Elevating Animals

Although the idea that animals have rights goes back at least to the eighteenth century, it has only recently become something of a cause célèbre among numerous serious and well-placed intellectuals, including moral and political philosophers. Jeremy Bentham, for example, seems to have suggested legislation requiring humane treatment of animals, but he did not defend animal rights per se -- not surprisingly, since Bentham was not impressed with the more basic (Lockean) doctrine of natural rights. John Locke's idea of natural rights has had enormous influence, however, and even where it is not respected, it is often invoked as some kind of model for what it would take for something to have rights.

In recent years the doctrine of animal rights has found champions in important circles where the general doctrine of rights is itself well respected. For example, Professor Tom Regan, in his important book The Case for Animal Rights,  finds the idea of natural rights intellectually congenial and extends this idea to cover higher animals. The political tradition that Regan works in appears to be Lockean, but he does not agree that human nature is distinctive enough, in relevant respects, to restrict the scope of natural rights to them alone.

Following a different tradition, namely, utilitarianism, the idea of animal liberation has emerged. This can lead to roughly the same conclusions as the natural-rights tradition, but the argument is different because for utilitarians, what is important is not that humans or other animals must have a specific sphere of dominion, but that they be well off in their lives. So long as the bulk of the relevant creatures enjoy a reasonably high living standard, the moral and political objectives for them will have been met. But if this goal is not reached, moral and political steps are required to improve on the situation. Animal liberation is such a step.

Before answering the question of whether animals have rights, I want to note that rights and liberty are certainly not the only things of moral concern to us. There are innumerable other moral issues one can raise, including about the way human beings relate to animals. In particular, there is the question of how people should treat animals. Should they be hunted even when this does not serve any vital human purpose? Should they be utilized in hurtful -- indeed, evidently agonizing -- fashion even for trivial human purposes? Should their pain and suffering be ignored in the process of being made use of for admittedly vital human purposes?

It is clear that once one has answered the question of whether animals have rights or ought to be liberated from human beings, one has by no means disposed of these other issues. I will be dealing mostly with the issues of animal rights and liberation, but I will also touch briefly on the other moral questions just raised. I will indicate why they may all be answered in the negative without it being the case that animals have rights or should be liberated -- that is, without raising any basic political issues. For example, one could address the issue, which is mainly one of ethics, as to whether animals ought to be hunted, used for sport, domesticated, etc. But these are beyond the scope of the present discussion, one that focuses primarily on matters of politics and law.

So, then, in this discussion I will argue that animals have no basic rights to life, liberty, or property. Now this is a task that needs to be approached obliquely since it is not possible to straightforwardly prove a negative proposition. That is one reason that in the criminal law it is the prosecution that must prove its case, with the defense merely needing to refute what the prosecution advances instead of having to make a case for a negative proposition, a denial.  (There are metaphysical considerations that underlie this matter but we will skip these for now.)

Let’s put it this way, then: the concept of “rights” is inapplicable to considerations of how animals ought to be treated.  I will argue that to think otherwise is a category mistake -- it is, to be blunt, to unjustifiably anthropomorphize animals, to treat them as if they are what they are not, namely, human beings. Rights and liberty are political concepts applicable to human beings because human beings are moral agents, in need of what philosopher Robert Nozick called “moral space,” that is, a definite sphere of moral jurisdiction where their authority to act is respected and protected so that it is they, not intruders, who govern themselves and either succeed or fail in their moral tasks. 

Defenders of animal rights make their case, first and foremost, by denying any fundamental difference between persons and other animals. They claim that no fundamental faculty distinguishes humans from other animals. If, however, this is wrong, if human beings are fundamentally distinguished from other animals by virtue, say, of possessing the capacity for moral agency, for initiating conduct that can be good or bad and for taking responsibility for that initiative, then we have here a sphere of uniqueness that can give rise to concepts that will not be applicable to other than human animals.

Oddly, it is clearly admitted by most animal rights or liberation theorists that only human beings are moral agents -- for example, they never urge animals to behave morally (by, for example, standing up for their rights by leading a political revolution). No animal rights theorist proposes that animals be tried for crimes and blamed for moral wrongs. If it is true that the moral nature of human beings gives rise to the conception of basic rights and liberties, then by virtue of this alone, animal rights and liberation theorists have made a fatal admission in their case.