Often in the animal advocacy movement, the problem of animal use is phrased as an absence of empathy or a lack of compassion. "If only people had more empathy! Veganism is a compassionate choice." What are we to make of these claims?
It is important to distinguish between empathy as a kind of emotional motivation that may or may not lead us to moral action, and moral action itself. It is the difference between the gasoline and the car, the driver, the driving, and the destination. Empathy can equally lead us into immorality if it is not properly considered. Moreover, it is important to distinguish between compassion, something we do as an act of benevolence, and justice, something we do because it is morally required of us to do it.
Many animal welfare advocates pose the moral problem as a need to understand the emotional world of another animal; often shorthanded as being "empathetic". None of us can do this properly, even if we might imagine that we can. That doesn't mean we cannot read body language or mood signals from other animals in some instances; it is simply to state the obvious that there would always be a certain amount of error involved.
Moreover, in my experience, many people relate to nonhuman animals (even their companion animals) in the same way that overbearing parents try to live vicariously through their children, mistaking their emotional echoes for the emotional lives of their companions. It is not clear that many people even get this far. Some instead treat all nonhumans (and just as often, other humans) with a complete moral apathy. This is not to say that more empathy would not be helpful in these situations. It might be. However, empathy flows often from our understanding of justice. That is, we are often empathetic to those to whom we already feel a sense of duty, even if we are not entirely certain about the nature of that duty.
Just understanding the emotional lives of nonhuman animals does not provide us with a proper basis to understand what we owe them in moral terms, as some animal welfare advocates have suggested it does. In a sense, this poses nonhuman animals as "things with feelings". But in fact, many nonhuman animals who would have a right not to be used as property may have little or no emotional lives at all.
This is, I think, different from comprehending animals as persons (some of whom have emotions, but all of whom would have some interests with respect the world) and trying to deepen our understanding of what we owe them in moral terms in light of that personhood. This is often (but not exclusively) an empirical process that informs and is informed by our rational decision making. If we wish to act most justly and most virtuously with respect to animals (human and non), some knowledge of their interests and a deepened understanding of them as persons to whom we owe moral consideration is required.
Let's say I told you a man died today in a traffic accident. You'd have some rational sense of what this meant. You might feel bad for him, feel bad for his family, etc. You might ask whether or not he suffered much.
But this would be remarkably different from an experience in which the man dies in your arms with his or her children standing nearby, the cars smashed and still smoking, broken glass all over the tar of the road, the sirens of ambulances and fire trucks, listening to his last breaths, watching his eyes flutter as he loses consciousness, his torso shaking, blue shirt, brown hair with streaks of grey, ashen skin, hazel eyes, all convulsing in your arms, seeing the looks of confusion and sadness on the faces of his children, one a girl who is just about to hit puberty with brown hair, freckles and a blue dress who will need braces and the other a boy in black jeans and a tan coat, and understanding as a whole (without fully thinking about it) the whole of the reality of the moment of his death and what it means in moral terms to all of those who will be affected by it.
In the first case, you're understanding rationally what's happened, but in the latter case, you comprehend cognitively in remarkably full and grave detail much more about the reality of that death in terms of what it meant to you and what it meant to the people involved: in short, what it meant in terms of moral reality.
If the man in my example had no children, he would still have an interest in continuing his life. If he were terrified or calm due to shock and hoping to see his dearly departed mother, he would still have an interest in continuing his life. If he could feel nothing emotionally at all, he would still have an interest in continuing his life. If he were a pig, he would still have an interest in continuing his life. If he were a bat, he would still have an interest in continuing his life. If he were a cuttlefish, he would still have an interest in continuing his life.
Although the precise nature of their interest in continuing their lives and their cognitive ability to comprehend and experience the world may vary, it does not follow from this that they have no interest in continuing their lives or that we are justified in harming them. His death would still be a loss, and insofar as we may be said to intentionally cause his death (or his harm, or to otherwise use him in a way to which he cannot consent), we would be doing something very gravely morally wrong. Moreover, we could not describe it legitimately as 'a compassionate choice' not to harm him but our duty in light of the justice that we owe him. It it not 'compassionate' to pay what we owe others; it is just.
Not using other animals as property (even if we don't cause them death in doing so) is obviously the most important thing we can do. Welfarist critics often describe the proposal to abolish the use of animals as an 'an abstract legal concept', and I always find this kind of baffling; in fact, it is critically important to understand nonhuman animals as persons with rights, who call us to limit our wills with respect to them, to not use them as property as the moral baseline of our lived daily practices.
Whatever the psychology, morality calls me to limit my personal will and desires in favor of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. Empathy and morality are not opposites, but neither are they mutually inclusive, nor can they be substituted. It is not because I am empathetic either to cockroaches or to Nazis that I don't intentionally harm either of them (although many of you can guess with whom I would rather share my bagel); it's because they both have a right not to be used as property because they are sentient.
We often think about nonhuman animals (and other humans) in ways that are remarkably vague, abstract and shallow. Rarely are their lives and deaths more than newspaper headlines or statistics. Even many vegans think of them as things with feelings that we try to accommodate as an act of our charity and goodness. We seldom comprehend them as persons to whom we owe an unequivocal duty, who have a unique place in the world, who want their lives, and that when any of them loses his or her life, that it's as morally meaningful as the death of a human being.
If we take the moral rights of nonhumans seriously (and we all should), we should internalize and act on a full understanding of the moral realities of what nonhuman animals face in slavery as an abridgment of their rights and denial of the justice we owe them. When we have cultivated properly this understanding of reality, only then can we be said to experience properly the visceral revulsion that attends to an encounter with speciesism that is immediate, sincere, and lucid.
This is different from a shallow, vague and rational understanding on reflection that it was a shame that raccoon was killed by a car, or an overly emotional cuddlitarian response that draws us into mistaking our own emotional desires to have a being continue his or her life with what s/he has lost in losing it and the tragedy that this proposes to us. Both of which are also different from the standard "so what?" that most people would experience.
It is not compassion that we need, but a strong sense of justice, an attention to our duties to others, and a habit of acting as virtuously as we can with respect to their rights. It is a sense of humility and not benevolence, a sense of justice, not charity. This begins with veganism. If you are not vegan already, you should go vegan today. If you are not an abolitionist, but wish to learn more about the approach, you should read my previous article or head over to www.abolitionistapproach.com
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