Reglamento Nacional de Edificaciones (Gerencia)

The issue of how we ought to treat animals is complex. On the one hand, current practice has animals being raised and slaughtered, often in conditions which cause significant suffering, for their meat, hides, fur, and so on. We use animals for pest control, clearing mines, and guiding the visually impaired. On the other, a large number of people attempt to eat only meat that is humanely reared and slaughtered; refrain from eating meat and consuming products which necessitate the killing of animals altogether (although, curiously, whilst moral reasons are often adduced for vegetarianism, vegetarians tend not to treat meat-eaters as morally reprehensible); or refrain from consuming products which involve the exploitation of animals.

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With such differences in practice and stance, the question is a pressing one. If there is any truth to the slogan, ‘meat is murder’, then the scale of the current atrocity warrants immediate action. The core of the question, however, is a metaethical issue: what is it that determines moral status and obligation? The issue is problematic, because for almost any feature which (putatively) determines moral status, there are human beings who lack this feature, and animals which possess it, at least to some extent. The exception, of course, is being

(genetically) human: but this is problematically vague, and not obviously morally relevant. Whilst we can readily differentiate between humans and dogs, it is not clear where the dividing line between humans and dogs lies - if, indeed, there is a sharp line. So it is quite plausible to think that the notion of being genetically human is vague: rather than there being an identifiable point beyond which incremental changes to the organism’s DNA turns a human into a dog, our species concepts simply are not sensitive to such incremental changes. Worse, the concept of a ‘species’ is itself problematic.2 In any case, there does not seem to be good reason to take genetic make-up per se to be morally relevant: the stock cases here are instances of human beings who lack moral status (the permanently brain-dead, for instance), and the possibilities of non-human creatures (angels or aliens) who possess moral status but are not genetically human. Nor would we exclude an otherwise normal person from

membership of the moral community if it turned out, on closer inspection, that some unusual mutation rendered them non-human. So the simple view, on which the only creatures which have moral status are human beings, seems implausible. This leaves even sophisticated constructivist or contractualist accounts at a disadvantage. On Kant’s view, for instance, our reason to refrain from torturing animals for fun is derivative from the negative impact that such activity would have on our characters. But this is entirely the wrong kind of reason. Torturing animals for fun is wrong regardless of whether or not it would have a negative impact on the torturer. And there is something much worse about the case where a torturer

actually inflicts wanton suffering on an animal, as opposed to the case where a torturer merely believes that she is doing the same. Hence what is morally the case does, after all, depend on the recipient.3 This strategy also shows that the wrongness of the action cannot (in such cases) be purely a function of whether or not it expresses the vice of cruelty.

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See O’Hara 1993. The core of the problem is that we have no principled way of distinguishing between major intra-species variation and minor inter-species variation. O’Hara speculates that this may be dissolved by a historical approach, on which ‘species are the ultimate terminal taxa in evolutionary trees: within species relationships are reticulate, and between species relationships are branching.’

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See Bernstein 1997. Bernstein discusses the possibility of extending Rawlsian contractualism to ‘marginal humans’, and concludes that such humans can be incorporated into the moral framework, but at the cost of attributing instrumental, rather than intrinsic, value to them.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the claim that all organisms have moral status seems equally implausible. We have no qualms about damaging or killing plants; likewise for bacteria, moulds, and so on. Torturing sentient creatures for fun, on the other hand, seems morally suspect, so we might think that what matters is the capacity to suffer. But this fails to accommodate the thought that there is something worse, ceteris paribus, about inflicting suffering on persons, rather than animals. Those who think that suffering (and related states) are the only relevant considerations are required to deny this claim.

The hybrid view has, I will argue, a significant advantage when it comes to addressing these questions. It accommodates the thought that we should avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on sentient beings, whilst allowing room for the thought that there is a morally relevant distinction to be drawn between persons and animals. Furthermore, it allows that the obligations to refrain from harming animals, and to refrain from harming persons, have (at least in part) the same metaethical status. There may be a further (constructed) obligation to refrain from harming persons; but there is in both cases an obligation grounded in the intrinsic disvalue of suffering. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the implications of the hybrid view for our obligations towards animals, and other hard cases - infants, the severely mentally impaired, and so on – and to argue that the resulting picture is plausible, and so lends support to the hybrid view.