How do you argue against animal cruelty if animals aren't moral agents?

How do you argue against animal cruelty if animals are not moral agents? Some argue that you can't be immoral to animals since they are not moral agents with a moral thinking. Animals don't understand what morality is. If they are not moral agents, how do you argue against animal cruelty then?

The object of one's actions need not be a moral agent for the actions to have moral implications.

Moral arguments may very well center on the effects on the actor or on other people.

I think when arguing against animal cruelty you have to provide an answer specific to the moral framework of the party advocating that animal cruelty isn’t bad. Though I believe whether or not they are moral agents is inconsequential as they are still sentient beings.

The statement that animal cruelty isn’t bad as animals aren’t moral agents is intrinsically flawed though as a moral agent isn’t what you should be moral too but rather moral agents should act morally. Meaning, I should not cause harm to an animal as I am a moral agent. The animals being moral agents or not is inconsequential for I am a moral agent.

Though you could make a case against that pretty basic definition so: First, as animals are sentient beings capable of feeling pain and most people can agree that causing unnecessary pain is immoral. Therefore it’s immoral. Second, if minimizing harm is brought into discussion it applies to the world not just that person, with most definitions and philosophical views, so you shouldn’t cause harm. And if a hypothetical proponent of animal cruelty were to say “I only want to minimize harm for humans and I couldn’t care for animals” then they still should care about animal cruelty as animals are crucial to the world and human survival. Saying animal cruelty isn’t wrong only creates the idea that animals are a disposable source leading to and catalyzing environmental problems and problems with the world ecosystem already seen in the status quo.

Please ask questions if there are any. Hope this helped!

There are 2 main ways people tend to justify moral obligations towards animals, given that they are not moral agents.

Moral Patients This is the more popular position in my experience. Basically, proponents argue that animals can be moral patients, that is the subject of moral actions, without being moral agents, that is the performer of moral actions. Under this understanding the sentence, 'I was kind to that dog' makes sense in a way that the sentence, 'I was kind to that rock' does not. This raises the question of what difference between animals and rocks makes the former moral patients. I personally like the answer Jeremy Bentham gives:

the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? [weird capitalization from original, page 236]

There are many variation of this arguments where 'capable of feeling pain' is replaced with sentience, self-interests, understanding of personal history, self-awareness, etc.

Indirect Obligations This position is most famously developed by Immanuel Kant, but it isn't very popular outside dedicated philosophers because it is fairly technical. To massively oversimplify, Kant argued that morality referred to obligations self-aware beings had toward other self-aware beings. Although modern zoologists would say many animals do possess self-awareness as Kant considers the term, in his time the consensuses was that animals were not self aware and the rest of this argument continues from this understanding. So if animals are not self-aware and moral obligations can only be toward self-aware being, can humans have obligations to animals?

Kant says we cannot have direct obligations toward animals, but we can have indirect obligations toward them. For example, image Alice adopts a dog from a animal rescue center and tell worker Bob, "I will take good care of this dog." Alice has a direct obligation to fulfill her promise to Bob, and this manifests and a indirect obligation to care for the dog well. This raises the question of what would happen if Alice acquired the dog without having any direct obligations to other people (e.g. she never made that promise, local laws do not forbid animal cruelty). From my understanding, Kant would say that Alice still has a direct obligation toward herself to develop good character traits, and this would manifest as a indirect obligation to treat her dog with kindness.

For more information, check out the SEP's and IEP's articles on the topic.

Infants are not (yet) moral agents. So, if it’s ok to be cruel to animals, it’s ok to be cruel to infants?

Therefore, either you are satisfied that it is moral to be cruel to infants - in which case, it’s your position that needs arguing for - or there’s something wrong with you premise that only cruelty towards moral agents is immoral. I think that we can adopt the second option and reject the idea that only moral agents can be the object of moral action by other morel agents.

But that leaves us with the question of what objects can be the target of moral action?

I submit that the criteria is that the object needs to have value, to itself or to some other creature, such that causing (unnecessary?) harm to it is a moral wrong. This position protects both animals and infants, but it also protects plants, fungi, ecosystems, and inorganic objects if they are of value to someone or something - that’s why it’s morally wrong to throw a rock through my car window.

According to Peter Singer, even if animals are not moral agents because they lack reason, they possess a degree of consciousness, and it based on their self-awareness and their awareness and experience of pain that is unethical to be cruel to animals. Then, we can consider animal cruelty an act on a spectrum. It is not cruel to kill corn, because corn is not conscious, does not possess a nervous system, etc. It's a little cruel to kill a mouse vigorously, even if it is carrying the plague, but preventing pandemics is important. To torture chimpanzees for fun is just wanton cruelty and a person should be penalized. This basis, of using what we value in ourselves, might make Singer's line of attack stronger since it appeals to our intuitions rather than to more logical pleadings.

That being said, an argument can be made that animals are moral agents. From the SEP article Moral Status of Animals (SEP):

The view that only humans should be morally considered is sometimes referred to as “speciesism”. In the 1970s, Richard Ryder coined this term while campaigning in Oxford to denote a ubiquitous type of human centered prejudice, which he thought was similar to racism. He objected to favoring one’s own species, while exploiting or harming members of other species. Peter Singer popularized the term and focused on the way speciesism, without moral justification, favors the interests of humans

Also see Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life (GB) for more details.

Simply, morality is not concerned with the object of the actions as much as it is concerned with the one performing the actions. "Should" is not a statement of an ideal state of things (morally speaking), but an impetus toward how an actor should act. It is not immoral for an animal to receive abuse, which is the only sense in which it matters whether or not they are moral agents. What matters is the person performing the abuse, and whether or not that actor (person) should do so.

There are many different types of moral frameworks and justifications for those systems and each provides its own insight on why animal abuse is bad. Some might involve things like Utilitarian concepts such as "it makes the world less happy", or theological systems such as "animals, like all things are ultimately property of a divine arbiter who cares for them", or perhaps systems that consider the psychological impact of the act upon the actor. What they all have in common is that they are primarily concerned with altering the choices of the actor rather than specifically addressing the ideal state of how a thing should exist.

How do you argue against animal cruelty if animals aren't moral agents?

Cruelty to another is not based on the moral agency of the victim. It is based on the victims capacity for suffering and the morals of the one being cruel. You can't be cruel to a rock because a rock can't suffer. Lawns aren't being tortured every time grass is mown because grass does not feel pain (based on current science).

Using the "moral agency" argument leads to a slippery slope. If being cruel to animals is OK since they are not "moral agents", then cruelty to a human who isn't a "moral agent" becomes acceptable.

This is the argument used to justify torture. Our enemies are not moral agents so it's OK to torture.

An 'agent' is defined by the capacity to choose between actions, and a 'moral agent' is one who chooses actions within a system of ethical or moral codes. Moral agency is located entirely within the subject considering an action; the people, animals, beings, or things which are ultimately targeted or affected by the agent's actions are mere objects, incidental to the morality or agency of the acts.

In the context of this question we consider persons to be a moral agents, in the sense that they are capable of choosing between actions and live within some system of ethical or moral codes. If a person takes or is given control over another being (be it human or animal) and chooses to engage in actions that are considered cruel by the standards of the surrounding moral system, the moral responsibility of that act lies entirely with the person making the action. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about:

There are variations in the codification of morals that need to be considered, obviously. Pastoral communities generally attach no moral wrong to killing animals: animals are frequently killed for food, or because they are incapable of performing the functions that pastoralists require of them. And many societies — from ancient Rome to the antebellum US South to certain fundamentalist sects of Islam — attached no moral wrong to killing people over matters of personal or familial honor. The modern, Western, Liberal moral code often conflicts with these older moral codes (as we saw with when Kristi Noem made the tone-deaf move of talking about killing an 'untrainable' dog), but even pastoral and honor-oriented societies distinguish between practical/necessary violence and needless harm, with the latter being considered thoroughly immoral. The intention of the subject making the act is the entire basis of moral evaluation (within a given moral system); the status or nature of the object of the act is not considered.

A righteous man is kind to his animals (Proverbs 12:10).

It does not matter that the animal cannot sin, nor do right or wrong. What matter is that YOU have that choice.

As men, all humans have Dominion over Creation, which includes the whole of the earth and the earth's biosphere. With Dominion comes stewardship. A good steward of livestock and animals will treat them in such a way that does not cause deliberate, unnecessary pain. He won't starve them or stab them, or leave them to die, and so on and so forth.

Animals don't need all the kindness that a man receives- you can, for instance, hit them in certain situations and they can be exploited for food, entertainment, and especially medical research -but they are nonetheless not objects. I'll repeat this: an animal is property, but not an object. It is expendable relative to a man, who is not expendable, but it is not an object to be abused and cast out. It entails responsibility.

Something doesn't have to be itself capable of morality, to be subject to effects of decisions that are determined by morality.

Most writing on this can be found in Resource request for philosophical arguments regarding the ethics of killing animals

Apart from that, I see alternatives such as:

Short answer: Causing pain to animals causes distress to other animals as they recognise a situation they don't want to be in, ultimately resulting in reduced yield, making the local community less competitive than other communities that don't engage in arbitrary pain causing. We see this phenomenon in failure to thrive of humans in violent/antisocial communities.

Universal conditional morality answer:

Humans feel like it's bad (because over years of trial and error some behaviours have resulted in preferential survival conditions via "social evolution"), so you shouldn't do it if you want to continue to interact with other humans.

You can add more words if you want, but there's really no more meaningful content than that.

Our understanding of morality is restricted by our ability to represent knowledge, which is motivated by our local reference frame.

Natural/universal/objective morality questions are ultimately about pure symbolic dynamics, where emotion is nothing more than a motivating and confounding force for local human action that limits our capacity for knowledge representation. Knowledge representation questions are far better answered with modern mathematics/computation than pure philosophy.