ANIMAL VOICE:

Professor Benatar, in preparation for this interview I watched many discussions and lectures on your work available online. It is striking that your book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, published two decades ago, continues to provoke intense philosophical debate. In it, you argue that coming into existence is always a serious harm, regardless of the quality of one’s life.

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When one considers the lives endured by billions of farmed animals – lives often characterised by confinement, deprivation, suffering and premature death – your thesis appears especially difficult to dismiss. Would you say that industrialised animal agriculture presents one of the clearest real-world illustrations of the harms associated with coming into existence? Please comment.

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PROFESSOR BENATAR:

You are absolutely correct. Although I think that coming into existence is always a harm, the worse one’s existence, the greater the harm. The animals of whom you speak suffer unspeakably. It should be patently obvious that they are seriously harmed by being brought into existence. 

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ANIMAL VOICE:
In Very Practical Ethics, you explore the power of language and the ways in which prejudice can become embedded within ordinary speech. You note, for example, the irony that terms associated with animals are frequently used as insults – even though many of the animals concerned are admired for qualities such as loyalty, intelligence, courage or affection.

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You also point out that calling somebody an “animal” is rarely intended as a compliment, revealing a deeply ingrained assumption of human superiority. To what extent do you believe language both reflects and reinforces harmful attitudes towards non-human animals?

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PROFESSOR BENATAR:

Of all the wrongs that humans do to animals, the linguistic ones are, in themselves, among the least serious. However, as you note, language can both reflect and reinforce attitudes that contribute to the much more serious harms. The language can help objectify and sometimes demonize animals. For example, referring to a human as an animal’s “owner” might be legally true, but it reinforces the idea that animals are entities to be owned rather than sentient beings to be morally considered. Such language does not always indicate that the person using it has negative attitudes towards animals. Even those who care deeply about animals can, by sheer convention, use such terms. However, even in such cases, the continued use of the language can reinforce wrongful attitudes. Thus, there is some value in our seeking to identify and abandon linguistic conventions that disparage animals.

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ANIMAL VOICE:
As editor of Animal Voice, I am sometimes asked why I avoid describing humanity’s relationship with animals as a form of “apartheid”. My response is usually that many people are resistant to such comparisons and may feel that applying the term to animals diminishes the immense suffering inflicted under South African Apartheid.

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At the same time, others argue that refusing even to examine parallels between different forms of oppression can limit moral reflection. How should society navigate these emotionally charged comparisons while still allowing serious ethical discussion to take place?

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PROFESSOR BENATAR:

I understand both the temptation and the resistance to analogising the human treatment of animals to Apartheid, slavery, and the Holocaust. The truth is that the human treatment of animals does have some features in common with these atrocities, but also some differences. Of the three practices mentioned, Apartheid probably has the least in common with the way in which humans treat animals. In general, I think that we should see the systematic mistreatment of animals as its own unique kind of wrong, even if it does bear some similarity to atrocities that humans inflict on other humans. 

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ANIMAL VOICE:
This resistance referred to in the question above, is perhaps captured powerfully in the title of Marjorie Spiegel’s book The Dreaded Comparison, which examines parallels between violence inflicted on humans and violence inflicted on animals. The very word “dreaded” seems revealing — as though society fears even contemplating such comparisons.

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Why do you think people react so strongly against moral parallels being drawn between human suffering and the suffering of animals?

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PROFESSOR BENATAR:

Of the possible explanations, two are the most compelling. First, the comparisons threaten the great divide of human and animal moral entitlements to which most people are committed. Second, because so many people participate, even if often only indirectly, in the abhorrent treatment of animals, any comparison of such treatment with atrocities against humans makes them much more like the perpetrators of human rights violations than they would like to acknowledge.

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ANIMAL VOICE:
A new phrase has now entered public discussion — “cultivated meat”. Significantly, Cape Town hosted a cultivated meat tasting event in 2023. In Very Practical Ethics, you write that it would be “much better if all those currently eating meat were instead to eat laboratory-grown flesh”, since doing so could prevent the suffering and deaths of billions of animals.

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Do you see cultivated meat as having the potential to become one of the great ethical advances of our time, or do you think there are still major psychological and cultural barriers preventing widespread acceptance?

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