A complex set of psychological factors prevents us from recognising our complicity in the sheer brutality embedded in the everyday treatment of animals. Those who seek to deny animal suffering literally avoid looking, resisting the demand – both emotional and moral – imposed by the reality of animals’ lives. The living subject, as well as her killing, blood, and suffering, is starkly absent from most people’s view, from their consciousness and consequently, their moral considerations. To see what happens to animals, and to engage emotionally with their plight, would potentially lead to widespread opposition to practices that render animals disposable.
REBEKAH. HUMPHREYS: This essay considers the philosophical and moral dimensions of the act of seeing in relation to animal suffering. What does it mean to see the world as one inhabited by billions of suffering animals? How do we bear witness to their suffering? The focus here is on avoidable animal suffering, the extent of which, as Jacques Derrida claimed, is almost unimaginable. The number of animals currently suffering for reasons related to profit is hard to comprehend…
Under the Animal Industrial Complex (A-IC), animals experience at least three kinds of suffering: physical suffering (pain and injury, for example), mental suffering (in the form of stress, frustration and anxiety), and emotional suffering (such as grief and loneliness). Despite this, there is a certain ‘banality of evil’ that has come to be associated with such extensive animal suffering…
When she used the phrase ‘banality of evil’, Hannah Arendt was emphasising that evil is not committed by monsters, but by people who blindly follow routine, who fail to reflect on what their actions mean in a moral sense and who fail to link their routine jobs or procedures to the suffering they cause…
The ongoing suffering of animals… can be seen to manifest a similar banality of evil. In this context, profound harm can be perpetuated through unreflective participation in institutional processes (including bureaucratic ones) that normalise violence against sentient beings. It can also occur through habitual, consumer, and cultural practices that do not question the status quo…
There is a complex set of psychological factors that prevent us from recognising our complicity in this. Those who seek to deny animal suffering literally avoid looking, resisting the demand – both emotional and moral – imposed by the reality of animals’ lives. As Elisa Aaltola claims, ‘We know that, after looking, we shall not be the same’ (I take it that ‘looking’ here is akin to what I mean by ‘seeing’). The now familiar phrase attributed to Paul McCartney also comes to mind: ‘If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian’. To see what happens to animals, and to engage emotionally with their plight, would potentially lead to widespread opposition to practices that render animals disposable…
This is not to say that ‘seeing’, on its own, is sufficient to change entrenched systemic and exploitative practices. Rather, it implies that ‘seeing’ is part of a process of change at the individual level and has a political dimension, as it plays a role in revising beliefs and attitudes, as well as habits and choices. This is part of what Aaltola means by ‘after looking [which I take to mean actively seeing], we shall not be the same’. Accepting our complicity, and thus our responsibility, forces our hand, so to speak, to confront the moral reality of what we support, to bear witness to animal suffering instead of turning away from it.
Despite potentially overwhelming feelings of despair regarding the current realities of animal use within the A-IC, there are things we can and should do to challenge these practices. Historical examples of humans overcoming entrenched systems of oppression are instructive here, with the suffragette movement and the abolition of slavery serving as two prominent cases.
Animals’ significant interests are persistently undermined by the A-IC, and this is precisely why political enfranchisement of non-human animals is vital to ensuring that their interests are properly represented; an enfranchisement which begins via seeing as an engaged act that reveals the stories of animals, brings their objectification to the surface and within public view. Such engagement is vital in prompting political and moral responses. SOURCE
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