Integrity as Bonitas

In Chapter 3 we looked at the notions of integrity and animal dignity as they were used in Article 120 of the revised Swiss Constitution and in the Dutch Animal Health and Welfare Act. We saw similarities and differences in the interpretation of these two notions. We have also seen, though, that integrity is a normative term, just like dignity, and that the notion of biological integrity rests on the assumption that every living being has a good of its own (though it does not logically follow from it). Not only are there, by virtue of what each of these organisms is, certain actions they are meant to perform and thus a certain kind of life they are meant to live. This life and the biological conditions that make it possible are also good for that living being. ‘Good’ is here to be understood in a basic sense that cannot be translated into positive subjective experience or even an absence of negative subjective experience, that is, pain and other forms of unhappiness or suffering. Note again that it is not conceptually required to link what is good for an organism to any form of subjective experience of it as being good. Assuming otherwise would be committing a Moorean naturalistic fallacy. Since, as G.E. Moore1 has demonstrated, the meaning of the term ‘good’ cannot be identified with any natural quality (such as pleasant), it is always theoretically possible that something possesses this quality without being good, or lacks this quality and yet is good. This might not in fact be the case but whether or not it is cannot be decided purely on the grounds of a conceptual analysis. Since this basic goodness is also assumed and emphasized in the notion of animal dignity, biological integrity and the dignity of creation – which we can understand as the dignity of living organisms as living organisms – may be, in respect to their meaning and rhetoric function, not so different after all.