Animal Objectification

I organized existing discussions of objectification, the commonalities and differences between objectification of humans and objectification of animals, and the relevance to animal-rights discussions, in order to examine what animal objectification means, why it is bad, and what kinds of actions or attitudes may count as animal objectification.

What Animal Objectification Is

I think animal objectification can include the following actions or attitudes:

Killing animals and eating their corpses
Confining animals and displaying them for human amusement
Viewing animals through things like “cute animal emojis” without respecting them as subjects-of-a-life, and instead reducing them to merely “cute beings”
Idealizing or deifying animals, such as saying “Animals, unlike humans, are not greedy,” or “Animals do not kill unnecessarily”
Reinforcing discriminatory human prejudices against animals and using them as metaphors, such as “betrays you like a rat” or “dirty like a pig”

Before Getting Started

In this article, by a “wrong action,” I do not mean the kind of “wrong” in “Killing a life for no reason is wrong,” but rather the kind of “wrong” in “I have a smartphone I bought 2 years ago, but buying a new smartphone is wrong, because if I used that money for OO I could save more lives.”

The smartphone analogy reflects the actual position of moral philosopher Peter Singer (The most good you can do, 2015; Famine, affluence and morality, 1972; though he did not use the smartphone analogy exactly), and I agree with this position as well.

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought, morally, to do it. —Famine, affluence and morality, Peter Singer

If we define “wrong action” in this way, then almost every action in the world is a wrong action, so it becomes necessary to define “right action” differently as well. From this point of view, a “right action” does not mean a “perfectly moral action,” but rather “an attitude or practice of trying to do fewer wrong actions than yesterday’s me.” (See also: Does utilitarianism demand too much?)

It is impossible to live while doing only perfectly right actions. Therefore, what we can do is 1) think about roughly which direction is the right one, and 2) try to move in that direction, even if only little by little. A guideline that says we should refrain from a certain action is not so much for condemning someone who does that action as immoral, but is closer to a suggestion that we all try to move together, little by little, in the right direction.

Overview

Objectification is a concept presented by the German philosopher Kant, referring to an attitude or act of treating a human being solely as a tool. This was later expanded by feminist theorists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and discussed mainly from the perspective of sexual objectification of women. Whereas MacKinnon and Dworkin regarded all objectification as negative, Martha Nussbaum argues that positive objectification can also exist, depending on the various features of objectification and the context in which it occurs.

Meanwhile, the discussions of Kant, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Nussbaum are mainly focused on objectification of humans. Because Kant argued that humans do not have direct duties to animals, it is difficult to directly extend and apply existing discussions of objectification based on Kantian theory to animals.

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, feminist and animal-rights activist Carol J. Adams points out that there is a deep connection between objectification of women and objectification of animals. In The Case for Animal Rights, moral philosopher and animal-rights activist Tom Regan defends animal rights based on a rights view that extends Kant’s theory. By contrast, because Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is based on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, it has less direct relevance to discussions of objectification grounded in Kantian deontology.

This article is organized in the following order.

Kant’s discussion of objectification
The discussion of objectification by the anti-pornography feminist camp influenced by Kant (MacKinnon, Dworkin)
The discussion in The Sexual Politics of Meat, which does not mention Kant directly but analyzes the intersection of objectification of women and objectification of animals (Adams)
The animal rights view, which does not mention objectification directly but extends Kant’s theory and applies it to animal rights (Regan)
The possibility of positive objectification, and the importance of the context in which objectification occurs (Nussbaum)

Finally, drawing on the above discussions, I organized my thoughts on the problem of animal objectification.

Kant on Objectification

Modern discussions of objectification begin with the philosopher Kant. Kant says that “one must not use individuals merely as means for achieving other ends,” and calls this the formula of humanity. The basis for the formula of humanity is as follows.

Most humans have reason and the ability to set their own ends and pursue them in accordance with reason. Such humans are called persons, and this characteristic possessed only by human persons is called humanity.
Because all persons possess humanity, they have dignity unlike other animals, and all persons are equally dignified.
Because persons possess humanity and dignity, they simultaneously have the right to be respected by other persons and the duty to respect other persons.
To use another person merely as a means for achieving some end is equivalent to treating that person as something beneath a person, such as an animal or an object, and since that is not respecting the person, it is unjust.

Kant’s view of objectification is closely tied to the formula of humanity. According to Lectures on Ethics, a book compiled by Kant’s students from lectures he gave between 1775 and 1780, Kant says this:

Sexual love makes the loved person into an object of appetite. As soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a squeezed lemon. … The moment a person becomes an object of another’s appetite, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an object of another’s appetite a person is treated as a thing and can be used and dealt with by anyone for the same purpose.

For Kant, objectification is an act that damages the dignity of a human person and turns them into something less than human by regarding that person only as a means/object/tool for achieving some purpose. Kant worried that erotic love outside a monogamous marriage could lead one to regard the other solely as a means (an object of sexual desire). Kant also believed, in theory, that all genders could be objectified, but he was aware that in practice it was almost always women who were objectified. According to Kant, prostitution is problematic because it is an act of exchanging the human body for money, and such an act necessarily harms humanity. However, Kant says that the “seller,” who has made their own body into a tool, bears moral responsibility. This is a position that can be criticized by both supporters and opponents of sex-work theory.

Sexual Objectification in MacKinnon and Dworkin

Kant’s view of objectification had a great influence on discussions of objectification among feminist theorists opposed to pornography, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

Kant argued that the solution to sexual objectification was monogamous marriage, but MacKinnon and Dworkin argue that objectification appears in all forms of heterosexual relationships and that there are no exceptions, including marriage. They also say that because sexual inequality exists throughout society, the institution of marriage cannot be a solution to this problem. According to them, society-wide inequality and the sexual objectification of women are closely connected to men’s consumption of pornography. In other words, sexual objectification not only directly harms those who are objectified, but also causes broad indirect harm because it affects the social gaze or attitude through which people look at and treat women.

MacKinnon defines pornography as follows:

writings, photos, or drawings that vividly and sexually explicitly depict the subordination of women. This includes: 1) women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or public property, 2) women enjoying pain, humiliation, or rape, 3) women being tied up, cut, mutilated, bruised, or otherwise physically harmed, 4) women posed in sexual submission, slavery, or display, 5) women reduced to body parts, 6) women being penetrated by objects or animals, 7) women used as material in scenarios of degradation, injury, or torture, 8) women depicted as dirty or inferior, 9) women bleeding or bruised, with that situation depicted as sexual

According to the above definition, pornography is a representative problem that reinforces the sexual objectification of women. MacKinnon and Dworkin say that in a patriarchal society, money constrains and coerces women’s choices, so even if pornography was filmed with agreement, this cannot be regarded as consent in the true sense.

The Connection Between Objectification of Women and Objectification of Animals: The Sexual Politics of Meat

If the discussions of Kant, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin focused on the problem of objectification of humans, Carol J. Adams analyzes the connection between objectification of women and objectification of animals in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat.

The cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption: … Objectification permits an oppressor to view another being as an object. The oppressor violates this being by treating it as an object. For example, a woman is raped as though she has no freedom to say no, or an animal, once alive and breathing, is slaughtered and turned into a dead object. This process in turn enables fragmentation or brutal dismemberment and ultimately makes consumption possible. Occasionally men literally consume women, but we all consume visual images of women all the time. Consumption completes the oppression and obliteration of the will of an independent being.

One of the most important concepts Adams introduces in dealing with the overlap between oppression of animals and oppression of women is the absent referent. Humans slaughter animals so that they can no longer exist as animals and instead exist only as food, and by giving new names to each part of the animal corpse, they erase the animal linguistically as well. In the context of meat-eating, the animal is an absent referent.

An animal that has become an absent referent is used as a metaphor for expressing the experience of another being. A representative example is an expression like “I felt like a piece of meat.” In this metaphor, the death experienced by the animal is transformed into the life experienced by the woman. Conversely, in violence inflicted on women, the woman becomes the absent referent, and accordingly rape too is often used as a metaphor for the experience of another being. Expressions such as “the rape/violation of nature” are examples.

In this way, some terms are so strongly connected to the oppression of a particular group that utterances that appropriate those terms for another target can be exploitative. For example, “rape” is strongly connected to violence against women, and “slaughter” is connected to violence against animals. Adams points out that expressions like “animal rape” or “the slaughter of women” are problematic in this sense, and criticizes Dworkin and others for sometimes using such expressions without awareness of the issue. According to Adams, some feminists use violence against animals only as a metaphor for representing women’s experiences, and as a result erase animals’ experiences. She says that such discourse is limited in that it fails to integrate oppression of animals into the analytical framework of patriarchy, and misses the strong connection between feminism and veganism.

Extending Kant’s Formula of Humanity: Tom Regan

Kant argued that humans do not have direct duties to animals, but only indirect duties. To say that one has an indirect duty not to injure the companion animal living next door means that one should not harm the animal living next door because that companion animal is the neighbor’s property, and one must not damage property. According to Kant’s theory, the concept of objectification of animals cannot exist. Therefore, in order to connect the relation Adams discovered between oppression of animals and oppression of women with the Kantian tradition of discussions of objectification, it is necessary to extend Kant’s formula of humanity.

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues for a rights view that extends Kant’s theory. Regan’s view is that Kant’s formula of humanity leads to the conclusion that some humans—such as zygotes, embryos, fetuses, infants in their first few years, and humans in comas—are humans but not persons, because they lack the ability to set ends and pursue them in accordance with reason, and therefore they lack humanity and dignity and thus have no right to be respected.

Regan thinks this problem arises because Kant’s concept of “human” is too broad and his concept of “person” too narrow, and as an alternative he newly proposes the concept of a subject-of-a-life.

Regan’s rights view can be summarized as follows.

Every life that has belief, desire, perception, memory, a sense of the future, an emotional life, preference, the ability to act in pursuit of goals, a psychophysical identity over time, etc. is a subject-of-a-life. (Based on the 1983 first edition of The Case for Animal Rights)
All subjects-of-a-life possess morally equal inherent value.
Among subjects-of-a-life, some are moral agents with the ability to make moral judgments in accordance with reason and act accordingly, while some are moral patients without that ability. All moral agents have a direct duty to respect all subjects-of-a-life. All subjects-of-a-life, whether moral agents or patients, have the right to be respected.
To use another subject-of-a-life merely as a means for achieving some end is unjust because it violates the rights possessed by that subject-of-a-life.

To summarize, the differences between Regan’s rights view and Kant’s view are as follows.

Unlike Kant’s category of person, Regan’s category of subject-of-a-life includes sufficiently developed humans and mammals. In the 1983 first edition, Regan used “mentally normal mammals aged one year or older” as the criterion, and in the preface to the revised 2004 edition, he broadened his position to include birds as well (he withheld judgment on fish). However, zygotes, embryos, and many invertebrates still remain excluded.
In Kant’s formula of humanity, rights and duties are always joined together, whereas in Regan’s rights view, the two are separated. Moral agents possess both rights and duties, whereas moral patients possess only rights without duties (moral patients are often translated as “morally incompetent beings”). Therefore, according to the rights view, humans have direct duties to animals.

Regan calls severe diminishment of the well-being of a human or animal harm. Harm includes infliction and deprivation. Deprivation differs from infliction in that the subject suffering the harm may not recognize the harm. For example, an animal that lives confined all its life and then dies may not know what it is like to be free, but this is deprivation, and thus a kind of harm. Therefore, the mere claim that the animal does not concretely recognize that some human act deprives it of some right is not by itself enough to conclude immediately that the act is not a harm done to that animal.

At the same time, it is also important that one cannot deprive a being of a right it never had in the first place, and that the kinds of rights humans have and the kinds of rights animals have are different. Regan says this:

Any view that holds that animals have a right to vote, to marry, or to change their citizenship is absurd.

For example, humans have the right to stand for election, that is, the right to run in a public election. Even if one does not know that one has such a right, if that right is taken away without justification, this is a harm. But animals, at least as far as is currently known, do not have the intellectual capacity to hold public office, and therefore do not have the corresponding right to run in public elections; preventing animals from running cannot be called a harm to animals.

In summary, this is the point.

Humans, as moral agents, have direct duties to animals, who are subjects-of-a-life and moral patients.
Harm to animals includes not only infliction but also deprivation. Even if an animal deprived of a right does not know that fact, it still counts as harm.
Even if animals and humans possess equal inherent value, that does not mean they possess equal rights. If an action is harmful to a human, it cannot always be said to be harmful to an animal as well, and if an action is harmful to an animal, it cannot always be said to be harmful to a human as well.

The Various Aspects and Context of Objectification: Nussbaum

Whereas Kant, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin focused mainly on the problem of regarding others as tools or means, Martha C. Nussbaum argues in her Objectification article published in 1995 that positive objectification can exist depending on the context.

As one example, Nussbaum presents three hypothetical situations. A woman W is about to leave for downtown for an important job interview, and a male acquaintance M says, “Do you really need to go? Just send a few photos.” Is this utterance objectifying?

If M is not a very close friend of W, then this remark can almost certainly be seen as objectifying. It treats W’s expertise or attitude as unimportant to the hiring process and considers only her face or body meaningful.
What if M is W’s lover, said this while they were lying in bed together, W and M deeply respect one another, W’s job interview was for a modeling position, and M said it both because he intended to say how attractive W is and because he wanted to spend a little more time with W? There is still some ambiguity, so it is hard to say there is absolutely no problem, but at least one can say it is considerably different from the former situation.
What if M and W are close friends, and W was in a situation where she wanted M to notice her physical attractiveness? W may have felt good hearing M’s remark.

Nussbaum’s claim is that because human beings are this complicated, it is difficult to make categorical statements about whether some instance of objectification is negative objectification without considering the context. (For more detail, see Objectification (article).)

There is also a subtle point in Kant’s formula of humanity that we looked at earlier. Kant does not say that one must never use human beings as means. He says only that one must not use human beings merely as means. In everyday life, humans always use other humans as means. The act of paying money and buying food at a restaurant is using the restaurant’s cook as a means, but that in itself is not a problem. But if one were to say something like, “I paid, so just bring me the food I ordered,” or treated the other person with that sort of attitude, that would be a problem because it is treating a human being merely as a means.

Kim Won-young explains this subtlety of objectification well in his book Standing Up for the Unfit.

Back in 2011, National Assembly member Na Kyung-won, then the Seoul mayoral candidate of the Grand National Party, visited a welfare facility for disabled people and volunteered to bathe a disabled child. A teenage boy with a disability lay naked on the bathroom floor, and Representative Na looked at him with a pitiful expression and earnestly helped him. That image was captured by reporters’ cameras. Of course, it was not merely caught accidentally by the cameras. Camera reporters were lined up in front of the open bathroom door, and a lighting panel was set up on one side. As with most politicians’ activities, it was a carefully planned performance. … When we are in a position where we need someone else’s help, and that help can bring a certain benefit to another person, we may sometimes be mobilized for a “performance.” … It is hard to say that every case in which disabled people participate in such performances is problematic. Disabled people too, as social actors, of course participate in performances and act. But in some kinds of performances, without even knowing that they have been mobilized into that performance, and without any role, individuality, or presence, a certain group (disabled people, the elderly, patients, the poor, homeless people, etc.) is used like a tool only in ways that suit a specific purpose. In this kind of performance, the group is thoroughly abstracted, anonymized, and turned into a symbol, and its existence is explained only through elements that convey “pitifulness” to others—that is, the degree of poverty, the severity of the disability, or a story that arouses sympathy.

Synthesis and Conclusion

Putting the above discussions together, negative objectification of animals, like negative objectification of humans, should be avoided because it causes direct and indirect harms. In order to judge whether some action is a case of negative objectification of animals, it may be good to think through the following points.

Is it not treating the animal merely as a means, and does it have the aim of respecting the rights of the animal as a subject-of-a-life? (Kant, Regan)
Judged in light of the rights of the animal concerned, rather than human rights, does it avoid causing direct harm to that animal by inflicting suffering on it or depriving it of its rights? (MacKinnon, Dworkin, Regan)
Judged in light of the rights of the animal concerned, rather than human rights, does it avoid bringing about short-term or long-term consequences that indirectly infringe the animal’s rights by negatively affecting human attitudes toward animals? (MacKinnon, Dworkin, Regan)
Does it avoid using the experience of oppression suffered by another group, such as women or people of color, as a metaphor for animal oppression and thereby erasing and objectifying one group’s experience? (Adams)
Taking all of the above contexts into account, can one say that the positive aspects are sufficiently greater than the negative aspects? (Nussbaum)

That is, if it does not treat animals merely as means (1), does not directly harm animals (2), does not indirectly harm animals (3), does not use others’ experiences of oppression as metaphor (4), and overall has sufficiently great positive effects, then it is probably okay; if it fails to satisfy even one of these, then it should probably be regarded as inappropriate.

Schematic:

The following are examples:

Using animal emojis: If one uses animal stickers commonly associated with “pets,” such as dogs or cats, simply because they are “cute,” that seems to violate points 1, 3, and 5. On the other hand, if one uses cow or pig stickers with the intention of changing perceptions of animals commonly regarded as “livestock,” that does not seem to violate point 1. However, depending on how the sticker depicts cows or pigs, there is still a possibility that it violates point 3, and if it violates point 3, then as a result it may also violate point 5.
Adding speech bubbles to images of exploited animals: Sometimes, in order to inform people about the reality of animals exploited and killed under the factory farming system, people add speech bubbles to their images with phrases such as “I want to live” or “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect my baby (cow).” In this case, it seems hard to think that it violates point 1 or 2. However, there is room for it to violate points 3 and 4 (and therefore also 5), and especially a message like “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect my baby” seems more so than “I want to live.” “I want to live” is subtle; if I had to look for a problem with it, one might say that instead of appealing to reason by exposing structural contradictions and so on, it adopts a strategy of appealing to temporary emotion by drawing attention to the miserable situation of an individual animal, and in that respect it could be seen as having the potential to violate point 3.

There is still plenty of room to refine this further, and these criteria alone may not always clearly distinguish actions that are cases of negative objectification of animals from those that are not, but I think they are useful to some extent.