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1 “What Does Rome Know of Rat and Lizard?”: Pragmatic Mandates for Considering Animals in Emerson, James, and Dewey James M. Albrecht We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in. —Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic” In their search for intellectual ancestors in the tradition of American transcendentalism , environmentalists have understandably focused not on Ralph Waldo Emerson but on Henry David Thoreau. As Lawrence Buell has argued, Thoreau ’s writings evince an emerging interest in “de¤ning nature’s structure, both spiritual and material, for its own sake,” while Emerson’s works, though representing a “great stride”toward a “more audaciously secularized”and naturalistic view of nature’s “philosophic, or at least theologic” signi¤cance, remain committed to an anthropocentric consideration of “how nature might subserve humanity ” (118, 117). Yet for those who believe that American pragmatism offers a distinctive contribution to the present debate on the moral status of animals, the line of in®uence between Emerson and his pragmatic descendants William James and John Dewey constitutes another important genealogy in the American environmental imagination. Speci¤cally,though Emerson celebrates human intelligence—including our language, concepts, and technology—as a powerful extension and augmentation of nature’s creative energies, he is also acutely concerned with the ways that our individual acts, and the cultural constructs that empower and focus them, blind us to aspects of the living and changing world of which we are a part. This Emersonian apprehension takes on, in the works of James, an explicitly ethical signi¤cance, an obligation to attend sympathetically to the signi¤cance of other beings’ experiences, to their desires and demands. Nonhuman animals tellingly emerge as examples in both Emerson’s and James’s prose when they pursue this line of ethical concern, but neither thinker explicitly pursues the possible consequences for the moral status of animals . Just how this concern might support a pragmatic argument for increasing the moral consideration we grant animals becomes clearer in light of Dewey’s analysis of ethics—speci¤cally, as Dewey’s analysis enables a critique of the two dominant positions shaping the animal rights debate, the utilitarian approach of Peter Singer and the rights-based approach of Tom Regan. While pragmatism has clear af¤nities with the utilitarian approach, one signi ¤cant difference is pragmatism’s emphasis on the legitimate and indeed necessary role that emotions or sympathy play in moral re®ection and choice. For Dewey, emotionally felt obligations to other beings are a fundamental, naturally occurring aspect of our associated existence as human beings; as such they are legitimate starting points in the moral dissatisfactions that trigger the process of moral re®ection, action, and change. Emotional dispositions also shape and determine our ability to perceive consequences that should be included in moral re®ection. Last, emotions are an unavoidable determinant in moral decisions, which, both James and Dewey argue, involve not only quantitative calculations about future consequences but also our desires and choices about the quality of happiness to be found, and the quality of character to be cultivated, in striving to achieve different ends. From a pragmatic perspective, extending the moral consideration we grant to animals is such a choice, and thus cannot be settled merely by rational arguments—whether of the Singer or Regan variety—about why the mental status of animals entitles them to greater consideration. Within this process of moral inquiry, a greater openness toward the diversity of experience and the diverse experience of others, such as Emerson and James urge us to cultivate, can encourage a pragmatic choice to grant animals greater moral consideration. But why start with Emerson, since these arguments, admittedly, could be made with reference only to James and Dewey? First, if the pragmatic tradition does have something distinctive to offer to the animal rights debate, our understanding of that contribution will be stronger, richer, and more historically accurate if we appreciate its origins and development. Moreover, there is a practical political value in seeing this tradition as a developing one, for though the relevance that pragmatic concerns have for the status of animals becomes increasingly clear as one proceeds from Emerson to James to Dewey, none of these thinkers—including Dewey, who, for instance, argued strongly in favor of experimenting on animals (in “Ethics of Animal Experimentation”)—articulated this relevance. That task remains for us; and seeing the pragmatic view of animals as an evolving one can encourage us, in...

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