131 research outputs found
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
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Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals
Philosoph
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Autonomy and the Second Person Within: A commentary on Stephen Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint.
Philosoph
The Myth of Egoism
This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1999, given by Christine Korsgaard, an American philosopher
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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 of moral motivation rather than merely of its , 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
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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
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