, religious or secular. Thus I would be happy with a partial political consequentialism, but not with comprehensive consequentialism, as a basis for political principles.

Martin Seligman, Helplessness: On Development, Depression, and Death (New York: Freeman, 1975).

Here I agree with Thomson (who is thinking mostly about Moore); see Goodness and Advice.

Peter Singer, ―Animals and the Value of Life,‖ in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays on Moral Philosophy, ed. Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1980), 356.

James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Daniel B. Botkin, ―Adjusting Law to Nature’s Discordant Harmonies,‖ Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum 7 (1996): 25–37.

See the critique by Martha Nussbaum in ―Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,‖ Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 1–31.

The laws do not cover all animals, in particular, not animals who are going to be used for food or fur.

On all this, see Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, ch. 2.

See Steven Wise, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), ch. 1.

See Martha C. Nussbaum, ―The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Implications of Cost-Benefit Analysis,‖ in Cost-Benefit Analysis, ed. Matthew D. Adler and Eric A. Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 169–200.

#vegan #animal rights #animal liberation #animal welfare #virtue ethics #martha nussbaum #justice #human rights #environmental protection #environmentalist #philosophy

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