The Species-Limit of Politics

So I recently started reading Scott Alexander's blog Slate Star Codex and boy is it fascinating. Scott is a member of the, ahem, rationalist community (maybe subculture is a better word?) associated with sites like Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias, and they're really not nearly as irritating as you'd think; I got back into them because I saw them linked in some extremely sensible discussions of the everyday problems of polyamory, for instance. Plus reading a genuine rationalist (as opposed to a rhetorician, or a mystic) is always salutary, because even when they're wrong, the progress of their argument reveals (rather than obscuring) the flaw in their premise.

For instance: Scott, a vegetarian himself, notes that most people agree that we should care to some degree about the suffering of animals, although most would agree that they're not quite as important as humans. So let's put a number on this, he suggests:

If it takes a thousand chickens to have the moral weight of one human, the importance of chicken suffering alone is probably within an order of magnitude of all human suffering. You would need to set your weights remarkably precisely for the values of global animal suffering and global human suffering to even be in the same ballpark. Barring that amazing coincidence, either you shouldn’t care about animals at all or they should totally swamp every other concern. Most of what would seem like otherwise reasonable premises suggest the “totally swamp every other concern” branch.

If you accept that the suffering of animals is a political issue, it should become almost the sole political issue, since there are a lot of animals out there, after all.

Scott's conclusion is that as a matter of fact animal suffering really should be far more important to him than it has been so far, and that the fact that it isn't reflects his atavistic and irrational tribalism. The progress of mankind has consisted in the steady extension of sympathy, from clan to nation to mankind as a whole; isn't the next step an extension beyond the boundaries of mankind? Wouldn't anything less be arbitrary human chauvinism, a sort of higher nationalism? He ought to devote most of his resources to the political program of ending animal suffering.

Hm.

---

My question is: what does the realization of such a political program look like? Suppose passionate, intelligent people like Scott devote all their energy to ending animal suffering, and at long last they achieve victory: what does that world look like?

Well, first of all, in this world everyone is vegetarian, so must domestic animals go virtually extinct. The global cow population drops from its current 1.4 billion to a few thousand kept in zoos for historical interest.

Second, and more interesting, it ought to be recalled that we humans aren't the only animals who eat other animals. Naturally if we think a gazelle's suffering is as important as a child's, we can't allow gazelles to be eaten by lions all the time any more than we could allow children to be so eaten. Perhaps we decide to kill off all lions--their suffering pains us, but just as we inflict suffering on criminal humans to protect innocent humans, we'll punish lions to save gazelles. But perhaps we find another way: we remove lions from the wild, where they will eat gazelles, and keep them in enormous zoos where they're fed on gazelle-flavored tofu product. Likewise with all the hawks, owls, wolves, cats, etc.

But--I can hear the ecologists jostling back there--this solution creates its own problem: Absent predators to regulate their population, gazelle populations will explode until they exhaust all available resources, at which point they'll face mass starvation. Now we don't allow humans to starve, or at least we shouldn't--how can we refuse to protect gazelles? Simply sending in UN relief workers to feed them won't work, since they'll just continue breeding. So we'll have no choice but to control their breeding through a massive ecological birth-control program, and similarly with all other prey animals.

---

My point is not that such solutions are "absurd"--to assert that would be to beg the question. My point is that the only way to realize an end to animal suffering would be through a vast and intense application of human "biopolitical" technologies to animals, in order to "humanize" them.

I think it's not too much to say that such a program to end animal suffering would, ironically enough, destroy the animal world as such. Lions would still exist in one sense, as organisms, but a lion who doesn't hunt and is fed tofu is like a human who doesn't live in a society and doesn't speak: if those were the only sorts of humans left in the world, I think we'd be justified in saying that "humanity" no longer existed. Analogously, animals whose entire natural ecology had been entirely destroyed and replaced by human technologies would scarcely still be animals. (And domestic animals, whose natural ecology is already humanity, would largely disappear.)

---

My interest in this thought experiment has nothing to do with refuting animal-rights politics, which after all is not a force in the world. Rather, I'm interested in the sense in which humans are the only political animals--the only animals who can be the object of properly political concern. Simply put, to end the suffering of gazelles would require a wholesale change in their way of life, and gazelles of course can neither conceive nor enact any such a change. If it is to be done at all it will be done by humans, and gazelles will be its passive object; they will understand it neither before nor after it occurs. Thus any project to end the suffering of gazelles will entail their ever-increasing domination by humans. Hayek's attitude to politics in The Road to Serfdom is correct here: for beings who can never become political agents, a project to improve their lives can only be a project to decrease their freedom. Hayek applies this dictum to humans simply because he believes that the mass can only ever be an animal.

But humans are different: humans collectively can decide (for instance) that their overpopulation is likely to lead to famine, and change their breeding habits accordingly. Humans collectively (and to a fair lesser extent, individually) can transform their way-of-life in such a way that decreased suffering goes hand-in-hand with increased liberty. The political community extends to every human because in the era of global capitalism, collective decisions concerning way-of-life can be made only on the scale of the universal. But the political community can never extend beyond the human because while non-humans can be the object of political action, they can never be its subjects.