Thank you, Ajit Deshmukh, for your question.
There are a few different ways to answer this question: one, to ask whether animals have a right to life; another, to ask whether humans have a duty of care towards them (non-human animals, that is); another still, to ask whether there is any reason to suppose that morality should extend to animals. It’s surprisingly difficult to claim that it is always wrong to kill animals, but that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for us to do so.
When thinking about the right to life, we have to ask whether we’re talking about an unconditional right, that is, a right that applies at all times without exception. Do animals have an unconditional right to life? We could answer ‘yes’, but then we prohibit ourselves from ever being able to end an animal’s life in order to relieve its suffering. It makes more sense to think of an animal’s right to life as being conditional upon whether they are able to live it without extreme pain, thus permitting us to intervene if it were to alleviate such pain. However, this means that the animal’s life is dependent on whether humans judge it to be tolerable, and it is hard to claim that a being has a right to life when this right is subject to the decision of a different being.
As for duty of care, we must ask whether humans are capable of carrying out this duty; if not, then it is unreasonable to expect us to do so. Any duty of care towards another living being must have its interests in mind; it seems as though we’re fully capable of doing this, insofar as we can anticipate and refrain from taking actions that might cause harm to animals. One problem with the idea of a duty of care is that there is no reason why we should prioritise non-human animals, and that there are many ways in which killing animals is in the interests of humans. While someone might object that we don’t need to kill animals to serve our own interests, we could respond that there are plenty of things that we don’t need to do but we do them anyway.
As for extending human morality to animals, peaceful co-existence is largely absent among non-human species, and so there is no specific reason why we shouldn’t present ourselves as simply one more threat. Animals, for the most part, exist in a predator/prey relationship which constitutes their entire reality; if humans are simply one more threat, then this reality does not change in any significant way. People might object that this is unkind, but the animal world is generally unkind.
Lastly, it might be the case that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are merely expressions of approval or disapproval by humans (this is what’s known as ‘meta-ethics’ – a question about what it means to use moral language and what we mean when we say something is ‘good/right’ or ‘bad/wrong’). So, the statement ‘killing animals is wrong’ may simply mean that the speaker disapproves of killing animals, which doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not is objectively ‘wrong’ to do so.
While it’s intuitively possible to ask whether it’s wrong to kill animals, it’s not a question we can answer without running into a lot of problems. However, none of this means that we should kill animals, or that it is ever ‘right’ to do so, and so we are left to work out for ourselves whether we want to kill them and whether we are happy living in a world where animals are killed.
What do you think? Is it wrong to kill an animal? Let us know in the comments.
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I did my BA in Philosophy & Creative Writing at London Metropolitan University, then completed MAs in Continental Philosophy at Warwick University and Social & Political Thought at Sussex University. I started (but didn’t complete) a DPhil at Sussex University, and have taught at Sussex, King’s College London and Birkbeck. I am particularly interested in political philosophy (both analytic and continental) and have studied modern philosophy (especially Descartes and Hume), Existentialism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory, and post-structuralist thought. I am most interested in the ancient Greek practice of parrhesia (the art of speaking frankly), as I think it is something we need very much right now.