Death, Misfortune and Species Inequality -...

Death, Misfortune and Species InequalityAuthor(s): Ruth CigmanSource: Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1981), pp. 47-64Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265169 .

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RUTH CIGMAN Death, Misfortune and Species Inequality

It has been argued that "speciesism"-unjust and discriminatory attitudes towards species other than our own-is a vice analogous to sexism and racism. Opposition to this phenomenon embraces two kinds of claims, one of them reasonable, the other by no means so. The weak claim, which I accept, is that we should treat many animals better than we do, and take whatever steps are necessary to oppose certain cruel practices toward them. The stronger claim is that, as women and blacks should have rights equal to those of men and whites, animals should have rights equal to those of persons, because difference of species does not constitute a morally relevant difference.

My view is that the stronger claim is sentimental and confused. Most important, it seriously misrepresents features of human experience such as attitudes to life and the misfortune of death. I shall attack it by exploring the relationship between (a) the kinds of obliga- tions we have towards a creature (person, animal), and the corelative rights to which he or she is entitled; and (b) the kinds of misfortunes of which that creature may be a subject (or victim). In particular, I shall be concerned with the complex relationship between the right to life and the capacity to be a subject of the misfortune of death. This relationship is significant where human lives are concerned; it does not, I believe, carry over to the lives of other species. My claim will be that death is not, and cannot be, a misfortune for any creature other than a human; this is a reason for denying non-humans the right to

? I980 by Princeton University Press Philosophy & Public Affairs io, no. i 0048-3915/8I /01 0047-19$00.95 /I



48 Philosophy & Public Affairs

life and therefore for embracing a form of speciesism. I shall then consider some implications for vegetarianism.

I. SPECIES INEQUALITY

The phenomenon of speciesism must be described with care. One anti-speciesist has described it as the belief that it is justifiable "to treat a member of another species in a way in which it would be wrong to treat our own."' This definition isn't quite right; nor does it parallel the definitions of racism and sexism. A school which received an application from a parent for admission of her child and pet monkey would be quite justified in accepting the child and rejecting the monkey, however dull the child and bright the monkey; just as a dramatic director would be justified in turning down the most talented actress in the world in favor of an inferior actor, to fill the role of King Lear. Neither school nor director would be guilty of the "ism" in question. The vice abhorred by anti-speciesists is not the denial that animals and persons are in all respects identical (whatever this would mean), and therefore entitled to identical treatment; it is rather a much more plausible claim about the possession across species (many, not all) of certain morally relevant capacities. Specifically, speciesism may be seen as a failure to acknowledge the equal capacities of persons and animals to suffer, and (it is claimed) the moral equality which is a corollary of this fact.

As such, speciesism bears at least a superficial resemblance to sexism and racism, the error of which consists in part in a failure to understand what Bernard Williams has called the "useful tautology" that all human beings are human beings.2 This phrase serves to remind anyone who believes that blacks or women are inherently inferior that these are not merely members of a certain species, but are also human or persons. The emphasis on these terms suggests certain capacities and related vulnerabilities which are more or less uni- versally possessed by persons, and one is made to think of such truths as: all persons are able to suffer physical and mental pain, and to

i. Peter Singer, "Animal Liberation," in Moral Problems, ed. James Rachels, (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

2. Bernard Williams, "The Idea of Equality," in Problems of the Self (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).



49 Death and Species Inequality

experience, and be frustrated in, affection for others. These truths give rise to certain moral claims which may be irrationally obscured by incidental characteristics such as skin color and sex.

Some anti-speciesists (notably Jeremy Bentham and, more recent- ly, Peter Singer) have attacked speciesism along similar lines.3 Species equality, they argue, is typically overlooked by virtue of morally insignificant features such as the number of legs a creature possesses, or the inability to talk. Equal capacity to suffer is the only reasonable ground for moral equality; it has been shown, moreover, that many species are in possession of nervous systems of comparable complexity to those of humans, and that they therefore suffer pain of comparable intensity.

However the equal capacity to suffer physical pain is only part of what the anti-sexist or anti-racist is getting at by emphasizing the humanity or personhood of all human beings. Implicit in this claim (the tautological status of which is, of course, more apparent than real) is an allusion to a range of vulnerabilities, or misfortunes, of which persons are able to be subjects, and by virtue of which they possess equal rights. Among these is the misfortune of death. Nothing that is said by the anti-speciesist about the suffering of physical pain suggests that animals are subject to the same range of misfortunes as persons, still less that death is a misfortune for an animal. Even if we grant that the equal capacity of persons and animals to suffer physical pain somehow yields equal rights not to be recipients of physical cruelty, it is far from clear why this should entail moral equality, that is, equality over a range of fundamental rights.

I want to suggest that a right to X entails the right to be protected from certain actions which will result in the misfortune, or possible misfortune, of not-X. A condition for being the subject of a right is therefore the capacity to be a subject of the corresponding misfortune. The relationship between capacity and desire in this context must be examined: for example, a creature may be a subject of the misfortune of death even if he or she doesn't desire not to die, so long as it is the case that he or she has the capacity to desire not to die. My sugges- tion is that, when we fill in the concept of desiring not to die in a

3. See Peter Singer, "Animal Liberation," where Bentham is quoted ap- provingly.




way which is relevant to the misfortune of death and the right to life, we shall have to withhold this from animals.

I turn to these problems in subsequent sections. To conclude the present section, I want to clarify the distinction between the right to be protected from cruelty and the right to be protected from death with reference to a provocative example of Robert Nozick.4 Nozick asks us to imagine the following: someone derives a special, unsub- stitutable pleasure from swinging a baseball bat, in circumstances where the regretted but unavoidable corollary of this act is the smashing of a cow's skull. We must consider whether the extra pleasure derived from this act, compared with a similar and harmless alternative act, could possibly justify the act morally. Nozick says that it cannot, thereby suggesting that the purely hedonistic justification for the (analogous) activity of meat-eating (and by implication, comparable activities which involve animal suffering and deaths) is inadequate.

What exactly does this example show? Its plausibility rests upon the suggested identification between, on the one hand, meat-eating and whimsical bat-swinging; and on the other, cow-skull-smashing and the taking of animal lives. The first pair are analogically but ques- tionably related; it is arguable that meat-eating is unjustly viewed as a whimsical, essentially eccentric satisfaction. This is a relatively unimportant point which I shall set aside for now. The second identification is more serious, since it is hardly analogical (we are to assume that smashing the cow's skull is fatal), yet more liable to obscure the problem at hand. In particular, it obscures two claims which I want to distinguish:

( i ) We have an obligation not to inflict gratuitous suffering on animals (or to refrain from gratuitous cruelty to animals).

(2) We have an obligation not to kill animals quickly and painlessly.

Claim (i) is, I take it, sufficiently vague to be self-evidently true, or at any rate, not hard to defend. I shall not attempt to do this, but I shall suggest that, while there is room for many divergences of opin- ion over what counts as "gratuitous" suffering or cruelty, these will

4. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974),

PP. 36-38.




generally, and reasonably, fall within an area embraced by whimsical satisfaction and the protection of fundamental human interests (life, health) as, respectively, inadequate and adequate justifications for causing animal suffering. (I shall return to this topic later in connection with vegetarianism.) Claim (2), which is more interesting, I believe to be false. If so, the moral justification for meat-eating would appear to depend above all upon the manner in which animals are killed. The force of Nozick's example then rests upon the question (setting aside for now the problematic analogy between meat-eating and whimsical bat-swinging) whether or not skull-smashing is a quick and painless death for a cow. I don't know whether it is or not, but I shall proceed with the assumption that it is possible to kill a cow quickly and painlessly. The moral significance of such a death may then be considered.

II. ANIMAL MISFORTUNE AND HUMAN MISFORTUNE

Of what kinds of misfortunes are animals subjects? A claim which may be rejected at the start is this: it is impossible to know exactly how much animals suffer, or what counts as a misfortune for them; it is therefore a form of speciesist arrogance to assume that their misfortunes are worthy of less concern than our own. Against this it must be said that the evidence we have that animals suffer at all is the same as the evidence which enables us to judge the nature and extent of this suffering. No philosopher has suggested this more power- fully than Wittgenstein, in his remarks about the deeply misunder- stood relationship between behavior and the "inner life." It is worth quoting some of these:

... only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.

Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!- And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish




and pain seems to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.

One can imagine an animal, angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not?

A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow?-And what can he not do here?"5

Wittgenstein is not merely concerned in these passages with the dif- ficulty of imagining the truth of certain mental descriptions (for example, "This dog is hopeful"; "This stone has sensations"). Maybe one can (or thinks one can-it may be hard to distinguish these) imagine these being true; what one cannot do is sensibly consider the possibility that they may be true, for to do this (Wittgenstein suggests) would be to remove the concept of hope from the context in which it has sense-where human beings talk and behave in ways which reveal their sense of the future, of alternative prospects, of concern for them- selves and others, and so on. These form part of the structure, so to speak, of hope; it does not make sense to ascribe hope to a creature which manifests no awareness of future possibilities. Wittgenstein's choice of example may be questioned here; I think there do exist a small number of animals which may express hope in their behavior. But the point is sound: the mental experience which is sensibly at- tributed to a creature is commensurate with the complexity and nature of its behavioral expression. A wriggling fly may be supposed to feel pain; here, though, hope definitely fails to find a foothold.

If this is correct, two further conclusions must be drawn: (i ) The "useful tautology" discussed earlier does not merely suggest certain vulnerabilities to which more or less everyone is subject; it also suggests, I think, certain complexities of experience surrounding these vulnerabilities, which are not attributable to animals. I have in mind, for example, the fear of death, or of contracting a fatal disease; the desire for respect or esteem from others; the desire to lead a fulfilling life (for one's life to have a "point," or "meaning"); the desire to achieve certain goals and resolve certain problems; and, finally, cor-

5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Basil Black- well, 1953), pars. 28I; 284; and p. 174.




responding fears and desires on behalf of others. (2) These thoughts or experiences suggest a reason why persons deserve greater moral concern than animals. The capacity to talk does not itself provide such a reason; rather this capacity is related to, and is a condition for, the capacity to suffer complex and severe misfortunes, which animals are logically unable to suffer. Among these are the kinds of misfortunes which we call ;'tragic." It is with great strain that we say of an animal that he suffers a tragedy, even, I think, when he is destined for a permature death. The failure of Bentham and others to recognize this results from a crude conception of what it is to suffer a misfortune. Let us consider this briefly.

This conception is narrowly utilitarian. If one thinks, with Ben- tham, that all the good and bad things that can happen to one in life are quantities of pleasurable and painful experience, the comparison between animal and human misfortune will appear quite reasonable; for it is plausible, given this conception, to suggest that one can distinguish degrees of intensity of animal pain as well as one can do this with human pain. But notice that this view suggests (a) that all misfortune involves unpleasant experiences; (b) that all unpleasant experiences are measurable against one another-which is most implausible where tragedies and many other severe misfortunes are concerned; and (c) that death (as opposed to dying) is not a misfortune at all, for it involves no unpleasant experience, but rather an absence of experience. In fact, (c) is part of a famous argument by Lucretius, to the effect that the fear of death grows out of an irrational conception of death as a state which we endure, in which the loss of life is in some sense experienced. Lucretius argues that death is not experienced at all, for it is complete annihilation; therefore there is no subject for whom death can be a misfortune, and hence death is not a misfortune at all.

I do not want to suggest that Bentham is committed to this Lucre- tian view;6 only that the identification of misfortune with unpleasant experience has this conception as a likely corollary. This identification seems to me generally adequate where animals are concerned; mis-

6. A Utilitarian like Bentham may argue that death is a misfortune because it prevents the satisfaction of certain desires. I find this unconvincing when applied to animals, however, for reasons which will be defended later on.




fortunes for animals essentially consist in a rather limited range of unpleasant experiences (physical pain, emotional loss, and so on). To the extent that these are the kinds of misfortunes of which animals may be victims, I think it is correct to conclude that death is not a misfortune for an animal. For if the worst that can be said of the quick and painless death of an animal (of course suffering is another matter) is that it removes a quantity of pleasurable experience from the world, this does not justify calling that death a misfortune for the animal who dies. One may prefer that the death had not occurred, because one has a kind of utilitarian preference for a world contain- ing as much pleasure as possible. This is very different from saying that it is the animal's misfortune. For this to make sense, it would have to be the case that the animal revealed a certain kind of desire to live, or was capable of having such a desire to live. What it is to have such a desire, and how this makes possible a very different kind of misfortune from that which we have discussed, will now be considered in connection with two recent articles on death and the Lucre- tian argument.

III. DEATH AS A MISFORTUNE

In the first, Thomas Nagel defends an Aristotelian conception of misfortune. This is as far from Bentham as one can imagine; Aristotle, we must remember, even included amongst a person's misfortunes the misfortunes of his or her descendants for an indefinite period of time beyond his or her death. It is very much in the Aristotelian spirit that Nagel says:

It ... seems to me worth exploring the position that most good and ill fortune has as its subject a person identified by his history and his possibilities, rather than merely by his categorical state of the moment. . ..

Nagel has in mind misfortunes such as deterioration to a "vege- table-like" condition, and betrayal in cases where the subject is ignorant that he has been betrayed. That these are not experienced as misfortunes does not prevent their being-described as such. So it is

7. Thomas Nagel, "Death,"' in Moral Problems.




also, Nagel suggests, with death, which is a misfortune for a clearly identified subject (contrary to Lucretius' argument) because it closes certain possibilities which would otherwise have been open to him or her. Nagel concludes that death is indeed a severe misfortune, even a tragedy, for most of us; for the experience of leading a life generally includes a sense of open-ended possibility which appears fortuitously circumscribed by the prospect of death at age eighty or so.

The concept of misfortune as something which befalls a subject "identified by his history and his possibilities" is unquestionably one which we possess. Yet this is rather vague, and should be considered briefly. Nagel appears to think that one's "history and possibilities" may be independent of one's desires, and that betrayal may be a misfortune for a person even though he is indifferent to whether he has ever been betrayed. Again, if desires are of negligible importance in deciding whether someone is the subject of a misfortune, an aborted fetus must, it seems to me, be seen as the victim of a terrible misfortune, being denied a possible life. This does not seem quite right-at least it is not obviously right. This is because what counts as a misfortune often depends not merely upon one's possbilities, but upon how these are viewed, how they are related to one's desires. (It is possible that Nagel had something like this in mind when he talked of a person's "history.") That this qualification is necessary is shown by the fact that most of us have many "possibilities" the nonfulfill- ment of which may wrongly be regarded as our misfortune, if our desires are ignored. It is very irritating, for example, to see parents bemoan their child's failure to become a concert pianist or a doctor because, despite his or her desire to do something else, this was a "possibility." One could in this way become the victim of all sorts of misfortunes, viewed differently by various anxious devotees, while leading a life with which one is perfectly content.

In the face of this, one may experience a kind of existen- tialist indignation, expressible in the words: "I am free to choose what counts as a misfortune for me." Yet this isn't right either, and it brings out an important truth in Nagel's position. The concept of misfortune, like the concept of happiness, is partially normative; both concepts, that is, stand in some complex relation to a conception of goodness. This is shown by the fact that it is sometimes correct to say




that a person who claims to be happy is, in fact, not happy and even to see him as the subject of a misfortune if, for example, he falls wildly short of the way we think it is good for a person to be. Suppose, for example, he has come to take pleasure in evil, or in an idle, point- less pursuit such as spending every spare moment enjoying pleasurable sensations by operating electrodes.8 He may be in some sense contented, but he is surely not happy (though he may not be unhappy either), and is justly described as unfortunate.

The normative concept of misfortune is strongly Aristotelian in its rejection of the idea that the subject's testimony upon his or her own experience is a sufficient criterion of misfortune. It may be argued that death is a misfortune in precisely this sense; that since death is so clearly not in one's best interests, it is a condition for which we reasonably pity others, irrespective of whether or not they feared it. If this is so, the death of an animal must be a great misfortune also; for a dead animal certainly falls short of the way we think it is "good" for animals to be.

I find this unconvincing, however, for it seems to me that death is not a misfortune merely because it is a bad condition to be in, relative to being alive, healthy, and so on; rather it is a misfortune because life is something most of us value, and want to experience for as long as possible. We usually pity a person who has just died for one of two reasons: because that person valued life and wanted to live; or because he or she did not value life, and failed to see death as a misfortune. I shall say more about the first reason in a moment. The second reason sheds an interesting complexion on the normative concept of a misfortune. For it suggests that what is unfortunate about the evil or idle person discussed above is that, like the person who did not value life, he does not have the right kinds of desires or values, and that we think it in some sense possible that he might have had these. The misfortune is not, then, simply his falling short of how we think it good to be; it is also, and I think fundamentally, his failing to desire to be this way. An animal cannot be the subject of a misfortune in this way. He can be better or worse in relation to some

8. This example is discussed by J.J.C. Smart in Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), by J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, pp. I9-20.




conception of what it is to be a good animal; but he cannot be an object of pity because he does not want to match up to this conception. It does not make sense to say of an animal, as we say of a person, "It's unfortunate for him that he didn't mind dying." For what this suggests in the case of a person is a condition of depressiveness, or indifference towards life, and a failure to appreciate the richness and interest of life for a creature as complex and sensitive as a person. It follows from the Wittgensteinian argument above that these emotions, and this failure, are not possible for an animal.

The concept of something's being a misfortune for X is not adequately captured by identifying a discrepancy between X's "history and possibilities" and X's actual condition, the alleged misfortune. X's misfortune must either be something which X did not want; or it must be something that X should not have wanted, because it so obviously conflicted with his interests. Without these qualifications, many conditions could be wrongly considered "X's misfortune," for example, X's failing to be a concert pianist, even though she succeeded in being the teacher she wanted to be. Also, there would be no reason to restrict subjects of misfortune in this sense to persons: an accident could be a misfortune for my car, or for the tree which was hit by it. We would of course beg the question unforgivably if we excluded the latter possibility merely by confining the possible subjects of misfortune to persons.

To be a possible subject of misfortunes which are not merely unpleasant experiences, one must be able to desire and value certain things. The kind of misfortune which is in question here is death, and to discover whether this is a misfortune for an animal, we must ask whether, or in what sense, animals don't want to die. Of course, in some sense this is true of virtually all animals, which manifest acute fear when their lives are threatened. Yet blindly clinging on to life is not the same as wanting to live because one values life. This is the kind of desire for life of which persons are capable. It is this which gives sense to the claim that death is a misfortune, even a tragedy, for a person. Bernard Williams (in a reply to Nagel) argues a view like this.9

Williams introduces the useful concept of a categorical desire. This

9. Bernard Williams, "The Makropolous Case," in Problems of the Self.




is a desire which does not merely presuppose being alive (like the desire to eat when one is hungry), but rather answers the question whether one wants to remain alive. It may answer this question affirmatively or not. Williams discusses what he calls a rational forward- looking desire for suicide; this desire is categorical because it resolves (negatively), rather than assumes, the question of one's continued existence. Alternatively one may resolve this question affirmatively with a desire, for example, to raise children or write a book. Such desires give one reason to go on living, they give life so-called point or meaning. Most persons have some such desires throughout sub- stantial periods of their lives.

A person who possesses categorical desires of the second sort is, Williams suggests, vulnerable to the misfortune of death in a way which neither Lucretius nor Nagel grasps. "To want something," says Williams, "is to that extent to have a reason for resisting what ex- cludes having that thing: and death certainly does that, for a very large range of things that one wants." A subject of categorical desires, therefore, "has reason to regard possible death as a misfortune to be avoided, and we, looking at things from his point of view, would have reason to regard his actual death as a misfortune." The fear of death need not grow out of a confused conception of death as a state which is somehow suffered, as Lucretius claims; it may be the entirely rational corollary of the desire to do certain things with one's life. Furthermore we often pity a person who has died on exactly the ground that death prevents the satisfaction of certain desires, and not merely-as Nagel suggests-that death closes certain possibilities that the subject may or may not have wanted to realize.

It will be obvious from the earlier discussion that I reject the sug- gestion that a categorical desire, or anything of this nature, is attributable to animals. For consider what would have to be the case if this were so. First, animals would have to possess essentially the same conceptions of life and death as persons do. The subject of a categorical desire must either understand death as a condition which closes a possible future forever, and leaves behind one a world in which one has no part as an agent or conscious being of any sort; or he must grasp, and then reject, this conception of death, in favor of a belief in immortality. Either way, the radical and exclusive na-




ture of the transition from life to death must be understood-it must at least be appreciated why people think in these terms-so that the full significance of the idea that "X is a reason for living" may be grasped.

One can only understand life and death in these ways if one possesses the related concepts of long-term future possibilities, of life itself as an object of value, of consciousness, agency and their annihilation, and of tragedy and similar misfortunes. It is only by an imaginative leap that possession of these concepts seems attributable to animals as well as to persons; this leap is all the more tempting, and therefore all the more dangerous, because it is not obviously absurd. It is certainly the case, for example, that some animals experience emotions of a relatively sophisticated nature, and that these emotions involve a kind of recognition of such things as human misfortune, im- pending danger to another, potential loss, and so on. I see no reason to withhold the ascription of sympathy, anxiety, even grief, to some animals; I only want to deny (what may be suggested by an anti- speciesist) that these emotions, and the range of awareness which they presuppose, give us a way into legitimately ascribing to animals an understanding of the finality, and potentially tragic significance, of death. Such understanding is necessary for a subject of categorical desires.

IV. MISFORTUNES AND RIGHTS

If my argument is correct, animals lack the very capacity which is necessary for the right to life: the capacity to have categorical desires. This capacity is necessary for a creature to be a possible subject of the misfortune of death, and this possibility is presupposed by the right to life; otherwise the right to life would be a right to be protected from something which could not conceivably be a misfortune, which does not make sense. I want to suggest, furthermore, that the capacity to be a subject of the misfortune of death is sufficient for possession of the right to life. I shall try to clarify this last point with reference to an article by Michael Tooley.10

i o. Michael Tooley, "Abortion and Infanticide," in Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. I (Fall I972).



6o Philosophy & Public Affairs

Tooley points out that the concepts of a person and human being are usefully prized apart by employing the former as a purely moral concept, entailing the right to life, and the latter to denote member- ship of the species homo sapiens. The question may then be raised whether all human beings should be regarded as persons (how about fetuses and even newborn infants?), and whether some non-humans shouldn't be regarded as persons. The distinction is a valuable one, but its usefulness depends upon the discovery of criteria for personhood in this purely moral sense. Tooley suggests that possession of the concept of self as a continuing subject of experiences, and knowl- edge that one is such a self, are necessary and sufficient for personhood. His claim seems to be that the right to life is entailed by the desire for life as a continuing "self," which is present, or explicably absent (for example, through insanity or indoctrination) in most persons. He argues (rather as I have done) that such a desire presup- poses a degree of conceptual sophistication which not all humans (for example, fetuses and newborn infants) possess.

Despite resemblances to my own position, there are important dif- ferences. For Tooley, a right to X is essentially an obligation on the part of others to respect the subject's desire for X; this is so, it seems, irrespective of whether or not the desire is reasonable or rational, good or evil. However it is most implausible to suggest that the right to life depends on the desire to live; one reason is that one does not forgo this right by relinquishing the desire to live. More generally, rights are independent of desires, for people may have desires without corresponding rights (for example, the desire to steal), and rights without corresponding desires (for example, the right to become an American citizen).

The connection between rights and misfortunes is a much more fruitful one. Not all possible misfortunes are matched by rights, though I believe the converse is true. Yet it seems reasonable to suggest that the reason why most human beings (biological concept) have the right to life is related to the fact that death is regarded as possibly a grave misfortune for a human being. The fact that most people desperately do not want to die is not what makes death a misfortune, or gives us the right to life; it is rather that this desire is an aspect of a rich understanding of what is not, so to speak, in our "interests" as



6i Death and Species Inequality

human beings. Human beings have, we feel, the capacity clearly to recognize what is so appalling about death-its finality and inexorable quality for a self-conscious being-and this recognition is part of what makes death appalling. This, combined with the fact that death is something from which we can to some extent be protected, is part of the reason why we ascribe to human beings the right to life.

I suggest, therefore, that the capacity to see death as a misfortune is sufficient for the truth of the claim that death is a misfortune for the person in question; also that this capacity is sufficient for the right to life. The concept of capacity in this context has not been examined; I have not, for example, tried to deal with the various ways in which a person may be said to possess an unrealized capacity to be a subject of the misfortune of death. Many awkward cases may be brought up in this connection: what of the incurably comatose, or-Tooley's interest-fetuses and newborn infants? To discuss such cases, and attempt to specify with precision what is meant by "capacity," would be beyond the scope of this paper. I shall close this section with some remarks on the complexity of this concept, and its resistance at certain points to a purely empirical analysis. It is of course an empirical fact that human beings and animals have the capacity to suffer physical pain; yet to claim that an incapacitated (comatose, insane, or whatever) human being nonetheless has the capacity to see death as a misfortune may be plausible, despite the impossibility of verifying this. If this is correct, we are forced to take seriously-much more so than Tooley for example-the biological relationship between human beings and persons (in the purely moral sense), and to observe the fact that, however uneasy one may feel about ascribing certain conceptual capacities to, for example, infants, this is not to be confused with the absurdity attendant on such attributions to animals. A case can be made (albeit, perhaps, a poor one) for describing the former but not the latter as possible subjects of the misfortune of death. To this extent then, all human beings are properly viewed as candidates for the right to life, even though some may be unable, so to speak, to sustain this right, by virtue of their inability to realize in any significant way the capacity we have discussed.

I have suggested, by contrast, that no non-human is even a candi- date for the right to life. This should be qualified at this point with a




distinction between those non-humans (for example, mice) of which it might be said that this is a logical impossibility, given the primitive- ness of their behavior; and those non-humans of which this cannot quite be said. Chimpanzees and dolphins, for example, are often cited as potential or actual language-users, and it is not absurd to suggest that these might turn out to qualify as persons in the purely moral sense. I have serious doubts about this possibility, as I think anyone must who understands the conceptual complexity surrounding our awareness of death, but it is not to be denied that where a small number of unusually sophisticated animals are concerned, the final answer may lie with a critical empirical investigation.

V. IMPLICATIONS FOR VEGETARIANISM

Finally, we must consider the implications of my argument for the practice of meat-eating. This has been a background concern until now: I have been mainly concerned with correcting a certain picture of animals, and the claims they legitimately make upon us. I con- cluded that animals are deserving of some moral concern, but not as much as persons; that their sufferings, not their (quick and painless) deaths, are morally significant. It remains to be seen just how this affects the vegetarianism issue; I shall close with some suggestions on this point.

My argument, if successful, has pulled the carpet from under the vegetarian ideology which seeks to protect animals from human jaws on the grounds of equal rights. This may reasonably be seen as a dis- appointing victory for someone who is trying to decide whether or not to eat meat; all it does is remove one argument for not eating meat. What is missing, it seems, is some criterion for deciding what kinds of human interests justify causing animals to suffer, or even to die a quick and painless death. With respect to the former, I have already said that certain human interests may outweigh the wrongness of causing animals to suffer; it must now be added that, despite our con- clusion that animals are not in any significant sense victims of the misfortune of death, the act of causing the quick and painless death of an animal is not necessarily morally neutral. I shall try to clarify




these points now in connection with Nozick's example, to which I promised to return.

This example is intended to show that human pleasure inadequately justifies cruelty to animals. The question then arises whether meat- eating is, as the example assumes, reasonably seen as a kind of per- sonal whim, a trivial pleasure with as little justificatory force as the eccentric satisfaction of swinging a baseball bat. If indeed this is the case, it is hard to see how meat-eating justifies either the painful or painless killing of animals. The bat-swinger whose special pleasure had as a (regretted) corollary the instantaneous killing of one, or let us say thirty, animals would, I feel, need to call upon something more than his eccentric pleasure to justify the act. Why this is so is not easy to say. It could of course be the case that the animals in question are valued by someone, or by other animals, and that this would bring us back to a verdict of gratuitous cruelty. Setting this possibility aside, we have to consider the intuition that whimsical bat-swinging, causing instantaneous animal deaths, is, if not a major misdemeanor, pointlessly destructive, perhaps in a way that is akin to the destroying of trees or certain artifacts. It is possible in this way to drive a slim wedge between the moral significance of (or appropriateness of moral concern towards) animal deaths on the one hand, and on the other the acts which bring these about.

The decision to eat or not to eat meat is, I suggest, profitably un- dertaken with this kind of example in mind. If meat-eating has more justificatory force than whimsical bat-swinging, we need to know what this is; it seems likely that, even if it were proved that meat is nutritively substitutable, a case could be made for according to meat- eating more weight as a reason for action than whimsical bat-swinging. After all, insofar as meat-eating is found pleasurable, this pleasure is generally rooted in certain attitudes and traditions of long stand- ing, which many are understandably reluctant to give up. It would of course be conservative in the extreme to give much weight to these considerations; the question is whether they carry sufficient weight to justify what I have presented as the morally tolerable, though not insignificant, activity of killing animals quickly and painlessly. My own view is that some such considerations, combined with the contingent fact that the nutritional value of meat is by no means




proven to be negligible, successfully justify this activity, though the more usual phenomenon of causing animals to suffer as they are pre- pared for death is another matter. As long as such suffering persists, and to the extent that one is confident that meat is nutritionally dispensable, vegetarianism may well be the correct course. It is important only to see that this issue cannot be settled in advance, but must be the consequence of many empirical and moral considerations.

I am grateful to Kenneth I. Winston, Laurence L. Thomas, and especially Steven L. Ross, for many helpful suggestions which have become absorbed into this paper.



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