Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

Fellow Creatures by Christine Korsgaard

Chad Trainer asks whether animals should be considered moral ‘ends in themselves’.

Do we have a moral duty to treat non-human animals well? Are they sufficiently like us to be considered ‘moral beings’? According to Immanuel Kant in his essay ‘Speculation on the Beginning of Human History’ (1786), man’s conception of himself as the ‘true end of nature’ prompted us to exalt ourselves “altogether beyond any community with animals”, relegating other animals to the status of mere means and tools for humans. But for moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard, the questions of how we’re related to other animals, and whether it matters how we treat them, take us into the ‘existential heart of philosophy’. It confuses her, therefore, that relatively few philosophers have ventured into this territory. She sets out to redress this balance somewhat with her book Fellow Creatures (2018).

To Korsgaard, Kant’s outlook on animals seems nothing short of “inherently unstable, if not absolutely incoherent.

…