Plutarch on the Treatment of Animals: The Argument from Marginal Cases

In 1965, English novelist and essayist Brigid Brophy published an article in the London Sunday Times that would exercise a profound influence on the crusade for better treatment of animals in Britain and the United States. In this brief article, entitled simply "The Rights ofAnimals," Brophy touched upon a number of points that were to become central to the arguments in defense of animals formulated by subsequent representatives of the animal rights movement.! Indeed, Richard D. Ryder, one of the most prominent historians of the movement, judges Brophy's article to have been instrumental in inspiring the rebirth of interest in this issue after decades, if not centuries, of neglect and indifference. Ryder considers the resurgence of interest in the status of animals in the 1960's, as exemplified by Brophy's article, to be a corollary to the anti-sexism and anti-racism crusades of that period as well as an expression of the return-to-nature philosophy of the hippie culture of that decade? What impresses one in accounts like that of Ryder is the persistent tendency of animal rights advocates to regard a serious concern for the lot of animals as a distinctly modem phenomenon whose philosophical position was formulated only in earlier philosophers in defense of animals are either ignored or summarily dismissed in most recent historical accounts of the growth of human concern for nonhuman species. In particular, this prejudice of contemporary moral philosophers has caused the sometimes profound arguments on the duties of human beings toward other species that appear in certain Greek writers to be largely overlooked.3 While it would be absurdly anachronistic to maintain that a philosophy of "animal rights" in a modem sense of that phrase can be traced to classical culture, a concern for the welfare of animals is clearly in evidence in some ancient writers whose arguments in defense of animals at times reveal striking foreshadowings of those developed in contemporary philosophical inquiries into the moral status of animals. This study examines an anticipation, in the animal-related treatises of Plutarch, in particular in his De sollenia animalium (On the Cleverness of Animals), of one of the more controversial arguments marshalled today in defense of animals, that which is commonly termed the argument from marginal cases.4 This argument maintains that it is wrong for humans to exploit animals in the belief that only humans are capable of mtionality or feeling or perhaps the use of language. These capabilities are not in fact possessed to the same degree by all humans, including, for example, such "marginal cases" as infants, the mentally feeble, or perhaps the severely physically handicapped.