The topic of animals and ethics existed only around the margins of philosophical and scientific discourse until the second half of the twentieth century. Classical philosophers, such as Aristotle, and moderns such as Kant and Bentham, briefly discussed what we owe animals, but their views were consequences of their broader philosophical outlooks rather than the results of focused investigation. (For a somewhat different view, see Sorabji 1993.) Since animals were ubiquitous in daily life and central to food production and transportation in this period, it is surprising how invisible they were as independent objects of philosophical interest and moral concern.
There were exceptions to the neglect of animals. In the fourth century CE, Porphyry wrote powerfully on behalf of vegetarianism, and during the Renaissance the sixteenth-century philosopher Montaigne argued brilliantly against human exceptionalism. Animals edged further onto the stage in the writings of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, but it was only with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, and especially his Descent of Man in 1871, that the foundation was established for a fundamentally different way of regarding animals. Humans could now be seen as continuous with other animals in ways that much of the philosophical tradition had obscured.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, animal cruelty became a concern throughout much of Europe. In 1876, the United Kingdom became the first country to pass an animal cruelty law regulating animal experimentation. In 1892, Henry Salt published Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, as good a defense of animal rights as has ever been published. In the second half of the twentieth century, the rise of factory farming brought questions about our treatment of animals to widespread public view. Ruth Harrison’s 1964 Animal Machines (with a foreword by Rachel Carson) was extremely influential, and Brigid Brophy’s cantankerous 1965 essay “The Rights of Animals,” published in the Sunday Times, argued against vivisection, in favor of vegetarianism, and drew an analogy between the way we treat animals and human slavery. These strands of concern came together with a powerful philosophical perspective in Peter Singer’s 1974 Animal Liberation, a book that dramatically changed the discussion of ethics and animals.
In the more than forty years since the publication of Animal Liberation, the philosophical landscape has changed appreciably. Animals are no longer invisible and the subject of “animal ethics” has been “normalized,” at least to some extent. While top journals are still relatively reluctant to publish on these topics, most leading moral philosophers feel compelled to stake out some sort of position regarding animals.
The most profound shift over the last forty years has been the shrinking of the distance between normal humans and other animals with respect to agency. This shift has had consequences both for particular normative views, and also for which areas of concern are regarded as most salient.
Published just eight years after Animal Liberation, Tom Regan’s 1983 The Case for Animal Rights was the second landmark work on ethics and animals published in the latter half of the twentieth century. Central to Regan’s theory is the distinction between moral agents and moral patients.1 A necessary condition for being a moral agent, according to Regan, is being autonomous in the “Kantian sense.” Moral agents
are individuals who have a variety of sophisticated abilities, including … the ability to bring impartial moral principles to bear on the determination of what … morally ought to be done … and to freely choose … to act as morality … requires. Because moral agents have these abilities, it is fair to hold them morally accountable.
(pp. 151–152)
Regan thinks that it is “highly unlikely that any animal is autonomous in the Kantian sense” (p. 84), so therefore it is highly unlikely that any animal is a moral agent. Normal adult humans are moral agents, but some humans are not (e.g., “human infants, young children, and the mentally deranged or enfeebled of all ages” p. 153). They, like “normal mammalian animals aged one year or more” are moral patients.
Moral patients are beings
who have desires and beliefs, who perceive, remember, and can act intentionally, who have a sense of the future, including their own future (i.e., are self-aware or self-conscious), who have an emotional life, who have a psychophysical identity over time, who have a kind of autonomy (namely, preference-autonomy), and who have an experiential welfare.
(p. 153)
Regan recognizes a second class of moral patients who are conscious, sentient, and possess other cognitive states such as belief and memory, but are not self-aware or self-conscious. Moral patients of whatever type
lack the prerequisites that would enable them to control their own behavior in ways that would make them morally accountable…. A moral patient lacks the ability to formulate, let alone to bear, moral principles in deliberating about which one among a number of possible acts it would be right or proper to perform.
(p. 152)
Regan’s categorical distinction between moral agents and moral patients is in some ways intuitive, and it helps him make one of the major points of his book and also simplifies the moral landscape. At the time Regan was writing, the Kantian-inspired view that only those who can respect rights can have rights was extremely influential. Regan was eager to reject this view, and the distinction between moral agents and moral patients was part of the conceptual machinery that allowed him to do so. Some humans and animals have rights in virtue of being moral patients, even though they cannot respect the rights of others (they are not moral agents). This distinction also gave Regan the resources to block a common argument against vegetarianism, perhaps most charmingly formulated by the eighteenth-century polymath, Benjamin Franklin.
[I]n my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs. Then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.”
(Franklin 1903; 2008, p. 51)
Franklin’s response is no good at all, according to Regan: Franklin is a moral agent who is accountable for his actions; the cod with fish in its belly is a moral patient and not accountable for its actions. Only agents like us are accountable for what we do. The vast suffering wreaked by nature and animals is beyond the reach of moral accountability.
Despite its apparent intuitiveness, Regan’s criteria for being a moral agent involve a set of very sophisticated abilities, and it is not clear what counts as evidence for having these abilities short of manifesting them in recognizable ways. Suppose that we agree, as is plausible, that there are beings with unmanifested abilities. How can we recognize them? I think it can be plausibly argued that large swaths of humanity have never actually brought (to quote Regan again) “impartial moral principles to bear on the determination of what … morally ought to be done.” Do they have the unmanifested ability to do so? On the other hand, a being can be remarkably sophisticated but fail to have the abilities that Regan requires for being a moral agent. A being can be self-conscious and have the ability to regulate its behavior according to “partial” moral principles and yet not be a moral agent on Regan’s view. This invites questions about what it is to be a moral principle and what exactly impartiality consists in. Motivating this worry is the concern that for Regan, only those with the ability to be a practicing Kantian or Direct Utilitarian count as moral agents.
Even before the publication of Regan’s book, there were arguments in the literature that suggested that some animals are moral agents, or moral agents to some extent, thus suggesting that the distinction is not categorical. The same year that Regan’s book was published, Lawrence Johnson (1983) argued that “moral agency does not require acting from principle” (p. 50) and that “we … share moral agency … with animals.” Even earlier, S. F. Sapontzis (1980) had claimed that animals can be virtuous even though they are not “moral beings.”
While the moral agent/patient distinction has continued to be used, the categorical distinction that it marked between “normal adult humans” and animals has become increasingly blurred (see, e.g., Pluhar 1988; Shapiro 2006; Sebo 2017). We have increasingly identified what appears to be agential behavior in many nonhuman animals, while at the same time we have come to see that much of the apparently agential behavior of “normal adult humans” succumbs to naturalistic (even reductionist) explanations, either through appeals to evolutionary notions such as inclusive fitness, neurological explanations, or non-conscious psychological mechanisms.2 The gap between “normal adult humans” and other animals has shrunk as we have learned more about both. As philosophical naturalism has gained ground, an argument that Johnson made in 1983 seems prescient:
[M]oral rules do not just fall from the sky … [M]oral concepts, if they are not to be empty, must be based on an awareness of and valuing of some difference … [T]here seems to me to be no persuasive reason to believe that an animal cannot be aware of, value, and act on those factors which give moral content to concepts and principles…. [S]uch an animal is displaying moral agency…. He, like most humans, would never do as a meta-ethicist, but he might be able to do the right thing on the basis of morally relevant factors in a given situation.
(Johnson 1983, p. 55)
This perspective directs us towards what humans and animals do rather than on the principles on which they may act. It is now clear that many animals cooperate, reconcile, punish, reciprocate, and engage in altruistic behavior (see, e.g., Bekoff and Pierce 2009, but data continue to appear on an almost weekly basis). Flack and de Waal (2000) say that these are the “building blocks” of morality, Rowlands (2012) claims that this is sufficient to show that animals are “moral subjects” (they can be motivated to act by moral reasons), and Bekoff and Pierce (2009) claim that some animals have full-blown moralities. The more we learn about nonhuman animals, the more ubiquitous these marks of agency become both within and across species (see Rowlands, Chapter 45, and Schlingloff and Moore, Chapter 36, in this volume).
Thus, the following dilemma: if moral agency is expressed in behavior, then it looks like many nonhuman animals are at least to some extent moral agents; if, on the other hand, moral agency requires psychological explanations of the sort given by Descartes and Kant, then the idea of moral agency is at risk of disappearing altogether. In different ways, both horns of this dilemma narrow the gap between “normal adult humans” and other animals when it comes to moral agency.
This is the influential current backdrop for thinking about ethics and animals. While there are other topics that are worthy of attention, in what follows I will discuss three substantive areas of inquiry that have been affected by these changes of outlook.
The distinction between suffering and pain can be viewed as tracking the distinction between agents and patients. This distinction has often been influential in discussions of ethics and animals (see Shriver, Chapter 16 in this volume). The idea is that while all conscious beings feel pain, only self-conscious creatures who are aware of their being in pain suffer. This distinction is sometimes used to explain why it’s worse to cause pain to normal adult humans than to most animals (but for a contrary view, see Akhtar 2011). When normal adult humans are in pain, they can have the additional bad experience of suffering because of their awareness that they are in pain. This distinction between suffering and pain naturally tracks the distinction between agents and patients, because the capacity (self-consciousness) that allows normal adult humans to suffer by reflecting on their pain is the same capacity that allows self-regulation, and is at least an important requirement for holding beings accountable for what they do. Anything that problematizes the agent/patient distinction thus can ramify through the consciousness/self-consciousness and pain/suffering distinctions. If many more animals than we might have thought have features of agency, then many more of them may suffer (or at least be in states that are more complex than simply registering pain). If these states are worse than being in pain, then harming many animals may be even worse than we had imagined.
Convinced that animal suffering is more ubiquitous than many have thought, some philosophers have begun to look at predation in a new way (e.g., Everett 2001, Cowen 2003, McMahon 2015). The natural relations between predator and prey are a site of enormous pain and suffering, and the world would be much better (at least in hedonistic terms) if we could prevent even a fraction of that suffering and pain. The blurring of the agent/patient distinction raises the salience of this issue, both by upgrading the experience of many animals from pain to suffering, and also by suggesting that some predators may, to some extent, be accountable for some of what they do (see, e.g., Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011).
Once animals are seen not just as moral patients capable of registering pain and pleasure, but as complex beings to whom it matters how they live their lives, then questions about captivity become even more salient.3 For beings who display characteristics of agency, the causes of their suffering and the frustration of their desires can be many and varied. For these creatures, the traditional criteria of animal welfare (e.g., adequate water and nutrition) look lame and limited. Moreover, the recognition of rich behavioral and psychological repertoires in animals also forces the recognition that “one size fits all” is a bad approach to animal welfare. Diverse, complex creatures have diverse, complex requirements.
Tragically, the widespread recognition of the complexity of other animals has occurred simultaneously with the systematic human transformation of the planet, driven by exponential increases in population and consumption, and expressed most dramatically in climate change. This transformation makes it almost impossible for us to ensure that wild animals can live in the habitats and under the natural conditions in which they evolved and which sustained them for millions of years. Furthermore, as the human domination of nature increases, the old distinction between captivity and natural habitat breaks down. There is almost nowhere on the planet that is now beyond the reach of humanity. The parks and reserves that provide sanctuary for shrinking populations of animals are increasingly taking on the characteristics of captivity, with guarded, patrolled, and often fenced borders. Our idea of protecting these animals increasingly looks like putting them in protective custody.
Some may think that protective custody is not such a bad idea. Just as the agent/patient distinction is increasingly breaking down with respect to humans and animals, so is the idea that culture is for humans and nature is for animals. When it comes to preventable disease and the depredations of others, we don’t let “nature take its course” among humans. The same case can be made with respect to animals. If humans have reason to escape the ravages of nature, so do other animals. An extreme version was discussed in the previous section (protecting predators from prey), but there are less extreme views that would require providing wild animals with vaccinations and veterinary care.
Questions about whether it is permissible to painlessly kill animals to serve our purposes after giving them happy lives have been discussed since at least the nineteenth century. Although there are disagreements about what this principle means in practice, it has been endorsed in different forms and with various qualifications by philosophers such as R. M. Hare (1999) and Peter Singer (2011). When animals are seen as loci of hedonic states, the permissibility of “painless killing with replacement” may look plausible. But when animals are seen as agential, the question of killing them painlessly to serve our purposes seems more fraught. Indeed, questions about killing agential animals begins to look a lot like questions about the permissibility of killing humans, and here our intuitions are clear, at least in broad brush. Except under the most extreme circumstances, almost no one believes that it is permissible to painlessly kill innocent, adult, normal human beings in order to serve our purposes. Greater latitude for killing is accepted when these qualifiers are weakened, but in those cases, intuitions tend to divide quickly, and many people would deny that many such killings are permissible. These considerations land us in the broader world of moral philosophy, with all of its disagreements.
In recent years, concern has grown about killing animals. This is evidenced by a growing philosophical literature on this topic (e.g., Višak and Garner 2016), and by what seems to be a growing public debate (e.g., Foer 2009). Either because many people believe that animals cannot be killed painlessly or that it is wrong to do so, there is growing interest in various meat substitutes. In some cases, these involve “real meat,” grown in vitro from cell cultures, while in other cases, these substitutes are derived entirely from non-animal products. While some may object to these substitutes on various grounds, their growing popularity indicates how uncomfortable many people have become with killing animals for food. Growing awareness of the environmental consequences of animal agriculture is surely part of the explanation as well, but so is the shrinking boundary between humans and other animals.
If we were to trace the arc of thinking about ethics and animals over the last half century, we would see that it begins with the recognition that animals are sentient, and so we ought not to cause them gratuitous suffering. This was based on the recognition of an important commonality between humans and other animals: their ability to feel pain. It also presupposed an important difference: that normal adult humans are moral agents and accountable for what they do, while most animals are not. In response to the growing recognition of the wide range of other, even agential, features shared by humans and other animals, the arc has moved towards integrating “animal ethics” into the broader domain of ethics, with ethics as a field becoming more attuned to variability and difference, both within and across species. Here, animal ethics has joined other currents emphasizing variability and difference, such as feminist ethics, disability studies, and the philosophy of race.
The landscape of moral philosophy has changed. Sensitivity to the variegated nature of the domain it investigates may limit the power of some of the grand old theories, complexify what seemed simple, and complicate some of our responses to particular cases, but it helps us to see how vast the domain of ethics really is, and how provincial and limited our appreciation of the needs of others and the demands of morality has been through much of our history. This is a gift that thinking seriously about the ethics of animals has given to moral philosophy as a field. I also hope that this work has made our treatment of animals a little better. In any case, the story is nearer to the beginning than the end.
Thanks to Nicolas Delon and Jeff Sebo.
1 I’m not sure how far back this distinction goes, but the earliest use of it that I have been able to find is in Nicolas Fotion’s Moral Situations (1968). Fotion introduces it as a situation-relative, role distinction (e.g., “[w]hen a husband … does something … for his wife, the former is the agent while the later is the patient” (p. 17)). He goes on to ask whether various kinds of beings could occupy the patient role: “Would men-like creatures barely able to develop a language qualify as patient-candidates? How about men-like creatures just below that level? How about seaweed?” (p. 26).
2 Changing views of agency has been a major theme in the social sciences and humanities since at least the 1980s. As the world is increasingly seen as dynamic and active, agency is identified with loci of activity rather than with beings that manifest a particular psychology. For an important early articulation of this perspective, see Callon 1986.
3 I first addressed these issues in “Against Zoos” (Jamieson 1985). An excellent early paper bearing on these issues is James Rachels (1976), “Do Animals Have a Right to Liberty?” For some recent perspectives, see Lori Gruen (ed.), The Ethics of Captivity (2014).
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