Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations

The title of this essay points to two sets of interrelated difficulties.¹ Those in the first set arise chronically from our individual psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals. The second set reflects the intellectually and ideologically crisscrossed connections among the various discourses currently concerned with those relations, including the movement for animal rights, ecological ethics, posthumanist theory, and such fields as primatology and evolutionary psychology. I begin with some general observations on kin and kinds—that is, relations and classifications—and then turn to the increasingly complex play of claims and counterclaims regarding the so-called species barrier.

The problem of our kinship to other animals mirrors that of our relation to other problematic beings: for example, the unborn, the mentally disabled, the drunk, or the terminally comatose—beings, that is, who are recognizably our own kind but not yet, not quite, not just now, or no longer what we readily think of as what we ourselves are. In all these cases, there are difficulties handling both sameness and difference, difficulties framing the claims—either conceptual or ethical—of kinship, and, for formal philosophy, difficulties above all acknowledging just these difficulties.

Of course we are animals, it is said; or, to quote philosopher of ethics Bernard Williams, "The claim that we are animals is straightforwardly true"(15), the straightforwardness of the truth here deriving, it appears, from the current scheme of biological classification.² It is not always clear, however, that the classifications and distinctions of natural science—or, for that matter, vernacular ones either—should be awarded such unproblematic ontological authority.³ When the issue is our responsibility to others, questions about limits are inevitably complicated by questions about sorts, and the relation between them broaches a domain we might call ethical taxonomy. Should we, for example, have care for dogs, cats, cows, and horses but not birds, snakes, or butterflies? For leopards and walruses but not lobsters or oysters? For all these, but not wasps, ticks, or lice? Or for these, too, but not microbes or viruses?⁴ Once the straightforward truth of our human distinctiveness is unsettled by the straightforward truth of our animal identity, there is no point, or at least no more obviously natural point, beyond which the claims of our kinship with other creatures—or, indeed, beings of any kind—could not be extended; nor, by the same token, is there any grouping of creatures, at least no more obviously rational grouping, to which such claims might not be confined.

My brief rehearsal, just above, of the chain of animate being was meant to evoke not only the variety of zoological kinds but also the disparateness of the domains in which we encounter them—on the streets and in our homes, on the farm and in the wild, at race tracks and circuses, in natural history museums and restaurants, beneath microscopes and in petri dishes. These juxtapositions are somewhat jarring, but this is to be expected. Each of these domains is likely to mark, for each of us, a specific history of experiential relations to the animal kinds involved (as provisioners of, among other things, food, clothing, transportation, energy, company, creative inspiration, and moral example; but also as parasites, predators, and pathogens) and, with each such history, a repertoire of more or less specific attitudes and impulses. The impulses in question are deeply corporeal and, accordingly, when disturbed by sudden or dramatic domain crossings (as in the juxtapositions above), likely to elicit that complex—jointly psychic and bodily—set of responses we call cognitive dissonance: that is, the sense of serious disorder or wrongness—and, with it, sensations of alarm, vertigo, or revulsion—that we experience when deeply ingrained cognitive norms are unexpectedly violated. These responses are sometimes invoked by ethical theorists as our intuitive sense of outrage at what is thereby supposedly revealed as inherently improper or unjust: for example, the production of human embryos by cloning,⁵ eating the flesh of dead animals, cutting open frogs, dogs, or human beings for medical instruction, or the spectacle of two grown men in erotic embrace. This series...