Octopuses are solitary creatures and thus plausibly will never experience true friendship or love.
Maybe if you drug them. And if drug effects do not count towards someone’s capacities, this might have important moral consequences in cases of mental illness in humans, like depression.
Possibly, they tend to be solitary due to zero-sum competition, and this happens to be circumstantial. See how this octopus and human interact.
Also, mother octopuses often die protecting their eggs, although I’m not aware of them raising their young.
Of course, maybe love and friendship aren’t good ways to describe these. Maybe octopuses are more like bees than cows in their maternalism.
If moral agency is a requirement for virtue, fish plausibly cannot be virtuous.
I think this would depend on how narrowly you define agency. If it requires abstract reasoning, maybe not? I think a case could be made for cleaner wrasses, who seem to pass a version of the mirror test and have complex social behaviours. Maybe groupers and moray eels, too, because of their cooperation in hunting?
Thanks for the comment. The examples are purely illustrative, so it’s probably best not to wrangle over the specifics of cleaner wrasse behavior and octopus drug responses. I think it’s plausible there are some creatures that by virtue of their natural solitary behavior are incapable of developing intimate bonds with other animals. And although definitions of moral agency certainly vary, I find it plausible that many animals are moral patients but not moral agents. If those two claims are right, then it shows that objective list theories of welfare predict differences in capacity for welfare, which is the point I aim to make in the text.
Maybe if you drug them. And if drug effects do not count towards someone’s capacities, this might have important moral consequences in cases of mental illness in humans, like depression.
Possibly, they tend to be solitary due to zero-sum competition, and this happens to be circumstantial. See how this octopus and human interact.
Also, mother octopuses often die protecting their eggs, although I’m not aware of them raising their young.
Of course, maybe love and friendship aren’t good ways to describe these. Maybe octopuses are more like bees than cows in their maternalism.
I think this would depend on how narrowly you define agency. If it requires abstract reasoning, maybe not? I think a case could be made for cleaner wrasses, who seem to pass a version of the mirror test and have complex social behaviours. Maybe groupers and moray eels, too, because of their cooperation in hunting?
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comment. The examples are purely illustrative, so it’s probably best not to wrangle over the specifics of cleaner wrasse behavior and octopus drug responses. I think it’s plausible there are some creatures that by virtue of their natural solitary behavior are incapable of developing intimate bonds with other animals. And although definitions of moral agency certainly vary, I find it plausible that many animals are moral patients but not moral agents. If those two claims are right, then it shows that objective list theories of welfare predict differences in capacity for welfare, which is the point I aim to make in the text.