Practical Philosophy

This is a draft of a paper coming out in Philosophical Investigations sometime soon. I think it is already available online. Practical Philosophy1 Karsten Schoellner, University of Potsdam Introduction Practical philosophy and theoretical philosophy are generally thought to differ in their subject matter — practical philosophy being philosophy about, for example, value, or action, and theoretical philosophy being about language, e.g., or logic. In this view, both practical and theoretical philosophy are ultimately theoretical disciplines, in that both develop theories about their various subject matters. Here I want to work out an idea of what a truly practical philosophy could be, i.e. that is practical in its approach and not just in its subject matter. I develop this notion of practical philosophy by way of three similar considerations put forward by different authors about our relations to animals — by Barbara Smuts and Wendy Doniger in their responses to Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals”, and by Cora Diamond in her article “Eating Meat, Eating People” — and in light of a central problem that recurs in these author’s approaches; the different ways one might respond to this problem can show what truly practical philosophy might look like. Hence the first section of this paper is about animals, the second about philosophy. Animals The primatologist Barbara Smuts was one of the four scholars asked to respond to South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s Tanner lectures, “The Lives of Animals”. Coetzee’s two lectures took the form of fictional stories about a fictional writer, Elizabeth Costello, who is asked to hold a lecture at an American university. Costello’s lecture is the centre of Coetzee’s stories; the lecture is perceived by the other characters in the fiction as an attack on eating meat, which it is, but in a larger sense it is a reflection on the ways we might connect to animals and the ways we cut ourselves off from animals and fail to see them, for example by philosophising. In her response Smuts writes that we can achieve deeper, more personal relations with animals than we ordinarily suppose: My own life has convinced me that the limitations most of us encounter in our relations with other animals reflect not their shortcomings, as we so often assume, but our own narrow views about who they are and the kinds of relationships we can have with them.2 She learned from studying baboons how to interact with animals as one of them, as “a social subject vulnerable to the demands and rewards of relationship”3 within their social framework rather than as a neutral observer. But she takes this home with her and develops a far deeper and more personal relationship with her new dog than she or other pet owners would have thought possible — a relationship of “joyful intersubjectivity that transcends species boundaries”4. She writes: “Even the most avid pet-lovers generally operate within a narrow set of assumptions about what their animals are capable of, and what sort of relationship it is possible to have with them.”5 But her text seems also to suggest that the explanation for these overly narrow assumptions is not just intellectual 1 I am grateful for the many helpful comments and criticisms I received from audiences at the University of Potsdam, the ETH in Zurich and at a meeting of the Welsh Philosophical Association, and in particular for the criticisms from Dieter Thomä, Anna Eusterschulte, Logi Gunnarsson and Joachim Toenges. 2 Coetzee (1999: 120). 3 Ibid., 110. 4 Ibid., 114. 5 Ibid., 115. 1 prejudice but a kind of laziness and wish for more convenient relations with animals: “relating to others (human or nonhuman) in this way requires giving up control over them and how they relate to us. We fear such loss of control, but the gifts we receive in turn make it a small price to pay.” For example, Smuts does not “train” her dog so much as come to an understanding with the dog; and she cannot make all the rules. Moreover she must open herself emotionally to achieve this relationship, which requires the “voluntary, mutual surrender to the dictates of intersubjectivity”6 — “For the heart to truly share another’s being, it must be an embodied heart, prepared to encounter directly the embodied heart of another.”7 And though Smuts does not mention this, if we want to eat meat and not worry about how it gets made it is convenient to think of animals as generally subservient to us. Smuts considers the baboons she worked with — and presumably her dog as well — to be “persons like you and me”8. Someone trained as a philosopher is likely to see this as a philosophical finding that has emerged from her quasi-empirical experience with animals, namely that baboons and dogs are persons; and insofar as “person” functions as a legal and moral term connected with rights and obligations, this finding would force us to revise our notions of how such animals may be treated. An extension of these findings to other animals — such as pigs — could of course have drastic implications for our life. In fact Smuts takes her thought in a slightly different direction: What it does mean is that I regard her as a “person,” albeit of another species—a possibility first made real to me during my life with the baboons. In the language I am developing here, relating to other beings as persons has nothing to do with whether or not we attribute human characteristics to them. It has to do, instead, with recognizing that they are social subjects, like us, whose idiosyncratic, subjective experience of us plays the same role in their relations with us that our subjective experience of them plays in our relations with them. If they relate to us as individuals, and we relate to them as individuals, it is possible for us to have a personal relationship. If either party fails to take into account the other’s social subjectivity, such a relationship is precluded. Thus while we normally think of personhood as an essential quality we can “discover” or “fail to find” in another, in the view espoused here personhood connotes a way of being in relation to others, and thus no one other than the subject can give it or take it away. In other words, when a human being relates to an individual nonhuman being as an anonymous object, rather than as a being with its own subjectivity, it is the human, and not the other animal, who relinquishes personhood.9 Smuts does not want to say that it turns out that certain animals are persons and that she has discovered this. Personhood is “a way of being in relation to others” — so if a pig and I really have a relationship wherein we each account for the other’s social subjectivity, rather than my simply using the pig for my ends, then I am a person for the pig and the pig is a person for me. If I do not care how the pig sees the world and just want to slaughter it and eat it, then the pig is not a person for me, nor am I (presumably) a person for the pig. On her view, subjects can “give” or “take away” personhood. She does not say that I can take the pig’s personhood away; rather, I can “relinquish personhood”, which I take to mean: I can relinquish the relation in which we are both persons for the other, which is a loss for both of us — we have both missed out on some potential personhood. Nonetheless this seems to put a certain amount of moral power into our hands, at least if we take “person” to be a moral and legal term connected with rights and obligations. If I do not enter into this personal relation with the pig, though it might well be possible to do so, then the pig is not a person to me, and then I am allowed to kill and eat it. The pig would also be allowed to kill and eat me, but I’m not worried about that. If I do enter into this relation with the pig, then the pig will be a person and I will have certain obligations and restrictions on my will. Of course this makes a certain amount of sense. A personal relationship is precisely a relationship wherein the other restricts my will, where their subjectivity is a source of reasons for me. But she leaves it up to the subject whether to enter into this relationship. If I treat the pig as a person, the pig 6 Ibid., 118. Ibid., 108. 8 Ibid., 108. 9 Ibid., 117f. 7 2 is a person. If I let the pig restrict my will, then the pig shall restrict my will. But if I want to eat bacon, all I have to do is see the pig as a source of bacon rather than a will that restricts my own, and then it’s morally permissible, a morally neutral act. People will be likely to find this a bit difficult. We can make it more difficult by locating the problem among humans. If I, along with my powerful cronies, wish to exploit a certain ethnic minority for my own material gain, all I have to do is discount their subjectivity and treat them as means, and then this will seem a quite appropriate way of treating them, for they are (to me) not persons but just means. Smuts does not seem to see this problem. She is a primatologist rather than a philosopher, so she isn’t paid to see it. But someone who is trained as a philosopher might think to help her by saying: perhaps “person” should be defined as anything with which a personal relationship is possible. Then I will not be able to make my slaves less than full persons simply by treating them as such; and to the extent that personal relationships with pigs are possible, then pigs will be persons now, and it will be wrong to eat them now and not contingent upon our discovering the possibility of this relationship. This would restore a certain order to the universe of moral concepts: though a personal relationship is a way of being, “person” is a status (though defined in terms of this relationship) that something has or does not have, which we discover. I will call this “the helpful modification” and will try to show why one might find this unappealing. But first I would like to present two more examples. In her answer to Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures, the religious historian Wendy Doniger reviews the various ways in which different cultures have conceived animals and our relation to them and the varying significance thereby attributed to the eating of meat. At one point she notes: And language is, I think, the place from which compassion springs. We cannot torment (or eat) the people we speak with. Elaine Scarry made this point, in reverse, when she argued that torture takes away speech, and Lewis Carroll made it when the Red Queen, having introduced Alice to the roast (“Alice—mutton: Mutton—Alice”), commanded: “It isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!” And this language need not be even the signing of chimps, let alone the whistles of dolphins (or the body language of primates that Barbara Smuts learns to read); it may be no more than the silent language of the eyes. Emmanuel Levinas once said that the face of the other says, Don’t kill me. This is the language that we must learn to read, and the language that is denied by people who defend the right to treat animals as things, through a self-serving tautology.10 It is hard to eat things you speak to; and it is hard to speak to the things you eat. This holds even when the content of the speech is not a plea for pity like “Don’t kill me”. She does not explain why this is true; it seems sufficient for her that it plainly is true. Eating and speaking involve incompatible attitudes to their respective objects, and I will say a little more about this in discussing the third example.11 However, at this point the trained philosopher, who has learned a formal 10 Ibid., 104. That there is a kind of contradiction or incompatibility between the relationship in which we communicate with something and the relationship in which we use it for sustenance — between relating to something as a subject or as a tool or resource — is central to Diamond’s paper “Eating Meat, Eating People”, which I discuss below. An anonymous reviewer has commented: “In the concrete question at issue, the main alternatives seem to be either eating farm animals or developing a personal relation with them. What then about the attitude that was quite usual in traditional agriculture, i.e. developing personal relations with farm animals and eating them?” I am grateful to the reviewer for reminding me to say something about this, even if what I say here will be both brief and speculative. Every time I’ve presented this paper someone in the audience has said to me something to the effect of: I grew up on a farm and the sheep walked around our house freely, they all had names, and then we ate them. Yet every one who says this presents it as something strange and disconcerting or inexplicable, as something that they as children had to struggle to adjust themselves to; one person said to me: “we simply got hardened to it.” It seems to me that even if what we might call the mixed attitude is typical in a great many societies, nonetheless it is also typically felt to be a kind of ugly contradiction that everyone has gotten used to and learned to work around. Hence I take this to be a demonstration of Diamond’s point more than a refutation of it. It is also worth noting that it is not entirely clear if Diamond feels that the personal view of animals she 11 3 definition of “tautology”, might wonder what exactly the tautology is supposed to consist in. Doniger’s point seems to be: we feel it is alright to eat pigs because they are not one of us, and part of what not being one of us means is: we don’t communicate with them. But here “not communicating with them” doesn’t just mean not talking to them, but also: not reading the look on their faces, not seeing any meaning there. The tautology would have to be something like: we don’t eat the things we speak with, or: we don’t speak with the things we eat. And we make self-serving use of this tautology when we decline to “speak” with animals because we (want to) eat them; we could we could just as well decline to eat animals because we (have started to) “speak” with them. We can illuminate this passage of Doniger’s — though we might also be taking it in a direction she did not intend — by connecting it with something the fictional protagonist of Coetzee’s story says on this exact point. In her debate with a (fictional) professional philosopher, who argues that animals must belong to “another legal and ethical realm entirely”12 because they cannot speak, she says: As for animals being too dumb and stupid to speak for themselves, consider the following sequence of events. When Albert Camus was a young boy in Algeria, his grandmother told him to bring her one of the hens from the cage in their backyard. He obeyed, then watched her cut off its head with a kitchen knife, catching its blood in a bowl so that the floor would not be dirtied. The death-cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?13 The (real) professional philosopher Cora Diamond uses this passage to characterise Costello’s approach to philosophical argumentation generally: She does not engage with others in argument, in the sense in which philosophers do. Her responses to arguments from others move out from the kind of engagement that might have been expected. She comments on the arguments put to her, but goes on from them in directions which suggest her own very different mode of approach. She does not take seriously the conventions of argumentation of a philosophy text, as comes out in her image of the hen speaking in the writings of Camus on the guillotine. (This is clearly, from the point of view of the conventions of argumentation, no way to respond to the argumentative point that animals cannot speak for themselves and claim rights for themselves as we can. The image itself is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s image of the rose having teeth in the mouth of the cow that chews up its food and dungs the rose.)14 She is referring to a passage in Part II of the Investigations (221f.) in which Wittgenstein compares three sentences: “A newborn baby has no teeth”, “A goose has no teeth”, and “A rose has no teeth”, and disputes the superficial sense we might have that the last sentence is more obviously true than the first two15. We know where we would locate teeth in a baby and a goose; but since we have no idea where the teeth are supposed to be in the rose, it is not so clear that the sentence is false; and it would be “not absurd” to rise to the occasion by saying that the rose has teeth in the mouth of the beast. Diamond does not really spell out the parallel to Camus’ hen, but we might want to say: we might think it at first simply false to say that a hen can talk, since we have a clear sense of what it would be for a hen to talk. That a hen could talk in the sense Costello suggests, however, it not obviously false. Doniger’s proposal is less extravagant than Costello’s, but nonetheless we can say: endorses is flatly incompatible with any way of eating animals; she concedes that there can be more or less respectful ways of farming animals, see e.g. Diamond (1991a: 326). Her writing is generally directed more against factory farming and animal experimentation. I take it that our modern maximally efficient use of animals is incompatible with any intersubjective relation with those animals. 12 Ibid., 62. 13 Ibid., 63. 14 Cavell et al (2008: 52). 15 Wittgenstein (1953: 221f.) 4 that a cow can communicate in that sense — that we can read the meaning of the look in its eyes — is not obviously false. Though I might be straining my interpretation of Doniger, I would suggest that she invites us to a natural but contestable extension of the notion of speech; and the naturalness of the extension is shown by how easily I could speak of reading the meaning of a cow’s look. Its naturalness is further suggested by the very moral purpose Doniger gives the expression: it would also be much harder to kill and eat a cow if we attended to its face in a certain way, opening ourselves to its expressiveness, in roughly the same way that, if you had to kill a person, it would be harder to do so while listening to them. But the way in which this way of speaking is not clearly true or false is connected with the way it is not really anything philosophy, as practiced institutionally, is prepared to deal with; Costello’s or Doniger’s responses would not get taken seriously in most philosophy departments as any kind of argument. Or if a professional philosopher did take it seriously, they would almost certainly begin by restarting the same problem that afflicts Smuts’ concept of the person: if I want to continue eating bacon, I could decline the invitation to this way of speaking of “speech”. Or alternately: I could continue not seeing anything expressive or meaningful in the looks of animals, and then, because they are dumb, I am free to use them. This approach seems to put the moral truth in my hands, which makes both the approach and its idea of moral truth morally rather useless. My third example is Cora Diamond’s approach to our relation to animals, which resembles Smuts’ approach structurally, though it is far more sophisticated; here I will be referring for the most part to her 1976 article “Eating Meat, Eating People”. It is probably fair to say that for Diamond, “persons” are simply “humans” — that is, she uses the terms interchangeably, as we ordinarily do outside of philosophical or legal contexts. She could be said to defend a kind of “speciesism”, at least as the “starting point” of ethical reflection: the fact that something is human makes a moral difference by itself. Hence for her it could never be a question whether a human with reduced capacities is for that reason of lesser moral worth than one of the more intelligent non-human animals. Yet at the same time she insists that the biological category of the human has no moral meaning by itself; what makes a difference is what it means to be human. This points us towards a non-biological concept of the human. (Though elsewhere she is clear that it does not differ in extension from the biological concept homo sapiens; but “grasping a concept (even one like that of a human being, which is a descriptive concept if any are) is not a matter just of knowing how to group things under that concept; it is being able to participate in life-with-the-concept.”16) This concept of the human is partly constituted by what Diamond calls our “modes of response” to other humans, which might be called practices that are fundamental to our life-form, for example that we do not eat each other, not even when one of us has died painlessly of natural causes, but rather that we sit down together to eat other animals; that we have names, and generally that “we treat human sexuality or birth or death as we do, marking them – in their various ways – as significant or serious”17. As we are raised into a life with these modes of response, humans will come to mean something to us — for example, that “a person is not something to eat”18 — and it will also mean something to us when a person is hurt or betrayed or in need. It is important for Diamond to emphasise that these “modes of response” are themselves (at least at the starting point) beyond justification and are in fact the “source” of our moral life. If we did not live in this way, we could not create moral obligation from scratch. If we abstract from these modes of response — or in other words, from our life with the concept of humanity and the sense that being human has for us — or if we simply forget it in our philosophical haste, then it will seem mysterious how anything could be meant by speaking of an absolute moral 16 Diamond (1988: 266). Diamond (1991a: 324). 18 Ibid., 322. 17 5 ‘ought’; and it will certainly be arbitrary stipulation to tie specific obligations to specific empirical properties such as rationality or sentience. Having established this “starting point”, however, Diamond wishes to pivot towards a more generous inclusion of animals within these essentially personal modes of response. We might, after all, find that some of our modes of response can be extended more or less naturally to various forms of animal life. Dogs and cats obviously have been given the role of quasi-persons: “A pet is not something to eat, it is given a name, is let into our houses and may be spoken to in ways in which we do not normally speak to cows or squirrels.”19 But poetry, or specifically the use of the imagination we find in poetry, can extend our personal modes of response and personal concepts to animals far beyond their typical limits. Diamond considers a poem by De la Mare about a little bird, “this tiny son of life” who offers the poet companionship for a moment before flying off “into Time’s enormous Nought”, and compares this with the poet Robert Burns’ lines about a mouse, “thy poor earthborn companion,/An’ fellow mortal”. We cannot see an animal in these terms and then eat it, of course; but these terms give a significance to animal life borrowed from a prior sense of the meaning of our lives, a sense that is partly built on a contrast with animals. The extension of our interpersonal modes of response to animals might be more or less precarious and in many cases it simply won’t take — you can’t see a shrimp as a friend in any sense, really. Even in the case of dogs the extension is always parasitic and somewhat attenuated. But we cannot know in advance where the limits are, in advance of specific achievements of the imagination. This extension is not exactly a matter of decision — we cannot decide to be moved by a poem, cannot decide to find a certain extension so natural that it comes to be a part of our world — nonetheless it is in some sense in our hands. The sense of humanity and the sense of animal life is something made by our imaginative responses.20 Like Smuts, Diamond is asking us to try to do something — while Smuts focuses on actual behaviour, Diamond focuses (though not exclusively) on what we do conceptually; she wants us to make more out of animal life through a more generous imaginative response. If I do this, then I will be unable to eat animals casually, it will have become morally impossible. But of course I might not do this if I like eating bacon enough. At this point we run into our problem: narrower and broader extensions of our personal modes of response are possible, and neither empirically given nor in any way logically deducible; so we might want to know what makes any particular extension right. Diamond says very little on this point. She suggests that a view of animals as “fellow creatures”, rather than as e.g. stages in the production of meat, might be “less hypocritical or richer or better” in some way that “remain[s] to be described.”21 She notes the objection that we might restrict interpersonal modes of response even within humanity, distinguishing between a master class and a slave class and seeing and treating the slaves as “persons” only in a very attenuated sense. (On Diamond’s approach the lack of a sound biological distinction between the two classes need not matter very much — for we might make something in our imagination of the difference.22) She only says however: “In fact I do not quite think it works that way, but at this point I am not trying to justify anything”23 — only to establish a point about the sorts of resources we have in moral thought. Hence we might suggest the helpful modification to Diamond: those things that could potentially be seen as persons are to that extent persons. In her case this modification will have to be understood to allow for degrees of closeness to personhood, but this is not a problem. 19 Ibid., 324. Diamond (1991a: 350-352); Diamond (1991b: 43f.). 21 Diamond (1991a: 325) 22 She writes elsewhere: “we have never made anything humanly valuable of the differences between races, the mythology of the American South notwithstanding” (1991a: 351), but I take this to be her substantial (and correct) ethical judgment rather than a formal disqualification of the possibility. 23 Ibid., 325. 20 6 All three writers seem to face roughly the same problem, and all three seem quite unconcerned with it. Someone might suspect that this is because two of the three are non-philosophers, and that it is the trained philosopher’s talent to see the problem and propose the modification. In fact I do not think there is any mistake or oversight involved here; we find the same structure in one of the central moral teachings of the Western tradition, the parable of the Good Samaritan: And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? Jesus now tells the story of the good Samaritan who helped the stranger who had fallen among thieves, and concludes: Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. (Luke 10:25-37) The lawyer sees a rule — that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself to get into heaven — and asks for a definition of “neighbour” so that he knows how to fulfil the rule. Jesus says that a neighbour is one who shows mercy — the Samaritan, for example, was a neighbour to the other. (In Smuts’ terms we could say neighbourness “connotes a way of being in relation to others, and thus no one other than the subject can give it or take it away”). At this point the lawyer has an easy out, and as a lawyer it is almost impossible that he miss it. He could say: if I don’t show mercy to anyone, I’ll have no “neighbours”, then it will be trivial to fulfil the law and I’ll certainly get into heaven. But it would be quite out of character for Jesus to offer the lawyer a modified definition of “neighbour” such that the rule now forced the lawyer to treat more people with more love. It should be clear by the way Jesus responds that he is in moral opposition to the lawyer’s whole way of thinking (we might call it a lawyerly way of thinking) and is refusing to respond in those terms. We can paraphrase Diamond’s comment on Elizabeth Costello: “His responses to arguments from others move out from the kind of engagement that might have been expected. He comments on the arguments put to him, but goes on from them in directions which suggest his own very different mode of approach.” Philosophy I will argue shortly that the helpful modification has disadvantages; that there are good reasons why three intelligent and reflective people who thought about the issue did not take it. But first I want to clarify what is supposed to speak in favour of it; and I will be referring to Smuts’ conception of the person, as it seems the simplest of the three examples. If we do not take on the helpful modification, then someone who simply wants to continue eating bacon will be able to justify this to themselves using Smuts’ vocabulary. Moreover, the danger is not just that someone might adopt the vocabulary only to abuse it, but that it seems to distort our moral relations to those we would like to consider immoral. For example: it might seem that because of how the Nazis treated Jewish people, in Smuts’ terms Jewish people were not really persons for the Nazis, but if the Jewish people were not really persons for the Nazis, then what did the Nazis do wrong? It may seem that we are unable to condemn them. 7 Let us now imagine two different responses to Smuts. The first reader takes up her invitation to see personhood as a way of relating to others, and tries to see how far she can stretch personhood. In her dealings with animals she seeks to relinquish control and to meet the animals in a true intersubjective exchange — in other words, she begins to open her heart. She cannot begin to change her relations to animals so long as she is willing to slaughter them for her convenience, so she will have to change certain of her behaviours on a kind of trust in the value of the experiment. But as she builds these relations, they will begin to have a real moral force for her: it will become morally impossible for her to use them for food. The animal’s will and point of view will now be a real limit on her will and point of view. She might now be in a position to formulate new moral rules, for example: we shouldn’t eat the meat of animals x, y and z; and she might do so if someone asked her for her opinion. But for her the rule is superfluous; at no point does it guide her in her thought. She cannot slaughter certain creatures for her convenience, not because of a rule that says so, but because of what it would be in her eyes to do so — she would not slaughter animals any more than she would purposefully step on someone’s toe or strike a baby. The rule could at best be a kind of helpful summary of the path her thought took, perhaps a reminder for moments when she must act quickly or is distracted. The second reader I am imagining takes up Smuts’ vocabulary, because he sees how easy he could make things for himself by doing so. He simply wants to eat bacon. Hence he does not really take up her vocabulary in the spirit of an experiment, for he already knows the result: the result is that he will eat bacon. He might even, in a kind of cynical smugness, begin to treat animals more callously so as to secure his right to use them for his convenience. I will call these two readers the practical philosopher and the sophistical philosopher. Both take up Smuts’ vocabulary and work with it, but the sophistical philosopher is in a sense not taking it seriously at all.24 Now there is a third possible response; I will call this person the theoretical philosopher, though this is short for theoretical practical philosopher, someone who theorises about moral practice, as opposed to the really practical philosopher discussed above. The theoretical philosopher is the one who proposes the helpful modification. The theoretical philosopher takes the issue seriously in his own way, but he does not adopt Smuts’ vocabulary and work with it. His response is controlled to a large extent by the possibility of the sophistical response. The theoretical philosopher wishes to change Smuts’ vocabulary so as to exclude the possibility of the sophistical response; and also so that it comes out that the Nazis are wrong. Like the sophistical philosopher, the theoretical philosopher knows in advance what results he wishes to have, and rejects Smuts’ vocabulary when it seems to make those results impossible. The practical philosopher, if I understand her right, will find the theoretical philosopher’s helpful modification an unhelpful distraction at best. The sophist, she will say, is self-indulgent, intellectually dishonest, incurious to the point of corruption. He is a sophist; he is not thinking seriously but rather looking for a way to make things comfortable for himself. And he will have no trouble finding a way. The helpful modification will not help; no theory will help. The sophist could simply reject any theory. We all know how easy it is to dispute a theory. As for the Nazis, it is not her primary point of business to condemn the Nazis, but if it comes to that, nothing is easier than condemning them; she does not wait for a theory to declare them wrong before condemning them. At this point it is important again to look at the exact sort of moral force the concept of personhood might have. We might imagine that the term “person” is hooked up to a rule specifying certain 24 In describing the practical response I am assuming that Smuts’ proposal has practical merit. It is of course conceivable that someone might take the issue seriously and try to work with Smuts’ vocabulary, and find it unworkable; perhaps her vision of intersubjective relations involves a kind of sentimental projection, for instance, or perhaps it begins to undermine my relations to other humans. I am not committed here to the view that any of these three examples succeed in practical terms. I should also note that it is not clear to what extent any of the three views here really constitute an objection to eating animals per se, rather than more specifically to the way they are treated in factory farms, for example. 8 forms of treatment; those falling under the concept may not be used, those outside may be used. And of course it would be an absurd and morally grotesque rule that varied across space and time depending on what the person in that region of space-time happened to be thinking at that moment, such that I could bend the rule to my convenience by thinking differently. Smuts does not say how moral norms figure in the vocabulary she is developing, but I would like to think that she would not attach the concept of personhood to a rule. The practical philosopher as I see her is not really interested in setting up rules, just as she is not interested first and foremost in condemning others. But it is essential to her point that the concept has a kind of moral force; and I think it must bring with it a kind of moral impossibility, a way that others restrict my will. If the Nazis really did see e.g. Jewish people as less than persons (though like Diamond I doubt whether it is as simple as that) then this will explain how they found it morally possible to treat them as they did. And this is precisely what we condemn them for: because they failed to exercise their moral imagination, for them the Jews were less than people and could be used like horses. This does not get the Nazis off the hook; it brings out precisely what they’re on the hook for. This is more than enough to stand on when we oppose them. The theoretical philosopher is looking for something else: a theory according to which they would be wrong in their failure and we would be right to oppose them. But we all know how disputable all philosophical theories are; any theory would be far too wobbly for a person to stand on. The theoretical philosopher doesn’t seem to really acknowledge what the practical philosopher is trying to do: to expand our awareness and sensitivity, to change how we respond to the world. The theoretical philosopher by contrast hopes to find a theory that states what we should do. But we will never be finished with the business of disputing philosophical theories, and even if we did all come to agree on one, there would be no guarantee that anyone would be moved to act on it. The helpful modification is as shaky as any philosophical theory; one could simply reject that definition of personhood, or reject the moral consequences that are supposed to follow from it. These theories are almost always and explicitly just cooked up to match the philosopher’s “intuitions” (or: “our intuitions”) so if the sophist doesn’t like the intuitions, he will be quite justified in rejecting the theory for that reason. The practical philosopher doesn’t appeal to the intuitions we already have in order to establish a rule we are then supposed to follow, and in this her approach presents a twofold virtue: she seeks to change our intuitions; and her approach aims to bring us, not a rule, but a moral vision that would express itself in our action and will as a matter of course. And from this practical perspective, the theoretical philosopher’s response is not only useless but positively harmful, as it distracts us from doing the sort of thinking that would expand our moral horizon. Theoretical philosophy looks to the practical philosopher like a corrupt sort of impatience, an impatience for the real work of moral thought. The idea that the scope of the moral relationship is up to us is, I think, a quite deliberate implication of the three approaches described here; the morally serious reader might rise to this responsibility. If however we believe that a theory has already given us the answers concerning our moral requirements, or that we would arrive at the answers by fiddling with the theory some more, then we will not see any real need to engage in the sort of thought that Smuts and Diamond recommend. The way Smuts’ vocabulary challenges us, and the way the helpful modification tends to weaken or evade the challenge, can be illustrated with the case of how people respond to the homeless. Ordinarily if someone were to ask me whether a homeless man is a person, I would say “yes” without hesitation. I might say this as a philosopher because I hold a theory of personhood according to which a typical full-grown human man falls under the category of “person”; or I might simply feel that the dictionary definition of “person” obviously would cover him. If this also entails certain obligations on my part, I might be reminded that I am failing to meet these obligations; but the obligations will likely seem very remote and in a sense external to my consciousness. In the language that Smuts is developing, the question “Is this a person” demands much more of me personally. I have to examine myself to determine whether I can sincerely say that a homeless man 9 on the street is a person for me. If I am honest I might have to say: “sort of but not really”, and this might bring me to change myself, even though (or precisely because) Smuts has not given us any rules of conduct. For the fact is that I don’t have to do anything. Nothing will ever force me to treat people better. Smuts’ vocabulary makes this transparently clear, and in doing so makes our endless responsibility clear. I can no longer take cover behind rules and definitions; I am continuously exposed. To summarise what I have said: the theoretical philosopher’s objection to Smuts and his helpful modification will seem necessary to most analytically trained philosophers — it will seem the rationally compelling response to her idea. I have hoped at the very least to undermine this sense of necessity. Various responses are possible. Smuts suggests that animals can be persons for us, though they do not have to be. We might reflect on this possibility and find that it transforms our relations to animals; and the very precariousness of their personhood might also suggest preciousness. The theoretical philosopher treats her suggestion as a proposition telling us what we may and may not do; but this simply misses the point, which is not to tell us what to do but change how we see animals and how we see the possibilities of our relations with them. The helpful modification at best dilutes Smuts’ proposal by obscuring the transformative power of the possibilities she presents us. What Smuts proposed as an adventure, the theoretical philosopher repackages as a definition competing with other definitions; and as a definition it looks simply arbitrary. That is, he fixes the scope of personhood definitionally; whereas on Smuts’ formulation each person fixes the scope of personhood personally, and she wishes to make it clear to us that how far we take personhood is our choice and our responsibility. Insofar as the theoretical philosopher spends his time and energy fiddling with Smuts’ formulation, trying to fix it so it states some results in advance, he is not examining himself and reflecting on the quality of our own relations to animals; in this regard the theoretical response is an evasion of our moral responsibility. Moreover insofar as the theoretical response is driven by simple judgmentalism — by the drive to judge others rather than attending to ourselves and to find the formulation that makes us right and others wrong — it is bad for that reason alone. Now I will face an objection from the theoretical philosopher at this point: it might be that what I am calling practical philosophy is better at getting people to act well. This is an empirical possibility. But, he will say, I am not at the moment primarily interested in getting people to act better, but in finding out the truth about how people should act. Moreover, the practical philosopher must let herself be guided by theoretical philosophy, for she must know which direction to try to move people in; it would be unfortunate if she moved people to shift their way of thinking in a direction that turned out (as moral theory might discover) to be wrong. This objection relies on assumptions the practical philosopher as I have described her would reject, for example in taking “moral impossibility” to be simply psychological impossibility, and taking the process of expanding our personal relations or just expanding our empathy to be, not a kind of moral thought in itself, but something we do or don’t do at the behest of a moral truth already recognised. Moreover the objection presupposes some notion of practical truth that can be discovered theoretically, and I suspect that the practical philosopher proceeds as she does partly because she is unable to make sense of this notion. (I am also unable to make sense of this notion.) But I will close by saying something about the role of truth in practical philosophy, and begin by noting how the practical philosopher can see herself as pursuing an ideal of objectivity. Quite simply, practical philosophy brings us out of ourselves and into the world. Smuts makes it clear that she is asking us to let go of our need for control and open ourselves to a shared experience of the world with other animals. Diamond writes that the transition to more objective values “depends on our coming to attend to the world and what is in it, in a way that will involve the exercise of all our faculties; and that religion, poetry, and science, if uncontaminated by self- indulgent fantasy, are the most important modes of 10 thought leading to that kind of attentive imaginative response to the world.”25 And indeed the sophistical philosopher, in contrast with the practical philosopher, is choosing not to exercise all his faculties out of sheer self-complacency; so of course the practical philosopher is the more objective one. This sense of objectivity is very close to the Humean notion of objectivity in judgments of taste, where the objective judge is not someone unswayed by feeling but someone who feels differently as a result of sharing the viewpoints of as many other people as possible and thus overcoming his own affective idiosyncrasies; and it is closer still to Iris Murdoch’s idea that in moral thought objectivity amounts to overcoming the “fat relentless ego” that threatens to distort all our perceptions,26 achieving “detachment”. When people speak about being guided by a love of truth, I think they generally have this notion of objectivity in mind. But what about plain propositional truth? I had said that if we asked the practical philosopher, after taking up Smuts’ invitation and working with it, what she now thinks about eating animals, it is conceivable that she might say: it’s wrong to eat animals, or: we shouldn’t eat animals. These are clearly moral propositions; are they true? On a minimalist understanding of truth, p and it is true that p have the same meaning; the predication of truth adds nothing of meaning to the sentence not already contained in the original assertion. Hence to ask whether it is true that we shouldn’t eat animals is simply to ask whether we shouldn’t eat animals, and the practical philosopher has already answered that. There is no special problem of propositional truth here. There would only be a special problem if the statement didn’t behave like a proposition (for example if the speaker does not subject it to the law of the excluded middle, or hesitates about the equivalency between p and it is true that p) or if we could find nothing at all to say in defence of the propositions in question. But if the practical philosopher asserts we shouldn’t eat meat and is confident in her assertion, and her confidence stems from her sense that she has moved in the direction of greater objectivity, then she will be equally confident in asserting the truth of her belief, and this will not be an empty confidence. What looks like a problem of propositional truth stems from the scanty role that propositions play in practical philosophy. A proposition might fall out at the end, but the three philosophers I mentioned here do not begin with propositions. Smuts says that she is developing a language; the development of a new language is not the assertion of a proposition, and she does not claim truth for her language. Doniger speaks of a “tautology”, presumably the tautology we don’t eat what we speak with. A tautology is a statement that is true no matter how we fill in the variables. We might begin by trying to speak with as many things as possible, and then we will not be eating those things; or we might begin by trying to eat as many things as possible, and then we will not be speaking with those things. If Doniger is serious in her use of the term “tautology”, then these will both be equally true. The ethical work is done by bringing it to our attention that we can use this tautology in different ways and that we might be answerable for our choice. Diamond is quite explicit that the alternatives of seeing animals as “fellow creatures” or as products or machines are alternatives not straightforwardly determined by the facts27; she does not speak of her view as being true but as offering us a richer world. These conceptual moves are not meant to be true but helpful— they should help us to think more clearly. They might be called true at best in the sense in which a work of art might be called true — and what it means to call an artwork true, it seems to me, is that it brings us out of ourselves and into the world more; it can do this without containing a single true proposition. 25 Diamond (1991a: 296). Strictly speaking Diamond is speaking on behalf of another philosopher here, Stephen Clark, but I take this to be roughly her view as well. 26 Murdoch (1970: 52). She writes also: “The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one” (59). 27 She writes for example: “it is not a fact that a titmouse has a life”; she is referring not to the obvious fact of biological life but to the idea that the titmouse might have a life to lead, as we do. Diamond (1991a: 330). 11 References Coetzee, J.M. (1999). The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cavell, Stanley et al. (2008). Philosophy and Animal Life. Chichester NY: Columbia University Press. Diamond, Cora. (1991a). The Realistic Spirit. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Diamond, Cora. (1991b). “The Importance of Being Human”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 29: 35-62. Diamond, Cora. (1988). “Losing Your Concepts”. Ethics 98(2): 255-277. Murdoch, Iris. (1970). The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: The Macmillan Company. Institut für Philosophie Universität Potsdam Am Neuen Palais 10 14469 Potsdam [email protected] 12