Animals Like Us: Animal Cruelty
by Having lived with animals all her life, Dr. Lynne Sharpe’s major criticism of many philosophers is that their perspective is purely theoretical. Applying such theories to the real world, she believes, is often problematical.
Although the adherents of this view present it as egalitarian and argue vehemently against racism, sexism and speciesism, their unquestioning acceptance of their own superior status exposes their “egalitarianism” as just another version of the hierarchical system that underlies the very prejudices they condemn. Racism, sexism and speciesism start with the assumption that “we” are special in a way that makes “us” superior to other groups whose members do not share the particular quality that defines “us”. The choice of one quality – whether skin colour, sex, species, race – or linguistically defined self-consciousness – as definitive, privileges those who possess it and the perception of “them” as not merely different but as inferior, prevents us from getting to know them, so that the professed concern for their “interests” is limited by an inadequate grasp of what those interests are.
In this respect, the fiercely “anti-speciesist” philosophers mentioned above are much closer than they would admit to those such as Peter Carruthers and Michael Leahy, who also take self-consciousness as the most important quality that any creature can have but who argue that the limits of our moral concern should be co-terminous with the limits of the human race. The main difference between the two groups is that, whereas the first recognises – in theory at least – that “pain is pain, whoever suffers”, the second argues either that animals’ capacity for suffering is insignificant compared to that of humans (Leahy) or that animal consciousness is so far removed from human consciousness that animals are “not appropriate objects of moral concern” at all (Carruthers). Raymond Frey has a foot in each camp, being anti-speciesist but denying that animals can have any interests at all. I believe that all of these views over-emphasise the role of language in human perceptions and feelings, distorting our understanding not only of animals but of humans too.
For Carruthers, Leahy and others, those who treat animals as thinking, feeling beings with desires and preferences and to whom we can relate are guilty of “anthropomorphism” – of attributing to them qualities and capacities which are exclusively human. Anthropomorphism is not a word in the vocabulary of Singer, Harris and other “anti-speciesists” who claim blindness to species barriers. Nonetheless they condemn not only emotional involvement with animals, but emotional involvement with babies or other “non-persons” as inappropriate, dismissing it as “soggy sentimentality” or evidence of excessive vulnerability to the appeal of the “cute and cuddly”.
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