Touchstone: Animal Ethics and Desire’s Role in Ethics
President Trump’s expressed attitudes and actions towards immigrants revolt me, and viscerally offend my deepest convictions abut American values. (As do many other of his attitudes and actions.) Yet when I encounter someone else who shares my feelings about Trump, I am brought back to my senses. For chances are very high that that someone else who is so disgusted with Trump is a meat-eater, given that so few people in this country are not, and furthermore feels little if any compunction about it, or, even if she does, has no intention whatever of ceasing to eat animals, not to mention diary, eggs, and honey. So I ask myself: How can moral feelings be taken seriously, or at least at face value? For if someone outraged by Trump’s behavior toward immigrants, or women, et al., can be relatively indifferent to the (in)human treatment of other animals – which is vastly more horrific to boot -- what does this say about the true basis of that outrage? Veganism has become my moral touchstone.
But am I making a coherent case? I seem to be suggesting that morality itself is a questionable enterprise. But isn’t the logical conclusion from what I have written only that some people wear moral blinkers and fail to see their own shortcomings when focused intently on others’? That is a commonplace of the moral life: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye” (Matthew 7:5, KJV). I am sure I wear blinkers too and am relatively indifferent, or even partial, to various things that other people are outraged by. This could be interpreted to mean only that I am human oh so human like everybody else and cannot be expected to be morally perfect, or comprehensively moral. That is not an indictment of morality as such, is it? Nobody is perfectly rational or knowledgeable either, but don’t we still value rationality and knowledge?
Furthermore, do I not myself exhibit outrage at both Trump’s behavior and that of omnivores? So how can I be asserting that morality is not to be taken seriously?
There is still something especially telling about the failure to be vegetarian, not to mention vegan, which is, again, why I refer to it as the moral touchstone. For, I am convinced, the human (mis)treatment of other animals ranks as the greatest atrocity of all time in terms of the sheer number of sentient begins who have been made to suffer and have their lives cut short. So if the vast majority of humanity continues to eat other animals, and shows no sign of ever stopping to do so, and without the least moral compunction, then doesn’t this tell us something stunning about morality itself? I think the relevant comparison to rationality and knowledge would be if human beings embraced contradiction or continued to maintain that the Earth is flat. If that were the case then I think there might be equal reason to dismiss rationality and knowledge as not as important as they purport to be in human affairs.
The knee-jerk response of most moralists to the proposal that we therefore all just give up morality is that chaos would ensue because every conceivable atrocity would suddenly become permissible. But, once again, the ongoing Supreme Atrocity of animal agriculture, with not only moral indifference but often even moral endorsement, quite undercuts that objection, it seems to me. (I don’t even need to critique the conceptual confusion of asserting that something would be permissible, which is itself a moralist notion, if there were no morality.) I don’t see morality standing in the way of atrocity. If anything, in fact, I see morality as abetting it. So this objection is at a minimum a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Let me conclude, in light of the discussion above prompted by reflection on Trump and omnivores, by offering a way to think about what is really going on with morality and ethics. I see the bottom line as desire. This is so in two ways. First is that the world would continue to spin merrily around if we got rid of morality because we would still have our desires. Trump would continue to disparage immigrants and others because he – correctly it appears! – sees this as a way (and perhaps the only way) to fulfil his desire to be and remain President. Most human beings would continue to eat other animals because they desire to experience the tastes they are used to and may even be hard-wired to enjoy. I would (and do, even since forswearing morality) continue to donate money to the ACLU to fight Trump’s policies and continue to eat only plants and urge others to do so because I desire to live in a country that embodies the message of the Statue of Liberty and to prevent other animals from needless suffering and premature death at human hands, resp.
The second way desire enters the picture, on my view, is that morality is itself a manifestation of desire. Thus, Trump no doubt believes he is a paragon of virtue who is forever doing the (morally) right thing, and sees his opponents as evil. And most human beings believe they are, at a minimum, doing nothing (morally) wrong by continuing to eat meat even if they don’t need it for nutrition and might even be healthier if they didn’t eat it. And people who oppose Trump’s policies and actions and animal agriculture believe that those things are (morally) wrong and their “perpetrators” probably evil to boot. But in all of these cases, it seems to me, it is the desires mentioned in the preceding paragraph that are calling the shots. Morality is window dressing.[1]
Normally we believe, or unthinkingly assume, that we desire certain things because we think they are good or bad or right or wrong etc. Thus, originally I thought my reason for wanting to end animal agriculture was that (I thought) it was bad or was wrong. But now I think the real reason was (and is) that I just can’t stand the thought of animals suffering and dying in that way and want it to stop. But, similarly, people who do not need to but nevertheless continue blithely to eat other animals, do so, not because they think it’s morally kosher to eat meat, but, for the most part, because they want to continue to indulge in the pleasures of eating it (or they want to stay healthy or vigorous and mistakenly believe they need to eat meat for that purpose, etc.).
Morality, then, is superfluous – an add-on to desire. This at the very least (if true) buttresses my case for just giving up morality, by undercutting the moralist’s argument that only morality stands in the way of chaos.
However, if morality were merely superfluous, it is hard to understand how it could have become so prominent in human affairs. If we accept a Darwinian view of the prevalence of traits. must not morality somehow serve important human purposes? My answer is: yes and no. No doubt morality has performed an essential function in preserving our species through the ages. It may have done so by pumping up our desires with a seemingly objective imprimatur (usually also reinforced by divine sanction), thereby giving us a motivational advantage over other proto-humans who lacked such a notion. But this is not an argument for our wanting to keep morality around today. Why not? Because the environment in which morality helped us to thrive has changed drastically … and in part even due to morality’s effectiveness. Our very evolutionary success now has us outstripping the carrying capacity of the planet. So what may have made us the dominant creatures we are today could now be paving the way for our extinction … and replacement by another species that lacks the moral embellishment of their desires …unless we ourselves can transform into Homo amoralist.
Mutatis mutandis for meat eating. The flesh and products of other animals may have helped to sustain us in the past. But today both our ever increasing numbers and our ever more powerful technologies conspire to clog our arteries and exhaust the world’s resources and even contribute to climate change. Meat eating may now have reached the tipping point of militating against our continued thriving and even survival. And so also for xenophobia and the like. At one time each human tribe had to defend against every other tribe. Today this is a recipe for societal breakdown and even the end of civilization.[2] Morality just makes these entrenched behaviors and attitudes all the more resistant to modification. It is therefore the straw that could break the back of human existence.
There are actually two ways that animal ethics (though certainly not alone in this regard) explodes morality. The first is that morality has gone blithely along all these millennia without doing the animals a damn bit of good … if anything, only reinforcing their exploitation. The second is that even when morality does attribute “moral considerability” to other animals, “weakness of will” usually comes to the rescue of human prerogatives. “I know it’s wrong but ….” So the complementary flaws of morality are well in evidence:
1) If we have a strong desire for something that morality seems, or can be made to seem, to endorse, invoking morality pumps up this subjective phenomenon with a false objectivity to the status of command, demand, injunction, sanction, imperative, obligation, prohibition ….
2) If we have a strong desire for something that morality seems to oppose (despite our casuistic efforts), invoking weakness of will reveals the (relative) weakness of our etiolated and really contentless desire to “do the right thing.”
This suggests that the apparent strength of our desire to do the right thing is (usually?) an illusion of misplacement, for it only reflects the strength of a coincident nonmoral desire. Thus, when we strongly want to do what morality demands (or can be made to seem to demand), then we display a strong desire to do the right thing; but when we strongly want to do what morality prohibits (and cannot make it seem permissible), then we manifest only a weak desire to do the right thing. In fact the moral desire as such is weak all along but takes on (or seems to take on) the strength of any coincident nonmoral desire.
One practical implication for moral abolitionism, then, is that the motivational cost of giving up morality would be low, since strong nonmoral desire will generally prevail in any case. However there is still an asymmetry that makes a difference: For while an opposing moral desire will hardly inhibit a strong nonmoral desire, a coincident moral desire will exaggerate a strong nonmoral desire. To me this suggests that there is a motivational benefit to giving up morality, precisely by denying our desires excessive strength (meaning, beyond what reason supports).
[1] Cf. Zimmerman (1962).
[2] But so also for veganism and the
Golden Rule and amoralism? At some point, it seems, I do have to be claiming
that the views I favor and hold are,
as a matter of objective fact and not just “taste,” more benign to human
prospects. Of course I can still insist that caring about human prospects is itself a “subjective choice.”
Zimmerman, M. 1962. “The ‘Is-Ought’: An Unnecessary Dualism.” Mind, New Series 71 (281): 53-61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251730