“Babies are nothing like pigs, because in a year or two one is talking to you whereas the other never will. And they are talking to you because of something that happened in that year or two, and it isn’t something that happens in pigs, ever.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge
“A baby seems to me to be no more capable of reason than a pig or a cow. These mammals seem to have wills. They also non-verbally communicate their desires and often require human assistance in order to meet their basic needs. If we should take babies seriously, does it follow that we should take pigs seriously too?”
Next you’ll be advocating eating babies. 🙂
Babies and pigs are nothing like alike. Even on the day of birth, a baby seems nothing like a pig to me. When my first baby was first born she looked directly into my eyes and smiled. There was humanity and reason in her eyes.
Babies are obviously nothing like pigs, because fast forward a year or two and one is talking to you whereas the other never will. And they are talking to you because of something that happened in that year or two, and it isn’t something that happens in pigs, ever. This is not a small difference, it is a radical difference.
What is also interesting is that there are things that the pigs can do that babies can’t. A pig can do everything it can do in its life within months of its birth, including walking and feeding. Humans have to learn these skills over a much longer period than pigs, even though in the distant past, our ancestors had their full repertoire built in just like pigs have it built in. Why is that? It is because in humans, all sorts of functions that in other animals are controlled by genes are instead controlled by ideas. So they have to be learnt. And everyone learns them in a slightly different way. Everybody learns slightly different speaking. Nobody learns the exact same meaning of words, and nobody speaks language in exactly the same way.
If what you have in mind is the idea that adults or older children have reason but babies do not, that idea makes no sense. How does reason get switched on, and when? The fact that a baby learns to talk means that the baby must have been making inexplicit conjectures about what things mean and what we call different things in order to learn language, and they are learning vastly more than just the words they can speak. Pigs do none of this. All their knowledge is built into their genes.
Babies and pigs both have genetic theories built in, but unlike newborn babies, pigs’ built-in theories are not replaced through creative rational processes. Babies interpret reality in part according to their built-in genetic theories—theories enable babies to learn language, to form other theories, and so on. There are probably also substantive theories built in, about things like three-dimensional space, and so on, because of babies’ control over their limbs, etc. Ultimately, babies end up creating explanatory theories but pigs never do.
As Jacob Bronowski said in The Ascent of Man (pp. 19-20 in the book version):
“Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it. And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution—not biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man. I use the word ascent with a precise meaning. Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts. He makes plans, inventions, new discoveries…”
For a related argument in a discussion about the morality of eating meat, see this comment and others in the thread.
See also:
- “Help! My baby hates diaper changes! Ideas for baby-pleasing solutions”
- The right to refuse medical treatment
- Bathtime and hairwashing
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 2022, Taking Children Seriously FAQ: ‘“If we should take babies seriously, should we not take pigs seriously too?”’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/if-we-should-take-babies-seriously-should-we-not-take-pigs-seriously-too/
everything on this website is perfect except for this. children AND animals should be taken seriously.
is the argument here that babies have more reason on the day they’re born than a pig ever will? not only is it provably untrue, it’s also irrelevant. coercion is bad because it causes suffering thus it should be avoided in any being that suffers when its goals are thwarted.
Thanks so much for the criticism. I agree that coercion is bad because it causes suffering, but that argument goes only so far before it comes up against many problems. For example, what about coercively stopping someone coercing someone else? Is that kind of coercion bad too (given that it causes the coercer suffering), or is it justified because the coercer is coercing another? If that kind of coercion is also never justifiable, it follows that any sufficiently evil group or person can prevail in your scheme of things, in which case, isn’t that problematic for your “coercion is bad because it causes suffering” idea? What counts as suffering? Is it just overt suffering at the time of the coercion, or does it include lifelong nameless despair set up by a pattern of coercion in early life? Which entities count as “beings that suffer when its goals are thwarted”? What happens when two people of good will disagree about whether or not this pig is such a being? What if there is a disagreement about the nature of a whole class of beings, like animals for example? Why goals in particular? Why limit it to those? Whose ideas about all this stuff are right? And if we are all fallible people, how do we know our own ideas are not mistaken? What makes you think that your own particular theory of this stuff is The Final Truth, 100% perfectly true, never to be superseded with a better idea?
These questions are important—I am not just being difficult. When it comes to how we treat our children, this stuff becomes really relevant really soon, because there is soooooo much well-meaning pseudo-justification for treating children as a means to our adult ends, including, for example, parents feeling justified in coercively imposing their own dietary restrictions (vegan/vegetarian) on their children in the name of ‘non-coercion’. When there is a disagreement about any of this, now what? Either we can resolve the disagreement through reason (such that there is wholehearted unanimous agreement, not a compromise) or if not that, that leaves only violence.
Thoughts?
See also my discussion in the comments under this article.