Abstract
This chapter outlines the main views about the moral status of animals that pass the test of minimally rational acceptability: Animal Subjectivism, Pathocentrism, Relationalism, Environmentalism and Humanism. The rest of the chapter explains why these views are sufficient to partially represent some other socially widespread views (religions and societal attitudes) and shows what views (those incompatible with the findings of science and those that include incoherent attitudes toward animals) are to be excluded from public justification.
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Notes
- 1.
Building on the same premise, Rodd (1990: 2) draws diverse conclusions: “we have to admit that some kinds of fact necessarily include a notion of value: notably facts about mental states. The fact that a mental state is an unpleasant mental state also implies that the state is a bad and undesirable one.”
- 2.
On the difficulty of this distinction, see Zuolo (2016b).
- 3.
This distinction at the core is inclusive of and crosscuts other distinctions such as that between “shallow” and “deep ecology” (Naess 1993).
- 4.
For this reason, Sagoff (1993) has appropriately pointed out that, despite the common social origin, Environmentalism and Animalism—a label including more or less all the three previous views—have been developed in contrasting, if not incompatible, ways.
- 5.
“The beings in question here are ones who are born to us or to others to whom we are bound by the requirements of justifiability. This tie of birth gives us good reason to want to treat them ‘as human’ despite their limited capacities” (Scanlon 1998: 184).
- 6.
The attribution of fundamental (negative) rights (to life, not to suffer from pain or deprivation and so on) rests on “the fact that they [animals] have a subjective experience of the world” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011: 31).
- 7.
- 8.
What follows is valid also for such other indirect accounts as St. Thomas’s and Carruthers’s (1992).
- 9.
For a short but comprehensive account of the main Christian views on the treatment of animals, see Passmore (1975). He explains how the main views in Christianity ranged from an attitude of neglect of animal sensitivity (Augustine and St. Thomas) to the idea that animals foreshadow human beings (Maritain). What unites these different positions is the idea that only human beings have full moral considerability and that the only actions that are forbidden to animals are due to cruelty.
- 10.
More specifically, Linzey and Cohn-Sherbok (1997: 1–16) single out the following common features among Judaism and Christianity. First, animals are thought to be at humans’ disposal; second, some animals are unclean or inferior; third, sacrifice is sometimes required; and, fourth, animals have no rational soul.
- 11.
Similar positions have also been reaffirmed in such other official statements as papal Encyclicals.
- 12.
It is also significant that the treatment of animals is discussed in a section concerning the issue of respecting persons and their goods. This means that the concern we owe to them is somewhat derivate via the concern we owe to persons.
- 13.
For this reason, it is baffling that Mark Rowlands (2009: 159–62) considers the possibility of reincarnation in animals as a ground for including animals in a Kantian reformulation of Rawls’s original position under the veil of ignorance.
- 14.
For an argument supporting the political and liberal protection of human-animal relations, see Smith (2012).
- 15.
This does not mean that human relations of affection with companion animals are negligible or unimportant at the public level. Of course, they are so to the extent that they matter to people and they involve the life of animals that are deeply entrenched with humans. What I want to emphasize here is simply the idea that the above-mentioned attitude-views provide a flimsy ground for justifying the complex set of rules and principles that should govern our relations with animals. Clearly relations and attitudes may be relevant and can be the ground of a publicly acceptable view (Relationalism). However, they can be so, to the extent that they form a coherent view or are attached to further sets of principles and autonomous grounds.
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Zuolo, F. (2020). Views on the Moral Status of Animals. In: Animals, Political Liberalism and Public Reason. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49509-1_4
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