Hogs, Humans, Rorty, Moral Personality and the Wisconsin State Fair

Perhaps it was the beer, the heat, or something *else* altogether but my one and only visit to the Wisconsin state fair lead to unusual new theses on the nature of moral personality and considerablility. My soul was unusually sensitive this evening, worn thin to the flesh as skin removed by sandpaper might appear, capturing the light-bulb soul in all the living things. Great red pavilions housed the hogs and swine, cows, poultry and humans--all in competition for the prize. The oceanic pink tide of flesh, caged and free, milling about together in the sawdust and heat, coalesced in my mind. And all of a sudden the old distinction long cherished and enshrined in the metaphysical and religious traditions of the west and first heard from the mouth of Father Koterski, namely, the distinction between a difference of degree and a difference of kind came crashing apart for me. As I stared at the crow's feet around the sleeping eyes of a pink pig, I saw so much "humanness" in it, so much intelligence and world-weariness. The eye blinkered open and I saw the sagacity there, the intense intelligence of the hog. The flesh of the hog, carried around its strong back and haunches, no different really from human beings. Do they not use pig hearts in human heart transplants? Sure, I thought, this pig's practical interests revolve around a thinner circuit of goods--food, sex, sleep, safety--but the life, the life, was there in it. I felt sure that with some proper care and cuddle the pig could manifest love just as my cat or dog manifests love. And, indeed, if what biologists tell us is correct, pigs are amongst the most highly intelligent of mammals. The life in it was, with minor differences, equivalent to the life in the great pink-fleshed horde of humanity ogling at it from the rim of its cage. The squeals of pleasure echoed forth from the human and hog hordes alike.

The difference, if there was one, lay in a thin capacity rooted in the somewhat larger brain of the human. There, nestled in the neurons and synapses lay rooted the deep structures of a higher order language and grammar. There, nestled in the cortex lay capacities for memory and conviction, "reason" and mathematics. But that capacity is a mere potentiality and if left unactualized was equivalent to never even having the capacity at all: there is no manifestation of higher-order capacities. As I surveyed the ocean of flesh extending backward out of the pavilion, into the alleyways, consuming the candies and crap, riding the rides, driven forth by sentiments and instincts peculiar to the human animal, it was not hard to imagine that these hogs were at least the moral equivalent of humans in many respects. And perhaps (though it sounds a bit cynical to say) these humans were, in many ways, the moral equivalent of hogs. And I, beer in hand, stood amidst the horde one of them too.