Ethic Theory Moral Prac DOI 10.1007/s10677-016-9732-7

Tatjana Visak & Robert Garner (Eds.): The Ethics of Killing Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016. ISBN: 9780199396085; £19.99 Christoph Schmidt-Petri 1

Accepted: 29 April 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

One paradigm shift largely due to Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics is that the ethics of killing humans may no longer be discussed, at least in professional philosophy, without discussing the ethics of killing animals. The new paradigm is by now so well entrenched that already the phrasing of the preceding sentence will appear outdated to many: really, according to standard terminology it should read ‘the ethics of killing human animals’ and ‘the ethics of killing nonhuman animals’: homines sapientes do not get special treatment any more. One consequence of this paradigm shift, only rather recently receiving explicit attention, is that the ethics of killing (non-human) animals has become terribly complicated. Because there are so many different species with so wildly different properties, it would be just as simple-minded to make general claims about the legitimacy of ‘killing animals’ as it is to make general claims about the ethics of ‘killing humans’. At the very least, we need to distinguish between persons and non-persons, but many further distinctions need to be drawn also within these groups and, unfortunately, we know rather little about animal minds and emotions. The book under review addresses these difficulties from several angles. The table of contents nominally divides it into three parts: after the introduction, part I discusses BAnimals and the Harm of Death^, part II the BMoral Evaluation of Killing Animals^ and part III BKilling Animals and the Politicization of Normative Ethics^.The book concludes with an afterword by Peter Singer, mostly discussing the paper by Tatjana Visak. Part I contains six papers, part II four and part III only two. The division seems somewhat arbitrary as topics discussed in part I, for instance, also include personal identity and essentialism (Steven Luper) and the value of coming into existence (Nils Holtug), the excellent paper by Alasdair Cochrane in part III is about animal rights in the abstract, just like the (reprinted) paper by Christine Korsgaard in part II, and none of these four papers focus on the ethics of killing animals. Be that as it may, all of the papers should be of interest to people trying to figure out under what precise conditions killing which animals is morally acceptable.

* Christoph Schmidt-Petri [email protected]

1

Department of Philosophy, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Schmidt-Petri C.

One reason why killing animals is particularly problematic is the fact that many animals are not persons. This means, roughly, that they do not conceive of themselves as persisting through time. As a result, it is impossible for a preference utilitarian such as Singer to claim that such animals have a preference for their lives to continue. Of course, if one were to kill such an animal, it would be robbed of its future, and to the extent that that future would have contained more pleasure than pain, there still is a utilitarian argument against it. But if that animal were to be replaced by another one, experiencing an equivalent net amount of pleasure, the utilitarian balance sheet will not show any deficit. Several papers in this volume address this ‘replaceability argument’ and I would like to summarise the solutions of Jeff McMahan and Shelly Kagan, which seem to me the most significant contributions. McMahan discusses the position plausibly lying behind the now popular preference for the consumption of organic rather than factory-farmed meat: it’s wrong to make animals suffer, but it is not wrong to kill them (painlessly, yet many years before their natural death). His timerelative interest account of the misfortune of death (TRIA) provides some support for this view, as it says that, in general, animals morally lose less than humans by dying early because their interest in continuing to live is less strong, given their impoverished mental life and their weaker psychological connection to their future life. As a result, the loss of their future, but not their present suffering, matters less than it does in the case of humans. McMahan now combines this with ‘the asymmetry’ – the view that future potential happiness gives less of a reason to create (human or other) animals than future potential suffering gives reason not to. McMahan’s view may then be defended against a variety of criticisms which play on the fact that the moral importance not just of future suffering but also of future happiness will be discounted by the TRIA. It intuitively does not seem right, however, that one should save an animal from a painless death now if that means the animal has to go through great suffering in the far future after experiencing a little happiness soon, whereas it does seem right that one should save an animal from a painless death now if that means a little bit of suffering soon but great happiness later (it does depend on the precise values, of course). TRIA should consider these cases equivalent as the suffering/the happiness in the far future is discounted equally and counteracted by the happiness/the suffering in the near future. However, joined with the asymmetry which essentially discounts future happiness but not future suffering (or at least discounts it more), the TRIA yields the intuitively right result. The argument works best for animals entirely unconnected to their future, because not saving (or killing) them turns out to be about as bad as not creating them in the first place. Because many people believe that that would not be very wrong, even if their lives would contain a lot of happiness, humane omnivorism applied to such animals might be acceptable. The matter is different for animals which are connected to their own future (e.g. pigs, cows, chicken), of course, as for these, not bringing one into existence is not equivalent to killing one. Kagan questions the widespread assumption that views on the morality of killing have direct implications for the morality of procreation. The parallel to killing an existing being is not creating a new one but to save the life of an existing being. Killing shortens and saving lengthens already existing life; creating new life is fundamentally different. But it is nevertheless interesting to ask whether animals or persons are replaceable. After discussing the meanderings of Singer’s position, Kagan sketches a new argument for the thesis that persons are not replaceable: because the preferences of persons are necessarily forward-looking and extend over their entire (expected) lifespan, that is, even young persons have preferences which can only be satisfied in old age (but, alas, not vice versa), cutting life short after half of its normal duration means frustrating more than half of a person’s preferences. For the same

Tatjana Visak & Robert Garner (Eds.): The Ethics of Killing Animals

reason, a potential replacement person could never have as many preferences satisfied in half the lifetime ‘left over’ from the first person, as it were, as the original person. So already in terms of plain preference satisfaction, one complete life adds up to more satisfied preferences than two half ones which both have to start at the beginning, hence, the replaceability argument fails quite obviously. Even though I have discussed only two papers at any length, I have enjoyed reading all of them and I think the book as a whole is a very welcome contribution to a field we may expect to further grow in importance as the moral sensibilities concerning the treatment of animals keep changing.