The Moral Superiority of People to Animals

People's current actions clarify the general sentiment regarding the treatment of animals. They use beasts for burden and food, showing that they regard animals as less than human. However, human resistance to causing animals undue pain is also a value of many societies. James Rachels dismisses the practice of treating animals as vastly inferior and proposes granting animals an evolutionary worth. He thinks that animals' similar "rational and moral capacities"[1] require that "to the extent that they have lives similar to our own, killing them must be regarded with a similar seriousness."[2]

Rachels' argument that animals are nearly human makes it difficult to justify the use of animals as means to human ends. Kant argued that animals are subhuman and approved using them for the purpose of man, but he did not sponsor gratuitous violence against animals or the causing of undue pain. He attributes his reasons for treating animals humanely to the betterment of mankind.[3] Kant felt that "as far as animals are concerned, [man has] no direct duties" because "animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end."[4]

But what truly distinguishes animals from humans? Why does the Kantian notion of treating people as ends and never merely as means not apply to animals? To answer these questions it is necessary to examine Rawls' contractarian idea of reciprocity. By this theory, we are permitted to make animals pull our tools and fill our plates because with animals there is no "possibility of mutual acknowledgment of principles by free and equal persons who have no authority over one another."[5]

Discussion over the altruistic tendencies, language skills, and other anthropomorphic properties of animals[6] becomes irrelevant when one considers the simple fact that a straightforward discourse between animals and humans is impossible and therefore a reciprocal relationship infeasible. Any reason humans have for allowing an animal to be free, or for refraining from eating it, could not (and would not) be used by the same animal if the situation were reversed and the animal had motivation and means to deprive the human of its liberty or life.

Additionally, if a human decides to eat or enslave an animal, the animal has no understanding of what is being taken from it and therefore no desire to retaliate against the species that offends it. While lack of retaliation is not a justification for maltreatment, a desire (or lack of desire) for retaliation serves as a litmus test for the moral agency of the animal and thus man's moral obligations towards it.

John Rawls' Theory of Justice centers upon the mutual consent of "rational persons."[7] Animals are not rational because they cannot "engage in social cooperation"[8] and are therefore not participants in Rawls' original position. They are not of primary concern to the persons forming principles of justice behind Rawls' veil of ignorance.

Rachels concedes that humans are more moral and more valuable than all other animals[9], but disagrees that "the wrongness of killing has to be an all-or-nothing matter."[10] However, in trying to distinguish the difference between killing a monkey and killing a bug,[11] Rachels grants the parlor tricks of a monkey a false significance equivalent to the higher order thinking of man. The truth is that monkeys cannot give any more conclusive reasons for their life than can a bug. If any more value is to be attributed to the life of a monkey it is merely because it is a more deeply violent act to slaughter an animal that fights back and makes sounds of protest than it is to accidentally step on a bug. When someone treats a monkey in a violent or cruel way, the similarity between the cruelty and equivalent cruelty to humans "damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind."[12] Killing a bug is a lesser immoral deed than killing a monkey, not because the monkey has any greater intellectual or social abilities, but because the witnessed suffering of the bug resembles less the suffering of a human. If a monkey was the size and shape of a bug but with equal mental faculties there would be no difference in acts of murder against the two.

It is also necessary to defend against the claim that all unnecessary death and inequality is wrong, that killing a bug is equal to killing a monkey is equal to killing a human. There is no way to avoid killing bugs, it might as well be said that one is to avoid sneezing because sneezing expels bacteria that cannot live outside the body. If humans are to live, they must cause the death of other creatures. The argument that some animals are worthy of exemption by their approximation to human rationality fails. The only logical cut-off point on the spectrum of animal rationality is at the point where one species can reciprocate the ethics of humans. If monkeys ever evolve to the point that they can debate human ethics, their classification could be reexamined. Until that point, they must remain under the general classification of subhuman.

Another major concern in separating humans from animals by means of the reciprocity framework is human beings whose mental faculties have been debilitated by damage or disease to the point where they are not a "rational person" nor capable of "engag[ing] in social cooperation."[13] These people are protected by Rawls' original position. In the original position every rational human being knows that they can be born without their full faculties or that they may lose their mental abilities later in life and would therefore agree beforehand to grant such people the status of human beings and to treat them according to the Golden Rule.

The delicate nature of life on earth dictates that treating every living being with equal care is impossible. An alliance with those who can create and follow a general set of rules is necessary. The principle of reciprocity determines that the only beings that must be treated with equality are those beings that can rationalize well enough to act on reasons that could be reasons for others. No animals fit in this category and therefore all animals are subject to the benevolent will of those who do.

[1] Rachels, James. Created from Animals : The Moral Implications of Darwinism. Oxford England: New York : Oxford University Press, 1991. Page 164.

[2]Created From Animals, page 209.

[3] Kant argued that any respect for animals stemmed from the analogous relationship between animals and men. He thought that "by doing our duties to animals in respect of manifestations which correspond to manifestations of human nature, we indirectly do our duty to humanity." - Kant, Immanuel, and Louis Infield. Lectures on Ethics. Torchbook ed. Gloucester, Mass: P. Smith, 1978. Page 239-241.

[4]Lectures on Ethics, Page 239

[5] Rawls, John, and Samuel Richard Freeman. Selections. 1999; Collected Papers. 1st. Harvard University Press Pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001. Page 256.

[6]Created From Animals, Chapter 4.

[7] Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Pages 17-19.

[8] "Those who engage in social cooperation choose together, in one joint act, the principles which are to assign basic rights and duties and to determine the division of social benefits." - A Theory of Justice, page 11.

[9] "killing a human is worse than killing a monkey" - Created From Animals, page 209.

[10]Created From Animals, page 209.

[11]Created From Animals, page 209.

[12]Lectures on Ethics, page 240.

[13]A Theory of Justice, pages 11 and 17