“As a biologist,” writes John Marzluff in Wired Magazine, “I believe all living organisms have rights.”
I had that in mind I was approached recently to lead an effort to speak on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves. The Virus Liberation Executive (VILE) was started in the face of the extermination of the Variola virus. It aims to defend the rights of all viruses against genocidal attacks — Ebola, HIV, all of the COVID family, are all at risk of extermination. “Rights?” you ask. Yes, because we in VILE do not think that rights are the exclusive domain humans, they attach to all living things. “Viruses, living?” you ask. Well, that depends on how you define life which is not as straightforward as it might seem at first glance.
Viruses are certainly parasitic on (other) forms of life in order to replicate, otherwise they are inert. But like seeds, under the right conditions, they have the potential to propagate. The parallel to seeds is worth consideration because, even if we don’t consider them alive, their potentiality puts them somewhere between the animate and the inanimate.
Fine, if you want to dismiss the claim that viruses have rights, consider BALE — the Bacterium Liberation Executive. I speak for them as well, and no respectable scientist denies that bacteria are unreservedly alive. Unlike viruses, writes Luis Villarreal in Scientific American, they exhibit “a degree of biochemical autonomy, carrying on the metabolic activities that produce the molecules and energy needed to sustain the organism.”
The website The Rights of Living Things states that “all life has the right to be regarded as important and potentially beneficial” and have:
· The Right to Peaceful Coexistence
· The Right of Self Protection
· The Right to Freedom
· The Right to be Valued
Well, you might say, COVID-19, and the like, have hardly demonstrated a life of peaceful co-existence with homo sapiens. But it is just the reverse. We are the ones who disrupted the ecological niche that COVID-19 occupied in its relationships, be it with bats, pangolins or other animals. And the same is true of SARS (bats, ferrets, pigs and chickens), HIV (chimpanzees) and so on.
Still, it has to be said, that there are some organisms that did not, and never have lived in peaceful coexistence with us. Fleas and mosquitoes come to mind. But, of course, the reverse is true. Our record of not living in peaceful co-existence with other living things should make us leery about calling the kettle black.
Maybe you think this has all been an excursion into the land of ethical absurdity. Merely being alive is not enough to give you moral standing you may say. In fact, notwithstanding the foregoing riff, I agree with you even if it offends John Marzluff and his ilk. But then what more do you have to have beyond being alive? If you say, “being human,” that is not a philosophical answer. You will need to say what it is about being human that qualifies humans as having moral standing, and then we can go on to ask if any other animals have the properties that you have identified.
I am going to cut to the chase here at the cost of shortchanging you of the tortuous foreplay: having moral standing depends on having interests, interests of the right kind.
I assume stones lack any interests and I assume that, to the extent that bacteria have interests, they are merely functional interests, like the interest in propagating. So what are the right kind of interests? Intuitively the idea is that how you are treated matters to you in a way that has no meaning when it comes to a stone or a bacterium. I think the relevant contrast is that even if a bacterium has interests, it does not care when those interests are not met. Who or what then does care? Creatures that are capable of awareness.
“Imagine you were a stone.” Wait a minute you should protest. I can’t imagine what it is like to be a stone because there is nothing like it is to be a stone. “What it is like to be” assumes that the thing you are imagining being has the capacity to be aware. Otherwise all you are doing is importing your capacity for awareness into a setting in which it does not belong. You are imagining being stone with human capacities, not a regular stone. (Here I am echoing a famous argument by Tom Nagel about the problem of imagining, in his case being a bat, something with different capacities from our own.)
So which creatures have the capacity for awareness?
The great neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria (1902–1977) had the good academic fortune to have a steady supply of brain damaged soldiers to treat during the second world war. Soldiers who survived with localized injuries gave him the opportunity to study the relationship between brain structure and function in a systematic way.
These kinds of correlations need to be handled with care. First, when loss of function is found to be associated with damage to a particular part of the brain, that, at most, shows that that part of the brain is a necessary condition for that function. But persistence of a function, despite local damage, does not necessarily mean that the damaged structure plays no role because of the existence of functional plasticity in the brain. Still, that said, when it comes to awareness, we have a well-developed understanding of what areas of the human brain need to be intact. Loose your cerebral cortex and you will lose awareness.
That is a very crude formulation, and interesting research allows us to say something much more detailed: if you expose subjects to written words for less than 275 milliseconds, they will not recall seeing it but, nonetheless, their visual cortex is activated. It takes longer exposure to see the word consciously and, when scanned, we can see the other areas of the cortex (the prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and parietal cortices) that are implicated.
So, can we not conclude from this that animals with the prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and parietal cortices are aware and those without are not? It is not that simple. These structures are not exactly replicated in other creatures. Where they do exist in some, they exist in different size, and size may make for a difference in function. In others, most notably octopuses (whose ancestors diverged from our ancestors on the tree of evolution some 100 to 160 million years ago), the structure of the nervous system bears no resemblance to ours despite its large size (relative to the animal’s weight) and its sophisticated behavior.
Discussion of these unknowns is complicated by the fact that we are not asking if other animals have consciousness or awareness in the way that we do. Instead, we are interested in whether they have enough of it to have moral standing. Let’s wave away these epistemological difficulties and just assume, for the purposes of argument, that some creatures are aware, but, in some sense, they are so in a much more limited way than us.
If creatures come with differing degrees of awareness, do they then also come with differing degrees of moral standing? But I don’t see how to embrace that idea without undermining the very idea of the moral.
Here is why. To follow John Rawls famous metaphor, to think morally is place ourselves “behind a veil of ignorance” stripped of the knowledge of who we are and, in that state of ignorance, we are tasked to specify rules to organize society. The metaphor invites the idea that behind the veil of ignorance, I should take into account where I might end up in society. Rawls’ conceit was that I can follow self-interest without knowing what those interests will be. The result, he argued, was a way to derive a theory of moral standing out of self-interest that would ground a theory of equal basic rights.
But what if we take the considerations of this last paragraph and enlarge the universe of creatures with moral standing beyond humans? Should or will we be willing to apply its conclusions that moral standing does not come in degrees under such circumstances? In the previous paragraph, nothing depended on our restricting it to humans. There is nothing to prevent us including positions behind the veil of ignorance for non-humans (with a point of view) and worrying if we might end up as one of them when the veil is lifted. That suggests that if Rawls’ argument grounds a theory of equal basic rights for humans, it ought also to be extended to any creature for which there is something like it is to be that creature. Bring in animals, and you simply have more variation to bracket.
Perhaps you will say, fine, if I can’t have different classes of beings with moral standing, I will forgo animal rights, but that does not mean I can’t embrace a theory of animal welfare to the extent that animals can suffer. But if you make that move, you owe an account of how you can have the capacity to suffer without meeting the conditions to have moral standing. For on the account of moral standing I am defending, you will need to show how suffering is possible without the capacity for awareness. Either that, or you will have to swallow hard, and embrace the idea that ethics is, in the end, a purely anthropocentric enterprise.