Caleb McDaniel has a fascinating discussion of a framework ethics for vegetarianism. He's primarily working from Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which I unfortunately haven't read, but he works in some interesting insights and questions of his own. Among them:
My question, though, is this: If someone follows Nozick's arguments and examples to the conclusion that Kantianism should apply equally to human beings and animals, would one then need to accept that Nozick's ultraminimalist state should protect animals from animals? If a pack of wolves kills a cow, aren't they using that cow as a means? And, on the putative view that "utilitarianism for animals" is wrong, wouldn't that mean that the wolves are violating the cow's rights?In this case some of the actors (all the animals) seem to be incapable of acting within any kind of ethical framework. Should that excuse other actors within the system from having to treat them ethically? Caleb goes on to dismiss this line of argument, which acknowledges differences between humans and animals, as undermining the original claim that human and animal rights should equally constrain us.
But don't we treat mentally disabled individuals differently under the law? The fact that they are incapable of acting within the same ethical framework doesn't mean the rest of us are excused from treating them ethcally. I'm certainly not trying to compare the mentally disabled to animals (!) but couldn't the same approach to an impaired ethical faculty apply to animals as well?
No, the real breakdown in this line of argument is that it exposes us to some responsibility to protect those who can't help themselves; in this system that means the animals who are killed by other animals. Unless we're willing to take on this responsibility, the whole idea of Kantianism (ie full constraining rights) for animals falls apart. This is why it seems to me there has to be some separation between human and natural ethics; animals (not the domesticated ones) exist within a natural order that is far from human notions of ethics, and trying to endow them with our own rights can't take that into account. This doesn't mean that we can't find ways to treat them ethically, just that the ethics will have to be more complex and nuanced than simply bestowing inalienable human rights.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Paul. I think you're right that the question of whether animals deserve protection from other animals will probably force most animal-rights defenders to accept some divergence between human ethics and the laws of the animal kingdom. It's a jungle out there, we may say, but that doesn't mean it should be a jungle in here.
But I'm still not certain whether one could accept this divergence and still protect the basic similarity between humans and animals that ethical vegetarianism posits. The analogy to human persons whose ethical judgment is impaired is an interesting one, but to pursue it fully you would have to argue that carnivorous animals are similarly impaired relative to their natural community of peers. Since I take it that most animal rights activists are probably also environmentalists, they would probably want to accept that animals killing other animals is a natural ecological process that is in fact vital for the stability of ecosystems.
We are led back, then, to the conclusion that the natural world is not governed by ethics, but by ecology. But in that case it seems hard to place fully robust side-constraints on behavior towards animals. (We also might start chipping away at side-constraints on humans if we thought about this too hard! After all, we're part of ecosystems too.)
All of this is still a major puzzle for me to work on. I certainly do think animals have the right to be protected from certain kinds of treatment. But maybe the real question I'm groping toward is whether all ethical behavior can be parsed as respect for side-constraints on action.
What I was hoping was that my question about animal ethics would expose some of the limitations of thinking about ethical obligations to others solely as negative side-constraints, which Nozick generally wants to do. I think he sets up a false dilemma between the inviolable individualism of Kant and a utilitarianism that allows the state to use individuals as means whenever necessary. There may be a third (or fourth or fifth) way, in which we determine our moral obligations not just on the basis of individual inviolability or (in Rawls' case) procedural justice, but also on virtues like compassion and self-sacrifice.
In that case, we would say that vegetarianism is ethical because it shows compassion towards beings who are less powerful than we are, or because it represents a self-sacrifice of our personal pleasure for the sake of maximizing the pleasure of another being. Those ideas are at least what shape my own moderate position of having a "preferential option" for plants, but without accepting the full side-constraints on my action that would require me to be a vegetarian.
The analogy to human persons whose ethical judgment is impaired is an interesting one, but to pursue it fully you would have to argue that carnivorous animals are similarly impaired relative to their natural community of peers. Since I take it that most animal rights activists are probably also environmentalists, they would probably want to accept that animals killing other animals is a natural ecological process that is in fact vital for the stability of ecosystems.
I guess I was thinking of animals being ethically impaired relative to their human peers. But I agree completely that the notion of ecosystem is more controlling for most people than any ethics could be on this issue, and I like the idea of an intermediate ethics that allows us to avoid human style rights (ie side-constraints) for animals -- although from a practical standpoint they seem a bit toothless...
Or maybe you were arguing against side-constraint style rights even for people?
I guess I was thinking of animals being ethically impaired relative to their human peers.
I agree with you there: that would help the argument that animals have the right not to be eaten by human beings. But the question I was raising was whether animals have the right not to be eaten by other animals. To say that they are ethically impaired relative to human beings doesn't help us answer that question.
All of this is a bit fanciful, I admit. But thinking about the full implications of Nozick's examples is useful, I think, primarily to help us think about whether he is right to frame the obligations of the state solely with individual side-constraints. You're right that I'm trying to put some pressure on that idea. While I certainly don't reject that there are rights which constrain our actions, I disagree with Nozick's libertarian view that those side-constraints always prove to be sure guides to ethical practice.
So was it unethical for me to feed my cat meat? For that matter, was my whole relationship with the cat unethical, even though I let him run around and he stayed with me voluntarily?
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