A person who has genuinely reckoned with what industrial civilization does to animals, and chosen to act differently, to whatever extent, is not merely kinder to animals. They are a more morally developed person, one who has extended the habits of empathy and honesty beyond the boundaries that convenience would draw. A civilization that extends genuine moral consideration to other species is not merely more compassionate. It is more fully human.
EMMA SLAWINSKI: There’s a question worth asking at the end of conversations about animal protection, when the arguments have been made and the positions staked out: What do you think this says about us? The pause it produces is longer than expected. We are comfortable discussing animals’ rights, their welfare, their sentience and suffering, and can fill hours debating their moral status. These are serious and worthwhile conversations that have driven genuine progress over two centuries. But in all this debate about animals, we keep missing what may be the most important question of all. What does our treatment of animals say about us?… This is an argument the animal protection movement has not yet made. At least not in a coherent, sustained, or named way that has cut through.
I don’t believe this is a sentimental question. I’d argue it’s the most hard-headed one going – because the great movements that changed the world were never solely about those whose treatment was at stake. The abolitionists made their case about what a society that kept people enslaved was doing to itself. The suffragists challenged the bankrupt moral credibility of a civilisation that claimed to be built on reason and justice while excluding half its population from both. The argument was about those who were suffering, yes, but it was equally, and often more powerfully, about all of us.
Addressing it deliberately might be among the most useful things the movement could do right now… How a civilisation treats the sentient beings in its power is a measure – I believe the most honest measure available – of its moral development. Not its wealth, its technology, or its legal institutions. Those are means. The measure is what we do with them, and to whom. It is the intuition behind the line widely attributed to Gandhi (that the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way it treats its animals). Humane-ism is about positioning our treatment of animals at the centre of how we judge our own progress, and making the issue about us, our society and our choices…
A person who has genuinely reckoned with what industrial civilisation does to animals, and chosen to act differently, to whatever extent, is not merely kinder to animals. They are I believe a more morally developed person, one who has extended the habits of empathy and honesty beyond the boundaries that convenience would draw. A civilisation that extends genuine moral consideration to other species is not merely more compassionate. It is more fully human.
I am not offering a finished theory. I am attempting to make an argument I believe is overdue. One that Lewis Gompertz was punished for making. The fact that it still needs making is, in itself, the point. It is a conversation started two hundred years ago, in a coffee house in St Martin’s Lane, that the movement has been trying to have – haltingly and often acrimoniously – ever since.
The question I believe he was expelled for asking is the one we most need to answer now. Not: how much does this animal suffer? Not: does this animal have rights? But: what are we becoming? And is that who we want to be? SOURCE
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