Can Animals Be Moral?
نویسنده
چکیده
1. Grace of the Virtues Eleanor, the matriarch of her family, is dying and unable to stand. Grace manages to lift her to her feet. She tries to get Eleanor to walk, pushing her gently along. But Eleanor falls again. Grace appears very distressed, and shrieks loudly. She persists in trying to get Eleanor to stand, unsuccessfully. Grace stays by the fallen figure of Eleanor for another hour, while night falls. If Grace were human, we might have little hesitation in attributing to her an emotion of a certain sort: compassion or sympathy. But neither Grace nor Eleanor is human. Eleanor is the matriarch of the First Ladies family of elephants. Grace is a younger member of another family of elephants, the Virtues Family.1 This is the sort of case cited as evidence for the claim that some non-human animals (henceforth “animals”) can be motivated by moral considerations. In this paper I am unable to survey the large and growing body of empirical research that bears on this claim.2 This work sits in the background – the springboard for a discussion that is rather more abstract and conceptual. I use this case both as a representative example of this research, and as a way of organizing discussion.
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