Disagreeing about the treatment of animals : an analysis and a modest proposal

In contemporary political philosophy, the dispute over the moral status of animals is not usually taken as a paradigmatic case of irreducible disagreement, as those of abortion, human cloning, or the status of embryos. Although in animal ethics disagreements about substantive issues are increasing and widespread, no attention has been devoted to their character and nature. The aim of this paper is to analyse the type of disagreement concerning some widely debated issues in animal ethics. Our goal is not to propose specific solutions to such disputes, but to understand the kind of disagreement at stake and how it should be treated. We begin by confronting debated issues in animal ethics with other types of normatively relevant controversies (such as climate change, abortion, death penalty) aiming at distinguishing between empirical and normative components of such discussions. The idea is to disentangle the diverse sources of disagreement and propose to assess them separately. This strategy seems promising because issues of animal ethics often rely both on empirical evidence, for example about evolutionary patters, and normative judgments about how such evidence should be assessed, for example about the moral significance of non-human animals’ capacity to feel pain. Understanding such different components, and how they relate to each other is fundamental to understand how disagreements about the treatment of animals should be addressed. Indeed, if it seems correct to consider disagreements about empirical matters as possible cases of peer disagreement, when it comes to disagreements about normative matters things are not so straightforward for different metaethical understandings of the nature of morality imply different understandings of normative disagreement. Out attempt is to explore how such different understandings imply particular commitments about how to tackle disagreement. Finally, we draw some conclusions concerning the different available options to deal with disagreements about the treatment of animals within democratic societies.