Animal Minds

Abstract

Any defence of the moral claims of animals is going to require that they possess at least some sorts of mental states. If utilitarianism is to work, we are going to have to attribute to animals such states as preferences or desires, or states of pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. If Regan’s rights-based approach is to work, we are going to have to regard at least some animals — the ones that make moral claims on us — as subjects-of-a-life, with the mental complexity that this entails. According to the contractarian defence of animal rights, defended in the previous chapter, the limits of moral consideration are determined by what, from the perspective of the original position, one could conceivably worry about being. That is, the boundaries of moral considerability coincide with those of sentience. The quickest way to deny animals moral status, therefore, is to deny them mental status; it is to deny that they are the subjects of mental states, to deny that they have a mental life. Such a denial might strike the person on the street — at least if their street is in any way populated with animal life — as absurd. This, however, has not stopped many prominent philosophers from issuing this denial.KeywordsProper FunctionBelief StatePropositional AttitudeIntentional ObjectMoral ClaimThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.