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Lengauer, Erwin 2008 Tierethik. In: Gosepath, Stefan / Hinsch, Wilfried / Rössler, Beate (Hrsg.).
Handbuch der politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie (HPPS). Berlin, De Gruyter
Verlag: 1334-1338. Translated by Gary Steiner, January, 2010
1.
Animal ethics is an area of bioethics concerned with moral and philosophical reflection on the
relationship between human beings and animals (cf. Wolf/Schaber, 1998, pp. 164ff.). The central focus of
animal ethics is the moral status of animals. It considers such questions as whether animals have any
rights and whether there are obligations to consider the interests of animals. It evaluates the legitimacy of
the ways in which we raise, transport, use, and kill animals (for the purposes of medical experimentation,
xenotransplantation, or human consumption). And it poses questions pertaining to the protection of
animal species.
2.
Among proponents of concern for animals and vegetarianism in antiquity, the first were Pythagoras, who
based his view on reincarnation in humans and animals, and Plutarch and Porphyry, who based theirs on
the idea that animals possess a sensitive soul (cf. Dierauer, 1998, pp. 1195ff.). Yet even more significant
is a religious-metaphysical anthropocentrism that manifested itself as early as antiquity and has continued
to exert its influence up to the present; this anthropocentrism assumes that only human beings, not
animals, possess a rational, immortal soul (cf. Niewöhner, 2001). Noteworthy representatives of Christian
philosophy, particularly Augustine and Aquinas, reasserted and fortified this idea by arguing that human
beings alone were “made in God’s image.” While some figures in this tradition considered animals to
have been created along with humans, albeit with mortal souls, Descartes reduced them to elaborately
functioning automata created by God (cf. Eckart, 1998, pp. 1205ff.). Antiquity is also the source of a
logocentric anthropocentrism oriented primarily on reason (cf. Schütt, 1990). As does the person-thing
dualism of Roman law (cf. Caspar, 1999, p. 41), this anthropocentrism excludes all animals from the
community of subjects to whom direct moral and legal consideration is owed. This position, which
permits merely indirect moral consideration of animals, is given additional impetus by Kant (see, e.g.,
Kant, 1797, p. 579). During the eighteenth century, in the age of Enlightenment, an increasing number of
voices advocate a pathocentric animal ethics oriented on the capacities for sensation and pain as the
proper criteria (cf. Perkins, 2003; Mayr, 2003; Wolf/Schaber, 1998, pp. 164ff.). The English legal
philosopher Bentham (1789, ch. 17) advances the foundational argument of the animal protection
movement emerging in England with the thesis “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk?
but, Can they suffer?”; in 1822 this movement succeeded in bringing about the world’s first animal
protection law. In the German-speaking world, Schopenhauer’s sympathy-based approach to ethics is
central to the discussion of animal protection (Schopenhauer, 1840, sec. 19). Salt (1892) and Nelson
(1932) develop the first concepts of animal rights as part of their larger program for social reforms at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
3.
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In the English-speaking world starting in 1970, a systematic reflection on animal ethics within the
framework of the newly emerging discipline of bioethics was necessitated by an increasing public
concern for questions surrounding large-scale animal husbandry, hunting, and animal experimentation (cf.
Ryder, 2000). This focus on animal ethics in English-speaking universities facilitated the study of a
highly sophisticated network of arguments that remain definitive to this day for international discourse
(cf. Sunstein/Nussbaum, 2004; Armstrong, 2003; Taylor, 2003; Kistler, 2000; Bekoff, 1998;
tierethik.org). The study of these arguments was also facilitated by a largely analytically-oriented
English-language ethical tradition (cf. Wolf/Schaber, 1998) that incorporated into the discourse of
bioethics the claims of modern evolutionary theory, with its assumption of a continuity between human
beings and animals (cf. Rachels, 1998), and the results of research into animal consciousness and
cognition (cf. Alan, 2006; Perler/Wild, 2005). This was accompanied by the widespread rejection of the
idea (which Günther Anders characterized as “anthropocentric megalomania” [cf. Linnemann, 2000, p.
7]) according to which all animal kinds, from insects to primates, are members of one single cagetory; in
its place the significance of “mental life” and “moral status” became central in the discussion (cf.
DeGrazia, 1996; Warren, 1999; Forrester, 1996; Dombrowski, 1997).
3.1 Contemporary discussions include a variety of views concerning the foundations of animal ethics.
Singer’s model (1975) for a utilitarian ethics of animal liberation marks the beginning of the modern
animal ethics debate. According to Singer (1979, pp. 82ff.), interests must be considered equally without
regard to the species of the being in question (cf. Kuhse, 2002, pp. 77ff.), in order that we not fall prey to
speciesistic discrimination, which is analogous to racism and sexism. Singer makes the idea of equal
consideration (cf. Ach, 1999, pp. 48ff.) dependent on those interests of human beings and animals that
can be actualized, thereby calling into question the long-standing concept of the “sanctity of human life”
(cf. Kuhse, 2002). Whereas human life had formerly been considered to be incomparable, it now
becomes, at every stage of its development, an object of ethical evaluation and comparison. Singer’s
model is one of the most-discussed approaches to animal ethics and bioethics in the English-speaking
world; but little has been said about him in German-language circles, due to his controversial reflections
on the value of life (cf. Nida-Rümelin, 1996) and the resulting “Singer debate” (cf. Singer, 1979, pp.
425ff.). Wolf (1992), Birnbacher (2006), and Gesang (2003, pp. 32ff.) present modified utilitarian
approaches to the consideration of animal interests; R. G. Frey offers a critique of such approaches
(1979).
Nozick’s call for “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people” (1974, p. 39) was subjected to
comprehensive critique in the course of more recent debates over animal rights (cf. Cohen, 2001). The
cornerstone for these debates was laid by Regan’s monumental case for animal rights (1983). Regan treats
more highly developed animals as conscious subjects-of-a-life, which count as ends in themselves. On
Regan’s view they are beings with inherent worth; this inherent worth demands respectful treatment by
human beings, which means that human beings are prohibited from causing animals pain and suffering
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and especially from killing them (cf. Regan, 1983; Flury, 1999; Ott, 1999). Some thinkers have modified
this model, Pluhar (1995) and Rowland (1998) through Kantian contractualism and Cavalieri (2001)
through the idea of animal rights as an extension of human rights. A particularly German perspective
takes its bearings from the debate over the “dignity of creatures,” a debate that was originally inspired by
theology (cf. Baranzke, 2002), and argues that “dignity” stands for “a being with intrinsic worth” (Liechti,
2002, p. 72). Hoerster (2004), Birnbacher (2006), and Singer (1976, p. 27) undertake an analysis of the
concept of dignity in ethical discourse and its application to human beings and animals. Joel Feinberg
(1974; cf. Ach, 1999, pp. 53ff.) has investigated the attribution of rights to animals as bearers of interests
in the legal sphere, a sphere in which the status of animals has been elevated from that of “things” to that
of “legal subjects”; reflections in the legal sphere constitute one of the most central elements in debates
over animal rights (cf. Wise, 2000; Francione, 2000; Joerden, 1999; Kaplan, 1998). The incorporation of
animal rights into the German constitution (article 20a) as a state objective in 2002 has been viewed
internationally as an important step in this direction (cf. Sunstein and Nussbaum, 2004, p. 4). The demand
for human rights for primates (cf. Singer and Cavalieri, 1994), which has been discussed extensively, has
provided additional impetus for the assertion of animal rights (http://www.greatapeproject.org). The
French Animal Rights League’s work on a Universal Declaration of Animal Rights in 1998 brought these
efforts into the sphere of French animal ethics. Work within a virtue ethics framework has been done by
Clark (1992), Midgley (1998), Hursthouse (2000), as well as in Wolf’s extended ethics of sympathy
(2003) and the feminist care ethics of Adams (1990) and Donovan and Adams (1996). Steeves (1999) and
Brenner (2003) offer the first phenomenological approaches to animal ethics, which take their bearings
from Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty.
3.2. In the contemporary animal protection movement, the concepts of “rights language” (cf. Silverstein,
1996 and Nussbaum, 2004) provide the basis for argumentation in public legal and political discourse.
The animal rights movement that has emerged from this framework has understood itself from the start as
a part of the civil rights movement; it argues that a “unity of oppression” underlies the exploitation of
human beings, animals, and nature (cf. Nibert, 2002 and Patterson, 2002), and that an alliance must be
formed with other movements working for social emancipation (cf. Armstrong, 2003 and Guither, 1998).
The resulting normative transformations in human-animal relations are treated as a new area of social
science research by Mütherich (2000), who considers them in connection with the Frankfurt School; by
Wiedenmann (2004); and, since 1993, in the journal Society and Animals, established by Psychologists
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
3.3. The raising of animals for human consumption, animal experimentation, and hunting stand at the
center of debates in applied animal rights. The spectrum of proposed solutions ranges from pragmatic
“animal welfare” reforms (cf. Schneider, 2001 and Garner, 2005) to radical demands for the immediate
and complete prohibition of these forms of exploitation (cf. Regan, 2001). For many years now, the “three
R’s” approach (Reduce, Refine, Replace) has served as the generally accepted basis for ongoing dialogue
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among the sciences regarding the controversy of animal experimentation (cf. Armstrong, 2003, pp.
289ff. and tierethik.org). With regard to animal husbandry, ethical consensus has been limited to the
demand for just treatment of animals (cf. Schneider, 2001 and Garner, 2005) and the widespread rejection
of killing without anesthesia, a practice once demanded on religious grounds (Caspar, 1999, pp. 318ff.).
The modern animal rights movement goes further and argues for a prohibition of the killing of more
highly developed animals (cf. McMahan, 2002, ppp. 189ff.; Ott, 1999; Joerden, 1999, pp. 41ff.; Singer,
1979, pp. 115ff.). The consumption of meat is seen as the the expression of a complex, symbolic, and
immoral dominance relation (cf. Adams, 1990) that Derrida (1989-90, p. 990) characterizes as “carnophallogocentrism” (cf. Steeves, 1999, pp. 15ff.). Moreover, the problems of increasing world hunger,
environmental pollution, and the brutalizing influence of meat production on human beings (cf. Walter,
1999) demand a heightened moral sensibility that Habermas (1991, p. 98) believes can be rendered
concrete through a vegetarian lifestyle.
3.4. In the opinion of political philosophers such as Kymlicka (1996) and Nussbaum (2004, pp. 299ff.),
by integrating nonhuman animals into the community of moral subjects whose interests merit
consideration, animal ethics makes an essential contribution to the establishment of universal global
justice.
4.
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Contact: Erwin Lengauer, Erwin.lengauer@univie.ac.at , http://ethik.univie.ac.at/lengauer
Prof. Gary Steiner, gsteiner@bucknell.edu , http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/gsteiner/
Steiner, Gary 2004. Descartes as a Moral Thinker. Christianity, Technology, and Nihilism. Amherst, NY,
Humanity Books.
Steiner, Gary 2005. Anthropocentrismus and Its Discontents. The Moral Status of Animal in the History
of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press.
Steiner, Gary 2008. Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. New
York, NY, Columbia University Press
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