John Baird Callicott (University of North Texas) on Convergence of Environmental and Animal Ethics
Channel: Radio-CRÉ
Date: 2017-11-09

Chair: Desaulniers, Élise (Idependant researcher)

Commented by : Martin, Angela (Université de Fribourg) and Rousseau-Mermans, Sophia (Université de Montréal / Université Paris-1 IHPST)

“The ‘Community Concept’: Toward a Theoretical and Practical Convergence of Environmental and Animal Ethics”

20th-century animal ethics was based on an “essence-accident” theory of moral ontology. An essential attribute—sentience or self-aware subjectivit —qualified animals (human and nonhuman alike) for equal moral consideration or rights. Other attributes—number of legs, fur, hair, feathers, body shape, size—are, so far as ethics is concerned, accidental characteristics and thus irrelevant to ethics. Therefore, humans, dogs, cats, cows, rats, squirrels, birds have equal rights or deserve equal moral consideration. From the perspective of 21st-century evolutionary moral psychology, duties and obligations, rights and deserts flow from community membership and differ one community from another—the family community, the civic community, the national community, the global village. With humans, animals are members of “mixed communities”—the family community (pets), the agrarian community (cattle, horses), the biotic community (wildlife)—and within each community, duties and obligations, rights and deserts differ. Pets deserve love and affection as well as food, water, and shelter—which their human “moms” and “dads” are obliged to provide. Through thousands of generations of artificial selection, the roles of domesticated horses and cattle in the agrarian community differ with correspondingly differing rights and deserts. Industrial animal agriculture grossly violates the rights and deserts of domestic animal members of historical agrarian communities. Because biotic communities are both shrinking (and disintegrating with climate change) due to the expansion of industrial animal agriculture (a principal source of greenhouse gases), among the environmental duties and obligations generated by human membership in the biotic community is to support policies to curtail and eventually to eliminate industrial animal agriculture.

Caméra et montage: Marc-Antoine Plouffe