by Mike O’Brien
For a variety of public and private reasons, this year is already worse than last year, and last year was awful. I’ve pretty much given up my long-standing news addiction, which in previous years had me reading vast swathes of reporting and analysis for hours a day, because now I just don’t want to know the details of all the unfolding horrors of which I am already vaguely aware. This began when I stopped reading The Guardian after the American election. Of all the major English-language news outlets, The Guardian hews closest to my own political and moral sympathies, and as such tends to focus on issues and events that I care most about. Because the issues and events that I care most about all seem to be converging in a slow-motion flaming train-wreck, accurate and insightful reporting on such matters is psychologically unbearable. Being informed, at least in the compulsive manner of the news addict, is not the empowering experience I hoped it would be. Knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition for improving the world, and if the other necessary conditions (like access to relevant institutions, material power, opportune social and political conditions) don’t obtain, then the cost of knowledge seems to outweigh the benefits. I still feel the moral pull to “bear witness” to the important events of the world, but this feels more and more like a private exercise of virtue and less like a public duty of any practical utility.
Luckily, there is plenty to read besides headlines about how everything that I value is cooked. For instance, there are academic articles about how to better understand the things that I value and which are cooked. One such article was the topic of a reading group that I joined recently, about the role of animal cultures in conservation efforts. While the main arguments of the piece didn’t quite grab me, the bibliography was a gold mine of ethnographic animal research, more or less filling my reading docket for the foreseeable future. I tend to trace bibliographies back to their earliest origins, finding all kinds of historical curios or (quite often) landmark works that apparently everyone but me has already read. (Such are the perils of the self-directed scholar; having nobody to tell you what to read is a blessing and a curse.) The same penchant for genealogy has, in music, brought me to YouTube videos of player pianos, having traced the roots of contemporary songs back to before the era of audio recordings. It’s not so much a deliberate search for context as an idle curiosity that, but for the arrow of time, would stretch into past and future alike. YouTube does not yet have a function to view the future, notwithstanding the swell of AI dross there (and the spectacle of people competing with AI-generated content to please an inscrutable algorithm, “humanity hanging from a cross of slop” as it were) which heralds a coming world that is somehow even more stupid and perilous than the present.
So, the bibliography. Through a few intermediary steps of citation, I ended up in the work of Robert Garner, a political theorist at the University of Leicester who mostly works on questions of animal and environmental ethics (for example, the books “The Political Theory of Animal Rights” and “A Theory of Justice for Animals”). I have a waning interest in reading works of animal ethics adapted from liberal rights theory, but Garner’s stuff seems compelling at first glance and has earned a spot on deck in my reading queue. His penultimate (so far! he’s still with us) book is a history of the Oxford Group, a collective of postgraduate philosophy students at Oxford University who shared ideas about animal ethics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their collaborations resulted in an edited collection entitled “Animals, Men And Morals: An enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans”, published in 1971. Peter Singer, an Oxford student at the time but not a core member, credits his discussion with four Canadian members of the group (Richard and Mary Keshen, and Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch) for kick-starting his interest in vegetarianism and animal rights. In 1972, Singer wrote a review of “Animals, Men and Morals” for the New York Review of Books, providing some scarce-at-the-time American publicity for the book and for the ideas it sought to disseminate, and three years later his own landmark work “Animal Liberation” was published.
The collection itself is a fascinating snapshot of the development of animal rights thinking in the Anglosphere. Much of it is still very current with present discussions, owing to the stubborn persistence of substantive moral puzzles. The contributions range from a literary analysis of sexual slang and hunting metaphors, to sober reviews of agricultural statistics and legislative clauses, to a psychological typology of animal-rights deniers, and much more besides. Refreshingly absent are contributions in the mould of “an X-ian reframing of Y-ian models of the Z-problem”, keeping the works in direct contact with the phenomena and concepts of interest, not dragged down by the sedimented burdens of The Literature. One particularly prescient sentence (among many, many others) comes at the end of Michael Peters’ contribution “Nature And Culture”, a sort of deconstructive conceptual genealogy of human moral exceptionalism: “It is no longer relevant to demarcate ourselves from the other animals and identify ourselves with those attributes such as analytical intelligence which are now much more effectively performed by machines”. Those machines have since been developed to the point where further iterations may be candidates for moral standing (see, for instance, the discussion of AI in Jonathan Birch’s 2024 book “The Edge Of Sentience”), while the lot of animals has worsened in absolute terms (and perhaps that of humans as well, depending on how optimistically one gauges our prospects for surviving the present century).
Through a now-untraceable (by me, anyway) thread of citations, I happened upon another influential work from the same era, a 1967 article appearing in Science entitled “The Historical Roots Of Our Ecologic Crisis”. Written by Lynn White Jr., a historian of medieval technology and a trained theologian, the piece argues that the ecologic (sic) havoc wreaked by humanity can be, to a great extent, attributed to the Judeo-Christian doctrines of Man’s creation in God’s image, and of Man’s ordained domination over the natural world. He casts Saint Francis of Assisi as a failed (in worldly terms) spiritual revolutionary, who “tried to substitute the idea of equality of all creatures , including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation”, concluding his article with “I propose Francis as a patron saint for all ecologists”. Unfortunately, White did not live to see the election of Pope Francis in 2013 (who, although a Jesuit, chose to honour the spirit of Saint Francis by his chosen name), nor did he witness the Vatican’s shift to ecological advocacy under Francis’ papacy. Indeed, under Francis the Vatican became one of the most explicitly leftist (in economic matters) and green institutions on the world stage.
White’s arguments about the enabling of environmental exploitation by Judeo-Christian morality may now seem old-hat, but, according to the secondary commentary on his article’s impact, it seems to have been quite important to the recent development of “green theology”, and of socio-cultural critiques of implicit ideologies regarding environmental rights and duties. A 2016 book entitled “Religion And Ecological Crisis: The ‘Lynn White Thesis’ at Fifty” traces the article’s legacy, and features among its contributors Michael Northcott, an Anglican priest and emeritus professor of ethics whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak at McGill University’s Catholic chaplaincy, the Newman Centre. (It is no accident that many great environmental advocates speak from a specifically religious moral standpoint, and even if it were, green progressives would do well to appreciate their value as fellow partisans. The reflexive anti-faith prejudices of some progressives is both historically unconsidered and strategically unsound.) Northcott’s work was particularly interesting to me when I was attempting a green reading of political theology during my M.A. studies, and he is a singular thinker worth reading. I haven’t yet read his contribution because, as you may have guessed by now, I try to read everything and am defeated by merciless finitude.
(I blame the Jesuits for instilling in me such a broad curiosity and scholastic sense of stick-to-it-iveness. If only Ignatius had dodged that cannonball, I might have survived my secondary education with a less burdened conscience.)
The final historical classic discovered during this particular bibliographic forage is a collection of essays delivered at “the first philosophical conference on environmental ethics” (according to John R. Shook’s “Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers”), a 1971 conference at the University of Georgia organized by William T. Blackstone. The collection, entitled “Philosophy and Environmental Crisis”, was published three years later. Blackstone’s own contribution, “Ethics and Ecology”, was of particular interest as it touches on three favourite themes of my own ecological thinking, those being the necessity of a “trans-valuation of all values” (borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, though not his moral agenda) to address the ethical dimensions of ecology, a rejection of both Kantian and utilitarian moral frameworks, and call for direct and forceful intervention in economic activities (and re-assessment of presumed rights to property and free enterprise) to address ecological dangers.
Even more than Blackstone’s contribution, the following chapter by Joel Feinberg (who, Wikipedia tells me, was a very big deal in twentieth-century legal and political philosophy), entitled “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations”, really grabbed my attention. My own trajectory into primarily eco-centric philosophy began with my M.A. thesis research, which ended up being about the tension between, on the one hand, the legitimacy derived by democratic governments from consultation and representation of living constituents, and, on the other hand, the rights of future generations who cannot be consulted and who cannot contest false”representations” of their interests. I eventually conceded that the focus on future generations was just a way of smuggling my ecological anxieties into political theory, and generalized the arguments about future generations to all unenfranchised entities, including sentient non-human animals.
Feinberg’s line of argument is that rights are grounded in the capacity to have interests. Plants can flourish, but they have no interest in flourishing in the sense that it matters to them psychologically. Irreversibly comatose humans similarly have no interests for rights to defend. People may have interests that survive their own lifespan (reputation, support of charitable foundations), and it may be the case that these interests ground rights enjoining the conduct of the living. “Newly born infants,” Feinberg writes, “are surely noisier than mere vegetables, but they are just barely brighter”. Nevertheless, their capacity to develop interest-grounding faculties later on makes it sensible to confer rights to them. By extension, fetuses also can be expected to develop faculties which enable them to have interests, and as such it makes sense to grant them rights (to be exercised by an actual person in the meantime), although Feinberg notes that it is not clear that fetuses have a right to be born at all, given that they lack the capacity to have interests in their actual state. (Note that the medical consensus on the ability of fetuses and newborns to experience pain and distress has advanced considerably since the publication of these essays, and it is now clear that humans at these stages of development are sentient enough to have welfare interests. Birch’s “Edge of Sentience” book details these issues very well).
This brings Feinberg to the case of future generations, the eventual existence of which is all but assured even if no single future person is yet as actual as any single present fetus. The lack of any determinate identity for these future persons means that no interests can be predicated of them, although we may posit that they have contingent rights, assuming that there will exist some determinate actual people in the future. But, as with the fetus case, it is not clear that future generations have an interest in coming into existence at all, and as such the foreclosure of their possibilities for existing (by some human extinction event) would not be a violation of their rights. Feinberg states that he is inclined “to believe that the suicide of our species would be deplorable, lamentable, and a deeply moving tragedy, but that it would violate no one’s rights. Indeed if, contrary to fact, all human beings could ever agree to such a thing, that very agreement would be a symptom of our species’ unsuitability for survival anyway”. I wonder if Feinberg would consider the electoral unpopularity of serious ecological action to be tacit agreement to that effect.
Oddly enough, I had originally planned to write this month about a book chapter by Heather Browning and Walter Veit entitled “Longtermism and Animals”, included in the collection 2025 collection “Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future”, where the authors criticize the anthropocentric exclusion of animal interests from most “longtermist” discourse. In contrast, reading works that came before the explosion of bad-faith longtermist “deliverables” from various think tanks is refreshing. While it is necessary for political reasons to rebut the flood of nonsense from the techno-billionaires’ retenue of salesmen and water carriers, it is grim work compared to the curiosity-tingling joy of reading philosophers’ early forays into debates that had not yet become “solved problems” for capital’s ministries of propaganda.
Oh, I also read some Tolstoy. “The First Step”, an 1891 essay wherein he describes a visit to a slaughterhouse and his subsequent conversion to vegetarianism. Good stuff. But that’s enough bibliography for now. If the present would stop futuring for one damned minute, I might get caught up on the past. But that’s not the deal here, as deplorable, lamentable and deeply moving a tragedy as that might be.
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