Alice Crary's
Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought is an excellent book, and I have no criticisms to offer. But I do have some questions about it. First, though, a summary of the argument, in the form of a series of quotations:
Human beings and animals have moral qualities that
are, in a straightforward empirical sense, open to view. That is the thesis
of this book. (p. 10)
I
describe thinkers who take human beings and/or animals to lack all
observable moral characteristics as situating human beings and/or animals outside ethics, and I describe those who in contrast take human
beings and/or animals to have moral characteristics that are open to
observation as situating human beings and/or animals inside ethics. (pp. 11-12)
It is
entirely standard to conceive of ‘moral’ values [...] as values that
are internally related to action and choice, and thus far in this chapter I
have simply assumed that my talk of human and animal ‘moral’ characteristics
would be read as implying—as I intend it to imply—that the
recognition that a creature has these characteristics is practically significant
in the sense of being directly relevant to how it should be
treated. (p. 13)
There are passages in his
later work in which Wittgenstein gives expression to a view of mind of
the sort I want to defend (viz., a view on which psychological categories
are irreducibly ethical and metaphysically transparent), and his writings
also develop interrelated lines of reasoning that, when brought together,
can be used to make a compelling case for such a view. (p. 39)
Mental characteristics
are only at home in human and animal lives in which some
things matter in that they are, say, to-be-feared, to-be-sought, to-be eaten,
to-be-protected, or to-be-befriended. Our ability to recognize
creatures as possessing such characteristics presupposes that we have
already at least imaginatively adopted an attitude toward them as beings
who are caught up in such lives and who accordingly, in appropriate circumstances,
merit specific modes of concern and attention. It is in this
respect, insofar as they are aspects of the lives of creatures who call for
particular forms of response, that the mental characteristics of human
beings and animals are essentially practical. Given that they are thus
both objective and essentially practical, it is fair to say that these characteristics
present us with objective moral values. (p. 88)
[I]n ruling out conceptuality we
commit ourselves to representing any natural or learned canine
responses as operating on (or triggered by) particulars. We cannot talk
about modes of conduct that involve the recognition of kinds of things
or of individuals. This is what speaks for attributing conceptual capacities
to dogs. (p. 113)
[I]f we are to bring
human beings and animals empirically into view in ethics, then—
without regard to whether they possess species-typical capacities of
mind—we need to look at them in the light of ethical conceptions of
what matters in the lives of members of their kinds. That is what speaks [...] for saying [...] that merely being a human or an animal matters for ethics. (p. 161)
[L]iterary works can contribute internally to the
kind of empirical understanding that we seek in ethics (p. 204)
One striking feature of the book is its similarity to, and engagement with, regular philosophy. That might not sound striking, but Crary somehow both draws heavily on Wittgenstein and engages in what looks very much like the kind of philosophical theorizing that he rejects. I can't help feeling that this is a sign that something must have gone wrong, but I also can't see that it matters. This is not a good position for me to be in. So my first question is, what should I do about this? I'll attempt a kind of answer below.
Secondly, Crary distinguishes between two kinds of facts in a way that puzzles me. This comes up especially in the last chapter of the book. For instance, see these passages about Jonathan Safran Foer's
Eating Animals:
To arrive at this recognition we need to know some of the plain facts
about what this system [i.e., the industrial food system] is like. These facts have in recent years gotten
attention in, among other places, non-fiction best sellers, blogs, and the
columns of major newspapers, and they are increasingly familiar to
the reading public. Safran Foer takes it for granted that his readers will
know the basics about factory farms, and he devotes himself to filling in
some of the details. For instance, when he talks about the treatment of
those chickens who are raised for meat—or, in the industry lingo,
“broilers”—he tells us not only that the birds are packed together in
close quarters but also that they are generally placed in windowless
sheds by the tens of thousands at densities that allow each bird on
average something less than a square foot of floor space; he tells us not
only that these conditions quickly become filthy and produce illness
but that they lead to respiratory disease, musculoskeletal injury, and
enormously high rates of infections of different kinds (including some
like E. coli that are caused by fecal contamination); he tells us not only
that the birds therefore all get antibiotics in their feed but also that
their bodies are routinely bathed in chlorine to decontaminate them
after slaughter; he tells us not only that many chickens are injured
when being packed for transport to slaughter but also that approximately
30 percent suffer broken bones, that they receive no further food
or water once under way, and that they are slaughtered by a mechanical
process that, when it works correctly, slits their throats while they are
still conscious and, in the small but significant number of cases in
which it doesn’t, scalds them alive; and so on and so on.
When Safran Foer discusses the treatment of broiler chickens, he isn’t
merely concerned with these kinds of neutral facts. He is taking for
granted the ethically charged image he develops of the significance of
different animals’ lives and using it to get us to register the horror of
what is done to the birds. One of his goals is to have us visualize what it
means for a chicken to be crammed into a room with tens of thousands
of its fellows, with no more than about an eighth of a square foot to
itself. “Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird
shaped something like a football with legs standing on it,” he instructs,
“and imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid.” He uses evocative
language in talking about the kind of ailments from which many of
these chickens suffer because he wants us to register the bodily significance
of the fact that a small percentage of the birds “die writhing in
convulsions from sudden death syndrome” and that three quarters have
the sorts of walking impairments that are in all likelihood signs of
chronic pain. He uses similarly expressive terms in talking about the
ways in which the birds are treated during transportation to slaughter
and during the killing process because he also wants us to register horrors
here. Workers are, he explains, expected to crate chickens so quickly
that they “will regularly feel the birds’ bones snapping in their hands.”
Moreover, “often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their
wings will be so loud that workers won’t be able to hear the person next
to them on the line,” and “often the birds will defecate in pain and
terror.” It is in this way—by moving from his effort, early in the book, to
get us to see that animals matter to evocative descriptions of the handling
of broiler chickens in the industrial food system—that Safran Foer
positions us to see the awful callousness of the birds’ treatment. (pp. 262-263)
Crary contrasts plain or neutral facts with ethically charged expressive terms and evocative descriptions. This sounds like a contrast between ways of saying what the facts are more than a contrast between two kinds of facts, and perhaps this is what she means. But I'm also not sure about where the contrast is. When she talks about "these kinds of neutral facts" does she mean both such facts as that "birds are packed together in close quarters" and that "they are generally placed in windowless sheds by the tens of thousands at densities that allow each bird on average something less than a square foot of floor space"? Or is the former a neutral fact while the latter is ethically charged? As these paragraphs are written it looks as though the stuff about birds having their throats slit while still conscious and in some cases being scalded alive are (supposedly) neutral facts while their dying while writhing in convulsions is either a different kind of fact (an ethically charged one) or else a different kind of presentation of a fact (an evocative one). I agree that there is a difference in kind between the bland statement that chickens are packed together in close quarters and the statement that the screaming and flapping of the birds is so loud that workers cannot hear the person next to them. But both, I take it, are equally facts.
The first paragraph quoted above contains a series of "not only...but also" pairs of facts, and it seems to me genuinely unclear whether Crary means that everything in the paragraph is a plain or neutral fact (which is what the words "these kinds of neutral facts" in the first sentence of the next paragraph seem to imply) or whether the "not only" facts are plain/neutral and the "but also" ones are ethically charged. That would make more sense to me. But the difference seems more one of degree than of kind. One of the "not only" facts involves reference to filthy conditions that produce disease. That isn't as evocative as the fact about routine chlorine baths for decontamination, but it's at least somewhat evocative. And this matters because the inside/outside ethics distinction that gives the book its title has to do with this distinction between neutral facts and (what I think Crary never calls) ethical facts.
A difference of degree is still a difference, but I wonder whether there's a tension, and whether this matters, between Crary's distinction between outside and inside ethics (between neutral facts and non-neutral facts) and her view that ethically relevant facts are empirically discoverable. Here's a possibility: those who situate humans and/or animals outside ethics believe that there are neutral facts, or perhaps rather that there is a space of neutral facts with no essential or internal connection to ethical facts; those who situate humans and/or animals inside ethics deny that there is such a space or, if there is one, that humans and/or animals exist within it. (The latter might think, for instance, that mathematics or physics is a kind of conceptual space in which the facts are neutral, but that in this space there are no people or animals.) In this case, from the inside ethics perspective, the distinction between neutral and ethical (non-neutral) facts is only relative at most. So in the passages quoted above about Safran Foer we need to read in words such as 'relatively' and 'supposedly' whenever anything is described as neutral or evocative or morally charged. Because all the facts mentioned there are morally charged to some extent. This, it seems to me, is in fact the case, i.e. it is the case, and not only "from the inside ethics point of view."
I can't (be bothered (here and now) to) explain how or why, but I think this shows the outside ethics position to be not just false but nonsensical. It is a 'position' that is committed to the existence of a way of making sense of human and/or animal life that does not exist. And what I suspect is that all of Crary's book has to be read in a kind of as-if spirit. The various 'theories' that she shows to be 'wrong' are, in fact, not even possibly correct. But she talks about them as if they might be. And the 'theories' that she shows to be better are in fact a (possibly misleading) representation of the only way we can, or at least do, make sense of the phenomena in question. Thus, for instance, there is not really "a view of mind" to which Wittgenstein gives expression and which Crary endorses. Rather, there is the way (or ways) we talk about and understand the concept of mind (or a whole bunch of concepts related to mind). I haven't spelled it out, but somewhere in this, I believe, is the answer to my first question about theories and Wittgenstein.
