Respecting other animals as beings with their own lives to lead in their own ways opens the possibility that there is more that is valuable than satisfying their interest in avoiding pain.
Other animals have an interest in being who they are and doing what they do, and insofar as we value the capacity to be oneself and work to protect it for other humans, we should extend that respect to all animals.
Currently, the reach of human activity has expanded across the entire globe, and humans are entangled with each other and other animals in complex ways. The nature and depth of these relationships vary, but most humans view other animals as objects, tools, commodi- ties, or obstacles. Those of us who are able to reflect on the impact of our actions, however, have an opportunity to rethink the standard view of other animals and work to make our relationships better, or at least not make them worse. When we participate in activities and institutions that directly harm others by creating negative experiences, deprive them of their well- being, or deny them opportunities to be who they are and pursue what they care about, we owe them at least our attention and probably some remedy. Since there is something that it is like to be another conscious being, we can try to empathize with these others and deter- mine how best to improve our relationships to promote well- being.
Even though it is challenging to understand what it is like to be another, and even though we are limited by our inevitable anthropocentric perspectives, being in respectful ethical relation involves, in part, attempting to understand and respond to another’s needs, inter- ests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, perspectives, and so on not by positing, from one’s own point of view, what they might or should be. I have argued elsewhere that through “entangled empathy” when we direct our moral attention to specific others in their particular circum- stance, we can patiently come to understand them better and respectfully respond to them.
Entangled empathy is a process that involves both affect and cognition. Individuals who are empathizing with others respond to the other’s condition and reflectively imagine them- selves in the distinct position of the other while staying attentive to both similarities and dif- ferences between themselves and their situation and that of the fellow creature with whom they are empathizing. This alternation between the first and third person points- of- view
Conscious Animals and the Value of Experience 99 helps minimize misperceptions and overly anthropocentric judgments (Gruen, 2015, Gruen, 2013; Gruen, 2012; Gruen, 2009).
Entangled empathy involves paying critical attention to the broader conditions that may negatively affect the experiences and flourishing of those with whom one is empathizing, and this requires those of us empathizing to attend to things we might not have otherwise.
It therefore also enhances our own conscious experiences and helps us to become more sen- sitive perceivers. When adopting a respectful perspective on the conscious experiences of other animals, the claims they make on us come into sharper focus.
Honing our skill at empathizing with different others is desperately needed as we humans, often mindlessly, destroy the planet and all of its inhabitants.
Notes
1. Experientialism is a term that encompasses a variety of utilitarian views, including hedonistic utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, and two- level views; it also includes views that ground “rights” in sentience or being “the subject of a life” or personhood.
Peter Singer’s approach (1990) can be called “experientialist,” as can Tom Regan’s (1983).
Experientialism is sometimes referred to as “sentientism” (see Gary Varner, 2003).
2. The ongoing debate about fish and whether they feel pain (apparently they do) and whether they are conscious of the pain (apparently they are) is illustrative of how the debate has evolved. See Braithwaite (2010).
3. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
4. There are some who believe that animals raised humanely and then painlessly killed do not suffer, but this view has come under increased scrutiny. See for example, Stanescu (2009).
The production of meat that does not entail suffering is not yet an actuality; in vitro meat (meat grown in laboratories) could be a very expensive option. McMahan (2008) has us consider eating animal bodies that have been genetically modified to cause the animal to die early natural deaths.
5. For clear descriptions of theories about “what makes a life go best” see Parfit (1984, appen- dix I). See also Crisp (2013).
6. Jakob von Uexküll, an early ethologist, was interested in the perceptual or phenomenal worlds that organisms experienced and in which they acted. He described the unique
“bubbles” in which very different types of beings experience their worlds as their umwelt.
“A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,”
in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire H.
Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1957), 5– 80.
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Chapter 9
Living Individuals
Biocentrism in Environmental Ethics Clare Palmer
Ethical positions on which all living individuals are valuable and worthy of respect or moral concern are normally called biocentric. Ethical biocentrism forms an important family of approaches to Western environmental ethics. An early kind of biocentrism, based on the idea of “reverence for life,” was proposed by Albert Schweitzer in Philosophy of Civilization (1923). More recently, a number of competing biocentric approaches have been systemati- cally developed. While unified by accepting the value of living individuals, these approaches differ over what characterizes a living individual; why those characteristics might be mor- ally relevant; whether some living individuals are more valuable than others; whether the value of life is just one among a broader, plural set of values or is the only such value; and in which ethical theory the value of life should be located. In this chapter, I briefly outline key elements of these debates, then consider how biocentric ethics might respond to emerging global environmental problems, in particular to anthropogenic climate change, about which little has so far been written from a biocentric perspective (though see Attfield, 2009, 2011).