Singer’s book Animal Liberation [2] and the numerous emotion-driven campaigns for animal protection and animal rights deserve credit for having created the public awareness that was necessary to induce policy makers to pass legislation designed to reduce unnecessary animal suffering. However, it may have also led to a sort of ethical overshooting or hypermoralism, as it manifests itself in Critical Animal Studies (CAS), an increasingly popular subject in the humanities. CAS scholars have been criticized for their implicit misconceptions and anthropomorphism that are also partially found in Singer’s original work [34].

However, is there an alternative in animal ethics one may consider of equal value and more in line with the realities in the practical world? The philosopher Baruch de Spinoza may be a candidate. Even though he lived three centuries before Singer, his approach to ethics has not lost any of its relevance and his description of human nature has been largely validated empirically by recent insights in neuroscience [35], experimental anthropology [36], and moral psychology [37].

Spinoza addressed animal rights concerns in Ethics, his most famous book [38]. Unlike his contemporary, Descartes, he did not regard animals merely as biological machines but understood them as sentient creatures that experience pleasure and pain [39]. One may therefore assume that Spinoza would have agreed with Singer’s demand to assign equal consideration of the treatment of animals. However, Spinoza does not display much sympathy for this idea in the paragraph on the slaughtering of animals in part IV of Ethics [39]. According to Spinoza, the nature of animals is different from the one of humans insofar as humans can make use of reason to embark on collective action. It enables them to convert nature into culture thanks to a unique form of shared intentionality that was not observed in any other animal [36].

In their universal desire to remain in existence, humans depend on the care of as well as on the cooperation with other humans. Humans also care for their domesticated animals and a relationship of mutual affection may exist in many cases. Yet, even though it is reasonable to treat these animals in a way that does not cause unnecessary suffering, they have been domesticated for a particular purpose, namely, to supply animal-based resources. Accessing these resources may require the slaughtering of animals. In this context, Spinoza argues that making use of animal resources is justified because humans need to meet their needs as much as omnivore animals need to meet their needs in the wilderness. Therefore, he argues that “We have the same right against them that they would have against us” [38]. This indeed raises the question why we regard the killing of an animal by a human as morally problematic, but not so when an animal kills a human. It reveals a misconception that is related to the unquestioned anthropomorphism in Singer’s term ‘Speciesism’ [2]. The term was used by Singer to point at our bias to merely care about the interests of those whom we consider belonging to our own species. However, from an anthropological point of view, humans had to limit their moral concerns to the human community on which their existence depended. That was also the realm in which they were able to assume responsibility in an effective way.

3. Global Humanitarianism Applied to Animal Welfare

The normative nature of the debates on animal welfare and animal rights in academia and society has led to a growing climate of intolerance toward more differentiated views that point at potential inconvenient trade-offs between costly domestic animal welfare measures and a growing share of import of animal proteins from countries with minimal or no animal protection laws.

The growing climate of intolerance also suggests that there is just one way that is morally acceptable: Since animals have the right not to be treated as property by humans, we should stop raising animals as property that is subsequently turned into meat products [48]. A meat-free society is assumed to be possible because meat consumption would be merely a tradition that does not meet any essential human needs anymore in the sense that there are ways to replace animal proteins through plant-based resources [48]. Such a view does not take into account that raising animals and using them as a ‘mobile’ asset for various purposes has always been an essential part of what makes us human, and still today, numerous nomadic tribes, who actually represent increasingly vulnerable minorities, make a living from owning, raising, consuming, and selling cattle.

In this context, raising animals goes far beyond meat consumption and the implied default scenario that ‘liberated’ animals would be free from pain is misleading. Domesticated animals have become dependent on being managed by humans. As such, they are also a product of human culture and this explains why we care about them—not just because they serve a particular use. Our specific obligations toward animals therefore entail treating them with respect and ensuring their well-being, while they exist, by continuously minimizing unnecessary suffering, also when ending their lives [49]. However, the responsible treatment of animals in everyday life is hardly a concern in the theoretical discussions on animal rights in academia.

Due to the detachment of real-world challenges in animal welfare, the academic debate is primarily about radical political demands, such as the call to end meat consumption, for example. This call has gained in popularity especially among ordinary young people who have grown up in affluence and are increasingly concerned about climate change and animal welfare. They are aware that such demands will be ineffective if the legal enforcement is limited to the nation state. As a consequence, they unite worldwide via social media with individuals and organizations who share similar concerns. As global movements, they are then able to put pressure on governments and international organizations to respond to their radical demands [50].

This type of global humanitarianism applied to animal welfare emphasizes the importance of giving every organism equal consideration, respect and dignity, as the Swiss constitution does. It reflects a shift of norms and values in an affluent post-material society that greatly benefited from economic globalization, and in which cooperation within the immediate community to meet essential material needs is no longer required. As a consequence, the perceived moral obligation in such societies becomes more abstract and utopic. It is no more about loyalty and solidarity within the community into which one was been born by fate. Instead, what used to be the norms and values that enabled cooperation within the extended nuclear family and the community in which it thrives, is now increasingly applied to every living sentient being on the planet, with special consideration to the vulnerable minorities, endangered species, and animals in captivity [43].

However, such an extension of morality from community to sentient beings at large may however not lead to less suffering by humans and animals in this world, but rather to the release of more aggression as a consequence of moral radicalization. According to Gehlen [51], ignoring the pluralistic nature of ethics and imposing a single abstract and universal concept of morality on the real world would ultimately require the destruction of the existing real world that is presumed to be governed by inferior types of morality or no morality at all. Throughout history, such attempts proved to increase rather than decrease human suffering because these abstract ethical concepts ignore the biological roots of morality [52,53]. Fairness and reciprocity are built-in human instincts that are linked more to our emotions and our unconscious than to our ability to reason and make conscious decisions [54]. Unlike classical normative ethics with its classical branches (de-ontic, consequentialist, discursive), the field of anthropology takes these scientific insights into account in its reasoning about the origins and the genesis of ethical principles that guide human action [37,55].

By developing an ethical approach that is based on the proper understanding of human nature, the anthropological approach to ethics is not normative [56]. It challenges the view that contemplating on how the world “ought to be” can be detached from a proper understanding on how the world actually “is”. As such, it is very much in line with the ethics of Spinoza [38]. It questions the normative view that moral behavior is unrelated to the human pursuit of enlightened self-interest.

As such, the anthropological approach to ethics is more practical, humane, and more aligned with the recent science-based insights on animal domestication gathered from the various fields of evolutionary sciences, such as genetics, archeology, and the study of the Anthropocene [57,58,59].

4. Niche Construction Theory (NCT) and Its Relevance for the Ethical Debate on Animal Welfare

The American evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin [89] was one of the first who argued that organisms do not just put up and adapt to any given external environment but rather actively shape it by constructing niches and habitats that are conducive to their needs. His argument eventually gave rise to the so-called human niche construction theory. It diverges from standard evolutionary theory (SET) in the sense that it recognizes that the evolution of organisms is not just guided by natural selection, but, in fact, co-directed by the ability of organisms to create niches [90,91]. In other words, offspring inherit not only genes, but also a modified locally selective environment relative to genetic fitness. Since niche construction is based to a great extent on biological mutualism, it is not just an adaptive response to resource depression, but also contains an active component [59]. Further, it is better able to explain why domestication and agriculture may have different regional trajectories with domestication often taking place at a much earlier stage [85,86,87,88,89,90].

In this context, the Cultural Niche Construction (CNC) by humans is especially powerful because it can rely on the inheritance of cultural knowledge, which is then partially transformed and passed on through numerous forms of social transmission and economic exchange [59,91]. The use of new instruments and technologies in archeology and genetics enabled the creation of high-resolution regional-scale records that support the emerging CNC hypothesis and challenge the single-factor explanatory frameworks as represented by the prime-mover accounts [59]. After all, the ability of humans to cooperate through shared intentionality [36] and to modify behaviors and pass them on through cultural transmission make them the “ultimate niche constructors”. This may also be what the philosopher Spinoza meant when he referred to the unique ability of humans to make use of reason [38]. As such, these empirical findings may again help enrich the ethical debate on animal welfare, since they challenge the popular view that animal domestication was a zero-sum game benefiting exclusively humans at the expense of domesticated animals. They also challenge the strictly normative orientation in the ethical debate and suggest a more naturalistic approach recognizing the impact of the extension of human cooperation on the evolution of moral thinking [34,35,36,37,92].

This cultural and economic expansion of human culture through trade and exchange since the emergence of early civilizations also shifted the perception of humans on the question of who deserves equal moral treatment. The extension of mutual dependence from the small nuclear family/community toward supra-regional networks of cooperation also led to a more inclusive understanding of moral thinking. In the age of globalization, t view that “we are all in the same boat” and therefore share the same fate moved from immediate kinship-based networks to life on this planet in general, and with it. This may help explain the popular contemporary demand for equal moral treatment of humans and sentient animals in general [93], as expressed by representatives of global humanitarianism. Consequently, global humanitarianism would not be possible without prior economic globalization. For early humans who made a living as hunters and gatherers, the idea of extending equal moral treatment toward humans beyond their kinship-based clan and as well as animals would not have made sense. This should not be interpreted as a sort of ‘moral inferiority’, but rather as a reflection of the different conditions in which life had to be mastered [93].

5. Concluding Remarks

The recent findings in anthropological research may help introduce a new type of ethics that is better informed about ‘the cooperative human’ [106], the distinct forms of mutualism found in the evolution of human–animal relationships and the importance of the historical and geographical context. As such, the emphasis of the anthropological perspective is more on the ethics of inclusiveness [101,102]. The demand for inclusive and sustainable growth is also one of the main pillars of the UN SDGs. If the remaining ten years to achieve the ambitious Agenda 2030 is really meant to become a ‘decade of action’, as the UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierres called it, then we may have to embrace this new ethical approach, because it is focused on effective outcomes in the world of practice.