Animal Minds, Human Ethics

Coming up

1. Thursday is our last day--we'll talk more about morality, review for final, etc.
2. Your lowest discussion grade will be dropped.
3. You should have turned in a paper plan and a first draft. You should be using my comments to produce your final draft.
4. If you have not done the plan/first draft, you do need to turn them in before the final draft. Turning things in very late is better than not turning them in at all.

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Recap

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Peter Singer

• Author of Animal Liberation and The Great Ape Project 
• Utilitarian ethics, not rights-based
• Must maximize total good--where pleasure is good, pain is bad 
• Jeremy Bentham (1879)--"The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
• Focus: factory farming and animal experimentation

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Peter Singer: Equal Consideration for Chickens 

1. Chickens are sentient--they suffer pain, enjoy pleasure.
2. If an animal is sentient, they have interests. THEREFORE
3. Chickens have interests.
4. Equal interests should receive equal consideration, regardless of the race, sex, nationality (etc) or species of the interest-holder--anything else is racism, sexism, speciesism, etc. THEREFORE
5. The interests of chickens should receive equal consideration.
6. Our interests in eating cheap chicken are more trivial than a chicken's serious interest in avoiding suffering. THEREFORE
7. We should stop eating chicken and chickens should be treated more humanely.

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Chickens and chimpanzees

What does "equal consideration" mean?  

Should we be more concerned about the chimpanzees because they have more of these capacities?  

What would Singer say?

1. Sentience, pain, pleasure
2. Consciousness beyond sentience
3. Self-awareness--e.g. mirror self-recognition
4. Time travel--recalling oneself in past, anticipating oneself in future
5. Thinking--insight, solving novel problems, having beliefs
6. Beliefs about social status of others
7. Imitation, culture
8. Communication
9. Theory of mind--understanding minds of others
10. 
    Precursors of morality--empathy, fairness, cooperation etc. 

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Insects and exterminators

What would utilitarians say?

What does a rights approach say?

Guardian article
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More about the rights approach 

• Kristin Andrews--one of 17 philosophers who wrote an amicus brief for the court in the Tommy case supporting legal personhood for animals
• Judge Eugene Fahey--argues that the rights argument shouldn't focus on personhood, but on animals having inherent value (therefore rights)
• The amicus brief supported personhood for animals, based on a cluster concept

Tom Regan--what gives animals rights is that they're "subjects of a life"--not talk of animals as "persons."

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Beyond animal minds

• Animal minds --> moral status
• So studying animal minds is pivotal for ethics

But are there other factors?

Sue Donaldson & Will Kymllicka, Zoopolis

1. We don't think the rights of people are solely based on their mental capacities
2. We assign rights to people who are mentally just alike based on political categories
3. D&K apply same idea to animals