Farm Animals' Challenge to Ecological Thinking: Skepticism about the Prospects for an Inclusive Ethics of Health

Ethics and the Environment, 5(2)243-251 ISSN: 1085-6633 Copyright © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Tom Settle Farm Animals' Challenge to Ecological Thinking: Skepticism about the Prospects for an Inclusive Ethics of Health PARTI FARM ANIMALS CHALLENGE OUR THINKING ABOUT INHERENT WORTH Desdemona: I do perceive here a divided duty. Othello, Act I, Scene III The Objectivity of Inherent Worth I think Shakespeare was right to hint that duty is perceived. Of course, not impeccably and not by all: lago was not good at it. But the sense of duty intuited in friendships or at a father's first sight of his first-born (the mother was on to it long before) is not to be dismissed for its fallibility in the way analytic philosophy scorned intuitionism. It is a precious clue to objective significance, more in need of nurture and honing than of rebuke. Intuition is our only access to moral truths, the way sight is our only access to color, or hearing to pitch. But intuition can be wrong, as can our sense of color or of a note's pitch. Still, we should not try to do without it. Loss of moral intuition is as serious a defect (or handicap) as loss of hearing. Moral intuition is the only functional argument there is, theology aside, for inherent worth. If a person does not see it somewhere, even if only in the self while loudly claiming rights not yet coded into law, there is no fulcrum for logic to turn on. Of course a person can "see" too much of it, and everywhere—there is need for discernment —but it is better than not seeing any, anywhere. That is a kind of pathology, I'm inclined to say. Direct all correspondence to: Tom Settle, "Applecross", RR6, Mount Forest, ON, NOG 2LO, Canada; Fax: (519) 323-4059; E-mail: tomset@wcl.on.ca 243 244 ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT Vol. 5, No. 2,2000 I have not found usage consistent, I am afraid, as to what to call the worth we intuit . Some people call the worth that an organism might be said to have in itself, so to speak, regardless of how it might figure in any particular person's system of values, inherent; others, intrinsic. I shall be using inherent in this article, reserving intrinsic to do duty where a particular person values something for its own sake or as an end in itself but does not expect the world to share this valuation. Subjectivists in ethics, then, would deny that anything has inherent worth but cheerfully, and without inconsistency , would accord intrinsic worth to the ends they pursue or to the people and other animals they cherish. (Of course, instrumental value and market value are something else again.) Farm animals challenge both the "only human beings have inherent worth" theory and its polar opposite, that "all sentient creatures have equal inherent worth." Of course pets also do this, but the case of pets is complex because they are generally so over-valued intrinsically that the question of their inherent worth is obscured. This rarely happens on the farm where the over-riding valuation is instrumental. Farm animals , then, are the locus for a moral struggle—and a key debate—over inherent worth. I am tempted to say the key debate, but there is also an enormously important debate of a similar kind focused upon the comparatively fewer animals used in scientific research. There, too, the raw question at issue is whether any creature other than the human being can have inherent worth. (It is somewhere else—say, in communist countries before the collapse of the Berlin Wall—that the debate rages as to whether even human beings have inherent worth, generally denied by personal or collective dictatorships.) But in Animal Care Committees, which monitor the use of animals in research, that all sentient species be treated alike is axiomatic, as if all had equal inherent worth. Despite its entrenchment, the supposition of equal inherent worth—or, to put it more weakly, equal moral considerability—across species is patently unsustainable in the research situation, because the interests of...