Animal Rights Theories

There are many different views about exactly how to determine who is entitled to rights, and how those rights should vary depending on the species or individual. Most rights views hold that individuals meeting some requirement (whether that requirement be sentience, the possession of desires and beliefs, autonomy, or something else) are entitled to have [...]

Moral consideration

In many situations in which we act we try to make sure our actions don’t harm others, or are actually beneficial to them. This means that we are taking others into account. We consider how they would be affected by our actions. This is moral consideration.  Moral consideration has to do both with other individuals [...]

Discrimination

Those with discriminatory attitudes think about others not as who they are but as what they are not. Many people have prejudices against other individuals. These prejudices lead them to treat those they have prejudices against worse than they would treat other individuals whom they don’t have prejudices against. We recognize these as cases of [...]

What is speciesism?

The term speciesism was first used in the 1970′s to describe discrimination against nonhuman animals. Many different definitions have been proposed since then. Speciesism is complex, and it can be useful to look at it from different perspectives — psychological, philosophical, and sociological. In philosophy, discrimination is based on judging others not for who they are but for [...]