Animal Ethics: The Basics

Tony Miligan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317543299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Animal Ethics has long been a highly contested area with debates driven by unease about various forms of animal harm, from the use of animals in scientific research to the farming of animals for consumption. Animal Ethics: The Basics is an essential introduction to the key considerations surrounding the ethical treatment of animals. Taking a thematic approach, it outlines the current arguments from animal agency to the emergence of the 'political turn'. This book explores such questions as:

• Can animals think and do they suffer?

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• What do we mean by speciesism?

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• Are humans special?

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• Can animals be political or moral agents?

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• Is animal rights protest ethical?

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Including outlines of the key arguments, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of key terms, this book is an essential read for philosophy students and readers approaching the contested field of Animal Ethics for the first time.

1 Picturing Animal Ethics

DOI: 10.4324/9781315728568-1

There are two main approaches towards animal ethics. On the one hand, there are theories which focus on a small cluster of key considerations or even on a single big idea such as rights, suffering or sentience. They are unifying approaches. On the other hand, there are theories which insist on situating animals within a broader ethical context, usually the context of a set of historically constructed practices which bind humans and animals together and which at the same time generate a sense of separateness. These are relational approaches. The former are appealing because they are streamlined, efficient and aim at precision. They tend to offer determinate answers to otherwise difficult questions such as ‘When, if ever, should we allow ourselves to eat meat?’ If the central concept which we work with is that of rights or harm then the answer to this question is straightforward: all other things being equal, we ought not to eat meat whenever doing so would involve a rights violation or whenever it would promote significant harm. If, by contrast, we base our ethic around some unifying standard that animals do not satisfy (such as a requirement for our kind of language use) then our ethic will tell us that we are entitled to continue meat-eating, to continue experimentation, and to continue various forms of animal incarceration. We may then be licensed to act in much the same ways that we have done in the past, especially if we abide by some reasonable welfare constraints to avoid unnecessary harm (to animals) or psychological distress (to ourselves and others).

In either case, by appeal to some basic consideration or small cluster of considerations, unifying approaches allow dilemmas to be reduced or eliminated and they tell us which practices are licensed and which are excluded. If we like our ethics to be determinate rather than uncertain or imprecise this is a definite advantage. Ethicists who work in the tradition of analytic philosophy, where lucidity and argument structures are given top priority, have tended to favour this option.

By contrast, more relational approaches tend also to be more discursive and somewhat harder to inhabit. They require deliberation of a different sort, often without any guarantee that a single final answer can be given to any particular question. Differing relational approaches may also ‘talk past’ one another, without acknowledging clear ways in which disputes may be settled. In these respects, they lack the charm of simplicity but instead, as compensation, they may claim to do greater justice to how the world is and to what human life is like. Relational approaches also tend to be more influenced by continental philosophy, and by the idea that picturing, rather than streamlined argument, is philosophy’s most important task. While this may involve precision, it is a different kind of precision from the sort that we find in the big unifying theories. And it is a kind of precision which may only be evident from the inside of this sort of discourse. From the outside, it may appear to be irreducibly messy.

This contrast of these two approaches is (like the contrast between analytic and continental philosophy) a simplification. The lines between the two approaches often blur under the pressure of dialogue and disagreement. But the sympathies of those who try to think seriously about animals, from an ethical point of view, do tend to lean towards one or other option. And where our own personal sympathies lie may tell us a good deal about ourselves. Even so, much of what follows will presuppose that both approaches are insightful enough to deserve our attention. There is, surely, a place for large, unifying ideas which can be rolled out across the entire field of enquiry—in the process generating close and persuasive argumentation. But there is also a place for context, for the messiness of the particular and for deliberations which may sway opinion without ever amounting to a conclusive proof. It is arguable that ethics in general, and not just animal ethics, is always like this. That is to say, it is always a cluster of different sorts of things: ways of arguing, ways of picturing, ways of shaping action and advice—sometimes clear and sometimes elusive. It would certainly be odd for someone with a deep interest in contemporary animal ethics to draw only and exclusively from one side of the divide. Yet the divide is real, if blurred, and attempts to talk across it do not always succeed.

Unifying Approaches

What I have called unifying approaches are not, of course, restricted to the use of a single concept. Rather, they make everything revolve around one central (unifying) idea or theme which is then repeatedly deployed. The best-known and most influential work of this sort comes from Peter Singer (who focuses on suffering as a basis for moral considerability); Tom Regan (who appeals to the pivotal importance of animals being subjects-of-a-life); and Gary Francione (who appeals to sentience as all that is required for moral standing). All three emphasize particular kinds of continuity between humans and other animals. They also consider the fact that we are human and they are not, to have no special ethical importance. For Singer, Regan and Francione, it is no more important than the fact that I have brown eyes while someone else may have blue eyes. The ethically salient considerations, the things that really matter for the purposes of deliberation and decision, are taken to be considerations of a quite different sort. They are taken to be considerations of the following sort: like us, a large range of animals suffer; many lead lives which are psychologically integrated and are not simply a mass of fleeting events; like us, such animals are beings who have the capacity for experience of a robust sort, although it is not necessarily the exact same kind of experience.

Of the three pivotal thinkers mentioned above, Regan and Francione are influenced by the deontological (rights- and duty-focused) tradition of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) while Singer is influenced by the utilitarian tradition of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Regan and Francione claim that animals have rights which we regularly violate and which, instead, we should respect, while Singer focuses instead on consequences rather than rights. For Singer, we should set aside unhelpful and contentious rights talk and instead try to secure the best overall outcome for our actions. Deliberation about what makes something a good outcome should, however, take animal interests into account, and for Singer, it should take such interests to be equal in importance to our own, human interests. (Although, what this means in practice turns out to be a little less radical than we might expect.) In addition to detailed criticisms of the sort which will be set out in subsequent chapters, and in spite of their differences, all three thinkers face a number of shared and general objections to their approaches. The objections are general in the sense that while they can occur in the context of deliberation about animals, they are not specifically or exclusively about animal ethics but, rather, they concern how we should go about the business of any kind of ethical deliberation. They are, ultimately, objections to the parent theories, respectively Kantianism and utilitarianism. The suggestion from critics is that such approaches are reductive or misleading about what it is to be an ethical agent, i.e. about what it is to act reasonably, on a day-to-day basis, in the light of ethical considerations.

Three objections of this sort stand out. The first involves an appeal to the complexity of experience; the second highlights a problematic separation of justification and motivation; and the third concerns a marginalizing of our humanity, a failure to accommodate the idea that being human is itself ethically salient.

The appeal to the complexity of experience charges that real, lived, experienced ethical deliberation is complex in ways that approaches such as Kantianism and utilitarianism do not comprehend. None of us live out our lives in a way which is shaped by commitment to a single overriding and guiding ethical consideration or norm, no matter what that consideration or norm may happen to be. Theories which suggest otherwise, which focus excessively on only one aspect of ethical life, promote what has (unflatteringly) been called ‘moral Esperanto’, a language of ethics that nobody speaks. As a point about what humans are like (i.e. most humans, people like us), we are invariably pluralists about ethical norms. In practice, when we have to make an important ethical choice, we factor in lots of different considerations and we do not always do so in the same way from case to case. This point applies even in cases of deliberation about suffering. The latter is a consideration which we might imagine will always play a single unwavering role, just in the way that harm does. The fact that something involves suffering, and hardship more generally, may be a reason to prevent it from occurring, and this is what we ordinarily assume to be true: suffering is to be avoided. However, the fact that something involves suffering may also function as a reason for bringing it about (as it does in the case of going to the North Pole or, less dramatically, walking the Inca Trail—both of which would require us to endure considerable hardship). Sometimes, we do things because they circumvent suffering, yet endurance in the face of suffering is a precondition for some kinds of accomplishment. And while it might be objected that the suffering in such cases is outweighed by the pleasure of accomplishment, the point remains that it is the adversity or the suffering itself which counts in favour of the action rather than against it. Focusing on suffering in the abstract then seems to miss the importance of the context in which it occurs.

Examples like this can be used to argue that an approach towards ethics (animal ethics or ethics of any sort) which centres too much on suffering, and on its avoidance, oversimplifies what our kind of life is like. It seems, to many ethicists, unable to account satisfactorily for large areas of what it is to be someone like us. A similar point can be made in the case of a single-minded focus on rights. Such an approach may seem to obscure and to lose sight of something important. And this point need not be a clever way of sidestepping the question of whether or not animals actually do have rights. It applies just as much when we think about humans. For example, let us imagine that a parent sells their child into prostitution because the going rate for children happens to be particularly favourable and not because they are in desperate straits and believe that prostitution is a better option for their child than starvation. There would be something distinctly odd about addressing this action firstly or simply in terms of rights and, relatedly, in terms of child protection. To capture a sense of what has gone wrong we might instead have to appeal, from the outset, to the idea of betrayal, to a very deep failure of parental responsibility, to the parent’s heartlessness and perhaps also to a failure to love. If we do not do this, we may miss salient aspects of the situation, aspects which we need to see if we are to grasp more fully what is going on.

The point here is not that child protection and rights are dispensable or peripheral, any more than a concern for favourable consequences. Rather, the point is that talk about rights and child protection needs to be situated within a broader picture of moral failure. And in order to perform this task we may need to see that this is not just the violation of a single important norm. Rather, we may need to see that something has gone wrong in the parent’s entire way of relating to the child. If the offending parent was to say, in their defence, ‘Of course, if I had known that my child had rights I would never have sold them’, this would be a far from satisfactory response. It would, after all, be odd to imagine that relations between the parent and child were utterly normal, healthy and appropriate up to the point when the parent suddenly, and purely for gain, decided to realize their investment by transferring ownership.

And if rights talk, although indispensable, does not always go ethically deep enough in the case of humans then why should we expect it to do so in the case of animals? Indeed, an overemphasis on rights might seem to entrench a sense that the standing of animals is second-rate. While relations with fellow humans are accepted as complex, as governed by far more than rights, relations with non-humans would then seem to be adequately captured by a much simpler set of rule-like considerations. And this is exactly the kind of downgrading of animal status that animal advocates have been keen to avoid. (Both here, and throughout, I will refer to agents who argue for a radical alteration in our treatment of animals as animal advocates.)

The upshot is that a number of such advocates have pressed the need to go beyond animal rights if we are to set matters straight. A number of feminists, in particular, have sought to talk instead about an ethics of ‘care’ which is far less rule-like, and hence is less shaped by what is taken to be a male and rule-oriented perspective. Some of those who advance this position, such as Kathy Rudy in Loving Animals: Towards a New Animal Advocacy (2011), have appealed to the idea that rights talk is restrictive as a reason to entirely reject the idea of animal rights because it is too bound up with the prevailing (flawed) power relations: it does not reflect life experience, but rather, it reflects the experience of those who exert a gendered dominance. Others have pressed the same point only to restrict the application of talk about animal rights, allowing such talk to perform some important roles but not others.

The second objection to the parent theories which sit behind unifying approaches, the appeal to a separation of justification and motivation, involves a claim that they pose a threat to our integrity. Unifying approaches risk the danger of introducing a kind of ethical schizophrenia into our lives, a division between the justifications which we offer for our actions and the considerations which actually motivate us to act. Take a simple example. Suppose that we see someone beating a dog in the local public park and that we then decide to intervene on the animal’s behalf. We might, if called on to explain our actions, appeal to the rights of the animal or to a concern with minimizing the overall amount of suffering in the world. We would not, of course, put matters in quite this way (it would sound too pompous), but we might nonetheless appeal to these considerations in a more roundabout manner.

However, it is not obvious that this would be at all plausible as an account of what has actually motivated our intervention. While it does seem possible that we might be motivated by the animal’s suffering, it is very unlikely that we would be motivated directly, or primarily, by a concern for the amount of suffering in the world at large. Similarly, while the beating might well violate the animal’s rights, it seems odd to suggest that we would be motivated by a concern for the upholding of rights rather than a concern for the animal itself. The sheer callous cruelty of the action, or compassion for this particular suffering creature, and more especially unease with the occurrence of harm before our very eyes, would be far more likely candidates for factors which might have helped to shape our response.

This might, nonetheless, seem like a rather academic or legalistic point. Even if justification and motivation do fall apart this fact may seem unimportant just so long as we end up doing the right thing. However, matters are not quite so simple. There are many things which each of us ought to do but which we do not do, for one reason or another. Partly, this is a matter of our just being human and, as such, it is something which we must accept if we are to live at all well. But partly, it is a matter of our engaging in ethical deliberation in ways which fail to motivate. This can be a way of evading matters which, arguably, we ought to be motivated by, which are entirely consistent with living well and enjoying a good life. It is an odd reflection, but nonetheless a realistic one, that we are not always moved to act on things that we consider to be wrong. This motivation problem is regularly commented on in the context of both animal ethics and environmental ethics and it was identified by Peter Singer, some years ago, in the opening introduction to his classic Animal Liberation (1975). Singer tried to address the puzzle of why there are people (many people) who accept the arguments for vegetarianism but who do not go on to change their diet or their lives. Instead, the arguments seem to have no practical impact. This may lead us to question the value of ethics or at least the value of ethical theory. Surely, it has to do more than allow us to pass exams or to identify ourselves with one philosophical tradition rather than another. Even worse, the formal acceptance of an argument (about the standing of animals, or about anything whatsoever) can function as a way of setting the matter aside, as something resolved and requiring no more deliberation.

Part of the reason for this failure of at least some arguments to motivate may be that we are fickle, which, of course, we are. But it seems unlikely that this can account for the problem as a whole. Alternatively, it may then be tempting to adopt general theory about the very nature of motivation and judgement, one which severs reasoning and motivation, beliefs and desires, so that each becomes quite separate from the other (a view which makes it difficult to understand why at least some beliefs do seem to motivate, even when we wish matters were otherwise). Or finally, it might be argued that deliberation which regularly fails to motivate, which merely runs parallel to motivation, is simply deliberation of the wrong sort. If the goal of animal advocates is to actually change our behaviour, then there may well be a good case for embracing the latter option.

In addition to the above concerns, there is a widespread suspicion that unifying approaches, by focusing so much on suffering, consequences or rights, tend not only to obscure the complexities of what is involved in being an ethical agent, but also to obscure important and ethically defensible differences between our attitudes towards other animals and our attitudes towards other humans. They involve what we might call a marginalizing of our humanity. If, for example, all that ultimately matters is suffering, or qualifying as a bearer of rights, or being sentient, then the mere fact that someone happens to be a fellow human automatically seems to be irrelevant. To talk about any special relation or special obligation that we have to other humans may even seem to be an instance of species bias or what has become known as speciesism. The way in which the best-known unifying theories are set up, from the outset, seems to quite deliberately bar any sense that our shared humanity is ethically salient. Yet the idea that our humanity does matter is a consideration which is extremely difficult to get away from. It may seem easy to send it into exile but this is an exile who keeps returning, albeit in unacknowledged and unexpected ways. It is hard, perhaps psychologically impossible, for a normal, human, ethical agent to truly escape from a sense of the ethical importance of being human. Psychopaths may do so rather more easily, but they provide a poor model for ethical agency.

As well as a concern about the psychological unavailability of such an escape from the importance of humanity, there are considerations of realpolitik which come into play. Humans are seen as having an almost unquestionable special standing in the minds of most moral agents and this is something which is unlikely to end anytime soon. Perhaps an effective real-world ethic cannot run too far ahead of the civilization in which it is embedded. Theories which ignore this may risk marginalization. They may fail to connect up with what most of us feel to be important and action-guiding. Our ethical task then may not be one of deliberating as if we were utterly neutral about species membership, but rather it may be the task of figuring out what is due to other creatures and what it is to be human in the species sense or in some other sense which involves being part of a human moral community—a comm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• The Basics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Picturing animal ethics
• 2 Singer’s utilitarianism
• 3 Regan on animal rights
• 4 Contract theories
• 5 What is so special about humans?
• 6 The Holocaust analogy
• 7 Abolitionism
• 8 Animals and the environment
• 9 The political turn
• 10 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index