“It is as futile as asking a cat to decide whether the consumption of mice can be ethically justified”

The expression compares human attempts to judge universal rights with asking a cat to decide whether eating mice is ethical. In Leon Anawak’s argument, the analogy makes the limits of human moral judgment vivid: humanity may not be able to assess values that exist beyond the reach of its own perception.

Context and Argument

In his essay “Self-Knowledge and Consciousness,” Anawak considers whether fundamental rights and values exist independently of human ethics, especially the right to life. The difficulty, he argues, is that humans are limited to what they can perceive, even if such values extend beyond those limits. The cat-and-mice comparison gives that epistemic problem a concrete form: a being may lack the perspective needed to judge the moral status of its own actions.

Rhetorical Function

The analogy does not resolve where universal rights come from or who could establish them. Instead, it warns against treating human judgment as the measure of every possible ethical reality. By shifting the question to an animal whose relation to its prey makes the dilemma immediate, the expression exposes the possibility that humans, too, may be unable to see the full ethical significance of life beyond their own framework.