ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Animals
Ethics
Sex

'Zoophiles', as they call themselves, often claim that committing sexual acts with animals is okay because animals are capable of consenting, either by sexual displays (lifting tails, humping hapless human legs, etc), or by not biting/fighting back, or by allowing the human access to them, so to speak. The problem I have with this is that an animal can't attribute the same idea to sex as a human can - for a human sex may be bound up with love and other types of emotions where by and large for animals it is another biological duty. In my opinion that would mean that there is no real consent between an animal and a human because the two are essentially contemplating a different act. Am I missing something here? And is there any validity in the idea that it is wrong to engage in sex with animals because for most humans it is intuitively wrong? If it doesn't really harm anyone - if the animal is unscathed - does that make the whole argument pointless?

This question raises interesting issues about animal cognition. I tend totake a rather hard line on this—a view similar to one held by the stoics and bythe contemporary philosopher Donald Davidson---according to which (non-human)animal cognition is so different from human cognition that animals cannot give thesort of consent that humans use to justify their sexual interaction. So, my own answer to your question is this: If it is morally wrong to interactsexually interact non-human animals without consent, then this sexual contactis always wrong because that sort of consent is impossible to obtain. I suppose one who shared my view of animal cognition could take a hardline on this and say that it is morally acceptable to use non-human animals assexual objects for human pleasure, but I would disagree -- at the very leastKant is right that treating animals as ends is wrong because it tends to leadto cruel treatment of humans, and it is probably true that animals are worthyof much stronger moral...
Animals
Ethics

In your opinion, is it OK to kill a spider, or a fly? I'm sure everyone has done so at some stage and felt no guilt, or only just a fleeting moment of sadness at the life just ended. But, should we go out of our way to avoid the killing of other living things, even seemingly insignificant insects? Can we allow ourselves this luxury on the basis that these are so much "lower" creatures as ourselves and therefore not worth bothering about? I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Environmental philosophers have done a lot of work exploring what sort of "moral consideration" we should accord non-human life. For some discussion of this, see my answer to this question .
Animals

If Cheese is made of bacteria culture, and bacteria is alive, is it wrong to eat cheese and yogurt? Or plants and anything else that is alive? If so, why do we have laws to protect people, animals, and other multi-organism beings, but not bacteria, which plays just as inportant, or even a more important role, than say a cat?

I think Peter is right that the philosophical answer to your question depends on finding a principled way to make judgments about moral considerability: since our energy and time are finite, we need to decide which things are most worthy of our consideration as we decide what we ought to do. Suppose that we decided that all living things were equally worthy of moral consideration. Given the sheer number of living things we interact with every day, it would be impossible for us to pay sufficient attention to all of them. In that case, we would either suffer "moral paralysis" or would have to make arbitrary, unprincipled decisions about which beings' moral interests we should care about. This practical problem is worse, of course, if one was inclined to consider non-living things worthy of moral consideration. So, there is a strong practical need to develop and defend criteria for moral considerability. Environmental philosophers who have investigated this include Richard Sylvan, Peter Singer,...