Review of Gary E. Varner's Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare’s Two-Level Utilitarianism (original) (raw)
Between the Species: An Online Journal for the Study of Philosophy and Animals, 2012
This is an important addition to the literature on nonhuman animal welfare and rights with some potential implications for environmental ethics. As the title of his book makes clear, Varner is working within the utilitarian tradition. As such, issues relating to animal sentience, cognition and personhood will take on special significance. He goes beyond the intuitive speculation often found in the philosophical literature and brings a large body of recent empirical research to the table.
Animal Ethics Around the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
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.
Utilitarianism generalized to include animals
Animal Sentience
In response to the seventeen commentaries to date on my target article on reducing animal suffering, I propose that the term "welfarism" (when used pejoratively by animal advocates) should be qualified as "anthropocentric welfarism" so as to leave "welfarism" simpliciter to be used in its generic sense of efforts to improve conditions for those who need it. Welfarism in this benign sense-even in its specific utilitarian form (maximizing the sum total of net welfare) with long-term future effects and effects on others (including animals) appropriately taken into account-should be unobjectionable (even if not considered sufficient by all advocates). Rights, both animal and human, should be similarly grounded in the promotion of welfare. My strategic proposal to concentrate on reducing the suffering of farm animals now has been criticized as putting human interests above those of animals and as ignoring the suffering of animals in the wild. These criticisms misunderstand my position and fail to distinguish between the short and long run or between strategy and ideal morality. My position is consistent with perfect impartiality between animals and humans at the level of ideal morality. I also respond to the extreme asymmetrical focus on reducing suffering, ignoring the moral importance of pleasure (the argument against trading off "my orgasms against others' agony"). Even mild measures for reducing animal suffering such as enlarging cage size for factory chickens and prohibiting the cutting of live eels have to be based on some interpersonal and interspecies comparisons of welfare. We must not use the philosophical uncertainty about the comparability or the very existence of animal sentience to diminish our efforts to protect animal welfare.
Ethics and Nonhuman Animals: A Philosophical Overview
The central purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the relationship between ethics and nonhuman animals. That is, in what way ethics has been understanding and incorporating nonhuman animals as participants in our moral community. To that end, I present how some of the different ethical perspectives concur to offer a more adequate response to the question of how we should include nonhuman animals in morality. The theoretical contributions offered by Peter Singer (utilitarianism), Tom Regan (law), Karen Warren (care) Martha Nussbaum (capabilities) and Maria Clara Dias (functionings) are called for the construction of this panorama and to the development of this debate.
Annotated bibliography in animal ethics and environmental philosophy
2023
This annotated bibliography is the first assignment for the "Environmental Philosophy" course of the "Philosophy and Religion" master programme at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. In this assignment, I present and discuss four papers in animal ethics and environmental philosophy: * Joel Feinberg, “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations” (1974) * Peter Singer, “All Animals Are Equal” (1974) * Paul W. Taylor, “The Ethics of Respect for Nature” (1981) * Mark Sagoff, “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce” (1984)
Environmental Ethics: The Case of Wild Animals
In this thesis, I will claim that—based on a few reasonable assumptions about the capacities many nonhumans most probably possess—capacity-oriented accounts of ethics must recognize the full moral considerability of all sentient animals. Once moral considerability has been established, I will maintain that there are strong reasons to intervene in nature to prevent or reduce the harms wild animals suffer. Even though many animal ethicists have traditionally claimed that humans should stay away as far as possible from the natural habitats of wild animals, I will show that all arguments to relieve us from our general obligation to intervene in nature on their behalf are either inconsistent, or based on a very skewed conception of life in the wild. Consequently, I will argue that (1) we have to raise concern about the subject of wild animal suffering, (2) we have to convince ecologists to shift their resources from conservation biology to "welfare biology," and (3) we must question speciesism, as most of us already accept that we should intervene in nature when human interests are at stake.
People spend much time writing and discussing clever or stupid actions, learning and memory, suffering or feeling happy, and how to deal with the various aspects of the world in which we live. These are the subjects of “Sentience and Animal Welfare by Donald M. Broom. Sentience is a term used in relation to human questions, such as when a foetus or baby is fully functioning, and how we decide when brain function has been lost in the brain-damaged or old. However, its most widespread use concerns the abilities of various animal species. How clever are the animals and what can they feel? The similarities between humans and other animals are described at length. After introducing the term sentience, the ethical background to some of the issues discussed is presented. The relevant aspects of research on cognition, feelings, emotion, awareness and motivation are explained with many examples. The concept of welfare is of key importance in our lives and in that of other animals. Hence the concept and its history are explained and the rapid developments in animal welfare science chronicled. How the methodology is being related to legislation and codes of practice is discussed. Animal welfare is a part of the sustainability of systems in which we use or have an effect on animals. The increase in the power of consumers in dictating to retail companies, production companies and governments is emphasised. Other matters discussed include the welfare of whales, animal welfare and the World Trade Organisation action on seal products, welfare aspects of the use of genetically modified and cloned animals and ethical decisions about human sentience and animal protection.
Animals and Ethics – table of contents and preface
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.
Towards an Animal Ethics for the Anthropocene
Springer eBooks, 2016
The complex problems of wildlife conservation during the current stage of the Anthropocene -the 'Great Acceleration' -are forcing us to develop an alternative to the traditional (utilitarian und deontological) approaches within animal ethics. I will put forward Martha Nussbaum's capability approach as a promising alternative to these traditional approaches, with the proviso that the current version of her list of basic animal capabilities will need to undergo some revision. "A dog has the right to be a dog." Article 12 of the Constitution of the Republic of Užupis
Science, sentience, and animal welfare
I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue that even the most progressive current welfare policies lag behind, are ignorant of, or arbitrarily disregard the science on sentience and cognition.
Animal Ethics: The middle ground
How far is too far? The current sphere of animal ethics consists of two main theories; utilitarianism, as advocated by Peter Singer, and the animal rights (or deontological) view, as put forth by Tom Regan. I believe that both these views have their shortcomings because they lack the tools to make them context specific and thus seem very extreme and unreasonable. In this paper, I reject the bases of both Singer and Regan’s view and show that it is impossible to maintain moral consistency when strictly following either of them. I then argue for a middle ground between the two views with practical elements from Singer and Regan, which could provide us with a normative theory on what action to take with regards to issues such as consumption of meat and animal testing.
The Problem of the Question About Animal Ethics: Discussion with Mark Coeckelbergh and David Gunkel
In this article I discuss the thesis put forward by David Gunkel and Mark Coeckelbergh in their essay Facing Animals: A Relational, Other-Oriented Approach to Moral Standing. The authors believe that the question about the status of animals needs to be reconsidered. In their opinion, traditional attempts to justify the practice of ascribing rights to animals have been based on the search for what is common to animals and people. This popular conviction rests on the intuition according to which we tend to treat better those beings that are closer to us and resemble man in one way or the other. The attempts to ascribe a special status to animals are therefore based on the question ''What properties does the animal have?''. However, the question is not well formulated because it leads to a number of ontological and epistemological problems. The question should rather be ''What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?''. Whilst fully subscribing to the suggestion, I cannot agree to the way the question is understood by both authors. I will demonstrate that the question opens up a transcendental dimension of reflections and may provide a clear justification of the need to engage in animal ethics. To do so, I will separate the easy and hard problems of animal ethics and use a different approach from the one suggested by Gunkel and Coeckelbergh to demonstrate how the need to pursue animal ethics may be justified.
Animal Welfare and the Moral Value of Nonhuman Animals
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2010
The animal welfare position, which represents the prevailing paradigm for thinking about our moral and legal obligations to nonhuman animals, maintains that animal life has a lesser value than human life and, therefore, it is morally acceptable to use animals as human resources as long as we treat them ‘humanely’ and do not inflict ‘unnecessary’ suffering on them. According to this position, animals are not self-aware and live in an eternal present; they do not have an interest in continuing to live as distinguished from an interest in not suffering. The use and killing of animals does not per se involve inflicting harm on them. The view that animal life has a lesser moral value cannot be justified in that all sentient beings are self-aware and have an interest in continuing to live. Although we do not treat all humans equally, we accord all humans the right not to be treated as property. We cannot justify not according this one right to all sentient nonhumans.
Personhood and animals: three approaches
Environmental Ethics
A common Western assumption is that animals cannot be persons. Even in animal ethics, the concept of personhood is often avoided. At the same time, many in cognitive ethology argue that animals do have minds, and that animal ethics presents convincing arguments supporting the individual value of animals. Although "animal personhood" may seem to be an absurd notion, more attention needs to placed on the reasons why animals can or cannot be included in the category of persons. Of three different approaches to personhood-the perfectionist approach, the humanistic approach, and the interactive approach-the third approach is the strongest. Personhood defined via interaction opens new doors for animal ethics.
Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness
Research in Phenomenology, 2010
The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals-and other people-as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of difference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals.