1 of 1- iwpoe
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Peter Singer's Utilitarianism and Animal Duties
Let's say you're Peter Singer or someone simmilar on animal ethics. Does it follow that animals have duties towards ourselves and eachother? If so, what is our place in mediating those duties? If not, why not?
I mean, I'll lift an obvious example from nature documentaries I love. I like the example because it takes out considerations of survival that predator-prey examples (which also seem troubling) would introduce:
Male chimps and lions will sometimes kill the young of a rival male apparently in order to gain sexual access to the mother. Clearly this causes suffering in the sense Singer would usually mean when discussing animals. Do the chimps have a duty to not do this? If so, do we have any kind of duty to prevent or punish this activity since the animals seem unable to effectively policie it themselves?
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Re: Peter Singer's Utilitarianism and Animal Duties
iwpoe wrote:
Let's say you're Peter Singer or someone simmilar on animal ethics. Does it follow that animals have duties towards ourselves and eachother?
I don't think so. On something like Singer's theory, value is located in preference satisfaction, and moral patients can have their preferences satisfied even if they are incapable of being moral agents.
Certain states of affairs are better than other possible ones; these will take into account animals' preferences. Those who are able to choose one or the other should aim at the better ones. Animals may not be able to aim at one or the other in a realistic sense. One can't offer them reasons, for instance. (There is, though, a general problem in connecting motivation with utilitarian reasons. Might humans be in the same position as animals in this regard? Singer seems to acknowledge this possibility at the end of Practical Ethics, if I remember correctly.)
If so, what is our place in mediating those duties? If not, why not?
I mean, I'll lift an obvious example from nature documentaries I love. I like the example because it takes out considerations of survival that predator-prey examples (which also seem troubling) would introduce:
Male chimps and lions will sometimes kill the young of a rival male apparently in order to gain sexual access to the mother. Clearly this causes suffering in the sense Singer would usually mean when discussing animals. Do the chimps have a duty to not do this? If so, do we have any kind of duty to prevent or punish this activity since the animals seem unable to effectively policie it themselves?
I don't think animals would have duties on his theory, but there might be some reason or obligation for humans to prevent such behavior. There might also be reasons to "punish" such behavior if that happens to prevent it in the future, but punishment on utilitarian schemes really only serves this preventive purpose, and does not require a retributive justification. So it might be reasonable, or obligatory even, to punish animals, even though they are not violating duties because they have none.
Singer is, of course, an applied ethicists. These are all possibilities. I suppose he would say that there are not realistic ways to police nature. It requires a lot of resources, while there are still lots of human problems left in the world, and human preferences have higher weight.