WHY ANIMALS MATTER - Ethics and the Beast - page 18

ation? 6 One can also ask what makes the Rollin-Bentham view preferable to other
theories of entitlement. What, for example, makes the connection between feeling pain
and possessing moral standing more plausible than the Kantian conviction that only
beings that can act not merely from laws but from thinking about these laws—which,
on Kant's terminology, makes them possessors of “reason”—have direct moral stand-
ing (in Kant's terminology: such beings are “persons” rather than “things”)? What
makes the Bentham-Rollin view more acceptable than assuming that only language-
possessing beings have interests, and, in turn, that only entities with interests possess
moral standing? What makes this view superior to holding that moral standing is re-
stricted to beings that can potentially actively participate in a hypothetical pact cast
behind a veil of ignorance in order to legislate just moral laws, or to the view that
entitlements arise from capabilities?
Although I claim that two-stage thinking is misguided, I will say why the
Bentham-Rollin view is more plausible than these other two-stage moves since there
is a component of this thinking that I will keep. A's capacity to feel pain means not
merely that I can substantially affect A's life, but that I can make A's world very bad
for A. I can obviously affect B's capacity to speak, frustrate B's interests, or prevent
B from expressing his interests in the initial contracting stage. But if we do not also
assume that these actions cause B to suffer, or if we do not also assume that they
matter to B, the moral status of my actions remains unclear. 7 The rivals listed above
to the Rollin-Bentham view are no alternatives; they presuppose it. We think that ra-
tional beings or language-possessing beings are entitled to moral standing because we
tacitly assume that they can be affected by actions that matter to them. When these
capacities are disconnected from the ability to suffer—imagine a race of rational,
language-possessing aliens that are genuinely indifferent to actions that affect
them—the ethical status of actions that are done in relation to the bearers of such ca-
pacities becomes mysterious. 8 The capacity for negative experience is not merely an
additional factor working alongside other properties (e.g., possessing language).
Language-possessing, rationality, etc.—when envisaged as status-endowing proper-
ties—all imply a capacity for negative experience, which is why it is this capacity
that is doing the work in all theories of entitlement.
The Rollin-Bentham view is deeper than its alternatives (“deeper” in the sense that
they presuppose it) and is to be preferred as an explication of the property by virtue
of which an entity is worthy of moral concern. 9 This view is incomplete, since, in
the framework of two-stage approaches, I presented it as offering a sufficient (though
not a necessary) condition for entitlement to direct moral concern, or at the very least
as being implied by a reason-based criteria for entitlement. But it forms a necessary