Fiona asked:

Concerning animal rights, there is the Utilitarian defence (for example, of Peter Singer), the
contractarian view (denying that non-human animals can have rights), the view that all animals have
inherent value (held by Tom Regan), and the view that species-ism is not necessarily a bad thing,
only one that is natural.

I would like to know if there are any other major theories concerning animal rights, and if so, who the
leading proponent(s) of the theories are.

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There is the view that while animals have no rights, people do have an obligation to them. We have
an obligation to pets or work animals — since we take them into our care it reflects badly on us as
moral agents if we cannot take care of them. Or the obligation may extend to a species, or perhaps to
the environment as a whole. In environmental ethics there is an argument that we have a duty to
protect the world that we inhabit, if only because we also have the means to destroy it. We kind of
owe it to ourselves to look after the world, to see our selves as capable of holding responsibility.

While this may be the best defence for the animal liberation movement, I think it might be a mistake to
talk about animals having rights. A right makes sense only for a member of a moral community and
animals are not members of our moral community. This is different, however, from saying that
animals do not have value. Clearly they can, they may even have many different kinds of value:
intrinsic value, instrumental value, aesthetic value, constitutive value. If we think of animals as having
value rather than rights as moral agents the issue may be less controversial and even more plausible,
and we may be able to fit the views of Singer and Regan.

For example, if animals have intrinsic value we may not be permitted to inflict harm on them or to
exterminate them. And it they have aesthetic value we may not want to, or bring ourselves to. If they
have constitutive value, the same would apply; something good is lost in the world, we become
diminished if an animal or a species is allowed to become extinct. I do not think however that we
ought to make a list of all the animals that have intrinsic or instrumental, or aesthetic value. For one
thing these categories overlap, an animal that is intrinsically valuable is also constitutively valuable
though one that is aesthetically valuable may not be intrinsically or constitutively valuable. Secondly
these categories are not meant to be hard and fast, or even exclusive. There may be no sharp
distinction between those animals that have intrinsic or instrumental value. In fact there is no reason
why animals could not change values, for example the squid, a common meal in most restaurants
and which has instrumental value, we use it, may be more intelligent than a dog. In which case it may
gain intrinsic value.

This view does not say that animals could never have rights, they could, if for example, we succeed in
'uplifting' a species to intelligence through genetic engineering, I can see no reason not to regard
them as members of a moral community, though it may then be hard to speak of them as animals any
longer.

You might want to look at sci-fi writer David Brin's Upliftseries for the idea of bringing animals into the
moral community. And also Steven Baxter's Timewhich deals (in part) with squid intelligence.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield