PHILOSOPHY ARGUMENT ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL DISCUSSION
the Mirror

The harvard review of PhilosoPhy vol.XVI 2009

A Lecture by Christine M. Korsgaard

Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where she previously served as department chair for six years.

the areas of practical reason, agency and normativity. Aside from being a leading interpreter and defender of Kant’s practical philosophy, Korsgaard has published original work in ethical theory, including her books Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996), (Cambridge University Press 1996), (Oxford University Press, 2008), and her recent (Oxford University Press, 2009). She is currently working on the differences between human and non-human animals, with a view both to understanding the nature of rationality and to answering questions about how we should treat the other animals.

ETHICS

This lecture was delivered as part of the Facing Animals Panel Discussion, held at Harvard University on April 24, 2007.

WhaT does iT mean To Be an animal? aBouT 600 million years ago, CerTain organic life forms on this planet began to wake up, and to become and to be the target of unwelcome interest on the part of others pain, and of terror. But some of them were also capable of the opposite feelings of

and boredom, of grief and joy, of family attachment and hostility to outsiders.

this strange evolutionary adventure are the animals, and you and I are among

Many of the moral problems that we talk about in philosophy are intended to illustrate the general features of ethical theories, and do not come up

whether to have an abortion, or to terminate the medical care of a dying loved one. But few of us, as individuals, will ever have to decide whether to torture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking bomb—although we may have

vol.XVI 2009 The harvard review of PhilosoPhy

in this room will ever have to decide whether to push a fat man into the path

the track. But you make decisions about how you are going to interact with the other animals many times every day.1 which cosmetics to use in the morning, when you put on your shoes and pick up your handbag or your briefcase, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and on many other occasions that you may not even be aware of. Moral decisions about how we should treat the other animals are inescapable, and that is why it is essential that we give the matter some thought.

animals. One is broadly ecological and mainly concerns the relationship of the

problems can overlap: our growing population and the resulting encroachment on animal habitats is threatening the extinction of many other species, but of course, it is doing that by causing the premature deaths of many individuals of those other species. But the solutions to these two kinds of problems can also be tragically at odds. In order to preserve the ecological balance among various species—a balance we ourselves have messed up—we may be faced with the necessity of culling populations by killing off individuals. In order to reintroduce orphaned predators to the wild, we may have to supply them with prey to practice on, just as their mothers sometimes do. In my remarks today, I am going to set aside the ecological questions, pressing as they are, and talk about the ethics of our relationships to individual non-human animals. In these brief remarks I will not have time to say much about what we may and may not do: instead, I want to talk in a general way about why we have duties to the other animals at all, and why these duties might not be as weak as many people seem to think they are.

It matters because, as I have already suggested, many of these individuals are complex centers of subjectivity, conscious beings, who experience pleasure and pain, fear and hunger, joy and grief, attachments to particular others, curiosity,

are all things that, when we experience them, we take to ground moral claims on the consideration of others. We think it is wrong when people kill us or make us suffer to promote their own ends, or when they separate us involuntarily

grounded in our own animal nature—and that is a point I will come back to. So I take it that the burden of proof is on those who think that we do not have duties to the other animals. Our human nature certainly changes the way we experience pain and pleasure, attachment and grief, and life and death themselves, in deep and important ways, and that affects the details of our duties to the other animals. But why should we think these differences are ones that make it wrong to impose

animals are mere mechanisms, with no form of consciousness whatever. But I

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Christine M. Korsgaard6

think many people talk themselves into thinking that the other animals have a consciousness so dim and fragmentary that all that really matters is that we spare them unnecessary pain. Even if that were true, many of our present practices would be called into question—experiments on animals that are wholly unnecessary, for example, like the testing of cosmetic products. But I do not think

even insects probably suffer from pain,2 well. So should we believe that highly intelligent mammals and birds, who lead complex social lives, have no more sophisticated form of consciousness than a

not just from painful sensations, but from stress and boredom and terror and from being deprived of the company of those to whom they are attached, just as they may enjoy play and exploration and love and family and fun. I am not asking you to take this from me, of course; it is an empirical question. Given how pressing the moral questions are, I would encourage everyone to read about non-human

suggests that many of us have underestimated the intelligence and emotional complexity of the other animals.

Many people would grant that the other animals are conscious and can suffer pain and terror and loss, and that this is a reason for compassionate treatment. But they also seem to think that this reason is very weak—so weak that it is outweighed by almost any reason human beings might have for killing the other animals or making them suffer—even as trivial a reason as that we enjoy

to think that this question somehow depends on whether there is some really big difference between human beings and the other animals. So philosophical defenders of animal rights or animal welfare often argue that there is no such big difference: they are, as we might call them, “gradualists” about the human/ animal distinction.

I have already said some things that might make you think I hold

a gradualist story is plausible about intelligence, emotion, and complex social

a social order.3 But actually I am among those who do think there is probably one really big difference between human beings and the other animals. But the big difference in question does not support the view that we have no duties to

explain what I think this difference is. It is sometimes said that human beings are the only animals who are

actually the issue is much more complicated than that, for self-consciousness like other attributes comes in degrees and takes many different forms. One form of self-consciousness is revealed by the mirror test. But I think it can be argued that animals who cannot pass the mirror test have rudimentary forms of self-

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aware of her prey—she is also locating herself with respect to her prey in physical

makes gestures of submission when a more dominant animal enters the scene is locating himself in social space, and that too is a form of self-consciousness. Parallel to these abilities would be a capacity to locate yourself in mental space, to locate yourself with respect to your own thoughts and emotions, and in particular,

Some of the language- trained animals can express the idea “I want”—Koko the

can both do this—so perhaps they have the ability to think about their own mental states. But it is also possible that they have just learned that such utterances will produce the desired effect, just as my cat knows that meowing at me when I am near the cabinet where the treats are kept will produce the desired effect. Some scientists have also pointed to cases of deception to suggest that some animals

evidence on these questions is, I think, inconclusive. But there is no question that we human beings are aware of our location

in mental space in a very important way—we are, or can be, aware of the grounds of our beliefs and choices, of our reasons for thinking and acting as we do. When I am aware, not just that I have a certain desire or fear, say, but that I am tempted to do something on the basis of that desire or fear, then it becomes open to me to step back from that connection and evaluate it: to ask whether my desire or

I think, is what makes human beings rational and moral animals, and this is

governed, I believe, by their instincts, desires, emotions, and attachments. Because

and attachments on our actions, we are not completely governed by them. We have the capacity to be governed instead by normative standards and values, by a conception of what we ought to do.6 We are moral animals.

we have no duties to the other animals: what follows is most obviously that they have no duties to us, or to each other. Does it follow from that fact that we owe

demands on themselves can make moral demands on each other, and therefore that only our fellow rational beings can give us obligations. Each of us regards himself or herself as an end in itself, a being with inherent value, and on that ground demands recognition and respect from others who are also capable of valuing. What this leaves out, though, is that what we demand, when we demand that recognition, is that our natural concerns—the objects of our natural desires and interests and affections—be accorded the status of values, values that must be

desire to avoid pain is an obvious example—spring from our animal nature, not

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Christine M. Korsgaard

you already believe, since there is an animal—yourself—whose suffering you declare to be morally objectionable. So while it is our rational nature that enables us to value ourselves and each other as ends in ourselves, what we value, what we declare to be an end in itself, includes our animal nature as well as our rational and human nature.7

It is a different question whether we may reasonably value human lives more highly than animal lives when the choice confronts us. But even if we may, that does not mean we may be prodigal with animal lives. Perhaps it is true that a human being who loses her life loses something more complex, rich, and connected than another animal who loses his life does. But, on the other hand, a human being and a non-human animal who lose their lives both lose everything

about how we interact with other animals many times every day. For that very reason, some people are reluctant to face the idea that perhaps we owe better treatment to the other animals than we are giving them now. Cruelty to animals is built into the fabric of our lives in ways that make it hard to avoid, and there

economic institutions. Indeed, it is built into the language, just like sexism is: as I wrote up these remarks, the automatic editor in my word processor kept complaining that I was making a grammatical error every time I referred to a non-human animal as a “who” or “she” or “he” rather than as a “that” or an “it.”

products that have not been tested on animals or that are not made of animals.

the other animals. We should not be too hard on ourselves, or each other; each of

think the fact that it is so hard to treat the other animals rightly is a reason not to try to do much better than we do.

societies, fresh produce from all over the world is available year round, and the delicious cuisines of many vegetarian cultures are available to us. In rich modern western societies, animals used for food are processed by the system of factory farming, one of the most wholesale systems of cruelty we have ever devised, and a genuine scandal to our humanity. Put those two things together on one side and what is there to set against them on the other side—that you like the taste

Some people would argue that the fact that I mentioned earlier—that it is simply the system of nature for life to prey on life—is an excuse for eating animals and even for treating them however we please. It is natural. But to put it somewhat paradoxically, it is precisely our nature, human nature, to impose higher standards on ourselves than the ones that nature gives us. In the end, humanity

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will be what we make of it. Should we just be the cleverest of all species, who

species who tries to respond with respect and compassion to the other animals

called it “facing animals.” One of the animals you have to face is the one you see in

is to do as much as we can to avoid living at the expense of the other animals.

Notes 1 I owe this formulation to Charlotte Brown. 2 Eisner, For Love of Insects 3 Some have pointed to the evolution of these complex social capacities, especially altruism,

to show that a gradualist story about what I am calling the one big difference—the fact that we are moral animals—is also possible. I do think that these things are relevant to the evolution of morality, but I think this is largely because they are probably relevant to the evolution of the special form of self-consciousness I am about to describe in the text. I do not share the common view that the roots of morality in animal nature are best shown by altruism. I think the nearest thing to morality in the animal world shows up in the phenomenon of the response to dominant

a dominant has learned a thought very much like the thought “I am not supposed to do that.” In his account of moral development in A Theory of Justice

case of say, dogs, even overlapping with it.

front of a mirror. If the animal reaches for the spot or looks back at it or whatever, that is evidence that the animal recognizes herself in the mirror, and is curious about what has happened to her body. (Obviously the experiment needs more controls than I have described—you can go to the

that they have some form of self-consciousness. Other animals never recognize themselves,

me—is recognizing its body as the locus of its subjectivity, and is therefore aware of its own subjectivity.

Strictly speaking, I do not think the grounds of our actions count as reasons for them until

6 The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge 1996. 7

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values