Lori Gruen - Ethics and Animals, An Introduction-18-60

1 Why animals matter
In early summer 2004, off the northern coast of the North Island of New
Zealand, four swimmers were suddenly surrounded by a pod of bottlenose
dolphins herding them into a tight circle. The dolphins were agitated, flap-
ping at the water, and they continuously circled the swimmers, keeping them
close together for over half an hour. A lifeguard patrolling in a boat nearby
saw the commotion and dove in with the swimmers to find out what was
happening. While under water, he saw a great white shark, now swimming
away, beneath the swimmers. Presumably, the arrival of his patrol boat had
scared the shark off, but it was the dolphins who were protecting the swim-
mers from a shark attack until help arrived. Dr. Rochelle Constantine, from
the Auckland University School of Biological Science, noted that this behavior
was rare, but not unheard of. “From my understanding of the behaviour of
these dolphins they certainly were acting in a way which indicated the shark
posed a threat to something. Dolphins are known for helping helpless things.
It is an altruistic response and bottlenose dolphins in particular are known
for it.”1
Are dolphins really altruistic? Do they think of humans as helpless things?
Can they understand threats to individuals other than themselves? Do they
care about other individuals, even members of different species? If dolphins
care about us, should we care about them and other animals? The anecdote
about dolphins saving humans from a potential shark attack generates curios-
ity and amazement and opens up a world of questions, many of which we will
address throughout this book.
Humans have always lived with or in close proximity to other animals.
Animals have worked beside us. They have hunted us, and we have hunted
them. We have used them as human surrogates in scientific and medical
1 www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=3613343.
1
2 Ethics and Animals
experiments, and we have physically and genetically altered them to suit our
tastes, our lifestyles, and our domestic needs. They have been the source of
entertainment, inspiration, loyalty, and devotion. Non-human animals also
serve a conceptual role in helping us define ourselves as human. We are not
them. It is against the animal that we define humanity. Their differences from
us highlight our similarity to other humans. Both the actual and the concep-
tual relationships humans have with other animals raise ethical questions,
as do all relationships between feeling individuals. We coexist with other
animals on a planet that does not have resources to sustain all of us endlessly.
Many, if not all, of our decisions and actions affect not just fellow humans,
but fellow animals as well. In this book we will explore a variety of ethical
issues raised by the relationships humans have with other animals.
Not everyone agrees that there are ethical issues raised by our relations
to animals, so we should start by examining the view that we do not have
ethical responsibilities to other animals. This view – what I will call human
exceptionalism – results, in part, from the way we psychologically and intel-
lectually distance ourselves from our own animal natures and, by extension,
from other animals. Our humanity is distinct from, and some even suggest,
transcends, our animality. We see humans as world-builders and meaning-
makers and think other animals are not. We engage in uniquely human activ-
ities, activities that elevate us above animals. Because humans are thought to
occupy a separate and superior sphere, some people believe that only humans
are the proper subjects of ethical concern.
This view has lofty historical antecedents. Aristotle was probably the most
prominent early philosopher to argue that animals were lower on a natural
hierarchy because they lacked reason. This natural hierarchy, he believed,
gave those on higher rungs both the right and the responsibility to use those
on the lower rungs. Later, the Stoics went a bit farther and denied that animals
had any capacity for thought and existed solely to be used. As philosopher
Richard Sorabji writes:
The most extreme elaboration of the idea that animals are for man is found in
the Stoics. According to Chrysippus, bugs are useful for waking us up and
mice for making us put our things away carefully. Cocks have come into
being for a useful purpose too: they wake us up, catch scorpions, and arouse
us to battle, but they must be eaten, so there won’t be more chicks than is
useful. As for the pig, it is given a soul . . . of salt, to keep it fresh for us to eat.2
2 Sorabji 1993: 199.

Why animals matter 3
Early Christian theologians, with the noted exception of Francis of Assisi, also
viewed animals as fundamentally distinct from humans in that they lacked
souls and were here just to satisfy human ends.3 And the “father of modern
philosophy,” René Descartes, is the most commonly cited proponent of the
view that humans have minds and are thus ensouled beings who have moral
standing, while other animals are merely bodily, mechanical creatures here
for us to use as we want. For Descartes, not unlike his predecessors, animals
were thought of simply as living machines who respond automatically to stim-
uli, unaware that anything is happening to them when they encounter such
stimuli. Their lack of reason, thoughts, consciousness, and souls corresponds
with their lack of moral standing. We don’t have ethical relationships with
alarm clocks, toasters, or cell phones and we don’t have ethical relationships
with other animals.
Despite their dismissive attitudes toward other animals, even these
thinkers believed that there were some ethical issues raised by our interac-
tions with them. No reflective person thinks that wanton cruelty to animals
does not raise ethical concerns. In fact, it is quite common to find examples
in the philosophical literature of actions involving such wanton cruelty that
are thought to be unarguably wrong. If it makes sense to say it is wrong to
torture a dog for fun or to burn a cat alive out of curiosity, then it appears that
on some occasions other animals can appropriately be the subjects of ethical
assessments. Some philosophers have suggested that the wrongness of acts of
wanton cruelty does not arise from the direct harm the act has on the animal
victims, but rather that such actions are thought to be wrong because they
reflect the type of character that often allows a person to engage in uneth-
ical behavior toward humans. According to Immanuel Kant, for example,
although “irrational animals” were mere things to which we have no direct
duties and “with which one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion,” there
are implications of actions toward animals for humanity. For Kant, “if a man
has his dog shot, because it can no longer earn a living for him, he is by no
3 Trying to articulate how animals made their way through the world without the ability to
think often generated extreme philosophical contortions, as in this quote from Augustine:
“Though in fact we observe that infants are weaker than the most vulnerable of the young
of other animals in the control of their limbs, and in their instincts of appetition and
defense, this seems designed to enhance man’s superiority over other living things, on the
analogy of an arrow whose impetus increases in proportion to the backward extension of
the bow.” City of God, Book XIII, Chapter 3. Thanks to Mary Jane Rubenstein for bringing
this quote to my attention.
means in breach of any duty to the dog, since the latter is incapable of judg-
ment, but he thereby damages the kindly and humane qualities in himself,
which he ought to exercise in virtue of his duties to mankind.”4 According
to thinkers who embrace some form of human exceptionalism, when a non-
human animal is tortured, the harm to the animal is not what matters from
an ethical point of view but rather the harm that reflects on the torturer and
the society to which the torturer belongs.
Many in law enforcement believe that cruelty to animals is a precursor
to violent crimes against humans, and some of the most notorious serial
killers had an early history of animal abuse. Torturing and killing animals
are also signs of antisocial psychological disorders. Consider a case of cruelty
that occurred in New York City in the summer of 2009. Cheyenne Cherry,
aged 17, after being arrested on animal cruelty and burglary charges, admit-
ted in court that she let a kitten roast to death in an oven. According to news-
paper reports, Cherry and a friend “ransacked a Bronx, NY apartment before
putting the cat, Tiger Lily, in the oven, where it cried and scratched before
dying.” While leaving court, Cherry was confronted by animal protection
activists holding signs protesting the killing. “It’s dead, bitch!” snapped the
unrepentant Cherry to the activists outside the court, while grinning widely
and taking credit for stuffing the helpless kitten into a 500-degree oven. The
kind of depravity that Cherry displayed raises concerns about her ability to
make any moral judgments at all and her suitability for living freely in society.
Philosophers, generally known for their consistent reasoning, have not
been completely consistent in their attitudes about ethics and animals. This
is probably due, at least in part, to an untenable commitment to human
exceptionalism. In the next section, we will explore this view in some depth
to see just how it is problematic.
Analyzing human exceptionalism
There are two distinguishable claims implicit in human exceptionalism. The

first is that humans are unique, humans are the only beings that do or have
X (where X is some activity or capacity); and the second is that humans, by
doing or having X, are superior to those that don’t do or have X. The first claim
raises largely empirical questions – what is this X that only we do or have,
4 Kant 2001: 212.

and are we really the only beings that do or have it? The second claim raises
an evaluative or normative question – if we do discover the capacity that all
and only humans share, does that make humans better, or more deserving of
care and concern, than others from an ethical point of view? Why does doing
or having X entitle humans to exclusive moral attention? In order to evaluate
the legitimacy of human exceptionalism, we will need to explore these two
separate claims.
How are we different?
Let’s start with the empirical questions. Surely, we are different from other
animals, but can we establish what it is that makes us unique? What capacities
do all humans have that other animals don’t? What do we do that no other
animal does?
Many candidate capacities have been proposed to distinguish humans from
other animals. Solving social problems, expressing emotions, starting wars,
developing culture, having sex for pleasure, and having a sense of humor are
just some of the traits that were considered uniquely human at one point or
another. As it turns out, none of these is uncontroversially unique to humans.
All animals living in socially complex groups solve various problems that
inevitably arise in such groups. Canids and primates are particularly adept
at it, yet even chickens and horses are known to recognize large numbers of
individuals in their social hierarchies and to maneuver within them. One of
the ways that non-human animals negotiate their social environments is by
being particularly attentive to the emotional states of those around them.
When a conspecific is angry, for example, it is a good idea to get out of his
way. Animals that develop lifelong bonds are known to suffer terribly from
the death of their companions. Some will risk their own lives for their mates,
while others are even said to die of sorrow. Coyotes, elephants, geese, primates,
and killer whales are among the species for which profound effects of grief
have been reported.5 Recently observed elephant rampages have led some to
posit that other animals are prone to post-traumatic stress, not unlike soldiers
returning from war.6 While the lives of many, perhaps most, animals in the
wild are consumed with struggles for survival, aggression, and battle, there
5 Bekoff 2002. 6 Bradshaw 2009.

are some whose lives are characterized by expressions of joy, playfulness, and
a great deal of laughter and sex.7
Studying animal behavior is a fascinating and informative way to identify
both differences and similarities between our way of being in the world and
the way that other animals make their ways. So much of what we observe
them doing allows us to reflect on what we are doing, often to our surprise and
delight. However, it isn’t simply the differences and similarities in behaviors
that are at the heart of human exceptionalism, but rather what underlies that
behavior – the cognitive skills that we have and they lack. Our intelligence,
many have argued, is what makes us unique. If claims of human uniqueness
are to be more than trivially true – only humans have human intelligence,
because only humans are human – there will need to be some capacity or set
of capacities that track this unique intelligence. What might the capacities
that are indicative of unique human intelligence be?
Tool use
For a long time, many thought that humans were the only creatures that
had the ability to make and use tools, and it was this tool-using capacity that
marked our unique intelligence. Early on it was even proposed that we be
classified as Homo faber, “man the toolmaker,” rather than Homo sapiens, “wise
man,” to highlight our particularly creative, intelligent nature.8 The view
that humans are the only animals that use tools was initially challenged in
the mid-1960s when Jane Goodall made a startling discovery at her Gombe
field station in Tanzania. Chimpanzees were removing leaves from twigs and
using the twigs to fish for termites by inserting them into termite mounds.
After creating the right tool and inserting it into the mound, a chimpanzee
would carefully remove the twig once the termites had climbed on, and then
promptly run the termite-coated twig through his teeth for a protein-rich
meal.9 Ethologists began observing other animals, even birds, using tools.
New Caledonia crows, for example, have been observed using sticks as tools
in the wild; and in a lab, an untrained female crow, presented with a pipe-like
structure containing a food bucket with a handle, bent a piece of wire into
a hook to retrieve the bucket from inside the pipe.10 The species of dolphins
7 Woods 2010. 8 Napier 1964 and Oakley 1949.

9 Goodall 1964. See also Goodall 1986. 10 Hunt 1996. See also Weir, et al. 2002.
that saved the swimmers from a great white shark are also known to use
tools. Bottlenose dolphins in Australia have been observed using sea sponges
as tools. With sponges covering their beaks, they dive to the bottom of deep
channels and poke their tools into the sandy ocean floor to flush out small fish
dwelling there. They then drop their sponges, eat the fish, and retrieve their
sponges for another round. According to the scientists studying the dolphins,
they are able to sweep away much more sand when they use the sponges.11
As exciting as these observations are, they are usually dismissed as a true
challenge to human uniqueness. The chimpanzees’ termite fishing rods, the
New Caledonia crows’ food-fetching hooks, and dolphin fishing sponges are
examples of non-human animals using simple tools. But humans develop
toolkits that can serve different functions, and animals don’t use toolkits.
Or do they?
Christopher Boesch and his colleagues observed chimpanzees first using
a stone to crack a nut and then a stick to dig the edible nutmeat out. The
chimpanzees were using different tools sequentially to achieve their goal. In
other words, they had developed a toolkit.12 Japanese primatologists observed
chimpanzees making leaf sponges to soak up water; when the water was out
of reach, the chimpanzees would push the leaf sponges into the hard-to-reach
areas with sticks. Recently, chimpanzees in the Congo were observed using
toolkits that consist of two kinds of sticks – a thick one to punch a hole in
an ant nest and a thin, flexible one to fish for the ants. If the chimpanzees
were simply to break open the nest, the ants would swarm, delivering painful
bites, and the chimpanzees would have fewer ants to eat.13 So chimpanzees
combine different tools to achieve their ends.14
Combining tools has also been observed in crows. In a laboratory experi-
ment conducted in New Zealand, New Caledonia crows were presented with
a short stick (and a useless rock); a toolbox, into which the bird could place
her beak but not her whole head, containing a longer stick; and a piece of
food buried in a hole that could not be reached with the short stick but could
be reached with the long stick. In order to get the food, the bird would have
to use the short stick to retrieve the long stick from the toolbox and then
carry the long stick to the buried food to extract it. Six out of the seven crows
initially attempted to retrieve the long stick with the short stick, and four
11 Mann, et al. 2008. 12 Boesch & Boesch 1990. 13 Sanz, et al. 2009.
14 Sugiyama & Koman 1979.
obtained the food reward on their first try.15 That apes and birds combine
different tools to solve problems suggests that humans are not unique as
tool-users.
Those who hold on to the notion that tool use is the trait that makes
humans unique have come up with ever finer distinctions, some suggest-
ing that what makes human tool use different is that humans follow cul-
tural trends in tool-using. Then primatologists observing chimpanzees in
Africa began to notice cultural variation in tool use in different locations and
among different groups of chimpanzees.16 When the directors of nine long-
term chimpanzee field sights in Africa compared notes, thirty-nine behavioral
patterns were identified as cultural variants, and these variations cannot be
accounted for by ecological or environmental explanations. For example, one
group of wild chimpanzees might crack nuts with stones while another geo-
graphically distant group might crack nuts with wood, when both stones and
wood are available in both sites. Another group might not eat the nuts at all,
even though they are available. Victoria Horner and her colleagues decided it
might be useful to see whether or not captive chimpanzees demonstrate signs
of cultural variation in tool use. Sure enough, they found that after teaching
the dominant members of one group one technique for acquiring food and
the dominant members of another group an alternative technique for acquir-
ing food from the same device, the particular behavior introduced to the first
group spread within that group, while the alternative foraging behavior intro-
duced to the second group spread within that group. These results suggested
that “a nonhuman species can sustain unique local cultures, each constituted
by multiple traditions.” The scientists concluded, “The convergence of these
results with those from the wild implies a richness in chimpanzees’ capacity
for culture.”17
Still not satisfied, those seeking to establish human exceptionalism sug-
gested that making and gathering tools prior to encountering a problem is
uniquely human. But those crafty crows have been observed creating particu-
larly functional tools and then holding on to them for some time. Researchers
from Oxford mounted miniature cameras on crows in their wild habitats and
found that a favored tool was used over a prolonged period of time, sometimes
carried in flight from one location to another.18
15 Taylor, et al. 2007. 16 Whiten, et al. 2001.

17 Horner & de Waal 2009. See also Horner, et al. 2006 and Whiten, et al. 2007.
18 Norris 2007.
Perhaps only humans use tools to plan and execute a hunt and that is what
makes us unique. Planning ahead requires a type of intelligence that only
humans have. Again, chimpanzees disproved a claim of human uniqueness
when they were observed making and using tools to hunt. At the Fongoli
research site in Senegal, Jill Pruetz reported twenty-two occasions on which
ten different chimpanzees, including female chimpanzees and youngsters,
used tools to hunt bushbabies (small primates). The Fongoli chimpanzees
made twenty-six different spears, each requiring up to five steps to construct,
including trimming the tool tip to a point.19 The chimpanzees prepare the
spears, take them to a particular area, and then jab them forcefully into
tree hollows where bushbabies nest. Pruetz has even observed what appeared
to be a mother teaching toolmaking and hunting techniques to her infant.
As National Geographic reported, “Since the 1960s scientists have known that
chimpanzees are able to make and use tools – behavior once thought to be
an exclusively human trait. Now . . . researcher Jill Pruetz has observed tool
making behavior that further blurs the line between the apes and humans.”20
The debate about tool use has a certain dialectic structure: the proponent
of human exceptionalism posits what is thought to be a behavior indicative
of a cognitive skill or capacity that only humans have, and then is proven
mistaken once that behavior is observed in other animals, and then posits a
more refined description of the capacity and the behaviors that might reveal
that capacity, only to have a behavior of that description also observed in other
animals. Debates about other candidate capacities for uniqueness follow the
same dialectic. Language use, for example, thought to be the exclusive domain
of humans, has been subject to a debate quite similar to the one about tool
use.
Language use
Although there are interesting fables about talking animals going back to the
Bible, the systematic study of animal language use did not begin until the
1950s when Keith and Kathy Hayes took in an infant chimpanzee, Viki, and
raised her in their home for a little over six years as a human child, a method
of rearing that came to be known as cross-fostering.21 One of the skills they
19 Pruetz & Bertolani 2007. 20 Pruetz 2007.

21 In the early 1930s, the Kelloggs raised an infant chimpanzee, Gua, with their son Donald,
for a nine-month period to chart comparative developmental milestones and did attempt
hoped to teach Viki was to speak. By manipulating her lips and blocking her
nose, they were able to get her to say “mama,” “papa,” “up,” and “cup,” but
none of these words was ever uttered very clearly. Viki came to understand
many spoken words even though she herself was never able to speak any.
Viki died of pneumonia when she was only six and a half years old and that
particular cross-fostering study ended. Only later did it become apparent that
chimpanzee vocal anatomy is quite different from that of humans, making it
impossible for chimpanzees to “speak” as humans do.
While human anatomy does make us unique in our ability to speak, not
all humans do speak. Those who are deaf, for example, often communicate
with gestures, and their sign language allows many who do not speak to
communicate in complex ways. The fact that non-verbal humans use gestural
language inspired Allen and Beatrix Gardner to undertake an investigation
to determine whether chimpanzees could communicate using American Sign
Language (ASL). Since chimpanzees and humans have similar hand dexterity,
the Gardners, in the 1960s, began a cross-fostering project to teach chim-
panzees sign language. The first chimpanzee to use ASL was Washoe, who
learned an estimated 200 words. This was widely recognized as a remarkable
achievement. But what was even more impressive was that Washoe combined
the signs she learned in novel ways to communicate new ideas. For example,
Washoe referred to watermelon as “candy fruit” and when she saw a swan for
the first time she signed “water bird.” She also taught her adopted son Loulis
to communicate using ASL. Roger Fouts, who was a graduate student of the
Gardners and eventually took over the research they began, conducted a five-
year study in which only chimpanzees, but no humans, could use ASL in front
of the young chimpanzee Loulis. By the end of the five-year period, Loulis was
using seventy signs that he had learned from Washoe and other signing chim-
panzees in their group – Dar, Moja, and Tatu.22 The chimpanzees were not
only using language, but they were also communicating among themselves
with it and teaching it to their own kind.
There was a great deal of enthusiasm about teaching language to apes dur-
ing the 1960s and 70s. During that time, Koko the gorilla began learning sign
to observe language use. Given that Gua was aged seven and a half months when the
study began, and Donald was ten months, the results in terms of language use were not
particularly meaningful. What was observed was primarily babbling and other guttural
vocalizations. Kellogg & Kellogg 1933.
22 See Gardner & Gardner 1989 and Fouts 1998.
language near Stanford University in California and was also able to combine
words in spontaneous ways. Chantek, an orangutan who was taught sign lan-
guage at the University of Tennessee before moving to Zoo Atlanta, mastered
150 signs. And there was Nim Chimpsky, born at the Institute of Primate
Studies in Norman, Oklahoma, a laboratory where dozens of chimpanzees
were taught to use sign language. Nim was sent to New York City where he
was initially cross-fostered in an Upper West Side brownstone and trained in
ASL at Columbia University under the skeptical eye of Herbert Terrace.23 After
learning approximately 150 signs, Nim was sent back to Oklahoma while Ter-
race and his students studied videotapes and data collected from their work
with the young chimpanzee. Terrace concluded that even though Nim was
trained in ways similar to Washoe, Nim’s use of signs was not the same as
using sign language. It lacked grammar of the kind that humans use in com-
municating via language. In addition, he suggested that many of the signs
that Nim used, and the ways in which he ordered signs, were mere responses
to cues being given by trainers or trained responses based on past successes,
but they were not sentences.24 At his most skeptical, Terrace claimed that
Nim did not actually understand the meaning of the signs he was using.
This deflationary conclusion – that the kind of communication the great
apes were engaged in was not really language because it lacked grammar –
provided relief to proponents of human exceptionalism. However, ape
researchers and the apes themselves had more to say on the matter. Sarah, a
chimpanzee whose cognitive capacities were probably the most studied of all
chimpanzees, used magnetic symbols representing familiar objects to com-
municate with researchers. If Sarah wanted an apple (or any other item not
immediately present), she would place the symbol for apple on the magnetic
board in addition to symbols indicating that she wanted her interlocutor to
give the apple to her. The human interlocutor could rearrange the order of
the symbols – for example, telling Sarah to give the apple to Peony, another
chimpanzee. When that happened, Sarah would often refuse, or reorder the
symbols to indicate that the apple should be given to her not Peony, sug-
gesting that she understood that the symbols placed in a different order
had different meanings. It looked as though Sarah understood grammar. As
Sarah’s comprehension developed, she was able to respond to more compli-
cated sentences such as “Sarah banana blue pail insert.” When presented with
23 Hess 2008. 24 Terrace, et al. 1979.

both bananas and apples, red and blue pails, and red and blue dishes, Sarah
would accurately place the correct fruit in the correct colored pail or dish the
majority of the time.
As remarkable as Sarah’s comprehension of this symbolic, representational
form of communication was, she did not use it to initiate discussions or to con-
struct sentences, as human language users do. The researchers who worked
with Sarah originally, David and Ann Premack, showed that chimpanzees
were not just responding to cues from researchers, as skeptics believed. But
while Sarah was able to use a representational system, the Premacks con-
cluded that the most advanced representation, the sentence, was “far beyond
the capacity of the chimpanzee.”25 So, it is the ability to construct sentences,
and not merely use language, that makes humans unique.
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who works with bonobos, has been critical of the
bar-raising dialectic of these debates, suggesting, as I do, that they are mis-
guided attempts by those who cling to the idea of an insurmountable divide
between humans and other animals to establish human exceptionalism –
even in the face of clear evidence establishing continuities between human
skills and the skills used by some non-humans. Every time an ape is able to
do something characteristic of human language usage, skeptics either deny
it actually happened or minimize the significance of that activity. Savage-
Rumbaugh took on the challenge of sentence comprehension by asking Kanzi,
the bonobo she worked with, to do very odd things. Like Sarah, Kanzi would
readily put bananas in blue pails or apples in green dishes when asked, but
now Savage-Rumbaugh was asking Kanzi to put pails on bananas, pine nee-
dles in the refrigerator, and soap on a ball. Kanzi did remarkably well, given
that he was asked to do things he had never seen done before and that seem
nonsensical, probably even to him. Kanzi’s younger sister, Panbanisha, did
even better.26
Still, some skeptics remained unconvinced that other animals were, in fact,
comprehending language. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist who studies lan-
guage acquisition in children, for example, thinks what Kanzi and others are
engaged in is mere associative learning. He thinks the apes have undergone a
complex form of training, and as a result, they have learned how to press the
right buttons or do the right behaviors in order to get the hairless apes who
train them to cough up M&M’s, bananas, and other desirable tidbits of food.
25 Premack & Premack 1984: 123. 26 Savage-Rumbaugh, et al. 1998.

While the apes had to be taught to use language, just as we are taught to use
language, their ability to teach each other, to generate words they haven’t
been taught by combining those they know, and to comprehend novel gram-
matical structures goes beyond simple training. Of course, those who believe
the capacity for language is innate in humans, like linguist Noam Chomsky,
will never be convinced. By definition, no other animals can use language,
because it is wired into the human brain. As Chomsky says, “attempting to
teach linguistic skills to animals is irrational – like trying to teach people to
flap their arms and fly.”27
Defining humans as unique in their capacity to use human language is
akin to saying only humans have human intelligence. But we don’t want to
define away the possibility that the capacities or skills that make up human
intelligence might be shared by others. If we approach other animals as if
they are so different from us that we cannot imagine them behaving in
fascinatingly familiar ways, we may overlook what they are doing and fail
to ask the right questions about the cognitive bases for their behaviors. If
we expect that they don’t have the requisite capacities, then we might miss
certain complex behaviors or interpret those behaviors in deflationary ways.
Our commitment to human uniqueness may bias our observations and even
the way that empirical research is conducted. This is precisely what happened
when a new capacity was proposed that many thought was surely unique to
humans – the capacity to ascribe mental states to others.
Theory of mind
Being able to understand that another being feels, sees, and thinks, and to get
a sense of what those emotions, perceptions, and thoughts might be, requires
a fairly complex set of cognitive skills. Someone who has a theory of mind
(ToM), as this complex set of cognitive skills is called, has to understand, at
a minimum, that they are individuals who are distinct from the other; that
the other has experiences, perceptions, and thoughts; and that those may be
different from one’s own. Humans above the age of four are generally able
to think about what others might be thinking. Most human teenagers seem
to be obsessed with thinking about what others think. But does this complex
cognitive capacity make humans unique?
27 Cited in Johnson 1995: C10. See also, Chomsky 1980 and Lloyd 2004.
The question of another animal possibly possessing the cognitive capacity

to recognize others as cognitive beings was first posed by Guy Woodruff and
David Premack in their 1978 article “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of
Mind?” According to them, to have a ToM, a being “imputes mental states
to himself and to others (either to conspecifics or to other species as well).”
Woodruff and Premack suggested that the types of mental states that would
be attributed to others might include “purpose, intention, beliefs, thinking,
knowledge, pretending, liking, and doubt.”28 In order to answer their ques-
tion, Woodruff and Premack modified Wolfgang Köhler’s “insight” experi-
ments with chimpanzees. While directing the Anthropoid Station in Tenerife,
Köhler presented chimpanzees with the problem of obtaining bananas hang-
ing just out of reach in their enclosure. They had bamboo poles and tools
nearby, and, according to Köhler, the chimpanzees would suddenly arrive at
the correct combination of actions needed to reach the bananas, leading him
to speculate that the chimpanzees had a sudden insight allowing them to per-
ceive the solution to the problem. In Woodruff and Premack’s experiments,
rather than presenting a problem for Sarah to solve, they videotaped humans
trying to solve problems, like how to obtain the out-of-reach bananas with
poles and boxes. Woodruff and Premack showed the videotapes to Sarah to
determine whether she would be able to recognize that the human was trying
to solve a problem by indicating or predicting how the human would solve
each problem.
Four thirty-second videotapes were made of a human actor in a cage trying
to obtain bananas that were inaccessible. In addition to the videos, still pho-
tographs were taken of the human actor engaged in a behavior constituting
the solution to the problems. Sarah was shown each video, until the last five
seconds, at which point the video was put on hold. Sarah was then shown two
photographs, only one of which represented a solution to the problem. The
experimenter left the room, and Sarah selected one of the two photographs
by placing her selection in a designated location. Sarah made the correct
selection in twenty-one of twenty-four trials. So, it looked as though Sarah
understood that the human actor was attempting to achieve a particular
goal, understood that he faced a problem that he wanted to overcome, and
was able to determine what would allow the actor to overcome the problem
to reach his goal. To be able to do that, Sarah would have to attribute “at least
28 Woodruff and Premack 1978: 518.

two states of mind to the human actor, namely, intention or purpose on the
one hand, and knowledge or belief on the other.”29
However, because there were a number of possible alternative explana-
tions to the theory of mind hypothesis – namely, that Sarah’s behavior
could be explained through association learning or empathy, Woodruff and
Premack expanded Sarah’s tests in an attempt to eliminate the possibility
that Sarah was either generalizing old situations to predict new ones (rather
than attributing mental states) or that she was simply putting herself in the
place of the human actor (simulating rather than reasoning).
To control for association learning, Sarah was shown four novel videotaped
scenarios requiring her, again, to choose the photograph representing the
solution to the problem in the video. Sarah performed significantly better
than chance. To control for empathy, the actors in the videos were now
a former acquaintance of Sarah’s to whom she showed no affection and,
alternatively, Sarah’s favorite caregiver. Sarah selected the right responses to
solve the problem for the actor she liked and selected the wrong responses,
failing to solve the problem, for the actor she didn’t care for at a highly
significant rate. This meant that she wasn’t putting herself into the position
of the human but, instead, could recognize distinct humans, solving the
problem for the human she liked and not solving the problem for the human
she didn’t.30
From this series of tests, Woodruff and Premack concluded that future
research would show that chimpanzees can correctly attribute wants, inten-
tions, and purposes to others. It appeared that some animals, other than
humans, had a theory of mind, only it wasn’t as sophisticated as human the-
ory of mind. However, as was the case with tool use and language use, some
people denied that this work defeated human exceptionalism. In response,
specifically focused experiments were conducted to determine whether chim-
panzees could pass what are called “non-verbal false belief tests,” often used
with human children before they can speak. A test was designed to determine
whether chimpanzees understood that seeing meant knowing. Two humans
would stand outside an enclosure with a desirable food item. One of the
29 Ibid.: 515.
30 I have known Sarah for many years (although not when she was performing these partic-
ular tests) and the observation about helping someone she likes and not helping someone
she doesn’t like sounds just like Sarah to me.
humans would not be able to see the chimpanzee. (Her eyes might be cov-
ered; she would have a bucket over her head; or she would be looking away.)
The other human would be looking right at the chimpanzee. If the chim-
panzee went to the human that could see him and asked for food, rather than
going to the human who could not see him to ask for food, researchers could
conclude that the chimpanzees understood that seeing was an important part
of the way individuals formed mental states. Chimpanzees approached the
humans randomly in this set of experiments.31 None of this work supported
the original conclusion that chimpanzees could attribute wants, intentions,
beliefs, or purposes to themselves or others. Indeed, quite the opposite was
being claimed. For example, in her 1998 article, Cecilia Heyes suggested that
“there is still no convincing evidence of theory of mind in primates. We should
stop asking Premack & Woodruff’s question.”32
There are a number of reasons why convincing evidence that chimpanzees
had a theory of mind was lacking. One was that the standards for what would
count as evidence kept changing as the meaning of ToM kept changing. For
example, Heyes writes, “an animal with a theory of mind believes that mental
states play a causal role in generating behavior and infers the presence of
mental states in others by observing their appearance and behavior under
various circumstances.”33 To have a theory of mind under this definition is
not just to make attributions of mental states to others in predicting their
behavior but also to have a view about how those mental states causally affect
the behavior. This involves having a concept of causation. Like the tool use
and language use debates, it looked like the bar was getting higher for what
it meant to have a theory of mind.
Then Brian Hare and his colleagues noticed that chimpanzees did seem to
understand something about the visual perception of other chimpanzees.34
Hare created an experiment in which a subordinate chimpanzee and a dom-
inant chimpanzee were put in competition over food, and showed that the
subordinate would systematically approach the food the dominant could not
see and avoid the food the dominant could see.35 In a variation on this theme,
a subordinate watched food being hidden that the dominant could only some-
times see, depending on whether or not the dominant chimpanzee’s door was
open or closed during the time of hiding. When the dominant was released,
31 Povinelli, et al. 1996. 32 Heyes 1998: 102. 33 Ibid.

34 Hare, et al. 2000. 35 Hare & Tomasello 2001.
the subordinate would only approach the food that the dominant had not
seen being hidden, even though the dominant could see it now. After a series
of experiments, the researchers claimed, “We therefore believe that these
studies show what they seem to show, namely that chimpanzees actually
know something about the content of what others see and, at least in some
situations, how this governs their behavior.”36 They concluded, “At issue is no
less than the nature of human cognitive uniqueness. We now believe that our
own and others’ previous hypotheses to the effect that chimpanzees do not
understand any psychological states at all were simply too sweeping.”37 The
researchers attribute the chimpanzee’s success in demonstrating an under-
standing of another’s psychological state to the ecological relevancy of the
experiment. Food competition, they suggest, rather than begging for food
from a human, is a more species-typical behavior and is, therefore, more
likely to be accompanied by complex social cognitive abilities.
Although there is still some debate about what exactly these ecologically
relevant changes mean in terms of whether chimpanzees have a theory of
mind, it is interesting to recognize that chimpanzees may be more interested
in solving problems that appear “natural” to them. When researchers stepped
back and observed what the chimpanzees tended to do when interacting
among themselves, and then designed the experiments based on those obser-
vations, the results were markedly different than those that emerged when
the experimental paradigm was designed as if chimpanzees were socially and
behaviorally like human children. What counts as a “natural” problem, par-
ticularly for individuals who have spent their entire lives in captivity, is itself
an interesting question we will explore in the next chapter. The acknowledg-
ment that we may learn more when we look at other animals behaving in
ways that are species-typical is an important insight that will certainly help
us to understand their cognitive processes. Their way of seeing us and their
worlds may turn out to be quite different than the way we see them and
imagine they see our world.
Ethical engagement
Some have argued that what makes humans unique is our ability to engage
in ethical behavior. Surely, no other animals can be said to act morally. Yet, it
36 Tomasello, et al. 2003: 155. 37 Ibid.: 156.

does seem that when the dolphins mentioned at the beginning of this chapter
were protecting the New Zealand swimmers from the great white shark they
were engaging in something like ethical behavior. In order to determine
whether or not it makes sense to think of dolphins and other animals as ethical
beings, or whether humans are the lone residents of an ethical universe, we
need to have a working definition of morality, keeping in mind that there have
been long-standing and unresolved religious, philosophical, and scientific
debates about the definition and domain of morality. If morality requires
scrutinizing one’s reasons for acting and deciding whether those reasons
would justify that particular action – which seems to require language and,
possibly, a theory of mind – then we are back to the debates just reviewed.
For some philosophers in the Kantian tradition, this is what morality consists
of – being able to formulate a principle of action, to reflect on that principle,
and, ultimately, to determine whether it can be willed to be a universal law.
And if that is what it means to be ethical, then in all likelihood no other
animals are ethical, and it may turn out that some humans aren’t either.
(We’ll discuss that possibility further in the next chapter.) However, if we
think of morality as involving other-regarding concerns and behaviors, then
it may well be that other animals could be considered moral. Protecting
the sick or weak (sometimes referred to as altruistic behavior), cooperation,
acting empathetically, and following norms all look like moral behaviors and
animals seem to engage in behaviors that can be described in these ways.
In Bossou in West Africa, chimpanzees are occasionally observed crossing
roads that intersect with their territories. One of the roads is busy with traffic;
the other is mostly a pedestrian route; and both are dangerous to the chim-
panzees. On videotaped recordings of chimpanzee behavior at the crossings,
researchers observed that adult males took up forward and rear positions,
with adult females and young occupying the more protected middle posi-
tions. The position of the dominant and bolder individuals, in particular the
alpha male, changed depending on both the degree of risk and number of
adult males present. Researchers suggested that cooperative action in the
higher-risk situation was probably aimed at maximizing group protection.38
This sort of risk-taking for the sake of others is often observed in male patrols
of territorial boundaries in other parts of Africa. In these instances, a bold
male, who may or may not be the alpha of the group, together with others
38 Hockings, et al. 2006.

with whom he has an alliance, begins a patrol with the goal of obtaining
potential food rewards, as well as of protecting the group from neighboring
threats.39
Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan conducted experiments to analyze coop-
erative food-sharing behavior among chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys in
captivity. They found that adults were more likely to share food with indi-
viduals who had groomed them earlier in the day. Grooming involves one
individual using his or her hands to look through another chimpanzee’s coat,
picking out nits, inspecting for injuries, but mostly the behavior seems to pro-
vide enjoyment for the one being groomed and the one grooming. De Waal
and Brosnan suggested that their results could be explained in two ways: the
“good-mood hypothesis,” in which individuals who have received grooming
are in a benevolent mood and respond by sharing with all individuals, or
the “exchange hypothesis,” in which the individual who has been groomed
responds by sharing food only with the groomer. The data indicated that the
sharing was specific to the previous groomer. The chimpanzees remembered
who had performed a service (grooming) and responded to that individual
by sharing food. De Waal and Brosnan also observed that grooming between
individuals who rarely did so was found to have a greater effect on sharing
than grooming between partners who commonly groomed each other. Among
partnerships in which little grooming was usually exchanged, there was a
more pronounced effect of previous grooming on subsequent food sharing.
They suggest that being groomed by an individual who doesn’t usually groom
might be more noticeable and, thus, warrant greater response in the form of
food sharing, or it could be what they call “calculated reciprocity.” They write:
“not only do the chimpanzees regulate their food sharing based on previous
grooming, but they recognize unusual effort and reward accordingly.”40 In a
different set of studies, de Waal and his collaborators described reconciliation
behaviors in which a high-ranking female will work to help two male chim-
panzees “make up” after an altercation. This kind of behavior, in which the
female first attends to the “winner,” then reassures the “loser” and encour-
ages him to follow her to a grooming session with the winner, has no obvious
or immediate benefit for the female, but does impact social harmony. Once
the males begin grooming each other, she will usually leave them alone.41
39 Muller & Mitani 2005. 40 Brosnan & de Waal 2002: 141. 41 de Waal 2000.
Recently, Christopher Boesch and his colleagues reported eighteen cases

of adoption of orphaned chimpanzees in the Tai forest of Côte d’Ivoire. They
describe the adoption of the youngsters, and the extended care it requires, as
altruistic behavior. Interestingly, half of the adoptions were done by males,
only one of whom proved to be the father. From this fascinating set of obser-
vations the researchers concluded that “under the appropriate socio-ecologic
conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of other unrelated group
members.”42
And it is not just chimpanzees that engage in altruistic, cooperative,
peacemaking, other-regarding behaviors. Marc Bekoff, an ethologist who stud-
ies canid play behavior and has written widely on animal behavior, recounts
numerous examples of moral behaviors in other animals:
A teenage female elephant nursing an injured leg is knocked over by a

rambunctious hormone-laden teenage male. An older female sees this
happen, chases the male away, and goes back to the younger female and
touches her sore leg with her trunk . . . A rat in a cage refuses to push a lever
for food when it sees that another rat receives an electric shock as a result. A
male Diana monkey who learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food
helps a female who can’t get the hang of the trick, inserting the token for her
and allowing her to eat the food reward. A female fruit-eating bat helps an
unrelated female give birth by showing her how to hang in the proper
way . . . A large male dog wants to play with a younger and more submissive
male. The big male invites his younger partner to play and when they play,
the big dog restrains himself and bites his younger companion gently and
allows him to bite gently in return. Do these examples show that animals
display moral behavior, that they can be compassionate, empathic, altruistic,
and fair? Yes they do. Animals not only have a sense of justice, but also a sense
of empathy, forgiveness, trust, reciprocity, and much more as well.43
Humans are much more sophisticated at large-scale cooperation, and, of

course, only humans engage in moral theorizing. But we shouldn’t forget that
we are also capable of engaging in tremendously evil acts. As one reporter put
it: “We’re a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness . . . And
at the same time . . . we’ve visited untold horrors on ourselves . . . [think of]
all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species
42 Boesch, et al. 2010. 43 Bekoff 2009: 1. See also Bekoff & Pierce 2009.
the planet has produced. That we’re also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-
drenched species is our shame – and our paradox.”44
While there are obvious differences between humans and other animals,
these differences are, as Darwin noted, ones “of degree and not of kind.”45 I
have discussed only a small amount of the fascinating work on animal cog-
nition suggesting that other animals may have some of the cognitive skills
that were once thought to be unique to humans. These capacities have been
observed in less elaborate form in other animals, and, usually, the more com-
plex cognitive capacities tend to be exhibited in our closest living animal
relatives, the great apes, but not always. Because human behavior and cogni-
tion share deep evolutionary roots with the behavior and cognition of other
animals, approaches that try to find sharp behavioral or cognitive boundaries
between humans and other animals will have to fill significant explanatory
gaps.
What we can take away from this discussion is that the empirical search
for a capacity or set of capacities that distinguishes humans from all other
animals has lead to rich and provocative understandings of other animals
and of ourselves, yet it has not provided a definitive conclusion about what
is unique to all humans. Whether the study of other animals, particularly
in their natural settings, is motivated by an interest in finding unique dif-
ferences or in studying evolutionary continuities, what we have learned can
usefully inform our attitudes and our behavior toward other animals. This
is a welcome result from investigations that, at times, generated somewhat
fruitless debates. And even though the empirical task of finding the capac-
ity that makes humans unique has not yet led to definitive conclusions, one
conclusion we certainly cannot draw is that humans and other animals are
indistinguishable. All animals are different one from the other, as members
of biological groups and as individuals. Chimpanzees are closer to humans
genetically and evolutionarily than either is to another great ape, the gorilla.
All great apes are markedly different from ungulates, carnivores quite distinct
from herbivores, monotremes very unlike cats. Some animals spend their
lives with their families, while others leave as soon as they are able. Some ani-
mals form lifelong pair-bonds; others are promiscuous. Humans have these
variations, too. Given the tremendous variety of animal shapes, sizes, social
structures, behaviors, and habitats, creating a human–animal divide really is
44 Kluger 2007. 45 Darwin 1888: 193.

a peculiar way to categorize organisms. Yet, marking difference in this way

serves multiple purposes and is not necessarily meant to be biologically, func-
tionally, or even conceptually neat. The divide in many ways supports, and
perhaps results from, human exceptionalism that requires conceptualizing
animals as others, particularly others of lesser worth.
Does difference matter morally?
Though there are many ways that humans are different from other animals,
the truly problematic feature of human exceptionalism is its second implicit
claim: the normative claim that elevates humans above other animals. By
“normative,” I mean evaluative – having to do with right and wrong, good
and bad, valuable or worthless. “Normative” has a more popular meaning
alluding to social expectations and what society views as “normal.” The social
norms in most parts of the world, though often very different, are similar in
one respect – they tend toward human exceptionalism. People are expected
to value humans above other animals. That is what is “normative” in the
popular sense. In fact, people who focus too much on animals, or who treat
their companion animals as children, for example, are often thought to be
pretty weird, not quite “normal.” I am not concerned here with this sense of
normative – that is, what people think makes humans unique or what society
judges to be uniquely valuable in humans. Rather I am interested in why,
from a more abstract philosophical perspective, having some capacity makes
the possessor better or worthy of more ethical concern than someone who
doesn’t have that capacity. The normative in this sense has to do with the
ethical weight we attach to some capacity that makes humans exceptional.
Suppose I have a really good friend who is a math wiz; he is exceptionally
good at it. He has a capacity that I don’t have. I’m not bad at math; I just
have to work very hard at it. Neither of us thinks that because he finds math
easy and I find it hard that he is better than me from an ethical perspective.
His skill with math just makes him the better choice if there is a calculus
problem in need of solution. That he is really good at math doesn’t give him
more rights, or more of a claim to ethical attention from others. We have
equal rights and equal claims to moral attention. There are certain traits or
capacities – being good at math, tall, blonde, bilingual (the list could go on) –
that simply do not make a difference from an ethical point of view. They are
irrelevant to thinking about what humans deserve or the way in which our
claims to respect or equal treatment are addressed.
So which traits or capacities are relevant from an ethical point of view? This
is another way of asking the question we are concerned with in this section. Let
us suppose for the sake of argument that there is some empirically identifiable
behavior, or capacity X, that is unique to human beings. Suppose it is the case
that only humans use sophisticated toolkits or language with a generative
grammar or have the capacity to attribute mental states to others. Why are
those capacities what makes an individual deserving of moral attention? Why
do these differences make a moral difference?
Those who advocate human exceptionalism as an ethical stance must pro-
vide answers to these questions. In virtue of what do all and only humans
matter morally? Let’s suppose the answer is that all, and only, humans mat-
ter because we use language. We would now want to ask why this is the
capacity that matters. There are a number of answers that could be given.
Those who use language can articulate their needs and interests and make
direct claims on others who might otherwise neglect those needs or violate
those interests. If someone is encroaching on me or acting in a way I deem
wrong or harmful, I can say so. (Of course, whether or not I’m heard or under-
stood is another matter.) I can use language to express my disapproval or
to demand recognition. I can protest certain types of unethical actions with
language. Since language is required to develop and convey ethical norms
and expectations, and language is the means by which we teach those norms
and correct violations, perhaps it is the capacity that indicates that humans
are uniquely deserving of moral concern.
These are important reasons that speak in favor of considering language-
users within the sphere of moral concern, but the class of language-users is
not identical to the class of humans. Not all humans have this capacity, so
human exceptionalism may not actually apply to all humans. If the boundary
for inclusion in the class of morally considerable beings is drawn around
all, and only, language-users, then humans who do not use language will
not be the subjects of moral concern. They will be outside of the sphere.
If they are outside the sphere delineating to whom ethical consideration is
warranted, then ethical issues would not directly arise in our interactions
with and treatment of them. They would only matter indirectly, as long as
those who matter directly had an interest in them. If they were not of concern
to language-users, the only individuals that matter directly on this account,
then non-linguistic humans could be used, enslaved, even killed, and that
would not be ethically wrong.
This is a frightening conclusion to draw. Humans who don’t use language
still have interests and needs that we generally think should be of moral
concern. When we think about acts of ethical heroism – running up the
stairs as a skyscraper is collapsing to try to save people, jumping into a chim-
panzee enclosure to try to save a chimp who has fallen into the moat and
is drowning, running into a burning building to rescue a family rendered
unconscious due to smoke inhalation – there often isn’t communication in
those instances, either because those in need are unconscious, don’t possess
developed language abilities, or there just isn’t time to talk. And it isn’t the
fact that they could use language that makes saving them right and impor-
tant. We don’t thank the firefighter for saving the family of language-users.
Risking one’s own well-being to protect the well-being of another is seldom
based on a determination of whether or not the individual is a language-user.
We don’t generally think of language use as a necessary condition for moral
consideration in the case of humans.
It might be argued that we don’t need to have conversations with humans
in danger to know that they are in trouble. If the circumstances were different,
they would use language to tell us that they would like their interests and
needs protected. Indeed, language is what allows us to organize and develop
emergency response teams who can go out and successfully do the right thing
in times of trouble.
While this is all true, and our ability to communicate through language is
a valuable capacity, being able to communicate through language isn’t tied to
the ability to experience undesirable states. Language helps us communicate
our desire not to be in such states, but it is being in such a state, not our ability
to express it, that matters morally. It isn’t only linguistic beings who may
experience distress. And we know this because non-linguistic beings – human
infants, humans with particular sorts of cognitive deficits, and other animals –
are capable of expressing their interests and needs without language. They are
certainly able to express distress, despair, and pain without language. Some
non-linguistic animals are even capable of expressing disapproval; when an
individual in their social group acts in ways that are inappropriate, others
in the group will punish the one who is misbehaving. Given that interests
and needs can be communicated both through language as well as through
other non-verbal forms of communication and practices, the capacity to use
language does not appear to be necessary for inclusion in the sphere of moral
concern.
The ability to use tools, possession of a theory of mind, planning ahead,
having a sense of humor, pointing to get someone’s attention, and engaging
in cooperation, all require cognitive skills, skills that are characteristic of
normal adult human beings. But they are not capacities that all humans
have, and, as we’ve seen, it may very well be that some other animals do have
these capacities, often in less sophisticated forms. Not all humans have the
exact same set of unique cognitive capacities, and if human exceptionalism
is meant to help us see why we should direct our moral attention to all and
only humans, we will discover that the view is flawed, as many of the most
vulnerable among us will be overlooked. Additionally, some other animals,
maybe dolphins or great apes, have fairly impressive cognitive skills, and
excluding them from moral attention simply because they are not human
amounts to nothing more than morphological or species-based prejudice.
Human exceptionalism, as an ethical position, is untenable.
Who is ethically considerable?
Since it seems that the boundary of moral concern cannot be drawn defensibly
around humans based on some unique, ethically relevant capacity that all and
only humans share, we cannot pay exclusive attention to the claims of only
other humans. If we must pay attention to how our actions affect more than
humans, though, how do we know to whom or to what to direct our moral
attention? Who can make claims on us that demand a moral response and on
what basis can such claims be made? Our lives are complicated, filled with
all sorts of beings and things that are affected by our behavior both directly,
through our immediate actions, and indirectly, through the choices and plans
we make. Which of those beings and things ought we to consider from an
ethical point of view?
Let’s now turn to some suggestions about how to answer these questions.
We will see that there are ways of answering these questions that extend the
moral sphere far beyond humans and other animals, to include plants and
all living beings, but in this section, we will primarily focus on why other
animals should command our moral attention.
One way to approach the question of who matters morally is to imagine
the following thought experiment. Suppose you have been abducted by aliens
who, you fear, plan to do things to you that you would rather not have done.
You decide you want to try to communicate with these aliens, and your hope
is that they might respond to reason. A couple of aliens appear at the door of
the enclosure where you are captive, and you decide to try to reason with your
captors, encouraging them to return you to your life on Earth. What exactly
would you say?
Imagine that you have figured out a way to communicate clearly with the
aliens; your words don’t sound like shrieks, hoots, or grunts to them. You
might express your desire not to be held captive, that being held against
your will is wrong, and that it prevents you from doing not just the things
you want to be doing at home, but the things you are supposed to be doing.
These aliens are frustrating your desires and preventing you from fulfilling
your obligations to others. You might explain that you are a rational and
sensitive individual who has immediate desires and long-term plans that you
hope to satisfy. You don’t think you should be treated as a means to some
alien ends. You might try to bargain with them, telling them you will do
something for them if they do something for you. You have relationships to
others that you want to continue to pursue, and you would be willing to
develop a relationship with them if they respect you. You value your freedom
and your ability to make choices. You need to be with your friends, family,
and others of your kind. If you are forced to stay with the aliens, you will
become bored, frustrated, lonely, angry, and depressed. You may even die.
Holding you captive, against your will, harms you in many, many ways.
Now let’s imagine you are successful convincing the aliens, and after a
few minutes you find yourself back in your own home. You persuaded the
aliens that your interests and well-being are worthy of their moral attention.
You probably would not have convinced them by saying you are human or a
member of the species Homo sapiens. That was obvious when they abducted
you, and it didn’t matter to them at that point. What does matter, pointedly
in this hypothetical case but importantly in our ordinary interactions, is that
when there are values at stake, ethical agents are called to respond, and in
our science fiction scenario it appears that the aliens thought of themselves
as ethical agents and responded well.
If we turn this thought experiment around and put ourselves in the posi-
tion of the aliens, or just see ourselves as conscientious ethical agents, and
think of the animals we produce, fatten, and slaughter in industrial agricul-
ture; those we experiment on in laboratories; those we hold captive in zoos,
aquariums, and circuses; those we are destroying in their native habitats; and
even those we have as pets, we can again imagine how they might respond to
us if they were able to communicate with us in ways that didn’t sound like
shrieks, hoots, or grunts. As ethical agents, we want to make our way through
the world taking the right sorts of actions, making the right sorts of choices,
and doing good for, or at least preventing harm to, others. In thinking about
other animals, then, we should consider whether our actions and our choices
can do them good, promote their well-being, or, conversely, cause them harm.
In our hypothetical scenario, we identified a number of values that we
wanted the aliens to recognize as providing them with reasons to act differ-
ently, to let us go. In the reversed situation, the values that are at stake will be
different, depending on the animal that we might understand to be making
the claim for our moral attention. Of course, in “making a claim” the animals
will not actually be formulating sentences to express the values they want
respected and promoted. They probably don’t recognize such values as values.
The challenge for us, as ethical agents who are responsive to values, is to try
to identify what values are being threatened in their particular contexts, to
try to make their claims on us understandable, and to act accordingly.
Living beings
Living a good life, in which individual well-being and flourishing is promoted,

is not an uncommon goal, and it is one that most would like supported in
an ethical world. Not only humans have this goal. The lives of all animals,
humans and non-humans alike, can go better or worse for them. There are
some things that are necessary for lives to go well, and discovering what those
things are will provide a first step in recognizing what sort of values are at
stake in a world where not everyone is in a position to lead a good life.
Having a life is certainly a fundamental value, and ending that life, other
things being equal, would be a clear way of destroying something valuable.
There are many philosophical difficulties here, and we will be exploring some
of these in the chapters ahead. What is important for current purposes is
to recognize that being alive is necessary for any other values to exist, and
there is, thus, a prima facie reason for valuing life itself. From an ethical
point of view there are vast differences between throwing away an inanimate
object, like a chair, and killing a living being, like a cheetah. In the case of the
inanimate object, there may be ethical questions that arise, for example, when
considering the proper disposal of the chair. It would be a bad idea to throw the
chair out of a window from a high-rise building onto a busy street below, but it
wouldn’t be bad for the chair, just the hapless passerby who might be hit by it.
In the case of living beings, ending life has complex ethical implications, and
it is usually bad for the one being killed. Consider the cheetah. We would want
to know whether this individual is healthy and would be destined to live many
more satisfying years. Destroying the cheetah under those conditions would
be bad for the cheetah, as it would foreclose the possibility of having future
valuable experiences. If the individual is terminally ill or gravely injured,
or already at the end of his life and barely existing with a very low quality
of life, then maybe killing him would not be so bad, but here, unlike the
case of inanimate objects, there are distinct questions of values. For example,
we may consider how the life of this individual affects the lives of others.
Will killing the cheetah hurt his family? Will they be able to survive without
him?
Plants, trees, and other parts of nature are also alive, and some theorists
have argued that, insofar as life is valuable, all living things should be consid-
ered from an ethical point of view. Noted theologian Albert Schweitzer, for
example, extolled a reverence for life and urged people to consider ending
life only if it is absolutely necessary.
Whenever I injure life of any sort, I must be quite clear whether it is

necessary. Beyond the unavoidable, I must never go, not even with what
seems insignificant. The farmer, who has mown down a thousand flowers in
his meadow as fodder for his cows, must be careful on his way home not to
strike off in wanton pastime the head of a single flower by the roadside, for he
thereby commits a wrong against life without being under the pressure of
necessity.46
In environmental ethics, biocentrists like Paul Taylor see all living things as
“teleological centers of life” and, as such, deserving of ethical consideration.47
Kenneth Goodpaster has also argued that all life matters from a moral point
of view. Plants, he suggests, like animals, have interests, and those interests
should be taken into account when making an ethical decision about life and
death.48
46 Schweitzer 1936. 47 Taylor 1986. 48 Goodpaster 1978.

Having interests
From an ethical point of view, the interests of all who have them should
be taken into account. To favor someone’s interests over another’s, simply
because you like, want to impress, or can relate to the first person, and dislike,
don’t care about, or can’t relate to the second person, would be objectionably
prejudicial. It is generally considered ethically wrong to engage in prejudicial
considerations or considerations that cannot be justified through argumen-
tation. It would seem to be prejudicial to ignore plant interests because they
are just plants. But does this mean that we should consider the interests of a
tree in not being chopped down as equivalent to the interests of a perfectly
healthy college student in not being killed? In order to answer this question,
we will need to be more precise about what we mean by “interests.” There are
two senses of interests. To say that A has an interest in X could mean that A
is interested in X – that is, A likes X or is aiming at X. I could be interested
in starting a sanctuary for primates no longer needed in biomedical research
or the entertainment industry. I might spend hours thinking about where to
locate the sanctuary. I might look for land, conduct research on ways to reha-
bilitate animals who have had traumatic lives, and visit existing sanctuaries.
This sense of interest requires that I direct my intentions and actions in a
particular way.
Another sense of the phrase “A has an interest in X” is that X will benefit
A, that X is conducive to A’s good. Perhaps I have a heart ailment that is made
better by a particular vitamin supplement. Taking that supplement would
be in my interests, but I needn’t be interested in taking the supplement. A
could be interested in X, but X may not be in A’s interests; and X could be
in A’s interests, but A may not be at all interested in X. The two senses are
distinct. Plants and trees may have interests in the second sense – that is,
they are the sorts of things that can have their interests negatively affected,
when they are chopped down, or lack water and light, but they will never
be interested in that impact. Animals, on the other hand, are the sorts of
beings that have both sorts of interests. Things can be against their interests,
and they can intentionally direct their actions. Unlike plants, animals, both
human and non-human, can express their interests as wants or desires that
can be interpreted through their actions.
So, in addition to the value of life, all animals have interests in both senses
and express those interests as wants or desires. Satisfying particular interests,
wants, and desires contributes to making a life a good life. Frustrating partic-
ular interests, wants, and desires diminishes well-being. Of course, there are
philosophical complications here, too. What if someone wants what is bad
for them, maybe they have distorted desires? Is there some objective way to
tell what interests, wants, and desires will be conducive to well-being, or does
it just depend on how the individual feels when his or her interests, wants,
and desires are satisfied? How do we know how another feels, particularly
if they are a different kind of animal? It will be worthwhile to explore this
debate about the nature and value of well-being a bit here as it will help us to
identify to what we should be ethically attending when we seek to promote
the interests of others.
Well-being
Some have argued that an individual has a high level of well-being if she has
attained some number of valuable things that can be represented on what has
been called an “objective list.” So, for example, if a recent college graduate
has physical health and bodily integrity, is able to think freely and dream, has
meaningful loving relations with others with whom she can freely choose to
associate, pursues the good life and has achieved success, is able to live in a
healthy environment, and has time to laugh, play, relax, and enjoy herself,
then it could be said that she has a high level of well-being.49 It would be hard
to argue that being healthy and having friendships, meaningful work, and
the like are not the sorts of things that are valuable and conducive to well-
being for humans. However, it might be suggested that, while these things
are generally conducive to our well-being, it is possible that the individual
who has them doesn’t consider herself to be at a high level of well-being,
perhaps because these aren’t the things that really matter to her. Perhaps,
what would constitute her well-being would be to live a purer, more pious
life, renouncing everything else in order to become more contemplative, and
she hasn’t succeeded in that. Regardless of what can be observed from the
outside, if an individual’s life does not contain the things that she herself finds
most valuable or important, then it would be a mistake to claim that she has
49 This is a partial list that draws on Nussbaum 2000: 78–80. She extends her list to include
animals, as we will see in the next section.
well-being. Well-being cannot be judged externally; it must be experienced

from the inside.
But if well-being is a mental state, which sorts of mental state or states con-
stitute well-being? Hedonistic theories identify well-being with happiness or
pleasure, where happiness and pleasure are desirable states of consciousness.
But consider a possibility that the movie The Matrix makes vivid cinemati-
cally. In the movie, humans are used as batteries to sustain machines, and,
in exchange, humans are given the illusion that they are having real lives, so
that they have desirable states of consciousness.50 The humans spend their
entire lives in pods that maintain their vital functions. They don’t move, they
don’t see, they don’t interact and they have no real experiences. When a few
of the humans living in this state become aware of it, they fight hard to leave
the matrix to enter the “real world,” and it seems obvious why. Being deceived
into thinking that one is having pleasure, or that one has desirable conscious-
ness, is not the same as having well-being. Well-being requires actual, not
illusory, engagement with the world.
The possibility that one may be deceived into pleasurable mental states
has led others to argue that well-being is more adequately captured by some
version of “desire satisfaction theory.” This sort of theory attempts to connect
mental states – namely, desires – with the world through their satisfaction.
Let’s suppose that our recent college graduate desires the love of her family,
a secure amount of wealth, and to be healthy, and that these desires are
reasonable. Let’s suppose further that she, in fact, has these things, yet she
doubts that her loved ones love her, fears that she will lose all her money
in a volatile stock market, and, even though she is healthy, worries that she
has some catastrophic, incurable disease. According to a desire-satisfaction
theory, only when she recognizes that her friends and family really do love
her, that she has made wise investment decisions, and that she is in good
health, will she have a high level of well-being. Her reasonable desires will be
satisfied. Of course, it is also possible that she is suspicious and pessimistic
by nature and no amount of evidence about how much she is actually loved,
how secure her wealth is, and how healthy she is will change her view of her
well-being. If this is the case, then the fact that her desires are satisfied will not
change her subjective experience of her own level of well-being. She may have
50 As a number of philosophers writing about The Matrix note, the movie represents a similar
problem to Nozick’s experience machine. See Nozick 1974 and Grau 2005.
uncorrectable misperceptions about her situation, believing that her desires

have not been satisfied, and, as a result, a low level of well-being despite the
fact that she has, indeed, satisfied her desires. So, the desire-satisfaction view,
even though it ties well-being to the desires a person has, still doesn’t capture
well-being from the inside.
While it is hard to deny that an individual’s sense of well-being must
be experienced (sensed) from the inside, there are also objective conditions
that must factor in to third-party determinations of well-being, factors that
are of particular interest to us. This is especially important when we are
trying to promote the well-being of those with whom we cannot directly com-
municate, such as other animals who cannot express in words what their
subjective states are. What might these objective conditions be? All beings
that have interests, wants, and desires are sentient, that is, they are capable
of experiencing pleasures and pains. And all sentient beings require basic
sorts of things in order to function at all.51 The minimal conditions for such
functioning – adequate nutrition and hydration, relative health and bodily
integrity, shelter from the elements, a non-toxic living environment, freedom
of movement, social engagement (for social beings), and freedom of expres-
sion in its various forms – seem non-controversial, and how these conditions
are satisfied will vary depending on the type of animal being considered.
An individual who is starving or sick, or who has been mutilated, poisoned,
imprisoned, kept in solitary confinement, or silenced (either physically or
psychologically) cannot be thought to have well-being. While the humans
serving as batteries in The Matrix have their nutritional needs met, for exam-
ple, and while they may believe they are happy and living meaningful lives,
the minimal requirements for well-being are absent. Thus, they cannot be
said to have well-being. This would also be true for individuals who are living
in solitary confinement, even when they are fed, can walk around their cells,
and are permitted to scream or sing or talk to themselves. If, against the odds,
51 I am alluding here to Amartya Sen’s functionings and capabilities account of well-being.

According to Sen, “The well-being of a person can be seen in terms of the quality (the
‘well-ness,’ as it were) of the person’s being. Living may be seen as consisting of a set of
interrelated ‘functionings,’ consisting of beings and doings. . . . The relevant functionings
can vary from such elementary things as being adequately nourished, being in good
health, avoiding escapable morbidity and premature mortality, etc. to more complex
achievements such as being happy, having self-respect, taking part in the life of the
community and so on.” Sen 1992: 39.
they are able to find some contentment or satisfaction in their thoughts, they
nonetheless lack well-being. Other animals who are confined, or who have
their lives controlled and bodies manipulated, also lack well-being, because
they are denied the minimal requirements necessary for its achievement.
The avoidance of pain and the exercise of relative freedoms represent the
basic interests of sentient beings. This sets a minimal limit on what ethical
agents should attend to when they are seeking to promote well-being. So, to
return us to our alien thought experiment: when you were attempting to
reason with the aliens, you expressed the value of being sentient, of having
interests and desires that were frustrated, of suffering physically and emo-
tionally from being away from your home and family. These are values that
we share with other sentient beings. You also expressed your value as an eth-
ical agent: that you had obligations to others and autonomy that was being
thwarted. It is not clear that other animals could make similar claims, and,
as we’ll see in the next chapter, there are some humans who can’t either. If
an individual is not autonomous in a certain sense, one in which freedom
depends on the ability to reflect on actions and choices and make decisions
about which of the actions one has reason to pursue, then denying that indi-
vidual autonomy will not constitute a harm. But, as we will see in Chapter 5,
there may be other ways of thinking about the meaning of autonomy. When
we deny sentient beings their basic interests we cause them to suffer emotion-
ally, physically, or both, and we are causing them harm. Other things being
equal, from an ethical point of view, harming another is a source of concern.
Of course, not all harms can be avoided. When interests conflict, as they often
do in our world of limited resources, we need guidance on how to adjudicate
these conflicts.
Attending to other animals
Other animals matter because, like us, their lives can go better or worse for
them. They are sentient beings who have interests and well-beings. They can be
harmed when their interests are thwarted and their wellness is undermined.
In an ideal world, we would be able to live harmoniously with one another
and with other animals, there would be no conflicts, and everyone would
have their interests satisfied. We don’t live in an ideal world. Insofar as we
have to make choices about how to act ethically when interests conflict,
having theoretical frameworks to guide our thinking and our actions will
be most useful. Fortunately, philosophers have developed a variety of such

frameworks to help us navigate difficult ethical terrain. These frameworks,
usually referred to as normative ethical theories, tend to conflict with one
another in principle, but very often lead to the same general conclusions
about courses of action. They provide us with different types of reasons for
acting in one way or another, but, on occasions, as we will see throughout this
book, they can be used to build upon each other to support a more inclusive
way of looking at our ethical obligations to other animals.
Utilitarianism
One of the strongest ethical theories to articulate how we ought to attend to

other animals is utilitarianism. As a theory that is fundamentally concerned
with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for all those affected by any
given action, it is not hard to understand what motivated classical utilitarian-
ism’s founding father, Jeremy Bentham, to extend the theory to other animals.
Bentham directly addressed the question we explored in the last section, but,
for him, pleasure and pain are what matter. As he famously stated, it can’t
be “the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of
the os sacrum . . . What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it
the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty for discourse? . . . The question is
not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”52 Utilitarians
include all sentient beings, beings who can suffer, in their calculus to deter-
mine what actions are right and what actions are not. If a course of action
will lead to more suffering than pleasure for all those who are affected by that
action, then that action will be ethically impermissible. It doesn’t matter if
the suffering accrues to moles or men, or if the pleasure accrues to wombats
or women. Once it is aggregated and compared, the course of action with the
least suffering is the course of action ethically required.
Peter Singer, who is often thought of as the “father of the modern ani-
mal rights movement,” argues for a more complex version of utilitarianism
than Bentham’s. His is a preference utilitarian view that applies to all beings
who have preferences, and it actually has nothing to do with animal “rights”
per se. Singer, like utilitarians before him, is concerned about promoting
pleasure and minimizing suffering, not in establishing rights, particularly
52 Bentham 1789: Ch. 17, n. 122.

rights that cannot be overridden by considerations of the greater good. For

utilitarians, who seek to bring about the best consequences when all morally
relevant interests are taken into account, rights can be violated if it would
promote the most good. According to Singer, if a being suffers, that suffering
must be taken into account along with the like suffering of others, and it
doesn’t matter what species the suffering being is. If it turns out, after all the
interests in not suffering are taken into account, that the action that leads to
the least overall suffering involves causing some suffering, maybe even some
death, to goats or gibbons, for example, then that action will be justified. It is
important to note that if less suffering overall would result by causing your
grandmother to suffer, then that would be the right course of action, too.
There is a difference, however, in Singer’s view, between killing a goat and
killing your grandmother, even if that killing is done painlessly. Although all
like suffering is to be given equal consideration, painlessly killing a goat may
be justified, whereas painlessly killing your grandmother may not be. This is
because, arguably, your grandmother can explicitly formulate her preference
for continued existence whereas the goat cannot. According to Singer, caus-
ing a being to suffer or violating that being’s interests is wrong only when it
fails to promote the greatest amount of interest satisfaction, all things con-
sidered. Put differently, if the way to promote greater happiness and interest
satisfaction for humans as well as for other animals is by causing some beings,
whether human or not, to suffer, then causing that necessary suffering is jus-
tified. Causing unnecessary suffering to humans or other animals is not, other
things being equal, justified. For Singer, causing any animal to suffer is a mat-
ter of ethical concern and something to be avoided, particularly if there are
different options available. However, if the only course of action that will pro-
mote the most good for humans and other animals involves some suffering,
then that course of action would be the ethical course of action.
Singer’s view, like other utilitarian views, is egalitarian in that it requires
that we take like interests into account equally, no matter who has those inter-
ests. But equal consideration does not mean identical treatment. A horse’s
interest in having a good meal and your brother’s interest in having a good
meal are equal interests, and if there were a way to satisfy those interests, then
that would promote the greatest happiness. However, the way those interests
are satisfied will be very different. Your brother may “eat like a horse,” but,
in reality, would probably not be very happy with a horse’s meal, and a
horse probably would eat very little of the meal your brother typically eats.
Giving equal consideration to equal interests will often require following very
different courses of action in order to satisfy those interests.
As we’ll see in Chapter 4, one of the most controversial issues for utilitar-
ians like Singer is the use of other animals in invasive biomedical research.
Much of the justification for conducting this sort of research on other ani-
mals, even painful research, is utilitarian. Many of those who experiment on
other animals believe that the pain and distress that is caused to rats and
rabbits in research laboratories is much less than it would be if the research
were performed on human beings. And they claim that the hoped-for benefits
promise to outweigh the pain, suffering, and death experienced by animal
subjects in the experiments.
Rights views
Animal rights proponents, like philosopher Tom Regan, take exception to

such utilitarian views. To allow for the use of animals flagrantly treats all ani-
mals (humans and other animals) as means to some end, rather than treating
every individual with the respect they are due. For Regan, we shouldn’t look
at each case and try to determine, based on the pleasure, pain, frustration,
satisfaction, etc., whether it is right or wrong.
The forlornness of the veal calf is pathetic, heart wrenching; the pulsing pain
of the chimp with electrodes planted deep in her brain is repulsive; the slow,
tortuous death of the raccoon caught in the leg-hold trap is agonizing. But
what is wrong isn’t the pain, isn’t the suffering, isn’t the deprivation. The
fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our
resources, here for us.53
According to Regan, all normal adult humans and other animals are what
he calls “subjects of a life” who have inherent worth and are due respect.
Utilitarians, because they are focused on considerations of the greater good,
reduce individuals to their usefulness to something bigger than them, making
them only instrumentally worthy. As it is sometimes put, utilitarians view
humans and other animals as mere containers of value, not beings who are
valuable in themselves. Utilitarians cannot respect the distinct intrinsic value
of individual lives. In order to protect that value, Regan argues we must
53 Regan 1985: 13–26.

recognize all subjects of a life as having rights. Subjects of a life are beings
with relatively complex mental lives that include perceptions, desires, beliefs,
memories, intentions, and at least a minimal sense of the future. Precisely
who is a subject of a life is open to some debate. (For example, do octopuses
have this sort of mental life? What about bats?) But the basic idea is that
the lives of these individuals matter to them, and this is what grounds their
worth and is why they have rights.
The rights view holds that treating subjects of a life as resources is an
injustice that must be remedied, not reformed. As Regan writes, “to reform
injustice is to prolong injustice.”54 The unjust exploitation of other animals
for food, in scientific research, or for entertainment must be abolished. The
rights position is often thought to be an absolutist position, one that opposes
appeals to improving the well-being of animals while ignoring the larger
structures of exploitation in which they exist. In Chapter 7 we’ll explore how
this view informs social activism.
Feminist ethics
Feminist scholars have raised concerns about the adequacy of both utilitari-
anism and the rights view as the basis for guiding our action and attention
toward other animals. The alternative theory, called a feminist ethic of care
by Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams, expresses a variety of insightful criti-
cisms of the dominant ethical views.55 While there are a number of variations
within the feminist care tradition, most proponents reject the detached cal-
culations of utilitarianism and the oversimplification and absolutism of the
rights-based approach. Instead, feminist care ethics views other animals as
beings with whom we are in relationships, and it is within these complex
relationships that animals command our ethical attention. Some of these
relationships will be relationships of dependency, as with our companion
animals; others will be relationships of power, as when animals have their
lives and, ultimately, deaths controlled by economic and political interests.
Attention to both the personal and the political forces that shape our relations
is central to guiding our actions, as is caring and respectful consideration of
the other. Of course, attention to the individual animals’ experiences is also
central. In order to respond ethically to the needs and interests of other
54 www.cultureandanimals.org/pop1.html. 55 See Donovan & Adams 2007.

animals, ethical agents need to develop empathetic skills allowing them to

understand the experiences of another, as well as to situate those experiences
in a larger social, political, and economic context.56 With other animals, we
are most often at some distance from their pain, distress, fear, confusion,
and suffering. Developing empathy with and awareness of the way others
experience the world is, thus, one of the ethical obligations that arises from
a feminist ethic of care. Without such awareness, we cannot know what
another animal needs or wants, what he may be nervous about, or when he is
annoyed or content, and, thus, we cannot accurately respond until we develop
it. Because non-humans cannot explicitly tell us what is in their interests, we
must develop skills to understand them across our differences.
Capabilities approach
One way we might do that is to identify the interests that other animals have
that, when fulfilled, lead to their flourishing. Martha Nussbaum has generated
a list in her work that extends the capabilities approach that she and Amartya
Sen developed for humans to non-human animals.57 This list is an objective
list of the sort that I discussed in the previous section, and, thus, it has some
of the drawbacks that objective theories of well-being have – namely, that
an individual may have all the things on the list but still not feel like they
have well-being. Nonetheless, the account may prove less problematic in the
case of non-human animals than in humans, precisely because it provides a
rough guideline for the promotion of individual flourishing without relying
on the subjective experiences of other animals which are often very difficult
to ascertain fully.
According to Nussbaum, the standard views, particularly utilitarianism,
do not take appropriate account of the value of activities that are required
for a life of dignity. She writes:
a good life, for an animal as for a human, has many different aspects:
movement, affection, health, community, dignity, bodily integrity, as well as
the avoidance of pain. Some valuable aspects of animal lives might not even
lead to pain when withheld. Animals, like humans, often don’t miss what they
don’t know, and it is hard to believe that animals cramped in small cages all
their lives can dream of the free movement that is denied them. Nonetheless,
56 See Cuomo & Gruen 1998 and Gruen 2009. 57 Nussbaum 2006a.
it remains valuable as a part of their flourishing, and not just because its
absence is fraught with pain. Even a comfortable immobility would be wrong
for a horse, an elephant, or a gorilla. Those creatures characteristically live a
life full of movement, space, and complex social interaction. To deprive them
of those things is to give them a distorted and impoverished existence.58
Nussbaum sees her approach as an improvement over the standard

approaches. Others have suggested that it is actually a helpful way to enhance
our understanding of our utilitarian obligations or to flesh out what rights
other animals might have. We needn’t concern ourselves with whether the
capabilities approach reduces to some other framework here. What is useful
about this approach is the way that her list of “entitlements” can help us
to focus more deeply on the values articulated in the previous section and
to highlight in a concrete, rather than abstract, way how we might harm
animals by violating their interests, and help them to flourish by promoting
their capabilities.59 As proponents of feminist care ethics would suggest, this
list provides a useful guide for directing our empathetic attention.
Here are some of the capabilities or entitlements on Nussbaum’s list (with
my commentary):
1. Life. According to Nussbaum, “all animals are entitled to continue their

lives, whether or not they have such a conscious interest.” As I have
already mentioned, all interests ultimately depend on life, so protecting
an animal’s life is, other things being equal, a central way to promote that
individual’s interests. Of course, if the life is full of unending pain,
equivalent to a life not worth living, then extending that life may not be
in the individual’s interests. (This would apply to all animals, human and
non-human.)
2. Bodily Health. This will vary by species, but all animals need proper
nutrition and hydration and to be protected from cruelty and neglect.
3. Bodily Integrity. As Nussbaum writes, “animals have direct entitlements
against violations of their bodily integrity by violence, abuse, and other
forms of harmful treatment – whether or not the treatment in question is
painful.”
4. Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Animals under human control have every
aspect of their lives determined for them. This is true of companion
58 Nussbaum 2006b: B6–8. 59 Nussbaum 2004: 314–17.

animals as much as it is of animals living in conditions of institutional

use. Promoting this capability means allowing choices for animals in
captivity, providing environmentally enriched enclosures, and supplying
a variety of enrichment activities to allow the animals to engage in
species-typical behaviors.
5. Emotions. Nussbaum suggests that “[Animals] are entitled to lives in which
it is open to them to have attachments to others, to love and care for
others, and not to have those attachments warped by enforced isolation
or the deliberate infliction of fear.” Recognizing animals as emotional
beings will help us to address their emotional interests.
6. Practical Reason. While it may be difficult to extend the notion that
non-humans have an interest in practical reason, the idea here seems to
be that, insofar as other animals are capable of planning their activities,
they ought to be provided with the opportunity to do so.
7. Play. According to Nussbaum, this is a centrally important capability for
all sentient beings and reinforces the need for adequate space, freedom,
and access to others of one’s kind.
If satisfying these capabilities is an obligation that ethical agents have, then

there will be some odd implications when it comes to human interactions
with wild animals, as well as in certain cases with captive animals. For exam-
ple, should we intervene in wild predation? If captive animals are traumatized
by the presence of other members of their species and seem to prefer to be
alone, should we force them to live with others? (This brings us back to the
worry about objective v. subjective conceptions of good.) We will explore
some of these issues in Chapter 6. Despite these challenges, the capabilities
approach allows us to focus on the particular needs and abilities of other
animals and provides us with a way to begin thinking about our specific
obligations to them.
Virtue theory and continental approaches
There are two additional frameworks that address our ethical relationships
with other animals. One has recently emerged from the continental philo-
sophical tradition, the other from virtue ethics. Neither is action-guiding in
the way that the standard rights-based frameworks and utilitarianism are.
Like the feminist ethics approach, these traditions are critical of the type
of argumentation utilized by the standard approaches, insofar as it tends to

oversimplify and flatten our moral experiences and thus leaves too much
out of the picture. Instead of focusing on protecting rights or preventing suf-
fering, work about animals coming out of the continental and virtue ethics
traditions urge us to reflect more deeply on our relations to animals and the
way those relations shape our conceptions of ourselves and our agency.60
Continental philosophers pose philosophical questions differently than
analytic philosophers. It could be said that continental philosophers tend
toward bigger, more expansive inquiry, whereas analytic philosophers try
to narrow and refine arguments. The standard ethical views about animals
come out of the analytic tradition, and in order to maintain difference, some
in the continental vein have eschewed talk about “ethics” altogether. Yet,
when it comes to “the question of the animal,” turning away from ethics is
difficult. Jacques Derrida took the challenge face on at the end of his life by
exploring the complex problems that “the animal” poses. He suggested that
the look of an animal calls into question not only our certainty about the
world but our very humanity. Standing naked before his cat, Derrida reflects
on the subject that the cat as Other brings into focus – the vulnerable human,
limited in his understanding of the world by language but connected to the
Other through the finitude of the body. Cora Diamond, who similarly rejects
analytic philosophical arguments about our ethical interactions with other
animals, suggests that we need, instead, to see other animals as members of
our communities who pull on us. It is in virtue of this pull that we will come
to acknowledge what is ethically wrong with cruelty, for example.61 When
we confront other animals as fellow creatures, we recognize the ways that we
share a common life, and this recognition allows us to see them as they are
and us as we are.
Relatedly, some virtue theorists have recently argued that using other
animals is wrong, not because it is a violation of the animal’s rights or because,
on balance, such an act creates more suffering than other acts. Rather, in
using them in ways that are harmful or destructive to them, we display moral
failings that reflect poorly on us as ethical agents. The traits of character we
might associate with mature members of the moral community – kindness,
sensitivity, compassion, generosity, and responsiveness – are what should
60 Thanks to Kari Weil for insightful conversations about these approaches.

61 Diamond 2001 and Clarke 1977.
be displayed in our dealings with all animals, human and non-human. As

Rosalind Hursthouse recognized after having been exposed to alternative
ways of seeing animals:
I began to see [my attitudes] that related to my conception of flesh-foods as

unnecessary, greedy, self-indulgent, childish, my attitude to shopping and
cooking in order to produce lavish dinner parties as parochial, gross, even
dissolute. I saw my interest and delight in nature programmes about the lives
of animals on television and my enjoyment of meat as side by side at odds
with one another . . . Without thinking animals had rights, I began to see both
the wild ones and the ones we usually eat as having lives of their own, which
they should be left to enjoy. And so I changed. My perception of the moral
landscape and where I and the other animals were situated in it shifted.62
The latter two types of approaches to animal ethics help us to rethink our
relationships with other animals and to begin to recognize that our very con-
ceptions of our selves is ultimately tied to our thinking and actions toward
them. These approaches, and some feminist approaches as well, provide a
means, through reflection, sensitivity, compassion, and empathy, to internal-
ize the moral demands that animals’ claims make on us. The standard views
provide us with external guidance for action, often in abstract or detached
ways. Thinking about all of the frameworks together can provide what philoso-
phers call both “internal and external reasons” for treating animals ethically.
The internal reasons that emerge through reflection allow us to see and act
differently because we view such action as consistent with our sense of our-
selves, our commitments, projects, and desires. When confronted with an
immediate ethical quandary upon which we have not yet reflected and for
which we may not be deeply motivated, we may nonetheless have external
reasons for acting to promote the well-being of animals – for example, that
to do so would respect their independent value or that it would, all things
considered, lead to greater good.
There have been disputes within the literature between proponents of
these various frameworks that are philosophically interesting, to be sure.
It is not clear to me that resolution of these disputes will ultimately help
us in addressing the diverse, complex, and pressing ethical issues that we
face in our dealings with other animals, however. Rather than attempting
62 Hursthouse 2000: 165–6.

to resolve the disputes in the pages ahead, or promoting one particular nor-
mative framework over others, I will instead draw on the resources of these
frameworks in discussing the ethical claims animals make on us in a variety
of contexts. If we can begin to see other animals as making claims upon us,
can make those claims intelligible to ourselves and to others, and can respond
in the right ways to those claims, we will become better ethical agents and
more robust selves, with a more compassionate – and, I would say, accurate –
sense of our place in the animal kingdom.

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1 Why animals matter

2 Sorabji 1993: 199.

Analyzing human exceptionalism

There are two distinguishable claims implicit in human exceptionalism. The

4 Kant 2001: 212.

How are we different?

5 Bekoff 2002. 6 Bradshaw 2009.

7 Woods 2010. 8 Napier 1964 and Oakley 1949.

15 Taylor, et al. 2007. 16 Whiten, et al. 2001.

19 Pruetz & Bertolani 2007. 20 Pruetz 2007.

23 Hess 2008. 24 Terrace, et al. 1979.

25 Premack & Premack 1984: 123. 26 Savage-Rumbaugh, et al. 1998.

The question of another animal possibly possessing the cognitive capacity

28 Woodruff and Premack 1978: 518.

31 Povinelli, et al. 1996. 32 Heyes 1998: 102. 33 Ibid.

36 Tomasello, et al. 2003: 155. 37 Ibid.: 156.

38 Hockings, et al. 2006.

Recently, Christopher Boesch and his colleagues reported eighteen cases

A teenage female elephant nursing an injured leg is knocked over by a

Humans are much more sophisticated at large-scale cooperation, and, of

44 Kluger 2007. 45 Darwin 1888: 193.

a peculiar way to categorize organisms. Yet, marking difference in this way

Does difference matter morally?

Who is ethically considerable?

Living a good life, in which individual well-being and ﬂourishing is promoted,

Whenever I injure life of any sort, I must be quite clear whether it is

46 Schweitzer 1936. 47 Taylor 1986. 48 Goodpaster 1978.

well-being. Well-being cannot be judged externally; it must be experienced

uncorrectable misperceptions about her situation, believing that her desires

51 I am alluding here to Amartya Sen’s functionings and capabilities account of well-being.

Attending to other animals

be most useful. Fortunately, philosophers have developed a variety of such

One of the strongest ethical theories to articulate how we ought to attend to

52 Bentham 1789: Ch. 17, n. 122.

rights that cannot be overridden by considerations of the greater good. For

Animal rights proponents, like philosopher Tom Regan, take exception to

53 Regan 1985: 13–26.

54 www.cultureandanimals.org/pop1.html. 55 See Donovan & Adams 2007.

animals, ethical agents need to develop empathetic skills allowing them to

Nussbaum sees her approach as an improvement over the standard

1. Life. According to Nussbaum, “all animals are entitled to continue their

58 Nussbaum 2006b: B6–8. 59 Nussbaum 2004: 314–17.

animals as much as it is of animals living in conditions of institutional

If satisfying these capabilities is an obligation that ethical agents have, then

Virtue theory and continental approaches

of argumentation utilized by the standard approaches, insofar as it tends to

60 Thanks to Kari Weil for insightful conversations about these approaches.

be displayed in our dealings with all animals, human and non-human. As

I began to see [my attitudes] that related to my conception of ﬂesh-foods as

62 Hursthouse 2000: 165–6.

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