ʻand Who Is My Neighbor?ʼ: Reading Animal Ethics through the Lens of the Good Samaritan

thought allows us to transcend the particularities of our specific place. This ability allows us to look past our own species and enter into relationships with other animals that amount to more than simply seeing them as objects for our consumption. On the other hand, our closest biological relatives, the Neanderthals, failed to form relationships with other animals that approach anywhere near the complexity of those we find between humans and animals. Archeologist Stephen Mithen attributes this failure to Neanderthals’ feeble capacity for abstract thought. “This was a serious constraint on the type and range of relationships that could be formed with animals,” he claims. Yet, this very ability that makes complex relationships with animals possible also allows us to ignore the particularity of relationships in place and live instead in abstract, isolated space. Ironically, our capacity for abstraction, which can prove helpful for realizing our commonality with other animals, can also prove detrimental to our caring for any particular animal. If we remain in the world of human abstraction and never attend to the actual places that we inhabit, we may never see the animals that live there too. Nearness, on the other hand, represents a constant feature of an animal’s lived experience that it cannot overlook or deny. Thus, while animals may tend naturally to care for those near them, for humans, this requires deliberate choice. To recall Augustine’s point in On Christian Doctrine I, we must love all equally, but we cannot do good to all equally. Therefore, neighborly love is concerned less with doing good to abstract concepts of human or animal-kind than focusing instead on those real individuals we encounter in the specific places we occupy. observation of animal behavior, a gradated view seems more appropriate. Such a conception would allow differing levels of understanding and abilities for different kinds of animal life, with some approaching nearer to that of humans than others. Alasdair MacIntyre critiques Kenny, who posits a similar chasm between humans and animals as Spaemann, along similar lines. MacIntyre states we should think “in terms of a scale or a spectrum rather than of a single line of division between ‘them’ and ‘us.’” MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 57. 503 Stephen Mithen, “The Hunter-Gatherer Prehistory of Human-Animal Interactions,” in The Animal Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, ed. Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 125. 130 4.1c More than Physical Proximity Mere physical proximity, however, does not suffice for making one a true neighbor. To become a neighbor we must actually meet or encounter the other individuals with whom we are proximate. In other words, neighborhood requires nearness and relationship. In two important essays, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger makes several valuable insights into the link between these two concepts. According to Heidegger, the concept of nearness (Nähe) cannot be defined simply by describing the length of space or time between two objects. “Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness,” he claims. Nearness, itself, cannot be experienced directly; yet, we can obtain nearness by attending to that which is near. Heidegger explicitly ties his understanding of nearness to the concept of neighborhood in his essay, “The Nature of Language.” Here he writes that although nearness does involve distances of space and time, these measurements do not encompass the full nature of the concept. For example, he observes that two isolated farmhouses, separated by an hour’s walk across the fields, may in fact be the best of neighbors; on the other hand, two townhouses, across the street or even sharing a common wall, may know no neighborhood. A neighbor, he explains, “as the word itself tells us, is someone who dwells near to and with someone else...Neighborhood, then, is a relation resulting from the fact that the one settles face-to-face with the other.” Thus, it is the face-to-face, the relationship, with the other that grounds the nearness that makes neighborhood possible. We saw in the previous subsection that to become a neighbor, humans must enter into the concrete world of place. For Heidegger, a place cannot be known independently from the beings that occupy it. It is in this way that the Samaritan in our parable can be said to have drawn near to the fallen traveler. The priest and Levite saw the man, but did not exist in the 504 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165. 505 Ibid.,166. 506 Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 103. 507 Ibid. 508 Ibid., 82. 509 Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 252. To a degree, this can be said even of inanimate objects. “When a bridge is built, the place on the river becomes a place. Previously it has not been a place. It merely was one of the many spots along the river for a possible bridge.”