ABSTRACT
LIVING IN THE WHOLE WORLD Kant thought that treating others as ends was necessary or possible only within our own species. He drew a sharp line at the species border. Man, he said, ‘is certainly titular lord of nature, and, supposing that we regard nature as a teleological system, he is born to be its ultimate end’. Or again, ‘The end is man. We can ask, “Why do animals exist?” But to ask, “Why does man exist?” is a meaningless question.’1 What about that? Kant is taking nature as a pyramid, converging towards a single end. This will not do, not only because we are not sure who forms the purpose. It makes no sense to consider the enormous range of animal species as existing as a means to anything, let alone us. They are not going in this direction at all. The oddity of suggesting that they are emerges rather pleasingly in an essay by the economist Kenneth E. Boulding.2 He is explaining that there is no need to study animal behaviour, since we have its raison d’être, man himself, the finished product, already before us. He writes, ‘The critical question is, how much we could learn about the jet plane from studying the wheelbarrow or even from studying the automobile – If the jet plane is man, the automobile perhaps is the mammal, the wheelbarrow the fish.’ This has to mean that all animals are devices for a single known purpose (apparently something parallel to rapid transport?), devices differing only in the degree of progress they have made toward efficiency. And now that we have Mark 12 before us, Mark 3 and Mark 7 are of interest only to industrial archaeologists.
