ChickieNobs and Ecological Dignity
No Brain, No Pain! So reads the fridge magnet in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, celebrating a blindingly direct solution to the problem of animal suffering. Simply do away with the areas of the brain responsible for sensation, or indeed — why not? — also those for voluntary movement, conscious experience, in fact anything not needed for digestion, assimilation and growth. While you’re making the necessary genetic modifications, why not give your chicken twenty breasts or twelve drumsticks, and get rid of other superfluous anatomy: feet, eyes, beak, and so on? Just an opening to pipe the nutrients into. The result: ChickieNobs, the ever-comatose chicken-like creature.
This, I think, is one of the most brilliant thought experiments to be found in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, for it raises an important question, and suggests an answer to it. The question is: is pain the most important aspect in the ethical treatment of animals? And the suggested answer is: no. Atwood’s protagonist Jimmy — despite being shallow, emotionally absent and self-absorbed — is repulsed by the idea. My instinct is to think Atwood intended to prompt this kind of reaction in readers. Certainly, though I acknowledge that not everyone might feel that way, it worked on me, and in this article I’ll be exploring what that kind of response tells us about our deep-seated and potentially under-examined ethical convictions.
To the extent that we are revolted by the ChickieNobs concept, what this tells us is that physiological pain, or indeed conscious experience of any type of suffering, then pain and suffering are not the sole determinants of ethical harm. Further, if your reaction to Atwood’s proposition is anything like mine, despite the total neutralisation of pain and suffering, inflicting such an existence upon another living being seems worse than most horrible forms of factory farming currently practised. The character of revulsion felt in response to the ChickieNobs concept might prompt us to locate it on the same spectrum of misconduct as factory farming, but further along it, suggesting that not only are pain and suffering are not the sole relevant factor, they are not even the most important factor in what makes factory farming unethical.
And yet, the premise seems perfectly reasonable: no brain, no pain! This might be especially so the way I have introduced it here, opening with the rationale, and following up with the logical practical response, the reverse of the order in which they are presented in Oryx and Crake. Some readers will no doubt be more persuaded by this than by any suggestion of visceral revulsion or intuitive recoil. After all, Western culture strongly prioritises reason over emotion. To argue against such a reaction would place me well out of my philosophical depth, so I won’t try, except to say that any logic system is only as good as its axioms, which can only be judged by values external to the logic system. Furthermore, I would point interested readers to the strong argument made by Val Plumwood for less emphasis on dispassionate rationalism in ethics, and more on “respect, sympathy, care, concern, compassion, gratitude, friendship, and responsibility,” in her 1991 paper, Nature, Gender and Self: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.
The most relevant and perhaps most nebulous of these concepts is respect. What is respect? Respect what? In human ethics, what we respect most fundamentally is dignity. Our respect for dignity applies even to people who are unconscious, or dead. As human relationships take place in society, interspecies relationships take place in ecosystems, so what we need, in order to understand respect for nonhuman beings, is an ecological conception of dignity.
Respect for human dignity means refraining from treatment that is degrading, dehumanising or exploitative. Common to these three modes of dignity violation is the coercive denial both of a person’s free agency — particularly social agency — and her or his nature and standing as a social being, in the context of social norms. It follows that a rough idea of ecological dignity can be found in respecting the free ecological agency of all beings, and their ecological-evolutionary nature. That is to say, an ecological respect position promotes the freedom of every organism (or association of organisms, as in a bee hive or a lichen) to pursue its own good in a way that is true to its species-nature, within the context of ecological systems of reciprocity, in which each organism is available to others as food. This is the meaning of ecological dignity.
Some hints concerning what considerations might arise from an ecological dignity position can be found in the following story, from Richard Nelson, concerning the animal ethics of the Koyukon people:
When I lived with Koyukon people, they sometimes mentioned wildlife researchers who had worked near their villages, capturing animals and tagging them, putting radio transmitters on them, or relocating them to start new populations. [Koyukon elder] Sarah Stevens once told me, “We never fool around like that with animals, because they have a spirit, and if we treat them wrong we might suffer just like they did.” At first this seemed inconsistent, given that Koyukon people live mainly by hunting and fishing. But later, as I learned more about the code of respect governing their relationships with animals, I realised how carefully they seek to protect the dignity and integrity of every living creature. My Koyukon teachers held a spiritually based covenant with all members of their natural community. According to this covenant, animals give themselves to feed and clothe people, but with few exceptions it is not appropriate to manipulate them, control them or confine them, or entertain the illusion of understanding them.
The ethical stance outlined above differs both from conventional Western ethics, and from Western animal rights / animal liberation theory, in a number of ways that can be understood on the basis of its origin in an ecological worldview.
What should be immediately apparent is that the Koyukon worldview is grounded in humility. Humans are just one of many species making up the ecological community; we are not the masters of the community, or the masters of its members. As a result, the level of restraint exercised in the Koyukon stance towards of animals goes far beyond the basic minimisation of pain, extending even to avoiding entertaining the illusion of understanding them. It would be arrogant and patronising to claim to understand a person we barely know, or an entire class of such people. Conceit of this type is a hallmark of discredited (but persistent) historical attitudes among Western elites towards women, people of the underclasses, and people of non-European cultures, and is implicated in their objectification and exploitation. An egalitarian perspective eschews reducing other persons to mechanistic predictability, and from an ecological outlook this includes nonhuman persons. Such humility is poignantly encapsulated in the Koyukon teaching that “each animal knows way more than you do”.
The humble egalitarianism of the Koyukon stance respects and protects the dignity of nonhuman animals in ways that far exceed the all but the most fanatical Western schools of thought around animal ethics, and yet the Koyukon people hunt and eat animals. Nelson explains this in terms of the spiritual covenant held between the Koyukon and their prey, but it’s not difficult to imagine a secular conception of this position, if this is preferred.
The ecological outlook accepts, in humility, the natural order of ecological systems as the foundation of the community, past, present and future. In Deborah Bird Rose’s graceful words, “mutual life-giving is the basis of ecological emplacement.” No being, human or otherwise, has a right to be unavailable to the ecological community as food, including humans, and one’s dignity is not contingent upon being ineligible for instrumental use. This is the covenant of reciprocity every organism accepts — consciously or otherwise— as a condition of our participation in the web of nourishment.
From an ecological outlook, to reject the appropriative order of nature, as some animal ethicists have done, is to indulge in hubris. Unlike social mores, which influence the interpretation of human dignity and are amenable to cultural change, ecological mores are a fixed, structural feature of the order of the natural world. The humility of the egalitarian ecological outlook not only accepts, but venerates participation in the food web, both as eater and as eaten, as an aspect of ecological dignity. Here, too, Koyukon practices seem to concord with an ecological outlook. Nelson reports that the Koyukon ethic of waste avoidance is based on spiritual respect for plants and animals, which includes being seen to value the gift of their flesh, so that “even if a diseased or starving animal is killed for humane reasons, it is still butchered and cached,” even though the meat is not usable.
That ecological dignity must be understood as operating within ecological systems of mutual appropriation is no minor point. This is the key difference between ecological dignity and human social dignity, and is an essential characteristic of any ethical approach that seeks to meet the challenge, laid out by Aldo Leopold and quoted in my opening post to Culture Dysphoria, to respect both the members of the ecological community and the community itself.
Because ecological communities depend on the bodily appropriation of their constituent beings, often in opposition to a being’s determined pursuit of its own good, the individualistic, libertarian formulations of human dignity that have arisen in the ecological vacuum of Western culture cannot be easily extended to the interspecies context. As discussed in the previous entry to Culture Dysphoria, philosophers who have tried to do so have been forced to hold entire classes of beings off to one side, in order that we may have somebody (“something”) morally inconsiderable to eat. The thought experiment of ChickieNobs reveals the weakness of the the appeal to the primary importance of sentience or consciousness made by these philosophers as a rationalisation of their separation of respected in-group from exploitable out-group.
A notable exception to this kind of minimal ethical extensionism is to be found in Paul Taylor’s theory of Respect for Nature. Taylor’s biocentric outlook, quoted in the previous entry to Culture Dysphoria, outlines a thoroughly egalitarian worldview, acknowledging that “all organisms are teleological centers of life.” Unfortunately, in building an ethical framework from this outlook, Taylor too tries to adapt individualistic concepts of human dignity to interspecies ethics. Since he doesn’t buy Peter Singer’s or Tom Regan’s tricks of denying the ethical considerability of plants and fungi, he winds up with a position that rejects all appropriative use of other organisms by humans, leaving him to resort to a series of ad hoc tie-breaker principles guiding us on how best to fail to meet our prima facie ethical duties, in order that we may eat at all.
The absurdity of this conclusion seems lost on many readers, judging by how widely and approvingly cited Taylor’s book has become. Interested readers are encouraged to read J. Claude Evans’ With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World, for a thorough dissection of Taylor’s deep rejection both of the ecological order and of human membership of ecological communities, and a consideration of what a properly ecological respect position might look like. I will also be returning to Taylor in the next entry to Culture Dysphoria.
So where does all this leave the ChickieNobs chickens? Why are we repulsed? We can’t be repulsed by the suffering, for the organisms involved in ChickieNobs experience no suffering, or even embarassment, shame, or regret. Are we repulsed on account of our innate sensitivity to ecological dignity? I think so. Certainly, our respect for human dignity would inspire a powerful reaction against any analogous initiative to genetically engineer and breed comatose humans for the sole purpose of exploitation. Ecological dignity differs from the usual conception of human dignity by affirming the availability of all beings as food, but this does not license the lifelong, total instrumentalisation of any being. The fact ChickieNobs chickens are eternally comatose does nothing to ameliorate our concern, just as drug-induced stupefaction doesn’t act in any way to neutralise the violation of date rape victims; if anything, it compounds our concern, because we care not just about suffering. Overarchingly, we care about dignity.
Atwood’s thought experiment makes it plain that an ecological dignity position leads to conclusions that differ in significant ways to the mainstream animal ethics movement, with its lingering anthropocentrism and preoccupation with consciousness and sentience. As we saw above, it takes no issue with hunting per se, and I should think it would take no issue with the conscious slaughter of livestock, as practiced under considerable controversy under some interpretations of halal and kosher dietary law. An ecological dignity ethic is much more likely instead to take issue with the commodification of animals, the industrial process of their processing through the slaughterhouse, their confinement for transportation, their lifetimes of enslavement, indeed the enslavement of their genome.
In the latter aspects, an ecological dignity position is in agreement with certain strains of Western animal ethics (abolitionism). But an ecological dignity position seems likely to feel equally strongly about the enslavement of economic plants and of the land, and about the extirpation and continued exclusion of wild ecological communities to make way for agriculture. However, a tough question then arises: how can we put such a position into practice in the context of a society that is totally dependent upon agriculture? I don’t have an answer for that.
References are available in the notes: visible as numbered speech bubbles to the right of the main text.
