Alice-Mutton: Mutton-Alice

"You look a little shy," the Red Queen says to Alice, "let me introduce you to a leg of mutton." After an exchange of bows with Mutton, Alice is told that one should not eat things to which one has been introduced. No dietary problem need follow, however, since the number of things with which we exchange bows is comparatively small, though of course not stable. Only some people eat Mutton, though most drink water. Historically, the list of edibles and drinkables has been known to expand (more rarely to shrink). It is now expected that similar creatures from neighboring villages will return a bow (though not in parts of Rwanda).

Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour's essay here argues for a world in which we would expect reciprocal courtesy from every item of its furniture and in "relative indifference to the nature of beings." It is therefore not an argument that goes about its business by expanding definitions of nature in order to accommodate new items; that is to say, their argument is not unlike those of the otherwise-very-different Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dependent Rational Animals (by Alasdair MacIntyre). The Hache/Latour essay shares with members of this latter family an important trait, namely, its reliance upon "moral sensitization." There is much to be said for sensitization and for a "revival of scruple," and many commentators have by now said much of it.

What interests me most in Hache and Latour's essay is their picture of universal reciprocation, which is based on their interpretation of responsibility. "I become responsible," they write, "by responding, in word or deed, to the call of someone or something." In the Alice picture: if Mutton bows, I bow back. In that picture there is little room for spasms of skepticism, since the Mutton happens to bow in ways that are recognizable to Alice as bows. It helps that the picture is fictional, as fiction is often about the possibility of Alices and Muttons having gone to sister schools. An analogue to common schooling would be their having a similar nature or at least one similar feature (such as a common origin, dispositions, language, or form). But Hache and Latour deny such commonality. There need not be, they suggest, any underlying similarity between ourselves and what we respond to. The question then arises of how "the call of someone or something" can be interpreted as a call. How do I answer the skeptic who tells, or rather reminds, me that what I construe as the call of the Mutton may be something altogether different? Do not, the skeptic would say, picture Mutton as if it were sacrificial by nature.

It is not surprising that most such calls are only so in an honorary sense. By calling them honorary I do not necessarily mean to disparage them. Some of the most important things are those to which we do honor, but the question remains of how to recognize when an object of honor is calling. Hache and Latour have no eccentric theory about the language of Mutton, and they do not need one. The reason is, or so I claim, that they do not need or want to imagine a substance common to all things under heaven. In order to explain reciprocity, they employ two metaphors. The first is inspired by a fiction of J. M. Coetzee's, according to which "animals have only their silence with which to confront us." This silence, Hache and Latour claim, "should be understood as the response of animals to our behavior toward them," and this silence we need to be able to hear "once again." (I will overlook "once again," which alludes to a historical claim that needs separate discussion.) This fable about silence is a clear application of Wilde's Law. Oscar Wilde remarked that Wordsworth "found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there" - a blithe paraphrase of the fact/value distinction. For Hache and Latour, though not for Coetzee, there can be no sermon preached to Mutton, since understanding the sermon would require just the commonality of nature that they otherwise...