Millions of animals die on roads – does this make driving morally wrong?
Imagine one morning, you are deciding whether to drive to work or catch the train. Eventually, you decide to drive. On your way to the office, a squirrel crosses the road leaving you no time to react, and you run it over. Did you do anything wrong by deciding to drive instead of taking the train?
Ethical debates about the morality of driving tend to stop at the possible harm to humans. This is surprising, considering the decades of work in animal ethics and the fact that around 223 million birds and mammals are killed on Europe’s roads each year.
Researchers in moral philosophy like myself analyse the extent to which our actions are right or wrong. One way to evaluate actions like driving is to ask whether it is morally justified to subject others to a certain risk. Driving fits this kind of reasoning because when we decide to drive, we are not certain that we will kill someone (human or non-human), but we know our action will put others at some risk of harm.
So, how much risk is permissible? There are two factors moral philosophers often use to assess this. The first is the extent to which the action that puts others at risk is part of a fair social system of risk-taking – in other words, a social arrangement in which people exchange risks but also benefits that everyone can access. The second concerns whether such a system works to the advantage of all those who participate in it.
Driving can be considered a social system of risk-taking, and it would be considered morally acceptable if everyone can drive or be driven by other people, and if the system of driving ultimately benefits those who are put at risk by it.
Some philosophers believe that in the case of humans, this line of reasoning makes driving morally acceptable. But what if we extend it to include animals?
A car through a deer’s eyes
Cats, dogs and other domestic animals may ride in cars but most wild animals will not, so they do not meet the first factor. The sheer number of animals that end their lives as roadkill indicates that driving does not work to their advantage. For most animals, cars are a threat rather than a benefit.
Driving, in this case, would not be morally acceptable according to the ethical test we set for our fellow humans.
Car travel has contributed to the decline of some species.
Natalya Ugryumova/Shutterstock
This may lead us to consider our risk of killing animals before we drive – including the road we will use, the season, or the speed we will drive at. It may even tell us that driving is morally impermissible.
One way to deny this would be to say that to forgo driving is too costly. For many people, driving is not an activity they can choose to do or not, but a basic need on which people depend for going to (or finding) a job, buying groceries, or visiting friends and family.
But even if we think these costs are important, what about the serious costs to animals? When we consider both of these factors, some tentative conclusions emerge.
Situations in which driving imposes a high risk of harm to animals, while not driving causes little cost to humans, probably make driving unacceptable. Take this scenario: your route to work during summer crosses congregations of house sparrows during the season in which they breed. Luckily, there is a convenient alternative.
Then there are situations in which driving imposes almost no risk to animals, but not being able to drive deeply affects people – such as a drive to the other side of a city to buy food, during which few wild animals are likely to cross your path. In such cases, driving is probably permissible.
But what about the various situations that sit between these two scenarios? In a lot of cases, driving is not necessary but may be more convenient than using public transport. Also, much of our driving is not done for essential activities but for things we generally enjoy.
Finding clear criteria that determine when it is morally acceptable to drive is the matter that ethicists should try to elucidate. All I can say is that all sets of costs and risks need assessing, and driving must be viewed as an activity subject to ethical reflection.
Drivers will need to decide, balancing the risk of harm they might impose on others by driving with the disadvantages of choosing not to drive. It should not come as a surprise, however, if we find that much of our driving is morally unjustified.
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