Enfranchising Animals in Legal Institutions: Fundamental Legal Rights

Abstract

This chapter investigates the second of the two most obvious options of legally facilitating the required consideration of animals’ interests in liberal democracies. It focusses on the option of assigning sentient animals fundamental legal rights. First, it is elucidated that, despite spectacular reports in the media and even in some scholarly work, non-human animals around the world have not yet been granted legal rights. Subsequently, it is defined what type of legal rights is considered and what the effects of these rights would be. Due to the fact that legal animal rights would have a significant impact on society and could have significant economic, democratic, and liberty costs, a robust, threefold justification for these rights is also given. It is argued that the interspecies democratic theory in this book is not the only ground for assigning animals legal rights; an interest-based account of rights also offers such a justification, as well as the fact that animal rights would significantly improve the legal systems in liberal democracies. Subsequently, it is investigated whether legal animal rights could meet the criteria for animal enfranchisement in liberal democracies. The chapter concludes that the option of assigning fundamental legal rights to animals has good normative papers, since this institutional setup would bring all enfranchisement criteria into view, while also respecting liberal democratic principles and even improving liberal democracies.