Ortega y Gasset VI The Ethics of Hunting

Some writers criticize the practice of hunting on utilitarian grounds. The claims here are that pleasure is good and pain is bad, that right actions maximize the balance of pleasure over pain (that is the utilitarian part), and that hunting can be shown to not maximize pleasure over pain (and the anti-hunting part). This critique calls those who resist applying the utilitarian framework and only that framework to non-human species “speciesists.”

Part of the disagreement with the hunting concerns the definition of what is meant by hunting. Ortega y Gasset defines “hunting” as “what an animal does to take possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species basically inferior to its own.” For the utilitarian, this definition misses the ethically relevant dimensions. That the hunter and the hunted belong to different species is beside the point. That the species have mutually adapted to each other such that, qua species, each depends on the other introduces extraneous data.

The utilitarian decrees that only pleasure and pain have an ethical weight, and not only humans but other animals too can feel pleasure and pain. For the utilitarian, hunting would be “what one sentient animal does to inflict death on another sentient animal, perhaps for the pleasure of eating it or displaying it.” From a utilitarian point of view, the only question is the extent to which the hunter can inflict death with minimal pain, as compared with the pain induced and the pleasure forfeited should the animal not die at the hunter’s hands.

Two features of Ortega’s account of hunting drop out of the utilitarian account. First, the difference of species disappears as irrelevant. As a basis for an ethic of hunting, this has troubling implications. Whether one hunts and eats or displays one’s own species is relevant only to the extent that it might increase the pleasure and pain involved. The utilitarian cannot oppose cannibalism on the grounds that it is cannibalism, only on the grounds that under certain circumstances it creates less than optimal balance of pleasure over pain. Further, though in principle it would not differentiate between species, in practice it values the species suffering pain over the species that inflicts the pain. The result is that animal rights advocates may feel pleasure at news of hunter accidents (and express such pleasure on internet forums) because at least there are fewer hunters to inflict pain on animals. Sometimes those who advocate animal rights must consciously remind themselves that "people are animals too" -- and this statement elevates humans to a moral status the activist can too easily lose sight of. (reference)

Second, the ecosystem drops out of the utilitarian calculus. Institutions, organizations, and systems, even ecological systems cannot feel pleasure or pain. Only individuals within those systems can; only individuals are real. Consequently, the only way to take account of an ecological system is through the pain felt by individuals; the collapse of an ecosystem and the extinction of species concerns the utilitarian only insofar as the individual sentient animals feel pain during the collapse. The utilitarian can have no objection to the extinction of a species, for an extinct species can no longer feel pleasure or pain. The utilitarian is pained only by the pain felt by the members of the species so long as they happen to exist. But “happening to exist” is itself neither good nor bad.

At this point I cannot but wonder if the utilitarian metaphysic is simply too truncated, if its inability to recognize certain realities does not doom those realities in its drive to efficiently maximize pleasure. Michael Pollan roots this metaphysic in a form of life. He notes “how parochial , and urban, an ideology animals rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development) , and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged. ‘In our normal life,’ Singer writes, ‘there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.’ Such a statement assumes a decidedly citified version of ‘normal life,’ certainly one no farmer – indeed, no gardener – would recognize.” (pp. 325-6).

According to animal rights advocates those who reject the utilitarian account are “speciesists.” This term of criticism may be accepted if we define it. To be a speciesist is to claim, minimally, that species and ecological systems ought to count directly in our ethical considerations. It is to claim that the continued existence of a species is a good that we should value, that an ecosystem is worth preserving even if more pleasure and less pain would seem to be the result of developing it. It is to claim that while the pains and pleasures of individuals are important, there are also goods and evils other than the pain and pleasures of sentient individuals. There is more in the world than is dreamed of....