ABSTRACT
Heuristics are unconscious strategies that we all use to speed up our thinking. In some cases, these are effective, and in others, they can lead to inconsistencies in judgments. Further, it has been suggested that there is a set of moral heuristics that functions in the same way when we are making moral judgements. One way in which we often make moral judgments using heuristics is when we are deciding on what is natural. Put another way, some things just seem “more natural” than others. For example, we might see eating poultry as natural, but genetically engineering the chickens used in factory farming as unnatural, even if the genetic engineering was done to lessen their suffering. In this chapter, we explore how these moral heuristics function in the case of determining animal naturalness and explore their implications in terms of how we think about and interact with animals. In a broad sense, it appears that different people make different decisions regarding what is and is not natural.
