You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The moral status of non-human animals is one of applied ethics' most rapidly evolving questions, and the AQA specification names it as a discrete issue of "non-human life and death": animals as food, intensive farming, animals in scientific procedures, cloning, blood sports, and animals as a source of organs. Underlying every one of these practices is a prior question — does an animal's experience count morally in its own right, and if so, what may we do to it for our benefit? This lesson sets out the two landmark secular positions, Peter Singer's preference utilitarianism and Tom Regan's rights view, alongside the older tradition descending from Aristotle and Aquinas that treats animals as instruments, and the live Christian dispute between dominion and stewardship readings of Genesis. The aim is to watch each position generate and defend a verdict on real practices, and to locate where each is vulnerable, rather than to collect opinions.
Peter Singer (b. 1946) opened Animal Liberation (1975) with a deliberately provocative claim: the liberation of animals is the next great extension of the moral circle, comparable in form (though not in every detail) to the earlier liberation of enslaved people and of women. His foundational principle is the principle of equal consideration of interests: where two beings have a comparable interest — paradigmatically, the interest in not suffering — that interest deserves equal weight, whoever has it. This is not the claim that animals and humans are equal in capacities or should be treated identically (a pig has no interest in voting or in literacy), but the claim that like interests count alike, so a given quantum of suffering is no less bad for being a pig's rather than a person's.
Key term: Speciesism — a prejudice or bias in favour of the interests of one's own species and against those of members of other species; for Singer a morally arbitrary discrimination structurally analogous to racism and sexism.
Singer credits the term speciesism to the psychologist Richard Ryder (b. 1940), who coined it in 1970. The charge is that species membership, like skin colour, is in itself morally irrelevant: to discount a being's suffering merely because it belongs to another species is to treat a biological category as though it were a moral one. The decisive property, Singer argues following Jeremy Bentham, is not reason or language but sentience — the capacity to suffer and to enjoy. Bentham's words are the most quoted in the field: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" A being that can suffer has interests; a being that cannot (a stone, or — Singer would say — a being with no nervous system) has none to consider.
Key term: Sentience — the capacity to have subjective experiences, in particular to feel pain and pleasure; for sentience-based ethics (Bentham, Singer) it is the threshold property that gives a being interests and so a claim to moral consideration.
It is worth marking a distinction the whole topic relies on, between a moral agent — a being that can act rightly or wrongly and be held responsible — and a moral patient, a being that can be wronged or benefited whether or not it can itself act morally. The instrumental tradition effectively denies animals both statuses that matter; Scruton grants them patiency but not agency and thinks this asymmetry decisive; Singer and Regan insist that full moral patiency is enough to generate stringent claims, since one need not be capable of duties to be capable of being wronged. Keeping the agent/patient distinction in view prevents the common error of treating "animals can't be moral, so morality can't protect them" as though it were valid — it is precisely the inference the marginal-cases argument exposes.
Two further clarifications are essential for an exam, because they are routinely got wrong. First, Singer is a utilitarian, not a rights theorist: he does not say animals have inviolable rights. He says their interests must enter the calculation at full weight, and that, once they do, most actual uses of animals cannot be justified because they trade immense animal suffering for trivial human gains (the pleasure of a particular taste; the convenience of a cheaper egg). Second, because his is a consequentialist framework, Singer can in principle countenance some use of animals where the stakes are genuinely asymmetric — a small amount of suffering set against the relief of great suffering — though he insists that almost nothing we actually do to animals comes close to meeting that bar, and that a great deal of animal experimentation is poorly designed, duplicative, or for non-vital ends. In his later work Singer moves to preference utilitarianism, on which what matters is the satisfaction or thwarting of a being's preferences; a self-conscious being with preferences about its own future (a "person" in his technical sense, which some non-human animals may approach) thereby has more at stake in continued life than a merely sentient being that lives moment to moment.
Tom Regan (1938–2017), in The Case for Animal Rights (1983), rejected the utilitarian framework outright and built a deontological, rights-based alternative. His core concept is the subject-of-a-life. A being is a subject-of-a-life if it has beliefs and desires, perception, memory, a sense of its own future, an emotional life, preferences and a welfare-interest in the pursuit of its goals, a psychophysical identity over time, and an experiential welfare — a life that fares well or badly for it, logically independent of its usefulness to anyone else. Mentally normal mammals of a year or more, Regan argues, plainly satisfy this test.
Key term: Subject-of-a-life — Regan's criterion: a being with beliefs, desires, perception, memory, a sense of the future, an emotional life and a welfare that matters to it for its own sake, and which therefore possesses inherent value and basic moral rights.
Every subject-of-a-life, Regan holds, possesses inherent value equally and in full — value as an end in itself, which (echoing Kant's Formula of Humanity, but extended beyond the species barrier) means such a being may never be treated merely as a receptacle for value or a resource for others. Crucially, inherent value does not come in degrees: a being either has it or it does not, so one cannot trade the rights of a few subjects-of-a-life for the welfare of the many. This is Regan's deepest objection to utilitarianism, which he accuses of treating individuals as mere "cups" whose only worth lies in the valuable experiences they contain, so that the cup may be smashed if doing so fills more cups elsewhere. Because rights function as what he calls moral "trumps", they cannot be overridden by appeals to aggregate benefit; hence Regan demands not the reform of animal agriculture, commercial trapping and animal research but their abolition. Reforming a cage leaves the rights-violation intact.
Regan does acknowledge hard conflict cases. His "worse-off principle" governs situations where rights genuinely cannot all be honoured: where the harms are not comparable, we should prevent the harm that would make any individual worse off than the others would be made. Because death is ordinarily a greater harm (a greater loss of opportunities for satisfaction) to a normal human, with its richer range of future goods, than to a dog, Regan's view can, in a genuine lifeboat dilemma, permit saving the humans — even many dogs' worth of them — without conceding that the dogs lacked rights. Candidates often misremember Regan as holding that animal rights always beat human interests; the worse-off principle shows the position is more disciplined than that, and noticing this is a mark of genuine understanding.
Immanuel Kant stands on the other side of the rights question. For Kant, moral duties are owed only to rational, autonomous agents — beings capable of giving themselves the moral law — and animals, lacking rational agency, are not ends in themselves but "things". It does not follow, however, that Kant licenses cruelty. In the Lectures on Ethics he argues that we have indirect duties regarding animals: "he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men", so that maltreating a dog corrupts the dispositions on which our duties to persons depend. The wrong of kicking a dog, on this view, is a wrong done to one's own moral character and, through it, to humanity — not to the dog. This is the position Andrew Linzey and Regan most want to overturn, since it makes the animal's own suffering morally weightless and lets it matter only as a training ground for human virtue or vice.
Key term: Indirect duty — a duty that concerns the treatment of a being (e.g. an animal) but is in fact owed to some other party (for Kant, to humanity); contrasted with a direct duty owed to the being itself.
The dominant Western view before the modern period treated animals as existing for human use. Aristotle held that nature makes nothing in vain and that, since plants exist for animals and animals for human beings, "it must be that nature has made all of them for the sake of man" (Politics I.8); animals lack the rational soul (logos) that for Aristotle is the seat of moral and political life. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) absorbed this into a Christian natural-law framework. On his hierarchical picture of creation — the "order of nature" running from God through rational creatures to the non-rational — animals lack the immortal, rational soul, and so are not the kind of being to which justice can be owed; we have no duties of charity or justice to them. Like Kant after him, Aquinas nonetheless condemns cruelty, but for two indirect reasons: it may dispose a person to cruelty towards human beings, and the suffering of animals can move us to pity in a way that trains right feeling. The animal's pain is thus, in the strict sense, not the ground of the wrong.
Catholic teaching has softened the harsher edges of this inheritance while keeping its structure. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§2415–2418) teaches that animals are God's creatures owed kindness, that "it is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly", yet that it remains "legitimate to use animals for food and clothing", for work, and — within reason — in medical experimentation, since creation is ordered to humanity's good. The framing is one of stewardship rather than rights: animals matter, but chiefly as entrusted goods rather than as bearers of claims against us.
The scriptural pivot is Genesis 1:26–28, where humanity, made in the image of God, is given "dominion" over the fish, the birds and "every living thing that moves upon the earth". The whole Christian argument turns on how that grant is read.
Key term: Stewardship — the view that humanity holds the natural world, including animals, in trust from God and is accountable to God for its care, as opposed to the dominion reading of Genesis 1:28 as a grant of mastery to be used for human ends.
Andrew Linzey (b. 1952), the Anglican theologian, pushes the stewardship line into a full theology of animal rights. In Animal Theology (1994) he argues for theos-rights: an animal's claim on us is grounded not in its rational capacities (which it may lack) but in God's prior creative claim — God made these creatures, called them "good" (Genesis 1:21, 25), and retains an interest in them, so that to wrong them is to trespass on God's own. From the pattern of the incarnation Linzey draws a generosity (or "Servant-species") paradigm: the strong are called to serve the weak, the higher to sacrifice for the lower, in imitation of a God who in Christ stoops to the vulnerable; humanity's superior power therefore generates greater obligation, not licence. He calls the eating of meat where alternatives exist, intensive farming and sport-hunting forms of unjustified violence, and dismisses the Thomist instrumentalism as the importation of Greek anthropocentrism into a faith whose God cares for sparrows (Matthew 10:29). Critics reply that Linzey reads a modern rights-vocabulary back into texts that lack it, and that the same Bible plainly permits sacrifice and the eating of meat; defenders answer that the trajectory of the scriptural witness, like its trajectory on slavery, points beyond its first-century settlement.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.