Comment: Animals in ‘Non-Ideal Ethics’ and ‘No-Deal Ethics’

Within the animal movement there is a tension between those who favor a ‘humane treatment’ of animals and those who think we need to abolish the (ab)use of animals all together and grant animals legal personhood. For an number of reasons philophers and other reseachers often try not to take a stance in this strategy debate. They however fail in doing so. As they make recommendations on how to treat animals they cannot avoid taking an implicit of explicit stance in the debate. This paper argues that we need a ‘directionists approach’ in this matter. We, as philosophers or reseachers, may for all sorts of reasons advice farmers, organisations or governments to take small steps towards more animal welfare, but only if we make clear on the outset that this will not be the end of the journey. We, as a society and as philosophers and researchers, are heading in a direction and one can either take the long and exhausting road of incremental change or take a shortcut.

The Vanishing Ethics of Husbandry

The ethics of food production should include philosophical discussion of the condition or welfare of livestock, including for animals being raised in high volume, concentrated production systems (e.g. factory farms). Philosophers should aid producers and scientists in specifying conditions for improved welfare in these systems. An adequately non-ideal approach to this problem should recognize both the economic rationale for these systems as well as the way that they constrain opportunities for improving animal welfare. Recent philosophical work on animal ethics has been dominated by authors who not only neglect this imperative, but also defeat it by drawing on oversimplified and rhetorically overstated descriptions of the conditions in which factory farmed animals actually live. This feature of philosophical animal ethics reflects a form of structural narcissism in which adopting a morally correct attitude defeats actions that could actually improve the welfare of livestock in factory farms to a considerable degree.

Turning to Animal Agency in the Anthropocene

Agency is central to humans’ individual rights and their organization as a community. Human agency is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through guaranteed rights, such as the right to life, basic education, freedom of expression, and the freedom to form personal relationships, which all protect humans from tyranny and oppression. Though studies of animal agency consistently suggest that we grossly underestimate the capacity of animals to make decisions, determine and take action, and to organize themselves individually and as groups, few have concerned themselves with whether and how animal agency is relevant for the law and vice versa. Currently, most laws offer no guarantee that animals’ agency will be respected, and fail to respond when animals resist the human systems that govern them. This failure emerges from profound prejudices and deep-seated anthropocentric biases that shape the law, including law-making processes. Law and law-making operating exclusively as self-judging systems is widely decried and denounced—except in animal law. This chapter identifies standpoint acknowledgement as a means to dismantle these tendencies, and provides instructions on how to ask the right questions. It concludes by calling for an “animal agency turn” across disciplines, to challenge our assumptions about how we ought to organize human-animal relationships politically and personally, and to increase our civic competence and courage, empathy, participation, common engagement, and respect for animal alterity.

Humanity in the Living, the Living in Humans

Recent studies in biology, ecology, and medicine make it clear that relationships between living organisms are complex and comprise different forms of collaboration and communication in particular in getting food. It turns even out that relations of collaboration and valuing are more important than those of aggression and predation. I will outline the ways organisms select and value specific items in their network of living and non-living entities. No organism eats everything; all organisms prefer certain foods, companions, and habitats. Relations between organisms are established on the basis of communication, exchange of signs, actions and goods, through mutual learning processes on all levels of life. Micro, meso and macro organisms participate in this process of valuing and communication. Animals and plants therefore show features that were traditionally attributed only to humans, like selfless assistance. The usual distinction between humans and other living beings on the basis of human’s sensitivity for altruism, language and values crumbles down due to the circumstance that also non-human living beings are prone to selfless assistance, communication and valuing.

Understanding and Defending the Preference for Native Species

The preference for native species, along with its concomitant antipathy toward non-natives, has been increasingly criticized as incoherent, obsolete, xenophobic, misanthropic, uncompassionate, and antithetical to conservation. This essay explores these criticisms. It articulates an ecological conception of nativeness that distinguishes non-native species both from human-introduced and from invasive species. It supports, for the most part, the criticisms that non-natives threaten biodiversity, homogenize ecological assemblages, and further humanize the planet. While prejudicial dislike of the foreign is a human failing that feeds the preference for natives, opposition to non-natives can be based on laudatory desires to protect natural dimensions of the biological world and to prevent biological impoverishment. Implications for our treatment of non-native, sentient animals are explored, as well as are questions about how to apply the native/non-native distinction to animals that share human habitats and to species affected by climate change.

Reimagining Human Responsibility Towards Animals for Disaster Management in the Anthropocene

Animals, like human beings, are prone to suffering harms, such as disease, injury and death, as a result of anthropogenic and natural disasters. Animals are disproportionately prone to risk and adversely affected by disasters, and thus require humane and respectful care when disasters strike, due to socially situated vulnerabilities based on how human communities assess and value their moral standing and function. The inability to integrate animals into disaster risk and management practices and processes can sometimes be associated with a lack of understanding about what animal ethics and animal health and welfare require when designing disaster management programs. This chapter seeks to reimagine human responsibility towards animals for disaster management. The pervasiveness of disasters and their impacts on animals, human-animal and animal-environment relationships underscore the importance of effective animal disaster management supported by sound ethical decision-making processes. To this end, we delineate six ethically responsible animal caretaking aims for consideration when developing disaster management plans and policies. These aims, which address central vulnerabilities experienced by domesticated animals during disasters, are meant to be action-guiding within the disaster management context. They include: (1) Save lives and mitigate harm; (2) Protect animal welfare and respect animals’ experiences; (3) Observe, recognize and promote distributive justice; (4) Advance public involvement; (5) Empower caregivers, guardians, owners and community members; (6) Bolster public health and veterinary community professionalism, including engagement in multidisciplinary teams and applied scientific developments. To bring about these aims, we offer a set of practical and straightforward action steps for animal caregivers and disaster management teams to ensure that animals’ interests are systematically promoted in disaster management. They include: (1) Respect and humane treatment; (2) Collaboration and effective disaster communication; (3) Strengthening systems of information sharing, surveillance, scientific research, management and training; (4) Community outreach and proactive contact; (5) Cultural sensitivity and attitudes check, and (6) Reflection, review and reform.

Animals in Our Midst: An Introduction

In this introduction we describe how the world has changed for animals in the Anthropocene—the current age, in which human activities have influenced the planet on a scale never seen before. In this era, we find many different types of animals in our midst: some—in particular livestock—are both victims of and unwittingly complicit in causing the Anthropocene. Others are forced to respond to new environmental conditions. Think of animals that due to climate change can no longer survive in their native habitats or wild animals that in response to habitat loss and fragmentation are forced to live in urban areas. Some animals are being domesticated or in contrast de-domesticated, and yet others are going extinct or in contrast are being resurrected. These changing conditions have led to new tensions between humans and other animals. How can we shape our relationships with all these different animals in a rapidly changing world in such a way that both animal welfare and species diversity are not further affected? We describe how animal ethics is changing in these trying times and illustrate the impacts of Anthropocene conditions on animals by zooming in on one country where many problems, such as biodiversity loss and landscape degradation, converge, the Netherlands. We conclude by giving an overview of the different chapters in this volume, which are organised into five parts: animal agents, domesticated animals, urban animals, wild animals and animal artefacts.

Comment: Evolution 2.0—Rewriting the Biosphere

The chapters in this section deal with rather diverse topics like gene drives and de-extinction, the resurrection of the heath hen, cultured meat and the (dis)enhancement of domesticated anmals, but they all explicitly or implicitly engage with ecomodernism. I have chosen the various ways in which the authors confront ecomodernist views as the red thread of my commentary.

An Introduction to Ecomodernism

Land use change has detrimental impacts on the planet. It is not only a major cause of biodiversity loss, through habitat destruction and fragmentation, but also an important driver for climate change, through deforestation and peat oxidation. Land use change is mainly driven by food production, of which meat production comprises the major share. Ecomodernists therefore feel reduction of the impact of meat production is paramount for a sustainable future. To achieve this, ecomodernists focus on intensification of the production process to produce more on less land, both through the closing of global yield gaps and through the development of integrated indoor systems like agroparks. On the demand side, ecomodernists feel a diverse strategy is needed, from the development of meat substitutes and lab meat, to the persuasion of consumers to move from beef to monogastrics like pork or chicken.

“Eek! A Rat!”

Rats are often despised. In what way does such aversion affect moral deliberation, and if so, how should we accommodate any distorting effects on our normative judgements? These questions are explored in this chapter with regard to recent proposals in (1) the ethics of pest management and (2) animal political theory. While ethical frameworks and tools used in the context of animal research can improve moral deliberation with regard to pest management, we argue based on psychological factors regarding the perception of rats that before implementing these methods in either animal research or pest management, one needs to ascertain that rats are owed genuine moral consideration. With regard to animal political theory, we identify three issues: truth-aptness, perception, and moral motivation. To complement as well as address some of the issues found in both animal research ethics and animal political theory, we explore compassion. Starting from compassion, we develop a pragmatist and interspecies understanding of morality, including a shift from an anthropocentric to a multispecies epistemology, and a distributed rather than an individual notion of moral agency. We need to engage with the experience of others, including rats and those who perceive these animals as pests, as well as pay attention to the specific way individual agents are embedded in particular socio-ecological settings so as to promote compassionate action.