Abstract
The aim of this paper is to take normative aspects of animal welfare in corporate practice from a blind spot into the spotlight, and thus connect the fields of business ethics and animal ethics. Using insights from business ethics and animal ethics, it argues that companies have a strong responsibility towards animals. Its rationale is that animals have a moral status, that moral actors have the moral obligation to take the interests of animals into account and thus, that as moral actors, companies should take the interests of animals into account, more specifically their current and future welfare. Based on this corporate responsibility, categories of corporate impact on animals in terms of welfare and longevity are offered, including normative implications for each of them. The article concludes with managerial implications for several business sectors, including the most animal-consuming and animal-welfare-threatening industry: the food sector. Welfare issues are discussed, including the issue of killing for food production.
Highlights
During the last few decades, societal and philosophical support for the idea that animals should receive more legal and moral protection has grown
This stance is supported by Hart and Sharma (2004), who argue in favour of including currently marginalised stakeholders like the poor, the weak, and the non-human, and by Mitchell et al (1997), who classify animals as ‘dependent stakeholders’: those who lack power but who have urgent legitimate claims as ‘dependent’, ‘because they depend upon others for the power necessary to carry out their will’ (p. 977)
In this paper I have argued that animals count morally, and that humans as well as their institutions, including companies, have moral obligations towards sentient animals, which had led us to the argument that companies bear responsibilities for the animals they have an impact on
Summary
Food Ethics (2022) 7:2 issue of ending their lives. In section 6, I draw conclusions and offer managerial implications. Rollin (2016b), for example, agrees with Warren that sentience is a sufficient condition for moral status He stretches the notion of pleasure and pain to any positive or negative mental state, such as boredom, and prefers to speak of what matters to animals. Biological research uses four types of evidence for sentience: a nervous system similar to the human nervous system, behaviour in reaction to injury that is similar to human behaviour in reaction to injury (crying, howling, shrieking, moaning, etc.), the presence of sense organs and/or behaviour indicative of perceptual ability (not sufficient for sentience, but apt to be accompanied by it), and the presence of neurochemicals that in humans are related to the experiencing of pleasure, pain, or emotion (Warren 1997)
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