7 Ethical

On Dec 5, 2023, in Florida, a pair of manatees were removed from a marine park:

Manatees removed

Two manatees housed at a US tourist park since 1957 were hauled out of the facility on Tuesday (local time), sparking celebration.

The decision to remove the animals from Miami Seaquarium comes after millions of social media users were shocked by a viral social media video showing the male’s home inside a concrete tank, hidden away from public view.

For months 67-year-old Romeo had been kept in isolation, while his one-time companion Juliet was paired with a younger female named Clarity. Now pictures show Romeo’s tank is empty, and all three have been transported to new homes at other facilities.

Captive manatees finally leave tourist park after 65 years

The manatees were removed because lots of people were angry and upset about their living conditions and there was a big online protest against the marine park.

But why were people angry and upset?

According to the advocacy group UrgentSeas, which released a video on X last month showing Romeo swimming alone in a tiny and decaying circular tank in a remote, non-public area of the park, the pair have been kept apart for months and were suffering a “horrendous captivity”.

“Manatees are semi-social animals and suffer psychologically when not living in groups or pairs. But Romeo remains alone, all the time,” it said in the tweet, viewed by more than 3.3 million people.

Phil Demers, a former marine mammal trainer who founded the group, described Romeo’s isolated existence as “Groundhog Day in hell”.

Manatees Romeo and Juliet freed from Florida theme park following campaign

People were angry because the manatees were suffering in a way that seemed cruel and inhumane and they felt that was morally and ethically wrong.

Arguments about ethics and morality, right and wrong, are crucial in society. They underpin our laws and social norms.

They are fundamentally concerned with how we treat others:

Is it right or wrong to treat another person this way?
Is it right to make this choice knowing the effect it will have on others?

At the end of the day, our definitions of right and wrong boil down to what might best be described as 'sacred values': fairness, dignity, freedom, health, and so on.

An act is 'wrong' if it violates one or more of those sacred values.

For example, this argument from the U.S. Geological Survey Communications team makes a general case for why we should save manatees in their natural habitat.

But is it an ethical argument? Does it explain why saving manatees is morally right, or why not saving them violates a sacred value?

Why is it important to save manatees?

It boils down to a fundamentally basic concept: Manatees are part of a system. If you remove any component from a system, there will be an effect on something else.

For example, manatees could die if we kill most of the plants they depend on for food. On the other hand, manatees help control the vegetation that can obstruct Florida waterways. They also provide a benefit by processing the vegetation they eat and passing it back out into the environment as a form of fertilizer.

Ecotourism forms the basis for a flourishing tourist industry in Florida. Close to 70,000 people visit Crystal River every year just to see and swim with manatees, thus helping the local economy.

There is an aesthetic value to manatees as well. They are fun to watch and we can learn a lot from their non-aggressive, passive demeanor.

Why is it important to save manatees?

This snippet makes an argument based on the benefits that manatees provide to us: manatees preserve the ecosystem and our tourist industry, and we enjoy their adorable aesthetics.

That might be a good argument! And many ethical arguments evaluate the good and bad effects caused by different courses of action.

But it's not an ethical argument because doesn't make a case based on moral values.

Compare the previous snippet about why we should save manatees in general (and how it benefits us) with this argument from Change.org about why Romeo, one of the manatees from the story at the top of this page, should be removed from his tank.

Do you see where it compares actions to sacred principles & values?

For 67 years, Romeo the Manatee has been confined within the walls of Miami Seaquarium, swimming in circles. This is a personal plea from someone who believes that all marine life should live freely in their natural habitats and not be used for entertainment purposes. The aquarium's parking lot is larger than any pool at the park, highlighting the stark contrast between human convenience and animal welfare.

Romeo is aging and his health deteriorating. If we do nothing, he will die a slow and lonely death within these confines. It's time to give him one last chance at freedom.

"Shut Down Miami Seaquarium and Release Romeo the Manatee"

Seaquarium conditions

Romeo manatee

Who or what gets moral rights?

But hold on... if ethical and moral arguments are about how we treat other people, why are we talking about manatees?

Why would anyone care about the suffering of a couple of sea-cows in a tank (where they're fed and kept safe from predators!)? Are they that important? Do they even "suffer" in the way that we humans do?

This is actually a really significant question because many ethical arguments aren't only about what is right or wrong, but also who or what gets the benefit of our ethical treatment.

For example, here’s philosopher Martha Nussbaum describing how different philosophical schools in history have cared or not cared about animal suffering.

Who thought animal suffering was relevant and who didn't?

Most philosophers throughout the history of Western philosophy have been very inattentive to the sufferings of animals, with a short list of honorable exceptions before we get to the present day. In India, the entire Buddhist tradition is very attuned to animal suffering, as is part of the Hindu tradition. But Kant, for example, said that animals were just things that we may use as we please. Descartes thought that they were mere automata.

Because They Feel

Can you explain why you think we should or should not care about animal suffering?

You might have noticed that it can be quite hard to explain why you think an animal should have moral rights (if you even do). It can be one of those, "I'll know it when I feel it" type of questions.

But here’s historian Lynn Hunt saying much the same thing about human rights:

Human rights are difficult to pin down because their definition, indeed their very existence, depends on emotions as much as on reason. The claim of self-evidence relies ultimately on an emotional appeal; it is convincing if it strikes a chord within each person. Moreover, we are most certain that a human right is at issue when we feel horrified by its violation.

Inventing Human Rights

This instinctive feeling of injustice or immorality runs so deep, that it’s not even limited to how humans feel about other humans or animals—it can be felt by other animals.

For example, take this famous experiment in ethics among capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees:

Here's a written account from The New Yorker:

A pair of brown capuchin monkeys are sitting in a cage. From time to time, their caretakers give them tokens, which they can then exchange for food. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that capuchin monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers. So what happens when unfairness strikes—when, in exchange for identical tokens, one monkey gets a cucumber and the other a grape?

When Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal carried out just this experiment, in 2003, focussing on female capuchin monkeys, they found that monkeys hate being disadvantaged.

A monkey in isolation is happy to eat either a grape or a slice of cucumber. But a monkey who sees that she’s received a cucumber while her partner has gotten a grape reacts with anger: she might hurl her cucumber from her cage.

Some primates, Brosnan and de Waal concluded, “dislike inequity.” They hate getting the short end of the stick. Psychologists have a technical term for this reaction: they call it “disadvantageous-inequity aversion.”

This instinctual aversion to getting less than others has been found in chimpanzees and dogs, and it occurs, of course, in people, in whom it seems to develop from a young age. The psychologists Alessandra Geraci and Luca Surian have found, for example, that babies as young as twelve months prefer fair-minded cartoon animals to unfair ones.

(From How We Learn Fairness by Maria Konnikova, in The New Yorker)

What's strange about all this is that while our moral values are on some level deeply instinctive, we still don’t always agree on what moral behaviour is, and who or what is covered by moral rules.

Which means we continue to have ethical and moral arguments about individuals and populations.

ZEIT: In recent decades, research has provided new knowledge, as you just mentioned: Most animals can feel pain, have feelings and possess a kind of subjective worldview. How has this knowledge changed your own thinking?

Nussbaum: I already knew a lot about elephants and whales, and of course about companion animals, but I learned a huge amount about many other animals. I’d single out birds especially: Like many people, I thought most birds had very limited cognitive capacities. Now I know that they are among the most versatile of animals, navigating by magnetic fields, planning in ways that show awareness of what other animals think, what’s called "metacognition," and using languages that even possess linguistic complexity. I also learned that many, if not most, mammals learn by post-birth social teaching, not by the automatic unfolding of a genetic program. This is very important, showing that it is totally immoral to rip a young dolphin or ape away from its animal community. Not only does this deprive them of company, it deprives them of all chance to become themselves.

Because They Feel

Pair of manatees

To recap

Ethical arguments are about moral choice and the difference between right & wrong.
- This is similar but different to valuational arguments about whether something is a good or bad member of a category.
They are almost exclusively concerned with how what we do affects another's well-being.
Ethical issues tend to relate to life, death, suffering, justice, fairness, power, and so on.
Ethical arguments usually rely on the idea of sacred values that must not be violated.
Ethical arguments often use different types of reasoning:
- Cause & effect reasoning to show how the consequences of an action violate a sacred value.
- Criteria & match reasoning to show that an action itself violates a sacred value.
- They also use principle-based reasoning, but that's out of scope for this lesson.

What’s a cruelty, injustice, or neglect that bothers you? Who is affected? Why is it wrong? What do you think should happen instead? (If you don't have any ideas, explain how you think the manatees should have been treated and why.)

Seven types of argument