path: root/jordan.im/w/fellow-creatures.7

.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.