How to Count Animals, more or less

by Shelly Kagan

Most people agree that animals count morally, but how exactly should we take animals into account? A prominent stance in contemporary ethical discussions is that animals have the same moral status that people do, and so in moral deliberation the similar interests of animals and people should be given the very same consideration. In How to Count Animals, more or less, Shelly Kagan sets out and defends a hierarchical approach in which people count more than animals do and some animals count more than others. For the most part, moral theories have not been developed in such a way as to take account of differences in status. By arguing for a hierarchical account of morality - and exploring what status sensitive principles might look like - Kagan reveals just how much work needs to be done to arrive at an adequate view of our duties toward animals, and of morality more generally.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

319 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 5, 2019

About the author

Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale. After receiving his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1976, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1982, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago before coming to Yale in 1995. He is the author of the textbook Normative Ethics, which systematically reviews alternative positions concerning the basic rules of morality and their possible foundations, and The Limits of Morality, which challenges two of the most widely shared beliefs about the requirements of morality. He is currently at work on The Geometry of Desert.

Reviews

[Travis Rebello · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shelly Kagan has not persuaded me to accept a hierarchical view of the moral status of people and animals, but How to Count Animals, More or Less is undoubtedly brilliant philosophy. If its arguments are to be believed, then an adequate theory of our moral obligations to our fellow creatures will be much more complicated than is typically thought. Much work remains to be done, both in the realm of theory—“the devil will be in the details, and the details are yet to come”—and in practice—

The day may come when it will be common to look back on mankind's long history of abuse of animals and recognize it as the disgrace and horror that it is. But that day is not yet upon us.

[Hyeonmin Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love his opinion and logic, but it's not a but. It's a lecture note.

[Jacob Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Drinking game: take a shot every time Kagan uses the phrase “But for all that…” You’ll be unconscious in no time! Or: take a shot every time he mentions an issue only to immediately say he’s not going to get into that issue.

But for all that, I find Kagan’s writing quite endearing. I’m just skeptical of his arguments.

I’ve written before about the notion of reflective equilibrium: how our intuitions about concrete cases and our intuitions about various abstract principles put pressure on each other in a process of perpetual refinement. I think people fall along a spectrum regarding which of those directions they’re more sensitive to pressure from. Some of us are more willing to revise our concrete judgments to make them fit into a more compelling unified theory; others are more willing to gerrymander the theory to accommodate more of their initial judgments. I feel like this book falls too far along the latter end of that spectrum. It works hard to come up with a theory whose prescriptions about when to treat humans and various animals alike or different line up closely (not perfectly) with common-sense opinion. I think this adds many complications to the theory that would seem arbitrary if you weren’t trying to reach specific preordained conclusions.

For example, consider what Kagan calls “modal personhood”:

Consider, for example, a 20 year old human who suffered irreparable brain damage as an infant, so that she never became a person, but remains, instead, at the cognitive level of a four month old. This individual does not have the potential to become a person, since there is nothing that we could do now for her that would allow her to become one. But for all that, it is still the case that she could have been a person (now), had the accident not occurred when she was a baby. (p. 137)

Kagan thinks this might mean the human in question has higher moral status than a nonhuman with equivalent capacities (assuming the nonhuman doesn’t also have a comparable degree of modal personhood). But the idea that modal personhood has ethical significance sounds pretty implausible to me on its face, and our natural tendency to care more about the human in this scenario seems easily explained in other ways: we just have a bias toward our own species, or it’s easier for us to empathize with modal persons, or we’re taking into account the impact on the human’s family members, etc.

(Kagan also discusses the notion of “modal doghood” which I think would make a great album title.)

(By writing the above sentence, have I increased the modal albumtitlehood of the phrase “modal doghood”?)

(No. Kagan distinguishes “potential” from “modal” whateverhood. Since it remains possible that one of you will one day release a record titled Modal Doghood, it would be more accurate to claim I’ve increased the potential albumtitlehood of that phrase. Now go get to work on it! And don’t forget me when you’re modally famous!)

The point of the book is to argue that there is a hierarchy of moral status, so that for example the same kind and quantity of suffering matters more (in itself, not in virtue of any differing consequences it may have) when it happens to certain creatures (like ordinary humans) than others (like ordinary insects). I remain entirely unconvinced, but Kagan does raise some interesting points along the way.

In section 4.4 he discusses whether the principle of equal consideration of interests rules out hierarchical views like the one he’s defending. You’d expect it to, but he argues it doesn’t “if we interpret the principle…as requiring only that we give equal weight to interests that are similar with regard to all morally relevant characteristics” (p. 106), since belonging to beings of differing moral status might constitute a relevant difference in otherwise similar interests. On the other hand, if “the principle is to be understood as requiring us to give equal weight to any two interests that are similar qua interests—that is, that are similar with regard to the features of the interest that make it have a bearing on one’s welfare” (p. 106), it will rule out Kagan’s view. He argues that “so construed the principle does little more than beg the question.”(p. 106) I’m more interested in his claim that this version of the principle is also incompatible with any ethical system that assigns intrinsic importance to questions of distribution:

Indeed, it is worth noting that no one sympathetic to our distributive principles can accept the principle under its second interpretation. For if interests that have the same impact on welfare must be given the same weight in our moral deliberations, then it is [sic] must be irrelevant to ask whether a given boost in well-being would go to someone who is worse off than others. We cannot legitimately hold that it will do more good to give the increase to someone who is worse off, rather than give an increase of the same amount to someone who is better off. Yet these are exactly the sorts of considerations that anyone drawn to egalitarianism will think relevant in assessing where a given increase in well-being will do the most good. Thus, despite the similarity in names, anyone who accepts an egalitarian distributive principle must reject the principle of equal consideration of interests, when it is understood in this second way. (p. 107)

I need to think about that a bit more.

Near the end of the book Kagan discusses “the problem of normal variation”: if differences in moral status exist and are rooted in differences in the degree to which different beings have various capacities, wouldn’t that (disturbingly) imply some humans have higher moral status than other humans, since e.g. our cognitive abilities vary from individual to individual? One response Kagan considers is that moral status may be determined according to a “step function”: status increases abruptly when capacities cross certain thresholds, but is constant between those thresholds. That sounds like exactly the sort of theory-gerrymandering I complained about above, but Kagan has an interesting strategy for justifying it: he appeals to the need for our ethical systems to be practical. Humans aren’t psychologically equipped to continually sort individuals into very subtle gradations of status on a case-by-case basis, so a practical system—he suggests—needs to give us just a few categories and we need to generally be able to tell easily which category any given creature falls into. (He initially presents this within the framework of rule consequentialism, but argues other ethical theories can make the same move.)

(crosspost)

[Maxwell Schneider · Rating 2 out of 5]

I rejected the argument of this book over the course of the first 4 chapters and then it was pretty uninteresting because I had already said and thought all I needed to to prove this line of thinking wrong to me. I don't really love analytical philosophy I'm discovering. Well argued though

[Sam Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone taking animals seriously ought to read this. It's probably the most important book on the ethics of how we treat animals since Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights.

[Mac d’Leeuwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

🥴

[Adam Ehlert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kagan is a really clear writer and the content of this book is pithy and interesting.

[Peter Zhang · Rating 2 out of 5]

ugh well written but just painfully agonizingly blisteringly slow