Brooke Houts and the curious case of Cognitive Dissonance - Cosmic Skeptic
Can an infamous example of animal abuse posted to YouTube - that stoked up so much anger from the online community - illustrate the ethical disconnect that arises when our morality fails to tally with our actions? Alex J. O’Connor, AKA Cosmic Skeptic, writes.
A few days ago, YouTuber Brooke Houts uploaded her third video in a Bible study series, discussing the Gospel of John and its implications for the state of the modern world. It is a perfectly innocuous video, and yet its approval bar is 84 percent dislikes, its comments section filled with vitriolic rage, and Houts is losing thousands of subscribers per month. Why? Because in August of 2019, footage emerged of Houts abusing her dog, and her reputation has still not recovered to this day. The tirade is not coming from a swath of angry Bible-hating atheists, but a wave of self-described animal lovers.
When trying to film a video for her channel, Houts’ dog kept walking into shot and being disruptive, to which she felt an appropriate reaction was to drag, hit, shout at, and spit on him. Stunningly, this is something she failed to edit out of the final composition, and uploaded the clips onto her YouTube channel for her 340,000 subscribers to see in all their incriminating horror. Almost immediately, her channel was burned to the ground, and the embers are still glowing hot today, kept alight by the untiring efforts of dog lovers from across the platform. This should not come as a surprise: the online community has a reputation for its love of animals and fondness for funny and cute videos of dogs and cats doing funny and cute things, and anybody with even a semblance of a moral compass is rightly appalled by the sight of the abuse of an innocent animal.
“Yet one of the gravest moral paradoxes of our brave new world is that incalculably more equally innocent (and equally intelligent) animals were subject to unimaginably worse tortures, most of which are too revolting to specify without a content warning, so that the same people spamming the dislike button on Houts’ videos could enjoy a bacon sandwich for breakfast this morning.”
Yet one of the gravest moral paradoxes of our brave new world is that incalculably more equally innocent (and equally intelligent) animals were subject to unimaginably worse tortures, most of which are too revolting to specify without a content warning, so that the same people spamming the dislike button on Houts’ videos could enjoy a bacon sandwich for breakfast this morning. A 2019 survey by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs reports that 86 percent of pigs slaughtered in England and Wales are killed by trapping them in a chamber of carbon dioxide, in which they spend the last moments of their lives writhing against each other in confused agony until they have finished choking to death. But not only do these same self-proclaimed animal lovers fail to condemn this; they continue to be responsible for it happening.
Whatever happened to personal choice? If you don’t want to abuse your dog, then I can respect that, but don’t try to force me not to abuse my dog. It’s my choice if I want to abide by your ethical judgements or not, and you shouldn’t guilt-trip people like myself (or indeed Brooke Houts) for having a different opinion to you about the moral worth of animals and the nature of our duties towards them.
Why is it that these words sound so patently absurd when applied to the abuse of dogs that they barely require refuting, and yet are so commonly employed when speaking of pigs that they constitute one of the most popular arguments in favour of continuing to eat their flesh? The answer lies in the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance: ‘the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change.’ Nowhere is this incongruence of thought more evident than in our arbitrary delineation of pigs as food and dogs as pets, or, more precisely, pigs as animals with which we can do whatever we please for the most trivial of reasons, and dogs as animals with whom we share moral worth, legal protection, and the receipt of love from other human beings.
By refusing our own obligation to refrain from harming animals because we like the way it tastes to eat them, we forfeit our right to condemn other people for harming animals because they like the way it feels to hit them. It doesn’t matter how much enjoyment or convenience Brooke Houts receives from hitting her dog; her sensory pleasures are an insufficient excuse for abusing an animal. Likewise, it doesn’t matter how much enjoyment or convenience we receive from eating a pig; our sensory pleasures are an insufficient excuse for abusing an animal.
Most people hold to the former of these ethical propositions but reject the latter. But, if we wish to retain consistency, either sensory pleasure justifies our inflicting harm on a nonhuman animal or it does not. To believe that it both does and does not at the same time is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, and one we would do well to identify, interrogate, and eliminate from our thinking.
Alex J. O’Connor is founder of the Cosmic Skeptic YouTube channel, podcast and blog, platforms dedicated to the publication of philosophical ideas and debates in an accessible format. He is currently reading for a degree in philosophy and theology at St John’s College, Oxford University. Alex is an international public speaker and debater, having delivered addresses in multiple continents at conferences, universities, and local drinking groups, as well as debated ethics, religion, and politics with a number of high-profile opponents before college audiences, on radio talk shows and on national television. He has produced videos with notable experts in respected fields, such as Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, and William Lane Craig. Visit CosmicSkeptic.com.
Don’t forget to check out Alex’s video on cognitive dissonance.
