Bexhill College is proud to announce that Cameron Clarke, a current student of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Biology, has been selected as one of the winners for this year’s ‘University of Sheffield Philosophy Essay Competition.’
Cameron submitted his essay on the topic of ‘Can Animals be Moral?’ and was selected out of submissions from across the country. The judges noted that Cameron’s essay is:
“…excellent, displaying clear organisation and utilising references, examples, and cases effectively to support its conclusions. The author adeptly focuses the discussion while addressing various key topics. The introductory section provides a good question to readers.”
He has been rewarded with a £25.00 Amazon voucher and has been invited to take part in an online workshop, alongside the other winners, with university professors and experts in Philosophy.
Cameron has been kind enough to provide us a copy of his essay which we are delighted to share below.
Cameron Clarke – Philosophy Essay 2024
Can animals be moral?
Introduction:
Amongst the layman population, it is widely conceded that humans can be moral. An example can be seen in the punishment of criminals who are believed to have committed immoral acts, or the rewarding of heroes who save others from burning buildings. Attributing morality to others plays a major part in our daily lives and wider society, but can we also attribute morality to non-human animals? In this essay, I demonstrate that animals can be moral, arguing from the free-will and consciousness of animals to their moral responsibility in certain situations.
Moral Responsibility:
To be moral or immoral, morality or immorality must be able to be attributed to your person. This truth is tautological, as to be moral is to possess morality as a property. It is clear that to ascribe morally evaluative phrases to some person, they must have had some responsibility over that scenario, where they either adhered to their responsibility sufficiently or not. From this reasoning, we can derive the fact that to be moral, you must have some moral responsibility. Consequently, a new question arises: what is it to be morally responsible?
Imagine you and a group of others are taking a brisk hike along an uneven, winding path. Walking with pace, your stride is suddenly broken, causing you to fall abruptly to the ground. Peering behind your shoulder, you notice the extended foot of a man with a sadistic grin. It would seem fair to call this man immoral, and hence say he had some responsibility over the scenario. Now imagine an alternative situation, in which it is not the sadistic man tripping you up, but rather a rock that you happened to neglect while checking your footing. Can we say that this rock is immoral? Intuitively, we reject this idea, but why do we discriminate between rocks and humans?
There must be some relevant differences between the human and the rock so that our moral evaluation differs. One difference that seems relevant is the possession of a conscious mind. At least one reason why we cannot attribute immorality to the rock is because there is no conscious mind to attribute immorality to (Levy, 2014). Inanimate objects lack such a mind with which they can perform morally significant actions.
To discover whether consciousness is sufficient to produce an immoral action, we can now imagine a similar situation where the rock (whom I shall henceforth name Bob) is conscious. Despite this alteration, we still struggle to call Bob immoral, so it seems there is another necessary condition for a morally significant action to be performed.
There looks to be no difference between a rock that lacks a conscious mind and our friend Bob, as even if Bob is conscious, Bob could do nothing about you tripping over him. Maybe this answers the question: to perform a moral act, you must be conscious and have some control over the situation (Fischer & Ravizza, 1998) (Talbert, 2019). If you have no control over a situation, you cannot be said to have responsibility for the outcome. This notion of control over a situation can be narrowed down to a more refined notion: control of yourself. Although you can have control over others, it seems that you can only do so in so far as you have control over yourself. So, fundamentally, the control of a situation is the control of oneself and what one does in that situation.
This idea of control appears oddly familiar to a related concept—free-will. If one has control of themselves, they ultimately have free-will; their will is subject to their own control. Hence, Bob can only be labelled immoral if he has the freedom to trip you up. Additionally, there is another component to free-will, besides freedom, which is the will itself. The will is something like a direction or intent of some action, so not only to have free-will do you need to be free, you need to be free do to what you intend. Freedom and intention present an explanation for why non-conscious beings cannot be moral or immoral: (1) because there is no conscious mind to be free, and (2) because intention is where the consciousness is pointing in the direction of some outcome (Jacob, 2023).
Mere freedom and intention are not sufficient, though, as we can imagine another scenario where Bob has the freedom to trip you up along with an unrelated intention. If Bob happens to trip you up when he does not intend to, Bob is not at fault, so Bob is not immoral. We require a unification of freedom and intention, where Bob’s intention is actualised by virtue of his freedom, to call Bob immoral.
We have now established the necessary conditions that compose moral responsibility: a conscious mind which freely intends the outcome of the situation in question. But do animals possess these components?
Animal Responsibility:
Modern science has unveiled a great evolutionary tree, indicating that all life originates from a single common ancestor (Gregory, 2008). With this knowledge, we realise that other animals—such as dogs or sheep—are not so dissimilar to ourselves. Therefore, we have reason to conclude that the minds of animals related to humans are not too dissimilar to ours. We can formulate this argument otherwise by a reductio ad absurdum. If consciousness is fundamentally a physical phenomenon, what’s different about the physical structure of humans making it the case that humans are conscious and animals aren’t? Conversely, if consciousness is fundamentally a non-physical phenomenon, where exactly on the evolutionary tree did humans become conscious? It would seem arbitrary—and absurd—to claim that humans just became conscious at some random point on the evolutionary tree, and other animals just didn’t.
In either case, we find it absurd to claim humans are conscious and animals are not, so the only other option available is the inferred conclusion that animals are conscious. This view does not commit us to believe all animals are conscious, nor that they’re conscious to a degree equal to or even greater than we are. All that has been shown is that animals relatively similar to us most probably possess conscious minds.
Furthermore, conscious animals must have some form of intention. If the will is simply the conscious mind directed to a specific outcome, claiming that animals lack intentionality amounts to saying something like ‘animals are not conscious’ as their minds would be doing nothing. Even if consciousness is merely ‘something that it is like to be that organism’ as Thomas Nagel put it (Nagel, 2005), this experience of being must come accompanied by certain mental states which are to be avoided or experienced. For example, we can see that our experience of pain just is our intention to stop the pain; pain is, by definition, something we will to avoid.
To complete the triad of moral responsibility, it must be shown that the will of animals is free. One classical argument against free-will gives a deterministic model of the world, where every occurrence has some deterministic cause(s) (Van Inwagen, 1983). A developed form of this argument claims that all occurrences either come about from deterministic causes or by pure random chance—neither of which we are in control of (If There Is No God, Is There Free Will?, 2023). Because we lack control over the occurrences, we lack free-will. Nevertheless, this only rules out one interpretation of free-will: lee-way freedom. Lee-way freedom describes free-will as the ability to have done something different (Timpe, 2019), which conflicts with a deterministic account of our universe. Contra, the argument fails to rule out our second interpretation of free-will: source-hood freedom. Source-hood freedom describes free-will as an agent being the source of their actions (Timpe, 2019). It is logical to conclude that even if the world is deterministic (the world has to be the way it is), we could still be the source of our actions in a way that grants us free-will. This is because we, as conscious minds, have personalities which determine our actions. This also applies to non-human animals, where their person is the source of their actions, allowing for free-will.
It has now been proven that animals possess all three components that determine whether a being can be moral: a conscious mind, intentions, and free-will. We can discover by the lights of our intuition that there is no contradiction in an animal unifying these three components in such a way as to be the author of a moral action. As it is at least possible for an animal to be the author of a moral action, we can conclude that animals can be moral.
Conclusion:
To be moral is to have moral responsibilities—the unification of a conscious mind that freely intends an outcome. It is illogical to say non-human animals lack consciousness, intentions, or free-will. So, possibly, non-human animals can have moral responsibility, and can be moral.
Bibliography
Fischer, J. M., & Ravizza, M. (1998). Morally Responsible People Without a Freedom. In J. M. Fischer, & M. Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwCompatFischerRavizza.htm
Gregory, T. R. (2008). Understanding evolutionary trees. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 121–137.
If There Is No God, Is There Free Will? (2023, December 9). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/7sHZS2rZyJM?si=7so1MmvyMauXaF01&t=370
Jacob, P. (2023, February 7). Intentionality. Retrieved from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#WhyInteSoCall
Levy, N. (2014). Consciousness and Moral Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, T. (2005). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Talbert, M. (2019, October 16). Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from Moral Responsibility: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-responsibility/#FreeRespDete
Timpe, K. (2019). Leeway vs. Sourcehood Conceptions of Free Will. In K. Timpe, M. Griffith, & N. Levy, Routledge Companion to Free Will. Routledge.
Van Inwagen, P. (1983). An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
