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Medical workers treating patients with Covid-19 at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in January 2022, when the Omicron wave was in full force.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student Pablo Neira
If the interests of sentient animals matter, then there are (at least pro tanto) reasons to prevent the harms they suffer. There are many different natural harms that wild animals suffer, including hunger, disease, parasitism and extreme weather conditions (Singer 1975; Clark 1979; Sapontzis 1984; Cowen 2003; Fink 2005; Simmons 2009; Horta 2010; McMahan 2010; Ebert and Mavhan 2012; Keulartz 2016; Palmer 2013; Sözmen 2013; Bruers 2015; Tomasik 2015; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021; Johannsen 2021). One of these (on which I will focus in this paper) is the suffering caused by predation. Predation is an antagonistic relationship in which a predator obtains energy by consuming a prey animal—either wholly or partially—which is alive when it is attacked (Begon et al. 2006, 266). The harms predation cause to prey animals can vary greatly, depending on the kind of injuries they suffer in the process and how painful they are, the amount of time it takes them to die, the release of endorphins that reduce pain or the extent to which psychological suffering—mostly distress—affects them during the process. In addition, beyond the pain of predation itself, there are other substantial harms related to predation. It has been argued that death itself may harm animals because it deprives them of any possible future positive experiences (Nagel 1970; Višak and Garner 2016). However, we do not need to agree that death harms animals in order to consider predation a harm, as the suffering it causes to animals is sufficient in its own right. Moreover, some animals may survive predation and yet suffer serious injuries that cause them pain for a prolonged period of time, sometimes chronically (Schoener 1979; Engh et al. 2006; Jonhson et al. 2006). They may also live in fear of being attacked by predators (Lima 1998; Holbrook and Schmitt 2002; Mashoodh 2009). Thus, the pain experienced by sentient animals when they are attacked in nature should not be overlooked. In this essay, I will argue that it is permissible, and perhaps obligatory, to intervene to prevent predation. Moreover, if we accept this, it leads us to consider predation prevention as a cause area to take action seriously from Effective Altruism.
Predation: A Thought Experiment
Consider the following thought experiment:
Trapped Animals. An antelope is trapped between branches and abandoned by its herd. A hyena finds the antelope and begins to devour different parts of its body while it is still alive. This lasts several hours, until the antelope finally dies. Anna is near the antelope and, without placing herself in danger, could untangle the branches so the antelope could escape.
According to some deontological or virtue ethics perspectives,[1] it can be argued that Anna’s intervention would be incorrect. This position can be defended by arguing that there is a rule that prevents intervention or that it is not virtuous to intervene. The idea that we should prevent predation may seem odd and wrong to some people at first. At the same time, based on other deontological approaches, we may have positive duties to animals (including wild ones), which we would fail to honour if we do not aid them when they are in need. Similarly, based on some virtue approaches, refusing to help animals would be contrary to what a virtuous person would do. In fact, that seems to be the case if we do not help the antelope here. Meanwhile, according to a consequentialist perspective, if Anna intervenes she would be acting in the correct manner, as long as her action leads to the best possible consequences all things considered. A counterargument could be that if we save the antelope, the hyena will starve, and thus Anna would be harming the hyena. This supports people’s intuition against preventing predation. However, consider the following alternative:
Trapped Animals 2. The situation is the same as in Trapped Animals, except that Anna is physically close to the antelope, and, without exposing herself to danger, she could place a vegetable meat alternative on the ground with identical characteristics to antelope meat. The hyena would eat this alternative and leave the antelope unharmed. Anna could then untangle the branches so the antelope could escape.
In this case, again, a consequentialist perspective would imply that if Anna intervenes, she will act correctly, as the best outcome will be achieved all things considered. Deontological and virtue ethics arguments could reach a similar conclusion, as we saw in the Trapped Animals case. Therefore, our initial intuition against preventing predation may be shown to be misguided simply by introducing a small modification to the scenario. This is because our intuition against predation may still be present when we consider this case, despite the fact that all relevant considerations would lead us to conclude that we should save the antelope. In addition, our intuition against preventing predation could also be challenged by the following variant of the same case:
Trapped Animals 3. Everything is the same as in Trapped Animals 2, except that instead of an antelope it is a human being that is trapped.
When we include a human in the scenario, our intuition changes significantly. It no longer seems merely permissible but obligatory for Anna to act. It could be argued that this has no relevance for the previous cases, as there is a crucial difference between wild animals and humans. Indeed, it has been argued that wild animals possess certain capacities that allow them to use their natural abilities to survive, while humans do not (Simmons 2009, 19–21). However, this objection does not seem to work, as in the cases we are considering both the human being and the nonhuman animal will surely die if Anna does not act. Thus, the antelope cannot adequately deal with the threat. So, if we are not speciesist, it seems we should hold a similar position in all cases.
This conclusion is further reinforced by the following case:
Trapped Animals 4. Everything is the same as in Trapped Animals 2, except that Anna is a biologist and knows that the antelope has a highly contagious disease. If the hyena eats it, this disease could infect other mammals, including humans.
Again, in this case it seems that it would not only permissible but obligatory for Anna to act. But, it is not clear whether there is a relevant difference between this case and the previous ones. We can only claim that there is if we maintain that the interests of humans are important in a way in which the interests of other beings are not.
Practical Implications: The Case for Effective Altruists
We may also conclude that this is an important cause, considering (as effective altruists do) its scale, neglectedness and tractability (Singer 2016, 19–20; MacAskill 2019, 12–15; Timmerman 2019, 166–68; Berkey 2020, 368–70). Regarding the scale, it is difficult to determine the exact number of wild animals that exist,[2] although we can estimate that the number is vast. Most suffer due to natural factors, and many are killed by predators. The overall amount of pain will be several orders of magnitude greater if we consider a long-term perspective, as the number of sentient animals that will live in the future is likely to be greater than the number of sentient animals that are alive now and have lived in the past as a whole. As for neglectedness, it is evident that this topic (and that of wild animal suffering in general) has received very little attention from animal charities or other organisations (for an exception, see Animal Ethics 2020). Finally, regarding tractability, there are different courses of action that could be implemented to prevent predation. I will now consider four of them. The first two are more speculative, and their expected results would need to be researched in far more detail before they could be implemented, which should first occur through pilot programmes. Meanwhile, the third and the fourth ones could be applied immediately and are much less controversial.
First, it has been argued that resources could be devoted to researching how to perform interventions similar to the natural evolution that led to the herborisation of some previously predatory species (e.g. the giant panda). This could be done by genetically modifying predators so that their offspring gradually becomes herbivorous, consequently changing their predatory behaviour (Pearce 2009; Palmer 2013; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021; Johannsen 2021).
Second, resources could be devoted to organising the gradual extinction of predatory species (Pearce 2009; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021), for example, by administering contraceptives to predators and allowing them to gradually disappear. Depot-contraception (a form of contraceptive injection that prevents ovulation in females) could be administered to carnivores, causing predatory animals to disappear within a few generations, and the resulting population effects on predated spices could be managed through more selective forms of contraception. Such advanced contraceptive techniques could be controlled by computer programs, which would be tested first on a small scale and then applied on a larger scale.
Third, the resources currently used to promote the conservation of predators (which are sometimes significant) could be allocated elsewhere, potentially having a better impact, while allowing the predators to disappear naturally (Cowen 2003).
Fourth, reforestation plans could be designed so the resulting ecosystems contain less rather than more predation. Different types of plants can support different types of animals. Accordingly, we could choose to plant types of vegetation that are less likely to support predators (Animal Ethics 2020).
If the arguments made in the previous sections are correct, then all the courses of action indicated above should be considered acceptable. However, many people will find this counterintuitive in the first two cases, despite the arguments presented above. Nevertheless, the latter two approaches could be considered acceptable by anyone willing to give at least some weight to the interests of wild animals. This means that preventing predation is tractable, at least in some ways.
Conclusion
I have argued that intervening to prevent harms to animals resulting from predation is morally right. Those who argue that we should not act in cases of predation must rely on ad hoc responses to intervention in scenarios in which such action seems to be the right choice. Admittedly, this will likely be a counterintuitive conclusion for many people, although the arguments I have presented appear to imply it. However, while some of the approaches for preventing predation may appear contrary to intuition, that is not true for all of them.
Notes:
[1] It could be also be defended from a rights perspective, wild animals can certainly harm each other, but they cannot violate the rights of others (Regan 1983; Jamieson 1990; Cohen 1997; Milburn 2015); of capacities, the capacity of specific species to flower, requiring a type of predation (Nussbaum 2006; Schlosberg, 2006; Cripps 2010); or of the community of animals, as it is reasonable to assume that wild animals are fully competent to address the challenges they face (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011).
[2] Specifically, there are estimated to be 1011–4·1011 birds, 1011–1012 mammals, 1011–1014 reptiles, 1011–1014 amphibians, 1013–1015 fish, 1014–1017 earthworms 1014–1017 mites, 1015–1018 polyps, 1017–1019 terrestrial arthropods, 1017–1019 rotifers, 1019 gastrotrichs, 1018 copepods and 1020–1022 nematodes (Tomasik 2019).
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Destructive desire, a brother so psychically contaminated by his twin sister’s sexual life it’s as though her actions are his, a mother who inflames the mutual enmity between her children, social codes as rigid as they are ambiguous: Strange Loops, the second novel by Canadian author Liz Harmer, has the intensity and drive of classic tragedy. The book opens with the main character, Francine—a thirty-three-year-old mother of two, a wife and teacher pursuing a PhD—having an illicit affair with a former student who just turned eighteen. From there, her life unravels with inevitability so fixed it feels damned, as she casts back to the events that led her to this point. Strange Loops offers a complex, ethically tangled engagement with the reckonings of “me-too.”
Harmer is also a widely published, internationally award-winning essayist and poet, writing about madness, motherhood, religion, and obsession. Her debut novel, The Amateurs, was a finalist for the Amazon First Book Award and has been optioned by Riddle Films. I love her bold, intimate work for how it combines an interest in overwhelming, seemingly unassimilable passions with the intellectual effort to make sense of them.
We have been friends for a decade and spoke over Zoom about tragedy, taboo, unmediated experience, and how we perceive the sexuality of teenage girls.
***
The Rumpus: Strange Loops explores the relationship between desire and subjectivity. What interests you about this subject?
Liz Harmer: Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession. I emerged from the hospital at eighteen, and by twenty-two I was married to my first love. These things, of course, formed me, and I’m glad for both. But, for me, the feeling that Anne Carson describes in Eros the Bittersweet—that erotic love can feel like you are finally connecting with the truest truth there is, peering straight down into time, finally seeing clearly—is a kind of common madness. What interested me is how much these peak experiences lead us to compose ourselves, invent a reality to suit the new situation, and also, can cause us to do great harm. When we think we are seeing most clearly, we see most poorly.
Rumpus: You’ve said that Loops might be a polarizing novel. Why do you say that?
Harmer: One concern I have is that it indulges a kind of melodrama. It’s unapologetically melodramatic and larger than life in a way that is not cool. Part of me worries about that being off-putting or seeming unintentional. I’ve also had a few reactions from people in workshops that made me believe we’re pretty confused about what we think a protagonist means. Is a protagonist the endorsement of the author? This character, Francine, who I’m obviously very interested in and fond of, and who is difficult, fascinating, and intense, is making very poor moral decisions and missing something crucial about her own life. But my answer to the problem of likeability has always been that what’s “likeable” isn’t the same as what’s nice or palatable. That what we—what I—really crave is a protagonist that surprises me.
Rumpus: We think of our culture here in the contemporary West as “permissive” but within the first few pages of Loops you approach the limits of what is permissible and take us into our taboos. What draws you to the forbidden?
Harmer: Yes, we are permissive about some things, and punitive about others, and my long training in the religious community that raised me, also raised me to ask why. As a teenager, I was constantly demanding that my elders tell me exactly why and for what theological reason sex outside of marriage was wrong. Here it says that Jesus will forgive us anything, that we can’t help sinning (even a lustful thought is as bad as adultery), and here it says we shouldn’t get married, and here are a bunch of God’s favorite adulterers. So, I am in the habit of looking at the rules and taboos and trying to ask what their basis is.
When I started to present parts of this novel in workshop, people had very different reactions to the content. One person told me she would never read a novel about a woman taking advantage of a student like this—it was too far (and I understood this, because I found Lolita mostly painful to read)—and then an older man who read it seemed to see that Francine at seventeen trying to seduce her thirty-something youth pastor was in total control. He said the man “didn’t stand a chance.” To me, both of these reactions were revealing. Our taboos and our reactions to the crossing of those taboos shows us something about our deepest beliefs about gender, about sex, about power, etc.
Rumpus: When you said people might find this “not cool,” I wondered, what’s “cool”?
Harmer: Maybe detached, ironic? There’s very little opportunity to have distance in this novel. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that there might be some experiences that are unmediated. This could mean being overwhelmed by art or the sublime; it could mean an experience of madness where you’re approaching something that you can no longer think through fast enough to mediate. Not wanting to have a persona, wanting to be a self that’s really there—this is an old-fashioned desire.
Rumpus: How do you get at unmediated experience in a medium?
Harmer: This is the puzzle I was facing. When I wrote this, I was writing in such a way that I was trying to access something I wasn’t intellectually in control of, which is the closest you can get in a medium to getting at something unmediated. I think I was trying to do something like automatic writing. I was trying to be guided by something that wasn’t clear to me and then in the editing process, to fix it up. I want this novel to feel like there’s less of a gap between the thing and the comprehension of the thing.
Rumpus: Can you talk about the structure you chose?
Harmer: In the first pass I was conjuring feelings and figuring out what was happening. But then when I went back, at a certain point I realized that the novel had three separate time periods and two separate narrative centers and was jumping between loops. I took each section, I made this nerdy infographic where I figured out the number of pages that were devoted to each loop, and tried to balance them out more. There’s a seventeen-years-ago loop where young Francine is having an affair with an older pastor, a present loop where she’s having an affair with her former student, and a section from in-between, where Francine’s family gathers at their country home and have a catastrophic fight during a tornado. At some point, I realized that while the first two loops drove the plot forward to its conclusion, the third didn’t. Instead, the energy of that section is like a tornado—it spirals down in. It doesn’t go forward—it goes deep. This was a very pleasing discovery to me. I placed the tornado loop in the mathematical centre of the novel, which felt like a sinkhole into which all the other events are tumbling. It’s very pleasing to me when the structure of a novel can reflect its themes and content.
Rumpus: Why is it pleasing when form and content mirror each other?
Harmer: Maybe it gets at a very deep pleasure of containment, like being swaddled. Maybe it’s like having a body instead of floating off into space.
My grade three teacher for some reason let me put on plays and cast all my classmates in them. The first play I put on was an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. When we got to the final scene, all the actors were so excited to be acting that we just kept going with no script. Eventually the teacher had to stop us and say this is enough. I think about this moment a lot. You just want to keep playing, you want to give your characters more things to say and do, but then you lose the thread completely and there’s no coherent story. I’ve written six novels and published two. The difference between a novel I can finish and one I can’t finish is the presence or absence of a shapely “container,” I call it.
Rumpus: I’ve often thought that we give teenage boys the grace of seeing their sexual advances and expressions as awkward or messy. With girls, we tend to give them this first-degree level of intention when it comes to their sexuality. Of course, teenagers want to be seen as sexual beings, but I think we see girls as more controlled than they are. When young Francine pursues an older authority figure, how responsible is she for this relationship?
Harmer: Francine is this very gifted young person who wants to think she’s in control and older than she is and is treated as though she’s older, which was also my experience as a kid. I think it’s a damaging thing we do to girls. We’re provoked by their sexuality and then our provocation is ascribed to them.
As a teenager, Francine takes this epic pilgrimage to throw herself at this older pastor. She’s determined to go down this path. But there are moments here, which, to me, are the saddest, darkest parts of the novel, where she’s alone in this house with him, trying to conjure up the feeling of wanting to throw herself into this thing, but she starts to feel afraid. Afterwards, she’s shaken up. She goes home weeping, and she thinks it’s because she’s in love. But I think there’s more going on there. This is Francine putting herself in a vulnerable position and then trying to be strong enough to withstand what has hurt her. She wants to see herself as older than her years, and the adults in her life also want to see her that way because then they don’t need to be responsible for her. She’s left to believe that she did this to herself and to this older man. She believes he was a victim to her desire.
Rumpus: Then Francine is the older teacher having an affair with a recent student. Were you thinking of trauma and its repetitions?
Harmer: I wasn’t thinking about it at all because I was trying to write in this immediate way. Later, I discovered that she believes she had been the villain when she was young, and her re-enactment is clearly an attempt to understand what motivated the pastor. So yes, unconsciously on my part and on Francine’s part, this is about trauma, but I wasn’t trying to offer a clear explanation for her behaviour.
I went through something traumatic when I was young and I didn’t acknowledge this to myself until about two years ago. I was so unwilling to accept that I wasn’t in control of what had happened to me and to see that I had been damaged by this experience that I was resistant to the idea of trauma. And I guess I was afraid to write a trauma plot because, you know, we’re “on the other side of the trauma plot.” But discovering that you have symptoms of PTSD twenty years after something happened and that for all that time you did not know that about yourself makes you ask: How many other things do I not understand about my own experience?
Rumpus: Is that what a “strange loop” is?
Harmer: The title Strange Loops comes from this book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, which is a very tender piece of personal, philosophical writing because it’s about his wife’s death and the belief he came to about consciousness and how intermixed our minds are with others. When someone we know well dies, things you love about them live on in your consciousness. So, there’s a sense in which we humans create each other’s consciousnesses. We’re part of a complex system of feedback loops where we take something in, put it back out, etc., and that’s how you create a self. I was thinking about Strange Loops as about creation of a self through others. To me, the main strange loop in the book is between Francine and her twin brother, Philip. They’re so entangled with each other that it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins. They’re like the snake that eats its own tail, or like the staircase that seems like it’s going up but it’s going down. He can’t bear what she’s done as though it’s happened to him.
Rumpus: In a number of essays you’ve written about coming from a Dutch Calvinist Reformed background and the way this impacted your sexuality as a young person. Here you gave Francine and Philip a liberal, secular household. How were you thinking about this obsession with female sexuality but without those traditional overdeterminations?
Harmer: Well, the sections in the past, set during Francine and Philip’s teenage years, take place in the late ‘90s. Even outside of my own stultified, confused sexual education, which was extremely misogynist and sex-negative—the messages were “don’t get pregnant.” “don’t be a slut,” “just get married and go away”—I was thinking of people like Monica Lewinsky and how she had been defamed and villainized even though she was so young, and he was…the fucking president. Our whole cultural attitude at that time was misogynist in a way I hope has changed a little bit, for my own kids.
I felt very unsafe about sex as a young person because, talking about the responsibilities we give to girls, I felt like I was responsible for the effect I was having on other people. For me, one of the grand ironies of my sheltered childhood going to a Christian school was that in order to attend this very conservative school on the other side of the city, I had to take an hour of city buses through the heart of downtown Hamilton. I’d get off downtown and wait for my next bus in front of a strip club. Men were everywhere, and they all thought I was twenty, not fourteen. I had a lot of negative encounters. So, I had a confusing inside/outside perspective on sexuality.
I’d internalized some misogyny but was very interested in rebelling against that so was reading second wave feminism and stuff about sex positivity. I was trying to talk a big game about being open-minded about sex in a context that was completely unwilling to entertain that. I was annoying and provocative to everybody all the time. Even at seventeen, Francine is not coy about her sexuality, and I think it was an intellectual position for her. She is trying on an intellectual position, as I was at that age.
But I also have compassion for Philip. He’s desperate for a meaning greater than his own reality, he’s going through his existential crisis that we do as teens, and he becomes interested in religion as something that will give him that meaning. I made his parents secular, but in a sense, this is a devotion to atheism that I’ve always found similar to being Christian. Even though the family in this novel comes from a different cultural background than my own—they’re also from a higher class than I’m from—I actually feel that psychologically they’re very similar to the more dogmatic, conservative figures I’ve known so well.
Rumpus: The book feels boldly tragic. Is this bucking a trend or are there contemporary works that inspired you?
Harmer: Do you remember The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides? In the press for that I remember Eugenides saying the 19th-century marriage plot no longer has force because domesticity is no longer a place of high stakes for, say, women. We have divorce laws. We have bank accounts. We can own property. But love and domesticity have been places in my own life of high drama and struggle. The minute I was facing my own divorce, I realized how much traditional gender roles had really infected my own life in ways both subtle and very obvious, and so The Marriage Plot inspired me only insofar as it irritated me.
After I wrote Loops I read Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert (the English translation is by Donald Winkler), which is based on Greek tragedy. It’s written in a way that you don’t have anyone to root for, and instead of God or Fate being the inescapable problem that causes the problem for the individual, it’s capitalism. I’m very compelled by the idea that tragedy as a form offers us evidence that there are things beyond our control, yet that we must bear the terrible consequences of these forces we can’t do anything to subdue. This is coming from my deep Calvinist roots, but what tragedy offers is a reminder that you are not your own. A great modern piety is that we believe in our own agency and we believe in our own freedom and we believe that we can make rational decisions.
I think I’m drawn, in most of the art I love, to the kind of ordinary darkness that everyone experiences: that every one of us, no matter what we might aspire to, is capable of failing to do what’s right, and that failure, no matter how we might explain it to ourselves, no matter how sorry we might be, could have catastrophic consequences anyway. This to me feels like the tragedy of the human condition, and it also feels like the source of some of the most beautiful, terrifying stories people have made.
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Author photo by Scott Nichols
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