Fellow Creatures Quotes

“Abolitionists and animal rights theorists distinguish themselves from animal welfarists, whose primary concern is with the suffering we inflict on animals.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“so. In any case, on a Kantian conception, what is special about human beings is not that we are the universe’s darlings, whose fate is absolutely more important than the fates of the other creatures who like us experience their own existence. It is exactly the opposite: What is special about us is the empathy that enables us to grasp that other creatures are important to themselves in just the way we are important to ourselves, and the reason that enables us to draw the conclusion that follows: that every animal must be regarded as an end in herself, whose fate matters, and matters absolutely, if anything matters at all.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“Kant’s epistemic modesty—his dictum that we cannot have any knowledge beyond the scientific—is an”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“In my view, the good things in life are all ways of living life well—modes of well-functioning. Health is physical well-functioning, and to be curious and understand things is to be intellectually well-functioning, to appreciate beauty is to be perceptually well-functioning, to love and be loved is to be socially well-functioning.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“complaint, then you have done nothing wrong. Moral standards are just the standards of conduct that we can all agree that people should adhere to. But it is not, as you might have thought, that we can all agree to this conduct, because it is morally right. Rather, it is morally right because we can all agree to it.12”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“with “gratitude for…long service (just as if they were members of the household).”11 He remarks with apparent approval that “In Athens it was punishable to let an aged work-horse starve.”12 He tells us that: “Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves.”13 6.2.2 But as that last phrase suggests, Kant thinks that these moral duties are not owed directly to the other animals, but rather to ourselves. They are duties with respect to the treatment of animals, but not duties owed to them. In a similar way, you might imagine we have duties”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“strains their capacities. The limitation he mentions sounds vaguely as if it were drawn from the Golden Rule: we should force them to do only such work as we would force ourselves to do.8 And if they do work for us, he thinks that we should be grateful. In his course lectures, Kant sometimes told a story about the philosopher Leibniz carefully returning a grub he had been studying to the tree from which he had taken it when he was done, “lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it.”9 Both in his lectures and in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant has hard words for people who shoot their horses or dogs when they are no longer useful.10 Such animals should be treated, Kant insists,”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“other animals, but that it must be quickly and without pain, and must not be for the sake of mere sport. Recreational hunting would therefore be wrong in Kant’s view, as well as sports like dog-fighting and cock-fighting that may lead to the animal’s painful injury or death. Kant does not say why we should kill animals, and he does not discuss the question whether we may eat them, but presumably that is one of the reasons he has in mind.6 He does not think we should perform painful experiments on non-human animals “for the sake of mere speculation, when the end could also be achieved without these.”7 He thinks we may make the other animals work, but not in a way that”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 27:710”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“and feeling that suggests this. We have a general discomfort in the face of wanton destructiveness, a tendency to wince when objects are broken, a sadness at the sight of uninhabited homes, an objection to the neglect or abuse of precision tools. These responses are not rooted completely in the idea of economic waste, perhaps not even in any sort of human-centered or animal-centered waste. Again it might be suggested that such feelings result from a kind of”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“a conception of “me.” But failure to pass the mirror test does not imply that an animal is not self-conscious. For one thing, many animals are not visually oriented. Imagine you are confronted with a surface which reflects back your distinctive odor. If you failed to identify that smell as “me,” would that show that you are not self-conscious? More generally, I think it can be argued that even animals who do not pass the mirror test have forms of self-consciousness. In fact, I think it can be argued that pleasure and pain are forms of self-consciousness, since what the animal who experiences these things is experiencing is the effects of the world on himself, on his own condition. In that sense, all animals are self-conscious because they can feel their existence. Again, you have self-consciousness if you have some sort of awareness”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“But failure to pass the mirror test does not imply that an animal is not self-conscious. For one thing, many animals are not visually oriented. Imagine you are confronted with a surface which reflects back your distinctive odor. If you failed to identify that smell as “me,” would that show that you are not self-conscious? More generally, I think it can be argued that even animals who do not pass the mirror test have forms of self-consciousness. In fact, I think it can be argued”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“around. For a human being, this has two distinct aspects. The unity of what we may call your “acting self”—a unity that we also call “integrity”—enables you to pursue your ends effectively and maintain your projects, commitments, relationships, and values over time.14 The unity of what we may call your “knowing self” involves the formation of an integrated conception of your environment, one that enables you to identify relations between the different parts of your environment well enough to find your way around in it. Those relations are temporal, spacial, causal, and for many animals social. By forming a unified conception of your environment, you also unify yourself as the subject of that conception. The fact that I identify with my self—with the agent of my projects and commitments and the subject of my conception of the world—means that there may be things about my body, such as its tendency to senescence, that are not good for me, even if perhaps they are good for my species or my genes. They are not good, that is, for the thing that I experience, and identify, as “me.” My functional good is what maintains the aspects of me that support my having a self.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“When I say that something is good-for me, even in the functional sense, the “me” that I am referring to is the embodiment of my self, a conscious subject and agent who is more or less (for, as we are about to see, this is a matter of degree) functionally unified over time.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“There are a few species of organisms—the examples are controversial, but hydras, flatworms, a certain species of jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) have been suggested—that apparently do always die of accidents and so are potentially, though never actually, immortal.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“When we say that something is a final good, what we are saying is that it constitutes or contributes to the well-functioning of an entity who experiences her own functional condition in a valenced way, and pursues her own functional goods through action.6 The standard is one deployed from the standpoint of empathy (1.4.2) because when we invoke it, we are looking at the creature’s functional goods as they appear in her own view, in the way that she necessarily looks at them herself—as things worth pursuing or realizing for their own sake. Final goods exist because there are such creatures, creatures for whom things can be good or bad.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals