QuestionsDo animals matter as much as we do?Animals are ends in themselves: we owe them rights
Do animals matter as much as we do?They have rights

Animals are ends in themselves: we owe them rights

The Kantian case for animal rights; fellow creatures

Christine Korsgaard born 1952Rereads Kant for today: our value comes from our capacity to choose our ends.
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What it claims

Animals are ends in themselves, and the only way we can be rightly related to them is to grant them rights.

Why

What makes our aims matter is that things can be good or bad for us, and animals are in the same position.

The same idea through history
Immanuel Kant1785Kant: rational beings are ends in themselves and must never be treated merely as means. For Kant, animals were mere means.Tom Regan1983Regan: all subjects-of-a-life have a value of their own. Korsgaard reaches a nearby conclusion by another road: staying inside Kant's framework.
Christine Korsgaard2004Tanner Lectures "Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals" (2004, published 2005): first version of the reasoning. It is taken up in "A Kantian Case for Animal Rights" (2012), which adds legal rights, then in the book Fellow Creatures (2018).
In short

"Animals are ends in themselves: we owe them rights" is an argument by Christine Korsgaard (Fellow Creatures, 2018; "A Kantian Case for Animal Rights", 2012, 2004) on the question "Do animals matter as much as we do?" (answer: they have rights). Its claim: Animals are ends in themselves, and the only way we can be rightly related to them is to grant them rights. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Fellow Creatures, 2018; "A Kantian Case for Animal Rights", 2012
Valid with an implicit premise

Kant's ethics is often thought hostile to animals, since Kant treated them as things. Christine Korsgaard argues the opposite, from Kant's own principles. When we choose an end, she says, we take it to be important, and that amounts to taking ourselves to be important. But what we value in this way is not first of all our reason: it is the fact that things can be good or bad for us. The same is true of the other animals. If we ask others to respect what is good for us, we commit ourselves to respecting what is good for them. They are therefore ends in themselves, and since we dominate animals who cannot defend themselves, the only rightful relation goes through rights recognised by law.

P1When we make a choice, we take what is good for us to be good absolutely, not just for us: this is how we take ourselves to be ends in ourselves.
P2What we thus take to be important is not our reason alone: it is being a creature for whom things can be good or bad. Food, comfort, freedom from pain and fear are good for us as animate beings, not as rational beings.
P3The other animals are, like us, beings for whom things can be good or bad.
P4 · implicit premiseIf the ground of the value I give myself is having interests, then every being with interests has the same value: I cannot keep that ground for myself and refuse it to others.
P5Humans, organised in society, dominate animals one-sidedly, and animals are almost entirely at their mercy. For Kant such domination is a wrong in itself, and rights are what allow us to escape it.
Animals are ends in themselves, and the only way we can be rightly related to them is to grant them rights.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where we have interests and animals do too, but only humans have value: the other premises stay true, the conclusion is false.
Valid with P4. Without it, we show that we give ourselves value because we have interests, but not that other beings who have them receive the same. P4 is Kant's own step: what counts as a reason for me must count as a reason for everyone. This is where the argument's opponents attack (see Kant's objection).
Analogy. In a queue, I say "let me through, I am tired". If my tiredness is a reason for me, it is a reason for everyone who is tired. Korsgaard says: my pain is a reason because it is my pain, not because I have learned logic, so a dog's pain is one too. Her opponents answer that the rule of the queue holds only between people who can discuss it.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Immanuel Kant 1797 · attacks premise 4

For Kant, by reason alone, man has duties only to man. Duties "regarding" animals, such as not mistreating them, are duties to ourselves, because cruelty blunts in us the sympathy that serves morality towards other men.

Korsgaard replies
see the argument
Christine Korsgaard defender of the argument · 2012
Korsgaard notes that, for Kant, moral obligation comes from our own willing that rational beings be treated in certain ways. If her first argument is right, we are already committed to treating as ends all beings who have interests. Animals cannot obligate us through their wills, but they can through their natures, as beings of that kind.
A
Allen Wood 1998
Before Korsgaard, the Kantian Allen Wood also rejects Kant's idea that every duty is a duty to a person. He keeps rational nature as the source of value, but says we must also respect its "fragments" and conditions where they exist without full reason: in small children, and in animals that suffer, desire or care about things.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The disagreement is over how to read Kant: does value come from reason alone (Kant), from reason and its "fragments" in animals (Wood), or from what reason must presuppose, the value of beings with interests (Korsgaard)? None of these readings is accepted by all Kantians.
David Hume 1751 · attacks premise 5

For Hume, justice arises between beings of roughly equal strength. Towards creatures incapable of any resistance, we would owe gentle treatment out of humanity, but no duty of justice, and they could hold no right. He says this is the situation of men with regard to animals.

a defender replies
Christine Korsgaard defender of the argument · 2012
Korsgaard answers that this reciprocity argument proves too much: if a small group took control of the one weapon able to destroy cities and forced everyone else to submit, it would no longer owe us justice. For Kant it is everyone's freedom, not everyone's interest, that is at stake, and one cannot claim a right without upholding the rights of others: that group would therefore still owe justice.
The debate goes on (our summary) A Humean can answer that the city-threat case is extreme, and that justice among humans rests on a mutual dependence which no group entirely escapes, whereas animals can never make us pay for injustice. Korsgaard thinks on the contrary that this absence of risk is exactly what makes domination dangerous for them.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core point: does justice require possible reciprocity, or only the existence of beings whose freedom or interests can be dominated? Both camps accept the case of very weak humans, but draw different conclusions.
Immanuel Kant 1797 · attacks the conclusion

For Kant, rights serve to protect freedom, defined as independence from being constrained by another's choice. Animals do not choose their way of life as rational beings do: the question of their rights does not arise (this is the objection Korsgaard puts to herself).

a defender replies
Christine Korsgaard defender of the argument · 2012
Korsgaard answers that the freedom at stake in rights is simply the freedom to use one's own body to carve out a decent life in the world where one finds oneself. In that sense, the "freedom" of animals is the sort of thing that rights could protect.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Kantians dispute what the freedom of rights presupposes: moral autonomy (Kant's answer) or simply the freedom to act with one's body (Korsgaard's answer). Korsgaard herself admits that the details of which rights to grant remain to be worked out.