The arrow of progress, historical analysis and animal rights

Ethics
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I’ve got a few things on my mind and only recently I can see how they might relate. The first is Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, where he makes a pretty strong empirical case that in pretty much any reasonable metric, so long as you take a long view, the world has been getting better, at least since the enlightenment. I don’t really want to debate his conclusions here. For the sake of simplicity, I’m just treating it as dogma that he is correct. I’m sure there are plenty of interesting implications to be had if we take it as correct, but let’s consider it in light of two other thinkers.

I risk running into problems with these next set of thinkers, because in both cases I have enough of a familiarity to be able to reasonably hold an opinion, but not so much that I mightn’t be missing something important. I’m sure if I am ignorant of something central to the topic at hand, someone will inform me. Let’s jump right into the spot I probably am least studied in…

My impression of Marx was always that he made a very astute analysis of historical trends vis-a-vis political power dynamics. I also feel that his extrapolation of those trends, and the prescriptive elements associated with that extrapolation, were a little hubristic. If nothing else, we can at least say that a few of the applications that were at least nominally associated with his thoughts have failed to live up the his predictions.

The third thinker I want to discuss in this context is Pete Singer. Singer is most famous for his position on animal rights. To give his position a probably awkward and incomplete, and possibly mistaken summary, he believes that the ability to suffer is the primary consideration in any moral formulation. It’s pretty uncontroversial that animals suffer, QED, they should have rights. No doubt his position holds more nuance than that, but as long as I’m not fundamentally mistaken, that is sufficient for my purposes.

I’m not sure I think Singer is right in his analysis, but I wonder if he might be right, at least to some degree, in his conclusion.

I am roughly speaking a rule utilitarian. I think as a society, we want the sorts of rules and norms that make us a better and healthier society. The kind of society that we want to live in. If we engage in a similar project to Marx, and adopt some of the observations of Pinker, I think we can see a trend where people become more inclusive. We have both softened the borders between "us’ and “them”, and we have also become more inclusive as to who qualifies as “us”. This seems to have served us well. Mindful that over-extrapolation can be problematic, if we did extrapolate this trend, the notion that we view animals as part of “us” seems reasonable. I mean we already treat pets that way.

For the record, I’m not a vegetarian or vegan. I am really just flirting with the idea that is might be a good thing to be. What do you think of this analysis?

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Well, I’m a longtime vegan and animal-liberation activist. So I think your analysis is great, though of course incomplete, as you say.

Here’s the thing, though. Precisely because my convictions are so firm and so longstanding on this topic, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to air them or argue for them on TPF. If I don’t have an open mind – and I don’t – then I’m not a good philosophical discussion partner. So I’ll just say “Right on!” and bow out of the thread. :slightly_smiling_face:

Happy to recommend books on the subject, though.

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I agree with this. Extrapolations, in general, are very dangerous to do.

The most alarming forecasts of the future get our attention and the publicity, yet usually don’t happen, be it with actual events like population growth or climate change (or in Marx’s time, modern industrial Capitalism). It’s only the moderate and not so imminently disastrous forecasts that usually are shown later to have been correct. We have this love with the idea that the World is ending. If you see a trend, especially an alarming one, never take it for granted. With Marx, we never should forget the era when he lived and the obvious inequalities of the industrial age in the 19th Century. His theories of the collapse of capitalism and his solutions didn’t come to be. Marx was unable to see that many major inequalities and problems were actually corrected quite peacefully through legislation, democracy and by the actions of the labour movement. Capitalism did not collapse. (Even if Marx hinted of the possibility of the proletariat just to demand higher wages, not to go for the revolution, he didn’t believe this to happen.)

In the same way I would see here with animal rights: animal rights have improved a lot, we take into account far more the living standards of farmed animals and also the environment of the wild animals. And pets? Well, their health care today is better than of humans 50 years ago. Can we extrapolate from this?

If animals rights are about not allowing animal cruelty, preserving wild life, then things are quite easy. But if we attach more to these rights, it can come more difficult.

Here lies the “danger” of extrapolation: if we would make a very simplistic extrapolation, would we, in the future, view all animals as we do now our pets and our pet animals as equals? If these rights are broadened, would we view animals as equals to us with all the rights we give to our fellow humans?

This may stray too far. The fundamental philosophical problem here is how we see ourselves. Are we part of the biosphere? Are we simply a highly intelligent animal species that are omnivores that now totally dominate nearly every aspect of our habitat, which now spans all over the World? Or are we, just as nearly all religions tell us, separate from the animal kingdom?

If one says that we are just a very smart species, who likely has killed or assimilated every other species in our genus, you get to one conclusion. Why would we be different in the end from other animals? Some animals can even “farm” food, not eat all and then starve. We obviously should take care of our own habitat.

Besides, we hardly give any thought in this way to the rights of other living kingdoms (plants, fungi, protists, bacteria and archaea) than our own (animalia).

Why would the animal kingdom only would have rights and others not?

If we take the view that humans are totally separate from the biosphere, that’s more like the religious view and more of an religious issue than philosophy. (Here I would have to say that idea of not wanting to kill any animal and just kill things from other kingdoms is totally acceptable as an individual decision.)

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Even Richard Rorty (a less foundationalist thinker than Pinker) and his notion of solidarity might be held to include animals within the expanding circle of moral concern. For Rorty, the idea of moral progress consists not in discovering universal ethical truths but in enlarging our capacity to identify with the suffering of others. Why not animals?

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To clarify, Pinker doesn’t take a public stance on animal rights that I’m aware of. He just speaks about the type of progress that we can easily frame in terms of moral good.

Let me try to think about the devil’s advocate response to that.

To start, it mostly won’t be reciprocal. We can’t reasonably allot responsibilities proportionate to the rights we grant. That isn’t trivial.

There are certainly some pragmatic concerns in terms of a dramatic change to animal rights on a large scale. Most animals bred for food would likely not exist in nature today, and certainly not at the population levels they do. Either our current use of animals for food would have to slowly abate, or we would have to expend resource to deal with these animals in an ethical manner. As bad as factory farming is, leaving them to starve in the wild is probably worse. There is a bit of a zero sum game here, where we 1) loose a large portion of our food supply, which would cause at least temporary scarcity, which will harm the most financially vulnerable, and 2) we need to spend resources to deal with a huge number of animals that we’ve bred to be unable to survive in the wild.

The moral calculus changes depending on which question is being asked. If it is “Should I, an individual, stop eating meat?”, that’s an easier case. If it is “Should we, as a society, no longer permit the killing of animals for food”, that’s a higher bar to meet, and there are many more things to talk about.

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Sure - I’m not aware of either taking a view on animals. What I mean is that Rorty is an anti-foundationalist and neopragmatist, with affinities to post-structuralist thinking. Pinker holds a more traditional Enlightenment view, emphasizing objective truth, scientific inquiry, and the possibility of moral and social progress.

I wasn’t thinking about the process of change or the actions needed. I was simply suggesting that Rorty’s notion of solidarity might also extend to animals if we consider the suffering of all conscious creatures morally significant. What I find interesting is that Rorty understood progress in terms of expanding solidarity, whereas Pinker emphasizes science, reason, and the measurement of social change.

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It is an interesting parallel/contrast. I personally think there’s room to think of progress in many ways.

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Don’t forget JS Mill for his contribution of the Harm Principle which certainly advocates societal rules. He also argued for the moral consideration for animals.