Do non-human animals have moral standing? Work on this question has focused on choosing the right grounding property (for example, personhood or sentience) while little attention has been paid to the various ways that the connection between grounding properties and moral standing has been explained. In this paper, I address that gap by offering a fresh way to approach the debate over the grounds of moral standing, including a novel taxonomy of positions, and argue that one kind of position, which takes a ‘value-first’ approach, is preferable to the other, which takes an ‘interests-first’ approach. According to value-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have properties that make them valuable. According to interests-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have interests, and any interest must always be taken into account. I argue that we should prefer value-first accounts because they engage directly with the problem the concept of moral standing is employed to solve, and because interests-first accounts cannot meet their explanatory burdens without begging the question against value-first accounts.
My thesis asked whether we have direct obligations to non-human animals—that is, whether they have moral standing—and if so, what are the grounds of their moral standing? I argue for three main claims:
Does sentience—the capacity for pleasurable and painful subjective experiences—ground animal rights? Several influential accounts, including Tom Regan’s influential account of sentient animals as ‘subjects-of-a-life’ (The Case for Animal Rights, 1985) and the accounts of contemporary animal rights theory (e.g. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis, 2011), argue that it can. In this paper, I examine how these accounts attempt to establish the claim. Successfully establishing this claim relies on explaining why sentience makes a creature appropriately valuable to be a subject of rights. I show, firstly, that Regan’s account is not primarily engaged in this task: Regan argues that subjects-of-a-life are ‘inherently valuable’ but, to avoid arguing an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, does not attempt to explain why. Secondly, I show that animal rights theorists have developed Regan’s account by appealing to the value of sentience; but while they establish a plausible necessary condition on rights, their account cannot do the work they require. I conclude that friends of animal rights theory ought to give up on appealing to the value of sentience and ought instead to appeal to the value of the kind of agential capacity we share with animals.
Agency is, in general, the exercise of powers and abilities to bring about events. If different kinds of beings cause events in distinctive ways, by exercising distinctive sets of capacities and abilities, they can be said to have different forms of agency. Is there a form of agency which is distinctive of animals—both human and non-human? While the rational capacities of human agents seem to make human agency distinctive in many ways, since (at most) very few species of non-human animals share these capacities this set of capacities cannot be what is distinctive about animal agency. But I argue that there is at least one feature of human agency which distinguishes it from the agency of inanimate beings and plants but not from the agency of non-human animals: that we sometimes have control over whether we exercise our abilities: the exercise of our abilities is ‘up to us’; or as it is sometimes put, we are sometimes able to ‘act otherwise’.
I argue, against the prevailing view of the nature of refraining, that it is possible to refrain without deciding to do so. I argue that the prevailing ‘decision’ view fails to account for many ordinary not-doings. I defend an account of the nature of refraining according to which refraining is not doing something one has the ability to do, and argue that my account solves the problem with the ‘decision’ view.
Here is review I wrote for the KCL Philosophy blog of a talk by Cécile Fabre.
I appeared on a KCL PPE student podcast, The Lion's Share, discussing the ethics of true crime.