Human
Obligations to
Animal Life
PHIL3640 Lecture 5
The Case for Animal Rights – Tom
Regan
Fellow Creatures – Cristine Korsgaard
The story so far
• For the first few weeks we have been trying to characterise
what life is
• This project has had an ethical and political dimension, but
we have not so far considered specific moral duties and
obligations
• The next three lectures address animals and animal ethics
• We shall see how the concepts of autonomy, agency,
valence, minimal cognition, and intrinsic teleology are
foundational to any attempt to articulate an ethics of the
animal-human relationship
Why focus on animals?
• Both readings are related to previous discussions of
organisms
• Experience
• Valuation
• Selfhood
• Autonomy and Agency
• Both readings are interested in “inherent value” and “final
good” as opposed to functional or instrumental value
Tom Regan
• The Case for Animal Rights (1983)
• One of the founding texts of animal
liberation scholarship and influential to
animal rights movement itself
• Regan is concerned with the inherent
value of animal life. Unlike Peter
Singer’s perhaps more famous theory of
animal ethics, Regan’s theory does not
start from utilitarian premises
Competitor theories
Regan develops his argument by highlighting the
shortcomings of other views:
1. ‘Humane treatment’ of animals
2. Contractarian view (‘crude’ and ‘refined’)
3. Cruelty-kindness view
4. Utilitarianism
Humane treatment
• Humane treatment of animals is okay,
for food or experimentation so long as
suffering is minimised
• Critique: the problem is that even this
‘welfarist’ view regards animals as
resources
“The fundamental wrong is the system
that allows us to view animals as our
resources, here for us – to be eaten,
surgically manipulated, or exploited for
sport or money.”
• So long as we regard animals as
resources, we cannot grant them
moral status.
‘Crude’ contractarian view
• “Morality consists of a set of rules that individuals voluntarily
agree to, as we do when we sign a contract”
• Moral agents enter into a social contract with one another
• Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes
• But duties are only indirect for those individuals who are unable
to sign the contract themselves
• Animals, but also children or people with intellectual disabilities
• (All of this is assuming a very literal social contract!)
• Indirect duties are not duties to them, but to the other people
who care about them (e.g. parents, carers, pet-owners)
• Only those animals that other people care about receive moral
consideration
‘Refined’ contractarian view
• Rawls – Theory of Justice
• When we imagine the signing of the
social contract we have to ignore
accidental features of being human
• In the ‘original position’, assume
parties to the contract do not know
their own standing
‘Refined’ contractarian view
• Rawls asks us to imagine the parties to
this social contract being behind a ‘veil
of ignorance’ concerning their own
status and attributes
• In a sense the parties do not yet know
who they will be born as: rich or poor,
disabled or not
• As such, they have to decide on principles
that will protect them regardless of their
position in society
• Same problem – animals are not parties
to this contract, so duties to animals (if
there are any) will be indirect
Cruelty-kindness view
• There is a general duty to be kind and a duty not to be cruel
• This applies in general
• But a kind act may not be right morally – Regan’s example: the
generous racist
• Absence of cruelty does not make an act moral. In animal case, for
instance, there are forms of animal exploitation and
instrumentalisation that can be performed without cruelty
• View also focuses on the virtues of the individual rather than the
moral integrity of the animals affected
Utilitarianism
• Everyone’s interests count equally or have
equal weight
• Maximised utility: finding the best overall
balance between satisfaction and frustration
for everyone affected
• Maximisation of pleasure
(interest/preference satisfaction)
• How can we ever make a calculation of utility?
Too complex in most cases
• Greater good objections: murder etc justified in
service of overall maximised utility
• Value lies in the satisfaction of interests, but
different beings have different interests: we
only have to respect interests that properly
belong to animals
• Value lies in the satisfaction of interests, not
in the individuals themselves. There is no
room for ‘inherent value’ of individual animal
life In utilitarianism the individual is just a locus
of pleasures and pains, not a unified
individual with purpose, integrity, autonomy
Regan’s alternative: inherent value
• We are more than mere receptacles of interests
• We are valuable in and of ourselves, independently of usefulness,
interests, pleasure
• This follows from our status as sentient, living subjects
• “we are each of us the experiencing subject of a life, a conscious
creature having an individual welfare that has importance to us whatever
our usefulness to others. We want and prefer things, believe and feel
things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our life,
including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our
satisfaction and frustration, our continued existence or our untimely
death - all make a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as
experienced, by us as individuals.” (Regan, 2008, p. 26)
• It seems hard to deny that we are sufficiently similar to animals
to say that they are ‘subjects-of-a-life with an inherent value of
their own
What is a subject-of-a-life?
• Question boils down to: what are
animal selves?
• And are ‘selves’ the only kinds of
beings for whom life is good?
• This brings us to Korsgaard
Cristine
Korsgaard
• Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to
Other Animals (2018)
• First we will look at her arguments in
the set reading for next week, on
animal selves.
• We will also look more broadly at
how her argument fits into a Kantian
framework
Kinds of good
• In the set reading Korsgaard distinguishes
between two kinds of good:
• Functional good (good as a means)
• Final good (good as an end)
• What kind of good is “life”? Functional or final?
• This is consistent with the trend of the unit so far:
living beings have final goods, are ends in themselves,
because life is intrinsically purposive or teleological
• Korsgaard is developing a version of Regan’s
argument: animals are subjects-of-a-life
• Animals have a point of view or perspective from
which being alive is evaluated
• Unlike Regan, however, she thinks intrinsic value
is problematic.
Nothing is good in itself, all goods have to be good for
something or somebody
Functions
• Any functional object is for something
• We say that an object is good insofar as it realises its
function well
• Animals are a special class of functional entity whose ‘good’
is realised internally and for-itself
• Survival, flourishing, reproduction, nutrition
“A well-functioning animal likes to eat when she is hungry, is
eager to mate, feeds and cares for her offspring, works
assiduously to keep herself clean and healthy, fears her
enemies, and avoids the sources of injury. Don’t say, “Well, of
course she does!” Allow yourself to be struck by the fact that
there are entities, substances, things, that stand in this relation
to themselves and their own condition. Because what I am
saying is that an animal functions, in part, by making her own
well-functioning, the things that are good for her in the
functional sense, an end of action, a thing to go for, a final
good.” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 21)
Animals vs artefacts
• An animal is self-maintaining. It tends to its own well-
functioning by looking after itself.
• Compare with artefacts: the sharpening of a knife is not good for the
knife
• Like Thompson, Jonas, Varela etc., Korsgaard agrees that the
animal perspective on the world is “valenced”. They represent
environments to themselves as domains of value
• Things in the environment are good or bad for the animal
Animals vs artefacts
• An animal is self-maintaining. It tends to its own well-
functioning by looking after itself.
• Compare with artefacts: the sharpening of a knife is not good for the
knife
• Like Thompson, Jonas, Varela etc., Korsgaard agrees that the
animal perspective on the world is “valenced”. They represent
environments to themselves as domains of value
• Things in the environment are good or bad for the animal
The animal is that entity whose
functional and final good coincide
Self-consciousness
• Self-consciousness is functionally unified agency over time.
• Self-consciousness has a reflexive character. It is a point of
view that distinguishes you from the world and identifies
your experiences as yours.
• Learning, integration of past experiences, expectations of
future
• Note: Korsgaard is prepared to use the phrase ‘self-
consciousness’; Thompson and Godfrey-Smith do not use
this terminology
Self-consciousness
•  “The unity of what we may call your “knowing
self ” involves the formation of an integrated
conception of your environment, one that
enables you to identify relations between the
different parts of your environment well enough
to find your way around in it. Those relations
are temporal, spacial, causal, and for many
animals social. By forming a unified conception
of your environment, you also unify yourself as
the subject of that conception. The fact that I
identify with my self—wth the agent of my
projects and commitments and the subject of
my conception of the world means that there
may be things about my body, such as its
tendency to senescence, that are not good for
me” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 29)
Animal selves
• Do animals have selves?
• Some animals have passed mirror test, but most do not. Perhaps
too high a bar: Animals clearly have a minimal form of self-
consciousness in sensation of pleasure and pain.
• Animals can learn and have projects, commitments, relationships,
tendencies and preferences that persist over time.
• Animal experiences are analogous to human episodic memory. The fact
that animals can be traumatised from repeated harm testifies to this.  
• “There is such a thing as the good because there are creatures
in this world for whom things can be good or bad. Those
creatures are animals, who pursue their functional good through
action: locomotion guided by valenced representations, or in
simpler terms, by sentience.” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 33)
Objections
The limits of sentience?
1. What about e.g., sponges and
oysters? Korsgaard is happy to
limit her theory to animals that
are sentient, that can evaluate
their world.
2. But why should we think that
only sentient animals have a
final good? As we have seen,
these arguments can be
applied to all living things in
general, not just higher
(sentient) animals
There is also a ‘mammalian’ bias in
animal rights work: insects, reptiles,
jellyfish are animals too
Objections
3. Death:
“most animals are doomed to die of senescence—the natural
weakening of the body with age—even if they do not die of
accident or disease […] But if that is true, how can the
individuals of the species be characterized as self-
maintaining? For these animals, death is not just a hazard of
material existence. It is, in Aristotelian terms, built into their
forms.” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 11)
• Problem for Korsgaard, since organisms are not indefinitely
self-maintaining. Death seems to be a necessary part of
their functioning
• Korsgaard’s views are very similar to much of what we have
seen so far.
• The more interesting challenge is fitting this theory into a
Kantian ethical framework.
• Looking at these difficulties also helps to clarify broader
problems in ‘ethics’ as a field for thinking about
multispecies justice
• Is a ‘Kantian’ or ‘Aristotelian’ framework futile – is ‘ethics’ always
too intertwined with anthropocentric values
A crash course in Kantian ethics
• Kant’s ethical theory is laid out in two main
texts:
• Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
• Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
• Kant is the theorist most associated with
duty-based moral philosophy, sometimes
called deontological ethics
• His themes are also central to contemporary
liberalism: autonomy, consent, respect,
integrity, rights
The moral law
• Kant ‘s most famous ethical concept is the ‘categorical
imperative’: ”Act only according to that maxim whereby
you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.”
• This can be interpreted as a rational reconstruction of the
‘golden rule’, to treat others as you would wish to be
treated
• An important nuance, the golden rule is personal (how you
would want to be treated) whereas the categorical
imperative is universal: treat others in a way that any
reasonable person would consent to
• Another interpretation is that you can never act in a way
that would be self-defeating if everyone acted in the
same way. Never do something if the only reason it works
is that not everyone does it:
• Cheating
• Lying
• Promise breaking
• Queue jumping
The moral law
• The obligation to act in such a way follows from the
principle that humans are free and autonomous
• We are capable of self-legislating, that is, setting laws for
ourselves
• Our autonomy is related to our rationality. As rational beings we
have a responsibility to behave in ways that respect our own
rationality.
• The categorical imperative can also be thought of as the result of a
close analysis of the rational structure of will
• It is fundamentally irrational to will something contradictory
• Actions that undermine social institutions and moral conventions are
contradictory E.g., we are mistaken when we think that we serve our own
interests by telling lies, since in fact it is not possible to will an end that
undermines the institutions in which our autonomy is best realised
The moral law
• Kant claims that the categorical imperative or ‘moral law’
can be reformulated in two other ways
• He claims these forms are strictly equivalent to each other
1. The Formula of Humanity: “So act that you use humanity,
whether in your own person or in the person of any other,
always at the same time as an end, never merely as a
means”
2. The Formula of the Kingdom of Ends: "So act as if you
were through your maxims a law-making member of a
kingdom of ends." 
The place of animals?
• It is in these formulas that the tension
between Kant’s philosophy and animal
rights becomes clearest
• On the one hand, we can see how
‘treating others as ends’ can be
transposed into an animal ethics
context
• On the other hand, the idea of a
‘kingdom of ends’ seems to be an
explicitly political concept, where
individuals are members of a ‘moral
community’
• They undertake actions of reciprocal
legislation
• To be a member of this moral community
is a two-way relation: the basis of moral
consideration requires is analogy with
oneself as an autonomous agent
The place of animals?
• The predicament is that Kant
is an explicitly anthropocentric
thinker
• Even if we put aside his
remarks about animals, it is
hard to see how to include
animals in his moral philosophy,
since it depends on moral
reciprocity
• To attribute moral respect to
someone is to acknowledge their
moral agency, as an autonomous
and ‘self-legislating’ individual
Moral community
• Korsgaard opposes the moral community
membership view to the ‘special property’
view.
• Human beings are moral agents with
obligations (and protections) under the
categorical imperative
• But it’s not just because we have
autonomy and rationality which makes us
matter more than other beings.
• These properties do not give us
‘intrinsic value’
• For Korsgaard, autonomy and rationality
are properties the exercise of which
involve us in a moral community
• They are capacities which have to be
exercised. They are relational properties
Different moral status
• “So we need not take Kant to be refusing moral standing to the other
animals because he thinks that autonomous rational beings are
absolutely or cosmically important and valuable while the other animals
are not, or that autonomous rational beings are absolutely or
cosmically more important and valuable than merely sentient beings
are. Rather, he refuses moral standing to the other animals because he
thinks that, not being autonomous, they cannot participate in
reciprocal lawmaking and so cannot be members of the moral
community” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 148)
Animal otherness
• An animal rights view does not mean we can’t acknowledge
important differences between humans and animals
• We can extend moral community membership to animals,
but they are not able to participate in the same way as us
“An important feature of the conception of morality that
emerges from these arguments is that our moral relationships
among ourselves—by which in this context I mean, the moral
relationships among rational beings—really are different from
the moral relationships in which we stand to the other
animals.” (Korsgaard, 2018, p. 146)
Recognising shared moral status
“Nevertheless, each of us stands in a relation to him- or herself that is
the ultimate basis of all value. That relation is that we each take the
things that are good-for us to be good absolutely, rationally endorsing
the natural tendency of conscious living beings, of creatures, to pursue
their own good as if it were good absolutely. We recognize that this is a
condition we share with all other creatures. Our reason for including
animals in the moral community is just that: that we recognize them to
be fellow creatures, with a good of their own just like ours.” (Korsgaard,
2018, p. 148)
• We can therefore extend our obligations under the moral law to
animals, insofar as it makes sense to do so:
• We are obliged to treat animals in ways they would in principle would consent to,
that is, in a way that respects their autonomy and selfhood
Some ethical puzzles
Korsgaard applies her theory to a number of controversial
issues in animal ethics:
• Is it ethical to keep pets?
• Is it ethical to keep animals in zoos?
• Are all forms of use of animals forbidden, or might it be
okay to eat eggs, milk etc so long as they are harvested
humanely?
• The categorical imperative does not completely forbid us
from ‘using’ humans – we do this all the time – so perhaps
same is true for animals
• Are we obliged to protect animals from natural predators?
• Biodiversity and extinction: are we obliged to species or
just individual animals?
Next week
• Dinesh Wadiwel The War Against Animals
• Alternative framework from critical theory rather than
analytic moral philosophy
• Draws on Foucault and Agamben’s concept of biopower and
biopolitics