Animal rights and their practical applications

Humans dominate Earth with advanced technology, developed governments, and unique social structures. More recently, philosophers have reflected on the treatment of animals by considering their rights, challenging many traditional purposes of domestication, such as farming animals for food. This essay will show that animals have both interests and rights by evaluating their cognitive capacity through a comparison to cognitively incapable humans, and showing how animal rights could be applied pragmatically in human society. 

Cognitive capacity—including capacity for interests, sentience, and autonomy—determines rights. Cognitive capacity is universal; therefore, rights are universal. In human society, we grant rights to certain humans who possess equal or less cognitive ability than animals but not to animals. But if cognitive capacity determines rights, then humans with less cognitive ability than animals should receive less than/equal rights as animals. A society where both animals and incompetent humans do not receive rights allows many morally unjust instances. Therefore both animals and incompetent humans should receive rights. 

But only a society that understands and recognizes rights can protect and enforce rights; in contrast, it is impractical to enforce a structure of rights in nature. Therefore, animals can only have their rights secured in a human society. Since humans’ advanced cognitive capacity structures are the basis for society, only animals that are affected by humans’ advanced cognitive capacity can be considered part of society. 

This essay aims to provide detail and justification to the logical framework above. Before the discussion begins, key terms including animals, humans, interests, and rights must be defined, along with their implications. 

1. Animals will refer to non-human animals;

2. Humans will refer to members of the species Homo Sapiens classified biologically, evolutionarily, and genetically;

3. Interests are outcomes that are conducive to a being’s flourishing. If some outcome is in a being’s interest, the performance of that outcome (the outcome’s coming into existence) will increase that being’s overall chance of flourishing (Mullins, 2019, p. 98). In legal practice, interests are not necessarily protected by the law. For example, a businessman might have an interest in being rich, but the law has no duty to assist the businessman in becoming rich; 

4. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rights “are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states” (Wenar & Cruft, 2025). Rights must be protected by the law in society. If one has a right to their life, then the law must guarantee that their life should not be taken unlawfully by others. 

In the context of animals, animal interests do not directly relate to legal protection of animals, but animal rights do. Furthermore, a being has rights because of some fundamental cognitive quality it possesses. For example, Interest theories grant rights to beings which can have interests, while Will theories grant rights to those who can enforce and control another’s duties (Wenar & Cruft, 2025). In these theories and any other theories of rights, beings are granted rights due to a possession of a defining, cognitive quality.

Animals have interests. Many animal behaviors, such as avoiding pain and seeking comfort, are evidence of animal interests. Some argue that animals are machines functioning only on instincts. However, this argument overlooks animals’ sentience, biological disposition, and ability to express preference, such as dogs comforting crying humans or wagging their tail to communicate (Lindell et al., 2024; Sanford et al., 2018, p. 382). But despite animals having interests, they lack humans’ uniquely developed, advanced cognitive abilities, including our ability to think abstractly, to solve complex problems through reasoning, to use tools, to understand others’ minds, to create laws and traditions, to reflect on morality, and to use language (Dicke & Roth, 2008, pp. 70-77). Though some animals do possess these skills, none are utilized as widely and efficiently as humans utilize them. But this recognition of human uniqueness does not justify speciesism—the belief that some species should be treated as morally more important than other species (Duignan, 2013). Imagine another animal species with equal cognitive and sentimental capabilities as humans. Excluding these creatures from having rights is obviously wrong, and including them proves that having rights is not based on species, but on some defining cognitive ability.

As established above, animals have interests yet lack advanced cognitive abilities. But similarly, defective babies and incompetents (those who are cognitively incapable) also do not have and will not develop any advanced cognitive abilities, due to most disabilities and neurodegenerative diseases being incurable (Pardo, 2023, p. 2339; What Are the Treatments, 2018). In fact, many animals have demonstrated levels of intelligence comparable to that of young children (O'Leary, 2025). But due to the variation of cognitive capacities in both animals and incompetent humans, they will all be considered to have roughly equal cognitive capacity. If rights are based on some cognitive quality, and incompetents, animals, and defective babies have roughly equal cognitive capacity, then either all or none of them should have rights. Yet legally, defective babies and other incompetents are granted rights, while animals are treated as property. For example, in the U.K., ownership of pets is handled like the division of any other property during a family dispute (Buttle, 2025). Some argue that defective babies’ and incompetents’ physical incapability grants them rights to protection. But physical abilities are not the determiner of rights. Though physical action might be a manifestation of a cognitive ability, physical attributes do not grant beings the ability to have interests or be rational, nor do physical capabilities directly relate to the cognitive capabilities of a being. 

The logic above leads to the conclusion that babies, incompetent, and animals must receive the same amount of rights due to their similar cognitive nature. Two options remain, either defective babies, animals, and incompetents all have rights, or they all do not have rights. Philosopher Peter Singer advocates for a system where pleasure and suffering are the guide for morality rather than rights (no rights are granted). This utilitarian system, aiming to grant the greatest pleasure to the greatest number, has led him to conclude the moral correctness of infanticide of disabled babies (Singer, 2012, p. 169–189). These conclusions are grounded in his claims that neither a newborn infant nor a fetus is a person in the morally relevant sense because of their inability to be autonomous, forward looking, and aware of their own existence. 

But Singer’s utilitarianism cannot stand as an effective moral system due to its reducing beings to utility and failing to consider non-consequential moral concepts such as dignity, intention, and relationships. Singer’s and any other utilitarian system, in focusing on impartial benevolence, loses the individual altogether, allowing many instances of morally unjust suffering, such as a person being painfully tortured for a crowd’s pleasure, as long as the net pleasure is more than the net suffering (Smart & Williams, 2006, p. 101). In contrast, a Kantian view demands that we treat each rational creature as ends in themselves, not merely as a means (Kant, 2017, pp. 28-29). Though Kant did not recognize animals as moral agents, Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian view argues that “things can be good or bad” for animals as well, “so we are committed to treating them as ends in themselves”(Korsgaard, 2020, pp. 282, 341). Any moral system which fails to recognize the rights of defective babies, animals, and incompetents—utilitarian or not—will function similarly to Singer’s, allowing and justifying exploitation of these vulnerable beings.

If a system where defective babies, incompetents, and animals are not granted rights cannot stand morally, then defective babies, incompetents and animals must have rights. Because they have rights, and rights are based on a certain cognitive capability, then there must be some cognitive ability that they share which grants them rights. This essay, however, will not make a claim on the specific quality, only state that it exists; that is a metaphysical discussion, irrelevant to the pragmatic treatment of animals. Additionally, since rights are based on a fundamental cognitive quality of a being, then beings that have rights must have them universally, regardless of society, class, and species. 

But not all beings with rights have the same rights. A system where incompetents, babies and animals hold the same rights as competent humans would be problematic, and would result in chaos due to the incompetents’ and animals’ inability to make a rational and moral decision. Rights should vary depending on the cognitive ability of the right-holder. Incompetents, babies, and animals possess the most fundamental quality, allowing them basic rights to care, protection, and life. However, rights such as liberty, freedom of speech, political participation, and ownership of hazardous objects (e.g. cars) should only be given to cognitively capable humans. 

But animal rights cannot be practically protected in every situation. For example, a wolf hunting down a deer in the wild cannot be morally constrained by any human. Only in a system where rights are understood, recognized, and protected through a set of widely recognized codes could beings have their rights be protected. This system is called society. A simple distinction should be made between human society, where rights could and ought to be enforced, and nature, where rights are impossible to enforce. Because nature neither recognizes nor enforces rights, rights are always in conflict; a tiger hunting down a deer does not act immorally because equal rights to life are in conflict. Because of this, a system of rights cannot be applied practically. Animals and humans, only by participating in a society, can have their rights rightfully protected and enforced. This participation in society is marked by relationships. Because human society is created and marked by human’s advanced cognitive abilities (as mentioned previously), being in a relationship that exists uniquely because of human’s advanced cognitive abilities can be considered part of human society. For example, domestication exists because of humans’ cognitive abilities, and does not exist anywhere else in nature. In contrast, natural relationships, even when humans are involved, such as predator-prey or symbiotic relationships, are considered nature and not society. For instance, a mosquito biting a human is a parasitic relationship where equal survival rights are in conflict.

Additionally, a society, as defined in this essay, is relationship-based, not recognition-based. For example, in the United States, a slave in the eighteenth century who was not legally and socially recognized as a legal person still has rights, despite the law not recognizing it—rights exist on their own, independently of human recognition. Participation in a society does not guarantee that human/animal rights be protected, only that rights could and ought to be protected. Since the legal code is influenced by social factors, it is common for rights that ought to be protected to go unprotected (e.g. women’s rights before the 19th century). 

But recognizing animal rights may challenge the purpose of certain human-animal relationships. For example, animal rights to life prevents us from killing animals for food. But only this way can we recognize human-animal relationships that deprive animals of their rights, granting proper treatment to animals.

Ultimately, animals deserve to be treated well because they have both interests and rights. Animals’ inherent cognitive ability similar to defective babies and incompetents grants animals rights which ought to be protected and enforced as they participate in our society. However, these rights are not enforceable outside society, due to the impossibility of establishing a practical system in situations where equal rights are in conflict—nature. As our reflection on animal rights and treatment deepens, a tier-rights legal system, where rights are granted based on cognitive ability and not species membership, could be established, balancing moral consistency with practical governing. Legal codes will, in certain contexts, treat animals as legal persons, recognizing them as ends-in-themselves. Education must change too, challenging speciesist claims and educating more to consider animals morally. As our technology advances, we must not abandon the morality and rational reflection that brought us here, but carry us forward to a more just and inclusive society. 

References

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