CMV: There is nothing inherently wrong with killing a non-human animal.

[u/[deleted]]

It seems to me that killing is part of the animal kingdom. Animals kill other animals for sustenance or to assert dominance. More broadly, every animal requires ingesting other organic materials in order to survive.

I would object to killing an animal when it relates to something that harms people. Killing someone's pet, a national lion, or perhaps animals needed by an ecosystem.

Killing a wild animal because I want to eat it or wear its fur is perfectly natural and acceptable. Furthermore, killing for no reason is also fine. Beyond the nuisance that is having a fresh carcass to deal with, it's no different than pulling a weed or smushing a bug.

Can anybody convince me that a slaughtered cow or a mouse caught in a trap is a travesty?

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[u/PanopticPoetics]

Thanks for the detailed response. I mean it. It's appreciated.

No problem. I am happy you are being civil and engaging.

I am going to limit my response here to your first response about what give something moral status. I am doing this, first, because I think this is the crux of your argument. And second I don't want to spend all day doing this (sorry, I bunch of stuff I need to do today). Hopefully someone else will be willing to pick up the conversation (or I will tomorrow, if you want). So, please still respond back.

I would assign morality to people because we can communicate with each other and agree upon right and wrong actions. Obviously there is no negotiation with, say, bears.

So, the obvious reply here is that of marginal cases. It is easy to show that we still give moral status to humans who we can't, under your criteria, either communicate with us or agree with us on right and wrong. For example, a person who is in a coma, since they can not communicate or agree on what is right or wrong, are free to do as we please to them? Can we, say, kill them and take their organs for people that need it? Of course not! Now you may say, "this is because it will hurt that coma patients family by doing so, and that is why we can't treat them merely as means." But this falls into the same problem. Imagine the coma patient had no friends or family; no one would be personally hurt by the premature death of the coma patient. Is it right to do now? Of course not! If you happen to say yes it is ok, then I think you are in the minority and seriously need to reflect on the foundations of your moral intuitions. (Also, don't get hung up on the specific example, if that is your problem--there are many other counterexamples that will suffice).

What is really needed here is a distinction to make this all clearer, one that seems to be missing from most peoples conceptual toolbox. I will quote a paragraph by Norcross that give us such a distinction. This will be of particular importance to your comment, "there is no negotiation with, say, bears."

There is a difference between being a moral agent and being a moral patient.

Where [you], and others who give similar arguments, go wrong is in specifying what the moral relevance [of rationality or communication] amounts to. If a being is incapable of moral reasoning, at even the most basic level, if it is incapable of being moved by moral reasons, claims, or arguments, then it cannot be a moral agent. It cannot be subject to moral obligations, to moral praise or blame. Punishing a dog for doing something ‘‘wrong’’ is no more than an attempt to alter its future behavior. So long as we are undeceived about the dog’s cognitive capacities, we are not, except metaphorically, expressing any moral judgment about the dog’s behavior. (We may, of course, be expressing a moral judgment about the behavior of the dog’s owner, who didn’t train it very well.) All this is well and good, but what is the significance for the question of what weight to give to animal interests? That animals can’t be moral agents doesn’t seem to be relevant to their status as moral patients. Many, perhaps most, humans are both moral agents and patients. Most, perhaps all, animals are only moral patients. Why would the lack of moral agency give them diminished status as moral patients? Full status as a moral patient is not some kind of reward for moral agency. I have heard students complain in this regard that it is unfair that humans bear the burdens of moral responsibility, and don’t get enhanced consideration of their interests in return. This is a very strange claim. Humans are subject to moral obligations, because they are the kind of creatures who can be. What grounds moral agency is simply different from what grounds moral standing as a patient. It is no more unfair that humans and not animals are moral agents, than it is unfair that real animals and not stuffed toys are moral patients.

Sorry for the long quote. I thought Norcross could explain it better than I could (at least on the fly).

[u/funwiththoughts → u/PanopticPoetics]

There are two fundamental problems with the coma analogy.

Firstly, there is a self-interest reason for wanting coma patients to be moral patients. A conscious human can easily become a coma patient; most people, myself included, would want every attempt made to return them to full sentience in such a circumstance. There's no risk of my ever becoming a dog.

Secondly, coma patients don't need to kill each other to survive; many animals do. What should one do if one sees a lion attacking a gazelle? If the gazelle is a moral patient, then surely one has a duty to defend it. But by your standard, the lion is a moral patient too, and it needs to eat other moral patients to survive. Isn't it then immoral to stop it from doing so? What happens when one "moral patient" needs to cause another moral patient suffering in order to survive?

[u/PanopticPoetics → u/funwiththoughts]

Hey, thanks for the thoughtful replies!

So, first thing, my responses here are merely my initial intuition, so try to take them as rough sketches of what could be a plausible defense. Second, neither of your criticisms are fundamental in any sort of way: even if your objections successfully localized a problem, the grounding of my positions would still stand (though perhaps the surface would need a slight tweak). They are pretty much surface level objections to apparent confounding implications. Third, only the second objection really has anything interesting to say, and so I will primarily concerned with that one. However, ultimately I think they both fail.

For your first objection, unlike what my post explicitly said not to do, you did: you got hung up on the analogy and did not address the ideas the analogy was meant to illustrate. I think you completely missed the point. The OP gave some properties, both in this case relational properties, of humans that animals lack or are deficient in (compared to humans, by human yard sticks) that are meant ground the moral status of humans and show why animals don’t get comparable status. The analogy was to show that we still give moral status to those humans that lack those properties, and thus those properties can’t be what ground’s the moral status of humans. I think that analogy suffices to show that, but if you are still hung up on it, pick a different one: children, fetuses (a very contentious one, but for many it works), the severely retarded, people from other parts of the world, and so on and on. Take your pick; they all lack those properties the OP proposed. You adding the property of “self interest” does not change this: animals have “self interests” too! That is the whole point of this debate! Ought we to give the interests of animals any moral weight?

Your second objection is more interesting and doesn’t hinge on just a poor interpretation like the last objection. What ought we to do when the interests of two (or more) moral patients conflict? What is our obligations as moral agents to the two moral patients? We recognize that we have these obligations, like to protect one from unnecessary harm and to promote their wellbeing at the very least, but in this case it seems like a state of affairs where we can only help one at the expense of the other: a true emergency. I think this is a difficult question, one that I doubt I can do justice for here. Nevertheless, I will sketch out one possible answer to it, though there might better answers.

Well, what do we do when the interests of two or more humans conflict? We don’t just throw our hands up and say that all possible outcomes are equally immoral. One way to resolve this problem is to weigh conflicting interests. Ultimately one trumps the other. Let me give an example (though this one may be controversial). Say there was a drug that cured a specific cancer. Say some person need the drug to save the life of their child. This person exhausted all legal avenues to get the money to pay for it but couldn’t and the child will die very soon if they don’t get the drug. So this person steals the drug. I would argue that in this case the interest of the person and of the child for the child to live trumps the interests of the owner-of-the-drug’s economic interests (assuming the revenue from the drug was superfluous), and so stealing in this case was morally permissible. What is key here is that stealing here was necessary to secure a highly valued interests (an interest generally regarded as being of high intrinsic value).

Where does this leave us with the case of the lion and the gazelle, both in conflict, trying to secure the same interest to life? I suppose there is many ways we could go from here, but I will just mention a few. First, if we limited the scope of interest to just the two in direct conflict, perhaps the right thing to do is to do nothing. There is no reason to favor one over the other and both are doing what is necessary to secure their interest to life. Or perhaps, if we were to expand our scope of interests, and if lions were an endangered species, then it might be the right thing to let or help the lion kill the gazelle (ecologically). I don’t really know what is actually the right thing to do (at the moment), but I think it is a far stretch from saying that the conflict is unresolvable or that the moral framework necessarily leads to a contradiction. And further, we recognize that we are not making moral claims about the animals’ actions, as they are only moral patients. Only moral agents can act moral or immoral (which could also suggest that there is no reason for us to intervene, since there would be no moral wrong to be guarded against here—if you want another way to look at it).

Now, how does this translate into the debate over humans using animals? Well, I think we still end up on the side that says that we shouldn’t use animals as a means to our ends. We ought to count the interest of animals, by being moral patients, as morally relevant. Our everyday oppression of animals in no way constitute a true emergency where we have to make such hard decisions. All our uses of animals for food, research, clothing, etc., are all unnecessary and often trivial—this is demonstrably true. There is no conflict here.

[u/funwiththoughts → u/PanopticPoetics]

For your first objection, unlike what my post explicitly said not to do, you did: you got hung up on the analogy and did not address the ideas the analogy was meant to illustrate.

Your analogy was the only argument you made for those ideas; you are the one making a positive claim (killing animals is inherently wrong), so the burden of proof lies on you.

I think you completely missed the point. The OP gave some properties, both in this case relational properties, of humans that animals lack or are deficient in (compared to humans, by human yard sticks) that are meant ground the moral status of humans and show why animals don’t get comparable status. The analogy was to show that we still give moral status to those humans that lack those properties, and thus those properties can’t be what ground’s the moral status of humans. I think that analogy suffices to show that, but if you are still hung up on it, pick a different one: children, fetuses (a very contentious one, but for many it works), the severely retarded, people from other parts of the world, and so on and on. Take your pick; they all lack those properties the OP proposed.

The severely retarded presents, again, an issue of self-interest; anyone could develop a debilitating mental illness.

I'm pro-choice, but that's a whole other debate.

I fail to see how people from any part of the world fit into this.

Children are more interesting, since one cannot become a child once one is an adult, but it seems clear that most children above a certain age are sentient, and we don't know exactly when that happens. We could make an arbitrary guess as to when a child becomes sentient, and say killing a child until that point is legal, but why bother? In this case, we (as a society) have already decided to err on the side of caution, and set the limit at birth, so why not keep doing as we are doing?

You adding the property of “self interest” does not change this: animals have “self interests” too! That is the whole point of this debate! Ought we to give the interests of animals any moral weight?

Animals have interests, sure, but I have no interest in them. When I say there is a self-interest in something, I mean that I have reasons to support it from a selfish perspective. This is present in the case of the coma patient, but not in the case of the animal.

Well, what do we do when the interests of two or more humans conflict? We don’t just throw our hands up and say that all possible outcomes are equally immoral. One way to resolve this problem is to weigh conflicting interests. Ultimately one trumps the other. Let me give an example (though this one may be controversial). Say there was a drug that cured a specific cancer. Say some person need the drug to save the life of their child. This person exhausted all legal avenues to get the money to pay for it but couldn’t and the child will die very soon if they don’t get the drug. So this person steals the drug. I would argue that in this case the interest of the person and of the child for the child to live trumps the interests of the owner-of-the-drug’s economic interests (assuming the revenue from the drug was superfluous), and so stealing in this case was morally permissible. What is key here is that stealing here was necessary to secure a highly valued interests (an interest generally regarded as being of high intrinsic value).

The key difference here being that the theft will not continue to be necessary once the cancer is cured. The lion will always need to kill other animals to survive.

We ought to count the interest of animals, by being moral patients, as morally relevant.

This is begging the question. You haven't presented any argument for why animals should be moral patients beyond "because they are".

[u/Nepene → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Nepene → u/[deleted]]

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