While this volume does not aim to make normative claims, at the heart of this policy issue are contested claims about how humans should relate to non-humans. Public policy’s apparent focus on technical decisions about resource allocation and administrative procedures only loosely conceals its core interest in the mediation of competing values (Considine 1994, 3). While many motivations are discussed in the following chapters – economic, political, strategic – it is important to understand where the various actors stand in relation to contemporary debates about human–animal ethics. Therefore, in this chapter I outline some significant currents of thought about the ethics of human–animal relations. No single group ‘owns’ an interest in animal ethics; rather, all the political actors discussed in this volume, including members of the general public, make decisions based on ethical assumptions. Significantly, however, the vast majority of actors may not be able to explicitly articulate their own ethical position regarding animals. In examining our society’s approach to human–animal ethics, we therefore need to begin with some basic questions: What is the locus of our concern? That is, to whom do we extend ethical consideration? How do we assess their interests? And how do we balance these interests against competing priorities and ethical concerns?

​What are animals?

Before we can consider the variety of ethical perspectives on animals, it is important to understand what we mean when we talk about ‘animals’. This is necessary not only to define the terrain of analysis, but also in order to recognise the limits of our current knowledge. La Barbera (2012, 1) observes that ‘animal’ is an ontological category: it helps us to define a socially meaningful class of entities. This is more than simply an esoteric discussion, as the scientific classification of animals by humans informs what social, legal and political status they are afforded. Inclusion or exclusion from the category of ‘animal’ leads to a range of different treatments, both under law and in the minds of thinkers about animal ethics.

By classifying the world, human beings have attempted to order the complex environment in which we live, and so to exert a measure (real or perceived) of control upon it (Crowson 1970, 1–2). As scientific understanding of the natural world has increased, there has been a paradoxical firming and loosening of the boundaries between different types of living things. Developments in evolutionary biology and genetics have enabled more definitive identification of living things. At the same time, however, a basic definition of what constitutes ‘life’ remains elusive, particularly as science explores deeper questions about sentience and mental states: at what point can an entity be said to possess the type of self- and situational awareness that humans see as morally significant? In the study of policy and politics, a similar focus on classification and definition has become increasingly important, as scholarly interest has shifted from questions of how and why power is mobilised to a focus on evidence-based political and administrative decisions: in making political decisions of ethical import, can we employ a formal and impartial set of criteria? In both biological and political terms, then, how we define and categorise ‘animals’ both reflects and informs our ethical perception of them.

The European tradition

The most eminent scientific treatise on animals in the European tradition emerged from ancient Greece. Aristotle undertook significant efforts to identify and classify animals, a body of work that remained highly influential throughout Europe and western Asia into the late Renaissance (Asimov 1965). Aristotle focused on categorisation based on physiological similarity, and his influence can be seen in the rise of Linnaean classification during the scientific revolution. Importantly, the Aristotelian approach also incorporated a moral hierarchy, ascending from plants to animals and finally to humans, that was based on the complexity of the soul. In this model, only humans possessed the high-order values of rationality – a distinction implicitly retained in the metaphor of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ forms of life in post-Darwinian thinking (Prothero 2007, 125).

In his Systema naturae (1735), Carl Linnaeus codified the various classification systems that had emerged from a mixture of classical Greek natural philosophy and from the Platonic idea that the observable natural world consists of approximates of perfect archetypes or ‘forms’. Animals sat in an exclusive category (kingdom) that was distinct from other biological entities (plants) and from non-living matter (minerals). Moving away from Aristotle, and in a direct challenge to religious orthodoxy, Linnaeus placed humans in a biological category alongside apes, based on physical rather than behavioural similarities. Over time, Linnaeus’ neat classification system has broken down, beginning with the discovery of microbial life (1676) and later with the ambiguous status of infectious agents such as viruses (Xue et al. 2012) and prions. More recently, the discovery of a range of organisms that have both animal and plant characteristics has further muddied such neat divisions (Ebdrup 2012). In the 20th century, reflecting the influence of Darwin, Linnaean classification was superseded by a ‘cladistic’ approach, in which organisms are classified according to their evolutionary relationship rather than physical similarities.

The upshot has been a move towards an inclusive definition of animals based on a minimum set of shared characteristics. Inherently, this excludes categorical discrimination based on the extent to which a specific trait (say, self-awareness) is displayed. Today, animals are generally defined as having five characteristics (Holland 2011, 1–3):

1. They are living things: they live and die, and are part of a process of reproduction.
2. They are multicellular organisms.
3. They consume other organisms (living or dead) to live.
4. They sense their environment and are able to move for at least part of their life cycle.1
5. They possess strong and flexible epithelial cells, which are critical in their embryonic development and to the development of the anatomical complexity exhibited by many animals.

In the development of the biological sciences, therefore, the notion of an ‘us and them’ distinction between humans and other animals has been collapsed by successive waves of analysis and classification. While humans may exhibit traits at the extreme end of a measurable spectrum (for example, rational planning and complex tool-use), similar traits are observed within the animal kingdom. This highlights the subjectivity of moral hierarchies based on any one trait, as well as the difficulty of picking a neutral benchmark against which to compare different types of animals for the purpose of making ethical judgements about their worth.

This latter point is particularly acute when animals come from different phylum (major subclassifications of the animal kingdom), and so have radically different bodyplans due to early evolutionary divergence. This can make simple definitions of ‘intelligence’, ‘consciousness’ and other characteristics difficult to pin down. Echinoderms (starfish), for example, lack the type of brain common to most animals, but sense their environment through eye-spots and a distributed net of neurons. With this ‘brain’ they independently control each of their arms to move and catch prey. Insect colonies, meanwhile, collectively display complex environmental sensing and organised response (Miller 2007); this is only revealed as a kind of non-human intelligence if the notion of intelligence is not tied to the individual brain.

Science has often been seen as a useful means of resolving questions about the moral significance of different animals. In reality, however, this is rarely true. While scientific research has facilitated comparisons of closely related species (for example, in recent developments in assessing the intelligence of chimpanzees), beyond simple direct comparisons scientific research more often serves to highlight the impossibility of understanding the subjectivity of different species. Scientific research itself also has practical implications for animal welfare and has been the subject of ethical debates; in the 19th century, for example, the drive for greater scientific understanding of animal biology saw the rise of unregulated vivisection without anaesthesia (Murrie 2013, 259–60). In considering the ethics of human–animal interaction, then, science does not provide us with easy answers; instead, philosophical and political thinking must also come into play.

​What concern do we owe animals?

​Classical perspectives

While science has undermined the primacy of Aristotelian binomial classifications as absolute categories, they remain important in the popular imagination. This is largely thanks to their useful heuristic value, but is also a result of the long-standing dominance of these categories, which are rooted in some of the earliest natural philosophy. Given the closeness of people in classical societies to agriculture and the natural environment, it is not surprising that the study and treatment of animals has a long philosophical tradition.

For the Greeks of the classical era, the dominance of Platonic forms had wider implications than simply the development of classification. Aristotle specified the degree to which living things could be seen to have ‘souls’: plants had a simple soul (they live but do not feel), animals a more developed soul (they feel but do not reason), and humans the highest soul (we reason) (Nordenskiold 1946, 36). This approach was not limited to thinking about the natural world. Aristotle explicitly linked the natural order to the political one, arguing in Politics (c350 BCE):

This instrumental view is based on a number of perceived characteristics of animals: first, that unlike the cultural development of humans, their nature is ‘fixed’ and therefore the current social order of human dominance can be seen as a natural part of life (an idea associated with a conservative worldview); and second, that animals lack rationality beyond a necessary ‘practical wisdom’ (Newmyer 2011, 9, 74), which excludes them from human considerations of justice. This position was contested by the stoics, who denied animals any reason (and therefore any ethical consideration) and who saw the affordance of justice to animals as a diminution of that which could be afforded to humans, revealing an early concern with ethical relativism (Newmyer 2011, 108–9). The stoic Cicero (1896, xcii) argues in On the nature of the gods that ‘In the first place the universe itself was made for the sake of gods and men, and the things that are in it were prepared and devised for the advantage of men’. Overall, the slightly more generous view of animals of the heirs of Aristotle tended to dominate the ancient world: animals were seen to exist ‘for man’, but were held to have some characteristics that might not entirely instrumentalise their use.

​The major Abrahamic religions1

The influence of this perspective on European thought remains today, and the work of Aristotle and his followers dominated the early and middle Christian period, with mediaeval scholasticism explicitly encouraged to focus on the heavenly realm; on worldly matters, they were encouraged to adopt the views of classical writers with limited revision (Asmov 1965). For the most part, the Aristotelean view of the pre-ordered nature of human–animal relations was compatible with Judaeo-Christian philosophy.2

While the key Jewish and Christian texts contain a range of dietary restrictions prescribing what foods can be eaten and how they should be prepared, both religions broadly give humans dominion over all living things as food.3 This notion of control or ‘stewardship’ has been subject to some theological debate. Callicott (1994, 24) considers it a care-taking role, one that goes beyond exploitation to entail greater ecological responsibility for retaining and sustaining God’s creation. Since the 19th century, passages of the Bible have been used to promote vegetarianism,4 and there has been a biblical motivation behind some contemporary conservationism (Basney 2000).

While the Bible has little to say specifically about the treatment of animals, there are some indications that unnecessary cruelty was not regarded as the act of a ‘righteous person’ (Proverbs 12:10).5 Similarly, care for animals can be seen as engaging in due regard for part of God’s creation (Genesis 1:25). Overall, however, the Bible is clear in making a distinction between humans and the natural world (Genesis 1:26–28), a hierarchy of ownership and control that is not automatically in alignment with contemporary environmental thinking about the inseparability of humans from their environment (Hayward 2011, 6). Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant (1963, 239–41)6 both objected to cruelty towards animals because of concerns that such cruelty could lead to cruelty between humans (Harwood 1928, 13, 40): thus, it was still an essentially anthropocentric concern. (This is the same reason why only slaves were permitted to butcher animals in Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516. Similarly, William Hogarth’s instructive 1751 engravings, The four stages of cruelty, depict a narrative of decline starting with childhood cruelty to animals.) This type of argument is not reserved to obscure biblical debates, but can be found in mass-produced Christian publications distributed across Australia for a general audience (for example The Watchtower, published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, May 2015).

In line with this instrumentalist perspective, René Descartes (1637) argued for a mechanical view of the universe. In building a general theory of the behaviour of the world without the need for divine intervention, animal action is akin to reflex. If animals are seen as complex machines without consciousness, no soul need be present to explain their behaviour. In creating this dualism between the physical brain and the higher-order mind, Cartesianism disassociated the similarities of humans and other animals in a way that diverged fundamentally from the Aristotelian tradition (Descartes et al. 2007, 60). Animals, as automata like the clockwork entertainments of his time, became objects that could be possessed (La Barbera 2012, 28), a perspective that the followers of Linnaeus and Darwin would end up struggling against.

This distinction between higher-order mental characteristics (reason, recognition of the rights of others, sentience) provided the basis for the distinction between humans and animals in the various strands of political contract theory (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau). Indeed, contract theories often define humanity in direct distinction to the animality of ‘states of nature’, albeit with different understandings of what the natural state looked like, and therefore different normative implications. Thus the political philosophy that stems from these views tends to focus on the capacity of humans to enter into contracts that govern their interactions – that is, their capacity to be agents, and therefore to demonstrate ‘moral agency’. Similarly, David Hume argued that justice is only possible between those of equal standing able to engage in a mutual agreement to establish a set of rules to distribute resources fairly. This type of thinking was an extension of the focus on rationality as the key difference between animal and human, and had implications for the expectation – central to these theories – that protection from violence is the fundamental purpose of political society.

Alternatively, early proponents of virtue ethics attributed moral significance to this very lack of rationality: animals could not be seen to engage in sin, as they lack an understanding of what sin is. They could thus be seen as innocents: animals could not sin, but could be sinned against by humans. As the anti-vivisectionist Francis Power Cobbe put it, they are ‘incapable of offence’ (1884, 5). This perspective implies a duty of restraint by humans towards animals, who, by their nature, were not required to demonstrate a reciprocal concern for humans.

​The development of the welfarist model

The limits of these traditional attitudes to animal welfare became politically significant in England in the 18th century. Shevelow (2008) observes that in the late 1700s reports of sadistic acts of animal cruelty and the enduring popularity of blood sports were appearing in the new media of public newspapers. Particularly gruesome acts – such as the Manchester butchers who cut the feet off sheep before driving them through the centre of town (213), or the man who tore out the tongue of his horse (Fairholme and Pain 1924, 13) – elicited concerns that such acts reflected poorly on a civilised Christian community, and appeared to be beyond sanction under a legal system based on classical views of animals as property (whether of private individuals in the case of domesticated animals, or of the state in the case of wild animals). Progressive clergy began actively to promote a more benign view of Christian dominion with relation to stock animals.

Armstrong and Botzler (2008, 4–5) argue that the widening acceptance that animals had more complex mental states strengthened calls for improvement in the treatment of animals. At this time Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy focused on the abrogation of unnecessary suffering through public policy and not simply private morality (Principles of morals and legislation, 1781). The development of early animal-welfare legislation reflected progressive thought of the time, rather than simply the idiosyncratic legislation of highly motivated individuals.

While the culmination of this new pressure for reform, Martin’s Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act, could be seen as a significant break with the past, it focused narrowly on a specific type of valued animal and did not extend to the owners of animals. This reflects both political pragmatism (Martin had learned the lessons of previous failed legislative attempts) and a continuation of thinking that stretched back to Aristotle. This connection is clear in the implicit hierarchy of animals based not on their implicit capabilities or capacities but on their functional relationship to human beings. Thus, while authors such as Francione (2000) argue that Benthamite ideas drove the development of contemporary animal-welfare laws, in reality these laws were the codification of competing approaches to determining the moral status of animals. They drew on utilitarian assessments of the relative capacity of animals to experience pain and suffering (1907, s122), historically contingent views of the value of animals to humans, and debates about animals’ mental and cognitive capacity and their relationship to human reason.

The most significant of the latter perspective has been the use of evolutionary theory to look at genetic relationships between species, with a recognition that simple and complex animal forms exist along a continuum. In Descent of man (1871) Darwin makes this clear, stating:

In making this connection, the Darwinian evolutionary thought that would be so powerful in shaping the natural and social sciences would promote thinking about animals along a continuum of capacity and subjectivity.

While Darwinism introduced new possibilities for the political treatment of animals based on grounds other than the instrumental, it remained heavily anthropocentric. Thus Bailey (2011) sees the common distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ animals in European philosophy as grounded not in a deeper categorical distinction based on phenomenological insight, but more simply in an intellectual justification of anthropocentric delineation based on the relative similarity of some animals to humans. This approach privileges primates based on their closeness to humans (both structurally and behaviourally), while overlooking animals whose very different physiologies may reflect their different environments. Cephalopods (octopuses), for example, exhibit sophisticated intelligence and the capacity for tool use, but have been neglected for many years owing to their very different nervous systems (Spedding 2000, 33) and their marine habitat.

​Challenges to the welfare model

The radical second-wave animal protection organisations both responded to and promoted new ethical frameworks for considering human–animal relations. While the publication of Singer’s Animal liberation7 directly encouraged the formation of second-wave groups in Australia, we should not assume that the movement seeks to implement a specific academic ethical position. In the UK, for example, new activist practices associated with animal rights (such as the Hunt Saboteur movement, which started operations in the 1960s) pre-date and significantly informed academic debates regarding human–animal relations. Reaching a critical mass in the 1980s, the initial codification and development of ethical perspectives by people such as Singer have generated a wide array of responses from different ethical perspectives.

Since the 1980s academic ethicists have applied every significant school of thought to the question of human–animal relations. Major debates have focused on the appropriate decision-making framework within which to assess ethical questions, the main models being Singer’s consequentialist (or ‘ends’) perspective, which highlights choice outcomes, Tom Regan’s deontological (‘rules’) focus on animal rights, and Rosalind Hursthouse’s application of virtue (or ‘character’) ethics.

Singer and Regan’s theoretical differences highlight competing perspectives on how to determine the nature of animals as moral subjects (what Regan calls ‘moral patients’). This in turn reflects differences in how ethical decision takers might assess the characteristics of animals in any moral calculus of their relative value. Commonly, this rests on contested notions of which animals exhibit sentience, which is itself a contested concept: some thinkers emphasise consciousness and self-awareness, while others stress the ‘emotional need to seek satisfaction and avoid suffering’ (Webster 2011, 7).

This draws philosophy and biological sciences into dialogue. Once, only animals with vertebrae were considered significant moral subjects;8 increasingly, as scientific studies have looked at a wider range of complex cognitive relationships, invertebrates have been included. This type of research includes behavioural studies, as well as biological research into attributes such as the presence of pain-sensing nociceptors, or comparative brain size to body weight. Shifting away from narrow comparisons with human anatomy has thus been important in advancing arguments for the moral standing of invertebrates without human-like central nervous systems.

In focusing attention on sentience as a tool to determine the moral obligation of humans to animals, Singer importantly popularised the concept of ‘speciesism’: the arbitrary valuation of other animals based on an irrational preference for members of one’s own species, a practice Singer equated with racism and sexism. While this represented an explicitly political claim at the time – situated as it was in the context of the 1970s – the move highlighted the enduring centrality of humans as the privileged referent, even within animal welfare debates.

Hursthouse, meanwhile, focuses on the perspective of a ‘virtuous person’, asking what type of choices a moral actor might make. This approach shifts attention away from the subject to the agent of moral choice, and in attempting to de-emphasise the potential for future biological science to resolve current ethical debates represented a departure from the dominant discourse.

Feminist care ethics have also been systematically applied to the question of animals. This approach, centred on the cultivation of positive relationships, challenges liberal and individualist assumptions to consider ethical choices in the context of ongoing interactions between humans and animals; it draws less on ‘scientific’ attributes and more on alternative drivers of behaviour such as emotion and empathy. In this way it is informed by standpoint feminism, but also has origins in the critical stance of the 19th-century anti-vivisection movement towards the instrumental rationality of biologists (demonstrating both the complex relationship between theory and practice as well as the parallel strands running concurrently throughout the 19th and 20th centuries). It also shares some ideas with Singer’s focus on liberation and speciesism. But in moving away from the dominant consequentialist and rules-based perspectives, it rebuffs Singer’s emphasis on crafted standardised sets of ‘decision rules’ to be applied universally as part of a masculinist ethical tradition that does not give due consideration of emotional states and situational relationships.

The legacy of anti-vivisection is also evident in the work of Gary L. Francione, which emerged in the 1990s. Francione is highly critical of both Singer and Regan for what he describes as a continued re-validation of traditions of animal use and anthropocentrism via their implicit and explicit comparisons of animal and human characteristics, as well as an inherent pragmatism that focuses on incremental change over radical abolition. While acknowledging that these thinkers present new ideas about animal ethics, Francione sees utilitarianism and strong rights positions as sustaining animals’ subordinate status in society. Describing these positions as ‘new welfarism’ to reduce the political and ideological distance between the 19th-century welfare movement and the early second wave, Francione argues that they continue to treat animals as property or slaves, and so undermine the prospect of meaningful changes to human–animal relations. In rejecting this approach, he argues that slavery cannot morally be reformed, only abolished. This mirrors 19th-century splits among anti-vivisectionists, between those who completely rejected the practice (abolitionists) and those who supported the moderation of vivisection through regulation and the use of anaesthesia (Murrie 2013). As we will see in later chapters, this welfare versus abolition debate currently defines interactions between animal activists in Australia today.

​Defending the status quo

As foreshadowed, one notable absence from the discussion above is a significant modern defence of the behavioural status quo. This absence is interesting and provocative. Keane (2009, 26–7), for example, observes that the slave-owning societies of antiquity were notable in their production of philosophical critiques of slavery, but did not produce a substantive defence of the institution. The justifications of slavery produced on the eve of the US Civil War, he argues, reflected the imminent death of an institution that could survive only when it was taken for granted. This ‘house of cards’ argument is reflected in Joy’s (2010) decision to name carnism. Similarly, Lupton (1996, 124–5) sees the reluctance to name and defend the status quo as a psychological defence: it allows meat-eaters to avoid explicitly acknowledging how meat is produced. Death is an implicit ‘absent referent’ that the contemporary consumer actively avoids. I will explore this topic further in Chapter 4.

Some formal defences of the status quo do exist.9 One example is Scruton’s (1998) Animal rights and wrongs. An Australian example is Leahy’s (1994) Against liberation. Responding particularly to the work of writers such as Singer and Regan, these volumes argue that proponents of animal rights overstate the similarity of animals to humans and understate the differences. For both authors, animals are ‘primitive beings’ that lack self-awareness, language, rationality and higher-order capacities to organise. In addition, only human society develops the moral capacity of subjects through its cultivation of an awareness of rights and responsibilities; this makes humans more significant moral subjects.

Leahy and others argue that as a result of this basic difference, animals are rightly available for human use, and are rightly lower in our hierarchy of concern. This is regulated by two factors: our ‘naturally humane’ character, and laws prohibiting excesses by social outliers. In democratic societies, Leahy argues, political and legal institutions ensure that humane standards are upheld. The status quo, therefore, is not arbitrary, but reflects a collective intelligence codified in law.

Elements of this argument have been employed in more popular (and more populist) texts. The best example is Michael Pollan’s (2006) The omnivore’s dilemma. Widely read and cited (Williams and Germov 2011), Pollan’s work popularises many of the same arguments contained in Against liberation concerning the subordinate status of animals.10 Pollan, however, rejects the argument of democratic conservatism, contending that modern food systems reduce the transparency of production systems, subverting our natural affinity for the animals we use. In his call to reconnect with the origins of food to produce a more ethical omnivorism, Pollan aligns with the pro-carnist ethics that Johnston and Baumann (2010, 154–6) identify in the popular food-appreciation movement. In their consideration of ‘foodies’, Johnston and Baumann argue that, while foodies prioritise personal hedonism over other ethical concerns, they often express an interest in obtaining ingredients from high-welfare meat production (what critics disparage as ‘happy meat’; see Image 5). Such consumers may pride themselves on not shying away from the realities of farming practices, unlike less discerning customers. As Johnston and Baumann point out, the idea that ethically produced meat also tastes better entails a logic of win-win for foodies: more ethical treatment of animals pays off with greater enjoyment at the table.

​Conclusion

Humans have a long history of contemplating our relationship with, and ethical duty to, animals. This has produced an array of ethical and moral positions, some based on received wisdom and others derived from first principles. Combined, these now occupy a large conceptual space, including religious law and various normative ethical schools of thought. In recent years, an ethical defence of the status quo has been added to this expanding body of literature. (A summary of the main ethical traditions regarding human–animal relations is provided in Appendix B.) These theories do not simply indicate what type of human–animal relations are acceptable; they also focus on different aspects of animality in order to delineate between different types of treatments.

While the extent to which these different perspectives form the basis of political action is discussed more in later chapters, it is clear that some political actors in the Australian context are directly informed by their engagement with the literature on human–animal relations. Animal Liberation organisations across Australia, for example, were directly inspired by Peter Singer’s book. Over time, some of these organisations have moved away from Singer’s utilitarianism towards different philosophies as a result of engagement with a widening literature. The relationship between these debates and the general public, however, is less clear: discussions of animal welfare issues in the popular media rarely, if ever, introduce the arguments of ethicists in support of a moral position. Even popular volumes that introduce ethical conundrums are massively outsold by books promoting – largely through cooking and consumption – the human–animal status quo. If, as Leahy might argue, it is right and proper for legislation and popular opinion to influence each other in the quest for an acceptable ethical position on animals, we need to understand the position of animals in the public eye. We turn to this in Part 2 of the book.