nl

Peter Singer vs the Casuist Approach to Hunting

Maarten Peels

Utrecht, October 2024

Written for the course Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

As part of the Master Applied Ethics (UU)

Word count: 3995


4 sentence structure summary (what's that?):

  • Singer says that we should generally not harm animals, which includes hunting.
  • I say that his approach is typical for applied ethics, in that it goes from an abstract theory towards concrete cases. Though this works fine for attacking the bio-industry and lab testing, the theory cannot deal with the fact that we need to cull wild animals for population control. Bio-ethical casuistry as explained by Arras et al. (2017) is much better to deal with this issue.
  • Singer might object that culling is immoral and that sterilizing animals is preferable.
  • I reply that in most of his texts he fails to discern between sport hunting and commercial (over)hunting on the one hand and hunting done as wildlife management on the other. Singer once hesitantly admitted that shooting wildlife is a necessary evil, but due to his framing, it is not unlikely that hunters have become the target of militant activism. A casuistic approach would allow the involved parties to arrive at common ground. It would take a holistic view of ecology into account, making interested parties agree that culling is at least an acceptable necessity, if not simply moral after all.


Introduction

Animal ethics has become hugely popular in recent decades, gaining not just a large following but influence on public policy around the world as well. Framing animals as worthy of moral consideration, the movement has worked to greatly reduce the suffering of animals in the bio-industry, in scientific research and in the entertainment industries. The idea of animals being on some level morally equal to us has also led some theorists and activists to try and abolish the practice of hunting and / or culling, which is seen as cruel and unnecessary. However, due to ecological considerations, it is highly undesirable to fully abolish these practices.

Because it has been by far the most influential on the animal rights movement, and to restrict the scope of this paper, I will focus on Peter Singer's views on hunting and wildlife management. I will show that generally his approach is to apply an abstract theory to concrete cases. Though this works fine for his main targets, namely factory farming and lab testing on animals, his theory starts to creak when we reach the topic of hunting and culling. This is reflected in the friction caused by activists in the societal arena. To simplify my narrative, I will take animal rights activism to generally follow Peter Singer's thinking, though I am aware that in reality there are sometimes significant differences. To start my critique on Singer, I will discuss Arras et al.'s paper Getting Down to Cases: The Revival of Casuistry in Bioethics (2017). They argue that modern casuistry is a practically useful approach to moral issues and that it helps different agents work towards consensus. In their view, abstract ethical theories are often hard or impossible to apply to real life. I take Singer's views on hunting to be an example of why an abstract theory does not always work well in practice. Currently, the most humane way to manage wildlife like deer (i.e. prevent overpopulation) is to kill them every now and then. This clashes with Singer's maxim of preventing harm.

The main point in my paper is that modern casuistry, working on a case-by-case basis, is a better way to determine how we should manage wildlife. This approach, which forces the parties involved to consider the facts, would make it clear that active population control of some form is necessary. Since casuistry also enables different parties to agree without deep differences in moral views being solved, it could allow for more workable solutions to problems of wildlife management and mitigate the outliers of animals rights activism.



Animal Liberation (for farm and lab critters)

Singer's animal ethics calls for radical changes in how we treat animals, emphasizing the reduction of suffering and the elimination of exploitative practices. Since his theory has been extensively discussed in other places, I will only summarize it briefly here. His theory, as articulated in his seminal work Animal Liberation (1975, I used 3rd ed. 2015), is grounded in a utilitarian approach to the moral consideration of animals. Central to Singer's philosophy is the utilitarian principle of equal consideration of interests, which posits that eligibility for moral treatment should be based on an individual's capacity to suffer or experience pleasure. As animals are, in the view of many biologists and philosophers, clearly capable of suffering, we should take their interests into consideration. Following from these elements, Singer constructs a utilitarian calculus, the result of which is that we should stop mistreating animals generally, but especially on the vast scale that it happens now in the food industry and in laboratories.

Treating animals as mere means to human interests is at the core of what he calls speciesism. This is the unjustified privileging of human interests over those of animals, a bias he equates with other forms of discrimination such as racism and sexism. He contends that granting greater moral weight to human beings merely because of their species is morally indefensible, unless there are relevant differences that justify such distinctions. As I will show later, this theory works fine for an attack on animal testing and industrial farming (in fact, his book is one of the things that convinced me to stop buying meat). However, his views on hunting are problematic. Some forms of hunting fall rightly under the critique of his theory, viz. pure sport or prize hunting, which treat the death of animals as a source of entertainment. But as we will see shortly, hunting in the form of culling, i.e. for population control of wild species, is conceptually very difficult to deal with using Singer's animal ethics, and he does so badly. First, however, I will explain the theory with which I will criticize Singer's approach to hunting.



Casuistry in Bioethics

In an article entitled Getting Down to Cases, Arras et al. (2017) explain the modern variety of casuistry and why it is relevant to ethics. 'Casuistry' was until recently a term used, often derogatively, to describe "a method of bringing abstract and universal ethico-religious precepts to bear on particular moral situations." (Arras et al., 45) It is also called the applied ethics approach, since an ethical theory is applied to a real-life case. This approach has many problems which ethicists have never been able to solve, the most serious of which is that the real world is always much more complicated than whatever structure we build with our concepts. At some point, tricky choices have to be made in interpreting the case to fit with the theory, and "this pursuit of rigorous theory is unhinged from the realities of the moral life and animated by an illusory quest for moral certainty." (idem, 47). Moreover, it has never happened that someone came up with a new, supposedly universal theory that everyone subsequently agreed with.

Modern casuistry, however, works the other way around, i.e. 'from the bottom up'. Arras et al. take examples from the approach to moral problems in medicine ("bio-ethics"). Casuists nowadays try to find the right way to decide on a case by first "analysing earlier, paradigmatic cases of harm, cruelty, fairness and generosity, and then branch out to more complex and difficult cases posed by biomedical research." (ibidem) Instead of using highbrow abstract theories, modern casuists base their moral deliberations on what they find in real cases. The normal procedure for a casuist approach to a moral problem is to first provide a detailed description of the case (idem, 46). Arras uses the example of a medical team deliberating on whether to keep a newborn alive that has a very low chance of survival. The casuist then adds a rubric, a short but adequate sketch of the topic, such as "termination of treatment". All the relevant facts, histories and wishes of the involved parties should be provided. From this, the casuist then determines what middle-level principles or maxims are triggered by cases of this sort. Arras gives the examples "Parents should normally make medical decisions for their children" and "Medically futile treatment need not be offered."

It is crucial that many (if not an exhaustive list of) previous similar cases are studied, and the responses to the cases catalogued. The case is then placed along "a continuum of cases stretching from a paradigm of acceptable conduct at one end to one of unacceptable conduct at the other end." (idem, 50) The gist of the casuistic approach is that the study of our responses to such paradigmatic cases leads the way towards a pragmatic solution or workable consensus. By collecting these responses, inductive generalizations can be made, and these feed into the midlevel principles. By this process of 'triangulating' their way across paradigmatic cases, a commission consisting of people with quite different moral views can find common ground. According to Arras et al., experience has shown that though our background moral ideas might be irreconcilable, real-life cases evoke very similar responses. Also, I would add, the fact that real decisions have to be made means that a commission cannot keep debating until the sun explodes, which is what philosophers sometimes seem to do.

As noted in the previous section, Singer's thought is essentially utilitarian: maximize the happiness and reduce the suffering of as many individuals as possible, and count the large animals as individuals too. Utilitarianism is one of the classic theories of applied ethics alongside deontology and virtue ethics (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2023), working top-down from abstract principles in order to guide actions below in the real world. The old problem of utilitarianism is that it is impossible to quantify how much happiness or suffering an act brings about, given that the outcomes of our actions are often uncertain and that the experience of happiness and suffering differ per individual. And so applying it with the exactitude that the theory requires is effectively impossible. In the case of the parents wanting their hopeless infant to remain alive, how can we tell what has more weight in the calculus: the life quality of the infant, the feelings of the parents or the feelings of the medical team? But the problem with Singer's thought, relating to hunting, is different, as we will see below. Due to a misfit of wildlife management with his maxims, he refuses to acknowledge an important contribution of hunting to maintaining ecological balance that a casuist would certainly take into account.



Singer's Hesitant Views on Hunting

It's safe to say that Singer's treatment of hunting is underdeveloped. As he states in chapter 1 of Animal Liberation, his main concern within animal ethics is to address the horrors of industrial farming and lab testing because these "cause more suffering to a greater number of animals than anything else that human beings do." (Singer 2015, 57) So it is understandable that hunting is given little attention there. But after reading his book, I was surprised to find that he subsequently never wrote any text committed to the topic of hunting. As a consequence, I had to collect short, disparate fragments from several sources in order to assess how, according to Singer himself, it fits in his view of animals. What follows is a near-complete collection of all the instances where Singer discusses hunting. Typically, he mentions it only in brief, dismissive terms. It is important to note, also, that the term 'hunting' is never disambiguated in Singer's work. I couldn't find the word 'culling' in any of his texts on animals. Some commentators have discussed hunting in the context of Singer's work (Loftin 1984; Cahoone 2009), but in this paper I want to get to his own thoughts on the matter. There are a mere two instances where he talks about hunting specifically as killing wildlife for population control, and then only hesitantly. Most of the time he talks about hunting, the impression is that he means the extractive-commercial or sport variety.

Earlier in chapter 1 of Animal Liberation, Singer writes that, following his arguments, we should "make radical changes in our treatment of animals that would involve (…) our approach to wildlife and to hunting, trapping and the wearing of furs, and areas of entertainment like circuses, rodeos, and zoos. As a result, a vast amount of suffering would be avoided." (Singer 2015, 49) And on the same page he states that "practices like hunting, whether for sport or for furs (…)" in fact "exist only because we do not take seriously the interests of other animals." Later in the book, he briefly deplores whale hunting (idem, 326-7). Note that he does not mention population control, subsistence or cultural practice as a reason for hunting. Singer, to be clear, characterizes hunting as firmly situated in the category of acts following from speciesism (idem 332).

This approach is echoed in his other works. He again criticizes whale hunting In the introduction to In Defense of Animals(2006, 1). He later calls fox hunting a cruel sport (idem, 8) belonging to one of the "areas in which animals need defense." In an essay entitled The Animal Liberation Movement: its Philosophy, its Achievements and its Future he writes that "we are not justified in treating animals as mere things to be used for whatever purposes we find convenient, [like] the entertainment of the hunt (…)." (Singer 1985, 11)

In an Animal Liberation chapter on the history of animal ethics in the West (which strangely enough leaves out our hunter-gatherer past) he describes how most thinkers since Biblical times have seen animals as instruments to human goals. He mentions a rare exception to the rule in Christian thought in Medieval times: "There were even some saints who, like Saint Neot, sabotaged hunts by rescuing stags and hares from the hunters" (Singer 2015, 282). This remark is reminiscent of instances where he praises activism against the institute of hunting: at the start of In Defense of Animals, he lauds two organizations that, from the 1960s onwards, sabotaged foxhunts in the UK. He also writes that activists "have greatly increased public awareness of the immense, systematic cruelty that takes place in intensive animal production, in laboratories, and in circuses, zoos, and hunting." (Singer 2015, 317).

It is critical that in the texts cited above Singer fails to mention the usefulness of hunting for population control, subsistence or Indigenous cultural practices. I would guess that he omits the acceptable varieties of hunting for rhetorical reasons: in an engaging explication of all the ways humans mistreat animals, such nuance can disturb the narrative flow. However, it is not unlikely that some animal rights activists have grown very aggressive towards hunting as a consequence, even in cases where wildlife managers maintain that it is necessary to maintain ecological balance. Consider as well the following remark, which is a strange enough characterization of hunters to mention, given that Singer provides no sources, nor further explanation, for the premise of his claim: "If we consider the unfortunate social background and childhood experiences of most hunters, their atrocious behaviour becomes readily explicable, and more a matter for pity than retribution." (Singer 2013, 11)

I think it is also difficult for Singer to admit the usefulness of hunting because of one of the central points in his theory of animal ethics. Namely, that out of moral consideration, we should not kill animals generally, and certainly not for food or entertainment. Singer did suggest that a hunter's meal is slightly less evil than a plate filled with industrial meat (Singer 2015, 333). But the tricky thing is that hunters sometimes kill for sport, sometimes to connect with nature or with ancestors, sometimes for food, sometimes for population control, and often for two or more of these reasons. Because of these overlapping goals, hunting of any form doesn't fit well with Singer's maxims, such as the one cited below:

"In any case, at the level of practical moral principles, it would be better to reject altogether the killing of animals for food, unless one must do so to survive. Killing animals for food makes us think of them as objects that we can use as we please. Their lives then count for little when weighed against our mere wants. As long as we continue to use animals in this way, to change our attitudes to animals in the way that they should be changed will be an impossible task."

(Singer 1999, 133-4)

This stance explains why Singer beats around the bush on the one page of all of his books where he explicitly discusses killing wildlife with the goal of controlling population numbers. In chapter 6 of Animal Liberation, Singer at first does not go so far as to state that culling is necessary or useful; rather, he argues that the mentality of wildlife management organizations to practice population control through hunting is morally dubious, because they write that they "harvest" the animals.

"The use of the term "harvest"—often found in the publications of the hunters' organizations—gives the lie to the claim that this slaughter is motivated by concern for the animals. The term indicates that the hunter thinks of deer or seals as if they were corn or coal, objects of value only in so far as they serve human interests. This attitude, which is shared to a large extent by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, overlooks the vital fact that deer and other hunted animals are capable of feeling pleasure and pain. They are therefore not means to our ends, but beings with interests of their own." (Singer 2015, 338)

Since he provides no direct sources for his claim about organizations that have an explicit harvest mentality, I will give an example that suffices: a Dutch wildlife reserve mentions on their website that their culled animals are made into "delicious meals" at the local restaurant (De Hoge Veluwe, 2022). Singer then hesitantly admits that overpopulation of wildlife requires action, though not necessarily hunting:

"If it is true that in special circumstances their population grows to such an extent that they damage their own environment and the prospects of their own survival, or that of other animals who share their habitat, then it may be right for humans to take some supervisory action; but obviously if we consider the interests of the animals, this action will not be to allow hunters to kill some animals, inevitably wounding others in the process, but rather to reduce the fertility of the animals." (ibidem)

So in most places, Singer highlights the fun and food that people obtain by hunting, the idea that this is unnecessary and the brute increase in suffering that it causes. In the context of his attacks on industrial farming and animal testing, this is understandable, but it is a simplistic rendering that omits the ecological necessity of hunting, and hunting as a whole got a bad name from it. To put it mildly, actually, because some hunters have to fear for their safety if they become the target of animal rights organizations. Singer himself almost admits that some anti-hunting activists go too far, writing on the growing militancy of such groups: "To disrupt a hunt so as to make it possible for the intended victim to escape is one thing; to seek "retribution" on the benighted hunters is another thing altogether, and morally far more dubious." (Singer 1985, 11) Perhaps a lot of suffering could have been prevented if Singer had stated something along the lines of 'Though overhunting and prize hunting are bad, leave the honest wildlife managers alone, because their killing is unfortunately necessary.'

In a lecture entitled The Ethics of What We Eat, Singer was asked directly about the acceptability of hunting for population control. His reply succinctly catches what I have gathered above:

"I would rather see other methods of controlling deer [populations]. We control our own population not by randomly shooting people but by encouraging people to use fertility control. I think we could do that for animals. We need a bit of science to tell us how to do it. That would be ideal. Admittedly, we don't have it at the moment. There are cases when animal population numbers need to be controlled, and if we don't have better techniques, you get somebody who is really an expert marksman to shoot them with a single bullet so that they don't know what's going on. The problem with hunting of course is that if people are not so expert, you get wounded and suffering animals. I'm not actually going to defend hunting but I can recognize that there are cases where killing may not be the greatest evil that you can do."

(Singer 2009, 1:06:01-1:07:47)

In other words, here Singer finally seems to be able to admit that, though hunting is not nice, in the form of professional culling it is an acceptable necessity. This remark points to the way that casuistry can help solve the controversy surrounding hunting.



Finding the middle way with Casuistry

Since there seems little to no moral retribution possible for hunters from Singer's perspective due to the theoretical rigidity of his ideas, a casuistic approach could offer a solution. I will sketch the potential deliberations of a casuistically minded commission following the description of Arras et al. The commission consists of representatives from a wildlife management organization and activists following Singer. It is tasked with deciding on a new wildlife management policy. For this example, I will discuss the deer population of De Hoge Veluwe, a nature reserve in The Netherlands. In this case, there are no natural predators yet (in reality, they entered the reserve several years ago). The rubric could be 'managing wild deer populations.'

First, the wishes of the involved parties must be made explicit. The challenge of this topic is that the two sides have very different wishes concerning the topic at hand: how to manage wildlife. Activists following Singer don't want any animals killed, and wildlife managers do want some killed.

The commission would then take the relevant facts into account. First, the deer population doubles every 2-3 years (Swihart, 1997). When unchecked, this leads to overgrazing (which disturbs reforestation, (Brown et al., 1999)) and starvation (Barkham, 2018). With the wellbeing of the deer and the ecological balance in mind, it should be clear for all those involved that doing nothing is undesirable. The middle-level principles triggered by these facts could be 'Do not let animals suffer needlessly' and 'keep the ecology in balance'.

The next step is to consider policies. To keep this paper within limits, I can only touch upon the options available. There are three options to reduce population numbers on De Hoge Veluwe: hunting, sterilization and introducing predators. Hunting is the most effective in controlling populations, and relatively cheap, though it requires actively killing the deer. Sterilization is an option with seemingly mild consequences for the deer, but it is very costly. It costs €500-800 to sterilize a deer (Staatsbosbeheer, 2022), and some American sources calculate as much as $1000-2000 (Edwards, 2024; Trapp, 2012). It is, moreover, unclear what the behavioural consequences for the individual deer are (Omroep Zeeland, 2021). It would require extra research to know whether this is negative for their wellbeing. Introducing predators, meaning the wolf in European context, potentially lifts the burden of killing from human shoulders. However, not only are such natural predators often not enough to control population numbers (Blanco & Sundseth, 2023), the deaths caused by wolves is often gruesome, painful and slow (Hoge Veluwe, 2022). From the wellbeing perspective of the deer, death by hunter is without a doubt preferable, for it is quicker, and without anticipatory stress. Wolves do have a significantly positive ecological effect, a process called "the ecology of fear" (Brown et al., 1999), making their presence desirable from a holistic view of the reserve.

Whatever the commission would decide on, from the above paragraph it is already clear that hunting would be either the desirable policy an sich or at least the necessary policy until sterilization has become feasible. Singer's view is impossible to realize right now due to feasibility constraints, so the animal ethicists have to concede a bit. The wildlife managers, meanwhile, have to seriously consider researching sterilization and introducing the wolf. Very different conclusions could be made by commissions on sport hunting and commercial overhunting.



Conclusion

Singer's work is focused on the ethical problems posed by modern city life, and the horrors that it has imposed upon billions of farm animals. The fact that there are large nature reserves out there that need a whole different attitude to animals seems to have little room in his theory, meaning that hunting is often framed as immoral. Wildlife managers know that in order to prevent ecological disbalance, it is necessary to harm wild animals, i.e. kill them. Whereas these clashing worldviews currently lead to societal tensions, a casuistic approach would allow for more constructive deliberation, making both sides deal with the nuances of the real-world situations of wildlife reserves.



Sources

Barkham, P. (2018). Dutch rewilding experiment sparks backlash as thousands of animals starve. The Guardian, 27.

Blanco, J. C. & Sundseth, K. (2023). The situation of the wolf (Canis lupus) in the European Union – An In-depth Analysis. A report of the N2K Group for DG Environment, European Commission.

Brown, J. S., Laundre, J. W., Gurung, M. (1999). The ecology of fear: Optimal foraging, game theory, and trophic interactions. Journal of Mammalogy 80: 385–399

Cahoone, Lawrence. "Hunting as a moral good." Environmental Values 18, no. 1 (2009): 67-89.

Edwards, Katherine (2024). Deer Management Program Population Control. Published on fairfaxcounty.org. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/wildlife/deer-management-program-population-control (last visited 25-10-2024)

Hoge Veluwe (2022). Wolf Standpunt van Het Nationale Park De Hoge Veluwe ten aanzien van de wolf. Retrieved on 14th January 2024 from https://www.hogeveluwe.nl/nl/ontdek-het-park/natuur-en-landschap/wolf

Loftin, R. W. (1984). The morality of hunting. Environmental Ethics, 6.

Omroep Zeeland, Experiment hertensterilisatie heeft nog veel haken en ogen. Omroepzeeland.nl, March 22, 2021. https://www.omroepzeeland.nl/nieuws/13304321/experiment-hertensterilisatie-heeft-nog-veel-haken-en-ogen (last visited 25-10-2024)

Singer, P. (2015). Animal liberation : the definitive classic of the animal movement (40th anniversary edition). Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1B2wEAAA2b/products/3f55ece4-de0b-438a-b6a6-9fab20a1ac39

Singer, P. (1985). The Animal Liberation Movement. Printed by Russell Press. https://www. utilitarian. org/(Sitert 23-09-2005) Tilgang: https://www.utilitarian.org/texts/alm.html (last visited 25-10-2024)

Singer, P. (Ed.). (2013). In defense of animals: The second wave. John Wiley & Sons.

Singer, P. (1999). Practical ethics. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Singer, P. (2009). "Peter Singer: The Ethics of What We Eat", video recording of lecture published by Williams College on youtube.com, 14 dec 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHzwqf_JkrA&t=3960s (last visited 25-10-2024).

Staatsbosbeheer (2022). Wat zijn alternatieven voor afschot damherten? Op naturetoday.com, July 1 2022. https://www.naturetoday.com/intl/nl/nature-reports/message/?msg=29400 (last visited 25-10-2024)

Swihart, R. K. and A. J. DeNicola. 1997. Public involvement, science, management, and the overabundance of deer: Can we avoid a hostage crisis? Wildlife Society Bulletin 25:382-387.

Trapp, Theresa (2012). Deer Population Control Methods – Cost & Effectiveness Comparison. Publication for the Hilltop Conservancy. https://www.hilltopconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Deer_control-methods-cost-comparison-v10.pdf (last visited 25-10-2024)