The treatment of animals
Michael Lacewing
[email protected]
Utilitarianism
• Happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain
– Bentham: The question is not ‘Can they reason? nor,
Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’
• Singer: speciesism is immoral discrimination
against animals just because they are not
human
– But surely there are important differences here, e.g.
reason, emotional depth, self-awareness, moral
agency
– Reply: true, but these are not relevant to causing
suffering
Implications
• Should we stop eating meat, wearing
leather, conducting animal experiments?
• Would doing so reduce the amount of
(animal) suffering in the world more than it
would increase (human) suffering?
• Suffering is wrong, but killing is not
– Happy animals that are replaced
Kant
• Human beings are ends in themselves.
– We have a rational will and can adopt ends.
– This is the only thing that is unconditionally
good.
– The goodness of every other end depends upon
being adopted by a will.
• Animals are not rational, and so are not ends
in themselves.
– So they can be treated as means to our ends.
Kant
• We have no duties to animals, but we do
have duties – to people – regarding animals
– We must not become unkind through how we
treat animals
• Objection: the harm to the animal, not
ourselves, is what is wrong
• Objection: do we have duties to other
human beings who aren’t rational?
Regan’s deontology
• Creatures who are a ‘subject of a life’ have
rights
– For such creatures, there is a way its life goes for
it, and this matters to it
• Therefore, we can’t kill them for any reason
less important than saving life.
• All right to life is equal
– We should discriminate between more and less
valuable lives
Aristotle
• Animals are not rational and cannot share in
eudaimonia
– So our moral concern with eudaimonia has little place
for considering animals
• Recent virtue theory: there are virtuous and
vicious ways of treating animals
• What matters is not just capacities, but
relationship
– We are not wrong to privilege those closest to us
– But we do form bonds with animals, and we share
aspects of our form of life with them
Virtue ethics
• Compassion requires that we take
account of animal suffering
– Reducing animals to ends is selfishness
• Implications?