Care Ethics and Animal Welfare

Abstract

Care theorists have outlined an approach to animal welfare issues that appears to avoid many of the most contentious claims of other animal welfare positions. The reason to oppose animal suffering from the perspective of care ethics is not because we wish to maximize utility or consistently apply our rights theory across species, but because we have relations with animals and care about them. By grounding human beings’ moral duties to animals in our relationships with them, care theorists sidestep debates about whether or not animals possess the necessary cognitive capacities to qualify for rights possession. They likewise evade disputes about whether or not social utility actually supports abolishing factory farming, eliminating animal testing and the like. In care ethics, our duties to animals arise out of the concrete, empirically verifiable relationships we have with them. Despite its promise, care ethics’ approach to animal welfare issues has been criticized as vague and underdeveloped, or in the words of one critic, as “simplistic and superficial,” “confused and confusing.” Some care theorists suggest that our capacity for caring is located in an innate sense of sympathy that needs only to be extended to include animals. Julian Franklin asks, however, whether we should extend sympathy to all animals or only some: Should we sympathize with the lion or the gazelle, the hawk or the field mouse? By his account, some sort of general rules or guidelines are necessary for deciding conflicts and directing applications of our compassionate feelings. “The lack of a rule of reason to regulate compassion is . . . a serious objection to the ecofeminist ‘ethic of care’.” Critics have also argued that care theorists fail to explain adequately why we should extend our sympathy to animals. Tom Regan asks, “What are the resources within the ethic of care that can move people to consider the ethics of their dealings with individuals who stand outside the existing circle of their valued interpersonal relationships?” Regan’s question is important since the majority of people currently do not seem to consider most animals worthy of moral consideration. Gary Francione further censures care theorists for failing to justify their speciesist bias. Most care theorists endorse some preference for human life over animal life, but fail to explain why human beings should enjoy absolute protections to life and bodily integrity while animals might sometimes be killed or harmed. Care ethics’ ambiguous position on animal welfare reflects deeper ambiguities in this still relatively new field. Carol Gilligan first outlined an account of care ethics about twenty-five years ago, and it is only in the last decade or so that care