Honor all interests

In Part C, we saw that the moral circle extends beyond people in one’s own group to all humans–friends and strangers, including citizens of other nations. But what about nonhuman animals? If the pains and pleasures of those outside our group hurt and please them, is it not also true that the pains and pleasures of nonhuman animals hurt and please them? Should animals count?

Utilitarianism, a theory that includes sentient animals in the circle of moral significance, has four main themes. The first theme is its identification of the fundamental good as pleasure or well-being. (Notice that pleasure and well-being differ from self-interest, keeping one’s word, and human dignity.) In this view, pleasure consists of pleasant, agreeable feelings, and well-being consists of the state of living a good life, or flourishing as an autobiographical being (or some other candidate). Utilitarians do not aim primarily at ensuring that all human rights are respected, although respecting rights is an important utilitarian value since people typically do not fare well when their rights are violated. Rather, utilitarians aim at acting so as to produce a world in which as many lives as possible are as full as possible of good things, and as empty as possible of bad things.

Second, utilitarians are committed to an instrumental theory of value for everything besides pleasure or happiness. On this view, the value of an ecosystem, for example, is not intrinsic to it, but rather is dependent upon its utility to some being who can appreciate or value it: in this way, its value is instrumental. Further, this instrumental theory allows us to identify and measure something’s value, even if our measurements are only very rough ones. An obvious metric is financial; one might ask with respect to the ecosystem how much money its component parts are worth. Indeed, economists can put rough price tags on, say, the value of clean water or fertile soil by figuring out what people are willing to pay for each item.