Sinnott-Armstrong, WalterBischof, Angela2022-06-152022https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25206<p>Since Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation, sentience has been the dominant justification for increasing non-human animal (hereafter ‘animal’) welfare. This dissertation is an attempt to discover a different reason to treat animals better: their moral agency. If animals are moral agents, then they deserve additional moral rights, rights that arise independently from their sentience.</p><p>To find out whether animals are moral agents, I focus on whether animals are ever morally responsible for their actions. More specifically, I examine whether animals punish each other. I focus on a special type of punishment: third-party retributive punishment. This is punishment issued by an unaffected bystander for a moral wrongdoing.</p><p>Humans do not treat animals as moral agents, but this does not mean that animals are never morally responsible. I evaluate animal behavior from the contexts of their own communities. Rather than focus on the ways in which humans treat animals, I focus on the ways in which animals treat one another. </p><p>This dissertation is highly interdisciplinary, utilizing principles of philosophy alongside empirical evidence from psychology, evolutionary anthropology, animal behavior, and ecology. Both the theoretical and empirical evidence support my main conclusion: animals are moral agents. </p>PhilosophyEthicsEnvironmental philosophymoral agentsmoral responsibilitynon-human animalsPunishmentDissertation