Animal ethics: Can they suffer?

In the past year, more than 760 million animals have been in German slaughter houses to be killed. Among them, around 620 million chickens, 55 million pigs and three million cattle were. In addition to more than 18,500 tonnes of fish bred in aquaculture. The Figures allow to draw conclusions on the quality of life, improvement is usually modest: a few weeks Ago, the Federal Council has approved new rules for the pig husbandry course. The compromise provides for, among other things, that the fixation of sows will be confined in box stalls – after a transitional period of eight years. A box stand is about seventy centimeters wide and two meters long, so slightly larger than the Sow to find the place.

Kai Spanke

editor in the features section.

your life will take two to three years. She is standing on slatted floors, and never sees the sun, is artificially inseminated and gets about five times the Young, to whom they have no natural contact. If she is in the slaughterhouse – the trip there should take a EU-regulation, according to the twenty – four hours, she panics when she smells the blood of their own kind. She is jaded, stunned, "stung", and in sixty degrees hot water. About five hundred thousand pigs on guards each year in the bathroom again, because the butcher has not performed his craft properly.

quibbles undInklusionsfuror

All of this reportage and TV documentaries is from a Newspaper familiar. Everyone knows the appropriate shots, hardly anyone will claim that it is unproblematic to keep animals as a mere resource. Nevertheless, it seems to us, to overwhelm this Knowledge, because little follows from it. In the German animal protection law: "Nobody may cause pain to an animal without reasonable cause, Suffering or harm." So there is the question of what is a reasonable reason, where the suffering begins, and whether a grass-hopper falls into the same category of animal as a duck or cow. The philosopher Hilal Sezgin says about our treatment of animals: "Somehow we are not stuck in a cul-de-SAC, because that's what is currently, apparently, legal or on the fringes of legality as a matter of Routine is tolerated, to all our moral ideas and our image of a civilized society."

arguments that do not relate to the suffering of the animals, seem to have the same effect, they sound alarming and at the same time, theoretically: The industrial animal husbandry heats up the earth more strongly than the transport sector; would not feed so much grain to livestock, there would be significantly less starving people in the world. A fruitful exchange of animal ethical positions takes place mainly in the academic context. While philosophers have fifty years ago, yet justified, our obligations to animals thinking, are books like Peter singer's "Animal Liberation" (1975) and Tom Regan's "The Case for Animal Rights" (1983) become classics. Nevertheless, the debate of theories, whose subtleties exclude any practical value from the outset problem, and that, in a Inklusionsfuror, which animals are anthropomorphized so much that it borders on condescension.

The stronger preference is the tone

Bernd Ladwig, Professor of Political theory and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, considered our treatment of animals for good reasons, as a result of systemic Evil. In his new book "Political philosophy of animal rights", highlights that such abuses are part of the "basic order of modern societies". Therefore, it makes sense, animal ethics and political philosophy together. Already Singer and Regan have used charged terms like "justice" and "liberation" – and the Foundation of discipline is laid, to which all others relate.

Singer is an advocate of preference utilitarianism. He argues that those animals in the moral community to include the sensation are capable of and have an interest in increasing positive feelings and avoid negative ones. Thus, it is based on Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1789: "The question is not ,Can they reason? nor ,Can they talk?', but ,Can they suffer?‘“ However, Singer is an apologist of the aggregation principle, which States that the negative and positive consequences can be balanced against each other. The stronger preference to the tone. It is not a matter to treat humans and animals the same, but similar interests of individuals in the same way. In this respect, includes Singer animal testing in principle.