## 1. The Moral Considerability of Animals



To say that a being deserves moral consideration is to say that there
is a moral claim that this being can make on those who can recognize
such claims. A morally considerable being is a being who can be
wronged. It is often thought that because only humans can recognize
moral claims, it is only humans who are morally considerable. However,
when we ask why we think humans are the only types of beings that can
be morally wronged, we begin to see that the class of beings able to
recognize moral claims and the class of beings who can suffer moral
wrongs are not co-extensive.


### 1.1 Speciesism



The view that only humans are morally considered is sometimes referred
to as "speciesism". In the 1970s, Richard Ryder coined
this term while campaigning in Oxford to denote a ubiquitous type of human centered prejudice, which he
thought was similar to racism. He objected to favoring one's own
species, while exploiting or harming members of other species. Peter
Singer popularized the term and focused on the way speciesism, without
moral justification, favors the interests of humans: 



> 
> 
> the racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight
> to the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash
> between their interests and the interests of those of another race.
> Similarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to
> override the greater interests of members of other species. The
> pattern is the same in each case. (Singer 1974: 108) 
> 
> 
> 



Discrimination based on race, like discrimination based on species is
thought to be prejudicial, because these are not characteristics that
matter when it comes to making moral claims.



Speciesist actions and attitudes are prejudicial because there is no
*prima facie* reason for preferring the interests of beings
belonging to the species group to which one also belongs over the
interests of those who don't. That humans are members of the
species *Homo sapiens* is certainly a distinguishing feature of
humans--humans share a genetic make-up and a distinctive
physiology, we all emerge from a human pregnancy, but this is
unimportant from the moral point of view. Species membership is a
morally irrelevant characteristic, a bit of luck that is no more
morally interesting than being born in Malaysia or Canada. As a
morally irrelevant characteristic it cannot serve as the basis for a
view that holds that our species deserves moral consideration that is
not owed to members of other species.



One might respond that it is not membership in a biological category
that matters morally, but rather the social meaning of those
categories, meanings that structure not only the institutions we
operate within, but how we conceptualize ourselves and our world.
Humans have developed moral systems as well as a wide range of other
valuable practices, and by creating these systems, we separate the
human from the rest of the animal kingdom. But the category
"human" itself is morally contested. Some argue, for
example, that racism is not simply, or even primarily about
discrimination and prejudice, but rather a mechanism of dehumanizing
blackness so as to provide the conditions that makes humans white (see
Fanon 1967; Kim 2015; Ko& Ko 2017). According
to this line of thought, speciesism isn't focused on
discrimination or prejudice but is a central tool for creating human
(and white) supremacy or exceptionalism.


### 1.2 Human Exceptionalism



Like speciesism, human exceptionalism can be understood in different
ways. The most common way of understanding it is to suggest that there
are distinctly human capacities and it is on the basis of these
capacities that humans have moral status and other animals do not. But
which capacities mark out all and only humans as the kinds of beings
that can be wronged? A number of candidate capacities have been
proposed--developing family ties, solving social problems,
expressing emotions, starting wars, having sex for pleasure, using
language, or thinking abstractly, are just a few. As it turns out,
none of these activities is uncontroversially unique to human. Both
scholarly and popular work on animal behavior suggests that many of
the activities that are thought to be distinct to humans occurs in
non-humans. For example, many species of non-humans develop long
lasting kinship ties--orangutan mothers stay with their young for
eight to ten years and while they eventually part company, they
continue to maintain their relationships. Less solitary animals, such
as chimpanzees, baboons, wolves, and elephants maintain extended
family units built upon complex individual relationships, for long
periods of time. Meerkats in the Kalahari desert are known to
sacrifice their own safety by staying with sick or injured family
members so that the fatally ill will not die alone. All animals living
in socially complex groups must solve various problems that inevitably
arise in such groups. Canids and primates are particularly adept at
it, yet even chickens and horses are known to recognize large numbers
of individuals in their social hierarchies and to maneuver within
them. One of the ways that non-human animals negotiate their social
environments is by being particularly attentive to the emotional
states of others around them. When a conspecific is angry, it is a
good idea to get out of his way. Animals that develop life-long bonds
are known to suffer from the death of their partners. Some are even
said to die of sorrow. Darwin reported this in *The Descent of
Man*: "So intense is the grief of female monkeys for the
loss of their young, that it invariably caused the death of certain
kinds" (1871: 40). Jane Goodall's report of the death of
the healthy 8 year old chimpanzee Flint just three weeks after the
death of his mother Flo also suggests that sorrow can have a
devastating effect on non-human animals (see Goodall 2000:
140-141 in Bekoff 2000). Coyotes, elephants and killer whales
are also among the species for which profound effects of grief have
been reported (Bekoff 2000) and many dog owners can provide similar
accounts. While the lives of many, perhaps most, non-humans in the
wild are consumed with struggle for survival, aggression and battle,
there are some non-humans whose lives are characterized by expressions
of joy, playfulness, and a great deal of sex (Woods 2010). Recent
studies in cognitive ethology have suggested that some non-humans
engage in manipulative and deceptive activity, can construct
"cognitive maps" for navigation, and some non-humans
appear to understand symbolic representation and are able to use
 language.[1]



It appears that most of the capacities that are thought to distinguish
humans as morally considerable beings, have been observed, often in
less elaborate form, in the non-human world. Because human behavior
and cognition share deep roots with the behavior and cognition of
other animals, approaches that try to find sharp behavioral or
cognitive boundaries between humans and other animals remain
controversial. For this reason, attempts to establish human uniqueness
by identifying certain capacities, are not the most promising when it
comes to thinking hard about the moral status of animals.


### 1.3 Personhood



Nonetheless, there is something important that is thought to
distinguish humans from non-humans that is not reducible to the
observation of behavior best explained by possessing a certain
capacity and that is our "personhood". The notion of
personhood identifies a category of morally considerable beings that
is thought to be coextensive with humanity. Historically, Kant is the
most noted defender of personhood as the quality that makes a being
valuable and thus morally considerable (for a contemporary utilitarian
discussion of personhood, see Varner 2012). Kant writes:



> 
> 
> ...every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not
> merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that
> will...Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on
> nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a
> relative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other
> hand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature
> already marks them out as ends in themselves. (Kant [1785] 1998: [Ak
> 4: 428])
> 
> 
> 



And:



> 
> 
> The fact that the human being can have the representation
> "I" raises him infinitely above all the other beings on
> earth. By this he is a person....that is, a being altogether
> different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals,
> with which one may deal and dispose at one's discretion. (Kant
> [1798] 2010: 239 [Ak 7: 127])
> 
> 
> 



More recent work in a Kantian vein develops this idea. Christine
Korsgaard, for example, argues that humans "uniquely" face
a problem, the problem of normativity. This problem emerges because of
the reflective structure of human consciousness. We can, and often do,
think about our desires and ask ourselves "Are these desires
reasons for action? Do these impulses represent the kind of things I
want to act according to?" Our reflective capacities allow us
*and* require us to step back from our mere impulses in order
to determine when and whether to act on them. In stepping back we gain
a certain distance from which we can answer these questions and solve
the problem of normativity. We decide whether to treat our desires as
reasons for action based on our conceptions of ourselves, on our
"practical identities". When we determine whether we
should take a particular desire as a reason to act we are engaging in
a further level of reflection, a level that requires an endorseable
description of ourselves. This endorseable description of ourselves,
this practical identity, is a necessary moral identity because without
it we cannot view our lives as worth living or our actions as worth
doing. Korsgaard suggests that humans face the problem of normativity
in a way that non-humans apparently do not:



> 
> 
> A lower animal's attention is fixed on the world. Its
> perceptions are its beliefs and its desires are its will. It is
> engaged in conscious activities, but it is not conscious *of*
> them. That is, they are not the objects of its attention. But we human
> animals turn our attention on to our perceptions and desires
> themselves, on to our own mental activities, and we are conscious
> *of* them. That is why we can think *about*
> them...And this sets us a problem that no other animal has. It is
> the problem of the normative.... The reflective mind cannot
> settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason.
> (Korsgaard 1996: 93)
> 
> 
> 



Here, Korsgaard understands "reason" as "a kind of
reflective success" and given that non-humans are thought to be
unable to reflect in a way that would allow them this sort of success,
it appears that they do not act on reasons, at least reasons of this
kind. Since non-humans do not act on reasons they do not have a
practical identity from which they reflect and for which they act. So
humans can be distinguished from non-humans because humans, we might
say, are sources of normativity and non-humans are not.


#### 1.3.1 Rational Persons



But arguably, Kant's view of personhood does not distinguish all
and only humans as morally considerable. Personhood is not, in fact,
coextensive with humanity when understood as a general description of
the group to which human beings belong. And the serious part of this
problem is not that there may be some extra-terrestrials or deities
who have rational capacities. The serious problem is that many humans
are not persons. Some humans--i.e., infants, children, people in
comas--do not have the rational, self-reflective capacities
associated with personhood. This problem, unfortunately known in the
literature as the problem of "marginal cases", poses
serious difficulties for "personhood" as the criterion of
moral considerability. Many beings whose positive moral value we have
deeply held intuitions about, and who we treat as morally
considerable, will be excluded from consideration by this account.



There are three ways to respond to this counter-intuitive conclusion.
One, which can be derived from one interpretation of Kant, is to
suggest that non-persons are morally considerable indirectly. Though
Kant believed that animals were mere things it appears he did not
genuinely believe we could dispose of them any way we wanted. In the
*Lectures on Ethics* he makes it clear that we have indirect
duties to animals, duties that are not toward them, but in regard to
them insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to
persons.



> 
> 
> If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of
> service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot
> judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity
> which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle
> his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he
> who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.
> ([1784-5] 1997: 212 [Ak 27: 459])
> 
> 
> 



And one could argue the same would be true of those human beings who
are not persons. We disrespect our humanity when we act in inhumane
ways towards non-persons, whatever their species.



But this indirect view is unsatisfying--it fails to capture the
independent wrong that is being done to the non-person. When someone
rapes a woman in a coma, or whips a severely brain damaged child, or
sets a cat on fire, they are not simply disrespecting humanity or
themselves as representatives of it, they are wronging these
non-persons. So, a second way to avoid the counter-intuitive
conclusion is to argue that such non-persons stand in the proper
relations to "rational nature" such that they should be
thought of as morally considerable. Allen Wood (1998) argues in this
way and suggests that all beings that potentially have a rational
nature, or who virtually have it, or who have had it, or who have part
of it, or who have the necessary conditions of it, what he calls
"the infrastructure of rational nature", should be
directly morally considerable. Insofar as a being stands in this
relation to rational nature, they are the kinds of beings that can be
wronged.



This response is not unlike that of noted animal rights proponent, Tom
Regan, who argues that what is important for moral consideration are
not the differences between humans and non-humans but the
similarities. Regan argues that because persons share with certain
non-persons (which includes those humans and non-humans who have a
certain level of organized cognitive function) the ability to be
experiencing subject of a life and to have an individual welfare that
matters to them regardless of what others might think, both deserve
moral consideration. Regan argues that subjects of a life:



> 
> 
> want and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect
> things. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure
> and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and
> frustration, our continued existence or our untimely death--all
> make a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as experienced,
> by us as individuals. As the same is true of ... animals ...
> they too must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with
> inherent value of their own. (Regan 1985: 24) 
> 
> 
> 



A third way of addressing this problem has been taken up by Korsgaard
who maintains that there is a big difference between those with
normative, rational capacities and those without, but unlike Kant,
believes both humans and non-humans are the proper objects of our
moral concern. She argues that those without normative, rational
capacities share certain "natural" capacities with
persons, and these natural capacities are often the content of the
moral demands that persons make on each other. She writes, 



> 
> 
> what we demand, when we demand ... recognition, is that our
> natural concerns--the objects of our natural desires and
> interests and affections--be accorded the status of values,
> values that must be respected as far as possible by others. And many
> of those natural concerns--the desire to avoid pain is an obvious
> example--spring from our animal nature, not from our rational
> nature. (Korsgaard 2007: 7) 
> 
> 
> 



What moral agents construct as valuable and normatively binding is not
only our rational or autonomous capacities, but the needs and desires
we have as living, embodied beings. Insofar as these needs and desires
are valuable for agents, the ability to experience similar needs and
desires in patients should also be valued.


#### 1.3.2 Legal Persons



In the courts, all humans and some corporations are considered persons
in the legal sense. But all animals, infants and adults, are not legal
persons, but rather, under the law they are considered property. There
have been a few attempts to change the legal status of some nonhuman
animals from property to persons. The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP)
founded by Steven Wise, has filed a series of cases in the New York
courts seeking to establish legal personhood for particular
chimpanzees being held in the state, with the goal of protecting their
rights to bodily integrity and liberty, and allow them to seek remedy,
through their proxies, when those rights are violated. Chimpanzees are
a good test case for establishing nonhuman legal personhood as they
are, according to the documents filed by NhRP, autonomous beings with
sophisticated cognitive abilities including 



> 
> 
> episodic memory, self-consciousness, self-knowing, self agency,
> referential and intentional communication, mental time-travel,
> numerosity, sequential learning, meditational learning, mental state
> modeling, visual perspective taking, understanding the experiences of
> others, intentional action, planning, imagination, empathy,
> metacognition, working memory, decision-making, imitation, deferred
> imitation, emulation, innovation, material, social, and symbolic
> culture, cross-modal perception, tool-use, tool-making,
> cause-and-effect. (petition of NhRP v. Samuel Stanley, p. 12, see Other Internet Resources)
> 
> 
> 



The legal arguments to extend personhood beyond the human parallel
more general ethical arguments that extend ethical consideration
outward from those who occupy the moral center. Turning to empirical
work designed to show that other animals are really similar to those
considered legal persons, primatologists submitted affidavits
attesting to what they have learned working with chimpanzees. Mary Lee
Jensvold suggests 



> 
> 
> there are numerous parallels in the way chimpanzee and human
> communication skills develop over time, suggesting a similar unfolding
> cognitive process across the two species and an underlying
> neurobiological continuity. (Jensvold affidavit, p. 4, in Other Internet Resources)
> 
> 
> 
> 



James King notes 



> 
> 
> chimpanzees and humans resemble each other in terms of their ability
> to experience happiness and the way in which it relates to individual
> personality. (King affidavit, p. 8, in Other Internet Resources) 
> 
> 
> 



And Mathias Osvath makes remarkable claims about chimpanzee
personhood:



> 
> Autonoetic consciousness gives an individual of any species an
> autobiographical sense of it self with a future and a past. Chimps and
> other great apes clearly possess an autobiographical self, as they are
> able to prepare themselves for future actions... they likely can,
> just as humans, be in pain over an anticipated future event that has
> yet to occur. For instance, confining someone in a prison or cage for
> a set time, or for life, would lose much of its power as punishment if
> that individual had no self-concept. Every moment would be a new
> moment with no conscious relation to the next. But, chimpanzees. and
> other great apes have a concept of their personal past and future and
> therefore suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill one's
> goals or move around as one wants; like humans they experience the
> pain of anticipating a never-ending situation. (Osvath affidavit, pp. 4-7, in Other Internet Resources)
> 
> 
> 



These claims, as well as those of others experts, identify the
relevantly similar capacities that chimpanzees and other great apes
share with humans and it is in virtue of these capacities that legal
personhood is sought.


### 1.4 Sentience



Using rational nature or cognitive capacities as the touchstone of
moral considerability misses an important fact about animals, human
and nonhuman. Our lives can go better or worse for us. Utilitarians
have traditionally argued that the truly morally important feature of
beings is unappreciated when we focus on personhood or the rational,
self-reflective nature of humans, or the relation a being stands in to
such nature, or being the subject of a life, or being legal persons.
What is really important, utilitarians maintain, is the promotion of
happiness, or pleasure, or the satisfaction of interests, and the
avoidance of pain, or suffering, or frustration of interests. Bentham,
one of the more forceful defenders of this sentientist view of moral
considerability, famously wrote:



> 
> 
> Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been
> neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded
> into the class of *things*. [original emphasis] ... The
> day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in
> which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of
> slaves, have been treated ... upon the same footing as ...
> animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal
> creation may acquire those rights which never could have been
> withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have
> already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human
> being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a
> tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of
> legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the
> *ossacrum*, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a
> sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace
> the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the
> faculty for discourse?...the question is not, Can they
> *reason*? nor, Can they *talk*? but, Can they
> *suffer*? (Bentham 1780/1789: chapter xvii, paragraph 6)
> 
> 
> 


 Contemporary utilitarians, such as Peter Singer (1990, 1979
[1993]), suggest that there is no morally justifiable way to exclude
from moral consideration non-humans or non-persons who can clearly
suffer. Any being that has an interest in not suffering deserves to
have that interest taken into account. And a non-human who acts to
avoid pain can be thought to have just such an interest. Even
contemporary Kantians have acknowledged the moral force of the
experience of pain. Korsgaard, for example, writes "it is a
pain to be in pain. And that is not a trivial fact" (1996:
154).



> 
> 
> When you pity a suffering animal, it is because you are perceiving a
> reason. An animal's cries express pain, and they mean that there
> is a reason, a reason to change its conditions. And you can no more
> hear the cries of an animal as mere noise than you can the words of a
> person. Another animal can obligate you in exactly the same way
> another person can. ...So of course we have obligations to
> animals. (Korsgaard 1996: 153)
> 
> 
> 



When we encounter an animal in pain we recognize their claim on us,
and thus beings who can suffer are morally considerable.


## 2. The Moral Significance of Animals' Moral Claims



That non-human animals can make moral claims on us does not in itself
indicate how such claims are to be assessed and conflicting claims
adjudicated. Being morally considerable is like showing up on a moral
radar screen--how strong the signal is or where it is located on
the screen are separate questions. Of course, how one argues for the
moral considerability of non-human animals will inform how we are to
understand the force of an animal's claims.



According to the view that an animal's moral claim is equivalent
to a moral right, any action that fails to treat the animal as a being
with inherent worth would violate that animal's right and is
thus morally objectionable. According to the animal rights position,
to treat an animal as a means to some human end, as many humans do
when they eat animals or experiment on them, is to violate that
animal's right. As Tom Regan has written,



> 
> 
> ...animals are treated routinely, systematically as if their
> value were reducible to their usefulness to others, they are
> routinely, systematically treated with a lack of respect, and thus are
> their rights routinely, systematically violated. (Regan 1985: 24).
> 
> 
> 



The animal rights position is an absolutist position. Any being that
is a subject of a life has inherent worth and the rights that protect
such worth, and all subjects of a life have these rights equally. Thus
any practice that fails to respect the rights of those animals who
have them, e.g., eating animals, hunting animals, experimenting on
animals, using animals for entertainment, is wrong, irrespective of
human need, context, or culture.



The utilitarian position on animals, most commonly associated with
Peter Singer and popularly, though erroneously, referred to as an
animal rights position, is actually quite distinct. Here the moral
significance of the claims of animals depends on what other morally
significant competing claims might be in play in any given situation.
While the equal interests of all morally considerable beings are
considered equally, the practices in question may end up violating or
frustrating some interests but would not be considered morally wrong
if, when all equal interests are considered, more of these interests
are satisfied than frustrated. For utilitarians like Singer, what
matters are the strength and nature of interests, not whose interests
these are. So, if the only options available in order to save the life
of one morally considerable being is to cause harm, but not death, to
another morally considerable being, then according to a utilitarian
position, causing this harm may be morally justifiable. Similarly, if
there are two courses of action, one which causes extreme amounts of
suffering and ultimate death, and one which causes much less suffering
and painless death, then the latter would be morally preferable to the
former.



Consider factory farming, the most common method used to convert
animal bodies into relatively inexpensive food in industrialized
societies today. An estimated 8 billion animals in the United States
are born, confined, biologically manipulated, transported and
ultimately slaughtered each year so that humans can consume them. The
conditions in which these animals are raised and the method of
slaughter causes vast amounts of suffering (see, for example, Mason
& Singer 1980 [1990]). Given that animals suffer under such conditions
and assuming that suffering is not in their interests, then the
practice of factory farming would only be morally justifiable if its
abolition were to cause greater suffering or a greater amount of
interest frustration. Certainly humans who take pleasure in eating
animals will find it harder to satisfy these interests in the absence
of factory farms; it may cost more and require more effort to obtain
animal products. The factory farmers, and the industries that support
factory farming, will also have certain interests frustrated if
factory farming were to be abolished. How much interest frustration
and interest satisfaction would be associated with the end to factory
farming is largely an empirical question. But utilitarians are not
making unreasonable predictions when they argue that on balance the
suffering and interest frustration that animals experience in modern
day meat production is greater than the suffering that humans would
endure if they had to alter their current practices.



Importantly, the utilitarian argument for the moral significance of
animal suffering in meat production is not an argument for
vegetarianism. If an animal lived a happy life and was painlessly
killed and then eaten by people who would otherwise suffer hunger or
malnutrition by not eating the animal, then painlessly killing and
eating the animal would be the morally justified thing to do. In many
parts of the world where economic, cultural, or climate conditions
make it virtually impossible for people to sustain themselves on plant
based diets, killing and eating animals that previously led relatively
unconstrained lives and are painlessly killed, would not be morally
objectionable. The utilitarian position can thus avoid certain charges
of cultural chauvinism and moralism, charges that the animal rights
position apparently cannot avoid.



It might be objected that to suggest that it is morally acceptable to
hunt and eat animals for those people living in arctic regions, or for
nomadic cultures, or for poor rural peoples, for example, is to
potentially condone painlessly killing other morally considerable
beings, like humans, for food consumption in similar situations. If
violating the rights of an animal can be morally tolerated, especially
a right to life, then similar rights violations can be morally
tolerated. In failing to recognize the inviolability of the moral
claims of all morally considerable beings, utilitarianism cannot
accommodate one of our most basic prima facie principles, namely that
killing a morally considerable being is wrong.



There are at least two replies to this sort of objection. The first
appeals to the negative side effects that killing may promote. If, to
draw on an overused and sadly sophomoric counter-example, one person
can be kidnapped and painlessly killed in order to provide body parts
for four individuals who will die without them, there will inevitably
be negative side-effects that all things considered would make the
kidnapping wrong. Healthy people, knowing they could be used for spare
parts, might make themselves unhealthy to avoid such a fate or they
may have so much stress and fear that the overall state of affairs
would be worse than that in which four people died. Appealing to
side-effects when it comes to the wrong of killing is certainly
plausible, but it fails to capture what is directly wrong with
killing.



A more satisfying reply would have us adopt what might be called a
multi-factor perspective, one that takes into account the kinds of
interest that are possible for certain kinds of morally considerable
beings, the content of interests of the beings in question, their
relative weight, and the context of those who have them. Consider a
seal who has spent his life freely roaming the oceans and ice flats
and who is suddenly and painlessly killed to provide food for a human
family struggling to survive a bitter winter in far northern climes.
While it is probably true that the seal had an immediate interest in
avoiding suffering, it is less clear that the seal has a future
directed interest in continued existence. If the seal lacks this
future directed interest, then painlessly killing him does not violate
this interest. The same cannot be said for the human explorer who
finds himself face to face with a hungry Inuit family. Persons
generally have interests in continued existence, interests that,
arguably, non-persons do not have. So one factor that can be appealed
to is that non-persons may not have the range of interests that
persons do.



An additional factor is the type of interest in question. We can think
of interests as scalar; crucial interests are weightier than important
interests, important interests are weightier than replaceable
interests, and all are weightier than trivial interests or mere whims.
When there is a conflict of interests, crucial interests will always
override important interests, important interests will always override
replaceable interests, etc. So if an animal has an interest in not
suffering, which is arguably a crucial interest, or at least an
important one, and a person has an interest in eating that animal when
there are other things to eat, meaning that interest is replaceable,
then the animal has the stronger interest and it would be wrong to
violate that interest by killing the animal for food if there is
another source of food available.



Often, however, conflicts of interests are within the same category.
The Inuit's interest in food is crucial and the explorer's
interest in life is crucial. If we assume that the explorer cannot
otherwise provide food for the hunter, then it looks as if there is a
conflict within the same category. If you take the interests of an
indigenous hunter's whole family into account, then their
combined interest in their own survival appears to outweigh the
hapless explorer's interest in continued existence. Indeed, if
painlessly killing and eating the explorer were the only way for the
family to survive, then perhaps this action would be morally condoned.
But this is a rather extreme sort of example, one in which even our
deepest held convictions are strained. So it is quite hard to know
what to make of the clash between what a utilitarian would condone and
what our intuitions tell us we should believe here. Our most basic
prima facie principles arise and are accepted under ordinary
circumstances. Extraordinary circumstances are precisely those in
which such principles or precepts give
 way.[2]



The multi-factor utilitarian perspective is particularly helpful when
considering the use of animals in medical research. According to the
animal rights position, the use of animals in experimental procedures
is a clear violation of their rights--they are being used as a
mere means to some possible end--and thus animal rights
proponents are in favor of the abolition of all laboratory research.
The utilitarian position, particularly one that incorporates some kind
of multi-factor perspective, might allow some research on animals
under very specific conditions. Before exploring what a utilitarian
might condone in the way of animal experimentation, let us first
quickly consider what would be morally prohibited. All research that
involves invasive procedures, constant confinement, and ultimate death
can be said to violate the animal's crucial interests. Thus any
experiments that are designed to enhance the important, replaceable,
or trivial interests of humans or other animals would be prohibited.
That would mean that experiments for cosmetics or household products
are prohibited, as there are non-animal tested alternatives and many
options already available for consumers. Certain psychological
experiments, such as those in which infant primates are separated from
their mothers and exposed to frightening stimuli in an effort to
understand problems teenagers have when they enter high school, would
also come into question. There are many examples of experiments that
violate an animal's crucial interests in the hopes of satisfying
the lesser interests of some other morally considerable being, all of
which would be objectionable from this perspective.



There are some laboratory experiments, however, that from a
multi-factor utilitarian perspective may be permitted. These are
experiments in which the probability of satisfying crucial or
important interests for many who suffer from some debilitating or
fatal disease is high, and the numbers of non-human animals whose
crucial interests are violated is low. The psychological complexity of
the non-humans may also be significant in determining whether the
experiment is morally justified. In the case of experimenting in these
limited number of cases, presumably a parallel argument could be made
about experimenting on humans. If the chances are very high that
experimenting on one human, who is a far superior experimental animal
when it comes to human disease, can prevent great suffering or death
in many humans, then the utilitarian may, if side effects are minimal,
condone such an experiment. Of course, it is easier to imagine this
sort of extreme case in the abstract, what a utilitarian would think
actually morally justified, again depends on the specific empirical
data.



In sum, the animal rights position takes the significance of morally
considerable claims to be absolute. Thus, any use of animals that
involves a disregard for their moral claims is problematic. The
significance of an animal's morally considerable interests
according to a utilitarian is variable. Whether an action is morally
justified or permissible will depend on a number of factors. The
utilitarian position on animals would condemn a large number of
practices that involve the suffering and death of billions of animals,
but there are cases in which some use of non-human animals, and
perhaps even human animals, may be morally justified (Gruen 2011: ch.
4; Gilbert, Kaebnick, & Murray 2012).


## 3. Alternative Perspectives on Human Relations to Other Animals



Given the long-standing view that non-humans are mere things, there
are still many who reject the arguments presented here for the moral
considerability of non-humans and the significance of their interests.
Nonetheless, most now realize that the task of arguing that humans
have a unique and exclusive moral status is rather difficult. Yet even
amongst those who do view animals as within the sphere of moral
concern, there is disagreement about the nature and usefulness of the
arguments presented on behalf of the moral status of animals.



Increasingly, philosophers are arguing that while our behavior towards
animals is indeed subject to moral scrutiny, the kinds of ethical
arguments that are usually presented frame the issues in the wrong
way. Some philosophers suggest that rational argumentation fails to
capture those features of moral experience that allow us to really see
why treating animals badly is wrong. The point, according to
commentators such as Stephen R.L. Clark and Cora Diamond, for example,
is that members of our communities, however we conceive of them, pull
on us and it is in virtue of this pull that we recognize what is wrong
with cruelty. Animals are individuals with whom we share a common life
and this recognition allows us to see them as they are. Eating animals
is wrong not because it is a violation of the animal's rights or
because on balance such an act creates more suffering than other acts,
but rather because in eating animals or using them in other harmful,
violent ways, we do not display the traits of character that kind,
sensitive, compassionate, mature, and thoughtful members of a moral
community should display.



According to some in the virtue ethics tradition, carefully worked out
arguments in which the moral considerability and moral significance of
animals are laid out will have little if any grip on our thoughts and
actions. Rather, by perceiving the attitudes that underlie the use and
abuse of non-human animals as shallow or cruel, one interested in
living a virtuous life will change their attitudes and come to reject
treating animals as food or tools for research. As Rosalind Hursthouse
recognized after having been exposed to alternative ways of seeing
animals:



> 
> 
> I began to see [my attitudes] that related to my conception of
> flesh-foods as unnecessary, greedy, self-indulgent, childish, my
> attitude to shopping and cooking in order to produce lavish dinner
> parties as parochial, gross, even dissolute. I saw my interest and
> delight in nature programmes about the lives of animals on television
> and my enjoyment of meat as side by side at odds with one
> another...Without thinking animals had rights, I began to see
> both the wild ones and the ones we usually eat as having lives of
> their own, which they should be left to enjoy. And so I changed. My
> perception of the moral landscape and where I and the other animals
> were situated in it shifted. (Hursthouse 2000: 165-166; see also
> Diamond 2001 [especially chs. 11 and 13], and Clarke 1977)
> 
> 
> 



Alice Crary argues that shifting perceptions of our moral landscapes
occur because these landscapes, and more precisely the rich worlds of
those who inhabit them, are not morally neutral. The characteristics
that philosophers tend to look for in other animals to determine
whether or not they are morally considerable, according to Crary, are
already infused with moral importance, "human beings and other
animals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics" (my
emphasis, 2016: 85) that are, as she puts it "inside
ethics". These values often sneak in under a supposedly neutral
gloss. By explicitly locating these characteristics inside ethics, the
texture, quality, and purposes of our ethical reflection on moral
considerability changes. Arriving at an adequate empirical
understanding requires non-neutral methods, identifying historical and
cultural perspectives as shaping how we consider other animals
morally. What ethical questions we think are important and how we
frame and answer them, will be different if we see our lives and the
lives of other animals as already imbued with moral values. 



Other feminist philosophers have taken issue with the supposedly
morally neutral methods of argumentation used to establish the moral
status of animals. For many feminists the traditional methods of
rational argumentation fail to take into account the feelings of
sympathy or empathy that humans have towards non-humans, feelings they
believe are central to a full account of what we owe non-humans and
why (see Adams & Donovan 1995; Donovan & Adams 2007; Adams
& Gruen 2014).



Feminist philosophers have also challenged the individualism that is
central in the arguments for the moral status of animals. Rather than
identifying intrinsic or innate properties that non-humans share with
humans, some feminists have argued instead that we ought to understand
moral status in relational terms given that moral recognition is
invariably a social practice. As Elizabeth Anderson has written: 



> 
> 
> Moral considerability is not an intrinsic property of any creature,
> nor is it supervenient on only its intrinsic properties, such as its
> capacities. It depends, deeply, on the kind of relations they can have
> with us. (Anderson 2004: 289).
> 
> 
> 



And these relationships needn't be direct. The reach of human
activity has expanded across the entire globe and humans are entangled
with each other and other animals in myriad ways. We participate in
activities and institutions that directly or indirectly harm others by
creating negative experiences, depriving them of their well-being, or
denying them opportunities to be who they are and pursue what they
care about. Philosophers Elisa Aaltola and Lori Gruen have argued for
refining our empathetic imagination in order to improve our
relationships with each other and other animals.



Even though it is challenging to understand what it is like to be
another, and even though we are limited by our inevitable
anthropocentric perspectives, being in respectful ethical relation
involves attempting to understand and respond to another's
needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and perspectives.
What Gruen calls, "entangled empathy" is a process that
involves both affect and cognition (Gruen 2015). Individuals who are
empathizing with others respond to the other's condition and
reflectively imagine themselves in the distinct position of the other
while staying attentive to both similarities and differences between
herself and her situation and that of the fellow creature with whom
she is empathizing. Entangled empathy involves paying critical
attention to the broader conditions that may negatively affect the
experiences and flourishing of those with whom one is empathizing, and
this requires those of us empathizing to attend to things we might not
have otherwise. It therefore also enhances our own experiences,
develops our moral imagination, and helps us to become more sensitive
perceivers.