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Animal Liberation and the Bible

Christianity and the Question of "Speciesism"

by Randall E. Otto (Author)
©2021 Monographs 372 Pages

Summary

Animal liberation contends that humans and animals are of equal value and that standard views of human uniqueness are an anthropocentric prejudice called "speciesism." It advocates ending human use of animals in recognition of animal rights. Animal liberation theology attempts to ground similar views in the Bible. It typically envisions an original creation free of predation to be restored free of meat-eating and animal use. It views animal sacrifice as murder and speaks of a "deep incarnation" by which God in Christ takes on "all flesh" for the salvation of all creatures in a "cosmic redemption." This is the first full-fledged critique of animal liberation in general and so-called speciesism in particular from a biblical and theological standpoint, with accompanying scientific and philosophical analysis. After it introduces the major thinkers, the book demonstrates the incoherence of animal liberation with human evolution, the use of animals in the domestic and religious life of Israel, and the New Testament assertion that God the Son was uniquely incarnated in the human Jesus for human salvation. This book reasserts historic Christian faith as sufficient to the scientific, philosophical and ethical challenges posed by animal studies, and concludes with an appraisal of key ethical concerns regarding animal use and foundational issues within the animal liberation movement.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • 1 Animal Liberation and Alleged Speciesism: A Historical Review
  • Founders of the Animal Liberation Movement
  • Richard Ryder
  • Peter Singer
  • Andrew Linzey
  • Tom Regan
  • Conclusion
  • 2 Pre-Historical Glimpses of the Relation of Humans and Animals
  • An Evolutionary Overview of Hominin Development
  • Meat-Eating and Mental Development
  • Meat Eating and Culture
  • Meat Eating and Morality
  • Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo Sapiens
  • God and Homo Sapiens
  • God in Creation
  • The Image of God
  • Adam and Eve?
  • The Neolithic Revolution
  • The Noahic Flood
  • Change from Vegetarianism?
  • Genesis 1:29-30 and a Command to be Vegetarian?
  • Conclusion
  • 3 The Place of Animals in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament
  • Animals as Food
  • The Passover
  • The Law of God
  • Offerings and Sacrifices Prescribed
  • The Nature of Holiness
  • The Ban
  • Sacrifice at the Temple
  • Conclusion
  • 4 Jesus Christ and the Place of Animals in the New Covenant
  • The Centrality of the Incarnation
  • Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election Expanded
  • The Life and Ministry of Jesus
  • The Cross and Atonement
  • Conclusion
  • 5 Universal Salvation
  • Sentience, Suffering and Theodicy
  • Key Passages Used in Support of Universal Salvation
  • Isaiah 11:6-9
  • Romans 8:18-25
  • Final Redemption
  • Contrasting Views of the New Creation
  • Resurrection and Renewal
  • Conclusion
  • 6 A Christian Response to Alleged Speciesism and the Nature of Human Uniqueness
  • Critique of the Concept of Speciesism
  • Ryder and the Appropriation of Darwin
  • Singer and the Appropriation of Bentham
  • Ideology and Prejudice
  • Sentience and Rationality
  • Suffering in Non-Human Creation
  • Metaphysics, Science, and Species
  • Imago Dei and a Judeo-Christian Response
  • Conclusion
  • 7 Biblical Faith and the Responsible Stewardship of Animals
  • The Biblical Call to Responsible Stewardship
  • Moral Obligation and Moral Consideration
  • Responsible Stewardship of Animals
  • Vegetarianism and Meat Eating
  • Animal Experimentation
  • Hunting Animals
  • Animals in Captivity
  • Conclusion
  • 8 Concluding Thoughts
  • The Problem of Speciesism
  • The Problem of Dominion
  • The Problem of Domination
  • The Problem of God
  • Bibliography
  • Concordance List for Subject Index
  • Biblical passages cited

Introduction

We need ethologists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, neurobiologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, religious scholars, and religious leaders all to rise to the extremely difficult task of understanding animals’ emotional and moral lives and figuring out how they compare to-- and have played a role in the evolution of—human moral, ethical, and spiritual understanding—Marc Bekoff

Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long (Ps. 25:5)

“It’s the biggest problem in the world. Animals are under attack. They are being tortured, imprisoned, brutalized. It’s war.” So says Steve Best, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas-El Paso, in the 2013 documentary “Speciesism: The Movie.” While the animals are not yet rising up against humans as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), they clearly have human mercenaries engaging in increasing numbers of skirmishes. Beyond those groups organized for war like the Animal Liberation Front and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), there are citizen activists taking a stand all over the world. These include the likes of vegan anti-speciesist activist group Boucherie Abolition, which demonstrated outside of butchers’ shops in Paris on Saturday, September 22, 2018, branding butchers as “murderers” and “food terrorists”, calling for “zoo-icide” to be criminalized and “shops of the zoo-locaust to be closed.”

Such demonstrations are by no means unique. In fact, there has been a day in August universally designated since 2015 as the World Day for the End of Speciesism (WoDES) on which marches, demonstrations, lectures and protests take place throughout the world to alert alleged speciesists to the error of their ways. Much of this is fueled by the findings of cognitive ethology since the mid-1970s and an explosion of studies, books, conferences and discussions that challenge previous assumptions regarding the uniqueness of human rational capabilities, language, tool use, even religion and spirituality. Popular journals regularly report on newly discovered capabilities in some animals that were previously thought reserved for humans. All of this has tended to underline the Darwinian dictum that humans differ from non-human animals only in degree, not kind.←9 | 10→

Human exceptionalism, once the foundational assumption of civilization, is now jeopardized by the view that human and non-human animals are all part of a continuum that puts animals and humans on the same level of consideration and, in some cases, even allows non-human mammals greater moral interest than humans. Any assumption that humans have greater moral worth or deserve greater consideration is alleged to be “speciesist.” “Speciesism” is a word coined by British psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970 to contest the unique moral status of humans. Philosopher Peter Singer popularized it in his 1975 book Animal Liberation as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” Since that time, “slandering speciesism has been something of a polemical sport for philosophers,” says Roger Wertheimer, a rare philosophical proponent of what he calls “the Standard Belief” in human uniqueness.

The demands of the animal liberation movement, those opposed to what they call speciesism, include the abolition of animals as possessions and all human use of animals for food, clothing, research or anything else that affects animal interests, rights or happiness. WoDES urges that these interests be codified into a new legal status for animals, together with an end to animal farming and fishing and a “non-violent and plant-based dietary culture” put in its place. Lastly, all decisions regarding the environment are to take account of animal interests. In short, the animal liberation movement envisions and strives for a radical reversal of human-animal relations to what might be termed a Romantic ideal in which all animals are allowed to live as they wish.

The limited response from the world of religion to all of this is exceedingly odd, as most religions are criticized for undergirding this alleged “bias” in favor of the human species. Given that the Jewish and Christian faiths in particular have been taken to task as the basis of this purported prejudice, it is bewildering that the church has said so little in its own defense. Where the issue is addressed with regard to theology and animal studies, the present tendency is to join this assault on human uniqueness, characterizing it as a form of idolatry, even nihilism. This sublimation of the animal rights agenda into theology has already had corrosive effects on central tenets of the historic faith, particularly with regard to the nature of God and the incarnation of God in Christ, the necessity of the cross and resurrection to salvation, and the extent and expectation of salvation. As animal liberation is fundamentally an ethical movement, practical concerns are prominent, with some asserting that vegetarianism is now as morally requisite as the refusal of emperor worship was in the early church and that all human use of animals be resisted.←10 | 11→

Animal liberation views itself as an extension of human liberation movements, but in going beyond the human to all other creatures and in leveling distinctions between them, one may ask how attributing rights to great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) as the Great Ape Project has sought since its founding in 1993, for instance, engenders human interests or liberation? So many people seem to see the animal rights movement as antagonistic to human rights that animal liberation advocates typically feel a need to defend their commitment to both. Certainly, despite the great compassion and love most people have for animals, particularly their pets, many are alarmed and feel threatened by the radical nature of many animal liberation proposals. The church should be particularly concerned by the threat this movement poses to fundamental teachings of the Christian faith and to the people of the world.

The time is long overdue for a critique of animal liberation, particularly with regard to how its theological tenets correlate with Holy Scripture. Chapter one will introduce the central thinkers in philosophy and theology who have spawned the secular and theological branches of the animal liberation movement. It will delineate the backgrounds and formative influences on the ideas of Richard Ryder, Peter Singer, Andrew Linzey, and Tom Regan and provide historical context and preliminary critique of their views.

Animal liberation claims a scientific basis, yet these claims are seldom checked. Chapter two will review the evolutionary relationship of humans and other animals. Humans and their predecessors have hunted animals to provide food and clothing since Homo erectus roamed throughout Africa and Asia over two million years ago. Meat eating was central to the expanded brain capacity and mental development of the Homo species. Eventually Homo sapiens existed alongside Neanderthals, but in the Upper Paleolithic Period (45,000–35,000 years ago), Neanderthals died out. Whereas Neanderthals lacked the type of consciousness necessary to conceive of a spirit world, Homo sapiens have a unique higher-order consciousness that involves a socially-based self, symbolic memory, and language. For them, all of life was religious. The emergence of Homo sapiens is what is described in the Genesis creation accounts, with humanity’s uniqueness found in the imago dei. Adam emerged from pre-Adamites as the representative man and lived in the Neolithic or Natufian period, demonstrated by the domestication, shepherding and permanent settlements characteristic of that period. There was already physical pain and death in the animal and pre-Adamite world, so animal liberation theology’s assertion of a creation free of predation, violence and suffering seems devoid of scientific basis. Sin is a spiritual category, though it can certainly have physical manifestations. The meaning and significance of ←11 | 12→Adam’s disobedience and fall into sin will be assessed, leading to the conclusion that creation as a whole is not fallen, but only humanity.

Because Judaism and Christianity both draw on the foundation of the Hebrew Bible, which Christians term the old covenant or Old Testament, it is imperative to review the place of animals there. This will be the focus of chapter three. Evidence for widespread intensive management of animals, i.e., domestication, occurs in the Levant and Fertile Crescent around the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (8800–6500 BCE). Animals and altars are evident in the patriarchal period for burnt offering, for the “cutting of a covenant” and there is divine provision of a ram in place of Isaac. God later commands the Israelites to kill an animal in the Passover as the means of their deliverance from Egypt. All of this calls into question animal theology assertions that God suffers with every sentient creature. The various offerings of the Israelites often involved killing animals to avert divine wrath on human sin by means of an animal substitute. In the Conquest, God orders Israel to destroy animals as well as pagan peoples. Animal sacrifice was then multiplied exponentially with the building of the temple in Jerusalem. The centrality of blood to forgiveness is unique to biblical sacrifice and demonstrates God’s holiness, the need for propitiation and substitution. Animals serve as human substitutes because they lack the ontological capacity necessary to the unique call God has given to humans.

This Old Testament background provides the basis for the chapter four focus on Jesus Christ and the place of animals in the new covenant. Animal liberation theology primarily seeks its grounding in the incarnation, which it expands to include “all flesh” in creatureliness. Animal theology further asserts a “cosmic significance” in the incarnation so that “all things” are involved in the scope of Christ’s redemptive work (Eph. 1:9-10; Col. 1:15-20). David Clough’s expansion of Karl Barth’s doctrine of election to include all creatures serves these universalist aims. The prophecies and Jewish expectation of a messiah fulfilled in Jesus are, however, clearly “species specific.” The cross of Christ, so prominent in the New Testament, receives little attention in animal theology, except as the culmination of God’s suffering with creation in the incarnation. The cross in animal theology has the effect of a moral example for humanity to follow in suffering with other creatures to redeem them and has nothing to do with biblical and orthodox concepts of propitiation and penal substitution.

Recent theology’s concern with how to exculpate God from the persistent problem of suffering is evinced in universalism, now extended to animals. After analysis of the problem of theodicy with regard to animals, chapter five will provide exegesis of two key passages adduced by animal theology (Isa. 11:6-9 and Rom. 8:18-25), demonstrating they do not provide sufficient support for animal ←12 | 13→redemption. Similar critique of animal theological allusion to a supposed Jewish hope of the restoration of all things in a new creation demonstrates that ideas of a new heaven and new earth are better understood as a new order of things in history, counterparts to the figures of cosmic convulsion found in biblical portrayals of divine judgment.

Animal theologians differ on the hope they have for the cosmic redemption they envision, one free of predation and violence, another admitting predation and yet overcoming it in a kind of constant resurrection. There is, however, no biblical basis for the resurrection of any other creatures than human beings. Contemporary and anthropocentric views of heaven, focused on human fulfillment in the restoration of all that was valued in pets and other things, may draw more on folk myth and pagan thought.

Having examined the claims of animal liberation theology in relation to the Bible, chapter six looks at how Christians should respond to allegations of speciesism by examining the ways in which animal liberationists have used key philosophical and scientific ideas, particularly those of Bentham and Darwin, respectively. Given how the church actually led the way at the end of the seventeenth century in the first wave of the animal welfare movement, recent disregard of that Christian underpinning demonstrates a naturalistic worldview that appears unable to address nature, human or animal, in sufficient depth. The possibility that Ryder and Singer have misappropriated Darwin and Bentham, respectively, in arriving at their doctrine of speciesism leads to a wider examination of that concept biblically and philosophically. Equivocation and imprecise use of terminology, particularly regarding sentience, suffering and consciousness, obfuscate many of the philosophical and scientific claims undergirding animal liberation. This then leads to some elaboration on the metaphysics underlying scientific claims and the need to recognize an essence or nature in all things, apart from which they cannot be truly known or classified. Humanity is distinguished as an essentially rational animal, uniquely made in the image of God and thus having a consciousness of God and responsibility from God to represent him as a good steward over all of creation.

Chapter seven addresses the ethical responsibility of humanity to animals from the standpoint of Scripture. Humans do not have moral obligations to animals, but should give them moral consideration by means of a responsible stewardship of what God has placed under human vicegerency. The key moral questions of vegetarianism, animal experimentation, hunting, and keeping animals in captivity are discussed from the standpoint of animal liberation and Holy Scripture.←13 | 14→

The concluding chapter highlights the results of this analysis with regard to the four fundamental “problems” that have arisen, those of speciesism, dominion, domination and God. The atheistic and theistic prongs of animal liberation converge in important ways. Their theological sublimation threatens to reduce Christian faith to Romantic visions of a post-human kingdom apart from the God of Scripture. The attempt to overcome all dualities and boundaries denies humanity its unique relation to God and stewardship of the creation that derives from God. Humanity’s primary category of self-identification, metaphysically, scientifically, biologically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually, is and remains the species concept.

Speciesism is a specious notion that has been taken up by some in Christianity to challenge human uniqueness and the dominion God has given to humans as those made in his image. Those who brandish it caricature the innate sense of human uniqueness by means of an ideology claiming scientific justification on dubious grounds. They assume a metaphysic that denies the essential nature of humanity in flattening out all distinctions in kinds. Finally, they ignore the innate and fundamental religious and moral aspects of humanity while seeking a post-human world wherein the boundaries between all living things are overcome. This comes to its greatest affront with the immanentizing of God in the suffering of all creatures, all flesh, all materiality.

Human uniqueness must serve as the basis for a responsible stewardship of God’s creation, including animals. This includes human use of animals in food, clothing, captivity, and experimentation. This book steers a “middle way” between radical animal liberationist aims and callous anthropocentric indifference, a balance coherent with the revelation and will of God as it is found in the Bible.

←14 | 15→1

Animal Liberation and Alleged Speciesism: A Historical Review

There aren’t “lower” and “higher” species. We make that differentiation because it serves us well and makes life easier when deciding who lives and who dies—Marc Bekoff

Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the Lord has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand—Isa. 1:2-3

From the inception of consciousness in humanity until the late 1960s, humanity, particularly in the West, was, with rare exception, assumed to be the crown of creation with dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:26-28). Humanity was the pinnacle of evolutionary development; as Charles Darwin said, the human “alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being.”1 That common conceptualization of almost two million years suddenly came into question, however, when, in 1970, psychologist Richard Ryder coined the word “speciesism” to contest the unique moral status of humans. That word stipulated that, because human and non-human animals are inextricably linked in the evolutionary continuum, there is nothing in humanity that warrants its exercising dominion over other species as has been normative for millennia.2 Those in the animal liberation movement thus assert that human domination over other animals is an unwarranted species bias in favor of humanity, a form of imperialism and colonialism to be cast into the moral waste bins of history with the racism of slavery and patriarchalism of sexism. Peter Singer and Andrew Linzey, who were immediately influenced by Ryder, have taken up the animal liberation movement’s leadership in its secularized philosophical and its Christian theological formulations, respectively, since ←15 | 16→the mid-1970s. Philosopher Tom Regan, who many consider to have been the intellectual leader of the animal rights movement, was not directly influenced by Ryder, Singer or Linzey in coming to his position, but instead came to his stance through the influence of Mahatma Gandhi.

Founders of the Animal Liberation Movement

Animal liberationists allege humanity is inherently speciesist. That is, humans seem to have an innate assumption of inherent superiority over other animals, particularly in cognitive ability, the uniqueness of which has come into question in studies of animal ethology since the mid-1970s.3 This focus on rationality, generally associated with Greek philosophy, is said to have had a largely adverse effect on animal treatment in the West. Because animals were not viewed as rational or having a rational soul in the Aristotelianism that became the philosophical foundation of much of science and theology till the Enlightenment, animals were considered devoid of the image of God and given by God for human use. Thomas Aquinas thus drew on “the Philosopher” to assert that it is in keeping with the order of nature that humanity should be master over animals, as well as the order of Divine Providence by which the superior always governs the inferior, and a “universal prudence.”4 Plato may also have influenced some of the Church Fathers through their use of the first century Jewish theologian Philo, who said God created humanity last, not as what would seem an inferior ←16 | 17→place, but as one for whom the cosmos, as a “festive meal and most sacred theatre,” would be ready.5 Early Christians held mixed views of the relationship of humanity to animals, generally regarding them as “irrational,” sometimes “immoral” (Letter of Barnabas), occasionally the object of miracles (e.g., snakes ceasing an attack at the command of a monk). Basil of Caesarea spoke of the soul of animals as characterized by irrationality, but said each animal had distinct natural traits given at its creation (e.g., the wolf is savage, the fox is crafty). Wolves and lions were said in apocryphal literature to repent and a lion to have been baptized by Paul (Acts of Paul), for instance.6

The common assumption of human superiority over animals, sometimes enacted in cruel behavior such as vivisection, has been equally true of religious and non-religious persons. The first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was initiated in England at the behest of the Anglican clergyman Rev. Arthur Broome on June 16, 1824 and comprised of twenty-one Christians, most notably William Wilberforce who had worked so tirelessly for the abolition of slavery there, together with one Jewish activist.7 These Christians and others who sought to care for animals, as well as those like Darwin who called animals “brethren” but hunted them, experimented on their corpses, and advocated for vivisection to advance human knowledge, did not deny human uniqueness or suggest a leveling of distinctions between humans and non-humans, however. That radical call was issued by Richard Ryder in the later twentieth century and has been followed by Peter Singer, Andrew Linzey, and Tom Regan with the movement they have spawned.

Richard Ryder

Richard Ryder was born in 1940 in Dorsett, England and grew up in historic Rempstone Hall in Corfe Castle, Wareham on thousands of acres of wildlife-rich moorland that had been in the family for generations. The house was full of dogs, cats and talking birds; he even shared his bedroom for three years with a capuchin monkey his mother rescued from a pet shop. Ryder early recognized in himself a ←17 | 18→natural affinity for the suffering of sentient creatures. Questioning ideas of God, the social order and right and wrong amidst the pain he himself often felt, Ryder later lashed out against the mistreatment of animals in Cambridge University psychology laboratories and then again in the United States at Columbia and Stanford. In 1969 he wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph against animal experimentation, saying, “It is not often pointed out that, since Darwin, scientists themselves cannot justify the torture of other species any more than the deliberate mistreatment of human beings, for they do not accept any essential difference between man and beast.”8 He followed with another letter entitled “The Rights of Non Human [sic] Animals” to the same paper a month later, hoping “our present iniquities” of animal experimentation could soon be viewed, along with slavery, as a thing of the past.

Later that year, as a result of his letters to the newspaper, Ryder came into contact with a few other philosophers at Oxford who were of like mind, from which came the opportunity to address the topic on television and contribute to a pioneering book edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris entitled Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans (1971). By this time he had already published a short work on the topic with which his name would become known, a tract entitled Speciesism. There he contended, “since Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no ‘magical’ essential difference between human and other animals, biologically speaking. Why then do we make an almost total distinction morally? If all organisms are on one physical continuum, then we should also be on the same moral continuum.”9 Because a clear moral criterion is suffering and all animals share a nervous system with us and thus suffer, any experimentation in which they might suffer was a form of speciesism, a selfish emotional argument instead of a reasoned one.

Ryder’s activism was no mere literary exercise. In April 1970 he had summoned the local press to see him resist, gun in hand, hunters who had been authorized by an older brother to hunt on his father’s estate. He went on to organize demonstrations at other hunts, using all lawful means possible to distract both hunter and hound through false trails, sprays, horns and placards. This aroused media interest and garnered him advocates from afar, including Ronnie Lee, who later founded the militant activist group Animal Liberation Front.←18 | 19→

Shortly before Animals, Men and Morals was published, Ryder met Peter Singer. They held discussions on speciesism thereafter, with Singer’s review of Animals, Men and Morals in the New York Review of Books in 1973 launching his own career in the field. Singer was consequently commissioned to write the book Animal Liberation (1975), to which Ryder contributed material but no co-authorship as Singer had requested. Ryder was, he wistfully admits, too busy campaigning against laboratory animals, against fur use, battery cages, veal crates, zoos, whale killing and more. Singer’s use of the term “speciesism” in the book, attributed to Ryder, and included in the title of his fifth chapter, “Man’s Dominion … a short history of speciesism,” popularized the concept. Singer defined it as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species,” and argued that it was a prejudice similar to racism and sexism, which was Ryder’s view, as well.10

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) Reform Group was founded in 1970 by members of the British RSPCA to change the organization from focusing mostly on companion animals to one opposing what the reformers saw as the real issues: factory farming, animal research, hunting, and bloodsports. They secured the election of reformers Ryder and Andrew Linzey to its ruling council. Ryder was elected to the council in 1971, became its vice-chairman in 1976, and chairman from 1977 to 1979.

Ryder thereafter ran twice for Parliament unsuccessfully, after which he continued ethical reflection, resulting in his moral theory of painience. Finding himself unable to accept Singer’s utilitarianism, “that the pains of some individuals can be justified by the pleasures of others,” he says, “during the early 1980’s, I emphasised the idea of sentientism (Andrew Linzey’s word) or painism--that morality should be based upon the (nontransferable) capacity of the individual to experience pain. In other words, I based rights upon painience.”11

Ryder views his theory of painience or painism as a morality consistent with science and the implications of Darwinism, moving beyond outdated notions that morality needs the idea of God. “The only morally relevant quality is the capacity to feel pain—that is the capacity to feel any sort of suffering whether it ←19 | 20→is cognitive, affective or sensory.”12 Here, it should be noted, pain and suffering are understood as equivalent, regardless of any conscious ability to understand pain in what others then distinguish as suffering. Painism, moreover, applies to all entities, “whether animals, aliens or robots.”13 “It does not matter, morally speaking, who or what the maximum sufferer is—whether human, nonhuman or machine. Pain is pain regardless of who experiences it.”14

It is hard to know how seriously to take all of this, since it seems self-evident that a machine does not “feel pain” of itself. It could potentially be programmed to respond to stimuli in a way that mimics human responses, and that is in fact underway as a mechanism to help some robots with damage avoidance. However, “one of the most useful things about robots is that they don’t feel pain. Because of this, we have no problem putting them to work in dangerous environments or having them perform tasks that range between slightly unpleasant and definitely fatal to a human.”15 This gets to the real implications of the animal liberationist, anti-speciesist, perspective, which is that there are no distinctions between entities. In words redolent of PETA co-founder and president Ingrid Newkirk’s famous dictum, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” Ryder says, “X amount of pain in a pig matters equally with X amount of pain in Socrates!”16

Ryder’s morality is a radically individualistic and highly subjectivistic one, since pain cannot be objectively totaled or measured.

How many suffered in a famine? How many were injured in a bomb outrage? Was one atrocity morally worse than another because it had more victims? Painism says such numbers are irrelevant because the sufferings of separate individuals cannot meaningfully be totaled. Instead, painism concentrates upon the levels of individual sufferings (their intensities and durations), and rates the badness of a situation by the individual who suffers most i.e. the maximum sufferer. So the badness of an action is measured not by how many suffered, but by how much pain was felt by the most affected victim.17

←20 | 21→

While the number of entities affected is irrelevant, the intensity of individual pain is decisive for whose victimhood is accorded greater worth. Ryder opaquely speaks of “units of pain,” as though there is an objective means of measuring pain. While efforts are presently underway to assess pain more objectively in humans, the standard means of assessment remains the Numeric Pain Rating Scale in which

the physician asks the patient to self-report how much pain he or she feels: “on a scale of 1–10, what is the level of your pain?”18 Pain tolerance is highly subjective and depends on a variety of factors, including sex, genetic variations, stress, sleep and more. Ryder’s “scientific morality” seems to be anything but scientific, mired in a radical individualism and subjective victimhood. In the end, one may wonder why he has even proposed it, as he concludes “freedom of the will is an illusion,” we can’t be sure “what is meant by moral responsibility,” and “perhaps culpability has become an obsolete concept.”19

Details

Pages
372
Year
2021
ISBN (PDF)
9783631851654
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631851661
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631851678
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631851647
DOI
10.3726/b18254
Language
English
Publication date
2021 (July)
Published
Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2021. 372 pp.

Biographical notes

Randall E. Otto (Author)

Randall Otto is Affiliate Faculty in Christian Ministries for Southwestern College in Wichita, Kansas, a Mentor in Humanities for Thomas Edison State University in Trenton, New Jersey, and Visiting Professor in Critical Reasoning for Chamberlain School of Nursing, global campus. He served for nearly thirty years as a Presbyterian pastor.

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Title: Animal Liberation and the Bible
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374 pages