Steps to a Land Ethic, continued

Looking at the human-animal relationship, then, let us say we allow natural rights to animals in general (not just to domestic, economic animals). Is this a bastardizing allowance in that the animals cannot ever act on any real obligation to respect our rights in turn? I think not. Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that no animal has ever used a human as a means to an end; animals implicitly respect our rights to keep on living and living freely. This, I believe, is the essence of Naess's "ecological egalitarianism," even though here I mean to use the term in a different context than the deep ecologist Naess probably intended. The obvious retort is to ask, "What of all the wild and savage animals that have acted brutally toward humans? Are safari leaders and backwoods trekkers simply foolish to carry rifles in order to defend themselves?" These questions miss the point.

When animals attack humans it is not for economic or instrumental purposes; it is to defend themselves, their territory, or their family. That the perception of a threat from humans can often be mistaken does not detract from the simple fact that cases of animal violence against humans are almost entirely defensive (or, very rarely, biologically predatory and therefore vital). Human violence against animals on the other hand is, rather than being necessary in order to protect the inherent interests of humans, both calculated and non-vital in the vast majority of cases (factory farming, commercial-scale slaughter, etc.). Implicit in this argument is the understanding that humans can and do thrive without meat consumption; hence carnivorism is not a biological necessity for humans as it is for, say, lions and wolves.

So extending rights to animals is not so much irrational as it is a more complex endeavor than extending rights to all humans. It entails a rather dialectical way of understanding obligations in ecological perspective; essential to that understanding is the emphasis on not treating morally significant beings purely as means to ends if such is not a biological necessity. This does reflect the consequentialist nature of deep ecology, which, unlike the animal ethics of Singer and Regan, allows in theory for animal killing under a number of different circumstances. Those circumstances, stemming from Leopold's thinking, might include, for example, cases where the killing is necessary to maintain the "integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community" under consideration (Leopold 1990, p. 174). This utility-related justification for killing smacks of the essential hubris of the human-as-supreme-manager mentality. Humans are implicitly deemed wise and knowledgeable enough to be able to predict when and where which activities will achieve this integrity-of-the-biotic-community aim.

We might talk of three notches on the continuum of such consequentialist hubris--the strong consequentialist view, the weak one, and the deontological or anti-consequentialist. First, we have the ecological mode which, in its facile and shallow incarnation, leads men to thinking they can manage the entire ecology (indeed, the biosphere) as if it were one grand machine, detailed to the minutia but nevertheless not unmanageable or even incomprehensible; the significant moral interest here is at the ecosystem (and largely instrumental) level. Second, we have Singer's views that the morally significant consequences we should concern ourselves with are the causing or prevention of suffering to individual animals; this leads Singer and others to the feeling that they can decide where to draw the line, that is, where life ceases to involve morally-significant sentience. (At the shrimp level? At the oyster level?) Third, we have Regan's anti-consequentialist views; Regan's ideas imply that we can never know, with infallibility, how all the interconnections in nature work, how nervous systems affect sentience, etc. Instead, we should develop first principles of nonviolence and the respecting of the interests of the non-human. These are principles that need not depend on incomplete understandings (and nonexistent wisdom) in science and medicine.