This blog post examines the philosophical challenges animal sentientism and animal rights theory encounter when explaining predation in the wild, deeply exploring the boundaries of human intervention and ethical responsibility.
Animal sentience theory asserts that animals deserve ethical consideration precisely because they can experience pleasure and pain. Animal rights theory, meanwhile, holds that animals possess inherent rights—such as the right to life and freedom from suffering—and thus should be subjects of ethical consideration. However, taking these two theories to their extreme implications raises new ethical problems. Criticism concerning predation most prominently highlights these issues.
Humans have long utilized animals in various ways, such as for food or clothing, but humans are not the only beings that cause animals pain or infringe upon their rights. Wild predators also hunt prey animals cruelly to eat them. The pain felt by prey animals in this context can be far greater than the pain experienced by animals during slaughter. The issue of animal rights being infringed can similarly be explained. If human meat-eating or animal testing is wrong because they cause suffering or infringe rights, then the predation of wild animals must also be wrong, as it causes suffering to prey animals and infringes their rights. Applying the principle that wrong must be corrected, one could conclude that human meat-eating should be prevented. Even so, arguing that animal predation itself must be stopped is absurd. For instance, preventing lions from catching and eating zebras is beyond our capabilities. Even if technically possible, such intervention would disrupt the natural order and is therefore wrong. Furthermore, the very fact that animal sentience theory and animal rights theory could imply an excessive obligation to prevent even wild animal predation provides sufficient grounds to criticize these theories.
Animal sentience theory is grounded in ethical consequentialism. Ethical consequentialism holds that the rightness or wrongness of an action should be evaluated based on the consequences it produces. According to utilitarianism, a typical form of ethical consequentialism, the utility of an action—that is, whether it maximizes pleasure—becomes the central criterion in this evaluation. Here, utility is calculated as the total amount of pleasure minus the total amount of pain expected to occur. Regarding the criticism that animal sentience theory imposes obligations like preventing predation, the utilitarian response is as follows: the total amount of suffering induced by such an ecological change would far exceed the total amount of pleasure gained by protecting prey animals through the removal of predators. Therefore, humans fulfill their duty by refraining from killing or abusing animals without reason, and there is no obligation to regulate animal behavior.
However, animal sentience theory grounded in utilitarianism does not perfectly prove that preventing predation cannot be a human obligation. Technological advances increasingly facilitate human intervention in predation scenarios, creating the possibility that the total expected pleasure could actually exceed the total suffering. According to the utility calculations of animal sentiment theory, which champions the maximization of total pleasure, preventing predation could still be derived as a duty humans must perform.
Meanwhile, animal rights theory is grounded in deontological ethics, which holds that actions should be evaluated based on their inherent nature—such as the fulfillment of duties—rather than their consequences. In deontology, a typical form of deontological ethics, the morality of an action is determined by whether the agent has appropriately fulfilled their duties. Regarding the criticism that animal rights theory imposes obligations like preventing predation, the response offered by deontologists is as follows: Moral agents possess the capacity to regulate and account for their actions, whereas moral non-agents, such as predatory animals, lack this capacity. For an entity to bear an obligation, it must possess the capacity to fulfill that obligation.
Since moral passives cannot regulate their actions according to moral standards, they bear no obligations. While animal rights are violated in both human meat-eating and animal predation, animals lack the capacity to control their actions and thus bear no obligation to refrain from consuming other animals. Consequently, it follows that humans bear no obligation to prevent a lion from hunting a zebra.
However, animal rights theory grounded in deontology fails to accurately address the core criticism concerning predation. The crux of the criticism regarding preventing predation is not whether the lion has an obligation to stop eating the deer, but whether we have an obligation to make it stop. For instance, just as a child who torments a cat for fun is a moral passive agent and thus has no obligation to stop the behavior, it cannot be said that the child’s parents have no obligation to prevent it. Ultimately, this reveals the limitation that animal rights theory develops its discussion without fully understanding the critique of predation. And this issue remains a crucial point of debate in contemporary animal ethics discussions.
