Discovering Darwin (1913)

AUTHOR: Moore, J. Howard

PUBLICATION: “Discovering Darwin.” Proceedings of the International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection Congress, Held at Washington, D.C. December 8th to 11th, 1913. New York: The Tudor Press, 1913. 152-158.
https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofint00unse_0/page/152/mode/2up

KEYWORDS: animals, animal welfare, anti-vivisection, cannibalism, capitalism, evolution, race, slavery

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Moore promotes animal welfare (including the practice of ethical veganism) on the grounds of evolutionary theory. Moore holds that “[t]he Doctrine of Evolution is the most important idea so far discovered by the human mind,” such that “it has almost rendered all previous thinking obsolete” (152). It is “thanks to the immortal Darwin” and evolutionary theory that “we can not only unlock the secrets of the past but even open the mystic doors of the future” (152). Moore asserts that all humans ultimately descend from the non-rational, “low-browed savage” and what he calls “the primitive mind” which, for Moore, entails cannibalism, because

there is no fact in anthropology better attested than that at a certain stage in human culture cannibalism was universal. And during this cannibalistic stage men disposed of those captured in war, not by making slaves of them, as they did later, but by eating them. So we have advanced some. Sordid and fixed and animalic as the human mind is now, it was immeasurably more so during the slow-creeping ages of racial infancy (153).

Since we are but “made-over savages” (153), our habits and customs still display traits of the “primitive mind”:

A man who will treat a dog or a guinea-pig as if it were an inanimate thing, who continues to act as if Darwin had never lived, has the psychological equipment to hold human beings as slaves in a little dimmer age than the present. And if such a person had struck existence during the cannibalistic ages, he would have been one of the most enthusiastic exponents of the ancient and respectable practice of dining on his fellow-men. I meet men every day who would have eaten their grandfathers and grandmothers in the jungle with a relish, if they had happened to hit existence at a convenient stage in human development (154).

His understanding of evolutionary theory allows Moore not only to link the question of animal welfare to slavery, but also to the perpetuation of monarchy “and capitalism and so many other anachronistic things” (154). The link is provided by what Moore calls “anthropocentricism – the doctrine that man is the central fact of the universe and that around him revolves everything that is, was, or ever will be,” which he thinks “was invented in the barbarian stage of development” and continues to persist “in this age of science and evolution” (154).

The anthropocentric worldview also facilitates the practice vivisection, which is based on the “fiction … that a thousand dogs or monkeys or guinea-pigs are of less consequence than one human being” (155). In truth, Moore maintains, animals “compare very favorably with human beings in their powers of feeling, and in their ability to get out of life what little there is in it” (155). He even goes so far as to assert that he has “had pet guinea-pigs that were more sensitive than savages, and who got out of life a higher quality of psychic experience than do primitive men, who are usually dull and feelingless” (155).

Moore condemns meat-eating as one of the most despicable practices, along with cannibalism and slavery. Even humanitarians, he complains, are not really

emancipated from the anthropocentric notion, for they continue to make meals out of the very beings they preach kindness towards. Kreophagy is the most direct and terrible of all the forms of inhumanity. It is sustained solely by the weight of numbers, as were cannibalism and human slavery. It hasn't a single logical leg to stand on. Indeed, it is so intrinsically horrible that if meat-eaters were the exception instead of the rule, they would, it seems to me, be almost hunted from the earth (155).

Moore states his non-anthropocentric ethical principle: “The same general moral code applies to every being that feels. In a general way, whatever is right to human beings is right also to non-human beings; and whatever is wrong to human beings is wrong to non-human beings” (156). Nevertheless, somewhat inconsistently, Moore's view is still based on both speciesist and racist hierarchies:

I do not say nor do I believe that a guinea-pig has the same rights to life and to the satisfaction of its desires as an Englishman has. Neither has an Eskimo. But I do say that an ethical system that treats guinea-pigs and non-humans generally with the ethical indifference that they receive to-day is a product of human provincialism pure and simple and is destined to become as obsolete as human slavery with the blooming of the ages (156).

The reminder of the article, which was orginally presented as a paper at the International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection Congress in 1913, deals with the cruelty of vivisection, describing several particular instances, and drawing an analogy with “the enslavement of the black race by the white race” (157).