Amoral Animal Rights (trans. D. Chabrajska)

Joel MAKRS

Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University, PO Box 208293, New Haven, Connecticut, 06520-8293, USA Telefon: +1 203 932 7103 , United States

Dorota CHABRAJSKA

John Paul II Institute, Faculty of Philosophy, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland , Poland

Abstract

The study of nonhuman animals has proved to be in my own life not only an important topic in its own right but also the undoing of all of my normative commitments and indeed of normativity (of the moralist stripe) itself. This evolution has taken two interesting turns. The first was my sense that animal ethics should be understood not only as a branch of applied ethics but also as integral to ethics as such. Animal ethics speaks to the very nature of ethics; ethics might even itself be better understood as s y n o n y m o u s with animal ethics, since human beings are themselves animals and may be ethical beings in virtue of that fact. The second turn was the realization that ethics may be better understood as about desire than about obligation (or morality or right and wrong or inherent value or justification, etc.). This turn did not come about by purely meta-ethical thought but, in equal measure, was midwifed by my growing awareness that the human moral response to the plight of other animals at human hands was a sham. Thus, I ended up facing the philosophical (and personal) challenge of my career and life: How to reconcile two apparently diametrically opposed facts, namely, the amoral basis of ethics and my personal commitment to animal liberation. This essay presents my response to that challenge.

Keywords:

animal ethics, amorality, moral nihilism, moral skepticism, metaethics, applied ethics, Kant, animal rights