Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert

Nonhuman animals have traditionally been excluded from the realm of beings who can be held morally responsible for their actions. In this article, I challenge this picture by expanding on anger’s relevance to moral responsibility practices, which has been little explored in the debate on animal morality. I develop an account that takes social mammals as paradigmatic examples and argue that these animals’ capacity for anger and empathy enables them to engage in responsibility practices that presuppose blame, reconciliation, and recognition of intentional harm. To defend this thesis, I posit a Strawsonian approach to moral responsibility, which takes our practice of holding others responsible and the reactive attitudes it entails as a starting point for outlining the nature of moral responsibility. More precisely, I argue that social mammals’ capacity (1) to recognize intentional harm and (2) to form interpersonal relationships with other animals (3) gives rise to expectations about how others ought to treat them. These expectations find their expression in a specific emotion: anger. Because these animals can recognize intentional harm in others and form interpersonal relationships that provide the basis of trust, this renders them susceptible to anger, which interacts with the awareness that an expectation was violated.

In Chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill contends that the roots of justice lie in two key elements: the belief that harm has been done to an individual and the desire to punish the wrongdoer. This second impulse arises from two emotional capacities shared with many nonhuman animals: the desire to defend oneself against aggression and sympathy, what we now commonly refer to as “empathy.” In this paper, I take up the challenge of providing a more detailed account of Mill’s remarks by appealing to the philosophical literature on moral emotions and animal morality. I concentrate on two capacities possessed by several mammalian and avian species: recognition of intentional action in others and empathy. More precisely, I argue that (1) many animals can recognize when individuals intentionally cause suffering to another and that (2) their empathy could track the badness of others’ suffering. These two capacities enable them to (3) recognize the wrong-making features of intentionally causing suffering. To defend this thesis, I first summarize Mill’s views on the origins of justice (Sect. 1) I expand on these three elements (Sects. 2–4), respond to two possible objections or reservations (Sect. 5) and conclude with some remarks on how sympathy could give rise to the desire to punish wrongdoers (Sect. 6).