Abstract
There is broad agreement that humans can be wronged independently of their incurring any harm, that is, when their welfare is not affected. Examples include unnoticed infringements of privacy, ridiculing unaware individuals, or disregarding individuals’ autonomous decision-making in their best interest. However, it is less clear whether the same is true of animals—that is, whether moral agents can wrong animals in situations that do not involve any harm to the animals concerned. In order to answer this question, I concentrate on the illustrative case of treating animals in a demeaning yet harmless way that would be disrespectful if humans were concerned. I discuss whether such actions are permissible or unjustifiably discriminatory from a moral point of view. I conclude that moral agents cannot directly wrong animals without harming them and thus do not owe it to a particular animal to refrain from such actions. However, if the actions increase the likelihood that animal abuse will occur, this presents a strong indirect reason against performing them. Thus, the reasons for refraining from such actions are merely indirect rather than direct.
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Notes
Defenders of the indirect duties view disagree with this; see for example Carruthers (1994).
Given that the starting point of this article is an experiential understanding of welfare, one may wonder about the implications for ‘natural living views’ of welfare, that is, views that take ‘naturalness’ as central concern for animal well-being. According to these views, animals should be able to perform their natural behaviour and live in a natural environment (Fraser 2008). If withholding possibilities to express animals’ natural behavior makes them worse off than they were before or could have been, this would consist in an unjustified harm by deprivation. However, if animals are not and will never suffer or be negatively affected by not pursuing natural behaviours, it is indeed an open question whether these animals are wronged or not. One difficulty with the notion of naturalness, however, is that it is unclear what it consists of. In the case of wild animals, this is quite clear: it is their natural environment. However, in the case of domesticated animals (as well as humans, as a matter of fact), it is harder to determine what naturalness amounts to.
How rational or autonomous these humans are is of little relevance. In all likelihood, nobody is perfectly rational and autonomous; what matters here is that a certain threshold is met.
While Hospital intuitively seems to involve a wrong, this view may lead to counter-intuitive consequences: one could raise the question of whether it is always wrong to mock other people, no matter how close they are to us. If vicinity to the victim of the action does not morally matter (which is probably right), then this example leads to the following consequence: that making fun (in the privacy of our homes) of incompetent politicians is morally problematic (I thank an anonymous reviewer for indicating this point to me). Most of us would probably not want to accept this conclusion, but are at the same time hesitant to claim that nearness respectively distance is what morally matters in Hospital. A way out of this is to say that the problem in Hospital lies in the fact that medical professionals were involved. Medical professionals not only have to provide care but also have to fulfil some standards of professional ethics. Hospital is at odds with care-givers’ respect for their patients in situations of increased vulnerability (for a discussion of the concept of respect in medical ethics, see Beach et al. 2007). Explaining the wrongness of Hospital this way avoids the implication that mocking politicians is always morally wrong.
This controversy led some to the suggestion that we should do away with the notion of harm in moral theorizing altogether (see Bradley 2012). However, given that it is commonly used and currently fulfils an important role in moral theorizing, for the moment it should not be abandoned.
The only exception is if harming is defined as wrongdoing, i.e. if one defends a moralized notion of harm (for a discussion, see Holtug 2002). However, this does not resolve the problem discussed here: it presupposes knowing what wrongs are in the case of animals, which is the question at stake here. Thus, moralized definitions of harm presuppose what this article aims to show.
One could argue that the individuals in Blood Transfusion and Hospital were not directly wronged: the actions of the physicians could be said to be morally wrong only because they might provoke mental distress in others witnessing the scene; or they are wrong because one may become more disposed to humiliate and thus harm conscious humans. It may indeed be the case that such actions are wrong due solely to their potential negative consequences for others. However, most people probably share the intuition that we owe it directly to unconscious individuals not to ridicule and to disrespect them, and this is one of the premises on which this articles builds. Thus, I accept a distinction between directly wronging someone and indirect wrongs, although this distinction may be disputed by some.
One could put forward that the zoo case is already problematic since animals are confined in a limited space, which is stressful for them. While this is very likely the case, it is not germane here. As an alternative, one can imagine the same scenario with gorillas or other animals observed in a vast nature reserve.
DeGrazia takes up the idea of respecting animals and using them as means to an end again in DeGrazia (2011). He suggests considering whether a proxy who cares about the animal could consent to subjecting it to a certain treatment. He thinks that this is the case when the animal incurs a net benefit, or when the risks are zero. However, he also notes that referring to the notion of respect in the case of animals is not very helpful, since the meaning of respect is unclear in their case. Thus, although he may no longer defend the view that the animals are wronged in the scenarios discussed, I will nevertheless inquire here what it means to (dis-)respect animals and whether the cases discussed are permissible from a moral point of view.
In his article, Vrousalis only addresses humans; however, he notes that his argument is not speciesist and could include nonhuman animals.
Similarly to Vrousalis, Višak (2013, pp. 120–126) tackles the same issue regarding animals from an utilitarian point of view by taking attitudes into account.
Barnes argued that considering cases of disability as wrongful existence is problematic and amounts to ableism (Barnes 2014). Although I share many of Barnes’s concerns, for the sake of the argument I accept Vrousalis’s premise here that it may be wrong in some cases to bring individuals into existence who will mostly suffer.
Note that the idea of an imaginary discourse is not new, as Vrousalis himself notes. It can, for example, be found in Habermas (1990).
It is challenging to determine whether animals can feel humiliated. There may be some evidence that cognitively higher developed animals, such as great apes and dolphins, can feel embarrassment vis-à-vis each other and humans (Masson and McCarthy 1996; Bekoff 2000; Bekoff 2008). However, it is unclear whether these few observations amount to anthropomorphism, or whether these animals really feel humiliated and ashamed. This is even harder to determine in the case of cognitively less developed animals (see, for example, Horowitz 2009 on guilt). What is clear is that we should refrain from such actions if the animals concerned indeed feel humiliated and are thus harmed by the action.
An exception is if the very same animal will, with great likelihood, be harmed in the future. For example, if I know that harmlessly disguising my dog in a distasteful way will, in the long run, incite me or others to harmfully exploit my dog (maybe by forcing him to do tricks that he does not want to do), then I do have a direct duty towards my dog not to φ.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank François Jaquet, Oscar Horta, Richard Healy and Valéry Giroux, two anonymous reviewers of Res Publica as well as the members of the Groupe de recherche en éthique environnementale et animale (GRÉEA) in Montréal for critical and constructive feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. Parts of this article were drafted during a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (PP00P3_123340), a junior research fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study in Bioethics at the University of Münster, and a postdoc at the Centre for Research in Ethics in Montréal.
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Martin, A.K. On Respecting Animals, or Can Animals be Wronged Without Being Harmed?. Res Publica 25, 83–99 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9379-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9379-9