Abstract A widely accepted moral principle holds that humans ought not to cause harm to animals. Yet anthropogenic activities routinely impose harms on both wild and domestic animals, diminishing their welfare and quality of life. Even when unintended, justifiable or unavoidable, such harms generate a moral responsibility to consider how affected animals might be compensated. We argue that compensation should extend beyond the reduction (or mitigation) of negative experiences to forms of redress such as opportunities for safety, agency, and positive affective states that would not otherwise occur. If successfully implemented, such compensation strategies should improve animals’ overall quality of life, and lead to overall human impacts that are beneficent rather than exploitative. Currently, no systematic framework is available to guide decisions about compensating animals, whether during routine management or for interventions that involve inherent risks, such as veterinary treatment. Another challenge is that current assessments of how harms and benefits combine in animal lives are too often based on human intuition. To encourage a more rigorous approach, we identify candidate biological mechanisms – such as distraction, social buffering, learning and mood modulation - through which benefits might (in part or in full) redress harms. We propose empirical methodologies for assessing compensation and argue that animals’ own choices provide an important benchmark for evaluating whether redress is genuine from their perspective. We conclude by distinguishing mitigative, justificatory, and restitutive relationships between harms and benefits, and we describe the associated moral duties that arise from each.
Nicol et al. (Mon,) studied this question.