Animals, Attitudes and Moral Theories

Animals, Attitudes and Moral Theories* Realism and theory Over more than thirty years, an enduring quality of Mary Midgley’s writing on attitudes towards non-human animals has been its realism, a recognition of actual beliefs and feelings that is missing from more abstract treatises on animal ethics. One thinks, for example, of her insistence that, before levelling accusations of ‘speciesism’, we recognize ‘a deep emotional tendency … to attend first to those around us who are like those who brought us up’ (1983: 106). One thinks, too, of the many places where she draws attention to the complexity of people’s attitudes to animals, to ‘incongruities’ and ‘paradoxes’ among these attitudes. ‘For as long as animals have been domesticated’, she remarks, ‘humans have looked at them with a kind of squint’, seeing them now as ‘things’, now as ‘something more or less like people’ (2008: 22. See also 1985: 57). She is critical, as well, of generalizations that display ignorance of large differences in attitudes between whole cultures or societies. These include cultures where totemic animals are held sacred and nomadic ones in which people form special bonds with horses, reindeer or camels (1983: 110). A further aspect of her realism is recognition of the many and complex ‘barriers’ that we have ‘erected against concern for animals’. These range from intellectual fashions and prejudices, like Behaviourist psychology, to ‘spasms of technological euphoria’ that encourage the mutation of farm animals into ‘agricultural products’ (2008: 21). It is a kind of realism, finally, that also informs Midgley’s reservations about the value of broad moral ‘notions like equality, rights and even justice’ in addressing our treatment of animals. For these notions have their primary use when directing attention to some ‘limited, chosen group’, within which ‘unfair privilege’ or arbitrary discrimination is identified (1983: 82-3). The question I discuss in this chapter is whether Midgley’s admirable realism doesn’t invite a harsher judgement on moral theorising than her own reservations about talk of equality and the like indicate. Is her realism about the motley of attitudes found among both individuals and societies consistent with maintaining, as she did in Beast and Man, that it is through moral ‘rules and principles’ that we may ‘guide ourselves through the jungle’ (1980: 169)? If not, then we need to consider the possibility that moral theorising is unhelpful, or worse, in the attempt to cultivate authentic concern for animals. Could it be that reliance on argumentation of the sort found in moral theories is one of those ‘barriers ... against concern for animals’ that we have erected? As my phrasing of these questions no doubt conveys, by a moral theory I mean something more specific than thinking about how to relate to and treat animals. I have in mind theories that Tzachi Zamir calls ‘two-stage’ theories, ones that first try to determine the ‘moral status’ of animals and then draw conclusions from this for our conduct towards them. Common to such theories is the thought that animals should be treated in certain ways ‘because they possess moral status’. He is right to observe that ‘virtually all work in animal ethics attempts to establish or reform the “moral status” of nonhuman animals’ (Zamir 2007: 16). For central to nearly all the many theories that invoke principles enjoining such-and-such treatment of animals are claims about moral status, ‘considerability’ or ‘entitlement’. Here are a couple of examples. One author’s answer to the question ‘why is it wrong to cause pigeons gratuitous harm’ is that this is because ‘pigeons …have moral status’ and hence ‘have moral rights’ (DeGrazia 2002: 37). Again, Martha Nussbaum – having proclaimed a need for ‘theories of justice’ so that we may ‘get the best out of our ethical intuitions’ – argues that since animals, like human beings, have ‘valuable’ powers and ‘capabilities’, they possess ‘dignity’ and are ‘worthy of respect’. This, she says, is why it is wrong to subject animals to intensive farming methods and other technologies (Nussbaum 2007: 31-4). Before turning to the question of the limitations of moral theories in this sense, it will be helpful to elaborate on Midgley’s reference to the motley of attitudes towards animals that men and women and whole societies have taken. Attitudes and ways of life Midgley herself describes certain figures whose attitudes towards animals form a complex and perhaps incongruous mix. She imagines, for instance, someone who is considerate to his pets, active in wildlife conservation, but who has no ‘scruples about hurting experimental animals, or eating factory-farmed meat, or even hunting’ (1983: 17). Let’s consider, in more detail, the testimony of a man who was acutely aware in himself of the ‘paradox’ of a ‘fondness of animals’ combined with the bloodthirstiness of the hunter. Gavin Maxwell is famous for a trilogy of books, beginning with A Ring of Bright Water, that recount his years spent on a remote stretch of the west coast of Scotland. ‘Fondness’ is too facile a term to describe his love of the otters he adopted and the wild animals – deer, geese and others – that lived in the area. Yet this love is juxtaposed with far more aggressive feelings. The death of an otter left him as ‘desolate as one who has lost an only child’: but Maxwell then goes off duck-shooting. On one occasion, he undertakes a drive of two hundred miles to take an injured gull to a vet and, soon after, enthusiastically joins in a day’s hare-coursing. It is not just love for otters and deer that Maxwell experiences: he admires and respects them, for their ‘nobility’, ‘steadfastness’ and ‘dignity’: and he feels himself to be in ‘intimate communication’ with them, his ‘neighbours’, and to stand to them in a relation of ‘trust’. These are not, however, attitudes he extends to the rats that he poisons with wolferine, or the sharks that he once ferociously hunted for profit. Midgley, we noted, draws our attention not only to the complex attitudes of individual men and women, but to the variety of attitudes found across cultures. Consider, for instance, some of the attitudes that anthropologists attribute to many hunter-gatherer societies (see Brody 2001 and Hurn 2012). A striking feature of these societies is the network of rules and customs that serve to regulate the hunting of animals. These determine who can hunt, when and where, and which animals can be hunted and in what numbers. Such customs belong to traditions that shape and constantly affirm attitudes towards different kinds of animal. Especially important are rituals, like the Native American sun-dance, of respect for certain animals. These may take the form of thanking the animals for their willingness to be killed in the expectation that this will encourage a future supply. Further regulations serve to prohibit the killing of certain animals, at least in certain contexts. These may be totemic animals deemed to be sacred ancestors of the hunter-gatherer clan. Several anthropologists emphasize the ‘fluidity’ or ‘porousness’ of the boundaries between human beings and animals that are drawn in societies where survival depends on constant intercourse and empathy with the lives of animals. One important skill of shamans is to cross these boundaries and to mediate between human and non-human animals. It is because of this porousness that, in many hunter-gatherer societies, people identify themselves with animals, maintain that people may transform into animals and vice-versa, and treat certain animals, notably dogs, as companions who may be afforded funeral rites. It’s been suggested that porousness reflects, in turn, the crucial adaptive capacity of Homo sapiens to attribute ‘human-like minds’ to animals (Mithen 1999: 204). Attitudes towards animals are, of course, no less complex in agricultural societies. One has only to think of the elaborate and culturally diverse rules governing which animals may be eaten. But the examples of hunter-gatherer communities and of an individual like Gavin Maxwell are sufficient at least to suggest certain general truths about these attitudes. They suggest, for a start, that attitudes – compassion and respect or callousness and indifference – are not free-standing, but interwoven with beliefs and practices. Especially significant are practices informed by beliefs about the relationship between humans and animals. The beliefs, for instance, that some animals are tribal ancestors, or that some animals are willing quarries, or that companion animals satisfy genuine human needs, or that wild animals were not created to be put under human control. The examples also suggest that concepts like respect for an animal, or its dignity, do not float free, but are situated or embedded within networks of beliefs and practices. Maxwell’s respect for the red deer owed to the way in which, as he put it, he shared ‘his world’ with these ‘neighbours’. It was not a respect he could intelligibly have extended to all creatures. Likewise, the dignity he discerned in otters was a quality peculiar to them and certain other creatures, not a universal quality of animals. Similar remarks could be made about the respect shown by hunter-gatherers to certain animals: it is a respect that presupposes an intercourse with, and dependence on, them that is missing in the case of many other creatures. It is a respect, moreover, that is expressed through appropriate practices, like that of Algonquian hunters who place the bones of slain bears in trees (Brody 2001: 256). The examples suggest, too, that the tensions or incongruities among attitudes that philosophers and sociologists identify are, sometimes at least, more in the mind of these detached observers than in the lives of the people being observed. Maxwell refers to the ‘paradox’ in the combination of his love of animals and his ‘bloodthirsty’ hunting instinct, but he describes it as a ‘pleasing paradox’ with which he is happy to live. Indeed, it is clear that he does not really regard it as a paradox at all: it only appears so to people who don’t live close to and engage with wild animals. And it would be rash to assume that apparent incongruities in the treatment of animals – considerate protection of some, ruthless extermination of others; worshipping a creature in one context, shooting it in another – demonstrate arbitrariness and inconsistency in a culture’s attitudes. Closer inspection is likely to reveal that such discriminations make sense within the wider economy of the culture’s beliefs and practices. Put in the most general terms, what my examples suggest is that attitudes to animals, like the concepts which inform them, are situated within a form of life. Abstract them from a web of beliefs and practices, and they become idle. It is important here to emphasize a distinction between real or effective attitudes and what psychologists call ‘non-attitudes’ or ‘vacuous’ ones (see Herzog 2010: 240). These are attitudes that people voice – perhaps out of political correctness, convention, or simply because it is the sort of thing ‘one says’ – but that do not engage with or inform their actions. They float free, without an anchor in people’s lives. This is a distinction to bear in mind now that I turn to the issue of the value or otherwise of moral theories when reflecting upon ethical concern for animals. Explanations and abstractions Accounts of the moral status of animals are usually yoked to general explanations of why people have tended to fail to recognize this status. Much work in animal ethics goes into exposing the reasons for this failure, in order that the proper moral status of animals will then become clear. Typically, these general explanations invoke dualisms or dichotomies that, it is argued, have obstructed recognition of moral status. The beliefs that only human beings have souls, that they alone are rational, that only they are made in the image of God, and the like have served historically to deny to animals the moral status attributed to humans. They have stood in the way, allegedly, of the appreciation, crucial to recognition of animals’ moral status, that human beings are one species of animal among others. But these general explanations are much too general. Once the motley of actual attitudes to animals is attended to, it is clear that dichotomies like those mentioned, even where they exist, do not by themselves dictate attitudes and practices towards animals. For example, people in some hunter-gatherer societies ‘say that humans and animals exist in separate domains’, but the further beliefs that shamans can sometimes ‘cross this divide’ and ‘negotiate’ with animals clearly influence what is held to be proper treatment of creatures (Brody 2001: 289). Again, for Buddhists, human beings are unique in that they alone are capable of enlightenment and liberation. Coupled, however, with the belief that humans may be reborn as animals, and vice-versa, the implications for how animals are regarded are different from those drawn in religions where there is no such belief. In many cultures, as also in the minds of many individuals, crude ‘human versus animal’ dichotomies or dualisms are not to be found. In some cultures, animals too have souls, or have the form of gods, or speak with men and women. The implications for how the animals are then regarded and treated are highly variable, as indeed are those of the wider belief that human and animal lives are on a continuum, that humans are a species of animal. This belief is perfectly compatible with holding that humans are such a superior species of animal that moral concern should be reserved for them, or with maintaining – in a Social Darwinist spirit - that between species there can be no moral relationship, only a struggle for survival and domination. These simple observations make historical nonsense of a story often told by theorists about the moral status of animals. According to this ‘expanding circle’ narrative, moral concern is originally confined to a limited class of human beings and then inflates concentrically to ever larger classes until it encompasses humanity at large. Only then can the circle of concern expand so as to include animals. But clearly, neither for individuals nor for whole cultures does moral concern for animals post-date one for human beings at large. Maxwell, for instance, saw himself as having obligations towards his otters and dogs, arising from a relationship of trust, that he did not have to the mass of humanity. In many societies, a family’s obligations to the animals – dogs, pigs and others – who live with it outweigh those to human strangers (see Serpell 1986). Many communities, observes Midgley, are ‘multi-species ones’ whose motley of complex attitudes cannot be captured in a diagram of ‘concentric circles’ of moral concern (1983: 111). Moral theorists are liable to respond by saying that the idea of the expanding circle should not be taken historically. Like that of the social contract, it is to be read as an ‘as if’ story, a heuristically useful reconstruction of the rational development of moral concern. The story supposedly reveals how logical consistency requires that an initial moral concern for, say, members of one’s family must extend – once relevant similarities with wider groups are perceived - to human beings at large and eventually to animals as well. Admittedly, the story is then no longer a chapter in an up-beat narrative of human progress, but its philosophical merits are not thereby impugned. However, it is a bad ‘as if’ story, and for the same reason that, according to many critics, the social contract story is: it is overly abstract. The story is guilty of a number of pretences, each to the effect that the direction of moral concern may be determined in abstraction from actual human practices. There is the pretence, first, that the consistency or otherwise with past attitudes of a new instance of this concern is always settled in advance, as if the established attitudes inexorably laid down the tracks along which future ones must run. This means, in effect, that an established moral concern for certain beings must extend to all beings that are relevantly similar to these. Crucially, however, perceptions and criteria of relevant similarity are situated and enmeshed in webs of beliefs and practices. The hunter-gatherer who extends to wolves the respect he already has for bears isn’t simply noting some general similarity between the two creatures – their intelligence, say – but bringing wolves into the same sphere of practice that bears already occupy. It is possible, and indeed quite common, for people to recognize a general similarity between humans and animals, or between some animals and other animals - such as susceptibility to pain - yet not to concede that this is relevant to an extension of moral regard. This is not due to a failure of logical consistency, but to structures of feelings towards and forms of engagement with animals that do not allow for the similarity to be perceived as relevant. A second and related pretence is that the notions that figure prominently in theories of moral status – dignity, respect, moral considerability, rights, intrinsic value, and so on – have any effective purchase and resonance in abstraction from actual practices. Utterances in documents like the Earth Charter to the effect that ‘every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings’ would surely have been unintelligible to most older cultures, including ones in which there were moral duties to certain animals – totemic ones, say. Such utterances would have been unintelligible for the same reason that the following pronouncement would now be for most of us: ‘All objects in the world, including, plastic cups and grains of sand, have dignity/intrinsic value/moral considerability’. They are not utterances or claims that can engage with real life, emotion and practice. That, today, claims about the dignity or moral rights of all animals are not dismissed as meaningless does not show that we have become enlightened, that reason has at last compelled us to admit that dignity and rights are possessed by all creatures. It may simply show that a moral rhetoric of justice has become familiar and entrenched, even though its terms – as Midgley points out in the case of ‘rights’ – ‘cannot be salvaged for any clear, unambiguous use’ in the discussion of why animals matter (1983: 63). It is an exaggeration, perhaps, to declare that ‘justice is an artefact of custom’ (Gray 2003: 103): but there is no doubt that, unhinged from laws, conventions and traditions, the language of justice and moral status comes to sound idle, hollow. Fish have ‘intrinsic value … irrespective of [any] utility’ to human beings: so announces the Preamble to the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment Report of 2005, whose discussion of water toxicity then proceeds to focus almost exclusively on its unfortunate effects upon people – preventing them, for example, from swimming and boating in lakes. Despite the elevated language of its Preamble, the Report has been accused, therefore, of representing fish simply as ‘commodities’ (Stibbe 2012: 93). There is a ritualistic flavour to many such declarations of the moral status of animals. ‘Yes’, people happily agree, ‘of course animals have rights, dignity and value’: but then they pass on, the implications for practice of what they agree upon left entirely opaque. The rhetoric registers ‘non-attitudes’ of the kind referred to earlier rather than live, effective convictions. Moral theories and moral concern Moral status theories, then, are too general and abstract – too tangential to the practices and ways of life in which moral notions are actually deployed – to contribute to the cultivation and exercise of moral concern for animals. Some critics would go further: these theories are among ‘the barriers against moral concern’, to recall Midgley’s phrase. These theories, the charge goes, encourage distracting debates and obsessions, and in other ways contribute to obscuring what is required if effective moral concern is to extend to the animals most in need of it in the modern world. A prominent champion of ‘virtue ethics’ concludes that we ‘can dismiss the question of the moral status of animals without a qualm’, not least because of the ‘overly theoretic stance’ that the question presupposes (Hursthouse 2006: 140, 146). One unfortunate aspect of this stance is an obsession with the relative rankings of humans and different kinds of animals in terms of their status. Questions that are senseless outside of particular cultural contexts – whether the life of a vegetative human being has more or less value than that of a healthy dog; whether fish are sufficiently ‘subjects of a life’ to have rights – are regularly addressed in philosophy journals. In focussing on such issues, moral theorists in fact play into the hands of those who have vested interests in the exploitation of animals. Factory farmers and animal experimenters, for example, are more than happy to have public debate bogged down in questions about the relative status to be accorded to this or that kind of animal. Chickens or salmon, some scientist can always be found to say, don’t enjoy the degree of feeling or intelligence to qualify for high status. It is not only factory farmers and animal experimenters who benefit from an excessive focus on issues of moral status. The ‘overly theoretic stance’ threatens, more generally, to be indulgent to people for their maltreatment of animals. The emphasis of the moral theorist is upon lack of moral concern for animals as a cognitive failure, for which lack of knowledge or a defect in practical reason is responsible. Someone who mistreats turkeys either does not know what turkeys are like or fails to draw the right conclusion about their moral status. Either he doesn’t recognize that they are intelligent, sensate creatures, or he fails to draw the required moral conclusion from their similarity in these respects with human beings. Tzachi Zamir surely provides the proper response to this when recalling his and his friends’ bungled, bloody killing of a turkey years before. What we lacked was not an acknowledgment of some basic equality between people or animals. Nor was it our speciesism that was at fault. We were simply the standard stone-hearted products of a society for which the living animal is merely a transition phase on the way to becoming food (Zamir 2007: 136). Implied in this confession is an array of ‘barriers against moral concern’ that are more extensive and operative than the failures of understanding, consistency and practical reason on which moral theorists dwell. Zamir and his friends, like the rest of us who live in developed countries, are ‘products’ of a hedonistic, consumerist, technophiliac environment in which most people are indifferent to the harsh lives and deaths of the billions of creatures that feed them. Few of these people proclaim the dualisms, prejudices and denials of animals’ moral status on which moral theorists concentrate. They are more likely to be ‘silent about animals. Not against, just silent’ (quoted in Patterson 2002: 155). These are the words of an American Jewish doctor when reflecting on the relationship between industrial farming and the Holocaust. They are quoted in a book whose title is taken from a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, in which he famously refers to ‘the eternal Treblinka’ that is the condition of the animals that live and die in industrial farms (Singer 2011: 271). Here is not the place for a detailed consideration of an analogy that has prompted heated exchanges, protests and even legal actions. But there is no need to endorse the analogy tout court in order to accept that, as with the Holocaust, so with Singer’s ‘eternal Treblinka’: it is a combination of willed ignorance, indifference, conformism, and the pursuit of personal comforts and pleasures that clears the way for those capable of callousness and brutality to proceed with their work unhindered. It is a combination, of course, that can easily exist alongside love, kindness and sympathy towards particular people or particular animals – family, friends, pets, birds in the garden, elephants. It can do this because, to recall the Jewish doctor’s words, people are not ‘against’ the animals they eat and otherwise use, any more than most Germans were ‘against’ Jews. In both cases, it is a combination of attitudes more effective, and more deadly, than the ‘theoretic stance’ of those who, on some ground or other, deny moral status to certain people or animals. ‘Heart’ and spontaneity Zamir spoke of the ‘stone-heartedness’ of people, including his earlier self, for whom turkeys and many other animals are only ‘phases’ in an industrial food process. He is not the only one to imply that the main barrier against moral concern for these animals has more to do with closure of the heart than with defective knowledge or logic. ‘I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles … open your heart and listen to what your heart says’, urges Esther Costello – the vehicle for J. M. Coetzee’s views in his book, The Lives of Animals (1999: 37). On the cover of a recent issue of Animal Times (2, 2014), Paul McCartney wears an ‘Eat No Fish’ T-shirt and invites readers ‘to let ‘em into your heart’. A merit of this rhetoric of the heart is to help redress an underlying assumption of theories of moral status. The assumption is made explicit by Bernard Williams: when it comes to ‘ethical relations’ with animals, ‘the only question there can be [is] how they should be treated’ by us (1993: 118, my italics). This might be true if the only thing that is relevant to ethical relations to animals is their moral status: for status – the possession of rights, say - is typically assigned to beings in the context of determining their treatment. But it isn’t true, and someone with a moral perspective on relations with animals will ask plenty of questions besides Williams’ ‘only’ one. Do the lives of animals hold moral lessons for us? Can human lives be bettered through engagement with animals? Do some animals themselves display moral understanding? Is an assumed human ‘kingship over other creatures’ a sure sign, as Montaigne thought, of the vices of ‘presumption’ and ‘arrogance’? (Montaigne 1991: 487). What feelings are appropriate towards animals of this or that species? Except on the peculiarly narrow conception of ethical relations presupposed by moral theories, the domain of these relations to animals is rich and many-sided. (Notice that I have switched from ‘moral’ to ‘ethical’. It is a legitimate worry whether questions about relations to and concern for animals, once detached from the framework of moral theories, are ones about morality, an institution, as Williams (1993) persuasively argued, that tends to be defined in terms of obligations, rules, principles, and status. ‘Ethical’, arguably, is free from these associations, hence the term usually preferred by ‘virtue ethicists’.) Attention to cultivation of the heart is not so much deflected, but actively discouraged, by moral theories. It is ‘reason – not sentiment, not emotion – [that] compels us to recognise … [animals’] equal right to be treated with respect’, urges one champion of such a theory (Regan 1985: 24). The fear, it seems, is that introducing matters of the heart will obscure the logical arguments for assigning moral status to animals. But argumentation, as Cora Diamond in her reflections on Coetzee’s book suggests, may be ‘a way we make unavailable to ourselves …. a sense of what animal life is’, and at any rate renders the cultivation of such a sense immaterial (Diamond 2008: 53). It is no good for the moral theorist to reply that he or she holds that animals, like humans, are sentient, intelligent or ‘subjects of a life’. For it is not such sweeping claims about animals, but a sense of, an empathy with, the lives – and struggles for life - of particular animals, that inspires effective moral concern. Another commentator on Coetzee’s book, the primatologist Barbara Smuts, describes how it is through engagement in ‘personal relationships’ with animals that an ‘opening [of] the heart’ to animals is made possible, as indeed is a recognition of them as ‘persons’ in a richer sense than the thin ones – ‘subjects of rights’, say - advanced by moral theorists (in Coetzee 1999: 120). If close attention to and personal engagement with the lives of animals is one way to cultivate and open the heart, another is to reflect on what is wrong with people who exploit and harm animals. Reflection suggests that it is vices of the emotions – ranging from indifference to a love of violence – that is wrong with them, not lack of knowledge or reason. It helps to open the heart to certain animals to appreciate that those whom we recognise as oppressing them are people whose hearts are closed, whose feelings are distorted. This is why it is important when, for example, Rosalind Hursthouse identifies the ‘vain-glory’ of fox-hunters and their ‘self-indulgent … impious, cruel and callous’ pleasures (Hursthouse 2000: 162). It is unlikely, of course, that the fox-hunting enthusiast will see himself in this light. But the people who do are thereby encouraged to open themselves up to an experience of animals less distorted by vices of the heart. Coetzee’s heroine gives a public lecture called ‘The Poets and the Animals’, whose aim is to bring to the audience’s attention a kind of poetry – Ted Hughes is mentioned – that is ‘the record of an engagement’ with particular animals, that communicates an ‘attentiveness to animals’ (Coetzee 1999: 51-2). This, she thinks, will be more effective than the language of ‘the whole animal rights business’ in combatting the ‘contempt’ that many people feel for the animals they eat and otherwise exploit. She is not the only writer to propose that poetry makes animals present to the moral imagination in a way that professional moral philosophy cannot. One author, for example, persuasively argues for the merits of the Japanese haiku tradition, in which many of the poems refer to animals. These record, with ‘empathy and positive regard’, ‘actual encounters’ with individual animals ‘living according to their natures’. They are poems that inspire a ‘reconnection’ with animals and a sense of their ‘importance’, and they do this ‘with no need for recourse to abstractions such as “the intrinsic value of nature”’ (Stibbe 2012: 148, 162). The little verses of Issa, Bashō and many others show, one might say, what the language of moral theories unsuccessfully endeavours to state. These tributes to the role of poetry in dismantling barriers against ethical concern for animals indicate, importantly, that cultivating a sense of animal lives, and opening the heart to them, does not issue in yet one more moral theory to add to the rest. If attentive regard and empathy for these lives prompts compassion and concern, this is not as the outcome of argumentation. Here there is no ‘two-stage’ movement from a premise about the moral status of an animal to a judgement on how it should be treated. The compassionate person, whose heart is open, seeks no justification for his response. Indeed, as Alasdair MacIntyre remarks in connection with generous behaviour, ‘to offer or even request such a justification is itself a sign of defective virtue’ (1999: 158). Once a good person is alert to, mindful of, the cruelty of a practice, he or she sees at once that this is not something to be party to. To propose that the practice is wrong because it violates the rights or moral dignity of a creature is to go an argument too far (see Hursthouse 2006: 143). This could be put by saying that the responses to animals of a person attentive to their lives is ‘spontaneous’. Spontaneity is a virtue especially associated with Daoism, and it is interesting that, for the Daoist sages Zhuangzi and Liezi, compassionate regard for animals is a mark of a person who perceives them for what they are and whose feelings are ‘flowing, unforced, uncontrived’. The contrast here is with people who govern their actions by reference to ‘rules and principles’ – to considerations of moral status, one might say. The tendency to do this is a sure sign of people’s loss of spontaneous virtue and, thereby, of the dao, the Way (see Cooper 2014a and b). The sages look back with nostalgia to a time before this loss, when ‘people lived together with the birds and the beasts’. The Daoist sages held out little hope that there could be a return to these happier times and would have held out even less if they were witness to a world in which billions of animals pass through an ‘eternal Treblinka’. But they would have recognized that it is possible for some human beings to live in a better relationship to animals. They would have recognized, too, that the incentive to do so is unlikely to be provided by moral theories and other distractions from the cultivation of spontaneous concern and openness of the heart. David E. 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