Hello, and welcome to Vanguard. This is the podcast for the International Journal of feminist approaches to bioethics brought to you by fab Network. My name is Kathryn McKay, and today I'm joined by Katherine walls from St. Lawrence University to discuss her paper, what's wrong with speciesism, toward an anti ablest reimagining of an abused term? Hi, Catherine. Hi, Kate. Nice to meet you. Nice to have you here.
You too. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you.
Oh, thanks for coming on the on the podcast, it's great to talk to you to get started, you could give the listeners just the elevator pitch for this paper.
Sure. So this paper had a few different goals and objectives. The thing that motivated it most was an interest in trying to name and illustrate the ableism inherent in some dominant critiques of speciesism that are out there today, namely the work of Peter Singer, and, to a lesser extent, least in terms of what the paper was able to cover, Jeff McMahon. But I also wanted to illustrate the often unnoted commitments to animal welfare in the work of some prominent critics of singer and McMahon's work. So a worry that that I have is that when it comes to thinking about animal ethics and thinking about disability, that these two communities of concern have become pitted against each other. And that the reason for that comes largely from the work of singer, which is ultimately I think ableist but in order to defend against the concerns about ableism, those in the community that advocates for consideration for people with disabilities, that equals out of anybody else in the human community often get called out as being speciesist or being flagrantly unconcerned with animal welfare. And I've always found that to be very much not the case. So it was an interest in showing both that these critics coming from the disability community are right to say there is ableism in singers work, but also to say that, that those voices taking that position are advocates, in many cases, for animal ethics themselves. And so these two, these two communities don't have to be pitted against one another as much as they've been.
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And I wondered if I kind of wondered where the motivation came for writing this paper? Have you been interested in kind of animal ethics for a while or more? Is this coming from a different place?
Yeah, so there's a few different motivations. So I would say there is a very strong, emotional pinpoint for me, which is that I was at this conference that happened at Stony Brook University back in 2008. In the room when this very charged, conversation took place between Peter Singer and Eva Kittay, and Eva Feder Kittay later became my dissertation advisor. So I developed a pretty intimate and ongoing relationship with her. I really think highly of her work and review her scholarship. And I think she's done an incredible amount to advocate for people with cognitive disabilities. And that moment, was from before I knew Eva, well, before we had established relationships, before he knew much about bioethics as a discipline. And it just stayed with me as sort of this, this burning point in my chest. Because I, because I saw her in pain. And I saw her in pain for very good reason. And I did nothing in that moment. And so in part, it was an effort to try and speak back to a moment that had left me feeling a certain kind of pain and discomfort and trying to, to honor his work and say what I didn't say that, and, and try to do that in a way that both both respected the quite outstanding commitments to animal ethics in the work of Peter Singer, but also didn't shy away from being very clear about the problems that are also there in his work. So yeah, I would say before, before I knew Eva, and before I started down the path that I did working on my dissertation with her, I was more interested in animal ethics, and less knowledgeable by far about issues related to disability. So both of my parents are veterinarians, we grew up with sort of being the family that everybody wouldn't bring, like the stray cat, you know, like random dog that was injured to bring into your house. So I spent a lot of time my childhood caring for animals, I felt really pretty intimate connections with animals, both wild and domestic. And, and I had a pretty strong commitment to certain pieces of animal liberation. And so just seeing, seeing what happened, you know, in that conference really, really shook me and started me down a course of thinking some more about these things. And they've been with me for a long time. So yeah, so I think that was the motivation. And then, you know, why did it come out? When it did? It's a different kind of question. You know, that probably has a lot of moving parts to it. But But yeah, that was the motivation of just really wanting to say something about a moment. That felt wrong, and that I was present to, and I didn't speak to when it actually happened. And then a worry that I had in the course of writing the paper was that I reopened something, you know, that Eva herself, might not have benefited from having reopened. So that was sort of my biggest fear about this paper.
Yeah. Did you talk to her about it?
Yeah. Yeah. So she was I presented a version of it at the APA conference, this past winter, and she responded to it there. So, so yeah, that was was very helpful. And I would say that incense, I mean, I didn't do the thing that I really didn't want to do, which is that I took her back to this painful moment in that dialogue. And, and we had to rehash it, and we rehash it publicly again, you know, but at the same time, my sense is that is that she feels like even if certain people in the animal ethics community that, you know, stand by singers work and singers positions don't aren't moved by any of her objections that perhaps other people in the audience, you know, hearing, hearing these conversations and hearing these disagreements of hearing this kind of discourse, will be and probably are, just like I was when I sat there that day. Um, so I didn't say anything she didn't know, you know. But it was very much very much affected by what she said, you know, and it wasn't just her emotion. So that's something that feels important to stress. It was like, her philosophical grit, you know, she really, she really stood up in an intellectually rigorous way, in a moment that was also, you know, intensely emotionally painful. And that's, that's incredibly impressive, and incredibly admirable.
Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to kind of change tack a little bit, just because I think it would be really interesting to hear about how, in the paper, you see, being able to kind of rescue some of the some of the animal welfare work from singer and make that amenable, at least, if not, like, completely compatible to a disability rights kind of point of view, or at least, you know, basically to make it non ableist. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you kind of see these two pieces fitting together.
Yeah, so thanks for asking me that. So this is this is something that I really sort of hemmed in hard over in the course of writing the paper. So did I ultimately, at the end of the day, want to say, you know, that like, like the title title was good for kind of announces, I was thinking of that title, what's wrong with speciesism? In two ways, and one of them was, is there anything wrong with speciesism? Is it a false problem? Has it been falsely named as a problem, when in fact, it isn't. And I wondered if that was ultimately where where I would wind up, you know, and part of me is inclined to think that is a false problem, or at least the naming of it visibles problem, because the naming of it draws on this analogy with racism and sexism. And Eva herself has done some really outstanding work, illustrating why that analogy is perhaps just not right. So. So her her claim that she makes in paper called on the margins, the moral personhood that I think came out in 2005. Is that racism and sexism? Yes, they do involve group based thinking, right, and sortal is based on groups, but they justify themselves to claims about propagates. So it's not just this group is better than that group. It's this group is better than that group because you know, being a Man needs being intellectually superior, being a woman needs being overly emotional, you know? Or, you know, other claims like that. Right. So, so yeah, so her claim was that, you know, when it comes to what singers call speciesism in some cases, which is just really the supposition that every human being should be considered as having equal moral status, regardless of their capacities, which is really, I mean, just if you take away the name speciesism, from that, it's a deeply dehumanizing objection, right? I mean, the idea is potentially that, that some human human beings are simply not morally equal, right, don't have the same moral standing as others. And that to assume otherwise, is something analogous with racism and sexism. Right. So yeah, I think that's wrong. I think that's the huge problem. And yet, ultimately, I wound up wanting to say that I do think the term can be useful and can be disentangle from the place that singer has led it. And part of that is a practical move, you know, less than a philosophical one. So practically, it is just so deeply written discourse now, around these issues, or is in Merriam Webster's Dictionary think that a pita uses it right, and it's out there, people use this term. And when I teach this material, my students gravitate towards the term, you know, they find it useful, but I don't think they buy in, for the most part into the ableist pieces of it. So what is it that people are grabbing on to? So my sense is that it's probably not singer's highly inflammatory and deeply controversial claims about the human community, involving people that are not equal to others, right. I mean, that's, that's such a latent, right, really, really challenging claim. It's that it's the idea that there is something that we need to be deeply concerned about when it comes to privileging human interests over those of all other creatures, right. And Christine korsgaard has this really powerful line about this idea in her recent book, fellow creatures, and I quote it in the paper. So she says, We should not confuse either the thought that we owe different things to animals than to people, or the thought that sometimes we may legitimately exercise the partiality towards our own species, with the thought that human beings are more important than animals generally. So, so my hope was that if you if we stop confusing those things, and we take speciesism, to refer to the thought that human beings are more important than animals, generally, there's no longer a problem of ableism there, right? And you can you can use the term it can be effective, it can be ethically meaningful. And I actually think that it's what a lot of people in the animal liberation community want speciesism to be about already. It's just that a few very prominent voices have pushed it in this other direction.
Yeah, yeah. That's super interesting. And when you put it that way, it just seems really obvious.
No, yeah. Yeah. I feel that way, too. It feels kind of common sense. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think that most people who care about animal welfare care about animal liberation, that's what they really, really buy into around the idea of speciesism that, that we need to stop trivializing the interests of non human animals, we need to stop, you know, immediately assuming that we can treat ourselves as vastly superior to them, that, you know, just vast, vast amounts of violence that go on on a very routine daily basis, you know, towards non human species are acceptable. There, they're deep, more problems. And yet, none of that means that we need to just treat, you know, people in the human community with any less, you know, moral significance that we currently do.
Yeah, part of your argument is kind of, it's about responding to this question that singer and I think McMahon to put to, not just Catania. But I think like people in general who holds a few about a certain view about moral status of people humans. And from the conference, singer says to Kitty, can you tell us some of these morally significant psychological capacities in which you think that human beings and let's talk about real ones, are superior to pigs or dogs or animals? And so singer, I think singers view is like, you need to point us to some kind of capacity, show me the thing that the human can do, that this other animal can't do and show me why this is different. And Cattai takes a completely different approach to establishing moral status. And I find that really interesting. So I kind of wanted to ask you about that and how you use that, in your paper, the kind of relationship focus that Kitty has compared to this capacity focus that singer has to motivate your argument to? Yeah,
right. And you right, so Jeff McMahon also asked a version of that question at the conference. And, and they were both very emphatic about it, like, like Jeff McMahon, at one point said, you know, an answer to this question, this one question will shut Peter Singer up for good. You know, that's what you need to answer. Right. And it will do the trick, right. And, yeah, there are a couple of things, you know, in going back to that moment, and looking at the transcripts from, you know, the particular wording from the conference, were a couple of things that really struck me so. So one was, that he used the word morally superior and asking that question, right. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't about equality. It wasn't about you know, it was an assumption that it had already been assumed, right, that people should be treated as morally superior, right? All people, right, regardless of cognitive capacities, they're just morally superior. And now, you know, give me the reason why, based on psychological capacities and properties, and so thinking about it closely, I thought, first of all, he made a false assumption in that moment, right? That actually, there was nobody who had asserted right blatantly right, that human beings, all human beings were morally superior, right? What was being insisted upon, instead, was that all human beings were morally equal to one another. That was a claim coming from, from the people that he was in conversation with in this very heated conference, right? It's not about my superiority. So. So it sort of snuck in there, right. And it makes it look, in fact, like, there's some sort of there's some sort of attack on moral equality that's coming from the side of those that are advocating for the rights of people with cognitive disabilities, right. But my take was that that just wasn't true. That wasn't what was happening at the conference at all. Instead, it was about insisting every human being is equal, right, and pointing out that singer makes arguments and take stances, where he's adamant that all human beings are not equal. So that was the first thing that I just wanted to highlight, right? Was that, that there was no claim like he was he was up against a false enemy, right? He's making a bit of a straw man out of those who is in dialogue with in that moment. And then the other. The other point was, yeah, that, that I wanted to try to answer this question in a way that was about insisting on relationships. And in fact, the the question was wrong, the question sort of presupposed that ethics and sort of ethical standing had to be parsed out in terms of properties and capacities. And I wanted to say like, like potatoes, and like many other feminist thinkers who use relational methodology do that, that instead, we relationships can be an inroads to moral standing, right. It's not just about properties and capacities. And and part of I went to Lebanon in the paper, which was some somewhat controversial, I know, for a lot of feminists, lemon, Lebanon is not sort of as somebody that people, you know, see, as part of the feminist community, not somebody that people are friendly to. But he is so adamant in his thinking that, that as soon as you're in the domain of thinking about property is right, or sort of what he thinks of as ontology altogether, you've alighted ethics, and you've entered into a place of potential violence, right. And ethics is instead a moment of encounter, and provocation and appeal that interrupts and comes before all of that kind of delimitation and demarcation and categorizing. And as soon as as soon as you've slipped into that other mode, you've left you left ethics behind, right, and potentially done harm in that act. So yeah, so I wanted to just sort of lean even more heavily into thinking about, you know, that the fact that that that that question, assume that ethics had to take this one approach around capacities and properties when in fact, I didn't think it did.
Yeah. So let's talk about lovingness for a second. And
because I think that when I think that the way in which he is loving us here is like really quite interesting and powerful. The way that he's responding to his experiences living through the Holocaust, seeing like witnessing the violence done to others when you make property based accounts of moral status. So do you think that webinars can be kind of made friendly towards feminist philosophy in general? Or do you think that this is just a particular instance where Lemonis has really specific answers to just this kind of question?
Yeah, so that kind of goes into more of the convoluted backstory of my paper, which is that, in fact, I sort of found myself writing this paper, in part out of an earlier attempt to write a paper about Lebanon and animal ethics. And I was realizing that some of the things that I thought I had to say that, that were perhaps the most significant potential kind of original contribution to writing about animal ethics from Lebanon perspective, would speak to disability as well. And there's very, very little scholarship whatsoever about 11 nos around disability. So yeah, so that's kind of the backstory. But yeah, the the bigger questions. So I think there are some, some real issues with lemon OSes ethics, in certain moments of his writing, where he, I don't know, potentially treats certain figures, right, in his writing that play a certain role are highly feminized. And in fact, I think like one common common critique from a feminist perspective of love and loss, his work is that he, we can make these demands about ethical asymmetry, right, like sort of you are, you are radically subservient, almost right, held hostage is his language. So you're held hostage by the appeal and the call of the other. And, and, you know, perhaps that resonates one way for a male audience who isn't used to necessarily taking on certain burdens of care and answering to vulnerability and answering to other other's needs. But when when women have historically been put in more of that position, what its sounds a different kind of alarm, right, and it potentially just further further interest, trenches, certain forms of injustice. So I think that's a fair critique and a fair concern. At the same time that I think I think there's a fair bit to be said for, for thinking about ethics in the way that's very deeply about the encounter, you know, provocation. And so, you know, another thing that sometimes people say about Lebanon when it comes to, you know, his relationship to feminism is that especially care ethics, right care ethics is our about care ethicists are about thinking about real concrete, intimate relationships, right? There's something about Lebanon, his work, that feels very abstract, right, that he's talking about these moments of encounter, but it's never you know, this person, but that's not fully true. So like some some of his work on animal ethics, actually, it is like, like his writing from when he was interred in the camp as a prisoner of war under the Nazis. It's about his encounter with a dog named Bobby. And that's one of the moments like I will always, you know, stand out for me and his writing, and it's very concrete. And he struggles with whether or not because he's a dog, you know, Bobby can play the role of the other, right? In his writing the way that human beings do. And yet, he sees Bobby as, as the, the one sort of being that saw him in his humanity, you know, everybody around him was seeing him as just this thing, right? She talks about other people stripping him of his human skin. Right, Bobby, this dog was the one that saw him and sort of, you know, called him, I called him back to Himself. And maybe the way I want one way to put it or, you know, Bobby was the ethical respondent. You know, and that's a deeply concrete moment of encounter. So, so yeah, so I think I think Robin OS can go there. You know, even if, yeah, he does veer more to what feels abstract at times, right. I think he's at his best when, when it's about sort of concrete encounter, right thinking through concrete uncountable.
This is really, really interesting, I don't know very much about the work of luminosity makes me want to read more. So I think we're kind of coming towards the end of our time here. So I wanted to ask you if there's one or two key messages that you hope readers will take away from this paper. Okay,
yeah, I have a few things that I was thinking about. So I guess, I guess one major hope of mine would be that, you know, somebody's reading this paper, thinking about the question with which Peter Singer charged Eva cote, and what with which Jeff McMahon charged others in a conference, that people will come away thinking, well, maybe, maybe, maybe that question actually doesn't need a response, in order to get to the conclusion that all human beings weren't the same moral status and standing right, that all human beings are equal amongst themselves, right? That instead, you can ethically justify that position through a Relational Approach that steers clear of property and capacity based thinking altogether. In fact, you know, seniors on early work, seems like he's going to go there, and then he winds up someplace else. So yes, so just, you know, just about the innumerable numerable insights of a Relational Approach to ethics and the many, many rich, rich avenues for think ethical betterment, that they can open up in all different directions, right, not necessarily just about disabilities, not necessarily about animal ethics. But I don't know thinking about systemic racism, thinking about immigration, justice, they give out many, many of the very pressing and current issues today. That's where I always go as sort of a starting point, you know, what kind of relational lens to these ethical and political issues bring to bear and reveal about the situation that we might not otherwise see. So that's one hope I have. Yeah, and, and, you know, another hope is, is that the will potentially just allow for the possibility of less divisiveness between those thinking about animal ethics and those thinking about disability, bioethics and more potential for a recognition of potential overlapping concerns, you know, an overlapping ethical interests. That yeah, like Foster, you know, improved outcomes for everybody. Those are my hopes. Yeah.
Well, it was a great paper, and hopefully it achieves those hopes for you, Kate, yeah, no problem. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. It's been great to speak with you. And thank you, everyone for listening to this episode of FAB gab. You can find Katherine's paper linked in this episode's notes along with the transcript. Fab Lab is hosted and produced by me Kathryn MacKay. You can find our other episodes on Spotify, radio public, anchor or wherever you get your podcasts of quality. Thanks again for listening