Philosophers and Moral Status

Ever since human beings began to think in a systematic, ordered fashion, they have been fascinated by moral questions. Is moral concern something owed by human beings only to human beings? Twenty-five hundred years of moral philosophy have tended to suggest that this is the case, not by systematic argument, but simply by taking it for granted. An entity has moral status “If … its interests morally matter … for the entity’s own sake” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2021). In other words, moral status relates to our duties, responsibilities, and obligations to others. Few thinkers have come to grips with the question of what makes a thing a moral object, and one wonders why. Surely the question of whether animals are direct objects of moral concern is a legitimate subject for inquiry. Yet, while examining the history of philosophy, there is very little discussion of the moral status of animals. What has prompted our ignoring of this question? Perhaps a cultural bias that sees animals as tools. Or, perhaps, a sense of guilt mixed with fear of where the argument may lead. For if it turns out that reason requires that other animals are as much within the scope of moral concern as are humans, we must view our entire history as well as all aspects of our daily lives from a new perspective.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that only rational beings can count as moral agents and that the scope of moral concern therefore extends only to rational beings. He believed that only humans could entertain, understand, and formulate statements that are universal in scope, therefore only humans are rational. In contrast, animals were believed to be subject to stimulus and response reactions. Kant concluded that only rational beings are “ends in themselves”: that is, beings that are not to be used as means to achieve some immediate or long-term goal. Animals had only instrumental value: any worth they had related to their usefulness to humans. The position linking rationality, language, and moral status may briefly be outlined as follows:

1. Only humans are rational.
   
2. Only humans possess language.
   
3. Only humans are objects of moral concern.

But if only rational and linguistic beings fall within the scope of moral concern, it is difficult to see how infants, children, the mentally disabled, the senile, or the comatose can be considered legitimate objects of moral concern. This shows that rationality and language do not represent a necessary condition for moral concern.

In a tradition most frequently associated with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Kant and incorporated into the legal systems of most civilized societies beginning in the late eighteenth century, cruelty to animals (see Chapter 20) was vigorously proscribed, though animals themselves were denied moral status. Most legal definitions of cruelty involve three criteria: (i) expert evidence of physical or mental suffering beyond a reasonable doubt; (ii) the suffering was unnecessary, unjustified, or illegitimate; and (iii) an intention to cause harm. Aquinas and Kant argued that allowing cruelty to animals would have a pernicious psychological effect upon humans; that is, if people are allowed to be cruel to animals, they will eventually abuse people, which is socially undesirable. Therefore, humans had only indirect duties to animals.

Why can we not broaden the anti-cruelty ethic to cover other animal treatment? It is because only a tiny percentage of animal suffering is the result of deliberate, malevolent acts. Cruelty would not cover animal suffering that results from industrial agriculture, safety testing of toxic substances on animals, and all forms of animal research. People who raise animals for food in an industrial setting, or who do biomedical research on animals, are not driven by desires to hurt these creatures. Rather, they believe they are doing social good, providing cheap and plentiful food, or medical advances, and they are in fact traditionally so perceived socially.

This left utilitarianism (see Chapter 4) as the source of the only clearly articulated basis for a robust animal ethic in the history of philosophy before the 20th century. Profound and intellectually bold utilitarian thinkers included Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), who based candidacy for moral status on sentience, the ability to experience emotions and feel pleasure and pain. Bentham famously affirmed that: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes” (Bentham 1996). Since animals can feel pain and pleasure, according to Bentham, they belong within the scope of moral concern.

This approach was appropriated by Peter Singer (1946–) in his revolutionary book Animal Liberation (Singer 1975), the first contemporary attempt to ground full moral status for animals. Singer argues that species membership alone should not determine moral status, and is speciesism, a form of discrimination no different than racism or sexism (Singer 2009). Singer has argued, for utilitarian reasons, that the only way to ameliorate the suffering of farm animals raised in industrial animal factories is to stop eating meat and adopt a vegetarian, if not vegan, diet. A moment’s reflection reveals the implausibility of this suggestion. People will not give up meat even when counseled to do so by their physicians to improve their own health or even to save their own lives, so the chances that they will do so in the face of a philosophical argument are exceedingly small. In other words, not only must a successful animal ethic be logically consistent and persuasive, but it must also suggest real solutions that people can both advocate and adhere to.

The fundamental question for anyone attempting to extend all or part of our socio-ethical concerns to other creatures is this: are there any morally relevant differences between people and animals that compel us to withhold the full range of our moral machinery from animals? Answering this question occupied most of the thinkers who were trying to raise the moral status of animals. While most philosophers working on this question did not affirm that there is no moral difference between the lives of animals and the lives of humans, there was a consensus among them that the treatment of animals by humans needs to be weighed and measured by the same moral standards by which we judge the moral treatment of humans.

On the other hand, there are a considerable number of thinkers who have tried to deny a continuum of moral relevance across humans and animals and have presented arguments and criteria that support the concept of moral cleavage between the two. Many of these claims are theologically based. Most famous, perhaps, is the omnipresent Catholic view that humans have immortal souls and animals do not. Such claims include the ideas that humans are more powerful than animals, are superior to animals, are higher on the evolutionary scale than animals, have dominion over animals, are capable of reason and language while animals are not, even that humans feel pain while animals do not. These arguments draw a hard and fast line between humans, who have thoughts and feelings, and animals, who do not. The superior position of humans does not serve as adequate grounds for excluding animals from moral concern. One can argue that humans are obligated to behave morally toward other creatures precisely because of their superior power. Just as we expect fair and benevolent treatment at the hands of those capable of imposing their wills upon us, so ought we extend similar treatment to those vulnerable to us.

Of all the philosophical arguments to exclude animals from the moral arena, the most damaging are those going back to Rene Descartes (1596–1650) that deny thought, feeling, and emotion to animals. This view perpetrated the notion that animals were nothing more than machines, devoid of souls. This paradigm justified live vivisection of animals without anesthesia or pain management. It is common sense that we cannot have obligations to entities unless what we do to them, or allow to happen to them, matters to them. Therefore, we cannot have direct moral obligations to cars. If I destroy your friend’s car, I have not behaved in an immoral way toward the car but only toward its owner, to whom the condition of the car matters. For this reason, anyone advocating for higher moral status for animals cannot let claims about lack of sentience in animals go unchallenged and unrefuted.

In my experience, most people will acknowledge a continuum from animals through humans, as Charles Darwin (1809–1882) did. Most people will affirm that animals have thoughts, feelings, emotions, intentions, pain, sadness, joy, fear, and curiosity. Even more important to the inclusion of animals within the scope of moral concern is the point that most people share empathetic identification with animals, particularly regarding their pain and suffering. All forms of mattering to an animal are determined by what Aristotle referred to as its telos, or unique nature. Every living thing is constituted of a set of activities making it a living thing. How each living being actualizes these functions and fulfills these needs determines its telos. If we are to adopt telos as the basis for ethical obligations to animals, as our societal ethic has done for people, we can considerably broaden what is included in the scope of moral concern. For this reason, to enjoy moral status, an animal must have the kind of telos whose violation creates some negative mode of awareness. My contention is that animals have needs and desires flowing from their telos, which when thwarted, frustrated, or simply unmet, result in negative feelings and poor welfare. Consequently, entrance into the moral arena is determined by someone’s being alive and having interests and needs that can be helped or harmed by a being who can act morally.

Evidence of Social Change for Animals

The past 60 years have witnessed a dazzling array of social ethical revolutions in Western society. Such moral movements as feminism, civil rights, environmentalism, affirmative action, consumer advocacy, pro- and anti-abortion activism, homosexual rights, children’s rights, the student movement, and anti-war activism have forever changed the way governments and public institutions comport themselves. This is equally true for private enterprise: to be successful, businesses must be seen as operating solidly in harmony with changing and emerging social ethics. It is arguable that morally-based boycotting of South African business was instrumental in bringing about the end of apartheid, and similar boycotting of some farm products in the United States led to significant improvements in the treatment of farm workers. It is de rigueur for major corporations to have reasonable numbers of minorities visibly peopling their ranks, and for liquor companies to advertise on behalf of moderation in alcohol consumption. Cigarette companies now press upon the public a message that cigarettes kill and extol their involvement in protecting battered women; and forestry and oil companies spend millions (even billions) to persuade the public of their environmental commitments. Socially and environmentally responsible investment funds are ubiquitous, and reports of child labor or sweatshop working conditions can literally destroy product markets overnight.

Of importance to the veterinary profession, legal mandates that a veterinarian must be a member of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees that provide oversight for animal research, the proliferation of veterinary specialists (including those in animal welfare and behavior), and the public’s acknowledgment of companion animals as members of the family are testaments to the evolution of the moral status of animals.

Not only is success tied to accord with social ethics but, even more fundamentally, freedom and autonomy are as well. Every profession – be it medicine, law, or agriculture – is given freedom by the social ethic to pursue its aims. In return, society basically says to professions it does not understand well enough to regulate, “You regulate yourselves the way we would regulate you if we understood what you do, which we don’t. But we will know if you don’t self-regulate properly and then we will regulate you, despite our lack of understanding.” For example, Congress became concerned about excessive use of antibiotics in animal feeds to promote growth and prevent disease and concluded that veterinarians were a major source of the problem. In 2016, Food and Drug Administration officials removed all over-the-counter access to antimicrobials that are both used in human medicine and given to livestock in feed or water. Those drugs now can be given only with veterinarian approval for disease-related reasons (Burns 2019).

One major social ethical concern is an emphasis on the treatment of animals used by society for various purposes. It is easy to demonstrate the degree to which these concerns have seized the public imagination. Legislators acknowledge receiving more letters, phone calls, e-mails, and personal contacts on animal-related issues than on any other topic.

Whereas 40 years ago one would have found no bills pending in the US Congress relating to animal welfare, recent years have witnessed dozens of such bills annually, with even more proliferating at the state level. Federal bills have ranged from attempts to prevent duplication in animal research, to saving marine mammals from becoming victims of tuna fishermen, to preventing importation of ivory, to curtailing the parrot trade. State laws passed in large numbers have increasingly prevented the use of live or dead shelter animals for biomedical research and training, have abolished cage confinement of animals raised for food, and have focused on myriad other areas of animal welfare. Eight states have abolished the steel-jawed leghold trap, as have some 85 countries. When Colorado’s politically appointed Wildlife Commission failed to act on a recommendation from the Division of Wildlife to abolish the spring bear hunt (because hunters were liable to shoot lactating mothers, leaving their orphaned cubs to die of starvation), the public ended the hunt through a referendum (Willoughby 2013). Now, most people in western states oppose spring bear hunting (NSSF 2019).

Interest in the welfare of horses has led to US federal laws that includes measures to stop the widespread doping of racehorses and increase track safety, keep horse slaughter plants shuttered, and boost funding to stop the cruel soring of Tennessee walking horses (Block and Amundson 2020). Municipalities have passed ordinances ranging from the abolition of rodeos and circuses to the protection of prairie dogs.

Even more dramatic, perhaps, is the worldwide proliferation of laws to protect laboratory animals. In the United States, two major pieces of legislation, which I helped draft and defend before Congress, regulating and constraining the use and treatment of animals in research were passed by the US Congress in 1985, despite vigorous opposition from the powerful biomedical research and medical lobbies. This opposition included well-financed, highly visible advertisements and media promotions indicating that human health and medical progress would be harmed by implementation of such legislation. There was even a less than subtle film titled Will I Be All Right, Doctor? – the query coming from a sick child, the response coming from a pediatrician who affirmed, in essence, “You will be if ‘they’ leave us alone to do as we wish with animals.” With social concern for laboratory animals unmitigated by such threats, research animal protection laws moved easily through Congress and have been implemented at considerable cost to taxpayers. When I testified before Congress on behalf of this law in 1982, a literature search in the Library of Congress turned up no papers in the scientific literature on laboratory animal analgesia and only two on animal analgesia, one of which said, “there ought to be papers.” A Google Scholar search now finds over three million papers and book chapters on animal pain (see Chapter 19).

In 1986, the UK superseded its pioneering Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876 (the first national legislation to regulate animal experimentation) with new laws aimed at strengthening public confidence in the welfare of experimental animals (HMSO 1986). Many other countries have moved or are moving in a similar direction, even though some 90% of laboratory animals are rats and mice, not the most cuddly and lovable of animals. Research on great apes has been truncated across the world. In 2021, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution to phase out animal experiments (Block and Amundson 2021).

Many animal uses seen as frivolous by the public have been abolished without legislation. Toxicological testing of cosmetics on animals has been curtailed; companies such as The Body Shop have been wildly successful internationally by totally disavowing such testing; Orca performance exhibits at SeaWorld ended in 2016 in response to a documentary Blackfish, which highlighted their miserable conditions and confinement; and greyhound racing in the United States has declined, in part for animal welfare reasons. In 2017, Ringling Bros. ended circuses founded on exotic animal acts after 146 years, and zoos that were little more than prisons for animals (the state of the art during my youth) have all but disappeared, and the very existence of zoos is being increasingly challenged (Pierce and Bekoff 2018) despite the public’s unabashed love of seeing animals. And, as Gaskell and his associates’ work has revealed (1997), genetic engineering has been rejected in Europe not, as commonly believed, for reasons of risk but for reasons of ethics: in part for reasons of animal ethics. Similar reasons (i.e. fear of harming cattle) have, in part, driven European rejection of bovine somatotropin (BST).

Animals in Agriculture and Research

Inevitably, agriculture has felt the force of social concern with animal treatment – indeed, it is arguable that contemporary concern in society with the treatment of farm animals in modern production systems blazed the trail leading to a new ethic for animals. As early as 1965, British society took notice of what the public saw as an alarming tendency to industrialize animal agriculture by chartering a group of scientists under the leadership of Sir Rogers Brambell, the Brambell Commission, which affirmed that any agricultural system failing to meet the needs and natures of animals was morally unacceptable (Brambell 1965). Though the Brambell Commission recommendations enjoyed no regulatory status, they served as a moral lighthouse for European social thought. In 1988, the Swedish Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what the New York Times called a “Bill of Rights” for farm animals, abolishing, in a series of timed steps, the confinement systems currently dominating North American agriculture (Lohr 1988). The European Union has moved in a similar direction, banning sow stalls (gestation crates) for pigs and battery cages for egg-laying hens in 2013, and the European Parliament recently voted to ban the use of cages in animal agriculture by 2027 (Kelly 2021).

Although the United States has been a latecomer to progress on agricultural issues, things have moved rapidly. My own work attests to this tendency. In 2007, over two days of dialogue, I convinced Smithfield Farms, the world’s largest pork producer, to phase out gestation crates. Most dramatically, I was able to broker an agreement between the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the Colorado Livestock Association passing a jointly sponsored farm animal welfare law in Colorado in 2008, abolishing sow stalls and veal crates. In 2008, the Pew Commission, on which I served as the advocate for farm animal welfare, called for the end of high-confinement animal agriculture within 10 years, for reasons of animal welfare, environmental despoliation, human and animal health, and social justice. Citizen ballot initiatives pressed by the HSUS abolishing sow stalls, battery cages, and veal crates have passed in 12 states. Cage-free egg production is now proliferating across the United States.

Evolving societal values are the basis of this progress for animals. While 58% of US adults believe that “most farmed animals are treated well” (Anthis 2017), 77% of consumers noted they are concerned about the welfare of animals raised for food (ASPCA 2016). The agriculture community in the United States has been far behind societal concerns. There is one monumental conceptual error that is omnipresent in the agriculture industry’s discussions of animal welfare – an error of such magnitude that it trivializes the industry’s responses to ever-increasing societal concerns about the treatment of agricultural animals. When one discusses farm animal welfare with industry groups or with the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), one finds the same response – animal welfare is solely a matter of “sound science.”

Those of us serving on the Pew Commission (2008) (better known as the National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production), which studied intensive animal agriculture in the United States, encountered this response regularly during our communications with industry representatives. For example, one representative of the Pork Producers, testifying before the Commission, answered that while people in her industry were quite “nervous” about the Commission, their anxiety would be allayed were we to base all of our conclusions and recommendations on “sound science.” Hoping to rectify the error in that comment, as well as educate the numerous industry representatives present, I responded to her as follows: “Madam, if we on the Commission were asking the question of how to raise swine in confinement, science could certainly answer that question for us. But that is not the question the Commission, or society, is asking. What we are asking is, ought we to raise swine in confinement? And to this question, science is not relevant.”

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