What Is Wrong with Eating Pets? Wittgensteinian Animal Ethics and Its Need for Empirical Data

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Wittgensteinian ethicists argue that we should not rely on a set of principles if we want to know how to treat non-human animals. Instead, we should look at how we witness and encounter animals in our lives. We admire wild animals, we feed our pets, and we cure them as patients. For Wittgensteinian animal ethicists, moral reflection should start from these ways of thinking about animals. However, our understanding of animals can change depending on context and circumstance. Not everyone thinks about animals in the same way. It is, therefore, important that Wittgensteinian animal ethicists are informed about the ways that people think about animals. We argue that this information should come from data gathered by social sciences such as sociology, psychology or anthropology. ABSTRACT: Wittgensteinian approaches to animal ethics highlight the significance of practical concepts like ‘pet’, ‘patient’, or ‘companion’ in shaping our understanding of how we should treat non-human animals. For Wittgensteinian animal ethicists, moral principles alone cannot ground moral judgments about our treatment of animals. Instead, moral reflection must begin with acknowledging the practical relations that tie us to animals. Morality emerges within practical contexts. Context-dependent conceptualisations form our moral outlook. In this paper, we argue that Wittgensteinians should, for methodological reasons, pay more attention to empirical data from the social sciences such as sociology, psychology or anthropology. Such data can ground Wittgensteinians’ moral inquiry and thereby render their topical views more dialectically robust.