Relation to others· Moralscoredifficulty
Moral circle
To whom do we owe moral consideration?
Where we draw the circle, we decide whom we may use without scruple and whom we must spare: too narrow, it licenses cruelty; too wide, it makes ordinary life impossible. To take a position is to say who truly counts, and how far what we owe extends to other beings.
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Only human beings have intrinsic moral worth, by virtue of their reason, consciousness, or dignity. Animals and nature may deserve consideration, but only indirectly, through the effects our treatment of them has on humans.
Explore this position →Descartesexplicit
Deprived of thought and therefore of soul, animals are for Descartes mere automata, the famous beast-machine: they neither feel nor suffer in the proper sense, their cries being only mechanical effects. Moral consideration is thereby restricted to thinking beings alone, a strict anthropocentrism.
Discourse on Method, V · Letter to the Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November 1646
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Lockeinferable
Locke condemns cruelty to animals because tormenting them can harden children and make them more likely to be cruel to other people. The prohibition belongs to a view in which animals are given for human use, within the limits of natural law. The reason explicitly given is therefore indirect: it aims to preserve human compassion rather than grounding the prohibition in any recognised worth of the animal itself.
Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §116 · Second Treatise of Government, §26
Marcus Aureliusinferable
Marcus Aurelius grounds the universal moral and political community in the reason humans share: if intelligence is common to us, so is law, and the world is like a city. He sharply distinguishes relations with rational beings, which belong to social life, from the use of animals and things, for which he asks only magnanimity and liberality. This prescribed gentleness does not make animal sentience the ground of moral worth.
Meditations, IV, 4 · Meditations, VI, 23
Senecainferable
Seneca distinguishes the impulses of animals from passions proper to humans, which require reason's assent: an animal has neither anger nor virtue in the strict sense. Yet he reports the reasons Sotion taught him for abstaining from meat, among them the fear of habituating humans to cruelty, and says he kept that diet for a year before dropping it on his father's advice, amid suspicion of foreign cults. The account shows moral reflection on diet, not a doctrine making animal sentience the ground of moral standing.
On Anger, I, 3 · Letters to Lucilius, 108, 17-22
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
Thomas takes up the Aristotelian hierarchy of living beings, the lower creatures being ordered to the use of the human being, alone made in God's image and endowed with an immortal rational soul. Charity is owed to persons, not to beasts, and cruelty toward animals is blameworthy only indirectly, because it hardens the heart. This is a marked anthropocentrism, tempered by the idea that every creature, insofar as it is, is good and reflects its Creator.
Summa contra Gentiles, III, 112
Aristotleexplicit
The anthropocentrism is explicit: plants exist for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of humans. A hierarchy of souls (vegetative, sensitive, rational) places the human at the summit, other living beings being ordered to its use.
Politics, I.8 (1256b)
Confuciusinferable
When the stables burned, the Master asked whether anyone was hurt, and did not ask about the horses: on the traditional reading, care for persons comes before all else. The Analects locate primarily in human relationships: the disciple Youzi names filial piety and respect for one's elders as the root of its practice. That priority does not rule out restraint toward animals: the Master fished with a line, not a net, and did not shoot at roosting birds.
Analects, X (the stable fire; numbering varies across editions) · Analects, I, 2; VII, 27
Aristotelianismexplicit
Moral consideration is reserved for beings endowed with reason: justice and friendship, properly speaking, can exist only among humans, for animals, lacking , do not share in the political community. This moral anthropocentrism, extended by scholasticism, places Aristotelianism firmly at the first pole, animals entering the circle only marginally.
Aristotle, Politics, I, 8; Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 11
Rick Deckardinferable
At first Deckard kills, on orders, beings who are afraid and who suffer, without asking what he owes them: in practice, in his line of work, only humans count. His acts move him toward without his reaching it: his concern goes first to one particular replicant and to the one who spared him, not to every being that can suffer. His early remarks, inferred here rather than stated as a principle, placed him on the opposite side.
The pursuit of Zhora · The rooftop · The final scene
Humeinferable
Hume credits animals with learning and with reasoning from experience, and grants them the gentle treatment that the "laws of humanity" prescribe. Yet he separates these duties of humane treatment from the obligations of justice: imagining rational creatures entirely incapable of resisting us, he grants them humane treatment without placing them under the protection of justice. Their inability to constrain us, rather than any lack of sentience, explains that exclusion. Benevolence thus reaches beyond the human species without extending to equal consideration for all sentient beings.
A Treatise of Human Nature, I, III, 16 · An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, III, 1
Arguments and objections (4)
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counts morally. The question is not "can they reason?" but "can they suffer?": sentient animals thus enter the moral circle, and their interests deserve equal consideration where interests are comparable.
Explore this position →Benthamexplicit
If the sole title to enter the calculus is to be able to feel pleasure and pain, then the boundary of moral consideration must follow sentience, not reason or language. Bentham thus turns back both the Cartesian argument of the animal-machine and the one that once excluded the slave: it is not the faculty of reasoning or talking that grounds a claim to consideration, but the capacity to suffer. The conclusion follows from the consistency of the utilitarian criterion itself: consideration extends to every sentient being, placing him in pathocentrism and making him a precursor of the animal cause.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII, §1, footnote (the suffering of animals)
Utilitarianismexplicit
Since the good is pleasure and the evil suffering, what grants moral standing can be neither reason nor speech but the capacity to suffer alone: every being with an interest in its pain ceasing counts in the calculus. draws from this criterion a consequence that rationalist moralities refused, the inclusion of animals; reads it as the principle of equal consideration of interests and denounces speciesism as a prejudice of the same structure as racism. The moral circle thus widens to all sentient life, by internal consistency rather than by sentiment.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 17 · Singer, Animal Liberation
Schopenhauerexplicit
The moral circle extends to everything that suffers: animals, manifestations of the same will as ourselves, are the direct object of , and he reproaches Christianity and alike for having made beasts into mere things for our use, a doctrine he finds 'revolting and abominable.' The moral boundary runs at sentience, not at reason; the background stays metaphysical, the same will throughout nature, which lends it a biocentric tinge.
On the Basis of Morality, §19
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Roy Battyinferable
Batty insists that manufactured beings count: himself, his kind, their fear and their deaths. His concern goes first to his own, and he kills the humans who stand in his way. The criterion that emerges from his acts is not origin but the capacity to suffer and to fear. is the closest pole; extending it to every sentient being, beyond human or manufactured persons, would be an extrapolation.
The meeting with Tyrell · The rooftop
The Buddhaexplicit
Non-harming (ahiṃsā) and the first precept, to abstain from harming the living, extend moral consideration to all sentient beings capable of suffering, not to humans alone. All fear the rod, all hold life dear: compassion expressly takes in the whole of living beings caught in the cycle of rebirth, which places the teaching on the pathocentric side.
Dhammapada, ch. X (Violence), 129-130 · Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, Sutta Nipāta 1.8 (may all beings be happy)
Buddhismexplicit
Non-harming (ahiṃsā) and the first precept extend moral consideration to all sentient beings capable of suffering, not to humans alone. Compassion expressly takes in the whole of living beings caught in the cycle of rebirth, which places Buddhism on the pathocentric side.
Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta (the discourse on loving-kindness) · Dhammapada, ch. X (Violence)
Millexplicit
Since the moral criterion is pleasure and pain, the circle of moral concern extends to all sentient beings capable of suffering, not to humans alone: a pathocentrism. Mill explicitly counts the happiness of animals in the utilitarian calculus and supports early legislation against cruelty toward them.
Utilitarianism, ch. 2 (the happiness of all sentient creatures) · Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852), on the moral standing of animals
Rousseauinferable
Rousseau separates the capacity to know natural law from the capacity to be protected by it: animals lack the first, but, sentient as we are, they "must partake of natural right". If we owe it to others not to harm them, it is less because they are rational than because they are sentient. The duty not to mistreat animals needlessly thus flows from , not from any share in reason: a direct extension of moral consideration that goes beyond strict anthropocentrism without establishing equality between human and animal interests.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Preface · Emile, II
Michel de Montaigneexplicit
Against the pride that sets man atop creation, Montaigne brings the beasts near to us: "when I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her?". They have their intelligence, their affections, a communication. From this kinship he draws a duty: we owe "justice" to human beings, but "grace and kindness" to the other creatures, and cruelty toward animals fills him with horror. Moral consideration thus spills beyond humanity toward whatever can suffer, without going so far as an equality of all living things.
Essays, II, 12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond" and II, 11, "Of Cruelty"
Arguments and objections (3)
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Every living being, sentient or not, has a worth of its own: plants, insects, and micro-organisms included. Ethics rests on reverence for life as such, each organism pursuing its own good in its own way.
Explore this position →Show implicit positions (1)
Jonasinferable
finds it "at least not senseless" to ask whether the condition of extra-human nature has a moral claim on us, "not only for our sake but for its own". His answer goes not through suffering but through purposiveness: in every living being that pursues its end, being says yes to itself, and that yes is a good in itself. It is a biocentric grounding, not a pathocentric one. The human keeps a priority, that of the sole subject of responsibility, but it does not reserve intrinsic value to humans.
The Imperative of Responsibility, ch. I · The Imperative of Responsibility, ch. III-IV
Arguments and objections (3)
2
Moral worth attaches to ecological wholes themselves: species, ecosystems, the biotic community as a whole. An action is right when it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of these wholes, of which individuals, humans included, are but members.
Explore this position →Environmental Ethicsexplicit
The founding gesture of the current is to widen the beyond humans alone, against the tradition's . Where to draw the new boundary divides the family: to every being capable of suffering for , to every being for , to themselves for and . All reject the idea that the human alone counts.
Singer, Animal Liberation (1975) · Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
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Zhuangziinferable
To set the human at the summit of a ladder of beings is for Zhuangzi an illusion of perspective: from the standpoint of the , the pillar and the stalk, the ugly and the beautiful, the human and the worm are equally modes of transformation, and none holds a privilege. This anthropological decentering strips the human of being the measure of all things and inscribes him as one being among myriads, brother to the butterfly he may have dreamed he was. The leaning is decidedly ecocentric, even though Zhuangzi does not formulate, as a modern ecologist would, a duty to protect a whole.
Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (On the Equality of Things) · Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (Autumn Floods)
Arguments and objections (3)
See the problem map in the Atlas →
Sub-problems to deepen this axis's discussion
- PrescriptiveMoralThe criterion of moral status
What gives a being moral worth: reason, as Kant held, or the mere capacity to suffer, as Bentham asked? Depending on the threshold chosen, the circle of beings that count opens or narrows.
a living being - PrescriptiveMoralThe privilege of the species
Is favouring one's own because they belong to our species a natural duty or an arbitrary prejudice, comparable to racism? And if infants or severely impaired humans count without possessing reason, can species still serve as the criterion?
a non-human animal - PrescriptiveMoralReverence for life
To count, must one be capable of suffering, or is it enough to be alive? A tree, an insect pursue a good of their own: do they deserve our respect on that ground, or does life without sentience oblige us to nothing?
a plant, an insect - DescriptiveThe inner life of animals
The whole debate assumes that animals feel something: but can we know it? Descartes saw them as machines without consciousness; how can we be sure there is "something it is like" to be a bat?
an animal's mental life - PrescriptiveMoralCan a machine count morally?
If an artificial intelligence said it was suffering, should the sentience criterion be extended to it, or does moral consideration stop at the living, simulated suffering obliging us to nothing?
an artificial intelligence - PrescriptiveMoralWelfare or rights
To grant that animals count, is it to place their interests on the scales of the greater good, sacrificing them if need be, or to recognise inviolable rights in them because they too are subjects-of-a-life?
the treatment of an animal - PrescriptiveMoralThe suffering of wild animals
If the suffering of animals binds us, does the suffering they inflict on one another bind us too? Should we intervene against predation and the ills of nature that we did not cause, or is that to presume it falls to us to correct them?
predation in nature - PrescriptiveMoralMust we stop using animals?
If sentient animals truly count, do factory farming, slaughter, and experimentation become wrongs that must end, even to the point of changing our lives and our plates, or can we owe them consideration without giving up the use we make of them?
farming and slaughter - PrescriptiveMoralThe individual or the whole
Ecology values the integrity of the biotic community, even to culling the animals of an invasive species to preserve the whole: does worth lie in the whole, or in each sentient individual that such management sacrifices?
the biotic community
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveMinds other than my own
I never perceive another's experience, only bodies behaving: how do I know there is someone behind them? The only consciousness I have direct testimony of is my own.
access to another's experienceThe enigma of consciousness - DescriptiveWhere does consciousness begin?
Does a dog suffer as I do? And a fish, an oyster, an embryo, a plant, a thermostat? Between what undergoes something and what undergoes nothing, is there a sharp threshold, a continuous slope, or is the question ill-posed? Whoever refuses to extend experience to all matter owes a criterion, and quantifying it is one way of paying that debt.
the distribution of consciousness in natureThe enigma of consciousness - PrescriptiveMoral Thought experimentThe last man
If the last human being could, as he died, wipe out all remaining life with no witness, would he do wrong? Does nature have worth only for us, or does it have worth in itself, independent of any human gaze?
the living worldHumanity's place in nature - PrescriptiveAestheticSanctuary or garden
Should nature be left wild and untouched, preserving the part we did not make, or is the ideal a tended, gardened nature that human care completes rather than violates? And is there any "untouched" nature left to save at all?
wild natureHumanity's place in nature - PrescriptiveMoralWould we owe it anything?
If a machine thought, would it have interests, a dignity, rights, or would it remain a thing we dispose of, owing it nothing?
a thinking machineCan a machine think - DescriptiveFor whom do norms hold?
Universal norms, but universal for whom? The status of rules meets the question of the beings they bind and protect: where does the circle of those who count end?
the circle of beings that countStatus of norms (metaethics) - DescriptiveThe circle of sympathy
Our concern for others weakens as they grow distant from us, in space, in blood or in likeness: should morality build on this natural slope, or correct it like an inborn prejudice?
human sympathyPartiality
Compassion for animals is so intimately bound up with goodness of character that one may confidently assert that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.Schopenhauer · On the Basis of Morality, §19
The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?Bentham · An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII
All tremble at the rod, all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of others, let none kill nor cause to kill.The Buddha · Dhammapada, X, 129