How do you argue against animal cruelty if animals are not moral agents? Some argue that you can't be immoral to animals since they are not moral agents with a moral thinking. Animals don't understand what morality is. If they are not moral agents, how do you argue against animal cruelty then?
@Philomath Just because they don't understand what morality is doesn't mean that they aren't moral agents. A person who is asleep doesn't understand what morality is either, but it's not OK to murder someone while they are asleep.
Newborns are in the process of becoming moral agents. My theory is that animals and humans share primitive emotions in common due to biological structures and functions. Baruch Spinoza describes affect (emotion) as a feeling of desire, pleasure, or pain accompanied by an idea of its cause. In the absence of such feelings and causal ideas humans would not be able to generate and recognize each other as moral agents. Animals probably have an innate sense of justice or injustice in their emotions but cannot form human ideas derived from emotions in common with animals. Thus: human compassion.
We are moral agents (at least to a point) and they are living things not stones or tin cans to be trodden on or kicked to the side/curb at will or left as found.
"Some argue" Citation needed, or at least would definitely help! Most ethical systems base morality on a moral actor's actions towards entities which can experience pain and pleasure. Whether the other entity reciprocates is not relevant in many contexts. You need to be much more specific about this question.
@MissUnderstands I understand that such unfounded appeals to emotion are popular 'arguments' within animal advocacy spheres. But they hold no water philosophically or logically, and are extremely counterproductive to discussions with the rationally inclined.
Moral agency is the wrong thing to consider here. Moral agency is about one's capacity to make decisions or perform actions with moral status or moral consequences. What matters here is one's capacity to suffer, be harmed, be sinned against, or so on. I don't know of a moral framework which says that agency is a necessary condition for suffering.
@kaya3 It is not so much the question whether agency is necessary for suffering, but whether agency is necessary for having moral value. The focus on minimizing suffering is a very culturally specific choice of moral valuation.
I suppose it may be that animals have no rights due to not being moral agents, but that just shows the inadequacy of rights based discourse. Animals can presumably suffer extreme pain, and IME such pain does not need to be possessed in order to be intolerable, both morally and psychologically.
@DavidGudeman "Just because they don't understand what morality is doesn't mean that they aren't moral agents. A person who is asleep doesn't understand what morality is either, but it's not OK to murder someone while they are asleep." You're equivocating understanding_1 (a disposition for understanding) with understanding_2 (occurrent act of understanding). Babies have no dispositional ability, sleeping people do. That said, it's hard to see how a newborn might understand or act on right from wrong. A baby that can crawl about and learn to respond to no clearly can.
@Philomath ^ So you guys might want to split the difference.
@JD, I disagree. Babies have the same disposition for understanding that sleeping people do, they are just in a condition where it will take them longer to fulfill that disposition.
@DavidGudeman I would suggestion that a disposition is fundamentally different than potentiality. A man who may or may not play poker on a given day is disposed to play. A man who does not know the rules and can learn them is potentially a player.
@JD, to me "potential for X" means that there are some natural courses of events for which X will be manifested and others where it will not. This doesn't describe the relation of being a newborn to being a moral agent. In this case, failure to become a moral agent is a failure of proper growth and development.
Discussion on question by bahhaar: Ho…
Discussion on question by bahhaar: Ho…