Cavalieri - The Death of the Animal: a Dialogue

The Death of the Animal

The Death of the Animal

A DIALOGUE Paola Cavalieri Foreword by Peter Singer

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-51823-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cavalieri, Paola, 1950-

The death of the animal : a dialogue / Paola Cavalieri ; foreword by Peter Singer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-231-14552-7 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-51823-9 (electronic)

1. Animals (Philosophy). 2. Animal psychology. 3. Speciesism. 4. Intellect. I. Title.

B105.A55C37 2008

179.3dc22

2008015349

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Contents

M Y THANKS go, first, to Franco Salanga, who has constantly provided essential criticism and support. Next, to Matthew Calarco, John Coetzee, Harlan Miller and Cary Wolfe for agreeing to participate in this enterprise, and to Peter Singer for writing the foreword. I owe a special debt to my editor, Wendy Lochner, for her insightful assistance, and to the two anonymous readers at Columbia University Press, whose comments substantially improved the book. Finally, I am grateful to Gregory Zucker for precious advice, and to Sue Donaldson for sharing with me her thoughts about the ethical issues addressed here.

A S PLATO SO ably demonstrated, the dialogue form is well suited to philosophy. In the context of a more or less natural exchange between two inquiring minds, it enables the author to develop a position while forestalling possible misunderstandings and dealing with likely objections. In the first third of this book, Paola Cavalieri uses her dialogue to develop an objection to the idea that because some conscious beings have certain desirable or important characteristics that others lack, or have these characteristics to a higher degree, they have a higher moral status. This aspect of our thought, which Cavalieri calls perfectionism, is fundamental to much of our ethical thinking, especially that which we use to deny nonhuman animals the same moral status as our fellow human beings, and so to justify our use of animals for food, as tools for research, for fur, or for entertainment. The problem with this justification is that, as one of the characters in the dialogue points out, we reject any suggestion that this same perfectionism should determine moral status among members of our own species. Perfectionism justifies the superiority of humans over animals, but within our own species, moral equality must prevail. How can that be defensible?

This is an important moral argument, and it is presented here in a form that is lucid, concise, and easy to read. As a critique of a widely held moral view it is, in my opinion, entirely successful. Still, the rejection of this standard view leaves us with a choice that is perhaps not quite as obvious as Alexandra Warnock and Theo Glucksman, the characters in the dialogue, take it to be: should we grant to nonhuman animals a basic moral status equal to that of humans, or should we recognize gradations of moral status for humans?

If this argument were all that the book you are holding contained, it would be well worth reading, though those familiar with philosophical work about animals in recent decades would recognize that it draws on earlier work, including that of Cavalieri herself, in her tightly argued book, The Animal Question. What makes this volume original and particularly fascinating is that the dialogue about The Death of the Animal is itself the launching pad for a distinct and very lively debate about the nature of philosophy and the role that reason can play in ethics. That discussion gets started because, as the names of the dialogues protagonists suggest, they come respectively from the analytic and the continental philosophical traditions. So, although the conversation proceeds with the clarity of analytic philosophy, it isnt long before Heidegger and Derrida are drawn into it. The differences between the two approaches to philosophy are brought into even sharper focus when the dialogue has concluded and other voices enter the discussion, in the roundtable that follows.

The ensuing set of exchanges between Cavalieri and Harlan Miller, on the one hand, and Matthew Calarco and Cary Wolfe, on the other, is one of those rare occasions in which people coming out of the analytic and the continental traditions actually meet in discussions on a specific subject and connect with each others positions. The topic of how we should think about animals proves to be very well placed to get to the heart of some important differences about how we should do philosophy and how philosophy can relate to our everyday life. This discussion should be particularly enlighteningif I may use that term without showing too much biasfor those who grew up with the idea that the analytic tradition is conservative and part of the establishment, while the continental tradition, especially in its postmodern aspect, is more critical and more radical.

The discussion between two very distinct ways of doing philosophy is subsumed by an even larger challenge, posed by the novelist J. M. Coetzee, who in his pithy contributions to the book asks whether the dialogue between Warnock and Glucksman is not itself, in the heavy weight it gives to reasoned discussion, an instance of perfectionism in practice. This leads Coetzee to suggestas his character Elizabeth Costello has already suggested in the novel that bears her namethat it isnt ethical reasoning that leads us to form our views about animals and whether we should eat them, but something quite different, something more like a conversion experience. Coetzee also refers to it as a mute appeal or, borrowing a term from Levinas, a look. This experience comes first, and the philosophical argument is just a kind of rationalization for it.

In saying this, Coetzee sides with other skeptics, not all of them sympathetic to postmodernist critiques of the role of reason, about the role of argument in moral life. He suggests that all the participants in this book are where we are todaythat is, have a deep moral concern about the way animals are treated,

not because once upon a time we read a book that convinced us that there was a flaw in the thinking underlying the way that we, collectively, treat nonhuman animals, but because in each of us there took place something like a conversion experience, which, being educated people who place a premium on rationality, we then proceeded to seek backing for in the writings of thinkers and philosophers.

But to this Harlan Miller says, in effect: You dont speak for me. Miller changed his views about animals, he tells us, precisely because he found himself unable to refute philosophical arguments against the way we generally think about, and treat, animals. If Millers and similar anecdotal accounts are rightand they are supported by one major sociological study of the modern animal movementthen we have to credit ethical reasoning, of the kind exemplified in the dialogue with which this book begins, with greater efficacy than Coetzee and other skeptics are prepared to allow it.