Morality is a contract between rational beings: animals have no direct rights

Contractualism against animal rights

Peter Carruthers born 1952Morality is an agreement between rational beings: animals have no direct place in it.

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What it claims

Animals have no direct moral standing. We have only indirect duties toward them: through respect for the feelings of those who love them, and through the good or bad qualities of character that they evoke in us.

Why

If morality is the set of rules rational beings would agree among themselves, only rational beings have direct rights.

The same idea through history

Immanuel Kant1797Kant also denies direct duties to animals and keeps an indirect duty not to be cruel. Carruthers starts elsewhere: not from reason as dignity, but from a contract between rational agents, and he treats separately the case of humans who are not rational.

Peter Carruthers1992Carruthers (1992) examines utilitarianism and then contractualism in the face of animals. He admits indirect duties, through the character of the one who causes suffering, and holds that non-rational humans keep their rights.

In short

"Morality is a contract between rational beings: animals have no direct rights" is an argument by Peter Carruthers (The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (1992), chs. 5-7, 1992) on the question "Do animals matter as much as we do?" (answer: humans first). Its claim: Animals have no direct moral standing. We have only indirect duties toward them: through respect for the feelings of those who love them, and through the good or bad qualities of character that they evoke in us. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P6). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (1992), chs. 5-7

Valid with an implicit premise

Many think that making an animal suffer is wrong because the animal suffers. Carruthers asks what the best moral theory says. He chooses contractualism: morality would be the set of rules rational beings would choose among themselves, behind a veil of ignorance (in Rawls's version), in the light of broadly self-interested desires. In this picture, only rational beings make the contract and receive direct rights. Animals, which are not rational agents, therefore have none. This does not allow everything: some acts are wrong because of what they reveal about the character of the one who does them. And humans who are not rational agents (babies, very old people) keep rights, through a slippery-slope argument and an argument from social stability.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, the computer finds a case where animals have no rights in the contract, yet have direct moral standing, because their capacity to suffer counts in itself outside the contract.

The argument is valid with the hidden premise P6. If morality is a contract (P1) in which only rational agents have direct rights (P2), and animals are not such agents (P3), then they have no direct rights. With P6, they have no direct moral standing either. P4 gives the "indirect duties" side, and P5 answers the objection from marginal cases. Objections target P3 and P5: are animals really non-rational? and why would non-rational humans be protected and not animals?

Analogy. In a club, the rules are decided by the members, who promise to follow them. A visitor has not voted, but one may be polite to him, out of habit or out of regard for those who invited him. Carruthers sees animals as visitors, whom the club treats with consideration without giving them member's rights.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Peter Singer 1974 · attacks premise 5

There seems to be no relevant characteristic that human infants possess that adult mammals do not have to the same or a higher degree. If rights come from reason, infants have no more than animals. If they are given them all the same, the same regard cannot be refused to animals with equal capacities.

a defender replies

see the argument

Peter Carruthers defender of the argument · 1992

Carruthers answers that the position is not undermined by failing to grant direct rights to humans who are not rational agents: those rights are granted through a version of a slippery-slope argument and through an argument from social stability.

David Boonin 1994

Boonin does not dispute the slippery-slope argument, but draws a consequence from it. For Carruthers, it is enough that contractors have a reason to want direct standing granted to non-rational humans for them to have it. But Carruthers also grants that contractors would want people who feel sympathy for animals "for their own sake". The same strategy therefore gives animals direct moral standing.

The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Singer wrote eighteen years before Carruthers, who answers the marginal-cases argument in his own book. Carruthers's answer rests on social stability, that is, on practical reasons and not on a property these humans would have.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: an open point. The argument from marginal cases is the major objection to contractualism applied to animals; its defenders find the answer from social stability sufficient, its critics do not.

Martha Nussbaum 2006 · attacks premise 1

The social contract tradition cannot do justice to animals, because it assumes that the contractors are roughly equal in power and ability. Animals are not only owed compassion and humanity: they are owed justice. Nussbaum proposes instead to extend the capabilities approach to all species, according to what each can do and be.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Carruthers in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Nussbaum wrote fourteen years after Carruthers and targets the contract tradition more broadly. We did not re-read any reply by Carruthers to this objection.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: a basic disagreement on the starting point of morality: an agreement between equals (contract) or what each living being can do and be (capabilities).

Tom Regan 1983 · attacks premise 2

Why should the contractors behind the veil of ignorance be allowed to know which species they will belong to? If they did not know, they would have reasons to protect animals too, and the contract would no longer reserve direct rights to rational agents.

no reply

Carruthers did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.

The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Carruthers answers this difficulty in The Animals Issue (pp. 101-103, according to Boonin), a passage we have not read. The objection has been taken up since, notably by Mark Rowlands.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: an open point. The debate is about what contractors who do not know which species they belong to would choose.