Of Kangaroos and Courts

Justice filleted is justice denied, or something like that. So says animal rights philosopher Paola Cavalieri:

Can a society be considered just when justice is granted to all human beings even in case nonhumans are still excluded from it? Let’s imagine a society where all the citizens have adequate food, shelter, medical care, education, work and free time; where no one is discriminated against and all have equal institutional protection and adequate self-esteem; and where all can keep to their idea of a good life, while conflicts are settled peacefully. Such a society, however, exploits nonhuman animals. Can such a society be described as just? Can we say that, at least within the boundaries of the intra-human community, justice is truly present? An indication in the sense of a preliminary negative answer can be detected in John Stuart Mill.

In the essay The Enfranchisement of Women, probably written four-handedly with Harriet Taylor, Mill advances an important claim. Directly addressing “those Radicals and Chartists.... who claim what is called universal suffrage as an inherent right, unjustly and oppressively withheld from them”, he states that the women’s request for civil and political equality is - indeed, must be - their direct business. For with what rationality, he retorts, can the suffrage be termed universal, while half the human species is excluded from it? Isn’t to declare that a voice in the government is the right of all, and demand it only for a part - the part to which the claimants themselves belong - to renounce even the appearance of principle? Mill’s conclusion is that “the Chartist who denies the suffrage to women is a Chartist only because he is not a lord; he is one of those levelers who would level only down to themselves”. 22

This allegation clearly applies to the problem of justice and nonhumans as well. True, while Mill and Taylor could somehow take for granted the view that women are part of those “all” to whom a voice in the government pertains, the same does not hold in the case of animals. However, our argument has shown that, though not yet included in the current egalitarian paradigm, the view that (many) animals are part of those “all” to whom justice pertains is already implicit in it, and needs only to be recognized, or, to use a legal term, “articulated”. In this light, justice as applied only within the intra-human realm is not universal, and cannot therefore be appealed to as a matter of principle. But a justice which cannot be appealed to as a matter of principle is not justice. It seems that, as the Chartists in Mill and Taylor’s case, those human beings who demand justice only for the members of their species, while withholding it from nonhumans, are not demanding justice - they simply aim at a better treatment for a favored group.

Principles do not require the erasure of all distinctions, and theories of justice have throughout time made it clear that it applied to the behavior of humans to other humans and not animals. Yes, justice applied has often erected boundaries between different classes of people, boundaries that we now recognize as unjust. But to extend this trend toward inclusiveness beyond the human sphere is clearly an example of Reductio ad Absurdum. You could spin any number of theoretical outcomes of an application of justice equally between humans and animals to show how absurd this notion is. If we are obligated to stop our predation of deer, are we also obligated to stop wolves from predating upon them as well, or is that an infringement upon their rights? Are we responsible for land uses that infringe upon the habitats of animals, and if so what is the remedy? Are they entitled to some protected habitat or to all of their historic habitat?

There is no way to envision an implementation of this principle that doesn't involve the complete eradication of human settlement upon Earth. So you have to ask yourself why seemingly smart people get themselves wrapped up with such absurd philosophies. The obvious answer is that she is a philosopher, that is what philosophers do. There is a certain level of absurdity in trying to create a rational, logical framework to explain the world, because the world itself is a brute, illogical, irrational fact that defies explanation. Cavalieri is trying to frame justice as some metaphysical perfection that we are obligated to acheive.

I sense the same kind of desperation to acheive some sort of metaphysical perfection from our friends arguing for objective morality in our latest discussion on homosexual pastors. The objective morality position is basically a Platonic exercise in forms. Cavalieri falls into the same trap with justice, believing that it is an objective thing that exists independently of the beings for which it is a matter of concern.

Justice and morality are human constructs, ways of thinking about behavior between humans that motivate us to act reciprocally with one another rather than exploitively. They are based on feelings and experiences, not on the apprehension of or reflection on metaphysical entities. We have such notions because they are of purely practical necessity, and they reflect behaviors that we as a species adopted long before we had words to describe them or philosophers and theologians to explain them. They're not amenable to mathematical precision, and they will change as the conditions of human experience changes, though not greatly as they are grounded in human nature which is not infinitely malleable.

So don't expect to be sued in a court by a kangaroo anytime soon. We'll find ways to outlaw senseless cruelty toward animals because we do feel an affinity towards them, but I see steak on the menu for many centuries to come, though at some point we'll figure out a way to grow the meat without the rest of the cow.