lecture notes 7/6/01

Kant: Duties to Animals

Duties: Direct and Indirect
- Relationship to rights
  - "A has a right to X against B by virtue of Y." Five main elements:
    1. The right-holder (A)
    2. The natue of the right
    3. The object of the right (X)
    4. The duty-bearer (B)
    5. The justifying ground (Y)
- A duty to some being is direct only if that being is an end-in-itself
- Any duty to a being is indirect if that being is not an end-in-itself, that duty being direct to some end-in-itself.
Kant: Our duties towards animals are indirect duties towards mankind.
Ends-in-Themselves - Self-Determination
- If a being can determine its own conduct through self-legislated principles derived from reasons, that being is an end-in-itself
  - Such rational self-determination involves self-consciousness
- Any end-in-itself can legislate universally for all ends-in-themselves and thus create the Moral Law
  - That makes such beings Moral Agents
- These beings aren't moral agents:
  - Beings who cannot so determine themselves are not ends-in-themselves; i.e., beings which are exclusively and exhaustively motivated by "appetite" or "desire"
  - beings whose behaviour can be exhaustively understood and explained by appeal to, say, the laws of stimulus-response or physiological accounts of motivation
- The only beings who can determine themselves by universal self-legislated rational principles of conduct are humans
- Therefore, humans are the only beings who are ends-in-themselves
Why Have we no Direct Duties to Animals?
- Direct Duties are owed to all and only those beings capable of formulating Duties and also capable of acting exclusively upon them
- Since non-human animals can neither formulate duties nor be motivated by them, no direct duties can be owing to them
- Why?
  [Kant's Test: It makes sense to ask: "For what purpose do animals exist?" but so sense to ask: "For what purpose do humans exist".]

Why Have we Indirect Duties to Animals? Why Treat Animals as We Might Treat Humans?

Any duty we have to an animal; e.g., to reward it or treat it with kindness, is properly considered a duty we have to humanity
We owe nothing to the animal itself - but our kindly actions towards animals, as analogous to actions concerning humans, serve to entrench and reinforce duties directly owed to all humans
Kant:
Such action helps to support us in our duties towards human beings, where they are bounden duties.

Tensions in Kant's View

There is nothing inevitable about a human's becoming hard-hearted towards humans by virtue of being cruel to animals
- Suppose it just didn't happen; i.e., that there was just no evidence that people who were cruel to animals ever failed in their moral duties to humans.
- Further, suppose that there was no evidence that people who were kind to animals transferred this kindness to humans.
- Would Kant then allow that nothing wrong was done in that cruelty? What are we to make of this:
  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."
What does it mean to Kant for an act to be "inhuman"?
- Presumably it signals a failing in a person's "humanity".
- But "humanity" may signal a quality such as: acting responsively to loyalty or suffering in general
- What seems to be relevant here is our identification in the non-human sphere not just analogues to what we respond to, but to the real article.

Regan: The Case for Animal Rights

Intro
- Applies Kant's principle to derive the egalitarian view
- "The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources"
Regan's objections to other views on the moral status of animals
- Indirect Duties (Kant)
  - Pain is pain, whatver the animal
- Indirect Duties (Contractarianism)
  - Contractarianism = the idea that moralilty consists of a set of rules that individuals voluntarily agree to follow
  - No guarantee that everyone gets to set the rules
- Cruelty-Kindness view
  - Idea: We have a direct duty to be kind to animals and not to be cruel to them
  - But there's no guarantee that a kind act or the absence of cruelty is right
- Utilitarian
  - No room for equal moral rights of individuals because it denies the existence of inherent value
    - Cup analogy (p. 475)
    - On Singer's utilitarian view the morally salient fact about our nature is our capacity to suffer or do well -- what matters is not us but how we are doing, how things are going for us in terms of suffering or well-being
    - In Regan's terms, we are merely vehicles for happiness or suffering when we are seen through the eyes of utilitarian moral theory
  - The best aggregated consequences for everyone are not always the best for each individual
    - Aunt Bea analogy (p. 475)
Regan's "rights" view on the moral status of animals
- Everyone has an equal amount of inherent value
  - They are "subjects of a life" (a thing conscious of its own welfare and interested in its promotion for its own sake)
  - to have value as something other than a receptacle for good (i.e., happiness) or bad (i.e., suffering) things.
  - to have status as more than a mere thing
  - to be more than a mere resource for others' use; it is value independent of what a creature can be used for.
    - "The genius and the retarded child, the prince and the pauper..." (p. 476)
- The ends don't justify the means
- Similarity to animals based on their being "subjects of a life"

Regan and Singer compared

Singer's view:	Regan's view:
Utilitarian (animal "liberation") Based on the possession of a capacity to suffer Whether one's interests are promoted or thwarted is morally basic No principled objection to using animals as means to our ends so long as those ends are very significant and legitimately outweigh the interests of the animals when given full and equal consideration	Kantian (animal "rights) Based on being a subject of a life One's inherent value as a subject of a life with ends of its own is morally basic Objects in principle to using animals as means to our ends; morality prohibits such use even if such use would bring about states of affairs where more and more important interests were satisfied and fewer frustrated

Regan replies to objections
- Obj. 1: Only humans have such value (477)
- Obj. 2: Animals have some value, but less than humans (477)

Some more questions

Is Regan's notion of inherent value sufficiently clear?
- What things don't have inherent value?
How might Singer reply to Regan?

Who has the burden of proof, those who would continue our practices or those who object to them?
- The standard practice is to treat animals as mere means to our fairly trivial ends (to satisfy our tastes in factory farming; to entertain us in rodeos and circuses; to die for the cause of 'sport' in hunting).
- Thus people almost inevitably expect that those who advocate the better treatment of animals must satisfy some burden of proof -- they must mount a sufficiently convincing case for their position before most people will acknowledge a moral obligation to change our culture's practices.
- Is it proper to place the burden of proof on the advocates of change in this way?
- How much evidence does it take to show that we have obligations not to treat animals in the way we do?