Animal Rights

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ANIMAL RIGHTS

The debate over animal rights revolves around a simple question: Do any nonhuman animals have rights? Like many simple questions, this one quickly becomes complex. What are rights? Do human beings have them? If so, what rights do people have, and why do people have them?

These questions have divided theoreticians over the past three centuries and more. Some of these thinkers (for example, the philosophers John Locke and Immanuel Kant) maintain that humans have rights. Others (for example, the philosophers David Hume and Jeremy Bentham) maintain that humans do not. The debate has been as intense as it has been protracted. Not surprisingly, adding animals to the mix only complicates matters.

The Terms of the Debate

Some things are clear. The debate concerns the moral rights of animals, not their legal rights. To ask what legal rights animals have is a straightforward empirical question that can be answered by using standard empirical methods (for example, consulting state and federal legislative databases). In 2002 the German Parliament voted to include respect for animal rights in the Constitution; that same year, the United States Congress passed legislation that explicitly excludes rodents and birds from the protection provided by the animal welfare act.

To ask what moral rights animals have, by contrast, is to ask a normative question that no amount of empirical inquiry can answer. Only normative reasoning can answer normative questions. The answers with the best arguments on their side are the ones that should be accepted; they are the ones that tell people how they should live. Understandably, who has the best arguments is the question that fuels the debate.

Fundamental Rights

The fundamental right in dispute is the right to be treated with respect. To have this right is to occupy a singularly important position, one that limits what other people are morally free to do. Those who have this right (to borrow Kant's terminology) are never to be treated merely as means to other persons' ends.

What Kant's injunction means in practice is that harm done to those who possess this right cannot be justified merely by showing that as a result of that harm someone else is better off. In other words, the obligation to respect the rights of the individual are morally more important than any obligation to benefit others, even society as a whole.

Philosophers have defended a variety of criteria that explain why people have rights, both the right to be treated with respect and other, derivative rights, including the rights to life and bodily integrity. The standard view (the one favored by the majority of thinkers) limits rights to moral agents.

Moral Rights and Moral Agents

Moral agents are rational; they have the capacity to bring reason to bear on their moral decision making. Moral agents also are autonomous; they are free to choose between right and wrong. This is why moral agents are morally responsible for their acts.

According to the standard view, then, there is an elegant symmetry between being morally responsible on the one hand and having moral rights on the other hand. Only those who are morally responsible (that is, only moral agents) have moral rights. Once proponents of the standard view add that, at least among terrestrial beings, only human beings are moral agents, their conclusion follows: Only humans have rights.

There are problems with the standard view, however. At least as far back as the philosopher Porphyry (233–306 c.e.) critics have pointed out that many human beings (all young children and the seriously mentally disadvantaged of any age, for example) are not moral agents. Thus, given the standard view, these humans lack moral rights.

This is no small deficiency. Bereft of rights, these human beings do not occupy the same moral position occupied by moral agents. Since they are bereft of rights, there is nothing about the moral status of these human beings that prevents anyone from taking their lives or injuring their bodies in pursuit of benefits for others, whether the beneficiaries are the few or the many.

It is hard to imagine how any friend of humanity could accept this repugnant conclusion. Certainly serious proponents of children's rights or the rights of the mentally disadvantaged cannot accept it. Their challenge is to find an acceptable alternative to the standard view.

An Alternative View

A plausible alternative begins with a characterization of moral patients. Moral patients are individuals who, though they lack the capacities necessary for moral agency, can be the object of direct moral wrongdoing. Young children who are physically abused by their parents are an example. They cannot do anything wrong, but grievous wrong can be done to them.

Some critics of the standard view use this judgment as a basis for revising that view. Only humans have rights, but human moral agents are not the only humans who have rights; human moral patients have rights too.

The revised standard view, then, is no less humanistic than the standard view (rights are restricted to humans only), but unlike the standard view, it avoids the repugnant conclusion. People are not free to take the life or injure the body of a young child, for example, just to secure benefits for themselves or others.

There is a problem with the revised standard view, however. Few even modestly informed people believe that all nonhuman animals are, as the philosopher René Descartes argued, mindless machines. On the contrary, most people agree with naturalist Charles Darwin: Not only do some nonhuman animals have a mental life, the mental life of some of them (nonhuman mammals, for example) is significantly more developed than what is found in many human beings.

Advocates of the revised standard view therefore face a serious dilemma. If they maintain that human moral patients have rights, it is difficult to see how they can consistently avoid accepting the same conclusion for nonhuman mammals. However, if these advocates insist that those animals lack rights, it is difficult to see how they can consistently maintain that human moral patients have them. Logically, it seems, advocates of the revised standard view cannot have it both ways.

Whether or not advocates can escape this dilemma, the challenge they face captures part, although not the whole, of the spirit of the animal rights debate. It is not difficult to propose a criterion for possessing rights that nonhuman animals cannot satisfy. The standard view does that. What is far more difficult (some would say impossible) is to find a criterion that all human moral patients satisfy but that every nonhuman animal fails.

Unless such a criterion is devised, the possibility that at least some nonhuman animals have rights cannot be summarily dismissed. Instead, the arguments for and against animal rights must be carefully examined with a view to discovering which among them are the best. That discovery would indicate which answers people should accept and how people should live.

The Significance of the Answers

Unlike many questions in philosophy, whose answers have no direct bearing on the "real world," the questions posed in the animal rights debate are fraught with practical significance. The answers people give have implications for what people should eat, wear, and do for entertainment; what careers people should pursue and what values they should teach their children; and what population policies they should favor and what development programs they should support. All this and much more, all of it touching on some of the most important areas of human life, is affected by how people answer that "simple" question: Do any nonhuman animals have rights? Paradoxically, few questions are more directly relevant to how people should live.

See also: Environmental Ethics.