The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals

Bernstein, Mark

doi:10.1057/9781137315250

Cited by 55 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…destroying habitats, introducing foreign species, and causing pollution and climate change) (Fraser and MacRae 2011). Individual consumers’ ethical judgments regarding the desired levels of animal well-being are often made by trade-offs between animal and human well-being (Bernstein 2015). Philosophers have developed ethical theories to describe different approaches to understanding and weighing up conflicting values (Lund et al 2016; Sandøe, Corr, and Palmer 2016).…”

Section: Well-being: Animal Consumer and Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Animals in our Lives: An Interactive Well-Being Perspective

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Beverland

et al. 2021

Journal of Macromarketing

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Humans have long interacted with animals. Recently, market-based responses to societal challenges, including loneliness and mental well-being include the use of animals. Considerable research concerning consumer–animal relationships has also examined the benefits (micro, meso, and macro) of human-animal interaction and companionship. However, much of this research is fragmented and lacks a broader organizing framework. It also suffers from an anthropomorphic bias, whereby the interests of animals are excluded. To address this, we provide a macromarketing perspective on consumer–animal relations and explore the interdependencies of consumer–animal relationships on consumer, animal, and community well-being. We introduce and apply the Interactive Well-Being framework to four contexts –ranging from private to public consumption spaces– that highlight the interdependencies and systems involved in consumer–animal relationships: (1) co-habitation with animals, (2) emotional support animals, (3) working with animals, and (4) animals in commercial service contexts. We discuss the implications of our framework for the resilience of marketing systems and how the framework aligns with alternative economy development.

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Section: Well-being: Animal Consumer and Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Animals in our Lives: An Interactive Well-Being Perspective

Wünderlich

Mosteller

Beverland

et al. 2021

Journal of Macromarketing

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“…Kagan 2019;Varner 2012). A tiny egalitarian minority argues that humans and non-humans have equal moral standing (e.g., Bernstein 2015;Persson 1993).…”

Section: Humanism Moral Status and Higher Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychological speciesism of humanism

Figdor

2020

Philos Stud

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Humanists argue for assigning the highest moral status to all humans over any non-humans directly or indirectly on the basis of uniquely superior human cognitive abilities. They may also claim that humanism is the strongest position from which to combat racism, sexism, and other forms of within-species discrimination. I argue that changing conceptual foundations in comparative research and discoveries of advanced cognition in many non-human species reveal humanism's psychological speciesism and its similarity with common justifications of within-species discrimination. Introduction. Humanism in moral philosophy is a view of moral status that "insists on the equal and distinctive worth of human beings over non-human animals" (Setiya 2018: 452). 2 Humanists have 1 Acknowledgements: For helpful comments and questions on versions of this paper as it evolved, I would like to thank audiences at the Beyond Anthropocentric Psychology invited symposium at the Philosophy of Science Association annual meeting in November 2018 and at my University of Sydney Philosophy Department colloquium talk in October 2019, and to extend particular appreciation to Paul Griffiths, members of his Theory and Method in Biosciences research group, and students in my Anderson Fellowship seminar in (southern hemisphere) spring 2019 at the University of Sydney; to Hannah Tierney; and to two anonymous reviewers for this journal. 2 While I will use Setiya's perspicuous label, Bernstein (2017) calls this view "hierarchism", and Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2018) simply call the humans-only high status "full moral status". Others define the same position indirectly. Varner (2012) defends a concept of personhood in which individuals with certain cognitive and experiential capacities deserve special respect, and no non-humans have these capacities (though some qualify as near-persons); a parallel label in these terms might be "personism". In DeGrazia's terms (1996: 46), given that an ethical theory that did not affirm an equal consideration principle for humans "would yield distinct moral statuses among humans", humanism is equivalent to affirming equal consideration for humans only. An EC principle (e.g. Singer 1975) holds that one must give equal moral weight to relevantly similar interests of different individuals. This humanism is distinct from secular humanism, "a democratic and ethical life stance" in which humans give meaning to their lives using reason and science, eschewing belief in a supreme supernatural being (https://humanists.international/what-ishumanism/). These humanisms are compatible but logically independent: one can be a moral-status humanist and hold that our higher moral status over animals stems from our greater similarity to

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“…If ethical deliberation consists in deciding after taking into account the positive and negative impact of the possible outcomes on the entities that may be affected by it, then the grounds for moral considerability must be whatever it is that makes it possible for an entity to be positively and negatively affected. That capacity is sentience (Bernstein, 2015; Sapontzis, 1987).…”

Section: Why Environmentalist Views Should Be Rejected: the Importancmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s Splitsville: Why Animal Ethics and Environmental Ethics Are Incompatible

Faria

Paez

2019

American Behavioral Scientist

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In this article, we claim that animal ethics and environmental ethics are incompatible ethical positions. This is because they have incompatible criteria of moral considerability and they have, at least in some cases, incompatible normative implications regarding the interests of sentient individuals. Moreover, we claim that environmentalist views lead to an insurmountable dilemma between inconsistency and implausibility and fail to properly account for the importance of wild animal suffering. From this it follows not only that (a) we can endorse one of the two views but not both at the same time but also that (b) we have overriding reasons to reject environmentalism and endorse some animal ethics view.

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The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals

Cited by 55 publications

References 0 publications

Animals in our Lives: An Interactive Well-Being Perspective

Animals in our Lives: An Interactive Well-Being Perspective

The psychological speciesism of humanism

It’s Splitsville: Why Animal Ethics and Environmental Ethics Are Incompatible

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