Considering that Kant is famous for arguing that humans are obligated to treat every human as an end in itself but towards nonhuman beings humans only have indirect duties, constituting a position that defends nonhuman animals’ moral status based on Kant is rather counterintuitive. However, in her book Fellow Creatures – our obligations to the other animals, philosopher Christine Korsgaard argues for a Kantian account of humans’ obligation to animals.
Korsgaard argues that when Kant claims that humans must value every human being as what he called ‘an end in itself’, he meant that humans should treat the choices, ends, suffering and happiness of each human as having an end in itself because they matter to someone. In other words, humans’ ends matter, because they matter to humans and they are valuable because humans value them. Since, as Korsgaard emphasizes, to say that something is good absolutely, doesn’t mean it has a free-floating goodness, but that it is good-for everyone for whom things can be good, in the final sense of good, or good from everyone’s point of view, that means that every human being has a certain kind of inherent value, and that’s why the ends, choices, suffering and happiness of each human should be considered valuable and be respected and even promoted by the community.
As opposed to treating someone as an end in itself, Kant argues that treating someone as a mere means is using someone for someone else’s purposes in a way that is contrary to that someone’s own good and to which that someone could not possibly consent.
Considering that many nonhuman animals are sentient beings capable of suffering, having interests of their own, and that things can be good or bad for them just as they can be good or bad for humans, Korsgaard asks what can possibly justify such an extreme difference between the way humans treat other human beings, or at least the way humans state that they should treat other humans, and the way humans treat nonhuman animals? Why when it comes to humans we must treat each of them as an end in itself, and when it comes to nonhumans we are allowed to treat all of them as a mere means to someone else’s ends in a way that is contrary to their own good and to which they could not possibly consent?
Korsgaard rejects Kant’s answer to the question derived from his own claims which is that only rational beings are ends in themselves and that humans therefore are free to use the other animals as means to their ends, and that nonhumans are not objects of direct moral consideration at all. And she rejects it for the simple reason that sentient nonhuman animals are ends in themselves in the sense that they are creatures for whom things can be good or bad. There is no reason that what is good for rational beings should be treated as good absolutely while what is good for the other animals can be ignored or discounted. Simply because nonhuman animals are creatures for whom things can be good or bad, what is good for them should be treated as good absolutely, as something that everyone must respect and pursue.
Korsgaard also rejects the softer and much more common claim which is that humans are more important than nonhumans. That is not because she thinks other animals are just as important as humans are, but rather because of her perception regarding importance and good, which is that things are important, only when they’re important to someone, and things are good or bad only when they’re good or bad for someone. She argues that there is such a thing as good and bad only because there are creatures in this world for whom things can be good or bad. Therefore, claims about the relative importance of different kinds of creatures do not make any sense to her.
So she doesn’t think that humans are more important than nonhuman. However she does think that humans are rational and moral creatures and nonhumans are not. When she argues that humans are rational she doesn’t mean they are intelligent but that they are asking themselves whether the reasons for which they believe and do things are good reasons or not. She believes that humans are aware of the grounds of their beliefs and actions, saying to themselves – ‘is that a good reason for believing or doing such and such?’, and nonhumans are not. And when she argues that humans are moral beings she doesn’t mean that they are morally good, but that humans’ actions are subject to moral standards, meaning they can be either morally good or bad, while the actions of the other animals are not subject to moral standards and cannot be either morally good or bad.
However, these differences she claims for are irrelevant, according to her, to the question of moral treatment, because of her stance on importance and good. In her own words: “It doesn’t follow from these differences that human beings are better than the other animals because you can only judge one creature to be better than another when they’re subject to a common evaluative standard and one of them meets it to a higher degree than the other one does. When they’re not subject to a common evaluative standard, you can’t rate them against each other. What follows from the fact that we’re rational and moral and the other animals are not is not then that we’re superior to the other animals, but rather that we can have duties to the other animals even though they can have no duties to us.”
That last sentence of this quote is part of the reason she thinks, as opposed to Kant, that nonhumans should be part of Kant’s famous ‘Kingdom of Ends’ – a spiritual or notional community, constituted by the relations among human beings who share a commitment to a conception of themselves and each other as ends in themselves.
Kant argues that the capacity to recognize and respond to reasons, including each other’s reasons, places rational beings in relations of reciprocity which enables them to make certain claims on each other. When rational beings judge that something is good for them, they treat it as something that’s good absolutely, and that they have a good reason to pursue it as long as they are neither harming nor wronging anyone else in doing so. Furthermore, making such judgment is also making a demand that others would respect the pursuit of it by not interfering and possibly even by helping to achieve this end. That is the meaning of treating the things that someone supposes are good as good absolutely. Everyone should treat these ends as things that are worthy of being pursued or realized in anyone’s eyes. In this way, when we choose to pursue our ends, we make a set of demands on ourselves and on others, a set of laws by which we mutually obligate one another to respect and assistance. The reciprocal demands that rational beings make on each other constitute us as a moral community pursuing common ends under common moral laws. This is basically Kant’s famous idea of the Kingdom of Ends.
Kant argued that since nonhuman animals are not rational beings and therefore cannot make and respond to moral laws, they’re not ends in themselves and cannot be part of this community. Korsgaard disagrees claiming that although indeed nonhuman animals cannot join humans in making laws for one another in the Kingdom of Ends, prior to that is the view that something should be treated as good absolutely simply because it’s good for someone, and since nonhuman animals share with humans the capacity for something to be good or bad for them, nonhuman animals are ends in themselves just as much. Animals are ends in themselves in the sense that what is good for them is good absolutely, even if they are not capable of joining with us in reciprocal legislation. Therefore, Korsgaard argues that humans, being rational beings, are members of the moral community in the active sense, and nonhuman animals are members of the moral community in a passive sense. Meaning, unlike humans, they may not be able to make the laws for themselves and each other, but they sure fall under the protection of the laws.
Although we highly disagree with the claims about rationality and morality, certainly with suggesting that all humans are categorically rational and moral and all the rest of the animals are not, given that this perception of her is not practically significant in her Kantian account of humans’ obligation to animals, we wish not to focus on that but rather on an idea, that is not only significant, but is practically the essence of the whole book. The basic idea behind Korsgaard’s Kantian account of humans’ obligation to animals is that each sentient nonhuman animal should be treated as an end in herself/himself, an idea we certainly don’t disagree with its ethical validity but with its possibility.
Human Impossibility
Korsgaard argues that since factory farming (including the so called humane farming), the use of animals in scientific experiments, in circuses, in zoos, and perhaps also in the police and the military, aren’t compatible with treating nonhuman animals as ends in themselves, they are morally wrong.
However, treating animals not as ends in themselves is realized in almost everything humans do, it is everywhere and in everything. The systematical, industrial exploitation of animals in the form of factory farms is by far the worst embodiment of treating animals not as ends in themselves, however it is far from being the only one. Not just factory farming but any type of farming is treating animals not as ends in themselves. The type and level of discrimination obviously largely differ, but excluding nonhumans from a particular area, the removal of native vegetation and planting vegetation that suit humans’ desires and not necessarily the needs of the native residents of the region, fencing the area, constantly poisoning nonhumans in it, changing the composition of the soil, dividing the nearby lands with roads to the farms, plundering water from other habitats, making noise with heavy machinery, crushing nonhumans with heavy machinery, polluting the area with humans’ waste of many kinds and etc. are all unquestionably forms of treating animals not as ends in themselves.
The impossibility of treating others as ends in themselves is derived from life most basic element – consuming energy. It is impossible for any being to live on this planet while treating others as ends in themselves and this ambition is particularly absurd when it comes to humans whose massive and violent footprint is with no comparison to any other creature, even in the case of vegans with a very high environmental awareness.
Some violent practices involved in some plant-based products are known to some activists and vegans, with some even stretching their personal definition of veganism to include for example palm oil, coconut, sugar, coffee, chocolate and etc. But that is because of the specific ways in which some specific products are currently being manufactured, where the violence involved in their production is relatively easy to spot while the whole mechanism is disregarded. The impossibility of treating others as ends in themselves is not in the specific production details, but in each of the ways each of the products is manufactured, transported, consumed and disposed of.
The manufacture of some vegan products that are considered basic such as soy milk, sugar, tofu, bread, oil, tea and etc., can include dozens of sub-processes like: cleaning and removing unwanted parts such as the outer layers, separating the beans from the pod, extracting the interior which is common with seeds, mixing and macerating as in preserved fruits and vegetables, liquefaction and pressing as in fruit juices and soy milk production, fermentation like in soy sauces and tempeh, baking, boiling, broiling, frying , steaming, shipping of a number of ingredients from different distances, wrapping, labeling, transportation of waste and of course transportation to the stores. All are inevitable. All are comfortably invisible as the finished product lies on the shelf.
It is hard to have in mind deforestation and land degradation when buying tofu.
It is hard to consider the amount of energy spent on the label of a can of beans.
It is hard to see all the sub production processes’ harms on a loaf of bread.
It is hard to acknowledge all the methane emissions of a rice milk carton.
It is hard to behold the 4,000 liters of water that were used to produce a cotton shirt.
It is hard to smell the burning wood when sniffing a bar of soap.
It is hard to think of the traps set on the tip of dens when buying cereals.
Despite that they wholeheartedly believe they should treat other animals as ends in themselves, even vegans with a very high environmental awareness are bound to personally, necessarily and inevitably participate in a systematical discrimination against beings from other species.
And it goes way beyond food, any food. Every aspect of humans’ lives is bound with treating animals not as ends in themselves. Every house, every car, every fueling of every car, every road, every ride on every road, every airplane, every flight in an airplane, every boat, every sail in a boat, every production of an electrical device, every use of an electrical device, or of electricity in general, every fence, every waste, and considering the massive harm involved in all stages of production and in routine washing of clothes, not only leather, fur, wool, silk and down, but in fact all clothes are forms of treating animals not as ends in themselves. And this is really just a partial list.
Even in the extremely far-fetched and delusionary optimistic scenario of a revolution in the way humans view nonhumans, it would still be the case that the whole human civilization and everything about the way humans live is built upon a massive global occupation at the expense of all the other sentient beings on this planet who are treated as anything but ends in themselves.
How can an extremely industrial and technological civilization of more than 8 billion humans, that dominates and impacts practically every inch on earth, ever treat all nonhuman being as ends in themselves?
Truly believing that “in suffering we are all equal”, and that “everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one”, and that truly the suffering of no one is of less importance than the suffering of another, any other, is simply beyond human possibility even theoretically, not to mention practically. Practically, we are still extremely far even from a vegetarian world, not to mention a vegan one.
Nonhuman Impossibility
Animal rights activists obviously acknowledge that nonhuman animals are not treated as ends in themselves in human civilization, however many of them don’t acknowledge that animals in nature are also never treated as ends in themselves.
In fact for many animal rights activists nature represents perfection, a romantic and virtuous ideal we should aspire to. But the truth is that nature is where trillions of sentient beings suffer from hunger, thirst, diseases, parasites, injuries, extreme weathers, rape, infanticide, violent dominancy fights, the constant fear of being attacked, actually being attacked, and only rarely die from caducity.
In many activists’ minds humans are the only problem in this world which without them would be perfect. But…
In a humanless world, hyena cubs would still viciously fight each other, tearing off slices of other cubs’ faces including ears and lips, to get more food.
In a humanless world, crabs would still be pulled apart limb by limb by otters.
In a humanless world, fishes would still be digested alive by the stomach acids of a pelicans who gulped them whole.
In a humanless world, wasps would still inject their eggs into a live caterpillar’s body to ensure that when their descendants hatch they will have easy access to food as the larvae eat the caterpillar from the inside out.
A humanless world is definitely not a masculinity-free world. Brutal fights for territory and for the “right” to mate would still occur in immense numbers. Walrus would still fight each other over territory with giant teeth that can reach up to one meter long and more than 5kg weight. And the biggest males with the biggest tusks would still push their way to the center of the iceberg pushing the females and pups to the edges where they are more likely to be attacked by an orca.
In a humanless world, billions of insects would still get chemically liquefied before they are eaten by spiders. And snakes would still swallow whole animals and slowly digest them until hawks hunt them, digging in with their talons into the snakes’ body until they give up fighting back, and then start to cut off pieces of their body and eat them.
Eels would still electrify other fishes to hunt them using up to 600V in a single discharge – this is 5 times the shock one would get from sticking a finger into an electrical socket.
Young offspring would still be murdered by opportunist males who want their own genes to be spread.
And in a humanless world, duck, dolphin, seal and sea lion females would still be gang raped routinely as a way of mating.
Unfortunately these examples are only a tiny glimpse of the horrors happening every single moment in nature. Every single second somewhere in the world, defenseless and frightened babies are left alone because their mother has to search for food, a turtle is burned alive as she can’t out run the flames of a fire, a bird’s feet are frozen to a branch since he couldn’t find shelter from the harsh weather, a baboon monkey is in ongoing stress as an higher ranking female takes food out of her mouth and eats it herself, a nestling is thrown off the nest by the other siblings so they can get more food, a coyote is experiencing severe hunger as the rabbit he chased managed to escape instead of being torn apart, a female dolphin is being raped after she couldn’t outswim a male or even a few of them who gang rape her, a badger drags his rotten legs with infectious wounds resulting from constant fights, a zebra is dehydrated but can’t approach the ponds as the lionesses might be on the prowl, a lizard is being slowly devoured by a fungus that spread through the organs, a weak robin chick starves to death because his parents don’t feed him as it makes more sense energetically to invest in his stronger siblings.
When it comes to animals living in nature, Korsgaard is aware of the impossibility of treating nonhuman animals as ends in themselves:
“once we invite the animals in to the Kingdom of Ends, that hope of making the world good for everyone is gone. The interests of animals, including now ourselves as animals, are irreparably contrary. Animals eat each other. They necessarily compete for habitat. They necessarily compete for the world’s resources. These conflicts are not avoidable or occasional misfortunes, many of which could be eliminated by just institutions, but built deeply into the system of nature. Far, far more animals are born than the planet can sustain. Most of the sentient beings who are born on this planet are doomed to be eaten, or to starve, or both.” (154)
For every being to be treated as an end in itself is basically oxymoronic. It can’t exist in a world where beings constantly compete with each other over resources, not to mention that for many, other beings are the resources.
Therefore, Korsgaard, who argues that “every sentient animal is a real individual with a center of subjectivity of her own, with experiences that matter to her”, and that “Every sentient animal’s life—his or her individual life—is valuable, at least to the extent that it is valuable to the animal herself” (204), realizes that although nonhuman animals being treated as ends in themselves is a moral obligation derived by their very nature, this can’t be realized in nature. She realizes the hard clash between what should absolutely be and what can absolutely never be.
In her words: “I suggested that work on animal ethics has produced a kind of Kantian antinomy, a case where the same premise appears to yield opposite conclusions. Supposing that we have a duty not to harm animals, and to protect them from harm if we can, those who advocate what I have called “creation ethics” argue that in order to protect animals from natural evils we must make them all domestic, while abolitionists argue that in order to protect animals from our own abuses we must make them all wild. Antinomies reflect deep disturbances in our thought. The disturbance in this case comes from a conflict between our moral standards and the way that nature works. The natural world staunchly resists moral reorganization. As a result, we are unable to treat all animals in the way that morality demands, that is, as ends in themselves who have a claim to be treated in a way that is consistent with their good.” (154)
Some animal activists are not particularly bothered by that, claiming that they are anyway only morally obligated to address the suffering caused to animals by humans. However, exactly because every sentient animal is a real individual with a center of subjectivity of her own, with experiences that matter to her, or in other words, exactly because what makes animals worthy of moral consideration is their subjective ability to experience, not the objective conditions of their lives (such as what species they belong to, where they live, and their relations with other species) or their relations with humans, activists should be obligated to prevent suffering no matter to whom, by whom and where it happens.
Moral status is non-dependent. Sentient beings don’t lose their moral status when their suffering happens in nature.
We mustn’t accept suffering just because it happens in what we refer to as nature, and to nonhuman animals by other nonhuman animals. To the sufferers, suffering is bad when it is considered natural just as much as when it is considered unnatural. And the victims are not consoled by the fact that it is nonhumans that hurt them and not humans. If labeling a violent scene as ’natural’ doesn’t affect the suffering of the victims, then it doesn’t have a moral effect.
Moral treatment mustn’t be based on the relations of animals from specific species with humans, but focus on the morally relevant capacities of the animals. We are morally obligated to help sentient beings in need because of their inherent ability to suffer, not our contingent involvement.
Moral consideration is supposed to be a product of internal abilities, not external relations.
Our goal is to end suffering no matter where it happens or who is causing it. Suffering is intrinsically bad for the sufferer no matter who causes it. So the suffering caused by humans is not more important to prevent than suffering caused by nonhumans.
Activists are morally obligated to end the suffering of nonhuman animals in nature, not because they are the ones who put them in these situations, but because they are the only ones who care enough to put them out.
Activists’ moral aspiration shouldn’t be to solely end the suffering they are responsible for, either individually or collectively as a species, but to strive for the end of suffering in general.
Kant’s highest moral aspiration is ‘Perpetual Peace’ accomplished by actuating the Kingdom of Ends. But nature is inherently so extremely violent, and humanity is even more extremely violent, that this aspiration is practically and theoretically impossible. The highest aspiration of morality, its absolute end, and the only way to truly achieve Perpetual Peace, is not a kingdom of ends but ending animal kingdom, all animals, as soon as possible, and for good.