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Animal Rights
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)
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
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)
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)
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.
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
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
Equal consideration, not equal rights
We don’t 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 shouldn’t. Animals
have just as much right to consideration as babies (or
more!) E.g. an adult ape is more aware, more selfdirecting and has at least as much capacity for
suffering as a baby.
Implications
Pro vegetarian: taking away a life for a insignificant benefit
(satisfying a person’s 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).
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 animal’s rights are potentially as important as a human’s.
Where to draw the line? At sentience. Where is the borderline
of sentience? Singer’s guess: between the clam and the
shrimp.
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)
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.”
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.
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 welfareinterests; 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.
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
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
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
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)
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?
Other objections to Singer and Regan
Cohen’s 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?
Readings
Thomas Nagel (1974), “What is it like to be a bat?”, The
Philosophical Review, LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974), 43550 at:
http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_b
at.pdf