Applied Ethics

1. Applied Ethics Section 3 Animal Ethics

2. History • Animal ethics was pioneered in the ancient world & resurfaced in the humanitarian movement of the early modern period. • It re-emerged in the 1970s because of new trends like factory-farming.

3. Criticism of the Treatment of Animals • Philosophical criticism took the form of an animal rights critique from Tom Regan &, differently, a consequentialist critique from Peter Singer.

4. Regan • Argues cogently that if humans have a right not to be made to suffer gratuitously, then so do nonhuman animals. • Since most farming, & almost all factory-farming, involves avoidable suffering, this supplies a strong case against consuming its products, & thus for vegetarianism, even before the supposed right to life of food-animals is as much as considered.

5. Singer • Defends the Principle of the Equal Consideration of Equal Interests. Two beings with the same interests at stake should be considered equally. • But greater interests should receive greater consideration, irrespective of species. • Thus the suffering inflicted in the course of factory-farming, being much greater than the interest of human diners in the pleasures of taste, means that the products of factory-farms should be avoided & boycotted.

6. Counter-criticism • R.G. Frey provided a counter-critique. • This critique is related to arguments from rights, from killing & from suffering.

7. Genetic Engineering • Animals with genetic material from more than one species are produced. • Such genetic engineering is sometimes considered to raise ethical issues. • If the resulting creatures suffer, that clearly requires a strong justification.

8. Objection Concerning Natural Kinds • The objection that genetic engineering of itself involves violence to natural kinds through failing to respect naturally evolved species & should therefore be discontinued is not in itself convincing. • BUT… that does not make it right to generate dysfunctional creatures.

9. Responsibilities • Those responsible for producing a new strain or species need to reflect on whether such a creature will be able to function healthily. • They cannot plead that because the new creatures will belong to no natural kind, nothing will count as harming them (see note 1 [final slide, this Section]). • Ethics doesn’t turn exclusively on considerations of harm. It can turn on avoiding the quality of life of new creatures being avoidably low.

10. Reduced Capacities • It’s not acceptable to avoid harm by rendering new animal species insentient (as is suggested by Frey); while this might prevent suffering, it also prevents intrinsically valuable animal lives being lived (see note 2 [final slide, this Section]).

11. Environmental Impacts Some practices in agriculture & fishing produce unintended environmental outcomes: • Animal-rearing has far reaching environmental implications. • Fishing has been so intensively pursued that many species have become endangered, & the ecological balance of the oceans has been placed at risk. • Consumers should take into account systemic impacts as well as animal treatment.

12. Animal ethics is concerned with… the welfare of individual beings. preventing pain & suffering. Environmental ethics is concerned with… the survival of species & ecosystems. a broader range of goods & evils. Animal Ethics V Environmental Ethics It has been argued that animal ethics & environmental ethics conflict.

13. Both in Conflict with Humanism • J. Baird Callicott suggested that these two branches of ethics form two apices of an equilateral triangle. • The third apex is traditional humanism that pays little or no heed to anything but the interests of humans (see note 3 [final slide, this Section]). • He later revised this view (see note 4 [final slide, this Section]).

14. Avoiding the Supposed Conflict • Animal ethics & environmental ethics need not have different values, despite being concerned with different fields. • Environmental ethics need not be committed to ethical holism (as if there were no intrinsic value in the lives of individuals), while animal ethics need not be blind to the importance of the systems & structures within which individual consumption & the treatment of individual creatures take place.

15. Notes • Robin Attfield, ‘Genetic Engineering: Can Unnatural Kinds BeWronged?’, in P.R. Wheale, & R.M. McNally, (eds.) Animal Genetic Engineering: Of Pigs, Oncomice and Men (London: Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 201-208. • R.G. Frey, Rights, Killing and Suffering: Moral Vegetarianism and Applied Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 179-180. Robin Attfield, ‘Intrinsic Value and Transgenic Animals’, in Andrew Johnson & Alan Holland (eds.), Animal Biotechnology and Ethics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1998), pp. 172-189. • J. Baird Callicott, ‘Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair’, Environmental Ethics, 2, 1980, 311-328, reprinted in Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic, Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp.15-38. • J. Baird Callicott, ‘Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again’, in Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic, pp. 49-59.