76 • Alternatives to Animal Use in Research, Testing, and Education 
Moral Standing 
Modern moral theory operates under a “law con- 
ception” of ethics (3). It judges particular human 
actions as right (lawful) or wrong (unlawful) as they 
comply with or violate some universal principle 
of conduct. In this, it departs from the classical 
theory of the virtues, which makes individual char- 
acter the unit of evaluation and does not attempt 
to reduce ethics to a system of rules. Under the 
law conception, moral standing also goes to per- 
sons, but it is not conferred by an individual, insti- 
tution, or community. From this point of view, an 
individual counts as a person because of some in- 
herent characteristic. This is the chief reason why 
it is within the moral domain to speak of the natu- 
ral duties and the natural rights of a person. A le- 
gal system can, of course, recognize natural duties 
and rights. 
For obvious reasons, no one has ever argued that 
animals can have moral duties (40). That would 
require that they freely choose to act among alter- 
natives they judge to be right or wrong— a skill 
as demanding as full-blown linguistic competence 
would be. Nevertheless, it is possible to take the 
view that animals have moral standing but do not 
have rights. 
There are two broad theoretical approaches to 
the subject of rights. The first, sometimes called 
the will theory , would discourage efforts to attrib- 
ute rights to animals. In its classical form, as given 
by Emmanuel Kant, it would define a right as a 
capacity to obligate others to a duty. Possession 
of a right carries with it an authorization to use 
coercion to enforce the correlative duty (31). This, 
in turn, implies that the right -holder's capacity is 
a power of discretion, either to enforce or waive 
the right. A right is therefore something that a 
right-holder may choose to exercise or not. The 
choice itself will be an act of will. 
H.L.A. Hart, a leading contemporary defender 
of the will theory, treats a right as a choice that 
gives the right-holder authority to control the ac- 
tions of someone else. The possessor of a moral 
right has a moral justification for limiting the free- 
dom of another, not because the action the right- 
holder is entitled to require has some moral qual- 
ity, but simply because in the circumstances a 
certain distribution of human freedom will be 
maintained if the right-holder has the choice to 
determine how that other shall act (28). 
The will theory helps to avoid confusion between 
claims of right, and other, separable requirements 
to promote or secure some valued state of affairs 
(e.g., to assist someone in need). Since animals could 
not be said to have waived or exercised the rights 
they had, all references to animal rights could sim- 
ply be translated into talk of human duties. 
Those who would assign rights to animals have 
embraced the alternative interest theory of what 
it means to have a right. A right, in their view, is 
a claim to the performance of a duty by someone 
else, but the right-holder need not be in a position 
or possess the competence to make this claim by 
an act of will. It is enough that the right-holder 
has interests that can be represented (by others) 
in a normative forum (20). These interests will in- 
clude things that are intrinsically good and things 
in which the right-holder “takes an interest,” self- 
ish or not (40). To have a right, then, will be sim- 
ply to have interests that can be affected by some- 
one else. 
The interest theory surfaces in Peter Singer’s 
Animal Liberation, among the first contemporary 
theoretical statements of the case for animals. In 
that work, Singer uses the term “right” to describe 
any claim that individuals may make to have their 
interests equally considered with those of others . 
It implies, therefore, nothing more than a capac- 
ity for suffering, which both humans and animals 
possess (45). 
The modest measure of animal awareness that 
such a test demands has been one source of its 
appeal. It has not, however, been free of contro- 
versy. Some have objected that animals cannot 
have interests because interests require beliefs and 
animals cannot have beliefs in the strict sense (24, 
36). This criticism suggests that pain-avoidance is 
not an “interest” because it is not a “belief,” a dis- 
tinction that seems more semantical than useful. 
Nevertheless, a more serious charge remains. As 
stated, the interest theory shows only that having 
interests is a necessary condition for having rights, 
not that it is sufficient. Singer himself has since 
abandoned the attempt to show sufficiency and, 
