The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [158]
Well, right here is where you run smack into the AMC: the moral status of the retarded and the insane, the two-day-old infant and the advanced Alzheimer’s patient. These people (“marginal cases,” in the detestable language of modern moral philosophy) cannot participate in ethical decision making any more than a monkey can, yet we nevertheless grant them rights. Yes, I respond, for the obvious reason: They’re one of us. Isn’t it natural to give special consideration to one’s kind?
Only if you’re a speciesist, the animal rightist replies. Not so long ago many white people said the same thing about being white: We look out for our kind. Still, I would argue that there is a nonarbitrary reason we protect the rights of human “marginal” cases: We’re willing to make them part of our moral community because we all have been and will probably once again be marginal cases ourselves. What’s more, these people have fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, which makes our interest in their welfare deeper than our interest in the welfare of even the most intelligent ape.
A utilitarian like Singer would agree that the feelings of relatives should count for something in our moral calculus, but the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that given the choice between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphaned child and a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child. Why? Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain.
Here in a nutshell is the practical problem with the philosopher’s argument from marginal cases: It can be used to help the animals, but just as often it ends up hurting the marginal cases. Giving up our speciesism can bring us to an ethical cliff from which we may not be prepared to jump, even when logic is pushing us to the edge.
And yet this isn’t the moral choice I’m being asked to make here. (Too bad! It would be so much easier.) In everyday life the choice is not between the baby and the chimp but between the pig and the tofu. Even if we reject the hard utilitarianism of a Peter Singer, there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we owe them moral consideration, then how do we justify killing and eating them?
This is why meat eating is the most difficult animal rights case. In the case of laboratory testing of animals, all but the most radical animal people are willing to balance the human benefit against the cost to the animals. That’s because the unique qualities of human consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain: Human pain counts for more than that of a mouse, since our pain is amplified by emotions like dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an animal’s because we understand what death is in a way that they don’t. So the argument around animal testing is in the details: Is that particular animal experiment really necessary to save human lives? (Very often it’s not.) But if humans no longer need to eat meat to survive, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of the animal?
I suspect this is finally why the animal people managed to throw me on the defensive. It’s one thing to choose between the chimp and the retarded child, or to accept the sacrifice of all those pigs surgeons practiced on to develop heart bypass surgery. But what happens when the choice is, as Singer writes, between “a lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preferences of a human being?” You look away—or you stop eating animals. And if you don’t want to do either? I guess you have to try to determine if the animals you’re eating have really endured a lifetime of suffering.
According to Peter Singer I can’t hope to answer that question objectively as long as I’m still eating meat. “We have a strong interest in convincing ourselves that our concern for other animals does not require us to stop eating them.” I can sort of see his point: I mean, why am I working so hard to justify a dinner menu?