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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

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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

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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

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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’

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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

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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

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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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