nor, Can they talk? Why is it typically wrong to kill human beings? I have seen animals shot dead in front of other animals, they notice that that animal’s behaviour isn’t what they expect from a functional m In fact, W does not in itself imply that eating an animal is wrong. I assume that animals warrant moral consideration i.e they ought to be taken into account in our moral decision making and so are unlike inanimate objects such as rocks or sticks. It would be bad for my dog if she died: she would be harmed by her death as this would deprive her of all of the goods of her life she would have enjoyed if she had not died. I think most people who own pet’s would have similar experiences to that described in my thought experiment, so I think many of them would believe that their pet’s death would be bad for the pet. Prominent in this paradigm shift was the lawyer/philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued in 1789 that, although a full-grown horse or dog is more rational and more able to communicate than a human infant, ‘the question is not, Can they reason? I have two choices: I can give her a drug that will make her nauseous and vomit or I can euthanize her. There are many ways this gap can be closed, which I will not go into in this post. However, after a few days she will make a full recovery and will be back to living a happy healthy life, probably for another 10 years or so. Once it is clear what is wrong with killing on some occasions it should become possible to explain why it is not wrong on others. This seems to be supported by these animals possessing temporally consistent behavioral traits (i.e a personality of sorts) and memories, which suggests some kind of psychological continuity. (6) claims that the wrongness of killing is based on the fact that killing frustrating an individuals desire to continue living. I may still grieve at her death, but since she was not deprived of a long valuable future by a premature death this grief would be minimal. In these cases it seems like it would be permissible to end the individual’s life: to euthanize them. This is a reasonable argument, though I would reject it because I think the harm done to the animal by ending it’s life would outweigh the very trivial gustatory pleasures we enjoy from eating meat. If we accept that it is bad for an animal to experience pain and suffering but not bad for them to die then this implies that it would be better for my dog to be euthanized, and worse for her to suffer for a short period before recovering. So such a “happy farms” would be an acceptable means of meat production. So I will assume that if someone accepts that it is wrong to cause an animal unnecessary suffering or wrong to kill them, then they will judge that it is wrong to purchase products that result from practices that involve animal suffering and death. I’m simply highlighting it may be wrong to assume that animals analyse and contemplate death in the same way humans do. What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities. Four possible explanations are: (4) Killing a human violates their universal right to life, (5) Killing a human being fails to respect them as a person, (6) Killing a human being frustrates their desire to live, (7) Killing a human being deprives them of a valuable future. To examine these arguemnts, I would recommend reading Robert Nozick on moral constraints, David DeGrazia “Taking Animals Seriously” and Tom Regan “The Case for Animal Rights”. ( Log Out /  If we provide a reasonably pleasant life and a relatively painless death, we have done nothing wrong. However, not all the calves that are born are needed to replenish the herd so most are killed at a young age for veal. I think it would bring me great happiness. Finally, (7) seems to be better than (6) in that it helps to explain why we have a desire to live, while (6) leaves this as a given. As such W does make a difference in practice: it suggests that we should not support happy farms in which the animal is free of suffering but is still killed and suggests that the egg and dairy industry would still be unethical unless their current practices were radically changed. Animal rights advocates counter that a lion, being a feline, is what is considered an obligate carnivore. He maintained that it was morally acceptable to use and kill animals for human purposes as long as we treated them well. If we saw killing an animal – however painlessly – as raising a moral issue, perhaps that might lead us to start thinking more of whether animal use is morally justifiable, rather than only whether treatment is ‘humane’. This means that the person accepts that pain and suffering is bad for an animal, they just reject that a painless death could also be bad. I will no longer be able to enjoy the activity of going on walks with her or being amused by seeing her scoff down her food. Effects of Hunting. However, many of the valuable states of affairs we are denied by our death would be more simple pleasures such as eating, playing, having sex, basking in the sun or simply enjoying the freedom to move around. Health problems are common, such as untreated infections and wounds, missing limbs, cannibalism, dead animals left to rot between living animals and lack of (clean) drinking water. Singer rejects the view that killing farmed animals is wrong, provided that the killing is truly painless. But, seeing as it is wrong to kill them, it must be wrong for reasons other than the possession of personhood. For example, perhaps killing a child is wrong because it deprives them of a long, valuable future. However, the benign carnivore also argues that there are situations in which raising and killing an animal for food would be acceptable. Alternatively, the benign carnivore could claim that the killing is justified by the pleasure we gain from eating the meat from the animal. As long as we have treated and killed an animal in a ‘humane’ way, we have done nothing wrong. ( Log Out /  For example, neonates and the severely mentally disabled may lack the capacity to conceive of their own death or the future to any significant degree. Furthermore, I assume that this moral considerability involves direct duties to animals: we have duties to animals, not just involving them. ouP uncorrected Proof revIses, t , neWgen acprof-9780199396078.indd 137 7/2/2015 9:30:30 PM Thus, consideration of what we judge to be better or worse for animals provides further support for (15), which in turn supports W. Another point of support is how W coheres well with our beliefs about when it is acceptable to euthanize an animal. I manage to track my dog through various CCTV footage and find that it ended up on a the doorstep of another person, who took in my dog and cared for her. In addition, I have argued that due to it’s strong merits, we have good reasons to accept the principle that depriving a human being of a valuable future is prima facie wrong. Rather, the harm of death is a negative or deprivational harm (for a discussion of the negative harm of death see Thomas Nagel’s “Death” or Don Marquis’s “Why Abortion is Immoral”). They tell me that she had a happy life and wanted for nothing. Let's Ask PETA. I originally planned on addressing it in this post, but realized that this would divert too much from the same argument, so in Section 4 I simply assumed the problem had been solved. Further steps would be needed to take us from the fact that killing an animal is wrong to eating animal products is wrong, because it may be permissible to eat an animal that died of natural causes or it may be acceptable to eat an animal that was killed by someone else. This strengthens the case for W, especially since the badness of an animal’s death is what explains W. W gains further indirect support by other beliefs that cohere with (15). If I give her the drug she will suffer from some of the after affects of eating chocolate for a few days and will feel horrible for a while due to the experience of nausea and several instances of vomiting. The long time foil of ethical vegans are what could be termed benign carnivores. Imagine that you’re on the playground during recess and one of your classmates throws a rock at you. And once you abandon mammalian pests, why not cows and pigs? In this case, someone who was an ethical vegan on the grounds of reducing suffering may decide to begin eating eggs and dairy again. In the previous sections I have tried to establish W. But, “what difference does W actually make?” someone may ask. So why does the truth of W matter? If we believed our future was not a valuable one, such as in the cases of terminally ill patients discussed above, we may no longer desire to live and may form the rational desire to die. A tendency to harm animals suggests that we may also tend to act cruelly towards humans too, which is morally unacceptable in Kantian Ethics. This is because animals possess valuable experiences similar to that of humans and because many animals have a future of which they can be deprived if they are killed. However, this also fails to explain H for reasons similar to that given for (5). In order to keep cows lactating they must become pregnant once per year, leading to large numbers of calves being born each year. I also think they tend to be stronger than the arguments for W, as the empirical facts and ethical principles underlying them (that animals can suffer and that modern agricultural practices cause large amounts of suffering) are much more firmly grounded than those I will draw upon to justify W. For these kind of arguments, I encourage you to look into the work of Peter Singer in “Animal Liberation” or a previous post of mine giving a short argument for ethical veganism on those grounds. Commitment to W would thus make a difference: we should continue to boycott the dairy and egg industry until it stops implementing practices that lead to huge numbers of animal deaths. Do humans have a moral right to life, or only a legal one? However, animals also experience good mental states and take an interest in many activities. I have claimed that W is supported by an argument from analogy with humans and because of (15): an animal’s death is typically bad for the animal. 2. This belief coheres well with (15) and W, which only assert the prima facie wrongness and badness of animal deaths and base this upon the value of an animal’s future. Sentience is not a characteristic that has evolved to serve as an end in itself. Half of all chickens bred by the laying industry are killed soon after birth because they are males who are unable to produce eggs. An animal raised for food is being used by others rather than being respected for itself. Come on people, they do the same. As the biologist Donald Griffin, one of the most important cognitive ethologists of the 20th century, noted, it is arbitrary to deny animals some sort of self-awareness given that animals who are perceptually conscious must be aware of their own bodies and actions, and must see them as different from the bodies and actions of other animals. The problem is that it simply asserts a right to life, but provides no explanation of why humans possess this right. If someone inflicts suffering on a dog or cat, they are excoriated. In this post, I will attempt to argue for this claim by appealing to an analogy with one explanation for why killing humans beings is wrong. I offered some reasons against this and expressed my belief that this line of argument fails, but my argument needs to be shored up. Killing animals is not the problem. It is time that we rethink this issue. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have.’ Bentham maintained that we actually do animals a favour by killing them, as long as we do so in a relatively painless manner: ‘The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature … [W]e should be the worse for their living, and they are never the worse for being dead.’ In other words, the cow does not care that we kill and eat her; she cares only about how we treat and kill her, and her only interest is not to suffer. In conclusion, I have presented arguments for believing that killing animals is typically wrong. The final belief that W coheres well with concerns our reasons for thinking pain and suffering are bad. So in part my concern for her safety is directed towards protecting my own interests, as I wish to continue having enjoyable experiences with my dog. "Animals have moral status, and animal suffering matters because it's a harm to something that counts morally. Hunting is bad for the environment and disturbs the population and nature cycle. He argued that we could no more morally justify ignoring the suffering of animals based on their species than we could ignore the suffering of slaves based on their skin colour. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. This would include people suffering from terminal, incurable diseases or horrific incapacitating injuries. Continued existence is in their interest. Take a position on this question, taking special note of the considerations raised in chapter four and five of Singer’s book. This individual will recover from their depression in a week but is currently without long term desires that would be frustrated by their death. As such, we would now have a justification for ending the animal’s life, and our killing of the animal would actually be in the animal’s interests. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Another major issue I did not discuss is how the badness of death for animals compares to that for humans. You are putting someone through pain and suffering for no reason other then your own pleasure, Whether that is the fun of killing them, Or … So, we are left with the conclusion that all four of the accounts given seem inadequate as explanations of H. However, we should not become pessimistic. More needs to be said to fully refute the benign carnivores position, but I leave that for another time. The problem is making them suffer. For some, this is because they reject the idea that death is bad for us: they believe that because death results in our nonexistence it cannot be good or bad for us. We could use symbolic communication; they couldn’t. In this post I have argued for W, the claim that it is prima facie wrong to kill animals. We share these valuable experiences with animals, and thus the differences in our capacities for experiencing valuable things does not seem so wide that we could deny them futures of value. Now, (7) seems to have many merits over the other explanations. This is actually a position held by Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher who authored Animal Liberation. It is because we judge our future to be a valuable one that we desire to continue to live. A person is an individual who is rational, capable of forming long term goals  and acting for reasons. Animals in traps will chew their paws or limbs off and thereby inflict excruciating suffering on themselves in order to continue to live. after all is a lion wrong and evil if it feeds on meat. I am also including the mentally disabled and mentally individuals in this principle, though I will exclude people suffering from a coma or who are in a vegetative state. I want to emphasize that W does not assert or imply any of the following: (2) It is never permissible to eat an animal, (3) Eating animal products is wrong only if killing animals is wrong. According to Bentham, animals live in the present and are not aware of what they lose when we take their lives. I may do this in a future blog post. but, Can they suffer?’. The benign carnivore could try to claim that killing the animal is in this case justified, as we are raising the animal to feed ourselves. Therefore, to say that a sentient being is not harmed by death denies that the being has the very interest that sentience serves to perpetuate. However, pain is also extrinsically bad: it is bad because of it’s affect on something else. Gary L. Francoine is a professor of law at Rutgers University, where he lectures onanimal rights theory and the law, and an honorary professor at the University of East Anglia. By calling something prima facie wrong I mean that it is wrong unless some reason can be given to show otherwise. Thus, if I choose the second option she will die but will experience no pain or suffering. Harming animals for its own sake reflects badly upon our own character. Natural predators help maintain this balance by killing only the sickest and weakest individuals. If an animal is suffering from a painful disease that is unlikely to get better, then we may judge that it no longer has a valuable future. I think the correct conclusion is either that we simply need to tweak these explanations a bit more or accept that the explanation for H will involve more than one of the discussed principles. Suppose someone rejects (15) i.e they believe that an animal’s death is not typically bad for the animal. Thus, lying is generally accepted to be prima facie wrong, as most people think it is wrong to lie unless you have a good reason to do so (e.g. Under what circumstances killing an animal is justified is a difficult question, and I will largely not tackle in this post. Mammals and birds seem to have desires and are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain (for arguments supporting the attribution of desires and pleasure to animals see David DeGrazia “Taking Animals Seriously” and Jonathan Balcombe’s “Animal Pleasure and It’s Moral Significance”). A bizarre system dubbed the “Headless Chicken Solution” would grow brainless birds in Matrix-style meat factories. Anna E. Charlton is adjunct professor of law at Rutgers University and the co-founder of the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic. For example, it is wrong to be cruel to an animal and this is primarily because of the suffering this causes the victim, rather than it’s effects on the perpetrator or society as a whole. And this harm is one of the greatest harms that can be inflicted, as it involves the loss of all of the net good the individual would have experienced if they had continued to live. Finally, W does not imply that the wrongfulness of killing animals is the only reason why eating animal products is or could be wrong. This account implies that it is not even pro tanto morally wrong to kill patients who are universally and irreversibly disabled, because they have no abilities to lose. These are individuals, real or hypothetical, who accept our arguments about the wrongness of causing pain and suffering and accept that because the modern agricultural industry causes pain and suffering we should not consume it’s products. Of course, this appeals only to those who have an interest in purely theoretical investigations in ethics, which may be very few. Putting aside these issues, my argument for W based on appeal to DVF also faces problems. For example, racism and sexism may be wrong not just because of their immediate negative impact on the victims but because of how they dehumanize a person and fail to treat them as a unique, autonomous being. In the third section, I will examine whether this account of the wrongness of killing can be applied to animals and will conclude that it can. It is wrong to wantonly inflict pain on animals. By way of contrast, we have no duties to objects such as cars or televisions, though we may have duties regarding them if someone owns these objects as in this case we would have a duty not to damage or take them without permission. Now, this does not establish that the belief that my dog’s death is bad for her is true. Thus, we can conclude that all three explanations seem reasonable, and perhaps are all true. But I believe comparison to the reasons we think a human’s death is bad gives support to this belief: the premature death of animals and humans is bad because both are deprived of valuable futures by their death. Yes, Hunting is a great thing. Thus the first option will cause her pain and suffering, which is bad for her. Interestingly, Bentham’s views are endorsed by Peter Singer, who bases the position he articulates in Animal Liberation (1975) squarely on Bentham. I want to emphasize that human being includes neonates, children, adults and the elderly: it is not restricted to “persons” in the psychological sense of a rational being who is self consciously aware etc. I will also lay out some background information and assumptions that I will draw upon. Hunters, however, kill any animal whose head they would like to hang over the fireplace—including large, healthy animals who are needed to keep the population strong. Animals in the fur industry often find it hard to adjust to live in a cage and are kept in horrible conditions. However, the chocolate will soon cause her death and she will suffer during the period as she dies. The harm of death is unlike many paradigmatic cases of harm such as experiencing pain or distress. I am open to the possibility that the faults in (5)-(7) actually suggest there is another, unitary explanation for H that I have not considered. Singer claims that ‘the absence of some form of mental continuity’ makes it difficult to … I wish to emphasize that “animals” here must be restricted to those animals who are sentient, and thus capable of valuable experiences, and animals who have a future in the sense of psychological continuity. It is also largely because my dog’s death would be bad for her that I will grieve when she inevitably passes, as I know that her death means she will no longer be able to engage in all the valuable experiences that typically make up her life, such as going on walks or eating food. As such, both the egg and dairy industries involve a lot of killing, even though they do not produce meat. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Perhaps there is no unitary reason for why killing a human is wrong-maybe there are different reasons in different cases and sometimes multiple reasons in a single case. These happy farms are obviously better than standard modern agricultural methods, and consuming meat that comes from them is preferable to eating meat that comes from factory farms or feedlots. And I would agree with this. H seems intuitively true: it seems prima facie wrong to kill a human being, and this belief is recognized as intuitive and forceful by most people. But seeing as the harm of death was grounded in the individual being deprived of a valuable future, it would seem that the harm of death is a function of how valuable the future is. So unless a better, contradictory principle is discovered I think that we can conclude that the following claim is probably true: DVF: It is prima facie wrong to deprive a human being of a valuable future by killig them. Thus animals can have experiences that are good or bad for them, and will often engage in activities that cause them pleasure or that they have a strong desire to perform. This is probably very obvious, but I still want to emphasize that someone can consistently believe that we ought not to eat animal products yet also believe that there is nothing wrong with killing an animal per se. In this section I have discussed four candidate explanations for the wrongness of killing human beings. A car then sped past and struck the other dog, killing it. Many animals also play with each other, enjoy basking in the sun and have a strong internal motivation to perform certain natural behaviors such as rooting in pigs or dust bathing in chickens. This will naturally include slaying animals. There are difficulties in understanding exactly what kind of psychological continuity animal’s possess, and many philosophers have proposed that it is almost certain that animal’s have less psychological unity over time than humans. Killing an animal harms the animal. So if we take animal interests seriously, we really cannot avoid thinking about the morality of use totally apart from considerations of treatment. However, in that post as well as in previous essays I have mentioned that I myself think painlessly killing animals is wrong, at least under normal circumstances. Thus, there must be a reason other than (5) for why killing this individual is wrong, so (5) cannot provide a complete explanation of H. The fourth explanation claims that killing a person is wrong because it deprives them of a valuable future. (4) explains H by claiming that all human beings have a universal right to life. However, seeing as we do not need to eat animal products to live a healthy life and most people living in Western Industrialized countries have easy access to other sources of food, this seems like an inadequate justification. I have talked to many people who accept this line of argument, and I can see why. Thus they would lack a desire to continue to live, and therefore (5) would not apply to them. Hereford cattle arrive at a meat processing plant. That is, I am claiming that the following propositions form a coherent, mutually supporting set and this increases the credence we give to W: (16) Humans grieve for the death of their animal companions, (17) It is better for an animal to go through a short period of suffering and live a valuable life than for an animal to avoid all suffering through euthanasia, (18) It is permissible to euthanize an animal if it does not have a valuable future, (19) It is bad for an animal to experience pain or suffering, (20) Pain is bad in virtue of (i) it’s inherent experiential quality (ii) how it prevents the subject of the pain from engaging in positively valuable activities and experiencing positively valuable mental states. Western conventional wisdom about animal ethics is that killing an animal is not the problem; the problem is making the animal suffer. It is partly because my dog’s death would be bad for her that I worry over her dying and take steps to avoid it. Credit: Daniel Garcia. However, both industries in their modern form still cause deaths of large numbers of animals. Given that animals are property, and we generally protect animal interests only to the extent that it is cost-effective, it is a fantasy to think that ‘humane’ treatment is an attainable standard in any case.