The deer who consents to me feeding him does not understand – and does not have the cognitive capacities to understand – my complex motivation to hand him food or the stories that I will later tell to my friends about this unusual encounter. The range of information that animals can learn differs from that of humans. This is not a problem though, because information that we do not have the capacity to grasp cannot constitute a deal breaker.
Read the article, thought it was interesting, my most direct philosophical objection was here. I think that information that we do not have the capacity to grasp can constitute a deal breaker. For instance, animals are incapable of understanding that they are being “fattened up” for slaughter, but if they could they would likely refuse to eat. It is permissible to do acts an animal does not consent to, like bringing my cat to the vet (scary) and having him vaccinated (painful), only when such acts are clearly in the animal’s own best interests so that a “rational” animal would surely consent if it existed. If my cat could understand the purpose of going to the vet he would agree to it.
More broadly, I think
we are lacking philosophical (or at least cultural) ways to talk about the difference between consent to sexual activity and consent in general. Consent can be given under a spectrum of coercion, from being economically coerced to work a job to being physically coerced to perform a sexual act. Under which circumstances is it valid? Is there a spectrum of acts that require different circumstances for consent to be valid? Capitalism encourages us to ignore “weak” economic coercion and pretend that all decisions were made of our own free will. I think vocabulary is impoverished here. Socially, these concepts are floating under the surface: it’s not illegal to fuck your employee, but you might get fired for it. It’s not illegal to date a much younger adult, but you may be ostracized. Socially, we recognize that a large majority of such unions are impermissible and impose various lesser consequences/taboos. Unlike the author, I am willing to accept an explanation for inability-to-consent laws that says they are all heuristic-based and not based on some inherent part of the act*. It should be illegal for a cop to fuck his ostensibly-consenting prisoner: even though 0.000001% of the time it’s fine and the coercion truly isn’t significant, the cop can lie and there’s no objective way for an onlooker to evaluate whether it’s permissible. That’s a sound enough argument for me to blanket ban sexual contact in large age/power/understanding differentials - with minors, animals, prisoners, severe mental disabilities, etc. - without requiring some ineffable component of the act to be wrong.
Coming up with a coherent moral rule for animals doesn’t really mean anything when 99% (by mass) of animals exist under conditions of absolute human domination. As has been pointed out in this thread, animal agriculture requires sexual contact with animals. I would go as far as to say that there are so few zoophiles that most acts of bestiality are already legal, carved out by the animal husbandry exceptions in the bestiality laws. If you made it legal everywhere you’d have the same 10 million farm pigs being inseminated a year, and maybe a dozen new pet pigs. So I don’t see a practical point to this proposal except for shock value
* whoops, this is deontology with extra steps. Ah well I’m a man of the people
Yeah, that sentence you quoted is just obviously untrue. The obvious counterexample to me is grizzly bears in Yellowstone. There’s a reason every trash can in Yellowstone is specially engineered to be bear-resistant. If bears start to associate humans with dumpster food, they get too comfortable around humans and once a bear no longer has the proper fear of humans, they get shot, because the park rangers at Yellowstone can’t have bears hanging out too close to humans and posing massive danger to human life.
So, the information a bear doesn’t have about dumpster food can absolutely affect them, even to the point of causing their death!
I’m a little annoyed that a so-called “philosopher” writing about animals and consent doesn’t understand even this basic example.
I’m not sure fundamentally changing the situation like that keeps things applicable to situation. a lot of people here don’t validate that logic in other situations.
putting that aside i’m not even sure it’s true. homer simpson would keep eating. probably some real people would as well, maybe me if the food tasted good enough and escape didn’t seem possible. Plenty of people refuse to do things to their own benefit equivalent to what going to the vet is to your cat.
i agree on the heuristic analysis, sometimes those relationships are even the less powerful person’s idea but that doesn’t eliminate the risks of those power dynamics… maybe your boss is hot but if they’re a shitty partner for months how able to dump them will you be? and are they going to not retaliate? maybe in one of the good star trek shows, but even in the optimistic TNG the writers had picard dump his subordinate because their relationship was affecting his judgement.
putting that aside i’m not even sure it’s true. homer simpson would keep eating
Yeah we’re being charitable here and imagining that my supernaturally-smart cat is his best self, a “rational” actor acting in his own best interest. We want basically the same yardstick parents use when they make their kids eat their vegetables and go to the doctor and such. If we override agency, we must make the decisions they would make if they were wiser. Otherwise you can just say “oh whatever this pig has poor impulse control, if he could understand he’d still probably just do [whatever I want / whatever he was already doing]” and then why bother with the thought experiment, you can just treat animals as property and ignore their agency altogether.
I agree with your conclusion (beastiality obviously bad) but this doesn’t work, “wiseness” isn’t an objective measure. We can’t actually decide what isn’t or is wise with any real consistency beyond what we perceive to be wise ourselves.
I would say that Homer Simpson continuing to eat food despite inevitably being brought to the slaughter could be perfectly wise, if he does not particularly care about his own longevity. The same would be true if he knew there was no option that would lead to him escaping. There would be no reason not to take the food, then.
Assuming that there is objectively wise decisions assumes there are objectively wise goals, and this is simply not true. There are only socially accepted goals and personally ingrained goals.
What this leads us to is the ability to simply skip all this and lead us to a much simpler benchmark: don’t do things to animals that go against the goals they have already shown. Surgery is barely permissible due to their obvious instinctual desire to live, but beastiality is not at all permissible because they have no desire to do anything like that with human beings. Most other things are fine because animals show an eagerness to do them and they do not against their goals, like training for treats.
I’m going to go through your examples to show how this heuristic works.
Another example of the “best self” thing: you should put your drunk friend to bed instead of letting him drive back to the club even if he’s a shithead and will still be mad you didn’t give him his keys once he sobers up.
You already know your friend does not want to die, usually, so this is perfectly fine because what they actually want aligns with what you do. If they did want to die in a car crash and not just because they were drunk or having an episode, then it’s not your fault that they can’t properly communicate that which goes against what they usually want. And, at risk of being very macabre, it is very easy to rectify if that is the case, unlike something like sexual assault which leaves permanent trauma.
Otherwise you can just say “oh whatever this pig has poor impulse control, if he could understand he’d still probably just do [whatever I want / whatever he was already doing]” and then why bother with the thought experiment, you can just treat animals as property and ignore their agency altogether.
Most pigs presumably want to be healthy and alive. Over feeding them or killing them after doing it goes against both of those things.
I suppose you could argue that I’m just rephrasing your point, but I think it’s an important way to rephrase it, because the logic of “best self” could be used to override eg kid’s consent to HRT and tell them they can’t get it, despite them wanting to, because as a Christian you think they just lack impulse control and need to be disciplined.
I believe the example you gave of a farmer projecting their desires onto a pig is the exact issue that assuming an objective concept of “best self” leads to. It assumes that other living beings have the exact same values as you, and gives you permission to do horrible things to them to make them conform to those values. We need to be willing to listen to people’s desires that go against our idea of what’s best to avoid this. Of course, after verifying that it is indeed what they actually want and not just a fleeting impulse.
CW: suicide for this part
You could perceive this as dangerous because it means it could lead to us, for instance, letting people die who are suicidal. While I understand the concern, I do think there’s a bigger issue with how we think about suicide in general. It’s pretty fucked up that we keep people alive against their consent because we’re fond of them- and then proceed to put them into horrible conditions like grippy sock jail that make their life worse. The logical conclusion of being against sanctioned suicide is worse than being ok with it. Of course, if we are going to be allowing this, we have to put measures into place to ensure people aren’t just being taken over by a depressive episode or feel pressured into death by social forces, and have a genuine, persisting desire to die, even through their moments of happiness. We need to be willing to improve everything else before resorting to such things, because many people resort to suicide due to feeling that what they want is impossible, not because they have a desire to die and of itself.
beastiality is not at all permissible because they have no desire to do anything like that with human beings.
See, the author’s article gives examples of an animal eagerly mounting a human. You have probably had a dog try to hump your foot or a stray cat in heat brush up against you and lift her tail. They certainly express this desire. Your formulation does not allow us to forbid bestiality in such cases, which is a serious problem. We must instead explain away the desire via interpretation, which is not trivial: animals masturbate and do all sorts of things in nature, so we can’t say their true goal is procreation or even sex with others animals of the same species. It becomes an exercise in motivated reasoning.
Similar objections apply for humans, since there is no objective way for an external party to tell the difference between “what they actually want” and “a fleeting impulse”. I think it is far better to use a standard that is separate from any individual. Courts routinely compare actions against those of a hypothetical “reasonable person”, and you can have a fiduciary duty to act rationally in another entity’s best interests. It’s possible to agree on what these legal fictions require. Your test is doubly unknowable. It asks us to first to know the true desires of the party in question, which is an interpretive task. We then must apply that desire to the definitionally-incomprehensible-to-the-party decision at hand, which is also interpretive. If we interpret the pig as having a desire to be free, does that mean that it really wants to go on some kind of hunger strike, or put its babies out of their misery? Totally abstract and impossible to agree on.
I suppose you could argue that I’m just rephrasing your point, but I think it’s an important way to rephrase it, because the logic of “best self” could be used to override eg kid’s consent to HRT and tell them they can’t get it, despite them wanting to, because as a Christian you think they just lack impulse control and need to be disciplined.
Yeah like you say, I think the way you rephrase this idea is ultimately not different. The bad decisions now come through the interpretive power given to the guardian, who can say e.g. “my kid is showing a desire to live a healthy life, and because they’re a kid they simply do not understand that HRT will hamper that goal, therefore I’m gonna withhold HRT”. It’s a terrible thing to be responsible for another: if they are granted any power at all to override immediate consent, guardians will always be able to mistakenly make bad decisions on behalf of their wards. But I think they can at least be given responsibilities that people can reasonably agree on.
suicide CW
I do agree that we are not always obligated to override the suicidal desires of our wards. It might well be in their best interest to die, e.g. unbearable mental or physical suffering with no hope of respite. We might even have a responsibility to euthanize a painfully dying pet or to refrain from performing traumatic CPR on a dying elder.
For people with similar levels of capacity over whom we have no power, my theory weakly suggests we should not interfere (the default of respecting others’ agency). Of course there might be other, stronger principles that justify interference, like the negative effects of suicide on others.
![[CW: bestiality] Professional "moral philosopher" ponders whether it's OK to sexually assault animals, featuring AI art](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/f26b2dce-7254-4537-acd1-5de623b591e0.png){kind=link}
Read the article, thought it was interesting, my most direct philosophical objection was here. I think that information that we do not have the capacity to grasp can constitute a deal breaker. For instance, animals are incapable of understanding that they are being “fattened up” for slaughter, but if they could they would likely refuse to eat. It is permissible to do acts an animal does not consent to, like bringing my cat to the vet (scary) and having him vaccinated (painful), only when such acts are clearly in the animal’s own best interests so that a “rational” animal would surely consent if it existed. If my cat could understand the purpose of going to the vet he would agree to it.
More broadly, I think
* whoops, this is deontology with extra steps. Ah well I’m a man of the people
Yeah, that sentence you quoted is just obviously untrue. The obvious counterexample to me is grizzly bears in Yellowstone. There’s a reason every trash can in Yellowstone is specially engineered to be bear-resistant. If bears start to associate humans with dumpster food, they get too comfortable around humans and once a bear no longer has the proper fear of humans, they get shot, because the park rangers at Yellowstone can’t have bears hanging out too close to humans and posing massive danger to human life.
So, the information a bear doesn’t have about dumpster food can absolutely affect them, even to the point of causing their death!
I’m a little annoyed that a so-called “philosopher” writing about animals and consent doesn’t understand even this basic example.
I’m not sure fundamentally changing the situation like that keeps things applicable to situation. a lot of people here don’t validate that logic in other situations.
putting that aside i’m not even sure it’s true. homer simpson would keep eating. probably some real people would as well, maybe me if the food tasted good enough and escape didn’t seem possible. Plenty of people refuse to do things to their own benefit equivalent to what going to the vet is to your cat.
i agree on the heuristic analysis, sometimes those relationships are even the less powerful person’s idea but that doesn’t eliminate the risks of those power dynamics… maybe your boss is hot but if they’re a shitty partner for months how able to dump them will you be? and are they going to not retaliate? maybe in one of the good star trek shows, but even in the optimistic TNG the writers had picard dump his subordinate because their relationship was affecting his judgement.
Yeah we’re being charitable here and imagining that my supernaturally-smart cat is his best self, a “rational” actor acting in his own best interest. We want basically the same yardstick parents use when they make their kids eat their vegetables and go to the doctor and such. If we override agency, we must make the decisions they would make if they were wiser. Otherwise you can just say “oh whatever this pig has poor impulse control, if he could understand he’d still probably just do [whatever I want / whatever he was already doing]” and then why bother with the thought experiment, you can just treat animals as property and ignore their agency altogether.
That is how the law works for both children and animals - parents are allowed to make arbitrary decisions for their kids, down to what clothes their 17-year-old wears to school, and owners can do almost anything to their animals. I think this is wrong; I think (a) we should not override the agency of others unless (b) we are making a choice that their best self would want us to make © we often have an affirmative responsibility to make these choices. It’s neglect if you don’t get your kid their shots, but it’s shitty if you control every tiny aspect of their lives. Another example of the “best self” thing: you should put your drunk friend to bed instead of letting him drive back to the club even if he’s a shithead and will still be mad you didn’t give him his keys once he sobers up.
I agree with your conclusion (beastiality obviously bad) but this doesn’t work, “wiseness” isn’t an objective measure. We can’t actually decide what isn’t or is wise with any real consistency beyond what we perceive to be wise ourselves.
I would say that Homer Simpson continuing to eat food despite inevitably being brought to the slaughter could be perfectly wise, if he does not particularly care about his own longevity. The same would be true if he knew there was no option that would lead to him escaping. There would be no reason not to take the food, then.
Assuming that there is objectively wise decisions assumes there are objectively wise goals, and this is simply not true. There are only socially accepted goals and personally ingrained goals.
What this leads us to is the ability to simply skip all this and lead us to a much simpler benchmark: don’t do things to animals that go against the goals they have already shown. Surgery is barely permissible due to their obvious instinctual desire to live, but beastiality is not at all permissible because they have no desire to do anything like that with human beings. Most other things are fine because animals show an eagerness to do them and they do not against their goals, like training for treats.
I’m going to go through your examples to show how this heuristic works.
You already know your friend does not want to die, usually, so this is perfectly fine because what they actually want aligns with what you do. If they did want to die in a car crash and not just because they were drunk or having an episode, then it’s not your fault that they can’t properly communicate that which goes against what they usually want. And, at risk of being very macabre, it is very easy to rectify if that is the case, unlike something like sexual assault which leaves permanent trauma.
Most pigs presumably want to be healthy and alive. Over feeding them or killing them after doing it goes against both of those things.
I suppose you could argue that I’m just rephrasing your point, but I think it’s an important way to rephrase it, because the logic of “best self” could be used to override eg kid’s consent to HRT and tell them they can’t get it, despite them wanting to, because as a Christian you think they just lack impulse control and need to be disciplined.
I believe the example you gave of a farmer projecting their desires onto a pig is the exact issue that assuming an objective concept of “best self” leads to. It assumes that other living beings have the exact same values as you, and gives you permission to do horrible things to them to make them conform to those values. We need to be willing to listen to people’s desires that go against our idea of what’s best to avoid this. Of course, after verifying that it is indeed what they actually want and not just a fleeting impulse.
CW: suicide for this part
You could perceive this as dangerous because it means it could lead to us, for instance, letting people die who are suicidal. While I understand the concern, I do think there’s a bigger issue with how we think about suicide in general. It’s pretty fucked up that we keep people alive against their consent because we’re fond of them- and then proceed to put them into horrible conditions like grippy sock jail that make their life worse. The logical conclusion of being against sanctioned suicide is worse than being ok with it. Of course, if we are going to be allowing this, we have to put measures into place to ensure people aren’t just being taken over by a depressive episode or feel pressured into death by social forces, and have a genuine, persisting desire to die, even through their moments of happiness. We need to be willing to improve everything else before resorting to such things, because many people resort to suicide due to feeling that what they want is impossible, not because they have a desire to die and of itself.
See, the author’s article gives examples of an animal eagerly mounting a human. You have probably had a dog try to hump your foot or a stray cat in heat brush up against you and lift her tail. They certainly express this desire. Your formulation does not allow us to forbid bestiality in such cases, which is a serious problem. We must instead explain away the desire via interpretation, which is not trivial: animals masturbate and do all sorts of things in nature, so we can’t say their true goal is procreation or even sex with others animals of the same species. It becomes an exercise in motivated reasoning.
Similar objections apply for humans, since there is no objective way for an external party to tell the difference between “what they actually want” and “a fleeting impulse”. I think it is far better to use a standard that is separate from any individual. Courts routinely compare actions against those of a hypothetical “reasonable person”, and you can have a fiduciary duty to act rationally in another entity’s best interests. It’s possible to agree on what these legal fictions require. Your test is doubly unknowable. It asks us to first to know the true desires of the party in question, which is an interpretive task. We then must apply that desire to the definitionally-incomprehensible-to-the-party decision at hand, which is also interpretive. If we interpret the pig as having a desire to be free, does that mean that it really wants to go on some kind of hunger strike, or put its babies out of their misery? Totally abstract and impossible to agree on.
Yeah like you say, I think the way you rephrase this idea is ultimately not different. The bad decisions now come through the interpretive power given to the guardian, who can say e.g. “my kid is showing a desire to live a healthy life, and because they’re a kid they simply do not understand that HRT will hamper that goal, therefore I’m gonna withhold HRT”. It’s a terrible thing to be responsible for another: if they are granted any power at all to override immediate consent, guardians will always be able to mistakenly make bad decisions on behalf of their wards. But I think they can at least be given responsibilities that people can reasonably agree on.
suicide CW
I do agree that we are not always obligated to override the suicidal desires of our wards. It might well be in their best interest to die, e.g. unbearable mental or physical suffering with no hope of respite. We might even have a responsibility to euthanize a painfully dying pet or to refrain from performing traumatic CPR on a dying elder.
For people with similar levels of capacity over whom we have no power, my theory weakly suggests we should not interfere (the default of respecting others’ agency). Of course there might be other, stronger principles that justify interference, like the negative effects of suicide on others.
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