Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The weakness in indirect theories is that the specific animal-related actions that
they ban can be substantially extended by utilizing negative arguments. Take Kant's
desire to banish cruelty not because it is a wrong done to the animal, but because
cruelty makes for a warped humanity. If a desired ideal of humanity is disrupted by
malicious behavior to animals, why stop at manifest cruelty, rather than target avoid-
able hidden and institutionalized activities that cause suffering? Alternatively, if one
concedes, as Kant did, that cruelty to animals can lead to cruelty to people, suppos-
ing (precariously) that some causal or didactic link exists between animal-related con-
duct and actions that are directed at humans, it seems plausible to hold that a further
deepening of kindness extended to animals may well be a springboard to more gener-
al tendencies to nonviolence with regard to other humans. 12 I have read no one who
unequivocally asserts that cruelty to animals should be prevented solely because of
the feelings of animal lovers (Carruthers comes close). Yet if someone concedes that
such feelings are a sufficient reason to prevent some conduct, then (again) such feel-
ings should encourage us to question other practices with relation to animals. To con-
clude: limiting some animal-related actions because of moral concerns can cohere with
a denial of the moral considerability of animals (if we must use the notion of consid-
erability at all), but it opens the door to pro-animal extension of morally unacceptable
animal-related conduct.
Kant himself did not foresee such extension, since, like Aristotle and Aquinas, Kant
endorsed the teleological (and sometimes theological) view that animals are means for
human ends. Kant also distinguished between persons and objects through identifying
persons with entities who can reason (according to his particular understanding of
“reasoning”). Can such an anthropocentric position be reformulated in credible terms
in contemporary bioethics? A modernized secularized neo-Kantianism will avoid tele-
ology and will retain some linkage between reasoning and moral status. A neo-Kan-
tian of this type will then contend that animals can never be wronged because they
are not the kind of entities that can be wronged. To distinguish between entities that
can and cannot be wronged, the neo-Kantian will appeal to a particular capacity to
reason that is peculiar to humans. To avoid the apparently obtuse ramifications that
this reasoning carries for humans that exhibit diminished reasoning capacities, the
neo-Kantian will appeal to a kind-token framework: humans are the kind of being
that can be wronged, so individual humans that lose the capacity to reason (or will
never attain it) preserve rights because they belong to this kind. Animals, on the oth-
er hand, belong to the kind of being that cannot be wronged, regardless of the capa-
city of a small number of them to surpass some humans.
13
If a being is wronged, it is (usually) also harmed. Yet the Kantian says that a be-
ing (a nonhuman animal) can be harmed (put in pain, for example), without being
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search