So, I came across a philosopher called Lori Gruen who has entangled some empathy into animal ethics. She seems to take a position pretty close to mine. Or, it seems my position is pretty close to hers. She believes that empathy - a considered and reflective empathy - is vital if we're to properly serve the well being needs of NHA. She also stresses that we are already entangled in relationships with NHA - essentially by virtue of sharing the planet with them, but also within our own homes, in our gardens and through human practices - agriculture and science.
This seems a more complete picture.
So, in one of the many drafts of my essay, I have used a quote from Gruen in the conclusion:
Respecting other animals as beings with their own lives to lead in their own ways opens the possibility that there is more that is valuable than satisfying their interest in avoiding pain. Other animals have an interest in being who they are and doing what they do, and insofar as we value the capacity to be oneself and work to protect it for other humans, we should extend that respect to all animals.(Gruen, 2015)
In this paper, I have addressed what speciesism is and the ethical theories that seek, heroically, to avoid discrimination by species. However, I remain in doubt as to whether the proxies used for evaluating the weight of the interests of NHA or the moral status of different individuals fully disengages from anthropocentrist thinking. While I accept the real difficulty of detaching anthropocentric principles, I feel that the argumentation often seeks to justify these principles.
So, like Lori Gruen, I am led to believe that anthropocentrism remains as an ghost in the animal ethics machine.
NHA, of course, cannot provide testimony. No dog will write a treatise - Down Boy, say - exposing the anthropocentrist structures that need to be dismantled. It’s up to us. And here I have some sympathy with Bernstein’s claim that the one salient quality we humans may have beyond those of NHA is a greater capacity for moral reasoning (Bernstein, 2002). Moral reasoning though cannot be an a priori pursuit: it has to engage in reflective deliberation, informed by research. Further, the conclusions reached by reasoning may provide reasons, but those reasons are motivated – here I side with David Hume – by feelings.
Much as we like to consider ourselves as the rational triumph of mind over matter, reason and emotion are intertwined in our thinking (Barrett, 2017; Damasio, 2018) and we’d do well to remember that when we gauge the intelligence of NHA.
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