This article discusses whether non-human animals have rights, and what is meant by animal rights.
This article discusses whether non-human animals have rights, and what is meant by animal rights.
There is much disagreement as to whether non-human animals have rights, and what is meant by animal rights.
There is much less disagreement about the consequences of accepting that animals have rights.
Animal rights teach us that certain things are wrong as a matter of principle, that there are some things that it is morally wrong to do to animals.
Human beings must not do those things, no matter what the cost to humanity of not doing them.
Human beings must not do those things, even if they do them in a humane way.
For example: if animals have a right not to be bred and killed for food then animals must not be bred and killed for food.
It makes no difference if the animals are given 5-star treatment throughout their lives and then killed humanely without any fear or pain - it's just plain wrong in principle, and nothing can make it right.
Accepting the doctrine of animal rights means:
Philosophers have usually avoided arguing that all non-human animals have rights because:
The second problem is dealt with by not arguing that all animals have rights, but only that 'higher' animals have rights.
One leading author restricts right to mentally normal mammals at least one year old (called 'adult mammals' from now on).
The case for animal rights is usually derived from the case for human rights.
The argument (grossly oversimplified) goes like this:
Human beings and adult mammals have rights because they are both 'subjects-of-a-life'.
This means that:
If a being is the subject-of-a-life then it can be said to have 'inherent value'.
All beings with inherent value are equally valuable and entitled to the same rights.
Their inherent value doesn't depend on how useful they are to the world, and it doesn't diminish if they are a burden to others.
Thus adult mammals have rights in just the same way, for the same reasons, and to the same extent that human beings have rights.
A number of arguments are put forward against the idea that animals have rights.
St Thomas Aquinas taught that animals acted purely on instinct while human beings engaged in rational thought.
This distinction provided the frontier between human beings and animals, and was regarded as a suitable criterion for assessing a being's moral status.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes, and many others, taught that animals were no more than complicated biological robots.
This meant that animals were not the sort of thing that was entitled to have any rights - or indeed any moral consideration at all.
This view comes originally from the Bible, but probably reflects a basic human attitude towards other species.
Christian theologians developed this idea - St Augustine taught that "by a most just ordinance of the Creator, both their [animals'] life and their death are subject to our use."
St Thomas Aquinas taught that the universe was constructed as a hierarchy in which beings at a lower level were there to serve those above them.
As human beings were above animals in this hierarchy they were entitled to use animals in any way they wanted.
However, as C.S. Lewis pointed out:
We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men.
C.S. Lewis, Vivisection
Christian theologians used to teach that only beings with souls deserved ethical consideration.
Animals did not have souls and therefore did not have any moral rights.
This argument is no longer regarded as useful, because the idea of the soul is very controversial and unclear, even among religious people. Furthermore it is not possible to establish the existence of the soul (human or animal) in a valid experimental way.
This also makes it difficult to argue, as some theologians have done, that animals should have rights because they do have souls.
Some of the arguments against animal rights centre on whether animals behave morally.
Some argue that since animals don't behave in a moral way they don't deserve moral treatment from other beings.
Animals, it's argued, usually behave selfishly, and look after their own interests, while human beings will often help other people, even if doing so is to their own disadvantage.
Not all scientists agree: Jane Goodall, an expert on chimpanzees has reported that they sometimes show truly altruistic behaviour.
Another reason for thinking that animals don't behave morally is that even the most enthusiastic supporters of animal rights only argue that animals have rights against human beings, not against other animals.
For example, as Mary Warnock put it:
May they [animals] be hunted? To this the answer is no, not by humans; but presumably their rights are not infringed if they are hunted by animals other than human beings.
And here the real difficulties start. If all animals had a right to freedom to live their lives without molestation, then someone would have to protect them from one another. But this is absurd...
M Warnock, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics, 1998
Why this might be relevant to the question of whether animals should have rights becomes clearer if you rephrase it in terms of duties or obligations instead of rights and ask - why should human beings have obligations towards animals, if animals don't have obligations to other animals or to human beings?
This argument states that animals are not members of the 'moral community'.
Animal and human rights boil down to one fundamental right: the right to be treated with respect as an individual with inherent value.
Philosophers have a traditional way of expressing this:
Animals with rights must be treated as ends in themselves; they should not be treated by others as means to achieve their ends.
From this fundamental right come other rights.
Particular species only get relevant and useful rights - so animals don't get all the rights that human beings get. For example: animals don't want or get the right to vote.
Sometimes a particular situation results in a conflict of rights.
Two methods can be used to determine the best course of action when there is no alternative to violating the rights of some individual or group:
Harm is defined as the reduction of the capacity to have and fulfil desires.
This definition of harm benefits people over animals because human beings have far more desires that they want to satisfy than do non-human animals.
This resolves many of the traditional problems of humans versus animals in favour of humanity, because the human being under consideration would suffer far more harm than the non-human animal.
But be careful: this method of choosing alternative courses of action is not utilitarian, it doesn't necessarily lead to choosing the course of action that produces the greatest overall happiness.
The phrase 'marginal people' or 'marginal human beings' is unpleasant. We use it here only because if you read the literature of animal rights you will encounter it often, and it's important to know what it means. We do not intend to denigrate the status or worth of any human being by using it here...
The problem with the line of thought in the section above that it takes rights away from many human beings as well as from non-human animals.
This is because some human beings (babies, senile people, people with some severe mental defects and people in a coma) don't have the capacity for free moral judgement either, and by this argument they wouldn't have any rights.
Some philosophers are prepared to argue that in fact such 'marginal human beings' don't have rights, but most people find that conclusion repellent.
The argument can be rescued by rewriting it like this:
But this is not an argument; it's a statement that human beings have rights and non-human animals don't, which is pure speciesism, and hardly persuasive.
It's also vulnerable to the (probably unlikely) arrival of a species of extra-terrestrial creatures who demonstrate the capacity for free moral judgement.
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