In thinking about Imanuel Kant's "Duties Towards Animals and Spirits," I could not help but think about a movie I have enjoyed consistently for the past 13 years, My Dog Skip, the coming of age story of small town, big brained Willie Morris and his precious dog, Skip.
In My Dog Skip (I'm trying really hard not to ruin it in case you haven't seen it (in which case holler at me and i'll give you my amazon prime password to watch it ASAP)) there is a scene in which Skip, as what now we must understand is a thoughtless, feelingless dog, runs around Willie's baseball game stealing the show and ruining the game until havoc wreaks and Willie incurs harm on Skip. At the moment Willie does this, the whole town watching this little league game shrieks in terror that this kind hearted boy would hurt his dog. The way the fans react is exactly what Kant argues, "he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals"(82). Willie shortly after realizes just how wrong he was and just how much he can and did learn from his dog, causing him to go great distances to find him, something Kant would think of as an unnecessary direct action. I think a duty implies it is universal and ethical answer or action, so this one instance cannot exactly disprove the indirectness of animals to humans.When Willie is good to the dog, the whole town knows who both Willie and Skip are and this unpopular boy gets friends-pretty unbelievable display of treating an animal as a neighbor. Later in this brilliant film, there is a moonshining bad guy who desperately wants to hurt or kill Skip because he thinks Skip is annoying. Despite Skip's being like 15 inches tall and what most of the philosophers have deemed thoughtless, the moonshiner believes Skip is getting in the way of some serious bad guy business. The moonshiner acts as Kant would suggest is not justified because "cruelty for sport cannot be justified"(82). Willie was not trying to be a bad person when he hit Skip, but he improperly tried to attribute a consequence and physical punishment onto Skip for his behavior.
--Back to hurting animals for a consequence to their poor behavior-- Let us say that animals do not have feeling, and they are on earth to reflect human morals because what you treat something that cannot retaliate and has no direct duty onto humans and humans onto it should foil one's own values. If these creatures exist for humans, and humankind is the center, as this "Anthropocentrism" section in our compilation argues, there is no reason for humans to purposefully treat an animal badly, ever, which seems more like an argument for animals than humans.
Kant's argument opens the door for anthropocentrism in a new light, one of morals; in order to be human, one must limit as much destruction as possible (83) because indirect duty is attached to everything.
This makes me question why aren't more people more conscience? I hope we all think animal crush videos are bad and evil, but where does the disconnect come from when we don't feel bad about printing off too much paper or even swatting a fly?
Is Kant right? Does his weird spirit argument seem like Newton's (sorry I don't really address it here, I touched on it on Maggie's post-check her's out!)
Were does that disconnect come from?
ReplyDeleteI think the disconnect you are talking about stems from what Kant describes as "any such cruelty for sport cannot be justified" (82). This phrasing is ambiguous and creates a large gray area in which the lines between "sport" and "use" are difficult to separate. This poses the question of when does an act go from being for the betterment of human kind (land development, fuel, food) and become just for sport. The argument could be made that hardly anything that humans do is for sport, instead we perform these harmful actions with a purpose that is beneficial to our own livelihood .