Interspecies Ethics by Willett Cynthia

Author:Willett, Cynthia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT039000, Nature/Animal Rights, PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

ANOTHER VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM: A DIGRESSION ON THE DISGUSTING AS THE RIDICULOUS

The morally disgusting and shameful at the bottom pole on the vertical vector can generate a sense of the ridiculous rather than of the tragic if the situation is relatively harmless. Policing our boundaries with animals has long been thought to be the primary source both of disgust and laughter. In conventional humor, animals are viewed as the ultimate outsiders, incapable of community membership (or of responding to its norms) or of possessing self-awareness, which are the capacities required in order to appreciate the comic. We humans use animals as vehicles for laughter and, compounding the insult, we rank ourselves above nonhuman animals through this very same capacity to mock them.

There are at least three ways in which humor has been used to affirm speciesism. In his book On Humour, Simon Critchley identifies the first two as the “reduction of the human to the animal or the elevation of the animal to the human,” or what he names as ridicule and comic laughter, and then offers a third, existential variation.53 In all three cases, the joke teller signals her own superior status as human. We can use examples from the comic skit “Whales Aren’t People,” performed by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report (2011) to explain the standard accounts of ridicule and comic laughter. However, this skit exhibits humor’s truly awesome transformative power for dissolving species barriers by demonstrating just how ridiculous speciesism can be, suggesting yet a fourth form of humor. Colbert’s skit begins as a satiric response to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which had fled a lawsuit challenging SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment Corporation to free their orcas (a type of whale) under the Thirteenth Amendment antislavery laws. Colbert mocks PETA by insinuating that animals are in a moral outrage over a human organization that would dare speak for them: “They can speak for themselves,” he retorts, exposing PETA to ready ridicule.54 Moral self-righteousness is one of satire’s favorite targets, and, in this instance, Colbert’s wit seems to set up PETA for an easy fall. The target (PETA) is viewed as even dumber than dumb animals and hence lower than the subaltern that they would claim to represent. Colbert also invokes an apparently innocent pleasure that is found in animals imitating the human when he reports that SeaWorld entertains its customers by dressing dolphins in hats and training sea lions to dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Both formulas for laughter serve to mock any claim that animals could be people.

Colbert’s satiric wit takes a sly turn, however, as he deconstructs those standard humor formulas where all the fun comes at the expense of (other) animals. Before turning to his final inversion, it is important to see how easy it is to cast SeaWorld-style entertainment and standard joke formulas into serious metaphysics. The phenomenologist Helmuth Plessner’s view of man as uniquely aware of his own mortality sets up for Critchley a third and highest form of humor.

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