This is philosophy bites with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
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Many moral philosophers argue that it really matters how we treat animals.
We can't justify factory farms or much of our experimentation on animals and so forth.
Harvard professor Christine Coarsgaard agrees, but she doesn't do so for the usual reasons.
Christine Korsgaard, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you for having me.
The topic we're going to focus on is the moral status of animals.
Now, post Darwin, we know that biologically non human animals are very closely related to us, yet we're still developing a clear notion of what the moral status of non human animals is.
What's your main stance on this?
Well, unlike many defenders of animal rights, I do think there are strong and distinctive differences between human beings and the other animals.
I think human beings, I use the traditional word rational to describe these differences, but I don't think it follows from this differences that human beings have a superior moral status to animals.
Just to get clear, what does it mean to be rational in this context?
To be rational is to have a certain form of self consciousness, namely consciousness of the grounds of your beliefs and actions, so that you're aware of the things that prompt you to believe and act as you do, and therefore have the capacity to evaluate those grounds and assess them and decide whether they're good reasons or not.
Now, in the area of animal rights considerations about animal welfare, I think it's fair to say that utilitarianism dominates the field.
There's a sense that what makes it wrong to harm an animal is a matter of the consequences, the pain that the animal feels, the fact that more suffering is brought into the world than would otherwise be the case.
I hold a view in general about good and bad, which is that nothing is good unless it's good for someone or bad unless it's bad for someone, and that the value actually attaches to the someone, not to the states of pleasure and pain themselves.