Non-Consequentialist Considerations For Cause-Prioritzation Part 2

Parker_Whitfill

2

Thanks for these write-ups! A really broad and informative overview of non-cons literature.

For your interest and perhaps to build on section 5, you might find these papers by Sapontzis (1984) and Fink (2005) interesting. They consider non-consequentialist and vaguely deontological reasons to reject the reductio of the Predation argument (briefly, if vegetarianism is an obligation, we ought also to intervene to prevent predation, which is absurd).

Sapontzis argues that:

Where we can prevent predation without occasioning as much or more suffering than we would prevent, we are obligated to do so by the principle that we are obligated to alleviate avoidable animal suffering.

Fink dissects a few versions of the reductio and challenges Singer for not accepting that we ought to intervene to prevent predation. He also makes this interesting argument:

Consider what our reaction would be if a human being were attacked by a wild animal. No one could reasonably argue that because a wild animal is not a moral agent and cannot, therefore, violate anyone’s rights, this releases us from any obligation to come to that person’s assistance. We have a moral obligation to protect all members of the moral community from harm, whenever possible, whether or not this harm comes from moral agents. If sheep are members of the moral community, therefore, it would certainly seem to follow that there is an obligation to protect them from wolves, whether or not wolves violate their rights.