Relational approaches to animal ethics and the intuition of differential obligations

Abstract

Capacity-oriented accounts of animal ethics have been fairly successful in establishing that the interests of animals ought to be included in moral considerations. Yet, even when individual animals have identical capacities and interests there remains a strong intuition that we have greater moral obligations to some animals, such as pets, than to others, such as animals in the wild. This thesis argues that contemporary relational approaches to animal ethics offer a plausible, more direct means of accounting for this intuition that do current forms of capacity-oriented approaches such as those offered by Peter Singer an Tom Regan.