Abstract

Animal Ethics rejects “moral anthropocentrism,” by which we mean the assumption that human needs, wants, or desires should have absolute or near absolute priority in our moral calculations, “instrumentalism”, by which we mean the assumption that animals exist for human beings, to serve their interests and wants, and “reductionism”, by which we mean the way in which our moral obligations to animals are reduced to other terms or subsumed under other categories. Animal ethics embraces 4 contrary positions: the first is that animals have worth in themselves, what may be termed “inherent” or “intrinsic” value. Sentient beings, or sentients, are not just things, objects, machines, or tools; they have their own interior life that deserves respect. This view extends worth to sentients as individuals, not just as collectivities or as part of a community. The second is that given the conceding of sentience, there can be no rational grounds for not taking animals’ sentience into account or for excluding individual animals from the same basic moral consideration that we extend to individual human beings. The third is that causing harm to individual sentients requires strong moral justification, if it can be justified at all. And it follows from the preceding that there must be profound moral limits to what humans are entitled to do to animals. Precisely what these limits are, and how they apply in specific situations, is the subject of practical animal ethics, but that there are such limits cannot be doubted. But the key thing is that we are in the middle of a welcome and necessary paradigm shift. The paradigm shift can be easily described: it is the move away from the idea that sentient animals are things, tools, commodities, means to human ends, and resources here for our use to the idea that animals have intrinsic value, dignity, and rights.