Paola Cavalieri

The animal question

The animal question : , The animal question : , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

Ethics, animals and the nonhuman great apes

Many widely held views in ethics have come under challenge in recent philosophical debates, and most of the involved challenges have deep implications for our treatment of nonhuman animals. It is thus worth offering a very synthetic presentation of how assumptions long taken for granted have been undermined by the renewed discussion. The most general aspect of traditional ethics which has been questioned is the idea that the moral community can be structured on the basis of specifi c belief-systems rooted in super-scientifi c explanations of things – that, in other words, individuals can be treated according to their alleged place within grand general views built to explain the universe. Today, it is no longer conceivable to treat non-Western peoples as inferiors on the basis of the idiosyncratic European conception of a metaphysical hierarchy of essences; analogously, one cannot treat nonhuman beings as inferiors on the basis of idiosyncratic religious views about their place in God’s plans (Corbey 2005). Another age-long assumption that has been undermined is the agent-patient parity principle, according to which the class of moral patients – the beings whose treatment may be subject to moral evaluation – coincides with the class of moral agents – the beings whose behaviour may be subject to moral evaluation (Warnock 1971; Miller 1994). We have long assumed that (full) moral protection was only due to those beings (rational, autonomous, etc.) which can refl ect morally on how to act, and can be held accountable for their actions. Beings which can be harmed but cannot act morally have instead been excluded from the moral community, or have been granted a much weaker moral protection, that allowed for their use as mere means to others’ ends. Refl ection on the plight of those non-paradigmatic humans who are irrevocably deprived of the characteristics required for moral agency – the brain-damaged, the severely intellectually disabled, the senile – has led mainstream contemporary ethical thinking to drop the agent-patient parity principle. But if we extend full moral protection to the members of our species who are not moral agents, we must, as a matter of consistency, do the same when it comes to nonhuman beings. True, the other animals are unable to directly claim such protection – but same holds in the case of non-paradigmatic members of our own species, who are not on this ground deprived of equal basic rights. It is worth noting that such conclusion clears away the conventional intellectual bias of Western thought, which has so long granted heavy moral weight to the possession of demanding cognitive capacities such as rationality and autonomy. It also clears away that reciprocity-based contractarian tradition which, though defensible in the case of roughly similar beings, becomes a mockery when it comes to the treatment of less endowed beings, as it clearly leaves the powerless at the mercy of the powerful (Barry 1989). Finally, there is the question of the forms of biologism that have often infected Western philosophy. Confronted with the kinds of biological discrimination against some human groups which have marked our history, reaching their apex in the organized genocides of the fi rst half of the twentieth century, contemporary ethics has unanimously argued that no individual can be morally discriminated against on the ground of her/his membership in a particular biological group. Stressing the moral irrelevance of purely physical characteristics such as skin colour and reproductive role, philosophical egalitarianism has openly condemned both racism and sexism. Also the discrimination based on species membership, however, is clearly a form of biologism, which appeals to a difference in genetic make-up. Accordingly, even ‘speciesism’ (Singer 1979) turns out to be discredited. This makes it no longer acceptable to treat nonhuman animals as second class beings on the ground that “they are not human”. While this is but a cursory sketch, it is enough to give an idea of recent changes in rational moral philosophy. We already know what this egalitarian doctrine has actually implied for the principled defense of the least among us. But where exactly can it lead us as far as the other animals are concerned? In the