Why is human life valued more than animal life in the absence of religion? Are arguments based on our being intelligent or sentient valid, after all we make the rules. If you could ask an elephant it might offer other criteria to value species by.

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Some people value their pets more than other people, but one reason for holding that morality protects human beings more than other animals is that morality only governs the behavior of human beings, that is, in order to persuade all human beings to follow the moral rules prohibiting killing, causing pain, etc., all human beings must know that they have the protection of the moral rules. Neither elephants nor any other non-human animals that we know about have any criteria for valuing species. And morality is not related to species either; if there were another species that was required to abide by the moral rules, the members of that species would also be protected by the moral rules.

According to some ethical theories that make happiness the central touchstone of morality, for instance utilitarianism, human happiness should not count more strongly than happiness in the non-human animal world. One quantum (as it were) of human happiness should contribute as much to the grand calculus of pleasure as does one quantum of rat happiness. Now, it may be that humans are capable of more happiness than rats; or perhaps, as John Stuart Mill argued in his Utilitarianism, they are capable of a kind of happiness that is of greater value than any happiness a rat could experience. But that's not to privilege humans; it's just to acknowledge a fact about their greater capacity for happiness.

You wonder whether this might be unfair, because you wonder whether, if an elephant had written Utilitarianism, the theory would have looked a bit different (say, assigning great value to distinctively elephantine pleasures). But this is an impossible road. We are human, we are who we are, and we have no choice but to think our thoughts and come to our conclusions. Of course, empathy with other creatures is an important part of our moral reflection. But still, it is we who must do the empathizing. At the end of the day, there is nothing for it but to come to our conclusions about what's right. There is such a thing as thinking "out of the box" -- but we can't get so far out of the box that we leave ourselves behind.

I appreciate that your question actually asks not about happiness but life. Now, if it's wrong to take a life because it deprives someone or some thing of future happiness, then perhaps the above remarks are still of relevance. But if taking a life is wrong for other reasons, for reasons unconnected to happiness, then the explanation about why human life is more valuable than non-human life (if indeed it is) will have to look quite different.

This question is extremely difficult to answer, because to answer itsatisfactorily, we must first settle the question of the nature ofmorality. Morality proposes certain norms for our behavior and perhapsalso for our emotional responses to certain events. But unless weknow what these norms are for,we can’t know whether or whywe should care about such norms. And unless we know what such norms arefor, we can’t know whether any proposed moral norm, such as “treatevery creature’s pleasure and pain as if it has equal importance,” iscorrect. If we thought, for example, that moral norms served thefunction of governing our behavior according to the will of God, thenwe would attempt to determine the correct moral norms by attempting toget information about the will of God. If, to consider anotherpossibility, we thought that moral norms served the function ofconstraining human behavior so as to allow for the sociallycooperative behavior that is essential to human flourishing, then wewould look to other sorts of facts to determine which moral norms werecorrect. On some conceptions of the point of morality, we should treat the interests ofnon-human animals as being as morally significant as theinterestsof human beings, but on other conceptions of the point of morality, we should not. To take our two hypothetical proposals, to answer thequestion whether we should treat the interests of elephants as equal tothe interests of humans, we'd first have to answer different sorts ofquestions. On the one proposal, we'd first have to determine how God wants us to treat the interestsof elephants. On the other proposal, we'd first have to determine whetherhuman beings would be better able toengage in mutually beneficial, socially cooperative behavior if they were todevelop a disposition to treat the interests of elephants asequal to those of human beings. The difficulty is that we tend not tothink of the point of moral norms in either of these two ways, or atleast, if we do, we tend not to do so consistently. Instead, we oftentend to think that the answer to questions like whether we should treatthe interests of elephants as equal to the interests of human beings isto be determined simply by discovering the answer to the questionwhether as a matter of factthe interests of elephants are as intrinsically important as theinterests of human beings. However, it is difficult to know how wewould go about answering this last question, and so, we remain puzzled.

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