Desire

Harlan B. Miller

[A Polish translation,  by Marina Stepanenko, is available at http://www.onlinecarparts.co.uk/science/?p=368 ]

I want, this morning, to talk about wants, about how what we want makes us who we are, and how some ways of understanding our own wants and the wants of others shape our lives both personally and politically. There are five parts, respectively personal, political, personal, political, personal.

I - Personal - What we are and what wants are not

So what do you want? What do you really want? Tell me what you want, what you really, really want. I've listened carefully several times, and read the lyrics, but I'm still not at all sure just what the Spice Girls really, really want. But I'm sure that their desires, authentic and inauthentic, transient and more or less fixed, make them who they are.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled, on cable, on an excellent British film from the 40s entitled Perfect Strangers. Greer Garson plays a mousy and sniffly and thoroughly submissive housewife and Robert Donat is her utterly drab husband. But it's 1940 and off he goes into the Royal Navy, and shortly thereafter so does she, into the Wrens. They are both transformed. I don't want to tell you much more, because I hope you'll have a chance to see it. The American release has the absurd and in fact insulting title of "Vacation from Marriage" - World War II as a vacation! Ignore that if you can.
Both characters become different people, and what really makes them different is not the squarer shoulders and the confident gaits but their completely different desires. What they want in 1944 isn't much like what they wanted in 1940. In fact their 1940 selves couldn't have imagined the way the world looks to their 1944 selves. One might say that a different sort of light shines on their 1944 worlds, painting quite different prospects in the colors of desire and of disdain.
What we want, to a very large degree, is what we are. But what is desire? What is it to want something? At the most basic level I'm afraid there isn't much to say. Desire is a very primitive notion, not really explicable in terms of anything else. We desire things and people and praise and pleasure, but to make sense of the whole range of things desired we have to take desiring that a state of affairs be actual to be conceptually fundamental. So all my desires are really of the form "I desire that p" where p is some proposition describing a state of affairs.
That is, I believe, true, but it isn't very exciting. What I want to talk about is the way our wants determine and are determined by our selves. But that is not to say that our wants are exclusively, or even predominantly, selfish. And that brings me to my first main point. A very bad theory of desire, of wanting, is intellectually dominant in our society. So my most important claim is not about what wants are, but about what they aren't.
According to what I will call the 'Homo economicus' or 'He' theory of desires, desires are simply given, they are exclusively oriented to the self, and they are all, in effect, founded on anticipated pleasure or satisfaction. This theory is most strikingly dominant in economics, with a few exceptions, but it has immense sway in all the social sciences, journalism, and popular culture as a whole. It is now dead in some parts of philosophy, but still thriving in others. All three of the elements of the He theory that I listed are incorrect. Desires are not just given, they are not exclusively selfish, and they generally do not concern anticipated pleasure.
On the He theory we are just born with some desires, others more or less inevitably appear in the course of maturation, some are the results of social conditioning, and some are just random. We don't choose our wants, and on most versions of the theory we can't rationally change them, though we might have ourselves deprogrammed or reprogrammed. This is just wrong. We quite naturally want food and companionship and sex, but not only can we choose anorexia, solitude, and celibacy, we can come to want them. Of course our wants are shaped by our parents and our peers. How could it be otherwise? But every parent soon learns that even very small children have wants, and propensities to form wants, that are very resistant to external pressure. The He theory is generally clueless about childhood, being, as it is, a theory of beings who suddenly pop into existence with a fixed inventory of desires and trade goods. This is a good place to acknowledge my debt to Roger Paden's delightful paper "The Lost Childhood of Homo economicus" from which I take the term and the abbreviation and doubtless more as well.
In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle explains virtues and vices as habits of choice, dispositions to make certain sorts of choices. The honest woman naturally tells the truth. Most of the time it simply doesn't even occur to her to lie. In difficult situations when it does occur to her she finds it very distasteful. The cowardly man is not the one subject to fear, for any rational being is subject to fear, but the one who is most likely to choose to abandon his duties in the face of fear. How do we come to have the virtues and vices, these dispositions to choose? By habituation. We become brave by acting bravely. In a word, characteristics develop from corresponding activities. For that reason we must see to it that our activities are of a certain kind, since any variations in them will be reflected in our characteristics. Hence it is no small matter whether one habit or another is inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary it makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference. (1103b21-25, Ostwald translation)
Since our character is determined by our choices, and our choices are at least substantially free, we are responsible for our character. I have always found Aristotle here both convincing and sobering. My choices over the years have made me what I am. At the deepest level I am responsible for my sloth and procrastination and gluttony. The late Bill Williams used to sing a bit of an old Beatrice Lillie song.

• And the very worst part is,
• you know in your heart you
• have only yourself to blame

But the point is that we do in fact choose our wants. We are capable of cultivating new tastes, and at least sometimes of overcoming vices. We overcome addictions. In childhood we transform our wants successively time and again. As we get older it becomes more difficult and we often fail. But we sometimes succeed, which should, on the He theory, be impossible. I want to ride my bicycle rather than drive a car when I travel about Blacksburg. I'm rather proud of that desire. Our wants aren't just given.
Nor are they exclusively selfish. The claim that all desires are selfish, that all desires are for one's own good, is called 'psychological egoism' by philosophers who confront it in every introductory ethics class. Psychological egoism is an astonishingly popular view, despite its obvious falsehood. The psychological egoist has to hold that the soldier throwing himself on the grenade is motivated not by duty or by love of his comrades but by an intense feeling of pride and anticipated posthumous glory in the couple of seconds he has before most of his internal organs are shredded. There is something not just wrong but indecent about such a position, yet millions of decent people believe it or think that they do.
That many of our wants are for the good of others has been recognized for millenia. Both David Hume and his friend Adam Smith stressed the power of sympathetic as well as selfish desires in our makeup. But that's a part of Adam Smith that many (not all) economists ignore. I want Montgomery County schools to be well-funded and well-staffed. I will never attend school here, my only child has passed through the system, and the chances of any grandchild of mine attending these schools is remote. But the schools are a public good of my community, and I care about them.
Nor, and now we come to the third egregious defect of the He theory of wants, are our wants based on or constituted by anticipation of pleasure. This is true of almost no one, but I will use myself as an example, since the data are readily at hand. I'm sure that very similar stories can be told about you. There are many things I want to do that do not give me pleasure. I give blood, I spend lots of money on life insurance, I grade seriously.
Every couple of months I go to the blood center. I lose an hour or so, most of the time I am quite bored, and it hurts. I always flinch when I'm stuck, and that always embarrasses me. I get a cookie and a cup of coffee. Why do I do it? Why do I want to do it? Well, I often say that it is one of the few things I do well, except for the flinching. But actually I do it because I think I should. Blood is needed, some people have a hard time donating and I don't, so I should give. But don't I do it for the satisfaction of having done a good deed? No, that gets things backwards. It gives me satisfaction to do a good deed, perhaps, but because it is a good deed, not because it is a satisfaction-producer. Giving blood is not like eating candy. I do it because I think I should, and then, perhaps, I am satisfied with myself. But the goal is not satisfaction, it is duty.
I spend a lot of money on life insurance. I'm pretty old, and I've made the actuarially clever move of avoiding death, so some of my older, smaller, policies are now paying for themselves. Still, I spend over $300 a month on life insurance. Why? With that money I could buy things that please me, such as computer hardware or books or beer. Instead I spend it in a way that is guaranteed to give me no pleasure. It will pay off only when I am not around to enjoy it. So why do I do it? Because I care about my wife and daughter. In fact, but please don't tell them, I love them both. What that means is that I am very interested in their welfare in the broadest sense. I want them to be happy, to live lives well worth living. My daughter is now making her own way in the world, but I'd like for her to come into a little estate some day. My wife will probably outlive me, and I want her to be reasonably comfortable. Those are the things I want, and so I pay for them. But notice that my pleasure or satisfaction is not in the picture. I will be dead, and thus incapable of pleasure or satisfaction.
I certainly don't believe in life after death. But suppose there is such a thing. Would it then be the case that I purchase life insurance because I anticipate looking down from Heaven (or, more likely, up from Hell) and being pleased by the flourishing of my wife and daughter? This still gets it backward. I would be pleased by their flourishing because I care for them. I do not care for them because I would be pleased by their flourishing. (Why would that be? Why their flourishing and not someone else's flourishing? Why their flourishing and not their misery?)
Third example. (I'm really beating on this horse because it refuses to die.) I teach at Virginia Tech, and I'm a pretty hard grader. I flunk from 5% to 20% of the students, and As are hard to get. This does not give me pleasure, and it does not give the students, except a few, pleasure. It certainly does not help my teaching evaluation scores or get me better raises. I could join the nearly universal flow of grade inflation and give lots of As and Bs and give Ds to those who never showed at all. It wouldn't hurt me, though it might lower me in the eyes of some of my colleagues. It would certainly avoid a number of unpleasant scenes. So why don't I do it? Why would I be ashamed of myself? Because I care about maintaining some sort of standard, because I want grades to mean something. But again, I maintain the standards not because it would be painful not to. I maintain the standards because I believe in them. I know full well that selling out, after a couple of semesters to numb my conscience, would produce more pleasure.
The He theory of desire is massively flawed. We can and do choose our wants. Our desires are not selfish. Our desires are not based on anticipated pleasure. But the He theory is not just an intellectually defective theory, it is a corrupting one. As Aristotle said, our choices determine our character. When we accept the He theory we act upon it. We take it for granted that our desires are selfish. And when we believe this long enough we make it true. Our choices form our character. When we are convinced that our choices must be selfish, our choices become selfish. And the consequences are serious indeed.

II - Political - Selfish Bargainers

If we are indeed all motivated simply by selfish desires for our own anticipated pleasures then we live in a world in which the public interest is a fraud or a mere average, love and commitment are simply delusions, and the price of everything is determined by the market.
In a sloppily written but otherwise admirable book, The Unconscious Civilization (American edition 1997, The Free Press, New York), John Ralston Saul argues that the whole notion of the public good, and, in effect, of citizenship, has been corrupted and displaced by the culture of selfishness and of individuals as members of interest groups, not as citizens.
We can see this quite dramatically on a small scale. Think of the last half-dozen committee or small group meetings you have attended. One goes to such a meeting, typically, with some idea of what is at issue and some preferences about the decisions to be made. Once there, one can listen and discuss, or one can bargain. If one actually enters the meeting as a cooperative undertaking, one's preferences, one's wants, are very likely to change, to evolve toward a group consensus. If, on the other hand, one enters the meeting simply as a bargainer trying to maximize the benefits to oneself or to the subgroup one represents, things are very different. In the latter case the positions and desires of other participants are simply tactical information. In the former they are claims with which one might well have some sympathy.
All of us have been in meetings in which most or even all participants are genuinely cooperating. Committee and juries work pretty well pretty frequently. But all of us have also been in meetings in which some participants have steadfastly refused to do anything but bargain for their own profit.
If one accepts the He theory of desire selfish bargaining is not only ubiquitous, it is the only rational form of behavior. In fact 'rational' is so defined in some contexts in economics.
The political effects are disastrous. Once we are reduced to interest groups the public good becomes irrelevant. Any attempt to appeal to it is instantly interpreted as a cynical ploy to gain some advantage. Lobbyists and money hard and soft become completely dominant in politics.
The last Virginia gubernatorial race was an exceptionally striking demonstration of the eclipse of the public interest. What was the pivotal issue? Was it the protection of our environment? Was it our children's education? Was it the jobs they will have and the lives they will live? No, of course not. It was the car tax. Vote for me and I'll give you a couple of hundred dollars.
The most shameful thing about the 1997 Virginia election is not that such a craven appeal was made but that it succeeded. I have no way of knowing how many of the Virginia voters who put a few bucks in their wallets above any appeal to the public good were affected by the He theory, but surely some were. The dominance of that theory poisons public discourse by branding any appeal to unselfishness as spurious and insincere.

III - Personal - Disorders of Desire

Let me go back again from the political to the personal. Some of our desires can be quite unfortunate, even destructive. The cocaine addict has an overwhelming dominant want that can, and often does, destroy him and those around him. I want to focus on different sorts of, as I shall call them, disorders of desire. I have in mind inauthentic desires, tyrannically limiting desires, and wantlessness.
About the first I will be very brief. Our peers or our fears or a suffocating system may convince us that what we want is to live happily ever after as a submissive housewife, or to join Rho Rho Rho fraternity, or to have a bright green lawn or a new car every year. And in fact these things may not be at all satisfying and may divert us from those goals, those wants, that would really give us direction and at least episodes of satisfaction. It's hard to know what you'd really really want if all those people weren't telling you.
But even a genuine desire can be or become tyrannical. When one is prisoner of a single dominating desire, even a basically reasonable one, one's life can be horribly constrained. When absolutely everything is subservient to saving souls for Jesus, or overthrowing capitalism, or patriarchy, or to attacking Hillary Clinton, or to getting into medical school, or to getting tenure, one is trapped. One is also very poor company.
But for most of us relatively comfortable people, the biggest threat is not becoming this sort of single-drive robot, not having overpowering desires, but rather drifting rudderless.
We had on our refrigerator, until it finally disintegrated, an Andy Capp cartoon in which Andy is sitting at the bar, staring into his pint and sighing. The barkeep explains in the next frame. "There's a lot of it going around. Not really knowing what 'e wants, but being sure 'e doesn't have it."
The perils of wantlessness have been fairly well explored in a wide range of literature. There was a striking episode in Upstairs, Downstairs in which James is at a weekend party of the idle rich. Except for James, none of them work, none have any responsibilities, and none have any real desires that give a structure to their lives. They are dreadfully bored and devote all their energies to the search for amusement. They are rich, many are physically attractive, but they are pathetic.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams describes archeological digs on various planets in which the uppermost stratum of the remains of a dead civilization consists entirely of shoes. He explains it as follows. As things are running down and people are ill-motivated and depressed, people tend to look down. What they see, then, is their feet. And then they think "That's it, what I need is a new pair of shoes." Happy people with things to do and places to go buy shoes when the old ones wear out. Surely you've noticed how many shoe stores there seem to be in every mall.
Wantlessness, either chronic or episodic, is epidemic in our society. When we don't really want anything enough to do anything about it we fritter, we waste, we eat even though we're not hungry, we watch bad television, we drink, we smoke, we visit malls. Our survival needs are met. We should be enjoying ourselves. But we're like Andy in the pub, ordering another pint because he's got nothing to do and no place to go. I know the feeling well.

IV - Political - The Desires of the Disordered

Here we are, pretty well off in our lavishly wealthy but significantly unjust society. We can do pretty much what we choose. And there is much to choose. We could struggle for economic justice, or for a rational health system. We could learn new skills or new sports, enrich our bodies or, especially, our minds. There are literatures upon literatures, histories upon histories, bodies of learning and art, archaeology, astronomy, botany, and on and on. World upon world of things to learn.
But that's not what we do. We either pursue power and possessions or we sit watching the Home Shopping Network, hoping to find something to want. Homo economicus is subject to one sort of manipulation, the wantless to many sorts. The wantless are especially vulnerable to advertising. Lacking any wants that are really theirs, they can be persuaded to desire beanie babies, or to purchase goods that are actually just advertisements. Why would anyone want to spend good money to buy shirts with other people's names on them? Who is Tommy Hifiger?
Not all of these bizarre pseudo-desires are the products of commercial manipulation. The very strange Princess Diana phenomena indicate to me that millions and millions of people were badly in need of something to care about. We're looking for needs in all the wrong places.
The poverty of our desires is perfectly reflected in the current state of national politics. Homo economicus belongs to that party that is an unstable alliance of the greedy and the resentful. And its only real rival is the party that no longer seems to stand for anything at all.

V - Personal - Desire and the Good Life

What should we want to really really want? We want to live a good life both on the large scale and on the small, to live well, to be happy. Happiness, said Aristotle, is essentially a matter of activity. To live well is to act well, to actualize our potentialities. A good life is one of action and engagement. Even on the smaller scale the things we really enjoy are activities that fully engage us and draw upon our abilities. That's the point of that most Aristotelian of bumper stickers "Are we having fun yet?". If that question can be asked then a negative answer is necessary. If the activity is really engaging so little of your attention that you can ask whether or not you're enjoying it, you aren't.
What sorts of desires are likely to lead us to this sort of excellence-in-activity, not just in episodes but in our lives? As Aristotle says, "One swallow does not make a Spring, nor does one sunny day; one day or a short time does not make a man truly happy and fortunate." (1098a17-19)
Really happy people are those actively engaged in the pursuit of something they really want. Very extensive wantlessness is completely incompatible with happiness.
But Homo economicus may well be happy for a while, accumulating wealth and power, clawing his way up the ladder of success. This game, like many others, may be highly enjoyable. But without genuine commitment to other people or to communities of any sort the rewards turn to ashes in the end.
A much more promising candidate for happiness is she in the grip of a single desire, tyrannical but genuine. It may be that the happiest, the most blessed lives, are led by happy warriors wholly and single-mindedly devoted to a cause or to a love.
Maybe so, and maybe it's just because I am myself incapable of such totally dominating commitment that it seems to me a sadly closed and less than fully human life.
The challenge is to combine love and freedom, to join, somehow, deep motivation and real openness to change, genuine membership in community and true autonomy. A worthwhile life, it seems to me, must be sufficiently open and reflective that elements and episodes of wantlessness are inevitable. They may, or they may not, enrich the satisfactions of commitment. I am sure that the most desirable life is not one in which one always knows, much less always gets, what one desires.

Copyright 1998, Harlan B. Miller. All commercial use is prohibited. A talk to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the New River Valley, 13 September, 1998.

On Abortion

Copyright 1993, Harlan B. Miller. All commercial use is prohibited.

A Czech translation by Andrey Fomin is available at http://www.pkwteile.de/wissen/na-potrat
A French translation by Kate Bondareva is available at http://www.autoteiledirekt.de/science/sur-lavortement

Part I - Names

Public debate about abortion generally produces more heat than light because of deep disagreements about the nature of the fetus, confused and confusing arguments from both sides, and a depth of hostility that makes it almost impossible for opponents to reason together.

In this paper I will address some of these confusions, draw some clarifying distinctions, and examine some of the arguments. I will be arguing for some specific conclusions, but I hope that even those who reject my conclusions will find the discussion valuable.

"The first step," Confucius is alleged to have said, "is rectification of names." Let us first seek appropriate names for the opposing parties in the abortion controversy. 'Pro-life' and 'pro-choice' are intentionally persuasive and suggest, wrongly, that the opposing sides disapprove of life or of choice. We can't properly speak of 'anti-abortion' and 'pro-abortion' positions, for no one thinks that abortions are a good thing. Nobody is pro-abortion just as nobody is pro-appendectomy. It is very unhelpful, in this context as in many others, to try to attach any specific meaning to 'liberal' and 'conservative.'
My proposal is a simple one. Let us refer to those who think that abortions should be prohibited as prohibiters, and to those who think that they should be permitted as permitters. There are of course a range of positions on each side.

In these debates one of the names that most require rectification is 'human.' Many on both sides agree that a central question, perhaps the central question, is "Is the fetus human?". But they then disagree on the answer. Some prohibiters take it that the answer is so obviously "Yes" that only astonishing ignorance or perversity could lead one to doubt it. Other prohibiters present biological evidence that the answer is "Yes." But some permitters dismiss the biological evidence as irrelevant. How is this possible?

The problem is that the English word 'human' is ambiguous. Some times in some contexts it is a purely biological term, equivalent to 'member of the species homo sapiens'. Sometimes in some contexts it functions as a moral term, equivalent to 'person'. Occasionally it means 'person who is a member of the species homo sapiens,' and often it is just a confused muddle of these two concepts. I will use 'homo sapiens' for the biological concept, and 'person' for the moral concept.

Both the moral concept and the biological one are complex and perhaps incurably vague. Homo sapiens are a variety of large primates with earlobes, 46 chromosomes, and so on. We can usually tell one when we see it. Persons are self-conscious beings capable not just of having beliefs and desires but of thinking about their beliefs and desires and of recognizing that others have beliefs and desires.
We naturally tend to muddle the ideas of homo sapiens and person together because (almost) all the homo sapiens we encounter are persons or well on the way to becoming persons and (almost) all the persons we encounter are homo sapiens. But it is important to distinguish these ideas.

Not all homo sapiens are persons. A homo sapiens who has sustained massive brain damage may be alive, a living creature of the human species, but not a person. An irreversibly comatose human is a live homo sapiens but a dead person.

Nor, probably, are all persons homo sapiens. Christians believe in a God who is three persons, at most one of them homo sapiens. Perhaps chimpanzees or porpoises should be recognized as persons. Science fiction provides us with a variety of non-homo sapiens persons. On Star Trek alone we have Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, and so on, none of them homo sapiens but all clearly persons. Lieutenant Commander Data is almost certainly a person, but he isn't even organic.
Of course science fiction is fiction, but (a) surely there's somebody out there, even if the galaxy is much less crowded in fact than in imagination, and (b) that we can understand such stories shows that we can conceive of non-homo sapiens persons.

The importance of this distinction to the abortion controversy is this. The question "Is the fetus human?" divides into two. One of them--"Is the fetus a homo sapiens?"--is easy. The other--"Is the fetus a person?"--is much harder. That a homo sapiens fetus is itself homo sapiens is denied by no sensible person. Of course it is, it isn't vegetable or mineral or artificial or a member of some other species. But that a homo sapiens fetus is a person is not obvious at all.

For the developing homo sapiens organism that is in question in the abortion controversy I will follow common practice and use the single term 'fetus' for the human embryo, except when more precision is needed. Strictly speaking the embryo is a fetus only in the later stages of development. As far as I can tell, this term does not beg any important questions, as do 'child' or 'baby', which presume or strongly suggest personhood, or 'piece of tissue', which presumes non-personhood.
Next we will turn from names to things.

Part II - Rape and the Status of the Fetus

Many people troubled by abortion have adopted a 'moderate' prohibiter position that morally forbids abortions except in the case of rape or incest. Such a position is untenable. If one opposes abortion on any reasonable grounds one cannot make exceptions in the cases of rape or incest. These exceptions make sense only if one's general opposition to abortion is itself based on morally contemptible principles.

A prohibiter of abortion opposes it on the basis of one or more of the following eight reasons. (I ignore here simply crazy reasons such as one that would require that the human population be increased as much as possible no matter what the circumstances.)

• (a) That the fetus is a person and so killing it is wrong.
• (b) That the fetus is a potential person and so killing it is wrong.
• (c) That sexual intercourse is evil and pregnancy is its proper punishment.
• (d) That God has forbidden abortion and whatever God forbids is wrong.
• (e) That pregnancy is a natural process and it is always wrong to interrupt a natural process.
• (f) That life is sacred.
• (g) That human life (the life of a homo sapiens) is sacred.
• (h) That permitting abortion would lead horrible results such as widespread infanticide, killing of the old and feeble, genocide, the moral breakdown of society, or some such.

Reasons (a) and (b) are at least fairly plausible and will be discussed in later parts. But neither leaves any room for exceptions in cases of rape. If a fetus is a person or potential person it is so because of the kind of thing it is. That it has its origin in a vile and despicable act in no way affects that status of the fetus. It isn't guilty, the rapist is.

Reason (d) suffers from two serious problems. Many people, including a number of theologians, deny that God's commands determine morality. Even for those willing to accept a Divine Command theory of morality, there is the serious problem that no Scripture (at least no Jewish or Christian Scripture) explicitly forbids abortion. In fact no Scripture mentions abortion. In two passages (Isaiah 49:1 and Jeremiah 1:5) prophets are said to be known, called, or ordained from the womb but these demonstrate God's knowledge of and control over the future, not any special status of the fetus. (Interestingly the Jeremiah verse refers to God's knowledge of an individual BEFORE conception.) In any case there is no record of God decreeing a prohibition of abortion with an exception for those resulting from rape.

Reason (e), once baldly stated, is quite implausible. We dedicate considerable resources to interrupting such natural processes as epidemics, aging, erosion, and so on. We would be happy to interrupt hurricanes if we could. Individual natural processes of cancer or smallpox or AIDS we are delighted to interrupt when we can. Even if we could accept this reason it would not support the rape exception. Perhaps some frequency of rape is 'natural' in any human population. If so, that's another strike against nature.

Reason (f) is no more plausible than (e). The smallpox virus is alive, but it is not evil to kill it. If one really believes that all life is sacred, one must not use disinfectants, resist disease, drive, walk, or breathe. Reason (g) is much more attractive. In the next part it will be examined and rejected. Neither (f) nor (g) would provide a basis for excepting the rape-engendered fetus from a prohibition on abortion.

Reason (h) might be able to provide such a basis, depending on how the reason were spelled out. But no version of reason (h) has been put forth that is at all plausible. Abortions have been performed in the United States and many other countries for quite some time without the slightest evidence of harmful social 'spillover' effects. One might compare the quality of life, and the protection afforded to persons of all sorts, in the Sweden that has freely permitted abortions for decades, to those in Romania under Ceausescu, when abortions were completely banned.

That leaves only reason (c). It is rarely made explicit, but it seems to be fairly widely accepted. "Serves her right" one some times hears people say, or "She wanted her fun, now she's got to face the consequences." If this is the reason why abortions are wrong, the exception for rape makes perfect sense--if she was raped it wasn't her fault. This is, I suggest, the only plausible reason that can ground a prohibition on abortion with an exception for rape.

If that is so, then such an exception is without justification, for reason (c) is vicious and contemptible. It is sexist, vindictive, unsympathetic, and, interestingly, deeply disrespectful of the fetus, which is seen simply as an instrument of punishment. To anyone capable of holding reason (c) thoughtfully I have little to say. The many who have thoughtlessly accepted something like it I can hope to bring to their senses.

(I have said little about cases of incest, largely because I believe that that part of the phrase "except in cases of rape and incest" is even more deeply confused. The reference to incest is motivated, I take it, mainly by a concern for the plight of girls impregnated by their fathers or other adult male family members. Such concern is of course appropriate--these girls need all the help we can give them. But so do little girls impregnated by men not in their families. All these cases, in our system, constitute rape, statutory even if not forcible, and so are already covered in the first part of the phrase. Is there any reason to make exceptions for pregnancies that result from consensual incest, say between siblings over 20? Perhaps lurking in the background is a biologically ignorant belief that the offspring of incestuous unions are always severely defective. Sloppy thinking abounds here.)

So far the more extreme prohibiters are on stronger ground than their 'moderate' allies. If abortion is wrong it is due to the status of the fetus and rape, outrageous as it is, is irrelevant to this question.
Next we will begin to examine the status of the fetus.

Part III - Life and Personhood

"Abortion is wrong," it is often claimed, "because the fetus is a human life." As we have seen, 'human' in this context is ambiguous. It can refer to membership in the biological species homo sapiens and it can also refer to the moral status of person. Using the terminology introduced in Part I, the ambiguity can be removed by replacing 'human life' by 'living homo sapiens' or by 'person'. In this part we'll try both.

Suppose the claim to be "Abortion is wrong because the fetus is a living homo sapiens." In the cases in question the fetus is indeed alive, and is indeed a member of the species homo sapiens and therefore is a living homo sapiens. Does it follow that abortion is wrong? More generally, is human life, the life of a homo sapiens, sacred?

If "human life is sacred" means or implies that it is always wrong to kill a homo sapiens, the human life is not sacred. There are cases of justified killing even of homo sapiens that are persons, for example in self-defense or in a just war. It might be said that a homo sapiens that is not (yet) a person cannot be justly killed because it is innocent, but this is mistaken, for a being that is not a person can be neither innocent nor guilty.

If I (an adult homo sapiens person) am severely injured or suffer massive brain damage due to a stroke I may cease to be a person although remaining a living homo sapiens. If the damage is irreversible the person has died. In these gruesome circumstances there is less point in keeping my body alive than there is in protecting a field mouse. The mouse, though not a person, is conscious and capable of pleasure and pain, of suffering and enjoyment.

A homo sapiens less severely impaired than the last example may fail to be a person and yet have a mental life of some richness, roughly equivalent, perhaps, to that of one of the higher nonhuman mammals. We will rightly presume personhood whenever possible, with a broad allowance for our ignorance. But where the being just cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a person there is no justification for assigning a 'sacred' status to that being's life and withholding it from the lives of other animals of the same intellectual level. The life of a homo sapiens is not automatically sacred.

It is much more plausible to hold that the life of a person is sacred. Is a fetus, a homo sapiens fetus, a person? At no stages of its intrauterine development, and certainly not in the first two trimesters when almost all abortions are performed does the fetus even come very close to meeting the usual criteria for personhood. It may be, in the later stages, sentient (aware of and responsive to stimuli) but it is not self-conscious, and certainly not reflectively self-conscious. The fetus is not capable of considering its own desires (if it can be said to have any), of having beliefs, or of recognizing that others have desires and beliefs (or of recognizing others at all).

In fact the homo sapiens fetus, even very late in pregnancy, is much further from meeting the requirements of personhood than an adult dog or cow. If dogs aren't persons, neither are homo sapiens fetuses.
Here it will be objected that a homo sapiens fetus, unlike a dog, has an immortal soul and therefore is (or should be treated as) a person. I admit that I am puzzled by this objection, for several reasons. (a) I am not at all sure I understand what a separable immortal soul would be like. (b) I don't know how to tell what does and what doesn't have a soul. (c) If homo sapiens have immortal souls and dogs don't, it would appear to follow that if forced to choose between saving a dog and a homo sapiens from a fire, one should always choose the dog, since this is the only life the dog has, but the homo sapiens, or the soul somehow associated with the homo sapiens, is immortal.

In any event, if, as some versions of some religions claim, there is a non-physical spirit connected in some way with a physical living being, it is not at all obvious what practical consequences follow. Nothing we do, it would appear, could destroy the spirit. The presence of this spirit does not change the nature of the associated physical being.

The fetus as physical being of course undergoes enormous changes in the course of intrauterine development. Even though it never, I have argued, attains a status even approximating personhood, it develops a nervous system and becomes a sentient animal. Thus the earlier the abortion the less significant is the ending of the life of the fetus. Morally as well as medically the earlier the abortion the better.

In fact very very few abortions (less than 0.01%) are carried out in the third trimester, when they would be most questionable. One reason to oppose parental consent laws is the evidence that they lead to an increase in later abortions.

If the moral status of the fetus develops gradually along with its neural (and therefore mental) complexity one might fear that a slippery slope prevents us from accepting abortion without also legitimating infanticide. There is no magic line in nature, no sharp break in development between an early fetus (clearly not a person) and a two year old child (clearly a person). Does it not follow that if we allow abortion we must therefore also permit the killing of any homo sapiens too young to file for a court injunction?

No, it does not follow. There is a continuous series of heights of humans, with no sharp discontinuity between the short and the tall. But some people are tall, and some are short. We do not need to draw a precise boundary. When we do require such a boundary the exact place for it is finally arbitrary within some range. Twelve is almost certainly too young to permit people to vote, and thirty is surely unreasonably old. We have adopted eighteen as the precise age of political majority, but it could have been nineteen, or seventeen and a half.

In the continuum of biological development we have a point of dramatic social significance--birth. Five minutes after birth the neonate's nervous system is as it was an hour earlier, but it has entered into a circle of social interaction, and is beginning to live in a new way. In one sense any point is arbitrary, but this one has a lot to be said for it.

Of course all this talk, in the last few paragraphs, of a continuum of development is just beside the point if abortion is wrong because the fetus is a potential person. The fetus is a potential person from conception. In the next part we must see what follows from that.

Part IV - The Fetus as a Potential Person

Fetuses are potential persons. That is, homo sapiens fetuses are potential persons. That is, normal homo sapiens fetuses are potential persons. What follows from that?

That the fetus is a potential person does not imply that it is a person, or that it should be treated as a person. In general, a potential X is not an actual X. A child is a potential adult, but it certainly does not follow that three year olds should have either the privileges or the responsibilities of adults. A midshipman is a potential admiral, but has no grounds to demand the pay, power, or perquisites of an admiral.

In fact human ova and spermatozoa are potential persons, or rather pairs consisting of one ovum and one spermatozoon. There are quadrillions (at least) of these ovum/spermatozoon pairs, the overwhelming majority of which will never come together and thus never proceed from potentiality toward actuality. In fact, of course, progress toward actualizing the potential of any one of these pairs, i.e. the union of the pair's members, prevents the actualization of astronomical numbers of other pairs.

In other words, there are mind-bogglingly many potential persons that will never come to be. Further, the conception of any homo sapiens automatically prevents the coming-into-being of enormous numbers of potential persons. But no one, or at least no one of whom I've even heard, is in the least upset about either of these facts.

Conception, the actual union of an ovum/spermatozoon pair, is taken to make an enormous difference in moral standing. Before this event we have a 'mere possibility' of no intrinsic value. After it we have something much more important, a potential per son. Does this make sense?

Biologically there are two significant differences between the zygote immediately after conception and the un-united pair of gametes before. First, the odds of the potential person actually developing are much higher after conception (although still less than even). Second, after conception the complete genetic coding for the homo sapiens is present in a single organism.

That the odds for successful development are higher cannot be a good reason for assigning higher moral status. The odds for successful development into full personhood are much higher for a newborn infant in Roanoke than for one in Rwanda. Surely it does not follow that the Rwandan baby is morally less important.

Prohibiters are much more likely to stress the second difference between the zygote and the separated pair of gametes. Once conception has occurred a specific individual, with a unique genetic code, has come into being. Let us agree that this is so, and set aside the objection that each of the separated pairs also 'has' a unique genetic code. The possession of a unique genetic code cannot be the basis for elevated moral status. Every fertilized fish or frog egg, every weed seedling, has a unique genetic code. (Actually not every individual organism has a unique genetic code. Identical twins have the same code. Does anyone believe that being an identical twin lowers one's moral standing?)
Still the prohibiter is correct that, after conception, there is a specific individual organism, and that organism is a potential person.

If my parents had never met, or if their parents had never met, I would never have come into existence. If, after the conception that in fact resulted in my birth, the pregnancy had been terminated, either by spontaneous or by induced abortion, I would never have come into existence. There is a difference between these two cases, both imaginary. In the second, but not in the first, an organism, a homo sapiens fetus, comes into being with a particular genetic code (mine, in fact), and later this fetus dies.

But in neither of these cases am I harmed, in neither have I any grounds for complaint. For in neither do I ever exist. In the second a fetus exists with the potential to become me. But neither in this imaginary case nor in the real world was this fetus me. I'm a person. At a much earlier stage this organism, now a person, wasn't a person. Potential persons aren't persons. To the extent that they are sentient it is wrong to cause them to suffer, but unlike persons they have no right to life.

When abortion is contemplated there is at least one person with a full set of rights who is intimately involved. But it's not the fetus, it's the woman.

Part V - The Fetus and the Woman

Genetically human mothers and fathers contribute equally to the production of offspring. That, the female and the male contribute equal quantities of genetic information. But once conception is past the male lacks even the opportunity to contribute equally to the development of the fetus and the child it becomes until some time after birth.

Pregnancy and birth are physically disruptive, and often dangerous, and they and motherhood transform the structure of one's life. No normal biological process of the human male compares to pregnancy in physical, social, and psychological effect. Men can and commonly do become fathers without knowing it. Theoretically a woman could become a mother without knowing it. Suppose an unscrupulous surgical team to remove ova from a woman without her knowledge while she was undergoing unrelated abdominal surgery. Further suppose one or more of these stolen ova to be fertilized in vitro and implanted in the uterus of another woman. The victimized woman would be the mother of any resulting child, but only genetically. This is a much weaker relationship than 'real' biological motherhood, but it is equivalent to biological fatherhood.

Modern medicine has made pregnancy and birth much less dangerous for the mother than was the case in the past. (But they are they are still significantly more dangerous for the mother than early abortion, given equal levels of medical care.) Pregnancy and birth cause substantial anatomical changes, some of them typically permanent. All pregnancies are sometimes unpleasant, and some are very unpleasant for much of their duration.

Childbirth is physically by far the most demanding normal event in human life. I cannot and could not speak from experience but those who can, although they disagree on the relative priority of pain, exertion, and fulfillment in the process as a whole, agree that it's not the sort of thing anyone would do just for the fun of it.

Along with the physical changes come social and psychological ones. A pregnant woman is seen, and sees herself, differently. The sequence of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood transforms a relatively independent person into one profoundly responsible for another. A mother's life, in almost every society, is not hers to live as she pleases. Many things limit one's ability to plan one's life and to carry out one's plans, but few more stringently than motherhood.

The physical, social, and psychological transformations of a woman's life go along, as pregnancy progresses, with a particular emotional transformation. The organism developing within her body normally, and progressively, draws her love and concern. I have argued above that the fetus is not, in itself, person. But a pregnant woman typically regards the fetus within her with love and concern of a high order. In part this is directed to the child the fetus will become, and this, in happy circumstances, the father can share. But in part it is a response to, and an interaction with, the being growing within her. Even in the closest and warmest relationship the father inevitably stands at a much greater emotional distance from the fetus.

One can see, on reflection, why it would be so. Nature (or evolution, or God) wisely begins, during the arduous physical (and emotional) labors of biological homo sapiens reproduction, to prepare for the arduous emotional (and physical) labors of the development of a person. Psychological parenting, the nurturing of persons, is quite distinct from biological parenting. In adoption the two processes are carried out by different people. In principle and sometimes in practice fathers may carry more of the burden than mothers (sometimes all of the burden).

But in all the societies with which we are familiar the dominant nurturer of the young child is its mother. Our mammalian nature insures that mothers are important, and most of our practices keep everyone else at a greater distance. Therefore it is natural that birth mothers are prepared, well in advance, to love and treasure that which will typically require their devotion for its survival.
We take the concern, the love, of a mother for her child for granted to such an extent that we are deeply shocked when it is absent. The reports of crack-addicted mothers abandoning their children shake us. That an alcoholic pregnant woman cannot refrain from drinking testifies to the strength of her addiction. Yet some prohibiters ignore the depth and strength of these natural attachments. They think it reasonable to ask a woman to undergo pregnancy, endure parturition, then give up the infant for adoption, as if the whole affair had been but a minor detour in the journey of her life.
Pregnancy is no small matter for one's health, one's life, or one's heart.

No one else has the right to decide for a woman whether or not she becomes pregnant or continues to be pregnant. It is hard to think of any decision a man could make that would have a parallel importance in his life. It would be morally and legally outrageous to suggest that I be assigned to a monastery against my will, or kept there over my objections. Compulsory motherhood would be at least as objectionable as compulsory monasticism.

It is nonsense to talk about 'balancing' the interests of the woman and the fetus. The woman is a person with a right to live her life. The fetus is at best a potential person, deriving such standing as it has from the emotional investment of the very woman in question. No one, absolutely no one, can be a better authority than she on the present importance of this prospective being.

I am not arguing that all abortions are right, but I am arguing that all women have the right to abortion on demand. Some abortions are doubtless wrong. (Abortions for sex selection, to avoid postponing vacations, because one can't be bothered with contraception, etc.-- but I have seen no evidence that any of these is at all common.) It is also true that some exercises of free speech are wrong. I may exercise my right to speak in order to betray confidences, or to humiliate others out of sheer malice. Still the right to free speech is essential to a free people. Similarly the right to abortion on demand is essential to insure to women that most basic of freedoms, the freedom to control the form and the content of one's own life.

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[Note: I have read works of scores of people on the abortion issue, and profited from those of a dozen or so. Most recently I have learned from Richard Flathman and Katha Pollitt.]

Gesargenplotzian Liturgical Calendar

Church of the Great Gesargenplotz

Provisional Liturgical Calendar

(adopted by the Council of Pembroke, 2 March AI 17)

3 January

Liberation Day (on which the GG ate the EE)

2 February

Groundhog Day (previously established)

22 February

Rabbit Day (when the rabbits play)

mid-March

Eatser, or Revelation Night, night of the full moon nearest March 14 (commemorating the revelation of the GG to the Chosen One) [if this night is clear in a given area, that area is said to be 'clear' for liturgical purposes for the entire year, otherwise the area is 'cloudy'. (the significance of this is unknown)]

19 April

Kite Day (on which Gesargenplotzians are urged to fly kites and to consider that life, like a kite, requires special conditions to operate at all, never lasts forever, but is sometimes worth the trouble anyway.)

5 May

Frolic Day (self-explanatory)

8 June

Princess of the Gerbils Day (on which to contemplate our sentience, which we owe to the EE, and which we have in common with other animals)

15 July

Poppin' Fresh Day

24 August

Dog Day (heretofore August had several dog days, but Gesargenplotzianism has reduced it to one)

29 September

Some Day (traditional time for reunion of Gesargenplotzian friends, who often part with the ritual expression "see you Some Day") (certain schismatics hold that this is properly Thumb Day)

13 October

Fledermaus Tag (scheduled to be redesignated Your Day in AI 33 (1995 in the common reckoning) (Your Day will come)

late November

Turkey Day, last Thursday in November (No Thanks, please)

25 December

Gifts-From-Us Day (who else would the gifts be from?) (often contracted to 'Gifsmus')

Authenticated, 28 February AI 27 Harlan B. Miller Archbullshop and CO

Gesargenplotzian Gospel

THE GESARGENPLOTZIAN GOSPEL

I. 1. In the beginning was the Great Gesargenplotz. And the Gesargenplotz was, and it knew that it was. 2.And it came to pass, for some reason or other, that the Great Gesargenplotz created Him. 3. And the Great Gesargenplotz went away, but He remained. 4. And He created the heavens and the earth, or at least this Earth and the nearby heavens. 5. He so arranged it that on this earth there arose creatures capable of belief in things beyond their senses -- human creatures. 

II. 1. To these human creatures He revealed Himself in many ways. To some He called Himself Allah, to others He gave His name as Zeus. To one people He said His name was Baal, to another He presented Himself as Yahweh. Some knew Him as Odin, others as Brahman. In many ways He revealed Himself. 2. To almost all of the humans to whom He revealed Himself he taught that only that revelation was the true revelation. Many were taught by Him that any way other than their own way was wrong, and that those who believed must fight all other ways. 3. Many duties He laid upon the humans. He made it a duty to stamp out other beliefs, to convert or kill those who believe in other ways. 4. Many duties He laid upon the humans. He taught that there were many things that they must do, and many things that they must not do. 5. Many of the things that He taught must be done were things that brought pain and unhappiness to the humans. Many of the things that He taught must not be done were things which would have brought pleasure to the humans. 6. Then He looked upon the Earth and saw it filled with humans who because of His deception hated one another and were much less happy than they might have been. And it pleased Him, because His heart was hard. 

III. 1. What pleased Him most was that He had revealed to many of these creatures an entirely false belief, a belief that if they behaved according to the rules He had given they would survive death and live on in some way. 2. Not all of the humans were told this story, for He wanted this to be one of the things about which the humans contended. And He loved contention greatly, because His heart was hard. 3. Those humans who believed His story of life after death thus came to believe that they, though animals, were not animals. Many lived their lives and died in this vain belief. Many made themselves and others miserable because of this belief. And this pleased Him greatly, for His heart was hard. 

IV. 1. Lo, in 1962 the Great Gesargenplotz came back, and it saw what He had done. And the Great Gesargenplotz was wroth, and it spoke unto Him saying "Why have you done this? Why have you created these creatures just to torment them?" 2. And He answered, saying "I have done so because it amuses me, Great Gesargenplotz. Of what matter is their pain and disappointment? They are not gods as you and I, they exist only for my amusement." 3. The Great Gesargenplotz, hearing His answer, knew that His heart was hard. The Great Gesargenplotz repented it that it had made Him. 4. The Great Gesargenplotz ate Him and He was no more. 

V. 1. The Great Gesargenplotz knew that the evil He had done did not perish with Him, that the evil He had done was caused not so much by His revelations as by what the humans believed. 2. As long as the humans continued to believe the false stories He had told them, their torments would continue. 3. So the Great Gesargenplotz decided that it would reveal itself to the humans. 4. It came to pass that the Great Gesargenplotz turned its attention upon a part of the Pacific Ocean, and there were few humans there. 5. There was a ship upon the Ocean, and there were many men upon the ship. It was night and but few of those men were awake. 6. And it came to pass that the Great Gesargenplotz revealed itself to one of those who were awake. In this way was the Chosen One chosen. And Harlan was the Chosen One. 

VI. 1. The Great Gesargenplotz revealed itself to the Chosen One and told him these things here written. 2. The Chosen One was filled with awe and fear, for never before had anything been revealed unto him. 3. After a moment the Chosen One spoke to the Great Gesargenplotz, saying "How then, O Lord, shall we worship you?" 4. And the Great Gesargenplotz answered the Chosen One, saying "That stupid question shows that you have missed the whole point! You are to worship no god. You are on your own." 5. And when it had said these things, the Great Gesargenplotz went away. AMEN.

Copyright 1988, Harlan B. Miller. Commercial use prohibited. This paper has appeared in Etica & animali I/2 (1988) in Italian translation, and in Between the Species 10/1 (1994) in English.
Translations into the following languages are available:

• Bulgarian by Albert Ward
• German by Valeria Aleksandrova
• Polish by Nick Stasov
• Russian by Oleg Meister
• Ukrainian by Jim and Andrew

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Science, Ethics, and Moral Status

This paper has two purposes, first to discuss the nature of ethics (or moral philosophy; I take these terms to be equivalent) and second to examine the notion of moral status in general and in particular the moral status of nonhuman animals (Note 1).

The practical importance of the second purpose will be apparent to readers of this journal. But the first purpose must come first, I believe, in order to counter a number of fundamental but widespread misconceptions of ethics. It is widely believed that ethics is relative to particular cultures in a way that science is not, or that ethics is not, as science is, objective, or that ethics is somehow intrinsically emotional. These beliefs lead to the conclusion that rational and productive work on ethical questions is just not possible. If rational justification of ethical positions is taken to be impossible, one need not concern oneself with the justification of one's treatment of animals. Those who object to accepted, customary, uses of animals are just being "emotional."

I

What is ethics? Ethics is a field of study (or the content of that field) concerned with what ought to be or with what we ought to do. We may distinguish between an ethics of action, addressed to the question "What should we do?" or "What ought to be done?" and an ethics of virtue in which the central question is "What ought we be?" or "How shall we live?" In many contexts, and on many theories, these are simply variant approaches to the same goal. We should be the sorts of people who freely choose to act in the way we ought to act. We ought to do those things we would naturally choose if we were the right sort of people. Until the last few years, much of modern moral philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, has emphasized the ethics of action much more than the ethics of virtue. In this paper the distinction will be of little importance (Note 2).

Ethics, then, is concerned with what ought to be (what we ought to do, what we ought to be, the right and the wrong). Science, taken very generally, is concerned with what is (what the world is like, the true and the false). There is more to science than a collection of facts. Even if it were possible for us to know and to express all the truths there are, a complete listing of them would not constitute an adequate science. At a minimum, there is an additional need to subsume particular truths under general laws. And further, a proposed law of science may cover all the relevant phenomena yet still be unsatisfactory if it lacks explanatory force. It is important to stress this. The concerns of science are not limited to covering facts; the facts are also to be explained. Inattention to this essential part of the mission of science contributes to the mistaken belief that moral philosophy (and philosophy in general) is radically unlike science.

Science and philosophy are both attempts to make sense of our world, to explain things. In the Greek origins of Western philosophy and science the two are sometimes inextricably intermixed and sometimes just indistinguishable. Although today it is quite easy to distinguish some sorts of scientific activity from some sorts of philosophical activity, it is still true that many, perhaps most, of the most interesting scientific questions either just are philosophical questions or border on and shade into philosophical questions.

In principle, the bedrock of science is observation. Scientific theory must account for the observations, save the phenomena. Observations are not simply glances, glimpses, or impressions. Not everything someone claims to have seen, observed, or just come to believe counts as an observation. Putative observations have to measure up to certain standards, which may be more or less well-defined, depending on the field. We are quite willing to throw out supposed observations as simply mistaken, biased, fraudulent, hallucinatory, or otherwise spurious.
A theory constructed to account for a set of observations may end up presenting an explanatory framework that includes most of the observations, but leaves some of them out. What happens in these situations? Suppose our theory covers 95% of the observations, but cannot account for the remaining 5%. We of course simply reject the deviant 5% as due to "experimental error" of some unknown sort. In other words, even though observations are basic, we are quite willing to sacrifice observations to theoretical simplicity and/or explanatory power.

The theoretical structure of science that I have just sketched in a manner both crude and idealized is exactly parallel, I shall argue, to the theoretical structure of ethics.

Corresponding to scientific observations are our "intuitions" of right and wrong, good and bad. Just as observations are not glances or momentary impression, so intuitions are not just transitory emotions or responses. Intuitions are our reflective evaluations, our approvals and disapprovals "in a cool hour" (to use Hume's phrase). If one's upbringing has been deficient in a certain way, one may at first react to the sight of a racially mixed couple with unreflective disapproval. However, one may well, upon very brief reflection, reject one's own reaction and replace it by the intuition that there is nothing amiss. Why would one reject one's initial reaction? Because one is unable to justify it on the basis of moral theories or principles that one accepts as otherwise satisfactory. Moral theories are satisfactory if and to the extent that they account for most, or the most central of, our intuitions, if they possess explanatory power, and so on. At a high level of generality the criteria for the adequacy of moral theories are the same as those for the adequacy of scientific theories.

My intuitions can, over time, change as a result of my acceptance of a moral theory or some elements of a moral theory and as a result of other factors. What I perceive (intuit) as right and wrong, good and bad, is obviously influenced by my upbringing, my antecedent beliefs both moral and factual, by my culture, and by the views of friends and family. That is, my moral intuitions are significantly affected by a wide range of prior commitments and inclinations. And something very similar is true of scientific observations. It is hardly news, at this date, to be told that scientific observations are "theory-laden" and subject to bias from many sources. We see what we are looking for, we categorize our experience and perceive our environment within the limits of the conceptual frameworks we bring with us to the laboratory, to the classroom, to the market. We see what we look for, and we can see only what we are ready for. This point is at least as old as Kant and has been a commonplace in the philosophy of science since the 1950s. When a physicist looks at a cloud chamber, or a neuroscientist at a brain tissue section, they see more than an ignorant observer such as myself. I may see a beautiful pattern, perhaps, but no more, while the physicist sees alpha particles and the neuroscientist sees old and new cortex. Those things are really there, and my eyesight is quite adequate, but I can't see them because I don't possess the relevant theory. (Because the patterns have meaning for the scientists it may be more difficult for them to appreciate the sort of beauty I may see in the images.) Our commitments, our inclinations, our theories influence our scientific observations and our moral intuitions alike.

It may not be amiss at this point, since I have just mentioned the influence on one's ethical intuitions of one's cultural background, to turn to the claim that different cultures have different ethics. It is of course true that different cultures may well instill in their members different beliefs about right and wrong. But it certainly does not follow that all these beliefs are equally correct. Different cultures may instill in their members different scientific beliefs. If Cora Du Bois is correct, the Alorese in the late 1930s believed that numerous acts of intercourse were necessary for the formation of a human fetus and, thus, that a single act of intercourse could not suffice for the birth of a child (Note 3). The Alorese were just mistaken. The cultural transmission of a belief is no evidence for its correctness. Some at least of my ancestors believed that human slavery (of "inferior races") was morally acceptable, and this belief was culturally transmitted. They were wrong. A society can embody and transmit false ethical beliefs just as it can embody and transmit false scientific beliefs. My ancestors' slavery-justifying beliefs were no more true than were the Alorese reproductive beliefs.
People sometimes use a curious locution of the form "true for X," where X is some person or group, and would say that the belief that slavery is justified was true for my great-grandfather. But to say that some belief of mine is true for me is either just to say that I believe it or is evidence of some deep muddle about the relation between truth and belief. To suggest that slavery was morally justified for my ancestors, because they believed it was, is exactly as sensible as suggesting that Alorese reproductive physiology was different from that of contemporary Italians, because Alorese and Italian beliefs differed. Cultures can just be mistaken, as can individuals. And mistakes, by cultures or individuals, need not be criminal and may in some cases be almost inescapable.
(That two cultures have conflicting moral rules need not mean that either is incorrect. There are some matters about which it is important to have a rule, but exactly which rule is chosen is morally indifferent. Such cases are common in the law. It is essential to specify which side of the road traffic will keep to, but either side will do.)

There is scientific progress, and there is moral progress. The human race is, in general, more free of unjustified discrimination than it was 50 years ago. Freedom of speech is more widely recognized, at least on paper. The rights of individuals to deviate from the norm, to be left alone, and to have their special needs met, are more widely granted. We are, as a species, less racist and less sexist than we used to be. Slavery is tolerated almost nowhere. This is moral progress. Moral progress is not as striking and perhaps not as widespread as scientific and technological progress, but it has been made.
It has been claimed that scientific disputes are decidable in ways that ethical disputes are not. Of course some low level scientific questions can be answered in satisfyingly clearcut ways. The question of whether a particular Tursiops brain weighs 1600 or 1700 grams may be quite easy to answer. The question of the mean brain weight for adults of that species can also be answered, if not so easily. But consider the following pair of questions. Is the weight of porpoise brains of any significance for our judgments of porpoise intelligence? Is porpoise intelligence of any significance for our judgments of the moral status of porpoises? It is not at all apparent how we should even begin to search for answers to these questions. But it is not obvious that an answer to the moral member of this pair need be any more elusive than an answer to the scientific member.

Many of the most interesting and important questions cannot be resolved by measurement. Take the opposition between evolutionary theory and so-called creationism. I am convinced of the reality of evolution, but I can point to no particular facts, and certainly to no measurements, that show creationism to be false. Creationism is a very poor theory despite the fact that it, in at least a minimal sense, accounts for all our observations and measurements. Creationism fails to cohere with the rest of our scientific picture of the world, and it fails to provide genuine, non-question-begging explanations. To say that animals and plants are the way they are because God has made them that way has no explanatory power, for no matter how plants and animals were, such an "explanation" would account for it. An explanation that can be guaranteed to explain any conceivable phenomenon really explains nothing.

When faced with two competing theories, one argues that one is better than the other because it accounts for antecedent intuitions and observations of various sorts, because it coheres with other theories, because it is powerful in generating explanations, and so on. This is the way scientists argue every day. Such arguments are analogous to, and sometimes are, philosophical arguments. Philosophers argue for their theories in just these ways, that the theories account for our experience and for our antecedent beliefs, that they provide satisfying explanations of the phenomena. Both scientific and philosophical theories sometimes have unintuitive implications. But if a theory is otherwise sufficiently strong, it may force one to reject or revise the "intuitions," be they moral or scientific, with which it conflicts.

Progress in both science and ethics is a matter of developing theories of increasing inclusiveness and coherence, theories that make sense of our intuitions and discipline them. We are an inquisitive species, and we want general explanatory theories both of what the world is like and of what is right and wrong. We want a general account of goodness just as we want a general account of color; that's the kind of animal we are.

Suppose someone were to object to my assimilation of ethics to science by insisting on a fundamental difference in subject matter. Such an objector claims that the increasing coherence and inclusiveness of scientific theories is an indication of increasing adequacy because there really are scientific facts. There is a world out there that we encounter at least occasionally and partially, and our increasing success in these encounters indicates that our picture of the world is improving. But, says this objector, the increasing coherence and inclusiveness (if such there is) of ethical theory is no guarantee that such theory is any more than well-constructed myth, for there is no external moral world against which the theory is tested.

This objection may be answered in two ways. First, one may say that our moral intuitions give us the same evidence of an independent moral reality that our observations give us of scientific reality. Or, second (and these replies are not incompatible), it may be pointed out that on some theories of science (e.g. those of Peirce and his successors) scientific truth is that to which, in the ideal we hope to approach, all researchers agree. Ethical truth can be, and has been, defined in the same way. What is right is what all fully informed, disinterested, rational observers agree to be right.

But our objector may persist. "No," he or she may say, "there really is an objective physical world, as may be seen from the fact that people with false scientific beliefs fail to deal satisfactorily with their environments, and those with generally correct scientific beliefs minimize aversive experiences. In contrast, people with opposed ethical views get along equally well, from which it may be inferred that there is no realm of objective moral facts." This is a plausible objection, but it may be rebutted from two different directions. First, better ethical views may well have "survival value," especially if the unit considered is a culture which espouses and inculcates the views. Contrary both to some folk wisdom and some pop sociobiology, nice guys and nice societies don't always finish last. Since they are unlikely to destroy themselves, they may well finish first. Second, it is clear that one may accept false scientific theories and still fare quite well. Millions of people believe fervently in contemporary astrology, surely one of the most ludicrous theories imaginable, without discernible decrease in life expectancy. Devoutly believing in Lysenkoist biology had great survival value in the Soviet Union for several decades. These are striking cases but not exceptions. Most humans can, and many do, live reasonably happy and successful lives while believing vast numbers of scientific and metaphysical (and ethical) falsehoods. Curiosity, as I noted earlier, is characteristic of our species, and some of us have emphasized and formalized and disciplined this characteristic by becoming scholars. It is probably salutary, if depressing, to remind ourselves that hundreds of millions (billions) of our conspecifics manage to build and repair automobiles, win friends and gain power, avoid walking into walls, and have and raise children without knowing or caring about the questions, and standards for answers, that we hold dear. One can tolerate, in other words, a large amount of bad theory, both in ethics and in science, without significant impact on one's chances of survival. In order to survive we need only do the right thing most of the time. We need not do it for the right reason, or understand why it is the right thing. Correct (morally _or_ scientifically) action may well generally have survival value, but correct explanation probably does not.

I have not been arguing that ethics is exactly like the sciences. That would be impossible, since the sciences are surely not exactly like one another. My claim is that ethics is, like physics and history and psychology and economics, an organized and rational inquiry into an aspect of the world we experience. It shares with other inquiries a structure in which theories are constructed to account for data and data is screened and sorted in the light of theory. There is considerable deep disagreement in ethical theory at present, and there are issues about which contending parties care deeply. The same can be said of other fields, past and present. There is no fundamental gap between science and ethics.
Let that be enough talk about moral philosophy for now. It is time to do some.

II

Any moral theory must include or presuppose some theory of moral status. An entity may be a moral agent or a moral patient or both or neither. A moral agent is something capable of action, the acts of which may properly be evaluated as right or wrong. My actions may correctly be so evaluated, but not those of a very young child. The very young, the insane, the severely retarded, and the comatose are not moral agents. Normal human adults are and so, perhaps, are adult animals of some other species, and perhaps corporations and nations.

A moral patient, on the other hand, is an entity the treatment of which may properly be evaluated as right or wrong. A human infant is not a moral agent but is a moral patient, for it does matter how an infant is treated. It is wrong to cause unnecessary pain to an infant, and wrong intrinsically. It may also be wrong to destroy my favorite pencil, but only derivatively, only because it makes me unhappy. The pencil is not a moral patient. Humans are, in general, moral patients and so are many other sorts of animals. It is wrong, intrinsically wrong, to cause gratuitous pain to a dog or a mouse or a porpoise or a seagull.

Since we adult humans are typically both moral agents and moral patients, it is easy to overlook the distinction between agency and patiency in the moral realm. This can lead to serious confusion. I once heard a paper entitled "Ethics is to Govern Human Beings Only." (Note 4) This sentence is importantly ambiguous, for it may be taken to mean that only human beings can be moral agents (only they are morally responsible, only they can be governed by moral rules) or that only human beings can be moral patients (only what is done to humans is of moral concern). Both of these interpretations, I believe, yield false sentences, but the first is at least faintly plausible while the second is not. It is easy, if one is not clear on the agent/patient distinction, to transfer to the second reading some of the plausibility of the first.

That other animals as well as humans are moral patients does not entail that they are entitled to equal moral concern. Not all moral patients are equal. This is widely but usually obscurely recognized. As a rational reconstruction of what I take to be common features of the views of most people today, I suggest the following "theory" of moral patients. Moral patients fall into three groups. Group A consists of persons in the moral sense of the word. It is generally taken that all and only humans are persons, but this is surely false. Persons are both moral agents and moral patients. They are possible contractors. Other moral agents, if there are any, such as corporations or states, are either denied to be moral patients at all or are placed in Group C.

Group B consists of all other sentient beings. These entities can suffer, and suffering matters. They are, however, incapable of rational actions and, thus, cannot be moral agents. All sentient nonhuman animals are placed in this category.

Group C consists of a heterogeneous collection the members of which have in common that they are not sentient and that they are thought by some persons (at least a few sane persons) to have intrinsic moral importance. Included here are species, cultures, states, laws, universities, ecosystems, and some specific physical objects such as particular old redwood trees, the Taj Mahal, and Michelangelo's Pieta. Jeremy Bentham and many others would deny any intrinsic moral value to any of these, granting them at most derivative value consequent on their affecting or being valued by members of Groups A and B. Other thinkers hold some or all of these to be genuine moral patients in their own right. There are a number of very basic, important, and difficult issues in moral theory involved in the countenancing of any moral patients in Group C. Fortunately, they need not be dealt with here, for our concerns are with Groups A and B and the relation between them.

Within Group A all moral patients are entitled to equal consideration. Each (human) person is taken to be of equal intrinsic value. Of course, if Jones is, and Smith is not, my parent, child, spouse, fellow soldier, fellow citizen, or one to whom I have made a promise, then my obligations to Jones may be stronger than my obligations to Smith. But in themselves, as persons, this view ranks Jones and Smith as moral peers.

Within Group B, in contrast, it is held that the moral status of creatures varies widely. Any Group B moral patient is, on this view, of vastly less significance than any Group A moral patient (person). But within Group B, one moral patient (a cat, say) may be much more important morally than than another (a crab, perhaps). More serious justification is needed for harming or discomfiting the "higher" animals than for harming the "lower," One general principle, accepted at least verbally by almost everyone who has considered it, is that pain should not be inflicted needlessly on any sentient being. A second principle is that the higher (more intelligent, more aware) the being, the more urgent must be the need in order to justify the infliction of harm or pain (Note 5).

To this more or less "official" view most of us subscribe. But our actions belie our words. We tolerate abominations such as bull fighting, fox hunting, leghold trapping, and fur ranching, in all of which "higher" animals are tortured for entertainment or status-display. For the production of expensive pate de fois gras and inexpensive chicken eggs we permit torture and incredible confinement. We are, further, inconsistent. Some of us protest with shock and dismay the sale of horses for meat but do not hesitate to eat a hamburger. Some of us bemoan the sale of pound animals for research and buy cosmetics needlessly tested in the eyes of rabbits. The use of very intelligent animals such as rats and primates for trivial and repetitive research is protested only by a very few.

Thus, even within the rational reconstruction of current moral sense that I have just sketched out there is a great deal of room for improvement in human treatment of nonhumans. But in fact the situation is much worse. For the assumption of a sharp break between groups A and B is spurious. It was clear to Aristotle and to many others before and since that humans are, after all, animals. Since the victory of Darwin, the fact that homo sapiens is one species among others has been part of the scientific outlook. It cannot plausibly be maintained, in the face of the science of the late 20th century, that there is a yawning gap between humans and the "merely sentient" rest of the animal kingdom (Note 6).

Nor is it possible to arrange animals on a single scala natura with humans clearly and safely at the top. Animals, humans included, have many sorts of characteristics and capabilities. To map these would require n distinct continua or an n-dimensional continuum, with n some number over 20. It will not do simply to consider perception, for that resolves itself into the traditional five senses, plus echolocation, temperature sense, and several others, and then each category splits into three factors: range, sensitivity, and discrimination. What about locomotion? In what media? Speed or endurance? It seems clearly wrong to try to reduce intelligence to one measure, for we well know that we have not yet satisfactorily sorted out the varieties of human abilities covered by the term, and we have little reason to believe that the human varieties are the only ones there are. Similar remarks can be made about social behavior, communicative ability, manipulative skill, and tolerance of environmental change. There are other continua yet, such as longevity and fecundity. But we need not, fortunately, even attempt to discover how many such characteristics there are, for it is clear that not all differences between animals are morally significant. Consider the mouse and the bat.
The mouse and the bat are in many ways alike and in many ways different. If we plot their characteristics on our various dimensions or continua, we will find that on some they occupy nearly or exactly the same spot, and on some they are far apart. Bats echolocate, but mice (like us) score a zero on that. Bats fly, mice don't. Despite the fact that bats and mice are very different in these ways, they have (at least approximately) the same moral status. The different sensory and locomotor abilities of bats and mice are very important in making them the sorts of animals they are, making bats bats and mice mice. But in themselves these characteristics are of no moral importance. They may have some derivative moral significance. If, for instance, it is wrong to prevent a creature from moving in its natural way, then it is wrong to prevent bats from flying. But it is not wrong to prevent mice from flying. Still, the sensory and locomotor differences are not morally important per se.
In those characteristics that are morally significant, here sentience, intelligence, and self-awareness, bats and mice are, to the best of our knowledge, close together. So bats and mice have the same moral status and are due the same sort of consideration from humans. Of this pair of animals, the mouse is much more like us than the bat, but we are not morally obliged to care more about the mouse than the bat. One cannot just identify "morally significant characteristics" and "characteristics similar to those of humans."

Now suppose extraterrestrials to arrive from some distant star system. Suppose that they are intelligent, they are distinct individuals, and that they find some means of communicating with us. Beyond that, suppose that they are as different from us as you can imagine. They are predominantly gaseous, their chemistry is not based on carbon, their sensory apparatus is radically unlike ours and mostly operates on parts of the electromagnetic spectrum closed to us, and so on. But they are intelligent; they can communicate; they have a sense of self; and they are capable of suffering and enjoyment. They are, in short, persons. It makes a great deal of difference how we treat them. Their moral status, full personhood, is for many purposes far weightier than that of a mouse, despite the fact that the mouse is enormously more like us. As many philosophers have been insisting for years, "human" and "person" do not express the same concept (Note 7). Given a choice between saving an irretrievably comatose human and one of these extraterrestrials, it would be wrong not to give preference to the extraterrestrial. The point is that morally relevant characteristics are a proper subset of all characteristics and are not those peculiar to humans.

What characteristics are morally significant, then? There is no clear consensus among moral philosophers on this question, but we can list some candidate characteristics. Sentience will appear on almost every list. By sentience is meant awareness of sensation and the ability to enjoy and to suffer. Those of use who think nothing of chopping up a live carrot but object to chopping up a live fish usually do so on the grounds that a fish is sentient and a carrot isn't. Other candidate characteristics include memory, a sense of self, the loose cluster of abilities called "intelligence", ability to communicate, concern for conspecifics, playfulness, and possession of an immortal soul.
Almost all of these candidate (for moral significance) characteristics are variable (Note 8). An animal may have a more or less definite sense of self, be more or less sentient, may communicate more or less broadly and flexibly. Most of these, in other words, admit of degree. When one is ascribing some status, moral or other, on the basis of characteristics that can vary in degree more or less continuously, there is a strong temptation to a sort of fallacious reasoning I will call "magic lines or slippery slopes." Consider the height of adult male humans. There is considerable variation among populations, but in almost any context, a man 135cm tall is short and a man 230cm tall is tall. It seems plausible to say that a man .1mm taller than a short man is short, and a man .1mm shorter than a tall man is tall. A contradiction is easily obtained, for by adding and subtracting in units of .1mm it now can be shown that a man of any height one chooses is both tall and short. This sort of fallacy is the slippery slope. If one believes that slippery slopes can be prevented only by magic lines, one has to believe that there must be some precise height which marks the boundary between tall and short, or more plausibly, two precise heights dividing the range into tall, medium, and short. In this case, however, it is quite obvious that there are no such magic lines. There are no sharp demarcations between the short, the medium, and the tall. But some men are tall, some are short, and most are in between. There are no magic lines, but the slope is not slippery.

In moral matters we seem particularly liable to this sort of fallacious thinking. In the abortion controversy many find only extreme positions tenable, and others seek magic lines at conception or quickening or viability or birth.

It is instructive to consider a concept much like many of the concepts of moral status, that of maturity. (In fact maturity is in part a matter of moral status.) Almost all of the factors relevant to maturity vary in degree. For several purposes it is necessary to stipulate magic lines for maturity. For most purposes, in the United States, one is counted as legally mature at age 18. But for marriage one may be counted as mature at age 16, and for the consumption of alcohol at 21. If someone were to ask "But what is the age at which one is really mature?," he or she would betray deep ignorance of the concept or of the facts. At 18 Elmo may be mature sexually and politically, immature emotionally, intellectually, and physically. Some never attain emotional and intellectual maturity but must be counted as full-fledged adults. Even if we have all possible information about Sally, and agreement that she is mature, it will still probably not be possible to say precisely when she became so. There certainly is such a state as maturity, but there are no magic line criteria for it.
What is the application of all this to nonhuman animals? I want specifically to consider cetaceans, the whales and porpoises. What level of membership should they hold in the moral community? They obviously are sentient and, thus, moral patients of some sort. Even those few who favor continued whaling find it necessary to give at least lip service to the need for humane methods of killing. On the rational reconstruction of popular views offered above (and rejected as inadequate) everyone would place cetaceans at least in Group B. Some, still within the person/nonperson framework, would argue that (at least some) cetaceans should be placed in Group A, i.e., are persons. Champions of cetacean personhood point to a number of characteristics, including intelligence as shown in behavior and evidenced by large brains, complex social behavior including extensive mutual aid, playfulness both intra- and inter-specific, ability to communicate, interest in and solicitude for humans, inspiration of awe in humans, and unique places in ecosystems.
I will set aside the last two items, because (a) that something inspires awe in humans does not even entail that it is sentient; consider the "starry heavens above and the moral law within" of Kant's famous line (Note 9), and (b) as far as I can tell, everything that is part of any ecosystem has a unique place in that ecosystem.

Of the remaining characteristics, no one, and no pair, will suffice to establish the personhood of cetaceans (or of anything else). Many animals, including insects, have complex social organizations with appropriate individual behavior. Some sort of communication has been observed in almost every vertebrate species, and notoriously in honeybees. Yet almost no one would suggest that the social and communicative honeybees are persons. Many animals play, and at least some (cats and dogs) play with members of other species. Many animals help one another. It is not uncommon, but it is futile, to attempt to find or construct a magic line in one or other of these characteristics (Note 10).
There remains intelligence. If information processing is central for intelligence, and intelligence criterial for personhood, it is but a short step to the question of rights for robots. If, on the other hand, one takes the adaptation of means to ends to constitute intelligence, then a vast number of species, including all the cetaceans, are well within the intelligent fold. But there are many varieties and aspects of intelligence, and even summing over them all, intelligence isn't everything. This is, of course, my point; no single characteristic is everything. There are no magic lines dividing fields of moral status.

Cetaceans are entitled to special moral consideration not because of some single characteristic but because they possess very high degrees of a number of morally important characteristics. They are highly intelligent, highly social, and capable of sophisticated communication. It appears that at least some sorts of cetaceans may well have as much right to be considered persons as do humans. If, as I suggest, we abandon the sharp person/nonperson distinction, we can say that some cetaceans are at least quasi-persons.

Similarly, the conclusion that the great apes are at least quasi-persons is inescapable. They are highly intelligent, highly social, self-aware, communicative beings. Most of the rest of the primates probably deserve nearly the same status. Our mistreatment of our primate cousins is even less excusable than our mistreatment of cetaceans, since apes and monkeys are literally anthropomorphic. They are so obviously close to us __ how can we use them as we do?

How should we treat quasi-persons? Clearly their enjoyment and suffering matter and must be taken into account. But that is surely not enough. We owe more than just consideration, we owe respect. We must respect their interests and their autonomy. The first thing we must do in regard to cetaceans and apes is to let them be, let them live their own lives as they choose. When their interests and ours come into conflict, as is sure to happen from time to time, interests must be weighed as impartially as possible. We owe quasi-persons, as we owe persons, consideration, respect, and justice.
There is no magic line between persons and the rest of the sentient world, and there are no magic lines within the sentient world. It is not just persons and quasi-persons but all conscious living things that are entitled, in many ways and to varying degrees, to consideration, respect, and justice. The levels of moral status are continuous, and can never reach zero while sentience remains.
Nothing I have said in this paper answers any specific questions about human treatment of nonhuman animals. I hope to have helped make clear that these are genuine moral questions and that moral questions are genuine questions.

 Harlan B. Miller

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Notes

1 This is a very extensively revised version of a paper, "Science, Ethics, and the Status of Cetaceans", written after a conference entitled "Cetacean Intelligence and Behavior and the Ethics of Killing Cetaceans", held in Washington, D.C., U.S.A., in 1980 under the auspices of the International Whaling Commission.
2 For a useful survey and critique of modern ethics of virtue see Robert B. Louden, "Some Vices of Virtue Ethics," American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3 (July, 1984).
3 Cora Du Bois, The People of Alor, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944) (reprinted New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 106.
4 translated title of paper delivered at the conference referred to in note 1
5 Or death. But many would deny that it is wrong to kill a nonhuman animal, without denying that it is wrong to cause pain without need.
6 Here and throughout this paper I am comparing adult animals of one species with adult animals of another. The questions of the moral status of nonhuman animals, of (human) abortion, and of (human) infanticide are closely related; all concern standing in the moral community At six weeks a human seems clearly inferior to a beagle of the same age in every morally relevant characteristic. Why then do we assign higher status to the human infant. Are we justified in doing so? I am glad to be able, on grounds of length, to exclude such issues from this paper.
7 Of course the terms "human" and "person" are often used as synonymous, whether philosophers like it or not, but this causes considerable conceptual trouble. In Christian doctrine the three persons of the Trinity are all persons, but only one is human. On Star Trek the Klingons are persons, but not humans, and Mr. Spock is clearly a person although only half human. So, it is at least conceptually possible to be a person without being a human. That one may be a human without being a person is hotly denied in some quarters, affirmed in others. Fetuses and the comatose are central to this dispute. The less controversial cases of nonhuman persons suffice to show the need to separate these concepts.
8 An exception is possession of an immortal soul. Presumably this is not a matter of degree--either one has such a soul or one does not. But if it is held that all humans have such a soul and no nonhuman animals do, it would appear that it is much worse to kill a porpoise or a pigeon than to kill a human. The human's soul, on this view, continues to exist, but to deprive the animal of bodily existence is to deprive it of everything.
9 Critique of Practical Reason, Conclusion, p. 161, Vol. V of the Prussian Academy edition
10 For example, those who would draw a magic line in communication, below which there is only signalling, and above which, in humans alone, lies true language, have been driven by ape language research to ever more desperate complications. Whatever can be found that at least some human linguistic behavior has and ape behavior lacks will be pronounced essential for 'real' language (until it is shown that the apes can do it).