Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:04]
A
This is Philosophy Bites with me, David.
- [00:06]
B
Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
- [00:08]
A
Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com. mary Midgley only died a few years ago, but was born just a year after the end of World War I. As Ellie Robson explains, all her life she was fascinated by the relationships between humans and other animals and the way we describe them.
- [00:27]
B
Ellie Robson, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
- [00:29]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [00:31]
B
The topic we're going to talk about is Mary Midgley on animals. Who was Mary Midgley?
- [00:38]
C
So Mary Midgley was a 20th century British philosopher. She was born in 1919 in Ealing, near London, and she lived an astonishing 99 years, 40 of which she was publishing books about philosophy.
- [00:51]
B
She started very late in philosophy, didn't she?
- [00:54]
C
So Midgley doesn't begin publishing until she's 59 years old. And she famously says in her amazing biography, the Owl of Minerva, that she just didn't know what she thought before then, which is quite a privilege for us in academia nowadays. Imagine waiting until you were 59 before publishing your first book.
- [01:11]
B
But she wasn't an autodidact. I mean, she came out of Oxford academic philosophy.
- [01:16]
C
Yeah. So this is a great story, which is the topic of two new popular books about four amazing women philosophers who were all writing throughout their lives, really. But they met as undergraduates at Oxford University in 1938 and Midgley was there alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foote and Iris Murdoch, and they all continued having a philosophical friendship all the way through their lives. Iris Murdoch was Mary Mitchley's bridesmaid, so they were all doing philosophy and they all went on to become these formidable women philosophers of the 20th century.
- [01:47]
B
So Mary Midgley wrote quite a lot about animals and that's what we're going to focus on. Just roughly, what was her take on animals?
- [01:55]
C
Midgley is quite a unique philosopher, I think, in the sense that her philosophy is very holistic and consistent and the theme of animals really runs through all areas of her thinking. So her animal ethics, obviously, also her metaethics, her philosophy of science. The idea of humans being a kind of animal is really, I think, the premise that sits under all of her philosophy. And the very first line of her first book, which I love to quote, is, we are not just rather like animals, we are animals. And this sounds like a really obvious point to make, but as I'm sure we'll go on to discuss, really, Mitchley thinks it's central.
- [02:29]
B
Well, what are the consequences of thinking that way?
- [02:31]
C
Sure. So Mitchelly's going To say that there are consequences for the way that we think about humans and the way that we think about animals. Unsurprisingly, the idea that man is a kind of animal, first of all, it's going to get us to try and think about human nature as not just simply one thing in the history of philosophy. Midgley has a really big problem with a swathe of traditions in history which talk about human beings as having one defining feature, which is usually something like rationality. So Midgley thinks that this simple, single characteristic of being rational is just going to encourage us to think of human nature as simple. So one side of the coin is that it's going to elevate us from non human animals, the idea of man being something different, something distinct from animals. It's going to encourage us to think of ourselves as superior to them, and that's going to have a bunch of ethical consequences, according to Midgley. It's also going to encourage us to reduce the lives of non human animals. It's going to encourage us to think of animals as this homogenous category. There's just humans and there's animals, and the animal category is just full of beings who are something like simple people, beings who don't have thoughts and feelings and beliefs. And she thinks further this idea of a dichotomy between beast and man, which is incidentally the title of her very first book. She thinks this kind of dualism is going to simplify our view of ourselves and simplify our view of animals.
- [03:48]
B
Where does she think that dualism comes from?
- [03:51]
C
So Midgley is like an anti reductionist through and through, but she thinks that maybe it's a human tendency to simplify and reduce concepts, and she doesn't think that that's inherently right or wrong.
- [04:01]
B
She.
- [04:01]
C
She thinks sometimes, for example, when we're teaching philosophy, we need to sometimes simplify concepts, but she thinks that when we simplify them too much, they can become damaging and inaccurate and they don't represent our real relationships, for example, with non human animals. It's just more complicated than the us and them lifeboat analogy, as she calls it. You're either in the lifeboat or you're out the lifeboat. And she thinks that these dualisms appear all over our thinking about the natural world.
- [04:28]
B
What kind of period was she writing in?
- [04:29]
C
Midgley's an interesting member of the wartime quartet, these women philosophers that I was talking about earlier. She leaves Oxford in 1940. She marries her husband, who's also a philosopher, Geoff Midgley, and she moves to Newcastle with him in the north of England, and she takes 13 years out in scare quotes of academia. But during this time she's reading loads of books about animal ethics, animal science, ecology, and she's watching David Attenborough and she's getting really interested in the lives of animals. So she begins publishing after that phase. She's raising her three boys, she's understanding what it is for humans to be animals, which she dedicates her first book to her three sons. Thank you for showing me that humans are a kind of animal. In 1972, she publishes her first paper. And from the 1970s she engages in debates in animal ethics.
- [05:22]
B
The 1970s were a golden age for animal ethics. So Peter Singer's Animal Liberation came out, I think, in 1975, and there's a whole movement emerging where suddenly people were recognizing that the way that animals were being treated in food production was incredibly cruel.
- [05:39]
C
Right. So Midgley's right in the thick of it. Her first monograph book comes out in 1978, and that's called Beast and the Roots of Human Nature. But the real text, where she's engaging in the debates of Peter Singer, directly criticizing him, although she does say that he gets a lot of things, comes out in 1983, and the book is called Animals and why They A Journey around the Species Barrier. Her idea in this book is to kind of give this, I think, a really radical approach to animal ethics. And it's essentially a kind of relational ethics. There's a kind of ethics that says we are animals and that means that we have a fellowship with other creatures in the world. And she thinks that this is just something like a natural fact. We are the kinds of animals, she says, that have always lived in mixed communities. We've always had animals as pets, we've always used animals to get around, we've ridden horses. But we also have shared societies with animals. The animals live all around us. The birds in the trees and the foxes that run across my wall at my flat in London. So she thinks that this is the starting point for thinking about animal ethics, is to acknowledge our kinship with animals and acknowledge that especially children are naturally able to empathize and think about the lives and needs of animals.
- [06:46]
B
Does she have anything to say about our antagonism with animals? Because in plenty of places people are fighting them off because they're endangering us.
- [06:55]
C
Sure. Mitchelli is going to say a lot of the problems that we have with non human animals are of our own making. We're the kinds of beings that are specially capable of having certain kinds of dominating vices we've taken control of animals lives, we've entered their spaces. But also, Nigel, she might say, you're engaging in this kind of dualistic thinking. It's an us versus them. Again, like, are you in the lifeboat or are you out the lifeboat? If you're not in the lifeboat, not going to help you, you're not our moral concern. And this is getting onto what she argues is wrong with Peter Singer's view. Mitchelly thinks that the idea of having what she calls a rationalistic or an abstract approach to ethics is what most animal ethicists during that period of animal liberation get wrong.
- [07:36]
B
Maybe you could just briefly explain Peter Singer's approach.
- [07:40]
C
Sure. So Peter Singer is a utilitarian and he's focused and he argues, drawing on the work of Jeremy Bentham, that famously, we should be thinking about the moral consideration of beings who are capable of something like sentience. So by sentience he means beings that are capable of feeling pleasure and pain. And in Singer's Animal Ethics, he argues that it's irrational to say that we can treat animals without any moral concern because they too have this thing called sentience. So the idea is something like there are abstract capacities which creatures can have which give them a kind of moral consideration. So Midgley thought what Zen got wrong was not that we should care about animals, but that we should be operating on moral theories according to this abstract reasoning. The idea that if you have something like rationality, a sense of the future, language, whatever's been suggested in the history of philosophy as that special characteristic that provides you with moral worth, whatever it is, she thinks that that's not the way to approach ethics. She's going to say that structurally speciesism, as Singer calls it, is not the same as something like racism or sexism. So Midgley is going to argue that that's not the right way of looking at things. In fact, we should be thinking about animal lives as much more different, complicated and rich than human lives. And we should be taking our cue of how to treat animals not based on one capacity, but based on a variety of needs and, and wants and capacities that they have in their nature. She's a real empiricist. She wants us to get on the ground and see what the animals need.
- [09:13]
B
What consequences does this have for an individual trying to think about how to live in relation to animals?
- [09:20]
C
Yeah, this is a good question. I feel like Mitchelli might be kind of frustrating to some philosophers because she's not going to give us a quote unquote moral theory or a guide to Everyday action. And I think in this sense she's much closer to the virtue ethics tradition than anything like the egalitarian or the Kantian. So it's a kind of a methodological thing in Midgley. She wants to argue that we should be responding to moral situations and contexts, not to abstract principles and rules. Her broad theory is going to tell us that we should be attending to the lives of animals in a way that encourages us to cultivate certain kinds of virtue, if we take Midgley's empiricism really seriously. So she says that when we're deciding to bring an animal into our lives, when we're designing a zoo, although she's against zoos, we should think about what that animal needs. We should think about what environment it needs, what kind of things make up its nature. In doing so, Midgley thinks that we're going to learn various things about the animal and we're going to have a realistic picture of that animal. And she thinks that that's going to encourage us to develop certain virtues like compassion, consideration, patience, empathy. And this all feeds into that idea, again, that she thinks that we naturally are the kinds of beings that can empathize with other animals. Her negative project is going to say, currently, the way that we treat animals is not illogical or irrational. According to the Singer view, it's vicious. It's actually revealing various kinds of character traits that we've allowed ourselves to get away with, which are kind of evidenced by our relationship with animals.
- [10:47]
B
What would Midgley say to the objection that human nature historically has always involved pursuing animals and eating them or keeping them, often quite cruelly, and eating them?
- [10:58]
C
First of all, she might say something like, it's actually a fairly recent phenomena that we use animals in such a large scale way, especially in terms of our diet and the mass meat eating industry, which has proliferated since the Industrial Revolution. The way we treat animals today is particularly vicious. So the idea of the myth of the beast and man is as worse as it's ever been. She is quite great at doing genealogies. In lots of her work, she traces back our thinking about non human animals. And she has examples of cultures where various animals are actually celebrated and their lives might be even treasured over the lives of certain humans. So she's saying something like, we can't make an abstract statement that nature is red in tooth and claws. It might be red and tooth and claw right now, but she's also going to have something to say about the fact that we don't see the animals that we Kill. So that's a kind of epistemic flaw as well. She's also going to say that we shouldn't just think about human nature as being one thing. So the kinds of animals that eat other animals, or, you know, we're just the kinds of beings that dominate nature, she thinks that's a myth. Human nature is much more complicated than that. And actually, if we have a look around us, humans are more sympathetic to animals. Humans might have this tendency to keep pets, but then eat animals at dinner time. Again, she's going to say these kinds of behaviors are all building into conceptual barriers that we have between humans and non human animals. So she's going to say basically that idea of nature being red and tooth and claw, human beings just wanting to kill and eat, being the head of the food chain, isn't necessarily accurate of human nature.
- [12:35]
B
Well, she could also have said that we are the kind of beings. I mean, this may be from falling into the trap of thinking of humans as rational animals, but we are the kind of beings who are capable of listening to reasons and changing our behaviour accordingly. So when somebody gives us good reasons not to eat meat or not to rear animals in a cruel way, we can adapt. That's not true of any other animal.
- [12:58]
C
Midgley rejects the premise found in the Aristotelian tradition that man is a rational animal. She thinks we're rational, among other things. And, and it's our emotional nature that allows us to have this kinship with non human animals. And our rationality is part of our nature, but it shouldn't dominate it. So it allows us to reflect on our behavior, but we should be responding to first and foremost our feelings and our emotions. And for Midgley, that's not really a dualism, it's an expression of our reason.
- [13:26]
B
So I have kinship with cats, we've got four cats at home, but I don't have kinship with mosquitoes. I don't see how kinship is going to explain my relationship with a mosquito that's biting me.
- [13:40]
C
So she focuses a lot on what she calls the mixed community, which is the idea that lots of Middle east scholars are super excited about at the minute. The idea that lots of human life is integrated with and shares various moral relations with other kinds of non human animal, and that gives us certain kinds of moral obligation. The lives of animals that are wild or distant from we might still have moral obligations depending on the circumstance and the situation. But she's also going to say something to you like, okay, I'm not denying that we have something like partiality. Towards those that are closest to us. Right. She actually thinks the utilitarian gets that premise wrong. We can and are justified in some kind of speciesism. It's just natural for me to prefer my sister to my dog. We are justified in preferring those close to us because of this emotional nature that we have. So Mitchelly's not going to say something like, if you had a million mosquitoes, they would have a larger moral claim than your four cats at home. Because for Midgley, the emotional bonds are source of lots of our moral demands. Again, this is why she rejects something in Singer. It's not just mere feeling or overly emotional or sentimentality that you have towards your cats. In fact, that's where moral philosophy needs to be done, is in your relation with your cats. It's not just about whether or not they have pleasure or pain.
- [14:55]
B
Do you think that because Mary Midgley had a kind of unconventional academic career meant that she hasn't been taken as seriously within academic philosophy as she might have been?
- [15:05]
C
Definitely. And a lot of my work is to place Midgley in conversation with academic philosophers and academic philosophy, especially Aristotelian naturalism. I think there's loads of real, quote unquote, proper philosophy in Midgley's work and it's been overlooked. A lot to do with the style that she writes in. She writes for a public audience and the fact that she wasn't in connection with the Oxford philosophers for lots of her career. She moved to Newcastle, she was in the north of England, and that back in the day was seen as a provincial institution. So I encourage people to overlook these potentially prejudice assumptions made about Mary Midgley and read Beast of Man to begin with.
- [15:45]
B
Ellie Robson, thank you very much.
- [15:47]
C
Thanks so much for having me.
- [15:54]
A
For more philosophy bites, go to www.philosophybytes.com. you can also find details there of Philosophy Bytes books and how to support us.