Abstract
In this paper I introduce the ‘changing the subject’ problem. When proponents of animal protection use terms such as dignity and respect they can be fairly accused of shifting debate from welfare to rights because the terms purportedly refer to properties and values that are logically distinct from the capacity to suffer and the moral significance of causing animals pain. To avoid this problem and ensure that debate proceeds in the familiar terms of the established welfare paradigm, I present an expressivist analysis of animal rights vocabulary. When terms such as dignity and respect are understood in line with the theory of moral language use known as expressivism, proponents of animal protection that use these terms can escape the charge of changing the subject. Drawing upon Helm’s theory of love, I show how the usage of rights vocabulary can be respectable way for people to register their concern for the welfare of animals, even at times when it is unlikely that the animals concerned are suffering. Tying rights vocabulary to welfare via expressivism aligns the aims of animal rights with welfare without the theoretical problems associated with attempts to ‘reduce’ dignity or respect to natural behaviour or inherent value.
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Notes
Nussbaum (2006) and Gruen (2010), for example, ground dignity in species-typical or natural behavior; Regan (2004) grounds respect in inherent value – a value that is ‘not reducible to experiences’. Regan’s rationale for postulating inherent value was to ensure that moral patients could have the same protection from being used or painlessly killed as moral agents. His point was that the morality of ‘using as a means’ and painless killing is conceptually distinct from the morality of suffering. See Regan 2004: xxii. Arguably, it is most appropriate to use terms like dignity and respect when animals are not suffering at all.
This claim should be read in the pragmatic or non-ideal spirit in which it is intended. As Jonathan Wolf (cited in Garner 2013, p.167) puts it: “The task of the political philosopher is not to design the best possible world, but to design the best possible world starting from here.”
Hedonism can be understood as both a theory of value in general and a theory of well-being or welfare for individuals. Roughly, it is the view that “all and only positive experiences are good and all and only negative experiences are bad “(Gregory 2015).
Animal welfare theory can be similarly cast as hedonistic. After all, two key ideas in animal welfare theory are (1) the principle that animals are held as having moral worth in virtue of being sentient and (2) the necessary/unnecessary suffering distinction (Garner 2013:80–81).
The hedonistic orientation of the feelings view needs little explanation. A hedonistic interpretation of the biological functioning view is that good or proper biological function points to the animal being free of distress or pain. Likewise natural behaviour can be interpreted as a proxy for the absence of pain or the presence of pleasurable feeling. Rice (2015: 385) casts the reduction of each welfare position to hedonism as prioritizing subjective views over objective views. He cites Hursthouse’s virtue-inspired view and Nussbaum’s capabilities view as the paradigmatic examples of objective views (381–384).
Two related accounts are the dislike theory (Parfit 1984), according to which pain is bad because the bodily sensation associated with it is undesired; and the felt aversion theory (Kahane 2016), according to which the badness of pain is analyzed as the experience of having a bodily sensation that is disliked giving rise to a special kind of emotion which is itself aversive. In his account of pain, Adam Swenson (2009) casts pain as a usurper – it is bad because it usurps an agent’s autonomy understood as their ‘user control’.
Both papers report a public concern for the expression of natural behaviour. While natural behaviour is interpreted by welfare scientists as a utility proxy, that is, as indicative of the absence of suffering; arguably, public concern to ensure factory farm animals express natural behaviour can be interpreted as a nonhedonistic consideration. The idea that natural behaviour is a nonhedonisitic consideration is also supported by its positing by Cataldi (2002) and Nussbaum (2004) as the grounds for dignity. See the discussion in Part II.
By ‘folk’ I mean simply common sense or the pre-reflective views of ordinary citizens. My hypothesis is that folk concern for animals is not as hedonistically-focused as proponents of welfare orthodoxy assume. I presuppose that animal welfare legislation and norms are meant to reflect the content of folk views. In so far as existing welfare paradigm has an exclusive hedonistic orientation then its democratic legitimacy can be called into question.
For Helm, some nonhuman animals are members of the relevant class, ‘agents’: “What it is to be an agent is to have and exercise the capacities not only to have beliefs and desires but also to care about things…(84)
Garner makes a similar point when he contrasts the views of research scientists with the views of a “majority of the public” (2013: 139). He identifies the former with the standard animal welfare ethic and the later with the ‘sentience position’ he advocates. Garner suggests that the different approaches entail contrasting interpretations of the so-called Five Freedoms.
If Cataldi were to align her usage of ‘dignity’ only to practices that required animals to suffer then she would face what Zuolo calls the redundancy problem. The use of the term dignity is redundant because the purported ‘wrongness’ of the practice is ‘already explained’ as a violation of a right not to suffer. See Zuolo 2016
Bear in mind that my claim is not that they are wrong to do this; rather, my aim is show how their concerns can be met within the confines of the welfare paradigm.
And also to the metaphysical and semantic problems mentioned above.
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Hadley, J. From Welfare to Rights without Changing the Subject. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 993–1004 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9856-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9856-4