Monday, August 11, 2008
Arguments against animal rights
I think that these goals are reasonable ethical presumptions, but for three reasons remain unconvinced that animals have “rights.” First, Regan concludes that only individuals (subjects of a life) can have rights, because he assumes only individuals have real inherent value. His “postulate” that only individual, moral agents have inherent value, which he claims is a reasonable “theoretical assumption,”[1] leads him to extend this value only to individual, moral patients and then to individual animals, which are like moral patients.[2]
Regan does allow that ecosystems, such as forests, “might have inherent value,” but he argues that the value of an ecosystem “is incommensurate with any one individual’s pleasures, preference-satisfactions, and the like, or with the sum of such goods for any number of individuals.”[3] This is not a minor point for Regan, as he condemns assertions of the intrinsic worth of ecosystems and species as “environmental fascism.”[4]
There is evidence, however, for giving moral consideration to species and for an understanding of human rights that transcends individuals. The US Endangered Species Act of 1973 ascribes value to threatened and endangered species, and does not subordinate this good to that of every individual organism.[5] Moreover, international human rights law, which asserts human rights as the necessary social conditions for human dignity, includes group rights and people’s rights, as well as individual rights. Despite the history in Western philosophy and law of emphasizing individual rights, the practice of law supports a more inclusive understanding.
Second, Regan argues that the inherent rights possessed by human and nonhuman “subjects of a life” are equal, making human culture of no importance for moral consideration. Yet, human culture is the source of rationality and ethics, and this is why we can have a discussion about animal rights![6] As explained in chapter 4, we may reasonably conclude that all life has intrinsic value for itself, because it has a good of its own, but that human life also has intrinsic value in itself, because it is the basis for moral culture. On earth, humans are uniquely capable of ethics, and this is not simply an individual characteristic. It is a social reality.
Third, Regan and other advocates of animal rights (and animal liberation) raise the objection of “speciesism” to the drawing of any line between humans, as a species, and other animals. “To avoid the prejudice of speciesism,” Regan says, “we must ‘allow that beings which are similar (to humans) in all relevant respects have a similar right to life’.”[7] What distinguishes this issue from the rejection of human culture, as a reason for drawing a line between humans and nonhuman animals, is the analogy to racism and the use of the scientific term “species.”
Regan’s assertion that race and species are analogous is misleading. Mary Midgley argues that: “Race in humans is not a significant grouping at all, but species in animals certainly is. It is never true that, in order to know how to treat a human being, you must first find out what race he belongs to. (Cases where this might seem to matter always really turn on culture.) But with an animal, to know the species is absolutely essential.”[8] A moral distinction based on race is wrong, but this does not mean that a moral distinction based on significant differences between species must be wrong.
A species “consists of all the animals of the same type, who are able to breed and produce young of the same kind.”[9] Humans are a species, but animals are a kingdom that is divided into two groups, vertebrates and invertebrates, each of which has various classes, and within each class are species. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are classes of vertebrates, and humans are a species within the class of mammals. All talk of “animal rights” is not only scientifically vague but also anthropocentric, as proclaiming such rights relies on an argument about the human-like characteristics of nonhuman animals.
Two other facts support a critical view of “speciesism.” Midgley notes that humans have a “natural preference” for living with other humans in societies, and that this “is not, like race-prejudice, a product of culture.”[10] She is well aware that a “species-bond” can “produce terrible misery,” but argues that these preferences “are also an absolutely central element in human happiness, and it seems unlikely that we could live at all without them. They are the root from which charity grows.”[11]
Furthermore, human societies have domesticated many other species. “It is one of the special powers and graces of our species,” Midgley observes, “to draw in, domesticate and live with a great variety of other creatures. No other animal does so on anything like so large a scale.”[12] The relationships in human societies between humans and domesticated animals have often been cruel, and in many ways continue to be so, but clearly this is not the whole story.
I think Regan argues that individual animal rights are equal to individual human rights, because be believes this is the only argument that will free animals from the tyranny and the suffering that humans continue to inflict on sentient animals. Regan may be right that an argument for animal interests will not bring about their liberation, but his argument for animal rights is not convincing. There are good reasons for ascribing moral consideration to many species, and for limiting rights to humans, as we are the only species on earth able to protect other species and the natural habitat we share with them.
Rolston suggests: “Humans do possess rights (that is, they can press claims on other humans about right behavior), and this use of ‘rights’ may be contagious enough to work rhetorically with higher animals, whose claims can be pressed by sympathetic humans. But environmental ethics uses ‘rights’ chiefly as a term of convenience; the real convictions here are about what is ‘right’.”[13]
That is why laws protecting an endangered species do not grant a right to life for every member of a species, but instead define the government’s duty to protect the species. This inevitably involves protecting particular organisms, but the focus is preserving habitats.
Whether or not we ascribe rights to animals in captivity, we have a duty to consider that it may be wrong to confine the members of some species. More than one zoo has ended its exhibit of elephants, when officials concluded that the elephants were being psychologically damaged by their confinement.[14] After studying dolphins for twelve years in a research facility, John C. Lilly, a neurophysiologist, released them, because he had become convinced that dolphins are too intelligent and sensitive to be kept in captivity.[15]
The US Animal Welfare Act enacted in 1966 has been amended to cover animals in research institutions, but at present excludes “virtually all birds, rats, and mice bred for research” although these species “account for approximately 85% of all animals used in laboratories.”[16] This exclusion should be ended. It is encouraging that in 2007 the US National Institutes of Health, which uses animals in biomedical studies, succumbed to moral pressure and agreed to stop breeding chimpanzees for research.[17]
[1] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 239-240.
[2] Carl Cohen argues that Regan’s argument confuses two different meanings of inherent value. “The argument for animal rights that is grounded on their ‘inherent value’ is utterly fallacious, an egregious example of the fallacy of equivocation―that informal fallacy in which two or more meanings of the same word of phrase are confused in the several propositions of an argument.” Regan commits this fallacy by simply stating that the inherent value of humans and the inherent value of animals are the same and thus must be protected by equal rights. Carl Cohen, The Animal Rights Debate, 54.
[3] Ibid., 362.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Although urging moral consideration for “trees” (note the plural) and animals, Christopher D. Stone is “skeptical” about ascribing rights to them and suggests, instead, that our “whole moral framework” needs to change. Christopher D. Stone, Earth and Other Ethics, 107-109.
[6] “[I]t is not just because we are subjects-of-a-life that we are both able and morally compelled to recognize one another as beings with equal basic moral rights. It is also because we are able to ‘listen to reason’ in order to settle our conflicts and cooperate in shared projects. This capacity, unlike the others, may require something like a human language.” Mary Anne Warren, “A Critique of Regan’s Animal Rights Theory,” in Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman, eds., Environmental Ethics, 94.
[7] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 219. He is quoting Peter Singer, who also writes: “There is no ethical basis for elevating membership of one particular species into a morally crucial characteristic.” Peter Singer, “Ethics and the New Animal Liberation Movement,” in Peter Singer, ed., In Defense of Animals, 6.
[8] Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 98, from a chapter entitled “The Significance of Species.”
[9] There are only about 4-5,000 species of mammals, but probably 1 million species of insects and 50-80,000 species of mollusks (including shrimp and oysters). “Classifying Animals,” online at http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0776195.html.
[10] Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 104.
[11] Ibid., 103.
[12] Ibid., 111.
[13] “The issues soon revert to what they always were, issues of right behavior by moral agents; an environmental ethicist, [for concerns] outside of culture, is better advised to dispense with the noun, rights, since this concept is not something that attaches to animals in the world, and to use only the adjective, right, which applies when moral agents encounter nature and find something there judged to be good (appropriate, valuable) before human moral agents appear.” Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 51.
[14] Michael Ellis, “Detroit Zoo to Free Elephants on Ethical Grounds,” Planet Ark (May 21, 2004) online at http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25192/story.htm. See “Animal Protection Groups Praise City and Residents of SF for Support of Elephants as Zoo Announces Transfer of Pachyderms to California Sanctuary,” IDA New Release (Jun. 10, 2004), online at http://www.idausa.org/news/currentnews/sf_zoo_victory.html.
[15] John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (New York: Bantam, 1972) and Lilly on Dolphins: Humans of the Sea (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1975).
[16] The Act also requires institutions doing research to “ensure that any pain and distress caused by experiments be minimized, and that investigators consider any alternatives that are available to them (including non-animal alternatives). Standards regarding amount of space, feeding, bedding, exercise, and transportation are written according to species.” “The Animal Welfare Act,” The Humane Society of the United States, online at http://www.hsus.org/animals_in_research/general_information_on_animal_research/laws_protecting_animals_in_research/the_animal_welfare_act.html.
[17] Will Dunham, “US Stops Breeding Chimps for Research,” Reuters (May 24, 2007), online at http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2438996920070524.
Regan does allow that ecosystems, such as forests, “might have inherent value,” but he argues that the value of an ecosystem “is incommensurate with any one individual’s pleasures, preference-satisfactions, and the like, or with the sum of such goods for any number of individuals.”[3] This is not a minor point for Regan, as he condemns assertions of the intrinsic worth of ecosystems and species as “environmental fascism.”[4]
There is evidence, however, for giving moral consideration to species and for an understanding of human rights that transcends individuals. The US Endangered Species Act of 1973 ascribes value to threatened and endangered species, and does not subordinate this good to that of every individual organism.[5] Moreover, international human rights law, which asserts human rights as the necessary social conditions for human dignity, includes group rights and people’s rights, as well as individual rights. Despite the history in Western philosophy and law of emphasizing individual rights, the practice of law supports a more inclusive understanding.
Second, Regan argues that the inherent rights possessed by human and nonhuman “subjects of a life” are equal, making human culture of no importance for moral consideration. Yet, human culture is the source of rationality and ethics, and this is why we can have a discussion about animal rights![6] As explained in chapter 4, we may reasonably conclude that all life has intrinsic value for itself, because it has a good of its own, but that human life also has intrinsic value in itself, because it is the basis for moral culture. On earth, humans are uniquely capable of ethics, and this is not simply an individual characteristic. It is a social reality.
Third, Regan and other advocates of animal rights (and animal liberation) raise the objection of “speciesism” to the drawing of any line between humans, as a species, and other animals. “To avoid the prejudice of speciesism,” Regan says, “we must ‘allow that beings which are similar (to humans) in all relevant respects have a similar right to life’.”[7] What distinguishes this issue from the rejection of human culture, as a reason for drawing a line between humans and nonhuman animals, is the analogy to racism and the use of the scientific term “species.”
Regan’s assertion that race and species are analogous is misleading. Mary Midgley argues that: “Race in humans is not a significant grouping at all, but species in animals certainly is. It is never true that, in order to know how to treat a human being, you must first find out what race he belongs to. (Cases where this might seem to matter always really turn on culture.) But with an animal, to know the species is absolutely essential.”[8] A moral distinction based on race is wrong, but this does not mean that a moral distinction based on significant differences between species must be wrong.
A species “consists of all the animals of the same type, who are able to breed and produce young of the same kind.”[9] Humans are a species, but animals are a kingdom that is divided into two groups, vertebrates and invertebrates, each of which has various classes, and within each class are species. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are classes of vertebrates, and humans are a species within the class of mammals. All talk of “animal rights” is not only scientifically vague but also anthropocentric, as proclaiming such rights relies on an argument about the human-like characteristics of nonhuman animals.
Two other facts support a critical view of “speciesism.” Midgley notes that humans have a “natural preference” for living with other humans in societies, and that this “is not, like race-prejudice, a product of culture.”[10] She is well aware that a “species-bond” can “produce terrible misery,” but argues that these preferences “are also an absolutely central element in human happiness, and it seems unlikely that we could live at all without them. They are the root from which charity grows.”[11]
Furthermore, human societies have domesticated many other species. “It is one of the special powers and graces of our species,” Midgley observes, “to draw in, domesticate and live with a great variety of other creatures. No other animal does so on anything like so large a scale.”[12] The relationships in human societies between humans and domesticated animals have often been cruel, and in many ways continue to be so, but clearly this is not the whole story.
I think Regan argues that individual animal rights are equal to individual human rights, because be believes this is the only argument that will free animals from the tyranny and the suffering that humans continue to inflict on sentient animals. Regan may be right that an argument for animal interests will not bring about their liberation, but his argument for animal rights is not convincing. There are good reasons for ascribing moral consideration to many species, and for limiting rights to humans, as we are the only species on earth able to protect other species and the natural habitat we share with them.
Rolston suggests: “Humans do possess rights (that is, they can press claims on other humans about right behavior), and this use of ‘rights’ may be contagious enough to work rhetorically with higher animals, whose claims can be pressed by sympathetic humans. But environmental ethics uses ‘rights’ chiefly as a term of convenience; the real convictions here are about what is ‘right’.”[13]
That is why laws protecting an endangered species do not grant a right to life for every member of a species, but instead define the government’s duty to protect the species. This inevitably involves protecting particular organisms, but the focus is preserving habitats.
Whether or not we ascribe rights to animals in captivity, we have a duty to consider that it may be wrong to confine the members of some species. More than one zoo has ended its exhibit of elephants, when officials concluded that the elephants were being psychologically damaged by their confinement.[14] After studying dolphins for twelve years in a research facility, John C. Lilly, a neurophysiologist, released them, because he had become convinced that dolphins are too intelligent and sensitive to be kept in captivity.[15]
The US Animal Welfare Act enacted in 1966 has been amended to cover animals in research institutions, but at present excludes “virtually all birds, rats, and mice bred for research” although these species “account for approximately 85% of all animals used in laboratories.”[16] This exclusion should be ended. It is encouraging that in 2007 the US National Institutes of Health, which uses animals in biomedical studies, succumbed to moral pressure and agreed to stop breeding chimpanzees for research.[17]
[1] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 239-240.
[2] Carl Cohen argues that Regan’s argument confuses two different meanings of inherent value. “The argument for animal rights that is grounded on their ‘inherent value’ is utterly fallacious, an egregious example of the fallacy of equivocation―that informal fallacy in which two or more meanings of the same word of phrase are confused in the several propositions of an argument.” Regan commits this fallacy by simply stating that the inherent value of humans and the inherent value of animals are the same and thus must be protected by equal rights. Carl Cohen, The Animal Rights Debate, 54.
[3] Ibid., 362.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Although urging moral consideration for “trees” (note the plural) and animals, Christopher D. Stone is “skeptical” about ascribing rights to them and suggests, instead, that our “whole moral framework” needs to change. Christopher D. Stone, Earth and Other Ethics, 107-109.
[6] “[I]t is not just because we are subjects-of-a-life that we are both able and morally compelled to recognize one another as beings with equal basic moral rights. It is also because we are able to ‘listen to reason’ in order to settle our conflicts and cooperate in shared projects. This capacity, unlike the others, may require something like a human language.” Mary Anne Warren, “A Critique of Regan’s Animal Rights Theory,” in Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman, eds., Environmental Ethics, 94.
[7] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 219. He is quoting Peter Singer, who also writes: “There is no ethical basis for elevating membership of one particular species into a morally crucial characteristic.” Peter Singer, “Ethics and the New Animal Liberation Movement,” in Peter Singer, ed., In Defense of Animals, 6.
[8] Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 98, from a chapter entitled “The Significance of Species.”
[9] There are only about 4-5,000 species of mammals, but probably 1 million species of insects and 50-80,000 species of mollusks (including shrimp and oysters). “Classifying Animals,” online at http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0776195.html.
[10] Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 104.
[11] Ibid., 103.
[12] Ibid., 111.
[13] “The issues soon revert to what they always were, issues of right behavior by moral agents; an environmental ethicist, [for concerns] outside of culture, is better advised to dispense with the noun, rights, since this concept is not something that attaches to animals in the world, and to use only the adjective, right, which applies when moral agents encounter nature and find something there judged to be good (appropriate, valuable) before human moral agents appear.” Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics, 51.
[14] Michael Ellis, “Detroit Zoo to Free Elephants on Ethical Grounds,” Planet Ark (May 21, 2004) online at http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25192/story.htm. See “Animal Protection Groups Praise City and Residents of SF for Support of Elephants as Zoo Announces Transfer of Pachyderms to California Sanctuary,” IDA New Release (Jun. 10, 2004), online at http://www.idausa.org/news/currentnews/sf_zoo_victory.html.
[15] John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (New York: Bantam, 1972) and Lilly on Dolphins: Humans of the Sea (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1975).
[16] The Act also requires institutions doing research to “ensure that any pain and distress caused by experiments be minimized, and that investigators consider any alternatives that are available to them (including non-animal alternatives). Standards regarding amount of space, feeding, bedding, exercise, and transportation are written according to species.” “The Animal Welfare Act,” The Humane Society of the United States, online at http://www.hsus.org/animals_in_research/general_information_on_animal_research/laws_protecting_animals_in_research/the_animal_welfare_act.html.
[17] Will Dunham, “US Stops Breeding Chimps for Research,” Reuters (May 24, 2007), online at http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2438996920070524.
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