I cringe when I hear those committing indefensible, horrific acts of violence against their fellow human beings described as “acting like animals,” “behaving like beasts,” and so forth. No less than Robert H. (Justice) Jackson* delivered an address at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association on Oct. 2, 1941, “The Challenge of International Lawlessness,” in which he compared the international legal order among the world of nation-states to “the law of the jungle” in contrast to desirability if not possibility of an “international order based on reason and justice.” Justice Jackson was speaking just prior to the U.S. entry into WW II, a war that followed the “war to end all wars,” that is, World War I. A few months after hid address of course, the U.S. was officially at war with both Japan and Germany, prompted by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The barbarism of these world wars was in no way, literally or metaphorically, representative or indicative of “the law of the jungle.” Only human animals—not our fellow creatures in the animal kingdom—individually and collectively, behave so ruthlessly and destructively, so aggressively and violently, with each other. The exaltation of reason, with seeds in the Renaissance and at its apogee during the European Enlightenment, need not, and should not have occurred at the expense of disparagement and ill-treatment—as ‘things’ or ‘property’—of nonhuman animals (it should be noted that such Enlightenment philosophers and intellectuals as Montaigne, Paine, Voltaire, Bentham, and J.S. Mill did in some respects speak on behalf of extending at least humane consideration to animals).
We should assiduously avoid using derogatory, damning, and false descriptions or characterizations of nonhuman animal life and behavior to describe what is peculiarly and conspicuously all-too-human in its violence, barbarism, and destructiveness. The word “brute” is defined “as characteristic of an animal in quality, action, or instinct,” that is, one who behaves in a savage or cruel manner; but that is more characteristic of human animals than nonhuman animals. It is human beings that are uniquely capable of exemplifying what it means to act as “brutes,” in other words, it is they—us—not animals, that frequently exhibit brutal behavior, be it in our relations with other human beings or nonhuman animals.
* “Robert H. Jackson (February 13, 1892 – October 9, 1954) was an American attorney and judge who served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He had previously served as United States Solicitor General and United States Attorney General, and is the only person to have held all three of those offices. Jackson was also notable for his work as Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals following World War II. [….] In 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Jackson (who took a leave of absence from the Supreme Court), as U.S. Chief of Counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. He helped draft the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which created the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials. He then served in Nuremberg, Germany, as United States Chief Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal.”
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