A Test of ‘Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People’

Many people believe that animals possess moral status, but human beings possess higher moral status than animals. To try to identify a theoretical basis for this view, Robert Nozick proposed Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People. The present manuscript evaluates Nozick’s proposal by identifying the tradeoffs in welfare that it permits in medical research with animals and assessing whether those tradeoffs are indeed permissible. This analysis suggests that at least some deontological side constraints apply to the treatment of sentient animals, hence, Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People is mistaken. Because Nozick’s proposal represents a prominent attempt to provide a theoretical basis for the common belief that human beings possess higher moral status than animals, this conclusion is noteworthy in its own right. Moreover, by granting equal moral weight to the interests of animals, but reserving deontological side constraints for human beings, Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People offers one of the more plausible bases for the claim that there are degrees of moral status among those who matter morally. The manuscript thus ends by considering the implications of the present analysis for the possibility that moral status comes in degrees.