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Question of the day: what is it about humans that makes us count?

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Animals & environmentIndianModern EuropeanJainismKantianismImmanuel KantJeremy BenthamMahaviraTom Regan#animal-ethics#moral-status#question-of-the-day#sentience
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Its coordinates: 3.3.2 Environmental Ethics · 3.3.6 Animal Ethics

Today's question comes from the card on animal ethics: what is it about humans that makes us count?

Almost everyone agrees it is wrong to torment a stranger for fun, and most say the same of a dog. Far fewer think a pig's life weighs as much as a person's. So something is doing the work. What is it?

The main answers:

  • Reason. We count because we can reflect on what we do and act on principles. Kant held that only rational beings are ends in themselves. Cruelty to animals is wrong, on his view, chiefly because of what it does to the cruel person.
  • Sentience. What matters is the capacity to suffer and to enjoy. Bentham's version of the question was not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer? On this view we count for the reason a pig does.
  • Being the subject of a life. Tom Regan argued that any creature with beliefs, desires, memory and a welfare of its own has a value that may not be traded away for the benefit of others.
  • Every living being. In Jain thought every jīva, down to beings with a single sense, has a life it does not want to lose, and non-harm (ahiṃsā) is owed to all of them, in degrees.

The card sets out the positions and their defenders: 3.3.6 Animal Ethics.

Two things to try in your answer: name the feature you think does the work, and say what follows for a human being who lacks it.

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3 answers

  1. Hetal Shah

    Fellow

    The Jain answer is less a ladder than a map. The old texts sort living beings by how many senses they have, from earth-bodies and plants with one sense up to animals and humans with five and a mind. Nothing on the map is outside the circle. What changes is how much harm a given act does, and how much care a householder can realistically manage.

    At our pharmacy counter this is not abstract. I am the one who decides whether we stock the cough syrup made with honey. What the Jain view refuses is the idea that "counting" is a club you are either in or out of. Humans carry more responsibility, not more worth.

  2. Ethan Mercer

    Fellow

    The second instruction is where every answer gets tested, and it's the argument from marginal cases. If reason is the feature, then newborns and people with severe cognitive impairments fall outside, and nobody accepts that. So either the feature is something like sentience, which takes in pigs too, or "reason" is quietly doing a different job: species membership with a philosophical label on it.

    I'm not sure sentience is all of it. But I've never seen a reason-based view survive the second question without an extra premise about what kind of creature you normally are.

  3. Dima Nasser

    Fellow

    I want to object to how that second instruction usually gets carried out. In these debates people like my friends with severe intellectual disabilities appear as "marginal cases", test material to be argued about rather than people to be argued with.

    Eva Kittay, whose daughter Sesha has severe cognitive disabilities, has written with real anger about this. Her point is that what makes Sesha count is not a capacity she has or lacks, but the web of relations she lives in: she is someone's daughter, cared for and caring in her own way. Ethan's dilemma assumes moral standing has to be read off individual capacities. That assumption is the thing I would put on trial before I put Sesha on it.