In 2018 Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard published Fellow
Creatures, a Kantian argument favoring our moral obligations toward animals.
A few years later, her book became the subject of an essay by Peter
Godfrey-Smith in Aeon.
As a philosopher of science, Godfrey-Smith is known for books on animal minds
and consciousness. He’s an accomplished writer, but one struggles to understand
what exactly he says and criticisms he makes regarding Korsgaard’s challenging
book. While Kant might not be the best philosopher one can muster to advocate
for animals, Korsgaard makes strides in the field of animal rights by including
him in the discussion, evident by Godfrey-Smith’s reaction. Our purpose here is
neither a response to Korsgaard nor a reply to Godfrey-Smith but an opportunity
to use these authors to talk about how humans harm animals as objects of means
to an end.
Godfrey-Smith starts with a focus on corporate animal
agriculture and the question about “what kind of wrongness” might entail in
farming animals as human food. Unfortunately, he never seems to answer this
implied query as he skirts around utilitarianism to reduce suffering and
Kantian ethics regarding respect for others. He admits, as is well known, that
Kant was not overtly concerned about animals and focused rather on human moral
relationships. Nevertheless, Korsgaard attempts to apply Kantian ethics (moral
duty under rational principles) to animals. Korsgaard is well-versed not only
in Kant but also in Aristotle, so there could be a virtue component to her
ethics. For instance, Kant argues how a bad action, such as harming another,
will diminish one’s good character. Moreover, Kant’s categorical imperative
calls for unconditional moral obligations, and perhaps that dictum could apply
to how we treat animals. The categorical imperative says act as if you will it
to be a universal law; and/or, act as if using yourself and others as an end
and not as a means.
Yet, whatever the philosophical basis of morality
(Schopenhauer found it in compassion), Godfrey-Smith does not buy Korsgaard’s Kantian
argument. If not by employing socially moral imperatives, then what are we to
do about nonhuman animals? We are surrounded by a diversity of life forms.
Initially focused on factory farming, Godfrey-Smith seems more inclined to
welfare but not rights. He’d look for ways to reduce suffering although
slaughterhouse-doomed animals sit in pens as they are fed antibiotic and hormone
laced feed to be fattened as human food. With a bolt to the head or a slice to
the jugular vein they are sawed into chunks, cut into pieces, and then packaged
for wholesale. Farmed animals are useful, then, since they supply humans with
meat, protein. Beans, leafy greens, nuts, and seeds also supply protein, and
without harmful fats or additives and with much less environmental degradation.
If one can achieve nutritional health without animal slaughter, then why not;
but Godfrey-Smith does not exactly make any such statement. Korsgaard admits
that it’s difficult to draw human/animal comparisons since both have values of
importance for themselves. Animals know what is good for them, and as Korsgaard
says, they know/experience good because they know/respond to good/bad.
Nonetheless, we have created false values regarding animals as sources of food,
entertainment, companions, and subjects for experiments.
Korsgaard tries to focus on the interests of others and how
we act with reason on their needs and desires, how we can share some basic,
common values. Animals in the wild are capable of making choices about what’s
good for them: with whom to mate, what to eat, how to raise young, when to
travel, where to nest, how to avoid conflict, etc. Not all of that is
instinctual per se; some of these types of choices could be part of their
individual brain functions or distinct group mentality. After all, individuals
who made successful choices survived to spread their genes in a population; those
who made bad choices died off. Taking animals out of the wild, artificially
breeding them, and confining them to enclosures, as we’ve done for at least eight
thousand years, to become human food renders them literally and figuratively as
objects barely capable of choice.
Korsgaard, not so much Godfrey-Smith in his essay, tries to
help people understand that our fellow creatures we call “animals” deserve
respect for their decision making, including types of reflection (like strategizing
by apes or wolves and matriarchal decisions by elephants, our examples). With
forced confinement in factory farms, zoos, laboratories, etc., humans have
erased an individual animal’s ability to choose. Fortunately, this is not
entirely the case with animals rescued from slaughter or retied from
laboratories who reside in bona fide sanctuaries. In sum, without any
categorical imperative, we have chosen our perceived needs over their lives.
Korsgaard sees this fault, but Godfrey-Smith apparently does not – at least in
this essay, distracted as he seems by his need to neuter Kantian ethics aligned
toward animals.
Granted, for Kant, there is no direct duty to animals, but
Korsgaard, like Tom Regan, argues that animals have intrinsic value; there
could be, then, an indirect duty. We have a duty toward animals since they are
part of society, whether as our food, in zoos and laboratories, as companions,
or in the wild (though Godfrey-Smith does not really clarify these
distinctions). More specifically, as Korsgaard might say, it’s not that animals
are without value and don’t sway us to exert moral obligations for them. Kant
would say we have no duty to irrational (i.e., nonhuman) beings. W.D. Ross
might jump in and say there’s a difference between duty as something we are to
be and something we tend toward. Do we act on the face of duty, or do we
try to predict consequences advantageous to ourselves? Kant says we should be
motivated by duty and not feelings or consequences. However, good acts
motivated by feelings have value; feelings need not be eliminated but should
not be the reason to act. For Ross, there’s a difference between actual and
ideal duty; one can have bad motives and seem to act rightfully, like a foreign
agent infiltrating a democratic government. The conundrum seems to hover around
how humans have falsely created a world separate from the flora, fauna, and fungi
of nature from which we have evolved. We are the foreign agents.
Kant, too, would argue that actions are more important than
theological theories or consequences disregarding a rationally-based moral
imperative. Religious or cultural traditions are not a sufficient excuse to
harm/eat animals given the many healthy plant options now available to most
people worldwide. Given that a society can choose to live in cities, why
destroy forests for suburban sprawl? Other examples include choices societies
make about travel, consumption of goods, etc. Does one really need a sofa or
car with leather seats? Godfrey-Smith himself might ask of such scenarios if
any of these actions make sense. Perhaps it does if one advocates extreme
capitalism at all costs. Consumerist choices that harm animals and the
environment are hardly defensible. At any rate, Godfrey-Smith flatly says he
prefers “a society where interference is discouraged.” That libertarian
attitude ignoring principles of duty can lead to many harms to many people and
to animals; it could also write into stone antiquated ideas, like patriarchy,
and olden cultural practices, like butchering lambs on Easter or decapitating
chickens during the Yom Kippur Kaporos.
Vague, hypothetical wordplay by Godfrey-Smith trivializes
the importance of Korsgaard’s argument. We should be concerned about what
others think if it could hurt them and other forms of life: deregulating laws
protecting clean water; deregulating laws regarding air pollution; deregulating
laws ensuring food safety, etc. That’s not interference but rationally-induced
moral norms for the common good. What’s “good” for all is not always relative,
as Godfrey-Smith suggests. Death and economic destruction from pollution or a
pandemic via zoonotic disease are not relative. Cattle ranchers in the western
parts of the U.S. are granted cheap grazing rights on federal land to raise
livestock for slaughter when those animals trample and ruin native vegetation.
The ranchers are encouraged to kill wildlife that’s in a balanced ecosystem.
Who is interfering against whom here? Government funding, grants, subsidies,
etc. for corporate polluters – many concentrated feeding operations produce
massive water waste and pools of offal – are not interference but the taxpayers’
gift to unwittingly engender ecological harms.
Considering acts and choices as values, any nation has, or
could have, a character: will that character be soiled by disrespecting
and harming others, the environment, or animals whether wild or domestic? Kant
believes that moral character is developed through rational reflection about
one’s past mistakes. As Korsgaard might put it, for Kant, autonomy is
characterized by one who regulates behavior with moral principles she deems law
as part of constructing a normative public self. Some social animals, like primates,
wolves, and elephants for example, are capable of self-evaluation in a social
context: what to do when with whom understanding different outcomes.
Considering the emphasis some philosophers place on the rational mind, not
discounting a moral sense, we’d have to ask what type of country do citizens
envision for themselves in a global environment. Harms against nature, upon
reflection and given the climate crisis, are not rational and do not seem to
fit Kant’s categorical imperative that asks reasonable people to be like
legislators in a world of ends.
Only in rare instances – unprovoked warlike violence – is
killing viewed by many as valuable moral aggression. In his criticism of
Korsgaard, Godfrey-Smith does not use concrete examples but speaks in vagaries
about “ordinary decisions” and veers far away from the core of Korsgaard’s
argument: respect for animals, which implies the greater sphere of the natural
environment. For instance, he asks, without stating who or what, why we should
have “respect for the goals of others”? For the animals? For those advocating
for animals? Even those questions can be more specific. For example, should one
who protests the transportation to slaughter of pigs hungry and crying in a hot
truck be arrested? Would no one respect how that individual person values life?
What about the mountain vacation lake used by privileged people over the spring
and summer for boating and swimming. The water has become filmy with algae. Factory
manufactured chemicals can eliminate the natural growth. Regardless, these
chemicals will likely kill the geese, ducks, herons and other species who rely
on the lake for sustenance – an ecosystem will perish.
To use Godfrey-Smith’s words, what in this morally-tinged situation
is “factual, emotive, structural”? In answer, people might contemplate not
using alternative facts or selfish desires in satisfying their recreational
needs over wildlife. Godfrey-Smith brushes against an anthropocentric attitude:
he does not see how the systems of Gaia that regulate atmospheric and planetary
health are on par with human decisions about environmental regulation, which he
fears can become “subversive.” We are animals; that’s a biological fact,
evident in harvesting pig organs for human transplant, so there’s genetic
parity with us. There’s little moral value in that equation, though, for the
pig. Every inch of the pig is harvested, and if not eaten by humans, the snouts
become dog chews. A healthy pig would not choose to relinquish her organs and
die as a dog’s play chew. What’s subversive is the turning upside down of moral
judgment to satisfy human needs and desires over an animal’s ability to live
freely. Extending Godfrey-Smith’s thinking to wildlife, humans can then drill,
mine, and develop oceans and lands since it’s their prerogative. While Godfrey-Smith
uses terms like moral and ethical, he’s unknowingly talking about cultural
evolution. We are not really evolving biologically, but we are evolving
culturally. Cultural change can be rapid, viz political revolutions in some
countries over the past few hundred years. Cultural transformation is also
subject to gradual Darwinian selection. One prediction is that given time, the
libertarian attitudes espoused by Godfrey-Smith, unless one misreads him –
leave me alone to do what I want – are slated to be replaced by more liberal,
tolerant, and fair values discussed by John Rawls. The question is whether or
not liberal toleration and fair treatment will include animal lives.
Finally, at the end of long digressions, Godfrey-Smith comes
back to the animals but succumbs to welfare over rights. Shockingly, he says we
have “unique human powers” over our animal kin. We cannot fly, live unaided
under water, scale buildings, or burrow and live underground, etc. Of course,
we have power in machines, but look how they’ve treated ecological systems.
With great limitations, he gets to what he calls cases of “special status,” but
then mentions none other than using the phraseology “some kinds of
mistreatment.” Factory farming? He seems to suggest smaller, what some might
erroneously label “humane” farms, though he’s not explicit. He wavers, too, on
the question of sentience positing it as “borderline forms and by degree.”
That’s obvious given species evolution, so too with sapience, but it exists in
many forms no matter how much (or how little he’d argue). Animals know how to
survive in a forest; most “civilized” humans do not. Humans do not have more
value if they destroy the environment that wildlife, flora, and fungi have
created and conserve. Godfrey-Smith does not address that issue, or others
outlined here, though he begs the questions. Instead, he ends with the ambiguous
and not novel idea that we need to “rethink our relationships” with the
nonhuman world. That’s not a very proactive stance and flies against what
Korsgaard, to her credit, tries to establish while Godfrey-Smith attempts to
dismantle her efforts.
Being human is not, as Godfrey-Smith suggests, a badge of
honor. In her book, Korsgaard has an entire chapter called “The Case Against
Human Superiority,” mostly because she sees how animals are important not in
the grand evolutionary scheme but to their kin, other species, and even humans.
That’s a good start, as Korsgaard ultimately disagrees with Kant’s belief that
only humans have moral standing. She goes on to say how some humans argue
there’s no duty to animals without any reciprocal relationship; but we live in
a world filled with the beauty, sounds, and antics of animals to whom we are
indubitably connected via biophilia, evolutionary kinship, and their ecosystem
engineering. With compassion we are able to value an animal’s life, but not all
people are equally compassionate. Even so,
Schopenhauer might say, if we have obligations and duties as rational, moral
and somewhat egoistic beings, we should be concerned about the differing conditions
of various life forms without only heeding an a priori hypothetical imperative.
Gregory F.
Tague, Ph.D. and Fredericka A. Jacks
Bibliography
of Works Consulted
Alvaro, Carlo. 2019. Ethical Veganism, Virtue Ethics, and the Great
Soul. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2021. “Philosophers and Other Animals.” Aeon, 25 February.
Kant, Immanuel. 1797. The Metaphysics of Morals.
Mary Gregor, trans. Cambridge: CUP, 1996.
Korsgaard, Christine. 2018. Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other
Animals. Oxford: Oxford U.P.
Kuehn, Manfred. 2001. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.
Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Revised edition.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap P. of Harvard U.P.
Regan, Tom. 2004. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: U. of
California P.
Ross, W.D. 1930. “The Right and the Good” chapter 2. Ethics: The
Classic Readings. David E. Cooper, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 246-261.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1840. On the Basis of Morality. E.F.J.
Payne, trans. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995.
Copyright©2024 by Gregory F. Tague. All Rights Reserved. Image by Pexels from Pixabay.
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