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10 Rel.: Beyond Anthropocentrism 9 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/relations10 and id is 1 raw text is: Korsgaard's Duties towards Animals Two Difficulties1 Nico Muller Universitit Basel DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/rela-2022-01-mull nicodario.mueller@unibas. ch ABSTRACT Building on her previous work (2004, 2012, 2013), Christine Korsgaard's recent book Fellow Creatures (2018) has provided the most highly developed Kantian account of duties towards animals. I raise two issues with the results of this account. First, the duties that Korsgaard accounts for are duties towards animals in name only. Since Korsgaard does not reject the Kantian conception in which direct duties towards others require mutual moral constraint, what she calls duties towards animals are merely Kantian duties regarding animals, verbally repackaged. Hence, Korsgaard's account is best understood as an expansion (albeit a substantial one) of Kant's own view of an indirect duty regarding animals. Second, the expansion does not take us quite as far as Korsgaard hopes. She aims for a conception in which our duties towards animals and humans are equally important, but her argument does not support this conclusion. I point out the potential for a more radical revision of Kant's anthropocentrism that rejects has underlying assumption that duties towards others are based on mutual constraint. Keywords: anthropocentrism; autonomy; deontology; duties to animals; Kant; Kantianism; Korsgaard; moral status; non-consequentialism; obligation. 1. INTRODUCTION According to a longstanding philosophical tradition, our duties concerning the treatment of animals are not directed towards animals themselves but 'This research was funded by the NCCR Evolving Language, Swiss National Science Foundation (Agreement #51NF40_180888). For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I am grateful to Muriel Leuenberger, Elodie Malbois, Samia Hurst, Markus Wild, Anthony Mahler, and the participants of the Basel Animal Ethics Reunion (BAER). Relations - 10.1 - June 2022 https://www.ledonline.it/Relations/ - Online ISSN 2280-9643 - Print ISSN 2283-3196 9

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