Animal Dignity
by
Craig Duncan
A longstanding tradition in moral philosophy, associated most closely with Immanuel
Kant but having precursors in the ancient Stoics,1 accounts for moral rightness and wrongness in
terms of a moral duty to respect the dignity of humans, a dignity that stems ultimately from our
powers of rational agency. And yet, broad-minded though this idea was in the ancient world and
in the eighteenth century, it has come now to be viewed by many philosophers as parochial. This
is so because it appears to exclude non-human animals from the circle of moral concern. In a
recent discussion of the Stoic account of dignity, for instance, Martha Nussbaum writes
Reason, language, moral capacity—all these things are seen as worthy of respect and awe
at least in part because the beasts, so called, don't have them, because they make us better
than others. This view has its moral problems, clearly. It has long been used to deny that
we have any obligations of justice toward nonhuman forms of life.2
One can imagine that in ancient times this would hardly have been judged a problem. But with
the recent growth in moral consciousness regarding the treatment of nonhuman animals, any
view that fails to ground some duties to nonhuman animals risks obsolescence.
The same defect has been attributed to Kant’s moral philosophy. Christina Hoff, for
instance, speaks of a “seamier side” to Kant’s ethical humanism. His “invidious humanism,” she
claims, leads him to deny any direct moral duties toward animals, and in denying this he
For discussion of the connections between the ancient Stoics and Kant’s moral philosophy, see Martha C.
Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 5:1-25 (1997).
2
Martha Nussbaum, Daedalus 132(1) (Winter 2003), 18.
1
“altogether excludes animals from the moral domain.”3 Indeed, the alleged failure of dignitybased approaches (Stoic, Kantian, or otherwise) to show due moral concern for non-human
animals is the subject of an entire book, namely, James Rachels’s Created from Animals: The
Moral Implications of Darwinism.4
Let us call this alleged defect of dignity-based moral approaches “the problem of animal
dignity.” It is my aim in this essay to solve this problem.
1. Animal Dignity and Purposive Agency.
The problem of animal dignity is indeed a challenging one. The challenge, I think, lies
not in believing that some nonhuman animals possess a dignity; I for one find that rather easy to
believe. Instead the challenge lies in articulating precisely the nature of animal dignity. By way
of tackling this challenge, let me recount a story that one of my colleagues relates about once
taking his young son to a circus in town, and discovering there a lone protestor outside the tent
silently holding aloft a sign that read "REMEMBER THE DIGNITY OF ELEPHANTS." The
sign hit him like a lightning bolt, my colleague said. The protester's point is surely an intelligible
one, though we could debate about whether it is genuinely reason enough to avoid all types of
circuses. As a second example, think about an eagle whose wings have been clipped to keep it in
a zoo's cage; it is not unreasonable to look upon such a creature and feel a keen sense of its
loss—even something of a tragic sense of its loss.
The key to explaining these reactions, I believe, is the sense that elephants and eagles
have some significant powers of agency of their own. It is true that such animals lack the powers
Christina Hoff, “Kant’s Invidious Humanism,” Environmental Ethics5 (Spring 1983): 63, 70. Cited in Gerald
Gaus, “Respect for Persons and Environmental Values,” pp. 239-264 in Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn, eds.,
Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1998).
4
Oxford University Press, 1990.
3
2
of rational agency that humans possess, for I presume they cannot consciously formulate
judgments as to which actions they have reason to perform and which actions they have reason to
avoid. However, many nonhuman animals surely are able to have conscious experiences (they
feel pain, have felt needs and wants, etc.)5 and are able to act in a purposive manner (e.g. as
when an animal goes to a river bank to drink), even though they admittedly do not have
conscious thoughts along the lines "I am now doing such-and-such in order to achieve this-andthat." Referring to these abilities as the "powers of purposive agency," my suggestion is that
creatures with these powers possess a type of dignity, even when these powers fall short of truly
rational agency.
My claim, then, shall be that where one finds purposive agency one also finds dignity. I
regard this as a normative claim rather than a meta-ethical claim, that is, in saying this I do not
purport to be defining the concept of dignity. Hence, before turning to a defense of the
normative claim just mentioned, a few words are in order about the definition of concept of
dignity itself.
One possible definition is due to Stephen Darwall, who defines dignity as “[a] moral
status or standing that is the appropriate object of (recognition) respect.”6 This is a suggestive
definition, but I have two worries about it. First, if indeed Darwall intends this to be a strict
definition of dignity, then it has a disappointing implication: since a reference to respect is built
right into the definition, it turns out that the claim “One ought to show respect for another
person’s dignity” is merely an analytic truth, rather than a substantive moral truth. Second, I
5
For a state-of-the-art look at the issue of animal consciousness see Colin Allen, "Animal Pain," Noûs 38:617-43
(2004).
6
Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), p. 234; this definition for “dignity”
comes from the glossary section at the end of the book. Note that this same glossary defines “recognition respect”
as “The attitude of recognizing someone’s dignity.” Hence the definitions as written are circular. For a more
3
worry the definition is overbroad. For example, Andy Warhol’s famous soup can paintings
probably merit respectful treatment—one shouldn’t burn them as campfire fuel, for instance—
but do they really possess a dignity? Should one really explain one’s moral unwillingness to
burn them as a case of showing respect for the dignity of the paintings? I doubt this.7
Hence I want to propose a distinct definition of dignity: the concept of dignity is just the
concept of a special sort of value, namely, what we might call “self-originating value.” (We
might also, following Kant, describe an object that self-originates its value to be an “end in
itself,” though I won’t employ this phrase in what follows.) Warhol’s paintings lack this; though
they are valuable in their own right (that is, they are not just instrumentally valuable), their value
was created by the artist: Warhol created the value that now inheres, so to speak, in the
paintings. The paintings did not create their own value; they are the creation rather than the
creator. By contrast—to temporarily advert back to the standard case of persons—persons, while
of course created by their parents, are not solely the creation of their parents, for in virtue of their
significant powers of rational agency, persons have significant (albeit still limited) powers of
self-creation. (Note that here I purport to be elucidating the concept of dignity rather than
vindicating it. It may be that our ideas of self-creation, and free will generally, are illusory, and
detailed account of recognition respect that might remove this circularity, see Darwall’s “Two Kinds of Respect,”
Ethics 88:1 (1977), pp. 36-49.
7
Perhaps one might try to rebut this objection by arguing that paintings are not fitting objects of recognition respect.
Darwall, however, apparently does not want his notion of recognition respect to be so limited. In his article
introducing the notion of recognition respect, he defines it thusly: “There is a kind of respect which can have any of
a number of different sort of things as its object an which consists, most generally, in a disposition to weigh
appropriately in one’s deliberations some feature of the thing in question and act accordingly” (ibid., p. 38). As
examples of possible objects of recognition respect, Darwall lists “someone’s feelings, the law, for the judge (in a
legal proceeding), for nature, and so on” (p. 39). It is true that Darwall goes on (p.40) to define a narrower sense of
recognition respect, namely, moral recognition respect. Some fact or feature is an object of moral recognition
respect “if inappropriate consideration or weighing of that fact or feature would result in behavior that is morally
wrong.” I don’t think a switch to this narrower notion would solve the problem, however. For burning a Warhol
painting probably is morally wrong. What is more, defining dignity as “a moral status or standing that is the
appropriate object of moral recognition respect” does not avoid the first problem for the definition noted above,
namely, that it results in it being merely analytically true that it is morally wrong not to show respect for another
person’s dignity.
4
must fall prey to a purely mechanistic picture of the natural world. This would entail that dignity
is likewise an illusion. There is a real question of the compatibility of our ideas regarding
dignity and mechanistic ideas of nature. I cannot hope to answer this question here.)
Suppose I am right to identify the concept of dignity with the concept of self-originating
value. Where does this leave my earlier claim that wherever one finds purposive agency, there
one finds dignity? Is this simply a contingent regularity, much like the claim that wherever one
finds a creature with a heart, there one finds a creature with a kidney? I do not think so. Instead,
I believe that my earlier claim exhibits the same sort of necessity as does the claim “wherever
one finds water, there one finds H2O.” In this regard, some terminology developed by Allan
Gibbard is instructive.
The concept of water, says Gibbard, is just that which must be known by competent users
of the term “water.” This is distinct from the concept of H2O; young school children, for
instance, have some concept of water even though they may never have heard of hydrogen or
oxygen, and the same goes for adults who lived before Lavoisier’s discovery of H2O. By
contrast, the property of being water just is the property of being H2O. In order to keep straight
this distinction between concept and property, Gibbard suggests the following technical
vocabulary: the term ‘water’ expresses the concept of water; the property of being H2O realizes
the concept of water; and the term ‘water’ signifies the property.8 Likewise, my proposal is that
the term “dignity” expresses the concept of self-originating value; the property of being a
purposive agent realizes this concept; and the term “dignity” signifies this property.
My task in what follows, then, is to explain why the property of being a purposive agent
realizes the concept of self-originating value.
8
Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 115; see also pp. 29-33.
5
2. Purposive Agency and “Willful Integrity”
Why should we think that purposive agents have the special sort of value necessary for
dignity? This is a hard question to answer, and my thoughts in this regard are somewhat
speculative. Let us use the term "purposive agents" to refer to creatures that possess powers of
purposive agency that fall short of rational agency. My suggestion is that purposive agents still
possess an integrity that rocks and blades of grass and drops of rain and other natural phenomena
lack. Purposive agents like elephants and eagles are still in some important sense capable of
living a life, unlike the other natural items just listed. They are not merely pushed around by
forces wholly external to themselves, devoid of any significant powers of their own. They are
not merely "dust in a wind," to borrow a phrase from the popular 70s rock tune by that title (an
effective metaphor indeed if one wishes, like the band Kansas who wrote the tune, to puncture
our typically exalted view of ourselves). To put the point slightly differently, it is easy to view
an entity that is devoid of significant powers of its own as merely a bit part of a much larger
system, and hence as devoid of a separate integrity of its own. By contrast, it is much harder to
view a conscious creature with powers of its own in this way; the integrity such creatures possess
seems to me to be a plausible source of value.
I want to stress that in my view not just any integrity will suffice for dignity. For
instance, I suppose that a snowflake could be said to possess a type of integrity (compare it to,
say, a snow drift), but in my judgment it is too much of a stretch to speak of the "dignity" of a
snowflake (imagine scolding children who are busy making snowballs for failing to respect the
dignity of individual snowflakes!). Instead I have in mind the integrity that comes with powers
of one's own, and in particular with what I have called the powers of purposive agency (this
latter qualification seems necessary, otherwise we might have to reckon hurricanes to possess
dignity, inasmuch as they possess both a sort of integrity and powers of their own). Perhaps we
6
can refer to the powerful sort of integrity that realizes dignity as "willful integrity," inasmuch as
non-rational purposive agents can be said to have a "will" of some sort, even if this will is not as
free as (we like to think) ours is.
As an aside, it is worth noting that the connection I am positing between power on the
one hand (in particular, the power of purposive agency) and dignity on the other should not really
be surprising, I think. Not so long ago, after all, only those people who had significant power
over others were believed to possess dignity. (Indeed, this substratum of meaning still persists in
our use of the term "dignitaries" to refer to individuals in positions of power.) Nowadays
doctrines of equal human dignity are more likely to hold sway; these doctrines sever the
connection between dignity and power-over-others, finding instead the locus of morally valuable
power to lie within each human individual. It is hence unsurprising that a further expansion of
the "circle of dignity," so to speak, to include nonhuman animals should retain a connection with
power of some sort. 9
Returning to the idea of purposive agency constituting a sort of “willful integrity,” I
believe that the connection between this idea of willful integrity and the idea of self-originating
value—which I earlier took to define the concept of dignity—is not hard to fathom. For surely
the idea of a self brings with it the idea of an integral whole—a self as a being separate from
other selves. (Putting it this way suggests that the idea of integrity lies implicit in John Rawls’s
famous notion of “the separateness of persons”: persons [that is, selves] are not just some cogs in
a larger whole but are wholes themselves, and hence are separate in some important sense from
other wholes.) And the reference to “will” in the phrase “willful integrity” carries with it the
idea of a power to originate action. As a result I believe the idea of willful integrity can serve as
9
For some further brief speculations on the connections between dignity and power, see Joel Feinberg, "Some
Conjectures About the Concept of Respect," Journal of Social Philosophy 4:1-3 (1973).
7
a bridge linking the ideas of purposive agency, on the one hand, and self-originating value, on
the other hand, as the following schema suggests:
Hence I conclude it is plausible to believe that the property of purposive agency realizes
the concept of dignity.
3. Non-Animal Dignity?
We ought to ask, however, whether the view defended above is too restrictive. For it is
not unheard of for people sometimes to speak of, say, giant redwood trees and mountains as
possessing dignity. Americans sing of "purple mountains majesty" in "God Bless America," for
instance; does this not impute a dignity to mountains? My account of dignity in terms of agency,
however, rules out such an imputation as at best misguided, at worst unintelligible, for surely
mountains and trees, lacking any sort of consciousness, are not purposive agents. It is true that a
tree's growth is sometimes susceptible to teleological explanation (e.g. when it grows toward the
sun). Surely, though, this is not enough to qualify it as a purposive agent, otherwise a
refrigerator, say, would likewise qualify since its "behavior" too can be described in teleological
8
terms ("it began its cooling cycle in order to bring the temperature back to the level of the
thermostat"). Even if this counterexample could be avoided on the grounds, say, that
refrigerators are human-made artifacts, other counterexamples threaten. For all I know, for
instance, the "behavior" of mold can be teleologically explained, but pace "biocentric
egalitarians" like Paul Taylor, mold surely does not thereby possess a dignity deserving of
respect.10 Hence I conclude that an account of dignity rooted in the notion of purposive agency
cannot ground a literal attribution of dignity to non-animal natural objects. But as just noted,
people sometimes talk this way. Thus this may be thought a problem for my account.
In reply, I want to make two points. First, it is not clear to me we should accept such
imputations of dignity. Perhaps instead of recognizing the dignity of mountains, for instance,
those who speak of this are best interpreted as displaying awe at their size, or reverence for their
beauty. In an engaging, recent discussion of reverence, for instance, Paul Woodruff defines it as
follows: “Reverence is the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and
shame when these are the right feelings to have.”11 In Woodruff’s view, then, reverence is a
broader phenomenon than respect, inasmuch as it encompasses shame and awe as well.12 Hence,
I suspect that the feelings frequently inspired by mountains, trees, and so on, are better described
as feelings of awe at these objects’ presence rather than feelings of respect for a dignity they
possess.
Suppose, though, that I am wrong about this; suppose those who speak of the dignity of
such natural objects insist that it is indeed dignity they mean to speak of. In this case I would
wish to make a second sort of reply from within my account of dignity in terms of purposive
agency. According to this reply, the cases in question are the exceptions that prove the rule, so
10
11
Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)
Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 8.
9
to speak. For there seem to be two natural ways of explaining our willingness to speak of such
entities as dignified. To begin with, it is natural to speak of a mountain "imposing its will" on us,
in the sense of standing as an obstacle potentially blocking our way; we might also speak of a
mountain-climber "struggling against" the mountain. The metaphorical reference to a mountain's
will—that is, the metaphorical reference to its agency—makes it natural to speak figuratively of
the mountain's "dignity."
I am not sure this idea is enough on its own, however. If we rely exclusively on this line
of thought to impute dignity to a mountain, we might also be forced, alas, to impute dignity to a
hurricane, for it can certainly "impose its will" on us. An additional line of thought provides the
necessary assistance. For surely it matters that mountains (and some types of trees) endure for
dramatically long periods of time, whereas hurricanes do not. It is easy to view this endurance
metaphorically as an achievement, as the impressively successful execution of a purposive
striving to stay in existence. Consider for instance this passage from “The Bleeding Heart,” a
“prose poem” by Mary Oliver:
I know a bleeding heart plant that has thrived
for sixty years if not more and has never
missed a spring without rising and spreading
itself into a glossy bush, with many small red
hearts dangling. Don’t you think that deserves
a little thought?13
More explicit in its affirmation of respect is the following passage by John Steinbeck:
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No
one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they
produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not their
unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no,
they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that
disappeared a million years ago in to the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their
own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence
12
13
See ibid., pp. 9, 65-66.
Mary Oliver, Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), p. 17
10
of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect—that’s the word. One
feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns.14
In short, I contend that attributions of dignity to natural objects, though not literally true,
draw their metaphorical strength from the ease with which we speak of some natural objects as
imposing their wills on us, as well as the ease with which we speak of endurance through the
ages as an achievement. If I am right about this, then even apparent exceptions to the connection
between dignity and purposive agency end up confirming it.
4. Conclusion
I have defended an account of dignity according to which the concept of dignity is
defined by the idea of self-originating value. I have furthermore argued that beings that are
purposive agents—beings that can act for a purpose—are beings that possess dignity in this
sense. They are a source of value in virtue of their being something other than a mere bit part of
larger system that is completely subordinate to the system’s ends—that is, they are valuable in
virtue of possessing an integrity that comes from possessing a will.
Admittedly, this is a rather barebones account. Much more remains to be said. Are nonhumans equal in dignity to humans? (My answer to this would be No.) What sort of duties does
this sort of purposive agency ground? Do we have the same set of duties toward non-human
animals that we have toward humans? (Again, no.) I hope to answer these questions on another
occasion. For now, I will be content if I have shown that the foundational notion of dignity can
plausibly be broadened to encompass the non-human animal world.
Word Count: 3824
14
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), pp. 168-69 (emphasis added); quoted
in Woodruff, op. cit., p. 222.
11