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Consider Ethics:
Theory, Readings, and
Contemporary Issues
Third Edition
Bruce N. Waller
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Chapter 12
The Scope of Morality
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Who Is Due Moral Consideration?
• Social Contract Ethics
– Those who enter into the social contract are the
people who count morally
• If you haven’t agreed to the contract, you are in a state of
nature without moral rules
– But since there is no literal contract, who is covered
by it?
• Includes people who can understand and follow the rules
• Does not propose other meaningful limits on who is
included
– What about animals? The rest of nature?
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Who Is Due Moral Consideration
• Kantian Ethics
– Under the Kantian model, admission to the moral
community requires that you use the power of
reason to understand and follow moral law
• You recognize the moral law as an imperative
• But you are useless to Kant if you are outside the moral
community
– Ex. There is nothing immoral about torturing an animal, since
they have no moral standing, except any negative effect it
might have on the person doing the torturing
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Who Is Due Moral Consideration
• Tom Reagan’s Kantian Account of Animal
Rights
– Proponent of animal rights who developed a
Kantian theory to defend animal rights:
• In order to possess inherent worth, you need only be a
“subject of a life,” not necessarily a rational lawmaker
• You must be conscious of having a life (have selfawareness) that can go well or poorly
– Reagan’s model makes the moral community far more
inclusive
– But the model has no dividing line. Are all animals the same?
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Who Is Due Moral Consideration
• Utilitarians and the Moral Community
– Utilitarian ethics has been seen as a better
environment for broadened ethical consideration
of animals
• Casts a wide moral net
• Maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain applies to
everyone affected (human and animal)
• All suffering and pleasure is morally significant
– Peter Singer: attempting to count animals’ suffering as less
significant is gross prejudice
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Who Is Due Moral Consideration
• Eastern Views
– The most inclusive moral systems come from the
East
• Buddhist morality emphasizes the personal moral
development of the individual, which requires concern
for the entire community
– The Buddhist community includes all living things
• Jainism believes that we must have uncompromising
reverence for all living things
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Moral Agents
• Moral Agency and Intent
– Genuine moral behavior requires more than good
results
– Motives, not reasons, must be examined. To act
morally, I must genuinely intend to do the moral act.
But motives do not have to include deliberation.
• Many animals (human and nonhuman) can form and act
upon intentions they cannot conceptually order and explain
• Michael Bradie
– “Animals can act on the basis of altruistic motives but they do not
and cannot form intentions to do act.”
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Moral Agents
• An Experiment in Moral Agency
– If eating food (when your starving) led to another’s
suffering, would you eat?
• This experiment was done with monkeys, many of whom
chose not to eat
• Arguments Against Nonhuman Moral Agency
– An animal is not human, and so its behavior cannot be
moral
• An animal mother comforting an infant is responding to her
desire to stop the crying, not an intention to comfort the
infant
• Daniel Batson – “altruism” experiments
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Darwin and the Moral Status of
Nonhuman Animals
• Being pro-animal rights is not being antiresearch. Rather, animal rights proponents
recognize the value of experimenting on
animals, but reject the suffering that it causes.
– Likewise, they acknowledge that human testing
would have helpful results, but are unwilling to
cause human suffering for gains in research
• Michael Ruse
– Darwin posited that features evolve gradually.
Morality must exist, at least in traces, in animals.
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Scope of Morality
• Charles Darwin
– Developed the “theory of evolution,” which built
off of earlier evolutionary theories
– Created the “theory of natural selection,” which
provided a mechanistic account of how evolution
proceeds
– The Descent of Man
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Scope of Morality
• Frans de Waal
– Ethologist
– Writes about primate behavior and social relations
– “The Tower of Morality” From Primates and
Philosophers
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.