BISHOP MAGEE ON OBJECTIVE TESTS OF CRUELTY. ,
IN an interesting correspondence concerning the meaning of 1. cruelty, and the limits of our right to inflict suffering on the lower animals for the purpose of alleviating human pain, which we published last week, a good deal of the discussion turned on the question whether we ought to measure what is cruel in relation to the lower animals, so far as is possible, by what is cruel in relation to man. The Bishop of Peterborough objected very strongly to this principle, on which we had insisted as the only one fairly touching the limits of cruelty at all, and objected on the rather strange ground that it is a purely subjective test, and therefore leaves "the gentler and more sensitive natures at the mercy always of the harder and fiercer ones, every man being justified by it in inflicting pain upon others in proportion to his own insensibility to it, or in proportion to the fanaticism which might enable him to despise it for the purpose in question.' " We fear, however, that the drift of this objection applies to all definitions of cruelty, in-
eluding the Bishop of Peterborough's, of which we have ever heard or can conceive. Until, at least, we get some barometer of pain,—some odynamoter, call it,—measuring at once not only the absolute torture inflicted, but the relative importance of the object for which it is inflicted, and of its cost in pain, as deter- mined by some infallibly just mind,—and of such a pair of moral scales the Bishop of Peterborough's letter does not appear to us to hold out any hope,—it is useless to talk of measuring cruelty by any but a strictly subjective standard,—a standard, let us add, which will be the more fatally cruel, the less distinct is the subjective reference to our own measures of suffering and our own willingness to suffer. Take the Bishop of Peter- borough's own definition, a definition fully as subjective as ours, but vitiated by completely ignoring the principle that pang for pang,—the suffering of the two creatures being supposed really equal, and no other consideration intervening,—we ought to regard the pang of a sensitive animal at least as much as our own. The Bishop defines cruelty as " the infliction of un.. necessary pain,"—and he says pain may be unnecessary in two ways ; either the object may be one so trivial as not to justify the infliction of pain at all ; or the object may be sufficient to justify pain, but even then the pain is still unnecessary, and therefore cruel, if more is inflicted than is sufficient to attain the purpose. Well, you cannot have any more subjective definition than this. It is a great deal more elastic than our own, because from not treating animal pain as in any degree of equal account with human pain, it gives us no sort of guidance, at least, none of that kind by which we are habitually accustomed to regulate our own actions. What is an object so trivial that it does not justify the infliction of pain at all P One man will say one thing, and ono another. The ordinary ethics of sport assume that the gaining by a novice of an accurate eye and hand as a marksman, is an ob- ject quite important enough to justify maiming and wounding hundreds of living creatures which are not killed by the shot, but escape to die of slow tortures in secret, The Bishop may per- haps disagree with the ethics of sport in this respect, but he will have the majority against him ; and how are we to rectify those ethics, except by appealing to the subjective test of which he thinks so lightly,—trying to make the sportsman realise what he would feel if, with his leg broken, he had to linger out his life and die of hunger and thirst,—and so bringing him to book in a region in which he can judge other creatures by himself P Again, the Bishop says that to inflict pain is unnecessary, and therefore cruel if, the object justifying the infliction of pain, more pain is inflicted than is necessary to attain that object. But what test could be more purely subjective P Dr. Klein thinks that more pain is not inflicted than is necessary to attain a scientific object, if the saving of the time of the inflicting physiologist be held to be part and parcel of the aim itself. And really, we do not see how the Bishop of Peterborough could refute this subjective estimate. If animal pain be of no account at all as compared with the human ends for which it is inflicted, is it not true that to economise the time of the highly educated scientific man whose mind is the only organ of discovery, may promote scores of discoveries of the greatest possible importance to human life and health, discoveries which would be lost if the physiologist in question had had to waste his time pottering,
as Dr. Klein world think it, with the administra- tion of antosthetics to his victim,--this operation being useless, or perhaps even injurious, to the scientific object itself, and very laborious to the operator P This is, indeed, the very pivot of the whole question. Most of our physiologists indignantly repudiate Dr. Klein, and think that a good deal of scientific time ought to be bestowed,—they will not call it wasted—to diminish the pain of the animal experimented on. But then, most of them will earnestly maintain—Dr. Rutherford being at their head—that if the administration of anaesthetics is at all likely to interfere with the results of the scientific experiment tried, that is reason enough for not alleviating the pain, but for inflicting it in full. Here is a second intellectual view, as subjective as the first, and one on which the Bishop of Peterborough's test affords no light. Dr. Rutherford's experiments on the drugs which affect the secretion of bile, for instance, are, in Dr. Rutherford's opinion, liable to be vitiated by the administration of anmsthetics, so he keeps his dogs quiet by curare, which paralyses their motor nerves, but does not diminish their pain. Is he warranted in this by the Bishop's highly subjective test of cruelty, or not The Bishop gives us absolutely no clue by which to decide.
But, says the Bishop of Peterborough, the objection to any test referring us to human suffering and willingness to en- dure it, as affording us a useful standard, is that it would justify hard men, who have no sensitiveness themselves, in in- flicting what, for like objects, they themselves would be willing to endure. No doubt ; but we are greatly afraid that the Bishop will find it very much more difficult to control the infliction of suffering by those who are comparatively insensible to it them- selves, by his own test. If hard men despise or even justify suffering inflicted on themselves, how is any intellectual or moral test to prevent them from despising and justifying it in like measure when inflicted on others P The difficulty in their case is a certain incredulity as to the existence of torture. Well, if they do not believe in it at all, they cannot take it into account in their intellectual and moral estimates. Only, so far as they do believe in it, can they take it into their account. We shall be fortunate if we can induce them to go so far even as to measure other creatures' capacity for suffering by their own. To make them go farther, and allow for a suffering they cannot feel, is cer- tainly even less probable on the Bishop of Peterborough's rule, than on oar own. It is just possible that by drawing their attention to their own suffering, and the signs of it which they betray, and showing how much more striking these signs of it are in other organisations, we may induce them to allow something for the greater sensitiveness of other natures. But if you assure them, as the Bishop of Peterborough would, that you must not measure cruelty in relation to animals by the willingness or re- luctance of men to endure such pain for similar objects, you leave them in an abstract intellectual region in which, if they choose arbitrarily to assure themselves that it is of immeasurably more importance to know how far podophyllin stimulates the secretion of bile, than it is to spare dogs suffering, you have no replyto offer them at all. You have encouraged them to put out of account altogether the consideration of what they would suffer in the victim's place, and having done so, you have no intel- lectual or moral consideration to plead, at all likely to be effec- tive, when they insist on the vast importance to mankind of measuring accurately the exact effect of a particular drug on the action of a particular bodily organ.
The Bishop of Peterborough says that if we are to condemn the torture of an animal for the purpose of alleviating, or discover- ing what may alleviate, human pain, he does not see how we can fail to condemn the torture of an animal for the purpose of alleviating human hunger. The reply seems to us very simple, that in kill- ing an animal by right methods, we certainly inflict no more, and probably far less pain, than it is quite sure to suffer in the course of nature, when it comes to die. Define "torture" as you will, you cannot define it as the instantaneous pain which all must suffer once, and probably much less than that which most of us will suffer once. So far as regards the few cases in which our present modes of killing are really torture, —and it is very likely that the Bishop of Peterborough is right in speaking of the whale-fishery as involving one such • species of cruel killing,—we are quite prepared to condemn them, We do not feel the least doubt that these barbarous modes of killing are the remnants of an age in which men never gave a thought to the sufferings of the lower creatures at all, and thought of nothing but the enterprise, the peril, the conflict,—in one word, the " sport," of the pursuit of the crea- tures whose destruction was essential to their comfort. Doubt- less scientific men might easily. find means to make the very first touch of the harpoon fatal to the whale, without diminish- ing in any degree the value of the oil and blubber ; and science would be far better employed on such attempts to diminish the sufferings of man's many and necessary victims, than in de- vising tortures by which the lower creatures are to be compelled to relieve man, not only at the expense of their lives, but at the expense of agonies far greater than we should account it just for any race of superior beings to inflict upon us, however much it might contribute to their own benefit. The principle we wish to enforce is that all sensitive creatures, and still more, all creatures capable of feeling affection and gratitude and loyalty to men, are, so far as their sensitive- ness and capacity for moral emotion go, our fellow-creatures, bound to us by the ties of common feelings, to whom we owe it to consider the claims of their individual natures on us, and not to treat them as if they were nothing in the world but instru- ments of our enjoyment, And we maintain that it is impossible for those who claim,—as we understand the Bishop of Peter- borough to claim,—the right of torturing such creatures with- out limit for the clear benefit of man, not to lose sight entirely of this most undeniable and most important truth.
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