Moral Psychology and Development: Practical Considerations (Part 4 of 4)

Over the past three essays, we have touched on two major schools of thought regarding morality: theories of “the right” and theories of “the good”; and we have explored the basic and most relevant elements of two theories of moral development corresponding to the two schools of moral thought: Kohlberg’s stage theory and Hoffman’s empathy theory, respectively.

The most striking similarity between Kohlberg’s and Hoffman’s theories is that their highest stages entail a widening of the moral community ultimately to a universal application of the principle of equal consideration for all beings holding relevant characteristics.

I cannot see how the universal application of equal consideration as the highest stage could be otherwise in any theory of moral development. If we take morality and moral development seriously, we must remove as much arbitrariness as possible; for the more arbitrariness is permitted in any moral development theory, the less such a theory makes sense. For cognitive theories based on a principle of equal consideration, this is obvious. For affective theories based primarily on empathy, it is much less obvious due to the non-rational, non-cognitive nature of purely affective/emotive drives, but we must introduce a sturdy, rational, cognitive element into an affective theory if we are going to talk about concepts like “development” and “making sense.” Purely affective theories without rationality degenerate into blind personal preference and egoism, which we might call morality’s opposite. Rationality and the principle of equal consideration can be viewed as the structural support on which empathy is developed to achieve the greatest heights of moral behavior and character.

Developing Moral Character: Structural Integrity

When we set out to construct a building, we must first design and construct the foundation and structural support which will act to give form, strength, and stability to the building. Without a strong foundation and supporting structural skeleton, our building will either be a “nonstarter”, a heap of plywood or cement, or collapse into a heap at the first challenge of wind or other force against it. Once we have designed and built a strong foundation and structure, we can start to fill in the walls with plywood and insulation or cement.

In the same way, when we set out to build moral character, we must first ground the moral character in sound reason and the principle of equal consideration. With unguided empathy, we are likely to end up with a pile of emotional nonsense, having an abundance of empathy in some cases and a poverty of empathy in other cases, all in one distorted heap. We will be overwhelmed with empathy for our dog while chewing on a formerly tortured and unjustly killed pig who deserved as much empathy as our dog. This kind of disparate, non-rational behavior toward animals is what the distinguished legal scholar Gary Francione aptly calls our society’s “moral schizophrenia” toward animals. Martin Hoffman, whose empathy theory we looked at in the third of these four essays, thinks of the justice principle (i.e. the equal consideration principle, which is a principle derived from reason) as regulating empathy to more appropriate levels from both over- and under-arousal. Clearly, sound moral reasoning and a principle of universal justice or equal consideration of relevant characteristics are essential if we are to build a reliable moral structure on which to cultivate empathy, which in our analogy, is the plywood or loose cement in need of form and a sturdy structure to maintain the form.

Developing Moral Character: Substantive Integrity

Just as our building will end up in a useless heap if we don’t give it form and structural integrity, the form and structural integrity alone is a cold, worthless building if there are no walls on the skeleton to prevent the snow, wind, and rain from filling the interior.

Just so, practical reason and the principle of equal consideration will tell us what morality is and should look like (i.e. give us form and structure), but by themselves, reason and principle may too often leave us without adequate motivation (i.e. substance) to behave in accordance with the principle of equal consideration. We need to cultivate the empathy (i.e. substance) to build our moral character into a strong and worthwhile fortress. Violations of reason may motivate us to correct a math error we are aware of, but violations of reason by themselves cannot motivate us in the way genuine empathy can to right a moral wrong or avoid committing that wrong in the first place. Empathy is something that can be intentionally practiced, cultivated, and developed to conform to practical reason and equal consideration. Many religious traditions have a long history of encouraging the development of empathy, compassion, and caring for others.

Practical Considerations for Advocacy

We clearly need to appeal to both reason and empathy in our advocacy for nonhuman beings. However, there is already significant human empathy for (certain) nonhuman beings in our society. This is plainly evident in how many millions of us, including many hunters, have abundant empathy for our dogs and other companion animals. It is also evident in how many millions (billions?) of charity dollars go to humane societies and animal welfare organizations. Indeed, rare is the person, even in animal agribusiness, who doesn’t entirely agree with “animal welfare.” We clearly do not like to see nonhuman beings suffer “unnecessarily”, and that is an almost universal belief among the sane.

The problem with our moral character as it relates to nonhuman animals is not a lack of empathy per se, but a lack of both reason and the principle of equal consideration guiding our empathy to give it coherence and consistency. Our empathy toward animals is currently an incoherent, distorted heap of nonsense. Our empathy has no structure or form. Our empathy is amoral and egocentric.

What we need is to have our empathy guided and cultivated in the places where moral reasoning and the principle of equal consideration of relevant characteristics (such as sentience) determine it ought to be located. This guiding and cultivating can take place when we think about the characteristics of pigs, chickens, cows, goats, sheep, elk, deer, and our dogs, and see that all of these beings have the same relevant characteristics of a deep desire to live and survive, to avoid pain, and to experience pleasure. They are all sentient. Their species is irrelevant. Their species is just as irrelevant as race, sex, intelligence, religion, or ethnic group. Reason and the principle of equal consideration applied to the relevant characteristic of sentience require us to guide and cultivate our empathy properly and build our moral character into a coherent form. Reason and the principle of equal consideration also require us to become and stay vegan as a moral imperative. It is appeals to reason, consistency, and the principle of equal consideration which ought to be at the forefront of our advocacy, encouraging the development of empathy where it is most needed.

The Development of Empathy: Hoffman’s Theory (Part 3 of 4)

This essay is the third in a series of four essays on moral psychology and development.

Martin Hoffman’s theory of moral psychology and development is primarily focused on empathy and empathic distress, but also includes classic conditioning, cognitive reasoning, and principles of caring and justice. Cognitive reasoning and justice are especially integrated into Hoffman’s theory in the more advanced stages of empathy development. Hoffman’s theory is comprehensive, and while much of it is supported by research, Hoffman makes use of many detailed anecdotes from interviews, open-ended research questions, and other sources to “fill in the research gaps” in the comprehensive theory.

Virtually all of the information on Hoffman’s theory in this essay has been extracted from Hoffman’s book published in 2000 entitled, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. My purpose is not to cover or summarize Hoffman’s book or entire theory, but only to provide some of the basic elements and bring forth what I consider to be the most relevant aspects of his theory to the development of empathy for nonhuman beings.

Empathic Distress Versus Egoistic Motives

Central to Hoffman’s theory is the occurrence of empathic distress in response to another’s distress where, 1) empathic distress is associated with helping, 2) empathic distress precedes helping, and 3) observers feel better after helping.

Empathic distress often competes with egoistic motives. Egoistic motives opposing animal rights would be the desire to maintain the status quo with regard to eating habits, the fear of learning more about the plight of animals (empathic over-arousal), over-estimations of difficulty in transitioning to or maintaining a vegan diet (even though it is very easy), fear of dealing with family and friends after committing to veganism, and, in the case of people whose occupations require animal abuse and killing, giving up their current occupations. Most of the egoistic fears regarding a transition to and maintenance of personal veganism are really nothing more than a fear of the unknown and, very likely in many cases, a lack of self-confidence in men and women.

Five Categories of Development

Hoffman has five categories in the development of empathic distress: 1) newborn reactive cry, 2) egocentric empathic distress, 3) quasi-egocentric empathic distress, 4) veridical empathic distress, and 5) empathic distress beyond the situation.

The first category, the newborn reactive cry, is likely caused by a “…combination of mimicry and conditioning, with each getting an assist from imitation.” (Hoffman, 2000, p 65) At this point, there is only distress, but no effort to relieve distress.

In egocentric empathic distress, which starts to occur at the end of the first year, the reaction to another infant’s distress is mostly the same, except that there is behavior which is meant to reduce their own distress (not the other infant’s distress). There seems to be genuine confusion at this point about who is in distress, therefore the oxymoron “egocentric empathic distress”.

By early in the second year, a sense of self occurs and along with it, quasi-egocentric empathic distress develops. In quasi-egocentric empathic distress, the child will attempt to help the other in distress, but from their own point of view. For example, a child may bring another crying child to her mother instead of the child’s own mother. There is clearly the desire to help the other, but from the only point of view that the helping child is aware of: their own point of view.

By late in the second year, children begin to show awareness that the inner states of others may be different from their own states. Corrective feedback, such as when one’s egocentric efforts to relieve another’s distress don’t work, leads to behavior which takes the other’s perspective into account. Eventually, corrective feedback is not needed as much (although, as Hoffman points out, even adults need corrective feedback at times). This is the development of veridical empathic distress, an important stage, since it “has all the basic elements of mature empathy and continues to grow and develop throughout life.” (Hoffman, 2000, p 72)

At some point in development, empathic distress moves beyond the situation to involve others’ life conditions. There is often contradiction in a victim’s behavior where, for example, a victim of a terminal illness is laughing or appears to be very happy. People who have not moved into this stage will identify directly and solely with the currently observed happy behavior of the victim. People who have moved into empathic distress beyond the situation, however, while they may or may not show it depending on the situation, will still have empathic distress, despite current outward appearances of the victim’s immediate happiness.

Empathic distress beyond the situation eventually matures to empathic distress regarding entire groups who are exploited, oppressed, or otherwise treated unfairly. This can happen both geographically, as when we empathize with groups in distant regions of the world; temporally, as when we empathize with groups in times long past; and beyond kin, as when we empathize with other ethnic groups, races, or species. It is this advanced stage of “empathic distress beyond the situation” which is required for normal adults to experience empathic distress for nonhuman beings. Unfortunately, many normal human adults have not reached this stage and may never reach it.

Moral Internalization and Socialization

According to Hoffman, a person’s prosocial moral structure is “a network of empathic effects, cognitive representations, and motives.” (Hoffman, 2000, p. 134) The moral structure includes principles, behavioral norms, a sense of right and wrong, and images of harmful or hurtful acts and the associated self-blame and guilt.

Moral internalization occurs when a person’s moral structure is accepted and the person feels obligated to abide by its principles and consider others regardless of external punishment or reward.

Socialization, according to Hoffman, is the process by which moral internalization occurs, mainly in the form of interventions. Among three types of intervention Hoffman discusses, only “induction” is relevant to changing moral behavior and causing moral internalization of new principles in law-abiding adults. Induction occurs when we take the victim’s (e.g. the nonhuman being’s) perspective and show a person (e.g. someone who consumes animal products) how his or her behavior is harming the victim. Showing pictures and videos of “food” animals in their daily lives and during and after slaughter and emphasizing the connection between the distressing footage and a non-vegan diet is an example of induction. Induction must usually be repeated anywhere from a few to several times before moral internalization has a chance to take place, and unfortunately, this repetition seems to be just as true for adults as children.

Empathy’s Limitations

The ability of empathy to generate moral behavior is limited by three common occurrences: over-arousal, habituation, and bias. Hoffman covers others, but my focus is on the limits common to empathy for animals.

Empathic Over-Arousal

Generally, the greater the victim’s distress, the greater the observer’s empathic distress. However, if the observer’s empathic distress is too great, it is likely to lead to personal distress. Empathic over-arousal is “an involuntary process that occurs when an observer’s empathic distress becomes so painful and intolerable that it is transformed into an intense feeling of personal distress, which may move the person out of the empathic mode entirely.” (Hoffman, 1978 and 2000) (Italics mine)

At the other extreme, empathic distress may not motivate moral behavior. So, empathic distress can be either too strong or too weak. To complicate matters for animal rights advocates, different people will over- and under-arouse to the same situation or film or leaflet, so finding a good balance in animal rights educational material is difficult.

Habituation

If a person is exposed repeatedly to victim distress over time, the person’s empathic distress may diminish to the point where the person becomes indifferent to victims’ distress. This diminished empathic distress and corresponding indifference is very common in those who abuse and kill animals as part of their occupation or recreation: animal researchers, employees in the animal entertainment industry, hunters, trappers, fishers, employees in animal feeding operations, truck drivers in animal transportation, slaughterhouse employees, and butchers. In fact, the most morally repugnant, horrific and violent footage of animal abuse, acts which would garner felony cruelty charges if done to a dog or cat in the street, occurs in most of these occupations, particularly slaughterhouses and research labs.

Familiarity Bias

Humans evolved in small groups, and often the small groups competed for scarce resources, so it is not surprising that evolutionary psychologists have identified kin selection has a moral motivator with evolutionary roots. The forms of familiarity bias include in-group bias, friendship bias, and similarity bias. The implications for nonhuman beings are as obvious as they are unfortunate.

On the positive side, however, great progress has been made in overcoming might-makes-right and familiarity bias over the past 400 years in what are now our liberal democracies. A live burning of a heretic or “witch” is now considered morally unacceptable. Chattel slavery, and the abuse and murder accepted with it, has been abolished. Wage slavery of the 19th century and early 20th century has been reformed. Women are permitted to vote and are no long expected to shut up and stay in the kitchen. Could animals be the next group admitted to the moral community by acknowledgement of their important interests which they hold as much as we do by way of certain morally relevant characteristics, such as, consciousness, awareness, and sentience? If we make the same progress during the next 100 or 200 years that we did during the past 200 years, future generations will look on our ignorance in a very similar way to how we look at the ignorance of previous generations of heretic burners and slave breakers.

Here and Now Bias

We tend to have a bias for empathic distress when the victim is in front of us at the present moment. The abuse and horror (i.e. distress) that nonhuman animals experience is generally here-and-now only for those habituated to directly generating the distress. The primary economic forces of the abuse and horror are derived from the consumer of animal products, who is almost never exposed to the horror story behind the eggs, meat, or glass of milk they consume. This ignorance is an unspoken “don’t ask, don’t tell” deal between the producers of animal products and the consumers, including mass media. It is a well-known saying among animal rights supports that “if slaughterhouses had glass walls (and we knew of the torture and slaughter in the milk and egg industries), we’d all be vegan.”

Animal advocates must continue to display the inconvenient truth about what goes on in the sheds, feedlots, labs, transportation vehicles, and slaughterhouses to combat the here-and-now bias. We also have to remind people that just because we don’t see it in our daily lives, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Also, it is extremely important to narrow down the focus to the heartbreaking stories of individual chickens, pigs, cows, and other nonhumans who have been severely abused in animal agriculture to use the here-and-now bias in the favor of the animals. Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary (see link on this blog) does a terrific job at leveraging the here-and-now bias in every form of advocacy they do: sanctuary tours, blog entries, billboards, and newspaper advertisements are almost always about individual nonhuman beings.

Empathy and Moral Principles

Moral principles, based on reasoning and cognitive function, have sometimes been criticized as being “cold”, and therefore, not morally motivating. Others have disagreed and claimed that moral principles are highly motivating. To me, it seems to depend on the person as to whether reason or emotions are more morally motivating. Regardless, when empathy is combined with moral principles, the moral principles tend to regulate or moderate empathic distress to a more appropriate level, thereby reducing the chances of empathic over- or under-arousal. Although I’m very much on the cognitive moral principles side of the principles/empathy dichotomy, this moderating effect (i.e. increasing empathic distress in under-arousal cases and decreasing it in over-arousal cases) seems to me to be a good reason for those advocates who lean more on the empathy side to include moral principles and reasoning in their education and advocacy.

Summary

Hoffman’s theory tells us much about the “emotional side” of morality and some of the strengths and limitations of empathy and its influence on moral behavior. Empathic distress generally has to overcome egoistic motives for moral behavior to occur. Hoffman believes that empathy is an evolutionary trait; and like other evolutionary traits, such as cognitive ability, it is likely on a bell-curve distribution, with some of us having more empathic capacity than others. Empathy also has other limitations, such as over- and under-arousal, habituation, and bias. Despite its limitations, empathy can be a powerful force for moral motivation. It is well worth the efforts of animal rights advocates to generate the empathic distress which comes naturally to most people when faced with the horrific realities of life for tens of billions of innocent nonhuman beings who are thrown into the hell of animal agriculture. There’s a reason industry (including the cage-free and free-range sectors) does not and will not open its doors to mass media or for general public inspection. There’s a reason why we don’t see mass media coverage of the animals’ lives: the empathic distress would be overwhelming, would cause significant moral conflict throughout society and eventually would lead to changes in what we choose to eat. A widespread vegan trend in society would alleviate much of this unimaginable hell. We can each, as individuals, internalize veganism as the moral imperative that it is.

The Development of Moral Reasoning: Kohlberg's Stages (Part 2 of 4)

This essay is the second in a series of four essays on moral psychology and development.

Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development has its roots primarily in Jean Piaget’s two-phase theory of moral judgment in children and secondarily in John Dewey’s three-stage theory of moral development. Piaget’s first phase is that of young children who see rules as fixed and absolute and handed down from an authority; and who also base moral judgments more on consequences than intention. By contrast, older children in Piaget’s second phase see rules as more relative and changeable, somewhat like a malleable social construct; and base moral judgments more on intention than consequences. John Dewey’s three-stage theory consisting of impulsive, group-conforming, and reflective stages is what led Kohlberg to the three levels of pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional.

Kohlberg’s Research Method

Kohlberg, over at least 20 years, interviewed or had other qualified researchers interview several dozens of people ranging from childhood to adulthood and across cultures. The questions were based on a series of moral dilemmas, with follow up questions for various types of responses. Kohlberg was interested in the reasoning behind the moral judgment, not the conclusion itself. To check the reliability of the scoring of responses, Kohlberg would have multiple researchers score the same responses. Kohlberg found the consistency of the score determination to be high among the researchers.

The Six Stages

Level I: Pre-Conventional Morality

Stage 1: Punishment and Obedience

Stage 1 is the morality of young children. An act is wrong because you’ll get punished. Punishment is what makes it wrong. Rules are handed down from an all-powerful authority and are to be unquestionably obeyed. At this stage, there is no realistic concept of morality.

Stage 2: Self-Interest and Fair Deals

Stage 2 is the morality of older children and unfortunately, many adults, especially in highly competitive occupations (certain corporate executives, most career politicians, and certain professionals) at least while they’re engaging in their occupations (they may move up to Stage 3 in family matters). At this stage, morality is relative to the self-interest of the deal maker and punishment is just a risk we want to avoid. We may exchange or return favors, but only if the continued relationship is worth carrying on from a self-interested point of view. There is no sense of community or even any substantial sense of morality, just self-interest and deal making.

Level II: Conventional Morality

Stage 3: Good Relationships

At Stage 3, people become genuinely concerned about good intentions and the well-being of their family and friends. The circle of concern, however, does not go much beyond kin selection. The moral community is small at this stage and is made up of those we know and trust. This stage is common in small, isolated villages and among tribal people. This stage is also common in many nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees and dogs.

Stage 4: Social Order

Stage 4 is about law and order, respecting authority, and maintaining the coherence of society as a whole. A typical Stage 4 comment is, “If everyone acted in self-interest and broke the law, we’d have chaos.” At this stage, what is moral is what society (including most religious groups, e.g. the Bible or the law) says is moral. As we shall see more clearly after covering stages 5 and 6, this is the level at which many adults in our current industrial societies eventually arrive and stay, especially if they are not in the more aggressive careers mentioned in Stage 2.

“Stage 4.5”: Moral Skepticism

Kohlberg noted in his longitudinal subjects (people he was testing more than once at various ages to look for stage progression) that some of them stated “principled-sounding” (i.e. stage 5 or 6) reasons in high school, but seemed to regress back to moral relativity (Stage 2) in college. Upon further questioning, these subjects seemed to be exploring meta-ethics and challenging the ultimate basis of morality, asking questions such as “Why be moral?” This moral skepticism often led them to adopt moral relativity as a solution to the problem.

What they hadn’t yet arrived at was the fact that moral relativity is inherently unstable through self-contradiction and an inherent moral degeneration into might-makes-right. Moral relativity is self-contradictory in the sense that if one person or society’s morals are as good as another, then moral absolutism is as good as moral relativity: an obvious contradiction. Also, if morals are relative, then we shouldn’t judge others’ morals; but then the morals which do judge other morals shouldn’t be judged either: another contradiction. Moral relativity degenerates into might-makes-right because it allows arbitrary judgments. If plainly arbitrary judgments are permitted at all, on what basis can we draw lines on how much arbitrariness is permitted? Certainly not consistent reason. Stage 2 might-makes-right (i.e. moral nihilism or universal amorality) is the logical conclusion.

The reasoning process of “Stage 4.5” is a prerequisite to advance to the “post-skeptical rationalism” of Stages 5 and 6. Otherwise, the “principled-sounding” reasons are likely little more than Stage 4 “received opinion” from Stage 5 or 6 mentors (e.g. parents or teachers) in high school. We need not spend any significant time at “Stage 4.5”, but we must genuinely think through “4.5” and reject it on rational grounds to prevent severe moral retardation at Stage 2.

Level III: Post-Conventional Morality

Post-conventional morality, particularly Stage 6, is the engine of all moral progress in civilization. By definition, post-conventional morality evaluates and challenges conventional morality from a higher and more impartial point of view. This level is the reason that the Church lost its “authority” to burn people alive for heresy, that we stopped burning “witches” alive, that liberal democracies formed, that chattel slavery was abolished, that women gained the right to vote, that federal civil rights laws were passed, and hopefully someday, that our society will eventually become vegan and give nonhuman animals the right to life and to be left alone. To most people, a vegan society sounds unrealistic now, but many of today’s realities sounded just as unrealistic 50 to 350 years ago.

Stage 5: Social and Individual Improvement and Individual Rights

Stage 5 is where people start to ask what makes for right action, a good individual, and a good society, without referring to their own society as a standard. People at Stage 5 think in terms of rights for individuals and democratic procedures in government for the improvement of laws.

Stage 6: Universal Principles

At Stage 6, universal principles of justice are the moral standard by which actions, individuals, and societies are judged. The philosophers Immanuel Kant [1] and John Rawls provide the theoretical framework of impartial, universal justice of Stage 6. Great moral leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King provide the spirit of Stage 6.

An example of the impartiality of Stage 6 is described by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice. An even better example and more impartial and universal description of Stage 6, since it avoids Rawls’s speciesism [2], is provided in Animals Like Us (an easy read written for the general reader) and Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence (written for the philosopher), both by Mark Rowlands. Briefly, the description goes like this: we are asked to take an impartial perspective by assuming a “veil of ignorance” of what role we will have in the society or situation which we are evaluating. We are then asked to prescribe the policies or acts which would be most fair to all roles involved, knowing we could end up in any of those roles (including birth as a chicken, pig, etc). If the prescriptive policies or acts given are irrational under the veil of ignorance, then they are immoral in the real world.

Two principles are salient in Stage 6: the principle of equal consideration and the principle of desert. The principle of equal consideration requires us to give equal moral consideration to others to the extent that others have interests which are crucial or important to them, regardless of whether those interests are important to anyone else. The principle of desert, inherent in the idea of justice as fairness, is that we (including nonhuman animals) should get what we deserve. In considering what we deserve, we must consider what we are responsible for, or what is within our control, versus what we are not responsible for, or what is beyond our control. Circumstances of birth, such as mental capacity, capacity for moral agency, place of birth, race, sex, and species are clearly beyond our control; therefore we don’t have responsibility for those circumstances; therefore we don’t deserve to have our important interests (e.g. life, liberty, bodily integrity) ignored because of those circumstances; therefore we have basic moral rights protecting those important interests.

The Six Stages and Speciesism

Speciesism can exist and even thrive at Stages 1 – 4, thriving best at the lowest stages and starting to be slightly threatened at Stage 4. At Stage 5, speciesism is significantly more threatened because of the willingness to question society, but there is nothing at Stage 5 which is inherently antithetical to speciesism because universal principles of justice are not yet considered important or even necessary. Speciesism is inherently antithetical to Stage 6 moral reasoning due to Stage 6's impartiality and universality in the application of justice. If we engage in genuine and careful Stage 6 reasoning, we cannot avoid landing in the middle of a strong animal rights paradigm.

The most significant reason that animal rights is currently “on the fringe” of current society is that a vast majority of people, perhaps around 99% of the population, are dwelling in Stages 2 through 5, at least in behavior, if not also in reasoning. Even when animal rights advocates reason with non-vegans at Stage 6, there are other factors, such as cultural and psychological influences (primarily habits), which cause non-vegans’ behavior to remain largely unchanged. Still, Stage 6 is the primary moral reasoning under which all previous social justice movements succeeded. Stage 6 thought also entails animal rights, and at this point, the best animal rights advocates can do is to continue to repeat Stage 6 principles to non-vegans until these principles penetrate the social barrier of conventional-level morality as they have in the past for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from witch trials, freedom from chattel slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights.

Notes:

[1] For an excellent analysis on why Kant’s universality entails moral consideration of animals while Kant failed to live up to his own idea of universality in this regard and other ways, see Tom Regan’s classic 1983 work, The Case for Animal Rights, pages 174 to 185. For 18th century cultural prejudices and ignorance Kant was likely a victim of, see the September 2007 essay in this blog entitled, “Present Realities and the Moral Status of Animals.” Kant’s universality is a Stage 6 concept, but Kant was not a Stage 6 thinker in the application of his universality.

[2] We might reasonably ask, if John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice provides a Stage 6 framework for impartiality, and Stage 6 entails animal rights, then why didn’t John Rawls argue for animal rights? Tom Regan examines this contradiction in Rawls’s thought in The Case for Animal Rights in significant detail.

Rawls is considerably ambiguous and equivocal not only on the issue of what duties, if any, we owe to nonhuman animals, but even on the issue of what duties, if any, we owe to moral patients (i.e. those incapable of moral reasoning, but capable of benefiting from the moral behavior of moral agents). In an essay written prior to A Theory of Justice, Rawls claims, in so many words, that moral agency (e.g. the ability to have a sense of justice) is required to qualify as an object of direct duties of justice. In other words, we have no direct duties of justice to moral patients (e.g. very young children, the mentally ill or disabled, the senile or nonhuman animals). Rawls backs off of this position in A Theory of Justice, but is still ambiguous and equivocal about direct duties to sentient nonhumans. Regan, from pages 163 to 174 in The Case for Animal Rights, analyzes Rawls’s position quite carefully and charitably, and in the process, shows how Rawls grossly misapplies and contradicts his own theory when it comes to nonhuman animals. Essentially, Regan shows in detail how setting up Rawls’s “original position” so as to exclude nonhuman animals is no different (i.e. no less arbitrary) than setting up the original position so as to exclude certain racial or ethnic groups or to exclude everyone except white, propertied males. Rawls’s theory of justice is a Stage 6 framework, but Rawls was not a Stage 6 thinker in the application of his theory.

Moral Psychology and Development: An Introduction (Part 1 of 4)

This essay is the first in a series of four essays concerning moral psychology and development. Moral psychology is an important area of knowledge for understanding various attitudes and beliefs regarding morality and, more importantly, for effecting moral progress. A society’s collective attitudes and beliefs toward social justice issues like animal rights are ultimately the collection of individual attitudes toward those issues. If we can better understand individuals at the psychological level, it will help us to better understand our society. In this series of essays, we will primarily look at moral psychology as it has developed during the 20th century up to the present. We will not consider evolutionary psychology or anthropology in this series of essays. Evolutionary psychology and anthropology are interesting for exploring the limits of our collective violence and altruism, as well as where we fit in an aggressive-altruistic continuum and how we arrived there, but compared to contemporary moral psychology, they don’t contribute much in the way of explaining how we behave and why in our modern industrial and informational societies.

Two Dominating Theoretical Groups of Moral Philosophy

There are two dominating groups of theories of moral philosophy which have been with us since the Enlightenment. For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I am going to discuss just the two groups of theories, rather than the specific theories under each group. One of the dominating groups in moral philosophy concerns actions and “the right” (often referred to as non-consequential or deontological theories). The other group concerns consequences and “the good” (often referred to as consequential theories). Theories other than the two dominating theories include virtue ethics, social contract theory, and various moral doctrines and precepts of religions. Again, for the sake of simplicity and brevity, we will not consider these other theories in this series of essays.

A theory of the “right” is primarily (and in, e.g. Immanuel Kant’s case entirely) cognitive, logical, and philosophical; and heavily emphasizes the intention of the actor and justice in determining “right action” while diminishing the consequences of actions in determining “right action.” Examples of theories in this philosophical group are Kantian morality, contemporary deontology, and rights-based theories. Another distinguishing characteristic of theories of the “right” is that they generally consist of prohibitive restrictions on behavior rather than a normative claim on all behavior. In other words, the moral agent is generally free to do whatever he or she wants, as long as he or she does not violate certain moral principles, such as justice, in his or her actions.

A theory of the “good” is primarily affective, empirical, and psychological; and heavily emphasizes the consequences and preference satisfaction of all sentient beings having an interest in the consequences in determining “right action” while diminishing the intention of the moral agent in determining “right action.” British sentimentalism and utilitarianism are examples of theories in this psychological group. Another distinguishing characteristic of theories of the “good” is that they generally attempt to maximize “the good” for all parties potentially having an interest in the consequences in all choices of action (e.g. utilitarianism), rather than merely prohibiting certain action which violates justice or a similar moral principle. Depending on how seriously the consequentialist takes the obligation of maximizing the “good” for everyone involved, the theory can significantly restrict freedom of action in everyday life, because most, of not all, actions should probably be subject to moral evaluation and only certain actions will maximize consequences, assuming we can calculate a maximum good in any specific choice. Most consequentialists, however, don’t take the theory that far, and look at consequentialism as a theory of justification in specific choices or conflicts rather than a theory of deliberation on all actions.

Two Dominating Theories of Moral Psychology

Just as there are two dominating groups of theories of moral philosophy, there are two dominating theories of moral psychology which correspond to the theories of philosophy.

Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

The dominant psychological theory corresponding to theories of action, justice, and “the right” is Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development. It emphasizes logic and cognitive reasoning in moral development and is primarily philosophical in nature.

Kohlberg was a brilliant psychologist who performed significant research in moral psychology and taught at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University. He was influenced by the great child psychologist Jean Piaget. His research consisted of in-depth interviews of many people of various ages (children and adults), from various socio-economic groups and from different cultures. In his interviews, which consisted of narrative moral problems and follow up questions, Kohlberg was not so much interested in the content or conclusions of his subjects, but the cognitive reasoning behind the content or conclusions. A subject could arrive at the same conclusion, but the cognitive reasoning could be at drastically different stages of development.

Kohlberg came up with six stages of moral development with two stages in each of three levels: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. The stages are based on cognitive reasoning in arriving at moral decisions, with the highest stage being based in universal principles of justice and/or fairness. We will look at Kohlberg’s stages in more detail in the second essay of this series.

Hoffman's Theory of Empathy Development

The dominant psychological theory corresponding to theories of consequences, feelings, and “the good” is Martin Hoffman’s Theory of Empathy Development. It emphasizes empiricism and emotion and is primarily psychological in nature.

Martin Hoffman is a Professor of Psychology at New York University who has engaged in three decades of study and research on moral development. Whereas Kohlberg’s theory emphasizes cognitive reasoning in moral development, Hoffman’s theory emphasizes affective/emotive response in moral development, including guilt and compassion, but particularly empathy and empathic distress.

While Hoffman has stages in his theory, he downplays the stage aspect of it compared to Kohlberg. Hoffman has two levels of empathy development, immature and mature, and two stages within each level. The highest stage in Hoffman’s theory is one where empathic distress extends “beyond the situation” into areas removed from the here and now. In this higher stage, people will respond with empathic distress to individuals and groups far removed from their geographical location, or removed temporally, such as slaves long ago. One might also say that “beyond the situation” implies a response of empathic distress removed from one by kin, such as overcoming racism, speciesism, or some other cultural prejudice. We will look at Hoffman’s theory in more detail in the third essay of this series.

Philosophy and Reason versus Psychology and Passion

At the core of these different perspectives of moral philosophy and psychology, cognitive and affective, is a dichotomy as old as philosophy itself: the struggle between reason and passion.

Immanuel Kant saw the degree of morality inherent in a given act as proportionate to the degree that one does it in accordance with obedience to the moral law that reason dictates as opposed to one’s passions or desires. For Kant, a moral philosopher who sought to define morality, only the good will is inherently good, and the good will is at its greatest when it triumphs over a base passion to do other than what reason and the “moral law” (i.e. morality defined) dictate one ought to do.

David Hume, on the other hand, believed that “reason is, and ought only to be, a slave of the passions.” For Hume, a moral psychologist who sought to explain why we behave morally, our sentiments of approbation and disapprobation determine what, for us, is moral or immoral. Reason only helps us determine what is most likely to be pleasing to our sentiments and beneficial to social utility (assuming our passions are directed toward social utility, and Hume thought our “calm passions” were in that direction, in the same way we have a “calm passion” for natural beauty). Interestingly, Hume believed that only social utility supports our calm passion for justice, and that without utility, we have no use for justice. For Hume, this explained the unjust treatment of women and Native Americans, and moral progress meant widening the circle of the moral community.

It is important to emphasize that Kant was offering us a rational definition of morality and a prescriptive code, while Hume was offering us his empirical observation of why we do what we do. Many people misinterpret Kant and Hume by conflating moral philosophy and psychology. Arthur Schopenhauer ridiculed Kant severely for postulating reason instead of compassion as a “basis of morality” (i.e. the motivating factor behind moral behavior), but what Schopenhauer failed to realize was that Kant was attempting to rationally define morality, not attempting to offer empirical observations on motivations for it. Hume, on the other hand, has been misinterpreted by many of today’s moral relativists as offering a moral philosophy or definition dependent on our feelings, and thus what is “moral” for me might be “legitimately” different from what is “moral” for you. What today’s moral relativists fail to realize is that Hume was silent on moral philosophy and definition; Hume was discussing only his empirical observation of moral motivation and psychology.

In morality, both philosophy and psychology can be broken down into primarily cognitive and primarily affective schools of thought. Also, moral philosophy is a primarily cognitive enterprise, while moral psychology is a primarily affective enterprise. Words like “primarily” are important here, because while there are major differences in these areas of thought which are irreducible and irreconcilable, they sometimes interrelate and sometimes have each other’s primary considerations as secondary considerations. Hume may be correct, in a certain sense, that our passions ultimately dictate our behavior, but it is also true that reason, impartiality, and justice can be our passion. In fact, through reason, we can intentionally cultivate virtuous passions and let our baser passions atrophy, thereby cultivating our character into a noble one providing us with a more fulfilling existence.

We will explore Kohlberg’s and Hoffman’s theory in the next two essays in the series, respectively, and wrap it up with a fourth and concluding essay, which will address practical considerations for advocates.

On “Imposing” Beliefs on Others

I was going to discuss moral psychology and development this week, but certain discussions last week have led me to postpone psychology and discuss the “imposing” word instead.

When discussions of animal rights come up, and especially when those discussions lead to an assertion by an animal rights advocate that veganism is a moral imperative, a comment is often made implying, if not stating outright, that we shouldn’t be imposing our beliefs on others. This is particularly prevalent among those who see morality through the foggy goggles of cultural relativity; instead of seeing morality through careful reasoning, justice, empathy, and most importantly, impartiality. This “anti-imposition” position is also prevalent among those who see the entire subject of morality as “muddy waters”, “messy”, or “subjective” (subjective in the way that a preference for a certain amount of sugar in one’s tea is subjective).

To be clear: there are muddy areas of morality and genuine dilemmas and conflicts where right and wrong are ambiguous (e.g. decisions about, say, justified war or conflicting rights). There are also honest and interesting disagreements in the realm of meta-ethics and between different moral theories, which can be ambiguous. However, there are also areas of morality where right and wrong are obvious, but due to traditional prejudices, individual habits and the like, these areas happen to be controversial in a given place and time (e.g. human slavery and, dare I say it, animal rights).

The point is that just because something is controversial doesn’t entail that it is also “muddy”, “messy”, or “subjective.” Ending slavery was so controversial that it was one of the significant causes of the American Civil War; but from a rational, just, empathic, and impartial moral standpoint, ending slavery was a moral imperative and that is plain and obvious to anyone capable of consistent moral reasoning.

As we will see in this essay, attempting to persuade others that ending slavery or going vegan is a moral imperative is not imposing that belief on another; it is merely advocating in favor of that belief.

What Do You Mean By “Imposing”?

To start with, I think it is helpful to define what we mean by “imposing.” Imposing, by definition, implies force of some kind. Politically, the sovereign state can impose laws, restrictions, and taxes through force and/or threat of undesirable personal consequences. As a practical matter, the individual cannot impose any belief on anyone in liberal democracies that is not already a law without getting into trouble with the law themselves (assuming non-guardian relationships). So, by discussing moral issues and participating in public demonstrations, nobody is imposing beliefs, circumstances, or behavior on anyone, unless they are using some kind of force or duress; and if force is the case, they are also very likely breaking the law.

Do You Mean Persuading?

If we are talking about persuading or convincing others of certain beliefs, then we should call it persuading or convincing, not “imposing”. I see nothing wrong with attempting to persuade or convince others to our beliefs, especially if our beliefs result in less violence and harm in the world. If someone feels guilty, for example, because I’ve told them how buying flesh or animal products contributes to severe harm and suffering that makes them feel very uncomfortable, I may have imposed on their conscience, but I have not imposed my beliefs, behavior, or any actions on them. Is imposing on someone’s conscience by informing them of facts, circumstances, and perspectives of which they were previously unaware a bad thing? No, it’s not. If anything, I’ve done them a favor by informing them of something they ought to know or a perspective they should consider.

So, vegans will continue to not impose our beliefs on anyone, but we will not stop attempting to persuade people of living a less harmful and less violent life, even if that means imposing on their consciences.

Impositions: On Persons Versus On Consciences

Let’s address this question of who is imposing beliefs on whom when it comes to nonhumans and their right to live free of gross injustice, serious harm, and murder (murder being defined in the moral sense as the intentional killing of the innocent).

Non-vegans impose, in the ultimate sense of the word and all of its force implications, extremely violent beliefs and actions on 10 billion land animals (i.e. persons) annually in the United States alone and impose that way of life on vegans (i.e. persons) every day by breeding, enslaving, and killing “food” animals (or buying product from those who do) and forcing vegans, through the law, social institutions, and their vast numbers, to refrain from imposing our much more sane and just beliefs and actions on them. Because non-vegans have so much overwhelming power in every way, imposing beliefs is simply not an option for vegans, while imposing beliefs and actions (on nonhumans and vegans) is the only way non-vegans do what they do (innocent animals are not giving their consent to be slaughtered any more than an innocent 3 year old child would give that consent). Vegans, as a practical matter, have only persuasion and reasoning, or imposing on consciences, as a viable way of changing the world at this time.

Granted, society-at-large is a bit like a speeding freight train that can’t exactly stop on a dime or turn sharp corners, regardless of its engineer’s wishes, and will impose on anything in its immediate path, including animals and vegans. Fortunately, however, individuals within society are NOT like freight trains. Individuals can stop on a dime and turn sharp corners, changing their moral lives rather quickly and permanently.

So, we can now see that the suggestion that vegans impose beliefs on others is, at best, a thoughtless misuse of the word “impose”, and most often, absurd. Individual consciences may be imposed on, but if consciences can be imposed on, then something out there isn’t morally right and consciences should be imposed on. Imposing on consciences is not the same thing at all as imposing on persons themselves or forcing (imposing on) people to do things that their consciences do not dictate the need to do. Vegans will only start imposing beliefs on persons when we have persuaded enough people with enough political power to be capable of imposing on persons who have not been persuaded via an imposition on their conscience (perhaps because, like many felons, they lack an adequate conscience).

The Moral Neutrality of Imposition

Finally, imposition itself, like power or intelligence, is morally neutral. It is the moral content of what is being imposed which has either positive or negative moral value. For example, the Nazis imposed their beliefs on Jewish people and the allies. I think that was a morally wrong imposition. On the other hand, the allies in World War II imposed their beliefs on the Nazis. I think that was a morally right imposition.

Present Realities and the Moral Status of Animals

Blind Tradition: The Historical Moral Status of So-Called “Brutes”

From pre-history until the 20th century, it was believed by almost everyone that humans needed to use and eat animals to thrive and even to survive. This was especially true prior to the 19th century; and philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Rene Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant had grossly distorted visions of the nature of nonhuman animals which fit well with the idea that God “put” animals in our world for our use, and that we had no moral obligations to animals whatsoever. Descartes viewed animals as insentient automata or “God’s machines”. For Descartes, one of the founders of modern vivisection, the intense squeals of dogs being beaten or tortured were merely the sounds of a broken machine, not cries of extreme pain. John Locke viewed animals as natural resources, like land and trees, which we may acquire as property and have “natural rights” to that property. For Immanuel Kant, animals were literally “things”: “...Beings whose existence depends…on nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a relative value as means and are therefore called things.” (Kant, 1785) The old, traditional distorted view of animals is still in our language today as most of us refer to an animal as “it” even when we know the sex of an individual animal and therefore his or her proper gender.

Given the prevailing view and circumstances of the 17th and 18th centuries that animals needed to be raised, used, and killed for basic human needs, is not surprising that thoughtful philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant sought to avoid thinking and writing seriously about the similarities between humans and nonhumans and how those similarities might have serious moral implications. Instead, to protect the perceived need of animal use, they emphasized a morally irrelevant difference between nonhumans and most, but certainly not all humans: rationality. Another, more intellectually honest approach would have been for these thinkers to admit that there were morally relevant similarities, and that these imposed a direct duty to animals to reduce suffering as much as possible, but that ultimately, moral consideration would have to yield to the perceived survival needs of humans. But we have to remember that these were times when women did not count as full persons, and humans owned other humans as chattel property and were often as cruel to human slaves as to nonhuman slaves. We can see how even careful thinkers as Locke and Kant may have been lost in the fog of their culture’s deeply-held prejudices.

“Food” Animals and Human Brutes

The torture endured by farmed animals from birth to slaughter in our industrialized and mechanized processing systems is unimaginably horrible, and there is no significant difference between free-range, cage-free, and “certified humane” versus the traditional industrial methods, despite the misleading claims of large welfare organizations (incorrectly referred to by the media and themselves as “animal rights” organizations). If you are born a chicken in the most “humane” environment, the best thing that might happen to you is that you are gassed or tossed alive into a wood-chipper as a baby chick, so you don’t have to experience a life of hell as a cage-free or “certified humane” egg chicken (a “layer”) or flesh chicken (a “broiler”). Make no mistake; both the old methods and the new, so-called “humane” methods rely on intensive confinement with filthy conditions, diseases, no individual attention, and no veterinary care to speak of. One thing is obvious: It is literally impossible to raise and slaughter hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of nonhumans without industrial methods. What is less obvious, but nevertheless true, is that “humane” labels are little more than a marketing ploy to ease the growing public sensitivity to the (unavoidable) reality of animal agriculture’s cruelty. Further, transportation and slaughter itself is extremely cruel, with slaughterhouse workers intentionally torturing animals, especially chickens, and animals often inadvertently being boiled or ripped apart alive (such cruelty is common knowledge among welfare advocates and has been documented in the Washington Post [‘They die piece by piece’] and in various films and documentaries of slaughterhouse conditions). When we do these things to a dog or cat, we are charged with a felony; when we do these while marketing unnecessary food preferences, we get paid a wage for it. Even if it were possible (and it’s not possible) to heavily police transportation and slaughter so that the cruelty was significantly reduced, it is still wrong to treat sentient beings with a crucial interest in their life and its quality as a means to an end. We need not wonder who the brutes are; a mirror will tell us.

Animal agriculture, on its modern scale of production, is an environmental disaster, with “cattle” and hog waste polluting groundwater, rivers, and streams and killing millions of fish throughout the country; and flatulence contributing significant quantities of carbon and other pollutants into the air. “Food” animals, particularly “cattle” and pigs, are reverse protein factories, consuming up to 10 times more protein in their short lives than they provide after they are slaughtered for food. A vast majority of the land used for growing plant food is to feed animals who will use up to 90% of that protein in their daily living, returning relatively very little after slaughter. The only way to achieve more pollution and greater inefficiency in food production is to breed and raise more nonhumans for food.

The Solution to Animal Agriculture

Now, early in the 21st century, more and more mainstream dieticians and health professionals are telling us that balanced vegan diets are optimal for our health. (For information about vegan nutrition, see the link on this blog.) There are now vegan alternatives to most animal-based ingredients and expanded vegan options, making gourmet vegan entrees and desserts as delightful to the palate as non-vegan versions ever were, and much healthier too (see the vegan menus links in this blog). Dieticians are also telling us that traditional animal-based diets, especially in the quantities we consume them, are literally killing us with heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, strokes, and cancer. For clothing, there are now synthetic materials, such as nylon, synthetic fleece, faux “leather”, faux “suede”, and faux “fur”, which easily replace, and are better than, the animal alternatives. The solution is to go vegan.

Animal Experimentation: Archaic, Brutal, and Dangerous

The things we do to sentient nonhumans in labs, 90% of the time for trivial reasons and never for crucial reasons, are beyond savage. Again, if we are unspeakably cruel to a dog or cat in the street, we get hit with felony cruelty charges (as we should); if we do the same thing in a lab under a thin veneer of respectability backed up by the law (laws heavily influenced politically by the vivisection industry), however, we get paid a wage.

Fortunately, there is a growing body of well-researched literature showing that modern alternatives to animal testing and training on animals, such as computer modeling and simulation, human tissue research, clinical observation and research, epidemiology, pathology, genetics, prevention, autopsies, and post-marketing drug surveillance are making animal testing archaic, obsolete, and even dangerous to humans. Indeed, it is blind tradition, powerful business interests, and wealthy lobbying which supports a vast majority of current animal research. Jean Swingle Greek, DMV, and C.Ray Greek, MD, have contributed volumes of valuable research, ranging from non-technical research appealing to the lay reader to highly technical research appealing to scientists and health professionals on the lack of need for animal use in modern medicine. The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine is also playing a valuable role in educating scientists and health professionals about responsible alternatives to animal testing.

Moral Reflection and Conclusions: The Personhood of Animals

We are clearly no longer in need of any animal use which would preserve the meaning of the word “need”, and in fact, if there is a need, it is a need to avoid animal use for our health and environmental sustainability. This has profound implications for our behavior toward nonhumans. Nonhumans have always had morally crucial and important interests in not being intentionally harmed or killed. The psychological and emotional interests of sentient nonhumans are too similar to and overlapping with our own to continue to ignore those interests, especially at a time when ignoring those interests is so unnecessary and destructive in so many ways. Rationality is a nice tool to use for good or evil, but it has no moral relevance when it comes to crucial basic interests such as the avoidance of serious physical or psychological harm or death. It is arbitrary to look to rationality as defining moral or legal personhood. Also, to do so is to necessarily exclude many humans from personhood, such as infants, the senile, and the mentally disabled or mentally ill. Sentience, the ability to have experiences (including pleasure and pain), is certainly sufficient for moral and legal personhood, and any being who has sentience to the high degree that cows, pigs, chickens, geese, deer, goats, sheep, elk, marine mammals, and many fish do, clearly has crucial interests and profound corresponding moral claims on our behavior. There may well be other criteria which would also suffice for personhood, such as the likely future acquisition of sentience. Such a criterion as a high probability for future sentience would be appropriate for considering the moral and legal personhood of comatose normal human adults and fetuses. Criteria other than sentience for moral and legal personhood, however, are beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that sentience itself is sufficient.

It has been clear empirically, even from the 18th century, that there is no non-arbitrary way to distinguish morally relevant characteristics of humans from nonhumans. In other words, there is no morally relevant characteristic which all humans and only humans have which would give humans special moral consideration. As such, attempts to distinguish between humans and nonhumans on species membership alone, without some morally relevant characteristic that all and only humans have, is plainly arbitrary, and therefore, is plainly speciesist. Such speciesism is every bit as morally unacceptable as racism and sexism. There may have been a weak excuse for such speciesism back in Locke and Kant’s day, considering the perceived need to use animals and the cultural racism and sexism of the time (all of which itself was wrong, even then), but with the knowledge and alternatives available today, there are no more excuses, not even half-baked excuses. A speciesist is a racist is a sexist: it is all the same moral wrong. If we do not consider ourselves racist or sexist, and if we are to avoid hypocrisy and maintain consistency, we must eliminate our speciesism by going vegan.

Animal Rights, Science, and Religion

The five major religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hindu/Brahmanism, Islam, and Judaism) all have a heavy influence on the thought, especially the moral thought, of people throughout the world, even in highly educated countries, and even at a time when science has knocked humankind off our imagined pedestal of being at the center of the universe with the sun and stars revolving around us, and utterly separate from and clearly above nature and other species.

Science: An Astronomical Perspective of Our Universe

We now know that not only is our Solar System heliocentric rather than geocentric, but that our Sun is just one very typical, garden-variety star of billions of stars within our own galaxy, and that our galaxy is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies within the visible universe (visible using the Hubble Space Telescope), each galaxy containing billions of stars themselves. Many of the galaxies in our Universe seen through the Hubble are over a billion light-years away (for perspective, our Sun is 8 light-seconds, or about 90 million miles away; one single light-year is about 3.9 million times that distance). The Universe is vast, and we are most likely not at the center of it. From this perspective, we have significantly more in common with gnats, dust mites, and amoebas than we might have otherwise thought and mammals are our brothers and sisters on this miniscule home we call Earth.

Science: An Astronomical Perspective of Time

The Universe is estimated to be approximately 14 billion years old. Many galaxies, including our Milky Way galaxy, formed about 13 billion years ago. Our Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago. The Cambrian explosion of diversity of life on Earth occurred about 550 million years ago. The first humans appeared about 350,000 years ago. If we put the 14 billion year age of the Universe on a 24 hour scale for perspective, then Earth formed almost 8 hours ago and the first humans appeared on Earth a little over 2 seconds ago, at 11:59:58pm. No longer can we claim a privileged position in the Universe. Again, we have much in common with beings who we consider having very short, relatively insignificant lives.

Science: Down to Earth

The theory of evolution is so foundational to our current knowledge of living organisms, including ourselves, that biology and modern medicine would not make sense today without it. Established scientific theories like evolution and relativity are not “just theories” randomly tossed onto the wall to see if they stick. On the contrary, established scientific theories provide the core principles of a scientific body of knowledge which have been confirmed thousands of times by empirical studies performed by independent scientists attempting to falsify them. If evidence from empirical studies counter any of a given theory’s principles, the theory is appropriately replaced in part or in whole. We know from evolution and modern biology that we are on an overlapping continuum of sentience with all other living organisms, with many more similarities than differences. Indeed, there are many nonhumans, some of whom we kill by the billions annually for trivial preferences, who are smarter, more sentient, and more self-aware than many humans. For example, normal pigs, chickens, dogs, and “cattle” are far more self-aware and intelligent than any infant or severely mentally disabled human. Humans are 2 – 4 years old before they can compare in self-awareness to so-called “food” animals. No longer can we claim a privileged position in the biosphere, at least not one untainted by characteristics which overlap in highly relevant ways (morally speaking) with many other species. Indeed, the difference in characteristics between us and other species, like Darwin said, is one of degree, not kind, and we can verify that the degree is significantly overlapping, even in that sacred characteristic which generates so many anthropocentric claims of superiority: intelligence, which by itself, is really little more than a handy tool that can be used for good or evil.

Science: Putting Us in Our Place

It is true that none of the science above disproves claims about the existence of God, the Absolute, Brahma, or Ultimate Reality. In fact, science, given its epistemological standards of empirical verification of logical theory and its insistence on scientific claims being falsifiable, has nothing to say about such matters. Science also has nothing to say about morality and ethics and what we ought to value in our life. But our newly and more properly conceived place in the Universe given to us by science over the past 150 years ought to offer us a different perspective about morality, especially as it relates to nonhuman animals. Apparently, God has had little or no effect on our folly and hubris in relation to Earth and other species, which we are continually polluting and abusing, respectively. Perhaps science can provide the information and perspective, and with appropriate maturity and judgment, we can recognize that we are not the center of the Universe; that we are not different from many other species on Earth in any morally relevant way which would justify our use and abuse of them; and that if we continue on our self-destructive trend, Earth will take care of the problem by becoming so sick and hot that we cannot survive here.


Religion: Monotheism

Let’s very briefly turn to the monotheistic religions of the Middle East and ask a few questions. If God is beneficent, would God want us, as individuals, to personally contribute to the torture and slaughter of 10 billion of animals annually in the United States (50 billion worldwide)? Perhaps we can get a hint from Genesis before The Fall of Man: “God said: ‘See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground, I give all the green plants for food’. And so it happened. God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.” Given these verses in Genesis, is not breeding, torturing, and slaughtering 10 billion animals annually the epitome of The Fall? How many animals do we need to breed, torture, and slaughter annually before we hit the rock bottom of The Fall? Wouldn’t a beneficent God want us to treat animals as we would like to be treated by God, perhaps with kindness instead of ruthless cruelty? Wouldn’t a beneficent God be utterly disgusted and revolted by our carelessness, ignorance, indifference, cruelty, greed, and gluttony? I think so.

Religion: Mindfulness and Compassion

For those who look to Eastern religions for moral guidance and inspiration, are we really mindful, compassionate, and observing the skillful means of nonharming when we personally contribute to the torture and slaughter of animals, including when those animals and their bodily fluids are labeled with marketing slogans like “certified humane”, “free range” or “cage-free”? Is slaughter ever humane or compassionate? How much do we really know about these so-called “humane” animal products? Is ignorance preferable? Would we like to be born as the future victim of someone’s oral cavity? Does “cutthroat compassion” make any sense? We cannot eat animal products with both mindfulness and compassion operating concurrently. If we are consuming animal products “mindfully,” we cannot be also consuming them compassionately, which also calls into question the existence of genuine mindfulness; and if we are consuming animal products “compassionately,” we cannot be mindful of the reality of that being’s slaughter, which also calls into question the existence of genuine mindfulness and compassion. Perhaps all we are mindful of when consuming animal products is our attachment to trivial preferences and unskillful actions.

Coming Up: Secular Moral Philosophy

For agnostics, including many scientists, the next blog entry or two will address secular moral philosophy and moral psychology. We’ll see that regardless of our religion or lack thereof, there are always much more compelling reasons to embrace animal rights and veganism than to continue onward in the glaring moral blind spot which has defined and grossly distorted our moral obligations to animals, especially in light of modern knowledge of nutrition and veganism.