by Harry Windsor

Created on: January 30, 2009

The ethical treatment of animals has had a long philosophical history, much of it centred on the supposed separateness of humans from animals. Such views, whether stemming from the religious (that man is divinely endowed with something that animals lack) or the neurological (humans seem to have a higher level of consciousness than animals), have tended to lead to an ethics of animal welfare that is profoundly anthropocentric - animals are under the dominion of humans, and while direct and excessive cruelty may be unacceptable for a number of reasons (cruelty denies us our humanity ; nature should be preserved as a resource or simply the admission that animals feel pain) it is generally accepted that a human life is worth more than that of an animal and so some killing of animals is justified.

In many ways this view is supported by biology, so for example eating meat and dairy products is a natural tendency, repeated throughout the natural world, and so long as the methods are not seen as unnecessarily cruel it is accepted than animals can be raised and killed for the needs of humans. Similarly, on this view, the use of animals for medical experiments or genetic research can easily be justified due to the benefits such research clearly gives to humanity as a whole.

The alternative to this view would be to say that animals all possess an inherent worth independently of their use to humans and as such should not be harmed. Such a view is harder to support in practise because it leads to the question of how this applies, whether to all living creatures or only some; if the former then it is hard to justify the deaths of much smaller animals and pests more than that of larger ones - why should it be OK to spray insects and kill them but not to kill a cow? Either a hierarchy must be imposed (and this would clearly be fairly arbitrary, based mainly on how similar each animal is to a human in terms of behaviour) or the lessons of nature can be accepted - a kind of survival of the fittest. In such a view intensive farming and the use of technology to dominate and destroy nature may be seen as unacceptable but the sustainable use of animals for food etc. may be accepted in some instances.

The problem then with the ethics of animal welfare is that if animals have an inherent moral worth that prevents any harm being done to them then it is hard to justify any other position than an extreme veganism where no animal is harmed. If on the other hand it is acceptable to kill some

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