The Opposition to Animal Enhancement

In 2008, Paul Thompson published the seminal article ‘The opposite of human enhancement: Nanotechnology and the blind chicken problem,’ kick-starting a lively debate among animal ethicists. In this article, Thompson argued that disenhancing animals in order to counter welfare problems resulting from livestock farming poses a moral dilemma: While disenhancement could improve the plight of animals, at the same time it raises the strong intuition that it is unethical. One of the underlying disagreements in the debate that ensued appears to be about the question of whether we should think about animal disenhancement from the standpoint of ideal or non-ideal ethical theory. According to Thompson (in The vanishing ethics of husbandry. In Bovenkerk B, Keulartz J (eds) Animals in our midst: the challenges of co-existing with animals in the Anthropocene. Springer, pp 203–221, 2021) and others, realistically, intensive livestock production and associated production diseases will remain for the foreseeable future and disenhancing animals can alleviate a great deal of suffering. Ideal theorists, on the other hand, tend to think there is something wrong with (intensive) animal husbandry in principle and discussing how to make marginal welfare improvements is not addressing the underlying problem. In this contribution, I argue that we need both ideal and non-ideal theory approaches, and I explore a possible objection to animal disenhancement, based on relational theory.