Hsiao's defense of animal cruelty fails

Responding to a phil paper arguing that it's fine to brutally torture animals for food

Many people describe Kershnar as holding horrific views and getting things wrong across the board. I certainly have many disagreements with Kershnar, but I also find myself in agreement with him on a wide range of topics. However, there is one philosopher whose views I find repugnant¹, who I think gets things wrong across the board. That philosopher is Timothy Hsiao.

Hsiao is a theist who is in favor of marijuana being illegal, anti homosexuality, anti contraceptives, pro natural law, and pro factory farming. I thought it would be worth responding to one of his papers—the one where he justifies harming animals. Hsiao’s aim is to, as he says, “…argue that animal suffering is not morally salient, and that animals lack the required features necessary for membership in the moral community.”

Hsiao objects to the view that animal suffering is bad by writing “However, the move from being harmed to being wronged is too quick. While pain experiences are no doubt harmful to the being who experiences them, this fact does not by itself establish that pain is harmful in a moralsense. A harm in its most general form is simply a setback to something’s welfare, and there is a distinction to be drawn between moral and non-moral harms. Not every violation of something’s welfare counts as a moral evil. Suppose I cut a rose off a bush. My cutting the rose has harmed the bush, but I have not wronged it. If I introduce malware into a computer, I harm the computer by compromising its ability to function properly, but it is not wronged by my act of introducing malware. A lack of motor oil is bad for an engine, but not morally bad. Fertilizer is good for a plant, but not morally good. Just as there are moral and non-moral senses of goodness and badness, there are likewise moral and non-moral senses of harm.”

What? Several things are wrong here.

1 There are three main theories of well-being, desire theory, objective list theory, and hedonism. None of them hold that a rose being plucked is harmful.

2 Something is harmful if one who was totally rational would want it not to happen. Imagine that the pig had a fully rational guardian angel, who had their interests at hand. They wouldn’t want to be castrated without anesthetic. I currently am a pretty rational being, albeit of course not fully rational. If you gave me drugs that made me very irrational, I currently rationally hold the judgement that it would be better if I were not in pain. However, if you turned me into a rosebush, I currently rationally hold no preference for avoiding thorns being plucked.

Hsiao continues, writing “Hence, if the ability to feel pain is a value-conferring property, then what makes it value-conferring cannot merely be the fact that it is a harm. Otherwise, this would render all harms as moral harms. There must be some further fact about pain that explains why it is morally relevant in a way that other harms are not. This is not to deny that our own pain experiences are morally relevant. The reason why our own pain experiences are morally relevant has to do in part with their harming us, but a bare appeal to harm cannot provide a complete explanation.”

I think my account is adequate. If you made me a car, I currently don’t care about what you did to the car. If you gave me drugs that slowly turned me into a cow, I wouldn’t want to be sexually abused or bolt gunned in the back of the head.

Hsiao later says “No Moral Standing Without a Rational Nature15 If neither sentience, consciousness, nor activity confers moral standing, what does? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a member of the moral community, and why? The account of moral status that I will defend has been the traditional one: in order for a being to have moral status of any kind, it must have the capacity to reason. 16 It is this feature that is the sine qua non of morality and moral standing.”

Several problems for this account.

1 What about severely mentally disabled people who can’t reason?

2 What about people who are intoxicated making them unable to reason well?

3 This sanctions animal cruelty across the board. Would it be okay to torture a dog to produce slight benefit for humans?

4 What about babies?

5 What about a non sentient AI who could reason impeccably?

Hsiao addresses these more later, so I’ll flesh them out more when turning to what he says about these. He next says

“To see how the two are intimately connected, we need look no further than to the concept of morality itself. The two essential objects of morality are knowledge and action. By knowledge is meant knowledge about what is good for oneself (‘‘knowledge of purpose’’), and by action is meant the free will to act on the basis of that knowledge (Oderberg 2000b; Reichmann 2000; Lee and George 2008; Lee 2009). Why knowledge and action? The answer is that the whole point of morality, moral theorizing, and moral living is so that we may be moral—that is, to determine the truth about the good life so that it may be pursued through activity. Whatever ancillary aspects it might have, morality, boiled down to its essentials, is fundamentally about pursuing what is good and avoiding what is evil.17 Pursuing good (or avoiding evil) requires knowledge that is meant to be applied, namely knowledge of what is good (or evil) and how it is to be pursued (or avoided). This means that a moral subject—that is, a being to whom moral duties are directly owed—must have the ability to pursue the good and therefore know what is good. Why? To say that someone is directly owed moral duties is tantamount to saying that his welfare is intrinsically morally valuable—that is, morally valuable for its own sake. But one’s welfare cannot be the locus of this intrinsic moral value unless it is morally salient. As we have seen from the many examples in the previous section, there are many things whose welfare is not morally salient and which for that reason lack intrinsic moral value. To have moral salience is to have the properties related to the concept of morality. This means having the properties related to pursuit of goodness and avoidance of evil, specifically the properties of being able to pursue good and avoid evil.”

This seems wrong in several ways.

1 Things can harm beings even if they aren’t aware of them. Babies don’t have knowledge of what’s good for them, but it’s still bad to hurt babies.

2 Beings without free will can also have moral salience. Imagine a sentient gargoyle which is supremely rational, but unable to move or do anything. This being has no free will, but it would obviously be bad to brutally torture it.

3 Morality isn’t just about figuring out what is a good life. One should sometimes do things that make their lives worse, for the greater good.

4 Pursuing good may usually require some knowledge, but it certainly doesn’t require moral knowledge. Moral anti realists don’t have moral knowledge—they don’t claim there is any such thing. However, they can still do good things. Similarly, a cow might not have a well worked out normative system, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t find it’s suffering to be bad. As cases like Future Tuesday Indifference show, things can be bad for people, even if they’re unaware of them being bad.

5 The phrase “properties related to the concept of morality,” is equivocatory. Obviously a being has to be morally significant for it to be morally salient. However, beings can have moral significance even while lacking moral agency, see the gargoyle example above. Similarly, imagine a causally inert disembodied mind that experiences holocaust esque levels of suffering every second. It obviously cannot pursue good or evil, but its suffering is still bad.

Hsiao continues, writing, “Now, as explained earlier, one must be able to know the good and to act on it to have moral standing. But significantly, the only kinds of beings that can do these actions are rational beings. Understanding, articulating, and fulfilling the demands of morality, after all, require the ability to reason. Hence, only rational beings can have the properties needed for their welfare to be morally salient and thus for their welfare to be the locus of intrinsic moral value to which duties are directly owed. Beings who lack the inherent capacity to reason totally lack moral standing.”

His account before was false, as I previously explained. However, even if we accepted this, we wouldn’t only grant standing to rational beings. Rationality may be required for one to fulfill the demands of morality. However, it is not a sufficient condition. Consider the earlier example of the disembodied mind who can’t interact with the world. They can’t fulfill any obligation, yet they are rational.

This can be shown with a parallel. The only kinds of beings that can know the good and act on it are existent beings. Therefore, existent beings have moral status.

Hsiao continues, writing, “Now, as explained earlier, one must be able to know the good and to act on it to have moral standing. But significantly, the only kinds of beings that can do these actions are rational beings. Understanding, articulating, and fulfilling the demands of morality, after all, require the ability to reason. Hence, only rational beings can have the properties needed for their welfare to be morally salient and thus for their welfare to be the locus of intrinsic moral value to which duties are directly owed. Beings who lack the inherent capacity to reason totally lack moral standing.”

Several problems.

1 There’s literally no justification for the “inherent capacity,” to reason criterion, rather than just the capacity to reason.

2 As was argued before, what matters is not being rational, but rather relating to things that a rational being would care about on your behalf. If I slowly became irrational in a flowers of algernon esque scenario, I currently rationally regard the suffering that my irrational self would experience as being very bad.

Hsiao next says “Since animals are incapable of acting for moral reasons, it follows that animals do not have moral standing. If animals were rational in the sense required to be a moral subject, then they would be under moral duties to each other. The cheetah would have a moral duty not to hunt the gazelle. Owls would be under a moral duty not to kill mice. Not only that, but we would be under obligations to prevent animals (who cannot help themselves) from killing each other. All of this is absurd. We do not hold animals morally responsible or put them on trial for their apparent misdeeds. Animals kill and maim each other, but there is no moral significance to these actions.18 The animal world is amoral.”

Several points are worth making.

1 To the extent we reject the moral standing and moral culpability distinction, we don’t have to hold that animals are culpable.

2 There’s a very obvious consequentialist reason for the difference. Animals are irrational so they can’t be deterred by being held responsible. However, they can still do bad things. When animals eat a human or a gazelle that is bad. They are not moral beings so we can’t really blame them, but it is bad, in much the way that a tornado is bad.

3 I think it’s plausible that we should try to prevent animals from suffering in the wild. Lions go for the groin when they eat non lions. If you have an ounce of sympathy for a sentient being having its genitals eaten by lions, you should support attempts to reduce animal suffering (if they were expected to be succesful).

Hsiao continues, writing, “Another related objection—and one that is perhaps the most common argument against any attempt to deny moral standing to animals—is the argument from marginal cases. We can summarize the argument as follows: If animals lack moral status because they cannot reason, then newborns, infants, and those who are mentally disabled must also lack moral status. But since newborns, infants, and the mentally disabled do have moral status in spite of their inability to reason, the ability to reason is not necessary for moral status.19

The response to this argument is simply that all humans, regardless of age or disability, have moral status because they possess a rational nature. 20 That is, all humans, in virtue of being the kind of organism they are, possess a basic or root capacity to reason. This capacity may be immature, undeveloped, or impeded in the case of certain individuals, but this does not entail that the capacity is non-existent. What is lacking in so-called marginal cases is not the capacity to reason, but its manifestation. Consider a rock and a human being born blind. Both lack the ability to see, yet the human being’s lack of sight is deficient in a way that the rock’s lack of sight is not. This is because human beings, unlike rocks, ought to see. There is an inherent normativity in the human ability to see that is not present in the rock. What explains this normativity is the fact that all humans as such have basic powers and capacities oriented towards fulfillment. Hence, the root capacity to reason is relevant to moral standing in a way that its developed form is not, for root capacities provide a benchmark by which can evaluate whether a thing’s life is going well or ill.

Without appeal to the normativity provided by these capacities, we would have no basis for our concepts of well-being, flourishing, maturity, immaturity, defectiveness, or disability. Root capacities are what dictate the growth, development, and proper functioning of an individual, and hence are present from the moment an individual begins to exist. Human embryos, for instance, develop in the way they do because their growth is teleologically directed from within by their nature. An embryo’s root capacities function as a blueprint that dictates how the process of biological development should proceed. Hence, all human beings, from conception to death, have moral status because they possess the root capacity for rational thought throughout every moment of their lives.21 On this view, there are simply no such things as marginal cases.”

Several problems arise.

1 What determines whether or not one has a rational nature. While it’s true that even disabled humans share a species membership with beings most of whom have a rational nature, it’s not clear why this categorization is relevant. For any irrational being we can create a set that includes that being and rational humans. For example, consider a set which includes a random zebra and all humans. Well, that set has a rational nature, so it’s a defect on the part of the zebra. It’s not clear why Hsiao is using species membership to categorize beings.

2 There are lots of related sets that we could categorize them as being part of. For example, we can say that a severely mentally disabled person is part of the set severely mentally disabled person, which does not have rationality as a constitutive feature. A terminally ill baby can be part of the set “babies who won’t become rational,” which does not have constitutive rationality.

3 Imagine we stumbled across a planet of beings who looked like humans but had the IQ of severely mentally disabled people. Would it be okay to eat them?

4 Imagine additionally that satan places a curse on some people, making it impossible for them to ever stop being unable to reason. Would we be okay with eating them? They cannot be rational at any point.

5 Imagine additionally that all mentally disabled people’s brains were transferred into the bodies of cows? Would they stop being morally relevant. Additionally, what if a few cows were rational. How many cows would have to be rational for the other cows that are not to be given moral consideration.

Hsiao continues “Puryear (2016) objects that it makes little sense to speak of root capacities if the requisite physical organs are destroyed or missing. Consider the case of a human being born without eyes. Puryear objects that such an individual lacks even the root capacity to see because he lacks the required physical organs to see. But this simply confuses the vehicle through which a capacity is expressed with the capacity itself. The person born without eyes lacks the physical organ through which sight should expressed, but he still ought to see, and what explains this oughtness is the existence of a root capacity that cannot be reduced to any physical organ. If this capacity were not present, we would be unable to explain why there is anything bad or defective about the condition of someone who is born without eyes. Indeed, the root capacity to see is what explains why humans develop eyes to begin with. The very reason why human development proceeds in lawlike ways is because of root capacities that direct the process of human life. Without appeal to these capacities, human development becomes completely inexplicable.22 In this sense, root capacities are prior to their characteristic organs in the same way that a blueprint is prior to a house. The fact that a blueprint may never be realized for whatever reason does not imply that the blueprint itself does not exist.”

What? The reason why it’s bad that people can’t see is because seeing is useful. We don’t think it’s bad for people to be born with high IQ’s or unique talents, because those are beneficial. The reason humans develop eyes is because seeing is biologically useful. If a human was born able to fly, that would be a unique feature that goes against humanities intrinsic nature, but it wouldn’t be bad.

“In light of the foregoing arguments, we can conclude that animals lack moral status. Since this entails that animals do not have any kind of right to noninterference on our part, it is morally permissible for us to use them for our own purposes. Animals may be used not just for food, but for experimentation, clothing, assistance, companionship, and a variety of other purposes. However, this is not to say that we are permitted to do literally anything we want to animals, anymore than the fact that we can use our property for our own purposes implies the right to do whatever we want with it. We may not have duties directly to animals in respect of their welfare, but we do have duties to ourselves and each other that require us to respect animal welfare. We may not torture, abuse, or otherwise mistreat animals, for in doing so we corrupt our own character, which also disposes us towards cruelty against our fellow humans.24”

Several issues with this.

1 Suppose that Mr. Hsiao gained knowledge that a trillion animals were slowly having their skins ripped off by razors, inflicting profound agony on them, before eventually killing them. He could prevent all of it by pressing a button. However, doing so would cost 20 dollars, thus harming humans slightly. If the only reason harm to animals is bad is because of how it affects us, then he’d be under no obligation to push the button. In fact, he’d be wrong to push the button, because he’d be harming humans to benefit animals. This is, however, implausible.

2 Suppose additionally that there were two children torturing cats. One of them was torturing a real flesh and blood cat. The other one was torturing a robot that looks like a cat but is not conscious. Hsiao can prevent one of those from happening. On his view, given that cats don’t matter at all, he should just flip a coin. They have the same effect on people. However, this is implausible. Part of what’s bad about setting a cat on fire relates to the harm to the cat.

He says “It is not clear why someone who denies that animals have moral status cannot be committed to the thesis that animal cruelty is wrong in part because of what it does to the animal. Animals, after all, possess welfare conditions, and so acts of cruelty harm them in a real sense. Even though it is human beings (either oneself or others) who are wronged, it is not incorrect to say that that animal cruelty is wrong in part because it harms animals, since it is through harming animals that persons are wronged. In other words, the harm dealt to animals is a necessary—but not sufficient—condition of what makes animal cruelty wrong. It is not necessary to attribute moral status to animals in order to explain the wrongness of animal cruelty in a way that references the well-being of the animal that is harmed.”

If we accept that animals don’t matter, it’s hard to account for this distinction. Setting a cat on fire is very bad. Setting a blade of grass on fire is not. If they have the same moral worth, those acts are morally indistinguishable.

He continues, writing “As a formal definition of animal cruelty, we may say that an act is cruel if it reveals a corrupt character or if it corrupts one’s character so as to make one more disposed to mistreating humans. Both animals and humans share the ability to suffer, and so taking delight in the suffering of an animal disposes one towards similar behavior when it comes to human suffering. But there is no straightforward way to give a catch-all list of the practices that meet this criteria. Since animals lack moral status, what counts as a cruel practice towards animals will be person-specific. A practice that evinces a cruel character for one person may not be considered cruel for another.”

Okay, so let’s imagine that a person sits on a cat and kills it. No one ever finds about it. On Hsiao’s view, there’s no reason to prefer that the cat wasn’t suffocated to death by accident. This is implausible.

Next Hsiao says “Some maintain that there is an inconsistency between the way we regard animals that are dear to us and the way we regard those killed in industrial farms, and that this can be exploited to show the immorality of industrial farming. Consider a thought experiment that Norcross (2004) raises. We are asked to imagine a scenario in which the only way an individual can please his gustatory appetite is to confine, torture, and kill puppies in order to secure a hypothetical compound that has the power to satisfy his urges. When he is put on trial for his actions, he insists that he not a sadist, and that he takes no pleasure torturing the puppies. He defends his actions by appealing to the priority of human pleasure over animal well-being. Yes, it is unfortunate that the puppies had to suffer, but they are mere animals. Norcross observes that in spite of this defense, nearly everyone would still find his actions to be morally reprehensible. But, he goes on to argue, what is going on in this scenario is no different from what occurs daily in industrial farms. Hence, Norcross concludes that individuals have an obligation to cease eating industrially-farmed meat. I fail to see how we can generalize from Norcross’ specific example to industrial farming in general. Take the practice of using dogs (and cats) as food for consumption. Such a practice strikes many in Western society as disgusting, sickening, and inhumane. Why? The explanation is likely due to the fact that dogs are regarded as companion animals with special social value. Individuals in Western cultures have, through various social practices, conferred ‘‘honorary moral standing’’ to dogs and cats in virtue of the roles that they have set for them (Carruthers 1992; Scruton 2000). We relate to our pets in ways similar to how we relate with human beings. For many of us, dogs occupy the role of an honorary family member.25 Hence, mistreating an animal that is regarded as a companion is good evidence of a cruel disposition, which also explains why the practice of eating a dog in the United States is bound up with a certain kind of social stigma. But while dogs have been accorded this special social value, chickens, cows, pigs, and other animals commonly farmed on an industrial level do not. This explains why many people feel the way they do when confronted with the prospect of consuming dogs, but not other animals. So we cannot generalize from our revulsion towards the slaughter of dogs to industrial farming. The disgust we associate with eating dogs can be adequately explained without having to attribute moral status to them. This is not, as Norcross suggests, to appeal to some crude form of moral relativism, but to acknowledge the fact that while animals lack moral standing, our attitudes towards them are shaped not just by our sympathy towards them, but also by the ways in which we use them. Thus, our intuition that there is something revolting about eating puppies but not other animals is defensible.”

This is certainly a response that can be given. However, on this view, it’s impossible for one to give an account of why a society that tortured cats for gustatory pleasure would be bad. If it’s only bad in virtue of people thinking it’s bad, then it would be perfectly fine if no one had any sympathy for cats.

Well, that’s all for now, thanks for reading :).

1. Hsiao is an accomplished scholar and no doubt a decent person. It is his views that I find repugnant, yet repugnant views should obviously not be censored.