Animal rights and personhood
Studium Generale
October 4, 2016
Bernice Bovenkerk
April 2015
First Time in World History Judge Recognizes Two
Chimpanzees as Legal Persons
Leo and Hercules
Non-human Rights Project
Steven Wise
(Studium Generale
November 13)
Ruling not upheld in court
Decision appealed
Still liberated (sanctuary)
Why is this significant?
 Animals already had rights (anti cruelty legislation)
 Now they were legally regarded as ‘persons’
 Grants special rights; in particular the right to argue that
they should no longer be incarcerated
 Doesn’t mean they are regarded as
human persons
Questions
 What is the moral basis for granting (any) animals
rights?
 What is the difference between legal and moral rights to
personhood?
 When is one considered a person according to animal
ethics theory?
 What does this mean in practice?
- Right to be free?
- Right to life?
- Right not to be used?
Structure of this talk
 Brief introduction to (animal) ethics
 Different rights theories (Regan, Francione, Cochrane)
 Which animals are considered persons?
Ethics?
Ethics
FACTS
What the world is like
(empirical)
How we should deal with that
world
Reflection
(normative)
Ethics
Ethics is a systematic
reflection on morality
Morality: “The totality of
norms and values that a
person (or group) regard as
directive for action and that
are deemed universalisable
and important by this person
(or group).
Moral judgment formation
Intuitions/
emotions
Principles
Facts
What is the status of a moral
judgment?
Ethics is dynamic
Outcome of reflection is an equilibrium/balance until other
relevant information comes to light or principles are
refined or intuitions change
Does not mean subjective or relative
Universality pretence
Based on logical
reasoning
Consistency
Moral Status: who counts
in our moral decisions?
What
arguments do
we have to be
able to speak
about moral
status?
Nature as a
whole
Plants
Animals
People
Moral status
 In our moral decisions the interests of each being with
moral status should be weighed
 All beings with certain properties matter
 Possible candidates for properties are:
- Sentience (capacity for enjoyment and suffering)
Because of these
properties it matters to
them how you treat
them: basis for interests
- Conscious experience
- Possession of desires
- Self-reflective agency
- Autonomous activity
- Purposive agency
- Being alive
Morally relevant capacities?
Sentience
The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor,
“Can they talk?” but rather, "Can they
suffer?” (Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832)
Analogy with racism and sexism
 Discrimination on the
basis of an irrelevant
characteristic
 Solely based on
belonging to a
specific species
Speciesism
 Belonging to the species
‘human’ is not a good
reason to be favoured

Only amount of suffering/
enjoyment is relevant
 Self-awareness could lead
to more (or less) suffering
Division between humans and nonhuman
animals
“One of the things that sets humans apart from
other animals is our perennial efforts to establish
our distinctiveness from them” (Gruen)
 On the basis of specific characteristics:
Intelligence, language, creativity, sentience, moral
autonomy, morality
 Difference between moral agents and moral
patients
Human exceptionalism
• Two problems with this human exceptionalism:
1) None of these characteristics are exclusively
human
2) Not all humans possess these characteristics
Marginal cases-argument
 Humans with lowered capacities and/or consciousness
and/or who do not have an image of the future
 For example babies, severely mentally retarded,
Alzheimer/coma patients
 If we do not eat them or perform tests on them, why do
this to animals?
 Singer: equal interests should be weighed equally and all
sentient creatures have a minimal interest in avoiding
pain
Equality
 Equal consideration of interests ≠ equal treatment
 Differences between species important when we
decide how to treat them
 But: equal interest = equal treatment for Singer
 Points out arbitrary
way in which we treat
different species
 A pet ≠ a wild animal
≠ a lab animal
≠ a production animal
Anthropocentrism
 Placing human interests in the centre
 Other beings only have instrumental value
 Animal ethics approaches try to avoid this
 But do they really?
 Moral status based on what
animals have in common with
humans
> human is still the standard
Animal rights
 Distinction between legal rights and moral rights
 Legal rights can be based on moral considerations, but
something can be immoral without it being legal and vice
versa
 In a sense easier to grant animals a legal right than a
moral rights
 Moral rights come with a specific theoretical framework
Rights theories
Rights framework
Utilitarianism
Virtue ethics
Relational ethics
Contractualism
Rights
theories/
Kantianism/
deontology
What do they have in common?
 Developed in opposition to utilitarian thinking
 Singer: all equal interests treated equally
 Maximize the total amount of good and minimize the
total amount of bad of all those involved
 Good: happiness, preferences, welfare
 Aggregation
What do they have in common?
 Interests should be respected irrespective of
consequences
 Boundaries > rights
 But: rights are not absolute; can be trumped by other
rights
 Should not sacrifice individuals for the good of the group
 Do not only focus on animal welfare, but also on other
considerations
Tom Regan
 Utilitarianism does not consider
individual rights
 Utilitarians focus on the happiness or
welfare of individuals, not on the
individuals themselves
 Respect for the intrinsic value of animals
 Animal dignity
 Belong to the moral community because they are
subject-of-a-life
 Should never treat them solely as means, but
always as ends in themselves as well (Kant)
Subject – of – a - life
 Experiential welfare, a sense of the future, desires
and beliefs, acting intentionally, perceiving, having
a psychosocial identity over time, having preference
autonomy
 When you have these, you have inherent value and
it is wrong for anyone to harm you
 Rules out animal use categorically
 Against animal cruelty, killing animals, using
animals in recreation, using animals in experiments,
confining animals in zoos, etc.
Gary Francione
 Animals have the right not to be used as human
resources or to be treated as property
 Only things can be property and animals are not things
 If an animal is property this means he or she has no
intrinsic value, only instrumental value for humans
 Francione likens property ownership of animals to
slavery; against any form of animal confinement
 According to the Dutch law animals are property.
 Tension > they are also regarded as possessing intrinsic
value. Can we have duties towards animals, while they
do not have rights?
Domestication
 Francione: we should stop domestication > not let any
more domestic animals come into existence
 Take care of the ones still alive
 Domestication makes animals completely dependent on
us
 We have bred companion animals, in particular dogs, to
be docile and dependent on us

We control their lives the way slave owners control the
lives of slaves
 In Francione’s view all animals have personhood
(because sentient and autonomous)
Rights bearers
 Some argue that only those who can understand rights
and have legal duties themselves can be rights-bearers

However, this is not the case for a lot of human beings
either, such as children and mentally challenged people
 Criticism of Francione: he seems to conflate legal and
moral concepts
 When animals can be owned legally, it does not follow
that the moral relationship is necessarily one where we
treat the animal as a thing.
 Humans have deep seated social relationships with other
animals and to view the “ownership” of a “pet” as
“slavery” is reductionist and a bad analogy
Alasdair Cochrane
 A theory of animal rights without liberation
 Argues against Regan: does not make clear
why a being with inherent value has a basic right to be treated
respectfully
 Rights are simply protections of important interests
 Sentient animals have important interests
 But: most sentient animals do not have an intrinsic interest in
liberty (only an instrumental interest)
 For this they would have to be autonomous agents
Cochrane
 As long as they are treated well, they can be
confined and used
 Against Francione: keeping an animal as a pet is
unlike keeping a human as a slave
 For humans freedom is important, because it is in
their interest to lead an authentic life, pursuing
their own goals
The Truman Show
Persons
 According to Cochrane some animals might have an
intrinsic interest in liberty, because they are autonomous
 Persons not necessarily all and only human beings
 The Great Ape Project (Singer, Cavalieri): great apes
“are the closest relatives of our species” and these
nonhumans “have mental capacities and an emotional
life sufficient to justify inclusion within the community of
equals.”
Personhood
 The term persons was historically reserved for rights
bearers, so slaves were not persons
 Nowadays it refers to beings with complex
consciousness: self-awareness over time, rationality,
sociability, autonomy
 Problem: self-awareness is not an all or nothing trait
 Comes in degrees
 In a sense all animals capable of purposive
action are self-aware and social animals
have sociability
 Not enough to have just one of these
traits, but do not need to have all of them
What animals considered persons?
Examples of very complex consciousness
 Crows with Theory of Mind?
 Dogs that can distinguish the meaning of words apart
from intonation
 Dolphins have conversations
 Elephants have very long memory
 Even fish who cooperate with other species
Conclusion
 Whether or not a being is considered a person from a
moral point of view is separate from the question
whether they are legal persons
 With more evidence about cognitive abilities of animals,
more and more animals may be granted (moral)
personhood
 Discussion needed between philosophy of mind, ethics,
biology, and ethology to determine who are persons
 For persons liberty may be an intrinsic interest
 Meaning: animals with personhood should not be
confined