The Ethics of Animal Beauty

By:  Samantha Vice (Rhodes)

Oneline in the defence of hunting animals concentrates on the virtues of character and intellect displayed by hunters.  In this paper, I remain within this aretaic approach and argue that a proper
response to animal beauty is a virtuous character trait that hunters lack.  My broad approach should not be controversial: I will argue that like other values, beauty calls for certain responses from us.  There seems something wrong both with the actions themselves and with the people who are so unmoved by beauty as to destroy it.  But within this approach, there is still much to be done.  For
instance, what is it about beauty that we are responding to?  What kind of demands does it place on us?  What deficiencies in character can the wilful destruction of beauty reveal?  My focus in this paper will be the nature and demands of beauty in animals, a topic that has received very little attention.

So this paper has two aims: First, I defend an account of beauty in animals.  Second, I argue for the ethical implications of animal beauty.  The beauty of animals, I shall argue, calls for a particular response from observers; it brings along certain duties and calls for the cultivation of certain traits of character – ones that are incompatible with hunting animals, and with many of the familiar things we do to them.  I hope therefore to justify a move from aesthetic value to ethical value, a move that will rely on the aesthetic notion of disinterestedness.  I hope that this will provide an alternative approach to justifying the moral significance of animals from more familiar standard approaches.