Should Animals Be Treated Equal

Are all animals equally entitled a right of moral standing or do they need to be a part of the moral community to be accepted as equals? Singer's view is that non-human animals should be equal to humans because they have the ability to feel pain/ suffer and avoid suffering and that, overall Speciesism is wrong. Fox’s view is that animals have to have certain characteristics to be part of the moral community, so they don't have rights, so they shouldn't be part of the community. Both have a different perspective, whether non-human animals should have the same equal right as humans. Although there are well- reasoned arguments on both sides, I would strongly agree with Singer’s argument that non-human animals should be treated equal and that …show more content…
He say that to have moral concern one needs to be a person, not an animal because animals cannot take responsibility their actions, meaning to be part of the moral community one needs to be able to function within one. Moral community is a group of people that have important likeness to one another. So to be part of the moral community one must be autonomous, meaning that one must have “ critical self-awareness, the ability to manipulate complex concepts and to to use a sophisticated language (especially for the purpose of communicating wishes, desires, needs, decisions, choices, and so on); and the capacity to reflect, plan, deliberate, choose, and accept responsibility for acting (Fox 182). Fox argues that lacking any of these characteristics disqualifies an individual from membership and that is the reason why non-human animals don’t fit into the moral community, because they don’t have self awareness. Also that these characteristics make the humans autonomous and capable to function as moral agents. A moral agent is a being that has the capacity to understand and follow moral rules. “Infants are appropriately related to as potential fully autonomous beings, possessing in latency those attributes that will later find expression, whereas those who are senile, comatose, mentally ill, or incapacitated by disease or accident are generally individuals who have achieved autonomy but whose full functioning is now blocked by conditions or circumstances beyond their control” (Fox 188). So infants are not part of the moral community until they are fully grown and the efficient beings might never achieve a semblance of autonomy. “If, as most would agree, natural emotional responses to and feelings of kinship with other species are allowed to count as factors in shaping our assessments of their moral status, then such responses and feelings should count equally in