Before I delve into this, let me say that MerrilyDancingApe is, after three years online, actually receiving hits. Not a million hits per day or a thousand or even a hundred, but a few, and that ain’t nothing. I find it pretty gratifying. If you’re one of the few, thank you.
A couple of animal rights activists named the MacAskills recently published an astonishingly stupid article called, To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion).
PZ Myers over at Pharyngula posted a thorough take-down, here and here. Pharyngula is my favorite blog. PZ makes several great points, and I agree with him.
Below the fold, I’ll give my own response to the article.
All philosophical arguments, including ethical ones, rest on a foundation of first principles. If you don’t agree with those principles then the whole thing is moot.
The starting point of the MacAskill argument is that “we should try to protect animals from unnecessary suffering and death.” The authors suggest most animal rights activists would agree. But they offer no evidence of this, they simply assert it as a brute fact. And they fail to weigh competing values and goals in their argument, which predictably leads to wacky outcomes.
Protecting animals from unnecessary suffering and death is not my goal, personally. My two goals are conservation of ecosystems and a reduction in unnecessary human-caused suffering and death, especially suffering and death caused for really stupid reasons.
But this objection aside, there are several other holes in the argument:
1- What about the predators themselves? They are animals too. Any animal welfare argument that involves eradicating or caging entire species is probably on the wrong track.
2- The assumption that eliminating predators would eliminate suffering doesn’t compute. In the absence of predators, prey animals would die of disease and starvation instead. Those are pretty terrible ways to go, too. In fact, since predators often cull sick and injured animals that would die anyway, an argument could be made that removing predators increases suffering.
3- Predators play a vital role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem, which in turn benefits other animals, including prey species.
4- You can’t devide the food chain cleanly into predators and prey. It’s not really a food chain, it’s a food web.
Points #3 and #4 are also made–and far more articulately–by PZ Myers.
The MacAskills have put forward one of those cloud-cuckoo-land pseudo-philosophical arguments that has no bearing on real life. How would this be implemented on a meaningful scale? The MacAskills worm out of this question in an odd way. They switch from advocating for large-scale interventions (i.e. the removal of all predators from an ecosystem), which in the understatement of the century they admit could be difficult to do without unforeseen consequences, to advocating for the killing of a few individual predators. In other words, hunting. The whole article turns out to be a defense of hunting lions.
The article comes down to this argument:
The death of a single predator like Cecil the Lion is counterbalanced by all the prey that will now be spared from that predator, thanks to hunters like Walter Palmer.[1]
Really? Your priority as an animal rights activist is to save gazelles by encouraging hunters to kill lions? Geeeesh.
Firstly, the exact same argument could be used for killing human hunters. Think of all the lions we’ll save by shooting Walter Palmer.
Secondly, you do know that guys like Walter Palmer also shoot prey animals, right? If you reduce the number of predators, the authorities will increase hunting quotas for those prey animals to keep populations under control. What you’ve done is replace predatory animals with predatory humans, and in the process decreased biodiversity and hurt the ecosystem.
When you apply pure logic to ethical problems in a vacuum, you always get inane results. You can’t possibly know all the consequences of killing one lion. You might save a few gazelles, yes, but that in turn might cause a ripple effect in the ecosystem that ends up increasing desertification and killing still other animals, or some other horrible thing. One thing you can know, though, is that when you kill one lion, you’ve killed one lion, which, if your aim is to reduce unnecessary suffering and death, seems like a bad way to start.
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- [1]This, at its core, is the Trolley Problem: Do you sacrifice one life to save many others? The Trolley Problem is an ethical puzzle dating back to the 60s, framed with an inherent Utilitarian bias. A trolley hurtles down a track toward five innocent people, and you can save them by diverting the trolley toward somebody else, or, in one variation of the problem, pushing somebody else in front of it. What do you do? This is the Kobayashi Maru of ethics. Most Utilitarians fall on the side of killing one to save five. Their ethics is based upon simple mathematics and five is more than one. (But notice that the Utilitarians don’t offer to jump in front of the trolley themselves.)↩