The Claims of Animals and the Needs of Strangers: Two Cases of Imperfect Right

This paper argues for a conception of the natural rights of non-human animals grounded in Kant’s explanation of the foundation of human rights. The rights in question are rights that are in the first instance held against humanity collectively speaking—against our species conceived as an organized body capable of collective action. The argument proceeds by first developing a similar case for the right of every human individual who is in need of aid to get it, and then showing why the situation of animals is similar. I first review some of the reasons why people are resistant to the idea that animals might have rights. I then explain Kant’s conception of natural rights. I challenge the idea that duties of aid and duties of kindness to animals fit the traditional category of “imperfect duties” and argue that they are instead cases of “imperfect right.” I explain how you can hold a right against a group, and why it is legitimate to conceive of humanity as such a group. I then argue that Kant’s account of the foundation of property rights is grounded in a conception of the common possession of the Earth that grounds a right to aid and the rights of animals to be treated in ways that are consistent with their good. Finally, I return to the objections to the idea that animals have rights and offer some responses to them

Reflections on the Evolution of Morality

In recent years a number of biologists, anthropologists, and animal scientists have tried to explain the biological evolution of morality, and claim to have found the rudiments of morality in the altruistic or cooperative behavior of our nearest nonhuman relatives. In this paper, I argue that there is one feature of morality to which these accounts do not pay adequate attention: normative self-government, the capacity to be motivated to do something by the thought that you ought to do it. This is a feature of the $form$ of moral motivation rather than merely of its $content$, one that I believe we do not share with nonrational animals. Unlike his more recent followers, Darwin, drawing on the sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy, did try to explain how this capacity evolved. I explain Darwin’s account and the way it drew on sentimentalist philosophy, and argue that such accounts are unsatisfactory. Drawing on the more radical accounts of the evolution of morality found in thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, I speculate that moral motivation may have originated with the internalization of the dominance instincts, and sketch the beginnings of the path that the development of reason in both its theoretical and practical employments might have followed.Philosoph

Kantian Ethics, Animals, and the Law

Legal systems divide the world into persons and property, treating animals as property. Some animal rights advocates have proposed treating animals as persons. Another option is to introduce a third normative category. This raises questions about how normative categories are established. In this article I argue that Kant established normative categories by determining what the presuppositions of rational practice are. According to Kant, rational choice presupposes that rational beings are ends in themselves and the rational use of the earth’s resources presupposes that human beings have rights. I argue that rational choice also presupposes that any being for whom things can be good or bad must be regarded as an end in itself, and that the use of the world’s resources presupposes that any being who depends on those resources has rights. Although the other animals do not engage in rational practice, our own rational practice requires us to give them standing.Philosoph

The Activity of Reason

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Rawls and Kant: On the Primacy of the Practical

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Natural Motives and the Motive of Duty: Hume and Kant on Our Duties to Others

Hume and Kant disagree about the motives involved in the performance of our duties to others. Hume thinks that natural virtues such as benevolence are best performed from “natural” motives, but that there are no natural motives for the performance of the “artificial” virtues, such as justice and fidelity to promises, which are performed from a sense of duty. Kant thinks all duties should be done from the motive of duty. In this paper, I examine the roots of the disagreement. If by a natural motive Hume means an intention that can be described without using normative concepts, Kant would deny that any adult human motives are “natural,” for all involve the thought that something is a reason. But Hume also seems to imply that being motivated to benevolence and self-interest is “natural” in some way that being motivated to keep our agreements is not. I trace this difference to differences in the two philosophers’ conceptions of action. Hume’s conception of action does not allow for genuinely shared action, while Kant’s does. For Kant, being motivated to keep our agreements is just as natural as being motivated to do others good.Philosoph

Natural Goodness, Rightness, and the Intersubjectivity of Reason: A Reply to Arroyo, Cummisky, Molan, and Bird-Pollan

In response to Arroyo, I explain my position on the concept of “natural goodness” and how my use of that concept compares to that of Geach and Foot. An Aristotelian or functional notion of goodness provides the material for Kantian endorsement in a theory of value that avoids a metaphysical commitment to intrinsic values. In response to Cummiskey, I review reasons for thinking Kantianism and consequentialism incompatible, especially those objections to aggregation that arise from the notion of the natural good previously described. In response to Moland, I explain why I think Hegelian worries about the supposed emptiness of the Kantian self do not apply to my account. And in response to both Moland and Bird-Pollan, I argue that, contrary to the view of some Hegelians, the intersubjective normativity of reason is not something developed through actual social relations; rather, it is something essential to an individual's relations with himself or herself. I want to begin by thanking Christopher Arroyo, David Cummiskey, Lydia Moland, and Stefan Bird-Pollan for their interesting and provocative comments in this symposium. There's more in their papers than I can possibly respond to in a reasonable space, so I'm just going to pick and choose. “The Origin of the Good and Our Animal Nature” spells out some of my current thinking on the good, so a summary of that paper will put me in a position to begin by addressing some of Arroyo's and Cummiskey's points.Philosoph

On Having a Good

In some recent papers I have been arguing that the concept ‘good-for’ is prior to the concept of ‘good’ (in the sense in which final ends are good), and exploring the implications of that claim. One of those implications is that everything that is good is good for someone. That implication seems to fall afoul of our intuitions about certain cases, such as the intuition that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases, so that there is no one for whom the second world is better. Such cases tempt people to think that there must be impersonal goods, and that what it means to say that something is good for you is that you are the one who ‘has’ some impersonal good. In this paper, I argue that if we approach things in this way, it is impossible to say what the ‘having’ consists of, what relation it names. This leads me to a discussion of various things we do mean by saying that something is good for someone, how they are related to each other, and what sorts of entities can ‘have a good’. Finally, I explain why we think that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases.Philosoph