Cosmopolitanism and Material Ethics 121To demonstrate the similarity, it is necessary to quote the author at
length:
It was in the middle of the twentieth century a group of powerful men in
Germany had the bright idea of adapting the methods of the industrial
stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter—or
what they preferred to call the processing —of human beings.
Of course we cried out in horror when we found out about this. We
cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If we had
only known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have been:
What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial
process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime,
come to think of it, to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial
process! 68This use of the word “crime” to describe the industrial killing of ani-
mals for human consumption, although clearly emotive and more
than a little rhetorically opportunistic, fits in well with the overall
ethical schema apparent in much of Coetzee’s work. More impor-
tantly, it evokes not only the sense of ethical transgression, but also
the contravention of an agreed-upon set of laws.
Of course, such laws do not exist, at least not in the contempo-
rary Australia and South Africa in which Coetzee wrote his novels,
for they would require the legal recognition that animals are equally
“worthy” of the right to live as humans. The fact that the word
“crime” is infused with such legal connotations therefore suggests
that Coetzee is not only seeking to provide animals with the same
moral considerations as are accorded to humans in ethical discourse,
but is also attempting to integrate their treatment within the socio-
political discussion hitherto reserved for human beings. Indeed, I
now move to demonstrate that not only is animal cruelty depicted as
ethically wrong in Coetzee’s fiction, but also, if we logically conclude
that animals should have legal rights to life, is politically unsound.
Coetzee’s novels, such as Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello, do not ask
us simply to feel morally offended by the suffering of animals; they
call upon us to recognize the social injustice it involves.
Given the novelty of this last point, it will require a degree of sub-
stantiation. However, if we examine Coetzee’s oeuvre, we can find