Abstract
Most contemporary Western laws regarding the treatment of animals in livestock farming and animal slaughter are primarily concerned with the principle that animal suffering during slaughter should be minimized, but that animal life may be taken for legitimate human purposes. This principle seems to be widely shared, intuitively appealing and capable of striking a good compromise between competing interests. But is this principle consistent? And how can it be normatively grounded? In this paper I discuss critically this principle (the priority of the minimization of animal suffering over animals’ right to life). I argue that this principle can be justified on the ground of respect for the value commitment toward animal welfare, which is held by many people. The advantage of this perspective is its inclusiveness: it can justify without contradiction the principle at stake and allow for the admissibility of religious slaughter while promoting animals’ interest in not suffering. This justification also has the advantage of being compatible with the cultural and religious pluralism of contemporary societies.
Highlights
Most Western laws on animal treatment provide that animals’ suffering during slaughter should be minimized
Most contemporary Western laws regarding the treatment of animals in livestock farming and animal slaughter are primarily concerned with the principle that animal suffering during slaughter should be minimized, but that animal life may be taken for legitimate human purposes
I have argued that the only way to justify this principle is by adopting an indirect view, one that does not recognize the autonomous moral worth of animals and the correspondent direct duties of human beings toward animals
Summary
Most Western laws on animal treatment provide that animals’ suffering during slaughter should be minimized. I will investigate whether we can provide a justification for the principles underpinning current laws without lending support to the idea that they are fully justified and entirely morally convincing In virtue of this starting point within current practices I will not rehearse traditional issues in animal ethics such as the moral equivalence between non-human animals and human marginal cases having a comparable level of mental development. The argument I will put forward should interest both those within the liberal camp who do not think that animals deserve direct moral recognition but who are concerned with people’s moral commitments and those who have a moral concern for animals but who are afraid that within current “non-ideal” conditions a full animal rights position would not be achievable In both cases, the argument I will propose takes seriously the fact that people reasonably disagree on the treatment of animals, and takes this disagreement as a starting point for finding mutually acceptable principles governing the relations between human beings and animals
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