NOTE-181: The Moral Status of Animals (SEP)

Contribution

The entry is a reference survey, not an argument for a thesis. It organises the animal moral-status literature into three questions. The first is considerability: can the being be wronged, and on what ground? The second is significance: which interests it has, and how its claims weigh. The third is a set of approaches that refuse the capacity-based framing. The 2024 revision (with Monsó as co-author) adds the ideology-critical reading of speciesism (Horta 2022; Fanon, Jackson, Kim, Ko & Ko), sentience-based cases for fishes, octopuses, arthropods and decapods, precautionary principles, the agency accounts, legal personhood, and the value-theory survey.

Key insight

“Being morally considerable is like showing up on a moral radar screen—how strong the signal is or where it is located on the screen are separate questions” (§2.2). Most of the disagreement about animals is about weight, and weight is fixed by the value theory and the normative framework. The capacity that admits a being to consideration does not fix it.

Assumptions

Premises and authorities:

• A morally considerable being is “a being who can be wronged”. The class of beings that can recognise moral claims is not the class that can suffer moral wrongs (§1).
• Species membership is morally irrelevant, “a bit of luck” like birthplace (§1.1, after Ryder and Singer).
• Ethological evidence: kinship, grief, social problem-solving, deception, cognitive maps, symbolic communication (§1.2, note 1).
• The Kantian tradition (Kant, Korsgaard 1996/2007, Wood 1998), Regan 1985, Bentham, Singer, Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, Nussbaum 2006, and Clark, Diamond, Hursthouse, Crary, Anderson and Gruen for §3.
• The entry treats sentience as “a non-observable capacity” (§1.4), which motivates precaution (Birch 2017; Fischer 2016; Knutsson & Munthe 2017).

Key results

What it argues or reports:

• §1.1 Speciesism is a prejudice analogous to racism (Singer 1974: 108). It is also a “collective phenomenon” and, on some views, a tool for constructing human and white supremacy.
• §1.2 Every proposed uniquely human capacity has been observed, “often in less elaborate form”, in other animals. So capacity-based human exceptionalism is “not the most promising” route.
• §1.3 Kantian personhood: rational beings are ends in themselves (Ak 4:428). Korsgaard’s problem of normativity arises from reflective consciousness, which “lower” animals lack (1996: 93).
  • §1.3.1 The problem of marginal cases defeats personhood as the criterion. Three responses are reported: indirect duties (Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Ak 27:459), rejected as failing “to capture the independent wrong”; Wood’s relations to “the infrastructure of rational nature” and Regan’s “subjects of a life”; and Korsgaard 2007, on which the natural concerns of animal nature are among the content of moral demands.
  • §1.3.2 Legal personhood: the NhRP’s chimpanzee cases rest on a capacity list and on primatologists’ affidavits.
• §1.4 Sentience: Bentham’s “Can they suffer?”, Singer, and Korsgaard (“it is a pain to be in pain”). The circle is expanding to fishes, octopuses, arthropods and decapods, with precautionary principles for uncertain sentience.
• §1.5 Agency: Sebo 2017 distinguishes propositional agency (acting on normative propositional judgements) from perceptual agency (acting on “normative perceptual experiences”). Perceptual agency is widespread, and all perceptual agents have “a right to life, liberty, and property”. Jamieson argues that agency, as well as welfare, gives life its meaning and value. Wilcox 2020a: agency is necessary and sufficient, and co-extensive with sentience. Lessard 2024: agency grounds self-determination rights in law.
• §2.1 Hedonism is popular in animal ethics and marginal in human ethics (Nozick’s experience machine). Its adherents accept disenhancement, the engineering of wild “paradise”, and priority for creating many small sentient animals (Sebo 2023). Preference satisfaction has problems with adaptive or manipulated preferences and with doubts about animal autonomy (Korsgaard 2006; Bruckner 2021). Objective lists (Nussbaum’s capabilities, plus freedom, dignity, meaning, culture, care) are hard to ground and risk the naturalistic fallacy and anthropocentric projection.
• §2.2 Rights views: violations are wrong even when justified, and generate forward-looking duties of repair. Zoopolis assigns domesticated animals citizenship, wild animals sovereignty and liminal animals denizenship. Utilitarianism weighs interests by strength, not by whose they are. Factory farming (“an estimated 8 billion animals in the United States … each year”) is condemned on balance, but vegetarianism is not entailed. The multi-factor refinement ranks crucial > important > replaceable > trivial interests. Note 2 adds VanDeVeer’s psychological-complexity tie-breaker. Some animal research is permitted when the probability of satisfying crucial interests of many is high and the number of animals is low.
• §3 Clark and Diamond: shared life “pulls on us”. Hursthouse: a changed perception of the “moral landscape”. Crary: animals have “empirically discoverable moral characteristics” that are “inside ethics”. Feminist care ethics. Anderson: considerability “is not an intrinsic property”. Gruen’s entangled empathy.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	No proposed capacity cleanly marks out all and only humans	survey of ethology, secondary sources	§1.2, note 1 (Griffin, Goodall, de Waal, Bekoff and others)
C2	Personhood cannot be the criterion because of marginal cases	informal argument	§1.3.1
C3	Indirect-duty views fail to capture the wrong done to the non-person	informal argument (authors’ judgement)	§1.3.1
C4	Being considerable does not fix how much a claim weighs	conceptual distinction	§2.2 radar-screen analogy
C5	A multi-factor utilitarian perspective handles hard cases (subsistence hunting, research) better than side-effect replies	informal argument, the authors’ own position	§2.2; note 2; Gruen 2021 ch. 4 (not in the entry’s References)
C6	Factory farming is not justified on utilitarian grounds	informal argument plus one cited figure	§2.2 (8 billion US animals per year, unsourced in the sentence; Safran Foer 2010, Singer 2023)
C7	Agency can ground moral status independently of, or alongside, sentience	reported, not endorsed	§1.5 (Sebo, Jamieson, Wilcox, Lessard)
C8	Moral considerability is relational, not intrinsic	reported (Anderson 2004), with sympathy	§3

Concepts

• moral considerability: being a being who can be wronged, i.e. one that can make a moral claim on those able to recognise claims (§1).
• speciesism: favouring members of one’s own species without moral justification (Ryder; Singer). Also, on the ideology-critical reading, a collective, institution-shaping phenomenon (§1.1).
• problem of marginal cases: humans who lack the capacities proposed as criteria (§1.3.1).
• subject of a life: Regan’s term for beings who want, believe, feel, recall and expect, and whose lives go well or badly for them (§1.3.1).
• propositional agency / perceptual agency: Sebo’s distinction between acting on normative judgements and acting on normative perceptual experiences (§1.5).
• interests: “everything in which she has a stake”, subjective and objective (§2.1).
• crucial / important / replaceable / trivial interests: the scalar ranking of the multi-factor view (§2.2).
• entangled empathy: Gruen 2015; empathy that combines affect and cognition, attending to similarity and difference and to the wider conditions of the other’s flourishing (§3).

Connections

• LIT-120 (Bruckner, Welfare Subjects and Autopoiesis), read. It extends the entry’s sentience-based considerability down to insentient autopoietic entities, and the entry never discusses plants or machines. Bruckner’s §8 schema has the same shape as Wood’s move reported in §1.3.1, and he relies on the considerability/weight split of the entry’s §2.2. The entry cites Bruckner 2021 in §2.1 on animal autonomy.
• LIT-166 (Schwitzgebel et al., review of Birch, Sebo and Keane), Deferred when this was written; since read in NOTE-116. It concerns the aggregation worry that §2.1 touches through Sebo 2023 (priority for large numbers of small sentient animals).
• LIT-193 (Terrill et al., degrees of moral status for plants), Deferred when this was written; since read in NOTE-120. It works in the weight dimension (§2.2) with degrees of sentience.
• LIT-126 (Vieira), Deferred. It denies AI moral patienthood on phenomenal-consciousness grounds, consistent with the entry’s experiential reading of both sentience and agency.
• LIT-117 (Enoch, “Agency, Shmagency”), Deferred. It is a critique of constitutivist grounding of normativity in agency, the Korsgaardian line the entry uses in §1.3.

Agency. The entry does not hold one account of agency. It reports two relevant to moral status. One is Korsgaard’s reflective agency (acting on reasons one endorses from a practical identity), which is proposed as what makes persons distinctive (§1.3). The other is Sebo’s perceptual agency (acting on normative perceptual experiences), which is widespread among animals and is proposed as a ground of status (§1.5). Both are experiential; Wilcox makes agency co-extensive with sentience. The tag is justified: agency as a ground of moral status is one of the entry’s five named candidates.

Bearing on the record

• No THEORY document in this record concerns moral status. If one is filed on moral patienthood (animal or artificial), this entry is the standard map for it. The considerability/weight distinction and the experiential character of every agency-based ground reported should be stated there.
• For ML practice: nothing. The entry does not discuss AI systems. Its only bearing on AI is indirect: the agency grounds it reports presuppose experience, so they do not by themselves extend status to AI systems. No ANTH document is affected.
• NOTE-181 should record the §1.5 authors beyond Sebo, the §1.3.2 and §2.1 content, and that §2.2’s multi-factor view and §3’s entangled empathy are the authors’ own.

Limitations

• It is a survey with a lean: §2.2 argues for a utilitarian multi-factor view, and §3 closes on the first author’s own approach.
• Coverage is of animals only. Plants, insentient organisms and artificial systems are outside it, so it says nothing about whether the grounds reported extend beyond sentient animals.
• Empirical claims (ethology, the 8 billion figure) are cited from secondary or popular sources, and the figure has no reference in its sentence.
• In the revision read, two in-text citations (Jamieson 2018, Gruen 2021) are missing from the References.

Open questions

• Do agency-based grounds (Sebo, Wilcox) and sentience-based grounds come apart in any real case? Wilcox’s co-extension claim is the one to test, and a non-sentient agent, if there is one, would settle it.
• How should weight be assigned under uncertainty about sentience? The entry names precautionary principles but does not say how they interact with the §2.2 weighing.

Corrections to the seeded skim

• The agency subsection is broader than Sebo, and its accounts presuppose experience. The skim reduces §1.5 to Sebo 2017. The subsection also reports Jamieson (“[f]or many of them … the meaning and value of life turns on what affects agency as well as on what affects welfare”, cited as 2018, p. 122). It reports Wilcox 2020a, for whom agency is necessary and sufficient for moral status because agency and sentience are co-extensive, and Lessard 2024, who argues that agency grounds a right of self-determination that suffering-based protection misses. Sebo’s perceptual agency is acting on “normative perceptual experiences”. So none of the agency grounds reported transfers to non-experiencing systems without further argument. That answers the skim’s question about transfer to AI: not as stated.
• The skim omits §1.3.2 Legal Persons and the three value theories in §2.1. §1.3.2 covers the Nonhuman Rights Project’s chimpanzee cases, quoting the petition’s capacity list and affidavits by Jensvold, King and Osvath. §2.1 covers hedonism, preference-satisfaction and objective-list theories, including Nussbaum’s capabilities and the later additions of freedom, dignity, meaning, culture and care. The skim’s “subjective and objective accounts” understates §2.1.
• “Growing consensus” is milder in the text. The preamble says “an increasing number of philosophers have argued” that the differences do not justify denying consideration. §3 says “most now realize that the task of arguing that humans have a unique and exclusive moral status is rather difficult”. It also notes that “there are still many who reject” these arguments. The skim’s “no candidate capacity … picks out all and only humans” is right for §1.2 and §1.3.1 (the marginal-cases problem), but it is not the entry’s framing of speciesism (§1.1), which is rejected as prejudice, not refuted as a failed capacity test.
• Which positions are the authors’ own. §2.2’s multi-factor utilitarian perspective (crucial > important > replaceable > trivial interests; the seal and the Inuit family; the permitted and prohibited experiments) is argued for, not merely reported: it is called “a more satisfying reply” and “particularly helpful”. The note on it cites Gruen 2021 ch. 4. §3’s close presents Gruen 2015’s “entangled empathy”. Both are the first author’s own positions.
• Citation slips in the entry (minor). In the revision read, “Jamieson (2018)” and “Gruen 2021” are cited in the text, but the References list only Jamieson 2003 and Gruen 2011/2014/2015. §1.1 prints the Singer 1974 quotation, and §§1.3–1.4 each quotation, once as a blockquote. The duplication in my extraction is an artefact of the page markup, not of the entry.
• agency tag: justified, as secondary. §1.5 treats agency as a candidate ground of moral status, and §1.3 turns on Korsgaard’s reflective (normative) agency as what marks out persons. Agency is a subject of the entry, though only one subsection of many.