Directionality and Virtuous Ends

This chapter examines the question of the moral status of animals in Kantian moral theory. Kant’s view that all our duties regarding non-human animals are duties to ourselves is widely thought to capture neither the content of these duties nor their ground. The chapter, therefore, focuses on the supposed problem of the directionality of our moral obligations. It seeks to articulate and defend an account of Kant’s understanding of the directionality of duty, and to deploy it to explain and defend his notorious claim that our duties regarding animals are duties to ourselves. More generally, we seek to explain the relation between the content of a duty and its directionality. The chapter identifies three possible sources of the directionality problem: the issues of it involving the wrong content, or a kind of instrumentality, or a kind of contingency. It argues that the contingency worry is the key one and suggests a response to it.

Content-Undermining

The fitness of concern as a response to others’ welfare, or respect as a response to their self-expression, can be undermined when their welfare or self-expression has the wrong content: for example, when a person takes pleasure in others’ suffering. This chapter shows how, by treating presumptive fitness relations as foundational to morality, we can not only allow for such exceptions, but explain them. The explanation draws on an insight from Brentano: loving the bad is bad, as he puts it. Adapting a Brentano-style value theory, simple structural principles can be repeatedly applied to explain how the complexity of morality is generated. A view with this structure can avoid circularity, and accommodates an Aristotelian view about the value of pleasure.