Vegans and the Intrinsic Moral Community, Part 2

There is another influential view in ethics on the size and membership of the intrinsic moral community, one that can be seen to turn the argument from marginal cases about humans on its head. For, you see, even ‘marginal humans’ with extraordinarily severe cognitive deficits can still feel pleasure and pain – if those parts of the brain that register such feelings die, so shall the human being. So perhaps sentience – the ability to feel pleasure and pain – is the key to intrinsic moral considerability. One of its earliest and most influential exponents of this view was the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham – but in order to include all humans in the intrinsic moral community, it turns out a lot more will have to be included as well:

“The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?...the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Bentham, J., 1781, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, edited b J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart, London: Methuen, 1982. [Available online at http://www.la.utexas.edu/research/poltheory/bentham/ipml/)

Contemporary utilitarian Peter Singer picks up on Bentham’s claim, stating that just as civilized society has realized the moral wrongness of sexism and racism (despite its pervasiveness in history), so shall we gradually awaken to the wrongness of speciesism – of treating only the species Homo sapiens sapiens as having intrinsic moral value. For Singer, morality is about producing pleasure and avoiding pain, and hence all sentient creatures – all creatures capable of feeling pleasure and/or pain – are intrinsically valuable. That is, as civilizations progress in their ethics, they will abandon the treatment of other sentient species as having merely instrumental value every bit as much as they have quit institutionalized racism or sexism. Then, for example, the institutional murder at factory farms of non-human animals for food consumption will be seen as every bit as vile as slavery – or even worse.

Thus, Singer’s view claims that sentience (the ability to experience pleasure/ pain) is the key moral attribute, and all sentient creatures should be treated in utilitarian fashion - more or less, we ought to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for all sentient creatures. To a first approximation, morality thus involves minimizing sentient suffering – suffering is only permissible when it produces greater net pleasure in the long run. This view, alas for Singer, leads to a reductio ad absurdum.

Singer’s utilitarianism implies that animal experimentation or consumption is wrong except in a case in which we would be willing to experiment on or consume a human with similar capabilities (sentience) to the animal. But, taken seriously, this view undermines all ethics, as usually understood. For let us be clear - our (human) obligation then is to minimize the total suffering of all sentient creatures, which means that ‘wild animals’ are most certainly NOT to be left to their own devices, with nature red in tooth and claw. No one disputes wild cats and dogs/ wolves endure far more suffering than domesticated ones, and so, if Singer is to be consistent, the human obligation to avoid suffering implies immediately that we should domesticate as many species as possible.

Further, a great deal of suffering occurs in the context of hunting and killing associated with meat eating, so it makes sense that we should not merely become vegetarians (and indeed vegans), but indeed should (as painlessly as possible!) sterilize and even euthanize all predators and carnivores, so that we drive them to extinction. Animal suffering would surely be alleviated in a world in which only peaceful herbivores exist. (We assume, of course, that plants cannot feel pleasure or pain).

But in truth, for a consistent Singer, we ought not stop there. The insects certainly behave as if they register pain, and self-conscious mental states are unnecessary for suffering on Singer’s view… so it appears crystal clear that the untold billions or even trillions of numbers of insects, including termites and roaches, are far more morally considerable than the entirety of the mammals, reptiles, amphibians and others more commonly called animals. A million roaches would certainly be more valuable, in terms of sentience, than a human life.

Indeed, a moral view would logically bid all ecological niches occupied by animals be vacated as well, so that the far more numerous insects could occupy them without suffering. Even the predatory insects should be extinguished, leaving only bees and their ilk. Hence, a world with only insect and plant life would have far less suffering, and all animals hence should be (again, as painlessly as possible!) driven to extinction. And of course, humans are animals – and as omnivores, we have a taste for meat. Singer’s ethics, consistently applied, would demand our extinction. Hence, for a consistent Singer, the culmination of ethical obligation is to remove all creatures capable of it!

This self-defeating conclusion is forced upon those who would have anything other than moral valuers – agents - in the intrinsic moral community. Inconsistency, indeed incoherence, is the ultimate fate of any position in ethics that has non-agents as part of the intrinsic moral community. So what then – how to address the argument from marginal cases and the moral status of non-human animals? Part 3 will provide one solution …