Note on intention
Readiness to cite intentions in ethical judgements increases in proportion as the judge identifies more with the perpetrator than with the victim.
Is it ethical for wolves to kill and eat their prey? I can see two reasons for the ‘not unethical’ answer at least: ‘They do it out of necessity’ and ‘They don’t know what they’re doing’. (Might these be combined: ‘They don’t know any better’?)
1. I’m not sure it’s intelligible to say that a statement like, ‘They could eat plants, they just wouldn’t like to’ is truer of wolves than of us. How sure would a zoologist be?
2. They don’t know? Well, they surely know they are eating something that they killed to eat. They lived the chase and the cruelty of the catch. What more do we know that makes our carnivorousness unethical?
Far from characteristically the species that does good, we are distinctively the species that knows what it’s doing is wrong – and can imagine better selves, with better histories. In some not really explicable way, and though animals are less innocent than we wish, the wrong we do is worse than the same done by animals. This may be our damnation. But that we command a free will that is denied animals’ more instinctual minds may too be a flattering lie that frees us to excuse and commit further wrongs.
Ethics is only an art. But in saying the wolf cannot practise it, I try to practise it for him. I think ethics does apply to his killing: I think the answer is ‘No’; and I think this ‘No’ is weaker than we fear to guess.
What does it matter to the Iraqi journalists that their destroyers may have mistaken them for insurgents? They’re as dead and deaf to extenuation as they would be had they been murdered or sentenced to death in court. Would you rather be killed by someone who meant to kill you, for justifiable cause? Perhaps. Perhaps it would comfort your family.
What does it matter to the diner that his veal was tortured? He’s full.
What does it matter to the rabbit or moose that the wolf knew no better? What does it matter to the rabbit or Afghan wedding guests that we did? How should it matter to the judge and to the judged?
