---
title: "Value to Duty"
language: en
date: 2026-09-12
canonical: "https://andreasvieth.de/en/materialien/animal-ethics/value-to-duty/"
format: markdown
generator: "TYPO3 LLMs.txt Extension"
---

# Value to Duty

Export the page as structured markup – optimized for machine processing and reuse. (Use the browser's back button to return to the website view.)

 [ Read markup ](https://andreasvieth.de/en/materialien/animal-ethics/value-to-duty/.md.md)

## Value to Duty

The following seven sections examine a central question of animal ethics: **How does the insight that animal suffering counts morally become a justified duty to act?** The path does not lead directly from value judgement to obligation. First, animal experience must become visible within the moral space at all; subsequently, it must be clarified which values, rights, relationships and differences are relevant, and which bridges can support a concrete obligation.

The seven stations trace this transition step by step: from the distinction between **value and duty**, through the **indirect addressing of animal experience**, egalitarian and hierarchical mappings, as well as the significance of **proximity, dependency and responsibility**, to the **bridge principles** that translate moral relevance into practical bindingness. At the end stands the idea of **composed fittingness**: a concrete judgement arises neither through a mechanical application of principles nor through mere personal preference, but rather through bringing together the relevant reasons in a particular situation in such a way that a sound judgement becomes possible.

The guiding question is therefore not simply: **"Are animals to be morally considered?"** But more precisely: **What follows from this – for whom, under what conditions, and with what justification?**

  [        ![Bronze sculptures in an industrial hall: Four people stand around a steel table bearing a model; below, connected by wires, bronze figures of a pig, a dog, a rat, and a cow. Wall texts read: "Other Lives Matter" and "Observe, Weigh, Decide, Act."](https://andreasvieth.de/fileadmin/_processed_/a/9/csm_vomgebotzur_skulpturmuseum_fb9620cb26.png "Andreas Vieth: Observing, Weighing, Deciding, Acting — and who stands beneath it. Own visual concept designed with generative AI (2026).") ](/fileadmin/_processed_/a/9/csm_vomgebotzur_skulpturmuseum_71eb50ad67.png) Sculptural ensemble in a repurposed industrial hall. Four bronze figures – men in suits, a woman with a clipboard in a lab coat – stand contemplatively around a large steel table on which a relief model of a cityscape lies. Beneath the tabletop, in semi-darkness, stand a pig, a dog, a rat and a cow made of bronze; wires connect them to the plane above, where deliberation takes place. The wall inscriptions name the process: "Observing – Weighing – Deciding – Acting" on one side, "Other lives count" on the other. The ensemble presents deliberation as a spatial order: those who decide stand at the table; that which is decided upon stands beneath it.

## 1 | Value and Duty

  [        ![A woman wearing a cap reaches for packaged ground beef in a supermarket; superimposed transparently over the refrigerated counter appear a cow, a pig, a barn with cows, and an animal transport vehicle.](https://andreasvieth.de/fileadmin/_processed_/b/a/csm_vomgebotzur_fleischtheke_ki_334603e16d.jpg "Andreas Vieth: Meat counter: product and origin at a glance. Own image concept designed with generative AI (2026).") ](/fileadmin/_processed_/b/a/csm_vomgebotzur_fleischtheke_ki_c4251118a4.jpg) A customer takes a package of ground beef from a supermarket's refrigerated display case; signs advertise "regional quality," "meat and milk," and "Münsterland freshness." Superimposed, semi-transparent, upon the glass doors are those stations that the sales situation ordinarily renders invisible: a close-up of a cow and a pig, a tie-stall barn, a livestock transporter on the highway, an empty production corridor. The image thereby juxtaposes two bodies of knowledge that normally remain separate in the act of purchase — not as an accusation, but as a question of what passes from production into the decision.

#### Why "Animal Suffering Is Bad" Does Not Entail a Duty

> **"Animal suffering is bad – does it follow that everyone must live vegan?"**
> The leap from value judgement to obligation to act is not self-evident; rather, it is precisely the point at which arguments in animal ethics either hold or break.

In debates about animals, the same pattern regularly occurs: a value judgement is voiced – animal suffering is bad, factory farming is regrettable, a world without avoidable suffering would be better – and from this a duty is immediately derived. Whoever shares the value judgement, it seems, must also accept the duty; whoever rejects the duty must, consequently, dispute the value judgement. This alternative is mistaken, and its consequences are considerable, for it divides the debate into two camps that henceforth demand nothing of one another but professions of faith. The error does not lie in the value judgement being false. It lies in the fact that a transition is being skipped over – one that itself stands in need of justification.

#### Two Axes of Practical Orientation

Within the practical domain, C. D. Broad distinguishes two families of concepts. *Concepts of Value* articulate that something is being claimed as good, bad, valuable, harmful, or regrettable. *Concepts of Obligation* articulate what is required, forbidden, or permitted. What is decisive here is the double movement: both families of concepts must be distinguished, yet they must not be separated. They are two axes of one and the same practical orientation. Where the connection between them is lacking, value tips over into an overreach of the "ought"; where, conversely, the reference to value is lacking, the "ought" tips over into empty form.

This corresponds to a second distinction, one that concerns the side of obligation itself. The **ought-to-be** has an axiological structure: a state of the world is judged as good, fitting, or as one that ought to obtain, without this immediately entailing any particular duty to act. From "This state ought to be" it does not follow that "You must bring it about." The **ought-to-do** has a deontic structure: it is addressed to agents capable of action and presupposes ability, receptivity to reasons, knowledge, alternatives, and the power to act. Each of these two forms has its own protective function. The ought-to-be curbs axiological imperialism, since it renders a value articulable without immediately translating it into a duty. The ought-to-do prevents moral overextension, since it binds demands to real persons in real circumstances.

#### Bridge Principles

The transition between these two axes is not accomplished by any single ultimate principle, but by bridge principles: methodological connecting links that render visible the conditions under which a value-consideration becomes practically binding. Among these belong avoidability, reasonableness, proportionality, irreversibility, role-responsibility, rights, duties of protection, and conditions of consent. If animal suffering is avoidable without significant loss, the duty to avoid it grows stronger. If a demand is addressed to persons without regard for their possibilities for action, their alternatives, and the burdens placed upon them, it loses its addressee. A simple proportionality of justification applies here: the further a duty is meant to reach, the stronger the supporting bridge principles must be.

Forms of life, too, can function as a bridge principle. Vegetarianism and veganism are, in this light, not merely individual dietary choices, nor merely the target of the objection raised above, but possible ways of stabilising a practice in which the moral relevance of the animal remains lastingly present. The objection is directed not against the form of life as such, but against the claim that it follows immediately from the value judgement.

What follows from this for the animal? Little and much at once. Little, because no particular prohibition yet follows from the value judgement. Much, because every practice that causes animal suffering thereby becomes in need of justification. Animal suffering is a morally relevant negative value-consideration that demands normative clarification and generates pressure for justification – of varying strength: up to a strict prohibition, where the suffering is severe, avoidable, and serves merely trivial ends; up to a duty of mitigation, where it cannot be fully avoided but can be reduced.

#### How the Various Positions Build the Bridge

The positions within animal ethics can be measured precisely by this criterion – not by how much protection they promise, but by which bridge they build between value and obligation, and by what sustains that bridge.

**Tom Regan** shifts the bearer of value. It is not experiential quality that counts, but the being that carries its states through time: the *subject-of-a-life*. To this being belongs inherent value, categorical and non-gradable. It is important to note that Regan by no means skips over the transition: for him, inherent value alone does not yet yield a sufficient call to action; this is instead derived from the respect principle and the harm principle developed from it, from which claims to respectful treatment arise. Conflicts, too, are not simply levelled out. The basic moral status remains equal, while the *miniride principle* and the *worse-off principle* take into account differences in the severity of concrete harms. The costs, therefore, do not lie in an inability to weigh conflicts, but in the categorical design of the basic status: empirically gradual differences in capacities, life-possibilities, and vulnerabilities to harm must be reintroduced at a subordinate level. Axiological imperialism arises here not within Regan's architecture itself, but rather in its abbreviated everyday version, which leaps directly from inherent value to absolute prohibition.

**Peter Singer** takes as his starting point the interests of sentient beings; the capacity for suffering and enjoyment marks the threshold for having interests at all. The normative bridge is formed by the principle of equal consideration of equal interests. Whether abstaining from consumption is obligatory therefore depends on consequences, alternatives, avoidability, and effectiveness. The gain is flexibility; the price is a balance-sheet structure: the individual animal appears as the bearer of interests that can be weighed against one another, and the phenomenal experience in which these interests are grounded can recede behind its function within the overall balance. Regan's objection to utilitarianism is aimed precisely at this interchangeability: individuals possess no moral status protected against aggregation, but can be overridden for the sake of a better overall outcome.

**Ursula Wolf** and **Martha Nussbaum** extend the basis of value in differing ways. Wolf does not simply universalise an empirically occurring affect of compassion, but transforms it into the normative attitude of a generalised or as-if compassion, from which, in particular, consideration and negative duties towards beings capable of suffering are meant to follow. Yet precisely thereby the problem of justification shifts: how does a motivationally comprehensible attitude become a universal moral claim? Wolf herself later conceded that compassion alone can sustain neither the universality of consideration nor the demanding character of moral norms. Nussbaum, by contrast, takes species-specific capacities and possibilities for flourishing as her starting point and understands the species-norm evaluatively. Her political implementation is explicitly graduated: in *Frontiers of Justice*, she formulates, in the first instance, good treatment and painless killing as a provisional, realistically utopian threshold, without thereby settling the further question of whether killing itself violates central capabilities. One point requiring scrutiny remains the evaluative selection and weighting of these capabilities: this can neither be established purely empirically nor be fully deduced from a superordinate principle, but rather combines knowledge of animal forms of life with normative judgements about what is to count as successful flourishing.

**Norbert Hoerster** disputes that any living being possesses an objective inherent value knowable through reason. Likewise, he disputes that animals possess, for lack of sufficient self- and future-reference, that weighty interest in survival which could sustain a general prohibition on killing. Duties towards animals nevertheless arise for him – by way of what might be called animal-altruism, that is, via altruistic human interests in the wellbeing of sentient beings. On this basis, Hoerster is quite capable of grounding sharp judgements concerning factory farming, animal transport, animal experimentation, or the keeping of zoos. The problem, therefore, is not moral leniency but the anchoring of the argument. The protection of the animal hangs upon a normative ground that does not lie in the animal itself. Where the altruistic interest is weak, or collides with stronger human interests, the protection of animals likewise loses weight.

**Peter Carruthers**, finally, demonstrates the possibility of a particularly far-reaching decoupling between an acknowledged value-consideration and direct normative relevance. Even granting his later concession that animals possess beliefs, desires, pain, and fear, and are capable of suffering, no independent moral status follows from this for him. Animals do not belong to the circle of rational agents from whose mutual justification moral rules arise, and are therefore not direct addressees of moral claims. Cruelty towards animals can nevertheless be wrong – for instance, because it reveals something about the moral character of the agent, or because the interests of other human beings are affected. Thus the acknowledged suffering is not denied, but it is stripped of any independent normative force: that the animal suffers does not, by itself, generate a duty that holds towards it. Precisely herein lies a normative formalism – not in the denial of the ground of value, but in its dependence upon a prior moral form that determines who may count as a bearer of immediate claims at all.

#### The Methodological Checkpoint

From this, a test question can be derived for every argument in animal ethics – including one's own: does it raise a claim of value, does it justify that claim, or does it convert it into an ought-to-do? And if it does convert it: which bridge principle sustains the transition, and does it sustain it as far as the obligation is meant to reach?

Two erroneous forms thereby become visible. **Axiological imperialism** occurs where a value judgement occupies the practical level so completely that all further transitions are skipped over – the judgement presents itself immediately as a duty. **Normative formalism** occurs where rules, prescriptions, and responsibilities are detached from their grounds in value – animal suffering then becomes a mere technical, legal, or economic factor of regulation. The distinction between value and duty guards against both, but only for as long as it remains a distinction and does not become a separation.

## 2 | The Translation of Suffering

#### Indirect Address and Experience Without a Voice

> **"Animals cannot speak – how does their suffering enter our arguments?"**
> Why animal ethics is necessarily a practice of translation, where this translation projects, where it empties out, and why the most dangerous distortion is not the wrong answer, but the question that is never even asked.

Animals are sentient beings. They can suffer, feel fear, avoid, bond, exhibit well-being. Yet nothing has thereby been said about how this experience enters moral discourse. This is precisely where the methodological centre of animal ethics lies. The animal experiences, but it does not argue. It suffers, but it does not give reasons. It shows something, but it does not formulate a claim to validity. From this difference it does not follow that the animal has no place in morality – rather, it follows that it has a place only if someone performs the work of translation, and that this work must itself be subject to control.

#### Three Levels of Address

Areas of applied ethics differ less in terms of ranked dignity than in terms of translational complexity. They form a relief of differing conditions of address, within which three levels may be distinguished.

In **direct address**, paradigmatically medical ethics, the addressee can speak and participate. Patients articulate interests, raise claims, examine reasons, give or withhold consent. Even where they are currently unable to do so, the mode is already prefigured: representation orients itself towards the presumed will of a being that could, in principle, say what it wants.

In **indirect address**, paradigmatically animal ethics, experience is present, but discursive self-representation is not. There is a centre of experience, and there is no voice. The animal does not sit at the table of reasons; nonetheless, its bodily experience is real and must be translated into this space if it is not to fall away.

In **mediated address**, paradigmatically environmental ethics, even this centre is absent. A river, a bog, a species, an ecosystem has no experience that could be represented on its behalf; the addressee must first be constituted through semantic, ontological, epistemic and axiological work. This spares animal ethics nothing – but it shows that its problem occupies a middle position: it has more than environmental ethics, namely experience, and less than medical ethics, namely no self-report.

#### The Scene of Translation

How this translation works can be shown by means of a scene. A laboratory animal withdraws, avoids an apparatus, shows altered posture, vocalisations, reduced food intake. An observer perceives this – not as a body in motion, but as a living being in a situation in which something may be happening to it. The scene is not yet a moral judgement, but neither is it a neutral occurrence of data.

Several levels must here be distinguished. The animal's experience is not given to it as a theory, but as an enactment: immediate acquaintance with a state that is bad for it. The animal has no argument for its suffering; it has the suffering. Human perception, by contrast, has no immediate access to this, but only expressive forms, bodily signs, behavioural patterns, contextual conditions. Between phenomenal acquaintance and discursive descriptive knowledge lies an epistemic distance that must neither be denied nor elevated into moral indifference.

The translation therefore proceeds in stages: a phenomenal occasion at which something gives cause for concern; a perception that takes in expression and behaviour; an interpretation in light of the animal species, the situation, species-specific expressive forms and physiological indicators; an examination of alternative explanations – pain, fear, illness, exhaustion, habituation; and only then the transition into a claim to validity. The first sentence is not: "This experiment is immoral." The first sentence is: "This animal shows signs of distress." The second sentence gives reasons why there is good cause to understand this distress as suffering. Such examination does not render perception colder, but more responsible. Representation without examination is presumption; examination without recourse to the experience is a hollowing-out.

Analogy here plays a delicate dual role. It is indispensable, because human beings do not recognise animal suffering from some Archimedean standpoint outside, but from bodily comparability: a guarded posture, a flight impulse, a stress reaction are expressive forms intelligible to bodily beings as such. One's own vulnerability is here not a disturbing factor but a condition of knowledge. Analogy, however, is not identification. An animal does not suffer as a human does merely because its behaviour recalls human suffering; it lacks the language of suffering, biographical self-interpretation, concepts of the future. Animal suffering is not less relevant for being structured differently – but it is structured differently, and the translation must preserve this otherness rather than painting over it with human inner life.

#### How the Positions Translate

Animal-ethical theories differ not only in their conclusions, but already in how they organise this translation – and each thereby gains something and loses something.

**Mary Midgley** first of all defends the basic analogical operation itself. This partial argument is epistemic and not yet committed to any particular normative principle: we cannot see directly into other human beings either; we ascribe to them feelings, intentions and experiences by interpreting behaviour in the light of our own experience. The barrier of experience therefore does not run, in principle, between human being and animal, but already between individuals as such: "The barrier does not fall between us and the dog. It falls between you and me." The additional boundary of species creates no fundamentally new form of inaccessibility. At the same time, Midgley warns against the counter-figure of anthropomorphism, namely mechanomorphism: whoever describes animals as instinct-driven, genetically programmed machines does not forgo analogy, but merely chooses a different one. The gain of her position therefore lies less in a positive moral theory than in an epistemic relief of animal experience: mental ascriptions are not suspect merely because their object is not human.

**Peter Singer** translates animal suffering into interests that can be comparatively taken into account across individuals and species. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment marks the threshold for possessing interests at all; the normative bridge is formed by the principle of equal consideration of equal interests. The gain of this translation lies in its comparability: animal experience can enter a general moral weighing without species membership conferring lesser weight upon it from the outset. The price is a balance-sheet structure. The individual animal appears as a bearer of interests that can be offset against one another, and the phenomenal experience in which these interests are grounded can recede in favour of its function in the overall balance. Under certain utilitarian assumptions this logic extends as far as considerations of replaceability: not the concrete individual, but the continuation of positive experience, can then become decisive. The danger of de-addressing here therefore lies not in a denial of animal suffering, but in its complete translatability into aggregable quantities.

**Tom Regan** translates animal experience into the status of a *subject-of-a-life*, to which inherent value belongs. His distinction between moral agents and moral patients is here decisive: moral agents can understand moral reasons and assume duties; moral patients cannot do so, yet nonetheless possess their own moral status and claims to respectful treatment. The absence of a capacity for duty is therefore, for Regan, precisely not an objection against holding rights. The actual problem of representation lies elsewhere. Animals cannot discursively formulate their claims, institutionalise them legally, or themselves defend them against misinterpretation; their rights must therefore be recognised, interpreted and practically asserted by human beings. It does not follow from this that these rights are generated by human beings – in Regan's theory they are grounded in the animal itself. What remains open, however, is the institutional question of what talk of rights additionally accomplishes, as against a theory of human protective duties, when the bearers of rights can never themselves articulate or claim them. The possible de-addressing therefore lies not in the concept of rights itself, but in the unavoidable human representation of what is to count as an animal claim.

**Ursula Wolf** keeps the translation particularly close to experience. Her starting point is the natural compassion felt for the suffering of other beings; what becomes morally relevant from this, however, is not simply a stronger or more widely shared affect. Wolf instead transforms selective compassion into the normative stance of a generalised or as-if compassion: even where we do not, in fact, feel compassion, we ought to take sentient beings into consideration as though we were correspondingly affected. The gain lies in the experiential closeness of this construction. The normative relation to the animal does not arise first through abstract rational capacity, participation in a contract, or a categorial status, but connects directly to the perception of another's well-being and suffering. The point that remains open for examination concerns the bridge itself, however: compassion can make intelligible why the suffering of others motivates us and why individuals as such become morally significant; it less readily explains where the universality and the demanding character of moral norms come from. Wolf herself later highlighted this problem. The danger therefore lies less in a distorting translation of experience than in a possible under-determination of the normative transition from being affected to being obligated.

**Martha Nussbaum** as well as **Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka** respond in different ways to the problem of missing discursive self-representation. Nussbaum defends a prudent, respectful paternalism: human agents must judge which capabilities are central to a flourishing life for a given animal species and a concrete individual, while at the same time opening up spaces for the animal's own activity, choice and development. Donaldson and Kymlicka go further politically. Their model of *dependent agency* is meant precisely to overcome classical guardianship: it is not a human representative who is to decide in the animal's place, but rather animal preferences, consent, refusal and social reactions that are to be interpreted and fed into shared decision-making processes. This ascribes to animals, at the very least, a mediated form of political co-authorship. The gain lies in a relationally differentiated structure of duties that does not treat domesticated, liminal and wild animals independently of their social relations. The price lies in the dependence of normative claims on such relational and political assignments. This is precisely where Cochrane's objection sets in: if comparable interests generate different political rights depending on group membership, it must be explained why outsiders with similar interests should have lesser claims. The difficulty of territorially delimiting wild communities exacerbates this problem, but is not its core. The danger of de-addressing thereby shifts: the main problem is no longer a lack of perception of animal experience, but the political order through which it is decided in which role an animal becomes addressable at all.

#### Two Abysses and One Form of Practice

The translation can fail on two sides, and it can be undermined altogether by a third figure.

The one abyss is **naive appropriation**: one behaves as though one saw the animal's suffering directly, in the same way one experiences one's own. The epistemic difference is then blurred; the animal is given a voice that is, in truth, one's own. Such language creates closeness while erasing the animal's own distinctive character; it appears inclusive, yet does not bear the otherness of the animal.

The other abyss is **distancing impoverishment**: one says that one sees only movements, stimuli, reactions, but no suffering. The expressive structure of the living being is then hollowed out. Described ontologically, this is a confusion of bearer and process – the animal no longer appears as a living being with its own way of living, but merely as a bearer of pain in an experiment, as a body of reactions, as stock, or as a factor of production. The first faulty form projects too quickly; the second withdraws too quickly.

Both are errors *within* translation. De-addressing

## 3 | Equality Is Not the Same as Equality

"Animals are equal" initially sounds like a very far-reaching claim. But equal in what respect? Animals and human beings evidently do not possess the same capacities, needs, or forms of life. A pig need not be permitted to vote, a human being needs no mud wallow, and a bird realises its wellbeing differently than a dog does. Animal-ethical egalitarianism therefore does not normally assert a factual equality, nor, without further ado, an identical treatment of all living beings. The decisive question, rather, is **at what point moral differences may no longer count as a reason for unequal treatment**.

Precisely for this reason, it is worthwhile to distinguish between various forms of egalitarianism. The customary contrast between weak and strong egalitarianism can here be supplemented by two intermediate or, respectively, extended forms. This yields a fourfold map: in **weak egalitarianism**, equality lies initially in moral consideration. **Extended egalitarianism** strengthens the claims to protection and life arising from it. **Strong egalitarianism** turns these into fundamentally inviolable moral rights. **Absolute egalitarianism** goes a step further still and asks about the political status of animals. This classification, then, does not describe four degrees of moral truth. It marks four different sites at which a demand for equality can be applied.

#### Equal consideration: weak egalitarianism

In Peter Singer's work, the egalitarian point is initially, and surprisingly, quite modest. Equality does not mean that all living beings possess the same value or have the same rights. It means that **comparable interests must be given comparable consideration**. Whoever feels pain has an interest in not suffering. Whether this interest belongs to a human being, a pig, or a dog should, for the purposes of its consideration, initially make no difference. Singer's famous scale metaphor expresses precisely this: on the scale, it is the strength of an interest that is to count, not the identity or species of its bearer.

This does not, however, mean that in every conflict human and animal concerns receive the same weight. Singer distinguishes, for instance, between personal beings with a pronounced sense of self and future-consciousness and non-personal sentient beings. The interest in not suffering may be equally serious for both, while the killing of a being with long-term plans for the future causes additional harm. Alison Hills arrives, by a different route, at a similar structure: for her too, sentient animals fall within the sphere of equal moral consideration, while autonomy becomes significant for further-reaching rights, in particular the right to life. Weak egalitarianism therefore does **not** mean that all use of animals is thereby excluded. Singer and Hills can demand very far-reaching changes to husbandry, research, and diet without deriving from this an exceptionless prohibition on every human use of animals.

Equality, then, is located here at a particular point: **no one may vanish from the moral calculation merely because he is not human**. How the interest thus considered is ultimately weighted is not thereby yet decided.

#### From interest to protected life: extended egalitarianism

Martha Nussbaum and Ursula Wolf go further. For them it is not enough merely to enter animal interests into a weighing process. Both ask, more emphatically, what it means for a living being **to be able to lead its own life well**.

For Nussbaum, this question leads to the capabilities approach. A living being does not simply possess an abstract interest in pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It has a particular form of life with possibilities for flourishing: movement, social relationships, play, foraging, reproduction, retreat, or the exploration of its environment may belong to this. What matters, therefore, is not to let animals live in as human-like a manner as possible, but to enable the unfolding of those capabilities that characterise their respective form of life. A cow must be able to flourish as a cow, a bird as a bird, and an elephant as an elephant. Nussbaum therefore speaks of a species-related form of dignity, and links to it not only duties of omission but, under conditions of human-induced dependency, also positive duties of protection.

Ursula Wolf develops her position differently. Her ethics of compassion takes its starting point in the subjective wellbeing of a being: wherever a living being can fare better or worse, there is something that demands moral consideration. Her "generalised compassion" is thereby not a mere surge of feeling, but the attempt to extend this consideration systematically to all beings capable of suffering. At the same time, Wolf works multi-criterially. For questions concerning killing, for instance, the capacity to want to go on living or forms of life-planning may become additionally important. Her position therefore reaches beyond Singer's mere weighing of interests, without categorically excluding every weighing of goods.

Extended egalitarianism thus shifts the boundary. Animals do not merely possess interests that must be counted in. Their life itself acquires a considerably stronger position of protection. This right to life, however, remains **in principle violable**. Under certain conditions, Nussbaum and Wolf can regard human use of animals, or even killing, as defensible. It is precisely here that the difference from the next position lies.

#### Equal rights: strong egalitarianism

Strong egalitarianism draws a more categorical consequence from the moral independence of certain animals. There are living beings whose lives may not simply be sacrificed for the sake of greater advantages to others. Their protected status is not merely a particularly heavy weight on a scale. It functions as a right.

Tom Regan formulates this position with particular clarity. For him, many animals are **subjects-of-a-life**: for them, something happens not merely biologically, but things can go well or badly for them from their own perspective. They have perceptions, desires, memories, interests, and their own experiential biography. Regan links this status to an **inherent value** that is not to be graded according to how intelligent, useful, or capable an individual is. From this value follows a claim to respectful treatment. The animal may not be treated merely as a resource for others' purposes.

This also changes the significance of killing. Whereas weak egalitarianism can ask how much suffering an action produces and what interests stand opposed to it, Regan regards killing itself as a fundamental harm: it deprives a subject-of-a-life of all future possibilities of its own wellbeing. Regan therefore does indeed arrive at an abolitionist position with respect to central forms of institutionalised animal use.

Yet an important conceptual brake is needed here. **Strong egalitarianism and abolitionism are not identical.** What belongs to the strong position, in the first instance, is the fundamentally inviolable right to life of the animals it covers. Whether this further entails the abolition of every property relation, all keeping of animals, and every form of human-animal cooperation is a further question. The sources therefore name, alongside Regan, quite different authors such as Gary Francione, Mark Rowlands, or Alasdair Cochrane as strong egalitarians. The position is a shared location on the map, not a fully unified theory.

Mark Rowlands, too, shows how differently this location can be reached. He does not argue with Regan's inherent value, but takes up Rawls's idea of a veil of ignorance. If morally arbitrary characteristics may play no privileging role in the choice of just principles, the question arises why species membership in particular should be shielded from this scrutiny. Strong egalitarianism can thus be grounded deontologically, contractualistically, or in other ways. The result is not identical in every detail, but the shift from **consideration to a strong rights-based constraint** is.

#### From moral right to political status

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka begin where classical animal rights theories often leave off. Even strong moral rights say relatively little about **how humans and animals are to live together politically**. A right not to be killed or mistreated still does not answer the question of what claims arise from domestication, a shared lifeworld, territorial overlap, or human-induced dependency.

This extension may be termed **absolute egalitarianism**. "Absolute" does not mean here that every single right must hold without exception and absolutely. What is meant, rather, is the furthest-reaching extension of the question of equality: from moral consideration, through moral rights, into the political order itself.

In *Zoopolis*, Donaldson and Kymlicka accordingly distinguish three typical relational situations. Domesticated animals live permanently within human-shaped societies and are to be understood as members of them, analogous to the concept of citizenship. Wild animals, by contrast, form independent communities whose territorial and social self-organisation is to be protected by a model of sovereignty. Between these lie liminal animals — such as rats, pigeons, or squirrels — which live within human settlement spaces without being domesticated members of our community. For them, the status of denizenship or *residency* is developed.

It is precisely this position that shows particularly well why egalitarianism does not mean levelling. One and the same basic moral consideration can lead to **different rights**, because the relationships in question are different. A dog, a wolf, and a city pigeon need not have the same political status in order for their interests to be taken equally seriously. Equality does not here demand the elimination of differences, but their morally controlled translation.

#### Four maps — no decision-making machine

The four forms can thus be read more precisely. In weak egalitarianism, the demand for equality reads: **equal moral consideration**. In extended egalitarianism, a more strongly protected, yet in principle violable, right to life is added. In strong egalitarianism, a fundamentally inviolable right to life is asserted for the animals concerned in each case. Absolute egalitarianism supplements these moral rights with political statuses and relational rights.

This ordering is useful as long as one does not mistake it for the terrain itself. Animal-ethical theories are not machines into which one feeds "animal testing", "meat consumption", or "keeping pets" and out of which the morally correct verdict then drops. They are **cartographies**: they render certain properties, relationships, values, and burdens of justification visible, and allow others to recede more easily into the background. Precisely for this reason, the philosophical task does not consist in deciding as quickly as possible in favour of Singer, Nussbaum, Regan, or Donaldson and Kymlicka. The more interesting question is what their respective map renders visible, and what price their abstraction exacts.

Above all, a distinction must be drawn between **moral relevance and moral decisiveness**. That an animal suffers, that its flourishing is impaired, or that a moral right is affected, generates relevance and thus a burden of justification. From this, the concrete verdict does not yet follow mechanically. Between value and obligation lie bridges: avoidability, alternatives, reasonableness, responsibility, dependency, proportionality, or special rights can determine what significance a given consideration acquires in a particular constellation. Whoever skips this step turns a moral value directly into a command. The topological perspective therefore holds fast to both: **the animal must not disappear from the moral terrain — but its visibility alone does not yet decide which path through this terrain is the right one.**

## 4 | Hierarchies in the Moral Landscape – Why Does the Human Being Take Precedence?

That humans and animals are treated differently in moral terms is, at first glance, not a philosophical theory. It is part of an already established moral world. We distinguish family members from strangers, pets from wild animals, dogs from pigs, laboratory animals from patients. We permit actions toward animals that would obviously be excluded toward human beings, while at the same time regarding cruelty to animals as reprehensible. A cow can be property and yet enjoy legal protection; a dog can be a family member without possessing the same rights as a human family member. The relationship between humans and animals is therefore not simply morally empty or consistently anthropocentric. It is **multilayered, relational and hierarchically ordered**. Such orderings shape what we see, which expectations we hold, and which actions strike us as self-evident or as irritating.

This is philosophically important because the charge of speciesism does not meet this order as though it were a blank slate. When an egalitarian demands that similar interests be given equal consideration regardless of species membership, he is not establishing morality for the first time. He is criticising a morality that has long distinguished between closeness and distance, between one's own and the foreign, between human and animal forms of life. However, it does not follow from this that the existing order is correct. Slavery, the political disenfranchisement of women, or racist hierarchies, too, were embedded in morally established societies. **Moral facticity is not moral justification.** Conversely, ethics must also not simply eliminate the validity claims of a lived moral world merely by opposing it with an egalitarian principle. The interesting question begins precisely between these two short-circuits.

#### Interests: Why should human concerns count for more?

Norbert Hoerster proceeds in an unusually fundamental manner. He denies that human beings or animals possess an objective "intrinsic value" that reason could discover independently of human evaluations. For him, moral norms must instead become intelligible on the basis of interests. Especially sustainable are rules in whose validity many or nearly all human beings have an enlightened interest: for instance, rules protecting life, bodily integrity, or freedom of action. Morality thus arises not from an objective order of values but from an **intersubjective stabilisation of convergent interests**.

For animals, this has a consequential implication. Hoerster by no means denies their capacity for sentience. Human beings can therefore develop an altruistic interest in animals not suffering. But this interest initially remains a **human interest in animal well-being**. On the moral scale, then, it is not directly the interest of the human being that is weighed against the interest of the animal, but rather human egoistic interests against human altruistic interests. This becomes especially clear in the case of killing. Hoerster assumes that most animals do not understand themselves as individuals identical over time, with a past and a future, and therefore possess no future-directed interest in their own continued existence. Pain can harm them; a painless killing, on this construction, however, violates no interest of their own in the future.

Yet it is precisely here that the vulnerable point of the position becomes apparent. Much hinges on empirical and conceptual assumptions about what an animal interest could even be. Must a living being **conceptually represent its continued existence as a future** in order to possess an interest in continued existence? Or can a life be harmed by killing even when its bearer cannot think a sentence of the form "I want to still be alive tomorrow"? This is not a mere matter of detail, but the very point at which a theory of interests generates a moral hierarchy.

Lawrence C. Becker begins differently. For him, the path runs through virtue ethics and **social distance**. Human beings do not treat the interests of others in a social vacuum. Family, friends, acquaintances and strangers stand at different degrees of closeness to us; dependency, familiarity and mutual relationships alter the weight that their concerns carry for us. Becker connects this in particular with reciprocity and empathetic identification. We identify more readily with those close to us; reciprocal relationships stabilise cooperation. A moral order structured according to social distance then appears not as a disturbance of morality, but as an expression of certain virtuous human dispositions.

The problem, however, can be stated more precisely than through the blanket charge of an "is-ought fallacy". That human beings in fact prefer closeness does not yet establish that they morally ought to do so. Becker therefore requires a **bridge** between anthropological regularity, social utility, and virtue. At the same time, reciprocity presupposes a capacity that animals, as non-moral agents, precisely do not possess in the same way. If social distance is determined by means of reciprocity, animals therefore risk not merely being placed further away; they may fall out of the order employed from the very outset. This is precisely what the source's critique marks.

#### Relations: Perhaps morality does not lie in properties at all

At this point it becomes apparent that not every non-egalitarian position simply pits the human being against the animal. Mary Midgley already regards it as reductive to suppose that moral consideration must be derived from a single individual property – such as capacity for suffering. Human beings and animals live in relationships, and these relationships themselves carry moral significance: kinship, responsibility, companionship, gratitude, dependency, particular states of distress, or affective bonds can alter what we owe one another.

This is remarkable, because Midgley's relationalism requires precisely **no rigid species boundary**. One's own dog can be emotionally far closer to a person than a completely unknown human being. The moral landscape then does not run cleanly along the biological boundary between human and animal. It consists of intersecting relations of closeness, responsibility and attachment. Precisely for this reason, the concept of speciesism captures this position only poorly: the relevant difference is not simply species, but relationship.

Clare Palmer shifts this relational argument once more. For her, it is less feelings than **causal responsibility, dependency and vulnerability** that are decisive. A wild animal whose living conditions were not caused by human beings stands in a different relation to us than a domesticated animal whose nourishment, reproduction, possibilities of movement, and often even bodily characteristics have been shaped by human practice. Where human beings deliberately place sentient beings into lasting dependency, an intensified responsibility for their well-being arises, according to Palmer.

Hierarchical differentiation can therefore, surprisingly, also generate **more** obligation. Precisely because a domestic dog and a wild wolf do not stand in the same relation to us, we may possess stronger positive duties toward the dog. Equal treatment would, at this point, even blur the morally relevant difference. The counter-question, of course, is how far causal responsibility extends: in an environment globally altered by human beings, it becomes increasingly difficult to cleanly delineate a sphere of truly unaffected wild animals. It is precisely here that the source identifies a weakness of a purely causal-relational drawing of boundaries.

#### Species: Can species membership itself count morally?

The hierarchy emerges even more clearly in Michael Wreen and Carl Cohen. Wreen deals with a well-known difficulty of property-based positions. If personhood, rationality, or future-directed consciousness ground a particularly strong right to life, how then are human beings who lack these properties to be treated? Infants, human beings with severe cognitive impairments, or permanently unconscious human beings obviously may not simply fall outside moral protection.

Wreen attempts to explain this asymmetry by means of a notion of fairness. Human beings who lack the prerequisites normally associated with human personhood are, in one respect, disadvantaged relative to other members of their species. They are – in his terminology – not "Fortune's Favored". Precisely for this reason, fairness is meant to grant them full protection. In the case of animals, whose species-specific development does not normally give rise to personhood, this disadvantage, he holds, does not exist.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the argument requires precisely the species boundary whose moral significance it is supposed to explain. Evelyn Pluhar's critique therefore targets the fairness principle: if fairness generates the full right to life only within the human species, it must already be explained why precisely this membership may be decisive for the distribution of the right. Otherwise, a circularity threatens: the species boundary grounds the differential right, while its own moral significance is already being presupposed.

Carl Cohen chooses a more sophisticated route. His argument is **not** simply: whoever cannot currently make autonomous moral judgements has no rights. That would in fact exclude numerous human beings from the domain of rights. Cohen claims, rather, that rights belong to a form of life, or to a kind of being, whose members can in principle understand moral rules, raise claims, and govern their conduct according to moral considerations. Hence individual human beings can possess rights even though they do not individually actualise these capacities. Animals, by contrast, belong according to Cohen to species for which such moral agency is not constitutive.

Cohen thereby circumvents the simple version of the so-called argument from non-paradigmatic cases. This, however, gives rise to another question: **Why should a capacity typical of the species determine the moral status of an individual?** If this particular animal suffers, enters into relationships, and possesses a well-being of its own, why should the capacities typical of the members of its biological species be decisive for its status regarding rights? The argumentative burden thus shifts from the individual property to the normative significance of species.

#### Anthropocentrism: Must one even begin with the animal?

Peter Carruthers and Timothy Hsiao go a step further still. They do not merely attempt to weight animal and human concerns differently. They call into question whether animal experience possesses the same kind of moral relevance at all.

Carruthers does not deny that animals can suffer, have desires, or feel fear. What is decisive for him, rather, is **whence moral rules derive their validity**. As a contractualist, he understands them as the result of a hypothetical agreement among rational agents. Whoever can understand rules, judge their general acceptability, and orient their conduct by them belongs directly within the architecture of the moral contract. Animals, according to Carruthers, do not satisfy this condition.

Carruthers resolves the well-known problem of non-rational human beings by appeal to relationships and social stability. A moral order that excluded children, human beings with severe cognitive impairments, or elderly relatives from protection would damage fundamental human bonds and undermine the conditions of stable social coexistence. Moral status therefore extends also to human beings who are not themselves rational contracting parties. This extension, he holds, does not apply to animals in the same way.

Yet precisely here a methodologically interesting tension arises. If species membership, or the particular strength of human bonds, is already treated as morally relevant in constructing the contractual situation, its relevance must actually be established **prior to** the contractual procedure. But Carruthers wants precisely this procedure to explain which moral rules hold. The source therefore diagnoses the danger of a circle: that which the procedure is meant to ground appears already partly built into its initial conditions.

Timothy Hsiao makes the threshold visible in an even more fundamental way. He asks why moral status should follow from capacity for suffering at all. That an animal feels pain is initially a descriptive statement. In order to derive a moral demand from this, pathocentrism requires a normative connection. Hsiao, for his part, attempts to distinguish between moral and non-moral interests and to tie moral interests to membership in a moral community. Animals can then indeed possess well-being without their interests, for that reason alone, counting as moral interests.

## 5 | Relationship Makes a Difference – Proximity, Dependence, and Responsibility

A horse starves in a pasture, even though its keeper could easily have provided for it. The moral reaction seems unambiguous: whoever keeps the animal may not simply abandon it to its own fate. We react quite differently to images from the Serengeti, in which wildebeest drown, are injured, or fall prey to predators while crossing a river. These animals suffer as well. Nevertheless, we do not normally expect human beings to dam the river, build bridges, or prevent predators from making a kill. Clare Palmer begins her animal ethics precisely with this irritation. In both cases, sentient animals are affected. If one considers their properties alone, the difference seems difficult to comprehend: pain remains pain, hunger remains hunger. Yet we judge our duties differently. In the case of the neglected horse, we immediately ask: **Who is responsible?** In the case of the drowning wildebeest, this question presents itself quite differently from the outset. Palmer refers to this intuitive reluctance to intervene in the lives of wild animals as a *laissez-faire* attitude. She does not simply want to adopt this intuition, but to explain the conditions under which it can be morally tenable. This brings into focus an aspect that is easily underestimated in property-based animal ethics: **Not only what an animal is, but also how we stand in relation to it, can be relevant to our duties.**

#### Properties alone do not yet draw a complete map

 Many influential animal ethics begin with the individual. What matters, then, is roughly whether a being can feel pain, possesses interests, is a subject-of-a-life, or can develop certain capacities. This is plausible at first. If a pig and a dog can suffer in comparable ways, it would require explanation why the suffering of the one should count morally while that of the other should be meaningless. It is precisely this individualist basic idea that animates the critique of speciesism. But this gives rise to a new problem. If comparable properties demand comparable moral consideration, why do we not have the same duties of assistance toward every sentient animal? Would we not have to systematically prevent hunger, disease, injury, and violent death among wild animals as well? Palmer therefore brings **moral individualism and relationism** into dialogue with one another. Her point is not to replace properties with relationships. Sentience remains morally fundamental. But equal properties need not lead to identical duties, because something else lies between the moral relevance of a being and our concrete obligations toward it: the relationship in which we stand to it. Topologically speaking: the property marks a point in the moral terrain; the relationship alters the paths that lead from this point to action.

#### Mary Midgley: Morality does not begin with isolated individuals

 Mary Midgley starts earlier. For her, even the image of a world in which initially mutually isolated individuals exist, and only afterward a decision is made on the basis of some property as to who may be admitted into the moral community, is already problematic. Human beings do not, in fact, live in such *species-isolation*. Our lifeworld has for millennia consisted of relationships between human beings and other animals. Dogs live with humans, humans work with horses, keep cattle, care for animals, fear some, admire others, or live with them in spatial proximity. Midgley therefore speaks of **multispecies communities**. In these communities, morality is borne by more than abstract properties. Kinship, special responsibility, gratitude, companionship, sympathy, admiration, and social bonds influence what one being owes another. We know this from relationships between human beings. That I have duties toward my own child that I do not have toward an arbitrary stranger does not mean that the stranger has less moral worth. Rather, the special relationship adds further reasons. Midgley transfers this observation across the species boundary. Closeness precisely does **not** coincide with being human. Human beings can have a close relationship with a dog, grown over years, while billions of other human beings remain entirely foreign to them. Midgley therefore considers the notion of a sharply separated human and animal world to be misleading. The lines of moral connection run across the species boundary. Domestication, too, then appears more ambivalent than a simple history of domination would suggest. It was not possible without human beings and certain animals developing forms of mutual social understanding. Training, cohabitation, and cooperation presuppose that human beings can perceive animal behaviour and that animals, in turn, can respond to human beings. Midgley emphasizes the concept of **sympathy** for this purpose. Her famous sentence captures the point precisely: human beings do not, by nature, exist in species-isolation. Yet it is precisely at this point that caution is required. That human beings naturally form emotional bonds and favour those close to them does not yet prove that this favouring is morally correct. The source formulates this objection explicitly: neither a value nor a duty can be directly derived from an alleged natural preference. Otherwise, one could also legitimize other supposedly “natural” forms of partiality merely on the grounds of their naturalness. Midgley's multispecies community is therefore a compelling **description of the moral terrain**, but not yet a sufficient justification of the paths that lead through this terrain. This is decisive for the question “From value to duty.” **Closeness is not yet a duty.** It can render a morally relevant relational context visible; why and under what conditions particular obligations arise from it must be shown separately.

#### Clare Palmer: What we have caused changes our duties

 Clare Palmer attempts to become more precise exactly at this point. She distinguishes two kinds of duties that possess different justificatory structures. Toward sentient beings, there first exist **negative duties**: we may not cause them harm without justification. For Palmer, this duty depends essentially on a property of the affected individual—its capacity to be harmed and to suffer. In this sense, it initially makes no difference whether an animal lives in the wild, is domesticated, or stands in a particularly close relationship to a human being. Injuring a strange fox is not morally unproblematic simply because we have no relationship to it. The situation is different with **positive duties**. Helping, providing for, protecting, supplying food, or arranging medical care requires active action. For Palmer, such duties do not arise simply from the fact that some sentient being somewhere might need help. They depend essentially on whether a special relationship exists between this being and us. This makes the difference between the wildebeest and the horse comprehensible. The wildebeest in the Serengeti find themselves in a danger which—in the ideal-typical case—was not created by human beings. The horses, by contrast, are under human control. Human beings determine their food, their range of movement, their shelter, their reproduction, and often even the very properties with which they are born in the first place. Whoever subsequently lets such an animal starve is not simply omitting some arbitrary good deed. He is abandoning a being **whose dependency is part of his own relationship to it**. Domesticated animals therefore possess, for Palmer, a particular form of vulnerability. Of course, wild animals, too, can be vulnerable. The decisive difference lies in the fact that human beings have, through breeding, keeping, and control, permanently placed domesticated animals in relationships of dependency. Some animals can fulfil their elementary needs only if human beings provide them with food, protection, and opportunities for movement. In the case of animals bred for suffering or for experimentation, this entanglement goes even further: human beings deliberately alter properties of the animal body and can thereby themselves produce its vulnerability. From this deep involvement in the emergence of properties and living conditions, Palmer derives an **intensified responsibility for the well-being** of the animal.

#### Relationship as a bridging principle

 This allows the philosophical gain of relationism to be determined more precisely. The relationship does not necessarily first generate the animal's value. The horse is not sentient because we bred it, and its hunger does not first become bad because it has an owner. Its sentience already renders its suffering morally relevant. But the concrete positive duty does not yet follow from this: **The animal suffers → its suffering is morally relevant → we must help this animal.** It is precisely this last transition that requires a bridge. For Palmer, **caused dependency** can form such a bridge. Put simply, the line of thought runs: we have helped bring about the conditions under which a sentient being is dependent on our provision; therefore we cannot behave as though its plight merely happened to affect us by chance. The relationship does not necessarily change the value of the suffering, but rather our **responsibility for this suffering**. This is an important refinement of the thought “From value to duty.” Bridging principles need not always be general formulas such as reasonableness or avoidability. Relational structures, too, can bear practical transitions: **responsibility for created dependency**, assumed custody, past harm, or one's own involvement in an ongoing endangerment can explain why it is precisely this person who is obligated to act. Here, too, however, the bridge must not become invisible. “A caused B” does not logically entail “A is obligated to care for B.” It requires the additional normative assumption that whoever foreseeably creates dependency or vulnerability thereby assumes special responsibility for its consequences. Palmer's theory makes this normative architecture very plausibly visible; yet even she cannot dispense with this transition by simply equating mere causality with responsibility.

#### Between wilderness and domestication lie contact zones

 The contrast between domestic animal and wild animal would be too simple if it established a new sharp boundary. Palmer therefore explicitly thinks in terms of a **spectrum**. At one end stands largely human-independent wild animal life; at the other, controlled domestication. In between lie numerous contact zones: cultivated landscapes, cities, roads, agricultural land, or the edges of settlements, in which human and animal life intertwine. It is precisely there that causality becomes morally interesting. A fox living in a city, an animal whose migratory route is cut through by a road, or a population whose food source disappears due to human land use, cannot simply be filed under “wild animal—none of our business.” Human beings have helped bring about the situation. Palmer therefore supplements dependency with a second origin of positive duties: **ongoing harm can generate duties of reparation**. When habitats are destroyed, food sources cut off, or freedom of movement permanently restricted, this history can give rise to a special responsibility toward the affected animals and, in part, toward subsequent generations as well. Her examples include coyotes in human-shaped contact zones, among others. This also makes clear why a blanket statement such as “laissez-faire applies with regard to wild animals” can today function only as an ideal type. The denser human interventions become, the harder it is to determine where a plight truly independent of human beings begins. Precisely herein lies a weakness of Palmer's model: if the idea of laissez-faire is understood too weakly, it underestimates human entanglements; if it is understood too strongly, it threatens to tip over into an unrealistic “hands off” position. The source expressly highlights this tension.

#### Not every distance is a moral distance

 This also reveals the limit of a naive relationism. Relationships must not become a licence for indifference. That an animal is emotionally distant from us does not eliminate its capacity to suffer. An experimental animal may be entirely unknown to us and yet still be harmed by our actions. Palmer therefore rejects precisely the notion that **emotional closeness alone** could form the basis of positive duties: such a morality could, paradoxically, exempt us from obligations toward precisely those beings to whom we have so far built up no relationship because we treat them instrumentally. The relationship between property and relation must therefore be understood additively. Properties must not vanish as soon as relationships come into play; but relationships, too, must not be abstracted out of ethics. An animal remains a sentient being even when it is distant from us. But an animal that we have bred, confined, made dependent, or harmed is **additionally** a

## 6 | From Value to Duty – Bridges in the Moral Terrain

  [        ![Painting: On the left, a pig in a warm, golden landscape; on the right, a cold, blue city with a courtroom; between them, a gorge spanned by a narrow wooden bridge with symbolic planks.](https://andreasvieth.de/fileadmin/_processed_/d/c/csm_vomgebotzur_schweinbr%C3%BCcke_ki_b01ad86596.png "Andreas Vieth: The Narrow Bridge between Animal and Culture. Own visual concept designed with generative AI (2026).") ](/fileadmin/_processed_/d/c/csm_vomgebotzur_schweinbr%C3%BCcke_ki_2d628a9c1c.png) A thickly painted picture divided into two halves: on the left, a pig at the edge of a rocky cliff, surrounded by straw, wildflowers, and evening light; on the right, a blue-grey world of high-rise buildings, marble floors, suited figures, and a panel beneath the scales of Justitia. Between the two lies a deep ravine. The only connection is a makeshift wooden footbridge, its planks bearing symbols: a seedling, a crossed-out circle, a set of scales, a group of human figures. The bridge is passable, yet narrow, and it leads in only one direction.

Animal suffering is bad. This sentence sounds strong—and it is strong. Whoever sees an animal in pain, experiencing fear, or being kept under conditions that cause lasting stress is confronted with a morally relevant consideration. This suffering must not simply be treated as a production cost, a technical side effect, or unavoidable background noise.

But what follows from this?

It is precisely here that one of the most difficult tasks of practical ethics begins. From "animal suffering is bad" it does not yet follow immediately that "this action is forbidden." From "a world with less animal suffering would be better" it does not yet follow that "you must perform action X." And from "animals are to be morally considered" it does not yet follow that "all human beings must live vegan." Between a **value judgement** and a **concrete ought-to-do** lie further argumentative steps.

The glossary therefore distinguishes an **ought-to-be** from an **ought-to-do**. The former says something about how a situation ought to be: it would be better if this suffering did not exist. The latter is addressed to an agent capable of action: you ought to prevent or reduce this suffering, or refrain from a certain action. For this second statement, it must be clarified who can act, what alternatives exist, what knowledge is available, who is responsible, and what can be demanded of the person concerned.

This distinction does not weaken the value judgement. On the contrary: it makes clearer what argumentative work is required for a value to gain **practical bindingness**.

#### Moral relevance is not yet decisiveness

This distinction can be connected with a second pair of concepts. A consideration is **morally relevant** if it may not simply be disregarded in forming a judgement. It is **decisive** only once it carries the overall judgement in a specific situation.

Animal suffering is the central example of this. As soon as it becomes visible, the situation regarding justification changes. A practice that causes animals to suffer can no longer be described solely in terms of economic efficiency, research, tradition, or enjoyment. It stands under a **burden of justification**. But this burden of justification is not yet a prohibition. Whether the suffering ultimately becomes decisive depends on what kind of suffering is at stake, what purposes it serves, what alternatives exist, who is responsible, and what other morally relevant considerations arise in the situation.

This is an important intermediate position. Whoever turns moral relevance immediately into decisiveness transforms a weighty reason into an ultimate principle. Whoever, conversely, infers from the fact that a reason is not always decisive that it is therefore irrelevant, makes the animal disappear again. In both cases, the structure of the terrain is lost.

**Bridge principles** sit precisely between these two erroneous moves. They help determine under what conditions a relevant value-consideration develops sufficient normative force to command, forbid, or at least modify an action.

#### Avoidability: when a burden is not necessary

A particularly illustrative bridge principle is **avoidability**. Suppose a practice causes considerable animal suffering. As long as this suffering is genuinely unavoidably connected to a very weighty purpose, the situation regarding justification looks different than when the same purpose can be achieved without a comparable burden.

An available alternative therefore changes the moral terrain. If the same goal can be achieved with considerably less harm, it becomes harder to justify why the more burdensome variant should be chosen. The alternative does not make the suffering bad in the first place. Rather, it changes the **justification for bringing it about nonetheless**.

This structure becomes especially visible in the case of meat consumption. In situations where animal-based nutrition is necessary to secure basic provisions, the argument takes a different shape than where nutritionally viable, affordable, and practically accessible alternatives exist. The more easily a burden can be avoided without producing a comparably weighty loss, the stronger the reason becomes actually to avoid it.

At the same time, avoidability too must not become an automaton. "Technically possible" is not the same as "practically available." An alternative may exist and yet be inaccessible, disproportionately burdensome, or bound up with other relevant disadvantages for a particular person. Precisely for this reason, avoidability frequently requires a further bridge principle.

#### Reasonableness: an ought needs an addressee who can act

Moral demands are not addressed to abstract points on a map. They are addressed to concrete human beings with particular capacities, resources, dependencies, and scopes for action. This brings the bridge principle of **reasonableness** (Zumutbarkeit) into play.

In matters of nutrition, a dietary change can mean something different for an affluent adult in a large city than for a child, a person in need of care, someone with particular health requirements, or someone whose nutrition depends substantially on institutional provision. Income, availability, health, age, familial dependencies, and social embeddedness can alter the scope for action. The chapter on vegetarianism and veganism highlights precisely this differentiation.

Reasonableness does not mean: as soon as a demand becomes unpleasant, the duty lapses. Moral duties may well cost something. The question is rather **what burden may be demanded, for what reason, of whom**. A moral command does not become more demanding by ignoring differences in life circumstances; it becomes cruder.

Here also lies the meaning of "ought implies can." An ought-to-do presupposes the power to act. Whoever neither knows nor can influence a particular situation stands in a different normative relation to it than someone who directly controls it.

#### Co-responsibility: causality in worlds structured by division of labour

With this, Section 6 connects directly to the relational context of the previous section. Responsibility does not exist only where someone personally inflicts harm on an animal.

Modern animal use is organised through a division of labour. The person at the supermarket checkout does not keep a pig, does not drive an animal transport, and does not carry out a slaughter. Nevertheless, their consumption is not entirely unrelated to these practices. Demand contributes to stabilising production structures. At the same time, it would be too simple to treat the individual act of purchase as though it caused the suffering of a particular animal in the same way as the directly performing action does.

**Co-responsibility** is therefore a distinct bridge principle. It makes it comprehensible why responsibility can be mediated, distributed, and gradual without thereby disappearing. Precisely systems structured by division of labour can morally benefit from the fact that each individual contribution looks small and seemingly inconsequential. Taken together, however, such contributions stabilise institutions and practices.

The question then is not simply: "Did I cause this suffering—yes or no?" More interesting is: What role do I play within the structure, what possibilities for influence do I possess, what alternatives are available to me, and what share in a change can reasonably be demanded of me?

Here **proximity of responsibility**, **role responsibility**, and **institutional co-responsibility** touch one another. They are not three competing ultimate principles, but different ways of determining more precisely the normative significance of an entanglement. The glossary therefore lists role responsibility alongside duties of protection, avoidability, or proportionality as a possible bridge between value and ought.

#### Proportionality: not every purpose bears the same burden

Proportionality, too, can take on such a bridging function. A burden may be avoidable and yet appear justified because of an extraordinarily weighty purpose; conversely, even a comparatively minor burden may be difficult to justify if it serves a trivial purpose.

This becomes especially clear when comparing different uses of animals. A painful procedure undertaken to develop a medical treatment for a serious illness places different demands of justification than the same burden imposed for a marginal increase in comfort. This does not mean that medical animal experimentation is thereby already justified. The term "research" does not by itself satisfy the burden of justification. Rather, it must be examined how realistic the benefit is, how severe the burden is, what alternatives exist, and what institutional controls apply.

Proportionality thus rules out two simplistic calculations: neither does "animal suffering outweighs every human purpose" hold, nor does "human benefit justifies animal suffering." A human purpose must first itself be qualified: trivial, important, existential, speculative, substitutable, or without alternative?

Precisely this shows why bridge principles are not mere justificatory tricks. They can **permit** an action, but equally **bring down** an existing justification.

#### Alternatives can become defeaters

Here a further concept comes into play: the **defeater**. A defeater is a consideration that weakens or overturns an initially plausible justification.

Suppose an animal experiment appears justified on account of a possible medical chance of rescue. If it is now shown that a methodologically equivalent, animal-free alternative is available, this new information changes the justification. It is not merely an additional item on the list. It can remove the very foundation on which the previous justification rested.

The same can hold for a merely speculative benefit, a considerably less burdensome alternative, or an institutional routine that formally documents animal suffering but in practice merely administers it. The chapter on animal morality therefore makes alternatives and defeaters central components of the examination of justification.

The moral map thus remains mobile. A judgement can change even though the value of the animal's suffering remains the same—because the **bridge structure** has changed.

#### Irreversibility: some interventions foreclose possibilities permanently

A further consideration is **irreversibility**. Not every harm has the same temporal structure. Pain can pass, a housing condition can be changed, a restriction can be lifted. Killing, by contrast, is not correctable for the individual affected.

This does not automatically mean that every reversible harm is minor and every irreversible action absolutely forbidden. But irreversibility increases the burden of justification. Where a decision cannot be taken back, it must be clarified all the more clearly on what epistemic and moral basis it is made.

The glossary therefore explicitly lists irreversibility as a possible bridge principle between value and ought. Precisely in cases of killing, breeding for suffering (Qualzucht), or permanent interventions in animals' living conditions, it becomes visible that temporality itself can acquire moral significance.

#### Form of life: when individual decisions become a practice

More unusual is the bridge principle of **form of life**. Vegetarianism or veganism can, after all, be more than the result of thousands of individual deliberations.

Whoever had to conduct the entire animal-ethical debate anew with every purchase could hardly act at all. Forms of life stabilise decisions. A vegetarian or vegan practice can therefore be a way of permanently embedding a once-recognised moral relevance into everyday life. The animal then no longer needs to be retrieved anew from invisibility with every product. The form of life keeps a particular form of addressing present.

This gives it moral weight but does not yet make it generally obligatory. Precisely here the problem of bridging shows itself especially clearly. A form of life can explain **how I practically give effect to a value**. It does not yet follow from this that everyone else must adopt the same form of life.

## 7 | Composed Fit – Why the use of animals is neither an absolute prohibition nor a private matter

The considerations offered so far could be misunderstood in two opposite directions. On the one hand, one might say: if animal suffering is morally relevant and animals must be given consideration for their own sake, then any use of animals is fundamentally wrong. On the other hand, one might conclude from the absence of such a general prohibition: it is then simply left up to each individual whether they eat meat, keep animals, accept animal experimentation, or use animal products.

Both would be too hasty.

That the moral relevance of animal experience does **not entail an automatic prohibition of every use of animals** does not render such use morally neutral. And that a moral consideration is not decisive in a particular constellation does not mean that it has ceased to be a moral reason. It is precisely this intermediate structure that is decisive for animal ethics. The sources capture it with the concepts of *right-making* and *wrong-making tendencies*, pro tanto reason, burden of justification, and composed fittingness.

## A reason can count without deciding alone

Suppose an action causes an animal pain. Then this action, **under this description**, possesses a negative moral tendency. The suffering speaks against it.

This is, at first, less spectacular than it sounds. But philosophically it is consequential. The sentence means neither:

**"The action is therefore forbidden."**

nor:

**"The suffering is merely one consideration among others, which one may also ignore."**

Rather, it means: the suffering is a **genuine moral reason against the action**.

C. D. Broad describes such considerations as *wrong-making tendencies*. Other features may accordingly possess *right-making tendencies*. An action may, for instance, cause animal suffering and thereby carry a moral consideration against itself; it may at the same time save a gravely ill person and, under this description, carry a strong reason in its favour. Neither of these descriptions is therefore merely apparent. Both belong to the moral structure of the situation.

This structure can be made more precise with the concept of the **pro tanto reason**. *Pro tanto* means roughly: to the extent that this reason reaches. Such a reason possesses genuine normative force without necessarily determining the overall judgement. If it is outweighed by a stronger reason, it does not thereby disappear. The non-decisiveness of a reason is not its irrelevance.

This is especially important with respect to animal suffering. Permitted animal suffering would not, on this view, suddenly become a moral nullity. Even where a particular action appears justified upon examination, the suffering it causes remains a moral burden upon the action. It may remain regrettable, subject to a duty of minimisation, or in need of explanation. It is precisely through this that a pro tanto structure differs from a mere accounting of goods.

## Burden of justification instead of moral neutrality

This also changes the question of who actually must provide the justification.

As long as animal experience remains invisible, a practice can appear self-evident: animals are transported, bred, slaughtered, used in experiments, or made into sources of organs. But as soon as it becomes visible that these practices concern sentient beings, the argumentative starting position shifts.

It is no longer the animal that must explain **why it counts morally**. The practice must explain **why it is justified despite the animal's morally relevant interests**.

This is the function of the **burden of justification**. It does not mean that every use of animals is initially prohibited and only exceptionally permitted. It means, at first, something methodologically more modest and at the same time more demanding: a practice that affects relevant animal interests can no longer justify itself merely by its own facticity. "That is simply what we do," "it is legally permitted," "it is tradition," "it serves research," or "human beings benefit from it" are not yet sufficient answers. Such considerations must themselves be qualified.

Moreover, the burden of justification is mobile. If alternatives arise, if a claimed benefit becomes more uncertain, if the burden placed on the animals turns out to be greater than assumed, or if institutional controls fail, the situation changes. The same holds in the opposite direction: an acute medical emergency can lend a purpose a different weight than a minor increase in comfort.

The moral judgement therefore remains responsive to new information. It is not a one-time acquittal or conviction.

## From the individual vector to the overall judgement

With this we reach the point at which the previous sections converge.

A concrete situation in animal ethics regularly contains several moral **vectors**. Animal suffering speaks against an action. A therapeutic benefit may speak in its favour. Avoidability may strengthen the counter-reason. The absence of alternatives may ease the justification. A dependency created by human beings may ground special duties of care. Irreversibility may raise the burden of justification. Rights may shield certain courses of action. Reasonableness may determine what may be demanded of a particular person.

None of these considerations automatically possesses the function of a supreme decision rule.

Broad's concept of *component fittingness* is especially helpful here. A single consideration initially possesses a **partial appropriateness**: under a certain description, it speaks for or against doing something. The concrete moral appropriateness of the action, however, emerges only as **resultant fittingness**, as the result of the interplay of these various considerations.

The English formula **composed fittingness** makes an important point visible here: the result is composed, not calculated.

## Composition is not compromise

This is more than a linguistic nuance.

One easily imagines a compromise as a situation in which two sides each give up something. The animal receives somewhat less protection, the human being somewhat less benefit, and somewhere in the middle lies the morally reasonable solution.

Composed fittingness functions differently.

It does not ask how much each consideration must "give up," but rather **what function each consideration has within the whole of the situation**. The sources use a musical image for this: a single note acquires its function through tension, contrast, repetition, and resolution within the whole. The same holds for moral reasons.

This also means that composition by no means always results in a middle solution. Sometimes the overall situation may yield a clear prohibition. Sometimes an action may be permitted, but only admissible under strict conditions. Sometimes a duty to minimise harm arises. And sometimes a particularly weighty counter-reason may justify a burdensome action.

Composed fittingness is therefore neither soft nor compromise-seeking. On the contrary, it is **strict**, because no relevant consideration may simply be removed from the picture.

## An animal transport as a simple example

An animal transport illustrates this structure vividly.

The animals may experience fear, cramped conditions, heat, exhaustion, and stress. Each of these considerations speaks against the practice. That the transport is economically efficient, legally permitted, or culturally established does not render these burdens irrelevant.

But it does not yet follow from this that every transport under all conditions is forbidden.

Further determinations become relevant for the concrete judgement: How long does the transport last? Under what climatic conditions does it take place? How densely are the animals packed? Is there provision of water? What purpose does the transport serve? Are there realistic alternatives? How severe is the burden? What controls are in place? Is the practice regularly repeatable, or is it an exceptional case?

The source explicitly formulates several possible outcomes from this: a prohibition may be appropriate, but so may a duty of mitigation or a structure of conditions. What is decisive is: **the relevance of the suffering stands at the beginning; its decisiveness arises only within the particular constellation.**

This is exactly where the difference between moral orientation and a mechanism of principles lies.

## Why simple slogans become too coarse

The logic of composition also explains why certain familiar sentences, while morally understandable, are philosophically too coarse.

"Animals may never be used" treats use, care, cooperation, keeping, therapeutic intervention, and killing as though they all possessed the same moral structure.

"Human beings may use animals as long as they benefit from it" makes the opposite error, allowing the intrinsic significance of animal experience to disappear behind human purposes.

"All suffering counts equally" confuses equal consideration with identical decisiveness and ignores intensity, duration, context, and avoidability.

"Human beings always count for more" settles the outcome before the particular constellation has even been examined.

The source formulates exactly this critique: animal ethics begins precisely where such simple sentences no longer suffice.

This does not mean that general principles are worthless. They mark lines in the terrain. "Suffering counts morally," "cruelty is wrong," or "subjects of a life may not be arbitrarily instrumentalised" are strong orientations. But they operate on a more general level. The concrete question is always: **this animal, this suffering, this practice, this purpose, this alternative, this institutional situation**.

## Determinable and determinate: two levels of moral validity

Here a second distinction is helpful, one that goes back to the conceptual surroundings of C. D. Broad: **determinable and determinate**.

A sentence such as "animal suffering is morally relevant" is relatively general. It provides a direction but does not yet determine each individual situation. It operates on the *determinable* level.

The concrete judgement –

**"This animal transport, under these conditions, is not morally defensible"**

– lies, by contrast, on the *determinate* level.

The difference does not concern the strength of the validity. A determinate judgement is not merely more subjective or weaker because it is situation-bound. It merely claims a different kind of objectivity: it is meant to **fit precisely this particular constellation**.

This gives rise to a twofold methodological warning.

The first error is the **subsumption trap**: a general rule is treated as though it already contained the concrete judgement. "Suffering is bad" is then immediately turned into "this action is forbidden."

The opposite error consists in immediately generalising a concrete judgement once more. If this particular animal transport is wrong, it does not automatically follow that every form of animal transport under every condition must be wrong.

Topological orientation keeps both levels apart while relating them to one another. General sentences prevent arbitrariness; concrete judgements prevent general concepts from swallowing up the case.

## Objectivity without a demand for universality

With this, composed fittingness reaches perhaps its most important point regarding validity.

One might object: if no general principle compels the judgement, and different considerations are weighted differently depending on the situation, is not everything ultimately subjective?

The answer from the topological perspective is: no.

A judgement can be objective