Abstract
Influential moral theories in the contemporary West face problems making sense of the conflict between the interests of animals and people’s interests in culture . They have trouble explaining either the existence of strong direct duties to animals or the importance of people’s right to culture (and frequently both). In this chapter, I aim to advance a relational ethic, grounded on the African philosophical tradition, that offers a promising alternative. I contend that duties toward animals and rights to culture are potentially conflicting normative branches springing from the common root of a demand to prize communal relationship. In addition to showing that communion makes good sense of the strength of some direct duties to animals and the moral significance of culture , I argue that it accounts well for how to understand the way in which they can clash and how to address that problem practically.
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Notes
- 1.
Thoroughly explored, and criticized, in Kai Horsthemke, Animals and African Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 2.
Paula Casal, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (2003), 1–22.
- 3.
Francesco Ferraro, “Ritual Slaughtering vs. Animal Welfare,” in The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, ed. Mary Rawlinson and Caleb Ward (New York: Routledge, 2017), 305–314.
- 4.
Kevin Behrens, “Tony Yengeni’s Ritual Slaughter: Animal Anti-Cruelty vs. Culture,” South African Journal of Philosophy 28 (2009): 271–289; Barry Bearak, “Spilling the Blood of Bulls to Preserve Zulu Tradition,” New York Times December 8, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/world/africa/09safrica.html?_r=0; and Christa Rautenbach, “Umkhosi Ukweshwama: Revival of a Zulu Festival in Celebration of the Universe’s Rites of Passage,” in Traditional African Religions in South African Law, ed. T.W. Bennett (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011), 63–89.
- 5.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison, “Perhaps Bullfighting Is Not a Moral Wrong,” The Last Arena February 25, 2015, https://thelastarena.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/perhaps-bullfighting-is-not-a-moral-wrong-my-talk-at-the-edinburgh-international-book-festival/; and Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, “Between the Horns: A Dilemma in the Interpretation of the Running of the Bulls—Part 1: The Confrontation,” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 1 (2007): 325–345.
- 6.
Does eating meat because one associates it with masculinity count? I leave this good question unanswered here, in order to focus on clearer cases that have been widely discussed in the literature.
- 7.
Richard Arneson, “Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19 (1990): 158–194.
- 8.
Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 9.
Including animal-friendly ethics such as the principles of respect for: a living organism in à la Paul Taylor, a subject of a life as in the thought of Tom Regan, valuable capabilities as per Martha Nussbaum, or phenomenal consciousness in forthcoming work by Rainer Ebert.
- 10.
Thaddeus Metz, “Animal Rights and the Interpretation of the South African Constitution,” Southern African Public Law 25 (2010): 301–311 at 309. For additional scenarios and analysis, see Thaddeus Metz, “An African Theory of Moral Status: A Relational Alternative to Individualism and Holism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (2012): 387–402 at 389, 399–400.
- 11.
Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, “Animal Rights, Multiculturalism, and the Left,” Journal of Social Philosophy 45 (2014): 116–135 at 119; see also 117, 120.
- 12.
In appealing to forced choice situations, the point is not that they are frequent but rather that consideration of them particularly reveals implicit judgments about the relative importance of lives.
- 13.
Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 14.
T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 182–185.
- 15.
For further analysis, see Thaddeus Metz, “The Reasonable and the Moral,” Social Theory and Practice 28 (2002): 277–301 at 281, 293–294.
- 16.
Christine Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values 24: 77–110.
- 17.
Some of these phrasings come from Thaddeus Metz, “Respect for Persons and Perfectionist Politics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001): 417–442 at 432–433. See Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 162–181, and Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 75–106. Cf. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 93–94.
- 18.
Andreas Føllesdal, “Global Ethics, Culture and Development,” Forum for Development Studies 1 (1999): 5–21 at 16.
- 19.
For a survey, see Thaddeus Metz, “African Ethics,” in The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2015), 1–9.
- 20.
For example, Thaddeus Metz, “Developing African Political Philosophy: Moral-Theoretic Strategies,” Philosophia Africana 14 (2012): 61–83.
- 21.
Peter Kasenene, Religious Ethics in Africa (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1998), 21.
- 22.
Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Random House, 1999), 35.
- 23.
Munyaradzi Felix Murove, “The Shona Ethic of Ukama with Reference to the Immortality of Values,” Mankind Quarterly 48 (2007): 179–189 at 181.
- 24.
Segun Gbadegesin, African Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 65.
- 25.
Yvonne Mokgoro, “Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa,” Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal 1 (1998): 15–26 at 17; http://www.nwu.ac.za/sites/www.nwu.ac.za/files/images/1998x1x_Mokgoro_art.pdf.
- 26.
Kwame Gyekye, Beyond Cultures; Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, Volume III (Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2004), 16.
- 27.
Pantaleon Iroegbu, “Beginning, Purpose and End of Life,” in Kpim of Morality Ethics, ed. Pantaleon Iroegbu and Anthony Echekwube (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 2005), 440–445 at 442.
- 28.
Gessler Muxe Nkondo, “Ubuntu as a Public Policy in South Africa,” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 2 (2007): 88–100 at 91.
- 29.
For an even more thorough analysis, see Thaddeus Metz, “The Western Ethic of Care or an Afro-Communitarian Ethic?: Finding the Right Relational Morality,” Journal of Global Ethics 9 (2013): 77–92.
- 30.
Traditionally construed in terms of degrees of “life-force,” an imperceptible energy thought to have come from God and to permeate everything that exists, with ancestors having more than humans, humans having more than animals, animals having more than plants, and plants having more than what is in the mineral kingdom. See, for instance, Edwin Etieyibo, “Anthropocentricism, African Metaphysical Worldview, and Animal Practices,” Journal of Animal Ethics 7 (2017): 145–162.
- 31.
For discussion of the tricky issue of how to accord babies a greater moral status than animals and also human fetuses with the same intrinsic properties, see Metz, “An African Theory of Moral Status,” 398–399.
- 32.
See note 9.
- 33.
Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 244.
- 34.
Casal, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” 13, 14.
- 35.
This is the argumentative strategy employed by Behrens, “Tony Yengeni’s Ritual Slaughter,” and David Bilchitz, “Does Transformative Constitutionalism Require the Recognition of Animal Rights?” Southern African Public Law 25 (2010): 267–300.
- 36.
Casal, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” 19–21. Cf. Kymlicka and Donaldson, “Animal Rights, Multiculturalism, and the Left,” for the view that fighting the wrongs done to animals need not be inconsistent in the long run with supporting the rights of minorities.
- 37.
At least twice, the courts in South Africa have ruled that previous state discrimination against traditional African cultures provides some reason for it not to curtail them, and in one case explicitly despite the prospect of severe harm to animals. See High Court of South Africa, Crossley & Others v. National Commissioner, SAPS, and Others. Case No. 6766/04, (2004) 3 All SA 436 (T), para. 17–18; and High Court of South Africa, Stephanus Smit and Others v. King Goodwill Zwelithini Kabhekuzulu and Others. Case No. 10237/2009. (2009) ZAKZPHC 75, sec. 20.
- 38.
Cf. Federico Zuolo, “The Priority of Suffering Over Life. How to Accommodate Animal Welfare and Religious Slaughter,” The Ethics Forum 9 (2014): 162–183.
- 39.
For written comments on a prior draft, I am grateful to Kevin Behrens, Dorothea Gädeke, an anonymous reviewer, and the editors of this volume.
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Metz, T. (2017). Duties Toward Animals versus Rights to Culture: An African Approach to the Conflict in Terms of Communion. In: Cordeiro-Rodrigues, L., Mitchell, L. (eds) Animals, Race, and Multiculturalism . The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66568-9_12
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