Relation to others· Morals

Anthropocentrism

Axis: Moral circle — To whom do we owe moral consideration?

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.

Who holds this position

Movements 1

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

Philosophers 3

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

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)

Arguments and objections

ArgumentThe dignity of the person — Full moral status rests on being able to be wronged, to hold rights; but rights and duties go together, and only a rational being can recognize a duty. Animals and nature thus fall under our benevolence, not the justice owed to an equal.

A being has full moral status when it can be wronged, when it has grievances to press, not merely suffer damage: one can injure an animal, but can one 'do it an injustice'?
Now rights and duties go together: only what can also recognize duties, enter the space of reasons where accounts are given, holds rights, and this is proper to rational beings.
Animals and nature can neither promise, nor consent, nor answer for anything: they fall under our benevolence, not justice; we owe them consideration, not the respect owed to an equal.

Therefore So the circle of justice is that of persons: cruelty to animals is a wrong because it degrades us and betrays our humanity, not because an injustice is done to the animal.

ObjectionAttacks the reasoningThe argument from marginal cases — Anthropocentrism makes reason the criterion of moral status; but many humans do not meet it. Either we exclude them, which no one accepts, or we include them through the sentience they share with animals, and the criterion then holds for animals too.

The argument makes reason, responsible agency, the criterion of full moral status.
But many humans do not meet it: infants, people with advanced dementia, the severely cognitively impaired can neither promise nor answer for their acts. We nonetheless grant them full dignity.
Either one keeps the criterion and excludes these humans, which no one accepts; or one includes them through what they share with animals, the capacity to suffer and to enjoy, and that criterion then holds for animals too.

Therefore So reason cannot be the real criterion: what brings a being into the moral circle is not reasoning but the capacity to suffer, and that many animals have.

ObjectionAttacks the position Thought experimentThe last man — The last man could painlessly wipe out all remaining life: if only humans count, the act would be indifferent; yet it seems a grave wrong, a sign that value did not rest on us alone.

Be the last human, dying, with no descendants: you can destroy at a stroke and without pain all remaining life, forests, oceans, animals.
No human will exist any longer to suffer from it or rejoice in it: according to anthropocentrism, for which all value is value for humans, the act wrongs no one and remains indifferent.
Yet it strikes us as a devastation, a wrong: this living world had worth, it seems, independently of any human gaze.

Therefore So value is not only value-for-us: if destroying life without harming any human remains a wrong, then the moral circle overflows humanity.

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

↑ What grounds it

The enigma of consciousness

If only the rational soul confers genuine inwardness, animals, lacking this thinking substance, are nothing but mechanisms without worth of their own. Substance dualism supports moral anthropocentrism: for Descartes, the "animal-machine" does not enter the circle of our direct duties. The link is looser, however, among anthropocentrists who, like Kant, ground dignity in reason rather than in a soul-substance.

↓ What it implies

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

Problems

PrescriptiveMoral
The 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
PrescriptiveMoral
The 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
Descriptive
The 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
PrescriptiveMoral
Can 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
PrescriptiveMoral
Must 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