Philosophy

174a Animals and Ethics

Lecture 18: Korsgaard

1. Review

Rational beings choose the laws that govern our actions
Moral Principle (categorical imperative) tells us to choose principles that could be laws
Principles that could be laws are acceptable from everyone’s point of view
Moral community, Kingdom of Ends, involves reciprocal legislation: everyone wills moral laws
for themselves and each other.
>Autonomy is required for membership in the moral community

Rational being pursues only ends that are good absolutely
Which ends are those?
- ends that are intrinsically valuable
rejected by Kant
Creature-Centered theory of value: things are good or bad because they are
good or bad for creatures
- ends chosen morally, in a way that makes them acceptable to everyone

But:

This assumes the moral community includes only rational beings. We could choose our ends in
a way that would make them acceptable to all rational beings, good-for all rational beings (or at
least not bad for them).

We cannot choose them in a way that makes them good for all sentient beings.

Not just a problem for Kant’s theory:
- Regan’s view: your end may be intrinsically valuable, but it doesn’t mean it is good from
every point of view that you should have it.
- Utilitarianism: is the maximum good absolutely good?
No, because someone’s good may be sacrificed to achieve it.

Mill: “No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person,
so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact,
we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require,
that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general
happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.” p. 34

If each person’s happiness is good, that is still true when we aggregate.
If only the maximum happiness is good, and not each person’s, why would we aggregate?

The common good is not a realizable ideal if animals are included
Two places this is especially clear:
- Debate over whether the friends of animals are committed to ending predation.
- Debates between the friends of animals and environmental ethicists.

Culling Elephants:
Animal ethicists: we have no right to kill them; they only need to be culled because we confine
them to nature reserves; we confine them to nature reserves so that we can have the
land for agriculture; we only need so much land for agriculture because we eat meat.
Environmental ethicists: we must cull members of a species if their overpopulation is destroying
the environment; that will be bad for all animals who depend on the environment
including them.
Animal ethicists: we don’t cull the species whose overpopulation is really destroying the
environment.


Why we can’t just exclude the animals from the moral community:

1. How would Kant establish that a creature has value?
1. Anti-metaphysics: not by rational intuition into the nature of things
2. Presuppositions of rational activity.
Rational activities:
Thinking
Forming a conception of the world (=science)
Deciding what to do (=ethics)
3. Why “every event has a cause” is a presupposition of forming a conception of the
world (i.e. one that enables you to find your way around in it)
Rationalists: every event has a cause is self-evident, known by intuition
Hume: can’t be known from experience, we don’t experience every event, even if we
knew every past event had a cause, that couldn’t prove the future will be like the
past, in fact we can’t predict the future at all unless the world is causally
organized.
Rationalists: this shows we must know “every event has a cause” by rational intuition
Kant: No: it shows that “Every event has a cause” is a presupposition of the rational
activity of forming a conception of the world; if it’s not true, the world isn’t the
sort of place we can form a conception of.
4. Why it is a presupposition of rational activity that we are ends in ourselves.
If we are to choose rationally, we must choose ends that are absolutely good.
Our ends are good-for-us not good-absolutely.
We can choose our ends in a way that makes them absolutely good =
1. We can choose them in a way that makes them acceptable to every
rational being.
2. When we do that, every rational beings ought to accept them.
That’s only justified if we are ends in ourselves.

Conclusion: Insofar as we are rational autonomous beings, we must act under the
presupposition that we are ends in ourselves.
Not the conclusion: only rational autonomous beings are ends in themselves.

2. Why animals (sentient beings, beings with a good) are ends in themselves.

We make laws for ourselves and each other (for that point see 8.5.2).
We make these laws only because we take what is good for us to be good absolutely.
This is not because we respect our own autonomy; we do that by conforming to our
laws. This act precedes the making of laws. We take what is good for us to be good
absolutely just because it is good for us.

Singer, Regan, as shifting the burden of proof:
Animals have interests, why don’t they count?
We take ourselves to have inherent value, why don’t animals?
Why did anyone think in the first place that duties are only owed to people or rational
beings?

Kant’s reply: the moral community is based on a reciprocal commitment to valuing each other
in a certain way, of which animals can be no part.

Korsgaard’s reply to Kant: Behind our commitment to valuing each other in a certain way is a
commitment to valuing ourselves in a certain way, and unless we do that we have no
reason for claiming standing in the moral community in the first place. So unless we
value ourselves as animals, we cannot value ourselves as people either.

Obligations to people: based on the claims reciprocal lawmaking, involve respect for autonomy
Obligations to animals: based on our own claim, on ourselves, to treat what matters to us as
good absolutely.

Two senses of “owed to.”
You made the law for me, you obligated me through legislation.
The law assigns you a right that I must respect

Trouble in the Kingdom of Ends

1. Animals aren’t equal
Williams: the only question about animals is how we should treat them.
Treat them = do things to them
vs. Act with them, i.e. share power
That’s what’s at issue in racism and sexism, not just what we should or should not do to
them.
Animals cannot have equal voice.

2. Animals are amoral and non-rational. Obligations can’t leave us helpless to defend ourselves
against this.

3. Animals make it impossible to realize a common good.