For a casual observer (and reader) of both continental and analytic philosophy, debates between the two sides can be frustratingly illuminating. As a student of the ‘hard sciences’, I’ve always been fascinated by Anglo-American philosophy and its attempts and rigor and systemization, and particularly in utilitarianism, which an attempt to systematize morality. Lately, however, I’ve found my heart bending towards Rortian pragmatism of the most radical kind, and then towards continental philosophy. So it was interesting to read the debate between Slavoj Zizek and Peter Singer on animal ethics: here’s Zizek’s original essay, and Singer’s reply. The ‘debate’ mostly consists of not-getting-the-others-point, but there are insights to be gleaned here.

To start off, I must say I am more sympathetic to Zizek, mostly because the attitude of Analytic philosophy to more ‘postmodern’ critics seems to be that of disdain — note the separation of ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ reasoning in Singer’s reply, a futile attempt to separate Zizek’s analysis into an orderly, logical, ‘allowed’ meaning and non-rational accusations that are illegally smuggled in. As if the effect words have can be separated thus, and especially with someone for whom such a separation does not exist! Zizek, for his part, does read Singer is a Continental way, but with much less disdain, and at the end of reading Zizek’s take, one still agrees with Singer, but with an appreciation of his limitations.

Peter Singer is renowned for making animal rights and utilitarianism popular and for making convincing arguments against the exploitation of animals. He is (as he says in his reply), an “aggressive consequentialist”, who “does not flinch before trade-offs”. Nor does he “flinch at showing the arbitrariness of those who reject such trade-offs between members of our own species, but gladly accept them when it comes to animals.” As such, this is admirable, and at no point does Zizek criticise the practical conclusion — that we have to stop exploiting animals. (Singer points out that “ nowhere does Žižek directly challenge the main tenets underlying [Singer’s animal rights] argument”.) His point is that Singer “ignores hidden qualifications”, which leads to a flattening of human rights — yes, animals do suffer, but humans do more than that. Subjecting human and animal desires to the same calculus would involve a sort of ‘flattening’ of human desires that is unacceptable to Zizek. His analogy is to a world spoken of by Hegel where a rational order prevails, which is ultimately becomes a “das geistige Tierreich”, an “animal kingdom”. (One caveat that Zizek overlooks is that Singer’s preference utilitarianism — a view he held at the time, but no longer holds — does allow for a broader expanse of human preferences.) Ultimately, the reply to such a criticism would be a “what else can you do”, or “this is the best way forward”, a rhetorical device rather than an analytic answer. Which is fine! But one must then be careful of never flinching.

To show that any sort of calculus does ‘flatten’ the notion of rights, and reduce the human world to an “animal kingdom”, Zizek’s concrete example is a notion from Lacan that he thinks is an “unflattenable” aspect of humanity — “the Thing, something to which we are unconditionally attached irrespective of its positive qualities.” This, as I understand it, could be something like the deep irrationalities associated with religious belief, which (Zizek believes) cannot be flattened and compared mathematically with (say) someone’s suffering. He ends, “In Singer’s universe, there is a place for mad cows, but no place for an Indian sacred cow.­”

Already, I’ve given a more sympathetic reading of Zizek than Singer does, for his objection to the sacred cows statement is that for Zizek, “Nonhumans appear here not in themselves, but as mere furniture of the human world: what matters about the Indian sacred cows is not that they are sentient beings, but that they are sacred for some humans, namely, Indians”. But that statement was only a stylistic contrasting of mad cows and sacred cows! Okay, see, it’s fine to point out that Zizek inadvertently smuggles in the notion of animals as mere furniture for the purposes of style (but wouldn’t doing so be that despicable ‘second-order’ kind of reasoning?), as long as you also reply to the actual notion of there being an unflattenable aspect to humanity. That’s not what Singer does. He really seems to think Zizek means “sacred cows” rather than “sacred cows”. Singer never answers the central question: does he think there is something that is lost when we arithmetically balance the preferences of 10 humans against 1000 animals? The ‘reification’ or ‘fetishism’ criticisms of any calculus of humanity exist at least since Marx (who Peter Singer has written two books about), and this is certainly one way to read the Hegelian notion of an animal kingdom— as analogous to the Capitalist world in Marx where everything is reduced to a commodity. So even if Zizek cites Hegel uncritically, this does not mean his central point is wrong. I’d certainly like an answer to it.

I realise that ‘no grounds have actually been stated for the claims Zizek makes’ is just academics doing academic debating, picking holes in the other’s arguments and poking fun at the other’s ability to reason logically. But there are broader issues at stake here, and lay readers reading this exchange. Leaving it at “on what ground should we decide that a world in which the highest rights are human rights is the specific world Hegel describes?” is simply bad behaviour. Singer has written a book on Hegel — why does he think a world where everyone’s preferences can be mathematically compared is not the same as Hegel’s rational world? What if I (mistakenly, maybe) decide that there are grounds to decide that it is such a world? (As I have above, mapping it to the world ruled by the commodity, in Marx.)

Instead, Singer opts for the accusation that Zizek, “when he speaks of nonhuman animals, he is not really concerned with their moral status — with their exclusion from, or inclusion in, the category of beings that should have their interests protected, nor with the degree of such protection.” But Zizek never says this, and by my reading he agrees with Singer that animals should have their rights protected, but only objects to subjecting humans to the same calculus. In fact, when he situates Singer’s “exaggerations” (which serve the purpose of decentering the notion of rights from the world of humanity) within a postmodern decentering of historically privileged groups of people, he is (by my reading) praising Singer for achieving this.

Anyway, many parts of Singer’s reply to Zizek are worth reading, because well, the continental philosophy style of reasoning bears criticising, and for the fun of seeing this done from an analytic perspective, full of analysis of “non-sequiters” and pointing out of unsubstantiated citations of Lacan and Lenin. It’s like watching CinemaSins pick apart a movie you enjoyed — ah yes, one goes, I didn’t notice that mistake, oh damn that scene undermines that entire subplot, as so on and so on. But you also get the sense that the CinemaSins guys didn’t really get the movie.

My main takeaway is that Singer is right in decentering humanity in regards to ethics, but is wrong in taking an aggressive stance wherein he will not flinch before trade-offs. I hope we do flinch if a situation arises where we do have to compare 10 humans to 1000 animals (these situations do arise when thinking of jobs in the dairy industry, for example, the transition away from which needs to be handled properly).

But I think we can go further.

For one insightful and penetrating criticism that Singer makes is that in Zizek’s moral universe, the place of the rights of cognitively impaired humans is uncertain, because at some points Zizek’s notion of rights seems to include all humans, while at others only those with “moral autonomy”, which some cognitively impaired people (and of course animals) cannot have. Singer’s stress on the calculus of suffering is clearly superior here, as a convincing concrete way of extending rights to these unfortunate sections of humanity.

But then it is precisely because Singer expands our moral horizons, and does it in an empathetic and convincing way, that renders his utlitarian calculus a useful tool. It does not mean that utilitarianism itself is right, for no moral theory can be the final one, and new movements, protests, philosophers, are always extending our conceptions (like Singer did with animal rights, or the trans community’s radical revision of the gender spectrum), and old philosophies are left by the wayside because they do not fit (like Marx’s ‘fetishism’ or Hegel’s ‘animal kingdom’).

A particular aspect of this can be seen in Singer’s comparison of racism and sexism with speciesism. (Jacobin has a nice article on this topic.) The extension of human rights to other races and women was not granted automatically, but had to be won through decades of struggle. Indeed, even though the US declaration of independence states that “all men” have “certain inalienable rights”, this meant something different in the 18th century than it does in the 20th. A utilitarian working in the late 18th or early 19th century did not necessarily think the abolition of slavery or colonialism was required by his theory, although some undoubtedly came to that conclusion.

There are two driving forces behind the historical extensions of the idea of rights: fights from below, or empathy from above. Conflating the two as Singer does makes progress in human rights seem natural, inexorable. It seems to follow from some sort of final theory, like utilitarianism, leaving no role for actual people in making and changing moral laws. But moral theories are historically contingent, and once you acknowledge something is contingent, you realise that the future is not certain either. The plea from the standpoint of Marxist concepts like ‘fetishism’ is ultimately a demand for contingency, for one of Marx’s complaints about fetishism was that it constrained people’s freedom, which includes their freedom to actualise themselves, to change themselves and the world into something radically different.

What is the place in utilitarianism for the ever-changing, often conceptually radical, demands of people? (For example, farmers about to lose their jobs because of an imposed shift to free-range farming.) If the answer is not to flinch before the mathematics, something has gone wrong.