The Ethical Animal: From Peter Singer to Patricia Highsmith

Recognizing Animal Studies

This essay places in dialogue the work of Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher of animal liberation, and Patricia Highsmith, whose fiction of the early 1970s takes a curious interest in the topic of animal welfare.  My argument will partly be that animals enter the ethical stage for Singer at a moment when utilitarianism comes under fire from a contract ethics that Singer rejects on the assumption that such ethics cannot be reconciled with our obligations to non-contractual creatures to whom we nonetheless owe consideration.  For this reason, I argue, Singer has proved especially unwelcome among scholars of contemporary animal studies who insist that what matters in animal-human relations is an ethics of reciprocity.  Highsmith's A Dog's Ransom (1972) and The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (1975) set in play a contest between utility and contract in regard to human-animal relations, and arrive at conclusions that look awfully close to Singer's.  By way of her interest in animals as the subjects and objects of brute violence, Highsmith also allows us a novel vantage on the fascination among contemporary ethicists with fictive scenarios, not unlike the novelist's own, in which the crucial issue is whether the killing of other people is permissible or blameworthy.  In this section, I consider the vexing role Singer occupies among contemporary theorists of what Kari Weil calls "the animal turn." 1 In the next section, I situate Highsmith's animal fiction in the context of the debate between utilitarian and contract ethics.  In the essay's final section, I connect the murder weapon in Highsmith's most politicized animal story—a pulled lever in "The Day of Reckoning," which focuses on battery-farmed chickens—to the pervasive interest among many philosophers in the seeming non-agency, and dramatic outcomes, of actions like button-pushing.

It may seem perverse to couple Singer (whose whole career might be said to comprise a reply to the question "Why be moral?") with Highsmith (whose whole career might be said to comprise a steadfast indifference to that question).  Yet Singer is somewhat notorious for what many observers (and more than a few philosophers) take to be a calculating heartlessness reminiscent of Highsmith's vintage sociopaths.  "We can't take our feelings as moral data, immune from rational criticism," he writes in his response to J.M. Coetzee's 1999 Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals. 2 This typically hardboiled comment is occasioned by Singer's encounter with the fictional Elizabeth Costello, who maintains that more recognition of our feelings toward animals affords a more nuanced sense of our duties to them.  Thus "when we divert the current of feeling that flows between ourself [sic] and the animal into words," Costello asserts, "we abstract it forever from the animal." 3  For Singer by contrast, the proper tendency of ethics is away from feeling toward abstraction.  All that matters in our moral obligations toward animals is that they feel—or, more exactly, that they are capable of feeling pleasure and pain.

Singer's strictly utilitarian notion of "feeling" is something of an outlier within the emerging field of animal studies.  For many scholars involved in that field, the crucial issue regarding our ethical relation to animals is not the simple or uncontroversial fact that animals feel, or even Coetzee's (or Costello's) less simple or more controversial point that we should take our feelings about animals into account, but rather how animals feel about us.  This is perhaps too glib a way of putting the matter.  What I mean to highlight is the large number of scholars in animal studies who, taking their lead for the study of ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, seek to assert the primacy of reciprocity in relations between humans and nonhumans.  In "The Name of a Dog" (1975), Levinas records a wartime memory of his internment in a German P.O.W. camp, where "halfway through our long captivity," a "cherished dog" named Bobby "would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight.  For him, there was no doubt that we were men."  On account of his powers of recognition, Levinas dubs Bobby "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims." 4  And on account of his relegating Bobby's generosity to no more than instinct, it would be more accurate to say that for scholars of animal studies, Levinas is less the sponsor of their project than its point of departure, insofar as these thinkers infer from his story a more radical conclusion than Levinas himself was willing to reach.

For Matthew Calarco, Levinas's story is "proto-ethical" but realizes "no politics or ethics proper" since Levinas fails to recognize "the ethical gift" that Bobby gives when he opts to "pause in his struggle for existence to be with the prisoners and to offer them what he can: his vitality, excitement, and affection." 5 Calarco's exegesis is reparative; it closes the gap in Levinas's parable between the dog as mere instrument for ratifying the humanity of the prisoners of war and "an animal who faces me, an interruption deriving from a singular 'animal,' an animal whom I face and by whom I am faced" (5).  Given the primacy of "face" in Levinas's ethics ("The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation," he writes in Totality and Infinity 6), we might say that Calarco grants Bobby a face that Levinas wills himself not to see.  By working through his "anthropocentric dogmatisms" (14), Calarco reveals a Levinas who confirms rather than ignores the fact that the dog is a moral agent in his own right.

By the same token, Donna Haraway writes in When Species Meet that, "sensitive as Levinas was of the service rendered by this dog's look," he maintained humanism's "Great Divide," which denies that "Animals are everywhere full partners in worlding." 7  As with Elizabeth Costello, so with Haraway: the ties that bind us to animals lead away from abstraction toward an intimacy in which "transforming regard" (176) is central—or, as Calarco puts it, "the ethical act par excellence" (58).  The "truth telling" Haraway promotes "is about co-constitutive naturalcultural dancing, holding in esteem, and regard open to those who look back reciprocally" (27).  And while Haraway demurs from the view that companion species refer merely to our pets, she is keen to foreground her attachments to her own domestic "messmates" (15) as exemplary of the individuation to which animals are no less entitled than their human partners.  In this regard, she also shares Calarco's understanding that a vital and overlooked feature of our ethical relation to nonhuman animals is their status as "singular" beings.

Even when revamped in animal studies to include nonhuman animals, the ethical project that follows from Levinas's account of "face value" remains somewhat curious from the point of view of contemporary ethics, which is far less concerned with singularity than writers like Haraway or Calarco.  In the preface to the first edition of Animal Liberation, Singer candidly admits that he really has no interest in animals as individuals.  In reply to a woman who asked him and his wife "what pets we had," Singer "tried," he says,

to explain that we were interested in the prevention of suffering and misery; that we were opposed to arbitrary discrimination; that we thought it wrong to inflict needless suffering on another being, even if that being were not of our own species; and that we believed animals were ruthlessly and cruelly exploited by humans, and we wanted this changed.  Otherwise, we said, we were not especially 'interested in' animals. . .  We simply wanted them treated as the independent sentient beings that they are, and not as a means to human ends. 8

In Singer's account, the animal need not be our companion in any but the most unspecific sense (cohabitant of the planet) in order for us to have an interest in honoring its preferences (to live its life free of unnecessary pain).  Indeed for Singer, the individuation of animals is less a sign of ethical progress than a symptom of ethical blindness.  Selecting some animals (pets) for favored treatment while consigning many others (food animals) to a brutal existence does not add measurably to the amount of pleasure in the world.

The prestige accorded to individual animals compared to animals in the abstract suggests a peculiarity of contemporary animal studies: the tendency of its practitioners to emphasize the political advantages of the posthuman even while maintaining that the best way to embrace such a novel paradigm is through celebrating the intimacy between people and animals.  For animal studies, the political is personal.  If "contemporary animal rights discourse" (7) has failed to mount "a direct challenge to liberal humanism and the metaphysical anthropocentrism that underlies it" (6), as Calarco argues, this is because that discourse has been insufficiently mindful of the "multiplicity of becomings and relational structures between humans and animals" (142).  "What is at stake in establishing a different protocol," Haraway claims, "is the never denotatively knowable, for human or nonhuman animals, relation of response" (310).  For Haraway, the "transforming regard" between animals and persons opens onto a "cosmopolitics" grounded in "entangling materially with as many of the messy players as possible" (106).  Such entanglement would take priority over the claims of rationality.  "The polis . . . where and when species meet" (19) treats "reasons" as "radically insufficient for companion-species worldliness" (88).

Whereas Calarco argues that "the genuine critical target of progressive thought and politics today should be anthropocentrism as such" (10), Cary Wolfe sees "speciesism" as the object in need of most urgent critique.  "Speciesism," as Wolfe puts it in the introduction to his 2002 book Animal Rites, is "fundamental . . . to the formation of subjectivity and sociality." 9 Even if its effects cannot be fully avoided, speciesism ought to be ferreted out of any anti-normative or radical project whose principles are betrayed by its latent commitment to the specialness of the human animal, since in practice speciesism "can be made to mark any social other" (7).  For Wolfe, who treats it as a version of racial profiling, the discourse of species is problematic not for the divide it creates between categories like human and nonhuman so much as for its reliance on ascription tout court: speciesism privileges the stability of classification at the expense of what he calls "the heterogeneous multiplicity of the living world" (66).  Like Calarco, Costello/Coetzee, and Haraway, Wolfe sees speciesism as a problem of abstraction trumping a singularity that cannot be subsumed without damage under any categorizing scheme.

Though both Singer and Wolfe are keen to indict speciesism, it must be noted that Singer does not share Wolfe's interest in linking the critique of speciesism to the embrace of "post-humanism" and all that the latter entails.  For Singer, the decentering of the human as all that counts does not imply the decentering of the humanist project as the most salient for construing ethics or politics.  That the goal of much animal studies is not the "practical ethics" in which Singer is invested but the dismantling of Enlightenment paradigms is confirmed by W.J.T. Mitchell in the foreword to Animal Rites, where he notes that Wolfe is less interested in the "effort to find a philosophical ground for animal rights" than in moving "beyond utilitarian justifications of 'the rights of animals' . . . modeled only on the 'rights of man'" (xiii).  Wolfe and Mitchell take issue with Singer's reliance on a rights discourse that reinstalls the primacy of "humanism" in such a way as to weaken his own indictment of speciesism.

This is a rather odd claim.  For if there is one thing Singer is less concerned with than the emotions of animals, it would have to be their rights: "I am not convinced that the notion of a moral right is a helpful or meaningful one." 10  In an exchange with Michael Fox, who finds that he has "surprisingly little to say" about "rights" in Animal Liberation, Singer replies:

Why is it surprising that I have little to say about the nature of rights? It would only be surprising to one who assumes that my case for animal liberation is based upon rights and, in particular, upon the idea of extending rights to animals.  But this is not my position at all. I have little to say about rights because rights are not important to my argument. My argument is based on the principle of equality, which I do have quite a lot to say about. My basic moral position . . . is utilitarian.  I make very little use of the word "rights" in Animal Liberation, and I could easily have dispensed with it altogether. 11

Utilitarianism for Singer is not wed but opposed to rights discourse, which is founded on an absolutism that Singer rejects. "The rules of ethics," he insists, "are not moral absolutes." 12

Considering Singer's animosity to "absolutes," it is slightly ironic to find Wolfe arraigning him for his "'essentialist' view of the moral worth of both human beings and animals," for his "naturalism," or for his "biologism" (34).  Singer's thought may be "essentialist," but not in the way that Wolfe understands that charge.  For what is essential to Singer's theory is the notion that there are neither "preference-independent values" nor ways to judge actions apart from their implications (PE, 117). This is the a priori of all utilitarians, who insist that acts must be understood in view of their consequences.  What makes this a metaphysical presumption is that such consequentialism does not stand or fall on the basis of any context.  Singer's preference utilitarianism, in other words, is not beholden to empirical verification; as Singer admits, the utilitarian axiom that "pleasure is good and pain is bad" (PE, 117) is the only instance of a "preference-independent value" within the theory itself.

Given that Wolfe takes him to task for his "biologism," among other naturalistic fallacies, it is worth citing Singer on the effort to trump moral philosophy by the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, whose "takeover bid" (EC, 54) of the ethical project Singer subjects to the following appraisal in The Expanding Circle:

If philosophers working in ethics take little notice of genetics or evolutionary theory, this is because the important philosophical questions—like "What is good?"—have to be answered before we can use information about the consequences of our actions in deciding what we ought to do. Since information about the consequences of our actions does not tell us which consequences to value, but only which action will or will not bring about the consequences we do value, most ethical theories simply incorporate new information about the consequences of our actions into our ethical decisions in a way which does not affect the fundamental theory of value itself. (EC, 64)

Even in the face of the most groundbreaking evolutionary research, "the nature and justification of fundamental ethical values," Singer insists, "remain untouched" (EC, 68).  "For any other ethic based on consequences," in fact, "argument would show that the ethic cannot be invalidated by new knowledge about the likely consequences of our actions or policies" (EC, 66).

One way to frame Singer's conclusion regarding the "unbridgeable gulf between facts and values" (EC, 73) would be to say that Singer's account is irreducible to the sort of materialist critique that biologists like Wilson and literary critics like Wolfe or Mitchell imagine as outwitting all such programs when they fill in the blank with content like "liberal humanism."  These critics assume that the idealist strain in Singer's ethics must be undermined by the material stratum central to Wolfe's argument, the matter that matters to him: the "animal other."  Singer's quarrel with Wilson illuminates a likeness between Wilson's "biologism" and Wolfe's anti-naturalism on the grounds of each thinker's commitment to the view that empirical knowledge will not merely inform ethics but displace it.  Just as Wilson sees ethics bowing to the eventual mapping of the moral genome, so Wolfe sees the "historically and socially contingent discourse called ethics" (42) humbled if not defeated by an encounter with an obdurate facticity—in the guise of animal otherness—it continually tries to shroud in a humanist mantle.

The ultimate culprit in Wolfe's indictment of Singer's brand of ethics, however, turns out to be the Enlightenment's most unseemly remnant, an overreaching positivism: "run[ning] aground on Kant's separation of prescriptive and descriptive discourses," Singer is guilty of imagining "a science of ethics" (69).  It is not at all clear that Singer is the sort of naïve positivist Wolfe alleges. "No science is ever going to discover ethical premises inherent in our biological nature," Singer observes in a statement that might lay to rest the notion that his work is enamored with "a science of ethics," "because ethical premises are not the kind of thing discovered by scientific investigation" (EC, 77). Yet it is evident that Wolfe's work enjoys a certain acclaim by virtue of its readiness to label misguided projects as far outside the postmodern fold as Singer's.  Aided by Jacques Derrida's late work on animality, Wolfe converts Singer into deconstruction's favorite strawman , a true believer in reason.  Whereas Singer's "mechanical unfolding of a positivist calculation" is "the very antithesis of ethics" (69), Derrida treats ethics not as an algorithm but as an interpersonal compact. 13 For Derrida, the important question raised by human-animal relations is how to assess the "order of being-huddled-together," how to parse "what sense of the neighbor" is implied by saying "that I am close or next to the animal, and that I am (following) it." 14 The difference between utilitarianism's numbers game and the posthuman theory espoused in animal studies is the difference that recognition makes.

Recognition, we might say, saves ethics from the chilling cost-benefit analyses that appear coterminous with utilitarian calculations.  As early as 1978, Cora Diamond explicitly saw Singer's reasoning as an "attack [on] significance in human life" and indicted the notion of "speciesism" in particular on the view that species have no obligations to one another, even though individual members of one species might have obligations to individual members of another. 15 For Diamond, to have an ethics "constitutes a special relationship" (470) to whatever creatures, human or otherwise, come into our moral ken.  "The abstract appeal to the prevention of suffering as a principle of action" (478) thus overrides what should really be a more immediate engagement with others.  This is why Diamond prefers what she calls "the fellow-creature response" (475), "the response to animals as our fellows in mortality, in life on this earth" (474), over the utilitarian aggregate, which appears to her to mirror the logic that brings animals onto the assembly line of the factory farm.  For in both cases, the animal as such is not in any meaningful sense approached "as company" (474).  "I am not concerned here to ask whether we should or should not do these things to animals," Diamond thus argues, "but rather to bring out what is meant by doing something to an animal" (476).

Diamond's "fellow-creature response" prefigures Haraway's claim that "Response is irreducible to calculation," that being "face-to-face in the contact zone of an entangled relationship" (227) bests even the most rigorous utilitarian logic.  Calarco also worries that Singer's "exclusive focus on rationality" disallows "recourse to poetic, literary, or artistic descriptions of animals, descriptions that might help us to see animals otherwise" (127).  The preference for what Wolfe calls "a truly postmodern ethical pluralism" (207) that embraces all comers without preordained criteria repeatedly plays out in animal studies as a desire for quality over quantity, a desire that literature and art alone can afford.  We might be forgiven if we find this desire a bit puzzling, given that animal studies' commitment to a posthumanist politics appears to resurrect that mainstay of liberal-humanist orthodoxy, a literary culture whose value consists in its championing of quality in a profanely quantitative world.   Since recognition theory places empathy at the center of the ethical project, literature appears tailor-made for the identifications that proponents of animal studies foreground between human and nonhuman animals.  In this view, literary texts are nothing if not efforts to rehearse the experience of recognition across any number of axes: writer and reader, reader and character, characters among themselves.  The animal-centric narratives favored by animal studies, which highlight what Derrida calls the animal's "point of view regarding me," 16 are merely one manifestation of a project in which all literature is allegedly engaged: the drama, as Haraway puts it, of "mutual acknowledgment" (25).

But is ethics primarily a matter of recognition, of what Haraway calls "face-to-face" contact? This is a question that Singer would answer in the negative.  For Singer, our "proximity or distance" regarding another person should have no bearing to our ethical relation to that person. 17 With respect to what we owe those in distress whom it is in our power to aid, Singer writes in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), "It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away." 18 And while his might appear an "extreme" view of the matter, this is not Singer's position alone.  Though they may be "psychologically powerful triggers to respond to neediness," Richard Arneson writes, "spatial distance and personal encounter are neither morally significant in themselves nor reliably correlate with anything that is per se morally significant." 19 While ethical philosophy involves the question of what if anything we owe to one another, while it might even be said to meditate precisely on how to recognize our obligations to one another, it is scarcely the case for many ethicists that the primary duty we owe to other persons is recognition.

Yet in reading many animal studies scholars whose chief influences are continental theorists in the phenomenological line, one might come away with the view that the essence of ethical thought is the effort to justify the degree to which we are meant to reciprocate another's "regard" or gaze.  To recognize the animal's recognition of us, to recognize the animal as "world-making" (2) (Haraway's term) or as "'rich' in world formation" (27) (Calarco's), is to make demonstrable progress in the project of recognition in general.  And this fining down of ethics to mutual recognition explains why animal studies scholars are finally less interested in the ethical questions Singer cares about than in promoting a version of the "politics of recognition" that underwrite multiculturalism.  In animal studies, animals function less as objects deserving of our efforts to end their suffering than as members of an identity group deserving of our efforts to respect their culture. 20 For Wolfe, the goal of animal studies is thus to "end up ethically recognizing" animals "because of their wonder and uniqueness" rather than "because they are inferior versions of ourselves" (192).

Animals Under Contract

If the field of animal studies works with a nostalgic account of ethics, an ethics of the "neighborly," it arrives there by way of an equally wistful view of literature as the repository of emotionally resonant experience.  Thus Kari Weil suggests that "the ethical must grow . . . out of an experience of shared mortality or bodily vulnerability," and that "narratives and artworks" allow us to identify such experience across the species barrier. 21 For Singer, such shared experience is beside the point.  In his view, animals are paradigmatic for our ethics insofar as we can never close the distance between us and them.  No research into the proximity between human and nonhuman animals on any number of axes will ever translate into the claim that animals are our neighbors in the Levinasian sense or grant relations between human and nonhuman animals the reciprocity on which a contract-driven ethics is founded.  Many animals can use tools; some animals have "language"; but human beings are surely the only contract-making animals.  Yet the fact that nonhuman animals do not make contracts does not render them outside ethical consideration.  The lack of interest utilitarians maintain in reciprocity as such is usually taken by its critics to signal the paternalistic relation between moral agents and moral objects on which utilitarianism is founded.  But for Singer, if symmetrical reciprocity is not irrelevant to ethical obligation, it is certainly far less determinate of ethics than many in animal studies assume.  An animal need not share equal footing with a person, in other words, in order to have its preferences given equal consideration.  To require mutual recognition between persons and animals in reference to ethics would be as mistaken as limiting our beneficence only to those persons who can reciprocate our altruism.

The remainder of this essay takes up some fiction by Patricia Highsmith to argue against the two most distinctive features of current animal studies scholarship: its understanding of ethics as based primarily on recognition and its view of literary texts as granting privileged access to it.  In an argument that focuses on debates within contemporary ethics, animal or otherwise, the choice of Highsmith here might be thought to rig the game.  No one would confuse her with J.M. Coetzee. Yet it is a telling feature of Highsmith's stringent misanthropy that she favored animals over people, and precisely as what Diamond would call "company."  "Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone," Highsmith told her agent when the latter complained that there was "no one likeable" in her fiction.  "My last books may be about animals." 22 And while she gravitated toward more orthodox pets (particularly cats), Highsmith pressed the personhood of animals to a certain limit; at one time in the sixties, she "kept three hundred snails as pets." 23

A Dog's Ransom has a plot slight even by Highsmith's own minimalist standards.  Ed Reynolds and his wife Greta, an affluent couple living on Manhattan's upper West Side, receive a series of anonymous letters from Kenneth Rowajinski, a man on "disability" who steals the Reynoldses' beloved poodle Lisa in Riverside Park and extorts $2,000 from the couple for her safe return (although he has in fact already killed her). 24  A policeman, Clarence Duhamell, takes up the Reynoldses' cause, tracks Rowajinski down, accidentally lets him out of his grasp, and thus becomes embroiled in Rowajinski's machinations when the re-apprehended Rowajinski accuses Duhamell of taking a $500 bribe. Arrested and then released under the supervision of a Bellevue psychiatrist, Rowajinski moves to a rooming house a few blocks from the apartment of Duhamell's girlfriend, Marylyn.  Rowajinski begins to send Marylyn harassing letters.  Leaving her apartment one night, Duhamell chases Rowajinski and pistol-whips him to death.  After a lengthy period during which his superiors try and fail to coerce a confession from him, Duhamell is cornered in his apartment by his colleague, Pete Manzoni, who shoots him in the stomach and flees the scene.  The novel ends with Duhamell presumably dying of the gunshot wound.

More interesting than its plot perhaps is the novel's insistence on yoking together two staples of post-sixties America: a critique of officialdom which it inherits from the counterculture and an equally pervasive distrust of the utilitarian thinking that seemed to many observers, in and outside the academy, to underwrite the welfare-warfare machine of the Great Society.  A Dog's Ransom is unambiguously hostile to the culture that the caretaker state has wrought.  Its New York setting is "a conglomeration to make money, not because people were fond of their fellow men," "a fragile web" where "friendships . . . had nothing to do with geography, neighborhood" (DR, 113).  This anomic city, where the calculations of administered society have evacuated an ethics of the neighborly, is simultaneously a petri dish for any number of botched experiments with "permissiveness," like the drug-fueled misadventures that lead to the death of Ed Reynolds's "promising daughter" Margaret, a college sophomore "who had fallen in with a lot of young crumbs" (DR, 14).  The city is "overrun by blacks and Puerto Ricans" and in general blighted by the aftershocks of a sixties culture that, as exemplified by Duhamell's "revolutionary" girlfriend Marylyn (DR, 197), openly despises legal authority while at the same time instituting a new orthodoxy of "Preferential Hiring Law[s]" for "minority races" (DR, 39).

In Highsmith's novel, the New York of 1972 is a utilitarian dystopia of good intentions gone awry. While not exactly a beneficiary of "Preferential Hiring," the "Pollack" Kenneth Rowajinski is the recipient of copious government largesse, from his "monthly compensation checks" (DR, 82) to the "VIP treatment" (DR, 134) with which he is ferried from the police to the psychiatrists at Bellevue before landing in an apartment house in the West Village where "he could collect more handouts" (DR, 125) and continue "bleeding the government" (DR, 120).  Marginalized and spectral, a "creep" lurking in the social shadows (DR, 143), Rowajinski appears as a "utility monster," to borrow Robert Nozick's infamous term, whose needs are impersonally catered to yet never sated even as his personhood is consistently reduced to that of an object: the ward of an entitlement culture run amok. 25

It would appear that in the contest between contract ethics and utilitarianism, Highsmith sides with proponents of contract.  In A Dog's Ransom, after all, the titular pet is not only a medium for the tenuous relationship between neighbors who are also strangers—that is, people outside any but the most generic social contract—but also, at least for the dog's kidnapper, a surrogate for the injustices to which Rowajinski is prey in that contract.  His own sense of disadvantage manifests itself in a "deep and justified contempt for types like Reynolds" (DR, 103) and his "snob dog" (DR, 11).  Moreover, the resentment he consummates in executing the dog is "justified" by Rowajinski's belief that the dog is replaceable with another of its kind in a way that persons manifestly are not.  "Let the snob buy another dog" (DR, 85), Rowajinski thinks; and sure enough, the Reynoldses acquire a new dog in due course.  Here Highsmith's novel touches on a claim for which Singer has long been criticized: his notion that "merely conscious beings are replaceable" (PE, 119), at least with other animals who are in all ways as capable of enjoying the benefits of creaturely life as the originals.  Where Lisa gives way to Juliette, or so Highsmith's novel suggests, there is no substitute for the dead Rowajinski.  This is a fact that utilitarianism, with its failure to account for what John Rawls calls "the distinction between persons," appears not to appreciate. 26 "What right have you got to be 'superior'?" (DR, 11) Rowajinski asks in one of his poison-pen letters to Reynolds.  Coupled with his untimely demise, that question appears to point Highsmith's novel, with its indictment of the impersonal ethics of welfarism, in the direction as well of an indictment of the failure of symmetrical recognition between cohabitants of the same social world.

Yet it is a curious feature of A Dog's Ransom that most of its characters come to think that people are replaceable, with both each other and with animals.  "A dog isn't a human being.  Like a child," (123), Rowajinski's doctor tells Duhamell in reference to the magnitude (or lack thereof) of Rowajinski's crime.  This paean to the specialness of human life somewhat contradicts Duhamell's view of the matter, which surfaces when he learns of the death of Ed Reynolds's "only child" and reflects that "now that Mrs. Reynolds was at least forty, they probably weren't going to have any children" (DR, 132)—as though another birth might compensate for the loss of the dead Margaret.  It also runs afoul of Ed's intuitions about the "difference" he knows "there should be" but does not feel between the loss of his "dog" and the death of his "daughter" (DR, 110).  Just as the novel's characters proceed "as if Lisa was a person" (DR, 154), to quote Ed's secretary (a supposition the dog's oddly human name does nothing to dispel), so they form a tacit consensus that Rowajinski is if not quite replaceable then at least disposable as a person.  "The amount of pain in the world was really appalling" (DR, 149), Duhamell thinks to himself, as though channeling Jeremy Bentham's ethical cri de coeur.  By dispatching Rowajinski, the novel implies, Duhamell really has done the "world" a favor by reducing its measure of pain.  In response to the commonsense view that Lisa's death "is not the same as if a child was kidnapped—or killed," Duhamell thinks: "The evil of the deed seemed exactly the same, whether it was a child or a dog" (DR, 133).  Given to such musings, Duhamell emerges over the course of Highsmith's novel as a consequentialist of the most exacting stripe.

The pervasive distrust of the legal apparatus among the novel's characters, from the "very left" (DR, 41) Marylyn (who delights in "lying" to the "fuzz" [DR, 183]) to Duhamell himself (on the verge of abandoning his police uniform by novel's end), serves to bolster the critique of contract ethics and the embrace of the utilitarianism that the novel begins by doubting.  For in the world of A Dog's Ransom, the rule of law, the cornerstone of liberal society, has no efficacy whatsoever.  In fact the whole notion of reciprocal exchanges underwritten by mutual consent, from Rowajinski's broken promise to ransom the Reynoldses' dog to the police's failure to hold Rowajinski accountable for his crime, routinely breaks down, clearing the way for a certain instrumentalist rationality, the ends-justifying logic of utility theory.  One of the more startling aspects of A Dog's Ransom is the shift of the moral scales that leads the novel's characters to find Duhamell's murder of Rowajinski defensible on the view that his superiors are themselves ethically compromised, minions of what Marylyn calls a "fascist state" (DR, 234), a "brotherhood" (DR, 203) that seeks to punish Duhamell because he is "an outsider" who "look[s] down on the police force" (DR, 265).  Strangely enough, the Homicide Unit's effort to torture a confession out of Duhamell comes to mirror Rowajinski's abusive relation to Ed Reynolds and his "snob dog": it is payback for a failure of recognition, for Duhamell's assumed hauteur.

That Duhamell meets an extralegal demise at the end of a policeman's bullet only confirms the powerful sense in which the police do not enforce the social contract so much as pervert it—or rather, reveal that contract as hopelessly liable to misuse.  From the novel's point of view, then, to speak of "rights" really is ethically naïve (as Cary Wolfe would maintain) or ineffectual (as Peter Singer would say).  But where Wolfe's preferred ethic of compelling recognition circles back to systematic bullying in A Dog's Ransom, the consequentialist reasoning of utilitarianism, where acts can be judged only by outcomes, appears to lead to some version of justice.  In this respect, Greta Reynolds's adamant insistence that lying for Duhamell is something for which she is "not sorry" (DR, 259) carries special weight.  A German Jew whose family fled Europe in the late 1930s, Greta is the survivor of a real rather than metaphorical "fascist state"—and so functions as the novel's moral compass.  Her certitude regarding the justice of Duhamell's act thus "must be right" (DR, 259), according to her husband.

Yet this clearly feels wrong.  For it is hard to imagine any cogent utilitarian reckoning whereby the taking of Rowajinski's life is outweighed by the benefits to those who have endured his bothersome presence in the world.  This may be why Highsmith leaves Duhamell dying on the novel's last page.  Even if Greta stamps his act with the imprimatur of her own unimpeachable convictions, it is as though the potential for a utilitarian calculus outside the social contract must abolish itself, and at the hands of the very enforcers of the contractual system it opposes.  In this moral universe, Duhamell's acts may be admirable; but they cannot count as legitimate.  More to the point, the illegitimacy of the moral universe itself does not license the kind of vigilante justice that Duhamell almost gets away with. A Dog's Ransom rejects as equally flawed both the statist utilitarianism that has deteriorated to a bureaucratic machine and the contract theory that uses the rule of law for the arbitrary exercise of power.  But it seeks to replace these decrepit institutional forms with a renovated consequentialism in which some agent takes on the role of judging for others the hedonistic yield, the social good, that derives from the acts that affect them and over which they have no control.  From this perspective, Duhamell is not so much an exemplary utilitarian as a sacrificial one.  He finishes the novel a virtual pariah: friendless, abandoned by his girlfriend, dying alone in his apartment.  While the novel distrusts the neutrality of the state in its role as impersonal arbiter of the general welfare, it is not ready to concede this position to any individual.

The need for an impartial observer emerges in A Dog's Ransom because of the distinctive lack of agency of a large class of beings—those nonhuman animals who have no capacity to make (or break) promises, who do not make contracts.  Implicit in the novel is a sense that the weighing up of lives that allows for things to come out equal between Lisa and Rowajinski is a valid ethical premise irrespective of the latter's superior powers of reason.  But the novel also steers clear of this premise in keeping its titular plot—the kidnapping and death of the pet dog—somewhat to the margins.  It is a salient fact about the novel that Duhamell does not kill Rowajinski in retaliation for Lisa's "murder."  Whereas in A Dog's Ransom the equal consideration given the dog and the dognapper remains an eccentric or unofficial opinion at best, such weighting forms an explicit theme in The Animal Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, a book that not coincidentally entertains a relentless critique of contract. The abuse of the animal that forms the pretext for the real action in A Dog's Ransom unfolds across the whole of Highsmith's later book, where the exploitation or abuse of animals is the norm.  Whether as pets, as zoo exhibits, as circus attractions, as beasts of burden, or as factory-farmed foodstuffs, animals are routinely presented in these stories as the raw material for human pleasure.

Given their routine brutalization, it comes as little surprise that the animals in Highsmith's stories take a rather dim view of their human partners.  The feline protagonist of "Ming's Biggest Prey," we are told, "detested people." 27 Nearly every tale in the collection involves an animal's unwilling relocation from happy circumstances to miserable ones as a result of human prerogative.  More tellingly, regardless of their ranks—whether single mammals, like the circus elephant in "Chorus Girl's Absolutely Final Performance" or the horde of hamsters in "Hamsters vs. Websters"—the animals in Beastly Murder are all included in a common, and familiar, scale: "Pain was pain" (BM, 57), as The Baron, an orphaned dog, concludes in "There I Was, Stuck with Bubsy."  Indeed, one of the distinctive features of Highsmith's book is its unwillingness to separate out the pain of nameless or wild or replaceable animals, like vermin or insects, from that of pets or primates.  However it is inflicted, whatever the magnitude of its recipient (from the lone camel beaten almost to death in "Djemal's Revenge" to the eyeless and legless rodent in "The Bravest Rat in Venice"), "pain," as the utilitarian sums it up, is "pain."

Whereas in A Dog's Ransom the payback for Lisa's death is indirect—Rowajinski dies as a result of Duhamell's unpremeditated act of rage—in the stories in Beastly Murder the animals exact their own retribution for the impaired contracts into which they are thrust against their will.  Poe was a favorite writer of Highsmith's, and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) seems the inspiration for the stories gathered in Beastly Murder.  In Poe's story, widely regarded as the progenitor of the detective genre, the puzzle of the murders is a puzzle of agency.  There is a crime but no one to blame; the orangutan who causes the deaths in Poe's stories is not exactly "guilty" in any moral sense, on the presumption that the orangutan cannot distinguish right from wrong.  What Poe's Dupin discovers in unraveling the murders is something like the prevalence of accident over design, of chance over motive.  I have argued elsewhere that Highsmith herself disdained the fetish for motive. 28  Yet in Beastly Murder she does not share Poe's interest in tying the lack of motivation to the presence of the creaturely (and thus the absence of agency).  Her animals are explicitly guilty not only of hating their human tormentors but of acting on that hatred.  In these stories, animals are highly motivated.

While the nonhuman protagonists of Beastly Murder are generally incentivized to kill, however, Highsmith offers us no metric by which such motives or their bearers might be seen as commensurate beyond the assertion that "pain is pain."  Some of the stories, for example, are told in the first person.  Indeed in the collection's lead tale, an aged circus elephant recollects her sad life behind bars, having "never [seen] another creature like myself" (BM, 15).  Though the story moves toward individuating the elephant, its first sentence already pulls away from that characterological investment with the presentation of the speaker's name, "Chorus Girl" (BM, 15), an interchangeable unit in the assembly line of performing bodies that embellish the modern stage.  "Chorus Girl's Absolutely Final Performance" also gestures in the direction of that other "chorus" whose presence on the Attic stage helped guide the audience in its response to the action unfolding in front of it.  Positioning Chorus Girl unstably between the one and the many, the named and the effaced subject, Highsmith also positions the elephant in particular, and "animal kind" in general, as the moral arbiter or framing device in the large-scale tragedy that is animal-human relations.

Lest this judgment strike us as unduly pious, and so hard to countenance in a writer as duly impious as Highsmith, we can look at the other first-person narrative in Beastly Murder to quell any suspicions regarding its author's sanctimony.  In "Notes from a Respectable Cockroach," the title character is a thoroughgoing snob living in a seedy Washington Square hotel not unlike the one in which Rowajinski is apprehended.  This narrator also partakes of Rowajinski's misanthropy, despising the human tenants who make him "count [him]self lucky to be a cockroach" (BM, 155).  Endlessly pining for "the good old days" (BM, 153) before the junkies and "degenerates" (BM, 154) took over the Hotel Duke, the cockroach ends the story hitching a ride in the suitcase of an equally disgusted guest.  And while he couldn't be more different from Chorus Girl, their lack of resemblance itself should give us pause when reflecting on what it means to recognize or identify with a nonhuman animal as an individual.  For though it may be relatively easy to project oneself into the skin of an elephant, a fellow land mammal, it is far less so to forge such identification with a cockroach (a point made in Kafka's "Metamorphosis," whose insectoid protagonist even has the advantage of appearing human-sized).  These narrations in the first person ring as artificial (Chorus Girl's life has been one of "performance") or are played for laughs ("Notes from a Respectable Cockroach" is the only story in Beastly Murder without a murder) not merely because Highsmith is intent on ironizing the anthropomorphic conceit of her Aesopian stories but because she resists taking seriously the recognition, political or otherwise, that might be presumed to follow from such individuation.  As her invidious cockroach confirms, individuals are hardly a priori bearers of moral surety.

I am suggesting that we can infer from the ways in which her first-person narrators fail to resemble each other a further claim about the failure or even absurdity of identification across the species barrier, however large or small.  If Highsmith could be said to have a position on the politics of recognition occasioned by human-animal encounter, it would not be the desire for the animal's particularization that we find urged on us by thinkers like Diamond, Haraway, or Derrida.  Indeed, "Notes from a Respectable Cockroach" exemplifies the degree to which quality defers to quantity among Highsmith's fictive animals.  The nameless cockroach brags not only about his lineage ("a resident by hereditary seat" [BM, 154] of the Hotel Duke) but also about his numbers: "As for children, they're beyond count, a boast I've heard many two-legged neighbors make also, but when it comes to the count, if the count is what they want (the more the merrier, I assume), I will bet on myself" (BM, 154). While Beastly Murder strongly indicates that size does not matter with regard to personhood (hence both elephants and roaches can have self-identity), the book is just as insistent that size does matter in terms of human-animal relations.

The Push of a Button

It is one thing to share the travails of a cockroach whose "seven" (BM, 154) wives and countless offspring have all met their doom under the foot of some bellboy or chambermaid.  As I have noted, the story is a comedy, which Highsmith surely intended as ironic, given her wedding of that most sociable of genres to the least socially redeemable animal in the collection. In the most arresting stories in Beastly Murder, on the other hand, the proliferation of the animal subjects strikes a Lovecraftian chord.  These explosive numbers appear catastrophic, as though some—clearly the wrong—species barrier has been breached.  The hamsters multiply like cockroaches (in "Hamsters vs. Websters"); the chickens mass like insect swarms (in "The Day of Reckoning").  Indeed this extravagance of scale mirrors the individuation of the wrong animals throughout the tales (singular and superlative rats, like the hero of "The Bravest Rat in Venice"; snooty, pedigreed cockroaches).  Such inversions of magnitude appear to make the ethical project of recognition unworkable while inviting a mindset that thrives precisely on quantities.

If any story in Beastly Murder were to stand as evidence of Highsmith's nonce utilitarian leanings in the area of animal ethics, it would surely be "The Day of Reckoning," whose title cannily evokes the utilitarian's ethical abacus.  "The Day of Reckoning" is a tale about a transition to which Highsmith's culture was bearing scarce witness: the shift from the small-scale farming of chickens for food to the "battery" (BM, 135) method, which brought Taylorization and economies of scale to the raising of poultry.  The story follows John, a junior at Ohio State, to his uncle Ernie Hanshaw's Midwestern farm, where he spent most of his childhood summers. Here is John's initial view of the barn on the farm, which has been renamed "Hanshaw Chickens, Inc." (BM, 133) in commemoration of its great leap forward:

There must have been forty rows of chickens on the ground floor, and eight or ten tiers of chickens went up to the ceiling.  Between the double rows of back-to-back chickens were aisles wide enough for a man to pass and sweep the floor, John supposed, and just as he thought this, Ernie turned a wheel, and water began to shoot over the floor.  The floor slanted towards various drain holes. (BM, 134)

This "marvel of modernization" (BM, 141), repeated indefinitely across the farmlands of Western democracies, is precisely what led Peter Singer to call for a measure of consideration of animal interests in Animal Liberation, first published in 1975 (the same year as Beastly Murder), though the argument that Singer developed in that book originated a year and a half earlier in a 1973 review of the landmark anthology Animals, Men and Morals in The New York Review of Books.  I do not know whether Highsmith read Singer's article (also titled "Animal Liberation").  Given her inveterate cultural striving, reflected in her masochistic partiality to venues (like The New York Review) that neglected her work, it is indeed conceivable that she happened upon it. 29 Whether or not she did so is immaterial, in any event, since the drafting of "The Day of Reckoning" predates Singer's article by five years.  The story took shape in the fall of 1968 after an exchange the previous year with the writer Ronald Blythe, whose "account of the barbarities of battery chicken farming had lingered in her mind." 30 Whereas Chorus Girl's interior monologue frames Beastly Murder, "The Day of Reckoning" inaugurates it.

The story hews to the revenge plot shared by most of the tales in Beastly Murder, with this crucial difference.  To the extent that we suspend our disbelief, we can say with some confidence that the murders plotted in the book are executed by rational agents. The Baron retaliates against Bubsy because Bubsy stands between him and Marion, a loving owner who wants to adopt him; and so killing Bubsy, a negligent owner, The Baron removes the obstacle to his own preferences.  In "The Day of Reckoning," by contrast, the chickens have no rational motives because, as Ernie's wife Helen puts it, "Our chickens are insane" (BM, 137).  More precisely, they have been made "insane" as a result of their intensive cohabitation, their rigged schedule, and other modern efficiencies.  Such practices have unintended consequences ("Ever hear of cannibalism among chickens?" [BM, 137] Helen asks John).  They have other, less direct unintended consequences (which are no less consequential for their indirection): Helen, who "doesn't much like battery chicken farming" (BM, 137), also doesn't much like her husband, a fact that—combined with her attraction to her husband's nephew John—influences her to ambush Ernie in the chicken barn late at night and throw the lever that opens the coops in order to give the "insane" chickens carte blanche access to Ernie, whom they devour.

The more proximate cause of her desire to see him dead is that she blames Ernie for the death of their daughter Susan, fatally "bumped" in the head by a swiftly "lowering" piece of feeding equipment in the barn while "chasing" a new kitten (BM, 143).  That pet's presence in the Hanshaw household is itself a result of the demise of the previous kitten, "flattened" [BM, 133] by a "big truck" whose "driver sits so high up he can't see" (BM, 136).  Violent death litters every page of this brief story, death that is senseless to the extent that it is machine-inflicted even if not precisely, like Ernie's chicken barn, "all automatic" (BM, 134).  The automation of the farm appears to smooth the path for the juggernaut of death that rolls over kittens and daughters indiscriminately.  Recognition falters repeatedly in proportion to the technology that comes between persons or between persons and animals.  And as in A Dog's Ransom, the question of replaceability is pivotal: kittens are replaceable, but daughters are not.  Indeed if kittens "cost . . . nothing" (BM, 140), daughters are priceless.  And someone must pay for their death.

That logic of payback is central to the motivation of any revenge narrative.  We might say that if the chickens in the story lack rational motives (not only because they are "insane" but also because they are chickens), Helen has them in spades.  Like Duhamell, she eliminates what she takes to be the source of her pain, the husband so dehumanized by his "chicken factory" that he fails to recognize his own daughter in time to stop the grain delivery unit from killing her ("I didn't see her in time" [BM, 143], he tells Helen).  She also removes Ernie as the obstacle that stands between her and John, in whose arms she ends the story and with whom she is already laying out her version of events to share with the police: "Ernie heard something and went down and—he wasn't completely sober, you know.  And—maybe he pulled a couple of wrong levers" (BM, 149).  Like Lisa in A Dog's Ransom, the chickens in "The Day of Reckoning" are not agents so much as instruments of the narrative's relevant actions.  Helen uses them to do her dirty work, the way that Roland in "Harry: A Ferret" uses the title character as a weapon to smite his enemies ("Harry was very heavy—as heavy as a pistol, Roland thought" [BM, 217]).  The difference is that Helen's motives, unlike Duhamell's, include a sense of wrong being done to the animals under her purview.  Whereas Duhamell kills Rowajinski to remove him as an obstacle between himself and Marylyn, Helen kills Ernie in part because he battery-farms chickens (a practice that not only makes chickens miserable but also kills daughters, and so makes mothers miserable too).  It is their suffering as much as her own that Helen seeks to end.

Helen's dislike of her husband, as I have noted, accompanies her attraction to John.  That attraction develops from their shared attitude toward the chickens they encounter on a neighbor's farm, an attitude that we might describe as pastoral-nostalgic: unlike the hens at Hanshaw Chickens, Inc., Frank Ferguson's "wonderful chickens," as Helen calls them, roam freely on his "wonderful mess" of a yard, as John adds, "like the chickens I knew when I was a kid."  These hens "regarded them with curiosity" (BM, 139) in the fashion of a reconstructed Levinasian ethics worthy of the "naturalcultural dancing" to be found in Haraway's species-companion polis.  Whereas no human hand ever comes in contact with Ernie's battery chickens, Frank's chickens invite Helen's "outstretched hand" (BM, 140) even if they do not quite take it.  When faced with the possibility of such a reunion between the species, if not exactly a mother and child reunion, who wouldn't opt for the choice Helen makes "to open all the coops in the barn and open the doors and let ours loose" (BM, 140), even if it obliges her to sacrifice her husband in the process?

The answer must be: very few of us.  Yet there is evidence that Highsmith would make Helen's choice, since she once "confessed that if she had a gun and she discovered which villager was responsible for docking the tail of a local black cat . . . she would not hesitate in shooting them—'and to kill.'" 31 In a gesture of anti-anthropocentrism perverse by almost any light, she also claimed that "if she came across a kitten and a baby, both of which were obviously starving, she would, without a doubt, feed the cat first if nobody was looking." 32 For Highsmith, it would seem, the utilitarian's insistence on equal consideration poses no sticky moral dilemmas; regarding the priority of human or animal preferences, she has no qualms favoring the latter.  Yet such a choice provides a clue to what is wrong with Helen's response, why it can never be the appropriate or just act in reference to ethical obligations.  For when Helen, like Highsmith, chooses animals over human beings, the issue is not that she has violated the sanctity of human life, in which utilitarians like Singer have little interest, but rather that she has violated the rule of impartiality, in which utilitarians have a good deal of interest.  And the impartial observer of kitten and baby would conclude that the considerations of the baby take precedence, since the newborn has a greater potential for a meaningful life than a kitten.  "It would not be speciesist to hold that the life of a self-aware being, capable of abstract thought, of planning for the future, of complex acts of communication and so on," Singer maintains, "is more valuable than the life of a being without these capacities" (PE, 53).

We could say that for Helen, as for animal studies, a just social world depends fundamentally on recognition: Ernie's failure to recognize the chickens or their creaturely interests arises from the increasing social distance he places between himself or any human worker and the laying hens in his custody.  When John arrives at the thriving Hanshaw Chickens, Inc., there is "not a chicken in sight," though there is "a hum of machinery" (BM, 133).  Having fired his single employee, a "handyman" made redundant by the automation of his farm, Ernie not only operates the battery by himself but also envisions a time when even he will be rendered superfluous, as when he advises his nephew to "start a battery farm when you finish school, and . . . take another job in Chicago or Washington or wherever, and you'd have a steady separate income for life" (BM, 140).  Ernie's fantasy of upward mobility imagines the farmer transformed into rentier.  We might say that, as a result of the mechanization of his farm, Ernie removes himself from any scene of recognition.  Hence Helen's murder of her husband fittingly makes central the tragic flaw that has led to his downfall.  "Let's watch them," she says to John of the chickens about to "finish" Ernie in the barn (BM, 147).  Yet if it were not already apparent, it is at this point surely obvious why Ernie's death is not justifiable by any rational "reckoning," utilitarian, contractarian, or otherwise.  For in killing her husband on account of his negligence, Helen can hardly be said to increase his ability to recognize the things that merit his attention, whether chickens, kittens, or daughters.  Being dead, Ernie is left in no position to repair his shortsightedness, to cast his regard anywhere.  Helen increases neither the potential for reciprocity (the contract ethicist's desideratum) nor the potential for satisfying preferences (the utilitarian's).  She merely satisfies her own preference for recognition, and the result is the ghoulish gratification to be had from watching another's suffering and demise.

It may be wrongheaded to construe a Highsmith text in light of the quarrels that arise among conflicting ethical theories, since fiction is not argument—and genre fiction perhaps even more so than "literary" fiction is unconstrained by the discourse of critical thinking.  Of course, mystery fiction has an obvious commitment to ratiocination; yet that is not my best reason for considering Highsmith's animal stories in the context of contemporary ethical debates.  For the more salient connection between Highsmith's brand of fiction and those debates is the prevalence of killing itself, which organizes not just the basic Highsmith plot but also quite a few of the gedankenexperiments in which contemporary ethicists deal.  Here is perhaps the most famous one, the "trolley problem" introduced by Philippa Foot in 1967, by coincidence the same year Patricia Highsmith became aware of the indecencies of battery chicken farming:

[Suppose there is a] driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. 33

As Foote clarifies the stakes of the problem, "the exchange is supposed to be one man's life for the lives of five." 34 Given that every outcome leads to killing, what is the tram driver's responsibility, if any, for minimizing such harm?

It would be a fool's errand to enumerate the many philosophers drawn to "trolleyology" since the late 1960s. 35  Fortunately, such an overview is uncalled for, since my point in bringing up Foot's hypothetical scenario is to draw attention to a feature, implicit in her version and explicit in later iterations like Judith Jarvis Thompson's or Peter Unger's, that resonates into Highsmith's treatment of Ernie's death in "The Day of Reckoning."  That would be the positing of an agent capable of causing or preventing harm by virtue of the mechanical means at his disposal.  It is no secret that modern ethicists are rather fond of thought experiments in which matters of life and death can be determined by pressing a key, pulling a lever, flipping a switch, or pushing a button.  To the philosopher, this is no puzzle; such contrived experiments, withdrawing any possibility of premeditation, have the virtues of directness and simplification.  Yet behind our commonsense assumption that pushing a button is an act categorically unlike the more serious deliberations entailed by actively killing one person or passively killing five, there lurks another assumption about the nature of instrumentality, the use of one thing to achieve another.  And that assumption bears directly on the sustained critique of utilitarianism in the post-sixties world, since utilitarianism is often taken to be synonymous with a blithe indifference to the instrumental use of one person for the benefit of people in general.  If technocracy is the practice, so the countercultural and academic argument had it, utilitarianism is the theory.

"Button-pushing" evokes the wide array of degraded activities—or non-activities—at the desiccated heart of bureaucratic modernity.  In the dimmest view of our technocratic world, we are all pushing buttons that, while they may not result in the immediate death of our fellows, nonetheless kill us all softly by degrees.  Inadvertently or not, contemporary ethicists load the dice when they pose experiments in which button-pushing figures as essential to the exercise of moral agency, since standing at the controls already implicates the agent in an ethically compromising act. 36 This much is confirmed by the frequency with which many people subscribe to the rightness of pulling the switch that diverts the tram and the wrongness of pushing someone onto the track, even if the outcome (five lives saved and one life lost) is identical.  "Throwing a switch is a relatively impersonal thing to do," Singer writes as a way of glossing these attitudes, "so we look at the harm that will result from throwing, or not throwing, the switch, and we act on the principle of minimizing harm.  Pushing a stranger off a bridge, however, evokes an immediate, and strongly negative, emotional response" (EC, 314).

Highsmith for her part does not hesitate to tie button-pushing to blameworthiness.  "He came down and went in the back door," Helen tells John with reference to Ernie's death by henpecking, "and I opened the coops with the lever" (BM, 147).  Helen's instrumental usages—the deployment of levers and chickens to accomplish murder—appear to replicate rather than mitigate the crimes of indifference for which Ernie has been found guilty.  And as though to drive home the cliché that two wrongs don't make a right, the aftermath of Ernie's dismantling by the hens finds John himself losing interest in the ethics of recognition.  "The obligation to look for Ernie seemed far away," he reflects, "not at all pressing on him" (BM, 149).  Given these turnabouts, the most plausible way to interpret this story might be to say that it points no moral, that no less than A Dog's Ransom it collapses the ethical alternatives of reciprocity and utility into the same unpalatable commitment to a reason that cannot account for perversity.  Thus to ask what motivates Helen to pull the lever is already to ask the wrong question, both of the story as a member of the class "murder mystery" and of the story as a fable about ethics.

Indeed, coupled with her indifference to Ernie's fate, her joy at the sight of the liberated battery hens on the lawn—"'Look!' Helen said, laughing so, there were tears in her eyes. 'They don't know what grass is! But they like it'" (BM, 149)—makes it seem that the best explanation of her act may simply be that Helen herself, like the chickens, has gone "insane."  But clearly this will not do.  As jarring as Helen's delight in the happiness of the hens may be, after all, it is a delight that John more or less shares.  The chicken exodus initiates not only their kiss, "stronger than any he had ever known," but also a kind of worship or communion: "they knelt facing each other, tightly embracing. . . . John did not know how long they knelt like that" (BM, 148).  It is striking that a story that diligently registers the non-contact between the farm's various inhabitants, from the kitten killed by an inattentive truck-driver to a chicken barn whose inmates are all but invisible to the death by non-supervision of Susan, should end with a scene of human contact that it treats as both intimate and sacred.  And it is here that we are forced to ask, yet again, whether this is what the utilitarian would call the best outcome.

For John and Helen, the answer is yes.  For Ernie, by contrast, it would just as surely be no.  And while neither a contractarian nor a utilitarian would dissent from Ernie's view—since his preferences are just as much denied as his Kantian separateness—it is arguable that, on the evidence of their own commitments, the animal studies scholars whom I considered in part one of this essay very well might.  For one thing, though the reciprocity that entails Ernie's being alive rather than dead is not on the table, the valuable interpersonal relations alleged to follow from interspecies acknowledgment clearly are.  For another, these valuable "face-to-face" relations descend from the rejection of the speciesist doctrine of industrial farming, which treats the animal as a product on an assembly line.  Speciesism has been vanquished, albeit at the price of a violent death; but a "naturalcultural" community, a farm where human dominion is held in check by the rejection of technological abstraction, has been reestablished.  Is the price too high?  Or is it, as the simultaneously reverential and erotic embrace at the end of the biblically named "The Day of Reckoning" suggests, a necessary sacrifice?

This cannot be other than a trick question; for surely no right-minded person, in or out of animal studies, would condone the death of a person on such terms.  To do so would be what Cary Wolfe calls "the very antithesis of ethics."  We are all deontologists where killing is concerned--or almost all of us.  It is unsettlingly the case for the preference utilitarian that, when it comes to taking life, "the wrong done to the person is serious, but not necessarily decisive.  The preference of the victim could sometimes be outweighed by the strong preferences of others" (PE, 80).  Such a position has led many people to see Singer, like Highsmith, as at best a moral relativist and at worst an apologist for murder.  Singer's reply to this charge is the endorsement of the "two-level utilitarianism" of R.M. Hare, who argues that "we adopt some ethical principles for our everyday life" which "experience has shown, over the centuries, to be generally conducive to producing the best consequences" even though—here is the second level of Hare's theory—"we can conceive of circumstances in which better consequences would flow from acting against one or more of these principles" (PE, 79).  This judgment treats as outliers, beyond the exigencies of practical ethics, those philosophical experiments that demand life-and-death decisions at the push of a button.  "Perhaps very occasionally we will find ourselves in circumstances in which it is absolutely plain that departing from our principles will produce a much better result," Singer admits.  "For most of us most of the time, however, such circumstances will not arise and can be excluded from our thinking" (PE, 79).

Yet it is not quite true that persons do not "most of the time" deal in ethical conundrums at the push of a button, usually less serious than murder but nonetheless morally fraught.  Downloading "free" music is one example of a button-pushing behavior that has widespread consequences affecting the preferences of many people (and not merely unemployed record company executives).  This example is actually quite relevant to Singer's interests, since he insists that the habitual actions of first-world consumers have detrimental effects on needy strangers, effects that are indefensible: buying luxury goods or status symbols, we spend money on unnecessary things that could be used to save lives or to lift indigent people out of poverty. 37 Swiping a credit card belongs to that class of automated actions, like button-pushing or mouse-clicking, that compromise our agency or at least implicate us in usually unwelcome chain reactions.  On the basis of their shared thoughtlessness, is it even plausible to put Helen's pull of the lever in a separate category from the conduct that guides us in our "everyday" circumstances?  The answer is both yes and no.  For Helen deliberately takes a life that had no preference for ending, and so does an obvious wrong to Ernie.  Yet Helen's pulling of the lever is not qualitatively different from any number of button-pushing behaviors that also appear to have drastic though unacknowledged effects.

The fulfillment of Helen's desire for recognition at the end of Highsmith's story is problematic, then, not only because she has come to it by an inexcusable path but also because the lesson she does not learn—but that Highsmith and, Singer too, I would hazard, wants us to take to heart—is that the pulling of a lever or the pushing of a button is not an innocent act, by which I mean not that it calls for guilt but that it calls for reasoning.  The world of pulled levers demands not the face-to-face presence privileged in animal studies, as though Ernie and his chickens just need to see more of each other, but a different kind of apprehension altogether, an understanding in which abstractions don't become tangible so much as interpretable.  The problem with pulled levers and the suffering such devices cause in "The Day of Reckoning" is not that they alienate social relations; it is that they cause us to imagine "alienation" as the name of the problem to be overcome.

This is why Helen's delight in the chickens' emancipation at the end of the story reads less like Born Free for Gallus gallus domesticus than like Shirley Jackson's take on Charlotte's Web.  Helen hasn't brought about an end to suffering so much as an antisocial wish fulfillment, a demented realization of the nostalgie de la boue she earlier experienced among her neighbor's free-range chickens.  This would not be Singer's ideal world.  In making his case against intensive factory farming, Singer often encounters the claim that he is unmindful of the economic catastrophe that would follow upon the end of the meat industry, from the hordes of displaced ranchers to the demise of retailers who process meat into any number of value-added comestibles.  The objection continues into the criticism that his theory is self-defeating, since the consequences of such widespread economic failure surely outweigh any pain suffered by food animals.  If we don't have factory farming, so the thinking goes, we won't have an industry based on food commodities, and the free market economy is sure to topple soon thereafter, and this is a world in which no being, person or animal, would want to live.  But this apocalyptic logic is merely the flipside of the pastoral fantasy in which Helen is mired.  Singer rejects both options.  He argues that the shift away from factory farming and meat-eating would not bring forth economic peril; it would bring about a different food economy, one that is potentially more sustainable and capable of feeding more people than the going concern.

I am frankly uninterested in whether or not this argument is sound.  I am merely interested in its unfolding, which occurs through a theory that gives primacy not to interpersonal recognition, or to the obligations neighbors have to one another or to their companion species, but to consequences.  If it would be too much to say that Highsmith was a consequentialist, it is arguable that her animal fiction shows us good reasons why it might be preferable to be one.  A Dog's Ransom and Beastly Murder discount the benefits of recognition as such on the view that an ethics of recognition reinforces rather than mitigates violence.  Yet a better reason for taking Highsmith as pointing the way to consequentialism may be the aesthetic one.  It is no accident that the static plot of A Dog's Ransom is also a tedious one; its dullness is a tribute to the fact that none of its characters, including Duhamell, knows how to think like a good consequentialist.  Because it treats the future as a garland of implications, consequentialism enjoins the progress of narrative. When we consider Highsmith's masterwork, the Ripley novels, we cannot help observing that its protagonist is a supremely gifted consequentialist.  That he is an even more skillful immoralist should also make clear the danger of enrolling Highsmith in any school of ethical thought.  For while she is capable of helping us recognize the territory known as ethics, we should not presume to place her under an obligation to settle there.

Michael Trask teaches English at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Cruising Modernism (Cornell University Press, 2003) and Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America, which is due out in the summer of 2013 with Stanford University Press's Post•45 series.

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References