2.5.6: Virtue Ethics, Difference, and Dominion

Both Singer and Regan present us with defenses based on shared similarities between animals and humans. Their defenses give credence to the moral status of beings (as related to having interests or inherent value). However, one problem with the status approach is that it can lead to disavowing subtle life forms, such as interwoven ecosystems. The status approach becomes problematic given the difficulty in deciding who/what deserves moral consideration. As such, the virtue ethics approach provides an alternative because it concerns itself with the question: “How shall I engage with ‘X’?”, without necessarily assigning moral status to ‘X’ beforehand.

Based on Aristotle’s writings, traditional virtue ethics is not so much concerned with universal and categorical rights or greatest beneficial consequences. Rather, it is concerned with acquiring virtuous traits that one develops and perfects with practice over time. This habituation of virtue is aimed at developing settled dispositions that allow one to arrive at a “golden mean” or appropriate actions between excess and deficiency. For example, suppose you find yourself in the midst of a bank robbery. What is the courageous thing to do? It would be foolhardy to view one’s duty to encounter the numerous gunmen while unarmed and possibly perish. But it would be cowardice to shield behind a child or elderly person. The courageous thing to do is what is appropriate at the right time, place, situation, and with the right people.

One of the merits of virtue ethics is that it aims to nurture a “virtuous mind” disposition. Such a mind highlights the complex and strenuous nature of deciding which course of action to take given a variety of options in a situation. To take a seemingly innocuous example, suppose we are walking along a river path that has heaps of ant hills. Somewhere along the path we decide to pollute the river and destroy the ants simply because we can. According to the status approach, the acts are permissible because the river and ant hills are devoid of moral status and, thus, moral consideration. But could we have related to them in other ways? This hypothetical case addresses the subtle nature of attuning and developing one’s moral sensibility to each new situation with which one is presented. It is posited here that each new situation carries the possibility for developing and nurturing a habituation of the virtues.

The virtue of benevolence or, in contemporary parlance, being socially conscious, seems most adequate to address the nature of moral consideration. Such a virtue is characterized by promoting the good, becoming serviceable to others, or the concern for social justice. In the context of animal ethics, we are interested in the virtue of benevolence based not only on similarity or status, but on the difference that each new encounter with life forms or species offers. We engage with non-human life forms in a very different manner than we engage with other humans, so the question arises of how to engage with such difference. The question pushes our moral horizon to reflect on the moral status of life forms or species who are different from what we know to be human, and who require a nuanced type of engagement with. It is in our daily engagement with such radical difference that we find a deeper meaning of morality. In fact, ecosystems, animals and vulnerable humans present us with a sense of difference that not only relates to moral consideration and benevolence, but to reconsidering our dominion over them. It is precisely because their difference offers us dominion over them that our moral consideration ought to be extended to them. Here we see moral consideration and benevolence conjoined by the notion of difference, as much as moral consideration and benevolence are united by the notion of sameness.

The virtue of benevolence, seen within contemporary social dynamics, helps us reinterpret the notion of dominion. Dominion, as human subjugation over others, undergoes a relational transformation. Dominion, no longer viewed as a despotic endowment, is now seen as an ethical call and question from the other, the animal, the different, the non-human. The process of moral transformation turns our early, narrow human-centered focus into a wider field of moral consideration open to diverse and different life forms. In this regard, humans could not only live with but flourish alongside non-human animals.