We Do Not Even Know, Yet, How to Take Non-Human Animals Morally Seriously

Abstract

<p> At the end of 2023, a proposal to amend the Finnish constitution passed the citizens’ initiative system and proceeded to be discussed by the Finnish Parliament. This radical proposal was based on the idea of respecting the individual value of ever non-human animal as sentient beings. Though this is a very defensible starting point, the proposal demonstrates some of the difficulties in achieving or even imagining a new state of society where these rights are fully respected. Some of the corollaries of the proposal as explicitly spelled out in it were too conservative to match the purported spirit of the proposal itself, whereas some of its unexplored but undeniable implications were radical beyond what its authors had seemingly intended. This article explores what the problems in the proposal demonstrated: that the idea of taking the individual moral value of non-human animals seriously is such a radical and unprecedented change to what we have now or have ever had that it is not possibly for us to know what such a world will be like, and we will need to learn what it will be like as we approach it; it is not possible to simply derive it from such principles as sentientism. Not only is human society built around a lack of recognition of non-human value, but even nature itself is problematically amoral. This is no justification to just give up on a radically more moral world, but it does mean we cannot see its full shape from here. <br></p>