The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (38 page)

This brings us to the second point. Why is it that many people are outraged over the torture and killing of a “cute” animal, but have no problem with the pain, suffering, and death caused to animals like cows, pigs, and chickens that are, admittedly, considerably less cute and cuddly than puppies, kittens, dolphins, and baby cows? If there is a
morally relevant
distinction between these kinds of animals, then these differences in treatment may be justified.

One answer might be that certain animals that we keep as pets, like dogs, are considered quite a bit smarter than animals that we eat, like turkeys (except, of course, for Alinicia, the turkey, who performs great feats, from “Helen Keller! The Musical”). So maybe intelligence is the key. Dogs and cats surely seem to be smarter than cows, chickens, and turkeys. But that can’t be all of it. Pigs, for example, are at least as smart as dogs, but most Americans shudder at the thought of eating a dog, while pork is “the other white meat.”
⁵
If intelligence is what we should look to in deciding who or what receives our moral consideration and who or what does not, then we should include pigs (at least) when we draw our line. Further, why wouldn’t really smart animals—like the rhesus monkeys routinely used in neurobiological and psychological experiments—deserve more consideration than some humans who have mental impairments so severe that they’re functionally less intelligent than the monkeys?
⁶

Maybe the line should be drawn between animals that are “useful” for purposes other than human consumption and animals that aren’t so useful. Some dogs, for example, can be trained to retrieve victims from disaster areas, assist handicapped people with certain daily tasks, or sniff out drugs in luggage. So, some animals have highly prized abilities that other animals don’t. But the standard for line-drawing can’t be physical abilities or prowess or anything like that because, if it were, then Cartman would be justified in harming or killing Timmy or Jimmy, both of whom lack the physical prowess and certain physical abilities that Stan, Kyle, Butters, and even Cartman have.

Maybe the problem some people have with eating veal has to do with a disgust factor. Let’s face it, it’s gross to imagine a chained-up baby cow as your dinner. But the living conditions of other animals people commonly eat are just about as gross and disgusting, so it’s hard to imagine that the disgust factor could keep someone from eating veal while they eat other animals bred in similarly gruesome conditions.
⁷

Could it be the age of animals that matters? It seems worse to harm a baby animal as opposed to an adult animal, just as it seems worse to harm a child rather than an adult. Many
South Park
episodes play on the moral outrage people feel over harming children. The episodes that deal with child abuse typically face more serious and successful protest and censorship. “Jared Has Aides” is a good example. In this episode, which is also controversial for making light of AIDS, it becomes clear that Butters is being physically abused and beaten by his parents. But when we look at crimes against
people
, as opposed to animals, the difference has to do with innocence and protection. A crime against a child seems worse because the child is innocent. Society has a duty to protect such individuals and watch them more closely because they’re not fully equipped to protect themselves. But even if it’s worse to hurt a child than it is to hurt an adult, it’s still wrong to hurt an adult. People deserve moral consideration regardless of their age. It would be strange to maintain the age of an animal makes a morally relevant difference when it comes to deciding which ones deserve our moral consideration and which ones do not.

And yet we humans do seem to place a high value on “cuteness.” Let’s say your daughter wants a puppy, a kitten, or a baby brother or sister for her next birthday. When you remind her of the fully grown dogs or cats and the older sibling she already has, she admittedly finds these considerably less interesting. Or, think of all of the smiles and “awws!” when a cute little baby, an adorable puppy, or a fuzzy little duckling makes an appearance in a group of adults. Even a piece of poop with a Santa hat, mittens, and a happy voice is cute to people (“Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo”). But we can’t imagine “cuteness” as being a morally relevant standard for inclusion or exclusion. If it were, then Nurse Gollum from “Conjoined Fetus Lady” would surely be treated as having fewer rights than the rest of us. Social scientists tell us that beautiful people make more money and are generally viewed as more likable than the average person. But we’re not talking about a cuteness rule for animals that makes them more popular, we are considering a criterion that allows us to kill the “ugly” ones without remorse but allows people to pass laws to protect the cute and cuddly ones. This kind of moral criterion is unfounded.

So, why is it that we draw a line between different kinds of animals and conclude that some of them deserve to be protected, while some of them do not? This problem is typical of a much larger issue in ethics: the issue of where we draw lines—that is, of deciding who or what deserves our moral consideration and who or what does not.

An important part of many ethical deliberations is the decision where to draw lines concerning whose interests need to be taken into account in moral decision making. In “Fun with Veal,” when Kyle and Butters happily eat beef jerky and fried chicken but refuse to eat veal, they’re drawing a moral line. The cute baby cows matter, so we can’t eat them. But the adult cows and chickens don’t matter in the same way, and so we can eat them. Stan decides to draw his line in a different spot by claiming that all animals matter, so he refuses to eat any of them. Cartman, on the other hand, draws a circle of consideration pretty much just around himself. This makes Cartman an
ethical ­egoist
, because he would probably argue that he doesn’t need to worry about the wishes of others, people or animals, unless those wishes correspond to what he, Cartman, wants.
⁸
Most of the adults, except for the hippies, would draw a line that excludes most animals from moral consideration, but includes most or all people and domesticated animals like dogs and cats.

Ethical egoism is only one kind of ethical theory. Although it’s not particularly popular among ethicists, we’ve already mentioned what ethical egoists think about line drawing: the line goes around the ­egoist, excluding everything and everyone else. An ethical egoist is concerned with the interests of others only if they promote or correspond with her own self-interest. Most other ethical theories draw the line differently. Ethical theories like utilitarianism, deontological ethics, and contractarian ethics, to name a few, contain some sort of appeal to
impartiality
.
⁹
This means that the interests of others should count equally, unless there is some morally relevant reason to exclude them. Generally, we shouldn’t exclude some people from our moral consideration because of their gender or race, for example, because these characteristics aren’t
morally relevant
characteristics. But this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, something very much like this can be found in the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
¹⁰
are created equal …” And so all people, at least, matter—unless we can point to some ­morally relevant reason to exclude them from the same consideration that is afforded to all other people. But this doesn’t directly answer the question about whether some animals count and some don’t.

Peter Singer, the best-known contemporary moral philosopher writing about the way humans treat other animals, argues that humans are guilty of “speciesism.” That is, most humans draw a line of moral consideration around their own species, while pretty much excluding all other species. Singer compares speciesism to racism and sexism, both of which are full of moral problems because they make distinctions, or draw lines, on the basis of irrelevant characteristics.
¹¹

Singer claims that the interests of any creature that can feel pain or suffer significantly need to be considered in ethical decision making. In this respect, Singer subscribes to utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), which claims that the right action to choose in a given situation is the one that brings about the most happiness and the least pain possible for
all
those affected by the decision.
¹²
And it’s been argued that “
all
those affected” would have to include humans
and
non-human animals, since
all
can experience pleasure and pain. Given that utilitarians are concerned about the happiness of all creatures that can feel, Singer argues that animals should be included in our ethical deliberations, especially when we’re considering the slaughter of these animals.

At this point, it should be obvious that Singer would disagree with Cartman and the majority of the South Park adults (except for the hippies). We can’t draw a line that excludes some animals from our ethical consideration without good reason. Since humans don’t need to eat animals to survive (“Medicinal Fried Chicken” notwithstanding), unless we can draw some
morally relevant
line that excludes them, we shouldn’t eat them. Cuteness and cuddliness aside, all ­animals deserve some moral consideration because of their ability to experience pleasure and pain, and especially because they can suffer.

So Singer would agree with Stan’s original decision to give up eating meat completely, because eating meat involves causing harm and death to creatures that can feel pain and suffering, and because this pain and suffering caused to animals
does
matter, on moral grounds. Now that we’re all vegetarians and giant pussies, what about zoos and aquariums that keep animals captive in small spaces, animal experimentation, and those crazy animal rights activists?

From the ALF (Animal Liberation Front) members in “Free Willzyx” to the eco-terrorist pirates in “Whale Whores,” and maybe even extending to the vegan Feegans and the hippie vegetarians,
South Park
revels in poking fun at animal rights activism. Utilitarian arguments against killing animals, even the ugly ones, for human consumption can easily be extended to keeping animals confined in zoos and aquariums. This is especially true if confinement causes them serious harm.

The episodes featuring animal rights activists show the activists protesting the captivity of animals. Even though this seems to be a lesser harm than slaughtering and eating the animals, keeping “wild” animals confined in a habitat that is “unnatural” can be harmful. Of course the animals that are prey to other creatures in the wild typically live longer lives in captivity than they otherwise would, but there’s still something to be said for the quality of the animals’ lives: a longer life may not compensate for low quality of life. The harm caused to a particular animal by caging it depends on the species as well as the condition of the confinement.

The question of where to draw the line in using animals in experiments that stand to cause significant harm or death to the animals is also situation-specific, at least on utilitarian grounds. The scientists in “Pee” and Dr. Mephesto, the Marlon Brando-like evil scientist in “An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig,” clearly cross a moral line in their experiments on animals, given the moral claims already discussed, but other experiments that stand to have significant benefit and attempt to minimize the harm caused to the animals may be permissible.

So, now that we’re all converted to hippie vegetarianism and crazy animal rights activism, allegiance to feminism must be next. Thankfully, there’s an episode for that too (“Eat, Pray, Queef”)!
¹³

1
. See, for example, chapter 2, by Henry Jacoby, “You Know, I Learned Something Today: Stan Marsh and the Ethics of Belief,” or chapter 4, by Robert Arp, “Dude, Listen to Reason! Logic Lessons Inside and Outside South Park.”

2
. See Plato,
Plato’s Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo
, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002).

3
. The year 2006 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, a story about Lithuanian immigrants who came to Chicago around the turn of the twentieth century to work in the famous stockyards. Sinclair gives a
very
descriptive account of the slaughterhouse process. Read the book, and you may never eat meat again.

4
. For example, see the research accumulated by Peter Singer and Jim Mason in
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
(Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2006).

5
. See, for example, Donald Broom, Michael Mendl, and Adroaldo Zanella, “A Comparison of the Welfare of Sows in Different Housing Conditions,”
Animal Science
, 61 (1995): 369–385.

6
. Rhesus monkeys, and other monkeys, have been used in experiments for years. In most cases, because of the experimenter’s radical adjustments to their physiology, they are killed after the experiment. A standard paper illustrating this kind of experimentation would be Thomas Rowell, “Agonistic Noises of the Rhesus Monkey (
Macaca Mulatta
),”
Symposium of the Zoological Society of London
, 8 (1962): 91–96.

7
. See Peter Singer,
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002) for a discussion of factory farming practices in the United States. An examination of the conditions under which most animals bred for consumption are kept would result in a fairly high “disgust factor.”

8
. Ethical egoism is a bit more complex than this. For an ethical egoist, the right action is the one that best promotes the interests of the egoist. See, for example, the treatments of ethical egoism in Louis Pojman, ed.,
Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings
. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2001) and Louis Pojman,
Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2005).