Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to uncheckable disease spread, today's drugs prevent this, while not pre-
venting the animals' misery in having their
teloi
violated. Animal pro-
ductivity was severed from well-being; and what Aristotle took for
granted was shown to be violable.
Those of us alarmed by the violation of the ancient symbiotic contract
with animals obviously needed a new ethical vocabulary to ground our
concerns. Peter Singer's work in
Animal Liberation
(1975) employed
pleasure- and pain-based utilitarian notions, but these seemed inade-
quate. While it is true that keeping a sow in a 2
1
/
2
¥ 7 ¥ 3 foot enclosure
for her entire life surely occasions misery, it seems odd to use the same
term—pain—as we do to talk about the misery created by branding, or
castration without anesthesia, which is also different from the social iso-
lation experienced by, say, veal calves. So the British Brambell Commis-
sion, created in 1964 as a response to public concern about “factory
farming,” spoke about the basic “freedoms” farm animals ought to
enjoy. Later, the Swedish Law of 1988 abolishing confinement agricul-
ture referred to needs following from the animals' biological natures.
And in my own philosophical articulation of a moral theory for animals
in the late 1970s, I appropriated Aristotle's notion of telos—the “pigness
of the pig,” the “cowness of the cow,” and generally much the same
across a species—as a basis for legally codified rights for animals. If
respect for animal nature no longer naturally followed sound agricul-
tural practice, it needed legal articulation, even as legal protection for
fundamental aspects of
human nature
from the general welfare was
encoded in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Thus, emerging social concern for
animal treatment is being plausibly couched in the language of rights,
which are themselves based on the idea of protecting the animals' telos,
the satisfaction of which constitutes happiness. So, in the face of modern
animal use, telos emerges as a basic normative notion guiding our obli-
gations to and protections of animals. Animals' rights should flow from
animal telos as human rights flow from what we perceive as human telos.
In some cases, we are guided more accurately in our ethical behavior
toward animals we live with by looking at the more specific telos of sub-
species or breeds of animals. Hence, in addition to a greyhound or an
Australian shepherd having the general telos of a dog, a greyhound has
a greater need to run than an ordinary dog, a shepherd has an urge to
work herding, and so forth.
