The Problem of the Question About Animal Ethics: Discussion with Mark Coeckelbergh and David Gunkel

In this article I discuss the thesis put forward by David Gunkel and Mark Coeckelbergh in their essay Facing Animals: A Relational, Other-Oriented Approach to Moral Standing. The authors believe that the question about the status of animals needs to be reconsidered. In their opinion, traditional attempts to justify the practice of ascribing rights to animals have been based on the search for what is common to animals and people. This popular conviction rests on the intuition according to which we tend to treat better those beings that are closer to us and resemble man in one way or the other. The attempts to ascribe a special status to animals are therefore based on the question “What properties does the animal have?”. However, the question is not well formulated because it leads to a number of ontological and epistemological problems. The question should rather be “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?”. Whilst fully subscribing to the suggestion, I cannot agree to the way the question is understood by both authors. I will demonstrate that the question opens up a transcendental dimension of reflections and may provide a clear justification of the need to engage in animal ethics. To do so, I will separate the easy and hard problems of animal ethics and use a different approach from the one suggested by Gunkel and Coeckelbergh to demonstrate how the need to pursue animal ethics may be justified.