| This thesis explains why we owe direct duties to non-human animals, considers why those duties can and should be framed as "rights," and explores the extent of these rights. I focus, in particular, on two seminal works in the ethics of animal treatment: Peter Singer's landmark Animal Liberation and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights. Some of the key concepts of these works, including "speciesism," various conceptions of justice and the "subject-of-a-life criterion" are explicated. These views are critiqued and this paper endorses a deep discriminatory fundamentalist rights view that provides a workable blueprint from which a modest framework of our ethical responsibilities to animals is derived. |
