Morality in animals: What it means and why it matters

Few philosophical ideas have been as resistant to a paradigm shift as the assumption of human superiority over other animals. Human uniqueness has been linked to a range of complex social and cognitive capacities, e.g. the capacity to reason, to use language or culture, or to have consciousness. Most prominently, man understands himself as the pinnacle of creation because of his moral capacities: humans can cooperate with others, console them and help them, show empathy and care, understand fairness and react negatively to inequity. But what if other animals can do so as well? During the past few decades, empirical research in comparative cognition has revealed astonishing abilities in animals. Biologists and philosophers are currently engaged in a vivid debate on how to interpret these findings. Our project contributes to this endeavor by addressing two main questions: What does morality in animals mean? And why does morality in animals matter? Philosopher Mark Rowlands claims that animals are moral subjects because they can be motivated by moral emotions. However, much conceptual work still needs to be done in order to determine whether animals can indeed behave morally. Departing from Rowlands theory, we firstly aim to specify the character and cognitive requirements of moral emotions in animals. Whereas the current debate mostly concentrates on empathy as a moral emotion and on morally good behavior, we will engage in an analysis of other moral emotions, such as patience, compassion, guilt, and grief and, furthermore, consider negative moral emotions, such as cruelty, jealousy, schadenfreude, and callousness. Secondly, we will ask whether the attribution of morality to animals comes with ethical implications a dimension that scholars in the debate have widely neglected. Our project aims to counter this shortcoming by analyzing the consequences of being a moral subject from the perspective of three important theories in animal ethics: the capabilities approach, the integrity approach, and the rights approach. This will elucidate the entitlements animals could have as moral subjects. We want our theoretical discussions to move beyond the proverbial armchair. Therefore, we will apply an interdisciplinary and empirically-informed methodology. Ultimately, our theoretical analysis will provide us with a conceptual toolkit to identify and discuss practical cases where humans might interfere with the moral abilities of animals. It is for example impossible for a social animal to console a conspecific in distress if husbandry conditions on farms and in labs separate individuals from each other. Also, some animal experiments aim at reducing the animals moral abilities (like their empathic abilities) by brain surgery or extreme forms of conditioning. Examples like these gain an additional ethical dimension if the animals affected by these practices are moral subjects.

Summary FWF Project P31466-G32 "Morality in animals - what it means and why it matters" (2018-2023) Few philosophical ideas have been as resistant to a paradigm shift as the assumption of human superiority over other animals. Most importantly, humans like to see themselves as the only beings capable of morality. Recent empirical research on animal behavior such as empathic helping, consolation or care has challenged this assumption and turned our attention to two research questions: What does morality in animals mean? And why does morality in animals matter? The first question we approached by empirically informed conceptual work into a de-intellectualized notion of morality, its components, pre-conditions and manifestations. We argued, for example, animals ought to have the status as moral subjects based on their ability to be motivated by moral emotions like empathy or grief, their possession of a concept of death, or their ability to share intentions and collaborate; and we pointed to the so-far neglected role of touch in moral interactions. To answer the second question, we explored whether and to what extent ethical theories could assign value to animal moral interactions, specifically value that points beyond the mere welfare relevance of such interactions. We engaged with widely used ethical theory, but also exposed new directions for future research by introducing under-represented non-western and feminist perspectives to the animal morality debate. Based on a de-intellectualized understanding of morality and a careful review of the scientific evidence for a wide range of species beyond "the usual suspects" like great apes, we found that moral behaviors, especially those relating to care, are phylogenetically widespread. The conception that animals lack morality rests on a narrow view of what counts as morality, which ultimately results in a denial of harm and wrongs done to moral animals as such in human-animal interactions. At least some animals qualify as moral agents in a minimal sense, and their moral capacities and relationships matter subjectively (to them) as well as objectively. This, we argued, has serious implications for the treatment of rodents in biomedical research whose empathic capacities are destroyed to model human psychopathology, for cows and calves in dairy farming who are separated after birth to take the milk for humans, or for the conservation of African elephant communities whose social fabric is being destroyed through culling, to name just a few contexts and species. Possible paradigm shifts will rely on research like ours that makes us aware of the many ways in which we value social and moral behavior in humans, the extent to which also animals possess such capacities, and finally the many ways in which current practices or husbandry systems inhibit, hinder or erase such capacities in animals.