Beyond category: Seeing animals as individuals

Beyond category: Seeing animals as individuals 

In my previous entry, "Vegan... for your own good" I claimed that eating meat is not in your own interest as an animal has more to give alive than dead. Killing the animal for food is to sacrifice a unique individual for the sake of inferior food. There is a major possible objection to this, and that is: You do not, normally, meet the animals you eat. They are not in your life whilst alive, but the meat products they are turned into, can be. If meat is unhealthy, it still wouldn't be worth it to exchange your money for something that is damaging to yourself. However, let's go down a different road. Would you be thinking the same way about humans?

Individualism versus collectivism 

Often, nonhuman animals are viewed as categories rather than separate individuals. That is, whilst Angelica the human has properties ascribed to Angelica, the individual, Penny, the horse, has properties ascribed to the horse species. While it would be scandalous for Angelica not to be named, Penny being named is optional. 

Individualism means seeing those you meet as individuals rather than as representatives of their group membership  (often not assigned by themselves but by the human individual who defines). This can encompass individuals of other species as well as humans. A given individual of cat species can matter more to you, yourself, as an individual person, than another given individual belonging to the human species. You might care more for Penny, the horse, than Angelica, the human, or vice versa depending on who enriches your life the most. 

This view, however, is controversial. Many people seem to think you ought automatically to place every single human above every single individual of another species just because of their species membership. This view is collectivistic. Which club you are in matters more than who you really are. This is twice damaging. First of all, it teaches us to automatically view any nonhuman individual as inferior to a human one. This is unfair to the animal who isn't even permitted a true evaluation. Second, it is potentially damaging to the human who buys into the collectivist view. If Penny the horse is good to this human, and Angelica the human is not, he tries to place someone worse above someone better. 

Individualism also entails viewing the judgment of an individual more important than the customs and prejudices of society. That is: The fact that the collectivist view of animals is prevailing in society, should not matter. 

The supremacy of the human species

What is there to say for the view that all humans are more valuable than all nonhumans?

Intelligence is often mentioned. Humans are simply more intelligent. While this seems to be true when speaking of the species as a whole, there are exceptions, and a claim stating that ALL humans are more intelligent than ALL nonhumans would be false. Grown up crows are, as a rule, more intelligent than human infants or grown up humans with certain brain damages. While the grown up crows might be able to make simple tools and communicate between themselves, the human infants and brain damaged, might not. If intelligence were all that mattered, these grown up crows would have higher value and more rights than the humans mentioned. 

Other traits and properties proposed to be of defining value also elude being relevant for all humans and no nonhumans. 

The Egoist Viewpoint 

From the Egoist viewpoint, the value of another individual doesn't depend on what species or group he belongs to, but rather as to what he means to you, yourself, for better or worse.

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This blogpost is based on my article "Veganer for ditt eget beste" on Masterbloggen (in Norwegian). Here, I chose to divide it into two separate articles. The article is based on my master thesis "The Ethical Egoist Case for Dietary Veganism, or the Individual Animal and His Will to Live". 

Vegan... for your own good

Vegan... 
for your own good

Is it a sacrifice to give up on meat and other animal products? Quite the contrary: It is a sacrifice not to be vegan. 

Veganism is on the rise. For what reason? To unselfishly and self-desertingly give up the taste of meat in order to save the world? Or... could it be that going vegan is the rational thing to do? Could it be that this is what would be beneficial to yourself? 

In my master thesis, I argued that embracing a vegan diet is the right thing to do from a standpoint even of ethical egoism. 

The Egoist Viewpoint

In this context, Egoism refers to the ethical view that choosing what is most beneficial to yourself is the correct thing to do. Given a choice between two options, the option beneficial to yourself is the good option, the option less beneficial or most detrimental to yourself is the evil option. 

There are many different versions of ethical egoism. I am primarily inspired by philosophers Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. 

Now, what is a self-benefitting choice? That is choosing the action(s) that help further your life. That is: the action(s) that make(s) you stronger, increase(s) your options, lengthen(s) and enrichen(s) your life. What weakens you is not self-benefitting. That is: a temporary high that leaves more damage than good in the long run is to be avoided according to this understanding of morality. 

Values worth keeping

The good(s) that enrichens and lengthens your life can be called values. When you collect values, you act in your own self-interest. 

Values are not necessarily material. A value can be a useful trait in yourself or in another person, that is a virtue. Living individuals can also constitute values. For one, they might have valuable traits, that is virtues. Second, for any reason, they might enrichen your life and contribute to your happiness. Individuals who contribute to your happiness constitute values. 

What is valuable is what you seek for. When you get it, you do your best to keep it. And the other way round: To exchange a value for something less valuable or even valueless, is morally incorrect given ethical egoism. An example of this would be to obey your parents in their aspirations for you, say in choosing a carreer, when you have better options that would make you happier. Exchanging a good for a neutral or a bad is a sacrifice and morally wrong.

What is most valuable to you? 

Choosing meat or animal products over a vegan alternative, could constitute a sacrifice. Given that you could choose between a diet based on animal products and a vegan diet, the question will be: What is most valuable to you?

I will take a look at two ways as to how meat eating could constitute a sacrifice: 
* If the individual animal has a value whilst alive, and this value is lost when that individual dies
* If meat or any animal product is less healthy than a vegan alternative

Would you have eaten a dog?

Nonhuman animals matter to us. Many of us have grown up with a companion dog or cat. Let's imagine you had a dog named Zeus. He had certain traits personal to himself and you think of him as an individual. 

If you've known other dogs, you'd probably recognize that they were each different from each other: that every one was unique. Maybe Zeus was especially intelligent? Maybe he was especially energetic? Or perhaps he was a lazy couch potato. 

Zeus was probably also very different from all the human individuals you knew. Zeus was more than "just a dog". He had specific traits and properties that the humans you know do not share. That is: Your dog Zeus was unique. Not only was he irreplaceable by any other dog: neither a human individual could ever fill his place. 

Can you imagine your dog Zeus being mashed up and turned into meatballs? Well. In most parts of the world, it is not common to eat dogs, so this thought experiment might seem odd to you. But what if Zeus wasn't a dog? Say he was a pig. 

Pigs can also be companions to humans. They have unique and individual personalities. Say Zeus the pig was your companion. What would be most valuable to you: Zeus, the companion, or the sausages he could be turned into? 

If you kill an animal to turn her into food, you sacrifice a personality. This is because a personality depends on a living body to sustain it. A corpse is rid of personality and cannot fulfill the functions of the living. 

What about your health?
And then what about the food itself? Let's just agree for the sake of argument that meat is unhealthy and that replacing it with a healthy vegan rich in fresh vegetables, fruit and vegan protein sources such as beans and lentils is an option. Then how could it be in your own interest to keep eating animal products?

A meatless diet can  be healthier than a diet containing meat. The so-called Adventist studies in the US found out that vegans have lower risk of obesity, diabetes type 2, cardiac disease and high blood pressure.

Now, nutrition is way too complex for us to conclude with certainty that a vegan diet is better than a meat based one. However, assuming that meat is less healthy than good vegan options, and assuming that living animals have value, then meat production is a negative value converter, turning value into nonvalue. That is, the living animal individual is turned into unhealthy food. A good is given up for a bad. 

The practice is detrimental. 

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This post is based on my article "Veganer for ditt eget beste" found on Masterbloggen. The article is based on my master thesis "The Ethical Egoist Case for Dietary Veganism, or the Individual Animal and His Will to Live". 

The original article, in Norwegian, is longer. I figured it allowed for easier reading to divide the article in two and thus publish the second half as a separate entry. 

I thank my flu

I was about to write that I love my flu, but that would be an exaggeration. My nose keeps running. I have red spots under my nostrils. I'm tired from not sleeping well due to waking up with bouts of uncontrolled coughing. My throat feels like sun-dried cardboard. Still, I thank my flu.

Health anxiety

I thank my flu because I used to have severe health anxiety. Now I don't. I don't have it anymore. When I cough, even though my back hurts, I don't expect my ribs to crack. I know it's just a flu. I know it will pass.

Though I wouldn't wish severe health anxiety upon anyone, I learned something from that period of my life. I learned how it feels to fear for one's life. I know how it feels to be frightened when noone sess or understands why, when the cause is invisible. That period made it easier for me to empathize with old or sick people, and it made me appreciate being alive and making the most out of it.

After having recovered from my health anxiety, I soon faced a challenge when I got some kind of food poisoning and fever. Deciding it should not freak me out, I decided to watch my feverish condition with interest. Okay, so I have a fever. Interesting. Now how does this feel? Okay, so I had an uncomfortable dream. It was different. It was exceptional. It was unique. It will never return again. What can I learn from it? I came through without problem. I wasn't scared.

Lessons from Nietzsche and the Buddha

What had changed? Well, first of all my outlook. Instead of believing the point of life was to be always happy, hedonistically understood, I started believing it was about developing myself and living my life. To exist is to live one's own exceptional story, including living through one's own particular pain or discomfort. Now, the psychological component of suffering almost disappears when one watches one's physical suffering with the eyes of a scientist, with interest. With mindfulness. I had come to believe what Nietzsche said: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger".

Nietzsche also wrote: "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering". I agree wholeheartedly. Amor fati. Love your destiny, embrace your history, your biography.

Now, this parallells the Buddhist teachings of the inevitability of suffering, of aging, sickness and death. However, instead of seeing the suffering as a problem in itself, Nietzsche saw it as a tool for hardening oneself and growing. I side with Nietzsche, although relieving the suffering that can be relieved, should be done. If not for anything else, than so in order to free the individual from the disability caused by agony. However, also the Buddha taught that everything is transient, nothing remains. Nothing is stationary. Reality is a process, not an essence.

Learning from my flu

Now I'm in the process of having a flu. So what can I take from it?

Yesterday I was on a train that was almost completely full. Accordingly, I was sitting next to another person, which in Norway, one does not do voluntarily unless one is intoxicated or has a psychiatric disease. Now I was coughing uncontrallaby, and had to sneeze repeatedly, though less often than I had to blow my nose. Not having napkins I kept having to go fetch paper from the bathroom or "tea section". Sitting next to the window, I felt like quite a nuisance to the guy I was sat next to. In short, I felt a bit shameful. Why? Because I felt weak? Because illness is disgusting? What norm does that reflect? Why should it be shameful to be sick? Now, this is something to reflect on. Which I wouldn't have if I wasn't exposed to that situation.

I discovered that when walking fast, or normally, I had to cough more. Thus I needed to walk at a slow pace. This made slightly impatient because I consider it a waste of time. So I am aware of that now. Also, I felt a bit annoyed when people were rushing past me on the bus when I was paying for my ticket. I felt slightly envious of the healthy people, and thought they were disrespectful not to wait in line till I had paid my ticket. Now, my flu is transient. It will pass. In a few days I will be among the rushing people again. However, some people have permanent health problems. They have to live with a slowed pace everyday. Although a flu is a flu, being sick in general will help you relate to other people being sick. Thus, the experience enables me to understand others' experiences a bit better, if never perfect. This enables bonding between me and them.

Today I slept at day time. I never do that. I did it because I felt I had to. Having the flu also makes me more generous with myself. I don't expect myself to make big dinners, being social or sleeping at regular hours. It's a state of exception. It disrupts the daily routine. Disrupting the daily routine is good. Then one sees that the world doesn't end by breaking the habit.

Still, I don't love my flu. I look forward to getting rid of it. I look forward to being a rusher again. Then I'll be thankful for being healthy.

The imperative to love yourself

What is a person's prime duty?

Is it to be kind to his others? Is it to serve a god? Is it to take responsibility for his closest companions? Is it to follow a principle of justice? Or is it to serve society? 

What's known as the ethics of closeness, associated with philosophers such as Buber, Løgstrup and Levinas, posits that a person owes himself to his others. He recognizes himself first after meeting them. He gains his own face before the face of the other. To a high extent the quality of his life depends on the way his closest treats him. Does he meet love and acceptance or is he rejected? 

On the face of it, the ethics of closeness might seem individualist in the sense that it speaks of relations and relationships, capturing situations with people you can actually see. The emphasis is not as much on society as it is on close and actual existing bonds. Thus it might seem more realistic and down-to-earth than certain other ethical theories that tend to posit universal answers, trying to capture what's right at all times at all places, though perhaps taking givens into account. This allows it to be more flexible. A person practicing it can be present in the situation, relying more on empathy and communication with his others, than just running to his book of laws (or straightjacket ethical platform). Instead of running through principles in his head, he can be open to perceive the actual person in front of him. 

I'm no expert on this theory and it does have its pros. 

However, I don't buy into it. 

It is true that our existence to a certain extent depends on others. We needed parents to be born. We needed someone to take care of us in our earliest years. And both then, and after, someone could at any time hurt us or even kill us. You might have a brain unique to yourself. You might have your own, unique genetical make-up. Noone is quite like you, biologically. But still, also your ideas are at least affected by your surrounding. Be as original as you want, what you think is formed in interaction with your surroundings. You can distance yourself, you can be the first to realize something is unjust. You can be the first to come up with an idea. But this idea will, at least in most cases, be formed in reaction to the given. 

This, however, doesn't mean your primary obligation is to others. Your life story is unique. Your face is unique. Noone is quite like you. Noone will never understand you completely. Why? Because they are not you. And they have not walked your path. They didn't share your story. And even though you could be a good narrator, you don't have the time to narrate all your life, and your memory is imperfect. No matter how you try to turn yourself inside out, noone will ever know you completely. You might not know yourself completely, either, but these facts mean you will win any arms race for knowledge of your self. Therefore, you will also be in a better position to assess your own needs. And likewise, the other has better cards at hand for understanding himself. To prioritize the other over yourself leads to less than optimal providing for needs, when compared to attending to oneself first and foremost. 

But most importantly, you were born with a survival instinct. If you didn't want to live, you wouldn't live. You could be careless or severely depressed and survive almost by chance. But you could also succumb to outright self-hatred and in the end commit suicide. This happens. All too often. But still, relatively few among the population, when the whole is taken together, succumb to such extreme self-hatred. It seems like the inborn survival instinct offers some protection from that. However, language is a strong tool. Sadly, our great cognitive capacities can be gravely abused. Thus a person can be made to hold ideals that ground him down, ideals he can not possibly ever come close to, because his nature keeps him from it. A person can also be made to dislike himself through internalizing bullying for example, or society's prejudices. Typical here is of course racism, homophobia, discrimination of people with disabilities, hatred of people deviating from social customs. The individual might be unable to succumb to society's conformist ideals. Therefore he ends up with the choice of accepting the prejudice and then seeing himself as inferior, or alternatively; reject it. He has an imperative to reject it. 

If he doesn't, he lets injustice get the upper hand. And at worst his perceived inferiority will lead him to self-hatred and isolation. 

Because you have the ability to commit suicide, and it can be done in a burst of anger, in a few seconds, in the spur of a moment, you must love yourself. Your life depends on your self-image. Once you realize this, you understand that lots of society's expectations of you must be rejected. You understand that social codes that repress your nature and labels it as wrong, must be fought against. My realization of this is part experience, having both struggled with impulsive, physical self-harm, been part suicidal myself and having lost a friend to suicide. 

There would be no humanity if noone liked himself to a certain degree. There can be no other, if the other refuses to exist. If all refused, there'd be no society for the one remaining. The last to go, is the one. 

All that follows from the one, depends on the one's choice to remain alive. 

You might say this means we need to build up the self-image of the other, and gives us a strong reason to condemn bullying. This might look like it can be accounted for by the ethics of closeness. However, that means that we must let the other be as he wishes. We must leave him be. Don't mold him, lest he molds you. 

Thus we end up in some form of ethical individualism. 

“To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’", said Ayn Rand. 

And in order to exist, you must choose your own existence, I say. 

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I hope you take this for what it is, a fast written blog entry, not an academic paper or text. I have so many things I want to write about. I don't have time for a tenth of them. If I should write academically about every subject that could be academic, I'd end up writing even less. This text could be expanded indefinitely. I encourage the reader to familarize yourself with the positions mentioned, as my coverage of them because of small space, is by necessity simplistic. My central point here is the primary necessity of loving oneself, so that one will choose to live. 

Understanding - my New Year Resolution

My New Year resolution for this year is to be more understanding, or forgiving, if you prefer. This for the sake of my own happiness.

Humankind has disappointed me over and over again. True enough, those who hurt me personally and directly are few. However it is also true that far too many among the world's human population fail to appreciate an individual's right to his own life and body, with what I consider awful consequences. At worst, people are outright killed. For gain, for having commited a crime themselves, for claiming the right to believe what they want or just for choosing a sex partner not to the killer's liking (by being gay, for example). This I consider evil. And it doesn't just happen incidentally. It is outright propagated by twisted moral systems and political ideologies, disguising quest for power and domination in coats of beautiful words. 

Some people disrespecting others' right to their own lives wouldn't kill anyone. They would just insist on making the decisions for others, on ruling them, that is. Substituting their own judgment for the judgment of the other. Considering themselves more knowledgeable of the other, than the other himself. This is disrespect. And most people are guilty of it, thinking their own way of life is the right one for all. Defend yourself, call it necessary, call it what you want. It's not worthy of praise. 

In the name of tradition and for the sake of farmers' profits, people cage up animals, depriving them of the space and freedom to act according to their impulses, instincts and urges. In the name of the same traditions, the animals end up slaughtered and eaten, even though there is plenty of evidence showing that it is unnecessary and even detrimental to the eater's health. 

I have trouble breathing in this polluted global village of madhouses. When I'm walking in a crowded street, I am most probably walking amongst perpetrators of the greatest evils there are. 

The only way I can deal with this is to remember they don't think like me. They act on different information. They cling to other standards of morality. They didn't live my life. They might never have heard any of these things discussed or debated. One cannot act in a space one isn't located in.  

I believe in information. I believe in knowledge. I believe in understanding. 

When not informed, how can you be judged from making decisions on the wrong premises? 

Jesus reportedly said: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing" (Luk 23:34). That is what I intend on doing (without being anyone's father). I intend on forgiving. Most have no idea what they do, or don't share my perspective. They don't mean to mean. They just happen to be. 

It's not personal. It's not intended. It's not a quality of the victim that causes evil. It's a lack of understanding and information on the part of the oppressor, of the abilitiy to stand in another's shoes. 

Bad actions might not be the offspring of hatred, they might just be the products of ignorance. 

Things can change.