[Forthcoming in Klaus Petrus and Markus Wild, Animal Minds and Animal Morals, 2010]
Abstract. The modern conception of moral status, in which humans are supposed to have absolute moral commitment to all other humans, while having no properly moral commitments, but only indirect ones, to the vast majority of other animals, is the result of a long and complex genealogy, and one that has yet to be written. If I speak of genealogy here it is because, with Nietzsche (1887), Foucault (1975), and Bernard Williams (1994), I wish to suggest that an investigation into the deep historical sources of a common assumption of the modern world might reveal, at the same time, the extent to which this assumption is merely or largely verbal, serving as the ad hoc account we give of a system of practices which only begins to make sense when we consider the way these practices emerge out of a world that did not share our assumptions.
But how could the human-animal dichotomy have a genealogy at all? What could be more deep-seated, more natural, than this? It is certainly true that the idea that humans are a variety of animal is a very new one. But the default assumption throughout most of human history has been that animals are themselves people, if not exactly in the same way we are (Durkheim and Mauss, 1902; ; Lévi-Strauss 1962; Sahlins 1976). Animals and humans were for most of the history of homo sapiens members of a single, all-encompassing community, in which each member was capable of a certain kind of rational activity grounded in intention and in anticipation of the future; in which members of each kind had reciprocal obligations towards members of all other kinds (even if these obligations did not involve refraining from killing, whether one was to refrain or not was not centrally determined by whether the creature in question was an animal person or a human person); and in which there was no meaningful division between nature and culture, or between the boundaries of the human world and the vast expanses of inhuman and indifferent wilderness that surround it.
Nietzsche, Foucault, and Williams were interested, each in his own way, in determining how we came to account for the range of ways we treat other human beings, and in each case the answer had to do with the invention of something we call 'morality' over the course of Western history. I want to argue in turn that if morality is new, and the loss of a view of the world on which animals are persons is also new, it may be that these two developments are part of a package. That is, coming to think of people as having something we might call 'moral status', rather than just being governed by shame and necessity, or by prohibitions that impose themselves as if from outside as quasi-physical forces, rather than flowing from within as a result of one's autonomous agency, involved a corresponding need to sharply determine the boundaries of the realm of beings endowed with such status. The extension of moral status to all human beings, to put this another way, might have as its flipside the limitation of moral status to only human beings.
From an earlier model on which beings derived their importance from, let us say, their ecological role in a socio-natural theater that included human beings, a new picture emerged on which moral status had to be articulated in terms of criteria based upon the internal capacities of the different kinds of creature. The question was no longer: do these creatures play a vital role in the ecology that includes us?, but rather, are these creatures inwardly like us? Wherein this likeness is to consist would be a question that would receive different answers over the course of history, but most would be variations on the idea that, whereas we have rational souls, or reason, or agency, or language, or recursive language, or a developed neocortex, they do not. The exact way in which these distinctions were to make all the difference, or in which practical consequences were to follow from them, was never entirely clear. As Richard Sorabji (1995) has noted, "they lack syntax, therefore we may eat them," is hardly a compelling inference.
On the account I wish to articulate, the discovery that there is something universally shared by human beings, regardless of country or clime, regardless of whether the humans in question are friends or enemies, meant at the same time that species became the sole criterion for the determination of the bounds of community. Human beings came to have moral status because they had this new thing, morality, and for the first time the range of what you can or cannot do to them came to be determined by this new internal capacity. At the same time, the range of what you can do to beings that are not characterized by that internal capacity grew without limit. The genealogy of morality, as the key defining feature of all human beings, goes together with what we might call the genealogy of animality: the creation of that class of beings that, as non-human, lies outside of the sphere of moral consideration altogether.
*
Michel Foucault, Surveillir et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris, Gallimard, 1975.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. Paris, 1962.
Marcell Mauss and Emile Durkheim, De quelques formes primitives de classification. Paris, 1902.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral [1887], in Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. De Gruyter, 1985.
Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason. University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Cornell University Press, 1995.
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity. University of California Press, 1994.
Comments