“Why Clement’s Argument Is, In Fact, Individualistic Rather Than Relational,
And Why It’s a Good Thing That It Is, Too”
This comment is supposed
to be brief and brevity does not come naturally to me. So I decided
that if I couldn’t give a long paper, I would at least give a short paper
with a long title. The title is: “Why Clement’s Argument Is, In Fact,
Individualistic Rather Than Relational, And Why It’s a Good Thing That
It Is, Too”. In the interest of brevity, my reading the title just
now will also serve as the introduction.
So on to the body of the
paper: I want to begin by making sure that we are clear about what, on
Clement’s account, makes a moral theory individualistic or relational.
An individualistic approach, according to Clement, is one that focuses
on the “characteristics of individual beings and their moral implications,”
while a relational approach is one that instead focuses on “relationships
between beings and their moral implications” (1-2). In considering
what duties we have toward so-called marginal humans, for example, the
individualist asks “What characteristic do even the most impaired humans
have that makes them morally considerable?,” while the relationalist insists
that our responsibilities toward them “depend not on their individual capacities
but on our relationships to them” (5). The question to which the
individualist gives one answer and the relationalist gives another, then,
is not the surface-level question, “which properties are morally relevant?”
(since different individualists may answer this question differently as
may different relationalists), but rather the more theoretically fundamental
question: “which subjects are the bearers of morally relevant properties?”
To this question, the individualist answers that it is individual beings
who are the bearers of morally relevant properties, and the relationalist
answers that it is instead the relationships between individual beings
and the agents who have moral obligations toward them.
Now it is clear enough,
on this account, why the argument from marginal cases counts as an individualistic
argument: it grounds its normative claim that (at least some) nonhuman
animals and marginal humans must be treated comparably on the descriptive
claim that (at least some) nonhuman animals have the same characteristics
as do marginal humans. But it is far less clear why the argument
that Clement proposes in its place should be viewed as any less individualistic
in this sense. The argument begins as follows: “We treat dogs as
valued companions, while we treat pigs as mere objects which are useful
to us. But dogs and pigs have similar capacities for intelligence,
sociability, etc. . . . Consistency requires that we treat dogs and
pigs with similar levels of moral respect” (pp. 7-8). It then continues
by attempting to overcome the objection that Clement believes limits the
force of the argument from marginal cases: that it leaves open the question
of whether we should therefore treat pigs like more like dogs or treat
dogs more like pigs. Clement argues that relational considerations
yield an answer to this question, and one favorable to the animal welfare
cause: “our relationships with companion animals allow us to know that
dogs are deserving of moral respect. On the other hand, our lack
of relationships with other animals of similar capacities, like pigs, allow
us to rationalize their use and abuse. So pigs should be treated
more like dogs, rather than vice versa” (p. 8).
It is at this point that
Clement considers the response I wish to pursue: that the appeal to this
consideration still leaves the argument as a whole an individualistic one,
since it still focuses on the claim that individual dogs and individual
pigs have comparable individual characteristics, and still urges that it
is in virtue of this fact about them as individuals that morality demands
that they be accorded comparable moral status. Clement’s reply to
this concern runs as follows: “I believe that the relational aspect of
this argument is significant. For this approach calls attention to
the fact that it is our relationships with animals that allow us to discover
what those animals are like, and thus what our moral responsibilities toward
them are” (p. 8). Or, as she puts the point a bit later, “Since we
learn about animals in themselves through our relationships with them,
we need a moral approach which focuses on such relations” (9). Clement’s
response to the claim that her argument is individualistic rather than
relational, then, seems to turn on two claims: (1) that we learn about
what animals are like through our relationships with them, and (2) that
a position that appeals to this claim is relational rather than individualistic.
I want now to raise some doubts about both claims.
Let me begin with the first
claim, the claim that we learn about what animals are like through our
relationships with them. One reason for denying this claim is that
there are ways of learning about animals other than by forming relationships
with them of the sort that Clement describes. Indeed, Clement’s own
argument presupposes that this is the case: her argument assumes that (a)
we know that pigs have dog-like capacities for intelligence and sociability
and that (b) we do not have relationships with pigs. But if both
of these claims are true, then it must be the case that we have ways of
knowing what pigs are like that do not involve our having relationships
with them. If this were not the case, after all, then we couldn’t
know what we do know about pigs.
A second reason for denying
the first claim needed to sustain Clement’s response is that having a relationship
with an animal can distort our understanding of its nature as easily as
it can reveal it. Because we care very much about dogs and not very
much about pigs, for example, we may be inclined, out of sentiment, wishful
thinking, and so forth, to think more highly of a dog’s abilities than
the facts truly merit. In the same way that we would not trust a
child psychologist’s estimate of her own child’s mental abilities as much
as we would trust her estimate of the abilities of a stranger’s child,
so we should not trust our own estimates of the abilities of the animals
we love as much as we should trust our estimates of the abilities of those
animals about whom we are more indifferent (and we should trust these,
in turn, more than our estimates of the abilities of those animals we find
positively repellent). Forming special relationships with nonhuman
animals, then, seems neither necessary, nor particularly desirable, for
helping us discover what they are really like.
But let us now suppose that
I am mistaken about this and assume that the best or only way for us to
discover what an animal is like requires us to have a special relationship
with it. Does this suffice to render Clement’s position relational
rather than individualistic? I believe that the answer is no.
The claim would suffice if the following argument were sound: (a) the kind
of relationship a person has with an animal is relevant to how accurately
a person can determine the individual properties of an animal (Clement’s
claim); (b) accurately determining an animal’s individual properties is
relevant to accurately determining what a person’s moral obligations to
the animal are (the individualist’s claim); therefore (c) the kind of relationship
a person has with an animal is relevant to what a person’s moral obligations
to the animal are (the relationalist’s claim). But this argument
is unsound: it does not follow from (a) and (b) that the existence of the
relation between the person and the animal is relevant to what the person’s
moral obligations toward the animal are; it follows only that it plays
a causal role in his uncovering the existence and content of those obligations.
After all, a person’s studying an animal with an electroencephelograph
might also be instrumentally valuable in determining the animal’s individual
properties, which might in turn be relevant to determining the person’s
moral obligations to the animal, but this would not show that the fact
that the person was studying the animal with an electroencephelograph was
itself relevant to what his moral obligations were. What is paradigmatic
of the individualistic approach, it is important to remember, is that it
asks of possible subjects of moral concern: “What characteristic do they
have that makes them morally considerable?” This is still the question
that Clement is asking about animals, even when she appeals to facts about
them as individuals that we may uncover through our relationships with
them when she attempts to answer it. And so on Clement’s account,
just as surely as on the account presented by the argument from marginal
cases, it is individual beings, rather than the relations between them,
that are the bearers of morally relevant properties.
I have argued thus far that
Clement’s argument is, at bottom, individualistic rather than relational.
It might be thought that this is merely a terminological quibble.
What difference does it make? But I think this fact about the argument
has at least two important substantive implications. The first is
that it shows Clement’s argument to be neither stronger nor weaker than
the argument from marginal cases. Clement argues that “the individualism
of the argument from marginal cases is in fact its main shortcoming” (2).
But if I am correct that her argument is just as individualistic as the
argument from marginal cases, then it follows that either (a) her argument,
too, has a serious shortcoming, or that (b) the argument from marginal
cases does not. Clement, of course, attempts to show that her argument
does not have such a shortcoming by maintaining that our relationships
with dogs enable us to know that we should treat pigs like dogs rather
than the other way around. I have argued that her so arguing is consistent
with her argument’s being an individualistic one. And if I am correct
about this, then there is also nothing inconsistent about a defender of
the argument from marginal cases offering a parallel response to the parallel
challenge: yes, it is true, she can say, the argument from marginal cases
is equally consistent with treating marginal humans like animals and treating
animals like marginal humans, but our relationships with the senile, the
retarded, the severely deformed, enable us to see that they are worthy
of our respect. It is due to our lack of comparable interactions
with comparably endowed nonhuman animals that we fail to perceive this
in their case. Therefore, we conclude that we should treat such animals
as we now treat marginal humans, rather than treat marginal humans as we
currently treat such animals. My point, I should emphasize, is not
that this is a decisive response to the objection to the argument from
marginal cases, but rather that it is just as effective or as ineffective
here as is the parallel response to the parallel objection to Clement’s
argument, and that nothing about the individualism of the argument from
marginal cases prevents its advocate from appealing to it.
This first implication of
my recharacterization of Clement’s argument is therefore partly favorable
and partly unfavorable to her position: it suggests that her position is
at least as strong as the argument from marginal cases, but it also suggests
that it is no stronger than it. The second implication is more straightforwardly
favorable. For there is, I believe, a powerful objection to any attempt
to offer a relational argument in defense of the moral status of animals.
It thus turns out to be a good thing that, on my account (although not
on hers), Clement has not offered such an argument in the first place.
The objection arises from
the distinction moral philosophers standardly draw between negative duties,
or duties of noninterference, and positive duties, or duties of assistance.
It seems quite plausible to suppose that the nature of the relationship
between A and B is relevant to the content of the positive duties that
A has toward B. But it seems far less plausible to claim that this
is so of negative duties. It is easy to imagine circumstances in
which, for example, whether or not it would be permissible for you to decline
to give food, or medicine, or clothing to a needy person depends, at least
in part, on whether that person is a stranger to you, a rival, a fellow
countryman, a friend, an enemy, your parent, your teacher, your student,
your lover, or your child. But it is extremely difficult to imagine
circumstances in which whether or not it would be permissible for you to
kill, or rape, or injure, or steal from a person would depend, even in
part, on such factors. We may well think worse of a person who kills
her own child than of one who kills a stranger, but surely this is not
because we think that you have a stronger right not to be killed by your
mother than you have not to be killed by a stranger. The strength
of one’s right not to be harmed does not vary from potential harmer to
potential harmer, but the stregth of one’s right to assistance may well
vary from potential benefactor to potential benefactor.
Moreover, this intuition
about the difference between what is relevant to positive and negative
duties makes good theoretical sense. A’s positive duties to B concern
the ways in which A is obligated to postively interact with B, so it makes
sense that facts both about B and about A’s relation to B would be relavent
to this. But A’s negative duties to B concern only the respects in
which B has the right to be left alone, and here it makes sense that facts
about B alone can be relevant to establishing them. In addition,
not only does this distinction seem intuitively plausible and theoretically
sound, but it also seems to be implicit in Clement’s own account as well.
When she speaks of the sorts of duties that relational considerations can
ground, she speaks only of “special responsibilities” that we can have
to others in virtue of the relationships in which we stand to them.
It seems natural to suppose that such special responsibilities are meant
to include the duties we have to care for some individuals and not for
others, but it seems equally unlikely that they are intended to include,
implausibly, special duties we have to refrain from harming some and not
others. And in the book in which she develops her account of vulnerability
in more detail, Clement is explicit about this, referring to her position
as the “vulnerability model of our care obligations,” rather than as the
vulnerability model of our obligations not to harm, or of our obligations
generally.
Now I do not want to suggest
that the question of what positive duties we might have to care for animals
is a trivial one. But I do want to suggest that the primary concern
of those concerned to defend animal welfare has been to establish the negative
duties that we have not to harm them. And this is as it should be.
Such questions as whether it is morally permissible for us to kill animals
for food and clothing, to hunt them for sport, to confine them for entertainment,
or to perform experiments on them for our benefit, are both more theoretically
fundamental and more practically urgent than are such questions as whether
we are obligated to care for stray animals, to prevent deer populations
from starving, to rescue animals that accidentally become trapped, and
so on. An approach to determining what our moral responsibilities
toward animals are that can answer the second kind of question but not
the first cannot be acceptable as a basis for grounding a full-blown defense
of the moral status of animals. And since, as I have suggested, the
relational approach to our moral responsibilities is just such an approach,
it proves to be a good thing that Clement’s argument proves to be an individualistic
one after all.
Let me conclude by considering
one response that Clement might offer to this last claim. Yes, she
might agree, on some relational accounts, it turns out that we can only
justify the special duties we have to some, not the basic duties we have
to all. But on the particular version of relationalism that appeals
to the notion of vulnerability, she might argue, this is not so.
Since, as Clement suggests, all animals are such that we can harm them,
it follows that all animals are vulnerable to us and are, therefore, subjects
of a basic duty on our part not to exploit that vulnerability (p. 7).
It would therefore follow that this sort of relational account can provide
what the defender of animal welfare is most centrally looking for, a reason
to believe that all animals have a basic right not to be harmed.
I am willing to agree that
this sort of account may, in fact, produce what the defender of animal
welfare is looking for. But it seems to me that it can do so only
because, once again, it is at bottom, an individualistic argument.
Clement maintains that the notion of vulnerability is relational rather
than individualistic, since one is not simply vulnerable simpliciter, but
rather is vulnerable to some particular individual (p. 7). But if
the concept of vulnerability is truly to be stretched to apply to all animals,
and to the acts of all people who could conceivably harm them, then the
superficially relational claim that an animal is vulnerable to some particular
person ultimately reduces to the more fundamentally individualistic claim
that the animal is an individual that is capable of being harmed, that
the animal, that is, has interests. Now I have no substantive objection
to a position that attempts to ground our duties to animals in the claim
that animals have interests. But the fact that Clement’s position
seems to come to this does seem, again, to suggest that her position is
a powerful one just to the extent that it is an individualistic one and
that to the extent that it is a relational one, it is also a problematic
one.
David Boonin
Dept. of Philosophy
University of Colorado