But what of the future? What current practices and behaviours will generations to come look back on with disbelief?
“I think the way we treat prisoners,” she replies. “I think solitary confinement is something that we’re going to look back on with horror. And factory farming. I’m not saying that everybody’s going to be a vegetarian or a vegan, but we will be horrified by the terrible amount of suffering that we’re inflicting.”
If so, she says we should thank Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher whose 1975 book Animal Liberation first stated the case for man’s inhumanity to animals. “I remember when it seemed crazy. But then other philosophers started talking, paying attention, criticising it, and it starts impinging on people’s emotions, it goes outside the realm of philosophy. It becomes a social movement.”
It’s unlikely that Plato would have thought too much about animal exploitation, although Ovid believed he was a vegetarian. But he would have appreciated the notion of an enlightened philosopher who is freed from a cave of false perception to envision a different and perhaps more accurate reality.
