Re: Animal liberation and Marxist

[Justin Schwartz <jschwart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff objected to my suggestion that the key issue with regard to our
treament of animals is avpidance of needless pain.

 >

> How do you decide whether the pain is needless, for example? Is the pain
> suffered by animals slaughtered for food needless? Is it still needless if
> the meat provides a living for a peasant? What about if it provides a
> convenient snack for a worker in an industrialised country?

It's not as if these questions can be avoided by saying that they're not
Marxist, or that it shows that they can be answered to remark that they
are hard questions.

Even under socialism we have to ask what we can do to animals and still
retain our moral self-respect.
 >
> Fundamentally, which is back to the question I originally asked, how do you
> decide between the claims of the animals and those of humans?

Well, we have to ask, which claims? There are the claims of animals to
live and do as they like, to merely live, or to live without needless pain
and suffering, for three. Radical biocentrists who deny moral differences
among species assert that animals have something like a right to the first
claim. Vegetarians, the second. I suggested a moderate position, the
third. Now, Jeff is right that even the third position does not settle the
issue between human and animal pain or between animal pain and other human
values, from low ones like a taste for (cheap) meat, ot pressing ones like
survival, or "high" ones like the survival of high culture, etc.

Obviously any answer humans give is going to be biased towards humans,
since morality is a way humans have of getting along with each other. But
a lot of people (rightly, I think) feel the pressure to include nonhiman
animals and perhaps even nonsentient nature in the scope of morality. We
would think quite ill of someone who tortured his cat, arguind that it was
just a machine inacapable of feeling pain, or that it's pain didn't matter
because it isn't human, or rational, or whatever. That line of reasoning
suggests that a morality acceptable to humans may favor humans by putting
our interest first without discounting those of animals entirely. I don't
think it's objectionable to put humans first. I would save my son, or even
you, before I saved my cat, and you would think me mad or monstrous if I
were to choose otherwise.

 And how does
> this have anything to do with the social revolution?

I'm not sure it does, in any direct way. But lots of things are important
that do not.

 Do we have a break from
> the class struggle to liberate the animals? What about if that means setting
> the class struggle back?

If by "break with the class struggle" you mean appeal to univeral human
values rather than class values, I don't know. I suspect that, as I hinted
in a hand-waving way in my last post, capitalist morality might encourage
particularly relentless harm to the interests of animals by putting profit
and efficiency before everything. A socialist society which could consider
other factors in its food supply and treatment of animals might be more
amenable to treating animals better.

As to "setting the class struggle back," how could advocacy of simple
humanity in treatment of animals do that?

> See, I just don't think you can attach animal lib to Marxism as a kind of
> optional extra. That's why I was asking about a distinctively Marxist 
> approach.

Is this any better?

--Justin Schwartz




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