© Per Ariansen
END OF FIRST SESSION
© Per Ariansen
Singer: Sentientism
• The anthropocentric Western tradition
• Animals serving man: Aristotle, Jesus, St. Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, Kant
• Speciesism
• Singer: Disregarding pain in animals is like disregarding pain in black slaves. We all know that skin colour cannot waive equal consideration of interests - anchored in subjective experiences of
pleasure and pain. Note Singer’s link to utilitarianism.
• Dealing with conflicting interests
• The stronger interests (more intense mental awareness) trump the weaker. Normally humans trump animals, but the reverse may occur.
• Rights?
• Utilitarianists dislike rights. Any interest can be overruled for a gain in total happiness.
Nevertheless: Animals have the basic right not to be wantonly harmed. Other rights are contractual and exist only among adult humans. Infants and mentally disabled are classified with animals.
• Killing (painlessly)
• Humans fear death. Humans grieve the dead. And: humans have preference for a continued future. Animals have preferences? (If yes: does biocentrism follow?)
• Practical applications
• Ban factory farming! Be a vegetarian! Avoid clear-cutting of woods, avoid pesticides with spillover to harmless species.
• Rarity, species
• Species or animals gain no direct protection from rarity. Species have instrumental value to
humans and animals and this should be taken into account. Possibly species have value as work of art, but then Singer ‘s last man on earth may rightfully burn “Mona Lisa” if it gives him enjoyment.
© Per Ariansen
Regan: Animal rights.
•Anti-cruelty and Pro-welfare
• Anti-cruelty (Non-maleficence) prohibits unnecessary pain. No agreement about what is unnecessary. Pro-welfare adds positive duties of care (Beneficence): animals should be made to thrive with humans. But animals are still allowed to be domesticated and “harvested”. Further there is usually (utilitarianist) replaceability: the welfare of some may be sacrificed to raise that of others (medical experiments).
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Animal rights as abolitionism, not anti-cruelty or pro-welfare.
• Animal Rights is not interest based. It can well be in an animal’s interest to be in a zoo. But it is wrong. First priority: see to it that animals are free. Then consider interests (conflicts between humans and animals).
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Empirical basis for animal moral standing - being subject-of-a-life
• Necessary: a complex mental life: perception, desire, belief, memory, intention, and a sense of the future
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Critique of Deep ecology (Leopold variety, ecocentrism):
• With focus on ecosystems, individuals become expendable. This is eco-fascism. Not so in Animal rights. Meat eating as a litmus test. Rarity does not trump individual rights. Species have no rights. Aesthetics and rarity are valuable, but cannot be summed up to outweigh rights.
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Practical policies.
• Abolition of test animals for cosmetics or medical purposes. Abolition of hunting, fur and skin trade, animals for entertainment.
© Per Ariansen
Taylor: Biocentrism
•The “bad” anthropocentric view
• Nature has instrumental value only :-(. Restrictions may apply only as a consequence of inter-human morality (property). Taylor: This limited attitude is morally impermissible.
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The biocentric outlook (content)
• Taylor: All living things are full bio-community members. All things are interdependent. Living beings have a good of their own. One ought to identify with their telos. The good of humans (who are biotical newcomers: The gnat is older than man) have no automatic priority. (Note similarity to Næss)
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The biocentric outlook (form)
• 1. A belief system (What sth. “is”). 2 A moral attitude (that what “is” has inherent value). 3. Sets of norms (what we ought (not) to do regarding the inherently valuable). Each item of nature interfaces with” 1-3. What sth. is informs of its value which in turn indicates treatment. Note link to phenomenology (coming topic).
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On ranking of worth and interests
• Ranking by merit or achievement is biased in favour of humans. Elevating humans because of their morality will not work. Animals are not immoral but amoral. Living beings have worth, and only caste societies consider worth rankable. But they do not have more worth than humans, so we do not have to forego vital interests. But non-vital must cede to vital non-human interests. (Except the need for museums and airports etc.)
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Comments
• The idea of an outlook (attitude of respect) evades the question of normative legitimacy. Also, see William French in “Dialogues”: human interests get unwarranted priority.
© Per Ariansen
William French
(Dialogues p.135 ff)on Taylor
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Equality of interests
• Taylor requires species-blind assessment of interests where vital should trump non-vital interests. But several human non-vitals are given priority if of high cultural and technical importance.
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Priority-relevance of moral agency
• Taylor: Self-defence should be species-blind, but (French): this will favour humans because of their moral agency Per: Humans can do vicarious self-defence because of their capacity for moral reasoning. I practice this gives an advantage (a moral right of way) to humans.
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The weight of non-basic human interests
• Contradiction: On the one hand human achievements (museums, airports) are valuable to the degree that promoting them overrules vital non-human interests. On the other, all
beings have the same worth. Per: must not their achievements be judged from within their species perspective?
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Killing equal interest-holders
• All interest holders have a right to a sufficient share of resources (e.g. land), but humans can kill animals because they do not have a higher worth than humans.
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Per on on Taylor in light of French’s critique
• Taylor seems split between two kinds of egalitarianism: one of equal sharing and one of equal claims. Since humans are more clever claimants, they can claim a larger share. All beings are entitles to what they can lay a hand on. Too bad animals don’t have hands.
© Per Ariansen
Leopold: Land ethic
•The scope of ethics has expanded through history.
• Odysseus and the slave girls
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Ecological evolution of ethics:
• Ethics as restriction on action in the struggle for existence. Community instinct. (See Donald Scherer’s liberalist perspective on sustainability)
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Extended community should include the land.
• Analogously one owes respect to all members of the land community and to the whole of the community.
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Conquest (of land) without respect is doomed
• Kentucky settlements produced bluegrass. Oklahoma settlements produced dust-bowls. The land ruled. (Note respect as instrumental insight)
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Tragedy of the commons
• Wisconsin 1930-40: No farmer is willing to sign collective restrictions on land use.
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Conservation must be motivated beyond individual economic gain.
• Preservation of predators is so far explained in instrumental terms. Now wildlife must be seen as inherently valuable. The moving image is the food chain, the land pyramid. All entities are interdependent, they give and get. We should protect the beauty,
© Per Ariansen
Rolston: Value in all of nature. Teloscentrism
•Value detection
• Value result from objective properties being detected by a human consciousness.
Analogous to secondary qualities. Grass is green, but it takes an eye to see it. Per: does the analogue hold?
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Value i humans
• Humans are conscious valuers and can compare value and appreciate value for others.
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Value in animals
• Animals value in that they seek something rather than anything. They can only value themselves (and offspring?) intrinsically. Others and other things are of instrumental value.
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Value in plants
• Objective value. Conatus. But no consciousness, so plants are holders of value, not beholders of value.
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Value in species
• The telos is the spreading and increased adaptation of the gene set. Species can be improved. They are value-able. And can be destroyed - harmed.
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Value in ecosystems
• Stability and adaptability are telos. Can be harmed.
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Value of Earth
© Per Ariansen
Cahen: Can an ecosystem have a good of its own?
•Moral considerability requires having a good of one’s own (interests)
• And also requires that it is wrong towards the interest-bearer to frustrate these interests. Sentience provides such a good, and so does the goal-directedness (conatus) of plants. Do systems have an analogous conatus?
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Suggested criteria for goal directedness
• Ernest Nagel: Required: when goals are defended by rejecting disturbing attacks, plus: when goals are reached by more than one route.
• Charles Taylor: Required: when the cause is “for the sake of” the effect. Artefacts are designed for an effect. Natural selection designs for fecundity. Accidental goals (tendencies and behavioural by-products) are fended off, since they are not the “purpose” of the design. Plants are “saved” by natural selection (the designer of “objective” purposes).
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Problem: no group selection
• The stability of systems serves and is caused by individuals, not the system. The case of “only four eggs”. For the good of the species? No, for the optimal chances of getting offspring which survive. More eggs would jeopardise the litter.
• Per: perhaps only humans can have goals for supraindividual entities? Why should organisms have the spreading of genes as a goal? What is so good about
© Per Ariansen
Katz: The conflict between individualistic
and holistic ethics
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Requirements of an env. ethic
• (1) Some interface with existing ethics. (2) Conducive of current env. policies.
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Re ecosystem-holistic env. ethics:
• Holistic and individual-oriented ethics are incompatible (1). Animal and human
interests are on a par and subordinate to ecosystem health (1). Rarity per se
has no significance (2). Thus: holism fails to satisfy (1) and (2)
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Re species-holistic env. ethics
• Species as “moral individuals”. Accommodates rarity. Indirectly protects
ecosystems. Incompatible with animal liberation. Weak indirect protection of
landscapes. Katz’ objection:Strange to award moral status to a collection. What
is the ethically relevant subvenient carrier?
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Re an ethic protecting individual entities.
• Problems identifying the across-the-board morally relevant property. Even with
life as a criterion, non-living entities (landscapes, rivers) are excluded.
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Synthesis?
• Lexical ordering of moral priority: Ecosystem health first, then individual
well-being. Individual are protected unless they threaten the ecosystem. Per: What
of humans in that respect?
© Per Ariansen
Ariansen: Anthropocentrism
•The breach with nature
• Humans are expelled from happy but heteronomous Paradise: no automatic way of life. Reason expelled us. Can reason regain an autonomous Paradise?
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Autonomy as self-legislation.
• Reason as the servant of desires will not give autonomy, but “slavery” under whims. Autonomy is non-whimsical (disciplined) agency. Discipline under divine commands would be heteronomy. Therefore autonomy is obeying self-imposed rules, These cannot be “private” (whims again), but must be rules for general human conduct. Rules must be universalizable..
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The analogy of games and rules.
• The rules of chess constitute the world of chess players. The rules of ethical reason constitutes the moral world of humans. As rules they are should not generate
contravolitions or contradictions. Players will have player rights and duties derived from the rule-set:This is the inherent value of players. Only beings that understand the game can be players. The result is anthropocentrism. (Note the marginal case objection.
See next slide).
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What of non-humans?
• Self-legislation loses its meaning unless there is a tacit respect for pain in others. But compassion alone is pre-ethical. Ethics is rationalised management of compassion, and as such builds on the general respect for suffering in others. Offending animals offends no specific ethical norm, but it offends or mocks the project of ethics. Analogous to respect for the (judicial) law: no law specifies it, but it is required for the rule of law.
© Per Ariansen
The Marginal Case Argument
•Morality and abilities - a problem
• If one restricts the moral community to those that have certain abilities, the the moral community will either 1) contain no animals and not all humans (advanced abilities) or all humans plus some animals (less advanced abilities). The humans that run the risk of being left out are the senile etc. - aka. marginal humans.
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Criterion: The ability to detect injustice
• The suggestion by Ariansen and other Kantians is that the criterion is the ability to understand morality, minimally having an awareness of justice and injustice. What of marginal people in this respect?
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Latent morality
• The reply is that morality may be latent in people - like when they sleep or are
unconscious. Senile people may have a longer moral “pause”, but they may well yet understand justice, either in bright moments to come or in the present, but concealed behind an inability to communicate clearly. Marginal humans get the benefit of the doubt.
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Why not the same for animals?
• Because only humans - no animals - have a “normal” case where the ability to detect injustice unquestionably is present. Further: whoever believes that animals mutely know justice, should hold them morally responsible for their acts. Few animal-supporters are prepared to do that.
© Per Ariansen
Norton: Weak anthropocentrism
•Felt and considered preferences
• Narrow human preferences seem “immoral”, but there are considered preferences (that accord with a considered world view).
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Strong and weak anthropocentrism
• Strong: value decided by felt preferences. Weak: value decided by preferences considered in relationship to a world view.
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Objections
• Regan:Ideals of harmony imply intrinsic value to nature. Norton: no, possibly instrumental value or value in ideals of spirituality (improving the soul). Reductionists claim:
considered preferences are just preferences; there is no essental distinction between weak and strong p.. (analogous to util: all is satisfaction). Norton: No. Per: content can’t be
separated from preferences. There is no such thing as a general preference. Thus no reductionism.
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Norton on fulfilling (felt) preferences of future generations (suspend to
futgen?)
• The Parfit paradox precludes ethical concern for future individuals. We have such concern, thus the concern can go beyond individuals, not merely stop by individuals’s felt
preferences. The task of maintaining and increasing a bequest needs not bring in its effect on individuals (Such effects concern distribution).
• Distributional concern is politics as usual. Long term bequests are guided by considered interests in what is a good life in a good environment. Entail both use and conservation and substitute technologies.
© Per Ariansen
McShane: Still an advantage to
non-athropocentrism?
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The anthropocentrism battle: and the winner is ....
• ”if we take serious the interests of future generations of humans and get
clear about all the ways in which the health of the natural environment
improves the quality of human life, we will have all the arguments we
need [to behave environmentally responsible]
• Non-a. have been charged with metaphysical, epistemological and/or
normative inadequacy.
• A. requires only minor changes in philosophical outlook.
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Non-a. is nevertheless relevant for how we feel
• Feelings governs acts, influences what we care about and what proper
human existence should be.
• Love, awe and respect requires that the object be seen as valuable in its
own right (non-a.). Such an attitude might, since feelings govern acts,
influence the way we manage nature.
© Per Ariansen
Summary of ethically relevant properties
• Sentience (Singer): • non-cruelty, welfare • Life-experience (Regan):
• rights to non-interference • A good of its own (Rolston):
• non-interference
• A good of its own (Leopold): • ecological management
(doctoring nature) • Conatus or life (Taylor):
• minimalist non-deceiving
interference, retributive justice • Conatus or life (Schweitzer):
• devout care
• The ability to understand ethics
(Kant and some athropocentrists):
• strict negative duties. Less
strict positive duties to humans. Ban on wanton pain and
destruction of non-humans. • Being a natural “something”
(Næss T):
• promotion of flourishing or self-realization for other and self, other being ultimately all other. • Being an object of God-ordained
human custodianship (Christian stewardship):
