Response to “The Problem of the Question About Animal Ethics” by Michal Piekarski

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Jul 2016

In this brief article we reply to Michal Piekarski’s response to our article ‘Facing Animals’ published previously in this journal. In our article we criticized the properties approach to defining the moral standing of animals, and in its place proposed a relational and other-oriented concept that is based on a transcendental and phenomenological perspective, mainly inspired by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. In this reply we question and problematize Piekarski’s interpretation of our essay and critically evaluate “the ethics of commitment” that he offers as an alternative.

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Response to “The Problem of the Question About Animal Ethics” by Michal Piekarski

Response to ''The Problem of the Question About Animal Ethics'' by Michal Piekarski Mark Coeckelbergh 0 1 David J. Gunkel 0 1 0 Department of Communication, Northern Illinois University , Dekalb, IL 60115 , USA 1 Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Universita ̈tsstraße 7 (NIG) , 1010 Vienna , Austria In this brief article we reply to Michal Piekarski's response to our article 'Facing Animals' published previously in this journal. In our article we criticized the properties approach to defining the moral standing of animals, and in its place proposed a relational and other-oriented concept that is based on a transcendental and phenomenological perspective, mainly inspired by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. In this reply we question and problematize Piekarski's interpretation of our essay and critically evaluate ''the ethics of commitment'' that he offers as an alternative. Animal ethics; Moral standing; Transcendental methodology; Essentialism; Other; Moral language; Heidegger; Levinas; Virtue ethics - substantial disagreement between us at all, it is partly based on a misreading/ misunderstanding of our position and partly based one’s choice of a different (and according to us problematic) route towards achieving the same critical intervention in moral philosophy. Let us elaborate on this point by taking up and responding to the main questions raised by Michal Piekarski. Piekarski stresses the importance of a transcendental mode of questioning, that is inspired by Kant and is focused on the ‘conditions of possibility’ for moral standing. But so do we in the analysis presented in our article, and so does Coeckelbergh in his book Growing Moral Relations (2012), which, in the second part, explicitly proposes a transcendental turn away from the standard properties approach. Consequently the proposed transcendental mode of questioning is neither new nor different from the approach that is already deployed by and operative in our essay. To unpack this, let us respond to Piekarski’s accusation that we take an ontic or empirical approach. We disagree. This would be the case if and only if we continued to advocate for a properties approach, which always turns attention to the empirical evidence provided by the entities before us. But this is precisely what we target and criticize. Our approach is distinctly non-ontic and perhaps even non-empirical in the sense that we are not interested in perpetuating that kind of empirical/scientific investigation that endeavors to decide what faculties or properties a particular animal or class of animals would possess. Our approach is strictly phenomenological, and it is phenomenological in the way that Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger characterize this term. In other words, we are interested in the way—the conditions of possibility—that the animal is encountered as being something other. This would be, in Heidegger’s terminology ‘‘ontological’’ and not ontic. If our approach is empirical at all, it is empirical in the sense that it invites phenomenological investigations of the conditions of possibility for how the animal appears and how we, in the face of this, ascribe moral standing (or, what is perhaps more common, withhold it). This may lead, for instance, to considering how technological practices constitute such conditions. The idea is that as long as we keep on doing technological practices x and y, we keep thinking/talking in certain way. Technological practices, therefore, are not neutral; they constitute the conditions of possibility for thinking/talking about things. So the stress might be on language, but that does dispense with the underlying need for a transcendental approach. Moreover, our article can be interpreted as attempting to adhere strictly to the transcendental method by following the innovations provided by Heidegger, Levinas, Kant, and others. Our approach is no longer connected with the human as such, with something absolute within the human being, nor with speech as something unique to the human. Instead we operationalize the transcendental approach in a relative or relational way that maintains an openness to other beings and that also attends to the material, technological, and concrete practices by which the other is experienced, and not to abstractions like ‘the human’ and ‘speech’ as presented by the Michal Piekarski. This does not mean that we think language is unimportant in animal ethics or moral philosophy, quite the contrary. For instance, in Growing Moral Relations (2012) Coeckelbergh has identified language as a crucial condition of possibility for moral status ascription, and in The Machine Question (2012) Gunkel has suggested that moral exclusions, especially as applied to animals and machines, depend on the use of (Cartesian) terminology and language. Following Heidegger, we find language to be a crucial element in our intervention in moral philosophy. But we have a different understanding of (the role of) language than (...truncated)


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Mark Coeckelbergh, David J. Gunkel. Response to “The Problem of the Question About Animal Ethics” by Michal Piekarski, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2016, pp. 717-721, Volume 29, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1007/s10806-016-9627-6