Autonomy and the Orthodoxy of Human Superiority

Abstract

Philosophers, who rarely agree on anything, have reached a surprisingly strong consensus that human life, because of autonomy, is more valuable than nonhuman life. According to the consensus view, our lives are more valuable than the lives of nonhuman animals because of a richness in our lives that derives from autonomy and autonomy-based abilities, with an emphasis on an ability to mold our life to some conception we have of how life should be. great 19th century philosopher Immanuel Kant expressed an early version of the consensus account when he wrote: The capacity to propose an end to oneself is the characteristic of humanity (as distinguished from animality).3 Below I will discuss two contemporary philosophers who express and defend versions of this consensus view. Because nonhuman animals exhibit some degree of what may be taken to be autonomy, we must clarify the degree of autonomy presupposed by the consensus account. To do this, it will be helpful to contrast how we are when we cook, or make chairs, or give lectures, with how we are when we become cooks, or fiecome carpenters, or become teachers. When we do any of the latter, we likely will have standards, values and ambitions, and might mold our lives in accord with them. This will automatically involve us in a more sophisticated kind of autonomy than just the ability to make choices. Goats and chickens make choices, but we do not believe that they use standards and values to mold their choices, their lives, or to live out some ambition. Someone who just cooks may not do that either, but a person who thinks of himself as a cook, who wants to become a better cook, or a respected cook-that clearly brings in ambitions we do not believe we share with goats and chickens. It is in this fuller sense of autonomy, the sense in which we have standards and can mold our lives in accord with them, that our lives allegedly are richer and, hence, of more value. For our lives to be more valuable than the lives of nonhuman animals because we are autonomous, each of the following claims would need to be true: