2 The natural and the normative

Crocodiles are animals who inhabit human nightmares and with good reason.
Crocodiles hide below the surface and wait until just the right moment to
spring out, toothy mouths ajar, to attack. They are ideal metaphors for the
subconscious. They are also truly frightening predators. The late ecofeminist
philosopher Val Plumwood had a near fatal encounter with a crocodile and
described her terror after enduring a crocodile “death roll.” Her description
of the attack is horrifying:

As I pulled the canoe out into the main current, the rain and wind started up
again. I had not gone more than five or ten minutes down the channel when,
rounding a bend, I saw in midstream what looked like a floating stick – one I
did not recall passing on my way up. As the current moved me toward it, the
stick developed eyes. A crocodile! . . . Although I was paddling to miss the
crocodile, our paths were strangely convergent. I knew it would be close, but I
was totally unprepared for the great blow when it struck the canoe. Again it
struck, again and again, now from behind, shuddering the flimsy craft. As I
paddled furiously, the blows continued. The unheard of was happening; the
canoe was under attack! For the first time, it came to me fully that I was prey.
I realized I had to get out of the canoe or risk being capsized.
The bank now presented a high, steep face of slippery mud. The only
obvious avenue of escape was a paperbark tree near the muddy bank wall. I
made the split-second decision to leap into its lower branches and climb to
safety. I steered to the tree and stood up to jump. At the same instant, the
crocodile rushed up alongside the canoe, and its beautiful, flecked golden
eyes looked straight into mine. . . . The golden eyes glinted with interest. I
tensed for the jump and leapt. Before my foot even tripped the first branch, I
had a blurred, incredulous vision of great toothed jaws bursting from the
water. Then I was seized between the legs in a red-hot pincer grip and whirled
into the suffocating wet darkness.
44
 The natural and the normative 45

Few of those who have experienced the crocodile’s death roll have lived to
describe it. It is, essentially, an experience beyond words of total terror. The
crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism are not suited to prolonged
struggle, so the roll is an intense burst of power designed to overcome the
victim’s resistance quickly. The crocodile then holds the feebly struggling
prey underwater until it drowns. The roll was a centrifuge of boiling
blackness that lasted for an eternity, beyond endurance, but when I seemed
all but finished, the rolling suddenly stopped. My feet touched bottom, my
head broke the surface, and, coughing, I sucked at air, amazed to be alive. The
crocodile still had me in its pincer grip between the legs. I had just begun to
weep for the prospects of my mangled body when the crocodile pitched me
suddenly into a second death roll.
When the whirling terror stopped again I surfaced again, still in the
crocodile’s grip next to a stout branch of a large sandpaper fig growing in the
water. I grabbed the branch, vowing to let the crocodile tear me apart rather
than throw me again into that spinning, suffocating hell. For the first time I
realized that the crocodile was growling, as if angry. I braced myself for
another roll, but then its jaws simply relaxed; I was free.1

In scenes from National Geographic’s Most Amazing Close Encounters and

from the full-length program Last Feast of the Crocodiles, crocodiles are shown
attacking other animals, in these cases not humans. Most of the attacks result
in the animal preyed upon being killed and eaten, although occasionally an
animal manages to escape to live temporarily with what are ultimately fatal
injuries.
Watching these scenes is like watching a horror movie, only the scenes
depicted are real. There was one particular segment that is worth recounting.
In this scene, a herd of impala comes to a river to drink.2 The young impala
have not yet learned that danger lurks below the surface of the water. An
impetuous young male impala attempts to cross the water and is suddenly
attacked by a crocodile who begins to drag the impala, thrashing, under the
surface of the muddy river. What happens next is quite surprising. A nearby
hippopotamus, noticing the commotion, charges at the crocodile with fierce
speed and frees the impala from the grip of death. The hippo nudges the
impala out of the water in what looks to be an attempt to save the youngster.
The impala stumbles onto land but then collapses. The hippo tries repeatedly
to resuscitate the impala, nudging him and trying to prop him up. At one

1 Plumwood 2000. 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=E51DyWl q0c.

46 Ethics and Animals

point, the hippo puts the impala’s head into her mouth in what looks to be
an effort to revive him. Hippopotamuses are herbivores, so the impala would
not have been a meal for the hippo. On this particular occasion, the hippo’s
efforts to resuscitate the impala fail as the impala’s injuries from the crocodile
attack are too severe. After the impala dies, the hippo wanders away. Almost
instantly the crocodile climbs onto the bank to retrieve the carcass and drags
the dead impala back to the water to eat it.
There is no way of knowing why the hippo did what she did or how often
hippopotamuses exhibit this type of seemingly caring or altruistic behavior
in the wild. We do know that, just as crocodiles are predictable predators,
hippopotamuses are capable of building cross-species relationships.3
These stories, while remarkable in their own right, also raise interesting
questions for us to try to answer. Did the crocodile choose to attack Val Plum-
wood? Did the croc let Plumwood go on purpose? Did the hippo purposely try
to help the impala because she recognized the impala was in mortal danger,
like the dolphins protecting the swimmers discussed in the last chapter, or
was it an instinctual response? If it was instinctual, why did it happen on
this occasion, but not on others? Does it make sense to say that what the
hippopotamus did in trying to save the impala was good, virtuous, or right?
Was what the crocodile did to Plumwood or to the impala wrong? These are
questions about the natural and the normative, the topics of this chapter.
The concept of the “natural” is a fraught one; it can mean many different
things in different contexts. Too often we think we understand what a claim
about what is natural means, but just a little bit of pushing reveals that we may
not be particularly clear. Normativity, as we briefly discussed in Chapter 1,
also has multiple connotations. It sometimes means what is typical, normal,
or expected; it sometimes means what is good; and it sometimes refers to a
combination of what is expected and what is good in the form of a prescription
for action.
In this chapter we’ll explore what is meant by “natural” and what is meant
by “normative” in the context of evaluating the grounds of our ethical obliga-
tions to other animals. We will begin with a very common skeptical response
to the central idea of this book – that we are in ethical relation with other ani-
mals and that our attitudes, decisions, and actions have ethical consequences
for all of us, humans as well as non-humans. When initially presented with

3 Hatkoff, et al. 2007.

 The natural and the normative 47

the idea that other animals matter from a moral point of view, skeptics think,
and some even say, “Animals kill, torment, and use other animals, and since
they do it, and since we too are animals, why shouldn’t we?” Since it is natural
for a crocodile to kill and eat an impala, it makes sense to think it is natural
for humans to kill and eat crocodiles or, more generally, to do what serves us
best, even if that means disregarding the interests and needs of other animals.

Doing what comes naturally

In assessing the skeptic’s claim, we first need to determine what it means to

act naturally or to do what is natural.
One way we might think of what is natural is in distinction to what is cul-
tural. Natural actions are those that aren’t informed or influenced by cultural
practices or traditions. This way of understanding the term is popular among
certain environmentalists, who tend to see culture as unique to humans and
think that our cultures remove us from the natural world. This removal or
alienation is thought to be one of the roots of our environmental crises. In
order to remedy the problems caused by our separateness from nature, these
environmentalists suggest it is important for humans to “get in touch with
nature” by eschewing culture. According to this understanding, what is most
natural is what is most distant from human culture, civilization, and their
influences. The natural is wild, untamed, undomesticated, and free of human
concepts and perceptions, including ethical ones.
There are a variety of problems with this dualistic notion of the natural as
opposed to the cultural. The first problem is that it seems to be incoherent.
If what it means to be natural is being free from human influence, then it
appears that humans are “unnatural” by definition. How then are we to make
sense of the skeptic’s claim that humans are supposed to be “acting naturally”
the way other animals do if being human is already acting in unnatural or
non-natural ways? Recall those chimpanzees and other tool-using animals we
discussed in Chapter 1. Primatologists and ethologists suggest that some of
their behaviors are “cultural.” There are different sorts of traditions and prac-
tices that vary between populations that aren’t strictly explicable in terms of
ecological variations in their habitat ranges. According to these observations,
cultural innovation and the transmission of cultural practices seem perfectly
natural. So nature and culture aren’t contrary to one another, and humans
and other animals may engage in both “natural” and “cultural” behaviors.
48 Ethics and Animals

The idea that nature is distinct from culture can also be seen as self-
defeating. If there were an imperative to “get back to nature,” it would result
from human conceptual and ethical reflection, which, according to the dualis-
tic conception under consideration, is unnatural. This conception of nature,
as William Cronin has so forcefully argued in “Getting Back to the Wrong
Nature: Why We Need to End our Love Affair with Wilderness,” rests on a
profound misunderstanding. Cronin writes, “Viewing nature and ourselves
in such stark, absolute terms leaves us little hope of discovering what an
ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look
like.”4 There is no way to value what is natural, because according to this
understanding of what it means to be natural, the very process of valuing
ends up devaluing nature.
So understanding nature as distinct from culture isn’t particularly sen-
sible. Another proposal for understanding what it means to be doing what
is “natural” is to think of natural behavior as synonymous with instinctual
behavior. The idea here is that when the crocodile attacks the impala the
croc is acting on instinct, and the skeptic’s claim, if we understand natu-
ral to mean instinctual, is that it is instinctual for us to use other animals
to serve our ends. But what exactly is instinct? The notion of “instinct” has
been subject to almost as much conceptual challenge as has “nature,” and
it may be that replacing “natural” with “instinctual” will not be particularly
illuminating. Historically, there were debates among psychologists and ethol-
ogists about what instincts were. Some saw instincts as automatic reactions
to specific stimuli; others saw them as adaptable motivations that underlie
behavior; and still others saw instincts as heritable systems “of co-ordination
within the nervous system as a whole, which when activated find expres-
sion in behaviour culminating in a fixed action pattern.”5 Sometimes the
term “instinctual” has been used interchangeably with the term “innate.”
Yet, here again, we may be exchanging one slippery term for another as there
is a tremendous debate about what constitutes “innateness.”
Commenting on innateness, ethologist Patrick Bateson identifies at least
six meanings for the term: “present at birth; a behavioral difference caused
by a genetic difference; adapted over the course of evolution; unchang-
ing throughout development; shared by all members of a species; and not

4 Cronin 1996a: 3. 5 Thorpe 1950 as cited in Griffiths 2004: 614.

 The natural and the normative 49

learned.”6 Each of these different meanings has very different implications,

and, as Paul Griffiths has argued, “the concept of innateness conflates a num-
ber of independent biological properties and is thus a confusing and unhelp-
ful notion with which to understand behavioral or cognitive development.”7
So when it comes to trying to understand what counts as natural behavior,
relying on some construal of innateness or instinct has not proven explana-
torily useful. We are merely replacing one vague concept, the natural, with
reductive and equally vague concepts.
In the last quarter century, developments in the field of evolutionary
developmental biology (what is called “evo-devo”) suggest we adopt a more-
integrative, less-reductive understanding of the nature of development where
genes and their environments are interacting to affect phenotypic, includ-
ing behavioral, characteristics of the organism. In other words, an evo-devo
approach maintains that there aren’t traits or behaviors that can be explained
purely by innate or hardwired instincts; science does not support the view that
underlies the old “nature–nurture” debates. Developmental systems theorist
Susan Oyama puts the point forcefully:

To call something biological (or genetic, natural, or innate) is clearly not just
to make a bare scientific statement. It is also to pronounce on the relevance of
experience and the conditions of life . . . The same is true for the contrasting
terms: cultural, acquired, environmental. If something is biological, it is
reasoned, it is physical, preprogrammed and controlled from the inside;
while learning is an accident of personal history, a product of mind, not body.
This echo of an ancient dualism should raise suspicions . . . the traditional
nature–nurture categories are incoherent. I suggest . . . we free ourselves from
the whole set of interlaced conceptual habits that keeps these disputes going.8

All this debate about the meaning of the terms natural, instinctual, or innate
doesn’t erase the possibility that there is something meaningful that the skep-
tic is trying to say. There are some behaviors that seem to be typical to a species.
As we briefly discussed in the last chapter and will return to in Chapter 5,
accurately interpreting the behavior of other animals is an important part
of understanding what their interests are and how our actions may impact
their abilities to satisfy those interests. Recognizing species-typical behaviors,
then, is an important part of understanding other animals. So, to return to

6 Bateson 1991: 21–2 as cited in Griffiths, et al. 2009: 605.

7 Griffiths 2002: 70–85. 8 Oyama 2007.
50 Ethics and Animals

our skeptic’s claim, perhaps what he means when he says that it is natural
for humans to use other animals to serve our ends is that it is part of our
species-typical behavioral repertoire, much as it is for the crocodile. Using
other species for food, clothing, protection, or even entertainment is some-
thing that we, as a species, evolved to do. As a couple of skeptics put it, “it is
an evolutionary necessity to regard one’s own kind as more important than
other species.”9 That we evolved to want to further our own species’ interests,
at the expense of members of other species, if need be, may very well be what
the skeptic means when he says it is natural for us to use other animals.
There are two issues raised by this particular version of the skeptic’s chal-
lenge. First is the issue of understanding what it means to say that a species
evolved to perform certain behaviors or to have certain attitudes. Second,
even if there were a way to establish that performing certain behaviors or
having certain attitudes was natural or a product of evolutionary forces, we
need to ask whether having a preference for one’s own species, what has been
called “speciesism,” is justified. In other words, does the natural justify the
normative?

Species and speciesism

You probably won’t be surprised, at this point in the discussion, to learn that
there are multiple and contested meanings of the concept of “species” and
that whether a particular population of organisms is classified as a species may
change, even quickly, so particular individuals who are currently members of
one species may later become members of a new species.10 Conversely, individ-
uals who were once members of different species may be classified as a single
species. Our understanding of species relies on various sorts of judgments
based on the reasons we need the classification and how such a classification
will help to organize particular inquiries and practices. Species categoriza-
tions are not, strictly speaking, fixed by nature but rather are constructed by

9 Nicholl & Russell 2001: 165.

10 Karen Strier wrote: “I have been studying the same group of monkeys, known as northern
muriquis, in a small forest in southeastern Brazil for nearly 28 years. When I began my
research they were called Brachyteles arachnoides. Subsequently, and within the lifetimes
of many of the individuals in my original study group, they were reclassified as a new
species, B. hypoxanthus, to distinguish them (as northern muriquis) from the southern
muriqui, which has retained the original Latin name.” Strier 2010.
 The natural and the normative 51

us to understand the natural world. Without going further into the fascinat-
ing debate about the species concept here, let us posit that “species,” as well as
“species-typical behaviors,” are not simply biologically or naturally given and
are not necessarily immutable, although they are based, in part, on evolved
biological properties, some of which may be intrinsic and others relational.
Given that species is not a biologically determinate classification, species are
not, in evolutionary terms, what natural selection operates on – rather it is
populations or groups, if that.11 If species is a relatively arbitrary unit in evo-
lutionary terms, it does not make sense to suggest, as the skeptic has, that a
preference for members of one’s own species is a product of evolution.
In addition, both empirical and historical examinations show that it simply
is not the case that members of the same lineage, species, or population do
prefer or protect their own. Ethological studies have established that members
of the same species, conspecifics, often compete fiercely with one another to
survive, and in some cases will kill their own kind. Some animals even kill
their own siblings. Great egret chicks are known to peck their youngest sibling
to death and then push him out of the nest.12 Many mammals, from rats to
primates, practice infanticide on conspecifics. Most individuals appear to be
concerned with their own survival, and possibly the survival of their offspring
or other members of their immediate group, not the survival of their species
as a whole. This is also the case among humans. The history of our own
kind is full of examples of mass murders, wars, and genocides. Humans, like
other social animals, are particularly adept at identifying in-groups and out-
groups and granting respect and protection to those in their own group, and
exhibiting contempt and disregard for others, no matter if they are members
of our species or others.
But nature isn’t always red in tooth and claw. There are less frequent, but
regularly documented cases in which members of one species help or protect

11 There are debates about units of selection (e.g., whether genes, cells, organisms, and/or
populations ultimately evolve) among biologists and philosophers. For a philosophically
rich discussion, see Godfrey-Smith 2009. There are some, most notably David Sloan Wilson
and Eliott Sober, who argue that selection can be understood to operate on groups, and
the late Steven Jay Gould, who argued for species selection. See, for a start, Wilson 1993
and Lieberman & Vrba 2005.
12 My colleague Barry Chernoff told me about the case of siblicide among armadillos who
are actually genetically identical twins. So when one armadillo kills her sibling she is, in
a sense, killing herself. He also mentioned that male fish, who look after the young, on
occasion will be forced to kill the mother as she is threatening to kill and eat her young.
52 Ethics and Animals

members of another species – as was the case with the dolphins discussed at
the beginning of the last chapter and the hippopotamus discussed earlier. The
struggle for survival may pit one animal against another, but it also involves
animals cooperating against obstacles and hardships in their environments.
Sometimes this will bring members of different species together for mutual
advantage.
The capacity to identify and favor those within one’s own group, and to
deny resources to or attack those who are outsiders, undoubtedly conferred
some evolutionary advantage on those who exercised this capacity. Yet the fact
that a capacity is evolutionarily advantageous does not have a direct bearing
on whether or not we humans (or other animals), here and now, are ethically
justified in continuing to invoke that capacity. At certain points in our history,
some humans may have experienced greater reproductive success relative
to other humans because the males raped and impregnated the females.
That this practice generated an evolutionary advantage to the group that
practiced rape doesn’t justify rape. The moral permissibility of exercising a
particular capacity, or engaging in a particular action, is not determined by
the evolutionary history or the success of the use of the capacity. As the late
Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “nature favors none and offers no guidelines. The
facts of nature cannot provide moral guidance in any case.”13
One of the capacities that humans have, and perhaps other animals, as
well, is the ability to make decisions about what behavior to engage in and
what course of action to follow. We may make bad choices – eat or drink too
much, have unsafe sex, smoke cigarettes, destroy our environments – but we
are not always destined to act on our bad choice. We can change our behavior.
Appeals to nature do not ethically justify various actions, including the use of
other animals, as we’ll see. Much of what is thought to be natural behavior is,
in fact, conventional behavior, behavior that we can, and should, hold up to
normative scrutiny and ask whether there are reasons to refrain from doing
certain things that we thought, before reflection, were permissible.
There are many human behaviors that feel utterly natural, but, as we have
just seen, it is sometimes difficult to explicate what lies behind that feeling.
Throughout human history, in-groups have often justified discriminatory and
violent behaviors toward out-groups by appeals to what is natural. The history
of genocides, too horrible to recount here, contain multiple examples of

13 Gould 1997: 13.

 The natural and the normative 53

attitudes and rhetoric in which those being destroyed are likened to animals,
a comparison that justifies their destruction.
In the 1970s, Richard Ryder suggested that the species boundary was
being used to identify who is “in” and who is “out,” and he coined the term
“speciesism” to denote this type of prejudice. Shortly thereafter, Peter Singer
popularized the term as being comparable to racism and sexism. He argued
that movements to end oppression often begin by uncovering a basic idea
and set of practices that seem natural and inevitable that, when subjected to
careful scrutiny, turn out to be unjustifiably discriminatory.

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the

interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their
interests and the interests of those of another race . . . Similarly, speciesists
allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of
members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.14

When we consider the reasons that people have given for denying equality
to non-whites, to women, and to gay men, lesbians, and transgendered peo-
ple, we often see that the prejudice is naturalized. One need only recall the
debates over gay marriage to illuminate how this is so. Much of the popu-
lar and legal rhetoric employed by opponents of recognizing gay marriage
was infused with claims about the “unnaturalness” of gay and lesbian rela-
tionships and arguments that socially endorsing such behavior by allowing
gay people to marry would legitimize this unnatural behavior. Attempts to
disguise animus against non-heterosexual people by naturalizing heterosex-
uality, though often politically successful, do not withstand the demands for
equal respect. Similarly, Ryder and Singer argue that invoking species mem-
bership in order to deny the moral claims of those who are not members of
the “in” species amounts to unjustified prejudice.
Discrimination on the basis of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or
being able-bodied is thought to be prejudicial, because these are not charac-
teristics that matter when it comes to making moral claims or demanding
moral attention. That one is a woman or in a wheelchair should not bear
on whether an individual’s interests matter from an ethical point of view.
Species membership, it has been argued, is also morally irrelevant when it
comes to determining who can make moral claims. If an individual’s life can

14 Singer 1990: 9
54 Ethics and Animals

go better or worse for her, by her own lights; if she has interests and desires,
the satisfaction of which will contribute to her well-being; and my behavior
can impact her life for better or worse, then my failing to consider how my
actions affect that individual would be morally irresponsible. If a child runs
out into the street, and I purposely fail to stop my car because the child was
Asian or a boy or wore leg-braces, I would rightly be judged a monster. Simi-
larly, if I fail to stop my car and purposely run over a cat, I will not be excused
by saying, “it was only a cat.” These are individuals who have interests in not
being run over by cars, and when I fail to consider these interests I put my very
capacity to act morally in question. My interests in getting to my destination
faster, or not being bothered to stop, do not obviously outweigh the interests
of those who inadvertently cross my path.
Sexism and racism involve actions and attitudes (either conscious or not)
that elevate the interests of one’s own gender or race over the interests of
another gender or race, merely because the sexist favors his gender and the
racist favors his race, over others. Similarly, speciesism involves actions and
attitudes that elevate human interests above the interests of any other species,
because humans favor humans over others and think of humans as superior.
Speciesist actions and attitudes are prejudicial, because there is no prima facie
reason for preferring the interests of beings like me, or of those belonging
to my group, to the interests of those who are different. I happen to have
been born a human female in the US, but I could have been born a male in
Australia or a chimpanzee in Africa. It is just a bit of luck that I was born
me, and it is no more interesting from a moral point of view, than the fact
that I have five fingers on each hand, including opposable thumbs. I’m happy
I have the hands I do. But, having hands like mine doesn’t give me more of a
claim to moral attention than those who don’t have hands like mine, and it
doesn’t justify my devaluing the interests of those who have different sorts of
hands. Species membership is a morally irrelevant characteristic, and, given
our discussion above, classification of the species to which I belong seems even
less important, given that it is a matter of convention, rather than something
irrevocably or naturally fixed.
Of course, that I am a human and not a chimpanzee has implications for
how I am treated. If I were a chimpanzee, my particular interests would be dif-
ferent. I would undoubtedly want to live a quite different, more active sort of
life. Ideally, I would want to be in a tropical forest with lots of fresh fruits and
vegetation and other chimpanzees. A chimpanzee’s interests in living a good
 The natural and the normative 55

life for her are no less morally important than my human interests simply
because they are not human interests. Difference does not justify disregard.
Attending to the specific interests of other individuals whose interests
matter from a moral point of view will require attending to both the biological
and the social facts about those individuals. Although some of the morally
relevant facts might be gleaned from species membership, many of them
won’t be so apparent. That an individual is a human may not tell us everything
we need to know about how to treat that individual, and the same will be true
of members of other species. For example, we hold some humans accountable
for their actions in a way that we forgive others for the same actions. A
paradigm example is children – when a toddler hurts the dog or another
child, we don’t think the toddler has done something morally wrong. Even if
the toddler were to cause the death of another, say by picking up a loaded gun
and shooting his sister, we would certainly find that tragic, but we wouldn’t
say that the child was a monster in the way that we might the adult who
purposely runs over a cat. This is because a toddler has not yet developed
the skills necessary to understand right from wrong and to make a decision
about how to act based on that understanding. A human child, much like
the crocodile, is acting without reflecting. Both lack the capacity to reflect on
their actions and, thus, cannot decide to act differently. Because they cannot
decide to do otherwise, we do not hold them ethically responsible for their
actions. In philosophical parlance, the human child and the crocodile are not
persons.

Humans and persons

Philosophers make a distinction between humans and persons. This may

seem somewhat odd and contrary to common usage as we ordinarily think
of the two as synonymous. It is understandable to be reluctant to accept this
as a meaningful distinction on first gloss. As one scholar has pointed out,
“Philosophers have made rather heavy weather of the concept of a person.
Heavy weather can make interesting philosophy but it does not necessarily
lead to true, clear or even any answers. If philosophically interesting concep-
tions of personhood lead to false and obnoxious conclusions then in the end
we will have to give up those conceptions.”15 Indeed, there are a number of

15 Teichman 1985: 176.

56 Ethics and Animals

philosophical distinctions that don’t make a difference, or at least much of

a difference, and some philosophical distinctions may very well be offensive
but they may nonetheless be important. The case of defining persons separate
from humans is central in the context of discussions about our relationships
with non-human animals and arguments for making the distinction play an
important historical and conceptual role in discussions of moral status and
moral obligations. After analyzing these arguments, I hope you will see that
this particular distinction is a meaningful one. Yet, the reluctance to accept it,
particularly a reluctance based on a worry that the distinction is “offensive,”
is also worth considering, and we will discuss this later in the chapter.
A human is a member of the species Homo sapiens. Since there is not one
singular definition of species, let’s use a reproductive isolation definition for
species for the purposes of discussion. This will help us to see humans as
distinct from aardvarks and apple trees, chimpanzees and cycads. Humans
come in different types and sizes and have a wide range of abilities, but
we have the same ontogeny; we share a distinctive developmental history.
Homo sapiens is the product of the fusion of two human gametes that then
develops in a uterine environment.16 Most other mammals are the product
of the fusion of gametes from two members of their species and spend some
amount of time in a uterus, although it needn’t necessarily be the uterus
of the same species.17 Some mammals, such as the platypus, lay eggs. Other
mammals, such as wombats and wallabies, are born in almost embryonic
form and develop in their mother’s pouch. These reproductive links – that
humans are born of humans and not other types of organisms – allow us to
distinguish humans from other species. Giraffes are born of and give birth
to other giraffes. Hens lay eggs that hatch chickens, not cheetahs. Dandelion
seeds produce dandelions, not daisies.
The fact that each member of a species is reproductively linked to other
members of the species, as we’ve discussed, is not in itself interesting from

16 Until fairly recently it made sense to say that humans develop in a woman’s body, but
given the fluidity of gender and the fact that some people who were born with female
reproductive organs identify as men and some of those men have given birth to children, it
is more accurate to say that humans, at least until technology becomes more advanced,
develop in uterine environments, whether those belong to individuals identifying as
“women,” “men,” or some other gender category.
17 For example, as the result of developments in reproductive technologies, including
cloning, surrogate mothers can be a different species from the developing infant.
 The natural and the normative 57

an ethical point of view. Just as other kinds of reproductive information, such

as the fact that dandelions reproduce asexually or that gibbons are monog-
amous, don’t tell us anything about how we should treat these organisms,
whether they have obligations or duties, or what obligations and duties we
might have toward them in light of such information. Reproductive practices,
expectations, and contexts may raise ethical issues; in humans there are a
variety of ethical issues that arise in the context of assisted reproduction, for
example, and in other animals there is a significant ethical issue that arises
in the context of captive breeding that we will discuss in Chapter 5. But the
biological facts of reproduction, that humans reproduce with other humans
and that seahorses reproduce with other seahorses, for example, don’t pose
ethical issues in themselves.
That one is “human” identifies a descriptive feature of that being; that one
is a “person” identifies a normative feature. The notion of “personhood” is
used to identify the value or worth of someone, and it has also been used
to identify who has “rights” and who is the subject of ethical duties and
obligations. Not all humans have rights or duties, and some other than human
beings may have worth. Distinguishing humans from persons marks these
ethical differences.
This distinction between humans and persons appears in a number of
philosophical discussions both historical and contemporary. Immanuel Kant
posited two important capacities, rationality and self-awareness, that were
associated with persons and distinguished persons from “things.” He wrote:

every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to
be arbitrarily used by this or that will . . . Beings whose existence depends not
on our will but on nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings,
only a relative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other
hand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature already
marks them out as ends in themselves.18

In his Lectures on Anthropology Kant wrote, “The fact that the human being can
have the representation ‘I’ raises him infinitely above all the other beings on
earth. By this he is a person . . . that is, a being altogether different in rank
and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, with which one may deal
and dispose at one’s discretion.”19 Similarly, John Locke defined a person as

18 As cited in Wood 1998. 19 Kant 1798: 7, 127.

58 Ethics and Animals

a “thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider
itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.”20 In
more contemporary language, we might say that a Lockean person is some-
one who has certain psychological capacities – cognition, self-awareness, and
episodic memory. While Locke’s view of personhood is primarily aimed at
identifying what capacities are needed in order to classify an individual as a
person, Kant’s view of personhood has stronger normative implications. Only
persons seem to matter morally on Kant’s view.
For Kant, it appears that non-rational beings who do not have a self-
conception – non-persons – are mere things. But some humans lack ratio-
nality and do not have a self-conception. Fetuses, newborns, and probably
even toddlers don’t yet have the concept of themselves as themselves, distinct
from others, and thus wouldn’t be considered persons, even though they
are humans. The same is true of a human in a permanent vegetative state.
The distinction between humans and persons has become a central one in
the bioethics literature. Whether we have duties to humans before they are
persons (at the beginning of life) and what sorts of obligations we have to
humans when they are no longer persons (after significant brain injuries or
at the end of life) are some of the most pressing questions for health care
providers and policymakers. Kant’s view would not allow us to recognize that
there are important ethical questions to address here. Similarly, Kant’s view
would have us deny most, but maybe not all, other animals moral concern.
This seems highly counterintuitive.21

20 Locke 1690: Bk. II, Ch. 27, sect. 9.

21 There have been arguments about how to get around this counterintuitive problem for
Kant. There are three possible responses. One is to suggest that non-persons are morally
considerable indirectly. Though Kant believed that animals were mere things, it appears
he did not genuinely believe we could dispose of them any way we wanted. In the Lectures
on Ethics he makes it clear that we have indirect duties to animals, duties that are not
toward them, but in regard to them, insofar as our treatment of them can affect our
duties to persons. And one could argue the same would be true of those human beings
who are not persons. We disrespect our humanity when we act in inhumane ways toward
non-persons, whatever their species. But this too is unsatisfying – it fails to capture the
independent wrong that is being done to the non-person. When someone rapes a woman
in a coma, or whips a severely brain-damaged child, or sets a cat on fire, they are not
simply disrespecting humanity or themselves as representatives of it, it can be argued
that they are wronging these non-persons. So, a second way to avoid the counterintuitive
conclusion is to argue that such non-persons stand in the proper relations to “rational
nature” such that they should be thought of as morally considerable. Allen Wood (1998)
 The natural and the normative 59

While we may be tempted to reject the very notion of the distinction

between humans and persons because of this counterintuitive result, we can
also accept a general, more descriptive understanding of what it means to be a
person, more like Locke’s view, without accepting the normative implications
of Kant’s view.
Some humans may not be persons and some non-humans may well be
persons, but the distinction itself doesn’t say anything about what this means
from an ethical point of view if we don’t accept Kant’s perspective. Before we
turn to the question of what ethical status persons and non-persons have, let’s
first briefly examine which other animals might be persons. As we discussed
in the last chapter, the cognitive capacities of many other animals are well
documented. There is also growing evidence that many non-humans have
self-awareness and episodic memory. One of the ways that psychologists try
to establish whether or not an individual has self-awareness is by testing to
see whether that individual can recognize him- or herself in a mirror. Great
apes are able to recognize themselves, whereas most of the monkeys tested
are not. Studies with dolphins, elephants, pigs, and pigeons have suggested
that they can pass the mirror test, but dogs, cats, and young human children
don’t recognize themselves in mirrors.22 Episodic memory is more difficult
to test, but in one of the more remarkable studies, episodic-like memory
has been found in scrub jays by Nicky Clayton and her colleagues. Episodic
memory involves recalling “where” a unique event or episode took place,
“what” occurred during the episode, and “when” the episode happened. In
her experimental work, Clayton found that these food-storing jays remember
“what,” “when,” and “where” food items are cached in experiments in which
the birds are allowed to recover perishable “wax worms” and non-perishable
peanuts, “which they had previously cached in visuospatially distinct sites.
Jays searched preferentially for fresh wax worms, their favoured food, when
allowed to recover them shortly after caching. However, they rapidly learned

argues in this way and suggests that all beings that potentially have a rational nature, or
who virtually have it, or who have had it, or who have part of it, or who have the necessary
conditions of it, what he calls “the infrastructure of rational nature,” should be directly
morally considerable. Insofar as a being stands in this relation to rational nature, they are
the kinds of beings that can be wronged. The third way has been proposed by Christine
Korsgaard (2004), who argues that though only persons can make moral demands on other
persons, what we demand is that our animal natures be respected. I discuss Korsgaard’s
view in the next section.
22 See Broom, et al. 2009 for pigs and Reiss & Marino 2001 for dolphins.
60 Ethics and Animals

to avoid searching for worms after a longer interval during which the worms
had decayed.”23 Clayton’s observations suggest that the birds “form integrated
memories about what happened where and when, rather than encoding the
information separately. Furthermore, the jays can also remember whether
another individual was present at the time of caching, and if so, who was
watching when.”24 If jays have a self-conception, then they might count as
persons.
So there are human persons and non-human persons, human non-persons
and non-human non-persons. Of course, more empirical work and further
conceptual refinement of the definition of personhood will help us to figure
out what sorts of beings, with what sorts of capacities, fall into what category,
and thus, what specific moral claims and responsibilities they will, in fact,
have. Even before we have definitive answers about “where to draw the lines,”
as it were, we can still explore what general ethical obligations or attitudes
we should have to those who are not persons but who still deserve our moral
attention.

Moral agents and moral patients

Some philosophers have marked the normative distinction between persons

and non-persons by indicating that persons are “moral agents” and non-
persons are “moral patients.” Moral agents as persons have certain capacities
that allow them to make reflective choices about their actions and to attend
to those who may not be able to make such choices but who nonetheless
have lives that will be affected, for better or worse, by our actions. These
latter non-persons are moral patients; they are the recipients of moral atten-
tion and concern, but they do not have the moral responsibilities that moral
agents, as persons, do. Because moral patients lack certain capacities, there
may be certain things that it is not wrong to do to them, that would be
wrong if these very same actions were done to persons. One of the capaci-
ties that persons or moral agents are generally thought to have, following
Locke, is a sense of themselves as existing over time. Non-persons or moral
patients lack this capacity. So, painlessly killing a non-person who has no
conscious interest or desire to continue living is not, all things considered,

23 Clayton & Dickinson 1998: 272–4. See also Clayton, et al. 2003.
24 Clayton, et al. 2007: R190.
 The natural and the normative 61

wrong in the way that killing a person who does have an explicit desire to
continue to exist would be, other things being equal. Similarly, persons are
autonomous, and, thus, denying them their freedom would be ethically prob-
lematic. In the case of many non-persons who lack autonomy, denying them
freedom may actually be the right thing to do from an ethical perspective.
We will talk about the issues of killing and liberty in greater depth in the
chapters ahead.
For now, it is important to see that the scope of ethical attention extends
over a broad range of beings, all of whom have valuable capacities and inter-
ests as we discussed in the last chapter: they are alive and have bodies that
experience pleasures and pains and can suffer from violence, neglect, or
abuse; they have emotions, desires, likes, and dislikes; and they are engaged
in the world in a variety of ways, some which are enriching and some which
are debilitating. If you are a being whose life can go better or worse, then you
are a proper object of moral attention. A subset of attention-worthy beings
has additional capabilities and interests as well as obligations and responsi-
bilities. Moral agents not only have interests in living lives that are good for
them by their own lights, full of enriching experiences, pleasurable activities,
and satisfying projects, but they also have ethical obligations that arise, in
part, because they have the capacity to reason about their actions and alter
their behaviors accordingly. Moral agents can form intentions about their
actions; are causally responsible for actions and can be blamed or praised for
them; are able to make judgments about rightness and wrongness, both of
their own conduct and of the conduct of other agents; and can construct and
follow norms or moral principles.
The moral universe, as it were, thus can be said to have two levels: a level
that contains moral agents, actors who are responsible for doing the right
thing; and a level that contains moral patients, those to whom right or wrong
actions are directed, but who may or may not be moral agents themselves.
Someone who lacks the capacities of personhood will always be at the level of
a moral patient. But the levels are not exclusive. In certain contexts, persons
can be moral patients too – for example, when they are the ones acted upon
by moral agents, when they are benefited or harmed by others, or when
they temporarily lose their capacities for reason and reflection. Similarly,
upon changes in the abilities of a moral patient, our understanding of those
abilities, or changes in the context in which moral agency is expressed, moral
patients may turn out to be moral agents some of the time.
62 Ethics and Animals

This two-level view of morality can be identified in both utilitarian thinking

and in the thinking of some contemporary Kantians.
For example, Peter Singer’s “preference utilitarianism” allows for differen-
tial ethical responses to agents and patients, persons and non-persons. Singer
believes that we must take into account the consequences of our actions on
all those who experience pleasure or pain as a result of that action, and that
accounting requires that like interests be treated equally, no matter who has
them. Sentient beings have interests, particularly interests in experiencing
pleasure and avoiding pain. Since most humans and non-human animals
are sentient beings who are capable of feeling pleasure and pain, the hap-
piness and suffering of most humans and other animals should be taken
into account. Things – like rocks, plants, and eco-systems – are not taken
into account. So the boundary of moral concern is drawn around the group
of beings who are sentient. However, Singer is concerned not simply with
interests in avoiding pain and experiencing pleasure, but also with interests
and desires that are projected into the future. So, within the sphere of moral
concern, there are two classes of beings: those who project their desires into
the future and those who do not have that capacity. When you or I have our
future desires frustrated, the disappointment and mental suffering that may
result is different than it would be for a being who doesn’t have a concept of
the future. Without a concept of time, or of existence into the future, one can-
not suffer a particular kind of harm, that of having one’s future preferences
thwarted. Singer’s preference utilitarianism thus judges actions not solely by
their tendency to maximize happiness and minimize pain, but also by their
role in promoting interests or satisfying preferences (and avoiding violations
of interests or frustration of preferences).
Christine Korsgaard, who works in the Kantian tradition, has argued that
what we are calling moral agents face “the problem of normativity” because
of the reflective structure of our consciousness.25 We can, and often do, think
about our desires and ask ourselves, “Are these desires reasons for action?
Do these impulses represent the kind of things I want to act according to?”
Our reflective capacities allow us, and require us, to step back from our mere
impulses in order to determine when and whether to act on them. In stepping
back, we gain a certain distance from which we can answer these questions
and solve the problem of normativity. We decide whether to treat our desires

25 She uses the term “human” when she is describing what we are calling “persons.”
 The natural and the normative 63

as reasons for action based on our conceptions of ourselves, on our “practical

identities.” When we determine whether we should take a particular desire
as a reason to act, we are engaging in a further level of reflection, a level that
requires an endorsable description of ourselves. This endorsable description
of ourselves, this practical identity, is a necessary moral identity because,
without it, we cannot view our lives as worth living or our actions as worth
doing. According to Korsgaard, moral agents have a conception of what it is
we ought to do and what other agents ought to do. Persons are aware of the
grounds of our beliefs and actions as grounds; non-persons or moral patients
lack this awareness.
Korsgaard sees the difference between those with normative, rational
capacities and those without as a big difference. But, unlike Kant, who thought
that only the former can have obligations and make moral claims, she argues
that those without normative, rational capacities share certain “natural”
capacities with persons, and these natural capacities are often the content
of the moral demands that persons make on each other. She writes:

what we demand, when we demand . . . recognition, is that our natural

concerns – the objects of our natural desires and interests and affections – be
accorded the status of values, values that must be respected as far as possible
by others. And many of those natural concerns – the desire to avoid pain is an
obvious example – spring from our animal nature, not from our rational
nature.26

What moral agents construct as valuable and normatively binding is not only
our rational or autonomous capacities, but the needs and desires we have as
living, embodied beings. Insofar as these needs and desires are valuable for
agents, the ability to experience similar needs and desires in patients should
also be valued. As a result, moral agents have duties to moral patients.
The two-level view of the moral universe – one that recognizes the moral
claims of agents and patients as springing from the same source, and the
duties and responsibilities of agents that emerge as a result of their status
as persons – appears in competing ethical theories. These theories will differ
when it comes to determining how to adjudicate conflicts of values and what
particularly constitutes right action. As we’ll see when discussing specific
issues, such as experimentation on other animals and conflicts that arise in

26 Korsgaard 2007: 9.
64 Ethics and Animals

assessing various strategies for addressing threats to wild animals, there will
be a good deal of substantive disagreement among these theories. Nonethe-
less, it is reassuring to note that there is an emerging common vision that
humans and other animals populate the moral universe.

The argument from marginal cases

Despite this apparent common ground about how and why we recognize our
moral obligations to other animals, there have been complex, often passion-
ate, debates about the characterization I have been making about the sphere
of moral concern. In particular, there has been reluctance from some quarters
to accept the distinction between humans and persons. Those who support
the distinction often use it to make the case for greater ethical regard and
better treatment for other animals, and they sometimes invoke what has been
called the “Argument from Marginal Cases,” or the AMC, for short. The AMC
goes something like this:

1. Some humans lack certain capacities or characteristics that are typical of

normal human adults (e.g., intentionality, self-awareness, memory,
imagination, a sense of existing over time). They are non-persons.
2. Many other animals also lack these capacities or characteristics (although,
as we have seen, some other animals may have them). They, too, are
non-persons.
3. Our general ethical attitudes about and conduct toward the humans
mentioned in 1 are dramatically different from attitudes about and
conduct toward the comparable non-human animals mentioned in 2. (For
example, it is generally accepted that we use other animals for food or in
lethal scientific experiments. It is thought to be monstrous to even
consider the use of infants or severely mentally impaired individuals in
such ways.)
4. Since there aren’t any morally relevant capacities or characteristics that
distinguish humans mentioned in 1 from the non-humans mentioned in
2, our general ethical attitudes are inconsistent. (Species membership, as
we discussed earlier, even if we had an operational definition of species, is
not a morally relevant characteristic.)
5. It is inconsistent to treat individuals mentioned in 1 differently than we
treat individuals mentioned in 2. To be consistent, we must either find it
 The natural and the normative 65

ethically permissible to think about and treat humans mentioned in

1 as we currently do non-humans, or we must think it is ethically
impermissible to think about and treat the non-humans mentioned in 2
as we do.

While proponents of the AMC generally use the argument to ground claims
that we should expand the sphere of those who deserve ethical attention, the
conclusion has led some to worry that the argument will diminish the respect
we have for humans who are not persons. And this worry is not unwarranted.
As Eva Kittay has noted:

Personhood in the past has also been used less capaciously to exclude specific
humans: women, slaves, Jews, certain racial groups, the disabled – those who,
for one reason or another, were believed unworthy or incapable of rationality
and self-governance. As current disputes over the moral personhood of fetuses
and very premature neonates attest, personhood has been, and continues to
be, a contested category.
What endows these controversies with urgency are the real-life stakes, for
personhood marks the moral threshold above which equal respect for the
intrinsic value of an individual’s life is required and the requirements of
justice are operative and below which only relative interest has moral
weight.27

The conclusion of the AMC allows that if we are to be fully consistent in

our ethical reasoning, to avoid acting on prejudice, and to strive to treat like
cases alike, we must change our attitudes and practices. But this can go in two
directions: either to grant ethical considerations to those who fall outside the
human species boundary and who fall outside the boundary of the category
of person, or to deny ethical consideration to anyone other than persons –
that is, to accept something like the counterintuitive conclusion that Kant
seemed to be advancing.
In order to prevent the possibility of excluding some humans who are on
the margins of personhood from direct ethical consideration, two types of
responses have been mounted. One challenges the notion that moral consid-
eration rests on the possession of certain intrinsic properties, arguing instead
that we ought to take into account the social relations in which individuals
are embedded. The other response is based on the offensiveness of the AMC

27 Kittay 2005: 101.

66 Ethics and Animals

and the dangers associated with comparing some humans with animals. Let’s
consider each of these responses in turn.28

Social relations

The ability to decide between eating pizza or stir-fried veggies, to enjoy the
warmth of the sun on a crisp spring day, to laugh when being tickled, to
enjoy a Beethoven piano concerto is based on the possession of intrinsic prop-
erties particular to individuals with certain types of perceptual and cognitive
capacities. As we have been discussing the occupants of the moral universe in
this chapter and the last, we have explored a range of such capacities. One of
the reasons that philosophers tend to examine intrinsic capacities in deter-
mining who matters from an ethical point of view is that by focusing on the
capacities an individual possesses, extrinsic considerations such as popular-
ity, usefulness to others, political expediency, and social prejudice can be set
aside. If I am the sort of being whose life can go well if I have the company of
good friends and enough chocolate, I should not be denied the opportunity
to spend time with friends and eat chocolate just because I am Jewish or a
woman. Belonging to a politically marginalized or unpopular group is not a
morally relevant social fact about me. No one should be denied the possibility
of exercising their capacities and satisfying their interests simply because of
inegalitarian social conventions or discriminatory traditions. These sorts of
relational properties have a long history of being used to exclude members of
“out” groups, and appeals to such relational properties have led to ethically
unacceptable practices and policies. It is interesting, then, that recently some
philosophers have challenged the AMC, because it is focused on intrinsic prop-
erties rather than relational ones. These philosophers argue that some social
relations must be taken into account.
Of course, to be able to exercise the deliberative capacities I just mentioned
– to have access to pizza or pizza-making ingredients, to be able to listen to
Beethoven, and to be with friends – presupposes that the individuals who are
in a position to exercise their capacities are embedded in social relations. We
wouldn’t know what pizza or Beethoven or friendship was without our human

28 It is quite interesting that these arguments are raised in particular against those who
argue for extending concern for sentient beings (philosophers like Peter Singer and Jeff
McMahan, who are consequentialists) when it seems that the worries would be just as
troubling for Kantians.
 The natural and the normative 67

communities enabling us to understand that there are choices to make and

providing us with a range of things to choose over. Indeed, many (some might
argue all) of the choices we make to satisfy our interests are influenced and
informed by our social relations. My sense of myself as someone whose life can
go better or worse for me in particular ways is a product of my social relations.
If I had a different upbringing, for example, I might not find satisfaction
in what I now find satisfying. Before we persons came to be the kinds of
beings who could more or less autonomously exercise our capacities, we were
dependent upon a network of care to help us to satisfy our most basic needs. In
all of these senses, the individual capacities we have are necessarily embedded
in social relations. I think to some extent this is true of all mammals, and
particularly social mammals. Our “animal nature,” to use Korsgaard’s term,
is inherently a social nature. Infants cannot survive without caretakers, and
developing children require others to help them understand and navigate
their worlds.
But this is not the only sense of social relations that critics of the AMC are
invoking. For those who object to the AMC, there are species-specific social
relations that are thought to make a difference from an ethical perspec-
tive. A human person’s normative commitments do not emerge solely from
their intrinsic psychological capacities; rather they are constructed and made
meaningful in social relations with other humans. As Elizabeth Anderson has
suggested, “Principles of justice [one example of a normative commitment]
cannot be derived simply from a consideration of the intrinsic capacities of
moral patients. Their shape also depends on the nature of moral agents, the
natural and social relations they do and can have with moral patients, and
the social meanings such relations have.”29 To illustrate, she has us consider
an individual with a profound case of Alzheimer’s, someone who is clearly a
moral patient, as this individual is unable to recognize herself or others, to
reason, or to care for herself. Anderson argues that this individual’s dignity
would be violated if she was:

not properly toileted and decently dressed in clean clothes, her hair combed,
her face and nose wiped, and so forth. These demands have only partially to
do with matters of health and hygiene. They are, more fundamentally,
matters of making the body fit for human society for presentation to others.
Human beings need to live with other humans, but cannot do so if those

29 Anderson 2004: 280.

68 Ethics and Animals

others cannot relate to them as human. And this specifically human

relationship requires that the human body be dignified, protected from the
realm of disgust, and placed in a cultural space of decency.
If the relatives of an Alzheimer’s patient were to visit her in a nursing
home and find her naked, eating from a dinner bowl like a dog, they might
well describe what shocks them by saying, “They are treating her like an
animal!” The shock is a response to her degraded condition, conceived in
terms of a symbolic demotion to subhuman animal status. This shows
that the . . . dignity of humans is essentially tied to their human species
membership, conceived hierarchically in relation to nonhuman animals and
independently of the capacities of the individual whose dignity is at stake.30

When proponents of the AMC make the situation for those in 1 equivalent
to the situation for those in 2, they are denying the very sensibility of this
scenario.

How might the proponent of the AMC respond?

One response might simply be to say that humans with severe Alzheimer’s, or
those who are severely cognitively impaired, and non-human animals, who
are not persons or moral agents, will command different sorts of treatment
depending on the kinds of reasoned justifications that moral agents can
make for that differential treatment and, as Anderson says, the types or
relationships with moral patients those agents have. Nonetheless, there is no
reason to invoke a hierarchy of moral status, where human moral patients
are higher than non-human moral patients in virtue of their species-based
connection to human moral agents. One can imagine that if one treated a
dog like a horse, some human moral agent might object in a similar vein.31
That the AMC equates the moral status of individuals in 1 with individuals in
2 does not mean that their treatment should now be identical or that there is
nothing troubling or objectionable about treating a human like a dog, a dog
like a horse, a chimpanzee like a human child.
In addition, consider the fact that different living options are available
for parents with Alzheimer’s. Adult children will often go to great lengths

30 Ibid.: 282.
31 Some object to greyhound racing on just these grounds, but I have in mind people riding
on dogs.
 The natural and the normative 69

to see that their ailing parents get the very best possible care, perhaps quite
expensive care, even when their parent is completely unaware that they are
being cared for in such an elaborate way. It is not for the parent’s sake that
this care is offered, but for the sake of the family and their peace of mind.
Some families don’t care for their ailing parents in these ways – because they
can’t afford such care; because they would rather spend what funds they have
on the members of the family who are persons and can directly appreciate
the benefit from such funds; or because they don’t see it as their moral
responsibility (perhaps the parent was abusive to the children who are now
estranged from her). We don’t force families to provide top-of-the-line care for
their parents who are not persons. (Indeed, we don’t have moral expectations
that families provide top-of-the-line care for members who are persons.) A
decent society would surely care for these individuals in ways that attend
to their basic needs. The specific social relations will determine how moral
agents come to understand their moral obligations to moral patients. A family
who has their mother with Alzheimer’s in a top-of-the-line facility might find
the state-run care “undignified”; they might even think that the state-run
facility “treats people like animals.” But this judgment could be the result of
snobbery or speciesism, and we should not draw moral conclusions from such
judgments. These judgments, in themselves, don’t show that human non-
persons, by virtue of their social relations with other, sometimes judgmental,
persons are due more consideration than non-human non-persons.
Kittay has also argued against the AMC on similar grounds. As the mother
of a severely cognitively impaired daughter, named Sesha, Kittay is vividly
attuned to the role of social relations in understanding our moral commit-
ments to others. When we think of the individuals in 1, she wants us always to
think of them as “someone’s child . . . That social relationship [entails] a series
of appropriate emotional and moral responses . . . It is morally (and emotion-
ally) appropriate to care for one’s child for the child’s own sake. It is the
practices that define parenthood, and not simply the intrinsic properties of
the product of the pregnancy.”32 The intrinsic properties account leads to the
conclusion that we may disregard individuals like Sesha and accept “treating
her like an animal” just as consistently as it would require greater moral
attention for people like Sesha and other animals. Kittay argues that we can
avoid this risk by rejecting the intrinsic properties account for determining

32 Kittay 2009: 145.

70 Ethics and Animals

who belongs in what category and, instead, focusing on species-specific social

relations that model the family. She writes:

Family membership is conditional on birth lines, marriage, and (under

particular conditions) adoption, not on having certain intrinsic
properties . . . Families (or adequate substitutes) are critical when we are
dependent, as in early childhood, during acute or chronic illness, with serious
chronic conditions including disability, and in frail old age. At these times,
we are generally best served by close personal ties. Families are called on in
times of moral crisis for the support of family love and loyalty. Similarly, I
propose that membership in a group of moral peers based solely on species
membership has as its appropriate moral analogue family membership, not
racism . . . As humans we are indeed a family.33

Here, Kittay is suggesting that partiality to one’s own group, the “in” group,
needn’t be thought of as necessarily prejudicial. She is urging us to think
of speciesism – favoring one’s own species over members of other species –
as on par with favoring one’s own family. Insofar as we think it is ethically
permissible to grant greater weight to the interests and desires of members of
our own family, so is it permissible to grant greater weight to the interests and
desires of members of our own species. Kittay is essentially denying premise
4 of the AMC.
There are a number of possible responses to this view. It might be suggested
that ultimately we aren’t morally justified in caring more about our own
children and family members than the children and family members of our
neighbors and colleagues; it is just a function of the way we have arranged our
social relations and institutions that we are psychologically oriented toward
favoring our own family members and, practically, it works out well if every
family takes care of their own. There are, in fact, different cultural practices
and alternative family arrangements in which caring for one’s own family
members more than for other people is not thought to be justifiable. Favoring
one’s own family and how we understand who counts as a family member are
arguably artifacts of our particular social and cultural practices. And cultural
practices are often the very sorts of practices that should be held up to ethical
interrogation, because they tend to make certain kinds of prejudices seem
natural, as I noted earlier. Even within our own culture, there are limits
beyond which favoring one’s own family members become questionable. We

33 Ibid.: 151–2.
 The natural and the normative 71

cannot go to any lengths to further the interests of our own children over
the interests of other people’s children. It would be quite objectionable, for
example, if you were driving your child and a neighbor’s child to school, for
you to use both seatbelts to double-strap your child in while leaving your
neighbor’s child without a seatbelt. In addition to being limited, partiality to
one’s own family members is not thought to be ethically required. We don’t
think that the parent who sends her children to public school and sends
the money she would have spent sending them to private school to support
education in the developing world is doing something unethical; indeed,
many would find that admirable. So, partiality to family looks more like a
contingent feature of our social relations and not a principle for organizing
our ethical obligations.
Families come in many forms. These days, families often include children
from other marriages and various genetic parents, adopted children, the chil-
dren of adopted children, girlfriends or boyfriends who have been rejected
by their families of birth, orphaned cousins, etc. One might also argue that it
is possible to think of “families” as including more than just humans. Many
people have come to identify other animals as part of their family or inti-
mate social units. Donna Haraway has written expansively about “compan-
ion species” who are not simply “pets” but other beings with whom we are in
significant, life-altering relationships. She describes her own transformation
as a result of working with her dog. Haraway says, ‘‘my over-the-top love for
Cayenne has required my body to build a bigger heart with more depths and
tones for tenderness. Maybe that is what makes me need to be honest; maybe
this kind of love makes one need to see what is really happening because
the loved one deserves it. There is nothing like the unconditional love that
people ascribe to their dogs!’’34 George Pitcher describes the relationship he
and his partner had with their two adopted dogs in distinctly familiar terms.
He describes:

their complete and unwavering devotion to us. They showed this constantly,
in countless ways . . . We loved them with all our hearts . . . and they loved us,
too, completely, no holds barred. Such love is perhaps the best thing life has
to offer, and we shall always be grateful for having had such an abundance
of it to receive and to give for so long a time . . . They were our surrogate
children . . . Naturally the love of one’s dog cannot be as deep and rich as the

34 Haraway 2008: 215.

72 Ethics and Animals

love of one’s child, but it can be in some ways just as intense. For example,
our concern for the welfare of Lupa and Remus was, I believe, as strong as a
devoted father’s for his child’s.35

Dawn Prince-Hughes, an autistic writer and anthropologist, found the most

comfort in the company of animals, and it was through her observations of,
and work with, gorillas that she was eventually able to enter into a human
family. Prince-Hughes, by spending time watching captive gorillas who were
“so sensitive and so trapped,” began to understand herself, the world, and
other humans. Through them she learned that “persons are more than chaotic
knots of random actions” and “that as people we are reflected in one another.
Because the gorillas were so like me in so many ways, I was able to see
myself in them, and in turn, I saw them – and eventually myself – in other
human people.”36 Bonds of kinship extend beyond the species border, in our
own culture and in others. If other animals can be part of families, then the
family does not serve as a model for identifying morally relevant distinctions
between species.

Taking offense

Kittay has simply denied the possibility that other animals can be members
of our families in the relevant way; indeed, she finds the idea offensive. She
has lived with and loved dogs, but to compare her feelings for her dog with
those for her daughter is, it seems, unthinkable for her. She writes:

How can I begin to tell you what it feels like to read texts in which one’s
child is compared, in all seriousness and with philosophical authority, to a
dog, pig, rat, and most flatteringly a chimp; how corrosive these comparisons
are, how they mock those relationships that affirm who we are and why we
care? I am no stranger to a beloved animal. I have had dogs I have loved, dogs I
have mourned for. But as dog lovers who become parents can tell you, much
as we adore our hounds, there is no comparison between the feelings for a
beloved child of normal capacities and those for a beloved canine. And I can
tell you that there is also no comparison when that child has intellectual
disabilities.37

35 Pitcher 1995: 158–9, 162, and 163, as quoted in McMahan 2005: 364.
36 Prince-Hughes 2004: 3. 37 Kittay 2009: 610.
 The natural and the normative 73

The comparisons between severely cognitively impaired humans, like Sesha,

with non-human moral patients are not just unthinkable but sickening. Kittay
continues:

to articulate the differences between a human animal with significantly

curtailed cognitive capacities and a relatively intelligent nonhuman animal
means that one first has to see the former as the latter. That is the moment of
revulsion . . . Note that this response has little to do with the affection one
might feel for a nonhuman animal . . . Imagine, if you can, taking the person
that you love as much as you love anything in this world, your beloved child,
and looking at her with the comparative measure of a dog or a rat or a chimp
or a pig . . . what makes this particular case so toxic is that the relentless
comparisons of my daughter to a nonhuman animal, this dehumanization, is
in itself the objectification of her.38

A person’s experience of emotional distress over a philosophical argument

is certainly something to take note of, and the distress and frustration that
Kittay feels when presented with the AMC should not simply be dismissed.
But that one is offended is not enough to disprove an argument, nor is it
enough to justify, without further examination, certain questionable prac-
tices. Consider the fact that many pious men are repulsed and offended by the
sight of a woman who is not completely covered in a burqa. Many racists are
disgusted when they encounter black people in positions of power. These feel-
ings can lead to ethically objectionable practices. As we have just discussed,
our feelings may be the result of certain cultural or traditional assumptions
that themselves do not hold up to critical ethical scrutiny. In addition, some
parents of severely cognitively impaired children may find the comparisons
between 1 and 2 in the AMC offensive and others may not. Some people have
an expansive capacity for love: they can love their children, each one differ-
ently but fully, and they can love the animals with whom they share their
lives.39 Some parents have come to deeply love particular animals when they
see it is with those animals that their severely cognitively impaired children
are their happiest and most comforted. Feelings about family members vary
from culture to culture and between individuals within cultures. Feelings of

38 Ibid.: 613.
39 As Mary Midgley 1983: 119 puts it: “One sort of love does not need to block another,
because love, like compassion, is not a rare fluid to be economized, but a capacity which
grows by use.”
74 Ethics and Animals

revulsion, disgust, and horror at arguments may be an indication that an

argument should be explored more carefully, but such feelings, alone, can’t
refute an argument.
Just as a parent of a severely cognitively disabled child may be disgusted by
the comparison of her child with non-human animals, some people who work
with animals find the comparison of normally functioning adult animals with
cognitively impaired humans offensive. If we think back to the hippopotamus
at the beginning of this chapter, we see an individual who is independent, can
take care of her own needs, acts intentionally, coexists with others relatively
peacefully, defends the weak, and apparently tries to help the injured. The
dolphins, chimpanzees, and birds we have discussed all engage in complex
social and cognitively sophisticated behaviors. These non-human animals are
capable of doing things that are sometimes far beyond the abilities of human
individuals with severe cognitive deficits who are unable to clothe themselves,
feed themselves, clean themselves, or perhaps even recognize others.
Those who worry about the sensibility of equating normal non-humans
with cognitively deficient humans might ask where non-humans with cogni-
tive impairments fit in. Other animals too suffer from cognitive disability. I
know a chimpanzee named Knuckles who has cognitive and motor-control
deficits believed to be due to cerebral palsy. Knuckles has lived at a sanctu-
ary called the Center for Great Apes since he was two years old, and there
he receives round-the-clock care from human caregivers, while also being
allowed supervised visits with other chimpanzees. Due to the diligent care
of the sanctuary staff and volunteers, Knuckles has learned to feed himself,
climb up and down steps, and pull himself up on special swings to hang
upside down and play. He is aware of activities around him, likes to play with
other chimpanzees, and is very affectionate. He is, however, quite distinct in
his abilities from other non-cognitively impaired chimpanzees, who are also
quite distinct from humans with cognitive impairments.
The point of the comparison of those in 1 with those in 2 of the AMC is
not to diminish either but to point to an inconsistency in our attitudes and
behaviors toward moral patients. When proponents of the AMC argue that
humans with severe cognitive impairments are not persons, just as many
non-human animals are not persons, they are not “demoting” the humans
to the status of animals. We are all animals. Rather, they are attempting to
rectify a mischaracterization of the moral universe that is based on species
prejudice. All moral patients, human or non-human, cognitively able or
 The natural and the normative 75

cognitively impaired, have interests that deserve our moral attention. But
that does not ensure that their interests will always win out when there are
conflicts of interests, just as is the case when conflicts between persons occur
and everyone’s interests cannot be simultaneously satisfied. Greater knowl-
edge of the specific kinds of interests that different moral patients have will
enhance our abilities to resolve conflicts in the most ethically defensible ways.
Kittay and others who have personal stakes in the lives of human non-persons
have succeeded in making more vivid the importance and value of the lives,
experiences, and interests of those living with severe cognitive abilities, and
have reminded us of the importance of epistemic humility. But there is no
reason to extend that humility to all humans then stop at the species border.
Those studying and caring for non-human animals have also enlivened our
understanding of the value of the lives, experiences, and interests of other
animals. Comparing the two is only offensive if one assumes that the lives of
other animals are less valuable or worthy of our attention, and, as I have been
arguing, that assumption is based on an unjustifiable prejudice.
The natural world contains hippopotamuses and crocodiles, dandelions
and dugongs, philosophers and biologists, Sesha and Knuckles. The categories
we now use to distinguish between these various organisms are not some-
thing that we can read off the natural world; we need to make distinctions
and judgments about how to categorize, and then give meaning to those cat-
egories. This is where the normative enters. Whether we tie our normative
evaluations to individual natural properties or relations between organisms
and their environments, or both, those who can make judgments, what I
have been calling persons, have certain ethical and epistemological respon-
sibilities, including justifying the value placed on the various categories as
constructed and, perhaps most importantly, being able to defend that valua-
tion in light of the implication these value commitments have in practice. It
is to the practices that we will now turn.