Lori has indeed done great work educating about the harms of captivity, work I myself have benefited from. Thanks for the clarifications.

Some have asked — “if captivity doesn’t cause suffering, that is, it doesn’t violate a captive’s physical and psychological or cognitive needs, then is there anything wrong with captivity.” Imagine something like The Truman Show, where Jim Carey happily lives his life happily ignorant of the fact that all the while he is in captivity. Is there anything wrong with this scenario?

I’m trying to explore whether we can answer that question affirmatively. I want to suggest that even though an individual may be happy to have all her needs met by her captive (maybe her life is easier and in some sense richer than it would otherwise be) there is still a sense in which living a life in which she plays a major role in the satisfaction of her own psychological needs is a better one, all things considered. That is what I take to be the value that is captured in the intrinsic account of liberty.

The difficulty of trying to determine what constitutes indignity in other animals should not be any easier than it is in humans and I think the same sorts of difficulties arise there. Elizabeth Anderson raises an interesting case that I discuss in another chapter of Ethics and Animals. She describes someone who is unable to recognize herself or others, to reason, or to care for herself yet argues that this individual’s dignity would be violated if she was:

“…not properly toileted and decently dressed in clean clothes, her hair combed, her face and nose wiped, and so forth. These demands have only partially to do with matters of health and hygiene. They are, more fundamentally, matters of making the body fit for human society for presentation to others. Human beings need to live with other humans, but cannot do so if those others cannot relate to them as human. And this specifically human relationship requires that the human body be dignified, protected from the realm of disgust, and placed in a cultural space of decency.

If the relatives of an Alzheimer’s patient were to visit her in a nursing home and find her naked, eating from a dinner bowl like a dog, they might well describe what shocks them by saying, “They are treating her like an animal!” The shock is a response to her degraded condition, conceived in terms of a symbolic demotion to subhuman animal status. This
shows that the…dignity of humans is essentially tied to their human species membership, conceived hierarchically in relation to nonhuman animals and independently of the capacities of the individual whose dignity is at stake.”

My goal in this short piece and in my longer reflections are to have us think differently about dignity and to start exploring when and how we deny other animals of theirs. I don’t think dignity just applies to humans. I think in determining whether a being is one who can have her dignity violated depends a lot on the particular kind of animal in question. I argue, for example, that we should seek to promote chimpanzees’ “wild dignity” but I would not suggest that Mathilde or Maggie who are dogs have “wild dignity” but I do think dogs can have their dignity violated and I would argue that to do so is wrong.

A word about how I (and most philosophers) understand an ethical judgment that something is “wrong.” It doesn’t follow from some practice being wrong, that it should necessarily be prohibited. If holding chimpanzees captive is wrong, because they are innocent (don’t deserve to be imprisoned), because their autonomy is violated, because their dignity is denied, the ethical conclusion is not to set them free. That would be, at least, equally wrong, as they would in most likelihood die immediately. The hard ethical/conceptual work now arises, how do well-meaning but imperfect beings like us, living in an non-ideal world, do the least wrong? In order to figure out answers to that question, we need to know what is at stake. Recognizing that keeping other animals captive is ethically problematic is essential to compassionately trying to attend to them and the wrongs we inflict on them (as I said above, we also need to pay attention to the valuable things that come out of these relationships too). It would be a mistake to think that because there is no clear or obvious solution to the ethical problem, that it doesn’t remain a problem.

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2004. “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life.” In Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. Sunstein, Cass R. and Martha Nussbaum (eds.). Oxford:Oxford University Press:277-298.

I have thought a lot about what it is about captivity that I am interested in exploring, and while providing necessary and sufficient conditions for captivity is not something I think I need to do in order to make the argument I am trying to make about being confined and under another’s control, I do think Stephen’s comments here are helpful. I think the existence of a “captor” or perhaps, more broadly, the existence of institutions designed to confine and control are certainly necessary features of the kind of captivity that I’m focused on.

I really appreciate the astute observation that Stephen makes about captivity being meaningful only when freedom is possible. While I tend to avoid these types of oppositional defninitions (one can’t suffer unless one has experienced what its like not to, a common retort to objections to the suffering of animals on factory farms, for example — they don’t know anything different — I think in the case of captivity this requirement makes a lot of sense. I thank Stephen for helping me refine my thoughts about the ethics of captivity in these ways.

I do want to clarify one important point. I did work with captive nonhuman animals (dolphins, rats, chimpanzees, chickens, etc.)earlier in my career as a psychobiologist but gave that up several years ago.Instead, during this time I have worked to educate the public and my colleagues about the abuses of captivity for other animals in zoos, aquaria, circuses, factory farms, and research labs. After seeing and learning more about these abuses I could not, in good conscience, continue to support captivity for other animals. A lot of my recent work has been on bringing to light the abundant scientific evidence for harm from captivity to dolphins and whales. Dolphins and whales are captured and taken from their families at infancy, thrown into a concrete tank from which they will never escape, are made to socialize with strangers and provided dead fish – all because they happen to be dolphins. These captive individuals suffer tremendous stress, self-mutilation, exhibit behavioral steroetypies, injury from other traumatized dolphins who become hyperaggressive, and a shortened lifespan and death. And although there are enormous social and political forces at work in the prison system and many prisoners also exhibit these problems there is no human prisoner who is made to suffer what captive dolphins (and other animals) suffer simply because they are a member of a particular species. And that, at least to me, makes all the difference in the world in terms of the ethics. Given that so many nonhuman animals suffer torture and death at the hands of our own species it is difficult for me to concern myself with human individuals who have at least some responsibility for the consequences of their behavior. Other animals never get the chance for “transformation” in biomedical labs, circuses, and zoos. That’s the difference.

“Ethics” from a philosophical perspective, which is the perspective that I am coming from, includes an analysis of effects. From a consequentialist perspective, the consequences of actions, practices, policies, etc., whether they be immediate and more distant, intended or unintended, are the primary focus of assessing right or wrong, good or bad. Part of what initially drew me to consequentialism was that this type of ethical assessment includes all those affected by an action or policy, so other animals are already part of the ethical landscape. I would argue, although won’t attempt to here, that other ethical traditions also take account of effects, but perhaps not in such a primary way.

It strikes me that the heart of your comment is your worry that in talking about human captives in an analysis of the ethics of captivity I have maligned non-human captives. I want to note first that I was clearly not making claims of their equivalence — I say:

“A commonly held view suggests that to hold someone captive is, prima facie, to cause them harm. When we imprison humans we harm them in ways that are both obvious (they are in conditions that can cause physical suffering and frustration) and not so obvious (long term psychological impacts of boredom, anxiety, and lack of control). Some argue that these harms may not be wrong, in part, because that is the alleged point of punishment. One of the corollaries of the commonly held view is that while denying liberty is harmful, denying liberty to one who is innocent, who does nothing to deserve the deprivation, is particularly wrong.”

I also suggest at multiple places that conditions of captivity vary widely and, of course, reasons for captivity also vary. If I were to be making it seem that all cases of captivity are equally problematic for the same sorts of reasons, then I would agree with you that there is an objection. But when philosophers analyze practices we want to look for the things that are similar, the things that would make practice X an instance of captivity, and here there are indeed similarities that are important in an ethical analysis of captivity whether the captives are human or non-human, whether they “deserve” their captivity or not. In noticing similarities we can also hold on to differences, and that is what I am trying to do here.

Having spent time teaching in prisons, I can say that your attitude about incarceration of those who “broke the social contract” and your assumption that those in prisons “are a risk to society”, while shared by a large part of the US population, is a faulty over-generalization and oversimplifies a complex set of social, historical, economic, and political forces at work in the prison-industrial system. One of the most important things I take away from working with incarcerated men is that it makes no sense to generalize or make assumptions about who they are and what they did. From an ethical perspective, however, it makes sense to ask whether we are justified in denying an individual who committed a horrible crime their dignity in addition to their liberty.

I hope this discussion might lead you and others to take a closer look at the prison system. My experience is that it is both sad and humbling but can also a sight of remarkable transformation. (I don’t work with programs that bring other animals into prisons, but am interested in learning more about that).

As I say in Ethics and Animals — to act autonomously does not require being completely free from constraints. Feminist philosophers, in their criticisms of the individualistic and overly rationalistic focus of some accounts of autonomy, have highlighted the ways that external forces or constraints are always present and how being socially and relationally emersed influences how one comes to shape one’s desires and interests and ultimately how one can seek to satisfy them. Some of those constraints are valuable as well, so they can’t and shouldn’t be completely ruled out. In the case of humans, the autonomous individual does not slavishly follow the dictates of family, religion, and the larger social institutions,
nor does she always buck those norms. She can determine how to act in light of her reflection on social pressures and expectations, and, in that determination, she expresses her “relational autonomy.” Individuals will be better or worse
at exercising their autonomy. Some of that variation will depend on personality, temperament, and upbringing; some of that variation will depend on the types of interests one has; and some of the variation will depend on what is possible for that individual given her social/historical location. As Diana Meyers has argued, autonomy should be thought of as a competency that is developed in “an ongoing and improvisational process of exercising self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction
skills.” Recognizing the ways that independence and authenticity emerge in particular social contexts expands the domain of those who are autonomous, particularly those who have been significantly constrained by oppressive social practices.

I appreciate being reminded again of both the excitement and the perils of cross-disciplinary discussion.