That consuming animal products reinforces the notion that animals are commodities is obvious – to vegans. However, what are we to say when educating nonvegans about veganism? What are we to say in a situation that many of us have encountered, or could, in any event, at any time, find ourselves in: a nonvegan, let's call her Susan, asks us what is wrong with eating a chicken who has been struck by lightning, or something of that sort. Of course our initial move may be, why is the chicken there in the first place. In reply, Susan might use the example of a wild animal who has neither been brought into existence nor killed by humans. What's wrong with eating a wild deer who died of natural causes, Susan might say.
To Susan as a nonvegan, we could not reply that eating the deer would be wrong because it would reinforce the notion that animals are commodities, since it could have no persuasive force with her, given her moral beliefs about animals, namely that there is nothing wrong with treating them as resources in the first place. Instead, we could try and make Susan consider whether she would eat, or use for other purposes, her beloved dog or cat when they, in a state of perfect health, had been run over by a car. Or any dog or cat who had come to die that way. Supposing Susan to be willing to be honest with herself, she would likely rule that out of consideration; if not, she would probably wish to deflect what she would uncomfortably experience as a question to which she had no ready reply.
What we would say to Susan is expressed in the aforementioned blog essay, where Francione writes:
Being vegan means that you reject the notion that animals are things for us to consume. They are not commodities; they are not resources. They are not food any more than a human arm that you find in the dumpster. We would never think of eating a human. Humans are moral persons. We don’t eat persons. But nonhumans are persons as well. They have moral value. Their bodies and the products made from them are not things we eat, even if we find them dead along the road way or in a dumpster, or even if they abandon their eggs.
In the ''Twenty Questions (and Answers)'' appendix to Introduction toAnimal Rights. Your Child or the Dog? (2000), Francione replies to question No 10, ''Do nonsentient humans such as those who are irreversibly brain dead have a right not to be treated as things?,'' that such humans ''are really no different from plants, they are alive but they are not conscious and have no interests to protect. According such humans a right not to be treated as the resources of others makes no sense.'' (p. 170)
It can be assumed that the same holds for animals.
But how can humans' and animals' bodies be no different from plants – and not things to eat at the same time?
With respect to rights and interests, there would, indeed, be no difference between a woman, let's call her Ellen, who had suffered severe brain injuries in an accident and had since been in a coma with no hope of recovery, on the one hand, and a mere source of spare parts, on the other. Yet we would not treat a victim of affliction such as Ellen, pitiably languishing in her comatose state, as an mere organ 'donor,' or as an object of biochemical experimentation, and we would not treat her as such even if there were no family or relatives who might oppose the instrumental use of Ellen's body. Why would we not do so?
We give funerals to our dead and do not eat or otherwise use them as resources, not, at any rate, without the person's prior consent or her legal representative's or legal successor's permission, for the purposes of donating organs or of scientific experimentation. We think of certain ways of treating human corpses, e.g., grave robbing, as desecration. Why?
In her seminal essay, ''Eating Meat and Eating People'' (1978), philosopher Cora Diamond writes:
Now the fact that we do not eat our dead is not a consequence - not a direct one in any event-of our unwillingness to kill people for food or other purposes. It is not a direct consequence of our unwillingness to cause distress to people. Of course it would cause distress to people to think that they might be eaten when they were dead, but it causes distress because of what it is to eat a dead person. (p. 467)
She sees our relationship to companion animals in the same light when she argues that ''a starting point … must be understanding what is involved in such things as our not eating people: no more than our not eating pets does that rest on recognition of the claims of a being simply as one capable of suffering and enjoyment.'' (p. 471) According to Diamond, interests and rights cannot be the foundation of a case against seeing animals as things to eat because interests and rights are not what prevents us from seeing humans as things to eat or otherwise use as resources, either. ''[I]t is not respect for our interests which is involved in our not eating each other.'' (p. 469)
A vegan will not eat any animal, or consume any animal products, because of what it would mean to do it. The meaning of it would not be changed if the animal's death had not been caused by humans, nor if eating her had no effect of demand. Some vegans claim that they wouldn't do it merely out of squeamishness. But then, why did they not feel squeamish before they became vegan? The aesthetic disgust supervenes on our recognition of what it means to do it, specified as its being, in some sense or other, wrong.
Giving funerals to our dead, and giving names to our children rather than numbering them, are, Diamond argues, ''ways in which we mark what a human life is'' and which ''belong to the source of moral life. (p. 471)
Let's leave aside here the practice of giving funerals to our dead as a practice inextricably intertwined with legal requirements and having partly or potentially controversial cultural and religious connotations. Let's think of our beloved companion animals. When they die, most people, vegans and nonvegans, bury or cremate them; and their doing so is not the outcome of any process of reflection on whether they should treat their bodies in other ways, such as chopping them up and feeding them to carnivores in order to diminish the demand for nonvegan pet food. Most people would not treat a dead stray dog's or feral cat's body in that way, either.
We deeply grieve the loss of our animal companions. A fellow vegan, Andreas, lay beside his cat Michelle, who was fatally ill, the day she died. He kept laying beside her until the next morning, tenderly stroking her; then he carefully covered her with a pillow case, carried her into the garden and buried her under a cherry tree. To do this was extremely important to him; had he not been able to, it would have caused him distress – on top of his grief. Why? Andreas' treating the dead Michelle thus reflected his love for her, and he felt, we would suggest, that in doing it he "did right by her." However, while his acting that way prevented him from experiencing distress, this was not the reason for it; he did it not for his sake, but for Michelle's.
What sense can be made of this from an interests / rights perspective? Just to be clear, we are in no way questioning how anyone grieves for their dead companion animals, but whether animal rights ideology can be said to yield a plausible explanation of it. We had an animal advocate tell us, when her dog died, that she cremated him because doing so made her feel better – but that this was, strictly speaking, irrational – as an attempt to "hold on" to him. Now, what would it mean to truly believe that our treating our dead animal companions differently from plants or inanimate objects is irrational? If one did believe it, would this not neutralize the effect of psychological relief, which depends for its consoling power on one's really believing it - somewhat as a delusion has an effective influence on one's thinking only to the extent that one does not realize that it is actually a delusion? We find it hard to imagine that one could make oneself feel better by doing something that was inconsistent with what one sincerely professed to believe, especially when it concerns grieving for loved ones. When we grieve for them, after all, should we not be concerned to grieve lucidly, lest we should besmirch their memory? Perhaps it is not what we profess to believe, however sincerely, but how we actually act - when the latter is generally inconsistent with the former - that is the definitive expression of what we really believe.
As for the idea that cremating or burying our dead is an attempt to "hold on" to them, with all respect to whomever may hold it, we think it is at best an overstrained interpretation to give to such action. We think it can much more plausibly be interpreted, not as consoling us by sustaning the illusion that we are somehow "holding on to" the dead, but, on the contrary, as enabling us to let go of them: an act of irretrievable separation in which we would feel pangs of guilt or betrayal were it not for our sense of doing right by them at the end, that is, by cremating or burying them, in what is the final act we can, and will, ever do for them.
As for the idea that cremating or burying our dead is an attempt to "hold on" to them, with all respect to whomever may hold it, we think it is at best an overstrained interpretation to give to such action. We think it can much more plausibly be interpreted, not as consoling us by sustaning the illusion that we are somehow "holding on to" the dead, but, on the contrary, as enabling us to let go of them: an act of irretrievable separation in which we would feel pangs of guilt or betrayal were it not for our sense of doing right by them at the end, that is, by cremating or burying them, in what is the final act we can, and will, ever do for them.
Cora Diamond criticizes Singer's and Regan's philosophical theories on the grounds that the discussion about interests and rights do not have the conceptual resources required to characterize an animal as the kind of being who is not something to eat [1]: ''[T]here is nothing in the discussion which suggests that a cow is not something to eat; it is only that one must not help the process along... '' (p. 468)
In our understanding, Diamond's critique, while referring to Singer and Regan, applies all the same to Francione in that the point of it is not to critique theories that require empirical properties and capacities beyond sentience for moral significance; it is rather to highlight the inadequacy of any theory that seeks to determine what humans (or animals) are solely by reference to their empirical characteristics. To date, her critique has not, to our knowledge, been responded to, much less refuted, by any proponent of the interests / rights approach to animal ethics.
What the bodies of our dead loved ones are as a moral matter cannot be determined in a detached scientific manner, solely by whether they possess any "morally relevant empirical properties and capacities." Indeed, we can agree with Francione's claim that corpses have no interests [1], and therefore no rights either, quite consistently with the recognition that corpses are nonetheless altogether different, morally speaking, from cabbages. To be sure, in terms of interests and rights, no morally relevant difference between a corpse and a cabbage can be identified. Yet the former can be treated in ways the latter cannot, at least not intelligibly. As in the above example of Andreas and Michelle, many of us may recall our caressing the dead but still soft body of a beloved dog or cat, rabbit, rat, or other companion animal. More generally, what the bodies of our dead loved ones are is "more an object of contemplation than observation" (Diamond), and can perhaps be best thought of as ''a unity of the given and the constructed''[2]. Here the given is the human form; the constructed, the tender, caressing responses made possible – invited, as one could put it - by it.
In a documentary about Aids that we watched recently, a man related how he lost his lover, disclosing that when his beloved was alive, he used to brush his hair. When his lover had died, he did not cease to be for him an object of tender affection, which he expressed in what was a poignant, unaffected way: he once again brushed his lover's hair. We can respond tenderly to our dead as we can to the unborn, irrespective of their status as sentient, and the possibility of responding in such ways yields to us our sense of the radical difference in kind between the bodies of our dead loved ones and what a woman carries when she is pregnant, her unborn child, on the one hand, and mere inanimate objects, on the other; it marks a morally relevant difference between them and whatever cannot be the intelligible objects of such responses. Diamond notes that ''[i]t is a mark of the shallowness of these discussions [of animal rights] ..that the only tool used in them to explain what differences in treatment are justified is the appeal to the capacities of the beings in question.''
In his seminal book Good And Evil: An Absolute Conception (2004 [first published in 1991]), philosopher Raimond Gaita, another deeply insightful critic of the interests / rights approach, writes:
Women sometimes love their unborn children. Some people wonder whether that is sentimental because they wonder whether what a woman carries when she is pregnant is an appropriate object of love. They will say that to describe it as I have, as her love for her 'unborn child' is to beg a lot of questions. They will say that we must first, as objectively as possible, understand what the 'status' of the foetus is, so that we may determine whether is is properly called a child and also to determine whether it is an appropriate object of love . (…)
It is important that the child grows in its mother's body, that her body changes with its growth, and that these changes can appear to us as beautiful, for this provides a focus for love's tenderness without which there could be no love. A foetus growing in a glass jar on her mantelpiece, with many of its 'morally relevant empirical properties' in plain view, could not be an object of her love, for her love could find no tender expression (which is not to say that a serious concern could find no expression). Or perhaps, more accurately, it could not if that were a general practice in a community. The pleasure of a woman with child at the changes in her body is the opposite of narcissism. It's the expression of her love for her child, and the possibility of such expression is a condition of that love. (…)
Suppose someone were to point to a foetus growing in a glass jar and to ask, rhetorically, how could it be called a child? His rhetorical tone would be partly justified, but mostly not. He would be right to suggest that we could not, that we would at least find it difficult, but he would be wrong in what he thought that showed. Those for whom it is natural to speak of a woman as 'big with child' do not mean that she had been caused to grow by something they believed or conjectured to be a growing child, but which turns out to be the same kind of thing as is growing in the jar. 'Big with child' (in this way of speaking) does not mean: caused to grow big by something that belongs to the natural kind Homo sapiens, and which might, or might not, have the relevant properties to be grouped along with paradigmatic exemplars of the word 'child'. If we ask what, in that case, she is big with, then it would not be wrong to say that she was big with child. But the sense of that is given by the use of the expression as a whole ('big with child'), and by the kind of place it has, because of its echoes and resonances, in certain ways of speaking in a certain culture. The phrase 'with child' is not detachable from 'big with child' in the way it would need to be for someone who says that it is an arguable matter whether she is big with (a) child. By way of contrast we may say.(pp. 119 f.)
Gaita argues that a woman's love for her unborn child is, for her, "the kind of love that makes abortion impossible. We might want to add that it makes it morally, not psychologically, impossible.'' (p. 121) Gaita writes, ''I do not think that we can understand her finding it morally impossible to kill a foetus (consider the impossibility of her saying 'my foetus' in the tone in which she may say 'my child') except insofar as that is implicitly redescribed.'' (ibid.)
Footnotes
Footnotes
[1] The claim that corpses that have no conscious interests is of course (banally) true.
[2] G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind.
