The Rights of Animal Persons By David Sztybel, PhD Essay as MS Word Doc Abstract: A new analysis in terms of levels of harmful discrimination seems to reveal that the traditional debate between 'animal welfare' and animal liberation can more accurately be depicted as animal illfare versus animal liberation. Moreover, there are three main philosophies competing to envision 'animal liberation' as an alternative to traditional animal illfare--rights, utilitarianism, and the ethics of care--and it is argued that only animal rights constitutes a reliable bid to secure animal liberation as a general matter. Not only human-centered ethics but also past attempts to articulate animal liberation are argued to have major flaws. A new ethical theory, best caring ethics, is tentatively proposed which features a distinctive alternative to the utilitarian's commitment to what is best, an emphasis on caring, and an upholding of rights. Finally a series of arguments are sketched in favor of the idea that animals should be deemed persons and it is urged that legal rights for animal persons be legislated. I. Introduction A movement to articulate and advocate 'animal liberation' as an alternative
to the traditional so-called 'animal welfare' paradigm was effectively launched
in 1975 with the publication of Animal Liberation by utilitarian philosopher
Peter Singer. Since that time, Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights in 1983
was probably the most widely recognized attempt, among many, to articulate a
defense of animal interests as based on a strong concept of rights, rather than
only considerations of welfare. Starting in the late 1970s, traditional ethical
theory, dominated by rights and utilitarianism, came to be criticized by
feminists with the suggestion of an alternative: the ethics of care. This latter
ethic was sometimes extended to animals, calling for their emancipation.
Competing with all three attempts to formulate animal liberation ethics--rights,
utilitarianism, and the ethics of care--is the traditional so-called 'animal
welfare' view that animals do not need to be liberated, but only treated kindly.
Singer was the most eloquent writer who argued that traditional welfarist ethics
is speciesist, although I will argue that, ironically, his own view is
speciesist. II. Does Speciesism Exist? 'Speciesism' is a term that was coined in 1970 by psychologist and
philosopher Richard D. Ryder and is now commonly used by philosophers who seek
to articulate some form of animal liberation. Speciesism is intended to be
analogous to forms of discriminatory oppression such as racism, sexism,
homophobia, ableism, ageism, and discrimination on the basis of religion, creed,
or nationality. The core idea is that all of these forms of discrimination
involve harming others (or refusing to benefit them) on the basis of an
arbitrary and irrelevant characteristic (e.g., skin color, sex, or species). III. Levels of Harmful Discrimination Instead of vaguely referring to humans (mentally disabled or otherwise) being treated differently or better than animals, with a few examples here and there, I try here to be more systematic by introducing levels of harmful discrimination. Ideally there is the standard of: No Harmful Discrimination This is what opponents of sexism and racism have strived for, although only relatively recently in historical terms. Beyond this there are different levels of harmful discrimination: Level 1: Minor Harmful Discrimination. Although provided with the necessities of life, targeted individuals may be regarded with contempt and perhaps insults. Many people will experience this as 'major' but still the following category is worse. Level 2: Major Harmful Discrimination. More than just verbal or 'intangible,' this form results in materially inferior treatment (e.g., poor quality of food, clothing, or shelter). Level 3: Very Major Harmful Discrimination. One treated this way may be eaten, skinned, have body parts used in soaps or other products, be hunted down, be forced to perform to amuse others, or forcibly be subjected to experiments (some of which may be medical). However at this level one stipulated requirement is that the being used in these ways must be treated 'kindly,' 'humanely,' or with no 'unnecessary suffering.' Level 4: Extreme Harmful Discrimination. At this level, animals may be
treated the same ways as on Level 3, but with no significant regard for
well-being, humaneness or kindness. Animals on factory farms, my relatives who
perished in the Holocaust, and runaway slaves who were whipped to death all fell
to Level 4 treatment. Now while more gradations of harmful treatment could be
added, there could not be fewer without losing a sense of the dramatically
different degrees of harm involved. IV. 'Special Reasons' The following rationales have been proposed for why we treat animals and mentally disabled humans so differently. These rationalizations form a quiet, foggy background to the loudly proclaimed--and I hope in the last section debunked--ideas that we treat animals worse just because they are less 'rational,' etc. In the following I will use rationality as an example: (1) Humans, including the mentally disabled, are normally rational, whereas nonhuman animals are not. Actually some humans might not be rational at all, so it does not sincerely use the criterion of rationality to count these humans as rational. Humans on average are born with rational capacities. But by the form of reasoning used in this rationale, any student should get a 'pass' in driving courses in which pupils 'normally' succeed. (2) It is a tragedy when mentally disabled humans lack rationality, but not so for animals. Anyone sensitive to tragedy would also presumably care about violence, which is always thought to be tragic when it happens to humans, and is preventable unlike, perhaps, most mental disabilities. We would consider killing a mentally disabled human to eat him or her violent--so it should be thought, without prejudice, to be both violent and tragic in the case of animals. (3) Mentally disabled humans look like other humans. This is as unacceptably superficial as discrimination on the basis of skin color, or against those disfigured by accidents. (4) Many people care about mentally disabled humans. Many care about animals too, and besides however people happen to care is not the basis of ethics, or slavery would have been right when people mostly 'cared' to have it as a practice. (5) It is 'natural' to prefer one's own species just as it is to prefer one's own family. Granted that there is special consideration for family, one still does not deny rights to those who are not of one's family, let alone treat them violently. (6) If we discriminate against mentally disabled humans then other humans are
next. Evelyn Pluhar argues that humans can be 'highly discriminatory' even when
beings do not differ in significant ways, and this seems to be true of the
former Apartheid regime in South Africa. Also, female infanticide is practiced
in China without endangering the general population. However, if such fine
distinctions can be put into practice, then we can even more 'safely'
discriminate (at least in a way that protects so-called 'normal' humans) in
cases in which the humans are very different from 'us,' as mentally disabled
humans are. V. Animal Welfare or Animal Illfare? 'Animal welfare' can have a great many senses. However, I would suggest that
my foregoing analysis in terms of levels of harmful discrimination implies that
it is speciesist even to allow the term 'animal welfarist' for those who would
treat animals at Level 3. An overriding concern with animal welfare or
'wellness' suggests a concern with animals' good above all. However Level 3
means not just minor but very major forms of harmful discrimination, where bad
and not good things happen to animals in the end. All harms such as killing for
food are falsely characterized by 'welfarists' as 'necessary.' Certainly such
harmful treatments are not 'necessary' for promoting animal welfare--quite the
contrary. It seems inaccurate or misleading then to characterize Level 3 as
overridingly being concerned with how 'well off' animals are or with being
'kind' to animals. We would never consider it kind to mentally disabled humans
to eat them, hunt them down, wear their skins, etc., even though these humans
may not know they are to be slaughtered and so on. Level 3 treatment considers
it right to inflict very considerable harms in the name of trivial benefits such
as enjoying the taste of flesh. So the old animal welfare versus animal
liberation debate perhaps never existed except in the minds of those who adopt
the speciesist label for Level 3. After all, someone who advocated the
subjugation and enslavement of blacks could not be called a 'black welfarist' or
someone overridingly concerned with the good of blacks without being put to one
side as a hypocrite or double-talker. VI. Utilitarianism Most animal protectionists do not realize that Peter Singer, the author of
Animal Liberation, is not a supporter of animal rights. Animal rights
philosopher and attorney Gary Francione is upset that People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (the largest animal 'rights' group in the world) describes
Animal Liberation as an animal rights book, exhorting: 'If you only read one
animal rights book, it has to be this one.' Singer himself even regrets ever
using the language of rights, observing that 'it would have avoided
misunderstanding if I had not made this concession to popular moral rhetoric.'
The knowledge gained from some experiments on animals does save lives and reduce suffering…[and if there are] strict conditions relating to the significance of the knowledge to be gained, the unavailability of alternative techniques not involving animals, and the care taken to avoid pain…the death of an animal in an experiment can be defended. It is also noteworthy that Singer explicitly adds that if animals are used
for experiments, so humans should be used who have mental capacities that are
comparable to those of animals used in laboratories. Animal rightists use the
argument from mental disability to protect both animals and mentally disabled
humans alike from vivisection, but Singer's use of the argument makes both
parties more vulnerable to exploitation. VII. Standard Rights Theories I hold that standard rights theories contain many flaws, but the one that I
shall focus on here is a single type of problem that repeats itself in different
guises: none of these theories, even granted their assumptions, logically entail
individual rights that would protect someone from being vivisected. Keep in mind
that I am not denying that rights philosophers assert such rights. I am merely
indicating that they do not provide logical justifications for these rights. The
result is that we cannot simply extend older theories of rights to animals--as
has already been done--if we are to provide a speciesism-free ethics that fends
off the threat of exposing individuals to vivisection. (1) Intuitionism bases rights generally on the 'intuition' that individuals possess a special value or dignity that may not be violated for 'the greatest good' as utilitarians propose. Tom Regan upholds 'reflective intuitions,' which are views that one holds after a conscientious effort to be rational, intuiting that animals are subjects of a life and are not to be treated as a mere means to human ends. Martha Nussbaum insists on the intuition that animals have a dignity and are not to be used as a means even for a great social good. Oddly, she then contradicts herself, stating that animals can be eaten if it is 'useful' to do so, and that vivisection is an 'ineliminable' tragedy even under the 'best conditions' --although evidently not the best conditions for animals. Other philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz offer intuitionist accounts of rights which only apply to human beings. I say that intuition does not logically entail individual rights simply because utilitarians, ethics of care proponents, virtue ethicists, ethical egoists, and skeptics in ethics each have their own 'intuitions' which disagree with those of the rights theorists. And one cannot use intuition to rule out competing intuitions without utterly begging the question. (2) Traditionalism, as I call it, tries to build a theory of rights on the liberal tradition which gave rise to them, as found for instance in the human-centered thinking of Joseph Raz. Likewise, S. F. Sapontzis appeals to 'everyday morality' or 'common sense' as a basis for animal rights, and animal rights defender Bernard Rollin also appeals to 'common sense.' Ironically, ethical egoist Peter Carruthers bases his defense of factory farming in common sense too. Traditionalism (or that which, strictly within a given tradition, appears to be 'common sense') does not guarantee rights because non-rights theories also have their own traditions and respective versions of 'common sense.' (3) Compassion also does not dictate that we embrace a philosophy of rights for humans or other animals. David Hume bases his ethical view in sympathy, as do Eastern moral philosophies found in the religions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. The ethics of care is another key player in this field. We have already seen that Level 3 (Very Major Harmful Discrimination) has been widely hailed as 'kind.' Basing ethics on whatever compassion people happen to have (or lack) may leave the way open for egoists, or even skeptics who deny any moral rules that are valid for all moral agents. Utilitarianism would predictably claim to 'maximize' compassion. So simple appeals to compassion then do not entail rights that protect against being vivisected. (4) Immanuel Kant is often called 'the father of rights.' Julian Franklin's animal rights view has directly extended Kant's moral theory to animals. Kant proposes a test for moral principles based upon universalizability, which means that any principle can be accepted as morally right if the agent can 'universalize' it so that any agent in the same position should do the same thing. For example, if one universalizes not keeping a promise, then one would not be able to rely on others' promises; therefore one should universalize promise-keeping instead. Franklin proposes the same universalizability test but draws animal rightist conclusions. Animal rightist Gary Francione employs what he calls 'the principle of equal consideration,' which just means treating like cases alike unless there is a reason to do otherwise. Francione's idea highly resembles universalizability in requiring a kind of rational uniformity. However, utilitarians, ethics of care advocates, ethical egoists, and skeptics in ethics might find nothing more agreeable than if everyone would 'universalize' their views, so ideas such as Kantian universalizability do not stave off the vivisectionist threat either. (5) John Rawls, in his classic, A Theory of Justice, asks us to imagine ourselves as spirits not yet born. We should consider to be just whatever principles we can create in this so-called 'original position.' We do not know if we will be born rich or poor, strong or weak, intelligent or otherwise, light-colored or darker, male or female. Therefore our principles of justice would presumably rule out racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression. Mark Rowlands extends this rights model to animal rights. However one can self-consistently create utilitarian or ethics of care principles of justice in the original position, or indeed principles of 'justice' that accord with ethical egoism and even skepticism in ethics. Unlike Rowlands, Rawls himself is a sort of egoist who claims that agents in the original position are 'not conceived as taking an interest in one another's interests.' As for skepticism, one can be skeptical anywhere in this world as well as in Rawls' imaginary world. So rights do not necessarily follow for Rawlsians. (6) The last major rights approach is that of Alan Gewirth. Gewirth observes
that for any given action, we need and so must value some degree of well-being
and freedom. There is some truth to his observation: anyone who is very
unhealthy (unwell) or trussed-up (unfree) could hardly act. From this point,
Gewirth quickly infers that everyone should claim rights to well-being and
freedom, and due to what he labels 'the principle of generic consistency,' we
should extend rights to all human beings. Now 'generic consistency' simply means
treating the same kinds of things in the same way, much like Kantian
universalizability. Pluhar deploys virtually the same Gewirthian argument on
behalf of animal rights. All theorists can concede that we need a certain amount
of freedom and well-being to act. However utilitarians seek to maximize
well-being in general, ethics of care supporters base their ethics on sympathy
with others' good, egoists are only concerned with the well-being of themselves
in the end, and skeptics would not infer any ethical principles at all from
Gewirth's observation about needing freedom and well-being for acting. Moreover,
in keeping with Gewirthian 'generic consistency,' even anti-rights theorists
would happily treat all like cases alike. VIII. The Ethics of Care This form of animal liberation is an important contender, and has
considerable merits. However, the ethics of care also has serious flaws. I would
only call 'animal liberationist' those versions of ethics of care which seek to
liberate all animals from oppression and exploitation. Having surveyed dozens of
books and articles in the field, I can say with confidence that most ethics of
care authors do not even mention animals, let alone take animal liberation
seriously. The feminist ethics of care emerged from Carol Gilligan's critique of
the 'masculine' bias in ethics which she said is abstract, justice-oriented, and
emphasizes the autonomy of individuals. She criticized the work of moral
psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg who saw an ethic of rational principle as the
most mature form of morality. Gilligan, who had worked for Kohlberg as a
research assistant, contended that the 'feminine' voice in ethics has been
neglected. Unlike the male orientation, the female approach to ethical
development is situated in context, concerned with caring (compassion, sympathy,
or empathy) rather than justice, and is not about separate individuals so much
as relationships and interdependencies. As Josephine Donovan succinctly puts it,
'sympathy, compassion, and caring are the ground upon which theory about human
treatment of animals should be constructed.' (1) Notice how there is a tendency for care theorists to base their ethic on actual caring relationships rather than reasoning from abstract principles. These theorists generally do not make an abstract ideal even out of compassion (although points (4)-(10) below apply to those who idealize sympathy or empathy). But basing ethics on chance sympathies, then, is precarious: one might fail to sympathize with blacks, animals, or indeed anyone beyond ego. This is an insufficient basis to guarantee liberation for anybody. (2) Some ethics of care theorists use motherhood as a role model, as Sara Ruddick does, but not all mothers are good, and why not model ethics on a businessman or soldier? (3) Some ethics of care theorists are irrational, as when Alisa Carse writes, 'Moral judgment, even paradigmatic forms of moral judgment, can be generated by direct response to another, without any guidance or mediation of categorical considerations' --or acting on principle. Erik Brown also proposes to 'base arguments for the acceptability of the principle of equality [of persons] on appeals to persons' spontaneous reactions,' even though not everyone 'spontaneously' favors equality. (4) Moral agents might empathize or sympathize with aggressors as Adams notes in passing without offering any solution. (5) Empathy ethics replicates a point of view but does not tell us how to act. It reduces our viewpoint to subjectivism or relativism, or deadlocked differing views. (6) Empathy often cannot reliably be achieved, even with intimates. (7) Someone with substantial empathy or understanding of another's position can abuse that other even more effectively at times by realizing weaknesses or by manipulation. (8) There is a potential bias towards ego with empathy because one's own feelings are more vivid than imagined psychological states of others. (9) Favoritism can result because people sympathize more with the like-minded, etc. (10) Ethics of care often does not take justification in ethics seriously: Why care in the first place? If it is to promote what is good or what is best, should we not make that part of the basis of our ethics? I do not know how either an ethic based on chance caring or even an ideal of caring can readily or otherwise overcome these objections without a radical reformulation of the view. These indeterminacies imply that the ethics of care cannot protect anyone from vivisection--or perhaps any destructive whimsy of anyone. Yet I cannot completely dismiss caring in ethics for the reasons given earlier, and it is impressive how much feelings are surreptitiously interwoven even into traditional ethical theories as I have reflected. IX. Best Caring Ethics as a New Basis for Animal Rights The last section concludes our examination of the state of the existing
animal liberation debate for the purposes of this essay. We seem to have arrived
at a scene of disaster. In spite of dire speciesism, animal ethics thus far has
not shone enough light to illuminate a way out. Utilitarians such as Singer
threaten individuals with involuntary vivisection, standard rights theories are
so logically empty that one can drive virtually any moral theoretical truck
through their loopholes, and finally the ethics of care, which many have
trumpeted to be our saving grace, is apparently mired in serious problems.
Neither the rights theories nor the ethics of care protects anyone from the
vivisector's knife. I recommend that we seek a new theory. X. A Best Caring Theory of Value I maintain that speciesism has resulted in a skewed consideration of the
emotions in ethics. I conjecture that is because if every positive or negative
feeling were acknowledged as significant we would have to treat animals very
differently, i.e., without speciesist exploitation. Noncognitivist theories from
the early to mid-twentieth century simplistically accounted for ethics using
emotions and attitudes, while denying that there is any such thing as a 'real'
moral obligation. For example A. J. Ayer maintained that 'good' means the
equivalent of 'yay!' and 'bad' much the same as ‘boo!' and C. L. Stevenson saw
moral judgments merely as evidence of pro-attitudes towards something. I argue
however that morality and the emotions are more complex than that, and that
there is such a thing as morally relevant 'emotional cognition' as against
noncognitivism, which maintains that we can have no cognition of significant
moral truths. Contrary to tradition, I hold that feelings occur as a result of a
specific mode of awareness or cognition, otherwise I suppose we would not be
aware of feeling anything. XI. Animal Persons It should not be too controversial to say that animal persons exist since humans are animal persons. Are other animals persons? The question is chiefly of relevance because legal personhood has been at the core of discussions of extending rights. Dictionaries partly define personhood in terms of being human, but that may just be a result of overt speciesism. There are arguments that animals are persons. Francione contends that any right-holder with interests is a person --but perhaps sentient beings are not persons? Francione is begging the question. Joan Dunayer argues that in grammar a noun is a person, place or thing and since animals are not places or things they must be persons. This is again inconclusive since sentient beings might be neither persons nor mere things. Very few ethicists put up any argument that animals are persons. I offer four new arguments in the affirmative: (1) We identify our personhood with our minds. If my psyche inhabited another's body (of course this is merely a thought experiment such as Rawls uses with his original position) that would still be 'me.' If I lose a limb I am still me. If my soul or psyche survives my death that is perhaps essentially me. Before I was conscious the body I would one day awake to was without personality and after I die the corpse will be devoid of personality. Yet other animals also have minds which may equally serve as a core to personhood in these sorts of ways. (2) If I use another thought experiment to imagine myself having a dog's joy when 'his human' comes home, I would call that a 'personal experience' on my part. So why not call it a 'personal experience' for the dog too? Only the species of the experiencer would be different in this case: the experience itself would be exactly the same. So would it not be speciesist to call the experience 'impersonal' in the case of the dog and 'personal' in the case of the human? I would not need to reflect rationally on the feeling for it to count immediately as a personal experience in my own case, so speciesists cannot try to insist that persons are necessarily 'rational.' Sometimes humans are downright irrational. If perceptions and feelings are deeply personal experiences in us, why not in other animals? We should not waver between 'sentient being' and 'person' after all if we find sentience (feelings, perceptions) in ourselves to be utterly personal. If we do not grant this then we depersonalize a huge and intimate part of our biographies, perhaps most of what we experience, and our personhood--if it is only 'rational'--is reduced to a wispy, interrupted and variable strain in our progression of existence. If persons must be 'moral' then psychopaths are not persons which almost no one maintains. A less moral person is not only 'partially' a person. It cannot decisively be objected that my notion of personhood is contrary to the dictionary, since lexicons only record cultural thoughts. Victorian dictionaries may once may have listed phlogiston as a real substance though dictionaries say this no longer. (3) Animals, I find, literally have personalities or characteristic ways of acting, moving, preferring, choosing, reacting, temperament, character, strengths and weaknesses, etc. Mere things only metaphorically have personalities (e.g., a judge's 'stern' gavel). Animals literally can be patient, or wait and endure without much fuss, but not things. (4) Sentient beings deserve moral and legal rights, or so I have argued. Since the law most unequivocally accords rights to persons, and typically denies rights to nonpersons, then practically, there is an imperative to deem sentient animals to be persons. My deliberations above show that there is nothing standing in the way of thinking of sentient beings as persons. Quite the contrary, there is seemingly more theoretically to encourage thinking of sentient animals as persons rather than the opposite. It seems to me, in the end, that for the most part only those who do not wish to facilitate rights for nonhuman sentient beings would object to such a usage, and that reluctance would be speciesist as I have argued. Blacks and women used to be considered non-persons too, and that was a form of oppressive discrimination. It seems only to be a result of tyranny that animals are viewed impersonally as mere things. Such a world view leads us to believe that animals are mere resources rather than ends in themselves. XII. Conclusion When Peter Singer's misleadingly entitled Animal Liberation was first
published it carried the sub-title, A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals. It
was indeed relatively new to insist against speciesism, a term that was then
only five years old. However, utilitarianism is no innovation, nor are the
mirrorings of old rights theories by animal rights philosophers. Also, I would
venture to say that Singer is a speciesist to propose to vivisect nonhuman
animals because they are supposed to be cognitively inferior. Even the ethic of
care was something new mostly in name only, since compassion is as old as the
hills, as is ethics which considers relationships and specific contexts. Best
caring ethics itself is perhaps only new in a recombinant way, a weaving
together of ancient though often latent strands of insight. However it offers at
least levels of harmful discrimination, a rethinking of traditional animal
welfare as animal illfare, a revised theory of ends in themselves, a distinctive
theory of what is best, a theory of emotional cognition, and a set of arguments
for animal personhood. Ethical View(s) Advantages (Best Caring Ethics Shares) Disadvantages (Best
Caring Ethics Avoids) I emphasize that I am not a radical pluralist or syncretist who simply throws
different philosophies together which I have argued are logically incompatible.
Nor do I conveniently pick and choose ideas when I practically deliberate as
would an eclectic. If the strengths and not the weaknesses of the other theories
I have mentioned emerge in best caring ethics, it is from an attempt at moral
reasoning rather than running a shopping cart through the history of moral
philosophy. Where traditional moral thinking fails to be reasonable and compassionate, the animal rights movement will endure and hopefully grow radically. We need yet another revolution--or perhaps an evolution--in our thinking about animals, shifting beyond the old narrow paradigms. Yet most animal liberationists are not moral philosophers, and most ethicists are not animal liberationists. So for a while at least we may only have what my country's Quebecers call a 'Quiet Revolution' among certain people who engage in anti-speciesist forms of moral reasoning. Quietism is not preferable but is simply difficult to overcome. Indeed that hardship occurs because the sounds of extended, civilized dialogue are almost as structurally stifled by our society as are literally billions of cries of protest from unheeded animals. [1] Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Avon Books, 1975). A revised 2d ed. simply called Animal Liberation was published in 1990 with Avon Books. Singer first caused a stir when he released an essay entitled 'Animal Liberation' in the New York Times Review of Books, April 5, 1973 which a few years later grew into his famous book. [1] In chronological order, the major animal rights ethics books are: Bernard Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981), rev. ed. 1992; Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Evelyn B. Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence (London: Verso, 1998); Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Julian Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). An earlier account of animal rights, which was largely ignored by scholars until republished, is Henry S. Salt, Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (Clarks Summit: Society for Animal Rights, 1980), originally published in 1892 with revised editions in 1905 and 1922. It was Salt who influenced Mohandas Gandhi to become an ethical as opposed to merely traditional vegetarian. [1] Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) started a small industry of scholarship. The latter book brought her views into prominence but see also Gilligan, 'Concept of the Self and of Morality,' Harvard Educational Review 47 (November 1977): 481-517. [1] Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990) first brought feminist ethics prominently to bear on animal liberation issues. However arguably the single most important work is Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.), Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1996), a collection of previously published papers. [1] Another strain of ethics used for animal advocacy is virtue ethics, which I discuss in Animal Persons. Briefly, virtues refer to character traits such as courage, honesty and patience, and vices refer to dispositions such as greed, stinginess and callousness. Virtue ethicists often follow Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. I agree that virtues are helpful and vices are destructive in general. However one limitation of basing ethics in virtues (as opposed to having an ethic with another basis that still includes virtues) is that virtue ethics is too vague, since any ethical theorist, even an ethical egoist, can list her own virtues and vices. So virtue ethics does not decide among theories of animal advocacy ethics. Rosalind Hursthouse, Ethics, Humans, and Other Animals: An Introduction with Readings (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 161 stresses that the virtue of kindness may stop people from fox hunting, although others might argue that the practice exemplifies the virtue of courage. Zoe Weil, The Power and Promise of Humane Education (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2004), p. 5, plausibly lists the best qualities of human beings as: (1) kindness, (2) compassion, (3) honesty and trustworthiness, (4) generosity, (5) courage, (6) perseverance, self-discipline, and restraint, (7) humor and playfulness, (8) wisdom, (9) integrity, and (10) a willingness to choose and change. However rights, utilitarian and care ethics proponents could all lay claim to these virtues, as can traditional animal welfarists who favor animal exploitation, so this list of virtues is too logically ambiguous to be decisively in favor of animal liberation, or so I argue in Animal Persons. [1] Ryder notes this autobiographical fact in 'Speciesism,' in The Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 320. [1] R. G. Frey, 'Animal Parts, Human Wholes,' in Biomedical Ethics Reviews--1987, eds. James M. Humber and Robert F. Almeder (Clifton: Humana Press, 1987), p. 105; Michael P. T. Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 203; Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 52; Michael Allen Fox, The Case for Animal Experimentation: An Evolutionary and Ethical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 89. Fox has since crossed over to the animal liberation side. [1] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 75; Thomas Aquinas, 'Differences between Rational and Other Creatures,' in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 2d ed., eds. Tom Regan and Peter Singer (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1989), p. 6.; Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated, 1964), p. 96; G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1953), p. 45. [1] 'Moral standing' has generally come to mean in ethics a status of being accorded basic practical respect. However, the term is not biased in favor of any given ethical theory and someone with moral standing may have due to them certain rights, or be entitled to utilitarian consideration, or be part of a network of relationships of caring. [1] Richard A. Watson, 'Self-Consciousness and the Rights of Nonhuman Animals and Nature,' Environmental Ethics 1 (Summer 1979): 115. [1] Bonnie Steinbock, 'Speciesism and the Idea of Equality,' Philosophy 53 (April 1978): 247. [1] A. I. Melden, Rights in Moral Lives: A Historical-Philosophical Essay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 54. [1] Carl Cohen, 'The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,' The New England Journal of Medicine 315 (October, 1986): 865-66. [1] Alan Holland, 'On Behalf of a Moderate Speciesism,' The Journal of Applied Philosophy 1 (1984): 286. Holland does not disavow speciesism. [1] L. B. Cebik, 'Can Animals Have Rights? No and Yes.' The Philosophical Forum 12 (1981): 252, 253, 257, 258. [1] Ruth Cigman, 'Death, Misfortune, and Species Inequality,' Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (Winter 1981): 60. [1] Meredith Williams, 'Rights, Interests, and Moral Equality,' Environmental Ethics 2 (1980): 153, 154. [1] R. G. Frey, 'Animal Parts, Human Wholes,' pp. 89, 91-3; Peter Miller, 'Do Animals Have Interests Worthy of our Moral Interest?' Environmental Ethics 5 (Winter 1983): 332; Peter Miller, 'Value as Richness: Toward a Value Theory for the Expanded Naturalism in Environmental Ethics,' Ethics 4 (Summer 1982): 112. [1] Michael Allen Fox, 'Animal Experimentation: Avoiding Unnecessary Suffering,' in National Symposium on Imperatives in Research Animal Use: Scientific Needs and Animal Welfare (Washington: National Institutes of Health, 1984), p. 112. [1] David Sztybel, 'Taking Humanism Seriously: ‘Obligatory' Anthropocentrism,' Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 13 (2000): 188. [1] I have clarified elsewhere that there is no logical link in general between being different in some specified way and having a license to harm the one who is different. David Sztybel, 'Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?' Ethics and the Environment 11 (Spring 2006): 100; Sztybel, 'Empathy and Rationality in Ethics' (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2000), 96-99. [1] James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 181-94. [1] Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed., p. 9. [1] See Sztybel, 'Taking Humanism Seriously.' [1] Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed., p. 18; Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, pp. 186-89; Regan, The Struggle for Animal Rights (Clarks Summit: International Society for Animal Rights, Inc., 1987), p. 75; Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality, 1st ed., p. 35; Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, chs. 1-2. Traditionally, this has been known as 'the argument from marginal cases.' I think the term, 'marginal humans' can carry unwelcome connotations that mentally disabled humans are either only marginally human or else only of marginal ethical concern. However I think the term was originally meant to refer to those who are marginally rational (or marginal in terms of manifesting other mental capabilities) compared to average human beings, which does not necessarily imply that the mentally disabled are any less human or less deserving of respect. Therefore I do not take offense anytime someone such as Pluhar uses the term 'marginal cases.' Still, for connotative reasons the term 'marginal' might well be avoided,. especially since the relevant clarifications seem never to be offered wherever the term is used. 'The argument from mental disability' may be used as a simple, relatively inoffensive substitute in the context of animal ethics. [1] I also note in passing that the argument from mental disability has helped to defuse one of the primary objections to animal rights, namely that animals are not ethical towards us so we have no obligation to be ethical towards them (notice how many 'humanists' noted above used the criterion of moral agency). The problem is that many mentally disabled humans cannot be ethical towards us either, but they typically receive full moral standing, so unless we extend the same benefit to animals, this seems to be a pattern of speciesist discrimination--unless anthropocentrists can account for why animals and mentally disabled humans are treated so differently. [1] A note about ranking Level 1 insults versus Level 2: most people would prefer verbal slights to starvation, not least of all because the latter is more dangerous. [1] For a detailed account of factory farming see Singer, Animal Liberation, ch. 3 and Jim Mason and Peter Singer, Animal Factories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), or visit http://www.factoryfarming.org. These sources impartially draw their facts from agricultural journals. [1] See Sztybel, 'Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?' and Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002) for a comparison between standard forms of contemporary animal treatment and the Holocaust. [1] For a comparison of how animals are treated and black slavery see Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, revised edition (New York: Mirror Books, 1996). [1] Are animal companions exempt from harmful discrimination? Millions of animals bred as 'pets' in speciesist society are killed for want of a home, and a great many who have homes are subject to neglect, squalor, deprivation and cruelty. Is there no harmful discrimination when 'pets' are treated well by speciesists? In that case there is arbitrary and harmful discrimination against other animals who are treated poorly, e.g., in agriculture. People often only focus on one part of the harmful discrimination equation, namely those who are arbitrarily disfavored; however another side of the equation consists of who is arbitrarily favored, such as many dogs and cats. [1] See also Evelyn B. Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 136-37. Pluhar discusses the idea that humans normally have qualities such as rationality and complains that it is 'outrageously unfair' that one be treated as if one possesses abilities that are normal for one's species rather than according to one's actual abilities. Presumably it would be unfair because a mentally disabled human might, for example, be expected to perform successfully in normal schooling? [1] See Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, p. 156. Pluhar objects, p. 158 that what she calls the argument from misfortune is circular because it assumes that some humans already have moral standing and are entitled to distributive justice. I agree that a theory defending rights for these persons is needed, but my point of objection is different from Pluhar's. [1] This objection is noted in Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, p. 162. [1] Ibid., p. 90. [1] Ibid., p. 95. [1] Other 'special reasons' I discuss in my book are that animals lack a human genotype, are not born to human families, lack souls, are not institutionally supported as mentally disabled humans often are, are not members of society unlike mentally disabled humans (who are often no more substantially functioning members of society than animals really), and none of these reasons (anymore than the ones considered in the main text) implies anything about why we should count benefits or harms to animals differently than those pertaining to mentally disabled humans. They are, in short, logically irrelevant to the issue at hand. [1] I reserve discussion of egoism and skepticism for the book for reasons of avoiding excessive length; however see the table in the conclusion of this essay. [1] Technically, 'animal welfare' is ambiguous, and I identified six different senses in my article, 'The Distinction between Animal Rights and Animal Welfare' in The Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998), pp. 43-45. Here I distinguished between (1) animal exploiter's animal welfare which might be deceptive and validate factory farming for instance, (2) common-sense animal welfare which is a fluid idea encompassing the average citizen's concern with kindness or anti-cruelty; (3) organized humane animal welfare, usually more disciplined and principled, e.g., as professed by humane societies and other institutions; (4) utilitarian animal welfare such as Peter Singer's, which is supposed to be 'animal liberationist'; (5) New welfarism, a characterization of Gary Francione of any self-professed animal rightist who accepts animal welfare reforms in the law; and (6) animal welfare-animal rights views, such as Richard Ryder's notable opposition to all animal experimentation while noting in Ryder, 'Painism: The Ethics of Animal Rights and the Environment,' in Animal Welfare and the Environment, ed. Richard D. Ryder (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1992), p. 197, that animal rights and animal welfare alike 'denote a concern for the suffering of others.' I am considering the term 'animal welfare' here as it is used conventionally, opposed to animal liberation (which is in keeping with (2) and (3) above). 'Animal welfare' is usually taken to mean: accepting the use of animals for food, leather, fur, entertainment, vivisection, hunting, zoos, and so on so long as the treatment is 'kind.' [sic] I believe that a seventh sense of 'animal welfare' needs to be added as a result of the arguments I am about to present, namely 'animal welfare' as a completely misleading euphemism for how we treat animals conventionally--and not just in factory farming or the worst kinds of vivisection as in sense (1), but also in terms of standard Level 3 treatments. [1] Morlocks are humanlike creatures adapted to living underground, as invented by H. G. Wells for his classic science fiction novel, The Time Machine, originally published in 1895. [1] The last point is a bit of a departure from Wells, since the Morlocks are 'savage.' However I do not imply that civilized people vivisect others. Quite the contrary. [1] Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, p. 50 refers to our culture's 'schizophrenic' profession of animal welfare while widely using for example factory farming, etc. (what I call Level 4 treatments). I am going farther and stating that even if Level 3 treatment were universal as 'welfarists' hope, the label 'animal welfarist' still is not apt. Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (Derwood, MD: Ryce Publishing, 2001), p. 121 notes that vivisectors nullify the welfare of animals while calling themselves animal welfarists, and pp. 133-34 notes the same contradiction exists in standard factory farming practices. So she makes a similar observation but in a more limited way. [1] It is noteworthy that most animals who are killed for human use--about 95%--are 'farmed,' according to the Humane Society of the United States. See http://www.hsus.org/farm_animals/factory_farms/. This figure does not include the estimated ten billion aquatic animals killed for human consumption. Now the vast majority of these animals are 'factory farmed' (see note 28) so they are not even treated according to the ideology of wrongly so-called 'animal welfare,' but rather according to the non-existent mercies of Level 4. This descent into currently widespread hellish treatment of animals seems superficially contrary to the logic of so-called 'animal welfare,' and therefore anomalous, but it is not when you realize that human interests--virtually any human interest such as the taste of flesh or financial profit--takes priority over the most important animal interests--even life itself--on what many people call 'animal welfare' (sic--animal illfare). It is usually thought that there is more money to be made in confining animals by cramming them into minimal spaces (less rent), in feeding them awful food (which is cheaper), keeping them in filth (rather than paying for cleaning), letting them suffer stifling, toxic air and extremes of hot or cold (rather than pay for regulation of the atmosphere in factory farms, transport vehicles, or stockyards), and transporting and killing them forcefully and hurriedly (because workers after all are paid by the hour). Such is the logic of so-called 'animal welfare.' [1] Here I defer treatment of egoists and nihilistic skeptics who are not especially associated with altruism. [1] Gary L. Francione, Rain without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), p. 53. [1] Peter Singer, 'The Fable of the Fox and the Liberated Animals,' Ethics 88 (January 1978): 122. [1] Peter Singer, 'Animals and the Value of Life,' in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan (NY: Random House, 1980), p. 254. [1] Ibid. [1] In fairness, Singer probably thinks that people will be more reluctant to use animals if humans must also be used at the same time, but the fact is that he allows and even defends the use of both sorts of sentient beings. People would be even more reluctant to use animals and mentally disabled humans if these beings were recognized to have a right not to be vivisected, which denounces rather than defends such a practice. [1] Bentham in The Principles of Morals and Legislation, equated all kinds of pleasures, but Mill controversially distinguished between base and noble pleasures in his famous essay, 'Utilitarianism.' [1] There is a further distinction between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. An act utilitarian seeks to choose the most good and the least bad in every single decision. A rule utilitarian, by contrast, uses utilitarianism mainly to justify broad rules for society which purportedly serve 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' to use a phrase commonly invoked by utilitarians. Rules are preferred by some utilitarians because estimating maximal utility in every case may be too daunting, chaotic, or biased in that some people may seek to rationalize dire acts as being for 'the greatest good.' We will see that rule utilitarianism is important for answering common objections to utilitarianism. [1] Joseph Wood Krutsch, The Great Chain of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. 147-48; cited in Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, p. 63. [1] Antony Flew (ed.), A Dictionary of Philosophy (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1984), p. 113. [1] J. J. C. Smart, 'Integrity and Squeamishness,' in Utilitarianism and Its Critics, ed. Jonathan Glover (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), p. 168. [1] Moreover, rule utilitarianism can rule out many such abuses. [1] Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 9. [1] L. W. Sumner, in a course lecture at the University of Toronto, 1995. [1] Singer, 'Animal Liberation or Animal Rights?,' Monist 70 (January 1987): 6. [1] L. W. Sumner, review of The Case for Animal Rights, by Tom Regan, Nous 20 (September 1986): 431-32. [1] Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, p. 92. If one looks up the Declaration of Helsinki which is readily available on the internet, one finds that it could permit vivisection of mentally disabled humans if a relative provides consent. I do not interpret that the earlier code features this loophole. [1] R. G. Frey, 'Animal Parts, Human Wholes,' p. 89. [1] Singer, Practical Ethics, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 110-111, 125. I refer students of this argument to my book, Animal Persons. [1] Mentioned in Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy, in the ch. on utilitarianism, which is worth citing as a whole for its astute points pertaining to this theory. [1] This is a verbal issue, but I think an important one. Now I would not argue that someone (unlike Singer) who targets "normal" humans for vivisection or rodeo abuses is truly aiming for human liberation as a general matter. Therefore I cannot consistently call utilitarianism an ethic that serves animal liberation. It is not enough that Singer has a goal in his own mind of 'animal liberation,' nor that he calls his seminal book by that name. For the label to stick he must seek to liberate animals--period--and this he fails to do. Rights advocates support the rights of all, not just some, and emphasize the rights of the vulnerable that are trampled by utilitarianism. One cannot emphasize such rights by simply overlooking the animals who are not liberated. I can grant that some animals or groups of them might be liberated on utilitarianism, but that seems insufficient for 'animal liberation' as a generality. I owe the idea about animal rights being a true form of liberation for animals, in contrast to utilitarianism, to Steven Best who provided very helpful comments on this essay. [1] Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, p. 134. [1] Ibid., chs. 7-9. [1] Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 70, 74, 82, 151. [1] Ibid., p. 63, 351. [1] Ibid., p. 393. [1] Ibid. [1] Ibid., p. 404. [1] Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. xv, calls a fundamental right to respect 'fundamental and axiomatic,' which may be called an intuition in the sense that I am using. [1] Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 157. [1] Joseph Raz, 'On the Nature of Rights,' Mind 93 (1984): 194-214; 195. [1] S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), p. 89. [1] Bernard Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981), p. 9. Rollin also refers to this as 'consensus morality,' or 'social ethics for humans.' [1] Carruthers, The Animals Issue, p. 7 states moral theory must take a start in common sense and supports factory farming 'without qualification' on p. 196. [1] See generally David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1983). [1] Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 105. [1] It will be pointed out that Kant relies not only on universalizability as a 'categorical imperative' as he terms it. Another categorical imperative for Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 96 (italics his), is: 'Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.' However one need not universalize this principle. I would speculate that this Kantian doctrine of the end in itself is rather based on intuition, or a bedrock belief for which he offers no rational defense. This intuitionist interpretation is supported by a key passage which I found in Kant's own mature writing. In Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 157, the German philosopher states: '...the moral law is given, as an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of pure reason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious, even if it be granted that no example could be found in which it has been followed exactly. Thus the objective reality of the moral law can be proved through no deduction, through no exertion of the theoretical, speculative, or empirically supported reason; and even if one were willing to renounce its apodictic certainty, it could not be confirmed by any experience and thus proved a posteriori. Nevertheless, it is firmly established of itself.' To consider his doctrine to be self-evidently correct and not supportable by reason sounds exactly like intuitionism, which I have already dealt with as a purported basis for rights. That said, I develop my own idea, hopefully grounded in reason, of sentient beings as ends in themselves in what follows. [1] Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy, p. 35. [1] Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, pp. xxxii, 82. [1] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 11-12. [1] See generally Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence, but also Rowlands, Animals Like Us (London: Verso, 2002). [1] Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 13. [1] Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 61. [1] Ibid., p. 67. [1] Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice, ch. 5. [1] Even where animals are mentioned or hinted at in this literature, it is too often dismissively. Joan Tronto is a well-known ethics of care theorist, and author of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), and on p. 103 defines care as 'a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world' so that we can live in it as well as possible.' She urges, p. 189, that we 'take caring seriously' and engage in an exercise of 'noticing boundaries' of care, to see who is included, and who is excluded from concern. Tronto apparently restricts care to the human species without justifying the exclusion of animals, who are not even mentioned in her index. Although she mentions the environment and the need for a 'life-sustaining web,' on p. 103, she does not seem to count animals as significant in themselves. Allison Jaggar, a prominent feminist, criticizes care theorists for the lack of attention to justification of ethical pronouncements in care theory, in her essay, 'Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral Reason,' in Virginia Held (ed.), Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics (New York: Westview Press, Inc., 1995), p. 189, but she does not justify her own exclusion of animals as beings to care about. Martin Hoffman worked on a theory of empathy for three decades but not once does he mention animals in his resulting book, Empathy and Moral Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), although p. 25 he claims to offer a 'comprehensive theory.' Lawrence E. Blum mentions animals in his essay, 'Compassion,' in the volume Moral Perception and Particularity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 173, but only to announce that he is '[b]ypassing the question of compassion for…animals….I will focus on persons as objects of compassion.' Blum merely takes it for granted that sentient beings are not persons. But see Section XI of the present essay. [1] Gilligan, In a Different Voice, pp. 18-19, 30, 44. [1] Lawrence Kohlberg, Collected Papers on Moral Development and Moral Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Laboratory for Human Development, 1973). [1] Donovan, 'Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals,' in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 147. [1] Marti Kheel, 'The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair,' in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 26. [1] Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, 'Introduction,' in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 16. [1] Erik Brown, 'Sympathy and Moral Objectivity,' American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (April 1986): 179-88; p. 184. [1] Marti Kheel, 'The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair,' in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 11 [1] Ibid., pp. 23, 31. [1] A psychopath can claim to abide by ethics out of self-interest or to manipulate others, but I interpret that ethics require more than superficial physical behaviors: an ethic seeks to command belief and corresponding attitudes which those without empathy decidedly lack. [1] Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 66. [1] Ibid., pp. 97-98. [1] Ibid., p. 68. Italics his. P. 69 Kant acknowledges that reverence is a feeling. [1] Ibid., p. 128. [1] Immanuel Kant, 'Duties in Regard to Animals,' in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989), p. 24. [1] Ibid. [1] See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). [1] Alisa L. Carse, 'Impartial Principle and Moral Context: Securing a Place for the Particular in Ethical Theory,' Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 23 (April 1998): 153-69; p. 157. [1] Brown, 'Sympathy and Moral Objectivity,' p. 183. [1] Adams, 'Caring About Suffering,' in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 187. [1] Kenneth Shapiro, 'The Caring Sleuth: Portrait of an Animal Rights Activist,' in Beyond Animal Rights, p. 134 notes that exploiters can use empathy to anticipate needs and wants. [1] Gary L. Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), p. 44. [1] Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), p. 174. She writes of 'an ethic of justice' and 'an ethic of care' that 'both perspective converge' at least in the aspect of rejecting inequality and violence. [1] It might be thought that the place to look for a dam against the overwhelming flood-waters of utilitarianism is deontology, or following duties 'for their own sake,' including a duty to refrain from vivisection. This is really a throw-back to Kant. However we would need certain rules and not others, and also exceptions to rules. It seems to me that deontology collapses into intuitionism or traditionalism unless it is based on promoting good and avoiding bad, but then deontologists fear that the specter of utilitarian maximizing of the good and minimizing of the bad returns to haunt us. Also we cannot purely follow a rule 'for its own sake,' since we cannot do anything for or against a rule in itself, and we cannot follow a rule just because it exists or is proposed. Perhaps then rules are significant to us because they protect against harms and promote benefits. However I find that rules themselves have a unique kind of value because they lend themselves to orderliness, firmness, dependability and predictability in the moral life. Thus rules may be much better than the apparent whimsy of acting according to chance caring or the atrocious choices of many act utilitarians. [1] There can also be 'realistic perfectionism,' or aiming for as much perfection as is really possible. I do not advocate this either because we are so imperfect that insisting on the best possible is too much. Someone's personal best will be fallible and that should be readily accepted, whereas a 'realistic' perfectionist (who can argue to be a 'truer' perfectionist since it is imperfect to expect the impossible) would not accept fallibility so compassionately. [1] Victor Grassian, Moral Reasoning: Ethical Theory and Some Contemporary Moral Problems (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981), p. 113; Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals, p. xii and L. W. Sumner, 'Animal Welfare and Animal Rights,' Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 13 (May 1988): 164. Sumner in this article and elsewhere explicitly supports vivisecting animals for medical progress. In L. W. Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), however, it is denied that animals should have rights; see David Sztybel, 'Animal Rights: Autonomy and Redundancy,' Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 14 (2001): 259-73 for a criticism of that denial. Sapontzis, in his book, pp. 209-16, rejects vivisection because animals do not consent. However, for a utilitarian, masses of utility still threaten to overwhelm the comfort any one individual takes in consent and any potential dismay on the part of that individual due to experiments occurring without consent. [1] Kant himself did not dignify sentient beings as ends in themselves but only rational beings. And he did not offer my argument as to why they should count as ends in themselves, but claimed obscurely to 'deduce' that rational beings should be considered ends in themselves from his universalizability principle, a version of the categorical imperative. Presumably he thought no one would want to be treated as a mere means, and universalized, this meant treating everyone the same way. However, technically, one could universalize treating sentient beings or rational beings as a mere means, or only treating oneself or a favored group as ends in themselves. Furthermore, although he called the idea that we should act on universalizable principles one version of his 'categorical imperative,' and he claimed that treating rational beings always as ends in themselves and never as a means only is another version of his categorical imperative, scholars are generally mystified as to how these principles could be semantically or logically equivalent or different versions of the same thing. I believe my argument offers greater clarity about the meaning and rationale of an 'end in itself' doctrine. [1] Bernard Rollin, 'Environmental Ethics and International Justice,' in Earth Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1995), p. 117, proposes giving moral standing to sentient beings because 'what we do to these entities matters to them.' Joel Feinberg, 'Can Animals Have Rights?' in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 1st ed., eds. Tom Regan and Peter Singer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976), p. 195 notes that mere things such as the Taj Mahal do not possess interests and so cannot have rights and we cannot have a duty to it. (Perhaps, against Feinberg, we can have an indirect duty to it, or a duty to care for it due to its importance to humans.) Singer argues in 'The Concept of Moral Standing,' in Ethics in Hard Times (New York: Plenum Press, 1981), p. 33, that we cannot give rocks moral standing because they cannot be benefited since they have no point of view. Regan, 'The Nature and Possibility of an Environmental Ethic,' in All That Dwell Therein: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 187, by contrast, claims that nonconscious entities in the environment should have moral standing on any adequate environmental ethic, but he never offers a convincing argument for this idea in my opinion. Singer--although I believe that he is more insightful than Regan on this point--fails to see the implications of this family of insights for utilitarianism as I will try to show. [1] Constellations additionally involve relationships between individuals and 'local' groupings (although with stars, the etymological root of 'constellation,' locality is very much a relative term), which we will see later are factors that are emphasized in best caring ethics. [1] Utilitarians would object to my account that maximal utility is not something we pursue just for 'it.' At the start utility is always assessed from individuals' lives, and in the end maximum utility goes to the benefit of individual sentient beings. However, any theorist must say that any good their theory does is for the benefit of sentient beings, so that is a necessary but insufficient consideration for ethics. It does not necessarily follow that any given theory is best for sentient beings, especially since we have determined that what is best for sentient beings involves respecting separate 'bests'--a respect which maximizing utility disallows or overrules. Utilitarianism allows the 'best' or |
