Equality, its Basis and Moral Status: Challenging the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests

Abstract

The principle of equal consideration of interests (ECOI) is a very popular principle in animal ethics. Peter Singer employs it to ground equal treatment and solve the problem of the basis of equality, namely the problem of why we should grant equal treatment despite the variability of people’s features. In this paper, I challenge Singer’s argument because ECOI does not provide plausible grounds to presume that the interests of diverse individuals are actually equal. Analyzing the case of pain and the interest in not suffering in particular, I contend that there are some insurmountable epistemic and axiological problems in accounting for the equality of interests. Besides criticizing ECOI as a basis of equality, I argue that we need to rely on an equality of moral status. I conclude by providing some considerations on the relation between equality and the principle of proportionality.

Keywords:

• Basis of equality
• animal ethics
• equality
• pain
• proportionality principle
• equal consideration of interests

Acknowledgements

This article was written thanks to the generous support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation – Research Fellowship for experienced researchers – Project ‘Politics and Animals: Addressing the Disagreement about the Treatment of Animals.’ I am grateful to Josh Milburn and Peter Niesen for their helpful comments to previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Singer has recently abandoned the preference-based account in favor of hedonistic utilitarianism (Lazari-Radek and Singer 2014). However, this does not change his endorsement of ECOI. In what follows, I will only refer to the preference-based utilitarian account because ECOI has been outlined within this context. In another paper, I have provided a more complete analysis of Singer’s two approaches (see Zuolo 2016b).

2. This clause may seem to pose an unnecessarily restrictive condition because one may have an interest in certain states of affairs, for instance options of choice, that are not actually experienced. The interest in freedom is an interest in having possible sets of actions available even when they are not experienced. Although this complicates my argument a little, it does not constitute a problem for it because it is possible to reformulate these types of interests in terms of possible experiences. However, for the sake of simplicity I will only consider actual experiences.

3. In passing it is worth recalling that we cannot say that the capacity for having interests is the basis of equality because such a capacity is unequally possessed.

4. In have argued for the overall non-egalitarian implications of McMahan’s thought in Zuolo 2016a.