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+.Dd February  11, 2021
+.Dt FELLOW-CREATURES 7
+.Os jordan.im
+.
+.Sh NAME
+.Nm Christine M Korsgaard - Fellow Creatures
+.Nd Our Obligations to the Other Animals
+.
+.Sh SYNOPSIS
+These notes are taken from lectures, essays, and book excerpts by Christine
+Korsgaard as they relate to her book Fellow Creatures.
+.
+.Sh DESCRIPTION
+
+Korsgaard's views are based on the views of Immanuel Kant, who's held that we
+must value every human being as what he called "an end in itself", by which he
+meant that we should treat every human being as having inherent value, from
+which it follows that their choices should be respected, that their ends should
+be promoted, that their rights should be recognized and upheld by the
+community, and that their happiness is valuable and their suffering is bad;
+it's to say the things which matter to them should matter to all of us, and
+that they should matter to us because they matter to them.
+
+Kant contrasted treating someone as an end in themselves with treating them as
+mere means, which means using them for our own purposes in a way that's
+contrary to their own good and to which they could not possibly consent.
+
+Many people accept something like a Kantian notion of the inherent value of
+individuals as a basis for our moral obligations to other humans, but we human
+beings have not been willing to afford this kind of value to the other animals
+who share the world with us; instead, we use them in all kinds of ways.
+
+We eat them, we experiment on them, we test products on them, we keep ourselves
+warm with their fur, skin, and feathers, we use them for transport, we've
+enlisted them in our wars and police work, employed them to sniff out bombs and
+drugs, we've made them fight and race for our amusement, have found joy and
+comfort in their companionship, and subjected them to immense amounts of
+torture and suffering in factory farms where they live short lives in dreadful
+conditions where they never get to see the sky.
+
+These uses have been, by and large, at the expense of the interests of the
+animals themselves. Even when we don't use other animals for our own ends,
+human beings have often been completely heedless of their welfare, freely
+killing them whenever they're a nuisance to us, and depriving them of the
+habitat upon which they and their communities depend for leading their own
+lives.
+
+We need to ask ourselves what, if anything, could possibly justify this
+difference between the way we treat other human beings (or how we think we
+ought to treat them) and the way we treat the other animals. After all,
+animals, or at least many of them, are beings capable of suffering and joy,
+with lives and interests of their own. They are the types of beings for whom
+things can be good or bad. We, then, should ask ourselves what accounts for the
+vast moral difference in what we believe constitutes permissible treatment of
+humans compared to non-human animals.
+
+Kant believed only rational beings should be seen as ends in themselves, and
+that we're therefore free to use the other animals as means to our ends. He
+thought we have no moral duties to the other animals, and that they are not
+objects of direct moral consideration. Most people are uncomfortable with that
+conclusion, because most people believe that it's morally wrong to subject an
+animal to unnecessary cruelty. Like Thomas Aquinas before him, Kant explained
+this by arguing that it's wrong to be cruel to animals not because we owe kind
+treatment directly to the animals themselves, but because if we're cruel to
+animals we're more likely to be cruel to people too. He thought we have what
+people have come to call an "indirect duty" to avoid cruelty to animals.
+
+Korsgaard disagrees with Kant in thinking we should not be kind to animals to
+keep our kindness "in practice" for the sake of humans but because we owe it to
+the animals themselves not to harm them if we can avoid it. Although many
+people acknowledge that we have some duties to animals, most people seem to
+believe these duties are rather weak as they apparently give way to almost any
+human interest short of a malicious delight in cruelty itself.
+
+People who think the ways in which we treat animals today is morally
+permissible never seem to write about it or say why they think so; the
+philosophical literature on animal ethics is almost entirely devoted to
+defending the idea that we have more extensive duties to animals than most
+might usually suppose.  The defender of animals has almost no
+philosophically-articulated position to argue against.
+
+What non-philosophical people tend to believe is that humans are simply more
+important than the other animals, and this difference explains the vast
+difference in the ways we're willing to treat them. This is the starting point
+in Fellow Creatures; she begins by asking whether human beings are really more
+important than the other animals. The conclusion she reaches is that we're not,
+not because the other animals are as important as we are, but rather because
+claims about the relative importance of different kinds of creatures do not
+make any sense at all.
+
+Things are important only when they are important to someone, human or
+non-human. While it's true that I can be more important to my mother or my dog
+compared to someone to whom they have no relation, we cannot therefore
+establish some sort of cosmic hierarchy of importance among creatures. If
+everything that's important is important because it's important to someone,
+then there could only be such cosmic hierarchy if some kind of creature was
+more important to all of the creatures than they are even to themselves.
+Similarly, Korsgaard believes that for something to be good or bad it has to be
+good or bad for someone. In the second chapter of Fellow Creatures Korsgaard
+offers a theory of the good based on this idea.
+
+If it does not make sense to say that humans are simply more important than
+other animals, is there some other difference between them that might explain
+in the ways we think we're allowed to treat them. Many philosophers who write
+in support of the moral claims of animals believe that in order to make their
+case, it's necessary to establish that all differences between humans and other
+animals are matters of degree; that there's no flat distinction between us,
+sometimes appealing to evolution in arguing any difference must necessarily be
+a matter of degree, and that claims of human uniqueness are therefore
+unscientific.
+
+In contrast, Charles Darwin argued in The Descent of Man that humans are the
+animals who base their decisions about what to do on thoughts about what we
+ought to do; that humans are the only moral animals. He held that sociability,
+intelligence, and memory are matters of degree, but when combined in a high
+degree they produce something new, like the capacity for thoughts about what we
+ought to do, and that a belief in human uniqueness is not unscientific so long
+as you can explain it in terms of other attributes that we have to a higher
+degree than other animals.
+
+Korsgaard agrees that humans are indeed different from the other animals, but
+asks in the third chapter of Fellow Creatures what difference (if any) supports
+the claim that human beings are entitled to treat animals in the ways that we
+do. She argues that human beings are rational and moral animals, that the other
+animals are not. By rational, she does not mean that we're merely intelligent
+and think in an orderly way, but rather that we ask ourselves whether the
+reasons for which we believe and do things are good or bad. Korsgaard believes
+the other animals do not ask evaluative questions about their reasons for
+action and belief. By moral, she does not mean that humans are morally good,
+but that because of the way we choose our actions, our actions are subject to
+moral standards, that they can be either morally good or bad, while the actions
+of the other animals are not subject to moral standards, and cannot be morally
+good or bad.
+
+It does not follow from these differences that human beings are better than the
+other animals, because you can only judge one creature to be better than
+another when they're subject to a common evaluative standard. In the absence of
+such a common standard we cannot rate them against one other. What follows from
+the fact that we're rational and moral and the other animals are not is not
+that we're superior, but rather that we can have duties to them even though
+they can have no duties to us.
+
+For similar reasons, Korsgaard argues against the view that what matters to
+people matters more because our lives are more valuable in the sense of being
+richer and more interesting than the lives of the other animals. Many people,
+including some of the more important philosophical defenders of animals like
+Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan think that life matters more to humans than it
+does to the other animals because people can enjoy art, music, science,
+philosophy, have deep, meaningful friendships and so on. Korsgaard rejects this
+argument, and argues instead that what counts as a good life for an animal
+depends on the nature of that animal; a dog's life is no worse for him because
+he doesn't enjoy listening to music than yours is for you because you don't
+enjoy chasing squirrels.
+
+There's a different way in which it might matter that we're the only moral
+animals (if indeed we are), which brings us back to Kant and the second part of
+Fellow Creatures which addresses Kant's views and what they imply about the
+treatment of animals. As mentioned above, Kant believed only rational beings
+should be treated as ends in themselves, and therefore believed the other
+animals are not direct objects of moral concern. His view is not, as people
+commonly suppose, that rationality is an especially valuable property, and we
+are especially valuable because we have it, but rather that the capacity to
+recognize and respond to reasons, including each other's reasons, places
+rational beings in relations of reciprocity which enable us to make certain
+claims on each other.
+
+Kant's argument was something like this: I'm a rational being when I judge that
+something is good or bad for me or one of my loved ones; I treat is something
+that is good absolutely, and by absolutely I mean that I have a good reason to
+pursue or realize it as long as I neither harm nor wrong anyone else in doing
+so. To be good absolutely is to be recognized as good in anyone's eyes.
+Furthermore, I feel that I demand that others must respect my pursuit of it by
+not interfering with my actions or attempting to manipulate my choices, and by
+aiding me in my pursuit of the end if I'm in need of help.
+
+By the same token, when I recognize that another person has a good reason for
+what he does, I recognize that I should not interfere with his choice, and
+possibly should also help him if he's in need. In this way, when we choose to
+pursue our ends, we make a set of demands on ourselves and on others, a set of
+laws by which we mutually obligate one another to respect and assist us. The
+reciprocal demands which rational beings make on each other constitute us as
+a moral community, pursuing common ends under common moral laws; Kant famously
+called this the "kingdom of ends". Kant thought that animals should not be
+treated as ends in themselves because they cannot be part of this community
+because, not being rational, they cannot create or respond to moral laws, and
+therefore are not ends in themselves.
+
+Unlike the argument that human beings are privileged or superior simply because
+rationality is such a valuable property, this is not an uninteresting argument.
+Relations of reciprocity are essential to our moral duties to other human
+beings. Nevertheless, Korsgaard argues that Kant's story was incomplete. As
+Kant saw it, when I make a choice, I make a kind of law for myself that
+I should realize a certain end, adopt it as a principle, and I make it a law
+for others to not interfere with me in the pursuit of this end, and possibly
+that they should even help me to achieve it. But prior to that decision is
+another: the decision that something should be treated as a good end absolutely
+by myself and others simply because it's good for me, or someone I care about.
+This is a prior weighing which I claim the standing of the end itself, simply
+because I'm a creature for whom things can be good or bad, I claim that what's
+good for me should be treated as good absolutely, as something that someone
+must respect and pursue.
+
+Human beings are certainly not the only creatures for whom things can be good
+or bad, that's true of all the other animals or at least the sentient ones. If
+the arguments for human superiority and importance fail, as Korsgaard thinks
+they do, there is no reason why what is good for rational beings should be
+treated as good absolutely, while what is good for the other animals can be
+ignored or discounted. Animals are ends in themselves in this sense too.
+
+There are two senses of being an end in yourself. Being a legislator in the
+moral community by making and responding to the laws we make for each other is
+one way of being an end in yourself, shared only by rational beings, having
+a good is another, shared by the other beings and rational beings alike.
+Korsgaard argues that Kant was correct in thinking that other animals cannot
+join us in making laws for one another in the kingdom of ends; our moral
+relations to humans are different from our relations to the other animals. We
+owe other rational beings certain duties of respect, having to do with choice
+and freedom that we don't owe to the other animals, but we have the same reason
+for treating what's good for the animal as good absolutely as we do for
+treating our own good that way, which is because it's somebody's good; the good
+of a creature for whom things can be good or bad.
+
+Rational beings are members of the moral community in the active sense. We
+create it by making the laws for ourselves and each other. Animals are members
+of the moral community in a passive sense, they fall under the protection of
+its laws.
+
+It's worth discussing the similarities and differences between the Kantian
+position sketched above and the utilitarian or consequentialist defense of the
+moral claims of animals. Utilitarians usually believe that either pleasure and
+the avoidance of pain or the satisfaction of desire and the avoidance its
+frustration are good in themselves. Any creature who is capable of experiencing
+those things has an interest in getting pleasure or his desires satisfied, and
+all such creatures have moral standing, meaning that what happens to them
+matters for its own sake. On Korsgaard's view, creatures for whom things can be
+good or bad have moral standing, they're ends in themselves in the sense of
+them having a good, which is the Kantian analog to moral standing. The two
+positions identify the same creatures as having moral standing (sentient
+animals).
+
+Where the two theories differ is in how they understand the idea that if you
+have standing then what happens to you matters for its own sake. Utilitarians
+understand that this way: pleasure or the satisfaction of desire is good in
+itself, so it matters wherever it happens, human or non-human. Animals have
+standing because good and bad things occur in their lives. The Kantian instead
+places value in the first instance on the creature herself. People and other
+animals matter, and what happens to them matters because it matters to them. In
+the utilitarian theory, the value of humans and other animals in inherited from
+the value of the things that can happen to them. In the Kantian theory the
+importance of what happens to the creature derives from its importance to the
+create himself.
+
+This difference between the Kantian and utilitarian view has practical
+consequences. Because utilitarians think that pleasure is good in itself, they
+think it makes sense to add and subtract pleasures across the boundaries
+between creatures. If the sacrifice of one animal's good led to a greater total
+good for a number of other animals it would, according to the utilitarian, be
+justified, which is why utilitarians are often in favor of medical research on
+animals.  A few animals lead lives of torment, but as a result many other
+animals (humans, predominantly) are saved. If my pleasures are good only
+insofar as they're good for me, and yours are good only insofar as they're good
+for you, we cannot simply add and subtract them in this way; there's no being
+for whom your pleasures in addition to my pleasures are better. The sacrifice
+of one creature's life or happiness for the sake of others is never that
+straightforwardly justified.
+
+In the third part of Fellow Creatures, Korsgaard explores the consequences of
+this position. She takes the wrongness of factory farming to be obvious, but
+she argues that we should not eat animals at all. Some people believe in what
+they call "humane farming", where the animals are allegedly treated well and
+then slaughtered mercifully. Even in a so-called humane farm however the
+animals must be killed as soon as they reach a sufficient size and development
+to be eaten, living a life far shorter than they would've otherwise lived.
+Likewise, dairy animals are killed when they can no longer be productive, which
+is long before their natural term of life. The idea that humane farming is
+morally acceptable depends on another quite controversial thesis: the idea that
+death is not a bad thing for a non-human animal.
+
+It's said that whether animals are healthy and comfortable while they're alive
+is what matters, but not how long they live, or whether at any moment they
+continue to live. Korsgaard contests this argument. While there are some
+reasons to believe that death is often a worse thing for a human being than for
+another animal; human beings have plans and hopes for the future in a way that
+so far as we can tell the other animals do not, and death disrupts these plans,
+philosophers believe that the main thing that's bad about death is that it's
+loss. It's the loss of whatever good you would've experienced had you continued
+to live, an argument which holds for animals as much as it does for humans.  If
+death is bad for animals then we shouldn't eat them given that it's perfectly
+possible to have an adequate diet without doing so.
+
+Korsgaard believes the entailment most people would contend with is the
+implication that we should not perform experiments on animals for the sake of
+medical progress; it's a much more serious matter than simply giving up a kind
+of food we might like. That said, she believes that once we give up the idea
+that we're free to use animals in ways that are contrary to their good, there
+is no way around it. After all, the best way to make medical progress and
+improve human lives would be to do experiments on people, but we don't do that
+because we know that it's wrong, and no one thinks that's an unacceptable
+sacrifice.
+
+There exists a certain kind of overheated rhetoric which claims that by
+experimenting on animals we can "save" human lives. It's a good idea to
+remember that there's an important sense in which we can't actually do that,
+namely that everyone dies anyway. What we can do is extend human lives (which
+of course is good), but we should ask ourselves whether it's worth imposing
+immense suffering and death on animals in order to do so.
+
+Korsgaard also argues that we should not use animal products or make animals
+work if the only way to do that is harmful or fatal to the animals themselves,
+which in many cases it is. In the military, dolphins and seals are often used
+in naval operations because of their ability to detect underwater objects with
+sonar. In police work, dogs are used to sniff out drugs and locate humans. If
+we have the right to ask people to take risks to fight crime, do we have the
+right to ask the other animals to do so as well? Korsgaard argues it depends on
+whether the animals, like humans, benefit from living in the state and are
+adequately dependent on its laws, something which is certainly not the case in
+the present. This case raises very different issues for wild and domesticated
+animals since the law treats them very differently. Wild animals are for the
+most part only protected as representatives of their species, not as
+individuals, and do not live in any particular state.
+
+Another set of practical questions concern the extinction and preservation of
+species. As many noticed, the concerns of environmental ethics and the concerns
+of animal ethics often seem to be at odds, since the preservation of species or
+the environment may require doing things which are harmful to individual
+animals. The obvious example is when a group of animals is culled to prevent
+them from populating beyond the carrying capacity in which they live. Korsgaard
+does not propose a solution, but does devote space in the last part of the book
+to ask what a species is, and why it's something we should care about at all.
+
+There's obvious reason to care about the biodiversity upon which we all depend,
+but that's not a reason to care about each particular species. Some species
+matter much more to the health and ecosystem than others do. It's puzzling how
+so many people care deeply about the survival of endangered species who do not
+seem particularly inclined to care about individual animals. In fact, concern
+for species sometimes makes people treat individual animals as if they were
+nothing more than abstract representatives of their species. Korsgaard believes
+it's important to remember that each individual animal is a center of
+subjectivity with a life of his or her own. She argues that it's important to
+care about and value communities of animals for the sake of the animals
+themselves by virtue of their individual dependence on their respective
+communities, but it is not however a reason to a reason for keeping members of
+endangered species in zoos, at least unless there's some hope of reestablishing
+their communities, but possibly not even then. Keeping animals in zoos at their
+own expense is often a case of treating them simply as an abstract
+representative of its species and not as an individual with a life of their
+own.
+
+The friends of animals tend to divide themselves into two opposing groups.
+Animal welfarists and so-called animal rights theorists. Animal welfarists are
+focused on the elimination of cruelty, while animal rights theorists focus in
+the idea that it's wrong to use animals as a means to our ends. The word
+"right" is sometimes used to refer to a kind of moral claim, a kind of claim
+which philosophers associate with what's called a "perfect duty". A right in
+this sense is a moral claim that's either absolute, or can only be overridden
+by another right; it cannot be overridden simply because it does a lot of good
+to override it. The word right is also used to refer to the kind of moral claim
+that either is or should be coercively enforced by laws.
+
+Animal welfarists often advocate interventions in nature to protect wild
+animals, for example using contraception to keep populations at reasonable
+levels so we don't have to face the question of culling them. The most extreme
+view advocated by Jeff McMahan and others is that if we could find a way to
+eliminate predator species without harming individuals or upsetting the balance
+of nature then we would be obligated to do so, since predation is so cruel. If
+we phased out the predators perhaps with contraception, we would of course have
+to find a different way to control the populations of prey animals; maybe that
+would be through contraception too.
+
+Such extensive interventions in the case of wild animals would in a way turn
+them into domestic animals, animals whose breeding and welfare is dependent on
+human beings, which is what we understand "domestic" to mean. Many animal
+rights theorists on the other hand oppose all human interaction with animals on
+the grounds that we could only be using them for our own ends, and we could
+certainly not get their consent. They think this is true even when keeping
+pets, a practice which they believe should be phased out. We should of course
+take care of the animals who have been bred to be pets already, but we should
+stop breeding pets for this purpose now so that the practice of keeping pats
+will eventually be eliminated, or so they believe, and think all animals should
+be wild.
+
+Korsgaard notes that both sides advocate for what amounts to be a sweeping
+change in the relation between human beings and nature itself. If the
+welfarists have their way, all animals would be domestic animals, actively
+cared for by human beings. If the rights theorists have their way, all animals
+will be wild animals, whom we may only admire at a distance, taking no
+responsibility for the cruel aspects of their lives, such as predation and
+injury, and as far as possible not interacting with them at all.
+
+The animal rights position as understood in the philosophical literature mostly
+uses rights in the first sense, to refer to an especially strict kind of moral
+duty, although many animal rights theorists also champion legal rights for
+animals. Korsgaard does not discuss legal rights for animals in Fellow
+Creatures, but does discuss them in a paper entitled "The Claims of Animals and
+the Needs of Strangers: Two Cases of Imperfect Right", wherein she works out
+a Kantian case for animal rights in the natural rights tradition.
+
+In the last part of the book, Korsgaard talks about why it's so hard for people
+to accept the idea that we have a sense of duty toward the other animals. It
+isn't simply because the sacrifice of goods and services upon which we
+traditionally claim seems demanding, but that she believes people find the idea
+of our having duties to other animals unsettling, because given what human
+beings are and the ways we live, and what other animals are and the way they
+live, it's not possible for us to always treat them rightly.
+
+We can't control the violence in nature but given our moral standards we can't
+simply ignore it either. Rather than face this fact, people pretend that we
+have no moral duties to animals at all, or only very weak ones. Learning to
+relate rightly with the other animals with whom we share the planet is not just
+a matter of being willing to make this or that sacrifice of our interest when
+they're at odds with the good of animals, it's a matter of coming to terms with
+our relationship with a natural world that is at the same time both our home
+and a place governed by standards which are alien to the standards of human
+beings.
+
+Korsgaard thinks we should face this fact squarely, and do as much as we can to
+treat those animals with whom we do interact in accordance with our moral
+standards. Animals are beings who share a fate with us, they are conscious
+creatures, and they are creatures for whom things can be good or bad. That
+makes them our fellow creatures and we should treat them as such.