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Brutality and Sentimentality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
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Extract

The notion that concern for the feelings of animals is as such sentimental is rather a common one. I shall suggest that, in general, the charge of sentimentality can never be made to stick in this way merely because concern is directed towards one class of sentient beings rather than another. It rests on the motives and reasons for being concerned, not on the objects to which concern is directed. About animals, however, a special point arises which I must deal with first. Objectors may say that it is sentimental to attribute feelings to them at all, or at least to attribute specific feelings, to suppose ourselves well enough informed about their states of consciousness for concern to be appropriate. The charge of sentimentality here is close to that of anthropomorphism.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 54 , Issue 209 , July 1979 , pp. 385 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979

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References

1 In my book Beast and Man, pp. 344–351 (Cornell University Press, 1978; Harvester Press in England, 1979).Google Scholar

2 Elephants are a particularly clear case, because they are still of great economic value in the timber trade of, for example, Burma and Sri Lanka, and yet no more economic method of handling them has ever been found than the traditional one, by which they are looked after by a mahout who spends his life with them, who treats and speaks of his elephant as a personal friend, and tackles all problems connected with it in very much the way appropriate to a temperamental but basically benevolent uncle. Were it possible instead to treat them like tractors, this would doubtless have been done.

3 Alpers, Antony, A Book of Dolphins (London: John Murray, 1965), chapter on Pelorus Jack.Google Scholar

4 There is also a frequent assumption that people who are attached to an animal are necessarily neglecting human beings in consequence. If so, it is a separate offence, and is just as likely to happen from loving the wrong human being as from loving an animal. But the effect of loving anybody can just as easily be to make loving others more possible. A dog often bridges a lonely person's way back into human life. Anyway, people must love whom they can.