This paper examines, identifies, compares
and severalises the disadvantages and advantages
of the views and ethical systems of the three
leading academic paladins in the field of
animal welfare and animal rights?
We observe them as they direct their lances
towards the doctrine that animals were put
on earth for the benefit of humankind. We
will look at the theories and Weltanschauung of Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Richard Ryder
in their commendable crusades to promote
a more humanistic and empathetic treatment
of animals. The paper will conclude by identifying
which of the theorists represented is nearest
to the author's own position.
As a life-long vegetarian who
has never tasted meat in seventy-two years,
and as a veteran campaigner for animal rights,
the author is somewhat dismayed at the philosophical
and ontological metaethical naivety, and
the divisiveness and concomitant tensions
generated in the public mind as a result
of two of the advocates, namely Singer and
Regan, claiming the existence of an intrinsic
'value' or natural inhesion of 'rights 'in
animals. For me it detracts from the reasoning
whereby they arrive at their valuable conclusions,
for though the writer disagrees with the
reification of intrinsicality by which route
they arrive at their conclusions, I agree
with many of their determinations and prescriptions
regarding the treatment of animals.
Such will be the note
on which I begin this essay and such will
be the same spirit with which I finish it.
It has been my personal experience that an
appeal to people's pragmatically enlightened
self-centeredness, incipient anthropocentrism
and natural appreciation of the fruits of
instrumentality can do a better job of attributing
value to flora and fauna than any transcendentalist
fantasy does.
Naturally I include
the
higher apes and members of our own
human
species in this denial and repudiation
of
'intrinsicality' as an entiative 'property,'
'essence' or existential 'condition,'
and
I will develop this dialectical remonstrance
later.. But first to address the substance
of the essay question itself, and take
a
look at the main protagonists and their
contending
ideas.
 |
| Peter Singer - Prophet of Sentience |
On approaching Singer we encounter
the utilitarian
stance which he developed in the sixties,
when appeals to ‘rights for all’ was
de rigour.
His call was for an ethical system
that would
no longer be human-centred and specieist,
which believed was just as loathsome
as any
other form of discrimination.. Holding
to
a consequentialist preoccupation with
the
secondary sequellas of actions, he
advocated
the maximum pleasure and minimum pain
for
the greatest number principle, and
was no
doubt influenced by Bentham's thought-provoking
question: 'Can they suffer?'
In practical terms
this
would mean moral agents aggregating
by means
of a 'hedonic or felicitic calculus' the pain and/or pleasure quotient across
the congeries of participants in some
cross-species
community of sentient moral patients,
and
establishing laws and policies based
upon
the outcome most likely to increase
pleasure
and limit pain for the greatest number
of
individuates.
Historically the
Benthamite
formulation referred specifically to
humankind.
Singer's seminal contribution was to
elaborate
and extend this anthropocentric humanitarian
concern to include animals. His moral
system
incorporates a strict hierarchical
infrastructure.
Sentience for him is
the mental
ability for basic consciousness - the
capacity
to feel or perceive, and to sense pain,
not
necessarily incorporating the ability
of
self-awareness, with the arbitrators
of this
property being the professional zoologists
and neurophysicists. In the resultant
zoological
pyramid of sentience and sensibility
humans
and the great apes are placed at the
top
of a stratified gradation, with the
lower
animals and insects at the bottom with
the
whole structure supported upon the
entablature
of his restricted model of circles
considerability.
The prognostication regarding notions
of
the awareness of others and joint attention
abilities in the higher apes on which
his
notions are based is not encouraging,
as
Warwick Fox recently pointed out in
a well
researched lecture at UCLAN. [2]
 |
| Tom Regan and the Subject of a Life |
For the animal welfarist and abolitionist
Regan there must be 'a cessation of
the use
of animals in science, a dissolution
of animal
agriculture and a total elimination
of commercial
and sport hunting and trapping.' [3]
For
Regan like Singer and Ryder too the
circle
of considerability does not extend
to the
environmemt and biosphere, although
all three
manifest a respect for the ecology
that we
have come to expect from all those
that are
active in this field. The qualifying
criterion
of being considered inherently worthy,
or
to be in possession of the magic ingredient
of having 'intrinsic value' is to be
'the
subject of a life.' This Reganist 'esteem
for life' approach was epitomised by
the
Christian doctor Albert Schweitzer
and his
spiritualistically derived notions
of reverence
for life. Schweitzer has a modern secular
philosophical following. In some ways
Tom
Regan is a recipient of the good doctor's
humanitarian inheritance. In stark
contrast
to this, Ryder's benchmark is not so
much
the nature of an entity's life, but
the answer
to a simple question: Can it feel pain?'
In a breathtaking leap of metaphysical
imagination
and ontological ingenuousness Regan
enthymemically
attributes properties and abilities
of self-interest
to animals which they prudently harness
in
the maintenance of their entiative
continuance,
a crude abuse of personification and
anthropomorphisation
which would have put my old English
master
into an epileptic fit, for in itself
the
notion implies a human-style cognizance
of
a putative 'futurity.'
Fox pertinently observes: [4]
|
'To say that living things have an interest
of some kind or on some level
in maintaining
their own existence, is to suggest
that they
actually "strive,"
"aim,"
or "desire" (or some
such equivalent)
to maintain their own existence.'
|
 |
| Richard Ryder and Painience |
At this third juncture in our explorative
review of animal welfare ideas we turn
to
the grizzled old campaigner of Animal
Rights
himself - British psychologist and
coiner
of the name 'Specieism' itself - Richard
Ryder, who created the neologism 1970
because
of the bad name which had attached
itself
to 'rights,' incorporating a negative
implication
in Britain entailing imagery of the
work-shy
and scroungers and 'the world owes
me a living'
brigade. Ryder prudently opted to call
his
brand of moral opposition to animal
cruelty
'painism,' because it underscored any
individual's
susceptibility to suffering. [6] Ryder
explains
his adoption of 'painism' thus:
'If we are similar psychologically
and physically
then why not morally? If we share these
to
a degree, with other animals, then
the morality
that flows from this will also be similar.'
ibid.
In the same talk Ryder makes it clear
that
a Singerian utilitarian-style 'aggregation'
is out:
|
'But the aggregation of the pains and benefits
of many individuals I consider
to be meaningless.
Pain, in its broadest sense is
what matters
morally; it underlies all other
moral criteria.
Our prime concern should be for
the individual
who suffers most.' ibid.
|
Contrasts and Comparisons
|
Components of each contrastive approach
have
much merit, and they share a common
pioneering
anti-specieist outlook, but we still
need
to examine the good points in each
system
and offset them against the drawbacks.
Nobody
can doubt the importance of Singer's
ideas
regarding the necessity of radical
change
in the way animals are perceived and
treated.
In many cases the maximum pleasure/minimum
pain formula works well. Triage is
a utilitarian-like
system used by emergency personnel
to allocate
restricted medical assistance so as
to treat
the maximum number of patients according
to a utilitarian style model, but there
is
always a tendency to select an extreme
counter-intuitive
examples [ like Callicott's sociopath
and
the baby example ] when any theory
is being
hostilely criticised. Compared to the
advantages
of his system, the underlying shortcoming
of his brand of utilitarianism lies
in its
almost Kantian inflexibility . We can
compare
this Singerian rigidity with the very
strict
but more pragmatic and more flexible
approach
of Ryder in these matters.
Regan's zealotry is of another type
- the
abrupt abolition of huge swathes of
age-old
traditions human agrarian society and
animal
husbandry. Likewise with Singer, there
seems
to be no room for tractability and
compromise
when the confrontation looms with disgrunted
farmers and egg-producers. In Singer’s
brave
new world, the non-specieist fireman
won’t
think twice when faced with the decision
of whom to rescue first from a burning
building
- a healthy young Chimp or a human
in a state
of coma from which she is unlikely
to recover.
The chimpanzee is carried to safety
first.
As with Regan and Ryder - painless
death
is acceptable, but Singer goes further,
in
that for him it is quite permissible
to painlessly
terminate the lives of certain types
of physically
and mentally disabled people. In a
Singerian
world one would think twice about going
in
hospital for a simple operation, for
one's
body might be cannibalised whilst one
was
under anathestic and its organs re-distributed
around the ward to ensure the survival
of
the 'deserving majority.’
A madman attacks a baby - what do we
do?
Kill the sociopath or let him kill
the neonate?
That is only the beginning of this
roll-call
of counter-intuitivity, for our whole
existence
would be dominated by this constant
utilitarian
introspection and decision-making as
to an
entity's rung on the ladder of psycho-physicality,
together with the unceasing aggregating
of
individuals and groups in unending
juxtapositioning
of social scenarios and inter-species
judgemental
conundrums. My belief is that a Singerian
world would be a Huxlian dystopia -
a cold,
frightening world of cold pragmatism,
and
ruthless utilitarian efficiency. Should
our
felix domesticus be deprived of the
pleasure
of killing mus musculus, or should
a kitchen-floor
drama be left to bloodily resolve itself
in the manner of the world of natural
predation
outside, in which for both Singer and
Regan
animals would be left alone to: 'Carve
out
their own destiny,' as Regan puts it?
Another feature
of Singerian
utilitarianism is the so-called 'negative
utilitarianism.' which requires us
to promote
the least amount of evil or harm, or
to prevent
the greatest amount of harm for the
greatest
number. The focus here is on minimising
pain
rather than maximising pleasure for
animals.
As with Singer, for Regan painless
killing
is acceptable, and indeed and discounting
pain by placing less emphasis on providing
pleasure is the name of the game. Whilst
for Ryder the pain of the individual
is paramount,
transacting the agony of one individual
against
that of another is valid act.
I am by far attracted to Ryder, the man who
confessed that he coined the term Specieism partly to avoid having to use the word "rights,"
whose more worldly approach appears to me
to be altogether more pragmatic and sensible,
and potentially productive for the success
of the movement mainly because it encapsulates
the genuine aspirations of the utilitarian
and rights positions without invoking their
orphic claims to some mysterious myth of
intrinsicality of 'rights' or 'value' as
being metaphysically 'resident' in animals,
as an a priori state of grace of which it
is only a matter of time before we more cognisant
members of the higher species become respectfully
aware. 'Intrinsicality' is plainly instrumentality
tricked out in metaphysical masquerade, for
the attriibution of instrinsic properties
to another entity, is merely a recognition
on behalf of the attributant that the simple
presence of the attributee is cognitively
or physically pleasurable.
As Ryder points out:
|
'I believed, first, that people too often
spoke of "rights" [7] as if they
had some independent existence - this seemed
irrational to me. The essential qualification
for rights is, therefore, Painience - the
capacity to suffer pain or distress of any
sort.'
|
As for me, though many thinkers still persist
in clinging to the general belief that intrinsic value is itself so obvious that it lets them go
immediately to the question of what can or
should be described as having intrinsic value,
there is a growing understanding and unanimity
of respect for our environment and other
species which can flourish without the need
to accept the dubious claims of the intrinsic
value of animals.
That which is important is
not by which philosophical journey or the
itinerary by which we arrive at our reformist
conclusions, but the need to arrive and change
the personal praxis of our people and the
shape of the public policies wereby we interact
with the animals which need our protection.
I have no doubt that gradually there will
be a convergence between the pragmatic wing
of animal rights and the metaphysical approach,
for whether animal worth and value and rights
be intrinsically present or extrinsically
attributed history is certainly on the side
of the animals as well as the angels.
[1] en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Speciesism
[2] Fox Warwick. 'Mindreading,' Joint
Attention,
Language and Harm: Cognitive Capacities
and
Moral Obligations. Lecture. UCLAN.
03.11.2005.
[3] Tom Regan. The Case for Animal
Rights.
[4] Fox, Warwick. A Critical Overview
of
Environmental Ethics. World Futures
46 (1996)
1-21.
[5] Op cit 36. quoting Singer's 'Practical
Ethics.' 2nd ed. (Cambridge University
Press
1993, p. 279. [6] Ryder, Richard. DARWINISM,
ALTRUISM AND PAINIENCE - In a Talk
presented
to Animals, People & the Environment
19.06.1999 http://www.ivu.org/ape/talks/ryder/ryder.htm
[7] op cit.
|
Evans Experientialism 
