Morality and Rights

As with most issues on the minds of many intelligent people, as well as innumerable crackpots, a discussion of whether there are animal rights and how we ought to treat animals cannot be concluded with dogmatic certainty one way or the other. Even though many of those who defend animal rights seem certain almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, all I claim to be is certain beyond a reasonable doubt. Animals are not beings with basic rights to life, liberty, and property, whereas human beings, in the main, are just such beings. Yet we know that animals can feel pain and can enjoy themselves, and this must give us pause when we consider using them for vital human purposes. We ought to be humane; when we kill them, rear them, train them, hunt them, or otherwise use them, we should do so with care about them as sentient beings.

Is it is wrong to use animals for non-vital purposes? Quite likely, ethically, but that is not the same as holding that animals have rights. Should there be laws against certain kinds of cruelty to animals?  This is not something I am willing to address fully here.  It is not an issue I have fully thought through.  Suffice it to say that, for my part, it would be morally unexceptionable for someone to rescue an animal that’s being treated with cruelty, even if this were to amount to invading someone’s private property. If one were to spot a neighbor torturing his cat, albeit on his own private property, one could well be morally remiss in failing to invade the place and rescue the animal. A court, however, would probably correctly consider this illegal trespassing but might, nonetheless, pardon the transgressor as a matter of judicial discretion.

Exactly where this leaves us with the matter of whether laws should exist to ban cruelty to animals I am not sure – I’d have to address that elsewhere, more carefully, after a good deal more thought. 

In a review of Tom Regan's provocative book mentioned above, The Case for Animal Rights, John Hospers makes the following observations that I believe put the matter into the best light we can shed on this topic:

As one reads page after page of Regan's book, one has the growing impression that his thesis is in an important way “going against nature.” It is a fact of nature that living things have to live on other living things in order to stay alive themselves. It is a fact of nature that carnivores must consume, not plants (which they can't digest), but other sentient beings capable of intense pain and suffering, and that they can survive in no other way. It is a fact of nature that animal reproduction is such that far more creatures are born or hatched than can possibly survive. It is a fact of nature that most creatures die slow lingering tortuous deaths, and that few animals in the wild ever reach old age. It is a fact of nature that we cannot take one step in the woods without killing thousands of tiny organisms whose lives we thereby extinguish. This has been the order of nature for millions of years before man came on the scene, and has indeed been the means by which any animal species has survived to the present day; to fight it is like trying to fight an atomic bomb with a dartgun. . . . This is the world as it is, nature in the raw, unlike the animals in Disney cartoons.

Of course, one might then ask, why should human beings make any attempt to behave differently among themselves, to bother with morality at all?

The fact is that with the emergence of the human species, a new problem arose in nature -- basic choices that other animals do not have to confront had to be confronted. The question “How should I live?” faces each human being. And that is what makes it unavoidable for human beings to dwell on moral issues and to see other human beings as having the same problem to solve, the same question to dwell on. For this reason we are very different from other animals -- we do terrible, horrible, awful things to each other and to nature, but we can also do much, much better and achieve incredible feats nothing else in nature can come close to.

Indeed, then, the moral life is the exclusive province of human beings, so far as we can tell for now. Other -- lower(!) -- animals simply cannot be accorded the kind of treatment that such a moral life demands, namely, respect for and protection of basic rights to life, liberty, and property.

This argument may not have  convinced everyone that animals don’t have rights. For some people the only thing about this subject they are sure of is that it hurts them to think of animals feeling pain or fear or grief.  And it appears to them that without ascribing rights to animals, the treatment of animals that induces pain, fear or grief cannot be adequately discouraged.Assuming that we are, indeed, more important than other animals because we have moral tasks they don’t have, that might be a reason why we have rights that supersede theirs. Yet, couldn’t the logic of the argument for human rights be used to show that animals (and even plants) have rights as long as their rights don’t interfere with those of beings that are more important? For example, they might have some rights to property because, as human  rights theory proposes, “to flourish as the beings they are,” they need part of Earth to be preserved as their natural habitat. And of course, they would also need to be alive and free to flourish.

The sentiments expressed here are powerful and have certainly engendered a widespread movement in favor of ascribing rights to animals.  If there were no other way to address this attitude toward the treatment of animals, one might have to conclude that the normative conceptual framework of basic rights to life, liberty and property would have to include animal rights. The notion that no ethical concerns arise vis-à-vis animals is just too obviously off base to be convincing. While our intuitions may not suffice to make adequate sense of the moral landscape involved here, they do suffice for us to be attentive to an area of our lives wherein they are so powerful. To claim, for example, that it is neither here nor there whether one tortures an animal, abuses it or even lets it starve under normal circumstances, would seem to contradict too much of our lives to let it go. Our children are brought up to heed the welfare of their pets, of domesticated animals, of livestock and of wild animals. Wanton killing of birds or field mice are naturally deemed morally objectionable.  So clearly there is need for a moral analysis of this realm of human conduct.

    Yet it is confusing, as I have argued above, to introduce the idea of rights, since what distinguishes them in moral discourse is that they are the framework for the treatment of beings with a moral nature, beings who can make moral choices, which is not the case with animals.  Humane treatment, compassion, lack of cruelty, and similar moral concepts will have to be developed for our adequate understanding of how animals ought to be treated by human beings.  The concept of rights simply cannot be made use of smoothly enough, without watering it down as a clear concept within politics and law, when enlisted to handle this area of our moral concerns.