Ferrater Mora Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics

Animals and Moral Motivation: A Response to Clement

Author(s): Mark Rowlands
Source: Journal of Animal Ethics , Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 15-24
Published by: University of Illinois Press in partnership with the Ferrater Mora Oxford
Centre for Animal Ethics
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/janimalethics.3.1.0015

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 Animals and Moral Motivation:
A Response to Clement
MARK ROWLANDS
University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.

In her article “Animals and Moral Agency: The Recent Debate and Its Implications,”
Grace Clement (2013) provides a lucid overview of the debate concerning the possibility
of moral action in animals and a suggestive proposal for how to advance this debate.
This article takes up certain themes from Clement’s article, themes that, it is argued,
are either problematic or insufficiently developed.

key words: agency, animals, Aristotle, Kant, morality, motivation, normativity,

responsibility

In her excellent article in this issue, “Animals and Moral Agency: The Recent Debate
and Its Implications,” Grace Clement has provided a lucid overview of the debate over
the possibility of moral action in animals and a richly suggestive, if thematic, proposal for
how to advance this debate. In this article, I take up certain themes from her essay—ones
that I regard as either problematic or insufficiently developed. The arguments I present
here are more fully developed in my book Can Animals Be Moral? (2012).

ANIMALS AND MORAL BEHAVIOR:

DISTINGUISHING EMPIRICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

In connection with the issue of moral action in animals, there are two distinct issues
that need to be addressed—and the distinction between them is perhaps insufficiently
flagged in Clement’s article. On the one hand, there is a broadly empirical issue, and
I say “broadly” because I doubt this issue is entirely free of conceptual assumptions
or commitments. Nevertheless, the issue is, at least in part and perhaps in large part,
empirical: What evidence is there for attributing moral motivation to animals? To ad-
dress this question, we must look at empirical work in the study of animal minds and
behavior, work conducted by cognitive ethologists, animal behaviorists, and so on. This
empirical question has its associated form of skepticism. One can deny that the empirical
evidence establishes the presence of the requisite motivations in animals. Although the

Journal of Animal Ethics 3 (1): 15–24

© 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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16 Journal of Animal Ethics, 3 (2013)

evidence may be suggestive of certain sorts of moral emotions in animals, evidence that
suggests the presence of an inner state of a certain sort does not establish the presence
of such a state. The attitude of Bernstein, cited by Clement (2013), is a good example
of this sort of skepticism: “It is, of course, possible that animals have a sense of justice
and morality . . . In science, however, one must present evidence that a certain relation-
ship is true and no plausible alternative is possible” (Bernstein, 2000, p. 33). In other
words, the claim that animals can act morally—be the subjects of moral motivation—is
underdetermined by available evidence. One should not explain an animal’s behavior by
postulating a moral emotion when another—nonmoral—explanation is available. The
plausibility or otherwise of these deflationary, nonmoral explanations is, of course, itself
an open empirical question.
It would be a mistake to suppose that assessments of these empirical questions are
entirely devoid of conceptual commitments (and often, I think, confusions). Nevertheless,
there is a distinct issue that is almost entirely conceptual: What is required for a motiva-
tion to be a moral one? An example will make the distinctness of the question clear. On
a busy four-lane highway in Chile, a dog has been struck by a car and lies unconscious in
the middle of the road. Another dog, at enormous danger to himself or herself, weaves
in and out of the traffic to reach the injured dog and eventually succeeds in pulling this
dog off the road to safety.1 The empirical question is, does this evidence establish the
presence of a certain sort of motivation in the dog—for example, an emotion that we
might broadly characterize as a form of concern—that causes the dog to behave in the
way he or she does? Or can the behavior be explained in some other, deflationary way?
This is, of course, an important empirical question. But suppose we could definitively
answer it. The conceptual question would remain: Is this emotion a properly moral mo-
tivation? To answer this question, we would conduct a conceptual investigation: What is
required—what conditions must be met—for a motivation to be a properly moral one?
Historically speaking, the bar here has been set very high. Kant, for example, thought
that for a motivation to be a properly moral one, it must occur in a creature who is capable
of subjecting it to critical moral scrutiny. As Korsgaard (2005) puts it,
[as] rational beings we are conscious of the principles on which we are inclined to act.
Because of this, we have the ability to ask ourselves whether we should act in the way
we are instinctively inclined to. We can say to ourselves: “I am inclined to do act-A for
the sake of end-E. But should I?” (pp. 148–149)
This ability—to understand the principles on which we are inclined to act—is, according
to Korsgaard (2005), part of the essence of morality in the Kantian image:
The capacity for normative self-government and the deeper level of intentional control
that goes with it is probably unique to human beings. And it is in the proper use of
this capacity—the ability to form and act on judgments of what we ought to do—that
the essence of morality lies, not in altruism or the pursuit of the greater good. (p. 140)
Any behavior that is not subject to this sort of normative self-government is not moral
behavior. If the seemingly heroic dog is unable to reflect on what he or she does—to ask

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 Rowlands, Response to Clement 17

himself or herself whether this is, in the circumstances, a morally good thing to do—the
dog is not a moral creature.
Aristotle paints a picture that is similar, at least in broad outline. In the following
passage from the Nicomachean Ethics (1999), Aristotle emphasizes the psychological
complexity of the virtues:
But for actions in accord with the virtues to be done transparently or justly it does not
suffice that they themselves have the right qualities. Rather, the agent must also be in
the right state when he does them. First he must know that he is doing virtuous actions;
second, he must decide on them, and decide on them for themselves; and, third, he
must also do them from a firm and unchanging state. (1105a27–35)
For an action to be an expression of a virtue, it must not simply be an example of what
would commonly be regarded as a virtuous action (have the “right qualities”). In addi-
tion, the agent must (a) know that he is performing a virtuous action and (b) perform
the action because it is a virtuous action (“decide on them for themselves”), and (c) this
decision must be an expression of a stable disposition on the part of the agent. Conditions
a and b collectively impose a minimal condition of reflection on the virtuous agent. To
satisfy these conditions, the agent must understand what a virtue is and be motivated by
this understanding to perform a certain action because the action would be expressive
of this virtue. If the seemingly heroic dog cannot do this, then the dog’s action in saving
his or her fellow creature is not morally virtuous.
No amassing of empirical evidence is going to allow us to determine whether the
Kantian/Aristotelian picture is correct, because this picture is not an empirical one, but
a conceptual picture that determines how our empirical evidence should be interpreted.
This intellectualist picture of moral action is also endorsed by B. A. Dixon (2008). In
Dixon’s work, we find a carefully interwoven combination of both Kantian and Aristotelian
strands. Her arguments against the possibility of moral action in animals turn on the sort
of intellectualist conception of moral action defended, in different ways, by Kant and
Aristotle. Animals, she argues, can possess emotions in a “thin” sense. But only when the
emotions are suitably embedded in a surrounding milieu of critical scrutiny and judgment
can they be regarded as emotions in the “thick,” morally relevant sense. If the seemingly
heroic dog does not possess the requisite cognitive abilities to supply this milieu, his or
her behavior is not moral behavior.
Clement (2013) concludes her article with a suggestive outline of an approach to
attributing moral motivation to animals—an approach that is broadly Wittgensteinian. I
agree that much discussion of animals’ mental abilities is situated in the context of either
analogical-inference or inference-to-the-best-explanation approaches to the problem of
other minds, approaches that are genuinely problematic. The Wittgensteinian dissolution
of that problem is a viable option that should figure far more prominently than it does in
the scientific discussion of animal minds. However, I suspect that this concluding sec-
tion of Clement’s article has the wrong target—or at least has only one, in my view less
significant target. Clement’s argument is an attempt to address the empirical issue, but it
leaves the conceptual issue untouched. Even if we can justify the attribution of motiva-

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18 Journal of Animal Ethics, 3 (2013)

tions such as concern, sympathy, kindness, and so on to animals, the question of whether
these motivations are moral ones still remains. To address this latter question, we need to
examine the conceptual issue of what conditions must be met for a motivation to count
as moral. And if we are to be persuaded that animals can act morally, the intellectualist
picture of moral action, endorsed by Kant and Aristotle, must be dismantled.

MORAL AGENCY

Clement (2013) frames the issue as one of whether animals can be moral agents. How-
ever, I suspect that the concept of agency is not the one we need for characterizing the
(seemingly) moral behavior of animals. The concept of a moral agent is constitutively
connected to the concepts of responsibility and evaluation. Roughly
X is a moral agent if and only if X is (a) morally responsible for, and so can be (b) morally
evaluated (praised or blamed, broadly understood) for, his or her motives and actions.
(Claim A)
Few philosophers have been willing to accept that animals are moral agents, and I think
they are right to resist this claim. However, as Clement (2013) points out, there are
dissenting voices, even among philosophers. David DeGrazia (1996, p. 203), Stephen
Clark (1982), Steven Sapontzis (1987), and Evelyn Pluhar (1995, p. 2) have all at least
flirted with the idea that animals can be moral agents. And among nonphilosophers, the
list expands significantly: Vicki Hearne (1987), Jeffrey Moussiaeff Masson (Masson &
McCarthy, 1995; Masson, 1997), Stephen Wise (2000), Frans de Waal (1996), and Marc
Bekoff (2000, 2002). Indeed, Darwin (1871) claimed that animals can be motivated by
the “moral sentiments.”2
I think it is a mistake to characterize animals as moral agents. The concept of agency
is inseparable from the concept of responsibility and hence from the concepts of praise
and blame. If animals are moral agents, they are responsible for what they do and so
can be praised or blamed for this. At one time, courts of law—both nonsecular and
secular—set up to try (and subsequently execute) animals for perceived crimes were
not uncommon (see, e.g., Evans, 1906; Dinzelbacher, 2002). I assume few would wish
for a return to this practice. At the core of this unwillingness is the thought that animals
are not responsible—and so cannot be blamed—for what they do. If this is correct, then
their characterization in terms of moral agency should be resisted.
It is not helpful, in this context, to talk of degrees of responsibility. Suppose a pig—let
us call her “Babe”—has been tried and is to be executed for the heinous crime of stealing
the neighboring farmer’s turnips. Babe, the court has decided, is a moral agent and so
is responsible for what she does. This does seem silly. But the attempt to save the idea
of moral agency by invoking the idea of degrees of responsibility scarcely redeems it. To
claim that Babe is less responsible for what she does—less than, say, an average adult
human—seems to imply that the punishment should be mitigated. Instead of death,
perhaps a good flogging would be appropriate. This punishment is as silly as the original.

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 Rowlands, Response to Clement 19

Ultimately, we might retreat to the idea that Babe is responsible for stealing the turnips
but should not be punished. But given this retreat, what is left of the concept of respon-
sibility? I suspect very little. I do not want to rule out the possibility of moral agency,
and hence responsibility, in animals tout court. However, I suspect that if it exists at all
in animals, moral agency is restricted to a number of small, highly idiosyncratic cases. In
the vast majority of cases, animals cannot plausibly be regarded as moral agents.

MORAL SUBJECTHOOD

There is, I think, another option. Although animals are not moral agents, they can be
moral subjects, where
X is a moral subject if and only if X is, at least sometimes, motivated to act by moral
considerations. (Claim S)
The concept of a moral subject has been almost invariably conflated with that of a moral
agent: A claim that Smith is motivated to act by moral considerations is thought to be
equivalent to the claim that Smith is responsible for what he does. In some ways this
conflation is odd, for as the two definitions make clear, these claims are, logically, quite
distinct. Claim A, presented earlier, is one about responsibility and evaluation; claim S is
a claim about motivation. Moral agency and moral subjecthood should be as conceptu-
ally distinct as the concept of responsibility and evaluation is distinct from the concept
of motivation. And it is reasonably clear that, in general, these are quite different things:
The motivation for an action is one thing; the evaluation of the action or the motivation
is quite another. Indeed, an evaluation is often of a motivation.3
Nevertheless, there are persuasive (in the sense that almost everyone has been per-
suaded) reasons for supposing that this general distinction between motivation and evalua-
tion is not applicable in the moral case—that is, in the case of specifically moral motivation
and moral evaluation. Thus, the standard view is that there is no distinction between a
moral agent and a moral subject. The reasons for this are not difficult to discern.
Imagine someone—for entirely obvious reasons, we can call him “Sigmund”—whose
motivations are always hidden from him. The motivational component of his mind is akin
to a black box: replete with states that successfully guide Sigmund’s behavior, but to which
he has no first-person access. There is an obvious sense in which Sigmund is, as we might
put it, “at the mercy” of his motivations. He has no idea what motivates him to act in the
way he does and therefore has no control over those motivations. Because of this, Sigmund
may not be an agent in the sense that an average adult human is usually taken to be an
agent: He is pulled this way and that by motivations to which he is blind. And if Sigmund
is not an agent, then a fortiori, he is not a moral agent. Nevertheless, it is still true that he
is motivated to act in various ways, even if he is blind to these motivations. Even if he is
not an agent, Sigmund is nevertheless a subject of motivation. Can he also be a subject of
specifically moral motivation? Control over his motivations might be required for Sigmund
to be a moral agent. But why should it be required for him to be a moral subject?

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20 Journal of Animal Ethics, 3 (2013)

The answer is to be found in Kant’s dictum that ought implies can. Because Sigmund is
blind to his motivations, he has no control over them; they are not things he can embrace
or resist. But if he can neither embrace nor resist his motivations, it makes no sense to
say that he should embrace or resist them. Sigmund’s motivations, in this sense, seem
to have no normative dimension. They are not the sorts of things he should endorse or
reject. Sigmund’s motivations make no normative claim on him. However, moral moti-
vations are precisely things that make normative claims on their subjects. Morally good
motivations are ones that should be embraced by their subject; morally evil motivations
are ones that should be resisted. Therefore, it seems Sigmund’s motivations cannot be
moral ones.
The connection between normativity and control is one that has decisively shaped the
most influential accounts of moral motivation. Moreover, in these accounts one finds a
specific conception of control. The essence of control lies in a form of critical self-scrutiny
that gives one the ability to reflect on and interrogate one’s motivations. We have seen
this idea at work in Aristotle and Kant (and Dixon). Therefore, it now becomes clear
what we need to make sense of the idea of moral subjecthood without moral agency—the
possibility of moral motivation without moral responsibility. We need another account
of normativity: another explanation of the sense in which moral motivations are things
we should either endorse or reject, an explanation that does not rely on the concept of
control. There is such an account available.

NORMATIVITY WITHOUT CONTROL

The alternative account of normativity takes its cue from Thomas Nagel’s (1970) observa-
tion that it is often instructive to think of the moral “ought” on analogy with other forms
of “ought.” Thus, consider the prudential “ought.” Let us consider the case of someone
whom we shall call Prudence. Most of the actions Prudence performs in her life are
prudent ones. Her motivations for these actions consist in cognitive and affective states
that also seem to be prudent ones. That is, Prudence typically acts prudently, and her
prudent behavior is the result of motivations that most prudential observers would accept
are prudent ones. Prudence is, however, unable to subject her motivations to critical pru-
dential scrutiny. That is, she is unable to ask herself such questions as the following: I am
inclined to act on the basis of motivation M. Is this an inclination I should, prudentially
speaking, embrace or one that I should resist? Though she often acts on the basis of what
appear, to the prudential bystander, to be prudential motives, Prudence is unaware that
this is what she is doing. That is, she is unaware that her motives are prudential and lacks
the metacognitive abilities required to categorize her motives in this way. Is Prudence a
prudential agent? That is, does she do more than merely seem to act in prudential ways
and on the basis of prudential motives? Does she, in fact, act prudentially and on the
basis of motives that are, in fact, prudential?
There is, I think, little temptation to be found in a negative answer to these questions.
And whatever temptation there is, I also suspect, dwindles to approximately zero when

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 Rowlands, Response to Clement 21

we add two more claims. The first concerns the correctness of Prudence’s judgments and
motivations. The second concerns their reliability. Suppose Jude (short for Judicious),
an ideal prudential spectator—an ideal judge of what is and is not, in any given situa-
tion, the prudent way to behave—agrees that Prudence both is acting in prudent ways
and is motivated to act by prudent motivations. That is, Jude agrees that Prudence is the
subject of prudent desires, that her beliefs provide effective ways of implementing or
realizing these desires, and that her resulting actions are, thereby, demonstrably prudent
ones. Jude is never wrong—or hardly ever wrong, depending on how one likes to think
of one’s ideal prudential spectator—about these things. In such circumstances, it seems
we should conclude that Prudence performs actions that are, in fact, the prudent ones to
perform in the circumstances, and she performs these because of motivations that are,
in fact, prudent ones to have in these circumstances.
Consider now the question of reliability. Suppose Prudence’s motivations are the
result of the operations of a reliable prudential module, understood as a mechanism that
translates perceptions of circumstances into prudent strategies for dealing with those
circumstances. Possessing this prudential module, Prudence’s motivation would not only
be correctly characterized as prudent; she would also have these motives reliably or sys-
tematically. Nevertheless, she would be incapable of subjecting her motivations to critical
prudential scrutiny. That is, she would be incapable of considering whether her motives
are ones that, prudentially speaking, she should embrace or resist. Does Prudence’s lack
of this critical ability disqualify her from the category of prudential subject?
The claim that it does is implausible. If one performs prudential actions, and one does
so on the basis of reliably prudential motives, this is sufficient for one to be a prudential
subject. The ability to engage in critical prudential scrutiny of one’s motivations is irrelevant
to one’s status as such a subject. The principle that ought implies can simply does not figure
when we are dealing with the “ought” of prudence. To be prudent, it is sufficient that one
be reliably motivated by prudential reasons—even if one cannot subject those reasons to
critical prudential scrutiny, and even if one is “at the mercy” of those motivations. Never-
theless, there is an “ought” of prudence, just as there is an “ought” of morality. There are
certain things that one, as a matter of prudence, ought to do and certain things that one
ought not. If critical prudential scrutiny is irrelevant to the status of a motivation as prudent,
we must look elsewhere to understand the “ought” of prudence. We might also look in the
same general direction to understand the “ought” of morality.
The direction we should look is, of course, one that is broadly evaluationally externalist
and objectively consequentialist. The general contours of such an account are relatively
familiar.4 Such an account will assume a fairly strong sense of ethical objectivity, ac-
cording to which, very roughly, situations contain features that make them good or bad,
independent of the subjective states (in particular, evaluations) of the agent. The evalu-
ation of a motivation will then be a function of whether it systematically (as opposed to
accidentally) promotes good- or bad-making features of situations. The normative status
of a motivation is therefore explained in terms of its relation to external factors rather
than the subject’s control over it.

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22 Journal of Animal Ethics, 3 (2013)

Thus, we might imagine a person—let us call him Myshkin, after the central char-
acter in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot—who is the moral analogue of Prudence. Prima facie,
Myshkin has the soul of a prince: Throughout his life, he performs many acts that seem
to be kind or compassionate. He performs these acts because he is the subject of senti-
ments or emotions that—again, at least prima facie—seem to be kind or compassionate
ones. When he sees another suffering, he feels compelled to act to end or ameliorate
that suffering. When he sees another happy, he feels happy because of what he sees. In
short, Myshkin deplores the suffering of others and rejoices in their happiness. His ac-
tions reflect, and are caused by, these sentiments.
Myshkin is incapable of subjecting his sentiments and actions to critical moral scrutiny,
however. Thus, he does not ever ask himself such questions as “Is what I am feeling the
right thing to feel in the current situation—that is, is what I am feeling the same thing
as what I should be feeling?” Nor does he think to himself, “Is what I propose to do in
this circumstance the (morally) correct thing to do?” He is incapable of doing this. His
dealings with others operate on a more visceral level.
Nevertheless, suppose there is a person named Marlow—christened after the skilled
scrutinizer of motivations who inhabits some of Joseph Conrad’s novels—who is capable
of the sort of critical moral reflection of which Myshkin is incapable. Indeed, Marlow—
whom we might think of as an ideal moral spectator—invariably reaches the correct
moral conclusion. Suppose, on the basis of his reflections, Marlow were to endorse the
same sorts of sentiments and actions that Myshkin feels and performs. For any given
circumstance C, Myshkin has sentiment S and, as a result, performs action A. Marlow,
an adept moral scrutinizer of his sentiments and actions, independently comes to the
conclusion that in circumstance C, it is morally correct to have sentiment S and perform
action A.
Finally, suppose Myshkin’s motivations are not produced accidentally but are the re-
sult of a mechanism—a moral module, if you like—whose function is to generate certain
emotions in the presence of (or the perception of) certain environmental features. The
operations of this module are reliable ones.
From an objectively consequentialist, evaluationally externalist perspective, Myshkin
would qualify as a moral subject: a subject capable of acting on the basis of moral consid-
erations. Specifically, Myshkin qualifies as a moral subject if he meets three conditions:
(1) possesses an appropriate sensitivity to pertinent features of his environment, where
this sensitivity (2) is normative and (3) is grounded in a reliable mechanism.
First, Myshkin’s emotions track the good- or bad-making features of a situation. When
Myshkin encounters someone suffering, he feels a strong desire to alleviate the individual’s
suffering. When he encounters someone happy, he rejoices in this, and so on. The notion
of tracking can be captured via counterfactuals. For example, all other things equal, if
the situation did not contain a person who was suffering, then Myshkin would not have,
specifically, this emotion and the resulting desire, and so on.
Second, Myshkin’s sensitivity is normative: It can be assessed as correct or incor-
rect. Marlow, our imagined ideal spectator, endorses Myshkin’s emotional responses to

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 Rowlands, Response to Clement 23

environmental circumstances, and he does so because he is, as much as anyone can be,
in possession of the correct moral theory.
Third, Myshkin’s normative sensitivity does not happen by accident. This sensitivity
is grounded in a mechanism—a moral module—that generates certain emotions in given
circumstances.
On this account, at the core of moral motivation, we find normative sensitivity grounded
in a reliable mechanism. Once a subject meets these conditions, that subject is a moral one.
The possession of metacognitive abilities certainly expands the type and variety of moral
reasons an individual is capable of entertaining. However, when grounded in a reliable
mechanism, normative sensitivity to the good- and bad-making features of a situation is
sufficient to constitute basic moral reason. It is in this sense that Myshkin possesses moral
reasons and so counts as a moral subject.

MORAL ACTION WITHOUT MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

If the foregoing arguments are correct, the seemingly heroic dog introduced earlier can
qualify as acting morally if he or she satisfies three conditions. First, the dog is appropriately
sensitive to the good- and bad-making features of situations. Second, this sensitivity is nor-
matively assessable (the sort of thing about which the dog might be mistaken). Third, his or
her motivations must be produced by a reliable mechanism. Nowhere in these conditions
do we find the idea of control. Therefore, if these three conditions are indeed sufficient
for the dog’s motivations to count as moral ones, the dog can qualify as a moral subject
without being a moral agent. If this is correct, there is at least one way of thinking about
moral motivation according to which it makes sense to suppose that animals can be moral
subjects—the subjects of properly moral motivations—without being moral agents. There
is, of course, a lot more to be said, and many thorny conceptual and metaphysical issues to
be navigated or negotiated remain. In particular, the traditional association between the
normative status of a motivational state and the subject’s control over that state is one that
needs to be subjected to sustained critical analysis. Elsewhere, I have argued (Rowlands,
2011, 2012) that control is simply not the right sort of thing to constitute normativity in the
way commonly thought. If this argument is correct, the traditional explanation of normativity
in terms of control cannot be sustained. I shall not reiterate those arguments here. For now,
I hope I have done enough to show that the question of whether animals can act morally
is not, necessarily, equivalent to the question of whether they are moral agents. The idea
that animals can act morally without being moral agents, and so without being responsible
for what they do, is a legitimate contender—a genuine position in logical space. I actually
think it is more than that: It is the position in logical space for which the best arguments
can be amassed. But that, as they say, is for another time.

Notes
1. See “Hero Dog Saves Another,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HJTG6RRN4E
2. Darwin (1871) did, however, stop short of claiming that animals are fully “moral beings.”

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24 Journal of Animal Ethics, 3 (2013)

3. Suppose, for example, that hard determinism is true. In such circumstances, no one could
be morally evaluated for what they do, but it would not follow that they were not the subjects
of motivational states.
4. See Driver (2000) for an example of such a position applied to the idea of moral virtue.

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