Resolution Theory and Animal Ethics Subjecthood, Sponsorship, and Shared Dependence

This paper argues that animal ethics is often misframed by beginning with the wrong question. Instead of asking whether animals possess the traits associated with full human moral agency, it asks what conditions must obtain before moral concern becomes intelligible at all. Drawing on Resolution Theory, the paper distinguishes moral subjecthood from full moral agency and argues that many animals are plausibly continuing subjects for whom conditions can genuinely go better or worse from within, even where they do not bear the full reciprocal burden of human moral responsibility. It then separates subjecthood, practical agency, and full moral agency, allowing that many animals exhibit meaningful practical agency without thereby becoming full moral agents. On that basis, the paper argues that responsibility is often asymmetrically concentrated at the human end of the relationship where humans create, organise, or sustain conditions of animal dependence. Companion animals emerge as the clearest case of “sponsored subjecthood,” while domestic farm animals and wild animals raise related but structurally distinct ethical demands. The result is a strict stewardship view: uncertainty about consciousness is not a licence for indifference, animal use is not automatically prohibited in principle, but morally cheap use becomes increasingly difficult to defend.