De-Humanizing Morality (original) (raw)

Beastly Morality: Animals as Moral Agents

For centuries, without the slightest bit of embarrassment and only the most miniscule of caveats, philosophical discussions of morality have assumed that moral agents are human. These discussions constantly assume human wants, needs, and capacities, and the resulting theories – which are presented as theories of “morality itself” and “moral agency itself” – are thus nothing of the kind. Instead, they are carefully shaped so as to ensure that only human beings comfortably fulfill the requirements (and not even all of them). There are three contemporary discussions that challenge this practice: the debates over whether corporations, artificial intelligences, and non-human animals might qualify as moral agents. The difficulty in each case is to explore the question without relying on paradigms of moral agency that presume a human agent. I offer my own approach, developed in the context of the corporate moral agency debate, as one likely to solve this problem. I begin by tracing the historical expansions of the "circle of moral concern" (regarding moral subjects, or patients) and the "circle of moral respect" (regarding moral agents), exploring the approaches that have enabled previous expansions. I then present my own, functionalist account of moral agency -- basically, X is a moral agent if X can function as a moral agent -- and outline the process of evaluating whether corporations can meet this standard. In the final section, I briefly suggest what it might look like to approach the question of whether non-human animals might qualify as well, and close by raising some concerns.