A sense of unreality often blocks our attempts to understand our moral relations with animals. The whole question is hard to fit into our ethical system. Arguments for taking it seriously tend to be dismissed rather than met, to be stigmatized wholesale as perverse, sentimental, emotive, childish, impractical, superstitious, insincere - somehow not solid. They do not, however, go away; if anything, they become more pressing. Now this kind of upsetting clash always deserves serious attention. The first thing to be said about such clashes is that they arise on plenty of other topics as well as about animals. We get a similar unnerving sense of double vision, of hovering between dream and reality, whenever we are confronted with any unsatisfactory and difficult corner of our moral scene. It happens both when principles collide, and when principle merely collides violently with practice. Ethics is pratical. If standards conflict, or if they are so high and so general that we cannot see easily how we could act on them, we feel dazed. Still more, if it seems that what we ought to do is something that no reasonable person would consider doing, we get sceptical; we suspect fantasy and confusion. We know that morality does actually need remote and general standards, and must sometimes demand actions which no reasonable person at the time would consider. We know that a morality which never shocks anybody dwindles into etiquette. The history of past reforms, like the abolition of slavery, shows this. All the same, ideals which nobody can translate into action are wasted. This tension is a quite general difficulty of life. (To look at it another way, it is a general factor in making life interesting.) In trying to embody remote general ideals - freedom, equality, love - in what we must hastily do under deplorable conditions at a particular time, we have to work out subsidiary, detailed principles of interpretation. These commonly give us much more trouble than the general and remote ones, because they involve clashes which are simply invisible from the prophetic distance.
I mention this general problem in order to point out that the animal issue is not really an isolated one. It is an aspect of morality like any other. Actually, by working on it, we shall find useful insights which can help us over everyday issues which everybody recognizes to be central.
by Mary Midgley in Animals and Why They Matter, p. 9 , The University of Georgia Press, 1983, Athens, Georgia.
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