This rhapsody is so contrary to how I think about ethics that I don't know properly what to say to it. I am inclined to say that animals have no moral standing. I want to think about why more, but doing so would require that I set out a larger moral framework than I can at this moment.

For preliminary consideration, some rejections (I suspect that the first will be most controversial):

A. One is not morally entitled to life.
B. Consciousness/having an I, as such is not the arbiter of moral right.
C. 'Personhood' is merely a confused and politically convenient label for something deemed in possession of intrinsic rights.
D. "Personality" is not "personhood", as confused as this latter notion is.
E. Pain is only of instrumental moral concern because it is a (particularly important) way of thwarting rational ends.
F. Animals have no rational ends.
G. Animals are our tools.
H. Ethics should not be confused with sentimentality.
I. "Projection" is not actually a criticism.
J. "Mystery" is of dubious moral import.

Feel free to object to them as you like. They don't constitute and argument of themselves.

DanielCC wrote:

It would be best if you waited for a quiet moment in which to outline your ethical theory, otherwise we'll just get caught up in particular cases.

I'll try though I wonder how much metaphysical work would have to be done to address the work.

Talking with John about it, however, it's very important to note that asking about "the value we attribute to human beings above animals" easily risks becoming a merely psychological question.

DanielCC wrote:

1. If there exists dispositional properties/physical intentionality/immanent teleology then there is one important sense in that animals have ends. What do you mean by rational ends here? It cannot merely be consciuessness of ends for some animals evidentially have them to. Recognition of objective moral truths? I would agree on that point.

I have in the back of my mind Aristotle's claim that:

The complete association made of more than one village is a city, since at that point, so to speak, it gets to the threshold of full self-sufficiency, coming into being for the sake of living, but being for the sake of living well. Hence every city is by nature, if in fact the first forms of association are as well. For it is their end, and nature is and end; for what each thing is when it has reached the completion of its coming into being is that which we say is the nature of each, as with a human being, a horse, a house. And that for the sake of which, the end, is also what is best, and self-sufficiency is both an end and what is best. From these things, then, it is plain that the city is one of things that are by nature, and that a human being is by nature an animal meant for a city; one who is cityless as a result of nature rather than by chance is either insignificant or more powerful than a human being. He is like the person reviled by Homer as “without fellowship, without law, without a hearth,” for someone of that sort is at the same time naturally bent on war, since he is in fact like an unpaired piece on a checker-board. Why a human being is an animal meant for a city, more than every sort of bee and every sort of heard animal, is clear. For nature, we claim, does nothing uselessly, and a human being, alone among the animals, has speech [λόγος]. And while the voice is a sign of pain and pleasure, and belongs also to the other animals on that account (since their nature goes this far, to having a perception of pain and pleasure and communicating these to one another), speech is for disclosing what is advantageous and what is harmful, and so too what is just and unjust [corrective justice: see Nicomachian Ethics, 1132a 6-19]. For this is distinctive of human being in relation to the other animals, to be alone in having a perception of good and bad, just and unjust, and the rest, and it is an association involving these things that makes a household and a city.

Politics, 1253A

And Heidegger's:

[1.] the stone (material object) is worldless; [2.] the animal is poor in world; [3.] man is world-forming

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, §42 [262-63]

You could gloss that as lacking of a "recognition of objective moral truths" though that is probably too high a level. Most animals cannot do something so basic as coordinating an extended group, and no animal has anything approaching an actual system of justice. Primates are our most impressive cases, and they seem to have something like sub-ritualistic groups. They coordinate on the basis of nothing but instinct, force, and habituations which are mostly within a fixed repertoire. They have menial levels of openness to expansion. Chimps can do something like learning about a new foord and how to eat it (a walnut). A chimp troop cannot, without human training, do something like figure out an efficient way (let alone ways) to produce nuts together. 

This is all trivial compared to something as sophisticated as 'what are my moral duties?'. Not only can animals not have ethics, they cannot even have the rudiments of ethics, nor a pre-ethical background (some way of life that could give rise to principles). It's not even like a child who only has sums, but not calculus. You could say they are like the cognitively impaired, but this would be a misunderstanding- as if you claimed we had a wing deformation.

DanielCC wrote:

2. One difference between persons and animals is that the later have their ends determined by their biological constitution whilst the former do not: presumably for any rational animal certain proscriptions e.g. against the killing of innocents still hold.

I think this probably gives too much away. Even if animals are not determined at all, they cannot guide themselves by means of reason. They cannot actually, for instance, have something as basic as a justice of fairness, where there is a shared concept of property loss and liability.

I suppose my thought is that ethics holds between those who can share abstractly and self-impose ends. It's about deliberating about how to live (with respect to our natures). Anything that can do that has direct standing which we recognize because we share our natures in that respect. It could *turn out* that it's not good to, say, eat animals, but that would be a truth of *how to live as men* not a truth of how to act in any case. Asking what responsibilities we have towards animals, seems as silly to me as asking what war strategy to use against a tornado. One is, at best, reasoning by analogy and at worst using the word wrongly.

I'll also bite the bullet on marginal case objections, after some provisos. It's what I intend to communicate through A. above.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/13/2016 5:01 am)

joewaked wrote:

I have more rudimentary questions about animals, particularly the ones we consider more intelligent, e.g., dogs, chimps, etc. If they lack rational souls, how do they seem to display emotions? And how do we call them "intelligent" although they lack intellect?

That's an equivocation on Aristotle's distinction. He completely recognizes that dogs and what have you recognize their owners and danger and etc. They lack logos: they cannot communicate, relate, or grasp universals as such.

They have faculties that can accomplish what they can do. Feser talks about it to a certain extent. See:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are-conscious-in-other-news-sky.html