Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness

Environmental Values, 2002

Traditionally animal ethics has criticized the anthropocentric worldview according to which humans differ categorically from the rest of the nature in some morally relevant way. It has claimed that even though there are differences, there are also crucial similarities between humans and animals that make it impossible to draw a categorical distinction into humans that are morally valuable and animals that are not. This argument, according to which animals and humans share common characteristics that lead to moral value, is at the heart of animal ethics. Lately the emphasis on similarity has been under attack. It has been claimed that the search for similarity is itself part of anthropocentric morality, since only those like us are valuable. It also has been claimed that true respect for animals comes from recognizing their difference and "otherness", not from seeing similarities. This paper analyses the new "other animal ethics" by critically examining its basis and consequences. The conclusion is that despite the fact that other animal ethics is right in demanding respect for also difference, it remains both vague and contradictory in its theoretical basis, and leads to undesirable consequences from the perspective of animal welfare.

2020

Simple Summary: Many animal ethicists consider cognitive capacities as being the basis for the moral status of an animal. On this view, animals that have, for instance, complex experiences, future preferences, or at least the ability to suffer, impose an obligation on us. Those beings that do not share these capacities do not have a moral status. This would also apply to embryos, infants, or severely cognitively impaired humans, but this seems to be at odds with many of our shared ethical intuitions. As a response, so-called relationalists argue that our different relations to different kinds of beings form the basis for moral obligations. However, on this view, it remains unclear (a) why it is particularly our relations to kinds of animals that are morally relevant; and (b) how we can criticize and change these relations. This paper seeks to combine both accounts of animal ethics to overcome these pitfalls. It argues that it is individual vulnerability that forms the basis of moral obligations, but that social structures and relations predetermine how we perceive and recognize vulnerability. However, particular relationships with animals as well as open possibilities to treat animals in different ways (e.g., to treat a dairy cow not as a mere resource) render critique and change of current practices possible. Abstract: This paper presents vulnerability and the social structures surrounding recognition of vulnerability as fundamental elements of animal ethics. Theories in the paradigm of moral individualism often treat individual rational capacities as the basis of moral considerability. However, this implies that individuals without such capacities (such as human or nonhuman infants) are excluded even though we grant them special protection in our lived morality. It also means that moral agents are pictured as disembodied, impartial observers, independent of social relations and particular relationships. Relationalists take moral obligations to be rooted in different kinds of beings. However, relationalism runs the risk of losing the individual animal and her capacities. It cannot also it adequately explain what forms different kinds of being, or the constitution of normativity through relations. Moreover, it lacks resources to explain how critique and change are possible. This paper argues that vulnerability and its recognition are the source of our moral obligations to animals. It seeks to combine individualist and relationalist arguments by using a social ontology of the bodily individual which can be applied to human agents and to any vulnerable being. Social structures predetermine the ways in which we perceive and recognize the vulnerability of living beings. However, we are not fully determined by these structures; particular relationships and direct encounters with individual animals as well as the open possibilities of treating animals differently that are immanent in common practices render critique and change of current conditions possible.

In this chapter, I explore mainstream culture's ambivalent relationship to our dependence on animals, particularly the animals in our homes, by turning to discussions at the intersection of disability studies and animal studies. Critically revisiting the debate between some from disability studies (Eva Kittay and Licia Carlson) and some from animal studies (Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan), over the comparative moral status of animals with higher IQs and some severely mentally disabled people, points to problems with the very framework of the debate. Furthermore, comparisons between supposedly non-rational human beings and non-rational animals—so called " marginal cases " —continue to vex both utilitarian (Singer and McMahan) and Kantian (Cheshire Calhoun and Christine Korsgaard) approaches to animal ethics, as well as disability studies. Here, spelling out some of the problems with both of these mainstream approaches to questions of animal ethics, I propose the need for an alternative approach to questions of both animals and disabled persons. Drawing on postmodernist resources, including Jacques Derrida's writings on the human/animal opposition, Cary Wolfe's Derridean-inspired analysis of posthumanism, a critical engagement with Julia Kristeva's work on disability, and my own past work on animal ethics , I suggest some ways forward through the thickets of moral status when it comes to living beings considered " non-rational, " particularly those with whom we share intimate domestic space. I begin with the nonhuman animals literally at the intersection of disability and animal studies: service dogs. 10_Castricano_Oliver.indd 269 16-07-22 11:26 AM

The question of whether non-human animals ought to be admitted into the sphere of our moral consciousness was not a mainstream philosophical issue, at least in the Western world, until the 1970's. The consensus among the surge of animal-ethicists writing today reveals that the debate continues to be dominated by two thinkers whose theories are in some ways fundamentally alike, yet methodically divergent: Peter Singer and Tom Regan, the forerunners of the animal welfare and animal rights movement, respectively. These thinkers have made a radical and indisputable impact in the world by familiarizing the general public to the simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible exploitation of animals, extirpating the false myths that distort our relationship with non-human animals, and presenting new ways to re-conceptualize our everyday treatment of these creatures. As the first thinkers to puncture, in a truly impressive way, the reprehensible customs, indulgences, and stipulated blindness of our time, and as the shepherds of some of the most active and efficient animal organizations, I and many others are assuredly indebted to their work.

Broadview Press, 2009

Can animals be regarded as part of the moral community? To what extent, if at all, do they have moral rights? Are we wrong to eat them, hunt them, or use them for scientific research? Can animal liberation be squared with the environmental movement? Taylor traces the background of these debates from Aristotle to Darwin and sets out the views of numerous contemporary philosophers – including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Anne Warren, J. Baird Callicott, and Martha Nussbaum – with ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to eco-feminism. The new edition also includes provocative quotations from some of the major writers in the field. As the final chapter insists, animal ethics is more than just an “academic” question: it is intimately connected both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to pressing current issues such as food shortages, environmental degradation, and climate change.

1998

A couple of decades after becoming a major area of both public and philosophical concern, animal ethics continues its inroads into mainstream consciousness. Increasingly, philosophers, ethicists, professionals who use animals, and the broader public confront specific ethical issues regarding human use of animals as well as more fundamental questions about animals' moral status. A parallel, related development is the explosion of interest in animals' mental lives, as seen in exciting new work in cognitive ethology 1 and in the plethora of movies, television commercials, and popular books featuring apparently intelligent animals. As we approach the turn of the twenty-first century, philosophical animal ethics is an area of both increasing diversity and unrealized potential-a thesis supported by this essay as a whole. Following up on an earlier philosophical review of animal ethics (but without that review's focus on animal research), 2 the present article provides an updated narrativeone that offers some perspective on where we have been, a more detailed account of where we are, and a projection of where we might go. Each of the three major sections offers material that one is unlikely to find in other reviews of animal ethics: the first by viewing familiar territory in a different light (advancing the thesis that the utility-versus-rights debate in animal ethics is much less important than is generally thought); the second by reviewing major recent works that are not very well-known (at least My thanks to Tom Beauchamp, Maggie Little, and Barbara Orlans for their comments on a draft of this paper.

Views in Animal Welfare, 1984

A bundle of grey and gold hair, three Eulemur fulvus rufus, the red-fronted brown lemur, were huddled on an angled branch at least 50 feet above where I sat. Most lemur species are highly endangered; I watched these fulvus, recognizing that their fate relied not on their survival by finding food and shelter when necessary, but on the fate of a conservation project whose success precariously balances between various interconnected programmes of education, health, research, eco-tourism, and foreign investment. This delicate balancing act attempts to keep itself upright amidst an onslaught of human needs, desires, and at times, greed.

2016

Animals and Ethics 101 helps readers identify and evaluate the arguments for and against various uses of animals, such: - Is it morally wrong to experiment on animals? Why or why not? - Is it morally permissible to eat meat? Why or why not? - Are we morally obligated to provide pets with veterinary care (and, if so, how much?)? Why or why not? And other challenging issues and questions. Developed as a companion volume to an online "Animals & Ethics" course, it is ideal for classroom use, discussion groups or self study. The book presupposes no conclusions on these controversial moral questions about the treatment of animals, and argues for none either. Its goal is to help the reader better engage the issues and arguments on all sides with greater clarity, understanding and argumentative rigor. Nathan Nobis, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA USA. NathanNobis.com Nathan Nobis. Animals & Ethics 101: Thinking Critically About Animal Rights. Open Philosophy Press, 2016. Buy the book on Amazon in paperback for $5.99 or Kindle for $2.99, or download the book for free. Reviews on Amazon and the Open Textbook Library. Available through www.AnimalEthics101.com

A number of theories have been put forward from the days of the pre-Socratic philosophers through modern times attempting to determine how the relationship between the animal species and the human species ought to function in regards to how humans treat animals. These theories have generated numerous ideas, but often rely on claims that animals are living creatures and thus deserve a set of rights, or, that animals are an inferior species to humans but are living creatures capable of feeling pain and thus a superior human species has a duty to keep the pain inflicted upon animals at the lowest level possible it not eliminate it all together. In this essay, I will argue that neither a rights based approach nor a duty to the animals based approach to how humans ought to treat animals are correct, but that humans possess a duty to our humanity to treat animals in a way that is commensurate with how we treat fellow humans. I will distinguish the difference between animals and humans regarding each set of species capabilities of performing moral actions and explain why these differences disqualify animals from being owed a set of inherent rights. I will then offer a thought experiment, "how we treat non-moral agents" to show how even without providing creatures capable of moral actions a set of inherent rights humans still have a duty to ensure animals are not mistreated. This duty will challenge the idea that we have a duty to animals for animal's sake, and I will show why a duty to animals for humans will still allow for animals to be treated in ways humans would not wish upon other humans. I will then put forward my theory on why humans owe it to humanity to treat animals with a basic respect.