Captivity

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

John Perry
We’re continuing conversations that began at Philosophers Corner at Stanford, where Ken I practice philosophy.

Ken Taylor
Today we’re thinking about captivity, both human captivity and animal captivity.

John Perry
Should we really be lumping people and critters together like that?

Ken Taylor
I don’t see why not.

John Perry
Well, because human captivity and animal captivity are different—in particular, morally different.

Ken Taylor
I frankly don’t see how, John. Putting a person in a prison deprives him of freedom and autonomy. Putting an animal in a cage will does the same thing.

John Perry
Yeah, but we put people in prison to punish them. We aren’t punishing animals when we put them in zoos or keep them as pets.

Ken Taylor
Oh, yeah? You ever asked a tiger, whether it wants to be locked up in a cage and gawked at all day?

John Perry
Well, I have no idea what a tiger wants can and neither do you, I suspect. But for better or worse, the savanna isn’t what it wants. Well, thanks to us human. Well, my point is for some animals, there’s really no alternative to life in captivity, given the way the world is. Keeping them in captivity might be actually the best thing for them. Especially if we make the conditions of their captivity as benign as possible.

Ken Taylor
John, come on. So first, we destroy their habitat, then we lock them up and throw away the key. And then we pretend it’s all for their own good.

John Perry
So you got a better idea? Let all the animals out of the zoos, that’s your idea? See how long they survive better life in a comfortable confinement than death in the vanishing wild.

Ken Taylor
Let me see you try that on humans. Why don’t why don’t you do that? Come on, we go to we go to invade your lid, take you captive. And then we’re going to make you like it. Oh, come on.

John Perry
Oh, well, thanks for a pressie of the history of mankind. But anyway, you’re missing the point that people and animals are different.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, John, they are because some people actually deserve to be held captive. Most, if not all, animal captives are just innocent victims of human greed and rapaciousness.

John Perry
Oh, come on. Can Do I hear you saying that all these young men rotting in prison, overwhelmingly minorities, for things like simple drug possession are getting what they deserve. Do you really think minimum mandatory sentences, three strikes and you’re out? And all the other crap? You think that’s a matter of justice?

Ken Taylor
I didn’t. And I wouldn’t say any of that our prison system is a moral nightmare. I grant you that. But you know what, John, our treatment of animals is even worse. We locked them up not just in zoos, but also in laboratories. We keep them as pets. We heard them for slaughter. And we do so without a single nod. That single nod to a justice or fairness.

John Perry
Boy, I’m starting to feel guilty about my ant farm , Ken. Look, I love animals as much as the next guy, but you’re going way overboard.

Ken Taylor
I don’t see why you would say that.

John Perry
Because we owe different things to animals than we do to human. in virtue of what Come on. Well, how about the fact that humans have a level of dignity, freedom and autonomy that no animal can mess?

Ken Taylor
You think of animals is myriad things? Oh, yeah. But they’re not. They have dignity too. And they could be free and autonomous do if we would just just let them be.

John Perry
Animals aren’t mere things, I grant you that. But they aren’t people either.

Ken Taylor
Big deal. So what?

John Perry
It makes a difference!

Ken Taylor
You still haven’t told me how!

John Perry
Well imagine a really pleasant confinement with enough food, shelter and water and plenty of opportunities for mental stimulation and physical exercise.

Ken Taylor
Oh yeah, right. That’s the best pets can hope for.

John Perry
Yeah, exactly. And it’s not bad for pets. Surely I agree. Keeping a human in that kind of confinement would be a really bad thing. Doesn’t matter how pleasant but I don’t see for a moment that it’s a bad thing for my dog, Gretchen. That’s what I ower her—not freedom or autonomy, she wouldn’t know what to do with that.

Ken Taylor
You know what? That’s thanks to us John, again. Gretchen’s ancestors were proud and free wolves. They were roaming the wild top predators of their domain. And what did we do to them? We domesticated them. We diminish them made them fit for nothing but captivity. That’s an affront to nature.

John Perry
Ah, can I don’t know where to begin to try to straighten you out.

Ken Taylor
And I don’t know where to begin to straighten you out.

John Perry
Well, maybe we should just step outside. But actually, instead, let’s see if our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Natalie Jones, can help. We sent her out to look at the lives of captive bears who serve as spectacles for humans. But they also help improve relations between people and free bears everywhere. She files this report.

Natalie Jones
It isn’t news that animals go after our food. But for people who live or camp in bear country, the stakes of being sloppy are high.

TV News
they’re not your typical backyard patio guests, but these bears have been making themselves at home in this Monrovia neighborhood—especially on trash day.

Stephen Colbert
We must guard our honeypots and seek new picnic basket technology or risk these super-bears running through our cities, like so many berry patches.

Natalie Jones
When bears get too close, they can turn into a threat. And when they discover how easy it is to forage for human food in trash cans campsite in yards, they can give up on traditional food sources altogether. And if they hang around people too much, the bears’ days are numbered.

Randy Gravatt
Very sadly, when a bear receives that unnatural unsecured food reward from humans. They can’t be changed and so yeah, they have to stay in captivity.

Natalie Jones
Randy Gravatt works at the grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center just outside the entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Here eight grizzly bears live out their days as captives. But these bears aren’t just on display, they have a mission.

Randy Gravatt
All of our bears were going to be euthanized. And instead of that happening, we rescue them. And they are literally here to help educate the public that visits the center so that they don’t make those same mistakes when they’re in bear country.

Natalie Jones
Gravette runs a container testing program that keeps the bears busy. Manufacturers send in their garbage cans and other products to see if they can market the containers as bear resistant.

Randy Gravatt
And we do use that word bear resistant versus bear proof. We along with the Forest Service believe that pretty much nothing out there is bear proof if given enough time. We’re going to leave the enclosure here and go out to the viewing area and let the bears out.

Natalie Jones
At the center, Gravette fills the container with food, peanut butter, meat, fish, honey, all the foods bears like and throws it into the fenced in yard where the bears roam, to let them take a shot at ripping it open. Like I know I can get into this, the bears get 60 minutes. And if they can’t crack the container and get the food, the container gets a seal of approval. If the bear gets in, the container fails. And that happens about 40% of the time. At the Discovery Center, bears do double duty. They help make containers more durable and also show visitors how strong and smart bears really are.

Randy Gravatt
Quite often, the public will make mention that they thought that bungee cords over a cooler were going to keep the bears out until they saw our bears, you know working some coolers.

Natalie Jones
The Yellowstone bears have become the gold standard for this kind of work.

Randy Gravatt
It’s been said that our bears are the experts. And since they’ve been doing this 10 years, they really have learned all the ways to get in.

Natalie Jones
But are the bears willing workers and testers? Or would these experts prefer to roam the wild? There’s no real way to measure that but cravat believes they appreciate the challenge.

Randy Gravatt
They enjoy getting the food reward. I mean, they’re they’re out there rolling a trash can around for an hour.

Natalie Jones
He thinks they find it stimulating, which is something the staff at the Center is always trying to encourage by giving bears the containers to play with or by hiding their food instead of just laying it out for them.

Randy Gravatt
Very, very important for any animal in captivity, to keep them physically and mentally stimulated.

Natalie Jones
The public is also stimulated by the bears. The center stresses the educational value of the animals above all else. Bringing bears and people together in captivity may help keep them apart in the wild. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Natalie Jones.

John Perry
Thanks, Natalie, for teaching us about bears and how they’re used up around Yosemite. I’m John Perry with me is my fellow Stanford philosopher, Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
And today we’re thinking about captivity. We’re joined now by Lori Gruen. sSe’s a professor of philosophy from Wesleyan University. She’s editor of “The Ethics of Captivity.” Lori, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Lori Gruen
Thanks for having me.

John Perry
Laurie, what first got you thinking about moral similarities and differences between animal and human captivity?

Lori Gruen
A few years back, I was working with captive chimpanzees that were in a cognition Research Center in Ohio. And they were taken from that center and put into a terrible place in Texas. And I worked very hard to have them removed from that place and brought to Chimp Haven, which is the National chimpanzee sanctuary. And in that process, I saw three very different conditions of captivity for these chimpanzees. And at the same time, I was asked to teach political philosophy in prison. So I started to really think hard about what was going on with captivity for both humans and nonhumans.

John Perry
So you’re a philosopher who does good things, and then reflects on the good and the bad and the principles involved. That’s great. Now human captivity, animal captivity, fascinating topics. But what’s the point? What’s really to be gained by combining these topics?

Lori Gruen
Well, one of the things I think that’s really useful about thinking about captivity for humans and for animals is that these are degrees of difference. Obviously, this situation isn’t identical. And even with it, animals, you have great variety. So for example, you might have heard lately, that zoos are increasingly trying not to keep elephants they are because elephants can’t really thrive or flourish in the limited space of a zoo. And similarly, with whales and other really large mammals, there’s been a lot of concern about getting these animals out of aquarium out of SeaWorld, because it’s such a bad situation for whales and elephants to be in that kind of captivity. But there’s differences too, there are some animals that can be in captivity under the right conditions. And so it’s important to recognize these differences for the animal’s own well being and also for human well being. But at the same time, I think we learn a lot when we’re able to do this comparison of human captivity and non human capital.

Ken Taylor
The thing that gets me is that, you know, I see that there are similarities, but the differences loom very large to me. I mean, systems of human captivity are systems of oppression and class division, and all this complicated human drama, power relations and all that, and all this kind of moral, and, you know, the captives make demand and they capitalist and vice versa, and all that, and it just seems like a really different world.

Lori Gruen
I don’t know can because if you think about the ways in which dehumanization in the human case gets legitimized, many, many of the men incarcerated men that I work with, are often compared to quote, unquote, animals. And that’s a way of devaluing and dehumanizing these incarcerated individuals. Now, if it were the case, that we weren’t thinking about the it being a norm, that it’s okay to hold animals in captivity, that very process of dehumanization would not have its legitimating ground.

John Perry
So if you look at the movie, like Free Willy, or you look at this video, that went viral about the elephant that just is so happy that it cries to be released from captivity. On the one hand, you see a lot of sympathy for your point among, you know, average humans. On the other hand, if you take something like an ant farm, and tried to convince someone that you were in any way, harming the ants by having them in an ant farm, I don’t even know if you would think that, do you see some kind of natural dividing lines or, or a natural dividing line between the cases where it’s not a big deal in the cases where it is a big deal?

Lori Gruen
I think I think it’s all a matter of degrees. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting about thinking about captivity is the attitude that we have towards captives. And what that does, in terms of, as Ken was saying, to structures of control, structures of domination, structures, even of oppression. And so looking at captivity and the ethics of captivity across the board, helps to reveal some of the ethical issues that these other attitudes, human attitudes, raise.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about captivity, both human and animal with Laurie Gruen from Wesleyan University.

John Perry
In our next segment, we ask What’s so bad about captivity anyway? is holding animals captive less morally problematic than holding humans captive? Can animals ever deserve to be held captive? Is it alright to hold humans capital for their own good? Is benign captivity ever preferable to precarious freedom,

Ken Taylor
The moral basis of animal and human captivity—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Johnny Cash
And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.

John Perry
Stuck in Folsom Prison like a caged animal. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk to program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. And today we’re thinking about captivity, both for humans and for animals.

John Perry
People have an intrinsic right to freedom and autonomy. But what about animals? If domesticating wild animals makes them fit for nothing but a comfortable confinement isn’t that an affront to nature, isn’t destroying animal habitats and leaving zoos is the only refuge just another form of conquest and enslavement. Our guest is Laurie Gruen, editor of “The Ethics of Captivity.”

Ken Taylor
So Laurie, I don’t want to put words in your brain or your mouth. But I, it seems to me that you think it’s wrong to hold an animal captive for pretty much the same reasons, whatever they are, and it’s wrong to imprison a human. But you know, people in animals are different as Don was dressing in the opening, and they do seem different in ways that really matter to the rightness and wrongness, or of holding them captive. Do you think there’s anything to that thought that the differences between them matter morally?

Lori Gruen
Well, I think there are different ways that individuals can be harmed by captivity. So for example, when you keep an otherwise wild animal in captive conditions, you’re denying that individual and that group, let’s say they they’re lucky, lucky enough to live in a social group, you’re denying them the possibility of doing what they would normally do. And that’s the same thing for anyone that’s held captive in to a large extent, you’re also when you hold humans and animals captive, you’re denying them a whole range of choices, you’re putting restrictions on them, who they can spend time with what they eat, when they can sleep, when they can avoid the human gaze, all of these things are actually quite similar. And when you start to look at conditions of captivity, you see these, these different ways in which both humans and animals are impacted by these captive conditionals. Now, in addition, go ahead.

Ken Taylor
I’m sorry, but but but don’t go back to John’s question. Just before the break, I mean, you could convince me the whales are pretty amazing creatures, their brains seem to be nearly as complicated as ours there. They, they seem to have culture, they have language, just not anything like a human language. And they seem to do what I like to call self representation. They seem kind of aware of this, you know, and probably they have life plans and all that stuff, and interrupting their lives and holding them captive is probably pretty much morally a candy holding a human cat. But let’s take a worm, you know, a worm just wriggles around. And I may feel pain or something, but I just wriggles around. If I put a bunch of worms in my, my garden or something like that, you know, I hold them captive, and it doesn’t seem so. So there’s at least some kind of dividing line, don’t you think?

Lori Gruen
Well, I think I mean, I think you raised a really important question. And one of the reasons I think thinking about captivity is so interesting from an ethical point of view is that traditionally, what we pay attention to are things like suffering. And suffering is usually physical suffering, like the worms pain, you suggested, maybe the worm feels pain, whether or not the worm can object to their captive condition. I mean, I think you’re right, I think it’s it’s very hard to say, in those kinds of cases, I think it’s important to recognize the kinds of attitudes and the ways that we’re shaping relationships with the others, and the the attitude of domination and control, that becomes part and parcel of the relationship with the other animal. That’s one feature of captivity, that I think it gets under thought about, when you’re a captive, whether you’re a human in prison, or whether you’re a giraffe in a zoo, you’re under the control of a human being, who basically decides how and whether your basic needs are met. And that is a feature of captivity, that deserves I think, philosophical and ethical reflection.

John Perry
Okay, Laurie, but I want to pin you down on this. Now, as a matter of fact, I do have a worm farm. Right. And I think it’s ecologically a good thing. Instead of using the garbage disposal as much as I might otherwise I dump all this stuff into my worm farm. And, you know, there’s 1000s of worms in there that wouldn’t exist without my worm farm. And I am complete control of their fate. I could kill them all. I could take a handful of them for phishing worms. Now, are you saying that that is somehow a morally objectionable or a bad thing?

Lori Gruen
No. And I think it’s also important, and Ken raise this earlier. There are over 2 million human beings in prison at the moment in the United States. And there are hundreds of billions of animals in captive conditions in the United States. And so what I’m interested in thinking about is those kinds of situations in which there are much more clear kinds of concerns for us to think about. I think that oftentimes thinking about the other end of the spectrum derails us from thinking about these really hard cases that we need to get our heads around and our minds around.

Ken Taylor
So it’s like so thinking about, say, chimps and whales are primate cousins, and I’m a million cousins who, you know, whales are probably near the top of the kind of cognitive hierarchy. And they’re thinking about them. I mean, I could see similarities and differences, you know, kind of close similarities and differences between us and them. Do you agree with that? Is that the point you’re making?

Lori Gruen
Yeah, I mean, I think the case of chimpanzees is a really, really hard case. Because as you were saying, their habitat is being destroyed, we’re destroying it. We mean, humans are destroying their habitat. And so there’s actually no place to let chimpanzees be free, who have been in captivity, often for six or seven generations. And so what this raises is a real, what I would think of as a true moral dilemma. On the one hand, we keep them captive, that’s bad On another hand, and on the other hand, we let them go. That’s bad. So here we have a dilemma. What do we do? And that’s one of the things that got me thinking about the ethics of captivity in the first place. Because I don’t think that we can let chimpanzees go, I think that’s a death sentence. So what do we do in instead? Is there a way of thinking about keeping them in captivity that isn’t, strictly speaking, awful. And so I think there’s ways in which we need to think differently about captive conditions and start to imagine ways of being in relation to captive animals that are very, very different than at the relations that we’re currently in.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about captivity for both humans and animals with Laurie Gruen from Wesleyan University. Vivian from Hayward’s on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Vivian.

Vivian
Thank you so much. You’re definitely on a subject that’s near to my heart. I was a zookeeper in the 70s. And I was probably in my 20s at the time. And we had baby animals. It was an unusual zoo, owned by the Rui brothers, German people from way back in Germany. And they came here and opened a couple of zoos. This is an Oakland. And one of the first animals that I was introduced to was a baby chimpanzee, probably about less than a month old. And the animals in this zoo, were all babies, baby lion, camels, elephants, and at the time, you know, you, you feel for them, because they’re babies. And the job was to take care of them, like your mother. So they hired mostly women, we bottle fed and pet fruit and baby chimpanzee home because it was a baby. It literally slept in my bed. It because it was like a, like an infant. And she might still be alive today. Her name was Colonia. And she probably is in captivity. And and, you know, I think about her because she was pretty precious and so close to us as human beings a lot of the similar behaviors and that you could see with an infant child and watched her grow. And that was a it was a profound experience for me. But really, all the animals were babies, and they were taken away from their, their parents at an early age. And even baby lions at six weeks old. We had them there.

Ken Taylor
So Vivian, I’m wondering, Did you are you morally conflicted by this? Did you think this was unbalanced? A good thing or a bad thing? I’m not quite sure.

Vivian
Yeah, I understand that. Yeah, I just kind of just laid it out, not in not taken aside. Partly because, for me, when I first became a member of the zoo there, I went there as a young woman, you know, young woman, and I was loved animals. And so I just thought is, oh, we’re taking care of these animals. They’re, they’re orphans. But as I began to realize that they really weren’t orphans, that they’d really been taken away from their parents, then we had to begin to hide that fact from, you know, visitors like how did that happen? Oh, and I realized that it was really a false false narrative. And that was, yeah, the night. i It was hard for me because I, I knew that they needed to be with their parents.

Ken Taylor
So I’m gonna thank you moving story they’ve been thanks a lot for sharing it with us. So Laurie, I’ve even talked a little bit morally conflicted. Some people think of the zoo movement. I know people used to think of the zoo movement as an evil thing. But I people don’t tend to think of zoos now as places where endangered species can be re can be saved. And there’s this whole kind of preservation movement associated with a zoo. So what do you think about the moral status of zoos?

Lori Gruen
Zoos are a complicated question. The the zoo that Vivian was talking about was probably would not be accredited by the the ACA now, but the the question about whether or not the zoos are actually successful in their conservation and pressor preservationist. Goals are very it’s a very conflicted topic because there is really a diminishing, diminishing habitats all Across the globe, so the idea that somehow, zoos are going to be waystations for some animals that will ultimately be quote, unquote, returned to the wild is becoming farther and farther afield, you can’t really imagine that being something that will happen safely. And indeed, there’s a recent case of some gorillas that were reintroduced to the wild in Africa and and rumor has it that five of them were killed by a wild gorilla.

Ken Taylor
So these are complicated claims, but I want to know what you think or feel.

Lori Gruen
I think we need to think very, very differently about the purpose and the role of zoos. And one of the things that I think is important in both thinking about prisons and thinking about zoos, is how do we envision something altogether different where the animals themselves in the zoos, for example, have much more control over their own lives? And I think that we learn a lot on thinking about these kinds of captive questions when we look to Sanctuary. So sanctuary is, of course another form of captivity, I don’t think anybody who’s in the sanctuary world would think of themselves as not being part of keeping animals captive. But there’s a different ethos in Sanctuary and in Sanctuary, what’s happening is animals are being protected. And animals are also being provided with an opportunity to be as free as physically possible within a captive confines. So there’s a different sort of ethos,

John Perry
Laurie, when I grew up in the 50s, in Lincoln, Nebraska, we had a zoo, which was, I think, probably a paradigm of an objectionable zoo, was probably on less than an acre of ground and had all kinds of animals lions and tigers and elephants. The preserves, you’re imagining the ones you help get the chimpanzees to the one that’s up in the Sierras that I know about has elephants and so forth. Those seem about as good as I can imagine getting. But let’s take something specific in between the San Diego Zoo that’s many people’s model for an excellent Zoo. They have acres and acres of land where the lions and tigers run around and the people have to be in caged in cars, when they look at them. What do you think about the San Diego Zoo?

Lori Gruen
I think the San Diego Zoo is is good in terms of the space. And I also think they have important programs for conservation education. So I think that those are two really important issues. But I guess again, what I want to harp on and get really clear is that there’s an attitude of the zoo. What the zoo is doing is presenting animals for human entertainment or and or education. It’s law, a lot of it is about sort of weekend fun with the kids and the grandkids. And so the idea is, if the San Diego Zoo had a different vision, a different model, where the animals there were thought more to be protected. They don’t have to be on display. They if they don’t want to be on display, and that the idea is really to provide a form of sanctuary for these animals. I think that that would be a much stronger way of making changing our relationship to these captives.

Ken Taylor
We’ve got another caller on the line, Tony from Oakland. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Tony.

Tony
Hi, there’s a lot of discussion about high cognition animals in captivity. I’m curious to discuss what about people who for genetic reasons or accidents or low cognition, humans? institutionalization, there is no obviously no natural habitat for a release. Because it’s our world. What do you think about that? What is? What is that? Is that captivity? Is it protection? How is it? How, what’s your thoughts on that?

Ken Taylor
Very good question, Tony. And I’m gonna just throw it to you. Laurie, what do you what do you think?

Lori Gruen
Yeah, that is that is an excellent question. I mean, there’s there’s a question often about whether or not children are captives because we control children, what they do, what they don’t do. And we do it, quote, unquote, for their own good. And I think that that’s an important recognition that as long as certain there are going to be certain times and certain individuals, both human and non human, for who, for whom freedom is going to be more problematic than not. And I think in those kinds of cases, it’s it really is very difficult to make that kind of determination that this is a objectionable form of captivity. But even there, I think we can make all sorts of comments about keeping a child for example, in a closet or in a crib for more hours and not providing stimulation, that would be an objectionable form of quote unquote captivity. So I think with even within this context of thinking about captivity We can start to ask questions about what makes the conditions of specific forms of captivity, problematic or more acceptable.

Ken Taylor
I think, Tony, I think he was getting at, well, if he wasn’t, I’m taking him to get the our prison system as a warehouse for what we seem to regard as, let’s call it the dregs of society. But I think of it as people whose humanity and is not respected, whose dignity is violated day to day. And I think we’ve tried to solve all kinds of social problems with this warehousing prison system of ours. And it’s, it’s an abomination. It’s a moral abomination. I don’t mean to be on my high horse. But I hope you to agree with me that the way we warehouse people in these prisons is such a waste of human capital.

Lori Gruen
I completely agree with you can I think that, as my work in the prison and other people’s work in the prisons have suggested, this is a system that is largely based on unjust, problematic racist structures in our society, and really need to really need to these structures really need to change. But one of the things I think is interesting about thinking about the prison system is the insights of those who are involved in the prison abolition movement, and the prison. abolition movement has been really inspiring. To me, there’s a variety of different forms of abolition. But one of the most important things that I take away from the prison abolition movement is this idea that we really need to think differently. We need to imagine what it would be like if we stopped dehumanizing, and exploiting and instrumentalizing others and we start to work on changing structures, so that we don’t just put those people who we’ve deemed unworthy into these massive warehouses where they’re denied their freedom, and they’re denied their autonomy and their, their dignity is often violated. And so one of the things I think is so useful about the abolition movement, is that it really gets us to start to think really calmly in complex ways about how to oppose and challenge the prison industrial complex and its growth around the globe.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about captivity with Laurie Gruen from Wesleyan University.

John Perry
Unless we go back to the days when animals roam freely all over the Earth some form of captivity seems the only option left for many animals and whole species of animals are their morally better and worse forms of captivity? And how about human captivity? We hold far too many humans in captivity for far too many reasons, particularly in the USA, is there any hope of reforming our system of human captivity?

Ken Taylor
Toward more ethically sustainable forms of captivity—when philosophy talked to continues.

Regina Spektor
And you’ve got time.

John Perry
Animals in cages, people in prisons—are they both doing time? We’re thinking about the morality of captivity. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Laurie Gruen from Wesleyan University, editor of “The Ethics of Captivity.” And we have a caller, Marie Louise from Palo Alto, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Marie Louise
Thank you. Yes, I’m calling about a story about the gorilla that was somehow imprisoned, I would have to call it in a very small space. And he was imprisoned for it was either 20 or 25 years, I believe. It was in a shopping center. And I’m sorry, I can’t be more specific, but he was there for that length of time. And I just cried when I read the story where he finally had been made out. But in all the time through the years, he sat in this or stood in this shopping center. And people came and looked at him as some kind of attraction. And it is beyond me how it could be going on for that long. Why didn’t people complain? You know, it’s just crazy to me. So I would love to hear what you might say about this, because it speaks a lot about the strangeness of human beings to allow something like that, to go on.

Ken Taylor
Thanks. Thanks for the call Mary Louise. Laurie, I want to add something to that just to set the discussion. I mean, I think Mary Louise is right to ask how could this go on but you know, I think about human beings and their relations to each other people have no problem. Well, they do have some problem, but people are pretty capable as viewing each other. As you know, like akin to yesterday’s garbage. Some people like you, I’m greatly moved by the suffering and plight of animals great sympathy, other human beings are devoid of that somebody they look at and And they see things to be exploited things to be hunted things to be eaten. I mean, so the human collectivity, we just a mess about this. So how could we ever come to any kind of we can’t even come to agreement about how to treat the Palestinians? How could we come to agreement about how to treat gorillas?

Lori Gruen
It’s a really hard, tough question. It’s one that I’ve been thinking about for a really long time. As you know, I think one of the things that’s important in trying to make those changes is to have people who are imagining things otherwise. And I think having actions to structure the changes to raise questions about that. I think that as long as most people think it’s perfectly fine to view other animals as sort of entertainment, to use other animals in certain kinds of ways to think of them as not as beings with lives of their own, or plans of their own, or friends have their own. But as just things that are here for us to use. I think that that attitude of instrumentalisation will just continue. And I think the same is really true of humans viewing other humans in that way. And there’s an important sense in which what we need to start imagining and talking about and working towards, is how we might otherwise respond to violence and conflict, not just in terms of more violence and more conflict, but just to really think differently about how we might go about that. And that I think, is part of the work that we philosophers can do.

John Perry
We’ve got an email against it a lacuna. In our discussion. So far. I think this from David in Oakland, you have been talking a lot about the problem with zoos. But I think the real problem is with the conditions in factory farms, pigs and cows are treated abysmally, zoos are not the problem, but factory farms are. And as a society were in complete denial of the immoral treatment of animals in our food chain. So I suspect the three of us probably would all, you know, take turns decrying the conditions in lots of factories, right. But the question to me, the more interesting philosophical question is not is not just how wrong that is. But how wrong is our ordinary practice of farming, I mean, I’ll just set out my own view. I think, chickens free range chickens, not in the official sense, which doesn’t require much but in the sense in which they raised when I was a kid, where they have a fairly large barnyard around which they can roam, I don’t see much wrong with that collect their eggs. even eat them, I don’t know. But pigs, that’s a timber matter. Pigs are very intelligent, more. Moreover, there’s a theory now that they’re one of our one of our ancestors. We treat these intelligent pigs horribly, we don’t empathize much with pigs, we treat them as dirty, stupid animals. They have gall bladders of the only animal that has a gallbladder aside from us. So we use a lot of pigs to train surgeons How To Remove gallbladders. And moreover, pigs do pretty well in the wild, right, even even even in the Sierras. When they’re let loose. Is there any excuse for the way we raise farm animals? Is there any natural boundary between kinds of animals or kinds of farms where it becomes Okay, what’s your thinking about this, Laurie?

Lori Gruen
Well, of course I don’t. I think that it’s really important. I’m really happy that the question about factory farmed animal captivity is raised it is in we’re in talking about billions of animals every year, who are both raised and killed on factory farms in for food, and that number is growing around the globe. So it’s really important that we not ignore that I think prisons and zoos are the more or less canonical forms of captivity. But can you raise some I mean, John, you raised some really great questions about how to think about chickens and pigs. I think one of the things that I’m getting out about really thinking differently about our relationships with these other animals is that if we stopped looking at these animals as beings, to whom it’s okay to use them for whom it’s not something that we should be doing. So having chickens in a relationship, that’s a relationship of respect, or equality, or having pigs in a relationship where respect to equality is a very different kind of thing than seeing them as animals that we can ultimately eat or kill to eat.

Ken Taylor
So let me try something new. Let me try something different. Okay, because I’m, I get your point, I really do. But I, I’m not sure how likely that argument is to win the day and alter the moral landscape. And I think you should try all kinds of different arguments. So my, the thing I want to suggest you isn’t so much a competitor, but a compliment, both to you, and I think we have this terrible attitude toward nature, especially in the West. So I don’t know much about the East, as I think to be exploited, right resources to be gotten out of it. And what does that lead to, in near environmental contests? trophy. If you think we need a different attitude toward the natural world, one that of all wonder and respected independently of ethical issues about rights, but just for the flourishing and thriving of the planet, I, you know, can’t we have a kind of compliment that takes it out of them? So much of the moral realm, I don’t really know about animal dignity and animal rights and autonomy, except when they get closer and closer to us. But the ecosystem deserves being treated gently. You know what I mean? I mean, can we kind of have both your kind of approach and my kind of approach and maybe alter the world with them both?

Lori Gruen
Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s a really important idea that we are in very, very fraught relationships with each other, with the rest of the animal kingdom and with the rest of nature, and we really need to work hard to rethink those. And on top of it, I think what’s really interesting is that it’s because of our real sort of dysfunctional relationship, if you will, with the natural world, that so many animals are losing their habitat, and thus, bringing it back to this question of captivity as well. So these things I think, are really closely connected. And a lot of it has to do I think, importantly, not so not so much with rights, not so much with that, but with really rethinking our relationships, and reimagining what might be possible, and we desperately need it both in both in the human case, but also in the case of other animals and the rest of nature.

John Perry
Why don’t want to rain on your guys parade. But I think these are, there’s a lot of tension between these two perspectives. The the, what I call the ken perspective, that is, you know, we’re part of nature, we’re not, we’re not Lords of nature, we’re not in control of nature, we’re parts of nature. If you have that view, you’re not going to be upset with eating animals, great. We were hunter gatherers. And there’s a you know, there’s a school of thought that when Cain slew Abel, you know, that was the step into farming and so forth. But, but the natural, if humans are part of nature, we’re killers, we’re, we’re, we’re like wolves. If on the other hand, humans are just this completely different thing that has this capacity that you don’t see much of in nature, or even in most of human history, the ability to empathize. By the way, I want to say there’s a great video starring Laurie on on the subject of empathy, and we’ll put a we’ll put a link to it up on our website. That’s a completely unnatural, saying for empathy beyond the bounds of family, or tribe, or in this Dell empathy beyond the bounds of species. So what’s it going to be? We’re partying, or rising above nature, and we’re getting so good at it, that we have to have a completely different attitude towards the other species. That is natural.

Ken Taylor
We’ll give you the last word on this, Laurie.

Lori Gruen
Oh, thanks. So I actually think it depends on what how you conceive of nature. And I think that there’s a sense in which there’s the one view of nature that it’s red in tooth and claw. And there’s another view of nature that it’s much more mutualist. And I like that view, as you might imagine, I think the idea is that we can see increasingly that there are other animals that have what we might call sort of proto empathy, or pseudo empathy are maybe the early bits of empathy with other animals. And so I think it’s complicated there. There’s a lot of different ways that animals and humans are in quote, unquote, nature. And I think that we can learn a lot. And we also don’t have to just take as given what we might see, just to return to chimpanzees, who I started with. I mean, chimpanzees are pretty violent beings. And it’s not clear to me that it’s right for any of us to imagine that they should stop being violent. But humans have choices. We can decide whether or not we want to be more dominating and violent, or whether we want to try to be living in a more harmonious way with each other and with the planet.

Ken Taylor
So Laurie, this has been a fascinating conversation. We just get into some really deep issues and but I have to thank you for joining us.

Lori Gruen
My pleasure, guys.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Laurie Gruen. She’s a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University. She’s editor of “The Ethics of Captivity.” Now, this conversation continues on our blog, at Philosophers Corner at our online community of thinkers, where our motto is Cogito Ergo Blogo—I think, therefore, I blog. And join us at the community of thinkers on Friday, August 22, at noon, Pacific time, when we’ll be chatting with today’s guest, Laurie Gruen. just head over to our website, philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
Now, we’re always a captive for this guy that’s coming up next: it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Some feel ethical pangs because cattle are held in captivity for our beef consumption.  On the other hand beefy buffalo were allowed to roam free, and were nearly hunted into extinction. Are goldfish in bowls captive?  Are birds in gilded cages?  I don’t let my cat go outside.  Is that cruel, or prudent?  Are we holding too many of our fellow humans captive, for too long, for trivial crimes?  And are we sometimes a little too free and loose with our notions about captivity?  A few years back, President Obama threw his weight, what there was of it, behind the development of high speed rail.  Along with dams, bridges, and enormous places to watch ball games, this is the sort of thing the nation used to build all the time.  Even in the libertarian pages of ATLAS SHRUGGED, you’ll recall, despite the efforts of bureaucrats and naysayers and the corrupt, Taggert Transcontinental Railroad went forward triumphantly.  Not any more!  In Ohio and Wisconsin, governors turned down federal funding for a high speed line.  In Florida, Governor Rick Scott turned down a couple billion bucks for a high speed stretch between Tampa and Orlando. In California, despite the support of Governor Jerry Brown, a proposed line between San Francisco and Los Angeles keeps floundering, as its cost keep ballooning. Sneering at the governor, columnist George Will wrote,  “Brown’s reverence for his rail bauble is fanaticism.”  A few years back Will also wrote an opinion piece called Why Liberals Love Trains.  It includes this, “To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they … are masters of their fates.” So it’s not just high speed rail and big government debt that keep us captive, it’s trains themselves!  We are trapped on rails, trapped by timetables, trapped inside swift boxes from the moment we leave one station and arrive at the next. But if it’s a liberal plot to make us all ride trains it’s not working so well.  Because another one of the many arguments against high speed rail is that there’s not enough riders to make it viable.  Well, you could say the same thing about cars.  Think how much oil we could save if a car was required to be crammed to the gills, like a clown car.  The least we could do is join the sharing economy, pick up passengers, and fill up the trunk with cargo.  Remember, the autonomy of the auto was due to social engineering in the fifties, the massive interstate highway system and the rise of the suburbs.  We made room for each car with a garage, a parking space at work, huge parking lots in town. But now our internal combustion autonomy is compromised by gridlock and high gas prices. I worry more about our captivity than I do about, say, horses.  On the other hand, only the rich can afford horses any more.  Maybe, as a progressive gesture, we should set all the horses free. But could they even survive in the wild?  And open range is scarce these days. No, for better or worse, the eohippus called civilization is out of the barn.  Our own desire for freedom has trapped us. Yet we’re still reluctant to switch to the bus, or a bicycle, or walking, or rail. Maybe ridership might increase if we allowed pets on trains.  Or, as progressives want us to call them, “animal companions.” Liberals.  They ruin everything. I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Manilla productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2014.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David Demarest.

John Perry
The program is produced by Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our director of research. Dave Millar is our Director of Marketing.

Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Chris Hoff, Merle Kessler, Karola Kreitmair, Jimmy Tobin, Jill Covington, and Mark Stone.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and partners at our online community of thinkers

Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too, can become a partner in our community of thinkers.

John Perry
I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.

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