When Bacon Meets Plato

A conversation on animal sentience

Some friendships begin with random circumstance, others with similar temperament. I once met a friend who had posted in the classifieds that he was looking for a grand piano to practice on and would clean in exchange. Surprisingly it turned into a 20 year relationship. Surprisingly, I replied. James and Andrei had met by chance and now their friendship deepened with each meeting. They were still in that enthralled stage where conversation feels like improvisation rather than digging a hole for a tree. Tonight they had ducked away from the music festival crowd to a café, their friends lost smoking pot near the stage lights. With hot coffee, they found themselves hamming it up on their favorite stage: the big questions of life.

---

Andrei: Oh that’s right, you don’t believe in universal morality.

James: How could one, in today’s world, where the pursuit of power, money, and sex is so blatant?

Andrei: Just because people don’t heed it doesn’t mean there is no universal morality.

James: You’re saying it’s like the stars? Even though there are clouds, they’re still out there.

Andrei: Exactly. And history shows morality evolves toward recognition, even if unevenly. Slavery, women’s rights, child labor—each once has been tolerated, then abolished.

James: What if it reverses? Republicans in America are not campaigning actively against gay marriage. Cultures differ wildly. In Korea, dog is dinner. Here, they’re man’s best friend.

Andrei: That doesn’t prove morality is relative. It proves some societies take longer to see what is constant. Even sub-societies within society, such as Republicans who want to keep marriage to a man and a woman. Or take murder, for example. all cultures forbid it, but all invent exceptions—war, capital punishment, and so on. The English and French abolished slavery long before the U.S.

James: That’s true.

Andrei: And would you justify slavery if one culture was to take it up again based on your theory of relativism?

James: No sir!

Andrei: (smiling) Well, I know someone who would. But she is on the far extreme right of American society. Let’s take another example. Eating pigs may be the blind spot of our day.

James: What do you mean? Why pigs?

Source: The Independent

Andrei: Because pigs are not mindless meat. Yet we slaughter them of our pleasure. The animal scientist Donald Broom shows they’re sentient—capable of joy, memory, problem-solving. They play. They grieve.