OK, more from How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn...
'I wish to signal that an anthropology that seeks a more capacious understanding of the human by attending to our relations to those who stand beyond us must also understand such relations by virtue of the ways in which they can be affected by that which is distinctively human. ... [S]ymbolic reference is distinctively human. That is the symbolic is something that is... unique to humans. The moral is also distinctively human because to think morally and to act ethically requires symbolic reference. It requires the ability to momentarily distance ourselves from the world and our actions in it; to reflect on our possible modes of future conduct, conduct that we can potentially deem good for others that are not us. This distancing is achieved through symbolic reference. [...] to imaagine an anthropology beyond the human that does not simply project human qualities everywhere, we must situate morality ontologically. That is we must be precise about where and when morality comes to exist. To state it baldly, before humans walked this earth there was no morality and no ethics. Morality is not constitutive of the non-human beings with whom we share this planet. It is potentially appropriate to morally evaluate actions we humans initiate. This is not the case for non-humans. Value, by contrast, is intrinsic to the broader non-human living world because it is intrinsic to life. There are things that are good or bad for a living self and its potential for growth... Because non-human living selves can grow [learn by experience] it is appropriate to think about the moral implications our actions have on their potential to grow well, to flourish.'
He says that morality 'stands in a relation of emergent continuity to value, just as symbolic reference stands in a relation of emergent continuity to indexical reference. And value extends beyond the human: it is a constitutive feature of living selves.'
When we are in relation with non-human selves, we are faced with, in Dionna Haraway's term, 'significant otherness'. In these encounters, 'we are faced with an otherness that is radically, significantly other - without that otherness being incommensurable or incognizable.' We can find ways to enter into intimate, significant relations with these others who are radically not us. Many of these selves who are not ourselves are also not human... not symbolic creatures... not loci of moral judgement. As such they force us to find new ways to listen. They force us to think beyond our moral worlds in ways which can help us imagine and realise more just and better worlds. A more capacious ethical practice, one that mindfully attends to finding ways of living in a world peopled by other selves, should come to be a feature of the possible worlds we imagine and seek to engender with other beings. Just how to go about doing this, just how to decide on what kind of flourishing to encourage, and to make room for the many deaths on which all flourishing depends, is itself a moral problem.'
So, I get from this that the moral cannot emerge without the symbolic. It is also the case that humans - for whatever reason, co-operation, opposable thumbs, abstract thinking - are the only species with technology on a paradigm-shifting scale. Indeed, with these two tools - morality and the technology to wield such power - we have become so divergent in degree that there is a blur between difference in degree and difference in kind.
We have both the ability to kill everything and to kill (virtually) nothing. No other animal can do this. Nor can she imagine doing this or desire to do this.
And by our actions - both in the past and ongoing - we have in large part stepped outside the integrated web of nature. We decided, which no other animal can do, that just because something is natural it is not good. All other species live out the naturalistic fallacy day by day. We believed that we could transition from natural to better - with less suffering, more justice, greater fairness. But in that process, during the long history in which the group for whom the good mattered progressed from rich white men to all humans (in theory), we have seen greater inequality between humans and a vast inequality between our species and the rest. We have come close to destroying the planetary home on which we all depend. Yes, average life spans for humans have increased dramatically and far fewer die of homicide and so on as Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of Our Nature, but billions of other animals live far worse lives.
And, though we are not, I believe, dependent on meat or leather, our fields may well be dependent on animals - or we use more chemicals and that hardly has a great track record. Sure, a technological fix. But, in time?
Can we do anything in time?
To get back to the reason for quoting Kohn, I think that this lesson about the symbolic and morality - as well as the power differential - means that in approaching animal ethics we cannot in good faith just consider the continuities, we have to also face up to the discontinuities. And then we have to ask ourselves how far intervention is warranted.
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