“Following the civil rights movement, veganism is the next step for moral progress in our society. I think the movement will follow the same historical trajectory as all previous rights movements - through denial and anger, but finally acceptance.”
– Ruby Roth, author of That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals
“It is racism when we choose to save one white person over two blacks. It is speciesism when we choose to save an orphaned an-encephalitic human infant whose existence is a secret over a chimpanzee.”
Some vegans like to think of veganism as the final frontier in ethical equality, the movement that could finally put an end to the discrimination and violence that humans have practiced since splitting into tribes. It’s a common enough view that sexism, ableism, racism, religious discrimination, classism and heterosexism have to go. All this leaves, say some vegans, is speciesism: and worldwide veganism would crush that.
But does it really?
Consider the following passages from pro-animal philosophers, which supposedly do not undermine anti-speciesism ideals…
Practical Ethics by Peter Singer, p. 122:
If cows, pigs, chickens and the other animals we usually eat are self-aware, they are still not self-aware to anything like the extent that humans normally are. I agree with Varner and Scruton that the more one thinks of one’s life as a story that has chapters still to be written, and the more one hopes for achievements yet to come, the more one has to lose by being killed. For this reason, when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of animals and of normal humans, it is not speciesist to give priority to the lives of those with a geographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation toward the future.
The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan, p. 351:
There are five survivors, four normal adult human beings and a dog. The boat will support only four. All will perish if one is not sacrificed. Which one ought to be cast overboard? The rights view’s answer is: the dog. The magnitude of the harm that death is, it has been argued, is a function of the number and variety of opportunities for satisfaction it forecloses for a given individual, and it is not speciesist to claim that the death of any of these humans would be a prima facie greater harm in their case than the harm death would be in the case of the dog. Indeed, numbers make no difference in this case. A million dogs ought to be cast overboard if that is necessary to save the four normal humans, the aggregate of the lesser harms of the individual animals harming no one in a way that is prima facie comparable to the harm death would be to any of these humans. But suppose, a critic may conjecture, it is not a question of having enough room on the boat. Imagine it is a question of which individual to eat if four others are to survive. Who should be eaten? The rights view’s answer, once again, is: the dog. And it is the dog who should be eaten because the harm that death is in the case of that animal is not as great a harm as the harm that death would be in the case of any of these humans. In lifeboat cases, in short, the obligation to be vegetarian can be justifiably overridden, according to the rights view. The survivors would be acting within their rights, justified by appeal to the liberty principle, if they chose to kill and eat the dog in these dire circumstances.
Introduction to Animal Rights by Gary Lawrence Francione, p. 159:
[In] the case of animals, we may well decide that although animals are similar to us in that they are sentient—the only characteristic that is relevant for the purpose of having a right not to be treated as a resource—there may be other characteristics of humans that cause us to tip the balance in their favor in these extreme and unusual cases. For example, I have absolutely no doubt that dogs are self-aware, intelligent beings who have a sense of the future and an interest in continuing life. Although I am certain that death is a harm for the dog, I do not know exactly what goes on in the mind of the dog and, therefore, I cannot fully appreciate what is at stake for a dog were she to die. I also lack direct access to the minds of other humans, but I am more confident that I understand better the harm of death to humans and what is at stake for them. I may, then, in these true emergency situations, in which I am forced to choose between a human and a dog, choose the human simply because I better understand what is at stake for the human than I do for the dog. But this is a matter of my own cognitive limitation and how that plays out in these extreme circumstances in which my decision will necessarily be arbitrary to some degree and in which no decision will be perfectly satisfactory. I do not think that death is a greater harm to the human than it is to the dog, but I understand (or think I do) the harm to the human in a clearer sense than I understand the harm to the dog; it is on this admittedly arbitrary and unsatisfactory basis that I break the tie between the two beings, both of whom hold a basic right not to be treated as resources.
Altering these quotes by substituting references to human groups, however, makes it pretty obvious that there’s some sort of othering going on here:
If [women] are self-aware, they are still not self-aware to anything like the extent that [men] normally are. I agree with Varner and Scruton that the more one thinks of one’s life as a story that has chapters still to be written, and the more one hopes for achievements yet to come, the more one has to lose by being killed. For this reason, when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of [women] and of [men], it is not [sexist] to give priority to the lives of [men, who have] a geographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation toward the future. …
There are five survivors, four normal [straight] human beings and [a gay man]. The boat will support only four. All will perish if one is not sacrificed. Which one ought to be cast overboard? The rights view’s answer is: the [gay man]. The magnitude of the harm that death is, it has been argued, is a function of the number and variety of opportunities for satisfaction it forecloses for a given individual, and it is not [heterosexist] to claim that the death of any of these normal [straight] humans would be a prima facie greater harm in their case than the harm death would be in the case of the [guy dude]. Indeed, numbers make no difference in this case. A million [gay men] ought to be cast overboard if that is necessary to save the four normal [straight] humans, the aggregate of the lesser harms of the individual [gay guys] harming no one in a way that is prima facie comparable to the harm death would be to any of these [straight] humans. But suppose, a critic may conjecture, it is not a question of having enough room on the boat. Imagine it is a question of which individual to eat if four others are to survive. Who should be eaten? The rights view’s answer, once again, is: the [gay man]. And it is the [gay man] who should be eaten because the harm that death is in the case of that [gay man] is not as great a harm as the harm that death would be in the case of any of these [straight] humans. …
[In] the case of [brown people], we may well decide that although [brown people] are similar to us in that they are sentient—the only characteristic that is relevant for the purpose of having a right not to be treated as a resource—there may be other characteristics of [white people] that cause us to tip the balance in their favor in these extreme and unusual cases. For example, I have absolutely no doubt that [brown people] are self-aware, intelligent beings who have a sense of the future and an interest in continuing life. Although I am certain that death is a harm for the [brown person], I do not know exactly what goes on in the mind of the [brown person] and, therefore, I cannot fully appreciate what is at stake for a [brown person] were she to die. I also lack direct access to the minds of other [white people], but I am more confident that I understand better the harm of death to [white people] and what is at stake for them. I may, then, in these true emergency situations, in which I am forced to choose between a [brown person] and a [white person], choose the [white person] simply because I better understand what is at stake for the [white person] than I do for the [brown person]. But this is a matter of my own cognitive limitation and how that plays out in these extreme circumstances in which my decision will necessarily be arbitrary to some degree and in which no decision will be perfectly satisfactory. I do not think that death is a greater harm to the [white person] than it is to the [brown person], but I understand (or think I do) the harm to the [white person] in a clearer sense than I understand the harm to the [brown person]; it is on this admittedly arbitrary and unsatisfactory basis that I break the tie between the two beings, both of whom hold a basic right not to be treated as resources.
It would sound strange if an opponent of racism, sexism and homophobia said that people of different races, genders or sexualities should be treated equally most of the time, but that these other lives were ultimately worth less when it came down to it and so it makes sense to favor people of their own race, gender or sexuality in a pinch.
So why do vegans get to call themselves anti-speciesist while saying that they put more value on human lives than animal lives? Is speciesism so inevitable that even those who spend their careers propagandizing against it can’t avoid succumbing to a preference for their own species, in apparent violation of their own ideology?
Not necessarily. You can call yourself an anti-speciesist and still say that human lives are more valuable than animal lives if you want, but this comes at a price: you need to accept another prejudice to explain this discrepancy. As the above quotes from animal philosophers suggest, the form of discrimination that almost inevitably arises in speciesism’s place is discrimination based on cognitive abilities: “cognitivism,” you could call it.
You may be a speciesist if you would always choose to save an anonymous human over an anonymous dog, but you might also be a cognitivist. Answering a couple of hypotheticals could help determine which:
1. Imagine that dogs had the same cognitive abilities of normal humans and were just as social and communicative, being able to interact with humans in most of the same ways that humans interact with each other, except mating. In the sinking lifeboat, would you still definitely save humans over dogs? If so, you’re probably a speciesist. If not, you might be a cognitivist.
2. Many vegans tend to see some animal lives as fairly expendable. In particular, they can be flippant about the mammals, birds, lizards, gastropods, amphibians and fish killed due to civilization and agriculture, mostly treating that daily massacre of wildlife as a nuisance threatening to poke a hole in their doctrine. Would these vegans be equally as cavalier about the same number of mentally impaired humans being ground up, shot, poisoned and suffocated for agriculture? If so, they’re probably cognitivists. But if they would find the latter to be a bigger ethical quandary, they could well be speciesists.
It may be that the majority of vegans would still be able to call themselves non-speciesists after honestly answering those hypotheticals. For that matter, it’s possible that meat eaters would also find themselves to not be speciesist; just because they eat steak doesn’t mean they would oppose the admission of genius apes into universities or eat bacon from pigs who can speak Latin. However, vegans who might save a talking dog over a human but wouldn’t do the same for a typical golden retriever almost definitely discriminate on the basis of cognitive ability. Presumably, Tom Regan would throw a million cognitively disabled humans off the boat rather than sacrifice a few cognitively normal humans, despite how grotesque that pile-up would begin to look.
The reason hypotheticals can be useful – even though they often are based on absurd, impossible situations – is that they can root out prejudice that has no real-life occasion to show itself. This is probably the major reason that so many vegans don’t like them.
One of the presumptions of “the argument from marginal cases” is that most people think it’s unethical to discriminate based on cognitive ability, and so treating other animals worse than we treat severely mentally impaired humans can only be due to speciesism. Putting aside that there is more to our favored treatment of cognitively impaired humans than species membership per se, there’s also the possibility that many people actually do care less about severely mentally impaired people, but that there is almost never a reason for them to admit this.
Most people never meet an adult human whose cognitive abilities are on par with those of a squirrel, and since cannibalism repulses the majority of us and humans are inefficient sources of energy anyway, almost nobody feels the loss if we do not raise cognitively impaired humans for food. Perhaps scientific studies could benefit from using cognitively impaired humans instead of animals to do initial tests of a drug, but it’s unclear how much that would actually help since all medicines that might reach the market go through voluntary human trials already.
Just as there are plenty of racists who never admit their racist beliefs because there is no advantage for them to do so in modern societies that largely discourage overt displays of race-based prejudice (notice that it’s often people ranting drunkenly who get in trouble for hate speech), discrimination based upon cognitive ability is often hidden because there’s just no reason for people to say that we should withhold rights from humans who will never be smarter than a pig, since granting those rights isn’t that big a sacrifice. But when there is such a sacrifice involved, the interests of the mentally impaired often get overruled. Consider a recent case involving a young girl who was refused a kidney implant because she was mentally impaired. From Janice D’Arcy’s article:
I also asked Arthur Caplan, the head of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania (which is affiliated with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), about the ethical framework involved in these decisions [over allocations of organ transplants].
He walked me through all the reasons doctors may decide to deny a child the opportunity to receive an organ, including medical issues, quality of life considerations and life expectancy.
He said that doctors might debate the issue when a child is in a vegetative state or if the child is institutionalized — a situation that increases chances for life-threatening infections after transplants and where medications cannot be as effectively monitored. But, he said, when a child is not institutionalized and is being cared for by parents, those issues do not exist.
Magnus said that teens with intellectual disabilities who are cared for by parents are actually more likely to follow medication protocols than typical teens who might rebel.
Of all the considerations Caplan said are ethically valid, intellectual abilities alone were not among them. Though that has not led to a reliable ethical standard.
“I do know many centers take it into account when they are putting a value judgment to quality of life,” Caplan said. But, “in my opinion, that’s bias.”
It would be frowned upon to have an abortion because your baby was going to be female, but few people would question why someone might want to abort a severely mentally impaired fetus. In fact, many would encourage it.
Nevertheless, we claim that we don’t discriminate based upon cognitive ability because we can claim that, since our actions – not using severely mentally impaired humans as resources – imply that we treat all humans the same. Similarly, vegans claim not to discriminate based upon species membership because weaning themselves off their desire to consume animal products looks like what anti-speciesism might look like. (Then again, an anti-speciesist might also eat animals of every species, including their own.) Why should vegans admit to being speciesists if they don’t have to?
Not that this helps them, since there’s still the lingering charge of cognitive bias.
The confusion between cognitivism and speciesism arises because — “marginal cases” aside — differing cognitive abilities track reliably along species line. You cannot honestly say, “The smartest man in the world is obviously smarter than the most intelligent woman” or vice versa, but it’s not merely stereotyping to say, “The smartest human is smarter than the most intelligent pig.”
It’s not surprising that vegans and vegetarians try to get us to be more empathetic toward animals by showing us they’re not as dumb as we think.
According to Skinny Bitch, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin:
Animals are intelligent, emotional, social creatures. Researches at Bristol University in Britain discovered that cows actually nurture friendships and bear grudges. One study showed cows displaying excitement while solving intellectual challenges.
Chickens are as smart as mammals, including some primates, claims animal behaviorist Dr. Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Australia. They are apt pupils and can learn by watching the mistakes of others. One researcher conducted a study that demonstrated chickens’ ability to use switches and levers to change the temperature of their surroundings. A PBS documentary revealed chickens’ love for television and music.
Pigs can play video games! They’ve been labelled as more intelligent than dogs and three-year-old humans. They too can indicate their temperature preferences. (74–75).
According to Joshua Katcher at The Discerning Brute:
Pigeons are commonly seen as dumb pests. People call them “rats with wings”. But according to a new study, these birds are much more intelligent than we may think. Their brains have the ability to use facial recognition in the same way that we humans do…
And on pages 64–66 of Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer says pigs are smart enough to open the latches of gates, play video games, have favorite toys, come when called and have a documented language “of sorts.” Of fish, Foer raves about their nest building skills, their monogamous relationships, tool use and ability to cooperatively hunt with other species. They are “Machiavellian,” have long-term memory, can spread information across generations and have cultural traditions. As for chickens, Foer also quotes an animal physiologist who says they are as intelligent as some mammals and even primates, and discovers that they have memories that are “written down according to some sort of chronological sequence that becomes a unique autobiography,” and can also pass on information, deceive one another and delay satisfaction for bigger rewards.
Funny that what many humans consider vices -– deceit, Machiavellian behavior, playing video games and hunting with other species –- become virtues when other animals do them because it shows how much they resemble us.
Of course the major animal philosophers are savvy enough to reject the animal intelligence approach, each saying that their own definition of sentience is enough to qualify for consideration of interests. Even though Regan and Singer still both say that cognitive ability has a bearing on quality of life (and thus how much harm a death is to a given being), Francione seemingly refuses to accept even this caveat. In his entry “A Note on Humanlike Intelligence and Moral Value,” Francione argues against the animal intelligence outreach strategy, correctly pointing out that the smarts game is one that other animals cannot win. Who cares that pigs can play video games when we already have plenty of humans who can do that without needing a treat after every right move?
Francione writes that humans attaching moral importance to intelligence would be like a bird seeing moral significance in the ability to fly, and says that “subjective awareness” is the only relevant factor in whether a being’s interests should be considered. This would seem to make Francione both anti-speciesist and anti-cognitivist, but despite often treating choices between humans and animals as Sophie’s Choice-esque impossible decisions, Francione can’t quite stomach the radical equality that true anti-speciesism requires. As quoted above, Francione admits that he doesn’t really know what the subjective awareness of other animals is like and how valuable the lives of other animals are to them, and so would tend to favor humans in an emergency. Also in Introduction to Animal Rights, Francione says:
What about the situation in which we have no choice but to eat an animal or starve? Assume that Simon is stranded on a remote, snow-covered mountain after a plane crash. He is starving and there is neither a reasonable hope of rescue nor any vegetables available. When a rabbit happens by, Simon is confronted with the choice of killing the rabbit or starving. Just as we would be inclined to excuse Simon if, under these extreme circumstances, he killed and ate a human—which has in fact happened more than once—his killing the rabbit would also be excusable and completely consistent with the animal rights position.
Francione again strikes the pose of an anti-speciesist/anti-cognitivist by saying it would be equally excusable for Simon to kill a human for survival as it would be for him to kill a rabbit, but as I pointed out in “The Survival Exemption: Great for Vegans Stranded on an Island… Horrible for Veganism,” the two examples Francione cites of humans killing other humans for survival don’t parallel his Simon on the mountain with the rabbit because the human cases are both lifeboat scenarios in which the choice was between some people dying and everyone dying. With Simon vs. the rabbit, it’s either Simon survives or the rabbit survives, and Francione does not explain why he thinks it should be Simon.
If this has nothing to do with Simon’s superior intelligence (since Francione argues that it’s self-serving for humans to see intelligence as morally important), all that’s left is either an appeal to might makes right or a belief that anyone who is on the verge of death can take whatever they need from someone else in order to save themselves, including their lives. If Simon can kill a rabbit or a human wandering by simply because Simon is starving – even though the rabbit or other human are at no risk of harm otherwise – this excuses all manner of moral non-sequiturs such as forced organ donations, even if the person being forced to give up their insides to a sick person is perfectly healthy. Such a rule would lead to a healthy-organ hot potato as doctors would have to keep switching organs between the forced donor and sick recipient, since as soon as they take the healthy guts from the forced donor and put them in the sick person, the original donor would now be the one most in need of organs, so they would have to go back, and then come out again, etc.
I doubt that Francione would defend such an awkward and invasive obligation, and he certainly wouldn’t claim to believe in might making right, which means that he obfuscates his true feelings about why humans should come before other animals in certain situations, so it’s impossible to say if he’s a speciesist or a cognitivist. Nevertheless, it certainly does not seem that he is as prejudice-free as he claims.
It’s smart of Francione to try to dodge this issue and avoid saying that human life has more value by virtue of greater cognitive abilities. As Speciesist Vegan points out in the comments of one of his entries, it’s embarrassingly convenient how the “morally relevant” features that supposedly anti-speciesist vegans credit for adding extra value to certain lives are only held by humans:
WHO decides what is and isn’t a morally relevant feature? If humans decide that humans just happen to have more morally relevant features, on average, than essentially all other animals, what does this say about us? What does it say about our (im)partiality? Your example of the chimp and the baby born with extremely severe mental impairments only proves this: that in order for the scales to be tipped in favor of the non-human, the human basically has to be really, really messed up i.e. they need to lack some sort of ability or capacity that we normally think of as being uniquely human. Can you give a situation in which a normal human deserves less moral consideration than a normal animal? If so, what qualities or attributes justify this? Don’t you find it interesting that in the vast majority of cases, humans deserve more moral consideration? That’s just a coincidence, though, right? Wow, lucky for Singer (and you), because otherwise, he would sound like a psychotic misanthrope!
Only humans can appreciate certain high-level concepts such as existential dread and the inevitability of death, and only humans are capable of complex communication, deep connections with others, “future orientation,” ethics and creating the illusion of meaning. Luckily, these happen to be the things that matter, and it’s not speciesist to say so! As Speciesist Vegan points out in a different comment, vegans favoring humans over animals and calling it non-speciesist by labeling the traits only humans have as “morally relevant” is like saying, “I didn’t save the baby instead of the dog because it’s human. I saved it because it has an opposable thumb.”
Thus anti-speciesism becomes the most convoluted, self-serving and seemingly self-contradictory of all anti-prejudice doctrines, all to hide the fact that in rejecting one form of discrimination – that based on species classification – vegans more often than not accept another.
The cognitivism or speciesism trap is certainly one vegans would avoid if they could. After all, vegans are saying that because of cognitive differences, animal lives matter less than human lives. Most vegans say that difference in life value only justifies killing animals in emergency situations, but that’s just how they personally choose to weigh human interests against other animal interests. Once you declare that animals don’t care as much about their lives for whatever reasons, and so that gives us the upper hand, there is little to no ideological leap between “tear down the forests so we can plant crops and build cities because we like having a reliable food supply and civilization” and “let’s eat meat because we like it.”
This is why vegans feel the desperate need to bust out “the argument from marginal cases” every chance they get. The problem is, if they already want to say that cognitive differences actually are morally significant, all the amc does is try to get meat eaters to agree with vegans that saving an “orphaned an-encephalitic human infant whose existence is a secret” over a chimpanzee would be speciesist. They might as well whip us with a limp strip of kombu.
But what else can vegans do? Abolishing both cognitivism and speciesism would lead to consequences too radical for even for the most hardcore animal supporters to accept because it would demand true equality between the species and a selflessness that would — if consistently applied — lead to voluntary human extinction.
So most people could be labelled either speciesists or cognitivists (the latter perhaps only to hide that they are the former). The challenge for cognitivists is that despite so many vegans attaching moral significance to cognitive ability and arguing that human life has more value because of its richness, there is no proof of this other than cocky, human-biased assertions such as “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
I’d love to believe that, but this appears to be nothing but wishful conjecture. Where’s the proof? Is such proof even possible? As I argued in “Why the Top Priority of Vegans Should be Human Extinction, Not Veganism,” the additional richness of human life includes plenty of added suffering, and it’s quite possible that life becomes worse the more complicated a being you are.
What Tom Regan leaves out of his calculation that human life has more value than animal life because humans have more avenues for satisfaction is that more often than not, these avenues are gridlocked. David Benatar skilfully argues in “Better Never to Have Been” that a desire you don’t have is as good as a desire satisfied. And he’s not alone:
Old age, Seneca argues, has its benefits: ‘Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.’ Indeed, he claims that the most delightful time of life is ‘when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.’ He adds that even the time of ‘abrupt decline’ has pleasures of its own. Most significantly, as one loses the ability to experience certain pleasures, one loses the desire to experience them: “How comforting it is,” he says, “to have tired out one’s appetites, and to have done with them!” …
As we age…our feelings of lust and the state of distraction that accompanies them diminish. Some would argue that this is a bad thing, that it is yet another example of one of the pleasures of youth that is lost to us. But the Greek dramatist Sophocles offered another viewpoint. When he had grown old and someone asked whether, despite his years, he could still make love to a woman, he replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from this, like a slave who has escaped from a mad and cruel master.” (A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine, 192 – 193)
Rather than seeing our complex natures and rich lives as an advantage, the Stoics and Epicureans saw this as a sort of curse that we needed to overcome – something other animals need not worry about because their limited desires and expectations come naturally to them. Dogs may not be able to appreciate refined, heady conversation, but then they also don’t suffer the inane banter that generally dominates instead. Fewer opportunities for satisfaction means fewer opportunities for dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction is arguably the more common state.
In The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton quotes philosopher Michel de Montaigne:
Dare we conclude that the benefit of reason (which we praise so highly and on account of which we esteem ourselves to be lords and masters of all creation) was placed in us for our torment? What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we should enjoy without it…? … We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive. (The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton, 120 – 121, quoting The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne, 1.14.57 & 11.12.541)
It’s hard to say for sure, but there is at least a strong case that it’s the simpler beings who have it good, because they have fewer needs to satisfy and are prone to fewer anxieties and disappointments. It’s even possible that the placid and unconscious life of a plant, which is likely no experience at all, would be preferable to the experience of a wild animal who is always battling to survive. If philosophers like David Benatar and Arthur Schopenhauer are right and life is more pain and hassle than it’s worth, maybe the priority should be on killing the sentient beings before the non-sentient, since the non-sentient state of existence is as close as life can get to the peaceful serenity of nirvana.
The reality is that we don’t know how attached to life other animals are, and so it’s nothing but self-serving speculation to say that other animals don’t get as much out of life as we do. Veganism, then, does not crush the last remaining prejudice. At best veganism — as practiced now — crushes the second to last one. But even if cognitivism could be destroyed too, odds are a new prejudice would materialize that “objectively” put humans above other animals. That’s because human domination is not about species discrimination or even cognitive discrimination. In an upcoming entry, I’ll elaborate.
