Abstract
According to a common view, animals have moral status. Further, a standard defense of this view is the Argument from Consciousness: animals have moral status because they are conscious and can experience pain and it would be bad were they to experience pain. In a series of papers (J Agric Environ Ethics 28(2):277–291, 2015a, J Agric Environ Ethics 28(11):11270–1138, 2015b, J Agric Environ Ethics 30(1):37–54, 2017), Timothy Hsiao claims that animals do not have moral status and criticizes the Argument from Consciousness. This short paper defends the Argument from Consciousness by providing two simple responses to Hsiao’s criticism.
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Notes
There are two other reasons I won’t discuss it. First, a number of other authors have already critically examined it. Second, to be utterly honest, I don’t know how to charitably interpret it. To illustrate, Hsiao sometimes speaks of the “purpose” of morality (2015a: 284; b: 1129) what the moral community is “centered around” (2015b: 1129), what morality is “about” (2015b: 1129), or the “point” of morality (2017: 45). I think these are metaphors and I don’t know how to plausibly cash them out. Additionally, Hsiao claims that a person without the physical organs necessary for vision still has a capacity for sight (2017: 47–48). While we can mark various distinctions (e.g., between the manifestation of a capacity, a non-manifesting capacity, and a capacity to acquire a capacity), I don’t see any way of interpreting this claim as to make it plausible. (Worse: if a person can see despite lacking necessary physical organs, why can’t animals reason in the way required for moral status by Hsiao’s view, even if they lack necessary physical organs?) So I don’t know how to charitably interpret his positive views.
References
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Perrine, T. Hsiao on the Moral Status of Animals: Two Simple Responses. J Agric Environ Ethics 32, 927–933 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-019-09807-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-019-09807-x