Like Mill, Beauvoir is concerned with the liberty of women; unlike Mill, she is not particularly concerned with the connection between liberty and happiness. She denies that there are any interesting general statements about what women are like, for what they are like is a response to their circumstances, some of which are social and therefore highly variable. (Mill appeared to think that there might be some such generalizations, but denied that any were known.) Besides, Beauvoir stands in the existentialist tradition and holds that how we react to our circumstances is a free decision for each of us—to pretend that we are wholly determined by our circumstances is inauthenticity, abdication of responsibility.
I have space enough only to touch one of the themes of this long and constantly lively book. In Chapter 7 I spoke of the enormous influence of Hegel, and mentioned his doctrine of self-knowledge: it arises when one meets aspects of oneself in something else, or one’s ‘Other’. Seizing on the psychological truth in this, whilst completely ignoring Hegel’s grand metaphysics, Beauvoir develops her most characteristic doctrine: woman is man’s Other, and the self-understanding of both depends on it.
When the Other is itself a subject, a person, the situation becomes more complicated and potentially very damaging. I’m watching you watching me watching you . . . How A sees B affects B, so it alters what A finds in B. And this (recall the doctrine about self-knowledge) alters A’s perception of A, which then affects A, both of which affect how A sees B . . . Just once get something badly wrong, as when man enslaved woman, thinking that that was good for him, and woman accepted enslavement, thinking that was the only choice for her, and all relations between the sexes are going to get entangled in a net of error and artificiality. Now ‘whatever he does . . . he feels tricked and she feels wronged’. The reciprocity of the relationship means that neither party alone can put it right: Beauvoir appeals simultaneously to men to recognize the independence and equality of women, and to women to become just that, by realizing that it is indeed the truth about themselves.
So on the very last page comes a sentence which, whilst completely characteristic of Beauvoir, could almost have been written by Mill: ‘when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the “division” of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form’. He, coming from the empiricist and utilitarianism tradition, and she, against the totally different background of Hegel plus existentialism, end up remarkably close together. It almost makes you think they might be right . . .Animals
Anyone promoting the interests of animals—non-human animals—faces an initial problem: animals can’t read. So the writer will have to convince an audience distinct from the group he seeks to benefit, which calls for one or both of two strategies: either appeal to their better nature, or argue that they will benefit too. We saw the second of those at work in attempts to engage the support of the laity for the priesthood; Mill and Beauvoir used both in trying to rally men to the cause of women’s emancipation.
The situation is even less promising when most of those to whom you are appealing benefit, or think they benefit, from the very practices you are trying to have abolished. Lots of people like to eat meat, lots of people believe that humans benefit enormously from medical research conducted by means of experiments on animals. Feminist writers had something of the same problem when they tried to win men over to their views, but at least they had a direct constituency in women; ‘animalists’ have no direct constituency at all.
Buddhism, without going to extremes, is naturally protective towards animals. I say ‘naturally’, because Buddhism retains the Hindu belief that souls return again and again to life, and that what is in one incarnation a human may in another be an animal. The Buddha once lived as a hare. Christianity had no such metaphysics, nor the attached scruples—ask an Indian cow whether metaphysics matters! Adam was created Lord over the animals, and they were created for the use of mankind. We have rational souls, but they don’t, which leaves them outside the moral sphere. (St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) said so, among others.) That one ran and ran. Hume took a pop at it (see p. 26), but still it went on running.
As the founder of the utilitarianism that Mill espoused and developed, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) took pain and pleasure to be the morally decisive categories, and famously declared of animals: ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ (They can, of course, so they enter into the utilitarian equation and we have moral responsibilities towards them.) But that was an incidental passage from a book devoted to human welfare. It was only quite recently that we began to get whole books explicitly about the morality of our treatment of animals, a fact which may reflect the tricky tactical situation which their authors have to address.
Their doctrines have made enormous progress over the last fifty years—the tactical problem wasn’t insoluble. They were able to appeal to the sentimentality of those who like to ascribe human characteristics to animals. They were able to appeal to the much harder facts of modern biology, which show, far more convincingly than Hume could have done, that our relationship to animals is a lot closer than Aquinas ever imagined. They appealed powerfully to people’s consciences, asking Bentham’s question whether the suffering of animals could be justified by resulting good for humans, and if
