Journal article
Are the folk utilitarian about animals?
- Abstract:
- Robert Nozick famously raised the possibility that there is a sense in which both deontology and utilitarianism are true: deontology applies to humans while utilitarianism applies to animals. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in such a hybrid views of ethics. Discussions of this Nozickian Hybrid View, and similar approaches to animal ethics, often assume that such an approach reflects the commonsense view, and best captures common moral intuitions. However, recent psychological work challenges this empirical assumption. We review evidence suggesting that the folk is deontological all the way down-it is just that the moral side constraints that protect animals from harm are much weaker than those that protect humans. In fact, it appears that people even attribute some deontological protections, albeit extremely weak ones, to inanimate objects. We call this view Multi-level Weighted Deontology. While such empirical findings cannot show that the Nozickian Hybrid View is false, or that it is unjustified, they do remove its core intuitive support. That support belongs to Multi-level Weighted Deontology, a view that is also in line with the view that Nozick himself seemed to favour. To complicate things, however, we also review evidence that our intuitions about the moral status of humans are, at least in significant part, shaped by factors relating to mere species membership that seem morally irrelevant. We end by considering the potential debunking upshot of such findings about the sources of common moral intuitions about the moral status of animals.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.1MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11098-022-01833-2
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Philosophical Studies More from this journal
- Volume:
- 180
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 1081-1103
- Place of publication:
- Netherlands
- Publication date:
- 2022-08-03
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-05-09
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1573-0883
- ISSN:
-
0031-8116
- Pmid:
-
35966171
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1237534
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1237534
- Deposit date:
-
2025-02-04
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Kahane and Caviola
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record