Should We Treat Nonhuman Animals Well Because They Have Rights, Interests, Neither, or Both?

IIntroduction

When I was thirteen, I visited a dairy farm as part of a summer science program. The air was heavy with the sour-sweet smell of hay and manure. I remember being told how important dairy farms were for providing fresh products and supporting the local economy, but I was not listening to the guide.

Across a low fence, a cow stood still, bellowing. The sound was not sharp but drawn out and almost hoarse, a long, guttural cry that echoed through the metal shed. She did not appear to be physically injured, but when I looked over the gate, I noticed that the straw bedding beside her was empty.

“That’s just how it works,” the guide said.

“Each calf is separated from the mother early for its own good.”

He tried to reassure me with a smile, but I stood there in borrowed boots, feeling disturbed and wondering when she would stop calling.

In the years since, I have often returned to that moment. I know that my reaction was emotional, but I do not think that makes it philosophically unimportant. Many people experience a similar discomfort when they see an animal suffering. Something about the suffering appears to demand a response before we have decided which ethical theory explains it. Yet the existence of that response does not tell us exactly why the suffering matters. Is the cow wronged because she has interests that deserve consideration? Does she possess rights that cannot be sacrificed for human convenience? Or does our discomfort reveal something deeper about the kind of moral agents we become when we learn to ignore suffering that benefits us?

These questions matter beyond individual acts of kindness. Contemporary societies depend heavily on institutions that use nonhuman animals: industrial agriculture, biomedical research, wildlife management, entertainment, and consumer production. At the same time, research in animal behavior and neuroscience has made it increasingly difficult to portray many animals as simple biological machines. A wide range of nonhuman animals exhibit pain behavior, social attachment, fear, memory, problem solving, and forms of emotional response. The ethical problem is therefore not merely that humans sometimes behave cruelly toward creatures we know nothing about. It is that our institutions increasingly recognize animal sentience while continuing to organize animal life mainly around human purposes.

Two influential approaches dominate modern philosophical debates about this problem. The first is interest-based ethics, especially utilitarian theories associated with Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer. These theories argue that an animal matters morally because it can suffer and therefore has interests that must be included in moral calculation. The second is rights-based ethics, most prominently defended by Tom Regan, which argues that at least some animals possess inherent value and cannot legitimately be treated merely as resources for others.

Both approaches identify something morally important, but neither is sufficient on its own. Interest-based ethics explains why animal suffering must count, yet its willingness to aggregate benefits and harms may permit serious violations of individuals when sufficiently large benefits are produced elsewhere. Rights-based ethics gives individuals stronger protection, yet it faces difficult questions about the basis and boundaries of rights and about conflicts between competing rights. I therefore argue for a qualified answer to the question posed in this essay: we should treat nonhuman animals well because their interests are morally relevant and because rights can be necessary to protect those interests from sacrifice, but neither the language of interests nor the language of rights fully captures the moral problem. Our treatment of animals also reflects how we draw the boundaries of moral visibility—whose suffering we notice, whose life we regard as expendable, and what kinds of exclusion we allow ourselves to normalize.

The final part of this essay develops this broader point through Foucault and Agamben. I do not claim that their political concepts can simply be transferred from human political history to animal ethics. Rather, their work helps illuminate a structural question already present in the debate: how institutions classify some forms of life as worthy of protection while making others available for use. This perspective does not replace interests or rights. It explains why both are necessary but incomplete.

IIInterest-Based Ethics: Why Suffering Matters

For much of Western intellectual history, animals were commonly placed below human beings within a moral and theological hierarchy. Augustine, for example, understood the created order in ways that gave human beings a distinctive moral status and did not treat animals as members of the same moral community.¹ Modern animal ethics represents a major challenge to this hierarchy because it asks whether species membership alone can justify giving human interests automatic priority.

The interest-based approach begins from a simple question: what feature of a being is morally relevant? Jeremy Bentham famously argued that the important question is not whether animals can reason or speak, but whether they can suffer.² Peter Singer develops this insight through the principle of equal consideration of interests.³ If a being can experience pain, frustration, pleasure, or satisfaction, then what happens to that being matters from its own point of view. Its suffering must therefore enter moral consideration.

This does not mean that Singer believes animals and humans must always receive identical treatment. Equal consideration is not identical treatment. Different beings have different interests. A human being may have interests connected to long-term plans, political participation, education, or complex relationships that another animal does not possess in the same form. But where an interest is genuinely shared—most obviously the interest in avoiding severe pain—it cannot simply be discounted because the sufferer belongs to another species.

This is the strongest part of the interest-based position. It gives us a clear reason why animal suffering matters without requiring animals to possess human intelligence, language, or rationality. If pain is bad when experienced by a human, species membership alone does not explain why comparable pain should become morally irrelevant when experienced by another sentient creature. Singer calls the unjustified privileging of human interest speciesism, comparing its basic logical structure with other cases in which morally irrelevant group membership is used to discount another being’s interests.⁴

The interest-based approach is also attractive because it is sensitive to consequences. Animal ethics often involves difficult questions in which every available option produces some harm. Agriculture, medical research, wildlife management, and environmental policy cannot always be addressed by a simple prohibition. A theory that compares suffering and benefit can therefore respond to moral complexity rather than pretending that ethical life contains no trade-offs.

Yet this strength also creates the theory’s central weakness. If moral value is calculated through the aggregation of interests, then severe harm to one individual can in principle be justified by sufficiently large benefits to others. Utilitarianism does not regard suffering as morally irrelevant, but neither does it ordinarily treat the individual who suffers as inviolable.

Imagine that scientists discover a treatment that would permanently eliminate seasonal allergies for every human being. Billions of people would experience a real, though relatively minor, improvement in their lives. Suppose, however, that producing the treatment required the deliberate and painful killing of one kitten. If every benefit and harm were simply added together, the enormous number of small human benefits might outweigh the intense suffering of the single animal.

The example is intentionally extreme because it isolates the problem. Many people would still regard the act as wrong even if the total quantity of discomfort prevented was greater than the suffering caused. Their objection would not necessarily be that consequences never matter. Instead, they might think that there is something morally objectionable about treating one sentient being entirely as a container of costs that can be cancelled by benefits experienced by others.

This reveals a distinction between having an interest and having a claim against others. Interest-based ethics is very strong at explaining why the kitten’s pain counts. It is less successful at explaining why there may be limits on what others are permitted to do to the kitten even when violating those limits produces a larger total benefit. The problem is therefore not that utilitarianism ignores animals. In fact, utilitarian philosophers have been among the most influential defenders of animal welfare. The difficulty is that a theory based on aggregate welfare may not provide sufficiently strong protection for individuals when their interests conflict with the interests of many others.

This is where rights-based theories become attractive.

IIIRights-Based Ethics: Why Individuals May Not Be Sacrificed

Rights-based ethics begins from a different moral intuition. Some things should not be done to an individual merely because doing them would benefit others. Rights place limits on the kinds of trade-offs that moral calculation may permit.

Tom Regan develops one of the most influential rights-based theories of animal ethics in The Case for Animal Rights. Regan argues that beings who are subjects-of-a-life possess inherent value. A subject-of-a-life does not merely exist biologically but has a life that can go better or worse for that individual. Such beings possess some combination of perception, memory, desire, emotional life, preferences, and a sense of their own experiences over time.⁵ Because their lives matter to them, they should not be treated merely as resources whose value depends entirely on their usefulness to others.

The rights-based approach directly addresses the problem raised by utilitarian aggregation. If an animal possesses a right not to be subjected to severe unnecessary harm, then the harm cannot simply disappear morally because enough other individuals benefit from it. Rights establish a boundary around the individual. They express the idea that moral subjects are not interchangeable units in a calculation of total welfare.

This protection is especially important in animal ethics because animals are usually much weaker than the humans and institutions that control them. A purely aggregate system can repeatedly place the burden of human benefits on creatures who have no political power to resist. Rights provide a language for explaining why some uses of animals may be impermissible even when they are profitable, convenient, or socially accepted.

However, rights-based theories generate problems of their own. The first concerns the basis of rights. If rights depend on being a “subject-of-a-life,” philosophers must explain which capacities are sufficient and why. The problem is not simply that some animals obviously fall outside Regan’s category. The deeper difficulty is that cognitive and emotional capacities exist on continua. Different species possess different forms of memory, social awareness, perception, planning, and sentience. Any threshold risks producing difficult borderline cases.

This does not refute rights theory, but it shows that rights cannot be assigned merely by announcing a category. If the threshold is set too high, some beings capable of substantial suffering may receive inadequate protection. If it is set very low, the theory must explain how rights operate across extremely different forms of life. Interest-based ethics handles this problem more easily because sentience can generate moral consideration even where the richer capacities associated with strong individual rights remain uncertain.

The second difficulty concerns conflicts among rights. Consider an ecosystem in which an invasive mammal species introduced by humans is rapidly destroying the population of an endangered native bird. If no intervention occurs, the native species may disappear. If the invasive animals possess strong rights against being killed, however, culling them may appear impermissible.

The problem is not that rights theories are literally incapable of discussing conflicts. Rights can be ranked, limited, or interpreted in relation to other rights. But once these qualifications are introduced, the theory must explain how competing claims should be balanced. The more flexible the balancing becomes, the more the theory begins to reintroduce considerations of interests and consequences.

The two approaches therefore correct different moral dangers. Interest-based ethics prevents us from excluding animal suffering merely because the sufferer is not human. Rights-based ethics prevents us from treating individuals as endlessly exchangeable whenever aggregate welfare favors sacrifice. Yet each approach needs something supplied by the other. Interests explain why a being can be harmed. Rights explain why some harms should not simply be traded away.

For this reason, the most plausible answer is not that animals matter because they have interests or because they have rights. The two ideas address different parts of the moral problem. Sentient animals have interests because events can go better or worse for them. Where those interests are sufficiently important, rights can function as protections against their systematic sacrifice.

Still, even this combined position does not completely answer the question that disturbed me at the dairy farm. It can explain that the cow has an interest in maintaining social bonds and avoiding distress. It may also support rights limiting the ways she can be used. But a further question remains: why are institutions able to make such interests and claims so easy for ordinary people not to see?

That question moves beyond the distribution of moral rights and benefits toward the politics of moral attention.

IVBeyond Rights and Interests: Ethical Reflection and Moral Visibility

Neither interest-based nor rights-based ethics should therefore be discarded. The problem is not that the theories fail completely. It is that they begin after an important moral decision has already been made: the decision to recognize another being as someone whose interests or rights are worth considering.

Animal suffering is not hidden because humans have never developed moral principles capable of recognizing it. In many cases, the suffering is visible. What is striking is our ability to organize institutions in ways that make the suffering morally ordinary. Modern agriculture, research, consumption, and environmental management often require human beings to classify animal lives according to their usefulness. The ethical question is therefore not only what animals possess but also how human institutions make some lives visible as moral subjects and others visible mainly as resources.

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is helpful here. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes a form of modern power concerned not simply with prohibiting actions but with managing life: populations are measured, classified, regulated, and organized through institutions.⁶ His primary subject is human political life, and the concept should not be casually transferred to animals as though the political histories were identical. Nevertheless, the framework raises a useful question for animal ethics. Modern institutions also manage animal populations on an enormous scale. Animals are bred, categorized, transported, confined, medically altered, reproduced, and killed according to systems designed around human objectives.

The relevance of Foucault is therefore structural rather than analogical. His work draws attention to the fact that power does not operate only through isolated acts of cruelty. It also works through systems that define what kinds of life can be managed and for what purposes. The moral difficulty of industrial animal use may therefore lie not only in individual harmful actions but in the normalization of a relationship in which an entire category of sentient life is administered primarily as a resource.

Giorgio Agamben develops a more radical vocabulary through the concept of bare life. In Homo Sacer, Agamben examines the political possibility of reducing a human being to biological existence while removing ordinary political protection. His central example, homo sacer, is a figure in Roman law who could be killed without the act counting as ordinary homicide.⁷ Again, this concept comes from a specific analysis of human sovereignty and should not simply be equated with the condition of farmed animals.

Yet Agamben helps clarify a moral structure that matters here: the distinction between life that receives institutional protection and life that can be exposed to harm without being recognized in the same moral or political terms. Many animals in modern systems are intensely regulated precisely because they are valuable as biological organisms. Their reproduction, nutrition, health, movement, and death may all be carefully managed. But this management does not necessarily imply recognition of them as subjects whose own interests constrain the purposes of the institution.

The paradox is important. An animal can be highly visible economically and biologically while remaining morally marginal. The dairy cow is valuable enough for every aspect of her reproduction to be controlled, yet her distress at separation can be treated as an ordinary cost of production. Her life is not ignored in a literal sense; it is monitored carefully. What is limited is the moral significance assigned to her experience.

This reframes the question of animal ethics. Instead of asking only, “What rights does this animal possess?” or “How much suffering does this practice produce?” we can also ask:

What kind of moral community allows some forms of suffering to become structurally easy to disregard?

The question does not replace rights or interests. It explains why they may fail to influence practice even when we intellectually acknowledge them. A society can accept that animals are sentient and still design institutions in which their interests routinely lose against minor human benefits. It can create welfare rules while continuing to treat the animal principally as an economic unit. Moral theory therefore needs not only principles for resolving conflicts but also reflection on how the conflicts themselves are framed.

Agamben’s work also suggests caution about the habit of exclusion. Here it is essential not to claim that animal exploitation is equivalent to the political persecution of refugees, colonized peoples, disabled persons, or other marginalized human groups. Such comparisons can erase important historical differences and can themselves become ethically careless. The more defensible point is structural: moral communities repeatedly rely on boundaries that determine whose experiences are taken seriously. Learning to regard vulnerability outside a favored category as morally irrelevant can become a dangerous habit of perception.

The lesson is therefore not that the same history repeats identically across species. It is that moral exclusion requires justification. If we become accustomed to treating membership in a category as sufficient reason for ignoring suffering, we weaken the demand that power explain why some lives receive less protection than others.

This insight returns us to interests and rights. Interests identify what is at stake for the animal. Rights place limits on what powerful actors may do with those interests. Ethical reflection on exclusion asks why those interests and rights become visible or invisible in the first place.

The three perspectives are therefore complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

VEthical Attention as Self-Definition

If this argument is correct, treating animals well is not only a response to facts about animals. It is also an expression of the kind of moral agents we choose to become.

This does not mean that morality should be reduced to human character. The cow’s suffering matters because it is her suffering, not merely because cruelty makes humans unattractive. An ethical theory focused only on what animal treatment reveals about us would risk making animals instruments of human moral development once again. The point must therefore be stated more carefully.

Animal interests provide an independent reason for concern. Rights may provide strong protections for those interests. But attention determines whether we are willing to recognize those reasons when doing so is inconvenient.

The experience at the dairy farm mattered to me because the cow interrupted the ordinary description of what was happening. The guide presented separation as part of an efficient agricultural process. The cow’s response made another description possible: a social animal had lost contact with her offspring and was distressed by that loss. Neither description was linguistically impossible. The moral question concerned which description I was willing to see as relevant.

Ethical attention therefore precedes some forms of moral calculation. Before we can weigh an interest, we must recognize that there is an interest to weigh. Before we can defend a right, we must regard the being who possesses it as the kind of individual whose claim deserves to be heard.

This does not produce a complete moral theory, and it should not pretend to. Attention alone cannot tell us whether invasive animals should be culled, which forms of biomedical research are justified, or exactly which rights different species should possess. These difficult questions still require principles, evidence, and judgment.

What attention does is prevent those principles from beginning with an invisible subject.

It reminds us that the beings affected by our institutions are not merely variables in economic, scientific, or ecological systems. They are living creatures for whom at least some things can go better or worse.

The ethical task is therefore both theoretical and reflective. We need interests because suffering matters. We need rights because suffering should not always be sacrificed to aggregate benefit. And we need attention because neither interests nor rights can protect beings whose claims we train ourselves not to notice.

VIConclusion

Should we treat nonhuman animals well because they have rights, interests, neither, or both? The most defensible answer is both, but neither is sufficient by itself.

Interest-based ethics provides the most basic reason why animals enter the moral community at all. Sentient animals can experience pain, fear, frustration, comfort, and satisfaction. What happens to them therefore matters to them. Their suffering cannot be dismissed simply because they belong to another species.

Yet interests alone are not enough. If every interest can always be aggregated with every other interest, then serious harm to vulnerable individuals may be justified whenever a sufficiently large number of others receive smaller benefits. Rights respond to this problem by expressing the idea that individuals possess claims that cannot always be exchanged for aggregate welfare.

Rights, however, also depend on judgments about which beings possess them, how strong different rights are, and how conflicts between rights should be resolved. The theory therefore needs continuing attention to interests, consequences, and differences among forms of life. Rights and interests should not be understood as competing explanations from which we must choose one. They protect different dimensions of moral standing.

But the debate remains incomplete if it stops there. Foucault and Agamben help reveal another dimension of the problem: institutions do not merely respond to already recognized moral subjects. They also shape which forms of life become visible as subjects at all. Modern societies can acknowledge animal sentience while continuing to organize billions of animal lives principally according to human purposes. An animal may be carefully managed as a biological and economic organism while its own experience remains morally secondary.

This is why the problem of animal ethics is also a problem of moral attention. Treating animals well requires more than finding the correct formula for balancing harms or assigning rights. It requires a willingness to notice the beings whose interests our ordinary practices make easy to ignore.

I therefore return to the cow I saw when I was thirteen. My sadness at the time did not amount to a philosophical argument. It did not tell me whether the cow possessed rights in Regan’s sense or how her interests should be weighed against those of farmers and consumers. But the reaction contained something morally prior to those arguments: a refusal, however incomplete, to regard her distress as merely part of “how it works.”

Philosophy should do more than preserve that intuition, because intuitions can be inconsistent and mistaken. Interest-based ethics explains why the suffering I witnessed mattered. Rights-based ethics explains why the animal should not automatically be sacrificed whenever human convenience points in the opposite direction. Reflection on moral exclusion explains why an institution can make both facts difficult to see.

We therefore treat animals well not only because they have interests or because some possess rights, but because taking those interests and rights seriously is part of refusing an unjustified boundary between lives that count and lives that can simply be used.

The question of animal ethics ultimately returns to a question about moral responsibility. Power over another form of life creates the possibility of using it, but it also creates an obligation to justify that use. The greater our ability to control animal life becomes, the less convincing ignorance becomes as an excuse.

Perhaps this is what stayed with me from the dairy farm. The cow could not explain her claim in the language of rights or utility. She could only continue calling. The ethical work began when that sound became something I could no longer treat as morally irrelevant.

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