Announcements
About RRs--
- Your third RR will not be an automatic "complete." Read your comments on the first two RRs!
- Use the checklist in the RR instructions. 6 requirements.
- Also, please number your answers.
- Don't include the question in your submission. (It messes up the word count. You need 150 words not including the question.)
Field trips
- Next Wednesday: we will talk about field trips and you will sign up for one.
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Jump ahead to the 18th/19th century:
- Immanuel Kant--1724-1804 (Kantian Ethics)
- Jeremy Bentham--1748-1832 (Utilitarianism)
We need to understand each approach to ethics before discussing animals.
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Kant's fundamental moral principle: The Categorical Imperative
"You must never treat a person merely as a means, but must always treat persons as ends in themselves."
- treating as a means: using, exploiting, dehumanizing
- treating as an end: seeking consent, treating with respect and dignity
Practice applying the Categorical Imperative. I desperately need $20.
- Stealing
- Borrowing with false promise
- Borrowing with honest promise
- Picking up a $20 someone dropped
- Not tipping
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Applies to persons because
- people have their own aims, they're self-aware and rational, they can be ethical
- So the Categorical Imperative doesn't apply to them
- So we don't have any duties to them.
- First sentence of today's reading
"Baumgarten speaks of duties towards beings which are beneath us and beings which are above us. But so far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man."
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Kant's question in the rest of today's reading
- Assuming we don't have any duties to animals...
- how is it that there are things we should and shouldn't do to them?
Kant's answer:
"Our duties toward animals are merely indirect duties toward humanity."
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| Example: dog has served his master faithfully and is no longer useful. |
- master should care for the dog
- this seems like a duty to the dog but it isn't
- it's an indirect duty to humanity
Why do we have this indirect duty? What's the basis for it?
- by caring for the dog we "cultivate the corresponding duties to human beings"
- this is because animals and humans have some similarities
Kant's psychological theory:
- Kindness to animals--> kindness to humans
- Cruelty to animals --> cruelty to humans
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This seems really cold! Like all he cares about is other people, not animals. But there are these sensitive passages!
"The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behavior, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care for their young. It is then difficult for us to be cruel in thought even to a wolf. Leibnitz used a tiny worm for purposes of observation and then carefully replaced it with its leaf on the tree so that it should not come to harm through any act of his. He would have been sorry—a natural feeling for a humane man—to destroy such a creature for no reason."
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Based on Kant's indirect duty view, what should we do? What shouldn't we do?
- Sport hunting (what does he say?)
- Vivisection--experimenting on live, awake animals
- Icelanders helping pufflings
- Icelanders hunting puffins for food
- Feed our pets
- Use camels for labor
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Suppose you think we do have direct duties to animals. Then do we have to throw out Kant altogether?Christine Korsgaard's new view:
- We should treat people as ends JUST because they have have their own goals, not because of rationality, self-awareness, etc.
- Animals have their own goals too.
- So we should treat animals as ends.
- So we have duties to animals like we have duties to people.
Are you a Kantian ethics fan? If so you might want to listen to this podcast with Korsgaard.
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Next time:
Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer--the utilitarian approach to animal ethics.
If time today: how do utilitarians approach the $20 problems?