Patienthood

Although I will be defending a hierarchical approach to animal ethics, I do so with considerable misgivings, for I am afraid that some may come away thinking that my aim is to defend an approach that would justify much or all of our current treatment of animals. […] [N]othing like this is remotely the case. Our treatment of animals is a moral horror of unspeakable proportions, staggering the imagination. Absolutely nothing that I say here is intended to offer any sort of justification for the myriad appalling and utterly unacceptable ways in which we mistreat, abuse, and torture animals. […] [I]t seems to me to be true both that animals count for less than people and yet, for all that, that they still count sufficiently that there is simply no justification whatsoever for anything close to current practices.

Shelly Kagan, How to count animals, more or less, Oxford, 2019, pp. 4–5

It is […] essential to see the public not merely as ’the patient’ whose well-being commands attention, but also as ’the agent’ whose actions can transform society.

Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and public action, Oxford [England] : New York, 1989, p. 279