“We are Human Beings, and We Value Human Life”: Glock and Diamond on Mental Capacities and Animal Ethics

Mikel Burley

doi:10.15845/nwr.v9i0.3544

Abstract

How should a philosophical inquiry into the moral status of (nonhuman) animals proceed? Many philosophers maintain that by examining the “morally relevant” psychological or physiological capacities possessed by the members of different species, and comparing them with similar capacities possessed by human beings, the moral status of the animals in question can be established. Others contend that such an approach runs into serious moral and conceptual problems, a crucial one being that of how to give a coherent account of the natural sense of concern for profoundly cognitively impaired human beings if moral status is assumed to depend on features that centrally include cognitive capacities. The present article discusses this debate with reference to Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers whose respective approaches, on the face of it, diverge dramatically. With a primary focus on Hans-Johann Glock and Cora Diamond, and a secondary focus on recent work by Alice Crary, I argue that, despite an overt disavowal of the kind of approach favoured by Diamond and Crary, Glock’s affirmation that we simply do “value human life” brings him closer to that approach than he acknowledges.

Highlights

How should a philosophical inquiry into the moral status of animals proceed? Many philosophers maintain that by examining the “morally relevant” psychological or physiological capacities possessed by the members of different species, and comparing these with similar capacities possessed by human beings, the moral status of the animals in question can be established
What is required for moral obligations to have the strength that they do between human beings, Glock insists, is not high-level verbal interaction, for other forms will suffice: “We should not underestimate the importance of facial expressions, gestures and bodily demeanours that are distinctly human in spite of being simple” (141)
13 Crary finds the notion of reality as something “hard” in Korsgaard (1996: 1–5); see Crary (2010: 42, 49 n.78). Korsgaard herself adapts it from Nietzsche’s talk of “oneself as a hard, recalcitrant, suffering material” (The Genealogy of Morals 2.18, quoted in Korsgaard 1996: 1). 14 See, for example, Crary (2018): “My book urges that pursuit of the kind of undistorted empirical understanding of human beings’ and animals’ lives that we seek in ethics requires openness to investigating ethically charged attitudes that we find expressed in, say, ‘work across different fields in the humanities as well as in literature and other arts’ ([Crary 2016:] 3), and Hauerwas is right that it follows from my larger argument that this openness should be construed to involve a posture of willingness to explore, inter alia, non-neutral perspectives that we encounter in theology and the study of religion.”

Summary

Hans-Johann Glock on the Superior Moral Status of Human Beings

The quotation in the title of my article occurs in what Glock terms a “Moral Epilogue (or: What Humans Owe to Each Other)” to his essay “Mental Capacities and Animal Ethics” (2013). In making this link between communicative abilities and moral status, Glock recognizes that he must address the issues thrown up by so-called “marginal cases” – the sorts of cases that involve human beings who lack the normal range of cognitive, and communicative, capacities.4 Relevant in this context are cases of human beings with severe intellectual impairments, so severe as to prevent their interacting with other people in precisely the ways that Glock has highlighted as being of moral significance. What is required for moral obligations to have the strength that they do between human beings, Glock insists, is not high-level verbal interaction, for other forms will suffice: “We should not underestimate the importance of facial expressions, gestures and bodily demeanours that are distinctly human in spite of being simple” (141) These are among the aspects of interpersonal human life in which intellectually impaired people can participate, yet they are unavailable to nonhuman animals. I move to a discussion of the position exemplified by Crary, and in the section subsequent to that I bring the work of Diamond more overtly into the discussion

Alice Crary on Two Forms of Naturalism in Moral Philosophy

Glock’s Rejection of Diamond’s “Virtue Theory”

Concluding Remarks