Chapter 4
All Human Beings and Animals Are Inside Ethics,
or Reflections on Cognitive Disability and the Dead
All living beings contain a measure of madness that
moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
– Yann Martel, Life of Pi, New York, NY,
Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 2001, p.41.
Having in earlier chapters presented an argument for situating human beings and
animals ‘inside ethics’ in my sense, I want to devote the current chapter to further
developing this argument and bringing out an aspect of its moral interest. The argument’s
main conclusion is that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics,
and, in arriving at this conclusion, I depict human beings and animals as proper objects of
moral concern. My goal now is to show that, if we help ourselves to the understanding of
moral thought that my argument brings within reach (2.3), we can demonstrate not only that
some human beings and some animals are proper objects of moral concern but that all are.
We can do this by defending both the classic view that the sheer fact of being human is
morally significant and the less widely discussed view that the sheer fact of being an animal
of some kind is morally significant as well.
This project possesses a certain urgency. Today a number of influential moral
philosophers are openly hostile to the idea that bare humanity and bare animality are morally
important. While any moral philosopher who is skeptical about the moral standing of human
2
beings and animals in effect rejects this idea, there are many non-skeptical thinkers who
dismiss the thought that merely being a human, or merely being an animal of some kind, is
relevant to ethics. Here I have in mind, above all, members of an internally diverse group of
moral thinkers who believe that a human or non-human creature’s moral standing is a
function of its individual characteristics. Moral thinkers who fit this description – and who,
for the purposes of this chapter I refer to as moral individualists – are committed to denying
that the sheer fact of being human, or of being an animal of some kind, is morally
significant. What unites different moral individualists is a thought about how any
consideration human beings and animals merit is a reflection of their individual mental
attributes, and it appears to follow from this thought that there can be no question of
regarding the plain fact that a creature is a human being or an animal of some kind (i.e., apart
from the possession of particular individual mental characteristics) as pertinent to ethics.
It is not uncommon for moral individualists to emphasize that, by their lights, merely
being human is thus irrelevant to ethics. Some moral individualists talk about intellectually
severely disabled human beings specifically with an eye to pointing out that, according to the
logic of moral individualism, the people in question merit less consideration than do their
mentally better endowed human fellows. This gesture has come in for intense criticism.
Some of its fiercest critics are disability theorists who protest the – politically consequential –
suggestion that intellectually severely disabled human beings matter less on account of their
intellectual impairments. When in this chapter I argue that the sheer fact of being human is
morally important, one of my goals is to position myself, within this dispute between
disability theorists and moral individualists, decisively on the side of the former.
The importance of merely being human is not, however, my only topic. I am setting
out to show not only that the plain fact of being human is morally significant but that the
3
plain fact of being an animal is so as well. This further contention brings me, once again,
into conflict with moral individualism. Although not all contemporary thinkers who qualify
as moral individualists bring their views to bear on the case of animals, there are a number of
well known moral individualists who emphasize that it follows from their theoretical views
that some individual animals (viz., those who possess what are deemed morally relevant
mental capacities) merit moral consideration. Among the thinkers who thus apply tenets of
different moral individualisms to the case of animals are some who are rightly counted
among the most high profile and outspoken advocates of animal protectionism. Indeed the
quarrel between moral individualists and disability theorists is sometimes presented as
confronting us with a choice between, on the one hand, recognizing animals as having
significant claims to moral attention and, on the other, recognizing human beings with
severe intellectual disabilities as having undiminished claims to such attention. Against this
backdrop, it seems important to underline the following point, viz., that it is a direct
corollary of things I say in this chapter that there is no question of being confronted with
some sort of human-animal choice along these lines. Here I claim that we should approach
questions about the moral standing of animals of different kinds in a manner exactly
analogous to that in which we should approach questions about the moral standing of
human beings. Despite their generally friendly intentions to animals, moral individualists
bequeath to us a morally problematic image of animal life. Insofar as they insist that any
moral consideration an animal merits is a function of its individual characteristics, they are
committed holding that merely being an animal (i.e., apart from the possession of any
individual mental characteristics) is irrelevant to ethics. An important ambition of this
chapter is to show that – like moral individualists’ accounts of human beings’ moral standing
– this account of animals’ moral standing is both philosophically unwarranted and morally
4
flawed and that, just as the plain fact of being human is pertinent to ethics, the plain fact of
being an animal of some kind is as well.
Below I get started by first discussing moral individualisms and presenting the twofold complaint about them that provides the motive for this chapter’s main claims. I describe
how disability theorists and others protest moral individualists’ proposal to ground human
moral standing in individual capacities, and I sketch a similar protest of moral individualists’
proposal to ground the moral standing of animals in individual capacities (4.1). Helping
myself to the conception of moral thought about human beings and animals that I defend
earlier in this book, I then argue that both elements of this attack on moral individualism are
justified and that, the claims of moral individualists notwithstanding, we are entitled to treat
as morally important the plain fact of being human (4.2) and the plain fact of being an
animal of some kind (4.3). I conclude the chapter with a few remarks on the nature and
implications of its main argument. Among other things, I note that the argument proceeds
by representing all human beings and animals as having observable moral characteristics and,
further, that is therefore aptly described – to put it in the terms of this book – as showing
that all human beings and animals are ‘inside ethics’ (4.4).
4.1. Toward a Critique of Moral Individualism
“Moral individualism” is a label that gets applied to ethical views on which, as the
self-avowed moral individualist James Rachels puts it, “how an individual may be treated is
to be determined, not by considering his group memberships, but by considering his own
5
particular characteristics.”1 While, by definition, moral individualists agree that any treatment
a creature merits is a function of her individual characteristics, the different thinkers who
count as moral individualists disagree, in various ways, about the kinds of characteristics that
count as morally relevant. For instance, whereas some moral philosophers who favor forms
of moral individualism focus solely on characteristics that are intrinsic, others maintain that a
creature may be entitled to specific forms of treatment from a particular other, or from
particular others, as a result of standing in a particular relationship (such as, e.g., the
relationship of an artist to her benefactor) and that we need to allow for ethically significant
relational characteristics.2 The question of whether there are such relational characteristics
does not, however, represent a point of fundamental disagreement among moral
individualists. Those who talk about relational characteristics typically resemble their peers in
holding that only intrinsic characteristics endow a creature with moral status in virtue of
which it is a source of reasons that aren’t functions of our relationship to it or, to use some
philosophical shop-talk, in virtue of which it is a source of agent-neutral reasons. This brings
me to a further point of disagreement among moral individualists. Moral individualists also
disagree about which intrinsic characteristics count as morally relevant. The set of moral
individualisms includes theories – such as, e.g., Tom Regan’s rights-based theory – that treat
1
James Rachels, Created from Animals: the Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),
173.
2
One prominent moral individualist who champions the idea of ethically significant relational properties is Jeff
McMahan (see, e.g., “Our Fellow Creatures,” The Journal of Ethics 9 (2005): 353-380, 354). For a second
example, see the work of Clare Palmer, esp. Animal Ethics: A Relational Approach (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 2010).
6
any claims to consideration a creature merits as functions of her capacity for subjecthood.3
And one of the largest subsets of moral individualisms is made up of theories – including,
e.g., Peter Singer’s preference utilitarianism (1.2) – that treat any claims to consideration a
creature has as functions of interests she possesses in virtue of her capacity for suffering.4
While specific moral individualisms are sometimes recommended on the ground that
their fundamental claims are intuitive,5 it is not difficult to see that these claims have radical
and arguably counterintuitive consequences for our understanding of human moral standing,
undermining the classic idea of human moral equality. To the extent that, in accordance with
the core tenets of moral individualism, human beings’ claims to solicitude are taken to be
functions of their individual characteristics, it appears to follow that any human being who
lacks whichever characteristics are regarded as morally significant will have diminished moral
standing. This is a striking – some would say, shocking – result, and, far from trying to
downplay this aspect of their ethical projects, some moral individualists actively celebrate it.
For example, Singer declares that he wants to reject “the idea of the equal value of all
humans” and replace it with “a more graduated view on which moral status depends on
3
See Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983) and Defending Animal
Rights (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
4
Many animal protectionists implicitly or explicitly follow Singer in advocating forms of moral individualism
that ground creatures’ claims to consideration in interests they have in virtue of their capacities for suffering.
5
This is an important theme of Singer’s recent defenses of the – utilitarian – form of moral individualism he
favors. See my discussion of Singer’s work in 1.2. McMahan also presents himself as defending his preferred
moral individualism partly on intuitive grounds (see, e.g., “Our Fellow Creatures”).
7
some aspects of cognitive ability.”6 Singer’s point is that human beings who for whatever
reason (e.g., illness, age, disease or some congenital condition) are short on what he regards
as interest-grounding cognitive capacities have diminished claims to moral attention and,
further, that it is therefore less bad to, say, perform painful or lethal scientific experiments
on them than on human beings without any cognitive impairments.7 And, to mention one
additional example, the self-described moral individualist Jeff McMahan resembles Singer
not only in distancing himself from the idea of human moral equality but also in defending
the view that, in McMahan’s words, “allowing severely retarded [sic] human beings to die,
and perhaps even killing them, are…less serious matters than we have believed.”8
While it is possible for thinkers who qualify as moral individualists to focus solely on
the human case, today many moral individualists bring their theoretical commitments to bear
on the case of animals as well. It would not be an exaggeration to say that moral
6
See “Speciesism and Moral Status,” in Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and its
Challenge to Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 331-344, 338.
7
See, e.g., Animal Liberation (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 15-16 and 18-19. Singer also
covers the same basic ground in Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 59-60.
8
McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 230. When McMahan defends the
view that some human beings with limited intellectual abilities merit less consideration, he explicitly makes
exceptions for individuals who have the capacity to develop what he regards as morally relevant characteristics
(e.g., fetuses and infants) as well as for individuals who once possessed what he regards as morally relevant
characteristics (e.g., adults whose cognitive limitations are functions of illness or injury). McMahan’s claims
about diminished moral standing are intended to apply exclusively to those human beings who have congenital
intellectual disabilities and whom he describes as “severely retarded.” See esp. 203-209.
8
individualisms owe a great deal of their current prominence to their role in ongoing debates
about the moral standing of animals. An important intellectual task of those who advocate
for better treatment of animals is establishing that animals are proper objects of moral
concern. This is because, within some older ethical traditions, animals are represented as in
themselves failing to impose moral claims on us,9 and because the view that animals lack
moral standing, in addition to being reflected in the utterly indifferent treatment animals
receive in settings such as factory farms, still receives significant intellectual support today.10
For these reasons, animal advocates often try to show simply that animals do have moral
standing, and those who do so frequently draw on some form of moral individualism.11
9
This was, as noted in 1.3, Kant’s official view. It was also the view of Descartes, who believed that animals are
mere automata. For a helpful set of excerpts from Descartes’ writings and letters, see Tom Regan and Peter
Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 13-19.
10
A useful list of contemporary works that deny moral standing to animals would have to include Peter
Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), David S.
Oderberg, “The Illusion of Animals Rights,” Human Life Review 26 (2003): 37-45 and Michael Leahy, Against
Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective, revised ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. Chapter 7. See also Roger
Scruton Animal Rights and Wrongs 3rd ed. (London: Metro Books, 2000). While Scruton sanctions the idea of
duties to individual animals arising from our relationships with them, he denies that we have any other duties to
animals that aren’t mere functions of duties to ourselves or other human beings (see esp. Chs. 7 and 8).
11
Many prominent contemporary animal advocates favor forms of moral individualism. This includes, e.g.,
three philosophers whom I have already mentioned, Singer, Regan, Rachels and McMahan. Another widely
read philosopher and animal advocate who accepts the basic tenets of moral individualism is David DeGrazia
(see, e.g., Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
esp. Chapter 3). Moreover, the group of influential animal advocates who endorse moral individualisms
9
It is not difficult to see how the tenets of moral individualism can seem to support
the conclusion that animals have moral standing. One widely used strategy for moving from
the core claims of moral individualism to this conclusion starts from the following reflection.
If we allow that the tenets of moral individualism apply to non-human as well as human
creatures, we are obliged to treat any capacities that we take to be morally significant in
human beings to be likewise morally significant in animals. The idea, as Rachels puts it, is
that “if we think it is wrong to treat a human in a certain way, because the human has certain
characteristics, and a particular non-human animal also has those characteristics,” then – other things
being equal – “consistency requires that we also object to treating the non-human in that
way.”12 This precept only seems to have a bearing on the treatment of animals if it is
combined with the view that some human beings and some animals possess the same
morally relevant capacities. So it should not surprise us to find that moral individualists who
take an interest in animals frequently try to establish that there are human beings who are no
better endowed with what they regard as morally relevant capacities than some animals are.
The particular human beings who are typically mentioned in this context are those who, as a
result of illness, injury, age or some congenital condition, are intellectually severely disabled,13
includes not only philosophers but also legal theorists, such as Gary Francione (see, e.g., Introduction to Animal
Rights: Your Child or the Dog (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000), xxix).
12
James Rachels, Created from Animals, 175, stress in the original.
13
Some moral individualists who take an interest in animals focus in this connection on more restrictive classes
of intellectually limited human beings. This includes, e.g., McMahan who focuses exclusively on human beings
who have severe congenital cognitive disabilities.
10
and, after observing that there are human beings fitting this description, animal advocates
who go in for moral individualism often proceed to draw the main conclusion they are after,
viz., that some animals have significant claims to moral solicitude. They also often add that
any tendency to place value on the sheer fact of being human is therefore unjustified or, to
employ a familiar bit of jargon, that any such tendency is a sign of an unwarranted speciesism.14
The argument I just sketched (i.e., the argument running from the tenets of moral
individualism to the conclusion that some animals have claims to moral consideration) gets
referred to as the argument from marginal cases.15 This argument owes its name to the
problematic idea that human beings with severe intellectual disabilities are morally
“marginal” cases of human beings. Setting aside for just a moment discussion of what is
problematic about this idea, I want to point out that it is a premise of the argument that
animals’ claims to moral consideration are grounded in their individual characteristics and, by
the same token, that the sheer fact of being an animal of some kind is morally unimportant.
Although, as we just saw, the principles of moral individualism get applied not only
to human beings but also to animals, it is their core human applications that generate the
most controversy. One of the most frequently repeated criticisms of moral individualism has
to do with the suggestion that human beings with severe intellectual impairments have
14
This term was coined by Richard Ryder and brought into general circulation by Singer and others.
15
For a sympathetic, older overview of different versions of the argument, see Daniel Dombrowski, Babies and
Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997). For a slightly more
recent overview, see Elizabeth Anderson, “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life,” in Martha
Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 277-298.
11
diminished claims to moral consideration specifically in virtue of their impairments. The
particular criticism that I want to explore does not depend for its bite on any
misunderstanding of what moral individualists are committed to. It is true that consistent
moral individualists need not be in favor of “leveling down” our current treatment of
severely intellectually disabled human beings so that it is, say, equivalent to our current
treatment of mentally similarly endowed animals.16 Their theoretical positions commit them
to holding that creatures with equivalent mental capacities have equivalent claims to moral
consideration, and this is something that moral individualists can consistently maintain while
also sanctioning (or even calling for improvements to) our current treatment of intellectually
severely disabled human beings. Nevertheless, without regard to their specific views about
the kind of treatment merited by intellectually severely disabled human beings, they are
committed to holding that, other things being equal, the individuals in question place lesser
demands on us for moral attention than do their unimpaired fellows. Moreover, as we saw,
this is a consequence that some moral individualists explicitly embrace.17
16
For talk of “leveling down,” see McMahan, “Our Fellow Creatures,” 358.
17
A comment is in order about terms I use in this chapter to refer to members of the group of human beings
whose moral standing is threatened by different moral individualisms. Here I talk about individuals with severe
“intellectual disabilities” or, alternately, individuals with severe “cognitive impairments.” Although I use these
terms, I am believe that what is at issue is a class of individuals so internally diverse that in referring to it as a
class we invariably run the risk of oversimplification and misunderstanding. My reason for nonetheless
employing the above terms is strategic. I need to employ them in order to directly challenge the tendency of
moral individualists to impugn the moral standing of those human beings who lack (or are short on) what,
according to different moral individualisms, count as morally relevant capacities.
12
One place at which moral individualists’ attitude toward severely intellectually
disabled human beings comes under attack is in disability studies. Theorists of disability
attack the idea that, as Michael Berubé puts it, “cognitive capacity is a useful criterion for
reading some people out of the human community.”18 They question moral individualists’
suggestion that severely intellectually disabled human beings are less deserving of moral
consideration and that harming them is, relatively speaking, a minor affair.19 These critics
sometimes proceed by using examples to get us to see that we ourselves take moral
individualists’ claims about human beings with severe intellectual disabilities to be repugnant.
The disability theorist and moral philosopher Eva Feder Kittay employs this strategy in
various papers in which she talks about her own daughter Sesha, who has cerebral palsy and
who, as an adult, “cannot speak, walk on her own, or care for herself in even minimal
ways.”20 In one essay, Kittay describes how the director of the agency running the small
home in which Sesha lives once discovered with dismay that Sesha was being wheeled from
18
From a letter to Peter Singer, reprinted in Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and its
Challenge to Moral Philosophy, 108
19
See the papers in ibid. See esp., Carlson and Kittay, “Introduction: rethinking Philosophical Presumptions in
Light of Cognitive Disability,” 1-25, Carlson, “Philosophers of Intellectual Disability: A Taxonomy,” 315-330
and Kittay, “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled
Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield,” 393-413.
20
This quote is from Eva Kittay, “Equality, Dignity and Disability” in Mary Ann Lyons and Fionnuala
Waldron, eds., Perspectives on Equality: The Second Seamus Heaney Lectures (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2005), 93-119,
96. I am indebted to Christopher Kaposy for bringing this article to my attention.
13
the bathroom back to her room, clad only in a towel, through a public corridor “where
young male residents and staff could encounter her.”21 When Kittay describes this scene, she
is trying to get us to recognize that it is right to speak, in reference to Sesha’s exposure, of a
slight to Sesha’s dignity that was there without regard to whether Sesha herself was capable
of experiencing the occasion as such a slight.22 Or, again, in an essay in which Kittay
provides a partial transcript of a public conversation she had with McMahan at an Atlanta
workshop on a book of McMahan’s, she tells us that McMahan was aware that she is, as she
puts it, “the mother of a wonderful woman with severe intellectual disabilities.”23 In
discussing her interaction with him, Kittay is inviting us to be horrified, as she is, by his
repeatedly voiced contention that harming her daughter would, in relative terms, be no big
deal and that it is “less bad to kill her than to kill ‘one of us’.”24
Disability theorists are not the only critics of moral individualists’ proposal to ground
human moral standing in individual attributes. Other moral philosophers also question the
idea that human beings with diminished mental capacities merit less solicitude. Some of
these thinkers likewise use examples to elicit shock at moral individualists’ claims. One rich
source of examples on these lines is the writings of Cora Diamond. Diamond asks us, for
instance, to consider the kind of indignation “we may feel at the rape of a girl lacking speech
21
Ibid.
22
See ibid., 97.
23
Eva Feder Kittay, “The Personal is Philosophical is Political,” 393.
24
Ibid., 395.
14
and understanding, lacking what we think of as moral personality and the capacity for
autonomous choice, and incapable of finding the event humiliating and the memory painful
as a normal woman might.”25 Similarly, she asks us to acknowledge that “the conviction by a
court of a severely retarded person for a crime that required an intention the retarded person
could not form [would be] unjust; the less capable of forming such an intention the person
is, the more palpable the injustice.”26 In addition to producing examples she believes will
elicit responses that moral individualism would oblige us to censor, Diamond calls on us to
examine our willingness to affirm similar responses of others. In one passage she invites us
25
“The Importance of Being Human,” in David Cockburn, ed., Human Beings (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 35-62, 56.
26
Ibid., p.53. Diamond wrote the article from which I am quoting, which was first published in 1991, at a time
at which there was not yet as clear a consensus as there is today that the term “retarded” is disrespectful and
should not be used in descriptions of individuals with congenital cognitive disabilities. (Diamond herself no
longer uses the term.) There have been changes over time in received views about how to characterize
individuals who have congenital intellectual disabilities. In the early twentieth century it was taken to be
appropriate to speak of “morons” or “idiots,” and until a decade or two past the middle of the twentieth
century it was taken to be appropriate to speak of individuals who are “mentally retarded.” (For an account of
this history, see Jeffrey P. Brosco, “The Limits of the Medical Model: Historical Epidemiology of Intellectual
Disability in the United States,” in Kittay and Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy,
27-54.) Today there is an emerging consensus that, in discussing individuals with congenital cognitive
impairments, it is more respectful to talk about “developmental delays.” The basic idea – which is reflected in
my own terminological choices in this chapter – is that this terminology, instead of wrongly suggesting that we
have antecedently determined that individuals with congenital intellectual disabilities won’t grow cognitively
past a certain point, signals an openness to discovering all kinds and levels of cognitive development and, by
the same token, to supporting policies that foster such development.
15
to assess the response of parents who feel a “special outrage” when their child ridicules “a
severely retarded person…who [has] no grasp of having been the butt of ridicule.”27
In the last two paragraphs I touched on criticisms of moral individualists’ accounts
of human moral standing. Given that, as I noted earlier, some of the staunchest defenders of
animals’ claims to moral consideration are moral individualists, it may be tempting to
interpret these critiques as attacks on the idea that animals are proper objects of moral
concern. But this interpretation is by no means obligatory. The critiques might also be taken
to suggest an analogous critique of moral individualists’ account of animal moral standing. If
we are disturbed by the idea that human beings only merit moral consideration insofar as
they have such-and-such individual characteristics, then we may equally well be disturbed by
the idea that animals only merit moral consideration insofar as they have such-and-such
individual characteristics. Imagine coming across a group of children using a brain dead
rabbit as a dartboard. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to think that, despite the fact that the
rabbit cannot be said to have any morally relevant individual characteristics, the children are
wronging or disrespecting it in some way? Isn’t the same thing true of the workers in a
California factory farm who, as a secret videotape showed, pushed cattle too sick to walk
around with a forklift? Weren’t they betraying a type of callousness to the creatures that
wasn’t merely a function of causing pain and suffering?28 Mightn’t we plausibly ask a similar
question about people who subject animals to forms of ridicule that are lost on the animals
27
Ibid., 55.
28
Singer discusses this case in Animal Liberation, ix. He uses it to motivate his preferred form of moral
individualism. He does not take it, as I do, to speak against such individualism.
16
in question? Consider in this connection the behavior of researchers at the University of
Pennsylvania Head Injury Laboratory who, as another secret video revealed, mocked and
ridiculed their already injured baboon subjects. Mightn’t we say – this is an example of
Diamond’s – that these researchers exhibited a form of disrespect to the baboons that wasn’t
somehow mitigated by the fact that it was lost on the baboons themselves?29 Or consider the
head slaughterer at a New York State slaughterhouse who merrily kissed each of the cattle he
was to kill just before shooting it through the brain.30 Or – to turn to an example of Lori
Gruen’s – the members of the Moscow Circus who dressed a bear up in a frilly pastel apron
and had it walk around the ring on its hind legs pushing a toy baby carriage.31 Or, finally – to
mention another example of Gruen’s – people who not only keep wild animals in cramped
enclosures but, moreover, adorn the enclosures with scenes of the open spaces in which the
animals could move freely.32 Insofar as we find these ways of treating animals insulting and
29
Diamond discusses this case in “Injustice and Animals,” in Carl Elliott, ed., Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers:
Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine and Bioethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 118-148, 137.
30
Sue Coe discusses this case in Dead Meat (New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996), 62.
31
Gruen discusses this case in Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 152-
153 and again in “Dignity, Captivity and an Ethics of Sight,” in Lori Gruen, ed., The Ethics of Captivity (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 231-247, 231.
32
Gruen discusses two cases fitting this description in “Dignity, Captivity and an Ethics of Sight,” 237-239.
Her reference points for both are photographs in Fran Noelker’s striking book, Captive Beauty (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2004).
17
wrong, we will be inclined to think that moral individualists fail to capture the source of our
conviction that animals merit forms of respect and attention.33
I just sketched parallel critiques of moral individualists’ views of human and animal
moral standing. It is not hyperbole to say that moral individualists have evinced little interest
in responding to critiques on these lines. To the extent that they take an interest in the
relevant objections, they generally dismiss them as unworthy of serious response. The
objections are at bottom judgments about how certain ways of treating human beings and
animals are, say, repugnant, callous or disrespectful, and it is not uncommon for moral
individualists to reject these judgments as mere moral prejudices. In making this gesture of
rejection, moral individualists sometimes present themselves as moral radicals who have the
courage, when led by sound argument, to challenge received moral opinion.34 They thus
sometimes draw what one commentator describes as a “rhetorical contrast between an
extant set of moral convictions which is to a large degree made up of inherited prejudices
33
For a more complicated case that raises questions similar to those raised in this paragraph, consider how a
California restaurant called “Pink Taco,” a slang term for a woman’s genitals, once employed an animal in an
advertising stunt. On May 5, 2011, in ‘honor’ of Cinco de Mayo, the restaurant shaved a donkey, painted it
pink, wrote “Pink Taco” on both of its sides and paraded it around. It seems likely that, as a number of critics
charged at the time, the stunt caused the donkey distress. At the same time, it seems reasonable to ask whether,
in involving the donkey in an outlandish prank that depended on misogyny for its effect, those responsible
showed disrespect for the creature that wasn’t merely a function of causing unnecessary distress. I am indebted
to Zed Adams and Hunter Robinson for drawing my attention to this affair.
34
This is the preferred stance of Singer and McMahan. See, e.g., Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1980): 325-327, 327 and McMahan, “Our Fellow Creatures,” 373.
18
and a new, critical morality which has passed through the mill of rigorous argument.”35 It
would, however, be overhasty to conclude that intellectual seriousness is on the side of
moral individualists. A good case can be made for affirming, with moral individualists’
detractors, that merely being human or merely being an animal of some kind (i.e., apart from
the possession of any particular individual characteristics) is morally important.
Making such a case is the business of the rest of this chapter. The strategy I adopt
presupposes this book’s argument thus far. In Chapter 2, I argued that human beings and
animals have observable moral characteristics. The particular observable characteristics I
identified as moral are qualities of mind broadly construed, and in describing these qualities I
claimed that they have necessary references to conceptions of what matters in the lives of
the human beings and animals who possess them. I also discussed implications of this
understanding of qualities of mind for how we construe the project of bringing human
beings and animals empirically into focus in ethics (2.3). One of my main claims was that we
need to see human beings and animals in the light of conceptions of what matters in their
lives (2.2.ii). The current chapter’s argument against moral individualism depends for its
success on efforts to get us to look at human beings and animals through the lens of such
ethical conceptions. It might seem reasonable to protest that argument of this sort – i.e., one
driven by ethically saturated modes of thought – cannot as such be in the business of
revealing objective features of human and animal life, and hence cannot be credited with
genuine authority. But this is wrong, and in the chapter’s closing section I bring out how it
follows from my book’s overarching argument that we are entitled to regard as objectively
authoritative the case I make here for holding – in opposition to moral individualism – that
merely being human, or merely being an animal of some kind, is morally important.
35
Peter Byrne, Philosophical and Ethical Problems in Mental Handicap (New York, NY: St. Martins Press, 2000), 46.
19
4.2. The Importance of Being Human
The plain fact of being human is pertinent to ethics. That is what I am setting out to
show in this section. I am, as I mentioned, going to proceed by following up on Chapter 2’s
argument for situating human beings inside ethics. According to this argument, mental
categories are categories for expressive behavior, and the patterns of behavior they pick out
are not neutrally available. In 2.2.ii I claimed that we are only in a position to recognize
relevant patterns in a creature’s behavior if we look at her in the light of a conception of
what matters in the lives of creatures of her kind, but I didn’t specifically discuss how to
understand this talk of kinds of creatures. Right now I want to clarify what it means to say
that recognizing the psychological significance of a human being’s expressions necessarily
involves looking at her in light of a conception of what matters in the lives of creatures of
her kind. My thesis is that for the purposes of psychological understanding human beings
belong to the kind “human being” and that in order to do justice to a human being’s
expressive behavior it is necessary to look at her in the light of a conception of what is
important in human life. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for bringing human
beings into focus in ethics. To bring human beings into focus in ethics we need a conception
of human existence that registers the importance of things like bodily integrity, physical
freedom, dependable companionship, social acceptance, language and memory (2.2.ii).
Saying this is consistent with recognizing that our ethical conceptions of human existence
may be limited or distorted and that, in many situations, getting human beings in view in a
manner relevant to ethics may require that we revise or refine them. Later in this book I
discuss works that count among their aims getting us to refine our conception of what
matters in human life in ways that thus contribute internally to understanding (6.2-6.4). Right
20
now I am concerned with works that are aptly described as trying to bring us to the more
fundamental recognition that a conception of what matters in human life is a lens through
which in ethics we need to look at all human beings, and not only the mentally well
endowed. It is a confusion – a serious moral confusion – to think that when in ethics we are
concerned with human beings with severe intellectual impairments the right ethical reference
point is a more truncated conception. Without regard to the level of their mental capacities,
human beings are, morally speaking, human beings. That is the view I wish to defend, and I
appeal to it in concluding that the plain fact of being human is pertinent to ethics.
There are no shortcuts here. My ambition is to show that bringing the lives of
human beings into view in a style appropriate for ethics is impossible apart from reference to
a conception of what is humanly important, and the only way to show this is to consider
cases. It is necessary to turn to the lives of different human beings and to demonstrate that,
by looking at them in the light of a conception of what matters in human life, we position
ourselves to discern things that aren’t otherwise available. Below I approach this task by
examining the work of a number of authors who invite us to look at human life through the
pertinent sort of ethical lens. I comment on the work of writers who invite us to see humans
with significant intellectual disabilities as morally speaking full-fledged human beings, and I
also consider the contributions of writers who ask us to look upon irreversibly comatose and
deceased human beings as, in a moral sense, our human fellows.36 After examining this body
of work, I discuss how it supports the conclusion that merely being human matters.
36
In adopting this strategy, I am largely in agreement with Eva Feder Kittay’s claim that “there is so much to
being human. There’s the touch, there’s the feel, there’s the hug, there’s the smile…there are so many ways of
interacting. I don’t think you need philosophy for this. You need a very good writer” (“The Personal is
Philosophical is Political: the Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield,” 408,
21
Let me start with a work of fiction. The centerpiece of Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers
for Algernon is a treatment of a developmentally delayed man that is very helpful for the
purposes of this discussion.37 The novel is set in New York City at a time, the nineteen
sixties, at which parents were routinely urged to institutionalize children with serious
intellectual disabilities. Although the novel’s protagonist, Charlie Gordon, was sent away
from home by his parents while still a child, he has avoided institutionalization because he
has a job, courtesy of a friend of a deceased uncle, doing cleaning work at a bakery. Charlie is
a trusting person with a strong desire to improve himself, and he takes classes at the “Adult
Center for Retarded People” at Beekman University. Through the Center, he becomes a
subject for an experimental surgical procedure to increase intelligence. The surgery initially
appears to be a success, and Charlie goes through a period of intense intellectual growth
that, we are told, raises his IQ from 70 to above 185.38 But the effects turn out to be merely
temporary. He soon begins a rapid intellectual decline, which will eventually take him below
his original mental level and result in his premature death.
Flowers for Algernon is designed to get us to look at both pre- and post-surgical Charlie
as a human being in a moral sense. A number of plot-related and structural features of the
novel serve this function. This includes the novel’s basic narrative form. When Charlie is
accepted for the experimental surgery, a doctor asks him to write daily “progress reports” to
stress in the original). I disagree with Kittay only in holding that the kind of writing that she here calls for
belongs within philosophy.
37
(New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1966)
38
Ibid., 126.
22
document his development, and the entire book takes the form of a series of these reports.
One result is that as readers we are asked to imaginatively participate in Charlie’s mental
development. This is apposite because, once he has become intellectually more sophisticated,
he is preoccupied with the recognition that he was in the past often treated as lacking full
human moral standing.39 Insofar as, in virtue of its structure, the novel invites us to identify
with Charlie, it at the same time invites us to join him in thus looking back at his pre-surgical
self through the lens of an ethically inflected conception of humanity.
Charlie’s reports include accounts not only of how he spends his time day-to-day but
also of how his memories of his pre-surgical life are becoming more intelligible to him.
Among the past episodes that he is newly able to understand are several having to do with
how he was treated at the bakery at which he worked. Charlie remembers that whenever
someone did something stupid his co-workers would say that the person had “pulled a
Charlie Gordon,”40 and, although he used to laugh along with everyone else, he now realizes
that he was being mocked. He recalls one particular occasion on which he fell asleep
standing up and a worker named Frank kicked his legs out from under him. When a third
worker rebuked Frank for this, Frank responded that what he did didn’t matter because
Charlie “don’t know any better.”41 Whereas Frank’s crude and presumably inchoate thought
is that what Charlie doesn’t understand can’t hurt him, Flowers for Algernon challenges this
39
Ibid., 113, 145, 160-161, 201 and 247-248.
40
Ibid., 23 and 42.
41
Ibid., 60.
23
thought. By asking us to look at the episode, as the post-surgical Charlie does, in the light of
a robust ethical conception of human life that emphasizes things like companionship and
social acceptance, the novel gives us a very different picture of what happened. Now it
appears that, in exploiting Charlie’s trust, Frank disrespects relationships that are among a
person’s most valuable goods and thus does Charlie a real injury. Moreover, it appears that,
far from being mitigated by Charlie’s intellectual disability, the injury that Frank inflicts on
him is exacerbated by the fact that Charlie doesn’t register that he is being hurt and so isn’t
in a position to defend himself.
Another event from the past that Charlie discusses in his progress reports is his
abandonment by his parents. Although earlier he lacked a clear sense of what happened,
after his surgery he pieces together what he knows. When he was little, his mother was
desperate to prove that he was “normal” and could learn like other children.42 This changed
after she had another child. When it became evident to her that her second child, a daughter,
could in fact learn, his mother became hostile to him.43 Eventually she used Charlie’s
sexuality as a pretext to send him away. When Charlie later reflects on what transpired on the
night on which he was banished, he isn’t sure whether he actually did anything, however
innocently, to provoke a reaction. But he does remember that his mother would get furious
with him when he had erections,44 and he realizes that, on the fateful night, she claimed that
42
Ibid., 73.
43
Ibid., 168.
44
Ibid., 112.
24
he made sexual advances to his sister and that she then threatened violence until his father
finally packed him up and took him out of the house.45 Within the novel, it is made clear that
at the time Charlie didn’t understand what was going on and felt only afraid.46 To the extent
that we are invited to contemplate this family drama, through post-surgical Charlie’s eyes, in
a manner informed by a sense of the human importance of relationships of trust, we are
invited to see his younger self as wronged in a way that isn’t merely a function of emotional
harm suffered at the time, and also isn’t merely a function of later consequences that he is
capable of registering, and that is aggravated by his inability to understand and protest the
wrong.
These are some of the ways in which, by encouraging us to look at young Charlie’s
life via a conception of what matters in human life, Keyes’ novel appears to give us access to
important aspects of it that aren’t otherwise accessible. Although I want to urge that this
appearance is veridical, I am not proposing that we uncritically adopt the attitudes that the
novel recommends. To be intellectually responsible we need to be willing to step back from
the complex ethical perspective at issue and to ask whether the things it seems to enable us
to see are mere projections. My suggestion is that, if we do this, we can see that this is not a
case of projective error and that, on the contrary, the person who refuses to look at Charlie
or other intellectually disabled human beings as, morally speaking, full human beings is
missing significant features of human life that are truly there. The ethical perspective that the
novel cultivates allows us to render intelligible elements not only of the novel’s social world
45
Ibid., 184-185.
46
Ibid.
25
but also of our own world that are otherwise confusing. It equips us to make sense of the
(otherwise potentially puzzling) observations that I made in 4.1, i.e., observations about how
many people respond with particular indignation to the abuse of individuals with intellectual
disabilities and about how many also feel that the person who is guilty of such abuse shows
herself to have behaved in a particularly low manner. To the extent that Flowers for Algernon
thus advances understanding, we are right to treat its preferred ethical perspective as
cognitively authoritative, and to affirm its suggestion that intellectually disabled human
beings merit consideration simply as the human beings they are.47
There are many congenial non-fictional engagements with similar issues. Here we
might turn, for instance, to memoirs by parents of children with Down syndrome.48 A
47
There is a respect in which the structure of Flowers for Algernon might seem to make it incapable of shedding
light on the lives of people with developmental delays. Because immediately post-operative Charlie is not
cognitively impaired, and because this Charlie learns to expect an accelerated cognitive decline, his story might
seem to be more that of a person with a cognitive disability brought on by age, illness or injury than that of a
person with a developmental delay. Perhaps this narrative observation has some merit. Nevertheless, it remains
the case that – as I have been arguing – Keyes’ novel is designed to open our eyes to important features of life
that pre-operative Charlie lives as an ordinary, developmentally delayed individual. Moreover, as I discuss in
just a moment, the strategies the novel deploys are in fundamental respects similar to strategies deployed in
some notable memoirs by parents of kids with Down syndrome.
48
Although in what follows I discuss only two such parental memoirs, there is a large literature. Christopher
Kaposy gives a helpful overview in “Memoirs of Parenting a Child with Down Syndrome,” in his unpublished
manuscript Choosing Down Syndrome in the Age of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing. Another rich source of insight into
perspectives of parents of children with Down syndrome is the chapter entitled “Down Syndrome” in Andrew
Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (New York, NY: Scribner, 2012), 169-220.
26
prominent concern of many of these works is getting readers to look at children with
Down’s, in an ethical sense, as full-fledged human beings. This is true of Rachel Adams’
Raising Henry,49 which tells the story of the first three years in the life of Adams’ son Henry
who has Down syndrome. Adams discusses how, just after Henry’s birth, she had to struggle
against the tendency of people around her to regard Henry’s existence as a “tragedy”
produced by medical oversight or “mistake.”50 She describes how she instead quickly came
to look at him as a distinctive human being, and she sets out to get us to look at him in the
same way. Similarly, in Life as We Know It, Michael Berubé reports that he is aware that other
people often look at his son Jamie, who has Down’s, simple as “disabled” but that he
himself has trouble seeing Jamie as anything other than the sui generis person he is.51 Berubé
then declares that he wants to affect the perceptual shift that he has undergone for readers
so that, in his words, we see “how loving, clever and ‘normal’ a child like Jamie can be.”52
49
Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability and Discovery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
50
See ibid., 36 and 106. Many parents of children with Down syndrome report similar experiences. See, e.g.,
Stanley Hauerwas’ account of a woman who was told by her physician simply to “forget” her newborn
daughter with Down syndrome (see Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped and
the Church (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 193). And in Far From the Tree, Solomon
describes many similar experiences of parents of kids with Down’s (see, e.g., 171, 181 and 187).
51
Life as We Know it: a Father, a Family and an Exceptional Child (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).
52
Ibid., 47.
27
One of Adams’ and Berubé’s main strategies for getting us to look at their children
through the lens of an ethical conception of human life is presenting vignettes about
everyday life with them. Adams talks about, among other things, how Henry takes delight
“from singing along with music or pouring bathwater from one cup to another” and how he
“loves to walk around with a puppet on each hand, making them talk to each other in
animated gibberish.”53 Berubé recounts that he and his wife were struck by “how vividly
[their] little boy responded to encouragement and praise,”54 by how Jamie loves the Beattles’
cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and by how, when he hears it, he “dance[s] with
delight.”55 The point of these and other anecdotes is not merely get us to see Henry and
Jamie as human beings in a morally salient sense. Both Adams and Berubé are in the
business of advocating for educational resources and opportunities for children with
developmental delays, and both proceed by challenging our society’s tendency to place
antecedent limits on what these kids can achieve. One of their shared aspirations is to show
that, when given proper support, developmentally delayed children very often exceed
53
Ibid., 106.
54
Ibid., 125.
55
Ibid., xi. There is a connection between Berubé and Adams. Before she had children of her own, Adams
reviewed Berubé’s book and got to know him. She wrote to him after she had Henry, and her book includes a
letter that he wrote to her in response. See Raising Henry, 28.
28
expectations.56 At the same time Adams and Berubé agree in baldly rejecting any suggestion
that a child’s claims to concern or attention is a function of its level of achievement.57 They
believe that all children, without regard to the level of their cognitive attainments, merit
concern just as the people they are. They invite us to imaginatively enter into scenes of daily
life with their own kids in significant part because they want us to see them as members of a
larger human moral fellowship who, like all other members, merit concern and attention.
What emerges from their memoirs is thus an image of individuals with Down syndrome that
is very similar to the portrait of a developmentally delayed person given in Keyes’ novel. It is
an image of them as individuals who are leading lives of undisputed human consequence and
who, because they have Down syndrome and therefore have certain special vulnerabilities,
are likely at times to require special help so that they can live their lives as fully as possible.58
This is an image that encodes a particular ethical perspective (viz., a perspective shaped by a
conception of what matters in human life), and the measure of this perspective’s cognitive
56
See Adams, Raising Henry, 24. See Berubé, Life as We Know It, 26 and “Equality, Freedom, and/or Justice for
All: A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” in Kittay and Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral
Philosophy, 97-109, 107.
57
For one of Berubé’s most succinct expressions of this point, see the epigraph to 4.1.
58
A similar image emerges in Jason Kingsley and Mitchel Levitz, Count us In: Growing up with Down Syndrome
(Orlando, FL: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., 2004). The two authors are young people with Down syndrome
who set out to educate others about what life with the condition is like. See also Andrew Solomon’s remarks on
the writing of Kingsley and Levitz’s book in Far From the Tree, 174.
29
authority is the extent to which it enables us to make sense of aspects of the lives of Henry
and Jamie, and of other kids like them, that didn’t make sense before.59
Some individuals are intellectually disabled as a result not of congenital conditions
but of disease.60 This includes people with advanced Alzheimer’s, and it is possible to find
59
Two people with whom I discussed this material – Christopher Fitzpatrick and Christopher Kaposy – floated
the idea that there might be something misleading about trying to develop my argument by turning to the lives
of people with Down syndrome. Fitzpatrick’s and Kaposy’s thought was that people with Down’s are often
gentle and sociable and that it would be more difficult to defend my views in reference to accounts of the lives
of individuals with intellectual disabilities who are violent or unsociable. Fitzpatrick suggested that I consider
stories of the life of Phineas Gage, an American railroad construction foreman who is generally thought to
have undergone profound personality changes, losing social skills and becoming aggressive and anti-social, after
surviving an accident in which an iron rod was blasted through his skull. Kaposy in turn suggested that I
address the descriptions of the lives of parents of children with autism that are included in Andrew Solomon’s
Far From the Tree. Although I have not expanded an already long chapter to include these additional cases, I
want to mention that it seems to me that, far from undermining my argument, the additional material in
question provides further support. Having argued earlier in this book that, in order to bring human beings
empirically into focus in ethics, we need to look at them through the lens of ethically inflected conceptions of
human life, in this section I argue that this applies to all human beings, not only the mentally well endowed.
Many accounts of and memoirs by people with autism – including those in Solomon’s book – depend for their
power on getting us to view their subjects as human beings in a morally loaded sense, and on thereby revealing
aspects of their subjects’ lives that aren’t otherwise available. (I can’t comment on the case of Phineas Gage
because I haven’t been able to find a substantial enough account of his life to refer to.) For a helpful discussion
of how, in order to engage responsibly with autistic people, neurotypicals need to be willing to revise their
ethical conceptions of human life in a manner that may require reshaping attitudes and modes of
responsiveness, see Ian Hacking “Humans, Aliens and Autism,” Dædalus 138 (2009): 44-59. For a more general
account of my own approach to human cases that challenge us morally and intellectually, see 4.4.
30
support for the view that merely being human is relevant to ethics in accounts of life with
this disease. One good place to turn here is John Bayley’s memoir about his marriage to the
philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. Murdoch began showing signs of Alzheimer’s late in
life, and Bayley seamlessly includes episodes from years in which the disease had already
begun to affect her strongly.61 A recurring theme is that Murdoch is, in a moral sense, the
same person both before and after she starts to decline mentally. Bayley repeatedly insists
that her struggle with Alzheimer’s, however terrible, is a chapter in her one human life.62
One of Bayley’s methods for getting us to look upon Murdoch as, morally speaking,
the same human being throughout is to present scenes from the years in which she had
Alzheimer’s as immediate sequels to scenes from her earlier life. There is a striking
application of this technique at the book’s beginning. Bayley is concerned with the custom
that he and Murdoch had of making their way to the Thames River near Oxford on hot and
humid days, stripping and enjoying the water.63 He opens his book by describing the first
60
There are moral individualists who believe that the considerations that, as they see it, diminish the moral
standing of people with congenital cognitive impairments fail to apply to people who were once cognitively
well endowed and who have serious intellectual disabilities as a result of age, injury or disease. The cases fitting
the latter description that I consider here, while directly relevant to my quarrel with only some moral
individualists, are nevertheless important for this section’s larger argument.
61
Elegy for Iris (New York, NY: Picador USA, 1999).
62
Ibid., 37, 49, 76 and 214.
63
Ibid., 3-4.
31
time they did this, telling us that it was “with the ardour of comparative youth” that they
“tore [their] clothes off and slipped in like water-rats.”64 A chapter later he recounts how,
forty-five years later when Murdoch is already sick, he has trouble undressing her for a swim
and how, when it is time to get out of the water, he is afraid that her muscles will fail and
that she will fall helplessly back in.65 Passages like these contribute to the development of an
image of Murdoch as embarked on a human life both early and late, and this image has
implications for how we understand the tragedy that her illness represents for her.
Alzheimer’s is not only a calamity for her insofar as she understands what is happening to
her and feels distressed. Although Bayley is concerned with forms of anxiety and despair that
grip her when she is cognizant of what she is going through,66 his account of her misfortune
is a larger story of human suffering. He invites us to think of Murdoch in relation to, and as
increasingly alienated from, the kinds of things that mattered in her life and that matter in
any human life, and he thus bequeaths to us a distinctive understanding of the kind of care
and concern that Murdoch merits. It is not merely that, like other human beings, she has a
claim to solicitude. Having described her particular human fate as a hard one that includes
the gradual loss of old habits and activities, Bayley presents himself as called on to preserve
64
Ibid., 47.
65
Ibid., 38-39.
66
Ibid., 63, 184, 239, 248 and 259.
32
those habits and activities as long as fully as possible. He is, he suggests, called on to do as
much as he can to – in a phrase of Hilde Lindemann’s – “hold her in her identity.”67
Because Bayley approaches his account of Murdoch’s life equipped with a
conception of what is humanly important, he presents a distinctive picture of what that life is
like, and he thus puts us in a position in which we might well ask whether the picture is a
faithful one. One mark of the cognitive authority of Bayley’s preferred ethical perspective is
that it illuminates otherwise murky aspects of Murdoch’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. Another
is that it allows us to make sense of other familiar yet potentially baffling features of life with
progressive degenerative neurological diseases. Now we can appreciate why it may seem not
only that neglecting, defrauding or abusing a person with such a disease is a particularly vile
thing to do and but, moreover, that the fact that the person may not understand what is
happening to her, and so may not mind, is not a mitigating factor. Further, we can
understand why it may seem disrespectful to dress or style a person who is no longer aware
of things around her in a manner that she would have found ridiculous or offensive,68 and
67
See Hilde Lindemann, “Holding One Another (Well, Wrongly, Clumsily) in a Time of Dementia,” in Kittay
and Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, 161-170, 162. What it amounts to to
hold a person with a progressive degenerative neurological disease ‘in her identity’ in Lindeman’s sense
naturally varies with the identity of the person in question. When my father was in the last years of his struggle
with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and cut off from the activities he had pursued most passionately –
sailing, above all – it was important to help him to continue to do some of things that he had always enjoyed
and that were still possible for him, e.g., sitting and gazing out at Puget Sound.
68
See, e.g., the striking scene in Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie Amour in which a visiting nurse does the hair
and makeup of the mentally compromised and bedridden protagonist in a crude style abhorrent to her.
33
why it may also seem disrespectful to allow her to live in a way that, however conducive to
health, she herself would have found foul or degrading.69
Thus far I have been concerned with treatments of the lives of actual and fictional
human beings with intellectual disabilities. The point of discussing these treatments was to
show that a conception of what is humanly important is the right reference point for
understanding the expressive lives of all human beings, without regard to how well or poorly
endowed mentally. Yet there are human beings – such as, e.g., the irreversibly comatose and
the dead – who don’t have any expressive lives to speak of, and the basic line of reasoning
that I have been developing applies to these human cases as well. Just as looking at minded
human beings through the lens of a conception of what is humanly important reveals
significant aspects of their lives that are not neutrally accessible, looking at human beings
who lack any substantial aspects of mind reveals significant aspects of their lives that are
otherwise hidden from view. If this seems hard to square with my emphasis up to this point
on expressive behavior, it may be helpful to consider that we sometimes think about the
limbs and faces of, say, brain dead people and corpses as sites of absent psychological
expressiveness. The cases I am about to discuss speak for treating this way of thinking about
human beings without mentation as authoritative in the sense of capable of revealing real or
objective things about them that are otherwise hidden from view.
Suppose we look at an irreversibly comatose person in the light of a conception of
what matters in human life. Here is, we might say, an individual who has lost almost every
69
For a discussion of this further kind of case, see Elizabeth Anderson, “Animal Rights and the Values of
Nonhuman Life,” in Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 277-298, 280-281.
34
good that human beings can enjoy, and who for this reason merits any respect and attention
that we can still pay to her. This way of looking at comatose human beings positions us to
make sense of the plausible idea (encoded, among other places, in US law) that the assault or
rape of a person who is comatose and hence incapable of registering what is being done to
her is every bit as much a wrong as the assault or rape of a person with control of her mental
faculties.70 Or suppose that we look upon corpses, in a manner informed by an ethical
conception of human life, as people at the end of their mortal tethers, irrevocably cut off
from every relationship and activity. This way of looking goes hand in hand with an
understanding of dead human bodies as in themselves proper objects of concern, and this
understanding in turn sheds light on many attitudes toward the dead. While there is striking
cultural and historical variation among practices with corpses,71 a commitment to treating the
bodies of people who were respected in life in ways that, however various, are taken to
connote respect comes at least very close to being a cultural and historical universal. This is
reflected, for instance, in attitudes toward cannibalism or anthropophagy, which has for the
most part been accepted by cultures only within clear-cut ritual settings,72 and it is reflected
70
For some sympathetic treatments of this idea, see the critical essays on Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film Talk to
Her in A.W. Eaton, ed., Talk to Her: Philosophers on Film (London: Routledge, 2008).
71
For a classic treatment of this topic, see Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an
Accepted Law,” in The Complete Essays, Donald Frame, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958),
77-90, esp. 81-82.
72
See the discussion of cannibalism in ibid., 82. Also helpful in this connection is Richard Fleischer’s 1973
movie Soylent Green, which depends for its power on the idea that there is something horrible about the mass,
unceremonious eating of the flesh of dead human beings.
35
in practices of honoring the cadavers used for training purposes in medical schools, as well
as in discussions about the ethics of organ transplantation and the ethics of the use of
cadavers in various kinds of experimentation.73
Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” makes a
powerful case for this way of regarding human corpses.74 The dramatic cornerstone of the
story, which is set in central Washington state around the nineteen seventies, is the discovery
of a dead body by four men on a fishing trip. The body is that of a recently deceased young
woman, and she is naked and face down in a cold stream when the men come across her.
Although one of the group wants to hike back out and summon the sheriff, the men
eventually decide to remain, fishing and drinking heavily, for the duration of their planned
three-day stay. They believe it suffices to wade into the river, pull the woman’s body toward
the shore and fasten a nylon cord around her wrist to prevent her from being pulled
downstream. They only report their find three days later when they go back to their car.
Although they regard their behavior as beyond reproach, Carver’s story invites us to regard
their treatment of the woman’s body not only as outrageous but as outrageous in ways that
connect it directly with forms of abuse to which men subject living women.
The story is told in the present tense and from the perspective of Claire, the wife of
one of the men on the fishing trip, and it opens the morning after the men’s return. Claire’s
73
For a discussion of these topics that takes for granted that corpses in themselves merit respectful treatment,
see Mary Roach, Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).
74
Raymond Carver, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” in Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories (New York,
NY: Vintage Contemporaries, 1986), 213-237.
36
husband – Stuart – has told her what happened, and she is staring at him, horrified by what
he and the others did. Her horror is in part a function of her vague sense of a link between
how Stuart treats her and how he and his buddies treated the dead woman’s body. Claire is
aghast that she admitted Stuart’s sexual advances the previous night, before she knew what
he had done.75 Part of what is striking about Carver’s story is that it asks us to recognize the
justice of her reactions. It impresses on us the wrongness of thinking of its featured corpse
as a mere thing, and it does this by means of a narrative strategy that positions us to look at
the dead woman’s body in light of a conception of what matters in human life.
As the story progresses, Claire learns more about what happened to the dead
woman. Claire comes to see her as an individual with her own hopes and dreams, and the
story’s first-person narrative encourages us to look upon the corpse in the same light that
Claire does. Consider, to begin with, Claire’s description of how, just after recounting what
happened on the fishing trip, Stuart gives her a newspaper article containing these details:
“unidentified girl eighteen to twenty four years of age…body three to five days in the
water….rape a possible motive…preliminary results show death by
strangulation…cuts and bruises on her breasts and pelvic area…”76
Claire is shocked and disoriented by what she reads. She recalls an occasion on which Stuart
threatened her with violence, and she now sees his threat in a more sinister light.77 Her
75
Ibid., 217.
76
Ibid., 218.
77
Ibid., 224 and 220-221.
37
feeling of alienation from him deepens as she finds out more about the murder victim. She
watches a televised newscast that shows both a photograph of “the girl” and footage of the
girl’s parents as they walk to and from the funeral home in which they identify their
daughter. Claire learns from the newscast that the victim’s name is Susan Miller and that
Susan had worked as a cashier at a local movie theater and probably knew her assailant.78
Claire attends Susan’s funeral, where she sees many young people, presumably Susan’s
friends, and listens to a service in which Susan is characterized as having gifts of
“cheerfulness and beauty, grace and enthusiasm.”79
One result is that Claire comes to look upon Susan’s body as the mortal remains of a
person to whom things matter. Far from conceiving it as a mere object, she regards the body
that Stuart and his buddies found as all that was left of a young person who has, in the worst
way, been cut off from everything humanly important. Now it seems to her that crudely
securing the body in a stream showed a complete failure to register the significance of the
situation. Carver’s story in these ways represents Claire as becoming censorious of the men’s
conduct. At the same time, it invites us to share Claire’s sense of importance so that we
likewise regard Susan Miller’s body as in itself meriting respectful treatment.
My thought is not that we should simply adopt, without critical assessment, the
ethical perspective that Carver’s story thus recommends. Rather, my thought is that, once we
distance ourselves from and scrutinize this perspective, it seems reasonable to say, not that it
78
Ibid., 226-227.
79
Ibid., 234.
38
ensnares us in a projective illusion, but that it reveals real features of the world that
otherwise remain invisible. The perspective enables us to make otherwise inaccessible
connections both among the different attitudes of the fictional characters of “So Much
Water So Close to Home” and among the assortment of familiar real-world practices
concerning the dead that I touched on a moment ago. That is what entitles us to treat it as
cognitively authoritative, thereby in effect endorsing the view that, like the body of the
fictional Susan Miller, the dead bodies of real human beings call for respectful treatment.
These reflections on Carver’s story, like my reflections on the other cases discussed
above, belong to this section’s argument for the view that merely being human is morally
important. The argument presupposes the claim, defended in 2.2, that, in order to bring
human beings or animals into focus in a manner relevant to ethics, we need to look at them
in the light of conceptions of what matters in the lives of creatures of their kinds. Drawing
on this claim, I set out to show not only that for the purposes of ethics all human beings
count as human beings but, moreover, that in ethics all human beings therefore need to be
looked at in the light of conceptions of what matters in specifically human life. My particular
concern was illustrating that this is true of those human beings who lack the individual
characteristics that moral individualists deem morally significant and who, as moral
individualists see it, accordingly have lesser claims to moral consideration. At issue are
human beings with severe cognitive impairments as well as human beings who lack cognitive
capacities altogether, and, with an eye to countering the contentions of moral individualists, I
discussed a range of actual and fictional human cases that fit these descriptions (including
cases of human beings with developmental delays and progressive degenerative neurological
diseases as well as cases of comatose and dead human beings). There is an indefinite number
of further cases that might be discussed in this connection (e.g., cases of anencephalic
39
infants, and of mature human beings who suffer from senile dementia or who have serious
brain injuries). But I submit that the cases considered here are representative enough to
support the conclusion that in ethics we need to look at all human beings, regardless of the
level of their intellectual capacities they possess, through the lens of a conception of what is
humanly important.80 This conclusion in turn entitles me to advance this section’s main
claim, namely, that the bare fact of being human is germane to ethics.81
80
It is not an implication of my conclusion (viz., that in ethics we need to look at all human beings through the
lens of a conception of the kinds of things that matter in human life) that individuals who, due to accident,
illness, age or a congenital condition, are incapable of enjoying certain human goods are somehow therefore
condemned to tragedy. That is, it doesn’t follow from anything I have said that a human being must be capable
of somehow enjoying all of the things that humanly matter in order to have a glorious life. The main point of
this section is about how a conception of what is important in human life is a necessary prerequisite of doing
empirical justice to human beings in ethics. Acceptance of this point, while it is consistent with recognizing that
some individuals experience current or impending cognitive disabilities as grave misfortunes, places no
obstacles in the way of recognizing that the lives of some individuals who have intellectual disabilities, and who
therefore do not enjoy every human good, are among the most wonderful and least tragic of human lives.
81
I cannot emphasize enough that the challenge to the normative conclusions of moral individualists that I am
mounting in arguing, as I just did, that merely being human matters is one that presupposes a prior challenge to
moral individualists’ fundamental theoretical framework. My point is that bringing a human being, however
well or poorly endowed mentally, into empirical focus in ethics is inseparable from seeing her as meriting
various forms of respect and attention. It follows that, in contrast to what moral individualists assume, there is
no question of somehow needing to find a morally salient intrinsic property to ground the treatment that
individual human beings merit. I added this note after discussing a late version of this material with Jeff
McMahan, who wrongly construed it as an attempt, consistent with the core tenets of moral individualism, to
show that ‘humanity’ is a morally relevant intrinsic property that all human beings share. This impressed on me
the need to stress that the idea of such a property has no place in my thought. The approach in ethics defended
40
4.3. The Importance of Being a Dog
Having just argued that merely being human is morally important, I now want to
defend the view that merely being an animal of some kind is as well. Because showing this
even with regard to animals of a single kind is quite involved, I largely limit myself to one
further exhibit. I devote most of this section to showing that the sheer fact of being a dog is
ethically significant, postponing until the section’s close a few remarks about how my
treatment of dogs carries over to animals of other kinds. My strategy parallels the strategy I
used in discussing human beings. Following up on the argument of 2.2, I defend the view
that merely being a dog matters by illustrating that bringing dogs empirically into focus in
ethics essentially calls for looking at them in the light of a conception of what is important in
specifically canine life.82 My suggestion is that this is necessary but not sufficient for getting
in this book, far from amounting to a move in the game that moral individualists are playing, is one that
deprives their larger theoretical preoccupations of any motivation.
82
Given the structure of ongoing conversations about animals and ethics, my starting point here is a fairly
radical one. I begin with the idea that at least those members of different kinds of animals who have kindtypical mental capacities as such merit specific forms of treatment. I speak of animals in reference to creatures
sophisticated enough to exhibit primitive expressive behaviors (e.g., perception, self-movement, struggle).
(Scientists today generally speak of animals differently, in reference to living beings that are not only
multicellular but that have cells of a certain complexity and are heterotrophic, nourishing themselves on other
organisms and thus differing from autotrophs, like plants and algae, that use energy from the sun to derive
nourishment from inorganic substances. Although my understanding of animals is different, the two
understandings are largely co-extensive.) It may seem far-fetched to represent as meriting respectful treatment
even those animals who threaten human beings with, e.g., painful scratches or bites, exposure to serious
diseases or even dismemberment and death. But to say that animals in themselves merit respectful treatment is
41
dogs in view in ethics. To get dogs in view we need a conception of canine existence that
registers the importance of things like bodily integrity, physical freedom and dependable
companionship (2.2.ii). At the same time, our ethical conceptions of canine existence may be
limited or distorted, and, in many situations, bringing dogs into focus may require that we
revise or refine these conceptions.83 Bearing this in mind, I should stress that at the moment
I am primarily concerned with attempts, not to deepen any particular ethical conception of
canine life, but rather to bring us to the very basic recognition that a conception on these
lines is a lens through which in ethics we need to look at all dogs, and not only those with
canine-typical capacities. I want to show that it is wrong to think that the appropriate
reference point for mentally impaired dogs is a more primitive ethical conception. Without
regard to the level of its capacities, a dog is, morally speaking, a dog.84
not to deny that in some circumstances – e.g., those in which they threaten our well being and in which there is
no simple way for us to get away – their claims to respect from us may be overridden.
83
For discussion of works that aim not only to get us to refine our conceptions of what matters in the lives of
animals of different kinds but, moreover, to do so in ways that contribute internally to understanding, see 6.26.4 and 7.1-7.2.
84
It may seem reasonable to protest a study of dogs in ethics on the ground that the dog is an unnatural life-
form. Dogs are indeed ‘unnatural’ in that they are the products of processes of domestication that to a
significant extent involved selective breeding geared toward human objectives. But it is possible to distinguish
questions about the process and aims of domestication from questions about what dogs are like. (For a
discussion of domestication that makes a general distinction along these lines, see Sue Donaldson and Will
Kymlicka, eds., Zoopolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 74-75.) It is also true that recent artificial
selection has had “grievous effects for many breeds” of dogs, leading members of certain breeds “to inherit
and pass down physical disorders” ranging from “skeletal dysplasias in large breeds…to spina bifida in the
42
Many memoirs about companion dogs feature descriptions of their subjects at the
end of life, when they have suffered at least a certain degree of mental decline, and some of
these memoirs invite us to think about the dogs whose lives they address in a manner
informed by a conception of what matters in canine life. One very deliberate project of this
sort is Jessica Pierce’s The Last Walk.85 Pierce is a bio-ethicist who wants to answer the
question, rarely raised in bio-ethics, of what a good death for an animal would be, and her
immediate reference point is her companion dog Ody, a Vizsla, who is at the time sick with
pug” (Alexadra Horowitz, “Canis Familiaris,” in Gruen, ed., The Ethics of Captivity, 1-21, 13). While such
physical disorders do not affect all dogs, some thinkers regard dogs and other companion animals as uniformly
‘unnatural’ because constitutionally dependent on humans. (See, e.g., Gary Francione, “The Abolition of
Animal Exploitation,” in Gary Francione and Robert Garner, eds., Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1-102, esp. 79.) It is undeniable that dogs’ dependence on
humans has left them vulnerable to many abuses, but, given that various forms of dependence are natural and
unavoidable for many social animals, humans included, it is unclear why the mere fact of dependence should be
taken as a mark of the unnatural. The source of the perceived unnaturalness may be that what is in question is
an interspecies, human-dog form of dependence, but it is unclear why human-animal interactions should be
regarded as inherently unnatural. Humans interact with animals in an enormously rich number of ways (see,
e.g., Donaldson and Kymlicka, eds., Zoopolis, 62-69). To the extent that it is possible to imagine what a world
without such interaction would be like, it’s not obvious that such a world should be thought of as a more
natural one. For these different reasons, I reject the idea that the dog is an inherently unnatural life-form and
also the related idea that a study of dogs in ethics is misleading and bound to introduce distortions.
85
Jessica Pierce, The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of their Lives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2012). For other thoughtful discussions of what a good death for a companion dog might be, see also
Mark Doty, Dog Years: A Memoir (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2007) and George Pitcher, The Dogs Who
Came to Stay (New York, NY: Plume, 1995).
43
bone or liver cancer and partly demented. Pierce recites a list of aspects of ‘quality of canine
life’, which includes forms of physical well-being, self-expression and social satisfaction, and
she discusses its application to Ody at different times during his last year.86 While this
exercise is programmatic, there are also passages in Pierce’s book in which she evocatively
describes the ailing Ody in the light of her understanding of what is important in canine life.
Pierce’s larger portrait of Ody includes an account of the fullness of his early life. She
tells us that Ody was extremely athletic, accompanying her on long runs and bike rides. He
was emotionally expressive, above all with his tail.87 He tried as far as possible to be in
physical contact with the human members of his household.88 His appetite was voracious
and indiscriminate, and he would eat not only any edibles that came within reach but also
many apparent inedibles.89 In describing the young Ody in these and other ways, Pierce gives
us a sketch of his individual personality. She at the same time brings out how he had access
to what she regards as the goods of canine life. When she turns her attention to Ody’s last
weeks and days, she invites us to see him, in a manner that presupposes her conception of
canine flourishing, as no longer enjoying a full dog life. She describes how he now falls
frequently, sometimes soiling himself in his own feces and sometimes getting trapped in
familiar pieces of furniture, and how he is frequently disoriented. She explains that he is
86
See Pierce’s discussion of the “pawspice scale” at ibid., 145-150.
87
Ibid., 5 and 44.
88
Ibid., 6 and 16.
89
Ibid., 16-17 and passim.
44
socially much more remote, no longer greeting as he used to and seeming generally “fairly
uninterested in affection.”90 What emerges is a picture of Ody as a sort of spectral figure,
haunting spaces he once properly lived in. He now “wanders about the house like a ghost,”
sometimes stopping “in front of a wall and seem[ing] befuddled about how to get turned
around.”91 He appears to “inhabit a different world.”92 Implicit in this picture of Ody is a
view about the kind of attention he merits. Pierce is actively concerned about the pain and
distress that Ody suffers in his geriatric state, but her emphasis is on how his decline cuts
him off from goods he once enjoyed in ways that he is not aware of. She presents herself as
in this sense mourning “his losses,”93 and she suggests that she is called on to do what she
can to help him to participate in his old form of life. That is, she suggests that she is called
on to, to project Hilde Lindemann’s term into a new context, ‘hold Ody in his identity’.94
90
Ibid., 21-22.
91
Ibid., 157.
92
Ibid., 1.
93
The inset quote is from the following passage: “The thought of losing him hurt, but even more than this, I
mourn his losses. I am sad that Ody can no longer run wild through a field of tall grasses or chase the teasing
squirrel in the backyard” (ibid., 6).
94
For my initial use of this phrase, see 4.2.
45
Pierce’s beliefs about the kind of solicitude older Ody merits reflect an image of him
that is, we saw, permeated by a conception of what matters in dog life.95 We might
reasonably ask whether we are justified in adopting Pierce’s preferred ethical perspective and,
more specifically, to ask whether it leads us to project onto the world something that isn’t
really there, or whether it instead contributes internally to genuine understanding. Pierce in
effect attempts to answer this question by underlining how her way of looking at Ody and
other dogs enables us to make sense of aspects of canine life that otherwise remain opaque.
At issue is a perspective from which mentally impaired dogs appear to be, morally speaking,
full-fledged dogs who, insofar as they lack access to things that matter in dog life, call for
special concern and consideration. Although Pierce knows that people often abandon or kill
companion animals when they (i.e., the animals) are old and sick,96 she attempts to impress
on us that the ‘disposal’ of ailing animals is especially callous and that we should rejoice at
95
There is an aspect of Pierce’s efforts to develop such an image that I haven’t mentioned. Her book opens
with a black and white photograph of an already graying Ody. He is shown slightly from the right and from the
shoulders up, in an upright posture, glancing seriously back to the left at the camera. The photo is in the style
of portraits of venerated, older human beings, and, just as such human portraits are conventionally taken to
invite us to look upon their subjects as individuals living lives in which things matter, the portrait of Ody
invites us to look upon him as an individual who has lived a life in which things matter. Moreover, because
Ody is a dog, and because making sense of dogs’ expressions essentially draws on our ethical conceptions of
dog life (see 2.2.ii), the portrait has a tendency to mobilize such conceptions. It thus supports Pierce’s efforts to
get us to look upon Ody in the light of such a conception. Something similar could be said about Isa Leshko’s
striking photographic portraits of aging companion and ‘farm’ animals in the series “Aging Animals” (see the
photographs and the “artist statement” at http://isaleshko.com/elderly-animals/).
96
See Pierce, The Last Walk, 9 and 74.
46
the fact that some abandoned animals receive palliative care.97 Additionally, in presenting her
account of the last year of Ody’s life, she vividly illustrates how caring for a severely disabled
dog, for all its difficulty (and despite the fact that those who undertake it are often subject to
ridicule), can be significant and deeply satisfying.98 It is to the extent that Pierce’s
characteristic ethical perspective enables us to make sense of these features of our lives with
dogs, and to the extent that stepping back from the perspective makes these things obscure,
that we are justified not only in representing it as cognitively authoritative but also in
maintaining that impaired dogs like Ody merit consideration simply as the dogs they are.99
Having just claimed that we need to refer to a conception of what matters in dog life
if we are to do justice in ethics to the expressive lives of dogs who are mentally impaired, I
want to say something similar about what is involved in bringing into focus in ethics dogs
who don’t have any mental capacities to speak of. In undertaking this further project, I am
not abandoning my emphasis on expressive behavior. I am taking it for granted that, just as
we sometimes think about the limbs and faces of, say, brain dead people and corpses as sites
of absent psychological expressiveness (see 4.2), we sometimes think about the limbs and
97
Ibid., 136 and 171.
98
In Dog Years, Doty also makes this point.
99
Should I have chosen a case involving dogs whose cognitive disabilities, unlike the forms of age-related
dementia that afflict Ody, render them erratic and vicious? Is it true of such dogs, as I argued it is true of the
older Ody, that otherwise inaccessible features of their lives come into view when they are regarded through
the lens of an ethical conception of dog life? I am convinced that this is true, though I don’t argue the point
here. For a general account of my approach to animal cases that challenge us morally and intellectually, see 4.4.
47
faces of brain dead or dead dogs as such sites. My aim in the next pages is to make it seem
plausible to believe that this way of thinking about dogs bereft of all mental capacities
reveals things about them that otherwise remain obscure.
I am going to take as my main reference point an arresting passage in J.M. Coetzee’s
novel Disgrace that involves the handling of dead dogs.100 Later in this book, I discuss
Coetzee’s novel in greater detail (see 6.3). Now I simply want to enter into it far enough to
explain how it asks readers to look upon dead dogs in a distinctive ethical light, and how it,
in doing so, it opens our eyes to things about them that we would otherwise miss.
The main character of Disgrace, which is set in newly post-apartheid South Africa, is
David Lurie, a middle-aged white academic whose professional specialty is modern
languages. Lurie favors the view, championed by some of his favorite authors, that the
possession of a refined moral outlook is internal to important cognitive capacities. But he
doesn’t himself take this view seriously in his own life, preferring to treat some of his own
cruder attitudes and impulses as incapable of change. The novel tells the story of how Lurie,
in part as a result of his complacency, falls into a condition of deep social disgrace. The
dramatic downturn in his life begins when he sexually harasses a student and consequently
loses his university job in Capetown. He responds by moving to a small plot of land on the
Eastern Cape owned by his grown daughter Lucy. Lucy proposes that he use his newfound
free time to help a friend of hers at a nearby animal clinic. Lurie agrees to this, although only
grudgingly at first. Initially, he patronizes Lucy’s friend and ridicules the idea that caring for
animals might be a worthy pursuit. But the events in his life ultimately affect his stance not
only toward human beings but also toward animals at the clinic, which houses many dogs.
100
(New York, NY: Penguin, 1999).
48
Disgrace in this way gives us a portrait of a character whose way of looking at dogs undergoes
a major shift. Moreover, in addition to describing how Lurie’s attitude toward dogs changes,
the novel uses literary techniques to get us to enter imaginatively into his new way of looking
at them. Disgrace is written entirely in the present tense, and it follows Lurie’s thoughts and
activities throughout, thus inviting readers to look at things through his eyes.
The animal clinic at which Lurie winds up working is neither well funded nor well
equipped. For the most part it can do very little to help the animals that come through its
doors. One of its primary functions is to euthanize unwanted dogs, and as things in Lurie’s
own life get worse he increasingly identifies with the dogs’ plight. As he does so, he starts to
look at them in the light of an at least primitive conception of what matters in their canine
lives. Now he regards them, in an ethically loaded manner, as individuals who, like himself,
are embarked on mortal adventures and who have arrived at a dismal closing chapter. He
continues to look at them in this way even after they have been killed. Because he sees the
dead dogs as individuals who are irrevocably cut off from all the goods of life, he looks upon
their bodies as having a kind of “honor” in virtue of which they merit respectful treatment.101
When he is asked to dispose of the dogs’ corpses, he accordingly refuses to simply leave
them at the dump until they can be incinerated. There is, for him, no question of regarding
them as mere indifferent detritus, so there is also no question of simply depositing them with
“waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped up at the roadside, [and] malodorous refuse
from the tannery.”102 Yet, if he merely brings the bodies to the incinerator, the workmen at
101
See ibid., 144-146.
102
Ibid., 145.
49
the dump attempt to break down the bodies using the backs of shovels, with an eye to
getting them to fit into the incinerator’s trolley. For these reasons, Lurie eventually takes to
incinerating the dogs’ bodies himself.
What interests me about these passages of Disgrace has to do with the fact that they
not only depict Lurie as sensitive to what he sees as dishonors to which dogs’ bodies may be
subject but also do so in a way that encourages us to imaginatively explore his perspective.
Coetzee’s novel invites its readers to look at dogs’ corpses, as if from Lurie’s perspective, so
that they appear to demand certain forms of respect and attention. Suppose we abstract
from the ethical perspective the book seeks to inculcate and ask whether this perspective
tends to distort our vision, or whether instead it helps us to see things about dead dogs’
bodies that are really there. In this connection, we might be struck by the fact that it is
common for people who live with dogs to treat the bodies of dead dogs as worthy of
attention and respect. We might also be struck by the fact that many people who have
companion dogs bury the dogs after they die (sometimes with toys they liked or in blankets
they found comforting) or cremate them and scatter the ashes in places they loved,103 and
103
The disposal of dogs’ and other pets’ remains is one of Pierce’s topics in The Last Walk. Her main aim in
discussing this topic is to affirm its significance and give people with companion animals license to take it
seriously. She discusses the burial of pets, pet cremation, pet funeral homes, and pet cemeteries (205-215). She
also discusses her regret at having waited until after Ody was cremated to visit the crematorium to which his
remains were sent (219-221). For another treatment of the question of how to treat the bodies of dead dogs,
see Mark Doty, Dog Years. Doty’s book is a eulogy to two companion dogs, Beau and Arden, and it includes
accounts of how both dogs died and of what Doty did with their remains (83, 148, 213). Let me add that my
partner and I buried two of our companion dogs – Sitka and Shi-Shi – on a plot of land in upstate New York
that belongs to our family, and that we regularly visit their graves.
50
that most of these people are also persuaded that it would be wrong to eat dogs, even if they
die when young and healthy.104 It is insofar as Lurie’s perspective enables us to make sense
of these attitudes and practices, and to connect them with similar attitudes toward and
practices concerning the corpses of human beings, that we are right to credit it with
cognitive authority and to say that there is indeed a sort of honor in the bodies of dead dogs.
This concludes my case for holding that the plain fact of being a dog is relevant to
ethics. Consider what would be involved in producing a case of this sort that applies not to
dogs but to animals of other kinds. We would need to show that in ethics we have to draw
on conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of whatever life-forms or species are
in question in order to arrive at an adequate empirical understanding, not only of animals
who possess species-typical mental capacities, but also of those who (as a result of injury,
illness, age or congenital condition) lack such capacities. We would need to show that
looking at animals who lack species-typical mental qualities through the lens of conceptions
of what matters in the – typical – lives of members of their life-forms enables us to bring
them empirically more clearly into focus than is otherwise possible. One strategy would be
to look at mentally impaired and dead animals of the kinds at issue in light of relevant ethical
conceptions and bring out how doing so enables us to grasp things that were previously
invisible. This would involve undertaking exercises analogous to those that Pierce and
Coetzee invite us to undertake in reference to mentally impaired and deceased dogs. We
might ask, for instance, whether the black and white photographic portraits of aged
companion and ‘farm’ animals in Isa Leshko’s series “Elderly Animals,” portraits that ask up
104
In this connection, see Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York, NY: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 24-
27. I discuss relevant portions of Safran Foer’s book in 7.1.
51
to look upon their subjects in the relevant sort of ethical light, open our eyes to features of
the animals’ lives that are otherwise hidden from view. Or we might ask whether adopting
the pertinent type of ethical perspective on a cow who has contracted bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”), and who as a result can no longer recognize its bovine
fellows or navigate its familiar environment, enables us to better appreciate what has
happened to it.105 Or whether adopting the pertinent type of ethical perspective on a sparrow
who has flown into a window and broken its neck, and who now lies dead on the ground
before us, brings its small lifeless body more clearly into focus for us, helping us to
appreciate the significance of its death.
There is a relevant treatment of a small bird’s body in Margaret Brown Wise and
Remy Charlip’s classic picture book The Dead Bird.106 Using nothing more than simple
illustrations and an unadorned story, the book positions readers not only to look at a newly
dead bird, in an ethical light, as a creature at the end of a life in which certain things matter
but, at the same time, to acknowledge that this way of conceiving the creature enables us to
bring it more clearly into focus. The book recounts the story of four children who find a
dead bird and then give it a primitive funeral. At the book’s opening, we are shown the bird
lying, as if peacefully asleep, in the grass. We are told that with their fingers the children
could feel the warmth of its body but no heartbeat and, further, that as they held the bird it
began to get cold and stiff. We are also told that the children regard the small body not as an
indifferent object that is in some sense fascinating but as a creature who has lost the goods
105
See, e.g., the footage of a cow with mad cow disease in Robert Kenner’s 2008 documentary Food Inc.
106
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1938).
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of bird life and who therefore merits respectful attention. They are, we read, “very sorry the
bird…could never fly again” but glad they found it “because now they could dig a grave in
the woods and bury it.” In one picture, a girl holds the creature reverently against her cheek;
in another two boys kneel on either side of the tiny body, which is laid out on a leaf; and in a
third three boys place the leaf-enclosed body in the ground while a girl brings wildflowers.
The text describes how the children sing a made-up song, cry, mark the grave with a stone,
visit the grave and then eventually forget to visit. Throughout the book the children’s
attitudes are portrayed as simple and natural, with the result that we are encouraged to share
their attitudes and to join them in looking upon the bird’s body as in itself precious. It is in
this way that the book gets us to look at the body of a dead bird in light of a conception of
what matters in bird-life and, in doing so, positions us to ask whether this way of looking at
it misleads us, or whether on the contrary it enables us to discern things that we would
otherwise miss. If we now imaginatively distance ourselves from the ethical perspective that
the book cultivates, we should be able to see that, far from misleading us, it enables us to
make sense not only of our attitudes toward dead birds but also of a wide range of attitudes
and practices concerning dead human bodies and the bodies of companion animals such as
dogs. That is what justifies us both in representing the perspective as authoritative and, at
the same time, in maintaining that a bird’s lifeless body merits respectful treatment.
This section’s illustrations were intended to show that – as I can now put it – looking
at mentally impaired and deceased animals in the light of conceptions of what matters in the
lives of animals of their species contributes internally to our ability in ethics to bring them
clearly into view. I have, above all, been preoccupied with showing that this is true of
animals who lack the sorts of individual characteristics that moral individualists take to be
morally important and who, by the lights of moral individualism, therefore have diminished
53
claims to moral attention. The class of animals who fall under this heading includes those
who largely or entirely lack species-typical mental capacities, and, bearing this in mind, above
I considered a small sample of actual and fictional cases that fit this description. Both of my
main cases concern dogs, and I have for the most part left it to the reader to explore
analogous cases involving other animals. But it is not unreasonable to assume that further
cases along these lines would confirm the conclusion that I now want to draw, viz., that if
we are to get animals in view empirically in ethics, then, regardless of what individual
characteristics they possess, we need to look at them through the lens of conceptions of
what matters in the lives of members of their species.107 Given that it is, in this way,
compulsory to allow ethical considerations to inform the way we look upon all animals in
ethics, we can fairly say that the plain fact of being an animal of some kind is relevant to
ethics or, more concisely, that merely being an animal matters.108
107
It is not an implication of this conclusion (viz., that in ethics we need to look at all animals through the lens
of conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of their kinds) that animals who lack species-typical
mental capacities due to accident, illness, age or a congenital condition and, who are incapable of enjoying
certain species-typical goods, must lead tragic lives. I am not claiming that an animal must be capable of
somehow enjoying all of the things that matter in the lives of animals of its kind in order to have a wonderful
life. My claim is that a conception of what is important in the lives of animals of a given kind is a necessary
prerequisite of doing empirical justice to animals of that kind in ethics. Acceptance of this point, while it is
consistent with finding that for some animals cognitive disabilities represent a grave misfortune (e.g., one that
exposes them social exclusion, starvation, attack and/or early death), places no obstacles in the way of finding
that the lives of some creatures who have cognitive disabilities, and who cannot enjoy every good available to
animals of their kinds, are among the most glorious and least tragic of animal lives.
108
I am claiming that all animals matter, but I am not claiming that we are called on to minister to all animals in
the same way that we are called on to minister to dogs and other animal companions. Companion animals place
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4.4. Conclusion
This chapter has been devoted to elaborating my book’s main argument in a quite
particular way. Its goal was to show that this argument equips us to say that the plain fact of
being a human or an animal of some kind matters for ethics. In undertaking this project, I
criticized the work of members of the large and heterogeneous group of contemporary
moral thinkers who qualify as ‘moral individualists’ insofar as they maintain that the moral
standing of human beings and animals is a function of individual characteristics and, further,
that there is accordingly no question of treating bare humanity or bare animality as morally
important. My strategy centered on illustrating that, if we are to bring human beings and
animals empirically into view in ethics, then – without regard to whether they possess
species-typical capacities of mind – we need to look at them in the light of ethical
conceptions of what matters in the lives of members of their kinds. That is what speaks not
only for rejecting as morally problematic the image of our ethical relationships to human
beings and animals that moral individualists bequeath to us but also for saying, in opposition
to moral individualism, that merely being a human or an animal matters for ethics. Because,
in defending this view, I depicted all human beings and animals as having empirically
on their human counterparts significant “agent-relative” demands for care and attention. This observation does
not undercut the insight that dogs and other animals are in themselves – independently of, among other things,
any relationships they may have with human beings – ethically important. The question of how we are called on
to respond to a particular animal depends on the nature of the circumstances, and the fact, if it is one, that we
have a close relationship with the animal, or the fact that it is constitutionally dependent on human beings (as
dogs are), will be among these circumstances.
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discoverable moral characteristics, it would be fair to describe this chapter as showing that –
as its title states – all human beings and animals are ‘inside ethics’ in the sense of this book.109
It might seem reasonable to protest that my critique of moral individualism makes
use of merely persuasive methods and that it accordingly lacks the kind of objective
authority that would allow it to hit its target in a meaningful way. What is likely to seem
especially problematic is the fact that the critique turns on modes of thought that are
essentially informed by specific ethical perspectives (i.e., perspectives informed by
conceptions of what matters in the lives of different animate creatures). It is commonly
assumed that ethically non-neutral modes of thought have an essential tendency to distort
our view of the empirical world and, further, that, if these modes of thought make a
necessary contribution to bringing some aspect of this world to light, the aspect in question
therefore cannot qualify as objective. Given this assumption, it appears that the foregoing
critique of moral individualism is grounded in claims about non-objective things and that it
accordingly has no title to be considered objectively authoritative. So it is worth observing
109
Once we get the observable features of specific human beings and animals into view in a manner relevant to
ethics, we may well find that, all things considered, we have good reason to take their cognitive capacities into
account in responding to them. (E.g., once we recognize that an older person with mild senile dementia gets
easily confused and anxious in new settings, we have good reason, other things being equal, to do what we can
to keep her in her familiar environment.) While it is true that cognitive capacities may thus be relevant to our
judgments about how best to treat to a human being or an animal, and while it may seem as though this
observation provides support for moral individualism, in fact the observation is distorted by moral
individualists. Whereas moral individualists see individual cognitive capacities as the original ground of moral
standing, it would be more correct to say – this is a way to summarize a central strand of my argument here –
that it is only against the backdrop of the recognition that we are confronted with a creature who matters that
we can meaningfully gauge the practical significance of the fact that she has such-and-such cognitive capacities.
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that the assumption is faithful to the logic of what earlier I called the ‘narrower conception
of objectivity’ (1.4). At issue is a conception that excludes from objectivity everything with a
necessary reference to subjectivity and on which there is hence no room for modes of
thought that are essentially informed by specific subjective perspectives – i.e., modes of
thought like those that drive my argument here – to make an internal contribution to
objective understanding. This book contains not only a thoroughgoing attack on the
narrower conception of objectivity but also a complementary defense of a very different
‘wider’ alternative (2.1). Within the context of the wider conception there is no antecedent
reason to deny that modes of thought that are essentially informed by ethical perspectives
might as such internally inform genuine understanding. The question of whether such modes
of thought are in fact sound is one we answer, in particular cases, by stepping back from the
ethical perspectives that they encode and asking whether or not these perspectives distort
our view of things, and, although in some cases we may find that they do in fact play a
distorting role, in others we may find that, on the contrary, they contribute directly to our
ability to grasp real features of the world. In 4.2 and 4.3, I set out to vindicate the ethical
modes of thought that are the centerpiece of my critique of moral individualism by
suggesting that ethical perspectives internal to them survive this kind of critical scrutiny.
Later in this book I have more to say about the sorts of non-neutral empirical methods for
ethics that I rely on here (6.1). Right now I simply want to note that it follows from things I
argued earlier that such methods are in principle capable of internally informing objective
understanding, and that it would be wrong to protest that a critique of moral individualism
that relies on them cannot help but fall short of objective authority.110
110
One project of this chapter was defending Eva Kittay’s efforts to show, in opposition to McMahan and
other moral individualists, that people with congenital cognitive disabilities, such as her daughter Sesha, have
57
One further comment is in order about the nature of this chapter’s argument. Here I
defended the view that merely being human or an animal of some kind is morally important
by providing a series of illustrations of how in ethics we need a conception of what matters
in the life of members of a given species in order to adequately understand any member of
the species (i.e., even one who partly or wholly lacks species-typical capacities of mind). My
case for thus aligning the extensions of our biological concepts of human beings and animals
with the extensions of our ethical concepts of human beings and animals is not an a priori
one. Nor do I believe that we could, even in principle, find an a priori route to detecting this
alignment. There is, as I put it at the beginning of 4.2, no ‘shortcut’ that spares us the hard
ethical work of doing what we can to bring human beings and animals empirically into focus,
in a manner relevant to ethics, in particular cases. So there is no question of antecedently
excluding the possibility – well represented in science fiction – of creatures who, while not
biologically human or biologically animals of particular kinds, do come into focus when we
undiminished claims to moral attention (see 4.1). Kittay’s argumentative strategy in some respects resembles my
strategy here. In “The Personal is Philosophical is Political,” she attacks the idea that a successful challenge to
McMahan’s views of moral standing must respect the logic of what I call the ‘narrower conception of the
objectivity’ and what she describes as “an unadulterated objectivity” proceeding as if from “a view from
nowhere” (ibid., 406). She tells us that, to the extent that McMahan insist on this idea, he wrongly implies that,
if she is to defend Sesha’s claims to moral attention, she has to objectify her daughter, looking at her in a
neutral manner as the possessor of such-and-such indifferently available capacities (ibid., p.400). Kittay then
counters that she is entitled to look at her daughter in an ethically loaded manner appropriate for a parent and
care-giver without thereby opening herself to the charge that she has lost any claim to objective authority and is
“blinded by love” (ibid., 405). Taking a term from Sandra Harding, she describes the conception of objectivity
to which she lays claim – on which attitudes we acquire in caring for people may be internal to an objective
view of them – as “strong objectivity” (ibid., 407). Thus understood, strong objectivity is a version of the
conception of objectivity that I refer to as ‘wider’ and that is pivotal for the argument of this book.
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look at them, in an ethical light, as animate creatures of the relevant kinds. (Think, e.g., of
the moral humanity of the – not biologically human – “replicants” in Phillip K. Dick’s novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and of the moral animality of their – not biologically
authentic – animal counterparts.)111 There is also no question of antecedently excluding the
possibility – likewise well represented in science fiction – of creatures who, while biologically
human or biologically animals of particular kinds, do not come into focus when we look
upon them, in an ethical light, as human beings or animals of the kinds in question. (Think,
e.g., of the humanoid zombies in Marc Forster’s 2013 film World War Z or Francis
Lawrence’s 2007 film I am Legend or of animal analogues of such monsters.) But until some
day we discover to our horror that the latter possibility has been realized – and we have
overwhelming moral reasons to refuse to allow that it has been realized unless, in some
awful and earth-shaking case, we find that there is really nothing else to think – we are not
111
(New York, NY: A Del Rey Book, 1968). Ridley Scott’s fantastic 1982 movie Bladerunner, based on Dick’s
novel, centers on a drama involving human-like “replicants” but leaves out the animal-like counterparts that
feature in the novel. Perhaps we don’t even need to turn to science fiction here. Currently widespread practices
of bio-engineering animals (e.g., the bio-engineering of animals who produce more of what are regarded as
edible tissues as well as that of animals who are bred to have genetic and/or physiological peculiarities that are
regarded as useful for experimental purposes) have at least brought us close to realizing the possibility of beings
who, while not biologically animals of any recognizable species, are nonetheless rightly conceived as animals in
a moral sense. See in this connection Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (New York, NY: Anchor Books,
2004), a dystopia that imagines a future in which practices of bio-engineering animals to serve gustatory and
experimental purposes clearly actualize this possibility. E.g., chicken meat is harvested from ChickieNobs,
chicken-like creatures bereft of all brain functions not related to digestion, assimilation and growth (203).
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merely entitled but obliged to accept the view, defended in this chapter, that merely being a
human or an animal of some kind is morally important.