Kant and Moral Responsibility for Animals

This chapter claims that Kant has a consistent and not counterintuitive account of why we have the moral attitudes we do about animals and of how it is that these attitudes have the appearance of being about the animals themselves. It argues that Kant can explain why it doesn’t follow from this that these moral attitudes arise from attributing moral rights to the animals themselves. Central to this interpretation is Kant’s Religion, as it contains an account of human nature that adequately explains both why we have the positive attitudes we do towards animals and why we consider other occasions of attitudes towards animals as genuine examples of moral failure.

Hope and Despair at the Kantian Chicken Factory

People who like animal products but believe it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of their individual, private choices that they are unable to resist. Although he was a deontologist, Kant was also aware of this ‘consequent-dependent’ side of our moral psychology. One version of his ‘moral proof’ is designed to respond to the threat of such demoralization in pursuit of the Highest Good. It provides a model for a contemporary, secular argument regarding what is permitted in order to sustain resolve in contemporary industrial contexts (like that of industrial animal agriculture). The argument’s conclusion is that one of the things we can rationally hold, as an item of defeasible moral faith, is a certain decision-theoretic principle regarding what it is to ‘make a difference’.

The Comparison of Animals

This chapter discusses the historical context of Kant’s theory of animal minds. The continuity thesis is discussed. This is the claim that, whatever the variations in their mental lives, animal and human minds manifest no differences in kind but rather exhibit the same general type of mental capacities merely exercised with very different degrees of sophistication. Kant is an ardent denier of the continuity thesis in that he claims that human beings are different in kind from animals by virtue of our ability for self-conscious understanding and the opportunities for normative self-determination that this ability affords. The approaches of Montaigne, Descartes, and Bayle are outlined. It is claimed that the relevant cognitive achievement with which Kant was concerned was that of the comparison of representations with each other and the noting of similarity or difference. It is argued that Kant adopted an analogy strategy, which claims that animals possess a capacity for the comparison of representations that is only analogous to human beings’ representational capacity.

Kant on Evolution: A Re-evaluation

Kant’s remark about the impossibility of there ever being a Newton of a blade of grass has often been interpreted as a misguided pre-emptive strike against Darwin and evolutionary theories in general. This chapter aims to re-evaluate this claim in the context of Kant’s account of organic generation and argue that, contrary to what is usually thought, it does leave room for the possibility of evolution. To do so, I examine Kant’s theory of generation and draw its implications for biological heredity, species diversity, and the role played by environmental factors in organic development. On this basis, I suggest that, first, evolution is a possible albeit far-fetched hypothesis for Kant, and second, Darwin’s theory of natural selection would have turned a far-fetched possibility into a plausible candidate. As I go on to argue, however, despite its explanatory success, the Darwinian account would not have disposed of the need for teleology. This is why Darwin could never have been a Newton of a blade of grass.

Animality in Kant’s Theory of Human Nature

This chapter provides an overview of Kant’s conception of the animality (or Tierheit) of human beings. Though human animality is treated in a wide range of Kant’s writings, it has received relatively little attention from scholars, perhaps because Kant wrote no text principally devoted to the subject. With the aim of establishing its systematic unity, I track the status and role of animality across three distinct but interrelated domains of Kant’s theory of human nature—his account of animality as one of three basically good original human predispositions in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, his account of animality as the target of discipline in the pedagogy lectures, and his account of animality as simultaneously a driver of and hindrance to the progress of history in ‘Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim’. I argue that these accounts, taken together and in light of the teleological vision of human development that connects them, manifest a distinctively Kantian vision of the human as an actively rational, but at the same time ineliminably animal, being. Far from denying that humans are animals or seeking to repress human animality wholesale, Kant in fact offers a nuanced and robust, though still problematic, defence of the necessity, innocence, and originality of the human’s animal side.

Kant on Nonhuman Animals and God

This chapter examines Kant’s account of the nature of nonhuman and human animals in the Critique of the Power of Judgement. It discusses how Kant thought that a complete account of the forms of explanation commit one to belief in God. It concludes, firstly, that Kant’s account implies an unhealthy anthropocentrism and an Enlightenment prejudice in the form of the overestimation of reason, and secondly, that the Kantian model of God lacks one of the main characteristics of the Christian conception of God: the universal divine love, a power that unifies and embraces all beings, including nonhuman and human animals and their orders.

Against the Construction of Animal Ethical Standing

This chapter argues against ‘standing egalitarianism’, the idea that there is a unique locus of ethical standing or status, and urges also that we should resist the idea that all entities who have ethical standing have it equally. It does so by engaging with Korsgaard’s recent work on animals and challenging its distinctive grounds for resisting standing egalitarianism. Drawing on the work of Tyler Burge, it argues for a different theory of the origin of value: values that matter came into the world with the first conscious beings; reasons were first possessed by the first judging beings; and moral obligations were first possessed by the first critically rational beings.

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.

Animals and Objectivity

This chapter examines the question of whether animals could ever, on Kant’s account, enjoy objective representational states of their environment by addressing Kant’s discussion of the conditions under which a mental state can be said to enjoy what Kant calls a ‘relation to an object’. I examine Kant’s discussion of this relation in the B-Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is standardly interpreted as arguing that a ‘relation to an object’ is possible only with the presence of intellectual faculties, and thus with the capacity for conceptual representation and judgment. I present an alternative interpretation that emphasizes the importance, in reading Kant’s argument, of distinguishing between acquaintance (Kenntnis) and cognition (Erkenntnis). On this alternative picture, although an animal does not rationally cognize the objective world, the world with which the animal mind is nevertheless acquainted is a world with particular qualities bundled or unified according to basic cognitive principles such as spatial continuity, cohesion, or proximity. I thus argue that there is a plausible interpretive case for Kant’s holding that animals enjoy objective states in a relevant sense of ‘objective’ but do not represent ‘objects’ in the sense with which Kant is primarily concerned in the Critique of Pure Reason.

What Do We Owe to Animals? Kant on Non-Intrinsic Value

This chapter argues that intrinsic value is necessarily connected to the rational ability people have to value things. Because animals do not have this ability, they cannot have intrinsic value. This means that if animals are to have any value at all, their value must be non-intrinsic. I argue that, despite their seemingly second-rate moral status, we can construct a surprisingly robust Kantian account of what we owe to animals. Kant is usually interpreted as arguing that the only reason we have to avoid cruelty to animals is that such behaviour is likely to harden our characters, making us more likely to behave cruelly towards people. I argue here that we can affirm the basic Kantian story about the loci and sources of both intrinsic and non-intrinsic value without being committed to a variety of morally problematic conclusions about animals. On this picture, we can still say that animals matter morally, that their interests must be taken into account, that they are moral patients or subjects, and that they deserve genuine moral consideration or regard.