Lecture 12 Animals Contemporary Moral Problems

CONTEMPORARY MORAL PROBLEMS

LECTURE 12

ANIMALS

THE MAIN ISSUES

Are we morally required to treat or not treat non- human animals in certain ways?

Is it wrong to inflict pain on non-human animals without sufficient justification?

Is it wrong to kill non-human animals without sufficient justification?

What counts as sufficient justification?

EMPIRICAL FACTS – FACTORY FARMING 1 Factory Farming = industrial farming aimed at maximum possible yield.

Quite different from the storybook farm.

Over 5 billion animals are slaughtered every year in the U.S. alone to satisfy human desires for flesh.

Many of them are treated in ways which seem to cause serious pain.

1 EMPIRICAL FACTS – FACTORY FARMING 2 Chicks: De-beaking Common.

Hens: Often 5 hens to a cage which is 10" x 20" x 14". Indoors their entire life in such cages.

Veal Calves: Spend almost their entire life in ’crates’ which prevent most movement. Fed a liquid diet to keep them anemic. This so that flesh is soft and white.

Beef Cattle: Branded and castrated without anesthetic. 4

EMPIRICAL FACTS – FACTORY FARMING 2 Piglets: Teeth clipped, tails cut off, ears notched.

Female Pigs: Kept in pens which prevent natural movement and activity and repeatedly impregnated.

Slaughter: Many animals stunned before slaughter but this often fails to work properly.

EMPIRICAL FACTS – RESEARCH 1 More than 200 million animals used worldwide per year for laboratory research.

A significant amount of this use seems to be for trivial purposes:

[1] Draize test used to test new shampoos and cosmetics. [2] LD50 test used to test new food colorings and additives.

2 EMPIRICAL FACTS – RESEARCH 2 Other examples of the infliction of pain for dubious benefit (from Singer):

[1] Rhesus monkeys used by U.S. armed forces to test effects of radioactivity on troops. [2] Wisconsin primate maternal deprivation experiments.

Note: These experiments seem to provide us evidence about humans only on the assumption that the animals used are similar to humans!

EMPIRICAL FACTS – OTHER USES

Zoos Circuses Pet Industry Sport Hunting Clothing Industry

FF IS UNNECESSARY FOR HUMAN HEALTH [1] We don’t need animals for food. In fact, a vegetarian diet is actually better for us.

Position Statement of the American Dietetic Association (ADA) regarding Vegetarian Diets (J AM Diet Assoc 1997):

1. low-fat vegetarian diet reduces heart disease mortality. 2. vegetarians have lower incidence of hypertension. 3. vegetarians have lower incidence of cancer. 9

3 FF IS INEFFICIENT [2] The production of meat in factory farming is a very inefficient use of food.

The conversion rate from feed to meat is poor.

So, it would be easier to feed the world if we ate considerably less meat.

FF & ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE [3] Factory farming causes considerable environmental damage.

The US meat industry produces 61 millions tons of waste each year. - USDA

Hog, chicken and cattle waste has polluted 35,000 miles of rives in 22 states and groundwater in 17 states. – EPA

South American rain forest is frequently destroyed to provide grazing land for beef. 11

MISCONCEPTIONS A person who thinks that we have moral obligations to animals may think many of our current practices immoral but need not be opposed (in principle) to

[1] medical research with demonstrable probability of real benefit. [2] the painless killing of animals for food. [3] the raising and killing of creatures incapable of feeling pain.

Different moral philosophers have different views. 12

4 SINGER'S UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT "All Animals are Equal" (1973) In many of the ways we treat animals, we are guilty of speciesism.

The person who treats animals as morally irrelevant is like the racist or sexist in violating the most basic principle of equality, the

Principle of Equal Consideration – the interests of every being affected by an action are to be taken into account and given the same weight as the like interests of any other being. 13

ANIMALS AND SUFFERING This principle, Singer holds, requires us to take seriously the suffering of any creature and to count it equally with the like suffering of other beings.

Notice: This allows that different kinds of beings are capable of different kinds of suffering! Perhaps self-conscious and rational beings such as adult humans can suffer more because of their nature.

PERSONHOOD AND KILLING ANIMALS Tooley's Self-Consciousness Requirement

Tooley claimed that it was not wrong to (painlessly) kill a being which was not self- conscious (a being which had no conception of itself as a continuing being).

However, as Tooley noted, killing some non- human animals might be as wrong as killing a human at a similar mental level.

5 ARE ANIMALS PERSONS? Are some non-human animals persons in Tooley’s sense? It does seem that there is some evidence that some non-human primates have a sense of themselves over time and can engage in rudimentary reasoning and planning.

This is both [a] an empirical issue – psychology, ethology, neuroscience and, [b] a philosophical issue – what counts as evidence for self-consciousness and rationality

THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT In Practical Ethics (1991), Singer argues that our uncertainty about self-consciousness and sentience should make us give some creatures the "benefit of the doubt."

If we are not relatively sure that something is not a person, we ought to treat them as if they were.

Likewise with sentience.

KILLING ANIMALS WHICH ARE NOT PERSONS There may be reasons not to inflict unnecessary pain on a sentient creature.

However, is there anything directly wrong with painlessly killing a non-self-conscious but sentient creature such as a fish or (perhaps) a chicken?

If Tooley's requirement were correct, then there would not be.

6 UTILITARIANISM AND PAINLESS KILLING

Two versions of maximizing consequentialism:

[1] the "prior existence view" – count only the good and bad had by creatures which exist or will exist independent of the action.

[2] the "total view" – count all the good and bad produced by the action.

THE PRIOR EXISTENCE VIEW & KILLING On this view, it will be wrong to kill any being whose life is likely to contain or can be made to contain more good than bad, unless doing so will produce a better outcome for other beings who exist or will exist independent of the action.

A problem with the view: It seems to imply that you do nothing wrong by bringing into existence a creature which will be miserable.

THE TOTAL VIEW & KILLING 1 On this view, it will not be wrong to kill a creature if that will lead to the existence of another creature whose life is exactly as good or bad.

Leslie Stephens – "The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all."

Perhaps his idea is that many pigs owe their very existence to human meat consumption.

7 THE TOTAL VIEW AND KILLING 2 A problem with the view: It seems to imply that one is morally required to produce a being with a life barely worth living if that is the only way to maximize the total.

Regardless of its defensibility, the view can’t [1] justify painless killing in the context of factory farming since the future (replacement) creatures will have miserable lives. [2] justify painless meat production unless this is the only way to the highest total good. Given the inefficiencies, it may not be. 22

UTILITARIANISM AND OUR SITUATION Given that current factory farming involves severe suffering for animals, is unnecessary for our health, produces environmental damage and is inefficient, there seems no utilitarian justification for it. Singer claims that one is at least required to avoid the products of factory farming.

Given that much research involves suffering for animals, it can only be justified by sufficiently valuable results. Singer holds that much (but not all) animal research use doesn’t meet this standard. 23

A DIFFICULTY FOR UTILITARIANISM? If we are forced to choose between secretly torturing a human and torturing a sufficiently large number of dogs, then pure utilitarianism might require our torturing the human.

If we are forced to save a human or a large number of dogs from death, then pure utilitarianism might well require that we save the animals.

Are these difficult consequences to accept?

8 CONTRACTUALISM

A contractualist moral theory holds that morality depends upon the rules governing action which rational agents capable of reasoning about the rules will or must arrive at in some suitably ideal conditions.

Kant’s Theory is, in broad sense, contractualist.

There are other contractualist moral theories.

CONTRACTUALISM AND ANIMALS Contractualists typically claim that we have no DIRECT obligations to animals because they are not rational agents capable of moral reasoning.

They DO NOT claim that we cannot act wrongly by torturing an animal for no good reason.

However, they do claim that the wrongness of our action does not consist in wronging the animal. Instead, it consists in exhibiting bad character of some kind or violating a rule all persons would agree to in suitable conditions. 26

KANT ON ANIMALS

In his Lectures on Ethics, Kant wrote

"But as far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals … are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man."

The reason for not being cruel is that

"he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men."

9 CONTRACTUALISM & NON-RATIONAL HUMANS The contractualist must either

[a] argue that non-rational members of the human species are like animals in that we cannot directly wrong them,

[b] explain why we can directly wrong infants, the severely retarded, and senile but not animals of equal or greater capacities. 28