ANIMAL RIGHTS AND EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE

 posted by Katherine Perlo

 

It is important to explain how the subaltern state of animals, even more than of subaltern humans, is reinforced by control of language and ideas, or epistemic injustice.

Epistemic injustice, as outlined by Miranda Fricker (2007), consists of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The first “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word”, for example due to racial prejudice, while the second “occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker, 2007, p. 1), for example due to the absence of relevant social and political concepts.

We may see the idea as foreshadowed by Marx’s observation that “the ruling ideas of any age are those of the ruling class,” who exert “control over the means of intellectual production” (quoted in Jessop, 2014, p. 5-6). This is seen in the human political context when workers have been steeped from childhood in those ideas, producing the world’s Alf Garnetts and ragged-trousered philanthropists. In relation to animals, the ideas are those of the ruling human species, and the means of intellectual production are human speech and writing. 

 Such injustices are an important feature of subalternity. Spivak (1988) argues that, while the “working class” are merely “oppressed”, and thus “according to Foucault and Deleuze … can speak and know their conditions” (Spivak, 1988, p. 78, emphasis in original), those in the “subaltern” category are oppressed but are also “subaltern” in that – as Spivak concludes – they “cannot speak” (p. 104).

In order to bring animals into the field, Podosky (2018) distinguishes between “self-oriented” and “other-oriented” hermeneutical injustice (pp. 218–219), noting that Fricker’s concept is limited to the former kind whereby “‘the subject is rendered unable to make communicatively intelligible something which is particularly in his or her interest to be able to render intelligible’ (p. 162)” (Fricker, 2007, quoted in Podosky, 2018, p. 218). This could minimize the oppressive class nature of epistemic injustice, which involves two parties.

Thus, such injustice towards the subaltern animal may be best clarified by considering, first, the role of the animal (corresponding to “self-oriented”), and then the role of the human (corresponding to “other-oriented”) in the process of actual or attempted communication.

 The role of the animal. Can the animal speak, and can it form the concepts that it needs to speak about? In fact, “animal studies have demonstrated that agency in human-animal interactions proves complex and irrepressible” (Armstrong, 2002, p. 416). As Skabelund (2019) suggests, “The bark, as well as the neigh, bray, roar, and even the meow of other creatures deserve to be heard and included in the histories we humans tell.” In a popular example, “To just about every audience she speaks to, Dr. Goodall gives a greeting in ‘chimpanzee’” (Jane Goodall Institute USA, 2009).  Altogether,

scholars who do animal studies … have established that, across historical time and cultural space, the range of human interactions with and beliefs about animals have provided alternatives to the dominant, modern, western default position of an assumed superiority over nonhuman creatures as having intellectual and even (in some cases) cultural lives comparable to ours. (Chaplin, 2017, p. 513)

As for concepts, do the animals suffer from “a gap in collective interpretive resources” that put them “at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences”? Some concepts relevant to human oppression of animals are “pain,” “cruelty,” and “wrong”.

All concepts are words that emerge from experience and depend on it for their meaning, and all experiences embody their corresponding concepts. To take the most concrete one, “pain,” the word “pain” exists because the experience of pain exists: the reverse – that pain exists because the word “pain” exists – isn’t the case. The animals’ pain is their initial embodiment of the concept.

As for “cruelty”, in suffering pain, the animals are aware that their suffering is bad – that being the meaning of “suffering” – and that humans are inflicting it on them (that being an inescapable fact). Their lack of words for it is not the same as lack of its embodied concept.

The word “wrong” seems highly abstract, and is, in the sense that humans can differ in their metaethical choices of the type of acts that merit the title. But the animals’ metaethics are implicit in their cries of pain and attempts to escape, reflecting the crying or struggling animal’s non-verbal sense that “What is happening should not be happening”.

In short, animals suffer testimonial and hermeneutic injustice not through their own lack of epistemic capacity, but through humans’ self-interested dismissal of that capacity.

The role of the human. For it is on the other-oriented side that the humans, more than the animals, become entangled in epistemic complexities in their relationship with their victims.

On the most practical level, human modes of communication have provided the technology and organizational capacity needed to control animals.

On the theoretical level, language supports two claims that are held to justify animal oppression. One is that animals are “inferior” and “less important” because of being less intelligent in the human way, and that therefore humans are entitled to hurt and kill them for human purposes. This hardly constitutes a theory: the words “inferior” and “less important” do not assert anything definable; they are magical terms long embedded in human social psychology, but they work as a theory when animal usage is threatened.

Moreover, even the above-described evidence of animals’ ability to speak, valuable though it may be both scientifically and (through satisfying our – cognitively dissonant – affection for and solidarity with animals) emotionally, it does not convince speciesists, because it can be used to present animals as only partly successful imitators of humans rather than as moral claimants in their own right. As Preece (2005) comments, in the Great Ape Project the apes “are accorded preferential consideration” even by their supporters “precisely because they are so like humans!” (p. 309).

The other claim is that the animals’ low cognition indicates their lower sensitivity, so that, while they are no longer dismissed as unfeeling machines, they are deemed less aversive than humans would be in response to the same treatment, and their testimony is accordingly rejected. Another tool for rejecting it is our old friend anthropomorphism, since “many scientists regard even the notion that animals feel pain as the grossest anthropomorphic error” (Masson and McCarthy, 1996, p. 43-44). Of course, some animals suffer silently, and here injustice may lie in human unwillingness to infer suffering from circumstances that would cause it in humans.

Animals also suffer testimonial injustice when their case, derived from their message of pain, is simply not mentioned. For example, Spivak’s article on the subaltern recognizes, in its postcolonial context, the “epistemic violence of imperialism” (p. 84). But only once does the word “animal” appear in the article (with reference to Freud’s theory of repression as perhaps partly stemming from “a preoriginary space where human and animal were not yet differentiated”: p. 92). The animals’ almost total absence from this discussion of the subaltern is the most relevant argument for their inclusion.

Indeed, most people would simply comment on this, with varying degrees of regret, “Of course it doesn’t mention animals; you couldn’t expect it to”: so accustomed are we to animals’ exclusion from even the most glaringly relevant discourse, except where specifically presented as an animal-rights argument.

Moving up to the more consciously moral level, humans have mainly altruistic concepts of right and wrong, and resist threats to their belief in their own compliance with these concepts. For this purpose, they have been able to develop all the excuses for animal abuse over history: ranging, with changes in the modes of production, from the apologetic myths of early hunter-gatherers, through the dominionist religious excuses of agricultural societies, to the rationalist, cognition-based excuses of the modern world.

On the political level, the dominant, speciesist majority of humans can neutralize the arguments of animal-rights campaigners with accusations of misanthropy or extremism, plus the vague but powerful concept of what is “normal”. And because the more absolute the power of an oppressing class, the more invisible and taken-for-granted its ideology, speciesism itself as a power-supporting ideology has been invisible until very recently, and is still omitted from any political list of discriminatory isms, outside of explicitly animal-rights discourse.

Reasons for hope. Against this epistemic landscape, there is flexibility. As Podosky (2018) observes, if “our ability to choose what we eat is greatly constrained by schemas involving normative expectations about food and consumption”, then “there is hope to revise the structures responsible for the abhorrent ways that nonhuman animals are treated” (p. 222).

Humans have already begun to be aware of language distortion as a political weapon. The twentieth-century language turn showed how phenomena treated as material or immutable can actually be constructions of language. In the political realm, Orwell made “Newspeak” a household word, and more recently, Carol Adams (1990), whom Podosky (2018, pp. 223–224) cites, applied similar insights to the animal realm, with the concept of the “absent referent”. The effect of categorizing slaughtered animals as “meat” (ibid.) is now frequently noted by animal advocates.

Epistemic injustice provides a platform for all equality campaigners to stand on: what’s needed is to bring the animals up to the platform to stand alongside humans and press their unanswerable argument of suffering.

References

Armstrong, P. (2002). The postcolonial animal. Society & Animals, 10(4), 413–419.

Chaplin, J. E. (2017). Can the nonhuman speak?: Breaking the chain of being in the Anthropocene. Journal of the History of Ideas, 78(4), 509–529. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2017.0029

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice. Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jane Goodall Institute USA. (2009). Jane Goodall’s chimp greeting. UTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr350j7Ya5E

Jessop, B. (2014). Marxist approaches to power. On-line, pre-copyedited, preprint version of Jessop, B. (2012). Marxist approaches to power. In E. Amenta, K. Nash, & A. Scott (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology (pp. 3–14). Oxford: Blackwell. 2012. Retrieved from: http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/2012_Jessop_Marxist_Approaches_to_Power___chapter-2.pdf

Masson, J. & McCarthy, S. (1994). When Elephants Weep. London: Vintage.

Podosky, P.-M. (2018). Hermeneutical injustice and animal ethics: Can nonhuman animals suffer from hermeneutical injustice? Journal of Animal Ethics, 8(2), 216–228.

Preece, R. (2005). Brute souls, happy beasts, and evolution: The historical status of animals. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press.

Skabelund, A. (2019). Can the subaltern bark? (blog) Cornell University Press. Retrieved from https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/can-the-subaltern-bark/

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, pp. 271–313. Retrieved from http://abahlali.org/files/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf