Animal Well-Being

There is a simple but powerful argument against the human practice of raising and killing animals for food (RKF for short). It goes like this: 1. RKF is extremely bad for animals. 2. RKF is only trivially good for human beings Therefore, 3. RKF should be stopped. While many consider this argument decisive, not everyone is convinced. There have been four main lines of objection to it. In this paper, I provide new responses to these four objections.

This essay examines several competing accounts of what makes life go well for non-human animals, including prominent subjective and objective theories of animal well-being.

Descartes denied that animals are capable of language and rationality. On this mechanistic philosophy, gorillas are purely reflex-driven machines without phenomenal consciousness. Following Descartes, we intuitively believe animals are conscious but we have no rational evidence to support this view. In this piece, I argue that there are rational grounds for believing gorillas may be conscious. I have chosen to focus on Project Koko, the longest running interspecies communication study in the world. Many take the study of Koko the gorilla (...) as confirmation that gorillas have consciousness. I argue that such a strong conclusion overlooks the difficulties of inferring consciousness from cognitive abilities. A healthy scepticism is necessary when inferring consciousness from an animal’s behaviour. At best, I argue that we can provide a cumulative, inductive case for gorilla consciousness. At worst, I argue that we cannot rule out the possibility that gorillas have consciousness. In drawing either conclusion, one must reject Descartes’ mechanistic account of gorillas. -/- Website: www.thepanpsychist.com. (shrink)

It is crucial for indigenous people living in the Arctic to harvest animals by hunting in a traditional manner, as is the case with such peoples in other parts of the world. Given the nutritional, economic, and cultural importance of hunting for aboriginal people, it seems reasonable to say that they have the moral right to hunt animals. On the other hand, non-aboriginal people are occasionally prohibited from hunting a particular species of animal in many societies. The question then arises: (...) why can aboriginal people, unlike other citizens, have special hunting rights? If indigenous people are to have the right to hunt a particular species that other citizens are denied, then it presents a significant challenge to philosophers to explore the moral grounds that justify such a special right. This exploration is the subject of the current paper. (shrink)