Redesigning Animal Agriculture

34 P. Thompson
of humans. An ethically responsible person
or organization consistently chooses
the course of action that produces maximal
welfare, all affected parties (human or animal)
considered. Peter Singer articulates
these concepts in his famous book Animal
Liberation (Singer, 2002).
A second reductionist strategy in philosophy
has been a focus on moral rights or
duties, sometimes called rights theory. The
history of the rights tradition is rather complex,
but Kant’s philosophy has been especially
influential in the debate over animals.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that for
each of us, our own freedom or autonomy
is basic to the way that we understand ourselves
as capable of acting ethically. From
this platform, we can derive a sense of what
our most fundamental and basic rights and
duties are, not only for ourselves but also
for others. Kant’s view was that a coherent
picture of responsibility flows from a principle
he called the Categorical Imperative:
never treat others solely as a means to an
end, but always as ends in themselves.
Kant was known for thinking animals
could not have rights, or, more accurately, that
humans could not owe moral duties directly
to animals. He thought autonomy required
much more advanced rational capacities than
he believed animals possessed. Animal rights
theorists, however, believe that, like humans,
each animal has its own subjective identity.
They argue that Kant was wrong to place so
much emphasis on advanced rationality, noting
that infants and mentally disabled human
beings lack this capacity, as well. This pattern
of reasoning, known as the Argument from
Marginal Cases (AMC), provides the basis
for including many animals in the sphere
of rights-holding beings. If infants and mentally
disabled human beings have rights, we
must move to a more general criterion for our
basic ethical principle. Once we do this, it is
logically inconsistent to ignore the animal’s
subjectivity and rights when weighing our
actions. Our duty is to respect this subjectivity
and never reduce animals to a means
to meet our ends. Tom Regan makes these
points in Animal Rights, Human Wrongs
(Regan, 2003).
A utilitarian emphasis on health and welfare
outcomes and an alternative emphasis
on the inherent rights of animals to live lives
free from human interference are the two ethical
philosophies that dominate the animal
ethics debate. These two philosophies represent
opposing strategies for reducing ethical
complexity. Utilitarianism and rights theory
represent the dominate alternatives within
ethical theory for the 20th century, irrespective
of whether responsibilities to animals
are discussed. Many philosophical debates
of the 20th century consisted in contrasts
between utilitarian and rights-based positions.
Furthermore, using Singer and Regan
to illustrate these two theoretical approaches
has proven to be an attractive pedagogical
approach within college curricula. When
many philosophers mention ‘the animal
rights debate’ they are referring to the debate
between Singer and Regan, as if these were
the only valid philosophical alternatives.
Nevertheless, there are a number of
challenges that might be made to utilitarian
and rights philosophers in considering the
ethics of how human beings relate to animals.
Some recent challenges in the philosophical
literature are discussed in the next
section. With respect to livestock production
systems, David Fraser has argued that reductionist
approaches to animal ethics lead to
three critical failures in insight: because they
emphasize similarities between humans and
other animals they neglect species-specific
characteristics that are critical to good husbandry;
they presume that the critical ethical
problem lies in showing that humans have
ethical responsibilities to animals, which
the husbandry ethic has already recognized;
and they neglect much of what is important
about the agricultural context (Fraser, 1999).
But the philosophical strategies utilized by
Singer and Regan have not been immune
from criticism by mainstream philosophers,
and the next section reviews some recent
debates.
Animal Ethics: Recent Philosophical
Developments
If Fraser’s 1999 paper is any indication,
livestock researchers work with a representation
of the philosophical approaches in