Animal Neopragmatism: From Welfare to Rights [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-25979-2, 978-3-030-25980-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Introduction (John Hadley)....Pages 1-15
The Political Problem of Welfare (John Hadley)....Pages 17-38
The Philosophical Problem of Welfare (John Hadley)....Pages 39-60
Relational Hedonism (John Hadley)....Pages 61-83
Responses to the Welfare Problems (John Hadley)....Pages 85-108
Two Problems for Animal Rights Theory (John Hadley)....Pages 109-131
Objections to Animal Neopragmatism (John Hadley)....Pages 133-150
Welfare, Rights, and Pragmatism (John Hadley)....Pages 151-159
Back Matter ....Pages 161-187

Citation preview

Animal Neopragmatism From Welfare to Rights John Hadley

Animal Neopragmatism “Hadley’s book offers a distinctly different and innovative animal ethics which goes beyond the, now rather stale, debate between exponents of rights and welfare. Through the utilisation of neopragmatism and an anti-representational analysis of language, he is able to show convincingly that the non-hedonistic rights vocabulary of dignity and respect can be tied to the more politically acceptable language of welfare. Hadley’s brilliantly conceived linguistic turn in animal ethics is therefore of considerable political significance.” —Robert W. Garner, Professor of Politics, University of Leicester, UK “The philosophical wit Sidney Morgenbesser quipped “Pragmatism is all very well in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.” In this accessible and engaging book, John Hadley demonstrates that pragmatism can be a genuine force for social and political change when theory and practice are brought into alignment. Hadley’s strategy is ameliorative working-from-within, using linguistic pragmatist tools to extend the folk notion of animal welfare to include difficult cases of pain-free but demeaning treatment of animals.” —David Macarthur, Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Sydney, Australia “Animal ethics is dominated by moral realists. Until now, alternative perspectives have barely been represented, much less defended in book-length detail. Animal Neopragmatism is, therefore, a game changer. In this insightful and provocative volume, John Hadley sets out a powerful pragmatist theory about how to understand dignity, and rights-based objections to seemingly harmless ways of using animals. Going forward, all proponents of animal rights will need to grapple with Hadley’s arguments.” —Bob Fischer, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Texas State University, USA

“Animal Neopragmatism is an engaging and accessible book presenting a novel theory of animal ethics. Using pragmatist philosophy—long overlooked by animal ethicists—Hadley reveals how both metalevel problems and linguistic analysis are of central relevance to even the most practical of moral and political questions about human-animal relationships. This is shown with both characteristic lucidity and philosophical acuity. Animal Neopragmatism deserves to be taken seriously by both animal ethicists and animal advocates.” —Josh Milburn, Associate Lecturer in Political Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK

John Hadley

Animal Neopragmatism From Welfare to Rights

John Hadley Western Sydney University Penrith, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-25979-2 ISBN 978-3-030-25980-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: Irene Law/EyeEm/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Passages in Chapters 3 and 4 appeared in ‘From Welfare to Rights without Changing the Subject’ in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Vol. 20, No. 5, 2017: 993–1004. I am grateful to the publisher, Springer, for permission to reproduce parts of the article. Thanks to Josh Milburn, Ben Bramble, Luca Simonian, David Macarthur and Paul Andrew for helpful comments on sections of the manuscript.

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Contents

1 Introduction 1 Neopragmatism 2 The Function of Language 3 Animal Welfare and Public Reason 4 Two Problems of Animal Welfare 5 Experiential Pluralism and Expressivism 6 Two Problems for Animal Rights Theory 7 Objections to Animal Neopragmatism 9 Pragmatist Critique of the Philosophical Tradition 10 Moral Realism, Rationalism and Reductionism: The Three-Rs of Animal Rights Theory 11 Last Word Philosophy 12 References 14 2 The Political Problem of Welfare 17 Hedonism 18 The Intrinsicality Thesis 20 Animal Welfare Science and the Scientific Concept of Welfare 22 vii

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Measurement of Welfare 24 Welfare Scientists as Accidental Hedonists 26 The Folk Concept of Welfare 27 Empirical Evidence for Folk Nonhedonism 28 Nonhedonistic Considerations 30 Nonhedonistic Considerations as Proxies for Feelings? 31 Conclusion 33 References 35 3 The Philosophical Problem of Welfare 39 Changing the Subject 40 Inherent Value and Respect 42 Dignity 43 Changing the Subject Is Strategically Unwise 45 Public Reason and Moral Pluralism 46 Philosophical Method in Animal Ethics 47 Philosophical Realism 48 Truth in Animal Ethics 49 Rationalism and Representationalism 50 Moral Realism 52 Reductionism 53 Conclusion 55 References 58 4 Relational Hedonism 61 The Social Dimension of Pain 63 The Nonrelational Orthodoxy 64 Concern for Pain 65 Helm’s Theory of Love and Concern 67 Two Models of Concern for Pain 69 The Aesthetic Dimension of the Badness of Pain: Pain’s Impact Upon Life Narratives 72 When Pain Is Out of Place 73 Two Cases of Out of Place Pain 74 Objections to the Life Narrative Thesis 75 Narrativism and Animals 77

Contents     ix

Conclusion 80 References 82 5 Responses to the Welfare Problems 85 The Political Problem of Welfare 87 The Changing the Subject Problem 89 Experiential Pluralism 90 A Similarity Argument for the Existence of N-Experiences 92 Unfamiliar Experiences 93 Objections 95 Expressivism in Animal Ethics 97 Public Deliberation and Deliberative Democracy 98 Expressivist Deliberation and Decision-Making 101 Conclusion 103 References 105 6 Two Problems for Animal Rights Theory 109 Animal Rights Theory 110 The Equivocation Problem for Animal Rights Theory 111 The Fallacy in the Basic Argument for Animal Rights 115 The Semantic Implications of Darwinism 118 Objections 119 The Placement Problem for Animal Rights Theory 120 The Metaphysics of Inherent Value 123 Animal Rights Theory and Quietism 125 Conclusion 126 References 129 7 Objections to Animal Neopragmatism 133 Philosophical Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth 134 Peircean Truth: Truth as a Regulative Assumption 136 Coercion and Deception 139 Peircean Truth and Animal Neopragmatism 141 The Warranted Assertibility View 142 The No Practical Difference Objection 143

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Institutional Animal Ethics Committees 145 Conclusion 147 References 149 8 Welfare, Rights, and Pragmatism 151 American Pragmatism 153 Insurgent Amelioration 153 Neopragmatism 154 Intrinsicality and Relational Hedonism 156 Contemporary Pragmatism 156 Animal Ethics Without Realism 157 References 158 Appendix: Animals, Friendship and Neopragmatism 161 Glossary 177 Author Index 183 Subject Index 185

1 Introduction

There are things people do to animals that give us pause for thought, even though it is unlikely the animals concerned are suffering. Relevant examples of the kinds of action I have in mind include using animals in artworks or as studio guests on television, confining them in more or less natural surroundings, petting zoos, genetic modification, fancy dress competitions, corpse desecration, and organ harvesting. What can be said in opposition to these practices if the animals are not suffering? The standard response from proponents of animal rights is to appeal to concepts like dignity or respect. For example, it might be argued that to dress a bear in an Elizabethan collar is to treat it in an undignified way, or to use a python as an object of curiosity on television is to fail to respect its inherent value. The problem with appeals to dignity and respect, however, is that they amount to changing the subject (Hadley 2017b)—of turning an issue that can be framed in the familiar terms of animal welfare into the specialized and idiosyncratic terms of animal rights. While media attention on animal protection issues is increasing, the distinctive features of animal rights philosophy rarely rate a mention in reporting or commentary. Against the background of widespread ignorance about animal rights, the concern with appeals to rights-based © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_1

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concepts like dignity and respect is that otherwise sympathetic people may be inattentive to claims they don’t understand or find too challenging. Yet it is appropriate for proponents of animal protection to object to certain seemingly benign uses of animals. After all, in liberal democracies that is their right. There is also a fair chance that persons objecting to practices in which animals do not suffer will find support amongst a significant number of their fellow citizens. This is because the average person is not simply anti-pain. What I mean is that, contrary to the presuppositions of the hedonists, citizens of liberal democracies have more diffuse and wide-ranging concerns than aversive phenomenology.1 While these concerns may be difficult for most people to articulate, arguably, they are part and parcel of human nature and spring from the moral psychology of the reasonably socialised person. In effect, the reasonably socialised person carries with them a picture of what appropriate human and animal relations ought to be like, and practices that are at odds with this picture can have a jarring effect on one’s moral sentiments (Hadley 2013, p. 98). Certain practices just seem problematic and make people feel uneasy. The proponent of animal rights is correct, therefore, to draw attention to questionable practices involving animals because doing so likely accords with the concerns of her fellow citizens.

Neopragmatism In this book I aim to show how thinking about human concern for animals as broad-based and nonhedonistic facilitates the development of an animal rights theory that avoids the practical and theoretical problems associated with appeals to rights-based considerations such as dignity and respect. The solution is to more closely align such considerations to the familiar and uncontroversial concept of animal welfare, specifically, the badness of pain which, I presuppose, is the central moral consideration of animal welfare theory and practice.2 The key to this alignment is to adopt a distinctly relational approach to animal welfare and focus on the linguistic practices of persons. A linguistic analysis is a

1 Introduction     3

signature feature of the version of American pragmatism known as neopragmatism. As two leading neopragmatists explain: Pragmatism begins with linguistic explananda; with phenomena concerning the use of certain terms and concepts, rather than with things or properties of a non-linguistic nature. It begins with linguistic behaviour and asks broadly anthropological questions. How are we to understand the roles and functions of the behaviour in question? What is its practical significance? Whence its genealogy? (Macarthur and Price 2007, p. 95)

In effect, the neopragmatist in animal ethics moves from analysis of a particular concept or property purportedly possessed by animals to an ostensibly anthropological analysis of the usage of terms by persons. In other words, instead of trying to define dignity or respect with reference to a natural feature of animals, we simply focus on why persons are using the terms. Accordingly, in line with the discussions in Chapters 4 and 5, the motivation for using terms like dignity and respect is to signal a concern about what is being done to animals, and this concern is more wide-ranging than simply a concern for any aversive phenomenology the animal may be experiencing. The two signature pieces of theory that serve to distinguish animal neopragmatism are: firstly, a psychological-cum-anthropological thesis about the scope of a person’s concern for pain and, secondly, an expressivist analysis of the semantic value of the usage of rights-based or nonhedonistic terms such as dignity and respect. In line with the former, the claim is that the scope of concern for pain extends beyond aversive phenomenology to include nonhedonistic considerations; in line with the latter, the claim is that sentences containing rights-based terms like dignity and respect are expressions of emotions, attitudes or opinions.

The Function of Language The linguistic focus of animal neopragmatism requires analysing the usage of terms like respect and dignity in what philosophers call anti-representational fashion. Anti-representationalism is contrasted

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with representationalism; each is a rival theory about the function of language. The representationalist accepts the standard picture of knowledge as a matter of having mental states which accurately correspond to the external world. In line with representationalism, sentences express beliefs which describe a state of affairs in the world. Accordingly, when someone says, “Using an animal as a studio guest fails to respect its inherent value”, they are making a claim about an action (using an animal as a studio guest) and the property of an animal (inherent value). In contrast to representationalism, anti-representationalism rejects the standard picture of knowledge as a matter of possessing beliefs that accurately describe the world; instead, sentences are understood in terms of the role they play in human practices (Bacon 2012, p. 175). In line with the form of anti-representationalism known as expressivism, sentences function to express the speaker’s emotions, attitudes or opinions. Accordingly, when someone says, “Using an animal as a studio guest fails to respect its inherent value”, they are expressing their disapproval of the practice. When a sentence is understood in line with anti-representationalism, no change of subject problem occurs because the speaker is not making a claim about animals and aligning their usage of rights-based terms to properties that are distinct from the capacity to suffer.3 How, then, can registering disapproval of a practice in which animals are not suffering be interpreted as a concern about the welfare of animals as opposed to their rights?

Animal Welfare and Public Reason Providing a credible answer to that question is an important concern of Chapter 4. The answer is two-fold: in liberal democracies, welfare is the only game in town and any practice involving animals must fall under the remit of the established animal welfare paradigm if it is to be the proper subject of ethical evaluation and, potentially, progressive policy reform. Any attention directed at the practice, therefore, by practical necessity renders the practice a welfare issue. In other words, because the usage of animals is governed by welfare legislation and norms, when an activist expresses objection to, say, the use of animals as studio guests

1 Introduction     5

on television, the action is bona fide welfare-directed. Secondly, as the empirical analysis in Chapter 2 and the Helmsian psychological thesis in Chapter 4 will show, people’s concern for others is broad-based, encompassing a range of concerns over and above aversive phenomenology. Simply put, a concern for an individual just is a concern for the individual in a wide-ranging and holistic sense.4 By corollary, the badness of pain encompasses more than simply aversive phenomenology and extends to a range of impacts upon the life of the sufferer. These impacts reflect the relational dimension of pain, and I will argue they deserve to be viewed as authentic elements of welfare. Accordingly, when people use terms such as dignity and respect to register their concern for what is happening to an individual, they signal their concern for the individual’s welfare.

Two Problems of Animal Welfare While the relational dimension of pain finds a place in the neopragmatic theory developed in this book, nonhedonistic considerations like dignity and respect are outside the existing remit of orthodox animal welfare theory. Orthodox animal welfare theory is grounded in the theory of value known as hedonism. Hedonism is the view that welfare is exclusively concerned with feelings, specifically, pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are phenomenologically valenced mental states: pleasure is any positively valenced mental state; pain is any negatively valenced mental state.5 In line with hedonism, only negatively valenced mental states can be bad for welfare, and only positively valenced mental states can be good for welfare. Accordingly, the welfare hedonist defines good and bad welfare with reference to pleasure and pain, respectively. The orthodox view of animal welfare is a consequence of the influence of animal welfare science. Animal welfare science is regarded by policy makers as an important source for the animal-related content of welfare policy.6 In line with the scientific conception of welfare, welfare is a measurable state of animals and the most important states are positively valenced and negatively valenced mental states. In other words,

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like hedonism before it, welfare science is feelings-focused and the key feelings are pleasure and pain. The disconnect between the broadbased public or folk conception of welfare and the narrow feelings-focused orthodox or specialist conception of welfare is what I refer to as the political problem of welfare. The political problem of welfare is the focus of Chapter 2. If orthodox welfare thinking is feelings-focused, then attempts to broaden the concept to include nonhedonistic considerations like dignity and respect are effectively attempts to move away from the welfare orthodoxy. Proponents of including dignity and respect in welfare legislation and codes are thus vulnerable to the charge of changing the subject. This the problem I label the philosophical problem of welfare or the changing the subject problem. The philosophical problem of welfare is the focus of Chapter 3.

Experiential Pluralism and Expressivism In Chapter 5 I present two theories which stand as possible solutions to the two welfare problems. Experiential pluralism is the view that feelings other than pleasure and pain can impact upon the welfare of an individual. Pluralism reconciles broad-based public concern for animals with the feelings-focused welfare orthodoxy by analysing nonhedonistic concerns in terms of nonhedonistic experiences. In line with pluralism, when a person uses a term such as dignity or respect, they are drawing attention to the nonhedonistic experiences of the animal. In turn, experiential pluralists can argue that their theory avoids the changing the subject problem because the change they enjoin is only minimal. The pluralist simply calls for a broadening of the range of welfare-related feelings. Whereas the hedonistic orthodox view is that pleasure and pain are the only relevant feelings, experiential pluralism encompasses other feelings such as novelty or compassion. It is important to note that experiential pluralism, like hedonism and orthodox animal rights theory, is a realist theory, which means that the foundational assumptions of philosophical realism are background assumptions of pluralism.

1 Introduction     7

Expressivism, in contrast, is an irrealist theory that purports to reconcile broad-based public concern for animals with the feelings-focused welfare orthodoxy by preserving the existing vocabulary of concern without any attendant ontological commitments. In other words, citizens can talk all they like about dignity and respect without being accused of changing the subject, because there is no suggestion that the terms they use refer to natural features of the world. It is only because nonhedonistic concepts like dignity, respect and inherent value are reduced to natural features of the world in orthodox animal rights theory, that proponents of animal rights are vulnerable to the charge of changing the subject.7 In Chapter 5 I also sketch how public deliberation about animal protection would play out when inquiry and moral vocabulary are understood in expressivist terms. Instead of seeking once and for all answers, deliberators are aiming to have their views resonate with their interlocutors. In fact, it is best to think of deliberators as co-experimenters and fellow community of inquiry members; linked in analogous fashion to the way all scientists can be said to be united in a common endeavour to get the world right, so to speak.

Two Problems for Animal Rights Theory Tying rights vocabulary to welfare is expedient for the business of promoting animal protection in the real world and makes for wellgrounded philosophical theory. As well as being politically engaged in the familiar terms of animal welfare, the neopragmatic approach to animal ethics avoids the metalevel problems associated with thinking about welfare and rights in the usual way. An analysis of these problems is the focus of Chapter 6. A brief summation of the problems will suffice for this introduction. The first problem is the equivocation problem or, more commonly, a fallacy of equivocation. A fallacy of equivocation is a well-known fallacy in the canon of informal logic. In line with time-honoured norms of philosophical logic, valid arguments have conclusions that are unambiguously supported by the premises. Validity, therefore, requires

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uniformity in meaning across the concepts in the premises of an argument. In other words, if a premise contains the concept chair, the sense of the term must be the same wherever the term appears in the argument; you cannot have chair meaning ‘head of the meeting’ in one premise and ‘item of furniture’ in another premise. An argument that included two distinct senses of the term chair would be classed an invalid and labelled fallacious. An invalid or fallacious argument arises when the meaning of one of the terms in the argument is sufficiently ambiguous to call into question the logical relation between premise and conclusion. In effect, the protagonist putting forward a fallacious argument commits a sleight of hand by trading on the ambiguity in the meaning of different senses of the same the term to secure the appearance of a valid argument. In Chapter 6 I suggest that orthodox analytic animal rights theory faces an equivocation problem. There is sufficient ambiguity surrounding the meaning of the term sentience to undermine the logical relations between the premises and conclusion of the basic animal rights argument. In Descent of Man ([1879] 2004), Darwin had famously said that the mental states of humans and animals differ by degree not kind. Implicit in this claim is an acknowledgement that there is variation between human and animal mental states. The question, then, is what are the downstream effects of this acknowledged variation? It is common for philosophers to suggest that the variation results in a difference in the interests or rights that can be meaningfully predicated to humans and animals (Rachels 1990). But why stop there? Why wouldn’t the implications of Darwin’s claim extend to the meaning of the terms used in speaking about interests and rights? After all, a degree of difference is still a difference. The second problem that undermines animal rights theory is the so-called placement problem. The placement problem is a distinctly metaphysical problem arising from the overall metaphilosophical worldview embedded in animal rights theory. The worldview is known as philosophical realism, but the specific aspect of realism that emerges as a particular problem for animal rights theory is object naturalism. I will explain realism and object naturalism in depth later; suffice to say now, however, that animal rights theory has an underlying metaphysical

1 Introduction     9

structure that is conceptually very similar to religious ethical theories. The problematic concept is Regan’s (2004) notion of inherent value, but the placement problem extends to any concept of value. How does value feature in a scientific picture of world? If the only entities that exist are things that can be the proper subject of the physical sciences, then how do we locate value in the physical sciences picture? Animal rights theorists pass over this question as if it has no theoretical significance. In Chapter 6 I suggest the placement problem calls into question the popular view that animal rights theory can trace its theoretical roots to Darwinism.

Objections to Animal Neopragmatism A full rendering of the equivocation problem and the placement problem will be given in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7 I address the main theoretical objections to the neopragmatic theory of animal ethics. The first objection relates to objectivity and truth: proponents of animal rights, like proponents of any theory, need to be able to claim the mantle of truth and the pragmatic theory advanced in this book leaves out truth altogether. The objection continues: because the timehonoured epistemic norms of philosophical realism find no place in pragmatist theory, there is no basis for judging the merits of any rival claims about the welfare of animals. There are two responses to the objection: one is to argue there is a conception of truth that can find a place in neopragmatic theory. This is the theory of truth, associated with pragmatist philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, as an ideal end point or regulative assumption of inquiry. The second response is to concede that truth is unimportant in animal neopragmatism but stress that the vocabulary of animal protection debates remains the same. Proponents of animal protection can still use the familiar vocabulary of animal rights in attempts to have their position resonate with their interlocutors. The second objection is that animal neopragmatism fails on its own pragmatic terms precisely by leaving so much of the status quo in place. It is a test of any pragmatic theory that it makes a practical difference in

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the lives of real people. The objection continues: given that the vocabulary of the animal protection debate remains the same, and given also that pain remains as the central concern for welfare, then neopragmatism leaves the animal protection landscape unchanged. The response to this objection is to concede that neopragmatism leaves the status quo substantially in place but to point out that the theoretical intention was always reform rather than revolution. In other words, what the objector mistakes for conservatism is actually the playing out the familiar pragmatist strategy of progressive amelioration.8

Pragmatist Critique of the Philosophical Tradition The starting point for the neopragmatist is a particular conception of persons set against the background of a rejection of the foundational assumptions of the philosophical tradition. Neopragmatism, therefore, has both a positive case and negative case motivating it. The merits of the kind of anti-representationalism typical of pragmatism will hopefully become clearer after the discussions in Chapters 5 and 6. Below, I will briefly explain some of the foundational assumptions of the philosophical tradition that pragmatists reject. I presuppose that these assumptions are operative in orthodox animal rights theory.9 The first assumption is metaphysical realism. The easiest way to understand metaphysical realism is with reference to the everyday practice of subject-predicate discourse. Imagine somebody pointing to a nearby item of furniture and saying, “The chair is wooden.” The subject of the statement is the chair and the predicate is wooden or, strictly speaking, woodenness. While it is commonplace to describe things like chairs with reference to their predicates, doing so has an implication for how the world is understood. Notice that the predicate term wooden is used to refer to a property or feature of the chair. The usage of subject-predicate discourse presupposes an ontology or metaphysical worldview whereby things exist as bearers of particular shareable properties. Some metaphysical realists are known as naturalists and some are labelled as supernaturalists. Naturalists hold that the

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only things that exist are the kinds of entities that can be the subject of the natural sciences, including psychology (Fisher 2011; Macarthur and Price 2007). A supernaturalist, in contrast, leaves room in her metaphysical picture of the world for entities that are difficult to place in a scientific account of the world. Items such as a human soul, numbers, and the property of sanctity are examples of entities that supernaturalists may include in their account of the world.

Moral Realism, Rationalism and Reductionism: The Three-Rs of Animal Rights Theory Moral realism is the idea that the framework just applied to the case of chairs and their properties can be just as readily extended to statements considered to have ethical subject matter. These are statements that include predicate terms like good, bad, right and wrong. Thus, for the moral realist, the statement “Giving to charity is good” picks out an action (giving to charity) and a property (goodness) in just the same way that the statement, “The chair is wooden”, picks out an item of furniture and a property it bears. And, according to realists, just as a statement about the materiality of chairs can be true or false, so can claims about the morality of particular actions. In line with moral realism, the statement “Giving to charity is good” is truth-apt and can be made true in the same way as the statement about chairs—by whether the world corresponds to the statement. In other words, whether, in actual fact, giving to charity is good. At this point readers may be perplexed about how claims concerning goodness can be true or false in the same way as claims about woodenness. Here another framing assumption of metaphysical and moral realism—reductionism—plays its part. Reductionism is the identification of one set of properties with another set of properties in order to enable a statement to be truth-apt (Fisher 2011, p. 180). For example, a hedonist may identify goodness with the promotion of pleasure. With such a reduction in place, the meaning of the statement “Giving to charity is good” becomes ‘Giving to charity promotes pleasure.’ The hedonist’s reduction of good to pleasure serves to render the statement

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capable of being true or false. The statement will be true if, in fact, giving to charity promotes pleasure, and false otherwise. It is easy to see how moral realism and, by corollary, metaphysical realism, are framing assumptions of orthodox animal rights theory. A claim such as “It is wrong to raise and kill animals for food” will be rendered truth-apt through a reductive analysis of wrongness to, say, ‘fails to promote a net aggregate balance of pleasure over pain.’ The statement will be true if, in fact, raising and killing animals for food fails to promote a net aggregate balance of pleasure over pain. Of course, determining the truth of this statement turns on the acceptance of a host of answers to related questions about animal mental states, the welfare impacts of intensive confinement systems, and consumer psychology, but the basic point is that the methodology of reduction furnishes truth conditions for claims about the ethics of practices involving animals. The final assumption is rationalism. Rationalism is the traditional philosophical methodology of reasoned argument based upon logical relations between premises and conclusions. For philosophers, reasoned argument is the functional equivalent of the scientist’s microscope. The back and forth process of justification and objection is like focusing a microscope upon a new discovery. The deliverances of arguments, like the findings of empirical inquiry in science, are held by rationalists as truths. A number of epistemic norms and virtues accompany rationalism, most notably, responsiveness to evidence and open-mindedness. I discuss the implications of these norms and virtues for the conduct of debates about the ethical treatment of animals in Chapters 5 and 7.

Last Word Philosophy The assumptions just described are all related and together they create a picture of the animal ethics literature as just so many rival theorists working away more or less like orthodox scientists. As the above discussion shows, just like a group of scientists, animal ethics theorists have certain metaphilosophical constraints upon them that are intended to serve to discipline their thinking. In line with this picture, disciplined

1 Introduction     13

thinking is accepted as a virtue of ethical reasoning. Inquiry is cast as a dispassionately objective process that proceeds via the consideration of arguments which more or less conform to the rules of philosophical logic. The conclusion of a rational argument can be accepted as the truth, in like manner to the findings of an empirical research protocol. Accordingly, the proponent of animal rights can claim that their argument deserves to be regarded as correct—as the last word on the subject. The problem with last word philosophy, however, is that it often fails to cohere with practice. Homo sapiens are emotional animals and prone to partiality. The framing assumptions of last word philosophy constitute ill-fitting constraints on people whose views are very likely the product of complex noncognitive factors and personal circumstances, and, thereby, resistant to rational evidence.10 While some people might be analytically minded and impressed by logical relations and clarity, others may prefer epistemically messy and emotionally charged debate; especially when the topic in question is human relations with animals. What the pragmatists succeed in doing is showing how the framing assumptions of the tradition are, ultimately, options, and people who aspire to make progress can find suitable theoretical resources elsewhere. Shaking up the established order in this way, neopragmatism affords the opportunity for the development of a distinctly different animal rights theory, a theory that coheres with a more realistic conception of people and their concerns.

Notes 1. In Chapter 2 I review the empirical evidence and in Chapter 4 I offer a psychological-cum-anthropological thesis in support of this claim. 2. I present a genealogical analysis in support of this claim in Chapter 2. 3. For example, Cataldi (2002) and Nussbaum (2006) each betray an implicit commitment to representationalism when they analyse a moral concept, dignity, in terms of a purportedly natural feature of animals. In Cataldi’s case, dignity is analysed with reference to inherent value; in Nussbaum’s case, species-typical behaviour.

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4. This part of the book owes a lot to Helm’s (2010) theory of love and concern, which I discuss in Chapter 4. In line with Helm’s view, when a person shows concern for some specific aspect of a loved-one’s life, we can be assured that they are concerned for the loved-one in a broader sense. In like manner, I argue herein that when a person shows concern for another’s pain, this reflects a wide-ranging concern for the other. 5. Negatively valenced mental states are often referred to as aversive and as involving aversive phenomenology. Phenomenology refers to how the experience feels on the inside, so to speak. 6. I say animal-related content because, clearly, welfare policy includes non-animal-related content in the sense that legislation, codes of practice and norms are influenced by commercial demands of representatives of animal user industries. 7. It is important to note that for the purposes of the critique of this book, besides reductionism any form of analysis that proceeds from a term or concept to a natural feature of the world will generate the changing the subject problem. 8. Koopman (2009, p. 2) identifies the “central concern” of pragmatism as “transitioning” and “meliorism”. 9. In Chapters 3, 5, and 6 I refer to these assumption as the three-Rs of animal right theory. 10. The lure of representationalism, it has a been argued by pragmatists (see, e.g. Rorty 1979, p. 376; 1991, p. 35), is the promise of an ultimate standard that is outside of our actual practices. The idea of such a standard, Rorty argues, appeals to a religious impulse. The thesis in Jamieson, Wenk and Parker (2003) opens up the prospect that an analogous impulse may also be a feature of animal rights thinking. For a discussion, see Hadley (2017a).

References Bacon, Michael. 2012. Pragmatism: An introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cataldi, Sue. 2002. Animals and the concept of dignity: Critical reflection on a circus performance. Ethics and the Environment 7 (2): 104–126. Darwin, Charles. [1879] 2004. The descent of man, 2nd ed. London: Penguin Classics.

1 Introduction     15

Fisher, Andrew. 2011. Metaethics: An introduction. Durham: Acumen. Hadley, John. 2013. Liberty and valuing sentient life. Ethics and the Environment 18 (1): 87–114. Hadley, John. 2017a. Religiosity and public reason: The case of animal rights advocacy. Res Publica 23 (3): 299–312. Hadley, John. 2017b. From welfare to rights without changing the subject. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (5): 993–1004. Helm, Bennett W. 2010. Love, friendship and the self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jamieson, Wesley V., Casper Wenk, and James V. Parker. 2003. Every sparrow falls: Understanding animal rights activism as functional religion. In The animal ethics reader, ed. Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler, 556–562. London: Routledge. Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as transition: Historicity and hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press. Macarthur, David, and Huw Price. 2007. Pragmatism, quasi-realism, and the global challenge. In New pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak, 91–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2006. Frontier of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Rachels, James. 1990. Created from animals: The moral implications of Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Regan, Tom. [1983] 2004. The case for animal rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, relativism and truth: Philosophical papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 The Political Problem of Welfare

In this chapter I outline the political problem of welfare. The ­political problem of welfare is the divergence between two different ways of thinking about welfare. On the one hand, the specialist conception of welfare and, on the other hand, the public or folk conception of welfare. Roughly, the specialist view is that welfare is all about feelings, ostensibly, measurable suffering, and the folk view is that welfare is about more than feelings. The folk have a broad-based and diffuse notion of welfare. When close attention is given to the folk view of welfare, it is fair to say that it encompasses a raft of considerations that progressive theorists identify as important elements of welfare. These considerations can be classed as nonhedonistic and include intrinsic value, respect, dignity, integrity, and naturalness.1 Because the views of the folk overlap with progressive theory, policy makers would be wise to consider progressive theories as a potential source for values and principles. An important take away message from this chapter is that progressive theorists are in-sync with mainstream opinion after all. That the specialist conception of welfare is so influential in shaping the policy conception of welfare, however, entails that there is a question mark hanging over the democratic legitimacy of existing welfare © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_2

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policy.2 The focus of existing welfare policy upon measurable suffering is too narrow to adequately reflect public opinion and, therefore, an exclusively feelings-focused welfare policy inevitably fails to achieve its democratic purpose to assuage citizens’ concern for the care of animals. Ideally, policy assuages citizen concern by having its content reflect the preferences and commitments of citizens. To the extent that policy makers are concerned to have democratically legitimate welfare policy reflect the view of citizens, then existing laws, codes of practice, and norms need to be reformed in the direction of the folk conception. In this chapter I will explore the political problem of welfare. I trace the problem to the theory of value known as hedonism, and the influence of animal welfare science over welfare orthodoxy. If welfare orthodoxy was not ostensibly hedonistic and scientistic, then there would be no divergence between the specialist conception of welfare and the folk conception of welfare.

Hedonism Hedonism is what moral philosophers call a theory of value.3 Theories of value purportedly tell us about why we should think something is morally significant. Theories of value may identify a single factor, or a range of factors, as the basis for valuing something as good or bad. Most theorists of value tend to be realists and single-minded about the basis of value. To be realist about value is to be believe that value is a bona fide feature of the world, akin to size, shape and colour. In line with realism, to say that something is good or bad is no more controversial than saying it is round or liquid. To be single-minded about value is to identify a single factor as the basis for valuing something. Someone who believes that there is one feature of the world which grounds the value of things is known as a monist. In line with philosophical monism, debate in value theory is a contest between rival views, each aspiring for the mantle of being correct, right or best. We will see below that welfare scientists and welfare policy is ostensibly realist and monist—scientists regard welfare as a real property of animals and they identify feelings as the sole measure of good or bad welfare.

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Hedonism is what’s known as an experiential theory of value. In line with an experiential theory of value, experiences are the only basis by which to judge something as good or bad. The experiential focus of hedonism affords a basis for judging the contribution that something makes to the value of individual lives. It is as a theory for judging how well lives are faring, that is, as a theory of welfare or well-being, that hedonism is most influential in debates about animal protection (Gregory 2016). In line with a hedonistic theory of welfare, only an experience can enhance or diminish an individual’s welfare. For example, imagine that I just had a conversation with a colleague. In line with experiential theories of value, the only basis for judging whether the conversation enhanced or diminished my well-being is an experience of some kind. Perhaps the conversation caused me to feel satisfaction or dread. The principle that experience alone can be good or bad for an individual’s well-being is known as the experience requirement (Hawkins 2016). Hedonism is distinctive in its singling out of only two kinds of experiences: pleasurable ones and painful ones. In line with hedonism, pleasure and pain are analysed in terms of positively valenced and negatively valenced feeling, respectively. Thus, to be in pain or suffering is to have an aversive (negatively valenced) experience on the inside, so to speak. Likewise, to have a pleasurable experience is to have a positively valenced feeling. Tying pleasure and pain to positive and negative feelings puts the hedonist in a position to say that anything that produces pleasure is good and, conversely, anything that produces pain is bad. The purported measurability of hedonism is held up as a virtue of the theory. The nineteenth century English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, enjoined that individual units of well-being, he called them utiles, should be distinguished on the basis of a range of variables such as intensity and duration (Bentham [1789] 2007, p. 29). For Bentham, the longer lasting and more intense pleasures added more to an individual’s well-being than fleeting low intensity pleasures. The merits of laws, policy proposals, a person’s dispositions and character, relationships, and actions, according to Bentham, could be similarly evaluated simply by taking into account the tendency of each to augment or diminish the individual or collective balance of pleasure over pain. In the nineteenth century, the measurability rendered hedonism a more transparent

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and objective basis for decision-making than political expediency, custom, or nepotism. We will see that this kind of reductive approach to well-being is mirrored in the scientific approach to animal welfare.

The Intrinsicality Thesis But hedonism is in one important respect incomplete. It is one thing to assert that pleasure and pain are the only values, it is another to explain why pleasure should be thought of as good and pain considered as bad. Despite pleasure and pain being two intuitively compelling and very familiar experiences, few people question and understand the underlying evaluative grounds of positively valenced and negatively valenced experiences. What makes pain bad exactly? Is it the experience of pain itself that makes it bad, or the fact that the experience is unwanted? Pain theorists purport to answer these questions (Kahane 2016). Imagine that you are in pain. Say that you have just had the first part of a root canal procedure. The anaesthesia has worn off and you have a sore tooth and jaw from the vigorous scraping out of the canal. You are trying to sleep but are distracted by the negatively valenced phenomenology that you are experiencing. On one side are pain theorists that say the pain is bad simply because of how it feels on the inside. These theorists are known as sensation theorists. A rival view is that pain is bad if and only if it is unwanted. In line with the latter view, pain is bad because it signals desire frustration, and desire frustration is purportedly bad in itself. The desire theorist says, because you are in pain it must be the case that you desire the experience to end. If you desired to experience the pain, however, according to desire theorist, the pain would not be bad for you. Notice how both the sensation theorists and the desire theorists accept that the badness making feature of pain is a nonrelational feature, that is, an aspect intrinsic to the experience of the sufferer. In line with this way of thinking, causing pain and alleviating pain is, at bottom, a matter of doing something to the sufferer and the sufferer alone. If I were to step on someone’s toe, for example, the badness of the pain is to be found inside them; my motives, character or concerns may bear

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upon the morality of the action but not the badness of the pain as such. Call this idea the intrinsicality thesis. As a thesis about the badness of pain, the intrinsicality thesis stands as an important moment in the history and philosophy of animal welfare. The purported intrinsicality of the badness of pain effectively restricts judgments about welfare to be made on the basis of assessments of the mental states of animals. This means that only something which impacts upon the mental states of animals can be a bona fide welfare issue. Consider the case of the Russian circus bears (Cataldi 2002; Hadley 2017; Humphreys 2016). Patrons to a Russian circus can purportedly be photographed alongside bears dressed in Elizabethan costume. In line with the intrinsicality thesis, the treatment of the bears is not a welfare issue because there is nothing problematic occurring inside their heads; they are not experiencing pain and, presumably after some training, they do not have a preference that is being frustrated. In line with the intrinsicality thesis, therefore, there is no welfare issue to address. When the mental states of animals are all that matters as far as welfare is concerned, then disciplines with the methodological tools for making judgments about such states are seemingly best-placed to take the lead role in shaping debate about the concept of welfare and the content of welfare policy (Fraser 2008). Hence the important role that animal welfare science has played in the existing institution of animal welfare. I will say more about welfare science shortly, suffice to say now that the intrinsicality thesis places a burden on those who seek to include nonhedonistic considerations, such as dignity and respect, within the remit of welfare, to tie these concepts back to the mental state of an animal. This can be a difficult exercise, however, as the discussion of experiential pluralism in Chapter 5 will show. The entrenchedness of the intrinsicality thesis means that reforming the existing institution of welfare requires either changing how the concept of welfare is understood, or loosening the connection between the concept of welfare and the content of animal protection policy.4 The latter option would allow for keeping measurable suffering as the focus of the concept, welfare, while allowing additional considerations to inform welfare policy. The theory of relational hedonism to be outlined in Chapter 4, however, is an attempt to have it both ways. In line with relational

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hedonism, when a person shows concern for the pain of another, they signal a broad-based concern. Relational hedonism, therefore, gives the intrinsicality thesis a holistic rationale. When the connection between holism and intrinsicality is laid bare, nonhedonistic considerations such as dignity and respect can then be viewed as important elements of the existing concept of welfare.

Animal Welfare Science and the Scientific Concept of Welfare Hedonism is the philosophical progenitor of the scientific concept of animal welfare.5 The framing assumptions, aims, and methods of animal welfare science are, in turn, an important influence on the policy conception of animal welfare. For many policy makers and animal user industry representatives, animal welfare science is the only credible source for the content of welfare policy. Animal welfare science, however, is a multi-disciplinary field and welfare scientists have different and, sometimes, conflicting views about welfare and how to measure it. Broadly, there are three scientific conceptions of welfare (Fraser 1998): the affective states or feelings view, the biological function view, and the natural behaviour view. Welfare policy and codes of practice invariably include values, insights and principles from each of these competing conceptions. The important point is that each conception can result in very different assessments of welfare. The same animal under the same conditions can be adjudged as having good welfare on one view but poor welfare on another (Fraser 2008, p. 77; Lassen et al. 2006; Mench 1998, p. 92). In line with the feelings view, for example, welfare is defined with reference to affective states like pain, suffering, stress, fear, boredom, anxiety, malaise, and depression. An animal faces welfare challenges if a housing system, handling procedure, surgical procedure, method of killing, or mode of transport causes them to experience one of these negatively valenced mental states. While the traditional focus of proponents of the feelings view was negative emotions, in recent times positive

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affective states such as pleasure and contentment have become recognized as bona fide welfare considerations (Fraser 1998; Mellor 2012; Mellor and Beausoleil 2015; Yeates and Main 2008). In contrast to the feelings-based view, the focus of the biological functioning view is the physical health of the animal. In line with the biological functioning view, measures of good welfare are the absence of injury or disease, the ability to reproduce, normal growth rates, and normal readings of physiological performance: heart rate, body weight, temperature, blood pressure, etc. If a dairy cow is able to produce the standard milk yield, for example, then this is evidence of good welfare to be counterbalanced by any welfare challenge posed by, say, calve induction procedures. Likewise, if a pregnant sow in an intensive piggery gains weight, then this good welfare indicator is set against any cost associated with being confined and unable to turn around. While it is true that the biological function view and the feelings view are logically distinct and it is possible for an animal to simultaneously be judged as having good welfare on one view and poor welfare on the other, there is a close connection between biological function and feelings. Indeed, is reasonable to suggest that the measures of good biological function also function as indicators of positive or negative feelings (Broom 2011). The natural behaviour view of welfare uses natural behaviour and capabilities as indicators of good or bad welfare (Bracke and Hopster 2006). Confinement systems pose the biggest welfare challenge if natural behaviour is defined broadly as living a natural life, or living like the animal would do in the wild. But if natural behaviour is interpreted more narrowly as the exercise of specific natural behaviours, say, dustbathing in chickens or snout rooting in sows, then modifications which improve welfare can be made to otherwise unnatural housing environments; for example, by increasing cage space to address the former and introducing organic bedding material to address the latter. The natural behaviour view has a philosophical echo in the theory of human well-being known as perfectionism (Bradford and Keller 2016, pp. 275–276). In line with perfectionism, the standard for well-being is an idealised exemplar of the perfect human being. This is a view traceable to the ethical theory of the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle. The central claim of perfectionism is that evolution has endowed humans

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with a set of capabilities, and a good life for us requires the exercise and development of natural capabilities. All we need to note about Aristotle’s theory is that this kind of view has its adherents in philosophical theories of animal welfare (Nussbaum 2006; Rice 2016). In line with a perfectionist theory of animal well-being, a housing system has a negative impact upon well-being to the extent that it denies animals the ability to exercise their species-typical capacities. For example, the welfare of a lion confined in a zoo and, thereby, denied the chance to hunt prey in the normal way, will be diminished to the extent that its predatory skills are less developed than skills of its natural counterparts. In line with perfectionism, the wild lions enjoy higher welfare because their predation capacity more closely resembles the species-typical ideal.

Measurement of Welfare Just as welfare scientists have different conceptions of welfare, they also have different methods of welfare assessment (Millman 2009, p. 90; Ohl and van der Staay 2012). Some welfare scientists are biologists and they will make assessments of welfare on the basis of physiological measures such as body mass, heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels (Broom and Johnson 1993). Other welfare scientists are ethologists who will assess welfare by observing an animal’s behaviour. An ethologist will, for example, compare the behaviour of a domesticated animal with a wild counterpart in order to determine the physiological or psychological challenges of a particular housing system. Does the domesticated animal continue to have a preference for behaviours that are run of the mill for natural conspecifics? Preference testing, supposedly in order to determine what the animals themselves want, is a standard methodology of ethologists (Dawkins 1980). Ethologists claim that the more an animal is prepared to work to obtain a good, the stronger the animal’s preference for the good and, by corollary, the greater the contribution obtaining the good will make to the animal’s well-being. Using this model of psychology as a background, it is possible to assess the impact of housing conditions and practices that result in the frustration of animal preferences.

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Other welfare scientists are veterinarians. Veterinarians assess welfare with reference to the findings of both the scientists and the behaviourists. In this respect the animal welfare veterinarian is a scientific generalist. Indeed, perhaps the simplest way to understand the scientific approach to animal welfare is by way of analogy with human welfare. Think of someone that you know, say, a friend or colleague. Is life going well for them? In other words, do they enjoy good welfare? A doctor would ask, “What seems to be the problem?” At bottom, it’s a matter of asking a common sense question such as: “Is the patient physically and mentally healthy?” If we were to make an assessment of a human being, we seek to determine whether they are injured or suffering from any disease or illness. We would then seek to find out if the patient is experiencing any negative mental states—depression, anxiety, etc. The situation is very similar with assessments of animal welfare except that animals often live in unique circumstances and are treated in ways that make answering the questions less straightforward. Of course, the inability of animals to speak for themselves is also a challenge for assessments of welfare and this is why preference testing is so important as a means of asking the animals. The value of welfare science is that it affords authoritative answers to these questions because it is at the interface of medicine and animal agriculture. Research agendas in the disciplines of welfare science are invariably shaped by the demands and priorities of the agriculture and companion animal industries (Fraser 2008, p. 266; Phillips 2013). Just like human biomedical research, the development of veterinary medicine and, thereby, welfare science, is driven by the market logic of profit and loss. Conflicts of interest are an ethical consideration that must be considered when evaluating claims about the purported welfare implications of research findings. More pertinently, just as in the human case of welfare, scientific welfare benchmarks admit of degree and value judgments are an inevitable part of welfare assessment (Fraser 1999; Mench 1998; Broom 2011; Tannenbaum 1991; Webster 1994). Quite apart from the basic question about which scientific conception of welfare ought to be chosen as correct or best, there are subsidiary ethical judgments to be made about the relative priority of individual measures of welfare. What is more important: dust bathing or freedom of movement? What is the

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better indicator of poor welfare: cortisol levels or passivity? A hedonistic approach is to prioritize the measures that impact upon animal mental states.

Welfare Scientists as Accidental Hedonists Sometimes scientists define welfare, however, in ways that make its connection to mental states opaque. Expressions like meeting needs, coping, or natural behaviour do not obviously connote the experience of aversive feelings. But, ultimately, all of these notions can be understood as suitable indicators of whether an animal is feeling pleasure or pain (Broom 2011, p. 127; Duncan 2006; Mellor 2012, p. 2; Yeates and Main 2008).6 Thus, in so far as these measures are regarded as indicative of the welfare of the animals, then their ethical significance can be traced to hedonism. Why is it bad if an animal fails to cope with its environment? Because it is suffering. Why is failing to have its needs met bad for an animal? Likewise, because it is suffering. After all, why care about an animal’s ability to scratch or breed unless the inability to scratch or breed are reliable markers for a negatively valenced mental state? If not because they point to suffering, why worry about tongue rolling, snout rubbing, maternal cannibalism or geophagia? The hedonistic focus of welfare science and policy is a contingent by-product of historical circumstance. The policy conception of welfare may well be very different if it had been philosophers that were called upon by legislators to respond to public controversy over the treatment of animals. In fact, in the early years of animal welfare science, there was widespread scepticism about whether animals can feel stress and experience emotions (Duncan 2006 cited in Broom 2011; Fraser 1999, p. 173; Fraser and Duncan 1998).7 As a number of commentators observe, the development of welfare science began in the wake of the publication of Ruth Harrison’s book, Animal Machines, in 1964. But while a concern with suffering was an important pillar of Harrison’s critique factory farming; the central plank was the perceived inappropriateness of treating animals like machine inputs in a vast impersonal system.8 But even though scientists cannot measure

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instrumentalisation; it was a group of scientists from a range of disciplines who were charged with developing policy responses to the problems of factory farming that Harrison’s book laid bare (Fraser 2008, pp. 61–63). Subsequently, the scientists responded in the only ways they knew how, by applying the knowledge and methodologies of their respective disciplines. Their findings, presented in the so-called Brambell Committee Report, were influential the world over.9 Indeed, the kind of findings made by these scientists, along with work by other scientists working in animal-related disciplines at the time, more or less set the agenda for research into animal welfare (Fraser 1999, 2008; Mench 1998; Lassen et al. 2006; Broom 2011). As Richard Haynes points out, “The report was taken as a mandate for animal scientists to undertake a study of animal welfare, and self-styled animal welfare scientists tend to trace their origins to this mandate (Haynes 2008, p. 107).”

The Folk Concept of Welfare As important as the Brambell Committee Report was to the development of animal welfare science, there is a sense in which it set the research agenda on the wrong course. Perhaps saying the wrong course is too strong and it is better to say that the course was too narrow. While Harrison’s book was a critique of the instrumentalisation of animals, the Brambell Committee set welfare science down a feelings-focused road. In the remainder of this chapter, I make the first part of a case for the view that, as far as welfare is concerned, the public care about more than feelings. Indeed, the considerations the public identify as salient are to be viewed as intrinsically, as opposed to instrumentally, valuable. When members of the public reflect on the concept of welfare, or express an opinion on an animal-related issue, what is the focus of their concern? Is their concern in line with the specialist conception of welfare and focused exclusively on feelings? In other words, are their concerns in line with hedonism or some non-hedonistic theory of value? The concern to get a credible answer to that question is motivated by a preference to have welfare policy that is in a meaningful sense democratic (Degeling and Johnson 2015; Haynes 2008). Just as there would

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be no political problem of welfare if measurable suffering were the only concern of the public, there would no political problem of welfare if the views of the public could be ignored by governments.

Empirical Evidence for Folk Nonhedonism Before we examine the case in favour of the claim that public concern for animals is nonhedonistic, it is important to acknowledge the difficulty with drawing strong conclusions from empirical findings into attitudes to animals. The standard questions that potentially challenge the credibility of all social science research loom large. Was the survey big enough to yield a representative sample? Were the participants chosen in an unbiased way? Is the data reported nonselectively by the researchers? Pertinently for the scope of the political problem of welfare, can data about attitudes to animals gathered in one country be used to make transnational and transcultural generalisations? Problems peculiar to the study of citizen attitudes to animals further murky the waters. A number of studies involve participants who can be fairly described as partisans. Studies often focus on vegetarians, animal advocates, representatives of animal user industries and farmers (e.g. Signal and Taylor 2006). As well as pro-animal or pro-industry bias; partisan views are unrepresentative of the broader population because people with a vested interest in an issue tend to be better informed than citizens and consumers. As a number of commentators observe, the public is largely ignorant about existing welfare standards and the nature and scale of animal agriculture. A cultural environment in which animal use is ubiquitous and unquestioned in the media compounds public ignorance. As Peter Chen (2016) observes in the Australian context, the presentation of animal welfare issues in the media tends to be episodic and superficial. Problems like these have led some researchers to suggest that many of the studies into attitudes to animals are merely indicative and unrepresentative of the views of citizens of the jurisdiction concerned (Clark et al. 2016). That said, indicative evidence is better than no evidence at all. After all, governments, corporations, industry representative bodies, animal

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advocacy organisations and universities devote considerable resources to social science research into animal-related issues. To dismiss such evidence completely would be going too far.10 Moreover, the evidence for the folk having broad-based views about welfare (folk nonhedonism) consists in more than just one or two studies. In fact, a number of studies (Te Velde et al. 2002; Lassen et al. 2006; Marie 2006; Vanhonacker et al. 2008, 2010, 2012; Clark et al. 2016; Robbins et al. 2018) indicate that citizens regard, for example, the expression of natural behaviour, as an important determinant of welfare. The study by Vanhonacker began as a survey of 521 Flemish citizens and concluded with a focus group numbering 29. The study conducted by Robbins et al. (2018) involved 502 US citizens. Clark et al.’s (2016) research focused upon farm animal welfare and involved a literature review of papers published over a twenty-year period from 1995–2015.11 Clark’s conclusions are perhaps representative of the findings of the attitudes-to-animals research: Naturalness was central to attitudes and concerns in relation to both the animals’ behaviours and living conditions. It was thought to be important for both animal physical and psychological well-being, with the hampering of natural behaviours being seen as having a negative impact on the animals’ overall health. (Clark et al. 2016, p. 462)

But in saying that naturalness was a central concern of the public is, perhaps, to overstate citizens’ level of concern. Regrettably, animal welfare is a low priority of people (Lassen et al. 2006; Chen 2016). Research suggests the welfare of animals is a middle ranking issue when placed alongside other matters of public interest (Southwell et al. 2006); and the consumer intention-behaviour gap (Vigors 2018) reinforces the existing evidence that people think food safety and price are more important than animal welfare. As Chen observes, “In talking about animals, animal protection and the ethical attitudes of the public, we are thus confronted with a public that has complex, quasi-coherent, highly ambiguous opinions and understandings” (p. 54). But that citizens and consumers are preoccupied by other considerations is no excuse to ignore the unrepresentative nature of existing welfare policy. If the public care about nonhedonistic considerations, then in so far

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as policy aspires to be democratic, welfare laws, codes of practice and norms ought to make reference to them.

Nonhedonistic Considerations Notice though that naturalness is a nonhedonistic welfare consideration. There is no necessary connection between, on the one hand, natural or species-typical behaviour and, on the other hand, positively or negatively valenced phenomenology. Logically, the capacity to engage in species-typical behaviour is distinct from both the capacity to suffer and the ethics of causing pain. In line with hedonism, an animal could be better off leading an unnatural life as opposed to a species-typical life because there is less suffering involved overall. Indeed, harsh confinement conditions aside, a balance of pleasure over pain is likely when an animal is living in captivity, safe from predation, free of disease, and with ready access to food and water. For participants of attitude to animals surveys, to identify naturalness as an important element of good welfare is to signal support for the view that things other than feelings matter. In addition to the findings singled out above, further support for the claim that the views of the public are at odds with the specialist conception of welfare can be gleaned from research reporting on the development of the so-called Welfare Quality® framework (Blokhuis et al. 2010). The Welfare Quality® framework12 is a set of animal welfare principles and criteria developed after collaborative discussions by welfare scientists in consultation with citizens, policy-makers, representatives of animal user industries and animal advocacy organisations (Miele et al. 2011).13 Four principles and 12 welfare criteria were identified as the most salient elements of welfare. While most of the principles and criteria could be classed as hedonistic and in keeping with the feelings focus of the so-called Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare, one principle and three criterions are nonhedonistic. The nonhedonistic elements of the Welfare Quality® framework are the appropriate behaviour principle, and three criterions (1) expression of social behaviours, (2) expression of normal behaviours, and (3) good human-animal relationship.

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Nonhedonistic Considerations as Proxies for Feelings? It might be objected that folk concern for naturalness is actually hedonistic and the public only care about naturalness indirectly. In line with this objection, public concern for naturalness is based upon a belief that naturalness equates with freedom from pain and suffering. This is a reasonable objection, and it is true that an important question mark hangs over the public’s expressed concern for naturalness. Are they concerned about naturalness per se or do they identify naturalness as important simply because they think it is a proxy for the absence of suffering? Perhaps they think that animals confined in natural settings or denied the chance to act in species-typical ways are experiencing pain? The question is particularly pertinent to any claims made about public concerns on the basis of the Welfare Quality® framework because of the key role that welfare scientists played in the initial identification of the principles and criteria. Recall that the dominant view in welfare science is the feelings view, which is a hedonistic view. If naturalness is valued simply as a proxy for the absence of suffering, then there is no political problem of welfare after all—the public’s view will be in line with the specialist conception that welfare is all about feelings. A recent US study with over 500 participants, however, stands as further empirical support for the claim that public concern is genuinely nonhedonistic. Robbins et al. (2018) asked participants to effectively choose between naturalness and feelings. Participants were asked to consider four vignettes involving a chimpanzee. The first pair of vignettes described a free-living chimp; the second pair of vignettes described a chimp in a laboratory setting. In the first pair of vignettes, the chimp is described, initially, as feeling good, leading a natural life and physically healthy, and then, secondarily, feeling bad, leading a natural life and physically healthy. Likewise, in the second pair of vignettes; the chimp is described as, in the first instance, feeling good, leading an unnatural life and physically unhealthy, and, in the second instance, feeling bad, leading an unnatural life and physically unhealthy. In each case, Robbins et al. report (2018, p. 5), the respondents judged the subjective

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feeling of the chimps as a less important determinant of welfare than other features described in the vignettes such as living conditions and physical health. In other words, respondents cared more about whether the chimp was living a natural life and physically healthy, rather than whether they were feeling good or bad. As Robbins et al. (2018) put it: Our results provide some preliminary support for the notion that subjective experience may not be the whole story when people assess animal welfare and welfare-related concepts. They generally replicate and extend previous research showing that the concept of happiness appears not restricted to describing mental states. (p. 6)

But if there is more to welfare than the mental states of animals, then the implications for welfare policy are potentially far-reaching. Housing systems, handling procedures, modes of transport, and slaughtering practices will also be judged by the extent to which they meet standards embodied in folk nonhedonism. Acceptable welfare will be defined by more than measureable physiological or behavioural indicators; instead, the public’s concept of acceptable care will be used as a guide to acceptability. Just what acceptable care involves will be unclear in many cases. When Robbins et al. (2018) asked respondents to consider the plight of chimpanzees leading, firstly, a natural life and, secondly, an unnatural life, who’s to say what they had in mind when they reflected on the expression natural life. After all, the public have an ambivalent attitude towards animals to begin with, and are no doubt as ill-informed about ethical theory as they are farming practices. It is more realistic, then, to say that the public understand natural life in a broad and unspecified way, than to think the they have a mature understanding closer to the kind of view held by a proponent of perfectionism, in which an ideal species-typical life sets the welfare benchmark. Given the empirical reality of folk nonhedonism constitutes a democratic mandate for potentially radical changes to the welfare landscape, it is easy to see why some theorists have suggested that moving beyond hedonism is a case of moving beyond welfare itself, to some other paradigm of human-animal relations. In the next chapter I explore whether

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adopting a more democratically representative conception of welfare policy would amount to a major paradigm shift away from the welfare orthodoxy (Yeates et al. 2011; Hadley 2017).

Conclusion The seeds of the political problem of welfare were sown back in the mid-1960s. Specialists whose work could only ever steer welfare policy in a hedonistic direction were employed to respond to a public outcry that was ostensibly nonhedonistic in character. It is ironic that scientists from a discipline so resistant to the idea of animal suffering, and who themselves did so much to overturn the sceptical orthodoxy prevailing amongst their peers, would today play a gatekeeping role preventing nonhedonistic considerations from entering into welfare policy. If welfare in theory and practice is by and large scientistic and hedonistic, then there will be substantial divergence between the welfare party line and the views of the public. I referred to the collision of the specialist view and the non-specialist or folk view as the political problem of welfare. Recent research into attitudes to animals surveyed above supports the claim that the public care about more than simply how animals are feeling. In the above, hedonism was presented in the orthodox way, as a nonrelational theory. In line with a nonrelational account of hedonism, the moral significance of pleasure and pain is solely a feature of the intrinsic experiences of the sufferer. The view of hedonism as nonrelational is a presupposition of both animal welfare science and the existing policy conception of animal welfare. In Chapter 4 I present a redescription of hedonism as a relational theory. The redescription paves the way for the solutions to the political problem of welfare and the philosophical problem of welfare given in Chapter 5. In the next chapter, I outline the second problem that animal neopragmatism can help to address: the philosophical problem of welfare, otherwise known as the changing the subject problem.

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Notes 1. A nonhedonistic consideration is one that is analysed as distinct from sentience and the ethics of causing pain. Normatively, a nonhedonistic consideration takes its significance from a nonhedonistic ethical theory such as Kantianism or perfectionism, or a theory of well-being such as the objective list theory of well-being. 2. A number of theorists have drawn attention to the difference between the public’s concept of welfare and the concept presupposed by scientists and policymakers (see Haynes 2008; Rushen 2003; Vanhonacker et al. 2010; Yeates et al. 2011). 3. While hedonism may inform a theory of morality such as utilitarianism, it is simply a theory of value. To say that sow stalls are conducive to poor welfare is one thing; to say that the use of sow stalls is wrong is another. 4. Yeates et al. (2011, pp. 427–428) argue for the latter option, enjoining that welfare policy should include insights from animal ethics, sociology, law, environmental science and economics. 5. Robbins et al. (2018) argue that the feelings view is the dominant scientific conception of welfare. Broom (2011) too concedes that feelings are the key focus of all animal welfare science. 6. As Broom says, “the importance of trying to assess feelings will continue to be common ground for welfare scientists” (Broom 2011, p. 34). 7. A number of studies (Heleski et al. 2004; Williams et al. 2005; Anil et al. 2005) indicate that some scepticism among scientists continued well beyond the 1960s. 8. Fraser (2008) attests to the nature of the public outcry when he says, “The new term ‘factory farming’ evoked cultural memories from a previous century of down-trodden workers exploited at the hands of ruthless industrial masters. Ms Harrison’s title seemed to go even further by suggesting that animals were being treated as actual machinery of the industrial system” (p. 63). 9. The Brambell Committee Report was responsible for the first iteration of the so-called Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare. 10. Readers sceptical of claims made on the basis of empirical research may find the conceptual argument in the next chapter more persuasive.

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11. Clark et al.’s (2016) database searching turned up 80 studies into animal attitudes: 59 from Europe; 14 from North America; 2 each from South America, Australia, and Asia, and 1 from Africa. 12. See factsheet at: http://www.welfarequality.net/media/1084/wq___factsheet_ 10_07_eng2.pdf. 13. The Welfare Quality Project was co-financed by the European Commission and involved scientists and researchers from 40 institutions; including participants from Europe, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. See Blokhuis et al. (2010) for details.

References Anil, Leena, Sukumarannair S. Anil, and John Deen. 2005. Pain detection and amelioration in animals on the farm: Issues and options. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 8 (4): 261–278. https://doi.org/10.1207/ s15327604jaws0804_3. Bentham, Jeremy. [1789] 2007. An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. Mineola, NY: Dover. Blokhuis, H.J., I. Veissier, M. Miele, and B. Jones. 2010. The Welfare Quality® project and beyond: Safeguarding farm animal well-being. Acta Agriculturae Scandinavica, Section a—Animal Science 60 (3): 129–140. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/09064702.2010.523480. Bracke, M.B.M., and H. Hopster. 2006. Assessing the importance of natural behaviour for animal welfare. Journal Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 18: 77–89. Bradford, Gwen, and Simon Keller. 2016. Well-being and achievement. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 271–280. London: Routledge. Broom, Donald. 2011. A history of animal welfare science. Acta Biotheoretica 59: 121–137. Broom, Donald K., and Ken G. Johnson. 1993. Stress and animal welfare. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Cataldi, Sue L. 2002. Animals and the concept of dignity: Critical reflections on a circus performance. Ethics and the Environment 7 (2): 104–126. Chen, Peter John. 2016. Animal welfare in Australia: Politics and policy. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

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Clark, Beth, Gavin B. Stewart, Luca A. Panzone, I. Kyriazakis, and Lynn J. Frewer. 2016. A systematic review of public attitudes, perceptions and behaviours towards production diseases associated with farm animal welfare. Journal Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 29: 455–478. Dawkins, Marion S. 1980. Animal suffering: The science of animal welfare. London: Chapman & Hall. Degeling, Chris, and Jane Johnson. 2015. Citizens, consumers and animals: What role do experts assign to public values in establishing animal welfare standards? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28: 961–976. Duncan, Ian. 2006. The changing concept of animal sentience. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 100: 11–19. Fraser, David. 1998. Animal welfare. In Encyclopedia of animal rights and animal welfare, ed. Marc Bekoff and Carron A. Meaney. Westport: Greenwood Press. Fraser, David. 1999. Animal ethics and animal welfare science: Bridging the two cultures. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 65: 171–189. Fraser, David. 2008. Understanding animal welfare: The science in its cultural context. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Fraser, David, and Ian Duncan. 1998. ‘‘Pleasures’’, ‘‘pains’’ and animal welfare: Toward a natural history of affect. Animal Welfare 7: 383–396. Gregory, Alex. 2016. Hedonism. In The Routledge handbook of philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 113–123. London: Routledge. Hadley, John. 2017. From welfare to rights without changing the subject. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (5): 993–1004. Harrison, Ruth. 1964. Animal machines: The new factory farming industry. London: Vincent Stuart. Hawkins, Jennifer. 2016. The experience machine and the experience requirement. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 355–365. London: Routledge. Haynes, Richard P. 2008. Animal welfare: Competing conceptions and their ethical implications. Dordrecht: Springer. Heleski, C.R., A.G. Mertig, and A.J. Zanella. 2004. Assessing attitudes to farm animal welfare: A national survey of animal science faculty. Journal of Animal Science 82: 2806–2814. Humphreys, Rebekah. 2016. Dignity and its violation examined within the context of animal ethics. Ethics and the Environment 21 (2): 143. Kahane, Guy. 2016. Pain, experience and well-being. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 209–220. London: Routledge.

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Lassen, J., P. Sandøe, and B. Forkman. 2006. Happy pigs are dirty! Conflicting perspectives on animal welfare. Livestock Science 103 (3): 221–230. Marie, M. 2006. Ethics: The new challenge for animal agriculture. Livestock Science 103 (3): 203–207. Mellor, David J. 2012. Animal emotions, behaviour and the promotion of positive welfare states. New Zealand Veterinary Journal 60 (1): 1–8. Mellor, David J., and N.J. Beausoleil. 2015. Extending the ‘five domains’ model for animal welfare assessment to incorporate positive welfare states. Animal Welfare 24: 241–253. Mench, Joy. 1998. Thirty years after Brambell: Whither animal science? Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 1 (2): 91–102. Miele, M., I. Veissier, A. Evans, and R. Botreau. 2011. Animal welfare: Establishing a dialogue between science and society. Animal Welfare 20: 103–117. Millman, Suzanne T. 2009. Animal welfare—Scientific approaches to the issues. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 12 (2): 88–96. Nussbaum, Martha. 2006. Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Ohl, F., and F.J. van der Staay. 2012. Animal welfare: At the interface between science and society. The Veterinary Journal 192 (1): 13–19. Phillips, Clive. 2013. Animal welfare standards must work for all, not just industry. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/animal-welfarestandards-must-work-for-all-not-just-industry-12498. Accessed 4 Apr 2019. Rice, Christopher M. 2016. Well-being and animals. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 378–388. London: Routledge. Robbins, Jesse, Becca Franks, and Marina A.G. von Keyerlingk. 2018. ‘More than a feeling’: An empirical investigation of hedonistic accounts of animal welfare. Plos One 13 (3): e0193864. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0193864. Rushen, J. 2003. Changing concepts of farm animal welfare: Bridging the gap between applied and basic research. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 81: 199–214. Signal, T., and N. Taylor. 2006. Attitudes to animals in the animal protection community compared to a normative community sample. Society and Animals 14 (3): 265–274.

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Southwell, A., A. Bessey, and B. Baker. 2006. Attitudes towards animal welfare: A research report. Canberra: TNS Consultants. Tannenbaum, J. 1991. Ethics and animal welfare: The inextricable connection. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 198: 1360–1376. Te Velde, H.T., N. Aarts, and C. Van Woerkum. 2002. Dealing with ambivalence: Farmers’ and consumers’ perceptions of animal welfare in livestock breeding. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 15 (2): 203–219. Vanhonacker, Filiep, Wim Verbeke, Els Van Poucke, and Frank A.M. Tuyttens. 2008. Do citizens and farmers interpret the concept of farm animal welfare differently? Livestock Science 116 (2008): 126–136. Vanhonacker, F., E. Van Poucke, F. Tuyttens, and W. Verbeke. 2010. Citizens’ views on farm animal welfare and related information provision: Exploratory insights from Flanders, Belgium. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23: 551–569. Vanhonacker, F., W. Verbeke, E. Van Poucke, Z. Pieniak, G. Nijs, and F. Tuyttens. 2012. The concept of farm animal welfare: Citizen perceptions and stakeholder opinion in Flanders, Belgium. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 25 (1): 79–101. Vigors, B. 2018. Reducing the consumer attitude–behaviour gap in animal welfare: The potential role of ‘nudges’. Animals 8: 232. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/ani8120232. Webster, John. 1994. Animal welfare: A cool eye towards Eden. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Williams, V.M., B.D. Lascelles, and M.C. Robson. 2005. Current attitudes to, and use of, peri-operative analgesia in dogs and cats by veterinarians in New Zealand. New Zealand Veterinary Journal 53 (3): 193–202. Yeates, J.W., and D.C.J. Main. 2008. An assessment of positive welfare: A review. The Veterinary Journal 175: 293–300. Yeates, J.W., H. Röcklinsberg, and M. Gjerris. 2011. Is welfare all that matters? A discussion of what should be included in policy-making regarding animals. Animal Welfare 20: 423–432.

3 The Philosophical Problem of Welfare

The philosophical problem of welfare comes into view when we ­consider cases that show up the inadequacy of having the specialist conception of welfare as the prevailing view for policy purposes. These are cases in which it is unlikely that the animals are suffering yet there is something that strikes us as problematic about the way they are being treated. Consider the case of the Russian circus bears (Cataldi 2002; Humphreys 2016; Hadley 2017). Patrons at a Russian circus can be photographed alongside bears dressed in Elizabethan costume. As it is unlikely that the animals are experiencing any negatively valenced phenomenology, the actions are outside the scope of the specialist conception of welfare. Because the problematic features of such a situation cannot be explained with direct reference to the animal’s capacity to suffer, the specialist conception of welfare cannot afford grounds for criticizing these practices. To be critical of these practices one must draw attention to a consideration that has nothing to do with how the animals may be feeling. The standard move is to appeal to concepts like dignity (Nussbaum 2006; Gruen 2011) and respect (Francione 2000; Regan [1983] 2004). The claim is that to use a bear in this way is to fail to respect it © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_3

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or treat it with the dignity it deserves. But as many theorists point out (Cochrane 2010; Humphreys 2016; Schultz-Bergin 2017; Zuolo 2016) the application of concepts like dignity and respect to animals is controversial. The controversy is a product of orthodox definitions of these concepts being avowedly person-centred. A person-centred definition of respect and dignity restricts undignified treatment and disrespect to cases involving persons only. In short, in line with the person-centred orthodoxy, you cannot ever fail to respect an animal or treat an animal in an undignified way because animals are nonpersons. But the orthodox view is too far removed from practice. If appeals to dignity and respect resonate with people when they reflect upon cases like the circus bears, then provision must be made for the meaningful application of terms like dignity and respect to animals. It is this line of thinking, however, that leads directly to the philosophical problem of welfare. If plausible nonperson-centred analyses of dignity and respect can be found and successfully applied to animals, then the danger is that their application to real world cases will amount to the rejection of the existing welfare paradigm—to so many calls for moving away from welfare towards something else (Yeates et al. 2011; Hadley 2017). The philosophical problem of welfare thus involves the rejection of welfare in favour of some other animal protection paradigm entirely. Below, I say why rejecting welfare is a bad idea and, in Chapter 5, I offer two solutions to the philosophical problem of welfare: experiential pluralism and expressivism. Both experiential pluralism and expressivism allow the public’s concern for nonhedonistic considerations to be seen as consistent with the maintenance of the existing feelings-focused welfare paradigm.1 I argue that expressivism is the preferred solution because it avoids some of the pitfalls associated with philosophical reductionism— a strategy relied upon by the proponent of experiential pluralism.

Changing the Subject We have seen that the traditional conception of welfare in science and policy is hedonistic. In line with a hedonistic conception of welfare, an assessment of welfare is to be made with reference to an animal’s mental

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states, and the key mental states are pleasure and pain. With a hedonistic focus, welfare science and policy is in line with the intrinsicality thesis. Recall that the intrinsicality thesis is the idea that the badness of pain is a function of something intrinsic to the experience of pain, namely, either the feeling itself or its unwantedness. I suggested that welfare science and policy inherits the intrinsicality thesis from badness of pain theory, and the thesis functions to place a constraint upon how welfare is understood. Accordingly, in line with the intrinsicality thesis, housing conditions, handling procedures, modes of transport and slaughtering practices that cause animals to suffer will make a negative contribution to welfare; those that cause animals to feel good will have a positive impact upon welfare. And any rival theory for how welfare is impacted by these conditions and practices will be ruled inadmissible for the purposes of welfare policy. The theory of value that u ­ nderpins the traditional focus of welfare science and policy is hedonism. In line with hedonism, “all and only positively valenced experiences are good; and all and only negatively valenced experiences are bad” (Gregory 2016). With feelings as the traditional focus of welfare, the public’s expressed concern for a nonhedonistic consideration like naturalness is outside the remit of the policy conception of welfare. Naturalness or species-typical behaviour is a consideration that is logically distinct from sentience— the capacity to experience pleasure and pain. Whether a practice compromises an animal’s ability to engage in natural behaviour, or whether a behaviour is part of a species-typical repertoire of behaviours, can be determined independent of an assessment of whether an animal is experiencing pleasure or pain. Likewise, policy and codes aimed at minimising suffering also fail to address the public’s opposition to cruelty and their concern that farming practices meet standards of humane care (Southwell et al. 2006).2 Humaneness and cruelty, however, are the properties of actions that characterise a relationship between persons and animals and are difficult to measure scientifically. Such considerations are consistent with a view of welfare as a relational property and a social construct.

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Inherent Value and Respect The same kind of logical disconnect between welfare orthodoxy and citizen concerns arises when members of animal advocacy organisations, and academic philosophers, make appeal to concepts like dignity and respect. Such concepts are analysed with reference to psychological capacities other than sentience and the capacity to have experiences. Tom Regan ([1983] 2004), for example, analyses respect against the background of his theory of rights, the centrepiece of which is the postulate of inherent value. I will say more about inherent value in Chapter 6 but the key point now is that, for Regan, “inherent value is a value that is distinct from, not reducible to, nor commensurate with the value of experiences” ([1983] 2004, p. 236). In other words, inherent value is logically distinct from valenced phenomenology. Recall that the hedonist says that experiences are the only basis for intrinsically valuing anything, and hedonists use experiences to compare the value of different lives. For Regan, in contrast, being in pain or experiencing a pleasure has no bearing upon whether you have inherent value, nor do pleasure and pain enhance or diminish your stock of inherent value.3 For Regan, the value of life is based upon an additional consideration that is, in theory, immune from the ups and downs of life’s experiences. In line with his theory, an individual with a crippling illness, or someone who is infirm or severely cognitively impaired, has as much inherent value as an individual that is thriving in every way. Regan’s rationale for postulating inherent value was to ensure that animals, and cognitively-impaired human beings, could have the same protection from being used, and painlessly killed, as persons. If the unjustifiability of inflicting pain on someone was the only measure by which an individual could be protected from being harmed, then there is no in principle obstacle standing in the way of harming animals and cognitively-impaired human beings for the benefit of others. As a theoretical tool, inherent value effectively ring-fences individuals from being used by others; in the same way that a religious notion like sanctity may be a theoretical obstacle to the use of surplus IVF embryos in ­biomedical research.

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It is important to note that Regan believed well-being and the quality of experiences were important considerations (2004, pp. 92–103); it’s just that he didn’t believe they were the only ethically relevant values. Most distinctively, he wanted to bring the kind of gravitas associated with religious notions like sanctity and human dignity to animals.4 Being a nonhedonistic theorist, in turn, meant that, for Regan, the morality of humans using animals for our purposes is conceptually distinct from the morality of causing pain and suffering. In line with Regan’s view, respecting animals requires more on the part of the agent than simply refraining from physical abuse. If the animals are being used for purposes of financial gain, then, by definition, an agent fails to respect inherent value.

Dignity A number of theorists (Cataldi 2002; Gruen 2011; Humphreys 2016; Nussbaum 2006) have recently invoked the concept of dignity and, like Regan’s use of inherent value, they analyse dignity as logically distinct from sentience; the capacity to experience pleasure and pain. Like Regan also, however, they are each exposed to the charge of changing the subject, that is, of no longer talking about welfare and talking instead about something else. Rebekah Humphreys, for example, identifies dignity with a number of considerations that would ordinarily be classed as nonhedonistic. In the passage to follow, notice how Humphreys (2016) draws attention to the instrumentalisation of animals, the denial of species-typical behaviour, and flourishing. Instrumentalisation is a concept traceable to Kantian theory; species-typical behaviour and flourishing are notions associated with the theory of value known as perfectionism: In this sense it may be that ‘dignity’ should best be seen as an ‘umbrella’ term that, in the case of the circus bears for example, refers to all the things we perceive to be appalling and heartrending about such treatment; that is, the excessive instrumentalisation, the lack of consideration for the bears’ interests or well-being, the lack of recognition of the bears’ value,

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the prevention of the bears fulfilling their species-specific tendencies and the total lack of concern for the bears’ good or flourishing. (p. 159)

Like Humphreys, Lori Gruen (2011) affords a nonhedonistic analysis of dignity that draws attention to a range of considerations over and above positive or negative feelings. Gruen’s particular focus is the ethics of confinement. She signposts the nonhedonistic flavour of her account when she says confinement can violate animal dignity, “even if it doesn’t cause any obvious suffering” (Gruen 2011, p. 155). While Gruen’s account of wild dignity shares important affinities with a species-typical or natural-behaviour view, it would be wrong to characterise her position as a version of perfectionism. She self-consciously ties the denial of natural behaviours to the instrumentalisation of animals in a manner dissimilar to proponents of perfectionism. Notably also, she foregrounds the autonomy of animals, which adds an additional normative dimension to her anti-instrumentalisation critique. In line with Gruen’s view, instrumentalisation is problematic because it involves treating a sentient being as an object or, as Ruth Harrison would say, an animal machine, and also because it thwarts animal preferences or desires. Gruen’s view is that these desires are important for their own sake, irrespective of the phenomenology attendant upon frustration or satisfaction. The emphasis on autonomy allows Gruen to invoke the concept of domination. According to Gruen, we deny animals their dignity when we shape them in our own image: When we project our needs and tastes onto them, try to alter or change what they do, and when we prevent them from controlling their own lives, we deny their Wild dignity…Often, in captivity, animals are forced to stop doing the things that make them indecent to ‘human society” and made to do things that they don’t ordinarily do because humans want them to. This is an exercise of domination, and it violates their Wild dignity, even if it doesn’t cause them to suffer. (2011, p. 155)

Gruen’s account is important for the purposes of this book because it is targeted at the kind of cases that expose the political problem of welfare. Cases in which it is unlikely that animals are suffering, yet there

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is something that strikes us as morally problematic about how they are being treated, call into question the adequacy of the existing feelings-focused paradigm. But her account is also important for laying bare the scope of the philosophical problem of welfare. Even though her theory includes a relational dimension, Gruen is unable to escape the charge of changing the subject. Because she analyses wild dignity to a range of nonhedonistic considerations, she can be fairly accused of taking the discussion of confinement out of the familiar context of welfare to a different conceptual space altogether. While she is concerned to draw attention (Gruen 2011, p. 153) to some of the pitfalls of the orthodox nonrelational approach to animal ethics, she ultimately succumbs to an impulse to reduce wild dignity, albeit to contextual or relational features. As will be laid bare more fully in Chapter 6, the philosophical method of reductionism exposes animal rights theory to a serious metalevel problem. Of immediate significance, however, is the fact that, in seeking to pin dignity down to a set of nonhedonistic considerations, Gruen runs the risk of alienating the public and, in the process, makes it harder to move animal welfare in a progressive direction.

Changing the Subject Is Strategically Unwise Pragmatically, for people concerned to see nonhedonistic considerations gain traction in public deliberation and animal-related legislation and norms, it is easier to broaden the scope of welfare than to introduce a new set of values and principles. After all, animal welfare is the established deliberative and policy paradigm (Garner 2013, p. 89). The many hundreds of animal protection and industry organisations that shape the content of animal-related policy, and the bureaucrats charged with administering the policy space, all sing from the welfare song sheet. While it is possible for new actors to find a place in the animal welfare policy development network, in liberal democracies innovative change takes time and must emerge incrementally (Goodin 1998; Sabatier 1997; Chen 2016, p. 130). In comparison to rights or perfectionism, animal welfare has a higher name recognition and much less baggage. In the minds of the ordinary citizen-consumer, animal welfare

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undergirds their dietary preferences and otherwise anthropocentric ­lifestyles. Policymakers can thus take cover behind animal welfare for any seemingly progressive or rights-driven measures.5 It is just more expedient to introduce terms like respect and dignity into welfare clauses than it is to create animal rights-based legislation and codes of practice. Indeed, propagating rights-based messages may well compound public ignorance about animal protection issues (Chen 2016, p. 138) and introduce further instability into an already fragmented policy domain.

Public Reason and Moral Pluralism In addition to practical expediency, there are also theoretical reasons for sticking with welfare. A shift to a new animal protection paradigm would undermine two signature liberal democratic values: public reason and moral pluralism. Roughly, public reason is the idea that debate about political matters ought to proceed by appeal to widely shared beliefs and values (Larmore 2003; Quong 2018). The rationale of public reason is that citizens invariably disagree about how to live and find meaning in life. Citizens live by their own moral and/or religious codes and these codes shape their sense of identity. Proponents of public reason argue it is too much to ask a fellow citizen to endorse a policy proposal that jeopardizes the viability of their own world view (Rawls 2005). Regrettably, citizens co-opt animals into their own projects. Expecting people for whom animal use, and abuse, is part and parcel of everyday life to endorse philosophies in line with abolitionism is against norms of public reason. What’s needed is a case for progressive reform that can be presented as the playing out of mainstream values and principles. The theory of animal neopragmatism presented herein is an attempt to provide such a theory.6 Moral pluralism is the idea that citizens ought to be allowed to choose their own ways of living and the state should only interfere if considerations of basic justice are at stake. In other words, people ought to be free to do what they want so long as they respect the rights of other citizens. The problem for animals, however, is the class of citizens is restricted to moral agents only, which means that the kind of

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autonomous agency possessed by persons is the most important value in liberal democracies.7 Accordingly, the implications for animals are dire because, as Garner (2013) observes, “moral pluralism would presumably include different attitudes toward the treatment of animals,” which entails [pluralism] “is likely to trump attempts to protect the interests of animals where such attempts conflict with the liberty of humans” (p. 50). Garner’s point is that people use and abuse animals in the service of promoting their own well-being and in the process of finding meaning in life. Regrettably, it is just plainly obvious that many people strongly desire and take pleasure in doing things that cause animals to suffer. Some citizens identify first and foremost as farmers, others as rodeo riders or biomedical researchers, and others as butchers or entertainers; and they find meaning in activities like hunting, fishing, racing, and breeding animals. Under the protection of laws and norms which ensure the promotion of moral pluralism, the state is supposedly to leave animal users and abusers to it (Garner 2013, p. 26). That moral pluralism and public reason face a number of well-known problems is no objection to my invoking these values. Bear in mind the normative merits of pluralism and public reason are irrelevant for my purposes; I’m merely pointing out that they are part of the theoretical underpinning of the existing institution of animal welfare in the modern liberal democratic state. As the account of animal welfare science and the survey of the attitudes-to-animals literature given in the previous chapter indicate, my concern is with accuracy—I’m concerned to get a true picture of the state of play for animals so as to show how the theory of this book is a bona fide redescription of the status quo. So much is the raison d’être of the progressive pragmatist. To paraphrase one leading figure in legal pragmatism: departures from the norm must be disguised as applications of it (Posner 2004, p. 58).

Philosophical Method in Animal Ethics In this section I outline some of the metaphilosophical issues that motivate the case for animal neopragmatism. A survey of metaphilosophical issues is important for understanding the philosophical problem of

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welfare—what I have elsewhere called the changing the subject problem (Hadley 2017). Why is someone who enjoins that, say, naturalness ought to be included in welfare policy, open to the charge of changing the subject? Why do appeals to respect or dignity amount to calls for moving away from welfare to some other paradigm entirely? The simple answer is because welfare is all about feelings, and dignity, naturalness and respect are about something else. A more complex answer is to draw attention to the underlying metaphilosophical worldview that shapes the animal welfare debate.8 In the remainder of the chapter, I will attempt to explain this worldview. Readers need to be aware that some of the following material is complex and jargon-laden. While the ideas are as ubiquitous in the real world as they are in welfare science and policy, they are rarely laid bare outside the realms of academic philosophy. Hidden in plain sight, the credibility of these ideas is taken for granted and few citizens know about the part they play in shaping theoretical debates and contributing to policy problems. Scientists don’t worry about the nature of truth; they simply get on with the business of testing hypotheses. Likewise, ethicists assume theorising is untroubled by metalevel problems and debates.9 Some readers may wish to skip this section altogether. The key point is simply that it is a basic presupposition of the welfare debate that inquiry can yield definitive answers to questions about what welfare is, what is good and bad welfare, and what should be included in welfare policy. This article of faith is characteristic of a metaphilosopical worldview I’m calling philosophical realism.10 It is philosophical realism that is ultimately responsible for the philosophical problem of welfare.

Philosophical Realism Philosophical realism is an all-encompassing approach to inquiry. It includes a more or less rationalist conception of philosophical method in which conceptual analysis and argumentation are the main tools of the trade. Along with its commitment to method, realism involves metaphysical and epistemological assumptions about truth, knowledge and language. While these assumptions go unquestioned in the orthodox animal ethics literature, in mainstream philosophical metaphysics and

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epistemology they are regularly debated. Indeed, some of the supposed pitfalls of realism have been identified as providing theoretical impetus for American pragmatism (Gutting 2003; Bacon 2012; Misak 2013). I will discuss the metaphysical assumptions that are specifically operative in animal rights theory in Chapter 6. The focus in what follows is on the epistemological assumptions. It is because each side in the animal welfare debate presupposes specific conceptions of truth and knowledge that the philosophical problem of welfare arises in the first instance.

Truth in Animal Ethics What is truth? What does it mean to call a statement true? Even though an answer to this question alludes most people, they go about their lives making claims that they take to be true. Likewise, in the animal welfare debate, each side believes that their view is correct and are seemingly untroubled by an ignorance of metalevel considerations. Scientists, theorists, and policymakers alike believe that there is a fact of the matter whether, say, sow stalls are bad for welfare or whether hedonism is the correct approach to welfare theory. Another way of making this point is to say that all of the stakeholders believe in once and for all answers. What I mean is that they believe that questions about animal welfare are no different to mundane questions about everyday life. Is the battery cage bad for the welfare of hens? Does the bus leave in 7 minutes? Both of these questions, hedonists and nonhedonists alike believe, can be definitively answered. With a commitment to once and for all thinking in place, someone who makes a claim about welfare is in a position to claim the mantle of truth for their position. This privilege extends no less to citizens speaking in the real world than to scientists in the laboratory or philosophers in the armchair. If you are committed to the idea of truth, then you can claim that your view is true and, supposedly, this in itself boosts the authority of your position. The article of faith is something like: in the great contest between ideas, you are on the side of the winners when what you say is true. Rightly or wrongly, people who take enough of an interest in issues and ideas to make a contribution to debates about them, find being on the side of the winners a very desirable place to be. It’s just

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human nature to want to be right. That an opposing view is correct, or an opposing statement true, is meant to be reason enough to compel a person to change their mind. A conception of persons as willing to revise their beliefs in the face of evidence is also an article of faith of realism. To illustrate the concept of truth in animal ethics, imagine a welfare scientist, Dr. Cortisone, who rejects the view that confining pregnant sows in stalls for the duration of their pregnancy cycle has a negative impact upon their welfare. In fact, imagine the scientist argues that, based on a range of variables such as freedom from disease and regular access to food, water and shelter, etc., sow stalls are, on balance, good for the welfare of sows. Let’s accept, for the purposes of the example, that the scientist has empirical support for his claim in the form of data about heart rates, body weight and cortisone levels. Now imagine a philosophical hedonist, Dr. Intuition, who argues pleasure and pain are the only basis for valuing anything and that using a bear as a studio guest on television is bad for the welfare of the bear. Let’s also accept that the hedonist has evidence in support of her claim in the form of, say, an analogy argument.11 It is safe to say that both Dr. Cortisone and Dr. Intuition believe that the claims they are making are true. Were they to express their key claims in a sentence, either in writing or verbally, the sentence would qualify for what philosophers call a truth-apt statement. A truth-apt statement is a claim about the world that is capable of being true or false.12 In the case of Dr. Cortisone, the claim is “Confining sows is good for their welfare”; in the case of Dr. Intuition, the claim is “Being a studio guest is bad for bear welfare.” Notice that each claim takes the form of subject-predicate discourse. Dr. Cortisone’s claims pick out a subject—confining sows—and a predicate—good for welfare. Likewise, Dr. Intuition’s claim picks out a subject—using a bear as a studio guest—and a predicate—bad for welfare.

Rationalism and Representationalism Subject-predicate discourse is a mainstay of philosophical logic. Logical reasoning is the basic method of the kind of rationalism typical of theorists who work within the tradition of philosophical realism.13

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The key instrument of rationalism is argumentation. At bottom, arguments are collections of statements characterised by a relationship of support between the premises and a conclusion. Statements are also sentences; and the classic sentence has a subject-predicate form. The subject-predicate form is an intuitively good fit for a particular way of thinking about the function of language. In line with a view known as the referential theory, the function of language is to refer to a state of affairs obtaining in the world.14 In effect, the function of language is to communicate descriptions of the world as it purportedly is and, thereby, furnish language users with potentially useful information. A presupposition of this picture is a view of language as involving a wordworld matching system—words purportedly hook up, or stand for, some object in the world (Price 2013, p. 8; Lycan 2019, p. 3). The word bear picks out a kind of animal; the verb confining picks out an action; the adjective bad picks out a quality of something. In the case of Dr. Intuition, the word bad picks out a property of a bear in a television studio and assigns a quality to it. With the framing assumptions of philosophical realism in place, a specific understanding of what is involved in acquiring knowledge emerges. In line with what’s known as a representational view of knowledge, sentences of the subject-predicate form express the beliefs of the speaker, and knowledge requires that the beliefs accurately mirror or represent the world. Accurately in the sense that the state of affairs described in the sentence must, in actual fact, obtain in the world. In other words, the world must correspond to what the speaker claims. This is the theory of truth known as the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory is the view that a statement is true if an only if facts in the world, independent of the speaker, correspond to what the speaker claims. A simple claim such as “The lights are on” will be true if the lights are, in actual fact, on and false if the they are off. Recall that, as a hedonist, Dr. Intuition analyses the concept bad and, by corollary, defines the term ‘bad’ in terms of negatively valenced phenomenology. Thus, Dr. Intuition’s claim, “Being a studio guest is bad for bear welfare” will qualify as an item of knowledge if adequate justification can be found for establishing that a correspondence relation holds between the term bad and the mental states of the bear. In other words, for a

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hedonist like Dr. Intuition, the aim of rational inquiry is to establish whether mental states are negatively valenced.

Moral Realism It is one thing to establish whether a bear is experiencing negatively valenced mental states, it is another to analyse badness in terms of negatively valenced phenomenology in the first place. Some might object that hedonists and nonhedonists alike can avoid the problems of once and for all thinking because claims about welfare are importantly different to claims about mundane states of affairs. But, such an objection overlooks how claims about welfare, and ethics more broadly, can also be the proper objects of truth claims when the framing assumptions of philosophical realism are in place. In fact, the concept that facilitates the extension of realism to ethics, reductionism, is arguably the most important concept for understanding why the philosophical problem of welfare arises. I will discuss reductionism shortly; firstly, I will make a few remarks about moral realism. Moral realism is the idea that moral properties like goodness, badness, rightness and wrongness are bona fide features of the world. In line with realism, speakers purportedly pick out moral properties when they use moral predicates like good, bad, right, and wrong. The realist believes that moral claims are every bit as truth-apt as non-moral claims. In other words, claims about the rightness of giving to charity or the wrongness of testing cosmetics on animals are no different to claims about the redness of tomatoes or the four-leggedness of chairs. For the moral realist, the statement “Giving to charity is good” picks out an action (giving to charity) and a property (goodness or being good ) in just the same way that the statement, “The chair is wooden”, picks out an item of furniture and a property it purportedly bears (woodenness or being made of wood ). In line with moral realism, the statement “Giving to charity is good” is truth-apt and can be made true in the same way as the statement about chairs—by whether the world corresponds to the statement.

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Reductionism But how do we know what to look for when we want to establish whether something is good? It depends on what we mean by good. So long as we do accept, in line with realism, that good does stand for something in the world, then we are in a position to establish whether an action, person, object, or states of affairs is good. You ask a hedonist and they will tell you that good means something like, “Promotes pleasure” or “Conducive to positive feelings”. You ask a nonhedonist, in contrast, and they will give you an alternative analysis: “The development of capacities” or “In line with natural behaviour.” Notice that what is happening in these cases is that the target concept is being defined with reference to other facts or entities in the world.15 This is the philosophical strategy known as reductionism (Blackburn 1996, p. 322; McNaughton 1988, pp. 43–45). Recall that both the hedonist and the nonhedonist is presupposing the methodology and framing assumptions of philosophical realism, which means that when they offer a reduction for a concept, this reduction is meant to hold once and for all, and any alternative analysis will be a case of changing the subject. In effect, in line with realism, the content of the analysis functions like genetic code, or the molecular structure of elements, to distinguish one concept from another in a fundamental way. To illustrate, consider a moral claim such as: “Giving to charity is good.”

The hedonist identifies good with promotes pleasure. This reduction has the effect of giving the statement the following form: Giving to charity promotes pleasure.

It can then be established in a scientific way whether in fact giving to charity promotes pleasure and, if it turns out that giving to charity does promote pleasure, then the claim “Giving to charity is good” is true.16 Consider a case more directly relevant to animal welfare. Imagine a welfare scientist claims:

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“Teeth-clipping piglets is bad for welfare.”

The welfare scientist, like the philosophical hedonist, defines bad with reference to feelings. Recall that welfare scientists use physiological or behavioural measures to determine whether an animal is experiencing pain. The reduction has the effect of changing the meaning of the statement to the following: Teeth clipping piglets causes pain.

Likewise, in the welfare scientist case, the reduction of the moral term, bad, to the nonmoral term, pain, renders the statement truth-apt and capable of being true or false. The statement will be true if, in actual fact, teeth clipping causes pain and, in the case of scientific hedonism, this will hinge upon whether evidence for the physiological markers of negatively valenced phenomenology can be found. The reduction also, however, has the effect of preventing any rival reduction from being a meaningful contribution to debate about the welfare of pigs. Imagine a nonhedonistic theorist claimed that: “Teeth-clipping piglets is bad for welfare.”

Assume this nonhedonist analyses bad in terms of, say, violates animal integrity. The reduction of bad to violates integrity has the effect of changing the statement to mean: Teeth-clipping violates the integrity of piglets.

But notice that from the perspective of the specialist view of welfare, the nonhedonist is changing the subject. In line with the specialist conception of welfare, because welfare is a feelings-based concept and the violation of integrity is a non-feelings-based consideration, the nonhedonist is talking about something other than welfare. To violate an animal’s integrity by modifying their bodies is a consideration that fails to meet the intrinsicality constraint. Recall that the intrinsicality constraint is the idea that any claim about the welfare of animals must draw

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attention to an element that is intrinsic to the experience of pain. While violating the integrity of a piglet by clipping its teeth may cause it to suffer, and an appeal to the suffering itself would be a consideration that meets the intrinsicality constraint, when the welfare orthodoxy is scientistic and hedonist, an appeal to integrity draws attention to a consideration beyond the scope of welfare.

Conclusion In this chapter I have outlined the philosophical problem of welfare. The problem is a by-product of the orthodox view of welfare and the theoretical commitments of influential voices in the welfare debate. Because the orthodox view is that welfare must be defined exclusively in terms of feelings, appeals to progressive non-feelings-based considerations, such as dignity and respect, amount to calls for changing the subject. Progressive ideas about welfare are ruled inadmissible, so to speak, because they are inconsistent with the intrinsicality thesis. It is because protagonists in the welfare debate presuppose that they are offering once and for all answers to welfare questions, that any new entrants seeking to broaden the scope of welfare can be dismissed as talking about something else. The philosophical problem of welfare arises organically as the upshot of a number of theoretical commitments on the part of scientists and welfare theorists. These commitments can all be traced to a worldview known as philosophical realism. Two key elements of realism are a representational view of language and reductionism. If language was anti-representational in character, and the competing analyses of welfare were thought of as pluralistic alternatives, then there just is no changing the subject problem. Rival voices could be heard as legitimate contributions to debates about welfare and avoid the charge of changing the subject. In the next chapter I begin the task of presenting an alternative way of thinking about welfare. The alternative view aspires to reconcile public concern for nonhedonistic considerations with the established hedonistic paradigm. The hedonists are right to focus on pain

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but they have a narrow view of its ethical significance. The lesson from the last chapter was that the narrow view about the badness of pain was imported into the welfare space via contingent circumstance. Scientists were the first point of call for ideas about animal welfare policy. In the early 1960s, biology and the nascent methods of behavioural ethology were tailor made for entrenching intrinsicality as a framing assumption of welfare. When the ethical significance of pain is understood more broadly, however, appeals to dignity and respect can be seen as proper responses to the suffering of others. In liberal democracies, welfare is whatever citizen’s make of it and there is no law of the universe that proscribes it must be set in stone. The theory to follow draws upon insights from neopragmatism, a recent manifestation of the philosophical theory known as American pragmatism. One key tenet of pragmatism is a rejection of the realist picture presented above. In line with pragmatism, knowledge as representation is just one option for how to understand the function of language. Another way of thinking about language is that it is fundamentally an expressive medium. In line with this view, when people use certain terms they are simply expressing an emotion, opinion, or attitude. This view of language, known as expressivism, affords an antidote to the ­philosophical problem of welfare.

Notes 1. The aim to reconcile the nonhedonistic folk concern with the hedonistic (feelings-focused) orthodoxy, as opposed to simply doing away with the status quo, marks the theory outlined in this book as meliorist. Koopman (2009) identifies pragmatism with what he calls meliorism. 2. The same can be said of integrity and autonomy (see Lassen et al. 2006). 3. Regan draws a distinction between quality of life, which may be measured using valenced-phenomenology as the yardstick, and the value of life or inherent value, which all so-called subjects-of-a-life possess and do so equally. 4. Regan cites the Kantian notion of individuals as ends in themselves as a theoretical inspiration for his idea of inherent value (2004, p. xxii).

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The analogy with the Christian notion of human dignity is clear when Regan says, “The lonely, forsaken, unwanted and unloved are no more nor no less inherently valuable than those enjoying a more hospitable relationship with others” (2004, p. 237). 5. This was certainly the case during the recent attempt by the conservative government in NSW to abolish Greyhound racing. The political message was that live-baiting and killing surplus greyhounds was at odds with prevailing values. A welfarist organisation, RSPCA, was at the forefront of the campaign to end the sport. 6. Note that I’m simply suggesting that neopragmatism, as a pragmatic theory, must accommodate public reason. Such a requirement is consistent with the basic pragmatist injunction that theory must start ‘where we are.’ 7. Moral agents or persons (I use the terms synonymously) are a sub-class of all sentient beings. For Rawls, they must be reasonable and rational and have a sense of justice. Roughly, they must be able to put forward ideas about how to live and how society should be organised, and they must be fully cognizant of the fact that others citizens may see things very differently. As Rawls (2005) says, “the zeal to embody the whole truth in politics is incompatible with an idea of public reason that belongs with democratic citizenship” (p. 442). 8. I use the term worldview because it suggests comprehensiveness and reflects the wide theoretical reach of philosophical realism and its cognate concepts and principles. 9. Perhaps they believe the problems will be sorted out by others working at a higher-levels of abstraction; more likely, they just don’t think about the issue at all. 10. What I’m seeking to draw attention to is a series of philosophical commitments in metaphysics and epistemology which have implications in philosophy of language and also ethics. Roughly, philosophy is seen as continuous with science and philosophical inquiry is purportedly answerable to nature in the same way that scientific inquiry is supposed to be. 11. I’m assuming the hedonist is a dyed in the wool rationalist. While it is open to armchair theorists to cite empirical research; for ease of exposition I will mark an evidentiary line to make the contrast between the two disciplines clearer. 12. A statement is different from other kinds of sentences, such as commands or proposals, because it purports to describe something.

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13. Of course, reasoning needs to be broadly construed; the point is that welfare scientists and theorists are committed to norms of logic and their reasoning more or less follows the basic logical patterns of premises and conclusion. In the case of scientists, it is inductive logic; in the case of welfare theorists, deductive or inductive logic. 14. Lycan (2019, p. 3) says it is the theory of meaning that everyone holds “by the time we are about 10 or 11 years old.” 15. In defining concepts with reference to objects or entities in the world, protagonists in the welfare debate signal that they are committed to naturalism, as opposed to supernaturalism. In line with supernaturalism, the target concepts are defined with objects or entities that are difficult to fit into a scientific picture of the world. For example, a supernaturalist may define good as approved of by God. A line of criticism of orthodox animal rights theory, to be explored in Chapter 6, is that inherent value is a concept better suited to a supernatural metaphysics. 16. Perhaps by asking people how they feel or by testing their blood for markers of positive feelings.

References Bacon, Michael. 2012. Pragmatism: An introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Blackburn, Simon. 1996. Oxford dictionary of philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cataldi, Sue. 2002. Animals and the concept of dignity: Critical reflections on a circus performance. Ethics and the Environment 7 (2): 104–126. Chen, Peter John. 2016. Animal welfare in Australia: Politics and policy. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Cochrane, Alasdair. 2010. Undignified bioethics. Bioethics 24 (5): 234–241. Francione, Gary. 2000. Introduction to animal rights: Your child or the dog. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Garner, Robert. 2013. A theory of justice for animals. New York: Oxford University Press. Goodin, Robert E. 1998. Political science. In A companion to contemporary political philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, 157–182. Oxford: Blackwell. Gregory, Alex. 2016. Hedonism. In The Routledge handbook of philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 113–123. London: Routledge.

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Gruen, Lori. 2011. Ethics and animals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutting, Gary. 2003. Rorty’s critique of epistemology. In Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 41–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadley, John. 2017. From welfare to rights without changing the subject. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (5): 993–1004. Humphreys, Rebecca. 2016. Dignity and its violation examined within the context of animal ethics. Ethics and the Environment 21 (2): 143–162. Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as transition: Historicity and hope in James, Dewey and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press. Larmore, Charles. 2003. Public reason. In The Cambridge companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman, 368–392. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lassen, J., P. Sandøe, and B. Forkman. 2006. Happy pigs are dirty!— Conflicting perspectives on animal welfare. Livestock Science 103 (3): 221–230. Lycan, Bill. 2019. Philosophy of language, 3rd ed. London: Routledge. McNaughton, David. 1988. Moral vision. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Misak, Cheryl. 2013. The American pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2006. Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Posner, Richard. 2004. Animal rights: Legal, philosophical and pragmatic ­perspectives. In Animal rights: Current debates and new directions, ed. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, 51–77. New York: Oxford University Press. Price, Huw. 2013. Expressivism, pragmatism and representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quong, Jonathan. 2018. Public reason. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2018/entries/public-reason/. Accessed 1 March 2019. Rawls, John. 2005. Political liberalism, Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Regan, Tom. [1983] 2004. The case for animal rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sabatier, P. 1997. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to implementation research. In The policy process: A reader, ed. M.J. Hill, 266–296. Harlow: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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Schultz-Bergin, Marcus. 2017. The dignity of diminished animals: Species norms and engineering to improve welfare. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (4): 843–856. Southwell, A., A. Bessey, and B. Baker. 2006. Attitudes towards animal welfare: A research report. Canberra: TNS Consultants. Yeates, J.W., H. Röcklinsberg, and M. Gjerris. 2011. Is welfare all that matters? A discussion of what should be included in policy-making regarding animals. Animal Welfare 20: 423–432. Zuolo, Frederico. 2016. Dignity and animals. Does it make sense to apply the concept of dignity to all sentient beings? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (5): 1117–1130.

4 Relational Hedonism

In this chapter I lay the platform for the purported solutions (in Chapter 5) to the political problem of welfare and the philosophical problem of welfare. The overall strategy is to call into question orthodox thinking about welfare and the content of welfare policy. I presuppose orthodox thinking about welfare is scientistic and hedonistic, that is, welfare is cast exclusively as a measurable property of the mental states of animals, and the important mental states are pain and pleasure. The key move is to challenge two shibboleths of welfare orthodoxy: firstly, the intrinsicality thesis. Recall that the intrinsicality thesis is the idea that the prudential significance of an experience, that is, whether it is good or bad for welfare, is tied to a consideration that is intrinsic to the experience. More specifically for my purposes, the intrinsicality thesis is the idea that a consideration that is intrinsic to the experience of pain is the best explanation for its badness. The second shibboleth of welfare that I aim to challenge in this chapter is a corollary of the intrinsicality thesis. If an element that is intrinsic to the experience of the sufferer explains the badness of pain, and if the badness of pain is meant to be the focus of welfare policy, then it follows that the experiences of the sufferer are the only proper © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_4

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subject of welfare policy. This implication of intrinsicality means that non-experiential considerations like dignity, respect, and naturalness cannot be the subject of welfare policy. The intrinsicality thesis is an unquestioned assumption of both animal welfare science and the theory of value known as hedonism. Whether pain is measured by reading blood samples or gauging preferences, the implication of the intrinsicality thesis is the same: welfare is a property of the mental states of animals. Construed as a measurable property of the mental states of animals, it is only natural that scientists equipped to make authoritative judgments about animal mental states play a lead role in shaping the content of welfare policy.1 The problem, however, is that where science is very exacting, the public is imprecise. As the survey of the attitudes-to-animals research in Chapter 2 laid bare, citizens have a broad-based and often ill-informed view about how animals should be treated. While the intrinsicality thesis lends itself to measurability and authoritative judgements about how housing systems and practices impact upon the mental lives of animals, its relevance to the messy and perennially contested domain of animal protection in ­liberal democracies is limited. In short, the intrinsicality thesis is too precise for its own good. Taken at face value the claim that the intrinsicality thesis is too precise is a weak criticism. But when we consider the context in which the thesis is meant to have its most important application, the inadequacy becomes apparent. Animal welfare policy is meant to reflect the concerns of citizens. Citizens, however, are concerned about more than feelings. The intrinsicality thesis diverts attention from democratically legitimate considerations and thus plays an integral role in maintaining the political problem of welfare. But some elements of the existing welfare landscape are worth maintaining. Pain is, after all, an intuitively compelling ethical consideration and feelings more generally are an important basis for caring about others, human and nonhuman. What’s more, feelings-focused welfare is the only game in town, so to speak. The hedonistic orthodoxy cannot be just sidelined in the name of ideologies hatched in the philosophical armchair as if it were just a vegan’s bad dream. My proposal, then, involves maintaining the focus of welfare on pain but broadening how

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its policy relevance is understood. Pain is a nonrelational problem for the sufferer, but also a relational problem for people that show concern for others in pain. If this idea is sound, the proper focus of welfare policy is both pain and citizen concern for pain. The key stakeholders are the sufferer and the carer. Call the view that relational concern for pain, in addition to the nonrelational experience of pain, is an appropriate topic of welfare policy, relational hedonism. The argument to follow motivates the case for relational hedonism. I will not rehearse the argument that nonrelational hedonism is an undemocratic approach to welfare. The main argument below is that nonrelational hedonism entails an implausible theory of public concern for pain, and relational hedonism better reflects the ordinary valuing behaviour of real people. While the argument below is primarily focused upon concern for other Homo sapiens in pain, it can be generalized to cases of concern for nonhuman animals. The argument bolsters the empirical support offered in Chapter 2 for the claim that public concern for animals is broad-based and diffuse.

The Social Dimension of Pain Pain is an important dynamic in any relationship. It is part and p ­ arcel of close relationships to alert one’s spouse or friend to a new pain. One of the first things that a child will do when they are in pain is alert their parents. Pain talk is frequently the subject of small talk between colleagues. Indeed, pain is lurking in the background of most social interaction. Think of the simple greeting, “How are you?” Strictly, the questioner asks: are you feeling pain? Loosely, she is not expecting a serious reply, assumes the person is not suffering pain and that they will answer something like, “I’m well.” In either case, pain is implicit in the meaning of the question. Concern for the pain of others is an important aspect of any caring relationship. We can be rightly criticized for showing insufficient concern for a loved one when they are in pain. Concern for a loved one’s pain extends beyond a concern for their feelings to the activities and goals they hold as worthwhile and that may be jeopardized by the

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pain (Velleman 1991; Hadley 2013). Showing concern for the pain of strangers says something about the kind of person we are and reflects well on the people responsible for our upbringing. Whilst perhaps weaker than concern for a loved one’s pain, it is natural to be concerned for the pain of strangers for their own sake. States invest considerable resources helping citizens to stay healthy and, thereby, remain painfree. Clearly, then, pain is a feature of life that has important relational dimensions.

The Nonrelational Orthodoxy Given the important relational dimension of pain, it is perhaps surprising that orthodox views about the badness of pain focus almost ­exclusively on nonrelational or intrinsic features. In line with orthodox views, the badness of pain is solely a feature of how it impacts upon the individual that is said to be in pain. For proponents of the orthodox view, the badness of pain must be an element that is intrinsic to the experience of pain (Kahane 2016). The two leading theories of the badness of pain are the sensation theory and the desire theory.2 In line with the sensation theory, pain is bad in virtue of aversive phenomenology—it feels bad on the inside. In line with the desire theory, pain is bad because it is unwanted and, thereby, the occurrence of pain frustrates a desire or preference of the sufferer. Each of these analyses extends readily across the species barrier to animals: pain is bad for animals because they experience it as aversive; or pain is bad for animals because it is unwanted. In line with the nonrelational orthodox view of the badness of pain, relational aspects of pain, such as the impact of pain upon your plans, projects and the people you care about, are merely instrumentally bad (Kahane 2016); bad, yes, but undeserving of a place in any analysis of pain’s badness. The orthodox focus is the product of the intuitive pull of the aversive phenomenology that ordinarily characterizes the experience of pain. Everyone unreflectively associates pain with unpleasant feelings and would readily accept that unwanted pains are the most unpleasant of all. But, just because unpleasant experiences push their way to the forefront of people’s minds when they suffer from intense

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pains, or when they recall past episodes of intense pain, it doesn’t follow that relational features must be considered second rate. After all, think of someone who is in the grip of such an intensely painful experience that they cry out in pain. They are crying out for someone to help or, at least, hear them and, in the process, showing that even experiencing an intensely unpleasant or unwanted pain has an important relational dimension. Consider the case of someone living in complete isolation from other people, a hermit character by the name of Curly. Curly has a terrible stomach ache. He has no one to share his pain with. He lies awake at night with only his thoughts to distract him from the painful feelings. In the vicinity of Curly’s cave lives a nonhuman mammal, say, a wolf that has been cast out of the pack to live the rest of its days alone. Imagine that the wolf is also in pain and like Curly must endure the experience in isolation. Notice how because both Curly and the wolf are alone, their experience of pain is set apart from the pain experienced by people who don’t suffer in isolation. Even though Curly is a person in the sense of being psychologically sophisticated, his living in a social vacuum is grounds for saying that his pain at this time is akin to the pain of a nonhuman mammal. He has no need for the capacities that persons ordinarily use to communicate their pain to others.3 In line with the orthodox view, how the pain feels on the inside, its intrinsic aversiveness, is the totality of the badness of Curly’s pain. In effect, the orthodox view conceptualises every sentient being as an organism.4 This is one sense in which the orthodox view is too precise for its own good.

Concern for Pain Caring for the pain of others involves more than concern for their feelings or desires. When news arrives that a loved one has had an accident or being taken ill, an important question is whether they are still alive or about to die. Or say you receive news that your loved one is miserable after having had a bad day at the office. In addition to any concern for how your loved one may be feeling, you seek to determine whether their upsettedness was the result of some inequitable or

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disrespectful action on the part of a co-worker. Equality and respect are thus two additional considerations that feature in everyday concern for pain and, arguably, there are a number of others. Indeed, people may register their concern for others in all sorts of ways and the terms they may use are many and varied. You might chastise your child for bumping into a stranger because the action failed to show respect; you might say it is “cruel” or “mean” to talk about a colleague behind their back; in end-of-life cases people respond to the suffering of their loved ones by using terms like dignity and vulnerability. It is commonplace for people to use the term life to refer to the impact of pain upon a person. We say: “Pain is interfering with George’s life.” It would also be meaningful just to say: “Pain is interfering with George” without making specific reference to his life. Other terms that could conceivably be invoked by people to register their concern for the impact of pain on someone include: agency, intrinsic value, well-being, welfare or sanctity. All of these terms are used to register a concern for the person that goes beyond a concern for the considerations identified by proponents of the orthodox view as central to the badness of pain, that is, aversive feelings or desire frustration. Proponents of the orthodox view might give feelings or desire-based analyses of the use of such vocabulary. For example, a person might use the term respect to register their concern for the felt pain of the stranger; or your concern about your colleagues’ feelings is registered by your use of the term cruel. But such an analysis would require that our concern at such times be specifically directed at the person’s feelings. Such a precise focus is asking a lot of people given that the context in which pain talk is used can be complex and challenging in many ways. We may be heavily emotionally invested in the situation, or in a poor epistemic position. Pain talk at such times is haphazard and its focus is often opaque. Consider the term dignity. Dignity is sometimes used by people in response to the stress of being with a loved one in end of life situations. But our concern for the dignity of our loved-one pre-dates the time of their dying. We don’t learn that a loved-one is feeling bad and then all of a sudden become dignity-sensitive. A more realistic view is that our concern for dignity is just an expression of our concern for them

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or their life—it is an instance of our enduring or pre-existing love or regard for the person. Loving someone entails that you stand ready to use the term dignity at any time.

Helm’s Theory of Love and Concern In his theory of love and concern, Bennett W. Helm (2010) seeks to explain two distinctive aspects of caring behaviour: firstly, the instrumental or goal-directedness involved and, secondly, the psychological sense of mattering. Helm is critical of attempts to extend orthodox belief-desire based theories of motivation to explain the behaviour involved in loving relationships. He argues that orthodox theories of motivation are inadequate because they cannot explain why the object of one’s desires are worthy of pursuit in the first place (Helm 2010, p. 54). His basic point is that orthodox theories of motivation treat all desires the same and hence cannot reflect the special significance of desires involving one’s loved ones. Helm believes theories of caring must accommodate the Aristotelian notion of valuing someone for their own sake as the kernel of a loving relationship (Helm 2010, p. 77). To care about someone for their own sake is to value them independently of any instrumental considerations such as pleasure, social acceptance, fame, or financial gain. Together these two aspects of caring behaviour, goal-directedness and mattering, constitute what Helm calls a theory of import. Consider someone who is worried about an exam. Why do they feel anxious? In line with Helm’s theory of import, because (1) they view the exam as instrumentally related to their well-being in so far as doing well, or badly, will impact upon their well-being, and (2) because they value their own well-being. In other words, the person is worried about the exam because they see the connection between the exam and their well-being, and they care about their well-being in the first place. Helm extends the same kind of analysis to instances of caring for others. Why do people direct their behaviour towards only certain others and feel the way they do in the process? Helm suggests the answer is two-fold: because we care about our loved ones for their own sake,

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and we see the connection between what happens to them and their well-being. He illustrates his theory of caring with reference to his wife’s bagpiping (Helm 2010, p. 156). While he takes no interest in bagpiping himself, he appreciates the significance of bagpiping for his wife’s well-being and feels happy when her life as a piper is going well. In cases such as this, Helm suggests we see caring as having two elements: a focus and sub-focus. The sub-focus of our concern, according to Helm, is the agent’s specific concerns: the activities and values that constitute the agent’s identity and go toward promoting her well-being. These considerations have the significance they do for us because we see the connection between them and the well-being of the person.5 But these considerations, Helm is clear, are derivative of recognition of the importance of the agent themselves. The agent themselves is the focus of our concern. As he says, The pattern of felt evaluations and evaluative judgments focused on and so constitutive of caring about an agent as such must normally include felt evaluations subfocused on the things that an agent cares about. To fail in general to exhibit such subpatterns in the overall pattern of the evaluations focused on an agent—to fail in general to care about what it cares about for the sake of the agent—is to fail to care about the agent as such. (Helm 2010, p. 84)

Helm’s view is instructive for understanding a shortcoming of orthodox views about the badness of pain: orthodox views reverse the order of priority; they make considerations that ought to be the sub-focus the focus and, in the process, the agent’s well-being, or them in a broad sense, is passed over. Consider the case of a crying child that has fallen over and has a grazed knee. As they comfort the child, the parents are confident that any aversive feelings will soon pass. Their focus is the child herself, and whether she is bearing up and becoming more resilient. The parents think the pain can’t be all that bad and they hope the child will learn a useful lesson about, say, running on the footpath. The aversive phenomenology attendant upon the grazing of the knee is just another opportunity for the parents’ love for the child to be expressed by showing concern for her.

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Two Models of Concern for Pain I turn now to the negative part of my argument. The claim is that orthodox thinking about the badness of pain yields an implausible ­picture of what is involved in being concerned about a person’s pain. Our focus, if the orthodox view is correct, is the painful feelings or frustrated desires. The implication is that our concern for the person ought to track their aversive intrinsic episodes. It’s as if when a loved one is in pain our concern should arise, but we should be unconcerned about them at other times. In effect, the orthodox view renders us with an in principle opposition to painful sensations or frustrated desires and asks us to be simply anti-pain. This model of episodic concern can be illustrated along the following lines: The orthodox model of episodic concern When we learn that a loved one is feeling pain, our concern arises. When we learn our loved one is no longer in pain our concern dissipates. And when our loved one is not in pain there is no concern at all. Our concern arises and goes away in response to our awareness of our loved one experiencing painful episodes.

But is this picture realistic? It suggests that our concern ought to come and go in response to the comings and goings of felt pain and frustrated desires. It paints our concern for another’s pain as like a stormy romance: we become engaged when we learn their intrinsic experiences are aversive; and separate again when we learn that their pain goes away. But, as the discussion above intimates, our concern for people in pain is much more all-encompassing than a concern for aversive feelings or frustrated desires. Our use of a broad range of terms at times when the object of our caring is in pain suggests that our concern is wide-ranging and more resilient than proponents of the orthodox view would have it. Compare the episodic model of concern with a rival picture, the folk model of concern:

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The folk model of concern We are concerned for our loved ones. When we become aware of a loved one’s pain our concern becomes more intense or animated, and when their pain eases our concern diminishes but never actually goes away. Consistent with the model of concern implicit in this picture, concern for pain is just a species of an abiding (pre-existing and enduring) concern.

In line with the folk model of concern, when a person learns that a loved one is in pain, their concern is neither wholly focused upon how the pain feels nor whether it is unwanted; rather, their concern is less specific and holistic, pre-existing and enduring. Concern for pain is just concern for someone after we learn that they are in pain. It is just what is involved in caring about someone at all, and caring about someone means more than simply caring about their felt pains and frustrated desires. One advantage of the folk model of enduring concern is parsimony. In line with the folk model, we have a concern for our loved one that predates any specific episode of pain and encompasses all the painful episodes. To be concerned enough to care about someone’s pain is to care about their life and/or well-being in the first place. According to a proponent of the folk model, people don’t have an additional concern that is conceptually distinct from our existing concern and which has felt pain or desire frustration as a specific focus. A proponent of the orthodox view may object that the orthodox episodic model of concern is a straw man and argue that their position can accommodate a concept of pre-existing concern. But notice that, for the orthodox theorist, the focus of our pre-existing concern must be the future felt pains or frustrated preferences of the loved one. In line with this view, abiding concern represents a concern that one’s loved one may at some time feel bad or have a desire frustrated. But this picture paints us as subconsciously feelings or desire-focused. It is counter-intuitive to suggest that we carry around with us a concern for a loved one’s felt pain or frustrated desires; more plausible, is the idea that once we care about people, it is part of our make-up to carry around a more encompassing and unspecified concern for them.

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It might be objected that any concern for the pain of others must be episodic and, by its very nature, come and go. But, consider the phenomenon commonly labelled as love. I have loved my wife for the entire time it has taken me to write this page even though the writing task has been my sole focus. Love is a nonspecific, broadly encompassing and enduring type of caring. My claim is that our concern for the pain of others is the product of the same kind of phenomenon. It is implausible to suggest, as proponents of the orthodox view imply, that our concern for the pain of others arises when we learn they are in pain and disappears when we learn they are once again pain free. Rather, once someone is on our radar, so to speak, they never drop off. It might be also objected that the folk model of concern is in tension with a pre-philosophical or common sense view about the badness of pain. In line with the objection, the common sense view is that pain is nonrelationally bad. Two responses can be made to this objection. Firstly, my argument is simply to point out an overlooked implication of the orthodox view: the relational dimension of pain is a serious issue that deserves more prominence in any account of the badness of pain. No doubt, painful feelings are unpleasant and people ordinarily seek to be rid of them, and it is also true that it is good to have one’s desires satisfied; but these facts alone are insufficient to establish that aversive feelings or frustrated desires exhaust the field of considerations pertaining to the badness of pain. Secondly, it is conceivable that, on the one hand, people’s prereflective views about the badness of pain and, on the other hand, the bases of their concern for the pain of others might diverge. After all, the former has a nonrelational focus; the latter is avowedly relational. Perhaps intuitive views about badness are produced by repeated recollection of aversive feelings; while concern for pain is better explained by the range of negative feelings that arise when a loved one in pain is called to mind? It might be objected that concern for the feelings or desires of the person in pain is not a normative implication of orthodox views about the badness of pain. In line with the objection, while the orthodox view is a theory of badness, no implications for the proper focus of concern for pain can be drawn from its identification of badness with aversive feelings or frustrated desires. But, if theories of the badness of pain

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presuppose that the badness of pain gives agents a reason to help ­alleviate the pain (Kahane 2016), then it follows that, in identifying feelings or desires as the badness making features of pain, proponents of the orthodox view likewise identify them as normative reasons for concern. What would be the point of pinpointing the badness of pain if agents were free to focus their concern on any consideration they like? In any event, my criticisms are, strictly speaking, directed solely at the hedonists who tie the normativity of pain exclusively to intrinsic features, and scientists who define welfare with exclusive reference to the mental states of animals. The feelings-focused view of welfare is implausibly precise. As a purely scientific enterprise, the feelings-focus of welfare science is entirely appropriate and in keeping with a scientific goal to understand the nature of animals. But as the focus of a project born out of public outcry about the instrumentalisation of animals (Harrison 1964), for scientists to insist on defining welfare in this way is to miss the point. For their part, hedonists can’t explain why people show a particular concern about the pain of their loved ones. If all that matters is pain itself, then the pain of a passing bird is as important to me as my wife’s pain.6 Such a picture paints people as inordinately focused on pain—as simply anti-pain.

The Aesthetic Dimension of the Badness of Pain: Pain’s Impact Upon Life Narratives If the nonrelational view is unsound because it depicts people implausibly as anti-pain, how should we understand the object of concern for the pain of others? We know from the examination of the empirical research in Chapter 2 that citizen’s concern for animals is broad-based and encompasses considerations such as naturalness, integrity, respect and anti-instrumentalisation. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to explore an additional way in which pain might be bad for reasons other than its intrinsic aversiveness or unwantedness. This is the sense in which it impacts upon a life narrative. Pain’s impact upon the life ­narrative of the suffer is also a legitimate focus of concern for pain.

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It is important to clarify at the outset that the central claim bears upon the relational dimension of narrativity: when people show concern for an animal, or express opposition to certain practices involving animals, they are reacting in a manner akin to the way that a reader of a novel may respond to an awkward or unconvincing plot device. Just as a reader has an idea of how, based upon what they have read thus far, the novel should play out, citizens have a default narrative for animals which includes how they ought to be treated.7 To show concern for pain is thus to have a reaction that is at least in part quasi-aesthetic.8 To begin, let’s think about these ideas with respect to human beings. Our starting point is the idea gleaned from Helm’s theory that concern for someone’s pain is a reflection of a broad-based concern for them. The notion of a life narrative helps to shed light on the nature of this broad-based concern.9

When Pain Is Out of Place Besides the life-changing events in a person’s history, a life story includes their actions, values, relationships, goals, emotions, and identity. A narrative stands as an ever present background or reference frame against which to reflect upon someone’s life. Presumably, we can glean something about a person’s well-being, happiness, and the meaningfulness of their life from reading about their life story. As the analysis of concern above intimates, the focus of folk concern for pain is an agent in a broad sense—their well-being, life, or just them, for their own sake. A life narrative is thus a suitably broad concept to ground an analysis of the badness of pain that is able to reflect the broad focus people have when they register their concern for the pain of others. It might be objected that the ethical significance of pain in a narrative must be determined by the chief protagonist of the story. In line with this view, the protagonist themselves is best placed to judge whether, and how, painful episodes find a place in a coherent whole. But, there are good reasons for questioning whether an agent herself is best placed to make judgments about the place of pain in a life narrative. Just as a reader cannot make authoritative judgments about the meaning of an artwork because

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the author’s intentions are unclear, we cannot be sure about how a person in pain will regard its interference in their life-narrative. We may be able to judge that a particular episode is unwanted by observing behaviour, but whether a sufferer believes that the pain is out of place in their life overall is something that we cannot know with a reasonable degree of certainty. For all we know they will look back upon the painful episode and regard it as valuable or otherwise congruent with their life story in some way. It is likely that assessments of the place that pain occupies (or occupied) in one’s life will be prone to bias and prejudices. Such prejudices count against leaving responsibility for the assessment of the place of pain in a life narrative to the person themselves. It is worth mentioning at this point that, consistent with the relationship between an author and a novel, a life narrative is not something a person owns or that exists only so long as they live. Just like it is meaningful to talk about Child of God even if all the books by that name are destroyed, likewise when a person dies their narrative endures. While it is true that after a person dies no one may read their story; nevertheless, the book of them, so to speak, exists and is the possible object of discussion and review.

Two Cases of Out of Place Pain Consider, for example, the case of my great grandfather, Donald McInnes. Donald had 6 children but died alone of stomach cancer in a small hospital in the remote New South Wales country town, Hay, in 1875. To die of stomach cancer at a time when there was no effective pain relief must’ve been like torture. To die alone as he did, with no family present; indeed, hundreds of miles from the nearest family member, renders his death all the more noteworthy. So noteworthy, in fact, that when I tell people about Donald McInnes’ life, his solitary end is the first thing which comes to mind. It hangs over his life story and blots my reading of his narrative. It is irrelevant whether he bore his suffering with good grace, desired for his suffering to end, or enjoyed the succour of the hospital staff. I have no way of knowing any of these facts. In Donald McInnes’ case, what makes his end of life pain out of

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place was the isolation—he endured it without relatives to offer support or distraction or, maybe, even a helping hand. This is the reading of his narrative which floats free of any desires he may have had for his life to end in a particular way. Consider also the case of the competitive dancer, call him Mick. Mick and his wife were regulars on the dancing scene and would go dancing several times a week. One-day Mick had an accident at work and injured his back resulting in chronic severe back pain. Intuitively, the back pain is a blight on Mick’s life; he can no longer go dancing with his wife and occupy his place in his circle of friends. In the dancing scene, post-accident, he has the appearance of a tragic figure—a spectator on the periphery when once he was in the thick of things. Now, it might be suggested that the only way to make sense of the badness of Mick’s pain is by referencing his autonomy. In line with such a view, it is only because Mick wrote the dancing theme into his narrative that makes the pain a blot on his life. But is this correct? His relationship and his identity were shaped by dancing. He was in a dancing family. His life as a father was inevitably shaped by his involvement with dancing. He organized his work hours to make room for dancing. To analyse the interference of pain in terms of Mick’s authorial autonomy neglects its social ramifications. It is the impact of the pain on the wider relational landscape that renders it a blot on his life narrative.

Objections to the Life Narrative Thesis An initial objection is that the analysis of the badness of pain in terms of interference with a life narrative also faces an episodic valuing problem. In line with the objection, our concern for the pain of a loved one ought to come and go only at times when pain is out of place in their life narrative. But such an objection passes over the psychology of concern for pain too quickly. Recall that, in line with relational hedonism, concern for pain is just an expression of a pre-existing and enduring care or regard for the person in pain. This kind of concern is steadfast in the face of the comings and goings of painful episodes. It is only when the focus of concern is narrowed to a specific consideration that

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the episodic valuing problem arises at all. Secondly, interference with a life, and the related notion of a congruent life narrative, is a very broad concept. Judgements about whether pain is out of place could conceivably be made on the basis of considerations that feature in accounts of meaning in life and theories of well-being. Virtue too would be another consideration that may inform a judgment that a painful episode constitutes interference in a life narrative. The point is that caring for a ­person is a reflection of broad-based and enduring sentiment; to avoid the episodic valuing problem and maintain parsimony, the analyses of badness must leave room for the range of considerations that mark out relationships between persons and which are reflected in the broad range of terms people use to express their concern for the pain of others. Another objection is that what I’m proposing is elitist or paternalistic. But, I’m not suggesting that people’s character or actions be evaluated against criteria laid down in perfectionist ethical theory or objective list theories of well-being. Rather, what is at issue is whether pain interfered in a person’s life in such a way, or to an extent, that it makes sense to say that it renders (or rendered) their life akin to a bad read. This will be an assessment made by people after they call to mind what they know of the person. Obviously, the more one knows of the details of a person’s life the better position they will be in to make a determination of the place of pain in their narrative; in the same way that a reader will be in a position to judge the merits of a book the more they have read of it. It is true that, if standards of objectivity or intersubjective validity are required, then people with relevant knowledge and skills will be needed to make authoritative judgments; but this would make evaluating the interference of pain in life narratives as no more elitist than the practice of evaluating novels. Bear in mind that, perhaps unwittingly, we evaluate specific people’s lives all the time; what’s novel about my suggestion is simply that the place of pain be given a specific emphasis. A further objection is that having one’s life story interfered with by pain is not serious enough to warrant being considered bad. But, if something that a person is enduring is the kind of thing that engages a carer’s disapprobation, then this is as good a reason as any for calling the phenomenon bad; all the more so if a painful episode stands out to successive generations of readers long after the sufferer has died. Recall that

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the person in a broad sense is the entity that, if Helm’s view is correct, is the focus of folk concern for pain. Making interference in a life story a feature of the badness of pain brings analyses of badness into line with the priorities of caring persons. Besides, as the argument above attests, rival analyses of the badness of pain will fall down either on parsimony grounds or because they face an episodic valuing problem. A related objection is metaphysical: out of place pain is not intrinsic to the experience of pain and, consistent with the orthodox view, any theory of the badness of pain must cite its intrinsic features. But, proponents of the orthodox view put the metaphysical cart before the evaluative horse. Intrinsicality is, at bottom, a descriptive relation. Its normative significance is unclear. Arguably, intrinsicality gets its evaluative significance from the usage of the term intrinsic itself. In ethics intrinsic is a morally loaded term. It connotes that the phenomenon concerned is a serious issue and ought to be given prominence in the relevant context. In fact, intrinsic is often wielded as a conversation stopper. This is particularly the case when it is paired with the term instrumental. To call something instrumental is to emphasise that it exists only for the sake of something else and, therefore, implies it must be of secondary importance. The mistake of proponents of the orthodox view is to approach an evaluative question as if it was a purely descriptive one. It’s as if the badness of pain can be read straight off a biological marker, just as the occurrence of pain can be read straight off, say, elevated cortisone levels. At bottom, what matters is whether people think it is bad and thereby warrants being given a place in analyses of badness.

Narrativism and Animals A final objection is that pain cannot impact on the life history of animals because the concept of a life narrative does not extend to them (Taylor 1989; Milligan 2009, p. 408; Rosati 2013, p. 26: n18). In line with the objection, because animals are nonpersons, they cannot be the authors of their own life story and, therefore, the events in an animal’s life, such as an episode of pain, cannot thwart the reflective desires that give a life its narrative shape.

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But narrativism has already been a topic of discussion in recent animal ethics literature. Tony Milligan (2009), for example, has invoked the concept of a “life-role of pain” (pp. 406–409) in a discussion about end-of-life decision-making at times when pets are sick or injured. The treatment an animal has endured at the hands of human beings throughout its life, Milligan suggests, can shape a narrative that a human companion could draw upon for guidance in end-of-life situations. Milligan asked us to consider Rover and Rex. While Rover was treated well throughout his life, Rex was a rescue dog that was subjected to cruel treatment from birth but eventually became a cherished companion in a loving home. Milligan asks: Are we not inclined to think that (a) the re-entry of pain into the life of Rex is a more serious matter than it is in the (already serious) case of Rover; and that (b) a special sort of care and attention is in order to ensure that Rex should never again suffer either intentionally and maliciously or unintentionally? Perhaps we might, at the end of our deliberations, intervene at just the same point in both cases. But that does not mean to say that the deliberations themselves will be of exactly the same sort. And if we accept that deliberation in these cases might be different, even if the outcome happens to be the same, then it is plausible to suggest that their differing pasts might on some other occasion override the similarity of their current condition unless a special rule or axiom were invoked to prevent this from happening. In the absence of any such rule or axiom, consideration of the life-role question would be action-guiding. (p. 208)

Milligan’s insight is that if, say, one’s feline companion was a survivor that cheated death throughout its life, it is reasonable for the human companion to consider whether enduring discomfort in its final days is in the animal’s interest. The decision to delay a lethal objection in such a case might be congruent with a narrative for the cat as the kind of cat for whom the expression “cat with nine lives” was coined. Likewise, but conversely, it would be better to end the suffering of a pampered lapdog given its life history of timidity.10 By positioning his analysis of life-history against the background of the emotionally charged circumstances of end-of-life care, Milligan attests to both the coherence of animal narrativity and its utility for thinking about animal welfare.

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In The Philosopher’s Dog, Raymond Gaita (2002) also describes episodes in the life of his animal friends; a dog, Orloff and a cockatoo, Jack.11 Gaita says his book is part story-telling part philosophical treatise. Clearly, given his subject matter, Gaita is seeking to raise, and answer, philosophical questions about human-animal relations. The key question, however, is whether what Gaita does is all that unusual. If people who share their lives with an animal recount stories about them, and these stories come together into coherent narratives, then this suffices to establish the meaningfulness of the concept of animal narrativity. Narratives are simply the product of episodes recalled to mind and annexed to the life of a particular animal. There is no need for a concept of authorial autonomy. The important question, then, is whether the narratives are the proper source for the content of welfare policy. In any event, authorial autonomy may be inconsequential even in the lives of persons. Hutto (2007) questions the importance of having one’s life translate into a weighty tome or even a short story; instead, ­“perhaps selves need not always be built from knitting together a series of mini-narratives in order to form an ‘omnibus’ edition. Indeed, for some, this latter activity may simply be impossible for various reasons” (p. 12). Hutto has in mind people with certain schizophrenia who suffer from dysnarrativia, the inability to string episodes in a life together in such a way as to form a coherent narrative. Animal narrativity could be viewed in an analogous fashion to human dysnarrativia—but for the inability to organise the pieces of narrative into a whole, animal life stories would be meaningful to them. Finally, consider again the concept of naturalness. It was shown in Chapter 2 that there is broad public support for naturalness to be considered for policy purposes as a bona fide element of welfare. For someone to call a practice unnatural, however, implies that they have in mind a picture of what a natural life involves. It is only a small step from the idea that people carry around a specific picture of what a natural life involves to the idea that they carry around complete narratives.

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Conclusion In this chapter my aim was to broaden thinking about animal welfare by calling into question the adequacy of the intrinsicality thesis. The intrinsicality thesis is a key presupposition of welfare science and hedonism. Welfare science and hedonism are two important influences on the policy conception of welfare. My argument was that using the intrinsicality thesis to sieve the content of welfare policy, filters out important relational aspects of pain experience. There were two parts to my argument: a positive part and a negative part. In each case, I asked the reader to consider the picture of human concern for pain implicit in the rival approaches to the badness of pain. The positive claim was that a relational account better reflects ordinary valuing practices and is more parsimonious than the orthodox view. The success of this claim turns upon the thesis that the focus of concern or caring is the sufferer in some broad sense—their well-being, life, or just them for their own sake. This model of caring aligns with the notion of folk concern for animals, which was outlined in the later sections of Chapter 2. The negative claim was that the orthodox view presents an unrealistic picture of what is involved in being concerned for someone’s pain. The orthodox view requires the focus of concern to be narrow and episodic: we must be concerned for aversive or unwanted feelings only at times when the individual is suffering. A more realistic picture is that concern for pain is just a species of an abiding concern for the sufferer and a painful episode is just another opportunity to express one’s concern or love for them.

Notes 1. Of course, there are legitimate scientific questions about the nature of animals that can only be answered by focusing on the animals themselves. My concern is with using intrinsicality to frame normative assumptions of welfare policy. The scope of welfare policy is broader than the research priorities of welfare scientists. As a pragmatist, my view is that once normativity enters the room, so to speak, the only proper source for its content is the valuing behaviour of actual people. Welfare policy needs to be shaped by people and their concerns.

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2. Two related accounts are the dislike theory (Parfit 1984), according to which pain is bad because the bodily sensation associated with it is undesired; and the felt aversion theory (Kahane 2016), according to which the badness of pain is analysed as the experience of having a bodily sensation that is disliked giving rise to a special kind of emotion which is itself aversive. In his account of pain, Adam Swenson (2009) casts pain as a usurper—it is bad because it usurps an agent’s autonomy understood as their user control. 3. Here I’m assuming, contra higher-order thought theories of phenomenal consciousness (Carruthers 2005), that sentience alone is sufficient for a bodily stimulus to be experienced as pleasurable or aversive. 4. Whether it is offensive or bad to be equated with an organism, or whether proponents of the orthodox view in some sense lower persons to the level of other species is by the by; rather, my claim is that analyses of the badness of pain need to take into account how a person’s psychological sophistication, by facilitating caring relationships with others, can play a part in the badness of their pain. The impact upon these caring relationships is an important part of the badness of pain. Proponents of the orthodox view may concede that pain impacts upon relationships but argue that this is merely an extrinsic feature of pain’s badness. But, as far as the badness of pain is concerned, it is the lexical priority of the various ways in which pain is bad that ultimately matters. 5. Helm’s theory is referred to as the intimate identification theory. We achieve the distinctive brand of intimacy associated with love and friendship when feel as our loved ones do upon news of the success or failure in their lives. Such a pattern of empathy is how Helm analyses taking to heart a loved one’s concerns. 6. Maybe by the lights of an abstract ethical theory the pain of a passing bird should mean as much to me as my wife’s pain; but my claim here is concerned solely with the descriptive picture implicit in hedonism. 7. See Mancilla (2009) and Cooke (2017). 8. Note that my point is simply that an aesthetic-type reaction is a feature of showing concern and, in so far as welfare is meant to reflect citizen concern, then the reaction is legitimate feedback, so to speak, for the practices implicated in the relevant painful episode. 9. A number of theorists (Dorsey 2015; Kauppinen 2015; Portmore 2007; Rosati 2013; Velleman 1991) adopt narrativism as a theory of well-being. Narrativism is, roughly, the view that events in a life can enhance or diminish the well-being or meaningfulness of the life, to

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the extent the events are congruent or incongruent with one’s life story. For Rosati (2013, p. 24) it is the recounting of the narrative to ourselves, rather than one’s life having a particular ideal narrative structure, that makes the distinctive contribution to well-being. 10. Milligan (2009) frames his discussion against the background of a theory of companionship. While he is reluctant to label such companion animal relationships as friendship, he positions irreplaceability or for its own sake valuing as an element of bona fide human-animal companionship. The irreplaceability condition serves to address the danger-of-cruelty objection (p. 208): that allowing narrativity to enter into end of life decisions could lead to animals experiencing unjustified suffering in their final hours. 1 1. In Loving Animals (2011) Kathy Rudy recounts episodes in her life with a pet beagle, Daisy. Mark Rowlands (2008) likewise builds a narrative picture of the life of an animal in his account of his relationship with his pet wolf, Brenin.

References Carruthers, Peter. 2005. Consciousness: Essays from a higher-order perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooke, Steve. 2017. Imagined utopias: Animal rights and the moral imagination. Journal of Political Philosophy 25 (4): 1–18. Dorsey, Dale. 2015. The significance of life’s shape. Ethics 125 (2): 303–330. Gaita, Raimond. 2002. The philosopher’s dog. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Hadley, John. 2013. Liberty and valuing sentient life. Ethics and the Environment 18 (1): 87–114. Harrison, Ruth. 1964. Animal machines: The new factory farming industry. London: Vincent Stuart. Helm, Bennett W. 2010. Love, friendship and the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutto, Daniel. 2007. Narrative and understanding persons. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 60 (May): 1–16. Kahane, Guy. 2016. Pain, experience and well-being. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 209–220. London: Routledge. Kauppinen, Antti. 2015. What so great about experience? Res Philosophica 92 (2): 371–388.

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Mancilla, Alejandra. 2009. Nonhuman animals in Adam Smith’s moral theory. Between the Species 13 (9). https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol13/ iss9/2/. Accessed 1 March 2019. Milligan, Tony. 2009. Dependent companions. Journal of Applied Philosophy 26 (4): 402–413. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Portmore, Douglas W. 2007. Welfare, achievement and self-sacrifice. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2 (2): 1–29. Rosati, Connie. 2013. The story of life. Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (1–2): 21–50. Rowlands, Mark. 2008. The philosopher and the wolf: Lessons from the wild on love, death and happiness. London: Granta. Rudy, Kathy. 2011. Loving animals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Swenson, Adam. 2009. Pain’s evils. Utilitas 21 (2): 197–216. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the self: The making of modern identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Velleman, J. David. 1991. Well-being and time. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1): 48–77.

5 Responses to the Welfare Problems

In this chapter I present two theoretical responses to the welfare ­problems. The two theories are experiential pluralism and expressivism. Both experiential pluralism and expressivism afford ways of aligning the specialist conception of welfare with the folk conception of welfare. By maintaining the focus upon welfare as it is ordinarily understood, whilst also making room for additional nonhedonistic considerations, each theory also holds out hope of solving the political problem of welfare without falling prey to the philosophical problem of welfare. But, while the feelings focus of experiential pluralism meshes well with the valenced phenomenology approach of the welfare orthodoxy, there is a sense in which pluralism remains vulnerable to the charge of changing the subject. Unlike hedonism, experiential pluralism allows for considerations other than intrinsic aversiveness to feature as an element of the phenomenological dimension of pain. Under the auspices of philosophical realism, however, the shift from aversive experiences to other kinds of experiences may well be sufficient to count as a case of subject change. After all, experiential pluralism purports to be a realist theory in which decisions about welfare are ideally to be made on the basis of whether rival claims accurately mirror reality. So, when the pluralist © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_5

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invokes unfamiliar experiences in an analysis of welfare, the analysis stands as correct and in steadfast opposition to the hedonist’s claim that any welfare-impacting experience must necessarily be aversive. In short, it is the reductionism inherent in experiential pluralism that exposes it to the philosophical problem of welfare and, in my view, tips the scales in favour of the expressivist solution. Expressivism, in contrast to pluralism, is an anti-realist theory and affords a very different way of thinking about animal welfare. The expressivist rejects the picture of knowledge as a matter of a person having mental states that faithfully mirror a world that is in some sense external to them; instead, the basis of knowledge acquisition is agreement between parties to an open-ended conversation. The focus of the expressivist approach to welfare, therefore, is citizens and their concern for the appropriate care of animals. In line with expressivism, questions about welfare are inherently contestable, and the scope of debate about welfare traces animal protection speech. An important feature of the expressivist approach is a linguistic focus, specifically, an analysis of the usage of the terms that citizens use to express their concern for animals. The terms shape the content of welfare policy by signaling opposition to, or acceptance of, practices involving animals. When someone uses the term dignity, for example, the claim is interpreted by expressivists simply as the expression of opposition to what is being done to them. In line with the theory of relational hedonism, for example, the focus of the concern in such cases is the animal in a broad and nonhedonistic sense. Understood in expressive terms, the usage of the term dignity can avoid all the metaphilosophical problems that are attendant upon understanding dignity in line with philosophical realism. Expressivism represents a shift from a purely nonrelational approach to welfare to an approach which foregrounds the relational dimension. Its implications extend all the way from how nonhedonistic considerations are understood at the personal level to the framing of public deliberation in liberal democracies. I address both of these implications below. Firstly, however, I will briefly recap the two problems that both experiential pluralism and expressivism can help to solve.

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The Political Problem of Welfare We saw in Chapter 2 that the leading theory of animal welfare is hedonism (Fraser and Duncan 1998; Rice 2016; Robbins et al. 2018). In line with animal welfare hedonism, welfare is defined exclusively with reference to subjective experiences, specifically, pleasure and pain. According to animal welfare hedonists, good welfare means something like the absence of aversive subjective experiences, the presence of pleasurable experiences, or a net balance of pleasure over pain. In turn, bad welfare means the presence of aversive feelings, the absence of pleasurable feelings and a net balance of pain over pleasure. To put it bluntly, in line with animal welfare hedonism, welfare turns upon positively valenced feeling and negatively valenced feeling, and nothing else. Hedonism has an important influence on welfare policy in liberal democracies by framing the normative basis of welfare science. Welfare science, in turn, is the primary source for the content of welfare policy. Recall that like welfare hedonism, the focus of welfare science is aversive feelings, specifically, measurable suffering. In line with the scientific approach to animal welfare hedonism, welfare is a property of the animal that can be measured by studying physiology or behaviour. To the physiological hedonist, measures such as elevated cortisone levels, high blood pressure, or elevated heart rate are evidence of negatively valenced feelings and, therefore, indicators of poor welfare. To the ethological hedonist, observable stereotypies such as bar biting, snout rubbing, over grooming, maternal cannibalism and geophagia are evidence of negatively valenced feelings and, therefore, poor welfare. The scientific aim to establish whether housing conditions, handling procedures, modes of transport and slaughtering practices cause suffering signals the welfare scientist’s, perhaps unwitting, acceptance of the intrinsicality thesis. Recall that the intrinsicality thesis is a thesis about the badness of pain. The claim is that while pain may be beneficial in some cases because it points to injury or disease, the experience itself is always bad because of, either, how it feels or unwantedness. The intrinsicality thesis acts to constrain how welfare is understood for the purposes of public policy. It acts like an invisible hand, ensuring that the feelings of sufferers

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are the only legitimate welfare considerations and rendering second rate any nonhedonistic considerations such as dignity and respect. The political problem of welfare is the disconnect between the specialist policy conception of welfare and the folk conception. In short, the specialist view is that welfare is all about feelings; the folk view is that welfare is about more than feelings. I suggested in Chapters 2 and 4 that we should think of the folk view as a diffuse conception of welfare.1 An important element of my characterization of the folk view is Helm’s theory of love and concern, in which the object of concern is always something broader than may first appear. In line with a Helmsian view of love and concern, concern for a sufferer’s aversive phenomenology is a concern for the sufferer in a global sense—concern for their well-being, for their lives, or just them for their own sake. In the last chapter I suggested that we can think about concern for the pain of animals in an analogous way to how a person may be concerned about the congruence of a narrative in a novel. While such an analogy may strike readers as idiosyncratic, it reflects the broad and ambiguous nature of human concern for animals. A more straightforward account of concern would fail to reflect how human concern for animals is itself idiosyncratic. Citizens love some animals, and love eating others. They tend to value pets and charismatic wild animals over animals used as food and so-called feral species (Chen 2016). Like attitudes to art, attitudes to animals are ambiguous and concern is shaped by social learning, self-interest and emotional dispositions. The empirical research presented in Chapter 2 indicates that there is evidence for a disconnect between the specialist view and the folk view. To cite just one recent study: Robbins et al. (2018) showed that citizens think naturalness is a better indicator of welfare than aversive phenomenology. Now it is true that care must be taken when interpreting empirical research, and it is also true that people tend to be ambivalent about animals to begin with, but such data is ordinarily accepted as legitimate in the policy sphere and, in liberal democracies, the strength of public concern is one thing, the content of policy is another. In liberal democracies in which policy is meant to reflect public concerns, all that matters is whether the issue is a matter of public concern.2 That said, public

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concern for animals is enduring—the attitudes-to-animals research goes back a long way and the trend for increasing public concern for animal welfare is clear.

The Changing the Subject Problem There is a danger, however, with interpreting folk concern for welfare as wholly at odds with the specialist animal welfare orthodoxy. Rightly or wrongly, an ostensibly hedonistic view is the default view of welfare for public policy purposes. Scientific evidence of measurable suffering is powerful support for evidence-based public policy. Even animal advocates that would like to see the concept of welfare broadened beyond an exclusive focus on feelings, will draw upon the specialist view when it suits their purposes. The normative significance of aversive feeling is well-established and continues to be an important element in debates about the treatment of animals. If public concern is interpreted as support for a nonhedonistic conception of welfare, however, then the task of moving welfare in a progressive direction will be exceedingly difficult. It will be difficult to disguise any progressive change to welfare as consistent with the existing paradigm. Indeed, if nonhedonistic considerations such as dignity, respect, natural living and bodily integrity are logically disconnected from feelings, then showing concern for them will amount to calling for a change of subject (Hadley 2017). In effect, when a person draws attention to, say, bodily integrity, they will be talking about something else other than welfare. What’s needed to better align the orthodox view of welfare with the folk view is a way of interpreting concern for nonhedonistic considerations as a concern for animals that is in sync with animal welfare hedonism. In other words, it needs to be shown that, when citizen’s appeal to dignity or integrity or natural living, they are showing concern for an animal’s subjective experiences. In what follows, I present two ways of achieving that objective. The first is via a version of the theory of welfare known as experiential pluralism (van der Deijl  2018); the second is by drawing upon elements of neopragmatism, specifically, the theory of language use known as expressivism.

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Experiential Pluralism Experiential pluralism (EP) is, like hedonism, an experiential theory. Recall that, in line with an experiential theory of welfare, only an experience can have an impact upon welfare (Hawkins 2016). In contrast to hedonism, EP allows for experiences other than pleasure and pain to have a positive or negative impact upon welfare (van der Deijl 2018; Paul 2014). Two experiences that have been singled out by proponents of EP as enhancing welfare are novelty and aesthetic value. The key difference between EP and hedonism is this: the hedonist restricts the relevant class of experiences to pleasure and pain; the experiential pluralist includes other experiences. As van der Deijl (2018) indicates, the experiential pluralist thinks that the hedonist have an overly narrow view about the significance of feelings: Feelings are features of experiences, but descriptions of feelings are not complete descriptions of experiences. Beside pleasure, we can distinguish other features of phenomenological states, such as its aesthetic features, the sense of understanding it entails, how new it feels. As I stare outside the window on a sunny autumn day, I may feel a sense of pleasure. The fact that I notice, for the first time this year, that the trees are turning auburn is something that provides pleasure. But, this sense of pleasure does not fully describe the experience. (p. 6)

What van der Deijl is suggesting is that, along with any positively or negatively valenced feelings, experiences also include additional elements, such as novelty, which can also impact upon well-being. In the passage above, van der Deijl is drawing a distinction between, on the one hand, looking at a tree in autumn and, on the other hand, looking at the same tree in autumn for the first time that year. In line with experiential pluralism, while each experience is pleasurable and enhances the well-being of the viewer, the novelty of the second experience affords scope for further enhancing well-being. An analogy with colourfulness may be helpful (Bramble 2016). Intuitively, a small abstract dot painting of many colours is more colourful than a large work with only one or two colours. In other words, the quantity of a given colour does not

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enhance colorfulness; rather, colourfulness is a product of a variety of colours. The experiential pluralists think the same about pleasures: an experience can impact upon well-being in more ways than through the intensity and duration of a positively valenced or negatively valenced mental state. In line with pluralism, particular experiences have an element that can impact well-being even if the experience itself is low intensity and short-lived. Allied with EP is a kind of view known as extra-hedonistic experientialism (EHE). In line with EHE—some experiences, such as novelty and aesthetic value (Bramble 2016; van der Deijl 2018), can be good or bad for welfare over and above the extent to which they are pleasurable or painful. In line with this view, novelty and aesthetic value serve to enhance the value or disvalue of a positively valenced or a negatively valenced feeling. Without some modification, however, EHE will be a poor basis for reconciling the specialist conception of welfare with the folk conception of welfare because EHE requires that extra-hedonistic experiences include at least some pleasure as a minimum (van der Deijl 2018). This requirement undermines the use of EHE as a device for reconciling the specialist view of welfare with the folk view of welfare because pleasure and pain are absent in many of the cases that elicit the disapprobation of the folk. The Russian circus bears, for example, may be under the influence of some drug that anesthetizes them from experiencing any aversive phenomenology, or they may have become desensitized to the experience of posing for photographs with humans.3 EHE cannot be invoked in such cases because, while the animals are experiencing something, it is unlikely that they are experiencing any valenced phenomenology; and valenced phenomenology is a prerequisite for the proper application of EHE to animals in any situation. What’s needed, then, is a version of EP that allows for experiences to be valuable or disvaluable even in cases when it is unlikely that the animals concerned are experiencing pleasure or pain. Consider, then, a version of EP we can call nonhedonistic experientialism (NHE). In line with NHE, experience alone can be good or bad for an individual, but some experiences are neither pleasurable nor painful, in a sense they are just neutral.4 Call experiences that are neither pleasurable nor painful n-experiences.

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The concept of an n-experience opens the logical space for the classification of folk concern as nonhedonistic yet still directed at experiences. n-experiences: an experience that feels like something, that is neither pleasurable nor painful but nonetheless can still be good or bad for the welfare of an individual.

The concept of an n-experience is tailor-made to be the object of folk concern for nonhedonistic considerations. Imagine a case in which a person objects to what is happening to an animal, say, the animal is being used as a studio guest on television. Let’s assume, for the purposes of the analysis, that the animal is not experiencing any positively valenced or negatively valenced phenomenology—in other words, the animal is neither experiencing pleasure nor pain. The person registers their objection by invoking the concept naturalness via the use of the term unnatural. Perhaps they say something like, “Using an animal like that is unnatural.” If the welfare orthodoxy is understood in line with hedonism, the person can be accused of changing the subject because ordinarily pleasure and pain are missing from an analysis of naturalness. Naturalness is ordinarily analysed with reference to an element, such as the exercise or development of a natural capacity, that features in a perfectionist theory of well-being. But, under the auspices of experiential pluralism, the term unnatural can be analysed to, say, an unfamiliar n-experience. With such an analysis in place, the charge of changing the subject is more difficult to make because experiences remain a key feature of the pluralist’s reduction. Pluralism, therefore, facilitates folk concern for animals meeting the welfare orthodoxy halfway, so to speak.

A Similarity Argument for the Existence of N-Experiences A defender of n-experiences needs to do two things. First, to argue for the metaphysical existence of n-experiences and then, secondly, to explain their evaluative significance for the individual. In respect of the first task: certain states of affairs have a feel that is best explicated as neither

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pleasurable nor painful. An individual may be only dimly aware of the experiences; they may be at the fringe of consciousness but nonetheless feel like something. Typing these words, for example, feels like something that is neither pleasurable nor painful. It is reasonable to suggest that animals from other species also have such experiences. Assuming that it is neither pleasurable nor painful, there is still something that it is like, for example, for a bear to be a studio guest on television or dressed in an Elizabethan collar. The second task for the defender of n-experiences is to explain their evaluative significance without reference to pleasure or pain. It needs to be shown that there is an experience an animal has, that is neither pleasurable nor painful, which is still bad for them to experience. How could this be?

Unfamiliar Experiences One option is to draw attention to the unfamiliarity or incongruity of a situation. A television studio or circus big-top is an unfamiliar environment for an animal. The life-history of an animal’s genome is unlikely to reflect time spent in environments like studios and circus tents. Consequently, the animal would not have any evolutionarily endowed goals or ends that could be realized in such an environment. The unfamiliarity thus has two senses: a literal sense—the animal may never have actually been in the environment; and an evolutionary sense—historically, the environment could not have contributed to the animal’s adaptive repertoire. Because the experience is unfamiliar it is thought about and the process of thinking engages the phenomenology. Note that to suggest they are feeling bad or stressed in the negatively valenced mental state sense would be to fall back onto hedonism; rather, my claim is that the feeling of unfamiliarity itself explains the diminution in welfare.5 Some might respond that after an animal has experienced something once it will no longer experience the thing as unfamiliar. In line with the objection, while a bear may experience being a studio guest as unfamiliar the first time it is in front of the cameras, before long it will

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become accustomed to the experience. And, if the animal is accustomed to an unfamiliar experience there is no way that the experience itself could be bad for welfare. If an objection of this kind is sustained it will restrict the application of the unfamiliarity argument to the animal’s initial exposure to a situation that gives rise to a feeling of unfamiliarity. An obvious question arises: Why think that unfamiliarity is a bad thing to experience instead of a good thing? For example, imagine that you woke up one morning with the ability to fly through the sky like superman. This would be a deeply unfamiliar experience but would it be bad? Bad, that is, for reasons other than feelings of fear? One way to explain why unfamiliarity is bad might be to invoke desire frustration. In line with the desire theory of well-being, the satisfaction or frustration of desire is the measure of well-being and, all things being equal, the frustration of a desire renders an individual worse-off. Are desires a feature of unfamiliar experiences? Might being exposed to unfamiliar stimuli cause animals to have a desire not to experience unfamiliar surrounds? As the experience of being on TV, or flying, exposes an individual to unfamiliar stimuli, the physiological and psychological effect on any animal is likely to be unsettling—elevated heart rate, dry mouth, breathing changes, etc. If that is true, then it is probable that a desire for an experience, or part thereof, to end, is a feature of a strategy for handling a feeling of unfamiliarity caused by exposure to unusual stimuli. The presence of a desire in such a situation affords a basis for gauging the value of the experience using desire satisfaction as the measure of value. The badness of desire frustration in such cases could be analysed either subjectively or objectively. In line with a subjective account, the badness is a function of how frustration feels even though there is no negative-valenced phenomenology (Carruthers 2000); in line with the objective account, desire frustration is objectively bad irrespective of any phenomenology associated with it. Proponents of the objective account would include desire frustration as an entry on so-called objective lists theories of well-being. One objection to the desire-based argument is that once an individual becomes accustomed to an experience, they will no longer desire for it to end. In line with this objection, a bear, for example, will become accustomed to being on television and therefore the desire argument

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will only apply to the initial occurrence of an n-experience. This objection presupposes a connection between unfamiliarity and pain. Arguably though, desensitization will only alter the desirability of any pleasure or pain experienced by the animal and the desirability of an n-experience as such will remain unchanged. The desirability of an ­n-experience is gauged from the nature of the animal and being a guest on television is no part of the nature of a bear. Another way to explain why a feeling of unfamiliarity is bad for an animal is to argue that certain n-experiences are not part of a happy life (see Haybron 2008). Even though there is no pain and suffering involved in the experience, the experience is not evaluatively neutral because a good or happy life is gauged from the nature of the animal, and being a guest on television is no part of the nature of a bear.6 A related version of this argument links the value of experiences to the value of the object of the experiences (Feldman 2004). In line with this view, while being a studio guest may be a valuable object for a person who desires to bolster their media profile, the value for a bear is very low or non-existent. While this view has traditionally been put forward as way of distinguishing objects of pleasure; here it is being suggested as a means for distinguishing experiences as such.

Objections The above argument for including nonhedonistic experiences as legitimate components of an experience-based concept of welfare faces a number of objections. The first objection is the trivializing pleasure objection (van der Deijl 2018, pp. 15–16). In line with this objection, to argue that some experiences are bad for an individual without recourse to pleasure or pain undermines the normative significance of the two most salient normative concepts. But to say that the above argument trivializes pleasure and pain is a straw man. When membership of a class is broadened, the original members of the class remain in place as full members. Likewise, in line with NHE, pleasure and pain may remain as salient considerations even though the class of experiences is widened. The only implication of experiential pluralism that

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ought to be cause for concern is whether a concern for n-experiences creates a social climate in which the pain of some animal somewhere gets overlooked. But as an objection to NHE, the prospect of agents overlooking the seriousness of pain misses the mark because NHE is targeted at cases when it is unlikely the animals are suffering. The second objection is that, in the absence of feelings of pleasure or pain, someone cannot be harmed (van der Deijl 2018, pp. 15–16). But this objection begs the question—such an objection (see Kauppinen 2015) assumes hedonism. A further objection is just that NHE assumes too much about people. In line with the objection, the folk have an unsophisticated understanding of animal protection issues and it is unrealistic to assume that they are nonhedonistic experience-focused any more than we can assume that they are pleasure and pain focused. This objection has some merit. As the argument of the last chapter and the survey of the attitudes-to-animals literature in Chapter 2 indicates, folk concern for animals is broad-based and diffuse. But it is reasonable to suggest that the folk are concerned with what is happening on the inside of an animal; in other words, with experiences. After all, they don’t think animals are automata. If, as research indicates, the folk are experienced focused, then the only theoretical option in line with the folk view is some form of experiential pluralism. As the scope of the analysis must extend to cases in which it is unlikely that animals are experiencing any pain and suffering, then the only available option to explain folk concern in such cases is NHE. Another objection is that NHE is vulnerable to the changing the subject problem because n-experiences are likewise logically distinct from the capacity to suffer and the morality of causing pain. There are two responses to this objection. The first is to point out that ­n-experiences can be understood as analogues of mere consciousness—they are no more distinct from pleasure and pain than mere consciousness. And to suggest that mere consciousness is distinct from pleasure and pain would be a stretch. The second response is to acknowledge the problem and lay the blame at the realist assumptions that are presupposed by both the hedonist and pluralist. Conceding that experiential pluralism remains vulnerable to the philosophical problem of welfare

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is motivation for exploring an approach to welfare that does not presuppose the truth of philosophical realism. Below I will outline an approach to welfare known as expressivism or neopragmatism.

Expressivism in Animal Ethics The second theory that can be employed to align the views of the specialist with the citizen is expressivism. Expressivism, along with the theory of relational hedonism outlined in Chapter 4, is a key element of animal neopragmatism. In what follows I discuss two implications of expressivism: firstly, its distinctive approach to understanding animal rights vocabulary; secondly, its flow-on implications for how to understand debate about animal protection in liberal democracies. Expressivism is a theory about moral language use and, more broadly, ethical behaviour (See Price 2013; Fisher 2011). In line with expressivism, moral claims are an expression of non-cognitive mental states, such as emotions, opinions, attitudes or commands. These mental states are, in turn, cited as the best explanation of the motivation for moral behaviour. For the expressivist, people are motivated to act morally by their attitudes or emotions. Expressivism affords an alternative to the analysis of moral language that was outlined in Chapter 3. Recall that in line with philosophical realism, language has a representational function; words match-up with objects in the world and sentences purport to describe states of affairs in which the objects appear. The realist picture of language has implications for animal rights vocabulary. When a person makes a claim such as “Factory farming is wrong” they are making a claim that can be true or false in just the same way as a claim such as “The lights are on” can be true or false. The claim “The lights are on” will be true if, in fact, the lights are on and false if they are not. Likewise, according to the realist, the claim “Factory farming is wrong” will be true if, in fact, factory farming is wrong and false if it is not. Recall that the realist presupposes the soundness of reductionism, which is the strategy that enables a statement with a moral predicate to be truth-apt. A utilitarian realist, for example, will reduce wrongness to something like, fails to promote utility; a perfectionist realist will reduce wrongness to fails to honour naturalness.7

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An expressivist analysis of the function of language is very different to the realist analysis. According to the expressivist, when a person makes a moral claim such as “Murder is wrong” or “It is right to pay your taxes”, they are best interpreted as expressing some kind of non-cognitive mental state. This kind of analysis of moral language has important implications for the use of animal ethics vocabulary. In line with expressivism, when an animal protection advocate claims that animal experimentation is wrong, they are not picking out an action, animal experimentation, and drawing attention to one of its properties, wrongness; instead, they are expressing an emotion or attitude, or simply registering their opposition to the practice.8 Such an analysis, in turn, has important flow-on implications for understanding public deliberation about animal welfare in liberal democracies.

Public Deliberation and Deliberative Democracy The status of animals within liberal democracies has been a topic of extensive debate in recent political theory (Cochrane 2012; Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Garner 2013; Hadley 2015; O’Sullivan 2011). Do animals warrant full-citizenship status or should they be thought of as akin to permanent residents, members of internal minorities or sovereign communities, or illegal aliens? To answer this question requires making reference to theories of democracy that specify the institutional arrangements of liberal democratic states and the norms and virtues purportedly binding upon the citizens therein. One such theory is deliberative democracy, and the place of animals within deliberative democracy theory has also been a topic of recent scholarly debate (D’Arcy 2007; Hadley 2015, 2017; Humphrey and Stears 2006; Parry 2017). Deliberative democracy theory foregrounds the process of decision-making and policy development as crucial elements in the smooth operation of a supposedly just nation state. It is important to note that deliberative democracy, in either its ideal or non-ideal guises, is a normative or aspirational theory. In other words, proponents of deliberative democracy put forward ideas about how deliberation and decision-making should take place and how policy

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should be developed. In line with orthodox deliberative democracy theory, legitimate public deliberation is dialogical, communicative, inclusive and, above all, reason-guided. Ideally, according to proponents of orthodox deliberative democracy theory, decisions are to be made on the basis of a consensus forged through exposure to what Habermas (1998) called “the unforced force of better argument” (p. 37). As Iris Marion Young (2001) explains: The theory of deliberative democracy expresses a set of normative ideals according to which actual political processes are evaluated and usually found wanting. Political decisions ought to be made by processes that bring all the potentially affected parties or their representatives into a public deliberative process. Deliberators should appeal to justice and frame the reasons for their proposals in terms they claim that others ought to accept. Doing so rules out the assertion of simple partisan interest or the attempt to compel assent by means of threats and sanctions. (p. 672)

By ruling out appeals to partisan concerns and by requiring deliberators to instead make decisions on the basis of independent evidence-based grounds, deliberative theory can be cast as more or less in line with the kind of rationalism that we encountered in Chapter 3. Against such an ostensibly reason-guided background, some contributions to public debate turn out to be legitimate and helpful, while others are seen as off-track and maybe even inadmissible.9 In line with deliberative democracy, a person who presents empirical evidence in support of a claim about, say, the preferences of layer hens, contributes in a constructive way to public debate about hen welfare. In contrast, a person who produces a graphic image or recites an evocative poem, will be seen as offering an unhelpful distraction to the process of decision making. In line with deliberative theory, imagery and poetry are seen as potentially coercive (Dryzek 2000, pp. 68–71)—supposedly the emotions they invoke threaten to undermine the agent’s power to discern the logical relations between premises and conclusion. An expressivist analysis of political behaviour has important implications for theorising about emotionally charged political activism and its relationship to public deliberation. In line with expressivism, statements

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such as “Murderer!”, “Stop the torture!”, “Calf roping is cruel”, or “Close the Oxford labs!” are not in the business of accurately representing the world—in metaphilosophical jargon, such statements are not truth-apt (Miller 2003, p. 6). In the case of direct action animal rights advocates, the relevant non-cognitive mental state that such speech expresses are likely to be emotions like frustration, rage, or despair. The most striking feature of the expressivist analysis is that the aim of the deliberative process is no longer truth or rationally motivated consensus.10 Recall that such aims were a corollary of the paradigmatic forms of argumentation privileged by philosophical realism: empirical evidence and rational argument. If, instead, deliberation consists in the expression of non-cognitive mental states, then public deliberation will have very different aims (Leiter 2007; Sorrell 2013). Indeed, proponents of philosophical realism would no doubt claim that an expressivist conception of public deliberation must have comparatively modest epistemic aims. It needs to be acknowledged that under the expressivist conception of public deliberation there is a watering down of the notion of a best or better argument. The expressivist rejects the idea that there exists a standpoint that is purportedly an ideal authoritative template for judgments arrived at in deliberation governed by the norms of philosophical realism.11 Instead, the epistemic standards will have a basis in the psychology of citizens themselves and their actual deliberative practices. In this respect, the expressivist theory of deliberation is consistent with the broadly anthropological and historical-cultural line of inquiry distinctive of neopragmatism (See Koopman 2009; Macarthur and Price 2007). In line with all forms of pragmatism, pragmatist analysis starts where we are, that is, against the backdrop of the practices and concerns of real people. In the case of public deliberation about animal rights, the relevant stakeholders will be the activists themselves, animal users, fellow citizens, policymakers and the media. The expressivist analysis of deliberation reflects two important elements of neopragmatism: a specific focus on linguistic practices and a rejection of the standard picture of knowledge, outlined in Chapter 3, as accurate representation. The concern with such a descriptive and anti-representational analysis is that without truth as the goal of inquiry deliberation may become,

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to quote Charles Sanders Pierce, “intellectually licentious” (quoted in Misak 2013, p. 110).12 But, such a charge can only be read as pejorative from a standpoint that downplays the significance of problem solving, or simply agreement, as a normative ideal for real world deliberation. Only if loosening the parameters of deliberation to include nondeliberative speech causes logjams, dissatisfaction, frustration or violence can it be licentious in a discrediting way.

Expressivist Deliberation and Decision-Making An expressivist conception of public deliberation would look like this: citizens will be exposed to the details of animal use. Perhaps they will witness a practice first hand or maybe they will learn of the practice second-hand from a friend, news report or social media. They will respond more or less emotionally in a way which is nonetheless explicable in terms of responding favorably or unfavorably to what has been said or done. Their fellow citizens will, ideally, take notice of their response and will themselves be moved to respond favorably or unfavorably. What matters is if, after being exposed to the relevant details, something hits home psychologically in terms of eliciting a non-cognitive state. Resonance or, as Stanley Fish puts it, ringing true, are terms that capture the process of judgment under the expressivist conception of deliberation. Judgment making will be explicable, to invoke David Hume ([1739] 2007), in terms of custom and habit, and it will be assumed that people invariably come to deliberation, particularly on controversial issues like animal protection, with their minds partially made up. This is certainly the case with animal advocates for whom, if the functional religion thesis (Jamieson et al. 2003) is to be believed, open-mindedness and revisability of beliefs would pose too great a threat to their sense of identity. Fish (2001) alludes to the futility of deliberating about sensitive issues on supposedly “neutral ratiocinative grounds” because: Neither party reaches its conclusion by sifting the evidence on the way to determining the truth of the matter; rather, each begins with a firm conviction of what the truth of the matter is, and then from inside the

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lens of that conviction receives and evaluates (the shape of the evaluation is assured) the assertion of contrary truth. As Augustine long ago taught us, no sequence of reasoning can even get started without the anchoring presence of some substantive proposition it did not generate. (p. 501)

Even though people enter into deliberations on controversial issues already encumbered with conviction, discussion and debate can still be productive. For some citizens, participation will be worthwhile in the sense that they will meet new people, make friends, and learn interesting facts and valuable lessons about life or political campaigning techniques. Citizens will have their views reinforced or weakened, acquire new desires or learn new ways of satisfying existing desires. Exposure to the deliberative contributions of fellow citizens may engender feelings of pleasure or satisfaction and these feelings will prompt them to ­co-operate further in the deliberative process. Agreeable experiences give deliberators hope and leave them feeling as if progress is being made, and this helps to predispose them to the psychological state that is ordinarily labelled as judgment. But, in line with the expressivist view, judgment will not be the result of what Williams (2003) describes as “insight into ultimate truths not vouchsafed our fellows (p. 73)” but from, as Rorty (1989) quoting the poet Phillip Larkin puts it, “the blind impress of our behavings bear” (p. 24). In other words, so long as citizens are sufficiently attentive to actions and deeds, a judgment will be forthcoming. But, just as a person’s identity is not solely the result of choice; neither is arriving at a judgment (Williams 2003, p. 73). Some actions and deeds carried out by animal activists will resonate with some people and these people will, in turn, see themselves as the kind of folk who can live in accord with the underpinning philosophical positions or attendant lifestyles. A number of other citizens will be turned off or have their prejudices reinforced. Basically, public deliberation, under the expressivist conception, will be an exercise in people assessing alternate conceptions of themselves (See Rorty 2007, p. 45). Some might object that the expressive conception of public deliberation purchases inclusiveness at the expense of the kind of epistemic orderliness attendant upon rival deliberative democracy theories.

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But, any loss in epistemic structure is compensated for by greater inclusiveness. What are the costs of such an inclusive conception? Dryzek warns that democratization requires that there be some limits upon deliberative inclusiveness because groups who are excluded can play a useful role becoming, “the seeds for, if nothing else, future and further democratization of the state” (2000, p. 114). But, there will be exclusions under the expressivist conception; it’s just that groups will likely be excluded for reasons tied to the social acceptability and utility, rather than epistemic credibility, of the deliberative contributions they make. In fact, some groups may wish to exclude themselves, preferring instead to comment on the process from the sidelines. Given the anthropological grounding of the expressivist conception, this is uncontroversial and serves to distinguish the expressivist conception from rival pragmatist theories which maintain truth as an aim of deliberation (Misak 2000; Talisse 2007).

Conclusion In this chapter I put forward two reconciling views: experiential pluralism and expressivism. Each theory holds out the hope of aligning the feelings-focused specialist conception of welfare with the more-thanfeelings folk conception of welfare. Experiential pluralism is the view that some experiences can be good or bad for an individual independent of any pleasure and pain. Experiential pluralism has a useful application helping to explain the ethics of certain cases of animal use—cases in which it is likely that the animal is not suffering any negatively valenced phenomenology. Experiential pluralism also affords a plausible explanation for the use of terms like dignity and respect in such cases. When people use terms like dignity and respect, they are making claims about animals and their properties and, in line with philosophical realism, presupposing a reduction of the terms to what I called the n-experiences of the animals. Interpreting folk concern in this way allows proponents of orthodox welfare and more progressive conceptions of welfare to meet each other half way, so to speak. The intrinsicality requirement is maintained but the class of relevant experiences is broadened.

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But because the proponent of experiential pluralism, like their hedonist counterpart, maintains the metaphilosophical commitments of philosophical realism, pluralism remains vulnerable to the charge of changing the subject. To avoid the charge entirely requires moving to an approach to welfare that is free of the strictures of philosophical realism and the intrinsicality of the welfare orthodoxy. In the above, I presented an expressivist theory of welfare that can meet those conditions. The focus of an expressivist welfare policy is public concern for the pain of the sufferer. Expressivist welfare theory conceives of debates about welfare as the quest for agreement forged by resonance, instead of the search for truth after dispassionate consideration of evidence or argument. The expressivist analysis of terms like dignity, respect, integrity, etc., gives maximal scope for resonance as there is no sense in which a person’s usage of the terms is incorrect or based upon a supposedly faulty analysis. Expressivism is one key component of animal neopragmatism. The other key component is relational hedonism, which was the focus of Chapter 4. In the remaining two chapters, I motivate the case for expressivism, and neopragmatism more broadly, by turning attention to the problems associated with philosophical realism and its offshoot theories in animal ethics. In the final chapter I will respond to the main objections to neopragmatism.

Notes 1. Fraser (2008) identifies a conception of welfare in the UK at the time of the Brambell Committee similar to what I’m suggesting is the contemporary broad-based folk conception of welfare. He identifies it with a dictionary definition-type concept: “Good fortune, health, happiness and prosperity” (p. 65). 2. Of course, depth of public feeling and steadfastness of public resolve may influence whether the outcomes of the policy development processes are taken up and enacted by government; my point is about the appropriate content of any welfare policy proposal. 3. Think also of cases like corpse desecration, fancy dress competitions, the use of animals as studio guests on television and YouTube, or as stylized elements in photographic portraits.

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4. Note: in calling the experiences ‘neutral’ I mean neutral only in terms of being neither pleasurable nor painful; I’m neither saying that they are evaluatively neutral nor devoid of all phenomenology. 5. Note that I’m simply suggesting the phenomenology is attendant upon the cognitive processing of sensory inputs. Whether animals need to be able to reflect on the phenomenology in order for it to nonhedonistically impact upon their welfare is irrelevant here. 6. Recall that an n-experience is only neutral in the sense of being neither pleasurable nor painful. 7. In these examples I am using Pettit’s (2003) distinction between promoting and honouring values as the signature difference between consequentialism (‘utilitarianism’) and nonconsequentialism (‘perfectionism’). 8. Of course an expressivist can accept that someone may have claimed that factory farming is wrong. The truth of the claim is distinguished from the truth of the action of claiming. 9. The debate over the place of direct action in deliberative theory (Humphrey and Stears 2006, D’Arcy 2007; Hadley 2015; Parry 2017) can be seen as a disagreement over the admissibility of the deliberative contributions of direct action animal rights activists. 10. By corollary, an important part of the defense of expressivism, and the neopragmatic theory in which is a part, is addressing concerns about relativism and metaethical irrealism. I will address these concerns in Chapter 7. 11. Rorty once hypothesized that the notion of an objective standard outside of our practices against which the soundness of deliberative claims can be judged is driven by a religious impulse (Rorty 1989, p. 5; 1999, p. 82;  see Rouse 2003, p. 88). 12. I discuss this objection in depth in Chapter 7.

References Bramble, Ben. 2016. A new defense of hedonism about well-being. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3 (4): 85–112. Carruthers, Peter. 2000. Consciousness: Essays from a higher order perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chen, Peter John. 2016. Animal welfare in Australia: Politics and policy. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

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Cochrane, Alasdair. 2012. Animal rights without liberation. New York: Columbia University Press. D’Arcy, Stephen. 2007. Deliberative democracy, direct action, and animal advocacy. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (2): 1–16. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A political theory of ­animal rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, John. 2000. Deliberative democracy and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldman, Fred. 2004. Pleasure and the good life: Concerning the nature, varieties, and plausibility of hedonism. New York: Oxford University Press. Fish, Stanley. 2001. Holocaust denial and academic freedom. Valparasio University Law Review 35 (3): 499–524. Fisher, Andrew. 2011. Metaethics: An introduction. Durham: Acumen. Fraser, David. 2008. Understanding animal welfare. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Fraser, David, and Ian Duncan. 1998. “Pleasures”, “pains” and animal welfare: Toward a natural history of affect. Animal Welfare 7: 383–396. Garner, Robert. 2013. A theory of justice for animals. New York: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1998. The inclusion of the other. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hadley, John. 2015. Animal rights advocacy and legitimate public deliberation. Political Studies 63 (3): 696–712. Hadley, John. 2017. Religiosity and public reason: The case of animal rights advocacy. Res Publica 23 (3): 299–312. Haybron, Dan. 2008. The pursuit of unhappiness: The elusive nature of ­well-being. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, Jennifer. 2016. The experience machine and the experience requirement. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 355–365. London: Routledge. Hume, David. [1739] 2007. A treatise of human nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Humphrey, Mathew, and Mark Stears. 2006. Animal rights protest and the challenge to deliberative democracy. Economy and Society 35 (3): 400–422. Jamieson, Wesley V., Casper Wenk, and James V. Parker. 2003. Every sparrow falls: Understanding animal rights activism as functional religion. In The animal ethics reader, ed. Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler, 556–562. London: Routledge. Kauppinen, Antti. 2015. What’s so great about experience? Res Philosophica 92: 371–388.

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Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as transition: Historicity and hope in James, Dewey and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press. Leiter, Brian. 2007. Science and morality: Pragmatic reflections on Rorty’s “pragmatism”. University of Chicago Law Review 74 (3): 932–937. Macarthur, David, and Huw Price. 2007. Pragmatism, quasi-realism and the global challenge. In New pragmatism, ed. Cheryl Misak, 91–121. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Miller, Alexander. 2003. An introduction to contemporary metaethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Misak, Cheryl. 2000. Truth, politics, morality. Oxford: Routledge. Misak, Cheryl. 2013. The American pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Sullivan, Siobhan. 2011. Animals, equality and democracy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Parry, Lucy. 2017. Don’t put all your speech-acts in one basket: Situating animal activism in the deliberative system. Environmental Values 26 (4): 437–455. Paul, Laurie A. 2014. Transformative experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettit, Phillip. 2003. Consequentialism. In A companion to ethics, ed. Peter Singer, 230–240. Oxford: Blackwell. Price, Huw. 2013. Expressivism, pragmatism and representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rice, Christopher M. 2016. Well-being and animals. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 378–388. London: Routledge. Robbins, Jesse, Becca Franks, and Marina A.G. von Keyerlingk. 2018. ‘More than a feeling’: An empirical investigation of hedonistic accounts of animal welfare. Plos One 13 (3): e0193864. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone. 0193864. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. A world without substances or essences. In Philosophy and social hope. London: Penguin. Rorty, Richard. 2007. Justice as a larger loyalty. In Philosophical papers, volume 4: Philosophy as cultural politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rouse, Joseph. 2003. From realism or antirealism to science and solidarity. In Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 81–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sorrell, K. 2013. Pragmatism and moral progress: John Dewey’s theory of social inquiry. Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (8): 809–824. Talisse, Robert B. 2005. Deliberativist responses to activist challenges. Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (4): 423–444. Talisse, Robert B. 2007. A pragmatist philosophy of democracy. London: Routledge. van der Deijl, Willem. 2018. Is pleasure all that is good about experience? Philosophical Studies. https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/article/10.1007/s11098-018-1090-y. Accessed 12 April 2019. Williams, Michael. 2003. Rorty on knowledge and truth. In Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 61–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2001. Activist challenges to deliberative democracy. Political Theory 29 (5): 670–690.

6 Two Problems for Animal Rights Theory

In this chapter, I continue the case for neopragmatism in animal ­ethics. So far, the case presented has been positive in the sense that I have sold the virtues of two key elements of neopragmatist theory: relational hedonism and expressivism. Combined, the two elements allow for moving the orthodox conception of welfare in a progressive direction whilst avoiding the changing the subject problem. The case presented in this chapter is negative in the sense that I aim to detract from the soundness of rival approaches in animal ethics. My main target is orthodox analytic animal rights theory (hereafter, animal rights theory). Animal rights theory is a suitable target for neopragmatist critique because it inherits the foundational assumptions of philosophical realism: rationalism, representationalism and [moral] realism—the three Rs of animal rights theory. There are two key problems that undermine the soundness of orthodox animal rights theory: the equivocation problem and the placement problem. Below, I discuss both problems in turn. Before I begin, however, it is important to clarify the methodological approach employed in this chapter. My aim is to criticize animal rights theory from within, that is, from within a framework in which the foundational assumptions of philosophical realism are taken for © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_6

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granted. The specific criticisms I make need to be understood as exposing how the assumptions taken for granted by proponents of animal rights theory expose its most serious shortcomings. Such an approach may seem like an odd strategy for a proponent of neopragmatism, given that pragmatism itself rejects the assumptions and prosecutes a kind of philosophy which has a very different take on value, truth, and the meaning of terms. If realist animal rights philosophy is so benighted, why don’t I simply continue on in a positive way selling the positive aspects of neopragmatism? The answer is two-fold. First, an argument from within is needed to avoid begging the question against both realism and orthodox animal rights theory. If I were to be critical of animal rights theory without saying why exactly it is so benighted, then the impression would be that I have assumed too much and only made a partial case for neopragmatism. Secondly, in an experimental spirit, I hope to foster dialogue between animal ethicists of all theoretical persuasions. One form that dialogue may take is a back and forth about the problems of each approach. Demonstrating that one understands the challenges facing proponents of rival views requires an explanation of the rival view in the strongest possible terms. In providing such an explanation I pay proponents of the rival view the respect they deserve. The hope is that they will, in turn, try to understand neopragmatism and engage in a dialogue about the problems that motivate it. So much is in keeping with the pragmatic view of philosophy as open-ended inquiry aimed at securing agreement forged by resonance.

Animal Rights Theory Before I lay out the two problems that beleaguer animal rights theory, it is important to be clear about the theory itself. My target theories are the animal rights theories from the analytic tradition, most clearly Tom Regan’s inherent-value based theory, but also any theory that derives value from psychology and presupposes an ostensibly realist approach to ethics. The target theories have three elements: firstly, a link between some kind of psychological capacity and moral value.1 This aspect

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of animal rights theory has been referred to as moral individualism (Rachels 1990; McMahan 2005). The capacity may be expressed simply as sentience or the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, but may, in the case of Regan’s theory, be explained with reference to a broad range of psychological capacities such as beliefs, desires, and memory, etc. (Regan [1983] 2004, p. 243). Secondly, equality. The claim by proponents of animal rights is that we should think of all the members of the class of sentient or psychologically complex animals as being of equal value or worth. Some animal rights theorists may posit subclasses within the class of all sentient or psychologically complex creatures and allow for a difference in value between the various sub-classes; for example, a distinction may be made between persons and so-called nonpersons.2 But so long as a commitment to equality of value within the relevant sub-class is maintained, the relevant theorist is still vulnerable to the placement problem Thirdly, value is categorical and does not admit of degree. This element applies most directly to Regan’s concept, inherent value, but it is also implicit in other theories and, presumably, it explains why there is no variation in value among the subclasses. Finally, the relevant feature that marks out an animal rights theory for the purposes of the following critique is a commitment to philosophical realism. Animal rights theory presupposes the foundational assumptions of realism I called the three-Rs: a representational view of language, a reason-based methodology, and [moral] realism. In so far as a theorist that argues for the better treatment of animals, or is critical of the political status of animals in liberal democracies, does not presuppose realism, then they are not an animal rights theorist in the relevant sense.3

The Equivocation Problem for Animal Rights Theory The first metalevel problem for animal rights theory is known as the equivocation problem or, more formally, the fallacy of equivocation. The equivocation problem is a problem for any theory supported by arguments in which the meaning of a key term is ambiguous.

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The ambiguity undermines the soundness of the arguments; unsound arguments then jeopardize the credibility of the theory. The foundational assumptions of philosophical realism need to be presupposed and taken as a legitimate constraint upon inquiry in order for an argument, and the theory in which the argument is accepted as support, to be prey to the equivocation problem. Of particular relevance to the equivocation problem for animal rights are the methodology of rationalism and the realist picture of knowledge as accurate representation. Recall that rationalism is the view that argument and conceptual analysis are the tools by which persons can come to acquire knowledge, and representationalism is the view that knowledge is a matter of a person having a mental state that accurately represents the external world. In the case of animal rights theory, representationalism entails that the term sentience hooks-up with a property purportedly possessed by individual animals (human and nonhuman). Knowledge is acquired, then, when a person accepts the basic animal rights argument and the premises of the argument accurately correspond to an existing state of affairs. To invoke a metaphor associated with Rorty (1979), when the world corresponds to the conclusion of an argument accepted by a person, the person’s mind can be said to be a mirror of nature. A fallacy of equivocation is a well-known fallacy in the canon of informal logic. In line with time-honored norms of philosophical logic, valid arguments are arguments in which the conclusion is unambiguously supported by the premises. Validity, therefore, requires uniformity in meaning across the concepts employed in the premises of an argument. In other words, if a premise contains the concept chair, the sense of the term must be the same wherever the term appears in the argument; you cannot have chair meaning “head of the meeting” in one premise and chair meaning “item of furniture” in another premise. An argument that included two distinct senses of the term chair would be classed an invalid and labelled fallacious. An invalid or fallacious argument arises when the meaning of one of the terms in the argument is sufficiently ambiguous to call into question the logical relation between premise and conclusion. In effect, the protagonist putting forward a fallacious argument commits a sleight of hand by trading on the ambiguity in the meaning of different senses of the same term to secure the

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assent of the agent by way of creating the appearance of a seamless logical relation. To illustrate, consider the Conservative Argument Against Abortion.4 Proponents of abortion argue that the conservative argument commits the fallacy of equivocation because the argument trades on an ambiguity between two senses of the term human being. The Conservative argument against abortion P1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being P2: A fetus is an innocent human being C3: It is wrong to intentionally kill a fetus. On its face the conservative argument looks persuasive. After all, who in their right mind would disagree with the claim that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings? But upon closer inspection the reasoning is unclear. Proponents of abortion argue that the persuasiveness of the argument is the result of a deception. The deception may be unintentional on the part of the conservative, but is the product of an ambiguity centred on the meaning of the term human being. What does the conservative mean when they use the term human being? Do they mean to make an all-encompassing claim, in which case perhaps human being refers to any member of the species Homo sapiens. This would entail that any fetus, at any stage of development, would qualify as a human being. Or is their claim restricted to a specific concept of human being? If the latter is the case, then the term may only hook-up to individuals who belong in a sub-class of the much larger class. Notice how one’s acceptance of the argument may change depending upon how the term human being is understood. If human being in P1 is understood to mean “member of the species Homo sapien ” then P2 seems straightforwardly true. But, if human being means person in the sense of “an individual with sophisticated psychological capacities” then P2 is obviously false.5 Likewise, if human being is interpreted broadly in the species sense, then the truth of P1 may be called into question: it maybe that there are some occasions in which killing an innocent human being is permissible.6 To illustrate all this formally consider two versions of the conservative argument with the rival analyses of human

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being in place. Recall that reductionism is the metaphilosophical strategy for rendering terms that seem contentious and incapable of being true or false, truth-apt. With the reduction in place the term can be placed into a sentence and the sentence is able to assessed in line with the correspondence theory of truth. In effect, the reductions make plain the meaning of the premises. Consider two valid versions of the conservative argument: Conservative argument against abortion V.1 P1: It is wrong to intentionally kill a member of the species Homo sapien P2: A fetus is a member of the species Homo sapien C3: It is wrong to intentionally kill a fetus. Conservative argument against abortion V.2 P1: It is wrong to intentionally kill a psychologically sophisticated individual P2: A fetus is a psychologically sophisticated individual C3: It is wrong to intentionally kill a fetus. Both V.1 and V.2 are valid arguments because the meaning of the term human being is standardized in all the premises. To say that an argument is valid, however, just means that the conclusion follows from the premises under the assumption that the premises are true. By the norms of rationalism, only statements can be true or false. Arguments are described as either sound or unsound. The term sound is reserved for arguments that are valid and contain only true premises; the term unsound is reserved for arguments in which one or more of the premises is false. Against the background of philosophical realism, a sound argument is the philosopher’s holy grail. The purported fallacy of the conservative argument can be illustrated using the two suggested analyses of the term human being: Conservative argument against abortion Fv.1 P1: It is wrong to intentionally kill an individual with sophisticated psychological capacities

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P2: A fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens C3: It is intentionally wrong to kill a fetus. Conservative argument against abortion Fv.2 P1: It is wrong to intentionally kill a member of the species Homo sapiens P2: A fetus is an individual with sophisticated psychological capacities C3: It is wrong to intentionally kill a fetus. Notice that in each of the invalid forms of the conservative argument the sense of the term human being is different in P1 and P2, and therein lies the fallacy. Only arguments in which the meaning of terms is unified throughout can be valid arguments, and only valid arguments can be candidates for soundness. Under the auspices of philosophical realism, a person is rationally committed to reject the conclusion of an unsound argument. To accept the conclusion when the reasoning is fallacious is to be irrational.

The Fallacy in the Basic Argument for Animal Rights The same kind of ambiguity that undermines the conservative argument against abortion can also be found in the basic argument for animal rights. The ambiguity is a product of attempting to extend to other species terms that had their meaning established prior to the development of the contemporary animal ethics literature. The awkwardness of applying deductive logic to animals becomes clear when we reflect upon the reasoning process that would be involved in thinking through a basic animal rights argument. A simplified version of the argument can be represented formally as follows: P1: Sentience is necessary and sufficient for rights P2: Animals are sentient C3: So, animals have rights.

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But notice that, like the conservative argument against abortion, a person’s acceptance of the argument may turn upon the meaning of the terms in the premises. Indeed, if the person is rational, and proponents of animal rights presuppose that everyone to whom the argument is directed is sensitive to norms of reason, then, as a minimum, the meaning of the terms must be unified in each of the premises. Consider two versions of the argument with rival analyses of the term sentience laid bare. In line with the first analysis, sentience is defined in terms of the capacity to experience aversive phenomenology; in line with the second analysis sentience is defined in terms of sapience, that is, the capacity to reflect upon aversive experience. To avoid confusion let’s refer to the capacity to reflect upon one’s aversive experience as the capacity for higher-order thought. Both analyses are capable of yielding a valid argument so long as the sense of the term is the same in each premise. The basic argument for animal rights V.1 P1: The capacity to experience aversive phenomenology is necessary and sufficient for rights P2: Animals can experience aversive phenomenology C3: So, animals have rights. The basic argument for animal rights V.2 P1: The capacity for higher-order thought is necessary and sufficient for rights P2: Animals have the capacity for higher-order thought C3: So, animals have rights. Attention to the structure of the animal rights argument reveals that it shares the same basic syllogistic structure as the conservative argument against abortion: two premises standing in a relationship of support to a conclusion. Notice also the importance, for the soundness of the argument, of the meaning of a term in each of the premises. In the case of the animal rights argument, the term is sentience; in the case of the anti-abortion argument, the term is human being. The crucial question is this: is there the same kind of ambiguity around the meaning

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of the term sentience in the basic animal rights argument as there is around the meaning of the term human being in the conservative argument against abortion? I think the answer to that question must be yes; at least if, as proponents of animal rights theory presuppose, the norms of philosophical realism must constrain our answers to the question. Before I defend this claim, consider the two ways in which the basic argument for animal rights may fall prey to the fallacy of equivocation. The basic argument for animal rights Fv.1 P1: The capacity to experience aversive phenomenology is necessary and sufficient for rights P2: Animals have the capacity for higher-order thought C3: So, animals have rights. The basic argument for animal rights Fv.2 P1: The capacity for higher order thought is necessary and sufficient for rights P2: Animals have the capacity to experience aversive phenomenology C3: So, animal have rights. Remember that in order to be valid the argument must contain the same analysis of the relevant term in each premise. Bear in mind also that the argument is directed at all people qua agents or persons. Under the auspices of philosophical realism, agents are conceived as openminded and committed to the norms of reasoning. In effect, agents are being asked to reflect upon what is required for rights possession and then consider whether animals qualify on those grounds. Consider now Darwin’s signature claim about human and animal psychology. Call the claim the degree of difference thesis: There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is immense…Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree not kind. (Darwin [1879] 2004, p. 151)

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In this passage Darwin at once draws attention to the similarities and the differences between the psychology of humans and other animals. In the animal rights literature, theorists have almost exclusively interpreted Darwin as emphasizing psychological continuity and his words have been invoked in the service of arguments for improving the ethical status of animals. The basic rationale is that if animals have the same kind of psychology, then they should have the same kind of status.

The Semantic Implications of Darwinism I think it is right, as far as ethics is concerned, to understand humans and animals as sufficiently similar and to point out that we have common origins. Darwin’s key insight was that if there are grounds for value in psychology, then it cannot be because we are made in the image of God, but must be on the basis of an evolved capacity—a capacity possessed by at least other mammals. But it is simply true that Darwin was also drawing attention to psychological differences between humans and animals. After all, he says the differences are “great” and “immense”; suggesting that were we to map psychology onto a continuum, the psychology of Homo sapiens would be at one point, and the psychology of others animals would be some distance away. The question arises: what are the implications of having Homo sapiens and animals from other species on the same continuum yet some distance apart? Can the purportedly great differences in mind be passed over as if they have no theoretical impact at all? After all, a difference of degree is still a difference. If, as Darwin claims, the differences between human and animal minds differ “immensely”, albeit by degree, then there must be variation across species in the experience of aversive phenomenology and the capacity for higher-order thought. If there was no variation, then there would be no grounds for positioning humans and animals some distance apart on the psychology continuum. This variation suggests that however sentience is defined, when the term appears in an argument for animal rights its meaning will be ambiguous. Does the term refer to the sentience of Homo sapiens or the sentience of animals? The ambiguity will serve to weaken the logical connection between premises

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and conclusion. The relationship of support necessary to establish the conclusion can only be preserved by papering over the gap that Darwin identified.

Objections It might be objected that sentience in P1 refers exclusively to the sentience of nonhuman animals and, therefore, the argument is in fact valid. In line with this objection, when people reflect upon the normative significance of sentience, their minds are drawn exclusively to the sentience of nonhuman animals. To use a formal expression, the term sentience in P1 connotes the sentience of animals—the same sense of the term that is connoted in P2. But the normative significance of sentience was established prior to the extension of rights theory to animals, which means it is more likely that sentience in P1 refers to the sentience of Homo sapiens. This claim can be defended in two ways. First, consider that the philosophical subfield, animal ethics, is also widely known as moral extensionism. Moral extensionism is the extension of existing or established theory to animals, and the focus of existing theory is Homo sapiens. After all, it is a familiar refrain among animal studies scholars that orthodox animal ethics theory has a humanist or anthropocentric conceptual inheritance. Secondly, the psychological genesis of the normative significance of sentience proceeds via a recognition of one’s own sentience, then recognition of the sentience of one’s significant others, then to similarly constituted others and then, finally, to nonhuman animals. Indeed, animal ethics can be understood as an attempt to establish that nonhuman mammals are relevantly similarly constituted. But people don’t start out valuing animals from the earliest stages of moral development; instead, a recognition of animals as relevantly similar marks a later phase of development.7 A further objection is that Darwin’s claim refers explicitly to psychology in a broad sense whereas the basic animal rights argument refers to sentience in particular. In line with the objection, the sentience of Homo sapiens and nonhuman animals is sufficiently similar even though psychology may admit of degree.

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But such an objection overlooks how evolution works as, as Dennett (1995) puts it, universal acid: “[I]t eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways” (p. 63). In other words, you cannot have just an element of psychology that remains static while psychology itself admits of degree. So much would amount to positing fixed essences at a time when essences are ruled inadmissible. Let’s assume, for the purposes of the argument, that sentience in P1 does refer explicitly to the sentience of nonhuman animals. If it was the case that sentience in P1 meant the sentience of nonhuman animals, then the basic animal rights argument would indeed by valid. But notice then that the difference of degree thesis would restrict the scope of the standard argument for animal rights to sentient nonhuman animals only, and proponents of animal rights would need an altogether distinct argument to the conclusion that Homo sapiens have rights. So much would undermine the shibboleth of animal rights theory that Darwinism was an equalizing project that brought down barriers between humans and other species. If proponents of animal rights theory need two distinct arguments to establish the rights of all sentient animals (human and nonhuman) then this suggests the barriers are still in place.

The Placement Problem for Animal Rights Theory The second problem facing animal rights theory is the so-called placement problem (Jackson 1998; Macarthur and Price 2007, p. 93; Macarthur 2010, 2018; Price 2013, p. 6). The placement problem is a distinctly metaphilosophical problem concerning the underlying metaphysical commitments implicit in the concept of value within animal rights theory. While the value is expressly referred to by Tom Regan ([1983] 2004) and Gary Francione (2000) as inherent value, the problem I aim to draw attention to is with the notion of value itself.8 Value

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does not readily find a place within a scientific account of the world.9 Like the equivocation problem, the placement problem weighs heavily upon animal rights theory in so far as it presupposes that value is a bona fide feature of the world derived in some way from a suite of psychological capacities.10 Pragmatist philosopher, Huw Price, lays the blame for placement problems at a form of philosophical naturalism he calls, object naturalism. Naturalism is a metaphysical and epistemological worldview that, as Price (2013) explains “exists in both ontological and epistemological keys. As an ontological doctrine, it is the view that in some important sense, all there is is the world studied by science. As an epistemological doctrine, it is the view that all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge (p. 4).” Representationalism is a key presupposition of object naturalism. Recall from the discussion in Chapter 3, representationalism is a theory about the function of language whereby words are understood as standing for objects in the world. Sentences, in turn, stand in a representational relationship to the world. In line with representationalism, the sentence “The bottle is on the table” purports to describe a state of affairs that is in some sense external to the speaker. Explicable as a mental state in the mind of the speaker, the sentence is said to have a representational structure. In effect, the idea is the speaker has in her head a mental state that purports to represent the world. When the world corresponds to the state, the speaker’s mind is said to mirror nature and, thereby, she is said to be in possession of knowledge. What is distinctive about object naturalism, Price claims, is its philosophical orientation towards objects and their properties. We first encountered this object-focused orientation in Chapter 2.11 Scientific and theoretical hedonists alike presuppose that inquiry into welfare is an exercise in studying an object, the animal, and a property, its welfare. Likewise, in this chapter we have been examining animal rights theory and it too presupposes that inquiry is about an object and its properties; in this case, an animal and sentience or inherent value. But neopragmatists argue that this orientation towards objects and their properties is just an option and only one way of making sense of the world. Instead, neopragmatists like Price (2013) argue, we could just as readily start

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with inquirers themselves, more specifically, with speakers and the terms they use. On one possible view, the starting point is the object itself. We are simply acquainted with X and…come to wonder how this thing-with-whichwe-are-acquainted could be the kind of thing studied by science. On the other possible view, the starting point lies in human linguistic practices, broadly construed. Roughly, we note that humans (ourselves or others) employ the term X in language, or the concept X in thought…and we come to wonder how what these speakers are thereby talking or thinking about could be the kind of thing studied by science. (p. 7)

In line with the linguistic orientation, which Price calls subject naturalism, concepts like value, meaning, truth, and causation are simply terms employed by [human] animals to meet their needs. No place in an ontological scheme of things need to be found for such items; instead, in line with subject naturalism, all that needs to be done is to explain the usage of the terms. The expressivist theory outlined in the last chapter is an example of a subject naturalist approach. Recall that, in line with expressivism, metaphysically contentious items like dignity, respect and inherent value are explained as the expression of noncognitive mental states such as emotions or attitudes. When such concepts are understood simply as the terms people use to express themselves rather than as objects in the world, there is no scope for accusing the person of changing the subject. Given the ubiquity of philosophical realism and the important place that science occupies in the real world, placement problems are very common; it’s just that people are too busy getting on with the business of living to see how their assumptions may be informed by an unscientific worldview. The neopragmatist points out that when inquiry begins with an object-focused orientation, it is difficult to see how meaning and truth could find a place in a naturalistic worldview. What is meaning exactly? What kind of an object is truth? People go about their lives assuming these questions have straight forward answers. But as Price says, “The difficulties stem from the fact that in many interesting cases it is hard to see what natural facts we could be talking about.”12

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The Metaphysics of Inherent Value As the discussion of the equivocation problem above made plain, Darwinism occupies an important place in animal rights theory. Indeed, some theorists have argued that the extension of morality to animals is a logical implication of Darwinian theory (Rachels 1990).13 But, as a number of commentators have pointed out (Ayer 1946; Mackie 1977), it is difficult to fit the concept of value in a scientific picture of the world. Intuitively, value seems very different to shape, texture or height, and it is more contentious to call something good or bad than to call it round or plastic. If value is to be an irreducibly abstract concept, like numbers (Miller 2016), then a reasonable question to ask is how do we know when we come across it, and how can we have knowledge of it? We can certainly have knowledge of what people think value is (Jackson 1998), but this is very different to having knowledge of value conceived as a bona fide natural property of the world inhering in psychologically complex individuals. In order to fit into a scientific picture informed by Darwinian ideas, the signature animal rights concept, inherent value, must be a property of an animal no less explicable than weight or bodily temperature. Regan’s derivation of inherent value from a purportedly unproblematic naturalistic basis, psychology, can be seen as an attempt at finding inherent value a place in a worldview consistent with science and Darwinian naturalism. The concern, however, is that if, as Regan suggests, we are to understand such a property as supervening upon natural properties like the so-called subject-of-a-life capacities or, simply, sentience, then the subsequent metaphysical picture will leave animal rights theory with a mysterious theoretical underpinning. After all, Regan (2004, p. xvii) claims that inherent value is a categorical property, meaning that it is all or nothing—an individual either has inherent value or they don’t, and all who possess inherent value possess it equally. But, all natural properties upon which inherent value may supervene admit of degree. In other words, there can be no naturalistic basis for the equality of inherent value. Consider the capacities Regan (2004) identifies as the basis of inherent value:

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Individuals are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. Those who satisfy the subject-of-a-life criterion themselves have a distinctive kind of value – inherent value – and are not to be viewed or treated as mere receptacles. (p. 243)

Each of these capacities is the product of evolution, more specifically, the upshot of the complexity of the evolved psychological capacities of individual mammals. The orthodox view in evolutionary biology, however, points to there being significant difference in psychological complexity between individuals within the same species and, indeed, within the same populations. The variation is a product of what’s known as genomic plasticity or, more commonly, adaptive variation. Okasha (2002) attests to the importance of plasticity for evolution: Darwinism leads us to expect variation with respect to all organismic traits, morphological, physiological, behavioural and genetic. For genetically based phenotypic variation is essential to the operation of natural selection. If selection is to cause a species to evolve adaptations, and eventually to evolve into different species, as Darwinian theory asserts, then there must be variation within the species for selection to operate on. Intra-specific variation with respect to all organismic traits, and thus the lack of species specific essences, is fundamental to the Darwinian explanation of organic diversity. (p. 197)14

Okasha’s point is that there is nothing fixed inside us that could play the role of an invariable essence upon which the equality of inherent value could be grounded. Sarah is more psychologically complex than Jane, who is more psychologically complex than George. The natural variation entails that if equality of value is to have a place in ethical theory, then its grounds must be what philosophers call non-natural or

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supernatural.15 Regan (2004) himself acknowledges that inherent value is a contentious concept: While an ethical theory would be simpler if it could dispense with this kind of value, simplicity isn’t everything; in order to have the best theory all considered, I argue that we must postulate inherent value. (p. xvii)

But if there is no naturalistic basis for inherent value, where does that leave animal rights theory? I have elsewhere drawn attention to how animal rights philosophy plays the role of a religion in the lives of committed activists (Hadley 2017). Perhaps animal rights theory having a quasi-religious metaphysical underpinning is entirely to be expected? Does it really matter if the central animal rights value, inherent value, is logically of a piece with a religious value like sanctity or made-in-the-image-of-God-ness?

Animal Rights Theory and Quietism A neopragmatist theory of animal rights avoids such awkward questions. No reference to the metaphysical underpinning of theory need be made when all that is required is to explain the usage of terms.16 In line with neopragmatism, “The key claim is that there is a rich plurality of kinds of words and concepts, and that the best way to understand a particular word or the concept it expresses is not by asking what it stands for but by asking what it does for us in the various conceptually infused practices in which humans engage” (Chrisman 2017, p. 111). In other words, the neopragmatist simply describes how the term is used by people and doesn’t worry about the nature of the concept itself. Indeed, for the neopragmatist, whether a person’s commitment to animal rights involves a commitment to quasi-religious values, and whether, unbeknownst to them, people share a metaphysical worldview of a kind similar to an established religion, is solely a matter of curiosity. Neopragmatists are quietist about the metaphysics of animal rights because in liberal democracies, under the auspices of the expressivist theory of deliberation, all worldviews are in a sense equal as potential

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vocabularies of resonance. Some will resonate, some will fall flat. It is up to citizens to be strategic about how they present their views and they must accept the consequences for their part in communicating messages that either succeed or fail to resonate. Some may question how neopragmatism can be quietist about metaphysics when the placement problem is offered as part of the case in support of animal neopragmatism. But recall the methodological approach of this chapter. My aim was to argue from a position in which the presuppositions and norms of philosophical realism were taken for granted. The three Rs of realism (representationalism, rationalism and [moral] realism) are unquestioned background framing assumptions of animal rights theory. My point was to show it is the foundational assumptions of animal rights theory itself that are responsible for its logical and metaphysical flaws. To avoid the problems requires moving away from philosophical realism to a theoretical approach that eschews getting the world right and giving once and for all answers.17

Conclusion It is a commonplace in scientific circles, and within the field of mainstream animal rights philosophy, to accept Darwin’s claim that human and animal mental states differ only be degree. Implicit in Darwin’s claim is acknowledgement that there remains variation between human and animal mental states. The question, then, is what are the downstream effects of this acknowledged variation? It is common for philosophers to suggest that the variation results in a difference in the interests or rights that can be meaningfully predicated to humans and animals. But why ignore the implications of Darwin’s claim for the meaning of terms used in speaking about interests and rights? The neopragmatist view is that the semantic implications of Darwin’s signature claim have been overlooked and a thorough appreciation of them motivates a move away from theorising about animals in the usual representational fashion. Given it is widely acknowledged that human and animal mental states differ by degree, the extension of terms such as interests, rights,

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intrinsic value, dignity and respect to animals raises the specter that the meaning of the terms ought to be different when applied to animals as opposed to when applied to persons. A person working their way through the basic animal rights argument might accept a premise that states that sentience is sufficient for rights, and accept another premise that animals are sentient, yet reject the conclusion animals ought to have rights on the grounds that, because the meaning of the term sentience in the first and second premises is ambiguous, the argument is fallacious. For animal rights theory, a reductive theory that identifies inherent value with a suite of psychological capacities, the metaphysical implications of Darwinism are no less clear and striking than the logical implications: the purported equality of value above the threshold level of complexity marking the boundary between persons and animals is at odds with the basic mechanics of evolution. Simply put, the capacities upon which inherent value purportedly derives admit of degree above the threshold at which proponents of animal rights theory claim inherent value is categorical. The implication is that at the metalevel animal rights theory yields a metaphysical picture at odds with Darwinian naturalism and in line with a religious world-view.

Notes 1. With the exception of the specific criticisms I make about Regan’s concept of inherent value, whether the connection between psychology and value is expressed in terms of worth, importance, considerability, status, intrinsic value, or inherent value is irrelevant for my purposes; it is the purported connection between an evaluative property and a natural property that is under scrutiny. 2. A nonperson is a sentient individual that lacks higher-order psychological capacities such as an ability to reason and reflect upon one’s own mental states. 3. The rejection of realism excludes theories that may be commonly labelled animal rights theory such as critical animal studies and continental philosophy theories in which the underlying metaethical

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commitments remain opaque. While Peter Singer has been labelled a noncongnitivist (see Jackson 1999; Huemer 2009), his commitment to rational argument and his identification of sentience as necessary for interests and, thereby, moral considerability, exposes him to the equivocation problem. 4. My argument in this section is influenced by the argument made by Peter K. McInerney (1990) against the conservative argument against abortion. 5. Even a staunch conservative, assuming they accept the norms of rationalism, would accept that P2 is false if human being means an individual with a sophisticated psychology. 6. Abortion, voluntary euthanasia and the unintended killing of civilians in a supposedly just war being obvious examples. 7. See Kohlberg (1969). Kohlberg claims that moral development is a gradual process moving from self-interested behaviour shaped by operant conditioning in early infancy, to an acceptance, motivated by a need for peer approval, of conventional morality, and then, finally, to principled behaviour that is other-regarding and may be frequently at odds with conventional morality. 8. The derivation of value from psychology has been called moral individualism (Rachels 1990; McMahan 2005) and, elsewhere, the psychological theory of intrinsic value (Agar 2001). In ‘A metalevel problem for animal rights theory’ I discuss how the derivation of value from psychology leaves animal rights theory with an inconsistent triad problem (Hadley 2015). 9. In his discussion of the placement problem, Macarthur (2010, p. 125) analyses ‘scientific’ in terms of scientific naturalism, which is presented as a commitment to (1) an ontological claim: “the only things that there are in the world are those things presupposed or posited by the successful sciences”, and (2) a methodological claim: “the only genuine and irreducible form of knowledge or understanding is that resulting from the methods of inquiry of the successful sciences”. Macarthur identifies physics, biology, chemistry and behavioural psychology as the paradigmatic natural sciences. 10. The placement problem applies irrespective of whether the precise relation between inherent value and the subjects-of-a-life properties is understood as reductive (natural, supernatural or non-natural), supervenient (strong or weak) or irreducible (natural, supernatural or nonnatural).

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11. Object naturalism is a methodological corollary of the view I called philosophical realism. 12. As well as meaning and truth, neopragmatists draw attention to numbers, value, reasons, mathematical facts, causation and kinds of modality such as necessity and contingency (see Price 2013, p. 5; Macarthur 2010). 13. Scientific naturalism is here being contrasted with a metaphysical worldview known as supernaturalism in which humans and nonhuman mammals are conceived as fundamentally different kinds of animals. 14. See also the discussion in Elliott Sober (2009, pp. 309–312). 15. Nonnaturalism is the view that there are entities in the world that are neither natural nor supernatural. In line with a view attributed to G.E. Moore ([1903] 1993), we can have knowledge of these entities through intuition. Supernaturalism is the term used to refer to metaphysical theories informed by religious ideas. In line with supernaturalism, ethical properties like good, bad, right and wrong are analysed in terms of God’s approval or disapproval. To illustrate: a claim such as ‘Giving to charity is good’ means ‘Giving to charity is approved of by God.’ 16. This is an approach to metaphysics known as metaphysical quietism. See Macarthur and Price (2007). 17. Some theorists have suggested that placement problems can be avoided by positioning theory against the background of more liberal forms of naturalism. The claim is that so-called Liberal Naturalism can purportedly accommodate values while at the same time maintaining a commitment to ‘basic’ naturalistic principles (see Macarthur 2010, 2018; Reynolds 2019).

References Agar, Nicholas. 2001. Life’s intrinsic value: Science, ethics and nature. New York: Columbia University Press. Ayer, Alfred. J. [1936] 1946. Language, truth and logic, 2nd ed. London: Gollancz. Chrisman, Michael. 2017. What is this thing called metaethics? London: Routledge. Darwin, Charles. [1879] 2004. The descent of man, 2nd ed. London: Penguin Classics.

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Dennett, Daniel. 1995. Darwin’s dangerous idea. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks. Francione, Gary. 2000. Introduction to animal rights: Your child or the dog. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hadley, John. 2015. A metalevel problem for animal rights theory. In Animal ethics and philosophy: Questioning the orthodoxy, ed. Elisa Aaltola and John Hadley, 15–30. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Hadley, John. 2017. Religiosity and public reason: The case of direct action animal rights advocacy. Res Publica 23 (3): 299–312. Huemer, Michael. 2009. Singer’s unstable metaethics. In Peter Singer under fire: The moral iconoclast faces his critics, ed. Jeffery A. Schaler, 359–380. Chicago: Open Court. Jackson, Frank. 1998. From metaphysics to ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Frank. 1999. Noncognitivism, validity and conditionals. In Singer and his critics, ed. Dale Jamieson, 18–37. Oxford: Blackwell. Kohlberg, L. 1969. Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In Handbook of socialization theory and research, ed. D.A. Goslin. Chicago: Rand McNally. Macarthur, David, and Huw Price. 2007. Pragmatism, quasi-realism and the global challenge. In New pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak, 91–121. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Macarthur, David. 2010. Taking the human sciences seriously. In Naturalism and normativity, ed. Mario De Cano and David Macarthur, 123–141. New York: Columbia University Press. Macarthur, David. 2018. Liberal naturalism and the scientific image of the world. Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1484006. Mackie, John. L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing right and wrong. New York: Penguin. McInerney, Peter K. 1990. Does a fetus already have a future-like-ours? Journal of Philosophy 87 (5): 264–268. McMahan, Jeff. 2005. Our fellow creatures. Journal of Ethics 9 (3–4): 355–380. Miller, Kristie. 2016. What is metaphysics? In What is this thing called philosophy? ed. Duncan Pritchard, 195–209. Oxon: Routledge. Moore, George Edward. [1903] 1993. Principia ethica, rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Okasha, Samir. 2002. Darwinian metaphysics: Species and the question of essentialism. Synthese 131: 191–213.

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Price, Huw. 2013. Expressivism, pragmatism and representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rachels, James. 1990. Created from animals: The moral implications of Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Regan, Tom. [1983] 2004. The case for animal rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reynolds, Jack. 2019. Temporal naturalism: Reconciling the “4Ms” and points of view within a robust liberal naturalism. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09613-w. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sober, Elliott. 2009. Metaphysical and epistemological issues in modern Darwinian theory. In The Cambridge companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 302–322. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7 Objections to Animal Neopragmatism

In this chapter, I address two objections to animal neopragmatism. The first concerns pragmatism itself and centres upon objectivity, and whether pragmatism entails that there are no standards against which to judge rival claims in any field of inquiry.1 The objection is: if there are no epistemic standards, then any claim is as true or as correct as any other. Call this objection the anything goes objection. The second objection relates to neopragmatism in particular and whether it fails on its own pragmatic terms to make a practical difference to how debate about animal protection is conducted in the real world. In line with this objection, whether speech is viewed in realist or expressivist terms, debate about animal protection is the same—in practice, all the stakeholders will continue to argue in familiar object naturalist terms about animals and their properties. The first response is to argue that the objector overstates the worry over objectivity and epistemic relativism. Below, I will introduce the reader to two different epistemic standards against which to judge the merits of deliberative contributions. The first is the regulative ­assumption view of truth associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, and the second is known as the warranted assertibility theory of justification. © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_7

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The warranted assertibility theory is associated with William James and Richard Rorty. In line with the warranted assertibility view, the aim of inquiry is to find adequate justification for the claim under scrutiny. Critics of the expressivist theory of deliberation outlined in Chapter 5 may argue that the best neopragmatism has to offer in terms of objectivity is a concept of adequate justification whereby adequacy is measured in terms of resonance. The response to the second objection is to bite the bullet and concede that neopragmatism leaves the animal protection landscape substantially unchanged, but to emphasise that it was always intended to be ameliorative rather than revolutionary. That said, to conclude, I discuss institutional animal ethics committees and show how neopragmatism affords a new lens through which to describe the mechanics of animal-related public deliberation. Before I explain the Peircean view, however, it will be helpful to reiterate the realist position which stands as the rival view and from which direction the objection is presented. The reiteration will serve to show that while realism and Peircean pragmatism may conceptualize truth very differently; the two views are substantially similar in practice. In each case, truth is an aim of inquiry, and inquirers are conceived as subject to doubts and responsive to evidence.

Philosophical Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth Recall the basic tenets of philosophical realism: representationalism, rationalism and [moral] realism. I referred to these tenets as the three-Rs of realism. An important corollary of representationalism is the view of truth as correspondence with an external reality. What this means is that a statement is true if facts in the world, independent of the speaker, correspond to what the speaker claims. This is the conception of truth that Rorty (1979) famously described as the mirror of nature view. The idea being that knowledge is acquired when the mind of an inquirer resembles a mirror of reality. A mirror in the sense that the belief expressed

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by the sentence is true and, thereby, accurate, because the statement it expresses corresponds with a state of affairs in the world. The belief is a metaphorical mirror of nature. To illustrate: Imagine that someone claims, “Green Book won the Academy Award for best picture”. In line with representationalism, the person is making a claim about a state of affairs in the world and the terms in the sentence connect up to objects in the world. The claim will be true if in fact the world corresponds with it, that is, if in fact Green Book did win the Oscar for best film. In turn, the claim will be false if Bohemian Rhapsody won the Oscar for best film. Notice that, in line with representationalism, it is the correspondence relation between words and the world that secures the truth of the claim. It is a basic tenet of realism that inquirers respect the correspondence relation and they see themselves as constrained by it. This is what it means for someone to be answerable to the world. The realist concedes that a person may be happier or richer ignoring the fact of correspondence, but only believing in it for its own sake can put someone in a position to be wiser. Recall also that moral realism is the idea that ethical claims are substantially no different to claims about the Academy Awards. In line with realism, ethical claims can be true or false in line with the relation of correspondence. It is the metaphilosophical strategy of reductionism that puts the realist in a position to claim that ethical statements are truth-apt. Reductionism is a process by which ethical terms are given nonethical analyses. With a reduction in place, the meaning of a statement changes in such a way as its truth value can be investigated by empirical means. To illustrate: Imagine that someone claims, “De-horning cattle without anaesthetic is wrong.” In line with representationalism, the person is making a claim about a state of affairs in the world and the terms in the sentence connect up to objects in the world. In this case, the object is the act of dehorning cattle without pain relief. The claim to be evaluated is whether the action has the property of wrongness inhering in it. Imagine now that the person who made the claim is a scientific hedonist. A scientific hedonist is someone who analyses wrongness, firstly, in line with hedonism, in terms of pain and suffering and, secondly, in line with welfare science, in terms of a physiological indicator for pain, say,

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elevated cortisone levels. With both the hedonistic and scientific reduction of the ethical term in place, the meaning of the statement is something like: De-horning cattle without anaesthetic causes elevated cortisone.

With the hybrid science-hedonism reduction in place, and the resultant meaning thereby operative, the statement is now truth-apt and it can be determined by empirical means whether in fact dehorning cattle without anaesthetic is wrong. If the cortisone levels of cattle are, in fact, elevated when their horns are removed without anaesthetic, then the statement will be true and the action will qualify as wrong.

Peircean Truth: Truth as a Regulative Assumption Truth is also an important aim of inquiry for certain pragmatists. But pragmatists are not concerned with truth for its own sake, but rather tie its importance to human purposes (Bacon 2012, p. 6; Misak 2013, p. 4). In contrast to realists, pragmatists reject the basic tenet of realism that the truth of a claim is secured by the relation of correspondence between words and the world. Correspondence itself is an empty notion and, according to pragmatists, it is implausible to predicate to a person a desire to secure correspondence between one’s beliefs and an external reality; at least if the person is to be conceptualised in a realistic way. Indeed, Rorty (1991) once suggested that respect for the notion of truth as correspondence, and objectivity more broadly, are quasi-religious impulses and the vestiges of a religious culture now past: In our culture, the notions of “science,” “rationality,” “objectivity,” and “truth” are bound up with one another. Science is thought of as offering “hard,” “objective” truth: truth as correspondence to reality, the only sort of truth worthy of the name…We tend to identify seeking “objective truth” with “using reason,” and so we think of the natural sciences as paradigms of rationality. We also think of rationality as a matter of following

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procedures laid down in advance, of being “methodical.” So we tend to use “methodical,” “rational,” “scientific,” and “objective” as synonyms. Worries about “cognitive status” and “objectivity” are characteristic of a secularized culture in which the scientist replaces the priest. The scientist is now seen as the person who keeps humanity in touch with something beyond itself…Truth is now thought of as the only point at which human beings are responsible to something nonhuman. (p. 35)2

Rorty’s signature hyperbole aside, his basic point was that securing correspondence between one’s beliefs and the world may be a goal attractive to someone inculcated in the disciplinary customs of science and philosophy, but to the ordinary person the notion can have little pull. Ordinary people may unthinkingly presuppose a concept of truth something like truth as it is cast in the correspondence theory, and they may believe what they say is true and desire to be correct in what they say, but to suggest they value objectivity and correspondence for its own sake is fanciful. Nevertheless, a concept of truth does find a place in pragmatist theory and it can be used as a measure to judge the respective merits of beliefs and the sentences they express. But it is true that pragmatists regard truth as a human creation (Misak 2013, p. 231) and, as such, its hold over people will be conditional upon its relevance for their specific purposes. But that said, as Peirce suggested, agents will still feel answerable to a standard that is in a sense external to them, in so far as they recognize that the merits of any claim must be tested against some measure other than their own self-interest (Bacon 2012, p. 34). The key question, however, is whether such a conception of truth can yield a standard of evaluation robust enough to settle the anxiety over objectivity that motivates the proponent of the anything goes objection. Recall that pragmatism is a philosophy that aspires to have a practical impact (Putnam 2004, p. 28; Malachowski 2010, p. 18). It starts where we are, that is, with an ostensibly descriptive picture of people and the communities of inquiry within which they grapple with problems.3 Pragmatists reject the lofty ideal from Plato that inquiring is a pursuit for the virtuous eager to make their way out of the epistemic darkness. Consider Misak’s characterisation of the agent at the heart of Peirce’s theory of truth:

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An inquirer has a body of settled beliefs, which are in fact not doubted. Such beliefs take a variety of forms: they may be empirically confirmed beliefs; regulative assumptions that act as working hypotheses in the business of life; or even deeply engrained beliefs whose origins are intangible. When something happens to throw a belief in doubt, the inquirer struggles to escape that unhappy state. Inquiry is the struggle to regain belief. It is ignited by a doubt and ceases only when a new belief or habit of expectation is re-established. (2013, p. 33)

What Misak illustrates is that pragmatists cast inquirers as real people people neither especially concerned with acquiring knowledge nor subject to exaggerated paper or armchair doubts. Inquirers are neither perfectly rational nor especially self-aware, and they have comparatively modest epistemic ambitions. In line with pragmatism, what gets a person’s epistemic juices flowing, so to speak, is the business of living. It is to be expected, then, that the central actor in pragmatist epistemology is an agent motivated by a self-interested concern to be rid of doubt. Doubt, yes, but more often simply a nagging concern about some practice, issue or question. For the pragmatist, it is bringing an end to doubt—the settling of belief—that is the aim of philosophical inquiry (Peirce [1877] 1997, p. 13; Bacon 2012, p. 21). In line with the Peircean view of truth, the truth of a claim is judged on the basis of whether it can put paid to the doubts of inquirers. Misak (2013) explains the Peircean view, A true belief is such that it would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could into the matter. A true belief is such that, no matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, it would not be overturned by recalcitrant experience and argument. (2013, p. 37)

For the Peircean, truth is understood in terms of the hypothetical or ideal end point of inquiry. In fact, calling it an ideal end point makes it seem more mysterious than it need be. In so far as we have settled beliefs about anything, then we have had practical experience with Peircean end points and reveal ourselves to be familiar with the Peircean view of truth. We hold most of our beliefs as true most of the time

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because they shape our habits of expectation.4 Truth, in other words, acts in the background as a regulative assumption of our lives. Thinking of it as end point of inquiry is just to draw attention to how we want to be rid of the doubts that give rise to inquiry so we can get on with our projects. In line with Peircean pragmatism, truth is something we need to make sense of common sense ideas like argument, debate, and making progress on an issue (Legg and Hookway 2019). As Price (2003) puts it: Without truth, the wheels of argument do not engage; disagreements slide past one another. This is true of disagreement about any matter whatsoever…If we didn’t have truth, in other words, we simply couldn’t argue… For we could be aware that we have different opinions…without that difference seeming to matter. (pp. 185–186)

Notice how Price draws attention to the practice-based orientation of the pragmatist theory of truth. In line with pragmatism, there is no commitment to the notion of correspondence and the related normative ideal that inquirers are answerable to a principle of fidelity to nature; rather, it is the claim that a view of truth is needed to make sense of what we already do. Reason-giving is part and parcel of life in a community of inquiry (Misak 2013, p. 37) and truth as the end point of doubt-driven inquiry is a basic presupposition of common sense thinking. Why would anyone debate questions and raise issues if they believed a satisfactory conclusion was impossible? In effect, inquirers are to ask themselves: does the claim or theory under scrutiny address the relevant concern in a helpful way? Helpful in this case means helping to put paid to the relevant doubt that gave rise to inquiry in the first place.

Coercion and Deception A realist may point out, however, that doubts can be laid to rest in problematic ways (Bacon 2012, p. 22). Imagine someone with Peircean doubt, say, a doctor that is questioning whether taking large doses of vitamin B3 reduces the risk of skin cancer. Imagine further an unscrupulous vitamin salesman deceives the doctor into believing that B3 is

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effective by deliberatively withholding information about the sample size in a relevant study. The doctor’s belief in the efficacy of B3 is settled and her doubt is dispelled. But let’s assume that were she to know that the sample size was very small, her doubts about the efficacy of B3 would’ve remained. Is this case a problem for the Peircean view of truth? After all, the doctor’s initial doubts have been settled by the withholding of information. Are we to accept that her belief in the efficacy of B3 is true? The standard response from pragmatists is to cite the special role that Peirce reserved for the methods of science (Bacon 2012, p. 23; Misak 2013, p. 43). As Peirce himself said, To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing human, but by some external permanency—by something upon which our thinking has no effect…It must be something which affects, or might affect, every man. And, though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science. (Peirce [1877] 1997, p. 21)

For Peirce, then, the model for a community of inquiry is scientific inquiry and thus the end point of such an inquiry must be truth as it is understood in the context of scientific inquiry. In that case, the realist’s objection misses the mark because the discussion between the doctor and the vitamin salesman was a very poor example of an inquiry. Had the inquiry been conducted in accord with the methods of science, then presumably the doctor’s doubts would’ve remained and the inquiry would’ve failed to reach the truth-marking end point. Hypothesis testing is driven by doubts, and if doubt remains then the inquiry must be taken up another day, building upon the findings hitherto produced. Peircean truth is, like the truths of science, a version of fallibilism (Putnam 2004; Misak 2013; Legg and Hookway 2019), in the sense that truths are in place so long as beliefs are settled, but all claims are ultimately revisable in response to new evidence. As Putnam (2004) puts the point, “philosophies arise out of time-bound reactions

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to specific problems faced by human beings in given cultural circumstances…Our task is not to achieve “immortality” (p. 31).

Peircean Truth and Animal Neopragmatism Is a Peircean account of truth open to a proponent of the kind of neopragmatism developed in this book? Recall that the neopragmatist theory outlined herein consists of two key elements: relational hedonism and expressivism. Relational hedonism is a theory of concern for pain and a related claim about the proper content of welfare policy in liberal democracies. Expressivism is an anti-representational theory about the usage of nonhedonistic terms like dignity, respect and naturalness. The claim is that the terms express the attitudes of the speaker. A corollary of these two elements is a theory of deliberation whereby the aim is to achieve agreement or resonance. If these are the central elements of neopragmatism, then the Peircean view is neither an especially good nor bad fit. It is a small step from the aim of having one’s view resonate with others to the aim of settling doubt-driven belief in a community of inquirers. In each case, inquiry has an end point, and proximity to the end point can be used as grounds for evaluating the merits of individual contributions to the inquiry. The end point of the Peircean theory is the settling of belief; the end point of the neopragmatic theory is the achieving of resonance. Perhaps the Peircean view affords a more extensive picture of the epistemic commitments of the person in so far as we are told agents are committed to the methods of science; but, at the end of the day, this difference is trifling because scientific evidence is admissible evidence in neopragmatic deliberation, and the Peircean concept of science is very broad, stretching into the familiar methods of ethical reasoning (Bacon 2012, p. 166). It is incumbent on the doctor in the vitamin B3 case described above to be diligent and check the credibility of the evidence presented by others. While it is true that, in line with neopragmatism, such an obligation is ostensibly a prudential one; over time a prudential obligation will function like a regulative ideal and thus play the same role in deliberation and the production of knowledge as a normative obligation under realism. However far removed the

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neopragmatist theory may be from realism, to suggest that it entails that any contribution to inquiry is as good as any other is an overstatement.

The Warranted Assertibility View A second response to the worry over objectivity in neopragmatic theory is to downplay the importance of truth in philosophical inquiry and to stress instead an alternative value such as consensus or solidarity. This is an approach to truth associated with William James and, more recently, Richard Rorty (1989, 1991). At its heart is a picture of human beings as intimately connected in a shared life and answerable only to each other. Instead of inquirers being answerable to a nonhuman standard, in the sense of having a desire to get the world right for its own sake, people desire to win over their fellow inquirers or, as Rorty puts it, “to extend the reference of us as far as we can” (Rorty 1991, p. 23). In effect, in line with the James-Rorty view, justification or assertibility replaces truth as the central value of inquiry. The warranted assertibility view restricts the boundaries of the epistemic community from all human kind to the community of inquirers within which the person finds herself making a claim. The position is sometimes referred to as ethnocentrism or epistemological behaviourism (Gutting 2003, p. 44; Rorty 1979, p. 173), whereby the epistemic credibility of a theory or claim turns upon whether the theorist or speaker can get away with it, so to speak. In line with epistemological behaviourism, the key question for any inquirer is something like: “Can I get my fellow community members to put their hands in the air without getting laughed at, abused, shouted down, or run out of the meeting?” In the accompanying model of inquiry, the picture of the lone scientist bound by trans-cultural, trans-historical epistemic norms in search of “a special relation between beliefs and objects which will differentiate true from false beliefs” (Rorty 1991, p. 22) is replaced by a picture of an inquirer who regards the distinction between knowledge and opinion simply as marking “topics in which agreement is relatively easy to get and topics in which agreement is relatively hard to get” (Rorty 1991, p. 23).

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Can a theory in which objectivity and truth are either side-lined or reinterpreted as agreement, adequately respond to the anything goes objection? Logically, it is conceivable that a community of inquirers could agree on something that would be considered eccentric and unthinkable were the traditional standards of realism in place. But, is the logical possibility of such an agreement enough to undermine the approach when it has obvious advantages? A very inclusive model of inquiry is a corollary of the warranted assertibility theory of justification. A person unschooled in the methods of the natural sciences and logic can still get a seat at the inquiry; one just has to be motivated to participate. While it is true that certain capacities deemed inadmissible under a realist conception of inquiry, such as rhetoric and humour, may be legitimate forms of knowledge exchange in the warranted assertibility theory, this is just to acknowledge that they invariably shape the decisions of real people in actual deliberative contexts. What is the point of excluding some parts of human experience if they are obviously operative in the business of life? It is the distinctive pragmatic concern to have theory make a practical difference in the lives of real people (Legg and Hookway 2019), that finds the warranted assertibility view purchasing inclusiveness, and a more realistic picture of inquiry, at the expense of potential theoretical embarrassment.

The No Practical Difference Objection The final objection to address is that animal neopragmatism will have no practical impact. The objection is: expressivism is a metalevel thesis about the function of language and unlikely to influence a person’s choice of words in practice. Therefore, irrespective of whether language is understood in line with realism or expressivism, public deliberation about animal protection will continue in the familiar object naturalist terms. Recall that object naturalism is the metaphilosophical perspective from which inquiry proceeds by conceiving of the world as consisting of objects and their properties (Price 2013). A key tenet of object naturalism is the view of knowledge as accurate representation. In line with an object naturalist approach, welfare

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questions have once and for all answers to be determined by studying an animal and its properties. Is confining sows in stalls bad for welfare? Is using an animal as a studio guest on television bad for welfare? In line with object naturalism, such questions are scientific and their answers turns upon whether it can be established that the animals concerned are suffering in measurable ways. The first thing to say in response to the objection is to clarify just what is at stake. Unlike, say, utilitarianism or deontology, which are theories intended to guide human conduct; neopragmatism is a metaphilosophical theory that affords alternative descriptions of real world phenomena. Like any metaphilosophical theory, the potential practical significance of neopragmatism can only be judged by its scope and the conception of the person it presupposes. If a metalevel theory leaves out something fundamental or depicts people in an implausible way, then it cannot be expected to have any practical impact. But if all the important elements of the relevant phenomena find a place in the theory, and if people are cast in a realistic way, then the task of the theorist is done, and the theory can occupy a place on a metaphorical shelf ready to be taken up by thoughtful people who may be motivated to consider it. It is true that neopragmatism preserves the existing vocabulary of public deliberation. Whether dignity, respect and welfare are understood in line with realism or expressivism, a person will still draw upon these terms when they participate in debate by writing or speaking about animal-related issues. But, neopragmatism is an ameliorative theory that aims to move from where we are to a progressive destination; from the existing concern for measurable suffering to a recognition of dignity and respect. Neopragmatism affords a novel interpretive lens for reflective people. It is reasonable to suggest that, in so far as they communicate their experiences to others, a person using a neopragmatic lens will play a part promoting certain virtues throughout the political culture.5 If I can come to terms with the idea that my most important commitments in life are simply the product of contingent circumstance, and that when I make claims I am simply expressing my own opinions or emotions, then this puts me in a position to be more open-minded and tolerant of others.6 After all, if I don’t speak the truth, then neither do

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my interlocutors; and who am I to criticize the contingent origination of their desires when my own are likewise the product of contingent circumstance? Neopragmatism, then, creates the conditions for epistemic humility.7 An additional response to the objection is to further develop the description of the expressivist model of deliberation outlined in Chapter 5. I will set the discussion here against the background of the institutional animal ethics committee (AEC) system. An AEC is an appropriate illustrative example of the ameliorative impact of neopragmatism because it is a good likeness, so to speak, of the animal welfare policy development context and, what a Peircean pragmatist would call, a community of inquiry.

Institutional Animal Ethics Committees Institutional animal ethics committees play an influential role in the conduct of scientific research involving animals (Monamy 2000; Tjärnström et al. 2018). In many countries around the world, institutions that conduct research are required by law to have an AEC. Ordinarily, the AEC is required to assess a protocol against the standards laid down in animal research related legislation and codes of practice. For example, an important function of an AEC in Australia is to assess whether the so-called three-Rs of animal research: reduction, replacement and refinement are adequately promoted in the design of a research protocol.8 An AEC may decide to require a researcher to amend their protocol, say, by restricting the number of procedures performed on an animal. Other functions of an AEC include assessing adverse incident reports and protocol amendments, and conducting animal house inspections.9 The make-up of an AEC is reflective of the differences of opinion in wider society and this, purportedly, enhances the democratic legitimacy of the committee’s decisions (Monamy 2000).10 Generally speaking, the composition of an AEC includes research scientists, veterinarians, welfare representatives and lay people. While many AECs operate in collegial spirit and aim to make decisions on the basis of consensus, there

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is considerable scope within the AEC context for robust discussion and disagreement (Tjärnström et al. 2018). It is to be expected that committee members will hold different views about the legitimacy of using animals for biomedical research (Russell 2012). Some committee members may hold positions that are strongly anthropocentric; others may hold views more aligned with the philosophies of animal welfare or rights (Schuppli 2011, p. 416; Tjärnström et al. 2018). Instead of a disinterested concern for finding the truth, the committee’s role is to approve or amend research protocols in a spirit of common purpose. While discussion of the moral status of animals and the morality of using animals as a means may feature as part of committee deliberations on rare occasions; the AEC system proceeds under the assumption that a broadly welfarist philosophy is the correct ethical theory.11 Likewise, in line with the kind of neopragmatic theory of deliberation outlined in Chapter 5, there is an assumption that animal issues are invariably contested and that a difference of opinion exists in society. The realist framing assumption that one view is true or correct is left behind; instead, it is an open secret that deliberators will come to the table encumbered with their own contrasting views. Fish’s words ring true here, “Neither party reaches its conclusion by sifting the evidence on the way to determining the truth of the matter; rather, each begins with a firm conviction of what the truth of the matter is, and then from inside the lens of that conviction receives and evaluates (the shape of the evaluation is assured) the assertion of contrary truths” (2001, p. 51). Nevertheless, it remains the responsibility of AEC members to act under the assumption that their contributions to committee deliberations will be seriously considered. While it is true that neopragmatism places no obligation on the part of members to be active participants, the deliberative flexibility it affords provides a significant incentive. Deliberators may employ a range of strategies to win the support of their fellow AEC members. In line with a neopragmatic theory of deliberation, humour, graphic imagery, and rhetorical appeals are no less bona fide deliberative as empirical evidence or rational argument. Assuming they are of sound mind; it is reasonable to expect that an AEC member would wish to have their views understood by others. After all, for psychologically complex animals like Homo sapiens, being

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understood by others is close to a precondition for a meaningful life (Kauppinen 2016). In line with Wolf ’s (2010, 2016) theory of meaning in life, for example, service on an AEC can be understood as participation in something that is larger than oneself.12 Of course, there are no guarantees that people who find themselves in a community of inquiry like an AEC will be passionate enough to find the process as meaningful. But inertia on the part of community of inquiry members is as much an objection to a realist conception of deliberation as a neopragmatic conception.

Conclusion In this chapter, I offered a response to concerns about the objectivity or epistemic credibility of animal neopragmatism. The first response was to point out that pragmatism affords at least two standards for judging the merits of deliberative contributions. The first standard is the regulative assumption view of truth associated with Peirce. In line with this view, truth is understood as the ideal end-point of inquiry, and the aim of inquiry is to eliminate doubt by arriving at a settled belief. The second theory is the warranted assertibility view of justification associated with James and Rorty. In line with the warranted assertibility view, truth is replaced by justification—a person must be able to provide their fellow inquirers with considerations counting in favour of their view. It is fair to say that neopragmatism allows for inquirers to bring forth an extensive range of relevant considerations; and the requirement to justify one’s views should be understood as ultimately a prudential obligation arising from a desire to live a meaningful life.

Notes 1. Guignan and Hiley (2003) sum up the concern: “If there is no independent test of the accuracy of our beliefs, if there is no way to compare belief and object to see if they correspond, we have nowhere to turn for justification than to the ongoing practice of reason-giving and

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deliberation. Objects and their casual powers drop out as explanatorily useless” (p. 12). 2. See also Rorty (1979, p. 376). 3. Koopman (2009, 4) describes pragmatic inquiry as “meliorist cultural criticism” and “moving from here to there”. 4. Peirce ([1877] 1997) identified belief with habit: “The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our action. Doubt never has such an effect” (p. 13). 5. Legg and Hookway (2019) stress that epistemic virtues are an important element of pragmatist epistemology: “Pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well.” 6. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty (1989) argues that recognizing that one’s most cherished commitments are the product of contingent circumstance is a facilitating condition for greater solidarity with others. 7. Of course, neopragmatists must concede that there is no non-question begging argument for the claim that open-mindedness and tolerance are virtues, as opposed to vices. 8. In Australia, for example, an AEC must determine whether the research is conducted in accordance with the Australian Code of Practice for the Care of Animals Used in Biomedical Research—the three-Rs are a mandated value in the Code. 9. Adverse events include the unexpected death or escape of an animal. Amendments include increasing the number of animals used in a study and adding a new investigator to the research team. 10. The committee system is a corollary of the development of animal research legislation, which, generally speaking, develops in response to public outcry following media reporting (see Rollin 2006). 11. By ‘welfarist’ I mean to draw attention to the animal welfare ethic as opposed to welfare in the sense of the theory of well-being. In line with the animal welfare ethic, it is acceptable for human beings to use animals so long as pain is kept to a minimum (see Garner 2003, Chapter 5). 12. Wolf (2016) defines meaningfulness as “subjective attraction towards objective attractiveness” (p. 261). In other words, she argues that for a person’s life to be meaningful, they must be passionately engaged in an

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activity that is in some sense objectively good. She understands objectively valuable in a very pragmatic way. She says, “I expect that anything that a significant number of people have taken as valuable over a large span of time is valuable” (2016, p. 265).

References Bacon, Michael. 2012. Pragmatism: An introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fish, Stanley. 2001. Holocaust denial and academic freedom. Valapariso University Law Journal 35 (3): 499–524. Garner, Robert. 2003. A theory of justice for animals. Oxford: Oxford University Pres. Guignan, Charles, and David R. Hiley. 2003. Introduction: Richard Rorty and contemporary philosophy. In Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 1–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutting, Gary, 2003. Rorty’s critique of epistemology. In Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 41–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kauppinen, Antti. 2016. Meaningfulness. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of well-being, ed. Guy Fletcher, 281–291. London: Routledge. Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as transition: Historicity and hope in James, Dewey and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press. Legg, Catherine, and Christopher Hookway. 2019. Pragmatism. In The Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/pragmatism/. Accessed 29 March 2019. Malachowski, Alan. 2010. New pragmatists. Durham: Acumen. Misak, Cheryl. 2013. The American pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monamy, Vaughan. 2000. Animal experimentation: A guide to the issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. [1877] 1997. The fixation of belief. In Pragmatism: A reader, ed. Louis Menand, 7–25. New York: Vintage Books. Price, Huw. 2003. Truth as convenient friction. Journal of Philosophy 100 (4): 167–190. Price, Huw. 2013. Expressivism, pragmatism and representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Putnam, Hilary. 2004. Ethics without ontology. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Rollin, Bernard. 2006. Regulation of animal research and the emergence of animal ethics: A conceptual history. Theoretical Medicine 27: 285–304. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, relativism and truth: Philosophical papers, vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Denise. 2012. Why animal ethics committees don’t work. Between the Species 15 (1). https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol15/iss1/8/. Accessed 10 March 2019. Schuppli, C.A. 2011. Decisions about the use of animals in research: Ethical reflection by animal ethics committee members. Anthrozoos 24: 409–425. Tjärnström, Elizabeth, Elin M. Weber, Jan Hultgren, and Helena Röcklinsberg. 2018. Emotions and ethical decision-making in animal ethics committees. Animals 8 (10): 181. http://doi.org/10.3390/ani8100181. Wolf, Susan. 2010. Meaning in life and why it matters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolf, Susan. 2016. Meaningfulness: A third dimension of the good life. Foundations of Science 21: 253–269.

8 Welfare, Rights, and Pragmatism

The distinction between the philosophies of animal welfare and animal rights has traditionally been marked by a difference in what is regarded as the central ethical consideration. On the one hand, welfarists think that feelings, specifically pain and suffering, are most important; on the other hand, rightists think that non-feelings-based considerations, such as dignity, respect, sanctity, autonomy and inherent value, are most important. In Chapter 4 I suggested that the divide between these two approaches could be narrowed by shifting the focus from the properties of nonhuman animals to the concerns of Homo sapiens. When we show concern for someone’s pain we signal a concern for them in a broad sense. In other words, to show concern for someone’s feelings is to show that we are concerned for the non-feelings based aspects of their existence. We register our broad-based concern for others by using terms such as dignity, integrity, inherent value, etc. I referred to this way of thinking about concern for pain as relational hedonism. Two aspects of the move from animals and their properties to humans and their concerns were distinctly pragmatist. Firstly, doing away with distinctions. Pragmatists tend to be sceptical of time-honoured divides between purportedly distinct concepts such as mindbody, individual-group, nature-culture, fact-value, truth-opinion, © The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8_8

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politics-ethics, ethics-aesthetics, theory-practice, ideal-nonideal, the list goes on. In line with pragmatism, philosophical progress is made by showing how problems don’t even arise when the particular distinction is collapsed. Secondly, the recourse to human sciences to solve or, more accurately, dissolve philosophical problems. The shift from animal properties to human concerns marks a shift from normative theory to psychology. When attention is given to the psychological process involved in caring for others, the distinction between feelings and non-feelings-related considerations is insignificant. In effect, the distinction between the philosophies of welfare and rights collapses. Think about a simple case of concern for a child’s grazed knee. The child’s cries draw your attention to the incident and, because you love the child, her well-being or life in general is what matters most to you. The pain the child is experiencing is a secondary consideration. If the pain itself was your chief concern, then anyone’s pain is as good as any other’s. There would be nothing special about the child. In fact, in that case, the grazed knee would be instrumentally useful for you, an opportunity to reduce the amount of pain in the world. Such a view of what takes place when a loved one is in pain is unrealistic. No one is simply anti-pain; instead, we are pro-loved ones. We care about the pain of our loved ones because we care about them in a holistic sense to begin with. The same kind of psychological process is operative in cases involving animals. We know from the attitudes-to-animals literature surveyed in Chapter 2 that human concern for animals goes beyond a concern for pain and is best interpreted as diffuse and often contradictory. Helm’s theory of love and concern suggests that concern for something specific is best explained as concern for something in a much more general sense. Helm’s theory can be applied just as readily to concern for animals: when we show concern for an animal’s pain, we show concern for them in a broader sense; their well-being, life or just them for their own sake. I suggested in Chapter 4 that we can even think of concern for animal welfare as like concern for the narrative integrity of a novel or film. Consider cases of animal use in which is it unlikely that the animals are experiencing aversive phenomenology. Such cases may include using animals in artworks or as studio guests on television, confining them in more or less natural surroundings, petting zoos, fancy dress competitions and genetic

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modification. Practices like these strike us as problematic; the experience is reminiscent of the feeling we have when the narrative of a novel or film that we are invested in takes an incongruent turn.

American Pragmatism The concept I refer to as neopragmatism borrows from American pragmatism the idea that philosophical questions, particularly contentious ethical questions, are open-ended, and debate about the questions is conceived as part of an ongoing conversation (Rorty 1979, p. 378; Putnam 2004, p. 28). In line with such a view, philosophical and ethical progress is measured by interlocutors engaging with each other’s ideas and finding some merit or utility in them. To paraphrase Putnam (2004, p. 31), the philosopher eschews epistemic immortality and instead aims to contribute to a reasoned resolution. The most important consequence for animal ethics of conceiving of philosophical inquiry as necessarily open-ended relates to the concept of animal welfare. The normative grounds of welfare, the proper focus of any welfare policy, and the meaning of the term itself, are forever open to debate. In other words, the traditional view of animal welfare as concerned exclusively with aversive phenomenology or measurable suffering is contestable and a legitimate case can be made that welfare should be understood as encompassing a wider range of considerations. The main new consideration, I would argue, is just the idea that there is more to the ethics of welfare than simply how pain feels on the inside. The expressivist thesis developed in Chapters 4 and 5 was that concern for this consideration is what people express when they use terms associated with animal rights like dignity, respect, naturalness, integrity, inherent value, intrinsic value, etc.

Insurgent Amelioration This book could have been called ‘The Insurgent Amelioration Theory of Animal Ethics’ because both insurgency and amelioration are signature concerns of pragmatists (Koopman 2009). Insurgency, for the

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purposes of philosophical theorising, can be understood as crafting a novel solution to a problem from materials located within the parameters of an existing debate or the structure of an established institution. In this book, the institution concerned was animal welfare and the materials are orthodox views about the badness of pain and public concern for welfare. An important additional element of insurgency is progress—the novel solution must represent an advance in some sense. The solution I put forward in this book is to understand the use of terms like dignity and respect as expressions of a broad-based concern for the welfare of animals. Understanding the terms in this way facilitates the transition from welfare to rights without either abandoning the central concern of welfare or positing the contentious values of animal rights theory. Progress is also an element in amelioration and must be understood as opposed to revolution or wholesale change. Taken together, an institution or pressing policy problem is subject to insurgent amelioration when it is redescribed in a new and, hopefully, engaging way. That the expressivist thesis could be a legitimate way of understanding concepts like dignity and respect, and that the concern for more than how pain feels could be a legitimate goal of welfare, is an example of what Koopman (2009) would call “meliorative transition” (p. 16). Because the question of what welfare is remains open, the space is created for experimentation—for people of goodwill to explore new ways of framing existing problems and novel solutions. Such a strategy aligns the project of this book with the Deweyan concern to keep philosophical inquiry focused upon practical matters, and the Rawlsian ideal that institutional or policy change ought to proceed in widely accepted terms.1

Neopragmatism This book is titled Animal Neopragmatism because my aim was to apply insights from the contemporary version of American pragmatism known as neopragmatism to animal ethics. The key insight of neopragmatism is a linguistic analysis of the usage of terms to dissolve philosophical problems. In the case of this book, the problem was the application of rights-based concepts like dignity and respect to animals.

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If the usage of the terms is understood in line with expressivism, then there is no sense in which a person using those terms could be accused of either misapplying them or changing the subject. The linguistic analysis is the methodological mainstay of what neopragmatists refer to as subject naturalism. Subject naturalism is an approach to philosophical inquiry with metaphysical and epistemological implications strikingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy. Where the orthodoxy deals with conceptual problems by thinking of concepts as objects with specific properties (object naturalism ), the subject naturalist begins with terms and the purposes for which they are used by human animals. As Rorty (1999) put it, “Pragmatists start with a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment – doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain. Words are among the tools which these clever animals have developed” (p. xxiii). Subject naturalism itself is a tool like any other. Its particular utility resides in its distinctive approach to the problem of how to reconcile particular concepts with a scientific picture of world, the so-called placement problem. I suggested in Chapter 6 that animal rights theory faces a placement problem because there is nothing in the natural world that could be the basis for the signature animal rights concept, inherent value. The placement problem arises when theorists try to reduce or analyse a concept to a natural feature of the world. Neopragmatism, in contrast to animal rights theory, avoids the placement problem because it understands inherent value simply as an evocative term designed to register opposition to what is being done to animals. In the context of debates about animal welfare in liberal democracies, expressivism has the particular virtue of reconciling the feelings-focused orthodoxy with the nonhedonistic folk view. In this respect, neopragmatism affords a democratic approach to welfare without being vulnerable to the charge from supporters of the policy status quo that the use of nonhedonistic vocabulary signals a shift to an unfamiliar and potentially destabilising animal protection paradigm. Strictly speaking, because the realist framing assumptions of orthodox animal rights theory are absent from neopragmatism, it is more accurate to describe neopragmtism as a progressive redescription of the welfare orthodoxy than a move towards rights.

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Intrinsicality and Relational Hedonism An important redescription that I advanced in Chapter 2 concerned the development of animal welfare science. I described welfare scientists as accidental hedonists. What I meant was that the authority of the intrinsicality thesis as a framing assumption in welfare science and, subsequently, welfare policy is a product of contingent historical circumstance. As Fraser (2008) pointed out, scientists were called upon to respond to the public outcry that followed the publication of Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines in 1964. The appointment of scientists meant that the exacting methods and norms of science were bought to bear on an issue that was placed on the agenda by a public responding to diffuse and conflicting intuitions. But while the science may have called for cool heads, the politics called for a response reflective of the passionate public mood. The resulting welfare science research trajectory, however, left little room for the kind of rights-based considerations that were an important part of Harrison’s critique of factory farming. Indeed, arguably, the central value of Harrison’s critique, anti-instrumentalisation, was passed over entirely. An appreciation of the contingent origins of welfare hedonism shows that intrinsicality is contestable and, in fact, its democratic legitimacy as a guiding influence of welfare policy can be called into question.

Contemporary Pragmatism In this book I have eschewed talking in great detail about specific pragmatists. I wanted to avoid turning the book into an exercise in the history of philosophy whereby I give a roll call of the implications for animal ethics of specific pragmatist’s ideas. Instead, I’ve sought to bring certain pragmatist resources directly to bear upon pressing theoretical and real world problems. It is irrelevant for my purposes whether the theory presented herein is more aligned with neopragmatism rather than the so-called new pragmatism. I called the book neopragmatism simply because expressivism is identified as an implication of

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neopragmatism’s linguistic focus, and expressivism is a key element in the book. No doubt there are elements in the work of classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, and Dewey) that I have overlooked. The same could be said for the work of Rorty and Putnam, and the many contemporary pragmatists that have written about ethics and politics (e.g. Fesmire 2003; Misak 2000; Talisse 2007), environmental ethics (McDonald 2004; Minteer 2012) and animal ethics (McKenna and Light 2004; Abbey 2017). If there is anything distinctive about pragmatism it is that there is no single way to understand a theory or problem, and such pluralism extends to how to understand pragmatism itself and identify specific pragmatists. I hope there is enough in this book that attests to its pragmatist credentials without having engaged more widely with existing pragmatist literature. At the very least, I hope I have said enough to renew interest in pragmatism in animal ethics.

Animal Ethics Without Realism As pragmatists are well aware, theory is one thing and practice is another. The norms of philosophical realism are well-entrenched and it will take some time and effort for people to view their own behaviour through the lens of neopragmatism. Too often philosophers tend to judge theories by reflecting upon a picture of what life would be like if the theory was part of the fabric of the universe, with everybody naturally thinking and acting in line with it. In reality things are very different. Change is a gradual process. Many people will be resistant to thinking reflectively about what they are doing and it could be that neopragmatism gets very little purchase in key policy making areas such as welfare science or animal protection advocacy. In one sense, welfare specialists and animal advocates have the most to lose in a neopragmatic universe. Each party believes they are in command of the correct position. To suggest, in line with neopragmatism, that everyone is simply expressing their opinions or emotions, and that any claim to absolute authority is illusory, may be too challenging for scientists and animal advocates alike to contemplate. In that case, both parties will likely continue to propagate the norms of philosophical realism, and the two

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problems of welfare at the centre of this book will likely remain for some time. But that welfare scientists and animal advocates may remain resistant to reflection is no excuse for theorists to ignore the two problems of welfare and the neopragmatist solutions offered herein. Perhaps the biggest impact of neopragmatism will be to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of moral realists who have hitherto held onto their own positions as dogma. In any event, pragmatism is in-sync with the perspective of welfare specialists and advocates at those times when each is wearing their ordinary citizen hats. After all, citizens recognize an intuitive difference between claims about physical objects and claims that include evaluative terms. They readily associate the latter with opinion and in doing so they implicitly betray sensitivity to the idea that ethical claims have weaker epistemic grounds than claims about objects. It is in this space that pragmatism inserts itself. A latent acceptance of the is-ought gap chips away at the feelings of certainty of the scientist and advocate at those moments when their guards are down. Maybe welfare is about more than measuring cortisone levels? Maybe animals don’t possess dignity after all? Such questioning explains a person’s motivation to entertain a rival view. Doubt about the adequacy of prevailing beliefs is part and parcel of the pragmatist’s view of knowledge and the rationale of inquiry. In line with pragmatism, such questioning is an indication of philosophical and ethical progress.

Note 1. Andrew Light (2004, p. 123) explains the pragmatist’s concern to align theory with the concerns of the “broader public” as an attempt to achieve what he calls “moral translation.”

References Abbey, Ruth. 2017. Closer kinships: Rortyan resources for animal rights. Contemporary Political Theory 16: 1–18.

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Fesmire, Steven. 2003. John Dewey and moral imagination. Bloomington: Indianan University Press. Fraser, David. 2008. Understanding animal welfare. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as transition: Historicity and hope in James, Dewey and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press. Light, Andrew. 2004. Methodological pragmatism, animal welfare and hunting. In Animal pragmatism: Rethinking human-nonhuman relationships, ed. Erin McKenna and Andrew Light, 119–139. Bloomington: Indian University Press. McDonald, Hugh P. 2004. John Dewey and environmental philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Minteer, Ben A. 2012. Refounding environmental ethics: Pragmatism, principle, and practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Misak, Cheryl. 2000. Truth, politics, morality: Pragmatism and deliberation. London: Routledge. Putnam, Hilary. 2004. Ethics without ontology. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and social hope. London: Penguin Books. Talisse, Robert. 2007. A pragmatist philosophy of democracy. London: Routledge.

Appendix: Animals, Friendship and Neopragmatism

Can human persons be friends with animals? This question has been a topic of recent philosophical debate (Clark 2008; Frööding and Peterson 2011; Milligan 2009; Rowlands 2011; Townley 2011). Much of the controversy centres upon the relative importance of specific ­constitutive conditions for genuine friendship. Can any h ­ uman-animal relationships meet the conditions and thereby qualify as bona fide friendships? In what follows I show how a neopragmatist approach can help to dissolve the problem of animal friendship. The key move is an analytical shift from object naturalism to subject naturalism. In other words, instead of proceeding in accordance with realism and conceiving of friendship as an object with specific constitutive properties, the focus of the analysis is the use of the term friendship by Homo sapiens. In line with neopragmatism, the friendship question is addressed by focusing on the use of language and asking broadly sociological or anthropological questions. Why do people use the term friendship when they discuss their relations with certain animals? What needs are being met when they employ the term? For the neopragmatist, an inquiry into human-animal friendship amounts to no more than seeking answers to such questions. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8

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Before I present the neopragmatist theory of friendship, it will be useful to survey the recent debate over human-animal friendship. Once again the discussion will proceed along realist lines and my remarks will be made from the perspective of someone committed to a representational view of language and a rationalist philosophical perspective. The hope is that proceeding in realist fashion will illustrate the difficulties of extending friendship theory to animals when the framing assumptions of realism dictate the terms of the analysis.

Aristotelian Friendship Theory and ‘For Its Own Sake’ Valuing Aristotle stressed the importance of mutuality as a necessary condition for friendship. For Aristotle, the requisite form of mutuality was mutual awareness of reciprocated goodwill (Aristotle 1999, p. 1156a5). Showing goodwill towards someone means caring about him or her for his or her own sake. Simply put, Tristan and Charlotte must care for each other and each must be aware of the other’s concern for them. The mutuality condition is regarded as central to an analysis of friendship because it serves to distinguish genuine friendships from comparatively superficial relationships such as workplace or neighbourly acquaintances, and friendships centred around a regular activity, such as playing sports or going to the theatre. The core idea is that genuine friends care about each other intrinsically, whereas lesser friendship is based upon instrumental valuing—people spending time together because doing so yields benefits such as pleasure, good health, peace of mind, or job security. Taken at face value, mutuality is a significant obstacle to humananimal friendship. While it is plausible to claim that a human person can care about an animal for its own sake and be aware of their own goodwill towards an animal, it is less obvious that an animal can either care for a human being for their own sake and be aware of it, or be aware of a human person’s goodwill towards them. After all, the former would require a pattern of caring engagement on the part of the animal towards its human charge that goes unrewarded by either food

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or affection; the latter would require a sophisticated understanding of human motivation. Neither of these requirements would be easily met by companion animals. Not only must the animal understand the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic valuing, it also must be able to read the mind of their human charge at the appropriate times.1

Virtue Theory and the Secrets View Another influential analysis of friendship is virtue-centred. Nancy Sherman, for example, argues that true friends form a kind of union that is an appropriate context for the promotion of virtue or good character (Helm 2017; Sherman 1987). Given that virtue is more than just being disposed to perform virtuous actions but instead a “multi-track disposition” (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016), it is unlikely that animals could participate in what Sherman would regard as a genuine friendship. Understood as a multi-track disposition, a virtue becomes part of a person’s identity. A person with the virtue of truth, for example, promotes the truth, honours the truth, hangs out with truth tellers and has no truck with liars and braggers. While a dog may perform an action that can be meaningfully called “brave” (Townley 2011, p. 53) or “temperate” (Mazis 2008, p. 129), it does not reflexively value courage or temperance (see Rowlands 2011, p. 77). It is unlikely, therefore, that a dog could possess a virtue in the multi-track disposition sense. Thomas (1987, 1989) suggests that mutual self-disclosure is necessary for a genuine friendship. Friends build bonds of trust by sharing personal information. Do human-animal relationships involve mutual self-disclosure? Consider the case of Diane, who lives alone with her cat, Georgie. At the end of each day Di sits on the back step with a whiskey and cigarette, mentally processing the day’s events. Georgie nuzzles up to her as Di recounts an argument she had with her boss. When Di recounts her trials and tribulations in the presence of Georgie, she is not sharing secrets in the relevant sense. While it is reasonable to say that animals may read off our moods from bodily countenances when we get things off our chests, to say they are capable of understanding the narrative details would be a stretch. Georgie does not understand

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how the events of the day were bad for Di’s well-being or posed a threat to her identity. There is no sense in which Di risks disapproval or further upsettedness when she discloses something to Georgie. Of course, Georgie may walk away and this may cause Di to become upset, but this is very different from the upsettedness Di experiences after rejection by a human friend that understands her circumstances and choices. Arguably, it is that kind of acceptance or rejection which informs the moral significance of disclosure between friends. Thomas (1987) also argues that friendships require minimal structures of authority. Unlike relationships between parents and children, or older and younger siblings, friends are not subject to the authority structures attached to pastoral care-type social roles. Thomas points out that the absence of authority structures can only be a force for the flourishing of a friendship when both parties have similar interests or share the same conception of the good. In other words, friends must be pretty much on the same page about most things. Clearly, human persons and nonhumans animals are not epistemically or ethically on the same page, and the asymmetries indicate that their relationships more closely resemble parent-child relationships. The dependency of animals on their human companions for the satisfaction of their basic needs is another consideration in favour of the parent-child analogy.

The Mutual Drawing Theory Cocking and Kennett (2000) argue that what is distinctive about friendship is mutual drawing. Mutual drawing has two parts: direction and interpretation. In line with Cocking and Kennett’s theory, our friends direct us when we take up new interests and values at their behest; our friends interpret us when we change our self-conception in the wake of feedback from them. Can the mutual drawing theory be extended to animals? Imagine taking your dog for a walk. Say that you ordinarily go to the park, but one day you decide to take your dog to the beach instead. Imagine it is the middle of winter and you hate the cold water. The dog goes crazily bounding in an out of the surf with abandon.

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You greatly admire the dog for his carefreeness, so you decide to go bounding in too and, subsequently, you develop a passion for swimming in the cold ocean. This looks like a case of an animal directing a human person in the relevant sense. Consider also the case of David Lurie in the novel Disgrace. At one point in the novel Lurie expresses his dismay at his newfound concern for two sheep awaiting slaughter at his neighbour’s party (Coetzee 1999, pp. 125–126). It seems reasonable to say that Lurie’s exposure to animals in the vet clinic where he works has led to a change in his self-concept. Lurie acknowledges that he is now receptive to the plight of animals when once he was indifferent and hard-hearted. This seems to be a case of what Cocking and Kennett call interpretation—a human person changing their self-conception in the wake of relations with animals, albeit with a number of animals rather than a specific animal ‘friend’. If my interpretation of the mutual drawing theory and the two illustrations of how mutual drawing could be extended to animals are sound, then it seems possible for human persons to be directed and interpreted by animals. But can human persons interpret animals in the relevant sense? Interpretation involves an individual changing their self-conception in response to prompting by their friends. Notice how demanding a concept interpretation is for animals. Firstly, it requires that the animals concerned be reflexive, that is, able to conceive of themselves as an experiencing subject. If a friend gives me the nickname, Jon Snow, then I need to be able to determine whether I am brooding and intense, which in turn requires I be able to reflect on my personality and way of relating to others. But as is widely known, there is widespread debate about whether animals can pass mirror recognition tests and what passing a test allows us to conclude about the complexity of animal mental states (Gallup 1970; Reiss and Marino 2001). After all, there is a big difference between awareness of oneself as a body and awareness of oneself as a subject of continuing experiences (DeGrazia 2009); bigger still, as seems required in cases of genuine friendship, an awareness of oneself as a subject with particular attachments that are reflectively acknowledged as important.

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Secondly, interpretation requires that animals change their selfconception in response to something done to them by a human being. Not only would animals need to have the capacity for higher order thinking about their own thoughts, they would need to have thoughts about human thoughts. Given that animal self-reflexivity is a capacity that is deeply contested, animal other-reflexivity is on even shakier grounds.

Plural Agency and Special Concern Helm (2010) argues that plural agency is a distinctive feature of genuine friendship. Just like an individual agent, a plural agent has an intentional goal that they reflexively hold as worth pursuing. While Helm intimates that sentient animals can be agents because there is a meaningful sense in which things “matter” (2010, p. 54) to them, he does not say whether they can form part of the kind of group that can be a plural agent. Helm does say, however, that each party to a plural agency group must be rationally accountable for their choices against the background of a “joint evaluative perspective” (Helm 2010, p. 273). To the extent that being rationally accountable and participating in a joint evaluative perspective requires both parties to value the plural agent as a distinct entity and be of one mind about its aims, then Helm’s view would seem to preclude friendships between human persons and animals. While there may be particular aims that an animal can endorse, say, going to the park, it is unlikely that the animal can value going to the park as a distinctive activity in a shared life. To say this is not to deny that an animal may exhibit a pattern of behaviour which is the product of associating a particular person with a specific activity, but the behaviour in such cases is best explained by a historical pattern of reward rather than reflective valuing on the animal’s part. But, if only one party to a plural agency group need value the relationship for its own sake; in other words, if only one party need be a person, then animals qua plural agent may be able to form friendships with other persons or other plural agents, because the conditions requiring mutuality can be satisfied by the human person.

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Jeske’s (2016) account of friendship is presented in the context of a discussion about the contribution of friendship to human well-being. She identifies mutual special concern and special knowledge as important features of what she refers to as “an open-ended and inclusive” (2016, p. 236) conception of friendship. By mutual special concern Jeske has in mind non-instrumental or for its own sake valuing; and one of her aims is to suggest that Aristotle erred in claiming that such valuing is the exclusive purview of only the best kind of friendship. She says: “Even if we agree with Aristotle that friends must exhibit special concern for each other that is not purely instrumental, there is no reason to suppose that such concern only occur in his complete friendship” (2016, p. 235). While it is not Jeske’s intention to discount friendship between human persons and companion animals, if we understand her analysis of mutual special concern as akin to valuing someone or something independent of any pleasure or utility, then it is unlikely that companion animals will be able to show mutual special concern. Is Jeske’s identification of special knowledge more amenable to human-companion animal friendship? By special knowledge she means, “a way of acting and interacting that is unique to us” (Jeske 2016, p. 236). It is possible to interpret unique action and interaction in two ways. First, it might mean that each party to a friendship is aware of the other parties’ idiosyncrasies and predilections and knows just how to respond to them at just the right time. As Jeske says, “Often, friends will say that they see a ‘side’ of each other that most others don’t see, where what that ‘side’ amounts to may not be explicable merely by stating facts that have been revealed by the friend” (2016, p. 236). But while an animal may exhibit a pattern of behaviour suggestive of them knowing how a person is going to behave, it seems a stretch to suggest the animal can understand the behaviour as idiosyncratic or peculiar to the person. It is straight forward, however, to suggest that persons are aware of an animal’s idiosyncratic behaviour. A second way of understanding unique action or interaction is in terms of exclusivity. Friends engage with each other in particular ways, or by doing particular things, and do not engage and act similarly with others. But this way of understanding unique action or interaction arguably makes it too easy to be friends with someone. It is not difficult to imagine co-workers spending so much time together

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working on specialized projects that they develop extraordinary insight into each other’s personality and capacity to complete the required tasks.

Recent Theory of Human-Animal Companionship Frööding and Peterson (2011) draw upon recent evidence from cognitive ethology to argue “animals actually do fulfil the Aristotelian condition for friendship based upon mutual advantage” (p. 58). In the philosophy of friendship literature, a friendship based upon utility or mutual advantage, like a friendship based upon pleasure, is regarded as second rate or a lesser kind of friendship (Helm 2017). But even the lesser friendships must include elements that serve to distinguish such relationships from non-friendship relations which may also have utility or pleasure as the glue that binds. To that end, Frööding and Peterson accept that to qualify as a genuine token of the lesser type of friendship both parties need to “harbor similar attitudes” (2011, p. 62) and be aware of the advantages attendant upon their union. Frööding and Peterson’s aim, then, is to make the case for thinking that animals have the psychological capacities to be parties to genuine friendships, albeit friendships of the so-called lesser variety. Frööding and Peterson base their case upon three claims. First, the notion Aristotle rejects that animals, like humans, do not cohabitate simply for reproductive purposes but “live together for the purposes of life” (2011, p. 63). Second, the truism that animals interact and communicate with other animals and, in some cases, with humans. Third, that recent research into animal cognition shows that animals are more cognitively sophisticated than Aristotle allowed. Taken together, Frööding and Peterson (2011) argue, the three claims support the conclusion that “animals can surely communicate and interact with each other to a sufficiently high degree to be of mutual advantage to each other” (p. 64). The soundness of Frööding and Peterson’s argument turns upon what the first and third claim tell us about the nature of the interaction and communication referred to in the second claim. If, as seems reasonable

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to suggest, animals spend their lives together for reasons other than breeding, then the implication is that their psychological capacities and the content of the mental states that cause them to communicate and interact must be tailored to nonreproductive aspects of life. But, it is one thing to point out that animals live together for nonreproductive purposes, and another to establish their mental states are such as to satisfy the psychologically demanding conditions of friendship. Frööding and Peterson infer a great deal from the logical space between reproductive purposes and what they refer to as “the purposes of life”. While the logical space itself may be grounds for thinking that animal minds are more sophisticated than has traditionally being assumed, it is not sufficient to establish that an animal can have a similar attitude to a human person, or be reflectively aware of the advantages of a relationship with a human person. Instead, a more parsimonious interpretation of what can be entailed by animal mental states and capacities being suited to inter-specific interaction and communication ‘for the purposes of life’ is that animals have mental states requisite for the satisfaction of a wide range of environment-directed goals, not all of which need be analysed as in the service of reproduction. Like Frööding and Peterson, Clark (2008) lays the blame for scepticism about human-animal friendship at the feet of Aristotle and is eager to draw attention to recent research into animal cognition. The implication of the recent research, Clark believes, is to overturn the Aristotelian narrative that humans and animals are fundamentally different and replace it with a story about behavioural and genetic continuities: My point here is to emphasise just how far modern thought has drifted from the metaphysical and biological theories that, once upon a time, validated the conviction that non-human creatures were all so different from ‘us’ that we could not possibly be friends. Each of us, human or non-human, is the product of a set of genes, almost all of which are widely shared between species: there are possibly no specifically human genes: no genes that belong only and entirely within ‘the human genome’ – and no specifically human patterns of behaviour. (2008)

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But one does not have to share Aristotle’s views about the differences between humans and animals to be sceptical about human and animal friendship. That animals are sentient and have beliefs and desires is not in question. That they feel emotions and experience pleasure and pain in the company of human persons is not in doubt. What is in doubt is that they have the kind of psychological capacities to meet the various mutuality conditions that friendship theorists identify as central to genuine friendship. Particularly important is whether any empirical research gives grounds for thinking that animals can reflexively value their relationships with human beings and care about their human companions for their own sake. Clark does not give an argument for such a view; instead, he concludes: “Animals become our friends, we become their friends, when they look back at us and we are confronted by the mystery of the Other which is at the root also of our own being” (2008). As a condition or typical feature of friendship, however, Clark’s view reduces friendship to a fairly commonplace psychological experience. Who has not gazed into the eyes of an animal and concluded that there are things about them that we will never know? Such an experience is possible with a wide range species. Perhaps Clark intends to draw attention to a psychological experience that is quite rare and best described as quasi-spiritual? But if that is the case, then his analysis would position human-animal friendship as being a different kind of friendship to human-human friendships; in which case there is grounds for thinking that he is talking about a different concept altogether. Drawing upon his own personal experiences with a schutzhund, Hugo, Mark Rowlands (2011) presents mutual admiration as “the bare bones of a general account of what is involved in human-animal friendships” (p. 77). Rowlands’s analysis takes place against the background of a debate with Frööding and Peterson over whether Aristotle’s virtue-based theory can be extended to animals. While he concedes that animals lack the reflexive capacities to meet the conditions of virtue-based friendship, he insists that a theory of human-companion animal friendship based upon mutual admiration deserves to be seen as a genuine friendship. He says, “I am not in the business of toeing the Aristotelian line…a plausible independent case can be made out for the idea of human-animal friendships based on mutual admiration” (p. 77).

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Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Rowlands thinks admiration need only be one-way—only the human party need be reflectively aware of their admiration for the other. He says, “Of course, with respect to the idea of mutual admiration, I can speak only for myself. Whether I am admired by other animals—by Hugo, for example—is something for them to decide, not me” (2011, p. 77). Elsewhere he says, “Because I admire him, I also try to ensure he admires me in return” (2011, p. 79), and then “I am more than happy to call Hugo my friend. And the basis of this friendship is admiration that I hope is returned” (2011, p. 79, emphasis added). Given that, in Rowlands’s theory, admiration need be one-way only, there are grounds for questioning whether the theory of mutual admiration is bona fide mutual. His asymmetrical theory of admiration purchases inclusiveness at the expense of mutuality. If only one party need admire the other, the danger is that there is nothing between the two parties that marks out the relationships as genuine friendship. After all, it is commonplace for one person to admire acquaintances, co-workers, and even strangers after the admirable details of their lives become known. Rowlands appears sensitive to the need that both parties to a friendship must play an equal part in satisfying friendship conditions; after all, he labels his theory mutual admiration, but his suggestion that one party must be prepared to live with a lingering uncertainty that one’s admiration may not be returned supports the conclusion that the mutual admiration theory is a theory of human-companion animal acquaintance not friendship. In her account of human-companion animal friendship, Townley (2011) suggests that two-way affection is a key feature of what she regards as genuine friendship. She says, “Some of each parties’ actions need to be plausibly called other-regarding, for example, by expressing affection” (2011, p. 52). Townley’s concern to have a theory of friendship which reflects other-regardingness marks her out as another theorist who acknowledges the importance of mutuality as a key value in any theory of human-companion animal friendship. But without making reflective awareness a condition of the expression of affection, the concern is that Townley’s theory undermines mutuality because it will be unclear whether the affection of each party is actually

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other-regarding. After all, when a dog directs affection towards a human companion, it could be simply that the companion is holding a bowl of food, and this would mean the dog’s affection is instrumental and self-regarding. What’s needed, then, is an emotion-centred theory that captures other-regardingness without requiring animals to be more psychologically complex than they probably are.

The Neopragmatic Approach to Human-Animal Friendship The neopragmatist approaches the question of animal friendship very differently to her realist counterparts discussed above. Instead of making the concept of friendship and the psychological capacities of animals the focus of analysis; the valuing behaviour of persons is central. The emphasis shifts from the concept in the abstract to the use of the related term. Human-animal friendships will be found wherever the term is employed by a person to make sense of their relationships and interactions with animals from other species. Recall that a key element of neopragmatism is expressivism. Expressivism is a non-representational theory of language use whereby claims are interpreted as the expression of emotion or attitudes. In line with expressivism, when someone says “Giving to charity is good” they are expressing the positive feelings that come to mind when they reflect on the act of giving to charity. The expressivist analysis of language is contrasted with the representational view whereby claims are interpreted as truth-apt descriptions of the world. In line with the representational view, when someone says “Giving to charity is good” they are making a claim about an action and its properties. In effect, the claim is that the act of giving to charity has the property of goodness, in just the same way that the sky has the property of blueness. For the neopragmatist, the concept of friendship is handled in the same way as value; we are to approach inquiry in a sociological or anthropological way against the background of a broadly evolutionary understanding of human behaviour. Like terms such as right and wrong, animals like us employ the term friend as a tool in the course of

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navigating our way about the world and in the service of meeting our needs. Accordingly, to say “Jason is my friend” is to signal my concern for him or to express the positive emotion I feel towards him. Recall also the importance of meaningfulness in the discussion of the no practical difference objection in Chapter 7. I described participation in a community of inquiry as the pursuit of meaning in life. While meaningfulness is not a signature feature of neopragmatism, it is consistent with the signature pragmatist emphasis on psychology to have meaningfulness also feature in a neopragmatic approach to human-animal friendship. Wolf (2010, 2016) says that meaning arises when “subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness”. Given the depth of feeling and extent of a person’s engagement with their animal charges, Wolf ’s subjectivity condition is easily met in cases of human-companion animal relationships. Likewise, as caring for an animal is strongly analogous to caring for a child, then the objectivity condition would likewise be readily satisfied. Of course, the neopragmatist does not approach the question of meaningfulness armed with a definition that functions as a checklist for picking out relationships that qualify as meaningful. A neopragmatic inquiry proceeds by asking sociological or anthropological question like: why do people invest so much in their dealings with certain animals? A plausible answer is that they do so because the relationships help to make their life meaningful.

Note 1. Perhaps so-called higher species are an exception and it might be possible for relationships between humans and great apes to meet the mutuality condition. After all, there is empirical evidence for chimpanzees having the capacity to read the minds of other chimpanzees (Hare 2000). Gennaro (2009) might argue that species other than primates engage in mind-reading given it is likely that they have higher-order thoughts; he cites evidence for episodic memory in primates and rodents (p. 188), and forward planning in scrub-jays (p. 193). But the significance of such evidence for the friendship question is unclear, given that it relates to species other than the familiar companion animal species.

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References Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean ethics, trans. Terrance Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Clark, Stephen R.L. 2008. ‘I knew him by his voice’: Can animals be our friends? Philosophy Now 67, May/June. Cocking, Dean, and Jannette Kennett. 2000. Friendship and moral danger. Journal of Philosophy 97 (5): 278–296. Coetzee, J.M. 1999. Disgrace. London: Verso. DeGrazia, David. 2009. Self-awareness in animals. In The philosophy of animal minds, ed. R.W. Lurz, 201–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fletcher, Guy. 2016. The Routledge handbook of philosophy of well-being. London: Routledge. Frööding, Barbro, and Martin Peterson. 2011. Animal ethics based upon friendship. Journal of Animal Ethics 1 (1): 58–69. Gallup, G.G., Jr. 1970. Chimpanzees: Self-recognition. Science 167 (3914): 86–87. Gennaro, R.J. 2009. Animals, consciousness and I-thoughts. In The philosophy of animal minds, ed. R.W. Lurz, 184–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hare, B. 2000. Chimpanzees know what conspecifics do and do not see. Animal Behavior 59: 771–785. Helm, Bennet W. 2010. Love, friendship and the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helm, Bennet W. 2017. Friendship. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/friendship/. Hursthouse, Rosalind, and Glen Pettigrove. 2016. Virtue ethics. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ ethics-virtue/. Accessed 4 Aug 2017. Jeske, Diane. 2016. Friendship and well-being. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of wellbeing, ed. G. Fletcher, 233–241. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Locke, John. 1975. An essay concerning human understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazis, G.A. 2008. Our embodied friendships with dogs. In What philosophy can tell you about your dog, ed. Steven D. Hales, 115–134. Chicago: Open Court.

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Milligan, Tony. 2009. Dependent companions. Journal of Applied Philosophy 26 (2): 402–413. Reiss, D., and L. Marino. 2001. Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (10): 5937–5942. Rowlands, Mark. 2011. Friendship and animals: A reply to Frööding and Peterson. Journal of Animal Ethics 1 (1): 70–79. Sherman, Nancy. 1987. Aristotle on friendship and the shared life. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (4): 589–613. Thomas, L. 1987. Friendship. Synthese 72 (2): 217–236. Thomas, L. 1989. Friends and lovers. In Person to person, ed. G. Graham and H. LaFollette, 182–198. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Townley, Cynthia. 2011. Animals as friends. Between the Species 13 (10): 45–59. Wolf, Susan. 2010. Meaning in life and why it matters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolf, Susan. 2016. Meaningfulness: A third dimension of the good life. Foundations of Science 21: 253–269.

Glossary

Animal:   for

the purposes of this book, unless otherwise stated “animal” refers to a sentient nonhuman animal. Animal ethics:   (1) the study of the ethics of human interactions with animals (2) umbrella term for a discipline that includes both animal welfare and animal rights. Animal neopragmatism:   (1) a theory of animal ethics that includes relational hedonism and expressivism as central elements (2) the extension of neopragmatic theory to animal ethics. Animal rights ethic:   the view that animals are owed moral rights in the form of legal protections against being harmed by human beings. Animal welfare ethic:   the view that it is appropriate for human beings to use animals so long as a reasonable attempt is made to minimise pain. Anti-representationalism:   the rejection of the representational view of the function of language and the subsequent conception of knowledge as accurate representation. Badness of pain theory:   rival explanations for why pain is bad when it is bad. Classical pragmatism:   the philosophical ideas traceable to the works of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952). Cognitivism:    the view that moral claims express beliefs and, therefore, are truth-apt. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8

177

178     Glossary Conception of the good:   a

person’s values, life goals, and aspirations understood as a unified whole. Coping theory:  the scientific theory that an animal’s ability to cope with its environment is the best indicator of welfare. Correspondence theory of truth:  the theory of truth whereby claims are true if facts in the world, independent of the speaker, correspond to what the speaker claims. Degree of difference thesis:  thesis attributed to Darwin that the differences between human and animal mental states are differences of degree not kind. Deliberative democracy:   a theory of democracy in which the central normative element is inclusive public deliberation. Desire theory:   (1) a theory of well-being whereby desire satisfaction is used as the sole measure of well-being (2) a theory for the badness of pain whereby pain is bad because it is unwanted. Direct action:   a form of activism on behalf of animals that pushes the boundaries of acceptable forms of advocacy. Epistemology:    the philosophical sub-field concerned with the study of knowledge. Experience requirement:  the view that only an experience of some kind can make a difference to the welfare of a human being or an animal. Experiential pluralism:  the view that there are experiences other than pleasure and pain that can impact upon well-being. Expressivism:   the view that moral claims express emotions or attitudes, not beliefs, and, therefore, are not truth-apt. Extra-hedonistic experientialism:   the view that some experiences can enhance or diminish wellbeing over and above the extent to which they are positively or negatively valenced. Fallacy of equivocation:  a logical fallacy whereby an argument trades on an ambiguity in the meaning of a term in order to create the impression of validity. Fallibilism:   the view that any claim to truth is ultimately revisable in the face of new evidence and, therefore, ought not be thought of as true once and for all. Feelings view:  the scientific view that welfare ought to be determined with exclusive reference to the feelings of an animal. Five freedoms of animal welfare:   seminal principles of animal welfare developed in the wake of the Brambell Committee Report. Folk:   citizens or laypersons—the public.

Glossary     179 Folk conception of animal welfare:   (1)

the conception of welfare held by citizens (2) a diffuse view to the effect that considerations other than feelings can be important determinants of an animal’s welfare. Folk nonhedonism:   the view, purportedly held by reasonably socialised laypersons in liberal democracies, that, as far as human-animal relations are concerned, considerations other than pain and suffering have ethical significance and ought to be considered as legitimate elements of animal welfare. Hedonism:   (1) the theory of value that prescribes the only basis for judging anything as good or bad is pleasure and pain, respectively (2) the theory of welfare or well-being that the only basis for judging anything as good or bad for an individual is pleasure and pain, respectively. Helmsian theory of love and concern:   theory of concern that draws upon Bennett W. Helm’s theory of love and friendship, whereby concern for X’s pain entails concern for X in a broader sense. Inherent value:   (1) a nonhedonistic property purportedly possessed by all subjects-of-a-life (2) the central concept of orthodox animal rights theory. Intrinsicality thesis:   the thesis that pain is bad because of a consideration that is intrinsic to the experience of pain, e.g. sensation or desire frustration. Meaning in life:   the concept of life’s ultimate purpose or the point of existence. Metaphilosophy:   the study of the methods, framing assumptions and theoretical structures of a theory, discipline, or field of inquiry. Moral individualism:  the idea that the moral significance of animals (human and nonhuman) is based upon a specific capacity they possess. Moral realism:   the view that moral values are bona fide features of the world and moral claims about good, bad, right and wrong, etc., refer to real properties somehow inhering in objects and actions. Narrativism:   (1) the view that the coherence of a life narrative is an element of well-being (2) the view that the place of pain in an individual’s life story is a legitimate focus of concern for the individual’s pain. Natural behaviour view:   the scientific view that natural behaviour is an important indicator of animal welfare. Naturalism:   the metaphysical worldview that only natural things exist and, therefore, supernaturalism and nonnaturalism are false. Neopragmatism:   (1) a version of pragmatism in which linguistic analysis is the main methodological tool (2) the philosophical ideas traceable to the works of Richard Rorty (1931–2007) and Hilary Putnam (1926–2016). New pragmatism:  the contemporary application of the ideas of the classical pragmatists.

180     Glossary Nonhedonistic:   (1)

a concept that is analysed as logically distinct from sentience or the capacity to experience pleasure and pain (2) a consideration that purportedly has (i) prudential significance independent of valenced phenomenology or (ii) ethical significance independent of the morality of causing pleasure or pain. Nonhedonistic experientialism:   the view that certain phenomenologically neutral experiences (‘n-experiences’) can diminish welfare even though they are neither positively valenced nor negatively valenced. Nonnaturalism:   the metaphysical world view that allows for the existence of properties that are neither natural nor supernatural. Nonrelational hedonism:   (1) see hedonism (2) the view that pain is bad because of its intrinsic features (3) welfare is determined by exclusive reference to the mental states of animals (4) the welfare of animals is the only proper source for the content of welfare policy. Object naturalism:   the philosophical methodology that inquiry best proceeds by studying objects and their properties. Objectivity:   the notion of criteria established in advance to test the truth of a claim. Orthodox animal rights theory:   the philosophical theory whereby subjects-of-alife are owed a right not to be used for human purposes in virtue of possessing inherent value. Peircean view of truth:   theory of truth associated with Peirce whereby truth is conceptualized as the ideal endpoint of inquiry. Perfectionism:   (1) theory of well-being in which the well-being of an individual is measured against a standard of excellence purportedly set by a species-typical ideal (2) theory of right and wrong focused on character and traceable to the ideas of Aristotle. Person:   a psychologically sophisticated individual with the capacity for higher-order thought. Philosophical monism about value:   an approach to value whereby a single consideration is identified as the basis of value. Placement problem:  distinctly metaphysical problem concerning how to find a place for contentious entities like values in an account of the everything that exists if scientific naturalism is the correct theory. Policy conception of welfare:   welfare is ostensibly hedonistic, and the only proper source for the content of welfare policy is welfare science. Pragmatism:   (1) a philosophical school that originated in North America in the late nineteenth century (2) the philosophical theory associated with the

Glossary     181

philosophical school and distinctive for rejecting both the correspondence theory of truth and representationalism. Quietism:   the view that a theorist may eschew committing to one side or the other in the debate between (1) naturalism and supernaturalism and (2) representationalism and anti-representationalism. Rationalism:    philosophical methodology in which structured argument and conceptual analysis are the main tools of the trade. Reductionism:   the philosophical methodology whereby a contentious property or entity is identified with a less contentious feature of the world. Referential theory of meaning:   the meaning of words is what they refer to or stand for. Relational hedonism:   (1) a psychological-cum-anthropological thesis about concern for pain and (2) the claim that concern for pain is a proper source for the content of animal welfare policy. Representationalism:   a thesis about the function of language whereby knowledge is seen as a matter of having beliefs that accurately represent an external world. Scientific biologists:   welfare scientists that use biological measures, such as heart rate and cortisol levels, to assess welfare. Scientific conception of welfare:   the view that welfare is a measurable [mental] state of an animal. Scientific ethologists:   welfare scientists that use behavioural measures to assess welfare. Scientific naturalism:   the view that (1) the only things that exist are the objects of study of the natural sciences and (2) the only bona fide items of knowledge are the findings of the natural sciences. Scientistic:   the tendency of a theory or analysis to be consistent with the findings and methods of scientific naturalism. Sensation theory:   a theory for the badness of pain whereby pain is bad because of how it feels bad on the inside. Sentience:   the capacity to experience pleasure and pain. Soundness:   a property of valid arguments in which all the premises are in actual fact true. Subject naturalism:   the philosophical methodology that inquiry best proceeds by studying human animals and the terms they use to meet their needs. Subjects-of-life:    any individual with a sophisticated psychology, e.g. normal mammals of one year or more.

182     Glossary Supernaturalism:   the

metaphysical worldview that allows for the existence of God and supernatural properties. Three-Rs of animal research:   principle for application in the design of animal research protocols: where possible, researchers ought to reduce the number of animals they intend to use; refine their experimental procedures to improve welfare; and replace animals with alternatives. Three-Rs of animal rights theory:  see moral realism, representationalism, and rationalism. Three-Rs of realism:   framing assumptions of animal rights theory: rationalism, reductionism, and [moral] realism. Truth-aptness:   able to be true or false. Valenced-phenomenology:   the relative aversiveness or pleasurableness of a feeling from the inside perspective of the experiencer. Validity:   a property of arguments whereby the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises under the assumption that the premises are true. Warranted assertibility theory of justification:   the view that the aim of philosophizing, or any community of inquiry, is simply to reach a level of justification sufficient to secure mutual agreement, consensus, or resonance. Welfare or well-being:   the extent to which an individual’s life is going well or ill. Welfare Quality® framework:  a series of measures and principles for animal welfare developed in consultation with a range of stakeholders including scientists, animal protection advocates, welfare theorists and animal-user industry representatives.

Author Index

A

Aristotle 23, 24, 162, 167–170

Fraser, David 21–23, 25–27, 34, 87, 104, 156 Frööding, Barbro 161, 168, 169

C

Cataldi, Sue 13, 21, 43 Chen, Peter John 28, 29, 45, 46, 88 Clark, Beth 28, 29, 35 Clark, Stephen R.L. 161, 169 Cocking, Dean 164, 165

G

Gaita, Raymond 79 Garner, Robert 45, 47, 98, 148 Gruen, Lori 39, 43–45 H

D

Darwin, Charles 8, 117–119, 126 F

Fish, Stanley 101, 146 Francione, Gary 39, 120

Habermas, Jurgen 99 Harrison, Ruth 26, 27, 34, 44, 72, 156 Helm, Bennett W. 14, 67, 68, 81, 88, 152, 163, 166, 168 Humphreys, Rebekah 39, 40, 43, 44 Hutto, Daniel 79

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8

183

184     Author Index J

R

James, William 134, 142 Jeske, Diane 167

Rawls, John 46, 57 Regan, Tom 9, 39, 42, 43, 56, 110, 111, 120, 123, 125, 127 Rorty, Richard 14, 102, 105, 112, 134, 136, 137, 142, 147, 148, 153, 155, 157 Rowlands, Mark 82, 161, 163, 170, 171 Rudy, Kathy 82

K

Kennett, Jennette 164, 165 Koopman, Colin 14, 56, 100, 148, 153, 154 M

Macarthur, David 3, 11, 120, 128, 129 McInerney, Peter K. 128 Milligan, Tony 77, 78, 82, 161

S

Sherman, Nancy 163 T

N

Nussbaum, Martha C. 13, 24, 39, 43

Thomas, Laurence 163, 164 Townley, Cynthia 163, 171 V

O

Okasha, Samir 124

van der Deijl, Willem 89–91 Y

P

Peirce, Charles Sanders 9, 133, 137, 138, 140, 148, 157 Peterson, Martin 161, 168–170 Price, Huw 11, 51, 97, 100, 121, 129, 139, 143 Putnam, Hilary 137, 140, 153, 157, 179

Young, Iris Marion 99

Subject Index

A

C

American pragmatism 3, 49, 56, 153, 154 Animal rights advocacy 100 Animal rights theory 2, 6–10, 12, 13, 45, 49, 58, 109–112, 117, 120, 121, 123, 125–128, 154, 155 Animal welfare science 5, 18, 21, 22, 26, 27, 33, 34, 47, 62, 156 Anything goes objection 133, 137, 143 Attitudes-to-animals literature 47, 96, 152

Coercion 139 D

Darwinism 9, 120, 123, 124, 127 Deliberative democracy 98, 99, 102 Dignity 1–3, 5–7, 13, 17, 21, 22, 40, 42–46, 48, 55–57, 62, 66, 86, 88, 89, 103, 104, 122, 141, 144, 151, 153, 154, 158 Direct action 100, 105 E

B

Badness of pain 2, 5, 21, 41, 56, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71–73, 75, 77, 80, 81, 87, 154

Equivocation problem 7–9, 109, 111, 112, 121, 123, 128 Experiential pluralism (EP) 6, 21, 40, 85, 86, 89–92, 95, 96, 103, 104

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 J. Hadley, Animal Neopragmatism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25980-8

185

186     Subject Index

Expressivism 4, 7, 40, 56, 85, 86, 89, 97–99, 103–105, 109, 122, 141, 143, 144, 155, 156, 172 Extra-hedonistic experientialism (EHE) 91 F

Fallacy of equivocation 7, 111–113, 117 Fallibilism 140 Folk conception of welfare 6, 17, 18, 85, 91, 104 Folk nonhedonism 28, 29, 32 For its own sake valuing 82, 167 Friendship 81, 82, 161–173

M

Moral pluralism 46, 47 Mutual drawing 164, 165 N

Narrativity/narrativism 78, 79, 81, 82 Narrativity thesis 75 Neopragmatism 3, 9, 10, 13, 33, 46, 47, 56, 57, 89, 97, 100, 104, 109, 110, 125, 126, 133, 134, 141, 143–147, 153–158, 161, 172, 173 New pragmatism 156 Nonhedonistic experientialism (NHE) 91, 95, 96 No practical difference objection 143, 173

H

Hedonism 5, 6, 18–20, 22, 26, 27, 30, 33, 34, 41, 49, 54, 62, 63, 80, 81, 85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 135, 156

O

Once and for all thinking 49, 52 P

I

Inherent value 1, 4, 7, 9, 13, 42, 43, 56, 58, 111, 120–125, 127, 128, 151, 153, 155 Institutional animal ethics committee (AEC) 134, 145–148 Insurgent amelioration 153, 154 Intrinsicality thesis 21, 22, 41, 55, 61, 62, 80, 87, 156 Intrinsic value 17, 66, 127, 128, 153 L

Last word philosophy 13

Peircean theory of truth 141 Perfectionism 23, 24, 32, 34, 43–45, 105 Persons 2, 3, 6, 10, 14, 19, 22, 40–42, 47, 50, 53, 57, 63–71, 73–77, 79, 81, 86, 88, 89, 92, 95, 97–99, 102, 104, 111–113, 115–117, 122, 125, 127, 135–138, 141–144, 147, 148, 155, 158, 161–167, 169–173 Philosophical problem of welfare 6, 33, 39, 40, 45, 47–49, 52, 55, 56, 61, 85, 86, 96

Subject Index     187

Philosophical realism 6, 8, 9, 48, 50–53, 55, 57, 85, 86, 97, 100, 103, 104, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 122, 126, 129, 134, 157 Placement problem 8, 9, 109, 111, 120–122, 126, 128, 129, 155 Policy conception of welfare 17, 26, 41, 80, 88 Political problem of welfare 6, 17, 18, 28, 31, 33, 44, 61, 62, 85, 88 Pragmatism 14, 47, 56, 110, 133, 137–139, 157, 158 Public reason 46, 47, 57 R

Rationalism 12, 50, 51, 99, 109, 112, 114, 126, 128, 134 Realism 8, 10–12, 18, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55, 109–111, 126, 127, 134–136, 141–144, 161, 162 Reductionism 11, 14, 40, 45, 52, 53, 55, 86, 97, 114, 135 Relational hedonism 21, 22, 63, 75, 86, 97, 104, 109, 141, 151 Respect 1–7, 17, 20–22, 25, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 48, 55, 56, 62, 66, 72, 73, 88, 89, 92, 100, 103, 104, 110, 122, 124, 127, 135, 136, 141, 144, 151, 153–155, 171 Russian circus bears 21, 39, 91 S

Specialist conception of welfare 6, 17, 18, 27, 30, 39, 54, 85, 91, 103

T

Three-Rs of animal research 145 Three-Rs of animal rights theory 11, 14 Three-Rs of philosophical realism 111 Truth 9, 12, 13, 48–52, 57, 97, 100–105, 110, 113, 114, 122, 129, 133–144, 146, 147, 163 U

Utilitarianism 34, 105, 144 V

Virtue 12, 13, 19, 64, 76, 98, 109, 144, 148, 155, 163 W

Warranted assertibility theory of justification 133, 143 Welfare 1, 2, 4–7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17–34, 40–43, 45–56, 58, 61–63, 72, 78–81, 85–95, 97–99, 103, 104, 109, 121, 124, 135, 141, 143–146, 148, 152–158 Welfare Quality© framework 30, 31 Well-being 19, 20, 23, 24, 29, 34, 43, 47, 66–68, 70, 73, 76, 80–82, 90–92, 94, 148, 152, 164, 167