Torturing a Cat Might Not Be Morally Wrong!

Robin, apparently unconvinced by my theory of morality, has arrived to question the normative foundations of my entire philosophical framework. 

I came across a sentence on Instagram recently that was probably intended as a joke: "You can't argue with a vegan because they're always right." The idea behind it was fairly familiar. If animals can suffer, and if we can avoid causing that suffering by not eating them, then eating animals is morally wrong. From there, the conclusion seems almost automatic: if you continue eating animals despite knowing that they suffer, you are doing something immoral.

I have encountered versions of this argument for years, but this time it made me stop for a different reason. I wasn't particularly interested in debating whether eating meat is good or bad. What caught my attention was the assumption underneath the argument. Why does the fact that an animal suffers create a moral obligation toward that animal? Why does suffering itself generate a duty? We often speak as though the answer is obvious, but I am no longer convinced that it is.

The question also brought me back to something I wrote about several years ago. In 2021, I published an article about my evolving philosophy on veganism and morality after going through my own journey from vegetarianism to pescetarianism, back to vegetarianism, and eventually several years of veganism. At that time, I was trying to understand what morality actually was, why humans developed moral systems, and whether my own behavior was consistent with the principles I claimed to hold. I eventually arrived at a fairly simple conclusion: morality seemed to me to be a human construction, a set of rules developed to allow humans to coexist. I could care about animals, feel compassion for them, and choose not to eat them, but I did not see a universal moral obligation toward them.

Looking back at that article now, I still recognize the basic intuition, but I also see how incomplete my formulation was. I was using concepts such as morality, social norms, agreement, empathy, suffering, obligation and self-interest too loosely. I also made several claims about human nature and evolution that were stronger than the evidence I actually had for them. The question was worth asking, but the framework I used to answer it was still crude.

Since then, I have continued thinking about these questions in different forms. Some of them have appeared in my writing, some in conversations, and many have remained as unfinished thoughts and drafts. For the last several years, I have also been working on a book in which questions about morality, existence, freedom, consciousness, meaning and uncertainty have repeatedly appeared. I have written several drafts, and I am now getting close to completing the drafting stage before beginning the larger process of revision and eventually looking for a publisher. So the Instagram post did not create this line of thought. It simply reopened a problem that has been sitting in the background of my thinking for years.

That is probably why such a simple sentence caught my attention. Sometimes a very ordinary statement touches a question that you thought you had already answered, only to reveal that you had merely stopped asking it.

What do we mean by morality?

Before asking whether eating animals is wrong, whether killing is wrong, or whether slavery was wrong, I think there is a more fundamental question that needs to be addressed first: what exactly do we mean when we use the word "morality"?

Most moral discussions begin by assuming that this question has already been answered. We speak about good and evil, right and wrong, duties, rights and obligations as though these things were simply properties of reality that exist independently of us. Sometimes moral language is treated almost like physical language. A stone has mass, water has chemical properties, and an action has moral value.

I have never been convinced that these things exist in quite the same way.

If I say that water has a particular chemical composition, I am making a claim about something that does not depend on whether I approve of it. If every human being disappeared, water would presumably continue to have the same chemical properties. The universe does not need our agreement for those facts to remain true.

But consider the statement, "Killing an innocent person is objectively wrong." What exactly is the property that makes the action wrong? Where does that property exist? Would it continue to exist if there were no conscious beings anywhere in the universe? Imagine a universe containing matter and energy but no conscious organisms, no preferences, no suffering, no relationships and no social interaction. Would that universe still contain moral facts? Would there still be something that was objectively good or objectively evil?

At the moment, I have no convincing reason to think so.

This places me broadly within the territory of moral anti-realism, although I am careful about attaching a definitive philosophical label to my position. Moral anti-realism is not a single theory, and the various positions grouped under that name differ significantly. My point is simply that I do not currently see evidence that moral properties exist as mind-independent features of reality in the same way that physical properties do.

That does not mean I think morality is meaningless. It does not mean that I think anything anyone does is equally acceptable. It does not even mean that moral disagreement is impossible. It means that I distinguish between the existence of facts about the world and the existence of objective moral values. An animal can objectively experience pain, and we can investigate that scientifically. The additional claim that this pain creates a moral obligation toward the animal requires a normative theory.

That distinction is where much of the disagreement begins.

Uncertainty is part of the framework

This position also follows from something I have written about before: my increasing discomfort with claims of absolute certainty. Over the last several years, I have become more skeptical of philosophical systems that present their conclusions as though they had escaped the limitations of human knowledge. I question certainty about God, consciousness, the self, free will and the nature of reality, and I see no reason why morality should receive special treatment.

I can believe something strongly without claiming that I know it with absolute certainty. I can consider a position more reasonable than its alternatives while remaining willing to abandon it if better arguments or evidence appear. That distinction is important because I am not presenting the framework in this article as a final theory of morality. It is the framework that currently seems most coherent to me, and I am deliberately exposing its weak points rather than hiding them.

If I reject objective morality because I cannot find a convincing foundation for it, I should also be willing to reconsider that conclusion if someone provides such a foundation. Otherwise skepticism becomes another form of dogmatism.

Why would morality exist at all?

If moral values are not objective properties of the universe, then why do human beings have morality at all?

I think the answer begins with something much more basic than morality: survival.

Humans are biological organisms. We evolved in environments where survival depended heavily on our relationships with other members of our species. We hunted together, raised children together, exchanged resources, formed alliances and depended on one another for protection. At the same time, the people around us were also potential competitors. They wanted resources, status, partners and security just as we did.

This creates a problem that any highly social species has to solve. I can benefit from cooperation with you, but I can also benefit from exploiting you. I can gain something by stealing your resources, but if everyone steals, nobody can safely keep anything. I can gain an advantage by betraying you, but if betrayal becomes the norm, cooperation becomes extremely difficult. I want other people to respect certain boundaries around me, but I also have to accept boundaries around them.

The result is a basic strategic problem: how do individuals with conflicting interests coexist without constantly destroying one another?

Humans developed an extraordinary collection of mechanisms for dealing with this problem. We remember who helped us and who betrayed us. We develop reputations. We punish people who violate expectations. We reward cooperation. We teach children rules. We create institutions. We develop laws and customs. We form social expectations about what people should and should not do.

Eventually these expectations become so deeply internalized that we stop experiencing them as arrangements created by human beings. They simply feel like the way things are supposed to be.

Perhaps that is one reason morality can feel so mysterious. We are born into a normative system before we are capable of questioning it.

Morality as reciprocal coordination

This is where my thinking has changed most significantly since I wrote about morality in 2021. I no longer think that saying "morality is an agreement between humans" is precise enough. Most of us never literally agree to the moral system we inhabit. A newborn obviously does not sign a social contract, and even adults do not individually negotiate most of the rules governing their lives.

I now think of morality more as a system of reciprocal normative coordination. The terminology sounds more complicated than the underlying idea. We are conscious beings whose actions can affect one another, whose interests sometimes conflict, and whose cooperation can make our lives substantially more secure and productive. Because of this, we develop expectations concerning how we may treat one another and what we can reasonably expect from one another.

The basic structure is something like this: I do not kill you, and you do not kill me. I do not steal from you, and you do not steal from me. I do not harm your children, and you do not harm mine. I respect certain boundaries around you because I expect you to respect similar boundaries around me. When someone violates these expectations, the community develops mechanisms for responding to that violation.

Of course, actual morality is vastly more complicated than this. It includes questions about justice, property, family, sexuality, political authority, punishment, responsibility, honesty, equality, rights and countless other subjects. But underneath this complexity I think there is a recognizable problem of coexistence between mutually vulnerable agents.

This is one reason I find contractarian traditions in moral and political philosophy interesting. Thinkers such as Hobbes and later contractarian philosophers explored, in different ways, why self-interested and vulnerable individuals might have reasons to accept restrictions on their behavior because cooperation and mutual security can benefit everyone involved. I do not think contractarianism explains the entirety of morality, but I think it captures something important about why normative systems can arise in the first place.

But why should I obey?

At this point, there is an obvious problem. Suppose I simply reject the norms of my society. Why should I obey them?

My answer is not particularly metaphysical. You do not necessarily have to.

There is no cosmic force that physically compels someone to respect a moral rule. A person can decide that they do not care about the norms of their society. But the other members of that society are also agents with their own interests, and they can respond to that rejection. If someone steals, they may be imprisoned. If someone repeatedly attacks others, they may be restrained. If someone attempts to kill another person, others may use force against them. If someone consistently refuses the norms necessary for coexistence, they may eventually be excluded from the community.

I do not see this as proof that the norms are objectively true. I see it as part of the mechanism through which normative systems function. You can reject the rules, but you cannot necessarily reject the consequences of living among other agents who accept them.

This is also why I have become more careful with the word "obligation." I am not talking about an absolute obligation that exists independently of minds, nor am I claiming that a moral obligation is some metaphysical force that exists forever. I mean an obligation within a particular normative framework. If I participate in a community and benefit from the stability produced by its rules, then those rules generate expectations about my behavior, and violating them exposes me to consequences.

The obligation is therefore conditional and contextual. It is not eternal.

The problem of agreement

There is another important correction I would make to my earlier thinking. I used to express the idea too simply by saying that if everyone agrees that something is moral, then it is moral. I no longer think that formulation works.

Societies are almost never unanimous. People can live under norms they reject. Minorities can oppose the dominant values of their society. Powerful groups can impose institutions on weaker groups. Individuals can resist the norms of their own communities, and entire societies can change their values over time.

So I no longer think morality requires unanimous agreement. I think of it as a system of norms generated, maintained, negotiated and contested among members of a community. Agreement is often partial. Conflict is normal. The important point is that these norms concern relationships between agents who can affect one another and who are capable, at least in principle, of participating in the normative structure.

This creates a strange implication for someone who rejects objective morality. If I say that slavery is objectively wrong, I appear to be appealing to a moral fact that exists independently of the people involved. I am not currently comfortable making that claim.

I can say that I reject slavery. I can say that I strongly prefer a society in which people cannot be owned. I can explain why individuals have powerful interests in not being enslaved and why a system that permits arbitrary domination creates insecurity for everyone who might potentially fall under the power of someone else. I can oppose slavery, fight against it and try to persuade other people to oppose it.

What I cannot do, within my current philosophical framework, is appeal to some independent moral law and say that the universe itself has declared slavery objectively wrong.

That does not make resistance meaningless. It simply means that resistance does not require metaphysical moral realism.

Does this mean anything goes?

This is probably the easiest way to misunderstand my position. If morality is constructed, someone might respond that anything should therefore be acceptable. I do not think that follows.

The fact that something is constructed does not make it arbitrary. Money is a human institution, but I cannot simply declare that I own a billion dollars and expect the rest of society to accept it. Language is constructed, but communication imposes constraints on how we can use words. Laws are constructed, but violating them can produce very real consequences.

The same applies to moral systems. They exist within a world that imposes constraints on us. We have bodies that can be injured, psychological systems that can experience fear and attachment, limited resources, dependence on other people and a need for some degree of stability. A society that completely ignores these realities will have difficulty maintaining itself.

This means that even if morality is constructed, normative systems can still be better or worse relative to particular goals. A society in which I can sleep without worrying that another person will randomly murder me is preferable to one in which I cannot, at least from my perspective and from the perspective of many other people. I do not need an objective moral property called "goodness" to explain why I prefer that society. I need reasons, and I have them.

I would rather live.

Who belongs to the moral community?

This brings me back to the question that originally led me here: who exactly is included in this system?

I do not think the most useful distinction is simply between humans and animals. Humans are animals, and species membership by itself does not tell us what makes a being capable of participating in a moral system.

What interests me is agency.

By a moral agent, I mean a being capable of participating in something like a normative relationship. Such a being would need to possess capacities that allow it to understand relevant rules, communicate expectations, recognize the interests of others, respond to reasons, make commitments, reciprocate and participate in a community governed by mutually intelligible norms. I am not claiming that every agent must be equally intelligent or that every agent must agree with every rule. Disagreement is perfectly compatible with moral agency. In fact, moral systems require the possibility of disagreement because otherwise there would be no need for negotiation, persuasion, enforcement or punishment.

This also means that my position is not fundamentally about human superiority. If another species eventually demonstrated sufficiently sophisticated communication, long-term planning, understanding of intentions, social norms, cooperation and the ability to participate in reciprocal agreements, I would have to reconsider its position within my framework. The same would apply to an extraterrestrial species, or potentially to an artificial system, if such a system ever genuinely acquired the relevant capacities.

The boundary I am trying to establish is therefore not "humans versus animals." It is the boundary between beings that can participate in reciprocal normative relationships and beings that cannot.

Whether that boundary is actually the correct one is another question.

What about babies?

The case of a newborn baby is one of the strongest challenges to an agency-based account of moral standing. A newborn cannot negotiate an agreement, understand moral rules, promise not to harm anyone, or participate in the kind of reciprocal relationship I am describing. Yet we still believe that the baby should be protected. Why?

I think the answer is that the relevant relationship is not simply between the baby and another individual as two independent moral agents. It is between the adult agents who constitute the community. We establish norms protecting children because they are vulnerable members of our community, because they normally develop into future agents, because we have powerful interests in living in a society where children are protected, and because our relationships with one another depend on the expectation that our children will not simply be treated as disposable objects.

There is also an important symmetry here. Any adult could become responsible for a child, could have a child, or could become vulnerable themselves. A society in which children could be harmed without consequence would create enormous insecurity for everyone. The protection of the child can therefore be understood as part of a broader system of norms among existing and future agents.

A similar argument can be made about someone who is temporarily unconscious or in a coma. That person may currently be unable to participate in a normative relationship, but they were previously capable of doing so and may become capable again. More importantly, any of us could occupy that condition. We therefore have strong reasons to establish a general norm protecting people while they are temporarily unable to participate.

This is different from saying that every being incapable of agency automatically has exactly the same moral status. That is where the animal case becomes considerably more difficult.

Animals and suffering

Animals complicate the framework because many of them clearly experience pain and other forms of suffering. This is not merely a philosophical intuition. The capacity for pain and other affective states can be investigated scientifically, although the precise nature and degree of subjective experience differs between species.

The vegan argument becomes serious at this point. It is not simply that animals are alive. It is that they are sentient beings capable of experiencing states that are negatively or positively valenced. From this, a vegan can argue that suffering itself is morally relevant regardless of who experiences it.

I think this is a coherent philosophical position. But notice the additional premise being introduced: suffering has moral significance independently of reciprocal agency.

That is the premise I am not willing to simply assume.

I can accept that an animal is suffering. I can recognize that I have empathy toward it. I can personally decide that I do not want to cause that suffering. I can support laws against cruelty. I can choose to avoid eating animals. But the claim that the animal's suffering itself creates a moral obligation requires a theory explaining why suffering generates that obligation.

That is the part of the argument I want to examine.

Empathy is not necessarily obligation

I think we often confuse our emotional reactions with moral facts. If I see an animal suffering and feel distress, that tells me something important about me. It tells me that I have empathy toward that animal. It does not by itself establish that the universe has imposed a duty upon me.

This distinction does not make empathy irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Empathy can be one of the mechanisms through which societies construct moral norms. If enough people find a particular form of animal suffering disturbing, they may organize around it, create laws against it, develop cultural expectations about it and punish people who violate those expectations. At that point, the treatment of animals has become part of a human normative system.

I therefore do not think there is anything incoherent about caring deeply about animals while rejecting moral realism. I can love a dog without believing that the universe has assigned the dog an objective moral right. I can think factory farming is disturbing without believing that the wrongness of factory farming exists independently of conscious beings. I can choose not to eat meat without claiming that everyone who does so is violating an eternal moral law.

This is also why I no longer think that the fact that some people care more about dogs than cows or pigs automatically exposes a logical contradiction. Human emotional attachments are not distributed according to a perfectly consistent philosophical system. We form relationships with particular individuals and species. Whether that is ethically defensible is a separate question.

The uncomfortable thought experiment

There is a thought experiment that makes my own position uncomfortable. Suppose I take a cat and torture it in complete isolation. Nobody sees me, nobody ever finds out, there is no legal consequence, no reputational consequence, no threat to cooperation, and no human agreement concerning what I did. If the cat's suffering alone does not automatically generate a moral obligation, then what exactly makes us react so strongly to the situation? Why does the scenario feel wrong even when there is no human victim, no social consequence and nobody around to judge me?

My current suspicion is that the discomfort itself is part of the answer. This is where I find moral emotivism particularly interesting. Emotivism, in its classical form, treats moral judgments not primarily as descriptions of objective moral properties but as expressions of approval, disapproval or other attitudes. When someone says, "Torturing this cat is wrong," the statement can be understood, at least in part, as an expression of strong negative disapproval toward the act and an attempt to communicate or evoke a similar attitude in others. This does not mean that the person is simply making an arbitrary noise. The attitude can be shaped by beliefs, experiences, social learning, empathy, expectations and reasoning. But underneath the moral judgment is still an affective response: we are for something or against something.

That seems particularly relevant to the cat example. Why does the hypothetical disturb us? Because we have a psychological response to the idea of suffering and cruelty. We experience disgust, distress, empathy, anger or some combination of these reactions. We then put those reactions into language. We say that the act is cruel, wrong, disgusting or unacceptable. Other people hear the judgment, experience similar reactions, and reinforce the norm. Over time, enough of these individual reactions can become organized into a social expectation: this is something people should not do. Eventually that expectation can become a moral norm, and in some cases it can become law.

This gives me another way of understanding the relationship between emotion and morality. I do not think emotion is necessarily the opposite of reason. Rather, emotion may provide much of the motivational foundation upon which moral reasoning operates. Psychological research on moral judgment increasingly treats affective and deliberative processes as interacting rather than simply placing emotion and reason on opposite sides. When I say that torturing a cat is wrong, I can give reasons for my judgment. I can explain the animal's capacity to suffer, describe the psychological effects of cruelty, discuss social norms against unnecessary violence, or argue that a society that tolerates cruelty may produce consequences that I do not want. But the fact that I can rationalize the judgment does not necessarily mean that the original motivational force came from a purely rational discovery of an objective moral property. The reasoning may be organizing, refining and communicating an underlying evaluation that is already affectively grounded.

This is also why I think the evolution of morality can be understood partly as the evolution and social organization of emotional responses. Humans did not first discover an abstract moral law and then develop emotions to help us follow it. It is at least plausible that the process worked in something closer to the opposite direction. We evolved emotional dispositions toward cooperation, attachment, reciprocity, aggression, empathy, disgust, fairness and punishment. Those tendencies interacted with our increasing cognitive and linguistic abilities, and we gradually developed increasingly sophisticated ways of expressing, negotiating and regulating them. What began as an emotional response can become a norm, the norm can become an institution, and the institution can eventually be described in abstract philosophical language.

This is where I think my earlier distinction between morality, law and social norms needs to be revised as well. I used to treat them as separate categories that emerged independently, but I increasingly think they can be understood as different levels of the same broader process. Humans experience certain things as desirable or undesirable, acceptable or unacceptable. We communicate those evaluations to one another. Groups develop shared expectations around them. Some expectations remain informal social norms. Others become stronger and more widely accepted and eventually become formalized as laws. The distinction between law and morality is therefore not necessarily a distinction in their ultimate psychological origin, but in their degree of institutionalization, enforcement and collective agreement.

Consider prostitution as a simple example. A society can have strong disagreement about whether prostitution is desirable, acceptable or harmful. One country may prohibit it, another may regulate it, and another may allow it under particular conditions. Even within a country where it is legal, a large portion of the population may still consider it morally objectionable. In that case, the legal system and the broader moral culture are expressing different levels of collective agreement. The law represents a formally institutionalized norm backed by significant sanctions, while moral and social norms can exist in areas where disagreement is greater and formal enforcement is either considered unnecessary or politically impossible.

The same structure can be seen with many forms of behavior that are legal but socially condemned. A person may behave in a way that nobody can reasonably punish through the criminal justice system, yet people can still regard the behavior as selfish, cruel, disgusting, disrespectful or immoral. The difference, under my framework, is not necessarily that one category is "really moral" and the other is not. The difference is partly one of institutionalization and enforceability. The stronger the consensus around a norm and the stronger the perceived need for collective enforcement, the more likely that norm is to become formalized as law. Norms that remain contested, difficult to enforce, or too dependent on individual values may remain within the broader categories of morality, ethics, etiquette or social convention.

I realize that this is not a perfect classification. Law and morality clearly overlap without being identical, and societies can have laws that most people consider immoral as well as moral norms that have never been written into law. I therefore do not want to reduce the distinction to a simple numerical scale of agreement. Power, institutions, history and political structures obviously matter. Still, I think there is something important in the idea that these systems share a common origin in human attempts to coordinate behavior and regulate responses to things we collectively care about.

The cat example becomes particularly interesting under this interpretation. If nobody felt discomfort at all about torturing cats, if nobody experienced empathy toward them, if nobody considered the behavior disturbing, and if there were no consequences for anyone else, it is difficult to imagine how a prohibition against torturing cats would emerge as a moral norm in the first place. There would be no emotional motivation for creating it, no social pressure to maintain it and no obvious reason for agents to spend resources enforcing it. The fact that we find the scenario disturbing is therefore not incidental to the moral judgment. It may be part of its foundation.

This is where I think the word "wrong" can become misleading. When I say, "Torturing this cat is wrong," I may feel as though I am describing something that exists in the cat-torturing act itself. But perhaps I am actually expressing something about my relationship to the act: I reject it, I am disturbed by it, I do not want it to happen, and I want other people to share that attitude. If enough people share that response, it can become a social expectation. If that expectation becomes sufficiently important and sufficiently institutionalized, it can become a legal prohibition. What looks from the inside like the discovery of a moral property may therefore be the endpoint of a much longer psychological and social process.

This also helps explain why moral disagreement can be so emotionally intense. If moral language were purely descriptive, disagreement would be closer to a disagreement about an ordinary fact. But when moral language expresses attitudes and attempts to coordinate those attitudes, disagreement becomes partly a conflict between interests, preferences and emotional responses. Stevenson emphasized precisely this social and persuasive dimension of moral language: moral judgments do not merely report attitudes but can function to influence the attitudes of others.

This does not mean that every moral disagreement is irrational or that reasoning has no role. We can give reasons for our attitudes, examine whether our beliefs are consistent, discover factual information that changes our emotional responses, and recognize contradictions within our own normative systems. A person can initially feel disgust toward something and later discover that the disgust was based on a false belief. Another person can learn more about an animal's capacity for suffering and consequently develop stronger concern for it. Our emotions are not isolated from cognition. They are shaped by what we believe, what we experience and what we learn.

This is also why I am hesitant to reduce everything to the simplistic statement that "morality is just emotion." I think that would be another oversimplification. The more interesting claim is that emotional valuation may be one of the foundations from which moral cognition develops, while reasoning, language, social learning and institutions transform those initial evaluations into increasingly complex normative systems. Morality can therefore have structure without requiring objective moral properties. We can reason about our preferences, compare them, discover contradictions, negotiate them with other people and build stable institutions around them without ever discovering an objective moral law.

And this brings me back to self-interest.

When I say that morality ultimately reflects human interests, I do not mean that every person consciously thinks, "This makes me uncomfortable, therefore I should create a moral rule against it." The process is much deeper than that. Comfort, discomfort, empathy, attachment, fear, disgust, pride, shame, belonging and the desire for social stability are themselves characteristics of the kind of organisms we are. They influence what we care about and what we are motivated to protect. If human beings had evolved without any capacity to experience distress at another person's suffering, without attachment, without empathy and without any preference for social stability, I doubt we would have developed morality in anything resembling its present form.

The same applies to animals. If humans did not experience any emotional response to animal suffering, if seeing an injured animal produced no discomfort whatsoever, if there were no attachment to companion animals and no tendency to empathize with their suffering, then I see little reason to expect humans to construct elaborate moral norms around animal welfare. The fact that we do care is therefore significant, but I interpret its significance differently from a moral realist. I see it as evidence about us, about the kinds of organisms we are and the things our minds are structured to value. I do not see it as evidence that the universe itself has assigned animals an objective moral status.

This is also why I think saying that everything ultimately comes back to self-interest needs to be understood carefully. I am not claiming that helping an animal is selfish in the ordinary sense of the word, or that a person who rescues an animal is secretly calculating personal gain. The person may genuinely care about the animal. The claim is deeper and more biological: the capacity to care, the satisfaction associated with helping, the discomfort produced by witnessing suffering and the motivation to act are all features of the organism. They exist because our brains have particular structures and motivational systems. We do not have to consciously calculate the benefit for the behavior to be connected to the interests of the organism producing it.

That is where I think the argument eventually reaches its limit. If someone tells me that there must be something beyond all of this, some objective reason why suffering matters even if no conscious being cared about it, I can listen to the argument. But at that point we are entering a metaphysical question. We are no longer simply describing how human beings actually make moral judgments. We are asking whether there is something beyond human psychology, social coordination and biological interests that makes one state of affairs objectively preferable to another.

I currently have no evidence that such a thing exists.

Perhaps it does.

But if it does, I have not yet encountered a convincing way of demonstrating it.

For now, the more modest explanation seems sufficient: we are organisms with interests, preferences and emotional responses. We live among other organisms with their own interests and responses. We experience certain things as desirable and others as disturbing. We communicate those evaluations. We negotiate them. We build norms around them. Some norms become institutions and laws. Others remain informal expectations. Over generations, these systems change as our experiences, interests, knowledge and emotional responses change.

What we call morality may therefore be less like discovering a law that was already written into the universe and more like the gradual construction of a system by beings trying to live with one another.

And if that is true, then the uncomfortable feeling I have when I imagine torturing a cat is not evidence that the universe has whispered to me that the act is objectively wrong.

It is evidence that I am the kind of organism for whom the act produces a powerful negative response.

The interesting philosophical question is what happens when millions of organisms with similar responses begin coordinating those responses, turning them into expectations, norms, institutions and eventually what they call moral truths.

That is where my current understanding of morality begins.

The alien problem

The same question becomes even stranger if we imagine encountering extraterrestrial life. Suppose an alien civilization arrives and we initially know nothing about it. We do not know whether its members are peaceful, whether they can communicate with us, whether they understand our intentions or whether they pose a serious threat. Under those conditions, humans would probably act defensively, and I do not think that would necessarily be a moral decision. It could simply be a response to uncertainty and perceived danger.

Now suppose we discover that these beings are peaceful, highly intelligent, capable of communication, capable of understanding our interests, capable of explaining their own interests, and capable of entering reciprocal agreements. At that point, I would have difficulty arguing that they are outside the moral community. Their biology would not matter. Their species would not matter. What would matter is that they possess the capacities required to participate in a normative relationship with us.

Now imagine the opposite. Suppose they are clearly sentient and capable of suffering, but completely incapable of communication, negotiation or reciprocal normative interaction. My framework would have to say that their suffering does not automatically generate a direct moral obligation. Again, I find that conclusion uncomfortable.

But discomfort is not a philosophical refutation.

It is a reason to investigate the premise producing the discomfort.

The strongest objection to my position

The strongest criticism of my current position is therefore not simply that animals suffer. It is the question of why reciprocal agency should determine moral standing at all.

I cannot answer that by saying that this is simply how I define morality. Definitions can clarify concepts, but they cannot settle substantive philosophical disputes. Someone could reasonably argue that morality is instead a system concerning how conscious beings ought to treat any beings capable of being affected by their actions. If that is the correct conception of morality, then animals could be moral patients even if they are not moral agents.

That possibility matters.

I do not want to construct a definition that excludes animals and then use that definition as proof that animals are excluded. That would be circular. The real philosophical question is whether reciprocal agency is actually a defensible foundation for moral membership.

At the moment, I think it explains an important part of morality, particularly the relationship between rights, duties, reciprocity and social cooperation. I am not yet convinced that it explains everything we mean when we use the word "moral."

Self-interest beneath moral motivation

There is another part of my position that I have probably expressed too simplistically in the past: the idea that morality ultimately comes back to self-interest. When I use the term "self-interest," I do not mean that human beings consciously calculate what they can gain from every action, nor do I mean that every apparently altruistic act is secretly selfish in the ordinary social sense. If I help a stranger, I may genuinely care about that stranger. If I rescue an animal, I may genuinely care about the animal. I do not need to consciously expect money, reputation or some other external reward for the action to be connected to my own interests.

What I mean is something more fundamental. Every action requires some motivational state within the organism that produces it. If there were absolutely no motivation to perform an action, the action would not occur. We act because something in us pushes us toward or away from a particular state. We seek things that our brains represent as desirable and avoid things that our brains represent as undesirable. Sometimes the motivation is conscious, and sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is immediate and obvious, and sometimes it is buried beneath layers of habit, emotion, social conditioning and reasoning.

This is why I use "self-interest" in a much broader sense than simply personal gain. Feeling comfortable is in my interest. Avoiding discomfort is in my interest. Experiencing satisfaction is in my interest. Avoiding fear, pain, disgust or distress is in my interest. Feeling connected to another person can be in my interest. Seeing someone I care about doing well can be in my interest because my own psychological state is affected by their well-being. Even something as apparently selfless as sacrificing myself for another person still requires a motivational architecture capable of making that sacrifice meaningful enough to act upon. If there were no motivational mechanism in the brain capable of making the other person's welfare matter to me, I would have no reason, psychologically speaking, to perform the action.

This is why I think the word "selfish" can be misleading. I am not claiming that someone who helps another person is pretending to care while secretly pursuing some material benefit. I am saying that the capacity to care about another person is itself part of the motivational structure of the individual who cares. The distinction is between the object of the motivation and the organism in which the motivation exists. I can be motivated by your happiness even though your happiness is not my happiness. The motivation nevertheless exists inside me, and my brain must represent your welfare as something worth pursuing for me to act on it.

The same reasoning applies to animals. Suppose I see a cat being tortured and experience immediate disgust and distress. I might intervene because I want the suffering to stop. I might not receive any money, social recognition or practical benefit from doing so. I might even put myself at some risk. Nevertheless, there is something in my psychological system that makes the animal's suffering matter to me. If I experienced absolutely no discomfort, empathy, disgust or other motivational response to what was happening, I would have considerably less reason to intervene. The suffering could still be objectively occurring, but it would not motivate me.

This is where the uncomfortable cat thought experiment becomes particularly important. If I imagine torturing a cat in complete isolation and feel disturbed by the scenario, that discomfort is not irrelevant to the moral judgment I subsequently make. It may actually be one of the foundations of the judgment. I experience the situation as unacceptable, I want the situation to stop, and I may then construct reasons explaining why it should stop. I can talk about suffering, cruelty, animal welfare, rights or unnecessary harm, but beneath those arguments is still a conscious organism responding to something it finds aversive.

If, hypothetically, human beings had evolved without any tendency to experience discomfort when witnessing suffering, without empathy toward other beings, without disgust toward cruelty and without any psychological reward associated with helping others, I doubt we would have developed moral systems that strongly condemn cruelty. There would be nothing psychologically motivating us to construct such norms. The cat could still suffer, but its suffering would not matter to us in the same way because nothing in our motivational architecture would make it matter.

This does not mean that emotion is the whole of morality, and it does not mean that reasoning is irrelevant. We can rationalize, generalize and organize our emotional responses. We can discover inconsistencies between our values. We can recognize that a rule we initially liked produces consequences we dislike. We can change our attitudes after learning new information. We can construct abstract principles that extend far beyond the situation that originally produced the emotional response. But the reasoning still takes place inside organisms that have motivations, preferences and interests. I do not see a need to introduce a separate metaphysical source of motivation when the motivational machinery already exists in the organism.

This is also why I think that even apparently altruistic behavior can ultimately be understood through the broader concept of self-interest without reducing it to conscious selfishness. Helping someone may give me satisfaction. Seeing someone I love happy may make me happy. Preventing suffering may reduce my own distress. Cooperating may give me a sense of belonging. Following a principle may preserve my sense of identity. Even sacrificing something important for another person can be motivated by values that are deeply integrated into my own psychological structure. In each case, the action is being produced by something that matters to the organism performing it.

I am aware that this position can easily be misunderstood as saying that altruism does not exist. That is not what I mean. Altruism can exist perfectly well as a description of the direction of behavior. If I sacrifice my resources for someone else without expecting anything in return, that can reasonably be called altruistic behavior. What I question is whether we need to posit something beyond the organism's own motivational architecture to explain why the organism performs the action. The person can genuinely value another person's welfare without there being an objective moral force outside the person compelling that valuation.

In that sense, I see self-interest as more fundamental than the usual distinction between selfishness and altruism. "Selfish" and "altruistic" describe the object or direction of a motivation, whereas self-interest, in the broader sense I am using here, describes the fact that the motivation exists within and operates through an individual organism. I can be motivated by another person's suffering, another person's happiness, an animal's welfare, the preservation of a forest, the survival of humanity or an abstract philosophical principle. In every case, the motivation ultimately has to be instantiated in my own mind if it is going to cause me to act.

This is also where my disagreement with appeals to purely objective morality becomes strongest. If someone tells me that I ought to help an animal even if I have no emotional attachment to it, no concern for its suffering, no preference for its survival, no social pressure to do so and no other motivation whatsoever, I can understand the sentence linguistically, but I struggle to identify what would make the obligation motivationally binding. If the claim is that I am obligated because the animal possesses some objective moral value independent of any conscious being's interests, then we have moved beyond psychology and social coordination into metaphysics. That may be true, but it requires an argument.

My current position is that we can explain much of morality without making that additional assumption. We are organisms with interests, and those interests include far more than money, survival or physical pleasure. They include comfort, attachment, belonging, curiosity, empathy, avoidance of distress, satisfaction, identity and countless other motivational states. We interact with other organisms who have their own interests, and because those interests sometimes conflict, we develop systems for coordinating them. Some of those systems remain personal preferences. Some become social norms. Some become moral expectations. Some become laws backed by formal sanctions.

Seen this way, morality does not need to descend from somewhere outside human life. It can emerge from human life itself. The fact that we care about something is not proof that the thing possesses objective moral value. It is evidence that we value it. And once enough of us value it, communicate that valuation and organize our behavior around it, it can become part of the moral structure of a society.

That does not make the resulting values imaginary. They can become extraordinarily real in their consequences. People can die for them, kill for them, build institutions around them and spend centuries arguing about them. But their reality may be the reality of psychologically and socially constructed values rather than the reality of mind-independent moral facts.

This is ultimately why I keep returning to the idea that morality is rooted in self-interest. Not because I think human beings are secretly selfish in the everyday sense, and not because I think compassion is fake. I think compassion is real. I think love is real. I think empathy is real. What I question is whether we need something beyond the organism experiencing those things to explain why they motivate us.

If my brain did not care, I would not act.

If my brain did not experience discomfort, I would not try to eliminate it.

If my brain did not find helping others rewarding in some form, I would have less reason to help them.

If my brain did not value social stability, cooperation would be much harder to sustain.

And if humans had never developed the psychological mechanisms that make certain things matter to us, I doubt that the moral systems built around those things would ever have emerged.

Perhaps, then, the deepest layer of morality is not an abstract principle existing outside us, but the much simpler fact that things matter to conscious organisms. We then take those interests, put them into language, negotiate them with other organisms like ourselves, generalize them into principles, and eventually give the whole structure the name "morality."

That is the sense in which I mean that everything ultimately comes back to self-interest. Not selfishness. Not greed. Not conscious calculation. Interest in the broadest possible sense: the things an organism is motivated to approach, preserve, avoid or change because of the way that organism is constituted.

And perhaps that is enough to explain why a tortured cat bothers us.

Morality, law and power

Another problem I still need to resolve is the distinction between morality and law. Both involve rules, both can be socially enforced, both can change over time, and both can be influenced by institutions and power. Yet we clearly do not consider them identical. Something can be legal and still be considered immoral, while something can be illegal without people necessarily believing that it is morally wrong.

This becomes even more complicated when we introduce unequal power. What happens when a powerful group imposes its preferences on a weaker group? What happens when ninety percent of a society benefits from something that harms the remaining ten percent? Does a norm become moral simply because it is socially dominant?

I do not have a completely satisfying answer to this yet.

I can explain how power influences institutions. I can explain how dominant groups can establish norms that benefit themselves. I can explain how minorities resist those norms and how moral systems can change as the distribution of interests and power changes. But explanation is not justification, and this distinction creates a genuine problem for any theory that tries to explain morality primarily through social agreement or coordination.

This is one of the areas where I expect my own framework to change as I continue working on it.

So what has actually changed since 2021?

Interestingly, the basic intuition behind my earlier article has not changed as much as the terminology and precision around it.

In 2021, I wrote that morality was a human construction and that I did not believe animals generated a direct moral obligation toward us. I still broadly hold that position. What has changed is that I no longer think it is sufficient to say that morality is simply an agreement between humans.

There are several layers involved. There is the biological layer of organisms trying to survive and reproduce. There is the psychological layer of desire, fear, empathy, attachment, aggression and cooperation. There is the social layer of repeated interactions, reputation, reciprocity, punishment and trust. There is the institutional layer of law, government, religion, customs and social structures. There is the philosophical layer where humans begin asking what these systems mean and whether they are justified.

Then there is the metaethical question underneath all of them: are any of these moral values actually objective?

I currently do not think they are.

But I also recognize that I have not demonstrated this conclusively.

Why I am still writing about this

This is also why I am writing this article now rather than simply repeating what I wrote five years ago. I have been working on these questions for years, including through the drafts of the book I have been writing. The process of writing a book has changed the way I think because having an idea in your head is very different from having to put it into a sustained argument.

When an idea exists only in your head, it is easy to move between intuitions without noticing the missing steps. You can use the same word in several different senses without realizing it. You can dismiss an objection because the conclusion feels wrong without examining whether the argument actually fails. You can think you have solved a problem when you have merely found a formulation that feels satisfying.

Writing forces those weaknesses into the open.

That is one reason I keep returning to these questions. I am not trying to construct a philosophical system that cannot be challenged. I am trying to construct one that can survive being challenged. If it cannot, I would rather discover that while writing than after spending years defending something I never properly examined.

Where I currently stand

At the moment, the framework I am working with is roughly this: I do not currently believe that moral values exist as objective, mind-independent properties of reality. I see morality instead as a human and social phenomenon that developed within a species whose survival and flourishing depend heavily on cooperation, coordination and relationships with other agents.

Moral systems are therefore constructed, transmitted, modified and enforced by communities. They regulate conflicting interests, establish expectations, define boundaries, distribute rights and responsibilities, and provide mechanisms for responding to violations. Their content is historically contingent, their institutions are shaped by power, and their rules can change as the interests and circumstances of a society change.

Within this framework, reciprocal agency appears to be an important condition for direct participation in morality. An agent does not need to agree with every norm, but it needs to possess the relevant capacities for participating in normative relationships. Non-agents can still be protected by moral and legal norms, but those norms are created by agents rather than necessarily originating from the protected being itself.

That is the part of the framework that matters most to my disagreement with strong forms of vegan ethics. I am not denying that animals suffer. I am not denying that their suffering can matter deeply to us. I am not denying that a society can reasonably decide that unnecessary animal suffering should be prohibited. What I question is the additional claim that animal suffering, simply by existing, creates a universal moral obligation independently of any human normative framework.

Maybe it does.

But that conclusion requires an argument.

I might be wrong (And probably I am)

I want to end with the qualification that runs through most of my philosophical thinking: I might be wrong.

I do not mean that as a polite disclaimer. I mean it literally. I am not certain that moral anti-realism is correct. I am not certain that reciprocal agency is the correct boundary of the moral community. I am not certain that suffering fails to generate moral obligations independently of human agreement. I am not certain that my explanation of how morality developed is complete.

What I am more confident about is that these questions need to be separated from one another. Whether an animal suffers is one question. Whether suffering has value is another. Whether that value generates an obligation is another. Whether obligations require reciprocity is another. Whether morality itself is objective is another. Whether a particular moral system is desirable or useful is another.

When all of these questions are compressed into a statement such as "animals suffer, therefore eating animals is immoral," an enormous amount of philosophical reasoning disappears between the premise and the conclusion.

That is the part I want to examine.

Perhaps I will eventually conclude that the vegan is right. Perhaps I will conclude that my current framework only needs some modifications. Perhaps I will discover that the distinction between moral agents and moral patients is fundamentally mistaken. I genuinely do not know.

And that uncertainty is not something I want to eliminate merely for the sake of having a conclusion.

Five years ago, I thought I had reached an answer. Today, I think I had only reached the beginning of the question.

Maybe that is one of the few things I have become more certain about.

The purpose of philosophy, at least for me, is not to manufacture certainty where none exists. It is to keep pushing an idea until I can no longer distinguish between what I actually know, what I merely assume, and what I want to be true.

This question is still open.

And I intend to keep pulling at it.

A Disclaimer!
This piece took approximately 38 days to write, rewrite, revisit, and refine. The ideas themselves have been developing for years as part of the book I’ve been working on for the past five years. I shared earlier versions with friends and others to challenge the arguments and identify weaknesses before publishing it.

I also want to be transparent about my use of AI. I used AI as an editing tool to correct grammar, improve phrasing, and clarify sentences. The ideas, arguments, reflections, and substance of this piece are my own. AI did not generate the philosophical content of this article.

This article is a brief glimpse into a much larger philosophical project. The book explores these questions in considerably greater detail and within the broader context of my philosophy of life.

 

Definitions used in this framework

The following are working definitions for the concepts used throughout this article. They are not intended as universally accepted definitions, but as clarifications of what I mean when I use these terms in the context of this particular framework.

Morality: A system of norms governing how moral agents ought to behave toward one another, emerging from their interests, preferences, emotional responses, social interactions and attempts to coordinate behavior within a community. In this framework, morality is not an objective property of the universe. It is a human or, more broadly, agent-generated system that develops through interaction, negotiation, shared attitudes and social enforcement.

Moral agent: A being capable of participating in normative relationships: understanding or responding to relevant norms, communicating interests, recognizing the interests of others, making commitments, reciprocating, and participating in agreements or disagreements concerning how agents should coexist. Moral agency is therefore not necessarily synonymous with being human.

Moral patient: A being that can be affected by the actions of moral agents but does not itself possess the relevant capacities for reciprocal normative participation. Animals, infants and some severely impaired individuals may fall into this category depending on the particular circumstances. Being a moral patient does not automatically establish an objective moral obligation toward that being within this framework.

Moral community: The community of agents capable of participating, directly or indirectly, in a shared normative system. Membership is not necessarily determined by biological species, but by the capacity to participate in reciprocal normative relationships.

Moral obligation: A norm regarded as binding within a particular moral framework or community. In this framework, an obligation is not an absolute or mind-independent requirement imposed by the universe. It is a normative requirement that emerges from the relationships, interests, agreements, expectations and enforcement mechanisms of a community of agents.

Moral standing: The status of being considered directly relevant to the moral deliberations of a community. Within this framework, moral standing is primarily associated with participation in the moral community, although agents can extend moral protection to beings that do not themselves participate in it.

Self-interest: Not merely selfishness, greed or conscious personal gain. Here, self-interest refers broadly to the interests and motivational states of an organism: what it is motivated to approach, preserve, obtain, avoid or change. Comfort, safety, attachment, belonging, satisfaction, curiosity, empathy and the avoidance of distress can all constitute forms of self-interest in this broader sense.

Emotion: An affective state that influences perception, evaluation, motivation and behavior. Within this framework, emotions are not treated as the opposite of reason, but as an important part of the psychological machinery through which organisms develop preferences and respond to the world.

Emotivism: The metaethical view that moral judgments do not primarily describe objective moral properties but express attitudes, approval, disapproval or other evaluative responses, and can function to influence the attitudes and behavior of others. In this framework, emotivism helps explain how subjective emotional responses can become shared moral norms without requiring objective moral facts.

Moral norm: A socially recognized expectation concerning how agents should behave. A moral norm may originate in individual emotional responses or interests and become increasingly stable through communication, social reinforcement, shared expectations and collective agreement.

Social norm: A socially maintained expectation about behavior that does not necessarily carry the same degree of moral significance or institutional enforcement as a moral norm. Social norms can concern etiquette, customs, appearance, language, manners and other forms of expected conduct.

Law: A formally institutionalized and enforceable norm established by a political or governing authority. In this framework, law and morality are related but not identical. Laws represent norms that have acquired formal institutional recognition and mechanisms of enforcement, while many moral norms remain informal or contested.

Agreement: Not necessarily an explicit contract or conscious verbal acceptance. In this framework, agreement can be implicit, gradual or socially inherited. It refers to sufficient convergence among agents regarding expectations, interests or rules governing their interactions.

Reciprocity: The mutual exchange of expectations, benefits, restrictions or obligations between agents. Reciprocity is central to this framework because moral systems arise primarily within relationships in which agents can affect one another and respond to one another's behavior.

Suffering: A negatively experienced conscious state, including experiences such as pain, distress or fear. This framework accepts suffering as a real phenomenon but does not automatically infer from its existence that an objective moral obligation exists to prevent it.

Empathy: The capacity to respond to, understand or be affected by the emotional or experiential states of another being. Empathy can contribute to the development of moral norms, but empathy itself is not considered equivalent to moral obligation.

Value: Something regarded by a conscious organism or community as desirable, undesirable, important, preferable or worth preserving. In this framework, value is dependent upon valuing beings rather than existing as an independent property of the universe.

Objective value: A value that would exist independently of any conscious being's attitudes, preferences or interests. This framework currently rejects the existence of objective moral value, although this remains a philosophical position rather than an empirically established fact.

Subjective value: A value that exists because a conscious being or community values something. Subjective does not mean meaningless or arbitrary. Subjective values can be deeply important, widely shared and capable of producing real psychological, social and institutional consequences.

Moral realism: The position that at least some moral facts or properties exist objectively and independently of human attitudes or conventions.

Moral anti-realism: The broad family of positions denying that objective, mind-independent moral facts exist in the way moral realism proposes. The framework presented here is broadly anti-realist, although it should not be understood as claiming that every form of anti-realism is correct.

Moral relativism: The view that the truth or validity of moral judgments depends upon a particular individual, culture, society, framework or standpoint. This framework should not be confused with the simple claim that "whatever a society believes is automatically correct." It is instead concerned with how normative systems emerge within particular communities and from particular interests.

Moral disagreement: A conflict between agents or communities concerning the norms, values or principles that should govern behavior. Within this framework, disagreement does not necessarily indicate that one side has failed to recognize an objective moral fact. It can represent a genuine conflict between interests, preferences, emotional responses, social structures or normative frameworks.

Moral progress: A change in a moral system that is considered desirable according to the values and interests of the agents evaluating that change. Because this framework rejects objective moral values, "progress" cannot mean movement toward a universally existing moral truth. It means movement toward a normative arrangement that agents have stronger reasons to prefer.

Normative system: The broader structure of rules, expectations, values, permissions, prohibitions and sanctions through which a community regulates behavior. Morality, social norms and law can therefore be understood as different forms or levels of normative organization.

Metaethics: The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and status of moral claims themselves. Rather than asking "Is killing wrong?", metaethics asks questions such as "What does 'wrong' mean?", "Are moral facts objective?", and "What would make a moral obligation binding?"

Descriptive claim: A claim about how something is, what happens, or how a system actually functions. For example, "Humans punish individuals who violate certain social norms" is a descriptive claim.

Normative claim: A claim about what ought to be done, what should be valued, or how an agent should behave. For example, "People should not torture animals" is a normative claim.

This distinction is particularly important to my argument. Explaining how morality developed does not automatically justify a particular moral system. Saying that humans evolved emotional responses to suffering is a descriptive claim. Saying that we therefore ought to prevent suffering is a normative claim. The second does not automatically follow from the first.

These definitions describe the framework as I currently understand it. They are provisional rather than absolute, and I expect some of them to change as I continue developing the broader philosophical project.