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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2022
This paper takes up Axel Honneth’s suggestion that we, in the 21st century Western world, should revisit the Marxian idea of reification; unlike Honneth, however, this paper applies reification to the ways in which humans relate to non-human animals, particularly in the context of scientific experiments. Thinking about these practices through the lens of reification, the paper argues, yields a more helpful understanding of what is regarded as problematic in those practices than the standard animal rights approaches. The second part of the paper offers ways of overcoming reification that go beyond Honneth’s idea of recognition by introducing Iris Murdoch’s idea of attention. This proposed strategy makes the ethical relevance of reification more salient and makes it possible to counter reification through a practice such as attention which, unlike recognition, can be consciously established.
1. Honneth, A. Reification: A recognition-theoretical view. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered University of California, Berkeley, March 14–16, 2005; available at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/h/Honneth_2006.pdf (last accessed 15 June 2017); and Honneth, A. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2008.
2. Lukács, G. Reification and the consciousness of the Proletariat. In: History and Class Consciousness (1923). Livingstone, R, trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1971:83–222 Google Scholar.
3. See Honneth, A. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press; 1995 Google Scholar.
4. This may look like a distinction based on the differing inherent value of something or a distinction based on the interests something/someone has in her/him/itself. There is something true in this, but the concept of “inherent value” is not standard in Honneth. As I explain in greater detail below, Honneth does not defend recognition as awareness of mind-independent value, but rather value emerges from recognition and is therefore the product, so to speak, of interaction between the valuing subject and the bearer of value.
6. For applications of Honneth’s idea of reification the environment, see Vogel, S. Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hailwood, S. Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7. See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 114–9.
8. See, for example, Poresky, RH, Hedrix, C. Differential effects of pet presence and pet-bonding on young children. Psychological Reports 1990;67(1):51–4CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
9. Compare, for instance Smuts, B. Encounters with animal minds. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2001;8(5–7):293–309 Google Scholar.
10. See note 3, Honneth 1995, at 21.
11. Dinesh Wadiwel argues that human relationships with non-human animals are essentially hostile and violence is a dominating factor, secured by property laws. See Wadiwel, D. The War Against Animals. Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi; 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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13. Including between 0.97 and 2.7 trillion fish caught from the wild and between 37 and 120 billion farmed fished slaughtered. See http://fishcount.org.uk/fish-count-estimates, with statistics from FAO.
14. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Slaughtered/Production Animals 2012, FAOSTAT Database (last accessed 24 Apr 2014).
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18. See Hauskeller, M. The reification of life. Genomics, Society and Politics 2007;3(2):70–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 74–7.
19. See note 18, Hauskeller 2007, at 77.
20. Regan, T. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press; 1983:243 Google Scholar. Regan uses this notion to argue that, since animals have an independent life that matters to them, they also have inherent value which should be respected, and it is therefore wrong of us to treat them as mere means to our own ends. That would mean, along Honnethian lines, treating them as mere things, overlooking their nature as other-than-thing.
21. See note 18, Hauskeller 2007, at 79.
22. This worry does not need to give rise to fatal objections—Peter Singer, for example, solves it by appealing to interests that are connected to some of the above properties, rather than attributing value to the properties themselves. Whether or not one accepts Singer’s solution, the worry about linking value to properties, directly or indirectly, is more urgent and appropriate when trying to deny value based on the absence of a particular property. Narrowing the moral circle should concern us more than expanding it.
23. See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 106–13.
24. See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 111.
25. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. Anscombe, GEM, Hacker, PMS, and Schulte, J, eds. Chichester: Wiley and Sons; 2010:178 Google Scholar.
26. See note 25, Wittgenstein L. 2010, at §38.
27. This is why, incidentally, theories in animal ethics that either attribute or deny value to animals based only on empirically established criteria—sentience, memory, concept-use—tend to miss something important about animal value.
28. See note 25, Wittgenstein L. 2010, at §284.
29. See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 125.
30. See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 100.
31. Murdoch, I. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge; 1970, at 37–40 Google Scholar. On Murdoch and attention see Caprioglio Panizza, S. The Ethics of Attention. New York: Routledge; 2022 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32. Honneth also concedes that there is something normative about reification (see note 1, Honneth 2005, at 100), in the implication it contains that a reified object is not perceived as it ought to be perceived. But his interest lies in the ontological and existential domains, and he appears to prefer to keep these spheres separate from morality. What I suggest here, following Murdoch, is that we have no reason to maintain this separation, and that Honneth’s ideas concerning evaluative attitudes can support this framework.
33. Carol Adams’s work on feminist vegetarianism revolves to a large extent around this distancing, liking the way we remove the living animal from consciousness when we use or consume her/him to the ways we remove from consciousness the individual woman being exploited, sexually or otherwise. Thus animals and women become the “absent referent,” whose presence is necessary (there must have been an animal for there to be meat) but which must at the same time be removed for the exploitative act to take place. See Adams, C. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum; 1990 Google Scholar.
34. JM Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello makes this point powerfully, in the context of delineating the idea of “willed ignorance,” which comes close to the way I am interpreting reification—as a form of ignorance or forgetting of something one does know, but the ignoring of which does not derive simply from a conscious act of will; it derives, rather, from deep and habitual ways of relating to the world, and/or from a psychological necessity not to face something which would throw one’s belief in the goodness of life/oneself into chaos: “I was taken on a drive around Waltham this morning. It seems a pleasant enough town. I saw no horrors, no drug-testing laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs. Yet I am sure they are here. They must be. They simply do not advertise themselves. They are all around us as I speak, only we do not, in a certain sense, know about them.” Coetzee JM. The Lives of Animals. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered Princeton University, October 15–16; 1997:119; available at https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/c/Coetzee99.pdf (last accessed 6 Dec 2017).
35. Honneth notes this, although he does not draw out the consequences I am suggesting in relation to moral action: “the notion that the stance of empathetic engagement in the world, arising from the experience of the world’s significance and value [Werthaftigkeit], is prior to our acts of detached cognition. A recognitional stance therefore embodies our active and constant assessment of the value that persons or things have in themselves.” See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 111.
36. See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 105–6.
37. The adverse reaction of people who do not want to be reminded that what they are eating or wearing was once in fact a living being shows both the recognition hiding behind the current practice and the wish to suppress it. Carol Adams’s theory of the “absent referent” is again relevant here. See note 33, Adams 1990.
38. See also, in other contexts, the use of “processed” for the handling of animal bodies or the word “livestock” to refer to cows and pigs, and so forth.
39. This point has been made extensively by Gary Francione, who argues that because animals have the legal status of property, albeit a special sort of property, their interests, when they do count, will always count as less important than those of their owners, and consequently the concept of right has a poor application when someone is someone else’s property. See Animals, Francione G., Property, and the Law. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press; 1995 Google Scholar. See also note 7, Wadiwel 2015, at 147–73.
40. Companion animals are sometimes an exception to this, though recognition of companion animals is also not to be taken for granted.
41. Or, as Honneth puts it, “a retroactive denial of recognition for the sake of preserving a prejudice or stereotype.” See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 131.
42. See Cavell, S. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press; 1979 Google Scholar.
43. See note 31, Murdoch 1970, at 20.
44. See note 1, Honneth 2005, at 130.
45. “In the moral life,” Murdoch writes in a much-quoted passage, “the enemy is the fat relentless ego. Moral philosophy is properly… the discussion of this ego and of the techniques (if any) for its defeat.” See note 31, Murdoch 1970, at 52. I suggest that we take the ego broadly and understand it as anything that leads us to act and think in ways that are, in some way, self-protective, self-gratifying, or self-reassuring. Taken this way, the ego can indeed explain many cases of distortion and denial that get in the way of goodness and justice, including reification, the case of animals being a particularly clear one.
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50. The moral significance of animal death, as opposed to pain and suffering, has been disputed in the literature. For a discussion of the various position, see Harman, E. The moral significance of animal pain and animal death. In: Beauchamp, TL, Frey, RG, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2011 Google Scholar.
51. See note 48, Johnson 2017.
52. The potential benefits deriving from painful research are not taken as a reason to use dissenting human subjects. Why should it be a reason to use dissenting animals?
53. Footage from the laboratories shows researchers laughing as they inflicted brain damage on baboons. A documentary on this was subsequently released: Newkirk I, Pacheco A. Unnecessary Fuss. [video] PETA; 1984.
54. This phenomenon is clearly not limited to the scientific contexts: parallels can be found in the case of farmers who grow attached to the animals they subsequently take to the slaughterhouse and treat them kindly up until that point, and in the fact that sometimes workers in the animal industry, more often people working in slaughterhouses, in fact, display a violent and aggressive attitude toward animals, which shows that they do recognise animals as subjects capable of feeling pain and thus fitting objects of anger.
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61. I am grateful to Maurizio Mori and Vera Tripodi for our discussion on this point.
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63. This is true without appealing to moral realism. If moral realism is true, which Murdoch’s philosophy suggests, then there is a simpler answer to this problem: the attentive gaze reveals the moral reality, and that will include which responses are appropriate and which are not.
64. I would like to thank Patrizia Setola, Jane Jonhson, and Anna Smajdor for helpful comments on this paper, and the participant at the workshop ‘The recognition and reification of non-capacitous human and nonhuman animals’ at the University of Oslo (2017) for discussion.
