Humans Centred Ethics: Aquinas

“Equals should be treated equally, and unequals unequally.” Aristotle.

The oldest approach to the environment is the natural law or teleological tradition which goes back to Aristotle and Aquinas.

For Aristotle to understand something fully was to understand its causes for it being the way it is. He thought there were four causes:

1. Material – its matter

2. Formal – how matter is organised

3. Efficient – how something comes to be

4. Final – explains purpose or characteristic of the object.

Aristotle thought that we do not understand an object until we understand its final cause or telos or goal, its purpose.

He thinks there are two basic types of natural objects – those that are alive and those that are not. The characteristic activity of living things, what we might call the “principle of life itself”, is called the “psyche”, often translated as soul. A being is alive if it has a soul – Aristotle describes three powers or functions of the psyche:

• Vegetative or Nutrition – only plants
• Sensation or appetites – animals possess appetites & nutritive attributes
• Thinking – only humans possess this, alongside the other powers

Thus plants can fulfil their telos by growing and reproducing, animals by growing reproducing and satisfying their appetites, humans by these attributes as well as thinking and leading a deliberative life.

“Plants exist for the sake of animals…all other animals exist for the sake of man, tame animals for the use he can make of them as well as for the food they provide; and as for wild animals, most though not all of these can be used for food and are useful in other ways; clothing and tools can be made out of them. IF then we are right in believing that nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man” Aristotle Politics Book 1

Aquinas sought to synthesize Christian theology and Aristotle. He took Aristotle’s metaphysical system (a combination of ethics and biology) as evidence of a divine plan operating in nature. Aquinas accepted, and modified, Aristotle’s hierarchy:

“Dumb animals and plants are devoid of the life of reason whereby to set themselves in motion; they are moved, as it were by another, by a kind of natural impulse, a sign of which is that they are naturally enslaved and accommodated to the uses of others.” Summa Theologica

Because of nature and animals subordinate status to man – they are there to be used (and abused) by man

“According to the Divine ordinance the life of animals and plants is preserved not for themselves but for man. Hence, as Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i, 20), ‘by a most just ordinance of the Creator, both their life and their death are subject to our use…He that kills another’s ox, sins, not through killing the ox, but through injuring another man in his property.”

Should not one be kind to animals and avoid animal cruelty? No, argues Aquinas because ‘charity does not extend to irrational creatures.’

? What’s wrong with this view?

Descartes

“Animals cannot reason or feel pain and are like robots.”

The great enlightenment Philosopher Rene Descartes shared the traditional dualistic notion that there is an ontological (of the nature of their being) distinction between value-giving creatures and the rest of nature. It therefore follows that only those who are capable of value-giving are in a position to decide how the rest of nature should be treated. He provides an extreme argument that as only humans are conscious then all animals are mere machines lacking souls and the ability to feel anything. Essential to Descartes’ argument is that as ‘brutes’ (animals) lack the ability to communicate through language they cannot have a rational soul:

“And this proves not only that the brutes have less reason than man, but they have none at all: for we see that very little is required to enable a person to speak…it is incredible that the most perfect ape of parrot of its species, should not in this be equal to the most stupid infant of its kind, or at least to one that was crackbrained, unless the souls of the brutes were of a nature wholly different to ours.” A Discourse on Method Part V

? Is such a view the logical result of the Enlightenment?