• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.37
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• pp.229-262
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• 2021

The debate on the treatment of animals has accelerated as a social issue in the West since the 1970s. In 1975, Peter Singers argued in his book, Animal Liberation, that speciesism should be banned. This led to an explosion in research on animal welfare in the philosophical and social sciences. Following Singer, Tom Regan suggested considering the animal rights as being on the same level as human rights. Their arguments were that animals should be imbued with some intrinsic weight sufficient enough to remind humans of their social responsibility to animals at least to a certain degree. In this regard, social responsibility for animal welfare as well as animal rights has formed an axis that organizes human morality in modern society. Such arguments regarding animal welfare can be perceived as an active and creative effort which accords with the free will of human beings who in Daesoon Thought are understood as facing the era of human nobility. This argumentation also aligns with the doctrine of grievance-resolution for mutual beneficence as a practical creed due to the way in which modern bioethics implies that animal welfare could become a practical communal morality integrated into legal systems prior to adoption as a system of individual morality. From within this context, this study discusses the nature and limits of modern animal welfare and animal rights from the perspective of the grievance-resolution which Kang Jeungsan promised to animals.