Was the Entire Universe Made for Man?

by Dmitry Chernikov
by Dmitry Chernikov

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Recently I and the proprietor of the Just Thomism blog have had a lively discussion on the subject of whether the entire universe was made for man, for his study, use, and enjoyment. JT wrote:

A human being has dominion over anything he can simply take and use. But if there were good things lying around in the far reaches of the cosmos – a pile of gold or a cure for cancer, for example, not only would man simply take them and use them, he would have a moral obligation to take some of them if he could. And so the rational nature has some dominion over all the things in the universe. And so there is some sense in which the universe is for the rational nature.

To which I replied that we can consider a case when a parasitic worm infects a living human or of a mosquito biting someone who is alive, or of a disease-causing virus that replicates by using living cells. These animals are higher than humans in the food chain: they use us to live and procreate. Why can’t we say that these living pests have dominion over living humans?

JT pointed out that "Consider also that the worm, and any other merely animal nature, can only use what is present to it by sensation. A worm can only use whatever it bumps into, and even a higher animal cannot use the whole universe, for it does not have an awareness of the whole as whole, and therefore can have no order to it directly."

I replied again that

I agree that non-human animals can never have dominion over Alpha Centauri, say. Directly. But indirectly, sure. Suppose humans find a habitable planet in that star system. The worms, mosquitoes, and viruses can travel to that planet with the colonists, perhaps unbeknownst to them. Or there may be native bugs there. Perhaps the good Lord has intended to grow parasitic worms for His own inscrutable ends, and created us as vehicles for spreading the nasties. …

We have to separate man from the non-human animals prior to any talk of the specialness of man. Just by looking at nature in the aspect of it where things devour each other in an endless and merciless "circle of life" will not get us to humans made in God’s image and likeness. An example of such separation would be Aquinas’s "argument from desire."

So much for the claim to actual dominion. But perhaps what JT means is that humans have a rightful if not always perfect dominion over nature. Hence I argued that

It would be good for the doctor to "cut out the worm and heal the man" and bad to "insist that the man live to support the worm."

The worm might disagree, though. So again, the rightfulness of man’s dominion over nature cannot be deduced by natural reason. We need something like Gen 1:26. What we can say in the absence of revelation is that man is the kind of creature who will naturally appropriate and use resources, convert them into capital and then consumer goods, and ultimately build civilizations. What suggests that man’s control over nature is rightfully his may be his very accomplishments in understanding and controlling it. If nature is to belong to someone, it may as well be man, because he knows what to do with it better than and enjoys the fruits of his labor more than any other creature.

JT countered that "one does not need to consult Genesis to swat a mosquito," to which I replied that it was still necessary to justify killing the mosquito. "Consulting the book of Genesis," I added, "lets you swat the mosquito. It’s an easy way out. But can we justify briefly ending the little bastard without using divine revelation?"

For example, a recent article on mises.org reprinted a chapter of The Ethics of Liberty called "The ‘Rights’ of Animals." Has Rothbard defended the human-centered natural law successfully? He writes:

In short, man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual man's capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. In short, man is a rational and social animal. No other animals or beings possess this ability to reason, to make conscious choices, to transform their environment in order to prosper, or to collaborate consciously in society and the division of labor.

Or, as Mises puts it,

What elevates man above all other animals is the cognition that peaceful cooperation under the principle of the division of labor is a better method to preserve life and to remove felt uneasiness than indulging in pitiless biological competition for a share in the scarce means of subsistence provided by nature. Guided by this insight, man alone among all living beings consciously aims at substituting social cooperation for what philosophers have called the state of nature or bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all] or the law of the jungle.

But how does the rightfulness of man’s dominion over all other animals follow from the all this? Another Mises quote seems to seal the argument:

Praxeology and economics do not say that men should peacefully cooperate within the frame of societal bonds; they merely say that men must act this way if they want to make their actions more successful than otherwise. Compliance with the moral rules which the establishment, preservation, and intensification of social cooperation require is not seen as a sacrifice to a mythical entity, but as the recourse to the most efficient methods of action, as a price expended for the attainment of more highly valued returns.

So, moral rules and their enforcement are in place in order to further human happiness. Animals cannot be forced to obey these rules and, in obeying them, increase general happiness, as praxeology promises. And because they don’t contribute to moral productive actions, they don’t receive consideration from humans either. Their happiness is simply not taken into account. Animals cannot participate in social cooperation, nor reap the fruits of social cooperation; they are merely objects which humans use in the process of such cooperation.

But why should that be so? It’s not enough, for example, to say that animals do not respect the "rights" of other animals – wolves don’t respect the rights of their "fellow" wolves, either, but humans respect the rights of their fellow humans. Perhaps they ought to respect the rights of lower animals, too. Indeed, we can learn little of ethics by studying the behavior of irrational animals.

Rothbard’s argument, I believe, is that natural law, which is the science of human happiness, and natural rights, which are the rights securing the means to happiness, particularly, to private justly acquired property, are limited to humans, because we are considering their nature only and not the nature of lower animals. But this invites the charge of speciesism. Should we ignore animals? Surely, we have some things in common with them. Perhaps the "nature" to be considered should be the "animal" nature in general rather than the merely "human" nature. Now since I and a mosquito biting me are enemies, my gain is its loss and its gain is my loss. The question is, why shouldn’t animals figure in, for instance, our utilitarian calculations? (E.g., if I lose, I lose only a minute amount of blood. If the mosquito loses, it loses its life.) Perhaps they indeed should not, because our benevolence should be extended to humans only. Or we should also extend charity to animals and allow them to appear conspicuously in our processes of deciding on the right courses of action.

At this point the solution to the problem becomes evident. Since charity is a kind of friendship, it is impossible to offer it to irrational animals, and this for three reasons. First, the goods that such animals can possess are trivial: health, freedom from hunger and thirst, and, perhaps, some sensual pleasure. This means that one’s love for them, i.e., willing them good, is highly attenuated. And even those goods they are not competent to own, since they acquire them by instinct, according to the "law of the jungle," or by human fiat in the case of pets rather than by an exercise of reason and free choice or personal autonomy. For example, a cheetah’s kill is not its "rightful property"; a pack of hyenas can steal it, yet nobody’s rights are violated.

Second, friendship depends crucially on a certain "fellowship in life," that is, community of interest, activity, feeling, or experience in a company of equals. But human life is regulated by reason. This means that animals cannot participate in either the active or the contemplative life as equals and friends to man but only as his tools.

And as Aquinas points out, "The third reason is proper to charity, for charity is based on the fellowship of everlasting happiness, to which the irrational creature cannot attain. Therefore we cannot have the friendship of charity towards an irrational creature."

It follows from these that the welfare of animals need not necessarily be our concern. This is because the beloved is another self, so that one works for the beloved’s happiness as if it were one’s own. Thus, the more one loves a creature, the more important its welfare becomes in one’s moral deliberations, and conversely, the less one loves it, the less weight is placed on its utility. (Note, by the way, that love is the key to interpersonal utility comparisons.) But if animals are not to be loved out of charity simpliciter, how are we to love them? According to Aquinas, "we can love irrational creatures out of charity, if we regard them as the good things that we desire for others, in so far, to wit, as we wish for their preservation, to God's honor and man's use." It is true that people get attached to animals and value their well-being, but it is clear that even if we have moral obligations to animals, they will be much less important to us than obligations to humans. Further, even pets and laboratory mice can count only on our solicitude for their welfare; whatever rights they have are supervenient on their status as property of humans.

But what of the The Argument from Marginal Cases? The argument consists in comparing certain humans, such as infants, the senile, the brain-damaged, those in a coma, and the like, whom I will call "unactualized" humans, to animals and says that if we are willing to grant rights to the former, we should also grant rights to the latter, because the latter’s capacities, powers, etc. are at least as great as the former’s. Is it possible to offer a satisfactory response to this? I believe so.

Now first, the reason why positive rights appertain to unactualized humans is that there is most of the time somebody who is willing to care for them and to protect them against the death they would surely suffer if they attempted to be autonomous. Children are guarded by the parents, the senile by their children or by the staff in nursing homes paid by their children; those in a coma are also paid for to remain on life-support; and the insane are institutionalized and supported by charities. I would argue that humans who figure in marginal cases really don’t have positive rights. For example, Rothbard famously argued that children have no claim on their parents to take care of them: "a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also… the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligation would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights."

But what of negative rights? Should animals be "left alone"? The differences between unactualized humans and animals are: (1) their species, (2) their potentialities, (3) their eternal destiny. With respect to the first, a few of the arguments that man’s nature entails his species’ rightful control over all the things in this world have already been given. Another possibility that would speak in favor of this conclusion is that animals have an only weakened personal identity. When they feel pain, it is not clear that there is an identifiable person feeling the pain, someone who can ask "Why me?" Further, we have a moral duty to help our fellow men, to do works of mercy, and the like. I think you will agree that we have no such duty towards animals. Why, then, assume that we have a moral duty not to harm animals? (E.g., from the utilitarian standpoint, helping and not harming are two sides of the same coin. If there is no moral duty to do the former, then where does the duty to do the latter come from?) And if no moral duty, then whence legal duty? Finally, as stated above, human beings are just the kind of animals who will use irrational beasts for their own benefit. We can talk all day about moral duties, but if humans can’t be stopped from using animals, all such talk is vain. (E.g., one reason socialism cannot work is that the state can’t crush all individuals into mindless obedience, no matter how hard it tries.)

In addition, the argument from marginal cases proves far too much. If animals have rights not to be aggressed against, then no human attempts to dispose of predators, control animal populations, protect their crops and livestock, kill harmful bacteria, drain swamps and cut down trees and thereby destroy "ecosystems," and so on, can be legitimate. In other words, we can’t leave animals alone. And if our animal rightist will object that he has no intention to disallow such activities, then why not also permit humans to eat animals? Or use them for medical research? A person who sits comfortably in his house, safe from nature’s assaults, can entertain dreams of blissful communion with nature. Unfortunately, in the real world, such dreams are nonsense.

With respect to the second, the unactualized humans are such only accidentally; in some possible world they are fully functional or grown, whereas there is no possible world in which a chimp can learn abstract thinking. A potentiality is not non-existence; hence we protect unactualized humans by force of law in order to preserve the unity and metaphysical dignity of the human race. In addition, it would be too risky to live in a society in which you have no (negative) rights as a child or lose your rights should you become incompetent: it is less costly to impose on all the duty to respect the rights of unactualized humans at the benefit of your continuing to enjoy such rights as a child or if you happen to become unactualized than the converse. But no human can turn into a monkey during his life, so the foregoing argument is no reason to grant rights to animals.

And this brings us to the final point. Humans have dignity that goes beyond what we appear to be, viz., clever apes. We have immortal souls, and God sorts them out according to His divine wisdom even if a person dies as an infant or becomes brain damaged during his life. How He does it is unknown, but it is clear that even unbaptized infants receive immortality and at least natural happiness, perhaps more, for God’s mercy is beyond our reckoning. Even unactualized humans are fully-fledged members of the brotherhood of men and even of the communion of saints. Animals can’t be part of any of these. Therefore, human rights and duties grounded in human dignity, such as "Thou shalt not kill," cannot extend to them.

And then there is Gen 1:26.

July 12, 2007

Dmitry Chernikov [send him mail] is a graduate student in philosophy at Kent State University. See his website.

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