not just your father—to save you rather than Max if the house catches fire.”
“Isn’t that still speciesist? Aren’t you saying that these characteristics—being self-aware, planning for the future, and so on— are the ones that humans have, and therefore they are more valuable than any that animals have? Max has a better sense of smell than I do. Why isn’t that an objective reason for saving him rather than me?”
“As long as Max is alive, the more happy sniffing he can do, the better. But ask yourself in what way killing—assume that it is painless, unanticipated killing, without any fear beforehand…” Naomi interrupts: “So you’re not talking about what really happens in slaughterhouses, then? You’ve just excluded the overwhelming majority of the deaths that humans inflict on animals.
This discussion is becoming purely theoretical.”
“Not purely. Let me finish. You tell me: in what way is painless, unanticipated killing wrong in itself?”
“It means the loss of everything. If Max were to be killed, there would be no more doggy-joy of welcoming me home, being taken for a walk, chewing his bone…”
“No more of that for Max, true. But there are plenty of dog breeders out there who breed dogs to meet the demand. So if we got another puppy from them, thus causing one more dog to come into existence, then there would be just as much of all those good aspects of dog-existence.”
“What are you saying—that we could painlessly kill Max, get another puppy to replace him, and everything would be fine? Really, Dad, sometimes you let philosophy carry you away. Too much reasoning, not enough feeling. That’s a horrible thought.”
Naomi is so distressed that Max, who has been listening attentively to the conversation, gets stiffly up from his rug, goes over to her, and starts consolingly licking her bare feet.
“You know very well that I care about Max, so lay off with the ‘You reason, so you don’t feel’ stuff, please. I feel, but I also think about what I feel. When people say we should only feel—and at times Costello comes close to that in her lecture—I’m reminded of Göring, who said, ‘I think with my blood.’ See where it led him. We can’t take our feelings as moral data, immune from rational criticism. But to get back to the point, I don’t mean that everything would be fine if Max were killed and replaced by a puppy. We love Max, and for us no puppy would replace him. But I asked you why painlessly killing is wrong in itself. Our distress is a side effect of the killing, not something that makes it wrong in itself. Let’s leave Max out of it, since mentioning his name seems to excite him and distress you. Someone once said that pigs have to be thankful that most people are not Jewish, because if all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all…”
Naomi interrupts again: “Pigs on factory farms don’t need to thank anyone for their miserable existence, confined indoors on bare concrete for life. They’d be better off not existing at all.”
“You know very well that I’m not defending eating pork, just trying to get a philosophical point across. Let’s assume the pigs are leading a happy life and are then painlessly killed. For each happy pig killed, a new one is bred, who will lead an equally happy life. So killing the pig does not reduce the total amount of porcine happiness in the world. What’s wrong with it?”
Naomi pauses momentarily. “You’re still killing animals with wants of their own. Pigs are as smart as dogs. And I know when Max is looking forward to his walk. Even if he doesn’t plan what he’ll do next week, he can have short-term wants and anticipations. I bet pigs can too. So we are doing them a wrong by ending their lives, and we don’t make up for it when we bring another pig or dog into existence.”
Peter smiles triumphantly: “Ah, but now you are conceding my point. We are disagreeing only about the facts of porcine and canine life. And maybe I don’t really even disagree with you about that. Suppose I grant that pigs and dogs are self-aware to some degree, and do have thoughts about things in the future. That would provide some reason for thinking it intrinsically wrong to kill them—not absolutely wrong, but perhaps quite a serious wrong. Still, there are other animals—chickens maybe, or fish— who can feel pain but don’t have any self-awareness or capacity for thinking about the future. For those animals, you haven’t given me any reason why painless killing would be wrong, if other animals take their place and lead an equally good life.”
Naomi has finished her breakfast, pushed Max away from her feet, and is lacing up her nonleather Doc Martens. Talking to her father about philosophy always ends up with his switching into lecture mode. Soon she’ll be able to get away. But she doesn’t want to be rude, so she asks, “And Coetzee doesn’t agree with that?”
“Costello doesn’t, anyway. She talks about bat-being and human-being both being full of being, and seems to say that their fullness of being is more important than whether it is bat-being or human-being.”
“I can see what she’s getting at. When you kill a bat, you take away everything that the bat has, its entire existence. Killing a human being can’t do more than that.”
“Yes, it can. If I pour the rest of this soymilk down the sink, I’ve emptied the container; and if I do the same to that bottle of Kahlúa you and your friends are fond of drinking when we are out, I’d empty it too. But you’d care more about the loss of the Kahlúa. The value that is lost when something is emptied depends on what was there when it was full, and there is more to human existence than there is to bat existence.”
Naomi says quietly: “Oh. I didn’t think you’d noticed the Kahlúa.” But her father has picked up the paper again and is flipping through the pages. “That’s not the worst argument, either. Listen to this. Costello is talking about a book she has written in which she thinks herself into the character of Joyce’s Marion Bloom, and then she says,
If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”
Naomi is glad to leave the topic of Kahlúa: “You don’t have to be a philosopher to see what is wrong with that. The fact that a character doesn’t exist isn’t something that makes it hard to imagine yourself as that character. You can imagine someone very like yourself, or like someone else you know. Then it is easy to think your way into the existence of that being. But a bat, or an oyster? Who knows? If that’s the best argument Coetzee can put up for his radical egalitarianism, you won’t have any trouble showing how weak it is.”
“But are they Coetzee’s arguments? That’s just the point— that’s why I don’t know how to go about responding to this so-called lecture. They are Costello’s arguments. Coetzee’s fictional device enables him to distance himself from them. And he has this character, Norma, Costello’s daughter-in-law, who makes all the obvious objections to what Costello is saying. It’s a marvelous device, really. Costello can blithely criticize the use of reason, or the need to have any clear principles or proscriptions, without Coetzee really committing himself to these claims. Maybe he really shares Norma’s very proper doubts about them. Coetzee doesn’t even have to worry too much about getting the structure of the lecture right. When he notices that it is starting to ramble, he just has Norma say that Costello is rambling!”