ANIMALS AND THEIR MORAL STANDING
Stephen L. Clark interviewed by Claudette Vaughan

It’s easy to forget that twenty years ago people thought only cranks and sentimentalists could be seriously concerned with the treatment of non-human animals. Professor Stephen R.L.Clark has had a distinguished academic career. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Liverpool University and has held that position since 1984. In 1997 he wrote a seminal book on animals called Animals and their Moral Standing. Written with characteristic clarity and conviction, Animals and Their Moral Standing has been essential reading for both philosophers and scientists, as well as the general public and animal activists alike, concerned by the debates over animal rights and treatment.

Abolitionist: What kind of moral standing do non-human animals currently have in the world Stephen?

Stephen R. L Clark: That depends on the country, and on the kind of animal. In India, for example, oxen and monkeys are protected by public opinion much more than dogs are. In Britain, dogs get a better deal than pigs. And so on. ‘Moral standing’, in this context, means, I take it, how sad and angry people are about the ‘mistreatment’ of particular creatures. But even people who mind about such mistreatment don’t usually think, or behave as if they think, that the creatures in question have any ‘right’ to make, as it were, their own life-style choices or be seriously consulted about how to organise the habitats we share! This could be summed up by saying that non-humans are often though inconsistently the object of charity, but not of justice.

Have things gotten better for the animals since the advent of the animal rights movement and since philosophers such as yourself got involved with the question?

There’s probably less unconscious or casual disregard for the interests of animals than there was, and people – in the West at any rate – are readier to acknowledge their own sense of outrage at some of the things that animals suffer at our hands. But the initial drive, for example, to improve the condition of farm animals, and to campaign against ‘factory farming’, didn’t start with philosophers, and neither did the campaign against ‘vivisection’. The change since philosophers began arguing against mistreatment is mostly within the academic community! There are still academics and others who preach that any concern for non-humans is sentimental anthropomorphism, but this usually now sounds much more strained and self-defensive than it used to.

What are your views on the current state of the Movement? Will you pin point for us streams of activity or thought processes you think useful for rightists in a very un-rightist world?

It’s good that it’s very diverse: people concern themselves with particular areas, and argue the case on many different grounds. The use of illegal means wasn’t a success: animal experimentalists closed ranks against what they could represent as terrorist assaults. Such assaults are only going to ‘work’ if there is general public approval of the cause, which there isn’t yet, and all disregard for law – even if it does, in the short term, ‘work’ - loosens the bonds of law in civil society in ways that we would all regret in the end. And though animal experimentation is – I think – an offense against a proper ethical sense, it’s not the sole nor even the main place in which non-humans are abused. That would be the farming industry. The most successful public campaigns have been against things like lengthy and inhuman transport of animals to sale or slaughter (but note that one reason that it’s a long way to slaughter is that we’ve insisted on higher standards in abattoirs, so that there are fewer of them). People may also condemn ‘factory farming’, but they don’t take steps to make such farming unprofitable (and of course non-factory farming is still, by welfarist as well as rightist standards, often very inhumane). Better education all round is needed – and especially hints of better (and happier) ways of relating to non-humans than eating them.

Weigh in on the rightist v welfarist debate.

I’m not myself committed to any general theory of ‘rights’: I prefer to say that ‘rights’ are created by law, and that they constitute the interests that law-makers seek to protect. So I can flatly say that some non-human animals do have rights in current UK law: people can be prosecuted and condemned for abusing them. But there is a wider issue: welfarists are concerned to ensure that non-humans are treated as well as possible while they are being used for our purposes, whereas rightists would reject the idea that such creatures can legitimately be used for any purposes we please. Rather than saying that they have rights independently of any human legislature, I prefer to say that we have no general right to use them at our pleasure.  Rightists, consistently, consider that it’s wrong – or at the least that it’s prima facie wrong – to kill any non-human creature: we can’t justify the killing just on the grounds that ‘we’ know better what good the creature is for. Welfarists, though they want the creatures not to be hurt, tend to suppose that death doesn’t hurt them. I don’t think this is a rational position!

Why does the animal rights movement need philosophers?

Partly, no doubt, simply for respectability! The movement may as well make use of the existence of articulate academics to make the case in appropriate settings, especially if they can be seen to be articulating widely held sentiments. I’d also say (well, I would) that people get into terrible confusions if they don’t listen carefully to their own words, and if they don’t have any idea what arguments and ideologies have been developed in the past, and that still have an influence in unexpected places. Those who won’t engage in philosophical discussion are usually themselves victims of past philosophers whose ideas entered the mainstream.

Are we a higher species if this is what we do to animals?

Darwin used to remind himself not to use words like ‘higher’ (though he often forgot his own warnings)! The human species has particular abilities and powers that effectively mean we can affect much of the rest of the world (though it’s worth recalling that bacteria have more collective influence). The idea that we are made ‘in the image of God’ has had unfortunate effects – people seem to assume that this means we matter more than other creatures, whereas the original point is manifestly that we are made to appreciate the good of the created world, and to look after it. Quite how people who don’t accept the theology (Christian, Jewish or Muslim) still go on supposing that human beings are somehow special (and should or would be considered special by any passing extra-terrestrial intelligence) I don’t understand! Extra-terrestrials might turn out to have a lot more respect and affection for quite different creatures: would they be wrong?
One of the ways in which evolutionary theory has damaged past rationales for our behaviour is its deconstruction of the very notion of a ‘species’. In times past, this meant a natural kind, such that all members of a species shared a particular nature quite different from any other. Nowadays, a biological species is a set of interbreeding populations, such that there need be no common, unique nature. The current human species is pretty homogeneous, but that’s because we’re all descended from one small population not all that long ago. Given time, we may be more diverse, and may split up into several different species: very few moralists think that this will eliminate our mutual responsibilities. There seems no good reason to think that just because the human and chimp populations can no longer interbreed the chimps are therefore without any moral significance.

Talk about your book ‘Animals and Their Moral Standing?’ What was your intention in writing this book, did you achieve it and what are some of the costs and benefits for animals now having more voices in the world on their side.

That book is actually a collection of papers written over twenty years, with some additions and corrections. My original entry to the field was The Moral Status of Animals back in 1977, which was written with rather more fury than I would now think helpful (not that I’m much less furious!). It originated after my wife and I turned vegetarian and I wanted to lecture on the topic, first at Oxford and then at Glasgow: I became more extreme as I began to realise how poor the arguments were on the other (anti-animal) side. I further wrote a succession of papers to try to deal with particular issues and problems, both practical and philosophical, and decided to have them – and other articles on the implications for political thought of considering that human beings were animals - collected in a pair of volumes (the other is The Political Animal) to be there as background for my next book, which was Biology and Christian Ethics (2000: it was published in Chinese in 2006). I don’t know how beneficial my own activity has been, except that people do sometimes tell me that they have been encouraged in their own pro-animal convictions, and rather more rarely that they have actually been converted to a pro-animal position. The same is probably true for other philosophers in the business.

What has to change to affect real change in the world for non-human animals?

People have to appreciate that we are all animals together, that we can’t afford to carry on treating our cousins as tools or materials for our own local purposes. If we don’t manage this we’ll continue to corrode the habitats we share, and eventually suffer the population crash that afflicts any species that loses its way. Some of us (and me) may interpret this as a divine judgment, but even without that description, and the attendant metaphysics, it’s likely to be a fact.

Is utilitarianism the preferred theory of the Nazi’s and aren’t we all Nazis when it comes to the animals?

I think that’s rather unfair to Utilitarian’s, though I emphasise that I don’t agree with them. Utilitarianism is essentially the doctrine (there are many variants) that we should always act to increase the happiness of the greatest number (and most Utilitarian philosophers included all sentient animals in that number, and were vilified for so doing). Nazis had (have) different aims, notably the glorious survival of their own national and racial group, with some patronising concern for creatures that were no threat to their supremacy. The doctrine that ‘the end justifies the means’ is indeed a very bad doctrine, amounting to a claim to divine power and authority neither of which any sane person could really believe we have! My own problems with Utilitarianism are first that only someone with a genuinely impartial concern for all creatures, and complete knowledge of the consequences of what s/he does could possibly act on that principle as originally stated (that is, only God should be a Utilitarian), and second that terms like ‘happiness’ simply conceal a number of ethical judgments which are thereby exempt from rational criticism.

Talk about the rights of wild creatures.

A standard argument against ‘animal rights’ has always been that ‘if animals have rights, then e.g. blackbirds are abusing the rights of earthworms and ought to be stopped’. Actually, the argument was always dubious, since even the people who proposed it (and believed in universal human rights) did not think that ‘we’ had a duty to protect all human beings everywhere. But at least we can imagine such an organisation for the protection of human beings, while we cannot imagine any human organisation that could compel the lion to lie down with the kid (and so on). My claim is that the only rights that could be generally protected are the ones to a habitat in which as many creatures of as many kinds as possible live out their lives (which will often be predatory lives, but which probably won’t be so far ‘successful’ as to destroy the habitat: where this has happened it’s usually been because we have introduced some sudden species (rats, goats) that native stocks can’t cope with). I contrast this with our additional responsibilities towards creatures that have been part of our households for millenia, co-evolved with us. We ought not to injure wild things, and especially ought not to damage their habitats, but have no absolute duty to protect them against injury by each other (the case of the domestic cat is an awkward one, requiring a lot of thought).

How do you think the burgeoning animal law movement will proceed with concrete cases from a yet untried abstract i.e., rights and personhood.

Getting protection for some animals has been going on since the early 19th century (till then the only long-lasting laws on the subject were in the Torah). I’m in favour of getting more protection where we can (and where public opinion will go along with it). ‘Personhood’ is another of these very strange, unanalysed concepts: in law, businesses can be ‘persons’, but the metaphysical sense of ‘person’ as a mature rational individual responsible for his/her own actions is largely theological in origin: it doesn’t sit very well with current secularist presuppositions, but we’re too scared of the cost of losing it entirely to admit this to ourselves. Deciding that apes are persons too is likely to be confusing, however useful it may be as an immediate strategy. I think that they (and dogs and dolphins and pigs and ….) are ‘personal’ in many ways, and that the best way of relating to them is ‘personal’ (that is, moved by affection to consider them as individuals and alert to their communications), but calling them ‘persons’ will lead on to demands that they be held responsible for their actions in ways that I don’t think we have any right to do. I wrote about some of these issues back in The Nature of the Beast (1982).

It’s very sad that some sectors of the Christian churches (both Catholic and American Protestant) have decided that efforts to get legal protection (including protection of their lives and liberties) for ‘animals’ are ‘unChristian’, because disregarding the special significance of the human. I hope that sensitive theologians will gradually dispel this nonsense, in line with Humphrey Primatt’s judgment (an eighteenth century Anglican cleric whose work inspired the RSPCA in its beginnings): ‘when a man boasts of the dignity of his nature, and the disadvantages of his station, and then and from thence infers his right of oppression of his inferiors, he exhibits his folly as well as his malice’ 1. If there is any ‘special significance’ in the human it’s that we can (and will) be held responsible for what we do to others, and the mess we make of things.