Nonsense on stilts? Wittgenstein, ethics, and the lives of animals

Inquiry

Volumn 49, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 314-336

  Pleasants, Nigel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33747159327     PISSN: 0020174X     EISSN: 15023923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00201740600831364     Document Type: Review

References (66)

1. Hereafter, in deference to linguistic convention, I shall mostly dispense with the 'non-human' qualifier.
2. On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), §475.
3. 'It is no accident that many critics of the claims that animals have beliefs and desires, or emotions, or consciousness, or self-consciousness, derive their criticisms from the broadly Wittgensteinian tradition which places language at the centre of human self-understanding and understanding of the world.' David Oderberg, Applied Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p.109.
4. I use 'liberation' to mean radical reform at least, and more likely abolition, of human practices involving the use of animals for food, clothing, experimentation, sport and entertainment; and 'liberationist' to mean one who advocates such change and who advances philosophical argument in support of that advocacy.
5. Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Pimlico, 1995), p.14. Rollin states that 'Wittgenstein, the most anti-Cartesian of all philosophers, shares the Cartesian bias against animal mentation by virtue of the absence of language in animals',
6. The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science (Oxford: University Press, 1989), p.137. Clark deplores those 'neo-Cartesians (or Wittgensteinians)' who asset that 'what is true is only what "we" will affirm - but "we" (bizarrely) always excludes anyone who gives weight to "animal" experience',
7. Animals and Their Moral Standing (London: Routledge, 1997), p.2.
8. For example: 'Wittgensteinians...simply have to accept that within the Nazi form of life Jews were seriously, and for that form of life appropriately, called parasites and poisoned humanity', Clark, Animals and Their Moral Standing 1997), op. cit. note 5, p.123.
9. Frey, Interests and Rights: the Case Against Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980);
10. Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective (London: Routledge, 1994 [second edition]). Hereafter the latter will be referred to in the main text and notes as 'AL'.
11. One exception is David DeGrazia, a liberationist who convincingly shows that Wittgenstein was not sceptical about the mental lives of animals: 'Why Wittgenstein's Philosophy Should not Prevent us Taking Animals Seriously' in C. Elliot (Ed.), Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). As implied by its title, DeGrazia's paper advances the mainly negative thesis that acceptance of Wittgenstein's 'anti-theory stance' (p.113) need not be taken to preclude philosophical argument for radical moral reform of our animalutilising practices (though his conception of 'ethical objectivity' is decidedly un-Wittgensteinian). I shall seek to make a more positive case for the fecundity of Wittgenstein's philosophical method.
12. Singer, Animal Liberation, op. cit. note 6, p.x.
13. Singer, Animal Liberation. Ibid., p.9.
14. Tom Regan, The case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
15. Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights a Philosophical Defence (London: Macmillan, 1998).
16. Ethics, Humans and Other Animals (London: Routledge, 2000).
17. Op. cit., note 6.
18. Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983);
19. Diamond, 'Anything but argument?' Philosophical Investigations Vol.5 (1982).
20. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: University Press, 1996).
21. Op. cit., note 6, p.10. Leahy satirises this as the 'if-you-don't-know- what's-in-other-people's-minds-how-can-you-be-sure-about-animals school of thought' (AL, 60).
22. Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), §244. Hereafter this work will be referred to in the main text and notes as 'PI'.
23. Leahy maintains that 'the system of laws in place at any one time in' democratic societies are 'a crystallised record of the society's received wisdom' (AL, p.176).
24. Op. cit. note 5, p.14.
25. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1988), props. 4.016, 4.001, 1.
26. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ibid., 4.01.
27. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), pp.3-4.
28. Leahy's predication of incapability to animals connotes deficit and disability in relation to beings who have the capability; Wittgenstein, on the other hand, simply registers what animals do and do not do.
29. Recall that the ancient Greeks could not detect any humanity in non-Greek people because their speech seemed to consist only in meaningless 'bar-bar' noises, hence the designation 'barbarian'.
30. Leahy asserts that 'it is not language' that they have learned, despite acknowledging that their skills 'go beyond the pre-linguistic prototypes of language' (AL, p163).
31. Op. cit. note 23, p.17.
32. '[The] rules of grammar determine the bounds of sense. They distinguish sense from nonsense', Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p.40.
33. '[T]he aim of this book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather-not to thought, but to the expression of thought...It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense', op. cit. note 21, p. 3.
34. Op. cit. note 28, p.39.
35. Also Peter Winch: 'one of our primary concerns is precisely to distinguish sense from nonsense' Ethics and Action (London: Routledge, 1972), p.83.
36. Leahy's remarks are directed at Harriet Schleifer's depiction of animals' experience en route to, and awaiting, slaughter, in 'Images of Death and Life: Food Animal Production and the Vegetarian Option' in P. Singer (Ed.), In Defence of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
37. Diagnosing nonsense is a critical device that is also favoured by non-Wittgensteinian philosophers. For example, Stuart Hampshire, asserting 'the senselessness of attributing intentions to an animal', says that 'it would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future', Thought and Action (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), p.98.
38. On a different, but related, issue - the status of the human foetus - Ronald Dworkin claims that 'it makes no sense to suppose that something has interests of its own...unless it has, or has had, some form of consciousness', Life's Dominion (New York: Vintage), p.16. Dworkin notes that some 'pro-life' advocates do say, 'rhetorically', that the foetus has interests hence rights. But he insists that conceptual analysis reveals that they don't - can't - really believe this because it is a 'scarcely comprehensible idea', p.20. (I would have thought that one pretty obvious way to make sense of, or comprehend, the idea that a foetus has interests [I claim no more] is to think of it as an organism that possesses those properties in virtue of which it will develop into a creature that does possess what Dworkin regards as the properties necessary for interests to attach, and that the later being is self-identical with the former organism. Dworkin does not explicate the moral significance of the difference between that which 'has had some form of consciousness' and that which will.)
39. In the Tractatus (4.461-1), Wittgenstein distinguishes 'senseless' from 'nonsensical', where the former pertains specifically to tautologies and contradictions. This is a technical distinction peculiar to the Tractatus. I use the terms in the 'everyday' manner, as interchangeable synonyms (as does Wittgenstein in his later writings).
40. James Conant, 'Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein', in A. Crary and R. Read (Eds.) The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000) , p.176.
41. Alice Crary, 'Introduction' in The New Wittgenstein 2000) , op. cit. note 34, p.12.
42. Op. cit. note 34, pp.176-7.
43. Although prominent for his innovatory reading of the Tractatus, Conant reads Wittgenstein's later philosophy in essentially the same way, except that here nonsense (i.e. mere nonsense) is said to result from attempting to 'speak outside language-games'. When this happens, 'either we mean something different from what we take ourselves to mean or we mean nothing at all', and we undergo an 'hallucination of meaning', 'Wittgenstein on meaning and use' Philosophical Investigations, (1998) Vol. 21 (3), p.248.
44. Philosophical Investigations, (1998) Ibid. p.177.
45. Commenting on the attitude of some research scientists, Midgley remarks that they believe that '[moral] claims on behalf of animals are not just excessive, but downright nonsensical, as meaningless as claims on behalf of stones or machines or plastic dolls', op. cit. note 15, p.10.
46. The renowned anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard calls this kind of thought-experiment the "'if I were a horse" fallacy', Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p.24.
47. Op. cit., note 2, 110.
48. After writing this I performed a Google search and discovered that others have already proffered very similar renditions of the proposition.
49. 'Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death', Wittgenstein, op. cit. note 21, 6.4311.
50. Much of the contemporary literature seems to me to centre around banal understatement and pseudo explanation. For example, Kai Draper states that 'an early death would typically deprive its subject of benefits she reasonably wants. Accordingly, it would be appropriate to be dissatisfied with the prospect of such a death', and '[d]eath is a genuine evil. For death takes from us the objects of our emotional attachments, and sadness is a fitting response to the prospect of losing the object of an emotional attachment', 'Disappointment, sadness, and death' The Philosophical Review, Vol. 108 (3), 1999, pp.407 & 409.
51. Similarly, Don Marquis argues that '[p]remature death is a misfortune, in general, because it deprives an individual of a future of value', 'An Argument that Abortion is Wrong' in H. LaFollette (Ed.), Ethics in Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p.96. These 'heories' are unsatisfying and unenlightening (to me at least) because they are merely banal analytic restatements of the basic conviction that death just is bad, masquerading as explanations of what that badness consists in.
52. See L. W. Sumner, 'A matter of life and death' Noûs, 10 (2), 1976.
53. See Peter Singer, 'What's Wrong with Killing?' in Practical Ethics (Cambridge: University Press, 1993), ch.4.
54. Wittgenstein characterises knowledge of, or belief in, the externality, objectivity, and continuity of things similarly: '[m]y life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on', op. cit. note 2, §7. For Wittgenstein, such 'knowledge' and 'belief' is not amenable to formulation in discursive knowledge-claims or reflective inquiry, and when philosophers try to do so they end up playing rather peculiar language-games of obscure relevance to the real-life phenomena they purport to be about.
55. Dale Jamieson also suggests, somewhat tentatively, that we may 'suppose that some of our knowledge of human and animal minds is perceptual'. 'Science, knowledge, and animal minds' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 98 (1), 1998, p.87. The suggestion that pain and suffering is apprehended directly and immediately is related to considerations that lead most philosophers nowadays to reject the idea that 'what we really see' is sense data, not the objects of perception.
56. The notion of 'speaking outside language-games' is Conant's paraphrase of Wittgenstein's famous simile of 'when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work', and the grotesquely amusing metaphor of occasions 'when language goes on holiday' (PI, §§32 & 38), op. cit. note 36, p.248. But an idling engine is still an engine, and indeed functioning as engines are designed to do; and language on holiday is still language, albeit in unfamiliar circumstances and relaxed mood. For Conant though, attempting to 'speak outside language-games' results in saying nothing, period.
57. Metaphysical, because the pronouncement is that an utterance does not make sense because it cannot make sense.
58. Conant, op. cit. note 34, p.194.
59. Cf. Karl Popper's suggestion that the terms 'senseless' or 'meaningless' are 'better fitted for giving vent to one's personal indignation about metaphysicians and metaphysical systems than for a technical characterisation of a line of demarcation', The Open Society Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1966), pp.297-8.
60. 'Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified', Wittgenstein, op. cit. note 2, §30.
61. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Ibid., §138.
62. Part of Leahy's rhetorical strategy involves (mis)representing his liberationist opponents as powerful and dangerous subversives driving 'an almost irresistible bandwagon of enthusiasm for animal rights' (AL, p.252). This is a common rhetorical device of the moral and political conservative.
63. However, Cora Diamond suggests that animals can be victims of ridicule, even though unaware that they are being ridiculed (their lack of awareness of what is done to them being central to the oppressive power exercised over them by the ridiculer), 'injustice and animals', in Elliot op. cit. note 8, pp.137-8. I still think that in this case the debasement entirely redounds on the abuser and the animal does not suffer from the ridicule per se; but I can see the sense of the argument.
64. I say this in opposition to Bernard Williams's contention that 'before one gets to the question of how animals should be treated, there is the fundamental point that this is the only question there can be: how they should be treated', Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), p.118 (approvingly quoted by Leahy, AL, p.208). This simply begs the question against liberation.
65. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §307.
66. Thanks to Jim Byrne, David DeGrazia, Adrian Haddock, Michael Hauskeller, Phil Hutchinson, Mark Peacock, Rupert Read, Ted Schatzki, and to the journal's referees for very helpful critical feedback and suggestions.