Should we treat non-human animals well because they have rights, interests, neither, orboth?
- Menghua Yang
- Oct 4
- 8 min read
Menghua Yang
2025
I. Introduction: The Central Question in Animal Ethics
Why non-human animals must be treated well is no longer a matter of speculative philosophy, but of ethically demanding, legally contested and scientifically informed space. The positionof animals is under scrutiny at courts, laboratories, and legislatures, as increasinglythereisevidence showing the cognitive and emotional sophistication of animals. The high-profilecases, including the habeas corpus petition on behalf of Happy the elephant in the BronxZoo, and the formal recognition of the sentience of animals in the European Union, NewZealand, and various Latin American constitutions highlight an increasing demand of a more firmlyestablished normative framework: Are animals to be treated well because they have rights, because they have interests, or due to some combination of the two?
The argument of this paper is that abstract rights are not the most justifiable basis of morality, but rather that morally relevant and empirically based interests are. Rights arenot foundational but instrumental, rhetorically powerful, and sometimes useful in legal strategy, but normative vessels that can acquire legitimacy only when they serve to secure important interests. The argument urges redefining rights as interest-weighted tools, not moral primitives. The fact that animals can suffer, thrive, build social connections, and learn to go about theirworlds in a goal-directed way is the foundation of their moral status. Not only is this a philosophically persuasive opinion, but scientific studies of the modern era have so conclusively proved it that any argument that animals do not have rights or interests is now outdated (Browning & Veit, 2022).
II. Rights vs. Interests: Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Debate
To justify the claim that animals are to be treated well because of their morally significant interests, one has to first explain the difference between rights and interests two fundamental but still confused moral concepts. A moral right is a normative right that has obligations onothers; it defines a sphere of protection of autonomy or wellbeing that is frequently codifiedas legal rights with institutional enforcement. An interest on the other hand is a state of affairsthat either positively or negatively impacts on the welfare of an individual in the eyes of that individual. Interests are empirical: they can be observed, inferred to behavior and can bemeasured in terms of suffering or flourishing. By contrast, rights are moral or legal constructswhose ascription turns on prior philosophical beliefs, not on observation.
In the past, animals were deprived of rights and interests. The Cartesian perspective regardedthem as mindless automata with no subjective experience, and Kant regarded obligations toanimals as only indirect obligations to mankind, and were concerned only with what animal cruelty says about human morality, not about the status of the animal itself. Such reductivemodels are still in use today by agricultural and biomedical industries, which regularlytreat animals as morally inert objects. But this perception of the world has been definitivelyrejected by modern studies of ethology and neuroscience. Browning and Veit (2022) surveyasentience shift in animal science: empirical consensus has come to agree that many speciesenjoy conscious experience, pain perception, and behavioral repertoires. The philosophical credibility of the view that animals do not have interests, that is, interests in avoiding suffering, in attaining pleasure, and in establishing social relationships, is now out of the question.
These philosophers such as Tom Regan and Gary Francione have reacted by supportinganimal rights. Regan asserts that animals have an intrinsic value and they should not be treated as means. Francione affirms that sentient beings have the right not to be regardedasproperty. These opinions have two great benefits. First, they put in place categorical moral safeguards: when an animal has a right to life, or bodily integrity, it cannot be overriddenbyautilitarian cost-benefit analysis. Second, they fit with powerful traditions of rights-basedlaw, and are rhetorically effective as litigation and political advocacy.
But the rights based perspective is full of conceptual and practical challenges. MadhurimaKasireddy (2023) criticizes this method as creating theoretical inflation: should we absolutelyprohibit euthanasia in hopeless veterinary cases, because every sentient creature has a right tolife? Are cognitively sophisticated species such as octopuses deserving political representation? Rights theory does not have a valuable gradational process of distinctionbetween species. The approach leads to absurd egalitarianism or ad hoc exclusion becauseall rights-holders are treated as moral equals. Moreover, rights usually depend on anthropocentric conceptions of autonomy and rational agency-Hohfeldian powers and immunities that presuppose abilities that most animals lack (Sravya et al., 2023). Therefore, the expansionof animal rights may require uncomfortable legal fictions or proxies, which interfere withconsistency.
In comparison, the interests-based approach, which is argued by utilitarianismby Peter Singerand Martha Nussbaum capabilities theory, bases moral status on sentient experience. This model is scientifically and ethically scalable. According to Bayesian models of animal cognition, Lecorps and Weary (2024) show that animals develop predictive representationsofpain and reward and adjust their behavior to them. Welfare in this case is not a moral ideal but
a biological reality. An animal suffers to this extent that he has a reason to be in another state; and to this extent that humans recognize this, then they are obliged to respond morally.
The scalar precision of the interests approach is what makes it so powerful. In contrast torights, which are either possessed or not, interests may exist in degrees, in intricacy, andinnormative significance. This gives us a non-relativist way to ethically differentiate amongspecies such as chickens and octopuses, in terms of cognitive sophistication and welfarerange. This graduated responsiveness to interspecies difference makes more balanced ethical andlegal reactions possible. In addition, the interests are action-guiding unlike the abstract rights. Laws based on enforcedminimum cage sizes or pain reduction procedures are not based on appeals to dignity but rather on empirical welfare judgments. The test is whether the animal’s interest is adequatelyserved, not formalized.
The most typical criticism, though, is that interests can be too readily overruled. Whensafeguarding the interest of an animal strains on human economic or cultural interests, thenwhy not kill the former? But this difficulty is more and more exaggerated. According toCrisante, Burman, and Wilkinson (2024), the attitude toward animal protection is highlyaligned with the perceived animal cognition and emotional capacity. Popular intuitions about moral consideration grow as scientific knowledge of animal minds grows. As animal interestsgain weight, rights risk losing support to metaphysical absolutism.
Legal regimes are already being restructured by this empirical evolution. According toMellorand Uldahl (2025), there has been a transition of negative prohibitions (e.g., avoid cruelty) to positive obligations (e.g., promote well-being), based on satisfying animal interests. Contemporary laws are more and more constructed so as to grow with the sentient realitiesofvarious species as opposed to imposing abstract, equalizing rights. Courts sometimes invokerights, usually as leverage in a procedural situation, or as a means of ascertaining legal standing, but these invocations are instrumental. The scientifically-based acknowledgement ofwelfare interests is the actual normative work.
III. Synthesis: Do Rights Add Value or Merely Serve Interests?
The claim that animal rights are morally primary misunderstands the architecture of normative justification. Strictly speaking, rights are juridical vessels whose only defensiblepurpose is to secure the concrete welfare interests of sentient beings; when they float freeof that purpose, they become empty abstractions. Contemporary scholarship confirms this instrumental reading and supports a model in which rights, if granted at all, are subordinatetothe recognition and protection of interests.
Joseph Raz’s influential interest theory holds that the statement “X has a right” means “someaspect of X’s well-being is a sufficient reason for others to be under a duty” (Raz, 1986). Inthis formulation, rights are not moral atoms but derivative constructs—tools justified bytheir function in safeguarding morally significant interests. Recent work continues and sharpens this position. Rutledge-Prior (2024) dismantles the rival will-theory objection by demonstrating that even paradigmatic autonomy-based rights ultimately serve the protectionof agent-specific interests. Once the will theory’s anthropocentric exclusion of animals is stripped away, the interest model applies comfortably to non-human cases. By re-centeringinterests, Rutledge-Prior (2024) avoids the metaphysical entanglements of personhoodandinstead grounds animal claims in the empirically incontestable fact of sentience.
The instrumental role of rights language is further revealed in litigation outcomes. In thehigh-profile case involving Happy the elephant, lawyers attempted to use habeas corpus toassert a right to bodily liberty for a captive animal. The New York Court of Appeals in2022refused relief, reasoning that personhood—and the attached rights—cannot be inferredfromcognitive complexity alone (Hughbanks, 2024). The court did not deny that Happy hadcomplex interests or could suffer; instead, it determined that those interests were adequatelyprotected under existing welfare laws. Thus, the decisive considerations were rooted inwelfare outcomes—transport risks, sanctuary readiness, and species-specific behavioral needs—rather than in the abstract content of a “right.” Rights talk attracted public attention, but the actual legal reasoning was ultimately grounded in balancing interests. When the court judged Happy’s interests sufficiently addressed, the purported right failed to compel action(Hughbanks, 2024).
European jurisprudence reflects the same instrumentalism, though it begins froma morerights-friendly orientation. Epstein and Bernet Kempers (2023) conduct a doctrinal audit of EU law and argue that animals and ecosystems can be recognized as rights-holders. However, they simultaneously acknowledge that every candidate right emerges only insofar as it shieldsvital interests rooted in sentience and ecological functionality. Where those interests are peripheral or diffuse, the associated rights claims lack traction. That is, rights language haspurchase only when anchored to empirically substantiated harms or benefits. Kotzmann(2023), in building a pluralist foundation for animal rights, concedes this point by groundingrights in sentience and intrinsic worth—both of which are themselves proxies for measurableinterests in pain avoidance and flourishing.
Whether such rights frameworks actually produce better outcomes than a purely interests-based approach is contested. Belgium’s 2024 constitutional amendment recognizinganimal dignity and the UK’s Sentience Act 2022 both introduced explicit rights or quasi-rights language into law. Yet empirical evaluations show that welfare enforcement mechanisms—inspection budgets, regulatory sanctions, field personnel—remained unchanged.
As a result, these rights failed to materially improve animal lives beyond their symbolic function. Schapper and Bliss (2023) reach a similar conclusion in their study of UnitedNations policy development. They document how proposals to institutionalize animal protection within the Sustainable Development Goals attracted moral support but deliveredlimited material gains due to weak funding structures and enforcement authority. Theyconclude that “rights discourse supplies normative visibility, not material protection” (Schapper & Bliss, 2023, p. 529).
From a practical standpoint, then, rights language serves primarily as an advocacy tool. It dramatizes moral urgency and translates interests into legal claims, thereby increasingthevisibility of animal suffering in courts and legislatures. However, treating rights as a foundation—rather than as a rhetorical or juridical device—misconstrues their normativerole. Only by foregrounding the measurable interests of animals—such as the avoidance of pain, fulfillment of social bonds, and realization of species-specific behaviors—can legal andethical systems produce proportionate duties, resolve moral conflicts, and direct scarce enforcement resources effectively. Rights may be useful in entrenching these interests inlaw, but they are philosophically dispensable where they obscure the concrete needs of animals or delay protection through metaphysical litigation.
Conclusion
Animals deserve moral consideration because they have real, measurable interests. Theseinterests come from their ability to feel pain, enjoy pleasure, and seek well-being. The ideaofrights can be helpful in legal or political settings, but it should not replace the deeper moral reason for treating animals well. That reason is their capacity for sentient experience. Scientific research strongly supports this view. Denying that animals have interests is bothoutdated and incorrect.
References
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