Human Beings and the Other Animals

[Pages:37]Moral Animals Human Beings and the Other Animals

Christine M. Korsgaard Harvard University

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except towards their pets...

- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man1

Human ethical practices and attitudes with respect to the other animals exhibit a curious instability. On the one hand, most people believe that it is wrong to inflict torment or death on a non-human animal for a trivial reason. Skinning a cat or setting it on fire by way of a juvenile prank is one of the standard examples of obvious wrongdoing in the philosophical literature. Like torturing infants, it is the kind of example that philosophers use when we are looking for something ethically uncontroversial, so that disputes about the example won't get in the way of the point we are trying to make.2 On the other hand, human beings have traditionally counted nearly any reason we might have for hurting or killing animals, short of malicious enjoyment, as non-trivial and sufficient. We kill non-human animals, and sometimes inflict pain on them, because we want to eat them, because we can make useful products out of them, because we can learn from experimenting on them, and

1 Princeton edition, p. 101 2 For just a few randomly chosen examples, see Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 160; Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 7; Peter Geach, "Assertion," Philosophical Review 74, 1965, p. 463.

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because they interfere with agriculture or gardening or in other ways are pests. We also kill them, and sometimes inflict pain on them, for sport ? in hunting, fishing, cockfighting, dogfighting, bullfighting, and so on. We may even kill them because, having done some sort of useful work for us, they have outlived their usefulness and are now costing us money. Uneasily balanced between these two apparent extremes of attitude is the conviction, common to so many people, that when we do use animals for our own purposes, we should treat them as humanely "as possible." The eating should go on, but the animals should be kept in pleasant conditions and killed humanely; the experiments should go on, but the pain should be palliated as much as conditions allow; the hunting should go on, but the scrupulous hunter should aim for the swift kill that involves no extended terror or suffering. The shape of our moral concern for the other animals, if I may put it that way, is rather like that of our moral concern for prisoners of war. Just as we strike an uneasy balance between treating prisoners of war as enemies and treating them in a way that acknowledges our common humanity, so we strike an uneasy balance between treating the other animals as a usable resource ? as Kant put it, as mere means - and treating them in a way that acknowledges our common nature as conscious and sensate beings.

So the other animals count, morally speaking, and yet they count for very little, or they count in a way that is easily overridden. At least, given our practices, that is what we seem to think. What, if anything, could justify this combination of attitudes? I believe that there are two primary types of claims that people have offered for what I

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will refer to as the moral asymmetry between our duties to our fellow human beings and our duties to the other animals. These two primary types of claims are first, that the moral asymmetry is based on the distinctive character of the human good, and second, that it is based on our distinctive relationship to the right. Those who favor the first theory suppose, speaking a bit roughly, that what happens to human beings is more important than what happens to the other animals, because of the type of good of which we are capable. Those who favor the second theory suppose that we can only be strictly obligated towards those who can be obligated to us, because morality is something like a reciprocal agreement: you respect me and my interests, and I will respect you and yours. Since the other animals are not moral animals and cannot be obligated to us, our duties with regard to them are of a less stringent kind, or are not owed directly to them at all, or more likely both. In this lecture, I use the accounts of the good and of our moral nature that I have set forth in the previous lectures to explain why I think that these considerations do not justify the moral asymmetry. Both arguments, I believe, reflect important truths, but once we see more clearly what those truths are, we can see that they do not imply anything as strong as the moral asymmetry. Questions about what we owe to the other animals should not be set aside on the grounds that we probably owe them very little anyway. They need to be worked out in detail.

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I. The Distinctive Nature of the Human Good Many people, I think, have the intuition that the human good somehow

matters more than the good of the other animals, because human beings themselves matter more than the other animals. In fact I think that it is hard to separate these two theses ? that the human good is more important and that human beings are more important ? because what it means to value a living creature is to regard its good as something important, something that should be respected or promoted. We value different things in different ways ? beauties of art and of nature by appreciating and preserving them, valuable activities by participating in them, valuable commodities by producing and consuming them ? and the way we value living beings is by caring about their good for its own sake.3 But in addition to that, it is normally also true that those who think human beings are more important than the other animals would explain that importance by pointing to some special feature of human beings ? rationality, self-consciousness, the connectedness of experience and identity over time - some special feature that would also inform the special character of the human good. So I will treat the two hypotheses ? that the human good is more objectively important than the good of animals and that human beings are more important than animals ? as being essentially the same.

3 Of course we might also value them as commodities, foods, slaves, etc. But that isn't valuing them in the sense I am talking about here. If a slave protested that his master didn't think that he was of any importance, that he had any value, it would be a bad joke for the master to reply "What do you mean? I treasure you, for you have been my most productive worker, and I expect you to fetch a very high price."

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The idea that the human good is more important than that of the other animals should not be confused with another idea ? namely the idea that it might be morally right, for some other reason, for us to treat the good of other human beings as more important, just as we might sometimes have reasons to treat the good of our loved ones as more important.4 In this section, I am considering the claim that there is something distinctive about the nature of the human good that makes it more important than the good of the other animals. I will take up questions about rightness later on.

The thought that the human good is objectively more important than the good of animals fits most easily into the objective realist theory of the good that I described in the first lecture. According to that theory, any creature's good consists in its participation in intrinsically valuable experiences and activities. Our intellectual and aesthetic faculties give us access to more intrinsically valuable activities and experiences, and so we are capable of a better life. Or one might hold that human beings themselves just have a greater objective value. Since on this theory value is a property, and I suppose comes in degrees, there is nothing incoherent in thoughts of this kind. It is not clear to me how anything as strong as the moral asymmetry could follow from this merely quantitative difference, however.

However that may be, if you accept the theory of value that I proposed in my first lecture, the idea that human beings are more important than the other animals

4 Or as uniquely important.

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is not merely false, it is incoherent. A creature's final good, I claimed, is its wellfunctioning as the kind of thing that it is in circumstances conducive to that wellfunctioning, and the individual things that are good are good because they contribute to or are parts of that well-functioning. An important part of the reason I advocate that theory of value is that it preserves the essentially relational character of the good ? that is, it preserves the intuition that everything that is good must be good for someone ? good for some person or animal, and from some point of view. And I would say the same thing, for the same reasons, about the concept of "importance." Everything that is important is important because it is important to or for some creature. But for whom is the human good more important than the good of another animal? Keep in mind here that I am separating the claim we are talking about now from the different claim that it is morally right for us to treat the human good as more important ? the claim here is just that human beings and the human good just are more important, in themselves. In the theory of value I advocate, there is simply no way to make that claim, for nothing is important in itself, that is, detached from its importance for some person or animal.5 So I'm not claiming that animals are just as important as human beings are. I am claiming, rather, that this kind of comparison makes no sense. Things are important to the kinds of beings to

5 Some of Nagel's arguments in The View from Nowhere turn on the idea that things that are good-for various people become detached goods in the way I am denying is possible here ? as if they were important to the universe, as indeed his title suggests.

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whom things can be important ? sensate creatures. Things are not important to the universe, so to speak.6

Many philosophers have noticed, however, that these claims about the relativity of value seem to have radical and counter-intuitive implications. Surely sometimes when we are deciding between two courses of action, we choose the one whose consequences matter more to one of several different people. For instance, you might decide to leave a sum of money to a niece for whom it will mean the difference between being able to go to college or not, rather than to a nephew for whom it will only mean additional luxuries. And you might do this with some thought about doing more good ? you might think it is better. But for whom is this better? It is better for your niece if she gets to go to college, but better for your nephew if he gets additional luxuries. Yet we may feel that the fact that it is more important to your niece to go to college than it is for your nephew to acquire more luxuries has some weight. The problem here is a variant of the general problem of aggregation ? why should we save two lives rather than one, if there is no one for whom that is better? Of course it is possible to argue that we have no reason to do

6 Linda Zagzebski asked whether it would make a difference if human beings were more important to a deity. I don't think it would. That would only show that human beings were more important to that deity, not that we are more important absolutely. Suppose we took the deity to have the good of the entire universe in view? Then the problem would be like the problem of utilitarianism ? if the good of an individual is the source of normative claims, it doesn't cease to be so once it is added to an aggregate. So even if aggregation gives us a reason to promote the good of the whole, it doesn't cancel our reason to promote the good of the individual, and therefore doesn't settle the question which we should promote when they come into conflict. The good of the universe is like that ? it can't swallow up the good of individuals.

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so,7 but many people have a strong intuition that even those who concede the relativity of value should make a place in their theories for doing more good. I do not have a method of doing this to offer to you, but let us suppose ? just for the sake of argument ? that it can done. Then we can still ask this question: Should we pursue human goods in preference to animal goods on the grounds that our goods are greater goods to us than theirs are to them? In his Tanner Lectures, written as a work of fiction called The Lives of Animals, J. M. Coetzee imagines a professional philosopher who makes precisely this claim. His philosopher says: "It is licit to kill animals because their lives are not as important to them as ours are to us."8 If our lives are a more important to us than the lives of animals are to them, could that justify the killing animals for our own purposes?

There are various reasons why people might think that we are more important to ourselves than the animals are to themselves. Few people seriously hold the Cartesian view that animals are unconscious mechanisms, but I suspect that some people tell themselves that the consciousness of an animal must be something so dim and disconnected that his life cannot be very important to him at all. Because he lacks self-consciousness, the thought seems to be, a non-human animal cannot integrate his experiences with one another as the experiences of a single being, so his life is a flow of disconnected experience. But self-consciousness comes in various degrees and kinds: even if something like this is true of primitive animals, there seems no

7 Taurec, "Should the Numbers Count?" 8 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, p. 64.

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