Animal Wrongs and Animal Rights: Why treat Animals Well?
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The moral status of non-human animals has long attracted philosophical and political contention, from debates about pet ownership and animal testing to dietary ethics and exploitation. However, beneath numerous practical concerns lies a fundamental question: why, and to what extent, should we treat non-human animals well? This essay approaches that question within the framework of inalienable rights—a structure that offers academic consensus in its application to Homo Sapiens (i.e., human rights), but of which I argue can be extended with moral consistency to non-human animals. I contend that animals should be treated well because they possess rights, and such rights arise from the possession of interests and sentience. In other words, sentience is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the possession of interests, of which justifies rights, which are necessary and sufficient in mandating duties of man to uphold the just and respectful treatment of animals. This argument will be discussed under four sections:
First, I will define sentience and demonstrate why it is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the possession of morally significant interests.
Second, I will explain how these interests impose correlative duties (rights) on moral agents, thus allowing rights to mandate well-treatment.
Third, I will argue that moral status is assigned based on shared morally relevant interests rather than species, thereby extending rights to animals, as well as exploring what “treating animals well” entails.
Fourth, I will outline how the utilitarian approach systematically fails animals, discussing the role of state institutions in perpetuating speciesism.
Ultimately, I conclude that we should treat animals well because they possess rights, which stem from interests.
Sentience as the Foundation for the Moral Consideration of Interests
Sentience refers to the ability to undergo subjective experiences, feel, and consciously undergo sensations such as pain, pleasure, fear, warmth, and hunger. Unlike higher-order cognition, sentience does not entail conceptual thought or awareness, but rather the embodiment of a first-person perspective through which experience is felt, no matter how primitive. This ability to feel is what distinguishes sentient beings from entities such as a rock or a plant, which may or may not exhibit complex behaviour, but lacks experiential access to the world around them.
For this essay, we will assume that all animals, from mammals to cephalopods to fish, are sentient, and, as we will prove, therefore have interests. As for organisms, like worms or jellyfish, whose sentient status is faced by empirical uncertainty, we ought to adopt a precautionary principle and err on the side of inclusion for these cases where suffering is involved.
In that sentience enables the capacity for experience, it is a prerequisite for any morally relevant interests. This is because, in order to have interests in an ethically significant way (i.e., interests that can be harmed or fulfilled), one must be capable of experiencing states of good or bad for themselves. For example, kicking a metal pole offers no moral consequences, as the pole cannot feel pain or experience “bad” for itself, while a pig confined in a factory farm has interests in avoiding suffering due to its ability to feel the suffering and thus, suffer. Therefore, sentience is the ontological ground from which interests arise, as anything other than feeling would depend on arbitrary conditions or socially built conditions. It is both a necessary and sufficient condition for moral considerability.
Kant argued that only rational beings—those capable of autonomous moral deliberation—deserve moral status, because interest is unique to conditions of personhood, and thus moral consideration increases with degrees of sentience. For instance, humans who are able to reflect, reason, and write philosophy papers deserve more moral consideration compared to a squirrel, which may only be able to feel pain and communicate it. However, Kant’s argument ignores the true moral relevance of sentience, which is its role as a threshold that, when crossed, given any degree of sentience is present, allows for full moral consideration. The idea that moral status is binary is consistent with our Homo Sapien norms: we do not deny moral status to infants, the comatose, or individuals with severe cognitive disabilities simply because their rational and reflective capacities are impaired. Accordingly, we must reject models of moral status that are tied to intelligence, linguistic ability or rational autonomy, as those traits may determine what kinds of interests a being may have, but not whether they possess interests at all.
Understanding Rights Through the Interest Theory
Morality, which offers what it means to treat others “well”, is fundamentally concerned with the consequences of violating duties owed to others. Duties arise from rights, which we will define as normative claims that grant entitlements or protections by creating corresponding duties for others to uphold, no matter the loss of utility or situation. Rights exist because sentient beings can have their interests wronged. Thus, we will evaluate rights through two core principles:
Rights are not metaphysically or biologically inherent, but arise from a collective recognition by its relevant population, and adequate moral substantiation that certain interests deserve protection. Human rights, for instance, are justified by reasons any morally responsible human agent could accept, and are rooted in our shared human interests.
Rights are independent of reciprocity, meaning one need not be capable of fulfilling duties towards others in order to hold rights themselves. For instance, even if A (being) having a claim to X right means that B (being) has a duty to respect X (right), if B fails to respect A’s rights, B is still independently deserving of their rights. This is because all sentient beings, even infants and comatose individuals, still have moral rights, not because they can reciprocate rights to others, but because they are vulnerable, have interests in not suffering, and can be wronged when treated as a means to an end.
Given such conditions, the Interest Theory of Rights holds that rights exist to protect our collectively experienced, recognized, and morally significant interests, especially those essential to well-being such as the interest in living without suffering or the interest in being free. It also follows that non-essential preferences (such as the interest to watch TV or eat meat when alternatives exist) do not give rise to rights due to their inability to meet our morally significant threshold. A common objection rooted in H.L.A Hart’s Will Theory argues that only autonomous agents deserve rights since only they have fundamental control over their own actions. This however contradicts Principle #2 and misinterprets the purpose of rights—not as a tool of reciprocal agency, but as protections for beings who can have their interests wronged. As Jeremy Bentham observed: “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?”
Extending Moral Considerations to Animals: Plausibility and Scope
Now, why should rights be extended to animals? While animals and humans may differ in cognition and possess different kinds of interests, the human-animal-nature interest in not suffering is universal across all sentient species. Given that a human’s interest to not suffer is ensured as a right, consistency demands we recognize the same basic right of not suffering unnecessarily for non-human animals. These “basic” shared rights are known as moral rights, which are inalienable rights justified simply by virtue of a sentient being’s moral status and vital to individual dignity, autonomy, and being treated as ends in themselves instead of means.
In defining what “treating non-human animals well” entails in terms of defendable rights, it is worth noting that animals need not possess the same rights as humans, as many human rights presume capabilities animals lack, such as political autonomy or recognition of discriminatory symbols. However, as previously outlined, due to animals’ interests in avoiding suffering and accessing the conditions that support their well-being, the starting point for treating animals well entails respecting their moral rights not to suffer unnecessarily.
Furthermore, an animal’s right to not suffer entails not only negative duties (e.g., banning animal testing to not cause them pain), but also the fulfillment of positive duties to promote their flourishing, (e.g. institutional support to ensuring domesticated animals who were made dependent on humans are cared for). According to Martha Nuzzbaum’s Capabilities Approach, each sentient creature has a unique characteristic set of capabilities which need support from surrounding material and social environments would allow the animal to flourish in its characteristic way. This suggests, although a basic understanding of the shared moral right to not suffer is a good starting point, that well-treatment will take on a case-by-case approach, which we strive to fulfill animal interests and rights to access that which increases well-being, and thus, flourishing.
Utilitarian Failures: The Necessity of Rights as a Prerequisite to Well-Being
The reason why interests are not sufficient to mandate well-treatment is because without rights, interests can be easily overridden by utilitarian calculations. Consider the lifeboat scenario, in which a human’s right to life is overridden based on the utilitarian justification that killing a man and eating his meat would save three others. In the same way we wouldn't harvest organs from a comatose patient to save others, we shouldn’t harm animals for mere convenience or pleasure, as rights protect sentient individuals as ends in themselves.
Similarly, even if animal suffering brings human benefits (e.g., drug testing), treating animals well means that we ought to reject such practices when they violate the animal’s basic rights. This is where Peter Singer’s Utilitarianism-based approach—which supports treating non-human animals and human suffering equally in theory but allowing for sacrifice when it comes to serving greater utility—fails.18 Utilitarians would use mathematical models to weigh the interests of beings:
in that wi represents the weight given to the utility ui of the ith sentient being. However, such theoretical models depend on the fact that the w of u for every i would be equally evaluated on objective parameters. In reality, the weighing of human interests is systemically privileged due to speciesism and anthropocentric bias embedded in the utilitarian frameworks calibrated upon human experience. Speciesism, drawing parallels to racism or sexism, also relies on arbitrary traits of species to deny equal moral consideration and exclude beings from accessing protection. To reject this discriminatory logic, we must thus extend fundamental moral rights and the right to flourish to all sentient beings, since as long as only humans possess both interests and rights, animal interests can be vetoed and will remain expendable.
At the institutional level, the state becomes complicit in sustaining speciesist structures. Through funding, regulating, and enabling industries such as factory farming, animal testing, and wildlife exploitation, governments routinely violate animals’ most basic interests through human exceptionalism and utilitarian justifications. However, if animals hold rights, then the state actions constitute not mere policy failures, but moral abuse of state authority and its monopoly on violence by engaging in a form of moral dereliction no different from the historic failures to protect marginalized human groups. Nussbaum claims that, for a just society to prevail, the state must set policy and actions to enhance species-specific capabilities to achieve their interests and rights. Such an argument underscores a broader state obligation to respect animal rights, furthering the moral imperative for both institutional and individual actions to treat animals and their rights with respect.
Conclusion
Non-human animals deserve moral consideration not only because they have interests, but because their specific interest in not suffering grounds access to rights. Rights are fundamental in protecting individuals from being used as mere means, and so denying animals’ rights while affirming them for humans exposes an indefensible speciesist double-standard. The institutionalized use of animals across experimentation, farming, and entertainment reflects not only this bias, but a profound moral failure of state power. Recognizing animal rights is far from radical, but rather a consistent application of the very moral principles we extend to humans—grounded in shared sentience and not species.
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