Abstract
This article discusses some aspects of animal ethics from an Aristotelian virtue ethics point of view. Because the notion of friendship (philia) is central to Aristotle’s ethical theory, the focus of the article is whether humans and animals can be friends. It is argued that new empirical findings in cognitive ethology indicate that animals actually do fulfill the Aristotelian condition for friendship based on mutual advantage. The practical ethical implications of these findings are discussed, and it is argued that eating meat from free-living animals is more morally acceptable than eating cattle because hunters (unlike farmers) do not befriend their prey.
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Notes
1. The following is not intended as a complete and exegetic study of Aristotelian virtue ethics, but rather as a contemporary exploration of a way to understand certain aspects of philia.
2. All such citations refer to the Nicomachean Ethics in Immanuel Bekker’s translation of
Aristotelis opera edidit Academia Regia Borussica
(1831
). For each citation, the first four digits refer to page, the letter refers to page column, and the digits thereafter refer to line numbers.3. More concrete obligations that could follow from this type of friendship are further discussed in the section titled “The Moral Significance of Nonhuman Friendship.”
4. See, for example, Price, Walker, and Cooper in Price (
1989
), Cooper (1977
), and Walker (1979
).5. Again we should recall that philia is a much wider concept than our friendship. It is more about a shared outlook on life and the worthwhile than the intimacy that we consider central in friendship.
6. For something to count as friendship, even the lesser kind, there has to be a genuine interest in the other for his or her sake, although there is, of course, much less interest, less merging of lives, less spending of time, and so on.
7. At this point, it is also worth pointing out that the present moral analysis covers merely how humans ought to treat animals. We by no means wish to ascribe moral properties to the behavior of animals. Although some animals can surely be friends with humans, it is far from clear that these animals are full moral agents. Arguably, some animals might fulfill some of the conditions (whatever they are) for being a moral agent, but it seems highly questionable whether any nonhuman animal can be fully morally responsible in the sense that most humans are.
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.Copyright 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
2011
