A Harean Perspective on Humane Sustainability

Animal well-being must be a primary normative consideration in a conception of humane sustainability. The two-level utilitarianism of R.M. Hare embodies aspects of both animal welfare and animal rights views, and in this paper I illustrate its application to questions about what counts as humane sustainability. Hare’s theory is highly controversial, and a thorough defense of it is beyond the scope of this paper, but the insightful way it provides of assessing various visions of humane sustainability testifies to the explanatory and analytic power of the theory. In particular, on a Harean analysis, it makes sense to distinguish among “prelapsarian,” “contemporary,” and “utopian” visions of humane sustainability.