Starting Points
Animal Ethics and Environmental Ethics: What's the Difference?
People who care about animals tend to care about the environment and vice versa. On a philosophical level, you can see how both forms of care are ways of making non-human beings matter. Advocates of animal ethics and of environmental ethics both stand against an anthropocentric ethics, according to which ethics is primarily or exclusively of the humans, by the humans, and for the humans. This way of framing the matter makes animal ethics and environmental ethics natural allies.
But matters aren’t so simple. As the environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott puts it, the relation between anthropocentric ethics, animal ethics, and environmental ethics is a “triangular affair.” In some respects, animal ethics has more in common with anthropocentric ethics than it does with environmental ethics. In this post, I’ll give an overview of these three outlooks and the tensions between them.
Ethics for Humans
For most of modern European history, it was taken pretty much for granted that ethics is the exclusive domain of humans. (This is mostly true of ancient philosophy as well, although there are some striking exceptions, like Plutarch and Porphyry.) Various kinds of cruelty toward animals were also taken pretty much for granted during this time.
Animals, Women, and "Inferior" Races
Some people draw parallels between the treatment of animals and similar European prejudices against women and non-white people. Non-white-males were also often excluded from moral consideration and they were also often very poorly treated. But the parallels aren’t quite as straightforward as all that.
To see this point, consider what it meant for societies in Europe and the Americas to grant the vote to women or to abolish slavery. These moves acknowledged—at least in principle, even if the practice has lagged far behind—that race and gender should be no bar to full political participation. With very few exceptions, all adult citizens in Western democracies nowadays have a right to vote, to run for elected office, and to be accorded equal dignity in a range of other respects.
Moral Agents and Moral Patients
By contrast, no one is arguing for non-human animals to get the vote. The reason is obvious but it points to a deeper truth. Many people think animals are moral patients in some respects—that they are objects of moral concern—but few think that animals are moral agents. You might think it’s morally wrong to mistreat a dog but you’re less likely to think it’s morally wrong of a dog to mistreat a human, or another dog. An aggressive dog might need training or disciplining, but it doesn’t need moral censure. In Medieval and early modern Europe, animals were sometimes put on trial for alleged crimes. We find this practice quaint precisely because we would never think to do this today.
Kant: Duties to Rational Agents
It’s not a huge leap from the thought that only humans are moral agents to the thought that ethics is exclusively a human affair. The most influential expression of this thought comes from Immanuel Kant. We have moral duties, according to Kant, as a consequence of our reflective, rational capacities. Unlike other animals, we don’t simply act. We have reasons for acting. And those reasons can be submitted to scrutiny. It’s not the actions themselves, but the reasons for acting, that are morally praiseworthy or blameworthy.
Our duties to other people, according to Kant, derives from the respect we owe them as fellow rational actors. And it’s only to other rational actors that we have moral duties. If I damage your bicycle, I haven’t wronged the bicycle; I’ve wronged you. And by this standard, says Kant, we don’t have moral duties to animals.
That doesn’t mean that we have carte blanche to treat animals however we please, according to Kant. In particular, he cautions that casual mistreatment of animals can harden our hearts and dim our sympathy for our fellow humans as well. But he does think that only rational beings are worthy of specifically moral consideration.
In Defense of Animals
Who Are You Calling Speciesist?
But isn’t this restriction of moral consideration to humans a bit, well, speciesist? That’s the term that Peter Singer uses to describe a moral standard that makes essential reference to species membership in deciding who counts and who doesn’t. Just as it’s racist or sexist to limit our moral horizons to members of our own race or sex, Singer thinks that traditional anthropocentric ethics is speciesist.
But wait, in talking about Kant a moment ago, I made no reference to human beings. Is it speciesist to say that only rational beings deserve moral consideration and that, as it happens, only human beings are rational?
The Argument from Marginal Cases
In response to this point, Singer and his ilk appeal to what’s known as the argument from marginal cases. Maybe only humans are rational (and depending on how you define rationality, that’s a big “maybe”) but not all humans are rational. Infants don’t deliberate rationally. Neither do adults with certain kinds of disability—severe development disabilities, senile dementia, or people in comatose states, for instance. If your ability to reason marks you as a member of the moral community, does that mean that a developmentally disabled human has no moral standing?
Maybe you can argue that infants are potential or future rational agents, and that disabled humans are beings with the form of rational agency and are disabled precisely insofar as they aren’t able to exercise their full suite of human capacities. But then your argument really has fallen back on speciesism. You’re saying that all and only humans are special because, well, they’re human.
Who Matters Morally?
Advocates of animal ethics generally try to specify some non-species-specific criterion to determine who matters morally. Utilitarians take their cue from Jeremy Bentham, who, more than two centuries ago, wrote, “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” Suffering is bad, according to utilitarians like Bentham, and whose suffering we’re talking about is irrelevant.
Note that the utilitarian concern for animal suffering doesn’t necessarily include all animals. Other mammals, certainly. Birds and reptiles too. But what about bivalves like clams and mussels, which don’t have many of the neural pathways that in human beings are associated with pain? If you’re a scientifically informed utilitarian, the jury is out with regard to at least some members of the animal kingdom.
But that ambiguity is a feature rather than a bug. Just as utilitarians don’t want to be speciesist, they presumably don’t want to be kingdomist either. It’s not that there’s anything special about being an animal that gives all animals higher moral standing than all plants or fungi. It’s rather this specific capacity for suffering, and its badness, that utilitarians worry about.
Individuals and Their Experiences
Utilitarianism is just one approach to thinking about animal ethics. In another blog post, I summarize some of the differences between this approach and animal rights arguments. Depending on how you define the scope of moral concern, you may include or exclude different kinds of animal.
But the focus in these different approaches is always on individuals and their experiences: you ask of this given individual organism, does it meet the criteria to be included in the moral community? And the answer generally depends on whether it’s the subject of experiences. Rabbits have experiences but the grass they nibble on doesn’t.
Environmental Holism
The Land Ethic
This focus on individual organisms and their experiences is where environmental ethics diverges from animal ethics. Environmental ethics focuses on the well-being of the ecosystem as a whole rather than the individuals within it. That includes not just non-sentient living beings like plants but also non-living entities like waterways and soil minerals.
Probably the most influential statement of an environmental ethics is Aldo Leopold’s maxim from the “Land Ethic” chapter of his Sand County Almanac: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
The Case of Deer Culls
What does this mean in practice? Take the example of culling deer. Humans have significantly reduced the number of wild predators in many parts of North America. Either by killing these animals in response to threats to their livestock or property or by turning wild spaces into cultivated land, humans have chased bears and wolves off many parts of their traditional ranges. In the absence of these natural predators, deer populations have exploded. Larger deer populations have knock-on ecological effects. By over-browsing the foliage of young trees, they inhibit the growth of forests, which places a strain on many of the other plants and animals that might live there.
One response to this problem is for human hunters to cull deer. That is, humans take on the role of the bears and wolves they’ve displaced and kill enough deer to keep the deer population in check and allow the forest to flourish.
Deer culls are controversial and you can see how different sets of principles point in different directions. Defenders of the deer cull will say that they’re acting for the benefit of the ecosystem as a whole. Defenders of the deer will say that we have no right to kill deer—especially since the explosion in their population is a consequence of our poor wildlife management practices to begin with.
Fighting on the Same Side?
This controversy about deer culls is just one point of fissure between advocates of animal ethics and advocates of environmental ethics. Defenders of animals care first and foremost about the deer. Defenders of the environment care first and foremost about the ecosystem.
To some extent, both sides to this controversy are fighting on the same side. If you want deer to flourish, you care about the deer having a supportive habitat. And if you want an ecosystem to flourish, you care about the organisms in that ecosystem.
Individualism vs. Holism
But the controversy also points to a deeper difference. Animal ethics, like anthropocentric ethics, focuses primarily on individuals. What’s good or bad is what happens to individuals. A utilitarian might want to aggregate the experiences of all the individuals concerned, but it’s the experiences of individuals that counts—after all, as far as we know, sentience only resides in individual organisms.
By contrast, environmental ethics takes a holistic approach. The ecosystem as a whole is more important than any of the individuals that make it up. That holism signals an important difference from both animal ethics and anthropocentric ethics. As the deer cull illustrates, the interests of individuals must sometimes be subordinated to the needs of the system as a whole.
Weighing the Differences
Advocates of both animal ethics and environmental ethics want to expand the domain of our moral concern beyond the human. One way of understanding their differences is to say that each suspects the other of harbouring a covert anthropocentrism.
Is Environmental Ethics Anthropocentric?
The advocate of animal ethics detects a whiff of hypocrisy in this ecosystems holism. You can see this in the case of the deer cull. Human overpopulation clearly places a heavy strain on ecosystems worldwide. But no one outside the extreme ecofascist fringe would propose a cull on humans. Humans have an inviolable right to life and any acceptable political or ecological response to human pressures on the land must respect that right to life.
So really it seems as if environmental ethicists are okay with the deaths of animals for the sake of some larger principle but not okay with the deaths of humans for the sake of that principle. How is that different from the anthropocentric ethics that they claim to have left behind?
Is Animal Ethics Anthropocentric?
By contrast, the advocate of environmental ethics suspects that animal ethics hasn’t really absorbed the lesson that ethics isn’t just for humans. Both utilitarian and rights frameworks have their origins in struggles for human equality. Extending these considerations to other animals takes an essentially anthropocentric ethic and applies it mostly unchanged to non-humans as well.
The tensions in animal ethics come into relief when you consider predation. Utilitarianism tells us that suffering is bad and it’s our duty to prevent it. Does that mean we have to prevent a lion from hunting antelope? And if so, how is the poor lion to nourish itself?
The advocate of environmental ethics hears a hint of the colonial mindset in the desire to extend to all animals the principles that govern (some) human societies. In applying human ethics to other animals, advocates of animal ethics don’t really liberate themselves from an anthropocentric worldview.
Is Suffering Bad?
What’s bad, according to both anthropocentric and animal ethics, is suffering and related ills: harm, death, disappointment, oppression. By contrast, environmental ethics can be strikingly blasé about suffering. The health of an ecosystem depends not just on the well-being of its constituent organisms but also on their deaths. Predators eat prey, herbivores eat plants, fungi, bacteria, and various bugs eat decaying flesh, and so on. None of these organisms can live without other organisms dying. That deep truth—that death and life, food and feeders, are all intimately intertwined—is the core of environmental ethics.
As the advocate of environmental ethics sees it, traditional ethics doesn’t want to confront this deep truth. By contrast, defenders of these more traditional ethics might reasonably ask whether environmental ethics deserves to be called an “ethics” at all. If you’re okay with a sentient creature being torn limb from limb, what does your so-called ethics not permit?
Wild vs. Domestic
If the advocate of environmental ethics is okay with predation, it’s because the health of ecosystems requires it. In almost all cases, the ecosystems in question only marginally include human beings, if at all. The human role is mostly to leave these wild spaces alone, or to manage them in a way that reduces the harms that humans have already visited on them.
None of this tells us what to do with livestock or pets. Humans live with millions of companion animals and feed on billions of farmed animals. It’s these animals—especially the farmed ones—that are the principal concern of animal ethics. The inciting motive for most advocates of animal ethics is the rampant cruelty visited on animals in human-constructed spaces.
Ultimately I think this difference between domestic and wild animals explains many of the differences between animal ethics and environmental ethics. Depending on whether the creatures under consideration already exist under human supervision, you might have very different ideas about what they require.
Further Reading
Let me close with a few suggestions for further reading in both animal ethics and environmental ethics.
The two main classics of animal ethics are Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, recently re-released in a 50th anniversary edition, and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights. These two books outline utilitarian and rights-based approaches respectively. Martha Nussbaum has advocated an alternative approach based on animal capabilities—check out her Justice for Animals to read more about that. And Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures outlines a Kantian approach to thinking ethically about animals.
As I mentioned above, Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is often taken as the founding document of modern environmental ethics. One of Leopold’s most ardent philosophical advocates is J. Baird Callicott. His In Defense of the Land Ethic collects some of his most important papers on the topic. Alternative approaches to thinking in an ecocentric way can be found in the Deep Ecology of Arne Næss—check out The Ecology of Wisdom as a primer—and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which takes its cue from indigenous ways of relating to nature. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is an accessible introduction to TEK.