[This transcript was generated by AI, so while it’s been checked over, it may contain small errors. Also, we had a little recording glitch, which, in a couple of places, makes it sound as if we are very briefly talking over each other/not quite in sync. But this shouldn’t affect your listening experience, as philosophers do this all the time anyway!]
REBECCA: Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe, and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast, in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts, with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.
Today, I’m joined by JP Andrew. JP is a philosopher at Austin College, which is actually in Sherman, in Texas. One of the greatest states. He writes about ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and more. Often writing about things like free will and animal ethics. He has one of the best and funniest Twitter accounts, and he has an excellent philosophy Substack, too, called Reflections on What Matters. He’s even on YouTube, so he’s a modern philosopher working on classic topics!
I’m delighted that he’s here with me today, and that we’re going to be talking about animals. Thanks so much for joining me, JP.
JP: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me on.
REBECCA: All right, so we’re going to talk about animals. What animals are, why they matter, what kinds of things they can do. But I thought we’d start with the hardest question of all… What’s your favourite animal?
JP: My favourite animal? Well, if we’re talking about a particular animal, it would be my border collie, Millie, who might make an appearance, actually. We’ll see about that. [laughter] But if you’re looking for a species, then I guess I’d have to generalise it out to dogs. Love dogs.
REBECCA: Okay, that’s very cool. And how meta would that be? A dog actually appearing on a podcast about what animals are! [laughter]
JP: It could happen. I wore her down before this conversation, so she might be napping the whole time. Which is no small feat, to wear a border collie down, I will say.
REBECCA: No small feet.. I think there’s a joke there. [laughter] Actually, in one of my previous episodes, with Michael Ignatieff, his cat appeared. But we were talking about liberalism, so maybe that was less apt.
I think my favourite animals are tigers. I like all of the big cats. My surname even, if you’re transliterating into German, means lion. But the tigers are the best, because they swim — they’re very good swimmers — and they’re individualistic, and I think they’re very elegant. But dogs are great, too.
JP: Very impressive creatures, yes.
REBECCA: They’re very cool, aren’t they!
Are philosophers well-placed to try to define animals?
REBECCA: Okay, so, we’ve dealt with the difficult stuff. I think we should get on to the easy stuff now. So, one question I have. You get that the idea of this podcast is we talk about these contested philosophical concepts.
JP: Right.
REBECCA: We’ve done things like equality, democracy, liberalism, freedom, rights. It does strike me that somebody listening to this might think, well, okay guys, you know, you’re two philosophers talking about those kinds of things — trying to define those kinds of things is what you guys should be doing. But here you are trying to tell us what animals are. Don’t you think you should have got a biologist, a zoologist, someone like this to join you?
Are we going outside of our remit here? What are we doing? Are we cheating? What’s going on?
JP: Well, I don’t — one of the nice things about doing philosophy is that it’s not totally clear where the boundaries of inquiry actually lie. It’s the ultimate dilettante’s field, right? So where does philosophy end? Who knows?
But yeah, I think when we’re trying to define concepts, we are ultimately doing philosophical work. It’s not an empirical question what a particular term refers to, or picks out in the world. It’s something we have to think about. And when your task is just to think more clearly about something, I think that’s a paradigmatically philosophical task.
REBECCA: That sounds like a good justification to me. I think there’s some kind of division of labour here, isn’t there?
JP: Some sort, yeah.
REBECCA: I like the Bertrand Russell thing, where he suggests that the scientists sometimes get into these kind of edge matters, which are very philosophical, and they sort of shift them over to the philosophers. The philosophers solve them and throw them back to the scientists. I find this particularly funny because the idea of philosophers actually solving the things and giving them back to the scientists seems to me a little hopeful, but…
JP: Yeah, I think it’s one of these things, you know, like from a thirty-thousand-foot view, we can delineate pretty well between philosophy and science. The scientists are tackling the questions that can be answered empirically, and the philosophers are dealing with the more conceptual questions. But then, like you say, at the boundaries, the two meet. And so I think there’s not a clear delineation, really. We’re all trying to figure out what’s true.
REBECCA: That’s right. That said, you have done the classic philosopher thing, which is exactly what I would have done too, of starting to compare, right? So, to try to work out what the philosopher does, we compare with what the scientist does. And it strikes me that when I start to try to think what animals are, the first thing I do is think: why are plants not animals?
JP: Ah right, yeah.
Is there a simple answer?
REBECCA: So, should we start there? I mean — let’s just roll back a sec. Do you have a simple answer to this? I like to ask people at the beginning of these episodes, just on the hope that maybe they’re just going to solve it, and then we can just do philosophy banter for the next 45 minutes. What is an animal, JP Andrew?
I’ve read your stuff. You write very beautifully about animals and morality in particular, but also animals more generally. What is an animal?
JP: Yeah… well, this one may be slightly above my pay grade. So, I can give a — you know, what we do in philosophy is give a provisional answer, and then we could probably refine it together. So, an animal is a living organism, for one thing. We don’t yet have a distinction between plants and animals, though, because plants are also living organisms, right?
So, an animal is going to be a living organism, plus some capacities or features that the things that we usually identify as plants don’t have, right? I guess there are two places that it seems natural to go first.
So, animals we tend to think have perceptual capacities, and plants don’t. That would be one potential avenue. Also, animals have the ability to engage in self-directed behavior, in a way that plants don’t. They can move around sort of their own volition. Plants can move around, but not on the basis of some kind of decision or choice.
So yeah, something like being a living organism plus having some perceptual abilities plus engaging in self-directed action. Something like that gets us in the territory, I think, even if that’s not totally satisfactory. What do you think of that, Rebecca, as a starting point?
REBECCA: I really like that. When I was thinking last night about how I’d answer this question, I came up with something a little more minimal, but very similar, I think. Something like ‘individuated living things that move of their own volition’.
I agree that there are these other things. I think we should get on to the question of whether all animals do have perception, whether we could know that. That does seem to me, however, another clear way of going down the line.
I think we might break into four kinds of things — doing the classic ‘philosopher does the taxonomy’ — when we try to think about the difference between plants and animals. This is what I came up with, anyway. So, there’s one simple answer which is something like ‘who studies them?’. [laughter]
JP: Yeah, right.
REBECCA: We know that that’s going to get kind of circular, but it might be useful for some people. Then, there seem to be these answers about their lineage. So, they have different descendants. Also, things like how they’re born, and how they develop. So maybe things to do with development. Or even evolution, a step back.
And then the third thing is, I think, the kinds of things you were getting on to, which is their capacities. So, we have these living organisms, the plants and the animals, and they have different capacities. That seems to me like a really good way of distinguishing. Particularly if we want to do this in quite an ordinary way, and just use our senses.
JP: Yep.
REBECCA: And then, there’s probably something about their makeup, where we might need the scientists to help us a bit more. So, I did a little bit of reading, and there are these things about cell structure — how they store energy in their cells. Whether they have neurons for coordination. Their systems. That seems like that’s in the scientists’ territory. But it might be useful for a more fine-grained distinction. Although then these fine-grained distinctions can get too complicated.
JP: Yeah, we could also go Aristotelian, I suppose, and say that they have different kinds of souls. Although that kind of talk makes people very nervous and queasy these days. But if we went back to the ancient world, there would be more talk in those terms, I suppose.
What about animalism?
REBECCA: I like that. I was going to ask you — so, one thing I think we have in common, is that we are both kinds of dualists, which is quite unusual in contemporary philosophy. And getting on to this talk of souls does make me think of the animalists. Where do you stand on animalism? I mean, you’re a dualist like me, so you probably aren’t an animalist. Although, that said, for a supposedly relatively simple type of theory, it does seem like the animalists have a lot of debate about what animalism actually is.
JP: Yeah, goodness. Well, I mean, first I should say that, yeah, if forced to choose a view in philosophy of mind, I would say that I’m a dualist. Although I think that’s held as a somewhat loose commitment. But yeah, I think it is all things considered the best position.
So, animalism is the view, for anybody that doesn’t know, that what we are fundamentally is an animal organism, right? So you, Rebecca, on this view, are not a mind, you’re not a soul. You are this whole organism. That’s like a mind-body composite. Now, there’s a kind of dualism associated with Aristotle that also, I guess, counts as a form of animalism, called hylomorphism or hylomorphic dualism.
And if there were a kind of animalism that I might endorse, it would be that variety, I suppose. And something that is attractive about it, I suppose, is that it does allow us to clearly distinguish both humans from other kinds of animals, and animals generally from plants. Because we’ll say, well, there’s a strict metaphysical boundary, here. We’ve got these creatures that have souls, which give them perceptual and other kind of higher-order mental capacities. And plants are the entities that don’t have those, right?
But I don’t really — I’ve never been able to make a whole lot of sense of hylomorphism. And if we’re not talking about hylomorphism, then I can’t really make much sense of animalism. So, that’s a long-winded answer to say that I don’t really know. [laughter]
REBECCA: Yeah, I get a little allergic to hylomorphism. Partly because, a long long time ago, I used to sometimes do some editing for a very nice Italian philosophy professor who loved hylomorphism. And I have to say I never fully got what the contemporary hylomorphists are writing.
JP: It’s a very hard view to understand.
REBECCA: It is very hard. And I think — I mean, I love Aristotle — I would say also, to me, the clearest contemporary animalist positions are those kinds of identity-type claims where they are explicitly pushing against the Lockean distinction between the animal and the person, or something like that. So, it’s literally the identity thing — the Eric Olson identity thing of…
JP: So yeah, it commits you to thinking that mental states are just identical to brain states…
REBECCA: Yeah, a particular kind of physicalism, on which a human person is identical with an individual animal. So, it’s a numerical identity thing. I do get that they then go beyond that, and there are these other interesting positions to be taken from it.
Okay. I would push back on one thing, though. I’m not sure I really believe in souls, but I do believe in some kind of immaterial substance that’s part of us, as someone like Descartes would say. But I’m not fully sure why I would assume that plants don’t have those things, if I assume that all animals have those things. I’m also not sure why I’d think that all animals have those things.
That said, I do think this brings us on to these very complicated questions about how could we ever know these things about animals. It seems to me like the simplest ways of going down, distinguishing between the animals and the plants, would just be these things like: the animal moves around. It’s not sort of tied to the floor by its roots!
Like, I think, if you ask a child, they’re going to pick up on this ‘moving around thing’. This seems very important. And I liked your point about ‘of its own volition’. This also seems very important. A robot is clearly not an animal. And the clearest distinction between the robot dog and the dog is that the dog has some kind of power over its own movement.
JP: Yeah, that’s right. And the dog is a biological entity, and maybe that matters, too.
REBECCA: Yes, yes, good. Exactly so. But it seems like maybe the combination of these two things. The biology — and again, maybe we can leave it slightly to the scientists about what that means. Does it mean some kind of carbon-based organic matter? You can tell I’m not a scientist by my clumsy use of words!
Plus, like you say, some further set of conditions. One of which seems to be an easy one — seems to be this thing about moving around. Although then, no doubt, the plant scientist is going to come along and say, “Don’t you know about this particular kind of plant that seems to move?”
JP: Yeah, right. Exactly. So there are going to be these edge cases. I think there’s just — this is a manifestation of a general phenomenon in philosophy that you will be very familiar with, as somebody who’s done a lot of this stuff. But I don’t know that there’s really a special problem, here.
There are all kinds of distinctions that we can commonsensically make. But then, when we’re trying to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying the two different kinds of things, we have a very difficult time. And sometimes, we just sort of throw up our hands and decide we can’t really do it. But nevertheless, in an ordinary context, we can still make the distinction. Which, you know, to your point, I think the ordinary person feels very confident about being able, most of the time, to distinguish plants from animals.
But then there are going to be cases like, I don’t know, a jellyfish, or something where maybe intuitions sort of cut in both directions. And it doesn’t mean there’s not a distinction there. But it’s really hard to do this stuff. Socrates taught us that, if nothing else, right? It’s that giving a totally satisfactory definition of almost any interesting concept is extremely hard to do.
The risk of over-delegating
REBECCA: Yeah, I totally agree. I’m a big fan of the ordinary approach, though. I think ‘picking stuff out’ like we do in everyday life shouldn’t be undervalued. The other thing I’ve come to think, and this is a little bit of philosopher’s arrogance, is sometimes there’s a risk that we over-delegate to the scientists.
So, I read recently — I got annoyed about this on my Substack — it was, to be fair, rather than reading the scientific article, which I just got too frustrated by the press release to do — there was some press release from some scientific study, which claimed that plants can hear things.
JP: Oh yes, yes.
REBECCA: And what it actually was, was that the plant seed gets slightly jostled by the wind, and then grows more! And they throw, all over these articles, these terms like ‘perceive’ and ‘hear’. And you don’t have to be a philosopher to see this is a massive jump.
JP: Yeah, yeah. Well, this brings to mind a couple of points. So, one — as I imagine you would agree — one problem with trying to do the delineation thing between science and philosophy is that you can’t do science without at least bringing in a bunch of philosophical assumptions, right?
It’s not true in both directions. Like, it is possible to do philosophy without doing science. [laughter] But to do science, even if one is not consciously thinking about the philosophical matters at hand, one must nevertheless make a bunch of assumptions that are, themselves, philosophically contentious and subject to scrutiny.
And then secondly, I don’t blame particular scientists, but it is maybe a problem with the way that education has developed in the last century or something, that it is possible to get a PhD in a scientific field, and just never have any direct contact with philosophy. And a consequence of that is the sort of thing that you’re talking about in that article. Where there’s just a lot of philosophical sloppiness that’s not being picked up on, because the scientists, although really good at what they do, are just not thinking in philosophical terms. And I do think that that is a problem.
REBECCA: Yes, they’re not thinking in philosophical terms, yet they are kind of doing philosophy, in a…
JP: That’s right, yeah.
REBECCA: In a mediocre way.
JP: That’s right.
REBECCA: I also notice this all the time in history books. Historians sometimes even explicitly say things like, “We don’t do normative matters! I’m not going to make any normative claims.” And then, they often follow it up by something like, “Because that would be bad.” [laughter]
JP: Yeah, right, there you go!
REBECCA: I mean, good luck trying to write a paragraph of a history book without getting into that business. That said, I mean, if we look at the other side of the equation, there is a very, very basic sense, in which we do depend on what at least the scientists might want to think is their domain, when we do philosophy. All of the time.
So, this is just a very simple, kind of trivial, not very interesting sense. In which, if you’re thinking about, you know, is it the table that I see in front of me? You have some idea of what a table is, in terms of what the scientists think it is. It’s something hard. It’s something that’s a substance. It has a certain number of corners. And similarly, the political philosopher thinking about distributing corn — whether it’s done justly — thinks that corn exists, what is corn.
But yeah, I think you’re right. When philosophers make really complicated claims about, I don’t know, the relation between the brain and the mind, it can really help if they do have some good awareness of the latest neuroscience. But yes, I think broadly I definitely agree with you that it seems to me like the dependence is much less strong.
JP: Yeah. And I think there are some clear cases, like, if somebody’s just doing pure formal logic or something, or speculative metaphysics, that that is just very far removed from science.
One other point that just came to mind is that since science carries a kind of cultural significance — a sense of authority — people look up to scientists as authorities. A worry here is that when scientists make what are ultimately contestable philosophical pronouncements, it carries the authority that culture now gives to science. So, a lot of times, these things are sort of taken to be settled when they’re not.
It’s like, oh the scientist that said that plants can communicate with each other! Plants are conscious. I mean, what are you thinking, you philosopher nerds!? [laughter] Science pronounced upon this! So get with the program, right!? I think that is a problem when you pair this kind of latent scientism with scientists who encroach upon philosophical matters. It is unfortunate.
REBECCA: You definitely also see that in domains like when doctors try to talk about ethics. And sometimes they don’t even really realise that they’re doing it. They’ll say things like, you know, “But this particular condition is more painful than this one, therefore we need to treat this person first.”
I mean, that’s a very simplistic distinction, but they don’t understand that already they’re laden with all kinds of commitments in terms of, you know, what it means to be obligated to treat somebody, what it means to… And it’s just sort of skated over, and particularly in times of crisis. I mean, we can think of good examples of this, recently. I mean, in COVID times, for instance. The idea that the scientists..
JP: Just follow the science!
REBECCA: Yeah, right, ‘follow the science’ — I mean, what is that? That, in itself, of course, is a philosophical claim! [laughter] Yeah, it’s very funny.
Okay, so I think we’ve done a pretty decent job of sorting out the metaphysics.
JP: Okay! [laughter]
REBECCA: In an over-carving-up sense! I want to touch a little on the philosophy of mind stuff.
So, it seems to me, particularly if we go down this route of making distinctions between plants and animals — and again, we also, apparently, the non-scientists always forget the fungi. I don’t know very much about fungi. And then there’s the bacteria. It seems like these things are interestingly, but subtly, different from the plants and the animals.
JP: Yeah.
REBECCA: It seems like, taking our ‘living organisms but they’re in some sense distinguished by their capacities’. I like this route. This seems like quite an understandable and ordinary route. But you mentioned some capacities which it seems to me a little harder to track in an ordinary sense.
So, we might distinguish, for instance, you suggested between the animals and the plants, in terms of which has a soul. This seems to me much harder than saying which ones move of their own volition. Although we then get into ‘what is of their own volition?’ How do we know that the plant isn’t moving of its own volition? Perhaps it is.
And then, perception. Perception seems like it’s very much in the philosopher’s ballpark. Do you have a settled-on view about the kinds of animals that perceive? Do you think all animals perceive? Do you think that your dog perceives you in a similar sense in which I perceive you? Where do you start on these kinds of matters?
The relevance of perception and pain
JP: Yeah, so I think that this is the normatively significant capacity that at least many animals can possess. I mean, it’s the one that we should care about, because it potentially carries lots of moral weight, and is the baseline for moral consideration, perhaps. So I think that probably not all the organisms that we’re going to want to classify as animals are going to also be perceivers.
So, probably it’s not the case that all animals are perceivers, even though probably most are. But I take it that being a perceiver, at least in the normatively significant sense — and we could talk about whether there’s another kind of not-normatively-significant perceiver — but that kind of perceiver is going to be conscious. So, normatively important perception is conscious perception. It’s perception that it’s like something to have.
REBECCA: Yep.
JP: Certainly, I think that my dog perceives me in that way. Like, she has experiences. It’s like something to be her. And so on. And that’s true with respect to lots and lots of animals. We don’t know how far down it extends. So, you know, there are very lively debates these days about whether insects, for example, are perceivers, in the sense of being conscious. For a while, I guess, there was debate about fish, although I feel like that’s kind of settled, at this point. Yeah, like, fish are conscious!
REBECCA: Yeah, I think I pretty much agree with that. I think it’s ordinary to think that animals perceive, but that some animals don’t perceive, and that the most morally relevant thing is whether they perceive. I also think I agree with you about the consciousness.
I get that within philosophy of mind — and actually, on my most recent episode of this show, I had Tim Crane on. We were talking about consciousness, and we talked a little about the distinction between sentience and consciousness. Oftentimes, these are blurred. I think there is a not very helpful ordinary distinction that is sometimes made — and I sometimes see this when people are making big claims about animal ethics — on which there’s a kind of sense in which you can be sentient but not conscious, such that it still bestows some sense of moral status.
I really, really struggle with what this position actually is. You sometimes see people saying things — and maybe I’m just being uncharitable — on which you have, like you say, your dog, in which we assume that it perceives like we do. There’s something it’s like to be your dog. It has feelings. It experiences pain in some kind of similar sense. And therefore we shouldn’t treat the dog in certain ways. And then they want to say, but there are these other kinds of animals, which are sentient in some sense. They feel some pain, but they don’t have this internal world. And straightaway it’s like, well, what could it mean to feel the pain, if they don’t have the internal world?
If they’re just responding to stimuli in some sense, but they’re not then feeling the pain, then you can’t really hinge it on feeling the pain! I feel like there’s often this kind of sloppy thinking in ordinary discussion, and among philosophers too, where you don’t get these super fine-grained distinctions that the really smart philosophers of mind might make.
But, more broadly, it seems to me anyway that the perceptual state, or the morally relevant sense in which the animals have perception is something like: they have awareness, they feel the pain, they don’t just fall down the hill and cut themselves, they feel the pain. And those are the animals to which we should afford most of our moral consideration. Or something like that.
JP: Yeah, so that all seems right to me. Just a couple of reactions.
So, in case anybody’s wondering what I was talking about earlier, with respect to potentially non-normatively significant perception. I don’t know, like, you might think that some creature, like a jellyfish, there’s some sense in which it’s able to perceive stuff in its environment without having experience. I myself would rather not use terms in that way. But I can imagine somebody using the term ‘perception’ to refer to that. I think that, morally speaking, there would be no reason to care about that sort of perception.
The sort of perception, as you suggest, that we should care about is the sort that it is like something to have. And so, when we’re talking about the notion of pain, I really do think that is essentially bound up with the concept of consciousness. There’s no such thing as pain that it’s not like something to have.
And I also think that — I don’t know if you would agree — but I think that it’s just that pain is straightforwardly bad. And so, since it is normatively laden, there’s no such thing as morally-neutral pain. I think pain for any creature that experiences it is bad. And we should care about it.
So, that’s kind of the baseline for moral consideration. Once you’ve got a creature that can experience a state like pain, well, then it matters now morally. And then we can have a discussion about how much it matters, but it now is entered into the moral calculus.
REBECCA: Yes, I broadly agree with that. I think I’d want to say something more like ‘being in a state of pain is bad for you’. But I feel like we’re going to come out at the same place on that.
Again, it’s quite clear that we can think of instances where, I don’t know, you need the operation, you have to go through the pain to be healed. You might want to say — somebody might want to say — oh but then the pain’s bad for you. [Note from Rebecca: I meant to say ‘good’ not ‘bad’, here!]. I actually don’t think in any sense you’re committed to say that. You can say the thing that’s good for you has this particular side effect, which is feeling pain. It’s also the case that something could be necessary without being good for you, in that kind of simple sense.
JP: Yeah, I think that there are a number of ways to handle this. I mean, you suggested a couple. I would want to say that the pain in such a case still is bad. It’s bad in itself.
But the overall state of affairs of undergoing the procedure — the operation, or whatever — is good. Because it’s possible for an overall good state of affairs to also involve some stuff that’s bad, right? So it might be, like, all considered, it might be good for me to undergo the treatments. But that doesn’t mean that the pain that I’m experiencing in the process is good. It’s still bad.
REBECCA: Yeah, I think the only thing I might push back on is the idea that then it would be altogether good. But I think then we’re just splitting hairs in an unnecessary way.
Somebody might, however, give one of these other cases like eating chilies. I read a fun Substack piece about this recently. I didn’t really agree with the conclusion, but I think it’s a great question. There are clearly some people who do claim to derive some joy from the pain of eating chilies.
Now, we could just take some simple thing and say, oh then they’re not in pain, or that’s not what counts as pain. Or again, you can do a ‘pain is side effect’ and actually it’s the taste that is interesting, or it’s something like enjoying the risk, or showing off, or something like that. I feel like there are ways around this.
But it nonetheless does seem to be the case that some people at least reliably claim that they derive some pleasure from pain. Again, we can just say, well, then it’s pleasure and it’s not pain…
JP: Yeah, I don’t want to say that!
REBECCA: That seems like maybe it’s cheating…
JP: Yeah, I do have a view about this that I am in the process of rolling out on my Substack. I wrote about this in my dissertation, which no one should read, but maybe some people should read the Substack. [laughter] But I actually stated my own view less than carefully. So, what I actually want to say is intrinsically bad is pain that is not, in some way, sanctioned by the will of a being.
So, in a case of a painful treatment, I’m not sanctioning the pain that I’m experiencing. And so, I think it’s still bad for me, there. But I think that rational agents have a capacity that I think non-rational agents don’t have, which is that we are capable of sanctioning pain. Like, endorsing an action that we know is going to involve pain. And we might even think that the pain that’s involved in the action, or the plan, that we endorse is part of what makes it overall good, right?
So, I run marathons. And so when I run a marathon, I think that I’m experiencing a lot of pain, for sure. But I think that I’m not thereby suffering. This is not bad for me, because it’s an activity that I rationally endorse. And running a marathon that involves no pain would probably be a less meaningful experience.
But I also think this is a weird thing about us, because my dog can’t do this, right? My dog can’t understand, okay, yeah, like this activity is going to involve pain, but I want to do it, anyway! So, I think that when pain occurs in non-human animals, it’s always bad. It’s not necessarily always bad in us, because of the chili peppers and the marathon-type cases. But those are kind of weird cases, too.
REBECCA: Yes, I like that. I feel that the sanctioning can do a lot of work, particularly in the permissibility of other people causing us pain.
So, it seems to me, like, you go to the physio after your run — I don’t know very much about running, but I know sometimes they go to the physio, and it’s like, “Oh, the physio really hurt me, but it solved my muscle cramp!” Or, similarly, in the even easier case of the doctor doing the operation, it seems to me like the person who’s going to be hurt — going to suffer the pain — giving their consent, sanctioning it, in some sense helps to solve at least some, maybe most, of making permissible for the person to do that to them.
I’m a little worried, I think, though, about making that do so much work in terms of whether it’s good or bad. Partly because I think it’s quite clearly the case that we can, and often do, sanction things that are bad for us. So, we get slightly into the ‘can you consent to be a slave’ kind of problem.
JP: Yeah.
REBECCA: And I just wanted — I have a pretty hardline view, which is there are certain things you can’t permit people to do to you. And that there are certain things that you might act in a permitting way, and either you don’t give the authority, or the thing is bad for you. And again, we can cut this up in different ways...
JP: Yeah.
REBECCA: So, I think I’d want to make some distinction between the permission-giving and the goodness-making. But I think broadly we come down in a similar place.
JP: Yeah, I think I can agree with all of that, though.
Because I would also say that the mere fact that one has endorsed some kind of activity doesn’t mean that it’s good, right? Because we would have to do some value theory. And I think that we can — we’re capable of desiring things that we shouldn’t desire. So, somebody might sanction a state of affairs where they’re enslaved or something, but then I would agree with you that that would be wrong. They shouldn’t do that. That would be a disordered desire.
So, I’m actually very happy to — I’m happy to say all kinds of desires are bad and disordered.
What is it permissible to do to animals?
REBECCA: Okay, good. I feel like now we’ve done some philosophy of mind, we’ve done some metaphysics, we’ve got into morality. So, let’s go into the question of what we’re permitted to do to animals.
So, we thought about, a little — I like your distinction between human beings as a kind of animal having this distinct capacity to sanction painful behaviour towards them, or something like that. That seems to be a very important distinction. Particularly when we’re thinking about the ways in which we are permitted to treat animals.
So, I guess my easy starter question is: do you think it’s ever okay to eat animals?
JP: Ever okay to eat animals? Yeah, I mean we can cook up cases, no pun intended [laughter], where it’s permissible to eat an animal. Certainly if — I think roadkill, that’s okay. If an animal’s already dead, and you can eat it, that’s going to be okay.
Also, you might think that was cheating, because what you’re really talking about is: is it okay to kill an animal to eat it? And even there, I would say, yeah, right? Like, if you’re in a situation where your life depends upon killing an animal to stay alive, that’s probably permissible.
So, yes. Although I do think that in most of the conditions that we now find ourselves, we probably shouldn’t be killing animals to eat them.
REBECCA: Okay, so just to follow up on the ‘if it’s necessary to eat the animal to stay alive’, are there kinds of ways in which you can’t treat an animal, if it’s necessary for you to stay alive? So, I mean, you think of the nasty philosopher’s case in which the guy comes along and says, “I’m gonna kill you if you don’t torture the animal!”
Are there certain things that are proscribed, in this sense? Eating seems okay, killing seems okay. But are there certain things that, even if your life depends upon it, you shouldn’t do to an animal?
JP: Oh, yeah, maybe I don’t have a totally settled view about that, honestly. But I think what I do have a settled view about is that if you find yourself in a situation where, all things considered, it is permissible, maybe even obligatory, to kill an animal, you should still be trying to do that in as pain-free a way as possible.
So the fact that it’s permissible to kill an animal in a given circumstance doesn’t mean that it’s permissible to kill the animal in any way whatsoever. Like, you’re not allowed to torture the animal first, and so forth.
But, you know, maybe it’s the case that human interests are such that in these sorts of life and death situations, it’s just always permissible to do what you need, as a rational human agent, to do to stay alive. Maybe that’s the case. I’m not strongly opposed to thinking that that’s the case.
REBECCA: I think that would risk meaning that there were kinds of horrible things that, therefore, we’d be justified to do to other people in our self-interest. And I think I’m quite unusual in at least trying to hold the position that in many of those cases you should just sacrifice yourself. I mean, I don’t think this is a very sustainable position for human beings to hold. We’d probably have died out a long time ago, if we didn’t support our own self interest in these ways.
Nonetheless, yes, I think it seems like a good route to go down, when we’re trying to think about the kinds of behaviours that are permissible towards animals, if we’ve accepted that there are certain circumstances in which we can eat them.
JP: So, I think in the human being case, we’re going to be on the same page. I’m entirely prepared to think that there are some acts that you’re just not allowed to perform with respect to another human, in order to save… Like, if you’re told that you have to torture someone for days on end and then kill them, or else you’re going to be killed, you might just have to sacrifice yourself in that situation.
But what I was thinking in the animals case, which may surprise people, since I’m going to sound like the crazed animal-advocate anti-speciesist, is I’m at least open to — I don’t want to dismiss out of hand the possibility that there’s a difference in kind with respect to the moral status that human rational agents have, compared to other animals.
So, we might think that human beings are such that there are just some actions that you can’t perform with respect to them. Is that true with respect to other animals? All other animals? Less clear to me. I don’t know. I just don’t have a super settled view about that.
REBECCA: I think I’m open to this view as well. I like the kinds of view that — Shelly Kagan, I think, is a good exponent of this kind of moral-hierarchy-type view. I don’t agree with how he gets there. I don’t like his utilitarianism. But I’m not opposed to the idea that it might be the case that there are quite different kinds of moral status held by different kinds of animals, including us.
Nonetheless, I feel like I spend quite a lot of time just beating back my natural skepticism about everything.
JP: You and me both!
REBECCA: And I do struggle with the idea that… [laughter] Yeah, I feel like this is, in some sense, my most fundamental quality is I’m just ultimately skeptical about everything. I do get that you have to just push past that, and try to make distinctions beyond it.
But one thing that I find myself quite interested in is: if we suddenly learned, or it became more likely to us, that the animals that we thought weren’t conscious, in this deep sense that we talked about — didn’t have this kind of perception — if we suddenly learned that it was very likely that they were, and more interestingly, I think, that the plants were, a couple of questions arise.
One of them is about how we should change our behaviours. Another, I think, is also probably about how we carve it up, in terms of our ontology. I think I’d be quite open to the idea, which might sound a bit crazy, of including some plants in the category of animal, if, for instance, it turned out that the plants were conscious.
It seems to me I might want to go as far as to say ‘being conscious is a sufficient condition of being an animal’. I know that there are going to be all kinds of problems that that’s going to cause….
JP: There are, yeah!
REBECCA: Not least for those animals that, as we said, don’t seem to be conscious. But I wonder whether I might actually just fall down that line. I’m open to the idea, I think, of doing some reclassification, as well as some kind of moral work, if I were to learn these new things. And I’m pretty open to the idea that plants might well be conscious.
JP: Okay, okay, I have a couple of reactions to that. So, first, I do want to reject the idea that consciousness is sufficient for counting as an animal, because panpsychism might be true. My dissertation supervisor was Galen Strawson, so he’s convinced me at least of that. Like, it’s epistemically possible that panpsychism is true, in which case… [laughter]
REBECCA: I knew it would only be a little bit of time until we got on to panpsychism, because I knew you were a Galen Strawson student!
What is it permissible to do to electrons?
JP: So, if panpsychism is true, then electrons are conscious, but I think electrons are not animals. And so, since it’s at least epistemically possible that an electron is conscious, I think that being conscious is not enough to count as an animal. That would be my attempted reductio on that view.
REBECCA: There are standard objections I could just make, in terms of, you know, we’re talking about organisms though, and you get the combination problem. But I don’t think we should go down there. I’m happy to accept something like some conditional ‘if panpsychism is not true, then’, or something like that.
JP: Yeah, so if the proposal is that an animal is an organism that is conscious, then that seems plausible to me. But just like, you know, that something is conscious is not enough, I think, because of the panpsychism possibility.
REBECCA: Yes, good.
So, at least in this simple sense of enabling us to do quite a lot of the work, in the same way that I’m happy to say the living organism — the individuated living organism — that moves around of its own volition. I feel like I’d probably also broadly be happy to get on with life, and believe that the individuated living organism that is conscious…
That both of these can be. Something like that. It feels like one, or both, in terms of getting on with my life, and thinking about things like animal ethics. I broadly think that that’s not very controversial, and that it seems relatively reasonable to go down either of those routes.
JP: Yeah, fair enough. I agree.
Though, with respect to the plants being conscious thing… So, I don’t think that plants are conscious. And I think that there are good reasons to not think that plants are conscious. I mean, they don’t have a nervous system. They don’t really seem to have anything that’s structurally analogous to a nervous system, despite what some not-super-well-thought-out pop-science pieces say. I don’t think there’s anything like that that’s present in plants.
So, I am a skeptic of plant consciousness. But I would say, even if plants are conscious, it would be a further question whether they can occupy normatively-significant conscious states. So, I don’t necessarily think that, in fact — I shouldn’t do the philosopher’s hedging thing — I don’t think that consciousness is, by itself, morally significant.
I think it’s got to be paired with the capacity to experience, at minimum, pleasure and pain. Because if I’m thinking, again, about the panpsychist possibilities, like, if an electron is conscious, it has just this unimaginably simple kind of consciousness. I don’t think it thereby takes on moral significance. Because it’s not really going to have like a welfare associated with it, right?
It’s not going to be better or worse off, if it’s not at least able to feel pleasure and pain. And, so, if plants merely have some ‘what it’s likeness’, that doesn’t yet mean that they, like, compete with conscious animals for moral significance, or something. Which is often — rhetorically, this is how this move is often invoked, right?
Because it’s usually deployed by people who are very annoyed by ethical vegetarianism, or something. And they want to say, well, but what if plants are conscious? And so I want to say, well, what if they are conscious? Do you think that they matter in the way that a pig matters, when the pig is in intense pain? I think very, very clearly there are good reasons for thinking not.
REBECCA: Yes, I do like this distinction between consciousness in the sense of the thing that obtains when the capacity is exercised, or something like that, and then the conscious mental state. So, you get JP is conscious, and you also get JP has conscious mental states. Or, mental states or events that have the property of consciousness, as I discussed in my last episode with Tim Crane.
That said, I still think I’m going to come down on the side which is something like ‘those mental states have to be experienced by a thing’. I don’t think it makes sense for them to, you know, float around. And I know you’re not saying that. But I would want to say if the electron is conscious in the sense that there is ‘what its likeness’, even if it’s only in a very thin sense, I’m still going then to want to afford it a load of moral concern. I think this is going to be very problematic for me in terms of how I go about my life!
I feel like, then, I’m going to be dependent on some kind of naturalistic justification for not just locking myself in a box, and still worrying about the germs and the little tiny particles. You know, the bits of bacteria, or whatever the scientists want to say. I can get past some of it by making a ‘it’s only if I intend to disrupt the thing, or harm the thing’.
But it seems to me like the possibility of consciousness obtaining at such a level, or all of these different kinds of other things being conscious, is very, very morally problematic. So I’m not sure I…
JP: I guess I don’t see that with respect to the electron. Because if you don’t think that the electron has a state of welfare, then it’s not clear what would harm or benefit the electron, right? Like is it..
REBECCA: I’m not sure why I wouldn’t think it had a state of welfare, if it was conscious. In the sense of there was a ‘what it’s like to be’ the thing.
JP: Yeah, I suppose the thought would be that if the electron were conscious, then the consciousness would take just this brute simple form, because there doesn’t seem to be reason to think that the electron is capable of experiencing interesting mental states, right? So, it’s just like this unimaginably simple form of awareness, is how panpsychists usually talk about.
Now, of course, we don’t have epistemic access to what it’s like to be an electron. So I guess we, you know, maybe the electron is thinking deep metaphysical thoughts, or something! But then this is just kind of the problem of other minds. So this is true with respect to all entities that we encounter. We ordinarily just have to make judgments on the basis of the behaviour that we perceive. And we just see no signs of interesting mental activity in the case of an electron.
We do see signs of interesting mental activity in the case of a dog, right? So, it’s just like very clear what it means to harm or benefit a dog. Whereas, I’m just kind of in the dark about what it means to harm... So, I think even if I were open to the possibility that an electron could be morally significant, I just — it’s a total mystery to me.
So it’s not really clear how this should change my behaviour in any way. Like, maybe the electron likes being blown up, or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a blast! [laughter]
REBECCA: It feels to me like that whole mystery thing, though, wants to leave me more open to the idea that it just could be something just entirely different for something to be interesting to an electron. It makes me think actually a little — and maybe this is a not very subtle way of shoehorning in a good philosophical thought experiment — but you remember the Thomas Nagel story about the spider that he finds.
JP: Yeah, yeah.
REBECCA: Yeah, he finds this spider in the, you know, how do Americans say it? Urinal? Urinal? I don’t know. I’m not a man, and I’m not an American…
JP: The former. Yeah, we don’t police this term! [laughter]
REBECCA: So, you know, he goes into the restrooms every day — the men’s room — and he sees the little spider, and the spider can’t get out of the ceramic bowl. And he worries about the spider. He thinks probably the spider’s surviving on the teeny little bugs. But he thinks it must be, in some sense, frustrating for the spider. Or the spider isn’t achieving its best life, or something. So, he sees this over several days, and then finally he takes the spider out, and places the spider beside the aforesaid object. And he comes back, and the spider has died.
Now, there are all kinds of things we can take from this story, and Nagel wants us to take from this story. But, to me, the relevant thing, in terms of our conversation, is maybe it’s just almost category-error-type stuff to think that we could even get into understanding the interests of something aside from us. So, I’d want to say that times a billion with the electron.
If the electron has any awareness, I mean that’s such a… It just seems to me, in itself, a kind of morally-laden matter. But the idea that I could know what, or — I mean, this just seems catastrophic to me. I certainly don’t want to rule out the idea that the awareness is important to the electron. That the awareness does indeed mean something like ‘being blown up feels good’.
As soon as I’ve started to accept that kind of thing, it seems to me like I should be trying really hard to work out the kinds of behaviours I should be displaying towards the electron. And maybe they are entirely different from the behaviours… But nonetheless there are still some behaviours.
JP: Yeah, okay. So, maybe I do feel less drawn to skepticism here than you. So, I think there’s a kind of proviso that I understand to be built into most knowledge claims that I make, which is that I could be wrong. But I think, in principle, I could be wrong about just about anything other than the fact that I have conscious experience in the first place, right?
Descartes was right about that. I can’t be wrong about that. I have no time at all for eliminativism or illusionism. But with respect to anything else, like I could be wrong. Like, maybe you’re not conscious right now. But I see lots and lots of evidence that you are, right? And so, just like I think that I have positive reasons for thinking that plants don’t feel pain, I think I have even better reason to think that electrons don’t feel pain, right?
Like, they have nothing remotely resembling a nervous system. Could I be wrong about that? Yeah, but I guess like in something like the way that I think that I could be wrong that I’m not living in the matrix or something. Like, I can’t totally decisively prove that I’m not living in the matrix, but also I definitely think that I’m not. And so yeah, I think that anytime we’re making claims about other minds, there’s the proviso built in that we could be wrong.
Maybe Descartes was right, and other animals are not conscious. But I think that’s also a really crazy thing to think. And so, in the same way that I think I’m on firm ground thinking that if electrons have conscious experience, it’s not interesting or morally significant. But maybe I’m wrong. I just assign a very, very low probability to the possibility that I’m wrong about that.
REBECCA: So I wonder if maybe the difference between us, then — or maybe just that we haven’t got on to this — is I think that there are ways that you can behave badly towards someone that don’t cause pain, in the sense of physical pain.
JP: I agree with that. Yeah.
REBECCA: So, yeah, if the electron has some kind of awareness, it seems to me like — I mean, I don’t want to start trying to psychologise the electron — but awareness seems to me the kind of building block for, for instance, doing some psychological damage to the electron, or treating it with disrespect.
These kinds of things which paradigmatically aren’t instances of physical pain, but that we — at least, I — want to leave some space for those things within my account of behaving wrongly towards something. Causing something bad for something. And I think I’m just going to want to afford more significance to the awareness, in terms of at least the set of possibilities of ways in which I could behave badly, or even wrongly, towards something.
JP: So, I’m with you for half of that. I’m with you in thinking that there are ways of wronging someone that don’t involve causing the person pain, or the entity pain. But I think that those forms of wrongness require mental capacities that I have positive reasons for thinking the electron doesn’t possess.
So, I think most of the non-pain-involving forms of harm are forms of harm that can only be inflicted on, basically, like, a fellow rational creature, right? So, I think I have duties to you as a fellow rational creature to respect you in ways that don’t necessarily involve just not causing you pain.
But I also think that the electron is not going to possess any of those capacities. In fact, I think most other animals aren’t going to possess those capacities, either.
REBECCA: Yes, I was coming to the conclusion that you were going to say that about other kinds of animals. So I think maybe, then, we do have a difference of opinion, because I think quite strongly that you can morally disrespect non-rational animals — if indeed the animals are not rational. I also think I probably just place less weight on the moral relevance of rationality, here. That’s two ways of saying the same thing.
JP: Yeah. And I don’t want to seem to make a stronger claim than I’m wanting to make, because, yeah, I’m not thinking about the way that we should relate to other animals in purely utilitarian terms. I’m not a utilitarian, actually. But I think that most kinds of non-pain-involving harm are going to be harms that we associate with other rational creatures.
But yeah, I think that there are ways of wronging non-human animals apart from causing them pain. So, we would be on the same page about that.
The relevance of disrespect
REBECCA: Yeah, I think so. So, I do think this idea of moral disrespect is something that plays quite a big role in my view of morality, and my view of the kinds of obligations we might hold to other living things.
I even think — I have some of these crazy views — I even think that if animals, for instance, non-human animals, had the best possible lives and deaths, I still think we’d be showing importantly-bad moral disrespect by eating their dead bodies. This causes me some problems even for lab-grown meat. I’ve written about this before.
I think I have quite an unusual position on this, which is, my problem is something like, in that we’re trying to simulate the dead body of the animal — we want the steak that looks like a bit of beef. We want the prawn that looks like a prawn. Sorry, the shrimp, as the Americans say, that looks like a shrimp. We want them to taste like those things. We want them to smell like those things. And if my ‘moral disrespect view’ is an important part of why I think I shouldn’t eat the actual dead bodies of animals, I think that carries over — maybe not to such a strong degree — into the simulated bodies of animals.
I may, of course, just be affording far too much respect to dead bodies, here. I don’t think I am affording respect to the dead body, per se, though! Or indeed to the dead animal. I don’t think it makes any sense to say you owe respect to something when it doesn’t exist anymore. But I’m willing to say something like ‘I’m disrespecting that kind of animal’. I’m disrespecting beef-kind, when I eat a steak.
I should clarify, by the way, I do eat beef. I’ve given up pork and chicken recently, kind of on pragmatic grounds and also factory-farming grounds. But I do think, for me — and this is partly why I find it so hard to give up all the animals — I worry that my position just leads me into this very desolate situation, in which I can hardly do anything in my life.
JP: Yeah, yeah. We would part ways there. So, I think with the lab-grown meat case, it’s not clear to me who I would be disrespecting by eating lab-grown meat. And I don’t think that it’s possible to disrespect a kind of animal, or a species. Now, with respect to the dead bodies, like eating roadkill or something, I think that’s fine too, honestly.
But I could imagine that maybe there’s a kind of respect, or something, that that sort of action sits uncomfortably with. I don’t know. I mean, I’m a proponent of lab-grown meat. I think my view would be that even if I conceded that there was some kind of morally problematic disrespect here, I think the benefits would overwhelm whatever badness obtains there, because the worst thing we do to animals is factory farming. And I think that the only way factory farming ends is if we have a sufficiently desirable replacement, which probably is going to mean lab-grown meat.
So, if there’s still some residual badness that’s involved in lab-grown meat, I think that my view would be that we should just swallow whatever that is. Because there’s no worse way of disrespecting animals really than torturing them en masse, which is what we currently do in factory farms.
REBECCA: I agree with most of that. I mean, for instance, I agree that a particular thing has to be disrespected for disrespect to obtain. But I just think it’s the particular instances of that kind of animal that exist.
So, in the same way that if you had a video game in which, I don’t know, it involved someone going around torturing women, or, you know, being sexist towards women — however you want to put it, or think of some other category — then I think you could say it’s disrespectful to womankind. I don’t mean that womankind as some kind of ‘lumped whole’ is the object of disrespect. I mean that the particular instances of women who exist are the objects of disrespect. Therefore, you’re in some sense disrespecting all the existing cows by eating the dead body of a cow. I get that that’s quite an extreme view.
Beyond that, I do agree, though. I mean, I would word it slightly differently because I’m so anxious about not falling into any kind of consequentialist reasoning — although I do think you can talk about costs and benefits without being a consequentialist.
JP: Yes.
REBECCA: I agree, for sure, it’s a morally better world, or something like that, in which we eat lab-grown meat than we factory farm. That just seems to me very clear.
A point you made — I read your reducetarian piece last night. It’s a very, very nice piece. I think it’s a great example of doing public philosophy. It’s so clear and well argued. You made many excellent points in it. But one I think which is under-discussed, yet seems to me very important — and I feel like might tie our positions together here — you made this point around ‘we should just accept that as the kind of creatures we are, meat tastes good to us’. Or, you know, our brains are wired to want to take in the high-protein food.
I think this may take us down some kind of naturalistic route. Although I don’t think we have to fall foul of the naturalistic fallacy, and think because something’s natural for us therefore it’s good for us.
JP: Yeah.
REBECCA: But it might just be this important psychological notion that we have to take in. That doesn’t mean that we might not want to push against it. So, for instance, if it’s the case that humans are disposed to doing some other thing which is horrible, we might spend our time trying to condition ourselves away from it.
But nonetheless, I feel like accepting this — which it seems like a lot of people in the, kind of, vegetarian movements don’t accept — which is that it is normal and natural for human beings to enjoy the taste of dead non-human animals. This just seems to me pretty true.
JP: Yeah. So I definitely don’t think that because it’s natural, it’s good. But this was just a pragmatic point that I think the animal protection movement has to be realistic about. Because, since the beginning of the animal protection movement — in the early 1970s, basically, is when it really got going in earnest — the share of global vegetarians and vegans just hasn’t increased that much, at all.
And this is I think because, at least in part, people like the taste of meat, and other animal products, a lot. And that’s what pushes me towards the lab-grown meat thing, because I think there’s got to be an alternative, basically. People are unlikely — could happen, right? — but people are unlikely to decide to take significant hits to their taste enjoyment simply out of moral conviction. I think that’s not really how human beings are.
I did want to circle back, just to register agreement with one thing that you said a couple of minutes ago. So, with respect to the respect point. I do think that I agree — in fact, I think you’re totally right, in the case of humans. So I think, yes, you’re correct that it is possible to disrespect humankind, or womankind, or something like that. Or, I can translate that into terms that I agree with.
And I think that’s going to be cashed out, though, in terms of the relevant cognitive capacities that humans have that animals don’t have. So, I think that it’s possible to disrespect women, as such, in a way that it’s not possible to disrespect cows. But I think that’s because women are rational agents, and cows aren’t. So, they’re susceptible to different kinds of harms.
REBECCA: It seems to me that our difference may be the capacity of the thing to be aware that disrespect is being paid. Not necessarily in the particular instance, but more generally. I mean, I’m going to just come up with a classic example about, you know, the person in the coma. And then maybe you just say, well, look, generally the person in the coma, when they are fully operating normally, they can understand disrespect, or something like that.
I think I worry, though, about hinging whether something can be an object of disrespect on the capacity — and maybe you’re not saying this, maybe I’m going too far — on the capacity, for instance, to then understand, not necessarily disrespect, but some of the consequences. So, maybe, feeling shamed. Or, maybe, feeling lowered in status, or something like that.
Am I getting somewhere towards your position?
JP: Yeah, I think the person in the coma is still a human rational agent, right? They’re a member of a particular kind of species, and we have certain, plausibly, certain duties of respect to that general kind. That natural kind. But I think that cows, as such, don’t have an interest in not having any cow meat consumed, however that cow meat is produced. That’s the way that I would want to go.
But it may be that I have views here about natural kinds that are just more metaphysically loaded, or something, than you might want to endorse. That might be the difference.
REBECCA: I feel like there may be some difference, there.
Are we obligated to bring back extinct species?
REBECCA: I have all of these other questions about animal ethics to ask you. Things about companion animals, I know you’ve written about. Things about domestication. But, I think, because we’re running out of time, I’m going to finish with my favourite one — I started writing something about this a while back, maybe I will use this as inspiration to pick it up — about whether we might be obligated to bring back extinct animals.
It seems like it’s a pretty standard view to think that we have obligations to prevent animals from going extinct. At least, if you’re the kind of person, like me, who has these weird kinds of ideas about the obligations we have to the ‘creature-kind’. Although, I did say that that was still predicated on there being some existing instances of the creature-kind.
Where do you get off the ground on thinking about extinct animals? Do we have any kind of obligation to bring them back? If so, what would you ground that in? Is it just something fun for the movies, or interesting for the scientists? Is there any kind of moral domain, here?
JP: Yeah, I haven’t thought a ton about this. But my reaction is that we probably do have some reasons to bring back extinct animals. Obligation sounds too strong, at least under present conditions. So, under present conditions — again, where we have tens of billions of animals that are suffering horrifically on factory farms — I think most of our reasons in relation to how we ought to be relating to other animals are reasons to try to end that state of affairs.
So, since we’re so bad at relating respectfully to other animals right now, I would think that bringing back extinct animals seems like a very bad idea under present conditions. Under future conditions that maybe are better, where we’ve gotten our act together a bit, then yeah, bringing back extinct animals might be a good thing. I don’t know, like, variety is good! [laughter] So, having more kinds of animals around is better than not.
But yeah, it doesn’t strike me that there are super strong reasons, here. But that there are reasons to do this, that seems plausible.
REBECCA: Yeah, I think if the argument about the current animals being more important is based in this sense of obligation to existing things, or if it’s something about feasibility and resource constraint, then I’m definitely with you.
If it’s more like ‘this is the most important thing, therefore we have to only attend to that’ — and I know you’re not saying that — but then you get the whole, you know, ‘you’ve broken your leg but I can’t feel sorry for you, because I should be paying all of my attention to the person who’s being tortured’.
JP: Yeah, I mean the broader point is that we’re just really bad at attending to the interests and welfare of animals, right now. And so bringing more animals into the fold just doesn’t seem like it should be a priority, at the moment. But yeah, if we got better at behaving respectfully towards animals, then I would be more interested in bringing back extinct ones.
But right now, I think that we would just be disposed to probably do all kinds of horrific things to the extinct ones that we brought back.
The phenomenology of moral disgust
REBECCA: Can I end by asking: do you eat any meat?
JP: So, I’ve been vegetarian at least since 2009. And it was actually a philosophy article that caused the change. I was reading the widely-anthologized piece by Alastair Norcross, Puppies, Pigs, and People. And I got about halfway through that, and decided that was it: I’m not ever eating meat again.
And there had been some kind of process before that, where I’d been kind of uncomfortable with eating animals, going back to the time I was probably twelve years old. So, that was 2009. And since then, I’ve increasingly approximated veganism. And the degree to which I’ve been fully vegan — like super, super strictly vegan — has varied.
But I do take something like — with some caveats that we could talk about some other time — I take veganism to be something like the ideal, and one should approximate it as closely as possible. And that’s basically what I do. So vegetarian, almost totally vegan, but not like the strictest vegan in the world, I guess, is the way to describe myself. I do the best I can, you know.
REBECCA: So, I go through periods of not eating meat. I’m currently not eating the chicken and the pork.
JP: I endorse that. Good job.
REBECCA: But when I did give up — I gave up meat, apart from fish and seafood, about a year ago, for maybe three or four months. And the thing which I found really interesting about this — aside from the fact that I came to the conclusion I was just cheating by eating seafood every meal, partly because I do have these concerns about all of the animals.
But one thing I found very interesting is that I assumed, previously, if I managed to give up meat, I would have just sort of strengthened my will, in every instance. So, you know, I go to the restaurant, and I see the cheeseburger on the menu, and I reason it through, and I have more strength of will, or the reasons are stronger, and the argument works. And then I have the little battle with myself, every time. And I assumed that the situation in which Rebecca is the vegetarian is a situation in which Rebecca just wins those arguments against herself. But that wasn’t the case at all, actually. I just — I lost the desire.
So I, similarly, had read something, a philosophy paper, which included some stuff about pigs. It’s this piece by my friend Sahar Akhtar. And she had this example — it’s actually about abattoir workers, and how bad it is to be an abattoir worker, or something like that — but she had this one example of this little pig, who had never known any affection, never really hung out with other pigs, came and nuzzled up against the abattoir guy who was just about to kill the little pig. And I just thought, oh my god, I can’t eat animals anymore.
And then it wasn’t, though, that I constantly thought about the arguments. I just no longer had the desire to eat the meat. I found this very psychologically interesting, because I had always been assuming that all of the vegetarians were just making the stronger arguments, being more convinced.
Do you recognise this? Or are you somebody who makes the argument every time and still has the desire?
JP: I see. It does seem like there’s a good bit of individual variation, here. So, I have no desire to eat meat. In fact, it disgusts me. And that is a way that some people end up going. I honestly have a hard time eating an enjoyable meal with somebody else who’s eating meat, because it just really does disgust me, at this point. And it’s interesting — it’s like a kind of moral revulsion, right? It’s just like morally yucky.
REBECCA: Yes, I was going to ask: is it that it’s disgusting in this simple sense that it tastes disgusting or smells disgusting? Can you separate that out from the moral revulsion? Because I think I have the moral revulsion, but I still have the desire to eat it. I’m fully convinced that it’s bad and wrong, and I particularly feel this when I see the full animal. The pig on the spit, or the little shrimp in the pan. But, nonetheless, I still do have the desire to taste it, to smell it, to subsume it. This seems confusing to me.
JP: Yeah, it’s something I should think about a little bit more, because I think it’s been under-theorised — the phenomenology of moral disgust, or something. Because it is a different kind of reaction than I would have to mouldy bread, or something.
Mouldy bread is gross, but there’s no kind of moral laden-ness there. But I do experience some sort of moral revulsion at the sight of meat. Now, it’s not totally rational, because I’m not disgusted by eggs and dairy. You know, I think they’re — really, I will say this — one should definitely avoid factory-farmed eggs. That’s one of the worst things that one can consume, really, in terms of animal suffering.
REBECCA: Yeah, I do.
JP: But when I look at a fried egg, I’m not disgusted, right? And I still kind of desire cheese, even though I think I have strong moral reasons to avoid it. So yeah, my affective states have not tracked my moral reasons in a totally rational way.
But yes, to answer the question, it is definitely different in kind from merely what we might call ‘aesthetic disgust’. But I can also say, just from talking to other people — I mean, there are people who’ve been vegan for 30 years who still desire to eat steak. And there are others who are just revolted by any kind of animal product at all. I think it does seem to be not terribly common for this, kind of, disgust reaction to develop, which I think is partially why the recidivism rate is so, so high, right?
Like, people will encounter an argument in a philosophy class, and become very convicted vegetarians, vegans. And then, a year later, after they’re no longer being reminded, they’re just right back to their old habits. It’s something that should probably be — it would be good to study it more, honestly. It would be valuable to study.
REBECCA: It also does make me think, in the same way that another nice point you made in that reducetarian piece was that we should just increase people’s knowledge about the badness of factory farming. If we could also find some way to increase people’s revulsion… Like, I would be interested in becoming more revolted. I clearly am, on some level at least, morally revolted.
Maybe I just need to put mouldy meat out in my house, every day. Maybe I need to, I don’t know, paint the shrimp a different colour, or something. It seems to me like perhaps I could condition myself down that line, such that my higher-order desire to be a good person might match my much more instinctive animal-type response to ‘ooh it smells nice, it looks nice’.
JP: Yeah, there’s an interesting philosophy paper that I don’t think yet exists — but that there could be a moral obligation to induce disgust or revulsion in ourselves. I would co-author that one with you, if you want to get on that someday. [laughter]
REBECCA: Let’s do it! All right, let’s do it.
But what is an animal?
REBECCA: So why don’t we finish — now we’ve committed to writing this paper — why don’t we finish coming back to this opening question about what an animal is.
I feel like early on — and this has allowed us to have such a wide-ranging and fun conversation — I feel early on we agreed broadly on this idea of ‘the individual living organism that moves around of its own accord’, something like that.
If the little kid comes up to you in the street, and says, “Hey, JP, I hear you write about animals! I need to go into my class today, and say what an animal is.” Are you going to go something down that line? Do you have something simpler? What is your simple off-the-cuff answer to what the animal is?
JP: If a kid just asked me that off the street, I would say, “You know, the kind of being that dogs and cats and pigs and cows are. That’s what I mean. Those are animals.” And that might be as good as we can do at the end of the day, actually. So, oftentimes, the answer that we would give to a random little kid on the street ends up being the best philosophical answer that we can get. [laughter]
REBECCA: I like that. If your definition of animals does not capture those paradigmatic animals, you fail.
Okay, this has been great. Thank you. This has been a lot of fun. And you may even have helped me go further down the vegetarianism route. So I’m eternally grateful to you for that.
JP: Well, you know, that was my hidden purpose in the whole conversation, Rebecca. It was just to make you a vegetarian by the end of it. [laughter]
REBECCA: That’s right — we’re back to Aristotelian teleology — good times! [laughter]
