Against Animal Liberation? Peter Singer and His Critics

2014

2012

Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie

In this paper, I will question Peter Singer’s position on the moral equality of all species. In order to highlight how mistaken he is, I will apply this issue on the use of animals in medical research. Lastly, I will offer a softer position compared to Singer that advances animal well-being without Singer’s prejudice against the other members of the human species.

The Connection Between Animal Rights and Animal Liberation: A Reconsideration of the Relation Between Non-human Animal Autonomy and Animal Rights, 2014

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1986

2012

Recognizing Animal Studies his essay places in dialogue the work of Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher of animal liberation, and Patricia Highsmith, whose fiction of the early 1970s takes a curious interest in the topic of animal welfare. My argument will partly be that animals enter the ethical stage for Singer at a moment when utilitarianism comes under fire from a contract ethics that Singer rejects on the assumption that such ethics cannot be reconciled with our obligations to non-contractual creatures to whom we nonetheless owe consideration. For this reason, I argue, Singer has proved especially unwelcome among scholars of contemporary animal studies who insist that what matters in animal-human relations is an ethics of reciprocity. Highsmith's A Dog's Ransom (1972) and The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (1975) set in play a contest between utility and contract in regard to human-animal relations, and arrive at conclusions that look awfully close to Singer's. By way of her interest in animals as the subjects and objects of brute violence, Highsmith also allows us a novel vantage on the fascination among contemporary ethicists with fictive scenarios, not unlike the novelist's own, in which the crucial issue is whether the killing of other people is permissible or blameworthy. In this section, I consider the vexing role Singer occupies among contemporary theorists of what Kari Weil calls "the animal turn." 1 In the next section, I situate Highsmith's animal fiction in the context of the debate between utilitarian and contract ethics. In the essay's final section, I connect the murder weapon in Highsmith's most politicized animal story-a pulled lever in "The Day of Reckoning," which focuses on battery-farmed chickens-to the pervasive interest among many philosophers in the seeming non-agency, and dramatic outcomes, of actions like button-pushing. It may seem perverse to couple Singer (whose whole career might be said to comprise a reply to the question "Why be moral?") with Highsmith (whose whole career might be said to comprise a steadfast indifference to that question). Yet Singer is somewhat notorious for what many observers (and more than a few philosophers) take to be a calculating heartlessness reminiscent of Highsmith's vintage sociopaths. "We can't take our feelings as moral data, immune from rational criticism," he writes in his response to J.M. Coetzee's 1999 Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals. 2 This typically hardboiled comment is occasioned by Singer's encounter with the fictional Elizabeth Costello, who maintains that more recognition of our feelings toward animals affords a more nuanced sense of our duties to them. Thus "when we divert the current of feeling that flows between ourself [sic] and the animal into words," Costello asserts, "we abstract it forever from the animal." 3 For Singer by contrast, the proper tendency of ethics is away from feeling toward abstraction. All that matters in our moral obligations toward animals is that they feel-or, more exactly, that they are capable of feeling pleasure and pain. Singer's strictly utilitarian notion of "feeling" is something of an outlier within the emerging field of animal studies. For many scholars involved in that field, the crucial issue regarding our ethical relation to animals is not the simple or uncontroversial fact that animals feel, or even Coetzee's (or Costello's) less simple or more controversial point that we should take our feelings about animals into account, but rather how animals feel about us. This is perhaps too glib a way of putting the matter. What I mean to highlight is the large number of scholars in animal studies who, taking their lead for the study of ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, seek to assert the primacy of reciprocity in relations between humans and nonhumans. In "The Name of a Dog" (1975), Levinas records a wartime memory of his internment in a German P.O.W. camp, where "halfway through our long captivity," a "cherished dog" named Bobby "would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men." On account of his powers of recognition, Levinas dubs Bobby "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims." 4 And on account of his relegating Bobby's generosity to no more than instinct, it would be more accurate to say that for scholars of animal studies, Levinas is less the sponsor of their project than its point of departure, insofar as these thinkers infer from his story a more radical conclusion than Levinas himself was willing to reach. For Matthew Calarco, Levinas's story is "proto-ethical" but realizes "no politics or ethics proper"

Essays in Philosophy, 2004