Is the Proposal to Help Wild Animals Welfarist?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VII, p. 26 of the PDF edition · English translation

Those who reject the proposal to help wild animals sometimes accuse it of being welfarist. The adjective welfarist is used in many senses. For example, in the debate over the morality of animal exploitation, it is used in at least three different senses, explained below.

A first sense refers to the position that there is nothing morally wrong with animal exploitation, as long as the animals' suffering is minimized during their use (even if the use causes death and some suffering).

A second sense refers to the position that accepts that animal exploitation is unjust and should be abolished, but holds that regulating it may lead to its abolition.

Finally, a third sense refers to the position that accepts that animal exploitation is unjust and should be abolished, but holds that regulating it makes animals suffer less, and that this is something that should be done regardless of whether or not it helps abolish it.

There is a debate about whether or not regulations would lead to the abolition of animal exploitation, and about whether they really make animals suffer less. We do not need to enter into this debate for our purpose here, which is to evaluate the claim that the proposal to help wild animals is welfarist.

To avoid confusion (and to see what confusion is involved in the objection we are discussing), we will not call these three positions “welfarist.” Instead, we will use the adjective “regulationist.”

Since regulationist positions are usually called welfarist, people commonly fall into the confusion of thinking that, because a certain position is concerned with the well-being of animals (as is the case with the proposal to help wild animals), it is necessarily regulationist (in one of the three senses above). As explained below, there is no such implication.

The debate over regulationism is a debate either: (1) about the morality of animal exploitation (in the case of the first sense of the term); (2) about whether regulating animal exploitation can help abolish it (in the case of the second sense of the term); or (3) about whether regulating it really reduces animals' suffering (in the third sense of the term).

The position someone holds regarding the morality of minimizing natural harms has no direct implication whatsoever for any of the three debates, since we cannot infer, from the fact that someone cares about the well-being of animals, what position they hold in these three debates.

For example, even those who argue that animal exploitation becomes just if it is regulated so that animals suffer less claim to care (at least to some minimal degree) about the well-being of animals (otherwise, they would not argue that it needs to be regulated so that animals suffer less). But those who advocate the abolition of exploitation also care about the well-being of animals (if the well-being of animals did not matter to these people, they would not advocate abolishing animal exploitation). Likewise, those who argue that regulating animal exploitation helps abolish it and/or reduces animals' suffering are concerned with the well-being of animals, but so are those who disagree with that strategy.

It could be objected that abolitionists care only about the freedom of animals, and not about their well-being. There are two problems with this objection. The first is that if abolitionists really give moral consideration to nonhuman animals, then they must take into account the interests of animals as a whole, and not only their interest in freedom. Since nonhuman animals have an interest in not suffering and in not dying, an abolitionist position that did not take these interests into account would hardly be plausible. The second problem is that even a position focused solely on securing freedom is also a position focused on concern for the well-being of individuals, since if such a position holds that “animals are better off if they are free,” what it is claiming is that freedom is a component (instrumental and/or intrinsic) of their well-being²².

Accordingly, the proposal to minimize natural harms is concerned with the well-being of animals. However, this does not make it a welfarist (that is, regulationist) proposal, since it is not a position that bears on the debate about regulating animal exploitation, in any of the three senses above.

In short, whatever position someone holds in the debates about regulationism (in any of the three senses above), this is no obstacle to accepting the proposal to help wild animals who are victims of natural processes.