Asserting Moral Duty to Individual Animals Undermines Moral Obligation to Animal Species

Asserting Moral Duty to Individual Animals Undermines Moral Obligation to Animal Species

Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 379-80

The obligation to sustain biological diversity stretches far into the future, far beyond the point at which we can identify individuals and requires that we shift our sights from individuals and the various elements of biodiversity toward concern for the processes of nature. In this larger resolution, individuals can only be seen as parts, functional elements in a larger process. I will now explore our obligations to wild species in this longer, intergenerational context.
MORAL OBLIGATION TO ANIMAL WILDNESS PRECLUDES OBLIGATIONS TO WILD INDIVIDUALS

Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 381

Looked at in this larger scale, humans have made mistakes in the past, by intentionally and unintentionally introducing exotic species and by causing extinction. Among these, I believe it was a mistake to eliminate predators on wilderness ranges – the policy of predator eradication destroyed a crucial (keystone) process in those ecosystems, and it has saddled subsequent generations of wildlife managers with the onerous task of destroying individuals of prey species who overpopulate and degrade their ranges. A failure to understand a crucial process led our forefathers to destroy that process. The moral responsibility exists not so much on the individual level as on the inter-population level. I am suggesting, then, that we make moral decisions in different spheres, and that differing considerations should dominate at different scales. Managing to protect biological diversity – and this will more often mean managing humans, not wildlife – occurs on an intergenerational scale on which populations and species interact, not on an individual level. Our moral decision to value wild animals as wild isolates us from moral obligations to wild animals as individuals.
OBLIGATIONS TO WILD ANIMALS STRONGER THAN TO DOMESTIC ANIMALS

Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 383

Most of us can agree, I think, that our obligations to domestic animals – farm animals, pets, and other animals that are integrated into our lives on a day-to-day basis – are far more extensive than our obligations to wild animals. The context in which we interact with these animals implies a contract to look after them. By living together with them, we have brought them into our community, and we are obliged to feed them, to care for them if they are injured, and so forth. We also accept responsibility for controlling their populations. My point is that it is the context of our interactions – the responsibilities we have taken – that determines our moral obligations more than the characteristic of the individuals involved; some of these responsibilities rest on us because of unfortunate choices and actions of our predecessors and ancestors. The morally relevant fact is not usually the content of experience of an individual creature but the context of our interactions with it. If I encounter the neighbor’s cat about to get a songbird in my back yard, I would intervene if possible. If I were hiking in the wilderness and I were fortunate to see a wolf pack run down and kill a deer, intervention would be profoundly inappropriate. The crucial moral fact that decides cases like this has nothing to do with the relative mental or moral capacities of songbirds and deer and everything to do with the context of the experience.

Asserting Moral Duty to Individual Animals Undermines Moral Obligation to Animal Species

Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 378

While wild animals may be considered morally, this depends on the situation. In the most straightforward situation – when individual wild animals live largely undistributed by human activities in their natural habitat – humans accept no responsibility for animals as individuals. This very general claim of nonresponsibility is not justified by any absolute claim about the intelligence or sensitivity of those individuals. It is rather a manifestation of a decision to respect the animal individuals as wild. By deciding to respect their wildness, we have agreed not to interfere in their daily lives, or deaths. We value them, but we value their wildness more; to respect their wildness is, in effect, to refrain from placing a moral value on their welfare or their suffering. It is to treat them as a separate community, one with which we limit our interactions in order to encourage its autonomy from our own society. We also value wild animals as part of natural processes. I believe that our interactions with animals in the wild take on a moral dimension only at the population and species level, not at the individual level.

Animal Rights Expansion Devalues Humans

Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 61

And there is even a secular argument for dichotomizing humans and animals, with or without reference to souls. It is that if we fail to maintain a bright line between animals and human beings, we may end up treating human beings as badly as we treat animals, rather than treating animals as well as we treat (or aspire to treat) human beings. Equation is a transitive relation. If chimpanzees equal human infants, human infants equal chimpanzees.
BROADENING THE COMMUNITY OF EQUALS INEVITABLY ENTAILS REDUCING THE TOTAL BENEFITS TO MEMBERSHIP

Dale Jamieson, Professor of philosophy, University of Colorado @ Boulder, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 226

A fourth source of the human resistance to equality is the recognition of the setback to human interests that would result. The broader the membership of the community of equals, the fewer the benefits that accrue to the members. This is part of the reason that there has been historical resistance to expanding the circle of moral concern. Societal elites have resisted claims of equality from the inferior classes; men have resisted such claims from women; and whites have resisted the claims put forward by blacks. The loss of unjust advantage is part of the cost of life in a morally well-ordered society, but those who stand to bear the cost typically try to evade it.
EXPANSION OF ANIMAL RIGHTS WILL DEPRECIATE HUMAN RIGHTS

Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 71

On the cost side, the practical impediments to defining and enforcing animal rights require particular emphasis. The questions I raised about Steven Wise’s approach were concerned with those costs. For example, what exactly does “freedom” for animals entail, and how do we decide through the case-by-case method of common law rule making which species are to be endowed with what rights? The more we think about these questions, the less apt the vocabulary of “rights” seems. My guess is that, if pressed, Wise would admit that the only right to which most, maybe all, species should be entitled is the right not to be gratuitously tortured, wounded, or killed—and as it happens those were, at least nominally (an important qualification), the rights of Negro slaves in the antebellum South. Yet we think the essence of slavery is to be without rights. To be told now that slaves had important rights shows how the movement for animal rights can depreciate human rights.