The question is not, Can they reason? Or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?
PHILOSOPHERS, BOTH ANCIENT and contemporary, have had an outsized influence on the development of animal-protection thought and activity. Unsurprisingly, the ancient Greeks wrote and argued about the proper place of animals in moral thinking. Sir Richard Sorabji’s book Animal Minds and Human Morals explores the thinking of Aristotle and his peers on animals and provides a foundational analysis of how animals’ moral capacities and experiences might differ from those of human beings.
Anybody involved in animal protection today will know of Descartes and Bentham, two philosophers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. Descartes is usually vilified for arguing that humans may do what they wish to animals, although his arguments and views are more nuanced, while Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham is credited with coining the foundational question for animal protection in what is now known as his “famous footnote,” where he asks, “The question is not, Can they reason? or, Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”
Peter Singer, another Utilitarian philosopher, authored the 1975 book Animal Liberation, which is widely credited with launching the modern animal-rights movement. In the foreword to Richard Ryder’s Speciesism, Painism and Happiness: A Morality for the Twenty-First Century, Singer noted that, in 1970, Bentham’s footnote was actually not at all famous and was “substantially overlooked in philosophical discussions of Bentham’s work.” In fact, Singer’s Animal Liberation drew attention to Bentham’s argument on suffering as a crucial consideration for animal moral interests. Also notable is that Singer, as a Utilitarian philosopher, does not support rights language in philosophical discourse, but rather, bases his arguments on the notion of animal sentience—namely, that animals experience both positive and negative feelings.
At around the same time, American philosopher Tom Regan was developing a rights-based argument that animals, or at least mammals more than a year old, are “subjects-of-a-life” that have inherent value that would prevent their killing for food or use in most experiments. Regan’s animal-rights arguments have been very popular in the animal-protection movement, and his research is highly sought after, evidenced by the more than 65,000 downloads of the chapter summary of his book in the Wellbeing International Studies Repository.
Another philosopher who has played an important role in promoting moral concern for animals is the recently deceased Bernard Rollin (1943-2021). Rollin’s approach was based on the Aristotelian concepts of telos and purpose, that is, he argued that animals have a purpose or function in the world that they need to fulfill and that it would be wrong to frustrate that purpose. Rollin was very active in reaching out to farmers and agricultural interests and engaged constructively with agricultural organizations such as various Cattlemen’s Associations.
In 2022, the University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum produced Justice for Animals, in which she applies the Capabilities Approach that she and Amartya Sen developed to address human needs where the focus is on providing choice and opportunity. When applied to animal protection, the Capabilities Approach is similar to Rollin’s teleological arguments where it would be wrong to limit an animal’s freedom of choice and behavioral opportunity.
While ethics is not a popularity exercise, it is striking how few philosophers in the past fifty years have argued against giving animals greater moral consideration or more freedom and choice. Singer’s Animal Liberation produced a renaissance in the animal-protection movement that continues to this day.
The general welfare of companion animals has improved since 1974, and the use of laboratory animals in biomedical research and toxicity testing has fallen by more than 50 percent since the mid-1970s. While the number of farmed animals housed and raised in intensive confinement has grown substantially in the last fifty years, new legislation and technologies are beginning to lead to positive trends in the agricultural arena as well. The animal-protection movement should certainly not relax, but there is much energy and commitment already leading to positive change. And while we are at it, let’s give thanks to the many philosophers who have helped empower individual advocates.