The Sharing of a Vision of Animal Life
Exploring an Alternative to Argument
Shortly after college, having by this point already found my calling in the fight for animal justice, I worked for a time with PETA traveling the country visiting college campuses. As is to be expected for an organization with far more money than good sense, the outreach we did was rather unorthodox: we were entrusted with a state-of-the-art virtual reality simulator into which we had been instructed to feed hapless, ill-informed students who would be transformed into chickens then sent to slaughter. I’ll admit that this all sounded pretty ‘dope’ to me, at least at first, at least in theory. (How couldn’t I be thrilled about the prospect of beginning a conversation about the wrongness of eating meat by virtually slaughtering my interlocutor?) In practice, however, the simulation failed on us more often than not, and on those occasions when we were fed up with the mind-numbing amount of troubleshooting required to get it back online, we’d just shrug and say, ‘fuck it’ and revert back to the old-fashioned way of doing things.
Fortunately, in college I had studied philosophy and done a little bit of debate, and so I was well-equipped to carry out the kind of proselytizing that predominates in vegan advocacy ‘After Singer,’ the Holy Father of our movement. Roughly, you begin by hearing out their ‘excuses,’ then you proceed to debunk their claims—either by pointing out inconsistencies or by referring them to ‘the facts’—and finally you hit them while they are stunned with your iron-clad argument and in this way subordinate them to the authority of your command: Go Vegan.
Again, I started out hopeful of such an approach. Philosophy, after all, had trained me to communicate in precisely this way. Not before long, however, I began to realize that—just as with our nifty virtual reality simulator—this method of persuasion fared better on paper than in practice. In practice, argument rarely yielded the sort of result I was aiming for. “Sure,” my interlocutor might say, “I can see why you think I am being inconsistent and/or irrational. But so what? I don’t care.” To which I could think of nothing to say. And that was only if I succeeded in enticing another to engage with me; more often than not they resisted all my attempts at initiating conversation, presumably because I had little in the first place to offer them that they saw of value.
Ultimately, what I took from my time with PETA is this: that disagreement often goes deep, deeper than (because prior to) a difference in explicitly held principles or a conflicting grasp of the empirical facts. Instead, when I disagree with another it can be more fundamentally because we to an extent live in separate worlds. And when the distance between us is so great and the differences so various and encompassing, argument stands little chance at bridging the gap and making a claim on the other.
Not being able to find the right language to articulate these intuitions of mine, they remained for a while inchoate—and all the more troublesome for that. It wasn’t until much later, while I was in grad school (largely to make sense of my failures as an activist), that I stumbled upon the particular word around which my scattered thinking on this matter was able finally to coalesce, and I experienced the intellectual catharsis that I had so long been searching for. That word was ‘vision,’ and I encountered it in a little-known essay called “Vision and Choice in Morality,” published in 1956 by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. In this paper, Murdoch observed that modern liberal morality was inclined to think of the “essence of moral life as sets of external choices backed up by arguments which appeal to facts” (79-80). According to this picture, when we disagree it is either because we subscribe to different principles (that is, we have chosen to define concepts such as ‘right’ or ‘good’ in relation to different states of affairs), or it may be that we share the same principles but “differ about what exactly the facts are” (which in turn results in a difference in what it looks like to act according to those same principles). However, when we attend to all those activities that may be said to “constitute an important part of what, in the ordinary sense, a person ‘is like’” (80)—for instance, “their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny: in short the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation” (80-81)—then “moral differences look less like differences of choice, given the same facts, and more like differences of vision… We differ not only because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds” in the first place (82).
Such an analysis, Murdoch believed, had implications too for what is required to bridge a gap of understanding between different individuals: “communication of a new moral concept cannot necessarily be achieved by specification of factual criteria open to any observer (‘Approve of this area!’) but may involve the communication of a completely new, possibly far-reaching and coherent, vision” (82). In many cases, that is, we simply cannot take for granted that all the facts at our disposal will be the same, even to the diligent observer; and, if this is so, having one’s stance understood requires a sharing of one’s unique perspective with another, describing to them how the world appears from one’s own particular vantage point.
But here there may arise the following compounding difficulties: first, the words used in such a description might in turn possess a dimension of meaning that corresponds to the personal, largely private experiences of the user; and, if one has not had those experiences, these words will in turn remain inaccessible to them. In such cases, getting one’s message across may necessitate first inviting the other to attend to the way that things are and thereby to discover and to experience for themselves that concept’s meaning and worth. There may then be the further difficulty that the other not even have access to the psychical environment that could ground such an experience in the first place. “Words,” writes Murdoch, “have both spatio-temporal and conceptual contexts. We learn through attending to contexts, vocabulary develops through close attention to objects, and we can only understand others if we can to some extent share their context… Often we cannot” (325). Which is not to say that the task of understanding of another’s conceptual scheme then becomes impossible, only more challenging in that it requires one to supply the context that is missing.
Ultimately, Murdoch’s notion of vision as that which makes one different from another (morally speaking), and as that which we can share in order to come to a deep mutual understanding I find attractive because it opens for us the possibility to imagine and develop an entirely new approach to persuasion beyond simple argument—the approach that continues to predominate today in animal advocacy despite how ineffective it has been at moving us towards the goal of total liberation.
For a concrete example of what the sharing of a vision might look like, read my earlier pieces: Every Vegan Should Have an Origin Story and The Urgency of Action.
For a more detailed look at the importance of context for getting a message across (and how to create such context in cases where it is missing), read Missing is the Context.
Work Cited
Murdoch, Iris. 1998. Existentialists and Mystics. London: Routledge.