Animals and Humans: Grounds for Separation?

Abstract

It is relatively uncontroversial that (at least some) non-human animals are morally considerable in their own right. While recognizing moral obligations to animals, many also hold that humans, but not other animals, pass a distinct, higher, threshold for moral consideration, implying that when choices must be made, serious human concerns always trump those of non-human animals. For example, Carl Cohen argues that “If biomedical investigators abandon the effective pursuit of their professional objectives because they are convinced that they may not do to animals what the service of humans requires, they will fail, objectively, to do their duty.” However, defenders of such views face what Jeff McMahan has called the “separation problem”—the challenge of explaining why members of the human species as such have special moral privilege. It is difficult to find a basis for separating the moral status of humans from that of non-human animals. Whatever criterion is used (language, sufferer, subject of a life, user of tools, cooperator, builder and so on), it seems that any attributes possessed by all humans are manifest also by some non-human animals, to an extent that matches or surpasses the accomplishment of some humans such as infants or those with extreme cognitive disability. Even ethical capacities are arguably possessed by some non-human animals. If being entitled to moral consideration or being owed moral obligation is based on possession of some inherent property, then any being or creature that manifests this property should qualify for that consideration, whichever biological category it belongs to. And unless there is a further argument for inclusion, then those beings or creatures that lack the morally salient property turn out not to be morally considerable in precisely this way, although they might be morally considerable for some other reason. Hence separationists, those who insist that certain special moral claims attach to all and only humans have been accused of “speciesism”—a moral privilege based on species membership parallel to the (rationally and morally) problematic phenomena of sexism, racism and the like. Those who oppose separationism argue that moral considerations, protections, rights, or benefits are independent of species membership. Belonging to a biological species or “looking like us” seem to be improper standards for moral salience. The separation argument needs a fact about the nature of all humans that does not include any other species. Inherent properties are not promising, but argu-