Most people in time and space have considered it strange to take the well-being of non-humans into account
I think this is wrong in an interesting way: it’s an Industrial Age blind spot. Only people who’ve never hunted or herded and buy their meat wrapped in plastic have never thought about animal welfare. Many indigenous hunting cultures ask forgiveness when taking food animals. Countless cultures have taboos about killing certain animals. Many animal species’ names translate to “people of the __.” As far as I can tell, all major religions consider wanton cruelty to animals a sin, and have for thousands of years, though obviously, people dispute the definition of cruelty.
I kinda think the opposite is true. It’s people who live in cities who join PETA. Country folk get acclimatized to commoditizing animals.
I’d like to see a summary of the evidence that many Native Americans actually prayed for forgiveness to animal spirits. There’s been a lot of retrospective “reframing” of Native American culture in the past 100 years—go to a pow-wow today and an earnest Native American elder may tell you stories about their great respect for the Earth, but I don’t find these stories in 17th thru 19th-century accounts. Praying for forgiveness makes a great story, but you usually hear about it from somebody like James Fenimore Cooper rather than in an ethnographic account. Do contemporary accounts from the Amazon say that tribespeople there do that?
(Regarding the reliability of contemporary Native American accounts: Once I was researching the Cree Indians, and I read an account, circa 1900, by a Cree, boasting that their written language was their own invention and went back generations before the white man came. The next thing I read was an account from around 1860 of a white missionary who had recently learned Cree and invented the written script for it. I may possibly be confusing the Cree with Ojibway, but it was the same language in both stories.)
I’m not aware of any Western religion that says cruelty to animals is a sin. Individual interpretations, maybe, but I’m pretty sure you won’t find a word about it in the whole of the Bible. The Anglican church was fine with bear-baiting. I don’t think the Catholic church complained about vivisection.
And it’s certainly true that tribal cultures gave zero or negative weight to the well-being of competing tribes. Utilitarianism is tricky to apply when you have to periodically kill your neighbors to survive.
In any case, indigenous cultures aren’t the ones complaining that utilitarianism leads to utility monsters. The people who’ve made those arguments do have their own preferred utility monsters.
I kinda think the opposite is true. It’s people who live in cities who join PETA. Country folk get acclimatized to commoditizing animals.
This sounds right to me. After all, you don’t find plantation owners agitating for the rights of slaves. No, it’s people who live off far away from actual slaves, meeting the occasional lucky black guy who managed to make it in the city and noting that he seems morally worthy.
You mean, have not yet expressed an opinion in a way that you understand.
Anyway, the fact that slaves and ex-slaves did advocate for the rights of slaves indicates that closeness to a problem does not necessarily lead one to ignore it.
This makes the claim unfalsifiable. People who work closely with animals are the greatest believers in animal rights? Obviously animals should have rights, since they’re the ones who know the best. People who work closely with animals believe in animal rights the least? Obviously animals should have rights, since people who work closely with animals are rationalizing it away like slaveholders and the people with the least contact with animals are the most objective. No matter what happens, that “proves” that the people who talk about animal rights are the ones we should listen to.
I could make equally-valid stories up to come to the opposite conclusion: People who work closely with animals are the greatest believers in animal rights? Obviously they are prejudiced by their close association. People who work closely with animals believe in animal rights the least? Obviously they’re the ones who know best.
There are two axes here—knowledge and bias. Those who own farms are most biased, but also most knowledgeable. Those who own farms but don’t work on them are both biased and ignorant, so I would predict they are most in favour of farming. Those who are ignorant, but only benefit indirectly—the city dwellers—I would predict higher variance, since it may prove convenient for various reasons to be against it. And finally, the knowledgeable and who benefit only slightly; I would predict that the more knowledge, the more likely that it outweighed the bias.
Of course, I already know these to be true in both cases, pretty much. (Can anyone think of a third example to test these predictions on?) But in general, I would expect large amounts of bias to outweigh knowledge—power corrupts—and low amounts of bias to be eventually overcome by the evidence of nastyness. That’s just human nature (or my model of it), and slavery is just a handy analogy where stuff lined up much the same way.
This argument doesn’t help you. The problem is that the original (implied) claim (that the positions of city-dwellers and farmers happen because vegetarianism is good but people oppose it for irrational reasons) is unfalsifiable: if city-dwellers favor it and farmers oppose it, that happens because vegetarianism is good; if city-dwellers oppose it and farmers favor it, that still happens because vegetarianism is good.
Your explanation in terms of two axes is not wrong, but that explanation implies that the positions of farmers and city-dwellers can go either way regardless of whether vegetarianism is good. In other words, your explanation doesn’t save the original claim, and in fact demolishes it instead.
This argument doesn’t help you. The problem is that the original (implied) claim (that the positions of city-dwellers and farmers happen because vegetarianism is good but people oppose it for irrational reasons) is unfalsifiable: if city-dwellers favor it and farmers oppose it, that happens because vegetarianism is good; if city-dwellers oppose it and farmers favor it, that still happens because vegetarianism is good.
Your explanation in terms of two axes is not wrong, but that explanation implies that the positions of farmers and city-dwellers can go either way regardless of whether vegetarianism is good.
What? No. Where are you getting that from?
In other words, your explanation doesn’t save the original claim, and in fact demolishes it instead.
Which original claim? I just pointed out that you have to take bias into account.
I kinda think the opposite is true. It’s people who live in cities who join PETA.
No, it goes both ways. It’s only people who live in cities who can either completely ignore animal welfare or go to the other wacky extreme, rather than realizing what is involved in using animals for raw material for things and understanding that some kind of arrangement has to be made and trying to make it the best one possible.
I’m not aware of any Western religion that says cruelty to animals is a sin.
FWIW I’ll provide some institutional references:
The current Catechism of the Catholic Church section 2418 reads, in part: “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly.” The 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia goes into more detail.
I also searched for statements by the largest Protestant denominations. I found nothing by the EKD. The SBC doesn’t take official positions but the Humane Society publishes a PDF presenting Baptist thinking that is favorable to animals.
The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism website has lots of minor references to animal welfare. One specific example is that they appear to endorse the Humane Farm Animal Care Standards.
The largest Muslim organization that I found reference to, the Nahdlatul Ulama, does not appear to have any official stance on treatment of animals.
The developed world is thoroughly urbanized. Des Moines is as far from animals as Manhattan. I think what you mean is that a certain politique ascendant on both coasts is much more likely to purchase animal rights as an expansion pack. Which is not to pre-judge the add-on, but to say it has very little to do with the size of your skyscrapers.
That said, I’m not disputing at all that modern agribusiness commodifies animals and that many of today’s farmers and ranchers are pretty insulated from the things they eat.
There are many accounts of prayers to animals. One of the best-attested is of the Ainu prayers to the bears they worship (and kill.)
I’m not aware of any Western religion that says cruelty to animals is a sin
Well, that does exclude Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, which famously do have animal ethics. But even if we’re just talking the western religions, then yeah, they do, too.
Without getting into a nasty debate involving proof-texting and what Atheists say the Bible says versus what Theists say the Bible says: if you go ask a few questions in the pertinent parts of Stack Exchange of Muslim, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Orthodox Jewish thinkers, I guarantee they will answer back that wanton cruelty to animals is wrong. And the same would be true if you started reading random imams, theologians, patriarchs, and pastors.
Individual interpretations, maybe
Unfortunately, there is no possible answer to this.
The Anglican Church was fine with bear-baiting. I don’t think the Catholic Church complained about vivisection.
While the first and loudest opposition to cock-fighting and bear-baiting came from Puritans and Methodists, outside the Church of England’s mainstream, these people were indisputably Anglicans at the beginning. And a voice of conscience from the margins of the culture is very common, and usually just means that the center of the culture has been captured by self-interest.
Catholics leaders were present at the beginning of the anti-vivisection movement.
it’s certainly true that tribal cultures gave zero or negative weight to the well-being of competing tribes.
If this were true, tribes would be in constant total war, which is actually a foreign concept to most tribal societies. Read Napoleon Chagnon again. They kill out of self-interest, and out of revenge, but it’s not constant and it’s not something they feel awesome about.
Unfortunately, there is no possible answer to this.
Of course there is. Not all statements in religious holy books require the same amount of interpretation. If the various holy books said “thou shalt not be cruel to animals” using fairly direct language, that would be an answer to that. Problem is, they don’t.
If this were true, tribes would be in constant total war
That doesn’t follow. I grant zero weight to the well-being of clothes, but that doesn’t mean I go around destroying my clothes and setting department stores on fire. Granting zero weight to something doesn’t imply wanting to destroy it, and even granting negative weight to it only means wanting to destroy it insofar as destroying it doesn’t make something else worse that you do care about (such as risking death to your own tribesmen in the war.)
Also, I wonder how many of the cultures who pray to the spirit of the animal also pray to the spirit of plants, rocks, the sun, or other things that even vegetarians don’t think have any rights.
A minimal investment of time would convince anybody willing to be convinced that at the very least there are many doctrinal authorities on record in every large strain of western monotheism against cruelty to animals, and that these authorities adduce evidence from ancient holy texts to support their pronouncements. Feel free to disagree with Aquinas, eastern patriarchs, a large body of hadiths, and many rabbinical rulings about the faiths they represent. There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I’m not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don’t seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.
I grant zero weight to the well-being of clothes, but that doesn’t mean I go around destroying my clothes
Clothes aren’t a threat to ambush you, and aren’t eating tapirs you could eat. I assume you would burn them if you feared ambush or starvation.
doesn’t make something else worse that you do care about (such as risking death to your own tribesmen in war)
Total war doesn’t mean you can’t be tactical in your approach, obviously. Dissembling and biding time are smart.
What I mean about the tribes being in constant total war is that since, as was pointed out, they are in competition for resources with neighboring tribes, they would kill neighbors whenever they thought they could get away with it if they attached zero utility to these people’s survival. And we see that’s not the case, not at all. Hunter-gatherers trade, they intermarry, they feast together, they form friendships and alliances between tribes, they do a bunch of things that would be socially impossible if there were not any empathy at all. Sometimes they betray and murder. But by no means all the time. Napoleon Chagnon’s accounts of the Yanomamo, where most of this stuff about violent stone-agers comes from recently, are quite clear that elders intervene to stop axe fights some times, and that the Yanomamo are mostly just terrified by the violence around them.
What we know from the psych side is that empathy appears to be basic in humans. Our researchers would have to be pretty consistently wrong about something very large if Stone Age people, just because they were Stone Age, were incapable of empathy with people outside their immediate kin group.
I wonder how many of the cultures who pray to the spirit of the animal also pray to the spirit of the plants, rocks, the sun, or other things that even vegetarians don’t think have any rights.
Yeah, this is pretty interesting to me, too. I suspect, though, that a lot of people into deep ecology and Christian environmentalism and similar forms of environmentalism have...analogous?...attitudes toward the parts of nature that lack nervous systems. Not inside the rationalist/hedonic calculus/Peter Singer/utilitarian communities, probably, because there’s so much emphasis on pleasure and pain there. But it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the “expanding circle of concern” eventually encompassed or re-encompassed things like trees and rivers.
there are many doctrinal authorities on record in every large strain of western monotheism against cruelty to animals
Which means that many doctrinal authorities are capable of making stuff up.
While most religions’ tenets require some interpretation of their holy books, there are degrees of this. Some claims made by religions come from their holy books in a fairly direct and straightforward way. Others are claimed to come from their holy books but in fact are the result of contrived interpretation. Religious animal cruelty laws fall in the second category. The holy books do not support laws about animal cruelty in the same way that they support “thou shalt not commit adultery”.
Furthermore, even those contrived laws don’t generally claim it’s cruel to eat animals. Bringing up the fact that religions oppose animal cruelty is like pointing out that every religion and culture has rules about sexual immorality, and therefore we should oppose some particular type of sexual immorality that you don’t like.
they are in competition for resources with neighboring tribes, they would kill neighbors whenever they thought they could get away with it if they attached zero utility to these people’s survival.
During much of history, most cultures that knew Jews attached zero or negative utility to them, but pogroms only happened every so often. They didn’t just kill all the Jews until the Nazi era.
What we know from the psych side is that empathy appears to be basic in humans.
Anthromorphizing is also pretty basic to humans; that’s why the Eliza program convinces people.
But it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the “expanding circle of concern” eventually encompassed or re-encompassed things like trees and rivers.
But you’re not following the implications of this. The idea that primitive cultures respect the spirit of animals was brought up to show that taking the well-being of animals into account is normal. If the same primitive people respect the spirit of things whose well-being we clearly should not take into account, such as vegetables, it doesn’t support the point you brought it up to support.
Which means that many doctrinal authorities are capable of making stuff up.
Friend, I’m assuming you believe all/most of religion is made up anyway, right? I mean, you might think some of it was made up sincerely and some was made up cynically. But you know with an extraordinarily high degree of certainty it’s all made up. Right? So who cares who made it up. It’s there. Some people take it seriously.
It doesn’t threaten non-theism at all to concede that religions define their own interpretations and belief systems. This concession is actually the bread and butter of non-theism. Really the only person who gets to contest that is the theist with an alternate interpretation, because he can appeal to a higher authority.
Even though I said I didn’t want to sling scripture, and I really don’t: why don’t you muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain? Why were the fifth and sixth days of creation declared good? Why was man created on the same day as the beasts of the field? Why was man originally given plants to eat, not flesh? Why was man specifically forbidden to eat “the life” of the animal? Why did you have to rest beasts of burden on the Sabbath? Why couldn’t you disturb mother birds on their eggs? Why did fallen beasts of burden have to be helped up? Why were the animals saved with Noah during the flood? Why doesn’t God forget sparrows? Why does God feed the birds of the air? Why is it that animals only become carnivorous after the exit from Eden? What does it mean that the lion will lie down with the lamb and that a little child shall lead them? Why are humans constantly portrayed as animals in scriptural metaphor?
Now, I totally believe you have answers for all these questions that acknowledge the scriptural references but manage to discredit their supposed connection to any sort of authorial concern for animal welfare or the environment. The problem is, that’s not enough. You have to show that your answers were the one that audiences have understood and adopted over centuries. That will be difficult. It certainly appears that St. Francis and St. Augustine and St. Aquinas and Cardinal Manning and Tolkien and John Paul II disagree with you, and I’m inclined to say that their readings carry more popular weight than yours.
But you’re not following the implications of this.
Oh, no, I get it. Respect for nature != concern for the pain of creatures with nervous systems. Spiritual environmentalism is nothing like utilitarian environmentalism. I just don’t care about that very much. I am much more interested in whether some secular environmentalists will eventually develop secular justifications for assigning “rights” or something very like that to aspects of the environment that lack nervous systems. Probably not worth chasing that rabbit, tho.
Even though I said I didn’t want to sling scripture, and I really don’t: why...
That’s a cheat that is commonly used by creationists who come up with lists of 100 and 200 arguments for creationism. The trick? Make a list containing a lot of very low quality arguments in the knowledge that it’s long enough that no one person will have the patience (or sometimes the knowledge) to properly refute every single one. Then latch on to whichever ones got the least thorough response.
It’s not hard to point out the flaws in your examples. For instance, Noah did save the animals, but he’s saving them as resources—because if he doesn’t, there won’t be any animals—not as an anti-cruelty rule. If God also commanded that he take some seeds, would you then have claimed that he was concerned about cruelty to seeds? And notice that he takes seven pairs of clean animals so that he can make animal sacrifices.
But no matter which example I refute, you’d just point to another I haven’t refuted. And I’m not going to do every single one.
Like I said, I really am sure you can refute these! That is beside the point. I doubt very much you can show that your refutations are what people actually believe about the texts.
I am not arguing the text is true. I am not even arguing that a certain interpretation of the text is correct. I am pointing out that people believe certain interpretations of the text.
This is not like arguing with William Lane Craig about creationism. This is like trying to tell William Lane Craig that nobody believes in creationism.
We may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Arguments are soldiers. Mine need a vacation. Enjoy your day.
I doubt very much you can show that your refutations are what people actually believe about the texts.
I would be very surprised if any major religion claims that Noah had to take the animals on the ark because not taking them would be cruelty to animals. In other words, yes, my refutation is what people believe about the texts. Except I’m not going to bother going through 13 refutations.
Furthermore, even those contrived laws don’t generally claim it’s cruel to eat animals. Bringing up the fact that religions oppose animal cruelty is like pointing out that every religion and culture has rules about sexual immorality, and therefore we should oppose some particular type of sexual immorality that you don’t like.
Actually, he’s responding to PG, who claimed that no major religion is against cruelty to animals … presumably implying that this is a modern aberration? Or something? Regardless, it was he who claimed (in your analogy) that since no religion is against “sexual immorality”, then clearly modern dislike of rape is not a part of basic human ethics.
During much of history, most cultures that knew Jews attached zero or negative utility to them, but pogroms only happened every so often. They didn’t just kill all the Jews until the Nazi era.
They demonized them. That is not the same as attaching “zero or negative utility” except in the most dire of cases (which, admittedly, crop up with some regularity.)
There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I’m not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don’t seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.
To be fair to this idea, it can be useful to approach things from a fresh perspective. Scholars have had longer to develop the more … complex misinterpretations.
The trouble springs up when you don’t check the, y’know, facts. Like the original text your copy was translated from, say. Or the culture it was written in. Or logic.
(Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers “really” believe.)
They kill out of self-interest, and out of revenge, but it’s not constant and it’s not something they feel awesome about.
Most Native American cultures felt awesome about killing enemies in battle. I don’t know if it’s universal, but it was very common for warriors to be highly-respected in tribal cultures, in proportion to how many people they’d killed.
I don’t think you can assert that it’s not constant, either. Look at the conflict between Hopi & Navajo, Cree & Blackfoot. Similar to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, and I’d call that constant.
Modern all-out, extended-duration war is a foreign concept to such groups, but “this tribe is our enemy and we will kill any of them found unprotected” and “let us all get together and annihilate this troublesome neighbor village and take their women” is not.
Most Native American cultures felt awesome about killing enemies in battle.
Weren’t you just saying there’s a lot of mythologizing of the NA past?
Did you know there are specific Navajo rituals designed to cleanse warriors returning from war before they re-enter the community, to prevent their violence from infecting the community? And that these rituals have counterparts in cultures around the world, and are of interest to modern trauma researchers?
It is helpful to separate desirable status as a successful warrior from desire for war. It is very common for very successful warriors to prefer peace, in tribal societies as in modern. That’s not to say young guys don’t want to make their bones and old guys don’t see the need to take care of business: it’s to say that only a totally deranged person kills without any barriers, and very few people are totally deranged.
It’s interesting that you adduce the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in this context. I am very certain that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians are capable of empathy for each other. This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t shell each other or commit atrocities. But you’re arguing a hard line: that tribes attach “zero or negative” utility to each other’s continued existence.
Only people who’ve never hunted or herded and buy their meat wrapped in plastic have never thought about animal welfare
Farmers are in contact with animals even more often than hunter gatherers. But have you ever seen the whole “asking for forgiveness” thing in an agricultural society? (not rhetorical)
No, though I’ve seen small-scale family farms ensure that their stock live pleasantly and are slaughtered humanely, and I myself have tried to make sure food animals I’ve killed died quickly and painlessly.
Mileage will vary. There are a lot of true horror stories about farming and ranching, and they’re not all from industrial feedlots.
The asking for forgiveness may indicate that people somehow thought of the act as killing, but that did not change their actions. Humans have had a distinctive influence on the local megafauna wherever they showed up. A cynic might write that “humans did not really care about the well-being of …”. We for instance also have taboos of eating dogs and cats, but the last time I checked it was not because of value their lives, but because they are cute. It’s mostly organized lying to feel OK.
What? Of course people care about the lives of dogs and cats.
Anecdotal Evidence: All the people I’ve seen cry over the death of a dog. Not just children, either. I’ve seen grown men and women grieve for months over the death of a beloved dog.
Even if their sole reason for caring is that their cute, that wouldn’t invalidate the fact that they care. There’s some amount of “organized lying” in most social interactions, that doesn’t imply that people don’t care about anything. That’s silliness, or puts such a high burden of proof/ high standard of caring (even when most humans can talk about degrees of caring more or less) as to be both outside the realm of what normal people talk about and totally unfalsifiable.
We for instance also have taboos of eating dogs and cats, but the last time I checked it was not because of value their lives, but because they are cute.
More because we regularly socialize with them. People are not, generally, in favour of killing just the ugly pets.
(And, this is purely anecdotal, but viewing animals more as less-intelligent individuals with a personality and so on and less as fleshy automatons seems to correlate with pets.)
People have to eat. It’s consistent to feel that animal life has value but to know that your tribe needs meat, and to prioritize the second over the first. The fact that you value an animal life doesn’t mean you value it above all else. And the fact that humans wiped out the Giant Sloth/Mammoth/whatever only necessitates that we were really good hunters. It says nothing about our motivations.
Also, I think you would find it really hard to disentangle cuteness from empathy, if that’s what you’re trying to do.
Asking for forgiveness is usually a hunter-gatherer thing. Before agriculture brought starchy grains and dairy on the scene animal fat was the major calorie source, and vegetarianism would have meant only fruits, nuts, leafy vegetables, and tubers. And you’d need a lot of tubers in order for this to be a sufficiently calorie rich diet.
Most cultures, I understand, base moral worth on a “great chain of being” model, with gods above heroes above mortals, and mortals above those **s in the next village above smart animals above dumb animals … you probably get the picture.
I think this is wrong in an interesting way: it’s an Industrial Age blind spot. Only people who’ve never hunted or herded and buy their meat wrapped in plastic have never thought about animal welfare. Many indigenous hunting cultures ask forgiveness when taking food animals. Countless cultures have taboos about killing certain animals. Many animal species’ names translate to “people of the __.” As far as I can tell, all major religions consider wanton cruelty to animals a sin, and have for thousands of years, though obviously, people dispute the definition of cruelty.
I kinda think the opposite is true. It’s people who live in cities who join PETA. Country folk get acclimatized to commoditizing animals.
I’d like to see a summary of the evidence that many Native Americans actually prayed for forgiveness to animal spirits. There’s been a lot of retrospective “reframing” of Native American culture in the past 100 years—go to a pow-wow today and an earnest Native American elder may tell you stories about their great respect for the Earth, but I don’t find these stories in 17th thru 19th-century accounts. Praying for forgiveness makes a great story, but you usually hear about it from somebody like James Fenimore Cooper rather than in an ethnographic account. Do contemporary accounts from the Amazon say that tribespeople there do that?
(Regarding the reliability of contemporary Native American accounts: Once I was researching the Cree Indians, and I read an account, circa 1900, by a Cree, boasting that their written language was their own invention and went back generations before the white man came. The next thing I read was an account from around 1860 of a white missionary who had recently learned Cree and invented the written script for it. I may possibly be confusing the Cree with Ojibway, but it was the same language in both stories.)
I’m not aware of any Western religion that says cruelty to animals is a sin. Individual interpretations, maybe, but I’m pretty sure you won’t find a word about it in the whole of the Bible. The Anglican church was fine with bear-baiting. I don’t think the Catholic church complained about vivisection.
And it’s certainly true that tribal cultures gave zero or negative weight to the well-being of competing tribes. Utilitarianism is tricky to apply when you have to periodically kill your neighbors to survive.
In any case, indigenous cultures aren’t the ones complaining that utilitarianism leads to utility monsters. The people who’ve made those arguments do have their own preferred utility monsters.
This sounds right to me. After all, you don’t find plantation owners agitating for the rights of slaves. No, it’s people who live off far away from actual slaves, meeting the occasional lucky black guy who managed to make it in the city and noting that he seems morally worthy.
Um, what about the actual slaves and ex-slaves?
In this analogy, they correspond to non-human animals, who have not yet expressed an opinion on the matter.
You mean, have not yet expressed an opinion in a way that you understand.
Anyway, the fact that slaves and ex-slaves did advocate for the rights of slaves indicates that closeness to a problem does not necessarily lead one to ignore it.
They did not benefit from slavery, as the plantation owners did.
Sorry, that was meant to be the implication of “plantation owners”—“they’re biased”, not “anyone who actually met slaves was fine with it.”.
This makes the claim unfalsifiable. People who work closely with animals are the greatest believers in animal rights? Obviously animals should have rights, since they’re the ones who know the best. People who work closely with animals believe in animal rights the least? Obviously animals should have rights, since people who work closely with animals are rationalizing it away like slaveholders and the people with the least contact with animals are the most objective. No matter what happens, that “proves” that the people who talk about animal rights are the ones we should listen to.
I could make equally-valid stories up to come to the opposite conclusion: People who work closely with animals are the greatest believers in animal rights? Obviously they are prejudiced by their close association. People who work closely with animals believe in animal rights the least? Obviously they’re the ones who know best.
If you can explain everything, you can’t explain anything.
There are two axes here—knowledge and bias. Those who own farms are most biased, but also most knowledgeable. Those who own farms but don’t work on them are both biased and ignorant, so I would predict they are most in favour of farming. Those who are ignorant, but only benefit indirectly—the city dwellers—I would predict higher variance, since it may prove convenient for various reasons to be against it. And finally, the knowledgeable and who benefit only slightly; I would predict that the more knowledge, the more likely that it outweighed the bias.
Of course, I already know these to be true in both cases, pretty much. (Can anyone think of a third example to test these predictions on?) But in general, I would expect large amounts of bias to outweigh knowledge—power corrupts—and low amounts of bias to be eventually overcome by the evidence of nastyness. That’s just human nature (or my model of it), and slavery is just a handy analogy where stuff lined up much the same way.
This argument doesn’t help you. The problem is that the original (implied) claim (that the positions of city-dwellers and farmers happen because vegetarianism is good but people oppose it for irrational reasons) is unfalsifiable: if city-dwellers favor it and farmers oppose it, that happens because vegetarianism is good; if city-dwellers oppose it and farmers favor it, that still happens because vegetarianism is good.
Your explanation in terms of two axes is not wrong, but that explanation implies that the positions of farmers and city-dwellers can go either way regardless of whether vegetarianism is good. In other words, your explanation doesn’t save the original claim, and in fact demolishes it instead.
What? No. Where are you getting that from?
Which original claim? I just pointed out that you have to take bias into account.
No, it goes both ways. It’s only people who live in cities who can either completely ignore animal welfare or go to the other wacky extreme, rather than realizing what is involved in using animals for raw material for things and understanding that some kind of arrangement has to be made and trying to make it the best one possible.
FWIW I’ll provide some institutional references:
The current Catechism of the Catholic Church section 2418 reads, in part: “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly.” The 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia goes into more detail.
I also searched for statements by the largest Protestant denominations. I found nothing by the EKD. The SBC doesn’t take official positions but the Humane Society publishes a PDF presenting Baptist thinking that is favorable to animals.
The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism website has lots of minor references to animal welfare. One specific example is that they appear to endorse the Humane Farm Animal Care Standards.
The largest Muslim organization that I found reference to, the Nahdlatul Ulama, does not appear to have any official stance on treatment of animals.
The developed world is thoroughly urbanized. Des Moines is as far from animals as Manhattan. I think what you mean is that a certain politique ascendant on both coasts is much more likely to purchase animal rights as an expansion pack. Which is not to pre-judge the add-on, but to say it has very little to do with the size of your skyscrapers.
That said, I’m not disputing at all that modern agribusiness commodifies animals and that many of today’s farmers and ranchers are pretty insulated from the things they eat.
There are many accounts of prayers to animals. One of the best-attested is of the Ainu prayers to the bears they worship (and kill.)
Well, that does exclude Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, which famously do have animal ethics. But even if we’re just talking the western religions, then yeah, they do, too.
Without getting into a nasty debate involving proof-texting and what Atheists say the Bible says versus what Theists say the Bible says: if you go ask a few questions in the pertinent parts of Stack Exchange of Muslim, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Orthodox Jewish thinkers, I guarantee they will answer back that wanton cruelty to animals is wrong. And the same would be true if you started reading random imams, theologians, patriarchs, and pastors.
Unfortunately, there is no possible answer to this.
While the first and loudest opposition to cock-fighting and bear-baiting came from Puritans and Methodists, outside the Church of England’s mainstream, these people were indisputably Anglicans at the beginning. And a voice of conscience from the margins of the culture is very common, and usually just means that the center of the culture has been captured by self-interest.
Catholics leaders were present at the beginning of the anti-vivisection movement.
If this were true, tribes would be in constant total war, which is actually a foreign concept to most tribal societies. Read Napoleon Chagnon again. They kill out of self-interest, and out of revenge, but it’s not constant and it’s not something they feel awesome about.
Of course there is. Not all statements in religious holy books require the same amount of interpretation. If the various holy books said “thou shalt not be cruel to animals” using fairly direct language, that would be an answer to that. Problem is, they don’t.
That doesn’t follow. I grant zero weight to the well-being of clothes, but that doesn’t mean I go around destroying my clothes and setting department stores on fire. Granting zero weight to something doesn’t imply wanting to destroy it, and even granting negative weight to it only means wanting to destroy it insofar as destroying it doesn’t make something else worse that you do care about (such as risking death to your own tribesmen in the war.)
Also, I wonder how many of the cultures who pray to the spirit of the animal also pray to the spirit of plants, rocks, the sun, or other things that even vegetarians don’t think have any rights.
A minimal investment of time would convince anybody willing to be convinced that at the very least there are many doctrinal authorities on record in every large strain of western monotheism against cruelty to animals, and that these authorities adduce evidence from ancient holy texts to support their pronouncements. Feel free to disagree with Aquinas, eastern patriarchs, a large body of hadiths, and many rabbinical rulings about the faiths they represent. There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I’m not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don’t seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.
Clothes aren’t a threat to ambush you, and aren’t eating tapirs you could eat. I assume you would burn them if you feared ambush or starvation.
Total war doesn’t mean you can’t be tactical in your approach, obviously. Dissembling and biding time are smart.
What I mean about the tribes being in constant total war is that since, as was pointed out, they are in competition for resources with neighboring tribes, they would kill neighbors whenever they thought they could get away with it if they attached zero utility to these people’s survival. And we see that’s not the case, not at all. Hunter-gatherers trade, they intermarry, they feast together, they form friendships and alliances between tribes, they do a bunch of things that would be socially impossible if there were not any empathy at all. Sometimes they betray and murder. But by no means all the time. Napoleon Chagnon’s accounts of the Yanomamo, where most of this stuff about violent stone-agers comes from recently, are quite clear that elders intervene to stop axe fights some times, and that the Yanomamo are mostly just terrified by the violence around them.
What we know from the psych side is that empathy appears to be basic in humans. Our researchers would have to be pretty consistently wrong about something very large if Stone Age people, just because they were Stone Age, were incapable of empathy with people outside their immediate kin group.
Yeah, this is pretty interesting to me, too. I suspect, though, that a lot of people into deep ecology and Christian environmentalism and similar forms of environmentalism have...analogous?...attitudes toward the parts of nature that lack nervous systems. Not inside the rationalist/hedonic calculus/Peter Singer/utilitarian communities, probably, because there’s so much emphasis on pleasure and pain there. But it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the “expanding circle of concern” eventually encompassed or re-encompassed things like trees and rivers.
Which means that many doctrinal authorities are capable of making stuff up.
While most religions’ tenets require some interpretation of their holy books, there are degrees of this. Some claims made by religions come from their holy books in a fairly direct and straightforward way. Others are claimed to come from their holy books but in fact are the result of contrived interpretation. Religious animal cruelty laws fall in the second category. The holy books do not support laws about animal cruelty in the same way that they support “thou shalt not commit adultery”.
Furthermore, even those contrived laws don’t generally claim it’s cruel to eat animals. Bringing up the fact that religions oppose animal cruelty is like pointing out that every religion and culture has rules about sexual immorality, and therefore we should oppose some particular type of sexual immorality that you don’t like.
During much of history, most cultures that knew Jews attached zero or negative utility to them, but pogroms only happened every so often. They didn’t just kill all the Jews until the Nazi era.
Anthromorphizing is also pretty basic to humans; that’s why the Eliza program convinces people.
But you’re not following the implications of this. The idea that primitive cultures respect the spirit of animals was brought up to show that taking the well-being of animals into account is normal. If the same primitive people respect the spirit of things whose well-being we clearly should not take into account, such as vegetables, it doesn’t support the point you brought it up to support.
IIRC, the requirements for humane slaughter are spelled out in great detail in the mishnah.
Friend, I’m assuming you believe all/most of religion is made up anyway, right? I mean, you might think some of it was made up sincerely and some was made up cynically. But you know with an extraordinarily high degree of certainty it’s all made up. Right? So who cares who made it up. It’s there. Some people take it seriously.
It doesn’t threaten non-theism at all to concede that religions define their own interpretations and belief systems. This concession is actually the bread and butter of non-theism. Really the only person who gets to contest that is the theist with an alternate interpretation, because he can appeal to a higher authority.
Even though I said I didn’t want to sling scripture, and I really don’t: why don’t you muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain? Why were the fifth and sixth days of creation declared good? Why was man created on the same day as the beasts of the field? Why was man originally given plants to eat, not flesh? Why was man specifically forbidden to eat “the life” of the animal? Why did you have to rest beasts of burden on the Sabbath? Why couldn’t you disturb mother birds on their eggs? Why did fallen beasts of burden have to be helped up? Why were the animals saved with Noah during the flood? Why doesn’t God forget sparrows? Why does God feed the birds of the air? Why is it that animals only become carnivorous after the exit from Eden? What does it mean that the lion will lie down with the lamb and that a little child shall lead them? Why are humans constantly portrayed as animals in scriptural metaphor?
Now, I totally believe you have answers for all these questions that acknowledge the scriptural references but manage to discredit their supposed connection to any sort of authorial concern for animal welfare or the environment. The problem is, that’s not enough. You have to show that your answers were the one that audiences have understood and adopted over centuries. That will be difficult. It certainly appears that St. Francis and St. Augustine and St. Aquinas and Cardinal Manning and Tolkien and John Paul II disagree with you, and I’m inclined to say that their readings carry more popular weight than yours.
Oh, no, I get it. Respect for nature != concern for the pain of creatures with nervous systems. Spiritual environmentalism is nothing like utilitarian environmentalism. I just don’t care about that very much. I am much more interested in whether some secular environmentalists will eventually develop secular justifications for assigning “rights” or something very like that to aspects of the environment that lack nervous systems. Probably not worth chasing that rabbit, tho.
That’s a cheat that is commonly used by creationists who come up with lists of 100 and 200 arguments for creationism. The trick? Make a list containing a lot of very low quality arguments in the knowledge that it’s long enough that no one person will have the patience (or sometimes the knowledge) to properly refute every single one. Then latch on to whichever ones got the least thorough response.
It’s not hard to point out the flaws in your examples. For instance, Noah did save the animals, but he’s saving them as resources—because if he doesn’t, there won’t be any animals—not as an anti-cruelty rule. If God also commanded that he take some seeds, would you then have claimed that he was concerned about cruelty to seeds? And notice that he takes seven pairs of clean animals so that he can make animal sacrifices.
But no matter which example I refute, you’d just point to another I haven’t refuted. And I’m not going to do every single one.
Like I said, I really am sure you can refute these! That is beside the point. I doubt very much you can show that your refutations are what people actually believe about the texts.
I am not arguing the text is true. I am not even arguing that a certain interpretation of the text is correct. I am pointing out that people believe certain interpretations of the text.
This is not like arguing with William Lane Craig about creationism. This is like trying to tell William Lane Craig that nobody believes in creationism.
We may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Arguments are soldiers. Mine need a vacation. Enjoy your day.
I would be very surprised if any major religion claims that Noah had to take the animals on the ark because not taking them would be cruelty to animals. In other words, yes, my refutation is what people believe about the texts. Except I’m not going to bother going through 13 refutations.
How about, say, three? I could probably do three myself, but they would suck because I’m biased. And I’d be genuinely interested to hear it.
(This is completely beside the point, at this stage, so I can understand why you may not want to bother.)
Mmmm. Clicked the wrong reply button. Sorry.…
It’s not that clear to Swiss politicians.
“The dignity of plants”.
That was written by one of the committee that produced this official Swiss government publication. (PDF)
Actually, he’s responding to PG, who claimed that no major religion is against cruelty to animals … presumably implying that this is a modern aberration? Or something? Regardless, it was he who claimed (in your analogy) that since no religion is against “sexual immorality”, then clearly modern dislike of rape is not a part of basic human ethics.
They demonized them. That is not the same as attaching “zero or negative utility” except in the most dire of cases (which, admittedly, crop up with some regularity.)
To be fair to this idea, it can be useful to approach things from a fresh perspective. Scholars have had longer to develop the more … complex misinterpretations.
The trouble springs up when you don’t check the, y’know, facts. Like the original text your copy was translated from, say. Or the culture it was written in. Or logic.
(Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers “really” believe.)
So very much this.
Most Native American cultures felt awesome about killing enemies in battle. I don’t know if it’s universal, but it was very common for warriors to be highly-respected in tribal cultures, in proportion to how many people they’d killed.
I don’t think you can assert that it’s not constant, either. Look at the conflict between Hopi & Navajo, Cree & Blackfoot. Similar to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, and I’d call that constant.
Modern all-out, extended-duration war is a foreign concept to such groups, but “this tribe is our enemy and we will kill any of them found unprotected” and “let us all get together and annihilate this troublesome neighbor village and take their women” is not.
Weren’t you just saying there’s a lot of mythologizing of the NA past?
Did you know there are specific Navajo rituals designed to cleanse warriors returning from war before they re-enter the community, to prevent their violence from infecting the community? And that these rituals have counterparts in cultures around the world, and are of interest to modern trauma researchers?
It is helpful to separate desirable status as a successful warrior from desire for war. It is very common for very successful warriors to prefer peace, in tribal societies as in modern. That’s not to say young guys don’t want to make their bones and old guys don’t see the need to take care of business: it’s to say that only a totally deranged person kills without any barriers, and very few people are totally deranged.
It’s interesting that you adduce the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in this context. I am very certain that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians are capable of empathy for each other. This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t shell each other or commit atrocities. But you’re arguing a hard line: that tribes attach “zero or negative” utility to each other’s continued existence.
This needs modifiers: it looks to me that with “always” added this is wrong, but with “sometimes” added this is correct.
Farmers are in contact with animals even more often than hunter gatherers. But have you ever seen the whole “asking for forgiveness” thing in an agricultural society? (not rhetorical)
No, though I’ve seen small-scale family farms ensure that their stock live pleasantly and are slaughtered humanely, and I myself have tried to make sure food animals I’ve killed died quickly and painlessly.
Mileage will vary. There are a lot of true horror stories about farming and ranching, and they’re not all from industrial feedlots.
The asking for forgiveness may indicate that people somehow thought of the act as killing, but that did not change their actions. Humans have had a distinctive influence on the local megafauna wherever they showed up. A cynic might write that “humans did not really care about the well-being of …”. We for instance also have taboos of eating dogs and cats, but the last time I checked it was not because of value their lives, but because they are cute. It’s mostly organized lying to feel OK.
What? Of course people care about the lives of dogs and cats.
Anecdotal Evidence: All the people I’ve seen cry over the death of a dog. Not just children, either. I’ve seen grown men and women grieve for months over the death of a beloved dog.
Even if their sole reason for caring is that their cute, that wouldn’t invalidate the fact that they care. There’s some amount of “organized lying” in most social interactions, that doesn’t imply that people don’t care about anything. That’s silliness, or puts such a high burden of proof/ high standard of caring (even when most humans can talk about degrees of caring more or less) as to be both outside the realm of what normal people talk about and totally unfalsifiable.
More because we regularly socialize with them. People are not, generally, in favour of killing just the ugly pets.
(And, this is purely anecdotal, but viewing animals more as less-intelligent individuals with a personality and so on and less as fleshy automatons seems to correlate with pets.)
I guess I’m not cynical?
People have to eat. It’s consistent to feel that animal life has value but to know that your tribe needs meat, and to prioritize the second over the first. The fact that you value an animal life doesn’t mean you value it above all else. And the fact that humans wiped out the Giant Sloth/Mammoth/whatever only necessitates that we were really good hunters. It says nothing about our motivations.
Also, I think you would find it really hard to disentangle cuteness from empathy, if that’s what you’re trying to do.
Asking for forgiveness is usually a hunter-gatherer thing. Before agriculture brought starchy grains and dairy on the scene animal fat was the major calorie source, and vegetarianism would have meant only fruits, nuts, leafy vegetables, and tubers. And you’d need a lot of tubers in order for this to be a sufficiently calorie rich diet.
You are right, of course. I did not want to imply that a vegan diet would have been feasible until recent advances.
I think “most people in time and space” have lived in the industrial age. Am I wrong?
Most cultures, I understand, base moral worth on a “great chain of being” model, with gods above heroes above mortals, and mortals above those **s in the next village above smart animals above dumb animals … you probably get the picture.