The black bear issue has been blazing hot lately, so I’ll throw in my two cents as well~
Simply put, morally speaking, I oppose live bear bile extraction. As for whether Genuizhang should be allowed to go public, I think that’s another matter; I’m not familiar with the relevant legal framework.
Why oppose live bear bile extraction? The usual arguments tend to focus on whether the bears are in pain, but I think that is actually a secondary issue. If the bears were injected with some kind of drug so that they not only felt no pain, but even became addicted to bile extraction, would that make everything okay?
Utilitarianism, and the mainstream animal ethics built on utilitarianism, tend to take “degree of happiness” as the standard for measuring value. So critics say: how could bears possibly not suffer? Defenders say: the bears are very comfortable, as comfortable as suckling milk; bears in captivity live longer than wild ones; and so on.
But virtue ethics does not talk about happiness; it talks about virtue and dignity.
The bear issue involves virtue in two layers. The first is human virtue: when human beings hunt or domesticate animals, the image they present is that of the king of beasts, the master of all things, standing at the top of the chain of being. Of course, this arrogant image is absolutely worth reflecting on; just like those heroes and rulers of antiquity who stood above others and looked down on slaves, the “excellence” embodied in them does not wholly apply to modern people. But in any case, the image of humanity presented in the relation of hunting and domestication—whether as a brave warrior, a powerful ruler, a mutually supportive friend, or a competent manager, and so on—can after all be regarded as a kind of excellence. But what about live bear bile extraction? The human role is unquestionably that of a tyrant, at best a selfish and cruel despot, even something like a parasite. In the relation between the bile extractor and the black bear, what is presented is not any kind of noble Way or commanding aura, but cruelty and brutality, cold-bloodedness, and greed.
Second is the virtue of the black bear. In the utilitarian approach, extending morality to animals faces a difficulty. That is: even if we can assign independent value to animals, we cannot correspondingly assign moral norms to them. The extension of virtue ethics avoids this problem, because virtue ethics does not talk about “norms” in the first place; it talks about virtue or “the good,” that is, what is “good.” Extending virtue ethics to animals is very simple: in other words, animals also have their own “good life,” and the goodness of this life lies in a free life in accordance with their nature, rather than depending on whether their life is good or bad for another species.
At this point, we need to stress one thing: the black bear is an undomesticated, wild, solitary, large mammal. Even if the captive environment for black bears is more spacious than that for pigs, cattle, sheep, and the like, even if black bears live more “comfortably” than livestock, that still cannot offset the fundamental difference between them. We know that, aside from a very few exceptional cases such as cats, large animals that can be domesticated by human beings are always social animals. Only social animals possess a sense of hierarchy, and only they can, from their own nature, willingly adopt a submissive posture. Domestication, moreover, is a long historical process, and at the beginning it was probably animals that first walked into the human world. As domestication was completed and symbiosis established, domesticated animals became obedient to human beings by nature; humans only need to prepare them an appropriate living space, without any extra coercion or inducement, and the livestock can settle in quite happily.
Black bears are completely different. By nature they are undomesticated and not domesticate-able; such a lone predator of the forest, even if one cannot quite call it the king of the forest, can at least hold sway over a territory. Except during mating season, even male and female bears have no contact with one another. Could such an aloof animal possibly be domesticated? To keep them in captivity, one certainly has to go against their nature and, in the manner of a circus animal trainer, force them into submission through coercion and inducement. And taming one bear cannot be passed on to the next generation; otherwise that would be Lamarckism. In other words, for every generation, for every single bear, one must repeat the process of discipline.
A bear has its own “good life,” and this “good” does, in fact, still arise from human judgment—even if black bears might, between drugs and the forest, choose to immerse themselves in drugs, we, from a human perspective, would still think that life in the forest is the better life for a bear. Virtue is always expressed and understood starting from human beings, but this is different from the anthropocentrism of moral philosophy in the sense of the starting point of inquiry—different from the anthropocentrism at the level of value theory, which takes human needs as the standard of measurement. Anthropocentrism here is not the same as anthropocentrism at the level of values, which takes human needs as the measuring standard.
In addition, the virtue ethics of animals also sidesteps the question that Professor Chen Jiaying has worked hard to answer: why is it important to save black bears—when there are so many out-of-school children who have not been rescued, what gives you the right to save black bears first? Children in Africa suffer even more; why do you save Chinese children first? … Professor Chen’s response is quite on point. The key is that we are not making choices according to a ranking of “importance,” or a list of “values”; what ethics should be asking is not “which matter is more important,” or “which object has greater value,” but rather “how to attain the good,” and “how to live a good life.” And a good life always belongs to the individual; it is historical and contextual. So-called good life is certainly not “the minimum life” or “the average life,” but an excellent life or a distinctive life.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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