Ethic for Animals

WellBeing International WBI Studies Repository 10-2012 A ‘‘Practical’’ Ethic for Animals David Fraser University of British Columbia, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/ethawel Part of the Animal Studies Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, and the Nature and Society Relations Commons Recommended Citation Fraser, D. (2012). A “practical” ethic for animals. Journal of agricultural and environmental ethics, 25(5), 721-746. This material is brought to you for free and open access by WellBeing International. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the WBI Studies Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A ‘‘Practical’’ Ethic for Animals David Fraser University of British Columbia KEYWORDS animals, animal ethics, animal welfare, conservation, ethics, environmental ethics ABSTRACT Drawing on the features of ‘‘practical philosophy’’ described by Toulmin (1990), a ‘‘practical’’ ethic for animals would be rooted in knowledge of how people affect animals, and would provide guidance on the diverse ethical concerns that arise. Human activities affect animals in four broad ways: (1) keeping animals, for example, on farms and as companions, (2) causing intentional harm to animals, for example through slaughter and hunting, (3) causing direct but unintended harm to animals, for example by cropping practices and vehicle collisions, and (4) harming animals indirectly by disturbing life- sustaining processes and balances of nature, for example by habitat destruction and climate change. The four types of activities raise different ethical concerns including suffering, injury, deprivation, and death (of individuals), decline of populations, disruption of ecological systems containing animals, and extinction of species. They also vary in features relevant to moral evaluation and decision-making; these include the number of animals affected, the duration of the effects, the likelihood of irreversible effects, and the degree to which the effects can be controlled. In some cases human actions can also provide benefits to animals such as shelter and health care. Four mid-level principles are proposed to make a plausible fit to the features of the four types of human activities and to address the major ethical concerns that arise. The principles are: (1) to provide good lives for the animals in our care, (2) to treat suffering with compassion, (3) to be mindful of unseen harm, and (4) to protect the life-sustaining processes and balances of nature. This ‘‘practical’’ approach arguably makes a better fit to the complex, real-life problems of animal ethics than the single foundational principles that have dominated much recent animal ethics philosophy. Introduction There have been many recent attempts to formulate an ethic for animals,1 mostly by applying one or other foundational principle drawn from existing ethical theory. Well-known examples include the principle of utilitarianism extended by Singer (1990) to animals that experience pleasures and pains, deontological approaches that extend rights to those animals that meet the criteria of rights-holders (Regan 1983), and neo-Aristotelian approaches that call for animals to be treated in ways that respect their ‘‘natures’’ (Rollin 1993) or that allow them to develop their ‘‘capabilities’’ (Nussbaum 2004). Such ideas have given rise to vigorous discussion about the merits of the various ethical theories, the appropriateness of applying them to animals, and the conflicts that arise when the different principles lead to different conclusions (Sunstein and Nussbaum 2004; Taylor 2009). In fact, as Broglio (2009) has observed, these ideas have become so well known that discussions of animal ethics by the public and the media often adopt, either explicitly or implicitly, an approach based in analytical philosophy. However, the theory-based approaches sometimes fail to address the ethical concerns of conscientious people facing complex, real-life problems of animal ethics. As one example, much animal ethics philosophy has provided very broad prescriptions that people can implement in their personal-choice decisions, but that provide little guidance that makers of social policy can implement within the scope of decision-making that is open to them. Thus, various philosophers have argued that it is wrong to hunt (Kheel 1996) or to eat meat (Regan 1983; Fox 1999), and based on such conclusions, individuals may make personal-choice decisions about their diet or leisure activities. However, public health veterinarians, conservation agencies, international development workers, and others are often required to formulate policy to address complex moral decisions involving the treatment of animals (Fraser 2011). For instance, some 600 million of the world’s poorest people, including many landless people, depend significantly on animals as a source of food and income (Seré 2003). The current increase in demand for animal products in the least developed countries could improve the lives of small-scale animal producers, but the demand occurs mainly in cities and it could lead to more intensive, grain-based production in peri-urban areas, possibly to the detriment of poorer farmers in remote areas; and the health and welfare of the animals is affected differently by small-scale, forage-based production versus large-scale, grain-based production. The situation creates a complex moral problem for policy-makers (Pinstrup-Andersen et al. 1999). Specifically, how should we act when very different options have complex effects on animal welfare, rural poverty, and food availability? Faced with such issues, policy makers are likely to find little practicable guidance from animal ethics philosophy that focuses on such basic questions as whether it is right to eat meat. Human actions that affect animals in indirect and unintentional ways create another area of misalignment between people’s ethical concerns and much animal ethics philosophy. Many biologists have raised concerns about unintended harms to animals caused by cars (Forman and Alexander 1998), windows (Klem 2009), agricultural machinery (Davis 2003), and many other aspects of human life (Sainsbury et al. 1995). However, animal ethics philosophers, working largely from traditional ethical thinking which generally focuses on intentional actions, have tended to disregard harms to animals that are caused unintentionally. When philosophers have commented on such harms, it has sometimes been to down- play their importance. For example, in stressing the importance of intentional harms, Lamey (2007, page 343) proposed, ‘‘surely we recognize a distinction between accidentally hitting an animal while driving on the highway’’ and intentional killing; and Francione (2010, page 72) proposed, ‘‘the fact that animals are accidentally or incidentally killed in the cultivation of crops is different morally from intentionally killing individual animals.’’ However, many people do express concern over unintended and indirect harms, and in a survey of the general public, many participants rated such harms as more serious than common forms of intentional harm (Dubois and Fraser 2011). As a third case, animal ethics philosophers tend to use theories that see sentient individuals as the only focus of concern whereas many people also have concerns about the decline of animal populations, the loss of animal habitat, and the extinction of animal species. For instance, in an effort to protect Kirtland’s warbler from extinction, people have killed tens of thousands of brown-headed cowbirds that parasitize the warblers’ nests and destroy their eggs (Askins 2000). The cowbirds likely suffer from being captured and killed, whereas the eggs that they destroy presumably do not; and the warbler parents seem content to raise young cowbirds instead of their own offspring. The program would presumably be condemned by influential theories of animal ethics because it is a violation of the cowbirds’ rights; it represents discrimination of the basis of species; and the killing of the cowbirds almost certainly causes more suffering than it prevents. Cases such as these have stimulated environmental ethicists to propose ethical theories that attach value to broader goods such as biodiversity, ecological systems, or the ‘‘biotic community’’ (Callicott 1989), and these theories have clashed famously with theories of animal ethics that focus on individuals (summarized by Taylor 2009). In the cowbird-warbler case, however, the issue is primarily about animals. Specifically, certain animal-oriented people are more concerned about the extinction of a rare species than about killing members of a very abundant one, and they feel that ethical theories that ignore such concerns must be flawed. As an alternative to the theory-based approach of much animal ethics philosophy, how might we create an ethical system that would make a better fit to the concerns and issues of conscientious people faced with complex, real-life interactions between people and animals? One possible option involves care- based ethics, as advocated by Donovan and Adams (2007), Engster (2006) and others who propose that people should approach animal issues not through ethical theory but by applying virtues such as care and empathy. Another option involves communitarian or relational approaches, developed by Midgley (1983) and others, which recognize ethical obligations as arising from different forms

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