Abstract
Timothy Hsiao asks a good question: Why believe animals deserve moral consideration? His answer is that we should not. He considers various other answers and finds them wanting. In this paper I consider an answer Hsiao has not yet discussed: We should accept a conservative view about how to form beliefs. And such a view will instruct us to believe that animals deserve moral consideration. I think conservatives like Hsiao do best to answer his question in a way that upholds the moral status of animals. Since my answer is one Hsiao has not yet addressed, it is compatible with the main points he makes against various other motivations in his many papers on this topic. So my paper should be understood as an invitation to Hsiao to consider another answer.
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Notes
For my explanations of why God allows animal (and human) suffering, see Hill (manuscript) and Hill (2020).
Newman quote taken from Scully (2002, pp. 67–69).
Some of these points are anticipated in Bass (2011). Bass thinks a conservatism-like principle, what he calls ‘moral lore’, gets the result that killing animals or causing them pain at all is wrong. I don’t go that far. I think what conservatism gets us is the result that animals deserve at least some moral consideration and that factory farming is immoral. But it doesn’t get us to vegetarianism or veganism. For that we need further argument.
See Horta’s (2018) argument that sentience is relevant to moral status.
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Acknowledgements
For comments and discussion I thank Robert Bass, Stephen Boulter, Bob Fischer, Anthony Holdier, Timothy Hsiao, Sarah Withrow King, Andy Lamey, Kelsi Nagy, Nathan Nobis, Joona Räsänen, Morteza Tabatabaee, Angus Taylor, Craig White and the anonymous referees for JAGE.
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Hill, S. Animals Deserve Moral Consideration. J Agric Environ Ethics 33, 177–185 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-020-09819-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-020-09819-y