Attempts to Justify Speciesism That Appeal to Authorities

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume I, p. 39 of the PDF edition · English translation

13.1. A moral double standard

The good of nonhuman animals is generally not given much importance. For example, around the world, nonhuman animals are exploited for the most varied purposes. In the vast majority of cases this involves killing them, after subjecting them to a life full of intense suffering. Another example: when wild animals are victims of natural processes such as hunger, thirst, disease, and natural disasters, the standard view is that we should not help them: "we should let nature take its course."

In both cases, however, if the victims were human, the standard attitude would be the opposite. This shows that most people apply a double standard, depending on the species of those affected by their decisions. This standard is anthropocentric: if they are human, they are respected and helped; if they are nonhuman animals, they are not.

There have been various attempts to justify this anthropocentric moral standard. In this text, we will discuss one in particular: the claim that this standard is justified because some moral authority approves of it.

13.2. The appeal to authorities

Below we will give examples involving attempts to defend eating animals. However, it is important to remember that everything said here applies equally to the appeal to moral authorities in an attempt to defend any other practice or attitude.

It is often claimed that eating animals is justified because some moral authority allegedly approved of it. For example, it is often pointed out that the Bible approves of eating animals, and that Jesus ate fish. At other times, appeal is made to other kinds of moral authority (not necessarily authorities tied to a religion). In short, the pattern of these arguments is the following: "a certain moral authority approved of a certain practice; therefore, the practice in question is justified."

13.3. How not to respond

Some people sometimes try to counter this kind of argument by denying that the authority in question approved of eating animals. However, this way of responding does not address the main problem with the argument (in fact, it also assumes it), which is the very appeal to authorities in debates about ethical questions. Let us see:

13.4. The Euthyphro dilemma

Plato, 399 years before Christ, had already noticed the problems with this kind of argument (so appeals to moral authorities were probably already quite common at that time). The main problem is illustrated by Plato in the dialogue titled Euthyphro⁴¹, which is why it became known as the Euthyphro Dilemma.

Basically, the dilemma consists in asking the following: "Does an authority approve of a certain practice because the practice in question is right, or does it become right because it was approved by the authority?" This reveals a serious problem with appeals to moral authorities, whatever answer one gives to this dilemma. Let us see:

13.5. The possible answers to the dilemma do not support the appeal to authority

Suppose someone says it is the second case (the practice becomes right because it was approved by the authority). If so, then the authority in question approves of the practice not because the practice has good reasons in its favor, since anything the authority randomly chose to approve would be right. If so, then we are not really dealing with a moral authority, but with someone who arbitrarily chooses what to approve.

Of course, if someone considers a certain person, book, or deity a moral authority, they will say that the authority in question is an authority because it has a great deal of moral knowledge, and so approves of certain things because it knows they are right (and not that they become right because they were approved by the authority). So it seems that the only way to claim that

we are dealing with an authority is to defend the first option: "the authority approves of a certain practice because it knows the practice is right."

But then this implies that it is not the authority's will that makes the practice right: the authority merely knows of some reason that makes the practice right. But if so, in order to assess whether the practice really is right, or whether the authority in question was mistaken, we need to know what that reason is.

13.6. It doesn't matter who said it: what matters is assessing the reasons

In short, the point is this: pointing out that a certain authority approves of a practice is not enough to justify it. We have to know what reasons that authority would have put forward in trying to show that the practice is right. And if we come to discover what those reasons are, we have to assess those reasons on their own merits.

That is, the argument presented will be sound or not regardless of who presented it. If the argument is good, it is good, whether it was put forward by an authority or by anyone else. On the other hand, if the argument is bad, it remains bad, even if it was put forward by an authority.

That is why, if our goal is really to discover which practices are justifiable, we will reject appeals to moral authorities entirely. We will assess the soundness of arguments regardless of who put them forward. This shows, then, that the fact that certain authorities approved of speciesist practices is not enough to show that such practices are justified.