The truth about "Cecil the Lion" outrage: Why we're so angry — and what it says about us

"There’s an enormous sense of outrage about this," says Yale philosopher Joshua Knobe

Published August 1, 2015 2:12AM (EDT)

  (AP/Andy Loveridge)
(AP/Andy Loveridge)

The case of Cecil the Lion – in which a Minnesota dentist, Walter J. Palmer, killed a lion living in a Zimbabwe sanctuary – has incensed people all over the world. Protestors have put signs up at his office and expressed their sorrow and frustration online. Palmer has apologized --  “I relied on the expertise of my local professional guides to ensure a legal hunt.” – but the anger has not abated.

Philosopher Joshua Knobe, who teaches at Yale University, looks at the relationship between morality and intention. In philosophical circles he’s also known for “the Knobe effect” which looks at how we judge things.

Knobe spoke to us from New York City. The interview has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity.

How does the morality of this lion hunt break down for you? We have a wealthy American who went to Zimbabwe, who lured a lion out of captivity and killed it. What are the important terms here for a philosopher for assessing this?

This is a case that people in my field, moral philosophy, have investigated a great deal. Obviously the way we live our lives do enormous harm to other animals. The way we eat, for example – by paying only a little more, or eating food that was only a little less tasty, we could do a lot less damage to other animals.

We could avoid doing harm to animals by choosing not to take a certain vacation, choosing not take a certain plane flight. By choosing to take the train when riding in the car would be more convenient.

But there’s something about this case – it’s just about hurting a single animal, and it’s not anywhere near the devastation that other things do… But there’s something about this case that’s special: What’s special about it is intention. In those other cases, the things we do every day we don’t do for the purpose of killing an animal. We do them knowing they’ll kill an animal.

When you choose to have dairy cheese, as opposed to soy cheese, you may be inflicting enormous suffering on a cow. But it’s not as if you are trying to… you just want to eat cheese, and you recognize that it will inflict suffering.

But here, the intention is to harm an animal.

A lot of your writing involves intention, right?

It [does]. There is other work that I think sheds light on this. What happens when people are given several moral questions in a row? You can see that sometimes thinking about one question changes their view of another.

In particular, when you think about something where you intend to harm someone, it can change your view about how wrong it would be if you didn’t intend it.

So what’s really striking about this case: There’s an enormous sense of outrage about this. People think that this is wrong. But think about all the times we do things like this, but we won’t intend it. It starts to be a little bit hard to defend the things that we’re doing every day.

Where do you think the intense outrage over this has come from?

What seems so different about this kind of act is that he didn’t want to achieve something, and he knew a lion would die. That was his goal.

Maybe one way to think about it: If you were eating that tasty cheese, and someone told you it did not inflict suffering on a cow, you would feel only delighted to hear that. But when he pulled the trigger, he wanted the animal to die.

Part of what’s outraged people here comes from the details – the lion was lured out of a sanctuary, shot with a crossbow, lived with that wound for almost two days, then was shot and killed. Does this ethically or morally make it different than a traditional hunt?

A number of moral philosophers see a difference between animals and human beings in terms of their suffering in particular. If you died, part of the significance would have to do with your suffering… but it would also have to do with your hopes and dreams, that would never be fulfilled – let’s say, you were really looking forward to attending your daughter’s graduation, but now you’ll never be able to do that.

For animals, those things don’t apply, so it seems like there’s a special [weight] attached to the issue for suffering for animals. It’s not like a lion has longterm hopes for projects. So this aspect of this lion’s death seems to highlight something that people regard as especially wrong in the case of animals.

I wonder if the place of animals –- and natural life in general – has shifted at all over the last decade or two? Maybe people like Peter Singer have moved the conversation a bit?

There’s definitely a shift in the philosophical world, where a lot of people think that animals have certain rights. But I think you also see a shift in the way people are seeing these things more broadly.

Some people think our attitude toward animals comes from the fact that we conquered them. What you might initially think that we treat animals the way we do because we have certain attitudes toward them – but it’s the opposite. It’s not that we eat certain animals because we think of them as having some kind of moral status. We think of them as having that moral status because we eat them.

If you, in experimental, cause people to eat a piece of beef jerky, they’ll conclude that cows have less capacity to feel pain. If you tell them that people in a certain culture eat an animal, they’ll conclude that the animal has lower moral status.

One way to describe the shift we’ve seen in our culture is to view behavior change: The fact that people eat meat gives them certain philosophical ideas, it’s not that philosophical ideas make them eat meat.

I see you identified as an experimental philosopher. What’s experimental about what you do?

The work that we do consists of running systematic experimental studies, the same way you would see in psychology. And then the difference is that then in trying to understand the significance, we consider them against the background of the tradition of philosophical reasoning.

 


By Scott Timberg

Scott Timberg is a former staff writer for Salon, focusing on culture. A longtime arts reporter in Los Angeles who has contributed to the New York Times, he runs the blog Culture Crash. He's the author of the book, "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class."

MORE FROM Scott Timberg


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Cecil The Lion Hunting Morality Morality_matters Philosophy