I met Ray Frey when our graduate years at the University of Virginia overlapped, back in the early 1960s. He was freshly-minted out of the prestigious undergraduate program at William and Mary, while, myself, I named Thiel College as my alma mater.
Let’s see: William and Mary, on the one hand, and Thiel College, on the other.
To those of you who knew Ray, well, you can imagine what he made out of that difference.
At the time our graduate days overlapped: that was before our mutual interest in animal rights surfaced. Back then I was writing my master’s thesis on G. E. Moore’s conception of beauty, under the supervision of Marcus Mallet, while Ray was taking graduate courses, preparatory to his going to Oxford University, where he received his D. Phil., under the supervision of R. M. Hare.
Let’s see, again: Marcus Mallet, on the one hand, and R. M. Hare, on the other.
To those of you who knew Ray, well, you can imagine what he made out of that difference, too.
Not that Ray was hoity-toity in his assessment of philosophy programs. Not at all. He—well—let’s just say he never let me forget about our respective pedigrees.
In fact, a favorite ploy of his, when we debated one another, as we often did, was to describe me as “the second best student to come through the philosophy graduate program at UVa.”
Rest assured that I laughingly reciprocated whenever I had the opportunity to describe Ray’s position relative to UVa’s graduate philosophy program.
Of course, Ray was a brilliant raconteur—the funniest philosopher I’ve ever known. For Ray, facts were no obstacle to a good story. Did he exaggerate? Is the earth round? If he hadn’t been a philosopher, he could have been a good stand-up comedian.
Because Ray had a dim view of animal cognition, it was natural for those who used nonhuman animals in their research to look upon him as their longed-for philosophical messiah. It was not good news for them, therefore, when Ray put his utilitarian cards on the table.
According to Ray, those researchers who favored using nonhuman animals in their labs, to be consistent, had to be just as willing to use mentally impoverished humans as subjects in their research. Indeed, because using these humans overcomes the problem of extrapolating research results from nonhumans to humans, researchers should be more willing to use these humans than to use nonhumans.
Ray, it ended up, was not the longed-for philosophical messiah who spoke in favor of animal experimentation; Ray, it turned out, from the researcher’s point of view, was a philosophical wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Did I seize upon this aspect of Ray’s teachings when we engaged in public debate? Well, let’s just say I’ve always been in favor of full disclosure. That was the least I could do for the second best student to come through the graduate philosophy program at the University of Virginia.
