Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought 9780674089075

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INSIDE ETHICS

INSIDE ETHICS On the Demands of Moral Thought ALICE CRARY

INSIDE ETHICS H A RVA R D U N I V ER SI T Y PR E SS

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England

2015

On the Demands of Moral Thought ALICE CRARY

H A RVA R D U N I V ER SI T Y PR E SS

Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England

2016 2015

Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crary, Alice, 1967– Inside ethics : on the demands of moral thought / Alice Crary. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-674-96781-6 1.Ethics.  2.Animal welfare.  I. Title. BJ1012.C73 2015 170—dc23 2015015040

For Nathaniel, Louise, Shepard, and Whidbey

CO N T E N T S

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. Outside Ethics: Tracing a Trend in Contemporary Moral Philosophy . . . . . . . 10 2. The Moral Dimension of Mind: Philosophy of Psychology as a Guide to Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

3. More on Animal Minds: Dogs and Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 4. All Human Beings and Animals Are Inside Ethics: Reflections on Cognitive Disability and the Dead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

5. A Couple of Competing Views: Foot’s Ethical Naturalism and Wolfe’s Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

6. Extending the Argument: Literary Accounts of Moral Kinship between Humans and Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

7. Two Issues in Ethics: Eating Animals and Experimenting on Them . . . . . . 255

Concluding Comment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Epigraph Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

PR E FACE

The idea for this book began to take shape in my mind, a number of years ago, when I was teaching my first course on animals and ethics. The body of work that my students and I then explored, and that I have now explored with many subsequent groups of students and activists, is dominated by the voices of people who are horrified by things that human beings do to animals and who hope to radically change how animals are treated. I sympathized unequivocally with this position. Yet I was dissatisfied with most of the arguments in its favor. I traced my dissatisfaction to a feature of discussions about animals and ethics that, while pervasive, is rarely taken to be arresting enough even to deserve mention. What got my attention is an assumption about how we arrive at the empirical or world-guided images of the lives of animals that we operate with in ethics. Thinkers who address questions about animals and ethics generally assume that this is not a task for ethics proper and that any acceptable empirical accounts of animal life that we use in ethics must be the products of disciplines independent of ethics such as the natural sciences. Once I had registered the organizing role played by this assumption, it occurred to me that contemporary

ethics is structured by an analogous assumption about how we learn about the lives of human beings. Moral philosophers mostly take it for granted that achieving the kind of empirical understanding of human life that we are after in ethics is the business not of ethics but of disciplines external to it. Having been struck by how ethics tends to look beyond itself for a suitable empirical grasp of human as well as animal existence, I began to critically examine this tendency. Wouldn’t we be right, I asked, to resist it? Aren’t moral insight and moral imagination necessary for bringing the lives of human beings and animals into empirical focus in a manner appropriate for ethics? Don’t we lose something important if we deny that ethically rich work in the humanities and the arts can as such be immediately pertinent to the world-guided images of human and animal lives that we seek in ethics? Doesn’t this gesture of denial threaten to hamper our efforts to bring clearly into view, among other things, egregious wrongs to human beings and animals? Don’t these abstract issues therefore have immediate practical urgency? Finally, assuming that there is something to the thought that we need to fundamentally revise our approach to ethical issues involving human beings and animals, what would a good philosophical argument for the relevant shift look like? The book before you is my attempt to answer these questions.

x P R E F A C E

Somehow we feel increasingly sunk in a world of mere things, in a hard-edged Reality that disallows imagination except to exact tribute from it. —​Marilynne Robinson, “Facing Reality”

INSIDE ETHICS

I N T RO D U C T I O N

A simple-minded faith in science . . . ​engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it. —​Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness”

This book is about the representation of human beings and animals in ethics. Its initial reference point is a conception of how human beings and animals enter moral thought that, while rarely discussed, plays an organizing role in contemporary moral philosophy. However different their theoretical commitments and substantive views, moral philosophers tend to assume that the set of observable characteristics of human beings does not include any moral characteristics and hence that, whatever moral characteristics human beings do have, those characteristics are not available to empirical discovery. Similarly, however different their theoretical commitments and substantive views, moral philosophers who address questions about animals tend to assume that the set of observable characteristics of animals does not include any moral characteristics and hence that, whatever moral characteristics animals do have, those characteristics are not empirically discoverable. These twin assumptions have substantial implications for how we construe appropriate methods for ethics. They imply that the task of bringing the lives of human beings and animals

into empirical focus in a manner relevant to ethics cannot require the use of any specifically moral resources. By the same token, they imply that the only methods capable of contributing directly to the sort of empirical or world-guided understanding of human beings and animals that we seek in ethics are those of disciplines, such as the natural sciences, that don’t themselves belong to ethics. The upshot is that it appears that any undistorted, world-guided understandings of human and animal life that we make use of in ethics must be handed down to ethical thought from outside. Dislodging this view is the critical ambition of this book. Here I present an argument against the view that has two main steps. Both steps depend for their interest on the recognition that a conception of empirical reality as in itself ethically inert now has the status of something like a default position in philosophy. As a result, the question of whether it is correct to deny that human beings and animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics for the most part simply does not come up. The first step of my argument lays the groundwork for raising this question. I attack some of the considerations that seem to speak most strongly for an ethically indifferent metaphysic. In criticizing these considerations, I join a longstanding debate, familiar to anyone who keeps abreast of research in moral philosophy, about realism—​ or objectivity—​ in ethics. Defending a disfavored position within this debate is not, however, my main argumentative aim in this book. The second and significantly more involved step of my argument is also its more distinctive contribution. After beginning my critical maneuvers by defending a conception of reality capacious enough to include observable moral qualities, I argue that human beings and animals possess such qualities. A consequence of this transformation of how we understand human beings and animals is a transformation of how we conceive the task of doing justice to human and animal lives in ethics. Now it seems clearly misguided to contract out all world-­ directed questions about what these lives are like to disciplines outside ethics. The book’s emphasis is on a positive corollary of this negative point. In its pages, I challenge the exclusion of moral characteristics from the set of observable characteristics of human beings and animals because I hope to revise an influential conception of the nature and difficulty of

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moral thought about human beings and animals. I argue that in ethics arriving at a faithful, world-guided understanding of human and animal lives is impossible apart from the use of moral capacities such as moral imagination. My thought is that, if we are to responsibly pursue the kind of empirical grasp of these lives that is germane to ethics, we need to be open to exploring ethically loaded perspectives of sorts that we find expressed, for instance, in work across different fields in the humanities as well as in literature and other arts. I complement my call for this methodological shift in ethics with illustrations of the kind of moral thinking that comes within reach once we make the shift. My chief concern throughout is describing and bringing out the practical importance of images of human and animal life that such thinking enables us to develop. The book opens with a chapter dedicated to stage setting. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for my overarching argument by documenting the larger trend in moral philosophy that is its primary critical target. At the chapter’s heart is an account of the tendency of moral philosophers today to assume that there are no moral characteristics among human beings’ and animals’ empirically discoverable characteristics and, further, that the only empirical methods we need in order to illuminate human and animal lives in ethics are therefore those of disciplines external to ethics. I describe how this tendency is driven by metaphysical outlooks that represent empirical reality as in itself ethically neutral, and I discuss how the basic line of thought that interests me gets developed, albeit in arrestingly different ways, in the writings of two high-profile moral philosophers—​Peter Singer and Christine Korsgaard—​ who address questions about the moral standing of animals as well as questions about the moral standing of human beings. Having thus set up my project, in Chapter 2 I turn to showing that, in contrast to what many moral philosophers assume, human beings and animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics. The centerpiece of my strategy is a defense of a philosophically irregular conception of mind that I trace to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The conception that I champion is one that is striking not only in invit­ ­ing us to understand mental categories as picking out patterns of behavior that are irreducibly ethical but, moreover, in representing this understanding of mental categories as consistent with their being

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transparently concerned with how things really are. The case I make for the relevant approach to mind is quite involved, taking up the whole of what is this book’s argumentatively most complex chapter. Nevertheless, the point of introducing the approach is simple. In accepting it, we buck the trend in moral philosophy that I am setting out to contest by claiming that, as minded beings, humans and animals have characteristics that are simultaneously empirically discoverable and morally loaded. The claim depends in part for its plausibility on the assumption that the approach to mind that is here at issue does justice not only to human minds but also to the minds of animals. This assumption is likely to strike even some otherwise sympathetic readers as problematic. That is because in making a case for the pertinent approach to mind I assign an essential role to what is sometimes called a conceptualist account of perceptual experience, that is, an account on which perceptual awareness is conceptual all the way down. Critics and champions of conceptualist doctrines tend to agree in regarding them as inseparable from the view that animals possess at best very primitive capacities of mind. Granted that this interpretation of what conceptualism amounts to interferes at least to some degree with the extension of my preferred view of mind to animals—​a nd given that some of my main claims depend for their soundness on the correctness of such an extension—​it is important for my purposes to challenge the interpretation. So, in Chapter 3, I set out to demonstrate that there is no necessary connection between a conceptualist posture, on the one hand, and the denial to animals of significant qualities of mind, on the other. I follow up on conversations about the conceptualist view of mind put forward by John McDowell. I note that a large number of critics have charged that McDowell’s view is wrongly prejudicial to animals, and I respond to this charge on his behalf, showing that a conceptualist position of the type he advocates is compatible with the recognition that some animals possess significant qualities of mind. To the extent that Chapters 2 and 3 mount a defense of the view that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics, they make up a—​philosophically irregular—​case for granting human beings and animals moral standing. Building on this case, in Chapter 4 I describe how my main line of reasoning can be elaborated to support

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the conclusion that the bare fact of being a human or an animal is morally important and hence that all human beings and animals have moral standing. This view merits discussion because it is practically consequential and because it currently has outspoken detractors. Today there are a number of influential moral philosophers who deny that merely being a human or an animal of some kind matters for ethics. This includes, prominently, members of a large and internally diverse group of thinkers who maintain that a human or non-human creature’s moral standing is a function of her individual qualities of mind, and who accordingly regard the sheer fact of being a human or an animal (i.e., independently of the possession of any particular mental qualities) as morally unimportant. When these moral philosophers talk about the individual mental characteristics that they take to be morally salient, they frequently emphasize that it is a consequence of their claims that human beings with significant intellectual disabilities have lesser claims to moral consideration. This image of human beings with serious intellectual disabilities (viz., an image of them as mattering less) has attracted fierce criticism. Disability theorists are among its chief critics, and one of my aims in Chapter 4 is to provide a defense of their critical position. I show that the concerns of disability theorists are justified by bringing out how it follows from my argument that human beings with intellectual disabilities have undiminished claims to respect and attention. One of my larger goals is, in this way, to bring out how the argument equips us to see that the sheer fact of being human is morally salient. This point about the value of humanity is enormously important not just for ethics but also for public policy. Discussing it does not, however, exhaust my concerns in Chapter 4. There I describe how this book’s argument can be extended to show not only that merely being human matters but also that merely being an animal of some kind does as well. I approach both human and animal cases by trafficking in the forms of moral thought about human beings and animals that the argument equips us to sanction, and in doing so I present the book’s first substantial illustrations of these forms of moral thought. In the next chapter—​Chapter 5—​I pause to underline the distinctiveness of the approach in ethics that I am presenting. There are some respects in which this book’s project resembles the rather idiosyncratic

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strain of ethical naturalism that Philippa Foot advocates in her later writings, and there are other respects in which it resembles the distinctive animals-oriented posthumanism that Cary Wolfe advocates. During the years in which I have been working on this book, it has occasionally been suggested to me that my view is at bottom a variant of one or the other of these positions. Here I rebut these suggestions, arguing that, despite certain similarities, my view differs fundamentally from those of Foot and Wolfe. Chapter 5’s specific emphasis is on demonstrating that my position departs from its supposed counterparts in ways related to things I say in the book about its moral interest and that, far from amounting to mere technical disputes, the divergences matter. Chapter 6 picks up and further elaborates the book’s argument by adducing additional illustrations of the kind of moral thought about human beings and animals that is my leading preoccupation (i.e., thought that essentially draws on our ethical conceptions and that, in doing so, contributes directly to a world-guided understanding of human and animal life). All of the illustrations in this chapter are taken from literature. A subsidiary aim of the chapter is to defend the theoretical claim that, insofar as they shape our ethical conceptions of human and animal life, literary works can internally inform the sort of empirical grasp of human beings and animals that is relevant to ethics. The chapter’s main aim is to show that, by thus internally informing our grasp of human beings and animals, three specific works—​a story by Leo Tolstoy and novels by J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald—​draw attention to neutrally inaccessible analogies between harms to which human beings and animals alike are vulnerable, thus bringing into relief important forms of human-animal moral fellowship. This foray into literature should not be taken as a sign of lack of concern with practical questions. Having insisted at various junctures earlier in the book that we need the type of moral thought with which I am preoccupied to responsibly address pressing issues involving the treatment of animals as well as the treatment of human beings, in the closing chapter—​Chapter 7—​I briefly return to and reinforce this practical point. Here I take up issues involving the treatment of animals in particular. I consider two works, a non-fiction book by Jonathan Safran Foer and a documentary film by James Marsh, that grapple with

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questions concerning, respectively, the ethics of eating animals and the ethics of experimenting on them. I describe how these works elicit the kind of moral thought that interests me and how their appeals to such thought are internal to powerful arguments against industrial farming and certain experimental practices with animals. An important general lesson of this exercise is that neglecting the relevant kind of moral thought is tantamount to closing our minds to an indefinitely rich source of practically significant considerations. This book is first and foremost a contribution to moral philosophy, composed for readers who have some familiarity with conversations in ethics and are willing to explore at least relatively involved philosophical conversations. But its driving concerns are practical. It depends for its interest on the fact that the philosophical assumptions it targets infect popular images of what ethical thought about human beings and animals is like, and it is written not only for readers who are preoccupied with questions of ethics quite generally but also for readers who are preoccupied in particular with ethical questions that crop up in disability studies and animal studies. For this reason, I have tried to make the book accessible to the broadest possible audience. Throughout I avoid unnecessary technical jargon and clearly indicate the rationale for the terms of art I do find it necessary to use. Nevertheless, there are a fair number of passages that will prove difficult for readers with no prior exposure to moral philosophy. The difficulties are especially pronounced in parts of the book’s main argumentative chapters, above all, in parts of Chapters 2, 3 and 5. Readers who find the going hard may want to skim Chapter 1, then turn directly to Chapter 4, which adduces a series of brief and accessible examples in support of some of the book’s main conclusions, before exploring the longer and equally accessible illustrations in Chapters 6 and 7. Some of my terminological choices deserve brief comments here at the outset. It belongs to the intellectual spirit of our age to regard human beings as at bottom kinds of animals, and it is not uncommon for authors to give expression to this theme by speaking in reference to human beings and animals of “human animals” and “non-human animals.” For the sake of naturalness and economy of expression, I have here instead elected to use the colloquial “human beings” and “animals” except where clarity calls for different terms. This is not because

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I am out of sync with the Zeitgeist. On the contrary, it would be fair to say what distinguishes this book is a special strategy for taking human animality seriously. Its strategy is notable insofar as it transforms our understanding of what animals as well as human beings are like, inviting us to see that all—​human and non-human—​a nimate creatures have moral characteristics that are open to empirical survey. This brings me to a terminological puzzle for which I have no simple solution. It has become common for animal protectionists to oppose the Standard English practice of using the neuter or impersonal pronoun “it” in speaking of individual animals, recommending instead the use of the personal pronouns “he” and “she.” Some animal protectionists argue in favor of this way of speaking by representing the employment of the neuter pronoun as objectifying. While “it” can be used in a non-objectifying style (e.g., there need be nothing wrong with saying of a human baby, “look, it’s smiling”), these thinkers are surely right that the neuter pronoun is often used in ways that objectify its referent. Some animal protectionists further elaborate the case for shifting to “he” and “she” by claiming that our use of these pronouns in reference to human beings belongs to practices of attending to humans as significant individuals who matter. The suggestion is that using “he” and “she” in connection with all animals—​a nd thus in effect generalizing the common practice of using them in connection with, for example, companion dogs and cats—​can help to encourage similar modes of attention to animals. That strikes me as right, and, as this book makes clear, I am persuaded that animals matter. Nevertheless, I don’t think that this settles, in any sort of neat, global way, the question of which pronouns to use in speaking of animals. This is in large part because I believe that the use of traditional gendered personal pronouns is problematic even in reference to human beings. Since it would require a major detour to explore this additional topic, I limit myself to airing my suspicion that we won’t find an elegant and appropriate pronominal approach to animals until we have a more satisfactory pronominal approach to human beings. That suffices to explain my decision, in this book, to make decisions about which pronouns to use in talking about animals on a case-by-case basis. My last terminological comment has to do with the fact that many moral philosophers make a technical distinction between ethics and

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morality. Whereas ethics is often taken to be concerned with broad questions about what is important in life, and about how we should live, morality is often taken to be concerned with the narrower questions about how we should treat—​human—​others. This is not a distinction that I find useful to draw in this book. Far from treating morality, in the sense just specified, as a separate object of study, here I develop a line of reasoning that invites us to see analogies between the ways in which human beings and animals call for attention, and I thus in effect bring together questions that, on the construal of the moral under consideration, would be said to fall both inside and outside morality. Not having a use for a familiar construal of the moral, I have opted to use a terminology better suited to my purposes. Here I employ “ethics,” “morality,” and their cognates interchangeably, so that both families of terms are concerned with what many moral philosophers would describe as the more general region of ethics.

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1 O U TSI D E E T H IC S Tracing a Trend in Contemporary Moral Philosophy

What we tend to forget is that whole other way in which we in the West have moved toward something like wisdom and enlightenment . . . ​that ongoing thing of the way we learn stuff through literature and the humanities. —​Geoff Dyer, from an interview with Robert Birnbaum

Human beings and animals have moral qualities that are, in a straightforward empirical sense, open to view. That is the thesis of this book. I defend this thesis with an eye to underlining the significance of its implications for how we conceive the nature of moral thought. It follows from the defense I mount that arriving at the sorts of empirical or world-guided images of human and animal lives that we seek in ethics is impossible apart from the exercise of moral capacities. It also follows that we cannot responsibly try to develop such images without recourse to methods—​of types characteristic of much work in the humanities and the arts—​that essentially involve the exploration of different moral views or perspectives. My larger aim is to show that this methodological precept has to be reflected in our practice if we are to position ourselves to respond justly and appropriately to ethical questions concerning the treatment not only of human beings but also of animals.

This project would not be worthwhile if its central claim were already widely accepted. So it is worth emphasizing the extent to which the position I am setting out to champion is at odds with the intellectual tenor of our time. The idea that human beings and animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics, while not without a recognizable presence in literature and the other arts, is largely absent from moral philosophy. Moral philosophers, together with popular ethical writers who take their cue from moral philosophy, by and large operate with the contrary assumption that, qua observable, human beings and animals don’t have any moral features. This assumption, which is rarely taken to be striking enough to call for commentary, owes its influence to an enormously widely accepted metaphysical worldview on which the real fabric of the world is in itself bereft of moral value. A great deal of work in ethics is guided by the thought that any creditable contribution needs to respect the constraints of this basic worldview. Once this thought is in place, there appears to be no question of allowing that human beings or animals possess moral characteristics that reveal themselves to empirical observation. It is accordingly unsurprising to find that, although moral philosophers often don’t explicitly address the question of whether human beings have observable moral characteristics, they tend to represent human beings as lacking such characteristics. It is likewise unsurprising to find that, although moral philosophers who take an interest in the ethical treatment of animals often don’t explicitly address the question of whether animals of different kinds have observable moral characteristics, they tend to represent animals as lacking such characteristics. These twin tendencies are what I have in mind in speaking of a general, mostly tacit consensus in contemporary ethics to the effect that human beings and animals have no empirically discoverable moral characteristics. A central ambition of this book is to challenge some of the considerations that seem to speak most strongly for this conception of human and animal life and, in doing so, to make a case for an alternative conception on which human beings and animals have moral characteristics that are available to observation. For the sake of convenience, I use the following terminology in talking about these competing conceptions of human and animal life. I describe thinkers who take human beings and/or animals to lack all observable moral characteristics as situating human beings and/or

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animals outside ethics, and I describe those who in contrast take human beings and/or animals to have moral characteristics that are open to observation as situating human beings and/or animals inside ethics. A central ambition of this book, to put it in these terms, is to resist the tendency of moral philosophers not only to situate human beings outside ethics but also, insofar as they take an interest in animal life, to situate animals outside ethics as well. I approach this project by presenting an argument for locating all animate creatures—​the non-human together with the human—​inside ethics. This isn’t a merely scholarly exercise. I want to contest the trend in ethics toward locating human beings and animals outside ethics because I believe that this trend is not only philosophically unjustified but also morally problematic. To the extent that we participate in it (viz., by taking it for granted that human beings and animals lack any observable moral characteristics), it will appear to us that shedding empirical light on the lives of human beings and animals is the prerogative of disciplines external to ethics. At the same time, it will appear that there can be no question of requiring any specifically moral resources in order to bring human and animal life empirically into view in a manner appropriate for ethics. Yet, once we help ourselves to a conception of human and animal life as having observable moral features, this restriction on appropriate methods for ethics seems both misguided and morally damaging. Now it seems clear that the use of moral capacities is necessary for arriving at the kind of world-guided understanding of human beings and animals that we need in ethics. Further, it seems clear that, if we stifle their exercise—​taking it for granted that these capacities cannot contribute directly to the kind of world-guided grasp of human and animal life that we’re after—​we put ourselves in the position of antecedently refusing to take seriously considerations immediately relevant to moral thought and conversation. We put ourselves in the position, that is, of simply refusing to listen. That is an abstract point, but, as I illustrate at a number of places in this book, it has entirely concrete practical ramifications. To the extent that we in fact succeed in shutting our minds to the kinds of ethical considerations that are in question, we deprive ourselves of the ability to recognize specific moral outrages and cases of moral goodness, thereby ensuring that we will also fail to register concrete occasions to do good and prevent harm.

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To account for the importance I attach to these matters I need to demonstrate that, as I have claimed, contemporary moral philosophy is characterized by a tendency to situate human beings and animals ‘outside ethics’ in my sense, and that it does accordingly call for the intervention that I plan to stage. That is the task of this opening chapter. A few comments suffice to explain my strategy. Insofar as moral philosophers situate human beings and animals outside ethics, they represent them as lacking empirically discoverable moral characteristics, and they thus exhibit at least local respect for the restrictions of a metaphysical outlook of the sort touched on a moment ago, on which the real or objective world is in itself bereft of moral value. It is in theory possible to situate human beings and animals outside ethics without accepting this metaphysic. But in practice the idea that reality is as such morally neutral is a guiding principle of ethics, and most moral philosophers who locate human beings and animals outside ethics do so because they accept this idea together with the constraints it imposes on what moral thought about humans and animals is like. This observation is reflected in this chapter’s structure. I initially set aside the question of how human beings and animals are represented in ethics and describe how a metaphysic that expels moral values from the objective world plays an organizing role in moral philosophy. Here I should pause to mention that, in describing the values that get excluded as “moral,” I am taking them to be as such practically significant. It is entirely standard to conceive of ‘moral’ values, in this way, as values that are internally related to action and choice, and thus far in this chapter I have simply assumed that my talk of human and animal ‘moral’ characteristics would be read as implying—​a s I intend it to imply—​that the ­recognition that a creature has these characteristics is practically significant in the sense of being directly relevant to how it should be treated. This unremarkable feature of my discussion deserves mention now because a small minority of philosophers uses the term “moral” to pick out values that aren’t conceived as essentially practical, and, more importantly, because it is necessary to bear my more orthodox conception of the moral in mind in order to understand things I say, in this chapter’s first section, about how a metaphysic that excludes all moral values from the objective world shapes the conceptual space in which some central conversations in contemporary ethics take place (1.1).



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After commenting on the influence of this metaphysic in general terms, I offer two examples of how it structures ethical treatments of human beings and animals, and of how it seems to oblige us to situate human beings and animals outside ethics. In this connection I turn to the writings of two prominent contemporary moral thinkers—​Peter Singer and Christine Korsgaard—​who are concerned with the moral standing of animals as well as human beings. I consider Singer and Korsgaard in particular not only because their contributions to relevant discussions are well known and influential but because each of them favors a version of a quite widely accepted approach in ethics. My larger goal is to show that their projects are representative, not only of the work of other moral philosophers who favor versions of their preferred ethical approaches, but also of a yet larger trend in (and beyond) ethics toward metaphysical presuppositions that, in addition to speaking for placing human beings and animals outside ethics, speak for imposing the limitations on the empirical methods of ethics that go together with this placement (1.2 and 1.3). Having at this point in the chapter argued that we are justified in speaking of such a trend, I conclude with a few reflections about what drives the trend. My emphasis is on identifying the considerations that seem to speak most strongly for a metaphysic that removes moral value from the objective world, leaving us with an image of the human beings and animal who inhabit it as shorn of any moral features that are empirically open to view (1.4).

1 . 1 .  A C O M M E N T O N M E T A P H Y S I C S AND CONTEMPOR ARY ETHICS

Objective moral values have only scattered friends in contemporary moral philosophy, and expressions of hostility to them are ubiquitous.1 This is all the more striking because the idea of such values is intuitively quite appealing. We can arrive at it simply by making a couple of observations about moral judgments (i.e., judgments that apply moral concepts  For one central example, see J. L. Mackie’s declaration, in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin, 1977), that “there are no objective values” (15).

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such as “good,” “wrong,” “courageous” and “selfish”). To begin with, it is natural to take moral judgments to be essentially concerned with how things are. When I make a judgment to the effect that, say, some person or action is selfish, I ordinarily take myself to be saying something about what the world is like. It is also natural to take moral judgments to have a direct bearing on, or to be internally related to, our reasons for acting. The point in this further case is that, when I make a judgment to the effect that, say, some action is right or courageous, then—​at least when my judgment has to do with my immediate circumstances—​I ordinarily take myself to be saying something that is, just like that, pertinent to what I have reason to do. Adopting a couple of widely used philosophical terms, we can speak of objectivism in reference to theories that take the first of these observations at face value, and we can speak of internalism in reference to theories that take the second observation at face value. Thus understood both objectivism (i.e., the view that moral judgments are essentially concerned with the objective world) and internalism (i.e., the view that moral judgments are internally related to action) are intuitively quite attractive positions, and if we combine them in the most straightforward way, we arrive at the likewise intuitively attractive idea of features of the world that are internally connected to action. That is the kind of thing I have in mind in speaking of objective moral values. One way to get a sense of how out of favor these values are is to consider things that moral philosophers say about the nature of moral judgments. It is fair to say that avoidance of the idea of objective moral values is an important organizing principle of debates about what these judgments are like. With an eye to steering clear of commitment to such values, most moral philosophers refuse to simultaneously incorporate, without revision, the two observations that speak for objectivism and internalism. A common strategy is to take at face value only one of the two observations, effectively trading them against each other. For instance, some philosophers help themselves to our ordinary understanding of moral judgments as necessarily concerned with how things are, thereby accepting objectivism, while rejecting our understanding of them as internally related to action, thereby abandoning internalism. The group of moral philosophers who thus exchange internalism for



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objectivism is, however, relatively small.2 There is a much larger—​and internally quite diverse—​group of thinkers who instead exchange objectivism for internalism. The latter group counts among its members advocates of two of the currently most widely discussed classes of approaches in ethics. This includes, prominently, the various thinkers whose views get referred to collectively as non-cognitivist theories of ethics. Different ethical non-cognitivisms are united not only by the anti-­objectivist thought that moral judgments aren’t essentially in the business of capturing how things are but also by the further pro-internalist thought that these judgments play the role of in some way expressing and eliciting practical attitudes.3 A second prominent family of moral philosophers who trade objectivism for internalism is the family of champions of Kantian approaches in ethics. That Kantian moral philosophers reject objectivism is harder to recognize because they frequently present themselves as straightforwardly incorporating what they call the “objectivity” of moral judgments. But when Kantian moral philosophers speak in these terms they are not championing what I am calling objectivism. To talk about the “objectivity” of moral judgments is, for them, to talk about a kind of universal authority that is a function of governance not by a world-directed or theoretical ideal but rather by an exclusively practical one, and embracing objectivity in this sense is consistent with rejecting objectivism. Kantian moral philosophers typically reject objectivism as unequivocally as non-cognitivists do, and in both cases the gesture of rejection belongs to a strategy for avoiding the idea of objective moral values.4  Members of this group are often described as fans of externalist realisms. Two of the best-known advocates of such realist positions are Richard Boyd (see, e.g., “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in Geoff Sayre-McCord, ed., Essays on Moral Realism [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988], 181–228); and David Brink (see, e.g., Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]). Notice that, insofar as they wind up talking about moral values that are only externally linked to action and choice, externalist realists like Boyd and Brink use a terminology that differs from the one that I am using here, on which ‘moral’ values are by definition internally related to our reasons for acting. 3  The set of ethical theories that qualify as non-cognitivisms is large and heterogeneous, including various emotivisms, prescriptivisms, quasi-realisms, expressivisms, and emotionisms. I am not in this book concerned with its internal variety. But see my remarks below about the specific non-cognitivist doctrine that Singer favored in his early writings. 4  For an illustration of the way in which the Kantian moral philosophers speak of the “objectivity” of moral judgments, see Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity 2

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This is by no means an exhaustive catalog of the classes of current accounts of moral judgment that steer clear of the idea of objective moral values. There are some accounts of moral judgment that manage to have no truck with such values because they are neither strictly objectivist nor strictly internalist. 5 There are also some accounts that try to lay claim to both objectivism and internalism while still somehow avoiding commitment to the idea of objective moral values.6 Bearing in mind the sheer number and variety of attempts to discuss moral judgment without reference to such values, we can speak of a general consensus that an acceptable account of moral judgment must avoid the suggestion of objective moral values. We can also say not only that opposition to these values is a thread running through most accounts of moral judgment but that acceptance of a metaphysic that excludes the values is an organizing principle of a great deal of work in eth ics today.7 This general metaphysical consensus has implications for how we conceive appropriate methods for ethics. If there are no moral values

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), e.g., 7. I discuss Korsgaard’s Kantian approach in ethics below. 5  See in this connection my discussion below of the approach in ethics Peter Singer currently favors. 6  This includes accounts that qualify as versions of the sort of “error theory” famously espoused by J. L. Mackie (see Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) as well as accounts that qualify as what are called “response-dependent views of moral concepts.” Influential early contributions to the large literature on response-dependence include Michael Smith’s, David Lewis’s, and Mark Johnston’s individual contributions to the sym­ posium “Dispositional Theories of Value,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 62 (1989): 89–111, 113–137, and 139–174. See also Philip Pettit, “Realism and ResponseDependence,” Mind 100 (1991): 587–626. 7  The point here is not that there are no contributions to ethics that reject this principle. One conspicuous dissenter is Derek Parfit, who helps himself to an idea of objective moral values in his two-volume work On What Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For Parfit’s defense of a notion of objective moral values, see vol. 1, chap. 2, 45–47. Strikingly, Parfit excludes the possibility that the kinds of objective and ethically irreducible facts that interest him might count as “natural” (see vol. 2, chap. 25, 324– 327). There is in this respect a clear contrast between his work and the work of members of a further group of moral philosophers who help themselves to an idea of objective moral values, namely, those who champion neo-Aristotelian forms of ethical naturalism. The position defended in this book is in certain respects similar to these neo-Aristotelian projects, and in 5.1 and 5.3 I discuss similarities as well as important differences.



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woven into the objective fabric of the world, then we don’t require any techniques that are specially suited to reveal such values. The only empirical methods we require are methods for illuminating a morally neutral world, methods that fall outside the purview of ethics proper. A methodological practice along these lines is in fact widespread in ethics. Moral philosophers for the most part limit themselves to the empirical methods of disciplines external to ethics, taking it for granted that the task of arriving at the kind of empirical understanding we want in ethics can be entrusted to them.8 One sign of the entrenchment of this methodology is the extent to which it fails to respond to criticism. There are some philosophers who present themselves as critics, arguing that any reasonable inventory of appropriate empirical methods for ethics needs to include ethically non-neutral possibilities. We find this kind of protest, for instance, in recent conversations about the relationship between moral philosophy and literature. A number of well-known contributors to these conversations undertake to show that works of literature that invite us to explore new ethical attitudes and perspectives can contribute internally to a genuine, world-guided understanding insofar as they do so.9 Although these projects represent a direct rebuke to the practice of outsourcing the kind of empirical understanding we are after in ethics to disciplines independent of ethics, they haven’t led to a larger debate about appropriate methods for ethics. Moral philosophers who restrict themselves to the empirical methods of disciplines external to ethics rarely feel obliged to justify, or even draw attention to, their willingness to impose this restriction. To the extent that what originally seems to speak for the restriction is a metaphysic that is intolerant of objective moral  Consider in this connection the recent and widely discussed philosophical movement known as experimental philosophy. A guiding theme of experimental philosophy is that invocations of intuitions are often more partial than philosophers believe and that, if we are to be entitled to rely on them, we need first to test them empirically in experimental settings. In making this proposal for a shift in philosophical methodology, selfavowed experimental philosophers tend to tacitly assume that the only legitimate empirical methods—​in ethics and elsewhere—​a re those of the sciences and that any further empirical methods at bottom involve mere appeals to intuition. For a tidy expression of this view, see, e.g., Stephen Stich’s account of his conception of philosophy in Steve Pyke, Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 192. 9  I discuss relevant aspects of conversations about moral philosophy and literature in 6.1. 8

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values, this observation adds another layer to this section’s remarks about the structural role played in ethics by such a metaphysic. Now we have a sketch of some of the ways in which a metaphysic that excludes objective moral values underlies and organizes conversations in contemporary ethics. For the sake of perspicuity, hereafter I refer to any metaphysic fitting this description simply as a hard metaphysic. The emphasis of this section has been on the way in which a hard metaphysic shapes debates about the nature of moral judgments (i.e., judgments that apply moral concepts). Given that many moral philosophers assume that moral thought is largely, or even wholly, composed of moral judgments, this strategy makes sense. But I should mention that this book’s argument for crediting human beings and animals with observable moral characteristics brings into question a familiar stress on moral judgments as the heart of moral thought. It follows from my argument that there is an irredeemably moral dimension to certain judgments that aren’t ordinarily taken to be moral judgments because they don’t apply concepts that are ordinarily classified as moral. I have in view, above all, judgments involving concepts for different aspects of mind. Later, after I have presented my preferred account of thought about mindedness, I return to the topic of how moral thought swings wide of moral judgments (2.3). Before doing so I need to describe how a hard metaphysic structures specific ethical treatments of human beings and animals, leading to the production of images of human beings and animals as ‘outside ethics’ in my sense.

1 . 2 .  N O N - C O G N I T I V I S T A P P R O A C H E S T O H U M A N B E I N G S AND ANIMALS: THE WORK OF PETER SINGER

One helpful place to turn in this connection is the writings of Peter Singer. Singer, a widely read public intellectual, is well known for things he says not only about the ethical treatment of human beings but also about the ethical treatment of animals. Indeed his work on animals is rightly regarded as an important source of intellectual inspiration for the contemporary animal protectionist movement. At the core of Singer’s ethical corpus are parallel accounts of human and animal moral standing. When Singer talks about the moral standing of human



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beings and animals, he does so from the perspective of a species of preference utilitarianism on which the right action in a given situation is the one that best promotes the interests of the beings concerned. In the course of his career, Singer employs two broadly different strategies for defending this utilitarian stance. Early on he grounds his utilitarian outlook in a form of ethical non-cognitivism that he inherits largely from the philosopher R. M. Hare and that, while distinctive in certain respects, resembles other non-cognitivisms in taking for granted a metaphysic that is ‘hard’ in the sense of excluding objective moral values (see 1.1).10 Later Singer criticizes the non-cognitivist position he himself once advocated, proposing to exchange it for a Sidgwick-inspired rationalist intuitionism on which certain objective moral truths reveal themselves to intuition.11 In this section I want to focus primarily on Singer’s non-cognitivist phase. I want to discuss how at this stage in his career Singer is moved by hard metaphysical assumptions to situate human beings and animals outside ethics. My main goal is to suggest that he is in this respect representative of other non-cognitivists. Given that hard metaphysical assumptions are encoded in all non-cognitivist doctrines, advocates of even very up-to-date non-cognitivisms are committed to situating human beings outside ethics and—​at least to the extent that they bring their ethical theories to bear on the case of animals—​to situating animals outside ethics as well.  For passages in which Singer explicitly endorses what I am calling a ‘hard’ metaphysic, see, e.g., How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), where Singer announces that “ethical truths are not written into the fabric of the universe” (231). See also “Reasoning Toward Utilitarianism,” in Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion, eds., Hare and His Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 147–160, 152, and 154; and “Reply to Michael Huemer,” in Jeffrey A. Schaler, ed., Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics (Chicago: Open Court, 2009), 380–394, esp. 380–381. 11  Singer discusses the roughly Sidgwickian rationalist intuitionism that he later champions in an early paper, “Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium,” Monist 58 (1974): 490– 517. Later he makes it clear that, although he now sympathizes with this position, he has had trouble arriving at a settled view. See, e.g., “A Response,” in Dale Jamieson, ed., Singer and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 269–335, 269–270; and “Reply to Michael Huemer,” 391–392. Singer makes his definitive case for the Sidgwickian position he now favors in a recent book coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See 216 for a remark about how for many years Singer accepted Hare’s non-­ cognitivist case for preference utilitarianism. 10

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Here is a brief description of Singer’s early non-cognitivist strategy for defending preference utilitarianism. To begin with, Singer appeals to what I am calling a ‘hard’ metaphysic in rejecting the idea, which in 1.1 I referred to as objectivism (and which Singer himself refers to as descriptivism), that moral judgments are essentially in the business of describing the world. Singer follows in Hare’s footsteps in advocating a non-cognitivist doctrine—​namely, prescriptivism—​that combines anti-objectivism with a claim about how moral judgments are in the business of mak­­ing prescriptions. The idea is that when, for instance, I judge that an action is good or courageous, I am prescribing that action. Further, insofar as the concepts we use in making moral and other judgments are resources for trafficking in the same contents in indefinitely many contexts, it follows that the prescriptions expressed by our moral judgments have a universal character. If, say, I assess a given action favorably, then I am committed to holding that it would be right for anyone in similar circumstances to act in that way.12 So, to the extent that we tend to favorably assess actions and traits of character that promote our own interests, it follows, on this line of reasoning, that we are obliged to favorably assess actions that likewise promote the interests of others. This, according to a central strand in Singer’s early thought, is how we are supposed to move from non-cognitivism to a form of preference utilitarianism on which the right action in a situation is the one that best promotes the interests of all involved. Moreover, in addition to presenting this argument, Singer makes a case for thinking that the resulting utilitarian doctrine brings not only human beings but also animals within the ethical fold. He takes the capacity to suffer as endowing a creature with interests, and he maintains, reasonably, that many animals have this capacity.13 The upshot is a utilitarian view that starts from what most philosophers would regard as unobjectionable—​hard—​metaphysical presuppositions, and seems to enable us to represent animals as well as human beings as having moral standing. It is not difficult to see that Singer’s non-cognitivist strategy for endowing human beings and animals with moral standing is a strategy  Hare presents his prescriptivist outlook in The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), and Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Singer discusses his debt to Hare in “R. M. Hare’s Achievements in Moral Philosophy,” Utilitas 14 (2002): 309–317; and “Reasoning Toward Utilitarianism.” 13  Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 8–9, and Practical Ethics, 57–58. 12



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that locates them outside ethics. It is true that, for Singer, we answer the question of whether a human or non-human creature has moral standing by determining whether she has interests, and it is also true that for him the question of whether she has interests is a straightforward empirical one. But, as Singer conceives them, interests are not as such moral characteristics. Rather they are morally neutral characteristics to which, for reasons having to do with the allegedly prescriptive and universal nature of moral judgments, we attach moral importance. The approach in ethics that Singer is developing when he offers this account of interests is one that, as we saw, respects the constraints of a hard metaphysic. So it’s not merely that interests don’t have the status of observable moral characteristics. More generally, there can be no question of any—​human or animal—​observable moral characteristics. Thus, at this point in his career, Singer locates human beings and animals outside ethics. Something similar can be said about other non-cognitivists as well. While most moral philosophers who currently espouse non-cognitivist doctrines champion accounts of the nature of moral judgment that differ substantially from a Singer-style prescriptivism, qua non-­cognitivists they nonetheless uniformly agree with him in taking a hard metaphysic as a starting point for their theorizing. It follows not only that they are likewise obliged to reject the idea that a human or non-human ­ creature might have observable moral characteristics but also that, even if they don’t discuss the moral standing of animals, they are effectively committed to locating animals as well as human beings outside ethics.14 Thus far I in this section have emphasized Singer’s early interest in non-cognitivism because non-cognitivist doctrines are well represented today, and because I wanted to use my remarks about his work to suggest that all non-cognitivists, however different in other respects, place human beings and animals outside ethics. But today Singer disavows the non-cognitivism he once espoused, and it is worth briefly discussing the alternative, intuitionist approach in ethics he now favors. Singer 14

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 The only other case I know of an explicitly non-cognitivist treatment of animals as well as human beings is in the work of Singer’s teacher R. M. Hare (see, e.g., “Why I Am Only a Demi-Vegetarian,” in Essays on Bioethics [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], 219–235). Hare makes it clear that he is taking his cue here from Singer.

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tends to approach a description of this intuitionist doctrine via an internal critique of the prescriptivism that he once championed. He argues that a conception of moral judgments as universal prescriptions doesn’t give us the resources to defend a preference utilitarian principle of the equality of all interests. One problem, according to Singer, is that an individual who favors trampling on the interests of the members of some group may be “fanatical” enough to universalize with perfect consistency, embracing the thought that, if she were herself a member of the group, she should be treated no better.15 One of Singer’s responses to this and other shortcomings of prescriptivism that he perceives16 is to introduce a substantive principle of impartiality that stipulates the equal value of all interests. He claims that a satisfactory case for this principle is impossible unless we depart from the austerities of a metaphysic on which there are no objective moral truths. His thought is that we require the resources of a form of rationalist intuitionism on which certain very general principles—​including a principle of the equal value of interests—​a re intuitable objects of reason.17 Despite any appearance to the contrary, this intuitionist step of Singer’s is not a step away from a hard metaphysic. Singer believes that the only moral truths that the world contains are precepts with a normative content in virtue of which they speak for specific forms of conduct. Yet he also believes that a person’s grasp of the precepts he takes to be intuitable invariably lacks the kind of motivational significance that would enable it by itself to explain her acting.18 Although I didn’t use these terms, when earlier I introduced the idea of objective moral values, I was talking about objective features of the world that are essentially practical in a way that Singer’s practical precepts are not. I was and am concerned with  “Fanaticism” is Hare’s term for this kind of case (see Freedom and Reason, 110), and Singer borrows the term from him. See, e.g., Singer’s “Hare’s Achievements in Moral Philosophy,” 312 and “Reasoning Toward Utilitarianism,” 148–149. 16  His critique of prescriptivism doesn’t end with his remarks about fanaticism. He believes that prescriptivism also lacks a compelling answer to the “amoralist” who simply doesn’t make moral judgments (see, e.g., The Point of View of the Universe, 125–126). 17  For discussion of the principle of the equal value of all interests, see Animal Liberation, 5, and “Reasoning Toward Utilitarianism,” 152–159. For a more complete account of the practical principles Singer thinks are intuitable, see The Point of View of the Universe, chap. 5. 18  See The Point of View of the Universe, 197–199. 15



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objective features of the world that are such that judgments about them, in addition to having the kind of normative significance that Singer’s practical precepts possess, also have the kind of motivational import that these precepts lack. So it is fair to say that Singer’s move toward intuitionism is neither a move toward things that count as ‘objective moral values’ in my sense,19 nor a move away from a hard metaphysic.20 Even in his intuitionist phase, Singer favors a metaphysical outlook on which there can be no such things as observable—​ human or animal—​moral characteristics, and on which the only place for human beings and animals is therefore outside ethics. In these respects the later Singer resembles non-cognitivists of all varieties, including his own earlier prescriptivist self. It is therefore not surprising to find that he consistently insists on the restrictions on the empirical methods of ethics that go with an image of human beings and animals as outside ethics. When Singer turns to methodological questions, he generally presents himself as, to put it in terms he uses in a piece coauthored with Anton Leist, regarding “natural science as the sole means of obtaining the master knowledge” that we seek in ethics and elsewhere.21 It is not that Singer does not place any importance on non-­ neutral methods in ethics. He takes an active interest in literature and the other arts, and he insists on the importance of literature that imaginatively, and by means of non-neutral strategies, encourages us to explore the range of human experience. But he dismisses the prospects that such literature might directly promote “the aim of gaining knowledge,” ascrib­ ­ing its value instead to its ability to illuminate “non-­cognitive human characteristics.”22 While it is for him a real question “whether we should be reasoning or philosophizing about ethical issues . . . ​rather than . . . ​ writing novels that may open people to new ways of looking at the world in which we live,”23 he never asks whether these two pursuits might be  For an explanation of my terminology, see the opening remarks of this chapter.  See in this connection The Point of View of the Universe, 132, and 234–235 where Singer openly expresses hostility to any sort of teleological metaphysic. 21   This quote is from Peter Singer and Anton Leist, “Introduction: Coetzee and Philosophy,” in Leist and Singer, eds., Coetzee and Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1–18, 3. 22  Ibid. 23  Peter Singer, “Foreword,” in The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue, Paolo Cavalieri, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), ix–xii, xi. 19

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directly linked. He never contemplates the possibility that literature and other works of art might, by using ethically non-neutral resources to open us to new ways of looking at things, directly contribute to the kind of empirical understanding of human and animal life that we want in ethics. I stress this point because taking this possibility seriously is tantamount to taking seriously the possibility—​neglected by the later Singer as well as by his earlier self and by non-cognitivists of all types—​that human beings and animals are rightly located inside ethics.

1 . 3 .  K A N T I A N A P P R O A C H E S T O H U M A N B E I N G S A N D ANIMALS: THE WORK OF CHRISTINE KORSGA ARD

For a second illustration of what it is to situate human beings and animals outside ethics, consider the work of the Kantian moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard. Korsgaard sets out to use Kantian resources to establish the moral standing of human beings and animals, and she adopts as one of her principles what she herself describes as a “hard” metaphysical outlook.24 It is characteristic of Kantian moral philosophers to operate with hard metaphysical assumptions (see 1.1), so Korsgaard is in this respect representative of other thinkers who favor Kantian approaches in ethics. At the same time, she is distinctive in that she underlines and discusses at length her preferred metaphysic. For instance, toward the opening of her book The Sources of Normativity, she defends this metaphysic by presenting an argument against positions—​ in her terms, “substantive moral realisms”—​that depart from it by providing a home for objective moral values.25 The argument’s starting point is what Korsgaard calls the “Modern Scientific World View,” by which she means a view of the objective world on which it lacks all teleological organization and hence does not by itself solicit actions. 26  Thus, e.g., Korsgaard asserts: “There has been a revolution, and . . . ​t he world has been turned inside out. . . . ​For us, reality is something hard, something which resists reason and value, something which is recalcitrant to form” (The Sources of Normativity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 4; stress in the original). 25  Sources of Normativity, 34. 26  For Korsgaard’s description of the objective world as free of all teleological organization, see, e.g., ibid., 18. See also Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38–39 and 114, and “Kantian Ethics, Animals, and the Law,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 33 (2013): 1–20, esp. 7–8. 24



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Korsgaard draws on this view in attacking the idea of objective moral values. She is appealing to the “Modern Scientific World View” when she expresses sympathy with J.  L. Mackie’s well-known argument to the effect that nothing could satisfy the criteria that objective moral values would have to meet, and that knowledge of such metaphysically anomalous or “queer” entities would be a mysterious affair.27 She is also appealing to this view when, going beyond Mackie, she says that we should dispense with the idea of objective moral values on the ground that a reference to an objective and hence, for her, non-teleological feature of the world could not by itself supply an agent with a motive for action, and hence could not possess the practical significance of a moral judgment.28 That is Korsgaard’s basic case against the idea of objective moral values, and, having presented it, she declares that we should reject substantive moral realisms as encoding a “false [view] about why human beings have normative words.”29 The error, as she sees it, is thinking that “ethics is really a theoretical or epistemological subject” and that “when we ask ethical questions, or practical normative questions more generally, there is something about the world we are trying to find out.”30 Here and elsewhere Korsgaard accents her commitment to a hard metaphysic on which the world lacks any theoretically or empirically discoverable moral features. 31 One of my aims in this section is to bring out how she is led by this metaphysical outlook to represent human beings and animals as bereft of observable moral features, and thus to situate them outside ethics. A second aim is to suggest that she is in this respect representative of Kantian moral philosophers more generally. Because  Sources of Normativity, 37. The relevant passage from Mackie’s writing is from Ethics, 38.  Sources of Normativity, 37–38. 29  Ibid., 43. 30  Ibid., 44. 31  For a set of further passages in which she discusses these metaphysical topics, see Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 278; Sources of Normativity, 44; “Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy,” in The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psycholog y (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 302–326, esp.  302–305; “Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 2004, available at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CMK.FellowCreatures.pdf, 79–110, esp. 93, 95, and 101; and “The Origin of Good and Our Animal Nature,” available at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CMK.MA1.pdf, 1, 5–6, and 39–40. 27

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Kantian moral philosophers characteristically help themselves to hard metaphysical assumptions, they wind up not only situating human beings outside ethics but also, insofar as they take an interest in the case of animals, situating animals outside ethics as well. The centerpiece of Korsgaard’s strategy for establishing the moral standing of human beings is an idea that clearly respects a ban on objective moral values, namely, the idea that judgments about how human beings should be treated have a type of universal authority that, instead of being a theoretical matter involving fidelity to the world, is a practical matter involving respect for attitudes encoded in the way in which a rational will cannot help but function.32 This is a Kantian idea, and Korsgaard offers an especially thoughtful and appealing account of it. She represents a rational will as the prerogative of beings who can think about their desires and who, when they act, invariably take the desire on which they act as a reason.33 It is a consequence, as she sees it, that as long as we look at things from our perspectives as agents we can’t help endorsing our reasons and thereby placing value on our own rational agency. Korsgaard takes this structural feature of rational agency to have larger significance because she believes that reasons have a public or universal character. 34 The conclusion she draws is that qua agents we are obliged to act in a manner respectful of the rational natures of all rational human beings. That, very briefly, is her Kantian case for endowing human beings with moral standing. This brings me to Korsgaard’s remarks about animals. Although Korsgaard’s story about the ethical standing of animals is in important respects a Kantian one, in telling it she insists on substantial modifications to Kant. Kant urges us to avoid cruelty to animals, but he does so on the ground that such cruelty harms our characters, not on the ground that it hurts animals themselves. His official position is that animals are in themselves ethically indifferent objects or instruments. 35  See, e.g., Sources of Normativity, 33.  Ibid., 92–93. 34  Ibid., 131–136. 35  See, e.g., Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, J.  B. Schneewind, ed., and Peter Heath, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 212–213; and Metaphysics of Morals, Mary McGregor, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 192. For recent sympathetic formulations of the Kantian idea that our only duties to animals are indirect duties to ourselves, see, e.g., Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral 32

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Korsgaard dismisses this position and combats it using ideas from Kant’s own writings. 36 The result is a story about the ethical standing of animals that runs largely parallel to her preferred Kantian story about the ethical standing of human beings and that likewise respects the constraints of a hard metaphysic. This story depends for any appeal it has on the following two claims. The first is that we act on our natural incentives except in those cases in which we find we cannot accept the reasons for acting that they suggest to us, and the second is that in acting we cannot help placing value not only on our own rational choices but also on the content of our choices. It is supposed to follow from these claims that there is a sense in which, as long as we look at things from our perspectives as agents, we cannot help placing value on our animal natures.37 Viewed in the light of the universal conception of reasons that Korsgaard favors (see above), this further structural feature of our agency appears to have a broader significance. It appears to imply that qua agents we are obliged to act in a manner respectful of the animal natures of all animate beings. This conclusion, which has straightforward implications for how we ought to treat human beings, is striking in part because it also implies that, like human beings, animals are proper objects of moral concern. Consider now what it comes to to say that, in presenting her views of the moral standing of human beings and animals, Korsgaard is situating human beings and animals ‘outside ethics’ in my sense. The key issue is that, in both cases, her strategy is designed to satisfy the restrictions of a hard metaphysic. It is with an eye to satisfying these restrictions that Korsgaard stakes her claims about the value of human and animal life not on observations about what the world is like but rather on reflections about attitudes that are inseparable from the exercise of Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992), 153–156; Michael P. T. Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective (London: Routledge, 1991),183– 186; and David S. Oderberg, “The Illusion of Animal Rights,” Human Life Review 37 (2000): 37–45, esp. 43–44. 36  For Korsgaard’s critique of the Kantian view that we have only indirect duties toward animals, see “Fellow Creatures,” esp. 91, n. 38. For other critiques of this view, see Allen Wood, “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement 22 (1998):1–30; and Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 52. 37  Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures,” 102.

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rational agency. Far from committing her to representing human beings and animals as possessing observable moral (and hence ‘non-hard’) characteristics, her views about human and animal moral standing presuppose that there are no such characteristics for a human being or animal to possess and that human beings and animals are, in my sense, ‘outside ethics’. It is not hard to see that this point generalizes to the work of other Kantian moral philosophers. While it is not uncommon for other Kantian moral philosophers to disagree with Korsgaard on many points, these thinkers still resemble her in wanting to avoid the idea of objective moral values. So other fans of Kantian approaches in ethics are likewise obliged to reject the idea that a human being might have observable moral characteristics, and, even if they don’t discuss the case of animals, they are also obliged to reject the idea that an animal might have such characteristics. It is fair to say that, as a class, Kantian moral philosophers are committed to locating human beings and animals outside ethics. The fact that Korsgaard and other Kantian moral philosophers are committed to endorsing pictures of human beings and animals as outside ethics is noteworthy because it means that they are committed to accepting the limitations on the empirical methods for ethics that go hand in hand with such pictures. They are committed to denying that we require specifically moral resources in order to arrive at the kind of empirical understanding of human beings and animals that we are after in ethics. There is, admittedly, a sense in which this feature of Korsgaard’s particular conception of the methods of ethics may be difficult to recognize. 38 This is because Korsgaard employs moral methods in arriving at the understandings of human beings and animals that she appeals to in her ethical writings. We can see this if we return to things I said a few paragraphs back about her approach to establishing the moral standing of human beings and animals. There I discussed how Korsgaard develops her preferred accounts of the value of human and animal life via what is aptly described as an internal exploration of rational agency. What I now want to add—​a nd this is something that Korsgaard herself underlines—​is that in the course of undertaking this  I am indebted to Elijah Millgram and Cora Diamond for pressing me on this point.

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exploration she consistently talks about the world in the evaluatively non-neutral and teleologically drenched terms in which, she believes, we encounter it as agents. 39 This means that there can be no question of denying that Korsgaard believes that in ethics we need moral resources to achieve a good grasp of human and animal existence. Yet the kind of grasp of human and animal existence that is at issue at this juncture in Korsgaard’s writings is supposed to be a strictly practical and hence non-empirical one. While it would thus be wrong to say that Korsgaard delegates the task of achieving this kind of non-empirical grasp of human and animal existence to neutral disciplines such as the natural sciences, this is consistent with the observation that she delegates the task of achieving the kind of empirical grasp of human and animal existence we are after in ethics to these types of neutral disciplines. That is the gesture that I am setting out to challenge in this book. I am setting out to challenge the tendency of moral philosophers—​ including ethical non-cognitivists such as the early Singer and Kantian moral philosophers such as Korsgaard—​to assume that any undistorted empirical accounts of human beings and animals that we operate with in ethics must be handed over to ethics from outside.

1 . 4 .  F I R S T S T E P S T O W A R D G E T T I N G H U M A N B E I N G S AND ANIMALS INSIDE ETHICS

Now we have before us my case for speaking of a trend in moral philosophy toward locating human beings and animals outside ethics. The heart of the case is 1.1’s description of how the constraints of what I am calling a ‘hard’ metaphysic (i.e., a metaphysic that excludes objective moral values) structure central conversations in ethics. In 1.2 and 1.3, I complemented this description with illustrations of how these constraints oblige ethical non-cognitivists and Kantian moral philosophers to repudiate the idea of empirically discoverable (human or animal) moral characteristics, thus making it seem compulsory to situate human beings and animals outside ethics. But my point is not limited to members of these two groups of moral philosophers. Given the 39

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 For Korsgaard’s descriptions of her methods, see, e.g., Sources of Normativity, 64, 95–96, 123–124. For her account of the teleologically rich image of the world she thinks we face as agents, see esp. chap. 2 of Self-Constitution.

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pervasiveness in ethics of hard metaphysical assumptions, there is good reason to regard these illustrations as representative of a more general tendency. We are justified in speaking of a trend toward situating human beings and animals outside ethics. The remainder of this book is devoted to resisting this trend by bringing out the plausibility and interest of an opposing vision of human and animal life on which such life falls ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. The centerpiece of my defense of this vision is an argument for thinking that human beings and animals have moral qualities that lend themselves to empirical discovery. Insofar as the approach in ethics that I am arguing for thus happily takes on board an idea of objective moral values, it might seem to invite classification as a form of “moral realism.” I am not, however, going to use this term. I have no need for it, and its use would very likely invite confusion with certain more familiar ethical positions that get described as moral realisms. For an example of the kind of confusion that I want to avoid, it is helpful to return to things I said, at the opening of 1.3, about the position that Korsgaard calls “substantive moral realism.” The realist position that Korsgaard has in mind is one that takes for granted a philosophical outlook—​the outlook she refers to as the “Modern Scientific World View”—​on which the objective world is free from all teleological structure and so does not by itself call for actions. Korsgaard’s substantive moral realist is someone who, starting from this basic outlook, attempts to locate moral values (i.e., values that are internally related to action) within the real and observable world. This is a familiar image of what moral realism amounts to, and it is no part of my ambition to deny that Korsgaard has a point when she attacks it. But the position that I defend in this book is fundamentally different from the kind of ‘moral realism’ that here falls within Korsgaard’s critical target. My position does not help itself to the familiar and allegedly scientific worldview that she treats as an unquestioned starting point.40 The ethical approach to 40



 I describe Korsgaard’s “Modern Scientific World View” as merely allegedly scientific because I do not cede the mantle of “respect for the sciences” to philosophers like her who effectively grant the natural sciences exclusive authority to tell us what objective reality is like. While it follows from this book’s main line of reasoning that there are features of the objective world that the natural sciences aren’t suited to illuminate, there is nothing antiscientific about this point. It is consistent with the recognition

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human beings and animals developed in this book is one that depends for its appeal on revisiting and radically revising an entrenched philosophical picture of what objective reality is like, and of what is involved in knowing it.41 The philosophical picture I want to dislodge is a picture, of the sort that Korsgaard takes for granted, on which the objective world is exhaustively composed of things lacking the kind of teleological form that would make them immediately relevant to action. It is not difficult to appreciate what seems to speak for this picture. To count as immediately relevant to action, a feature of the world has to be such that, in the right circumstances, things that possess it have a tendency to invite specific practical attitudes. An essentially practical feature of the world must in this sense stand in an internal relation to our affective responses. Yet the idea that a feature of the world that is internally related to affective responses might qualify as objective is in direct conflict with a widely accepted philosophical understanding of what objectivity amounts to. Philosophers tend to assume that objectivity is free from everything with an essential reference to our affective or other subjective responses, and, insofar as they make this assumption, they wind up committed to understanding the objective world as in itself practically inert. For the purposes of this book, I describe the assumption about what objectivity is like that is here at issue as a distinctive conception of

that the natural sciences make a massive and wholly unique contribution to our understanding of the world. Thinkers who go further, granting the natural sciences a corner on describing the objective layout of the world, adopt a posture that is not so much scientific as scientistic. 41  I am here exploiting a weakness in Korsgaard’s argument against substantive moral realism that, as Cora Diamond notes (see “Murdoch the Explorer,” Philosophical Topics 30 [2010]: 51–85, esp. 60–62), Korsgaard herself tacitly acknowledges. Toward the end of Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard undertakes to explain what she calls the truth of moral realism. Revisiting her initially sympathetic remarks about Mackie (discussed above in the text), she now presents herself as able to rebut Mackie’s claim that nothing could satisfy the standards for objective moral values and that knowledge of such values would have to be extraordinary. Her thought is that her own Kantian claims can be taken to show not only that there are things that satisfy Mackie’s standards—​namely, human beings and animals—​but also that knowledge of these things is indeed very different from anything Mackie had in mind (Sources of Normativity, 166; for a clarification of the kind of knowledge that Korsgaard takes to be in question, see my remarks above

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objectivity. I use the word “conception” somewhat technically, so that there is a contrast with talk of our concept of objectivity. I speak of the “concept of objectivity” in reference to our notion of features of the world that are such that any thinker ought to be capable of registering them,42 and I speak of different “conceptions of objectivity” in reference to particular renderings of what falls under this concept. The prevalent philosophical assumption that I just claimed saddles us with a picture of objective reality as a practically indifferent realm (viz., the assumption that everything internally related to subjectivity is excluded from objectivity) is rightly characterized, employing these terms, as a particular conception of objectivity. A more detailed account of this conception might proceed as follows. It is a conception that denies objective status to every quality that we can’t adequately capture without reference to subjective (i.e., perceptual or affective) responses elicited by objects that possess it. Suppose we refer to all qualities fitting this description as subjective qualities. Among the qualities that count as subjective in the pertinent sense are those that an object can be said to possess merely insofar as it in fact elicits a certain subjective response from someone (e.g., the qualities “seeming ridiculous to X” or “appearing blue to X”). There are, in addition to such merely subjective qualities, also subjective qualities that an object can be said to possess just insofar as it is the kind of thing that would elicit certain subjective responses in appropriate circumstances. The class of these more substantive subjective qualities includes evaluative qualities such as “ridiculous.” Granted an account of perceptual qualities on which the quality of, for example, being blue is one that an object is said to possess only insofar as it has a tendency to seem blue in suitable circumstances,

about her conception of the method of ethics). Diamond’s point is that, to the extent that Korsgaard presents herself as having identified ‘objective moral values’ that aren’t constituents of a non-teleological world, and that aren’t known in the way in which features of such a world are known, she “removes the sting” from her earlier argument against substantive moral realisms, opening the door for other positions that likewise aim to reshape our understanding of what moral reality is like, and of how it is known (“Murdoch the Explorer,” 60–61). The position defended in this book falls within the space that, as Diamond thus observes, Korsgaard herself leaves open. 42  There are other ways of understanding what objectivity amounts to, but this is the concept of objectivity that is pivotal for the conversations about objectivity in ethics that are reference points for this book.



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the class also includes perceptual qualities.43 The traditional philosophical conception of objectivity that I am describing is one on which objectivity is characterized by the expulsion of all subjective qualities, and not only the ‘merely subjective’ ones. Earlier in this section I discussed how this conception of objectivity bequeaths to us a picture of the objective world as a practically neutral domain. Before that I had already followed up on Korsgaard’s plausible case for thinking that this basic picture makes a (‘hard’) metaphysic that excludes objective moral values seem obligatory (see 1.3 and the opening of the current section). I had also illustrated how the constraints of such a metaphysic pressure us, when we turn our attention to ethical questions about human and animal life, to situate human beings and animals outside ethics (1.2 and 1.3). Bearing these different bits of argument in mind, we can say that there is an important sense in which an image of human beings and animals as outside ethics is held in place by the conception of objectivity just sketched. It follows that a reasonable first step toward the alternative vision of human beings and animals that I am after would be to ask whether this conception is obligatory. To ask this is to ask whether we are obliged to antecedently expel all subjective qualities from objectivity, or whether we are instead justified in admitting the possibility that objectivity, despite excluding everything that is merely subjective, includes at least some subjective qualities. For ease in addressing this question, I use the following two technical terms. I refer to the conception of objectivity that I want to discredit, which purges everything subjective from objectivity, as the narrower conception of objectivity, and I refer to a prospective alternative that is capacious enough to encompass some subjective qualities, and that holds forth the promise of supporting a critique of a hard metaphysic, as the wider conception of objectivity. The question I want to ask about how best to render the concept of objectivity is, to put it in these terms, a question about whether the narrower conception of objectivity 43

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 The account of perceptual qualities such as colors that I outline in this sentence is not without critics. I omit a discussion of competing accounts because the question of how best to understand perceptual qualities is not central here and because my argument does not depend for its success on how we answer it.

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is compulsory, or about whether we are instead entitled to its wider cousin.44 This question may seem confused. It may seem reasonable to reject any—​‘wider’—​conception of objectivity that includes some subjective qualities merely on the ground that objectivity and subjectivity are conceptual opposites. But this gesture of rejection, however tempting, is unjustified. While it is true that we sometimes use the term “subjective” to mean non-objective, we also sometimes use “subjective” to mean essentially related to subjectivity. When thinkers take for granted the narrower conception of objectivity, they are in effect assuming that these ways of talking about the subjective are coextensive and, more specifically, that everything that is subjective in the sense of being inseparable from subjectivity is also subjective in the sense of being non-­ objective. What underlies talk of a ‘wider’ conception of objectivity is the recognition that it is intelligible to ask whether these two understandings of the subjective come apart. The idea of a wider conception provides the conceptual background against which the strategy of this book’s second chapter makes sense. There, in just a moment, I argue not only that it is in principle possible for subjective qualities to establish themselves as objective but, furthermore, that some subjective qualities actually realize this widely objective possibility. Moreover, I make a case for thinking that the class of those subjective qualities that count as objective includes some that are in themselves ethically significant. In this connection I focus in particular on the mental characteristics of human beings and animals. That, in a highly schematic form, is my initial strategy for defending this book’s central thesis, namely, that human beings and animals are inside ethics.

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 I spoke of “narrower” and “wider” conceptions of objectivity as far back as Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). But there are significant differences between the argument for the wider conception that I present in this book and the arguments I presented in earlier publications.

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2 T H E M O R A L D I M ENSI O N O F M I N D Philosophy of Psychology as a Guide to Ethics

It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology. —​G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy”

This book’s first chapter contains a description of the tendency in moral philosophy that the book is designed to criticize, namely, the tendency of moral philosophers to represent human beings and animals as shorn of empirically discoverable moral qualities or, to put it in the term of art I introduced, the tendency of moral philosophers to situate human beings and animals ‘outside ethics’. My main critical ambition in the book is to show that this tendency is both philosophically unjustified and morally problematic. I want to bring out how ethical approaches that situate human beings and animals outside ethics bequeath to us distorted conceptions of moral thought, thereby encouraging us to de-emphasize, or overlook entirely, moral considerations that are directly relevant to bringing human beings and animals empirically into focus in ethics. In later chapters I give illustrations of the kinds of moral considerations that get neglected, and also of the moral costs of this neglect. But first I need to motivate my preferred alternative

account of moral thought about human beings and animals. In the present chapter I get started by defending a heterodox image of human beings and animals on which qua observable they have moral characteristics, and on which they are accordingly ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. The centerpiece of my defense is a philosophically irregular view of mind that can be sketched as follows. What distinguishes this view is a very particular understanding of psychological discourse. The view invites us to conceive our categories for thinking about psychological qualities as ethically inflected categories that resist any meaningful reduction or translation to physical terms, and it also asks us to understand these categories as essentially matters of sensitivity to how things really are. The resulting approach to mind is one that falls outside the framework of most conversations in philosophy of mind and is rightly thought of as philosophically heretical. Indeed, it is philosophically heretical in more than one sense. Even without the additional stipulation that psychological discourse has an essentially ethical character, the idea that such discourse is simultaneously physically irreducible and metaphysically transparent encounters fierce philosophical resistance. To say that this idea is philosophically contentious is not to imply that is an affront to common sense. Our ordinary modes of thought and speech encode an understanding of applications of psychological concepts as philosophically unproblematic in the sense that there is no question of arriving at a better or more fundamental grasp of what justifies them by shifting to physical or other natural scientific modes of description. Yet this commonsensical understanding of psychological discourse is at best modestly represented within philosophy of mind. Suppose we speak in this connection of commonsense realism about the mind. We can take a reasonable stab at explaining why such commonsense realism has a low profile in philosophy of mind by noting that it offends against the materialist Zeitgeist. There is widespread agreement among philosophers of mind (as well as among philosophers quite generally) that a materialist outlook of some sort is obligatory.1 To be sure, there is also a confusing amount of

 This may seem plainly wrong. Far from being limited to the contributions of materialists, conversations in contemporary philosophy of mind are organized around a quarrel between materialists and their dualist detractors. Although classic “substance dualisms”

1



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disagreement about precisely what such an outlook is like. What is least controversial is that “materialism” refers to a metaphysic that many philosophers believe to be implicit in the natural sciences. Materialists hold that if we are to be faithful to our natural-scientific inheritance we have to conceive the world as at bottom composed of physical ingredients.2 Moreover, whereas historically philosophers have discussed the character of substances, today materialists by and large represent themselves as concerned with the character of properties. Materialists typically advance some version of a claim about how all non-physical properties are dependent on or necessitated by physical ones. They also typically give this claim an ontological twist, suggesting that it follows from it that we are entitled to regard physical properties as the fundamental building blocks of the world. It is to the extent that materialism is construed so that it involves this basic ontological orientation that it seems to exclude any sort of commonsense realism about the mind. 3 are now generally regarded as of merely historical interest, different forms of what is called “property dualism” continue to attract advocates. That there are today many selfavowed—​property—​dualists does not, however, contradict my point about a materialist consensus in philosophy of mind. As I discuss below, dualists today tend to accept the basic metaphysical claims of materialists, differing from their materialist counterparts primarily in restricting the scope of these claims. 2  There is a dispute among philosophers about whether “materialism” is the right moniker for the basic metaphysical position that I just sketched, or whether this position is better placed under the heading of “physicalism.” The dispute turns partly on observations about the historical use of the two terms and partly on questions about whether philosophers today are best thought of as conceiving the fabric of the world as material or physical. A reasonable case can be made for either nomenclature, and, although I have elected to speak of materialism here, I regard the terms as interchangeable. 3  It is, admittedly, possible to define materialism so that it is consistent with commonsense realism about the mind. Suppose, e.g., that we rejected the specifically ontological aspirations of materialists and instead took global mind-body supervenience to be the essential mark of materialism. Such supervenience is generally taken to involve some claim about how mental properties depend on physical properties and about how the world could not differ in mental properties without also differing in physical properties. Although the idea that the world is made up of objects that instantiate ‘properties’ owes its appeal to the kind of physical ontology that the commonsense realist rejects—​a nd although the commonsense realist is therefore likely to protest that she isn’t sure what it comes to to talk about a global dependence relation between properties of different kinds—​it still seems reasonable to think that she might be willing to accept some atypical version of a global supervenience claim. A case might in this way be made for describing commonsense realists as (non-reductive) materialists. This terminology would, however, be non-standard, and I am inclined to think that it would create confusion.

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For such commonsense realism not only treats mental descriptions and explanations as resisting any sort of significant reduction to physical terms but also asks us to regard aspects of mind as elements of the true furniture of the universe—​a nd hence as things that have the effective powers attributed to them within such descriptions and explanations.4 While it is thus fair to say that commonsense realism is a rebuke to the materialist orthodoxy in philosophy of mind, it is important to stress that the conception of mind that I am going to discuss in this chapter is not merely an undifferentiated version of this kind of commonsensical position. What interests me is, as I already mentioned, a view on which psychological discourse, in addition to being both physically irreducible and metaphysically transparent, has an essentially ethical dimension. There is a sense in which a view of this sort is likely to seem especially objectionable from the perspective of materialists. Although any proposal to enrich our understanding of the fundamental components of reality so that it includes more than the physical bespeaks a departure from materialism, it seems to many philosophers that there are special obstacles to broadening our conception of the real to include ethically charged things. So in setting out to defend a view of mind on which psychological categories are both essentially concerned with how things really are and irreducibly ethical, I am taking on an extra argumentative burden. This chapter’s argumentative strategy centers on borrowing from Wittgenstein’s later reflections on mindedness. There are passages in his later work in which Wittgenstein gives expression to a view of mind of the sort I want to defend (viz., a view on which psychological categories are irreducibly ethical and metaphysically transparent), and his writings also develop interrelated lines of reasoning that, when brought together, can be used to make a compelling case for such a view. I take advantage of these features of Wittgenstein’s writings. I start by considering strands  It would be wrong to protest that commonsense realism about the mind is antiscientific. Nothing in the outlook of a commonsense realist commits her to denying the authority of scientific explanations, say, by insisting that there must be ‘gaps’ in them. There is also no obstacle to her allowing that these explanations make a uniquely important contribution to our understanding of the world. Her thought is simply that psychological descriptions and explanations also make an irreplaceable contribution to worldly understanding and, further, that like their scientific counterparts, they are metaphysically revelatory.

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of his thought that speak for challenging the materialist metaphysic that dominates contemporary philosophy of mind and for replacing it with a more permissive metaphysic that, far from being limited to the physical, accommodates things that are as such ethically charged (2.1). Next I turn to passages that are specifically concerned with mental phenomena, beginning with a set of remarks in which Wittgenstein directly links different aspects of mind to modes of behavior. Early in the reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, many commentators took these remarks to be expressions of a familiar type of philosophical behaviorism. The relevant interpretations depend for their plausibility on attributing to Wittgenstein the assumption that it is possible to adequately describe expressive behavior in physical terms. Partly with an eye to dislodging this interpretative approach, I focus on lines of thought from Wittgenstein’s writings that invite us to understand expressive behavior as resisting any sort of physical reduction. I pay particular attention to stretches of text that suggest the need to understand such discourse as irredeemably ethical. I close my treatment of Wittgensteinian themes by drawing these different threads together, arguing that they bequeath to us a commonsensically realist view on which, in addition to being metaphysically revelatory, mental categories are irreducibly ethical (2.2). The resulting view is one on which mindedness is an ineradicably ethical phenomenon, and in the chapter’s final section I observe that, when brought to bear on the cases of human beings and animals, this view supports an image of human beings and animals as ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. By way of closing, I offer a sketch of how this image transforms received understandings of the nature of moral thought (2.3).

2 . 1 .  T O W A R D A C O M M O N S E N S E R E A L I S M A B O U T THE MIND

Materialism is, in a quite straightforward sense, agenda setting for philosophy of mind. This is true despite the fact that there is significant disagreement about what a materialist outlook involves. Although con­ tem­­porary materialisms exhibit great variety, they are united by a metaphysic that is supposed to be encoded in the natural sciences. This metaphysic is one on which the basic constituents of the world are ­physical. Moreover, in contrast to older materialisms, which tend to be concerned with the physical or non-physical nature of substances, 40

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contemporary materialisms focus on the nature of properties or, in other words, on the sorts of things that particular objects instantiate. Materialists by and large formulate their views about the metaphysical preeminence of the physical by saying things to the effect that all properties are either physical or in some way necessitated by physical properties. 5 This basic metaphysical stance is noteworthy because it provides the impetus to fundamental debates in philosophy of mind. These debates take as their starting points a question about whether all mental properties are necessitated by physical ones or, somewhat less technically, a question about whether mindedness is at bottom a physical affair. It is insofar as philosophers assume that it is obligatory to grapple with a question along these lines that it is fair to say that materialism sets the agenda for philosophy of mind. Among the argumentative challenges faced by materialists, the most formidable is widely believed to be illuminating the nature of consciousness. Very generally, the problem—​sometimes referred to simply as “the hard problem”—​is that the materialist’s physical resources, while at least arguably adequate for illuminating functional and structural aspects of mental phenomena, seem ill suited for capturing the conscious or experiential dimension of such phenomena.6 One influential strategy for bringing out forcefully the nature of the difficulty here emphasizes the sense in which conscious mental states are subjective. The basic idea is that these states are the kinds of things that have a phenomenology or a “what it’s like.” So in order to do them justice we need to mention properties that are constituted by how things seem to us and thus clearly count as subjective (i.e., “phenomenal properties,” “qualia,” or “raw feels”). But the subjective status of these properties appears to be a problem for the materialist. This is because, on any plausible account of what the physical realm is like, it is a non-subjective realm. It follows that, when the materialist turns her attention to  For a detailed, congenial account of what unites contemporary materialisms, see Daniel Stoljar, Physicalism (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010), esp. chap. 2, section 6. 6  The phrase “the hard problem” is due to David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 200–219, esp. 200–203. Some materialists challenge the very idea that conscious mental states present an especially hard problem for materialism, arguing that consciousness is a philosophers’ construct and that, when we have accounted for the structural and functional aspects of mental phenomena, no extra conscious residue remains. Later in this chapter I discuss how to situate the concerns of these eliminativists with regard to my argument. 5



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conscious mental states, she finds herself in the uncomfortable position of trying to use non-subjective materials to shed light on phenomena that are by their very nature experiential or subjective.7 Standard narratives about what’s what in the philosophy of mind depict materialists as in conversation with dualists, that is, with philosophers of mind who favor dual or twofold metaphysics involving mental as well physical domains. Contemporary dualists form a heterogeneous family, but there are significant points of agreement. These philosophers mostly differ from their classic dualist counterparts—​who like older materialists focus primarily on the metaphysical status of substances—​in taking an interest not in substances but in properties. The distinctive shared suggestion of today’s dualists is that, in order to do justice to aspects of mind, we need to treat mental as well as physical properties as basic. In thus proposing a mental addendum to materialist metaphysics, dualists are not attempting to enrich our conception of the objective or public world so that is no longer at bottom exhaustively physical. Rather they are insisting on the need to complement the objective world, which they agree with materialists in regarding as fundamentally physical, with a non-objective or logically private add-on. The introduction of a metaphysical domain that is logically private and unavailable to objective scrutiny may seem extreme, but in the eyes of dualists it is justified. Their thought is that, in contrast to what materialists of different stripes maintain, this step is required to deal satisfactorily with the problem of consciousness. The shared commitments of dualists thus clearly place them in opposition to materialists. Nevertheless, it would not be unreasonable to say that materialists and dualists have a great deal in common. I already pointed out that, despite disagreeing about whether the objective world has a non-objective or logically private counterpart, members of these two groups of philosophers agree in regarding objectivity as thoroughly physical.8 Now I want to add that they also agree in  This basic approach to capturing the hardness of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is associated with Thomas Nagel’s influential paper “What It’s Like to Be a Bat,” reprinted in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 165–180. 8  Stoljar is making this point when he declares that “dualists of the standard sort hold that physicalism is nearly or mostly true” and that, “with the exception of the psychological realm, they might be physicalists” (Physicalism, 45). 7

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operating within the constraints of the conception of objectivity that in 1.4 I described as ‘narrower’. That conception is one on which everything that is objective (i.e., in the sense of being public or such that any thinker ought to be able to register it) is necessarily free from qualities that are subjective (i.e., in the sense of having an internal reference to subjectivity). It is not difficult to see that, in developing their respective approaches to mind, materialists and dualists alike respect the logic of this conception of objectivity. Materialists are faithful to the narrower conception insofar as they represent the mind not only as thoroughly objective but also as thoroughly physical and hence non-subjective. Dualists are faithful to it insofar as they complement their accounts of the mind as partly subjective with a description of its subjective parts as non-objective. Moreover, it is fair to say not only that materialists and dualists thus agree in accepting the restrictions of the narrower conception of objectivity, but also that this conception plays an organizing role in the conversation between them. Within the conversation between materialists and dualists, there is rarely even a hint of an account of mind that flouts narrowly objective constraints by combining objectivism with the inclusion of subjective elements. It is not that the idea of an account on these lines gets considered and then rejected as unsatisfactory. The possibility of such an account simply goes unregistered.9 These remarks equip me to describe my aim in this section. My aim is to lay the groundwork for an approach to mind that defies the logic of the narrower conception of objectivity and accordingly falls outside the familiar quarrel between materialists and dualists. At issue is an approach that treats mental phenomena as having an essentially subjective dimension, yet does so without impugning their status as objective. Or, alternately, it is an approach that qualifies as a form of what I  To confirm this, lay your hands on a few up-to-date introductions to philosophy of mind and survey their tables of contents. What you are likely to find is a set of headings that describe different types of materialisms and dualisms, perhaps together with an idealism (i.e., a view that claims that the physical universe is illusory and that the world is exhaustively composed of minds and their contents) or a mysterianism (i.e., a view that claims that consciousness is a mystery and that a solution to the problem it poses is out of reach of human understanding). You are also likely to find headings that mention topics of concern to advocates of views of these different sorts. What you are unlikely to find is any heading that mentions a view that challenges the logic of the narrower conception of objectivity.

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am calling ‘commonsense realism about the mind’ insofar as it represents our categories for mental phenomena as physically irreducible—​ because ineradicably subjective—​and also objectively authoritative.10 Later in this chapter I turn to the particular form of such commonsense realism that interests me. Like other commonsense realisms about the mind, my preferred view depends for its interest on the rejection of the narrower conception of objectivity, and in this section I set the stage for my eventual discussion of it by raising a question about this conception’s authority. Defenses of the narrower conception of objectivity tend to start from an initially plausible picture of what cognitive access to the world is like. According to this picture, it is in the nature of our subjective endowments to obstruct our view of how things really are, and it is therefore only insofar as we abstract from these endowments that we are justified in thinking that we have an accurate image of reality. This matters because, in attempting to distance ourselves from everything subjective in our makeups, we at the same time gradually cast out from our image of the world all qualities with necessary references to subjectivity. An initially plausible picture of what it is to get an unobstructed view of the layout of reality in this way seems to speak for a vision of the world as free from all subjective qualities or, in other words, for the narrower conception of objectivity. This strategy for motivating the narrower conception calls on us to understand it as motivated by a requirement to abstract from our subjective endowments or, as I also put it elsewhere, an abstraction requirement. The approach to discrediting the conception that I develop and defend in this section works by contesting the very idea of such a requirement. This approach has a number of historical precedents. Many philosophers have undertaken to show that there is something internally confused about an ideally abstract image of thought. Some of the most interesting of these projects are designed to establish that, however tempted we are to think otherwise, we ourselves lack a clear idea of what it would be for a region of thought to satisfy an abstraction require­­ ment and are therefore obliged to reject the putative requirement as 10

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 For an explanation of talk of “commonsense realism about the mind,” see this chapter’s opening remarks.

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unintelligible.11 Philosophers sympathetic to the idea of an abstraction requirement have different views about what area of thought represents the best case for meeting it, so critical efforts along these lines need to aim at more than one target. Some rationalistically inclined philosophers regard the whole of arithmetic as the best case for meeting an abstraction requirement, and, in response to this rationalist tradition, some critics undertake to show that it is fundamentally unclear what an ideally abstract arithmetic would be like.12 Other philosophers whose sympathies incline toward classic empiricism regard perceptual experience as the best case for meeting an abstraction requirement, and, in response to this empiricist tradition, critics sometimes undertake to show that it is fundamentally unclear what ideally abstract perceptual experience would be like.13 Elsewhere I have presented critiques of the narrower conception of objectivity that proceed by bringing into question the cogency of an abstraction requirement. But in the past I failed to emphasize that a compelling challenge to the requirement needs to track its role in both  Below I offer illustrations of this basic strategy for criticizing the idea of an abstraction requirement. There are admittedly less radical strategies for criticizing this idea. Dualists in effect take issue with the idea of an abstraction requirement, not because they take it to be incoherent, but because they believe that the non-subjective domain we arrive at by imposing such a requirement represents only one region of reality. They typically refer to the portion of reality that they think comes into view in this manner as ‘objectivity’, and they add that reality includes, in addition to objectivity, also a logically private, phenomenal realm. 12  Wittgenstein counts as such a critic insofar as, in what are known as the rule-following sections of the Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed., G. E. M. Anscombe trans. [London: Macmillan, 1958], §§185–242), he attacks as confused the idea that arithmetic series satisfy an abstraction requirement. It is arguable that the rationalistically inclined philosopher with whom Wittgenstein is primarily concerned in this part of the Investigations is his own earlier self. He is plausibly read as attacking the conception of a formal series that he himself favored in the Tractatus (rev. ed., C.  K. Ogden, trans. [London: Routledge, 1974]), viz., a conception on which, once you have a series’ initial term and a way of getting from one term to the next, you in a sense have the whole series given. See esp. 6.022–6.03. 13  The members of this class of critics include many philosophers who attack abstract conceptions of perception by arguing that content that is merely causally (and hence non-conceptually) ‘given’ to the senses—​a nd that is in this sense abstract—​lacks the rational significance of perceptual experience. Both Kant and Hegel develop criticisms along these lines, but I don’t discuss their thought in the present book. Later in this section I discuss how Wittgenstein develops such a criticism, and in the next chapter I discuss how, partly following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps, John McDowell does so as well. 11



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rationalist and empiricist modes of thought.14 This now strikes me as a serious oversight, and in this section I set out to remedy it. I proceed by following up on lines of thought from Wittgenstein’s later writings that contain criticisms of the very idea of an ideally abstract arithmetic (2.1.i) as well as of the very idea of an ideally abstract image of our perceptual lives (2.1.ii). My suggestion is that, if we appreciate the significance of these criticisms, we see that they speak for rejecting a ‘narrower’ construal of the concept of objectivity and replacing it with what I am calling a ‘wider’ alternative (2.1.iii). There are precedents for a suggestion on these lines in the secondary literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. A number of commentators have drawn attention to the passages that interest me in arguing that Wittgenstein should be credited with relaxing or broadening our rendering of the concept of objectivity.15 Yet even when commentators explicitly insist that they take Wittgenstein to be trying to revise our construal of the concept of objectivity, they are often taken—​wrongly—​to be depicting him as a skeptic about objectivity who advocates the blanket rejection of this concept.16 There can for this reason be no question of simply taking for granted, without commentary, an image of Wittgenstein as challenging an entrenched view of what falls under the concept of objectivity. Part of what is distinctive about my defense of such an image of Wittgenstein here is that, as I just noted, I insist on the significance of the fact that he questions the idea of an abstraction requirement in reference to both mathematical and perceptual thought. Indeed, although I am not primarily concerned to make a contribution to Wittgenstein exegesis, I want to add  See, e.g., Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.2.  This approach to reading Wittgenstein is most closely associated with the work of John McDowell. McDowell represents Wittgenstein as moving from an attack on what I am calling an abstraction requirement to a defense of a construal of the concept of objectivity on which it is no longer governed by such a requirement. See, e.g., “Virtue and Reason” (1979), reprinted in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 50–75. See also “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following” (1981), in ibid., 198–219, and “In Defense of Modesty” (1987), in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998): 87–107. 16  For a vivid illustration of this phenomenon, see Onora O’Neill’s response to McDowell’s reading of Wittgenstein in Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp.  77–88. For a second illustration, see Robert Pippin’s remarks on my reading of Wittgenstein in his “Critical Notice” of Beyond Moral Judgment in Analytic Philosophy 52 (2011): 49–60. 14

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that I now believe that Wittgenstein’s philosophy owes its persistent appeal in substantial part to the fact that he radically revises a pervasive understanding of the layout of the objective world—​a n understanding so deeply entrenched that it structures conversations in entire sub-­d isciplines of philosophy—​by tracing the appeal of the abstraction require­­ment that seems to underwrite the understanding back to these two roots.17 Setting aside this exegetical suggestion, what above all inter­­ ests me about Wittgenstein’s two-pronged attack on the narrower conception of objectivity is that it sets up his call for the ‘wider’ alternative that is integral to his defense of a special sort of commonsense realism about the mind.

2 . 1 . I .  T H E C A S E O F A R I T H M E T I C

One place at which Wittgenstein is critically engaged with the idea of what I am calling an ‘abstraction requirement’ is in the portions of the Investigations—​often described as containing his “rule-following considerations”—​in which he discusses simple mathematical series. Here he approaches his critique of an abstraction requirement by urging us to go as far as we can toward imagining what it would be for such a requirement to be satisfied in the case of particular mathematical series. We are asked to take seriously that the steps of different series are laid out before us so that they are accessible independently of any subjective responses. Or, to put it in terms that Wittgenstein introduces in one frequently cited remark, we are asked to take seriously that the steps of a mathematical series are like the stages of an ideal mechanical rail that is “laid to infinity.”18 Wittgenstein’s goal in this part of his thought is to challenge the idea of an abstraction requirement by getting us to  W hen, in earlier work, I failed to recognize that a satisfactory critique of the narrower conception of objectivity needs to attack the idea of an abstraction requirement in connection with both rationalist and empiricist modes of thought, I also failed to register the significance of the fact that Wittgenstein attacks this idea in both domains. I feel about Wittgenstein as Hilary Putnam claimed to feel about Kant and others when he (i.e., Putnam) wrote: “As I get smarter, Kant, Aristotle, etc., all get smarter as well” (Thomas Scanlon and S. Phineas Upham, eds., Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the Harvard Review of Philosophy [London: Routledge, 2002], 20). 18  See Philosophical Investigations, §218, which reads, “Whence comes the idea that the beginning of a series is a visible section of rails invisibly laid to infinity?” 17



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recognize that, however tempted we are to think that we have a use for this rail imagery, we in fact have no clear notion of what it would be to satisfy the requirement it seems to evoke. His well-known strategy involves presenting several vignettes about the teaching and learning of mathematical series. To begin with, he describes a scenario in which a student is being taught to produce the series of natural numbers.19 Next he asks us to imagine teaching her to produce the series of even natural numbers.20 We give the student examples and exercises until she can write the even numbers up to 1000. At this point we are encouraged to try to describe our student’s achievement in the manner suggested by the idea of an abstraction requirement. The idea would be that she has internalized some sort of algorithm that enables her to produce correct behavior independently of any particular subjective responsiveness, so that she moves on to each successive step in the series in something very much like the way in which a car hitched to a mechanical rail gets pulled farther along. Wittgenstein’s thought is that, despite any apparent plausibility, this picture of what mathematical understanding is like is confused. One way to capture the confusion is to note that, if we insist on conceiving the student’s grasp of a mathematical series in the ideally abstract terms that seem to invite Wittgenstein’s rail imagery, we put ourselves in a position in which it is no longer clear what would justify us in crediting her with mastery. This is because, in insisting on abstractness, we impose a severe limitation on what we can count as a sign of understanding. We can’t count anything our student says about her sense of the point of our examples or instruction (“Oh, I see, it’s like that. . . .”) since, by our lights, any such subjective perspective is at best auxiliary to the business of understanding. So we are obliged to restrict ourselves to the student’s bare behavior. This restriction represents a problem because what interests us is a mathematical capacity that manifests itself in indefinitely many performances. Any stretch of bare behavior that we witness is at best a merely partial expression of the capacity and, as such, consistent with the possibility that the student has not understood and will subsequently go on incorrectly. For instance—​turning now to an example that 19

 Ibid., §143.  Ibid., §185.

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Wittgenstein famously adduces in this context—​even if she has correctly produced the series of even natural numbers up to 1000, it is in principle possible that she has not understood and will now go on like this: “1004, 1008, and 1012. . . .”21 Indeed, it is in principle possible that she will respond to our efforts to show her that she has erred by saying, “Yes, isn’t it right? I thought that is how I was meant to do it.” The upshot is that, if we respect abstract constraints while trying to determine whether a student has grasped a series, we deprive ourselves of the very resources we need to make a determination. Wittgenstein is not here making a skeptical point about our inability to recognize conceptual mastery in others.22 The same difficulties arise if we attempt to construe our own understanding of a mathematical series in ideally abstract terms. Even in this case fidelity to the idea of an abstraction requirement commits us to placing restrictions on what can count as a sign of understanding. We have to disregard any sense we have that we appreciate what we’ve been taught and limit ourselves to appealing to our own bare behavior. As before, this limitation causes trouble. Any stretch of our own bare behavior that we witness will at best be a merely partial expression of the capacity that interests us (i.e., since it is a capacity that manifests itself in definitely many performances), and will hence be consistent with the discovery that our subsequent conduct diverges from that of people around us. So appeals to bare behavior cannot ground our confidence that we ourselves have gotten it right. This means that, with regard to mathematical cases, we have no clear idea of what—​either our own or others’—​satisfaction of an abstraction requirement would be like. That is one of the central points that Wittgenstein is making in the core sections of the Investigations in which he discusses simple mathematical series. His point is that our grasp of such series is not somehow governed by an abstraction requirement.

2 . 1 . I I .  T H E C A S E O F P E R C E P T U A L E X P E R I E N C E

It may seem as though the prospects for defending the idea of an ab­­ straction requirement are substantially better if we turn away from 21

 Ibid.   For helpful discussion of this point, see McDowell “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following.”

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mathematics and toward the case of perceptual thought. The Wittgensteinian argument against an ideally abstract mathematics that I just presented can be generalized so that it applies to all conceptual capacities, mathematical or otherwise. But many philosophers believe that perceptual thought is informed by content that is given merely causally and hence in a manner that is both non-conceptual and ideally abstract. This grounding in non-conceptual content is characteristic of classic empiricist accounts of perceptual thought, and views that ground perceptual thought in non-conceptual content are also the dominant force in philosophy of perception today. Given that non-­ conceptual content qualifies as suitably abstract, it might seem possible to use the relevant philosophical corpus to vindicate the idea of an abstraction requirement. Despite its influence, this body of work is not without its critics. Members of a substantial group of critics respond to it by arguing that perceptual experience is conceptual all the way down. Let me pause here to introduce a helpful bit of jargon. Members of the group of critics just mentioned are sometimes described as conceptualists, and members of the group of philosophers whose work conceptualists attack are sometimes described as non-conceptualists.23 What interests me now is the fact that the critical efforts of thinkers who, to put it in these terms, count as conceptualists are generally motivated by the conviction that those who count as non-conceptualists cannot help but place irreconcilable demands on perceptual experience. Conceptualists typically observe that thought about the world is normatively organized in the sense that it is possible to raise questions about, say, what justifies it. Conceptualists also typically observe that in the case of non-inferential perceptual thought experience is what plays this justificatory role. They appeal to these observations to elicit the recognition that perceptual experience is rationally significant. Their claim is that this fact about perceptual experience represents a problem for non-conceptualists. Insofar as we follow non-conceptualists in conceiving the experiential inputs to perceptual thought as merely causally given, we are obliged to regard such inputs as in themselves free from normative organization. This is  For references to the work of different conceptualists and non-conceptualists, see the next chapter.

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problematic because it is not clear how experience can lack normative structure and have a rational bearing on perceptual belief. That is what conceptualists have in mind when they allege that non-conceptualists place irreconcilable demands on perceptual experience, and it is not hard to see that this allegation bears directly on the question, of concern to me in this section, of the fate of an abstraction requirement. If conceptualists are right that the views of non-conceptualists are untenable, then it is misguided to believe that perceptual thought is governed by such a requirement. The debate between conceptualists and non-conceptualists about the nature of perception is involved, and I cannot hope to weigh in decisively on the side of conceptualists in this brief section. In Chapter 3, I offer a defense of conceptualism against some of the criticisms that are taken to speak most strongly against it. Right now my aims are more limited. I want to discuss a line of thought in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that develops a version of the criticism of non-conceptualism that I just sketched. Anticipating Chapter 3’s defense of conceptualism, I then provisionally maintain that in the relevant portion of his writing Wittgenstein shows us that non-conceptualism is untenable and, further, that he is accordingly rightly credited with complementing his attack on an abstraction requirement in reference to mathematics with an attack on it in reference to perceptual thought. A good way to approach a discussion of the anti-non-conceptualist strand of Wittgenstein’s thought that I want to consider is to briefly touch on one set of remarks in which Wittgenstein clearly demonstrates interest in a conceptualist view of visual perception. The remarks I have in mind occur in Part II, § xi of the Investigations and are dedicated to a treatment of what he calls changes of aspect. The phenomenon that he places under this heading occurs in situations in which, while visually surveying an object, we see something new in it (a new ‘aspect’) while also seeing that the object has not changed.24 His emphasis is on pictures and diagrams, including the famous “duck-rabbit,”25 that are designed to present viewers with different visual aspects. But he also considers changes of aspect in quite uncontrived cases (such as, e.g.,  Ibid., 193, 195–196.  Ibid., 194.

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cases in which, when gazing at two faces that strike us as wholly different, we suddenly see a great resemblance between them).26 Moreover, he stresses that he is concerned with cases in which new features of a thing strike us quite suddenly. He accents this sudden or instantaneous character because he is interested, not in shifts in which we interpret something that we already see, but rather in shifts in which, as he believes, we genuinely see something new. He is drawing attention to visual transitions that, in his view, are such that an interpretation or thought, far from being external to what is seen, contributes internally to our perception of a thing—​so that the contributions of thought and world cannot somehow be factored out.27 One of Wittgenstein’s aims in showcasing these transitions is to persuade us that, if we want to isolate the kind of ‘seeing’ that makes visual content non-inferentially available to thought, we need to say not only that someone with good eyesight is gazing at something in appropriate conditions but also that what is being taken in visually is saturated by thought or by concepts. He is attempting to motivate what, on the terms I am using, qualifies as a ‘conceptualist’ account of visual experience. To be sure, the methods he uses to motivate such an account are not decisive. He is suggesting that we need to embrace a conceptualist account if we are to incorporate, in the most straightforward manner, the features of our visual lives that he refers to as changes of aspect, and a non-conceptualist could accept this suggestion while at the same time maintaining that a good philosophical case can be made for refusing to take the relevant visual phenomena at face value and for instead reconstructing them in some way. This brings me to a line of reasoning in the Investigations that speaks directly against non-conceptualism. This line of reasoning is traced out in what are sometimes called the “privacy sections.”28 Although in the first instance these sections have to do with sensations or ‘inner experience’, they are immediately pertinent to the critical assessment of non-conceptualist views of perceptual experience. A crucial challenge for these views is, as I mentioned at this section’s opening, to explain how content that in itself lacks normative structure can have a rational bearing on perceptual judgments. In his  Ibid., 193.  Ibid., see, e.g., 193–194, 197, 204–205, 211–212. 28  Ibid., §§243–270. 26 27

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reflections on privacy, Wittgenstein examines accounts of sensation that confront the same challenge. He is struck by the fact that philosophers often help themselves to understandings of sensations as inner objects that are merely given to consciousness and that, although they thus need to be understood as in themselves normatively unstructured, still manage to bear rationally on thought about the inner life. When he turns to critically surveying accounts of sensations that have these features, he attempts to show that they place incompatible demands on what inner experience is like, and his efforts undercut not only the accounts of inner experience that are his primary concern but also non-conceptualist accounts of perceptual or ‘outer’ experience. For my purposes, the key remark in the relevant portion of the Investigations is one in which we are asked to imagine a man wrapping his mind around a sensation in a manner consistent with an understand­ ­ing of it as a bare (i.e., normatively unstructured) presence.29 Suppose we call this man N. Because N is concerned with felt content that is supposed to be given to consciousness in a manner that entails being as such un-conceptualized, there can be no question of his giving a definition of what he feels. 30 He would undermine his own project if, for instance, he offered a—​conceptualized—​description of his sensation as, say, a stab or a tickle or, alternately, as something that reminds him of a scene from his childhood or makes him want to wince or blink. He is limited to making mere mental contact with his sensation, or, to put it in terms that get employed in the text, to using a special form of ostension that involves nothing more than concentrating his attention inward. Because N wants to introduce the sign “S” for his sensation, he uses this ostensive strategy to “[impress on himself] the connection between the sign and the sensation.” At this point in the story of N, we are encouraged to ask whether it is conceivable that he is using S to pick out a definite sensation, and whether it is conceivable that he is accordingly in a position to correctly reidentify it on other occasions. It is not difficult to see that there are obstacles to returning an affirmative answer. Any claim N makes about having S again is necessarily unsupported by any thought of S’s features and can only be justified by something like a 29

 Ibid., §258.  “I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated” (ibid.).

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naked flash of intuition (whatever that is), and such a flash lacks the kind of justificatory import that would entitle us to “talk about right.” The trouble is not merely that N has no grounds for thinking that he has gotten his mind around a determinate sensation. He lacks grounds for thinking that he has gotten his mind around a sensation as opposed to something else or nothing at all.31 Wittgenstein in this way attempts to get us to see that it is fundamentally unclear what it would be for a bare presence to be available to thought in the way that sensations are. He offers a dramatization of how a view of sensations as bare presences disintegrates under the pressure of our attempts to realize it. Wittgenstein might equally well have dramatized the failure of a—​ non-conceptualist—​ view of perceptual contents as bare presences. Suppose that, revising Wittgenstein’s official scenario slightly, we envision a person M who takes herself to confront a bare perceptual presence. Having seen how N, in his efforts to grapple with a bare sensory presence, winds up with his mind around nothing at all, we can now easily tell a tale about how M, in her efforts to grapple with a bare perceptual presence, likewise fails to make mental contact with anything at all. We can in this way reap from Wittgenstein’s remarks in the privacy sections of the Investigations resources for a fundamental critique of non-conceptualist views of perception, and we can thus lay the groundwork for the conceptualist view that he himself discusses in Part II, § xi. Earlier in this section, I mentioned that conceptualist views of perceptual experience are philosophically controversial. I also mentioned that I offer a defense of such views in the next chapter. For the moment, I want to help myself to the conclusion of that later discussion. My main concern now is what Wittgenstein can be said to teach us, in the portions of his work that I have been considering, about the fate of an image of perceptual thought as governed by an abstraction requirement. This image depends for its soundness on the success of some sort of non-conceptualist view of perceptual experience. It follows that, if, as I am proposing, we provisionally assume that Wittgenstein is justified in accepting a conceptualist view, we can credit him with demonstrating that the idea of an abstraction requirement has no purchase on perceptual thought. Moreover, given that Wittgenstein demonstrates that the 31

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 Ibid., §§261 (“So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would just like to emit an inarticulate sound”) and 270.

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idea of an abstraction requirement has no purchase on mathematical thought (2.1.i)—​a nd given that mathematics and perception represent the best cases for realizing such a requirement—​we can credit him with showing that we lack any coherent image at all of what it would be for an abstraction requirement to be satisfied. We can say that he puts us in a position in which we need to consider the implications of liberating ourselves from the very idea of such a requirement.

2 . 1 . I I I .  A C A S E F O R A C O M M O N S E N S E M E T A P H Y S I C

When Wittgenstein urges us to liberate ourselves from the very idea of an abstraction requirement, he is urging us to jettison a picture of the world as somehow available to thought in an absolutely unmediated manner or, in other words, in a manner not informed by the sorts of subjective responses characteristic of us as participants in particular linguistic practices. He is suggesting that our subjective responses contribute internally to our ability to grasp features of the world. He sometimes expresses this point by saying that linguistic practices that shape our responses thereby make necessary contributions to our ability to bring the world into focus. So we might say—​a s many readers have in fact said—​that he bequeaths to us an image of our cognitive lives as in an important sense practice-bound. Before commenting directly on this image, I want to say a word about how it tends to figure in discussions of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. There is nothing contentious about the suggestion that Wittgenstein develops an image of thought as essentially non-abstract and practice-bound. Suggestions along these lines get made in the work of commentators of all different stripes, even those unsympathetic to what they take to be the larger arc of Wittgenstein’s thought. What interests me is that, in addition to representing Wittgenstein as favoring a practice-bound understanding of thought, commentators tend to depict him as believing that this basic understanding is inseparable from some form of skepticism about objectivity. 32 This merits a comment because it follows from what I have been saying that, despite its broad acceptance, the relevant exegetical move is unwarranted. 32



 This claim underlies the many interpretations of Wittgenstein on which he is depicted as some sort of anti-realist or relativist.

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The original impetus for this move is a widespread assumption about how our concept of—​ full-blooded—​ objectivity is necessarily linked to the idea of an abstraction requirement. Against the backdrop of this assumption, an irrevocably practice-bound conception of thought appears to go hand in hand with a retreat from objectivity. Now it appears that, granted that Wittgenstein favors such a conception, it is obligatory to read him as turning his back on the concept of objectivity. But this exegetical strategy, while well represented, depends for whatever plausibility it has on attributing to Wittgenstein a version of the very outlook that, in relevant portions of his work, he is concerned to contest. Wittgenstein is here inviting us to take seriously the possibility that all our modes of thought are essentially informed by subjective responses, and he is thereby rejecting the idea of an abstraction requirement. To the extent that readers interpret this gesture of rejection as a sign that he is departing from the concept of objectivity, they represent him as accepting that ideal abstractness is a condition of objective authority. This means that they portray him as preserving, now in the form of a coherent if unattainable ideal, the very demand for abstractness that, by their own lights, he is trying to discredit. The result is a picture of Wittgenstein as favoring a philosophical stance that is threatened by a significant internal tension. What is unsatisfying is not merely that here he is taken to stand in an inconsistent relationship to the idea of an abstraction requirement. There is also no good textual reason for ascribing to him the relevant internally inconsistent position. 33 Consider what it would be to relinquish the very idea of an abstraction requirement in a consistent manner. To relinquish this idea is not merely to abandon the thought that we are capable of surveying the world in an ideally abstract manner. It is possible to abandon this thought while still holding that we have a clear enough image of what it would be to survey the world relevantly abstractly in order to use the image as a standard for assessing the fidelity to the world of our actual modes of discourse. To free ourselves from the very idea of an  Wittgenstein’s characteristic pose is that of a thinker who, far from wanting to expose our modes of thought and speech as lacking objective authority, seeks to affirm their authority while transforming our assumptions about the ground of our confidence in that authority.

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abstraction requirement is to admit that we don’t have a clear enough notion of what ideally abstract mental contact with the world would be like even in order to employ it as such a standard. So there can be no question of our being in a position to insist that every step away from abstraction in our modes of thought and speech is as such a step away from fidelity to the objective world. Our efforts to shake off the very idea of an abstraction requirement, far from placing us at risk of losing our grip on the concept of objectivity, put us in a position in which we are obliged to revise our conception of what falls under this concept so that we no longer arrive at an account of its extension through a process of maximal abstraction from everything subjective. Let me reformulate this point using my terms of art for discussing different conceptions of objectivity (1.4). If we relinquish the idea of an abstraction requirement, there can be no question of our having antecedent grounds for insisting on the correctness of the conception that I am describing as ‘narrower’ (i.e., the conception on which objectivity excludes all subjective qualities). This tone of insistence only seems justified if we take ourselves to have the kind of image of what it would be to survey the world from an ideally abstract standpoint that would enable us to determine that subjective responses have an essential tendency to block our view of how things really are. But this kind of image of what ideally abstract mental contact with the world would be is what we were supposed to have abandoned. So, if we follow in Wittgenstein’s footsteps in relinquishing the idea of an abstraction requirement, this should lead us, not to reaffirm our commitment to the narrower conception of objectivity (and not to mistrust the very concept of objectivity), but rather to take seriously the possibility that subjective qualities may gain footholds in the objective world. It should lead us to take seriously the possibility of reworking our conception of objectivity along ‘wider’ lines. 34

 There are some philosophers who attempt to combine rejection of the very idea of an abstraction requirement with what I call the narrower conception of objectivity. Wilfrid Sellars is the best case of this that I am aware of. That our conceptual capacities, and hence our subjectivity, necessarily inform all modes of thought is the moral of Sellars’s well-known attack on the “myth of the Given” (see Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997]). Yet Sellars is also a committed materialist who believes that there can be no question of bringing anything

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To argue that it is in principle possible for qualities with internal references to subjectivity to establish themselves as objective is, admittedly, not yet to show that any actually do. An important goal of later portions of this chapter is showing that some subjective qualities—​in particular, mental qualities—​a re in fact aptly credited with objective status. Right now I simply want to observe that, if we are indeed entitled to widen our conception of objectivity along the lines envisioned here, we have grounds for rethinking the structure of one of the most fundamental debates in contemporary philosophy of mind. Earlier I described how the familiar quarrel between materialists and dualists about how to understand aspects of mind bears the imprint of the logic of the narrower conception of objectivity. I also observed that this conception seems to prevent us from even contemplating the possibility of a commonsense realism about the mind that treats mental p ­henomena not only as ineradicably subjective and non-physical but also as fullstanding features of the objective world. It is with an eye to motivating this possibility that, in 2.1.i and 2.1.ii, I traced out—​Wittgensteinian—​ lines of thought that lay the groundwork for a wider conception of objectivity. There is, however, a sense in which this argumentative prologue may seem inadequate for my purposes. What interests me in what follows is a quite distinctive type of commonsense realism about the mind—in particular, a type of such realism that treats mental qualities as in themselves ethically significant. Qualities that are in themselves ethically significant are naturally, and rightly, understood as having internal references to our attitudes or affective responses. If a case for the wider conception of objectivity is to open the door for the kind of commonsense realism about the mind that I favor, it needs to establish not only that at least some subjective qualities count as objective but, more specifically, that at least some of these affect-related qualities do. Yet many philosophers believe that, even if we widen objectivity to include perceptual qualities, there are a priori obstacles to including the kinds of evaluative qualities that are here in question. internally related to subjectivity within the objective fold (see, e.g., Sellars’s discussion of perceptual qualities in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Science, Perception and Reality [Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991], 1–40). It follows from my line of reasoning here that this position is internally inconsistent.

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The view that evaluative qualities are peculiarly resistant to objective assimilation is typically grounded in the following disanalogy between values and perceptual qualities such as colors. Whereas in the case of perceptual qualities we are dealing with qualities that objects possess insofar as they causally elicit certain subjective responses, in the case of values we are dealing with qualities that objects possess insofar as they merit such responses. Granted that questions about whether something merits a given response are evaluative questions, it follows that judgments about values are in some sense governed by our evaluative beliefs—​by the very body of beliefs, that is, to which the judgments themselves belong. Evaluative judgments appear to be characterized by a distinctive form of circularity, and many philosophers appeal to this circularity in arguing that values are cut off from achieving objective status. 35 A good case can, however, be made against regarding this worry as fatal. Notice, to begin with, that the relevant form of circularity does not exclude certain quite ordinary arguments about values. Consider, for instance, a situation in which someone challenges an ethical judgment you have made by claiming that it depends for its interest on some further evaluative belief of yours (e.g., “You only think this is tragic and worthy of attention because you think that is important.”). Here your detractor is likely to be impugning your original judgment by suggesting that it depends for its authority on a mere prejudice. You may accordingly respond by trying to persuade her that the belief she takes to be mere bias is well grounded, and you may well succeed. The possibility of this sort of ordinary debate about values suggests a perspective from which the circularity of evaluative judgments appears innocent. But this is not enough to satisfy the philosophers who are keenest to underline the pertinent form of circularity. These philosophers typically suggest that the mere fact of such circularity is a sign of irremediable epistemic limitation. 35



 Discussions surrounding this argument against the objectivity of values by themselves make up a recognizable body of ethical literature. For one early influential version of the argument, see Crispin Wright, “Moral Values, Projection, and Secondary Qualities,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 62 (1988): 1–26, esp. 23–24. For a widely discussed survey of the literature, see Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, “Toward Fin de siecle Ethics,” Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 115–189, esp. 163.

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This suggestion depends for its apparent authority on the idea of a contrasting non-circular mode of thought. To justify adopting it, we would need an intelligible description of what it is for a mode of thought to bear on the world in a relevantly non-circular manner, that is, a manner not shaped by standards that themselves reflect substantive beliefs about how things are. One place at which it is possible to find intimations of this type of non-circularity is in defenses of what I am calling ‘non-conceptualist’ accounts of perceptual experience (2.1.ii). Insofar as non-conceptualists represent applications of basic empirical concepts as justified by non-conceptual content that is merely causally ‘given’ to the senses, they treat such concepts as bearing on the world in a manner that is relevantly non-circular in that it is independent of the mediation of any standards shaped by scientific opinion at a given historical juncture. But this is simply the image of empirical thought that I criticized in 2.1.ii, now under a different description. Any mode of thought that qualified as non-circular in the sense in which non-­ conceptualists take empirical thought to be would be a mode of thought that, because it would thereby exclude subjective perspectives from informing how the mind makes contact with the world, would also satisfy an abstraction requirement. I have already described not only a challenge to the view that perceptual thought satisfies an abstraction requirement but also a larger challenge to the very idea of an abstraction requirement (2.1.i and 2.1.ii). It is not difficult to see that, in rejecting this idea, we are at the same time rejecting the assumption that a mode of thought might somehow qualify as wholly non-circular. This means that the sorts of worries about the circularity of evaluative judgments that I touched on a moment ago fail to amount to an independent case for impugning the objective credentials of values. Once we abandon an abstraction requirement and equip ourselves with a conception of objectivity that accommodates the possibility that some subjective qualities count as objective, we are obliged to construe the concept of objectivity so that it is in principle capable of incorporating values. We are obliged to allow that, while in some cases we may find that the appearance that something is endowed with a value is at bottom mere appearance, in others we will discover that an appearance to this effect is accurate and that an evaluatively loaded account of things is objectively authoritative.

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I just argued that there are no a priori obstacles to recognizing some values as objective. It would be fair to point out that it doesn’t follow that any are in fact objective. My remarks thus far are intended as a preface to a treatment of the distinctive—​ethically saturated—​form of commonsense realism about the mind that is my main concern in this chapter. When, momentarily, I turn to discussing this form of commonsense realism, I will be completing this section’s defense of a wider conception of objectivity by claiming that aspects of mind are irreducibly ethical and suggesting that we have no reason to deny that they belong to the objective fabric of the world.

2 . 2 .  E T H I C S I N T H E P H I L O S O P H Y O F M I N D

The view of mind that I defend in this section is one that represents aspects of mind as essentially tied to modes of behavior and also depicts the categories we use to capture such expressive behavior as physically irreducible. On the terms of this view, psychological categories resist any sort of meaningful reduction to physical terms because they have necessary references to ethically loaded conceptions of the lives of the—​ human or non-human—​creatures to whom they apply. The introduction of this understanding of psychological categories is tantamount to the introduction of an understanding of discourse about minded or animate life as having a special ethical logic. This logical gesture in turn depends for the significance I attach to it on my earlier rejection of the narrowly objective assumptions that structure ongoing conversations between materialists and dualists (2.1). Because the view of mind that interests me is at home in a metaphysical context with widely objective resources, it can combine an understanding of psychological thought and talk as irreducibly ethical with an understanding of such thought and talk as revelatory of what minds are really like. This view qualifies as a form of commonsense realism about the mind because, in addition to calling on us to reconceive the logic of psychological discourse along ethical lines, it upsets received—​materialist and dualist—​ ideas about the kinds of entities minds are, thus presenting us with a distinctive metaphysic of mind. Below I motivate this novel view of mind by appealing to strands of thought from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that I have not yet



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discussed in this chapter. I start by commenting on a set of passages in which Wittgenstein invites us to recognize that psychological qualities are inseparable from modes of expression (2.2.i). I then turn to remarks that can be read as presenting an argument for thinking that concepts for psychological qualities have necessary references to ethically loaded understandings of the lives of the creatures to whom they apply (2.2.ii). Lastly, I discuss the significance of the ethically charged and physically irreducible account of psychological discourse that emerges here in light of the bits of Wittgenstein’s work, considered in 2.1, that speak for a wider conception of objectivity. It is in this way that I defend a distinctive form of commonsense realism about the mind (2.2.iii). Given that my strategy involves appealing to Wittgenstein at every step, and given that many of my claims about how to read him are contentious, I should again stress that my main aims here are not interpretative. It suffices for my purposes to show that the strains of thought that I credit to Wittgenstein, when brought together, compose a powerful case for radically revising—​a long widely objective lines—​familiar conceptions of the logic and metaphysics of mindedness.

2 . 2 . I .  I N W A R D N E S S A N D E X P R E S S I O N

It is fair to say that the idea of a necessary tie between aspects of mind and modes of behavior is unpopular among philosophers. Philosophical impatience with this idea is driven in significant part by recognition of the limitations of various older behaviorist doctrines that encode versions of it. A number of doctrines that claim that mental terms can be translated into behavioral terms, referred to as analytic or logical behaviorisms, excited widespread enthusiasm in philosophy for about twenty years starting in the 1960s and then fell quickly out of favor. Logical behaviorisms are mostly reductive materialisms that treat mental talk as reducible to physical behavioral talk, and what occasioned their dramatic reversal of fortune was, at the most basic level, the belief that as such they veer toward simply ignoring subjective experience and denying the inner life. Since in this section I appeal to passages in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in arguing for a direct link between mental qualities and behavior, I want to acknowledge that to some extent interest in his remarks on mind has risen and fallen with interest in logical

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behaviorism. Many of the most influential early readers of Wittgenstein represented him as a logical behaviorist, 36 and many subsequent readers accepted this representation and took it as grounds for criticism, charging Wittgenstein with being unjustly hostile to inwardness. An image of him as a logical behaviorist is, however, no longer as widely accepted as it once was, and, in commenting here on passages in which Wittgenstein connects aspects of mind directly with modes of behavior, I lend my voice to the chorus of readers who believe that it should be discarded. As will emerge, I am interested in these passages because I believe they belong to the articulation of an approach to mental qualities that, far from qualifying as an unappealing logical behaviorism—​or indeed as any other sort of (reductive or non-reductive) materialism—​ qualifies as an intuitively satisfying commonsense realism about the mind. The idea of a necessary connection between qualities of mind and modes of behavior, however controversial in itself, tends to be regarded as more controversial in reference to those qualities of mind that belong largely or wholly to what philosophers call sentience than it is in reference to those that participate to at least some extent in what philosophers call sapience. Partly for this reason (i.e., partly because sentience is often taken to represent the hardest case for attempts to tie mental qualities directly to behavior), and partly for the sake of containing the length of my remarks, I take as my main exhibit a pair of remarks in which Wittgenstein is concerned with sensation and, specifically, with pain. 37  A mong the most influential to do so was Norman Malcolm; see, e.g., “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,” in Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1963), 96–129; and “Behaviorism as a Philosophy of Psychology,” in Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 85–103. 37  A lthough it is, I believe, widely held today that sentience represents a harder case than sapience for a view that ties aspects of mind directly to behavior, there is ample room for disagreement. Gilbert Ryle seems to have held, on the contrary, that the hardest cases are cases in which someone is sitting and thinking about something or other, with no obvious link to her behavior, and with no obvious link to any disposition to do something later. See, e.g., “The Thinking of Thoughts: What is ‘le Penseur’ doing?” in Collected Essays, 1929–1968: Collected Papers, vol. 2 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009), 494–510. (I am indebted to Cora Diamond for this reference to Ryle.) If I had written the current section with Ryle in mind, I would have adopted a different strategy, foregrounding a range of passages in Wittgenstein’s writings that tie forms of sapience directly to behavior, passages that here I merely refer to in passing. 36



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Sections 283–284 of the Investigations are designed to bring us to the recognition that, even if we are initially inclined to think otherwise, we ourselves are unsure about what it would be for pain to be severed from expressiveness. The sections work toward this goal by inviting us to imagine pain that lacks any direct tie to behavior and is thus ‘merely inner’. They invite us to imagine “having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted.”38 This exercise is to the point because any pains that a stone or other inanimate thing had would necessarily be detached from behavior and would thus be exclusively inner. But “how could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing?”39 Well, if I exert myself, I may be able stifle the expression of even quite terrible pain, remaining immobile and in this respect resembling a stone. Moreover, it is physiologically possible for me to be brought into a condition in which I suffer terrible pain without being able to express it. This happened, for instance, to the individuals who, during a period in the 1940s when the paralytic curare was wrongly believed by some doctors to have analgesic properties, were forced to undergo painful surgical procedures under curare’s influence.40 But when these people described their horrible sufferings, they talked about having had great urges to scream and move in different ways, and a stone isn’t the type of thing that has urges to do things like scream and move. People who are on morphine (or who have suffered certain brain lesions) sometimes claim to still feel the location and intensity of horrible pains they had been suffering while also claiming that they now no longer feel a strong urge to respond. But morphine-takers also generally connect their newfound tranquility with a reduction in pain. So their experiences fail to provide a model for horrible pain that doesn’t as such move its bearer to do anything. To form an image of such pain, we might try to take seriously the possibility that, say, the person sitting quietly in the office next door, breathing regularly and reading a book, and making no particular effort to do these things, is in horrible pain. The trouble is that it is not clear why, once we have severed our colleague’s allegedly horrible sensations from any direct link to human bodily expression—​once  Investigations, §283.  Ibid., §284. 40  For a discussion of this case, see Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psycholog y (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 209–219. 38 39

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we have as it were sedated the bearer of these sensations so that she is no longer impelled to respond—​we should think that we are left with anything recognizable as pain.41 Nor is this only a point about pain in human beings. Imagine the absurdity of trying to persuade someone that a dog who is now lying silently on the floor at our feet, breathing gently and gazing out at nothing in particular, and who has no relevant behavioral symptoms whatsoever, is in excruciating pain.42 The upshot is that we are entitled to reject the idea of pains that are ‘merely inner’ and to talk about a necessary tie between pain and modes of behavior. We are entitled to say, with Wittgenstein, that “only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains.”43 The idea of direct ties between aspects of mind and behavior is a central preoccupation of Wittgenstein’s, and, while the case of sensations is frequently regarded as the most contentious and might hence be taken to be the most significant for my purposes, there are many passages in which Wittgenstein grapples with this idea in reference to mental qualities of different kinds. For instance, he returns again and again to the thought that different forms of understanding are essentially behavioral.44 There is also a scattered set of passages in which he represents emotions as essentially expressive phenomena or, as he at one point puts it, as “pattern[s] that [recur], with different variations, in the  Wittgenstein makes a version of this point at Investigations, §391. It would be disingenuous to try to rebut the point by insisting on the relevance of pain asymbolia, a condition in which people report feeling the location and intensity of stimuli that would ordinarily cause great suffering yet aren’t inclined to respond in any way. To insist that people in this condition provide counterexamples simply begs the question. The question I am grappling with is about whether we can make sense of frightful pains that are as such detached from movement. The ‘pains’ of the person with asymbolia are substantially detached from movement, but it is not clear what would justify us in classifying them as instances of what we ordinarily call pain. For a helpful discussion of these matters, see Nikola Gahek, Feeling Pain and Being in Pain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 42  See Investigations, §250. 43  Ibid., §283. 44  Ibid., see, e.g., §§153–155, where Wittgenstein critically examines the idea that arithmetic understanding consists in a merely inner state such that we could investigate what it is like “quite apart from what it does.” He reminds us that we use behavioral criteria to determine whether someone has understood and that, by our own lights, it is therefore in principle possible that, for any given merely inner state we select, understanding could occur without it, or the state could be present without understanding. 41



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weave of our life.”45 Today it is not uncommon for philosophers to represent emotions as essentially made up of feelings together with belief-­ involving or object-directed behavior. (The idea is that, e.g., grief consists in a certain feeling combined with the belief that one has lost some prized object.) But even those who favor this kind of—​to use the current lingo—​cognitivist account of emotions might balk at the suggestion that there is an essentially behavioral dimension to the feelings integral to emotions. Yet in his remarks on emotions Wittgenstein makes a suggestion precisely along these lines. In one passage, he casts doubt on the idea that feelings of grief are merely inner by trying to get us to register the senselessness of saying of a man, “For a second he felt deep grief.”46 Wittgenstein’s thought, as I understand it, is that, if all that it is for a person to grieve is for her to have—​in addition to, say, certain beliefs about the loss of a valued object—​a merely inner episode, then it is of no consequence if the person is not inclined to dwell in thought on what she believes she lost, if she has no difficulty going about her ordinary pursuits with a cheerful demeanor, and so on. Now there is no reason to think that we might not encounter a person who felt deep grief for just a second or, alternately, one who regularly felt deep grief for just a second on every other Tuesday. What reflection on the inanity of these scenarios shows is that, just as in trying to separate horrible pains from expressiveness we render them unrecognizable as pains, in trying to separate feelings of grief from expressiveness, we render them unrecognizable as feelings of grief. These are the kinds of considerations that, within Wittgenstein’s writings, speak for conceiving feelings as constitutively related to modes of behavior.47 Having touched on these  See, e.g., his remarks on grief at ibid., 174.  Ibid. 47  For additional congenial remarks of Wittgenstein’s on grief and other emotions, see Investigations, §§536–537; Lectures on Philosophical Psycholog y, 1946–1947, from the notes of P. T. Geach et al., P. T. Geach, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 281– 282; and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psycholog y, vol. 1, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, eds., G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), §§448–450. While Wittgenstein’s view of the emotions is foreign to much philosophy of mind today, it is possible to find what seem to be expressions of it in the broader culture. E.g., in Henning Mankell’s novel Side-Tracked (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), a police officer remarks of a woman who has just set herself on fire in front of him and police inspector Wallander, “we don’t know what she was thinking . . . ​[and] may be imagining that she was frightened.” Wallander replies, “No, “I’ve seen enough fear in my life to know what it looks like” (33). 45

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considerations, I conclude the condensed case I am making, with Wittgenstein as a guide, for connecting aspects of mind immediately to expressive behavior.

2 . 2 . I I .  A N E T H I C A L E X T E R N A L I S M

Consider now what speaks for saying that psychological categories, which according to the argument of 2.2.i are categories for picking out behavioral or expressive patterns, thwart any attempt at reduction to physical terms.48 Non-reductive accounts are a dime a dozen in contemporary philosophy of mind, but the particular account I favor is distinctive. I work toward it below by developing lines of thought from Wittgenstein’s writings that speak for an approach to the mind that is aptly described as a form of externalism (i.e., insofar as it claims that, in order to do justice to the psychological significance of a bit of behavior, we need to refer to something external to that behavior). Externalist accounts of the mind are, admittedly, quite common.49 Nevertheless, the particular account I am about to present is unusual. It isn’t merely that externalisms don’t typically start from understandings of psychological categories that treat them as categories for determining patterns of behavior. Most externalisms stress that the content of at least some mental states is constituted by—​‘external’—​facts about individuals’ physical and social environments. 50 While it is no part of my ambition to deny that we sometimes need a reference to features of an individual’s physical and social environment to capture the psychological significance of her behavior, my emphasis in what follows is on making a case for a non-­ reductive approach to mind by showing that, in order to capture the  Wittgenstein repeatedly expresses sympathy for the view that psychological discourse is physically irreducible. See esp. Investigations, §§284 and 307–308, and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psycholog y, §314. 49  Classic externalisms are exclusively concerned with intentional mental states such as, e.g., beliefs and desires. Arguments for externalism about mental content are usually traced to the cases for semantic externalism in Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), and Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of Meaning,” in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–271. 50  The accent in the classic externalist texts of Kripke and Putnam is on external physical facts. For an influential case for bringing external social facts in an account of intentional mental states, see Tyler Burge, “Individualism and Psychology,” in The Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 3–45. 48



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psychological significance of an individual’s behavior, we invariably need a reference to some sort of specifically ethical conception. 51 The heart of my case for this ethical externalism is a discussion of what is involved in understanding different types of expressive behavior. Expressive behavior is helpfully conceived as forming a continuum that runs from, on the one hand, behavior that is wholly unlearned or part of creatures’ original natures to, on the other, behavior that is fully linguistic (i.e., behavior of the sort exhibited by a speaker when she expresses herself by saying something). Thus conceived, expressive behavior is the domain of animals as well as human beings. Whereas only mature human beings exhibit behavior that falls all along this continuum, and whereas animals of some kinds exhibit only unlearned behavior, many animals exhibit behavior that ranges from the fully unlearned up to quite sophisticated intermediate points. Taking my cue from these observations, I tell a story about conditions of understanding expressive behavior—​a nd of thereby understanding aspects of mind—​that is pertinent to human beings and animals alike. My larger claim is that grasping a human or non-human creature’s expressions is impossible apart from reference to a conception of what is important in the life of creatures of its kind. Since this claim is likely to seem least plausible in reference to the kind of full-blown linguistic expression that is the prerogative of human beings, I start with the linguistic case. The basic idea I want to defend is that a grasp of what a person is saying in producing a set of words involves a necessary reference to a conception of what matters in human life. While largely foreign to contemporary philosophy of language, this idea can be seen to emerge from a well-known set of conversations. With an eye to being as concise as possible, below I limit myself to giving an overview of these conversations. The view of language that I am after finds expression in Wittgenstein’s later remarks on language, and I take my initial bearings from his writings. A reasonable way to characterize the aspects of Wittgenstein’s later conception of language that interest me would be to speak of a special pragmatic emphasis. Having chosen to use this term, I should stress that  The claim I am here making—​u nlike the claims defended in some of the most wellknown externalist arguments—​is general, applying to non-representational as well as representational aspects of mind.

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the kind of pragmatic view that Wittgenstein favors is one that falls outside the framework of familiar debates in philosophy of language about the significance of ‘pragmatics’, understood as the study of those features of linguistic expressions that depend on their use. These debates tend to pivot on questions about the relationship between pragmatics and semantics, where semantics is understood as the study of those features of the relation between linguistic expressions and the world that determine truth and falsity. A great deal of contemporary philosophy of language is focused on semantic questions, and a recurring theme is that any reasonable semantic theory needs to include pragmatic considerations. Most philosophers of language hold that we should thus acknowledge the importance of pragmatics. Although most also assume that pragmatics is external to semantics in the sense that any pragmatic observations we make will amount at best to an addendum to semantic theory, this widely accepted view of the relation between semantics and pragmatics has some outspoken critics. A number of philosophers attempt to upend it, arguing that propensities and sensitivities we acquire in learning language—​propensities and sensitivities that are rightly thought of as pragmatic—​contribute internally to linguistic capacities that fall within the purview of semantics. The bits of Wittgenstein’s thought that I am about to touch on are consistent with this reversal of a standard view of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. The idea that our ability to answer semantic questions is logically dependent on pragmatic propensities is indeed an idea of Wittgenstein’s. I would, however, give a highly misleading impression of his pragmatic orientation if I represented it as limited to this idea. Unlike many contemporary philosophers of language, Wittgenstein does not treat describing states of affairs or reporting on the facts truly or falsely as the primary job of language. He is concerned with the open-ended range of things we do with words or, in other words, the open-ended range of our modes of linguistic expression. In speaking of a distinctive pragmatic emphasis, I am drawing attention to portions of his writing in which he suggests that we necessarily draw on pragmatic sensitivities in making sense of what a person is saying in a manner that is relevant to, among other things, determining whether her words invite evaluation in terms of truth or falsity, or whether they invite evaluation primarily in terms of some other standard.



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One line of reasoning in Wittgenstein’s later writings that speaks for this kind of emphasis on pragmatics has to do with what is sometimes called the priority of judgment. A signature thought of his writings is that judgments (or complete acts of speech) are logically prior in the sense that, if we want to determine the logical character of the sentential or sub-sentential expressions that compose them, we have to start with a grasp of the judgments and ask what logical contributions the relevant expressions make to them. Wittgenstein provides a defense of this thought in portions of his work in which he presents his distinctive view of the limits of sense. Throughout his work, in the Tractatus as well as later on, he maintains that logic is constitutive of thought in a sense that excludes the possibility that something might count as a thought yet lack logical structure. He repeatedly attacks the assumption that a combination of words or an utterance can fail to make sense because it, as it were, says something illogical. His thought is, as he puts it, that there is no such thing as a string of words that doesn’t make sense on account of the particular thing—​the supposedly “senseless sense”—​that it tries to say. 52 In making this gesture Wittgenstein is rejecting the presupposition that we can grasp the logical character of an expression outside the context of a judgment or speech situation. If we could thus grasp its logical character, then it would seem to follow, absurdly, that we could combine expressions in ways that produce logical clashes or ‘senseless senses’. It is in this way that, in laying out his view of the limits of sense, Wittgenstein makes a case for the priority of judgment. It is a small step from the priority of judgment to the pragmatic bent of Wittgenstein’s conception of language. To take seriously that judgments are logically prior is to take seriously that recognizing something as a judgment is not merely a matter of applying antecedently available rules for the meanings of its constituent expressions. Recognizing something as a judgment is, rather, a matter of seeing it as having a smooth and natural connection with other things that count as judgments. Wittgenstein develops this theme at length, for instance, in On Certainty, where he observes: “We use judgments as principles of judgments.”53 His point is that to deal in judgments we must have a sense for  Investigations, §§499–500. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes a version of this point as follows: “We cannot think anything illogical, for then we would have to think illogically” (3.03). 53  On Certainty, §124. See also §§128–131, 140, 348–351. 52

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the kinds of linguistic moves that speakers make or, alternately, a sense for the rich variety of kinds of things that people do with words, and such a sense belongs to pragmatics. That is what it comes to to represent Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy of language as having a special pragmatic emphasis. This pragmatic emphasis is philosophically controversial and stands in need of defense. One way to approach a defense is by criticizing opposing trends in philosophy of language. The relevant pragmatic view is, we might say, prompted by observations about the dependence of the meanings of linguistic expressions on the larger speech situation or context, and most philosophers of language today believe that it is possible to incorporate observations along these lines without taking the sort of pragmatic turn that is at issue. Admittedly, philosophers who adopt this stance for the most part assume that stating facts truly or falsely is the main task of language, and they accordingly for the most part take an interest in questions about context dependence only in reference to truth-evaluable statements. Consider in this connection members of the central set of philosophical views of language that are sometimes referred to as forms of invariantism. Invariantists tend to share the following very basic commitments. Taking it for granted that reporting truly or falsely on the facts is the primary business of language, they tend to insist that we need to appeal to aspects of a speech situation in order to eliminate ambiguities and determine how the indexical aspects of a sentence inform its (truth-evaluable) meaning. Further, they tend to maintain that it is in principle possible antecedently to formulate rules for making such determinations (i.e., rules for giving values to the parameters represented by the different indices) and hence that, far from essentially requiring a specifically practical sensitivity, the capacities possessed by mature speakers can be thought of as capacities for applying such rules. 54 Within the context of this kind of rigidly rule-governed account of linguistic competence, it appears that we can deal in truth-evaluable bits of language without the sorts of pragmatic sensitivities that Wittgenstein represents as necessary. Indeed, 54



 The sorts of familiar, rule-bound views of language that I am here referring to as invariantisms are also sometimes referred to as parameters-based (see François Recanati, Literal Meaning [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 85–86) or indexicalist views (see Charles Travis, “Pragmatics,” in Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Language [Oxford: Blackwell, 1999], 87–107, esp. 91–93).

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since now it appears that we can traffic in these bits of language independently of a feel for things we do with words, it also appears that we would be justified in following invariantists in treating fact-stating as a not only distinctive but also privileged function of language. There are, however, good grounds for mistrusting these appearances. Some suggestive criticisms of invariantism come from members of a group of philosophers who are described as contextualists. Taking their cue from invariantism, contextualists focus on questions about context dependence in reference to descriptive or fact-stating language. They argue that pragmatic sensitivities contribute internally to our ability to grasp the (true or false) claims expressed by particular combinations of words. Although there is something problematic about contextualists’ tendency to follow invariantists in fixating on truth and falsity, this line of criticism of invariantism remains valuable. A good place to turn in this connection is the work of Charles Travis. The heart of Travis’s rejoinder to invariantism is the thought that a pragmatic “occasion-­ sensitivity” internally informs our grasp of the contribution that ordinary empirical predicates make to the content of sentences. Consider, for example, a predicate for a physical quality such as “soft.”55 There are good reasons to doubt that we can antecedently identify the contribution that, in different contexts, this predicate makes to thoughts. Suppose, for example, that I am walking through my kitchen, showing someone trays of candies I just made and explaining that, while all have hard and brittle outer shells, and while some are hard throughout, some have a soft filling. Stopping in front of a tray of candies that fit this last description, I say, “These candies are soft.” Although what I say is true, I would be saying something false if, when a friend asks me for a confections that she can squish into the corners of a small candy box without damaging them, I point to the same tray and again say, “These candies are soft.” Even once we have assigned values to the parameters

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 For a rich trove of what are sometimes called “Travis-style examples,” see The Uses of Sense: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) and Unshadowed Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Many of Travis’s examples feature color predicates. Since some critics have charged that his main claims turn for their apparent soundness on peculiarities of those predicates, I here consider an empirical predicate of a different kind (“soft”). My remarks here follow the structure of Travis’s own examples.

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represented by the indexical elements of a sentence in which it figures, “soft” can make different contributions to what someone says in producing the sentence. Further, far from being limited to terms like “soft,” this point is general, applying to, among other things, color terms and terms for shape and physical placement. 56 It may seem as though invariantists can simply incorporate these Travis-style considerations into their preferred views of language. Why shouldn’t we say that linguistic expressions that exhibit the form of semantic variability that is in question are ambiguous and that they make different contributions to thoughts simply because we use them in different senses? With regard to “soft” in particular, the idea might be that there is a sense in which a thing with a hard outer surface and soft core is soft and also a sense in which such a thing is not soft. The trouble is that even if we use “soft” in the second of these senses (i.e., in the sense in which being soft is incompatible with having a hard surface), we may find that we sometimes say something true and sometimes say something false when we apply the term to a given object (say, a candy that, while gummy at room temperature, is currently frozen or a gooey marshmallow confection that has bits of hard toffee in it). With a little imagination we can see that, if we now speak of more senses of “soft,” this pattern will simply repeat itself. So talk of the ambiguity of “soft” doesn’t 56



 It might seem as though Travis’s point does not apply to familiar indexical elements of language such as, e.g., “he,” “it,” “here,” “now,” and so forth. It may seem to be part of the meaning of these terms that they determine antecedently specifiable aspects of speech situations. But consider the case of “here.” Suppose I am sitting at the table with a book I haven’t read lying open in front of me, so that some page around the middle of the book is visible. If a friend of mine who has walked past me into the kitchen without seeing me asks me where I am and I say, “I am here” and point immediately in front of me, I will have said something true. But if my friend asks me how far along I am in my book, and I say, “I am here,” and make the same gesture, I will have said something false. The problem isn’t simply that “here” is ambiguous and that we use it in two senses, in one of which it picks out physical spaces and in another in which it picks out logical positions in, say, positions in texts or musical scores. Even if we focus on the latter of these senses (i.e., the sense in which it picks out logical positions), we may still find that we sometimes say something true and sometimes say something false when, in a given context, we say, “I am here.” Suppose I am reading quickly through a math textbook, familiarizing myself with some of the concepts without doing any of the exercises. If you ask how far I have gotten with my reading, and I point to the page and say, “I am here,” I will have said something true. But if you want to know how far I have gotten with the exercises and I say, “I am here,” pointing to the same place in the text, I will have said something false.

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help the invariantist. Even once we have assigned values to the parameters represented by the indexical elements of a sentence in which it figures, “soft” can make an indefinite, and antecedently unspecifiable, number of contributions to what someone says in producing the sentence. Nor will it help to protest that that the choice of “soft” is contrived because, as it may seem, it picks out a concept that is unusually vague. It is customary in philosophy to speak of vagueness in reference to thoughts that lack determinate truth-values, and, as the above examples illustrate, we can easily use “soft” in contexts in which it contributes to thoughts that are anything but vague in this sense. Yet, even if there were something unusual about the case of “soft,” it would be possible to make the same point in reference to an indefinitely large range of other predicates. There is thus good reason to doubt that we can arrive at rules that antecedently capture the contributions that terms make, in different contexts, to the content of factual claims that they are used to express. 57 By the same token, there is good reason to reject invariantists’ rule-based vision of our competence with fact-stating language. 58  It might seem possible to deprive the Travis-style example I adduced in support of this conclusion of its force by claiming that it involves a sentence that is elliptical for a longer sentence. The idea would be that, once we formulate ‘non-elliptical sentences’, we eliminate any semantic variability that persists even once we have assigned values to the parameters represented by a sentence’s indexical elements. But it is not clear why the move from generic to allegedly non-elliptical sentences should help here. Suppose, e.g., that in a given context I said not “These candies are soft” but rather “These candies depress at least 1/8 of an inch without damage when submitted to 1 pound of pressure.” It requires but a little ingenuity to see that, even once its indexical elements have been pinned down to a particular context, this sentence could be used to say something true or something false. No further expansion of the sentence will absolutely exclude this kind of semantic variability. 58  It would be wrong to protest that Travis et al. are not exhaustive enough in their survey of strategies for generating such rules. Perhaps we should proceed like this. We could collect every case we can find in which “This candy is soft” is used and, in reference to this set of uses, we could formulate rules for the semantic contribution of “soft.” Then we could do the same thing for sentences in which “soft” is predicated, not of candy, but of other objects. We might then claim to have an exhaustive set of rules for the contribution “soft” makes to thoughts on different occasions of use. But this claim would be unjustified. No matter how rigorous we were in collecting cases there is no way to exclude the possibility that “soft” makes a contribution to the expression of a thought that our rules don’t cover. Moreover, the fact that we cannot say with justification that we have produced a satisfactory set of rules obliges us to conclude that, in trying to generalize such rules, we are drawing on some sense of what sentences involving “soft” say that isn’t determined by such rules. 57

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To the extent that contextualist critiques of invariantism are concerned exclusively with fact-stating language, they fail to bring us all the way to the distinctive pragmatic view that above I associated with Wittgenstein’s later thought. But there is an important respect in which the critiques move us in this direction. To begin with, if—​following up on these critiques—​we allow that pragmatic sensitivities contribute internally to our grasp of all truth-evaluable language, we lose one justification invariantists might have taken us to have for privileging such language. Moreover, the sorts of examples that Travis and others use to get us to see that pragmatic sensitivities necessarily inform our grasp of truth-evaluable language might, with subtle but significant alterations, also be used to get us to see that such sensitivities necessarily inform our grasp of all language, whether fact-stating or not. The point of Travis’s examples is to elicit the recognition that, apart from a pragmatic sense of what a speaker is doing with her words on some occasion, we are not in a position to grasp what she is saying well enough to make a determination of truth or falsity. Travis himself tends to assume that speakers who utter or write the—​declarative—​sentences that figure in his examples are making truth-evaluable claims. But it would not be difficult to use variations on his examples to demonstrate that this assumption is unwarranted. We could easily find examples to show that, even once we have assigned values to the parameters represented by the indexical elements of a particular sentence, the sentence can be used to express not only claims with different truth-values but also entreaties, rebukes, forms of reassurance, jokes, and so on. 59 We could use such examples to elicit the recognition that, apart from a pragmatic sense of what a person is doing with her words on some occasion, we aren’t in a position to determine whether she is saying something that invites evaluation in terms of truth or falsity; whether she is saying something that at least primarily invites evaluation in some other terms; or whether she has perhaps failed to say anything meaningful at all. We might in this way arrive at the view, championed by Wittgenstein, that language is not “everywhere bounded by rules”60 and that all  Avner Baz carries out an exercise along these lines using one of Travis’s own examples in chap. 4 of When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 60  Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., §84. 59



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linguistic understanding necessarily involves forms of context sensitivity that are rightly classed as pragmatic. Now we have before us a description of the kind of pragmatic view of language that interests me. It is not difficult to see how ethical considerations come into play. At issue is a view on which linguistic understanding invariably starts with the recognition of the utterance of a given combination of words as the performance of an intelligible act. To be linguistically competent we have to operate with a sense of the kinds of things speakers can meaningfully do, and there is a straightforward respect in which such a sense belongs to ethics. A sense of the kinds of things speakers can meaningfully do is inseparable from a sense of the kinds of things that give our endeavors a point or, alternately, a sense of the kinds of things that are important in our lives. To be sure, the claim that a sense of what matters in human life invariably informs linguistic understanding is likely to strike many philosophers as in tension with the very idea of objectivity in language. I turn to related topics below in 2.2.iii. Right now I simply want to observe that, to the extent that the pragmatic view of language I just laid out represents linguistic understanding as necessarily informed by ethical concerns, it asks us to construe such understanding as an essentially ethical affair. A good case can be made for an analogous claim about the understanding of non-linguistic modes of expression, including various modes of expression that are characteristic not only of human beings but also of animals of different kinds. The idea of an essentially ethical dimension to the understanding of non-linguistic modes of expression may well seem less heretical than does the idea of such a dimension to linguistic understanding. Because language is an artifact, it may be tempting to believe, with invariantists, that linguistic understanding is rule-governed in a way that excludes any necessary reliance on ethical conceptions. This belief loses its appearance of plausibility as we move away from linguistic understanding and toward the understanding of progressively less sophisticated non-linguistic modes of expression. Partly for this reason, I proceed more quickly in discussing how ethical considerations inform such understanding, focusing exclusively on modes of expression that are unlearned as well as non-linguistic. The centerpiece of my case for an essentially ethical dimension of linguistic understanding is the pragmatic view that I initially introduced by talking about the ‘priority of judgment’. I want to ground my case for 76

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an essentially ethical dimension of the understanding of unlearned modes of expression, in a similar manner, in a pragmatic view that is aptly placed under the heading of the priority of the complete expression. In speaking of the priority of the complete expression, I am self-­consciously introducing a notion that is both more general than and inclusive of the notion of the priority of judgment. A larger claim of this section is that we need to start with a grasp of the significance of complete modes of expression, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, in order to be in a position to determine the significance of their constituent parts (e.g., individual terms or gestures). With regard to unlearned modes of expres­­sion, the idea is that recognizing something as an expression of a given aspect of mind is a matter, not of applying antecedently available rules for the psychological significance of isolated physical movements in ­certain contexts, but rather of seeing a pattern of behavior as having the same essential psychological significance as other behavior that counts as expressive of the relevant mental quality. Our ability to pick out such patterns presupposes that we have a sense of the place that that mental quality has in the lives of the (human or non-human) ­creatures in question, and such a sense belongs to pragmatics, broadly construed.61 To accept this pragmatic view is to reject the idea that recognizing something as an unlearned expression of an aspect of mind is at bottom a matter of applying antecedently available rules for the psychological significance of certain physical gestures. Part of what speaks against this idea is the open-ended physical variability of unlearned modes of expression. Even if we limit ourselves to the unlearned expressiveness of human beings, there can be no question of a physical account of what expressions of a given aspect of mind are like that by itself equips us to authoritatively identify new instances. One human being may very well naturally express, say, a particular emotion or sensation with physical gestures that others either don’t use at all or use to express different mental dispositions.62 Expanding the scope of our inquiry to include  I am generalizing the understanding of pragmatics introduced earlier in the section so that now what is in question is not a concern with those features of linguistic expressions that depend on their use but concern with those features of all—​non-linguistic as well as linguistic—​e xpressions that depend on their use. 62  For some interesting discussions of the physical variability of human expressiveness, consider the literature on atypical emotional expression in people with schizophrenia 61



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the unlearned expressiveness of animals of different kinds, the point isn’t merely that no description of physical gestures would equip us to authoritatively pick out, for instance, unlearned expressions of fear in chickadees, dolphins, and domestics cats as well as in members of as of yet unencountered species. The point is that, within given species, individual animals exhibit the same sort of natural expressive variability that human beings do.63 This is not an attack on the practice, within observational psychology, of what is called the coding of human and animal expressive behavior, that is, the describing of such behavior in explicit physical terms. It is an implication of the line of thought that I am developing that researchers’ ability to code appropriately is parasitic on a pragmatic understanding of the lives of the human or animal subjects they are studying, as well as on a sense of the role of the targeted aspect of mind within those lives, pragmatically understood. (E.g., if, in an observational study of the sympathetic reactions of very young children, researchers set out to code sympathetic behavior, their efforts depend for their success on a pragmatic understanding of human life and of the place of sympathy in it.64 Or again, if, in an observational study of jealousy in dogs, researchers set out to code jealous behavior, their efforts

(see, e.g., Louis Sass, “Contradictions of Emotions in Schizophrenia,” in Cognition and Emotion 21 [2007]: 351–390), or the literature on atypical pain expression in people with autism (see, e.g., Sylvie Tordjman et al., “Pain Reactivity and Plasma ß-Endorphin in Children and Adolescents with Autistic Disorder,” in PLoS ONE 8, available at e5289, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005289). For helpful general discussions of expressive variability in people with autism, see Jonathan Chalier, “Otherwise Specified: Investigating Autism and Philosophy of Mind” (Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 2014); and Ian Hacking, “Humans, Aliens and Autism,” Dædalus 138 (2009): 44–59. Both Chalier and Hacking are preoccupied with the sorts of questions about the ethical demands of understanding human beings who don’t express themselves ‘typically’ that I address later in this book. 63  Thus, e.g., some dogs growl and snap to express not fear and a willingness to attack but rather happiness. 64  For an illustration, see Amrisha Vaish, Melinda Carpenter, and Michael Tomasello, “Sympathy through Affective Perspective Taking and Its Relation to Prosocial Behavior in Toddlers,” Developmental Psycholog y 45 (2009): 534–543. Vaish et al. make it clear that they believe that it is against the backdrop of what I would describe as a pragmatic understanding of human life—​a n understanding that includes, among other things, an appreciation of things that count as injuries for a human being—​t hat the physical gestures that they isolate are recognizable as expressions of sympathy (see esp. 537).

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depend for their success on a pragmatic understanding of canine life and of the place of jealousy within it.65) It is also an implication of the line of argument that I am developing that no coding can by itself be used to authoritatively circumscribe a mode of expressive behavior. By my lights, it is invariably possible that, guided by their pragmatic understanding of the lives of their human or animal subjects, researchers will discover that a bit of coding either wrongly includes some behavior that does not express a targeted aspect of mind, or that it wrongly excludes some behavior that does in fact do so. But these challenges of behavioral coding are widely recognized. Psychologists routinely discuss pertinent methodological issues.66 Far from being in conflict with the things I am saying here, the coding practices of observational psychologists provide support for my claim that there is an irredeemably pragmatic dimension to the understanding of unlearned expressive behavior. We are not only on good ground, but also in good company, in maintaining that the recognition of unlearned expressive behavior invariably presupposes a pragmatic sense of the life of the human or animal whose behavior is in question. There can be no question of competently thinking and talking about human beings’ and animals’ unlearned modes of expression in a manner that doesn’t draw on a sense of the psychologically significant ways in which human beings and animals of different kinds can behave. Such a sense is equivalent to a sense of the point of the behavior of human beings and animals of different kinds or, alternately, to a sense of what matters in human and animal lives, and such a sense belongs to ethics. So there is an essentially ethical  For an illustration, see Christine R. Harris and Caroline Prouvost, “Jealousy in Dogs,” in PLoS ONE 9 (2014). In their remarks on coding, Harris and Prouvost indicate that they believe it is in the context of a pragmatic understanding of canine life—​v iz., an understanding that includes, among other things, an appreciation of the importance that a relationship to a human companion can have for a dog—​t hat the physical gestures they identify can be seen as expressions of jealousy. 66  Harris and Prouvost (ibid.) acknowledge that their coding of dogs’ jealous behavior may fail to capture some genuine expressions of jealousy (e.g., some involving ear tilting and tail positioning), and they also acknowledge that any single behavior coded as jealous “may not be indicative of jealousy per se.” Similarly, in “Sympathy through Affective Perspective Taking,” Vaish et al. acknowledge that their coding of young children’s sympathetic behavior may fail to capture some genuine expressions of sympathy (e.g., some looks that, while concerned, aren’t directed toward the study’s “victim”). 65



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dimension to the understanding of unlearned expressions of aspects of mind. Suppose we combine this argument with my earlier argument for an essentially ethical dimension of the understanding of linguistic expressiveness. Suppose we also assume that we could show that there is an essentially ethical dimension to the understanding of modes of expression that fall between the fully unlearned and the fully linguistic. The result is that we can represent ethical considerations as contributing internally to the understanding of all modes of psychological expression. We can say that our categories for human and animal expressive behavior have necessary references to ethically loaded conceptions of human and animal lives. It might be tempting to dismiss this conclusion as at best tangentially related to how we conceive of minds. At issue is a conclusion about the nature of our categories for expressive behavior, and, if we assume that modes of expression and mental qualities are only accidently connected, it won’t seem to bear directly on what minds are like. But against the backdrop of 2.2.i’s reflections on necessary ties between aspects of mind and modes of expressive behavior, it is fair to take the current section’s claims about what is involved in understanding different modes of expressiveness as claims about what is involved in bringing aspects of mind clearly into focus. What emerges is a view that treats mental categories as having necessary (‘external’) references to ethical conceptions and that, as I suggested above, might well be placed under the rubric of an “ethical externalism” about the mind. I am interested in this externalism in part because I believe that it has transformative implications for how we conceive of mental phenomena. There is, however, a danger that, far from seeming philosophically radical, it will seem to be nothing more than a somewhat unusual variation on the materialist themes that dominate contemporary philosophy of mind.

2 . 2 . I I I .  A R E A L I S T I C A P P R O A C H T O M I N D S AND MORALS

Taken in isolation, the argument for an ethical externalism about the mind presented in the last two sections (2.2.i and 2.2.ii) is consistent with a couple of very basic materialist doctrines. The claim that

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psychological categories are irremediably ethical might be heard as a pitch for a sort of eliminativism about the mind. It might, that is, be heard as a pitch for a view on which mental discourse is taken to be merely folkish and metaphysically unilluminating and hence best discarded—​or ‘eliminated’—​in favor of a scientific vocabulary that is presumed to be more authoritative. Alternately, the claim that psychological categories are irreducibly ethical might be received as a brief for a type of non-reductive materialism. It might, that is, be received as a brief for a materialist view on which psychological discourse is conceived as resisting any meaningful reduction to physical terms and on which, despite thus lacking metaphysical transparency, it is also conceived as somehow cognitively authoritative. Despite the fact that by itself my case for an ethical externalism admits materialist interpretations, it would be wrong to interpret it as a case for a materialist doctrine. It is situated against the backdrop of 2.1’s attack on the—​in my terms, ‘narrower’—​conception of objectivity that appears to underwrite a materialist metaphysic. In addition to attacking the narrower conception of objectivity, 2.1 sets the stage for a defense of an alternative conception that departs from materialism by depicting the objective realm as ‘wide’ enough to encompass not only physical qualities but also non-physical, perceptual, and evaluative ones. Within a widely objective context, there is no a priori obstacle to combining an account of some region of discourse as irreducibly ethical with an understanding of it as metaphysically transparent. So there is no a priori obstacle to combining an account of psychological discourse as irreducibly ethical with the—​decidedly non-materialist—​view that thus understood psychological discourse is metaphysically transparent. By the same token, there is no a priori obstacle to representing an ethically irreducible account of psychological discourse as a distinctive form of what at this chapter’s opening I called ‘commonsense realism about the mind’.67  These remarks are a response to, among other things, the worry about objectivity in language that I touched on in the last subsection. What drives the worry in question is the thought that we can’t treat linguistic understanding as having an essentially ethical dimension without losing our entitlement to represent it as objectively authoritative. But this is wrong. It is possible to formulate the point I am making here in the text as a point about how this chapter’s defense of the wider conception of objectivity

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Although there is no a priori barrier here, it might seem as though there are nevertheless good a posteriori grounds for refusing to represent the type of ethical externalism that I am defending as a realist account of mind. According to this externalist view, we necessarily draw on ethical conceptions of human and animal lives in applying psychological categories to human beings and animals. To the extent that we represent psychological discourse thus understood as objectively authoritative, we imply that our ethical conceptions of human and animal lives may be objectively faithful to these lives, and it may seem as though there can be no question of arriving at ethical conceptions that achieve this status. The difficulties may seem particularly intractable in connection with the idea of an ethical conception of human life. This is because, as Philippa Foot once put it, “there is so much diversity in human beings and human cultures” that the prospect of a conception of what matters in human life tout court may seem to be “inapplicable from the start.”68 The worry to which Foot gives voice is a significant one, and I want to respond with a methodological suggestion. In the pursuit of a conception of what is important in human life, we can proceed by turning our attention to mental ascriptions that are capable of surviving critical scrutiny and establishing themselves as authoritative. Some eliminativists maintain that no mental ascriptions fit this description. But to show that they are entitled to this view they would need to demonstrate that they can bring mental talk into question in even the most ordinary and seemingly unproblematic cases, and I see no reason to think that a demonstration on these lines is forthcoming.69 eliminates a priori obstacles to allowing that a mode of intellectual contact with the world that is non-abstract in the sense of being ethically inflected can as such be objectively authoritative. This point applies to the understanding of all modes of expression, the linguistic as well as the non-linguistic. 68  See Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 43. Although she raises this objection, Foot believes that we can specify things that are, in an ethical sense, necessary for human life. Later in this book I discuss relevant parts of Foot’s work in detail. 69  To give such a demonstration would be to directly answer what might be called “Strawson’s challenge.” In his famous essay “Freedom and Resentment” (in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays [New York: Routledge, 2008], 1–28), P. F. Strawson discusses how we sometimes set aside the psychological terms that we ordinarily use to describe human behavior, describing people in exclusively non-psychological terms and thereby adopting what he calls “the objective attitude” on them. Although we do

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There is no problem about proceeding here by looking to the kinds of circumstances to which mental categories straightforwardly apply. Suppose, then, that we consider what children are doing when they are first learning to think and talk about pleasure, pain, joy, and fear. In light of the argument of 2.2.ii, it should be clear that such learning presupposes modes of interest and attention that reflect a sense of the importance of things like, say, bodily integrity and physical freedom. Suppose, further, that we consider what children are doing when they are first learning to think and talk about love and hatred. Such learning presupposes modes of interest and attention that reflect a sense of the importance of things like reliable companionship and social acceptance. Lastly, suppose that we consider what we are doing when we first come to think and talk about more sophisticated forms of pleasure, pain, joy, fear, love, and hatred. If we allow ourselves to imagine a range of cases we can see that in many of them learning presupposes modes of interest and attention that reflect a sense of the importance of things like language and memory. This, then, is a rough sketch of how we might persuade ourselves that it is possible to arrive at a conception of what matters in human life that is capable of informing objectively authoritative modes of thought. Something similar can be said about how to arrive at faithful conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of different kinds. However unattainable such conceptions may initially seem, we can approach them by turning our attention to attributions of mental qualities to animals that are capable of surviving critical scrutiny and establishing themselves as authoritative. Just as some philosophers deny the possibility of unproblematic attributions of mental qualities to human beings, some deny the same possibility in connection with animals. This includes a fair number of behavioristically inclined animal researchers. Yet, in order to discredit all mental thought and talk in reference to animals, these thinkers would need to show that they can bring such thought and talk into question in even the seemingly least problematic cases, and the prospects for a demonstration along these lines are no this in individual cases, there can, according to Strawson, be no question of adopting this attitude globally while still keeping the stuff of human life before our eyes (esp. 14). I am here agreeing with Strawson and suggesting that some eliminativists present themselves, wrongly, as able to meet the challenge with which he confronts us.



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better here than they are in the human case. There is no obstacle to proceeding by looking to contexts in which mental categories apply to animals in an entirely straightforward manner. We might accordingly consider what children are doing when they are first learning to think and talk about pleasure, joy, and fear in reference to, say, dogs. Again, taking our bearings from 2.2.ii, it should be clear that such learning presupposes modes of interest and attention that reflect a sense of the importance to dogs of things like bodily integrity and physical freedom. If we then consider what children are doing when they are first learning to think and talk about affection in reference to dogs, we should be able to see that such learning presupposes modes of interest and attention that reflect a sense of the importance to dogs of social bonds. And we might tell a parallel story about what is involved in learning to apply mental categories not merely to dogs but to animals of different kinds. The result is a strategy, one analogous to the strategy I recommended in the human case, for persuading ourselves that we can produce conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of different kinds that are capable of informing objectively authoritative modes of thought. This section has been devoted to showing that the ethical externalism about the mental that I defended in the last section (2.2.ii) qualifies as a realist doctrine. One thing that distinguishes this ‘ethical externalism’ is that it represents psychological discourse as irreducibly ethical, and at this section’s opening I cleared the way for a realist interpretation of the view by observing that there are no a priori obstacles to combining an account of psychological discourse as thus ethically irreducible with an understanding of it as metaphysically transparent. I then argued that there are also no a posteriori obstacles to crediting the particular ethically irreducible account of psychological discourse that I favor with being metaphysically transparent. The upshot is that it is fair to represent the ethical externalism that interests me not only as a realist view but, more specifically, as a form of what I have been calling ‘commonsense realism about the mind’. In drawing this conclusion I am fulfilling the promise I made at the end of 2.1.iii to show that, instead of representing a mere metaphysical possibility, what I am calling the ‘wider’ conception of objectivity is in fact realized. At issue is a conception capacious enough to include within its scope some qualities with essential references to subjectivity, and what I have shown thus far in this chapter is that psychological qualities are subjective qualities that do in fact 84

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count as objective. But my main emphasis has not been on a metaphysical point about our entitlement to ‘widen’ our conception of objectivity. I have been primarily concerned to show that the ethically inflected form of commonsense realism about the mind that this broad metaphysic brings within reach represents a noteworthy contribution to philosophy of mind. By way of closing, I return to this chapter’s larger theme and suggest that it also represents a striking contribution to ethics.

2 . 3 .   I N S I D E E T H I C S

The larger project in this chapter was to defend the view that human beings and animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics and that they thus qualify as ‘inside ethics’ in the sense of this book. I carried out the project by presenting an argument for what I referred to as an ethically inflected ‘commonsense realism about the mind’. According to this form of commonsense realism, psychological concepts are objectively authoritative concepts that pick out certain observables, namely, the expressive behaviors of human beings and animals. Moreover, the observable behavioral patterns that these concepts pick out are patterns that are only available in terms of specific ethical conceptions. So bringing psychological concepts to bear on a creature essentially involves looking at her through the lens of an ethically charged conception of the life of creatures of her kind. We can gloss these reflections about the nature of human and animal mental qualities, and about how ethical concerns permeate our thought about such qualities, by saying that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics. That, very concisely, is what I mean by saying that human beings and animals are ‘inside ethics’. This image of human beings and animals has transformative implications for how we conceive of ethics. The rest of this book is devoted to further developing my argument for the image and discussing how it changes our understanding of the ethical enterprise. The purpose of the remainder of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for what is to come. One way in which this book’s case for locating human beings and animals inside ethics promises to transform our conception of ethics is by changing our understanding of what moral thought is like, and of where to look for it. It is, as I noted in 1.1, common for moral philosophers to take it for granted that moral thought is the prerogative of

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moral judgments, where these are understood as judgments that apply moral concepts (such as, e.g., “good,” “wrong,” “courageous,” and “selfish”). A striking implication of this chapter’s argument is that this focus on moral judgments is misguided. I have already argued that thought about the minded lives of human beings and animals necessarily draws on ethical considerations. In a moment, I also argue that such thought provides the ground on which moral judgments operate, and I claim that, for these reasons, it needs to be included in any reasonable account of what moral thinking is like. But before developing this point, I need to make a comment about its scope. I am proposing to bring under the heading of “moral thinking” thought about aspects of human beings’ and animals’ minds or psychologies. There is a danger that it will seem as though I am concerned merely with an easily circumscribed set of concepts—​of the sort that might get used, say, in the titles of university courses in psychology—​for sensory, emotional and cognitive characteristics. So I should stress that the argument of 2.1 and 2.2 has a bearing not merely on a specialized class of such psychological or mental concepts but on members of the vast and open-ended class of concepts that we require to do justice to human and animal expressive life in its messy entirety. This is the class of concepts to which I am referring in arguing that moral thought includes applications of concepts for aspects of mind or psychological characteristics. Before proceeding, I want to anticipate two potential misunderstandings. Although I am proposing to place thought about aspects of mind under the heading of “moral thought,” I am not making the absurd claim that it is impossible to think about mental characteristics outside of clearly ethical contexts. I return to this topic a little later in this section. Right now I simply want to note that my case for including judgments about aspects of mind within moral thought is grounded in the observation, not that such judgments invariably occur in ethical contexts, but rather that, without regard to where they occur, they necessarily draw on ethical concerns. My thought, which I have yet to defend, is that the judgments in question thereby necessarily contribute to the formation of the non-neutral landscape within which moral judgments function. This observation leads me to a second potential misunderstanding. I am claiming that we need to expand our conception of moral thinking

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so that it includes more than moral judgments. But it would be wrong to suppose that I am thus merely calling for a new category of moral thinking—​ namely, thinking about psychological characteristics or aspects of mind—​without implying the need to transform the way we conceive of moral judgments. In addition to inviting us to construe moral thinking as comprising more than moral judgments, my main line of reasoning speaks for a new understanding of what these judgments are like. When, in 1.1, I discussed moral judgments, I observed that it is natural to understand them as both ‘objectivist’ (i.e., as essentially matters of sensitivity to how things are in the world) and ‘internalist’ (i.e., as internally related to action and choice). I also noted that, if we accept an account of moral judgments that combines objectivism and internalism in the most straightforward manner, we commit ourselves to an idea of ‘objective moral values’ (i.e., values that are both objective and essentially practical). And I mentioned that moral philosophers generally make what I called ‘hard’ metaphysical assumptions that exclude the possibility of such values, and that this commits them to trying to account for our ordinary understanding of moral judgments without appealing to an idea of such values. What I want to suggest now is not only that the current chapter’s argument demystifies the idea of objective moral values but also that it thereby positions us to embrace an intuitively attractive account of moral judgments that takes at face value our ordinary understanding of them as both objectivist and internalist. The main conclusion of my argument is that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics. To talk about such moral char­­ acteristics is to talk about things that count as ‘objective moral values’ in the sense at issue here. Objective moral values are, of course, supposed to be objective, and above I defended a—​‘wider’—​conception of objectivity that licenses us to take the aspects of mind that I claim are moral characteristics to be objective features of human and animal life. Objec­­ tive moral values are also supposed to be essentially practical (see the opening of Chapter 1), and, although I haven’t specifically addressed this issue, it seems reasonable to think that, as I presented them in 2.2.ii, human and animal mental characteristics have immediate practical relevance. One of my central claims about these characteristics is that



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they have essential references to conceptions of what matters in the lives of the human or non-human creatures who possess them. Mental characteristics are only at home in human and animal lives in which some things matter in that they are, say, to-be-feared, to-be-sought, to-beeaten, to-be-protected, or to-be-befriended. Our ability to recognize creatures as possessing such characteristics presupposes that we have already at least imaginatively adopted an attitude toward them as beings who are caught up in such lives and who accordingly, in appropriate circumstances, merit specific modes of concern and attention. It is in this respect, insofar as they are aspects of the lives of creatures who call for particular forms of response, that the mental characteristics of human beings and animals are essentially practical. Given that they are thus both objective and essentially practical, it is fair to say that these characteristics present us with objective moral values. To the extent that ordinary human and animal existence affords an enormously rich supply of psychological characteristics, it is an abundant source of such values. Despite general philosophical antipathy to the idea of objective moral values, these values are embedded in pervasive and entirely unmysterious features of animate life. This strategy for demystifying the idea of objective moral values brings within reach an understanding of moral judgments that is both distinctive and appealing. Consider in this connection members of the core class of moral judgments that involve assessments of human actions.70 In assessing an individual action, we are asking whether it reflects an appropriate responsiveness to the circumstances at hand. It is natural to interpret this as a question about appropriate responsiveness to—​practical and hence moral—​values encoded in the relevant circumstances. An analysis of a central class of moral judgments can in this way suggest the idea of objective moral values. Although it is common for moral philosophers to try to account for moral judgments without helping themselves to this idea, there is in fact no need to abstain. The world is filled with things that are endowed with objective moral values, namely, human beings and animals. Hence we are right to 70

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 Some moral judgments involve assessments of human beings’ persons and personal characteristics, but these assessments are arguably parasitic on prior assessments of actions. It is an implication of this book’s argument, an implication that I explicitly consider in the next chapter, that there is no obstacle to discovering further classes of moral judgments that are concerned with the actions of non-human animals.

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take at face value a natural understanding of moral judgments as worldguided assessments of appropriate responsiveness to these values. At this point we have an outline of how an image of human beings and animals as inside ethics changes our understanding of what moral thought is like. The image equips us to see that thought about aspects of mind is essentially shaped by moral considerations and, further, that such thought brings into view a rich and variegated realm of objective moral values. The image also equips us to recognize that our thinking about aspects of mind furnishes the ground on which moral judgments function. Now it seems clear that we need to revise our conception of moral thought in two closely connected ways. We need to revise it so that it includes more than moral judgments, and we also need to revise it so that it features a transformed account of moral judgments on which they presuppose a more fundamental kind of moral thinking that is concerned with getting human beings and animals empirically in focus. This change in how we conceive of the nature of moral thought has substantial implications for how we conceive of the difficulty of such thought. Any plausible account we give of the difficulty of moral thought needs to address an issue that invariably gets obscured in the work of moral philosophers who situate human beings and animals outside ethics. Such an account needs to discuss specifically moral challenges of bringing human beings and animals empirically into view in ethics. The empirically discoverable qualities of human beings and animals that count as moral are psychological qualities, and, in presenting my preferred account of these qualities, I observed that they have essential references to conceptions of what matters in the lives of the human beings and animals who possess them. I also observed that bringing these qualities into focus essentially involves being able and willing to look at the human beings and animals who possess them in the light of these ethical conceptions (2.2.ii). It follows that a certain exercise of moral imagination is required when we are trying to bring human beings and animals empirically into focus in ethics. It also follows that such an exercise is required when we are trying to do justice to the psychological characteristics of human beings and animals in non-ethical contexts. With an eye to capturing what is distinctive about the ethical contexts that are my main concern, I want to say something about their non-ethical counterparts.

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Consider the case of observational psychologists studying specific mental qualities of human beings or animals. Within research in observational psychology, mental qualities may be ‘coded’ or given explicitly physical descriptions, and it is, as I noted in 2.2.ii, a consequence of my argument that researchers’ ability to code exploits pragmatic—​a nd ­ethical—​conceptions of the lives of their human or animal subjects. Although the understandings of human or animal mindedness that researchers appeal to in coding are necessarily informed by ethical ­considerations, and although any coding researchers rely on is in this indirect sense ethically inflected, there are two respects in which researchers are entitled to limit the role in their work of ethical considerations. To begin with, as long as there are no legitimate questions about the adequacy of their coding, they can bracket the ethical considerations that originally shaped their understandings of the qualities of mind that they are studying. If legitimate questions about the adequacy of their coding do arise, they will have to revisit these understandings, and it is true that they will then have to deal (however implicitly) in ethical considerations. It’s not merely that, in again trying to understand whichever mental qualities they take to be of interest, they necessarily appeal to ethical conceptions of the lives of the creatures who possess the qualities. More significantly, they can’t exclude the possibility that, in order to successfully improve on their understandings of these qualities, they will have to refine the conceptions and try looking at their human or animal subjects in the light of a new idea of what matters in their lives. This brings me to a second respect in which psychologists who use observational methods are justified in limiting the role of ethical considerations in their work. Although, if questions arise about the adequacy of their coding, they can’t help but confront the kind of demand for moral imagination just described, there is a sense in which they are entitled to limit this demand. Because they can specify ahead of time which human or animal mental qualities are of interest, they need only be willing to readjust the ethical conceptions that inform their thought insofar as doing so enables them to grasp the quality or qualities in question. In sum, researchers can for the most part simply set aside the exercise of moral imagination that I am describing, and, when they can’t set it aside, they can still effectively limit its scope.

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Things are very different when we are trying to bring human beings and animals empirically into focus in ethics. Here we cannot responsibly limit the challenges of moral imagination that we confront in either of the ways that are legitimate within observational psychology. First, there can be no question of bracketing the ethical considerations that inform our empirical grasp of human beings or animals we encounter in ethically charged situations. For it is a standing possibility that, in order to do empirical justice to human beings or animals in ethics, we will need to revise or further develop our conceptions of what matters in their lives. Further, there can be no question of limiting the imaginative exercise that we accordingly face by specifying ahead of time which aspects of human beings’ or animals’ lives are of interest. For we cannot exclude the possibility that, once we have refined our conception of what matters in these lives, our understanding of them will shift, revealing that characteristics that once struck us as unimportant are in fact morally salient. Arriving at an adequate empirical understanding of the lives of human beings and animals in ethics thus imposes distinctive demands for moral imagination. In later chapters, I discuss ways in which we can fail to meet the relevant imaginative challenges, thereby saddling ourselves with distorted accounts of human and animal existence. I also discuss how we can productively respond to cases of such failure (4.2–4.3 and 6.2–6.4). When, in the pages that follow, I address questions about the difficulty of moral thought, I will, as just indicated, emphasize moral challenges of bringing human beings and animals empirically into focus in ethics. But this is not my only emphasis. I am not suggesting that the only task we confront as moral thinkers is achieving an appropriate empirical understanding of the lives of human beings and animals. We can achieve such an understanding and yet still fail to register its bearing on a particular situation. We can, for one reason or another, fail to appreciate connections between an undistorted, ethically inflected empirical understanding of a human being or animal and practical conclusions that such an understanding in fact supports. This book’s illustrations are concerned not only with attempts to do empirical justice in ethics to the lives of human beings and animals but, at the same time, with attempts to call attention to important practical conclusions that the relevant empirical observations equip us to draw.



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3 M O R E O N A N I M A L M I N DS Dogs and Concepts

He who understands baboons would do more toward metaphysics than Locke. —​Charles Darwin, Notebook M

Following up on Chapter 2’s argument for situating human beings and animals ‘inside ethics’ (i.e., for treating them as having moral characteristics that are, in a plain empirical sense, open to view), I dedicate the current chapter to an objection that is likely to be raised in connection with the case of animals in particular. The core of the argument of Chapter 2 is a defense of a philosophically heterodox approach to mind that brings human beings and animals inside ethics by representing their mental qualities as both objective and morally salient. What interests me now is what may appear to be a problem with my reliance on the particular approach to mind in question. This approach may appear to go hand in hand with the view that we can’t ascribe to animals any substantial mental qualities at all. My defense of the approach depends for its success on a non-­ materialist metaphysic that I introduced by arguing for what I called a ‘wider’ conception of objectivity (viz., a conception of objectivity that is capacious or ‘wide’ enough to incorporate some subjective qualities; 1.4 and 2.1). A decisive step in my argument for the wider conception of

objectivity was a case for a ‘conceptualist’ account of the perceptual experience of rational human beings, that is, an account of such experience as conceptual all the way down (2.1.ii). There is a sense in which this appeal to conceptualism may appear self-defeating. The trouble is that conceptualisms are often taken to be inseparable from a form of skepticism about animal minds that would deprive the enterprise of situating animals inside ethics of a great deal of its interest. An oft-repeated criticism of conceptualist doctrines is that they commit us to holding, implausibly, that animals lack any but the most primitive qualities of mind. The main sources of this criticism’s appeal are not difficult to identify. Many philosophers champion understandings of what concepts are from which it seems to follow that no non-­ rational animals possess them. One result is that it may appear to be a necessary consequence of conceptualist outlooks not only that no non-­ rational animals are rightly credited with capacities of mind exactly analogous to those characteristic of rational human beings but, moreover, that no non-rational animals possess the sorts of modes of awareness that would justify us in attributing to them any significant mental qualities at all.1 If this basic understanding of what follows from a conceptualist outlook were sound, it would affect this book’s larger project. 2 It would oblige us to say that animals have at best primitive qualities of mind,  One prominent conceptualist who argues along these lines is Richard Rorty (see, e.g., Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979], 182). When Rorty discusses implications of his preferred conceptualist outlook for the mindedness of non-human animals, he insists that it follows from it that animals lack the modes of awareness typical for mature human beings and hence also those required for significant mental qualities. Rorty doesn’t think we are wrong to describe animals as having sensations and being aware of things around them. But he holds that the ‘awareness’ at play in these cases is a function of a kind of “discrimination-behavior” that animals share with computers, photoelectric cells, and record changers (ibid., 182–183 and 186). So our willingness to represent animals as enjoying more robust forms of awareness at bottom amounts to nothing more than “a community feeling which unites us with [them]” (ibid., 189). 2  A list of high-profile conceptualists who embrace it should include, alongside Rorty (see the last note), Donald Davidson. Davidson defends his preferred conceptualist position in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 183–198. Elsewhere he employs elements of the position in arguing that no non-linguistic animals have “propositional attitudes.” (See esp. “Thought and Talk,” in ibid., 155–170; and “Rational Animals,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 95–106.) 1



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and to say this is, by the lights of the argument of Chapter 2, equivalent to advancing a blanket claim to the effect that animals live lives in which only certain very basic things are important. While this claim is consistent with situating animals inside ethics, it obliges us to radically pare down our conception of the sorts of morally loaded analogies that it is possible to find between human beings and animals of different kinds. Now there appears to be no question of finding analogies that presuppose, for instance, that some animals have complex emotions and form attachments to individuals. But this appearance is misleading. It depends for its plausibility on the idea of a necessary connection between conceptualism and skepticism about animal minds, and there is good reason to reject this idea as confused. Since one of the aims of this book is to bring significant forms of moral fellowship between human beings and animals more clearly into focus (see Chapter 6), I need to say something about what speaks against this understanding of conceptualism’s implications for animal mindedness. That is the project of this chapter. I approach it by sketching a well-known conceptualist position and showing that it doesn’t interfere with our ability to make mental ascriptions to animals. The conceptualism from which I start is the one presented in the writings of John McDowell, and I hasten to acknowledge that my selection of McDowell’s work for this project may seem ill advised. McDowell undertakes his conceptualist commitments when addressing philosophical anxieties that arise in the context of reflections on the relation between mind and world. His first comprehensive account of this enterprise is given in his 1991 John Locke Lectures, “Mind and World,” lectures that were published under the same title, together with several postscripts, in 1994. 3 What may seem to speak against turning to McDowell’s lectures in this context is the fact that they get criticized by many readers specifically for depriving us of the resources to credit animals with any except very primitive capacities of mind.4 Below I concede that there is a rationale for this charge in the  Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). A second edition with a new introduction was published in 1996. All references here are to the second edition. 4  See Taylor Carmen, “Intellectualism and the Scholastic Fallacy,” in Joseph Schear, ed., Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate (London: Routledge, 3

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main text of the lectures. At the same time, I point out that what is at issue is a set of passages in which McDowell to some extent misinterprets the significance of his own conceptualist views for how we think about animal mindedness. I note that already in a postscript published with his lectures McDowell begins to correct his misinterpretation and, additionally, that in yet more recent writings he goes further. Now when he discusses the conceptualist claim that characteristically human modes of awareness are intrinsically conceptual, he insists that this claim is properly understood as part of a descriptive account of what these modes of awareness are like and that as such it places no antecedent restrictions on how similar to (or different from) ours the modes of awareness of animals may be. My object in exploring these portions of McDowell’s thought is to demonstrate the availability of a conceptualist orientation that equips us to accept observations suggesting that some non-human animals possess sophisticated mental capacities. The position I defend is one of fundamental sympathy for McDowell’s conceptualist project. Nevertheless I do not follow his lead in every respect. After first sketching the philosophical outlook in which his conceptualism is at home (3.1) and then considering its bearing on questions about the mental capacities of animals (3.2), I suggest that if we want to think clearly about animal minds it is helpful to speak of concepts and conceptuality in a manner different from the way in which McDowell speaks of these things. Whereas he favors a notion of a concept that excludes the possibility that a non-rational animal might operate with concepts, I defend a contrasting notion flexible enough to accommodate the prospect of finding that some non-rational animals

2013), 165–177; Hubert Dreyfus, “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental,” in Proceedings & Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005): 47–65, esp. 47 and 60–61, and “Detachment, Involvement, and Rationality: Are We Essentially Rational Animals?” in Human Affairs 17 (2007): 101–109; Richard Gaskin, Experience and the World’s Own Language: A Critique of John McDowell’s Empiricism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. chap. IV; Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1999), esp. 60–61 and 69; Christopher Peacocke, “Phenomenology and Non-conceptual Content,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2001): 609–615, esp.  613–614; Gerald Vision, “Perceptual Content,” in Philosophy 73 (1998): 395–427, esp.  406 and 420–424; and Crispin Wright, “Human Nature?” in Nicholas Smith, ed., Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (London: Routledge, 2002), 140–173, esp. 147–150 and 163–167.



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are concept-users. Not that this terminological departure represents a philosophical disagreement. McDowell himself stresses that it is possible to talk about concepts differently than he does. 5 Yet in order to make a case for the alternative understanding of a concept I favor I need to touch on aspects of human cognitive development that—​ while allowed for by McDowell’s philosophical commitments—​a re not discussed in his writings. The flexible account of what a concept is that emerges from my reflections on cognitive development is pivotal for my main line of reasoning. I refer to it in demonstrating that it is possible to talk, from within a conceptualist framework, about substantial analogies between human and animal minds (3.3). I then append a discussion of the kinds of age-old observations that speak for attributing concepts, as I understand them, to dogs (section 3.4) before closing with a brief conclusion (3.5).

3 . 1 .  M C D O W E L L ’ S C A S E F O R C O N C E P T U A L I S M

Consider how McDowell develops his conceptualist outlook. He develops it in the course of discussing the problem of what he calls a “minimal empiricism.”6 The type of empiricism that interests him is ‘minimal’ because it is not a doctrine about the relation between experience and knowledge, as classic empiricisms are, but rather, less ambitiously, a doctrine about the relation between experience and thought about the world, whether knowledgeable or not. A position qualifies as a minimal empiricism, in McDowell’s sense, insofar as it represents experience as mediating how thought is directed toward and answerable to the world.7 McDowell defends the plausible (but by no means uncontested) thought that a minimal empiricism is necessary in that to abandon it is to abandon the very idea of thought being answerable to the world. It is as he elaborates this thought that he presents the particular conceptualist position he favors. He recognizes that many philosophers reject as untenable his conceptualist approach to the problem of  See, e.g., McDowell, “Conceptual Capacities in Perception,” in Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 127– 144, 132. 6  McDowell, Mind and World, xi. 7  Ibid., xii. 5

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a minimal empiricism, and, when he responds to some of the most fundamental objections to the approach, he brings out further respects in which the conceptualism he favors is distinctive. McDowell’s story about the necessary elements of a minimal empiricism begins with a description of what it is to be mentally directed toward the world, a description that he inherits, with a small alteration, from Wilfrid Sellars. The Sellarsian insight is that to characterize something as a state of knowing is to situate it in a normatively ordered “space of reasons” so that there is room for questions about, for instance, what justifies it. McDowell notes that Sellars’s point has a bearing on even what he calls “non-knowledgeable thought” and that “a normative context is necessary for the [very] idea of being in touch with the world.”8 This observation is the heart of McDowell’s conceptualism. To say that thought about the world is at home in a normative framework is to say that questions may arise about what justifies it, and, in the case of non-inferential perceptual thought, experience plays this justificatory role. McDowell’s conceptualist contention is that it is only by representing perceptual experience as conceptual that we can account for the rational support it brings to our beliefs about the world. When McDowell describes human perceptual experience as conceptual, he is making two distinct claims. First, he is claiming that experience has a universal form. The idea here, which he leaves mostly implicit, is that in order to play a rationalizing role in our epistemic lives, experience needs to resemble empirical judgment in being about individuals and kinds of things. And in order to be about such things it must encode a type of universality. For example, if someone is rightly credited with a perception of a dog—​a kind of thing—​then her perception must have internal to it the thought of connection to other actual or possible representations of dogs and must in this sense have a universal structure. By the same token, if someone is rightly credited with a perception of a particular dog—​a n individual—​then her perception must have internal to it the thought of connection to other actual or possible representations of the dog and must, in an analogous sense, have a universal structure.9  Ibid., xiv.  For a classic contemporary treatment of these themes, see P. F. Strawson, “Imagination and Perception,” Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), 57–72.

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The second claim that McDowell is making in describing our perceptual experience as conceptual is that reason is what supplies the relevant universal structure. When McDowell speaks of “reason” he means the capacity to step back from one’s inclinations to believe things and to ask whether one in fact has reason to believe what one is inclined to.10 It is not difficult to see what leads him to say that, in the case of characteristically human perceptual experience, reason is the source of the universality distinctive of conceptuality. McDowell wants to do justice to the role that experience plays in empirical thought. He is committed to accommodating the observation that (apart from exceptional circumstances) we only credit a rational human being with a perceptual experience when the candidate experience is integrated into her epistemic life so that she can judge that the world is as it presents it to be. This is what leads him to say not only that our perceptual experience has a universal structure but also that this structure falls within the scope of reason.11 McDowell sometimes formulates the conceptualist account of experience that emerges here in Sellarsian terms by speaking of the “Myth of the Given.” Sellars’s phrase fits because the account opposes the idea that something that is merely causally—​a nd hence pre-conceptually—​ ‘given’ might have the significance for thought that experience does. In order to explain more precisely what McDowell means when he describes ‘givenness’ as a myth, it is necessary to mention one respect in which he has revised his conceptualist understanding of experience since the publication of Mind and World. Within Mind and World, McDowell suggests that when he represents perceptual experience as having conceptual content he is thereby representing it as having content that is propositional. Thus in a number of passages he formulates his conceptualist claim about experience by saying that the content of experience is “that things are thus and so.”12 In other writings before and around the same time, McDowell similarly suggests that what he describes as the conceptuality of experience is equivalent to propositionality. For   See, e.g., McDowell, “Response to Sabina Lovibond,” Jakob Lindgaard, ed., John McDowell: Experience, Norm and Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 234–238, esp. 235–237. 11  For passages in which McDowell says that in characterizing perceptual experience as “conceptual” he means that reason is at play in it, see, e.g., Mind and World, 5, 11–13, 31, 47, 49, 52, 60–61, 66. 12  Ibid., 9; emphasis in the original. See also 26, 161. 10

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instance, he presents himself as sympathizing with a view advanced by Sellars to the effect that experiences make claims.13 The idea that the content of experience is thus propositional is a central critical target of a number of commentators on Mind and World, including some who are otherwise receptive to McDowell’s conceptualism,14 and in recent writings McDowell himself rejects this idea.15 This gesture of rejection is relevant insofar as it separates the notion of conceptuality from that of propositionality, so I want to consider what speaks in its favor. A good phenomenological case can be made against understanding experience as propositional. Consider the case of visual experience. In such experience, the world becomes visually present to us. What thus comes into view is describable in propositions. But the descriptive possibilities are unlimited, and none in particular is given. If we are to accept these features of our ordinary understanding of visual experience without correction or qualification, then we can’t think of experience itself as propositional. We have to adopt a view of experience that takes seriously the recognition that, as Arthur Collins put it in a commentary on Mind and World, “experience does not come, as though, with subtitles.”16 When McDowell discusses his reasons for rejecting the idea that the content of visual (and other forms of sensory) experience is propositional, he says he wants to take at face value an observation that is closely related to the observation, just touched on, that in perceptual experience no particular propositional description of the world is simply handed down to us. He wants to take at face value that when we  See Having the World in View, e.g., 10. This passage comes from lectures McDowell gave at Columbia University in 1997. 14  See Arthur Collins, “Beastly Experience,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998): 375–380. 15  This is a central topic of “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in Jakob Lindgaard, ed., John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 1–14. 16  Collins, “Beastly Experience,” 379. McDowell criticizes this gesture of Collins, suggesting that Collins takes him to be inviting the idea of subtitles because Collins wrongly imposes on him the assumption of a divide—​of a sort quite foreign to McDowell’s writings—​between the sensory and the conceptual, and because it accordingly seems to Collins that McDowell is making experience a conceptual/linguistic as opposed to a sensory affair (see “Conceptual Capacities in Perception,” 135). There is something to this (see “Beastly Experience,” 377–378). But in the passage in which he makes his quip about subtitles Collins is primarily concerned to show that “there are overwhelming reasons for thinking that perception is not intrinsically propositional” (ibid., p. 379), and this is a point that McDowell now accepts. 13



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move from such experience to beliefs about the world we are not drawing inferences from given propositions. On the contrary, we ordinarily take ourselves to be arriving at beliefs about the world non-inferentially, by articulating, or rendering in propositional form, content that is visually revealed to us.17 These considerations leave untouched McDowell’s grounds for speak­ i­ ng of a “Myth of Givenness.” His point is that we can’t account for the rational interest of experience (i.e., its ability to provide rational support for beliefs about the world) if we conceive it as the non-conceptual, ‘given’ upshot of merely causal processes. We can respect this point with­ ­out construing the content of experiences as propositional. It is enough if we allow that experiences are of individuals, as well as of kinds of things, and that in this respect they have conceptual content. Suppose that I go for a walk and see an unfamiliar dog. The content of one of my visual experiences would be “a dog,” and this could be mentioned in specifying rational grounds for certain of my—​non-inferentially arrived at—​beliefs about the world (e.g., my belief that there is a dog over there). So there is no particular difficulty about arriving at an understanding of perceptual experience on which, while not problematically propositional, it is conceptual and hence immune to worries about the Myth of the Given. Earlier I noted that, when McDowell describes human perceptual experience as conceptual, he is exclusively concerned with forms of universality that are permeated by reason.18 At this point, it should be clear that he does not restrict conceptuality to these specific forms of universality because he thinks concepts only figure in the sorts of articulated propositions that are the prerogatives of rational beings. McDowell recognizes that conceptuality need not be propositional. But he refuses to talk about even non-propositional conceptuality in reference to creatures who don’t traffic in reasons. He refuses because he thinks doing so best enables him to highlight what is distinctive about the mindedness of rational human beings. The resulting terminology has striking consequences for how we talk about human cognitive development and the minds of animals, and these consequences are my concern below in 17

 See “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” 11–12.   McDowell is explicit about this restriction. See Mind and World, 22, 49–50; and “Response to Sabina Lovibond,” 234–235.

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3.2–3.4. Right now, having sketched McDowell’s conceptualist understanding of our perceptual experience, I want to consider how he further elaborates it in the process of responding to objections. McDowell notes that it appears to follow from certain deeply engrained philosophical assumptions that a conceptualist understanding of experience—​however necessary for a minimal empiricism—​ is untenable. The specific philosophical assumptions that most interest him concern the demarcation of the realm of nature. In speaking of the realm of nature, he is speaking of the realm made up of things that are real as opposed to merely apparent. The question of what falls within this realm is important for McDowell because it seems clear that experience is constituted by transactions (viz., impingements of the world on our senses) that qualify as natural in the relevant sense. Yet the realm of nature is often delimited in a way that would prevent experience, understood along conceptualist lines, from counting as natural. Many philosophers take nature to be limited to the subject matter of the natural sciences. McDowell’s thought is that this influential view of nature obstructs efforts to represent experience as both ineluctably conceptual and natural. The point he is making presupposes that the intelligibility of rational relations is different in kind from the intelligibility of the individual natural sciences or, as he puts it in recent work, that such relations possess their own logic and are sui generis.19 This presupposition is by no means philosophically uncontroversial. Many philosophers regard the natural sciences as affording not just an important but also a metaphysically privileged mode of access to the 19



 I n central parts of Mind and World, McDowell formulates this presupposition differently. He speaks in reference to the logic of the natural sciences of the “realm of law,” apparently thinking of the kinds of law-like, merely causal relations constitutive of explanations in physics (see xv), and he says that the presupposition he wants to make is that the intelligibility of the realm of reasons is distinct from that of the realm of law. This formulation takes for granted that talk of “the realm of law” fits all of the natural sciences. More recently, McDowell rejects the idea that the natural sciences have a unified logic, indicating, e.g., that he sympathizes with the view that teleological explanations in biology have a special intelligibility. For McDowell’s remarks on this change in his thought, see “Experiencing the World” and “Responses,” in Markus Willaschek, ed., John McDowell: Reason and Nature: Lecture and Colloquium in Münster 1999 (Münster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2000), 3–17, 93–117; and “Response to Graham Macdonald,” Cynthia and Graham Macdonald, eds., McDowell and His Critics (London: Blackwell, 2006), 235–239. For a sympathetic take on the idea that biology has a special logic, see my discussion of Michael Thompson’s work later in this book.

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world. Some who do so also insist that it must be possible adequately to capture rational relations in the terms of these sciences. These philosophers effectively bring the realm of reasons within the logical realm represented by these sciences, thereby rejecting McDowell’s presupposition about the sui generis character of relations among reasons. McDowell refers to such philosophers as “bald naturalists.” What interests me now is an observation he makes about the consequences of helping ourselves to the presupposition, foreign to bald naturalists, that relations of reason are sui generis. Against the backdrop of this presupposition, it appears to follow from the influential conception of nature touched on in the last paragraph (i.e., the conception that limits nature to the objects of the natural sciences) that experience cannot be both natural and essentially conceptual. Now it seems clear that, if he is to defend his conceptualist outlook in an attractive naturalistic form, McDowell needs to discredit this conception of nature. And this is what he sets out to do, introducing a capacious metaphysic on which nature includes more than the subject matter of the natural sciences, specifically insofar as it accommodates intrinsically normative relations of reason.20 A terminological comment is in order here. The concept of ‘nature’, as McDowell construes it, is coextensive with the concept of ‘objectivity’, as I am construing it in this book. At issue in both cases is our concept of those things that are real as opposed to merely apparent. In this book, I am referring to a construal of what falls under this concept of objectivity that is broad enough to include evaluative or normative things as the ‘wider conception of objectivity’ (1.4 and 2.1). For the sake of convenience, I am, in similar style, going to refer to McDowell’s preferred metaphysic as a wider naturalism. If we are to appreciate the significance that McDowell attaches to a wider naturalism, 21 we need to note that he represents his conceptualism about perceptual experience as an instance of a larger pattern of thought. In addition to defending an account of perceptual experience on which it is both natural and conceptual, he claims that characteristically human sensory experience and action need to be understood as

 Mind and World, 64–65, 70–86.   McDowell himself occasionally describes his preferred naturalistic posture as a “relaxed” one.

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natural and conceptual.22 The conceptualist posture that McDowell uses a widely naturalistic metaphysic to underwrite thus involves a great deal more than perceptual experience. When he sounds conceptualist themes, he is attempting nothing less than to do justice to ways in which, as he sees it, reason pervades human experience and action. He requires a wider naturalism because he wants to do this without forfeiting the recognition that we are natural beings and that rationality is “our special way of living an animal life.”23 McDowell’s claim is not that we are born rational but that our rational capacities are capacities that get actualized in non-mysterious, natural ways during our upbringings. In defending this claim, he introduces one of his signature terms of art, describing our rational capacities as making up our second nature.24 He talks about second or acquired nature because he wants to accent his interest in eliminating philosophical obstacles that seem to speak against taking cognitive growth, as he understands it, to be a natural developmental process. This is the aspect of McDowell’s work that primarily interests me here. Below I argue that the same sorts of considerations that McDowell adduces in representing human cognitive development as a natural process also enable us to represent non-rational animals as possessing a wide range of different mental capacities. In arguing along these lines, I follow in McDowell’s footsteps in helping myself to widely naturalistic resources. This move is philosophically controversial, so I should stress I have in effect already defended my entitlement to it. In presenting an argument for the wider conception of objectivity (2.1), I made a case for the coextensive McDowellian metaphysic that I am referring to as ‘widely naturalistic’. Although I am not going to discuss relevant portions of McDowell’s work, I want to mention that McDowell also defends his entitlement to what I am calling a ‘wider naturalism’. He repeatedly criticizes a priori arguments for assigning metaphysical priority to the objects of the natural sciences. A case could be made for crediting him  Mind and World, 36–40 and 89–91. See also “What Myth?” in Inquiry 50 (2007): 338–351, esp. 338–339 (“I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities . . . ​I have also suggested . . . ​that something parallel should be said about our agency”). 23  Mind and World, 65. 24  Ibid., 78–84, 87–88, 91, 104–105, 109. 22



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with a forerunner of the basic strategy I employed in 2.1 for undermining the abstract picture of mental directedness to the world that drives these arguments.25 Setting aside a treatment of how McDowell defends his preferred widely naturalistic posture, my point here is that the adoption of such a posture after him need not be a casual matter. There need not be anything intellectually irresponsible about following him in conceiving nature more capaciously than philosophers for the most part do. Nor need there be anything intellectually irresponsible about starting from his wider naturalism in thinking about the minds of animals.

3 . 2 .  M C D O W E L L O N A N I M A L M I N D S

What implications does McDowell’s conceptualist position have for how we think about animal minds? To appreciate the answer that McDowell himself gives to this question, we need to bear in mind that he takes the conceptuality that he sees as internal to human perceptual, sensory, and practical experience to be a matter of forms of universality that are suffused by reason. It follows that he is committed to declaring that non-rational animals lack our forms of experience.26 When he makes this declaration, it may sound as though he is denying that animals possess any significant capacities of mind. But, however McDowell’s claims sound, they do not actually imply that animals are mindless brutes. McDowell’s conceptualist position is at home within what he calls a “naturalism of second nature.” To grasp the position’s bearing on questions about animal mindedness, we need to appreciate what it comes to to say that rationality is a second natural acquisition. The idea is that our rational capacities are capacities that get actualized, in natural or non-spooky ways, in the course of our upbringings. Alternately, the idea is that to be rational is to have reached a certain stage in a natural  W hile McDowell doesn’t speak in these terms, it is fair to say that he traces this picture of mental directness, as I did in 2.1, back to its roots in both rationalist and empiricist traditions. He traces it to rationalist modes of thought in the portions of his work in which he appeals to Wittgenstein in attacking the idea of an ideally abstract arithmetic. He traces it to empiricist modes of thought in portions of his work—​d iscussed below—​in which he attacks the idea that in perceptual experience we enjoy an ideally unmediated mode of access to the world. 26  Mind and World, 50, 119. 25

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developmental process. This last formulation is telling because, in introducing the notion of a natural process of development, we imply that there can be no question of antecedently restricting the extent to which different stages on the way to rationality resemble each other. Individual stages of growth need to be understood as locations on a naturalistic continuum. So we need to be open to the possibility of discovering that developmental stages we designate as pre-rational involve capacities of mind that resemble, in significant respects, capacities of mind characteristic of rational human beings. Moreover, in allowing for significant similarities between the mental capacities of pre-rational human beings and their rational human counterparts, we effectively also allow for significant similarities between the characteristic mental capacities of non-rational animals and those of rational human beings. It would accordingly be wrong to say that a McDowell-style conceptualist position obliges us to regard animals as mindless brutes. Properly understood, the position eliminates philosophical obstacles to allowing that some animals have qualities of mind very much like our own.27 The perception that McDowell is committed to a more dismissive attitude toward animal minds is, however, not without textual grounds. In Mind and World, McDowell draws conclusions about animals’ mental capacities that aren’t supported by his main line of argument. After claiming that non-rational animals lack the agency and forms of experience characteristic of human beings, he invites us to understand such animals as living lives that are “structured exclusively by immediate biological imperatives.”28 His thought is that features of these animals’ surroundings show up for them not as conceptualized items—​that is, not as individuals and kinds of things—​but rather as mere particulars on which instinctive or learned responses operate. He marks the distinction he thus envisions between the lives of rational human beings and non-rational animals with the following jargon of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s. Whereas individuals who display the conceptually saturated modes of comportment that (as both Gadamer and McDowell see it) are typical of human beings are, in Gadamer’s parlance, oriented toward the world, creatures whose lives are governed by immediate  Sabina Lovibond makes this basic point about McDowell’s thought in “Practical Reason and Its Animal Precursors,” in Lindgaard, ed., John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature, 112–123, esp. 120. 28  Mind and World, 115. 27



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biological imperatives merely inhabit environments.29 In making use of this Gadamerian contrast between ‘world’ and ‘environment’, McDowell is anticipating a fundamental misunderstanding of his own argument. He wants to underline the fact that, in denying characteristically human agency and forms of experience to animals, he is not thereby suggesting that animals are mere automata whose lives are adequately describable in merely causal, physicalistic terms. 30 He has the resources to construe animals’ responsiveness to their surroundings as involving primitive normative reactions and not as merely caused in a mechanical or automatic sense. Yet in the section of Mind and World that I am discussing McDowell does more than simply observe that he is not committed to depicting non-rational beings as automata. Additionally, he claims—​a nd it is in this connection that he makes use of Gadamer’s world-environment opposition—​that non-rational beings are governed wholly by merely biological impulses. The author of Mind and World is right that it doesn’t follow from the argument of his lectures that non-rational animals are mere automata. 31 But he is wrong that it follows that non-rational animals must therefore be adequately describable in exclusively biological terms. There is no reason, as far as his argument is concerned, to exclude the possibility of forms of life that are not rational in his sense (i.e., in the sense of being capable of stepping back from impulses to believe or do things and asking whether they in fact have reasons to believe or do what they are inclined to) and yet are not products of mere control by immediately   For McDowell’s remarks on Gadamer, see ibid., 114–115. His remarks draw on Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 438–456. 30  Here he differs, e.g., from Richard Rorty, who moves directly from defending a conceptualist account of the distinctness of human modes of awareness to representing nonhuman animals as limited to modes of awareness that invite comparison with the functioning of computers and record changers. 31  Earlier I pointed out that in central passages of Mind and World McDowell characterizes all of the natural sciences as having the same kind of “law-like” intelligibility. Here he leaves no room for the thought that biological categories are logically distinctive and that, when in biology we describe an organism as perceiving its environment and responding to what it perceives, we are concerned with matters that can’t adequately be captured in merely causal or mechanistic terms. But, as I also pointed out, in more recent writings he revises his understanding of the logic of the natural sciences in a way that enables him to accommodate a non-reductive account of biology. McDowell is already appealing to such an account in the parts of Mind and World that I am now discussing in which he repudiates an image of non-rational animals as automata. 29

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biological drives. There is, that is, no reason to think that a creature that is not in Gadamer’s sense fully ‘world-oriented’ must therefore be limited to negotiating a merely biologically structured ‘environment’. Mind and World’s main line of reasoning obliges us to allow for every sort of developmental stage on the way to rationality. This means, among other things, that the book’s argument obliges us to allow for modes of conduct that, while not accurately characterized as mere functions of exclusively biological urges, do not rise to the level of rationality. The argument obliges us to allow for modes of conduct that, while more sophisticated than instinctive or learned forms of responsiveness to mere particulars, do not involve a capacity to distance oneself from one’s inclinations to believe or do things and to ask oneself whether one should believe or do what one is inclined to. It calls on us to make room for the possibility of discovering that some non-rational animals operate with at least primitive forms of universality and are rightly described as dealing not merely in particulars but in individuals and kinds of things. Yet, while McDowell himself positions us to take this possibility seriously, he also sometimes suggests that he wants to exclude it. My point here is that, to the extent that he makes this gesture of exclusion, he misrepresents the interest of his own project as a resource for thinking about animal minds. There is a straightforward respect in which this criticism of the author of Mind and World is out of date. Already in a postscript to the book, McDowell distances himself from the features of his view of animals that I just criticized. “Perhaps,” he writes, “[my] talk of biological imperatives already represents a harder line than I need, even without the reductive conception [of the biological] that I disown.”32 That in representing non-rational animals as structured by exclusively biological imperatives he took a harder line than necessary is, I believe, now McDowell’s official view, though perhaps he has not always made this as clear as he might have. 33 In any case, although there is at least one 32

 Mind and World, op. cit., 182.  I n suggesting that McDowell has sometimes been unclear, I have in mind passages in his recent papers in which he employs Gadamer’s distinction between world and environment in ways that appear to reaffirm the account of non-rational animals he presented in the main text of Mind and World. See, e.g., “What Myth?” esp. 343–344. On a charitable reading, McDowell’s point here is not that we should take non-rational

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passage in his recent writings at which McDowell touches on the possibility of forms of life that are neither mere products of governance by immediate biological forces nor rational, 34 he excuses himself from exploring this possibility. He says that the emphasis of his work is on the distinctive character of the rational human case, not on continuities between the lives of rational human beings and those of non-­ rational animals, and that he leaves exploration of the latter topic to others. 35 His reticence should not prevent us from asking how a conceptualist orientation of the sort he favors might be brought to bear on the sorts of continuities that, within his own writing, never take center stage. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to investigating such continuities. A good way to approach what I want to say about affinities between rational human beings and non-rational, non-human animals is to say something about affinities between rational human beings and pre-rational or pre-linguistic children.

3 . 3 .  C O N C E P T U A L I S M A N D C O G N I T I V E D E V E L O P M E N T

Children who are not yet rational in the demanding sense at issue here36 sometimes behave in ways that resist being fully captured in merely biological terms. This is a preliminary way of formulating the claim that I want to defend in this section. I need a vocabulary for developing my claim, and for this purpose I am going to depart from McDowell. Whereas McDowell restricts talk of concepts to rational individuals, I am going to express the point I want to make by saying that children who are not yet rational may possess concepts. Here it is helpful to recall the kinds of considerations that lead McDowell to adopt his more animals to be enslaved to biological imperatives but only that the characteristically human ways of living he describes as modes of responsiveness to the “world” are special. But a reader might be forgiven for confusion on this point. 34  McDowell, “Response to Sabina Lovibond,” 236–237. 35  Ibid., 235. See also Mind and World, 183, where McDowell writes: “If someone wants to work out a conception of orientation toward the world that is detached from spontaneity in the Kantian sense, with a view to making the language of world-directedness available for talking about the mentality of brutes, that is, so far, perfectly all right by my lights. I have no wish, apart from this context, to say anything at all about mere ­a nimals, and certainly no wish to play down the respects in which their lives are like ours.” 36  I.e., in a sense that involves the capacity to step back from impulses to believe or do things and ask whether one in fact has a reason to believe or do what one is inclined to.

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restrictive terminology. McDowell wants to bring into relief respects in which the lives of rational individuals are distinctive. His point is not that concepts only figure in discursive episodes involving full-blown or propositionally structured reasons. In his recent treatments of perceptual experience he makes use of a notion of non-propositional conceptuality (3.1). He would presumably also allow that conceptuality apart from propositionality has a place in sensory or ‘inner’ experience. But McDowell only speaks of even non-propositional conceptuality in reference to the experiences of individuals who count as rational in the sense that they are capable of giving and asking for (propositionally structured) reasons. This is because he wants to bring out how a rational individual’s experiences are integrated into her epistemic life. They are integrated in that she can judge that the world is as they present it to be. Or, to put it in the Kantian terms McDowell sometimes employs, they are integrated in that the “I think” can accompany them. 37 My motive for employing “concept” more broadly than McDowell does is not a critical one. The terminology I use is in the service of a thought that is in the spirit of McDowell’s work. His broad naturalism encodes an understanding of our capacities of reason as products of a natural process of development. This applies to specific capacities for dealing in universal categories, and it also applies to those capacities we have insofar as the “I think” can accompany our different representations. Suppose we refer to the acquisition of the former capacities (i.e., capacities for dealing in universal categories) as learning. Suppose we then distinguish the acquisition of the latter capacities (i.e., capacities we have insofar as the “I think” can accompany our different representations) from learning by referring to it as maturation. Equipped with these terms, we can say that McDowell makes the plausible assumption that learning and maturation invariably go hand in hand. We can also say that he restricts talk of concepts to rational individuals because he is exclusively interested in learning that individuals exhibit insofar as they have arrived at an advanced stage of a natural process of maturation. My interest is different. I am interested in capacities of mind, of a sort that McDowell’s broad naturalism equips us to sanction, that are precursors to those McDowell himself considers. I talk about concepts  “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” 8.

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in reference to pre-rational children in order to draw attention to cognitive achievements that count as learning in my sense insofar as they meet the following description. Despite not yet demonstrating rational maturity, they already involve primitive capacities for dealing in universal categories. There is a treatment of such cognitive achievements in Stanley Cavell’s Claim of Reason. Cavell wants to get us to see that, in the acquisition of a first language, “there is not the clear difference between learning and maturation that we sometimes suppose there is,”38 and he invites us to recognize that coming into language involves many steps suffused with elements of both. His central illustration is an anecdote about his daughter’s linguistic abilities at fifteen months. It begins with a description of the achievements that led to the recording of the word “kitty” in her Baby Book. There was, Cavell writes: The day on which, after I said “kitty” and pointed to a kitty, she repeated the word and pointed to the kitty . . . ​[that is] she produced a sound . . . ​which I accepted, responded to . . . ​a s what I had said, [and] the next time a cat came by, on the prowl or in a picture book, she did it again. A new entry for the Baby Book under “Vocabulary.”39

Cavell adds that a few weeks after the word “kitty” was recorded in the book his daughter smiled at a fur piece, stroked it and said “kitty.” At first he was disappointed, but he reflected that it wasn’t clear how to transcribe this further performance. Perhaps it should be transcribed as “   ‘This is a kitty’ or ‘Look at the funny kitty’, or ‘Aren’t soft things nice?’, or ‘See, I remember how pleased you are when I say “kitty”’ or ‘I like to be petted’.”40 Without deciding among these options, Cavell observes that “in each case [his daughter’s] word was produced about a soft, warm, furry object of a certain size, shape, and weight”41 and that his daughter is starting to respond in ways that reveal that she is making connections among kittens and kitten-like things or, in other words,  Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 171. 39  Ibid., 171–172; emphasis in the original. 40  Ibid., 172. 41  Ibid. 38

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that she is dealing in universals. This brings Cavell to characterizing her accomplishment. It would be premature to say, without qualification, that she has grasped what the word “kitty” means. She has yet to learn what “giving the meaning of a word” is.42 It would also be premature to say, without qualification, that she has matured to the point of having understood what a kitty is. To know “what a kitten is” is to know many things she doesn’t, for instance, that it is a young cat; that it is the sort of creature that will typically learn to climb trees and run from dogs, to purr when happy and hiss when hostile; and that it may have fur of many different colors or none at all. After cautioning against saying either that his daughter has learned what the word “kitty” means or that she has grasped what a kitten is, Cavell insists that she has nevertheless taken a “leap” toward inhabiting a world with kittens and mastering the meaning of “kitty.” He says that his daughter has moved in the direction of learning a word, and this seems right. But while she has started to deal in primitive universal categories, she isn’t yet all that close to word-mastery. Her primary developmental distinction is a certain repertoire of doings-appropriate-when. (Cavell reports that whereas “all [his daughter] did with the fur piece was, smiling, to say ‘kitty’ once and stroke it,” when she sees real kittens “she not only utters her allophonic version of ‘kitty’, she usually squeals the word over and over, squats down near it, stretches out her arm towards it and opens and closes her fingers . . . ​purses her lips, and squints with pleasure.”43 Compare this case of Cavell’s with Collingwood’s case of a baby who pulls off its hat in a happy rebellion, shouting “Hattiaw!”, a trick acquired because its mother always says “hatty off!” when removing its hat.44) Having such a repertoire is a necessary step toward language, but early on the uttering of a word such as “kitty” is just one part of the performance. My point here is not about how close Cavell’s daughter is to word-mastery but about how her repertoire of doings-appropriate-when involves the ability to operate with primitive universals. This ability is a conceptual one in my sense. By my lights, Cavell’s daughter is operating with a concept of kittens. In saying this, I am not  See, e.g., ibid., 170.  Ibid., 172. 44  R .  G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 227–229. 42

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overlooking the distance that separates her from a mature speaker who possesses knowledge of what a kitten is. I am simply observing that she has progressed rationally enough to deal in forms of universality that are precursors to those internal to mature rational thought about kittens. These reflections take for granted the sort of ‘wider’ metaphysics of nature that McDowell favors. This metaphysics equips us to represent rational development, understood as a sui generis affair, as a natural process. Speaking of naturalness here allows us to be open about the extent to which stages en route to rationality may resemble each other. It saves us from the absurdities of those conceptualists who, because their restrictive metaphysics prevent them from representing cognitive development as natural, find themselves compelled to insist that children lack any substantial mental capacities until the precise moment at which they are deemed rationally mature.45 A wider naturalism underwrites a more appealing account of cognitive growth, and my suggestion is that the flexible notion of a concept I have been discussing is helpful for bringing out the account’s appeal. Although in this section I have been exclusively concerned with the usefulness of the relevant notion for describing mental capacities of pre-linguistic children, the notion applies to other human cases. It is useful for describing mental capacities of some human beings who are congenitally cognitively impaired as well some who are sick, injured, or senile. These remarks bring me back to this chapter’s central project. My aim in introducing a notion of a concept that is not restricted to fully rational beings is to show that a conceptualist outlook does not prevent us from attributing sophisticated qualities of mind to non-rational animals. This notion of a concept enables us to directly challenge the line of reasoning that makes it seem as though a conceptualist orientation commits us to denying non-rational animals any but very primitive mental capacities. Conceptualists are not obliged to advance a blanket claim to the effect that non-rational animals lack concepts. So they are not obliged to deny the possibility of significant analogies between, on  Thus, e.g., Rorty wants us to agree with him that “knowledge, awareness, concepts, language, inference, justification, and the logical space of reasons all descend on the shoulders of the bright child somewhere around the age of four, without having existed in even the most primitive form hitherto” (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 187).

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the one hand, typically human modes of awareness and mental qualities and, on the other, those modes of awareness and mental qualities that are typical of different non-rational animals. This chapter’s argument is now at a close. Before ending my discussion, I want to consider some cases in which it is in fact reasonable to speak of concepts in reference to non-rational animals. The cases I am going to discuss involve dogs. A reader sympathetic to my argument in favor of speaking of concepts in reference to some non-rational animals may nevertheless object to what I say about dogs. So I want to preface my illustration by noting that the argument is independent of my claims about its bearing on this particular case.

3 . 4 .  D O G S A N D C O N C E P T S

A good way to capture what makes it seem reasonable to talk about concepts in reference to dogs is to consider how we are limited if we exclude this way of talking. The exclusion does not prevent us from describing dogs as learning. We can still talk about canine learning that takes the form of the development of natural responses—​or instincts—​through more or less complex feedback loops. But in ruling out conceptuality we commit ourselves to representing any natural or learned canine responses as operating on (or triggered by) particulars. We cannot talk about modes of conduct that involve the recognition of kinds of things or of individuals. This is what speaks for attributing conceptual capacities to dogs. It seems impossible adequately to capture many things dogs do without characterizing them as recognizing kinds of things and individuals. Let me start with an example of the sort of observation that speaks for claiming that dogs deal in kinds of things. Thomas Mann wrote a memoir of his life with a German shorthaired setter named Bashan, and in it he gives an account of the day on which Bashan for the first time saw a man shoot a duck. Mann tells us how, after the report of the gun “the body which had been struck became a mere inanimate object and fell swift as a stone.”46 Then he turns to describing Bashan’s response to the event. He writes: 46



 Thomas Mann, Bashan and I (Philadelphia: Pine Street Books, 2003), 235.

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There are a number of coined phrases and ready-made figures of speech which I might use for describing [Bashan’s] behavior—​current terms—​terms which in most cases would be both valid and appropriate. I might say, for example, that he was thunderstruck. But this term does not please me, and I do not wish to use it. Big words, the big, well-worn words, are not very suitable for expressing the extraordinary. One may best achieve this by intensifying the small words and forcing them to ascend to the very acme of their meaning. So I will say no more than that Bashan started at the report of the gun and the accompanying phenomena—​a nd that this starting was the same as that which is peculiar to him when confronted with something striking, and that all this was well known to me though it was now elevated to the nth degree. It was a start which flung his whole body backward, wobbling to right and left, a start which jerked his head in rash recoil against his chest and which, in recovering himself, almost tore his head from his shoulders, a start which seemed to cry, from every fibre of his being: “What, what! What was that? Hold! In the name of a hundred thousand devils! How was that!”47

Drawing on his familiarity with Bashan’s characteristic ways of behaving, Mann represents the dog as utterly surprised by duck hunting. He describes him as overwhelmed by his encounter with what for him is a new kind of thing. The context for the description is Mann’s account elsewhere in his memoir of Bashan behaving differently, more familiarly, with things such as roads, trees, people, houses, cats, and trains. What Mann in this way gives us is an image of Bashan as living a life in which there are different kinds of things. One thing that may well strike us about this vignette from Mann’s life with Bashan is how commonplace it is. I recall various analogous episodes with the different dogs I’ve lived with, and I imagine the same is true of other people who spend significant time around dogs. My partner Nathaniel and I once lived with an Australian Shepherd named Sitka. When Sitka was approximately a year and a half old we somehow acquired a small plastic wind-up crab. One day Nathaniel wound up the 47

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crab and placed it on the floor. As it began to whirr and move, Sitka, who had been lying nearby, leapt up into the air and, after first barking sharply several times, began to circle the toy, occasionally throwing herself back into a lunge position and issuing short yips, occasionally getting close enough so that she almost touched the thing with her nose and then jumping back abruptly as if she had received an electric shock. The next few times Sitka saw the toy she gave roughly the same performance, and for a while she behaved similarly when confronted with other wind-up and electronic toys. Over time her conduct changed. When she saw such a toy, she would frisk around a bit, slapping it with her paws and sometimes picking it up delicately with her mouth and shaking it. In these respects, her behavior around wind-up and electric toys differed from her behavior around, for instance, cats and squirrels. We discouraged her from chasing cats and squirrels, and by the time she was two years old she would respond to the appearance of a cat or a squirrel by doing little more than gazing at it, pricking up her ears and sniffing. Against the background of a familiarity with Sitka’s characteristic ways of behaving, it seems natural to say that when she first saw the toy crab she registered a form of surprise that was a function of being confronted with a thing of a new kind. Moreover, just as Sitka arguably came to recognize various other kinds of things (e.g., dogs, squirrels, cats, human beings, trees, cars, streets, houses, stairs, and dog dishes), she eventually came to recognize self-moving toys.48 Consider now examples of the sort of observation that speaks for saying that dogs deal in individuals. Within memoirs people write about their lives with dogs, we find story after story that depict dogs relating to their human companions as individuals. Thus, for instance, in Bashan and I Mann talks about how Bashan would wait in the dark lane for his return from the city and how Bashan would greet him by performing a dance “consisting of rapid tramplings, of prodigious waggings . . . ​which demand[ed] tribute from his entire hindquarters up to his very ribs”;49 in  Many dogs have the same response to their first encounters with a vacuum cleaner that Sitka had to her first encounter with a wind-up toy. For a further illustration of dogs dealing with kinds of things, see Emmanuel Levinas’s description of how, in a Nazi camp for Jewish prisoners of war wearing the French uniform, in which he and others were treated as “subhuman, a gang of apes” by guards, a wandering dog clearly recognized them as men (“The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press], 151–155, esp. 152–153). 49  Ibid., 14. Bashan is described as waiting for Mann at 73–75. 48



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All the Dogs of My Life, Elizabeth von Arnim discusses how her huge companion dog Coco would place a protective paw over her ankle whenever she sat down and how he dragged himself from his kennel in the yard to the threshold of the house to greet her one last time moments before he died;50 in My Dog Tulip, J.  R. Ackerly tells stories about how a female Alsatian named Tulip protected him, mourned his absences, and how she put herself in the darkest corner of his bedroom when she once accidentally bit him;51 and in The Dogs Who Came to Stay, George Pitcher inserts, among the many stories he tells about his two companion dogs Lupa and Remus, a comic tale about how Remus once proudly exhibited to him the—​in Remus’s view—​lovely excrement in which Remus had just rolled. 52 In all of these memoirs, dogs are represented as relating to humans as individuals. The sorts of human-dog interactions that are in question here are so ordinary that anyone who lives in a household with dogs is likely to have further examples. Consider another case involving Sitka. By the time Sitka was six months old, Nathaniel and I had established a routine that prevented us from leaving her at home alone for a stretch of time longer than three hours. One day I came home at the end of a threehour interval, grabbed Sitka’s leash and collar, and stepped outside with her, only to hear the phone ring. I stepped back inside, bringing Sitka with me, and answered the phone. The call was from the philosopher Cora Diamond, and I, still a graduate student at the time, was reluctant to explain to Diamond that it would be better for me to speak another time. I stayed on the phone for thirty minutes or so, at which point Sitka—​ who was then already perfectly housetrained—​ walked across the rug until she was about four feet in front of me and, staring directly into my face, half squatted, lifted her leg, and emptied her bladder on the rug. Among the things it seems right to say about this stunt of Sitka’s is that it was performed for my eyes. Sitka was giving me a demonstration of her frustration, and in this respect she was interacting with me as an individual. 53  All the Dogs of My Life (London: Virago, 1995), 80–81 and 136–139.  My Dog Tulip (New York: New York Review Books, 1999), 19–20, 110. 52  The Dogs Who Came to Stay (New York: Penguin, 1995), 74–75. 53  I n The Dogs Who Came to Stay, Pitcher tells a similar story about how his—​older and house-trained—​dog Remus protested a strange dog’s sojourn in the house by walking 50 51

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Human beings are not the only individuals in dogs’ lives. Dogs live lives in which there are individuals of various sorts—​not only individual human beings, but also individual places, individual inanimate objects and individual non-human animals. Several of the authors whose dog memoirs I just mentioned discuss attachments that their dogs form to other dogs. Von Arnim describes how her female fox terrier Knobbie loved a male fox terrier named Chunkie and became less affectionate to him after she had puppies, and also how both Knobbie and Chunkie mourned the death of their pup and canine companion Winkie;54 Pitcher describes how Remus loved his mother and companion Lupa and mourned her death;55 and, during two years in which Nathaniel and I were resident tutors at Harvard’s Mather House, Sitka, who after puppyhood was for the most part relatively indifferent to other dogs, became enamored of a grey male whippet named Pensey, a dog who was walked daily by one of our students and whom we ourselves found dandyish and rather silly. Taken at face value, these vignettes about how dogs operate with individuals and kinds of things speak for the ascription of concepts in my flexible sense to dogs. It follows from this chapter’s argument that there is no general philosophical obstacle to taking the vignettes at face value. To say this is not to deny that it is possible to try to explain the behavior of dogs, without attributing concepts to them, by representing them as pure stimulus-response mechanisms or as beings governed by immediate biological impulses. That this is indeed possible will be clear to anyone with even a slight familiarity with the recent history of the study of animal behavior. But we can allow for this possibility while asking whether purported explanations of dogs’ behavior that do not attribute any conceptual capacities do justice to the complexity of their lives. Admittedly, the fact that it strikes many people as natural to think and talk about dogs’ lives in ways that presuppose that dogs deal in concepts

up beside the chair in which Pitcher was sitting and “empty[ing] his bladder on the rug” (160). For a classic literary description of a dog recognizing an individual human being, see the account in Homer’s Odyssey of how Odysseus’s old dog Argos recognized Odysseus when he returned to Ithaca after a twenty-year absence, how Argos dropped his ears and wagged his tail (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 263. 54  All the Dogs of My Life, 169–170, 182–183, 209–210. 55  The Dogs Who Came to Stay, 56, 121, 131.



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in my sense does not demonstrate that we should regard explanations that don’t ascribe concepts to them as inadequate. It is conceivable that a mode of canine conduct that is such that it is natural to describe it as involving conceptual capacities may, upon closer examination, turn out to be explicable in terms of more primitive capacities. By the same token, it is conceivable that some or all of the memoir writers I just cited wrongly read sophisticated qualities of mind into what are in fact quite simple modes of canine conduct and that these writers are accordingly guilty of a sort of sentimental projection. It is no less conceivable that my account of my life with Sitka betrays a tendency toward such projection. What would show that we were indeed confronted with cases of sentimental projection? We rightly take ourselves to be confronted with such a case if, for instance, we can show that some environmental stimulus triggers a mode of canine conduct that we took to be expressive of more sophisticated capacities of mind. But the prospect of showing this in particular instances is unthreatening. We can admit that we may discover that local aspects of dogs’ behavior that we take to be concept-involving are more primitive and also say that a clear-sighted survey of the massive, millennia-old body of observation and testimony about the lives of dogs nevertheless speaks for attributing concepts to them. This is what I am saying here. 56 Dogs recognize individuals and kinds of things, and in this respect they traffic in concepts. 56

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 This section’s examples tell against the influential case for denying propositional attitudes to animals that Donald Davidson makes in “Rational Animals,” 95–106. The crux of Davidson’s case is an idea of semantic opacity. This is Davidsonian shorthand for the observation that the truth-values of statements attributing propositional attitudes vary when different referring expressions with the same referents are used. (Thus, e.g., while it may be true that my young daughter believes that she has given me a piece of mail, it may also be false, in a case in which the piece of mail is correspondence from the IRS, that she believes that she’s given me a bit of tax-related correspondence.) Davidson claims that ascriptions of propositional attitudes to non-rational animals fail to exhibit semantic opacity, and he concludes that we are justified in refusing to attribute propositional attitudes to them. The examples in this section undermine his initial claim. If dogs possess concepts, it is right to describe them as thinking of objects in some ways and not in others. (E.g., it may be both true that my dog believes that he and I are walking on a street and false that he believes that we are walking down a street named after a famous US president, even when we are in fact walking on a street with the name “JFK.”) See David Finkelstein’s critique of Davidson’s case against animal minds in “Holism and Animal Minds,” in Alice Crary, ed., Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 251–278.

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3 . 5 .  B E Y O N D T H E C A S E O F D O G S

The centerpiece of this chapter’s defense of conceptualism is the introduction of a flexible notion of a concept. Although the defense does not depend for its success on establishing that we are right to ascribe the relevant sorts of flexible concepts to dogs, it does depend for its success on showing that a conceptualist outlook can accommodate the possibility that animals who are not—​fully—​rational may possess such concepts. If a conceptualist outlook can be thus accommodating, then it is wrong to say that conceptualism as such commits us to skepticism about animal minds. It would be more correct to say that a thoughtful conceptualism contributes to our understanding of what we are talking about when we talk about the mental capacities of animals of specific kinds and, further, that such a conceptualism thereby equips us to accurately capture convergences between human minds and the minds of non-human animals. To say that a thoughtful conceptualism equips us to capture convergences between human minds and the minds of non-human animals is not to deny that it equips us to capture divergences between them. The introduction of the form of conceptualism described in this chapter does not by itself speak in favor either of convergences or of divergences between human and animal minds. Describing these convergences and divergences is a job for philosophically sophisticated empirical observations. There are, I believe, good empirical grounds for holding that McDowell is right to claim that reason, in the full-blown sense that interests him, is the prerogative of human beings. 57 But this is not the point that concerns me here. My point is that the conceptualist position I favor—​a nd that I am inheriting from McDowell with some alterations—​places no obstacles in the way of allowing that human minds diverge from those of other animals in the respect that interests McDowell while also saying that many non-human animals have significant mental capacities, say, capacities for recognizing great numbers of features of their surroundings, solving problems, playing, fighting, fleeing, forming friendships, feeling pain and pleasure, experiencing 57



 See, e.g., aspects of the work of the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello that show that some—​but only some—​of the fundamental elements of human language are present in the gestural practices of great apes. See, e.g., The Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

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fear, happiness, sadness, and so on. This is what I set out to show in this chapter. To shore up this book’s main argument I needed to demonstrate that my reliance in it on a form of conceptualism (2.1.ii) doesn’t prevent me from saying these kinds of things about the mental capacities of different animals. What I want to stress is that conceptualist commitments are consistent not only with an image of animals as inside ethics but also with an openness to discovering that there are substantial, irreducibly ethical analogies between human lives and the lives of animals of different kinds. One final comment before I conclude. To say that animals of different kinds are ‘inside ethics’ in my sense is to say that, insofar as they are observable, they are endowed with moral qualities. This is not the same as claiming that things animals do invite moral assessment. Nevertheless, I want to close this chapter by underlining the fact that my argument makes room for the possibility that the actions of some non-human animals are open to such assessment. The upshot of the argument is that a conceptualist outlook does not commit us to holding that animals of all kinds are either mere bundles of stimulus-response mechanisms or mere systems of exploitable instincts. Animals may traffic in concepts, thereby occupying partial stages of rational development. One reasonable way to gloss this claim is to say that animals may be distinguished by partial forms of freedom in virtue of which their actions are rightly subject to some types of moral evaluation. Consider again the case of dogs. If we allow that dogs deal in the kinds concepts discussed in 3.4, then we should allow that individual dogs—​say, those who are integrated into human household routines—​may aptly be characterized as trustworthy as opposed to merely predictable. We should also allow that dogs are capable of having moral relationships with others. 58

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 That some canine behavior needs to be understood in moral terms is a central theme of the writings of the poet and dog trainer Vicki Hearne. See Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). For a thoughtful commentary on Hearne’s work, see Raimond Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002), 40–42. I discuss relevant aspects of Hearne’s work in “Freedom Is for the Dogs,” in Martin G. Weiss and Hajo Greif, eds., Ethics—​Society—​Politics (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013).

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4 A L L H U M A N B EI N GS A N D A N I M A L S A R E I NSI D E E T H IC S Reflections on Cognitive Disability and the Dead

All living beings contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. —​Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Having in earlier chapters presented an argument for situating human beings and animals ‘inside ethics’ in my sense, I want to devote the current chapter to further developing this argument and bringing out an aspect of its moral interest. The argument’s main conclusion is that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics, and, in arriving at this conclusion, I depict human beings and animals as proper objects of moral concern. My goal now is to show that, if we help ourselves to the understanding of moral thought that my argument brings within reach (2.3), we can demonstrate not only that some human beings and some animals are proper objects of moral concern but that all are. We can do this by defending both the classical view that the sheer fact of being human is morally significant and the less widely discussed view that the sheer fact of being an animal of some kind is morally significant as well.

This project possesses a certain urgency. Today a number of influential moral philosophers are openly hostile to the idea that bare humanity and bare animality are morally important. While any moral philosopher who is skeptical about the moral standing of human beings and animals in effect rejects this idea, there are many non-skeptical thinkers who dismiss the thought that merely being a human, or merely being an animal of some kind, is relevant to ethics. Here I have in mind, above all, members of an internally diverse group of moral thinkers who believe that a human or non-human creature’s moral standing is a function of its individual characteristics. Moral thinkers who fit this description—​ and who, for the purposes of this chapter, I refer to as moral individualists—​a re committed to denying that the sheer fact of being human, or of being an animal of some kind, is morally significant. What unites different moral individualists is a thought about how any consideration human beings and animals merit is a reflection of their individual mental attributes, and it appears to follow from this thought that there can be no question of regarding the plain fact that a creature is a human being or an animal of some kind (i.e., apart from the possession of particular individual mental characteristics) as pertinent to ethics. It is not uncommon for moral individualists to emphasize that, by their lights, merely being human is thus irrelevant to ethics. Some moral individualists talk about severely intellectually disabled human beings specifically with an eye to pointing out that, according to the logic of moral individualism, the people in question merit less consideration than do their mentally better-endowed human fellows. This gesture has come in for intense criticism. Some of its fiercest critics are dis­­ability theorists who protest the—​politically consequential—​suggestion that severely intellectually disabled human beings matter less on account of their intellectual impairments. When in this chapter I argue that the sheer fact of being human is morally important, one of my goals is to position myself, within this dispute between disability theorists and moral individualists, decisively on the side of the former. The importance of merely being human is not, however, my only topic. I am setting out to show not only that the plain fact of being human is morally significant but that the plain fact of being an animal is so as well. This further contention brings me, once again, into conflict with moral individualism. Although not all contemporary thinkers

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who qualify as moral individualists bring their views to bear on the case of animals, there are a number of well-known moral individualists who emphasize that it follows from their theoretical views that some individual animals (viz., those who possess what are deemed morally relevant mental capacities) merit moral consideration. Among the thinkers who thus apply tenets of different moral individualisms to the case of animals are some who are rightly counted among the most high-profile and outspoken advocates of animal protectionism. Indeed the quarrel between moral individualists and disability theorists is sometimes presented as confronting us with a choice between, on the one hand, recognizing animals as having significant claims to moral attention and, on the other, recognizing human beings with severe intellectual disabilities as having undiminished claims to such attention. Against this backdrop, it seems important to underline the following point, namely, that it is a direct corollary of things I say in this chapter that there is no question of being confronted with some sort of human-animal choice along these lines. My view is that we should approach questions about the moral standing of animals of different kinds in a manner exactly analogous to that in which we should approach questions about the moral standing of human beings. Despite their generally friendly intentions toward animals, moral individualists bequeath to us a morally problematic image of animal life. Insofar as they insist that any moral consideration an animal merits is a function of its individual characteristics, they are committed to holding that merely being an animal (i.e., apart from the possession of any individual mental characteristics) is irrelevant to ethics. An important ambition of this chapter is to show that—​ like moral individualists’ accounts of human beings’ moral standing—​this account of animals’ moral standing is both philosophically unwarranted and morally flawed and that, just as the plain fact of being human is pertinent to ethics, the plain fact of being an animal of some kind is as well. Below I get started by first discussing moral individualisms and presenting the twofold complaint about them that provides the motive for this chapter’s main claims. I describe how disability theorists and others protest moral individualists’ proposal to ground human moral standing in individual capacities, and I sketch a similar protest of moral individualists’ proposal to ground the moral standing of animals in



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individual capacities (4.1). Helping myself to the conception of moral thought about human beings and animals that I defend earlier in this book, I then argue that both elements of this attack on moral individualism are justified and that, the claims of moral individualists notwithstanding, we are entitled to treat as morally important the plain fact of being human (4.2) and the plain fact of being an animal of some kind (4.3). I conclude the chapter with a few remarks on the nature and implications of its main argument. Among other things, I note that the argument proceeds by representing all human beings and animals as having observable moral characteristics and, further, that it is therefore aptly described—​to put it in the terms of this book—​a s showing that all human beings and animals are ‘inside ethics’ (4.4).

4 . 1 .  T O W A R D A C R I T I Q U E O F M O R A L I N D I V I D U A L I S M

“Moral individualism” is a label that gets applied to ethical views on which, as the self-avowed moral individualist James Rachels puts it, “how an individual may be treated is to be determined, not by considering his group memberships, but by considering his own particular characteristics.”1 While, by definition, moral individualists agree that any treatment a creature merits is a function of her individual characteristics, the different thinkers who count as moral individualists disagree, in various ways, about the kinds of characteristics that count as morally relevant. For instance, whereas some moral philosophers who favor forms of moral individualism focus solely on characteristics that are intrinsic, others maintain that a creature may be entitled to specific forms of treatment from a particular other, or from particular others, as a result of standing in a particular relationship (such as, e.g., the relationship of an artist to her benefactor) and that we need to allow for ethically significant relational characteristics.2 The question of whether there are such relational characteristics does not, however, represent a  Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 173. 2  One prominent moral individualist who champions the idea of ethically significant relational properties is Jeff McMahan (see, e.g., “Our Fellow Creatures,” The Journal of Ethics 9 [2005]: 353–380, esp. 354). For a second example, see the work of Clare Palmer, esp. Animal Ethics: A Relational Approach (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 1

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point of fundamental disagreement among moral individualists. Those who talk about relational characteristics typically resemble their peers in holding that only intrinsic characteristics endow a creature with moral status in virtue of which it is a source of reasons that aren’t functions of our relationship to it or, to use some philosophical shop-talk, in virtue of which it is a source of agent-neutral reasons. This brings me to a further point of disagreement among moral individualists. Moral individualists also disagree about which intrinsic characteristics count as morally relevant. The set of moral individualisms includes theories—​ such as Tom Regan’s rights-based theory—​that treat any claims to consideration a creature merits as functions of her capacity for subjecthood. 3 And one of the largest subsets of moral individualisms is made up of theories—​including Peter Singer’s preference utilitarianism (1.2)—​that treat any claims to consideration a creature has as functions of interests she possesses in virtue of her capacity for suffering.4 While specific moral individualisms are sometimes recommended on the ground that their fundamental claims are intuitive, 5 it is not difficult to see that these claims have radical and arguably counterintuitive consequences for our understanding of human moral standing, undermining the classic idea of human moral equality. To the extent that, in accordance with the core tenets of moral individualism, human beings’ claims to solicitude are taken to be functions of their individual characteristics, it appears to follow that any human being who lacks whichever characteristics are regarded as morally significant will have diminished moral standing. This is a striking—​some would say, shocking—​result, and, far from trying to downplay this aspect of their ethical projects, some moral individualists actively celebrate it. For example, Singer declares that he wants to reject “the idea of the equal value of all humans” and replace it with “a more graduated view on which moral status  See The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) and Defending Animal Rights (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 4  Many animal protectionists implicitly or explicitly follow Singer in advocating forms of moral individualism that ground creatures’ claims to consideration in interests they have in virtue of their capacities for suffering. 5  This is an important theme of Singer’s recent defenses of the—​utilitarian—​form of moral individualism he favors. See my discussion of Singer’s work in 1.2. McMahan also presents himself as defending his preferred moral individualism partly on intuitive grounds (see, e.g., “Our Fellow Creatures”). 3



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depends on some aspects of cognitive ability.”6 Singer’s point is that human beings who for whatever reason (e.g., illness, age, disease or some congenital condition) are short on what he regards as interest-grounding cognitive capacities have diminished claims to moral attention and, further, that it is therefore less bad to, say, perform painful or lethal scientific experiments on them than on human beings without any cognitive impairments.7 And, to mention one additional example, the self-described moral individualist Jeff McMahan resembles Singer not only in distanc­ i­ ng himself from the idea of human moral equality but also in defending the view that, in McMahan’s words, “allowing severely retarded human beings to die, and perhaps even killing them, are . . . ​less serious matters than we have believed.”8 While it is possible for thinkers who qualify as moral individualists to focus solely on the human case, today many moral individualists bring their theoretical commitments to bear on the case of animals as well. Indeed, moral individualisms owe a great deal of their current prominence to their role in ongoing debates about the moral standing of animals. An important intellectual task of those who advocate for better treatment of animals is establishing that animals are proper objects of moral concern. This is because, within some older ethical traditions, animals are represented as in themselves failing to impose moral claims on us,9 and because the view that animals lack moral standing, in  See “Speciesism and Moral Status,” in Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 331–344, esp. 338. 7  See, e.g., Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 15–16 and 18–19. Singer covers the same basic ground in Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 59–60. 8  The Ethics of Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 230. When McMahan defends the view that some human beings with limited intellectual abilities merit less consideration, he explicitly makes exceptions for individuals who have the capacity to develop what he regards as morally relevant characteristics (e.g., fetuses and infants) as well as for individuals who once possessed what he regards as morally relevant characteristics (e.g., adults whose cognitive limitations are functions of illness or injury). McMahan’s claims about diminished moral standing are intended to apply exclusively to those human beings who have congenital intellectual disabilities and whom he describes as “severely retarded” (see esp. 203–209). 9  This was, as noted in 1.3, Kant’s official view. It was also the view of Descartes, who believed that animals are mere automata. For a helpful set of excerpts from Descartes’s writings and letters, see Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 13–19. 6

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addition to being reflected in the utterly indifferent treatment animals receive in settings such as factory farms, still receives significant intellectual support today.10 For these reasons, animal advocates often try to show simply that animals do have moral standing, and those who do so frequently draw on some form of moral individualism.11 It is not difficult to see how the tenets of moral individualism can seem to support the conclusion that animals have moral standing. One widely used strategy for moving from the core claims of moral individualism to this conclusion starts from the following reflection. If we allow that the tenets of moral individualism apply to non-human as well as human creatures, we are obliged to treat any capacities that we take to be morally significant in human beings to be likewise morally significant in animals. The idea, as Rachels puts it, is that “if we think it is wrong to treat a human in a certain way, because the human has certain characteristics, and a particular non-human animal also has those characteristics,” then—​other things being equal—​“consistency requires that we also object to treating the non-human in that way.”12 This precept only seems to have a bearing on the treatment of animals if it is combined with the view that some human beings and some animals possess the same morally relevant capacities. So it should not surprise us to find that moral individualists who take an interest in animals frequently try to establish that there are human beings who are no better  A useful list of contemporary works that deny moral standing to animals would have to include Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David S. Oderberg, “The Illusion of Animals Rights,” Human Life Review 26 (2003): 37–45; and Michael Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. chap. 7. See also Roger Scruton Animal Rights and Wrongs, 3rd ed. (London: Metro Books, 2000). While Scruton sanctions the idea of duties to individual animals arising from our relationships with them, he denies that we have any other duties to animals that aren’t mere functions of duties to ourselves or other human beings (see esp. chaps. 7 and 8). 11  Many prominent contemporary animal advocates favor forms of moral individualism. This includes several philosophers whom I have already mentioned, such as Singer, Regan, Rachels and McMahan. Another widely read philosopher and animal advocate who accepts the basic tenets of moral individualism is David DeGrazia (see, e.g., Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], esp. chap. 3). The group of influential animal advocates who endorse moral individualisms includes not only philosophers but also legal theorists such as Gary Francione (see, e.g., Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000], xxix). 12  Created from Animals, 175; emphasis in the original. 10



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endowed with what they regard as morally relevant capacities than some animals are. The particular human beings who are typically mentioned in this context are those who, as a result of illness, injury, age or some congenital condition, are severely intellectually disabled,13 and, after observing that there are human beings fitting this description, animal advocates who go in for moral individualism often proceed to draw the main conclusion they are after, namely, that some animals have significant claims to moral solicitude. They also often add that any tendency to place value on the sheer fact of being human is therefore unjustified or, to employ a familiar bit of jargon, that any such tendency is a sign of an unwarranted speciesism.14 The argument I just sketched (i.e., the argument running from the tenets of moral individualism to the conclusion that some animals have claims to moral consideration) gets referred to as the argument from marginal cases.15 This argument owes its name to the problematic idea that human beings with severe intellectual disabilities are morally “marginal” cases of human beings. Setting aside for just a moment discussion of what is problematic about this idea, I want to point out that it is a premise of the argument that animals’ claims to moral consideration are grounded in their individual characteristics and, by the same token, that the sheer fact of being an animal of some kind is morally unimportant. Although, as we just saw, the principles of moral individualism get applied not only to human beings but also to animals, it is their core human applications that generate the most controversy. One of the most frequently repeated criticisms of moral individualism has to do with the suggestion that human beings with severe intellectual impairments have diminished claims to moral consideration specifically in  Some moral individualists who take an interest in animals focus in this connection on more restrictive classes of intellectually limited human beings. This includes, e.g., McMahan, who focuses exclusively on human beings who have severe congenital cognitive disabilities. 14  This term was coined by Richard Ryder and brought into general circulation by Singer and others. 15  For an older, sympathetic overview of different versions of the argument, see Daniel Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997). For a slightly more recent overview, see Elizabeth Anderson, “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life,” in Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 277–298. 13

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virtue of their impairments. The particular criticism that I want to explore does not depend for its bite on any misunderstanding of what moral individualists are committed to. It is true that consistent moral individualists need not be in favor of “leveling down” our current treatment of severely intellectually disabled human beings so that it is, say, equivalent to our current treatment of mentally similarly endowed animals.16 Their theoretical positions commit them to holding that creatures with equivalent mental capacities have equivalent claims to moral consideration, and this is something that moral individualists can consistently maintain while also sanctioning (or even calling for improvements to) our current treatment of severely intellectually disabled human beings. Nevertheless, without regard to their specific views about the kind of treatment merited by severely intellectually disabled human beings, they are committed to holding that, other things being equal, the individuals in question place lesser demands on us for moral attention than do their unimpaired fellows. Moreover, as we saw, this is a consequence that some moral individualists explicitly embrace.17 One place where moral individualists’ attitude toward severely intellectually disabled human beings comes under attack is in disability studies. Theorists of disability attack the idea that, as Michael Berubé puts it, “cognitive capacity is a useful criterion for reading some people out of the human community.”18 Disability theorists question moral individualists’ suggestion that severely intellectually disabled human beings are less deserving of moral consideration and that harming them is, relatively speaking, a minor affair.19 These theorists sometimes  For talk of “leveling down,” see McMahan, “Our Fellow Creatures,” 358.  A comment is in order about terms I use in this chapter to refer to members of the group of human beings whose moral standing is threatened by different moral individualisms. Here I talk about individuals with severe “intellectual disabilities” or, alternately, individuals with severe “cognitive impairments.” Although I use these terms, I believe that what is at issue is a class of individuals so internally diverse that in referring to it as a class we invariably run the risk of oversimplification and misunderstanding. My reason for nonetheless employing the above terms is strategic. I need to employ them in order to directly challenge the tendency of moral individualists to impugn the moral standing of those human beings who lack (or are short on) what, according to different moral individualisms, count as morally relevant capacities. 18  From a letter to Peter Singer, reprinted in Kittay and Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, 108. 19   See the papers in ibid. See esp., Carlson and Kittay, “Introduction: Rethinking Philosophical Presumptions in Light of Cognitive Disability,” 1–25; Carlson, 16

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proceed by using examples to get us to see that we ourselves take moral individualists’ claims about human beings with severe intellectual disabilities to be repugnant. The disability theorist and moral philosopher Eva Feder Kittay employs this strategy in various papers in which she talks about her own daughter Sesha, who has cerebral palsy and who, as an adult, “cannot speak, walk on her own, or care for herself in even minimal ways.”20 In one essay, Kittay describes how the director of the agency running the small home in which Sesha lives once discovered with dismay that Sesha was being wheeled from the bathroom back to her room, clad only in a towel, through a public corridor “where young male residents and staff could encounter her.”21 When Kittay describes this scene, she is trying to get us to recognize that it is right to speak, in reference to Sesha’s exposure, of a slight to Sesha’s dignity that was there without regard to whether Sesha herself was capable of experiencing the occasion as such a slight.22 Or, again, in an essay in which Kittay provides a partial transcript of a public conversation she had with McMahan at an Atlanta workshop on a book of McMahan’s, she tells us that McMahan was aware that she is, as she puts it, “the mother of a wonderful woman with severe intellectual disabilities.”23 In discussing her interaction with him, Kittay is inviting us to be horrified, as she is, by his repeatedly voiced contention that harming her daughter would, in relative terms, be no big deal and that it is “less bad to kill her than to kill ‘one of us’.”24 Disability theorists are not the only critics of moral individualists’ proposal to ground human moral standing in individual attributes. Other moral philosophers also question the idea that human beings with diminished mental capacities merit less solicitude. Some of these thinkers likewise use examples to elicit shock at moral individualists’ claims. One rich source of examples on these lines is the writing of Cora

“Philosophers of Intellectual Disability: A Taxonomy,” 315–330; and Kittay, “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield,” 393–413. 20  This quote is from Kittay, “Equality, Dignity and Disability” in Mary Ann Lyons and Fionnuala Waldron, eds., Perspectives on Equality: The Second Seamus Heaney Lectures (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2005), 93–119, 96. I am indebted to Christopher Kaposy for bringing this article to my attention. 21  Ibid. 22  See ibid., 97. 23  K ittay, “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political,” 393. 24  Ibid., 395.

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Diamond. Diamond asks us, for instance, to consider the kind of indignation “we may feel at the rape of a girl lacking speech and understanding, lacking what we think of as moral personality and the capacity for autonomous choice, and incapable of finding the event humiliating and the memory painful as a normal woman might.”25 Similarly, she asks us to acknowledge that “the conviction by a court of a severely retarded person for a crime that required an intention the retarded person could not form [would be] unjust; the less capable of forming such an intention the person is, the more palpable the injustice.”26 In addition to producing examples she believes will elicit responses that moral individualism would oblige us to censor, Diamond calls on us to examine our willingness to affirm similar responses of others. In one passage she invites us to assess the response of parents who feel a “special outrage” when their child ridicules “a severely retarded person . . . ​ who [has] no grasp of having been the butt of ridicule.”27 In the last two paragraphs I touched on criticisms of moral individualists’ accounts of human moral standing. Given that, as I noted earlier, some of the staunchest defenders of animals’ claims to moral consideration are moral individualists, it may be tempting to interpret these critiques as attacks on the idea that animals are proper objects of moral  Diamond, “The Importance of Being Human,” in David Cockburn, ed., Human Beings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35–62, esp. 56. 26  Ibid., p. 53. Diamond wrote the article from which I am quoting, which was first published in 1991, at a time at which there was not yet as clear a consensus as there is today that the term “retarded” is disrespectful and should not be used in descriptions of individuals with congenital cognitive disabilities. (Diamond herself no longer uses the term.) There have been changes over time in received views about how to characterize individuals who have congenital intellectual disabilities. In the early twentieth century it was taken to be appropriate to speak of “morons” or “idiots,” and until a decade or two past the middle of the twentieth century it was taken to be appropriate to speak of individuals who are “mentally retarded.” (For an account of this history, see Jeffrey P. Brosco, “The Limits of the Medical Model: Historical Epidemiology of Intellectual Disability in the United States,” in Kittay and Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, 27–54.) Today there is an emerging consensus that, in discussing individuals with congenital cognitive impairments, it is more respectful to talk about “developmental delays.” The basic idea—​which is reflected in my own terminological choices in this chapter—​is that this terminology, instead of wrongly suggesting that we have antecedently determined that individuals with congenital intellectual disabilities won’t grow cognitively past a certain point, signals an openness to discovering all kinds and levels of cognitive development and, by the same token, to supporting policies that foster such development. 27  Ibid., 55. 25



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concern. But this interpretation is by no means obligatory. The critiques might also be taken to suggest an analogous critique of moral individualists’ accounts of animals’ moral standing. If we are disturbed by the idea that human beings only merit moral consideration insofar as they have such-and-such individual characteristics, then we may equally well be disturbed by the idea that animals only merit moral consideration insofar as they have such-and-such individual characteristics. Imagine coming across a group of children using a brain-dead rabbit as a dartboard. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to think that, despite the fact that the rabbit cannot be said to have any morally relevant individual characteristics, the children are wronging or disrespecting it in some way? Isn’t the same thing true of the workers in a California factory farm who, as a secret videotape showed, pushed cattle too sick to walk around with a forklift? Weren’t they betraying a type of callousness to the creatures that wasn’t merely a function of causing pain and suffering?28 Mightn’t we plausibly ask a similar question about people who subject animals to forms of ridicule that are lost on the animals in question? Consider in this connection the behavior of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Head Injury Laboratory who, as another secret video revealed, mocked and ridiculed their already injured baboon subjects. Mightn’t we say—​this is an example of Diamond’s—​that these researchers exhibited a form of disrespect to the baboons that wasn’t somehow mitigated by the fact that it was lost on the baboons themselves?29 Or consider the head slaughterer at a New York State slaughterhouse who merrily kissed each of the cattle he was to kill just before shooting it through the brain. 30 Or—​to turn to an example of Lori Gruen’s—​the members of the Moscow Circus who dressed up a bear in a frilly pastel apron and had it walk around the ring on its hind legs pushing a toy baby  Singer discusses this case in Animal Liberation, ix. He uses it to motivate his preferred form of moral individualism. He does not take it, as I do, to speak against such individualism. 29  Diamond discusses this case in “Injustice and Animals,” in Carl Elliott, ed., Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 118–148, 137. 30  Sue Coe discusses this case in Dead Meat (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996), 62. 31  Gruen discusses this case in Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 152–153; and again in “Dignity, Captivity, and an Ethics of Sight,” in Lori Gruen, ed., The Ethics of Captivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 231–247, esp. 231. 28

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carriage.31 Or, finally—​to mention another example of Gruen’s—​people who not only keep wild animals in cramped enclosures but, moreover, adorn the enclosures with scenes of the open spaces in which the animals could move freely. 32 Insofar as we find these ways of treating animals insulting and wrong, we will be inclined to think that moral individualists fail to capture the source of our conviction that animals merit forms of respect and attention. 33 I just sketched parallel critiques of moral individualists’ views of human and animal moral standing. It is not hyperbole to say that moral individualists have evinced little interest in responding to critiques on these lines. To the extent that they take an interest in the relevant objections, they generally dismiss them as unworthy of serious response. The objections are at bottom judgments about how certain ways of treating human beings and animals are, say, repugnant, callous or disrespectful, and it is not uncommon for moral individualists to reject these judgments as mere moral prejudices. In making this gesture of rejection, moral individualists sometimes present themselves as moral radicals who have the courage, when led by sound argument, to challenge received moral opinion. 34 They thus sometimes draw what one commentator describes as a “rhetorical contrast between an extant set of moral convictions which is to a large degree made up of inherited prejudices and a new, critical morality which has passed through the mill of rigorous argument.”35  Gruen discusses two cases fitting this description in “Dignity, Captivity, and an Ethics of Sight,” 237–239. Her reference points for both are photographs in Fran Noelker’s striking book, Captive Beauty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 33  For a more complicated case that raises questions similar to those raised in this paragraph, consider how a California restaurant called “Pink Taco,” a slang term for a woman’s genitals, once employed an animal in an advertising stunt. On May 5, 2011, in ‘honor’ of Cinco de Mayo, the restaurant shaved a donkey, painted it pink, wrote “Pink Taco” on both of its sides and paraded it around. It seems likely that, as a number of critics charged at the time, the stunt caused the donkey distress. At the same time, it seems reasonable to ask whether, in involving the donkey in an outlandish prank that depended on misogyny for its effect, those responsible showed disrespect for the creature that wasn’t merely a function of causing unnecessary distress. I am indebted to Zed Adams and Hunter Robinson for drawing my attention to this affair. 34  This is the preferred stance of Singer and McMahan. See, e.g., Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1980): 325–327, esp. 327; and McMahan, “Our Fellow Creatures,” 373. 35  Peter Byrne, Philosophical and Ethical Problems in Mental Handicap (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 46. 32



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It would, however, be overhasty to conclude that intellectual seriousness is on the side of moral individualists. A good case can be made for affirming, with moral individualists’ detractors, that merely being human or merely being an animal of some kind (i.e., apart from the possession of any particular individual characteristics) is morally important. Making such a case is the business of the rest of this chapter. The strategy I adopt presupposes this book’s argument thus far. In Chapter 2, I argued that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics. The particular observable characteristics I identified as moral are qualities of mind broadly construed, and in describing these qualities I claimed that they have necessary references to conceptions of what matters in the lives of the human beings and animals who possess them. I also discussed implications of this understanding of qualities of mind for how we construe the project of bringing human beings and animals empirically into focus in ethics (2.3). One of my main claims was that we need to see human beings and animals in the light of conceptions of what matters in their lives (2.2.ii). The current chapter’s argument against moral individualism depends for its success on efforts to get us to look at human beings and animals through the lens of such ethical conceptions. It might seem reasonable to protest that an argument of this sort—​one driven by ethically saturated modes of thought—​cannot as such be in the business of revealing objective features of human and animal life, and hence cannot be credited with genuine authority. But this is wrong, and in this chapter’s closing section I bring out how it follows from my book’s overarching argument that we are entitled to regard as objectively authoritative the case I make here for holding—​in opposition to moral individualism—​that merely being human, or merely being an animal of some kind, is morally important.

4 . 2 .  T H E I M P O R T A N C E O F B E I N G H U M A N

The plain fact of being human is pertinent to ethics. That is what I am setting out to show in this section. I am, as I mentioned, going to proceed by following up on Chapter 2’s argument for situating human beings ‘inside ethics’. According to this argument, mental categories are categories for expressive behavior, and the patterns of behavior they pick out are not neutrally available. In 2.2.ii I claimed that we are only

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in a position to recognize relevant patterns in a creature’s behavior if we look at her in the light of a conception of what matters in the lives of creatures of her kind, but I didn’t specifically discuss how to understand this talk of kinds of creatures. Right now I want to clarify what it means to say that recognizing the psychological significance of a human being’s expressions necessarily involves looking at her in light of a conception of what matters in the lives of creatures of her kind. My thesis is that for the purposes of psychological understanding human beings belong to the kind “human being” and that in order to do justice to a human being’s expressive behavior it is necessary to look at her in the light of a conception of what is important in human life. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for bringing human beings into focus in ethics. To bring human beings into focus in ethics we need a conception of human existence that registers the importance of things like bodily integrity, physical freedom, dependable companionship, social acceptance, language and memory (2.2.ii). Saying this is consistent with recognizing that our ethical conceptions of human existence may be limited or distorted and that, in many situations, getting human beings in view in a manner relevant to ethics may require that we revise or refine them. Later in this book I discuss works that count among their aims getting us to refine our conception of what matters in human life in ways that thus contribute internally to understanding (6.2–6.4). Right now I am concerned with works that try to bring us to the more fundamental recognition that a conception of what matters in human life is a lens through which in ethics we need to look at all human beings, and not only the mentally well endowed. It is a confusion—​a serious moral confusion—​to think that when in ethics we are concerned with human beings with severe intellectual impairments the right ethical reference point is a more truncated conception. Without regard to the level of their mental capacities, human beings are, morally speaking, human beings. That is the view I wish to defend, and I appeal to it in concluding that the plain fact of being human is pertinent to ethics. There are no shortcuts here. My ambition is to show that bring­ing the lives of human beings into view in a style appropriate for ethics is impossible apart from reference to a conception of what is humanly important, and the only way to show this is to consider cases. It is neces­ sary to turn to the lives of different human beings and to demonstrate



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that, by looking at them in the light of a conception of what matters in human life, we position ourselves to discern things that aren’t otherwise available. Below I approach this task by examining the work of a number of authors who invite us to look at human life through the pertinent sort of ethical lens. I comment on the work of writers who invite us to see humans with significant intellectual disabilities as, morally speaking, full-fledged human beings, and I also consider the contributions of writers who ask us to look upon irreversibly comatose and deceased human beings as, in a moral sense, our human fellows. 36 After examining this body of work, I discuss how it supports the conclusion that merely being human matters. Let me start with a work of fiction. The centerpiece of Daniel Keyes’s novel Flowers for Algernon is a treatment of a developmentally delayed man that is very helpful for the purposes of this discussion.37 The novel is set in New York City at a time, the 1960s, at which parents were routinely urged to institutionalize children with serious intellectual disabilities. Although the novel’s protagonist, Charlie Gordon, was sent away from home by his parents while still a child, he has avoided institutionalization because he has a job, courtesy of a friend of a deceased uncle, doing cleaning work at a bakery. Charlie is a trusting person with a strong desire to improve himself, and he takes classes at the “Adult Center for Retarded People” at Beekman University. Through the center, he becomes a subject for an experimental surgical procedure to increase intelligence. The surgery initially appears to be a success, and Charlie goes through a period of intense intellectual growth that, we are told, raises his IQ from 70 to above 185. 38 But the effects turn out to be merely temporary. He soon begins a rapid intellectual decline, which will eventually take him below his original mental level and result in his premature death.  I n adopting this strategy, I am largely in agreement with a claim that Kittay makes to the effect that “there is so much to being human. There’s the touch, there’s the feel, there’s the hug, there’s the smile . . . ​t here are so many ways of interacting. I don’t think you need philosophy for this. You need a very good writer” (“The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political,” 408; emphasis in the original). To the extent that I want to hedge my agreement with Kittay, it is only because I believe that the kind of writing that she here calls for belongs within philosophy. 37  Flowers for Algernon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966). 38  Ibid., 126. 36

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Flowers for Algernon is designed to get us to look at both pre- and post-surgical Charlie as a human being in a moral sense. A number of plot-related and structural features of the novel serve this function. This includes the novel’s basic narrative form. When Charlie is accepted for the experimental surgery, a doctor asks him to write daily “progress reports” to document his development, and the entire book takes the form of a series of these reports. One result is that as readers we are asked to imaginatively participate in Charlie’s mental development. This is apposite because, once he has become intellectually more sophisticated, he is preoccupied with the recognition that he was in the past often treated as lacking full human moral standing. 39 Insofar as, in virtue of its structure, the novel invites us to identify with Charlie, it at the same time invites us to join him in thus looking back at his pre-­ surgical self through the lens of an ethically inflected conception of humanity. Charlie’s reports include accounts not only of how he spends his time day-to-day but also of how his memories of his pre-surgical life are becoming more intelligible to him. Among the past episodes that he is newly able to understand are several having to do with how he was treated at the bakery at which he worked. Charlie remembers that whenever someone did something stupid his coworkers would say that the person had “pulled a Charlie Gordon,”40 and, although he used to laugh along with everyone else, he now realizes that he was being mocked. He recalls one particular occasion on which he fell asleep standing up and a worker named Frank kicked his legs out from under him. When a third worker rebuked Frank for this, Frank responded that what he did didn’t matter because Charlie “don’t know any better.”41 Whereas Frank’s crude and presumably inchoate thought is that what Charlie doesn’t understand can’t hurt him, Flowers for Algernon challenges this thought. By asking us to look at the episode, as the post-surgical Charlie does, in the light of a robust ethical conception of human life that emphasizes things like companionship and social acceptance, the novel gives us a very different picture of what happened. Now it appears that, in exploiting Charlie’s trust, Frank disrespects relationships that are  Ibid., 113, 145, 160–161, 201, 247–248.  Ibid., 23 and 42. 41  Ibid., 60. 39

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among a person’s most valuable goods and thus does Charlie a real injury. Moreover, it appears that, far from being mitigated by Charlie’s intellectual disability, the injury that Frank inflicts on him is exacerbated by the fact that Charlie doesn’t register that he is being hurt and so isn’t in a position to defend himself. Another event from the past that Charlie discusses in his progress reports is his abandonment by his parents. Although earlier he lacked a clear sense of what happened, after his surgery he pieces together what he knows. When he was little, his mother was desperate to prove that he was “normal” and could learn like other children.42 This changed after she had another child. When it became evident to her that her second child, a daughter, could in fact learn, his mother became hostile to him.43 Eventually she used Charlie’s sexuality as a pretext to send him away. When Charlie later reflects on what transpired on the night on which he was banished, he isn’t sure whether he actually did anything, however innocently, to provoke a reaction. But he does remember that his mother would get furious with him when he had erections,44 and he realizes that, on the fateful night, she claimed that he made sexual advances to his sister and that she then threatened violence until his father finally packed him up and took him out of the house.45 Within the novel, it is made clear that at the time Charlie didn’t understand what was going on and felt only afraid.46 To the extent that we are invited to contemplate this family drama, through post-surgical Charlie’s eyes, in a manner informed by a sense of the human importance of relationships of trust, we are invited to see his younger self as wronged in a way that isn’t merely a function of emotional harm suffered at the time, and also isn’t merely a function of later consequences that he is capable of registering, and that is aggravated by his inability to understand and protest the wrong. These are some of the ways in which, by encouraging us to look at young Charlie’s life via a conception of what matters in human life, Keyes’s novel appears to give us access to important aspects of it that aren’t otherwise accessible. Although I want to urge that this appearance is veridical, I am not proposing that we uncritically adopt the  Ibid., 73.  Ibid., 168. 44  Ibid., 112. 45  Ibid., 184–185. 46  Ibid. 42

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attitudes that the novel recommends. To be intellectually responsible we need to be willing to step back from the complex ethical perspective at issue and to ask whether the things it seems to enable us to see are mere projections. My suggestion is that if we do this we can see that this is not a case of projective error and that, on the contrary, the person who refuses to look at Charlie or other intellectually disabled human beings as, morally speaking, full human beings is missing significant features of human life that are truly there. The ethical perspective that the novel cultivates allows us to render intelligible elements not only of the novel’s social world but also of our own world that are otherwise confusing. It equips us to make sense of the (otherwise potentially puzzling) observations that I made in 4.1, that is, observations about how people often respond with particular indignation to the abuse of individuals with intellectual disabilities and about how people often also feel that the person who is guilty of such abuse shows herself to have behaved in a particularly low manner. To the extent that Flowers for Algernon thus advances understanding, we are right to treat its preferred ethical perspective as cognitively authoritative, and to affirm its suggestion that intellectually disabled human beings merit consideration simply as the human beings they are.47 There are many congenial non-fictional engagements with similar issues. Here we might turn, for instance, to memoirs by parents of children with Down syndrome.48 A prominent concern of many of these  There is a respect in which the structure of Flowers for Algernon might seem to make it incapable of shedding light on the lives of people with developmental delays. Because immediately post-surgical Charlie is not cognitively impaired, and because this Charlie learns to expect an accelerated cognitive decline, his story might seem to be more that of a person with a cognitive disability brought on by age, illness or injury than that of a person with a developmental delay. Perhaps this narrative observation has some merit. Nevertheless, it remains the case that—​a s I have been arguing—​Keyes’s novel is designed to open our eyes to important features of life that pre-surgical Charlie lives as an ordinary, developmentally delayed individual. Moreover, as I discuss in just a moment, the strategies the novel deploys are in fundamental respects similar to strategies deployed in some notable memoirs by parents of kids with Down syndrome. 48  A lthough in what follows I discuss only two such parental memoirs, there is a large body of literature. Christopher Kaposy gives a helpful overview in “Memoirs of Parenting a Child with Down Syndrome,” in his unpublished manuscript Choosing Down Syndrome in the Age of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing. Another rich source of insight into perspectives of parents of children with Down syndrome is the chapter entitled “Down Syndrome” in Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (New York: Scribner, 2012), 169–220. 47



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works is getting readers to look at children with Down’s, in an ethical sense, as full-fledged human beings. This is true of Rachel Adams’s Raising Henry,49 which tells the story of the first three years in the life of Adams’s son Henry who has Down syndrome. Adams discusses how, just after Henry’s birth, she had to struggle against the tendency of people around her to regard Henry’s existence as a “tragedy” produced by medical oversight or “mistake.”50 She describes how she instead quickly came to look at him as a distinctive human being, and she sets out to get us to look at him in the same way. Similarly, in Life as We Know It, Michael Berubé reports that he is aware that other people often look at his son Jamie, who has Down’s, simply as “disabled,” but that he himself has trouble seeing Jamie as anything other than the sui generis person he is. 51 Berubé then declares that he wants to affect the perceptual shift that he has undergone for readers so that, in his words, we see “how loving, clever and ‘normal’ a child like Jamie can be.”52 One of Adams’s and Berubé’s main strategies for getting us to look at their children through the lens of an ethical conception of human life is presenting vignettes about everyday life with them. Adams talks about, among other things, how Henry takes delight “from singing along with music or pouring bathwater from one cup to another” and how he “loves to walk around with a puppet on each hand, making them talk to each other in animated gibberish.”53 Berubé recounts that he and his wife were struck by “how vividly [their] little boy responded to encouragement and praise,”54 by how Jamie loves the Beatles’ cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and by how, when he hears it, he “dance[s]  R aising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 50  See ibid., 36 and 106. Many parents of children with Down syndrome report similar experiences. See, e.g., Stanley Hauerwas’s account of a woman who was told by her physician simply to “forget” her newborn daughter with Down syndrome (see Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986], 193). And in Far From the Tree, Solomon describes many similar experiences of parents of kids with Down’s (see, e.g., 171, 181, 187). 51  Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 52  Ibid., 47. 53  Ibid., 106. 54  Ibid., 125. 49

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with delight.”55 The point of these and other anecdotes is not merely to get us to see Henry and Jamie as human beings in a morally salient sense. Both Adams and Berubé are in the business of advocating for educational resources and opportunities for children with developmental delays, and both proceed by challenging our society’s tendency to place antecedent limits on what these kids can achieve. One of their shared aspirations is to show that, when given proper support, developmentally delayed children very often exceed expectations. 56 At the same time Adams and Berubé agree in baldly rejecting any suggestion that a child’s claims to concern or attention is a function of its level of achievement. 57 They believe that all children, without regard to the level of their cognitive attainments, merit concern just as the people they are. They invite us to imaginatively enter into scenes of daily life with their own kids in significant part because they want us to see them as members of a larger human moral fellowship who, like all other members, merit concern and attention. What emerges from their memoirs is thus an image of individuals with Down syndrome that is very similar to the portrait of a developmentally delayed person given in Keyes’s novel. It is an image of them as individuals who are leading lives of undisputed human consequence and who, because they have Down syndrome and therefore have certain special vulnerabilities, are likely at times to require special help so that they can live their lives as fully as possible. 58 This is an image that encodes a particular ethical perspective (viz., a perspective shaped by a conception of what matters in human life), and the measure of this perspective’s cognitive authority is the extent to which it enables us to make sense of aspects of the lives of  Ibid., xi. There is a connection between Berubé and Adams. Before she had children of her own, Adams reviewed Berubé’s book and got to know him. She wrote to him after she had Henry, and her book includes a letter that he wrote to her in response. See Raising Henry, 28. 56  See Adams, Raising Henry, 24. See Berubé, Life as We Know It, 26, and “Equality, Freedom, and/or Justice for All: A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” in Kittay and Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, 97–109, esp. 107. 57  I touched on this aspect of Berubé’s work earlier in this chapter. 58  A similar image emerges in Jason Kingsley and Mitchel Levitz, Count Us In: Growing up with Down Syndrome (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004). The two authors are young people with Down syndrome who set out to educate others about what life with the condition is like. See also Andrew Solomon’s remarks on the writing of Kingsley and Levitz’s book in Far From the Tree, 174. 55



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Henry and Jamie, and of other kids like them, that didn’t make sense before. 59 Some individuals are intellectually disabled as a result not of congenital conditions but of disease.60 This includes people with advanced Alzheimer’s, and it is possible to find support for the view that merely being human is relevant to ethics in accounts of life with this disease. One good place to turn here is John Bayley’s memoir about his marriage to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. Murdoch began showing signs of Alzheimer’s late in life, and Bayley seamlessly includes episodes from years in which the disease had already begun to affect her  Two people with whom I discussed this material—​Christopher Fitzpatrick and Christopher Kaposy—​floated the idea that there might be something misleading about trying to develop my argument by turning to the lives of people with Down syndrome. Fitzpatrick’s and Kaposy’s thought was that people with Down’s are often gentle and sociable and that it would be more difficult to defend my views in reference to accounts of the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities who are violent or unsociable. Fitzpatrick suggested that I consider stories of the life of Phineas Gage, an American railroad construction foreman who is generally thought to have undergone profound personality changes, losing social skills and becoming aggressive and antisocial, after surviving an accident in which an iron rod was blasted through his skull. Kaposy in turn suggested that I address the descriptions of the lives of parents of children with autism that are included in Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree. Although I have not expanded an already long chapter to include these additional cases, I want to mention that it seems to me that, far from undermining my argument, the additional material in question provides further support. Having argued earlier in this book that, in order to bring human beings empirically into focus in ethics, we need to look at them through the lens of ethically inflected conceptions of human life, in this section I argue that this applies to all human beings, not only the mentally well endowed. Many accounts of and memoirs by people with autism—​including those in Solomon’s book—​depend for their power on getting us to view their subjects as human beings in a morally loaded sense, and on thereby revealing aspects of their subjects’ lives that aren’t otherwise available. (I can’t comment on the case of Phineas Gage because I haven’t been able to find a substantial enough account of his life to refer to.) For a helpful discussion of how, in order to engage responsibly with autistic people, neurotypicals need to be willing to revise their ethical conceptions of human life in a manner that may require reshaping attitudes and modes of responsiveness, see Ian Hacking, “Humans, Aliens, and Autism,” Dædalus 138 (2009): 44–59. In this chapter’s closing section, I offer a more general account of my own approach to human cases that challenge us morally and intellectually. 60  There are moral individualists who believe that the considerations that, as they see it, diminish the moral standing of people with congenital cognitive impairments fail to apply to people who were once cognitively well endowed and who have serious intellectual disabilities as a result of age, injury or disease. The cases fitting the latter description that I consider here, while directly relevant to my quarrel with only some moral individualists, are nevertheless important for this section’s larger argument. 59

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strongly.61 A recurring theme is that Murdoch is, in a moral sense, the same person both before and after she starts to decline mentally. Bayley repeatedly insists that her struggle with Alzheimer’s, however terrible, is a chapter in her one human life.62 One of Bayley’s methods for getting us to look upon Murdoch as, morally speaking, the same human being throughout is to present scenes from the years in which she had Alzheimer’s as immediate sequels to scenes from her earlier life. There is a striking application of this technique at the book’s beginning. Bayley is concerned with the custom that he and Murdoch had of making their way to the Thames River near Oxford on hot and humid days, stripping and enjoying the water.63 He opens his book by describing the first time they did this, telling us that it was “with the ardour of comparative youth” that they “tore [their] clothes off and slipped in like water-rats.”64 A chapter later he recounts how, forty-five years later when Murdoch is already sick, he has trouble undressing her for a swim and how, when it is time to get out of the water, he is afraid that her muscles will fail and that she will fall helplessly back in.65 Passages like these contribute to the development of an image of Murdoch as embarked on a human life both early and late, and this image has implications for how we understand the tragedy that her illness represents for her. Alzheimer’s is not only a calamity for her insofar as she understands what is happening to her and feels distressed. Although Bayley is concerned with forms of anxiety and despair that grip her when she is cognizant of what she is going through,66 his account of her misfortune is a larger story of human suffering. He invites us to think of Murdoch in relation to, and as increasingly alienated from, the kinds of things that mattered in her life and that matter in any human life, and he thus bequeaths to us a distinctive understanding of the kind of care and concern that Murdoch merits. It is not merely that, like other human beings, she has a claim to solicitude. Having described her particular human fate as a hard one that  Eleg y for Iris (New York: Picador, 1999).  Ibid., 37, 49, 76, and 214. 63  Ibid., 3–4. 64  Ibid., 47. 65  Ibid., 38–39. 66  Ibid., 63, 184, 239, 248, and 259. 61

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includes the gradual loss of old habits and activities, Bayley presents himself as called on to preserve those habits and activities as long and as fully as possible. He is, he suggests, called on to do as much as he can to—​in a phrase of Hilde Lindemann’s—​“hold her in her identity.”67 Because Bayley approaches his account of Murdoch’s life equipped with a conception of what is humanly important, he presents a distinctive picture of what that life is like, and he thus puts us in a position in which we might well ask whether the picture is a faithful one. One mark of the cognitive authority of Bayley’s preferred ethical perspective is that it illuminates otherwise murky aspects of Murdoch’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. Another is that it allows us to make sense of other familiar yet potentially baffling features of life with progressive degenerative neurological diseases. Now we can appreciate why it may seem not only that neglecting, defrauding, or abusing a person with such a disease is a particularly vile thing to do but, moreover, that the fact that the person may not understand what is happening to her, and so may not mind, is not a mitigating factor. Further, we can understand why it may seem disrespectful to dress or style a person who is no longer aware of things around her in a manner that she would have found ridiculous or offensive,68 and why it may also seem disrespectful to allow her to live in a way that, however conducive to health, she herself would have found foul or degrading.69 Thus far I have been concerned with treatments of the lives of actual and fictional human beings with intellectual disabilities. The point of discussing these treatments was to show that a conception of what is humanly important is the right reference point for understanding the  See Hilde Lindemann, “Holding One Another (Well, Wrongly, Clumsily) in a Time of Dementia,” in Kittay and Carlson, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, 161–170, esp. 162. What it amounts to to hold a person with a progressive degenerative neurological disease ‘in her identity’ in Lindeman’s sense naturally varies with the identity of the person in question. When my father was in the last years of his struggle with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and cut off from the activities he had pursued most passionately—​sailing, above all—​it was important to help him to continue to do some of things that he had always enjoyed and that were still possible for him, e.g., sitting and gazing out at Puget Sound. 68  See, e.g., the striking scene in Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie Amour in which a visiting nurse does the hair and makeup of the mentally compromised and bedridden protagonist in a crude style abhorrent to her. 69  For a discussion of this further kind of case, see Elizabeth Anderson, “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life,” 277–298, esp. 280–281. 67

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expressive lives of all human beings, without regard to how well or poorly endowed they are mentally. Yet there are human beings—​such as the irreversibly comatose and the dead—​who don’t have any expressive lives to speak of, and the line of reasoning that I have been developing applies to these human cases as well. Just as looking at minded human beings through the lens of a conception of what is humanly important reveals significant aspects of their lives that are not neutrally accessible, looking at human beings who lack any substantial aspects of mind reveals significant aspects of their lives that are otherwise hidden from view. If this seems hard to square with my emphasis up to this point on expressive behavior, it may be helpful to consider that we sometimes think about the limbs and faces of, say, brain-dead people and corpses as sites of absent psychological expressiveness. The cases I am about to discuss speak for treating this way of thinking about human beings without mentation as authoritative in the sense of capable of revealing real or objective things about them that are otherwise hidden from view. Suppose we look at an irreversibly comatose person in the light of a conception of what matters in human life. Here is, we might say, an individual who has lost almost every good that human beings can enjoy, and who for this reason merits any respect and attention that we can still pay to her. This way of looking at comatose human beings positions us to make sense of the plausible idea (encoded, among other places, in US law) that the assault or rape of a person who is comatose and hence incapable of registering what is being done to her is every bit as much a wrong as the assault or rape of a person with control of her mental faculties.70 Or suppose that we look upon corpses, in a manner informed by an ethical conception of human life, as people at the end of their mortal tethers, irrevocably cut off from every relationship and activity. This way of looking goes hand in hand with an understanding of dead human bodies as in themselves proper objects of concern, and this understanding in turn sheds light on many attitudes toward the dead. While there is striking cultural and historical variation among practices with corpses,71   For some sympathetic treatments of this idea, see the critical essays on Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film Talk to Her in A. W. Eaton, ed., Talk to Her: Philosophers on Film (London: Routledge, 2008). 71  For a classic treatment of this topic, see Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law,” in The Complete Essays, Donald Frame, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 77–90, esp. 81–82. 70



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a commitment to treating the bodies of people who were respected in life in ways that, however various, are taken to connote respect comes at least very close to being a cultural and historical universal. This is reflected, for instance, in attitudes toward cannibalism or anthropophagy, which has for the most part been accepted by cultures only within clear-cut ritual settings,72 and it is reflected in practices of honoring the cadavers used for training purposes in medical schools, as well as in discussions about the ethics of organ transplantation and the ethics of the use of cadavers in various kinds of experimentation.73 Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” makes a powerful case for this way of regarding human corpses.74 The dramatic cornerstone of the story, which is set in central Washington state around the 1970s, is the discovery of a dead body by four men on a fishing trip. The body is that of a recently deceased young woman, and she is naked and face down in a cold stream when the men come across her. Although one of the group wants to hike back out and summon the sheriff, the men eventually decide to remain, fishing and drinking heavily, for the duration of their planned three-day stay. They believe it suffices to wade into the river, pull the woman’s body toward the shore and fasten a nylon cord around her wrist to prevent her from being pulled downstream. They only report their find three days later when they go back to their car. Although they regard their behavior as beyond reproach, Carver’s story invites us to regard their treatment of the woman’s body not only as outrageous but as outrageous in ways that connect it directly with forms of abuse to which men subject living women. The story is told in the present tense and from the perspective of Claire, the wife of one of the men on the fishing trip, and it opens the morning after the men’s return. Claire’s husband—​Stuart—​has told her  See the discussion of cannibalism in ibid., 82. Also helpful in this connection is Richard Fleischer’s 1973 movie Soylent Green, which depends for its power on the idea that there is something horrible about the mass, unceremonious eating of the flesh of dead human beings. 73  For a discussion of these topics that takes for granted that corpses in themselves merit respectful treatment, see Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York: Norton, 2003). 74  R aymond Carver, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” in Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1986), 213–237. 72

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what happened, and she is staring at him, horrified by what he and the others did. Her horror is in part a function of her vague sense of a link between how Stuart treats her and how he and his buddies treated the dead woman’s body. Claire is aghast that she admitted Stuart’s sexual advances the previous night, before she knew what he had done.75 Part of what is striking about Carver’s story is that it asks us to recognize the justice of her reactions. It impresses on us the wrongness of thinking of its featured corpse as a mere thing, and it does this by means of a narrative strategy that positions us to look at the dead woman’s body in light of a conception of what matters in human life. As the story progresses, Claire learns more about what happened to the dead woman. Claire comes to see her as an individual with her own hopes and dreams, and the story’s first-person narrative encourages us to look upon the corpse in the same light that Claire does. Consider, to begin with, Claire’s description of how, just after recounting what happened on the fishing trip, Stuart gives her a newspaper article containing these details: unidentified girl eighteen to twenty four years of age . . . ​ body three to five days in the water. . . . ​ rape a possible motive . . . ​ preliminary results show death by strangulation . . . ​cuts and bruises on her breasts and pelvic area. . . . ​76

Claire is shocked and disoriented by what she reads. She recalls an occasion on which Stuart threatened her with violence, and she now sees his threat in a more sinister light.77 Her feeling of alienation from him deepens as she finds out more about the murder victim. She watches a televised newscast that shows both a photograph of “the girl” and footage of the girl’s parents as they walk to and from the funeral home in which they identify their daughter. Claire learns from the newscast that the victim’s name is Susan Miller and that Susan had worked as a cashier at a local movie theater and probably knew her assailant.78 Claire attends Susan’s funeral, where she sees many young people, presumably Susan’s friends, and listens to a service in which Susan is  Ibid., 217.  Ibid., 218. 77  Ibid., 224, 220–221. 78  Ibid., 226–227. 75 76



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characterized as having gifts of “cheerfulness and beauty, grace and enthusiasm.”79 One result is that Claire comes to look upon Susan’s body as the mortal remains of a person to whom things mattered. Far from conceiving it as a mere object, she regards the body that Stuart and his buddies found as all that is left of a young person who has, in the worst way, been cut off from everything humanly important. Now it seems to her that crudely securing the body in a stream showed a complete failure to register the significance of the situation. Carver’s story in these ways represents Claire as becoming censorious of the men’s conduct. At the same time, it invites us to share Claire’s sense of importance so that we likewise regard Susan Miller’s body as in itself meriting respectful treatment. My thought is not that we should simply adopt, without critical assessment, the ethical perspective that Carver’s story thus recommends. Rather, once we distance ourselves from and scrutinize this perspective, it seems reasonable to say, not that it ensnares us in a projective illusion, but that it reveals real features of the world that are otherwise invisible. The perspective enables us to make otherwise inaccessible connections both among the different attitudes of the fictional characters of “So Much Water So Close to Home” and among the assortment of familiar real-world practices concerning the dead that touched on a moment ago. That is what entitles us to treat it as cognitively authoritative, thereby in effect endorsing the view that, like the body of the fictional Susan Miller, the dead bodies of real human beings call for respectful treatment. These reflections on Carver’s story, like my reflections on the other cases discussed above, belong to this section’s argument for the view that merely being human is morally important. The argument presupposes the claim, defended in 2.2, that, in order to bring human beings or animals into focus in a manner relevant to ethics, we need to look at them in the light of conceptions of what matters in the lives of creatures of their kinds. Drawing on this claim, I set out to show not only that for the purposes of ethics all human beings count as human beings but, moreover, that in ethics all human beings therefore need to be looked at 79

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in the light of conceptions of what matters in specifically human life. My particular concern was illustrating that this is true of those human beings who lack the individual characteristics that moral individualists deem morally significant and who, as moral individualists see it, accordingly have lesser claims to moral consideration. At issue are human beings with severe cognitive impairments as well as human beings who lack cognitive capacities altogether, and, with an eye to countering the contentions of moral individualists, I discussed a range of actual and fictional human cases that fit these descriptions (including cases of human beings with developmental delays and progressive degenerative neurological diseases as well as cases of comatose and dead human beings). An indefinite number of further cases might be discussed in this connection (e.g., cases of anencephalic infants, and of mature human beings who suffer from senile dementia or who have serious brain injuries). I submit that the cases considered here are representative enough to support the conclusion that in ethics we need to look at all human beings, regardless of the level of intellectual capacities they possess, through the lens of a conception of what is humanly important.80 This conclusion in turn entitles me to advance this section’s main claim, namely, that the bare fact of being human is germane to ethics.81  It is not an implication of my conclusion (viz., that in ethics we need to look at all human beings through the lens of a conception of the kinds of things that matter in human life) that individuals who, due to accident, illness, age or a congenital condition, are incapable of enjoying certain human goods are somehow therefore condemned to tragedy. That is, it doesn’t follow from anything I have said that a human being must be capable of somehow enjoying all of the things that humanly matter in order to have a glorious life. The main point of this section is that a conception of what is important in human life is a necessary prerequisite of doing empirical justice to human beings in ethics. Acceptance of this point, while consistent with recognizing that some individuals experience current or impending cognitive disabilities as grave misfortunes, places no obstacles in the way of recognizing that the lives of some individuals who have intellectual disabilities, and who therefore do not enjoy every human good, are among the most wonderful and least tragic of human lives. 81  I cannot emphasize enough that the challenge to the normative conclusions of moral individualists that I am mounting in arguing, as I just did, that merely being human matters is one that presupposes a prior challenge to moral individualists’ fundamental theoretical framework. My point is that bringing a human being, however well or poorly endowed mentally, into empirical focus in ethics is inseparable from seeing her as meriting various forms of respect and attention. It follows that, in contrast to what moral individualists assume, there is no question of somehow needing to find a morally salient intrinsic property to ground the treatment that individual human beings 80



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4 . 3 .  T H E I M P O R T A N C E O F B E I N G A D O G

Having just argued that merely being human is morally important, I now want to defend the view that merely being an animal of some kind is as well. Because showing this even with regard to animals of a single kind is quite involved, I largely limit myself to one further exhibit. I devote most of this section to showing that the sheer fact of being a dog is ethically significant, postponing until the section’s close a few remarks about how my discussion of dogs carries over to animals of other kinds. My strategy parallels the strategy I used in discussing human beings. Following up on the argument of 2.2, I defend the view that merely being a dog matters by illustrating that bringing dogs empirically into focus in ethics essentially calls for looking at them in the light of a conception of what is important in specifically canine life.82 My suggestion is that this is necessary but not sufficient for getting dogs in view in ethics. To get dogs in view we need a conception of canine existence that registers the importance of things like bodily integrity, physical freedom, and dependable companionship (2.2.ii). At

merit. I added this note after discussing a late version of this material with Jeff McMahan, who wrongly construed it as an attempt, consistent with the core tenets of moral individualism, to show that ‘humanity’ is a morally relevant intrinsic property that all human beings share. This impressed on me the need to stress that the idea of such a property has no place in my thought. The approach in ethics defended in this book, far from amounting to a move in the game that moral individualists are playing, is one that deprives their larger theoretical preoccupations of any motivation. 82  Given the structure of ongoing conversations about animals and ethics, my starting point here is a fairly radical one. I begin with the idea that at least those members of different kinds of animals who have kind-typical mental capacities as such merit specific forms of treatment. I speak of animals in reference to creatures sophisticated enough to exhibit primitive expressive behaviors (e.g., perception, self-movement, struggle). (Scientists today generally speak of animals differently, in reference to living beings that are not only multicellular but that have cells of a certain complexity and are heterotrophic, nourishing themselves on other organisms and thus differing from autotrophs, like plants and algae, that use energy from the sun to derive nourishment from inorganic substances. Although my understanding of animals is different, the two understandings are largely coextensive.) It may seem far-fetched to represent as meriting respectful treatment even those animals who threaten human beings with, e.g., painful scratches or bites, exposure to serious diseases, or even dismemberment and death. But to say that animals in themselves merit respectful treatment is not to deny that in some circumstances—​e.g., those in which they threaten our well-being and in which there is no simple way for us to get away—​t heir claims to respect from us may be overridden.

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the same time, our ethical conceptions of canine existence may be limited or distorted, and, in many situations, bringing dogs into focus may require that we revise or refine these conceptions.83 Bearing this in mind, I should stress that at the moment I am primarily concerned with attempts, not to deepen any particular ethical conception of canine life, but rather to bring us to the recognition that a conception on these lines is a lens through which in ethics we need to look at all dogs, and not only those with canine-typical capacities. I want to show that it is wrong to think that the appropriate reference point for mentally impaired dogs is a more primitive ethical conception. Without regard to the level of its capacities, a dog is, morally speaking, a dog.84 Many memoirs about companion dogs feature descriptions of their subjects at the end of life, when they have suffered at least a certain  For discussion of works that aim not only to get us to refine our conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of different kinds but, moreover, to do so in ways that contribute internally to understanding, see 6.2–6.4 and 7.1–7.2. 84  It may seem reasonable to protest a study of dogs in ethics on the ground that the dog is an unnatural life-form. Dogs are indeed ‘unnatural’ in that they are the products of processes of domestication that to a significant extent involved selective breeding geared toward human objectives. But it is possible to distinguish questions about the process and aims of domestication from questions about what dogs are like. (For a discussion of domestication that makes a general distinction along these lines, see Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, eds., Zoopolis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], esp. 74–75.) It is also true that recent artificial selection has had “grievous effects for many breeds” of dogs, leading members of certain breeds “to inherit and pass down physical disorders” ranging from “skeletal dysplasias in large breeds . . . ​ to spina bifida in the pug” (Alexandra Horowitz, “Canis familiaris: Companion and Captive,” in Gruen, ed., The Ethics of Captivity, 1–21, esp. 13). While such physical disorders do not affect all dogs, some thinkers regard dogs and other companion animals as uniformly ‘unnatural’ because they are constitutionally dependent on humans. (See, e.g., Gary Francione, “The Abolition of Animal Exploitation,” in Gary Francione and Robert Garner, eds., Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation [New York: Columbia University Press, 2010], 1–102, esp. 79.) It is undeniable that dogs’ dependence on humans has left them vulnerable to many abuses, but, given that various forms of dependence are natural and unavoidable for many social animals, humans included, it is unclear why the mere fact of dependence should be taken as a mark of the unnatural. The source of the perceived unnaturalness may be that what is in question is an interspecies, human-dog form of dependence, but it is unclear why human-animal interactions should be regarded as inherently unnatural. Humans interact with animals in an enormously rich number of ways (see, e.g., Donaldson and Kymlicka, eds., Zoopolis, 62–69). To the extent that it is possible to imagine what a world without such interaction would be like, it’s not obvious that such a world should be thought of as a more natural one. For these different reasons, I reject the idea that the dog is an inherently unnatural life-form and also the related idea that a study of dogs in ethics is misleading and bound to introduce distortions. 83



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degree of mental decline, and some of these memoirs invite us to think about the dogs whose lives they address in a manner informed by a conception of what matters in canine life. One very deliberate project of this sort is Jessica Pierce’s The Last Walk.85 Pierce is a bioethicist who wants to answer the question, rarely raised in bioethics, of what a good death for an animal would be, and her immediate reference point is her companion dog Ody, a Vizsla, who is at the time sick with bone or liver cancer and partly demented. Pierce recites a list of aspects of quality of canine life, which includes forms of physical well-being, self-expression, and social satisfaction, and she discusses its application to Ody at different times during his last year.86 While this exercise is programmatic, there are also passages in Pierce’s book in which she evocatively describes the ailing Ody in the light of her understanding of what is important in canine life. Pierce’s larger portrait of Ody includes an account of the fullness of his early life. She tells us that Ody was extremely athletic, accompanying her on long runs and bike rides. He was emotionally expressive, above all with his tail.87 He tried as far as possible to be in physical contact with the human members of his household.88 His appetite was voracious and indiscriminate, and he would eat not only any edibles that came within reach but also many apparently inedible things.89 In describing the young Ody in these and other ways, Pierce gives us a sketch of his individual personality. She at the same time brings out how he had access to what she regards as the goods of canine life. When she turns her attention to Ody’s last weeks and days, she invites us to see him, in a manner that presupposes her conception of canine flourishing, as no longer enjoying a full dog life. She describes how he now falls frequently, sometimes soiling himself in his own feces and sometimes getting trapped in familiar pieces of furniture, and how he is  Jessica Pierce, The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of their Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For other thoughtful discussions of what a good death for a companion dog might be, see also Mark Doty, Dog Years: A Memoir (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007); and George Pitcher, The Dogs Who Came to Stay (New York: Plume, 1995). 86  See Pierce’s discussion of the “pawspice scale” at ibid., 145–150. 87  Ibid., 5, 44. 88  Ibid., 6, 16. 89  Ibid., 16–17 and passim. 85

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frequently disoriented. She explains that he is socially much more remote, no longer greeting as he used to and seeming generally “fairly uninterested in affection.”90 What emerges is a picture of Ody as a sort of spectral figure, haunting spaces he once properly lived in. He now “wanders about the house like a ghost,” sometimes stopping “in front of a wall and seem[ing] befuddled about how to get turned around.”91 He appears to “inhabit a different world.”92 Implicit in this picture of Ody is a view about the kind of attention he merits. Pierce is actively concerned about the pain and distress that Ody suffers in his geriatric state, but her emphasis is on how his decline cuts him off from goods he once enjoyed in ways that he is not aware of. She presents herself as in this sense mourning “his losses,”93 and she suggests that she is called on to do what she can to help him to participate in his old form of life. That is, she suggests that she is called on to, to project Hilde Lindemann’s term into a new context, ‘hold Ody in his identity’.94 Pierce’s beliefs about the kind of solicitude the older Ody merits reflect an image of him that is, we saw, permeated by a conception of what matters in dog life.95 We might reasonably ask whether we are justified in adopting Pierce’s preferred ethical perspective and, more  Ibid., 21–22.  Ibid., 157. 92  Ibid., 1. 93  This quote is from the following passage of Peirce’s book: “The thought of losing him hurt, but even more than this, I mourn his losses. I am sad that Ody can no longer run wild through a field of tall grasses or chase the teasing squirrel in the backyard” (ibid., 6); emphasis added. 94  For my initial use of this phrase, see the last section. 95  There is an aspect of Pierce’s efforts to develop such an image that I haven’t mentioned. Her book opens with a black-and-white photograph of an already graying Ody. He is shown, slightly from the right and from the shoulders up, in an upright posture, glancing seriously back to the left at the camera. The photo is in the style of portraits of venerated, older human beings, and, just as such human portraits are conventionally taken to invite us to look upon their subjects as individuals living lives in which things matter, the portrait of Ody invites us to look upon him as an individual who has lived a life in which things matter. Moreover, because Ody is a dog, and because making sense of dogs’ expressions essentially draws on our ethical conceptions of dog life (see 2.2.ii), the portrait has a tendency to mobilize such conceptions. It thus supports Pierce’s efforts to get us to look upon Ody in the light of such a conception. Something similar could be said about Isa Leshko’s striking photographic portraits of aging companion and ‘farm’ animals in the series “Aging Animals” (see the photographs and the “artist statement” at http://isaleshko.com/elderly-animals/). 90 91



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specifically, ask whether it leads us to project onto the world something that isn’t really there, or whether it instead contributes internally to genuine understanding. Pierce in effect attempts to answer this question by underlining how her way of looking at Ody and other dogs enables us to make sense of aspects of canine life that otherwise remain opaque. At issue is a perspective from which mentally impaired dogs appear to be, morally speaking, full-fledged dogs who, insofar as they lack access to things that matter in dog life, call for special concern and consideration. Although Pierce knows that people often abandon or kill companion animals when the animals are old and sick,96 she attempts to impress on us that the ‘disposal’ of ailing animals is callous and that we should rejoice at the fact that some abandoned animals receive palliative care.97 Additionally, in presenting her account of the last year of Ody’s life, she illustrates how caring for a severely disabled dog, for all its difficulty (and despite the fact that those who undertake it are often subject to ridicule), can be significant and deeply satisfying.98 It is to the extent that Pierce’s characteristic ethical perspective enables us to make sense of these features of our lives with dogs, and to the extent that stepping back from the perspective makes these things obscure, that we are justified not only in representing it as cognitively authoritative but also in maintaining that impaired dogs like Ody merit consideration simply as the dogs they are.99 Having just claimed that we need to refer to a conception of what matters in dog life if we are to do justice in ethics to the expressive lives of mentally impaired dogs, I want to say something similar about what is involved in bringing into focus in ethics dogs who don’t have any mental capacities to speak of. I am not here abandoning my emphasis on expressive behavior. I am taking it for granted that, just as we sometimes think about the limbs and faces of brain-dead people and corpses  The Last Walk, 9, 74.  Ibid., 136 and 171. 98  Doty also makes this point in Dog Years. 99  Should I have chosen a case involving dogs whose cognitive disabilities, unlike the forms of age-related dementia that afflict Ody, render them erratic and vicious? Is it true of such dogs, as I argued it is true of the older Ody, that otherwise inaccessible features of their lives come into view when they are regarded through the lens of an ethical conception of dog life? I am convinced that this is true, though I don’t argue the point here. For a general account of my approach to animal cases that challenge us morally and intellectually, see this chapter’s closing section. 96 97

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as sites of absent psychological expressiveness (see 4.2), we sometimes think about the limbs and faces of brain-dead or dead dogs as such sites. My aim in the next pages is to make it seem plausible to believe that this way of thinking about dogs bereft of all mental capacities reveals things about them that otherwise remain obscure. I am going to take as my main reference point an arresting passage in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace that involves the handling of dead dogs.100 Later in this book, I discuss Coetzee’s novel in greater detail (see 6.3). Now I simply want to enter into it far enough to explain how it asks readers to look upon dead dogs in a distinctive ethical light, and how, in doing so, it opens our eyes to things about them that we would otherwise miss. The main character of Disgrace, which is set in newly post-apartheid South Africa, is David Lurie, a middle-aged white academic whose professional specialty is modern languages. Lurie favors the view, championed by some of his favorite authors, that the possession of a refined moral outlook is internal to important cognitive capacities. But he doesn’t take this view seriously in his own life, preferring to treat some of his own cruder attitudes and impulses as incapable of change. The novel tells the story of how Lurie, in part as a result of his complacency, falls into a condition of deep social disgrace. The dramatic downturn in his life begins when he sexually harasses a student and consequently loses his university job in Capetown. He responds by moving to a small plot of land on the Eastern Cape owned by his grown daughter Lucy. Lucy proposes that he use his newfound free time to help a friend of hers at a nearby animal clinic. Lurie agrees to this, although only grudgingly at first. Initially, he patronizes Lucy’s friend and ridicules the idea that caring for animals might be a worthy pursuit. But the events in his life ultimately affect his stance not only toward human beings but also toward animals at the clinic, which houses many dogs. Disgrace in this way gives us a portrait of a character whose way of looking at dogs undergoes a major shift. Moreover, in addition to describing how Lurie’s attitude toward dogs changes, the novel uses literary techniques to get us to enter imaginatively into his new way of looking at them. Disgrace is written entirely in the present tense, and, although it also written in the third person, it follows Lurie’s 100



 Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999).

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thoughts and activities throughout, inviting readers to look at things through his eyes. The animal clinic at which Lurie winds up working is neither well funded nor well equipped. For the most part it can do very little to help the animals that come through its doors. One of its primary functions is to euthanize unwanted dogs, and as things in Lurie’s own life get worse he increasingly identifies with the dogs’ plight. As he does so, he starts to look at them in the light of an at least primitive conception of what matters in their canine lives. Now he regards them, in an ethically loaded manner, as individuals who, like himself, are embarked on mortal adventures and who have arrived at a dismal closing chapter. He continues to look at them in this way even after they have been killed. Because he sees the dead dogs as individuals who are irrevocably cut off from all the goods of life, he looks upon their bodies as having a kind of “honor” in virtue of which they merit respectful treatment.101 When he is asked to dispose of the dogs’ corpses, he accordingly refuses to simply leave them at the dump until they can be incinerated. There is, for him, no question of regarding them as mere indifferent detritus, so there is also no question of simply depositing them with “waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped up at the roadside, [and] malodorous refuse from the tannery.”102 Yet, if he merely brings the bodies to the incinerator, the workmen at the dump attempt to break down the bodies using the backs of shovels, with an eye to getting them to fit into the incinerator’s trolley. For these reasons, Lurie eventually takes to incinerating the dogs’ bodies himself. What interests me about these passages of Disgrace has to do with the fact that they not only depict Lurie as sensitive to what he sees as dishonors to which dogs’ bodies may be subject but also do so in a way that encourages us to imaginatively explore his perspective. Coetzee’s novel invites its readers to look at dogs’ corpses as if from Lurie’s perspective, so that they appear to demand certain forms of respect and attention. Suppose we abstract from the ethical perspective the book seeks to inculcate and ask whether this perspective tends to distort our vision, or whether instead it helps us to see things about dead dogs’ bodies that 101

 See ibid., 144–146.  Ibid., 145.

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are really there. In this connection, we might be struck by the fact that it is common for people who live with dogs to treat the bodies of dead dogs as worthy of attention and respect. We might also be struck by the fact that many people who have companion dogs bury the dogs after they die (sometimes with toys they liked or in blankets they found comforting) or cremate them and scatter the ashes in places they loved,103 and that most of these people are also persuaded that it would be wrong to eat dogs, even if they die when young and healthy.104 It is insofar as Lurie’s perspective enables us to make sense of these attitudes and practices, and to connect them with similar attitudes toward and practices concerning human corpses, that we are right to credit it with cognitive authority and to say that there is indeed a sort of honor in the bodies of dead dogs. This concludes my case for holding that the plain fact of being a dog is relevant to ethics. Consider what would be involved in producing a case of this sort that applies not to dogs but to animals of other kinds. We would need to show that in ethics we have to draw on conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of whatever life-forms or species are in question in order to arrive at an adequate empirical understanding, not only of animals who possess species-typical mental capacities, but also of those who (as a result of injury, illness, age, or congenital condition) lack such capacities. We would need to show that looking at animals who lack species-typical mental qualities through the lens of conceptions of what matters in the—​t ypical—​lives of members of their life-forms enables us to bring them empirically more clearly into focus than is otherwise possible. One strategy would be to look at mentally  The disposal of dogs’ and other pets’ remains is one of Pierce’s topics in The Last Walk. Her main aim in discussing this topic is to affirm its significance and give people with companion animals license to take it seriously. She discusses the burial of pets, pet cremation, pet funeral homes, and pet cemeteries (205–215). She also discusses her regret at having waited until after Ody was cremated to visit the crematorium to which his remains were sent (219–221). For another treatment of the question of how to treat the bodies of dead dogs, see Doty, Dog Years. Doty’s book is a eulogy to two companion dogs, Beau and Arden, and it includes accounts of how both dogs died and of what Doty did with their remains (83, 148, 213). My partner and I buried two of our companion dogs—​Sitka and Shi-Shi—​on a plot of land in upstate New York that belongs to our family, and we regularly visit their graves. 104  In this connection, see Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 24–27. 103



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impaired and dead animals of the kinds at issue in light of relevant ethical conceptions and bring out how doing so enables us to grasp things that were previously invisible. This would involve undertaking exercises analogous to those that Pierce and Coetzee invite us to undertake in reference to mentally impaired and deceased dogs. We might ask, for instance, whether the black-and-white photographic portraits of aged companion and ‘farm’ animals in Isa Leshko’s series “Elderly Animals,” portraits that ask us to look upon their subjects in the relevant sort of ethical light, open our eyes to features of the animals’ lives that are otherwise hidden from view. Or we might ask whether adopting the pertinent type of ethical perspective on a cow who has contracted bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”), and who as a result can no longer recognize its bovine fellows or navigate its familiar environment, enables us to better appreciate what has happened to it.105 Or whether adopting the pertinent type of ethical perspective on a sparrow who has flown into a window and broken its neck, and who now lies dead on the ground before us, brings its small lifeless body more clearly into focus for us, helping us to appreciate the significance of its death. There is a relevant treatment of a small bird’s body in Margaret Brown Wise and Remy Charlip’s classic picture book The Dead Bird.106 Using nothing more than simple illustrations and an unadorned story, the book positions readers not only to look at a newly dead bird, in an ethical light, as a creature at the end of a life in which certain things matter but, at the same time, to acknowledge that this way of conceiving the creature enables us to bring it more clearly into focus. The book recounts the story of four children who find a dead bird and then give it a primitive funeral. At the book’s opening, we are shown the bird lying, as if peacefully asleep, in the grass. We are told that with their fingers the children could feel the warmth of its body but no heartbeat and, further, that as they held the bird it began to get cold and stiff. We are also told that the children regard the small body not as an indifferent object that is in some sense fascinating but as a creature who has lost the goods of bird life and who therefore merits respectful attention. They are, we read, “very sorry the bird . . . ​could never fly again” but glad

 See, e.g., the footage of a cow with mad cow disease in Robert Kenner’s 2008 documentary Food Inc. 106  The Dead Bird (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1938). 105

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they found it “because now they could dig a grave in the woods and bury it.” In one picture, a girl holds the creature reverently against her cheek; in another two boys kneel on either side of the tiny body, which is laid out on a leaf; and in a third three boys place the leaf-enclosed body in the ground while a girl brings wildflowers. The text describes how the children sing a made-up song, cry, mark the grave with a stone, visit the grave, and then eventually forget to visit. Throughout the book the children’s attitudes are portrayed as simple and natural, with the result that we are encouraged to share their attitudes and to join them in looking upon the bird’s body as in itself precious. It is in this way that the book gets us to look at the body of a dead bird in light of a conception of what matters in bird life and, in doing so, positions us to ask whether this way of looking at it misleads us, or whether on the contrary it enables us to discern things that we would otherwise miss. If we now imaginatively distance ourselves from the ethical perspective that the book cultivates, we should be able to see that, far from misleading us, it enables us to make sense not only of our attitudes toward dead birds but also of a wide range of attitudes and practices concerning dead human bodies and the bodies of companion animals such as dogs. That is what justifies us both in representing the perspective as authoritative and, at the same time, in maintaining that a bird’s lifeless body merits respectful treatment. This section’s illustrations were intended to show that—​a s I can now put it—​looking at mentally impaired and deceased animals in the light of conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of their species contributes internally to our ability in ethics to bring them clearly into view. I have, above all, been preoccupied with showing that this is true of animals who lack the sorts of individual characteristics that moral individualists take to be morally important and who, by the lights of moral individualism, therefore have diminished claims to moral attention. The class of animals who fall under this heading includes those who largely or entirely lack species-typical mental capacities, and, bearing this in mind, above I considered a small sample of actual and fictional cases that fit this description. Both of my main cases concern dogs, and I have for the most part left it to the reader to explore analogous cases involving other animals. But it is not unreasonable to assume that further cases along these lines would confirm the conclusion that I now want to draw, namely, that if we are to get animals in view

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empirically in ethics, then, regardless of what individual characteristics they possess, we need to look at them through the lens of conceptions of what matters in the lives of members of their species.107 Given that it is, in this way, compulsory to allow ethical considerations to inform the way we look upon all animals in ethics, we can fairly say that the plain fact of being an animal of some kind is relevant to ethics or, more concisely, that merely being an animal matters.108

4 . 4 .   C O N C L U S I O N

This chapter has been devoted to elaborating my book’s main argument in a quite particular way. Its goal was to show that this argument equips us to say that the plain fact of being a human or an animal of some kind matters for ethics. In undertaking this project, I criticized the work of members of the large and heterogeneous group of contemporary moral thinkers who qualify as ‘moral individualists’ insofar as they maintain that the moral standing of human beings and animals is a function of individual characteristics and, further, that there is accordingly no  It is not an implication of this conclusion (viz., that in ethics we need to look at all animals through the lens of conceptions of what matters in the lives of animals of their kinds) that animals who lack species-typical mental capacities due to accident, illness, age or a congenital condition and who are incapable of enjoying certain species-typical goods, must lead tragic lives. I am not claiming that an animal must be capable of somehow enjoying all of the things that matter in the lives of animals of its kind in order to have a good life. My claim is that a conception of what is important in the lives of animals of a given kind is a necessary prerequisite of doing empirical justice to animals of that kind in ethics. Acceptance of this point, while consistent with finding that for some animals cognitive disabilities represent a grave misfortune (e.g., one that exposes them social exclusion, starvation, attack, and/or early death), places no obstacles in the way of finding that the lives of some creatures who have cognitive disabilities, and who cannot enjoy every good available to animals of their kinds, are among the least tragic of animal lives. 108  I am claiming that all animals matter, but I am not claiming that we are called on to minister to all animals in the same way that we are called on to minister to dogs and other animal companions. Companion animals place on their human counterparts significant “agent-relative” demands for care and attention. This observation does not undercut the insight that dogs and other animals are in themselves—​independently of, among other things, any relationships they may have with human beings—​ethically important. The question of how we are called on to respond to a particular animal depends on the nature of the circumstances, and the fact, if it is one, that we have a close relationship with the animal, or the fact that the animal is constitutionally dependent on human beings (as dogs are), will be among these circumstances. 107

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question of treating bare humanity or bare animality as morally important. My strategy centered on illustrating that, if we are to bring human beings and animals empirically into view in ethics, then—​ without regard to whether they possess species-typical capacities of mind—​we need to look at them in the light of ethical conceptions of what matters in the lives of members of their kinds. That is what speaks not only for rejecting as morally problematic the image of our ethical relationships to human beings and animals that moral individualists bequeath to us but also for saying, in opposition to moral individualism, that merely being a human or an animal matters for ethics. Because, in defending this view, I depicted all human beings and animals as having empirically discoverable moral characteristics, it would be fair to describe this chapter as showing that—​a s its title states—​a ll human beings and animals are ‘inside ethics’ in the sense of this book.109 It might seem reasonable to protest that my critique of moral individualism makes use of merely persuasive methods and that it accordingly lacks the kind of objective authority that would allow it to hit its target in a meaningful way. What is likely to seem especially problematic is the fact that the critique turns on modes of thought that are essentially informed by specific ethical perspectives (i.e., perspectives informed by conceptions of what matters in the lives of different animate creatures). It is commonly assumed that ethically non-neutral modes of thought have an essential tendency to distort our view of the empirical world and, further, that if these modes of thought make a necessary contribution to bringing some aspect of this world to light, 109



 Once we get the observable features of specific human beings and animals into view in a manner relevant to ethics, we may well find that, all things considered, we have good reason to take their cognitive capacities into account in responding to them. (E.g., once we recognize that a person with mild senile dementia gets easily confused and anxious in new settings, we have good reason, other things being equal, to do what we can to keep her in her familiar environment.) While it is true that cognitive capacities may thus be relevant to our judgments about how best to treat a human being or an animal, and while it may seem as though this observation provides support for moral individualism, in fact the observation is distorted by moral individualists. Whereas moral individualists see individual cognitive capacities as the original ground of moral standing, it would be more correct to say—​t his is a way to summarize a central strand of my argument here—​t hat it is only against the backdrop of the recognition that we are confronted with a creature who matters that we can meaningfully gauge the practical significance of the fact that she has such-and-such cognitive capacities.

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the aspect in question therefore cannot qualify as objective. Given this assumption, it appears that the foregoing critique of moral individualism is grounded in claims about non-objective things and that it accordingly has no title to be considered objectively authoritative. So it is worth observing that the assumption is faithful to the logic of what earlier I called the ‘narrower conception of objectivity’ (1.4). At issue is a conception that excludes from objectivity everything with a necessary reference to subjectivity and on which there is hence no room for modes of thought that are essentially informed by specific subjective perspectives—​that is, modes of thought like those that drive my argument here—​to make an internal contribution to objective understanding. This book contains not only a thoroughgoing attack on the narrower conception of objectivity but also a complementary defense of a very different ‘wider’ alternative (2.1). Within the context of the wider conception there is no antecedent reason to deny that modes of thought that are essentially informed by ethical perspectives might as such internally inform genuine understanding. The question of whether such modes of thought are in fact sound is one we answer, in particular cases, by stepping back from the ethical perspectives that they encode and asking whether or not these perspectives distort our view of things, and, although in some cases we may find that they do in fact play a distorting role, in others we may find that, on the contrary, they contribute directly to our ability to grasp real features of the world. In 4.2 and 4.3, I set out to vindicate the ethical modes of thought that are the centerpiece of my critique of moral individualism by suggesting that ethical perspectives internal to them survive this kind of critical scrutiny. Later in this book I have more to say about the sorts of non-neutral empirical methods for ethics that I rely on here (6.1). Right now I simply want to note that it follows from things I argued earlier that such methods are in principle capable of internally informing objective understanding, and that it would be wrong to protest that a critique of moral individualism that relies on them cannot help but fall short of objective authority.110 110

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 One project of this chapter was defending Kittay’s efforts to show, in opposition to McMahan and other moral individualists, that people with congenital cognitive disabilities, such as her daughter Sesha, have undiminished claims to moral attention (see 4.1). Kittay’s argumentative strategy in some respects resembles my strategy. In “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political,” she attacks the idea that a successful

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One further comment is in order about the nature of this chapter’s argument. Here I defended the view that merely being human or an animal of some kind is morally important by providing a series of illustrations of how in ethics we need a conception of what matters in the life of members of a given species in order to adequately understand any member of the species (i.e., even one who partly or wholly lacks species-­ typical capacities of mind). My case for thus aligning the extensions of our biological concepts of human beings and animals with the extensions of our ethical concepts of human beings and animals is not an a priori one. Nor do I believe that we could, even in principle, find an a priori route to detecting this alignment. There is, as I put it at the beginning of 4.2, no ‘shortcut’ that spares us the hard ethical work of doing what we can to bring human beings and animals empirically into focus, in a manner relevant to ethics, in particular cases. So there is no question of antecedently excluding the possibility—​well represented in science fiction—​of creatures who, while not biologically human or biologically animals of particular kinds, do come into focus when we look at them, in an ethical light, as animate creatures of the relevant kinds. (Think, e.g., of the moral humanity of the—​not biologically human—​“replicants” in Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and of the moral animality of their—​not biologically authentic—​a nimal counterparts.111) There is also no question of antecedently excluding the challenge to McMahan’s views of moral standing must respect the logic of what I call the ‘narrower conception of objectivity’ and what she describes as “an unadulterated objectivity” proceeding as if from “a view from nowhere” (ibid., 406). She tells us that, to the extent that McMahan insists on this idea, he wrongly implies that, if she is to defend Sesha’s claims to moral attention, she has to objectify her daughter, looking at her neutrally as the possessor of such-and-such indifferently available capacities (ibid., p. 400). Kittay counters that she is entitled to look at her daughter in an ethically loaded manner appropriate for a parent and caregiver without thereby opening herself to the charge that she has lost any claim to objective authority and is “blinded by love” (ibid., 405). Taking a term from Sandra Harding, she describes the conception of objectivity to which she lays claim—​on which attitudes we acquire in caring for people may be internal to an objective view of them—​a s “strong objectivity” (ibid., 407). Thus understood, strong objectivity is a version of the conception of objectivity that I refer to as ‘wider’ and that is pivotal for the argument of this book. 111  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Del Rey Books, 1968). Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Bladerunner, based on Dick’s novel, centers on a drama involving humanlike “replicants” but leaves out the animal-like counterparts that feature in the novel. (Glen A. Larson’s and Ronald D. Moore’s 2004-2009 TV series Battlestar Galactica invites comparison with Bladerunner insofar as it depends in significant part for its



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possibility—​likewise well represented in science fiction—​of creatures who, while biologically human or biologically animals of particular kinds, do not come into focus when we look upon them, in an ethical light, as human beings or animals of the kinds in question. (Think, e.g., of the humanoid zombies in Marc Forster’s 2013 film World War Z or Francis Lawrence’s 2007 film I Am Legend or of animal analogues of such monsters.) But until some day we discover to our horror that the latter possibility has been realized—​a nd we have overwhelming moral reasons to refuse to allow that it has been realized unless, in some awful and earthshaking case, we find that there is really nothing else to think—​ we are not merely entitled but obliged to accept the view, defended in this chapter, that merely being a human or an animal of some kind is morally important.

interest on questions about the moral humanity of human-like “cylons.”) Perhaps we don’t even need to turn to science fiction here. Currently widespread practices of bioengineering animals (e.g., the bioengineering of animals who produce more of what are regarded as edible tissues as well as that of animals who are bred to have genetic and/or physiological peculiarities that are regarded as useful for experimental purposes) have at least brought us close to realizing the possibility of beings who, while not biologically animals of any recognizable species, are nonetheless rightly conceived as animals in a moral sense. See in this connection Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (New York: Anchor, 2004), a dystopian novel that depicts a future in which practices of bioengineering animals to serve gustatory and experimental purposes clearly actualize this possibility. E.g., chicken meat is harvested from ChickieNobs, chicken-like creatures bereft of all brain functions not related to digestion, assimilation, and growth (203).

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5 A CO U PL E O F CO M PE T I N G V I E WS Foot’s Ethical Naturalism and Wolfe’s Posthumanism

I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L[eonard] to come & mushroom & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly, “This is Earth life.” I seemed to see how earthy it all was & I myself an evolved kind of hare; as if a moon-visitor saw me. —​Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf

One way to capture what is distinctive about this book’s argument is to contrast it with a couple of projects with which it might seem to invite comparison. The two competing projects that I have in mind are the quite striking ethical naturalism that the philosopher Philippa Foot advocates in her later writings and the animals-oriented posthumanist doctrine that the literary theorist Cary Wolfe champions. The emphasis of my book thus far has been on showing that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics and that they are in this respect ‘inside ethics’. When below I turn to Foot’s and Wolfe’s endeavors, I bring out how, although they may seem to invite description in similar terms, the similarities do not run as deep as they may appear to at first glance. I describe how Foot is rightly credited with locating human beings ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. Yet she leaves vague

significant aspects of her preferred account of moral thought about human beings. Further, although she doesn’t discuss questions of animals and ethics—​a nd so cannot be credited with situating animals inside ethics—​it is not unreasonable to think that, instead of being a mere oversight, this omission is connected with gaps in her account of moral thought about human beings (5.1). After discussing Foot’s project, I discuss how, in contrast to Foot, Wolfe may seem to be locating animals as well as human beings inside ethics. There are, however, elements of his posthumanist position that speak directly against this characterization (5.2). These are my basic claims about Foot’s and Wolfe’s ethical endeavors, and, after defending them, I close with a few comments about how my reflections on Foot and Wolfe bring my own concerns into sharper relief (5.3).

5 . 1 .  F O O T O N E T H I C S A S H U M A N N A T U R A L H I S T O R Y

It is not difficult to understand why it might seem appropriate to compare this book’s main line of thought with the strain of ethically naturalistic thought defended in the later writings of Philippa Foot.1 Foot’s work belongs to a larger movement in ethics aimed at revising received assumptions about what ethical naturalism is like. Ethical naturalisms are typically conceived as doctrines that ground ethical assessments in facts within the compass of the natural sciences and that thus take for granted the possibility of reductively capturing the ethically normative qualities that these assessments pick out in ethically neutral terms.2 Yet today many ethical naturalists disclaim reductive ambitions, and this includes Foot. She and various others resemble familiar ethical naturalists in representing moral judgments as essentially modes of concern with the objective—​or natural—​world, but differ from them in discussing such modes of concern in reference to features of the world that can only be fully specified in ethically normative terms. Foot and others thus help themselves to the philosophically controversial idea that some features of the world are simultaneously objective and ethically  See Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).  For a useful overview of traditional, reductive ethical naturalisms, see Charles Pigden, “Naturalism,” in Peter Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 421–431.

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normative. They champion versions of the sort of ‘wider naturalism’ that I described in reference to McDowell’s work in 3.1 and that, as I observed, is at home in this book’s argument. There is a further convergence between Foot’s preferred ethical naturalism and the concerns of this book. In developing her ethically naturalistic position, Foot suggests that we require ethical resources in order to bring human beings empirically into focus in a manner relevant to ethics (2.2 and 4.2). It is accordingly fair to credit her with situating human beings ‘inside ethics’. Although she doesn’t make any move toward situating animals inside ethics, this parallel between her larger naturalistic approach in ethics and my leading claims may seem to speak for regarding her project as a congenial antecedent. The distance between Foot’s project and my own is, however, greater than these observations suggest. Below I set about showing this by first offering an overview of relevant portions of her work. When Foot describes her preferred ethical outlook as naturalistic, she is expressing enthusiasm for what she calls a “unified theory of natural goodness.” The heart of the theory is the thought that we arrive at otherwise unavailable insights into the significance of talk of goodness in moral contexts by undertaking what might be described as a grammatical investigation. We are supposed to take seriously the idea of an analogy between “good” as it is used in species-relative assessments of nonhuman organisms in biology and “good” as it is used in moral judgments—​where these are understood as assessments of human beings’ exercise of rational will.3 Foot’s idea is that, just as we appeal to facts about the life-form to which a plant or animal belongs in offering species-­relative assessments of it in biology, we appeal to facts about human life in making moral judgments. In presenting the account of species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology that informs her naturalistic view of ethics, Foot draws heavily on an

 This way of talking about moral judgments is largely but not wholly consistent with the terminology of this book. I regard as a core class of moral judgments those that are in the business of assessing human actions, and I think Foot is right to describe human actions as exercises of rational will. But Foot doesn’t seem to register the fact that rational maturity comes in degrees; that animals may arrive at partial stages of such maturity; and that sound moral judgments may involve assessments of the actions of animals.

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original and insightful treatment of these matters in the writings of Michael Thompson.4 For this reason, below I initially proceed by commenting on pertinent parts of Thompson’s thought (5.1.i). Then I consider how Foot applies Thompson’s ideas about the representation of non-human life to the human case. I argue that Foot’s analogy between species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology and moral judgments is ultimately untenable and that, far from being necessary for understanding the nature and challenges of moral judgment, it is at best a distraction. I also suggest that, if we seek a naturalistic model for moral thought about human beings, we are better served by turning not to natural history but rather to some version of the basic account of moral thought about animals given earlier in this book. These, very briefly, are the considerations that speak for concluding that, despite certain notable convergences, Foot’s ethical naturalism is not in any obvious sense a forerunner of the project of this book (5.1.ii).

5 . 1 . I .  T H O M P S O N O N S P E C I E S - R E L A T I V E A S S E S S M E N T S OF NON-HUMAN ORGANISMS IN BIOLOGY

A good way to open a discussion of Foot’s naturalistic program in ethics is to consider the distinctive account of species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology that Foot borrows from Michael Thompson. When Thompson discusses such assessments, he is interested in illuminating our practice of treating them as flowing directly from what he calls vital descriptions, that is, descriptions of features and operations that individual living organisms have qua living beings. He wants to shed light on our practice of treating the assessment that, for instance, “this frog is deformed or defective” as flowing directly from  See Life and Action: Elementary Structures in Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), chaps. 1–4; “Three Degrees of Natural Goodness,” published as “Tre gradi di bonta naturale,” Iride 38 (2003): 191–197; and “Apprehending Human Form,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47–74. Both Foot and Thompson claim to be taking their cue from passages of Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Human Life, Action and Ethics (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005), 169–194, that touch on the idea of an analogy between species-relative assessments of non-human animals and moral judgments. Perhaps the most thoughtful commentary on Foot’s naturalistic project in ethics is Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chaps. 9 and 10.

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a—​vital—​description of the frog as having only three legs. So he initially focuses on the character of vital descriptions, arguing that they have a distinctive, irreducible logic that we obscure if we treat them as logically indifferent instances of ascriptions of properties to concrete particulars. 5 The centerpiece of his argument for this thesis about the logically distinct character of vital descriptions is a case for what, picking up a bit of jargon from philosophy of mind that I use in 2.2.ii, he at one point describes as a type of “externalism.”6 His thought is that attempts to capture the content of vital descriptions by fixating on material aspects of individual organisms are frustrated by their individualistic focus and, further, that the vital constitutions of organisms need to be understood as essentially functions of facts external to the organisms’ individual makeups. Thompson attempts to vindicate this vital externalism by showing that materially similar aspects of organisms can amount to different vital features or operations.7 One of his examples concerns an imaginary plankton-eating shark that, like other sharks, chases smaller fish and incorporates them but nevertheless cannot be said to “eat” because the resultant “hideous brew” never enters its bloodstream and is instead “spewed out occasionally to frighten predators.”8 Another example concerns the mitosis-involving phase in the reproduction of amoebas, a phase that is in itself indistinguishable from mitosis in  A fter briefly summarizing things Thompson says about biological assessments of nonhuman organisms as members of their species, the author of one critique of Foot’s theory of natural goodness excuses herself from further consideration of Thompson’s work, remarking that “the idea that some evaluative judgments are species-relative is fairly familiar” and adding that “it is, for example, standard to view judgments about the adequacy of vision as species-relative” (Chrisoula Andreou, “Getting On in a Varied World,” in Social Theory and Practice 32 [2006]: 61–73, esp. 64). The idea that some biological evaluations are species-relative may indeed be familiar. But Thompson’s account of species-relative assessments of non-human organisms, although not without philosophical antecedents, is in fundamental respects distinctive. Below I in effect suggest that, if we fail to appreciate its distinctive elements, we will fail to appreciate what is at stake in Foot’s decision to incorporate it into a larger theory of natural goodness. 6  “Apprehending Human Form,” 64–65. 7  Thompson’s initial step toward an account of vital descriptions as logically distinctive is the observation that particular vital features (e.g., eyes) and vital operations (e.g., eating) are realized in materially quite different ways in members of different species. He moves from this kind of claim about “multiple realizability” (to borrow a term from philosophy of mind that Thompson does not employ) to the kind of externalism that is my topic right now. 8  Life and Action, 54. 5



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human cells, though what is at issue in the human case is not reproduction but growth or self-maintenance.9 These examples of how materially similar things can add up to different vital ones are supposed to establish that we need to refer to facts external to the individual organism to capture its vital qualities. But it might appear that we can arrive at accurate vital descriptions of the organisms, in a manner that undermines calls for externalism about the vital, by introducing functional definitions of the different vital operations in question (viz., eating, reproducing and growing) that can be applied at the level of the individual organism. To dispel this appearance Thompson presents a vignette about an expert on jellyfish or jellies who, while exploring in distant waters, comes across a jelly that strikes her as peculiar. At first, the expert is simply perplexed. (She reflects that “for a jelly so tiny it has an unusually large number of secondary mouths . . . ​its tentacles are disproportionately short; its upper part, or ‘bell’ is extremely thin, spreading out over the rest of its mass like an umbrella.”10) A bit later the expert is struck by the idea that she may be contemplating a defective instance of some already familiar jelly species. Finally, she becomes persuaded that she is in fact looking at a member of a new species, which she dubs “umbrella jelly.”11 When the expert has determined that she is confronting a new species, she sets about not only classifying individual jellies as members of the species but also characterizing the species itself, offering a “natural history” of it. She makes judgments about how the umbrella jelly’s life cycle “moves from an egg to a polyp state to what is called the medusa stage, as it does in every form of jelly-life,” and about “numerous peculiarities” of this “familiar basic pattern.”12 Thompson refers to judgments composing the natural history of a species as natural-historical judgments. One of his objects in telling his tale of jelly exploration is to get us to see that the knowledge represented by the jellyfish expert’s natural-historical judgments about the umbrella jelly make an ineliminable contribution to her ability to describe individual umbrella jellies. The expert’s natural-historical research gives  Ibid., 55.  “Apprehending Human Form,” 48. 11  Ibid. 12  Ibid., 49. 9

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her an improved understanding of, among other things, “the umbrella-­ shaped bell that the umbrella jelly grows.”13 This new understanding directly informs her ability both to tell “when this individual jelly here and now before her in the reef is moving itself up or down the water column and when instead it is being moved by currents” and to “distinguish individual cases of bell-contraction that are a part of self-movement from those that are immediate defensive reactions to perceived predators.”14 By the same token, her improved natural-historical knowledge of the umbrella jelly’s life cycle makes an internal contribution to her ability to identify the reproductive organs of a particular umbrella jelly, even of one not engaged in any process of reproduction.15 One thing that thus emerges is that Thompson’s jellyfish narrative does more than simply fund an abstract claim about how vital descriptions encode a necessary reference to certain ‘external’ facts. What the jellyfish expert needs in order to accurately describe individual umbrella jellies is natural-­ historical knowledge of the species “umbrella jelly.” Her vital characterizations of particular specimens essentially reflect the natural-­historical judgments about the species that she has learned to make. So we can capture an important moral of Thompson’s reflections on jellyfish by speaking of an inevitable “mutual interdependence of vital description of the individual and natural-historical judgment about the form or kind.”16 Thompson’s vital externalism wouldn’t support a claim about the irreducibility of vital descriptions if the natural-historical judgments to which these descriptions refer themselves came in a familiar logical form, and Thompson makes a compelling case for regarding these judgments as logically distinctive. He prefaces his treatment of this topic with reflections on the judgments’ grammar, noting that we might formulate a natural-historical judgment about a given species, S, in any one of a number of different ways: for instance, “the S is/has/does F, or S’s are/do/ have F, or S’s characteristically are/have/do F.”17 These grammatical possibilities make it natural to think that we are confronted, if not with universal judgments, then with some kind of statistical generalizations, but  Ibid, 51.  Ibid., emphasis in the original. 15  Ibid. 16  Ibid., 52; emphasis in the original. 17  Ibid., 49. 13 14



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Thompson claims that this thought is at bottom the product of grammat­­ ical illusion. Consider in this connection examples of natural-­historical judgments such as “the yellow finch breeds in the spring, attracting its mate with such and such a song.”18 While not about a particular bird, this judgment does not predicate something of every yellow finch. Nor is it simply that the truth of the judgment is indifferent to the fact that some individual yellow finches (e.g., the one with slightly unusual markings that has been frequenting our bird feeder for weeks) have no song. Nor for that matter is it simply that true judgments of the kind in question need not do justice to even a substantial proportion of members of the species in question (as, e.g., the truth of the natural-historical judgment “cross-jelly eggs characteristically progress to the medusa stage” is unaffected by the fact that the vast majority of cross-jelly eggs never reach the medusa stage19). To grasp what is distinctive about the logic of natural-historical judgments we need to see that by conjoining a number of true judgments of this type we could very likely produce a true compound judgment that does not accurately describe even one actual member of the species at issue. That is what it comes to to claim, with Thompson, that natural-historical judgments are neither universal judgments nor a class of (even “hedged”) statistical generalizations.20 Thompson insists that, when he denies that natural-historical judgments possess a type of generality that is a matter of statistical accuracy, he is not cutting them “free of ‘the facts’.”21 He points out that one lesson of his jellyfish tale is that, while a naturalist’s ability to offer accurate vital descriptions of individual members of a species essentially depends on her natural-historical knowledge of the species, she nevertheless progresses toward that knowledge via observations of individual organisms. His jellyfish tale thus speaks for the view—​it is a view well represented in the history of philosophy—​that thought about living beings is circular in the sense that knowledge of particular organisms presupposes knowledge of the whole life-form and vice versa. 22 In just a moment, I discuss questions about whether this circularity compromises  Life and Action, 65.  See “Apprehending Human Form,” 50–51. 20  Life and Action, 71–72. 21  Ibid., 72. 22  See in this connection, e.g., Goethe’s work on the representation of plants and animals. Goethe presents a view of what Thompson calls “vital descriptions” that anticipates 18

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the cognitive claims of vital discourse. Right now, having noted that, by Thompson’s lights, natural-historical judgments are grounded in obser­­ vations of individual organisms, I want to consider how to positively characterize the judgments’ logic. Thompson approaches this topic by describing the temporal organization of the elements of natural histories (i.e., the discursive forms for thought about life-forms considered as totalities). What interests him is a contrast with the temporal structure of descriptions of the lives of individual organisms. While these descriptions are formulated in past and future as well as present tenses (thus, e.g., of a particular bobcat, Elsa, we might say that she bore three cubs last spring, that she is now pregnant, and that very likely she will soon give birth23), natural histories are formulated exclusively in the present tense (thus, e.g., of the bobcat as a life-form, we might say that, as Thompson puts it, “when the springtime comes. . . . ​the female . . . ​gives birth to two to four cubs [and] nurses them for several weeks”24). This grammatical observation suggests that natural histories need to be conceived, not as statistically accurate pictures of how individual members of a species actually move through time, but rather as standards for how, in some sense, individual members of a species are supposed to move through time. Thompson accordingly invites us to understand the ‘histories’ as accounts of ideal temporal progressions for organisms of different kinds and to understand individual natural-historical judgments as “outtakes” from the larger, unified progressions that natural histories represent. He claims Thompson’s in representing the process of arriving at an account of the vital parts of an organism as thus inseparable from the process of arriving at an account of the natural history of its whole kinds (see Goethe’s Botanical Writings, Bertha Mueller, trans. [Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1989], 86, 217, and 225). Goethe’s view of vital descriptions also anticipates Thompson’s in that—​u nlike the view Kant presents in the Critique of Judgment—​it clearly and unambiguously insists on objectivism. I discuss Thompson’s objective interpretation of vital descriptions in a moment. 23  Thompson, Life and Action, 65. 24  Ibid., 63. To be sure, we can talk about the past and futures of the life-forms that are of concern to us when we are doing natural history, as we in fact do, for instance, when we discuss whether a given life-form existed in some geological age or whether it will survive changes associated with global warming. But this reflection is consistent with the recognition that a capacity for natural-historical thought is conceptually independent of a capacity for such historical and futuristic musings and that, as Thompson puts it, “the simple classification of individual organisms in terms of life-form precedes any possible judgment” about the life-form’s historical genesis or future development (ibid., 67).



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that the judgments deal with features or operations of life-forms that are internal to these progressions in the sense of contributing directly to their further stages. If, elaborating on this moment in Thompson’s work, we add that the life-forms of plants and non-human organisms are organized for self-maintenance and reproduction, we can say that in these cases natural-historical judgments need to be understood as, in Philippa Foot’s words, having “to do, directly or indirectly, with self-maintenance, as by defense and the obtaining of nourishment, or with the reproduction of the individual, as by the building of nests.”25 With or without this elaboration, we can capture the positive spin Thompson places on his claims about the logic of natural-historical judgments by speaking of an irreducibility that is a function of the possession of generality that, instead of being a matter of statistical accuracy, needs to be understood teleologically.26  Natural Goodness, 31. Both Foot and Thompson regard natural-historical judgments as concerned with features or operations of organisms that have a certain role or function in the life of the organism. Both also insist that they are speaking of function in reference not to genetic or evolutionary success but to the current flourishing of the lifeform (see ibid., 32n10, and Thompson, Life and Action, 79). In thus distancing themselves from an evolutionary perspective, they are not suggesting that it is possible to grasp the idea of a species or life-form apart from a conception of its members as reproducing themselves over time. Their point is simply that it is in principle possible to grasp the idea of a species independently of any view of how species change over time. Thus, among other things, they can claim that the bare capacity to represent life requires the idea of whole species without implying that, say, creationists are somehow cut off from thinking and talking about life. 26   In simply describing natural-historical judgments in terms of a non-statistical, teleologically-­organized form of generality, Thompson is not representing the judgments as logically indistinguishable from judgments about social practices or artifacts. Thompson acknowledges that certain judgments about social practices resemble natural-­ historical judgments in possessing a generality that needs to be understood teleologically and not statistically, and in Part III of Life and Action he discusses what he sees as the interest of similarities between these classes of judgment. In Part I of Life and Action, he points out that when, with regard to social practices, we say “first one does this, then one does this,” we are tracing out a type of ideal performance and not describing how things have in fact generally been done. But Thompson denies that these parallels suffice to establish an exact analogy to vital discourse. Natural-historical judgments and judgments belonging “to the general description of a particular [practice]” diverge insofar as judgments of the latter sort presuppose “that someone makes or has made the corresponding judgment, or at least some others belonging to the same system of judgments” (ibid., p.  80; emphasis in the original). This marks a contrast with natural­­ historical judgments because these judgments “are in no sense presupposed by what they are about” and because, indeed, “unrecognized life-forms are common” (ibid.). 25

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Now we can see how Thompson’s vital externalism is supposed to shed light on the practice of treating vital descriptions of individual non-­­human organisms as grounding species-relative assessments of those organisms. In defending the externalist position he favors, Thompson claims that vital descriptions are conceptually tied to natural-­­historical judgments, and he also claims that these judgments are in turn stages of the ideal temporal progressions constitutive of natural histories. Taken together, these claims give us a picture of vital descriptions as invariably referring to these ideal temporal progressions, and this outcome sheds light on our ordinary practice of moving directly from vital descriptions of individual non-human organisms to species-relative assessments of them—​a nd of counting organisms as defective when, according to our descriptions, they fail to conform to true natural histories of their kinds. At this point, we have before us the main portion of Thompson’s work that interests Foot. As we will see, the use that Foot makes of Thompson’s work is only justified if Thompsonian vital descriptions and natural-historical judgments are taken to be capable of revealing the—​objective—​facts of the living world. Thompson signals that he regards these forms of thought as metaphysically transparent, 27 but he never specifically makes a case for what might be described as the sort of objectivist attitude toward the vital that would suit Foot’s purposes. Instead he limits himself to defending his claims about the irreducibility of vital discourse. For instance, Thompson addresses the concerns of philosophers who grant his observations about the logic of vital categories but insist that it is in principle possible to conceptualize life without using such categories, say, by describing processes internal to living organisms as one does in biochemistry and speaking of “photosynthesis . . . ​or the Krebs cycle, or the replication of DNA.”28 He observes that, while accounts of physical and chemical processes have a decisively important place in discourse about life, these processes only  See, e.g., Thompson’s claim that he is defending the “idea of a reciprocal dependence between judgments about the individual organism and judgments about its form” and the idea of a “correlative connection that facts about the individual bear to facts about its form” (Life and Action, 79, emphasis in the original; see also 10). 28  Ibid., 41. Although Thompson doesn’t use the term, the trend in philosophy of biology he is here engaging with is a trend toward regarding vital discourse as mere “folk biology” that a scientific biology can do without. 27



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have the status of biological processes insofar as they contain a reference to whatever life-forms are in question. He points out that there are no authoritative answers to the sorts of questions about “what happens next?” to which descriptions of the stages of such processes (qua biological processes) provide answers unless conditions given by the natural history of the relevant life-forms are at least tacitly presupposed.29 However interesting in itself, this antireductionist gesture of Thomp­ son’s falls short of a defense of an objectivist attitude toward vital discourse.30 It is not unreasonable to think that there is historical precedent for combining the antireductionist interpretation toward the vital that Thompson does defend with an anti-objectivist attitude, 31 and today a fair number of thinkers espouse what might be described as forms of non-reductive materialism when considering vital descriptions. 32 For these  Thus, e.g., there is no answer to the question of what comes next at a certain stage in photosynthesis if we limit ourselves to physical and chemical terms. Given this limitation, the right answer would be: “Well, it depends on whether an H-bomb goes off, or the temperature plummets toward absolute zero, or it all falls into a vat of sulfuric acid” (ibid.). 30  Thompson does in various ways make room for such an attitude. E.g., he deflects the charge that an account of vital discourse as irreducible and metaphysically transparent is inseparable from an unjustifiable reference to a divine or transcendent mind. What may seem to justify this charge is the fact that natural-historical judgments combine into teleological clauses. If we claim not only that natural histories involving this type of clause are irreducible but also that the categories they employ best capture the facts that make them true, we may seem to be insisting on “an independent, conscious subject who sets things up thus ‘teleologically’” (ibid., 78; see also Foot’s sympathetic commentary in Natural Goodness, 32). Thompson’s response to this worry centers on showing that the teleological constructions of natural history and psychological explanations have different logics. A satisfactory psychological explanation of the sort I am demanding when I ask why a person did something illuminates the person’s ends. If I ask why some individual is acting in a certain singular manner, an appropriate answer will specify that she is comporting herself in order to do such-and-such. In contrast, when, in the mood of natural history, I ask why something is the way it is, my question refers not to the individual organism but to its life-form. So it is wrong to represent the teleological constructions of natural history as necessary markers of a divine purpose (see ibid., 79). This is how Thompson arrives at the conclusion that doing natural history does not commit us to the idea of a Divine Mind. (Although he convincingly shows that we are not obliged to regard the teleological connections of natural history as elements of Divine Creation, he doesn’t show that we would be wrong to regard them in this manner. We would be overstating his case if we took it to show that those who claim to find God’s work in living organisms must be mistaken.) 31  This sort of hybrid posture is sometimes attributed to Kant in the Critique of Judgment. 32  E .g., some contemporary Kantians take themselves to be following Kant in adopting positions along these lines. For a clear and well worked out example, see the work of 29

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reasons, it is important to note that this book’s argument for what I am calling the ‘wider conception of objectivity’ (1.4 and 2.1) can be construed as making room for an objectivist attitude toward the vital. When I defended this conception of objectivity, I was at the same time distancing myself from a more influential ‘narrower’ conception that represents the objective realm as free from all qualities with necessary ties to subjectivity. Within the context of this conception, what seems to speak for excluding vital qualities from objectivity is the fact that accurate accounts of these qualities are necessarily informed by subjective perspectives. Recall that the heart of Thompson’s account of these qualities is an externalism on which descriptions of the qualities—​vital descriptions—​have a necessary reference to natural-historical judgments. Since these descriptions don’t pick out independent sets of facts, it follows that recognizing the vital quality at issue in a description of a particular organism is a matter, not simply of conjoining knowledge of what lies before one with knowledge of certain independent facts, but rather of somehow seeing relevant aspects of the organism in light of the sort of dependent knowledge of its kind that the judgments represent. We might say that bringing a particular vital quality into focus presupposes an appreciation of the significance of this knowledge insofar as it informs what is before us here and now. 33 It follows that there is no question of recognizing Thompsonian vital qualities apart from the possession of certain modes of appreciation or sensitivities and, as a result, no question of taking these qualities to meet the standard for objectivity underwritten by the narrower conception of Paul Guyer, e.g., “Organisms and the Unity of Science,” in Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 86–112. The group of contemporary Kantians who embrace forms of ‘non-reductive materialism’ about the vital also includes Christine Korsgaard. See my discussion of her work in Chapter 1 of this book. 33  Borrowing a slogan of Goethe’s, we might say that, when Thompson is concerned with our ability to pick out the vital qualities of individual organisms, he allows that “there is a difference between seeing and seeing” (i.e., a difference between, on the one hand, simply detecting that there is before us an organism with certain physical characteristic and hence ‘seeing’ in one sense and, on the other, having the kind of understanding of the organism’s life-form that allows us bring its vital qualities accurately into focus and hence ‘seeing’ in a further sense; see Goethe, Goethe’s Botanical Writings, 180.) For a good commentary on relevant themes from Goethe’s writings, see Eckart Förster, “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes’,” in Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift für Literaturwissenschaften und Geisteswissenschaften 5 (2001): 87–101.



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objectivity. By the same token, it follows that, in making a case for the wider conception of objectivity (i.e., a conception wide enough to incorporate subjective qualities), I already made a case for bringing vital qualities into the objective realm. The fact that Thompsonian vital descriptions are embedded with natural-historical judgments in a logical circle is not a separate reason for skepticism about their metaphysical transparency. According to Thompson, in describing the vital features and operations of a given organism we invariably draw on our beliefs about its life-form. This means that vital descriptions are shaped by the very body of beliefs to which they are themselves contributions. Philosophers who regard circularities of this sort as insurmountable obstacles to objectivity are banking on the intelligibility of the idea of contrasting non-circular modes of discourse. For a domain of discourse to be relevantly non-­ circular, our view about how to bring the world into focus within it would need to be excluded on some grounds from counting as a substantive account of what the world is like. That is, our view about these matters would need to be excluded from forming part of the body of belief to which the judgments it shapes contribute. The concepts in a domain of discourse that qualified as non-circular in this sense would apply themselves immediately to the world, thereby satisfying what I have described as the ‘abstraction requirement’ internal to the narrower conception of objectivity. My critique of the narrower conception involves a critique of the coherence of the idea of a suitably abstract mode of thought (2.1). So it addresses worries about the objective status of vital qualities that presuppose an ideal of non-circularity. 34  In presenting Thompson’s work, I have left unmentioned some reservations I have about the larger project to which his account of the concept “life” belongs. Thompson invites us to think of this concept as situated on a scala naturae so that it presupposes certain concepts, e.g., “object,” that lie on one side of it and is in turn presupposed by concepts, e.g., “animality,” that lie on its other side (Life and Action, 1–4). Thompson’s scala naturae ends with the concept of “agent” and becomes instead a scala practica. I have reservations about this gesture of Thompson’s that are variations on the reservations about Foot’s work to which I give voice in 5.1.ii. I also have reservations about his scala naturae taken by itself. It’s not clear that he exhibits the kind of conceptual flexibility required to capture ways in which the world can surprise us. There is in principle no obstacle to encountering phenomena that call for description in ways that fall partly inside and partly outside his analysis of the concept “life.” A plausible case can be made for thinking that we already confront such phenomena (e.g., “vestigial organs”

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There are additional considerations that might seem to speak for rejecting an objectivist attitude toward Thompsonian vital descriptions and the species-relative assessments they ground. I have been anticipating objections that target the fact that these vital descriptions refer necessarily to natural histories that are teleologically organized. But there are other objections that may seem telling. Species-relative assessments in biology are assessments of organisms qua members of particular species. Questions may justly be raised about the determinacy or uniqueness of species discriminations, and these questions may seem to give us reason to question the objectivity of species-relative assessments. Consider the sort of thing that is at play when species discriminations are described as indeterminate.35 A natural-historical account of a species describes its typical way of behaving within its natural environment, and there may be no clear answer to the question of whether an organism is in its natural environment. When it is unclear whether an organism is in its natural habitat, it will also be unclear whether the fact that it is flourishing should be taken as a reason for regarding it as a good specimen of its kind or whether it should instead be taken as a reason for concluding that some members of the species are changing and that the species therefore needs to be subdivided. It is undeniable that species discriminations thus allow for fuzzy or borderline cases. But it is not obvious that we should conclude that talk about species therefore falls short of objectivity. If we moved directly from the existence of borderline cases to skepticism about the objectivity of claims within a discipline, we would be forced to impugn the objectivity not only of natural history but also of, for instance, meteorology, histology and geology. It may seem yet more damaging to the objective claims of species classifications to note that biologists argue with each other about the appropriate principles for making these classifications. Some of the most widely accepted principles (e.g., morphological, reproduction-based and

that it seems right to represent as “vital qualities” of organisms even though they don’t have the function within whatever life-form is in question that we refer to in speaking of them). We can also imagine confronting new phenomena that challenge established ways of representing life (e.g., phenomena it seems right to place under the heading “synthetic life” even though there is no question of membership in a life-form). 35  I am indebted to Rosalind Hursthouse’s discussion of these topics in On Virtue Ethics, 203–204.



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genealogical principles) at times yield different classificatory schemes. 36 Following Thompson, it seems appropriate to conceive the relevant principles, not as independent strategies for identifying life-forms, but rather as considerations internal to the articulation of the natural histories that we draw on in arriving at vital descriptions of particular organisms. But the point is that, however conceived, these principles sometimes suggest different species classifications, and it is not clear how—​or whether—​ we should decide among them. Suppose we accept that in some cases we need to accommodate competing schemes for classifying species. 37 This only seems like a threat to objectivity if we assume that any legitimate cognitive endeavor must, in the words of John Dupré, “be concerned with discovering the real and unique structure of nature.”38 So it is worth stressing that the present book mounts a direct challenge to this assumption. One of my claims here is that we should not limit ourselves to scientific methods for bringing human beings and animals empirically into focus in ethics. We should recognize the legitimacy of certain irreducibly ethical methods. In defending this thesis, I am making room for equally legitimate yet different scientific and ethical accounts of human and animal life, and I am thereby in effect already attacking the assumption that reality has a univocal structure. I see no reason to allow this assumption to disrupt the view that species distinctions, together with the species-relative assessments that they inform, are objectively authoritative.

5 . 1 . I I .  D I S M A N T L I N G F O O T ’ S M A S T E R A N A L O G Y

The thesis of Foot’s “unified theory of natural goodness” is that moral judgments are the human counterparts to species-relative assessments of non-human animals in biology and that, if we are to understand moral judgments, we need insight into these assessments. 39 Foot

 See John Dupré’s discussion of these matters in The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foun­ dations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 44–53. 37  Dupré defends a combined or “pluralistic” approach to making species distinctions; see ibid., 49–53. 38  Ibid., 51. 39  See, e.g., Natural Goodness, 27: “For all the differences that there are . . . ​between the evaluation of plants and animals and their parts and characteristics on the one hand, and 36

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inherits her account of species-relative assessments of non-human animals in biology from Thompson, and she takes for granted an objectivist interpretation of these assessments (5.1.i). She believes that the logical parallel at the heart of her ethically naturalistic vision (viz., the parallel between the logic of moral judgments and that of species­­ relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology) is notable in part because she believes it makes it possible to represent moral judgments as having objective grounds. This matters to her because it represents a decisive break with the ethical subjectivism that she herself defended, with great emphasis and a certain flair—​and in good company—​ earlier in her career.40 A number of Foot’s readers move from registering the objectivist ambition of her new ethical enterprise to representing her as basing moral judgments, reductively, in facts of human beings’ baldly animal existence.41 Although I am going to criticize Foot’s theory of natural goodness (see below in the current section), it is clear to me that this particular criticism misses its mark. Foot distances herself from the reductive position envisioned by her critics, stressing that she has no interest in treating deviations from norms of human life conceived merely biologically as grounds for moral censure.42 A comment is in order about Foot’s terminology. Foot sometimes uses the term “natural history” in formulating her main thesis. Some people today regard this term as antiquated.43 But Thompson continues to use it, the moral evaluation of humans on the other . . . ​t hese evaluations share a basic logical structure.” 40  For a helpful account of the development of Foot’s thought over time, see “The Grammar of Goodness: An Interview with Philippa Foot,” in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 11 (2003): 32–44. Foot’s early subjectivist tendency is expressed in several essays, written between the late 1950s and the 1970s, that are collected in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). See especially the essay “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” 157–173. Interestingly, certain lines of thought that oppose this subjectivist tendency, and that will turn out to be central to her later naturalistic project, are also already developed in this collection of essays. 41  See, e.g., Michael Slote, “Review of Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness and of Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value,” in Mind 112 (2003): 130–139; and Scott Woodcock, “Philippa Foot’s Virtue Ethics Has An Achilles’ Heel,” in Dialogue 45 (2006): 445–468. 42  See, e.g., Natural Goodness, 3. 43  There is, e.g., a trend among museums in the United States that once bore the name “natural history” to refashion themselves as museums of “science” or, alternately, museums of “science and culture.” I am grateful to Kirk Johnson for drawing this trend to my attention.



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in an established if no longer current manner, to refer to the part of biol­ o ­ gy that includes the different modes of representing life (viz., ‘vital descrip­­ tions’, ‘species-relative assessments’, ‘natural-­historical judgments’ and the larger ‘natural histories’ that these judgments compose) that he him­­self discusses.44 Foot adopts Thompson’s vocabulary and, because she regards moral judgments as the human-centered analogues to Thompsonian species-relative assessments of non-human organisms, she extends talk of natural history to moral judgments and other modes of moral thought to which she takes these judgments to be connected. A good way to succinctly capture her overarching theory of natural goodness is accordingly to say that it treats moral thought about human beings as the human-oriented branch of natural history. The original impetus for Foot’s theory is a question about what a Thompsonian ‘natural-historical account’ of human life would be like. A Thompsonian natural-historical account of a species is, as I discussed in 5.1.i, an account of how individual members of the species ideally move from birth to death. Foot’s story about what speaks for her preferred approach to human natural history starts from the classic thought that human beings are as such “rational creatures,” specifically “in being able to act on reasons.”45 Foot claims—​plausibly—​that, unlike members of a class of beings who differed from us merely in having divergent banking practices or styles of clothes, beings who resembled us yet weren’t rational would not count as human.46 She claims that we human beings are thus rational because she wants to stress that, for rational creatures like us, nature is not normative. Her thought is that, when raised in reference to rational creatures, questions about how  The meaning of the term “natural history” has changed over the last few hundred years. Whereas at least until recently it was used—​roughly, as Thompson uses it—​to mean the collection and observational study of organisms, in the past it was used also for reflections about organisms’ aesthetic qualities and theological significance. See, e.g., George Perry, Concholog y or the Natural History of Shells (London: W. Bulmer, 1811), which opens with this declaration: “The study of Shells, or testaceous animals, is a branch of natural history which, although not greatly useful to the mechanical arts, by the beauty of the subjects it comprises, is most admirably adapted to recreate the senses, to improve the taste or invention of the Artist, and, finally and insensibly to lead to the contemplation of the great excellence and wisdom of the Divinity in their formation.” 45  Ibid., 53. 46  This example is from the section of Thompson’s “Three Grades of Human Goodness” entitled “Logical Footianism.” 44

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ideally to go through time can be heard as questions that we answer by appeal not to independent ends (e.g., survival or reproduction) but to exercises of practical reason. Why, after all, should we do what conduces to survival if it is not, all things considered, the best thing to do? Foot makes these observations because she thinks they teach us how to do human natural history. She believes that it follows that we should reject the idea that “the natural-history account of human beings could be explained in terms of merely animal life.”47 Her thought is that, once we recognize that reason and not nature is our guide to life, we should agree that we ought to take our cue in producing such an account from the deliverances of practical reason. But her reasoning here is flawed. Foot is moving directly from the claim that human beings aren’t enslaved to merely biological imperatives to the conclusion that a human natural history cannot be given in strictly animal terms. And it is not at all clear that this inference is a good one. Suppose we agree with Foot, as I am convinced we should, that human beings are rational creatures. Foot’s point is that there is a sense in which, if a natural history for human beings is elaborated in strictly biological terms, it will stand in a different relation to human life than the natural histories of creatures beholden to the dictates of mere biology stand to those creatures’ lives. By itself this is a good point, and, indeed, it follows from the argument of this book that it generalizes in ways that Foot herself doesn’t register. Foot doesn’t consider the possibility that human beings aren’t alone in having a life-form that transcends mere biology, but, as I claimed in Chapter 3, there is good reason to think that some non-human creatures who fall short of fullblown rationality—​for example, dogs—​a re nevertheless not simply governed by biological impulses. Revised to reflect this observation, Foot’s insight could be reformulated as follows. The idea is that, if a natural history for creatures who are either wholly or partly rational is elaborated in strictly biological terms, that natural history will stand in a different relation to the creatures’ lives than the natural histories of creatures beholden to the dictates of mere biology stand to their lives. So why should we take Foot’s—​sound—​claim that human life transcends mere biology to imply that we need to look beyond mere biology for a human natural history? Why shouldn’t we instead say that in 47



 Ibid., 41.

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natural history we are concerned with what it is for creatures of a kind to move ideally through time in a strictly biological sense, without regard to whether or not their lives are governed by strictly biological constraints? Let me mention a couple of basic reasons for preferring this approach to human natural history to Foot’s. One is that, unlike Foot’s strategy, this alternative strategy enables us to straightforwardly register parallels between natural historical accounts of non-human life-forms and certain kinds of judgments that we make about human beings in biology (e.g., “the mature adult human has 32 teeth”). Another reason for preferring this alternative approach to human natural history is that it clears the way for us to register parallels between moral thought about human beings and moral thought about non-human animals. One way to approach a description of the particular parallels between moral thought about human beings and moral thought about animals that I have in mind is via a discussion of Foot’s preferred conception of moral thought about human beings. Foot arrives at her conception in the course of explaining what she takes a natural history for human beings to be like. So, before discussing parallels between moral thought about human beings and moral thought about animals, I want to consider how she goes about offering such a natural history. We already saw that Foot urges us to turn in this connection to the deliverances of practical reason. To appreciate what she thinks we learn from doing so, we need to know how she conceives practical reason. Foot arrives at her preferred conception of practical reason by attacking the practice—​which she herself once advocated and which is distinctive of different non-cognitivist theories of ethics—​of bringing Humean views of practical reason to bear on analyses of moral judgment.48 What distinguishes these views is the idea that a complete account of a reason for acting needs to include, alongside the mention of a belief, the mention of an independent desire or passion. The inclusion of such a desire is supposed to be required to furnish a motivational source, and, given the familiar observation that moral judgments are internally connected to action (see my discussion of this topic in 1.1), these views appear to  For Foot’s earlier defense of a Humean view of practical reason, see esp. “Reasons for Acting and Desires,” in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, 148–156. Foot applies her defense to an account of moral judgment in “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.”

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oblige us to concede, in Foot’s words, that the descriptive or factual “grounds of a moral judgment do not reach all the way to it.”49 Unsatisfied with this conclusion, Foot now proposes a switch from demanding that “morality [in this way] pass the test of rationality” to demanding that “rationality pass the test of morality.”50 When she insists on putting rationality to the ‘test of morality’, Foot is presupposing an attractive but by no means undisputed understanding of virtues as achievements of practical reason. She is assuming that what distinguishes those who possess particular virtues is that “for them certain considerations count as reasons for action, and as reasons of a given weight.”51 Her thought is that the capacity possessed by the virtuous person resembles other rational capacities, including, for example, prudential ones, in consisting in a form of responsiveness to genuine reasons that is aptly glossed as “goodness of the will.”52 She traces doubts about whether this non-skeptical conception of practical reason accounts for motivation to what she regards as misguided Humean views of reason explanation on which desires are mechanical “forces that move the will in a certain direction.”53 Similar objections to Humean views get raised, among other places, in the work of various Kantian moral philosophers. But Foot gives the objection a distinctively un-Kantian turn. Far from representing reasons for acting as having a formal logic, she represents such reasons, whether moral or non-moral, as having worldly, descriptive grounds that ‘reach all the way to them’. 54 The upshot is an account  Natural Goodness, 8.  “The Grammar of Goodness,” 41. 51  The inset phrase is from Foot, Natural Goodness, 12; emphasis in the original. The understanding of virtue that Foot defends, on which virtues are achievements of practical reason, comes under attack from theorists who find it ‘intellectualist’, ­ alleging that if we want to retain the link between virtues and the development of character, we need to represent them as essentially distinct from the exercise of practical intelligence. See, e.g., Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 52  Ibid., 11. 53  Ibid., 21. Taken by themselves, Foot’s brief critical remarks on Humean views of practical reason are incomplete. I believe that it is possible to overcome their limitations by turning to the work of philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard, John McDowell and Tim Scanlon, who—​implicitly or explicitly—​make cases for regarding Humean views as characterized by a confusion aptly placed under the rubric of “psychologism.” But I do not here further address this topic. 54  Natural Goodness, 14 and passim. Contrast Foot’s position here with Korsgaard’s in 1.3. 49

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of practical reason that might be described, to use the language of 1.1, as non-formal and ‘objectivist’. The last paragraph describes how Foot presents the objectivist account of practical reason that she favors. It is not clear to me that she offers anything that could be called a rigorous argument for the account. Given that objectivist accounts are philosophically contentious, it is accordingly worth noting that my main line of reasoning in this book equips us to defend her position against some very fundamental objections. Insofar as, in championing the position, she presupposes that a person’s undistorted cognitive take on her circumstances can by itself exhaust her reason for acting in a particular way, she helps herself to a notion of what, in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1, I referred to as ‘objective moral values’ (i.e., elements of the objective world that are internally related to action). Anyone who accepts the constraints of the influential conception of objectivity that I am referring to as ‘narrower’ (i.e., the conception that excludes from the objective anything with an internal relation to affective or practical responses; 1.4) is committed to rejecting this presupposition and, by the same token, to rejecting the conception of practical reason that the presupposition appears to underwrite. Yet things look different once we move, as I have urged that we should, to a wider conception of objectivity (2.1). Now there don’t seem to be any antecedent philosophical obstacles to taking at face value the kinds of observations that Foot takes to speak for an objectivist account of practical reason. Bearing these points in mind, here I abstain from any further defense of Foot’s preferred conception of practical reason and simply take it for granted that she is right to embrace it. Consider how Foot draws on the conception in arriving at what she thinks of as a natural history for human beings. To begin with, it’s important to note that, to the extent that Foot conceives of practical reason as objectivist in the sense of being essentially world-guided, she treats it as having objective authority. If practical reflection were a merely subjective affair, then there would be no hope of producing an authoritative human natural history through its exercise. But given a Footian understanding of practical reason as objectively authoritative, we can hope to draw general conclusions about the guidance that our capacities for practical reason provide, and, assuming we succeed, we

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can use our conclusions to tell a story about what ‘a characteristic life’ for human beings would be like.55 A story along these lines is what, accord­ ­ing to Foot, qualifies as a natural history in the human case. 56 Her thought is that, when we do natural history in the non-human case, we are concerned with questions about what features and operations of organ­­ isms are necessary in the sense of being decisive for self-­maintenance or reproduction, and, when we do natural history in the human case, we are concerned with what she regards as analogous yet still fundamentally different questions about what modes of conduct are necessary in the sense of representing so much good in human life that they are practically demanded of us. 57 The question of how much good is rep­ resented by particular modes of conduct is not, for Foot, one that can be answered from outside the perspective of practical reason. Foot insists that practical judgments about which modes of conduct are demanded of us are the human counterparts to natural-historical judgments  Natural Goodness, 42.  Foot insists that her claim about a conceptual parallel between natural-historical accounts of non-human organisms and a general account of what practical reflection reveals about human life is consistent with the recognition of the legitimacy of an indefinitely rich range of different human life-projects and purposes. To the extent that in the human case she is concerned with forms of responsiveness to reasons that characterize human life in all its diversity (ibid., 39), Foot in effect places herself in opposition to substantive moral skeptics, i.e., thinkers who, while willing to allow that practical reflection can in principle yield objectively defensible guidance, deny that in practice we ever arrive at practical judgments that retain their appearance of authority when we reflect on the fact that they are made in specific historical and cultural contexts. 57  This means that self-maintenance and reproduction do not play the same role within a Footian natural history for human beings that they play within natural histories for non-human organisms. There is, for human beings, no question of establishing the importance of any merely animal (or, for that matter, other) goals except as conclusions of practical reflection, though there is also nothing to prevent practical reflection from revealing that things like sex, health, and the care of children and the aged are of genuine importance. This is a point that Rosalind Hursthouse, in other respects a faithful reader of Foot, appears to miss. Hursthouse inherits Foot’s claim that the characteristic human life is one lived in accordance with reason, but she also wrongly attempts to combine this claim with an understanding of moral judgments, foreign to Foot’s work, as assessments of human beings with respect to ends such as individual survival and the continuance of the species. See On Virtue Ethics, 205–216. For a criticism of this moment in Hursthouse’s work, see David Copp and David Sobel, “Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics,” in Ethics 114 (2004): 524–554. 55 56



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about non-human organisms, and she follows Elizabeth Anscombe in referring to the former judgments as “Aristotelian necessities.”58 There is a substantive dimension to Foot’s reflections here that I want to briefly mention. In addition to offering a structural description of human natural history, Foot also defends some substantive claims about what the ‘necessities’ internal to such a natural history are like. She argues that when we actually try to specify these necessities we come up with forms of responsiveness to reason that are characteristic not only of various ‘other-regarding’ virtues, such as promise-keeping, that contemporary philosophers typically classify as moral but also some ‘non-­otherregarding’ virtues, such as temperance, that are today often treated as non-moral. What I want to stress is that we can accept Foot’s structural account of human natural history even if we are skeptical about the substantive claim that traditional morality is part of it. Suppose that we rejected as unsound modes of responsiveness to reasons that are distinctive of traditional moral virtues and advocated instead new modes of responsiveness to reason. By itself this project would leave entirely unaffected Foot’s thought that we can approach an authoritative natural history for human beings by asking which modes of responsiveness to reason are practically required. The moral here is that, in critically investigating Foot’s approach to human natural history, we can set aside her substantive claims about what such a natural history is like. These remarks bring me back to my critique of Foot’s overarching theory of natural goodness. The centerpiece of the theory is an analogy between natural-historical thought about non-human organisms and Foot-style natural-historical thought about human beings. It is an analogy that aligns species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology with moral judgments understood as assessments of human beings’ exercises of practical reason. Foot’s larger suggestion is that assessments of both kinds are members of the same family of assessments of natural goodness. Although I believe that we should reject this suggestion—​a nd although in just a moment I further elaborate the critique of it that I have already begun to develop—​my point is not that Foot is wrong to talk about similarities between moral judgments and species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biol­ o ­ gy. My point is rather that the similarities, while indeed interesting, 58

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don’t justify us in speaking of the kind of larger naturalistic analogy that Foot has in mind. In speaking here of similarities, I am assuming that we are right to follow Thompson, as Foot does, in understanding species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology as grounded in facts about features and operations of the organisms in question. Like Thompson and Foot, I am also assuming that our ability to move directly from descriptions of individual organisms to species-relative assessments is a function of the fact that in arriving at the relevant—​ vital—​descriptions we necessarily draw on knowledge of the natural histories of the organisms in question, that is, on knowledge that is teleologically organized and evaluatively non-neutral. When Foot compares species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology with moral judgments, she has these features of the assessments in mind. She thinks that the comparison is a good one because, as we saw, she takes moral judgments to be grounded in facts about human life. To be sure, in order to explain how we can move directly from attention to aspects of human life to moral judgments, she would need to discuss what it is to conceive aspects of human life as in themselves morally significant and hence as calling for specific rational responses, and she does not address this topic. This is a notable gap in Foot’s argument, but it is no part of my ambition here to suggest that the gap cannot be filled. On the contrary, this book’s main line of reasoning equips us to take the relevant argumentative step. In 2.2 and 4.2 I claimed that, in bringing human beings empirically into view in ethics, we necessarily draw on ethical conceptions of human life. This claim positions us to accept a Footian image of ourselves as transitioning seamlessly from attention to human life to moral judgments if, as I recommended in 2.3, we conceive moral judgments as evaluations of the appropriateness of responses to the values that, by my lights, empirical attention to human life in ethics reveals. One striking result of these reflections is a conception of moral judgments as life-form-relative in a manner that has some resemblance to the species-relativity of biological assessments as Thompson understands them. This resemblance is, I believe, what Foot has in mind when she insists on an analogy between the species-relative assessments of biology and moral judgments. Her theory of natural goodness stands or falls with the thought that we are justified in speaking here not merely of similarities but of an exact analogy.

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But this thought is false. Earlier in this section I expressed my reservations about Foot’s master analogy by questioning her reasons for thinking that a human natural history could not be given in merely biological terms. I suggested that, the differences that Foot mentions notwithstanding, we are right to class natural-historical thought about non-human organisms together with various forms of merely biological thought about human beings. Now I want to attack Foot’s theory of natural goodness from a different direction. Drawing on my discussion in 2.2. and 4.3 of how animals can enter moral thinking, I want to suggest that, if we are in search of a workable naturalistic analogy in ethics, we should compare moral thought about human beings, not, as Foot recommends, with natural-historical thought about non-human organisms, but rather with moral thought about animals. A good way to approach this topic is to follow up on what I said a moment ago about a sense in which Foot’s account of moral thought about human beings stands to be further filled in. When Foot discusses moral thought about human beings, she focuses on moral judgments. Although she claims that we move directly from attention to facts of human life to such judgments, she doesn’t explain what the relevant, morally non-neutral modes of attention to human life are like, and, as I noted, we can remedy this omission from Foot’s work by picking up on things I said in 2.3 about moral thinking about human life that doesn’t take the form of moral judgments. The particular passages that I was referring to were passages in which I claim that, in order to bring human beings empirically into focus in ethics, we need to look at them in the light of a conception of what matters in human life (2.2 and 4.2). What emerges is a conception of moral thought about human beings as in an important sense life-form-relative. This is noteworthy because above I also argued that there are life-form-relative modes of moral thought about animals that are exactly analogous to these life-form-relative modes of moral thought about human beings (2.2 and 4.3). It follows from my argument that natural-historical thought is not the only life-form-relative mode of thought about animals. If we hope to find a non-human, life-form-relative analogue to moral thought about human beings, we are on much firmer ground in looking for it not in natural history but rather in moral thought about animals. To say this is not to deny that in various respects moral thought

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about human beings differs from moral thought about animals. One notable difference has to do with the role of moral judgments. Whereas we assess human beings with regard to the appropriateness of their rational responses to the values encoded in human and animal life, such assessments have no place in moral thought about wholly non-­ rational animals. It is, admittedly, fair to ask how many non-human animals are aptly described as wholly non-rational. Above in 3.3, I argued that animals’ capacities of mind are rightly situated, together with human beings’, on a naturalistic continuum, and in 3.5 I added that it is possible that some animals arrive at stages of rational maturity in virtue of which they invite forms of moral assessment. (Thus, e.g., dogs may be trustworthy as opposed to merely predictable.) Determining whether this possibility is realized, and if so where, is a task for conceptually sophisticated empirical study. But even if it turned out that the possibility is not actualized, and that moral judgment is only at home in moral thought about human beings, this would not count against taking moral (as opposed to natural-historical) thought about animals to be the closest non-human, species-relative counterpart to moral thought about human beings. Despite certain divergences, moral thought about human beings and moral thought about animals are instances of fundamentally the same kind of thinking. For all of these reasons, Foot is wrong to claim that moral thought about human beings is part of natural history. Moral judgments are not the analogues of species-relative assessments of non-human organisms in biology, and, far from shedding helpful light on such judgments, a Foot-style theory of natural goodness supplies a false model for them. These observations equip me to contrast Foot’s project with the project of this book. To begin with, it is not hard to see that Foot situates human beings ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. To the extent that she conceives moral judgments as grounded in facts about human life, she assumes that human beings have empirically discoverable moral characteristics, and she thereby locates human life inside ethics. However, although Foot assumes that human beings have observable moral characteristics, she doesn’t present an argument for this assumption. This is noteworthy given that, as I discussed at this book’s opening, the assumption is foreign to a great deal of work in contemporary ethics, and given that furnishing an argument for it is no small undertaking.



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From my perspective, Foot’s case for situating human beings inside ethics appears seriously incomplete. Moreover, Foot deflects attention away from her own best insights concerning moral thought about human beings by presenting them as part of a flawed theory of natural goodness. While Foot’s move to situate human beings inside ethics is thus in important respects unsatisfactory, it is fair to say that the question of whether animals are inside ethics simply does not come up in her work. 59 Perhaps if Foot had developed an argument for the view that human beings possess observable moral characteristics, it would have occurred to her that animals likewise possess such characteristics. But, setting aside speculation along these lines, it suffices for my purposes to observe that because Foot doesn’t locate animals inside ethics—​a nd because, despite the fact that she locates human beings inside ethics, she doesn’t provide an argument for doing so—​it is wrong to regard her project as a significant forerunner to mine.60

5 . 2 .   W O L F E ’ S P O S T H U M A N I S M

If not in Foot’s treatment of ethical naturalism, perhaps it is possible to find a plausible forerunner to this book’s project in discussions of posthumanism. “Posthumanism” is the going term for an internally diverse set of—​currently widely discussed—​intellectual initiatives. While selfavowed posthumanists depart significantly from each other in their positive theses,61 they tend to agree in their main negative claims. One unifying negative theme is hostility to classic humanisms that depict  The only passage of Natural Goodness that mentions questions of ethics and animals is the book’s postscript (see 116), and here Foot raises the issue only to deny that she has said anything directly relevant to it. 60  This section’s commentary on Foot’s work differs from commentaries that I myself offer in earlier publications. (See “Ethics and the Logic of Life,” SATS: The Nordic Journal of Philosophy 10 [2009]: 5–34; and “Ethics as Part of Human Natural History,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 [2009]: 391–408.) Earlier I sympathized with tenets of Foot’s theory of natural goodness that I have since come to regard as unsatisfactory. The story of the writing of the current book is in part the story of my discovery that I was obliged to abandon aspects of Foot’s project that I myself once sought to defend. 61  Referring to this diversity, Bruce Clarke and Mark B.  N. Hansen describe posthumanism as a “cultural cliché lacking definitional consensus” (Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009], 7). 59

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rational human beings as exempt from the contingencies of physical or bodily life. Posthumanists reject this classic type of human exceptionalism and exchange it for various non-exceptionalist images of human life. Among the most prominent of these alternative images are some that emphasize continuities between human beings and animals of different kinds,62 and the posthumanist views that are likeliest to invite comparison with this book’s main line of thought are of this type. These views tend to apply to human beings and animals categories that are both intrinsically ethical and world-guided, and they thus tend to presuppose that human beings and animals have observable moral characteristics. It might therefore appear reasonable to credit them with anticipating my call to locate human beings and animals ‘inside ethics’. This appearance is, however, misleading. There is in fact a subtle but significant misalignment between many of these posthumanist enterprises and the main claims of this book. We can see this if we consider the influential posthumanist account of human beings and animals presented in the writings of Cary Wolfe.63 While there are a number of apparently suggestive similarities between Wolfe’s claims about human beings and animals and the contentions of this book, these similarities coexist with fundamental differences. Like many contributions to discussions about posthumanist positions, Wolfe’s contribution draws heavily on poststructuralism and, more specifically, on the work of the poststructuralist Jacques Derrida. Here I approach my remarks on Wolfe’s work by first considering some aspects of Derrida’s thought that are important for him. During the last decades of his life, Derrida produced many lectures and seminars that explicitly address questions about human beings, animals, and ethics. This late body of work picks up on lines of thought that, while more muted in his previous work, run through his whole  Some strains of posthumanist thought emphasize continuities between human beings and electronic systems (see, e.g., the essays in Hansen and Clarke, eds., Emergence and Embodiment) as well as continuities between human beings and all other—​a nimate and inanimate—​l ife-forms and ecosystems (in this connection, see, e.g., Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, [Cambridge: Polity, 2013], esp. 81–83). 63  See Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 62



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oeuvre.64 A guiding theme of his later output on animals is hostility to humanistic modes of thought that, as he sees it, are false insofar as they equate humanity with independence from the vulnerability of animal existence. Despite not being always explicitly theorized, this theme is already there in Derrida’s earlier writings, in a place no less central than the account of the logic of signs that is pivotal for his philosophical project. An important motif of this account, in which Wolfe takes a particular interest, is the concept of what Derrida calls iterability. Derrida introduces this concept by raising a question that he wants us to consider with respect to all words that we take to be meaningful. He asks whether it is certain that our words have corresponding to them concepts (or significances) that are “unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable.”65 Derrida wishes us to see that the ideal of meaning that is presupposed here is unrealizable. He attempts to get us to recognize that words come to function as signs as a result of being used in different contexts. His thought is that, when words are thus used, their contents undergo a shift that is incompatible with a unique or univocal character.66 The main conclusion that he wants to draw is that a traditional ideal of meaning is subject to what he famously calls “deconstruction.”67 The relevant deconstructive procedure retains the demand for rigor and uniqueness that the traditional ideal of meaning imposes.68 The point of the procedure is to illustrate that this demand cannot be met. “Iterability” is Derrida’s term  Derrida gives a brief survey of passages from his early writings that touch on the relationship between human beings and animals in The Animal That Therefore I Am, MarieLouise Mallet, ed., David Willis, trans. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 34–38. See also the commentary on Derrida’s long-standing interest in animals in Anne E. Berger and Marta Segarra, “Thoughtprints,” in their edited collection Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2011), 3–22, esp. 4. 65   Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–23, esp. 1. 66  There are intricacies of Derrida’s position that I do not here discuss. E.g., he argues that we cannot rescue a traditional ideal of meaning by assuming that the ambiguities associated with the projection of words can be “reduced by the limits of what is called a context.” Very briefly, his thought is that this strategy won’t work because, in his words, “the conditions of a context [are themselves never] absolutely determinable” (ibid., 2; emphasis in the original). 67  For Wolfe on this Derridean gesture, see e.g. What Is Posthumanism? 11–12, 81, 90, 157. 68  See, e.g., Derrida, Limited Inc, 117–119, 128, and “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–272, 247–248. For helpful discussion of this theme, see Simon Glendinning, In the Name of 64

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for the vision of the ways of words that emerges here, and in various places he indicates that he thinks his notion of iterability can be extended to all modes of thought, including not only those that involve semio-­linguistic forms but also those that are experiential.69 One recurring theme of Derrida’s discussions of these topics is that the very idea of iterability embodies a certain paradox. The point—​which Wolfe echoes—​is that talk of iterability implies, paradoxically, that the very projectability that endows expressions with meaning also keeps them from bearing meanings in the rigorous manner required by the unattainable ideal.70 To speak of iterability in Derrida’s sense is to imply the need for reworking certain widely received construals of logical concepts such as “objectivity.” If we adopt this manner of speaking, we present ourselves as discerning that the fact that expressions are essentially projectable or context-­bound represents a privation that prevents them from conveying univocal or universally authoritative meanings. Now it appears not only that any authority our words have is at bottom context-­relative but also that there can be no question of satisfying a familiar ideal of objectivity that encodes the idea of universal authority. If we continue to talk about objectivity, we need to do so in a fashion that encodes this qualification. The suggestion of the need for a logical reorientation along these lines is pervasive in Derrida’s writings,71 and, as we will see in a moment, Wolfe picks up on this suggestion and brings it to bear on his own reflections about human beings and animals. Before turning to this topic, I want to consider how a conception of language as iterable can be seen to inform Derrida’s resistance, early in his career, to the humanistic idea that to be fully human is to have partly overcome the conditions of animal life.72 Derrida appeals to such a conception in telling a story about how the intellectual capacities we have as Phenomenolog y (London: Routledge, 2007), 202–203; and Toril Moi, “‘They practice their trades in different worlds’: Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” New Literary History 40 (2009): 801–824, esp. 806–810. 69  See, e.g., “Signature Event Context,” 9. 70  See, e.g., ibid., 10, 15, 17. Wolfe comments approvingly on Derrida’s remarks on the paradoxicality of iterability at, e.g., What Is Posthumanism? 26, 43. 71  For one of Derrida’s clearest treatments of this topic, see “Afterword,” in Limited Inc, 111–154. 72  For Wolfe’s take on the Derridean thought of a connection between iterability and the idea that trafficking in signs doesn’t given us immunity to animal contingency, see What Is Posthumanism? 42–43, 81, 157.



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human beings are capacities we have as natural or animal beings. An important chapter of this story has to do with how, as he sees it, the notion of iterability represents a rebuke to the widely held view that the natural sciences alone present us with an authoritative image of what the world is like. To accept the Derridean notion of iterability is to accept the idea that intellectual moves necessarily draw on our sense of the significance of similarities among the different contexts in which expressions are used (or, in the case of experiential thought that doesn’t involve semio-­linguistic forms, the idea that intellectual moves necessarily draw on our sense of the significance of similarities among representations). Derrida takes it to follow not only that it would be wrong to regard the natural sciences as representing an ideally abstract mode of access to the world but also that the natural sciences should therefore not be credited with any sort of exclusive epistemological privilege. The result is supposed to be that we need to make room for other, equally authoritative modes of thought, and one of Derrida’s preoccupations in this connection is demonstrating the cognitive authority of thought that deals in irreducibly practical forms of normativity and that in this respect counts as ethical. Derrida moves from thus validating ethical discourse to treating the forms of practical normativity that it uncovers as ontologically on a par with the subject matter of the natural sciences. This last gesture is the centerpiece of his strategy for representing rational (or discursive) humans as natural beings. If we are to arrive at a satisfactory image of ourselves as natural beings, we need to be entitled to represent our intellectual capacities as natural phenomena. To the extent that intellectual performances are taken to be characterized by iterability, they are taken to essentially involve irreducibly practical forms of normativity. So it matters a great deal that, according to the Derridean line of thought just traced out, we appear to be justified in conceiving irreducibly practical forms of normativity as part of the natural order of things. This, according to Derrida, is what is supposed to equip us to regard our intellectual capacities as proper to us, not as creatures who have dispensed with animality, but as the kinds of—​human—​a nimals we are.73

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 See, e.g., Derrida, Of Grammatolog y, Gayatri Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 70. See also the related discussion in Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenolog y, 203.

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In his later writings, Derrida returns to and elaborates this image of humans as kinds of animals. One of his strategies involves combating the idea that there is a sharp distinction between a reaction and a response, where a reaction is conceived as an interaction with the environment of the type a non-­linguistic animal is capable of and a response is conceived as an interaction that needs to be understood in at least primitively recognitive or linguistic terms.74 Granted these conceptions of the notions of reaction and response, it is not difficult to see that attempting to discredit the idea of a sharp reaction/response distinction is tantamount to attempting to make room for fundamental continuities between the lives of human beings and the lives of other animals. Derrida draws on his view of our intellectual capacities as essentially involving certain sensitivities—​or, as we might also put it, as essentially involving certain natural reactions—​when he discusses such continuities. He claims that there is an ineliminable element of animal reaction in human responsiveness and, further, that there is accordingly no antecedent ground for presenting animals as cut off from primitive forms of responsiveness in a way that restricts them to mere reacting. This is one of the main ways in which he further develops the distinctive picture, already present is his early work, of kinship between human beings and other animals. When, in these ways, Derrida discusses continuities between the lives of human beings and animals, he is concerned with forms of kinship that, far from falling within the subject matter of the natural sciences, are as such ethically non-­neutral.75 This is the aspect of Derrida’s thought that is of particular interest to Wolfe. Following in Derrida’s footsteps, Wolfe denies that there is any reason to think either that real similarities between human beings and animals must fall within the  For a sample of relevant passages, see The Animal That Therefore I Am, 8–9, 59–60, 79, 83, 110–111, 122–123; and The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, Michel Lisse et al., eds., Geoffrey Bennington, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 117–120, 178–179. 75  Derrida rightly notes that recognizing significant kinship between human beings and animals is compatible with recognizing a great difference between them—​a nd, indeed also consistent with acknowledging a multitude of differences among animals of specific kinds. For Derrida’s insistence on preserving the distinction between human beings and animals, see The Animal That Therefore I Am, 29. For his insistence on differences among kinds of animals, see ibid., 31, 39–41, 47–48; and Sovereignty and the Beast, vol. 1, 128. 74



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province of scientific discourses such as biology or that such similarities must be describable in the ethically neutral terms of these discourses.76 On the contrary, he tells us that we are entitled to an essentially world-­ guided and irreducibly ethical image of fellowship between human beings and animals. That is the posthumanist moment in Wolfe’s Derridean thought about animals. It is not difficult to see how Wolfian posthumanism might seem to anticipate the concerns of this book. To the extent that Wolfe maintains that in ethics we need world-­guided and irreducibly ethical terms in order to do justice to the lives of human beings and ­a nimals—​a nd, indeed, in order to capture forms of fellowship between human beings and animals—​he appears to be depicting human beings and animals as having observable moral characteristics and, by the same token, to be situating them ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. There is, admittedly, no argument in Wolfe, of the sort that I present in 2.2–2.3, for thinking that in ethics we require ethically loaded categories in order to bring human and animal lives empirically into focus. Having followed up on Derrida’s attack on the idea of a priori obstacles to allowing that we might need ethical resources for the kind of empirical understanding of human beings and animals that we seek in ethics, Wolfe seems to assume that no further argument is needed. Nevertheless, because he follows Derrida in describing human beings and animals in terms that are world-­guided and ethically loaded, it may seem reasonable to represent him as situating human beings and animals inside ethics. This would be a straightforward misrepresentation. To say that human beings and animals are ‘inside ethics’ in my sense is to imply that we require ethical resources not merely to do empirical justice to their worldly lives in ethics but, moreover, to do so in an objectively authoritative manner. In contrast, for Wolfe there is simply no question of objective authority. This is because Wolfe arrives at his posthumanist outlook via the Derridean view that discourse is characterized by iterability. To speak of iterability is, we saw, to insist on the context-­ dependent character of meaning while at the same time preserving the idea of a standpoint from which to discern that it would be necessary to somehow overcome context dependence in order to get our minds around the world in a manner that has more than context-­relative 76

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 See Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? 88, 176–177.

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authority. So, given a claim about iterability, there can be no question of thinking or talking about the world in an objectively authoritative manner, and this is a conclusion that Wolfe accepts. He tells us, in this connection, that if we treat the ethical concepts that we use in discussing human beings and animals as modes of concern with how things objectively are, we are invariably guilty of a morally pernicious form of ethnocentrism that involves falsely granting universal significance to concepts that possess merely local or contextual authority.77 More generally, his thought is that, when we use ethically loaded terms in trying to shed empirical light on the lives of human being and animals, we should see ourselves, not as trying to do objective justice to a region of reality, but as striving to attain a merely pragmatic ideal—​a s striving to cope as best we can with, as he puts it, “the materiality and technicity” of the relevant modes of thought and speech.78 It is not merely that there is a misfit between Wolfe’s posthumanism and the outlook defended in this book. Wolfe’s position is fundamentally unstable. In adopting the Derridean notion of iterability, Wolfe is not only representing a context-­independent account of meaning as unattainable but also taking that account to supply a standard for measuring the authority of thought. He is taking for granted that he can make sense of a context-­independent account of meaning at least well enough to register the significance of departures from it. His Derridean view of discourse in this way depends for its apparent interest on the very philosophical perspective from which it has supposedly broken, and it is in this respect marred by a significant internal inconsistency. There is a clear contrast with the line of reasoning traced out in this book. It would not be inappropriate to say that, when in 2.2 I followed up on the pragmatic strain in Wittgenstein’s later view of language, I was defending a thoroughly context-­dependent account of meaning. But my defense of such an account was paired with an attack on the very idea of an ideally abstract or context-­independent vantage point for thought. In claiming, as I did in 2.1, that this idea is bankrupt, I was rejecting the  Ibid.; see esp. 88–89. Wolfe levels this charge of ethnocentrism against Cora Diamond and Vicki Hearne, two thinkers who are aptly described as situating human beings and animals ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. For Wolfe’s remarks on Diamond, see ibid., 80–85; for his remarks on Hearne, see Animal Rites, 48–53. See also Simon Glendinning’s related claim that what is characteristic of Derrida’s ethical reflections about human and animal life is the rejection of cognitivism (In the Name of Phenomenolog y, 205). 78  What Is Posthumanism? 88–89. 77



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possibility of somehow appealing to it to determine that our context-­ bound intellectual practices are logically defective and that they leave us forever cut off from discoursing about the world in an objectively authoritative manner. There is for me no question, as there is for Wolfe, of trying to occupy a position in which we both undertake to reject as confused an ideally abstract vantage point and endeavor to appeal to that same vantage point to impugn the objective credentials of our modes of thought and speech. I developed a line of thought that, far from confusedly asking us to abandon the concept of wholehearted objectivity as unattainable, calls on us to refashion our conception of what falls under this concept, along what I have described as ‘wider’ lines, so that an abstraction from all sensitivities is no longer its mark (2.1).79 In addition to equipping me to overcome a fundamental tension internal to the articulation of Wolfe’s posthumanist position, the wider conception of objectivity is decisive for my larger argument in this book. My main argumentative goal has been to situate human beings and animals ‘inside ethics’ by showing that, in contrast to what many moral philosophers assume, they have empirically discoverable moral characteristics. There can be no question of achieving this goal unless we ‘widen’ our conception of the objective realm so that it encompasses morally significant things. What I now want to stress is that, insofar as Wolfe lacks the resources to lay claim to the wider conception of objectivity, he fails to represent human beings and animals as having empirically discoverable moral characteristics, except in some severely attenuated sense. Because Wolfe in this way fails to situate human beings and animals inside ethics, his project should not be taken as an antecedent to the project of this book. There are non-­trivial moral stakes to the difference between Wolfian posthumanism and an image of human beings and animals as ‘inside ethics.’ It appears to Wolfe that, if we embrace an image along these lines—​that is, if we present ourselves as in the business of trying to 79

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 For congenial discussion of the relationship between Derrida’s preferred vision of discourse and the view of discourse developed in Wittgenstein’s later writings, see Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Toril Moi, “‘They practice their trades in different worlds’: Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy”; and Martin Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” in Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2007), 83–117.

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identify observable and objectively unimpeachable moral characteristics of human beings and animals—​we will necessarily be guilty of ethnocentrism.80 In contrast, I suggested that this way of looking at things depends for its apparent authority on the logic of a limited, ‘narrower’ conception of objectivity, and I noted that I defend a more satisfactory, ‘wider’ conception. My claim is not, however, that the introduction of the wider conception of objectivity somehow erases ethnocentrism as an ethical danger. Nothing I have said frees us from the obligation to ensure that, when we address ethical questions about human beings and animals, we are not simply projecting our local prejudices and taking them for discoveries. My claim is that we should not allow our awareness of the risk of ethnocentrism to lead us either to obscure the fact that empirical human and animal lives are as real as they are significant or to make us forgetful of our responsibility to bring these lives into focus in ethics as justly and accurately as we are able.

5 . 3 .   C O N C L U S I O N

This chapter’s treatments of the work of Philippa Foot and Cary Wolf are intended to complement things I have been saying about what is distinctive about this book’s main claims. Consider, once again, how the position I defend in the book differs from the unusual and noteworthy form of ethical naturalism that Foot champions. To begin with, whereas Foot doesn’t provide any sort of detailed defense of her assumption that human beings have observable moral characteristics, this book contains a detailed argument for this view. Second, whereas Foot is silent on the topic of whether animals likewise have observable moral characteristics, this book discusses how the same basic considerations that speak for attributing such characteristics to human beings speak for attributing them to animals. Lastly, whereas, as I argued at length, Foot is distracted by an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to classify moral thought about human beings as part of natural history, this book aims to provide a more satisfactory model for moral thought about human beings—​ namely, moral thought about animals—​a nd it thus gets us looking in the right direction for answers to questions about challenges of such thought.  See What Is Posthumanism? 88.

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My primary concern in considering Foot’s work has been how these criticisms of her naturalistic project in ethics bring out what is distinctive about the project of this book. But it is worth underlining one respect in which the two projects resemble each other. Both projects—​Foot’s and mine—​represent human beings as having empirically discoverable moral characteristics. Given an understanding of ethical naturalisms as views that treat moral thought as essentially directed toward the objective world, it follows that, despite the many significant differences between them, it is reasonable to group the two projects together as contributions to conversations about the prospects for a viable naturalism in ethics. This observation permits me to succinctly capture what I described as the advantages of my preferred position over Wolfian posthumanism. The trouble with Wolfe’s position is that, as I can now put it, it is not a naturalistic position. Although Wolfe represents human beings and animals as having moral characteristics that are in some sense observable, his theoretical commitments prevent him from acknowledging that these characteristics are part of the objective order of things. This keeps him from recognizing that in ethics we are called on to bring human beings and animals clearly and objectively into focus. It would be wrong to dismiss this as a morally inconsequential oversight. As I argue above (2.2–2.3 and 4.2–4.3), the relevant task is central to responsible moral thought. My goal in the rest of the book is to say more both about ways in which this ethical shift changes our image of human beings and animals and about the practical significance of these changes.

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6 E XT EN D I N G T H E A RGU M EN T Literary Accounts of Moral Kinship between Humans and Animals

“That is the kind of poetry I bring to your attention today: poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal . . . ​ but is instead the record of an engagement with him.” —​Elizabeth Costello in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

The chapters of this book thus far offer a philosophically unorthodox account of human and animal life, an account on which all human beings and animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics and are, in my parlance, ‘inside ethics’. My argument for this account has implications for how we conceive moral thought about human beings and animals. It follows from it that, in order to bring a human being or an animal empirically into view in a manner relevant to ethics, we need to look at her in the light of a conception of what matters in the lives of creatures of her kind. It also follows from it that in ethics it is invariably possible that we will need to enrich our ethical conceptions of creatures of specific kinds in order to do empirical justice to particular creatures of those kinds (2.3). In addition to defending this view of demands of moral thought, I illustrated it—​in a manner that extends this book’s argument—​by showing that we need an ethical

conception of creatures of a given life-­form in order to bring empirically into focus in ethics not only those creatures belonging to the life-­form who possess life-­form-­t ypical capacities but also those who do not (4.2 and 4.3). The current chapter again illustrates the relevant view of demands of moral thought in a manner that extends the book’s larger argument, this time with an eye to showing that the argument brings within reach distinctive and practically significant images of moral fellowship between human beings and animals. All of my illustrations here are taken from literary works. It is characteristic of literature to invite readers to imaginatively explore specific attitudes and evaluative perspectives, and below I consider three works that, in particular, ask us to look at human beings and animals in specific ethical lights. I argue that, in shaping our attitudes toward human beings and animals in particular ways, these works directly inform the kind of empirical understanding of human and animal life that we are after in ethics and do so, moreover, in a manner that bequeaths to us neutrally inaccessible images of human-­a nimal moral kinship. It is a presupposition of this argument that, in virtue of ways in which they engage us, literary works can contribute internally to the kind of empirical understanding that we seek in ethics. Below I get started by describing how this claim about the cognitive power of literature qua literature echoes well-­ known contributions to ongoing debates about the relationship between ethics and literature (6.1). Then I turn to works of literature that illuminate empirical features of human and animal life specifically as literary works, thereby bringing to light forms of moral fellowship between human beings and animals that are not indifferently available. I consider a story by Leo Tolstoy (6.2) and novels by J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald (6.3 and 6.4) before closing with a brief comment about my methods (6.5).

6 . 1 .  A C O M M E N T O N C O N V E R S A T I O N S A B O U T E T H I C S A N D L I T E R AT U R E

The idea that literary works are important resources for ethics is not by itself controversial. It is unexceptional for moral philosophers to make use of literary material. Without regard to whether they explicitly address the question of the relationship between ethics and literature,

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moral philosophers frequently treat novels, stories, and poems as sources of particularly intricate and helpful descriptions of attitudes, actions, persons, and character traits. They also sometimes extract arguments, or parts of arguments, from the texts of these works. Yet they generally have little to say about what I will call the specifically literary qualities of a work, that is, those qualities that have a tendency to engage readers, shaping their senses of what is interesting and important. Thus understood, literary qualities include things like the use of irony, ambiguity, repetition, metaphor, and other types of figurative language, and they also include the selection of particular temporal strategies, vocabularies, narrative voices, and even page layouts. While moral philosophers often make use of material from literary works, they nearly always treat the literary qualities of these works as in themselves philosophically negligible. They by and large cull the descriptions or arguments that interest them from works of literature in a manner that abstracts from ways in which, in virtue of such qualities, the works in question are designed to engage readers. In this way they effectively exclude the possibility that the value of a literary work for moral philosophy might be a direct function of its literary features and that literature as literature might contribute directly to moral philosophy. This gesture of exclusion structures the work of many moral philosophers who don’t directly comment on the relationship between ethics and literature, and it is also well represented within conversations about the nature of this relationship. Given the prevalence of the gesture, it is fair to describe the views of those who make it as versions of the standard view of how literary works can contribute to ethics. A central debate within discussions about the relationship between ethics and literature takes the form of a referendum on the standard view. The debate counts among its most outspoken participants various critics who maintain, in opposition to it, that works of literature qua literature can directly contribute to the kind of genuine understanding we want in moral philosophy. The critics I have in mind are not concerned to make an implausible claim to the effect that all works of literature in this way inform genuine understanding. What interests them is a more targeted claim to the effect that it is possible for particular works of literature to invite sound lines of moral thought, and to contribute directly to the sort of rational understanding we are after in ethics,



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specifically in virtue of ways in which they direct our responses. The idea is, we might say, that the rational moral interest of particular works of literature may extend, beyond any examples and plain arguments that can be extracted from them, to their tendency to engage us and shape our sensibilities. It is fair to say that this idea is philosophically controversial. This is at bottom because it represents a rebuke to a construal of the ideal of rationality that is deeply engrained in moral philosophy. Moral philosophers by and large take for granted an account of what rationality amounts to on which it must in principle be possible to make the connections constitutive of a rational line of thought independently of the possession of any particular affective endowments. According to this account, rational discourse invariably takes the form of argument, where an argument is a statement (or set of statements) that licenses a further concluding statement in a manner that does not depend on any tendency of the initial statement or statements to direct our affective responses. Although, as I point out below, it is possible to speak of argument more permissively, within contemporary ethics it is argument in this restrictive sense that is by and large taken to be the mark of rationality. Given this understanding of rationality, it appears that we cannot accommodate the idea that the tendency of literary work to shape our affective responses might be internal to its rational interest. By the same token, it appears that, if we want to weigh in on the question of the relationship between ethics and literature, we have to accept some version of the standard view. We have to accept, that is, that literary works cannot as such internally contribute to rational understanding or, as one advocate of the standard view puts it, that such works cannot as such offer “substantiation for their implicit claims.”1 Among the most interesting critiques of the standard view are some that directly attack the rendering of rationality that appears to underwrite it. There are moral philosophers who distance themselves from the standard view by arguing that literature qua literature may have rational power and by thus laying claim to a very different understanding of what rationality is like. These thinkers hold that we are  Joshua Landy, “A Nation of Madame Bovarys: On the Possibility and Desirability of Moral Improvement through Fiction,” in Gary L. Hagberg, ed., Art and Ethical Criticism (London: Blackwell, 1998), 63–94, esp. 68.

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entitled to a construal of the notion of rationality that, insofar as it allows a stretch of discourse that shapes a person’s affective responses to contribute internally to rational understanding, is capacious enough to encompass more than arguments in the above restrictive sense. They draw on the logic of this construal of rationality in attempting to show that literary works can as such present us with rational forms of moral instruction. One of their aims in turning to literature is to discredit the idea that, in the words of Cora Diamond, “when someone is reasonably convinced of something, the convincing will have to have proceeded [so that] the capacities of his head and not of his heart will be all that is involved.”2 They in this way mount challenges to the standard view that depend for their success on discrediting a philosophically influential account of rationality on which the realm of the rational is limited to argument, restrictively understood. 3 In one of its most familiar guises, this quarrel between advocates of the standard view and their critics takes the form of a debate about what moral responsibility demands from us. Some of the most outspoken champions of the standard view recommend it specifically on grounds of moral responsibility. One of the best-­known projects of this sort is developed in the work of Onora O’Neill. In an influential essay, O’Neill observes that literary discourse that shapes our sensibilities doesn’t invariably lead us to outlooks that are just and enlightened and that “plenty of people have been converted (or corrupted) to mean or  “Anything but Argument?” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 291–308, esp. 293. For further discussions of relevant aspects of Diamond’s work, see the text below. 3  It is possible to overlook the fact that in the essay just cited Diamond is mounting a challenge to a received view of what rationality is like because she uses the term “rationality” for what she regards as an overly restrictive conception of reason and hence pre­ sents herself as resisting the idea that convincing has to proceed by means of, as she puts it, “purely rational considerations” (ibid., 296). Terminology aside, even a casual reading of Diamond’s work reveals that she is hostile to assumptions about what rationality is like that exclude the possibility of authoritative reasoning that doesn’t take the form of restrictive argument. Any helpful list of moral philosophers who, like Diamond, ground attacks on the standard view of the relationship between ethics and literature on appeals to less restrictive construals of rationality would need to include Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, and Martha Nussbaum. For relevant references to the work of these and other like-­m inded thinkers, and a discussion of how they appeal to a philosophically irregular conception of rationality, see my “Ethics and Literature” in the online International Encyclopedia of Ethics. 2



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violent or racist moral practices and outlooks.”4 When O’Neill makes this observation, she is taking for granted the influential account of rationality that I have been discussing (i.e., the account indexed to a restrictive notion of argument). So it appears to her not only that argument restrictively construed is the only legitimate instrument of rational scrutiny but also that we are obliged, on grounds of moral responsibility, to accept some version of what I am calling the standard view of the relationship between ethics and literature. O’Neill’s idea is that, if we want to employ literary material in ethics in a morally responsible manner, we need to withhold endorsement of any apparent insights it yields until after having confirmed them by appeal to the “mediation of principles or of theory.”5 O’Neill is by no means alone in cherishing this idea. It is not difficult to find other thinkers who agree with her in maintaining that—​a s one literary theorist who sympathizes with the standard view puts it—​literary works can only be responsibly used as tools of moral education “as long as they are backed up by the sanction of an external authority.”6 Things look very different to critics of the standard view whose work is premised on challenges to received assumptions about what rationality is like. A good way to see this is to turn to Diamond’s writings. Like O’Neill, Diamond recognizes that literary discourse can get us to accept distorted or pernicious views or, to use one of Diamond’s own formulations, that “the magic worked by a vivid imagination [can lead us] into deep trouble.”7 While Diamond acknowledges that “to be convinced [a person] must be led through the use of his capacities as a thinking being,”8 she insists that restrictive argument is not the only route to producing rational conviction and that “there are other ways of trying to convince someone of one’s view.”9 She maintains that there is  “The Power of Example,” Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165–186, esp. 173. 5  Ibid., 176. 6  The last quote is from Landy, “A Nation of Madame Bovarys,” 77. One of the most outspoken advocates of the standard view of the relationship between ethics and literature who defends it by appeal to considerations of moral responsibility is Richard Posner; see, e.g., “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 21 (1997): 1–27; and “Against Ethical Criticism: Part II,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 394–412. 7  “Missing the Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum,” in The Realistic Spirit, 309–318. 8  Ibid., 306. 9  Ibid., 292. 4

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sound moral thought that is essentially “charged with appropriate feeling” and, by the same token, that it is possible to convince someone of the merits of a moral view by eliciting such thought.10 In championing this position, Diamond is not claiming—​ absurdly—​ that all modes of instruction that invite emotional responses are rationally convincing. Nor is she claiming that those modes of instruction that invite emotional responses, and are as such rationally convincing, are somehow bound to convince everyone who confronts them. But this admission is hardly damaging. After all, even if we deal exclusively with restrictive arguments, “we presumably do not expect to be able to convince anyone who is incapable of following our arguments, or who is too prejudiced to consider them.”11 When Diamond suggests that literature qua literature can convince, her point is that literary works are as such capable of eliciting modes of thought that are sound in the sense that any thinker should be able to make the connections internal to them. She is claiming that “the inattentive reader” runs the risk of “miss[ing] out” on the distinctive moral insights and ideas that some literary works impart in virtue of ways in which they engage us. Further, since she denies that rationality is limited to restrictive argument, she doesn’t agree with O’Neill and others that, if a moral view is presented in a literary work, “its critical evaluation must be carried out through [such] argument.”12 Despite recognizing that immersion in literature can lead us astray, she accordingly concludes not only that “the greater danger is inattention [to literature],” but also that moral responsibility requires leaving ourselves open to the possibility that literary discourse may as such reveal features of our lives that aren’t indifferently available.13 The project of this chapter is helpfully situated against the backdrop of this debate about the relationship between literature and ethics. On one side of the debate are thinkers who assume that rationality is tied to a restrictive notion of argument, and who draw on this assumption in arguing that in ethics we can only responsibly make use of literature if we do so in ways that reflect prior scrutiny by means of such argument. On the other side are thinkers who reject this assumption about what rationality is like, and who call for investigating literature as literature  The inset quote is from ibid., 298.  Ibid., 292. 12  Ibid., 301. 13  The inset quote is from Diamond, “Missing the Adventure,” 315. 10 11



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because they think that doing so can open our eyes to aspects of our lives that aren’t neutrally accessible. To the extent that, in this chap­­ter, I am setting out to illustrate that literature can as such internally inform the kind of empirical understanding of human beings and animals that we seek in ethics, it should be clear that I am positioning myself on the side of the latter group of thinkers. But I hasten to acknowledge that nothing I have said thus far in this section speaks for these thinkers’ distinctive outlook and, further, that the positions of parties on both sides of the debate—​that is, the parties for and against the standard view—​appear equally justified when considered in the light of their respective construals of the notion of rationality. Given the widespread (if mostly merely tacit) acceptance of an account of rationality linked to a restrictive type of argument, it may appear that advocates of the standard view have the upper hand. This appearance is, however, misleading. As Stephen Mulhall notes in a helpful commentary on the conversation between Diamond and O’Neill that I have been describing, “there simply is no account of rationality, and so of moral reasoning, available here that is not itself essentially open to question.”14 Mulhall’s point is that it would be intellectually irresponsible to accept without argument or discussion either the more widely accepted understanding of rationality that informs O’Neill’s version of the standard view or the alternative understanding to which Diamond lays claim. Bearing this in mind, I want to stress that, although I am opting for the philosophically more heretical account of what rationality amounts to that Diamond favors, I am in doing so drawing on earlier portions of this book that effectively lay the groundwork for this account. In the course of presenting this book’s case for locating human beings and animals inside ethics, I attacked what I called the ‘narrower conception of objectivity’, and I argued that we should exchange it for a ‘wider’ alternative (2.1). Now I want to bring out how the narrower conception of objectivity seems to provide support for the understanding of rationality encoded in the standard view of the relationship between literature and moral philosophy. A bit of additional terminology is 14

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 The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1–19, esp. 7.

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useful at this point. Suppose we speak of a conception of rationality in reference to a construal of what falls under our concept of rationality, where this is understood as our concept of inferences that are correct in the sense that any thinker should be able to recognize them as truth-­ preserving. To the extent that the narrower conception of objectivity represents the objective realm as free from everything with an essential reference to subjectivity, it excludes the possibility that the possession of particular sensitivities might be a necessary prerequisite of understanding how things objectively are and, by the same token, excludes the possibility that we may need to further develop our sensibilities in order to grasp a feature of the world or make the inferences internal to a rational line of thought about it. The narrower conception of objectivity in this way appears to support a conception of rationality, of the sort taken for granted by fans of the standard view of ethics and literature, on which rationality extends no further than a restrictive sort of argument. For the sake of perspicuity, here I speak in connection with this conception, which is a close cousin of the narrower conception of objectivity, of the narrower conception of rationality, and I speak in connection with the conception of argument to which this conception of rationality is indexed of the narrower conception of argument. When earlier I argued that we should exchange the narrower conception of objectivity for its wider counterpart, I in effect made a case for a conception of rationality that, unlike the narrower conception—​a nd like the conception defended by the critics of the standard view whose work I have been discussing—​a llows rationality to encompass more than narrower arguments. The wider conception of objectivity represents the objective realm as ‘wide’ enough to encompass subjective qualities. In defending this conception, I argued that sensitivities are internal to all of our cognitive capacities (esp.  2.1.i and 2.1.ii). I thus made room for the possibility that we might need new sensitivities in order to recognize certain features of the world or make certain sound inferences. Openness to this possibility is what distinguishes a conception of rationality that includes more than narrower arguments. This is how the wider conception of objectivity provides support for the conception of rationality advocated by critics of the standard view. For convenience’s sake, I speak in connection with this conception, which is a close cousin of the wider conception of objectivity, of the wider conception



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of rationality, and I speak in connection with this conception’s cognate conception of argument of the wider conception of argument.15 These terms equip me to give a new and more parsimonious description of the dispute about the relationship between literature and ethics that I sketched in this section. At issue is, as I can now put it, a dispute that turns on the competing credentials of the narrower and wider conceptions of rationality or, alternately, on the question of how narrowly or widely we ought to construe the concept of argument. Having in earlier chapters developed a line of reasoning that speaks for the wider conceptions of rationality and argument, I have set the stage for placing myself, within the dispute, on the side of critics of the standard view.16 I am not, however, interested in a merely generic claim about how literature qua literature can inform understanding. I want to discuss how individual works of literature can as such directly contribute to the kind of empirical understanding of human beings and animals that is pertinent to ethics. Indeed my aim here is even more specific. The rest of this chapter is devoted to discussing not only how some literary works  This terminology differs from the terminology I employ in Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). There I use the term “argument” for what I am now calling ‘narrower argument’, and I don’t speak of ‘wider argument’. I take my current terminology to be preferable because within philosophy it is common to treat rationality and argument as cognate notions. The result is that if one adopts definitions of “rationality” and “argument” such that rationality swings wide of argument—​a s I did not only in Beyond Moral Judgment but also in earlier publications—​t hen, however much one protests to the contrary, one runs the risk of sounding as though one is no longer talking about full-­blooded rationality. 16  The dispute about ethics and literature at issue here is distinct from but not unrelated to a set of discussions in aesthetics about the possibility of ethical criticism. These discussions are sometimes conceived as arguments between moralists who believe that the aesthetic value of artworks are always immediate functions of their moral value and aestheticists who believe that moral concepts have no place in aesthetic assessment. The tendency of recent interventions in these discussions is to reject moralism and aestheticism alike as overly extreme positions and to focus instead on a question we can raise without embracing either position. Theorists now frequently ask to what extent, or in what ways, the moral and aesthetic features of a work may be intertwined. (For a classic contemporary set of attempts to grapple with this question, see Jerrold Levinson, ed.,  Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998].) The side that I take in the debate about ethics and literature clearly has implications for how we answer this question. Insofar as I sympathize with moral philosophers who maintain that literary works can as such directly contribute to moral understanding, I am committed to allowing that these works may have a kind of interest for ethics that is a direct function of their literary or aesthetic features, and that in this respect moral and aesthetic values may be intertwined. 15

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as such inform the kind of empirical understanding of human beings and animals that we’re after in ethics but also how some do so in ways that bring out indifferently inaccessible forms of moral kinship between humans and animals.17

6 . 2 .   T O L S T O Y ’ S S T R I D E R

A good place to turn in this connection is the writings of Leo Tolstoy. This is in part because, throughout his work, Tolstoy is preoccupied with the widely rational idea that there are legitimate forms of ethical instruction that, far from being mere matters of the imparting of plain doctrines, essentially involve the shaping of affect. Whereas in his essays and non-­fictional books he sometimes offers theoretical treatments of this idea,18 in his stories and novels he approaches it differently, for instance, by offering sketches of characters that presuppose it. He pre­ sents characters who, while learned in a scholarly sense, lack the kind of emotional development that is a necessary prerequisite of ethical understanding, and he also presents characters who, while not learned, possess the sorts of sensibilities that bring such understanding within reach.19 Nor is this the extent of Tolstoy’s engagement, in his fiction, with the idea of non-­plain forms of ethical instruction. In his stories and novels, Tolstoy explores this idea not only by giving descriptions of characters that presuppose it but also by trafficking in the very kind of ethical instruction in question. He not infrequently crafts narratives that direct readers’ feelings in various ways with an eye to thereby internally contributing to ethical understanding.20 Moreover, he uses literary gestures to rationally illuminate, in intricately interconnected ways, the lives of human beings and animals.  W hen in the opening paragraphs of this chapter I said that in attempting this project I would be extending my book’s argument, I was already using “argument” in the ‘wider’ sense introduced a moment ago. 18  For two of Tolstoy’s central non-­fictional treatments of this idea, see The Gospel In Brief, Isabel Hapgood, trans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), esp. Tolstoy’s introduction, 15–34; and “A Confession,” published as the first segment of A Confession and Other Religious Writings, Jane Kentish, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 17–80. 19  Characters of the former sort include Anna Karenina’s Levin, and those of the latter sort include War and Peace’s Platon. 20  Although I touch on this aspect of Tolstoy’s work in Beyond Moral Judgment, 4.3, my guiding concerns right now are distinctive, having to do with the representation in his literary writings of human beings and animals. 17



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There is nothing contentious about the suggestion that Tolstoy takes an interest not only in human beings but also in animals. Many of his stories and novels feature vivid descriptions of animal life, 21 and relatively late in his career—​in the 1890s, when he was in his sixties—​he dedicated himself to questions of animal welfare, condemning the cruelty of slaughterhouses and advocating vegetarianism. 22 The story I want to consider, Strider: The Story of a Horse, contains descriptions of horse behavior, and it also develops an analogy between horses and humans. The story is traditionally read as using this analogy to criticize the Russian aristocracy, and it is no part of my ambition here to challenge this traditional interpretative approach. But my emphasis is different. I want to show that Tolstoy employs literary devices not only to present but also to rationally motivate his horse-­human analogy. My concern is showing that he makes use of these devices to contribute internally to our understanding of human beings and animals in ways that reveal genuine forms of human-­a nimal moral kinship that aren’t neutrally open to view. The first portions of the story, which have the form of third-­person omniscient narrative, describe a day in the life of the herd of horses to which the eponymous equine, Strider, belongs. The story opens on a spring day, some time in the 1850s, at the stable yard of a rich young Russian nobleman who collects and breeds horses, and from the beginning the focus is on the horse we later come to know as Strider. This horse is singular in a number of respects. He is piebald and a gelding, and he is in a state of advanced physical disintegration. He has torn lips, yellow and worn-­down teeth, sunken eyes, stiff and crooked legs, a substantial swelling on one front knee, protruding ribs, an abundance of  Thus, e.g., Anna Karenina contains several scenes in which we are invited to inhabit the perspective of Levin’s faithful hunting dog Laska as well as the tragic scene in which, if only for one brief and devastating moment, Vronsky recognizes the fatal injury of his mare Frou-­Frou for the terrible that thing it is; War and Peace contains an extended scene that depicts young Natasha and Nicholas Rostov out hunting with a large party and that at one point asks us to enter sympathetically into the state of mind of the wolf that the hunters trap and kill; and in “The Bear Hunt,” Tolstoy offers an involved description of the outlook of a bear. 22  See his case for ethical vegetarianism in The First Step: An Essay on the Morals of Diet, Aylmer Maude, trans. (Manchester, UK: Albert Broadbent, 1900). Tolstoy’s turn toward concern with animal welfare marks a clear change in his life. The story “The Bear Hunt,” written in 1872, chronicles an episode in his own life from 1852. 21

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partly healed scars, and a tail that in addition to being partly bald is constantly filthy as a result of chronic bowel troubles. At the same time, despite these different marks of decay, the aged piebald is physically impressive. He is of extraordinary height and has strikingly broad bones, slender cannons, and a well-­crafted neck.23 Moreover, he stands apart from his equine counterparts not only in that he possesses this peculiar combination of physical deterioration and physical greatness but also in that, unlike the other horses—​who share similar pedigrees and have mostly lived together since birth—​he is an interloper who was brought into the herd when already advanced in age. The different distinguishing qualities that the piebald gelding thus possesses are notable in part because they play a role in the account we are given of a sunrise-­ to-­sunset stretch of life in his herd. The emphasis of this account is on how the other horses react to the piebald gelding’s uniqueness, singling him out for special abuse. Strider’s treatment is described as a particular instance of a more general type of behavior that falls under the heading of “equine ethics.” The fundamental principle of this ‘ethics’ is, we are told, that “only those [are] right who [are] strong, young and happy . . . ​who [have] life still before them, whose every muscle quiver[s] with superfluous energy, and whose tails [stand] erect.”24 In representing this principle as central to an “equine ethics,” the story’s initial third-­person narrator is not inviting us to think of horses as beings whose conduct is subject to ethical assessment in the way human beings’ conduct is. The narrator speaks of “equine ethics” in reference not to ways he thinks horses should behave but to ways in which, as he sees it, they do behave. His idea is that horses accept provocative modes of behavior from their “strong, young, and happy” fellows that they resist from weaker, older, and more vulnerable horses. Insofar as this is the idea that is being developed, it is clear that “equine ethics” is a descriptive enterprise. The relevant modes of description are not, however, scientific modes of description where these are understood as distinct from and independent of ethical ones. The question of whether the muscles of a given horse are, to use the  For the description of Strider as a decayed yet still majestic creature, see “Strider: The Story of a Horse”, in Louise and Aylmer Maude, trans., Leo Tolstoy: Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1 (London: Everyman Publishers, 2001), 588-­590. 24  Ibid., 594. 23



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language of “equine ethics,” “quivering with superfluous energy” is not one that can meaningfully be settled by, say, a physiological test. To describe a horse as having muscles that quiver with superfluous energy is to describe it in fundamentally ethical terms. So, although in introducing talk of “equine ethics,” the narrator is not introducing an ethic for horses, he is asking us to think about horses in ethical categories. He is doing so by inviting us to adopt particular attitudes toward the story’s cadre of horses or, alternately, by inviting us to place importance on particular aspects of their lives. Among other things, he is asking us to regard some horses as beings “who have life still before them and whose tails stand erect.” As the story’s opening account of the gelding’s herd proceeds, it becomes evident that we are supposed to recognize the members of a group of two-­and three-­year-­old fillies and still foal-­less mares as the horses that best fit this description. Unlike the herd’s foals, who are described as presenting a comic spectacle with their feeble and rather arbitrary antics, and unlike the younger colts and yearling fillies, who are presented, likewise in a humorous light, as preoccupied with “pretending to be grown up and sedate,” the fillies form a “merry virgin crowd” that prances coyly around, playing and making mischief.25 Further, the fillies’ conduct and demeanor, in addition to thus distinguishing them from younger horses, are represented as expressing readiness for a fullness of life that they are just on the verge of claiming. At one point in the afternoon of the day on which the story begins, the most spirited and beautiful of the fillies calls out to a little bay horse working in a distant field, and in her whinnying there is, we are told, “the desire for and the promise of love” she has never known.26 Given that this filly and her companions are presented as “happy and strong and still having life before them,” it follows that it would be compatible with “equine ethics” if they were to harass weaker horses with impunity, and this is in fact what happens in the story. In the course of the story’s first afternoon, these fillies frighten still rickety foals and play tricks on worn-­out old mares, and they also contrive to be particularly vicious to the piebald gelding, pestering him with mock and real butts and kicks. Moreover, while their hounding of the gelding is equine business as usual, their relatively harmless pranks  The two inset quotes are from ibid., 592.  Ibid., 593.

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serve as the prelude to a much less usual and more violent episode. When in the evening the horses have returned to the stable yard, all of the horses, young and old—​provoked partly by the fact that the piebald gelding has been left saddled and hence in their eyes presents a “fantastic spectacle”—​r un after the old horse, nipping him and striking him with their hoofs.27 At this point we have a sketch of the narrative about Strider’s herd that comes at the opening of Tolstoy’s story. The kind of significance the story’s opening invites us to understand the different stages of equine life as possessing is at least partly a function of their being located in finite or mortal life spans. For example, the two-­and three-­ year-­old fillies in Strider’s herd are made to seem gloriously gay because they are represented as on the cusp of a physical flowering that is of poignantly short duration. Similarly, the foals—​with their tottering and rather aimless capers—​a re made to seem precious in part because they are represented as having taken a small step away from infancy and toward the greater power of, among others, the two-­and three-­year-­old fillies. In these and other ways, the opening portions of Tolstoy’s story call on us to regard the stages of horses’ lives as possessing forms of importance that are functions of their being stages in the lives of mortal individuals. These early portions are followed by others in which Strider himself acts as narrator, telling his tale up to the time of the story’s present, and it is to a significant extent against the background of the involved or ethically loaded image of horses’ lives which the early portions develop that Strider’s own individual tale has interest. Before turning to Strider’s tale, I want to briefly comment on the fact that Strider himself narrates it. To the extent that Tolstoy’s story represents Strider as telling his own story, it attributes to him human capacities that no horse possesses. Indeed Strider-­a s-­narrator goes further, depicting himself for instance as pondering “the injustice of men who blamed [him] for being piebald” and as understanding talk of Christianity while failing to comprehend what it means when he is described as the property of a certain man.28 In these and other ways Tolstoy’s story indulges in what might be characterized as unwarranted or bad forms of anthropomorphism. This fact might seem to speak 27

 Ibid., 596.  Ibid., 602-­603, 604.

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strongly against crediting the story with illuminating equine life. Yet it seems clears that one of the points of making Strider the narrator of his own tale is to put this horse’s life before us in a way that is free from the distorting perspectives of the humans in his life. Among other things, we are supposed to see that, while men’s property claims affect Strider, the concept of property has no place in his own experience. Moreover, while Strider-­a s-­narrator ascribes to himself attitudes and thoughts that no horse possesses, he also offers a realistic description of how the course of his life is affected by the desires and decisions of human beings. This is to the point because, when, late in the story, we are invited to reflect on the kind of wrong done to Strider by human beings, what is operative is this realistic description. The inappropriate thoughts and attitudes that Strider ascribes to himself drop out as irrelevant. So, although at the level of the narrative there is indeed ‘bad anthropomorphism’, this turns out to be part of a literary strategy for bringing the life of an individual horse clearly into focus. 29 Strider opens his tale by recounting how he was born in the stables of a count who bred the finest thoroughbreds of his day.30 He adds that he was immediately recognized as having the makings of a great racehorse and that later on he was given the nickname “Strider” because of his “long and sweeping strides.”31 But his piebald appearance was regarded as a defect by human beings. Although his fellow horses did not mind his spots, this human verdict had a significant impact on his life. Like  There is ‘bad’ anthropomorphism not only in the portions of Strider that Strider narrates but also in the portions—​before and after Strider’s narrative—​t hat are given in the voice of an omniscient narrator. One striking instance of this is a long internal monologue attributed to Strider in which he anticipates the gestures and habits of the keeper who rides him, offering a biting commentary on the keeper’s vanity (see ibid., 587–588). Here the point is not to get us to think of Strider as a super-­horse with cognitive capacities beyond those of any real horse but to get us see that the keeper’s self-­absorption has real and painful effects on Strider’s life. 30  The stable-­yard attack on Strider is what prompts him to tell his tale about his life. When Strider has been reduced to despair by the blows he receives, the oldest mare suddenly recognizes him as having come from the stables into which she was born, and this is what leads Strider to speak. Strider himself stresses that the mare’s recognition of him is what prompts him to narrate his life because he wants to make it clear that he is not trying to change the way the other horses treat him or, as he puts it, to court “equine sympathy” (ibid., 597). Although he doesn’t speak in these terms, he presents himself as acting in a manner consistent with the kind of “equine ethics” that I discussed earlier. 31  Ibid., 596. 29

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the other foals in his stables, he was separated from his mother during his first year of life, and, also like these others, he soon stopped longing for his mother and got caught up in play with other foals. Yet, because Strider’s human owner took his dappled coat to make him unbreedable, he was gelded around the time he began to romp and flirt with fillies. 32 Nor was this the only significant way in which human attitudes toward Strider’s mottling changed the course of his life. Because he was piebald, Strider’s owner didn’t keep him, giving him instead to his head groom, and, again because he was piebald, the thing that “constitutes [a horse’s] chief merit—​a fast pace,” became “the cause of [his] banishment.”33 Strider was banished from the district of his birth because, when he raced the count’s best horse, he won. His victories were considered a disgrace, and the result was that the groom was asked to sell him far away so that, as Strider puts it, “nothing more should be heard of me.”34 After being sold by the groom, Strider was, he tells his audience, passed around to many different human hands. He was happiest during years he spent with an officer of the hussars, and this was, he suggests, because the life he lived with the officer allowed him to exercise his natural powers to the fullest. Strider’s officer was young, rich, handsome, proud, and cold. He took Strider to be a fitting symbol of his own self-­ importance because Strider was physically superior and because he had a piebald coat that the horses of other great men lacked. Strider’s daily routine with his officer involved having his mane and forelocks dampened, getting harnessed to a richly ornamented sledge, and speeding about and passing other conveyances. Strider presents himself as having taken enormous pleasure in thus exhibiting his fine form and long stride. But he soon lost the physical power that made this form of pleasure possible. He explains that his decline was accelerated by human ill-­ treatment and, further, that he was harmed most by the very officer of the hussars whom he loved above all others. In the afternoon of a day on which Strider had already raced, the officer discovered that his mistress had run away with a new lover. Without a thought to anything except overtaking the pair, he whipped Strider and made him gallop sixteen miles in pursuit. Thus pushed to overexertion, Strider became seriously  Ibid., 598-­599.  Ibid., 606. 34  Ibid., 607. 32

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ill. His hoofs came off, his legs grew swollen and bent, his chest sunk and he forever lost his pace. Not long thereafter the officer sold him, and Strider was mishandled and abused by the successive people who bought him until, having declined to the state of physical decrepitude in which his equine listeners find him, he was bought by the steward to his current master. This tale of Strider’s comes after the portions of Tolstoy’s narrative, discussed earlier, that invite us to find pathos in the lives horses lead as mortal individuals. It is in part by entering into Strider’s life that the tale presents us with an occasion to register this pathos. It positions us to appreciate, for instance, the glory of the type of physical self-­ expression that Strider enjoys in the household of the officer of the hussars, which we can now see as the transient radiance of an individual horse who has traveled along a particular path to maturation. By the same token, it positions us to appreciate the tragedy of the maltreatment Strider suffers at the hands of the officer, which we can now see as affecting the irreversible decline of an individual horse with a particular mortal fate before him. Later sections of Tolstoy’s story, which once again have the form of omniscient, third-­person narrative, are designed to get us to register the possibility of analogous poignancy in the lives of human beings. The analogy is brought out in the story’s treatment of its main human character, the officer of the hussars who once owned Strider. This officer, Serpukhovskoy, figures not only in Strider’s own tale but also in the segments of Tolstoy’s story that follow it. Here we are invited to recognize basic parallels between Strider’s life and Serpukhovskoy’s while also looking at Serpukhovskoy’s life in a distinctive manner. We are shown Serpukhovskoy on a visit to Strider’s current master, where he is presented as resembling Strider in existing in a state of ruin. Once rich, he is now in debt; once handsome, he is now stout and bloated; and once proud, he now grasps at stories about the past in an effort to persuade himself that he has something to boast about. Further, like Strider, Serpukhovskoy still has some of the marks of better days. Although his good looks and money have disappeared, he retains his stature and some of the symbols of his old affluence, such as his expensive clothes and watch. Yet, whereas the changes in Strider are effects of aging and mishandling by men such as Serpukhovskoy himself—​factors that don’t

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essentially detract from his dignity—​the changes in Serpukhovskoy are effects of a shallow and dissipated life. 35 Insofar as Serpukhovskoy’s specific style of living is recognizable as characteristic of Russian aristocrats of the period, the portrait we are given of him implies a critique of the aristocracy, and this is the emphasis of most readings of the story. What interests me here is, however, as I mentioned earlier, not this critique but rather the analogy between horses and humans on which it is grounded. Central to the analogy is the story’s unflattering depiction of ­Serpuk­hovskoy. With his complacently hedonistic lifestyle, Serpukhovskoy has stunted his own moral growth. Let me pause here to once again observe that, throughout his fictional and non-­fictional writings, Tolstoy is preoccupied with the idea of modes of understanding that essentially presuppose particular ethical sensitivities. This preoccupation is in evidence in Strider’s treatment of Serpukhovskoy. The story represents Serpuk­hovskoy as incapable of understanding the course his life has taken. At the same time, the story is designed to get us to make connections of thought that Serpukhovskoy cannot make—​including connections that would better illuminate his relationship to the piebald gelding—​specifically by using literary techniques that engage us and invite us to look at things in particular ethical lights. Immediately after the conclusion of Strider’s narrative, Tolstoy’s story shifts to a scene in which Serpukhovskoy and Strider’s current owner are touring the stables to which Strider now belongs. Serpuk­hovskoy’s fallen state is such that he is grieved by the sight of his companion’s wealth and is merely trying to feign interest in his horses. Yet he can still speak with pleasure about his own past possessions, and, as he and his host are leaving the stables, he catches sight of the piebald 35



 Consider in this connection a scene in which Serpukhovskoy returns to the room in which he is staying very late one night and, unable to remove one of his boots, is obliged to sleep with it still on. The image we are given of Serpukhovskoy sleeping with one boot on invites comparison with the image we are given of Strider in the scene, touched on earlier in the text, in which he is left saddled and in which the other horses attack him. Serpukhovskoy’s boot is an emblem of his wretchedness just as Strider’s saddle is an emblem of his, yet the story represents Serpukhovskoy as responsible for his footwear predicament. It invites us to connect Serpukhovskoy’s inability to fully undress with its characterization of him as a lazy wastrel who drinks too much and has grown fat and unaccustomed to doing things for himself.

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gelding, slaps him on the rump and starts talking about the superior piebald he himself once owned. Strider recognizes his beloved old master and emits a plaintive whinny. 36 But even this doesn’t alert Serpukhovskoy to the fact that he is standing near the very horse he is discussing. Turning his back on Strider, he walks with his host to the house. There, during a night of drinking, he rattles on boastfully about Strider in ways that make it clear that he sees the horse as a status symbol and hence in a light very different from that in which the early portions of Tolstoy’s story have led us to see Strider. To the extent that these early portions of the story lead us to see something transiently glorious in the life that Strider led together with Serpukhovskoy, they also position us to see something worthy of attention in the horse’s uncritically affectionate cry to this man. It is in this way that Tolstoy uses literary techniques to get us to see things about Serpukhovskoy’s life with Strider that Serpukhovskoy himself cannot. By the same token, it is in this way that the story deals in the sorts of individually demanding modes of understanding that Serpukhovskoy is represented as culpably failing to cultivate. 37 Serpukhovskoy’s self-­satisfied neglect of his capacity for these modes of understanding is what, within Strider, brings about his ruin. Central to the story’s portrait of fellowship between horses and humans is a comparison between Serpukhovskoy and Strider in their ruined conditions. We are invited to compare the faded glory of Strider’s equine life with the spoiled glory of Serpukhovskoy’s human one. More generally, we are supposed to appreciate something about the greatness of horses  Ibid., 615.  Compare the portrait of Serpukhovskoy given in the bits of Tolstoy’s Strider discussed in this paragraph with elements of the portrait of Vronsky given in his masterpiece Anna Karenina, written approximately ten years later. Vronsky, like Serpukhovskoy, is presented as having been led by a consuming passion for his mistress to ruin a majestically powerful horse. Vronsky goes to see his mistress, Anna, on the very day on which he is to race his splendid mare Frou-­Frou in a steeplechase, and there he learns that Anna is pregnant with his child. He is unsettled, and his agitation affects his performance. He shifts awkwardly during a jump, causing Frou-­Frou to fall and break her back. Just after his accident, Vronsky says to himself “Ah, ah, ah! What have I done?” in a manner that suggests some appreciation of Frou-­Frou’s tragedy, and, indeed, this response comports with the fact that in chapters leading up to the account of the steeplechase Vronsky is depicted as having a powerful bond with Frou-­Frou. But, despite being in these ways a deeper character than Serpukhovskoy, Vronsky remains severely limited. As soon as he grasps what has happened, he becomes fixated on the fact that in causing Frou-­Frou to fall he lost the race.

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and to see humans as analogous in being mortals with one shot at flourishing. The horse-­human bond in question is not something that we can grasp by bringing into focus certain indifferently identifiable capacities that human beings and horses share. Whereas the relevant characterization of horse life belongs to the ethically saturated form of thought that in Strider is referred to as “equine ethics,” the relevant characterization of human life treats what I am calling ‘widely rational’ modes of moral and cognitive development as fundamental and is thus likewise ethically saturated. What we are invited to recognize is, we might say, a form of fellowship grounded in parallels between, on the one hand, the greatness and pathos of the activities of mortal horses and, on the other, the greatness and pathos of the activities of mortal human beings. This recognition is not open to the thinker who limits herself to surveying hard or ethically indifferent features of human beings’ and animals’ worldly lives. 38 This is what I have in mind in claiming that Tolstoy’s Strider directly contributes to rational understanding of ties between equine and human life specifically as a literary work. To be sure, nothing I’ve said in this section will by itself move the thinker who is committed to the narrower conception of rationality and who believes that there are a priori grounds for thinking that our sensitivities cannot internally contribute to rational understanding. Because earlier I attacked the narrower conception of rationality and recommended a wider alternative (6.1), I see no need to address the concerns of such a critic here. But even given the logic of the wider conception of rationality, it doesn’t follow that the non-­neutral image of things that this—​or any other—​story encourages us to form must be just and accurate. We do need to survey the complex ethical perspective the story urges us to explore and to ask whether we are simply projecting that perspective and then wrongly taking our projection for a discovery, or whether instead we are right to regard certain things that only come into view from that perspective as things that, far from being mere projections, are really there. Tolstoy’s  I n addition to presenting an ethically loaded form of fellowship between horses and humans, the story brings out something distinctive about human life. It illustrates how certain capacities internal to human flourishing are capacities that individual human beings are responsible for cultivating, and that individual human beings can bring themselves to states of decay with a moral ugliness that has no exact analogue in the lives of horses.

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story encourages us to look at human and equine life through the lens of a nuanced perspective from which the fact of mortality imbues with pathos health and other forms of bodily well-­being, physical freedom, self-­expression, and social bonds. Occupying a perspective of this sort positions us to understand features of the story that would otherwise be opaque. The story portrays Serpukhovskoy as deeply flawed, and our recognition of him as limited depends on our ability to see value both in the capacities for self-­expression and sociality that he has destroyed in his own life and in the different but in some respects analogous capacities that he has destroyed in Strider’s. Further, in enabling us to make better sense of its fictional world, Tolstoy’s story also enables us to make more sense of aspects of the real world. Now we can take at face value the familiar idea of, for instance, the poignancy of a child’s first babblings or the glory of a colt’s first wobbly steps. What a posteriori grounds might we have for repudiating a perspective that opens us to these and other aspects of human and horse life? If a critic were to propose plausible grounds, that would be an occasion to continue the conversation. But absent an intervention on these lines, it is reasonable to conclude not only that we are not obliged to reject this way of looking at human beings and horses but also that the relevant gesture of rejection would be unjustified. That is the substance of my defense of the claim that Tolstoy’s Strider contributes internally to our grasp of a distinctive and neutrally unavailable picture of fellowship between human beings and horses.

6 . 3 .   C O E T Z E E ’ S D I S G R A C E

It is an important theme of J. M. Coetzee’s fiction, just as it is of Tolstoy’s, that there are forms of understanding that are unavailable apart from the possession of particular sensitivities or modes of appreciation. Many of Coetzee’s novels are set in societies riven by forms of institutionalized discrimination with deep historical roots (e.g., apartheid and immediately post-­apartheid South Africa, Australia, and other actual, historical and allegorical colonial and post-­ colonial societies), and these settings provide the framework for various treatments of the idea that individuals may need to grow emotionally in order to understand significant features of their lives. Several of the novels foreground

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characters whose social privileges are marks of complicity with society’s injustices and who, even if they to some extent try to free themselves from biased and unjust ways of thinking, fail to arrive at the sort of undistorted understanding of their lives that could guide just modes of conduct. These characters are portrayed as unwilling or unable to respond properly to people with whom they come into contact, and a recurring motif is that their failures of understanding are direct functions of these affective limitations. 39 This widely rational motif finds expression not only in the terms in which Coetzee presents his characters and tells his stories but also in the novels’ narrative structures. A number of his novels unfold narratively in ways that largely eliminate traces of an authorial standpoint, inviting readers to view their (often violent and disturbing) fictional worlds from the perspectives of morally compromised characters. Through the qualified identifications that they encourage, these novels call on us to respond to features of their worlds in particular ways and, at the same time, position us to better understand the features in question.40 The works are thus preoccupied with the idea that emotional responsiveness is internal to understanding in ways that go beyond treating this idea as an element of a story. Anyone familiar with Coetzee’s literary output will be aware that within several of his novels questions arise both about the treatment of animals and about the relationship between human beings and animals. The protagonist of Elizabeth Costello, for instance, is an older Australian novelist who is horrified by the thought of what human beings do to animals.41 On a trip to a US college during which she lectures about the treatment of animals, Costello presents herself as an animal with vulnerabilities analogous to those of the animals she is discussing.42 Themes having to do with human-­a nimal moral kinship  A suggestion to the effect that particular sensitivities are essential to moral understanding figures significantly in at least one novel, The Life and Times of Michael K (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), whose central characters are not socially well situated. 40  The set of novels that employ variations on this basic narrative strategy includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron, Disgrace, and Slow Man. 41  Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003). 42  Questions about the lives of animals come up in a different way in The Life and Times of Michael K. The protagonist is a developmentally delayed gardener with a harelip, and his primitive mode of life is repeatedly compared to the lives of different animals, 39



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are also important in Disgrace,43 and the question of how this novel engages these themes is my topic in this section. Disgrace addresses the themes at the level not only of its storyline but also of its narrative structure, and it is capable of directly informing our grasp of the lives of human beings and animals specifically as a literary work. In describing these aspects of the novel, I follow up on things I said in 4.3 about how, as a work of literature, Disgrace contributes to an understanding of dogs. The novel’s main character is, as I mentioned in Chapter 4, a man named David Lurie, a fifty-­t wo-­year-­old, divorced, non-­A frikaans, white academic in newly post-­apartheid Capetown, South Africa. While even David’s surname—​a traditionally Jewish one that is sometimes taken to be a sign of distinguished heritage—​tells us something about his social circumstances, he himself is in significant respects clueless about these circumstances. Not that he is ignorant of political changes afoot in the country. David was demoted from a professor of modern languages to an adjunct professor of communications as a result of a nationwide restructuring of universities, so he is at some level knowledgeable about the new political order. Yet he fails to register the extent to which social privileges he enjoys are products of persistent inequalities. This failure is especially apparent in his sex life. He doesn’t see that his ability to secure certain kinds of sexual attention is a reflection of social privileges he enjoys as a result of deep-­seated forms of gender and racial bias.44 As readers we are invited to connect David’s benightedness with certain emotional and imaginative limitations he manages to hide from himself. David is the author of three books (on Boito’s operatic interpretation of the Faust legend, on the mystical theology of Richard of St. Victor, and on Wordsworth’s poetry), and he shares with his favorite

sometimes with the suggestion that—​a s a result of unjust social arrangements—​he has suffered a certain debasement, sometimes with the suggestion that, despite his debased condition, he has a sense of the glory of life that other human beings lack. 43  Disgrace (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). 44  Here and in the remainder of this section I use terms of racial and ethnic classification (e.g., “white,” “black,” “Coloured,” “non-­A frikaans,” “Jewish”) that are almost entirely absent from Disgrace. I do this because Disgrace unfolds from the perspective of David Lurie and because David’s thought and action reflect racial and ethnic distinctions that he doesn’t recognize as affecting his conduct. Since one of my main concerns is capturing how Disgrace highlights shortcomings of David’s that are related to these forms of social blindness, I find it helpful to use terms that the novel does not. I am indebted to Sandra Laugier for discussion of this topic.

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thinkers and artists a—​in my terms, ‘widely rational’—​doctrine about how intellectual development is inseparable from the growth of feelings and a sense for the comic. He sometimes flatters himself that he has realized this doctrine in his life. But this is self-­deception. Although capable of biting irony, he is strikingly without a sense of humor, and, although willing to nurture sexual desire, he is devoid of real passion. What gets expressed in David’s conduct is not so much openness to new experiences as a refusal to repress sexual (or other) desires. David is emboldened in this refusal by his sense that he is too old to change. He frequently tells himself that his temperament is fixed beyond alteration and that there can be no question of improving himself or learning new lessons.45 To be sure, his commitment to what he calls “the rights of desire”46 is not without appealing aspects. It frees him from the judgmentalism of his Capetown university colleagues, who are inclined to automatically censor departures from received standards of conduct. But David’s insistence on being guided by desire saves him from being judgmental without deepening his insight into his own character or personal circumstances. The portrait we are given of him thus itself encodes the widely rational idea that emotional responsiveness—​of the sort that he extols but doesn’t practice—​is necessary for the growth of moral understanding. This idea is further elaborated in the novel’s main storyline, which centers on two key events in David’s life. The first involves a sexual harassment suit brought against him for a relationship with a young Coloured woman in one of his classes, a theater student named Melanie Isaacs, and ends with his dismissal from his job at the university. The second, which takes place in a house his grown daughter Lucy has on a small plot of land on the Eastern Cape, involves a violent assault by two black men and a black boy, an assault in which he himself is badly burned and Lucy is raped and impregnated. In neither case is David able to arrive at a good understanding of what has happened. Although he recognizes that he is violating the trust invested in him as Melanie’s teacher and taking advantage of her inexperience, his self-­righteous impatience with his colleagues’ moralism—​with their refusal to register ways in which desire or feeling can lead us into conflict with social and  Ibid., 2, 49, 66, 72, 77, 172, 209, 216.  Ibid., 89.

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institutional strictures—​keeps him from undertaking the kind of self-­ examination that would enable him to see that what he is doing is truly exploitative. Similarly, although David recognizes that the attack on him and Lucy is conditioned by specific political and historical injustices, and although he has little sympathy for those of Lucy’s settler neighbors who overlook their enjoyment of the spoils of past brutalities and arm themselves to meet violence with violence, he is too involved in his own fears as Lucy’s father to see Lucy clearly. He cannot process her reasons for resisting his efforts to get her to terminate her pregnancy and flee the social world to which her small parcel of land connects her. Disgrace is no Bildungsroman. David makes little progress in overcoming the limitations of his emotional repertoire that underlie his obtuseness about these matters. At the story’s end, he is still preoccupied with thoughts of Melanie, and he has managed, through his refusal or inability to understand Lucy’s wishes, to produce something like a rift with his daughter. Nevertheless, David is now for the first time willing to admit that his attachment to a fixed set of desires may be a mark of limitation. He begins to open himself to new experiences. One emblem of this shift is his absorption in an opera he is writing about Byron’s last mistress. David has long believed that language is essentially an outgrowth of the expressiveness of song,47 and, even before he left the university, he hoped to work this theme into a modest operatic work. But it is only later, in his state of disgrace, that he begins to develop the receptive and responsive capacities required to explore his own expressive impulses in the work’s composition.48 Now David begins to listen for a voice capable of transporting him beyond the intellectual and moral order that he has hitherto accepted. If, following up on a proposal of Derek Attridge’s, we think of the kind of responsiveness that David now allows himself as an openness to grace, we can say that Coetzee’s novel suggests a play on the (conceptually only loosely linked) notions of grace and disgrace, bringing out a sense in which the former can be a condition of emergence from the latter.49 In plainer terms, the  Ibid., 3–4. For another treatment in Coetzee’s oeuvre of the idea that language begins with song, see Foe (New York: Penguin, 1987). 48  Disgrace, 160–162, 180–181, 192, 209, 213. 49  See Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 177–179. 47

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idea is simply that the novel invites us to connect David’s new emotional responsiveness with a glimmering of what better self-­understanding will demand. The narrative of Disgrace encourages significant if partial forms of identification with David. Unfolding in the present and proceeding almost wholly from David’s perspective, it invites us to explore his experience. We are encouraged to take things in through his eyes both during his double ordeal and afterward when, having lost his job and lived through the assault on Lucy, his manner of interacting with the world begins to change and he starts to catch a glimpse, however limited, of the kind of effort that might allow him to grow. By calling on us to imaginatively participate in David’s trials and their aftermath, the novel equips us to see things that are lost on David and that he is, at the novel’s end, at best just starting to discern. Among the things he gradually beings to understand, and that we are invited to grasp along with him, are the fact that he possesses a kind of animal vulnerability and the fact that there is pathos in the forms of animal life in which he participates. Consider the novel’s treatment of David’s relationship with Bev Shaw. Bev, a friend of Lucy’s in Salem, is a middle-­aged woman who, out of concern for the welfare of animals, provides crude veterinary care in a local clinic. When he meets Bev for the first time, David focuses on her physical appearance, her cultural niche, and ways in which her social concerns get expressed in her personal hygiene and domestic arrangements. He describes Bev to himself as a “dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckled, close-­cropped, wiry hair, and no neck” who is “full of New Age mumbo jumbo.”50 At Lucy’s urging, he agrees to help Bev at the clinic, but in Bev’s presence he is impatient and brusque. When Bev tells David to “think comforting thoughts” because, as she puts it, “[animals] can smell what you are thinking,” David silently dismisses her advice as nonsense. 51 When, on his first day at the clinic, he watches her calm an injured goat, what strikes him is that she lacks the training for a sophisticated veterinary intervention, and he feels more disdain than admiration. 52  Disgrace, 72, 84.  Ibid., 81. 52  Ibid., 83–84. 50 51



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David’s relationship with Bev changes after he and Lucy are attacked. The attackers pour methylated spirits on David and set him on fire, badly burning his scalp and one ear. Reduced to a state of physical and emotional frailty, he begins to take comfort in social gestures he once disparaged and to notice aspects of people and situations he previously overlooked. Together with Lucy, David spends the night after the assault at Bev’s house, and, before he and Lucy leave the next day, Bev changes his bandages, putting him in the position of the goat he earlier saw her treat. David now no longer focuses on Bev’s appearance or the primitiveness of her methods. He is soothed by the delicacy with which she touches him, the quiet manner in which she works, and the calm she instills. These are the things that now impress him about Bev, and he finds himself wondering whether the goat “felt the same peacefulness.”53 David thus begins to contemplate the possibility that Bev is a more competent person than he originally assumed. At the same time, he imaginatively places himself in the position of the goat he saw her treat and begins to think of himself as having a bodily susceptibility that brings him into fellowship with it. David’s ordeal is among the events that the novel presents from his perspective. The men who attack David and Lucy lock David in a bathroom, and the narrative follows David’s panicked thoughts as he tries frantically to free himself, all the while imagining what might be happening outside and wondering, moment by moment, if it is now too late. The novel in this way invites us to imaginatively participate in his devastation, and it prepares us to sympathize with the relief he feels afterward when he is under Bev’s care. One result of this is that, like David, we are called on to respond to Bev in ways that position us to recognize her sensible solicitousness. Another result is that, like David, we are invited to be forcefully struck by the fact that we are fleshly creatures with bodily susceptibilities. Let me mention a further respect in which, specifically as a work of literature, Disgrace aims to shed light on animal life. Early in the novel, David is inclined to treat animals as beings of a different order who, while meriting humane treatment, shouldn’t be regarded as individuals deserving special forms of care and attention. He tells Lucy that he  Ibid., 106.

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thinks of people like Bev who concern themselves with animal welfare as well-­intentioned but misguided do-­gooders. When Bev herself asks him whether he likes animals he replies sarcastically: “I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them.”54 David’s manner of dealing with animals is very different after he and Lucy are attacked. The shift is not a simple byproduct of the change in his relationship to Bev and her animals. It is also partly a function of his attempt to cope with the slaughter of the half dozen watchdogs whom Lucy boards on her property. David and Lucy’s assailants also target these dogs. Before leaving, one of them systematically shoots all of them in their cages. This act of brutality is by no means politically incomprehensible, given that South Africa is “a country where,” as David at one point tells himself, “dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man.”55 Yet at the beginning of his stay in Salem David betrays insensitivity to the interplay between race relations and dogs. When he first meets Petrus, a black man in his forties who lives near Lucy and who is both her assistant and coproprietor, David struggles for a way to start a conversation and then observes: “You look after the dogs.”56 The most striking changes in David’s relationship to animals come when he begins to identify with individual animals in their physical vulnerability and need for comfort. When David looks at animals, he now sees beings whose reactions to physical threats are salient and significant. This vision gets expressed, for instance, in an interest in vegetarianism. After the attack on Lucy and himself, David finds himself sympathizing with two sheep that Petrus tethers on the property and plans to slaughter to feed to guests at an upcoming party. David has always been a meat eater, but he considers staying home from Petrus’s celebration partly to avoid eating those sheep. David’s new way of looking at animals also shows up in his attachment to the dogs at Bev’s clinic. As I discussed in 4.3, he comes to see the unwanted dogs who are to be euthanized as individuals awaiting their mortal fates. He brings the dogs’ corpses to the dump so that he can personally arrange for their incineration and spare them the “dishonor” of being left with “waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped up at the roadside,  Ibid., 81.  Ibid., 110. 56  Ibid., 64. 54 55



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malodorous refuse from the tannery.”57 Here as elsewhere Disgrace invites its reader to imaginatively enter into David’s perspective, and what merits emphasis is that, insofar as the novel encourages us to sympathize with the sense of vulnerability that leads David to new identifications with animals, it at the same time invites us to imaginatively explore his way of looking upon animals. These are some of the more striking ways in which, specifically as a work of literature, Disgrace develops a notable image of human-­a nimal kinship. The case the novel makes for this image will seem unsatisfactory to thinkers who take for granted constraints of the narrower conception of rationality, but, as I did in 6.2, I want to defer to 6.1’s critique of this conception of rationality earlier in this book and set aside the worries of such thinkers. My point is not, however, that we should uncritically accept the account of moral fellowship between human beings and animals that the novel places before us. This account comes into view from a perspective, cultivated by the novel, from which things like bodily well-­being and the freedom to develop kind-­t ypical capac­ ities appear important for human beings as well as for animals of ­d ifferent kinds, and among the capacities that we are invited to see as important in the human case—​in this respect Disgrace resembles Tolstoy’s Strider—​is the capacity for forms of (in my terms, ‘wider’) rational development that essentially involve the growth of feelings. In positioning us to adopt its preferred perspective, Disgrace asks us to see human beings as distinctive in our ability to injure ourselves by stunting our own emotional and rational development. This theme is just as prominent in Disgrace’s portrait of David Lurie as it is in Strider’s portrait of Serpukhovskoy. At the same time—​a nd here there is at least a difference of emphasis from Tolstoy’s story—​Disgrace encourages us to look upon human beings as like animals in being essentially at risk of injury by natural and social forces beyond our control. We are encouraged to see ourselves as creatures who, because we need to develop emotionally in order to develop rationally, can be denied our one shot at human flourishing by violent acts or events that disrupt our lives, stunting our emotional growth, much as animals can be denied their one shot at flourishing by tethers, cages and abuse. In this way the novel impresses on us the insidiousness not only of the kinds of historical and 57

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political forces that leave Melanie, Lucy, and any number of real-­world individuals vulnerable to unwanted and violent sexual contact but also of the kinds of historical and political forces that leave animals subject to capricious treatment. It shows us connections not only between what David did to Melanie and what happened to Lucy but also between these different abuses of human beings and a host of abuses of animals. If we step back from the ethical perspective that the novel tries to cultivate—​a nd if we thereby distance ourselves not only from its ethically drenched picture of animal life but also from its widely rational picture of human development—​we are no longer in a position to make these connections. To the extent that making the connections enables us to make sense of otherwise opaque features of the natural and political world, we are on good ground in affirming them. That is what speaks for saying that, as a novel, Disgrace makes a defensible case for a distinctive image of moral fellowship between human beings and animals. 58 This section has a brief epilogue. I want to consider an objection to things I have been saying about Disgrace and Coetzee’s fictional work more generally. Encoded in my remarks is the thought that to do justice to Coetzee’s fiction we have to help ourselves to a ‘wider’ conception of rationality that allows that a literary work may as such directly contribute to rational understanding. It might seem reasonable to protest that Coetzee himself does not operate with this conception and that, on 58



 W hen it first appeared in 1999, Disgrace was criticized by a number of prominent South Africans and was attacked in the ANC’s submission to the African Human Rights Commission’s inquiry into racism in the media. Some critics alleged that the novel’s portrayal of black on white rape contains an antiblack racist message. Some of the critics who made this allegation had legitimate concerns about the kind of social response the novel was likely to produce. But in lodging their complaints many simply ignored the contribution that its literary devices make to its moral and political character. I have been suggesting, in contrast, that the novel’s moral import is inseparable from its distinctively literary qualities. There is no such thing as appreciating the significance of its portrayal of the rape of a white woman by three black assailants apart from an appreciation of how this portrayal aims not only to open our eyes to features of the political landscape in which such an act might occur (features that include, e.g., a brutal and persistent history of antiblack racist violence) but also to impress on us the difficulty of bringing such a landscape clearly into focus. For an overview of political controversy surrounding Disgrace, see Interventions: An International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4 (2002). The opening piece by Attridge—​“J.  M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Introduction,” 315–320—​is especially helpful. The question of Coetzee and the political is taken up in a more general way in Jane Poyner, ed., J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). Poyner touches on Disgrace at 11–12.

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the contrary, he helps himself to the wider conception’s ‘narrower’ counterpart. The point of the objection I have in mind is not to deny that Coetzee sometimes represents affective endowments as necessary for moral development but only to suggest that when he does this he is not intimating that we should allow a wider conception of rationality to shape our view of moral thought. Rather he is telling us, in a narrowly rational manner, that our moral attitudes fall outside the domain of rationality altogether. 59 At first blush it might seem possible to find good evidence for this alternative image of Coetzee. In essays and interviews, Coetzee expresses skepticism about efforts to bring our ethical commitments wholly within, as he once put it, “the project of rationality,” and it might seem as though we are justified in concluding from this that he holds the narrowly rational belief that our attitudes are necessarily external to any rational capacities we possess.60 An initially plausible case can be made for representing some of his novels as supporting this conclusion. Con­ sider a passage late in Disgrace in which David is attempting to convince Lucy, now for the third or fourth time, that she should move away from Salem. David ends his case with the plea “Can’t the two of us talk about it rationally?” In response, Lucy shakes her head and says: I can’t talk any more, David. I just can’t . . . ​I know I am not being clear. I wish I could explain. But I can’t. Because of who you are and who I am. I can’t.61

Given that Disgrace represents David as hampered in his relationship to Lucy by limitations of emotional responsiveness, and given that this passage indicates that he differs from Lucy in relying on certain “rational” methods, it might seem reasonable to read the novel as suggesting, in a narrowly rational fashion, that David stands in need of a kind of moral and emotional development that is independent of the growth of rationality.62  This objection was suggested to me by Anton Leist and Peter Singer.  The inset quote is from Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4. 61  Disgrace, 155. 62  A similar conclusion might be drawn from a passage in Elizabeth Costello in which the central character is giving a lecture on things human beings do to animals. Costello suggests that we need to rely on passionate modes of speech if we are to bring our lives 59

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However plausible it initially seems, this narrowly rational approach to Coetzee’s work is untenable. It doesn’t capture the complexity of his moral posture. An examination of his essays and interviews, for instance, makes it clear that, when he disparages the idea that the moral life is a wholly “rational” endeavor, he is presupposing what I am calling ‘wider’ rationality (6.1). His fundamental thought is that what I am calling ‘narrower’ argument (also 6.1) is not the right tool for assessing the merits of our deepest moral convictions. He is not denying that we need to use our minds, broadly construed, to authoritatively survey and assess matters of conviction. Rather, he is advancing the widely rational claim that, if we are to put ourselves in a position to examine our beliefs in an intellectually and morally responsible manner, we need to go beyond argument narrowly conceived and allow ourselves to explore modes of thought that only a willingness to follow up on new responses to life brings within reach.63 Coetzee’s genius lies partly in the way he allows this thought to animate his novels. Consider again the scene in Disgrace in which David asks Lucy whether they can discuss her situation “rationally.” Given that David is for the most part incapable of engaging with others in ways that demand a flexible emotional response, we have every reason to believe that he takes narrower argument to be the sole method of rational conversational exchange. At the same time, it seems clear that we miss the point of this interaction between David and Lucy if we fail to question this fixation on narrower argument. When Lucy rejects David’s attempt to “rationally” discuss what happened to her, she is suggesting not that there is nothing there for him to get his mind around but rather that a transformation of his person would be required to bring what she wants to say within his mental reach. (“I wish I could explain. But I can’t. Because of who you are and who I am, I can’t.”) Far from supporting an understanding of Disgrace as repudiating the very

with animals clearly into focus, and she adds that refusing to rely on such modes of speech is tantamount to wrongly “bow[ing] to reason” (Elizabeth Costello, 67). If we assume that Costello is implying that passionate speech necessarily operates on us in a non-­rational manner, and if we also assume that the novel is recommending reliance on such speech, then it will seem appropriate to represent the novel as urging us to move moral conversation outside the realm of reason. 63  For a forceful treatment of these themes, see Coetzee, Giving Offense, 3–6.



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idea of rational moral discussion, this scene between David and Lucy supports an understanding of the novel as implying that, if we are to participate responsibly in moral conversation, we need to reject constraints internal to the narrower conception of rationality and avail ourselves of a wider alternative.64 There is in fact no good evidence for thinking that Coetzee restricts himself to the logic of the narrower conception of rationality. The objection just explored gives us no reason to reject this section’s claim that, as a work of literature, Disgrace presents a striking and valuable account of human-­a nimal moral kinship.

6 . 4 .   S E B A L D ’ S A U S T E R L I T Z

W. G. Sebald is well known for his engagement in his prose fiction with individuals who were ripped out of the circumstances in which they were at home by wars, colonial enterprises, and other cataclysms of the twentieth century. He is preoccupied with ways in which people cut off from their pasts by different forms of political upheaval are made to suffer, and he returns again and again to forms of suffering that are functions of obstacles that uprooted people encounter in arriving at a coherent sense of what is interesting and important. As a result of having been violently disconnected from their pasts, Sebald’s characters respond to their environments in ways that they cannot make sense of well enough either to decisively identify with or to repudiate. Moreover, the trouble these characters have developing their own modes of responsiveness interferes with their ability to understand their lives. The 64

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 A complementary claim can be made about the passages in Elizabeth Costello in which the eponymous Elizabeth is giving first a lecture and then a seminar on animals. Although early in her lecture Costello disparages constraints of “reason” (67), she is in fact making a complex point. She notes that it may seem as though the only alternative to “reason”-­governed discourse is inchoate emoting (68), and she adds that this is because any utterance that counts as intelligible will by that token fall within the domain of “reason” (70). When the day after her lecture Costello gives a seminar, she reads a couple of poems about animals, underlining respects in which the poems play on our passions and arguing that a stretch of discourse such as a poem can present us with intellectually respectable modes of thought in virtue of ways in which it directs our feelings (94–96). The portrait of Costello we are given is of a thinker who, far from opposing the very idea of a rational ethics, is committed to approaching questions of ethics in a manner shaped by a conception of rationality capacious or ‘wide’ enough to include literary speech, taken as such, as a rational discursive form.

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self-­understanding they are cut off from doesn’t consist in and can’t be reduced to the sort of neutral knowledge that is distinctive of the sciences. Participation in practices of fact-­gathering presents no special obstacles to them.65 Yet these characters lack the sort of insight into themselves that would allow them to truly live, and within the narratives this lack of insight is depicted, in what by my lights counts as a widely rational manner, as an immediate expression of their emotional handicaps. The resulting accounts of disrupted human lives are supposed to be naturalistic in the sense of treating their human subjects as natural, non-­ magical beings or, alternately, as animals of a distinctive kind. While it is widely recognized that naturalistic modes of thought play a significant role in Sebald’s thought, the fact that the narratives explore two different types of naturalistic thinking receives less attention. Some of Sebald’s thinking belongs to natural history on the most familiar, contemporary understanding of what this amounts to. Today “natural history” is generally taken to be the name for the part of biology, discussed earlier in this book in reference to the writings of Michael Thompson, that is dedicated to sorting living organisms into kinds, giving accounts of their characteristic features and operations, and describing their individual features. Sebald is interested in natural history in this familiar sense. Not only are his narratives filled with characters who are trained in relevant practices of naturalistic classification, but his narrators also occasionally offer their own amateur natural histories of different organisms.66 But when Sebald talks about uprooted individuals as natural beings who are cut off from important forms of self-­understanding,  The characters in question include, among others, a surgeon and a schoolteacher who is a serious amateur botanist. The surgeon and the amateur botanist are Dr. Henry Selwyn and Paul Bereyter of Sebald’s The Emigrants, Michael Hulse, trans. (New York: New Directions, 1997). 66  The naturalists in the narratives include Paul Bereyter of The Emigrants, who was one of Sebald’s actual childhood teachers; the seventeenth-­century naturalist Thomas Browne, who figures prominently in Rings of Saturn (Michael Hulse, trans. [London: Vintage, 1998]); and the various members of the fictional Fitzgerald clan of Austerlitz (Anthea Bell, trans. [New York: Modern Library, 2001]) who are botanists and naturalists of other kinds. Additionally, a significant portion of Sebald’s prose poem After Nature (Michael Hamburger, trans. [New York: Random House, 2002]) is devoted to the life of the eighteenth-­ century botanist, zoologist, and physician Georg Wilhelm Steller. Finally, the narrator of Rings of Saturn relies on the work of unnamed “natural historians” in talking about the lives of herring and silkworms (see 49–51 and 274–276). 65



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he tends to describe them in ethically non-­neutral terms that don’t belong to traditional natural history. He helps himself to the kind of ‘wider’ or ethically inflected naturalism that I discussed in reference to the work both of John McDowell (3.1) and of Philippa Foot (5.1 and 5.3) and that, when seen as directly pertinent to human life, is of a piece with situating human beings ‘inside ethics’ in the sense of this book. An image of human beings as inside ethics, properly developed, is an image of human life on which emotional growth is internal to the growth of moral self-­understanding (2.1, 2.2, 4.2, and 6.1). So it isn’t surprising that, when Sebald depicts his characters as natural beings subject to forces that interfere with their emotional development, he also suggests that these forces cut them off from modes of thought that would enable them to register what they have been made to undergo.67 This set of themes gets developed, among other places, in passages in Sebald’s fiction involving naturalistic images that take artifacts as proxies for human beings. It is a signature gesture of Sebald’s to depict household objects, clothing, and other personal effects and, above all, buildings as emblems of human thought and action. He invites us to see these objects’ vulnerability to displacement and decay as an emblem of the vulnerability and transience of human life. He occasionally describes his simultaneously ethically saturated and naturalistic studies of artifacts as constituting a sort of “natural history” of them.68 This way of talking underlines the importance of the role of widely naturalistic perspectives in ethical thought about human beings as Sebald conceives it. It is not a sign of any confusion on his part about the distinctness of the  For an illustration of what it comes to to describe Sebald’s narratives as making these two suggestions, see this section’s discussion of Austerlitz. 68  See in this connection the English translation of Sebald’s 1997 lectures Literatur und Luftkrieg, entitled On the Natural History of Destruction (Anthea Bell, trans. [New York: Modern Library, 2003]), which are concerned with the firebombing of German cities by Allied forces at the end of World War II. These lectures ignited controversy in Germany because Sebald was taken, wrongly, to be trying to mitigate Hitler’s atrocities by pointing out that Germans were also made to suffer horribly during the war. In fact Sebald wanted to underline avoidance by German authors of the horrors of the firebombing and trace it to a failure to come to terms with the horrors of National Socialism. Setting aside this dispute, my point is that within the lectures categories of ethical naturalism (and not those of traditional natural history) predominate and that the title of the English translation—​which Sebald approved before his death—​ includes the phrase “natural history.” 67

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modes of thought proper to traditional natural history (for discussion of differences between ethical and natural-­historical thought, see 5.1.ii). Human beings (and artifacts that stand in for them) are not the only things, in Sebald’s fiction, that fall under an ethically charged, naturalistic gaze. Non-­human animals frequently do so as well. We are repeatedly called on to look upon animals of different kinds as meriting pity insofar as they are prevented from living in ways that adequately develop their characteristic capacities.69 We are also repeatedly asked to contemplate ethically charged images of animals together with ethically charged images of humans. Sebald’s narratives often invite us to recognize pathos in the lives of individual humans whose development bears scars of social upheaval by juxtaposing depictions of these individuals with descriptions of individual animals who have likewise been prevented from fully living.70 This basic vision of moral kinship between human beings and animals, which is central to Sebald’s thought, includes the idea that human beings need to develop emotionally in order to think and live well. This need is taken to represent a form of vulnerability that is a mark of  Sebald’s narratives often move seamlessly between natural histories of animals and ethical portraits of them. E.g., in what he describes as a “natural history” of herring, the narrator of Rings of Saturn integrates reflections about things “natural historians” have said about herrings with evocative, ethically loaded observations (see esp. 56–57). He thus suggests, plausibly, that there is a connection between our ability to bring herrings into view in natural history and our ability to appreciate the pathos of their lives. 70  Thus, e.g., in Rings of Saturn, the narrator gives us a portrait of members of the aristocratic Ashbury family who were impoverished in the financial crisis following the Irish Civil War and who are now squatting in their ancestral home busying themselves with work that has about it “something aimless and meaningless and [seems] not so much a part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress” (211). Readers are primed to appreciate the pathos of this portrait of the Ashburies by an earlier account of an isolated, caged Chinese quail “running to and fro along the edge of [its] cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix” (36). This strategy for leading us to see the pathos in human life (i.e., the strategy of moving from images of animal suffering to images of human suffering) depends for its effectiveness on the assumption that we respond more readily to animal than to human suffering. Given how abominably industrial societies treat animals, this assumption may seem implausible. But there is something to be said for it. See in this connection Raimond Gaita’s discussion of how passersby who witnessed an elderly woman get struck by a car and then saw a dog get injured by the fall of a drunk man responded in greater numbers, and with less restraint, to the plight of the dog (The Philosopher’s Dog [Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing, 2002], 21–23). 69



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fellowship with animals. Sebald’s larger suggestion is that, just as other animals can be harmed by human and natural forces that prevent them from developing their characteristic capacities, human beings can be harmed by forces that uproot them from their surroundings, thereby obstructing forms of growth that are both emotional and rational. Sebald’s prose fictions develop this suggestion at the level not only of their storylines but also of their narrative strategies. Many readers have underlined his singular style, noting—​a mong other things—​that he uses narrators whose biographies match his own in specific respects, scatters photographs throughout the resulting narratives, adorns these narratives with digressions that explore suggestive coincidences, and avoids the use of direct quotation. The claim I defend here is that these literary gestures engage readers in ways that contribute internally to motivating the image of human and animal life that preoccupies Sebald and that, as he himself maintains, we require cultivated sensibilities to grasp. An especially good place to see this is Austerlitz, Sebald’s last prose narrative,71 and in the remainder of this section I am concerned with this work. My emphasis is on how the contribution Austerlitz makes to our understanding of vulnerabilities that human beings and animals share is inseparable from an involved narrative strategy, and on how this book of Sebald’s is therefore aptly described as contributing directly to our grasp of kinship between human beings and animals specifically as a work of literature. The focus of Austerlitz is the life and experience of a man, Jacques Austerlitz, who—​like many of Sebald’s characters—​was displaced by World War II.72 As the narrative unfolds, we learn the following about  The idea that Austerlitz is, in the respects just indicated, Sebald’s masterpiece is not uncontroversial. I discuss the place of Austerlitz within Sebald’s literary oeuvre below. 72  Austerlitz, like most of the other characters in Sebald’s different prose narratives, is partly fictional and partly drawn from life. The most significant real model for Austerlitz’s life is the life of Susi Bechhöfer as recounted in Sally George’s 1991 BBC documentary Whatever Happened to Susi. (In interviews Sebald mentions the Bechhöfer documentary, and, while his memory of several details is inaccurate, he rightly represents it as providing a good model for Austerlitz’s years with his foster family as well as for Austerlitz’s later efforts to learn about his early life. See “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” an interview with Joseph Cuomo, reprinted in Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald [New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007], 93–118, esp. 110–111; see also “The Last Word,” an interview with Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, December 21, 2001.) Susi Bechhöfer wrote a memoir with Jeremy 71

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Austerlitz. In the summer of 1939, when he was four and a half, he was brought on a Kindertransport from Prague to London, then taken to Wales to live with a childless couple, a Calvinist minister and his wife, who changed his name and told him nothing about his origins. By the time Austerlitz had finished at school, he knew his real name and had a few bits of information that he could have used to arrive at general facts about his background. But he repressed thoughts about where he came from both then and during his university studies and a thirty-­year career as a lecturer on architectural history. He focused on his research, allowing the accumulation of knowledge to serve as a sort of “compensatory memory,”73 until upon retirement it struck him that he had never understood his life and had “never really been alive.” 74 Gripped by anxiety and thoughts of suicide, he began—​at first without conscious exertion and later quite deliberately—​to recollect and research his early childhood. He traced his family to Prague, managed to meet his one-­ time babysitter and uncovered facts both about how his Jewish mother was interred by the Nazis, deported, and murdered, and about how his father, also a Jew, initially avoided interment by traveling to France. When the narrative closes, Austerlitz is trying to learn more about his father’s fate and to find a woman, Marie de Verneuil, who had been his own closest companion but to whom he never properly responded as a lover. The book impresses on us the fateful permanence of scars inflicted by murder and social upheaval. At the same time, it suggests that the kinds of horrors in question do damage in part by interfering with the role memory plays in composing a coherent and fulfilling life and that a project of recollection can contribute to an important, albeit necessarily partial, type of restoration. Austerlitz’s discoveries about his past cannot affect any sort of happy transformation, but some of them strike him with the force of small epiphanies, equipping him to make new sense of things and giving him an idea of what it might be to truly live. Within the narrative, it is indicated that Austerlitz’s break from his past interferes with his ability to cultivate his own sensibility and thereby Josephs—​R osa’s Child: The True Story of One Woman’s Search for a Lost Mother and a Vanished Past (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996)—​t hat contains a longer account of her life, but Sebald seems not to have read it. 73  Austerlitz, 140; see also 260. 74  The inset quote is from ibid., 137; see also 44, 125.



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obstructs his efforts to make sense of his life. Again and again, his fractured personal history is depicted as putting him in a position in which he is subject to emotional responses that he cannot make sense of well enough either to reject or to claim them with conviction and in which, as a result, he is prevented from identifying with particular ways of responding to the world. For example, a dam near Austerlitz’s Welsh foster home elicits from him a jumble of conflicting and emotionally intense associations that he regards as an impenetrable mystery and that he only begins to relate to very late in life when, traveling up through Germany by the same route he took while being transported to England as a four-­year-­old, it dawns on him that he has always associated the dam with a tower he saw on his earlier journey.75 Or, to mention another example, a trip Austerlitz takes to the spa at Marienbad in 1972 with Marie de Verneuil gives rise in him to desperate feelings that he does not understand and cannot negotiate with conviction until he learns that he and his parents visited the spa at Marienbad in 1938 and realizes that his violent reaction is connected with associations from that earlier trip.76 In these and other parts of Sebald’s book, Austerlitz’s rupture from his past is depicted as handicapping his efforts to cultivate his own routes of feeling. It is also suggested that it is in significant part in this way—​by preventing him from arriving at a coherent sensibility—​that his dramatic loss of his childhood impedes his ability to understand his life.77  Ibid., 54–55, 225.  Sebald’s choice of the Marienbad spa as the site of Austerlitz’s trips is evidently partly a nod to Alan Resnais’s 1961 film L’année Dernière à Marienbad. Resnais’s film is a forerunner of Austerlitz in that, like Sebald’s narrative, it deals with ambiguities surrounding a forgotten past trip to Marienbad in connection with a romantic relationship. (For a discussion of Sebald’s interest in Resnais, see Matthias Frey, “Theorizing Cinema in Sebald and Sebald with Cinema,” in Lise Patt, ed., Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald [Los Angeles: Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007], 226–241.) Sebald’s selection of the Marienbad spa seems also to have been prompted by the fact, noted in the text (210), that the waters at the spa bear the name “Auschowitz Springs,” a name not only close to “Austerlitz” but also, hauntingly, to “Auschwitz.” 77  There is no suggestion in Sebald’s narrative that Austerlitz’s growth is simply a reflection of his acquisition of plain facts about his childhood that he previously lacked (e.g., the fact that he once went to Marienbad with his parents or the fact that he traveled by train to England, over a certain route, on a Kindertransport). The text suggests that Austerlitz’s growth is essentially a function of the way in which, in the process of piecing together bits of his past, he comes to make sense of and lay claim to his own responses to the world. 75 76

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The passages just discussed describe Austerlitz as hindered in developing the sort of sensibility he would need for a good self-­understanding. There is an additional set of passages that deserve mention in this connection, a set of passages containing references to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Sebald’s book has a narrator, a man about ten years younger than Austerlitz, and early on this narrator prepares us for the introduction of Wittgensteinian themes by including a photograph of Wittgenstein’s eyes and commenting at length on what he sees as Austerlitz’s “personal similarity to Ludwig Wittgenstein.” 78 Later the narrator represents Austerlitz as talking about his own thought and experience using different images and catchphrases from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For instance, he describes Austerlitz as making use of the image from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations of “rails laid out to infinity” (see 2.1.i). The narrator tells us that, in his efforts to uncover his past, Austerlitz goes to Theresienstadt, the camp where his mother was interred. On his way, he stands at a train station and is struck by the thought that the “railway lines ran away into infinity.” 79 In another nod to Wittgenstein’s Investigations, the narrator represents Austerlitz as using Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances.” The narrator claims that Austerlitz describes his own method in architectural history as one of finding “family likeness” between buildings80 and that Austerlitz frequently spends hours with a set of black-­a nd-­white snapshots he has taken and collected throughout his life and sorts them according to their “family resemblances.”81 Finally, in a gesture that is evidently a reference to the many passages in Wittgenstein’s later writings that are concerned with the teaching and learning of simple mathematical series, the narrator relates how, when Austerlitz found his  Austerlitz, 4, 40–41. In these pages, we receive a list of resemblances that the narrator sees between Austerlitz and Wittgenstein. Like Wittgenstein, Austerlitz characteristically wears a “horror-­struck” expression on his face; carries a rucksack with him everywhere; is “a man locked into the glaring clarity of his logical thinking as inextricably as into his confused emotions”; does with as few possessions as possible; and doesn’t “linger over any kind of preliminaries.” Although it is not mentioned, it is also true that, like the fictional character, the philosopher was a German-­speaking immigrant living in England. 79  Austerlitz, 185. 80  Ibid., 33. 81  Ibid., 119. 78



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long-­lost Czech babysitter and heard her start to count in Czech, he realized that he himself could go on.82 Consider some of the bits of Wittgenstein’s thought to which these passages from Sebald’s narrative refer. It is in an early passage of the Investigations in which he is talking about what it is to grasp the concept “game” that Wittgenstein introduces the notion of family resemblances. He illustrates the pointlessness of trying to arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that will by themselves allow us to authoritatively determine whether given activities count as games, and he suggests that, far from referring to such a set of conditions, a person’s grasp of the concept “game” invariably expresses her sense of the importance of resemblances among various of its applications.83 To speak in this way of family resemblances is to say that a person’s mastery of the concept “game” is inseparable from her possession of an appreciation of the significance of similarities linking its different uses. One of the hallmarks of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is insistence on bringing the idea that underlies this talk of family resemblances in reference to games to bear on even those of our conceptual practices to which it might seem to be most foreign. In the collection of remarks in the Philosophical Investigations that get referred to as the “rule-­following sections,” Wittgenstein applies the idea to practices of counting or extending simple mathematical series (2.1.i).84 It is in this context, with an eye to evoking the class of views of mathematics he is challenging, that Wittgenstein speaks of “rails laid out to infinity.”85 His point is that, according to the views he repudiates, extending a mathematical series is like hitching oneself to a car on an indefinitely long mechanical rail and having it simply pull us along. He counters that we should  Ibid., 160.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (New York: MacMillan, 1958), §67. 84  I n most circumstances in which we apply concepts—​say, the concept “game”—​we need to demonstrate a dual capacity, appreciating the situation that confronts us and seeing what about it does or does not demand the use of a given concept. Mathematical series seem less problematic insofar as they reduce to a minimum the first of these two elements. Although we need to locate ourselves within the series, there is no perceptual component to complicate matters. Whereas the idea that forms of training that instill responsiveness are internal to teaching might seem unobjectionable when it comes to the teaching of a concept like “game,” it can thus seem out of place with regard to mathematical concepts. 85  Philosophical Investigations, §218. 82

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instead see our ability to take successive steps as essentially informed by our sense of what speaks for the steps in question. There is controversy about the upshot of these portions of Wittgenstein’s thought. Many readers regard his willingness to represent sensitivities as internal to all our conceptual capacities as a sign of a form of skepticism about objectivity on which there can be no question of discursively picking out objective regularities in the world. The familiar idea is that Wittgenstein takes questions about the correctness of particular conceptual moves to be questions not about fidelity to how things are but rather about something like community agreement. When, earlier in this book, I discussed relevant portions of Wittgenstein’s thought, I didn’t directly challenge this interpretative approach. I restricted myself to showing that Wittgenstein’s observations about how we necessarily draw on sensitivities can be used to make a case, not for adopting a skeptical attitude toward objectivity, but rather for revising objectivity along wider lines (2.1.iii). Happily here I can again avoid wading into debates about how best to read Wittgenstein. For my purposes now it suffices that Austerlitz does not in any way hint at a conception of Wittgenstein as a skeptic about objectivity. The book’s references to Wittgenstein are internal to its characterizations of Austerlitz, and its descriptions of Austerlitz presuppose that an individual needs a developed sensibility in order to arrive at a good self-­understanding. There is no suggestion that the kind of self-­understanding at issue somehow has community agreement as its touchstone or that it is anything other than genuine—​or objective—​self-­understanding. A person who held that no capacities that necessarily involve sensitivities can as such be matters of concern with the objective world would not offer this portrait of Austerlitz. So there is good reason to think that we should regard the bits of Wittgenstein’s writing that crop up in the book’s characterizations of Austerlitz as invitations to regard Austerlitz’s thinking as necessarily involving his sensibility and, moreover, as doing so in a manner that doesn’t compromise its status as a mode of engagement with what his life is really like. The image we get of Austerlitz, trafficking in family resemblances while thinking about the history of architecture and organizing his collection of snapshots, is a sort of narrative suggestion to the effect that Austerlitz cannot help but draw on his own sense of salience and significance, however unstable and fragmented it is, in trying to make

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sense of his circumstances. Something similar is true of the image we are given of Austerlitz gazing at tracks ‘laid out to infinity’. More­ over, insofar as the particular tracks Austerlitz has in view run to Theresienstadt, his gesture invites us to associate this visual illusion with the railway system at the heart of the Nazi machinery of death and hence with the very forces that displaced and damaged him, indelibly marking his one shot at human flourishing. Against this backdrop, it should seem anything but accidental that the watershed moment in Austerlitz’s journey of self-­recovery involves counting. This simple conceptual activity is a site at which the fantasy of dehumanized and dispassionate thought is at its most seductive. The fact that Austerlitz begins to reconnect with himself in counting is intended as a sign that he has taken an important step toward claiming his own life. Thus far I have been focusing on passages of Sebald’s book that depict Austerlitz as suffering from a form of emotional stuntedness that amounts to a cognitive limitation. But this image of Austerlitz is part of a larger constellation of ideas. Readers are invited to regard Austerlitz’s emotional and cognitive handicap as the result of a serious injury of a sort analogous to injuries that can be inflicted on animals. This invitation gets issued primarily through Austerlitz’s literary strategy. The book employs an interwoven set of literary devices that are designed to elicit responses that Austerlitz doesn’t at first have and to see things that he only comes to see late in life. Central among the things that come into view for him is that the injury inflicted on him by the rupture with his past is an affliction that keeps him from fully living in a manner analogous to the way in which captive animals are prevented from fully living. In the book’s fabulous opening passage, the narrator uses rich and expressive language—​language that invites responses of a sort the young Austerlitz has difficulty manifesting—​to motivate this analogy between Austerlitz and captive animals. The narrator is recounting how he once visited the Nocturama, or nocturnal house, at the Antwerp Zoo and how his visit left him with a clear memory only of one raccoon who, he says, “sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple again and again.”86 The narrator makes it clear not only that he regards  Austerlitz, 4.

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the raccoon’s repetitive washing as a displaced response to circumstances that keep it from behaving in a more natural way but also that he takes its subjection to these circumstances to represent an injury. He tells us that it seemed to him as if the raccoon “hoped that all [its] washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world into which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own.”87 After evocatively presenting his encounter with the raccoon, the narrator tells us that he walked straight from the Nocturama to the adjoining train station and that, prompted in part by the impression made on him by the fading evening light, he mentally connected the travelers under the station’s dome with the inhabitants of the Nocturama. The one traveler who captured his attention, and who thus occupied the same place in his thoughts about this imaginary Nocturama that the raccoon occupied in his thoughts about the real one, was the man—​then a stranger to the narrator—​whom we soon come to know as Austerlitz.88 The narrator tells us that Austerlitz was writing busily, taking notes on the hall in which he was seated. We as readers don’t yet know the sorts of things about Austerlitz that speak for regarding his immersion in his architectural studies as a strategy for evading life. But the manner in which Austerlitz is thus introduced to us encourages us to connect him with the raccoon and to think of him as resembling it in being constrained to channel his energy into compensatory conduct—​a nd in therefore being a fit object of compassion. Whereas in this first passage the book’s narrator evokes a perspective from which there is a close analogy between Austerlitz’s injured condition and injuries animals can be made to suffer, later in Sebald’s book Austerlitz himself repeatedly evokes such a perspective. How is Austerlitz, a man harmed in ways that deprive him of self-­understanding, capable of doing this? Consider how Austerlitz develops during the years Sebald’s narrative chronicles and how his way of looking at things is introduced into the narrative. Austerlitz is framed as a series of encounters, over roughly thirty years, between Austerlitz and the narrator, and the narrator’s account of the encounters possesses a significant temporal complexity even though he presents them in the order in which they occur. 87

 Ibid.  Ibid., 6–7.

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The complexity is a function of the sequence in which Austerlitz relates different episodes in his life to the narrator. During the narrator’s first meetings with Austerlitz, which take place when Austerlitz is in his early thirties, Austerlitz doesn’t mention anything connected with his personal life. The narrator’s remaining meetings with Austerlitz take place much later, after Austerlitz has already traced his roots to Prague and begun to understand himself better. But in these further meetings Austerlitz describes his entire life from the time he landed in Wales until his retirement before talking about how he learned about his Czech origins. In preserving the temporal order of his interactions with Austerlitz, the narrator gives us a portrait of the thirtysomething Austerlitz and relays the older Austerlitz’s account of himself from age four and a half to nearly sixty without mentioning anything about Austerlitz’s earliest years. This means that the sort of information about Austerlitz’s real family that would enable us to make more sense of his responses to the world than he can himself early on is withheld from us until late in the narrative. It also means that the Austerlitz who is the source of our information about his early years is a man who has in certain respects grown past the disoriented person he once was and is now able to look at and respond to events of his childhood in new ways. This Austerlitz is a quite reliable narrative guide, and Sebald’s book employs a number of techniques to foster identification with him and to encourage readers to enter into the perspective he has achieved on his early way of seeing the world. To begin with, although Austerlitz’s tale is relayed to us by a narrator, the book is structured in ways that blur the distinction between this narrator and Austerlitz, thereby to a large extent bridging the distance that separates us from Austerlitz. The narrator is a particular, younger man and hence neither omniscient nor disengaged. Like all of the narrators of Sebald’s works of prose fiction, he resembles Sebald in a great many respects. Among other things, he is a German expatriate living in England who has significant feelings of dislocation.89 As a result of his sense of a rupture with his own past, the narrator  For Sebald’s own remarks on his relation to the Germany of his childhood, see, e.g., the interviews in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, esp.  66–68, 105–107. See also the partly fictionalized account Sebald gives of his return to the German village in which he spent his earliest years in the long closing section of Vertigo, Michael Hulse, trans. (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 169–263.

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identifies with Austerlitz’s story. He creates a further impression of intimacy with Austerlitz—​in a stylistic mannerism arguably inherited from Thomas Bernhard—​ by moving seamlessly from his own words to Austerlitz’s without the kinds of breaks introduced by the use of quotations.90 Turning now to stylistic peculiarities of Austerlitz’s, Austerlitz recounts his experiences in long sentences which, through suggestive associations and other descriptive techniques, evoke his early sense of the world as a bleak and incomprehensible place, a place not only marked but haunted by the dead.91 Complementing these literary techniques are the photographs scattered throughout the book’s pages. While some of these photographs are supposed to be images found in books or newspapers or on postcards, most are presented as snapshots taken by the narrator or Austerlitz—​ snapshots of architectural structures, cityscapes, interior spaces, household objects, artworks, and landscapes, as well as of animals and people.92 Insofar as the snapshots taken by Austerlitz in particular are markers of moments at which the world was present to him, their placement in the narrative represents occasions to put ourselves in his shoes.93 Further, insofar as these snapshots present us with glimpses of  For Sebald’s account of his debt to Bernhard, see “A Poem of an Invisible Subject,” an interview with Michael Silverblatt, in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 77–86, 82–83. 91  For an example of this sort of suggestive association, consider the series of echoes among the names “Austerlitz,” “Auschowitz” (i.e., the name of the waters at the spa at Marienbad that Austerlitz visits with his parents and later with Marie) and “Auschwitz.” 92  We are given the following account of how Austerlitz’s photographs fell into the narrator’s hands. At one point, Austerlitz invites the narrator to his house in London and shows him a collection of black-­a nd-­white photographs that he has taken and collected. Then, later, toward the end of the narrative, when Austerlitz is heading off to learn more about his father and locate the woman he loved and lost, Austerlitz gives the narrator the key to his house and tells him to feel free to study the photographs (Austerlitz, 293–294). 93  Given the use of snapshots in Austerlitz (and elsewhere in Sebald’s prose narratives) and given the book’s many references to Wittgenstein, it is interesting that Wittgenstein once scorned the practice of sharing our personal snapshots. He spoke of “those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which [are] interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness” (Culture and Value, Peter Winch, trans. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 4e–5e). But this remark should not be taken to speak against the way in which snapshots figure in Austerlitz. The narrative strategies I’ve been discussing have the function of encouraging identification with Austerlitz and putting us in the position of being not disinterested third parties of the sort Wittgenstein is talking about but rather parties who can enter into Austerlitz’s experience and appreciate his pictures. 90



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the past, they contribute to creating the impression of a world that is haunted, as the young Austerlitz’s is, by the uncanny presence of days gone by. These are the sorts of things I have in mind in speaking, in reference to Austerlitz’s narrative, of different strategies for getting us to enter into and contemplate his early way of experiencing the world.94 This brings me back to passages that suggest a connection between Austerlitz’s early damaged condition and the damaged condition of captive animals. There are suggestions along these lines not only in the narrator’s own reflections but also in the reflections of Austerlitz’s that the narrator relates. Consider a passage that comes at a point at which Austerlitz has already told the narrator about his journey of discovery to Prague. Austerlitz has turned to discussing how, after learning that he and his parents visited the Marienbad spa, he can understand why the trip that he and Marie de Verneuil took to Marienbad in 1972 was a disaster and why it led to their separation. After recounting how during most of the time he spent there with Marie he was overcome by feelings of despair that didn’t make sense to him and that he therefore couldn’t illuminate for her, Austerlitz says that on one walk he and Marie took together his attention was caught by a decayed dovecote. In it, the bodies of several dead birds lay partially covered in a desiccated mass of droppings, and the remaining birds survived “in a kind of senile dementia, coo[ing] at one another in tones of quiet complaint.”95 The force of the line of thought in which Austerlitz embeds his account of these intensely wretched pigeons is to prompt us to regard his state of emotional confusion as an analogous condition of wretchedness. We are invited to regard the political forces that dislocated him and prevented him from making sense of his life as hateful because they thwart his specifically human development in a manner comparable to the manner in which confinement in cramped and filthy quarters warps the lives of birds.  Here I register a local disagreement with James Wood’s in other respects perceptive remarks on Austerlitz in “On W.  G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” The London Review of Books 33 (2011): 15–18. Wood represents the structural features of Sebald’s narratives that I have been describing—​in Wood’s terms, the “layering” affected by using a narrator to relate Austerlitz’s story—​a s keeping Austerlitz at a distance or, in Wood’s words, as making him “difficult to get close to” (15). Wood misses how Sebald’s narrative strategy enables us to inhabit Austerlitz’s experience and gain a perspective on it that Austerlitz himself only achieves very late in life, bringing us closer to Austerlitz than he himself for the most part manages to get. 95  Austerlitz, 214. 94

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Austerlitz’s narrative includes, in addition to analogies between harms to animals and harms to human beings, analogies between the glory of the lives of uninjured animals and the glory of the lives of human beings at fortunate moments in which they enjoy the sort of peace, health, and companionship that allow for the unhampered growth of mind. When Austerlitz is discussing occasions on which he felt most at home with himself and most capable of self-­understanding, he sometimes gives expression to his sense of the majesty of the moment by describing the splendor of different animals around him. One of these occasions occurs when then school-­aged Austerlitz is staying at the house of his best friend Gerald Fitzgerald, the place where Austerlitz feels most oriented, and he and Gerald have gone on a nighttime excursion with Gerald’s naturalist uncle Alphonso. Austerlitz reports that Alphonso entertained the two boys by talking about the natural history of moths. After Alphonso lit an incandescent lamp on the promontory on which they were all sitting, moths began to fly in a sublime display, “describing thousands of different arcs and spirals and loops, until like snowflakes they formed a silent storm around the light.” 96 On another occasion, then research student Austerlitz is with Marie, and the two of them are enjoying one of their most tranquil intervals, strolling around the streets of Paris and letting caprice guide them. Austerlitz’s sense of the mysterious grandeur of the outing is brought to his consciousness when he finds himself responding with a surge of feeling to a band tune that he later thinks brings up for him not only hymns from his Welsh childhood but even earlier waltzes and ländler themes. This experience was summed up for him at the time, he says: [i]n the image of [a] snow-­white goose standing motionless and steadfast among the musicians as long as they played. Neck craning forward slightly, pale eyelids slightly lowered, it listened there in the tent beneath that shimmering firmament of painted stars until the last notes had died away, as if it knew its own future and the fate of its present companions.97

The portions of Sebald’s book in which Austerlitz expresses a sense of the transient stateliness of uninjured animal life resemble in an  Ibid., 90.  Ibid., 275.

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important respect the portions in which Austerlitz and the narrator evoke the pathos of the plight of captive and damaged animals. These bits of the book resemble each other in contributing to efforts to lead readers to see a preciousness in the features of human life that leave us exposed to social cataclysm and natural disaster that is analogous to the preciousness of features of the lives of animals. This concludes my account of how, by means of a distinctive literary strategy, Austerlitz invites us to adopt a perspective from which human beings’ and animals’ bodily well-­being and exercise of kind-­typical capacities are taken to be of great value. In urging us to look at things from this perspective, the emphasis of Austerlitz is on getting us to see human beings and animals as fellow creatures with analogous—​if also in important respects different—​susceptibilities to injury. Like the story of Tolstoy’s discussed in 6.2 and the novel of Coetzee’s discussed in 6.3, Austerlitz represents human beings, in what I am calling a ‘widely rational’ manner, as having intellectual capacities that are essentially functions of affective endowments. At the same time, unlike the works of Tolstoy and Coetzee that I considered, it tends to leave in the background our specifically human capacity for obstructing our own rational development. Instead Austerlitz accents the terribleness of the harm that can be inflicted on us by natural and political forces that rip us out of our social settings, and it invites us to connect the terribleness of this harm with the terribleness of things human beings do to animals. It is not difficult to see that, if we abstract from the larger ethical perspective that Austerlitz attempts to cultivate, we will no longer see this connection. Austerlitz is concerned with how forces that dislocate human beings stunt our development in a manner analogous to that in which caging an animal stunts its development, and in order to appreciate what speaks for the respective pictures of human beings and animals at play here we need to look at both human beings and animals, as the book encourages us to do, in an ethically charged manner. To be sure, even if we set aside the possibility of critiques of Sebald’s project that are driven by the narrower conception of rationality, we need to acknowledge that a critic may claim that there are good a posteriori reasons for rejecting this Sebaldian vision. I have been attempting to anticipate such a critic by arguing that the—​wider—​a rgument of Austerlitz is elegant, acutely perceptive, and defensible. My suggestion is that we should credit Sebald

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with giving us a kind of insight into the awfulness of twentieth-­century-­ style social cataclysms that presupposes a sense of ourselves as sharing vulnerabilities with animals. That is what I have in mind in claiming that, as a work of literature, Austerlitz contributes directly to our understanding of forms of moral kinship between human beings and animals.98 Moreover, the image of such moral kinship that it bequeaths to us is one that, despite various differences of emphasis that I have noted along the way, in significant respects resembles the images that emerge from literary productions of Tolstoy and Coetzee.

6 . 5 .   C O N C L U S I O N

This chapter discusses how three works of literature—​Tolstoy’s Strider, Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Sebald’s Austerlitz—​shape our attitudes toward human beings and animals in ways that, in addition to shedding independent empirical light on human and non-­human creatures, bring empirically into view forms of human-­a nimal kinship that aren’t indifferently available. These works reveal how human beings and animals resemble each other in being transiently glorious mortal animals and how they are hence vulnerable to similar harms. Before closing my discussion, I want to anticipate one likely misunderstanding. Throughout the chapter I have been claiming that the contributions that these literary works make to an understanding of human and animal life are inseparable from literary strategies in virtue of which the works shape our ethical conceptions. Yet I myself discussed  While similar images of human and animal moral kinship get developed in all of Sebald’s prose narratives, Austerlitz is particularly powerful. Some otherwise enthusiastic commentators on Sebald’s fiction criticize Austerlitz because it focuses on the life story of one character and because, more than Sebald’s other works, it thus contains elements of the traditional novel. The idea is that, in inheriting aspects of the traditional novel, Sebald somehow forces his thought into a shape that cramps it. (See, e.g., the critical remarks printed in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 13, 89, 149, 169.) Yet it is difficult to find examples of this supposed cramping, and it is not clear to me that any examples are actually to be found. The different literary techniques of Austerlitz I have been discussing serve to deepen the book’s treatment of themes that run through Sebald’s fictional opus. I am inclined to agree with Ruth Klüger when she writes that “one could say that Sebald continually wrote the same book, save that it was always getting better” (“Wanderer Zwischen Falschen Leben,” Text + Kritik 158 [2003]: 95–102, esp. 100; my translation).

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these matters in a plain style that is largely free from literary gestures of the sort that get made in the works in question, and it might seem as though my own practice thus undercuts my central claim. That is, it might seem as though, despite my claim to the contrary, I myself have demonstrated that it is possible to extract any insights the works I consider contain about human-­ a nimal moral fellowship in a neutral manner.99 It would, however, be wrong to mount a challenge on these lines. I have been describing how a set of literary works make cases for regarding human beings and animals as moral fellows. I have been suggesting that they make such cases by eliciting the generally neglected forms of moral thought about human beings and animals with which this book is primarily concerned (i.e., forms that, in addition to being essentially world-­d irected, essentially draw on our sense of what matters in the lives of human beings and animals). My remarks here are not intended—​in a manner that would indeed involve me in a performative contradiction—​a s replacements for these forms of moral thought. My remarks are dedicated to identifying works that elicit these forms of moral thought and highlighting ways in which the works illuminate otherwise invisible forms of human-­a nimal moral fellowship.100 Insofar as I have successfully carried out this exercise, and insofar as I have thereby shown that we need the forms of moral thought that interest me if we are to capture important respects in which human beings and animals are moral fellows, I have at the same time brought out in a new way the specifically moral stakes of this book’s argument. I have also extended the book’s argument in a significant respect. This book makes a case not only for situating all human beings and animals inside ethics but also for highlighting important and frequently overlooked respects in which, morally speaking, human beings and animals are fellows.

 A similar protest might equally well be raised to my use of literary works and works with literary qualities in 4.2–4.3 and 7.1–7.2. The response to the protest I give in this paragraph could be adapted for those contexts. 100  This chapter does not contain a theory of literature. I do not claim—​a nd also do not believe—​that all works of literature as such contribute internally to understanding. Although I do believe that, far from necessarily detracting from its literary merits, the tendency of a work of literature to open our eyes to features of ethical life can essentially augment those merits, I do not explicitly defend this view here. 99

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7 T WO ISSU E S I N E T H IC S Eating Animals and Experimenting on Them

I am not engaged in any pretense of standing above the fray: I am a committed crank and zoophile, and my hope is to convert my audience. —​Stephen Clark, The Moral Status of Animals

Throughout this book, I have been concerned with developing and defending an image of human beings and animals as ‘inside ethics’ (i.e., in the sense of having empirically discoverable moral characteristics). It is an implication of my case for this image that in ethics we necessarily draw on our ethical conceptions of human and animal life in bringing human beings and animals empirically into focus and, further, that, in order to understand particular aspects of the lives of human beings and animals in a manner relevant to ethics, we may need to enrich these conceptions. With an eye to elaborating my larger argument, I have at different junctures provided illustrations of thought about human beings and animals that thus essentially draw on—​a nd may presuppose revisions to—​our ethical conceptions (see 4.2–4.3 and 6.3–6.4). Along the way I have repeatedly insisted on the practical significance of strategies for eliciting these forms of moral thought. Before bringing my narrative to a close, I want to offer a couple of additional

illustrations of the relevant forms of moral thought. This time my aim is not to further elaborate my main line of reasoning but, more simply, to reinforce this practical point. My new illustrations are of appeals to the forms of moral thought I have been discussing that get made within arguments for improving the treatment of animals. I hasten to admit that there is nothing about the architectonic of this book that speaks for this exclusive focus on animals. The conception of moral thought that I defend here is no less philosophically controversial when it comes to human beings than it is when it comes to animals, and, if I had been willing to make this book even longer than it is already, I might also have included additional illustrations of appeals to the forms of moral thought that interest me that get made within arguments for combating injustices to human beings. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that this book’s overarching argument, while not philosophically more provocative in its bearing on animal cases, is morally and politically more provocative in its bearing on these cases. As I noted in 4.1, animals are represented as in themselves morally indifferent things within a number of prominent ethical traditions, and the view that animals lack moral standing, in addition to remaining noticeably present in moral philosophy today, is expressed in the wholly callous treatment of animals in large-­scale, society-­wide practices such as factory farming. Partly for this reason—​a nd partly because, as I noted in the Preface, I myself was originally struck by the larger trend in moral philosophy that this book criticizes when preoccupied with questions of animals and ethics—​in the current chapter I illustrate my argument’s practical pertinence by discussing debates about the treatment of animals in particular. I proceed by discussing one contribution to debates about the ethics of eating animals (7.1) and one contribution to debates about the ethics of animal testing (7.2). Both of my examples are taken from the realm of non-­fiction. Before getting started, I want to stress that the distinction between fictional and non-­fictional work is fairly unimportant for my purposes. I have in this book turned to literary fictions a number of times, bringing out how they may be designed to elicit the type of moral thought that is my main concern. I did this in 4.2 and 4.3, when I discussed several literary works in reference to questions about intellectual disability and the dead, and I did it again in 6.2–6.4, when I gave close

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readings of a series of works of literature with particular attention to light they shed on questions of human-­a nimal moral fellowship. In the current chapter I turn not to fiction but to a couple of non-­fictional works because I want to underline that the kind of moral thinking I am after isn’t somehow a ‘merely literary indulgence’ and that, if we close ourselves off to such thinking, we thereby risk rendering ourselves incapable of registering genuine—​practically important—​moral insights (7.3).

7. 1 .   E A T I N G A N I M A L S

During the twentieth century, starting roughly in the 1920s, pressures to imitate the industrial methods and economic efficiency of factories led to the radical transformation of animal husbandry in the United States. Today the marks of this transformation include the nearly universal use of animals engineered for the quality, size and growth rate of their edible tissues, the confinement of animals being raised for slaughter at great densities, the mass prophylactic use of antibiotics to combat infections and diseases that plague animals thus confined, and the use of large abattoirs that kill animals on assembly lines at high rates. Several billion land animals are now slaughtered for food in the United States each year, and an overwhelming proportion of these animals are subjected to such industrial methods.1 Moreover, the reach of this sort of factory farming now extends not only to Europe and the United Kingdom but, increasingly, to other parts of the world as well. Factory farming has many critics, and over the last two to three decades these critics have grown more outspoken and insistent, raising a variety of different objections. Among the most serious and plausible objections are some having to do with substantial negative effects on the environment and public health, with human rights abuses against slaughterhouse workers, and with long-­term economic inefficiency.2 Yet

 For a calculation of the proportions of land animals slaughtered for meat in the United States that come from factory farms, see Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 271. 2  The environmental case against factory farming is straightforward. By crowding huge numbers of animals tightly together, it ensures that the land on which animals are housed cannot furnish adequate feed and cannot reabsorb the animals’ waste. The result is that feed needs to be transported to animals, a process requiring substantial 1



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other serious objections have to do with allegations of gross harms to animals. Most critics who focus on the treatment of animals count among their aims educating the public about the plain facts of factory farming. They tell us, for instance, about the mental and emotional capacities of different ‘farm animals’ and about what gets done to these animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and industrial slaughterhouses. Although it is not the norm for critics concerned with the treatment of animals to self-­consciously inherit from moral philosophy, it is also not uncommon for such critics to at least tacitly fall in with the larger trend in ethics that I have been concerned with throughout this book—​namely, the trend toward situating animals ‘outside ethics’—​a nd to assume that neutral facts are all that we require in order to bring the lives of affected animals empirically into view in a relevant manner. 3 amounts of fossil fuels, and animal waste—​which often causes respiratory diseases in humans living nearby and leaks into water supplies—​needs to be disposed of. Wendell Berry summarizes these problems by declaring that industrial farming isn’t “sustainable” (see, e.g., Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food [Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009]). See also Michael Pollan’s Berry-­inspired treatment of similar themes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), chap. 4; as well as David Kirby’s Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010). For a critique of factory farming on grounds of human rights abuses in industrial slaughterhouses, see Lance Compa’s 2004 report for Human Rights Watch entitled “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” available online at http:// digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1333&context=articles. See also chaps. 7 and 8 of Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (London: Penguin Books, 2002); and Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (Belmont, CA: Thomson-­Wadsworth, 2004), chap. 5. Critiques of factory farming on public health grounds sometimes mention that such farming tolerates high rates of infections among animals, and infected meat sickens and kills many consumers (see Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, chap. 9; Kirby, Animal Factory; and Robert Kenner’s 2008 film Food, Inc.). There are also questions about the role of the constant prophylactic use of antibiotics in huge animal populations in creating antibiotic-­resistance “superbugs,” as well as about whether packing together genetically homogeneous and sick animals contributes to the development of new virus strains that may jump to humans (see, e.g., Whitney Krueger and Gregory Gray, “Swine Influenza Virus Infections in Man,” Current Topics in Microbiolog y and Immunolog y 370 [2013]: 201–225). When these concerns about factory farming are registered, and when it is noted that the system is fed by huge government subsidies, it seems fair to ask whether it actually has the main virtue for which it is lauded, viz., economic efficiency. 3  For a classic animals-­oriented critique of factory farms that conforms to this pattern, see chap. 3 of Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). While Singer stands out among critics of factory farming insofar as he explicitly advocates a

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There are, however, some who clearly buck this trend. Far from presupposing that shedding empirical light on the lives of animals in ethics is a matter of dealing in plain facts, these critics take a very different tack. They approach the task of bringing animals’ lives empirically into view by trying to enrich our ethical conceptions of these lives, and they thereby effectively represent animals as having observable moral characteristics and situate them ‘inside ethics’ in my sense. A good illustration is Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2009 book Eating Animals. Safran Foer has a clear political agenda. His aim is to expose the brutality of the industrial farming of land and sea animals and to convince readers that support for such farming is unacceptable. He also praises a number of farmers who attempt to preserve traditional methods of animal husbandry, and, although he never endorses any particular methods of raising and killing animals for food, he doesn’t exclude the possibility of doing so. This openness to more traditional farming methods makes Safran Foer’s position insupportable to activists who believe that any attempt to mitigate the suffering of animals without challenging their legal status as property invariably misfires and that nothing short of a fundamental rethinking of animals in relation to the law will serve to check cruel and arbitrary treatment.4 Bearing these things in mind, I should stress that what matters for my purposes here is not whether Safran Foer’s political stance is radical enough—​in fact my own views differ from his5—​but the methods he uses in attacking factory farming. Along with statistics and other information, Eating Animals contains many passages that are designed to shape readers’ attitudes toward animals. What interests me is showing that the portions of Safran Foer’s book that engage us are capable of contributing internally to our understanding of what animals’ lives are like and, further, that these parts of the book are integral to his critique of the treatment of metaphysic that obliges him to situate animals ‘outside ethics’ (see 1.2), many critics with less of an orientation toward moral philosophy implicitly take their cue from him in assuming that plain facts alone suffice for the sort of understanding of animals’ lives necessary for their critical purposes. 4  For an influential challenge to the property status of animals, see Gary Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 5  I sympathize with idea that animals should not have the legal status of property and am committed to veganism on ethical grounds. Yet I also believe that Safran Foer’s argument can be used to support stronger practical conclusions than he draws and that his central considerations support a call for veganism.



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animals in the industrial food system. Although nothing I say depends on this further point, I am convinced that Safran Foer is self-­conscious about trafficking in modes of instruction that depend for their rational interest on shaping our sensibilities. Early in his book, he observes that while “few know the details about the contemporary meat and seafood industries . . . ​most know the gist—​at least that something isn’t right.” After acknowledging that the details about the contemporary meat industry “are important,” he then adds that “they probably won’t on their own persuade most people to change. Something else is needed.”6 It seems clear that, in speaking of “something else,” Safran Foer has in mind gestures of a sort he himself makes in his book, that is, gestures that shape our attitudes toward animals in ways that contribute internally to the kind of understanding of their lives that is relevant to ethics. The first chapter of Eating Animals opens with a narrative about how Safran Foer went from being a person who disliked dogs and dog enthusiasts to a person who loved dogs. The catalyst for his transformation was a black puppy with an “adopt me” vest that he and his wife happened upon one day in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Safran Foer describes how he proposed adopting the puppy, whom he and his wife wound up calling George, and he talks about the early days of falling in love with George as well as about the life he eventually shared with her. Although the portrait he gives of this life isn’t a romantic one—​he explains that George is “a major pain in the ass an awful lot of the time”7—​it is one that captures both the precious vitality and what he describes as the mysterious “foreignness” of her being.8 This portrait of George serves as the prologue to a stretch of the text in which Safran Foer discusses the pros and cons of eating dogs. Among other things, he presents a traditional Filipino recipe for stewed dog. The recipe starts like this: “First kill a medium-­sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire. Carefully remove the skin while still warm and set aside for later use.” It is no part of Safran Foer’s aim in reading the recipe to impugn people whose cultures condone the cooking and eating of dogs. He makes a point of observing that the same animals are either cherished or eaten in different cultures and that it is a contingent fact about our culture that we keep dogs as pets and  Eating Animals, 35.  Ibid., 23. 8  Ibid., 24. 6 7

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eat cows.9 He focuses on dogs, starting with George, because companionship relationships with dogs are familiar to his audience and because dogs are thus the best case for awakening in his readers an ethical conception of the lives of animals. His recital of the recipe for stewed dog depends for its power on his having evoked an ethically charged image of dog life in particular. It encourages us to think anew about familiar conventions for preparing meat by getting us to contemplate them in the light of things that, by our own lights, are important in dogs’ lives. “Cut meat into 1” cubes,” the recipe continues, “Marinate meat in mixture of vinegar, peppercorn, salt and garlic for 2 hours.” One function of these lines is to get us to shudder at the thought of cubing and marinating the flesh of dogs. But this isn’t their only function. Just after producing the lines, Safran Foer goes on to make various observations about how pigs and other animals resemble dogs. Far from being scientific, his observations concern how, for instance, pigs have the same vital spirit as dogs—​how they “can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection.”10 He wants to get us to look upon pigs and other ‘farm animals’ as he has already invited us look upon dogs (viz., as creatures in whose lives things like health, physical freedom, play, and social bonds matter), so that we can recognize that when we eat meat we are doing something analogously earthshaking to what we would be doing if we cooked and ate dogs. Safran Foer in this way sheds light on the prodigious thing we are doing when we eat animals, and what I want to stress is that his techniques for shaping our attitudes toward animals are internal to his critical agenda.11 The passages from Eating Animals that I have discussed so far are about how animals matter and about how, morally speaking, eating them is therefore a non-­trivial thing. These passages do not directly address the ethics of the treatment of animals in factory farms, but it is not difficult to see how they lay the groundwork for Safran Foer’s remarks on this further topic. Having invited us to look upon different animals as in themselves meriting respect and attention, Safran Foer is  Ibid., 25.  Ibid. 11  At the end of his remarks on eating dogs, Safran Foer he says that “eating animals has an invisible quality” and that he has attempted to render it visible by inviting thought about “dogs and their relationship to the animals we eat” (ibid., 29). 9

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in a position to lead us to the recognition that the way in which they are treated in the industrial food system is abhorrent in the extreme. To arrive at this recognition we need to know some of the plain facts about what this system is like. These facts have in recent years gotten attention in, among other places, non-­fiction best sellers, blogs, and the columns of major newspapers,12 and they are increasingly familiar to the reading public. Safran Foer takes it for granted that his readers will know the basics about factory farms, and he devotes himself to filling in some of the details.13 For instance, when he talks about the treatment of those chickens who are raised for meat—​or, in the industry lingo, “broilers”—​he tells us not only that the birds are packed together in close quarters but also that they are generally placed in windowless sheds by the tens of thousands at densities that allow each bird on average something less than a square foot of floor space;14 he tells us not only that these conditions quickly become filthy and produce illness but that they lead to respiratory disease, musculoskeletal injury, and enormously high rates of infections of different kinds (including some like E. coli that are caused by fecal contamination);15 he tells us not only that the birds therefore all get antibiotics in their feed but also that their bodies are routinely bathed in chlorine to decontaminate them after slaughter;16 he tells us not only that many chickens are injured when being packed for transport to slaughter but also that approximately 30 percent suffer broken bones, that they receive no further food or water once under way, and that they are slaughtered by a mechanical process that, when it works correctly, slits their throats while they are still conscious and, in the small but significant number of cases in which it doesn’t, scalds them alive;17 and so on and so on.  Think, e.g., of Michael Pollan’s best seller The Omnivore’s Dilemma or of Mark Bittman’s widely read blog “On Food” in the New York Times. 13  Within Eating Animals, Safran Foer has a great deal to say about the industrial farming of sea animals, presumably because this topic has been neglected by many critics of industrial farming and because the general reading public knows far more about the industrial farming of land animals. 14  Ibid., 129–130. 15  Ibid., 106, 131. 16  Ibid. 17  Ibid., 132–133. For other accounts of the treatment of broiler chickens, see Erik Markus, Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, and Money (Boston: Brio Press, 2005), 22–23; Stull and Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues, 36–51; and Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 98–106. 12

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When Safran Foer discusses the treatment of broiler chickens, he isn’t merely concerned with these kinds of neutral facts. He is taking for granted the ethically charged image he develops of the significance of different animals’ lives and using it to get us to register the horror of what is done to the birds. One of his goals is to have us visualize what it means for a chicken to be crammed into a room with tens of thousands of its fellows, with no more than about an eighth of a square foot to itself. “Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-­grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it,” he instructs, “and imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid.”18 He uses evocative language in talking about the kind of ailments from which many of these chickens suffer because he wants us to register the bodily significance of the fact that a small percentage of the birds “die writhing in convulsions from sudden death syndrome” and that three quarters have the sorts of walking impairments that are in all likelihood signs of chronic pain.19 He uses similarly expressive terms in talking about the ways in which the birds are treated during transportation to slaughter and during the killing process because he also wants us to register horrors here. Workers are, he explains, expected to crate chickens so quickly that they “will regularly feel the birds’ bones snapping in their hands.” Moreover, “often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won’t be able to hear the person next to them on the line,” and “often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.”20 It is in this way—​by moving from his effort, early in the book, to get us to see that animals matter to evocative descriptions of the handling of broiler chickens in the industrial food system—​that Safran Foer positions us to see the awful callousness of the birds’ treatment. He positions us to see that “illness is rampant; suffering is always the rule; the animals are always only a unit, a weight; death is inevitably cruel.”21 That is what it comes to to say that Safran Foer’s book deals in the forms of ethical thought about animals that have been my main preoccupations in this book. I have been discussing essentially world-­ guided thought that necessarily draws on—​a nd may involve further  Eating Animals, 130.  Ibid. 20  Ibid., 132–133. 21  Ibid., 136. 18

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developments to—​our conceptions of what is important in animals’ lives. My point here is not merely that, insofar as Eating Animals invites us to see things about animals (such as broiler chickens) by trying to enrich our sense of their lives, it is in the business of eliciting such thought. What interests me is how the book appeals to the relevant kind of moral thought in an immediately practical context. Safran Foer is setting out to criticize industrial farming, and it is by getting readers to register, for instance, the preciousness of the lives of birds that he positions us to register the horror of CAFOs and industrial slaughterhouses that ‘process’ these creatures like mere objects. An appeal to the sort of moral thought about animals that I have been considering is thus internal to a devastating critique of factory farming. Further, although, as I noted above, Safran Foer doesn’t clearly describe what conditions, if any, he thinks would have to be met for a practice of killing animals for food to be acceptable, his efforts to prompt the kind of imaginative exercise necessary to bring ‘farm animals’ empirically into focus in ethics equip us to think through for ourselves more general questions about the ethics of eating animals. One moral of these reflections is that commentators on the industrial food system who assume we don’t need to venture beyond neutral facts in order to do empirical justice to the lives of animals, and who thus effectively situate animals ‘outside ethics’ in my sense, wrongly deprive themselves of needed resources of thought. There is, as I discussed earlier in this book, a discernible trend in—​professional and popular—​ethics toward overlooking the relevant argumentative possibilities (1.1–1.3). But Safran Foer is not the only critic of factory farming who urges us to make connections of thought that we cannot follow unless, in attempting to bring animals empirically into focus, we look at them in certain ethical lights and thereby locate them ‘inside ethics’. It would not be unreasonable to compare the argumentative strategy of Eating Animals with, for instance, aspects of the methods of certain documentaries about animals in the food industry, such as Robert Kenner’s 2008 film Food, Inc. and Louie Psihoyos’s 2009 film The Cove.22 Nor do we need to limit ourselves here to reproducible works such as books or  I f we ventured into narrative film, we might consider, e.g., scenes from Chris Noonan’s 1995 movie, Babe.

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movies. Argumentative strategies of the sort that Safran Foer employs are sometimes deliberately incorporated into ordinary modes of interpersonal interaction. Consider in this connection some of the educational strategies of Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. Farm Sanctuary is a refuge for rescued ‘farm animals’ that, among other things, invites human visitors to relax and interact with its resident pigs, cows, sheep, goats, geese, ducks, turkeys, and other creatures in much the same way they might relax and interact with companion dogs or cats. Each of the animals has a name, and visitors are told their individual histories and personal idiosyncrasies. There is no lecturing, and there are no heavy-­handed attempts to persuade anyone that factory farms are guilty of gross cruelty. Yet the experience of being at the sanctuary is supposed to get visitors not only to look upon the resident animals as creatures living lives of significance but also to reevaluate what they know about the industrial food system and register the awfulness of what is done to animals within it.23 Like Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, Farm Sanctuary appeals to the type of moral thought about animals I have been describing to motivate a fierce and intellectually defensible critique of factory farming and to position visitors to address more general questions about the ethics of eating animals.

7. 2 .  E X P E R I M E N T I N G O N A N I M A L S

“Animal testing” is the name used for a diverse set of experimental practices involving animals. These include educational exercises, basic research, medical testing, and the testing of household and industrial products and cosmetics. There is a large critical literature on these and other similar practices with animals, 24 and, although the criticisms are heterogeneous, nearly all are concerned—​d irectly or indirectly—​with the  For an account of the history of Farm Sanctuary as well as of its educational aspirations, see Gene Bauer, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008). Bauer is the president and cofounder of Farm Sanctuary, and I am grateful to Bauer, Samantha Pachirat, and Susie Coston for hosting a small 2013 workshop, in which I participated, where we discussed, among other things, the sanctuary’s educational methods. 24  I n speaking here of “similar practices,” I have in mind, above all, a range of educational exercises with animals (such as the dissecting of frogs in high schools) that don’t involve any kind of testing. 23



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ethical treatment of animals. Some of the most widely discussed criticisms, for instance, are driven by skepticism about whether animal testing in fact plays an important role in the development of particular medicines and medical techniques or in advancing scientific understanding.25 Despite emphasizing questions about the usefulness of experimentation, these criticisms turn for their interest on the thought that the lives of the creatures used in animal testing represent a value that needs to be weighed against the value of any new medicines, medical procedures, or forms of scientific understanding that their laboratory use brings within reach. Or, again, while some research on animals is attacked for serving the sole function of advancing the financial and professional interests of individuals and institutions involved in the catching, breeding, genetically altering, and testing of whichever animals are in question, 26 attacks on these lines depend for their interest on the assumption that animals matter and should not be treated as mere instruments of financial or professional advancement. The basic outlines of what gets done to animals in experimental settings aren’t terribly well known, and critics of different kinds of animal testing frequently devote significant time to describing current testing practices including the physiologies of the animals involved in them.27 Like critics of factory farms, these critics frequently participate in the  For a survey of such criticisms, see chap. 2 of Lynda Birke et al., The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007). For a defense of animal testing’s medical value, see, e.g., Baruch A. Brody, “Defending Animal Research: An International Perspective,” in Jeremy R. Garrett, ed., The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 53–66. For a polemic against the medical usefulness of animal testing, see Tony Page, Vivisection Unveiled: An Exposé of the Medical Futility of Animal Experimentation (Charlbury, UK: John Carpenter, 1997). Page’s polemic belongs to a long history of attacks on vivisection; see, e.g., James Macaulay et al., Vivisection, Scientifically and Ethically Considered in Prize Essays (London: Marshall Japp, 1881). 26  See Singer, Animal Liberation, 69–74. 27  A lthough I don’t survey the relevant factual terrain here in this book, I have an unpublished “Animal Testing Handout” for use in teaching that describes the interconnected set of laws and policies that have regulated the experimental use of animal in the United States since the passing of the first Animal Welfare Act in 1966. One of the points of the handout is to make it clear that, despite the existence of a complex regulatory corpus, in a vast number of laboratory settings animals are still treated as mere experimental instruments. 25

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larger trend in ethics that is the main target of this book (viz., the trend toward situating animals ‘outside ethics’), taking it for granted that a preoccupation with plain facts suffices to bring the lives of affected animals empirically into view in a relevant manner.28 Just as what interests me in 7.1 is criticism of factory farms that proceed along quite different lines, what interests me now is criticism of practices of animal testing that likewise departs from this trend. The particular work that I want to discuss is James Marsh’s 2011 documentary Project Nim, a film that intervenes in debates about the ethics of testing on chimpanzees. The film is about the extraordinary life of one chimpanzee. Born in 1973 at the Oklahoma Institute for Primate Studies, the eponymous Nim was taken from his mother at birth and loaned out to a Columbia University psychology professor, Herbert Terrace, who hoped to demonstrate that chimps’ capacity for learning human sign language was greater than generally believed. For nearly five years Nim lived in different human households, and during this period he was treated like a human child and taught to use many signs. But when Nim bit and badly injured one of his student handlers, Terrace unceremoniously deposited him back at the Oklahoma Institute for Primates. Thanks to the care and attention of a research student named Bob Ingersoll, Nim, who had never before seen a member of his own species, eventually adjusted to life with other chimps. This was not, however, the end of his troubles. A few years after Nim’s return all of the institute’s chimps were sold to the NYU Medical Center’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) where, among other things, they were used to test vaccines for humans. Ingersoll worked hard to publicize Nim’s plight, and eventually Nim was moved to an animal sanctuary in Texas called the Black Beauty Ranch. There he was given a relatively large concrete compound with a porch. But he lived alone, and his health suffered as a result. Ingersoll intervened again and arranged for 28



 Just as Singer’s critique of factory farms is aptly taken as a classic case of a critique that situates animals outside ethics, his critique of animal experimentation in Animal Liberation (25–94) is aptly taken as a classic case of a critique that does this. Many critics who are less concerned with moral philosophy than Singer is take their cue from him in implicitly assuming that it is possible to arrive at the sort of understanding of animals’ lives necessary for responsible criticism of animal testing by attending exclusively to plain facts.

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two other chimps to move in with Nim. These chimps were Nim’s companions for five years until his death in 2000. The film that Marsh made about Nim deals with these and other events in Nim’s life. Marsh reports that, when he set out to make Project Nim, he did so because he wanted to understand the life of a particular chimp. Marsh clearly did not take his goal of understanding to limit him to the plain recital and visual presentation of facts. Marsh does rely heavily on archival material such as movies and photographs taken by people who knew Nim. But he also uses various methods that invite us to enter into and explore different perspectives on what happened to Nim. Marsh employs images from the archival material in an expressive manner; he stages and films a number of reenactments, using them in a similarly evocative style; he intersperses this archival material with footage not only of reenactments but also of his own formal interviews with some of the individuals who interacted most closely with Nim; and he uses music to capture the most psychologically and emotionally salient aspects of Nim’s story. These techniques shape our attitudes, inviting us to place importance on particular aspects of Nim’s life, and the techniques are essential to Marsh’s efforts to convey an understanding of what that life was like in a way that enables us to assess the ethics of things done to Nim in the name of science. Consider how the film brings out the magnitude of the wrong that was done to Nim and the other chimps when they were sold to LEMSIP and used for testing vaccines. Relevant here are not only portions of the film that are specifically concerned with LEMSIP but also portions that show Nim in happy times. Some of Nim’s happy times were at the Institute for Primate Studies. During the day he and his friends had access to an indoor compound with toys and climbing surfaces, and Nim himself also had Ingersoll, who took him for walks, roughhoused with him, and simply hung out. In one sequence, we see Ingersoll and Nim heading out of the compound, signing to each other in a relaxed manner. Ingersoll signs “where?” to Nim, and Nim responds by making the sign for “walk.” Nim turns to Ingersoll, makes the sign for “play” and sprints energetically off across a field. As we see these images, Ingersoll tells us: “Chimps aren’t humans. You have to kind of understand chimps to be able to . . . ​work with them and be with them.” This voice-­over is accompanied by a folksy musical phrase played repeatedly

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on an acoustic guitar, a melodic fragment that differs notably from the menacing riff that we hear in parts of the film that show Nim living with humans and threatening physical violence. These techniques encourage us to look upon Nim’s life at the time he knew Ingersoll in an ethically charged manner, so that we place importance on his physical freedom and friendships and, more generally, so that we see in his activities and antics the glorious pulse of chimpanzee life. These happy days form the background to Nim’s time at LEMSIP, where individual chimpanzees are separated from each other and confined to small barren cages. Traumatized by what has been—​a nd is being—​done to them, they appear alternately groggy and frenzied. A veterinarian from LEMSIP explains that since he and his colleagues knew that some of the chimps could sign they posted pieces of paper with pictures of signs so that everyone in the lab could learn them. As this vet is speaking, the camera turns and—​in what is evidently a reenactment—​scans a series of pieces of paper with drawings of signs on them, coming to rest briefly on a drawing of the sign for “hug” and then, after a brief interval, lingering on a drawing of the sign for “play.” The film thus impresses on us a contrast with Nim’s former life that could not be more poignant. However hard the lab workers try to communicate with their chimp subjects, say, by signing about hugging and playing, the magnificent chimp form of life to which hugging and playing belong has already been cruelly extinguished. It is in this way—​ by means of the orchestrated use of a series of expressive techniques—​ that Project Nim conveys an understanding of the magnitude of the harm done to Nim at LEMSIP. Far from simply presenting us with neutral facts, it engages us in ways that internally inform our grasp of ethically important features of Nim’s life. It is not difficult to see that Marsh’s film invites the type of ethical thought about animals that I set out to illustrate, namely, ethical thought about animals that essentially involves the development of our sense of what is important in their lives. Nor is it difficult to see—​a nd this is my main point—​that its efforts to elicit this type of ethical thought are internal to the critique it offers of a range of experimental practices with chimps. By helping us to appreciate the value of things like Nim’s social contacts, the role of memory in them, and his joy in expression of various kinds, the film positions us to physical self-­



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understand Nim’s life in a manner relevant to grasping the extent and irreparability of the injury inflicted on him by taking him from his mother at birth and placing him in a human family, abruptly placing him in an enclosure with other chimps in his adolescence, and then, a few years later, placing him in a facility that does medical testing and subjecting him to various drug tests.29 Project Nim in this way appeals to the modes of thought I have been discussing to offer a vivid account of the significance of the harms inflicted on Nim, thereby positioning us to critically assess not only the experimental practices with chimpanzees that are shown in the film but also those that are still ongoing. 30 At the same time, it presents us with a model for how to approach questions about the ethics of experimentation on animals of other kinds.

7. 3 .   C O N C L U S I O N

The two works that I discussed in this chapter are works that are concerned with practical issues concerning animals—​namely, eating and experimenting on animals—​a nd that also deal in the frequently overlooked form of moral thought with which I have been concerned in this book (viz., moral thought that, in addition to being world-­g uided, essentially draws on our sense of what matters in the lives of creatures  Marsh’s film offers a particularly harsh criticism of Terrace insofar as, abstracting from the question of the value of his research, it reveals an indifference to Nim’s fate for which there is no scientific rationale. The film also offers a harsh criticism of LEMSIP insofar as, setting aside the question of the value of the medical research done there, it reveals an indifference to the chimpanzees’ well-­being for which, again, there is no scientific rationale. LEMSIP closed in 1997, and the story of its closing is a striking, if also somewhat ambiguous, chapter in the movement in the United States to end experimentation on chimps. 30  Since Marsh made his documentary, laws and institutions in the United States have changed in ways that are prompted by the recognition that many experimental practices with chimps and other great apes are unjustifiably cruel. Between 2011 and 2013, the NIH took steps to limit the number of chimps subjected to invasive experimental procedures, and in 2013 a bill passed—​the Chimpanzee Health Improvement and Maintenance Protection Act (CHIMP)—​that helps to fund chimps’ ‘retirement’ to animal sanctuaries. Although by 2010 most countries in the world had banned all experiments on great apes (i.e., chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans), the United States still has not. There was for years a bill in Congress that banned all such testing (the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act), but the bill was never brought up for a vote. 29

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INSIDE ETHICS

of specific kinds). The point of my discussions was simply to underline things I have said elsewhere about the practical indispensability of this form of moral thought by showing that it contributes internally to sound argumentative treatments of these issues. At this juncture it should be clear that, if we routinely overlook the relevant form of moral thought, we shut ourselves off from considerations directly pertinent to our practical concerns, thereby hampering our ability to participate responsibly in moral conversation.



T W O I S S U E S I N E T H I C S 271

CO N CLU D I N G CO M M EN T

The ambition of this book was to bring into focus an aspect of our intellectual culture that often goes unremarked. We have come to think of human beings and animals as elements of a “hard-­edged Reality” that, to adapt Marilynne Robinson’s phrase, disallows moral imagination “except to exact a tribute from it.” This little commented-­on trend, which shapes the work of moral philosophers and popular ethical writers alike, has unambiguously pernicious effects, distorting our understanding of the nature and demands of moral thought. The trend is to a substantial degree driven by philosophy, so it is reasonable to combat it by investigating the roots of its philosophical influence. A large portion of the book was devoted to tracing sources of existing views of human beings and animals back to tendencies in ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, and to showing that these views are ultimately untenable. My goal was in this way to underline the moral urgency of transforming our practice so that, far from wrongly taking it for granted in ethics that human beings and animals are ­exclusively ‘hard-­edged’, we treat the exercise of moral capacities like moral imagination as necessary for arriving at adequate world-­g uided

understandings of them. I wanted to show that the situation is dire in that, absent this transformation, we are in danger of stunting our own moral growth, of suppressing the capacities that we most need for moral insight and understanding. One of my strategies was to follow up on a rich selection of literary and other accounts of human and animal life that we can only properly grasp if we allow our ethical conceptions to color the way we look at human beings and animals. What I hope to have contributed is a philosophically provocative and practically important portrait of humans and animals as beings who merit solicitude simply as the creatures they are and who are fellow travelers on a glorious and fraught mortal adventure.



C O N C L U D I N G C O M M E N T 273

ACK N O W L E D G M E N T S

This book could not have been written without the help of a number of individuals and institutions. I took a first stab at its argument in 2009– 2010 while on leave from the New School for Social Research, on a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Experienced Researchers in Berlin. I completed the manuscript in the summer of 2014 while again in Berlin, this time on a Humboldt Foundation Grant for a Renewed Research Stay. In between, I did much of my writing at a desk David Hupert gave me in his lower Manhattan office. I am grateful to the New School, the Humboldt Foundation, David Hupert, and my Humboldt sponsors Rahel Jaeggi and Christoph Menke for their generous support. I am also grateful to Harvard University Press’s Amanda Peery, Shan Wang, and Lindsay Waters for their support and guidance, as well as to Dan Boscov-­Ellen for his discerning contributions to a couple of final rounds of editing and to Erik Zimmerman for his thoughtful assistance with the index. I would like to thank several friends and colleagues with whom I was in touch while I was writing. I am fortunate to have been able to discuss my ideas with, and benefit from the insights of, Nancy Bauer, Jay Bernstein, and Martin Stone. Nathaniel Hupert and Elijah Millgram

gave me helpful feedback on early versions of the entire manuscript, and Elijah had the foresight and graciousness to tell me, almost exactly two years before I finished, that he thought I still had two years to go. I am indebted to an anonymous reader for Harvard University Press who noted ways in which my submitted draft might yet be substantially improved. Finally, I owe a debt to Cora Diamond that is difficult to calculate. I have discussed numerous aspects of this book with Cora over the years, and in significant respects it bears the imprint of her contributions to our conversations. Cora kindly took the time to read a complete late version of the manuscript, offering a valuable detailed commentary that, among other things, impressed on me the need to rethink some of my terminological choices. I have presented portions of the book at many workshops, symposia, and conferences, and I have frequently discussed the book’s themes in informal settings as well as in correspondence. I want to thank the people who made constructive comments along the way. I owe thanks in particular to Paul Abela, Donald Ainslie, Zed Adams, Carla Bagnoli, Gene Bauer, Sarah Beckwith, Andrew Benjamin, Richard Bernstein, Simon Blackburn, Dan Boscov-­Ellen, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Kevin Cahill, Robin Celikates, Jonathan Chalier, Anne-­Marie Sondergaard Christensen, Stefan Cojocaru, Matthew Condgon, Susie Coston, Arnold Davidson, James Dodd, Piergiorgio Donatelli, Lisabeth During, Christopher Fitzpatrick, Juliet Floyd, Bernie Flynn, Jennifer Flynn, Eckart Förster, Gary Francione, Adam Gies, P.J. Gorre, Hajo Greif, Steven Gross, Lori Gruen, Janna van Grunsven, Logi Gunnarsson, Martin Gustafsson, John Hacker-­Wright, Gary Hagberg, Robert Haraldsson, Edward Harcourt, Jane Heal, Gregg Horowitz, Dale Jamieson, Christopher Kaposy, Katie Kelley, Sandra Laugier, Anton Leist, Hallvard Lillehammer, Hoyeon Lim, Áine Mahon, Kate Manne, Sarin Marchetti, Lisa McKeown, Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Toril Moi, Robin Muller, Stephen Mulhall, Jean-­Philippe Narboux, Dmitri Nikulin, Mark Okrent, Cathy Osborne, Samantha Pachirat, Timothy Pachirat, Ally Peabody, Alois Pichler, Ross Poole, Aleksandra Przegalinska, Dirk Quadflieg, Rupert Read, Lynette Reid, Mark Richard, Hunter Robinson, Allison Ross, Mike Rust, Simo Säätelä, Marina Sbisá, Karsten Schoellner, Peter Singer, Cecilia Sjöholm, Gary Steiner, Pirmin Stekeler-­ Weithofer, Mark Theunissen, Olivier Tonneau, Bernhard Weiss, Meredith Williams, Michael Williams, Charlotte Witt, and Linda Zerilli.

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E PI G R A PH CR E D I T S

Book Epigraph. Marilynne Robinson, “Facing Reality,” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 2005), 77. Introduction. Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1998), 293. Chapter 1. Geoff Dyer, from an interview with Robert Birnbaum, published on the blog Identity Theory, February 11, 2003. Chapter 2. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1. Chapter 3. Charles Darwin, Notebook M, 1938. Chapter 4. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 41. Chapter 5. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.1, 1915–1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1977), 190. Chapter 6. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51. Chapter 7. Stephen Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 3.

INDEX

Abstraction requirement, 44–50, 54–57, 60, 178 Ackerly, J. R., 116 Adams, Rachel, 140–141 Almodóvar, Pedro, 145n70 Anderson, Elizabeth, 128n15, 144n69 Andreou, Chrisoula, 169n5 Animal experimentation or testing, 163n111, 265–270 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 168n4, 188 Anthropomorphism, 217–218 Argument, 212n15; narrower conception of, 211; wider conception of, 211–212 Argument from marginal cases, 128 Attridge, Derek, 228–229, 233n58 Atwood, Margaret, 164n111 Bauer, Gene, 265n23 Bayley, John, 142–144 Baz, Avner, 75n59

Bechhöfer, Susi, 240n72 Behaviorism, 77–78 Berger, Anne, 194n64 Berry, Wendell, 257n2 Berubé, Michael, 129, 140–141, 141n55 Birke, Lynda, 266n25 Bittman, Mark, 262n12 Boyd, Richard, 16n2 Braidotti, Rosi, 193n62 Brink, David, 16n2 Broadway, Michael, 257n2, 262n17 Brody, Baruch, 266n2 Brosco, Jeffrey, 131n26 Brown Wise, Margaret, 158 Byrne, Peter, 133n35 Carlson, Licia, 126n6, 129n18,n19 Carmen, Taylor, 94n4 Carpenter, Melinda, 78n64 Carruthers, Peter, 27n35, 127n10 Carver, Raymond, 146–149

Cavell, Stanley, 110–111, 200n79, 207n3 Chalier, Jonathan, 77n62 Chalmers, David, 41n6 Charlip, Remy, 158 Clarke, Bruce, 192n61, 193n62 Coe, Sue, 132n30 Coetzee, J. M., 6, 155–159, 204, 210, 224–228, 233–236, 252–253 Collingwood, R.G., 111 Collins, Arthur, 99n16 Commonsense realism about the mind, 37, 39 n.4, 40, 44, 47, 58, 61–63, 81, 85 Compa, Lance 257n2 Conceptualism, 4, 51–52, 93–97, 108, 119–120; non-conceptualism, 50– 54, 60 Contextualism, 72, 75 Copp, David, 187n57 Corpses, 145–146, 154–157 Darwall, Stephen, 59n35 Davidson, Donald, 93n2, 118n56 DeGrazia, David, 127n11 De Montaigne, Michel, 145n71, 146n72 Dennett, Daniel, 64n40 Derrida, Jacques, 193–198; iterabil­­ity, 194–199; reaction vs. response, 197 Descartes, René, 126n9 Descriptivism, 21, 95, 99 Diamond, Cora, 32n41, 116, 131–132, 199n77, 207–210 Dick, Phillip, 163n111 Disability Theory, 5, 122–123, 129– 130, 131n26 Dombrowski, Daniel, 128n15 Donaldson, Sue, 151n84 Doty, Mark, 152n85, 154n98, 157n103 Dreyfus, Hubert, 94n4 Driver, Julia, 185n51 Dualism, 37n1, 42–43, 45n11, 58, 61 Dupré, John, 180

280 I N D E X

Eating animals, 255–265 Eliminativism, 41n6, 81–83 Empirical methods of ethics, 24, 29, 89, 160–162; empirical understanding of animal and human life, 25, 29–30, 91, 134, 142, 149n80, 150, 157, 160n107, 161–163, 167, 189–190, 198, 204, 210, 212–213, 258, 267; empirically discoverable moral characteristics, 2–5, 26, 31, 85, 161, 191, 200–202 Ethical externalism about the mind, 67–80 Ethical naturalism, 165–168, 201–202 Ethnocentrism, 199, 201 Experimental Philosophy, 18n8 Expressive behavior, 76–80; linguistic, 77, 80; non-linguistic and unlearned, 68, 77, 80 Externalism about the mind, 67n49,n50, 80, 84 Factory Farming, 7, 256–260, 257n2, 262n13, 264–265 Farm Sanctuary, 265 Feder Kittay, Eva, 126n6, 129–130, 136n36, 162n110 Finkelstein, David, 118n56 Fleischer, Richard, 146n72 Foot, Philippa, 82, 164–168, 175–180, 187–188; Life-form Relative Moral Thought, 189–190; Unified Theory of Natural Goodness, 167, 174n25, 180–192 Förster, Eckart, 177n33 Francione, Gary, 127n11, 151n84, 259n4 Frey, Matthias, 242n76 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 105–107 Gaita, Raimond, 120n58, 239n70 Gahek, Nikola, 65n41 Gaskin, Richard, 94n4

George, Sally, 240n72 Gibbard, Allan, 59n35 Glendinning, Simon, 194n68, 196n73, 199n77 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 172n22, 177n. 33 Gray, Gregory, 257n2 Gruen, Lori, 132–133 Guyer, Paul, 176n32 Hacking, Ian, 77n62, 142n59 Haneke, Michael, 144n68 Hansen, Mark, 192n61, 193n62 Hare, R. M., 22n14, 23n15 Hard metaphysics, 19–31, 87; Singer, 20–24; Korsgaard, 25–30 Harris, Christine, 79n65,n66 Hauerwas, Stanley, 140n50 Hearne, Vicki, 120n58, 199n77 Homer, 116n53 Horowitz, Alexander, 151n84 Human-animal moral kinship, 204, 214, 225, 236, 253n98 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 168n4, 179n35, 187n57 Inside ethics, 12, 25, 30–31, 35–37, 40, 85–91, 120, 160–161 Internalism about motivation, 15–17, 87–88 Intuitionism, 20, 23–24 Invariantism, 71–72, 75 Johnston, Mark, 17n6 Josephs, Jeremy, 240n72 Kant, Immanuel, 27n35, 126n9 Kantian ethical theories, 16, 25–30, 109, 176n32 Kaposy, Christopher, 139n48 Kenner, Robert, 158n105, 257n2 Keyes, Daniel, 136–142 Kingsley, Jason, 141n58

Kirby, David, 257n2 Korsgaard, Christine, 3, 14, 16n4, 25–35, 176n32, 185n53,n54 Kripke, Saul, 67n49,n50 Krueger, Whitney, 257n2 Kymlicka, Will, 151n84 Landy, Joshua, 206n1, 208n6 Larson, Glen, 163n111 Leahy, Michael, 27n35, 127n10 Leist, Anton, 24 Leshko, Isa, 153n95, 158 Levinas, Emmanuel, 115n48 Levinson, Jerrold, 212n15 Levitz, Mitchel, 141n58 Lewis, David, 17n6 Lindemann, Hilde, 144, 153 Literature and ethics, 11, 18, 24, 135– 139, 146–149, 155–157, 204–213, 252–253; Ethical criticism, 212n16; literary qualities, 135–136, 205, 254, 256–257; standard view of the relationship between, 205–212 Lovibond, Sabina, 105n27 Macaulay, James, 266n25 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 94n4 Mackie, J. L., 14n1, 17n6, 26, 32n41 Malcolm, Norman, 63n36 Mankell, Henning, 66n47 Mann, Thomas, 113–115 Markus, Erik, 262n17 Marsh, James, 267–280 Materialism about the mind, 38n2,n3, 41n5; non-reductive, 38, 63, 81, 176– 177; reductive, 62–63 McDowell, John, 4, 45n13, 94–109, 112, 119, 167, 185n53, 238; minimal empiricism, 96–97, 101; on concepts, 94–105, 108–109, 112, 119; on naturalism, 101–104, 106n31; on Wittgenstein, 46n15, 49n22, 104n25; second nature, 103–105

I N D E X 281

McMahan, Jeff, 124n2, 125n5, 126, 127n11, 128n13, 129n16, 130, 133n34, 162n110 Mental properties, 41–44, 58, 65, 80 Midgley, Mary, 28n36 Moi, Tori, 194n68, 200n79 Moore, Ronald, 163n111 Moral imagination, 3, 89–91, 272 Moral individualism, 122–134, 142n60, 149, 159–162 Moral judgment, 14–27, 86–89, 166– 168, 180–191 Mulhall, Stephen, 210 Murdoch, Iris, 142–144, 207n3 Myth of the given, 98–100 Nagel, Thomas, 42n7 Natural history, 168, 170–191, 201, 237–239; externalism in, 170. See also Thompson, Michael Natural sciences, 24, 38–41, 101–103, 106n31, 166, 196–197 Noelker, Fran, 133n32 Non-cognitivism in ethics, 16–25, 30, 184 Noonan, Chris, 264n22 Nussbaum, Martha, 207n3 Objective moral values, 13–34, 87–89, 186 Objectivism about moral judgments, 15–16, 21, 87 Objectivity, concept of, 32–33, 46, 56, 60, 81n67, 85, 102; conception of, 32–35, 43, 57; narrower conception of, 43–45, 57n34, 58, 81, 162; wider conception of, 35n44, 58, 61–62, 84–85, 87, 102–103, 177–178, 186, 200–201 Oderberg, David, 27n35, 127n10 O’Neill, Onora, 46n16, 207–210 Outside ethics, 2, 11–34, 89, 258, 264, 267 Page, Tony, 266n25 Palmer, Clare, 124n2 Parfit, Derek, 17n7

282 I N D E X

Peacocke, Christopher, 94n4 Perception, 34n43, 50–55, 97 Perry, George, 182n44 Pettit, Philip, 17n6 Physical properties, 38, 41–42 Pierce, Jessica, 152–158 Pigden, Charles, 166n2 Pippin, Robert, 46n16 Pitcher, George, 116–117, 152n85 Pollan, Michael, 257n2, 262n12 Posner, Richard, 208n6 Posthumanism, 165–166, 192–202 Poyner, Jane, 233n58 Pragmatics, 69–71, 77 Preference utilitarianism, 20–23, 125 Prescriptivism, 21–24 Principle of impartiality, 23 Priority of judgment, 70, 76–77 Priority of the complete expression, 77 Prouvost, Caroline, 79n65,n66 Psychological discourse, 37–39, 61–62, 81–84; psychological categories, 37–39, 61, 67, 80–84 Psychological expressiveness, 80, 145, 155 Putnam, Hilary, 47n17, 67n49 Rachels, James, 124–127 Railton, Peter, 59n35 Rationalist intuitionism, 23 Rationality, 211, 212n15; concept of, 211; conception of, 211, 223; narrower conception of, 211, 212n15, 223, 232–233, 236; wider conception of, 211–212, 223, 233–234 Recanati, François, 71n54 Regan, Tom, 125, 126n9 Resnais, Alan, 242n76 Roach, Mary, 146n73 Rorty, Richard, 93n1, 106n30, 112n45 Ryder, Richard, 128n14 Ryle, Gilbert, 63n37 Safran Foer, Jonathan, 6, 157n104, 259–265

Sapience, 63 Sass, Louis, 77n62 Scanlon, Tim, 185n53 Schlosser, Eric, 257n2 Scott, Ridley, 163n111 Scruton, Roger 127n10 Sebald, W. G., 6, 204, 236–253 Segarra, Marta, 194n64 Sellars, Wilfrid, 57n34, 97–99 Semantics, 69 Sentience, 63 Singer, Peter, 3, 14, 16n3, 19–25, 30, 125–129, 132n28, 133n34, 258n3, 262n17, 266n26, 267n28 Slote, Michael, 181n41 Smith, Michael, 17n6 Sobel, David, 187n57 Solomon, Andrew, 139n48, 140n50, 141n58 Speciesism, 128 Stich, Stephen, 18n8 Stone, Martin, 200,n79 Strawson, P. F., 82n69, 97n9 Stoljar, Daniel, 41n5, 42n8 Stull, Donald, 257n2, 262n17 Subjective qualities, 33–35, 43–44, 57–62, 84, 211 Thompson, Michael, 101n19, 168– 180, 237; foot on, 180–183, 189;

natural-historical judgments, 170– 182; natural history account of an organism, 168, 173, 176, 179–182; species-relative assessment of nonhuman organisms in biology, 167– 168, 175–182, 188–191; Vital Descriptions, 168–172, 175–180 Tolstoy, Leo, 6, 204, 213–224, 232, 252–253 Tomasello, Michael, 78n64, 119n57 Tordjman, Sylvie, 77n62 Travis, Charles, 71n54, 72–75 Vaish, Amrisha, 78n64, 79n66 Von Arnim, Elizabeth, 116–117 Wider naturalism, 102–104, 112, 167, 238. See also McDowell, John Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39–40, 46–58, 62–71, 75, 199, 243–245; family resemblance, 243–245; changes of aspect, 51; On Certainty, 70; percep­­ tual experience, 49–55; privacy, 52– 55; on rule following, 45n12, 47–49, 74–75; Sebald on, 243–245, 249n93; seeing as, 70 Wolfe, Cary, 192–200 Wood, Allen, 28n36 Wood, James, 250n94 Wright, Crispin, 59n35, 94n4

I N D E X 283