Professor’s Erin McKenna’s lecture on Thursday addressed the current misconception of human involvement with all other animal. As a devout pragmatist, McKenna used Dewey’s means-end-continuum to show how we can better understand our connection with animals, and how recognizing these commonalities will create an ameliorated animal ethic. McKenna argued that we as human must consider ourselves as part of the “animal kingdom”. Though we as humans have different characteristics from most other animals, we nonetheless fall under the same genus of animals. We should therefore spend less time trying to figure out how animals live, how they can fulfill human ends, and more time figuring out how we (as animals) relate to each other. With this in mind, the more we see ourselves as intertwined with other all animals the less we ought to embrace an over-anthropomorphic view of animals. The problem with sticking to an over-anthropomorphic view of animals is that often elevate ourselves as the dominant animal, which falsely validates why humans can view all other animal “instrumentally”. As an advocate of “pet” ownership, however, McKenna was intent on clarifying how animals cannot be considered as “things”. This approach to animal ethics reinforces the instrumental view of animals as “ends” for humankind. Animals thus become the means for human ends rather than ends in and of themselves.
Last semester I took Prof. Terj’s class on Environmental Ethics. We read a few articles by McKenna; one of which attacking the use if on factory farming and the other an eco-feminine approach to animal ethics. Of course both articles, not to mention her lecture, where motivated by pragmatic understanding of animal ethics. One of the points she reiterated in her lecture was how pragmatist recognize their own fallibility. In general, the pragmatist would dismiss what William James might call “supposed necessities” and use the rule of fallibility helping reshape an undersigning humankind kind. But what I found most appealing in McKenna’s philosophy is how she employs an eco-feminine perspective to animal ethics. The advantage of an eco-feminine perspective helps reassess what we as humans are missing in our approach to animal ethic. The eco-feminist perspective encourages humans to abandon the “dominant”, anthropomorphic view of animals. Instead it appeals to the interest of all animals, which we as humans should embrace as being part of the animal kingdom. Thus, if the eco-famine can indeed teach more about our involvement with animals, it is that our relationships with animals are more intimate and transformative than they are instrumental. Only in abandoning the anthropomorphic view are we as humans then able to consider the needs and interest of all other animals.
Humans should embrace ourselves as part of the animal kingdom is McKenna's point however there is a problem with this view. Considering the intelligence of these animals, and pragmatism's attempts to find ways to gain the most mutually beneficial approach it is an inevitability that we see animals on a lower plane than humans. Animals who ended to have their decisions made for them will inevitably be considered inferior. After all it is what we do with children, and it was a justification for the treatment of other races in America. We constantly justify these hierarchies by saying that the other cannot make the decision themselves. As long as decisions are made for them they will be considered inferior.
ReplyDeleteI just felt like arguing for arguments sake.