Animal Rights

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Animal Rights
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Direct vs. Indirect duties towards animals

• Direct duties duties owed to the animals
  themselves (treating animals welfare as an
  intrinsic good)
• Indirect duties duties to act in certain ways
  towards animals for the sake of ourselves, others
  or society (treating animal welfare as an
  instrumental good)

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• Examples of indirect duties towards animals
• Duty to respect private property (animals that
  belong to someone)
• Duty to avoid cruelty because it encourages a
  cruel nature in us, which might then be expressed
  towards other people
• Duty not to hurt the feelings of people who love
  animals by abusing animals
• Duty to maintain the health of biosystems and
  nature in general, for our own good
• Duty to preserve beautiful creatures, for the
  enjoyment of others and future generations
• Duty to preserve species that may be sources of
  other instrumental goods, e.g. medicine

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Ethical status for animals

• Animal welfare as an intrinsic good
• Kantian and utilitarian ethics traditionally
  extended to all
• people, but only people
• Kant all rational beings are ends in themselves
• assumption only humans are rational (or maybe
  humans, angels and extraterrestrials)
• Utilitarianism the pleasures and pains of all
  conscious beings are of equal importance
• assumption (?) only humans are conscious/have
  pleasure and pain
• But note Jeremy Bentham, early utilitarian
  (pre-Mill)
• The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can
  they talk?
• but, Can they suffer? (Bentham 1789)

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Peter Singer

• Contemporary Australian philosopher
• Professor of bioethics at Princeton
• Preference utilitarian
• Famous advocate of animal rights
• Animal Liberation (1975)
• All Animals are Equal (1989) (and humans are
  animals)

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Animal Liberation

• Singer sees ethics as evolving.
• In the past, slaves, women and people of other
  races were often not treated as persons, and
  their interests were not given consideration.
• Now we recognize all people as persons and extend
  equal consideration to all people.
• Now we should extend equal ethical consideration
  to animals as well.

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Speciesism

• Discrimination against animals is speciesism,
  analogous to racism
• To discriminate on the basis of species
  membership, or even on the basis of intelligence
  or rationality, is like discriminating on the
  basis of skin color
• What matters is sentience. Any animal that is
  sentient (can feel pleasure or pain) counts as a
  moral subject.
• All pleasure or pain, or preferences, should
  count equally, whether they are the pleasures of
  preferences of humans or animals

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The argument from borderline cases

• Borderline cases babies, the severely mentally
• retarded, psychopaths
• Argument from analogy borderline cases are
  similar to (some) animals (in terms of abilities,
  sentience, capacity for pleasure and pain), so
  animals should be treated similarly
• We routinely grant importance to the interests to
  human borderline cases not full rights (e.g.
  the right to vote), but the right to have their
  preferences treated as morally important and the
  right not to be mistreated
• Animals are not equal to normal adults, and
  therefore cannot have truly equal rights, but
  their preferences (e.g. the desire to avoid pain)
  should be given equal consideration

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Equal consideration, not equal rights

• We dont discriminate between people on the basis
  of intelligence or ability. So we should not
  discriminate against animals because they are
  less intelligent or lack certain abilities.
• We treat babies and the severely brain damaged
  better than we treat animals, but we shouldnt.
  Animals have just as much right to consideration
  as babies (or more!) E.g. an adult ape is more
  aware, more self-directing and has at least as
  much capacity for suffering as a baby.

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Implications

• Pro vegetarian taking away a life for a
  insignificant benefit (satisfying a persons
  tastes) is unjustified. Although, Singer allows
  that it is possible to raise animals ethically
  for food, if they are raised to have a pleasant
  and enjoyable life. An animal without a life plan
  does not suffer from death, and a happy animal
  can be replaced by another happy animal without
  net loss to the world.
• Anti-vivisection the utilitarian arguments we
  raise to justify using animals this way would not
  be accepted as justification for human
  vivisection, and therefore are not accepted for
  the case of animals either (except in extreme
  cases).

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Implications (cont.)

• Individual animals have moral standing, not
  species or biosystems.
• Thus, killing two common deer would be a greater
  sin than
• killing one endangered tiger.
• An animals rights are potentially as important
  as a humans.
• Where to draw the line? At sentience. Where is
  the borderline of sentience? Singers guess
  between the clam and the shrimp.

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Tom Regan

• Contemporary American Philosopher
• Deontologist, in the tradition of Kant
• Specialist in animal rights
• The Case for Animal Rights (1983)
• Animal Rights, Human Wrongs (1980)

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Animal Rights

• Utilitarians are wrong to focus only on pleasure
  and pain.
• What is important is respecting the dignity of
  others, and to treat those with moral standing as
  ends in themselves, not means (c.f. Kant).
• What is wrong with eating veal, for example, is
  not that the animal suffers, rather

the fundamental wrong is the system that allows
us to view animals as our resources, here for us,
to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or put in
our cross hairs for sport or money.
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Moral Standing

• Distinguishes moral agents from moral
  patients
• Moral agents typified by competent human adults
• Moral patients include everything that has
  interests, e.g. babies, the mentally incompetent
  and animals.
• Both moral agents and moral patients have moral
  standing, i.e. are ends of themselves and are
  subject to rights
• What has interests?
• Subjects-of-a-life.

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Subjects-of-a-life

• To be the subject-of-a-life involves more than
  merely being alive and more than merely being
  conscious. To be the subject-of-a-life is to
  have beliefs and desires perception, memory, and
  a sense of the future, including their own
  future an emotional life together with feelings
  of pleasure and pain preference and
  welfare-interests a psychophysical identity
  over time and an individual welfare in the sense
  that their experiential life fares well or ill
  for them, independent of their utility for
  others.
• Not all animals, but only animals that meet these
  criteria.

Typically mentally normal mammals of a year or
more, although potentially other animals with
the relevant cognitive capacity.
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Implications

• The following violate animals rights
• Raising animals for food or fur
• Hunting for sport or money
• Keeping pets
• Keeping animals in circuses or zoos
• Vivisection
• Like Singer, holds that only individuals have
  moral standing, not species or biosystems.
• More inclusive than Singer as to what causes harm
  to animals e.g. pets, raising well-cared-for
  animals for food, keeping happy animals in a zoo,
  etc.
• Not as inclusive as Singer as to which animals
  matter mostly only mammals of over a year old
  compared to everything that is at least as
  sentient as a shrimp

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Against rights for animal

• Carl Cohen
• Contemporary American philosopher
• Theoretical rights are reciprocal, among moral
  agents or members of a community of moral agents
• Practical
• Medical research
• Animals in the wild

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Medical research

• Animal used for vaccines, treatments, of human
  diseases, e.g. polio, malaria
• But this research would not be allowed if animals
  had rights
• Rights entail duties
• Rights trump interests absolutely

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Rights trump duties

• Regan agrees
• The harms others might face as a result of the
  dissolution of some practice or institution is
  no defense of allowing it to continue. . . . No
  one has a right to be protected against being
  harmed if the protection in question involves
  violating the rights of others. . . . No one has
  a right to be protected by the continuation of an
  unjust practice, one that violates the rights of
  others. . . . Justice must be done, though the .
  . . heavens fall. (Regan, The Case for Animal
  Rights, 1983)
• On the rights view, we cannot justify harming a
  single rat merely by aggregating the many human
  and humane benefits that flow from doing it. . .
  . Not even a single rat is to be treated as if
  that animal's value were reducible to
  his possible utility relative to the interests of
  others. (Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 1983)

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Animals in the wild

• If animals have rights, we have the duty to
  protect those rights, even in the wild.
• But this is impossible. And undesirable.
• Should we protect prey from predators? Should we
  inoculate wild animals from disease? Should we
  shoot some members of overpopulated herds (e.g.
  deer) to prevent mass starvation? How can we
  judge between competing interests/rights? Would
  we want to?

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Other objections to Singer and Regan

• Cohens objection is that rights for animal is
  too inclusive only humans should count.
• Other argue that Singer and Regan are not
  inclusive enough should include all animals,
  maybe even plants (Goodpaster anything alive
  should have moral standing)
• Ironically animal rights is criticized as being
  essentially anthropocentric still maintains
  that only persons count, but some animals count
  as persons
• What about species, biosystems, larger ecological
  systems?

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Readings

• Thomas Nagel (1974), What is it like to be a
  bat?, The Philosophical Review, LXXXIII, 4
  (October 1974), 435-50 at http//organizations.ut
  ep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf