If Ethics Is a Human Activity, Is It Just to Disregard Animals?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume I, p. 33 of the PDF edition · English translation

10.1. The appeal to ethics as a human activity

One of the arguments sometimes used to deny moral consideration to animals points out that ethics is a human activity and that, therefore, only humans should receive moral consideration. Below we will look at three criticisms of this argument.

10.2. Is every human capable of moral agency?

The first criticism points out that it is false that ethics is a human activity. Humans who reflect on ethics do not do so because they are human, but because they are rational. For example, if there are rational beings on other planets, they will very likely not be human, but they will quite probably be able to reflect on how they should act. And, more importantly: there are humans who lack the capacity to think about ethics, such as babies, children up to a certain age, and victims of certain accidents or diseases that affect cognitive capacities. So ethics is an activity of beings who have certain developed cognitive capacities, not of humans in general.

10.3. Do the beneficiaries of a practice need to be capable of engaging in it?

The second criticism points out that, from the fact that an activity is carried out by a group of beings, it does not follow that the beneficiaries of that activity must also be capable of carrying it out. For example, to practice medicine, one needs to be a doctor, but it makes no sense to say that, because of this, only doctors should receive medical treatment. To teach music, one needs to know about music, but it makes no sense to say that only those who already know something about music should take music lessons.

Therefore, from the fact that ethics is an activity of beings who possess certain cognitive capacities, it does not follow that the beneficiaries of their decisions must be only beings who possess those same capacities. This is already widely accepted in the human case. Otherwise, children up to a certain age and humans with certain cognitive impairments would be used in the same way nonhuman animals are used (as food, to make clothing, as test subjects, and so on). However, if the fact that these humans lack those capacities cannot justify doing to them what is commonly done to nonhuman animals, then the fact that nonhuman animals lack such capacities could not justify what is commonly done to them either³³.

Therefore, the argument in question confuses what is relevant to knowing who can be held responsible (the capacity to reflect on what one should do) with what is relevant to knowing who needs consideration (the capacity to be harmed/benefited)³⁴.

10.4. Circularity

Finally, the third criticism points out that the argument is in fact circular. The argument aims to explain the relevance of belonging to the human species for knowing who should be considered. It claims that nonhuman animals should be excluded from the sphere of moral consideration because they are not capable of acting ethically. However, the argument includes within the sphere of moral consideration the humans who lack this capacity (at least, that is what seems to be suggested when someone says that ethics is a human activity, since one could say instead, for example, that it is an activity of rational beings, which does not include all humans).

In other words, the argument aims to explain a morally relevant difference between humans and nonhumans, but, on realizing that there are humans who do not meet the criterion it proposes, it includes them within the sphere of moral consideration because they belong to the same species as those who can reason about ethics. In short, the argument is circular because it claims to explain the relevance of the species criterion but in fact already assumes that criterion in advance.

In short, this argument is no different from the appeal to capacities and the appeal to the group, only presented in other words. It therefore has exactly the same problems.