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Animal Suffering and Moral Salience: A Defense of Kant’s Indirect View

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Notes

  1. Patrick Kain, “Duties Regarding Animals,” in Lara Denis (ed.), Kant’s “Metaphysics of Morals”: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 210–33; Matthew C. Altman, Kant and Applied Ethics: The Uses and Limits of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 13–44; Allen W. Wood, “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 (1998): 189–210; and Christine M. Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals,” in Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 24 (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 2005), 77–110.

  2. Altman, Kant and Applied Ethics, 13–44.

  3. I reference works by Kant in the text parenthetically using the following abbreviations:

    A/B: Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

    CPrR: Critique of Practical Reason. In Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy, 137–271. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

    G: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy, 41–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

    LE: Lectures on Ethics. Trans. Peter Heath. Ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

    LL: Lectures on Logic. Trans. and ed. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

    LM: Lectures on Metaphysics. Trans. and ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

    MM: Metaphysics of Morals. In Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy, 363–602. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

    WE: “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy, 15–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

    As is customary in Kant scholarship, each parenthetical reference to Kant’s writings gives the volume and page number(s) of the Royal Prussian Academy edition, which are included in the margins of the translations.

  4. Peter Singer, “Not for Humans Only: The Place of Nonhumans in Environmental Issues,” in Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III (eds.), Environmental Ethics: An Anthology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 55–64; Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, rev. ed. (New York: Ecco, 2009), p. 244; and Tom Regan, A Case for Animal Rights, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 174–85. See also James Skidmore, “Duties to Animals: The Failure of Kant’s Moral Theory,” Journal of Value Inquiry 35, no. 4 (Dec. 2001): 541–59.

  5. For evidence in favor of the violence graduation hypothesis, see note 15 below.

  6. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2006), p. 330; and Wood, “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature,” pp. 194–95. Versions of this objection are also made by Alexander Broadie and Elizabeth M. Pybus, “Kant’s Treatment of Animals,” Philosophy 49 (Oct. 1974): 375–83; Christina Hoff, “Kant’s Invidious Humanism,” Environmental Ethics 5, no. 1 (1983): 63–70, esp. p. 67; Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 52; Heather Fieldhouse, “The Failure of the Kantian Theory of Indirect Duties to Animals,” Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 2, no. 2 (2004): 1–9, http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/JCAS-Vol-2-Issue-2.pdf (accessed 9/7/18); and Jens Timmermann, “When the Tail Wags the Dog: Animal Welfare and Indirect Duty in Kantian Ethics,” Kantian Review 10, no. 1 (Jan. 2005): 128–49.

  7. J. Baird Callicott, “Intrinsic Value in Nature: A Metaethical Analysis,” Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (Spring 1995), http://ejap.louisiana.edu/EJAP/1995.spring/callicott.1995.spring.html (accessed 9/7/18).

  8. Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 149.

  9. Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  10. Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. xxvii.

  11. Jared Prunty and Kevin J. Apple, “Painfully Aware: The Effects of Dissonance on Attitudes toward Factory Farming,” Anthrozoös 26, no. 2 (2013): 265–78.

  12. For a state-by-state listing of the status of this anti-whistleblower legislation, see American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), “What Is Ag-Gag Legislation?,” https://www.aspca.org/animal-protection/public-policy/what-ag-gag-legislation (accessed 9/7/18). See also Pamela Fiber-Ostrow and Jarret S. Lovell, “Behind a Veil of Secrecy: Animal Abuse, Factory Farms, and Ag-Gag Legislation,” Contemporary Justice Review 19, no. 2 (2016): 230–49.

  13. See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2005), www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/usa0105.pdf (accessed 9/7/18).

  14. Amy J. Fitzgerald, Linda Kalof, and Thomas Dietz, “Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover From ‘The Jungle’ Into the Surrounding Community,” Organization & Environment 22, no. 2 (June 2009): 158-84.

  15. Studies supporting the violence graduation hypothesis include: Stephen R. Kellert and Alan R. Felthous, “Childhood Cruelty toward Animals among Criminals and Noncriminals,” Human Relations 38, no. 12 (Dec. 1985): 1113–29; Stephen R. Kellert and Alan R. Felthous, “Childhood Cruelty to Animals and Later Aggression against People: A Review,” American Journal of Psychiatry 144, no. 6 (June 1987): 710–17; Linda Merz-Perez, Kathleen M. Heide, and Ira J. Silverman, “Childhood Cruelty to Animals and Subsequent Violence against Humans,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 45, no. 5 (Oct. 2001): 556–73; and Kelly E. Knight et al., “Parental Predictors of Children’s Animal Abuse: Findings from a National and Intergenerational Sample,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 29, no. 16 (Nov. 2014): 3014-34. Studies that challenge the violence graduation hypothesis usually show that animal cruelty is not a predictor of violence toward humans specifically but of antisocial behavior in general, including nonviolent criminal behavior. For example, see Arnold Arluke et al., “The Relationship of Animal Abuse to Violence and Other Forms of Antisocial Behavior,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 14, no. 9 (Sept. 1999): 963–75; Glenn D. Walters, “Testing the Specificity Postulate of the Violence Graduation Hypothesis: Meta-Analyses of the Animal Cruelty-Offending Relationship,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 18, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 2013): 797–802; and Glenn D. Walters, “Testing the Direct, Indirect, and Moderated Effects of Childhood Animal Cruelty on Future Aggressive and Non-aggressive Offending,” Aggressive Behavior 40, no. 3 (May/June 2014): 238–49. Although the latter studies challenge the violence graduation hypothesis, they do not cast doubt on Kant’s broader claim that animal cruelty tends to corrupt a person’s moral character.

  16. Dan Egonsson, “Kant’s Vegetarianism,” Journal of Value Inquiry 31, no. 4 (Dec. 1997): 473–83, p. 477.

  17. Daniel M. Zane, Julie R. Irwin, and Rebecca Walker Reczek, “Do Less Ethical Consumers Denigrate More Ethical Consumers? The Effect of Willful Ignorance on Judgments of Others,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 26, no. 3 (July 2016): 337–49.

  18. Nancy M. Williams, “Affected Ignorance and Animal Suffering: Why Our Failure to Debate Factory Farming Puts Us at Moral Risk,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21, no. 4 (Aug. 2008): 371–84.

  19. Alix Cohen, “Kant on the Ethics of Belief,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114, no. 3, pt. 3 (Dec. 2014): 317–34. See also Alix Cohen, “Kant on Doxastic Voluntarism and its Implications for the Ethics of Belief,” in Kant Yearbook, vol. 5: Kant and Contemporary Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 33–50; and Melissa Merritt, Kant on Reflection and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), esp. pp. 124–58.

  20. Cohen, “Kant on the Ethics of Belief,” p. 328.

  21. I presented part of this paper at the Northwest Philosophy Conference in October 2018. I would like to thank the conference participants for helpful feedback, especially Timothy Linnemann, who provided commentary during the session. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewer for The Journal of Value Inquiry who suggested revisions that substantially improved the paper.

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Altman, M.C. Animal Suffering and Moral Salience: A Defense of Kant’s Indirect View. J Value Inquiry 53, 275–288 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9667-4

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