Christine Korsgaard's book Fellow Creatures makes the claim that we ought to treat animals -- all of them, severally and collectively -- as ends in themselves and never merely as means to our ends.
PAUL J. GRIFFITHS: ‘Christine Korsgaard argues in her book that we humans have obligations to other animals because life can go well or badly for them: they are the subjects of their lives, and they therefore have an interest in how those lives go. Those facts about them give them a moral claim on us. Korsgaard, as the Kantian she is, makes this claim by saying that we ought to treat animals — all of them, severally and collectively — as ends in themselves and never merely as means to our ends. The burden of Fellow Creatures is to explain the underpinnings of this thesis, and to show some of its practical implications. Philosophers have devoted considerable attention to these questions during the past forty years or so. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which makes a case similar to Korsgaard’s though from a utilitarian rather than a Kantian point of view…
For Korsgaard, to be an animal, human or not, is to be sentient. If you are sentient, that means, roughly, that it seems like something to you to be you. A capacity for pleasure and pain is a minimal version of this. More elaborate versions include a sense of having a life extended in time, and of being related to a world external to yourself in ways more complex than simple pleasure or pain. But the minimal version of sentience is sufficient for being an animal, and also sufficient for having interests and a point of view. To have those is to have a self, to be the subject of a life, and that, in turn, is to have moral standing as the animal you are. All this is, in short, what it is to have animal life: you have an interest in what’s good for you, and you act in accord with that interest…
Korsgaard is an exceptionalist about humans: she thinks we have properties and capacities that non-human animals lack. But she doesn’t do what most human exceptionalists do, which is to link her exceptionalism to some objective scale of value. Quite the contrary. All value, for her, is “tethered,” by which she means that all value is value for some person or some self. The universal value is that all selves should get whatever is good for them, but the particulars of what’s good for one kind of creature won’t, ordinarily, be the same as the particulars of what’s good for another. Humans are not, in this view, objectively more important or better than spiders or tigers; we’re different from them, as they are from one another, and so what’s good for us is also different from what’s good for them’. SOURCE…
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