Which Fields Should Answer What to Do About Wild Animals?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VII, p. 48 of the PDF edition · English translation

Those who advocate helping animals living in the wild are sometimes accused of thinking that a question belongs to the field of ethics when it actually belongs to the field of ecology: “they are making value judgments where such judgments do not belong: they need some basic notions of ecology.” Does this criticism make sense? That is what we will discuss in this chapter.

Describing what happens in natural ecosystems is a task for ecology. However, those who advocate helping wild animals recognize this, and they rely precisely on this knowledge to get an idea of the amount of suffering and death that exists in nature and of how interactions in ecosystems take place, in order then, on the basis of ethical principles, to prescribe what should be done about it. So it makes no sense to suggest that those who advocate helping animals in the wild should study ecology, since that is exactly what they are doing as well. The proposal to create the field of welfare biology⁴² (which we will look at in more detail in Chapter 27) is a good example of this.

Describing what happens in natural ecosystems is a task for ecology. However, investigating which things have intrinsic value and which have value only as resources is a question for value theory. Establishing which goals we should pursue is a question for the field of ethics. It is these two fields that will provide us with the tools to reflect on whether what we should seek to secure is the good of sentient beings, or whether nonsentient entities such as species and ecosystems have intrinsic value and, if they do, how to weigh this against the good of sentient beings⁴³. This is a debate about what has value and about what we should do. No descriptive science has the answer to these questions. Therefore, those who make the mistake of treating a question from one field as if it belonged to another are those who think that descriptive fields ground what we should value and how we should act.

Moreover, it is not only those who advocate helping animals in the wild who are making moral judgments about what happens in ecosystems. Saying “we should not help

animals living in the wild” is also a moral judgment⁴⁴. The same happens when someone argues that our goals should be to secure biodiversity and ecological balance, rather than to reduce the suffering of sentient beings. One reason such a position is usually not perceived as involving moral judgments is that it is sometimes advocated by scientists. The discourse of scientists is received by the public as an objective and morally neutral description of the facts. However, as we have seen, it often contains hidden normative and evaluative premises.

Sometimes a moral judgment is intentionally disguised as a description so that it seems neutral, since this increases its chances of being accepted. In this way, listeners unwittingly absorb a whole set of values and rules, thinking that they are simply hearing descriptions, and they reproduce this cycle when they talk about the subject. This is something that sometimes happens even on the part of professionals and students in scientific fields themselves. One reason this happens is that there are often no courses on ethics in scientific degree programs, and so students do not clearly distinguish the descriptive, evaluative, and normative domains. Moreover, in many of these programs environmentalist or anthropocentric values are generally conveyed to students implicitly, and therefore there is no discussion of whether or not they are plausible.

The presence of environmentalist values among life science professionals may give the impression that those who hold that the good of each sentient being matters in itself lack the appropriate scientific knowledge. But this is an illusion, which is due in part to the confusion between the terms “ecology” and “environmentalism”. Environmentalism is the idea that certain nonsentient entities (such as species or ecosystems) should receive direct moral consideration (that is, that they matter in themselves, and not as a means of securing the good of sentient beings), and that they matter more than the good of sentient beings. Ecology, on the other hand, is the science that describes how interactions in ecosystems take place. Animal advocates hold an ethical conception completely different from the one held by environmentalism. However, they do not reject knowledge in ecology (in fact, they depend on such knowledge in order to be able to help wild animals safely).

Science describes the physical world. We need these descriptions in order to try to achieve the goals we pursue. However, since science only describes, it does not tell us which goals to pursue or which things to value. The fields that can tell us something about this are value theory and ethics. Accordingly, ecology would never prescribe that we should value species, ecosystems, biodiversity, or anything else, simply because it only describes how interactions in ecosystems take place – it is not about which things to value or which goals to pursue: it prescribes nothing. People who say they are opposed to helping wild animals and claim that in doing so they are “just applying what ecology dictates” are in fact concealing that they are defending a moral position called environmentalism, and disguising this moral position as a neutral description.

Given the predominance of speciesism, knowledge from fields such as ecology has generally been employed with a view to achieving anthropocentric or environmentalist goals. However, a perspective centered on concern for sentient beings in no way prevents or diminishes knowledge in these fields. The only difference would be that such knowledge would be used to benefit animals, not to harm them. Moreover, concern for animals could even greatly expand such knowledge, since interest in knowing how they are affected as individuals who have a well-being (and not as components of ecosystems and specimens of species) is still largely neglected. We will return to this subject in Chapter 27.