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on Animal Suffering

Should animals suffer?
Roger Scruton asks if the Director of the Centre for Animal Ethics has his ethics right. Andrew Linzey is a theologian and an Anglican priest, who campaigns widely for laws which will, in his view, offer increased protection to both wild and domesticated animals. He directs a “Centre for Animal Ethics” which he has established in Oxford, and has been a staunch opponent of fur-farming, seal-hunting and hunting with hounds – all three of which activities are considered at length in this book, in which he argues for moral and legal reforms that will answer to long-neglected human duties.
Linzey does not really tell us why animal suffering matters; nor does he need to – it matters because it is suffering. Linzey’s argument is really directed to the question how animal suffering matters to us, and how a concern for animal suffering should be built into the moral fabric of human society. He argues persuasively that animals should not be treated as mere instruments for our purposes, and that it is not permissible to impose heavy burdens on animals for some small human gain. He repeatedly emphasizes that the defenceless position of animals in the face of human power and ingenuity is a reason for offering them moral and legal protection, just as we do to children. And the fact that animals are non-rational, without moral feelings or the capacity for self-conscious reflection, is no reason for excluding them from our moral concern but, on the contrary, a reason for including them, since we alone are able to provide for their welfare in an increasingly hostile world.
All that is both humane and reasonable, and few people today would disagree with it. Linzey is able to summon theological and scriptural resources – including a hadith of Muhammad, no more obviously bogus than the rest of them – in order to reinforce his view that God has placed animals under our care and protection, and commands us to include them within the life of respect and compassion that it is our duty to establish. But he intends his argument to carry weight for atheists and agnostics as well as for believers, and this is where a little philosophy is needed, if he is to convince those not already persuaded, or those (a minority, perhaps, but not necessarily an unthinking minority) who consider the fashionable emphasis on the sufferings of animals as an elaborate moral evasion. The problem is that Linzey offers us only a little philosophy, and certainly not enough to justify the far-reaching condemnations which emerge as the goal of his argument.
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Unlike Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation (1975) initiated the “animalist” agenda, Linzey is not a utilitarian. He does not think that moral questions can be settled by cost-benefit calculation. Nor does he think that it is open to us to engage in those thought experiments for which Singer is notorious and which have been held to justify murder in all its more well-meaning and public-spirited forms, such as abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, eugenic cleansing, and the liquidation of inconvenient minorities. For Linzey there are moral absolutes which cannot be qualified by calculation, and it is not only humans that are the beneficiaries: animals, too, are protected by principles which have an absolute force, and which cannot be set aside by the benefits of flouting them.
But whence comes this absolute force? Linzey does not tell us. Like Singer, he has no clear metaphysical position concerning the nature of human beings and the distinction between moral agents and others. For Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and the other great philosophers of ethics, this distinction is not only absolute but foundational to our understanding of the moral life. If you say nothing about it, and give no indication what it means to us humans, that we alone in the world are beset by moral burdens, that we alone are free, responsible and accountable, that we alone are sovereign over our lives and bound by obligations, then you are not likely to say anything plausible about the grounds of moral judgement, or about the absolute principles that govern us. Still less are you likely to cast any light on our relation to the animals, who cannot reciprocate our moral concern, who have no conception of the injustice of their sufferings and who make no claims of their own.
Many, if not all, of the absolutes that order the moral life of ordinary people stem from their recognition that human beings are special. There are things you cannot do to people without committing a crime that must be atoned for. You cannot punish someone for an act that he did not commit, whatever beneficial effects might result from doing so. You cannot steal, rape, or murder; you cannot trap someone into fulfilling your designs or fraudulently use him to your own advantage. You cannot keep someone captive, train him by stick and carrot to do your will, or put him out of his misery when his sufferings have become a problem. There is, around each person, a wall that cannot be transgressed, and the foundation of that wall is the real topic of moral philosophy. Is there such a wall around each individual animal, including the mouse in my kitchen and the rat in the barn? Linzey assumes as much; but he gives no argument to prove it, since he ignores most if not all that philosophers have said concerning the concept of the person.
Nevertheless, Linzey is prepared to enunciate two absolute principles which should govern our dealings with animals. The first is that it is wrong to inflict suffering on an animal unless for its own good. Linzey is clear that such a principle involves extending to animals the respect for the individual that we owe to our fellow humans. Hence he is dismissive of those conservationists who believe that it is right to kill individual animals for the sake of the habitat that is needed by the species, or to control one species (the grey squirrel, for instance) for the sake of another (the red squirrel). The principle has other and yet more challenging consequences. Killing animals for food is ruled out, unless the killing can be effected entirely without pain, fear and distress. For Linzey it is not just halal butchery that is forbidden, but butchery of just about every kind. It becomes obligatory to be a vegetarian. At a certain point Linzey seems to accept this conclusion; but he is careful not to announce it when putting his principle forward.
Equally counter-intuitive, it seems to me, is the consequence that it is morally wrong to control pests if our doing so causes them to suffer. I live on a farm which is plagued by rats, mice and feral cats. But I am obliged, according to Linzey’s principle, to adopt an attitude of laissez-faire, since there is no way of killing any of these creatures that will guarantee a painless death. Exactly how I am to respect our rats as individuals is another question. I value their presence in the fields, since they provide food for other and more beautiful species – foxes, badgers, buzzards and hawks. But their presence in our out-buildings means stolen eggs, polluted horse feed, and a general risk of disease which I am surely under an obligation to eliminate.
More plausible is Linzey’s second principle, which holds that “it is intrinsically wrong to cause suffering for the purposes of amusement, recreation or in the name of sport”, a principle which, he believes, is the real ground for condemning hunting. This principle is more plausible precisely because it does not focus on the animal, and what supposedly cannot be done to it, but on the human being, and the state of mind from which he acts. In other words, it does not involve extending to animals the privileges and protections that are the gift of moral agency. The principle is rooted in a conception of human vice – the vice of enjoying suffering for its own sake.
But the phrase “for the purposes of” is not clearly defined. We all of us make a distinction between an activity that someone enjoys (horse racing, for example) which has animal suffering as an unwanted side effect, and an activity in which it is precisely the suffering – or the spectacle of suffering – that is enjoyed. Linzey’s language elides these two things, and so gives him an easy route to accusation. Anglers enjoy catching fish; but they don’t enjoy the suffering that they cause, and a good fisherman strives to minimize that suffering and to extract the hook kindly when the fish is landed. Surely there is all the difference in the world between such a fisherman and the hooligan who takes fish from the water in order to pierce them with barbs and to shriek with delight at their misery. The first is enjoying the sport, the second is enjoying the pain.
There are other relevant distinctions too. You may be engaged in an activity that directly causes suffering to an animal – as when you beat a recalcitrant horse or shoot a dangerous bear. Or you may be engaged in an activity that does not directly cause suffering, but which nevertheless has suffering as a foreseeable by-product – as when you keep a domestic cat, which is very likely to kill mice and birds in the lingering way that cats on the whole prefer. You might say that, in both cases, a human is responsible for animal suffering. But it is another question whether this responsibility imputes any measure of moral guilt.
Whether fox-hunters are to be condemned for sins that cat-keepers somehow avoid is a matter that is in no way settled by Linzey’s arguments, which remain at such a shallow level that one can only bridle at the self-righteous judgements he heaps on those, like myself, whose way of life he abhors. For Linzey, followers of foxhounds are “animal abusers”, comparable to those who torture cats and dogs for their amusement and who – according to research that he cites without question – are predisposed to become violent criminals when they turn their attention to their fellow humans. I conclude from this that Linzey may be a humane observer of animals, but he is no charitable observer of people. Maybe he cannot bring himself to attend a meet of foxhounds; but he could at least have consulted the literature, from Plato and Xenophon to Turgenev, Sassoon, Masefield and Ortega y Gasset, devoted to the place of hunting in a virtuous life.
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of Linzey’s position is his endorsement of the British government’s argument for the ban on fur-farming. This ban was justified on the grounds that the rearing of captive animals for a “luxury” product is an offence against “public morality”. It is true that the law must, at some level, respond to genuine moral concerns, and cannot be simply out of line with the ordinary conscience. But what exactly is public morality, and who is to define it? What happened to Mill’s famous argument in On Liberty that the coercion of the criminal law can be justified only in order to prevent us from harming others, and never in order to force our compliance to a moral code? What happened to the Wolfenden Report, disapproving the judgment, in DPP v. Shaw, which held that it is a crime to offend “public morals”? What happened to the argument for the decriminalization of homosexuality, despite widespread moral disapproval? What happened to the sovereignty of the individual, which British law has, over the centuries, striven to define and protect, and which Linzey is covertly relying on in urging us to treat animals as individuals, entitled to a life and and fulfilment of their own? And why is it so sinful to breed animals for their outer layers, and not for the stuff inside? The MP who introduced the Bill to ban fur-farming often wears woollen cardigans and leather shoes. But this, it seems, is an offence only against the private morality of those who stick to animal-friendly but environmentally destructive materials such as nylon and plastic. The sad thing is that Linzey either doesn’t see, or doesn’t care, where the use of this kind of argument is leading. He is right to want to protect animals from people. But people also need to be protected from people, not least from the prigs and puritans who dislike their way of life. The liberal thinking that was until recently enshrined in our law was the most successful means ever devised to achieve this.

Andrew Linzey
WHY ANIMAL SUFFERING MATTERS
416pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $29.95).
978 0 19 537977 8

Roger Scruton’s most recent books include a third edition of A Dictionary of Political Thought, 2007. I Drink Therefore I Am: A philosopher’s guide to wine and Beauty both appeared last year. He is Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, where he teaches Philosophy at their graduate school in both Washington and Oxford.