Response from Bernard Gert on November 10, 2005

Some people value their pets more than other people, but one reason for holding that morality protects human beings more than other animals is that morality only governs the behavior of human beings, that is, in order to persuade all human beings to follow the moral rules prohibiting killing, causing pain, etc., all human beings must know that they have the protection of the moral rules. Neither elephants nor any other non-human animals that we know about have any criteria for valuing species. And morality is not related to species either; if there were another species that was required to abide by the moral rules, the members of that species would also be protected by the moral rules.

Response from Alexander George on November 12, 2005

Response from Jyl Gentzler on November 13, 2005

This question is extremely difficult to answer, because to answer it satisfactorily, we must first settle the question of the nature of morality. Morality proposes certain norms for our behavior and perhaps also for our emotional responses to certain events. But unless we know what these norms are for, we can’t know whether or why we should care about such norms. And unless we know what such norms are for, we can’t know whether any proposed moral norm, such as “treat every creature’s pleasure and pain as if it has equal importance,” is correct. If we thought, for example, that moral norms served the function of governing our behavior according to the will of God, then we would attempt to determine the correct moral norms by attempting to get information about the will of God. If, to consider another possibility, we thought that moral norms served the function of constraining human behavior so as to allow for the socially cooperative behavior that is essential to human flourishing, then we would look to other sorts of facts to determine which moral norms were correct. On some conceptions of the point of morality, we should treat the interests of non-human animals as being as morally significant as the interests of human beings, but on other conceptions of the point of morality, we should not. To take our two hypothetical proposals, to answer the question whether we should treat the interests of elephants as equal to the interests of humans, we'd first have to answer different sorts of questions. On the one proposal, we'd first have to determine how God wants us to treat the interests of elephants. On the other proposal, we'd first have to determine whether human beings would be better able to engage in mutually beneficial, socially cooperative behavior if they were to develop a disposition to treat the interests of elephants as equal to those of human beings. The difficulty is that we tend not to think of the point of moral norms in either of these two ways, or at least, if we do, we tend not to do so consistently. Instead, we often tend to think that the answer to questions like whether we should treat the interests of elephants as equal to the interests of human beings is to be determined simply by discovering the answer to the question whether as a matter of fact the interests of elephants are as intrinsically important as the interests of human beings. However, it is difficult to know how we would go about answering this last question, and so, we remain puzzled.