Third Example Nonhuman Animals

112 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
accidents, guns, and HIV/AIDS. Yet cigarettes are legal throughout

the United States, and marijuana is not.
The utilitarian case for legalization seems so strong that one
might wonder how marijuana became the main target of America’s
Drug War. Did the architects of that war really believe that mari-
juana is extremely harmful?
Evidently, they did not. In the mid-1990s, President Nixon’s
advisor John Ehrlichman appeared to speak frankly about why
Nixon had started the War on Drugs. “You want to know what this
was really all about?” he said.
[The Nixon White House] had two enemies: the antiwar left
and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to
be either against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting the
public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with
heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt
those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their
homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after
night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about
the drugs? Of course we did.
In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. Yet his

Drug War goes on. It goes on, even though it now seems like a war
that began dishonestly, with racist, partisan political motivations,
and has done more harm than good.
7.4. Third Example: Nonhuman Animals

The treatment of animals has traditionally been regarded as a trivial
matter. Christians believe that man alone is made in God’s image
and that animals do not have souls. Thus, by the natural order of
things, we can treat animals in any way we like. Saint Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) summed up the traditional view when he
wrote,
Hereby is refuted the error of those who said it is sinful for a
man to kill brute animals; for by the divine providence they
are intended for man’s use in the natural order. Hence it is not
wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing them or
in any other way whatever.
T he Utilitarian Approach 113
But isn’t it wrong to be cruel to animals? Aquinas concedes

that it is, but he says the reason has to do with human welfare, not
the welfare of the animals:
And if any passages of Holy Scripture seem to forbid us to be
cruel to brute animals, for instance to kill a bird with its young,
this is either to remove man’s thoughts from being cruel to
other men, lest through being cruel to animals one becomes
cruel to human beings; or because injury to an animal leads to
the temporal hurt of man, either of the doer of the deed, or of
another.
Thus, according to the traditional view, people and animals are
in separate moral categories. Animals have no moral standing of
their own; we are free to treat them in any way we please.
Put so bluntly, the traditional doctrine might make us a little
nervous: It seems extreme in its lack of concern for nonhuman
animals, many of which are, after all, intelligent and sensitive crea-
tures. Yet much of our conduct is guided by this doctrine. We eat
animals; we use them as experimental subjects in our laboratories;
we use their skins for clothing and their heads as wall ornaments;
we make them the objects of our amusement in circuses, rodeos,
and bullfights; and we track them down and kill them for sport. All
of these activities involve considerable animal pain.
If the theological “justification” of these practices seems thin,
Western philosophers have offered plenty of secular ones. Philoso-
phers have said that animals are not rational, that they lack the
ability to speak, or that they are simply not human—and all these are
given as reasons why their interests lie outside the sphere of moral
concern.
The utilitarians, however, would have none of this. On their
view, what matters is not whether an animal has a soul, is rational,
or any of the rest. All that matters is whether it can experience
happiness and unhappiness. If an animal can suffer, then we have a
duty to take that into account when deciding what to do. In fact,
Bentham argues that whether an animal is human or nonhuman is
just as irrelevant as whether it is black or white. He writes,
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may
acquire those rights which never could have been withholden
114 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already
discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a
human being should be abandoned without redress to the
caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized
that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the
termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient
for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is
it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of
reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown
horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as
a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week
or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what
would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can
they talk? but, Can they suffer?
If a human is tormented, why is it wrong? Because that person
suffers. Similarly, if a nonhuman is tormented, it also suffers.
Whether it is a human or an animal that suffers is simply irrelevant.
To Bentham and Mill, this line of reasoning was conclusive. Humans
and nonhumans are equally entitled to moral concern.
This view may seem as extreme, in the opposite direction, as
the traditional view that grants animals no moral standing at all. Are
animals really the equal of humans? In some sense, Bentham and
Mill thought so, but they did not believe that animals and humans
must always be treated in the same way. There are factual differences
between them that will justify many differences in treatment. For
example, because of their intellectual capacities, humans can take
pleasure in many things that nonhumans cannot enjoy—mathematics,
movies, literature, strategy games, and so on. And similarly, humans’
superior capacities make them capable of frustrations and disap-
pointments that other animals cannot experience. Thus, our duty to
promote happiness entails a duty to promote those special enjoy-
ments for humans, as well as to prevent any special harms they
might suffer.
At the same time, however, we have a moral duty to take into
account the suffering of animals, and their suffering should count
equally with any similar suffering experienced by humans. The con-
trary view—that animal suffering matters less, because they’re just
animals—is called speciesism. Utilitarians believe that speciesism is
T he Utilitarian Approach 115
discrimination against other species, just as racism is discrimination

against other races.
Human beings are especially “speciesist” in their production
of meat. Many people believe, in a vague way, that slaughterhouses
are unpleasant, but that animals raised for food are otherwise treated
humanely. In fact, farm animals live in abhorrent conditions before
being taken off to slaughter. Veal calves, for example, spend 24 hours
per day in pens so small that they cannot turn around, lie down
comfortably, or even twist their heads around to get rid of parasites
on their own bodies. The producers put them in tiny pens to save
money and to keep the meat tender. The cows clearly miss their
mothers, and like human infants, they want something to suck,
so they try in vain to suck the sides of their wooden stalls. The
calves are also fed a diet deficient in iron and roughage, in order
to keep their meat pale and tasty. Their craving for iron becomes
so strong that, if they’re allowed to turn around, they will lick at
their own urine—which normally they would never do. Without
roughage, the calves cannot form a cud to chew. For this reason,
they cannot be given straw bedding, because they would eat it, in
an attempt to consume roughage. So, for these animals, the slaugh-
terhouse is not an unpleasant end to an otherwise contented
existence.
The veal calf is just one example. Chickens, turkeys, pigs, and
adult cows all live in horrible conditions before being slaughtered.
The utilitarian argument on these matters is simple. The system of
meat production causes enormous suffering for the animals with no
compensating benefits. Therefore, we should abandon that system.
We should either become vegetarians or else treat our animals
humanely before killing them.
What is most revolutionary in all this is simply the idea that
nonhuman animals count. We normally assume that human beings
are alone in deserving moral consideration. Utilitarianism challenges
that assumption and insists that we should care about any creature
that feels pleasure and pain. Human beings are special in many ways,
and an adequate morality must acknowledge that fact. But we are
not the only animals capable of suffering, and an adequate morality
must acknowledge that fact as well.

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112 THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

accidents, guns, and HIV/AIDS. Yet cigarettes are legal throughout

In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. Yet his

7.4. Third Example: Nonhuman Animals

But isn’t it wrong to be cruel to animals? Aquinas concedes

discrimination against other species, just as racism is discrimination

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