An Evolutionary Point of View of Animal Ethics

Frontiers in Psychology

article

François Criscuolo¹  Cédric Sueur¹ 

[1] Université de Strasbourg;Institut Universitaire de France;Centre Européen d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Ethique, Université de Strasbourg

关键词: animal ethics;    evolutionary biology;    trade-offs;    human-animal relationships;    environmental ethics;    empathy;    sentience;    one health;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00403

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The observation that animals may respond to the emotional states of conspecific or evenheterospecific individuals is not new. Darwin broached the question by underlying the ability ofanimals to express sympathy, i.e., the response to non-self-emotional status, even across speciesbarriers. More importantly, he tried to find the evolutionary origin of this animal trait, suggestingthat it evolved from the selective advantages of kinship behavior in the struggle for life (Darwin,1872). Such a behavior corresponds, for instance, to alloparental care, which is relatively commonin mammals and birds and is now also characterized in fishes and insects (Josi et al., 2019; Wu et al.,2020). After more than one century, the need to define what exactly non-human animals are able tofeel and—from this starting point—rethink the legal status and place of animals in human societiesis becoming increasingly necessary. This can mainly be considered as an indirect consequenceof people’s increasing awareness of the consequences of dramatic human-driven impacts on theglobal climate and biodiversity, but this also holds true for the daily issues concerning animallife and welfare. However, because assessable currencies are required to establish laws, animalswere classified into categories based on ecological (e.g., invasive species, pest, wild, and domestic),biological (e.g., vertebrates and invertebrates), or cognitive (e.g., primates and cephalopods) traits.This should help lawyers to define ethical rules of animal use by humans and, from that, determinethe rights of animals (Rollin, 2006; Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011). A major issue of such anapproach to animal ethics is, however, that it remains human-centered (i.e., anthropocentrism) andfocused on human thought (i.e., anthropomorphism). Indeed, the human empathy tree appearsto be different to the phylogenetic tree, meaning that human empathy toward other organismsis not equally distributed within the tree of life (Miralles et al., 2019). Why, for instance, arecognitive capacities considered to be highly important in defining which animals can be used forhuman benefit? Why are individual lifespans or animal culling considered to be the most importantparameters in the ethical equation? This is all because these criteria are what define us, citizensof modern human societies, as the superiors. We project our wishes and expectations regardinglongevity, issues of euthanasia, and the death penalty onto animals.

【 授权许可】

CC BY