A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Jeremy Bentham on the suffering of animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
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Jeremy Bentham on animal ethics
”Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a distinctly quotable author. One thinks, for example, of the crisp, robust statement of the utilitarian moral philosophy of which he is held to be the ‘father’: ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’. Like many of his radical English contemporaries, Bentham was active in his opposition to slavery, colonialism, the death penalty, the treatment of women as inferiors, and vast discrepancies in wealth. More unusually for the times, he also took up the cause of the welfare of animals.
The remark of Bentham’s that I come across most frequently is the one quoted at the beginning of this article in which, of course, ‘they’ refers to (non-human) animals. It occurs in the context of advocating the extension of legal protection to animals. Having applauded the French for affording protection to black people — for, in effect, recognising the irrelevance of skin colour to legal status — he proposes that the same be done for animals. In the case of human beings and animals alike, the only relevant criterion for establishing legal rights against cruel treatment is the capacity to experience suffering. The ability to reason or converse is as irrelevant as skin colour.
For Bentham’s later admirers, his point should not be confined to the sphere of law. As an application of the general principle of utility it in effect furnishes the basis for animal ethics at large, for deciding quite generally how we should treat and otherwise relate to animals. There is hardly an animal welfare or rights organization whose website does not contain an approving citation of Bentham’s famous line. Indeed, it has become a virtual slogan for the whole animal liberation movement over the last few decades.
Some of the enthusiastic responses to Bentham’s remark are certainly misinformed. On one animal rights website, for example, it is stated that Bentham was a ‘pioneer of animal rights’. This is doubly wrong.
First, he did not think that animals could have any rights except those granted to them by the law. In another of his most frequently quoted remarks, he wrote that the idea of non-legal rights — of ‘natural’ or ‘human’ rights — was ‘nonsense on stilts’, a left-over from a theistic ethics that, …
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