Cass Sunstein on Animal Liberation, Burke, and Tradition

For those who don’t already know Cass Sunstein’s achievements, he is a professor in the Harvard Law School, the most-cited legal scholar in the United States, and the author of many important books, of which perhaps the most famous is Nudge, co-authored with Richard Thaler. Under President Obama, Sunstein served as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, in which position he took the difficult and much needed action of requiring that assessments of the cost of new regulations must put a price on carbon emissions. The Trump administration just eliminated that requirement, one more step in its catastrophic dismissal of the most pressing problem now facing everyone living on the planet. (You can hear Sunstein, whose book Climate Justice was recently published, discuss the significance of this decision with me and Kasia de Lazari-Radek on our podcast, Lives Well Lived.)

I’m telling you all this because Sunstein has a new Substack post on reading my own book, Animal Liberation Now. I’m delighted to report that his reading has led him to rethink his attitude to the value of tradition, as defended by the great eighteenth century English conservative thinker, Edmund Burke. I’m going to give you some of the key points below, but you should read his post in full.

Singer’s book casts a dark light on Edmund Burke, the conservative thinker who is one of my heroes. The reason is that Burke valorized traditions, which he opposed to reason. Singer makes reason look pretty good, and he makes (some) traditions looks pretty awful.

When, in my undergraduate history classes, I first studied Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, I was opposed to it, and firmly on the side of the revolutionaries, with their championing of liberty, equality and fraternity, their Declaration of Rights, and their freeing of the slaves in the French colonies. But it can’t be denied that the French Revolution went off the rails, and declaring that every citizen had rights did not help the many innocent people who were guillotined. So the question of where traditions should be overthrown, and where they should be respected and followed, remains a real issue.

Cass correctly states that I am a rationalist who sides with Jeremy Bentham in arguing for the decidedly untraditional view that “If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.” Cass describes Chapter 5 of Animal Liberation, in which I explore the history of speciesism by writing: “It holds up old ideas, and longstanding ideas, and makes them look clueless or terrible.” He then describes Chapter 6, by saying that it “deals with objections to Animal Liberation, in which distinguished philosophers (including Bernard Williams and Shelly Kagan) seem to be pretty desperate to defend the view that human beings count a lot more than nonhuman animals do.” By that he means that when these distinguished philosophers try to justify discounting the interests of other sentient beings who are not members of our species they are “not at their best.” I am no doubt biased, but that seems to me to be the simple truth, and there is an obvious reason for it.

The point is, Cass goes on to say, that nonhuman animals did not participate in the creation of the traditions that regard them as things we can use for our purposes. The same, of course, could be said of Africans and the tradition of slavery that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And the conclusion to be drawn is that the reasons for regarding traditions as practices to be valued and respected do not apply when those whose interests the traditions suppress, ignore, or discount have had no role in creating them.