Animals – and not just pets, all kinds of animals – do not enjoy the care and acknowledgement of being our veritable brothers and sisters, as living beings, that they should by right receive. This much is beyond debate. The obscene practice of killing rhino for the supposedly medicinal and/or aphrodisiac properties of their horns, as well as the ongoing decimation of that most beautiful of big cats, the (different species of) tiger, for the same reason – that the male tiger’s penis is an indispensable source of potency for men – is but the tip of the iceberg that represents abominable human exploitation and abuse of animals.
One could draw the circle of inclusion much wider, of course. I recall an episode of Carl Sagan’s wonderful television series, Cosmos, that opened where the famous astronomer was standing next to a big, leafy tree. Probably to the surprise of most viewers, he remarked that he was standing next to a close cousin of ours – that is, humans – namely, the tree, informing them that the difference between humans and that specific species of tree can be measured in a few percentage points of DNA. If this seems counter-intuitive, recall that, as Joel Kovel points out in The Enemy of Nature, all living beings show a similarity in DNA structure which indicates that, fundamentally, they share the same genetic ‘architecture’. In other words, ALL living beings, including plants, insects, reptiles, and mammals (of which humans are one species) come from the same genetic forebear(s). All living beings are related.
This should be a sobering thought for those who look upon animals as nothing more than beasts of burden, or food, or a source of income (in racing, or dog-fights, for example). As Kovel argues, every living being has its own signature of being, which is different from a bee to a snake, to an elephant, a dolphin or a rhinoceros. And, to use a term from Martin Heidegger, given this rich ontological diversity of life-forms, humans should practice what he called ‘letting-be’; not in the sense of passivity, but an active letting-be of every living being according to its ownmost ‘nature’.
Daphne Sheldrick, a naturalist who has worked with animals – mainly elephants – for 50 years, is someone whose authority in this field is beyond doubt. In a recent interview with Time magazine on her new book (Love, Life and Elephants) she talks about the characteristics of these large pachyderms, such as their way of mourning their loved ones (by returning to their remains for years, and covering these remains with leaves and branches), as well as their amazing infrasound communication and their intelligence. They even know, she claims, that they are being killed for ivory, as evidenced by the fact that the few large-tusked bulls left at Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park have become nocturnal, and when spotted by humans, turn around to hide their tusks.
To the question, whether rhinos can be saved, given the Chinese and Far Eastern markets that are threatening them, she retorts that this depends on the ‘education’ of these countries, adding laconically: “The horn is a fingernail. If people bite their nails, they’d be getting the same thing.” This is not very optimistic. Nor is her prognosis for elephant survival: “There’s no hope as long as there’s trade in ivory.” She believes that here, too, people should be educated about the nature of elephants, which is the only possible thing that could prevent their extinction.
An unusual avenue for such education is found in the work of the “zoosemiotician” (or “biosemiotician”), Thomas Sebeok, who has extended the field of semiotics – the science of signs – to include all domains of life. At a seminar of 1987 he remarked:
“The world is composed entirely of signs, and therefore, I think of the whole world as my oyster; whereas for some people only the human world, and then only a small portion of that, is their oyster” (Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio: Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life, p. 7).
In a nutshell, Sebeok’s work causes a bit of a dent in humans’ sense of self-importance by demonstrating that, far from being restricted to human sign-activity, what he calls “semiosic processes” are to be found everywhere among living beings, from the simplest protozoa to the most complex (humans, primates, dolphins, elephants, whales), and even beyond these in the “flow of energy-information”.
The difference between human life and other life-forms as far as semiosis or the use of signs is concerned, is that only human life employs or functions by means of two types of signs, verbal and non-verbal, while other life-forms function via non-verbal signs. Elephants, it will be recalled, use infrasound communication, while ants communicate by exchanging chemicals that function as signs, and birds engage in sign-rich mating rituals that are evidently “interpreted” in a certain way by males and females to lead to successful mating, for example. The exchanges of sounds functioning as signs between dolphins is so complex that scientists who study it have even concluded that there is a specific (matronymic) pattern to the series of sounds comprising the “names” of young dolphins.
Moreover, animals are endowed with impressive sign-decoding powers. Think of a bloodhound’s ability to pick up and follow a scent, or the acuteness of a dog’s (or a cat’s) hearing. Lyall Watson, in his book, Neophilia (The Love of the New) gives an astonishing account of recorded cases of animals (pets) tracing their human “owners” over hundreds of miles from their erstwhile homes (where the animals were left, either accidentally or deliberately) to their new homes, even if the scent of the people was not embedded in the ground; invariably they travelled by car.
None of these remarkable attributes of animals should have to be invoked to secure their existence, however. The mere fact that different species of animals exist, including the human animal, should be enough to impel humans to recognize the intrinsic value of these animals’ lives, and refrain from reducing them to food, or abuse them in other ways, such as when animals are kept in cages or on chains and ropes in cramped spaces. The saddening truth of the matter is, however, that many, if not most, people care, at best, for their pets – if they have any – while others don’t give a fig what happens to the members of our extended family of living creatures.
I had a friend – who regrettably passed away because of cancer – who was a zoologist and animal lover, and was particularly aggrieved by the wanton destruction of the habitat of tortoises (and usually many tortoises themselves) when land was cleared for the construction of golf estates. Add to this the destruction of the habitat of millions of animals and insects when rainforests are cut down for various reasons – to clear the forests for agriculture, or to provide timber from rare trees like the Diptocarp trees of Borneo – and we have to face the stark truth that humankind does not really (with the exception of a handful of committed people) care much whether animals continue to exist or not.
We have come a long, downward-spiralling way from St Francis of Assisi’s “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”, an expression that signified Francis’ acknowledgement of the kinship of everything in the universe.
Ironically, as my grandfather, who was an animal-lover, observed once when we were walking through the veld on his farm, one can usually tell from a person’s treatment of animals what kind of human being he or she is.
Back on topic. As Maria pointed out, we are running out of fish. A big reason is because fish is not treated as property and their supplies are rationed. There are strict regulations and quotas in place. Fishing is not a free market (very little farming is actually, agriculture is heavily subsidised, etc). Of course, such a system lends itself to corruption because it’s in nobody’s interest to watch the watchmen.
Rhino product trade is verboten, but the market demand in China is so huge that the Chinese are farming their own rhino for ‘medicine’:
http://zeenews.india.com/news/eco-news/china-farming-rhinos-in-wildlife-reserves-report_609304.html
There’s simply no amount of education that’s going to change cultural mindsets. Besides, won’t doing this be in contrast with Heidegger’s notion of ‘letting-be’? Yet Chinese want rhino products so they’re upping rhino numbers, market or no.
If anyone was thinking the idea of farming endangered species to protect their numbers starts and ends with Rational Ivo:
http://mises.org/daily/2120
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentalism.html
Pre 1994 SA was farming fish in places like Jonkershoek,and oysters in places like Knysna and Langebaan.
Post 1994 attempts have been made to farm salmon and perlemoen (abalone) but have floundered on obstructionist tactics of local ANC municipalities.
@Garg:
1: You’re either willfully ignoring everything I’ve said (I’m not *that* unclear) or you’re really not getting the idea of post-normative ethics. Even the original article we’re all commenting under is already a criticism of the idea that allowing animals the right to self-determination necessary implies a normative ethics. Making empty just-so statements in this regard, like ‘human ethics don’t apply to animals,’ doesn’t get us very far at all. Anyway, here are the kinds of things that are discussed in contemporary ethical philosophy: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/the-question-of-flat-ethics/ – follow the thread, it’s really interesting.
Also, I know my fallacies – thanks for asking.
2: You could *try* and read it. It’s far shorter than Ivo’s ramblings (yes, I’ve read the rhino *facepalm* thing).
3: *Complicity in suffering* is the issue for vegans. As there’s no moral complicity in the suffering of an animal that was run over by a car inhering in the act of picking up its corpse on the side of the road and eating it, I fail to see the problem or the oxymoron. Clearly one of us is seriously confused on this point. I hope things are able to be clarified.
4: Yes, and atheism is just another religion. See the problem?
The point of reposting the Springer link was to point out mitigating factors that render the original ‘paradox’ more of a constrained problem. If it’s not strictly paradoxical, your original point is…
5: I posted my response to Ivo’s fracking article as it contains some more general observations about his rhetorical style, dishonest approach to the framing of the debate, shaky logic and so forth, all of which actually apply to the rhino article. Perhaps it would help to think of Ivo as a mediocre bot: if you can expose the algorithm, why bother engaging each variation of its output?
Here’s the full version of the response, btw: http://meme.co.za/?p=28
So, we can agree that treating animals well and looking after the planet is very, very important, and I advise anyone to get behind these movement. Not because animals are our family, that is ludicrous, but because it is our God -given duty. (One we will also be judged for)
The God of the Bible is rather nice. He made all things to be vegetarian. Go and read it if you don’t believe me. Only after our TRUE FORBEARS (Bert) sinned, was there death, and only then did creatures start turning on each other. The first animal to die was the one God used to make Adam and Eve’s clothes (I believe this was all literal and not that long ago…well, compared to evolution of course)
But if you have eaten anything before, Bert, you are a cannibal, as you are eating family. Sis. Even cabbages. (I am only using your own logic against you) Don’t worry, God made allowances for us to eat what ever we want in a fallen world…(See Peter’s vision in Acts) but he will restore Paradise after he has returned, then the lion will lie down with the lamb again.
And finally, remember Bert:
There are no transitionery fossils
There are not even enough fossils available for the world to be millions and millions of years old
There is not enough salt in the ocean for the world to be that old
There is not enough helium in the atmosphere for the world to be that old
There has not been enough continental erosion for the world to be that old
Mutations are actually diseases, caused by THE…
@Aragorn23:
1. If you read the original post, you’d notice Heidegger’s notion of ‘letting-be’: “humans should practice what he called ‘letting-be’; not in the sense of passivity, but an active letting-be of every living being according to its ownmost ‘nature’.”
This counts for humans and our ownmost omnivorous natures too, or not?
2. I did read it. I also grew up next to an abbatoir and nobody plays with their food like Zizek describes. I prefer lucid thought and clarification over incoherent ramblings and obfuscation. You’re one post away from convincing me that veganism should be classified as a disability.
3. Morality schmorality. Ethics is necessarily normative, which is why I would not try to convince others by means of something on such shaky ground. The original link did not mention veganism.
4. It appears that you did not study biology or research methodology. Not wilful ignorance on your part, but if you had these tools you’d note how the Springer link not only confirmed the paradox, but showed how their model makes certain unrealistic assumptions. It’s the equivalent of a petri dish and it only models simple predator-pray relationships.
Furthermore, the model reached points of stability under these assumed conditions.
Points of stability should not be confused with happily ever after, sustainability or abundance.
5. We weren’t discussing fracking or Ivo’s rationality. Logical fallacies, obfuscation and smug doth not a rebuttal make.
Roadkill is VERY unsafe – wild animals are full of diseases, especially once they start to putrefy. Badgers invading human living spaces in Britain have already spread severe diseases to cats and then to children who played with the cats.
@Aragorn23:
‘Complicity in suffering’ is another freebie paradox, thank you:
I am not complacent when the abbatoir slaughters animals, or when those animals are ‘enslaved’ before they get there, I just eat the meat. Just like a vegan who stumbles upon roadkill is not complacent in the suffering involved during the actual killing or during the rearing of the animal. According to this brand of vegan ethics then, I can sleep easy both when I eat meat and when I don’t eat meat. What if the roadkill is a farm animal? Is the vegan still in the clear, but somehow I am not?
But woe is cognitive dissonance! I can’t be morally and ethically absolved by the same ethics that grant vegans their smelly smug. At which point exactly is the Goldilocks zone where we may all wash our hands? How does this relief ensure conservation?
Purely letting animals be requires vast tracts of land. This in turn requires zoning and keeping people out, but paradoxically, when nobody owns land, nobody is liable for destroying it either (“Sorry, Mr Cow. You cannot fart since your methane contributes to global warming. Yes, I know you’re a cow and cows fart, but vegan ethics, you know. I cannot feed you because then I’d be complacent in our suffering. You go ahead and grow your own food.”).
I am totally against the present abbatoir system – it is unnecessary and inhumane to transport animals in stressful conditions in trucks to cities.
They should be slaughtered humanely in the rural towns and the meat transported in refrigerated trucks, but our present laws and vested interests don’t allow that.
@Garg:
1: Active letting be for humans would go well beyond ‘innate omnivorism’ and include the innate urge to copulate without consent, the innate drive to murder, etc. This is the dilemma from which emerges ethical thought, the underpinning of everything from Leviathan to Levinas to libertarianism. In other words, you’re begging the question.
2: I find Zizek reasonably clear and lucid most of the time.
3: “Ethics is necessarily normative”. Contemporary philosophy disagrees. Also, trying to convince people and proscription are two different things; perhaps that’s where the confusion is coming in.
4: *sigh* That’s exactly my point: the model made unrealistic assumptions because, wait for it, it’s the equivalent of a petri dish. A paradox in a petri dish does not necessarily translate into a real world paradox, it simplies implies a potential paradox or, more realistically, set of problems.
I understand what stability (and metastability) are.
5: I’m not interested in refuting Ivo on rhinos.
6: Tacit endorsement (I want the meat, so keep killing it for me) is complicity. Freeganism is not an endorsement of farming animals, it’s an endorsement of eating dead things you find on the side of the road. The cognitive dissonance here is all yours.
7: Letting animals be involves allowing for ecosystemic dynamics to regulate population numbers. It works reasonably well, at least most of the time. We certainly wouldn’t see billions of cows supported by any stable ecosystem for any stretch of time. Sure, we could occasionally intervene, but this would probably be the exception, not the rule.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated” – MK Gandhi.
And do animals let each other be? The predators, birds of prey and scavengers?
Just remember that all the worst palgues have jumped from animals to humans – AIDS from monkeys, smallpox from cows, the Black death from fleas on rats.
Which is why farmers have to dip cattle and innoculate animals. Animal farming has to be controlled to prevent diseases of both humans and animals. Milk has to be pasteurised. Or would you like to do without milk and cheese and yoghurt? What will babies drink, and where will humans get calcium from?
@Aragorn23:
1. Raping, murder and veganism are fringe norms rather than the norm. If I were begging the question, I would assume the initial point that fringe norms are representative of human nature in general.
Given that ethics is normative, we won’t be conforming to fringe norms, per definition. To suggest this is in fact begging the question.
I’m assuming only the initial point that people are political animals and like to ensure that others conform. This holds for both those on the fringe and those on the cusp. See what I did there?
2. It’s common in contemporary philosophy to agree with Lithping Zizek because it’s Lithping Zizek and dislike Rational Ivo because it’s Rational Ivo. Cults of personality do not bolster arguments.
3. Contemporary philosophy cannot disagree or agree, because contemporary philosophy needs to solve its epistemological crisis.
(cont)
5.Then you have no reason to claim that you have. Evidently you have not, not even on fracking.
If you want to claim that you’ve debunked an argument, then you’d have to offer more than a telling *sigh* or a meme. Otherwise, rather than revealing how you’ve debunking arguments, it reveals how intimately familiar you are with logical fallacies.
6. I have no problem with being complacent in suffering, due to the obvious paradoxes that result when we try to claim this as a standard. I breathe easy while destroying the microbes. I have also slaughtered animals and hunted them for eating. I am however also complicit in ridding domesticated animals of disease, protecting them from their other predators who do not care much for humane killing or minimising their suffering, and by means of hunting I am complicit in affording animals a living space where they are allowed a reasonable level of self-determination.
I think Heidegger’s ‘letting-be’ notion is also an is-ought problem and I don’t agree with it. I’m just trying to stay on topic.
7. We are seeing it now.
@Aragorn23:
Re: Paradox of enrichment:
In science, we observe a phenomenon, like the paradox of enrichment. Then, we recreate it as a petri dish version so we may tinker with the model in order to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.
That’s the kind of deeper understanding one may gain by avoiding contemporary philosophy and getting back to basics that work in both the petri dish and in the real world.
From your previous statements, it appears that you are under the impression that the petri dish version confirms or rejects the paradox of enrichment. It only models it. It confirms it in the sense that it recreates it. In the petri dish version, we see predator numbers increase when their food numbers increase.
Suggest that it is true that veganism would feed more people, we could expect to experience a human population boom. More people who need to be employed and are entitled to their self-determination.
But this is all grasping at straws and jumping to conclusions. We can’t even model this in a petri dish version of events, and small variations in some variables do cause unpredictable effects in other parts of the system.
While we can observe global warming, we cannot say with certainty what its effects are, or that these effects are desirable or not. This is the nature of a complex system.
1: Your blatant misrepresentations of my argument – and ethical philosophy – are just getting more and more tortured. Rape and murder are not norms, opposition to rape and murder are. Norms emerge due to a variety of mechanisms, which include the proposal of new norms and normative discourses. *Normative* veganism / animal rights, for example. However, active letting-be doesn’t rely on normativity; it is a situated ethics that emerges from individual encounters.
For your edification, here’s a clarification of (transcendental) normativity vs. non-normativity from a chapter by Nathan Jun in the book Deleuze and Ethics: “Writ large, normativity refers to imperatives, duties, obligations, permissions, and principles which do not describe the way the world is but rather prescribe the way it ought to be. Morality, which may be regarded as coextensive with normativity, concerns laws, principles, and norms which prescribe how human beings ought and ought not to act. To this extent, it is principally concerned with expressing what is right (i.e., what ought to be done) as distinct from what is good (i.e., what is worth being valued, promoted, protected, pursued, etc.). The latter is the purview of axiology or ethics – the study of what is good or valuable for human beings and, by extension, what constitutes a good life.
2: I disagree with Zizek on many things. I agree with Ivo on some things. Sharing a quote does not mean membership in a cult of personality.
3: Contemporary philosophy doesn’t have an epistemological crisis – Nietzsche resolved it a little while back (see: active nihilism). The most interesting discussions now are happening in ontology (see: speculative realism).
5: All I said is that I wasn’t bothered to refute Ivo. Stop misrepresenting me.
6: *Complicit*, not complacent. And there is no universal standard that would result in a paradox. As Levinas puts it, ethics emerges from the fact that innocence is foreclosed for us.
7: What, stability? LOL!
8: The relationship between model and reality is far more complex than you suggest. See Manuel de Landa’s Philosophy and Simulation, for some interesting arguments on this front: http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Simulation-Emergence-Synthetic-Reason/dp/1441170286
Also, I think we do have a reasonably sound understanding of population dynamics; they have a lot more to do with specific economic models than diets
@Aragon23:
1. Opposition to rape and murder are indeed norms. This is not what you claimed, you claimed that since our ownmost natures allow for ominvorism, we should (that is-ought thing just refuses to go away) allow for the impulse to rape too.
In the way that you presented this premise, you appeared to mean the one is on par with the other when it comes to characteristics of human nature.
How can the impulse to rape and the impulse to oppose rape both be characteristic of human nature? They can’t, because, like the notion of ‘complicity in suffering’, it gives us both the results we want and the results we don’t want.
We already covered why ethics is not a solid principle due to the lack of an objective standard. ‘Good’ is also a value judgement and it’s not an objective standard to guide ethics.
Your quote there also implies that ethics is normative, you’re just using a different norm that is also subjective and doesn’t serve to bolster your stance. It’s another freebie, but I can see you really are struggling so I apologise for making fun of you.
I believe you said “I am not a moralist”. Neither am I, so let’s leave the ethics.
2. The quote from Zizek does not discuss the ethical treatment of animals that we eat. Zizek did not observe the phenomenon of eating meat and he did not reach a conclusion that any reasonable person could mull over to reconsider our omnivore ways.
While Zizek’s emotional appeal might be a moralist parable for those who abuse animals, the link you posted does not offer us any reason why we should not torture animals in the way that he described other than if we span a while in the cat’s paws we’d feel pretty crappy about the creatures spinning us.
Zizek could cut the chase and mention the golden rule and we’re golden (is the golden rule part of our ownmost human nature?). But this is not the brand of plagiarism tenured professors get paid for, so he has to dress it up a bit.
Whether you agree with Ivo or whether I agree with ZIzek is immaterial. When you link to a quotation, you should (very normative of me, I know) link to an argument that holds regardless of who offers it. That is if you would like to debunk arguments.
Similarly, when you offer a debunking of Rational Ivo, it should hold regardless of how many memes there are making fun of the guy. Debunking Ivo’s fracking post does not mean his rhino post is also debunked. Please don’t make me draw a Venn diagram, rather just accept another apology because I assumed you knew this.
3. Epistemology is the study of justified knowledge and belief. An epistemological crisis means we don’t have a means to justify knowledge and belief objectively.
Nietzsche, far from solving an epistemological crisis, rather pointed out that there is an epistemological crisis since we do not have an objective means to ascertain whether something is true or false. Nietzsche’s ‘solution’ was to claim that epistemology is subjective and relative to perspective (see perspectivism.
Active nihilism means you enjoy the state of being condemned to be free as a meaning-creating exercise (life is art, etc). It is really not relevant to epistemology in the slightest.
5. I apologise, I was under the impression that you’ve debunked Ivo because you said:
“I have pointed out Ivo’s crummy logic on numerous occasions”.
I interpreted this as meaning:
1. Ivo has crummy logic.
2. You’ve pointed it out on numerous occassion.
I interpreted this as a debunking. It didn’t appear to me that you have debunked anyone, so I merely asked for clarification.
Now you claim that you have not and will not debunk Ivo. This is sufficient.
Interested readers may then see what Ivo has to say about rhino hunting and decide for themselves how crummy the logic is.
6. Well-spotted, thanks for the correction. I meant complicit, but I am complacent with eating animals.
Yes, and there is no universal standard. You cannot hold me to the standard of ‘complicity in suffering’ because it’s no standard. Is it good to minimise suffering? Then it is good when I eat meat because I am also complicit in the better treatment of animals measured by less disease. Yet I am also complicit in the slaughtering of animals for food. Again, we see the good is not a sufficient measure for a standard, so the measure of ‘complicity in suffering’ does not hold.
But we’re not having a discussion on ethics because we’re not moralists here.
7. Insert the scary quotes and namesdropping of your choice here. Debunked, QED.
8. I think I did a good job at clarification.I never insinuated a simple mapping between model and reality. On the contrary.
Now that we’ve established how complex the mapping is, why would you want to appeal to petri dish models of population dynamics?
8. Delando does not model reality for a living. There are countless people who do not have an inkling of a clue about artificial intelligence who have plenty to say on the subject, much like the field of hermeneutics/visual communication is littered with opinions that cannot be qualified by demonstration.
I guess Delando is just not interested enough in his field to practice it?
Are you sure that you have not misrepresented and misinterpreted what I posted? If you did understand, you would not appeal to another petri dish model that models population dynamics, of which we cannot even give accurate forecasts of human numbers.
@Garg: It’s safe to assume that we’re largely speaking past each other at this point. For instance, what you say about Nietzsche is exactly what I was saying about Nietzsche. Your conflation of ethics and morality, which I’ve pointed out numerous times, is another example of either a lack of clarity on my part or selective deafness on yours.
It’s honestly very hard to have a productive discussion about ethics with you when you present me with statements like “ethics is not a solid principle due to the lack of an objective standard,” as though this should be revelatory to either myself or anyone else interested in the subject, or in any way undermines the key points of the article and ensuing debate around active letting-be, etc. You’re very clearly quite confused about these things, as is evident in the way you speak about normativity, or when you claim that active nihilism has nothing to do with epistemology.
Also, I’m not appealing to models when I talk about the effect of economic systems on population dynamics, I was making an off-the-cuff observation, hence the
Oh, and out of interest, De Landa did in fact used to code computer models of complex systems for a living. Perhaps you could bother to learn a little more about things (and people) before dismissing them with such smug certainty?
Anyway….
@Aragorn23:
1. We weren’t discussing ethics. We’re agreed that there is no objective standard.
2. Then we’re agreed that there is an epistemological crisis.
3. Oh, LOL!
4. According to De Landa’s faculty page, he did computer art for a living:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/manuel-de-landa/biography/
I do (much to my chagrin and disappointment, usually) bother learning a little more. Another guess, you did not study computer science nor complex systems or economics. If you did, the contradictions here would be clear:
http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/de_landa/antiMarkets.html
He starts of well, citing facts. Then he takes off into fancy that does not follow. Regardless, De Landa and I are here more in agreement than you and I. Make of that what you will.