How Not to Understand the Issue

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VII, p. 10 of the PDF edition · English translation

2.1. The Idea That It Is Not an Ethical Issue

A common view is that harms resulting from natural disasters, hunger, thirst, disease, and conflicts between animals are not an ethical issue because it makes no sense to hold either natural processes or nonhuman animals morally responsible. According to this view, we should therefore not try to minimize this kind of harm.

There are at least two basic mistakes this view makes, explained separately below.

2.2. Whatever You Think We Should Do, It Is an Ethical Issue

The first mistake lies in the contradiction between the claims “the way natural processes affect wild animals lies outside the scope of ethical evaluation” and “we have a duty not to help wild animals who are victims of natural processes.”

But it goes further: even those who claim that helping animals in this case should be optional are also seeing the issue as an ethical one, since ethics deals not only with what is morally required or forbidden, but also with what is morally permissible but not required. In short, whatever anyone thinks we should do about this situation, it is an ethical issue simply because it concerns whether an action should be required, forbidden, or permitted.

There are questions that are not ethical questions. For example: “Is there life on other planets?”; “What was the identity of Jack the Ripper?”; “Will it rain tomorrow in Florianópolis?”; “When is Luciano Cunha's birthday?”; “What is 2+2?”; “Is there life after death?”; “What is consciousness?” None of these questions is an ethical question, because none of them concerns how we ought to act (even though some of them may have an indirect bearing on our reasons for acting one way or another). The question of what our attitude should be toward the harms animals suffer as a result of natural processes is about how we ought to act. Therefore, it is an ethical question.

2.3. The Question Is Posed to Us, Not to Natural Processes or to Animals

The second mistake is that the fact that natural processes and nonhuman animals cannot be held morally responsible is irrelevant, since the question is not being posed to them, but to us. It is we who must answer what we should do about this issue. The fact that natural processes and animals cannot be held responsible for what they choose does not make us any less responsible.

To illustrate, imagine that the same excuse were offered in a situation involving human victims. For example, imagine that a government could save humans in a flood without sacrificing anything of greater importance in doing so. But let us imagine that the officials said: “We have no obligation to do anything, because the water cannot be held morally responsible.” At the very least, this would be regarded (rightly, in my view) as one of the flimsiest of excuses. However, the fact that the victims are nonhuman animals does not make this same excuse any less flimsy.