Is There Room for Animal Rights?

We have seen that the most sensible and influential doctrine of human rights rests on the fact that human beings are indeed members of a discernibly different species, in which the members have a moral life to aspire to and must have principles upheld for them in communities that make their aspiration possible. Now, there is plainly no valid intellectual place for rights in the nonhuman world, the world in which moral responsibility is for all practical purposes absent. A few would want to argue that some measure of morality can be found within the world of at least higher animals, such as dogs. For example, Rollin holds that “[i]n actual fact, some animals even seem to exhibit behavior that bespeaks something like moral agency or moral agreement.” His argument for this is rather anecdotal, but it is worth considering:

Canids, including the domesticated dog, do not attack another when the vanquished bares its teetht, showing a sign of submission. Animals typically do not prey upon members of their own species. Elephants and porpoises will and do feed injured members of their species. Porpoises will help humans, even at risk to themselves. Some animals will adopt orphaned young of other species. (Such cross-species ‘morality’ would certainly not be explainable by simple appeal to mechanical evolution, since there is no advantage whatever to one's own species.) Dogs will act ‘guilty’ when they break a rule such as one against stealing food from a table and will, for the most part, learn not to take it.

Animal rights advocates such as Rollin maintain that it is impossible to clearly distinguish between human and nonhuman animals, including on the grounds of the former's characteristic as a moral agent. Yet what they do to defend this point is to invoke borderline cases, imaginary hypotheses, and anecdotes.

In contrast, in his book The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, Mortimer Adler undertakes the painstaking task of showing that even with the full acknowledgment of the merits of Darwinian and, especially, post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, there is ample reason to uphold the doctrine of species distinction -- a distinction, incidentally, that is actually presupposed within Darwin's own work.  Adler shows that although the theistic doctrine of radical species differences is incompatible with current evolutionary theory, the more naturalistic view that species are superficially (but not negligibly) different is indeed necessary to the theory. The fact of occasional borderline cases is simply irrelevant -- what is crucial is the generalization that human beings are basically different from other animals, by virtue of “a crucial threshold in a continuum of degrees.”  As Adler explains:

[D]istinct species are genetically isolated populations between which interbreeding is impossible, arising (except in the case of polyploidy) from varieties between which interbreeding was not impossible, but between which it was prevented. Modern theorists, with more assurance than Darwin could manage, treat distinct species as natural kinds, not as man-made class distinctions.

Adler adds: “Without the critical insight provided by the distinction between superficial and radical differences in kind, biologists [as well as animal rights advocates, one should add] might be tempted to follow Darwin in thinking that all differences in kind must be apparent, not real.”

Since Locke's admittedly incomplete -- sometimes even confusing -- theory had gained respect and, especially, practical import (for example, in British and American political history), it became clear enough that the only justification for the exercise of state power -- namely, law enforcement -- is that the rights of individuals are being or have been violated. But as with all successful doctrines, Locke's idea became corrupted by innumerable efforts to concoct rights that governments must protect, rights that were actually disguised special-interest objectives -- values that some people, perhaps quite earnestly, wanted very badly to have secured.

While it is no doubt true that many animal rights advocates sincerely believe that they have found a justification for the actual existence of animal rights, it is equally likely that if the Lockean doctrine of rights had not become so influential, they would now be putting their point in another way that might secure for them what they, as a special-interest group, want: the protection of animals they have such love and sympathy for.