Ovo je Journal of Controversy Ideas:
Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible
Fira Bensto
Two crucial questions have dominated the ethical discussion around zoophilia. First,
does zoophilia harm animals? Second, can animals meaningfully consent to sex with
humans? I will discuss each of them in the next sections. In the course of doing so, I will
also point out some dubious claims that have underlain most objections to zoophilia.
3. Harm
One important worry is that having sex with animals would harm them. This is a legitimate
worry.
What critics of zoophilia need to show
is that harm is a necessary feature of sex with animals. This is a very demanding claim,
which seems patently false at first glance. Many sexual interactions with animals, such
as that between Alice and her dog, do not seem to cause any pain, bodily damage, or
psychological distress. In fact, there is sometimes positive evidence that the animal is
having a pleasant experience.
Insisting that all instances of sex with animals produce an immediate harm appears
dubious, but we might still maintain that there are other ways in which it harms them.
Perhaps it has negative longterm consequences on their wellbeing. But what kind of
longterm harm would be inflicted when no harm is inflicted during the activity? Human
beings might be harmed in the long run by a sexual interaction because it perturbs their
subsequent development as persons and alter their psychological makeup, or because
they reevaluate through time what they have experienced and its appropriateness.
Animals, however, do not have the complex psychological lives of paradigmatic human
beings as well as their intricate social norms around sexuality, so that we should be wary of
excessive anthropomorphism on this matter. As Bourke notes, “the dog who approaches
and voluntarily mounts a human is following his own speciesspecific ‘meaning’,” 32 so he
does not incur the risk of future harm that humans might incur.
We might argue that even though no harm is reliably caused by having sex with
animals, the risk of harm is enough to make such interactions wrong. This argument
– let us call it the argument from ignorance – is premised on a particularly pessimistic
view on our knowledge of the inner lives of animals and/or a sweeping precautionary
principle. The problem with it is that assessing the wellbeing of animals is far from an
insuperable challenge, especially when it comes to facetoface interactions with animals.
What critics of zoophilia need to establish is that sex with animals is always too risky for
the longterm wellbeing of animals. No such argument to support this has been proposed
so far. Moreover, it is unclear why this argument would apply only to sex. If the risk of
harm is high enough when having sex with them, would it not be high enough too when
engaging in other kinds of interactions with them? I agree that we should treat animals
with great caution because it is not easy to understand how they feel – especially when
we do not know them well – but it is an overreaction to infer from this that having sex with
animals is wrong.
4. Consent
Consent is widely seen as a necessary condition for nonproblematic sexual interactions,
one that respects our right to autonomy and might even constitute “the touchstone of
morally permissible sex.”41 The second major worry about zoophilia is that the animal
would not, or could not, consent to sex with humans.42 To unravel this argument, it is
important to be clear on what consent is in the first place. I will then turn to what makes
consent ethically valid.43
In its most basic form, consent can be defined as a voluntary (i.e. uncoerced) verbal
or behavioral indication of agreement to engage in a specific activity, or the mental attitude
signified by this indication.44 Are there activities to which animals can consent in this
sense? The answer is clearly positive.
Just as we would be unable to assess whether
a sexual interaction harms the animal, we would be at a loss to assess whether the
animal consents to it. This might be taken to trace back to a fundamental problem in
communicating with animals. Beirne goes so far as to claim that “animals are incapable
of genuinely saying 'yes' or 'no' to humans in forms that we can readily understand.”47
Regan, in order to criticize Singer’s position on zoophilia, expresses similar ideas:
An animal cannot say yes. Or “no.” In the nature of the case, for humans to engage
in sexual activities with animals must be coercive, must display a lack of respect, thus
must be wrong. 48
Such claims about the impossibility of communicating with animals, which are very
common in discourses about zoophilia, strike me as plainly untenable.
*
It is widely thought that mere uncoerced sign of agreement is not enough for valid
consent. Critics of zoophilia might recognize that animals can consent while still arguing
that they cannot satisfy one of the additional criteria that are needed for valid consent,
and thus that they cannot validly consent.
To start with, valid consent might require that the consented action does not harm the
consenting individual. Because I have already argued in the previous section that some
instances of sex with animals do not harm them, such a noharm criterion to valid consent
could easily be satisfied.
Second, it might be argued that consent can be valid only if the consenting individual
has a specific capacity or status that animals would lack.
*
Is animals’ consent to sex with humans misinformed in such a way? Do animals
lack crucial information that would have otherwise made them refuse to engage in sex? I
struggle to find any reason to think that such misinformation is a conspicuous feature of
human–animal sex. Of course, one difficulty is that there may be aspects of the activity
that animals do not have the capacity to understand. The deer who consents to me feeding
him does not understand – and does not have the cognitive capacities to understand – my
complex motivation to hand him food or the stories that I will later tell to my friends about
this unusual encounter. The range of information that animals can learn differs from that
of humans. This is not a problem though, because information that we do not have the
capacity to grasp cannot constitute a deal breaker.
*
Fourth, we might argue that valid consent requires equal power. Since in zoophilic
activities humans hold more power than animals, the latter’s consent would be invalid. It
is true that humans usually exert a pervasive control over the animals’ lives (e.g. on their
existence, their living conditions, their conditions of reproduction), especially in the case
of pets and farm animals. Most relationships between humans and animals therefore take
place within a latent structure of domination. The importance of power balance for valid
consent has been theorized by some feminist philosophers and mostly applied to human
sexual activities. MacKinnon, for example, emphasizes the importance of entering sexual
intercourse as “social equals.”53 This idea can easily be translated to human–animal
interactions and it has inspired quite a few authors.54 Haynes, for example, points out that
“there is something deeply troubling with sexual relationships of unequal power”55 and he
takes this to be a major objection to bestiality.56 The problem with such arguments is
that it is clear that power asymmetry, by itself, does not undermine the validity of consent.
What is important is rather how it affects consent. This is recalled by MacKinnon herself,
who notes that for a sexual interaction to count as rape there must be “exploitation of
inequalities,” i.e. the latter must be “deployed as forms of force or coercion in the sexual
setting.”57 It is unclear what exploiting power inequalities means exactly, but again it
seems unlikely to be a conspicuous feature of sex with animals. In the absence of any
convincing argument to this effect, this objection is unsuccessful.
In the end, we can conclude that animals can consent to sex with humans. As for the
validity of this consent, the gist of my discussion has been that animals can validly consent
according to most conceptions except the most demanding ones, and that the latter turn
out either to be unacceptable for other reasons or to make valid consent unnecessary
to engage in sex with animals. Given that having sex with animals does not necessarily
harm them either (see Section 3), we can conclude that having sex with animals is not
wrong and, with that, that zoophilia is not wrong.
Conclusion
Critics of zoophilia need more than outrage, they
need better arguments. I suggest that the permissibility of zoophilia should now be taken
as the default position, with the burden of proof belonging to its critics.
The practical implications of this conclusion remain fairly open, though ensuring that
people have the legal right to engage in zoophilia seems to be a straightforward next step
to discuss. The stringent crackdown on all forms of zoophilia that has accompanied the
improvement in the legal status of animals in the last decades may turn out to be a mistake.
At any rate, it is time for philosophers, animal rights activists, and decisionmakers to
reconsider their view on zoophilia. Hopefully, this article can contribute to opening this
overdue discussion.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/reader/432066e1add684629c9c5261f1f17838eef355d8
