Seoulscapade

Peter Singer
The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures 2007

Throughout Western civilization, nonhuman animals have been seen as beings of no ethical significance, or at best, of very minor significance. Aristotle thought that animals exist for the sake of more rational humans, to provide them with food and clothing. In the book of Genesis, man is given dominion over the animals, and only humans are made in God’s image. St Paul asked “Doth God care for oxen?” but it was a rhetorical question – he assumed that the answer was obviously no. Later Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas reinforced this view, denying that the suffering of animals is any reason, in itself, for not harming them or for showing kindness towards them. (The only reason they offered for not being cruel to animals was that it may lead to cruelty to humans; the animals themselves were of no account.)

Most Western philosophers accepted this attitude. Descartes even denied that animals can suffer. Kant did not, but he thought only rational beings can be ends in themselves, and animals are mere means. There were, however, a few exceptions to this dominant attitude. Montaigne challenged human arrogance, and Hume thought we owed “gentle usage”, although not justice, to animals. The strongest dissent to the dominant view came from the British utilitarian writers, Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, each of whom insisted that the suffering of animals matters in itself. Bentham went so far as to look forward to the day when animals will be recognized as having rights. But even the classical utilitarians relegated their comments on animals to the margins of their philosophical writings. Their thinking was influential in leading to laws that sought to prohibit gross acts of cruelty to animals, but it did not lead to reconsideration of the assumption of the priority of human interests when they conflict with the interests of animals.

In the East, the tradition is different. Both in Hinduism and in Buddhism, humans and animals are seen as closely connected. The Hindu idea that we may be reincarnated as an animal links us to animals in a way that is completely abhorrent to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. Compassion for all sentient beings is at the core of Buddhist teachings. Both the Indian king Ashoka, and the Tokugawa shogun Tsunayoshi, known as the “dog shogun” were far ahead of their Western contemporaries in making laws to protect animals. Nevertheless, in Buddhism animals are thought of as “lower” than humans – it is clearly a negative thing to be born as an animal. And while it would seem that the Buddhist precept of compassion to all sentient beings would lead to radically different practices towards animals, in fact we find that practices towards animals do not differ significantly between Buddhist and Western countries.

Against this background, let me introduce my own ideas. More than thirty years ago, I published an article in The New York Review of Books that began with these words:

We are familiar with Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, and a variety of other movements. With Women’s Liberation some thought we had come to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the last form of discrimination that is universally accepted and practiced without pretense, even in those liberal circles which have long prided themselves on their freedom from racial discrimination. But one should always be wary of talking of “the last remaining form of discrimination.”

In the text that followed, I urged that despite obvious differences between humans and nonhuman animals, we share with them a capacity to suffer, and this means that they, like us, have interests. If we ignore or discount their interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists or sexists who thinks that those who belong to their race or sex have superior moral status, simply in virtue of their race or sex, and irrespective of other characteristics or qualities. Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or other intellectual capacities to non-human animals, that is not enough to justify the line we draw between humans and animals. Some humans –infants, and those with severe intellectual disabilities – have intellectual capacities inferior to some animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to test the safety of household products. Nor, of course, would we tolerate confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them. The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is therefore a sign of “speciesism” – a prejudice that survives because it is convenient for the dominant group – in this case, not whites or males, but all humans.

In the early 1970s, to an extent barely credible today, scarcely anyone thought that the treatment of individual animals raised an ethical issue worth taking seriously. There were no animal rights or animal liberation organizations. Animal welfare was an issue for cat and dog lovers, best ignored by people with more important things to write about.

Today the situation is very different. Issues about our treatment of animals are often in the news. Animal rights organizations are active in all the industrialized nations and have had a significant influence in some. A lively intellectual debate has sprung up. (The most comprehensive bibliography of writings on the moral status of animals lists only 94 works in the first 1970 years of the Christian era, and 240 works from 1970 and 1988, when the bibliography was completed. The tally now would be in the thousands.) Nor is this debate simply a Western phenomenon – leading works on animals and ethics have been translated into most of the world’s major languages, including Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

How well has the position I outlined in that first venture into this field stood up to the variety of criticisms and arguments that have been raised against it over the last thirty years?

To assess the debate, it helps to distinguish two questions. First, can speciesism itself – the idea that it is justifiable to give preference to beings simply on the grounds that they are members of the species Homo sapiens – be defended? And secondly, if speciesism cannot be defended, are there other characteristics about human beings that justify us in placing much more moral significance on what happens to human beings than on what happens to nonhuman animals?

The view that species is in itself a reason for treating some beings as morally more significant than others is often assumed but rarely defended. Some who write as if they are defending “speciesism” are in fact defending an affirmative answer to the second question, arguing that there are morally relevant differences between human beings and other animals that entitle us to give more weight to the interests of humans. The late Bernard Williams, however, defended speciesism in an unpublished paper entitled “The Human Prejudice” which will be published in a forthcoming collection of his essays, and also, with my response, in a collection of critical essays about my work to be called Singer Under Fire. Since Williams is the most distinguished and able philosopher to have attempted to defend speciesism against my own critique of it, I will spend a little time discussing his defense.

Williams begins with a discussion of different possible views of the place of human beings in the universe. He rejects religious and anthropocentric views according to which the universe revolves around us, either literally or metaphorically. But the problem with such views, he says, is not merely that we overestimate our significance from the cosmic point of view, but that we assume that there is such a thing as a “cosmic point of view” at all. Hence the claim that we have some, but perhaps relatively little, significance, is rejected as a muddle. Instead Williams prefers the Nietzschean view that “once upon a time there was a star in a corner of the universe, and a planet circling that star, and on it some clever creatures who invented knowledge; and then they died, and the star went out, and it was as though nothing had happened.”

It may be that human existence, or even all sentient life on this planet, will one day come to an end, and it will be “as though nothing had happened,” but in fact something will have happened, and there is no muddle involved in thinking that the universe will, timelessly, have been worse if all sentient beings who ever lived on this planet lived in unrelieved misery than it would have been if the lives of all these beings was filled with happiness and satisfaction. Just how much of a difference this will make in any overall judgment of the state of the universe will depend on something we do not know: the proportion of sentient life in the universe as a whole that is to be found on this planet. In the unlikely event that the Earth is the only place in the universe where sentient beings exist, or ever will exist, then our judgment of how well the universe has gone will depend entirely on how well the existence of sentient beings on Earth has gone. But if our planet is only one among billions of planets, each of which had, has, or will have, billions of sentient beings, then how well sentient existence on our planet goes is a very minor factor in any overall judgment of how well the universe goes.

To say this does not involve the quasi-religious claim that the universe actually has a purpose or a point of view. But the denial of a purposeful universe does not compel us to accept that the only sense in which our existence matters is that it matters to us. We can still maintain that our lives, and the satisfaction or frustration of our preferences, matters objectively. At least, there is nothing that Nietzsche, or Williams, says that refutes this possibility. All that is needed is the ability to imagine an impartial observer who puts herself in the position of all of the sentient beings involved, and considers which of various possible universes she would prefer, if she were living all those lives.

Williams’ purpose in arguing against the idea of a cosmic point of view is to suggest that all our values are necessarily “human values.” Of course, in one sense, they are. Since we have yet to encounter any nonhumans who articulate, reflect upon and discuss their values, all the values we have are human, or at least have been developed by human beings from behavioral dispositions we inherited from our pre-human ancestors. Still, the fact that our values are human in this sense does not exclude the possibility that our distinctively human nature includes an ability to develop values that would be accepted by any rational being capable of empathy with other beings. Nor – and this is the most important point – does the human nature of our values tell us anything about what our values can or should be, and in particular, whether we should value the pains, pleasures and lives of nonhuman animals less highly than we value our own pains, pleasures and lives.

Williams, to his credit, does not attempt to argue that because our values are human values, concern for animals is somehow misguided. On the contrary, he acknowledges that “it is itself part of a human, or humane, outlook to be concerned with how animals should be treated, and there is nothing in what I have said to suggest that we should not be concerned with that.” Instead Williams’s argument is directed to the idea that we do not have to justify having a bias or prejudice in favor of human beings over other animals

As we have seen, from the very beginning of my writing on these issues, I have drawn parallels between racism, sexism and speciesism. In each of these instances, I argue, a dominant group develops an ideology that justifies treating outsiders in ways that are to its benefit. This ideology also disregards or discounts the interests of these outsiders – they simply don’t matter as much as the interests of the insiders do. The analogy between racism, sexism and speciesism is useful, in part because it leads us to see humans, not as the only beings who matter, but as a dominant group that uses other beings for its own ends. Moreover, the analogy raises questions about the use of mere biological differences as the justification for differences in how much consideration we give to others.

To this analogy, Williams objects that speciesism is not like racism or sexism, and is not morally objectionable. It is true, of course, that the parallel between racism, sexism and speciesism is inexact. Williams gives some of the reasons why this is so. The differences between normal humans and, say, kangaroos, are vastly greater than the differences between people of different races, or between men and women. I said that myself in the first edition of Animal Liberation, when I wrote: “There are many areas in which the superior mental powers of normal adult humans make a difference: anticipation, more detailed memory, greater knowledge of what is happening, and so on.” The claim that speciesism is morally objectionable is not affected by such arguments, because I define specisism as discrimination on the basis of species, not as discrimination on the basis of superior mental powers, even if those superior mental powers typically are possessed by members of our species and not by members of other species.

The most curious aspect of Williams’s discussion of speciesism, however, is that he never discusses the cases in which this discrimination is most evident – cases involving human beings who do not have mental powers who are superior to those of a dog or a pig, but nevertheless are accorded the same superior moral status as other humans. Consider the fact that we are prepared to subject chimpanzees, monkeys, pigs and dogs to painful and lethal experiments, when we regard it as a violation of human rights to subject humans to such experiments – and here, “humans” includes humans who, perhaps because of a genetic abnormality, or an accident at birth, never have had, nor will have, intellectual abilities comparable to these animals. Does this not show a prejudice in favor of humans that has nothing to do with mental abilities or with any of the other features that Williams discusses in distinguishing humans from nonhuman animals? Any one who defends our present treatment of animals needs to respond to this possibility. It is not, after all, a purely hypothetical one. In many instances, the use of severely brain-damaged human beings would be beneficial for medical science, because there are significant differences between species, and results from research on nonhuman animals can be misleading. Yet we refuse to contemplate such research, while continuing all the time to do millions of experiments on nonhuman animals at a higher level of intellectual awareness than at least some of these humans.

When it comes to the crunch, Williams last resort in defense of “the human prejudice” is surprisingly crude. He asks us to imagine that our planet has been colonized by benevolent, fair-minded and far-sighted aliens who, no doubt fair-mindedly and on the basis of full information, judge it necessary to “remove us” – that is, kill us. In this situation, Williams says, we should not discuss the rights and wrongs of the aliens’ policies. Even if they are acting fairly and for the greater good of all, the only question, Williams thinks, is: “Which side are you on?”

It’s odd that Williams should first deny the analogy between racism and speciesism, and then resort to “which side are you on?” as the ultimate bulwark of his argument. For it is a question we have heard before. In times of war, or racial, ethnic, religious or ideological conflict, it is used to evoke group solidarity and suggest that any questioning of the struggle is treason. McCarthyists asked it of those who opposed their methods of fighting communism, and now the Bush administration has used it against its critics to imply that by criticizing the policies of the administration, they are giving support to terrorists. “Which side are you on?” divides the world into “us” and “them” and demands that the mere fact of this division transcend ethical issues about what is the right thing to do.

In these circumstances, the right thing to do, and the courageous thing to do, is not to listen to the tribal instincts that prompt us to say “My tribe (country, race, ethnic group, religion, species, etc) right or wrong” but to say: “I’m on the side that does what is right.” Although it is fantastic to imagine that a fair-minded, well-informed, far-sighted judge could ever decide that there was no alternative to the “removal” of our species in order to avoid much greater injustice and misery, if this really were the case, we should reject the tribal – or species – instinct, and answer Williams’s question in the same way, by being on the side that does what is right.

Before leaving this issue of the parallel between racism and speciesism, I should mention one other argument that has been made in defense of speciesism: the claim that just as parents have a special obligation to care for their own children in preference to the children of strangers, so we have a special obligation to other members of our species in preference to members of other species.

Advocates of this position usually pass in silence over the obvious case that lies between the family and the species. For example, Lewis Petrinovich, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and an authority on ornithology and evolution, says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives – and then lists “children, kin, neighbors, and species.” If the argument works for both the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere of the species, it should also work for the middle case: race. But Petrinovich is plainly to embarrassed to draw that conclusion. An argument that supported preferring the interests of members of our own race over those of members of other races would be less persuasive, today, than one that allowed priority only for kin, neighbors, and members of our species. But if race is not a morally relevant boundary, why should species be morally relevant?

In 1983, Robert Nozick argued that we can’t infer much from the fact that we do not yet have a theory of the moral importance of species membership, because the issue had not, until recently, seemed pressing, and so no one had spent much time trying to formulate such a theory. Since Nozick wrote that, however, many philosophers have given a great deal of attention to the issue of the moral importance, or otherwise, of species membership, but none of them has succeeded in saying anything at all convincing. Nozick’s comment therefore has taken on a different significance. It seems increasingly likely that there can be no successful justification of it.

That takes us to the second question. If species is not morally important in itself, is there something else that happens to coincide with the species boundary, on the basis of which we can justify the inferior consideration we give to nonhuman animals?

Those who regard morality as a kind of social contract say that it is the lack of a capacity to reciprocate. Peter Carruthers, for example, argues that ethics arises out of an agreement that if I do not harm you, you will not harm me. Since animals cannot take part in this social contract we have no direct duties to them. The difficulty with this approach to ethics is that it also means we have no direct duties to small children, or to future generations yet unborn. If we produce radioactive waste that will be deadly for thousands of years, is it unethical to put it into a container that will last 150 years and then drop it into a convenient lake? If it is, ethics cannot be based on reciprocity.

Many other ways of marking the special moral significance of human beings have been suggested: the ability to reason, self-awareness, possessing a sense of justice, language, autonomy, and so on. But the problem with all of these allegedly distinguishing marks is, as noted above in our discussion of Williams, that some humans are entirely lacking in these characteristics and few want to consign these humans to the same moral category as nonhuman animals.

The appeal to our treatment of human beings whose intellectual abilities are not superior to those of nonhuman animals, in order to demonstrate the speciesism of our existing practices towards animals, has become known by the tactless label of “the argument from marginal cases.” It is a powerful argument against the way we currently draw the boundary between beings with special moral status and beings who lack that status, but it also shows that a critique of speciesism has implications for how we think about humans, as well as how we think about animals. These implications some find alarming. I shall discuss them more fully in my next lecture. For the purposes of today’s discussion, only a brief summary of the issue is necessary. If we accept the prevailing moral rhetoric that asserts that all humans have the same set of basic rights, irrespective of their intellectual level, the fact that many nonhuman animals – let’s say, at least, all normal birds and mammals – are as rational, self-aware and autonomous as some human beings looks like a firm basis for asserting that all animals have these basic rights, including, presumably, a right to life. If, on the other hand, humans with profound intellectual disabilities are as lacking in rights as we currently believe nonhuman animals at the same mental level are, then it seems that we may use these humans in painful and lethal research, as we currently do with nonhuman animals.

Some argue that because in normal conditions human beings are members of a moral community protected by rights, abnormality does not cancel membership of this community. Thus Roger Scruton claims that even though humans with profound intellectual disability do not really have the same claims on us as normal humans, we would do well to treat them as if they did. But slave-owning societies had no difficulty in drawing lines between humans with rights and humans without rights. Nor is it clear why humans are to be elevated above other animals because of the characteristics they normally possess, rather than those they actually have. This argument seems to appeal to a kind of unfairness in excluding those who “fortuitously” fail to have the required characteristics. If the “fortuitousness” is merely statistical, it carries no moral relevance, and if it is intended to suggest that the lack of the required characteristics is not the fault of the abnormal humans, then that is not a basis for separating abnormal humans from nonhuman animals.

I conclude that the debate of the past thirty years has not revealed any fundamental objections to the idea that all sentient beings – all beings with interests – are entitled to equal consideration of their interests. Such a position does, however, face the inevitable difficulties of estimating what those interests are. The interest a being has in continued life – and hence the wrongness of taking that being’s life – will depend in part on whether the being is aware of itself as existing over time, and is capable of forming future-directed desires. A being who is incapable of seeing itself as existing over time cannot want to go on living, and so death cannot thwart that desire. To that extent characteristics like self-awareness and a sense of the future do make a difference to how serious a harm is done by killing a being. It might be objected that even a fish will struggle for its life if it is pulled out of the water. Is this a sign that it is self-aware, and wants to go on living? But the answer is that it is not. A fish pulled out of the water is certainly in distress, because it cannot breathe, and it presumably is suffering as it slowly suffocates. It struggles because of that distress, but it would be wrong to draw from that struggle the conclusion that it knows that it exists over time, and wants to continue to live.) Again, I shall say more about this issue of the wrongness of killing in the next lecture.

I should, however, say something about the boundaries of sentience. My view is that all sentient beings are entitled to equal consideration of interests. By “sentient beings” I mean beings with interests, and the capacity to feel pain is sufficient for a being to have interests – such a being has, at least, an interest in not feeling pain. But which beings have that capacity?

No one can directly observe the consciousness of another being. The only consciousness of which we have direct experience is our own. In all other cases, we can only infer the existence of consciousness by analogy. When other animals are in circumstances that would cause us pain, and they behave much as we would, we have some reason for believing that they are experiencing what we experience when we are in pain. The analogy grows stronger when we discover that they have nervous systems very like ours, transmitting impulses to brains like ours. Add the knowledge that we have a common evolutionary origin – animals are not clever little robots built by toy companies to mimic animal behavior – and it becomes reasonable to assume that they have conscious experiences as we do. So it seems clear that all mammals can feel pain, and there is little doubt about birds either. There has been some controversy about fish, and also about invertebrates. But a recent study of the behavior of fish strongly suggest that they are capable of feeling pain. With crustacea and insects it is more difficult to be confident of this. In some respects, their behavior appears to be more rigidly programmed, in a way that may not require consciousness. But we cannot be sure, and therefore the most ethical course of action is to give them the benefit of the doubt, and avoid, where possible, doing things that will cause them to suffer if they are capable of suffering.

Some people are skeptical about the impact of moral argument on real life. They believe that moral argument is really a rationalization of what we wish to do, and rarely or never does it change anyone’s mind. The animal movement offers a counterexample to this view. As James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin observed in The Animal Rights Crusade: The Growth of a Moral Protest, “Philosophers served as midwives of the animal rights movement in the late 1970s.” This movement has led to significant reforms in the ways in which experiments are performed on animals, and, especially in the European Union, to laws phasing out some of the worst forms of factory farming, including keeping veal calves and sows in crates so small that they cannot walk or even turn around, and keeping hens in very small wire cages without any kind of nesting box to lay their eggs in, or enough room to perform basic instintual behaviors. These reforms in the European Union will affect hundreds of millions of animals, and transform large industries – all because of an ethical concern for the welfare of animals. Now it seems that the United States is beginning to follow Europe’s example. Following referenda in Florida and Arizona that have banned some of the cruelest factory farm practices, the largest pig producer in the world, Smithfield, has announced that it will voluntarily phase out keeping its sows in individual crates. Canada’s largest pig producer, Maple Leaf, has now said it will do the same. Now big veal producers in the United States have also announced that they will be phasing out the cruel individual stalls they have been using for veal calves. So here is an area of everyday life in which philosophy has played a truly critical role in society, not only at the level of ideas, but in instigating significant changes in society.

It is noteworthy that this modern philosophical challenge to the way we think about nonhuman animals came from writers in what is sometimes called the “analytic” tradition, that is, the tradition of English-language philosophy. Thinkers in the continental European tradition, the tradition of Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and Deleuze, played no role at all. Despite the much-vaunted “critical stance” that these thinkers are said to take to prevailing assumptions and social institutions, this extensive body of thought has largely failed to grapple with the issue of how we treat animals. Why should this have been so?

Of course, it is possible to ask the same question of philosophy in the analytic tradition before the 1970s, and some of the possible answers are common to all philosophical traditions. Just as it was convenient for the slave-traders and slave-owners to believe that they were justified in treating people of African descent as property, so too it is convenient for humans to believe that they are justified in treating animals as things that can be owned, and to deny that they have interests that give rise to moral claims upon us. But there are other, more specific factors involved in the failure of the continental tradition to challenge orthodoxy regarding animals, even when philosophers outside that tradition were actively engaged in debating the issue. One reason may be that the British tradition of Hume, Bentham and Mill already had reached the conclusion that the capacity for experiencing pain and pleasure is what is crucial to moral status. In contrast, the continental tradition, focused more on Kant, made the ability to reason, and with it the capacity for autonomy, the crucial requirement. Still, it is astonishing that so few of Kant’s followers noticed that this gave rise to a problem about the status of human infants and humans with profound intellectual disabilities. Clearly, if the ability to reason or to act autonomously, is what makes human beings “ends in themselves” rather than just the means to the ends of others, then obviously some human beings are just means to the ends of others, not ends in themselves.

The real lesson to be learned from the failure of continental European philosophy to grapple with the issue of the moral status of animals, is that to adopt a “critical stance” requires us to be critical about vague rhetorical formulations that appear profound or uplifting, but do more to camouflage weaknesses in reasoning than to hold them up for critical scrutiny. Philosophy should be less respectful of the authority of the “great” philosophers of the past, and more ready to punch a whole in inflated rhetoric that lacks clear argument – even if doing so makes us as unpopular as Socrates became when he did the same thing in ancient Athens.

My original New York Review essay, from which I quoted at the beginning of this lecture, ended with a paragraph that saw the challenge of the animal movement as a test of human nature:

Can a purely moral demand of this kind succeed? The odds are certainly against it. The book holds out no inducements. It does not tell us that we will become healthier, or enjoy life more, if we cease exploiting animals. Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation movement, since animals are incapable of demanding it for themselves, or of protesting against their exploitation by votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Is man capable of such genuine altruism? Who knows? If this book does have a significant effect, however, it will be a vindication of all those who have believed that man has within himself the potential for more than cruelty and selfishness.

So how have we done? Both the optimists and the cynics about human nature could see the results as confirming their views. Significant changes have occurred, in animal testing and other areas of animal abuse. Many big corporations, like Revlon, Avon and Bristol-Myers, used to routinely test their products on animals. They would immobilize thousands of rabbits in wooden boxes, and then, while the rabbits were fully conscious, place ingredients to be used in cosmetics directly into their eyes. Then the technicians would return a day or two later and measure the damage done to the eye. Sometimes very caustic or acidic substances would be placed in their eyes, and the eyeball would blister. One can only imagine how excruciating this must have been for the rabbit. Fortunately, as a result of the activities of the animal movement, these corporations no longer test their products on animals, and the eye test has largely disappeared. Fur is another area in which some progress has been made. In many European countries, and in North America, fur is much less popular than it was, because of publicity about the suffering of animals in the fur industry.

By far the most significant area of animal abuse by humans, however, is in farming, because the numbers of animals used there is so vast. In the United States alone, ten billion land animals are raised and killed for food each year. As I have mentioned, in Europe, whole industries are being transformed because of the concern of the public for the welfare of farm animals. Now this transformation may be beginning to happen in North America. Perhaps most encouraging for the optimists is the fact that millions of activists have freely given up their time and money to support the animal movement, many of them changing their diet and lifestyle to avoid supporting the abuse of animals. Vegetarianism and even veganism (avoiding all animal products) are far more widespread in North America and Europe than they were thirty years ago, and although it is difficult to know how much of this relates to concern for animals, undoubtedly some of it does.

On the other hand, despite the generally favorable course of the philosophical debate about the moral status of animals, popular views on that topic are still very far from the basic idea of equal consideration for the interests of beings irrespective of their species. Most people still eat meat, and buy what is cheapest, oblivious to the suffering of the animal from which the meat comes. Notwithstanding the gains made by the modern animal movement, it has to be admitted that on a global scale, the situation for animals is getting worse, not better. The gains I have mentioned are dwarfed by the huge increase in factory farming in Asia, especially China, but including also many other Asian nations that have an increasing, and increasingly prosperous, middle class. Korea, I am sure, is among them. The overwhelming majority of these factory-reared animals live miserable lives, entirely indoors, never knowing fresh air, sunshine or grass until they are trucked away to be slaughtered. In short, the outcome so far indicates that as a species we are capable of altruistic concern for other beings; but imperfect information, powerful interests, and a desire not to know disturbing facts, have limited the gains made by the animal movement.