Doris Schneeberger

Animals are an important part of our social, economic and corporate world. Their wellbeing is significantly affected by the ways in which humans treat them. However, animals have long remained (and, indeed, continue to remain) effectively invisible in the business ethics and corporate responsibility discourse. This article argues in favor of the moral necessity of according animal welfare a higher priority in business. In line with most streams in both recent and traditional animal ethics, this article derives the avoidance of unnecessary animal suffering as the moral minimum standard for responsible management in the livestock industry. Based on a broad range of different interpretations of what animal suffering may be necessary, the article discusses three distinct ways in which humans working in the animal industry could meet their moral responsibility to avoid unnecessary suffering, and, with this, increase animal welfare: by ameliorating circumstances for animals, by aiming at a two‐pronged transformation, or by transforming into a “zero‐suffering” business. Considering animal welfare as a legitimate ethical value in and of itself is a first step towards overcoming the anthropocentric bias in today's sustainability and corporate responsibility debate.

I would like to begin the book proper with a few preliminary metareflections in terms of anti-speciesist language, metaethics, and ethical principles. Language plays a pivotal role in shaping our perceptions and actions towards nonhuman animals, as highlighted by Pablo Castelló (2022). In this section of the book, I engage with various animal ethicists’ linguistic choices, illustrating progressive shifts towards less speciesist language. These linguistic adjustments aim to challenge anthropocentric views as well as promote greater respect for nonhuman beings. In fact, the discussion extends to the term “animal” itself, critiquing its exclusion of humans and highlighting the problematic human-animal divide ingrained in Western thought. I advocate for a broader, more inclusive understanding that acknowledges humans as animals, emphasizing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman animal rights. Regarding metaethics, I take a cognitivist, realist, naturalist stance, asserting the existence of ethical truths rooted in natural properties. I discuss ethical principles such as beneficence, non-maleficence, and anti-speciesism before finally discussing the intuitive appeal of sentientism and pathocentrism.

The original concept behind this book was to propose and discuss a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Nonhuman Animals analogous to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948. However, it soon became clear that a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Animals that encompasses all animal species would be difficult to formulate and might not be effective. Instead, a separate declaration needs to be developed for each species (Benz-Schwarzburg 2012, 407). Stucki (2023, 96) seems to be in agreement here, when she states that “animal rights must be differentiated in correspondence with animals’ specific capacities, interests, and (functional) needs.” After all, the UDHR is also limited to one species.

This book is a revised version of my philosophical PhD thesis, which I submitted in 2016 at the University of Salzburg. I wrote my thesis in German between 2013 and 2016, and quoted numerous German sources: for the book you are currently reading, I have translated any quotations originally in German into English. It should be noted that my positionality (cf. Castelló 2022) as an Austrian is apparent in this book, since I often discuss the legal and moral situation in this country. Moreover, it is evident that I have been socialized in a Western capitalist democracy, which heavily influences how I perceive and understand the world. Before we find ourselves in medias res, I would like to tell you a little about my own personal story, since this will help to contextualize the discussions offered in this book.

The division into persons and non-persons is by no means insignificant from a legal and ethical point of view. A human person enjoys a certain legal protection which other sentient beings are denied. The dignity (= inherent value) of a human person is recognised. This tends to be denied to nonhuman animals who are in general not recognised as persons. Meanwhile, the concept of “person” is also viewed critically in the animal ethics discussion, as it is rooted in a speciesist-perfectionist outlook. Maneesha Deckha (2021) points out that the category of legal personhood is anthropocentric, and thus not helpful when it comes to the project of creating just multispecies societies. The personhood concept is a tool of discrimination, as it is also used within a species (although intuitively definitely justified in part) to divide human beings into groups that have different rights and obligations. From a legal point of view, the personhood concept is also flexible and stretchable, as it is not limited to human beings. Think, for example, of nonhuman entities called “legal persons” (e.g. associations, corporations, foundations, etc.).

When it comes to the question of which rights beings ought to have, we must examine their needs, abilities and interests. A right not to be prevented from satisfying a need is extremely important if the need is strong and its frustration is consequently damaging/painful/unpleasant/torturous. A right to freedom, for example, is important where the need for freedom is urgent (or pressing). A right to freedom of religion is only meaningful where there is also a need for the free practice of religion. For example, according to our current knowledge, denying an earthworm the right to free exercise of religion is unlikely to cause them any harm. For humans, who are potentially religious animals, such a right is nevertheless significant.

On 6 February 2007 an application for guardianship of a man named Mathias Hiasl Pan, born in 1981 in Sierra Leone, and living in Vösendorf was filed at the District Court of Mödling, Lower Austria (Balluch 2014, 84ff). When the judge read Mr. Pan’s residential address, she became suspicious, because the residential address was the address of an animal shelter in Vösendorf (ibid.). Mr. Pan was, in fact, not a Homo sapiens, but a Pan troglodytes, i.e. a chimpanzee. However, the initiators of the application for guardianship—Martin Balluch and his colleagues—were quite serious in their application. They wanted to have the chimpanzee Hiasl, who had initially been bought by a pharmaceutical company as a laboratory animal, but was, as of 2006, housed in the animal protection centre in Vösendorf, which had had to file for bankruptcy, placed under guardianship (ibid.). Hiasl’s welfare was directly threatened at this time: he was to be sold as part of the bankrupt estate, potentially either to a foreign circus—since a ban on wild animals in circuses in Austria has been in force since 2005 (Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes n.d.-b, § 27)—or to an animal experimentation laboratory abroad—as, again, in Austria, experiments on great apes, for purposes other than their inherent interests or their own wellbeing, have been prohibited since 2006 (ibid. n.d.-c, § 13). He therefore stood not only to be sold, but possibly even killed. A group of animal rights activists tried to source the living costs for Hiasl; these, however, could only be donated to the animal shelter in Vösendorf, which meant that they would then directly go to the creditors, rather than reaching Hiasl; in order to be able to help Hiasl, Balluch and his colleagues thus applied for guardianship of Hiasl (Balluch 2014, 84ff).

Due to the growth of human populations and the steady spread of humans, the habitats of more and more nonhuman animals living in the wilderness are threatened. Consequently, nature conservationists, environmentalists and animal rights activists—despite differing in their ethical positions and values—can join forces against disruptive human interventions or the (total) destruction of habitats. A right to life must also imply a right to suitable habitat; where there is no habitat, there is no life, or as Bradshaw (2020, 32) puts it: “[C]learing a forest to make a field has the same effect on wildlife that a slaughterhouse has for livestock.” Nonhuman animals also defend their territories in various ways; there are sometimes bitter territorial fights between individual nonhuman animals or between groups of them. Donaldson and Kymlicka (2013, 394; my emphasis) explain, with regard to nonhuman animals living in the wild: “What they need is not (or not only) a property right to their special nest or to their own den, but they need protection of their right to continue to live their own lives in their own territory. In short, what they need is sovereignty.” Donaldson and Kymlicka (ibid., 374) further suggest that injustices between humans and nonhuman animals living in the wild should be addressed “by setting fair terms for interactions between sovereign communities.” Nussbaum (2010, 538) states that the human right to property corresponds to a nonhuman animal right to habitat. It follows that humans should respect the territorial integrity of the habitat of nonhuman animals.

The term “freedom” has a broad range of meanings from “total absence of restraint to merely a sense of not being unduly hampered or frustrated” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary n.d.-b). Freedom is intuitively valued, since “being free allows animals to pursue those things that are in their own interests” (Browning and Veit 2021, 1). Humans, for example, often rate the wellbeing of nonhuman animals kept in zoos less favourably than the wellbeing of nonhuman animals living in the wild, since they might consider the former to be “bored and sad” (ibid.). In line with this intuition shared by many, “Donaldson and Kymlicka condemn capturing animals and putting them in zoos, even in the most progressive zoos, as ‘a violation of their basic individual rights, and a violation of their rights as members of sovereign communities’” (Keulartz 2021, 119). Castelló (2022, 145) suggests that Nussbaum seems to be in agreement when she states that “depriving animals of their differential ways of living and existing causes “a kind of premature death, the death of a form of flourishing that has been judged to be worthy of respect.” In contrast to this view, Browning and Veit (2021, 2) make the case that “captive animals, when well-cared for, need not necessarily suffer and can even do well in captivity—perhaps even better than in the wild.” “Interests in control or autonomy could […] be outweighed by the factors that reduce autonomy in the wild such as predation, disease, and time spend [sic!] on foraging” (Browning and Veit 2021, 10).

Education is not an exclusively human phenomenon, as most nonhuman animals also need a certain amount of education to thrive. Human and nonhuman animal children, by their very nature, receive this oftentimes automatically from their parents and/or other members of their social group. In a multispecies society, we need diverse kinds of education and learning. We can speak of intraspecies learning (humans learn from humans, dogs learn from dogs, etc.) and interspecies learning (humans learn from dogs, and dogs learn from geese, for example). When we as humans open our minds in the multispecies community, we can learn from nonhuman beings and become “other-wise” (O’Doherty 2016, 421).

Which political theories and systems are most suitable when it comes to including nonhuman animals into our polis? Cochrane (2010, 9), after reviewing the existing literature on the political consideration and inclusion of nonhuman animals, concludes that utilitarian and liberal theories provide the soundest basis. Utilitarianism correctly emphasizes the importance of sentience in deciding who should be considered morally (ibid.). Liberal approaches focus on the individual and their wellbeing and thus, combined with the utilitarian consideration of sentience, can provide an appropriate approach that recognizes the subject as the proper focus of just politics (ibid.). The strengths of both approaches could then be combined in an interest-based approach (ibid.).

In ancient philosophical writings from as early as the fifth century BC onwards, animal ethical considerations can be found, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, Porphyrios, and Pythagoras. Notable philosophical contributions concerning how humans should treat nonhuman animals were later made by Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Schweitzer, amongst others, with animal ethics later experiencing a renewed upswing in the last few decades of the twentieth century. The reflections in this book are situated within this modern discussion of animal ethics, which is why I would like to first provide an overview of central contemporary thinkers and their positions.

It would be difficult to deny that the human needs for love, sexuality, procreation, family, and friendships tend to be strong needs. But how important is the fulfilment of these needs and the actualization of the corresponding abilities for nonhuman animal species? In order to be able to answer this question, we need to become more specific, and ask the question at least about each species; even then, there might be differences in the needs individuals within each species have. However, Nussbaum (2010, 535) argues for a nonhuman animal claim to loving attachments and relationships: “Animals have a complex emotional life. […] Like humans, they are entitled to a life that enables them to form bonds with others, to meet them with love and concern, and not to be […] denied these bonds.” Since there are more findings about these needs in the human realm and these are generally conducive to a general understanding of the complex of phenomena surrounding love and sexuality in the nonhuman animal kingdom, findings with regard to these phenomena in the context of humans will also be discussed in this section (cf. epistemic anthropocentrism, Sect. 5.1 in this book).

In his 2004 book Haben Tiere eine Würde? (Do Animals Have Dignity?), Norbert Hoerster presents his views on animal ethics, which will be briefly discussed in this excursus, as in the course of this some counter-arguments against a nonhuman animal right to life can be addressed. In Haben Tiere eine Würde? Hoerster (2004, 73) negates that nonhuman animals should have a right to life. Hoerster (ibid., 72) argues, for example, that nonhuman animals, unlike humans, have no interest in survival that could be violated by their killing. That this view is motivated by Hoerster’s interest in meat consumption is even suggested by Hoerster’s (ibid., 71) own argumentation; against a ban on killing animals for meat consumption, he argues: “My view is that I myself and many other people like to eat meat, which speaks against a ban on this practice.” Equivalently, a paedophile could argue for a right to have sex with children, since he and many other people enjoy having sex with children.

When we think about nonhuman animal rights in general and the right to life in particular, it is interesting to note that there are already certain nonhuman animal species that are granted a right which is somewhat similar to the human right to life, at least in some countries. Consider cows in India who have special protection due to religious causes, for example. In Austria, the killing of dogs and cats for the purpose of obtaining their meat or other products of their bodies is prohibited (Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (RIS) n.d.-a, § 6.2). Although the lives of dogs and cats in Austria are not threatened by human consumption of meat, many of them are legally euthanized.

Currently, nonhuman animals suffer from human “tyranny” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2014, 42). Donaldson and Kymlicka (2014, 23f) state that “[j]ustice demands that domination and hierarchy be replaced by relations of citizenship and its accompanying ethos of equality, participation, consent and cooperation.” It is clear that on our way to a less speciesist future, we need to make concerted efforts to collaboratively imagine new ways of relating to each other across species boundaries: we need to “develop a new philosophy of interspecies society” (Kymlicka 2022, 213) and work towards a “response-able ethico-politics” (Castelló 2022a, 142) which entails “responsiveness to different ways of living and being” (ibid.) and “seeks to reduce violence as much as possible” (ibid., 148).

The central research question guiding the reflections in this book were: Should nonhuman animals have rights, too? And if so, which? And why? And how could those rights be implemented? In this section, I will try to summarize what my answers would be—at this point in time. In this book, I have argued that nonhuman animals should have rights too, since “what happens to them, matters to them.” The argumentation that grounds human animal rights can equally ground nonhuman animal rights. They, too, are born with an inherent dignity, which should be recognised and protected collectively. Which rights should be granted to which nonhuman animals would require an answer to which this book can only provide an approximation. Rights are protective fences around goods, needs, capabilities, and those vary in the animal kingdom. We therefore need to examine each species individually.

This book presents an ethical discussion of the possible future Universal Declarations of (diverse specific nonhuman) Animal Rights. It contributes to a basis for a discussion about (nonhuman) animal rights concerning diverse aspects and quality of (nonhuman) animal life. Doris Schneeberger deals with the interpretation and justification of animal rights, and argues that because (nonhuman) animals are individuals whose lives are intrinsically and inherently valuable, their goods and welfare ought to be protected. She claims that these rights should be protected in possible morally advanced societies of the future. Doris Schneeberger is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Change Management and Management Development at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria. She obtained a PhD degree in philosophy focusing on animal ethics and one in economic and social sciences in the field of Animal Organization Studies.

Animals are an important part of our social, economic and corporate world. Their wellbeing is significantly affected by the ways in which humans treat them. However, animals have long remained (and, indeed, continue to remain) effectively invisible in the business ethics and corporate responsibility discourse. This article argues in favor of the moral necessity of according animal welfare a higher priority in business. In line with most streams in both recent and traditional animal ethics, this article derives the avoidance of unnecessary animal suffering as the moral minimum standard for responsible management in the livestock industry. Based on a broad range of different interpretations of what animal suffering may be necessary, the article discusses three distinct ways in which humans working in the animal industry could meet their moral responsibility to avoid unnecessary suffering, and, with this, increase animal welfare: by ameliorating circumstances for animals, by aiming at a two-pronged transformation, or by transforming into a “zero-suffering” business. Considering animal welfare as a legitimate ethical value in and of itself is a first step towards overcoming the anthropocentric bias in today's sustainability and corporate responsibility debate.