Philosophy and Animals

  • Overview
  • More information
  • Detailed discussion
  • Related information

Brief Summary of Philosophy and Animals
Alissa Branham (2005)


By Jebulon (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

Contemporary animal rights and creature welfare advocates often make use of philosophers in the articulation and advancement of their movement. Sometimes a philosopher is just trotted out for perfunctory corruption because of his animal-unfriendly philosophical views (that philosopher usually existence the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes). This is not always altogether unfair, especially in Descartes' example, as his view that animals are incapable of feeling pain strikes almost today as obviously absurd, and his indifferent depictions of experimentations upon all the same living animals strike most as horrifying.

The works of Immanuel Kant (an eighteenth-century philosopher) and John Stuart Mill (a nineteenth-century philosopher) have been used more substantively in beast advocacy movements, though. John Stuart Mill's philosophy (utilitarianism) was actually already adequately animal-friendly. He believed that in any given situation the correct activeness would be the activeness that tended to minimize the suffering and pain, and maximize the pleasure and happiness, of all interested parties. He further thought that the suffering, pain, pleasance and happiness of animals should be included in this calculus. Peter Singer's Animal Liberation is a gimmicky discussion of how such a utilitarian philosophy should impact our treatment of animals.

Another philosopher frequently discussed within animate being advocacy movements is Immanuel Kant. Kant himself did not retrieve that nosotros had any direct ethical duties to animals. He believed that the only reason nosotros should avoid existence cruel to animals is that in doing so we might develop brutal habits that we would inflict on other people. According to Kant, nosotros only owe ethical duties to rational beings, and animals are non included in that group. Nevertheless, animate being rights advocates accept been attracted to Kant's philosophy for many reasons. 1 reason is that in Kant's philosophy each individual to whom nosotros do owe directly upstanding duties can never be sacrificed to the happiness of others, no thing how much happiness might result. Kant posited that rational beings have inviolable rights, owed to them considering of their rational nature, and that each must be treated every bit an end in herself. So, while in utilitarianism the right thing to do, that action which maximizes happiness, might involve inflicting pain on someone, in Kant'due south philosophy that would never exist acceptable. Animal rights advocates often contend that animals also accept these sort of rights, and that they should never be sacrificed under the auspices of the greater adept, either as food or as the subjects of medical experimentation.

Overview of Animals and Philosophy
Alissa Branham (2005)

     While Western philosophy has not historically been concerned with animal rights or animal welfare, it has more than recently get an important part of animal advancement conversations and movements.  The three historical philosophers that are almost discussed are René Descartes, John Stuart Manufacturing plant, and Immanuel Kant.  While contemporary animal advocates have voiced concerns with the means in which each of these figures dealt with animals in their works, many advocates have also constitute these thinkers to be helpful in defining our upstanding relationship to animals.  In this overview of the topic, the views of each of these thinkers and their place in contemporary fauna welfare and rights movements will be briefly set out.

René Descartes (1596-1650)
It is quite common in the writings of an animate being rights thinker for Descartes' views on animals to exist counterposed to their own. That is to say, Descartes is almost invariably set up equally a philosophical villain in discussions of brute rights--and understandably so. Descartes' committed views on philosophy of listen left him with some very unintuitive, and some might say disturbing, views on animals.
Descartes was a dualist, which is to say, he believed that humans are composed of two dissever substances: heed and body .  Sensations, like the sensation of pain, are only possible in beings that are composed of both mind and body considering sensations emerge from the commingling of these ii substances. Animals, according to Descartes, are, however, composed of merely one of the two substances: body. Hence animals are sophisticated machines that are capable of making the physical motions and grimaces that would in humans accompany the sensation of pain; but, possessing no minds themselves, animals are incapable of possessing the accompanying sensation.
While it does non necessarily follow from the suggestion that animals cannot feel pain and exercise not possess minds that we have no ethical duties to them, it does brand for a difficult starting position.  For instance, to go on to maintain that one's treatment of animals is ethically constrained, 1 might argue that while beating a dog does not hurt the dog, it is unethical to do so considering information technology makes one more likely to crush a person. The obvious objection, however, is that if neither a dog nor a rug has any sensation, and so chirapsia a dog should exist no more than probable to desensitize 1 to human pain than would beating a rug to go the grit out of it.  After all, if you are not inflicting pain on the dog, how could beating information technology be more likely to cause you to injure another person than chopping downwardly a tree or skipping a stone across h2o? Consequently, if ane adopts the philosophy of mind that Descartes did, information technology seems especially difficult to take issue with acts upon animals such as scientific experimentation—acts that are washed without cruelty and for (arguably at to the lowest degree) good purpose.  And indeed, Descartes did not take event with scientific experimentation on animals and fifty-fifty vividly depicts vivisection in his work.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Kantian ethical philosophy has proven attractive to many fauna rights advocates, in big part considering his ethical theory incorporates the idea that upstanding duties owed to a person are accented ; they cannot be overridden or dismissed based on other circumstances and considerations.  Animate being rights advocates find this fashion of thinking well-nigh ethical obligations bonny because while many people agree that we accept duties and obligations of some sort to animals, they call up that these duties can be trumped by other considerations.  For instance, while many people think it is wrong to hurt animals, they concede that hurting animals should exist permitted under certain circumstances. For case, they might recall that it is permissible to injure them for the sake of making clothing and shoes, or at the very least, it is permissible to injure them to plow them into food or to use them to find cures for human diseases. To establish that animals accept inviolable rights would hence offer a great deal of protection to animals, and bar such concessions.
Kant himself, all the same, did not include animals amongst those beings that had these sorts of inviolable rights. He did not therefore maintain that we take any direct upstanding duties to animals.  Kant held that the basis of such ethical duties was respect for heightened cognitive capabilities—capabilities which animals, he held, do non possess.  Some narrate this heightened cognitive capability every bit self-consciousness.  Current animal rights thinker Steven Wise, responding to Kant, argues that some animals exercise take the level of cognitive power that Kant demands, and Wise claims that contemporary science can aid us to place which animals those are. In this fashion, Wise hopes to institute that there are some animals to whom we do take direct ethical duties.
It should be noted, that while Kant did not believe that we owed upstanding duties to animals, he did believe that there are upstanding restraints on our treatment of animals based on our upstanding duties to ourselves. Granting that animals are capable of feeling pain, and hence are qualitatively dissimilar from inanimate objects similar rugs, Kant had more resources for making such an argument than a Cartesian would accept. Kant argued that we should not be cruel to animals because desensitizing ourselves to causing them hurting could make us more insensitive and more likely to inflict pain on other people.

John Stuart Manufacturing plant (1806-1873)
John Stuart Manufacturing plant was a utilitarian.  He believed that ethical acts are those acts that tend to minimize pain and maximize pleasance.  Animals, according to Mill, can feel both pain and pleasure and and then they should be taken into consideration in all ethical decisions.  While the further claim that humans are capable of experiencing college pleasures can skew calculations in their favor, Mill'south philosophy is still viewed past beast advocates as a especially promising first step.  Peter Vocalist, a contemporary philosopher that advocates ethical treatment of animals, famously expounded on the place of animals inside a utilitarian framework in his volume Animal Liberation .  While both Mill and Singer would agree that it can be ethically permissible to inflict harm on animals if enough overall happiness would tend to result from that deed, Singer doggedly maintains that many of the ways we employ animals today are not ethically permissible under utilitarianism given the triviality of the pleasure attained and the slap-up magnitude of the suffering endured.