Animal Rights: A Historical Anthology

by Andrew Linzey (Editor), Paul Barry Clarke

This comprehensive and diverse anthology, the only one of its kind, illuminates the complex evolution of moral thought regarding animals and includes writings from ancient Greece to the present. Animal Rights reveals the ways in which a variety of thinkers have addressed such issues as our ethical responsibilities for the welfare of animals, whether animals have rights, and what it means to be human.

Genres: Animals

193 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 2004

Reviews

[Karl Steel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is no impersonal reason for regarding the interests of human beings as more important than those of animals. We can destroy animals more easily than they can destroy us; that is the only solid basis of our claim to superiority. We value art and science and literature, because these are things in which we excel. But whales might value spouting, and donkeys might maintain that a good bray is more exquisite than the music of Bach. We cannot prove them wrong except by the exercise of arbitrary power. All ethical systems, in the last analysis, depend on weapons of war." Betrand Russell, "If animals could talk."

"There is no day nor hour, in which in some regions of the many-peopled globe, thousands of men, and millions of animals, are not tortured to the utmost extend that organized life will afford." William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

"it has been observed that those who are most forward to disallow the rights of others, and to argue that suffering and subjection are the natural lot of all living things, are usually themselves exempt from the operation of this beneficent law." Henry Salt, Animals' Rights

"Ethics are responsibility without limit towards all that lives." Albert Schweitzer, Civilisation and Ethics

WARNING: This is a cheaply produced reprint of the 1990 anthology, Political Theory and Animal Rights. Columbia UP didn't even bother to change the page headers to reflect the collection's new title...Andrew Linzey's new introduction is, because of its defensiveness, pretty weak tea. Its opponent, a caricature of animal rights theory, would not merit consideration except for its source: another Oxford academic. Linzey aims to distinguish true animal rights thinkers from false (read: violent activists), but this kind of taxonomic hairsplitting--say, between false and true Xians--has always seemed suspect to me. If Linzey wants to argue against violence in defense of others, he is welcome to do so, but it seems inapposite in the introduction to this volume. Given that the new introduction dates from 2004, he would have done better to consider the rise in "continental" treatments of the animal question, represented in this volume only by Nietzsche and Horkheimer. He would have done better, in short, to consider the assault on rights-based approaches to the animal.

Sadly, it is no surprise that the Middle Ages--and, for that matter, philosophers outside the Greek/Latin/German/French/English traditions--are barely represented at all. As is usual, it cites only Augustine and Aquinas. Only one is necessary, as Aquinas's animal theory only refines Augustine (instructors: do not shy away from the sloppiness of Aquinas's treatment of animals: note how he mangles scripture by, for example, omitting human vegetarianism in Eden, or, in his explanation that plants are for animals and animals for humans, his inability to deal with carnivorous animals). Had Linzey and Clarke consulted a medievalist, they might have provided another view of animals: perhaps Ambrose's treatment of animal morals from his Hexaemeron, Adelard of Bath's argument for the immortality of animal souls (by which he counters common ignorance, and on which point he might be linked to Leibniz on spiritual indestructability), or, better yet, something from narrative, especially given the central place of narrative in Montaigne's famous passages on animals. At the least, John of Salisbury's thoughts on hunting in Policraticus belong in the original version of this anthology!

Nonetheless, the volume is essential reading for any animals thinker. The appalling continuity of anthropocentric thought is immediately apparent. We see here arguments for indirect rights (which is roughly the same in Kant as it is in Aquinas), the denial of abstraction and thus a denial of the true capacity to die (which is the same in Schopenhauer--"indeed the brutes do not properly speaking feel death" and "between the brute and the external world there is nothing, but between us and the external world there is always our thought about it"--as it is in Heidegger), the denial of the animal ability to respond rather than merely react (which is the same in, well, you name it (Rousseau, Lacan, e.g.), as it is in Albertus Magnus and other proponents of the sensus aestimativa), the argument from human posture (for which see Ovid, William of St Thierry, inter alia, repeated by Johann Herder, and countered directly by Montaigne's citation of ostriches and camels), and the argument for the minimal suffering of animals owing to their lack of development (Shopenhauer, akin to medieval explanations of Jesus's exquisite--because divinely perfected body--suffering).

It's not all horrifying, however. Many thinkers merit praise. Had he known or remembered them, they would have mollified Derrida's dismissal of virtually the whole 'Western' philosophic tradition. While Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and--although he is unrepresented in this volume--Heidegger rearticulate the same positions in their own particular vocabulary, there were nevertheless a few proponents for animals in the early period apart from Montaigne and Bentham (and his particular inheritors): Hume (whose characterization of reason as a "wonderful and unintelligible instinct" certainly speaks to Derrida's confounding of Lacan's distinction between animal reaction and human response), Alexander Pope (who writes, "I know nothing more shocking or horrid, than the prospect of one of their kitchens cover'd with blood, and filled with the cries of creatures expiring in tortures. It gives one an image of a giant's den in a romance, bestrow'd with scattered heads and mangled limbs of those who were slain by his cruelty"), Kropotkin (who--happily!--argues for the superiority of sociability in evolutionary development) , and, above all, Humphry Primatt, whose eighteenth-century Dissertation of the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals might be the first sustained argument for justice towards animals since Porphyry (pace Montaigne), and whose attack on the "therefore" (animals lack, therefore...) anticipates Cora Diamond.

[Jean-françois Virey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting anthology which unfortunately has chosen to focus on what the great philosophers have had to say about non-human animals over the millenia, but since that is precious little, the volume makes for rather depressing reading, apart from the end-of-section selections from more modern authors who did think non-human animals should be protected from more than "wanton cruelty." Humphrey Primatt, Herman Daggett and Henry Salt were welcome intruders in that intellectual desert.

I'd like to see an anthology that featured more authors from outside the philosophical canon, which I think should be possible today after the studies of Renan Larue on Enlightenment vegetarianism, or Cecilia Muratori on animals in the Renaissance. Even in the canon I could think of a few authors that might have been included (though they are still disappointing), such as Porphyry or David Hartley. Anti-vivisectonists like Frances Cobbe or C.S. Lewis could also have been anthologised, as could more modern writers mentioned in the introduction (such as Ruth Harrison.)

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given to me by a philosophy colleague a few year back, and I'm glad he did. Took my living with a Great Dane to spur me to read it, but it has lead to some important reflections over the last 12 months that I have slowly explored its vast historical scope. (But sadly many writers and cultures are absent, which is a shame considering how many of these writers echo the sentiments of those before them... a bit more variety would have done wonders for making this less polemic and more inspiring.)

At the end of it all, I am left thinking of the luxurious dinner tables I have known, the hungover breakfasts, the hurried lunches, the family meals growing up, the quick snacks the boozy NYC brunches, the slew of different national cuisines, etc... and how so many of these moments, these daily ingestions of caloric energy, have included the flesh of animals.

And I cannot just accept that as a simple norm, because I have come to see that man and animal are on a close spectrum of connnectedness, and so because we are similar animals deserve compassion and mercy in our handling of them. Eating them ends their life, it is as simple as that, and I cannot just say, "man stands apart, man is different", and let that lie comfort me in my rapaciousness. But neither do I wish to deny that my teeth are naturally designed to rip flesh as surely as chew plants, and the world is full of ethical and culinary complexity. How this plays out is the tricky part. How do we determine an appropriate ethic of eating?

The idealistically reductive logic of the "rights view", that Tom Regan lays out at the end, is very convicingly pristine logic, that at first really gives one pause about the idea of slaughtering an animal just to give extra flavors to your meal. But it can too easily be spiralled down in to absurdity. If not cows, if not fish, it not mice, if not bacteria, if not yeast, if not plants that cast a shadow, etc... and we are left with immolation as our only option, lest we infringe on the rights of anything around us. Ethics and life are not so easily compartmentalized and segregated. We get into each other, and it is in those messy interactions that an Ethic is supposed to guide us.

So is my choosing to eat an omnivorous diet a sort of daily proclamation (a perverse Eucharist, if you will) that I reject the pure logic of an idealistic ethics based on Equality in favor of a confused ethics based on Self and Aesthetics? I cannot deny that my eyes are open to the closeness of Human and Animal, and there is a need for Respect. So, do I see my joining the traditional dinner table as a display of a terrifying embrace of amoral Relativism? Or do I choose to view my eating of animal flesh as a realization that the complex Ethics of Existence can be experienced by my participation in the Aesthetics of Eating?

My answer is -- I know I will be watching "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" this Thanksgiving.

PS - Who knew Hume was so thrillingly quirky in his thinking, to suggest that "reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligble instinct", in the same manner as other animal instinctual skills that we find untranslatable and amazing, like a bird building her nest and incubating her eggs so expertly, or the dance language of bees. Perhaps I need to read more Hume next...