Anyone who has ever done animal advocacy has had the experience of explaining rationally why animal exploitation can’t be morally justified, only to have the person with whom they are talking say something like, “Yes, that’s interesting but I just don’t think that it’s wrong to eat animal products,” or “I think you’re being perfectly logical but I just love ice cream and cheese and am going to continue eating them.”
How can this be? How can people reject logical and rational arguments?
The answer is simple: logic and rationality are crucial to moral analysis. But they can’t tell us the whole story about moral reasoning. It’s more complicated than logical syllogisms. Moral reasoning—about animals or anything else—requires something more than logic. That something else involves two closely related but conceptually distinct notions: moral concern and moral impulse, which precede our engagement on a rational or logical level.
If people don’t have what I call moral concern about animals (by which I mean a belief that at least some animals matter morally) and a moral impulse (by which I mean that they are motivated to follow through, to act on that belief so that they want to do the right thing, and not just think the right thing about the matter), then logic and rationality won’t matter very much.
The source of that moral concern or moral impulse is irrelevant.
If someone cares about animals as moral beings, it does not matter whether her moral impulse was triggered as the result of her relationship with a companion animal, reading about St. Francis, reading a novel like Black Beauty or a poem, such as Byron’s Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog, believing in the principle of nonviolence, or the golden rule, or the interconnectedness of life, or as the result of her aesthetic revulsion to bullying.
What matters is that she has the moral concern and the desire to want to act in accordance with it. It is then and only then–when she wants to do the right thing with respect to the animals that she thinks matter morally–that we can use logic and rationality to demonstrate that her moral concern should extend to all animals and that it requires that we abolish, and not regulate, animal use.
Read more: http://bit.ly/KTeVWx
Gary L. Francione
Professor, Rutgers University
