What Is Promising About a Radical Kantian Animal Ethic

Abstract

This chapter introduces the idea of ‘Kantianism for Animals’: An amended version of Kant’s moral philosophy which recognises duties towards animals. If Kantianism includes animals as moral patients, animal ethicists can put Kantian philosophical resources—notions, distinctions, arguments—to more helpful, creative, and interesting use. Furthermore, including duties to animals in a Kantian framework shows that tying morality to autonomy is not sufficient to deny moral status to animals. The chapter also makes explicit the book’s agenda: Kant’s philosophy is to be used constructively, it is to be revised, and duties to animals are to be set on equal philosophical footing with duties to other human beings.

1 Kantianism for Animals

Under a certain description, Immanuel Kant appears like an intellectual ancestor of today’s animal rights movement.¹ Here we have a philosopher who insists that duty trumps self-interest. That we should treat others according to rational principles, not momentary appetites. That moral responsibility arises from the capacity to determine our own actions autonomously—not from tradition, a self-interested contract with other human beings, or the commands of a human-shaped God. That we should exercise self-control. That we should not exalt ourselves above others. That we should cultivate sympathy and act on it. Even—though this is less widely known—that we should adopt the happiness of others, along with our own moral integrity, as the supreme ends of our actions. Do today’s ethical vegans and animal advocates not think along these lines? I know I do. Us friends of animals may disagree with the eighteenth-century Prussian professor on what exactly our duties are, but our movement takes a general view of morality that seems to hew close to his. So we might draw great benefit from considering our own moral thinking through the lens of Kant’s philosophical framework of notions, distinctions, and arguments. For one thing, better understanding our own moral thinking helps us remain critical and inquisitive. But it is also crucial when trying to convince others.

Alas, the above description of Kant is selective. In other passages, he appears harshly dismissive of animals. Most importantly, he denied that human beings have any duties whatsoever towards animals (MM 6:442.08–12; MM 6:241.10–17; Collins 27:460). We do bear a moral responsibility to treat animals with a certain sympathy, since sympathy in general is an important capacity in our moral relations with other human beings (MM 6:443.13–16). But we have this responsibility only towards ourselves, not the animals. Kant explicitly states that his anthropocentric view does not rule out killing animals for food, coercing them into labour, and using them in scientific experiments (if these experiments serve a human purpose over and above mere speculation, MM 6:443.16–21). According to Kant, the human being is “the ultimate end of the creation here on earth” (CPJ 5:426.36–37), animals are merely “things […] with which one can do as one likes” (Anth 127.08–09). For all his ‘Copernican Revolutions’, Kant never came to view the doctrine of human superiority as a convenient human rationalisation.

In recent years, this aspect of Kant’s philosophy has been unpopular. Even sympathetic readers have called Kant’s denial of duties to animals “counterintuitive”, “repugnant”, “notorious”, “unsettling”, “entirely unsatisfactory”, “inadequate”, and “offensive”.² Although, as we will see, there remain influential voices in the debate who defend and laud Kant for his supposed insight that animals do not matter for their own sake, it is dawning on more and more readers that Kant’s views on animals stand in dire need of revision.

When animal ethicists write about Kant, they rarely say more than that he denied the existence of duties to animals. To many, this implication makes Kant’s entire approach to moral philosophy untenable (Broadie and Pybus 1974; Skidmore 2001; Moyer 2001; Regan 2004, 174–185; Wolf 2012). Animal ethicists tend to see Kant the way they see a Descartes or a Malebranche, namely as a relic from a darker philosophical age that we can happily leave to history. But this perspective on Kant fails to appreciate the philosophical commonalities he shares with today’s animal advocates, as well as the positive, creative potential his framework could have for animal ethics. We can only speculate what animal ethicists could do with Kant if only they engaged with his thought more where it is helpful. How could an opponent of animal exploitation draw on the notion that we must never use others as mere means? What might change about our understanding of vegetarianism if we based it on autonomy and moral integrity, rather than purely on the avoidance of bad consequences? What relation to wild animals and their environment can one justify with a body of philosophy that asks us to love others, yet not encroach upon them too much? There is a potential for challenging, unusual, and exciting animal ethics here. But as things stand, the way ahead is blocked by Kant’s own insistence that our duties can never be directed towards animals. One can hardly blame animal ethicists for refusing to engage with a philosopher who devalues animals out of hand.

But could we go the other way? That is: Instead of rejecting and ignoring Kant’s system of moral philosophy, could we develop a new version of Kantianism that recognises the existence of duties towards animals? This amended version of Kantianism might still, say, derive duties from our own autonomy rather than from an axiology of pleasure and pain. It might still view duties as primary to moral rights or claims, and acknowledge that we have duties to self. And it might still tie the moral worth of actions to their incentives.³ But it would not restrict moral consideration to human beings.

When we try to imagine this potential ethical framework, the question arises naturally: In what respects could it remain Kantian ‘capital K’, and on which underlying issues would it have to differ from Kant? A good answer to this question does two things: First, it explains why Kant excluded animals, thus identifying the points on which we would have to disagree with him in order to recognise duties towards animals. Secondly and more importantly for animal ethicists, it illuminates an alternative framework, one that remains as close to Kant as possible without denying that there are duties to animals. Call this framework ‘Kantianism for Animals’.

Although the strongest reason for developing Kantianism for Animals is its positive potential for animal ethics, there also lies a risk in not developing it. The objectionable philosophers that social movements do not reclaim can quickly become the figureheads of their adversaries. In fact, Kant has already had a turbulent history of being claimed by both sides of political animal welfare struggles. First, appeals to Kant’s staunchly anthropocentric views of animal ethics were instrumental for the nineteenth-century animal welfare movement in Germany and Great Britain (Altman 2011, 34; Baranzke and Ingensiep 2019, 35). At a time when the very idea of using the law to protect animals was considered novel and unfamiliar, Kant’s human-centred considerations against cruelty served as a catalyst. If animal protection was not ultimately about protecting animals, but about protecting human beings, then it might be legitimate to legislate about it. Interestingly enough, it was always Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue to which animal-friendly politicians and advocates turned, despite the fact that its topic are explicitly non-legal, ethical duties (MM 6:388.32–33). So the kind of Kantian argument that most strongly influenced early animal welfare politics did not provide a direct legal-philosophical or political argument. Its role was rather to lend ethical legitimacy to anti-cruelty policies—to tell us why a certain type of treatment of animals is ethically desirable.

More than a century later, the dialectical context has changed dramatically. Under animal welfare regimes inspired by Kant’s anthropocentric anti-cruelty doctrine, animal use has been industrialised and expanded to an extent unimaginable in the eighteenth century. To be certain, many countries now have highly detailed animal welfare regulation which outlaws ‘unnecessary’ or ‘cruel’ violence. However, most of the violence actually perpetrated against animals—the confining, the injuring, the mutilating, the separating, the killing—is inflicted with the blessing of regulation, since it is considered ‘necessary’ to achieve some preconceived human purpose. In important ways, the state is still not interested in animals for their own sake, but rather in preventing cruelty from driving human actions. This shows how little we have truly advanced beyond Kant’s anthropocentrism.

It is only thanks to the struggle of an ever-growing animal rights movement that we are seeing a slow process of incremental ‘subjectivisation’ of animal welfare legislation in certain countries (Stucki 2016, 138). That is to say, although these legislations started out protecting animals purely as legal objects, out of human-centred concerns, over time they have granted to animals certain protections for their own sake, a sliver of legal subjecthood. For example, the Swiss constitution and animal welfare law acknowledge that animals have a value in themselves, even calling this value by the Kantian-sounding name “dignity” (Bolliger 2016). Although legislation at this high level is only as good as its concretisation, steps away from pure anthropocentrism are basically a good thing for animals. A law that aims at protecting animal lives and welfare, even if it succeeds only to some extent, can go much further in its prescriptions and prohibitions than a law that aims merely at curtailing human cruelty. For this reason, many animal ethicists today call for the further subjectivisation of legal animal protection, often expressed in terms of animal rights (these are the people I mean when I speak of ‘progressive’ animal ethicists in this book). The future of the animal rights movement lies in reforming laws and societies for the benefit of the animals themselves, not just for the prevention of cruel character dispositions in human beings.

For the animal rights movement today, Kant’s anthropocentrism is a philosophical obstacle and threat. It is an obstacle insofar as it legitimises the dominant paradigm of anti-cruelty and animal welfare legislation, which condones and perpetuates the suffering and death of billions of animals each year worldwide, by appeal to a philosophical system that continues to be taken very seriously. It poses a threat in that it can easily be weaponised for reactionary anti-animal politics that would rather undo what little progress the animal rights movement has made and give human beings even more licence to exploit animals (so long as they do not recognisably do it with cruel pleasure, of course). It is no coincidence that some of the literature’s most ardent opponents of animal rights have made frequent appeals to Kant (Cohen 1997, 2001; Scruton 2006). Since Kant is so closely associated with the notions of reason, freedom, and autonomy, these reactionary appeals also simultaneously serve to stereotype animal advocates as irrational, illiberal, and sentimental.

In the midst of this dialectic, animal advocates concede too much if they reject Kant wholesale. A certain amount of reclaiming is advisable, and other social movements have set good examples for how this can be done. Critical race theorists were the first to point out and investigate Kant’s now-notorious racism against anyone who is not a white northern European (Eze 1995, 1997; Mills 1998; Bernasconi 2002, 2003). But instead of ignoring Kant and leaving him to be appropriated by today’s racists, Mills (1998, 2018) has carefully dissected Kant’s philosophy and rebuilt it into a “Black Radical Kantianism” (Mills 2018). Similarly, Hay (2013) has shown how Kant, the famous sexist, can still be of use to feminist philosophy—on a certain reading, with certain modifications. On Hay’s account, Kant’s notion of a duty to self can help us capture the moral predicament of oppressed human beings. We may owe it not only to others to resist oppression, but also to ourselves. The aim behind such revisions, reclamations, and repurposings of Kant is not to preserve his reputation as a canonical European philosopher. Nor is it a matter of uncritically invoking Kant in order to then adorn social movements with his plumes. To the contrary, a partial revision and reclamation of Kant requires a critical engagement with his work. The aim behind such reclamations is to draw on a corpus of philosophical thought—which, for better or worse, is common philosophical currency—to advance the thought of a social movement, in the sense both of refining it and of spreading it. Kant here appears less like a philosophical authority to be revered, but more like a philosophical resource to be put to good use.

We are yet to see the same level of critical and creative engagement with Kant when it comes to his views on animals. When Kant scholars have commented on these views, they have mostly been preoccupied with showing two things: first, that Kant has good theory-internal reasons for his most notorious claims—say, that animals have no intrinsic value (Hay 2020), that animals do not have the same kind of moral standing as human beings (Hayward 1994; Denis 2000; Garthoff 2020), and that we do not have any duties ‘towards’ animals (Baranzke 2005; Herman 2018; Howe 2019; Ripstein and Tenenbaum 2020; Varden 2020). Secondly, and in the same texts, they argue that the upshots of such views are nevertheless quite animal-friendly. The problem is that they typically make the first point with much more force and precision than the second. Kant scholars are adept at explaining the internal intricacies of Kant’s thought, but they are not particularly trained to assess animal ethical implications thoroughly and critically. Nor is it their job to reflect on and endorse any specific agenda in animal politics against which they could measure the appropriateness of Kant’s views. Should it turn out, on a closer look, that objectionably animal-unfriendly upshots follow from Kant’s views, all that is left is a defence of objectionable views in animal ethics. And indeed, I will argue in Chap. 3 that Kant’s denial of duties to animals does have troubling implications no matter how charitable we are.

Against this backdrop, this book pursues three goals: first, to investigate what leads Kant to the conclusion that we have no duties towards animals; secondly, to propose a way to include animals in Kantian moral concern, pace Kant; and third, to explore where the changes lead us. My claim is that we must disagree with Kant on certain issues if we want to include animals in his conception of moral concern for their own sake, but these disagreements are surprisingly peripheral to his ethical system. In large parts, Kant’s moral philosophy survives the conversion to an ethic that recognises duties towards animals.

The result is a coherent and interesting philosophical framework, Kantianism for Animals, on which animal ethicists can draw to reflect on our moral relations to animals. It is a ‘radical’ system in the sense that it includes animals in Kantian moral concern ‘at the root’, in the same way and on the same grounds as it includes other human beings. It also lends itself as a starting point for a ‘radical’ critique of practices such as using and eating animals (see Chaps. 8 and 9) that takes as its object not just the contingent consequences of these practices, but the very ends and incentives from which they spring.

2 A Constructive, Revisionist, Radical Agenda

To see more clearly what distinguishes this book from other texts on Kantian animal ethics, consider the origins of the debate. Although Kantian ethics and animal ethics have both flourished in anglophone philosophy since the 1960s, they have flourished in largely separate social biomes. Most of the literature’s few dozen articles were written either by professional Kantians making a brief foray into animal ethics, or vice versa. Korsgaard (2004, 2012, 2013, 2018) was the first to pay more than occasional attention to both fields. She was also the first to publish a monograph on Kantian animal ethics (Korsgaard 2018), after which recently followed the field’s first edited volume (Callanan and Allais 2020). Although all of these contributions have helped to advance the debate a great deal, the book you are reading takes a different approach to the topic. The approach can be summarised in three words: constructive, revisionist, and radical.

First, this book does not pursue a destructive anti-Kantian project, but a constructive Kantian one. The aim is emphatically not to prove Kant’s moral philosophy wrong by way of a modus tollens argument about its unacceptable implications in animal ethics. To do just that has been the goal of a long series of previous contributions by animal ethicists (Broadie and Pybus 1974; Pybus and Broadie 1978; Hoff 1983; Skidmore 2001; Moyer 2001; Regan 2004, 174–185). Of course, considering critical perspectives is indispensable when scrutinising Kant’s system, and hence I will discuss them at various points throughout the book, especially in Chap. 3. But at the end of the day, a destructive approach has little to offer to animal ethicists. Most in this field already believe that Kant is not an interesting philosophical interlocutor. What good does it do to reinforce this belief? Instead, I intend to show that an amended version of Kantianism can be fruitful and interesting for animal ethicists. Due to this constructive approach, I also try to tamper with Kant as little as possible, though as much as necessary.

Secondly, this book’s approach is revisionist, rather than purely exegetical or defensive. In other words, I do not primarily try to explain or defend Kant’s account of animal ethics in the face of objections. My aim is to revise and repurpose it. A lot has already been written to defend Kant’s anti-cruelty doctrine, typically by Kantians reacting to what they see as ill-informed criticism from animal ethicists (Hayward 1994; Denis 2000; Baranzke 2005; Altman 2011, 2019; Svoboda 2012, 2014; Geismann 2016; Wilson 2017; Herman 2018; Howe 2019). Of course, such defences are relevant to consider if the goal is a fair assessment of Kant. But even the strongest refutation of objections can only make Kant’s views less repugnant, not more useful or interesting to animal ethicists. To make the most of Kant in animal ethics, we should try to include animals in Kantian moral concern. Revisionism presupposes both a certain optimism and a certain pessimism. It presupposes the optimistic view that Kant’s ethical system can be brought to recognise duties towards animals without sacrificing too much of what makes it attractive in the first place.⁴ At the same time, revisionism implies the pessimistic view that we must depart from Kant on some points to yield acceptably animal-friendly conclusions. So this project also differs from earlier contributions that make the case that duties to animals already follow from Kant’s views, if only we understand them correctly (Wood 1998; Korsgaard 2004, 2012, 2013; Kaldewaij 2013).⁵ For reasons I will explain in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 6, I am more pessimistic.

Third, this book takes a ‘radical’ approach to the inclusion of animals in Kantian moral concern. That is, the aim is to revise Kant’s account of moral consideration ‘at the root’ so that it applies to animals, rather than merely adding duties towards animals after the fact. This approach yields an ethical system in which our duties to animals do not belong to a special, separate class, but are simply instances of our duties to others, just like our duties to other human beings. This radical agenda is stronger than mere non-anthropocentrism. Not only do animals merit moral attention for their own sake, but they merit it for their own sake in the same way and for the same reasons as other human beings. In Midgley’s words: “If you think cruelty wrong in general—which Kant certainly did—it seems devious to say that cruelty to animals is wrong for entirely different reasons from cruelty to people” (Midgley 1995, 33). At the same time, the agenda does not imply that our duties towards human beings and animals are exactly identical in their demands, only that they have the same form and normative ground. We can concede that beneficence demands markedly different actions vis à vis bats and human beings, just like beneficence can demand different actions vis à vis human beings with different tastes. But the duty of beneficence is still one and the same towards both.⁶

While Kantians have made non-anthropocentric proposals, they have not been radical in this sense. Their main concern was to present a Kantian argument in favour of protecting animals for their own sake, but they are happy to let this argument run along a very different path from its human-centred counterpart.⁷ An example is Cholbi’s argument that animal welfare is an ‘end in itself’ because it does not depend on a good will for its goodness (Cholbi 2014, 348). Whereas human happiness is only good if we deserve it, animal welfare is always good (so that a disinterested rational spectator would approve of it). From this value of animal welfare, Cholbi then directly derives duties towards animals (Cholbi 2014, 349). In doing so, his aim is explicitly not to set moral concern for human beings and animals on equal footing (Cholbi 2014, 338). After all, Kant’s account of our duties towards other human beings does not hinge on any premiss to the effect that their happiness is good independently of a good will, nor does Cholbi think it does. Hence, his view is purposely non-radical (though I will draw on it for my radical purposes, see Chaps. 4 and 6).

Another example of a non-anthropocentric, but non-radical approach is Korsgaard’s.⁸ As she emphasises herself, “our moral relations to the other animals have a different basis and a different shape than our moral relations to other people” (Korsgaard 2018, 148). The difference is that our duties to other human beings respond to interpersonal moral ‘constraint’ under a shared moral law, but our duties to animals do not (Korsgaard 2004, 104, 2018, 123–126). Thus, animals ‘obligate’ us only in a different sense than human beings (Korsgaard 2018, 147), and they are ‘ends in themselves’ only in a different sense too (Korsgaard 2018, 141). Drawing such distinctions is almost inevitable if duties to animals are put on a different philosophical basis from duties to other human beings. But it can also lead into trouble: If interpersonal constraint accounts for the ‘directionality’ of our duties—their character of being ‘directed towards’ others—it appears unclear how our duties towards animals can be directed ‘towards’ them. They may be duties about animals, or duties at which we arrive by considering animal well-being. But in Kant’s terminology, these would simply be duties regarding animals, not towards. Since Korsgaard does not reject the notion that directionality requires a shared moral law (Korsgaard 2018, 124), it is hard to see how her ‘obligations to the other animals’ could be anything else than Kantian ‘indirect’ duties repackaged.⁹ Ultimately, every non-radical account of duties towards animals runs the risk of collapsing back into old-fashioned Kantian anthropocentrism, since the duties we add to Kant’s system after the fact fail to be directed towards the animals in the way Kant’s duties are directed towards human beings.¹⁰

Setting such philosophical troubles aside, a radical approach has the added benefit of making Kant’s own discussion of our duties more directly relevant to our duties towards animals. If our duties towards animals are not a special and separate class of duty, but the same in form and ground as our duties to human beings, we can repurpose more of Kant’s own philosophical tools for animal ethics. So, without denigrating the philosophical and political value of non-radical approaches, there is great potential in pursuing a radical approach.

Apart from its different approach to the topic, there is another feature which sets the present text apart from the previous literature on Kantian animal ethics: Being one of the first monographs on the topic to date, it has more space at its disposal, particularly to explore implications concerning some specific questions of animal ethics. We need not content ourselves with showing that there can be Kantian duties towards animals, but we can also explore to some extent what duties they might be, and what kinds of arguments animal ethicists might construct from considerations about them. Hence, the format of a book makes it easier to illustrate what kind of novel insight can be gained by considering a Kantian perspective—adequately amended—on our moral relations to animals.

3 Limitations and Responses to Initial Worries

Even in a book, there is not enough space to discuss all issues at the intersection of Kantian ethics and animal ethics. Some limitations are inevitable, and I want to mention two in particular: First, this book is strictly concerned with the treatment of animals, with their role as moral patients rather than moral agents or subjects. This is important not only because animal ethicists take an increasing interest in animals as more active participants in morality (e.g. De Waal 2003, 2006; Bekoff 2004; Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Rowlands 2012). It is also important because it starkly distinguishes this book’s project from aforementioned projects in Kantian feminist and anti-racist theory. Both Hay and Mills draw heavily on Kant’s views on human beings as moral agents. Their liberatory projects rely on strengthening the egalitarian parts of Kant’s thinking while revising its racist and sexist structures and commitments. But the move of reemphasising Kant’s egalitarianism among autonomous beings will evidently not help animals. They are not ‘autonomous’ in the sense that matters for Kantian ethics: being able to act on a self-imposed moral law.¹¹ The problem is thus not that Kant made a mistake in thinking that animals do not meet his system’s criteria for moral concern. The problem lies in the criteria themselves. We cannot plausibly include animals in a picture of reciprocal moral relations between autonomous, free, and equal agents. Rather, we need to challenge the very idea that such reciprocity is a necessary feature of Kantian moral relations.¹² To be sure, this limitation is not a bad thing. Rather, the fact that different Kantian considerations are possible with regard to the oppression of autonomous human beings and the oppression of animals might itself tell us something worthwhile about the differences between these types of oppression.

The second limitation is that this book covers only one out of two types of Kantian moral duty. What this book is concerned with are so-called ethical duties, which Kant also calls duties of virtue. I am not concerned with legal duties, which Kant calls duties of right. This fundamental distinction is a recurrent theme throughout Kant’s later moral philosophy (for more on the distinction see Chap. 2). In short, ethical duties are a matter of ‘inner’ legislation (MM 6:220.19–21). They prescribe adopting certain ends or maxims, telling us what to will or strive for rather than what to do in terms of purely outward acts. Legal duties, by contrast, are a matter of ‘outer’ legislation (MM 6:229.05–6). They prescribe mere acts irrespective of motive. Due to this difference, we can force others to observe legal duties, but not ethical duties, since we can only force others to perform certain acts, but not to perform them for the sake of some particular end (MM 6:381.30–33; MM 6:383.18–20). Because they are enforceable, legal duties call for a Doctrine of Right: an account not only of what we may do, but also of what the state or other human beings may force us to do. Kant develops this account in the first book of the Metaphysics of Morals. But how exactly this Doctrine of Right relates to the rest of his moral philosophy is a difficult and controversial question. On one influential reading, legal duties do not derive from the Categorical Imperative at all, but from an entirely separate social contract theory, and hence they do not truly belong in the Metaphysics of Morals (Willaschek 1997, 2009). But of course, I do not want to show merely that animals fit into some detachable part of Kant’s moral system. Nor is it my goal to argue, against parts of the literature, that legal duties do derive from the Categorical Imperative. This would lead into special exegetical difficulties that have little to do with animals. Therefore, somewhat grudgingly, I exclude legal duties from my view in this book. When I speak of ‘moral concern’, I always mean the consideration of individuals insofar as there are ethical duties towards them (for a justification of this terminology see Chap. 2).

The distinction between ethical and legal duties is perhaps the first piece of helpful Kantian terminology this book can add to the animal ethicist’s philosophical toolbox. In later chapters (Chaps. 8, 9, and 10), I hope to show that various interesting arguments can be construed with a Kantian notion of ethical duty particularly because it addresses what we should will and not just what we may do. The downside of focusing on ethical duties is however that this book cannot offer a legal-philosophical or political argument for animal rights, or indeed for legal protections of any kind. It cannot show that any particular arrangement of institutions and laws is just and legitimate. This is somewhat unfortunate, since it is one of Kant’s shortcomings in animal ethics that he considered the morality of our treatment of animals to be a wholly private affair. The problem is not that Kant did not call for animal protection by law, an idea which only began to take serious hold abroad, in Great Britain, around the time of his death. The problem is that even in retrospect, nothing in Kant’s Doctrine of Right readily lends itself as a basis for the protection of non-autonomous beings.¹³ It is hard to see how a system of legal thought based on respect for the external freedom of autonomous beings (see MM 6:230.29–31) could protect animals, let alone at the expense of human utility. Developing a more compelling Kantian perspective on legal animal protection would therefore be a worthwhile endeavour. Korsgaard (2012, 2013) has started the conversation with her Kantian account of animal rights. But this book is unfortunately not the place to continue it.

However, even if Kantianism for Animals is an approach focused on ethical duties, it is indirectly relevant to animal politics. To reiterate: Kant’s own anthropocentric arguments were also neither legal-philosophical nor political, yet they contributed a great deal to legitimising early animal welfare policy ethically. Kantianism for Animals responds in kind. The framework may not tell us how we may treat animals as a matter of legal and political legitimacy. But it tells us something about the ends a good person should pursue and the kind of coexistence with animals they should strive to develop. In this way, the framework can lend ethical legitimacy to a political programme.

The book’s endeavour may raise some concerns right from the start. First, one might worry that there is not one Kant in whose conception of moral concern we can include animals. There are more than 200 years of reception history associated with Kant’s moral philosophy, as well as ongoing exegetical debates. In general, there is little consensus on how to read Kant. However, this book’s project does not require that we find the ‘one true reading’ of Kant’s text that settles all exegetical debates. All we need is a reading that facilitates a productive engagement on the part of animal ethicists. So if given the choice, we should go for a less orthodox reading that is more productive, not vice versa (so long as it still passes for a reading of Kant’s text). If anything, the variety of readings makes it easier to find a version of Kant that is helpful.

One might also take issue with the fact that this book about Kant openly presupposes an agenda: It takes as its starting point the view that there are duties to animals, and that these duties have the same form and ground as duties to other human beings. It then asks how Kant’s philosophy can be modified to accommodate these presuppositions. One might expect that such an agenda-driven project is unlikely to treat Kant charitably. However, while it is true that this book combines an exegetical perspective with a critical-argumentative one, the constructive aim of the project gives rise to a strong interest to read Kant as charitably as possible. The intended result is an amended Kantian system with which animal ethicists will be interested to engage. And the more compelling Kant turns out to be, the more interesting he is to work with later. Indeed, the revisions of Kant’s system I will make are not so much corrections of philosophical errors on Kant’s part. They rather undo certain philosophical decisions made by Kant with which one could reasonably disagree and still remain a Kantian in important respects. As far as this book is concerned, the reason why we should disagree with Kant on underlying issues is not that Kant’s view is obviously indefensible. The reason is simply that these positions lead to the exclusion of animals, which in turn makes Kant unattractive for animal ethicists to work with. So the combination of openly adhering to an agenda in animal ethics, but wanting to make use of Kant, enables a particularly productive and charitable engagement.

4 The Way Ahead

The chapters that follow are grouped into three parts: (I) Kantian Foundations, (II) Building Kantianism for Animals, and (III) Using the Framework. My goal in the first part is to further clarify and motivate the project. In Chap. 2, I begin by presenting Kant’s account of moral concern. Kant offers a taxonomy of duties with several crucial distinctions, as well as a series of spotlights on duties he deems particularly important. By considering this taxonomy, it becomes clearer what it means to include animals in Kantian moral concern, and we can get another glimpse of what progressive animal ethicists might gain from a Kantian perspective.

In Chap. 3, I add some critical thoughts on Kant’s ‘indirect duty’ view. I do this because Kantian defences have painted the picture that animal ethicists should find nothing objectionable in Kant’s views, correctly understood. This is overly optimistic. Though some traditional objections to Kant’s view have been overstated, the same must be said about the Kantian defences. There are serious problems with Kant’s ‘indirect duty’ account.

In Part II of the project, I turn to the question what we must change about Kant’s ethical system to turn it into Kantianism for Animals. The first step is to make it clear how Kant establishes the account of moral concern introduced in Chap. 2. How is the line of moral concern to be drawn in Kant’s view? That is, where do our duties towards others come from, and towards whom can these duties be directed? The first part of my answer (Chap. 4) will be negative: Contrary to popular readings, specific duties towards others do not follow directly from formulas of the Categorical Imperative. The attempt to derive moral concern for others directly from the Formula of Humanity in particular leads into philosophical trouble. I point out that in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant himself derives specific ethical duties by means of a ‘doctrine of obligatory ends’. According to this doctrine, our chief duty towards others is to promote their happiness. Our chief duty to self is to promote what Kant calls our own moral perfection. As surprising as it may be, the crucial Kantian question when it comes to animals is not whether they are ‘ends in themselves’. Rather, it is whether they belong among those whose happiness we should strive to promote.

I discuss Kant’s stated reason for excluding animals in Chap. 5. In general, it is true that we ought to promote the happiness of others. But Kant also holds that we can only have duties towards those whose will can ‘constrain’ us. I endorse the reading that Kant ties interpersonal moral relations to the sharing of the moral law. To say that a duty is directed ‘towards’ an individual is to say that this individual’s sharing of the moral law is necessary to make the duty binding. This account excludes all animals who are not autonomous in the strong sense of sharing the moral law. Here is the first point on which we must truly disagree with Kant if we want to include animals in moral concern. I argue that another, more thoroughly ‘first-personal’ account of interpersonal moral relations is possible. On the alternative view I propose, a duty towards an individual is a duty whose content is about that individual in a special way. Duties towards others are duties to promote their happiness. Duties towards self are duties to promote one’s own moral perfection. Once we accept this conception pace Kant, duties towards animals are possible again.

As I discuss in Chap. 6, some problems remain: Much of what is characteristic about Kant’s account of moral concern—most importantly, the idea of a reconciliation between ‘love’ and ‘respect’ for others—can only apply to subjects of pure practical reason. First, Kant’s ‘duties of respect’ revolve around the recognition of equality in moral potential (which involves respect for others’ humanity). Because other human beings are fundamentally our equals in their potential for good and evil, we should not be arrogant or contemptuous towards them, and neither should we be so overbearingly beneficent towards them that their moral self-esteem suffers from it. None of this appears to apply to animals incapable of morality. My argument, however, is that there is still a duty not to exalt ourselves above animals in certain ways. Not because of any equality in moral potential, but because of the fundamental moral incomparability between moral agents and moral non-agents. A second, quite separate problem is that according to Kant, animals are not subjects of instrumental practical reason; indeed they are not agents in any ambitious sense of the word. Because they play no active role in pursuing their own happiness, we cannot react to them in the way Kant asks us to react to human beings. However, I will argue that we can be more generous about animals’ practical capacities even within the bounds of Kantian philosophy. If we acknowledge that animals are broadly capable pursuers of their own happiness, we end up with a desirably uniform picture of duties towards human beings and animals. This is the last amendment necessary for Kantianism for Animals.

To conclude Part II, Chap. 7 presents an overview of some features that set Kantianism for Animals apart from other approaches in animal ethics. In particular, I highlight five claims: (1) Our own autonomy is the normative basis of our duties towards animals; (2) Duties have explanatory, epistemic, and normative primacy over rights; (3) We have duties to self as well as towards others; (4) We ought to reconcile practical love for animals with non-exaltation; (5) The moral worth of our actions depends on what end we pursue, on the maxim from which our action springs, and on the incentive on which we act. Taken together, these claims not only differentiate Kantianism for Animals from sentimentalist, utilitarian, virtue-ethical, care-ethical, and contractualist approaches. They also differentiate it from self-avowedly ‘deontological’ approaches.¹⁴

Part III delves into possible applications of the resulting framework. My goal is to showcase some of the resources Kantianism for Animals brings to the table in animal ethics. A recurrent theme is that Kantianism for Animals is radical in the original sense of the word: It goes to the root of the problem rather than dwelling on contingent consequences. Chapter 8 illustrates this by offering a novel argument against using animals based on the revised Kantian framework: When we set out to ‘use’ animals, we treat some non-moral end of ours as a limiting condition on the promotion of the happiness of animals. This is a stance that is opposed to duty, which Kant calls a ‘vice’. This objection to animal use is more fundamental than the usual ‘abolitionist’ line, which argues for the badness of certain preconditions or consequences of animal use, but not for the badness of animal use itself. Chapter 9 offers a novel argument against eating animals. Though our duty not to harm and kill live animals are duties directly towards them, there is also a separate duty towards ourselves not to regard the bodies of the recently deceased as mundane commodities for us to consume. This argument is again more radical than its predecessors in the literature, which focus on the harm that contingently follows from meat consumption. Chapter 10 provides an alternative Kantian approach to environmental protection. Pace earlier Kantian contributions, I argue that Kant has a largely exploitative approach to the non-human environment. But once the line of moral concern is moved to include animals, this exploitation is no longer objectionable. Kantianism for Animals calls for a distinctly zoocentric environmentalism, which is a more independent and compelling Kantian interlocutor position for environmental ethicists than earlier Kantian proposals. In particular, the notion of a duty to self helps to deal with some philosophical difficulties of approaches that view the environment exclusively through the lens of the good of sentient beings. Finally, Chap. 11 makes a plea for animal ethicists to take a constructive, revisionist, and radical approach to other philosophers besides Kant. This promotes a historically conscious, but appropriately irreverent, discipline of animal ethics.