If Ethics Was Invented for Self-Protection, Is It Just to Disadvantage Animals?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume I, p. 37 of the PDF edition · English translation

12.1. The appeal to self-interest

It is sometimes claimed that humans invent ethics to protect themselves. According to this view, people condemn things like murder not because they genuinely care about others, but because they are afraid others will do the same thing to them. This view is sometimes used to argue that, if the basis of ethics is self-interest, then there is no reason to consider nonhuman animals, since they have no power to threaten us³⁸.

12.2. Could the appeal to self-interest justify speciesism?

A first problem with this argument is that it could not justify the view that it is right to commit atrocities against nonhuman animals and wrong to do the same to humans. After all, there are also humans who have no power at all to threaten other humans. Babies, children up to a certain age, and victims of certain diseases and accidents that cause physical or mental disability are good examples. If what the argument claims were correct, then it would be right to commit every kind of atrocity against them, and not only against nonhuman animals³⁹.

12.3. Is the claim about ethics and self-interest correct?

The second problem is that what the argument claims about the facts is false, namely, that people respect only those they fear. Of course, there are people who respect only those who have the power to threaten them. But, fortunately, many other people are not like that. Many people respect highly vulnerable individuals who have no power at all to pose a threat to them. What the argument claims may be true of the argument's proponents. It is possible that they, indeed, respect only those who have the power to threaten them. However, this is certainly false if it refers to humanity in general. In fact, this mistake is very common: when someone says "that's what humanity is like," they are sometimes actually making a hasty generalization from the observation that they themselves are like that.

12.4. The appeal to the origin of ethics

Suppose, however, that the argument is about the origin of ethics, and not about how people apply it today. For example, one could say that the first ethical systems in history arose out of self-interest, on the part of individuals seeking mutual protection. On this basis, someone might then argue that, for this reason, we have no reasons to consider those who cannot threaten us.

Here, again, there are two problems. The first problem is that, once again, the factual claim the argument makes is probably false. Observations of the behavior of nonhuman animals seem to suggest that ethics arises from altruistic behaviors that are probably a genetic inheritance⁴⁰, much older than any self-interested ethical system.

However, there is an even bigger problem with the argument. Suppose ethics had arisen out of self-interest. This does not imply that this conception of ethics is correct. For example, the first astronomers had certain convictions about astronomy, but this does not mean they were necessarily right. Over time, in fact, many of the things they thought were proven wrong. The same applies to ethics.

The argument in question confuses describing how the activity of ethics arose with justifying a particular conception in ethics. Even if egoism were a good explanation of the origin of the activity of ethics (and, as we have seen, not even that seems to be the case), this would be no reason at all to think that egoism is justified. To think otherwise is to make the mistake of thinking that descriptions of the way people act, or of what motivations they have, could ground questions that are normative (that concern what is just or unjust, what we should or should not do, and so on). This would be the equivalent of trying to prove that a mathematical calculation is correct by pointing out that this was the way the calculation was done thousands of years ago.