Animals Don't Have Morals

“Animals can’t think like us and don’t have the capacity to care about what’s right and wrong. Why should we respect and consider them at all?”

The following questions come to mind for myself:

• Why should I care about an animal that couldn’t care if I lived or died?
• Morality is a human construct and so should animals even be considered with any ethical decisions?
• A lion or bear would eat me quicker than I could say “ethics”, so why should I care about them at all?

Contractually Obligated

There is a general societal contract that we all implicitly agree to just by being members of society. The idea is that other people deserve our moral consideration because they give us theirs in return. For example, when we form the inevitable queues waiting for Blank Street matcha lattes, we expect others to not push ahead of us and respect our turn at the counter.

Animals can’t communicate enough to participate in this contract. They don’t agree to respect us, so doesn’t this equally mean that they don’t deserve our moral consideration?

This all seemed pretty sensible to me except when I start to think of those who cannot participate in this contract… (e.g. bebes & oldies)

Moral Agents vs. Moral Patients

Philosophers have found a way to understand how our moral considerations fit into two buckets:

Moral Agents: Beings (us) who have empathy, and logic can evaluate the morality of our actions and make decisions accordingly.

Moral Patients: Sentient beings who aren’t intelligent enough to make moral decisions, but can still have subjective experiences (feel pain and joy)

Animals are moral patients. Should they be penalised just cause they’re not smart enough to be part of our little moral considerate club?

The Human Benchmark

The thing is, we don’t truly follow a system based on absolute transactional morality. It would be a mad world if that was the case because what about those who cannot participate in the moral contract.

Think about babies, toddlers, or individuals with severe cognitive decline. None of them understand or respect the “moral contract”. If a toddler finds a weapon, they won’t understand the consequences of pointing it at someone and pulling the trigger.

Despite not being able to participate in the moral contract, we still protect these moral patients and we still ensure that they don’t endure unnecessary suffering.

I easily understand protecting human moral patients cause they’re human, and well they’re human obviously! Why should I care about non-human moral patients like animals though? That leads to the idea of anthropocentrism!

Conclusion

Personally, the conclusion I draw is that we have this shared agreement not just due to a transactional understanding of morality but because we inherently understand what it means to be capable of suffering. I believe that just because non-human animals cannot participate in the moral contract, it does not mean they are undeserving of our moral consideration.