Raymond Frey

Frey authored Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (1980), Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (1998, with Gerald Dworkin and Sissela Bok), and The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (2011, with Tom Beauchamp, eds.).

Frey wrote from a preference utilitarian perspective, as does Singer. Preference utilitarianism defines an act as good insofar as it fulfills the preferences (interests) of the greatest number. In his early work, Interests and Rights (1980), Frey disagreed with Singer – who in his Animal Liberation (1975) wrote that the interests of nonhuman animals must be included when judging the consequences of an act – on the grounds that animals have no interests. Frey argued that interests are dependent on desire, and that one cannot have a desire without a corresponding belief. He argued further that animals have no beliefs because they are unable to comprehend the concept of a belief (that is, they are unable to hold a second-order belief: a belief about a belief), which he argues requires language: "If someone were to say, e.g. 'The cat believes that the door is locked,' then that person is holding, as I see it, that the cat holds the declarative sentence 'The door is locked' to be true; and I can see no reason whatever for crediting the cat or any other creature which lacks language, including human infants, with entertaining declarative sentences." He concludes that animals have no interests.

Frey obtained his B.A. in philosophy in 1966 from The College of William and Mary, his M.A. in 1968 from the University of Virginia, and his D.Phil. in 1974 from the University of Oxford – where his supervisor was R. M. Hare – for a thesis on "Rules and Consequences as Grounds for Moral Judgment".

Raymond G. Frey (/fraɪ/; 1941–2012) was a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, specializing in moral, political and legal philosophy, and author or editor of a number of books. He was a noted critic of animal rights.