On Animals

Volume II: Theological Ethics

David L. Clough

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780567660886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología

This book presents an authoritative and comprehensive survey of human practice in relation to other animals, together with a Christian ethical analysis building on the theological account of animals which David Clough developed in On Animals Volume I: Systematic Theology (2012). It argues that a Christian understanding of other animals has radical implications for their treatment by humans, with the human use and abuse of non-human animals for food the most urgent immediate priority. Following an introduction examining the task of theological ethics in relation to non-human animals and the way it relates to other accounts of animal ethics, this book surveys and assess the use humans make of other animals for food, for clothing, for labour, as research subjects, for sport and entertainment, as pets or companions, and human impacts on wild animals. The result is both a state-of-the-art account of what humans are doing to other animals, and a persuasive argument that Christians in particular have strong faith-based reasons to acknowledge the significance of the issues raised and change their practice in response.

Chapter 1

TOWARDS A CHRISTIAN ANIMAL ETHICS

As noted in the Introduction, addressing the ethical question of whether what humans are doing to other animals is justifiable turns out to be complex and contested. This chapter addresses some of the preliminary questions that arise in taking up this question in a Christian context. The Introduction discussed the most obvious of these preliminaries, whether we can afford the time to give moral consideration to other animals, given the range of other issues that demand our attention. The positive answer I gave to that question leads us to a range of methodological questions, which are the subject of this chapter. The first section of the chapter engages ethical perspectives that deny that we have any direct moral duties towards animals, arguing that the theological work of Volume I demonstrates that they are mistaken. The second section considers the relationship between a Christian approach to animal ethics and other ethical views that recognize direct duties towards other animals: animal rights, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, feminist ethics of care, and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. The next three sections of the chapter address themes that are foundational for the analysis of subsequent chapters: consideration of non-human animal suffering and death, the significance of the Christian doctrine of the fall, and consideration of what it means for animal creatures to flourish. The final section sets out some key categories for thinking ethically about other animals, as fellow covenant partners, neighbours, the poor, the oppressed, and moral exemplars.

Defending Animal Ethics

In the Introduction I argued that there is no escape from the complex web of our relationships with other animals, which means we are faced with the challenge of attending to and engaging with this complexity. As we assess the ways of doing so ethically, it is helpful first to indicate a class of ethical approaches that are ruled out by the theology of animals developed in the first volume. If it is the case that God is directly concerned with the lives of all animals in creation, reconciliation and redemption, we can immediately see that a theological ethic must recognize the possibility of direct ethical duties towards them. John Wesley put this succinctly: recalling God’s mercies towards other animals should ‘enlarge our hearts’ towards them.¹ The flourishing of animals matters to God, and Christians are called to conform their love to God’s love, and to care for those God cares for. The place of all animals in God’s purposes therefore gives Christians reason to avoid actions that unnecessarily block their flourishing, and to take action where possible to promote it. This means at the most basic level that the lives and wellbeing of non-human animals have moral relevance in a theological ethics. To save the life of a stranded dolphin, to protect the environment required to support the lives of a group of gorillas, to shoot a dog dead, to keep chickens in confined conditions not conducive to their welfare, are all actions with relevance for theological ethics. This is not to prejudge the question of whether the former actions may always be chosen or the latter actions always avoided, but simply to make the basic point that such actions have moral content in a theological framework. In doing such things, we can act rightly or wrongly by these fellow creatures, and by their God.

Tom Regan classifies the range of ethical positions that reject direct moral duties towards other animals as ‘indirect duty views’.² These are ethical positions maintaining that actions in relation to non-human animals have moral relevance only when they impinge on humans in some way: we can have direct moral duties only to human beings; any duties towards non-human animals are indirect. One key theological proponent of this view is Aquinas. When arguing in the Summa theologia that there is a reasonable cause for the rituals of the religion of ancient Israel, he considers the objection that the law is unreasonable in forbidding the taking of a mother bird with her young (Deut. 22.6), the muzzling of an ox treading corn (Deut. 25.4), and hybrid animal breeding (Lev. 19.19) because Paul states that God does not care for oxen (1 Cor. 9.9). Aquinas responds that, provided one is acting reasonably, it does not matter how one behaves towards other animals, but in respect of the passions, we should recognize that pity for non-human animals may lead to pity for other human beings. God therefore prohibited cruelties towards other animals, he argues, in order to inculcate pity that would operate towards human beings.³ Similarly, when discussing the theological virtue of charity later in the work, Aquinas judges that charitable love can be directed only to God and one’s neighbour. Since other animals have no fellowship with human beings in the rational life and cannot properly possess goods that could be wished for them, they cannot be the direct recipients of charitable love, according to Aquinas, though we can love them indirectly out of charity if we regard them as good things we desire for other humans.⁴

Immanuel Kant is another influential proponent of an ethical framework in which there can only be indirect moral duties towards non-human animals. In a passage headed ‘Duties to Animals and Spirits’ in his ethics lectures, he argues that ‘since all animals exist only as a means, and not for their own sakes … it follows that we have no immediate duties to animals’.⁵ Following this bald claim, he discusses indirect duties towards non-human animals on the basis of analogies between human and non-human animals. A man should reward the lifetime’s service of his dog by caring for her after she is no longer able to serve him, until her death, but this care is a service to humanity, rather than the dog: in shooting the dog instead the man would damage ‘the kindly and humane qualities in himself, which he ought to exercise in virtue of his duties to mankind’.⁶ Kant considers that a good lesson to children is provided by William Hogarth’s 1751 engravings ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’, which show a man progress from torturing a dog, to abusing other animals, to murdering his pregnant lover, and after being hanged his corpse is shown in the final plate being dissected before a high court judge and audience, with dogs eating excised organs. Strikingly, Kant also notes with approval at this point the story that Leibniz ‘put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it’, commenting that ‘[i]t upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason’.⁷ The question we should ask here is why it upsets a person to destroy such a creature: Kant seems here to rely uncharacteristically on moral sentiment. Kant’s account of ethics is under tension at this point: his moral system cannot admit direct moral duties to non-human animals, but it is obvious to him that Leibniz’s action is praiseworthy. It does not seem at all plausible to find the praiseworthy moral content in Leibniz’s action in its future impact on his action towards human beings: the care shown to the grub is much more obviously interpreted as kindness or charity towards the grub directly, which neither Aquinas nor Kant can account for in their moral systems.

A third type of moral account that finds no place for direct moral duties towards non-human animals bases moral obligation on social contract. David Hume, for example, takes the hypothetical case of a creature that was rational, but had such inferior bodily strength and mental ability that it was unable to resist human beings. While humans ‘should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures’ we would not ‘properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them’ because our relationship with them ‘could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality’.⁸ This, Hume states, is the position of non-human animals in relation to human beings, though he remains uncommitted on the question of how far they possess reason. On Hume’s account, duties of justice arise because they are useful in regulating a society of those that can be judged equals, capable of acting to protect their interests. The power imbalance between humans and other animals makes justice considerations inapplicable. John Rawls’s more recent contractarian account of justice takes a similar line, that strict duties of justice are inapplicable to creatures who do not have a capacity for a sense of justice, but that cruelty towards them is wrong for other reasons.⁹ Hume’s statement that we can have no society with non-human animals on the grounds of inequality is similar to Aquinas’s statement (drawing on Augustine), that humans have no fellowship with other animals in the rational life.¹⁰

The structure of each of these indirect duty theories disallows direct duties to those outside the community of equals, defined either as fellowship of reason (Aquinas), morally autonomous subjects (Kant), bodily and mental power (Hume), or the capacity for a sense of justice (Rawls). Moral theories structured in this way fail to account for direct duties towards those outside the community of equals. The theological location of animal creatures described in the first volume means that moral frameworks such as these, which are structurally incapable of recognizing that we can act rightly or wrongly towards non-human animals, must be judged theologically inadequate on this basis.

Approaches to Animal Ethics

Since indirect duty views are ruled out by the theological view of animal creatures outlined in Volume I, we must turn to what Regan terms direct duty views: approaches to ethics that recognize direct duties towards non-human animals. I will survey five ethical frameworks in this category: the preference-utilitarianism developed most fully by Peter Singer, the animal rights theory for which Tom Regan is the leading advocate, the virtue ethics approach taken by Rosalind Hursthouse, the feminist ethic of care approach presented by Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan, and the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum. I will argue that each of these approaches to animal ethics contains important insights into how we should think ethically about other animals, but that none is individually sufficient as an ethical expression of the theological approach developed in this work. Instead, a Christian ethical approach to the ethics of the human treatment of other animals will be methodologically pluralistic in relation to these approaches.

Singer’s preference-utilitarian approach to animal ethics came to prominence with the 1975 publication of Animal Liberation.¹¹ His fundamental claim is that the principle of equality requires that equal interests of all beings should be treated equally. This means that the suffering of a being should be counted equally with the like suffering of any other being. Species boundaries are therefore irrelevant, Singer argues: ‘sentience … is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others’.¹² Ignoring species boundaries generates a radical moral framework in which the inflicting of suffering by humans on other animals could only be justifiable if it avoids similar levels of suffering, or generates compensatory levels of enjoyment, to other beings.

Singer identifies research on non-human animals and the factory farming of animals as two examples of contexts where this perspective would lead to radical change: experiments that cause the suffering of non-human animals without being likely to lead to compensatory gains for other beings should be ended (ch. 2) and the suffering caused to other animals raised for food in intensive conditions is not justifiable merely to satisfy human dietary preferences, so such farming practices should be abolished (ch. 3). These arguments are made on the basis of preferences for non-human animals to avoid suffering: Singer acknowledges that the ethics of killing are more complex in a utilitarian context. Assuming a being can be killed without causing suffering, there is no intrinsic objection in a utilitarian ethical framework to killing as such: the ethics of killing depend on the balance of suffering and enjoyment such acts bring about. Jeremy Bentham’s often-quoted slogan – ‘the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ – appears in a footnote referencing an unpublished work in which Bentham concludes ‘Killing other animals therefore is nothing: the only harm is tormenting them while they live’.¹³

Singer’s preference-utilitarian account also ascribes value to the fulfilment of a being’s future preferences: ‘to take the life of a being who has been hoping, planning, working on some future goal is to deprive that being of the fulfilment of all those efforts’.¹⁴ He interprets the wrong done in killing a human being, or any other being capable of having future preferences, is that these preferences are frustrated. Such a consideration would not apply, however, to a being without the capacity for such preferences: ‘to take the life of being with the mental capacity below the level needed to grasp that one is being with a future – much less make plans for the future – cannot involve this particular kind of loss’.¹⁵ If we had evidence that chickens, for example, were incapable of grasping that they were beings with a future, then within Singer’s framework there would be no intrinsic wrongness in killing them, provided it could be done without suffering and other beings capable of similar or higher levels of preference satisfaction were allowed to live in their place. The humane farming of animals without future preferences is therefore prima facie acceptable in Singer’s framework, although he adopts and commends a vegan diet on the basis of wider factors, such as global food supply.¹⁶

Tom Regan’s animal rights account operates on a very different basis from Singer’s utilitarian approach. Regan argues that ‘s...