To Eat or Not to Eat: Philosophical Questions About the Animal Dead
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To Eat or Not to Eat:
Philosophical Questions About the Animal Dead
Bess Rothman
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with Honors
Department of Philosophy
in the University of Michigan
Advisor: Professor Laura Ruetsche
Second Reader: Professor Daniel Herwitz
For:
Snickers,
Sam,
Benjamin,
Hugo,
and
George
1
It was a brother, not a slave, who died...
Death yearns for equal law for all the dead.
Antigone
2
Contents
1 Robust Vegetarianism
1.1 Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2 The Literature at Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2.1 The Animal Ethics Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2.2 Where Posthumous Harm and Animal Ethics Meet . . . . .
1.3 Robust Vegetarianism in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.3.1 Diverging from the Literature and Motivating Our Problem
1.3.2 Robust Vegetarianism and Moral Absolutism . . . . . . . .
1.4 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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7
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2 Animal Identity and Animal Corpses
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.2 What Are Animals? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.2.1 Notes on Sortals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.3 What Are C-Animals? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.3.1 The Organic View, Contemporary and Ancient
2.3.2 The Somatic View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4 O-Animals Are C-Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4.1 Animals Are Their Animals . . . . . . . . . . .
2.5 Animal Corpse Survivalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.5.1 Worries About Animal Corpse Survivalism . .
2.6 Animal Corpses and the Good . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3 The
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
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25
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Permanent Moral Standing of Animals
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Borrowing and Diverging from Korsgaard . . . . . . . . . . .
Why The Switch Cannot Be Flipped Off . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.3.1 The Present Characteristics View . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.3.2 The Potentiality View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.3.3 The Life View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Permanence View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.4.1 Instrumentalizing and the Good . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.4.2 Animal Corpse Survivalism and the Permanence View
Person-Affecting Principles and the Problem of the Subject .
3.5.1 What Happens Later? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.5.2 Species Membership and the EV . . . . . . . . . . . .
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54
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4 The Surviving Interests of Animals
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.2 Feinberg’s Argument from Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.2.1 Feinberg’s Argument and the Problem of the Subject .
4.3 Expanding Feinberg’s Argument to Animals . . . . . . . . . .
4.3.1 How Far Should We Expand Feinberg’s Argument? . .
4.4 The Surviving Interests of the Animal Dead . . . . . . . . . .
4.4.1 A Closer Look at Surviving Interests . . . . . . . . . .
4.4.2 The Surviving Interests of the Animal Dead . . . . . .
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5 Mourning and Respecting the Animal Dead
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.2 Respect for the Animal Dead . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.2.1 Instrumentalizing the Dead . . . . . . . . . .
5.2.2 Properly Respecting the Animal Dead . . . .
5.3 Reverence for the Animal Dead . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.3.1 Reverence for the Dead . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.3.2 Reverence for Death Itself . . . . . . . . . . .
5.4 Mourning the Animal Dead . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.4.1 Precarious Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.4.2 Precarious Life as that Which We Share . . .
5.4.3 The Precarious, Mournable Lives of Animals
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Acknowledgements
Christine Korsgaard writes in the preface to Fellow Creatures that “by the time you reach a certain
age in philosophy, the burden of your intellectual debts is so heavy that you cannot face writing
acknowledgements without a profound sense of inadequacy”.1 That age, I can confirm, is 22. But
let me try to thank just a few of the people who have made this thesis possible.
To begin, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my thesis advisor and second reader, Laura Ruetsche
and Daniel Herwitz, respectively. Professor Ruetsche has been a part of this thesis since I began
to conceive of it as one, in Summer and Fall 2020, while she taught Philosophy 401. Without
her encouragement and help then, I am not sure I would have continued to work on this project,
an admittedly strange one. She has carefully read and commented on every draft of this thesis,
and there have been many; her incredible skills as an interlocutor, teacher, and advisor cannot be
overstated, and the scope of her philosophical knowledge never fails to impress me. This project
began as one ostensibly in practical ethics, but Professor Ruetsche allowed and encouraged me to
bring together ideas from metaphysics and ancient philosophy to enrich it and carry out the vision
I had for it. She has taught me to be rigorous, clear, and persistent, as well as confident in my own
work. For all of this, and her remarkable support and mentorship, I could not be more grateful.
Professor Herwitz and I met in 2019, when I took Philosophy 355 with him as a freshman. He
assigned, in that class, the excellent novel Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. As my reader shall soon see,
Disgrace has been a big part of the development of this thesis. Moreover, Professor Herwitz has
been wonderfully devoted to this project, much more than I could have expected him to be; he
has thought deeply about the issues it engages, and given me thought-provoking and invaluable
comments on each chapter. He also has the helpful gift of often knowing exactly what I want to
argue, even when I argue it inarticulately. I could not be more grateful to have worked with someone
so knowledgeable, astute, and kind.
This thesis, however, was not really a project completed with the help of only a few members
of Michigan’s philosophy department. Rather, it was a project completed with the support of
what feels like the entire department. I’d like to thank Professor Janum Sethi for her incisive and
thorough comments on a version of this thesis as a writing sample, and for her incredible advocacy
and confidence in my work. I’d also like to thank Professor David Baker for encouraging me to write
1 Korsgaard,
2018, p. xii.
5
a thesis in the first place, and for his excellent comments on it as a writing sample. His support
throughout my undergraduate career has been tremendous, unrelenting, and incredibly important to
me. And I’d like to thank Professor Eric Lormand for conducting an independent study with me on
animal consciousness in Winter 2020, without which I would not have had the necessary background
to carry out this thesis. Professor Lormand was the first to ask so many questions—about deserted
islands and person-affecting principles, for instance—which I take up seriously in this thesis. I am
not sure he is happy about this matter, but our reading Fellow Creatures together was integral to
the development of this thesis. And he will be happier, I think, to see that I return over and over
to the question of the importance of functions to ethics.
I also need to thank my peers from Philosophy 401, who listened to ideas from this thesis week
after week, and provided me with some of the most thoughtful comments and objections I’ve received
thus far. My peers in the Animal Ethics Society have been similarly helpful, and I owe them a great
thanks for letting me test-drive ideas each week in a club that is not just about the topics in my
senior thesis. In particular, I’d like to thank Spencer, my Animal Ethics Society co-president, for
his friendship and his persistent role as my sounding board.
Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, Ed and Wendy, for listening to me muse about animal
ethics for the past few years, even when they were eating dinner, and for their tireless support. And
this thesis was, I think, in the end truly inspired by the animals who have shared their lives with
me: my (living and late) dogs, to whom this thesis is dedicated. My love for them has made this
work possible, and I hope that the awe and adoration I feel in their presence is reflected in the thesis
to come.
6
Chapter 1
Robust Vegetarianism
1.1
Objectives
This thesis is about the nonhuman animal dead.1 The questions I attempt to answer here are:
1. Is it wrong, all auxiliary concerns aside, to eat or otherwise use the corpse of an
animal?
2. What should we do for the animal dead?
As the first question above may suggest, my primary objective in this thesis is to make a novel
argument for vegetarianism. My argument will draw on the obvious fact that to eat meat is to
eat a part of an animal’s corpse. Most other philosophers who argue for vegetarianism themselves
with things like killing animals, causing animals to suffer, and buying meat; these are the ‘auxiliary
concerns’ to which the first question refers. I do not deny that these are real and serious problems,
but I question whether they ought to be the focus of an argument against eating meat. Philosophers
who focus on these other problems tend to ignore the fact that to eat meat is really to eat some
part of a dead animal, or in other words, to eat part of an animal’s corpse. I think that in ignoring
this fundamental fact about eating meat, they cease to provide fully compelling arguments for
1 Hereafter,
I use the term ‘animal’ to refer to nonhuman animals alone, ‘human’ to refer to humans alone, and
‘beings’ or ‘creatures’ to refer humans and animals alike. In the second chapter of this thesis I also introduce the
term ‘O-animal’ to talk about nonhuman animals, but this is not for the purpose of distinguishing between animals
and humans; rather, it is for the purpose of distinguishing between those entities in our world we might call ‘animals’
and the kind of thing in our world which is, ontologically speaking, an ‘animal’; I call members of the latter group
‘C-animals’. In fact, I argue that those who are O-animals are also, ontologically speaking, C-animals, but this is a
philosophical claim, not a stylistic choice.
7
vegetarianism, although they take themselves to do so. But in failing to be fully compelling their
arguments are not also totally wrong, or worth discarding. In fact, these other arguments for
vegetarianism are often excellent; I try to make my own arguments compatible with the major
points made by these other arguments, and often make use of them in crafting my own arguments.
Broadly construed, my approach here is to consider eating meat as a form of posthumous harm,
and to thus create a new argument for something I call ‘robust vegetarianism’. My argument for
vegetarianism is not about killing animals, the suffering of animals, or the wrongness of buying meat.
It is about the wrongness of eating meat. It is about the relations in which we stand with the animal
dead, and the right and wrong ways we might treat them.
One cannot approach the subject of eating meat in this way without also discussing two closely
related issues. One such issue, included in the first question above, regards other uses of dead
animals, or parts of animal corpses. We use parts of animal corpses not only as food, but also to
make gelatin, leather, soap, and other such products. I argue against these uses of animal corpses
just as I argue against eating meat. The other such issue, addressed by the second question above,
regards the right way to treat the animal dead; after I have argued that we should not eat or
otherwise use parts of their corpses, I go on to ask what, if anything, we should do to or for the
animal dead. When I address this last issue, I discuss respect and reverence for the animal dead, as
well as mourning the animal dead, although I do not argue strongly for a moral obligation to, say,
mourn the animal dead. Rather, I attempt to show my reader why she might want to mourn the
animal dead, or feel respect or reverence toward them.
I begin this thesis by examining the existing literature on animal ethics and posthumous harm,
introducing and motivating my own two theses, and discussing my methodology. Then I move to
defend these theses in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, before discussing respect, reverence, and mourning in
Chapter 5.
Chapter 2 takes the form of a discussion of the metaphysical status of dead animals; I argue there
for the perhaps-surprising claim that animals survive their own deaths as their corpses. In Chapter
3, I argue that animals have permanent moral standing, and use the metaphysical conclusions from
Chapter 2 to argue that eating or otherwise using the corpse of an animal is a violation of her moral
standing. In Chapter 4 I provide a different kind of argument for the claim that we can have moral
8
obligations to dead animals which entail our not eating or otherwise using them, one which draws on
Joel Feinberg’s argument for the possibility of posthumous harm. In Chapter 5 I consider possible
ways to treat the animal dead which do not involve our using or eating them. Drawing on Judith
Butler, Cora Diamond, Sophocles, Homer, J.M. Coetzee, and others, I defend the claim that we
have good reason to mourn, respect, and revere the animal dead instead of eating them.
For my reader’s convenience, I list my two major theses, which I’ll discuss further in Section 1.3
in this chapter, and the abbreviations by which I refer to them here:2
The Robust Vegetarianism Thesis (RVT): We ought to refrain from eating the
corpses of animals in all normal circumstances.
The Posthumous Use of Animals Thesis (PUAT): We ought to refrain from otherwise using the corpses of animals in all normal circumstances (e.g., for leather).
1.2
The Literature at Present
I could not try to defend the aforementioned theses without making significant use of other philosophical literature. Here, I briefly survey the existing literature on animal ethics, animal ontology,
and posthumous harm which are most relevant to this thesis: the texts which constitute its philosophical background. I should note that I do not here survey all of the texts I use in my thesis, but
rather those which are most important to its context; many of the books and papers I talk about
here are those from which I diverge most significantly. I focus heavily on the animal ethics literature,
to which this thesis is intended to contribute. I leave a discussion of the more technical and esoteric
literature I use in Chapter 2 for that chapter, where I hope I explain it adequately.
1.2.1
The Animal Ethics Literature
Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Christine Korsgaard have each written a well-received book on animal
ethics, and theirs are some of the most important texts in the animal ethics literature upon which
I build. Since Singer and Regan’s books were both originally published a number of decades ago
2 Nota
bene: A reader familiar with, or disinterested in, the animal ethics literature may skip ahead to Section 1.3,
where I summarize my divergences from it and introduce my thesis. This reader will, however, then have to take my
word for certain points I make there about the literature and draw upon in Sections 1.3.1 and 1.3.2.
9
(in 1975 and 1983, respectively) there have been a great number of papers published in recent
years which build upon their work, and I touch on some of these contributions as well. Although
there are a number of interesting problems in animal ethics that involve living animals—animal
experimentation, the keeping of companion animals, predator elimination, and so on—I try to limit
my discussion here, and mostly focus on the arguments these philosophers give for vegetarianism.
Singer’s Animal Liberation is one of the most foundational texts in the animal ethics literature.
In it, Singer argues that we cannot deny animals moral standing on any morally relevant grounds;
that is, we can give only speciest reasons (which, for Singer, are comparable to racist or sexist
reasons) for excluding animals from moral consideration. From this point, Singer argues that all
sentient creatures deserve equal consideration of their interests. After all, equality is something
formalized and constructed; there is a great deal of variation in human capacities, and yet we still
think it is right to treat equally humans who are less X (rational, smart, etc.) than other humans
are. There is not a reason to treat animals any differently unless we accept speciest principles. From
this principle Singer argues for an end to factory farming,3 and for vegetarianism4 as a means to
this end, as well as abstention from buying leather and fur. But Singer does not think we need to
be vegetarians in all circumstances.5
I do think, though, that Singer’s reluctance to advocate for robust vegetarianism (vegetarianism
in all normal circumstances, where ‘finding a dead deer by the side of the road’ is a normal circumstance, and starving on a deserted island is not) is perhaps a result of his not considering that robust
vegetarianism need not be morally absolutist. In fact, I defend a form of robust vegetarianism which
is not morally absolutist, as I explain in Section 1.3.2 of this chapter, where I also discuss ‘normal
circumstances’ in more detail. It is really moral absolutism, I think, to which Singer objects. Of
course, depending on how hedonistic Singer’s utilitarianism really is (an open question), he may not
accept the arguments I give for robust vegetarianism. But Singer’s argument hinges on interests,
remember, and not just pain and pleasure; this suggests a departure from hedonism, and possible
amenability to the argument I make in Chapter 4.
In recent years, many philosophers have defended utilitarian vegetarianism (of a Singerian nature)
3 Singer,
1975, Chapter 3
fact, veganism. Singer, 1975, p. 176.
5 Singer, 1975, p. 160; Singer, 1980, especially pp. 327-328.
4 In
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against a particular kind of objection: causal impotence objections, which suggest our not buying
meat does not make a difference to animal suffering. Shelly Kagan has taken up this task in Do
I Make A Difference? ; as has Alastair Norcross, in Puppies, Pigs, and People. These responses
illustrate a larger trend in (consequentialist) animal ethics.6 They focus on problems proximal to
eating meat, like buying or producing meat, and they abstain from discussing marginal cases (like
roadkill) that highlight the most fundamental fact of eating meat: to eat meat is in all cases to eat
some part of an animal’s corpse, whether or not you contributed to her suffering, whether or not
she was raised and killed in a factory farm, and so on. At the end of this survey, I say more about
why refusing to buy meat is not the only way to make a difference.
Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights is another central text in the animal ethics literature.
In it, Regan argues that certain creatures have inherent value, and that this inherent value is what
gives them the power to make moral claims on us (and so entails our having duties to them). All
inherent value is equal, Regan argues, and so all creatures who have inherent value are owed a duty of
treatment respectful of their value—they have a claim to that kind of treatment, and so a right to it.
The kinds of creatures who have inherent value (and so rights) are those who are subjects-of-lives.
It will be important to remember that Korsgaard and Regan use this term differently: Regan’s
idea of the criteria someone must meet to be the subject-of-a-life are much stronger, allowing in
fewer creatures than Korsgaard’s. Regan’s concept of a subject-of-a-life importantly requires that a
creature have beliefs and desires, a sense of her future, an emotional life, and many other, similar
things.7 From these and other points Regan argues to a number of conclusions about our duties to
animals. One such duty is vegetarianism, which Regan argues for as follows: “Since this [the meat]
industry routinely violates the rights of these animals, for the reasons given, it is wrong to purchase
its products. That is why, on the rights view [outlined above] vegetarianism is morally obligatory”.8
Of course, that last claim is exactly the kind of thing I want to strengthen. It does not follow
from the claim that we ought not support the meat industry that we ought not eat meat in all
normal circumstances. This is an example of a broader pattern: I engage with The Case for Animal
Rights in much the same way as I do Animal Liberation. Regan’s is a very fine book, but it does not
6 To
be more precise, Kagan is actually responding to causal impotence objections in general, not just with regard to
buying meat. But he is interested in buying meat as a major case.
7 Regan, 1983, p. 243
8 Regan, 1983, p. 351.
11
put forth an argument for robust vegetarianism, and he does not intend it to. Regan’s view about
subjects-of-lives is compatible with my conclusion about robust vegetarianism and abstaining from
other uses of the animal dead, and although I take issue with its scope, that is not the focus of this
paper. Regan’s work also serves another purpose: it shows that the lack of arguments for robust
vegetarianism is not a problem confined to the consequentialists.
Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures is another very fine non-consequentialist treatment of the
major questions in animal ethics. Korsgaard makes a Kantian case for our having moral obligations
to the other animals. She puts forth the claim that there are two senses in which one can be an end
in herself, the kind of being to whom the categorical imperative can apply. There is an active sense,
in which one is capable of morally legislating for others. If a being is an end in herself in this sense,
she is owed duties of non-coercion and non-deception, as well as duties of benevolence (duties which
mean others must take her good to be good absolutely, i.e., worth promoting). Creatures who are
ends in themselves in the passive sense are incapable of moral legislation, and are only owed duties
of benevolence. In order to argue that animals fall into the latter category, Korsgaard suggests that
self-consciousness and sentience give someone a good, and so we owe duties of benevolence to many
animals.9 From these points, she argues that eating meat is not merely about “consequences and
numbers”; it is about treating a particular animal as a means to an end—treating her in ways that
are not in accordance with her good.10 The same ostensibly goes for fur and leather.
In fact, Korsgaard also gives an argument for atemporal moral standing which makes her master
argument amenable to robust vegetarianism. I do not explain the entire argument in my thesis,
but I do adopt some of its main points and make a different argument for the same concept. The
argument for atemporal moral standing is perhaps the most important existing argument of which
my paper makes use. In it, Korsgaard argues that the moral standing of any sentient, self-conscious
creature (any subject of a life) is atemporal, i.e., outside of time. She also argues that creatures
themselves should be taken to be atemporal. Rather than arguing for these same points, I argue
in Chapter 2 that animals survive their deaths as their corpses, and argue in Chapter 3 that dead
9 This
is actually an extremely brief summary of Korsgaard’s argument, and it leaves much out. In fact, Korsgaard’s
argument for treating animals as ends in themselves spans the full length of the first eight chapters of her twelvechapter book. For a longer summary, see Chignell, 2020, and for a closer look at the parts of Korsgaard’s book most
important to this thesis, see Chapter 3 of this thesis.
10 Korsgaard, 2018, p. 223.
12
animals permanently retain the moral standing they acquired in virtue of their sentience and selfconsciousness during their lives.
One thing to note about all of this, however, is that Korsgaard does not say explicitly that
she takes herself to be arguing for robust vegetarianism or anything like it. She does not, that
is, link her argument about atemporal moral standing to conclusions about anything we do to the
animal dead. And she does not even mention her atemporality argument when she gives her own
argument for vegetarianism.11 Rather, she takes it to solve a number of problems in population
ethics, reproductive ethics, and related fields; she also talks about it in relation to posthumous harm
to humans.12 In fact, I think the reason Korsgaard raises the atemporality point is not related to
animals (living or dead) in particular at all; rather, I suspect she is responding preemptively to
worries other philosophers may have regarding the implications of her person-affecting principle,
which is in fact a creature-affecting principle, but we will get to this later, in Chapters 3 and
4. Her person-affecting principle might make seem like something which would prevent her from
calling problems in population ethics related to future persons problems at all (since they are not yet
persons). I think she makes the atemporality argument to ward off charges like this. Doing so allows
her to say, in effect, what Joel Feinberg does: that the area of someone’s good is larger than her
biological life. This in turn helps her reconcile intuitive solutions to problems in population ethics
with her person-affecting principle. This is a bit of a digression; the main point is that Korsgaard
does not intend her argument to serve as a part of an argument for robust vegetarianism or against
other uses of the corpses of animals, and does not have much to say about dead animals at all.
Let me make some comments about the animal ethics literature. My main observation is that it
is focused on the right things—just not all of the right things. It is true that factory farming causes
immense animal suffering or violates animal rights (that ‘or’ is inclusive). I also believe that it is
wrong to cause animal suffering, wrong to use animals as means to our own ends, and so on. But
I do not think the arguments we’ve seen are complete, or robust, because they cannot advise us to
be vegetarians in all normal circumstances, i.e., circumstances in which these other concerns may
not arise. My second observation is that none of these philosophers are interested in eating meat
qua eating the dead, or in fact in dead animals at all; when they argue against eating meat, they
11 For
Korsgaard’s argument for vegetarianism, see Korsgaard, 2018, pp. 220-226.
2018, Ch. 5.
12 Korsgaard,
13
generally tend to do so by arguing that eating (or buying, more likely) the corpse of one dead animal
is likely to make the life of another animal worse. They are concerned with the living counterparts
of the dead animals whose corpses we eat parts of; they are not concerned with those dead animals
themselves.
I should note that there is a topic in animal ethics which runs more or less parallel to the topic of
this thesis. That topic is animal death itself. Temporally speaking, the problem my paper addresses
occurs after the problem of animal death: I am concerned with animals who have already died. In
other words, I do not spend much time discussing the badness of animal death itself; rather, I want
to talk about what happens next. But those interested in a discussion of animal death might turn
to Singer and Jeff McMahan, who have written about the subject in detail.13
1.2.2
Where Posthumous Harm and Animal Ethics Meet
I now want to turn to the texts I use to bridge the gap between animal ethics and the philosophy
of death. First, there is Cora Diamond’s paper Eating Meat and Eating People. Earlier, we saw
Singer and Regan’s arguments for vegetarianism, and these two arguments are the main targets of
Diamond’s paper. In this paper, Diamond claims that it is strange that arguments like Singer’s and
Regan’s14 do not prohibit the eating of meat in all circumstances. She cites the example of eating
roadkill as something to which, problematically, neither the Singerian vegetarian nor the Reganian
vegetarian should object.
She thinks of eating meat as a conceptual (or ‘category’, although I eschew this phrasing) mistake
similar to Gradgrind’s refusal in Dickens’ Hard Times to call children by their names, but realizes
that even if we categorize animals as ‘fellow creatures’, and recognize the relationships we have with
them, we may still think that eating them is an appropriate way to treat them. My argument is
more decisive than Diamond’s, and I engage most directly with her criticism of Singer and Regan’s
arguments, and with her attempted redirection of the animal ethics literature. She is the one, after
all, who suggests we ought to look at our reasons against eating the human dead in order to come up
with good reasons against eating the animal dead. She further argues that our reason for not eating
13 I
am referring to, in particular, McMahan, 2015, and Singer in Coetzee, 1999b, pp. 85-91.
is actually discussing an earlier work, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, written by both Regan and
Singer, but the point she is making holds with regard to both Animal Liberation and The Case for Animal Rights.
14 Diamond
14
the human dead is that dead humans are not something to eat, i.e., that they are not categorized as
anything which is ‘for eating’. I think this is plausible, but not the beginning of a strong argument
in favor of vegetarianism, so I argue differently in Chapters 2 through 4. I do, however, bring
Diamond’s conceptual-mistake claim up again in Chapter 5, where I try to supplement it with
additional argumentation. Diamond’s roadkill objection is also very important for this paper, and
we will return to it many times.
A text I engage with similarly, in Chapter 5, is Chloë Taylor’s Respect for the (Animal) Dead.
Taylor, like Diamond, examines our interactions with the animal dead and looks beyond suffering
and killing. Taylor does not draw on the posthumous harm literature, but instead on the dichotomy
between mourning (the way we treat the human dead) and instrumentalizing (the way we treat the
animal dead, which she links to a dominant utilitarian approach to animal ethics). She suggests
we do have ideas about treating the animal dead with respect, but that they are related to ‘not
wasting’, or instrumentalizing, rather than respecting or grieving. She claims, drawing on Judith
Butler, that Western society’s stance on mourning animals—that it is strange or childish—makes
animal lives less real. I agree with and make use of all of these claims, but Taylor does not offer a
normative picture of mourning animals or treating dead animals with dignity, or an argument for
the claim that we ought to do either. She similarly does not make an argument for vegetarianism
using her ideas about the animal dead.
As I’ve just said, Taylor draws on Judith Butler, and in particular on Butler’s conceptions of
mourning and what Butler calls ‘precarious life’. Butler’s idea of precarious life was not intended to
apply to animals, but it can be made to do so without any trouble at all. Working with a paper by
James Stanescu on the same subject,15 I draw Butler into a conversation about mourning animals;
I bring together Butler’s 2004 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence with the
animal ethics literature, Ancient Greek literature, and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in order to paint a
detailed picture of mourning the animal dead, and hopefully, to motivate the idea that mourning
the animal dead is not only possible but also desirable.
Joel Feinberg’s Harm and Self-Interest is unique in that it is an argument intended to show the
possibility of posthumous harm to humans, but one which also can apply to animals.16 Feinberg
15 Stanescu,
16 It
2012.
is well worth noting that there are other very fine accounts of posthumous harm which do not lend themselves
15
argues that we should take interests, rather than persons, to be the units to which harm can come.
This is how he avoids the ‘problem of the subject’ prevalent in posthumous harm literature. Then,
he shows that some interests can be thwarted or promoted after the death of the person to whom
they once belonged. Finally, he makes an argument by analogy to show that harm after death is no
different from nonaffective harm during someone’s life. In short, Feinberg appeals to the idea that
harm can come to you even when you are unaware of it and even when it does not impact your life
in any way, and argues from this idea to the possibility of posthumous harm.
I use Feinberg’s argument to make a case for the truth of the RVT and PUAT. I do this by
explaining that some ‘welfare’ interests, as Feinberg calls them–interests you have in virtue of what
is good for you rather than what you want—can plausibly survive the death of their subject. The
main welfare interest I cite with this potential is the welfare interest in bodily unity, which can be
thwarted by our eating or otherwise using the corpses of animals.
I also make use of some other texts outside of, but not unfamiliar to, analytic philosophy proper.17
These are J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace and his Tanner Lecture, The Lives of Animals. The Lives
of Animals is, to some much-debated extent, a work of fiction; Disgrace is less-controversially so.
Through his protagonist in Lives, the presumably-fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee argues that it is our empathy for the other animals, and not our reasoning about them, which should
form the basis of a proper animal ethics. Coetzee-through-Costello also argues, as Korsgaard does,
that animal lives seem to matter to the animals living them as our lives matter to us.18 Another
major project Coetzee takes on through Costello is attempting to motivate the intuition that there
is something deeply strange and troubling about consuming or instrumentalizing the corpses of animals.19 I try to formalize this process in my paper using a number of thought experiments and
analogies, and also try to motivate the same intuition less formally in Chapter 5. One final project
Coetzee takes on through Costello is to convince his reader that eating meat and otherwise using
as obviously to the quest for a robust argument for vegetarianism. Feinberg’s works in part because it incorporates
a certain kind of objectivism about harm and interests.
17 Korsgaard, Taylor, and Singer are some of the philosophers who have responded to and engaged with Coetzee’s
fiction almost as if it were philosophy.
18 Coetzee, 1999b, p. 54. This is in opposition to, and perhaps in response to, arguments given by philosophers like
McMahan and Singer about the lesser value of animal lives to the animals who live them. And interestingly, in
Singer’s response to The Lives of Animals, he actually seems to have budged a bit on his position that animals do
not have future-regarding interests. This is again a bit tangential to my own arguments, but worth mentioning.
19 Costello’s Holocaust analogies are a memorable and much-discussed example of this, but I do not appeal to these
or anything like them.
16
animals is part of a certain sort of moral worldview, and namely one which also includes as acceptable, or inches toward, things like genocide.20 I am going to agree with the former in Chapter 5,
but will not touch on the latter.
Disgrace was in fact the inspiration for this thesis: its final chapters see its protagonist David
Lurie grappling with the appropriate way to treat the corpses of dogs euthanized at the animal clinic
where he volunteers. He realizes the futility of trying to protect the dogs from death—he cannot
save them all—but he does what he can to dignify them, both before and after they are dead. After
the dogs have been euthanized, their corpses are to be incinerated. David brings the corpses of the
dogs to the incinerator himself, so that the crew assigned to do so will not treat the corpses in an
undignifying way, but wonders why he has taken on this job: “For the sake of the dogs? But the
dogs are dead, and what do dogs know of dishonour and honour anyway? For himself, then. For his
idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient
shape for processing”.21
I share David’s sentiment—and that is why I write this thesis. Faced with the futility of preventing the killing of animals in its entirety, some philosophers may turn to accounts like Singer’s,
Regan’s, Kagan’s, or Norcross’, and suggest that if we do not buy meat, we will have a chance to
make a difference that is good for at least some animals. I suggest an alternative: every time you
abstain from eating meat you are making a definitive moral difference in relation to the animal herself whose corpse you otherwise might have consumed. You are doing what David Lurie does: you
are choosing to help create a world where the corpses of animals are not dismembered and processed
as if they were mere things. And that is how you can really make a difference.
1.3
Robust Vegetarianism in Context
Here again are the two theses I wish to defend in this paper:
The Robust Vegetarianism Thesis (RVT): We ought to refrain from eating (parts
of) the corpses of animals in all normal circumstances.
20 I
thank Daniel Herwitz for encouraging me to include this point.
1999a, p. 142
21 Coetzee,
17
The Posthumous Use of Animals Thesis (PUAT): We ought to refrain from otherwise using the corpses of animals in all normal circumstances (e.g., for leather).
In fact, I will also argue in Chapter 5 for a third, if less easily stated, thesis. Perhaps ‘argue
for’ is even the wrong way to put it: I might instead say that I will encourage my reader to see
and feel its truth. That thesis is, roughly, that the way we treat the animal dead both reveals and
constructs the moral world in which we live, in a way we might dislike, and want to change, upon
close inspection.
As the RVT and PUAT suggest, my work in this thesis will diverge from the literature above in
a number of ways. I hope that in Section 1.2 above I made some of these points of divergence clear,
but let me summarize them here, very briefly.
First, I diverge from Singer, Regan, Norcross, and even Korsgaard in that I do not address eating
meat by way of related problems in animal ethics. Rather, I address eating meat qua eating meat,
i.e., qua eating the dead. That is why the RVT and PUAT reference ‘corpses’.
Second, I diverge from the philosophers who have written about the animal dead—Taylor, Diamond, and Stanescu, to name just a few—in that I try to make a complete argument for vegetarianism
from points about the animal dead, and that I use the concept of posthumous harm to do so.
Finally, my argument differs from those of the philosophers mentioned above in that I am concerned with making an argument which will advise against the eating of animals whenever we are
not faced with extreme circumstances, e.g., starvation. This is what makes the vegetarianism I
argue for here ‘robust’. And it is why the RVT and PUAT reference ‘normal’ circumstances: the
implication is that there are some circumstances in which eating meat might be morally permissible,
but that such circumstances would be very extreme. Recall Diamond’s roadkill case again: these
other philosophers’ arguments cannot advise against the eating of roadkill, but argument will do
just that. And it will do so, I think, precisely because it considers eating meat qua eating the dead.
I now want to elaborate first on the reasons I choose to diverge from the literature in these ways,
and second on the concept of ‘robust’ vegetarianism as opposed not to vegetarianism of the SingerRegan sort but rather to absolutist vegetarianism. In elaborating on the reasons I diverge from the
literature, I hope I’ll also be able to motivate my quest for an argument for robust vegetarianism.
18
1.3.1
Diverging from the Literature and Motivating Our Problem
The major reason I’ve chosen to diverge from the existing literature on animal ethics is that I
think eating meat is inherently bad. In other words, I do not think eating meat is bad in virtue
of circumstances that may or may not accompany it; eating meat, in my view, is bad not simply
because it causes living animals distinct from the dead ones we eat to suffer, and it is not bad simply
because it is the product of an unjust system like that in which factory farms operate. Rather, I
think it is bad for another reason: it is not an appropriate way to treat the animal dead. In the
third and fourth chapters of this thesis, and even in the fifth to an extent, I support this view of
mine: I try to show, without reliance on these other problems, that eating meat, and secondarily
using the corpses of animals for other purposes, is morally wrong all on its own.
But, of course, you might not find this compelling: you may not already have the intuition, or the
conviction, that eating meat is inherently bad. That is perfectly fine: I try to evince this conviction
in the rest of this thesis, so anyone who does not already have it need only read on. Still, I should try
to say something here about why the problems I address in this thesis are philosophically interesting
and important even if you do not already share my intuition—I should try to convince you to read
on.
Let me begin by noting, as Diamond does, that we do not usually eat the human dead, even
if they did not suffer, and even if their flesh might be tasty and in good condition for eating. We
have strong convictions that eating the human dead would be morally wrong, disrespectful, and
inappropriate. And yet we eat and use parts of the animal dead routinely. There is a startling
asymmetry between our treatment of the human dead and the animal dead, and it is startling in
part because prima facie, the human and animal dead are quite similar: neither a dead human nor
a dead cow can feel, speak, or reason, for example. It seems, then, that examining this asymmetry
further is worthwhile, even simply to see if it is justifiable.
On a related note, if our intuition about the wrongness of eating the human dead is right but
cannot, at present, be well-defended in moral terms, what I have to say in this thesis may help,
insofar as the human and animal dead are actually similar. Although I will suggest in Chapter 2
that there are some important differences between the animal and human dead, at least some of
what I argue in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 may be helpful to anyone attempting to defend this intuition
19
about the wrongness of eating and using the human dead.
The third point I want to make to motivate my question is this one, which I think will take
some explaining. As we’ve now seen Diamond suggest multiple times, arguments for vegetarianism
of the Singer-Regan sort cannot deal with certain marginal cases: roadkill, for instance. It might be
worthwhile or epistemically responsible, just as an exercise, to see if we can deal with these marginal
cases with a new argument for vegetarianism. But further, there is a sense in which it is strange
that Singer and Regan’s arguments cannot advise against eating roadkill, or meat that someone else
has purchased. Vegetarians and vegans, I think, generally tend to abstain from eating meat in most
cases, and I have never seen one eat roadkill or meat that someone else has purchased. Perhaps
these abstentions are actually principled, and philosophically defensible.
Moreover, though, most philosophical arguments against certain practices do not make exceptions
for cases analogous to eating roadkill. If, for instance, someone arguing against murder said: “Murder
is permissible, but only when the murder has not caused the victim to suffer, and when the murder
will not cause further suffering to any living people,” you might think this very strange indeed. This
is, of course, because almost everyone has the intuition about murder that I have about eating meat,
i.e., the intuition that murder is inherently wrong. But there is still a point here that even those who
do not (yet) share my conviction about eating meat as morally wrong can share in. A prohibition
on eating meat in all but extreme circumstances might make more sense; we have a prohibition on
murder in all but extreme circumstances, for instance, and this is exemplified by our understanding
of killing in self-defense as morally permissible. But there is nothing extreme about finding roadkill;
it is not like self-defense. So if you have even the slightest idea that eating meat might be wrong, you
might wonder why the exceptions made by the arguments of other philosophers seem so arbitrary.
In just a moment, when I begin the next subsection, I’ll say much more about normal and extreme
circumstances. But I want to make one last point about the importance of the questions this thesis
tries to answer. If my arguments are right, and it is in fact impermissible to eat or otherwise use
the corpses of animals, this is, to state the obvious, a very good reason to stop eating meat. We
will have reason not only to refrain from buying meat, but reason to refrain from eating animals in
a plethora of other circumstances.
20
1.3.2
Robust Vegetarianism and Moral Absolutism
Just a moment ago we talked about murder, noting the fact that we typically consider murder wrong
in all normal circumstances and that extreme circumstances are typically required in order to justify
murder. This, I think, is proof of our considering murder inherently wrong, or wrong for its own
sake. We also considered that it never seems good (or always seems bad) to take another human’s
life, but when one does so in order to save one’s own life, the good of saving one’s own life seems
to mitigate, ameliorate, or even outweigh the bad of taking another’s life. As I’ve said, I think that
eating meat is inherently bad. But I also think there may be circumstances in which it is permissible.
Those circumstances, however, are not normal ones, but rather mitigating ones.
The RVT and the PUAT both reference ‘normal circumstances’. In this section I attempt to
explain, quite briefly, what I mean by this phrase. This is important because I want to make
clear that I am not arguing for something like total or absolute vegetarianism—vegetarianism in all
circumstances, period. To argue for this sort of vegetarianism would be to think of eating meat as
something so inherently bad it can never be justified, and I am not prepared to argue for anything
that strong.
By ‘normal circumstances’, I mean circumstances without any mitigating factors present. When
mitigating factors are present, they transform circumstances from circumstances in which we are
expected to morally reason as usual to circumstances in which we could not possibly be expected to
do so. A good example of a mitigating factor with regard to eating meat is food scarcity. If Jane
is stranded on a deserted island and must either eat meat or herself perish, the mitigating factor of
food scarcity is present, and she is no longer dealing with normal circumstances; her circumstances
have become extreme. But if Jane sees a dead deer on the side of the road and wonders if she should
have it for dinner, without any mitigating factors present, she is dealing with normal circumstances.
Extreme circumstances are outside the scope of this paper and outside the scope of the RVT and
PUAT. As such, the RVT and PUAT are not morally absolutist: they do not suggest we can never
eat meat or use the corpses of animals, but merely suggest that the conditions under which these
practices are permissible require the presence of mitigating factors.22
Notably, pleasure, such as the gustatory pleasure one gains from eating meat, or the aesthetic
22 Singer
objects to Diamond on grounds of moral absolutism in Singer, 1980.
21
pleasure one gains from wearing leather, is obviously not a mitigating factor. An analogy with rape
is perhaps crude but helpful.23 Try to imagine some circumstances under which rape is permissible;
it is quite difficult. If we could name even one mitigating factor which might allow for permissible
rape, it would have to be ‘saving the lives of one thousand innocent people’, or some such thing. We
would not suggest that mere pleasure is a mitigating factor. Nor would we say that the claim that
rape is impermissible in all normal circumstances is morally absolutist. (And if it is to be objected
that rape is relevantly different than eating the corpse of a dead animal, note the strong intuition
that rape is impermissible even when the victim cannot feel any harm).24
1.4
Methodology
Here I want to elaborate upon my methodology in this thesis.
First, ‘robust’ is not just an adjective I like. I choose to call my version of vegetarianism ‘robust’
in part to distinguish it from Singer-Regan vegetarianism, and from absolutist vegetarianism. But
moreover, the word ‘robust’ has a particular meaning on which I wish to draw here. In a statistics
paper entitled ‘Permutation Theory in the Derivation of Robust Criteria and the Study of Departures
from Assumption’, G.E.P. Box and S.L. Anderson write that a statistical criteria is robust (in the
statistician’s sense) if it is “insensitive to changes of a magnitude likely to occur in practice, in
extraneous factors”.25 The sense of ‘robust’ I have in mind is analogous to this one: I am arguing
for a vegetarianism that is responsive to what I consider details non-extraneous with regard to the
wrongness of eating meat (e.g., that eating meat is eating some part of an animal’s corpse) and not
responsive to, or insensitive to, what I consider details extraneous to the wrongness of meat-eating
(e.g., whether the meat one might eat was produced in factory farm).
Let me now make a broad point about practical ethics, in which this thesis is ostensibly a project,
23 I
do not use the analogy lightly. See Adams, 1990, Ch. 2 for a sustained discussion of analogies between violence
against women (Adams is particularly interested in female cases, because she sees certain kinds of sexual assault as
more similar to eating meat than others) and violence against animals, both living and dead.
24 I remain mostly silent about marginal cases like ritualized hunting and meat-eating in other communities. It could
be argued that these practices are performed for reasons which count as mitigating factors. The RVT and PUAT
are meant to have limited enough scope to allow for arguments for and against practices like these. In Chapter 5 we
meet the Wari’, an Amazonian people which eats its own dead, i.e., practices cannibalism. There, I agree that the
Wari’ may be behaving respectfully toward their dead, given that ‘respect’ seems in some sense culturally relative.
But I do not comment on the moral permissibility of their actions.
25 Box and Anderson, 1955.
22
and its relation to this notion of robustness. I believe that practical ethics, at its best, is convincing—
it gives reasons for action which readers can accept regardless of their other theoretical, moral, and
practical commitments. So in a certain loose sense, what I am saying is that I think arguments in
practical ethics should be ‘robust’ as I described the word above. They ought not be insensitive to
their readers’ prior commitments, but rather aware of those commitments, and constructed such as
to work with or around those commitments. To put it colloquially, and, again, loosely: I want to
make a robust argument for robust vegetarianism.
Out of respect for this ideal I have in mind for practical ethics, I rely on a number of different
arguments and tools in order to reach conclusions about our obligations to the animal dead. This is
exemplified in two ways. First, I provide not one but two arguments for the truth of the RVT and
PUAT: one spans Chapters 2 and 3, while the other can be found in Chapter 4. Very importantly,
these arguments are not always compatible with one another, and they are not intended to be. They
are intended to convince readers with different prior convictions and beliefs, and to cohere with
different existing theories.
Second, within each chapter following this one, I offer my reader many different ways to accept
each major argument I make. For instance, in Chapter 3, I show my reader that, should she have
them, her views about the importance of life are compatible with my focus on death, and that,
should she have them, her views about species membership as that which confers moral standing
are compatible with a different version of my argument which preserves the truth of the RVT and
PUAT. I also offer my reader chances to accept parts of what I argue but not all of it, while still
preserving the truth of the RVT and PUAT: should she dislike the metaphysical conclusions I draw
in Chapter 2, she can disavow them and still accept the argument I give in Chapter 4.
I also try to refrain from engaging with arguments which require a lot of their reader, i.e.,
arguments which require things like belief in a deity or an afterlife, or an understanding that Kant
is the best moral theorist. Instead, I try to start with simple premises most people can accept, and
again work to provide multiple arguments for the same claim.
A moment ago I also said that my arguments are intended to cohere with other theories. Despite
the fact that I’ve spent a great deal of time in this chapter criticizing the work of other philosophers,
I remain convinced that Singer, Regan, Korsgaard and the rest make very important points, and that
23
someone who acts in accordance with the prescriptions of their arguments probably will act morally,
for the most part. I do not expect my reader to disavow their views, should she like them. Rather,
I hope that the reader who has already enjoyed the work of one or more of these philosophers, as I
have, will be able to treat my argument as a compatible supplement to, rather than a replacement
for, their work. Although I do think these philosophers have provided less-robust arguments for
vegetarianism than I will here, in part because they have not considered the animal dead, their
thoughts about living animals are well-regarded and popular for a reason. I imagine my reader
performing a test like this one: if she wants to know what is permissible behavior with regard to
some living animal, she can look to Singer, Regan, Korsgaard, or one of the others, and if she wants
to know what is permissible behavior with regard to some dead animal, she can look to an argument
like mine. All of my arguments are compatible with what Singer, Regan, and Korsgaard have to say
about living animals, albeit compatible to varying degrees.
24
Chapter 2
Animal Identity and Animal
Corpses
2.1
Introduction
In this chapter, I present a view which connects living animals to their corpses. This view has an
important purpose in my thesis. Both the RVT and the PUAT reference the bodies of dead animals,
or rather, the corpses of animals. Specifically, the RVT and PUAT reference specific harms we may
do to these corpses. A good question, then, is whether we are harming anyone or anything when we
harm corpses. Here, I propose that animals do not lose their most important intrinsic features, those
which allow us to properly call them ‘animals’, when they die; rather, they undergo a phase change
after which they come to be their corpses. When we harm animal corpses, then, we are harming
animals. In order to explain this proposal, I defend a form of ‘animalism’, a view about personal
identity or ontology, for non-human animals. This defense begins with a thorough understanding of
what it is to be an animal.1
1I
note here for my reader that in this chapter, I often cite Aristotle, and my footnote citation style for his work
differs from my citation style of the work of others, i.e., contemporary philosophers. Rather than citing his work by
its translator’s last name and the year it was translated, which I doubt would be helpful to an interested reader, I
cite the work in which it appears (e.g., De Anima) and the book and subsection in which it appears, as is customary
(although due to my use of online resources, especially from the MIT Classics Archive, I typically cannot cite the
line numbers). In the bibliography, volumes of Aristotle’s work are listed under his name, followed by his translators’
names. The one exception is citation of Physics. I use the translations Sarah Waterlow gives in her book (Nature,
25
2.2
What Are Animals?
There are a number of creatures in our world we call animals: ducks, deer, lions, dogs, cats, and so
on. Call this group of creatures, ordinarily just called ‘animals’, O-animals (‘O’ stands for ‘ordinary’,
designating the ordinary usage of the word). In most cases, when we say ‘animals’, we don’t mean
to include ourselves, humans, although we might also be animals.
What are O-animals? When I ask that question, what I mean is: What kind of thing is an Oanimal? If we ask the same question of ourselves, humans, we will encounter a number of different
answers. We might be immaterial souls, brains, bundles of perceptions, or animals.2
But the “What is it?” question is rarely asked of O-animals. Perhaps this is because the answer
is terribly obvious: O-animals are animals. I actually think this answer, maybe the obvious one, is
the right one. I’ll argue for that in this chapter, and talk about its implications.
The claim that animals are animals might not seem very interesting as a response to the question
“What are animals?”. Typically, philosophically interesting answers do not sound like this one.
Imagine asking an ethicist: “What’s the right thing to do?” and receiving the response “The right
thing to do is the right thing to do”. What makes the claim that animals are animals philosophically
interesting is that ‘animals’ in the former sense is not quite the same as ‘animals’ in the latter sense.
‘Animals’ in the former sense refers to O-animals, just those creatures we ordinarily call animals.
And ‘animals’ in the latter sense refers to a category or natural kind in our world, a category in
which some objects belong and others do not, not on the basis of our language but rather on the
basis of their own necessary, metaphysically important features. Call creatures who are animals in
this second sense C-animals (‘C’ stands for category).
It’s important to emphasize this last point—that ‘C-animal’ is a metaphysical or ontological
category of which some objects are a part, not just a linguistic designation. Some philosophers like
to call the metaphysical or ontological categories I’m talking about ‘substance concepts’ or ‘sortals’.3
These philosophers don’t use the term ‘C-animal’, of course,4 but some of them think ‘animal’, in
Change, and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics), which is an interpretive work on Aristotle, rather than a complete
translation of Physics. The reader interested in finding the translations I’ve used of Physics, then, will need to look
to Waterlow’s book.
2 See Olson, 2003, and Olson, 2007, for a more extensive list.
3 See, e.g., Robinson, 2016, Wiggins, 1980, and Olson, 1997.
4 This isn’t only because I’ve made up the term C-animal for ease of reference to a particular sense of ‘animal’; it’s
because these philosophers are talking about humans as animals, not non-human animals as animals.
26
the sense picked out by ‘C-animal’, is a good substance concept or sortal.5 I think this is partially
right, and I will give my brief criticism of it later (3.2.1). But first, let us see why ‘animal’ (C-animal)
is a plausible example of a substance concept or sortal: first, by learning what a substance concept
or sortal is, and then by examining why ‘animal’ seems to track the metaphysical phenomenon we
want sortals or substance concepts to track (persistence in time).
The term ‘sortal’ seems to have been popularized by David Wiggins, who derives his most basic
understanding of sortals from Aristotle’s category of substance:6 a sortal should tell us not that
something, e.g., runs or is white, but what it is that runs or is white,7 as well as its persistence
conditions8 and how it can be individuated.9 Denis Robinson, highlighting the importance of persistence in sortals and substance concepts, writes that a substance concept “is a sortal or ‘kind’
concept so associated with essential persistence-criteria that something can begin or cease falling
under it only by beginning or ceasing to exist”.10 Richard Grandy and Max Freund offer a simpler
version of Wiggins’ understanding, on which a sortal answers the questions, of any object: What is
it? Under what conditions does it persist in time? How can we count it?11 Put simply, everyone
seems to agree that a sortal or substance concept should tell us what something is, how to count
or individuate it, and ought to apply to an object over its entire existence, and no longer. When a
sortal or substance concept ceases to apply to an object, that object no longer exists; if a sortal or
substance concept applies to some object both before and after some event, the object has survived
that event.
The concept of a sortal or substance concept (hereafter, I just use ‘sortal’) seems to track something metaphysical, and in particular, something special about persistence in time or survival as
they relate to the kind of object something is.12 Imagine Daphne, a deer, who undergoes a mysterious transformation.13 What remains after the transformation is a brick. It does not seem possible
5 See,
e.g., Olson 1997. Cf. Aristotle’s Categories, part 5, to which we will return.
1980, p. 7.
7 Wiggins, 1980, p. 15.
8 Wiggins, 1980, p. 68
9 Wiggins, 1980, p. 68.
10 Robinson, 2016, p. 67
11 Grandy and Freund, 2020.
12 This is essentially the idea put forth by Aristotle, in his idea of the ‘nature’ of a thing (decided by the kind of
substance it is) as that which in part determines which kinds of changes can happen within that thing, and which
kinds of changes cannot, i.e., will put an end to its persistence. See Waterlow, 1982, p. 38 and p. 45, for more on
this view of nature as the inner principle of change.
13 I use individual cases—typically Daphne’s—for ease of reference and stylistic reasons (it is confusing to say ‘animal’
6 Wiggins,
27
that Daphne has survived the transformation.14 This seems to suggest that part of what it is to be
Daphne is to be an animal, as opposed to another kind of object. If some object is a brick, that
object cannot be Daphne; to be Daphne, an object must be an animal. (I have not yet said what I
think an animal is, but I imagine my reader finds bricks bad candidates.) If we want to know whether
Daphne has survived some event, then, we ought to ask first whether any animal has survived that
event. Whether the animal that survives is Daphne, I should say, is in some way beyond the scope
of this paper. (That is: mine is primarily a project in identity more generally, or in personal, in fact
animal, ontology, rather than a project in ‘personal identity’, which tends to focus on the identity
of individuals over time. See Blatti and Snowdon, 2016, p. 7, for more on this distinction, and see
Sections 2.4-2.4.1 for the closest I get in this chapter to talking about the identity of individuals
over time.)
So a sortal like ‘animal’ (C-animal, that is) seems to track something important about persistence.
Things that we might want to say fall under the sortal ‘C-animal’ (i.e., O-animals) do seem to persist
in time only as long as they are properly classified by that sortal. But the case so far has been intuitive
and brief; I want to turn now to a more rigorous understanding of both sortals and C-animals.
2.2.1
Notes on Sortals
It’s important to emphasize here that sortals are merely a helpful tool for understanding persistence,
kind, and countability. There is no causal relationship between someone’s sortal and her persistence
in time. Rather, it is the case that sortals track an existing metaphysical connection between kind
and persistence, the one we just saw an intuitive case for. Daphne’s persistence depends in part on
the category or kind of which she is a member. Whether she is the same being at some moment in
time M1 and some later moment M3 , i.e., whether she has survived some event at, say, M2 , depends
in part upon whether she is the same kind of being at M1 and M3 . If we can find out what kind
of being Daphne is, then, we know one of her persistence criteria. So a sortal does not determine
a creature’s persistence in time, strictly speaking; rather, her kind does. Her kind, of course, is
also not merely linguistic; it picks out her necessary, intrinsic features, just the sorts of things we’d
too often). But ‘Daphne’ is arbitrary, and as I say later, I am not trying to take up a project in personal (or animal)
identity. Using terminology from later in this paper, I will not say what makes ‘Daphne’s animal’ Daphne’s.
14 It also seems that we should count Daphne and the brick separately, rather than counting them as the same—I
make the point just to emphasize the counting criterion sortals ought to help with.
28
expect would be important for persistence. In short, sortals pick out groups of objects by their
kind, noting that their kind helps to determine their persistence criteria. There is nothing otherwise
special about sortals: they are not ‘magic words’, just useful ones for talking about persistence and
kind all at once, given their relationship. The metaphysical features they pick out are theoretically
prior to sortals themselves.
All of this should serve to emphasize the importance of finding the right sortals, ones that really
do pick up on natural kinds and categories, and more fundamentally the necessary features of beings
we might want to group together into kinds. After all, there are right and wrong sortals: sortals are
not whatever we say they are. They should pick up on something real, important, and identifiable
in the world around us.
Besides the fact that sortals track this important metaphysical relationship between kind and
persistence, they also make it easy to talk about the relationship between a creature’s most important
features—her necessary features—and her more ephemeral ones. We’ll actually talk about two kinds
of sortals here, one of which picks up on a creature’s necessary features and one of which picks up on
her contingent or accidental features, most of which tend to be (although not necessarily so) fleeting
or otherwise temporally limited. Right now, we are talking about substance sortals; I introduce that
second kind of sortal, a phase sortal, in a subsection to 2.3.1 entitled ‘Failures of the Organic View’.
The next thing to say about sortals is that the kind-persistence relationship they pick out doesn’t
need to be ‘one-way’, as it were. So far, I’ve been talking mostly about how kind can help us understand persistence. That’s the thing I focus on for the rest of this paper, too. But the relationship
between kind and persistence can also work the other way around. Take from Kafka the case of
Gregor, who appears to becomes an insect. If Gregor does survive the transformation, as it seems
he does, that might give us a clue about what kind of thing Gregor is. We will know he is the kind
of thing that can survive being transformed from a human into an insect, so he is unlikely to be
necessarily human. Perhaps he is an immaterial soul, or a brain capable of undergoing some specific
(strange) changes. So it is not just that we must look at something’s kind in order to make conclusions about its persistence; rather, we can also look at events through which it seems to persist, and
ask what kind of thing could survive those events. In fact, this later direction is the direction more
29
frequently taken by many philosophers who write about personal identity today.15
Finally, two notes on terminology. First, I have been saying ‘necessary’ features rather than
‘essential’ or ‘most fundamental’ features. This is because I think the features I’ll eventually pick
out are necessary for a creature to have in order that she be a certain kind of thing (a C-animal), but I
don’t want to identify them without argument with her essence,16 nor do I want to call them (without
argument) her most fundamental features. It seems plausible to me that ‘constitutive’ could do the
work that ‘necessary’ will continue to do in this chapter, but I continue to use ‘necessary’ because
in Chapter 3, an objection which uses ‘consitutively’ in a different way will arise, and hopefully
using ‘necessary’ here will help me refrain from inducing confusion in my reader once we reach that
chapter, although I do say more about the constitutively/necessary talk there.
Second, there are a number of different ways of talking about sortals, and some are more clear
with regard to what we have said about the priority of metaphysically important characteristics over
linguistic designations than others. For any sortal S and object X, we might say: ‘X falls under
the sortal S ’, ‘X has the sortal S ’, ‘X is best classified by the sortal S ’ or ‘the sortal S applies to
X’. Wiggins prefers to say that X ‘is in the extension of S ’. I tend to shift between these ways of
speaking, but I hope my reader will keep in mind what I have said in this section about the priority
of a creature’s real features and real persistence over her sortal.
2.3
What Are C-Animals?
I’ve said that I want to show that O-animals are C-animals. Now we can turn to my case for that
claim, beginning with an understanding of what a C-animal is. A C-animal, I think, is a biological
object organized for a particular kind of life. The organization criterion comes from both John
Locke and Aristotle, and has more recently been endorsed by David Mackie and others.17 Locke
suggests that it is the organization of parts that distinguishes things like plants and animals from
mere artefacts, or what he would call “masses of matter”. Aristotle also writes that natural bodies
15 This
is perhaps part of the reason I am so inclined to call mine a project in personal (well, animal) ontology instead:
I tend to work the other way around, as Olson and others working on what we’ll soon come to know as ‘animalism’
do.
16 To see why this is particularly important, consider that humans are typically called ‘essentially’ rational beings.
Our intrinsic or necessary features may be related to this capacity, but they may not be identical to it. That is, the
essence of a human may be ‘rational’ rather than ‘human’.
17 Mackie, 1999, Olson, 1997, p. 130, cited in Nichols, 2010.
30
with the potential for life are organized, seeming to make the same distinction Locke does.18 But
Locke also writes that “participation in life” further distinguishes plants and animals from mere
masses of matter.19 Soon, we shall see that Aristotle is in agreement. Mackie, engaging only with
Locke, disagrees; he sees no reason to require that plants and animals actually be living in order
that they be plants and animals.
The Mackie-Locke conflict is illustrative of a general point of conflict in the literature on animal
identity and ontology. The question here is whether animals are essentially, fundamentally, or
otherwise importantly (i.e., necessarily) ‘living’: whether being alive is part of what it is to be an
animal. If ‘living’ is included in what it is to be an animal, conclusions interesting with regard to
our purposes here follow: a creature will cease to exist at the end of her life, or rather, not survive
her death; the sortal ‘animal’ will only apply to a creature for the duration of her biological life.
Sometimes, this problem is put as a problem about whether animals are organisms. Organisms, it
seems, are thought to be importantly (necessarily, rather than accidentally or contingently) living.
Eric Olson, for example, tends to use the terms ‘animal’ and ‘organism’ mostly interchangeably, but
his is a view which stipulates that part of what it is to be an animal is to be living.20 We can put
the debated question this way: must an O-animal be living in order to be classified by the sortal
C-animal?
Let us call the view that (C-)animals are necessarily (or most fundamentally or essentially, but
‘necessarily’ will do best for our purposes, as described above) living the ‘organic’ view, following
Blatti. In what follows, I want to show that the organic view is wrong, and then to defend my own
position, the somatic view, about what animals are.
2.3.1
The Organic View, Contemporary and Ancient
As we’ve said, the organic view is that C-animals are necessarily living. This view entails that nothing
dead can be a C-animal, since part of what it is to be a C-animal is to be living. The organic view is
not only attributable to Locke, but also to Aristotle, with whom we have been in agreement so far,
regarding sortals and the role kind plays in persistence. Aristotle’s rich organic view, unabashed in
18 De
Anima, ii.1
1975, II. xxvii, cited in Mackie, 1999.
20 Olson does provide a definition of ‘organism’ which is not limited to animals in Olson, 1997, p. 6.
19 Locke,
31
its functional definition, and with the support of his broader conception of potentiality and capacity
behind it, will be our primary target in the next few sections, as I try to show the strangeness of the
organic view. We will also consider a contemporary organic view, Olson’s; I explain and relate the
two below. Let me also briefly note that I talk a lot about ‘functional definition’ in the sections to
come, and I should be clear here about what I mean by that term. To define something functionally,
as I understand the term here, is to define it first by what it does. A functional definition of a car,
then, as we shall see later, does not begin with the parts of a car but rather with what a car does.
Such a definition might go like this: “A car is that which transports people, at a high speed, from
place to place.”
Aristotle, it seems, did not conceive of anything correctly called a ‘dead animal’. He writes in
Politics that “things are defined by their working and power”,21 and expresses a similar commitment
to functional definition elsewhere, e.g., in Meteorologica and Generation of Animals.22 Defining
animals and their parts functionally leads Aristotle to say that there are no dead eyes,23 hands,24 ,
or bodies,25 except in name alone. Like axes, Aristotle writes, eyes, hands, and bodies are essentially
functional.26 When they cease to function, they cease to exist in all but name.
Strikingly, it is, according to Thomas Ainsworth, this commitment to functional definition which
leads Aristotle to say that animals are essentially ensouled, rather than the other way round.27 (For
Aristotle, it is the soul which gives rise to functionality. See, e.g., De Anima ii.2.) It follows that
animals themselves are essentially alive, because on Aristotle’s conception of the soul, “that what
has soul in it differs from what has not, in that the former displays life”.28 It is very important
to note that we do not, it seems, need anything like ‘soul’ to get from the claim that animals are
essentially functioning to the claim that animals are essentially living. Aristotle is talking about
functions like locomotion, nutrition, and sensation: it does not seem at all plausible that the dead
have the capacity to perform such functions. Further, if I were to give a definition of ‘living’ (in
the biological sense), it would be precisely the capacity to carry out these functions and others like
21 Politics,
i.2
22 Meteorologica
iv.12, Generation of Animals ii.1.
Anima ii.1
24 Politics, i.2
25 De Anima ii.1
26 De Anima, ii.1
27 Ainsworth, 2020
28 De Anima ii.2
23 De
32
them; Arisotle seems to agree when he writes that living “may mean thinking or perception or local
movement and rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay and growth”.29 This point—about
the direct path we can draw from ‘functioning’ to ‘living’—is of help with regard to our purposes
here, given that ‘soul’ is absent from both my own account and the accounts of other contemporary
philosophers working on animal ontology and identity.30
What we have seen, then, is that Aristotle holds a version of the organic view in virtue of his
commitment to functional definition. It is because he thinks animals are defined by what they can
do31 that he thinks they must (necessarily) be alive. That which is not capable of functioning as
an animal does is not an animal; therefore, dead animals are not animals at all. You might wonder
whether Aristotle would, without the word ‘sortal’ in his vocabulary, similarities between ‘sortal’
and ‘substance’ aside, think it fair to characterize his view as requiring of any object that it be living
in order to fall in the extension of the sortal ‘animal’, which is how we have been explaining the
organic view. But as we saw earlier, his remarks about dead hands, eyes, and bodies show that he
does believe that when something loses its capacity to function, it ceases to exist (in all but name).
As such, Aristotle’s view is commensurable with the others we have been considering and my own,
which we will consider shortly; his view, too, is a view about what makes someone a member of
a kind, and what follows about her persistence conditions. What makes someone a C-animal (the
kind of thing that is in the extension the sortal ‘C-animal’) is in part her capacity to function; when
she no longer has this capacity, she ceases to be a C-animal, and ceases to exist.
Understanding Aristotle’s account this way allows us to locate it in the contemporary debate
about organic views in general. Olson has proposed that substance concepts, like his preferred
‘animal’ and ‘organism’ (used interchangeably), should not include functional concepts, which pick
out objects on the basis not of their intrinsic, structural properties, but rather on the basis of their
capacities to perform certain functions. (A good example of a functional concept is locomotor ).32
Peter Nichols has disagreed on two counts: first, he has suggested, in an Aristotelian vein, that
substance concepts should be or include functional concepts, and second, he has argued that Olson’s
29 De
Anima, ii.2
e.g., Olson, 1997, 2003, and 2007.
31 Cf. Olson’s reading of Wiggins’ reading of Aristotle, albeit Wiggins’ reading of Aristotle’s Categories, Olson, 1997,
p. 15.
32 Olson, 1997, pp. 35-36
30 See,
33
own definition of ‘animal’ (or ‘organism) is at least in part functional.33
I am not aware of anyone who both holds the organic view and successfully describes the sortal
(C-) ‘animal’ in non-functional terms. Olson tries, but he is committed to animals as necessarily
alive, and what it is to live, as we saw when we agreed with Aristotle earlier, is really to perform
or be able to perform a group of functions. That is why Olson ends up suggesting that what it is
to be an organism (to fall within the extension of the sortal ‘organism’, i.e., C-animal) is in part to
have certain ‘life-giving features: metabolism... self-directed growth and development”.34 Certainly,
‘metabolizer’ and ‘grower’ are functional concepts. So to be abundantly clear, it seems that the
organic view and functional definition are quite intertwined, and perhaps inseparable. This appears
not only in Aristotle’s work, which moves from the proposal that (C-) ‘animal’ must be functionally
defined to the conclusion that anyone properly classified as an animal must be living, but also in
Olson’s, which moves begrudgingly from the proposal that anyone properly classified as an animal
must be living to the conclusion that (C-) ‘animal’ must be defined functionally.
Failures of the Organic View
Having seen the organic views held by both Olson and Aristotle, we can now begin to examine them
critically. I want to argue that, contra Aristotle and Olson, functional concepts are bad-making
features of sortals; in other words, we should not say that what it is to be a C-animal is to be living,
nor should we say that C-animals must by definition perform certain functions.
I should note here that there is a rather flat-footed, if in some sense instructive, reason sortals
cannot include functional concepts. Sortals, as we saw in Section 2.2, tell us what something is, how
we can count it, and the conditions under which it persists in time. Wiggins writes:
If somebody claims of something named or unnamed that it moves or runs or is white,
he is liable to be asked the question by which Aristotle sought to define the category of
substance: What is it that moves (or runs or is white...)?35
Nichols takes the same passage as evidence of what he calls a “Aristotelian-Wigginsian”36 distinction between the questions of what something is and what it does. Whether the distinction in
33 Nichols,
2010.
1997, p. 262. We’ll see the rest of this quote in Section 2.3.2.
35 Wiggins, 1980, p. 15
36 Nichols, 2010
34 Olson,
34
question is really Aristotelian is up for debate; as we have seen, Aristotle thinks things are best
defined by their functions, so although he certainly would concede that the questions are different
(as in Categories, e.g., part 4), I am not sure he would agree that the distinction between what
something is and what it does makes a difference, because of how important what something does
is to his conception of what it is.37 The point (a weak one, in my view) is really that functional
concepts in some literal sense answer the wrong question: they tell us what a creature does rather
than what she is. But as I have said, this is not my own response to the organic view; if you think
what an object (necessarily, essentially) does is not importantly separable from what she is, as I
think Aristotle does,38 this flat-footed point will seem even more superficial. Those who hold this
view, though, are the ones I aim to convince in this section with further argument.
Our first task will be to spell out what it is to function, be capable of functioning, or have the
potential to function. I should note that I am going to use some examples of artefacts here, which
are fundamentally different from animals. Artefacts are designed to function in a certain way—
they are designed to be used and useful. Whatever you might think about animals, artefacts seem
to be paradigmatic examples of necessarily functional objects. In other words, it seems even more
intuitive that the sortals by which artefacts are properly classified are functional than that the sortals
by which animals are properly classified are functional. So I will set out to show the plausibility the
of stronger claim, which is that not even the sortals under which artefacts are properly classified
ought to include functional concepts, and hope that the weaker claim (that the sortal ‘C-animal’
should not include functional concepts) becomes more plausible in so doing.
Consider the case of a car. Cars are artefacts designed for a particular purpose: namely, transportation. Nichols imagines a child pointing at a car, and asking: “What is that?”. He suggests it
would be not only permissible but in fact obligatory to respond with not merely “a car”, but also
“something which transports people from place to place at high speed”.39 Suppose that ‘something
which transports people from place to place at high speed’ is the right definition of ‘car’, and that
further it is contained in the sortal ‘car’ (or whatever the sortal for cars is): it answers the kind
37 The
real issue here, I suspect, is the fact that ‘Daphne runs’ is a bit different from ‘Daphne is a running thing’,
where the latter means something like: Daphne is necessarily or essentially a thing capable of running, and the
former means something like: Daphne runs [occasionally/often/across fields/right now]. Nichols, too, points out a
distinction like this, but apparently does not think Aristotle recognizes it.
38 See, for corroboration on this reading, Ainsworth 2020, and Code, forthcoming, esp. n7.
39 Nichols, 2010.
35
question (What is it?), as well as the persistence question (Under which conditions will it persist
in time?) and the countability question (How can we count it?). A car ceases to be a car, then,
when it no longer is something which transports people from place to place at high speed. This is
an obviously functional definition of ‘car’, and similarly if the sortal ‘car’ contains ‘something which
transports people from place to place at high speed’ the sortal contains a functional concept, ‘mover’
or ‘transporter’ (or a functional definition).
But is the sortal ‘car’, containing ‘something which transports people from place to place at a
high speed’ or ‘transporter’, a good sortal? The matter seems to turn on our reading of ‘transports’,
or ‘transporter’. If the words ‘transports’ or ‘transporter’ require of their subject that any time they
are used correctly, the subject must be actively engaged in transportation, we should expect cars to
cease being cars whenever they are, say, parked. Worse still, if being a transporter is included in the
sortal ‘car’, we would expect cars to literally go out of existence when they are, say, parked. This
does not seem like a promising interpretation of ‘transports’ or ‘transporter’, even for the proponent
of functional definitions.
Most who like functional definitions, though, do not understand functional concepts like ‘transporter’ this way. Rather, they understand them as what Nichols calls ‘dispositional’: a functional
concept should tell us not what an object is doing at any given time, but what it is capable of doing.
On this understanding of ‘transporter’, a car will not cease to be a transporter when it is parked,
and so it will not cease to be a car (even when ‘transporter’ is included in the sortal ‘car’). Parked
cars are, ostensibly, still capable of transporting people from place to place at high speed; they are
just not actively being used for that purpose. I’ll assume that based on what we have just seen, we
should take all functional concepts to be dispositional, and we should read all functional definitions
as tracking dispositional traits. It seems clearer to talk about dispositional traits using predicates
like ‘transporter’ rather than present-tensed verbs like ‘transports’, so I’ll try to use the former.
The question about whether functional concepts are a bad-making feature of sortals, then, seems
to turn on the way we understand what correctly predicating ‘mover’, ‘locomotor’, ‘grower’, etc.
of a subject requires of that subject. The question is really about what it means for something
to be capable of, or disposed to, e.g., moving, locomotion, or growth. A rather typical answer, I
think, would be that ‘capable of moving’, ‘disposed toward motion’, and ‘mover’ express potentiality:
36
whether an object is moving right now or not, to say that she is ‘capable of moving’, ‘disposed toward
motion’, or ‘a mover’ seems to express her potential for motion. I think this is the Aristotelian
answer, too: when Aristotle writes that the essence of the eye is sight, he is clear that he means
“the power of sight” and contrasts the correctly-identified (i.e., seeing) eye not with, say, the closed
eye of a man asleep, but the eye of a statue.40 Further, it would seem simply uncharitable to read
Aristotle’s extensive talk of functions as requiring that every creature who has the function of (say)
locomotion be constantly moving herself around. Rather, it seems right to say that a creature who
has the function of locomotion can still be said to have the function of locomotion even when she is
stationary, in virtue of her potential or capacity for locomotion.
Later, I do want to say more about Aristotle’s own understanding of potentiality. But for
now, the common understanding will do. I take that common understanding to be something like:
“something is potentially F if it has the power, capacity, or disposition to be F”.41
Let’s apply this kind of potentiality to another artefact case. Suppose that my desktop computer
has the sortal ‘computer’, and since sortals should include functional concepts, the sortal ‘computer’
includes something like ‘potentially computing, storing data, connecting to the internet (and so on;
fill in whatever you think computers necessarily do)’. Recall that sortals describe not only what a
thing is, but also its persistence conditions. When I unplug my computer, and it dies, will it go out
of existence? That seems unlikely. But my objector might suggest that in this case my computer has
not really lost its potential to compute, store data, connect to the internet, and so on, for it is only
a moment away from performing all of these functions as soon as I plug it in again. But suppose
the computer crashes and dies for the last time, as computers sometimes do; now it is no longer
even potentially functional. The proponent of functionally-defined sortals will have to admit that
my computer has gone out of existence. The thing sitting on my desk is no longer a computer, and
what’s more, it ought to be counted as a second object distinct from the computer in its place mere
moments ago. Worse still, the counting point suggests a new thing has come into existence after my
computer’s demise. And it’s not clear how we could even classify that new thing using functional
40 De
Anima ii.2. Code corroborates this reading in Code, forthcoming.
definition could be pressed on charges of circularity. But we’ll see what is probably a better definition later,
and I don’t know of another way of describing the common notion of potentiality, save for using the locution ‘it is
possible that X become F’, which seems to very obviously bring us to the cusp of sticky modal problems. We talk
about potentiality again in the next chapter of this thesis, and I address the same concern (as well as many others)
there.
41 This
37
concepts, given that it’s not functional at all (except, perhaps, as a very large paperweight or some
such thing).42 The conservative response—that nothing new has been created, and the object on
my desk is still a computer, functional or not—seems like the right one.
The point here is that countability and persistence do not seem to correlate nicely with functional concepts, even in artefact cases, and crucially, even when we employ a potentiality-informed
understanding of the functional concepts in question. It also seems counterintuitive to answer the
“What is it?” question a sortal ought to answer differently of my computer before and after it dies.
But let’s take a human case, just to see that the point holds there too. The capacity for reason has
been long-lauded as that which is most fundamental to humans. So the sortal ‘human’, in this case,
might include ‘potentially rational’. When Violet, an elderly woman, develops dementia at the end
of her life, she should then cease to be a ‘human’. We should count that object in her rocking chair
as a new thing, created when she ceased to have the potential to be rational, and count it as two
with Violet, not one. This, too, seems deeply counterintuitive.
Now, take a very different kind of example, meant to prove a different but related point. Suppose
we create a robot from inorganic material which functions exactly as a deer does. It moves around
independently, respires, grows, and so on. Is the robot a deer? It seems unlikely, but the proponent
of functional definition will be in a bad position to say why this is the case. In other words, when
we are asked why our robot is not a deer, we will have to cite something other than functional
concepts. The robot was not created by means of reproduction typical of any species of deer, we
might suggest, nor was it the product of evolution.43 And, we might emphasize, it does not have the
genetic material typical of deer, nor does it have the complex cellular organization characteristic of
deer and all other living things.
These features, I think—especially genetic material and organization for life—are the kinds of
features a sortal ought to include, or rather, pick out in creatures. I think we can characterize
them as “intrinsic or structural” (the ‘or’ is inclusive; some might be both intrinsic and structural).
42 You
might think that some kinds are best defined functionally, while others are not. So perhaps the new thing
comes into being as a member of a kind which is not best understood functionally. It would be difficult work, I
think, to find some feature of each sort of kind that makes this distinction non-arbitrary. If someone could find such
a feature, she would also have to say why it does not appear in animals such that they must be defined functionally,
while other things must not.
43 My reader might notice that these are actually relational properties of objects. I address this point in the notes
(note 58) to Section 2.3.2. Let me note for now that intrinsic, structural features and the relational features I cite
here are the same in that they avoid the problems I’ve said functional definition will run into.
38
Picking up on intrinsic, structural features of creatures and artefacts alike will help us avoid cases
like the ones we saw above—Violet’s, the case of the robot, and the case of the computer. The sortal
‘C-animal’, then, should not include functional concepts, but rather draw upon intrinsic, structural
features of objects. As we saw earlier, the organic view is committed to functional definition, because
to live is really to perform a series of functions (growing, developing, respiring, and so on), or at the
very least to have the capacity to perform a series of functions. Since functional concepts do not
seem to correlate with kind (by which I mean whatever the answer to the ‘What is it’ question is of
an object), persistence, or countability, the organic view cannot be right.
Let me say one more thing about intrinsic, structural features. As we saw earlier, Olson presents
a version of the organic view, but also disagrees with the idea of functional definition. (I’ve shown
that even in Olson’s definition, these two ideas can’t be compatible.) Olson writes:
Why doesn’t “It’s a thing that can move”, or “It’s a locomotor”, answer the question
What is it? This is a difficult matter, but I think part of the answer is that locomotion
is a dispositional or functional property that can be realized in a wide variety of intrinsic
structures.44
On Nichols’ reading, which I think is correct, Olson is pointing out that the big problem with
functional definition is functional concepts themselves.45 But Nichols also notes that Olson might
be picking up on another problem, which I’ll term the homogeneity concern.46 The problem here is
that functional concepts can describe a great number of things: ‘locomotor’ seems to group together
everything that moves on its own, and in fact locomotion is a property held by things with a variety
of different structural and intrinsic features. In other words, ‘locomotor’ (which Olson is using here
as an example of a bad sortal) picks out a group that is too heterogeneous to be picked out by
the same sortal. On the other hand, we seem to be capable of much more specificity when we
use structural and intrinsic features to define sortal words like ‘C-animal’. Olson doesn’t take the
homogeneity concern to be a major one, but I, like Nichols, want to take some time to consider it,
and show why intrinsic, structural features can help us address it. I do so below, in a subsection to
Section 2.3.1 entitled ‘Species and the Homogeneity Concern’.
44 Olson,
1997, p. 34
2010.
46 Laura Ruetsche helpfully pointed out to me that ‘multiple realizability’ is used in other areas of the philosophical
literature.
45 Nichols,
39
But there is something very compelling about functions and functional definition which cannot
be ignored. I want to try to find a place in my view for the intuition that what something does is in
some sense important to what it is, while still using only intrinsic, structural features as the basis of
sortal-determination. First, I want to introduce a new kind of sortal, and explain how this new kind
of sortal can account for the functionality-as-important intuition. Then, I want to examine Sarah
Waterlow’s reading of Aristotle’s understanding of potentiality, and show that, in a very unorthodox
sense, our ideas may not be so diametrically opposed.
So far, I have just been saying ‘sortal’, rather than differentiating between two different kinds
of sortals, substance and phase sortals. That is because we have only been talking about substance
sortals up until this point. Substance sortals answer the questions a sortal ought to answer (kind,
persistence, and countability) of an object over its whole existence, while phase sortals answer the
same questions over some phase of an object’s existence. A good example of a phase sortal is ‘puppy’:
the underlying object, a dog, will not go out of existence when she ceases to be a puppy, but a puppy
will go out of existence when the underlying dog ceases to be a puppy.
As I’ve said above, I do not think that functional concepts are good candidates for substance
sortals, for both the reasons cited above (in the robot, computer, and Violet cases) and the homogeneity concern, which I explain in more detail in 3.2.1. But I do think that functional concepts
might be candidate phase sortals. Consider a classic example of a phase sortal, ‘athlete’,47 narrowed
down to just ‘runner’. ‘Runner’ is indubitably a functional concept. But it seems at least possible
that ‘runner’, ‘reasoner’, and other such functional concepts could be phase sortals.48 This is in part
because phase sortals need not apply to a creature over her entire existence; we will not, then, meet
trouble suggesting that human runner goes out of existence when she becomes, say, paralyzed. A
runner will go out of existence, but the underlying human will not. Later (in Section 2.5.1), I even
suggest that ‘living’ itself is a phase sortal, and I think most functional concepts can be. So I do not
think that functional concepts are a bad-making feature of all sortals—they are just a bad-making
feature of substance sortals.
Now we can return to potentiality and Aristotle. It’s not clear to me that there is a consensus in
47 Olson,
1997, p. 29
calls ‘person’ both a phase sortal and a functional concept, so I think he tacitly accepts this point. Andrea
Sauchelli calls ‘person’ a “functional phase sortal”; see Sauchelli, 2017.
48 Olson
40
the interpretive literature on Aristotle’s understanding of potential and potentiality. Alan Code, for
example, suggests that for Aristotle “What makes something potentially F in the first place is the
possession of a dunamis or capacity”.49 This is much like the definition of potentiality I came up
with earlier, and called then ‘the common view’. Sarah Waterlow, on the other hand, distinguishes
between two senses in which Aristotle uses potential or potentiality. One is an exclusive sense, in
which an object is merely potentially F, and one is an inclusive sense, in which an object is both
actually F and potentially F.50 In the exclusive sense, which Waterlow seems to take to be more
frequent in Aristotle, ‘potentially F’ means “suitable to be F, but not actually F”,51 which indicates,
necessarily, a privation: a lack of F-ness.52
We have seen why an understanding like Code’s of Aristotelian potentiality will not save functional concepts from being bad-making features of sortals. But Waterlow’s understanding, on the
other hand, might in an unorthodox sense be compatible with something like the somatic view I’ll
introduce shortly. Put simply for now, there is a way of understanding certain intrinsic, structural
features, e.g., organized complexity on macro-physical and micro-physical scales, genetic material,
and so on, as making their possessors ‘suitable’ for life. Certainly, many dead animals who die
relatively peacefully have these features, and they also lack life (they fulfill the privation criterion).
Although it is a truism, as far as I know, that death is final, there might be some sense in which animals are still suitable for life, and thus ‘potentially living’, even after they die. I want to emphasize
that this was almost certainly not Aristotle’s own view, as evidenced in De Anima, where he writes:
“We must not understand by that which is ‘potentially capable of living’ what has lost the soul it
had, but only what still retains it”.53 However, Aristotle did agree that the matter of an animal,
although not the animal herself, persisted through the death of an animal.54 And he agreed that
that persisting matter was capable of living again, i.e., becoming ensouled again, as a (new) living
thing.55 Without a concept analogous to ‘soul’ in my own account, and without any contemporary
49 Code,
forthcoming.
1982, p. 115. The passage in which Aristotle describes his own two uses of ‘potential’ is Physics, 201
a19-21, cited in and translated by Waterlow, 1982, p. 115.
51 Waterlow, 1982, p. 115
52 The exclusive sense is also more useful to us here, given that we are not talking about living things, who can
actualize their functions.
53 De Anima, 2.2.
54 Metaphysics, H5.
55 Metaphysics, H5. See Code, forthcoming, for a corroboration of this reading.
50 Waterlow,
41
accounts of animal identity or ontology involving ‘soul’ to work with, I cannot truly give Aristotle’s
own ideas about potentiality and change a fair or comparable response, given that they are informed
by not only what is possible for objects given their matter, but also what is possible for objects
given their form, which for living things is soul. But I hope to have, in this section, illuminated
some real problems with the organic view by illuminating problems with functional definition, all of
which I suspect would continue to be problems for Aristotle’s account even if we were able to pay
a bit more mind to soul. I also hope to have shown how functions can have a place in the somatic
view, to which we now turn.
2.3.2
The Somatic View
Having seen Aristotle’s version of the organic view, we can return to Olson’s, which will contribute
directly to our formulation of the organic view. As we have said, Olson understands ‘animal’ (Canimal) as a substance sortal, and he thinks that in order for any creature to be an animal, that
creature must be alive. We have seen what is wrong with this part of Olson’s view, but his view
is in fact more complex than I have said. Part of it, I think, is exactly right. For Olson, who
uses the terms animal and organism interchangeably, an organism is not just necessarily living, but
also “anything that has these life-giving features: metabolism, teleology, organized complexity—
and whatever further properties necessarily go along with them, such as self-directed growth and
development [and] an internal genetic plan...”56
We saw earlier, when we considered the robot case and others, that looking at the intrinsic,
structural features of some thing seems to be a good way to determine its substance sortal. The
intrinsic, structural features of an object appear to persist when that object appears to persist,
and seem to help us determine something’s kind (e.g., by helping us say that only biological deer,
and not robots that function like deer, are deer) and whether it ought to be counted as one or two
with another similar object. Nichols notes that Olson’s definition only picks out two intrinsic and
structural features of organisms: their internal genetic plans and their organized complexity. I think
these two intrinsic, structural features are the perfect beginning to a proper explanation of what it
is to be a C-animal.
56 Olson,
1997, p. 262. I omit the rest of the quote because, as Nichols notes, it just lists more functional concepts.
42
As I have said, I think a C-animal is an object in our world organized for a particular kind of life.
We saw earlier that Mackie and Locke, engaged in a debate similar to the one between Nichols and
Olson (and the one between Aristotle and I), agreed that organization was important for animals
but disagreed about whether life was. In the passage below, Mackie proposes a way of defining
‘C-animal’ that takes Locke and Aristotle’s organization criterion seriously, but doesn’t require that
that organization actually lead to life. Mackie, like Olson, uses animal and organism interchangeably
(separating, unlike Olson, ‘organism’ from its usual usage):
The obvious alternative [to Locke’s view] is to suggest that the persistence of biological
organisms depends on their retaining (enough of) the organisation of parts that is the
product of their natural biological development, and that makes them apt for life, while
stopping short of saying that life itself is necessary.57
Mackie’s proposal is, I think, a very good one. It does not draw on the actualization of any
functions, which would render its understanding of ‘animal’ functional. Rather, it draws on what
is required for these functions, and the Lockean point that what is required for these functions and
processes is the proper organization of parts.
Borrowing from both Mackie and Olson, I think we can say that what it is to be an animal (a
C-animal, in fact) is to have certain intrinsic, structural features, namely, organization of parts and
a genetic plan, which help to render their possessor apt or suitable for life life.58 Call this definition
of ‘animal’ (C-animal) the somatic view, borrowing again from Blatti. If we took a further step,
and said that life itself (or the functions which make it up) was a requirement, we would give a
functional definition of ‘animal’ instead of one that picks out intrinsic, structural features, and we
would run into all the problems we saw in the section entitled ‘Failures of the Organic View’.
So ‘animal’, on the understanding the somatic view provides, seems like a good substance sortal.
Let’s return to Daphne. Daphne does seem to persist only as long as she is an animal; if Daphne
underwent some event, after which there remained only a brick, it would not seem that Daphne
57 Mackie,
1999.
I mentioned that we might also want to say that ‘being the product of evolution’ and ‘being the product of
reproduction by means typical of some species’ were part of what it is to be a C-animal. I still think this is right.
But I think these two criteria pick out relational properties of objects, rather than intrinsic, structural ones. I don’t
want to argue here (lest we distract ourselves from our objective) that relational properties are not bad-making
features of substance sortals, although I suspect the case could be made. If my reader finds relational properties
unobjectionable, I advise reading them in wherever I’ve listed only ‘organization of parts’ and ‘an internal genetic
plan’.
58 Earlier,
43
survived that event.59 That is because what it is to be Daphne is to be an animal: to have organized
parts and an internal genetic plan apt for life. And ‘animal’ as a substance sortal will also help us
count Daphne and the brick as two, rather than one.
Species and the Homogeneity Concern
Earlier, when I alluded to the somatic view, I said that animals were not just organized for life, but
organized for a particular kind of life. To see why this is important, consider another transformation
thought-experiment. Daphne, our deer, undergoes a mysterious procedure after which there remains
a duck. Certainly, a duck is an animal (a C-animal, according to the definition we produced above).
As is a deer. So some animal has survived the transformation, but is that animal Daphne? As I
have mentioned, I do not want to say too much about what makes any animal Daphne. But I do
think it seems implausible that the remaining duck is Daphne. If this is right, part of what it is
to be Daphne is not just to be an animal, but to be a particular kind of animal, organized for a
particular kind of life. And Daphne will only persist as long as she is organized for that particular
kind of life—deer life. Perhaps Daphne’s substance sortal, then, should not be ‘animal’ but rather
‘deer’.
We could continue on with more thought experiments. If Daphne is a white-tailed deer, would
she survive a transformation rendering her a moose (another kind of deer)? The proper conclusion becomes murkier as we descend the pyramid of taxa, encountering increasingly homogeneous
groups, and eventually we will reach the question I am trying to abstain from answering, which is
whether Daphne would survive a transformation after which an unspecified white-tailed deer (perhaps Daphne, perhaps not) remains. I do not want to say that species designations are the ‘best’
substance sortals, although there seems to be much to be said in favor of the point. Those who have
the homogeneity concern we saw alluded to above in Olson—that ‘C-animal’ does not pick out a
group homogeneous enough to be described by a single substance sortal—will probably think species
designations make better substance sortals than ‘C-animal’.
I should say I do not doubt that there are ways of defining particular species without using
functional concepts. We could just draw on the definition above: a white-tailed deer, for example,
59 Note
that even if the brick had deer-like capacities, it would still not seem like a deer; I owe this point to Laura
Ruetsche, and I tried to make it clear earlier with the robot example.
44
could be defined as an object who meets the conditions outlined by the somatic view but is organized
for the life of a white-tailed deer in particular (rather than just any life).
There are troubles with species designations as substance sortals, although I suspect they would
not be difficult to resolve. The first problem is that, as Nichols says, if homogeneity is what matters
in choosing substance sortals, it’s not clear why we should stop the search for more and more
homogeneous groups at the level of species. Perhaps we should continue on to the family (in the
ordinary, rather than taxonomic, sense) or individual level. Second, some philosophers think species
are unhelpful because they are hard to differentiate from one another in a meaningful and nonarbitrary way.60
On the other hand, there are benefits of using species designations or even genera as substance
sortals. I have outlined some of these benefits already, but let me note one more here, and assure
my reader that others will become clear when we talk about the moral upshots of the view I’m
presenting in sections 2.5.1 and 2.6. The benefit I want to touch on here is the one Aristotle brings
up in Categories:
Of secondary substances, the species is more truly substance than the genus, being more
nearly related to primary substance. For if any one should render an account of what a
primary substance is, he would render a more instructive account, and one more proper
to the subject, by stating the species than by stating the genus.61
Aristotle uses ‘species’ and ‘genus’ differently than we do today, and takes ‘horse’ to be a good
example of a species and ‘animal’ to be a good example of a genus. Still, the point remains. It
is just more instructive and clear—a better description of a thing—to answer the ‘What is it?’
question of an animal with her species designation than it is to answer the same question with
simply ‘animal’. And there is, according to Waterlow’s reading of Aristotle, a reason to prefer the
instructive and clear answer. That reason is that a description picking up on features that are not
actually sortal-constitutive (for Aristotle, substance-constitutive) will mislead us about the changes
that can happen to (for Aristotle, within) that object without its destruction.62 Species designations
may help us understand which changes can happen to an object without putting it out of existence
60 See
McMahan, 2002, pp. 212-217, for this line of argument.
part 5
62 Waterlow, pp. 22-24.
61 Categories,
45
(i.e., its persistence conditions) better than ‘C-animal’ can.63
For now, we can continue to talk about ‘C-animal’ as a substance sortal, since it will not make a
difference to our present purposes whether any animal survives her death as a member of the same
species or a different one. But in order to rule out deer-duck transformation cases, the possibility
that plants are animals, and other strange (although perhaps not dire) problems with using ‘Canimal’ as a substance sortal, I think that when we are talking about individual cases, it will be best
to call individual O-animals ‘C-animals of a certain sort’ (and treat that as their substance sortal).
‘Sort’ leaves open the possibility of species or genus (or my reader’s preferred relatively homogeneous
taxon, e.g., family) as a better substance sortal than simply ‘C-animal’.
2.4
O-Animals Are C-Animals
Let’s recapitulate. We saw, first, that there are two senses in which we use the word ‘animal’:
O-animal and C-animal. We set about defining ‘C-animal’, and saw an intuitive case for both the
claim that C-animal is a substance sortal and the claim that substance sortals track an important
metaphysical phenomenon: persistence in time. We also saw that the somatic view of ‘C-animal’
had some advantages over the organic view of ‘C-animal’ as a substance sortal; namely, it didn’t
utilize functional concepts, which are bad-making features of substance sortals.
Now that I have said what it is to be a C-animal, I want to say why I think O-animals are
C-animals. That is, I want to spell out in more detail why ‘C-animal’ is a good substance sortal
for O-animals, and what follows from that. Of course, I have said that C-animal seems like a
good substance sortal in that it can answer the questions sortals ought to, the questions of kind,
persistence, and countability. But is it a good substance sortal for O-animals? Further, I have thus
far presented the claim that O-animals are C-animals as an ontological claim—a claim about the
kinds of beings O-animals are. But there is a claim about identity which follows from it, namely,
the claim that each O-animal is numerically identical with a C-animal. I want to defend this claim,
too, and since the two claims are so intertwined as to be inseparable (the latter is really just another
way of putting the former), I can defend them together.
63 Aristotle’s
favor for good descriptions is actually deeply important to his understanding of, and resolution of the
paradox of, change. This is all examined further by Waterlow, pp. 12-27.
46
2.4.1
Animals Are Their Animals
Supporters of a view called ‘animalism’ in the personal ontology and personal identity literature
contest that we humans are animals. There are a number of different ways of putting this claim.
One way of putting it is that a good substance sortal for us is ‘animal’ (C-animal, and perhaps in
the way I’ve defined it above). Another way of putting the claim is that each of us is numerically
identical with an animal. Animalists sometimes refer to the animal numerically identical with you
as ‘your’ animal; I adopt that convention. Here, I want to say why we might think O-animals are
numerically identical with their animals, rather than something else.
Animalism (for humans) seems implausible in part because we humans identify so much with
our psychological and mental characteristics, so many of which we consider central to our identities.
In animal ethics and other areas of philosophy, it is often proposed that humans differ from animals
because of our psychological or mental characteristics: we are different because we are rational,
because we have future-regarding interests, because we can make moral judgments, and so on. One
view about personal identity, which we can call the psychological continuity view, appeals to similar
intuitions, and suggests that what makes me me or you you is the psychological continuity of us
over time.64 The psychological continuity view can explain the kinds of intuitions we might have
about so-called ‘brain transplant’ thought experiments, in which one’s brain is put into the body of
another human. (The most common intuition is that one would survive such a transplant as oneself.)
Insofar as your thoughts, memories and so on, and all of their connections, remain intact after the
transplant, your self ought to remain intact as well. Animalism cannot explain that same intuition.
In fact, there are no self-preserving reasons an animalist can cite to prefer a brain transplant to total
annihilation.65 But it is not clear that that intuition holds in animal cases.
I think we tend to think of animals as less psychological or mental creatures than we are, and
perhaps rightly so. Daphne, our deer, probably does not have many of the things we consider
important to our identities. Daphne probably does not have extensive plans for the future (e.g., the
deer equivalent of attending graduate school or publishing a book), nor does she likely have extensive
64 The
psychological continuity view is more clearly about the conditions under which we persist in time than it is
about what we are, i.e., it does not provide a competitor for ‘animal’ as a substance sortal. Philosophers who like
this view offer a wide range of accounts of what we are.
65 Blatti, 2019.
47
episodic memories of the past. If she does have memories of the past, she is unlikely to consider them
formative in the way we might consider ours formative—almost as if they have helped shape our
identities. Daphne almost certainly has some psychological continuity; she must understand that
cars are the things which move quickly and ought not be approached based on her past experience,
for example. But her psychological continuity seems different than ours; it seems less central to her
identity, and less stable or more fractured. Crucially, it seems at best unclear, to me at least, that
Daphne would still be Daphne if we put her brain into a different animal, even another deer.
It also seems difficult to conceive of Daphne as being anything other than her animal. I cannot
imagine Daphne as just a thinking-thing, for example, the way I take Descartes to be imagining
himself, however briefly and for whatever rhetorical purposes, as just a thinking thing. I can conceive
of a human brain-in-a-vat perhaps still being the person it was prior to envatment, but not of Daphne
as a brain in a vat still being Daphne. Perhaps this is because so many of the characteristics which
seem most central to Daphne’s identity properly belong to her animal.
To reinforce this idea, take the following sentences:
1. John is deteriorating with age.
2. John’s animal is deteriorating with age.
3. Daphne’s animal is deteriorating with age.
4. Daphne is deteriorating with age.
When ‘John’ designates a human, it seems plausible that sentences 1 and 2 mean different things.
We might understand sentence 1 as saying something just about John’s mind, e.g., ‘John’s memory
is deteriorating’, or ’John’s just not himself anymore’. Animalists might suggest this is just a matter
of linguistic convention, or the strangeness of calling anything in our world ‘X’s animal’. But they
will have to contend with the underlying intuition: there seem to be things attributable to John
which are not attributable to John’s animal, or things John can do that his animal can’t. Sentence
3 is perhaps linguistically strange, but I think it means the same thing as sentence 4, implying that
Daphne is inseparable from her animal in the way that animalists suggest humans are inseparable
from theirs. The similarity in meaning, also demonstrated by sentences like ‘Daphne is thirsty’ and
even ‘Daphne is afraid’, also seems to suggest that there is little attributable to Daphne not also
48
attributable to her animal. This is perhaps just because deer do not do things like read the New
Yorker (consider the strangeness of ‘John’s animal reads the New Yorker’), but that fact does not
seem like it defeats the point.
The point of these last few arguments, about animals and their psychological continuity and
mental features, is that it does not seem likely that O-animals are purely mental or psychological
entities who are either contained in their animals or separate from them all together. Something like
this might be a plausible account of human ontology, identity, or persistence in time, but it seems
unlikely to be a plausible account of animal identity, ontology or persistence in time. On the other
hand, saying that each animal is numerically identical with ‘her’ animal, and that each O-animal is
a C-animal, seems less implausible for animals than something similar might for humans.
A perhaps less orthodox point in favor of animalism might appeal to those who already like the
idea that animals are self-conscious, although I have not yet said anything in favor of that point
and will not defend it too extensively here. Most animals, I think, are conscious of themselves as
objects in their world distinct from others. Experiences of pain, for example, help us conclude that a
creature understands, however briefly, that she is distinct from that branch over there or the seaweed
to her left.66 She knows that it is her tail that has been stepped on, or her mouth on which a hook
has been caught, and that is why she yelps or writhes. (I will return to this point, and a question
about whether what I’m describing here should really be called ‘self-consciousness’, in Chapter 3.)
It’s important to note that these experiences of pain are perhaps the best data we have about
the self-consciousness of animals. Our data on human self-consciousness mostly comes from our own
experiences of ourselves, and the reasonable inference that other humans have similar experiences
of themselves. We are not in that kind of position for inference when we look at animals, and
so these experiences of, say, recognizing pain, are important ones for those who think animals are
self-conscious. When we look closely at these experiences, which seem to exhibit self-consciousness,
we might ask reasonably what it is that an animal is conscious of. Is she conscious of her self, her
being, as an immaterial soul, a brain, or a bundle of perceptions? Probably not. She seems to be
conscious of her animal, and the role it plays in helping her feel. That might suggest, then, that an
animal’s animal is central to her identity in an important sense.
66 I
owe the spirit of this point to Christine Korsgaard, and will make the same point in more detail when we return
to her work.
49
In many ways, the case for C-animal as a substance sortal (and for the claim that each animal
is numerically identical with her animal) is reducible to this point: there are not very many other
promising directions in which we might look for a substance sortal for animals. The direction of
psychological continuity seems to clash with our understanding of animal minds, and especially
our understanding of animal memories. It also seems to clash with our intuitive understanding of
animal persistence conditions: if animals persisted in time if and only if they were psychologically
continuous with their former selves, it is not clear why the intuition that they would survive a brain
transplant just as we would is less strong or absent entirely. It is also not clear what the psychological
continuity view, applied to animals, would have to say about animals without brains, like jellyfish.
And the ‘continuity’ part of psychological continuity, too, seems dubious when we consider it as
an alternative to my view. We would expect animals with low capacities for episodic or long-term
memories and very few, if any, constant beliefs or desires over time to go out of existence fairly
frequently if something like ‘psychologically continuous being’ were the proper substance sortal for
these creatures.
There are other views about what we humans are and what our persistence criteria are that
could be applied to animals, but they are hard to spell out in any great detail. Could animals be
immaterial souls, for example? Perhaps, but it is difficult to say what that would mean, and what
persistence criteria would follow.
The alternative, of course, is to adopt my view, which is that each animal is numerically identical
with her animal and that O-animals are C-animals (that C-animal, or some sort of C-animal, is the
proper substance sortal for each O-animal). This view is not difficult to spell out in detail, as I
hope I have shown here, and it provides an intuitively compelling account of persistence criteria for
animals.
2.5
Animal Corpse Survivalism
If what I have said so far is right, O-animals are (their) C-animals, and ‘C-animal’ is a good substance
sortal for O-animals. It follows, given what we have said about the metaphysical phenomena a sortal
tracks, that O-animals exist only as long as they are C-animals.
50
Plainly, many objects we’d often call ‘dead animals’ are C-animals. We said earlier that on the
somatic view, what it is to be a C-animal is to have certain intrinsic, structural features, namely,
organized parts and a genetic plan, which help to render their possessor apt for a particular kind
of life. When an O-animal dies peacefully, she often retains her organized structure and internal
genetic plan for quite some time following her death. It does not matter that she is not actually
living: she is in an important way (genetically and organizationally) ‘apt’ for life. She has the right
machinery; she is simply not ‘plugged in’ anymore, so to speak.
It follows, then, that in many cases, animals survive their own deaths as what we might typically
call their corpses; put perhaps less strangely, O-animals come to be their corpses at the times of
their deaths. (Following Olson, we can call this view animal ‘corpse survivalism’.) An O-animal
survives events after which she is still properly classified as a C-animal (perhaps the right sort of
C-animal); plainly, many dead O-animals are still C-animals.
To be abundantly clear, animal corpse survivalism is not the claim that Daphne’s animal survives
her death but Daphne does not. Daphne is her animal, as we have seen, and so if her animal survives
her death, so does she. Consider the alternative, which is that Daphne does not survive her death,
but her animal does. We will have to say what Daphne is, if she is not her animal, and we saw the
difficulties that might arise there in Section 2.4.1. We will also have to say how Daphne’s animal
could seemingly be attached to her during her life, doing what she does and going where she goes,
but could still come apart from her after her death. One related virtue of animal corpse survivalism
is that it allows us to count Daphne and her corpse as one, rather than two; we also need not say
that anything new comes into existence at the time of Daphne’s death.
Since the case for animal corpse survivalism is fairly straightforward, given everything we have
said already, we can now turn to addressing some worries about animal corpse survivialism.
2.5.1
Worries About Animal Corpse Survivalism
The first worry I want to address is that dying is a rather large change for any animal, and so it is
strange to imagine Daphne continues to exist exactly after her death as she did before her death.
This seems right to me; death is a serious change. My view can account for this, though, by calling
death a phase change (a moment at which someone’s phase sortal changes). Recall that phase
51
sortals apply to a creature over a particular part of her existence, but when phase sortals change,
the underlying creature does not go out of existence. When a cat is no longer best classified by the
phase sortal ‘kitten’, a kitten ceases to exist, but the underlying cat does not. Similarly, I think,
when Daphne dies, she is still best classified by the substance sortal ‘(some sort of) C-animal’, but
also best classified by a phase sortal like ‘dead’. I alluded to this possibility earlier: I think ‘living’
is also a phase sortal.
This same proposal, about phase changes, should help us respond to another worry: must we
treat living and dead animals the same way? Those who like the ideas of natural kinds and substance
sortals, for example, tend to also like a certain approach to ethics. Such an approach suggests that
we ought to treat objects in our world in accordance with their kind—perhaps their substance
sortals. This seems partially right to me. The problem, though, is that we also seem to need to treat
someone in accordance with her phase sortals. Child labor, for example, is perhaps objectionable in
part because it fails to treat human children as children, and rather treats them as adults. Similarly,
we need not take dead dogs on walks—what is good for someone will depend not only on her
substance sortal but also her phase sortals, and dead dogs are dogs, but they are also dead. Of
course, treating someone in accordance with her substance sortal remains important: we would not
want to take those children out of a factory and put them out in a field to graze, nor would we need
to send dogs, living or dead, to kindergarten.
While we are speaking about ethics here, I should note one more thing: treating creatures in
accordance with their substance sortals will be much more successful, I think, if substance sortals
pick out homogeneous groups like species. This may be another reason to prefer species or genera
as substance sortals.
2.6
Animal Corpses and the Good
I have just shown that O-animals survive their deaths as their corpses. Say that M1 is some moment
in time before Daphne’s death, and M2 is some moment in time after Daphne’s death, but some
moment at which Daphne still exists (i.e., some moment at which the substance sortal ‘(some sort
of) C-animal’ still applies to Daphne). In fact, say M2 is just that moment right after Daphne’s
52
death. It does not follow from anything I have said that we owe Daphne at M2 and Daphne at M1
the same things. In fact, I have just said that Daphne at M2 falls under a different phase sortal than
Daphne at M1 , and that phase sortals should impact our treatment of the creatures to whom they
apply.
What we are left with, then, is a question about how to treat Daphne’s corpse, given that it
is Daphne, but also given that it is not Daphne alive. You might wonder, since I have not said
anything defend a contrary view yet: isn’t one morally permissible way of treating a dead animal
eating her ? You might think this way even if you are convinced by the account I have given here.
You might think that when the phase change Daphne’s death brings about actually occurs, Daphne
loses her moral standing, or some such thing.
That question, about the right way to treat animal corpses, is one this thesis attempts to answer,
in a number of different ways. This chapter, on the other hand, has only been intended to posit
a connection between the corpse and the animal, such that our further work will be rescued from
contention with the problem we have dealt with here. Since the connection we have found is a
relationship of identity, it should suffice: what you do to Daphne’s corpse, you do to Daphne, so to
speak. This should serve to relate the conclusions we are going to draw about Daphne—e.g., that
her moral standing is permanent—to the conclusions we want about her corpse, e.g., that a violation
of her corpse is a way to violate her moral standing, given that she comes to be her corpse. And
finally, if you disagree with the argument I have presented here, in keeping with my methodological
commitments as described in Chapter 1, I will present some arguments which do not draw upon it
at all.
53
Chapter 3
The Permanent Moral Standing of
Animals
3.1
Introduction
In this chapter, I introduce a modified version of Christine Korsgaard’s idea of atemporal moral
standing. I choose to argue instead for the permanence of moral standing, in part because the
literature on atemporality is beyond the scope of this thesis.1 My view, which I call the ‘Permanence
View’, is that the moral standing of animals is permanent: once it is properly accorded, it can never
be revoked, even after the creature to whom we originally accorded it dies.
Korsgaard is actually arguing for two claims with the atemporality argument: that (a) that we
should take a creature’s moral standing to be atemporal, and (b) that we should take the creature
herself to exist atemporally. Similarly, I argue that (a*) that we should take a creature’s moral
standing to be permanent, and (b*) that animals survive their deaths as their corpses. We saw my
defense of (b*) in the last chapter, but in this chapter, I connect (b*) to (a*), and show that the
truth of the RVT and PUAT follows.
1 To
expand upon this point: ‘atemporal’ may call to mind for some readers things like ‘atemporal truth’. Since I do
not want to engage with that literature here, I am using the term permanent instead, and arguing for permanence
instead of atemporality. To be very precise, Korsgaard and I both think moral standing can be accorded in time,
although it seems that she thinks that moral standing is accorded in time, and then continues outside of time after
that moment. I argue that it continues as far as the future does, in time.
54
3.2
Borrowing and Diverging from Korsgaard
Besides the differences we saw above, there is another point at which Korsgaard’s argument and the
one I give here diverge. Korsgaard’s account comes to us from the book Fellow Creatures, which
presents a thorough and excellent argument for the claim that we have moral obligations to animals.
Korsgaard notes that her argument for atemporal moral standing serves as an argument for the
possibility of posthumous harm, but, perhaps surprisingly, she does not bring it up when she argues
for vegetarianism.2 Rather, she presents it as a response to the Argument from Marginal Cases,3
and takes it (I think rightly) to solve a number of problems in population and reproductive ethics.
But the fact remains that Korsgaard did not use her atemporality argument to argue for anything
like robust vegetarianism, and it is not clear to me that she would agree with the RVT or PUAT.
Now we can take a look at those things I do adopt from Korsgaard’s argument. For Korsgaard,
and I think fairly uncontroversially, moral standing is something that gives us obligations to the
beings to whom it belongs. So if we have moral obligations to someone, including someone who is
dead (or, for Korsgaard, perhaps even unborn), that is in virtue of her moral standing. Korsgaard
also argues that it is in virtue of their being ‘subjects of lives’4 that creatures can be properly
accorded moral standing. I agree with Korsgaard on both of these points. It seems clear to me
that moral standing is that which generates obligations, and I don’t know of anyone who both likes
the idea of moral standing and conceives of it differently. I don’t argue further for this point. But
briefly, later in this section, I present Korsgaard’s argument for the claim that creatures have moral
standing in virtue of their being the subjects of their lives.
The argument I present for the Permanence View also makes use of three of Korsgaard’s important footholds, points about the nature of moral standing separate from the one we already
saw—that moral standing is that which generates obligations. The next points of which I make use
are (1) that moral standing should not be thought of as applying to creatures at particular stages of
life, (2) that it should not be thought of as a switch which can be flipped off, and (3) that it should
2 For
Korsgaard’s argument for vegetarianism, see Korsgaard, 2018, pp. 220-226.
AMC is a popular approach in the animal ethics literature. Roughly, it suggests that there is no moral standingconferring characteristic that all humans have and all animals lack.
4 The phrase ‘subject of a life’ is also important to Tom Regan’s argument for animal rights, but he uses it somewhat
differently; Regan’s conception is stronger and so ropes in fewer creatures.
3 The
55
not be thought of as a property. The second claim is most important.5
Now, we should see why the argument I am about to make will apply to animals and humans.
As I have said, I agree with Korsgaard that what makes someone the kind of being to whom we can
accord moral standing is her being, or having been during her life, the subject of her life. Another
way of putting this point is that subjects of lives are the proper units of moral standing. For
Korsgaard, what makes someone the subject of her life is her sentience and self-consciousness. This
is because for Korsgaard, “to have moral standing is to be someone whose good matters for its own
sake”.6 Here, Korsgaard is using ‘good’ in a particular sense, meaning ‘end’ or ‘final good’. For
Korsgaard, only these goods—final goods or ends—can matter for their own sake. They are to be
contrasted with functional goods, which help an object maintain its well-functioning, but are not
good-for that object.7 Functional goods do not matter for their own sake: they matter insofar as
they promote the well-functioning of an object. Artefacts like knives only have functional goods,
while animals have both final and functional goods.
In order to set ends, or have a ‘final good’, someone must relate to her surroundings and herself
in a particular way. She must be able to ‘take’ certain things to be good or bad for her, i.e., value
them, or in other words, set ends. And this will require of her that she be both the sort of being for
whom things can actually be good or bad and the sort of being who recognizes herself as the one for
whom those good or bad things are good or bad. The first condition is met by her sentience, and the
second is met by her self-consciousness. (It’s worth noting that self-consciousness, on Korsgaard’s
account, admits of degrees, and the kind I describe here is fairly minimal.) Korsgaard thinks that
beings who meet these conditions are subjects of lives, and their goods (final goods, or ends) are the
kinds of goods which matter morally.
We are now in a better position to see the importance of the distinction between final and
functional goods. A knife does not set sharpness as its end, nor does it pursue sharpness; sharpness
is only a functional good for a knife. But humans and animals are the kinds of beings for whom
things can be good, and also the kinds of beings who can take things to be good or bad for them (set
5 Korsgaard
thinks moral standing is not a switch at all. I will argue that there is a proper way of conceiving of moral
standing that is compatible with the idea of moral standing as a switch—but a switch which can only ever flip on,
and once it is on cannot be flipped off. It is not, I should say, clear to me that Korsgaard would deny this.
6 Korsgaard, 2018, p. 83
7 Korsgaard, 2018, pp. 19-20.
56
ends, or value things). So animals and humans are subjects of lives, while knives and other artefacts
are not. An interesting question arises here about plants, and although I will not answer it in any
great detail, I should say that plants do not seem to set or pursue ends, or value things. But the
best examples of animals who seem to set and pursue ends, or value things, involve locomotion; even
Korsgaard notes this.8 But it does not seem that plants conceive of themselves as objects distinct
from their surroundings, and namely, the objects for whom things can be good or bad. So a plant
seems to lack the kind of self, and self-consciousness, in which Korsgaard is interested.
I should emphasize here that many things which are good for animals are good for them in the
sense that they help them function well. This is an Aristotelian idea to which Korsgaard’s view
is not hostile, despite first appearances. Korsgaard and I agree that much of what is good for an
animal, e.g., Daphne, is good for her in that it helps her function well. Similarly, what is good for a
ficus is good for that ficus in virtue of the fact that it helps it function well. The distinction between
these two senses of ‘good-for’ is grounded in the fact that Daphne can take certain things to be good
for her, or set them as ends, while a ficus cannot. The things Daphne takes to be good for her may
be functional goods in the sense that they help her function well, but they are not functional goods
in the sense that she cannot take them to be good for her; she can, after all, do this. Final goods,
or ends, are often just functional goods, but functional goods which an animal can take to be good
for her, and set as the ends of action.
We are also now in a better position to see that on Korsgaard’s view, sentience and selfconsciousness are intimately related. In Chapter 2, we discussed this view briefly, and said there that
sentience seems to be a minimal form of self-consciousness. An animal, we said, conceives of herself
as something in her world for which things can be good or bad anytime she feels something as good
or bad for her. And she conceives then of herself as distinct from her surroundings.9 Returning to
plants for just a moment, we can see perhaps even more clearly why they seem like weak candidates
for moral standing: they do not, it seems, even conceive of themselves by feeling themselves as distinct from their surroundings. But given what we have said about self-consciousness and sentience
here, it seems clear that many animals, and most of those we regularly eat, are subjects of lives, and
8 Korsgaard,
2018, p. 25
Chapter 2, I said more about the direction in which this works. I mentioned there that it seems plausible that
a creature’s feelings of pain almost alert her, in a manner of speaking, to the fact that she is distinct from her
surroundings.
9 In
57
so the proper units of moral standing.
A different point in favor of animal self-consciousness comes from observing animals not just as
they feel pleasure or pain, but as they experience more complex emotions. Daniel Herwitz suggested
jealousy in particular might demonstrate self-consciousness. Indeed, a 2014 study by Christine Harris
and Caroline Prouvost documented the arousal of what certainly looked like jealousy in dogs brought
on by the sight of their human companions being affectionate with stuffed dogs.10 The dogs in Harris
and Prouvost’s study displayed more seemingly-jealous behavior when their human companions
showed affection to the stuffed dogs than when their human companions showed affection to Jacko-lanterns. This seems to indicate that the dogs Harris and Prouvost met understood themselves as
specific beings in their world, competing with like beings rather than unlike ones. Of course, the
study’s results could also be accounted for with an account of dog-jealousy on which jealousy is an
instinct, undertaken without any specific understanding of the object of whom a dog is jealous. On
this interpretation, however, dogs would need to be innately inclined to be jealous of only other
dog-like objects, and so, it seems, programmed with a sort of recognition of dog-like objects. In
any case, this is not terribly important to the broader point I am making here. On Korsgaard’s
understanding of self-consciousness, no such understanding of oneself and one’s similarities to other
creatures, which may put one in competition with them, is necessary. Korsgaard’s view requires
only that a being be sentient in order that she also be self-conscious; sentience, for Korsgaard, is a
minimal form of self-consciousness.
But there is a good question about whether self-consciousness as Korsgaard describes is is really the sort of thing we want to call self-consciousness. Some philosophers may object that selfconsciousness requires language, which many animals may not have; even Korsgaard’s source material, the work of Immanuel Kant, suggests that a self-conscious creature can attach ‘I think’ to all of
her thoughts, which it is not clear that animals can do. If my reader finds objectionable Korsgaard’s
calling an understanding of oneself as something in one’s world distinct from one’s surroundings
self-consciousness, there is a simple solution, drawn from Korsgaard’s understanding of what selves
and self-consciousness are. Korsgaard writes:
[T]o have a self is to have a point of view, and to have a point of view is to be aware of the
10 Harris
and Prouvost, 2014.
58
difference between you and everything else, and in that sense to be aware of yourself.11
We can see here that Korsgaard conceives of the self as a point of view, and consciousness of
the self as awareness of that point of view. A reader who thinks that selves and self-consciousness
are something else entirely is welcome to read ‘point of view’ where I say ‘self’, and ‘awareness
of that point of view’ where I say ‘self-consciousness’. The word ‘self-consciousness’ itself does no
work in Korsgaard’s argument, nor does it do any work in mine. Rather, what is important about
‘self-consciousness’, or ‘awareness of one’s point of view’, if you prefer, is that it means a creature
can identify herself as an object in her world distinct from her surroundings, and namely the kind
of object in her world that has her experiences of things as good or bad for her. (That, remember,
allows her to take things to be good or bad for her, and seek them out or avoid them, accordingly.)
You can agree that animals have this special feature—the ability to experience their world from
their own perspectives, and recognize themselves as the experiencers of their worlds from those
perspectives—without thinking this special feature should be called ‘self-consciousness’.12
Although some philosophers think instead that the ground for moral standing is rationality, moral
agency, or some other such thing, it seems a fairly well-accepted point in the animal ethics literature
that sentience is important (and perhaps the thing most important) for moral standing. Since there
has already been so much said in favor of this point, I do not defend it further here. Rather, my
argument attempts to proceed from the understanding that living animals do have moral standing,
and I accept one classic grounding of this claim, which is in sentience. (Although, as I have said, I
add, as Korsgaard does, minimal self-consciousness—defined as an awareness of one’s point of view.)
Accordingly, instead of arguing further for the importance of sentience and self consciousness,
I spend much of this chapter arguing for point (2) above. Something to note is that in so doing,
11 Korsgaard,
p. 30.
is another good question here about whether most of the animals we eat are really sentient and self-conscious
(or aware of their points of view, if you prefer). Given what we’ve said about sentience as a minimal form of what
Korsgaard and I call ‘self-consciousness’, it should suffice to show that most of the animals we eat are sentient.
But I won’t do that here. Rather, I refer the interested reader to Michael Tye’s excellent book Tense Bees and
Shell-Shocked Crabs (Tye, 2017). Tye explains, using a first-order theory of consciousness and relying on inference
to the best explanation as we do for other humans, why we should think that fish (Ch. 6, esp. 6.1-6.3), birds (Ch.
7, esp. 7.1 and 7.3), and even crabs (8.4) have conscious experiences. He describes, in these sections, the exact
kind of behavior we might identify in other animals as ‘taking things to be good or bad’. Crabs engage in trade-off
behavior to avoid being shocked (8.4); injured chickens choose feed which has been laced with pain relievers (7.3);
and trout engage in pain-relief behaviors like rubbing their lips against their tanks and rocking from side to side
when their lips are injected with bee venom and acid (6.2). I take it that these are the problem cases for my reader,
and that cases like those of cows, pigs, and other mammals are less controversially sentient and capable of pursuing
what is good for them and avoiding what is bad for them.
12 There
59
I often use the light-switch analogy, referring to creatures as having ‘moral standing switches’ or
simply ‘standing-switches’. In these terms, I should emphasize that what I have said about the
grounds for moral standing so far is really about why someone’s standing switch will flip on to begin
with, and in particular why the standing switches of animals flip on to begin with; I have not yet
said anything about why it cannot be flipped off.
3.3
Why The Switch Cannot Be Flipped Off
A moment ago, I mentioned some characteristics or traits that might be held to confer moral
standing. Let’s call these traits standing-conferring traits, or standing-conferring characteristics.
Some philosophers, and most in the animal ethics literature, agree with Korsgaard and I that
sentience and self-consciousness are the grounds of moral standing: the ‘true’, or ‘ultimate’ standingconferring characteristics. Others think rationality or moral agency, or even something more vague
like ‘personhood’, are the true or ultimate standing-conferring characteristics. I cite these examples
not because I plan to argue against them further, but rather to elaborate upon what a standingconferring characteristic looks like, since standing-conferring characteristics will be important in the
sections to come.
My view, again, is that moral standing is permanent. I hold that once you have the standingconferring characteristics that matter—sentience and self-consciousness—your moral standing switch
flips on, and there is no good reason to flip it off after it flips on in the first place. One way to
understand this view is to look at its opponents: views that suggest moral standing is a switch which
can be flipped off. In the following subsections, I address a series of different views I take to suggest
that moral standing switches can be flipped off, for some good reason, at some moment in time. My
strategy, in broad strokes, is to show of each view that it provides an inadequate reason to flip off
someone’s moral standing switch.
3.3.1
The Present Characteristics View
At first glance, you might think that a good reason to flip off someone’s standing switch is painfully
obvious. We’ve said that standing-conferring characteristics confer moral standing; why should their
60
absence at some time T1 not be a reason to flip off someone’s moral standing switch at T1 ? That is,
if someone lacks the standing-conferring characteristic we think matters at some moment in time,
why should we think she still has moral standing at that moment? Let’s call this view, the view that
only a creature who presently has a standing-conferring characteristic C (whichever one we think
matters) can have moral standing, the ‘Present Characteristics View’, or PCV. Creatures who do
not presently have C do not have moral standing on the PCV.
To see why the PCV can’t be right, imagine that C is rationality; we’ve all agreed that rationality
is the standing-conferring trait that matters. Infants are not presently rational, so we cannot have
obligations to them on the PCV. Persons with dementia similarly are not presently rational, so they,
too, will lack moral standing on the PCV, and we will not be able to owe them anything, either.
I suspect that nobody wants to deny that these groups have moral standing, or that we can have
obligations to them. The PCV has quickly become an unpalatable view. And so it seems unlikely
that someone can lose her moral standing, or have her standing switch flipped off, just because she
is not presently X, where X is some standing-conferring characteristic.
You might think this trouble is just with rationality, and that were we to select a different
standing-conferring characteristic, the PCV would be successful. But even choosing sentience—
perhaps the least stringent standing-conferring characteristic—will not make the PCV more compelling. Persons who are anesthetized cannot feel pain, but it does not seem plausible that at the
moment of her anesthetization someone loses her moral standing, and we can no longer have moral
obligations to her.
It seems clear, given these results, that someone’s present lack of standing-conferring characteristics is not a good reason to turn off the switch of her moral standing. You might object, of course,
that I’ve taken a very narrow view of what it is to be rational, or sentient, or the possessor of any
standing-conferring characteristic at all. When we say someone is rational, we do not usually mean
that she is reasoning constantly, at every moment in time. Rather, we might mean something like:
at every moment in time she has the potential to reason, or at every moment in time she is the kind
of being who can be rational. I want to address these views in turn, in the sections below.13
Briefly, I want to address one more thought about the PCV. You might have the idea that moral
13 See
Section 3.3.2 and 3.5.2, respectively.
61
standing has something like a ‘grace period’, and sticks around for a certain amount of time after
one has lost her standing-conferring characteristics. Thinking this way will help us deal with cases
like the anesthetized patient we saw above: you could say that her moral standing doesn’t disappear
right after she loses her sentience, but rather after a period of time has passed since she has lost
her sentience. The trouble with this view is that you will need to say how long that period of time
should be, and why it should be only that long.
Finding a non-arbitrary reason to put an end to that period of time will be difficult. Should it
be one hour? Why? Two weeks? Why? I suspect most people who like this ‘grace period’ idea
really want to say that the period of time in question should last as long as someone’s biological
life. But again, why should that be the case? The reasoning behind the claim, I suspect, is not
that lives are the right amount of time, since lifespans vary, but rather either (a) that life is relevant
to someone’s moral standing, i.e., we cannot have moral obligations to the dead, or (b) that moral
standing requires a subject, and the end of one’s life is the end of one’s being that kind of subject.
But (a) can be rephrased as a version of the PCV, which the grace period idea was introduced to
bolster and protect from the objections we have already seen. What (a) really says is that life must
be present in a subject at any time T1 in order that we may properly accord her moral standing at
T1 . So unless you think life is relevantly different from the other standing-conferring characteristics
in that its not being present in a subject actually is a reason to deny her moral standing, it is not
clear why (a) would be of any help here. I address the idea that life is relevantly different from
the other standing-conferring characteristics below, in Section 3.3.3, and the idea (b) describes in
Section 3.5.1. But in a broad way, the ‘grace period’ idea has a home in the Permanence View, as
we shall soon see: the Permanence View merely denies that the grace period is a ‘period’, i.e., a
slice of time with not just a beginning, but also an end.
3.3.2
The Potentiality View
The Potentiality View (which I will refrain from abbreviating, given that its abbreviation would be
the same as that of the Permanence View) suggests that someone has moral standing at some time
T1 if and only if she has the standing-conferring characteristic C that matters at T1 , or if she has
the potential to have C at some later time T2 . The Potentiality View appears frequently (for the
62
purpose of refutation) in the animal ethics literature, as a favorite of those who like rationality as a
standing-conferring characteristic but dislike the idea of refusing moral standing to infants. But the
Potentiality View does not just provide us with an explanation of why someone’s standing-switch
will turn on in the first place; it also tells us what it is that will flip that switch off. Namely, someone
who likes the Potentiality View will suggest that when a creature loses the potential to be or have
C, where C is the standing-conferring characteristic we think matters, her standing switch will flip
off. I want to reject this view for two reasons, beginning with the idea of potentiality itself.
Proponents of the Potentiality View tend to take a particular view of the nature of potentiality;
they adopt what I called in Chapter 2 the ‘common’ view of potentiality, on which someone has
the potential to become F if she has the capacity for F-ness. I alluded in Chapter 2 to some of the
troubles with this view of potentiality; chiefly, it is difficult to say what exactly ‘having the capacity
for F’ consists in, and worries may arise about circularity; on the other hand, saying that someone
is potentially F if it is possible for her to become F seems to dredge up sticky modal problems.
My first pass at refusing the potentiality view, then, looks like a rejection of the notion of
potentiality as far too vague to be meaningful.14 You might wonder I contradict myself by criticizing
potentiality here, when I made use in the last chapter of the phrase “apt for life”, which may suggest
an underlying notion of potential. In fact, I do not think I do contradict myself, but I do want to
take a moment to address this worry, since I think it will be instructive. To clarify briefly, “apt for
life” need not indicate or evoke potentiality, since it draws on structural features that are important
in that they do often give rise to the group of functions (e.g., growth, metabolism) we might think
of as ‘life’, but these intrinsic, structural features can also exist without ever doing so, and without
the ‘capacity’ to give life (whatever that is; I am just trying to distance my view from the common
idea of potential, which is, again, typically characterized by this ‘capacity’ wording).
But I also noted in Chapter 2, and want to emphasize again here, that there is a certain understanding of potentiality compatible with both the claim we saw in Chapter 2, that even dead
C-animals are “apt for life”, and the claim we will shortly see made by the Permanence View (that
14 Here
is another, related point about potentiality, inspired by Regan, 1983, p. 16. Diplomats who come to the
United States (and many other countries) are granted a specific kind of legal standing called ‘diplomatic immunity’
which protects them from prosecution. Suppose Evan, a non-diplomat British citizen, is caught selling drugs in the
US. It would still be very strange if he said, upon his arrest: “But I have the potential to become a diplomat in the
future, and gain diplomatic immunity—so you cannot prosecute me now!” The point is that according standing in
the present based on a characteristic someone might have in the future may lead to strange consequences.
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moral standing is permanent). The understanding of potentiality compatible with my view is the
one we saw Sarah Waterlow explain: someone is potentially F if she is suitable for F-ness, but not
currently F. I contrasted it with the typical understanding of potentiality, the one we saw just above:
that someone is potentially F if she has the capacity for coming to be F. The former understanding
seems, strangely enough, amenable to the idea that even dead animals are ‘potentially living’, just in
virtue of their being apt or suitable for life but not yet living. I emphasized in Chapter 2, and again
here, that being apt or suitable for life is a matter of having the intrinsic and structural features
which generally give rise to the group of functions we might say make up ‘living’. An animal can
have those features when she is dead. You might think similar intrinsic, structural features15 could
stand to some standing-conferring characteristic as organization of parts and an internal genetic plan
stand to life. If this is what someone means by ‘potentially rational’, then at least some dead persons
are potentially rational, and this understanding of potentiality is compatible with the Permanence
View (mutatis mutandis: my permanence view cites different standing-conferring characteristics).16
But I do not take this to be the common meaning of ‘potentially rational’, and it is not the meaning
I criticize here. Rather, I criticize the common understanding of ‘potentially’.
Now we can return from this clarification to our rejection of the Potentiality View. You might
like the idea of potential, metaphysically, despite everything I’ve said so far. But there is a strong
moral reason against accepting the claim that someone’s moral standing switch flips off when she
comes to lack the potential to have or be C, where C is whatever standing-conferring characteristic
we think matters.
In the sections to follow, we’ll return often to the example of Terri, whom I now want to introduce.
Suppose Terri is an average, 26 year-old human. Before her heart attack, she has all of the traits we
might think confer moral standing: she is rational in the descriptive sense, sentient, capable of moral
decision-making, and so on. She is resuscitated successfully after her heart attack, but having been
deprived of oxygen for so long, she has suffered serious brain damage and is now in a permanent
vegetative state and wholly reliant on life-support machines. She can no longer reason, feel, or make
15 The
presence of a certain type of brain, perhaps.
is all a bit imprecise: this version of the Potentiality View might, I think, be more compatible with something
I’ll eventually call the ‘Existence View’, which I introduce in Section 3.5.1. But the Permanence View and Existence
View can both support the major conclusions we reach in Section 3.4 and 3.4.2, which is the truth of the RVT and
PUAT.
16 This
64
decisions, moral or otherwise; she has no conscious experiences. But her heart is still beating, and
she is still alive.
Terri’s story is real, and may be familiar to my reader as the story of Terri Schiavo, who, even
after decades of exploratory treatments, could never reason, speak, or, presumably, feel again. Most
crucially, persons like Terri Schiavo cannot, speaking empirically, be said to have the potential (in
the common sense) to regain the characteristics they lost any more than the actually dead and
buried can.
Yet if someone sexually assaulted Terri, mutilated her, or even spread vicious lies about her,
we would, and I think rightly, suspect that these actions were morally wrong. It seems, then, that
we can still have moral obligations to Terri, even though she has lost her rationality, sentience,
and so on. And so it seems that Terri still has moral standing—her moral standing switch has not
yet been flipped off.17 It seems, then, that even when someone loses all of her standing-conferring
characteristics, as well as the potential to regain them, she still does not lose her moral standing.
So someone’s lacking the potential or capacity to have C, where C is some standing-conferring
characteristic, does not seem to be a good reason to turn off her moral standing switch. In other
words, we can reject the Potentiality View.
3.3.3
The Life View
Philosophers like Albert Schweitzer18 and Tom Regan19 have endorsed the claim that being alive
is an important condition for subjects of moral standing to meet: that being alive is a standingconferring characteristic of its own.20 If ‘being alive’ is a standing-conferring characteristic, it seems
at least prima facie plausible that death is a good reason to flip off someone’s moral standing switch.
Call this view, the view that life is a standing-conferring characteristic and death is the end of moral
standing, the ‘Life View’, or the LV.
I do not think the absence of life is a good reason to flip someone’s moral standing switch off,
and I want to explain why here.
17 In
Section 3.4, I address the objection that if we were to accord Terri moral standing, we would not be able to
‘unplug’ her, so to speak, and allow her to die, as the parents of the real Terri Schiavo did.
18 Schweitzer’s views are summarized by Regan, in Regan, 1983, pp. 241-243
19 Regan, 1983, pp. 243-244
20 Schweitzer seems to think that life is both necessary and sufficient for moral standing; Regan seems to believe that
it is only necessary.
65
First, now that we have encountered both the Potentiality View and the PCV, I am ready to
state my claim about present and potential standing-conferring characteristics; it will soon become
clear why this is relevant to my rejection of LV. When we examined the PCV, we said that it seems
implausible that someone’s present lack of standing-conferring characteristics is a good reason to flip
off her moral standing switch. Maybe you like standing-conferring characteristics that require a lot of
their subjects, like rationality or moral agency. Or maybe you like standing-conferring characteristics
that require comparatively little of their subjects, like sentience. In either case, if you accept the
view that your standing-conferring characteristic of choice must be present in a subject at time T1 in
order that we may accord her moral standing at time T1 , you will run into marginal cases: persons
with dementia, young children, anesthetized persons, or persons in persistent vegetative states like
Terri. We also addressed the grace-period idea in Section 3.3.1, and said that unless you think life is
a standing-conferring characteristic different from the others in that it somehow avoids the problems
we saw with the PCV, you cannot imagine that moral standing ‘sticks around’ in a subject for some
period of time with a distinct end, after she has lost her standing-conferring characteristics.
When we rejected the Potentiality View, we also said that someone’s possible, future standingconferring characteristics are not a good reason to accord her moral standing, and more importantly,
her failing to have the potential (in the ordinary sense) to obtain those characteristics cannot be the
end of her moral standing. We looked specifically at Terri’s case, and saw that even when someone
loses the potential to have any putatively standing-conferring characteristics at all, we would be
remiss to deny her moral standing.
From these conclusions, we can draw an important point about moral standing. Your standingswitch will not flip off because of facts about characteristics you lack right now, nor will it flip off in
virtue of characteristics you no longer have the potential to gain in the future.
I’m sure it is not a surprise that I am going to address the LV as a version of the PCV or the
Potentiality View, since I already suggested this maneuver in 3.1. To recapitulate, I said there
that the LV works like the PCV: it suggests that a subject must be living (life must be present in a
subject) at some time T1 in order for us to accord her moral standing at T1 . There is another version
of the LV, which, drawing on the Potentiality View, says that a subject must be living (life must be
present in a subject) at some time T1 , or some subject must be potentially living in order for us to
66
accord her moral standing at T1 . Let’s first briefly address this Potentiality View-LV hybrid: I have
already said that on the Waterlowian understanding of potential, someone is generally potentially
living after the end of her biological life, however strange that may sound. So the Potentiality ViewLV may not actually support the LV. Further, there are all sorts of worries about potentiality as too
broad or too vague, and perhaps even more problematic worries about fetuses, zygotes, and so on.
I also doubt the Potentiality View-LV hybrid has many supporters.
The PCV-LV hybrid,21 on the other hand, may have supporters I now want to address. We
have already said why the PCV is wrong, but we used other standing-conferring characteristics, like
rationality and sentience, to make that point. A proponent of the PCV-LV hybrid may now suggest
that life is a standing-conferring characteristic relevantly different from the others, such that the
PCV-LV hybrid may succeed while others fail. If this were the case, the present absence of life in
a subject would be a non-arbitrary reason to flip off the switch of her moral standing. I am going
to suggest in response that we have reason to doubt that life is a standing-conferring characteristic,
but even if it were, the LV would still be wrong, because it is not relevantly different from the PCV.
It is true, I think, that ‘being alive’ or ‘life’ is relevantly different from the other standingconferring characteristics. But this difference may work against the PCV-LV hybrid view, rather
than in its favor; we may decide, in fact, that life is not a standing-conferring characteristic at all. In
Chapter 2, we agreed with Aristotle about what it is to be alive: what it is to be alive is to perform
certain functions, e.g., respiration, metabolism, growth, and so on. The LV may seem appealing in
part because we might think of life as something mysterious or special, but life, on the Aristotelian
conception with which we have been in agreement, is merely the performance of certain biological
functions. (Still, I do address the ‘mysterious and special’ view of life later in this section.)
These functions seem different in kind from the function of, say, reasoning or feeling, which we
may take to be morally significant. But they are not intuitively more relevant to moral standing than
those other characteristics. They are, I think, intuitively less relevant to moral standing (although
not, as I discuss later in this section, less morally relevant in general). Even if you think otherwise,
you will need to say why these natural functions are relevant to moral standing, while the natural
21 The
LV is a form of the PCV, so the views are not different enough to warrant the label of a ‘hybrid’ view. I only
call the typical form of the LV, the one we address here, ‘the PCV-LV hybrid’ in order to avoid confusion with the
Potentiality View-LV hybrid (of which the same holds).
67
function of, say, sight, is not.22
There is also a very old problem about deriving normative claims from natural facts. Although I
am not always convinced that this problem really is a problem, it is worthwhile to note that deriving
the claim that someone has moral standing from the claim that she is living is in fact deriving a
normative claim from a natural fact. We might also note here that life can exist in a subject without
giving rise to any other standing-conferring characteristics, as we saw in Terri’s case.
If you still think, after all of this, that life might be a standing-conferring characteristic, you
will still have to say why the absence of life in a subject is different than the absence of other
standing-conferring characteristics. That is because we have already shown, in Section 3.3.1, that
the absence of the other standing-conferring characteristics is not a good reason to flip off someone’s
standing switch. You might argue that life is distinct from rationality, sentience, and the other
standing-conferring characteristics we’ve been considering in that it lasts longer, i.e., is present in a
subject longer than other characteristics. This seems like a promising direction in which to look for
support for the PCV-LV hybrid, because we rejected the PCV in part because it allows someone’s
standing-switch to flip on and off too rapidly, denying her moral standing when we would intuitively
like to accord it to her.23 But it is not immediately clear why longer-lasting characteristics should
be favorable; this is a claim in need of an argument. If the answer to my query is, as I suspect,
that longer-lasting characteristics prevent us from denying moral standing to persons like Terri, the
proponent of the PCV-LV hybrid should note that she must also accept that the PCV-LV hybrid
also accords moral standing to some things to which we would not usually like to accord it, e.g.,
plants and cancer cells.24
The final point I will make against the PCV-LV hybrid view is that we do not typically assume
we can only have moral obligations (the result of moral standing) to those who are presently living.
For instance, you might think it utterly wrong to remove the organs from a dead person without her
prior consent. Of course, I am ultimately arguing against a similar kind of behavior toward animals,
and I do not want to engage in any circular reasoning. This point merely suggests that the PCV-LV
22 One
response might be: “They are life-giving, and that is what makes them important.” This will take us nowhere
fast: why are life-giving functions important? is the question for which we seek an answer.
23 This might not even be right: someone can presumably be what we would usually call ‘living’, while not, at any
particular moment in time, be performing all of the functions we have said make up life.
24 This point is drawn from Regan, 1983, p. 242.
68
view is less intuitive than it may seem.
In sum, I think we can reject the LV because it is a form of the PCV, and we have found nothing
to suggest that life is different from the standing-conferring characteristics which we used in our
argument against the PCV. Put simply, we are now in a good position to say that the absence of
any characteristic, standing-conferring or not, in a subject at some time T1 is not a good reason to
deny her moral standing at T1 , or flip off her standing-switch at T1 .25
One final question to address is the question that was raised in (b), in Section 3.3.1. We saw
there that those who like the LV may like it for one more reason not yet addressed. Someone who
is not living, you might think, cannot be a subject, and so cannot be a subject of moral standing.
I will address the claim that moral standing requires a subject in much more detail in Sections 3.5
and 3.5.1, but for now, it will suffice to note that based upon what we have said in Chapter 2 about
animal corpse survivalism, death is not the end of the existence of an animal, at least in most cases.
(This matters only if you think the end of someone’s existence is the end of her being a subject,
which I give reasons to doubt in 4.2.1.) Since we are concerned chiefly with making the claim that
eating or otherwise using an animal is a violation of her moral standing, all of the cases with which
we are concerned do have subjects: animals survive their deaths as their corpses, and so if their
moral standing, too, survives, as I think it does, there are still subjects of moral standing after life
has ended.
Still, there are three very good questions related to the LV which remain. The first is about
whether life is morally relevant at all; what I have said here may suggest it is not, but I want to
maintain that it is—it simply is not morally relevant to moral standing, as we have already shown.
The second is about life as an indispensable means to the other standing-conferring characteristics,
and whether this can help the LV. The third is about a different conception of life than the biological
one we have been considering, and whether such a conception might make life more promising as a
standing-conferring characteristic. I address all three below.
25 Almost.
I hold off on addressing two last versions of the PCV until Sections 4.2.1-4.2.2, but neither proves threatening to the RVT or PUAT.
69
Remaining Questions about the LV
I do not think life is not morally irrelevant, even if ‘being alive’ is not a good reason to stop according
someone moral standing. We said in Chapter 2 that it was important to treat someone in accordance
with her phase sortals, and I think this remains true. (‘Living’, recall, is a phase sortal.) Intuitively,
the fact that someone is alive is not morally irrelevant at all: it tells us a great deal about her
functions, and that will lead us right to her functional goods. But the claim that I have made in
this section—that ‘not being alive’ at some time T1 is not a good reason to flip someone’s moral
standing switch off at T1 —is not incompatible with the claim that ‘being alive’ and ‘not being alive’
are morally relevant in some other way. To see why this is the case, let me elaborate upon the
distinction, left implicit until this point, between someone’s moral standing and her good.
As we saw in Section 3.2, there is an intimate relationship between someone’s having a good and
her having moral standing. To say that someone has moral standing, we said there, is to say that
she has a good that is valuable for its own sake. The fact that you have goods, where ‘goods’ means
‘final goods’ or ‘ends’, is the reason your standing-switch flips on to begin with, and this is why
sentience and self-consciousness are so important. But your (final) good and your moral standing
are distinct, even though it is true that your having the former is the reason you begin to have
the latter. Recall that moral standing is that which generates obligations. When I say that you
have moral standing, I am saying that you have a good which is valuable for its own sake, and that
fact creates obligations for me. But the content of these obligations will depend on the content or
nature of your good. Saying that someone has moral standing tells us nothing about what we owe
to her, because moral standing does not depend on the content of her (final) good, but rather on
its existence. Saying that someone has moral standing merely tells us that we do or can owe her
something, and does not tell us what we do or can owe her. Whatever your final good is (or whatever
your final goods are), I am obligated to respect it as long as it really is a final good, because that
is what it is for you to have moral standing. But the fact that you have moral standing only tells
me that you do have final goods for me to respect; it does not tell me what your final goods are, or
how I ought to respect them. Put one final way, I can deduce from the fact that you have moral
standing that you have a final good, but I cannot say what that final good is from the fact alone
70
that you have moral standing.26
Now it should be easier to see how someone’s being alive can be relevant to her good without
being relevant to her moral standing, as we have already shown it is not. The fact that someone
is alive right now may tell us something about her good, or what we owe to her. We will certainly
still need to investigate further in order to say exactly what we owe to her. But from the fact that
someone is alive, I can tell that it is at the very least functionally good for her to grow, metabolize,
respire, self-repair, and so on. (Recall that to say something is functionally good for someone is just
to say that it helps her function well.) The point is this: someone’s being alive tells me what is (at
least functionally) good for her. Take Daphne as an example. I know that I have moral obligations
to Daphne in virtue of her being, or having been, sentient and self-conscious. If she is alive, the
content of these obligations will be different than it would be, were she dead instead. I might owe
her help when she is hurt, or it might be my duty to refrain from thwarting her pursuit of her goods.
If she were dead, I would not owe her either of these things—although I might owe her something
different, as I will later argue.27
Next, let us consider the claim that life is an indispensable means to the standing-conferring
characteristics we might think matter. It is not obvious how this claim might help to support
the LV, but perhaps its proponent thinks it will make a final case for life as a standing-conferring
characteristic of its own. I will respond to it here in part because it highlights something important
about the Permanence View and the LV. We have seen that life can be present in a subject without
entailing that the other standing-conferring characteristics are: Terri’s case is a good example of
this. It seems conceivable, at least, that we could develop robots who, while not biologically living,
could feel, reason, and be conscious of themselves. So perhaps life and the other standing-conferring
26 An
attentive objector might think something like this: Bess, you have just said that life is relevant to someone’s
good; it would not be too difficult, then, to say that life gives someone a good. If someone has a good, this objector
will reason, based upon what we said in Section 3.2, she has moral standing! So life is, after all, a standing-conferring
characteristic. But this line of reasoning is mistaken. Even if I grant that life gives someone a good, life may only
give someone functional goods. And functional goods are not sufficient for moral standing, as we showed in Section
3.2. (In fact, I am fairly sure that this is the case, i.e., that life does give all its possessors a functional good. But it
does not give all its possessors a final good. Plants have life but no final goods, in virtue of the fact that things can
help them function well and so be good for them in the functional sense, but also in virtue of the fact that plants
do not take those things to be good for them.)
27 A particularly nice facet of this understanding is that it avoids the problem we considered earlier about deriving
normative claims from natural facts. To say that helping Daphne when she is hurt is good for her, or that giving
Daphne water is good for her, is simply to cite a natural fact derived from a natural fact (the latter natural fact
being one about what helps her function well).
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characteristics are not so inseparable.
But I do not need to reject the claim that life is an indispensable means to the other standingconferring characteristics in order to make my point. I do not even need to reject the claim that
life is a standing-conferring characteristic to make my point, although I think I have given some
reasons to think that it is not one. It could be true that life is an indispensable means to the other
standing-conferring characteristics and simultaneously be true that the absence of life, like all other
standing-conferring characteristics, is not a good reason to flip off someone’s moral standing switch.
On such a view, life might be one part of the reason someone’s standing switch flips on to begin
with, given that her sentience and self-consciousness may be dependent on it. But that does not
make it a good reason to flip off her standing switch, as we have seen.
Finally, I want to respond to a final objection to my response to the LV in the previous subsection.
Some proponents of the LV, I think, are proponents of the LV because they view life differently than
I have described it here. They see something in life that transcends the biological, and I have only
responded to the LV as a view about biological life. This other view is difficult to spell out or argue
for in any great detail, but I want to try to briefly understand and respond to it here. This view,
I think, is that life has some special quality—maybe sacredness, or inviolability, to draw from Jeff
McMahan—that isn’t describable in terms of functions, or necessary and sufficient conditions for
being alive (things of that nature). There is something about life, or about the living, that inspires,
as Schweitzer would say, reverence in us. If this is the case, I should note that my rejection of the
LV on the basis of its similarities to the PCV will still stand; only my rejection of the LV on the
basis of life as a standing-conferring characteristic at all will be threatened.
My response to this version of the LV is: does the same not hold true of death, or the dead? The
meaningful contrast between ‘living’ things and ‘non-living things’, where one inspires some kind of
reverence and the other does not, does not seem to be between things that are living and things
that are dead. Rather, the ‘non-living things’ that do not evoke in us some sense of reverence are
more likely ordinary artefacts. (When Schweitzer and Regan defend the view that life is a standingconferring characteristic, they contrast living things with always-inanimate ones, not formerly-living
ones.) You might marvel at the way a plant or a child grows, for instance, but are unlikely to
marvel at a table. On the other hand, Iskra Fileva has written that perhaps death inspires a sort
72
of reverence too: when we look down upon those who speak ill of even the least admirable dead,
she wonders whether we are responding to, or acting out of respect toward, the ‘otherworldliness’ of
death.28 While interesting, I do not rest my argument on this point—I do not know how to argue
for it, and Fileva similarly refrains from doing so. It is easier to respond to the ordinary LV, which
can be at least explained, if not also argued for, in great detail. I aimed to do so satisfactorily above,
in Section 3.3.3.
3.4
The Permanence View
To recapitulate, we have seen three different views, the PCV, the Potentiality View, and the LV, each
of which describes one reason we might flip off someone’s standing-switch. We have rejected each.
Without a good reason to flip off the switch of moral standing, I think, we are in a good position to
conclude that moral standing is permanent: that once we properly accord someone moral standing,
it can never be revoked.29
Having heard the points I’ve made about present and potential characteristics, though, you
might wonder if I haven’t been simultaneously arguing for another claim. That claim might be
something like this: the position of someone’s standing-switch at any time T2 is not dependent on
her characteristics at T2 , or her potential characteristics at some time T3 in the future, but rather
on her characteristics at an earlier time T1 , when she became the subject of her life and so was
granted moral standing. This claim is, I think, really just another way of putting the Permanence
View. But I have not been arguing for the Permanence View as a positive claim. Rather, I have
been arguing for the Permanence View as a negative claim: that there are not good reasons to flip off
someone’s standing switch, and so we cannot rightly do so. I suspect the alternative positive claim
may require a different sort of argument, so I leave this matter aside, and continue to understand
the Permanence View as I have before.
Korsgaard’s view is this: “Once you exist, once your life begins, you have a moral standing that
28 Fileva,
2020.
I address one final view, the Existence View, which suggests that someone’s ceasing to exist is a good reason
to flip off her standing-switch. This view arises naturally as this chapter progresses, so I address it when it does
so. But importantly, it does not pose a threat to any of the claims I make about the moral standing of the dead
animals with whom we are concerned here, or what we owe to them.
29 Later,
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is itself atemporal”.30 Mine is this: Once you have moral standing (once you are the subject of your
life, i.e., sentient and self-conscious), that moral standing is permanent. Your standing switch can
never be flipped off, because there is no good reason to flip it off, and so from the beginning of your
life, you have moral standing which extends as long as the future does. Put another way, if you were
the subject of your life at time T1 , then you have moral standing at any later time T2 , regardless
of whether T2 is before or after your death, while you are in a coma, while you have dementia, and
so on.
It follows from the claim we have just defended—that moral standing is permanent—and the
claim we saw in Section 3.2, that moral standing is that which generates moral obligations, that we
can have moral obligations to a creature after her death. In fact, if she was the subject of her life
(i.e., if she was sentient and self-conscious) at T1 , we can have moral obligations to her at any later
time T2 , in virtue of the permanent moral standing she acquires at T1 .
Knowing what kind of permanent moral standing animals have will help us understand what we
owe to them. For Korsgaard, the exact kind of moral standing subjects of lives (including many
animals, namely, plenty of the ones whose corpses we eat and use) have is standing as ends in
themselves.
I do want to say something here about why, for Korsgaard, animals have this kind of moral
standing, moral standing as ends in themselves, especially because the term ‘end-in-itself’ is undeniably Kantian, and Kant himself did not take animals to be ends-in-themselves. What it is to be an
end in oneself, Korsgaard thinks, is to be someone who matters for her own sake, and whose good
matters for its own sake because she matters for her own sake.31
Korsgaard’s story about why animals are ends in themselves goes like this. We humans are
rational beings, and so in order to properly value anything, rather than just want it, we must value
it for a reason. Ruling out the possibility that things are valuable all on their own, i.e., without
valuers, Korsgaard argues that we start by valuing things that are good for us: we set them as ends.
In other words, we take something’s being good for us to be a reason to value it, or set it as an
end. In taking what is good for us to be valuable, or worth pursuing, we treat ourselves as ends
in ourselves. And we expect others to treat us as ends in ourselves, too: we expect them not to
30 Korsgaard,
31 Korsgaard,
2018, p. 89
2018, pp. 136-137.
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interfere with our pursuit of our ends, and to help us pursue them, when our ends are not in conflict
with their own. (As rational beings, all of our ends ought to be like this.) Korsgaard and Kant
both think we cannot treat ourselves as ends in ourselves, and expect others to treat us as ends in
ourselves, without also treating others as ends in themselves. Since what it is to be an end in oneself
is to be someone whose good matters for its own sake because she matters for her own sake, we can
say that we expect others to treat us as if our goods matter for their own sake, because we matter
for our own sakes. Put loosely, this part of the story goes: I take what is important to me to be
important because it is important to me, and in doing so, I take myself to be important. I expect
others to take what is important to me to be important because they take me to be important.32
But why are we required to treat others this way? It is because they share some important
feature(s) with us. For Kant, these features are our autonomy and rationality. Korsgaard thinks
this is wrong, at least in part. The features that matter when we are considering treating someone
as an end in herself, Korsgaard thinks, are not her autonomy or rationality. Rather, what matters
is whether she has a good: whether she sets ends. After all, when we treat ourselves as ends in
ourselves, we do so because we take what is good for us to be valuable, worth pursuing, an end, etc.
And the other creatures do this too: they also set ends, take what is good for them to be valuable,
and so on. (We saw this in section 3.2.) They can do so because things are good for them, in the
sense of ‘functionally good’. (This is also from 3.2.) So we must treat others who set ends, who
value themselves and what is good for them, as ends in themselves, because this is why we value
ourselves as ends in ourselves.33
You may now interject that this is not quite what Kant had in mind. Korsgaard is quick to
present the idea that there are two senses in which someone can be an end in herself. The first is
the active sense, which requires of beings that they are rational and autonomous. If someone is an
end in herself in this active sense, we must respect her choices not only because they are good for
her, but also because she makes them rationally and autonomously. This carries with it some extra
duties: we must not coerce and deceive her, for example.34 (This should all sound more clearly
Kantian.) This first sense in which someone can be an end in herself is also the ‘legislative’ sense:
32 Korsgaard,
2018, p. 139.
Korsgaard’s longer and more precise version of this same story, see Korsgaard, 2018, pp. 136-145 and Ch. 8
more generally.
34 Korsgaard, 2018, p. 145.
33 For
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someone who is an end in herself in this sense should be able to engage in reciprocal moral legislation
with us. (To see how this all fits together, consider that autonomy, on one popular understanding,
is self-legislation.) I’ll say more about this legislative sense in just a moment.
But if someone is an end in herself in a second sense, the passive sense, we do not owe her duties
of non-coercion and non-deception. Rather, we owe her duties of benevolence: we have obligations
to promote her good. So far, we have been talking exclusively about ends in themselves in the
passive sense: whenever I have said, say, that you can expect others to treat you as an end in
yourself by taking what is good for you to be valuable, I have meant ‘in the passive sense’. To be
an end in yourself in the passive sense, you need only have a good, i.e., you need only be sentient
and self-conscious. And so most animals, and almost all of the ones we regularly eat, are ends in
themselves in this passive sense.
Animals cannot be ends in themselves in the legislative sense, but their inability to legislate
themselves does not preclude them from being protected by moral law. If we are to make reasonable
moral laws about duties of benevolence, they must include animals. This is because the reason we
must have duties of benevolence to begin with is that we expect them ourselves, in virtue of our
having things which are good for us and also taking those things to be good for us. If our moral
laws about benevolence are to apply to other humans in virtue of the fact that they share this trait
with us, the same laws must also apply to animals. This all comes from the story we told above.
The way to treat someone as an end in herself in the passive sense is perhaps unsurprising, since
it follows from Korsgaard’s understanding of the term ‘end in itself’. All we must do for creatures
who are ends in themselves in the passive sense is to treat their goods as valuable for their own
sake: to help them pursue these goods when we can, for instance. In doing so, we treat these
creatures themselves as valuable for their own sake: as ends in themselves. Valuing animals as ends
in themselves, then, is as simple as valuing what is good for them, and actively treating them in
ways consistent with their good.35
Now I can state my view, the Permanence View. Anyone who was once the subject of a life—a
sentient, self-conscious creature, and so one with a good—has permanent moral standing as an end
in herself. We showed earlier (in Section 3.3) that moral standing must be permanent. We showed
35 Korsgaard,
2018, p. 219.
76
in Section 2 that animals are subjects of lives, and so have moral standing. And we’ve just shown
here that that permanent moral standing animals have takes the form of standing as an end in itself.
It follows, then, from this and what we have said about treating ends in themselves in accordance
with their good, that we ought to continue to treat animals in accordance with their good, even
after they are dead.
Having seen what it is to treat creatures in accordance with their moral standing as ends in
themselves, we can address a lingering worry about Terri, which is that if we accept that she has
(permanent) moral standing, we might not be permitted to do what the real Terri Schiavo’s parents
did—remove Terri’s feeding tube and allow her to die. But, of course, removing her feeding tube
and allowing her to die may have been the best way for her parents to treat her in accordance with
her good. By all accounts of the real case, it seems that it was the way to treat her with dignity,
and as an end in herself rather than a object and a topic of highly politicized debate.
There is one more worry to address here. It is not clear, you might think, why an animal’s
moral standing as an end in herself should be permanent. You might wonder, in other words, why
her moral standing should not change at the time of her death. This, I think, is a good time to
refer back to Section 3.3.3, where I explained the difference between moral standing and the content
of moral obligations. To say that someone has moral standing, recall, is to say that we can have
obligations to her, but is not to say anything about the content of those obligations. So, as we said
there, it seems obvious that the content of our obligations to some being will change after she has
died. However, it is not clear why her moral standing itself should change, and an objector wanting
to claim that it should will have to provide an argument for that claim.
Making matters more difficult for this objector is the fact that our ethic of respect for the dead
is typically deontological in nature: we do tend to view the dead as ends in themselves in the sense
that we dislike the idea of instrumentalizing them, e.g., for food or clothing. This is of course a point
about humans, and one to which we will return in Chapter 5. But it is not obvious why it should
fail to apply to animals, given that animals and humans each have standing as ends in themselves
during their lives. This, remember, must be the case: we have to treat humans as ends in themselves
because we wish for the same, and we wish for the same on the basis of a trait we share with the
other animals (having a final good). Put simply, this point about the dead is: our practices suggest
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that the moral standing the human dead have is as ends in themselves; if the reason they have this
sort of moral standing is because they had it during their lives, and it is permanent, it is not clear
why animals should lose their standing as ends in themselves at the moment of their death while
humans do not.
3.4.1
Instrumentalizing and the Good
Here I want to be a bit clearer about the relationship between not instrumentalizing a creature and
treating her in accordance with her good. This will all be important in the next subsection, 3.4.2.
In Section 3.4 just above, we saw why animals are ends in themselves (in the passive sense).
Animals are ends in themselves in the passive sense for the same reason you and I are ends in
ourselves in the passive sense: we all set particular things that are good for us, since we are after
all the sorts of beings for whom things are good or bad, as ends. We, in other words, have final
goods. When we do this, we want others to refrain from interfering in our pursuit of these ends,
and we want help when we need it. This is what it looks like to want to be treated as an end in
yourself: you want others to value your ends. Treating someone as an end in herself, then, just looks
like valuing her ends, but it doesn’t look like valuing her ends for any old reason, or because they’re
good for you in some way. You should value her ends because you value her.36 When you fail to
value a creature’s ends, then, you fail to treat her as an end in herself.37
A very obvious, literal case in which you do not treat someone as an end in herself is that of
instrumentalizing, understood here as using someone as a mere means rather than an end in herself.
Of course, you might say. It seems obvious that treating a creature as a means to an end rather than
an end in herself is failing to treat her as an end in herself. But so that we are not just playing with
words, let me explain how these two ways to fail to treat someone as an end in herself are related.
If you are an end in yourself, remember, you are valuable for your own sake: you are not only
valuable for the ends which you might help someone else achieve. As a result of your value, the rest
of us have an obligation to treat your ends as valuable. When we treat you as if you exist just for
our ends, i.e., as a mere means to our ends, we disregard your ends, and so we disregard your value.
36 Just
so you can see how this might go, you might sometimes dislike her ends and still value her enough to help her
pursue them.
37 Valuing a creature’s ends will not always mean you must put them before your own or those of another creature.
This is because all three of you might be ends in yourselves, all deserving of similar treatment.
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But, of course, it cannot be the case that every time I use you as a means I am disregarding your
ends. For instance, I might use you as a reference on my curriculum vitae, as a means to obtain a
good job. But you might share in that end: you might even have my getting a good job as one of
your own ends. At the very least, you could share in it: presumably there is nothing about your
constitution or your own ends that conflicts with my end of getting a good job.
This is the sort of reasoning, as we shall soon see, Kant seems to adopt; you are using someone
as a mere means to an end when you use her for an end in which she cannot share. You are doing so
even if you use her as a means to an end that does not directly conflict with one of her ‘set’ ends, one
of the things she is presently pursuing: if your end is something in which she cannot share, you are
using her as a mere means. Since ends are ‘final goods’, as we said in Section 2, we can circle back
to Korsgaard’s idea of treating beings in accordance with their good, and see that instrumentalizing
someone, or treating her as a mere means, is not treating her in accordance with her good. To treat
her in accordance with her good is to value her ends because you value her, and if you show disregard
for her ends by using her for an end of your own in which she cannot share, you are showing that
you do not value her by not valuing her own ends. And the last ‘her own ends’ might even make
more sense read as ‘her own good’, since you can use someone as a mere means to an end without
contradicting her own presently-set and pursued ends, just in case your ends are those in which she
cannot share.
So, in the end, it seems that instrumentalizing someone is in fact one way to fail to treat her
as an end in herself. Understood most simply and literally, this is because valuing her as an end
in herself just cannot admit of treating her as a mere means. Understood in a more Korsgaardian
way, this is because valuing her good is the way we treat her as valuable in herself, and valuing her
good cannot admit of treating her as a means to our achieving our own goods, when she could not
possibly share in them.
Having shown that instrumentalizing and treating someone in ways incompatible with her good
come together like this, we are now in a position to talk about eating meat as instrumentalizing,
and instrumentalizing as a violation of an animal’s (permanent) moral standing.
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3.4.2
Animal Corpse Survivalism and the Permanence View
Here I want to make the case that eating or otherwise using an animal’s corpse is a violation of her
permanent moral standing as an end in herself.
Korsgaard, as we have noted, is not writing specifically about dead animals. Some of what we
saw her say earlier in Section 4 cannot be straightforwardly applied to the dead. Namely, while it
seems right to say that an animal’s moral standing as an end in herself persists through her death,
since her moral standing is permanent, it is not clear that treating her as an end in herself after she
has died will look the same way as treating her as an end in herself did while she was alive. It does
not seem obvious to me, at least, what a dead animal’s good is. Korsgaard, drawing on Aristotle,
tends to conceive of what is good for someone as in part related to her natural functions, and so
many of her examples of treating someone in accordance with her good are examples of helping
someone have what she needs to function well: water, food, and so on. It does not seem right to say,
however, that giving a dead animal water or food will be treating her in accordance with her good.
But Korsgaard does make a very useful point in her own case for vegetarianism. She writes that
eating meat
...is about you and a particular animal, an individual creature with a life of her own, a
creature for whom things can be good or bad. It is about how you are related to that
particular creature when you eat her, or use products that have been extracted from her
in ways that are incompatible with her good. You are treating her as a mere means to
an end, and that is wrong.38
Korsgaard tends to refrain from drawing too literally on the Formula of Humanity in Fellow
Creatures, and perhaps that is for the best—it is the Formula of Humanity, after all. But she makes
the point here that when you eat meat or use animal products, you do treat someone who is an
end in herself as a mere means. In fact, prima facie, eating someone seems like a very clear case
of the kind of instrumentalizing that the Formula of Humanity warns against. Korsgaard seems
to realize this, although she has been interested in a looser understanding of our duties to ends in
themselves in discussing other problems in animal ethics. This is why we had to spend some time
talking about instrumentalizing in the last subsection; I wanted to show that Korsgaard’s account
38 Korsgaard,
2018, p. 223.
80
of treating ends in themselves as ends in themselves is indeed compatible with the more literal idea
that instrumentalizing creatures is not treating those creatures as ends in themselves.
Suppose that we set ‘humanity’ aside, as Korsgaard does above, and only talk about instrumentalizing creatures themselves. Is there a case to be made for the wrongness of instrumentalizing
other creatures? I think there is. Let us begin where we left off in the last section. I said there
that instrumentalizing a creature fails to treat her in accordance with her standing as an end in
herself because it disregards her good: it treats her as a mere means to your own good, in which she
could not share. Although it is not at all obvious to me what treating a dead animal in accordance
with her good looks like, in a positive sense, it seems easier to say what treating a dead animal
poorly looks like, based on things like the ends in which she could not share. This is why arguing against instrumentalizing, rather than taking a more straightforwardly Korsgaardian approach,
seems appropriate here.
Let us, then, look at a passage from Kant about treating other creatures as mere means. Kant
writes, in a passage on making false promises:
Second, as regards necessary duty to others or duty owed them, he who has it in mind to
make a false promise to others sees at once that he wants to make use of another human
being merely as a means, without the other at the same time containing in himself the
end. For, he whom I want to use for my purposes by such a promise cannot possibly
agree to my way of behaving toward him, and so himself contain the end of this action.39
Samuel Kerstein notes that many philosophers read this passage as providing a sufficient condition
for using someone as a mere means, or instrumentalizing someone, as I have been putting it.40 The
condition in question, as I suggested in the last section, is that of end-sharing. If the creature being
used cannot share the end for which she is being used, she is being instrumentalized, or treated as
a mere means rather than an end in herself. It seems fairly obvious that no animal, dead or alive,
could share in the end someone wishing to eat her or use her body might have in mind.41 And this
is why eating or using the body of a dead animal is wrong, as a violation of her permanent moral
standing: it treats her as a mere means to an end which she cannot share. As I have said, I do not
know what a dead animal’s good is. But it seems fairly obvious that treating her as a mere means
39 Kant,
1997, 4:430.
2019.
41 I address this worry again, though, in Chapter 4.
40 Kerstein,
81
to an end is a good way to fail to treat her in accordance with her good: it is a good way to use her
for ends in which she cannot share.42
Now we are in a better position to see why the last chapter of this thesis was necessary. An
objector might now suggest that I have made an impermissible move. Treating an animal as a mere
means to an end is wrong, she might agree, but treating a corpse as a mere means to an end, as,
she might grant, we do when we eat or otherwise use animal corpses, is a different matter entirely.
Corpses do not have moral standing, she might say, and so there is nothing wrong with treating them
as mere means to an end. But we have shown that animals come to be their corpses; they survive
their deaths as their corpses, in fact. We have also shown that their moral standing is permanent.
These points, in combination with what we have just said about instrumentalizing, show that eating
or otherwise using a creature’s corpse is a violation of her moral standing. After all, following her
death, she is her corpse. So treating her corpse as a mere means to an end, as we have just shown
that eating or otherwise using her is, is treating her as a mere means to an end.
Parts of Animal Corpses
There is, of course, a point which cannot be ignored. It is fairly rare that we find entire corpses of
animals, and decide to instrumentalize or eat them. It is much more common that we encounter parts
of animal corpses. Will what I have said deem eating just parts of animals morally impermissible,
too?
An animal seems to be more than the sum of her parts, and it seems right to say that, say, steaks,
are not cows. However, it remains true that steaks are parts of cows (since animal corpse survivalism
is true), just as my left kidney is part of me right now. Suppose someone took my left kidney out
in the night, meaning to use it for an organ transplant to which I had not agreed. (Suppose further
that I never learn of this, and I feel no pain, and so on—just so that the conditions are analogous
to cases in which the subjects are dead.) This, I think, would still be using me as a mere means to
an end. First, it is certainly a case in which something is used for an end in which I cannot share.
42 There
is a good question here: are all uses of the dead like this case? That is, can the dead share in any ends? The
answer to this question eludes me, but I do wonder whether there might be ends in which a dead being can share.
For example, one of my ends—one of the things I take to be valuable for its own sake, that is—could be seeing my
children, or my business, flourish. Perhaps that remains one of my ends after my death. But whether there is any
situation in which I, posthumously, am used as a means in order to bring about that end is unclear.
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The question, of course, is whether the ‘something’ used is related to me in a morally relevant
way. Since my right kidney is still here, I do not need my left kidney any more than a dead cow
needs, say, the flesh of her back. But in some sense, the kidney case is a bit misleading. After all,
we have said that animals are their animals. Their animals are their selves. Humans, like me, might
be something else entirely: we might be brains, immaterial souls, bundles of perceptions, and so on.
Instrumentalizing a part of my animal, if I am not my animal, should not be a terrible violation of
me. On the other hand, instrumentalizing a part of an O-animal’s animal is instrumentalizing a part
of her ; instrumentalizing a part of her self. And that, I think, is what makes eating or otherwise
using even parts of an animal’s corpse a violation of her moral standing. My moral standing, as a
human, may not even extend to my animal, perhaps problematically: it may only extend to whatever
it is that I am. But an animal’s moral standing belongs to her, and she is her animal.
It seems to follow from this, and the points made in the rest of this chapter as well as in Chapter
2, that we should practice robust vegetarianism: vegetarianism in all normal circumstances, and
that we also ought not otherwise use the corpses of animals. This is because when an animal dies,
neither she nor her moral standing cease to exist. Rather, she continues to exist as her corpse, and
her moral standing continues to exist, since it is permanent. Using her, by way of using her animal,
and in this case her corpse, as a means to an end, is a violation of that permanent moral standing.
As such, we are violating an animal’s moral standing when we eat or otherwise use her, i.e., her
corpse, which as we said in Chapter 2, is her. To eat or use Daphne’s corpse, or even parts of it, is
to eat or use her, and that is a violation of her permanent moral standing.
3.5
Person-Affecting Principles and the Problem of the Subject
Korsgaard commits at the beginning of Fellow Creatures to something often called a ‘person-affecting
principle’ in the literature on population ethics. Her person affecting principle suggests that everything which is good (or bad) is good (or bad) for someone.43 When she argues that moral standing
is atemporal, she preserves her person-affecting principle by suggesting that the self, too, is atem43 Korsgaard,
2018, pp. 9-12.
83
poral. Korsgaard, then, addresses a major problem in the literature on posthumous harm. That
problem is called the ‘problem of the subject’, and we will see it arise again in response to Joel
Feinberg’s argument for the possibility of posthumous harm in a later chapter. Here, I too have
tried to preserve a person-affecting principle for those readers who might accept it, although we, like
Korsgaard, will have to read ‘person’ quite loosely. (Korsgaard’s person-affecting principle is more
of a ‘creature-affecting’ principle.)
Some philosophers are hesitant to accept person-affecting principles. Others find it hard to
conceive of harm or good being harmful or good without being harmful or good to someone or for
someone. But one virtue of the account I have just presented is that it does not face the problem
of the subject: rather, since animals survive their deaths as their corpses, they are the subjects of
the posthumous harm they encounter. Those who like person-affecting principles will note this as a
virtue of the account I have provided.
3.5.1
What Happens Later?
What I have just said about person-affecting principles might seem too good to be true. In point
of fact, corpses are not permanent: they decompose, and eventually go out of existence. But moral
standing is permanent, as we have said. There is, then, a question about what happens after an
animal has decomposed, although her moral standing remains. To begin with, if you accept a personaffecting principle, you might worry that when an animal ceases to exist, she can no longer be the
subject of goods or harms, and perhaps then can no longer be the subject of moral standing. Then,
you might think, the Permanence View is not quite right: moral standing requires a subject, and
some subjects of lives (and so moral standing) do not exist permanently. One reason to think this
way might be that moral standing seems to come about in virtue of the fact that there are beings
for whom certain things were or are good or bad. You might think that when those beings cease to
exist—even if that does not happen at the end of their biological lives—their moral standing does,
too.
The first thing to note, I think, is that you do not need to accept the Permanence View, word
for word, in order to have seen compelling support for the RVT and PUAT in this chapter. There is
an alternative for which I have not argued. The alternative view is maybe best called the ‘Existence
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View’ (EV). The EV says that a creature’s moral standing ceases to exist when she does, i.e., that
moral standing is properly accorded over the period of time that is a creature’s existence (aligned or
unaligned as that may be with her biological life). We showed in Chapter 2 that animals continue
to exist after their deaths as their corpses, but it seems that when their animals cease to exist, i.e.,
when their corpses decompose or when they are cremated, they too cease to exist.44 But you might
agree that animals continue to exist after their deaths and think that at some later time they cease
to exist, and at that time (whenever it is) their moral standing, too, should stop. Those who like
person-affecting principles, I think, will be drawn to the EV.
But even if you accept the EV rather than the Permanence View, you will still have reason to
accept the RVT and PUAT. The RVT and PUAT are both theses about harms which we do to
animals by way of their corpses, and as long as you accept animal corpse survivalism, the EV will
still be enough to provide support for the RVT and PUAT. It will still be true that when you eat
or otherwise use an animal’s corpse, you are doing something wrong: you are using her as a means
to an end, and that is a violation of her moral standing—the moral standing she still has, because
she is still in existence. So you do not need to accept the Permanence View in order to accept the
RVT and PUAT: you can accept the EV instead.
Note, next, that the EV is a form of the PCV: it suggests that in order to have moral standing
at some time T1 , someone must be in existence at T1 . In Section 3.3.3, we were able to reject
the LV, another form of the PCV, even when faced with the claim that moral standing requires a
subject. We were able to do so because animals survive their deaths as their corpses, and so can
be the subjects of moral standing even when they are not alive. Here, though, we are faced with a
different challenge; even though life is not necessarily the end of existence, existence is the end of
existence. And if you think existence is required of someone in order that she be a subject, you will
44 As
an interesting but somewhat tangential question, you might wonder whether cremating an animal is a violation
of her moral standing. This really seems to turn on why you cremate an animal: are you using her as a means
to an end in doing so, or somehow otherwise not treating her in accordance with her good? If the answer is ‘no’,
then cremation should be just fine, even on the Permanence View supplemented with the thesis of animal corpse
survivalism. The only other objection to cremating animals might be that existence itself is a good. But that seems
wrong: some existences are definitely bad, and that is why we have the intuition the procreation asymmetry draws
out: you do not have an obligation to bring into the world a child who would have a good life, but you do have an
obligation to refrain from having a child whose life would be horrible. Existence cannot be a good unless the person
existing can enjoy it. Further, if existence were a good (on its own), we might be obligated to create things all the
time: reproduce constantly, breed our pets and all other animals, and produce as many artefacts as possible. All of
that sounds quite implausible. We’ll return to the issue of cremation later when we turn to Joel Feinberg’s argument
for the possibility of posthumous harm, which, I think, takes up a different position on cremation of animals.
85
have good reason to think that the EV is a form of the PCV not easily rejected by the means we used
earlier to reject the PCV, since existence is relevantly different than the other standing-conferring
characteristics in that when it disappears, someone ceases to be a subject all together. In what
follows, I try to give some possible reasons to reject the EV nonetheless, some of which are related
to its being a version of the PCV and some of which are not.
But there are reasons to accept the Permanence View over the EV. First, someone who likes
the EV will have to say why someone’s going out of existence is a good reason to flip her standing
switch off. Citing a person-affecting principle itself might be helpful here, but one must be prepared
to argue for it. And even this line of defense may not be helpful. You might accept that all harms
and goods have subjects, and that moral standing, related as it is to beings for whom things are or
were good or bad, also requires a subject. But you might also accept that beings need not be in
existence in order to be the subjects of harms or goods, or the subjects of moral standing. Think,
for instance, of the statement that our failure to mitigate or slow the impacts of climate change is a
harm to future people. In making this statement, one implicitly accepts that subjects of harms and
goods need not be in existence in order to be the subjects of harms and goods.45 I will not press
this point here, since I have already shown that it is not necessary for the truth of the RVT and
PUAT that my reader accept it. But I think it is a promising direction in which someone devoted
to the Permanence View and a person-affecting principle might look.
In further support of the idea that we can have duties to subjects not in existence, it might be
worth mentioning just how deeply held our own convictions about the dead are. Most of us, I think,
tend to believe that humans cease to exist when they die. I have not said anything in support of
animalism about human identity, and in fact I have remarked on its implausibility often. So it seems
quite possible that humans do not survive their deaths as their corpses, and perhaps even that they
do not survive their deaths at all. Still, it seems evident that in almost all human cultures, the
dead, and things like their bodies and reputations, are held to be important and worthy of respect.
Murderers who violate the bodies of their victims are seen as especially disturbed and perverse;
speaking ill of the dead is frowned upon; even those of us who are not religious engage in elaborate
rituals surrounding our dead. We dedicate things like books to our dead, carry out their wills and
45 Depending
on your views about when existence begins, saying to an expectant mother that something is ‘good for
the baby’ might convey tacit acceptance of the same idea: something can be good for someone who does not exist.
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last wishes, and feel sympathy or sadness for them when we feel they have been wronged or violated.
For whom do we do these things? If we ultimately do them for ourselves—to aid us in grieving,
perhaps—why do we continue to do them even when they are inconvenient, or in direct contradiction
with our own wishes? Why do we respect the goods and interests of the dead as we do the living?
Another reason to accept the Permanence View over the EV is that the EV is reliant on persistence conditions which may be difficult to spell out in great detail. In other words, in order to
act in accordance with the EV, we will need to know when all beings with moral standing really do
cease to exist.46 We know roughly when animals cease to exist, since I have said a great deal about
their persistence conditions. But I have not said anything about human persistence conditions, and
you might think that such conditions are even more difficult to understand. Further, even if we can
agree on these persistence conditions, they may not neatly correlate with our intuitions about moral
standing. For instance, suppose you think each human is that human’s brain: that humans are the
kinds of things in our world that fall into the extension of the substance sortal ‘brain’. Each of us,
then, persists only as long as her brain does. But then brain-death will presumably be the end of
existence for us. Is it permissible, then, to mutilate the body of a brain-dead object which once was
human?
I hope to have given some reasons against accepting the EV over the Permanence View, but I
should say again that it does not matter to the truth of the RVT and PUAT which my reader prefers.
Assume that you have been convinced by my critiques of the EV, and are now poised to accept the
Permanence View. You might still wonder: what happens after an animal’s corpse decomposes, and
she ceases to exist? Can posthumous harm still come to her?
In theory, I suspect it could. In order to maintain a person-affecting principle (a creature-affecting
principle) while holding that an animal ceases to exist after her corpse decomposes and that her
moral standing is permanent, we will have to accept the line of reasoning I alluded to above: the
idea that someone can be the subject of harm or good without being in existence. This does not
seem terribly problematic: in fact, as we noted earlier, it seems to match up with a typical thought
about having duties to future generations and the dead. We could also talk about something like
‘Daphne’s memory’ as the subject of her posthumous harm or good after her animal, as her corpse,
46 You
might argue that we might need to know only roughly when a creature ceases to exist, and act carefully around
the time of our estimate.
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has decomposed.
But in practice, I am not sure whether animals could be the subjects of posthumous harm after
their corpses decompose. Philosophers who argue for the possibility of posthumous harm like a
certain kind of very intuitive example of posthumous harm, and that kind of example rarely involves
corporeal harm. When we think of animals, living or dead, we are, I think, more inclined to expect
harm that comes to them to come through their bodies, or their animals. Examples of non-corporeal
posthumous harm to humans include things like slander, for instance, or the miscarriage of one’s will.
Philosophers like Joel Feinberg take these to be the paradigmatic examples of posthumous harm.
But animals do not have wills; and if they were slandered during or after their biological lives, it
is not clear that they would know or mind. Of course, this is not to say that slandering an animal
cannot be a violation of her moral standing: plenty of things about which someone cannot know,
and which might not bother her, can be violations of her moral standing. But there seems to be
something odd about saying that slandering an animal would violate her moral standing, however
improper or strange it might be to actually slander a dead, or living, animal. (I suspect no one
would like to hear her dead pet called a terrible menace, or some such thing.)
The point remains: non-corporeal harm is a bit unrelated to the specific harms we are talking
about, all of which are harms to the corpse. This point has some symmetry with the harms and
goods of living animals: if you asked me to come up with a list of things that are good for a deer, I
might list things like water, food, safety, space to move around, and so on. Most of the things that
are good for most living animals are really good for their bodies, or their animals.47 If what we are
concerned with chiefly is treating animals in accordance with their goods, as Korsgaard suggests, we
might think that most of an animal’s goods are related to her animal, and that this will still be true
after her death. It would seem likely, then, that her harms and goods would continue to be related
to her animal, even after her death. On the other hand, there are perhaps ways of instrumentalizing
an animal, say, Daphne, without literally instrumentalizing her, i.e., her animal. This point may still
hold after her death. So it seems at least possible that Daphne could still be harmed posthumously
even after her animal, as her corpse, decomposes.
47 This
equation of ‘body’ with ‘C-animal’ is a bit imprecise. See Olson, 2003, for some reasons we might not want to
say that Daphne’s animal is her body.
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3.5.2
Species Membership and the EV
Let us return briefly to our conversation about moral standing switches. There is one last view to
consider about this matter, but to address it properly, we will need to have the EV in mind; that is
why I have reserved it for this last section. The final view to consider is the Species Membership View
(SMV). The SMV suggests that a creature’s moral standing is accorded to her on the basis of her
membership in a species that is constitutively C, where C is the standing-conferring characteristic
we think matters. I am not going to argue against the SMV; rather, I am going to show that it is
compatible with the EV, and perhaps even the Permanence View, and so compatible with the truth
of the RVT and PUAT, and the argument we have made for that truth.
First, let us see why the SMV might seem, at first glance, incompatible with the Permanence
View or EV. Put simply, you might think that someone’s membership in a species ends at the end
of her biological life. I am going to show that this is not the case, but first, I want to show that the
species membership view is compatible with both the claim that animals have moral standing and
the metaphysical work we did in Chapter 2 regarding sortals.
First, although it has found favor among those who seek to deny that animals have moral standing
in the animal ethics literature, the species-membership variation is not incompatible with the claim
that animals have moral standing. It’s certainly true that some proponents of the membership
variation like rationality as a standing-conferring characteristic, and so say that only members of a
constitutively-rational species (i.e., Homo sapiens) have moral standing. But as we have seen, there
are other possible standing-conferring characteristics; we might instead say that membership in a
species that is constitutively sentient, or even just generally sentient, is the proper basis on which
to accord moral standing.
In that last line, I alluded to the fact that we could seemingly replace ‘constitutively’ with
‘generally’. I understand ‘constitutive’ loosely here to avoid confusion. Saying that some trait—like
rationality—is constitutive of a species might sound a bit like saying that rationality is part of what
it is to be a human, or a member of the species Homo sapiens. But this is not what the membership
variation as I understand it is suggesting. In fact, if it were, the idea behind the membership
variation would be incompatible with what we saw in the last chapter, which, as I show just below,
is not the case. The reason this incompatibility would seem to arise is that many traits we might
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want to call constitutive—like rationality and sentience—are functional. And as we have seen, good
substance sortals should not be functionally defined; we saw in particular, when we examined the
case of Violet, the elderly woman with dementia, that ‘rational’ or ‘reasoner’ cannot be included in
whatever the substance sortal for humans is.
But I do not think the membership variation attempts to identify traits that might make up
substance sortals. That is, I don’t think the membership variation suggests that traits constitutive
of a species answer the kind, persistence, and countability questions we saw sortals answer in the
last chapter. Rather, I think that saying that members of a species are constitutively X, where X
is some standing-conferring trait, must mean something like: the average member of this species
is X, although members of the species can exist without being X.48 I’ll continue to use the word
‘constitutively’ with this understanding in mind.
Now I want to turn to showing how the SMV is compatible with the claims I have made in this
chapter. I do not think species membership ends at the end of someone’s life. In the case of animals,
I suspect, species membership persists as long as the animal in question does. The short way to
defend this claim is to say that all animals are members of some species or other,49 and since animals
survive their own deaths as their corpses, their corpses retain membership in the same species. This
line of reasoning seems promising, but would likely require further elaboration.
A more thorough defense of the claim that species membership does not end at the end of life
might make use of the work we did in the last chapter of this thesis. We saw that what it is to
be an animal is to have the sort of organization that makes one apt for life, as well as some other
intrinsic, structural features, including an internal genetic plan. These features persist through
death. We might simply amend this definition to say that, say, a dog, is a member of the species
Canis familiaris just as long she has the complex organization characteristic of those apt for the life
of a dog, and the sort of internal genetic plan typical of a dog. We might also note some relational
features: someone is a dog if and only if she has been produced by means of reproduction typical of
dogs, and if she is the product of a certain sort of evolution. With all of this in mind, it seems right
to say of anyone who is the kind of thing in our world in the extension of the sortal C-animal that
48 There
might be a connection between constitutive traits and phase sortals very common among members of a
species: reasoner, feeler, etc.
49 In fact, as Jens Johansson (Johansson, 2016, p. 285) writes, we might take “individual whose body is a member of
some biological species” as a “suitably loose” definition of ‘animal’.
90
her species membership persists through her death.
It follows, then, that the SMV can support the RVT and PUAT, providing a sort of intermediate
step between standing-conferring characteristics and moral standing. A dead cow who dies peacefully, for instance, will first have been accorded moral standing in virtue of her membership in a
species that is constitutively sentient and self-conscious, namely, the species Bos taurus. Since her
membership in the species Bos taurus will persist through her death, so will her moral standing.
In fact, her membership in the species will persist as long as she does, if we accept the claim made
in Chapter 2 that species designations are in fact the best substance sortals for animals. That is
because her persistence conditions are dictated by her substance sortal—she literally cannot exist
without existing as a member of the species Bos taurus. All of this is to say that species membership persists in animals who die peacefully at least as long as they do, and so if it is their species
membership from which their moral standing is derived, their moral standing should persist well
beyond their death. In other words, the SMV is compatible with, or a version of, the EV. And as
we have said, the EV can support the PUAT and RVT.
I said just a moment ago that species membership persists at least as long as animals do. I
chose to say this because you might think that species membership can work like sentience and selfconsciousness do in the Permanence View. Late in Section 3.3.3, we said the same thing about life.
Perhaps it is the case that species membership is a necessary condition on someone’s moral standing.
But it could also be true that someone’s species membership is just the reason her standing-switch
flips on to begin with, and is not a reason to flip it off. I have not been talking about the SMV
as a form of the PCV, but it is in fact one, although it need not be. Rather, it could be the case
that someone’s species membership (in a species constitutively sentient and self-conscious) at some
time T1 is the reason we begin to accord her moral standing, and the reason she has moral standing
at any later time T2 , even if T2 is a time at which she is no longer in existence, and so no longer
presently a member of the species in question. In this way, the SMV may even be compatible with
the Permanence View.50
50 Interestingly,
the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, of the Potentiality View, even when it employs the common
conception of potentiality, which we have criticized. The important thing to bear in mind in each case is that reasons
for turning on someone’s standing switch may not also be reasons for turning it off. As we saw in Terri’s case, even
if potentiality (to be sentient and self-conscious, perhaps) were the reason her standing-switch flipped on in the first
place (perhaps before she was born), her presently lacking that same potentiality still would not be a good reason
to flip her standing switch off.
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Chapter 4
The Surviving Interests of Animals
4.1
Introduction
In the last chapter of this thesis, I defended the claim that animals have permanent moral standing.
I showed there that eating or otherwise using animal corpses is wrong in that it violates an animal’s
permanent moral standing, since animals come to be their corpses. Here, I want to defend a very
different kind of argument for the possibility of posthumous harm to animals, which I think will help
us reach the truth of the RVT and PUAT in a new way. This argument may be more appealing to
non-Kantian readers, or those who are hesitant to accept the metaphysical conclusions we drew in
Chapter 2.
The argument I present here begins with an explanation of Joel Feinberg’s argument for the
possibility of posthumous harm. I go on to show that this argument, although developed for humans,
can also be applied to animals.1 Feinberg’s most important contribution is perhaps the concept of a
surviving interest—an interest which survives the death of an original possessor while maintaining
its ability to be the basis of moral claims upon others. After what I hope is a thorough treatment
of both Feinberg’s broader picture and the concept of a surviving interest, I try to imagine the
surviving interests of animals, and the obligations, for us, that may follow.
1 It’s
probably worth noting that Feinberg has written elsewhere about the place of animals in the same sort of account
of harm and interests he gives here. I don’t draw on that argument here, because it is largely concerned with living
animals, but it can be found in Feinberg, 1974.
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4.2
Feinberg’s Argument from Interests
We should begin with an understanding of two important concepts of which Feinberg makes use:
harm and interests. For Feinberg (and, I think, fairly uncontroversially), these two things are
intimately linked. Feinberg’s primary claim is that posthumous harm is possible. In order for this
claim to be compelling, then, Feinberg must make a case for posthumous interests. This is because
he explains harming as follows: “A person is harmed when someone invades (blocks or thwarts) one
of his interests. A person has an interest in Y when he has a stake in Y, that is, when he stands
to gain or lose depending on the outcome or condition of Y”.2 There is no harm without interests,
Feinberg says, because by definition harm is the invasion of interests.
Feinberg has more to say about what an interest is and what it is to have interests. He detangles
interests from wants, which will be important for my later expansion upon his argument. Wants are
not, strictly speaking, necessary or sufficient for all kinds of interests. Some interests, like ‘welfare
interests’, as Feinberg calls them, do not require any wanting at all: someone has them just in virtue
of what is good for her. Health, Feinberg posits, is a welfare interest: it is in a person’s interest
that she be healthy, regardless of whether she wants to be healthy or not. Wanting is necessary but
not sufficient for creating another kind of interest, which Feinberg calls ‘ulterior interests’. Ulterior
interests require of someone not only that she want X, but also that she stand to gain or lose
depending on the outcome of X. This last condition follows from Feinberg’s definition of interests:
recall that what it is to have an interest in X is to stand to gain or lose when X is fulfilled or
thwarted.3
Making use of W.D. Ross’ distinction between want satisfaction and want fulfillment, Feinberg
argues that these two things are not so inextricably linked. In fact, we often have our wants fulfilled
without feeling satisfied (e.g., when we had hoped for X, but X was not all we thought it would
be when we finally got it). We also sometimes feel satisfied without actually having had our wants
2 Feinberg
1977, p. 45
is a certain parallel between the welfare/ulterior interest distinction and the functional/final good distinction,
and the ideas of ‘wanting’ and ‘taking something to be good for oneself’, but it cannot be followed too far without
inducing confusion; Korsgaard’s idea of ‘taking something to be good for oneself’ is not quite wanting, and presumably
we can want things without taking them to be good for us and conversely. Final goods are ends we set for ourselves,
and it is not clear that everything we want and have a stake in (i.e., have an ulterior interest in) also becomes an
end for us. For humans, at least, setting ends ought to be a process guided in part by reasoning; wanting things and
having a stake in them are not quite the same.
3 There
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fulfilled (e.g., when we are deceived into thinking we have received X but really have not). So the
proper account of harm, Feinberg contends, does not accord significance to whether such harm is
felt or affective in any way—whether we are satisfied or frustrated.4 Instead, it accords significance
to whether one’s interests are thwarted or promoted (fulfilled or not fulfilled). In short, harm is not
about interest satisfaction, so to speak, but about interest fulfillment. In accordance with Feinberg’s
own terminology, we can call this position about harm and interests a kind of objectivism.5 The
idea is that harm does not depend on your subjective experience of being harmed, but rather on
whether, objectively speaking, your interests have been thwarted.
Now, it may still seem doubtful, even with this objectivist framework in place, which allows
for what I’ll later call ‘non-affective’ harm (harm that doesn’t affect its subject, phenomenally or
otherwise), that the dead could be harmed. For presumably someone, or something, must be the
subject of harm, and the dead, as George Pitcher puts it, are ‘just so much dust’. Feinberg has
an answer for this: we ought to think of interests, not persons, as the subjects of harm. When
we talk about persons being harmed, Feinberg suggests, we are really speaking ‘elliptically’—it is
their interests that are harmed, and they are harmed as a result of that.Feinberg writes about this
‘elliptical’ way of speaking as follows. If I punch you and break your nose, what I have really done
is harm your interest in maintaining the integrity of your nose, and I have harmed you, in a sort of
roundabout way, by harming your interest in the integrity of your nose. After someone is dead, her
‘surviving’ interests can still be harmed—what it is to be a surviving interest is to be an interest
available for promotion or thwarting after death.6 Some of her interests, about things like pleasure
she wants to experience, will not survive her death, but others, such as her interest in having a
good reputation after she dies, will. And those interests can be the subjects of harm long after their
original possessor (the antemortem person who had the interest s in question) is gone. In other
words, some interests can be harmed postmortem, because “the area of a person’s good or harm
is necessarily wider than his subjective experience and longer than his biological life”: he can have
4 In
tagline form: What matters is that you get what you want, not how you feel when you get it.
1977, p. 63. Notably, Feinberg is not an objectivist about well-being in general; as we said earlier, he
does think some interests, namely ulterior interests, require desire on the part of the interested party. Only welfare
interests indicate some commitment to objectivism about well-being on Feinberg’s part It’s worth noting, though,
that welfare interests will play a greater role in my expansion of Feinberg’s argument than will ulterior interests.
6 Feinberg, 1977, p. 64
5 Feinberg,
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interests available for harm or promotion after his death.7 One final way of putting this is that
Alice’s having had an interest in X at time T1 makes it possible for her interest in X to be harmed
at time T2 , where T1 is during her life and T2 is after her death, as long as her interest is of the
kind which can survive her death (I will say more about this in [later]). Putting Feinberg’s point in
this way also eliminates worries about backward causation that can sometimes accompany accounts
of posthumous harm.
Feinberg has more to say to motivate the possibility of posthumous harm to antemortem interests.
He offers three cases for our consideration. Case A features a man who devotes his life to a certain
cause and founds an institution in order to further it. He has an interest in this institution’s continued
flourishing. It collapses a month before he dies, but his friends deceive him into thinking this is not
the case, and he dies happily, without knowledge of this collapse. Case B is identical to Case A save
for the fact that the man’s institution flourishes until his death, after which it collapses. Feinberg
wants to suggest that there is no relevant difference between these two cases. We should say, in both
cases, that the man’s interests have been harmed, even though the man is no longer alive at the
time of his interests’ being harmed in Case B, or risk saying, against our intuitions, that the man’s
interests have not been harmed in either case.
What happens here, in greater detail, is that Case A gets us to agree with Feinberg that not all
harms are affective: that we need not feel differently in order that it be true that our interests have
been harmed. This point reinforces the earlier distinction we saw Feinberg make between interestfulfillment and interest satisfaction: what matters is not that you feel differently when your interests
are harmed or helped, but that your interests have been harmed or helped. Since we want to say
that Case A really is a case of harm, Feinberg thinks, we’ll also have to agree that Case B is a case
of harm, even though posthumous harm, by nature, cannot have an affective character; the dead
cannot feel satisfied or hurt. Feinberg thinks there is only one relevant difference between Cases A
and B left to address, and he raises Case C in order to do so.
In Case C, the facts are the same as in Case B, but the collapse of the man’s institution is caused
by a group of “malevolent conspirators” who spread rumors about the man and his institution,
betraying his trust and leading to the “ruin of his interests”.8 Case C is meant to address the
7 Feinberg
8 Feinberg
1977, p. 64
1977, p. 67
95
problem of the subject, which we saw arise in Chapter 3 of this thesis, too. Feinberg claims that
there can be no ‘problem of the subject’ in Case C; if his objector had been concerned about Case
B for this reason, Case C is a response. For, Feinberg says, in Case C it is clear that something
wrong has been done, and to whom could it have been done, besides the man, elliptically, through
his interests? He writes:
When a promise is broken, someone is wronged, and who if not the promisee? When a
confidence is revealed, someone is betrayed, and who, if not the person whose confidence
it was? When a reputation is falsely blackened, someone is defamed, and who, if not the
person lied about?9
Let me make some comments about Feinberg’s argument. Primarily, he seems to be trying to
make a case for something we might call nonaffective harm.10 The point of the first argument I
explained seems to be that (a) harm is about thwarted interests, not about feeling unsatisfied when
you believe (rightly or wrongly) that your interests have been thwarted, and that (b) it is legitimate
to talk about interests, instead of persons, as being harmed, especially because harm need not affect
someone’s felt condition in any way. The point of the second argument (the argument by analogy)
which I explained seems to be to reinforce claim (a) from above by showing that harm can come
to a person’s interests without that person knowing about the harm in question, and to show that
nonaffective harm during a person’s life is no different than posthumous harm, which is by nature
nonaffective.
4.2.1
Feinberg’s Argument and the Problem of the Subject
Note that Feinberg’s argument is fairly different from the one I gave in the last chapter. Perhaps
most notably, Feinberg thinks of interests as the subjects of harm, and so his case for posthumous
9 Feinberg,
1977, p. 68.
possibility of nonaffective harm as something bad is inherently incompatible with hedonism, a view about
well-being. I do not take this to be a major problem for Feinberg’s view, and suspect that hedonism is not widely
held to be true, especially in light of some compelling defeaters, like Nozick’s ‘Experience Machine’. There are
also some philosophers, like Ernest Partridge, who deny the possibility of nonaffective harm, in order to argue
against posthumous harm as Feinberg conceives of it. I won’t engage further with this view here, but the case
for nonaffective harm can be bolstered with more thought experiments. A friend of mine likes this one: Suppose
there are two worlds, D and E. In each world, you’ll have many friends, who will bring you great joy. In World D,
however, they all secretly hate you, although you never learn it, and of course your felt experience is the same. In
World E, your friendships are all genuine. In which world would you rather live? (The point is that presumably
you have an interest in genuine friendships, and it matters to you whether this interest is thwarted or not—not just
that you feel as though it’s not thwarted.)
10 The
96
harm need not turn on whether a person or an animal survives after her death, but rather whether
her interests do: whether they are still available for promotion or thwarting. By contrast, we saw
that the argument I gave in Chapter 3 relied on the metaphysical conclusions I laid out in Chapter
2. This is, I think, a very good time to remind my reader that the arguments I give in Chapters 2
and 3 are not meant to be compatible with the argument I give here; rather, these arguments are
meant to appeal to different readers with different convictions, prior commitments, and intuitions.
Of course, Feinberg’s argument has still met some of the same kinds of objections we saw in
the last chapter. James Stacey Taylor, for instance, has charged Feinberg with responding to the
problem of the subject insufficiently.11 This, I think, is not an unfounded concern. Feinberg favors
the point that interests rather than persons are the subjects of harm, but also thinks that persons
can (only) be harmed through the thwarting of their interests.12 When he discusses posthumous
harm, he prefers the former point to the latter, but realizes that those who do not like the idea of
interests as the subjects of harm rather than persons may still need persuading, and this is why he
brings to our attention Case C.
It is not immediately obvious, though, that those who like person-affecting (or creature-affecting)
principles, or those who are concerned with problems of the subject,13 will be convinced by this
reasoning. Feinberg asks us a bit of a leading question: Who is the subject of the harm that
happens in Case C? He wants us to respond, as we saw, that the man is the subject of the harm
which comes to him by way of his thwarted interests. But let us pause to consider how this could
be right.14
Call the man in Case C ‘Cal’. How could it be the case that Cal is harmed by the thwarting
of his interests? One possibility is that Cal exists after his death. Another possibility is that Cal
doesn’t exist after his death, but can still be the subject of harm when he is not in existence, as
11 Taylor,
2005.
pp. 67-68.
13 I tend to think these two groups have a lot of overlap, but Feinberg is writing in the 1970s, and so he only responds
to the latter group by name. To my knowledge, talk of ‘person-affecting principles’ started later, in the population
ethics literature, and rose to prominence with Parfit, 2017.
14 I should note that, despite their name, person-affecting principles should not be taken to prioritize affective harms
exclusively. Korsgaard’s, for instance, states that everything which is good (or bad) is good (or bad) for someone.
Something can be good (or bad) for you without your knowing about it, and without its changing your condition.
(Korsgaard does not say ‘everything which is good must feel good for someone’, and Kantian accounts tend to be
fairly amenable to nonaffective harm in general, since they aren’t concerned with pain and pleasure above all else.)
For instance, you might take monogamy to be good for you, and set it as an end, in Korsgaard’s language. If your
partner is unfaithful, then, she has hindered your good, or end, even if you never learn that she has done so.
12 Feinberg,
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we discussed in the last chapter. A final possibility is backward causation: antemortem Cal is
harmed by the thwarting of his antemortem, surviving interests, although the time at which those
interests are thwarted is after his death. Feinberg gives no indication that he accepts the first or
third possibilities, and since they would probably require a good deal of further argument on his
part, I take it that he accepts the second. The longer quote we saw above, I think, is supposed to
serve as his argument for the second possibility. He seems to take it that certain harms—breaking
promises, for instance—require a subject, and concludes from this point that the best candidate
subject of the harm that indubitably happens in Case C is Cal, through his interests. He concludes,
then, that those who are concerned with the problem of the subject need look no further: certain
harms that require subjects certainly can come to the dead, and nobody but the dead person in
question could be that subject.
This is a convincing enough argument, but I don’t think Feinberg needs it, and Taylor and others
are ready to push back against it. Rather, I think Feinberg can be content with the point he’s already
made, and the point I take him to prefer: that interests are the subjects of harm rather than persons.
He assumes that some harms necessarily have persons for subjects when he asks who the subject
of the harm in Case C is, but he doesn’t need to: he could simply ask ‘what’ the subject of the
harm in Case C is, instead. There is something nice (simple, perhaps) about the idea of surviving
interests as the reason posthumous harm is possible: we do not need any further ideas about what
it takes to be a subject, or any metaphysical premises about survival of subjects after death. (I say
more about this in the next section.) At a bare minimum, Feinberg’s argument can work whenever
certain interests are available for promotion or thwarting after their initial possessor’s death.
In another way, though, Feinberg can preserve some of the sentiment behind a person-affecting
principle even if he were to refrain from assuming that certain harms necessarily have subjects. One
idea behind Korsgaard’s person-affecting principle15 is that there are not free-floating goods (or
harms): everything which is good (or bad) is tethered to someone for whom it is good (or bad). In
other words: whenever we say that something is good, or better, we must ask: “Good, or better, for
whom?” The way Korsgaard frames her own person-affecting principle suggests that at least part
of the reason she accepts it is in order to avoid statements like: ‘Human lives are better than pig
15 I
draw the interpretation I give in this section from Korsgaard, 2018, pp. 9-17.
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lives.’ (“Better for whom?”) Of course, this is not the only concern which leads her to adopt the
person-affecting principle she does; but it suggests something important about her person-affecting
principle, which I don’t think is totally missing from Feinberg’s account. She means to suggest in
part that the idea of a good, or something’s being good, comes about because there are beings for
whom things are good: as she writes in Chapter 2, “I think that there are things that matter because
there are entities to whom things matter: entities for whom things can be good or bad, in the sense
that might matter morally”.16
In fact, the centrality of interests to Feinberg’s account of harm preserves this thought: interests
arise because there are beings who have them, and if there were no beings for whom things could
be good or bad, there would be no interests. (Welfare interests depend upon what is good for
someone, and ulterior interests depend upon what is good for someone and what she wants.) Of
course, interests do not survive only under the condition that there is (still) someone in existence for
whom they are interests, but they come about to begin with because they are someone’s interests,
i.e., there is no such thing as an interest which never had a possessor. And that idea—that things
are good, or morally worth promoting, because they are ‘good-for’ someone—is part of the idea
behind Korsgaard’s person-affecting principle, too. I think Feinberg’s take on the same matter is
that interests come about because there are beings for whom things are good or bad, and so that
harms and goods come about because there are beings for whom things are good or bad—those are
the beings who have interests. Feinberg just also believes that those interests can persist even when
those beings in whose interest they initially were cease to have them as interests (i.e., cease to be
beings for whom the promotion or thwarting of those interests will be good or bad).17
The Interests-First Approach
Even if you don’t accept a person-affecting principle, or worry about the problem of the subject,
you might think it is strange to talk about interests, rather than persons, as the subjects of harm
for another reason. Earlier, I gave this case, borrowed from Feinberg, to explain the ‘elliptical’
16 Korsgaard,
2018, p. 17.
only way Korsgaard can conceive of posthumous harm while avoiding this same idea is by simultaneously
conceiving of the self (the subject of harm) as atemporal; I avoided the same idea in Chapter 3 by proposing in
Chapter 2 that animals survive their own deaths. Either option, of course, remains available to my reader, to ‘mix
and match’ with Feinberg’s account as they choose.
17 The
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way of speaking about persons as the subjects of harm, through their interests, which Feinberg
likes. If I punch you, breaking your nose, what I have really done is harmed your interest in the
integrity of your nose, and so harmed you. That, you might think, is ‘one thought too many’: I have
harmed you, and that is wrong, period. This example is, I think, on Feinberg’s part a bad rhetorical
choice; felt (affective) harms make less intuitive sense when captured by the interests-first model
than do non-affective harms. It seems better, to me at least, to imagine speaking of nonaffective
harm using the interests-first model. Suppose Pat’s spouse is unfaithful to her, and that she has an
ulterior interest in a monogamous relationship, but that she never finds out this infidelity. It seems
less strange to say in this case Pat’s interest in a monogamous relationship has been harmed, and
Pat has been harmed elliptically. Nonaffective harms do seem to happen in cases like Pat’s, and
the interests-first model accounts for these harms in a way other models (which prioritize affective
harm, for instance) may fail to. It’s also important, as we’ll see just below in this same section,
that we be able to account for harms that just don’t seem to have a subject—untethered harms, we
might call them, as I suggested in a note earlier—and the interests-first model provides us with an
exceedingly easy way to do so.
I sympathize with the idea that this might still be one thought too many, but there are, nonetheless, good reasons to adopt Feinberg’s ‘interests first’ approach. I have already alluded to one such
reason: since Feinberg thinks interests can survive without being tethered to a person, he doesn’t
need to adopt any metaphysical premises in order to talk about posthumous harm. That is, since
Feinberg thinks interests survive death and interests are the subjects of harm, he can sensically talk
about posthumous harm without also showing that the subject of the harm still exists (as her corpse,
or her soul, etc.) after her death. Whether you think interests are good candidates for being subjects
of harm is a different matter, and one we addressed above. The point is that if you accept that interests are the subjects of harm, a virtue of Feinberg’s argument, despite the one-thought-too-many
objection, is that it allows us to conceive of posthumous harm with a subject, while simultaneously
rejecting the idea that beings continue to exist after their deaths.
You might wonder whether there is a symmetrical consideration about the interests of unborn
generations. Later, I’ll talk a bit more about prenatal beings, like fetuses—beings who have started
to take shape already—but right now let’s talk just about future people, who haven’t been conceived
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yet. A natural thought, and one we saw in Chapter 3, is that we have an obligation to members
of future generations to mitigate or slow the impacts of climate change, and if we do not fulfill this
obligation, we will harm them. This sort of thought might be best supported by an interests-first
approach; we can simply say that it is in the interest of future people that they inherit a planet
suitable to inhabit, and thwarting this interest, or failing to promote it, is a harm to them.
In the last section, 4.2.1, I said that Feinberg’s argument could preserve some of the force behind
Korsgaard’s person-affecting principle. I wrote that goods and harms come about, on Feinberg’s
account, because of interests, which are necessarily had by beings for whom things can be good
or bad: both because interests to not arise out of nowhere (they always begin as ‘tethered’, i.e.,
someone’s interest) and because you cannot have interests if nothing is good or bad for you—if you
do not have a stake in anything.18 You might wonder if that point is incompatible with what I
have just said about future people. But it is not, or at least cannot be said to be so without further
argument. Rather, we might accept that future beings are beings too, and things can be good or bad
for them just as things are good and bad for those of us in existence right now. The only difference
is that we cannot say exactly who they are, or point them out, and so it may be easier to talk about
harming their interests, or harming them by way of their interests, rather than harming them.
It also seems possible that interests only become the subjects of harm once there is no person
to be the subject of harm. In other words, perhaps we need not always think of harm coming to
interests first and persons second. One plausible thought is that during your life, since you are
available to be harmed, you are the first subject of the harms that come to you, while your interests
are the reasons harm comes to you. When you are alive, we could say: “I harmed you in punching
your nose, and it was a harm to you because you had an interest in maintaining the structural
integrity of your nose” (be it a welfare interest or an ulterior one). After your death, since your
interests survive you, but since perhaps you do not survive your own death, your interests become
the ‘first’ subjects of the harm that comes to you. This is a bit like another way of speaking we saw
in the last chapter, when I proposed that perhaps when Daphne’s corpse ceases to exist, ‘Daphne’s
memory’ becomes the subject of harms that come her way.19
18 Recall
the definition of interests we gave in Section 4.2, as well as the understandings of welfare and ulterior interests
we reached there.
19 We have been talking a lot about the presence of interests without the existence of their initial possessors, and in
fact this is a central idea for Feinberg. The blanket term I suggested in Section 4.2, ‘nonaffective harm’, might now
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4.3
Expanding Feinberg’s Argument to Animals
It is not difficult to get from Feinberg’s claim, which is that posthumous harm is possible, to a
conclusion about moral obligations to the dead. In fact, all we need to add is this: if someone or
something can be harmed, we ought not harm that being or thing, ceteris paribus. It seems clear
that this is true. And so we ought not harm the surviving interests once belonging to the deceased.
Later, I will give surviving interests a much more thorough treatment, but for now, I want to merely
reiterate what I said earlier: put quite briefly, surviving interests are just those interests available
for promotion or thwarting after the death of their original possessor.20
Suppose we accept Feinberg’s argument, granting all of his premises as well as the additional
one above. In order to see what moral obligations follow with regard to the interests of the animal
dead, we should take a look at the way moral obligations follow with regard to the interests of the
human dead. These obligations will not be to the dead themselves. Rather, they will be obligations
to the interests of the dead, or, perhaps, obligations with regard to the dead, elliptically, through
their surviving interests.21
Any moral obligations with regard to the dead which follow from Feinberg’s argument will be
determined by the surviving interests of the being in question. Adult humans often create wills at
some point prior to their deaths; it seems reasonable to think that what is expressed in someone’s
will is indicative of her surviving interests. But we mustn’t be too quick to generalize from this
point. After all, many humans do not leave wills; those who do may leave important surviving
interests out of their wills. And yet we still try to treat our dead in accordance with something like
their surviving interests: we try to treat them in accordance with our best approximations thereof.
In short, we almost always face some degree of uncertainty when we are attempting to promote or
refrain from thwarting the surviving interests of the dead, because we are almost always uncertain
about their surviving interests, since we cannot communicate with them.
Take a case even more uncertain than that of an adult with a vague will. Very young infants seem
seem a bit misleading: nonaffective harm might imply the presence of a subject who could be affected, but is not,
for whatever reason. It might be better to speak of ‘untethered harm’ when we discuss harm without a subject
in existence at the time the harm occurs—when we discuss posthumous harm, and harm to future persons, for
instance.
20 Feinberg, 1977, p. 64.
21 I say ‘perhaps’ in case my reader is still concerned about the problem of the subject, or thinks we cannot have
obligations to those not in existence, despite my argument against this claim in Chapter 3.
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to lack a concept of death, as well as future-regarding ulterior interests (which, remember, require
wanting). These two things make infants quite similar to animals, who also at the very least seem
to lack a concept of death,22 and more controversially may lack future-regarding ulterior interests.23
And yet when an infant dies, we are not quick to suggest that since we are unsure about her
interests, and since she might be tasty, we ought to eat her. Rather, when an infant dies, we take
her surviving interests to be similar to ours, or at least not in contradiction with them. Is this action
right, strictly speaking? It may be objected that treating the infant dead respectfully—refraining
from eating them or throwing their bodies away—is merely a matter of norm, law, or tradition,
rather than a matter of moral right and wrong. But if this were the case, we would be committed to
saying that throwing away the bodies of the infant dead or eating them would only be wrong insofar
as it were illegal or culturally impermissible. And I think we have the intuition that these things
are morally wrong, not just illegal or unconventional, and would be wrong in societies different from
ours. Intuition, then, suggests that to treat a dead infant as if she has no surviving interests is
morally wrong.
I bring up the infant dead to emphasize this point: infants are relevantly similar to animals,
and although we are uncertain about the surviving interests of the infant dead, we do not treat them
as if they have none. We often do, on the other hand, treat animals as if they have no surviving
interests. I am not saying we should treat the infant and animal dead the same way. The exact
stance we take up with regard to the infant dead24 cannot be straightforwardly transferred to the
animal dead. Our best approximations of the surviving interests of infants seem to be informed by
the humanity we share with them. This is to say that we need not treat the infant and the animal
dead equally, because we are not equally uncertain in each case, or if we are, the uncertainty about
animal interests may be of a different kind. However, we can take the principle from the case of
infants and apply it to the case of animals. We do not merely treat infants (or humans of other ages)
as lacking surviving interests because we are uncertain about what their interests might be. Since
animals and infants are in much the same predicament after they have died, it is not clear why we
22 I
ignore, for the the purpose of this thesis, fascinating phenomena like mourning among great apes—since they are
not the creatures we eat.
23 The issue of animal interests about the future has been of much interest to many philosophers since Animal
Liberation. See Coetzee 1999, pp. 85-91, where Peter Singer signals his views may have changed on this topic.
24 I want to remain vague about exactly what this stance is.
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should treat the former group as lacking surviving interests all together, while we do not treat the
latter as such.
There is an obvious point worth making, as is often the case in philosophy, which is that it seems
implausible (almost impossible, perhaps) that animals have a surviving interest in their being eaten
or otherwise used. The idea of responding to this point is that you might wonder, even if you agree
that we should not treat animals as if they have no surviving interests at all, whether they might
have a surviving interest in being eaten (or otherwise used). But aside from the cow we meet at the
Restaurant at the End of the Universe, who implores diners to enjoy ‘parts of [his] body’,25 it seems
fairly obvious that animals do not have interests in being eaten: it is not clear that they understand
what it is to be eaten, so it is not clear that they could want to be eaten.26 And further, they
seem to have a contrary welfare interest in not being eaten. I haven’t yet said more about surviving
interests, but it seems clear that this interest can be thwarted or promoted after the death of the
animal who once had them: we do eat and use animal corpses all the time, after all. So not only
does it seem absurd to imagine that animals want to be eaten (or otherwise used); it also seems that
they have surviving interests against being eaten (or otherwise used).27
Now let us return after this brief interlude to the ideas of animals and infants with uncertain
interests. It seems to me that what we do with the uncertainty we face in infant cases can be a
helpful guide to what we ought to do with the uncertainty we face in animal cases. I want to say
more about this in a moment, but first, I want to explain why I think we could probably stop
here—why we might already have said enough to draw tentative support for the RVT and PUAT.
25 I
thank Laura Ruetsche for bringing this passage, from Adams, 1980, Chapter 16, to my attention. One could
write an entire philosophy paper on this passage, which I stop short of doing here, although I will note that our
earthling protagonist thinks it “horrible” and “revolting” to imagine eating an animal who wants to be eaten, while
his alien companion says: “Better than eating an animal that doesn’t want to be eaten”. For my part, I don’t find
the thought of an animal so indifferent or amenable to her own destruction so much horrible as inconceivable, and
perhaps that is part of the (ironic) point of the passage.
26 Even if they did have this interest, they certainly don’t communicate it to us: we’d have no basis for treating it like
an interest laid out in someone’s will.
27 Bear with me: Christine Korsgaard quotes Peter Singer quoting Leslie Stephen as saying: “The pig has a stronger
interest than anyone in the world in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at
all.” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 201.) What’s wrong with this line of reasoning? Korsgaard writes: “Who is ‘the pig’ who
supposedly has a particular interest in the demand for bacon? No actual particular pig has a (positive) interest in
the demand for bacon. The demand for bacon is going to get her killed. Even if the pig owes her life to the demand
for bacon, and in that sense we think of her as having benefited from it, she would still be better off if everyone
became a vegetarian during her lifetime.” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 202.) Korsgaard, I think, has it exactly right; no
particular pig (in the real world, rather than the restaurant at its end) has any such interest. We said similarly, in
the last chapter, I should note, that animals cannot share in the end that is their being eaten.
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Having seen the difficulties that arise when we do not know the content of someone’s surviving
interests, you might think the epistemic position we are in with regard to the infant and animal dead
is bad enough that we should refrain from any action at all. Certainly, you might agree, it would be
bad to conclude that the infant and animal dead have no surviving interests whatsoever. But since
we don’t know what their surviving interests are, you might reason, we should be especially cautious.
You could take up a view like this: If we do not know someone’s surviving interests, we should leave
what remains of her—her corpse, her name, her reputation, and so on—alone. In other words, the
obligations you have to someone who is dead, but whose surviving interests you do not know, are
not determined by the content of her surviving interests, but rather the fact that you do not know
the content of her surviving interests. We can call this the ‘Know Nothing, Do Nothing’ view. If
this view were right, I think, we would in fact be obligated to refrain from eating or otherwise using
the bodies of the animal dead: not taking any action with regard to a dead animal certainly entails
not eating or otherwise using her corpse.
There are problems with the Know Nothing, Do Nothing view: how uncertain about someone’s
surviving interests would we need to be in order to be obligated to leave what remains of her alone?
Could we still move, bury, or cremate corpses, even just in order to prevent unsanitary conditions
in our communities? I don’t doubt that these questions could be answered satisfactorily. But one
reason to reject the Know Nothing, Do Nothing View is that it seems at odds with what we actually
do when we are uncertain about someone’s surviving interests. In infant cases, for instance, or more
generally, when we encounter dead persons about whose interests we have a good deal of uncertainty,
we seem to do something specific: we make inferences about their interests, using the tools available
to us. We think about what they might want, or might have wanted, and try to act in accordance
with that.
In fact, it might be worth noting that making inferences, based on relatively good but imperfect
information, about someone’s interests is not such an unusual thing. It is quite common, and in
many cases morally obligatory, that we make inferences about both the welfare and ulterior interests
of beings with whom we cannot communicate. We cannot refuse to feed an infant because she has
not said: “I need some food now,” and the same goes for animals. Instead, we infer from things like
corporeal and nonverbal cues, our knowledge of the biology and functional goods of the creatures
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involved, and so on, that they have certain interests. We also often infer that infants and animals
want to play, have company, and so on.28 So the ‘inferences about interests’ suggestion I make is
not such a strange one; in fact, we quite often do make inferences about the interests of creatures
who cannot (and even the interests of creatures who can) communicate those interests to us verbally
(or in writing, as a will might).
Here, then, is the full positive point bringing together the claims we have made so far. When we
are faced with uncertainty about someone’s surviving interests (as we almost always are, since the
dead cannot communicate), we should not assume she does not have any. Instead, we should use
the most reliable information we do have to make inferences about what her interests might be, and
so to determine our obligations with regard to her. We do this with deceased humans of all ages,
since we face some uncertainty in all of these cases, although the phenomenon of uncertainty and
inference-making is most clearly present in infant cases. And we ought to treat animals the same
way. The thing which differs from case to case is the information available to us—the information
from which we can make inferences.29
4.3.1
How Far Should We Expand Feinberg’s Argument?
I’ve just expanded Feinberg’s argument to animals. As I noted earlier, Feinberg writes elsewhere,
in The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations, that he thinks animals do have interests—not
just welfare interests, but also ulterior interests.30 In that same paper, he discusses a slew of other
cases: those of plants, fetuses, and special artefacts. I want to address here what I take to be the
two cases most pertinent to my argument: the case of plants, and the case of fetuses.
The worry about plants, I think, arises naturally given the uncertainty argument I just made
about infants, but arises from a misunderstanding of that argument. I should be absolutely clear here
28 We
also make inferences about the interests of average, adult humans, living and dead alike. Sometimes, these
inferences are fairly straightforward: “She practiced Hinduism, so although she did not leave a will, I think she
would want to be cremated.” And sometimes they are more complicated; occasionally they even rely on something
like counterfactual reasoning. “Princess Diana Would Have Wanted Her Sons to Marry For Love”, a relatively recent
ABC News headline states, implying that while the late princess never said anything of the sort, had something
gone differently (perhaps, had she lived long enough to think about her sons marrying) she would have done so.
29 Since the interests of the infant dead are not the focus of this chapter (or this thesis), I refrain from saying more
about what this information might be, save for the example I cited earlier, our shared humanity—as, I stress, a
conjecture. The point is really that we do not have the same tools for making inferences about animal interests as
we do infant interests.
30 Feinberg, 1974.
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about one point I am not making with that argument. The point I am not making is that when you
are uncertain about someone’s interests, or something’s interests, you should not eat her, or otherwise
use her. Rather, I am making the point that when we are uncertain about someone’s (surviving)
interests, we should not assume that she does not have any at all, and rather, we should, and do in
infant cases, make inferences about her interests. Of course, as I said earlier, the information on the
basis of which we can make inferences will vary from case to case, and so similarly will the inferences
we make vary.
Here is why this matters, and how it pertains to plants. I do not deny that plants have interests.
For one thing, I could not consistently do so; I have just said that when we are uncertain about
someone’s interests, we cannot assume that she has none. I was speaking about surviving interests
above, but I see no reason to deny that the point could be generalized to the interests of the living.
Further, welfare interests seem to me, albeit not to Feinberg, about which I will say more in a
moment, especially universal among creatures who were once or are living (and perhaps even those
who will come to live). They work a bit like ‘functional goods’, which we saw in the last chapter.
Recall that a functional good is something good for someone just in case it helps her function well;
as soon as she takes it to be good for her, that same thing which is functionally good for her becomes
finally good for her (and no sooner). Similarly, someone has welfare interests just in virtue of what is
good for her, and certainly some things are good for plants: water, sunlight, and so on, even though
plants cannot take these things to be good for them. So plants seem to have welfare interests, and
we seem to sometimes be unsure about the content thereof.
In a moment, I am going to say why that last sentence might seem problematic for my argument,
and I am also going to show that it is not problematic for my argument because it relies on a
misunderstanding thereof. But let me say something more about plants, functional goods, and
welfare interests before I do so. Suppose that interests are the basis for obligations, as I said at
the very beginning of 4.3 that they could be. It would seem, then, that we could have obligations
to any being with interests, even if she (or it) only had welfare interests. This seems to be the
situation we have with plants: they do not seem to have beliefs or desires, and so it is not clear how
they could have ulterior interests, but they certainly seem to have welfare interests. By contrast,
on Korsgaard’s picture, we saw that functional goods, analogous in some ways as they may be to
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welfare interests, are not sufficient to give us obligations to a creature, since they are not sufficient
to give her a final good. In order to have a final good, she must set ends, and pursue them; she must
also, relatedly, have some sort of sentience and self-consciousness.
So if Feinberg’s argument were that we could have obligations to all creatures with any interests
of any sort, we could have obligations to plants, since they have ulterior interests. This, however,
is not Feinberg’s argument, given that he stands by the commitments he makes in his earlier work.
Feinberg thinks of welfare interests as the ‘indispensable means’ to ulterior interests, implying that
ulterior interests are a necessary prerequisite for the possession of welfare interests. In The Rights
of Animals and Unborn Generations,31 he says more about this idea, suggesting that not only wants
but also beliefs must be present in a creature in order for welfare interests to also become present in
that creature. (Wants and beliefs may not be separable in the sense that a creature may need beliefs
to have wants; Feinberg claims very clearly that they are not separable for this reason.) Without the
presence of beliefs and wants, Feinberg writes there, there are no welfare interests; there are merely
‘needs’ attributed to the things in question (his examples are cars and plants) by us. So thus far in
this section, I have not been quite faithful to Feinberg: I just said that plants have welfare interests,
and I am describing now that he does not think this is right.
The reason I do not pursue this line of argument from Feinberg is that I do not think it promising
to tie welfare interests so inextricably up with wants. It is just not quite clear why welfare interests
need to be construed as the ‘indispensable means’ to ulterior interests, rather than construed as
those things which help a creature function well. This might in fact be a place where Korsgaard and
Feinberg come apart yet again: Korsgaard does not say that end-setting, or having a final good, is
dependent on one’s having wants or desires. We can imagine a sentient, self-conscious creature who
can set ends, but does not want anything at all: on Feinberg’s actual account, we could not have
obligations to this creature, but on Korsgaard’s, I think we could, insofar as this creature could set
ends—perhaps she could set as ends things she knows are good for her, even though she cannot
bring herself to want them, or some such thing. This is one reason I prefer my version of Feinberg’s
account, on which plants and other living things have welfare interests even if they do not also have
ulterior interests, to Feinberg’s version (or at least the one I’ve cobbled together for him, using two
31 i.e.,
Feinberg, 1974
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of his papers on interests). The other reason I prefer my plant-friendly version of Feinberg’s account
is that I cannot hold that when we are uncertain about someone’s interests she does not have any
while simultaneously maintaining that plants do not have interests.
Let us return, after this digression, to the problem plants might pose to my argument if my
argument were misunderstood. I just said that plants do seem to have interests, and we do seem
to be, to some degree, uncertain about the content thereof. Now we can see why the claim I am
not making—the uncertainty-to-not-eating claim—might be problematic for my argument. If I were
suggesting that when we are uncertain about an entity’s interests, we should not eat it, I would
likely have to accept that we cannot eat plants. We are, I do not deny, uncertain about the interests
of plants. But that does not automatically mean we should not eat them; rather, we should try to
make some inferences about their interests, based on the information available to us about them. A
rudimentary understanding of plant biology will help us determine, for instance, that being eaten
and expelled, perhaps by birds or similar creatures, is a good way for plants to spread their seeds
and maximize their offspring. So we may be able to plausibly infer that plants even have a positive
interest in being eaten, although we have no similar information from which to infer that animals or
infants stand to gain from, or have an interest in, being eaten.32 This example illustrates a larger
trend: many things which would be extremely detrimental to, or contrary to the interests of, animals
are in fact well within the interests of plants. Significant ‘bodily’ fragmentation can be very good for
plants, for instance, while the same sort of thing often seriously compromises the well-functioning
of animals. (We’ll consider this further later.) None of this means we should not care for plants:
rather, we should care for plants, but not as we should care for animals, since what is in the interest
of members of each group differs.33
Earlier, we also talked about future persons, in the distant sense: persons who have not yet been
conceived. I said, in Section 4.2.1, that it seems plausible that future persons have interests; this
raises a question about whether conceived but not yet born entities, like zygotes or fetuses, have
interests, too. This seems plausible to me, but a problem about the permissibility of abortion need
32 I
thank Laura Ruetsche for bringing this point to my attention.
should also note here that, as Daniel Herwitz pointed out to me helpfully, this is not what our usual moral
reasoning looks like. We do not think to ourselves: It is actually in this plant’s interest that someone eat it! But I
am not trying to capture our actual moral reasoning: I am trying to explain how we might morally reason, if we
were pressed to do so by an argument that plants have interests.
33 I
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not arise here. For one thing, fetuses seem to lack the desire to be born (or the desire for anything
else), ruling out the possibility that fetuses have an ulterior interest in being born. However, fetuses
might still have a welfare interest in being born.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that fetuses have all the interests that might matter: welfare
interests in being born, continuing their existence, and so on. Still, in order to ward off unpalatable
conclusions about the impermissibility of abortion, we can imagine cases in which thwarting someone
else’s interests in order to refrain from thwarting one’s own will be permissible. This case, for
instance, comes to us from Judith Jarvis Thomson:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious
violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney
ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records
and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so
that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own.
The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers
did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did
it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But
never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment,
and can safely be unplugged from you.”34
The dominant intuition, it seems, is that it is permissible to request that you be unplugged from
the violinist, even though doing so will thwart many of his interests (in Feinberg’s language). It
would be good, or kind, you might think, to remain plugged into the violinist, but doing so is not
morally obligatory. I bring up this example in order to suggest that even if fetuses or zygotes did
have interests which might be promoted by their being born, it still would seem permissible to thwart
these interests. In fact, Feinberg’s broader picture, and its interests first approach, allows us to see
how different the cases of the violinist and the fetus really are: the violinist indubitably has so many
more interests than the fetus, and so many more we might intuitively think are worth promoting. I
am not going to put forth an entire account here of the ways in which we ought to weigh the interests
of two different individuals against one another,35 but it is clear that the intuition Thomson teases
out would certainly need a place in any such account. It seems an uncontroversial point that one
need not thwart a great majority of one’s own important interests in order to promote the interests
34 Thomson,
35 I
1971.
do discuss weighing an individual’s welfare interests with her ulterior interests at the very end of section 4.4.2.
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of others.
You may see already hints of the broader picture I’m trying to paint here. But before concerning
yourself with the implications of this point about the permissibility of thwarting fetal interests for
vegetarianism, remember that we are arguing for robust, not absolute, vegetarianism. There may be
cases in which thwarting the surviving interests of a dead animal is permissible in order to promote
something like one’s own interest in living. But just as we would not take kindly to someone wishing
to unplug herself from the violinist36 just in order that she experience a few moments of gustatory
pleasure, we need not take kindly to someone wishing to thwart the surviving interests of animals
in pursuit of that same gustatory pleasure.
4.4
The Surviving Interests of the Animal Dead
The question to which I will soon turn is: How can we make reliable inferences about the surviving
interests of the animal dead, and what information should we use to do so? In order to answer this
question, I want to begin by taking a closer look at surviving interests more generally.
4.4.1
A Closer Look at Surviving Interests
Before I actually answer that question I just made my target, I want to say a bit more about
what surviving interests are. First, let’s look back at what Feinberg has to say about the matter.
Feinberg writes: “The interests that die with a person are those that can no longer be helped or
harmed by posthumous events.”37 So those which do not die with a person, it seems, must be
available for promotion or thwarting after death, as I have been saying, and with which Feinberg
seems to agree.38
But Feinberg is hesitant to stray from uncontroversial examples of surviving interests. He is quick
to cite as prime surviving interests things like having a good reputation, the triumph of a particular
ideal or cause, and the flourishing of one’s business or children. These are all obviously ulterior
(wanting) interests; Feinberg thinks that only ulterior interests can survive the death of the beings
36 I
refrain from saying ‘abort the fetus’ because as I have said, fetuses seem different from the violinist in at least one
important way.
37 Feinberg, 1977, p. 64.
38 Feinberg, 1977, p. 65.
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to whom they once belonged.39 The interesting thing about this claim is that it is not immediately
obvious why only ulterior interests can be surviving interests, since Feinberg thinks that all interests
available for promotion or thwarting after death are surviving interests.
There is almost an accidental quality40 to surviving interests. I suspect this might be what
Feinberg wants to avoid when he cites only ulterior interests as examples of surviving interests.41
Eventually I am going to talk about there being surviving welfare interests, and the accidental
quality I am thinking of here will seem much more pronounced when we reach that claim. But this
almost accidental quality is inescapable, and we must either embrace it or embrace the unpalatable
conclusions we’ll end up with if we refuse to do so. This is true even if we think only ulterior interests
can survive the death of their original possessor, so avoiding this accidental quality is not a good
reason to think only ulterior interests survive the death of their original possessors. Let me explain
why this is the case.
Here is a good example of the almost accidental quality I think surviving interests have. Suppose
Anna is very invested in having a good reputation; it matters a great deal to her that her friends
and colleagues think highly of her. But Anna dies unexpectedly at 22, without having made a will
or thought about what will happen after her death. Anna, then, never thought to herself: ‘I hope
that after I die, I still have a good reputation’. And yet it seems, since her interest in having a
good reputation can certainly be promoted or thwarted after her death, her interest survives her—
not necessarily against her wishes, but without them nonetheless. And if someone were to spread
vicious lies about Anna after her death, I think we would still consider her interests in having a good
reputation harmed. So even ulterior (wanting) interests Feinberg agrees are certainly the kinds of
interests that survive death end up having this accidental quality in at least some cases. The point
is that we cannot avoid this accidental quality by avoiding considering welfare interests as surviving
interests.
You might now interject that to avoid the accidental quality all together, we should only consider
interests that are specifically about posthumous events ‘surviving’ interests. The problem with this
39 Feinberg,
1977, p. 68.
thank my classmates in Philosophy 401, and especially Lucas Preuth, for originally bringing this point to my
attention.
41 The other reason for his doing so is that they are just more intuitive examples; importantly, Feinberg doesn’t argue
against the possibility of surviving welfare interests.
40 I
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idea is that it means we can, presumably, permissibly slander Anna after her death. Limiting the
scope of ‘surviving’ interests to only those which take the form: ‘I have an interest in X, and X is
something which can only happen after I have died’ will lead us to a number of similarly unpalatable
conclusions. Meg might not like the idea of being mutilated, for instance. And perhaps she even
has an ulterior interest (in addition to the obvious welfare interest) in not being mutilated. But
mutilation can happen before or after someone’s death, unlike, say, cremation.42 We can also imagine
a world in which Meg never thinks about being mutilated after her death—she only thinks about
how much she’d dislike being mutilated while alive. But this doesn’t help my objector’s case; it only
hurts it.
So, if we adopted the idea that surviving interests must take the form ‘I have an interest in X, and
X is something which can only happen after I have died’, we would have to say that mutilating Meg
after she dies might be quite alright. And all of the uncontroversial examples Feinberg cites—having
a good reputation, one’s children flourishing, and so on—are just like Meg’s interest in not being
mutilated: their content includes things which can happen before or after death. So we cannot think,
I do not think, restrict the definition of ‘surviving’ interests to either (a) only ulterior interests or
(b) only interests which take the form ‘I have an interest in X, and X is something which can only
happen after I have died’. We cannot restrict our attention to only ulterior interests since the reason
to do so is, I think, to avoid a problem which occurs in most cases in which interests survive.43 We
can also not restrict our attention to interests which take the form ‘I have an interest in X, and X
is something which can only happen after I have died’, unless we want to face unpalatable moral
conclusions.
Having deemed this ‘accidental’ quality surviving interests seem to have benign, and in fact
unavoidable unless we want to face morally problematic conclusions, we can turn to another question
about the nature of surviving interests. I have been saying, in accordance with Feinberg despite his
not recognizing the full implications of the point, that surviving interests are those which can be
thwarted or promoted after the death of their original possessor. In other words, I have been
suggesting that availability for thwarting or promotion after death is a sufficient condition for an
42 I
suppose you could cremate or bury a living person, too. This obviously doesn’t defeat the point I’m making, but
it also isn’t the sort of thing I have in mind when I talk about interests that are about things which can happen
before or after your death.
43 I address another reason we might prefer ulterior interests over welfare interests as surviving interests later.
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interest’s survival. You might wonder why either Feinberg or I accept this idea.
A good question to ask is about the persistence conditions of interests, so to speak: the conditions
under which interests will fail to survive. We seem to have ruled out the possibility that your interests
exist when and only when you do. But as we said earlier, interests are really stakes: they are things
that matter for you in the sense that you stand to gain or lose depending on their outcome. Recall
also that we said that whether you stand to gain or lose depending on the outcome of X does not
depend on how that gaining or losing will make you feel, but rather whether you will, objectively,
have gained or lost: whether what you want (in the case of ulterior interests), or what is good for
you (in the case of welfare interests), comes to pass or fails to come to pass.
During your life, you might cease to have an interest in X for any number of reasons. If your
interest in X was an ulterior interest, it seems right to say that you will fail to have that interest
when you fail to want X anymore. If your interest in X was a welfare interest, it seems right to say
that you will fail to have that interest when X fails to be good for you, whether you want it or not.
And in either case, if you lose your stake in X—if it fails to be true that you stand to gain or lose
depending on the outcome of X—you will lose your interest in X.
These are all reasons you might cease to have an interest during your life. But could they be
reasons that your interests fail to persist after your death? Take the idea of wanting, for instance.
When you die, of course, you cease to want anything at all. So if we took your failing to want X
to be a reason X fails to be an interest of yours after you have died, you would have no surviving
ulterior interests at all. To some extent, suggesting of each of the reasons listed above that it is a
good reason an interest might fail to survive the death of its original possessor will lead us to the
same conclusion, and we will be left to wonder whether there are any surviving interests at all. If
you think that any interests survive the deaths of their subjects, you will have to agree that the
persistence conditions of interests after the deaths of their subjects are different than the persistence
conditions of interests before the deaths of their subjects.44 And you should, I think, believe that
there are at least some surviving interests, at least if you don’t accept the idea of permanent moral
standing I put forth in Chapter 3. Otherwise, it is not clear how you could account for posthumous
44 This
way of putting things—in terms of ‘persistence conditions’—requires in order to be coherent either a very loose
understanding of ‘persistence conditions’ (different, say, than the one we used in Chapter 2), or an understanding
that interests during one’s life are just different in an important way than interests after one’s death. Perhaps there
are phase sortals for interests, too: ‘living’ and ‘surviving’. I’m not sure the point matters.
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harm, and most of us accept that certain things we might do to the dead are harmful to them, at
least in some sense. If you believe that any interests are surviving, then, as I think you should, you
will need to think that the conditions under which an interest survives during the life of its possessor
and the conditions under which it survives after the life of its possessor are different.45
What, then, are these new persistence conditions? I won’t present an entire picture of the
metaphysics of interests here, in part because I wouldn’t quite know where to begin. But we have
seen many times now that being too stringent about the conditions an interest must meet in order
to survive is not a good way to go about things: it will lead us to reject the idea of surviving
interests all together, and so (Chapter 3’s escape hatch notwithstanding) the idea of posthumous
harm, or it will lead us to call certain intuitively impermissible things permissible (as we saw earlier
in this section, considering interests regarding that which can only happen after the death of their
possessor). You might think, then, that to stay on the safe side, we should think all antemortem
interests survive their possessors. This belief will allow my argument to proceed, so I am happy to
allow a reader who holds it to continue to hold it.
But it seems plausible that there are some interests which cannot reasonably be thought to be
available for promotion or thwarting after the death of their original possessor, even if it is not
logically impossible to promote or thwart them after the death of their possessors. And perhaps
there are interests—like the welfare interest in health or locomotion—which literally cannot be
thwarted or promoted after the death of their original possessor. So I take the condition Feinberg
and I have been repeating—availability for thwarting or promotion—to be sufficient for survival. It
is a nice middle ground between the suggestion that all interests survive the deaths of their original
possessors, and the suggestion that none do, each of which we have shown to be undesirable in its
own way.46
45 There
is an interesting line of argument I don’t pursue here. For objectivists about well-being—objective list
theorists, perhaps—things can be good or bad for you in the objective way welfare interests are, without the
naturalistic connotation of ‘welfare’ interests Feinberg and I have been taking as given. Objective list theorists tend
to think, e.g., that autonomy is good for you, objectively. I could have betrayed ulterior interests all together here
and suggested that while you can no longer want anything after you are dead, things can still be good for you, in
the sense of being objectively good for you that the objective list theorist has in mind. If this were true, welfare
interests (not bound by the confines of some kind of naturalism) would be the only interests which could plausibly
survive your death. This would not be a problem for me: I argue later that the interest we thwart by eating animal
corpses is a surviving welfare interest. But I am hesitant to do away with the idea of surviving ulterior interests.
46 This is another point where symmetrical considerations about prenatal interests, and the interests of future persons,
might be well worth considering. It seems plausible that interests which predate their subjects must meet similar
conditions: that they must be available for promotion or thwarting, for instance, in order to be bona fide ‘predating’
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4.4.2
The Surviving Interests of the Animal Dead
Now I want to answer the questions I posed above: How can we make reliable inferences about the
surviving interests of the animal dead, and what information should we use to do so? My answer
may be surprising, and I want to note that it is not the only possible answer.
In fact, based on the accidental quality we saw arise around surviving interests in the last section,
it seems like a great number of interests may survive the death of their original possessor. Think
of all the interests which can be thwarted or promoted after your death—they include not only the
usual, intuitive ones, like your interest in a good reputation, but also some stranger ones: your
interest in leaving your job, for instance. So suffice it to say that it seems there are probably a lot
of interests which survive the death of their initial possessors; I am going to pick out just one here
and argue that it survives the deaths of many animals, but there are certainly others of which we
could say the same, and which we could similarly use to support the RVT and PUAT.
I propose that the best tools we can use to make inferences about the surviving interests of the
animal dead are their putative surviving welfare interests. This is in part because it seems easier to
determine something that is in an animal’s interest than it is to determine what she wants; even if
you don’t accept all of the metaphysical conclusions we reached in Chapter 2, you can still think an
animal is the kind of creature for whom certain things are just good, and others are just bad. The
former claim may seem perplexing at first. Feinberg’s paradigmatic example of a welfare interest
is health. Health is not a potential surviving interest, because it cannot be promoted or thwarted
after the death of its subject; the dead cannot be made healthy or unhealthy. But some welfare
interests will survive death, precisely because they can be thwarted or promoted after death, and
this is what qualifies any interest as a ‘surviving’ one. We saw this in the last subsection, where
we said that limiting our attention to another group of interests and calling only those ‘surviving’
will not be a very fruitful idea. It is not immediately clear what these surviving welfare interests
of animals might be, but I think that when we consider some very modest proposals about what is
good for an animal during her life, we may have a good chance of inferring something useful.
I submit that one welfare interest we might infer is a surviving interest of at least some animals
is bodily unity, by which I mean the physical integrity of someone’s body. The kind of bodily unity I
interests.
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have in mind is unity at a level higher than cellular, so it is not compromised by, say, cell turnover or a
haircut. It is the significant kind of bodily unity, perhaps defined as that which can be compromised
by serious fragmentation—the loss of a limb, for example. You might think this distinction is hard
to make, but it’s obvious that animals don’t have a welfare interest in not losing cells or fur here
and there.47 In fact, losing matter and replacing it is a central function of animals, and of most
living things—we saw Aristotle and Locke agree with this point in Chapter 2—so it is hard to see
why they would have a welfare interest in not losing any matter at all. However, it’s obvious that
animals do have a welfare interest in the general wholeness of their bodies, and an interest against
losing limbs and being significantly fragmented.
This kind of bodily unity is, as I’ve said, obviously a welfare interest of almost all living creatures.48 It can be promoted or thwarted before death (e.g., by injury) or after death (e.g., by
fragmenting a corpse as we do in order to eat it or make gelatin out of it), so it is a surviving
interest. This interest is uncontroversial and easily inferred, so it is exactly the kind of thing we
should cite as a putative surviving interest. And this is where we might find support for the RVT
and PUAT: eating meat, making leather, and producing gelatin, for example, thwart this interest.
We have an obligation to refrain from thwarting the surviving interests of the dead. As such, if we
accept Feinberg’s argument and this welfare interest as a surviving one, we have an obligation to
refrain from engaging in these practices.
That was very quick indeed. I want to say a bit more about bodily unity, besides that it is easily
inferred, fairly uncontroversial, and in the interest of almost all animals. You might still think that
‘bodily unity’ as a surviving interest seems ad hoc or arbitrary. I want to motivate the intuition
that bodily unity is an extremely important interest for antemortem animals. First, we can be a
bit clearer about why exactly bodily unity seems so important, which will actually turn out to be
instructive. I’ve already implied that one way we could think of welfare interests is Aristotelian: we
could determine a creature’s welfare interests by making inferences from her natural functions, or
47 We
also already make the moral distinction between significant and insignificant fragmentation all the time: think
about the difference between having your fingernails trimmed and having an organ removed. Violating an animal’s
bodily unity posthumously by fragmenting her corpse is generally comparable to the latter example.
48 Plants are an interesting case. They do not seem to have this particular welfare interest in not being significantly
fragmented; it is in their interest, for example, that we remove their dead leaves in order that they may grow new
ones. But they do seem to have other welfare interests. There are also some animal marginal cases—e.g., snakes
who shed their skin. But all the animals we commonly eat have this particular welfare interest in bodily unity.
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the functions of creatures like her (perhaps other members of her species). In other words, a way
to determine welfare interests of an antemortem creature is by looking at what helps her function
well. So many of an animal’s natural functions are related to her body, and the wholeness of her
body,49 that it seems quite plausible that having an unfragmented, unified body is one of the most
important interests an antemortem animal has. Animals also, of course, need bodily unity in order
to pursue their ulterior interests. I should note here that although human interests are not the focus
of this chapter, I do think it is plausible that humans, too, have this interest.
Let’s pause here for a moment to address a worry I think will prove instructive, while highlighting
another reason not to prefer only ulterior interests as surviving. I’ve just said that bodily unity is
important to creatures in part because it helps them function well; the dead do not function. So
how could bodily unity be an interest of the dead? Earlier, in a note to the previous section, I said
that I’d respond to one more point that seems to favor ulterior interests over welfare interests as
surviving interests, and this is that point. I take Feinberg to have this point in mind, too, when he
disqualifies, without argument, welfare interests from being surviving interests. But the trouble with
this point is that we will end up in the same position no matter what interests we call surviving.
Ask yourself why having a good reputation, or having your children flourish, is one of your
interests. It makes me happy, you might think, or it enriches my life, or I care deeply about it.
You can also ask yourself the same sorts of questions about interests that take the form: ‘I have
an interest in X, and X is something which can only happen after I have died’, e.g., “Why is it
important to me that I be buried instead of cremated?”, and you will reach the same conclusions.
Surviving interests are important to the antemortem beings; this is how they come about, and they
do not impact the experiences, functioning, or phenomenal conditions of the dead, since the dead
have neither experiences nor phenomenal conditions, and they do not function. But this does not
‘disqualify’ them, so to speak, from being the sorts of interests which can survive the death of their
possessors.50 The only thing which can make an interest fail to survive the death of its initial
possessor is, as we’ve said, its inability to be thwarted or promoted after the death of that possessor.
So we can see again that there is not a reason to believe that ulterior, but not welfare, interests can
survive the death of their possessors.
49 Her
ear alone, for example, or even her heart or brain, could not do what her whole body can.
if it did, we would face some difficult moral problems like the ones we saw above.
50 Again,
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The very important point, which I am trying to make here and also tried to make in Section
4.4.1, is that surviving interests necessarily come about because the contents of those interests are
important to antemortem, or living, beings. That is why an interest comes into existence in the
first place. Nothing is important to the dead; things are only important to the living. Some things
which are important to the living continue to be important after the living become the dead, but
they do not continue to be important because they are important to the dead. Rather, they come
to be important by being important to the living, and continue to be important because they were
important to the living, not because they are important to the dead. These statements are true
of all interests we might consider surviving. Your interest in (say) being buried is important to
you, a living person: it is not important to postmortem-you, because nothing is. If we say that
interests cannot survive the deaths of their possessors just in virtue of their being important to
those possessors while they were alive, then we will have to do away with the interests picture all
together: there will be no surviving interests. Denying that bodily unity is a surviving interest
because it is important to living beings will mean we must also deny that burial, for instance, is a
surviving interest. Our choices, to put it briefly, are either to be very permissive about what counts
as a surviving interest or to do away with the theory of thwarted surviving interests as the basis of
posthumous harm all together.
I’d also note that I do not think that the only problem with violating an antemortem animal’s
bodily unity is that doing so impairs her ability to function. The concept of bodily unity as I’ve
described it here has some affinities with the concept of ‘animal integrity’, which has been described
by Rob de Vries as concerned with the importance of preserving the “wholeness and completeness”
of animals, as well as their “species-specific balance[s]” and capacities to self-maintain.51 de Vries
notes something from the literature on animal integrity which I think will be helpful in understanding
the importance of bodily unity to antemortem animals. Common examples of violations of animal
integrity include things like docking the tails of dogs, trimming the beaks of chickens, and dehorning
cattle.52 Note that each example seems like a violation of an animal’s interest in bodily unity,
as we have described that above (a violation of bodily unity seems to be marked by ‘significant’
fragmentation). In these examples, de Vries notes, what is at stake is not just the ability of the
51 de
52 de
Vries, 2006.
Vries, 2006.
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animal in question to function well, but also her chicken-ness, dog-ness, or cattle-ness—when we
tamper with an animal’s wholeness and completeness, we interfere with features central to, if not
constitutive of, the kind of being she is. (This conclusion is made all the weightier by the metaphysical
work we did in Chapter 2, but I don’t want to rely on that in this argument.)
Now we can turn to the second case for the importance of bodily unity; this time, the case for the
importance of bodily unity to the dead. We’ve reiterated many times now that all interests which
can be thwarted or promoted after the deaths of their original possessors are surviving interests.
This means that an animal’s interest in bodily unity just will survive her death—no questions asked,
so to speak.53 But although it is not crucial to my expansion of Feinberg’s framework, it may be
helpful to note that the interest in bodily unity does seem, in at least some cases, to be important
after death. This is true even though the reasons the interest in bodily unity first comes about—its
helping a creature function well, for instance—cease to be relevant after her death. It seems almost as
if bodily unity, at least in some cases, comes to matter for new reasons after death, although I don’t
claim to know what those reasons are. We have strong intuitions that dismembering, mutilating, and
disturbing human corpses is wrong. We are, I think, even disturbed by the idea of dismembering,
mutilating, or disturbing animal corpses: very few of us butcher the animals we eat ourselves. If it
is to be objected that this is attributable merely to a physical reaction of disgust, rather than some
moral reaction, I would suggest that these things are not necessarily so separable: disgust may be
a powerful moral emotion. Finally, respecting bodily unity seems in some way compatible with the
intuition we saw when we considered the ‘Know Nothing, Do Nothing’ approach that when we are
not sure what to do with a creature’s corpse, for example, we should leave it alone: respecting the
interest in bodily unity prevents us from engaging in many behaviors broadly classified under the
heading ‘disturbing a corpse’.
Again, I should reiterate that these ideas I’ve just presented, which might be described as intuition pumps meant to draw out the idea that bodily unity is important after death, are actually
independent from the conclusions I have been trying to draw from Feinberg’s argument. They are
meant to mitigate the strangeness of ‘bodily unity’ as a surviving interest by showing my reader
53 If
she dies peacefully, that is. If she leaves no corpse behind, the interest can no longer be thwarted or promoted
after her death. But as we saw when we considered similar problems in Chapter 3, these are not the cases with
which we are concerned.
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that she might already think bodily unity matters after death. But this is more or less irrelevant, if
the arguments I have given so far are right: the interest in bodily unity should survive an animal’s
death, no questions asked, so to speak.
There is one more worry to address before we move on. That worry is that, without the metaphysical premises from Chapter 2, on which I have been hesitant to rely here, dead bodies are bodies
in name alone. The reason this might be problematic is that even if you think bodily unity is a
plausible surviving interest to infer on the part of a dead animal, say, Daphne, you might worry
that Daphne’s corpse is not Daphne’s animal, or her body, or anything related to her in such a way
that her interest in bodily unity could also be, or could become, an interest in her corpse’s unity.
In other words, you might find it plausible that Daphne does have an interest in bodily unity, but
that that interest only applies to her body, and not her corpse, since her corpse (her ‘dead body’) is
a body in name alone.
If you think this way, however, you will have to accept that there is not a good reason to refrain
from, say, dismembering corpses, since on your view, corpses are not bodies, and even if someone’s
interest in bodily unity survives her death, it does not apply to anything but her body. We do not, I
think, want to accept the conclusion that dismembering corpses is quite alright.54 This suggests to
me, at least, that we accept a certain relationship between the body and the corpse even in human
cases;55 if we thought corpses were just ‘masses of matter’, like artefacts, dismembering a corpse
would be no more morally wrong, prima facie, than tearing apart a notebook or some such thing.
You might now respond that dismembering animal corpses is just fine because of this worry about
bodily unity not applying to corpses, but dismembering human corpses is different. Of course, I will
ask in return what it is that makes dismembering human corpses wrong, and why that, whatever it
is, does not also apply to animals. If you were poised to suggest some sort of ulterior interest makes
the difference—“I want to be buried, not dismembered!”—I would refer back to the case of infants,
who seem to lack such interests.56
54 Even
dismembering animal corpses, I think, is frowned upon, especially outside of the butcher’s shop (i.e., for
‘fun’ rather than food, or some such thing). If you think about it for a moment, you might find that even the
dismembering of corpses that does happen inside a butcher’s shop or inside a meatpacking plant disturbs you. The
mere idea that what is really happening is the dismemberment of corpses, not just the preparation of meat, is a
powerful one.
55 Interestingly, this sort of reasoning might be of help if we were trying to argue that humans survive their deaths as
their corpses, as we argued that animals do in Chapter 2.
56 A further consideration in favor of the same point can be found in the case of organ donation. When you consent to
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You might respond here with another idea about the wrongness of posthumous dismemberment:
perhaps that it can be explained by something like our reverence or respect for the dead, and the
wholeness of their bodies, or some such thing, rather than their interests in bodily unity. This point
is well-taken, and will be addressed in the next chapter. The Argument from Interests may not be
of interest to all my readers, and I try to account for that in both Chapter 3 and Chapter 5, where
I provide alternative ways of reaching the same conclusions.
I’ll say again that this chapter isn’t about the interests of the human dead. But since I’ve
tentatively suggested that humans might have an interest in their own bodily unity, too, and since
I’ve used a few human examples, I imagine that some worries about human surviving interests have
arisen. I try to address one such worry in the following subsection.
Human Interests and a Principle for Inference
When we are considering animal cases, our best assessments of the surviving welfare interests of the
animal in question may be the best information available to us for inferring her surviving interests.
(As I have said, treating her as if she has none will be a difficult position to defend in the face of
infant cases.) A question about humans arises here, and although this thesis is about animals, I think
the question is worth responding to. When we are considering human cases, we will sometimes have
the opposite problem, especially when someone has left an up-to-date and highly specific will. That
is, she may have a number of easily-inferred surviving welfare interests, a number of easily-inferred
ulterior interests, and a number of specified surviving interests, too. Often, there will be conflicts
between some of these interests—just as in life, when we may have an interest in, e.g., both quitting
a job and keeping it.
I think we ought to adopt a broad principle about inference and welfare and ulterior interests
in order to manage this problem. That broad principle is that when we justifiably believe that
X’s interest in Y is a surviving ulterior interest, we ought to prioritize Y over Z, where Z is some
presumably surviving welfare interest. This is because generally, it seems that we should promote
become an organ donor after your death, you consent to the removal of organs from something which is presumably
yours: your body, you might think. (If that object, body or not, were not yours, it is not clear how you could
consent to the removal of its parts.) The thing is certainly yours, then. If it is not your body, what ‘your’ thing is
it? It cannot be related to you in the ways your shoes, books, or bedside tables are; otherwise, it would not be so
grievous a harm for someone to remove its parts without your consent.
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a person’s ulterior interests over her welfare interests when the two conflict.57 Suppose a Jehovah’s
Witness refuses a lifesaving blood transfusion on religious grounds. Although in doing so we would
violate one of the most easily inferred welfare interests, the interest in living, I think we could not
give her the transfusion against her wishes.58
This principle will work best on the condition that we have very good information about someone’s ulterior interests, and also consider her the being best poised to determine what is good for
her. Speaking very roughly, in order for an ulterior interest to supersede an inferred welfare interest,
we ought to be at least equally justifiably confident in both interests. If a person has expressed some
ulterior interest to us, and we are merely inferring the conflicting welfare interest, as in the blood
transfusion example, the condition is obviously met. But the condition might also be met if we infer
the ulterior interest on reliable information, such as the religious or personal beliefs of the deceased
in question. This principle, explained as such, can help us respond to worries about cremation,
organ donation, and so on, that may arise from the proposal of bodily unity as a surviving welfare
interest.
Let me address one other problem about human interests and conflicting interests before wrapping
up this chapter. In this section, I’ve provided a principle for weighing the welfare interests of a single
individual with the ulterior interests of that same individual. As I said in Section 4.3.1, I don’t aim
here to provide a full account of the proper way we might weigh the interests of one being against the
interests of another. Still, I did discuss there, albeit very briefly, the idea of weighing the interests
of a pregnant person with the interests of a fetus. And here it seems worth my while to say a bit
more about weighing the interests of certain individuals—living individuals—with the interests of
the dead. This will also give me a chance to address an offshoot of the Jehovah’s Witness problem
I addressed above: that of the Jehovah’s Witness who refuses a blood transfusion on behalf of her
57 Should
we worry that in promoting the surviving interest in bodily unity, which is a welfare interest, we are neglecting
the surviving ulterior interests of animals? I am not sure we should, since our uncertainty about what animals want
is especially pronounced. Many of an animal’s ulterior most easily inferred interests—say, in play, inferred when a
dog brings us a ball—die with her, so to speak, or in other words fail to survive her death. Whether animals have
ulterior interests in things like burial, being mourned, the prosperity of their children, and so on, seems less clear,
at least to me. But of course, the very connection between animals and infants upon which I drew earlier in the
uncertainty argument was uncertainty, and I am certainly not in a position to say I know exactly which interests
survive an animal’s death. Could we be behaving abysmally toward animals in choosing to respect their inferred
welfare interests over their ulterior interests? Perhaps, but how could we be blamed for doing so, when we are even
less sure about their ulterior interests than their welfare interests?
58 Physician-assisted suicide might be another similar case, albeit a more controversial one.
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child.
First, let me note that there are number of ways to interpret what I said in Section 4.3.1,
which was essentially that even if fetuses do have interests, it might still be permissible to thwart
those interests. I cited Thomson’s famous violinist thought experiment, from which we can draw
this conclusion, but I didn’t say exactly the conclusion might be right, other than on the basis of
intuition. I also alluded to the idea that living persons might just have more interests to thwart
than fetuses do. It might also be the case that certain interests matter more than others. It doesn’t
seem right to say that ulterior interests always matter more than welfare interests when the two
exist in different beings; in fact, the opposite may seem true.
I don’t know which of these ideas, if any, is right. But we can try some thoughtful abduction on
for size here. I said in Chapter 1 that I didn’t want to make a case for absolutist vegetarianism, and
cited in defense of this the idea that you might, in some extreme circumstances, need to, e.g., eat
meat to save your own life. This seems intuitively right, like the sort of thing you should be able to
do. Similarly, if a Jehovah’s Witness tells us she would rather that her child die than have a blood
transfusion, we might want to give her child the blood transfusion anyhow. By contrast with this
second Jehovah’s Witness case, we might again consider abortion. These three cases might tell us
that the stage of existence in which a being is presently located can help us determine how much
weight to give her interests. This sort of principle might help us understand why, should someone
leave a will with maximally specific but especially cruel instructions which will harm, say, her living
relatives, we might be inclined to disregard her will. And it might help us explain the permissibility
of abortion; although in a different parent-child case, e.g., the second Jehovah’s Witness case, our
intuitions differ, perhaps this is because of the stage of life (or phase) in which the child or fetus is
located.
None of this is to say that we permissibly disregard the interests of the dead (or the unborn),
but rather that when they come into conflict with the sufficiently-important interests of the living,
we might be inclined to prioritize the latter. In saying this, I do not compromise my position on
the impermissibility of eating meat in all normal circumstances. This may already be obvious to my
reader, but it is worth saying here that the mere desire to eat meat cannot give rise to an ulterior
interest: wants are not sufficient to create any sort of interest, including an ulterior interest, as
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we said in Section 4.2 (one must both have a stake in the outcome of Y, and want Y, in order
that Y become one of her ulterior interests). Let me further add that even if gustatory pleasure
and similar things—pleasure of any sort, it seems—were sufficient to create ulterior interests, these
would not seem to be the sorts of sufficiently-important ulterior interests that we could prioritze
over the interests of the dead. Eating the dead for pleasure, and necrophilia, for instance, show that
we should not prioritize the pleasure of the living over the interests of the dead.
Again, this issue seems a bit tangential to our defense of the RVT and PUAT, since we have been
thinking, for the last few paragraphs, outside the realm of both animals and normal circumstances.
I do not, as I’ve said, attempt to give a full, detailed picture of weighing the interests of the living
against the interests of the dead.
Having responded to these concern about conflicting interests, I think we are in a good position
to say that the RVT and PUAT can be supported by Feinberg’s Argument from Interests. This is
because in practice, the argument will often require that we make inferences about the interests of
the dead. In animal cases, some of our best inferences will be based upon our best approximations
of the surviving welfare interests of the dead. One such surviving welfare interest may be, as I have
suggested, bodily unity. Eating or otherwise using the bodies of animals thwarts this interest, and
so we are obligated to refrain from doing so.
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Chapter 5
Mourning and Respecting the
Animal Dead
5.1
Introduction
In Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis, we saw two different arguments for robust vegetarianism, as well
as arguments against the use of the corpses of animals for purposes such as leather making, gelatin
production, and so on. Here, I turn to a new question. We have seen what we ought not do to
the animal dead: I have shown, in other words, that we have ‘negative’ or prohibitive duties to
them. But now I want to turn to the question of what, if anything, we ought to do—or even might
have some reason to do—for the animal dead, wherever we encounter them. Of course, there are
myriad ways of treating the dead we might consider morally permissible, morally obligatory, morally
praiseworthy, supererogatory, and so on. But here, I want to focus mainly on respect and mourning,
although I also talk about reverence. In many cases, I don’t provide a positive argument, or at least
not a strong one, in favor of the proposal that we must respect or mourn the animal dead. Rather,
I try to explore the possibilities for such an argument, and more frequently, I try to imagine what
respecting, feeling reverence for, or mourning the animal dead might look like. My argument in this
chapter is not intended to make my reader believe what I believe, but rather to help my reader see
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what I see, and perhaps even feel as I feel.1
5.2
Respect for the Animal Dead
It’s not easy to say exactly what respect is. Among the Oxford English Dictionary’s many definitions
of the word ‘respect’ are two of particular interest:
1. To treat or regard with deference, esteem, or honour; to feel or show respect for.
2. To treat with consideration; to refrain from injuring or interfering with; to spare.
Interestingly enough, the OED counts (2) as something like a subsidiary of (1), i.e., as if (2) were
a variation on (1), or its consequence. I suppose this is fair enough, since (1) includes the phrase
‘to feel or show respect for’, which will almost necessarily encompass all uses of the verb ‘respect’ of
interest to us here.
In one sense of the verb ‘respect’, captured best, I think, in (2), it seems that respecting someone
(or something) can be about refraining from doing something to her (or it). You might display
respect for someone’s life by not killing her, or respect for her position, as, say, your professor or
peer, by not interrupting her when she is speaking. In this sense of the word ‘respect’, we have been
talking about respecting the animal dead all along. And perhaps this was not even unclear. We
spoke of treating a creature in accordance with her moral standing in Chapter 3, and of promoting
or refraining from thwarting her interests in Chapter 4. Each point could be rephrased as one about
respect: respect for a creature’s moral standing, or respect for her surviving interests.
But what of the sense of ‘respect’ brought out by some of the phrases in (1): regard with deference,
esteem, or honor ? We have not talked obviously about deference, esteem, or honor so far, although
perhaps these ideas have been lurking in the background of some of our discussions. It might, for
instance, be the case that when you respect a creature’s moral standing or her interests, you are,
1 In
this chapter as our second, I cite work by Aristotle. I also cite other classical literature—Homer’s Iliad and
Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. I adopt in this chapter the same footnote citation convention I adopted for classical
works in Chapter 2. That is, rather than citing an ancient text by its translator’s last name and the year it was
translated, which I doubt would be helpful to an interested reader, I cite the work in which it appears (e.g., De
Anima) and a particular subsection, book, or line number. I’ve accessed Aristotle’s work using the MIT Classics
Archive, which is digital, so I do not cite line numbers when I cite Aristotle. However, I use hard copies of Sophocles
and Homer’s work, and thus in those cases cite line numbers. In the bibliography, volumes of Aristotle’s work are
listed under his name, followed by his translators’ names. I follow the same convention, mutatis mutandis, for the
work of Sophocles and Homer.
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perhaps tacitly, honoring her in some way, or showing that you hold her in high enough esteem
that her interests or moral standing matter to you. And there are certainly other ways the ideas of
deference, esteem, and honor could be read into the arguments we have already seen.
But I think it better that we see the two arguments I have already given as arguments primarily
for robust vegetarianism, rather than for posthumous respect, although readings on which they are
for the latter are, I think, not unwelcome. Here, by contrast, I do want to begin a discussion of
posthumous respect for the animal dead, and not just in the sense of (2) above, but rather in the
sense of (1).
5.2.1
Instrumentalizing the Dead
I want to begin by discussing a particular way some think we might respect the animal dead:
instrumentalizing, or not-wasting, their corpses. I want to show that this is not a very good way of
regarding the animal dead respectfully.
Chloë Taylor is one of the few philosophers who has written about the animal dead in great
detail. Her goal, in Respect for the (animal) dead, is to examine the ways in which we treat the
animal dead and the human dead differently. She makes a number of observations about this
treatment. The first is that we do in fact already have an ethics of respect for the animal dead, one
which is focused on not-wasting, or otherwise put, instrumentalizing. This certainly sounds strange;
even non-Kantian ethical traditions are rarely, if ever, grounded in the idea of instrumentalization as
morally good, even if they do not decry it outright. Taylor further observes that our ethics of respect
for the human dead is vastly different, in that in most cultures and almost all Western cultures, it
prioritizes non-instrumentalizing. She takes these points in conjunction to confirm that we tend
to prefer consequentialist approaches to problems in animal ethics, while preferring deontological
approaches to ethical problems involving humans—living or dead.
In service of her first observation, Taylor employs a number of stories. She retells a story
from Milan Kundera about Salvador Dalı́’s cherished companion rabbit, whom his partner, Gala,
apparently killed, and subsequently ate, the former in order to avoid leaving the rabbit alone while
the pair took a long trip. For Gala, “there existed no more perfect fulfillment of love than eating
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the beloved”.2 One wonders whether Gala would have liked to treat Dalı́ as she did the rabbit, or
whether her ideas about eating the beloved only extend to the animal dead. Taylor also tells us of
her colleague, a hunter who eats and make household items out of the animals he kills, thinking it
respectful to use every part of the corpse—and more respectful to hunt animals than to buy meat.
Finally, there is the story of a pilot who collects the corpses of animals left behind by tourist hunters,
and takes the corpses to indigenous peoples, who in turn use them for food and clothing. These
are somewhat unusual cases, but it is not particularly strange to imagine that many hunters feel as
Taylor’s colleague does.3
Taylor does not give stories in support of her second observation, but she does not need to.
It is quite obvious that nobody would complain that burial is a waste of a corpse perfectly wellsuited for use as food or to make household products. And nobody would think it disrespectful
to, say, her father, to bury or cremate his corpse rather than use every part of it for some other
purpose. We think of the instrumentalization of human corpses as disrespectful, and I think even
consequentialists on deserted islands would have a difficult time instrumentalizing a human corpse
for the greater good. By contrast, we instrumentalize animal corpses frequently, and typically not
for any greater good, without a second thought.4
The big question, I think, which arises from Taylor’s observations, is about whether instrumentalizing animals, or indeed instrumentalizing anyone at all, is a good way to respect them, or show
them respect. I take it that those who think instrumentalizing animals is a good way to respect
them are using ‘respect’ in the positive sense of (1) above, i.e., they take it that they are honoring
or showing deference to the instrumentalized animals in question in some way.
In Chapter 3, I argued that instrumentalizing (dead) animals is not a good way to treat them in
accordance with their permanent moral standing as ends in themselves. As I noted earlier, I think
this point could be rephrased as one about respect: you fail to respect an animal’s moral standing
as an end in herself when you instrumentalize her. Although I think this Kantian line of reasoning is
still quite promising, I want to try to examine instrumentalizing differently here. Rather than giving
2 Kundera,
1990, p. 96, cited in Taylor, 2013.
I address a question provoked by the nature of these cases: Is Taylor right that we have an ethics of respect
for the animal dead at all?
4 Taylor’s third point—the observation that we prefer consequentialist solutions to moral problems involving animals,
and deontological solutions to moral problems involving humans—is a bit outside the scope of this chapter, although
I think she is probably right.
3 Later,
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an argument equal in strength and conviction to that Kantian one I gave in Chapter 3, I want to
point out a few things I think are strange or wrong about the idea of instrumentalizing-as-respect.
The first point to make, I think, is that prima facie, instrumentalizing someone does not seem like
a typical way to show her respect, whether she is dead or alive. Taylor tugs at this thread when she
makes her second observation, which is that instrumentalizing the human dead is not usually taken
to be a good way to treat them with respect. To make the obvious point, why instrumentalizing
someone would ever be a way to respect her, especially when she has not requested it, still stands
unexplained. The burden of proof, in other words, seems to sit with those who do imagine that
instrumentalizing someone is a good way to respect her; they will have to say why we should think
that instrumentalizing animals is a good way to show them respect.5 A defense of this point, I think,
would require one to say why animals are different from humans in such a way that instrumentalizing
the one is respectful and instrumentalizing the other is disrespectful, and even impermissible. It
almost seems more natural to imagine that we should not respect the animal dead at all than to
imagine that we should respect them by instrumentalizing them. Put simply, it’s just not clear that
we have any reason to imagine that instrumentalizing someone would be a good way to treat her
with respect, whether she is an animal or a human, dead or alive.
The second point to make, I think, is that we can imagine a culture in which instrumentalizing
the dead is taken to be respectful of the dead, whomever they are—and that that culture is not our
own. Taylor gives the example of the Wari’, an Amazonian people who find burial undignifying,
and take it that everything they eat wants to be eaten. The Wari’, perhaps now unsurprisingly, eat
their own dead, i.e., practice cannibalism. The Wari’ do not enjoy eating their own dead; they do
so out of respect for the deceased. If this were our situation (in the West, or in the US), I think,
the idea of instrumentalizing animals as respectful might be more plausible. Respect does seem in
some sense culturally relative; it is easy to think of visiting another country and ‘showing respect’
differently than we might in our own country. But relative to our own culture, our own society,
instrumentalizing the dead does not seem to be respectful. As Taylor shows, we do not take up the
same stance with regard to respectful treatment of both the animal and human dead; we are thus
5 To
be abundantly clear, I am not talking about instrumentalizing someone out of necessity here: rather, I am talking
about instrumentalizing her for pleasure and similar sorts of things. It’s not clear that either would be respectful,
but the latter seems justifiable while the former is less so.
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unlike the Wari’. The point is this one: if we were like the Wari’, and thought that eating the dead
(human and nonhuman) were the only way to treat them with respect, it might seem more plausible
that instrumentalizing the dead would be an acceptable form of respecting them, given that respect
seems in some way culturally relative. But we are not like the Wari’; our ethics of respect for the
human dead is different from our ethics of respect for the animal dead, and we take instrumentalizing
to be respectful to the latter and disrespectful to the former, without, it should be said, any good
(as far as I can tell) reason to take it to be respectful to the latter. Again, it seems almost more
natural to imagine that we should avoid having an ethics of respect for the animal dead rather than
adopt one which prescribes that we treat them in exactly the opposite way we treat humans.
In a moment I want to talk a bit more about the Wari’, but we should also address here a question
about whether respect might also be individually relative, given that, as we’ve just noted, respect
seems, at least in some sense, culturally relative. There is, I think, a difference between showing
respect and feeling respect. As we’ll discuss later when we talk about mourning and grieving, it
seems implausible to imagine a moral obligation to feel some certain way. If asked to provide support
for this line of reasoning, I think I would be inclined to say that ought implies can, and often we
cannot control our feelings, i.e., force ourselves to feel this or that. I take people like Taylor’s hunter
colleague, who states that he eats the animals he kills out of respect, to be serious, rather than
disingenuous. In other words, I imagine that people who think this way really do feel respect for
the creatures they eat. And I’m sure that Taylor’s colleague feels that he is showing respect to the
animals he eats. But whether he is really showing them respect is a different matter, and I do not
think that matter can depend only on his feelings or thoughts. What it is to show respect seems
to be constituted by the norms of a community, at least in part, and not by the feelings of a single
individual. What it is to feel respect seems entirely relative to the feeler in question.6
6 We
might also wonder about the reasoning behind the hunter’s position about killing animals as more respectful
than buying their corpses, although killing animals is not the subject of this thesis. I do not deny that there is a
powerful intuition behind the idea that the wrongness of an action can be mitigated by doing it oneself. Imagine, for
instance, a friend who insisted on telling her partner that she wanted a divorce by having him served with divorce
papers. You might be inclined to advise her that she should tell him herself, rather than through an intermediary.
(Even in this case, it is not clear that your friend is morally wrong to seek a divorce; it is a bit late in this thesis
to say so, but killing animals does not seem as morally innocuous.) Perhaps the issue is taking responsibility for
one’s injuring someone else (whether the injury is wrongful or not). But one can take responsibility in some way
besides committing the injury oneself, and one can also, at least in the case of the hunter, simply avoid just avoid
committing the injury to begin with. Our hunter presumably does not require meat to survive, so he should have
no trouble refraining from both hunting and buying meat at the store.
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Some hunters may object that they are not merely feeling respect when they hunt, but rather
showing it in some particular way that is indeed societally-sanctioned. One way to show respect,
these hunters might say, is to come to know someone, exactly as they must do in order to track
and kill their prey. I do not question the idea that successful hunters do typically have great stores
of knowledge about the particular species of animal they hunt: they must, in order to successfully
ensnare their prey. And I do not question the idea that ‘knowing one’s enemy’, to put it proverbially,
may be one acceptable way of showing respect. But for whom, and to whom, is this respect shown?
It is not clear that hunters have a great body of knowledge about the individual animals they track
and kill;7 rather, they tend to have a wealth of knowledge about ‘deer behavior’, for instance, and
similar such things. Whether one can show respect for an individual being by coming to understand
behavior characteristic of that being’s species is not obvious to me.8
Let’s return to the Wari’. I said a moment ago that Taylor notes that the Wari’ do not enjoy
eating their own dead. She writes:
The reason for eating one’s in-laws was not to incorporate or retain them, and was not
aimed at satisfying any nutritional needs or desire for flesh. The Wari’ ate the rotting
and roasted meat of their in-laws with reluctance, amidst wailings of grief, overcoming
disgust out of respect for the dead and their families.9
This picture of eating the dead can be directly contrasted with the way in which we eat the animal
dead in our own society. Most of us enjoy eating the animal dead; we consume them for pleasure,
and nutrition. It is especially, even suspiciously, convenient to imagine that we are respecting the
animal dead when we eat them because instrumentalizing the animal dead is the proper way to
show them respect. What a happy coincidence it would be, were it the case that the proper way to
respect the animal dead happened to yield material and gustatory benefits to us.10
7 One
counterexample comes to us from Season 4 of the television series The Crown. The Crown is in fact based at
least in part on real events, but the event in question here does not seem to have occurred. In Episode 2, entitled
‘The Balmoral Test’, Prince Philip and other members of the British royal family hunt not deer in general, but one
particular stag, whom one could argue they come to know over the course of the hunt.
8 This point is a bit crude, but usually we do not consider knowing behavior typical of someone’s group to be knowing
her as an individual. Consider saying to a friend something like: “I just knew you’d say that—you’re a Christian!”
9 Taylor, 2013.
10 There is an interesting, similar point to be made about corporations which instrumentalize animals for profit, and
although I am perhaps not going to do it justice, the point might be something like this: despite the fact that
capitalist systems are notoriously wasteful, the idea that no part of an animal should go un-profited from does
not seem unwelcome in these same systems. I refer the interested reader to Wrenn, 2017, in which the theme of
consuming (eating and buying) animals and parts of animals under capitalism is examined closely.
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So far we have made a few points about instrumentalizing: first, that the respectfulness thereof
is in need of an argument; second, that the respectfulness thereof might find such an argument in a
culture drastically different from ours in the relevant way; and third, that it would seem suspiciously
convenient if instrumentalizing the animal dead were respectful of them. Now I want to examine a
fourth idea about instrumentalizing, one which I fear is a bit elusive but also find promising. This
idea is the idea of eating meat, or otherwise using the corpses of animals, as a conceptual mistake.11
Cora Diamond, in her paper Eating Meat and Eating People, brings something like this to our
attention, and Taylor does so too, in discussing the work of Val Plumwood. Let’s get acquainted
with this slightly elusive idea by examining it in the work of each philosopher.
Conceptual Mistakes
Diamond’s paper is largely a criticism of existing arguments for vegetarianism of the sort given by
Singer and Regan. She makes the same sort of claim I do in this thesis, broadly construed: to fail to
address the fact that eating meat is really eating dead animals, while arguing for vegetarianism, is to
miss something very important about eating meat, and so to fail to argue against it as compellingly
as possible. Diamond’s approach is to ask what makes us hesitant to eat our own dead, and she
suggests that the answer to this question is: “a person is not something to eat”.12 There is a
very interesting metaphysical question about whether there are dead people, i.e., whether there is
such a thing as a dead person, and it is addressed by David Mackie in the same paper with which
we engaged in Chapter 2.13 But let us put aside this question for just a moment in order to get
Diamond’s broader picture in view. (As I’ll say later, I think Diamond’s picture makes sense, and
an important point, even if there aren’t dead people or dead animals.)
A helpful case in understanding Diamond’s argument is that of Gradgrind, the rather soulless
superintendent from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Gradgrind refuses to call the schoolchildren by
11 Daniel
Kaufman prefers ‘category error’, but ‘conceptual mistake’ conveys the same idea without the philosophical
baggage. What I mean by ‘conceptual mistake’ will become clearer as we talk more about Diamond’s argument, but
the idea, in broad strokes, is that one can misunderstand what is involved with some X’s being an F, where F is a
concept designation like ‘human’, or one can misunderstand, and perhaps mistreat, X by failing to understand that
X is in fact an F. A good example (outside of eating meat) of the kind of conceptual mistake we’ll be talking about
here comes to me from Laura Ruetsche. This example is book-burning: when someone burns a book, although she
may not realize it, she is misunderstanding what is involved with being a book, or more broadly what books are
for, when she uses them for fuel instead of reading.
12 Diamond, 1978; emphasis in original.
13 That is, Mackie, 1999.
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their names, and rather calls them by numbers, e.g., ‘Girl number twenty’. Diamond writes:
Doing [Girl number twenty] out of a name is not like doing her out of an inheritance
to which she has a right and in which she has an interest. Rather, Gradgrind lives in
a world, or would like to, in which it makes no difference whether she has a name, a
number being more efficient, and in which a human being is not something to be named,
not numbered. Again, it is not ‘morally wrong’ to eat our pets; people who ate their pets
would not have pets in the same sense of that term... Treating pets in these ways is not
at all a matter of recognizing some interest which pets have in being so treated. There
is not a class of beings, pets, whose nature, whose capacities, are such that we owe it to
them to treat them in these ways. Similarly, it is not out of respect for the interests of
beings of the class to which we belong that we give names to each other.14
What Diamond suggests here, I think, is that eating one’s pets is the same sort of mistake as is
calling a child by a number, rather than her name.15 Diamond insists that these mistakes are not
moral ones, or at least are not essentially so; rather, they arise from a misunderstanding of what a
child is, or what a human is, or what a pet is. The matter is not as simple as imagining that ‘being
named’ is contained within the concept ‘child’; rather, the fact that we call children by their names
is in a sense constitutive of what it is to be a child. As Diamond writes later, our not eating each
other “is not a consequence of what human beings are, it is not justified by what human beings are:
it is itself one of the things which go to build our notion of human beings”.16
For Diamond, then, the way we treat animals and the concepts under which they fall are engaged
in a sort of mutually-formative relationship. She thinks that we already have a concept of animals
on which eating their corpses is not quite right, not quite the right way to treat them: we view them,
at least sometimes, as fellow creatures. For Diamond, ‘fellow creature’ is a non-biological concept
including those creatures in whom we can find companionship, whom we can see as individuals with
lives of their own, whom we can pity, and perhaps most importantly, with whom we share life and
death, i.e., mortality. She argues that focusing on responding to animals as fellow creatures will
work as responding to humans as fellow humans does: we will see that eating them is, in many cases,
not a way to treat them.
There are problems with Diamond’s argument, but they are not problems for Diamond; rather,
they are problems for those of us who would like to take her argument and make it an airtight one
14 Diamond,
1978.
a similar analysis, see Kaufman, 2015.
16 Diamond, 1978.
15 For
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against eating meat. For Diamond’s part, she admits freely that something like ‘not for eating’
is not necessarily included in the concept ‘fellow creature’, and is hesitant to condemn ‘respectful’
hunting. I am not going to insist that Diamond’s argument is totally right.17 Rather, at various
points throughout this chapter, I’ll draw on pieces of her reasoning. Here, as I said earlier, I want
to think more about conceptual mistakes.
Let me make one criticism pertinent to conceptual mistakes as Diamond thinks of them before
moving on to Taylor. Diamond insists that the conceptual mistake we make when we eat meat is
not a moral one. For instance, as we saw above, she is certain that eating one’s pet would not
be morally wrong: it would merely indicate that whatever one ate was not one’s pet at all. It is
not clear to me that Diamond is right to effectively stipulate that conceptual mistakes cannot also
be moral ones, or at the very least, ones with morally important consequences. There is, I think,
nothing about Diamond’s picture, besides her saying so, that necessitates that conceptual mistakes
cannot be moral ones. So although it’s not terribly important to my argument here that conceptual
mistakes can also be moral mistakes, I’ll assume that this is possible.
Now we can turn to Taylor, who also engages with the idea of eating meat as a conceptual mistake.
She discusses the story of fellow philosopher Val Plumwood’s trip to the Australian wetlands, on
which Plumwood was attacked by a crocodile. Plumwood writes, of the encounter:
I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any
other edible being. The thought, ‘This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being.
I am more than just food!’ was one component of my terminal incredulity. It was a
shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat. Reflection
has persuaded me that not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to
be more than just food.18
Of course, crocodiles do not seem to have concepts; the point I aim to make is not that crocodiles
make a conceptual mistake when they tacitly consider us ‘food’ rather than ‘human beings’. Rather,
Plumwood’s realization suggests an interesting distinction between that which is edible and that
17 In
particular, it strikes me that Diamond does not take what I see as the obvious route to the argument for
vegetarianism which she clearly has an interest in making: arguing that if we have a concept of pets on which pets
are not-for-eating, it is not clear why we could not extend that concept to include many of the other animals. It also
strikes me that she finds it strange for vegetarians (with ‘fellow creature’ concepts no doubt in mind) to eat roadkill,
but can imagine hunting as quite alright. And for all her talk about the animal dead, as I note later, she doesn’t
have anything positive to say about mourning them, and thinks funerals for dogs are strange. I am not saying that
Diamond could not respond to these points; I could imagine her doing so even using only the ‘conceptual mistake’
tool. But that would require further argument, or at the very least explanation, which she does not give.
18 Plumwood, 2000, p. 7, cited in Taylor, 2013.
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which we consider ‘for-eating’; whether we humans think of it often or not, we too are edible, that
is, reducible to food. More importantly, Plumwood notes that ‘any creature can make the same
claim to be more than just food’. This, I think, gets to the heart of the conceptual mistake I suspect
we make when we eat meat.
The point I want to make here regards why we should not think of corpses as food. I have a bit to
say in favor of this point, but I do not think I will be able to convince anyone who does not already
have the intuition—at least to some degree—that corpses are just not for-eating. You might wonder
whom I aim to convince, then, since most of the world eats meat. But as I suggested in one note to
Chapter 4, most meat-eaters do not think of eating meat as eating corpses. Most philosophers who
write about vegetarianism do not think of eating meat as eating corpses, or even parts of corpses,
in fact. And this very simple shift in our thinking can be immensely helpful in making the case
for vegetarianism. Daniel Herwitz put it poignantly, when he said to me in conversation that the
pleasure we take in eating meat depends on a willful sort of misrecognition. I suspect that once we
recognize ‘meat’ (an odd term indeed; not to mention ‘pork’, ‘beef’, and the like), and especially
eating meat, for what it really is, we will find our opinions about it changing. That is, then, what
this chapter (and to some extent this thesis) is really about: seeing eating meat for what it really
is, and providing some alternatives.
Now I’ll present my argument (or rather, my thoughts in argument-like form). First, I think we
have to say something about what corpses are, and what food is. Of course, in Chapter 2, I already
gave a very detailed account of what corpses are: they fall in the extension of the substance sortal
‘[some sort of] C-animal’ and the phase sortal ‘dead’. On this view, corpses are animals, and parts
of corpses are parts of animals. The view I put forth in Chapter 2—‘animal corpse survivialism’—
might make the argument I am about to give stronger, but I do not need to draw on it here. So
let us begin instead with the much less controversial point, not at all involved with the perhaps
shocking idea that animals survive their deaths, that corpses are dead bodies. This is a fairly typical
thought, and a further typical thought is that there are both human and animal corpses. (Animal
corpses are sometimes called ‘carcasses’, but I doubt anyone would disagree that they exist.) A final
typical thought is that although corpses are dead things by definition, not just anything which dies
comes to have a corpse. My computer, or rather its battery, might die, but I will not be left with a
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computer corpse. We would also not call a dead tree a ‘tree corpse’, and we have no word analogous
to ‘carcass’ for the corpses of trees; ‘wood’ suggests something entirely different than ‘carcass’. So
corpses, on this understanding, are just dead bodies, and probably only the dead bodies of humans
and animals.
When you eat something, you do not necessarily take it to be food. But at least in most cases,
you do take it to be for-eating. To be for-eating is different than being edible, of course, since so
many things are in theory edible. But we do not eat human corpses, and I think, as Diamond does,
that this is because we do not take them to be for-eating. What makes human corpses not foreating? Presumably, foreswearing metaphysical conclusions about humans surviving their deaths as
their corpses, the answer has something to do with the idea that humans are related to their corpses
in a certain way (although perhaps not by an identity relationship). In Chapter 4, we saw this idea:
even if dead human bodies are just bodies in name alone, and even if they are not the humans whose
bodies (or animals) they once were, we still conceive of a connection between dead bodies and their
original inhabitants (or however you’d like to put it, depending on your metaphysical beliefs). This
is evidenced by our beliefs about the wrongness of, say, mutilating or dismembering the dead. In
broader strokes, though, I think the point about our taking human corpses as not for-eating is that
we take human corpses to be more than food, more than tools, more than instruments or means to
ends. In some sense, we recognize them as having value.
When you do take something to be for-eating, you are taking it to be a particular kind of object.
All of the things which are uncontroversially for-eating—bread, potatoes, carrots, and so on—are not
things in our world about which we concern ourselves, morally or otherwise. They are not intimately
historically related to creatures with whom we did share or might have shared companionship; they
are not intimately historically related to beings for whom we had or could have had respect. (Before
you object to ‘might have shared companionship [or respect]’, remember that you might have shared
companionship with any number of human strangers, and this is probably part of the reason you
would not eat their corpses if you found them or parts thereof.)
To group animal corpses in with all of these other things—potatoes, bread, carrots—is, I think,
to make a conceptual mistake. Animal corpses share far more with human corpses than they do
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with potatoes, bread, carrots, breakfast cereal, or anything of the sort.19 The family resemblance
between animal corpses, or parts of animal corpses, and all of these other food items, is limited to
only that family resemblance we impose by similarly treating them as ‘for-eating’. Animal corpses,
like human corpses, once housed beings whom we respected or could have respected (had we known
them, and taken it upon ourselves to do so). They once housed beings which had desires of their
own. They once housed beings who, like us, avoided death. And they once housed beings who, as we
all will, eventually met death anyway. All of this ought to be compelling no matter what you think
of the metaphysical status of corpses. In fact, you could think corpses are basically like artefacts
and still be moved by this kind of thinking. There are artefacts we would not group with carrots or
potatoes: the Mona Lisa, for instance, while technically edible, is not for-eating.
Eating is just one form of instrumentalizing, of course, but I do not see why this case could not
be generalized as a case against other sorts of instrumentalization. You would not make a human
corpse (or just its skin, I suppose) into a new jacket, because human corpses (or just their skin) are
not for-jacket-making, for reasons similar to those listed above. You could easily make a swatch of
cotton into a new jacket; swatches of fabric are for-jacket-making. To which sort of thing—human
corpses, or their skin, or swatches of cotton—are animal corpses, or ‘hides’, more similar?20
There is another point about instrumentalizing here. There are some kinds of instrumentalizing,
where instrumentalizing is understood as ‘using as a means to some end’, that are not simultaneously conceptual mistakes. For instance, you might instrumentalize someone (some human person)
by using her as a reference on your curriculum vitae in order to get a better job, or you might instrumentalize someone by using her as a waitress in order to get your food at a restaurant. But when
you instrumentalize human persons in this way, you are not simultaneously denying their humanity,
or denying that they fall under the concept ‘human’. In other words, when you treat someone as
19 Notice
that this sort of argument doesn’t need to be stretched or prodded in order to account for the differences
between animals and plants. I already suggested that plants don’t have corpses, but even if they did, there would
still be these noticeable differences between ‘plant corpses’ and animal and human corpses, and our responses to
each kind of corpse differ. But the difference between dead animals and dead plants is actually crucial to the
argument in a different way than the same difference has been throughout the rest of this thesis: it is almost built
into the argument rather than added on.
20 As Laura Ruetsche helpfully pointed out to me, if we do have reasons against fashioning a swatch of cotton into
a new jacket, they are not like our reasons against fashioning human skin into a new jacket. One good reason to
refrain from using cotton to make a jacket, for instance, might be that using this particular kind of cotton, or some
such thing, is bad for the environment. But we would not suggest that a reason to refrain from using cotton to
make a jacket is that cotton is just not-for-jacket-making. Our reasons against fashioning human skin into a new
jacket are different, and so too I think are our reasons against fashioning animal skin into a new jacket.
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a waitress or a reference on your curriculum vitae, you are not necessarily treating her as ‘just a
waitress’, or ‘just a reference’. You can simultaneously treat her as a waitress or a reference and as
a human being, with a certain kind of worth.
But treating someone, or something, as ‘for-eating’, I think, is different than treating someone as
a reference or a waitress. (A similar point, I suspect, could be made about treating someone as ‘for
using’.) It is difficult to diagnose the asymmetry here, but I find it apparent. One possible diagnosis,
I think, is something like what Plumwood has in mind. You cannot treat someone, or something,
as ‘for-eating’, while simultaneously not treating her as ‘just food’. Certainly there are ways to
ritualize eating, make it ceremonial, and so on; perhaps one could thank the animal whose corpse
one is about to eat, or some such thing. But as long as one eventually eats the corpse, or a part of
the corpse, I think, one has treated it as ‘just food’, in grouping it with the other uncontroversially
for-eating things we consider food. When we treat something as for-eating, or for-using, I think, we
objectify it, in a not-so-demanding sense of the word, by which I mean something like ‘treat as an
object like any other common object’. Not all instrumentalization is simultaneously objectification;
we can again think of the reference and waitress cases. But treating someone or something as food
seems to be both instrumentalizing and objectifying.
The fine details of the story I have just told are not beyond question or alteration. And again,
I am not so concerned with the tightness of the arguments I present in this chapter as I am with
the picture they suggest of the world in which we live, its faults, and the way we make it what it
is when we eat meat. The point I want to make in this section is that instrumentalizing animals
seems to be a conceptual mistake of some sort, and perhaps one with moral consequences. Again, I
fear that this point may be a bit elusive, but I find it quite plausible that dead animals, like dead
humans, are not for-eating, or more broadly, for-using. The similarities, or resemblances, between
human corpses and animal corpses, upon which I have drawn to make this argument, are worth
considering for a few reasons. What I have argued here is that, given these similarities, treating
animal corpses as for-eating (or for-using), i.e., grouped with such substantively different things as
carrots and potatoes (or swatches of cotton), might be problematic. This is because we presumably
want to maintain that human corpses are not for-eating (or for-using), and animal corpses are more
similar to human corpses than they are to the other things we eat and use.
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Why might this sort of conceptual mistake be relevant to the conversation about respect we have
been having? First, this discussion about conceptual mistakes should support the point I have been
trying to make, about the unsustainability or tenuousness of taking up such different ideas about
what is respectful to two sorts of corpses which seem to share striking similarities. In other words,
the point about conceptual mistakes should help us see why instrumentalizing the animal dead might
be wrong (in some, perhaps not moral, sense of the word ‘wrong’, as referring to children by numbers
instead of names is wrong, or in the general moral sense of the word ‘wrong’). But moreover, there
is a point about what it is to respect someone. Part of respecting someone, I think, is treating her
like the sort of thing she is; respecting her place in the world. This is the sense of respect on which
we might draw to explain to someone why she should address the Vice President, upon making her
acquaintance, as ‘Madam Vice President’ rather than ‘Kamala’.
Let me address one worry about the view I have presented here before moving on. This worry
relates to what we saw in Taylor’s passage about Val Plumwood, who had an encounter with a
crocodile. You might think that since other animals, like crocodiles, seem to view us and others as
‘for-eating’, we have no reason to view them as not-for-eating, or even just ‘more-than-for-eating’.
There are a few troubles with this line of reasoning; one such trouble is that it is not clear that
crocodiles really do view us as for-eating in any meaningful way. They may just eat whatever looks
good to them, not thinking twice about it, as our dogs may sometimes seem to do. A deeper trouble
lies in the underlying principle, which I think works like this: If some creature behaves in way W
toward another creature A, we humans, too, can behave in W toward A. This seems patently false,
and even more obviously so when we consider treating other humans, and not just other animals,
the way (say) crocodiles treat humans. A crocodile might eat an infant human, but we would not.
We have the capacity to reason morally, so why not exercise it, even if others cannot?
5.2.2
Properly Respecting the Animal Dead
I have now given a few reasons we might think that instrumentalizing the animal dead is not the right
way to show them respect. We can now return to a question we saw much earlier, when we considered
Taylor’s observation that our ethics of respect for the animal dead prescribes instrumentalizing them.
Recall that the cases Taylor used to support this observation were somewhat unusual ones. You
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might worry that the kind of thinking she points out in the case of, say, her hunter colleague, is not
particularly common. And you might subsequently wonder whether Taylor is right—whether our
ethics of respect for the animal dead is really as she describes it.
The point here, I think, is that even if Taylor is wrong, though I have been taking her to be right,
for the sake of argument, there does not seem to be a viable alternative observation. By this I mean
that if Taylor is wrong that our ethics of respect for the animal dead is about instrumentalizing,
what she is wrong about is our having an ethics of respect for the animal dead at all, not its nature.
In other words, if we do have an ethics of respect for the animal dead, I am not sure what it could
be besides one which prescribes instrumentalizing. So the viable alternative view is that we do not
have an ethics of respect for the animal dead at all. This might be confusing, so let me restate my
view once more: Taylor has suggested (a) that we do have an ethics of respect for the animal dead,
and (b) that it involves instrumentalizing. If you do agree with (a), then you must agree with (b),
for as far as I can see, if (a) is right, there is no alternative to (b): besides instrumentalizing, there
is no other way we treat the animal dead that might be construed as an ethics of respect. You can,
however, easily disagree with (a) all together; perhaps we just do not have an ethics of respect for
the animal dead, even if we ought to.
I find these two choices about equally plausible, and they may both be right; certain people or
groups, even in our culture, may have an ethics of respect for the animal dead which prescribes
instrumentalizing, and others may not have an ethics of respect for the animal dead at all. The
question with which we are left is: Should we have an ethics of respect for the animal dead? If
the answer to that question is ‘yes’, I think I have shown such an ethics should not prescribe
instrumentalizing. But it is difficult to argue that we should, morally speaking, have an ethics of
respect for any groups at all. This is related to two concerns I raised earlier: one about respect as
both shown and felt, and one about respect as culturally, and perhaps individually in some cases,
relative.
Earlier, I considered the example of addressing the Vice President as ‘Madam Vice President’. It
is not clear that I can argue, from anything like morality, that you must address the Vice President
this way. But if I were to do so, I might draw on an idea like this. If you were willing to address a male
vice president as ‘Mr. Vice President’, but unwilling to address a female vice president as ‘Madam
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Vice President’, I might charge you with behaving inequitably—a charge with moral weight. Respect
of the sort addressed here is not the same as respect for someone’s moral standing, or someone’s
interests, in that it is not inherently morally-laden. It may be either amoral or supererogatory; it
might also be required of us morally, but I am not sure how one would argue that it is. However,
once respect is shown to one group, it seems plausible that there is a moral case to be made for
treating groups similar in the relevant ways equally. And perhaps this point about equality, along
with the similarities between the animal and human dead, is a good place to begin if we want to
argue for a moral obligation to respect the animal dead.
So I will not argue that you have a moral obligation to respect the animal dead in some positive
sense. I have, as I noted earlier, already argued that you have a moral obligation to respect the
interests or (inclusively) moral standing of the animal dead. This is, in a sense, respect for the animal
dead, but perhaps more clearly ‘respect’ as outlined in (2): respect as refraining from injuring. If
one did want to show the animal dead respect, independent of any argument on my part, I would
advise her to begin with the sort of deontological principles we use to guide our treatment of the
human dead, including the principle of anti-instrumentalization.
There is one more question about respecting the animal dead in some positive sense which
requires our attention. What I have said so far in this section problematizes the ideas of hunting
and eating the animal dead as forms of respect for the animal dead, and as I have said, I am not
arguing for a duty to respect the animal dead in some other way. But there is a set of cases we have
not yet spoken about yet: cases involving companion animals who, while not eaten as in case we
saw from Kundera above, are memorialized by their companion humans in some way that would be
considered strange or disrespectful were those memorialized humans instead of animals. Cases like
this include taxidermy of one’s pets, for instance.
Taxidermy seems less obviously problematic than eating or otherwise using the animal dead for,
say, gelatin, since it is done in a different way and for different reasons. By the former I mean
that someone who has her companion animal taxidermied does not usually choose to do so lightly,
without any serious thought, at the dinner table. And by the latter I mean that she does not do
so for gustatory or aesthetic pleasure, but rather for the purpose of remembering her companion.
There may still be some sort of conceptual mistake here, but it does not seem like the same sort
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of conceptual mistake we saw with eating meat; if taxidermy is instrumentalizing, it might be of a
different kind than eating meat is, insofar as the taxidermied animal is not treated as merely décor.
Taxidermy may be on a par with hunting in the sense that it is perhaps most likely considered a
form of respect because of the feeling of respect it may evoke in its perpetrator. But in another way,
taxidermy of a pet is not at all like hunting. Earlier, I objected to hunting as a form of respect on the
grounds that it does not usually involve knowledge of an individual animal, but rather knowledge
of a species, or some such thing. If the implication there was right—that knowing someone as an
individual is one way to show her respect—then having one’s pet taxidermied will not fall to the
same objection as hunting did.
In the end, I am not sure whether taxidermy is a good way to show respect to one’s pets. I
am not even sure whether it is instrumentalizing, although it seems at odds with the deontological
principles we might use to determine whether some action is respectful with regard to the human
dead. But let me leave my reader with this thought. We cannot do whatever we please with the
dead, even if they are our family members, as our pets might be. But if someone came to us, genuine
and pleading to have her father taxidermied, explaining that she believed it was the most respectful
thing to do, we might be inclined to grant her wishes, even though having humans taxidermied is,
as far as I know, illegal. We tend to believe that the people who knew the dead best, and have good
intentions, are also best poised to determine the proper treatment of the deceased being in question.
While the rabbits in the bushes outside my apartment do not stand in this close relation to me, so I
am not best poised to talk about what is respectful treatment of them, the dog with whom I share
my home does seem to stand in this close relation to me.
Notes on Naming: A Digression
Let us return to Diamond for just a moment. I want to make room for an aside which may interest
my reader, although it was not closely related enough to the argument I gave above (beneath the
heading ‘Conceptual Mistakes’) to be included there.
When I first read Eating Meat and Eating People, what struck me most was Diamond’s very
brief discussion of naming. Again, I fear this point will be a bit elusive, but I will still try to make it.
Diamond suggests that naming and not-eating are analogous, citing the reason that each is a way we
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show we understand, and help to construct, the concepts of ‘child’ and ‘pet’, respectively. Perhaps
there is also a sense in which naming and not-eating are analogous in that each shows respect for a
creature, whether she is living or dead, respect which is required of us in that it is required by the
sort of thing she is—the concept under which she falls. I suggested this when I discussed Diamond’s
work earlier, and it does not seem too far from what she has in mind.
So far, we have been mostly concerned with the ‘not-eating’ part of the ‘not-eating/naming’
parallel. But suppose we take naming on its own, and consider briefly what having a name means.
In Chapter 2, I introduced our deer, Daphne, whom we have subsequently encountered often. Daphne
has a name, and a human name at that. Although I gave it to her for ease of reference, you might
also think that there is something meaningful about my choice. I have also been using, following
Carol J. Adams’ scathing criticism of the use of ‘it’ as a pronoun for animals,21 the pronouns ‘he’,
‘they’, and most often ‘she’, for animals.
Adams writes that language is one way in which we distance ourselves from the cruel realities of
eating ‘meat’. She develops the concept of an ‘absent referent’, arguing that eating meat necessitates
that we make animals absent referents: we must kill living animals, make them absent as animals,
in order to eat them. We further make them absent as dead animals when we dismember their
bodies. But those of us who do not work in slaughterhouses also participate in making animals
absent referents, with our language (among other things, including our purse strings). We call an
animal ‘it’, for instance, or call some part of her corpse ‘pork’, ‘a steak’, or simply ‘meat’. None
of these terms so much as allude to the fact that we are really talking about an animal, someone
with a place in the world and a life of her own, or some part of her corpse. They distance us from
her, objectify her, and make her an absent referent. Unlike Daphne, the animals we eat do not have
names known to us: they are made all the more absent by this fact, all the more unknown, and all
the easier to (posthumously) harm.
It’s difficult to say exactly what it is that makes turning someone into an absent referent bad
or wrong. Certainly, objectification and instrumentalization seem bad, and they often play an
important role in making someone into an absent referent. Of course, the purpose of this chapter
is not to convince you that this or that way of treating dead animals is totally wrong; that was the
21 Adams,
1990, p. 46
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purpose of the other chapters of this thesis. Rather, I’m trying to bring your attention to ways of
treating the animal dead which may unsettle you (e.g., making animals absent referents by eating
them), and different ways of treating the animal dead that you might find attractive (e.g., mourning
animals). But let me make two small points about naming animals and making animals absent
referents.
First, we might reflect upon our own treatment of unnamed and named victims. Numerous
studies, chronicled by Karen Jenni and George Lowenstein,22 show that we tend to be more concerned
with saving or helping ‘identifiable victims’ than unidentified or ‘statistical’ victims. Jenni and
Lowenstein contrast the case of ‘baby Jessica’, an infant whose falling into a well was met with
exorbitant donations after being covered by news outlets, with cases in which we might be asked to
donate money to save a much greater number of nameless, unidentified children. We can also recall
the events of Summer 2020, during which the Black Lives Matter movement grew drastically in
response to George Floyd’s murder, despite the fact that by May 25th , the date of Floyd’s murder,
more than 100 other Black men had been killed by the police in 2020.23 Of course, these other
victims have names too, but we may find them hard to recall, if we ever learnt them in the first
place. And this is perhaps why we often hear calls to “say their names”. The point is that the
Black Lives Matter movement did not grow so drastically in response to ‘the shooting deaths of
100 [unnamed] Black men by police officers in 2020’, but rather ‘the murder of George Floyd ’. For
whatever reason, we learned Floyd’s name, and he became an identifiable victim, rather than a
statistical one, and so one about which we began to care vastly more.
So when a victim has a name, at a bare minimum, we seem likelier to care about him or her.
And this seems to suggest that our not naming animals may ultimately be to their detriment.
Importantly, as Floyd’s case shows, the identifiable victim effect need not only apply to the living.
To name someone, or call her by the name she already has, is in some elusive way to recognize that
she is an individual, someone cared about enough to be named, someone with a life and identity of
her own.
Second, Adams often talks about what we might call a ‘remembering / dismembering’ distinc22 Jenni
and Lowenstein, 1997.
statistics come from the Washington Post (Tate et. al, 2021). Their database only includes shooting deaths,
so I say ‘more than 100’ since there were 100 Black men shot by the police before May 25th , 2020, and one (not
Floyd, but Dion Johnson) shot on the 25th .
23 These
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tion, though often in the context of discussing the vegetarian literary tradition rather than animals
themselves. But we might think about the fact that making animals nameless, absent referents
makes them more difficult to remember, memorialize, and mourn. Our names do, after all, survive
us, and occasionally they are made to do so in a particular way, as when our loved ones dedicate
books to us, or name children or buildings after us. Depriving animals of names is depriving them
of the chance to be remembered in these ways and others.24
I could not demand of my reader that she give every animal on the planet a name, though there
is a sense in which doing so might be for the best, as we saw when we considered the identifiable
victim effect. The important thing to draw from this section is that not-naming, along with eating,
animals is one way in which we distance ourselves from them, and from the things we might do to
them during their lives and after their deaths. In failing to name animals, we often seem to fail to
recognize them as individuals with lives of their own. That this is morally wrong I am not sure; but
it seems to play a role in our objectification and consumption of the animal dead.
5.3
Reverence for the Animal Dead
In Chapter 4, we considered cases of posthumous dismemberment. I suggested one way of accounting
for the wrongness of posthumous dismemberment in particular: I said that we could infer an interest
in bodily unity on the parts of both humans and animals, and that that interest would survive the
deaths of the humans and animals in question. If that were the case, the interest in bodily unity
could be thwarted after death by things like dismemberment, and we could thus call dismemberment
morally impermissible. I also said, however, that there was another plausible way of accounting for
the wrongness of posthumous dismemberment, among other intuitively wrong things we might do
to the dead. The idea I had in mind was that of reverence, although respect might also do the trick.
You might now wonder: Reverence for whom, or what? This is a good question. The obvious
answer is that we might revere the dead person or animal in question, but it also seems plausible
that we might revere death itself, or rather that death might inspire a certain kind of reverence in
us. I want to get back to these points in a minute, but first, let’s talk about the distinction between
24 I
dedicated this thesis not to ‘Companion Animal Numbers One Through Five’, but rather to Snickers, Sam,
Benjamin, Hugo, and George.
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reverence and respect.
You might doubt that there is a significant difference between reverence and respect. Among the
OED’s definitions of reverence we find:
3. Deep respect and veneration for some thing, place, or person regarded as having a
sacred or exalted character.
This definition even uses the word ‘respect’. But there is, I think, a phenomenal difference
between the two—between feeling respect for someone and feeling reverential toward her. To feel
reverence for someone or something seems, to me at least, a bit more like being struck with awe. The
two also seem separable: you can, I think, feel respect for someone without revering her, although I
am not so sure that you can revere someone without respecting her.
It does not matter very much, for the purpose of this section, whether reverence and respect
are actually different things. You can read ‘respect’ where I write reverence, if you so choose. The
reason I choose to write about ‘reverence’ in this section is simply that I am going to approach
reverence a bit differently than I approached respect: rather than talking about ways in which we
might, or should, treat the dead reverentially, i.e., imagining what treating the animal dead with
respect might look like, I want to focus almost entirely on why we might have reverence for death
or the dead. But this section can act as a continuation of the last, rather than a departure from it,
if you believe that reverence and respect are not different.
5.3.1
Reverence for the Dead
When we feel reverence for some particular dead person, we often so do in virtue of something she did
during her life. She might have, for instance, written a great book, or made a significant discovery.
We can take this sort of reverence as a paradigm case: reverence, as inspired by extraordinary
antemortem actions.
We saw in Chapter 3 that there is a certain view on which life itself is something extraordinary,
something worth marveling at and revering. As I suggested there and will suggest again soon,
there is a certain sense in which death, too, is worth marveling at and revering. But let us pause
for a moment to consider this idea of life itself as extraordinary. The proponents of this view we
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met in Chapter 3, Regan and Schweitzer, seem to think there is not just something special about
life but also that there is something special about the manifestation of life: namely, that there is
something special about living things. In other words, they do not simply find the idea of life alone
awe-inspiring; rather, they find living creatures awe-inspiring in virtue of their being alive.25
Are Regan and Schweitzer alone in thinking that life is an extraordinary activity, one which
inspires reverence in us when we are faced with the things which enjoy it? It does not seem so. Both
Korsgaard and Aristotle, for instance, seem at times amazed and reverential when investigating life
and those who enjoy it. Aristotle writes:
We therefore must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler
animals. Every realm of nature is marvellous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers
who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and
hesitated to go in, reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in
that kitchen divinities were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind
of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and
something beautiful. Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end
are to be found in Nature’s works in the highest degree, and the resultant end of her
generations and combinations is a form of the beautiful.26
And Korsgaard writes:
A well-functioning animal likes to eat when she is hungry, is eager to mate, feeds and
cares for her offspring, works assiduously to keep herself clean and healthy, fears her
enemies, and avoids the sources of injury. Don’t say, “Well, of course she does!” Allow
yourself to be struck by the fact that there are entities, substances, things, that stand in
this relation to themselves and their own condition.27
Both Korsgaard and Aristotle, then, seem somewhat awed by the activity of life and living
creatures. Two points are worth noting here.
First, Korsgaard and Aristotle each focus on living creatures, i.e., animals; Aristotle seems more
broadly concerned with, and awestruck by, everything natural, but still is primarily making a point
about animals. Korsgaard is exclusively concerned with animals. This focus on living creatures
25 In
what follows, since I am sympathetic toward this point from Regan and Schweitzer, you might wonder whether
I am contradicting myself, since in Chapter 3 I urged against accepting the Regan-Schweitzer view of life as the
single ground for moral standing. But recall that there I did not say life was not awe-inspiring, or that it was not
important; on the contrary, I said that life was both morally important (to the content of someone’s goods and our
obligations to her) and certainly awe-inspiring. I simply disagreed with Schweitzer in particular that life itself can
be both necessary and sufficient at any time T1 in order that some creature have moral standing at T1 .
26 Parts of Animals, 1.5.
27 Korsgaard, 2018, p. 21.
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seems apt to me; we rarely feel reverence toward cells, for instance. And while we may be inspired
to reverence by certain things plants do, or by their resiliency or beauty, we are rarely, although
perhaps occasionally, as awestruck when observing them as we might be while observing animals.
Consider, for instance, the reactions of most children when asked if they would rather go to the zoo
or to the botanical gardens. There is something about the way animals go about living that strikes
us.28
What is it about animals in particular that strikes us in this way? You may say that I am
anthropomorphizing if I tell you that animals seem to want things as we do and seek them out as
we do, feel things as we do, and perhaps most remarkably have lives of their own as we do: lives
which matter to them, lives of which they are the subjects, lives in which they are aware of their
surroundings. But if this is just my own anthropomorphizing, that does not render it weightless.
Rather, there is something about the way animals live that lends itself to anthropomorphizing:
animals do seem to have their own. And for all of this similarity we can appreciate, we are also often
struck by things animals do which highlight our dissimilarities instead: who has not marveled at a
bird in flight or a butterfly emerging from her chrysalis? In any case, I need not press this point; if
you feel reverence toward everything natural, not just animals, you are welcome to continue to do
so.
And second—I did say there were two points to note, after all—neither Korsgaard nor Aristotle
merely notes his or her own reverence for living things. Each of them also urges us to feel the same
reverence: to really allow ourselves to be struck by it.
The broader point I want to make is the same one Korsgaard and Aristotle make. We should,
and, I think, do, feel reverence for the other living creatures just in virtue of their performance of the
activity of life. Living is difficult work, and it should not go unrecognized. Together with the idea
that extraordinary antemortem activities might make us feel reverence toward the dead, I think,
this point about the awe-inspiring nature of life itself might suggest that we should feel reverence
toward all the dead, or at least all the dead creatures (for reasons we’ve already considered), just
in virtue of their having been alive. Put another way, just as her antemortem discovery of radium
might be reason for us to revere the late Marie Curie, perhaps the mere antemortem aliveness of
28 I
owe this point to Laura Ruetsche.
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creatures may be a reason to revere them, too, even after they have died. After all, if you really
allow yourself to ponder life, as Korsgaard and Aristotle do above, you might find that you, too, are
awestruck by it.
You might, of course, feel reverence for a dead being without also feeling that reverence toward
her corpse. I don’t think it’s necessary that I show my readers that they must feel reverence when
they are faced with a corpse, but since so much of our work so far has really been about corpses, I
do want to say a bit about feeling reverential toward an animal, and directing that reverence toward
her corpse, here. Further, I don’t find it at all odd to imagine that an interaction with a corpse
might be the impetus for one’s feeling reverence for the animal whose corpse it is. Our interactions
with corpses, I think, are often the best place to begin making sense of our relations with the dead.29
Whatever else you might think about the metaphysical status of corpses, you probably agree that
corpses are dead bodies. We made this same point in the last section, where I motivated it using
some fairly ordinary ideas. Even if animalism about animal identity is false, and we eschew all talk
of the ‘X’s animal’ form, an animal’s body is still extremely important to the animal whom it makes
embodied. An animal’s body helps her feel pleasure and pain, which plays an instrumental role in
her survival. It allows her to achieve her ends by sustaining her life. It goes everywhere she goes,
and through it, she experiences her world. All of this is really to say that if we feel reverence for dead
animals in virtue of their antemortem aliveness, there is no reason that reverence cannot extend to
their corpses, their ‘dead bodies’: an animal’s dead body was, I think, once alive just as she was, or
at the very least played a vital role in her being alive. Reverence for dead animals, then, directed
toward their corpses, i.e., ‘dead bodies’, may provide another way to account for the wrongness of,
or at least the strangeness of, posthumous dismemberment of animals. Mutatis mutandis, a similar
case could be made about reverence as a reason not to posthumously dismember the human dead.
29 I
fear this point will verge on tangential, and it is not necessary for my argument. But I am thinking of something
like this: our interactions with corpses may reveal much more about us, and what we think is morally right and
metaphysically true, than we assume they do. I draw the spirit of this point from a paper of David Enoch’s on
moral realism and moral disagreement (Enoch, 2009). Enoch suggests that we might be able to attribute moral
disagreement about the right way to treat the dead, or their corpses, to metaphysical disagreement about what
happens to people after they die.
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5.3.2
Reverence for Death Itself
In Chapter 3, while we were considering views about reverence for life, we also saw a view which
proposed that we may also have a certain kind of reverence for death itself. That view was Iskra
Fileva’s, outlined in the article What Do We Owe the Dead?. Fileva is considering the cultural norm
which prescribes that we ought not speak ill of the dead. Her argument is abductive: she notes
that we have the intuition that we ought not speak ill of the dead even when the dead person in
question was of questionable character. She considers and rejects the possibility that we refrain from
speaking ill of the dead in order to prevent causing further suffering to the family of the deceased,
noting that in at least some cases, the family of the deceased recognize that their loved one was of
questionable character. She also considers and rejects the idea that the dead person in question is
not around to defend herself, noting that we do not have norms against gossip, for instance.
Finally, Fileva proposes that the best explanation is that there is something special about death
itself which makes us feel as though we ought to refrain from speaking ill of those it takes from
us. The point of addressing these other considerations is that there are cases in which that which
motivates the intuition that we ought not speak ill of the dead cannot be respect or reverence for the
deceased person herself. But the idea that death itself inspires a sort of reverence in us can account
for the presence of the not-speaking-ill intuition even in cases in which we do not have respect or
reverence for the dead person herself.
Fileva does explain the idea of death itself as inspiring reverence, although it is difficult to do so
in great detail. She writes that there is a ‘perceived otherworldliness’ to death, one which inspires
reverence in us. She writes:
It’s as though death has put a stamp of nobility on the forehead of the one whose heart
is no longer beating, and it is that stamp, that halo that pushes us to act as we do. The
deceased belong to death now, not to us. And it may be that we feel that it is not simply
other people watching us; we are being watched by death itself. Death has come to visit,
and we are all in its presence when we share a room with one of its recent claimees.
This idea, I think, may be a good way to account for many of our norms surrounding the dead.
But if Fileva is right, and what we respond to when we feel we must revere or respect the dead is
really death itself, there is no reason we should feel reverence and respect only when a human dies.
After all, death comes for animals just as it comes for us. There seems no good reason to deny that
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they too should receive the ‘stamp of nobility’ death affords its claimees. This line of thought is
corroborated by the old adage that we are all equal in death, which I pursue further later, in the
next section of this chapter.
5.4
Mourning the Animal Dead
Here, I want to begin a discussion of mourning the animal dead. My aim here is not to argue that
we have a moral obligation to mourn the animal dead; rather, it is to consider why we might want to
mourn the animal dead. Judith Butler, in Precarious Life and elsewhere, has argued for something
like the moral value of mourning, although I think it would be reductive to put her point as one
about duties. Here, I want to begin with Butler’s idea of precarious life, and her conception of
mourning as a political or moral act.30
5.4.1
Precarious Lives
Butler’s idea of precarious life begins with the idea of shared vulnerability.31 Our shared vulnerability
is inescapable, and grounded in the realities of our lives as embodied creatures: our embodiment
means that we are physically vulnerable to death, injury, and perhaps most importantly, to one
another, which binds us together.32 This last part is very important; on James Stanescu’s reading
of Butler, it is in fact our embodiment and physical vulnerability which accounts for the fact that
“we have sociality, that we have a capacity for being together”.33 On Butler’s view, those of us
who are physically vulnerable to one another are bound up together because of our vulnerability:
the dual notions of vulnerability and the community—the being bound up with one another, with
everyone who shares the same conditions—which that creates are the essential bases of the concept
of precarious life.
Stanescu has written that Butler’s idea of precarious life can be treated as an ontology, and in
30 I
should say at the outset that Butler doesn’t tell us what her concept of ‘the political’ includes, at least in the
collection of essays (Butler, 2004) I’m drawing on here. You might worry later that her construction of mourning as
‘political’ might be wrong because you understand ‘political’ or ‘the political’ in a different way than Butler does.
But this shouldn’t defeat any of the points I attempt to make. In many cases, we can even replace ‘political’ with
‘public’.
31 Butler, 2004, p. 20.
32 Butler, 2004, p. 20, p. 26.
33 Stanescu, 2012.
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particular a social ontology.34 This seems right to me; Butler thinks this precarious life is what
constitutes us as a community, where ‘us’ is that group of beings who share in our vulnerability to
one another and the forces we cannot control. Another not-at-all distinct way of conceptualizing
precarious life is as something like what the phrase ‘the human condition’ evokes or ought to evoke.35
The idea of ‘the human condition’ is supposed to bring out those shared features of our lives which
bring us together into a sort of community. The idea that ‘precarious life’ is a bit like ‘the human
condition’ is an interesting one to push a bit. Stanescu notes that Butler’s work is sometimes
anthropocentric, and is right to do so: Butler leads us into the discussion of precarious life professing
that we will be taking up the “question of the human”,36 but goes on to describe precarious life in
such a way that her reader almost wonders if she had animals in mind after all. But when people
say ‘the human condition’, they often have something similar in mind—mortality, for instance.
As I’ve just said, of course, the idea of precarious life is quite well-suited to a discussion of
animals, who are surely as physically vulnerable as we are—not just to us, but also to one another,
and perhaps most importantly to this thesis, to death. You might also notice some similarities
between Butler’s idea of ‘precarious life’ and Diamond’s conception of a ‘fellow creature’: namely,
the idea of shared finitude, or shared mortality. Before I say more about precarious life as it relates
to mourning, though, I want to examine Butler’s conception of mourning, and Stanescu’s ideas about
its applications to animals.
Butler’s work on mourning, it seems, began with a concern about grief in post-9/11 America: a
concern about which lives were considered grievable and which were not.37 But Stanescu begins his
paper with another scene in which we encounter the ungrievable: the supermarket. Stanescu and
Taylor both note that those who mourn animals, especially those who mourn animals who were not
their own companion animals, are often seen as childish, strange, or at worst, mentally ill.38 Butler
writes of the pain that comes along with being told, while bereft, that the object of one’s grief is
not grievable. Stanescu recognizes that pain at the meat counter.
34 Stanescu,
2012.
I think, alludes to this same idea in Violence, Mourning, Politics.
36 Butler, 2004, p. 20.
37 For now, I use the terms ‘grieve’ and ‘mourn’, and their variants, interchangeably; I think there is a distinction here
to be made, but I will refrain from making it right now, since Butler uses them interchangeably.
38 Stanescu, 2012, Taylor, 2013. (Diamond thinks there is something wrong with having a funeral for a dog, although
she doesn’t have anything to say about mourning.)
35 Butler,
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What does it mean to be ‘ungrievable’ ? For Butler, a life that is deemed ungrievable is denied
the status of a life at all: it is made ‘unreal’, or ‘derealized’.39 Butler writes:
There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there
cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to be a life, a life worth
noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition... [the
obituary] is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable
life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy.
The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does
not qualify as a life and is not worth a note.40
(Without crudely comparing tragedies, we might note that animals do not receive obituaries,
funerals, or anything of the sort.) Butler’s point is that there is a sense in which mourning a life
makes that life real, and that lives which are not mourned in virtue of their being ‘unmournable’
are derealized. We constitute the lives of others and their significance in part by mourning them, so
to call a life ungrievable is to call it insignificant—to call it ‘hardly a life at all’. We can see where
Butler is coming from: real lives have ends; they are finite. And to fail to recognize the end of a
life, by way of mourning, is to fail to recognize that it was a life at all.
Now we can see why, then, for Butler, mourning is a political act, or an act with political worth.
When we publicly mourn, we show others that we take the object of our grief to have had a real
life, one worth mourning. And for Butler, publicly mourning the ‘unmournable’ is one of the most
important, striking political acts we can perform.41 Mourning, construed thus as a political act,
plays a central role in Butler’s idea “a way out of the circle of violence”.42
We can also see now why mourning, for Butler, is the right way to treat other precarious lives.
Mourning is a recognition of the finitude we all share, and the precarity of our existences; our
own vulnerability. And it is also a recognition of the sense in which each of us is constituted by
our relationships with others. Just as the precarity of your life is partially constituted by your
vulnerability to others, the importance of your life is partially constituted by the mourning, or grief,
of others.
39 Butler,
2004, p. 33.
2004, p. 34. Emphasis is my own.
41 Butler, pp. 36-38.
42 Butler, 2004, p. 42.
40 Butler,
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5.4.2
Precarious Life as that Which We Share
Before turning to the topic of animals most specifically, I want to say a bit more about the idea of
precarity as that which unites us, binds us together. Butler makes a compelling case for this idea, as
we saw above: to say that we are all vulnerable to others and the forces of nature we cannot control
is not only to say that we are all bound together in virtue of our being vulnerable to one another,
but also to say that this constitutes us as a community, a community of vulnerable beings. In other
words, we are bound together not just in virtue of the fact that we are vulnerable to one another,
but also in virtue of the fact that we are all, in the end, vulnerable to roughly the same things.
We are not each fighting a separate battle against everyone else; everyone whose life is precarious is
fighting the same sorts of enemies, not just fellow soldiers but also forces beyond one’s own control.
While the former might seem to divide us, it is when we consider the latter that we realize we are
actually united.
The idea that our susceptibility to death is really that which unites us is not an unfamiliar one,
and I think that this idea is that from which our capacity for empathizing with the dead comes.
We saw a similar idea in Section 5.3.2 of this chapter, when I brought up the idea of our all being
equal in death. That adage, I think, is perhaps not quite right; rather, I think, as Butler does, that
we are all equal in mortality, in vulnerability. But this is perhaps never clearer than when we are
faced with the dead or dying themselves. Consider two passages from Ancient Greek literature, for
instance. (It is difficult to write anything about death without bringing the Greeks into it.)
In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, we meet Oedipus as a blind, aging man in exile, nearing death.
He knows he must die in a land sacred to the Furies—divine will demands it—and suspects Colonus,
a city near Athens, is that place. But the people of Colonus try to prevent him from entering, fearful
that he will ‘pollute’ Colonus as he did Thebes. Then Theseus, the King of Athens, enters. Theseus,
by contrast with the people of Colonus, says to Oedipus:
I am sorry for you, I should like to know what favor here you hope for from the city and
from me.... no wanderer shall come, as you do, and be denied my audience or aid. I
know I am only a man; I have no more to hope for in the end than you have.43
In Homer’s Iliad, we find a similar scene: two very different men, in this case actually on opposing
43 Oedipus
at Colonus, 556-568.
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sides of an ongoing war, recognize their own precarity and that of those around them. Priam, King
of the Trojans, has made the dangerous journey to the territory of the Greeks in order to collect the
body of his son, Hektor, killed by Achilleus. Achilleus still has Hektor’s body; he earlier attempted
to mutilate it, but was prevented from doing so by the gods. Priam must beg for the return of his
son’s body, begins his plea to Achilleus: “Achilleus like the gods, remember your father, one who
is of years like mine, and on the door-sill of sorrowful old age”.44 Priam goes on to describe the
deep sorrow and grief he feels at the loss of his son, repeatedly evoking the twin ideas of Achilleus
grieving his own father, and Achilleus’ father grieving him. After hearing Priam’s speech, Achilleus
is moved. Homer writes:
So he spoke, and stirred in [Achilleus] a passion of grieving for his own father. He took
the old man’s hand and pushed him gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam
sat huddled at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor, and
Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos.45
I cite these passages more for their help in bringing about in their readers a certain feeling than
for the precedent they set. But we can still see that Butler’s ideas are easily corroborated by these
scenes. As is my contention that recognition of our shared precarity, and its role in uniting us, is
that from which empathy for the dead may spring. In the scene from Oedipus at Colonus, we see
Theseus recognize Oedipus’ own precarity as something in which he, too, shares. This, and not any
involvement from the gods, I might add, is what compels Theseus to defy the wishes of his people
and agree to let Oedipus die in Colonus. Theseus treats Oedipus as he himself wishes to be treated,
after recognizing that he, too, is a mere mortal, and has ‘no more to hope for in the end’ than does
Oedipus.
Similarly, in the scene from the Iliad, we notice that Priam begins his plea to Achilleus by
speaking about Achilleus’ father’s precarity. We can also see that it is the shared experience of
grief which brings Achilleus and Priam together: these men recognize their vulnerability not only
to death itself, but also to one another, and to the sadness that the loss of a loved one brings.
And Achilleus brings himself to forget his hatred for Hektor (on account of Hektor’s having killed
Patroklos) in order to perform one final act of respect for him: the allowance of his body’s safe
44 The
Iliad, 24.486-487
Iliad, 24.507-512. (Patroklos is Achilleus’ dear cousin and friend, who was, more or less accidentally, murdered
by Hektor earlier in the Iliad.)
45 The
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return to his father, and later to Troy. It is death, vulnerability, mortality, grief, which eventually
brings Achilleus to empathy. It is an understanding of his own precariousness, and that of his father
and his dear cousin, which I think provokes him to finally empathize with Priam and Hektor.
Reflection upon our own precarity, then, and the precarity of our loved ones and indeed every
other creature, can bring us, like Achilleus and Theseus, to empathize with the dead, whomever they
are. And reflecting on these similarities between ourselves and the other creatures may be enough
to empathize with them such that we would rather mourn than eat them once they have died.
5.4.3
The Precarious, Mournable Lives of Animals
Butler’s picture presents us with reasons to grieve animals, but perhaps more importantly, it allows us
to see why grieving animals might be possible to begin with, and not at all childish or unreasonable.
In this subsection, I want to tie together the ideas we’ve seen about grief, mourning, and precarious
life, and tie them to animals.
Before I go any further, I should probably say that although Butler does not make one explicitly,
I think there is actually a distinction between grieving and mourning.46 Mourning is, I think, first
a task and second a feeling. Grieving is, on the other hand, first a feeling and second a task. To
mourn someone is to do the work of mourning, as Butler suggests, and while one can say one is ‘in
mourning’, there is not an associated emotion word, analogous to ‘grief’. To see why this distinction
matters, notice that it would be very difficult for me to urge you to grieve someone, or say anything
about the value of your feeling grief—usually, you are not morally required to feel anything, nor is
it good or bad for you to feel this or that. On the other hand, actions tend to have more easily
defensible moral weight. So perhaps it is best that we speak of ‘mourning’ as a political act, rather
than grieving.
You might wonder whether mourning a creature is incompatible with eating or using a part of
her corpse. I am not sure that it is, at least in all cultures. But in the vein of mourning as a political
act, I think eating meat (or gelatin, and so on) and mourning animals send opposite signals. To
eat meat is to show that you ultimately do think of humans and animals as different in some way
46 Or
at the very least, there should be some distinction like this; I don’t proclaim to be the expert on the difference
between the two words, but there are two distinct things I want to talk about which need names, and ‘mourning’
and ‘grieving’ seem as good choices as any.
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that matters; it is to show that you do not think the precarity of life, or something else which joins
us with our fellow creatures, is what really matters, but rather that you think whatever it is that
divides us is what really matters. You are not choosing, as Achilleus and Theseus do above, to see
the similarities between you and the dead being in front of you. Remember that Butler is not just
arguing that we have precarious lives; she is arguing that we first and foremost, or even essentially,
have precarious lives. She is arguing that we make each other what we are, both in life and after its
end. And if you choose to make animals the objects on your dinner plate, rather than the objects
of your grief or mourning, you are contributing to the construction of a reality in which animals are
dinner, and probably just dinner, rather than fellow creatures, your fellow creatures in precarity,
finitude, mortality.
Let me dwell on that last point for just a moment. The idea of that point is that when we
eat meat, or otherwise use the corpses of the animal dead, we are contributing to a certain kind of
world. Of course, every act is like this; but of course there are worse and better ones nonetheless. I
am going to talk more about creating a certain kind of world later in this section, but, I think, in a
different way. Mourning animals, or feeling grief for them, and eating them, are acts that contribute
to different sorts of worlds. Think, for instance, about burning books. While the act in itself is not
at all good, it is also not (intuitively) as bad as some other acts we might think up. But the sort
of world in which we burn books is not a good one; our burning books says certain things about us
as a community, and what we deem acceptable. It signals that we simply do not care about certain
things, and that others may become acceptable soon.47 Eating animals, and really eating animals
as casually as we do, says something about us and what we accept as a good way of treating others
with precarious lives, and contributes to a certain sort of world very different from a world in which
we mourn them instead. We might ask ourselves, then, whether mourning and eating can really
coexist, when they seem to drive our world in such different directions, and signal such different
things about the right way to treat those with whom we share precarity.
On the whole, Butler’s argument, I think, is quite compelling. There is something both disruptive
and powerful about the idea of mourning animals publicly, just as Butler imagines there would be
something both disruptive and powerful about publicly mourning other ‘unmournable’ lives. But
47 The
sentiment here is expressed in Heinrich Heine’s line about societies which burn books, and their inevitable turn
toward burning people instead. The idea of this connection, and for this paragraph, is owed to Daniel Herwitz.
158
even privately, it seems that there is some moral weight to the idea of mourning or grieving the
animal dead. Realizing lives need not be a political affair in order to be meaningful. As we saw in
the case of Achilleus and Priam above, private grief can be just as significant, and a display of one’s
moral character just as grand. To paraphrase something I quoted from Korsgaard in Chapter 3,
what you do with the animal dead is not just about consequences, or numbers, or making the lives
of other, future animals better. Rather, what you do with, or about, a particular dead animal, or
parts of her body, is about you and that animal. I want to propose, in fact, something I just alluded
to in the last paragraph: that what you do with the animal dead is not just about you as you are
right now and that animal, but rather about you as the sort of person you would like to be, and
about the sort of world in which you would like to live.
I draw this thought from J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Disgrace sees its protagonist, David
Lurie, in many compromising positions and some redeeming ones. David has begun to volunteer at
an animal clinic, where unwanted dogs are euthanized. Toward the end of the novel, he begins to
take the corpses of these dogs to the incinerator where they are to be burned. He schedules this
task meticulously, despite never having been a man who took care for animals seriously. He will not
leave the corpses at the incinerator site over the weekend: “this would mean leaving them on the
dump with the rest of the weekend’s scourings: with waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped
up at the roadside, malodorous refuse from the tannery—a mixture both casual and terrible. He is
not prepared to inflict such dishonor upon them”.48 He also will not let the corpses be incinerated
by the workmen, who beat the corpses with shovels until they fit nicely into the incinerator. David
asks himself:
Why has he taken on this job... For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and
what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself, then. For his idea of
the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient
shape for processing... He may not be their savior, the one for whom they are not too
many, but he is prepared to take care of them when they are unable, utterly unable, to
take care of themselves.49
Let us begin by noting here that David’s actions bear some striking similarities to a piece of
literature we have not yet discussed: Antigone, a line from which was this thesis’ epigraph. Antigone
48 Coetzee,
49 Coetzee,
1999, p. 141.
1999, pp. 142-143.
159
goes to great lengths to preserve the honor of the corpse of Polynices, her brother. Although
Antigone’s uncle, Creon, has prohibited burying or (publicly) mourning Polynices, Antigone wants
to bury him, mourn him, and perform the proper funerary rights.50 She knows she will be sentenced
to death if she does so, but does so anyway. And of her burial of her brother, she says to Creon:
“And if you think my acts are foolishness, the foolishness may be in the fool’s eye”.51 Here Antigone
seems almost in conversation with David.
Antigone and David both honor, and moreover mourn, the dead against the expectations of their
respective societies, even though they realize that in some sense their acts are insensible. Ido Geiger,
noticing the same parallel, calls David a “dog-Antigone”.52 What are we to make of this parallel? A
more in-depth analysis than I can give here might reveal that mourning those deemed unmournable
is not foolish at all, but rather one of the most honorable things one can do. But I shall stop to note
that this parallel highlights the sheer age of the question we are considering in this passage, about
mourning the unmournable, and the broader question we have considered in this thesis, about the
proper way to treat the animal dead. Disgrace was published in 1999. Antigone, Homer’s Iliad, and
Oedipus at Colonus are some two thousand years older.
Of course, these are not the only works of literature that contend with the themes of respecting
and mistreating the dead, broadly construed. But it’s worth noting the fact that more than two
thousand years after Sophocles and Homer, we collectively continue to be struck by issues of treating
the dead rightly and wrongly. Questions about the right way to treat our dead, I think, are some
of the most fundamental human questions. Disgrace urges us to view these questions as not only
fundamental but also pressing; and it encourages us to broaden the scope of the ‘our’ in the phrase
‘our dead’.
Now let us return to Disgrace itself. We can see that David’s act, however private, however
inconsequential, is about his idea of the world. In the world in which David would like to live, we do
not do horrible things to animal corpses; we dignify them, however we can. David’s act is also about
him; we see his development as a character in this scene, his gradual shift from a man who finds care
50 A
part of dialogue from Antigone which Butler would like comes to us in lines 84-87. Antigone’s sister Isemene,
upon hearing Antigone’s plan to bury her brother, urges Antigone to at least keep her act “hidden”. Antigone
retorts: “I shall hate you more if silent, not proclaiming this to all.”
51 Antigone, 469-470.
52 Geiger in Singer and Leist, 2010.
160
for animals unserious to a man who gives up his own time in order to prevent too much dishonor
from coming to them, even after they have died. I would argue that David’s actions here are about
both mourning and grief, and also recognition of his own vulnerability, in which he realizes he is not
alone. As he contemplates and comes to terms with his own aging in Disgrace, while simultaneously
participating in the euthanasia of all of these dogs, he comes to recognize the precarity of his own
life and the other lives around him.
This is not a point about literature, or an analysis of Disgrace, or at least it need not only be
that. Rather, it is a point about us, and the way we behave—or can behave—toward the dead.
What does our treatment of the animal dead say about us, this passage from Disgrace asks? What
sort of world are we living in, and what are we doing to make it a world of that sort? When we are
faced with a choice about how to treat precarious others, I think we should choose as David does,
even in private. That is a choice not just about mourning, or eating, or using, or grieving: it is a
choice about the sorts of people we want to be, and the sort of world in which we want to live.
161
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Part of To Eat or Not to Eat: Philosophical Questions About the Animal Dead