The moral status of animals: Degrees of moral status and the interest-based approach

This paper addresses the issue of the moral status of non-human animals, or the question whether sentient animals are morally considerable. The arguments for and against the moral status of animals are discussed, above all the argument from marginal cases. It is argued that sentient animals have moral status based on their having interests in their experiential well-being, but that there are degrees of moral status. Two interest-based approaches are presented and discussed: DeGrazia?s view that sentient animals have interests in continuing to live, and that their interests should be granted moral weight; and McMahan?s TRIA which similarly postulates that animals have interests and that in a given situation we should compare the human and animal interests at stake. Finally, the paper concludes that the anthropocentric approach to animal ethics should be abandoned in favour of the biocentric ethics.

The Rise of Ethical Concern for Animals as a Major Social Phenomenon

The second half of the 20th century represented a major rise in new ethical concerns, including, in the 1970s, the moral status of animals. Until then, analgesia was never used in veterinary medicine, even though many modalities were already known to control pain. This author and others wrote American law that required effective analgesics, which the US Congress mandated in 1985. The research community eventually recognized that failure to control pain in animal research subjects involved not only immoral pain to the animals but also caused invalid research results. Public concern in these areas also spread to farmed animals in intensive agriculture settings, where it was perceived that the profit motive had replaced the husbandry ethic. The increasing number of people owning companion animals also influenced their view of farm animals' moral status and others. The larger number of companion animal owners results from the alienation of human social relations, with animals' replacing the emotional value of human companionship.

Kant and Animals

This is an edited collection devoted to the topic of the role of animals within Kant’s philosophy. It addresses key issues within both his theoretical and practical philosophy. It examines the place of Kant’s model of animal minds in the historical and contemporary contexts. It addresses the question of whether Kant’s philosophy of mind allows for animals to be capable of intentional representations of spatiotemporal objects. It explores how Kant treated the issue of animal nature as it manifests in humans and non-humans alike, and questions how Kant’s scientific theory attempted to accommodate animals within his broader Enlightenment worldview. It also addresses traditional worries about the moral status of animals within Kant’s and Kantian moral theory. Kant notoriously denied that we have direct obligations to animals, and the question persists as to whether Kantian moral theory provides the right account of the moral status of non-human animals. Several papers in this collection address the question and whether Kant’s views can be defended or ought to be rejected altogether on this basis alone. The collection considers the relevance of Kantian theory for our understanding of contemporary challenges facing human beings with regard to our relationship to animals.

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.

Introduction

This is an edited collection devoted to the topic of the role of animals within Kant’s philosophy. It addresses key issues within both his theoretical and practical philosophy. It examines the place of Kant’s model of animal minds in the historical and contemporary contexts. It addresses the question of whether Kant’s philosophy of mind allows for animals to be capable of intentional representations of spatiotemporal objects. It explores how Kant treated the issue of animal nature as it manifests in humans and non-humans alike and questions how Kant’s scientific theory attempted to accommodate animals within his broader Enlightenment worldview. It also addresses traditional worries about the moral status of animals within Kant’s and Kantian moral theory. Kant notoriously denied that we have direct obligations to animals, and the question persists as to whether Kantian moral theory provides the right account of the moral status of non-human animals. Several papers in this collection address the question and whether Kant’s views can be defended or ought to be rejected altogether on this basis alone. The collection considers the relevance of Kantian theory for our understanding of contemporary challenges facing human beings with regard to our relationship to animals.

Artificial Beings Worthy of Moral Consideration in Virtual Environments: An Analysis of Ethical Viability

This article explores whether and under which circumstances it is ethically viable to include artificial beings worthy of moral consideration in virtual environments. In particular, the article focuses on virtual environments such as those in digital games and training simulations – interactive and persistent digital artifacts designed to fulfill specific purposes, such as entertainment, education, training, or persuasion.The article introduces the criteria for moral consideration that serve as a framework for this analysis. Adopting this framework, the article tackles the question of whether including artificial intelligences that are entitled to moral consideration in virtual environments constitutes an immoral action on the part of human creators. To address this problem, the article draws on three conceptual lenses from the philosophical branch of ethics: the problem of parenthood and procreation, the question concerning the moral status of animals, and the classical problem of evil.Using a thought experiment, the concluding section proposes a contractualist answer to the question posed in this article. The same section also emphasizes the potential need to reframe our understanding of the design of virtual environments and their future stakeholders.