Thinking about nonhuman animal rights according to Kant

An approach to Christine Korsgaard’s proposal

Abstract

The question of how we consider and treat non-human animals has been approached by a lot of authors in different historical moments, however, in the project of the illustration existed certain concordance between thinkers from different traditions as Bentham and Kant, who argued that unnecessary cruelty to animals is unjustified; the first held that the day that they recognize rights to animals and spoke of the existence of direct obligations come. Kant considered that we can only maintain indirect obligations kind to animals, as claimed direct obligations to keep such animals, they should be able to understand the content of the obligation. It has been considered that the philosophy of Kant is not a good starting point for basing theoretically the rights of animals, we will revisit several postulates of Kant through some texts of Christine Korsgaard, studious of Kantian thought, the hand that we can rescue important ethical and legal aspects of the work of Kant, as Korsgaard argues that from the postulates of the German philosopher can speak perfectly obligations direct type and therefore ownership of moral rights that give way to legal rights for animals, we analyze the cases in which Korsgaard criticizes the basis of the property status of the other animals and proposes that these be considered as ends in themselves.