The Cow with a Human Face:
Race, Gender, and Animal Ethics
Cathryn Bailey
It is probably not in a philosophy classroom that most of us first encounter morally inflected discussions about animals. We adore animals, of course, spending billions each year on pet care and enshrining their images in everything from sports logos to beloved children’s literature. But the dinner table likely tells a different story. With the family dog eagerly awaiting a dropped morsel, a middle-class, suburban child may be casually informed one evening that her hamburger “came from” a cow, with further questions swept away by the confident assurance of parents she trusts. In the meantime she is taught to stroke the kitten with loving attention, but not to be concerned about dead squirrels or notice the pink snouts of pigs poking through the slats of reeking semi-trucks on the freeway.
If she continues questioning as years pass, she may be informed that the same God to whom she prays for birthday presents provides humans with animals to serve our needs, or that it is the human being’s magnificent view from the top of the evolutionary ladder that justifies our dominion. If such explanations fail to reassure her, what then? Will her parents reluctantly accept her discomfort about animal suffering as a sign of an overly sensitive nature? Will they halfheartedly accommodate her vegetarian preferences with barely disguised expressions of amusement? And if the child’s family is working class, will they interpret this “finicky” behavior as a nascent tendency toward elitism? If it is a boy, will his gentleness to animals be regarded as “sweet,” or as an early sign of deficient masculinity?
Surely, even our earliest and most casual conversations about animals serve as much to develop our own identities as to address “the animal question.” In fact, given the deep contradictions glossed over in such habitual ways of speaking, a “properly socialized” adult might be forgiven for having learned to avoid the question altogether. It is to the great credit, then, of professional animal ethicists that they have brought moral philosophy out of its ivory tower and down to the farm. But what questions are most such ethicists actually asking? Are they the same ones that haunt the child at the dinner table? How does their process of analysis bear on the experience of one who has been made to understand for the first time that she is eating a cow? How do their conclusions and assumptions risk reinforcing, rather than challenging, our comfortable notions about who we are as raced, gendered, and human beings?
The human dependence on animals for food, work, scientific experiments, entertainment, and even companionship is obvious to most of us. We are aware, at least at some level, of many of the blatant forms of exploitation, such as factory farms, puppy mills, and circuses. But the purpose served by animals through the role they play in the moral arguments we create about them are much less obvious. These are not only based on particular qualities – the wolf as noble, the goose as absurd – but the very notion of what it means to be an animal may be the most basic human projection, one that functions indirectly to define humanity.
Following Derrida, Jason Wirth argues that an animal defined as a sacrificeable being helps make us human, that we become the ultimate subject by reducing the rest of the animate world to a consumable, disposable “it.” As Wirth explains, “Whether animals are below man and man is below God, or whether one takes God out of the equation, humanity has been achieved in part by dominating the animality both within and without humanity” (102). And so we express outrage at “inhumane” cruelty in protest at having been treated “like an animal,” or as “no better than a dog.” It’s a way of speaking that underscores our acceptance of the animal as the human’s ethical opposite. The meaning of being human, then, is not simply given or obvious. Rather, it is a tenuous achievement, one that demands an ongoing comparison of humans and animals wherein the animals are exposed as "obviously" inferior.
It can be little wonder, then, that animals also help establish and maintain more specific aspects of our human self-understandings, identities associated with race, gender, class, and nationality. In short, human ideas about animals affect how we perceive and treat animals even as they shape interactions between raced and gendered human beings. That we see animals through a haze of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism is clear. First, there is the childish tendency to imagine dogs as male and cats as female. We outgrow this innocent “genderfication” of species, but likely maintain the general inclination to anthropomorphize in ways shaped by race and gender. This inclination is reinforced by children’s books, films, television, and commercials, when certain cartoon animals are given voice by males rather than females, or apparently “black” or “white” voice actors. This phenomenon has been scrutinized, for example, analyses of the racial implications of King Louie, an orangutan, in The Jungle Book, and Sebastian, a crab in The Little Mermaid. That it can still be jarring to see a traditionally masculine man walking a furry “lapdog” says something about how our projections onto animals shape our mundane evaluations of people and the genders we expect them to inhabit.
The connections between these human projections, including those infected by racial and sexual stereotypes map fairly neatly onto academic ways of speaking and understanding, including those of moral philosophy. Important elements of contemporary discussions of animal ethics, both popular and academic, are simply the latest installment in an ongoing conversation that relies on ancient, binary frameworks in which women and people of color are closely aligned with the bodily and bestial realm while white masculinity is associated with the mental and ethereal. Such traditional philosophical associations have been explored by a number of feminists, for example, Susan Bordo and Nancy Tuana, and it is instructive to examine how this ideological legacy impacts both moral philosophy and our casual ethical conversations.
Because animals are regarded as the epitome of all that is bodily – nasty, smelly, instinctive, and dumb – they have been regarded as the very opposite of a reason construed as universal, pure, and dispassionate. White women, people of color, and animals have served as a foil for reason in action, dark objects against which light of rationality proudly shows itself. This is a pure reason that defines the terms of the debate, the nature of existence itself, even as it retreats from the messiness of actual physical reality. The result is a philosophical “flight to objectivity,” as Bordo (1987) calls it, which offers the illusory promise of a comfortable psychological distance, and a reaffirmation of the value and primacy of reason.
With this in mind, it is almost to be expected that the most highly regarded works of animal ethics would be those that maintain some distance from the embarrassingly physical beings they are writing about. And, in fact, some key contributions to animal ethics such as Animal Rights by Regan and Animal Liberation by Singer have been praised for their “lack of emotion.” Not surprisingly, Regan recommends that animal ethicists make a “concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or parade our sentiments” (2004). He is clearly sensitive to the fact that one who becomes upset by how humans treat animals is likely to be mocked and dismissed (and at the same time, implicitly gendered as “weak” and “female”).
But what is increasingly unclear is why anyone should be more concerned about uncaged emotion than rampant reason. It appears that academics get away with being so dismissive about emotion precisely because of the inherited ideological legacy that has largely vilified it. In the West, ours is an intellectual tradition based on a “tendency to view emotion and desire with deep suspicion, as something more to do with the body we have as animals than the mind we have as humans” (Little). This is directly relevant to conversations about animal ethics because the desire to escape emotion emerges from the fantasy of rising above our animal nature. Feminist scholar Josephine Donovan pushes the point even further, claiming that such rarified animal ethics, with this “bias toward rationalism,” is based on a philosophical position that "established a major theoretical justification for animal abuse” (1996, 35).
A similar concern is expressed by J.M. Coetzee’s fictional character, Elizabeth Costello, who is deeply troubled by the human treatment of animals:
"I am not sure I want to concede that I share reason with my opponent. Not when reason is what underpins the whole long philosophical tradition, stretching back to Descartes and beyond Descartes, through Aquinas and Augustine to the Stoics and Aristotle. If the last common ground I have … is reason, and if reason is what sets me apart from the veal calf, then thank you but no thank you, I’ll talk to someone else" (66-67).
It is formal academic philosophy that Costello criticizes most directly here, a genre that often indulges in verbal gamesmanship and facile logical distinctions, pretending all the while to say something meaningful. It is not just silly and pompous, but blasphemous, she suggests, to speak of the unspeakable suffering of animals in a way that privileges “piddling distinctions” over empathy.
I recall my own initiation into the formal study of animal ethics with remarkable clarity. My undergraduate philosophy class was asked what we would do at sea on a life raft with several other people and a friendly dog. “Who would you save?” the teacher asked, though neither he nor we thought we were being asked to sincerely respond. Rather, he was trying to expose our supposedly shared, “commonsense” belief in the supreme value of human life. No one objected to the introduction of such an unlikely scenario, but if anyone had, they would have become fodder to demonstrate the importance of abstract “philosophically sophisticated” deliberation. Anyone who was disturbed by being asked to imagine this hapless dog on the verge of sacrifice, would have been gently shamed for such a childish emotional response.
I remember my undergraduate ethics courses so well partly because I went on to perform in similar classrooms as a philosophy professor years later. I too insisted on the indispensability of hypothetical “thought experiments,” encouraging my students to imaginatively weigh the value of all they held dear, including their grandparents, pets, and futures. Apparently, my education was not so different from that of Regan and other highly regarded philosophers, as reflected in his hypothetical example: “There are five survivors: four normal adults and a dog. The boat has room enough only for four. Someone must go or else all will perish. Who should it be?” (2004, 324).
The emphasis on and reverence for the abstract and rational is explicit in a formally philosophical education. As many feminists have documented, from the very inception of western philosophy, at least from the time of Plato, rationality has been intimately linked with privileged masculinity. Women, slaves, and variously defined “others” have been made to represent physicality and emotion and then been denigrated for this association. But these longstanding associations aren’t just the stuff of philosophers; they seem to underlie the more casual discourses of animal ethics as well. Otherwise, it would not be so concerning.
And we develop our identities in all sorts of ways as a result of such discourses. So, for example, barely disguised ethnocentric pronouncements about the “civility” of foreign others may be based on that nation’s apparent orientation to animals. The Spanish bullfight, for example, emerges as a durable symbol that supports North American moral superiority in that it represents a moral limit for the treatment of animals. The spectacle of the bullfight brings to mind apparently “savage” others -- those cheering throngs that fill the dusty arenas -- and functions to maintain the “civilized” identities of those who express their moral outrage. In simple terms, part of how “we” know we are morally superior is because we don’t do that. And the measure of our own civility is reflected in how vociferously we protest them.
An example closer to home is the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal, which I read as reaffirming the identity of middle-class whites. That this spectacle of animal cruelty became and remained front-page news while countless other instances of animal cruelty have gone unnoticed is illuminating. The “appropriate” (white, middle-class) moral outrage is directed at Vick, but I wonder why his indifference to the suffering of dogs is thought to be more outrageous than the almost universal disregard of the suffering of most animals most of the time. Except, of course, for a select group of dogs, cats, and horses, the ones we name and include in our memoirs. This moral outrage also reinforces the supposed bestiality of Vick. Can it be a coincidence that the public recounting of his abuse of dogs echoes centuries old stereotypes of Black men as more animal than human, more emotional than rational? Vick’s membership in the category of “human,” tenuous at best, is revoked on the grounds of his cruel treatment of man’s best friend, his “inhumane” behavior serving to confirm his inhumanity.
I am indebted to earlier feminists as I consider connections between animal and human exploitation, especially when it comes to discussions about ethical vegetarianism. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, for example, Carol Adams is relentless in her arguments that the abuse and exploitation of women is connected to the exploitation of animals. One consumes women through pornography as one consumes animal flesh, she explains. As she argues in a later work , “Sexism and speciesism are interconnected, mutually reinforcing systems of oppression and ways of organizing the world” (2007, 202). She explores how “meat” (itself a problematic term) is intimately linked to white, Western masculinity with femininity associated with plants and vegetation in general, along with negative connotations of passivity. This lesson was brought home to me by my family’s concern when my brother, a vegetarian, enlisted in the military. They didn’t have to read Adams to have developed a clear understanding of how his vegetarianism would be used to challenge his masculinity.
In the ethical discussions about vegetarianism, the mundane, but deeply rooted, connections between race, gender, class, and animals is especially well reflected. I was first moved to consider this because of the surprisingly intense objections I heard from some feminists to ethical vegetarianism, including occasional encounters with women who seemed to connect being carnivores with being feminist. That I was once startled by the proud and loud declaration of a feminist acquaintance that she wanted a “big, bloody steak” reveals much about my own associations of gender, politics, and the food culture.
But given the long historical and cultural connections among masculinity, wealth, power, and meat, as well as the persecution of those who express sympathy with animals as “sissies,” it makes sense that equality-minded women might reject vegetarianism. Similar associations between race, class and eating practices in the Western world help account for the common impression of vegetarianism as an obnoxious expression of white, bourgeois elitism. Such a reduction not only minimizes the contributions and participation of people of color to the vegetarian movement, but it obscures the fact that, worldwide, heavily vegetarian diets are more common than not.
Not only, then, do we rely on notions about animals to construct our ideas about human identity, we also use ideas about human “others” to disguise and deflect, even from ourselves, the grim reality of our dealings with animals. Knowing that “moral outrage” serves at least partly to help limit and distort identities also helps account for why discussions of animal ethics are so illuminating; we probably make such judgments more for our own sake than for theirs. The philosopher may rush to point out that here I am making a psychological claim and not one that is properly philosophical at all. I will embrace this imagined criticism since I think more psychology is exactly what philosophy needs. In fact, it’s one of the greatest strengths of the alternative ethical accounts I embrace, for example feminist pragmatism, that psychology is taken as seriously as it deserves to be.
A feminist perspective shaped by Buddhism and pragmatism is especially attractive in that it urges us to consider that our practice of engaging in ethical discussions and debates almost certainly functions to serve complicated and predictable psychological needs. Whether in the classroom or at the dinner table, we should not assume that our talk of animals is primarily about our concern for them, but might also consider how this sort of debate serves as scaffolding for our raced, gendered, and tenuously human identities. Of course, since the animal question nags and tugs at many of us, discussing animal ethics has the additional advantage of helping us feel we are doing something when we may actually be doing exactly nothing. It’s a process I came to understand intimately when, for years, instead of quitting smoking, I studied books about it and discussed it ad nauseum. We might wonder to what extent the very human habit of dialogue and discussion in general serves as a smokescreen to indefinitely postpone action, that, at the deepest level, we feel to be utterly urgent and necessary.
A feminist ethics of care harmonizes well with the Mahayana Buddhist emphasis on compassion and pragmatist “sympathy.” A dialogue shaped by Buddhism, feminism, and pragmatism, because it pushes us toward a reflective engagement with emotion, will not permit us to sidestep the discomfort that might lead to attitudinal and actual behavioral change. It encourages us to transcend our “blindness toward the feelings of peoples and creatures different from ourselves” which is “the greatest obstacle to the ethical life” (Seigfried, 222). Not coincidentally, the Buddha saw the intellect as being on the same plane as our other natural senses, a wonderfully useful capacity, but not more fundamental than the others. This more modest, supporting role accorded to rationality by feminism, pragmatism, and Buddhism may be just the dose of humility we need to shift the terms and purpose of animal ethics.
As a young professor I was perfectly willing to treat the most poignant, ferociously moral questions as being no weightier than puzzles. What I wanted, of course, was to be taken seriously as a philosopher. Fortunately, because I was also being forged though my encounters with Buddhism and feminism, both of which offer powerful critiques of abstract philosophical approaches, my emotional and intellectual dissonance became intense. My current interest in animal ethics, then, is a reflection of my own struggle to reconcile the imprint of my philosophical training with my maturing awareness of the precious, concrete particularity of suffering. That I have to get personal here makes sense since I am insisting that a new approach to animal ethics will be based on fearlessly personal self-exploration. It will require an honest assessment of our conscious beliefs as well as some of our (usually invisible) meta-philosophical assumptions. And it will include a hard look at how we use and misuse clever and impassioned talk about animal suffering to define and maintain our own privileged complacency.
It is no accident, then, that my attention has been captured by what I call the “sensitive carnivore movement,” first popularized by the publication of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Building on the ideologies associated with the organic and local food movements, which emphasize the environmental and health benefits of more intentional eating practices, the sensitive carnivore is one who is ostensibly committed to being self-reflective in the ways I suggest. The literature surrounding it is not aimed so much at discouraging the eating of animals, but at encouraging more responsible and sustainable eating practices, which may include eating meat. So, for example, the book Eating Animals is praised by a popular magazine for “its unflinching insistence that we take stringent moral inventory of our eating habits” (Reese, 2009, 60); it is seen as a strength of the book that it is more about the first word in the title than the second.
Although there are positive aspects to this movement, here too the animal seems to serve indirectly as a human resource. That is, the idea of the animal is mined for its potential to facilitate human self-actualization. A world peopled by sensitive carnivores would surely result in far less animal suffering than the one we have and this is no small thing, but surely we can do better than continue to reduce the animal to a supporting role in our own self-help drama. Animals can effectively serve this rhetorical and psychological purpose, certainly, just as they serve to pull our carts, fill our bellies, and amuse us, but we should be scrupulously honest about whom the discourse ultimately serves.
Maybe it is inevitable that all human conversations, including those about animals, reflect human purposes and values. But there is something distinctive about animal ethics that deserves special attention. These discussions are more foundational than others because they function, in circular fashion, to help us define our very identities, as raced, gendered, and human. It is in speaking of those other animals, those lesser creatures, that we come to occupy the very position of rational subject that marks our superiority, our humanity. We often appeal to the line between human and animal to ground our ethical reflections about animals, but it is a line created partly through these very discussions.
All too often, then, our earnest talk of animals occurs behind a mask. It is the image of a chicken, a pig, or an elephant, that, when removed, turns out to have been a human face all along.
Sources
Adams, Carol J. 2007. “Caring About Suffering: A Feminist Exploration” [1995] in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, eds., Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams. (New York: Columbia University Press), 198–226.
Adams, Carol J. 1991. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum Publishing Co.
Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
---------- 1987. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Coetzee, J.M. 1999. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jaques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28: 369–418.
Donovan, Josephine. “1996. "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory.” In Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, eds., Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams. New York: Continuum, pp. 34-59.
Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1978.
Little, Margaret Olivia. 1995. “Seeing and Caring: The Role of Affect in Feminist Moral Epistemology.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 7(31), p. 117 (ProQuest Information and Learning Co.).
Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press.
Reese, Jennifer. 2009. “Eating Animals: Jonathan Safran Foer,” Entertainment Weekly, November 6.
Regan, Tom. 2004. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press.
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. University of Chicago Press.
Singer, Peter. 1999. “Reflections,” in The Lives of Animals, J.M. Coetzee, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 85–91.
Wirth, Jason M. 2001. “Animal Desiring: Nietzsche, Bataille, and a World without Image.” Research in Phenomenology, Volume 31, Number 1, pp. 96-112.
It is probably not in a philosophy classroom that most of us first encounter morally inflected discussions about animals. We adore animals, of course, spending billions each year on pet care and enshrining their images in everything from sports logos to beloved children’s literature. But the dinner table likely tells a different story. With the family dog eagerly awaiting a dropped morsel, a middle-class, suburban child may be casually informed one evening that her hamburger “came from” a cow, with further questions swept away by the confident assurance of parents she trusts. In the meantime she is taught to stroke the kitten with loving attention, but not to be concerned about dead squirrels or notice the pink snouts of pigs poking through the slats of reeking semi-trucks on the freeway.
If she continues questioning as years pass, she may be informed that the same God to whom she prays for birthday presents provides humans with animals to serve our needs, or that it is the human being’s magnificent view from the top of the evolutionary ladder that justifies our dominion. If such explanations fail to reassure her, what then? Will her parents reluctantly accept her discomfort about animal suffering as a sign of an overly sensitive nature? Will they halfheartedly accommodate her vegetarian preferences with barely disguised expressions of amusement? And if the child’s family is working class, will they interpret this “finicky” behavior as a nascent tendency toward elitism? If it is a boy, will his gentleness to animals be regarded as “sweet,” or as an early sign of deficient masculinity?
Surely, even our earliest and most casual conversations about animals serve as much to develop our own identities as to address “the animal question.” In fact, given the deep contradictions glossed over in such habitual ways of speaking, a “properly socialized” adult might be forgiven for having learned to avoid the question altogether. It is to the great credit, then, of professional animal ethicists that they have brought moral philosophy out of its ivory tower and down to the farm. But what questions are most such ethicists actually asking? Are they the same ones that haunt the child at the dinner table? How does their process of analysis bear on the experience of one who has been made to understand for the first time that she is eating a cow? How do their conclusions and assumptions risk reinforcing, rather than challenging, our comfortable notions about who we are as raced, gendered, and human beings?
The human dependence on animals for food, work, scientific experiments, entertainment, and even companionship is obvious to most of us. We are aware, at least at some level, of many of the blatant forms of exploitation, such as factory farms, puppy mills, and circuses. But the purpose served by animals through the role they play in the moral arguments we create about them are much less obvious. These are not only based on particular qualities – the wolf as noble, the goose as absurd – but the very notion of what it means to be an animal may be the most basic human projection, one that functions indirectly to define humanity.
Following Derrida, Jason Wirth argues that an animal defined as a sacrificeable being helps make us human, that we become the ultimate subject by reducing the rest of the animate world to a consumable, disposable “it.” As Wirth explains, “Whether animals are below man and man is below God, or whether one takes God out of the equation, humanity has been achieved in part by dominating the animality both within and without humanity” (102). And so we express outrage at “inhumane” cruelty in protest at having been treated “like an animal,” or as “no better than a dog.” It’s a way of speaking that underscores our acceptance of the animal as the human’s ethical opposite. The meaning of being human, then, is not simply given or obvious. Rather, it is a tenuous achievement, one that demands an ongoing comparison of humans and animals wherein the animals are exposed as "obviously" inferior.
It can be little wonder, then, that animals also help establish and maintain more specific aspects of our human self-understandings, identities associated with race, gender, class, and nationality. In short, human ideas about animals affect how we perceive and treat animals even as they shape interactions between raced and gendered human beings. That we see animals through a haze of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism is clear. First, there is the childish tendency to imagine dogs as male and cats as female. We outgrow this innocent “genderfication” of species, but likely maintain the general inclination to anthropomorphize in ways shaped by race and gender. This inclination is reinforced by children’s books, films, television, and commercials, when certain cartoon animals are given voice by males rather than females, or apparently “black” or “white” voice actors. This phenomenon has been scrutinized, for example, analyses of the racial implications of King Louie, an orangutan, in The Jungle Book, and Sebastian, a crab in The Little Mermaid. That it can still be jarring to see a traditionally masculine man walking a furry “lapdog” says something about how our projections onto animals shape our mundane evaluations of people and the genders we expect them to inhabit.
The connections between these human projections, including those infected by racial and sexual stereotypes map fairly neatly onto academic ways of speaking and understanding, including those of moral philosophy. Important elements of contemporary discussions of animal ethics, both popular and academic, are simply the latest installment in an ongoing conversation that relies on ancient, binary frameworks in which women and people of color are closely aligned with the bodily and bestial realm while white masculinity is associated with the mental and ethereal. Such traditional philosophical associations have been explored by a number of feminists, for example, Susan Bordo and Nancy Tuana, and it is instructive to examine how this ideological legacy impacts both moral philosophy and our casual ethical conversations.
Because animals are regarded as the epitome of all that is bodily – nasty, smelly, instinctive, and dumb – they have been regarded as the very opposite of a reason construed as universal, pure, and dispassionate. White women, people of color, and animals have served as a foil for reason in action, dark objects against which light of rationality proudly shows itself. This is a pure reason that defines the terms of the debate, the nature of existence itself, even as it retreats from the messiness of actual physical reality. The result is a philosophical “flight to objectivity,” as Bordo (1987) calls it, which offers the illusory promise of a comfortable psychological distance, and a reaffirmation of the value and primacy of reason.
With this in mind, it is almost to be expected that the most highly regarded works of animal ethics would be those that maintain some distance from the embarrassingly physical beings they are writing about. And, in fact, some key contributions to animal ethics such as Animal Rights by Regan and Animal Liberation by Singer have been praised for their “lack of emotion.” Not surprisingly, Regan recommends that animal ethicists make a “concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or parade our sentiments” (2004). He is clearly sensitive to the fact that one who becomes upset by how humans treat animals is likely to be mocked and dismissed (and at the same time, implicitly gendered as “weak” and “female”).
But what is increasingly unclear is why anyone should be more concerned about uncaged emotion than rampant reason. It appears that academics get away with being so dismissive about emotion precisely because of the inherited ideological legacy that has largely vilified it. In the West, ours is an intellectual tradition based on a “tendency to view emotion and desire with deep suspicion, as something more to do with the body we have as animals than the mind we have as humans” (Little). This is directly relevant to conversations about animal ethics because the desire to escape emotion emerges from the fantasy of rising above our animal nature. Feminist scholar Josephine Donovan pushes the point even further, claiming that such rarified animal ethics, with this “bias toward rationalism,” is based on a philosophical position that "established a major theoretical justification for animal abuse” (1996, 35).
A similar concern is expressed by J.M. Coetzee’s fictional character, Elizabeth Costello, who is deeply troubled by the human treatment of animals:
"I am not sure I want to concede that I share reason with my opponent. Not when reason is what underpins the whole long philosophical tradition, stretching back to Descartes and beyond Descartes, through Aquinas and Augustine to the Stoics and Aristotle. If the last common ground I have … is reason, and if reason is what sets me apart from the veal calf, then thank you but no thank you, I’ll talk to someone else" (66-67).
It is formal academic philosophy that Costello criticizes most directly here, a genre that often indulges in verbal gamesmanship and facile logical distinctions, pretending all the while to say something meaningful. It is not just silly and pompous, but blasphemous, she suggests, to speak of the unspeakable suffering of animals in a way that privileges “piddling distinctions” over empathy.
I recall my own initiation into the formal study of animal ethics with remarkable clarity. My undergraduate philosophy class was asked what we would do at sea on a life raft with several other people and a friendly dog. “Who would you save?” the teacher asked, though neither he nor we thought we were being asked to sincerely respond. Rather, he was trying to expose our supposedly shared, “commonsense” belief in the supreme value of human life. No one objected to the introduction of such an unlikely scenario, but if anyone had, they would have become fodder to demonstrate the importance of abstract “philosophically sophisticated” deliberation. Anyone who was disturbed by being asked to imagine this hapless dog on the verge of sacrifice, would have been gently shamed for such a childish emotional response.
I remember my undergraduate ethics courses so well partly because I went on to perform in similar classrooms as a philosophy professor years later. I too insisted on the indispensability of hypothetical “thought experiments,” encouraging my students to imaginatively weigh the value of all they held dear, including their grandparents, pets, and futures. Apparently, my education was not so different from that of Regan and other highly regarded philosophers, as reflected in his hypothetical example: “There are five survivors: four normal adults and a dog. The boat has room enough only for four. Someone must go or else all will perish. Who should it be?” (2004, 324).
The emphasis on and reverence for the abstract and rational is explicit in a formally philosophical education. As many feminists have documented, from the very inception of western philosophy, at least from the time of Plato, rationality has been intimately linked with privileged masculinity. Women, slaves, and variously defined “others” have been made to represent physicality and emotion and then been denigrated for this association. But these longstanding associations aren’t just the stuff of philosophers; they seem to underlie the more casual discourses of animal ethics as well. Otherwise, it would not be so concerning.
And we develop our identities in all sorts of ways as a result of such discourses. So, for example, barely disguised ethnocentric pronouncements about the “civility” of foreign others may be based on that nation’s apparent orientation to animals. The Spanish bullfight, for example, emerges as a durable symbol that supports North American moral superiority in that it represents a moral limit for the treatment of animals. The spectacle of the bullfight brings to mind apparently “savage” others -- those cheering throngs that fill the dusty arenas -- and functions to maintain the “civilized” identities of those who express their moral outrage. In simple terms, part of how “we” know we are morally superior is because we don’t do that. And the measure of our own civility is reflected in how vociferously we protest them.
An example closer to home is the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal, which I read as reaffirming the identity of middle-class whites. That this spectacle of animal cruelty became and remained front-page news while countless other instances of animal cruelty have gone unnoticed is illuminating. The “appropriate” (white, middle-class) moral outrage is directed at Vick, but I wonder why his indifference to the suffering of dogs is thought to be more outrageous than the almost universal disregard of the suffering of most animals most of the time. Except, of course, for a select group of dogs, cats, and horses, the ones we name and include in our memoirs. This moral outrage also reinforces the supposed bestiality of Vick. Can it be a coincidence that the public recounting of his abuse of dogs echoes centuries old stereotypes of Black men as more animal than human, more emotional than rational? Vick’s membership in the category of “human,” tenuous at best, is revoked on the grounds of his cruel treatment of man’s best friend, his “inhumane” behavior serving to confirm his inhumanity.
I am indebted to earlier feminists as I consider connections between animal and human exploitation, especially when it comes to discussions about ethical vegetarianism. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, for example, Carol Adams is relentless in her arguments that the abuse and exploitation of women is connected to the exploitation of animals. One consumes women through pornography as one consumes animal flesh, she explains. As she argues in a later work , “Sexism and speciesism are interconnected, mutually reinforcing systems of oppression and ways of organizing the world” (2007, 202). She explores how “meat” (itself a problematic term) is intimately linked to white, Western masculinity with femininity associated with plants and vegetation in general, along with negative connotations of passivity. This lesson was brought home to me by my family’s concern when my brother, a vegetarian, enlisted in the military. They didn’t have to read Adams to have developed a clear understanding of how his vegetarianism would be used to challenge his masculinity.
In the ethical discussions about vegetarianism, the mundane, but deeply rooted, connections between race, gender, class, and animals is especially well reflected. I was first moved to consider this because of the surprisingly intense objections I heard from some feminists to ethical vegetarianism, including occasional encounters with women who seemed to connect being carnivores with being feminist. That I was once startled by the proud and loud declaration of a feminist acquaintance that she wanted a “big, bloody steak” reveals much about my own associations of gender, politics, and the food culture.
But given the long historical and cultural connections among masculinity, wealth, power, and meat, as well as the persecution of those who express sympathy with animals as “sissies,” it makes sense that equality-minded women might reject vegetarianism. Similar associations between race, class and eating practices in the Western world help account for the common impression of vegetarianism as an obnoxious expression of white, bourgeois elitism. Such a reduction not only minimizes the contributions and participation of people of color to the vegetarian movement, but it obscures the fact that, worldwide, heavily vegetarian diets are more common than not.
Not only, then, do we rely on notions about animals to construct our ideas about human identity, we also use ideas about human “others” to disguise and deflect, even from ourselves, the grim reality of our dealings with animals. Knowing that “moral outrage” serves at least partly to help limit and distort identities also helps account for why discussions of animal ethics are so illuminating; we probably make such judgments more for our own sake than for theirs. The philosopher may rush to point out that here I am making a psychological claim and not one that is properly philosophical at all. I will embrace this imagined criticism since I think more psychology is exactly what philosophy needs. In fact, it’s one of the greatest strengths of the alternative ethical accounts I embrace, for example feminist pragmatism, that psychology is taken as seriously as it deserves to be.
A feminist perspective shaped by Buddhism and pragmatism is especially attractive in that it urges us to consider that our practice of engaging in ethical discussions and debates almost certainly functions to serve complicated and predictable psychological needs. Whether in the classroom or at the dinner table, we should not assume that our talk of animals is primarily about our concern for them, but might also consider how this sort of debate serves as scaffolding for our raced, gendered, and tenuously human identities. Of course, since the animal question nags and tugs at many of us, discussing animal ethics has the additional advantage of helping us feel we are doing something when we may actually be doing exactly nothing. It’s a process I came to understand intimately when, for years, instead of quitting smoking, I studied books about it and discussed it ad nauseum. We might wonder to what extent the very human habit of dialogue and discussion in general serves as a smokescreen to indefinitely postpone action, that, at the deepest level, we feel to be utterly urgent and necessary.
A feminist ethics of care harmonizes well with the Mahayana Buddhist emphasis on compassion and pragmatist “sympathy.” A dialogue shaped by Buddhism, feminism, and pragmatism, because it pushes us toward a reflective engagement with emotion, will not permit us to sidestep the discomfort that might lead to attitudinal and actual behavioral change. It encourages us to transcend our “blindness toward the feelings of peoples and creatures different from ourselves” which is “the greatest obstacle to the ethical life” (Seigfried, 222). Not coincidentally, the Buddha saw the intellect as being on the same plane as our other natural senses, a wonderfully useful capacity, but not more fundamental than the others. This more modest, supporting role accorded to rationality by feminism, pragmatism, and Buddhism may be just the dose of humility we need to shift the terms and purpose of animal ethics.
As a young professor I was perfectly willing to treat the most poignant, ferociously moral questions as being no weightier than puzzles. What I wanted, of course, was to be taken seriously as a philosopher. Fortunately, because I was also being forged though my encounters with Buddhism and feminism, both of which offer powerful critiques of abstract philosophical approaches, my emotional and intellectual dissonance became intense. My current interest in animal ethics, then, is a reflection of my own struggle to reconcile the imprint of my philosophical training with my maturing awareness of the precious, concrete particularity of suffering. That I have to get personal here makes sense since I am insisting that a new approach to animal ethics will be based on fearlessly personal self-exploration. It will require an honest assessment of our conscious beliefs as well as some of our (usually invisible) meta-philosophical assumptions. And it will include a hard look at how we use and misuse clever and impassioned talk about animal suffering to define and maintain our own privileged complacency.
It is no accident, then, that my attention has been captured by what I call the “sensitive carnivore movement,” first popularized by the publication of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Building on the ideologies associated with the organic and local food movements, which emphasize the environmental and health benefits of more intentional eating practices, the sensitive carnivore is one who is ostensibly committed to being self-reflective in the ways I suggest. The literature surrounding it is not aimed so much at discouraging the eating of animals, but at encouraging more responsible and sustainable eating practices, which may include eating meat. So, for example, the book Eating Animals is praised by a popular magazine for “its unflinching insistence that we take stringent moral inventory of our eating habits” (Reese, 2009, 60); it is seen as a strength of the book that it is more about the first word in the title than the second.
Although there are positive aspects to this movement, here too the animal seems to serve indirectly as a human resource. That is, the idea of the animal is mined for its potential to facilitate human self-actualization. A world peopled by sensitive carnivores would surely result in far less animal suffering than the one we have and this is no small thing, but surely we can do better than continue to reduce the animal to a supporting role in our own self-help drama. Animals can effectively serve this rhetorical and psychological purpose, certainly, just as they serve to pull our carts, fill our bellies, and amuse us, but we should be scrupulously honest about whom the discourse ultimately serves.
Maybe it is inevitable that all human conversations, including those about animals, reflect human purposes and values. But there is something distinctive about animal ethics that deserves special attention. These discussions are more foundational than others because they function, in circular fashion, to help us define our very identities, as raced, gendered, and human. It is in speaking of those other animals, those lesser creatures, that we come to occupy the very position of rational subject that marks our superiority, our humanity. We often appeal to the line between human and animal to ground our ethical reflections about animals, but it is a line created partly through these very discussions.
All too often, then, our earnest talk of animals occurs behind a mask. It is the image of a chicken, a pig, or an elephant, that, when removed, turns out to have been a human face all along.
Sources
Adams, Carol J. 2007. “Caring About Suffering: A Feminist Exploration” [1995] in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, eds., Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams. (New York: Columbia University Press), 198–226.
Adams, Carol J. 1991. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum Publishing Co.
Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
---------- 1987. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Coetzee, J.M. 1999. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jaques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28: 369–418.
Donovan, Josephine. “1996. "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory.” In Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, eds., Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams. New York: Continuum, pp. 34-59.
Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1978.
Little, Margaret Olivia. 1995. “Seeing and Caring: The Role of Affect in Feminist Moral Epistemology.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 7(31), p. 117 (ProQuest Information and Learning Co.).
Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press.
Reese, Jennifer. 2009. “Eating Animals: Jonathan Safran Foer,” Entertainment Weekly, November 6.
Regan, Tom. 2004. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press.
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. University of Chicago Press.
Singer, Peter. 1999. “Reflections,” in The Lives of Animals, J.M. Coetzee, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 85–91.
Wirth, Jason M. 2001. “Animal Desiring: Nietzsche, Bataille, and a World without Image.” Research in Phenomenology, Volume 31, Number 1, pp. 96-112.
About the author
Cathryn Bailey earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Missouri in 1994 and serves as Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Western Michigan University. Her focus is on feminist philosophy, especially ethics and epistemology. Her most recent publications, exploring the raced, gendered, and heteronormative nature of animal ethics discourse, and the work of Anna Julia Cooper, have appeared in Hypatia, Ethics and the Environment, and Philosophia Africana.