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This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham]On: 06 October 2014, At: 19:59Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK
Inquiry: An InterdisciplinaryJournal of PhilosophyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20
Nonsense on Stilts?Wittgenstein, Ethics, and theLives of AnimalsNigel Pleasants aa University of Exeter , UKPublished online: 18 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Nigel Pleasants (2006) Nonsense on Stilts? Wittgenstein, Ethics,and the Lives of Animals, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 49:4,314-336, DOI: 10.1080/00201740600831364
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201740600831364
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Nonsense on Stilts? Wittgenstein,Ethics, and the Lives of Animals
NIGEL PLEASANTS
University of Exeter, UK
(Received 10 February 2005)
ABSTRACT Wittgenstein is often invoked in philosophical disputes over the ethicaljustifiability of our treatment of animals. Many protagonists believe that Wittgenstein’sphilosophy points to a quantum difference between human and animal nature that arisesout of humans’ linguistic capacity. For this reason – its alleged anthropocentrism –animal liberationists tend to dismiss Wittgenstein’s philosophy, whereas, for the samereason, anti-liberationists tend to embrace it. I endorse liberationist moral claims, butthink that many on both sides of the dispute fail to grasp the import of Wittgenstein’sphilosophy. My argument proceeds through close engagement with Michael Leahy’sAgainst Liberation, which makes extensive use of Wittgenstein’s ‘notion of language-games’ as an ‘essential methodological aid’ in its defence and justification of the moralstatus quo. Leahy’s understanding and application of that method exemplifies anentrenched interpretative stance in the wider Wittgensteinian scholarship which I seekto counter. This enables me to show that far from entailing conservatism, as some of hiscritics and followers contend, Wittgenstein’s philosophical method is just as conduciveto radical moral and political critique as it is to any other normative position.
Non-human animals1 make frequent appearances in Wittgenstein’s later
philosophical texts. Dogs, cats, lions, and squirrels are called upon to
illustrate key points about knowledge, belief, certainty, doubt, under-
standing, induction, etc. His philosophical anthropology is decidedly
naturalistic, exemplified by the statement that ‘I want to regard man here
[in a discussion of human learning] as an animal; as a primitive being to
which one grants instinct but not ratiocination’.2 Nevertheless, because
Wittgenstein is typically understood to be a ‘linguistic philosopher’, he is
often taken to have drawn a sharp ontological contrast between humans as
Correspondence Address: Nigel Pleasants, University of Exeter, Department of Sociology and
Philosophy, Amory Building, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK. Email: n.j.pleasants@ex.ac.uk
Inquiry,
Vol. 49, No. 4, 314–336, August 2006
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/06/040314–23 # 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740600831364
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fundamentally linguistic beings, and animals as inherently devoid of
linguistic capacity.3 This reading of Wittgenstein is reflected in philosophical
dispute over the moral justifiability of the ways in which animals are treated
in modern society. Because of its supposed anthropocentrism, animal
liberationists4 tend to dismiss Wittgenstein’s philosophy, whereas, for the
same reason, anti-liberationists have found it a useful resource.
Founding liberationists such as Peter Singer, Stephen Clark, and BernardRollin regard Wittgenstein as a neo-Cartesian sceptic who taught that ‘we
cannot meaningfully attribute states of consciousness to beings without
language’.5 More generally, these philosophers are irritated by what they
take to be Wittgenstein’s conceptual conservatism, which they think
inevitably issues in moral and political conservatism.6 On the other side,
anti-liberationists such as R.G. Frey, and Michael Leahy, appeal to
Wittgenstein’s philosophy for insight into the nature of mind,
consciousness, and meaning.7 Leahy, in particular, makes extensive use ofWittgenstein’s ‘seminal notion of language-games’, as an ‘essential
methodological aid’ in his defence of the status quo in human treatment
of animals (AL, p.13).
With respect to the interpretation and application of Wittgenstein’s
philosophy I find myself at odds with both sides. Morally and politically I
side with the liberationists, but I baulk at their claims on the implications
of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for understanding the lives of animals (claims
which I am sure are based more on reputation than textual familiarity).8
On the other hand, whilst I share Leahy’s enthusiasm for Wittgenstein’s
philosophy, my understanding of it diverges sharply from his at key
points. Leahy’s exegesis and application of it trades on manoeuvres and
assumptions that in my view renege on some of its core methodological
commitments. Although my critical focus in this paper is on Leahy, his
way of practicing Wittgenstein’s philosophical method attunes with a
common interpretative stance in Wittgensteinian scholarship, as I shall
indicate in the course of my critique. My wider aim is to challenge thisstance, and to show that far from entailing the kind of conservatism that
some of his critics and supporters identify with it, Wittgenstein’s
philosophical method is well-suited to serving radical moral and political
critique.
I. Animal liberation: the common ground
Singer’s ground-breaking case for animal liberation was based on the ‘basicmoral principle of equal consideration of interests’,9 especially interests in
avoiding pain and suffering, and pursuing pleasure and enjoyment –
regardless of the species-identity of the bearer of these states and
experiences. Assessed against this fundamental utilitarian principle, Singer
averred that our major animal-utilising institutionalised practices ‘require
Wittgenstein and Animals 315
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the sacrifice of the most important interests of members of other species
in order to promote the most trivial interests of our own species’.10 But
there are others who share the liberationist goal whilst rejecting
utilitarianism as a wholly inadequate moral theory on which to base it.
The most prominent alternative grounding, exemplified by Tom Regan,
draws upon natural rights theory.11 Regan objects that the contingencies
of utilitarian calculation, aggregation and compromise renders someindividuals (animal and human alike) vulnerable to sacrifice for a greater
collective benefit. Until recently it was held that contract theory (which in
Rawls’s hands synthesizes elements of utilitarianism and deontology) is
constitutionally unable to recognise claims for the moral status of
animals. But Mark Rowlands has argued that knowledge of their own
species is one of those contingent facts of social and natural endowment
that contracting parties must be prevented from knowing in the ‘original
position’.12 There are other liberationists who work outside of main-stream moral theory, such as Rosalind Hursthouse, who appeals to the
concepts of virtue and piety from virtue ethics,13 as does Clark, who also
invokes theological and Christian values and concepts.14 Even further
from the mainstream, Mary Midgley, and especially Cora Diamond,
make the case for animals whilst rejecting what they see as the
pretensions of moral theory as such.15 DeGrazia seeks to transcend the
traditional utility-rights dichotomy, taking on board some of the ‘anti-
theoretical’ critiques of the rationalism and universalism inherent to thattradition, whilst holding onto its commitment to impartiality and
theoretical illumination.16
However, a reasonably thorough survey of the liberationist literature
reveals that advocacy of the radical reform or abolition of animal-
exploiting practices is not dependent on any particular moral theory and, I
would argue, ultimately does not rest on any moral theory at all.
Utilitarianism, rights theory, contract theory, virtue theories, anti-theory
theories (oxymoron intended), and pretty much any other moralperspective, have all been drawn upon both to support, and to oppose,
the case for liberation. However, despite these differences, liberationists
broadly agree on the basic facts of animal nature and experience, and the
salient continuities and commonalities between animals and humans. And
they agree that it is in virtue of these basic facts that animals warrant some
substantial degree of moral consideration and hence protection or
liberation from cruel, exploitative and oppressive human practices. This
agreement is often obscured by foregrounded disagreement over moraltheory, principle, method, and philosophical perspective. But no moral
theory or perspective can yield normative prescriptions for the treatment
of animals without some prior conception of what kind of beings animals
are. It is the latter that forms the ground on which liberationists ultimately
stand.
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II. Leahy against liberation
Leahy poses a major challenge to liberationists because he takes issue with
what they agree on, namely, their perception of the kind of beings that
animals are in virtue of which they deserve substantial moral consideration.
In line with some virtue ethicists, and understandably as a Wittgensteinian,
he disparages moral theories as (quoting Midgley) mere ‘academic artifacts’,
arguing that our natural reactions and responses have an ineliminable
primacy, and that moral theories are ‘eminently manipulable’ in the light of
our intuitions (AL, pp.168,169). His contention is that the very idea of
animal liberation is predicated upon a distorted representation of the
mental, emotional and behavioural lives of animals, which vastly
exaggerates their similarities to humans. To combat this misrepresentation,
Leahy aims to set out ‘in considerable detail the implications of what
Wittgenstein has to offer to a particular picture of human, then by subtle
contrast animal, nature’, thence to draw out ‘the implications’ of these
pictures ‘for the practical [i.e. moral] issues involved’ (AL, p.3).
Leahy contends that in fact it is the liberationists, not Wittgenstein, who
are in the thrall of Cartesianism. Singer, for example, gives a classically
Cartesian account of our knowledge and understanding of conscious
experience:
how do we know that anyone else feels pain? We cannot directly
experience anyone else’s pain, whether that ‘anyone’ is our best friend
or a stray dog. Pain is a state of consciousness, a ‘mental event’, and as
such it can never be observed…[it] is something that we feel, and we
can only infer that others are feeling it from various external
indications.17
The lesson that Singer and other liberationists draw from these considera-
tions is that because we have no direct acquaintance with anyone’s conscious
states other than our own we have no more reason to doubt that animals
have conscious experiences like our own than we have to doubt it of other
humans. Moreover, were one to find the evidence for animal consciousness
wanting, one should also be unconvinced by the evidence for it in other
humans apart from oneself, and this is a reductio of the initial sceptical
hypothesis. Liberationists that adopt this epistemic stance (as most do) are
not really opposed to Cartesianism at all. Rather, they espouse consistent
application of the ‘argument from analogy’ by insisting that it is arbitrary to
restrict the inferability of conscious experience to members of the human
species.
Leahy of course, as a Wittgensteinian, rejects the tempting picture of
consciousness as an epistemically private inner space housing ‘mental
events’ that are perceived directly by the subject but which are only ever
Wittgenstein and Animals 317
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inferentially accessible to observers. Its principal source is an even more
tempting, overarching picture of linguistic function, which gives the
misleading impression that experiential and psychological terms such as
‘belief’, ‘understanding’, ‘thinking’, ‘intention’, ‘desire’, ‘fear’, ‘hope’, ‘pain’,
etc. operate as names or labels for mental processes, states, or events in the
mind of the individual of whom they are predicated. In its place, Leahy
proffers an alternative ‘language-game’ picture which draws uponWittgenstein’s hypothesis of how people learn to speak of their mental
experiences without having first to identify an essentially private object in
their consciousness then attach the right name to the right mental object.
‘Here is one possibility’, says Wittgenstein: ‘words are connected with the
primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place’,
and by this means the child learns ‘new pain behaviour’.18 The crux of this
suggestion is that sensation words, in a variegated range of language-games,
largely come to take the place of the primitive, natural expression ofsensations (though not entirely of course). It is this use of words in language-
games, and not the ‘naming’ of putatively private mental entities, which
gives ‘meaning’ to our discourse involving the expression, description and
attribution of mental and experiential states. The point about pain words
not functioning as ‘names’ of epistemally private mental objects or processes
follows upon Wittgenstein’s more general criticism of the name-object
picture of essential linguistic function. Just as the meaning of words such as
‘dog’ or ‘democracy’ are not given by whatever mental image happens toaccompany their use, so the meaning of pain words is not given by the
phenomenal experience that accompanies them. Thus ‘the pain of angina’
and ‘the pain of rock-climbing’, qua occurrent sensation, may be
phenomenally similar or even identical, yet the sensation is a component
of experiences with very different meanings and implications in the two
cases (AL, p.125), the one experience being suffered and the other enjoyed.
Leahy accepts that animals are conscious and sentient, that is, they
perceive and experience pain and pleasure – they ‘see, hear, feel, and so-on’,and that, like humans, they ‘have inner lives of pains, itches, tingles, thrills,
and throbs’ (AL, pp. 255–6; p.142). Further, they also exhibit ‘the ancestral
tokens of human attributes such as deliberate intent, rational planning,
choice, desire, fear, anger, and some beliefs’ (AL, p.165–6). Nevertheless,
these observations should not delude one into thinking that animals
experience pain, fear, or anger, or have beliefs, desires, or intentions, or
exercise choice and instantiate rationality, in the same way or sense that
humans do. These experiences and behaviours are what Leahy refers to asthe ‘pre-linguistic prototypes’ (AL, p.127) of their ostensible human
counterparts.
According to Leahy, the crucial difference between humans and animals
is that, in the human case, the acquisition of linguistic competence
transmutes biologically-given, pre-linguistic consciousness and sentience
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into an ontologically higher form of experience and being. It is through the
mediation of language that the capacity for sensation and perception is
overlain with the meaningfulness of fear, terror, trepidation, anxiety,
despair, grief, dread, remorse, shame, guilt, joy, love, compassion, etc.,
which constitutes the specific ‘form of life’ of human beings. Conversely,
because animals are inherently devoid of linguistic capacity, their experience
has no significance for them beyond its unmediated occurrence: ‘lackinglanguage, animal behaviour does not have meaning for them’ (AL, p.139).
Because they ‘lack language’, animals are unable to learn and play language-
games with self-referential terms such as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’ ‘you’, ‘yours’,
etc., and therefore do not and cannot have self-consciousness. In Leahy’s
picture of ‘what animals really are’ – their essence – animals are ‘primitive
beings’ (AL, pp. 163, 165). Their subjectivity consists of nothing more than
a constellation of discrete phenomenal experiences, with nothing to connect
or unify them; there is no subject that ‘has’ or ‘experiences’ thoseexperiences, and no subject for whom those experiences have meaning.
Thus: ‘it is as primitive creatures that we must assess the claims to proper
treatment made on behalf of animals’ (AL, p.166). The major ethical
implications that Leahy derives from his picture of animal nature attend
upon what it imports for the concept of suffering. On Leahy’s view,
suffering is primarily a second-order phenomenon. It is not to be identified
with any particular experience as such; rather, it inheres in being aware of,
and understanding, the nature, ramifications, and implications of certainexperiences or states of affairs. Thus suffering paradigmatically pertains to
the meaning and significance of certain experiences or states of affairs for the
subject who has or contemplates them. Because they lack language, animals
are unable to attach meaning or significance to their experiences, or indeed
to anything: an animal ‘cannot consider its plight’; its ‘‘‘suffering’’ is
uncomplicated’ (AL, pp.133, 256 [note the scare-quoting of ‘suffering’]). So,
for example, ‘animals can manifest relatively short term distress at, say, the
loss of a mate, but it shows itself only in a disruption of behaviour’; ‘a fox orrabbit, once blinded, will not suffer the plight of the human being, who can
meditate upon his or her past vision knowing that it is gone for good’ (AL,
pp.133, 266). The extent to which animals can suffer, then, is limited to the
severely attenuated primitive prototype of the meaning-impregnated form of
suffering that humans undergo. And the moral relevance of such potential
‘suffering’, in terms of the kind of harms to which animals can be
susceptible, is correspondingly diminished. It is on this basis that Leahy
concludes that current institutionalised practices that utilise animals are insound moral order just as they are. Indeed, Leahy contends that current
institutional arrangements extend ‘extreme generosity to animals, with
prolific legislation affecting every aspect of their treatment’ (AL, p.265). We
have a duty of care towards animals (an ‘indirect duty’ in Kant’s sense),
which obliges us to treat them ‘humanely’, but ‘treating animals humanely’
Wittgenstein and Animals 319
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does not preclude ‘eating them, experimenting upon them, and a lot else
besides’ (AL, p.76). Although Leahy is evidently a moral and political
conservative,19 his prescription for the proper treatment of animals is
equally clearly in harmony with most people’s attitudes towards animals.
Before turning to critical mode, I should note that Leahy’s argument is
not the simplistic one that Singer associates with Wittgenstein (that ‘we
cannot meaningfully attribute states of consciousness to beings withoutlanguage’). Singer easily dismisses this thesis with the observation that
‘language may be necessary for abstract thought…but states like pain are
more primitive, and have nothing to do with language’.20 As we have seen,
Leahy readily accepts that pain is a primitive, non- (pre-) linguistic state and
therefore is properly attributable to animals. His sceptical argument is
directed not at pain qua phenomenal state, but at the meaning and
significance of the phenomenal state for the subject that has or undergoes it.
It is ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ that he deems to be language-dependent,not pain or other states of consciousness. Nor does Leahy claim that our
ordinary practices in which pretty much the whole gamut of mental,
emotional, and agentive predicates are attributed to animals, and even to
inanimate objects such as dolls and cars, are mistaken. He notes that adults
as well as children play these language-games. They are perfectly in order, he
says, and they function in various ways, such as to facilitate interaction with
animals and other objects, and they are part of the fantasy world through
which children learn to deal with the real world. The problem is not with thepractices (language-games) themselves, but with the philosophical inter-
pretation of their meaning and import. Because of their lack of ‘under-
standing of the way that language works’, liberationists do not realise that
when experiential concepts are predicated of animals, the language-games
are parasitic on, and metaphorical extensions of, their paradigmatic human
applications, and thus ‘hedged in by emphatic but inexplicit contextual
implication’ (AL, 13). ‘The error’, says Leahy, ‘is to confuse the identity of
terms in the language-games used of animals and human beings, with anidentity of implication’ (AL, p.141). Liberationists, to paraphrase
Wittgenstein, contemplate ordinary linguistic practices, ‘put a false
interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it’
(PI, 1194).
III. Against an anti-liberationist use of Wittgenstein
Leahy seeks to expose what he regards as the distortions and absurditiesperpetrated by liberationists’ claim that ‘animals enjoy a whole range of
cognitive abilities in the same sense in which we ascribe these to human beings’
(AL, 196) and can, therefore, be harmed in just the same ways that humans
can. This ‘naıve essentialism’, he maintains, is rooted in pictures of essential
linguistic function (the name-object picture) and of experiential predicates
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(the inner-mental-state picture). However, despite his avowed anti-
essentialist intent, Leahy ends up espousing his own ‘Wittgensteinian’
brand of essentialism.
i. Language, language-games and meaning
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy was motivated by dissatisfaction with whathe came to see as ‘grave mistakes’ (PI, p.viii) in the philosophical method set
forth in his first book. In that book, Wittgenstein presented a theory of ‘the
essential nature of the proposition’ which, he asserted, displays the
relationship between language (‘the totality of propositions’) and reality
(‘all that is the case’).21 This relationship, its ‘logical form’, was said by
Wittgenstein to be a ‘pictorial’ one - language depicts reality through
propositions, and ‘a proposition is a picture of reality’.22 It is this ‘super-
picture’ that Wittgenstein has in mind when he commences Philosophical
Investigations with an outline of ‘a particular picture of the essence of
human language’ (PI, 11). He proceeds to identify some of the ways in which
this picture (the name-object picture), and others that seemingly capture the
essences of things, befuddles philosophical understanding. Wittgenstein
acknowledges the compulsion and intellectual appeal of such pictures, but
endeavours to show how they militate against philosophical clarity. The
concept of ‘language-games’ emerges as a critical device for questioning and
disrupting the a priori assumption that ‘everything that we call language’(PI, 13) partakes of a unitary ‘logical form’ with the essential function of
depicting reality in propositions. It should be noted that instead of vainly
striving to depict ‘language’ itself, Wittgenstein now talks in second-order
mode of what we ‘call language’, such that the word ‘language’ is to be seen
in situ in the language-games in which it features. Leahy seems not to have
registered this crucial point.
Leahy uses ‘language-game methodology’ to good effect in his examina-
tion of the practical conditions of application, and contextual implicature,of seemingly simple and straightforward experiential predicates. But when
he pronounces on the nature of ‘language’ as such, in particular that it
metamorphises bare conscious experience onto a higher plane of ‘mean-
ingfulness’, and that animals ‘lack language’, he abandons that methodo-
logical stance. In asserting that ‘animal behaviour does not have meaning for
them’, Leahy is either stating the triviality that animals do not use the word
‘meaning’, or that they cannot partake of something that he calls ‘meaning’
where that word betokens an experience (of ‘meaning’) which is not actuallyan experience at all but rather is ‘the meaning of the experience’. It is the
latter that Leahy intends. Such paradoxical usage of the word ‘meaning’, as
a ‘philosophical superlative’ (PI, 1192), conjures images of what
Wittgenstein calls an ‘occult’ or ‘queer kind of medium’, ‘something
immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs’.23 Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein and Animals 321
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responds to such apparent profundities with the quizzical rejoinder: ‘what is
the content of the experience of meaning? I don’t know what I am supposed
to say to this’ (PI, pp.175–6). For Wittgenstein, by contrast, ‘meaning’ and
‘language’ are best thought of as words in language-games: ‘if the words
‘‘language’’, ‘‘experience’’, ‘‘world’’, have a use, it must be as humble a one
as that of the words ‘‘table’’, ‘‘lamp’’, ‘‘door’’ ’ (PI, 197). Clearly, animals do
not have a use for the word ‘meaning’. Wittgenstein’s coinage anddeployment of the ‘language-game’ metaphor is designed to challenge the
beguiling idea that the terms ‘language’ or ‘meaning’ function as names for
an ontologically special medium or experience: ‘‘‘Language (or thought) is
something unique’’ – this proves to be a superstition…produced by
grammatical illusions…[a]nd now the impressiveness retreats to those
illusions’ (PI, 1110). The very idea of language-games - a ‘multiplicity of
language-games’ - should lead one away from the assumption that there is
an ‘incomparable essence of language’ to divine (PI, 1124, 97). Leahy’spicture of ‘language’ as the repository of ‘meaning’ is more akin to
Heidegger’s numinous idea of language as ‘the house of being’ than it is to
Wittgenstein’s down-to-earth naturalism.
Leahy quotes Wittgenstein saying that animals ‘do not use language – if
we except the most primitive forms’ (PI, 125) as support for his contention
that animals are ‘incapable of language’ (AL, pp.116 & 252).24 But what
does Wittgenstein mean by ‘the most primitive forms’ of language, which by
implication animals do use? He has already given an example of a ‘primitivelanguage’ (PI, 12), consisting of just four words (‘ ‘‘block’’, ‘‘pillar’’, ‘‘slab’’,
‘‘beam’’ ’) used by two individuals to coordinate their building activities.
Whilst animals do not use words (or do not use humanly recognisable
words25), and do not construct buildings out of blocks and pillars etc., it is
well attested that they do engage in collective activities in which their action
is coordinated by sounds, signals and gestures. In using the phrase ‘primitive
forms of language’ for what he takes to be within animals’ behavioural
compass Wittgenstein implicitly recognises a basic kinship of communica-tional capacity between animals and his human builders. Moreover,
however stringently one assess the well-known attempts to teach sign-
language to apes and chimpanzees,26 they surely exhibit linguistic ability
that is equal to Wittgenstein’s builders. Wittgenstein himself sees no
essential difference – differences, certainly, but no essential difference –
between ‘primitive forms of language’ and ‘our more complicated ones’: ‘we
recognise in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a
break from our more complicated ones’.27 And he notes that he will‘sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game’ (PI, 17).
Wittgenstein steadfastly declines his interlocutor’s demand to state ‘what
the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is’ (PI, 165). He
suggests instead that we think of ‘language’ as a word for an extended family
of (more or less closely) related communicational, coordinative, and
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expressive activities, relations, and instruments within a common ‘form of
life’. If one follows Wittgenstein in giving up on the idea of a unitary ‘object’
with an essential form, structure, and function corresponding to the term
‘language’, what is it, exactly, that animals are supposed to lack in lacking
‘language’? How can it be said that animals inherently lack ‘language’ if we
cannot say what ‘it’ essentially is? Nobody would deny the obvious fact that
animals do not communicate in human language, but it is far from obvious
that they do not communicate with one another, or even with humans, at
all. To compare animal and human communication and expression is just to
focus on different sets of actions and responses in different forms of life.
It is telling that Leahy introduces his case against animal liberation by
stating that his method consists in drawing ‘a particular picture of human,
then by subtle contrast animal, nature’. Whereas Leahy thereby endeavours
to capture what animals and humans ‘really are’, Wittgenstein, in his later
philosophy, sought to escape the simplification and distortion that comes
with such ‘pictorial’ thinking.
ii. Language-games, sense, and nonsense
Like many other Wittgensteinians, Leahy endorses Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations critique of the transcendental ‘super-picture’
of language as essentially a picturing medium, but nevertheless ends up
reifying that critique into a purportedly more faithful picture of the nature
and conditions of sense. According to this new picture, sense and meaning
are immanent in the practical rules (‘grammar’) of everyday social practice
(language-games).28 Understood thus, the fundamental philosophical aim of
the Tractatus – to find a way of demarcating sense from nonsense29 –
continues to animate Wittgenstein’s later philosophical method, though this
is no longer pursued transcendentally. This conception of the distinctive role
of philosophy is succinctly stated by the influential Wittgenstein-exegetes
Baker and Hacker: ‘philosophy is not concerned with what is true and what
is false, but rather with what makes sense and what traverses the bounds of
sense’.30
In line with this conception of (Wittgensteinian) philosophy, Leahy sets
his task as that of exposing the ‘senselessness’ of liberationists’ core beliefs
on animal experience and the harms to which they are susceptible. Not
surprisingly, he is especially critical of the idea that animals have a basic
‘right’ not to be killed by humans, and dismisses the claim, ‘frequently made
by liberationists’, that ‘animals awaiting slaughter are aware of their fate’
(AL, p.218):31
if…animals lack self-consciousness, as I have argued…then no sense
can be given (a far stronger claim than that we do not know) to the
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contention that they are aware of the prospect of death and terrified at
its implications (AL, p.199).
As Leahy himself remarks, this is indeed a strong claim. It is not that as a
matter of fact animals cannot be aware of the prospect of death and in fear
of it, but that it makes no sense to suppose that they could be. And he does
not say just that he cannot make sense of the contention, but that no sense
can be made of it, presumably because it has none.32 What exactly does
Leahy mean by this?
One might think that the proposition that animals can be in fear of death
is not obviously senseless, or that it is not as senseless as some propositions,
and that there are degrees of senselessness, or different ways in which
utterances or statements may lack sense.33 In recent Wittgenstein scholar-
ship ‘two different conceptions of nonsense’ are identified: (i) ‘mere
nonsense’, which is a statement or utterance that is ‘simply unintelligible –
it expresses no thought’, and (ii) ‘substantial nonsense’, which is ‘composed
of intelligible ingredients combined in an illegitimate way – it expresses a
logically incoherent thought’.34 Conception (i) might seem an apt
characterisation of an utterance such as ‘piggly wiggle tiggle’,35 whilst
conception (ii) might seem more fitting for propositions such as Noam
Chomsky’s famous ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’, and if the
animal-fear-of-death proposition is nonsense it would be so in this way.
However, according to Conant (and other New Wittgensteinians) this is a
false distinction, the making of which he attributes to other schools of
interpretation. Conant insists that ‘from a logical point of view’, mere
nonsense is ‘the only kind of nonsense there is’.36 Thus the idea of
‘substantial nonsense’ is itself a prime example of mere nonsense, ‘an illusion
of meaning something’.37 So on this view, if the animal-fear-of-death
proposition is nonsensical, it must be mere nonsense and ‘express no
thought’ at all (which is not to say that Conant would classify it thus).
Leahy though, evidently conceives the proposition as ‘senseless’ in the
manner of the substantial conception of nonsense (the expression of a
‘logically incoherent thought’. His claim is that it makes no sense to
attribute states and experiences that are inherently linguistically-mediated to
beings that have no linguistic capacity. Therefore, to think that an animal
‘fears death’ is to imagine it being ‘in the distinctly paradoxical position of
fearing something of which it could not, in any sense, be aware’ (AL, p.164).
Hence to attribute awareness and fear of death to animals is as senseless as
attributing colour and sleepiness to ideas.38
Reflecting on ‘the meaning’ of death, Leahy evidently finds himself
unable to conceive the phenomenon of death without employing the
linguistically-mediated concept of ‘death’. He tries to project himself into
the position of a creature that does not have his (our) concept of death and
then reflects on what death (the phenomenon) could ‘mean’ for a creature so
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positioned.39 His assertion that no sense can be made of the animal-fear-
of-death proposition is the result of this reflective manoeuvre, focusing
on the proposition in isolation from any conditions and circumstances of
its actual use. But the proposition clearly does have a use, and is used
(which is of course precisely why Leahy criticises it) by a lot of people,
including some eminent philosophers and scientists as well as lay-people.
This being so, asserting that the proposition is really senseless disregardsWittgenstein’s exhortation that ‘it is only in use that the proposition has
its sense’,40 therefore ‘[l]et the use teach you the meaning’ (PI, p.212). If
one heeds this methodological principle, then rather than summarily
pronouncing a proposition to be senseless, one instead looks to its use(s)
and users to find out what sense it is imbued with in and through that
usage. From this standpoint, one major difference between usage of the
animal-fear-of-death proposition and ‘nonsensical’ propositions such as
Chomsky’s ‘colourless green ideas’ is obvious: the former is meant to betaken literally, and the latter is not. One could say that they are, or
belong to, quite different language-games, or different kinds of language-
game.
Chomsky’s proposition is invariably used as a heuristic to demonstrate
vividly the effortlessness with which we detect sentence-grammaticality (by
showing that this is easily done even with a ‘nonsensical’ sentence). Thus it
might be thought that Chomsky’s ‘proposition’ has a use but no meaning,
and that in itself, taken literally, it is nonsensical, and indeed that it being sois intrinsic to the use to which Chomsky puts it. However, with some
ingenuity we could come up with a use for the proposition that does not
presuppose its nonsensicality. Here is one possibility. It is commonplace
nowadays to describe environmental thought as ‘green ideas’ (the expression
did not exist when Chomsky formulated his proposition); a critic or sceptic
complains that such ideas are colourless, meaning that they lack political
verve and reality, and an indignant environmentalist retorts: ‘colourless
green ideas sleep furiously’ (perhaps with certain intonations on ‘colourless’and ‘sleep’, and emphasis on ‘furiously’). Wouldn’t it be reasonable to
interpret this as meaning something like: ‘people might think green ideas are
weak and ineffectual, but in fact they’re smouldering beneath the surface of
political orthodoxy’?41 Clearly, this is not what Chomsky meant, but what
he, or anyone else, means by the proposition is determined not by analysis of
the meaning and syntax of its constituents, but through consideration of the
circumstances in which, and the purposes for which, it is being used.
The animal-fear-of-death proposition, on the other hand, is usually usedto express a belief that the speaker or writer takes to be literally true.
Nobody, presumably, believes that ideas, qua abstract entities, can literally
be green and asleep, whereas users of the animal-fear-of-death proposition
do believe that animals, qua conscious beings, can literally be aware and in
fear of the prospect of death.
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In addition to ignoring its usage, Leahy’s classification of the animal-fear-
of-death proposition as ‘senseless’ depends on some contentious empirical
assumptions, namely: that awareness of death is necessarily a language-
dependent state; that being in fear of death entails that the subject
understands ‘its’ (death’s) ‘implications’; that animals lack the postulated
linguistic/conceptual capacities; and that possession of linguistic/conceptual
capacity is the required ground for attributing awareness and fear of deathin what Leahy calls the ‘primary language-game’ of such attribution to
human beings. Even granting the soundness of these assumptions, it is hard
to see why it is nonsensical rather than just mistaken to reject them and to
think that awareness and fear of death are not language-dependent, or that
animals do possess the requisite linguistic/conceptual capacities. But the
assumptions are eminently challengeable.
What are the ‘implications’ of death to which Leahy alludes? Elaborating
a little, he reiterates that animals awaiting slaughter ‘must, and can only,remain unaware of their fate since to be even possibly otherwise would
involve an understanding of dying, and its implications for one’s desire to
continue living’ (AL, pp. 218–9). He also remarks that, whilst animals can
be seen to ‘strive instinctively to keep alive’, in the light of them ‘lacking
language’ it is ‘unduly anthropomorphic to describe this as hoping or
aspiring to live to a ripe old age’ (AL, p.199). This is, of course, his
(caricatured) description; those who refer non-ironically to animals’ aversive
reactions to life-threatening situations clearly would not describe it thus.Leahy’s description would hardly be more felicitous in the case of a human
striving to keep alive, which is more likely to be seen as the manifestation of
a (non-cognitive) ‘survival instinct’, not a conceptual understanding of
mortality.
I submit that it is not at all typical for humans to have such a conceptual
understanding of death. Contemplating the ‘meaning’ of death is a taxing
metaphysical exercise. Its abstruseness is encapsulated by the beguiling
philosophical question: To whom can death be attributed, and who sufferswhat it brings?42 Philosophers through the ages have tried, and failed, to
come up with a satisfying answer to the question of what death is and in
what its badness consists.43 Utilitarians, notoriously, have difficulty finding
anything that is bad about death for the subject,44 and have correlative
difficulty identifying the moral wrong done to the subject in cases of unjust
killing.45 Non-philosophers would most likely be extremely perplexed by
questions about what death is and in what its badness consists, and such
understanding as they have is unlikely to reach beyond the mere linguisticability to say that death is the end of life and that just is bad. For most
people, the basic conviction that death is a very bad thing is manifested not
in discursive knowledge-claims, or reflective inquiry, but in how they behave
in, and react to, certain situations and events.46 And this, I would suggest, is
how it is with animals too.
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Wittgenstein’s ‘language-game methodology’ behoves us to remind
ourselves of the grounds on, and conditions under, which people contend
that animals are aware of and terrified by the prospect of death. This is what
Wittgenstein did with regard to the sceptical question of how we know – or
indeed whether we can know - the experiential states of human beings other
than ourselves. For Wittgenstein, the idea that there might be grounds for
doubting that others experience pain, fear and suffering, or that they do soto the same degree and quality as we ourselves do, is otiose: ‘[i]f I see
someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his
feelings are hidden from me’ (PI, p.223). And ‘[j]ust try–in a real case–to
doubt someone else’s fear or pain’ (PI, 1303). Wittgenstein’s point is that if
we consider the conditions and circumstances in which we take someone to
be in pain or fear, it will be seen that this is an immediate, direct perception –
not an interpretation – wherein we apprehend the bodily condition and
behavioural demeanour and comportment of the sufferer.47 When animalsare in situations of mortal danger their behaviour is strikingly similar to that
of humans: they frantically try to escape the source of harm or threat, their
vocalisations are redolent of human screams of pain and terror, the ‘look’ in
their eyes and the contortion of their faces closely resembles that of humans
in distress, or they may simply cower mutely and motionlessly. Thus the
ground for attributing fear and terror to animals in the face of a life-
threatening situation is much the same as it is for attributing it to another
human, and this ground is not prior recognition of the victim’s capacity forconceptual/linguistic understanding of ‘the meaning’ and ‘implications’ of
the situation vis-a-vis their mortality. Our judgmental practices show that it
is in virtue of being a ‘living thing’ – not a ‘thinking’, ‘meaning’, or
‘interpreting’ thing – that we hold a creature to be the bearer of pain, fear,
and suffering: ‘if one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul’
(PI, 1357).
The animal-fear-of-death proposition makes perfectly good sense to me,
as it does for many others. Leahy, on the other hand, insists that it issenseless. How might such stark disagreement be resolved? Leahy’s claim is
grounded in his understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and use of
‘language-game methodology’. But we disagree over the latter too. On my
reading, deployment of the ‘nonsense!’ charge as the fundamental mode of
philosophical criticism is a residue of the transcendental stance that
Wittgenstein renounced in his later philosophy. It can only perform this
critical role of diagnosing that which inherently does not make sense if the
term ‘nonsense’ is exempted from the purview of language-game examina-tion. ‘Nonsense’ then becomes the name for any utterance that, according to
the ‘substantial’ conception, is an invalid move in a language-game (e.g.
attributing fear of death to an animal is like trying to checkmate in
draughts), or according to the ‘mere’ conception, any attempt to ‘speak
outside language-games’.48 In contrast, I regard the terms ‘sense’ and
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‘nonsense’ and their synonyms – as with ‘meaning’, ‘language’, and indeed,
‘language-game’ – to be just as susceptible to language-game examination as
any others. I take this to be the import of Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘what
we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’
(PI, 1116).
From this point of view, one can ask: Which language-game is Leahy
playing with the word ‘nonsense’? The fact that he, and otherWittgensteinians, diagnose as nonsense propositions that many, including
other philosophers, do not or would not accept as nonsensical shows that he
deploys the word in a specialised philosophical (metaphysical49), not
‘everyday’, way. On my view, this is seen to be one language-game amongst
others in which the word ‘nonsense’ features, and in these others it will be
used according to various different standards and criteria in a variety of
contexts. There is no good reason to think that this particular transcen-
dental-metaphysical use of ‘nonsense’ trumps these other uses and users.Rather than accepting the implicit (albeit disavowed) claim to an
epistemically superior standpoint from which to judge authoritatively what
does and what does not make sense, we might look at the circumstances and
conditions of such pronouncements. What we will see, I suggest, is that
when Leahy pronounces that the animal-fear-of-death proposition is
senseless, and Conant maintains that the sceptical philosopher ‘fails to say
anything at all’,50 they are manifesting their attitude to these utterances,
rather than stating an ascertainable fact about them.51 They are implicitlysaying ‘I cannot make sense of this utterance; it means nothing to me; I can
do nothing with it’. In these cases, the word ‘nonsense’ is being used
‘emotively’, as a vehicle through which to express the speaker’s or writer’s
intensity of dissent from, or distaste for, the utterance under consideration.
But, as Wittgenstein might say, one should not infer from ‘I can make no
sense of this’ to ‘it has no sense; no sense can be made of it’.52
Upon consideration of the circumstances in, and the purposes for, which
Leahy asserts that no sense can be made of the animal-fear-of-deathproposition it is clear that this assertion is a forceful expression of his dissent
from, and distaste for, liberationist aims and arguments. But, as
Wittgenstein points out, whilst it is perfectly in order to respond to an
opponent’s claim by dismissing it as nonsense so as to register one’s
disapproval of it, this will not pass for philosophical criticism: ‘‘‘Nonsense!’’
one will say…–But is that an argument? Is it not simply the rejection of an
idea?’.53 The ‘emotive’ use of ‘nonsense’ is often politically motivated, and
used, as Leahy does, for the purpose of discrediting or ridiculing a weakeropponent’s claim.54 It is a much more powerful political strategy than
simply arguing that an opponent’s claims are false, incorrect, misleading or
confused. Historically, this strategy has often been used by the powerful to
protect their privileged way of life from proper critical scrutiny. Nineteenth
century proposals for the enfranchisement of women were rejected out of
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hand in the British parliament as ‘nonsensical’ (Deep-Green claims about
the intrinsic value of non-sentient natural entities are currently dismissed by
some critics in just the same way). This rhetorical strategy was also common
currency for resisting the claims of the anti-slavery movement. Thus it is that
the charge of ‘nonsense!’ (usually conceived ‘substantially’) has often been
deployed as a way of evading the challenge to take seriously arguments
against cruel, exploitative and unjust institutionalised practices. It isnoteworthy that minority and marginalized critics are in no position to
dismiss defensive justifications of the status quo as ‘nonsense’. Its rhetorical,
emotive force generally depends on having the social power, prestige,
credibility and tradition to back up the charge.
iii. Linguistic understanding and ethical relevance
Although I have disputed Leahy’s claim that a linguistically generatedontological hiatus divides humans from animals, it would be foolish to deny
that they differ considerably in their linguistic and conceptual capabilities.
Clearly, such differences betoken significance for thinking about the ways in
which people should treat one another and how they should treat animals.
The specific linguistic and conceptual attributes of humans render them
liable to some harms to which animals presumably are not susceptible, such
as, being lied to, slandered, libelled, disenfranchised, defamed, humiliated,
or ridiculed.55 But these linguistic and conceptual capacities are themselves,partially at least, dependent on the shared human form of life (‘to imagine a
language means to imagine a form of life’ [PI, 119]). Thus in saying that
there are harms to which animals are not susceptible, I am not adverting to
metaphysical impossibility, but to differences in the basic manner in which
members of different species organise and live their lives. Specifically intra-
human moral harms are to do with how people should treat one another
given that they share a particular form of life and certain ways of living
together and interacting with each other.But the question of how we should treat animals overlooks the fact that
they have been forcibly brought into our midst in the first place, thereby
rendering them captive recipients of our ‘treatment’. The fundamental
ethical question from a liberationist standpoint is not so much ‘How should
we treat animals?’, but ‘Should they be the objects of our treatment at all?’56
For Leahy, though, ‘what is ‘‘in the interests’’ of animals is mediated by
human practices that involve them’ (AL, p.200). This means that we can do
to animals whatever we like in order to gain some (socially approved)resource, whether in food, clothing, information, sport, or entertainment.
The only restriction that Leahy countenances is that animals should be
treated ‘humanely and with respect’ (AL, p.253). However, what counts as
‘humane’ and ‘respectful’ treatment is determined by the human context in
which the act takes place, not the nature of the act itself (though Leahy
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would presumably say that the very nature of the act is determined by its
context) or its effects. This means that throwing a corrosive substance into
an animal’s eye would be sadistically cruel if done on random occasions in
the home or on the street for the purpose of entertainment, but
when performed on a large sample of animals by scientists in a
laboratory this same physical act is an instance of ‘humane’ and ‘respectful’
treatment.In Leahy’s view, then, animals are wholly dependent on human purposes
and interests for whatever derivative significance they are conventionally
accorded. ‘Lacking language’, they have no point-of-view; they are not
beings for whom things can go well or badly, better or worse. Whatever
happens to them just happens and has no ‘meaning’ or significance for them
at all. The physical condition of an animal can have meaning or significance
for its human owners or custodians, but not for the animal itself. Thus, to
recall the earlier cited example of a hunted fox and a laboratory rabbit, the‘fox or rabbit, once blinded, will not suffer the plight of the human being
[with the same injury], who can meditate upon his or her past vision
knowing that it is gone for good’ (AL, p.266). In this example the human
and the animal undergo exactly the same physical invasion and injury, but
the crucial difference, according to Leahy, is that the human will be aware
‘that they are being mutilated or whatever’ (AL, p.266).
Again, Leahy simply misdescribes the way that the words ‘meaning’,
‘significance’, and even ‘awareness’, are actually used, and seeks to imposehis own particular, restricted, use as the only correct one. I agree that, in
most cases, a blinded human can reflect on the loss of her sight, the
permanence of her blindness, and the consequences of that injury for her
future life, whereas a rabbit or fox cannot think of their condition in this
way. Such thoughts probably are language-dependent, and they add extra
dimensions to the suffering of the human. Even so, these extra dimensions
do not warrant Leahy’s conclusion that blindness, ‘whatever it ‘‘must mean’’
for’ the fox or rabbit, ‘would mean infinitely more’ for the human (AL,p.266) – with the implication that it means nothing to the fox or rabbit. The
human’s reflective capacity also gives her the wherewithal to reorganise
herself so as to be able to continue living a fully ‘meaningful’ life (e.g.
exemplified by David Blunkett, the blind ex British Government minister).
In contrast, what kind of life could a blind fox or rabbit lead – has it not
irrevocably lost more than the human (in the way that a poor person made
homeless loses much more than a wealthy financier who loses a million
dollars in a bad investment)? Human-specific cognitive reflexivity is adouble-edged capacity, generating both an extra dimension to suffering
compared to animals, and also the means for being able to deal with and
overcome that suffering.
The moral wrongness of deliberately blinding someone surely does not
consist in the ruminations to which the injury gives rise and its ‘meaning’ and
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‘significance’ for the victim (just as the moral wrong of killing someone does
not consist in the ‘meaning’ of the act for the victim). Leahy’s depiction of
moral wrongness – which is supposedly based on our commonsense
intuitions, not on moral theory (AL, pp.167–70) – makes the act’s wrongness
contingent on it actually having these effects. But don’t we consider such
acts morally wrong regardless of whether they generate the envisaged
meditative thought processes? Would it not be considered morally wrong
(by nearly everyone) to blind a mentally disabled person who was unable to
reflect on the meaning and significance of their injury in the way that Leahy
describes? A reductio of Leahy’s tying moral wrong to the meaning and
significance an injury generates for the victim is that an unexpected and
unseen fatal blow to a human which produces an injury the meaning and
significance of which its victim cannot comprehend or experience (because
dead) therefore is not a morally wrong act.
My claim, then, is that Leahy fails to identify, or misdescribes, our actual
practices (language-games) of moral perception and judgement regarding
such fundamental wrongs as killing, assault, and torture. Examination of
these language-game shows, I aver, that the wrongness of the latter is
directly-taken-in, immediately intuited, and not predicated upon anything
more fundamental or consequential than the nature of the act itself. With
such basic moral perception, whatever reasons or grounds may be offered in
justification, none are ‘as certain as the very thing they were supposed to be
grounds for’.57 So, when (some) people claim that the killing, enslavement
and torture of animals is morally wrong, they have just the same grounds for
the claim as we all have for believing that it is wrong to treat humans thus.
Admittedly, it is only a small (but substantial and steadily increasing)
minority who do regard such treatment of animals as morally wrong. The
majority, as Leahy says, take the context set by conventional human welfare
purposes to determine the moral significance of what is done to and with
animals (or rather, most do so implicitly without thinking about it at all).
Leahy infers from this social fact about the majority’s judgement of moral
considerability that they are therefore right (morally right) to judge thus and
that this is the only way one can (sensibly) judge. However, whilst we do
take majority belief and judgement to be generally reliable normative guides,
we also know, as a prominent fact about our moral history, that often in the
past majorities have judged it right and justified to kill, enslave, and torture
certain apparently (to them) inferior kinds or sub-kinds of human being.
Thus we all know that the language-game(s) of moral perception and
judgement can be, and have been, played badly or incorrectly by the
majority of players. This is not to say that the majority currently play the
language-game(s) of moral judgement badly or incorrectly vis-a-vis our
treatment of animals, but that there is nothing intrinsic to the contextual
factors that Leahy invokes, nor the grounds on which we judge moral wrong
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in the human-to-human case, that shows liberationist challenges to be
fallacious.
Conclusion
Leahy is by no means the first to have argued that Wittgenstein’s philosophy
advocates acceptance of, and reconcilement with, the social, political andmoral status quo. Such a conservative position has often been taken as an
obvious implication of Wittgenstein’s famous injunction that ‘what has to
be accepted, the given, is–so one could say–forms of life’ (PI, p.226). But
Wittgenstein says here that it is the form of life that has to be accepted, not
any in particular of the multitudinous contents that happen to be subsumed
by that form. From the standpoint of language-game examination, it can be
seen that the language-games of moral debate, disagreement, conflict, and
attempts at persuasion are a core feature of our social life. These critical anddisputational practices are, I take it, as much a part of our ‘forms of life’,
which have to be accepted, as any of the other practices, relations,
dispositions etc. that are constitutive of those forms. Hence engagement in
radical moral and political critique is ‘accepting’ the givenness of our forms
of life, for these disputational practices enter into the constitution of the
forms. But there is no compelling reason to count the peculiarly modern
institutionalised practices of animal exploitation as constitutive of our forms
of life. On the contrary, as liberationists cogently argue, they arecontingent practices within those forms, and could be abolished without
perverting the form or even any significant diminishment to human well-
being.
I have not sought to claim that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, as such,
provides any special license for the liberationist position that Leahy
opposes and which I support. On the contrary, I endorse Wittgenstein’s
renunciation of philosophical insight sub specie aterni into the very essence
of things, whether of ‘facts’ or ‘values’. But although liberationist idealsare characteristically couched in an argumentative form that is alien to
Wittgenstein’s style of reflection, their moral content can be illuminatingly
re-presented in a manner that assumes the mantle of his mode of
philosophical inquiry. When Wittgenstein says: ‘one can imagine an
animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled’ (PI, p.174), he is not
telling us something we did not know; he is simply reminding us of what
we already know about the kind of being that an animal is. Liberationist
arguments, I believe, are most plausibly and powerfully heard as reminding
us that the kinds of being that can be ‘angry, frightened, unhappy, happy,
startled’ etc., are the kinds of being that ought to be granted basic moral
respect (i.e. the great ‘negative’ freedoms from interference, incarceration,
assault and killing). To be reminded of this is not to be given any new
information or theory, or to be told something that we did not in some
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sense already know, or which contradicts any of our fundamental moral
intuitions.58
Notes
1. Hereafter, in deference to linguistic convention, I shall mostly dispense with the ‘non-
human’ qualifier.
2. On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 1475.
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’, 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’, Animals and Their Moral Standing (London:
Routledge, 1997), p.2.
6. 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, op. cit. note 5, p.123.
7. Frey, Interests and Rights: the Case Against Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980);
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’.
8. 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 animal-
utilising 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.
9. Singer, op. cit. note 6, p.x.
10. Ibid., p.9.
11. Tom Regan, The case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983).
12. Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights a Philosophical Defence (London: Macmillan, 1998).
13. Ethics, Humans and Other Animals (London: Routledge, 2000).
14. Op. cit., note 6.
15. Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); Diamond,
‘Anything but argument?’ Philosophical Investigations Vol.5 (1982).
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16. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: University Press,
1996).
17. 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).
18. Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 1244. Hereafter this work will be
referred to in the main text and notes as ‘PI’.
19. 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).
20. Op. cit. note 5, p.14.
21. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1988), props. 4.016, 4.001, 1.
22. Ibid., 4.01.
23. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), pp.3–4.
24. 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.
25. 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’.
26. 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).
27. Op. cit. note 23, p.17.
28. ‘[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.
29. ‘[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.
30. Op. cit. note 28, p.39. Also Peter Winch: ‘one of our primary concerns is precisely to
distinguish sense from nonsense’ Ethics and Action (London: Routledge, 1972), p.83.
31. 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).
32. 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. 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.)
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33. 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).
34. 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.
35. Alice Crary, ‘Introduction’ in op. cit. note 34, p.12.
36. Op. cit. note 34, pp.176–7. 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.
37. Ibid. p.177.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. Op. cit., note 2, 110.
41. After writing this I performed a Google search and discovered that others have already
proffered very similar renditions of the proposition.
42. ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death’, Wittgenstein, op. cit.
note 21, 6.4311.
43. Much of the contemporary literature seems to me to centre around banal under-
statement 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. 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 ‘theories’ 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.
44. See L. W. Sumner, ‘A matter of life and death’ Nous, 10 (2), 1976.
45. See Peter Singer, ‘What’s Wrong with Killing?’ in Practical Ethics (Cambridge:
University Press, 1993), ch.4.
46. 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, 17. 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.
47. 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
Wittgenstein and Animals 335
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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.
48. 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, 11132 & 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.
49. Metaphysical, because the pronouncement is that an utterance does not make sense
because it cannot make sense.
50. Conant, op. cit. note 34, p.194.
51. 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.
52. ‘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, 130.
53. Ibid., 1138.
54. 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.
55. 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.
56. 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.
57. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 1307.
58. 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.
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