Rights for Animals?

Equal consideration without rights

Bentham, who called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts”, asked of animals not whether they can reason or talk but “Can they suffer?” Singer follows him (Animal Liberation, 1975; Animal Liberation Now, 2023): what matters morally is not rights but interests, and a being’s interest in not suffering deserves the same weight as the like interest of any other being. The language of rights, he writes, is “a convenient political shorthand”, but the case for changing how we treat animals does not depend on it. The view cuts both ways. It condemns most of what we now do to animals, because their suffering outweighs what we gain; but it rules nothing out in advance, whatever the consequences, and for Singer killing an animal painlessly is a harder question than making it suffer, since it may weigh less for beings without a sense of their own future.

Held by

• Jeremy Bentham1748–1832
• Peter Singerb. 1946

Rights against being used

Regan answers Singer directly (The Case for Animal Rights, 1983): utilitarianism treats individuals as mere receptacles of pleasure and pain, whose loss can be outweighed by gains elsewhere. Every “subject-of-a-life” – a being with beliefs, desires, memory, a sense of its own future and a welfare that matters to it – has instead an inherent value of its own, equal and independent of its usefulness to others, and with it the right to be treated with respect, above all not to be harmed for the benefit of others. Mentally normal mammals of a year or more are clear cases, and probably many other animals too. What follows is not reform but abolition: of commercial animal agriculture, of harmful experiments, of hunting and trapping for sport and trade. The legal scholar Gary Francione puts the point in terms of law (Animals, Property, and the Law, 1995; Introduction to Animal Rights, 2000): as long as animals are property, conflicts with their owners’ interests are decided against them, so all sentient beings need one right – not to be treated as property – and for individuals the consistent response is veganism.

Held by

• Tom Regan1938–2017

Ends in themselves

Korsgaard, a Kantian, argues against Kant’s own view that we owe duties only to rational beings (Fellow Creatures, 2018). She distinguishes two senses in which a being can be an end in itself. In the active sense only rational beings are, because only they can make laws for themselves and for each other; in the passive sense every being that has a good of its own is, because its good must be treated as good absolutely – as a reason for everyone, not only for itself. When we value ourselves as ends, we also value ourselves as animate beings for whom things can go well or badly, and that we share with other animals. Animals cannot take part in moral legislation, but we must legislate with their good in view: what we owe them, we owe to them, not merely to ourselves. To use them merely as means, as in raising and killing them for food, violates that claim.

Held by

• Christine Korsgaardb. 1952

Justice and capabilities

Nussbaum treats the question as one of justice rather than compassion (Frontiers of Justice, 2006; Justice for Animals, 2023). Social contract theories, Rawls’s included, cannot do this, because they include only those who can take part in the contract. On the capabilities approach, by contrast, every sentient animal has a dignity of its own and is entitled to a real opportunity to flourish according to the form of life of its kind – to move, play, form relationships, use its senses and be free from pain. These entitlements are rights in a full sense: law and politics should secure them, with human representatives speaking for animals, much as others speak for young children. Since capabilities differ between species, so do the rights; and since human activity now shapes the lives of wild animals as well, the duties of justice reach them too.

Held by

• Martha Nussbaumb. 1947

Political rights: citizens, sovereigns, denizens

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (Zoopolis, 2011) accept the basic negative rights of animal rights theory – not to be killed, tortured, confined or owned – but argue that it says too little about the different relationships between humans and animals. They propose a political theory modelled on citizenship. Domesticated animals, whom humans have bred into their societies, should be co-citizens whose interests count in making the shared rules, with humans interpreting their preferences; wild animals form sovereign communities on their own territories, owed non-interference and fair terms where human activity affects them; and “liminal” animals such as pigeons, rats or urban foxes, who live among us without being domesticated, are denizens with a secure right of residence but fewer mutual obligations. On this view what we owe animals depends not only on what they can feel and do, but also on the relationships in which we stand to them.

Duties regarding animals, not rights

Kant held that we have duties only to beings who can bind themselves by the moral law. Cruelty to animals is still forbidden, but as a duty to ourselves: it dulls our shared feeling for their suffering and so weakens a natural disposition that serves morality in our relations with other people (Metaphysics of Morals, 1797, § 17). Contractualists give this a modern form. For Peter Carruthers (The Animals Issue, 1992), moral rights arise from rules that rational agents could agree on; animals cannot take part in such agreement and so have no rights, though cruelty remains wrong as an expression of bad character. Carl Cohen argued in the New England Journal of Medicine (1986) that rights exist only within a community of beings who can make moral claims against one another, while granting that we have obligations not to cause animals pointless suffering. The standard objection is the argument from “marginal cases”: on such views, how can human infants or people with severe cognitive disabilities have rights? Defenders answer that rights belong to beings of a kind whose members normally have these capacities, or that our relations to such humans give them their standing; critics see in both answers an appeal to species membership after all.

Held by

• Immanuel Kant1724–1804