There was a time when “animal ethics” referred to a subfield of environmental ethics. Then there was a schism, with two sorts of ethicists going their separate ways: the ones who tended to think that it was important not to focus on species, but on animals as individuals; and the others, who thought the opposite. Still, “animal ethics” referred to an enterprise that wasn’t wholly sympathetic to animals. You could, for instance, “do animal ethics” in a way that involved denying direct moral standing to animals (a position for which Peter Carruthers has long argued).

But if The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics is any indication, then we are at a second juncture in the story of moral theorizing about animals. According to the editors, animal ethics rejects anthropocentrism (“the assumption that human needs, wants, or desires should have absolute or near absolute priority in our moral calculations” (5)), instrumentalism (“the assumption that animals exist for human beings” (7)), and reductionism (the claim that “our moral obligations to animals [can be] reduced to other… terms or subsumed under other categories” (8-9)). Moreover, animal ethics insists that animals have intrinsic value in virtue of their sentience; that “there can be no rational grounds for not taking animals sentience into account or for excluding individual animals from the same basic moral consideration that we extend to individual human beings,” (12); “that causing harm to individual sentients… requires strong moral justification, if it can be justified at all” (13); and that there are “profound moral limits to what humans are entitled to do to animals” (14).

The result is a field that’s a bit like contemporary feminist philosophy. There is going to be plenty of disagreement and diversity, but there is also quite a lot that’s taken for granted. Feminist philosophers don’t debate whether the patriarchy is, ultimately, a good thing. According to Linzey and Linzey, some questions are similarly closed for animal ethicists.

As the parallel suggests, this isn’t necessarily an objection: some questions can indeed be ignored, and the work worth doing in a field simply starts from certain (perfectly defensible) assumptions. But unlike the presumption that patriarchy is morally objectionable, which enjoys widespread support, Linzey and Linzey’s animal ethics invites controversy.

Consider, for instance, Mark Bernstein’s contribution. In it, he takes issue with “the comparative wrongness of killing doctrine,” according to which it’s morally worse to kill humans than it is to kill animals (ceteris paribus). The standard way to defend this view is to insist that it’s worse for humans to die than it is for animals to die, since humans have more to lose in death: humans are self-conscious beings with the capacity for future-directed thought; we make plans that death can frustrate, rendering our present actions meaningless. So, on the assumption that we ought to minimize harm, when forced to choose between killing a human killing an animal, we should kill the latter, since death harms the animal less.

Strikingly, however, Bernstein thinks that the opposite is true. He insists that while it may be the case that humans live better lives than animals in virtue of having more sophisticated cognitive capacities, it remains the case that humans did nothing to deserve this better sort of life; they have it simply in virtue of being the kind of beings they are, and not due to any effort on their part. Because human beings are lucky to live better lives than animals, it would then be perverse to disadvantage animals further for already having drawn the short end of the stick. In luck egalitarian fashion, we ought to apportion undeserved benefits equally, and since humans have already received more than their fair share in life, they shouldn’t receive an extra benefit in conflict cases, where someone must die. So when the choice is between a human and an animal, then, ceteris paribus, the human should be killed.

There may be ways to object to this argument. Perhaps, for non-identity-problem sorts of reasons, we should be dubious of the role that luck plays here. Or perhaps we should insist that although Bernstein has identified a consideration that counts in favor of killing humans instead of animals (in the relevant cases, and ceteris paribus), it’s a consideration that’s never decisive, as the mandate to minimize harm is so much weightier. Or what have you. But for present purposes, we can set aside the question of whether Bernstein’s argument succeeds or fails. Instead, let’s focus on what it suggests about the commitments of the new animal ethics.

After the schism with the environmental ethicists, most animal ethicists would probably still have balked at a conclusion like the one that Bernstein endorses – as evidenced by the fact that prominent animal ethicists did balk at it; the “fathers” of that field, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, both endorsed the comparative wrongness of killing doctrine that Bernstein criticizes. Indeed, Bernstein’s conclusion is the sort of thing that motivates alternative approaches to animal ethics – contractualist proposals, or relational accounts, or attempt to revitalize natural law theory. But these alternative approaches are the ones that Linzey and Linzey mean to rule out: contractualist proposals are reductionist; relational accounts don’t make sentience sufficient for moral standing; natural law theories tend not to generate “profound limits on what humans are entitled to do to animals.” By excluding these options, it looks like Linzey and Linzey are trying to shift the Overton window; it seems that they want the commitments of animal ethics to be decidedly pro-animal. It will be interesting to see whether they succeed.

© 2018 Bob Fischer

Bob Fischer teaches philosophy at Texas State University. He’s the editor of The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat (Oxford, 2015; with Ben Bramble) and College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues That Affect You(Oxford, 2017). He’s also the author of several essays on animal ethics, moral psychology, and the epistemology of modality.