Episode nine: Can they suffer? Humanism beyond humans and the British animal rights tradition | Unholy Histories podcast

In 1789, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham asked a deceptively simple question about the treatment of animals. The question, he wrote, is not whether they can reason, nor whether they can talk, but whether they can suffer. With that one footnote – buried in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation – Bentham opened a long argument about how a secular, humanist ethics might reach beyond the human. A century later, a Victorian reformer would take that question and build a movement around it. This week’s episode of Unholy Histories follows the line of that argument from Bentham’s footnote, through the late-Victorian Humanitarian League, to the modern vegan and animal rights movements.

The tenth episode of our podcast traces the humanist ideas at the heart of the animal rights tradition; from Bentham’s question, through Henry Salt and the campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to the philosophical revival of the 1970s and the contemporary debate over factory farming, vivisection and animal personhood.

Joining host Madeleine Goodall this week, in the absence of co-host Andrew Copson, are Dr Helen Cowie, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of York, whose books on the history of animals include studies of Victorian zoos, menageries and the trade in animal commodities; and Dr Andrew Fenton, Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who works on the ethics of scientific animal use and on the philosophy of Henry Salt.

Together, the panel discusses the writers, campaigners and philosophers who, drawing on humanist ideas of rationalism, kinship and shared evolutionary origin, made the case for taking other animals seriously as subjects of moral concern. At the centre of the conversation is Henry Salt (1851–1939) – Etonian, classics master, socialist, vegetarian, and the founder, with his first wife Kate, of the Humanitarian League (1891–1919). Salt’s Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892) made the case, by what Fenton calls a parity move, in plain terms: do animals have rights? Well, if humans do, yes. The argument rested on a recognition of evolutionary kinship and on the same capacities – feeling, individual character, the desire to develop ourselves on our own terms – that humanists held to be the foundation of human dignity.

A recurring theme is the radical breadth of the humanitarian movement. The Humanitarian League’s campaigns reached across the abolition of vivisection and the reform of zoos and blood sports, and into prison reform, the abolition of corporal punishment, economic justice for women, vegetarianism, and an anti-imperialism that placed Salt and his colleagues at odds with much of late-Victorian respectability. Salt’s friendships with the writer Edward Carpenter and his quiet support for what would now be called LGBT rights ran in the same vein. His was, as Salt himself was pleased to say, “a compendium of cranks” – a single moral imagination applied without discrimination to every form of cruelty he could name.

Another thread is the long afterlife of Salt’s argument. The episode follows it through the novelist and humanist Bridget Brophy, whose 1965 Sunday Times essay reopened the British conversation on animal rights; into the Oxford Group of the 1970s – the philosophers Richard Ryder, who coined the word “speciesism”, and Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation (1975) drew explicitly on Salt’s anthology – and on to Tom Regan and the rights-based theorists who followed. As Cowie reflects, much of what Salt criticised in 1892 is still with us today; factory farming and the global growth of meat consumption would, both guests suspect, have left him gutted. But his arguments, in Fenton’s phrase, remain prescient. Salt’s late book The Creed of Kinship (1935), a summary of the Humanitarian League’s principles, reads now almost as a manifesto for the contemporary animal rights movement.

Tune in to this week’s episode as we uncover more about the philosophers, novelists and reformers who insisted that humanist ethics must reach beyond the human – and on the long British tradition of asking, after Bentham, whether the animals we share the world with can suffer, and what we owe them.

New audio episodes of Unholy Histories arrive every Wednesday, followed by video versions on the Humanists UK YouTube channel every Thursday.

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