Bibliography

animal rights is an area of inquiry and debate that focuses on a variety of

approaches to assessing the moral status of nonhuman animals. One of the
main approaches in contemporary scholarship is deontological and argues
for strict rights for animals on the grounds that they are subjects-of-a-life
(Tom Regan) and thus possess inherent worth; such views often seek to
expand Kant's ascription of inherent worth to rational agents so that it
applies to all sentient beings. Other views, including those of some secular
naturalists, seek to ascribe rights to animals not on the basis of inherent
worth but on the basis of capacities shared by all sentient beings. Another
main approach encompasses a variety of views that tend to be "welfares" in
the sense that they do not seek to ascribe strict right to animals but instead
argue that certain actions performed against animals (such as killing them or
using them as sources of milk or eggs) are permissible as long as human
beings perform them in a humane manner. Welfares views are generally
utilitarian in character, being based on calculations of the quantity of harm
that can be done to a given living being, and they tend to assert hierarchies
in which beings that are cognitively more sophisticated can be harmed in
ways in which beings that are cognitively less sophisticated cannot; on the
basis of such hierarchization, welfares views typically ascribe moral
superiority to human beings over nonhuman animals, although they also
tend to avoid a speciesism privileging of all human beings over all nonhuman
animals on the grounds that some nonhuman animals are cognitively
superior to some human beings. Thus thinkers such as Peter Singer argue
that self-conscious beings have a stronger claim to life than non-selfconscious beings, where self-conscious beings are defined as those that can
conceptualize the past, present, and future of their lives as one coherent
whole.