How to Count Animals, More or Less

320 Pages·2019·1.596 MB·English

by  Shelly Kagan

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/12/2018, SPi
How to Count Animals, more or less
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/12/2018, SPi
UEHIRO SERIES IN PRACTICAL ETHICS
General Editor: Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford
Choosing Children
The Ethical Dilemmas of Genetic Intervention
Jonathan Glover
Messy Morality
The Challenge of Politics
C. A. J. Coady
Killing in War
Jeff McMahan
Beyond Humanity?
The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement
Allen Buchanan
Ethics for Enemies
Terror, Torture, and War
F. M. Kamm
Unfit for the Future
The Need for Moral Enhancement
Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu
The Robust Demands of the Good
Ethics with Attachment, Virtue, and Respect
Philip Pettit
Why Does Inequality Matter?
T. M. Scanlon
Why Worry About Future Generations?
Samuel Scheffler
Fellow Creatures
Our Obligations to the Other Animals
Christine M. Korsgaard
How to Count Animals, more or less
Shelly Kagan
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/12/2018, SPi

How to Count Animals,
more or less
Shelly Kagan
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/12/2018, SPi
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Shelly Kagan 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956840
ISBN 978–0–19–882967–6
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/12/2018, SPi
For Gina,
again, and always
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/12/2018, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/12/2018, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Standing 6
1.1 Standing and Status 6
1.2 Sentience 10
1.3 Agency 16
1.4 Agency without Sentience 23
1.5 Welfare and Standing 30
2. Unitarianism 37
2.1 Unitarianism 37
2.2 The Greater Harm 42
2.3 Comparing Lives 45
2.4 Hierarchy 52
3. The Argument from Distribution 58
3.1 Distributive Principles 58
3.2 The Argument from Distribution 62
3.3 Replies 69
4. Hierarchy and the Value of Outcomes 79
4.1 Hierarchy in Distribution 79
4.2 Problems for Priority 87
4.3 Well-Being 96
4.4 Dismissing the View 101
4.5 The Status Adjusted Value of Well-Being 108
5. Status 112
5.1 Grounds of Status 112
5.2 Individualism 117
5.3 Which Capacities? 121
5.4 Potential 130
5.5 Modal Status 137
6. Worries about Hierarchy 146
6.1 Elitism 146
6.2 Superior Beings 149
6.3 Marginal Cases 156
6.4 Normal Variation 164
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viii Contents
7. Deontology 170
7.1 Consequentialism and Deontology 170
7.2 Absolutist Deontology 174
7.3 Moderate Deontology 179
7.4 Some Calculations 184
8. Restricted Deontology 191
8.1 Excluding Animals from Deontology 191
8.2 Autonomy 194
8.3 Resisting the Argument 201
8.4 Dichotomous Properties 207
9. Hierarchical Deontology 215
9.1 Weaker Rights 215
9.2 Thresholds 219
9.3 Meeting the Threshold 231
9.4 Other Principles 238
10. Defense 248
10.1 The Right to Self-Defense 248
10.2 Defending Animals 252
10.3 Defending Against Animals 258
10.4 Defending Animals Against Animals 267
10.5 More on Proportionality 274
11. Limited Hierarchy 279
11.1 A Suitable Step Function 279
11.2 Practical Realism 284
11.3 The View that Emerges 292
11.4 Pretense 299
11.5 How to Count Animals 302
References 305
Index 307
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Acknowledgments
This book is based on a series of lectures I gave at Oxford in November 2016.
I am grateful to the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education for their gen-
erous support of the lecture series, and to the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
for the warm welcome and the stimulating discussions, both at the lectures
themselves and elsewhere at Oxford. Since I am quite certain I would never
have written the book were it not for the invitation to give those lectures, I am
especially grateful to Julian Savulescu, for extending the invitation, and to Jeff
McMahan, for persuading me to accept it.
Why did I need persuading? Because the Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics
are indeed supposed to be on practical ethics. I take this to mean that there
should be at least some actual discussion of real choices that people may face, a
genuine attempt at applying the otherwise rather unremittingly abstract ideas
that moral philosophers frequently debate. As someone whose own work in
moral philosophy lies very firmly on the abstract, theoretical side of the spec-
trum, I certainly admire the work of those who do applied or practical ethics;
but I have never thought of myself as among them.
As it turns out, I was probably right about that. What follows is indeed a
discussion of animal ethics, and by current conventions I suppose this does
indeed count as a topic within practical ethics, but I fear that the discussion
itself is about as abstract a treatment of the topic as one could offer. Those who
hope for guidance on pressing questions like (for example) when, if ever, it is
morally permissible to experiment on animals, whether it is permissible to
keep animals as pets, or companions, or whether we are morally permitted to
cull wild deer to prevent starvation in the larger herd, will find no explicit
answers here; they won’t even find any direct discussion of such questions. I do
think that the ideas I put forward should be relevant for addressing genuinely
practical concerns like these more directly, and I very much hope that this
comes sufficiently close to being a contribution to practical ethics to fulfill the
terms of the promise I made to the Uehiro Centre. But I am rather less confi-
dent of the latter than I am of the former.
A different sort of acknowledgment is in order as well. While developing my
views about animal ethics my thinking was constantly stimulated by the writ-
ings of other moral philosophers, several of whom have already made major
contributions to the subject. There are too many authors for me to try to list