Online research in philosophy

Thinkers in the past have compared nonhuman animals to machines, drawn a sharp moral line between humans and animals, and claimed that God created the animals to be put at our disposal.1 Since the 1970s, though, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our treatment of animals. My aim is to use two arguments of Peter Singer’s to arrive at a fairly strong theory about the extent of our moral obligations to animals.

Charles J. Lumsden and E.O. Wilson, in their writings together and individually, have proposed that human behaviors, whether moral or nonmoral, are governed by innate constraints (which they have termed epigenetic rules). I propose that if a genetic component of moral behavior is to be discovered, some sorting out of specifically moral from nonmoral innate constraints will be necessary. That some specifically moral innate constraits exist is evidenced by virtuous behaviors exhibited in nonhuman mammals, whose behavior is usually granted to be importantly governed by genetic factors. Propensities for such virtuous behaviors may have been passed to humans as highly conserved mammalian genes and continue to influence us. I propose that these constitute at least a rudimentary morality and may account in part for the moral intuitions. But other innate constraints which are nonmoral in nature interact with the specifically moral innate constraints and with culture to yield human moral decisions and actions. Any model which aims to identify the genetic component of moral behaviors or behaviors with moral import must provide not only a delineation of cultural causes but must also distinguish between those genetic causes which may have their origin in innate moral constraints from others which are fundamentally nonmoral because the critical faculty necessary to higher level human morality itself arises in part from innate constraints of a nonmoral type; i.e., the processes of inductive reasoning common to both ethics and science. Finally, humans who could bring the nonmoral evaluative capacities to bear upon whatever moral intuitions might be genetically conserved in mammalian heritage would have an advantage over similar beings who could not.

In Moral Animals, Catherine Wilson develops a theory of morality based on two fundamental premises: first that moral progress implies the evolution of moral ideals involving restraint and sacrifice; second that human beings are outfitted by nature with selfish motivations, intentions, and ambitions that place constraints on what morality can demand of them. Normative claims, she goes on to show, can be understood as projective hypotheses concerning the conduct of realistically-described nonideal agents in preferred fictional worlds. Such claims differ from empirical hypotheses, insofar as they cannot be verified by observation and experiment. Yet many, though not all, moral claims are susceptible of confirmation to the extent that they command the agreement of well-informed inquirers. With this foundation in place, Wilson turns to a defense of egalitarianism intended to address the objection that the importance of our non-moral projects, our natural acquisitiveness and partiality, and our meritocratic commitments render social equality a mere abstract ideal. Employing the basic notion of a symmetrical division of the co-operative surplus, she argues that social justice with respect to global disparities in well-being, and in the condition of women relative to men, depends on the relinquishment of natural and acquired advantage that is central to the concept of morality.