Vulnerability & The Other Non-Human Animal: a Phenomenological Approach to Animal Ethics

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This project uses the phenomenological approach offered by Levinas(1981) and Logstrup(2020) to address the question of animal ethics. Most current accounts of animal ethics in the Western tradition ground morality on a being's capabilities. This approach is the capabilities approach and is defended by a wide range of philosophers (Nussbaum (2006), Palmer (2010), Bendik-Keymer (2014), Korsgaard (2018), Irvin (2004)). While all theorists agree that moral considerability is tied to an animal's possession of certain capabilities, they all disagree on the set of capabilities. This conceptual disagreement hints at a wider problem generated by the capabilities approach, i.e., its incapacity to account for the moral worth of less cognitively developed beings such as mentally disabled humans and non-human animals.This thesis aims to relocate ethics at the level of the encounter with an Other. I shall argue that a phenomenological approach to animal ethics is best suited to solve the problems generated by capabilities models because it views ethics as arising out of a being's vulnerability. Phenomenology is the study of the first-person experience of beings in the world. I will use the phenomenological approaches of Levinas and Logstrup to explore the ethical dimension arising during a being's interaction with another being. I will argue that the embodied presence of a non-human animal facing a human being creates a demand on the latter. What Logstrup calls the 'Ethical Demand' is the one-sided and silent request the Other makes on the One by exposing their vulnerability to them. This demand is prior to any convention and can only be heard by the One who becomes morally responsible for the Other. Ethics is not the product of capabilities, but is rather the pre-conceptual weight of being confronted to another living creature which has infinite needs that need to be fulfilled.