Better-World Philosophy (1899)

AUTHOR: Moore, J. Howard

PUBLICATION: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis. Chicago: Ward Waugh, 1899.
https://archive.org/details/cu31924030226165
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293101668477&view=1up&seq=9

KEYWORDS: animals, animal welfare, capitalism, evolution, eugenics, food, race, slavery

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Better-World Philosophy covers some of the same ground as The Universal Kinship and, more particularly, The New Ethics. For Moore, the human, just like any other being, is primarily “a creature of desire” (11). All desires can be reduced to two: “the desire to avoid pain, and the desire to experience pleasure. Every conscious movement made by living beings, from oyster to philosopher, is directed toward the accomplishment of one or both of these ends” (12). Moore does not distinguish between high (e.g., knowledge) and low (e.g., sexuality) kinds of desire. For him, “[t]here is no reason why any desire capable of satisfaction possessed by a living being should not be satisfied, except that its satisfaction may interfere with the satisfaction of other more valuable desires possessed by the being himself or by other beings. Every pain is to be avoided, except those whose endurance will enable the avoidance of greater pain, and every possible happiness is to be harvested, save those whose foregoing will help the universe to larger happiness” (16-17). Moore's ethics entails the minimization of pain and the maximization of pleasure in the universe as a whole (and not just for humans). “The ideal universe,” he writes, “is a universe so ordered or natured as to allow its inhabitants to understand and dominate it sufficient to satisfy their desires, and inhabited by beings with desires so poised and assorted that there is not only not mutual inhibition of desires, but such a dovetailing and intertwining of the consciousnesses that there is mutual aid in the satisfaction of desire – a universe responsive to the whims of its inhabitants, and inhabited by beings socially harmonious and helpful” (146).

It is on this basis that Moore discusses humans in relation to both other humans and non-human others. The first topic he breaches is the question of labor, for labor “is pain, and, like all other pain, human beings have struggled to escape it” (32). Hence Moore's disdain for industrial capitalism and the exploitation of humans for labor, which he condemns in the strongest of terms: “The industrial system which allows the unlimited appropriation of land and inventions,” he writes, “furnishes to the more powerful and avaricious classes of communities the means by which they compel the rest to labor for them. And not to call such deprivation slavery is to neglect to use the word with its most essential connotation. The human beings who possess the dominion of land and machinery and compel others, in order to obtain the essentials of existence, to serve them, are as truly masters of slaves as they who exact blood from the dorsals of their fellows with literal slave whips” (36-37). Given that Moore's ethics concerns all beings, not just humans, the same holds for the exploitation of (domesticated) animals:

The horse, the ox, the fowl, the sheep, the dog, and the camel have from time immemorial been compelled to undergo the most cruel slaveries for the benefit of their tyrant species. Man has not only compelled these races to submit to terrible servitudes, but he has subjected them to the most unparalleled personal plunder, unhesitatingly advancing even to extermination, whenever such extermination would contribute to human nutrition, human amusement, or human whim. In fact, all the non-human races have been presumed to possess no raison d'être except to cater in one way or another to the master species. They have been slaves and scapegoats upon whom human beings have shifted, or have attempted to shift, all possible hardship (32-33).

In fact, for Moore it is clear that “[t]he human species, because it is more powerful and more conceited than any other, is the most egoistic toward other species of all the species that live” (125) because “man” simply “eats and enslaves what can not get away from him” (124).

Capitalist accumulation based on exploitation also parallels the exploitation of animals for sport: “The acts of human sportsmen, who slaughter other beings for pastime” are analogous to “the acts of those immense kleptomaniacs of human industry, who, according to established forms or in spite of them, acquire possession of the products of others' industry, not because they need, but in obedience to a blind insanity for acquisition” (94). Moore is exasperated that “[e]ven for a tooth or a feather to wear on our vanity, marauders are sent thru the forests of the earth to ravage and depopulate them” (129). For Moore, the religious basis of human morality is immoral and rotten to the core:

The very energy with which men preach peace, justice, and mercy is obtained by stripping the bones and tearing out the vitals of their fellow-beings. Holy days, days above all others when it seems men's minds would be bent on compassion, are farces of gluttony and ferocity. Unfeeling ruffians cowardly shoot down defenceless birds, or prowl the country in rival squads, massacring every living creature that is not able to escape them, and for no higher or humaner purpose than just to see who can kill the most! This is egoism unparalleled on the face of the earth. No species of animal except man plunges to such depths of atrocity. It is bad enough, in all conscience, for one being to suppress another in order to tear it to pieces and swallow it; but when such outrages are perpetrated by organized packs, just for pastime, it becomes an enormity beyond characterization. … Nonhuman murderers are ruthless, but even serpents and hyenas do not exterminate for sport (130-131).

One reason for this state of affairs is that “the civilized consciousness, which is barely able to realize the kinship of human beings, is yet too feeble and rudimentary to comprehend the solidarity of all beings” (119). For Moore, it is beyond doubt that “[e]very living creature is a constituent of a universe of things every part and particle of which is by the most relentless affinities related to and dependent upon every other part” (73). In Moore's understanding, everything is interconnected. Unfortunately, “[h]uman philosophy, which has been so slow in discovering the solidarity of the human species, is to-day, except in its Oriental manifestations, as reluctant to recognize other species in its ethical contemplations as were dominant human groups in less advanced stages of aggregation reluctant to recognize the solidarity of the hominine species” (144). But Moore thinks this is but a matter of time, as he is convinced that the universal ethics and his understanding of cross-species social relations as described above are selected for by evolution: “The social ideal here enunciated is the ideal, also, of the evolutional processes by and in accordance with whose intentions all things are determined” (164), Moore writes.

Moore's Darwinism leads him to embrace views that are now seen as problematic such as eugenics. He proposes natural selection via eugenics as a way to eliminate “as much as may be of a dark and egoistic heredity” (246) and to foster an ethics of trans-species altruism. Ultimately, he suggests that the required modifications might be engineered by means of surgical intervention or “physiological and neural violence” (275).

Last updated on November 23rd, 2024

SNSF project 100015_204481

@VLS@veganism.social | VeganLiteraryStudies | @veganliterarystudies | @vegan_lit_studies