Philosophy of pets 2
Is a pet a friend?
I ended Philosophy of pets 1 a few weeks ago with the question of whether we should call pets friends. The question came up because we share a more reciprocal relationship with dogs and cats than we do with smaller, caged or aquarium-ed pets. Just how robust is it, though? Heads up: I don’t think this is one of the Important Questions, but I found it interesting.
Should we call pets friends?
Well, what’s a friend? Philosophical accounts of friendship agree that it’s a personal relationship that involves at least (1) mutual care about or love for another for their sake, (2) shared activity, and (3) some level of intimacy we don’t have with strangers. I also think of it as an expansion of the self, given that the mutual care means that your interests intertwine with your friends’. To greater and lesser extents depending on the relationship, we shape our worlds around our friends.
In favor of the claim that bigger pets can be our friends, we have the following:
The relationship is personal. While it’s somewhat serendipitous how you come to have the relationship—which is also true of human friends—once it’s formed, you wouldn’t substitute any old dog for yours, and your dog wouldn’t swap you.1 I’m less sure about the latter in the case of cats, but I think we’re still on pretty good ground there too.
There’s mutual care/love. Our pets matter to us, and we matter to them. We show concern when they’re not doing well, and vice versa. Now, pets probably don’t get all the way to a sophisticated desire for our eudaimonia (happiness, flourishing), so there’s at least an asymmetry here. Still, (1) not all of our human friends necessarily get to the level of desiring our happiness, at least not in a robust way, and (2) I think dogs and cats do notice when we’re not doing well and they can show concern for us.
The concern is for one another’s sake. It’s not merely instrumental, though it probably is instrumental to some extent: we rely on our pets for things like affection, emotional support, and meaning, and they rely on us for food, shelter, and affection. This mixture of intrinsic and instrumental is the case for many human friendships too.2 There’s nothing in the definition that requires that friendship be purely intrinsically valued, just that intrinsic valuing of one another is involved. Many valuable things are valued both for their own sake and for the sake of something else, as Aristotle observed.
We share activities with our pets: play time, walks, cuddle time, etc. We might not otherwise do some of these activities. (This is also an example of world-shaping.)
Intimacy is a little harder, mostly because it’s harder to pin down exactly what that means in the first place. But I think of intimacy in terms of mutual knowledge. You know a friend better than you know strangers: what they like, what they value, how they’ll react to circumstances, etc.3 I think this is also where the intertwined interests come in: loving someone means you take some interest in their interests, and while you don’t adopt all of their interests as your own, you’ll support them in pursuing them. (I really have no interest in chewing on a rope bone, but I’ll make sure Onyx has one.) And again, I think it’s pretty clear that we can have this with our pets. We know our dogs and cats better than we know the neighbors’, and they know us better than they know the neighbors.
So far, it seems pretty convincing—even obvious—that pets can be friends. So why is there even a question here? Why think that pets can’t be friends? Philosopher Stephen Clark suggests, and I agree, that it mostly has to do with our general speciesism: we simply assume that because other animals are not sophisticated (in the same ways as humans are) that their companionship is automatically in a different category from the friendship we have with other humans.
It’s true that because we can’t converse with them verbally, we don’t get the same things out of pet relationships as we do out of human ones. In particular, we don’t get what’s traditionally understood as characteristically human activity from our relationships with animals. Aristotle’s “highest” form of friendship is between virtuous people, who enjoy (among other things) engaging in intellectual contemplation with one another. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily do a lot of intellectual contemplation with most of my friends most of the time (though I do with some of them some of the time).4 Still, clearly we can’t do intellectual things with other animals, and that is a major part of what makes our pet relationships different from our human ones.
This is where that point about my dog’s inability to desire my flourishing gets its significance. Although a dog or cat can show concern for you, they can’t really intentionally aim at eudaimonia—yours or theirs—and that’s an important component of love as I see it. Nevertheless, many people don’t necessarily have a sophisticated conception of happiness either, so the fact that an animal doesn’t have one maybe shouldn’t count against them. Furthermore, we’re almost never directly or consciously aiming at a friend’s happiness when spending time with them; the flourishing is what happens in the background as a result of the activities and emotional connections of friendship. When a friend’s happiness is in jeopardy, then it becomes a conscious aim within the friendship. And that seems true of pet relationships as well.
Still, as another species, pets are inescapably Other; this is a major part of why we don’t think of them as friends. They have one foot in nature, one in culture, as philosopher Mark Alizart says of dogs in an interview with Salon. But because they’re domesticated, they’re also related to humanity in a way that wild animals simply are not.
It seems overly dismissive to think that just because a relationship can’t be sophisticated that it’s not a friendship. Pets do often provide the occasion for life lessons, usually having to do with living in the moment and not borrowing trouble by thinking too hard about past or future. To the extent that they’re present in their lives at each moment, they provide companionship that is less reflective, yes, but also less likely to be hung up on any little thing you did or didn’t do or say. That’s a lesson we could all use more of.
So it seems to boil down to whether the lack of intellectual companionship and the Otherness of animals enough to make friendship with a pet impossible. What should we conclude at this point? Friendships come in a wide variety of forms, and feed us in diverse ways. Humans are also Others to one another in their own way; they’re never fully knowable to us. Otherness itself is therefore not enough to rule out friendship. All I’ve said here suggests that it’s not out of the question that pets can be friends. Still, I feel the pull of the idea that as valuable as the relationship is, a pet is not a friend in the way a human is.
Not a lot rests on the question, in the end. Pets are valuable companions for the sheer joy they can bring us, for the emotional connection they offer, and for the meaning they bring us—both in terms of the way they live their own lives, and the way they expand our worlds beyond narrow concerns with ourselves.5 Pets can provide us with meaning, but they don’t hand it to us. We have to find it in their lives and our relationships with them.
(We’re assuming healthy human-pet relationships here.)
The fact that friendships are often also instrumentally valuable (that is, that friends are good for us) makes it easy to think that the instrumental value is the reason for the friendship. But this mistakes a side effect for the central purpose, and I would also suggest that it’s a manifestation of the individualist tendency to assume that everything we do is motivated by narrow self-interest. I think this is false.
In a more formal piece of philosophy, this “better than” would require more careful definition, but for present purposes we’ll leave it at the intuitive level, partly because this is one of the harder problems for philosophical accounts of friendship.
This says something about the traditional ideal of rational humanity, but that’s a story for another time.
This last relates to Susan Wolf’s suggestion that the value of a meaningful life is that is harmonizes with the fact that we are not the only sources of value in the universe.
Along the same lines, can one be a "friend" with someone who is non verbal due to a significant intellectual disability? I think sometimes we mistakenly focus too much on coming up with definitions and trying to figure out whether someone fits that definition or not. In the specific case of friends, perhaps, we should first focus on whether we can love someone who is not a fully competent human, whether it would be a human with an intellectual disability, or someone who had a massive stroke and is no longer able to verbally communicate, or a non-human animal for that matter. I think that answer to all of the above is yes!
Spinoza defined love as joy (or pleasure) accompanied by the idea of the external cause of that joy. Our friends bring us joy (at least some of the time!) therefore we love them in the Spinozian sense. In fact, Spinoza did not seem to differentiate between different kinds of love such as towards a child, a parent, a romantic partner, a friend, or a pet for that matter. Relationships with all of the above (hopefully) bring us pleasure, therefore we love all of them.
Different friends bring us pleasure for different reasons: with some we enjoy pondering philosophical questions, with others we like to listen to music, and others might prefer political discussions. With one friend (specifically, my non-verbal daughter with a genetic disorder) I enjoy taking a walk in the woods looking at trees and the ocean without saying much.
In discussing friendship, I feel that philosophers put too much emphasis on the verbal communication that requires a certain kind of a brain permitting it. We seem to forget that a lot of communication is non-verbal and we are just bad at understanding the non-verbal language of someone who is very different from us. We are so quick to assume that if someone, be it a human or a non-human animal, is unable to communicate the way we do, their inner world is not as rich as ours. I have no idea how it feels to be my daughter but I understand enough of her non-verbal language to know many things about her: I know that she loves being in the nature, taking a dip in the ocean, and listening to the piano music by Debussy or Chopin. I also know that, unlike her father, she is not a big fan of Mahler. There is a lot more she is trying to "tell" me in her language consisting of various sounds, facial expressions and body movements that unfortunately I am just not able to understand as her language is unique to her and there is no other person in the world completely fluent in it. Yes, I cannot discuss philosophical matters with her but by spending time with her, often in silence, I get to contemplate a lot. I think it was Eva Kittay who said that having a disabled child makes one a philosopher as spending so much time with another human being who is unable to communicate verbally makes one think a lot about certain kinds of things. This is one of the very few opportunities where you can feel totally comfortable staying completely silent in the company of another human being. Just by being herself, either largely silent or making various sounds that she uses to communicate, she generates all kinds of thoughts in my head that I can contemplate while having that walk in the woods near the ocean, just her and I...This friend of mine has changed me profoundly as a person, more than anyone else in my life.
I think Aristotle overestimated the importance of verbal communication for meaningful friendships. When being alone with our non-verbal friends, we get to enjoy their company in silence and to contemplate ideas that can arise ONLY in this kind of company. So, in my view, pets can definitely be our friends, too :)
A pet cannot be a friend to a fully competent human in the same way as another fully competent human. But not all humans are fully competent, and no human is fully competent for their entire lifetime. When my son was an infant and toddler I was immersed in the literature concerning the evolution of social intelligence. I annoyed his mother by frequent comparisons between his level of intelligence and that of other social mammals and birds. It takes some years for us humans to intellectually outstrip our furred and feathered kin.