I shall defend three claims that represent the most distinctive and significant
contribution of my work in ethics over the past 30 years - views about animals,
about the sanctity of human life and about our obligations to the poor.
On animals - our ethical thinking, especially in the West, draws a sharp boundary
between human beings and nonhuman animals. We think that all members of our
own species have rights. We say that we have a dignity that demands respect.
We consider all human lives precious. Nonhuman animals have no rights, and
no dignity that we should respect. We can own them, as we once owned slaves.
If we want to eat their flesh and we can get it cheaper by confining them
indoors all their lives, that is what we do.
The fact that a being is a member of another species though is no justification
for discounting its interests. The principle of equal consideration of interests
should govern our treatment of animals. Similar interests should be given
similar weight, irrespective of the race, of the sex or the species of the
being whose interest it is.
It follows from this we should boycott all animal products from factory farms
in particular but also those from more traditional farms that fail to give
equal consideration to the interests of animals. Maybe there are a few farms
that can meet this standard, in practice though for most of us, the simplest,
clearest, the most ethical choice is to avoid all animal products and be preferably
vegan, at least vegetarian.
This argument is not based on the claim that it is always wrong to kill animals
but rather on the suffering that we inflict on animals when we raise them
for food by the methods that are standard today.
If we turn, though, to these questions of killing and of taking life we commonly
say that it's human life that is sacrosanct, and it's killing a human being
that is the serious thing - not killing a nonhuman animal. But why should
that be? The fact that a being is a member of the species Homo sapiens
cannot in itself surely be a reason for holding that his or her life is of
greater value than the life of a being of a different species. Why should
mere species membership make such a difference?
A better argument is based on the superior cognitive abilities of normal human
beings. Equal interests, as I have said, should get equal consideration, but
a self-aware being who knows that he or she has a past and a future, has a
different kind of interest in continuing to live from a being who is not self-aware,
has no conception of the future, and hence no future-directed desires. For
this reason we are right to be more concerned about killing normal human beings
than we are about killing animals.
But this argument cannot establish that it is always wrong to kill an innocent
human being. I will mention two cases. First is when the human being in question
is competent, and capable of seeing what the future most probably holds, but
prefers to die rather than to live through that future. This might be the
case when a person is terminally or incurably ill, and wants to be killed.
Like the person who wants to go on living, such a person has future-directed
desires that we should seek to satisfy. The difference is that these desires
are to die.
The second case is that of a human being who is not cognitively superior to
a nonhuman animal. This might be because the human is a newborn baby, or because
he or she has a serious intellectual disability. Let us say that this human
being has never been capable of understanding that he or she has a past and
a future so there are no past wishes to take into account. Then his or her
intrinsic claim to life is not superior to that of nonhumans at a similar
mental level. Why should it be? Of course the wishes of others, especially
parents or close family, are relevant here. In the case of life and death
decisions about a severely disabled baby, it is the parents who, with proper
information, should make the decision.
These views are not really as contrary to what we do - as distinct from what
we say - as many people think. If a baby is born prematurely, and suffers
serious brain damage, many doctors and theologians hold that it is permissible
to withdraw the respirator, knowing that this will cause the baby to die.
In effect, they are accepting that some lives are so poor that it is better
that they not be lived. That is the key moral question - when is a life worth
living? I agree that some lives are so bad that is better that they not be
lived but then why not make sure death comes swiftly and humanely rather than
letting nature take its course, as some will say.
Thirdly, just as a doctor cannot escape responsibility for a patient's death
by saying "I did not kill him, I merely allowed him to die," so
we cannot escape responsibility for the deaths of those we refrain from saving,
when we could easily save them. We know that in the world's least developed
countries extreme poverty causes extensive suffering and death - UNICEF says
that nearly 30,000 children die every day from avoidable, poverty-related
causes. We know that we can reduce that death and suffering by donating money
to UNICEF, or to Oxfam, or other organizations that assist people to lift
themselves out of poverty. That sum that buys us a meal in a fine restaurant
would be enough to provide basic health care to a child who might otherwise
die of an easily preventable disease. Since we should give equal consideration
to the interests of all, whether they are our fellow-citizens or the citizens
of a distant country, we are not justified in treating the life-and-death
interests of those people as if they matter less than our own indulgence in
luxury. We spend our money on luxuries and do not give substantial sums -
let's say, 10% of our income - to help those in need, we're not morally decent
citizens of the world.
The common thread in these three themes is a critique of long-standing prejudices
against those beyond some boundaries - the boundaries of our nation or of
our species. These boundaries allow suffering to continue when we could quite
easily reduce it. I hope that you will join me in reconsidering these boundaries
and reducing suffering wherever it occurs.