Abstract

There are four major types of arguments which support the contention that animals possess moral rights. In Chapter One, this dissertation identifies these arguments in the animal rights literature. The arguments are generally concerned with explicating the moral criterion which enables beings to possess moral rights. The problems with these arguments lie in the justification and specification of these proposed criteria, i.e., sentience, interests and inherent value. ;Chapter Two examines the appeal to particular moral intuitions offered as justification for several of these arguments. The appeal leads to difficulty in identifying and in distinguishing intuitions from social customs; it also leads to apparently irresolvable conflicts among intuitions. ;In Chapter Three the specification of these criteria is examined. The criteria are employed in a way which is much too general. This is a serious problem for the theorists of animal rights, since some specifications of these criteria may not, in fact, afford animals moral rights. ;Chapter Four examines the appeal of proponents of animal rights to a perceived correspondence between legal and moral rights. This justification fails to explain adequately how the descriptive fact that animals possess legal rights, by virtue of "claims" and "interests", necessarily implies that animals possess moral rights. ;The final chapter examines two more general difficulties which encumber the usefulness of these arguments for animal rights. These difficulties are that the arguments underlying and supporting conceptions of moral rights fail to account either for the normative status of their conclusions, because of their emphasis on descriptively true manifestations of these criteria, or for the validation of claims concerning animal rights. In an attempt to rectify these inadequacies I examine traditional moral rights theories which do grapple with these normative considerations, in the hope of finding a possible grounding for these arguments. Unfortunately, these rights theories do not support the arguments or animal rights, with the possible exception of a utilitarian theory of rights. ;This dissertation concludes that the arguments proposed to date fail in their objective of showing that animals can and do possess moral rights