Rocio asked,

I have long been interested in the subject of animal rights and the human relation to them regarding
ethics. Kant would probably start the discussion with a reference to our superior rational nature.
However, isn't this being a bit anthropocentric? If rationality and intelligence capacity is the factor for
value then we would be justified in treating mentally retarded children like we do cows or chickens.
There must be a basis for the assumption that humans have a greater value besides just, 'Well, we're
human.'

Many would argue that we have the capacity for moral reasoning and animals do not, but this seems
more of an argument for the moral burden of caring for sentient life that does not have our capacities.
A lack of moral reasoning in a retarded child would oblige us to care for them to a greater extent than
a person with full capacities.

So with this lengthy preface, What is the best way to account for the human value system, given the
ethical questions involved? In other words, how could we justify valuing ourselves above other
sentient life forms?

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What does it mean: to value ourselves above other sentient life forms? If it means that we always put
our own interests above the interests of other species, there is no justification. It sounds like
selfishness, pure and simple. Being rational, and therefore highly imaginative and empathetic, we
care about lots of things other than ourselves. We would not ourselves be so wonderful if we did not
have the capacity to care about other people, other species, mountains, music and the Andromeda
Galaxy. Our values are our values, but that does not mean that the only things we value are our own
interests.

If animals are incapable of moral reasoning then the sort of moral attention centred on others
precisely as moral reasoners, does not apply. Some people argue, for example, that only moral
reasoners can have rights. But even if that were true, it would not exhaust our moral concern. The
Body Shop, in promoting its animal friendly policy, used Bentham's famous remark "The question is
not, can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but can they suffer?". Animals experience pain and they
have interests. Most of us believe that we ought to consider their welfare as well as our own.

However, an animal's experience of pain is affected by its emotional and imaginative resources. The
human animal experiences despair, horror and outrage at injustice. In my opinion, non-human
animals do not experience this depth of spiritual suffering, though many are capable of depression
and anxiety.

In discussing issues of animal welfare, we ought to be very careful in drawing comparisons — as you
do in your question — with hard human cases. The fact that a damaged human being is (a bit!!) like a
healthy non-human animal raises some questions, but it does not resolve them. A bird with a broken
wing is not very like a dog because it cannot fly. It is a completely open question whether two quite
different creatures ought, on the basis of some similarities in capacity, to be treated in similar ways.
My instinct, like yours, is that people with special needs have a special claim to care.

There is another sense in which we could be said to value ourselves above other sentient life forms:
we may place rational capacities above physical capacities in a hierarchy of value. How would you
rate being good at theoretical physics (Einstein) in relation to looking pretty (a bird of Paradise)? This
exercise sounds like fun, but, as a thought experiment designed to test our scale of values, it should
be treated with caution: what if the house is on fire and you have to choose between saving granny,
the baby, the last surviving manuscript of Beethoven's Fifth or the budgie? Part of being so darned
clever is the ability to avoid having to make these choices. Buy a smoke alarm. But what if the alarm
fails?...

Ok if I have to play, I would save the baby, (invest in the future), wring the budgie's neck (so that it
has a quick death), forget about the manuscript (having faith in the future creative powers of the
human race) and kiss granny goodbye (I wouldn't kill her because, you never know, something may
turn up, so she survives against all the odds).

There are, of course, non-flippant issues of prioritising in, for example, the provision of medical
services. And sometimes choices can become tragic or desperate. During World War II, parents in
the Jewish ghetto at Vilna had to choose either to hand their children over to be killed or to refuse and
have the Nazi soldiers come in and take them by force. Such moral traumas create upheavals in our
moral world. They are Nietzsche's "ploughshare of evil". These transformation in the moral landscape
go too deep in the ourselves and our society to be captured in tick-list of priorities.

Incidentally, Kant's concern with rationality, he would say, is not anthropocentric, because what
attracts Kantian moral respect is not the human, but the rational element in human reason. Any other
form of rational existence, if any, would have the same moral value.

Michael Bavidge
Deputy Director
Centre for Lifelong Learning
University of Newcastle