Brutality and Sentimentality Author(S): Mary Midgley Source: Philosophy, Vol

Royal Institute of Philosophy

Brutality and Sentimentality Author(s): Mary Midgley Source: Philosophy, Vol. 54, No. 209 (Jul., 1979), pp. 385-389 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3750611 Accessed: 06-03-2020 11:35 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Royal Institute of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy

This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:35:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Brutality and Sentirmentality

MARY MIDGLEY

The notion that concern for the feelings of animals is as such sentimental is rather a common one. I shall suggest that, in general, the charge of sentimentality can never be made to stick in this way merely because concern is directed towards one class of sentient beings rather than another. It rests on the motives and reasons for being concerned, not on the objects to which concern is directed. About animals, however, a special point arises which I must deal with first. Objectors may say that it is sentimental to attribute feelings to them at all, or at least to attribute specific feelings, to suppose ourselves well enough informed about their states of conscious- ness for concern to be appropriate. The charge of sentimentality here is close to that of anthropomorphism. The notion that it is sentimental to attribute feelings to animals is pretty confused, because it is a charge against the motives of the attributors, not really against what they say. In fact sentimentality is altogether a rather ill-formed notion, and I had better discuss it first. Being sentimental is misrepresenting the world in order to indulge our feelings. Thus, Dickens created in Little Nell and various other female characters a figure who could not exist and was the product of wish-fulfilment-a subservient, devoted, totally understanding mixture of child and lover, with no wishes of her own. This figure was well-designed to provoke a delicious sense of pity and mastery, and to set up further fantasies where this feeling could continue. One trouble about this apparently harmless pursuit is that it distorts expectations; it can make people unable to deal with the real world, and particularly with real girls. Another is that it can so absorb them that they cannot react to what is genuinely pitiful in the world around them. Now this is all very scandalous. We ought not to distort reality for the sake of indulging our softer feelings. But is it any better if we distort it for the sake of indulging our harsher ones? Many thrillers distort reality every bit as much as Dickens. The difference is just that they do it, not to let the reader feel soft-hearted, but to let him feel pleasingly tough and ruthless. The howling self-deception, the distor- tion of the world, is present in both cases. And this is the core of the charge against sentimentality. We do not, however, call such thrillers sentimental, we are more likely just to call them slick and dishonest. No doubt this sort of brutal fantasy carries a core of sentimentality too. The

Philosophy 54 I979 385

This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:35:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Discussion

writer's over-indulgence towards his hero can be quite as crude as that of Dickens towards Little Nell. But this is too indirect a way of saying what is wrong with it. Brutality is bad in itself. The objection to whatever sentimentality may lie hidden in it is a separate one and comes later. To put it flatly-the central offence lies in self-deception, in distorting reality to get a pretext for indulging in any feeling. Various circumstances can make this worse. In sentimentality, they mostly centre round the flight from, and contempt of, real people by comparison with imaginary ones. In the case of brutality, this is just as likely to follow. But here there is also another, worse iniquity involved. The feelings themselves are bad, apart from being misdirected. So deliberately indulging in them is odious in itself. This is what I mean by saying that the notion of sentimentality is ill-formed. Our objection to it is asymmetrical. The real offence is distorting reality to indulge any feeling. But the charge of being sentimental is often brought against people who just feel, or express, sympathetic feelings when the occasion actually warrants them. With this preparation, let us now look at the suggestion that it is sentimental to suppose that we can identify the feelings of animals. This would mean (i) that the supposition was false, and (a) (something which could only become relevant when (i) was established)-that those who made it did so for the sake of wallowing in apparently sympathetic sensa- tions. If somebody claimed that his car was frightened when he was in danger, that it was deeply devoted to him, jealous of his friends, and grateful for his attention to it, we should probably all agree that he was being sentimental. Now to apply this, we start with (i), and ask, what grounds are there for thinking it false that people can identify the feelings of animals? It is, as I have argued elsewhere,1 no odder to claimn that you know when your dog is frightened than to claim that you know this about another human being. Your fear is not my fear; all the same, you can have perfectly good grounds for drawing the conclusion that I am frightened, rather than indifferent, angry or pleased, and for saying various things about the kind of fear it is. Exactly the same thing is true of a horse, dog or elephant with which you are reasonably familiar. Notions like fear, anger, pleasure, etc., were not invented in or for an exclusively human world, any more than they were invented privately for inner pointing. They grew up in a thoroughly public world inhabited by many species, some of them constant companions of men. Species solipsism is no more convincing than the personal kind.

1 In my book Beast and Man, pp. 344-35I (Cornell University Press, I978; Harvester Press in England, 1979).

386

This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:35:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Discussion

Of course it is possible to misidentify feelings, e.g. to take greed for affection. And of course this could be done from self-indulgent motives. But where misidentifying makes sense, it has to be possible to identify rightly. The test of whether people are getting it right is the same for people and animals. We watch how well they predict, and how successful they are at making friends with them. I see then no clear grounds for accepting (i). But does (2) operate all the same and settle the matter? Are all those who think they can identify the feelings of animals clearly in fact sentimental people? This has to be an empirical question. If we are to talk confidently of sentimentality at all, we have got to be able to identify it as a personality trait. It seems then that we ought to look at the whole range of people who reckon that they can deal with animals by understanding their feelings- vets, zoo-keepers, mahouts, jockeys, grooms, dog-handlers and even some hunters, as well as ethologists-and should detect the guilty, wallowing, day- dreaming look in their eyes. Also of course these people ought constantly to be going wrong in their predictions-predictions on which their work and very often their lives depend-and being forced to hand over to experts of a different kind who would presumably treat the creature as some sort of a machine, and thereby achieve far higher success . . . ? In the case of the car, there simply is not this kind of difficulty. Cars do not have mahouts who treat them as part of the family.2 Altogether, the evidence for the sentimentality hypothesis is pretty thin. But what about turning the tables and examining the brutality one? People who say that the feelings of animals cannot be identified, and are not comparable with those of human beings, can have bad motives just as much as their opponents. They may be anxious to believe it because they like treating animals cruelly or to save the trouble of altering cruel customs, or even, without having any such practical interest, they may like to maintain it because it makes them feel tough. Their motives may be, as I suggested at the start, no safer than sentimental ones cognitively and morally much worse. They have at least to suspect themselves of a Fear of Feeling. We have to notice here too the working of what may be called the Sceptic's Law of Inverse Credulity. This lays down that when one hypothesis, unwelcome to the human sympathies, competes with another which is welcome to them, the first can prevail merely on its emotional appeal,

2 Elephants are a particularly clear case, because they are still of great economic value in the timber trade of, for example, Burma and Sri Lanka, and yet no more economic method of handling them has ever been found than the traditional one, by which they are looked after by a mahout who spends his life with them, who treats and speaks of his elephant as a personal friend, and tackles all problems connected with it in very much the way appropriate to a temperamental but basically benevolent uncle. Were it possible instead to treat them like tractors, this would doubtless have been done.

387

This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:35:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Discussion

without needing either evidence or initial probability. One well-known example of this is the wholly unconvincing suggestion that all smiling done by young babies is 'only wind'. Another (from a rich store concerning animals) occurred when a porpoise called Pelorus Jack used for twenty years to accompany the ships crossing a strait in New Zealand. One local resident said firmly that the only reason why Jack did it was so as to use the move- ment of the ship to scratch off his barnacles . . .3 That an exceptionally agile animal, with all the rocks in the sea to choose from, should choose a moving ship for this purpose would be extraordinary. That he should travel with the ship, rather than against it, and should take so long on the job as regularly to make the whole journey, would be wilder still. Actually there is a great deal of evidence of dolphins and porpoises simply seeking out the company both of human beings and their ships without anyone's scratching anyone. There are also several very interesting possible reasons for their particular tendency to play round the bows of ships. First, they sometimes skilfully ride on the bow wave. Second, they are known to have very keen hearing and to be interested in noises; they may like the sound of the engines. Third and perhaps most intriguing, baby dolphins often play around the heads of their mothers and rub up against them-do adult dophins in some sense treat a ship as a super-parent? Since their play is so varied, it is not likely that any one of these explanations would cover it all. Quite long and careful observations would be needed to check which factors made dolphins come and go, which led to what sort of behaviour. Pelorus Jack's acquaintance, however, did not need all that. He just knew- in virtue of the law I have mentioned. I do not like to be too hasty in judging people, but it really does seem hard to understand what people have in mind who reason like this, unless it is the crashing blunder of confusing talk about emotions with emotional or emotive talk. Those who take this line tend strongly to reduce every case of interspecies communication to that of the standard Old Lady with a Fat Pekinese. It should be clear that, if the pekinese is fat and the lady mistaken about his feelings, we have here a case of incompetent pet-keeping. And it is not competence that we are talking about. Plenty of people however will go further and say that pet-keeping itself, however well-conducted, is necessarily perverse, sentimental and ruinous ;4 worse still, they often say it is British. (This last stab seems to be one of

3Antony Alpers, A Book of Dolphins (London: John Murray, i965), chapter on Pelorus Jack. 4 There is also a frequent assumption that people who are attached to an animal are necessarily neglecting human beings in consequence. If so, it is a separate offence, and is just as likely to happen from loving the wrong human being as from loving an animal. But the effect of loving anybody can just as easily be to make loving others more possible. A dog often bridges a lonely person's way back into human life. Anyway, people must love whom they can.

388

This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:35:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Discussion

those pieces of Left-Bank Parisian propaganda which so confused British intellectuals early in the century. I lately saw a survey of pets' cemeteries in France which made it clear that they were so far lusher than the British as to cast in the shade the similar difference in human cemeteries in the two countries. . . .) Now certainly it is true that pet-keeping is only one small area in our relations with animals, and one that misleads if it is taken as a model for the whole. But you do not have to belong to a perverse and over-civilized Britain to go in for it. Hear the Prophet Nathan-

'The poor man had nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had brought and nourished up, and it grew up together with him and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. 'And the rich man . . . took the poor man's lamb and (killed it and) dressed it. And King David's anger was greatly kindled against the (rich) man- and he said unto Nathan, 'As the Lord liveth, the man that has done this thing shall surely die' (2 Samuel xii, 3-5).

King David did not say, 'serve him right for his sentimental perversity; why did he not adopt a human orphan?' Some people, however, will surely think that he ought to have done so; that no creature ought seriously to concern us which is not of our own species, whether in our personal life (like pets) or on a larger scale, in such matters as not destroying other species. It is certainly held that we can only be 'justified' in recognizing any claim from beyond the species barrier if the claim is indirectly a human one; if the creature in question will somehow (at least spiritually) be fit for human consumption. It is time, I think, that some reason was offered for this extraordinary assumption. Spinoza, when he undertook to do this, produced what may be the prize exhibit in a competition for examples of bad argument by good philosophers (Ethics, Part IV, prop. 37, note i). Descartes runs him close-notably in a letter to Henry More (5 February i649). These and other similar per- formances before the present century make an extraordinary effect of negligence, of arguing something which is so obvious that it can hardly be expressed. Descartes brushes Montaigne aside like an absurd intrusive bluebottle; it seemed unquestionable to him that the only possible ground of moral obligation was fully developed human reason. But today nobody subscribes to this sort of extreme and dogmatic rationalism. In any other context it would provoke instant derision. Can anybody show reason why it should be taken seriously here?

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

389

This content downloaded from 141.218.30.136 on Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:35:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms