Review Section

Society & Animals 21 (2013) 315-323 brill.com/soan Review Section The Ethics of Assisting Domestic and Wild Animals Clare Palmer, Animal Ethics in Context. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 203 pp. In Animal Ethics in Context, Clare Palmer provides a carefully argued defense of the claim that we have moral duties to assist domesticated animals, such as horses, by providing them with food, water, medical care, etc., but no such duties to assist wild animals. Palmer’s book is a well-written, carefully researched, and thought-provoking contribution to the fields of animal ethics and environmental ethics. Palmer begins her book with two examples. In 2007, migrating wildebeest tried to cross Kenya’s Mara River at a difficult location with steep banks. Two thousand wildebeest died in one day as camera crews and tourists watched. In 2009, members of a British family in Amersham were arrested after 32 horses were found dead on their property, with an addi- tional 114 suffering from starvation, dehydration, and medical problems. The press and the public reacted with horror to the stories of the Amersham horses. However, there was no such horror that thousands of wildebeest were allowed to die without anyone trying to help them climb the steep banks of the river. Palmer cites the reactions to these two cases as examples of the widely held intuition, which she calls the laissez-faire intuition, that we have moral obligations to assist domesticated animals, but no such obligations to assist wild animals living in the wild. Given that the wildebeest share the capacities, such as sentience and the ability to experi- ence fear, stress, and frustration of desires, which make the Amersham horses morally considerable, why is it that so many people do not recognize any moral obligation to assist the wildebeest? Palmer argues that when a being has morally relevant interests, we have negative duties not to harm such beings, at least in the absence of some overriding moral concern. Palmer focuses on the experiences that beings have, and she defines a “harm” as an action that is carried out by a moral agent or agents that is detrimental to the long-term experiential well-being of a being. By this account, the wildebeest who died painfully while trying to cross the Mara River were not harmed because their painful deaths were not caused by any moral agent. The deaths were unfortunate, but the animals were not wronged or harmed, and the onlookers were under no moral obligation to help them. Even though Palmer’s account focuses on experiential well-being, she argues that animals as well as people can be harmed by their painless deaths. Drawing on the work of Jeff McMahan, Palmer argues that an animal need not have a robust sense of self-awareness in order to have psychological continuity over time. When an animal’s psychological capacities give it a great deal of continuity between its present self and its future self, that animal can be harmed by the loss of future goods that it would have experienced. Palmer’s account of the potential harms of a painless death is spot on. In Palmer’s account, the wildebeest © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685306-12341276 316 Review Section / Society & Animals 21 (2013) 315-323 were hurt by their deaths both because they died and because of the pain they experienced, but they were not harmed because these hurts were not caused by a moral agent. Palmer argues that utilitarian theories, rights-based theories, and the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum, all focus on the capacities that animals have while ignoring other bases for moral obligations. While she thinks that an animal’s capacities, such as its ability to have positive or averse experiences, are important in establishing its moral considerability, she argues that these approaches must be supplemented by a relational approach in order to understand all of our moral obligations to animals and humans. Palmer is critical of consequentialist approaches and of Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. While she does not argue for a rights-based approach, she does say that her view is compat- ible with a theory of negative rights. What her view adds is that many moral obligations, including positive duties, are determined by relations and context. In particular, she focuses on causal relations. So, for example, if we are causally responsible for the fact that an animal is in a position of dependency, this places a special obligation on us to assist that animal. There does seem to be fairly widespread agreement that we are under no moral obligation to assist wild animals living in the wild—whether it be helping wildebeest cross the Mara River in Kenya, helping an elk who has fallen through the ice in Yellowstone Park, or helping prey animals escape from predators. If I had found myself at the Mara River watching wildebeest drown, I’m not sure whether I would have tried to help them. There are two primary concerns that would have made me hesitate. The first is the fear that interfering in a natural ecosystem might have unanticipated negative consequences. Second, I might have worried about the loss of naturalness in a world where humans interfere with animals living in the wild. However, Palmer, in her search for a justification for thelaissez-faire intuition, rejects these two potential justifications. She rejects the worry about unanticipated negative consequences on the grounds that it is conditional. There will not always be negative consequences when humans interfere with natural ecosystems. There are bound to be some cases in which humans could actually improve the long-term experiential well-being of wild animals by interfering with natural ecosystems. And she rejects the concern about the loss of naturalness on the grounds that it is metaphysically suspect. Presumably she has in mind Holmes Rolston’s defense of naturalness as an objective value-adding property, which has been questioned by many critics. I’m not sure what she would have to say about subjectivist approaches to the value of naturalness, such as Robert Elliot’s. I suspect that she would argue that neither objectivist approaches nor subjectivist approaches give us good reason to think that the value of naturalness ought to trump the experiential well-being of sentient beings. It becomes apparent that Palmer’s view is very different from Rolston’s principle that we ought to let nature take its course. As Palmer makes clear, she and Rolston defend very different principles for very different reasons. Rolston argues that it is wrong to assist wild animals living in the wild, while Palmer sees such assistance as permissible but not required. While Rolston wants to conserve natural value, Palmer is concerned with our moral obligations toward individual sentient beings. If I accepted that sentient beings are morally considerable (as Palmer does), and I believed that there are situations in which we could aid wild animals without negative ecological consequences (as Palmer does), and I was not worried about the loss of naturalness (as Palmer is not), I would have no hesitation about coming to the aid of wild animals in dis- tress. Furthermore, I would think that such aid was morally obligatory, at least when it could be achieved without sacrificing anything of moral significance. Palmer, however, argues that we have no duties to assist wild animals living in the wild because we do not have the sorts of relations with those animals that would generate such duties. We do not .

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