Cartmill, Review IV

Cartmill’s final account of the immorality of hunting fails to convince. First, his claim to have found “consensus” among “the industrialized West” is as persuasive as asserting “we the people…” It leaves out not only non-Westerners, but also the non-industrialized in the West, particularly the rural poor, including those living on reservations. I suspect that the asserted consensus, even within the industrialized West, is a lie. Our way of life could not exist without considerable suffering from many animals. We need them to test medicines and medical procedures, and to provide foods of choice to people living in large cities. We are vaguely aware of their suffering, and most of us do not object.

Second, Cartmill himself notes that many contest the claim that a utilitarian ethic can and should be the fundamental principle by which we judge our treatment of animals. The objection is that utilitarians consider only pleasure and pain, and pleasure and pain can be felt only by individuals, not by species. By treating everything as an individual, the utilitarian cannot make important ethical distinctions; that is, utilitarian principle is blind to certain realities. For example, if an invasive species threatens to throw an entire ecosystem out of whack, and if biologists set out to eradicate the invasive species, utilitarians will protest on behalf of the individuals that will suffer under the eradication program. The utilitarian fails to recognize that individuals can exist only in certain ecosystems, alongside other specific species, and this is because an individual is not only an individual, but a member of a species. Cartmill notes that hunters share this view with environmentalists and biologists, but he makes no reply (236). (I will save other objections to utilitarian ethics for another day.)

Finally, Cartmill’s argument is that if we erase the distinction between humans and animals as morally irrelevant, then we can see that hunting is wrong. This conclusion follows only if we put on the utilitarian blinders. Attention to American Indians, such as the Lakota Sioux, would have shown the hidden assumptions. According to the Lakota, the bison is their brother. That is why they hunt the bison. To understand this view requires more than learning how to employ a single abstract principle (pain is bad) in a detailed, ledger-book calculation. It requires understanding an entire history of a people and a way of life carved out for centuries in symbiotic relationship with the bison.