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Still life with a swan by Frans Snyders: »How narrow-minded do you have to be?"
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It was a long time ago when politicians listened to philosophers.
And you shouldn't overestimate the matter.
Certainly: without the Enlightenment there would be no separation of powers, no parliamentary democracy, no fundamental rights and no rule of law - but which ruling monarch had been convinced of this and voluntarily gave up his power?
Philosophical thoughts do not change the balance of power.
They only become fruitful when these power relations have long been shaken and doomed for completely different reasons.
Even scientists and their findings very rarely contribute to a completely different policy.
The episodic bloom of epidemiologists and virologists in the Covid-19 pandemic should not deceive us about this.
And climate researchers, ecologists and conservationists can sing a fado about it.
The reason for the general powerlessness of philosophers and scientists is easy to name: because politics is generally not about the best argument and only extremely rarely about morality!
And because big questions in politics always have to remain unanswered questions and a question counts all the more the smaller it is and the easier it can be answered with a little more money.
Every living being lives in its own universe
You keep these thoughts in mind when reading "Animals Like Us", the current book by Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard.
The author, one of the most renowned philosophers in the world and a vegetarian for decades, has made it a passion to brood deeper into life with and against Immanuel Kant.
Its goal is a philosophy of reason not of the 18th century, but of the 21st century; a philosophy that Kant does not just take literally, but seriously. What would a Kant have to think who did not strictly separate the mind from the body, who thought through Darwin and took animals seriously? Wouldn't he have to say, along with Aristotle, Korsgaard's second source of inspiration, that all life consists in bringing oneself successfully to the goal, and that this is precisely where its importance lies and nowhere else?
Anyone reading Korsgaard's book is confronted with the most lucid and subtle analysis of all animal ethical problems and conceivable questions that philosophical literature, which is already quite demanding in this regard, has to offer.
Your core argument is impressive: Every living being intuitively values its life - even if only in rare cases consciously - as an unsurpassable good, completely independent of how it communicates, what it dreams of, what it is afraid of and what else it may desire.
Every living being lives in its own universe.
And the only standard of value for the quality of his life comes from the respective living being itself and not from the outside, where another living being judges like a human about what makes the life of other living beings more or less worth living from his point of view.
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Christine M. Korsgaard
Animals Like Us: Why We Have Moral Obligations To Animals
Editor: CHBeck
Number of pages: 346
Editor: CHBeck
Number of pages: 346
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As is well known, there is no shortage of such value gradations: reason, soul, spoken language, use of tools, arithmetic skills - but none of these criteria are notches that distinguish people with woodcutter certainty from all other animals. As the Australian philosopher Peter Singer wrote in the studbook of all previous and future philosophers, there is no characteristic that distinguishes all human beings from all animals. Newborns are neither autonomous nor capable of differentiated speech; people with severe mental disabilities or dementia sufferers are sometimes less self-aware than the animals that we eat or kill in the laboratory.
When people decide what is important for an unconditional value in life, they should always know, according to Korsgaard: "Nothing can be important without being important to someone." So it does not look good on people, the value of other life after human To measure importance criteria.
What really matters are the importance criteria of mussels, chickens and pigs, which Korsgaard is sure are as unconditional as the human ones.
In this sense, I have at least pleaded somewhat more cautiously for an "ethics of ignorance".
Since we can only speculate on this question, if in doubt we should assume that Korsgaard is right.
Eugen Drewermann once said that animals can only ask whether animals have a soul and feelings.
And indeed: Animal ethicists may differ in nuances and use different ways of justification, their demands may be more steeply or more pragmatic, but they all agree in their judgment: What we do to animals in farmed animal husbandry and wild animals by destroying their habitats is moral unjustifiable and completely wrong!
Even if the majority of philosophers omit the topic, the majority of those philosophers who deal with the animal question come to this conclusion.
more on the subject
New study: State supports animal husbandry with 13 billion euros - year after yearBy Nicolai Kwasniewski
Study on possible meat tax: More animal welfare is possible - but when? By Alexander Preker
Recordings from pig breeding: a mess in the stable of a farmer's lobbyist by Nicolai Kwasniewski
Groundbreaking negotiation in New York: Happy's right to freedom by Viola Kiel
But what use is this concentrated intelligence and the multitude of clever analyzes for practice?
Will they overcome the existing power relations, the usual ways of thinking and the prejudices that have been established for more than 2000 years?
To be honest, just imagine that our Minister of Agriculture, Julia Klöckner, reads and understands Korsgaard's demanding book. They would have to learn that no ethical argument justifies intensive farming and that livestock husbandry in stables and on pastures, including animal feed production, is one of the worst ecological sins of mankind. In addition, there would be the fact that EU law and free trade are completely contrary to the morality of animal welfare and that animals must not be a commodity, at least not if you carefully weigh all the reasons for and against them.
If politics followed the force of the better argument in morality, hardly anything would remain as it is in our dealings with animals. Unfortunately, not only is every living being its own universe, but also every social subsystem. Politics and philosophy are galaxies, each with its own reward culture.
In the academic world, ideally the better reason counts, in politics completely lousy ones are sufficient if there are strong economic interests behind them. Nobody will seriously believe that the Greens, as a possible junior partner of the CDU / CSU, will abolish factory farming in Germany in the next government coalition. Presumably, as a precaution, they will not even take over the Ministry of Agriculture, but instead gamble away their capital in ecological expertise for the completely sterile Foreign Ministry in this regard.
The opportunity is actually cheaper than ever before in German history. Two huge revolutions, the digital and the sustainability revolution, will plow the century in the next few decades. An enormous surge of modernization, much faster and more global than any other industrial revolutions before, will not only drastically change our economy, but also our society and our way of life.
Whether in the end there will be a better earth for everyone or its total destruction has not yet been decided. But when, if not in the systemic crisis of the old systems, can pioneers of the new be successful? Unfortunately, it is not very likely that half of the earth will one day be available to wild animals, as Korsgaard dreams. It is conceivable, however, that at least intensive farming and the billions of misery in the stables will end.
How narrow-minded do you have to be in order not to see that products with a nature-identical meat taste or meat grown in the laboratory will in the foreseeable future put the bloody handicraft of cheap industrial meat - through morality and price? And that those who refuse to make this progress will fare no differently from what the automotive industry may soon be doing? Anyone who is not one of the first will eventually no longer be one of them. Like most of her predecessors, our Minister of Agriculture may have learned to listen aloof on moral issues - perhaps economic ones help?
