Nico Dario Müller

Building on her previous work (2004, 2012, 2013), Christine Korsgaard’s recent book Fellow Creatures (2018) has provided the most highly developed Kantian account of duties towards animals. I raise two issues with the results of this account. First, the duties that Korsgaard accounts for are duties “towards” animals in name only. Since Korsgaard does not reject the Kantian conception in which direct duties towards others require mutual moral constraint, what she calls duties “towards” animals are merely Kantian duties regarding animals, verbally repackaged. Hence, Korsgaard’s account is best understood as an expansion (albeit a substantial one) of Kant’s own view of an indirect duty regarding animals. Second, the expansion does not take us quite as far as Korsgaard hopes. She aims for a conception in which our duties towards animals and humans are equally important, but her argument does not support this conclusion. I point out the potential for a more radical revision of Kant’s anthropocentrism that rejects his underlying assumption that duties towards others are based on mutual constraint.

This open access book revises Kant’s ethical thought in one of its most notorious respects: its exclusion of animals from moral consideration. The book gives readers in animal ethics an accessible introduction to Kant’s views on our duties to others, and his view that we have only ‘indirect’ duties regarding animals. It then investigates how one would have to depart from Kant in order to recognise that animals matter morally for their own sake. Particular attention is paid to Kant’s ‘Formula of Humanity,' the role of autonomy and the moral law, as well as Kant’s notions of practical reason and animal instinct. The result is a deliberately amended version of Kantianism which nevertheless remains faithful to central aspects of Kant’s thought. The book’s final part illustrates the framework’s use in applied contexts, addressing the issues of using animals as mere means, the ethics of veganism and vegetarianism, and environmental protection. Nico Dario Müller shows how, when furnished with duties to animals, Kant's moral philosophy can be a powerful resource for animal ethicists.

Animal ethics has often been criticized for an overreliance on “ideal” or even “utopian” theorizing. In this article, I recognize this problem, but argue that the “nonideal theory” which critics have offered in response is still insufficient to make animal ethics action-guiding. I argue that in order for animal ethics to be action-guiding, it must consider agent-centered theories of change detailing how an ideally just human-animal coexistence can and should be brought about. I lay out desiderata that such a theory of change should suffice so as to be helpful in guiding action. Specifically, a theory of change should determine (1) who needs to do what in order for ideal justice to be achieved in the long run, (2) who should be expected to refuse compliance and how they should be moved to comply, and (3) why specific intermediate steps are necessary. I show how previous “nonideal” contributions, though helpful in other ways, are insufficiently determinate on these points and I sketch a (still somewhat utopian) theory of change for one specific context. This brings animal ethics a crucial step closer to being action-guiding in the real world.

Arguments against inflicting violence on people to defend animal rights have relied on the view that inflicting violence is always wrong. But these arguments end up prohibiting too much, as defensive violence should be permissible in certain extreme cases. We argue that considerations about the counterproductiveness of defensive violence are better at distinguishing permissible and impermissible instances of animal rights violence than a blanket rejection of violence. We respond to the objection that assuming violence to be counterproductive is ad hoc, discussing real-world and fictional examples of animal rights violence. We argue that defensive violence on behalf of animals should almost always be assumed to be counterproductive because it threatens to trigger self-reinforcing reactions on the part of the socio-technical regimes that violate animal rights in the first place.

Animal ethicists have worried that hoping for the success of the animal rights movement is epistemically irrational because it contradicts our best evidence and practically irrational because it makes animal rights advocates complacent. Against these worries, this article defends the claim that animal rights advocates can rationally hope for the success of their movement despite grim prospects. To this end, the article draws on Philip Pettit's (2004) account of hope to articulate the novel notion of “careful substantial hope.” Hope in this sense is a cognitive strategy of thinking as if movement success is likely because the right strategies and tactics will be employed. The article concludes with suggestions for how philosophers can encourage this kind of hope.

This article captures and critiques a recurring and prominent political argument against animal welfare improvements in Switzerland which we term the “ranking argument”. This states that Swiss animal welfare law ranks among the strictest in the world, therefore no improvements are called for. This argument was advanced three times by Swiss government authorities in 2022 alone, but also in a case dating back to 1984, to advise the electorate on popular initiatives aiming at animal welfare improvements. We argue that, while the argument commits a fallacy of relative privation and is ethically dubious, it can be deployed to great effect by agents opposed to norm change in animal welfare regulation. We conclude with some thoughts on how the ranking argument can and should be challenged in public discourse.

Government authorities often view the 3Rs of “replace, reduce, refine” popularized by Russell and Burch as both a regulatory principle and a governance principle aimed at reducing the total amount of animal distress in science. They thus expect that the 3Rs should, in time, result in changes in total animal experimentation numbers. Communications by Swiss authorities provide stark examples of this expectation. But the 3Rs do not aim at affecting animal experimentation at the level of total numbers; rather, they focus on study design in the individual case. While the underlying philosophy of the 3Rs indeed included a principle of seeking feasible overall reforms, this notion is completely absent in the 3Rs framework itself. Authorities need to stop treating the 3Rs as a means to reduce total distress and should instead invest resources into developing feasible and effective strategies for transformative governance in animal research.

This paper identifies an overlooked but widespread philosophical view in the animal rights movement, Animal Rights Vanguardism. This is the view that (1) the arc of history, by way of ever-increasing moral awareness, bends towards animal liberation,(2) animal rights activists are aware of the moral truth when it comes to human-animal relations thanks to a moral-epistemic privilege, and (3) the primary moral imperative for animal rights activists is to increase the moral awareness of the masses. The paper then makes four points about Animal Rights Vanguardism: First, it can be found across a wide range of animal rights literature. Second, it is the target of many familiar objections against vegans and animal rights activists. Third, it presents an obstacle to the success of the animal rights movement. Fourth, consciously rejecting it leads to a more compelling philosophy of animal rights activism, termed Critical Animal Rights Collectivism, which is based on the principles that social change is contingent, that everyone has broadly equal access to moral truth, and that activists should focus on collective organization more than on individual persuasion.