Comments on George Bracken’s “The Meaningful Lives of Animals”
George Bracken argues that the moral status of animals is secured on the basis of the fact
that animals have meaningful life experiences (which he characterizes as “touching the lives of
others in a deep and loving way”). This is as opposed to the theories of Peter Singer, who holds
that animals deserve moral consideration based on the fact that they can suffer; Tom Regan, who
holds that animals deserve moral consideration based on the fact that they are subjects of a life;
and RG Frey, who denies that animals deserve full moral consideration based on the fact that
they lack autonomy, which, Frey claims, is essential to a meaningful life and therefore moral
value. Bracken concludes that, since animals can have meaningful life experiences, and these are
a sufficient basis for moral value, animals have moral status.
Let me begin by saying that I am sympathetic with Bracken’s claim – against Frey -- that
touching the lives of others in a deep and meaningful way is more important than having
autonomy. The problem, though, is that I don’t know if it is possible to generalize this to human
lives in general, and I am not even sure it is true for me personally. Maybe, on my death bed, I’ll
lament not having told more people that I loved them; or maybe I’ll regret not having worked
harder at being a ballplayer. My point is that I simply don’t see how we can make any plausible
generalizations about what makes a human life meaningful. This relates to my fundamental
criticism of arguments about animal rights, which I’ll raise at the end of my remarks.
I turn now to Bracken’s criticism of Singer, since it illuminates an important
consideration in Bracken’s paper. As Bracken points out, Singer grounds animals’ moral status
in the fact that animals are capable of suffering, and argues that our attitude toward animals is
speciesist, since we generally – and arbitrarily -- count a non-human animal’s suffering as having
little or no value relative to a human being’s suffering, even in cases where their capacity to
suffer is the same. But Bracken finds fault with utilitarian defenses of animal ethics on the basis
of the following reasoning: “Cruel treatment of animals in rodeos, circuses, and zoos may be
outweighed by the pleasure of the audience. Or the horrors of being subject to painful
experiments may be outweighed by the pleasurable use of higher faculties experienced by
researchers”. ... The problem with utilitarian views, Bracken thinks, is that they do not provide
animals with a value that is not reducible to utilitarian calculations.
Now, one problem with this, it seems to me, is that it is not clear that Bracken’s own
criterion for moral value, namely, that a being has moral value if it can have meaningful life
experiences, obviously secures the kind of non-reducible moral value that Bracken is looking for.
Given that Bracken is right to say that non-human animals do have such experiences (and I think
he is quite right about this), why should I therefore conclude that their value cannot be
outweighed by utilitarian calculations? What is the criterion for deciding whether a morally
relevant property guarantees one non-utilitarian value rather than utilitarian value?
A related problem is this. Bracken admits that it is not clear whether fish or reptiles can
form the sort of relationships that Bracken describes as grounding moral consideration. But
surely torture is morally wrong even if the subject is a fish or a reptile (or even an insect, I would
say). If this intuition, which I think is very powerful, is correct, then this lends support to idea
that Singer is right, and animal ethics is grounded in the mere fact that non-human animals can
suffer. As we saw, Bracken rejects Singer’s account because moral value, for utilitarians, is not
absolute. But one could without inconsistency hold that the fact that animals suffer guarantees
them the kind of non-negotiable value that Bracken thinks is important. In short, I suppose I am
claiming that Bracken conflates two different issues: (1) what is the metaphysical basis of non-
human animal value? and (2) given that non-human animals have value, what kind of value is it?
I am claiming that the answer to (1) does not obviously dictate an answer to (2).
This brings me to what I think is a problem with the general structure of arguments about
animal rights, including Bracken’s. In each case, the reasoning seems to be something like the
following. Human beings have moral standing, and if anything else has moral standing, its moral
standing must be grounded in the same qualities that ground the moral standing of human beings.
The next step is to isolate that quality that gives humans moral value and then to argue either that
animals lack that quality and therefore have no moral standing, or that they have the quality and
therefore deserve moral consideration. The problem with such arguments is that they implicitly
beg the question in against animals having moral standing. For premise 1 implicitly favors
human beings and is implicitly speciesist. By positing humans as the paradigm case of beings
with moral standing, all other beings must, as it were ‘prove’ that they are sufficiently like
humans to warrant moral consideration.
Similar arguments are common in arguments about racism, sexism, and heterosexism:
one group is taken to be the paradigm case of a being with rights, then other groups are expected
to show that they, too, possess those qualities and are therefore deserving of moral consideration.
(A salient example is the argument over the rights of gay people to marry: the arguments
generally presume that straight people ought to be granted the right to marry, and then the
question is whether gay relationships are sufficiently like straight one). But why we should not
instead begin with the assumption that something deserves moral consideration unless it can be
shown to be otherwise is not clear.
Bracken does have a reply to this line of thinking: surely cancer cells, for instance,
should not be granted moral status. This assumes that, independently of our theory of value, we
can identify which things have moral value and which do not. But Bracken also puts plants in
this category of things that we want our moral theory to exclude from moral consideration. And
while I agree that cancer cells should not be granted moral status, I am not so sure about plants.
The point I am making is, it starts to look as if our theory is being driven by our prior decision
about which things we should respect, and not vice versa. We need to kill cancer cells and eat
plants to survive; therefore, to respect them would burden humanity. But, again, this places
human interests at the basis of moral consideration. I do not see why this is not itself arbitrary.1
1
I am reminded of the following remark by Nietzsche: One might invent such a fable and still not have
illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human
intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again,
nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is
human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it.
But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the
same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so
despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power
of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks
that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.
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