Expanding Our Circle of Moral Concern to Animals
When we read about abuses of power like the legal disenfranchisement of women, enforced child labor, and chattel slavery, most of us see them as as shameful relics of bygone eras.
Although these injustices certainly continue to exist, many human societies have thankfully progressed to the point that where we’ve outlawed such examples of systemic inhumanity. It’s simply no longer publicly acceptable in much of the world to mete out calculated mass brutality or disadvantage on fellow human beings.
While much progress has been made advancing beyond socially condoned abuse of the most vulnerable humans — though there’s still more left to do — the industrialized exploitation of animals remains a widespread part of human culture. The point of course isn’t to equate one injustice with another, but rather to point out where we, as a species, can and should continue advancing.
Seeing the worth and dignity of animals
Past generations tended to see animals as mindless machines, beasts of burden or raw materials existing for the sole purpose of producing food, clothing, and entertainment for the benefit of humans. Science is revealing to us, more each day, just how wrong-headed this view really is.
Animals’ inner worlds, to the extent that research has opened them to us, are much deeper and more vivid than humans would have thought possible even a few decades ago. We’re beginning to realize that, just because animals don’t process data or communicate in ways visibly like our own, that differences between us are often more of degree, not of kind.
Most of us have heard about some of the great apes who have learned sign language to communicate with humans, and with one another. In 2016, Scientific Reports published a Durham University team’s account of how they coached Rocky, a young male orangutan, to vocalize basic human speech sounds. And scientists have documented extensive and subtle webs of communication among dolphins and orcas, who obviously suffer greatly when kept in isolation in enclosed spaces, as remains the case in theme parks.
But we don’t eat orcas or orangutans. What about the animals we use for food?
Research has also shown us that chickens are notably intelligent, even scoring well on tests of simple mathematics skills. A group of Italian neuroscience researchers conducted a study, published in 2014, that found chickens were able to add and subtract numbers up to five. The scientists concluded that the chickens outperformed typical human toddlers in their grasp of mathematics.
Pigs have shown themselves to be smarter than dogs. A research team worked with a group of pigs to teach them to move a joystick with their snouts to achieve results in a video game. The pigs even continued playing the game for social contact after they no longer had access to the food reward.
How will future generations see us?
When our grandchildren read about how we treated thinking, feeling animals like chickens and pigs, they’re likely to feel bewilderment at best, and revulsion at worst. That’s how it often happens: Each generation learns more about the world — and the other humans and animals with whom we share it — and begins to include them in an expanding universe of moral responsibility.
Our present-day relationship with animals, largely centered on violence and domination for our own benefit, may one day become another astonishing relic of history. Future generations might wonder at how we ever could have justified animals having no moral or legal protection from exploitation or the industrial-scale infliction of pain.
A little perspective always helps:
In 1791, Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man. In its pages, he argued a passionate plea for respecting the rights and dignity of commoners against an upper-class aristocracy that had arrogated power and privilege almost solely unto itself. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft (whose daughter Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein) wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
These two remarkably far-seeing books aroused plenty of controversy.
Paine’s and Wollstonecraft’s calls for expanding humanity’s circle of moral concern beyond a narrow circle of wealthy, white men led to ridicule and public vilification of the authors and their ideas. Their contemporary Thomas Taylor then published a biting critique of both writers, which he called A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes.
If common people and women were to have rights thanks to an “amazing rage for liberty,” Taylor argued, then soon “brutes” (animals) would have them, too. And since it would be outrageous for animals to be granted legal rights, obviously the same would be so for commoners and women.
Taylor meant to mock and satirize the notion of an expanding circle of moral concern. That’s what typically happens when new voices of advocacy point out the need for greater empathy toward those not “like us.” The “us” being the people used to having their voices heard above all the rest.
But someday, a future generation might understand Taylor’s pamphlet not as satire, but literally, as a moral imperative to broaden human understanding and respect for non-human beings.
Moral expansion never happens by itself. It only happens when kind, caring, and powerful voices speak up on behalf of those left without a voice, either for reasons of social or political exclusion, or because they communicate in ways humans don’t fully understand.
Animals are not just commodities. Morally and legally, they deserve better than they’ve experienced up to now at our hands. The time to begin creating that future is now. Younger generations seem to be standing at one of history’s hinge points. We can accept this call to action, and we can serve as a voice urging a new expansion of humanity’s moral circle of concern.
Paul Shapiro is the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, the CEO of The Better Meat Co., a four-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast.
