Rollin - A new basis for animal ethics: telos and common sense

FOR THE LAST forty-five years, I have worked to raise the moral status of animals in society, on both a theoretical and a practical level. Unlike many philosophers, I have been able to effect significant change in animal use in society, to the direct benefit of the animals. Other, like-minded people and I have made major changes in the ways animals are used in education, eliminating many of the atrocious exercises that were earlier seen as essential to becoming a veterinarian or a physician or a science professor. We have been able to establish the control of pain in research as a major duty of the responsible researcher, and we have encoded this duty in legislation. We have been able to catalyze the elimination of one of the most egregiously inhumane housing systems regnant in confinement agriculture: sow stalls, or gestation crates. Equally important, we have been able to occasion moral thinking regarding our ethical obligations to animals among citizens and animal users alike.

This book is an account of the thinking underlying these far-reaching changes. It is based in the realization that ones ethics cannot be separated from ones worldview or metaphysics. A metaphysic that sees the world as simply made of material particles obeying the mechanistic laws of physics, as, for example, Descartes postulated, is going to see such a world inevitably as having no place for values, and particularly, no place for ethics. Such is the world envisioned by physics developed during and after the Renaissance. In such a world it is understandable how scientists could affirm that a scientific description of the world is value-free and leaves no conceptual room for ethics.

Happily, this is not the only way of looking at the world. Ordinary common sense sees the world as replete with qualitative differences not capturable bythe language of mathematical physics alone. In the world of our experience we find beautiful and ugly, living and nonliving, good and bad, right and wrong, and the entire vast array of qualities that make the world an exciting and challenging place to live. The metaphysics of that world was best captured by Aristotle, particularly in his emphasis on telos as the core explanatory concept for the world we live in. We understand what an animal is by what it doesthe pigness of the pig, the dogness of the dog. This is the biology that ordinary people understand, the study of living organisms as they live, not as reduced to their molecular components. This is the nature of an animal, and considering this helps us understand our obligations to animals even as an understanding of human nature helps determine our obligation to humans. In this book, then, I will explicate and justify our moral obligation to animals in terms of the commonsense metaphysics and ethics of telos. By so doing, I hope to introduce ordinary, commonsense people to a set of obligations to animals following from their own beliefs. I hope to, as Plato said, lead people to recollect their own ethic, not teach them something new.

It took decades, but I can finally see a unity in the disparate ideas I have developed over my career.