Weighing Up Animal Dignity – Due Caution about Going Beyond Welfare

Recently, there have been growing calls to take animals’ sui generis dignity into consideration when weighing the competing values at play in our treatment of them. Iargue that, as things stand right now, we are not justified in doing so due to considerations of moral caution.This is because for sui generis dignity to be meaningfully distinct from other, less controversial forms of dignity, it must carry weight also and especially when it comes into conflict with subjectively based values such as those of happiness and autonomy – with what can be widely construed as the animal’s welfare. In such conflicts, one should be cautious about not incurring undue moral risk. But not only is our evidentiary basis of sui generis dignity much worse than that of the values it comes into conflict with; taking into account animals’ supposed sui generis dignity would also, if the value does not obtain, inflict on animals just those kinds of moral wrongs it is meant to prevent. We should therefore, until more evidence or better argument arise, not consider animals’ sui generis dignity when weighing up how to treat them. While this result has profound consequences for how we should treat and legislate animals, it does not mean that we cannot appeal to the concept of animal dignity in any form – only that, if we do so, we are still in a position where we have to give good reason as to why it is important. For now, such reasons must be based in subjectively based values.