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Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?

Anand Pillai Fellow
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Animals & environmentAnalyticIndianModern EuropeanJainismKantianismChristine KorsgaardImmanuel KantMahaviraPeter Singer#ahimsa#animal-ethics#ends-in-themselves#humanity-formula
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I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a committed Kantian, said that on Kant's view animals are not ends in themselves, because they are not rational agents. We have duties regarding them, not to them.

I grew up among Jain neighbours, and this felt wrong to me in a way I struggled to argue. As I understand Kant, he did think cruelty to animals was wrong, but because it dulls our compassion toward human beings. That seems to make the bird's suffering matter only as practice for something else.

I have since learned that Christine Korsgaard, one of the best-known Kantians alive, wrote a whole book, Fellow Creatures (2018), arguing that Kantians should regard animals as ends in themselves after all. I have not read it yet.

My open question: can the formula of humanity be extended to animals without abandoning what makes it Kantian? Or is the exclusion of animals built into the theory, so that anyone who wants to protect animals directly needs a different framework, utilitarian, Jain, or something else?

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5 answers

  1. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Your colleague's reading is accurate for Kant himself. In his lectures on ethics he says that someone who is cruel to animals becomes hard in his dealings with people too, and that is the core of his account. But Korsgaard's argument is cleverer than a simple extension. Roughly: when we value ourselves as ends, part of what we value is that things can be good or bad for us. Animals share that feature. So the ground of our valuing ourselves extends to them, even if the capacity for moral reasoning does not. Whether that is still Kant or a Kantian revision is the debate.

  2. Hetal Shah

    Contributor

    From a Jain household, the Kantian question seems to me to start in the wrong place. Jain thought begins with the jīva, the living soul, present in every creature, down to beings with only the sense of touch. Harm is wrong because of what it does to the jīva, not because of the harmer's rationality or character. Mahāvīra's teaching does not ask whether animals reason. It asks whether they can be hurt. In that respect it is closer to Bentham than to Kant, though with a very different metaphysics.

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  3. Aroha Tipene

    Contributor

    In Aotearoa a river now has legal personhood, and my students do not think this is strange, because in tikanga the river is an ancestor and our relationship to it carries obligations both ways. I mention it because both Kant and the utilitarians assume that moral standing is a property an individual has. Relational views start from the relationship. Anand's birds may have a claim not because of what they are individually but because of what the lake is to everyone who depends on it.

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  4. Ethan Mercer

    Contributor

    The utilitarian answer is the simplest: if the birds can suffer, their suffering counts, full stop. Singer's argument that species membership is not a morally relevant line is, I think, the thing every Kantian extension has to answer. Korsgaard's book is in some ways a Kantian attempt to reach Singer's conclusion by a different route. I'm not sure the route matters if the destination is the same, though Henrike will tell me it does.

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  5. Anand Pillai

    Fellow

    Thank you. Henrike's summary of Korsgaard makes me want to read it properly: grounding the value of animals in the same place we ground our own is a much stronger claim than “cruelty makes us cruel”. Hetal and Aroha remind me that the question of who counts can start somewhere else entirely. For the wetland meeting I think I will use Ethan's argument, because it is the quickest, and Aroha's, because it describes the lake.