1 *PENULTIMATE DRAFT* Moral Animals? A Review of Mark Rowlands’ Can Animals be Moral? by Dan Hooley The topic of animals and morality is something of a burgeoning field, with many different disciplines contributing: from cognitive ethology, evolutionary biology, and social neuroscience, to moral psychology and philosophy. Ethologists studying animal behavior have investigated and explored the presence of seemingly moral or proto‐moral emotions and behavior in other animals. Others have focused on the historical evolution of morality, giving plenty of attention to how other animals fit into this evolution. Amidst this work, some scientists and philosophers have begun to argue that animals can act morally, with differing understandings of this claim. It is in this context that we find Mark Rowlands’ excellent book, Can Animals be Moral? While other philosophers and scientists have addressed this question, few have tackled it with the same clarity, detail, and systematicity that Rowlands does. The focus of Rowland’s book, it is worth stating at the outset, is not empirical: he does not investigate or analyze the behavior of actual animals to see if they act on the basis of moral emotions or concern for others. So, with the exception of some initial examples from this literature, you won’t find many studies or stories about elephants, dolphins, apes, or other social mammals acting morally. Instead, Rowlands’ focus is on how we should interpret this, already extensive, empirical literature. His primary concern is to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy among philosophers that animals can never act in ways that are genuinely moral. Rowlands’ central thesis is the claim that animals can be moral subjects. That is, animals “can act on the basis of moral reasons, where these reasons take the form of emotions with identifiable moral content” (35). The current conceptual terrain dominant among moral philosophers allows an individual to relate to morality in two possible ways. A moral patient is a legitimate object of moral concern (someone to whom we can have direct obligations), while a moral agent is responsible for, and so can be morally evaluated (praised or blamed) for her motives and actions (72). Rowlands argues that we need a third category, since an individual can be a moral subject yet fail to be a moral agent. An individual is a moral subject if and only if he or she is sometimes motivated to act by moral reasons (89). Rowlands argues that this is a distinct concept: moral agency is concerned with moral responsibility while moral subjecthood is concerned with motivation. Nevertheless, while examples of what seems to be moral behavior among other animals abound, many would deny that this behavior is genuinely moral. Consider the following example: