Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, [1] the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. [2] [3] Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. [4] [5] [6] There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism. [7] [8]
The history of the regulation of animal research was a fundamental step towards the development of animal ethics, as this was when the term "animal ethics" first emerged. [9] In the beginning, the term "animal ethics" was associated solely with cruelty, only changing in the late 20th century, when it was deemed inadequate in modern society. [10] The United States Animal Welfare Act of 1966, attempted to tackle the problems of animal research; however, their effects were considered futile. Many did not support this act as it communicated that if there was human benefit resulting from the tests, the suffering of the animals was justifiable. It was not until the establishment of the animal rights movement that people started supporting and voicing their opinions in public. Animal ethics was expressed through this movement and led to big changes to the power and meaning of animal ethics.
The first animal rights laws were first introduced between 1635 and 1780. In 1635, Ireland was the first country to pass animal protection legislation, "An Act against Plowing by the Tayle, and pulling the Wooll off living Sheep". [11] In 1641, Massachusetts colony's called Body of Liberties that includes regulation against any "Tirranny or Crueltie" towards animals. [12] In 1687, Japan reintroduced a ban on eating meat and killing animals. [13] In 1789, philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , that an animal's capacity to suffer—not their intelligence—meant that they should be granted rights: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?" [14]
Between 1822 and 1892, more laws were passed to protect animals. In 1822, the British Parliament passed the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act. [15] In 1824, the first animal rights society was founded in England by Richard Martin, Arthur Broome, Lewis Gompertz and William Wilberforce, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which later became the RSPCA. [16] The same year, Gompertz published Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes , one of the first books advocating for what will be more than a century later known as veganism. [17] In 1835, Britain passed the first Cruelty to Animals Act. [18] In 1866, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded by New Yorker Henry Bergh. [19] In 1875, Frances Power Cobbe established the National Anti-Vivisection Society in Britain. [20] In 1892, English social reformer Henry Stephens Salt published Animal Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress . [21]
In 1970, Richard D. Ryder coined speciesism , a term for discrimination against animals based on their species-membership. [22] This term was popularized by the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer in his 1975 book Animal Liberation. The late 1970s marked the beginnings of the animal rights movement, which portrayed the belief that animals must be recognised as sentient beings and protected from unessential harm. [23] Since the 18th century, many groups have been organised supporting different aspects of animal rights and carrying out their support in differing ways. On one hand, "The Animal Liberation Front" is an English group that took the law into their own hands, orchestrating the Penn break-in, while a group such as "People for Ethical Treatment of Animals" founded in the US, although supporting the same goals, aim for legislative gains. [24]
Animal testing for biomedical research dates to the writings of the ancient Greeks. [25] It is understood that physician-scientists such as Aristotle, and Erasistratus carried out experiments on living animals. [25] After them, there was also Galen, who was Greek but resided in Rome, carrying out experiments on living animals to improve on the knowledge of anatomy, physiology, pathology, and pharmacology. [25] Animal testing since has evolved considerably and is still being carried out in the modern-day, with millions of experimental animals being used around the world. [26] However, during recent years it has come under severe criticism by the public and animal activist groups. Those against, argue that the benefits that animal testing provides for humanity are not justifiable for the suffering of those animals. Those for, argue that animal testing is fundamental for the advancement of biomedical knowledge.
Drug testing on animals blew up in the 20th century. In 1937, a US pharmaceutical company created an infamous drug called "Elixir Sulfanilamide". This drug had a chemical called DEG in it which is toxic to humans, but at the time was not known to be harmful to humans. Without precautions, the drug was released to the public and was responsible for a mass poisoning. The DEG ended up killing over a hundred people, causing uproar among civilisation. [25] Thus, in 1938 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) established the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. [27] This ensured the testing of drugs on animals before marketing of the product, to confirm that it would have no harmful implications on humans.
However, since the regulations have been put in place, animal testing deaths have increased. More than one million animals are killed from testing every year in the US. [28] In addition, the deaths of these animals are considered sickening; from inhaling toxic gas, having skin burned off, getting holes drilled into their skulls.
The Three Rs were first introduced in a 1959 book called "The Principles of Humane Experimental technique" by zoologist W. M. S. Russell, and microbiologist R. L. Burch. [29] The Three Rs stand for Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement and are the guiding principles for the ethical treatment of animals used for testing and experimentation: [30]
The Three Rs principles are now widely accepted by many countries and are used in any practises that involve the experimentation of animals.
There is a wide range of ethical assessments regarding animals used in research. There are general opinions that animals do have a moral status and how they are treated should be subjected to ethical consideration; some of the positions include:
The Norwegian National Committee for Research Ethics in Science and Technology (NENT) have a set of ethical guidelines for the use of animals in research:
This section is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic.(July 2020) |
Ethical thinking has influenced the way society perceives animal ethics in at least three ways. Firstly, the original rise of animal ethics and how animals should be treated. Secondly, the evolution of animal ethics as people started to realise that this ideology was not as simple as was first proposed. The third way, is through the challenges humans face contemplating these ethics; consistency of morals, and the justification of some cases. [33]
Consequentialism is a collection of ethical theories which judge the rightness or wrongness of an action on its consequences; if the actions brings more benefit than harm, it is good, if it brings more harm than benefit, it is bad. [34] The most well-known type of consequentialism theory is utilitarianism. [35] [36]
The publication of Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation, in 1975, gathered sizeable traction and provided him with a platform to speak his mind on the issues of animal rights. [33] Due to the attention Singer received, his views were the most accessible, and therefore best known by the public. He supported the theory of utilitarianism, which is still a controversial but highly regarded foundation for animal research. The theory of utilitarianism states that "an action is right if and only if it produces a better balance of benefits and harms than available alternative actions", thus, this theory determines whether or not something is right by weighing the pleasure against the suffering of the result. [33] It is not concerned with the process, only the weight of the consequence against the process, and while the consequentialism theory suggests if an action is bad or good, utilitarianism only focuses on the benefit of the outcome. While this may be able to be applied to some animal research and raising for food, several objections have been raised against utilitarianism. Singer made his decision to support utilitarianism on the basis of sentience, selecting that aspect as the differential factor between human and animals; the ability of self-consciousness, autonomy and to act morally. [33] This ended up being called "The argument from marginal cases". [33] However, critics allege that not all morally relevant beings fall under this category, for instance, some people with in a persistent vegetative state who have no awareness of themselves or their surroundings. [37] Based on Singer's arguments, it would be as (or more) justified to carry out experiments in medical research on these non-sentient humans than on other (sentient) animals. Another limitation of applying utilitarianism to animal ethics is that it is difficult to accurately measure and compare the suffering of the harmed animals to the gains of the beneficiaries, for instance, in medical experiments.
Jeff Sebo argues that utilitarianism has three main implications for animal ethics: "First, utilitarianism plausibly implies that all vertebrates and at least some invertebrates morally matter, and that large animals like elephants matter more on average and that small animals like ants might matter more in total. Second, utilitarianism plausibly implies that we morally ought to attempt to both promote animal welfare and respect animal rights in many real-life cases. Third, utilitarianism plausibly implies that we should prioritize farmed and wild animal welfare and pursue a variety of interventions at once to make progress on these issues". [8]
Deontology is a theory that evaluates moral actions based only on doing one's duty, not on the consequences of the actions. [38] This means that if it is your duty to carry out a task, it is morally right regardless of the consequences, and if you fail to do your duty, you are morally wrong. There are many types of deontological theories, however, the one most commonly recognised is often associated with Immanuel Kant. [39] This ethical theory can be implemented from conflicting sides, for example, a researcher may think it is their duty to make an animal suffer to find a cure for a disease that is affecting millions of humans, which according to deontology is morally correct. On the other hand, an animal activist might think that saving these animals being tested on is their duty, creating a contradiction in this idea. Furthermore, another conflicting nature of this theory is when you must choose between two imposing moral duties, such as deciding if you should lie about where an escaped chicken went, or if you should tell the truth and send the chicken to its death. Lying is an immoral duty to carry out, however, so is sending a chicken to its death.
A highlighted flaw in Kant's theory is that it was not applicable to non-human animals, only specifically to humans. [38] This theory opposes utilitarianism in the sense that instead of concerning itself with the consequence, it focuses on the duty. However, both are fundamental theories that contribute to animal ethics.
Virtue ethics does not pinpoint on either the consequences or duty of the action, but from the act of behaving like a virtuous person. [40] Thus, asking if such actions would stem from a virtuous person or someone with a vicious nature. If it would stem from someone virtuous, it is said that it is morally right, and if from a vicious person, immoral behaviour. A virtuous person is said to hold qualities such as respect, tolerance, justice and equality. One advantage that this theory has over the others, is that it takes into account human emotions, affecting the moral decision, which was absent in the previous two. However, a flaw is that people's opinions of a virtuous person are very subjective, and thus, can drastically affect the person's moral compass. With this underlying issue, this ethical theory cannot be applied to all cases.
Differing conceptions of the treatment of and duties towards animals, particularly those living in the wild, within animal ethics and environmental ethics have been a source of conflict between the two ethical positions; some philosophers have made a case that the two positions are incompatible, [41] while others have argued that such disagreements can be overcome. [42]
In ethical philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of intrinsic value. Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".
Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. It investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. It is usually divided into three major fields: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Speciesism is a term used in philosophy regarding the treatment of individuals of different species. The term has several different definitions within the relevant literature. Some sources specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership, while other sources define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not. Richard Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species." Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals, which scholars say is pervasive in the modern society. Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to endorse racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that ensure the greatest good for the greatest number.
This index of ethics articles puts articles relevant to well-known ethical debates and decisions in one place - including practical problems long known in philosophy, and the more abstract subjects in law, politics, and some professions and sciences. It lists also those core concepts essential to understanding ethics as applied in various religions, some movements derived from religions, and religions discussed as if they were a theory of ethics making no special claim to divine status.
In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action. It is sometimes described as duty-, obligation-, or rule-based ethics. Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted to consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and pragmatic ethics. In this terminology, action is more important than the consequences.
The animal rights (AR) movement, sometimes called the animal liberation, animal personhood, or animal advocacy movement, is a social movement that seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and an end to their use in the research, food, clothing, and entertainment industries.
Secular ethics is a branch of moral philosophy in which ethics is based solely on human faculties such as logic, empathy, reason or moral intuition, and not derived from belief in supernatural revelation or guidance—a source of ethics in many religions. Secular ethics refers to any ethical system that does not draw on the supernatural, and includes humanism, secularism and freethinking. A classical example of literature on secular ethics is the Kural text, authored by the ancient Indian philosopher Valluvar.
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth independent of their utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Broadly speaking, and particularly in popular discourse, the term "animal rights" is often used synonymously with "animal protection" or "animal liberation". More narrowly, "animal rights" refers to the idea that many animals have fundamental rights to be treated with respect as individuals—rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture that may not be overridden by considerations of aggregate welfare.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ethics.
The intrinsic value of a human or any other sentient animal comes from within itself. It is the value it places on its own existence. Intrinsic value exists wherever there are beings that value themselves.
Wild animal suffering is the suffering experienced by non-human animals living outside of direct human control, due to harms such as disease, injury, parasitism, starvation and malnutrition, dehydration, weather conditions, natural disasters, and killings by other animals, as well as psychological stress. Some estimates indicate that these individual animals make up the vast majority of animals in existence. An extensive amount of natural suffering has been described as an unavoidable consequence of Darwinian evolution and the pervasiveness of reproductive strategies which favor producing large numbers of offspring, with a low amount of parental care and of which only a small number survive to adulthood, the rest dying in painful ways, has led some to argue that suffering dominates happiness in nature.
Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation. His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Cochrane is a Sentientist. Sentientism is a naturalistic worldview that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.
Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations is a 2012 book by the British political theorist Alasdair Cochrane, in which it is argued that animal rights philosophy can be decoupled from animal liberation philosophy by the adoption of the interest-based rights approach. Cochrane, arguing that there is no reason that (nonhuman) animals should be excluded from justice, adopts Joseph Raz's account of interest rights and extends it to include animals. He argues that sentient animals possess a right not to be made to suffer and a right not to be killed, but not a right to freedom. The book's chapters apply Cochrane's account to a number of interactions between humans and animals; first animal experimentation, then animal agriculture, the genetic engineering of animals, the use of animals in entertainment and sport, the relationship of animals to environmental practices and the use of animals in cultural practices.
Negative consequentialism is a version of consequentialism, which is "one of the major theories of normative ethics." Like other versions of consequentialism, negative consequentialism holds that moral right and wrong depend only on the value of outcomes. That is, for negative and other versions of consequentialism, questions such as "what should I do?" and "what kind of person should I be?" are answered only based on consequences. Negative consequentialism differs from other versions of consequentialism by giving greater weight in moral deliberations to what is bad than what is good. Due to this, it can be considered an instance of what has been called "suffering-focused ethics", the view that the reduction of suffering has moral priority over any other possible duties we may think of.
John Hadley is an Australian philosopher whose research concerns moral and political philosophy, including animal ethics, environmental ethics, and metaethics. He is currently a senior lecturer in philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He has previously taught at Charles Sturt University and the University of Sydney, where he studied as an undergraduate and doctoral candidate. In addition to a variety of articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, he is the author of the 2015 monograph Animal Property Rights and the 2019 monograph Animal Neopragmatism. He is also the co-editor, with Elisa Aaltola, of the 2015 collection Animal Ethics and Philosophy.
Gary Edward Varner was an American philosopher specializing in environmental ethics, philosophical questions related to animal rights and animal welfare, and R. M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor in the department of philosophy at Texas A&M University; he had been based at the university since 1990. He was educated at Arizona State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison; at Madison, where he was supervised by Jon Morline, he wrote one of the first doctoral theses on environmental ethics. Varner's first monograph was In Nature's Interests?, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. In the book, Varner defended a form of biocentric individualism, according to which all living entities have morally considerable interests.
The ethics of uncertain sentience refers to questions surrounding the treatment of and moral obligations towards individuals whose sentience—the capacity to subjectively sense and feel—and resulting ability to experience pain is uncertain; the topic has been particularly discussed within the field of animal ethics, with the precautionary principle frequently invoked in response.
Suffering-focused ethics are those views in ethics according to which reducing suffering is either a key priority or our only aim. Those suffering-focused ethics according to which the reduction of suffering is a key prioritiy are pluralistic views that include additional aims, such as the prevention of other disvaluable things like inequality, or the promotion of certain valuable things, such as pleasure. Nevertheless, these views still prioritize reducing preventable suffering over these other aims.
Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature is a 2022 book by the philosopher Catia Faria published by Cambridge University Press. It examines wild animal suffering as a moral problem. Faria contends that if we have a moral obligation to aid those in need, we should intervene in nature to prevent or alleviate the suffering of wild animals, as long as it is practical and leads to a net positive outcome.
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