by Mike O’Brien
This column was going to be about new issues in animal ethics and politics, following a slew of recent publications by Kristin Andrews, whose work I’ve been following for a few years. My big question about animal normativity, and the clues it may hold about the emergence of human capacities of moral reasoning, is whether animals display any signs of “meta-normative” capacities. In other words, whether they are able to reflect upon the norms they follow, and possibly rank or otherwise distinguish the generality and importance of these norms. So far, the answer is no, and one possible reason for this is that language may be a necessary tool for such abstract reflection. (Another reason is that it is very difficult to devise ways of investigating such capacities, or even to define them in ways that are not question-begging or overly anthropocentric). As no other animal species has yet demonstrated anything like human languages’ abilities of abstract representation and logical proposition, if moral reflection is dependent on language capacities then it may be unique to humans. (Yes, there are talking parrots and signing apes whose language abilities exceed what was hitherto believed possible, but they only achieved this by deliberate human tutelage, and the most capable of these animal individuals are not necessarily representative of species-wide capacities).
Curious whether proto-meta-ethical capacities may have been enabled in other species by proto-linguistic capacities, I wondered whether anyone has looked into pantomime in apes and other animals as a representational form of communication. Sure enough, many researchers have, with a great flourishing about a decade ago, including a paper by Dr Andrews that managed to escape my attention. But I’m not going to write about pantomime’s role in enabling proto-meta-ethical cognition in apes. Not in this column, anyway. Because, while navigating the many references and bookmarks of animal ethics publications littering my digital writing desk, I happened upon a paper about the ethical quandaries of owning a simulated human skin lampshade. How does one simply pass that over in silence?
The authors of the paper are Bob Fischer and Burkay Ozturk (hereafter shortened as F&O). I had the pleasure of meeting Fischer virtually in a Zoom conference earlier this year. I was already indebted to his work, as he is one of only two reviewers (as far as I can tell) to have written an appropriately negative review of Shelly Kagan’s God-awful book on animal ethics, “How to Count Animals, More or Less”. (The original draft of this column had a whole paragraph about how bad this book is, and how much I hated it, and how much the generally positive reception it enjoyed in the philosophy literature shook my faith in academic philosophy. I deleted it because it wasn’t long enough.)
F&O’s paper, published in 2016* and entitled “Facsimiles of Flesh”, posits a homicide detective who sees a lampshade made from human skin in the home of a serial killer and, struck with admiration for its handiwork and aesthetic qualities, desires to own a (non-human) replica. We are asked to consider why this desire is morally problematic (the authors stipulates that it is), and whether these moral problems also plague the consumption of imitation meat. I usually have a tin ear for the word “problematic”, along with “reasonable” and “plausible”. It seems like a way of expressing discomfort, and intimating that this discomfort stems from objectively solid reasons, without committing to any claims about those reasons. The paper explores possible reasons at length, so these misgivings about “problematic” are not properly directed at his employment of the word, but rather at its proliferation in general discourse as an under-defined weasel-word. The paper also gives lengthy consideration to the evidentiary value of intuitions, in the form of disgust, though the authors do so while explicitly considering the possibility that such twiggings are just false positives from a clunky inherited heuristic system.
Of several possible grounds for moral wrongness explored by F&O, the one that I found most compelling was a lack of reverence (for the life of the serial killer’s victims in the lampshade case, and for the lives of animals slaughtered for meat in the fake meat case). When I am drawn by thumbnails of Youtube cooking videos, with tantalizing images of aged briskets and Michelin-starred game hens, I do sometimes feel an internal reproach; I think a lack of due reverence for animals, or due repugnance at their abuse, is the object of that reproach. This wrongness is not of a clear-cut consequential variety, or even necessarily of a clear deontological maxim-violating variety; rather, it is the violation of something like an “imperfect duty”, such as “give to charity” or “be patient with others”. No one instance of failing to give to charity or failing to be patient with others could mark a person as totally non-charity-giving or non-patience-having, but perhaps some failures have more symbolic weight than others. This is subject to sometimes capricious changes in circumstance, such as the amount of money in my pocket when I am asked to donate or the amount of sleep I got the night before being called to be patient with someone. These episodes are opportunities to perform significant, symbolic acts of value-affirmation, “virtue-signalling” not in the pejorative rhetorical sense but as a means of showing to ourselves what values we realize, and of strengthening our moral commitments though performance. Moral rectitude is more like gardening than snooker, and cultivating a subtly enmeshed variety of habits and tendencies is more likely to produce better outcomes than preparing for the perfect shot.
This raises the question of character. In the case of the detective’s replica skin lampshade, we might ask whether the aesthetic appreciation is not indicative of some darker fascination. This kind of concern is often part of these disgust-as-moral-clue discussions; acts or attitudes which are themselves merely off-putting or convention-breaking might hint at hidden evils. Take the repugnance (to some) of the seemingly obvious answer to the standard trolley problem: flip the switch so that one dies rather than five. Do people object to saving lives? Probably not. But they might worry that someone who is comfortable with being a death-causing agent (rather than a non-death-preventing bystander) is capable of unhesitant killing for reasons less noble than saving people from runaway trolleys. (This assumes, of course, that the presumed horror at unreserved switch-flippers, and the presumed weightiness of the distinction between making happen and letting happen, are not narrowly specific to some cultures and not others.) Maybe the detective really is an upstanding moral agent with a grotesque lampshade, and maybe the trolley-switching saviour-of-five-and-executioner-of-one really is just a committed consequentialist who is no more inclined to killing than anyone else. We would expect our self-preserving assemblage of moral and folk-psychological intuitions to prompt us to keep an eye on such characters, though.
This paper grabbed my attention not only because of the snappy title, but because I am a regular eater of fake meat. I am also a (very) rare eater of meat and animal products that would otherwise be wasted, and have been known to make little arts-and-craft projects with scrap leather. I know several militant vegans (defined by their actions, not their personalities) who would not eat realistic meat substitutes due to a combination of immediate disgust and moral objection. On the former ground, they would claim that meat, and by extension convincingly faked meat, no longer appears to them as appetizing, or even as belonging to the category of “food”. On the latter ground, they would claim that enjoying fake meat continues to normalize animal-eating culture and valourise the aesthetic experience of meat-eating. (They may say much else besides this, as they spend a lot of time thinking about these things). I have considered these possibilities, too. I confess that I haven’t thought too hard about the degree to which the economic systems of meat-provision are entwined with the fake-meat industry, and how much enriching the coffers of the latter enriches those of the former. Such systemic questions tend to end in an exhausted sigh of “no ethical consumption under capitalism”, and I tell myself that I worry too much. I already gave up cheese, for God’s sake. (Catholic vegans can quite literally give up cheese for God’s sake, as Pope Francis has enunciated clearly the divine command to love and honour animals, which is generally incompatible with funding the continuance and expansion of industrial livestock operations.)
F&O argue that unrepentant meat eaters could permissibly eat fake meat, as it is a less-bad substitute for real meat, the desire for which they still have and the consumption of which they may continue but for satisfying alternatives. Vegans and vegetarians, however, having overcome their meat-eating desires, ought not to eat fake meat since such substitutes are not necessary to keep them from eating the real thing, and since consuming fake meat has moral downsides. This argument seems off to me, as it appears to presume some lack of motivation or knowledge or behavioural plasticity on the part of meat eaters, such that abstaining from meat is not an option for them. Rather than saying that eating fake meat is permissible because it displaces consumption of real meat, why not say that eating both real and fake meat are impermissible, though the former is much worse than the latter. It seems perverse that meat abstainers’ efforts to improve their moral behaviour is punished by being subjected to harsher moral standards than those applied to meat eaters. This “vegetarians don’t even like meat” argument also seems off because I have the personal experience of still regarding animal-derived food as appetizing and within the realm of practical eating options. I didn’t stop eating meat because it stopped tasting good, and in the years since I stopped eating it the smell of sizzling steak or frying butter has not become disgusting. I am quite aware of the harm done to produce these foods, and that awareness keeps me from eating them except in those very rare cases where my consumption does not contribute to aggregate demand. I changed my diet not because of my gustatory desires, but in spite of them. It would be convenient if my taste buds and moral convictions were more aligned, but that would make moral agency superfluous.
This admission that meat tastes good may be a moral offence, according to one argument that F&O tease in the final footnote of the paper. By seeking out and consuming products that mimic the aesthetic experience of meat-eating, we are affirming the meat-eaters’ argument that the pleasure of eating meat is a justification for its consumption (and for all that goes into its production). By failing to deny the pleasure of meat-eating, we fail to deny to advocates of meat-eating their main argument. I suspect that this idea was tucked away in a footnote because it is quite weak. First, because we should not simply grant that “meat tastes good” is a serious moral argument, any more than we would consider the enjoyment of the rapist or the recreational torturer as a serious moral argument in defence of their preferred activities. Second, because it would be disastrous to follow a moral edict to ignore or deny any claims, even true claims, that are inconvenient to our moral arguments. The importance of this second point cannot be overstated; there is enough evidence for the side of right, if evidence indeed matters, to make the invention of lies and suppression of truth unnecessary. This concern gets my hackles up when I see people who should know better, or who should have been taught better, agitating for “ameliorative definition”, trying to unilaterally redefine shared language to affirm their standpoint, rather than doing the harder but more effective work of making superior arguments within the confines of conventional definitions. In addition to being underhanded, it is futile when undertaken by advocates of a minority opinion, who lack the social power to impose changes in language. I am not suggesting that the authors endorse such an approach; I don’t even think they subscribe to the argument in the footnote.
I still feel uneasy about hanging around the vestiges of animal exploitation culture. As a knife collector and cooking enthusiast, I watch a lot of content aimed at people who not only eat meat but hunt and butcher animals. I purchased a chef’s knife from a small producer who also makes hunting knives; I purchased a petty and a vegetable knife from a store that hosts butchery workshops. Do my fancy knife purchases indirectly fund the captivity and slaughter of animals? Does my engagement with cooking media nudge the algorithms to promote sushi and butchery tutorials? Does my abstaining from eating animal products earn me enough ethics points that I don’t have to worry about these marginal considerations?
There is yet another reason that I found this paper so poignant. For that last year or so, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a story, of as-yet undecided form, about creating plant-based simulated animal bodies, replete with differentiated organs, to allow vegans and vegetarians to enjoy the craft of butchery. I submitted one version of this idea to the CBC’s nonfiction contest, under the title “Cronenburgers”. (Yes, that is very clever title, thank you for saying so.) The story would revolve around a consumer focus group, as recruited volunteers navigate the curiosity and disgust elicited by these uncanny pseudo-corpses. The characters would discuss their ethical qualms and personal unease about playing at butchery, perhaps wondering if they would be so taken by the enjoyment of it that they would eventually become hunters and butchers of animals. Echoes here of Fischer’s detective and a feared slippery slope beginning with a faux-human lampshade and ending with a decor-driven murder habit. As the author, I can pull the “art for art’s sake” card and claim that the story must take whatever form the muses choose, and that to worry about the moral externalities of pushing these ideas into the world would endanger the creative sovereignty that makes art possible. That would be a cop-out, but it would not necessarily be false. Not that I expect this story to be influential, or even read. But F&O’s paper felt like an encroachment of ethical judgement into a realm that I had been imagining as purely creative (though deliberately evocative of moral ideas). Perhaps that’s how the artisanal butchers and barbecue aesthetes feel when the meat abolitionists come knocking.
*Please note that, given the seven or so years that have passed since the paper’s publication, Fischer and Ozturk may well have modified or abandoned the arguments that I quibble with here.