Abstract

Morality places constraints on our treatment of certain beings, but what sorts of beings? Why these beings? These are questions any moral theory must answer, and the adequacy of its answer can serve at least in part as a measure of the adequacy of the theory itself. Focusing on their answers to these questions, my dissertation raises a significant problem for deontological moral theories. These theories fail to account plausibly even for quite minimal moral constraints on our treatment of animals. ;Beginning with Kantian theories, I argue not only that Kant's own proposed solution---that duties to animals are in fact 'indirect' duties to fellow human beings---cannot succeed, but that attempts by contemporary Kantians to establish more direct duties to animals fail as well. Other prominent deontological frameworks---social contract and rights theories---suffer from the same shortcoming. None of these frameworks can justify any significant moral constraints on our treatment of animals. ;I then move on to a diagnosis of the failure. In order for such theories to present a plausible alternative to consequentialism, typically by embracing an account of fundamental rights, they must rely on criteria for moral 'status' that exclude all or most animals from consideration. The theories face a dilemma: they can accommodate duties to animals only by adopting weaker criteria, but these criteria render their rejection of consequentialism implausible. After a brief examination of the prospective strategies for avoiding this dilemma, the final chapters examine a theory of value, developed by Thomas Nagel, which appears to succeed in doing so. I argue that while Nagel's theory avoids the dilemma, it is unable to justify the "agent-centered" restrictions that are crucial to its rejection of consequentialism; and further, no other plausible foundation for such restrictions is compatible with the features of Nagel's theory that enable it to generate constraints on our treatment of animals. Thus I conclude that no deontological theories have yet provided a plausible account of even minimal constraints on our treatment of animals, and that it is unclear at this point how any could do so