This paper explores two questions. First, is there a virtue ethical case for the moral claims of animals. Second, can animals act in morally virtuous ways.
En el presente escrito expongo, a la luz de la teoría moral kantiana, la importancia del buen trato animal en el camino de la vida virtuosa. He escogido tratar el tema desde la perspectiva de Kant, cuya principal preocupación no es cómo... more
En el presente escrito expongo, a la luz de la teoría moral kantiana, la importancia del buen trato animal en el camino de la vida virtuosa. He escogido tratar el tema desde la perspectiva de Kant, cuya principal preocupación no es cómo debemos tratar a los animales, sino que su propuesta respecto al trato moral animal se encuentra basada en un ámbito racional, más no emocional; siendo este último, un contexto que ha tenido como consecuencia la pérdida de la credibilidad cuando se habla de protección animal. El discurso animalista se fundamenta en la relación emocional que llegamos a compartir con los animales, la cual nos aleja de argumentos objetivos y sólidos que fomenten la consideración moral de los animales como seres a los que es necesario prestarles atención.
Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in... more
Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.
