Abstract Assuming that people have moral rights, I argue in a new way that dogs (and, by extension, other animals) have them as well. Some treatments of dogs would be wrong despite having optimal consequences. The wrongness is most plausibly explicable, given the assumption of rights for people, by attributing a right to the animal, so such attribution is warranted. My argument is novel in presupposing neither any theory of rights nor the universal possession of rights by sentient human beings. It is also dialectically modest, aiming to convince only those having certain pre-theoretical intuitions and lacking certain prior theoretical commitments. It nevertheless reaches an important conclusion from widely held and reasonably believable assumptions.
Eugene Mills (Wed,) studied this question.