Abstract
Those who wish to abolish or restrict the use of non-human animals in so-called factory farming and/or experimentation often argue that these animal use practices are incommensurate with animals’ moral status. If sound, these arguments would establish that, as a matter of ethics or justice, we should voluntarily abstain from the immoral animal use practices in question. But these arguments can’t and shouldn’t be taken to establish a related conclusion: that the moral status of animals justifies political intervention to disallow or significantly diminish factory farming and animal experimentation. In this paper, we set out to do two things: First, we argue that while the arguments mentioned above may establish the moral impermissibility or injustice of the practices they condemn, they are not sufficient to justify political interventions or social policies to abolish or restrict such practices. It is one thing to argue that some moral imperative or imperative of justice exists, and quite another thing to call for the use of political power to induce compliance with that imperative. Our second task is to assess the prospects for developing an argument that is sufficient to justify political interventions to restrict or abolish the use of non-human animals in factory farming or experimentation. Beyond establishing the immorality or injustice of animal consumption or experimentation, one must show that the interventions in question constitute legitimate use of political power. Would prohibiting or discouraging animal use be legitimate? We attempt to answer this question within the context of fundamental liberal constraints on the legitimate use of coercive political power.
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Notes
Those who appeal to animals’ moral status to criticize the treatment of non-human animals in various practices do not necessarily agree about what should be done in response to these arguments, i.e., there is not agreement about the implications of recognizing the moral status of animals. Those with Utilitarian commitments, like Singer (2009), are more inclined to accept that animal experimentation might be justified under some circumstances and that humane treatment of non-human animals in agriculture might make raising animals for food permissible. Those who advance moral status criticisms of these practices and have deontological normative commitments, such as Regan (1983), Gruen (2011), and Francione (2009), argue that any use of animals in these practices, no matter how humane, is inconsistent with animals’ moral status. Our concern is not about how practices should be revised in light of moral status concerns, but about whether moral status arguments suffice to justify political intervention to bring about those revisions. Much of the discussion is framed in terms of argument for the abolition of certain practices, but we take the concerns we raise to apply equally well to arguments for political policies that merely restrict animal use in certain ways: for example, to arguments that we should legally permit the use of non-human animals only when that use can be justified on Utilitarian grounds, or only when the interests of non-human animals aren’t discounted simply because they are the interests of non-humans.
It is often hard to tell whether those who advance moral status criticisms of practices such as factory farming or animal experimentation take their arguments to justify political intervention. For example, calls to abolish animal experimentation might be taken as just another way of saying “this practice is always immoral”; they might be taken more strongly to claim that individuals should take action so as to stop animal experimentation on moral grounds; or, more strongly still, such calls might be construed as demands for political responses to animal experimentation, such as legal prohibition or tighter regulation. We think that at least some proponents of these moral status criticisms take their arguments to have legal implications. For example, Francione (2009) argues against the “property status” of non-human animals on grounds that treating animals as property is incommensurate with their moral status. Since the property status of animals is codified in law and Francione takes his arguments to undermine the property status of animals, it seems like we are supposed to see moral status arguments as having policy implications. It seems to us that, at least sometimes, proponents of moral status criticisms flirt with the idea that their arguments justify political interventions on behalf of animals. Our aim is to show that any such flirtations are to be avoided, or at least stand in need of further justification. Furthermore, even though it is often difficult to tell whether a philosopher who advances a moral status criticism of some animal practice intends to justify some political intervention, there are some relatively unambiguous cases, and animal advocates who expressly advocate for political intervention often do appeal to moral status considerations. See footnote 10 for further discussion.
Again, the conclusions of such arguments vary widely depending on which normative theory the proponent of the argument endorses. For a Utilitarian, for example, “equal consideration of interests” means that like interests get equal weight in Utilitarian calculations independent of species membership. For a deontologist, “equal consideration of interests” will entail that if a human interest in not suffering grounds a right against experimentation, then a similar interest in a non-human will ground a similar right.
Another example of this form of argument is Norcross’s (2004).
For more on the development of Rawls’s views on animals and justice, see (Garner 2012).
Engel Jr., for example, takes his commonsense moral principles, their corollaries, and some additional facts about the efficacy of certain forms of animal experimentation to entail that various experiments “are wrong and ought to be abolished” (Engel Jr. 2012, 219). The “abolitionist approach” with which many prominent animal rights theorists are associated seeks “a prohibition on the use of animals by humans” (Garner 2013). See the “Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach” website: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/.
If justice does not generate obligations for individuals, then obligations that the state cannot legitimately discharge would cease to be obligations of justice at all, though they would remain cases wherein individuals’ actions—which they are not obligated to take—could promote the cause of justice. In this case, duties of justice to animals would be, if they are duties of justice at all, prima facie duties of justice which become actual duties only if they can be discharged by political institutions. We remain neutral on this issue. Though we use the language of “duties of justice” throughout this paper, these may in fact be only prima facie duties of justice.
Presumably, we also face the burden of showing that the proposed interventions meet various standards of efficiency: that they are cost-effective public expenditures, and that they do not generate negative consequences whose disvalue outweighs the value of enhanced compliance with moral norms. For example, legal prohibitions on abortion might be unwarranted if the consequences of prohibition would be sufficiently bad to outweigh the good of reducing (ex hypothesi) immoral activity. We assume for the sake of argument that some version of animal protection interventions can meet these standards of efficiency.
Clearly, the two mechanisms for establishing the legitimacy of political interventions are inter-related. For example, the majoritarian processes of the first mechanism can justify intervention only within the parameters set by the absolute protections of the second. To ensure that our conclusion is robust across various ways in which the two mechanisms might interact, we argue that the consensus approach cannot currently justify intervention even assuming those protections are otherwise consistent with applicable constraints on democratic decision-making.
A direct majoritarian consensus is not the only democratic process by way of which to legitimately enact laws or policy. For example, it might be legitimate for the state to allow an agency, like the NSF, to make autonomous decisions. See (Brighouse 1995) for an example of this sort of autonomy and whether it is justified in the context of decisions about state funding of the arts.
The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966 was in large part motivated by public outcry over the use of dogs in animal experimentation. See (Adams and Larson 2015)
It is worth noting a distinction between two senses in which a majoritarian consensus might be relevant to questions of political intervention on behalf of animals. One way it may be important is that a majoritarian consensus will be practically necessary in order to effect change. Many of those who advance the claim that non-human animals are not currently treated in a way that is commensurate with their moral status claim that we are unlikely to realize commensurate treatment without broad public support. Along these lines, Francione claims that “on the social and legal level, there needs to be a paradigm shift as a social matter before the legal system will respond in a meaningful way” (Francione 2009 p. 109). This claim about the practical necessity of consensus is consistent with the view that political intervention on behalf of animals might be legitimate absent such consensus.
As Donaldson and Kymlicka note: “Far more animals are being harmed today to serve human interests than 40 years ago, and every projection is that even more animals will be harmed and killed to serve humans 20 or 40 years from now. As a society, we remain addicted as ever to the exploitation of animals for human benefit” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2012, 7).
See O’Sullivan (2007) for a strategic proposal for building consensus in favor of new animal protections by drawing attention to internal inconsistency in our current animal treatment practices: that is, by drawing attention to cases wherein different sets of standards regulate our treatment of animals in morally relevantly similar circumstances.
We think that something like the mistake identified in this paragraph leads Garner prematurely to reject liberalism’s commitment to respecting pluralism (Garner 2003).
Notice also that the justification for citizenship encompassing certain capacities is why the account of citizenship is not “speciesist.” Appeals to agency or moral capacity to ground the moral status of humans is problematic because agency is not a morally relevant difference between humans and non-humans; no justification can be given, according to moral status arguments, for why the interests of non-agents should not be accommodated. On the other hand, such a reason has been given for the political idealization of citizenship to include these capacities.
Similarly, protections of bodily integrity are called for by the importance of physical security to having even the most rudimentary capacity to pursue our chosen conception of the good; certain curricular requirements for children’s education might be justified on the grounds that they are necessary to ensure that all children can develop a capacity for a sense of justice; and redistributive social policies and other social services might be justified on the grounds that they ensure the material preconditions for the effective exercise of our basic liberties.
Given the causal relationship between factory farming and global climate change, there may in fact be citizenship interests at stake that would justify actions that political intervention to significantly limit factory farming, for example. See (Flanders 2013) for a public reasons argument in favor of animal protections that’s based largely on appeal to human benefits that would be derived from such protections.
Or what has traditionally been called the problem of “marginal cases” This alternative phrasing, due to Mylan Engel Jr., identifies the problem without suggesting that the individuals under consideration are in any way marginal. DeGrazia offers another alternative, “non-paradigm humans,” in (DeGrazia 2014)
For an assessment of the (lack of) attention to disability among philosophers generally, see (Tremain 2013).
Nussbaum’s approach appears less controversial when we examine the actual animal policies she thinks it licenses, including guidelines for the ethical treatment of the animals we use or consume, including those in circuses and zoos, and those consumed for food. She argues that, over the long term, we should work toward a consensus against eating sentient animals, but she does not argue that her capabilities approach can justify outlawing or even seriously restricting any of these practices. These policy recommendations may well be less controversial than the capabilities approach that Nussbaum uses to support them, but they fall far short of what would be required to seriously reduce immoral use and consumption of animals. Indeed, as the policy implications claimed for the capabilities approach become stronger, the claim that the approach can maintain the support of an overlapping consensus becomes correspondingly less plausible.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following people for feedback at various stages of this paper: Jeff Behrends, Brian Berkey, Eric Blumenson, Michael Bukoski, Candice Delmas, Mylan Engel Jr., David Faraci, Bo Kim Kopek, Matt Kopec, Katie McShane, Stephen Nathanson, Ronald Sandler, Eric Stencil, Daniel Wodak. We also received exceptional feedback after presenting these materials at the Rocky Mountain Ethics (RoME) Congress in 2015. We are especially grateful for Katie McShane’s comments on this work. We apologize for not being able to list all the attendees that offered feedback. Finally, we are thankful to anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful, helpful comments that much improved this paper.
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Basl, J., Schouten, G. Can We Use Social Policy to Enhance Compliance with Moral Obligations to Animals?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 629–647 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9895-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9895-5