Kantianism for Animals

Front matter

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Part I Kantian Foundations 1.1 Kantianism for Animals

12 A Constructive, Revisionist, Radical Agenda 1.3 Limitations and Responses to Initial Worries 1.4 The Way Ahead

2.1 What Is Moral Concern Kantian-Style?

2.2 Kant’s Taxonomy of Duties

2.3. Others’ Happiness as an Obligatory End

2.4 Practical Love and Respect for Others

2.5 Kant’s List of Duties Towards Others

2.6 Kants Restorative Project in Moral Philosophy References

31 Kants Indirect’ Account of Duties Regarding Animals 3.2 Structural Problems of Kant’s Account

3.3 Substantive Shortcomings of Kant’s Account

3.4 The Unhelpfulness of Kant’s Account xviii © CONTENTS

Part II Building Kantianism for Animals 87 4 Is the Formula of Humanity the Problem? 89 41 Animals and the Formula of Humanity: Some Background 89 4.2 The Esteem-Concern Equivocation 94 4.3 Wood and Korsgaard Against the Esteem-Concern Equivocation 103

44 Obligatory Ends: How Kant Derives Duties to Others 107 45 What Is the Point of the Formula of Humanity, if Not

Moral Concern? 117 References 124 5 Animals and the ‘Directionality’ of Duties 127 5.1 Do We Truly Share’ the Moral Law? Thompson’s Challenge to Kant 127 5.2 First-Personal Versus Second-Personal Accounts of Directionality’ 134 5.3 Rejecting Thompson’s Challenge 140 5.4 Consent, Forgiveness, and Apologies Without Second- Personal Authority 142 References 151 6 Kantian Moral Patients Without Practical Reason? 153 6l Duties of Respect Towards Moral Non-agents? 153 6.2 Adopting Another’s Ends as Our Own 159 6.3 Kants Denial of End-Directed Animal Agency 160 6.4 Animal ‘Ends’: Conceptual, Non-conceptual, ‘Obscure? 164 References 173

71 Duties from Autonomy 175 7.2 The Primacy of Duties over Rights and Claims 178 7.3. Duties to Self and Others 181 7.4 Practical Love and Non-exaltation 183 7.5 Motives Matter 185

CONTENTS Part III Using the Framework

8 A Kantian Argument Against Using Animals 81 External? Arguments Against Using Animals 8.2 <A Kantian-for-Animals Internal? Argument Against Animal Use References

9 A Kantian Argument Against Eating Animals 9.1 The Philosophical Stalemate Regarding Vegetarianism 92 A Kantian-for-Animals Argument Against Eating Animals References

10 A Kantian Argument Against Environmental Destruction 10.1 Kant and the Environment: Previous Approaches 10.2 A Kantian-for-Animals Perspective on the Environment References

11 Animal Ethics and the Philosophical Canon: A Proposal References

Index

Xix

191 191

198 205

207 207

214 219

221 221 228 233

235 241

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 4.1

List of Tables

Terms related to moral concern

Kant’s list of duties towards others

What is good for animals versus for our capacities Terms related to moral concern and esteem

30 49 76 96 xxi

PART I

Kantian Foundations

Chapter 1 1.1 Kantianism For Animals

Under a certain description, Immanuel Kant appears like an intellectual ancestor of today’s animal rights movement.' Here we have a philosopher who insists that duty trumps self-interest. That we should treat others according to rational principles, not momentary appetites. That moral responsibility arises from the capacity to determine our own actions autonomously—not from tradition, a self-interested contract with other human beings, or the commands of a human-shaped God. That we should exercise self-control. That we should not exalt ourselves above others. That we should cultivate sympathy and act on it. Even—though this is less widely

Tn animal ethics, it is customary to note that one uses ‘animals’ as a shorthand for ‘nonhuman animals’. But for my purposes, this seems too strict and too loose. It is too strict because the ethical framework proposed in this book treats other human beings and animals largely equally, and so its application is not restricted to non-human animals. It is too loose because Kantian moral concern for others, on my reading, is a matter of regard for their happiness on a broadly hedonistic conception (see Sect. 2.3 below). So non-sentient animals cannot be objects of this kind of concern. Explicitly using ‘animal’ as a shorthand for ‘nonhuman animal’ turns a vague, everyday notion into a more specific, biological notion, and one which unhelpfully lumps together pigs, orang-utans, drosophilae, sponges, and corals. What I have in mind when I say ‘animal’ is a being capable of happiness, where ‘happiness’ is a function of hedonic states (see Sect. 2.3). I take it that this coincides roughly with the beings we usually think of first when we talk about ‘animals’, except that it also includes human beings.

© The Author(s) 2022 3 N. D. Müller, Kantianism for Animals, The Palgrave Macmillan known—that we should adopt the happiness of others, along with our own moral integrity, as the supreme ends of our actions. Do today’s ethical vegans and animal advocates not think along these lines? I know I do. Us friends of animals may disagree with the eighteenth-century Prussian professor on what exactly our duties are, but our movement takes a general view of morality that seems to hew close to his. So we might draw great benefit from considering our own moral thinking through the lens of Kant’s philosophical framework of notions, distinctions, and arguments. For one thing, better understanding our own moral thinking helps us remain critical and inquisitive. But it is also crucial when trying to convince others.

Alas, the above description of Kant is selective. In other passages, he appears harshly dismissive of animals. Most importantly, he denied that human beings have any duties whatsoever towards animals (MM 6:442.08-12; MM 6:241.10-17; Collins 27:460). We do bear a moral responsibility to treat animals with a certain sympathy, since sympathy in general is an important capacity in our moral relations with other human beings (MM 6:443.13-16). But we have this responsibility only towards ourselves, not the animals. Kant explicitly states that his anthropocentric view does not rule out killing animals for food, coercing them into labour, and using them in scientific experiments (if these experiments serve a human purpose over and above mere speculation, MM 6:443.16-21). According to Kant, the human being is “the ultimate end of the creation here on earth” (CPJ 5:426.36-37), animals are merely “things [...] with which one can do as one likes” (Anth 127.08-09). For all his ‘Copernican Revolutions’, Kant never came to view the doctrine of human superiority as a convenient human rationalisation.

In recent years, this aspect of Kant’s philosophy has been unpopular. Even sympathetic readers have called Kant’s denial of duties to animals “counterintuitive”, “repugnant”, “notorious”, “unsettling”, “entirely unsatisfactory”, “inadequate”, and “offensive”.? Although, as we will see, there remain influential voices in the debate who defend and laud Kant for his supposed insight that animals do not matter for their own sake, it is dawning on more and more readers that Kant’s views on animals stand in dire need of revision.

?In the order of appearance: “counterintuitive” (Potter 2005, 303), “repugnant” (Hill 1994, 58), “notorious” (Wood 1998, 189), “unsettling” (O’Hagan 2009, 531), “entirely unsatisfactory” (Calhoun 2015, 194), “inadequate and offensive” (Timmermann 2005, 128).

When animal ethicists write about Kant, they rarely say more than that he denied the existence of duties to animals. To many, this implication makes Kant’s entire approach to moral philosophy untenable (Broadie and Pybus 1974; Skidmore 2001; Moyer 2001; Regan 2004, 174-185; Wolf 2012). Animal ethicists tend to see Kant the way they see a Descartes or a Malebranche, namely as a relic from a darker philosophical age that we can happily leave to history. But this perspective on Kant fails to appreciate the philosophical commonalities he shares with today’s animal advocates, as well as the positive, creative potential his framework could have for animal ethics. We can only speculate what animal ethicists could do with Kant if only they engaged with his thought more where it is helpful. How could an opponent of animal exploitation draw on the notion that we must never use others as mere means? What might change about our understanding of vegetarianism if we based it on autonomy and moral integrity, rather than purely on the avoidance of bad consequences? What relation to wild animals and their environment can one justify with a body of philosophy that asks us to love others, yet not encroach upon them too much? There is a potential for challenging, unusual, and exciting animal ethics here. But as things stand, the way ahead is blocked by Kant’s own insistence that our duties can never be directed towards animals. One can hardly blame animal ethicists for refusing to engage with a philosopher who devalues animals out of hand.

But could we go the other way? That is: Instead of rejecting and ignoring Kant’s system of moral philosophy, could we develop a new version of Kantianism that recognises the existence of duties towards animals? This amended version of Kantianism might still, say, derive duties from our own autonomy rather than from an axiology of pleasure and pain. It might still view duties as primary to moral rights or claims, and acknowledge that we have duties to self. And it might still tie the moral worth of actions to their incentives. But it would not restrict moral consideration to human beings.

When we try to imagine this potential ethical framework, the question arises naturally: In what respects could it remain Kantian ‘capital K’, and on which underlying issues would it have to differ from Kant? A good answer to this question does two things: First, it explains why Kant excluded animals, thus identifying the points on which we would have to

3 According to my account, all of these points do turn out to be features of Kantianism for Animals. For a summary of the Kantian-for-Animals framework, see Chap. 7.

disagree with him in order to recognise duties towards animals. Secondly and more importantly for animal ethicists, it illuminates an alternative framework, one that remains as close to Kant as possible without denying that there are duties to animals. Call this framework ‘Kantianism for Animals’.

Although the strongest reason for developing Kantianism for Animals is its positive potential for animal ethics, there also lies a risk in ot developing it. The objectionable philosophers that social movements do not reclaim can quickly become the figureheads of their adversaries. In fact, Kant has already had a turbulent history of being claimed by both sides of political animal welfare struggles. First, appeals to Kant’s staunchly anthropocentric views of animal ethics were instrumental for the nineteenthcentury animal welfare movement in Germany and Great Britain (Altman 2011, 34; Baranzke and Ingensiep 2019, 35). At a time when the very idea of using the law to protect animals was considered novel and unfamiliar, Kant’s human-centred considerations against cruelty served as a catalyst. If animal protection was not ultimately about protecting animals, but about protecting human beings, then it might be legitimate to legislate about it. Interestingly enough, it was always Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue to which animal-friendly politicians and advocates turned, despite the fact that its topic are explicitly non-legal, ethical duties (MM 6:388.32-33). So the kind of Kantian argument that most strongly influenced early animal welfare politics did not provide a direct legal-philosophical or political argument. Its role was rather to lend ethical legitimacy to anti-cruelty policies—to tell us why a certain type of treatment of animals is ethically desirable.

More than a century later, the dialectical context has changed dramatically. Under animal welfare regimes inspired by Kant’s anthropocentric anti-cruelty doctrine, animal use has been industrialised and expanded to an extent unimaginable in the eighteenth century. To be certain, many countries now have highly detailed animal welfare regulation which outlaws ‘unnecessary’ or ‘cruel’ violence. However, most of the violence actually perpetrated against animals—the confining, the injuring, the mutilating, the separating, the killing—is inflicted with the blessing of regulation, since it is considered ‘necessary’ to achieve some preconceived human purpose. In important ways, the state is still not interested in animals for their own sake, but rather in preventing cruelty from driving human actions. This shows how little we have truly advanced beyond Kant’s anthropocentrism.

It is only thanks to the struggle of an ever-growing animal rights movement that we are seeing a slow process of incremental ‘subjectivisation’ of animal welfare legislation in certain countries (Stucki 2016, 138). That is to say, although these legislations started out protecting animals purely as legal objects, out of human-centred concerns, over time they have granted to animals certain protections for their own sake, a sliver of legal subjecthood. For example, the Swiss constitution and animal welfare law acknowledge that animals have a value in themselves, even calling this value by the Kantian-sounding name “dignity” (Bolliger 2016). Although legislation at this high level is only as good as its concretisation, steps away from pure anthropocentrism are basically a good thing for animals. A law that aims at protecting animal lives and welfare, even if it succeeds only to some extent, can go much further in its prescriptions and prohibitions than a law that aims merely at curtailing human cruelty. For this reason, many animal ethicists today call for the further subjectivisation of legal animal protection, often expressed in terms of animal rights (these are the people I mean when I speak of ‘progressive’ animal ethicists in this book). The future of the animal rights movement lies in reforming laws and societies for the benefit of the animals themselves, not just for the prevention of cruel character dispositions in human beings.

For the animal rights movement today, Kant’s anthropocentrism is a philosophical obstacle and threat. It is an obstacle insofar as it legitimises the dominant paradigm of anti-cruelty and animal welfare legislation, which condones and perpetuates the suffering and death of billions of animals each year worldwide, by appeal to a philosophical system that continues to be taken very seriously. It poses a threat in that it can easily be weaponised for reactionary anti-animal politics that would rather undo what little progress the animal rights movement has made and give human beings even more licence to exploit animals (so long as they do not recognisably do it with cruel pleasure, of course). It is no coincidence that some of the literature’s most ardent opponents of animal rights have made frequent appeals to Kant (Cohen 1997, 2001; Scruton 2006). Since Kant is so closely associated with the notions of reason, freedom, and autonomy, these reactionary appeals also simultaneously serve to stereotype animal advocates as irrational, illiberal, and sentimental.

In the midst of this dialectic, animal advocates concede too much if they reject Kant wholesale. A certain amount of reclaiming is advisable, and other social movements have set good examples for how this can be done. Critical race theorists were the first to point out and investigate

Kant’s now-notorious racism against anyone who is not a white northern European (Eze 1995, 1997; Mills 1998; Bernasconi 2002, 2003). But instead of ignoring Kant and leaving him to be appropriated by today’s racists, Mills (1998, 2018) has carefully dissected Kant’s philosophy and rebuilt it into a “Black Radical Kantianism” (Mills 2018). Similarly, Hay (2013) has shown how Kant, the famous sexist, can still be of use to feminist philosophy—on a certain reading, with certain modifications. On Hay’s account, Kant’s notion of a duty to self can help us capture the moral predicament of oppressed human beings. We may owe it not only to others to resist oppression, but also to ourselves. The aim behind such revisions, reclamations, and repurposings of Kant is not to preserve his reputation as a canonical European philosopher. Nor is it a matter of uncritically invoking Kant in order to then adorn social movements with his plumes. To the contrary, a partial revision and reclamation of Kant requires a critical engagement with his work. The aim behind such reclamations is to draw on a corpus of philosophical thought—which, for better or worse, is common philosophical currency—to advance the thought of a social movement, in the sense both of refining it and of spreading it. Kant here appears less like a philosophical authority to be revered, but more like a philosophical resource to be put to good use.

We are yet to see the same level of critical and creative engagement with Kant when it comes to his views on animals. When Kant scholars have commented on these views, they have mostly been preoccupied with showing two things: first, that Kant has good theory-internal reasons for his most notorious claims—say, that animals have no intrinsic value (Hay 2020), that animals do not have the same kind of moral standing as human beings (Hayward 1994; Denis 2000; Garthoff 2020), and that we do not have any duties ‘towards’ animals (Baranzke 2005; Herman 2018; Howe 2019; Ripstein and Tenenbaum 2020; Varden 2020). Secondly, and in the same texts, they argue that the upshots of such views are nevertheless quite animal-friendly. The problem is that they typically make the first point with much more force and precision than the second. Kant scholars are adept at explaining the internal intricacies of Kant’s thought, but they are not particularly trained to assess animal ethical implications thoroughly and critically. Nor is it their job to reflect on and endorse any specific agenda in animal politics against which they could measure the appropriateness of Kant’s views. Should it turn out, on a closer look, that objectionably animal- unfriendly upshots follow from Kant’s views, all that is left is a defence of objectionable views in animal ethics. And indeed, I will argue in Chap. 3 that Kant’s denial of duties to animals does have troubling implications no matter how charitable we are.

Against this backdrop, this book pursues three goals: first, to investigate what leads Kant to the conclusion that we have no duties towards animals; secondly, to propose a way to include animals in Kantian moral concern, pace Kant; and third, to explore where the changes lead us. My claim is that we must disagree with Kant on certain issues if we want to include animals in his conception of moral concern for their own sake, but these disagreements are surprisingly peripheral to his ethical system. In large parts, Kant’s moral philosophy survives the conversion to an ethic that recognises duties towards animals.

The result is a coherent and interesting philosophical framework, Kantianism for Animals, on which animal ethicists can draw to reflect on our moral relations to animals. It is a ‘radical’ system in the sense that it includes animals in Kantian moral concern ‘at the root’, in the same way and on the same grounds as it includes other human beings. It also lends itself as a starting point for a ‘radical’ critique of practices such as using and eating animals (see Chaps. 8 and 9) that takes as its object not just the contingent consequences of these practices, but the very ends and incentives from which they spring.

1.2 A CONSTRUCTIVE, REVISIONIST, RADICAL AGENDA

To see more clearly what distinguishes this book from other texts on Kantian animal ethics, consider the origins of the debate. Although Kantian ethics and animal ethics have both flourished in anglophone philosophy since the 1960s, they have flourished in largely separate social biomes. Most of the literature’s few dozen articles were written either by professional Kantians making a brief foray into animal ethics, or vice versa. Korsgaard (2004, 2012, 2013, 2018) was the first to pay more than occasional attention to both fields. She was also the first to publish a monograph on Kantian animal ethics (Korsgaard 2018), after which recently followed the field’s first edited volume (Callanan and Allais 2020). Although all of these contributions have helped to advance the debate a great deal, the book you are reading takes a different approach to the topic. The approach can be summarised in three words: constructive, revisionist, and radical.

First, this book does not pursue a destructive anti-Kantian project, but a constructive Kantian one. The aim is emphatically mot to prove Kant’s moral philosophy wrong by way of a modus tollens argument about its unacceptable implications in animal ethics. To do just that has been the goal of a long series of previous contributions by animal ethicists (Broadie and Pybus 1974; Pybus and Broadie 1978; Hoff 1983; Skidmore 2001; Moyer 2001; Regan 2004, 174-185). Of course, considering critical perspectives is indispensable when scrutinising Kant’s system, and hence I will discuss them at various points throughout the book, especially in Chap. 3. But at the end of the day, a destructive approach has little to offer to animal ethicists. Most in this field alveady believe that Kant is not an interesting philosophical interlocutor. What good does it do to reinforce this belief? Instead, I intend to show that an amended version of Kantianism can be fruitful and interesting for animal ethicists. Due to this constructive approach, I also try to tamper with Kant as little as possible, though as much as necessary.

Secondly, this book’s approach is revisionist, rather than purely exegetical or defensive. In other words, I do not primarily try to explain or defend Kant’s account of animal ethics in the face of objections. My aim is to revise and repurpose it. A lot has already been written to defend Kant’s anti-cruelty doctrine, typically by Kantians reacting to what they see as illinformed criticism from animal ethicists (Hayward 1994; Denis 2000; Baranzke 2005; Altman 2011, 2019; Svoboda 2012, 2014; Geismann 2016; Wilson 2017; Herman 2018; Howe 2019). Of course, such defences are relevant to consider if the goal is a fair assessment of Kant. But even the strongest refutation of objections can only make Kant’s views Jess repugnant, not more useful or interesting to animal ethicists. To make the most of Kant in animal ethics, we should try to include animals in Kantian moral concern. Revisionism presupposes both a certain optimism and a certain pessimism. It presupposes the optimistic view that Kant’s ethical system can be brought to recognise duties towards animals without sacrificing too much of what makes it attractive in the first place.* At the same time, revisionism implies the pessimistic view that we must depart from Kant on

*Some Kant scholars have objected that supposedly ‘Kantian’ approaches to animal ethics have largely abandoned the substance of Kant’s views on morality, merely preserving this or that superficial “keyword” (Geismann 2016, 413FN3; see also Altman 2011, 26; O’Hagan 2009, 554). However, the approaches they criticise do not represent targeted efforts at constructive revisionism—at staying as close to Kant as possible while recognising duties to animals. They were simply texts in animal ethics that employed Kantian vocabulary. Hence, even if we agree that some previous ‘Kantian’ proposals differed very significantly from Kant, this does not doom all future Kantian proposals to the same fate.

some points to yield acceptably animal-friendly conclusions. So this project also differs from earlier contributions that make the case that duties to animals already follow from Kant’s views, if only we understand them correctly (Wood 1998; Korsgaard 2004, 2012, 2013; Kaldewaij 2013).° For reasons I will explain in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 6, I am more pessimistic.

Third, this book takes a ‘radical’ approach to the inclusion of animals in Kantian moral concern. That is, the aim is to revise Kant’s account of moral consideration ‘at the root’ so that it applies to animals, rather than merely adding duties towards animals after the fact. This approach yields an ethical system in which our duties to animals do not belong to a special, separate class, but are simply instances of our duties to others, just like our duties to other human beings. This radical agenda is stronger than mere non-anthropocentrism. Not only do animals merit moral attention for their own sake, but they merit it for their own sake in the same way and for the same reasons as other human beings. In Midgley’s words: “If you think cruelty wrong in general—which Kant certainly did—it seems devious to say that cruelty to animals is wrong for entirely different reasons from cruelty to people” (Midgley 1995, 33). At the same time, the agenda does not imply that our duties towards human beings and animals are exactly identical in their demands, only that they have the same form and normative ground. We can concede that beneficence demands markedly different actions vis 4 vis bats and human beings, just like beneficence can demand different actions vis à vis human beings with different tastes. But the duty of beneficence is still one and the same towards both.°

5Altman (2011, 26, 35) suggests that Korsgaard and Wood set out to “revise” Kant’s views. This strikes me as only half true. Though both Korsgaard and Wood aim to show that Kant was wrong about whether animals are ends in themselves, they each argue on the basis of (what they take to be) Kant’s own, unaltered views. More accurate seems the formulation chosen by Basaglia (2018, 90), who characterises Wood and Korsgaard as ‘correcting’ Kant based on theory-internal Kantian considerations. My own disagreements with Kant, in any case, will not be intended as ‘corrections’ on his own terms, but as disagreements based on my preconceived, radical approach.

©Note that this type of ‘radicalism’ is still compatible with various views about whether duties to animals and duties to rational human beings are equal in weight. If one considers it a desideratum to give less weight to the claims of animals than those of rational human beings (as Garthoff does, Garthoff 2011, 25), one can still try to account for this imbalance after the fact, particularly within an account on how to resolve apparent moral conflicts. Like Kant’s own view, however, Kantianism for Animals will not come with a highly specific view on the resolution of apparent moral conflict (see Chap. 11).

While Kantians have made non-anthropocentric proposals, they have not been radical in this sense. Their main concern was to present a Kantian argument in favour of protecting animals for their own sake, but they are happy to let this argument run along a very different path from its human-centred counterpart.’ An example is Cholbi’s argument that animal welfare is an ‘end in itself? because it does not depend on a good will for its goodness (Cholbi 2014, 348). Whereas human happiness is only good if we deserve it, animal welfare is always good (so that a disinterested rational spectator would approve of it). From this value of animal welfare, Cholbi then directly derives duties towards animals (Cholbi 2014, 349). In doing so, his aim is explicitly not to set moral concern for human beings and animals on equal footing (Cholbi 2014, 338). After all, Kant’s account of our duties towards other human beings does not hinge on any premiss to the effect that their happiness is good independently of a good will, nor does Cholbi think it does. Hence, his view is purposely non-radical (though I will draw on it for my radical purposes, see Chaps. 4 and 6).

Another example of a non-anthropocentric, but non-radical approach is Korsgaard’s.* As she emphasises herself, “our moral relations to the other animals have a different basis and a different shape than our moral relations to other people” (Korsgaard 2018, 148). The difference is that our duties to other human beings respond to interpersonal moral ‘constraint’ under a shared moral law, but our duties to animals do not (Korsgaard 2004, 104, 2018, 123-126). Thus, animals ‘obligate’ us only in a different sense than human beings (Korsgaard 2018, 147), and they are ‘ends in themselves’ only in a different sense too (Korsgaard 2018, 141). Drawing such distinctions is almost inevitable if duties to animals are put on a different philosophical basis from duties to other human beings. But it can also lead into trouble: If interpersonal constraint accounts for the ‘directionality’ of our duties—their character of being ‘directed towards’ others—it appears unclear how our duties towards animals can be directed ‘towards’ them. They may be duties about animals, or duties at which we arrive by considering animal well-being. But in Kant’s terminology, these would simply be duties regarding animals, not towards. Since Korsgaard

7Other examples of such approaches include Wood (1998), O’Neill (1998), and Garthoff (2011).

8 Another difference between this book and Korsgaard’s is that hers builds upon her own original, neo- Kantian thought. Kant is an inspiration here, to be sure. But a diagnosis of why Kant himself excluded animals and an amendment of his system is simply not Korsgaard’s project.

does not reject the notion that directionality requires a shared moral law (Korsgaard 2018, 124), it is hard to see how her ‘obligations to the other animals’ could be anything else than Kantian ‘indirect’ duties repackaged.” Ultimately, every non-radical account of duties towards animals runs the risk of collapsing back into old-fashioned Kantian anthropocentrism, since the duties we add to Kant’s system after the fact fail to be directed towards the animals in the way Kant’s duties are directed towards human beings.'°

Setting such philosophical troubles aside, a radical approach has the added benefit of making Kant’s own discussion of our duties more directly relevant to our duties towards animals. If our duties towards animals are not a special and separate class of duty, but the same in form and ground as our duties to human beings, we can repurpose more of Kant’s own philosophical tools for animal ethics. So, without denigrating the philosophical and political value of non-radical approaches, there is great potential in pursuing a radical approach.

Apart from its different approach to the topic, there is another feature which sets the present text apart from the previous literature on Kantian animal ethics: Being one of the first monographs on the topic to date, it has more space at its disposal, particularly to explore implications concerning some specific questions of animal ethics. We need not content ourselves with showing that there can be Kantian duties towards animals, but we can also explore to some extent what duties they might be, and what kinds of arguments animal ethicists might construct from considerations about

°Even if Korsgaard’s duties ‘towards’ animals are ultimately Kantian duties ‘regarding? animals, it must be said that in substance, her duties go far beyond Kant’s. Still, we have yet to see a version of a Kantian ethic that includes duties to animals in the same way as it includes duties towards other human beings. The driving motivator behind the book you are reading is the desire to explore what such an ethic could look like and what philosophical considerations it could encourage.