William Lane Craig -- Christian philosopher and well-known Christian apologist – has recently argued that God shielded the animal kingdom from an awareness of pain. Some readers, including someone named Mark from the United Kingdom, believed that Craig was undermining the basis for designating moral consideration upon animals. Craig, responding to this objection, maintained that a theistic accounting is sufficient to establish moral consideration of animals, but notes for atheists and naturalists that there does not seem to be “any basis whatsoever for ethical standards for the treatment of animals.”
Craig writes, “Given naturalism, why think that human beings have any objective moral duties toward other animals? Why is it wrong for humans, who are just relatively advanced primates, to inflict pain on other animals?” Craig also notes, “The theist enjoys the advantage that the ethical treatment of animals can be grounded in God’s commands to human beings to be good stewards of the Earth.”
Naturalists -- those who believe that the natural world is all that exists -- need not appeal to objective moral duties or any supernatural entities in order to justify reasons for establishing ethical standards for the treatment of animals and seem to be no better poised than theists to do the same; whether one believes in anything supernatural, it seems, has no bearing on whether one can establish ethical standards for the treatment of animals.
Appealing to emotions in animals such as grief, relationships that animals build, the problem-solving ability of animals and other similarities between humans and animals that are noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the moral status of animals can establish why humans should believe that animals are worthy of moral consideration and should view the suffering of animals, whether animals realize they are suffering or not, as undesirable.
The article explains, “Animals that develop life-long bonds are known to suffer terribly from the death of their partners” and “It appears then that most of the capacities that are thought to distinguish humans as morally considerable beings, have been observed, often in less elaborate form, in the non-human world. Because human behavior and cognition share deep roots with the behavior and cognition of other animals, approaches that try to find sharp behavioral or cognitive boundaries between humans and other animals remain controversial.”
If animals possess many of the characteristics that humans possess which grant humans moral consideration, atheists seem to have a firm grounding for granting moral consideration to animals. Craig additionally notes, in his recent response, that “sentient animals do experience […] pain, which should not be needlessly inflicted.” On this basis alone, it seems – and/or with other considerations – persons appear to be well-grounded in having a basis for granting moral considerations toward animals regardless of whether they believe a god exists or not.
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