When the Tail Wags the Dog: Animal Welfare and Indirect Duty in Kantian Ethics

Kantian Review

Volumn 10, Issue , 2005, Pages 128-149

  Timmermann, Jens ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 60950393718     PISSN: 13694154     EISSN: 20442394     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1369415400002168     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, Freisschrift iiber die Grundlage der Moral, 2nd edn (Leipzig” Brockhaus, 1860), p. 162 (§8); On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Providence and Oxford” Berghahn, 1995), p. 96. On Schopenhauer and the role of compassion in animal ethics in general, cf. Ursula Wolf, Das Tier in der Moral (Frankfurt” Klostermann, 1990).
2. Elizabeth Pybus and Alexander Broadie, ‘Kant's treatment of animals’, Philosophy 49 (1974), 375-83 (quotation p. 375). Cf. also Tom Regan, ‘Broadie and Pybus on Kant’, Philosophy 51 (1976), 471-2; and Elizabeth Pybus and Alexander Broadie, ‘Kant and the maltreatment of animals’, Philosophy 53 (1978), 560-1.
3. There is one notable exception” for a recent exploration and apology of the original Kantian theory, cf. Lara Denis, ‘Kant's conception of duties regarding animals” reconstruction and reconsideration’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 17 (2000), 405-23. However, Denis's defence of Kant's account seems to rely on an inadequate understanding of Kant's notion of an ‘indirect’ duty (see below). Modified Kantian accounts include Allen W. Wood, ‘Kant on duties regarding nonrational nature I’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXXII (1998), 189-210. Wood rejects Kant's assumption that all duties have to be duties to persons, either to oneself or to others, which opens up the possibility of duties regarding animals that are not duties to any specific person while at the same time respecting certain conditions of personhood present in animals. I shall return to this proposal. Cf. also Paul Guyer, ‘Duties regarding nature’, in Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge” Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 303-34.
4. Cf. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge” Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. Lecture 4.
5. God's case is somewhat more complicated because we have no knowledge of God's existence. It is, however, said to be a duty to the self to be religious, that is, to believe in God.
6. Cf. Kant's preparatory notes for the Doctrine of Virtue, 23” 380-1.
7. In both the Lectures on Ethics and the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant's examples of ‘lifeless’ things are products of nature. He never even mentions an artefact as something we could have a duty not to destroy. This is curious. Is it because its destruction is psychologically harmless and there is not even an indirect duty regarding artefacts? Or because the products of nature have some special value (which seems unlikely in the context of an indirect duty)? Or because they are just Kant's favourite examples of things beautiful? Is it because artefacts have makers that are themselves worthy of moral consideration, which would complicate the matter?
8. Lara Denis stresses this point in her philosophically conservative account of Kantian duties regarding animals, cf. ‘Kant's conception of duties regarding animals’.
9. Kant ought to have said ‘in Ansehung’ ('regarding') animals, but he (or rather the person who took the lecture notes) defies terminological consistency. There is a further infelicity” the Lectures claim that ‘we have no immediate duties to animals; our duties to them (gegen die Tiere) are indirect duties to humanity’ (27” 459). Kant probably said that all ‘indirect’ duties regarding animals are ‘direct’ duties to the self (cf. 6” 443, the passage quoted above).
10. It is an amphiboly of ‘the moral concepts of reflection’, similar to the transcendental amphiboly of the theoretical understanding discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason, A 260/B 316 ff.
11. Cf. Alexander Baumgarten, Ethica Philosophica, 3rd edn, 1763 (repr. Hildesheim” Olms, 1969, and in volume 27. 2,1 of the Academy Edition of Kant's works), $§301 ff.
12. Cf. Ursula Wolf, Das Tier in der Moral, pp. 33-8.
13. This may include potential rational beings such as infants. We treat them well for the sake of their incipient rationality. Human beings who will never develop or regain full autonomy probably ought to have the same moral status as non-human animals, but cf. Wood, ‘Kant on duties I’, 199, and Onora O'Neill's discussion of Kant's ‘speciesism’ in her ‘Kant on duties II’, 217 ff.
14. Wood, ‘Kant on duties I’, 193.
15. Cf. for example, Critique of Pure Reason, A 534/B 562.
16. Cf. O'Neill on the two aspects of Kant's ‘logocentrism'” We are agents to whom moral commands are addressed; and we are also on the ‘receiving end’ of each other's actions, ‘Kant on duties II’, 217.
17. A wide duty to others is, in a sense, not a duty to the person benefited, but rather a duty to humanity in that person. Formal duties to others, for example, the duty not to lie to them, are also duties to mankind in my own person; they are only the latter if the person in question ‘drops out of the picture’ because he has lost his moral status.
18. This does not imply an overall moral judgement. Even if the amount of pain was exactly the same, twisting the tail of a dog is not in all respects morally equivalent to stepping on someone's toe. The point I am trying to make is merely that in both cases pain, wilfully inflicted, has direct moral weight. For the moment we shall leave such complications aside.
19. Concerning the psychology of animal sacrifice, the divinity was presumably supposed to be pleased with the sacrifice human beings were prepared to make for his or her sake, not about the suffering of the victim.
20. Similarly, Allen Wood notes that ‘if it happened to be a quirk of human psychology that torturing animals would make us that much kinder toward humans (perhaps by venting our aggressive impulses on helpless victims), then Kant's argument would apparently make it a duty to inflict gratuitous cruelty on puppies and kittens so as to make us that much kinder to people’ ('Kant on duties I’, 194 f.). As things actually-and contingently-are, Kant seems to be right” human beings who maltreat animals are more likely to treat other human beings badly too.
21. It is not the animal's fault that it is the kind of thing it is. Animals are morally innocent. However, it may be a person's fault if he turns himself into an animal, and it is not clear how a principle like the Golden Rule should be applied in such cases.
22. In his article ‘The structure of practical reason’ (Garrert Cullity and Berys Gaut (eds), Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 161-88), Berys Gaut rightly challenges Kant's view that ‘without man, all of creation would be a mere wasteland, gratuitous and without final purpose’ {Critique of Judgement, 5” 442). It is wrong to say that ‘the value of animals and plants is completely dependent on that of people’ (p. 179, my emphasis), or that if we had to choose we should be indifferent as to whether to prefer a world in which all life is destroyed and a world in which animals and plants survive (It is not the animal's fault that it is the kind of thing it is.). Whereas the case for plants may be purely aesthetic, the case for animals is bound, at least in part, to be moral.
23. Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, esp. Lecture 4. There is at least one crucial difference between the book, published by Cambridge University Press in 1996, and an apparently earlier version of the Tanner Lectures, reprinted in Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard and Peter Railton (eds), Moral Discourse and Practice (New York & Oxford” Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 389-406. In the latter version of the text, Korsgaard applies the Golden Rule directly t o animals” We must be able to ask the question ‘How would you like it if someone did that to you?’, and thus ‘must be able to intrude into our consciousness and make us think’ {Tanner Lectures, p. 403). It is absent from the ‘official’ 1996 Cambridge University Press version (cf. Sources, p. 153).
24. Korsgaard, Sources, p. 150. This sounds like realism about reasons, not in the case of human beings, but rather in t h e even more contentious case of animals. The Wittgensteinian attempt to make normative reasons public seems philosophically risky. The claims that, according to Korsgaard, animals as well as human beings have onus almost seem to be ‘external’ reasons incompatible with Kantian autonomy. It also appears to make obligation conditional on whether others make their reasons publicly known.
25. Korsgaard, Sources, p. 150. There is a problem here” not all pain is damaging, orathreat to the animal's identity, in any substantive sense. Indeed, a torturer may be so clever as not to cause any physical damage at all-but we would still think that causing an animal to be in pain would be bad. I should like to thank Sarah Broadie for pointing this problem out to me.
26. Cf. Groundwork, 4” 428.
27. Korsgaard, Sources, p. 148.
28. It is true that we mislead animals, for example, lure them into traps by making them believe that they will obtain food easily and safely. Yet, in that case, it is still the damage and harm done to the animal when we actually catch it that morally matters, not the act of deception as such.
29. Triebfeder, literally the ‘driving spring’ of action. The analogy is mechanical; ‘motive’ or (in a broad philosophical sense) ‘desire’ would be less misleading translations.
30. Cf. Stephen Darwall, ‘Reasons, Motives, and the Demands of Morality’, in Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard and Peter Railton (eds), Moral Discourse and Practice, pp. 305-12, esp. p. 308. Metaphysical internalism is a variant of the principle ‘Ought implies Can’. If you cannot be sufficiently motivated by rational considerations, and if action needs a sufficient motive, you cannot act accordingly. Kant struggles to solve the problem of moral motivation, of how we can take an interest in ‘reasons’ external to our motivational set, in the third section of the Groundwork.
31. Schopenhauer clearly considers his ethic of compassion or sympathy superior to Kantian ethics because it can accommodate duties to animals” ‘The moral incentive advanced by me as the genuine, is further confirmed by the fact that the animals are also taken under its protection’ (Preisschrift §19.7, p. 283, English trans., p. 175).
32. The motive could also be something like love. At first sight, Kant seems to suggest a division of labour between respect and love in the Metaphysics of Morals, 6” 448 ff. (Perfect duties to others are said to be a matter of respect, wide duties of practical love.) A closer look reveals that the respect in question is not the moral incentive that motivates the adoption of a maxim but, rather, the respectful attitude specified in a maxim adopted on the strength of such an incentive. Similarly, practical love is not an incentive to adopt a maxim of loving one's neighbour, nor any other kind of feeling, but the content of a maxim (6” 450) adopted on the basis of moral judgement and the intellectual incentive of respect for the moral law. Without the incentive of respect, no maxim of practical love can be adopted.
33. I fear that much the same difficulties arise if, like Wood, one drops the requirement that duties must always be duties to some person or other. Respect for reason would never get off the ground because nothing essentially links animals and rationality. Without an appropriate motive or incentive, the thesis of metaphysical internalism defeats any possible obligation.
34. ‘Kant's treatment of animals’, p. 375.
35. Korsgaard, Sources, p. 153.
36. That is why, in the case of the murderer at the door in ‘On a presumed right to lie’, Kant thinks that, even though the person asking about the whereabouts of your friend has no right to your being truthful, you still have to honour your moral duty to yourself to be truthful. N.B. that in the legal context of the essay-which cannot consider duties to the self-he seems to dispense with the personification principle and argues for an abstract duty to humanity ‘tiberhaupt’ (8” 426 f.).
37. Wolf similarly objects to Kant's rather quick classification of animals as mere means” it is not, in fact, obvious that animals-though not persons-should be means at all (cf. Das Tier in der Moral, p. 35)
38. Taking sentience to be the relevant criterion for what an animal would mind being done to it, I have bracketed the question which animals are sufficiently sentient to merit moral consideration. This seems largely an empirical question that need not concern us at present. Denis spells out some of the possible practical implications of Kant's original account, ‘Kant's conception of duties regarding animals’, pp. 412 ff.
39. If duties involving animals are duties to the self, does that mean that the state has no right to interfere? If the state ought to have a right to interfere, can duties involving animals still be duties to the self? These questions too merit further discussion.