Biology Reference
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ists should strive to create. This does not obviously legitimize everything done to
dogs or horses. Some aesthetic surgery for dogs cannot be legitimated, and some
modes of keeping and using horses will disappear. But this position involves embra-
cing a quasi-paternalistic relationship with these beings, holding that doing so is bene-
ficial to them. For a liberationist, the moral price of accepting this position is uphold-
ing the moral legitimacy of bits, harnesses, whips, and invasive surgery. Yet for liber-
ationists such as myself, the moral price that the first world implies, although more
abstract in nature, is higher: one has to, in this case, swallow the implications of a
petless world, both in terms of ourselves and of these beings. And since the lives of
many horses and pets are qualitatively good ones, I do not subscribe to the morally
purer stance that will make all of these disappear.
Responding to the second counterargument requires specifying when and where the
argument from nonexistence can be legitimately employed. Merely bringing a being
into existence is not, ipso facto, a benefit to it. Two additional considerations have to
be brought into play before one can conclude that an entity benefits from bringing it
into existence. First, the qualitative consideration: if the entity's future life is pre-
dicted to be qualitatively bad in a significant way, then bringing it into existence is
not a benefit to it. The negative quality has to, of course, be significant. An obvious
second consideration is “teleological”: bringing a being into a life form that is objec-
tionable, even if the life offered is qualitatively reasonable—for example, bringing
some people with a rare blood type into the world with the sole purpose of using
them as donors later (while providing them with a qualitatively reasonable existence).
I call this consideration “teleological” because here the problem is with the morally
distorted projected goal for a life.
I have claimed that in the case of rodents, birds, reptiles, fish, and monkeys, there
is no species-related, welfare-based justification that enables perceiving AAT as a
practice that helps these beings qua members of a potentially extinct species. The
counterargument has granted this yet claimed that bringing a
particular
member of
these animals into existence for the purpose of AAT benefits it. In response, I admit
that the AAT therapist who brings a particular rodent to life for the purpose of AAT
does not necessarily abuse it. The life of the rodent may be comfortable, and it need
not constitute a perverse life-goal in the same manner in which, say, factory-farming
abuses the lives of the animals that it utilizes. However, that a particular rodent does
benefit from the decision to bring it into existence should not modify the conclusion
for a liberationist. The reason for this is that when a particular AAT animal's welfare
is genuinely considered, it seems overall best for it to be set free
after
it has been
brought into existence by the therapist. And so, if the technician is truly concerned
