According to this view, otherwise similar harms or benefits for people and animals count equally from the moral point of view. “Pain is pain,” as the point is sometimes put (Singer, Animal Liberation, p. 20; DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously, p. 234). In this sense, animals and people can be said to have the same moral status. To be sure, there are important differences between people and other animals, including differences in terms of which goods and which bads are likely to be at stake in any given case. These, in turn, can make it morally appropriate to treat people and animals differently. But that’s not because animals somehow count less than people do, from the moral point of view. On the contrary, similar goods (or similar bads) are to be treated the same, regardless of whose interests are at stake. That is to say, in and of itself it matters not at all whether we are talking about the interests of a person or the interests of an animal. Similar interests are to be given equal weight in our moral deliberation, regardless of whether we are dealing with a person or an animal. Strictly speaking, everyone has the same moral status. For obvious reasons, it would be natural to call this position egalitarianism. It assigns the same weight to the interests of animals and of people. It gives the same moral status to both, considering neither group higher or lower than the other.
In contrast to the unitarian approach to animal ethics, it seems to me that common sense embraces, rather, a hierarchical approach, where animals count, but count in a lesser way. On this alternative view, people have a higher moral status than animals do. There are still restrictions on how we are to treat animals, but these are not the very same restrictions that govern our treatment of people. People have rights that animals lack, or have stronger rights, or perhaps a person’s interests count for more than (or count in different ways from) an animal’s. Animals lack moral standing altogether—could still be described as hierarchical, since people clearly have a higher status on this account than animals do. But similarly, there is a sense in which such a view could instead be called unitarian, since it holds that there is indeed only a single moral status (that had by people). But as I intend to use the terms, at any rate, neither label applies to those who simply deny the moral standing of animals.
