Meaning in the lives of humans and other animals
Philosophical Studies 175 (2):317-338 (2018)
Abstract
This paper argues that contemporary philosophical literature on meaning in life has important implications for the debate about our obligations to non-human animals. If animal lives can be meaningful, then practices including factory farming and animal research might be morally worse than ethicists have thought. We argue for two theses about meaning in life: that the best account of meaningful lives must take intentional action to be necessary for meaning—an individual’s life has meaning if and only if the individual acts intentionally in ways that contribute to finally valuable states of affairs; and that this first thesis does not entail that only human lives are meaningful. Because non-human animals can be intentional agents of a certain sort, our account yields the verdict that many animals’ lives can be meaningful. We conclude by considering the moral implications of these theses for common practices involving animals.Author Profiles
DOI
10.1007/s11098-017-0869-6
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Citations of this work
Animal Morality: What It Means and Why It Matters.Susana Monsó, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg & Annika Bremhorst - 2018 - The Journal of Ethics 22 (3-4):283-310.
Recent Work on the Meaning of 'Life’s Meaning': Should We Change the Philosophical Discourse?Thaddeus Metz - 2019 - Human Affairs 29 (4):404-414.
Animal Agency, Captivity, and Meaning.Nicolas Delon - 2018 - The Harvard Review of Philosophy 25:127-146.
References found in this work
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