Animals and Misanthropy offers a powerful reflection on the awful treatment of animals and moral character of humankind, one that David E. Cooper argues justifies misanthropy – not a hatred of people, but a ‘dark vision and hostile appraisal’ of human culture and ‘forms of life’ (p. 2). Despite animals being, in Milan Kundera's phrase ‘at our mercy’, they constantly meet with systematic abuse and exploitation that manifests our worst vices. Cooper's account is bleak and compelling, softened only slightly by the possibility of more modest, virtuous ways of ‘being with animals’.
Chapter 1 characterises misanthropy, a concept not widely used in contemporary philosophy. Cooper rejects optimistic visions of our moral capacities and performance inherited from the Enlightenment, reinstating an older, ‘darker perception of human beings’ (p. 54). Such appraisal does not invoke rights, autonomy, and ‘moral status’, which are rejected, later in the book, as overly abstract and idle. Informed by older traditions, the misanthrope focuses on human failings and vices – some moral, like cruelty, greed, and vanity, others ‘spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional’, such as hubris, insensitivity to beauty, and self-deception (p. 7). Such vices are not confined to awful people under extreme circumstances: they are entrenched and pronounced within the attitudes, practices, and structures of our forms of life, ‘distinctive […] of and integral to’ human life as it has come to be (p. 63).
Vices provide the basis for the misanthrope's two main styles of argument. Chapters 3 and 5 are ‘comparative’, charting various similarities and differences between humans and animals. Cooper rejects breezy claims about our being ‘just another species of animal’: only we have existential self-regard and a reflective moral sense. But where humans are virtuous and vicious, animals are necessarily viceless while being capable of various virtues such as loyalty, spontaneity, compassion. First, the asymmetries between virtue and vice favour animals: to be cruel, vindictive, or hubristic requires a psychological complexity animals lack, whereas many virtues are simple, ‘innocent’. Second, the various ‘machinations, complications and temptations’ intrinsic to human social life afford vast ‘scope and material’ for our failings (pp. 69–70). Without pecking orders and greasy poles, there can be no envy and vainglory, no vices premised upon characteristically human forms of life. Many animal researchers baulk at such moralisation of animals, but they have to contend with Cooper's careful arguments and phenomenologically rich testimonies from insightful writers who enjoy close, intimate engagement with animals.
Readers happier with talk of human vices will prefer the misanthrope's second style of argument, the critical documentation of the multiple failings evident in ‘institutionalised’ exploitation of animals in all their ‘variety’, ‘triviality’, and ‘casualness’ (pp. 86, 114, 115). Where Cooper's earlier work focused on virtues, chapters 4 and 6 survey five ‘vice-clusters’ manifested across human practices, institutions, and ways of life. This exercise in vice ethics enables fine-grained descriptions of the heterogeneous wrongs of our treatment of animals, a welcome contrast to the blander evaluative language afforded by mainstream approaches in animal ethics. Battery farming is morally wrong for its cruelty, heartlessness, and rapacity, not because it violates the rights or autonomy of chickens. Such direct moral castigation will be uncomfortable to those zealously determined to ‘tolerate’, without judging, the ‘choices’ or ‘lifestyles’ of others (most of whom, though, doubtlessly also lambast factory farming).
Cooper's strategy is explicitly set against the entrenched ethical focus on animal's rights, autonomy, and moral status. Such approaches are abstract, ignoring the complex emotional and cultural character of our relationships to animals. Pets and cattle are both animals, but we treat them differently, cuddling the former, slaughtering the latter. Consequently, rights and status theories are idle, empty of practical guidance. ‘All animals have rights’ might play well as a slogan, but tells us nothing about their concrete treatment, most of which anyway pays lip service to their alleged status and rights. By contrast, there is no such abstraction or idleness in vivid descriptions of the callousness, indifference, hypocrisy, and wilful ignorance manifested by industrial animal agriculture. Recognising a practice as cruel is sufficient, with no further need for talks of rights or status to ‘lubricate’ the judgment (p. 128).
Animal researchers contribute their own set of invidious abstractions, privileging the cold, detached descriptions that fuels what Mary Midgley calls ‘ritual scepticism’ about their life and character. By ignoring our concrete experiences of and engagements with animals, a scientist can profess uncertainty about their feelings, moods, and inner life, which is obvious to anyone who attends to them. Self-imposed empirical poverty masquerades as epistemic purity, meaning morally awkward questions about the suffering of dogs, pigs, and chickens can be postponed indefinitely. Such attitudes manifest vices in the ‘bad faith’ cluster – ‘self-deceit, wilful ignorance and a proneness to be “in denial”’, which the guiltily complicit use to self-servingly regard themselves as an ‘ignorant spectator’ (pp. 51, 41).
Moral abstraction leads to practical impotence, argues Cooper, encouraging the false sense that ‘rational regard for their status and rights, not emotions like compassion, defines a morally acceptable relationship to animals’ (p. 125). Activists focus on the ‘contradictions’ and ‘inconsistencies’ of those who, in the title of Melanie Joy's influential book, Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (p. 127). Such apparent rational failures dissolve once we abandon generic talk of ‘animals’, detached from our actual practices and traditions. Moreover, talking of illogicality lets us off the hook, morally speaking. Most people would rather admit failures of logic than confess to such failings of character as ‘callousness, willful ignorance, and self-serving illusions’ (p. 127).
Given the ubiquity and entrenchment of our failings and vices, Cooper rejects two types of response, ‘optimism’ and ‘radicalism’. Steven Pinker's recent upbeat praise of humankind's ‘marvelous’ moral progress overlooks the variety of sufferings meted out to animals. Contributors who answered ‘Yes’ to the titular question of an edited volume, Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?, do not mention animals at all. Also rejected are radical proposals about ‘moral engineering’ and projects of ‘social revolution’, aimed at ‘enforced reconstruction of our moral condition’ (pp. 117–8). Energizing as radicalism tends to be, it tends in practice to be fanciful, hubristic, or guilty of fantasy. Champions of entomophagy or vegan activists cannot seriously anticipate the mass abandonment of meat in favour of tofu or locust. Supermarkets that proudly include ‘veggie’ dishes in one aisle stock chicken and beef in the next. Meat-free Mondays end punctually on Tuesday morning.
Cooper prefers ‘quietism’, smaller, humble forms of ‘personal accommodation’ to – or ways of being with – animals, such as birdwatching, gardening, and wildlife photography (p. 118). Such practices cultivate attentive, caring, compassionate encounters with animals in ways that enhance their lives as well as one's own. Critics will protest this as insufficient and egocentric, a call to enjoy the view without an effort to save it. Cooper argues that quietism entails no ‘abandonment of action’, only ways of living ‘focus[ed] on what one can sensibly hope to achieve oneself’ (p. 118). Perhaps this understates our potential for collective moral action, evident in organizations like Greenpeace. Such confidence is misplaced, argues the misanthrope, given that our vices and failings are most evident at the collective level of institutions, communities, and ways of life. As Cooper puts it in a recent interview, ‘what is fundamentally wrong in our treatment of animals is us’.
Animals and Misanthropy is a challenging book, not least for its depressing accounts of the terrible treatment of animals and the complexity of the vices they display. Although Cooper is on the side of the angels, he robustly criticizes many ethicists and activists whose efforts may be severely limited. If our treatment of animals is deeply problematic, so are our attempts to properly articulate the fundamental nature of its wrongs. Focusing on rights and moral status while trying to scientifically verify ‘hypotheses’ about the possibility of ‘animal minds’ disguises the true nature of the wrongs and delays moral action. Amid the bleak and critical claims, though, the book evinces Cooper's characteristic virtues: a pleasing economy of argument, clarity of style, and generous appeals to a variety of sources and traditions – phenomenologists and poets, ethologists and ethicists, nature writers and animal lovers, and figures and movements from the Western, Indian, and Chinese philosophical traditions. Animals and Misanthropy is a provocative book, enlightening even as it tells dark truths.
