The place of animals in Kantian ethics

Kantian ethics has struggled terribly with the challenge of incorporating non-human animals as beings to which we can owe obligations. Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures is a bold, substantial attempt to meet that challenge. It is a significant book. In this essay, I won’t attempt a chapter-by-chapter summary. I will set the scene for the book’s core argument (which comes rather late, in Chapter 8), offer a reconstruction of that argument, and reflect on its strengths and limitations. I’ll also briefly compare the view at which Korsgaard arrives to that of Tom Regan in The Case for Animal Rights (1983).