Animal Rights, Moral Motivation, and the Experience of Wonder
Wonder is an emotion often associated with the mysterious or magical. It is as if we glimpse a part of something greater, something hidden and inscrutable. Wonder can lay the ground for compassion without provoking strategic ignorance. The nature of wonder means that it can bring about the attentiveness required to properly appreciate a sentient being's value. To re-evaluate something, an agent must see it anew or with increased focus. Wonder achieves this not only by grabbing our attention, but also by unsettling us and forcing us to contemplate its object. Thus, the experience of wonder can move an agent towards seeing nonhuman animals as ends-in-themselves.
STEVE COOKE: An important reason why progress towards justice for nonhuman animals has been slow concerns how animals are constructed in our imagination. There are two contributing elements. The first is through disenchantment, whereby the lives of nonhuman animals are rendered meaningless and uninteresting. Partly, this involves conceiving of certain animals as objects and describing them in mass terms rather than as individuals. The second is by placing imaginative distance between humans and the animals we use to benefit ourselves. This distancing occurs at both structural and individual levels. Each of these tendencies can be countered by fostering a particular attitude of wonder.
Motivating people to take seriously, or to act upon, well-reasoned claims that animals are owed rights can be challenging. One reason for this is that the structures and processes of industrial animal agriculture increase the imaginative distance between us and them. By removing nonhumans from our thoughts, either by making them uninteresting and mundane, or by concealing aspects of their lives, we are hindered from attending to suffering…
The distancing of agricultural animals, particularly their slaughter, is deliberate. Prior to refrigeration, vast numbers of animals were slaughtered within cities. This led to public concerns around hygiene, cruelty, and public nuisance, and prompted some of the earliest animal rights and welfare activism. Almost as soon as it was possible, slaughterhouses were removed from the public gaze. Now, encounters with nonhumans are often carefully curated, sanitised, or invented by industry. Detachment is exacerbated by technical, scientific language.6 As a result, most people are unaware of what is involved in the rearing and processing of animals, particularly in industrial agriculture.
In addition to its concealing function, industrialised agriculture, and its attendant bureaucratic processes, strips animals of individuality. Instead of as living, feeling beings, individual animals come to be thought of as economic units, products, stock, capital, units, or machines…
A second form of distancing is psychological rather than structural. To counter the structural issues outlined, activists use shocking images to draw attention to animal suffering. This tactic forms part of what is known as the politics of sight, and its intention is to provoke a compassionate response. Compassion is an evaluative emotion, felt in response to another’s suffering. The evaluation includes judgements that the other’s suffering is non-trivial and bad for them. It is bad both because suffering is unpleasant and because it is undeserved.
Because it contains this combination of feelings and judgements, compassion can be a powerfully motivating emotion. Unfortunately, while the politics of sight can succeed, it often also provokes strategic ignorance. Images of animal suffering cause unpleasant negative emotions, such as shame and guilt. To feel compassion, an agent confronted by shocking images must attend to the suffering, and this can be deeply uncomfortable. Rather than change behaviour, many escape discomfort through disassociation, such as by using euphemistic terms for flesh and killing, and by actively avoiding information that challenges them.
Compassion thus struggles to get off the ground unless agents are already receptive to seeing nonhuman animals as worthy of it. If they do not, then they may be unwilling to take on the emotional burden of feeling compassion. A second problem with reliance upon compassion is that it involves perspective-taking. A sympathetic imagining of another’s circumstances causes us to appreciate how the other feels, and thus our compassion is stimulated. However, the more alien another being is, the more difficult it is to take their perspective, and thus the harder it is to feel compassion…
A possible solution to the problems above lies in the cultivation of attitudes of wonder and reverence towards nonhuman animals… Wonder is an emotion often associated with the mysterious or magical. We feel a sense of wonder when confronted with something that defies easy explanation or understanding. It is as if we glimpse a part of something greater, something hidden and inscrutable. As a result, wonder often accompanies awe. Mysteries such as the meaning of life or the nature of creation provoke such wonder and inspire contemplation; hence Aristotle’s description of wonder as the beginning of philosophy.
Because it does not rely upon stimulating unpleasant mental states, wonder can lay the ground for compassion without provoking strategic ignorance. And, because wonder leads to openness, it can enhance or replace compassion, particularly towards creatures we cannot easily imagine ourselves as. Wonder, however, can be felt in different ways, not all of which are friendly to animal rights. A wonderment conducive to justice for nonhuman animals needs to be directed at seeing them as respect-worthy individuals. As a result, wonderment ought to be promoted alongside, and form the basis of, a form of reverence-based respect…
The attention-grabbing nature of wonder means that it can bring about the attentiveness required to properly appreciate a sentient being’s value. To re-evaluate something, an agent must see it anew or with increased focus. Wonder achieves this not only by grabbing our attention, but also by unsettling us and forcing us to contemplate its object. Thus, the experience of wonder can move an agent towards seeing nonhuman animals as ends-in-themselves. SOURCE…
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