Why Do Humans Have Individual Rights?
Where do individual human rights come into this picture? The rights being talked of in connection with human beings have as their source, as noted earlier, the human capacity to make moral choices. We have the rights to life, liberty, and property -- as well as more specialized rights connected with politics, the press, religion, and so forth -- because we have as our central task in life to act morally. And in order to be able to do this throughout the scope of our lives, we require a reasonably clear sphere of personal jurisdiction -- a dominion where we are sovereign and can either succeed or fail in living well, doing right, acting properly.
Sign up for the OV Daily Newsletter
OV Social
Animals are much like modernist works of art- we should not attempt to justify them- their content is unknown- only their form is apparent to us. They have a right by default to exist outside of our influence and unaltered by us. Their existence and the right to that independent existence is present on its own terms and exists only for its own sake- outside of any human considerations of morality or lawfulness or religion . It is not necessary to prove that animals are like us, or that they have morality to justify their right to be in and for themselves and not in our interest or for us.
Furthermore, their very beingness and its nature is not understandable. Animals are self-sufficient and self-referntial- like modernist art works, except when we attempt to place them in the context of our value systems. It is then that they cease to have meaning.
But what is moral is relative- even among humans. Could animals also be moral agents with different morals to us, but with individual rights within their own juridiciton domain? Animals clearly have laws among themselves. Lions are upset and attack other male lions who enter their territory. Beavers do not react well to other beavers taking over their home etc..If we violate the individual rights of animals, why shouldn't animals eat us and therefore violate our moral right not to kill? Whye do we put down dogs who kill our children ? Shouldn't dogs then have the right to kill humans who put down their pups or violate some other dog right? Why should we assume that we are entitled to a dominion where we are soverign when it comes to making moral choices? How do we know for sure animals do not also make moral choices within the parameters of their own morality? Why is our morality more important and dominant?
Humans have individual rights only because our society has evolved to think of the individual as having rights. Nature itself certainly didn't give them to us. We have rights because we respect the value of the individual. Beyond that is nature and nature operates on rights given to the strongest. Human society was created for humans to live in a way to maximize our combined strengths so that we could share in the benefits that come from that, not the least of which is a greater ability to live a life with the maximum sense of peace possible to pursue what we, as individuals, want.
Having said this, I do not believe that just because we are at the top of the food chain that we have the right to do as we please with the other creatures of the world. We need to respect life in general as a resource just like any other resource on this planet. Animals, perhaps due to their status in the pecking order of intelligence, are owed more respect than say others of lesser intelligence. However, this in no way means that animals should have the same rights as people. Humans created their society of respect for the individual human, and, as the top of the food chain humans have a stewardship responsibility to those below us on the food chain, but that is all. It is not the same as the rights afforded our individuals.
As a society to extend animals the same rights as the individual is to go against nature's pecking order in a major way that would ultimately destroy us as a species because in the end our existence itself could only impinge on the extended rights of animals and that is tandemount to saying humans should sacrifice ourselves so that animals can live unimpeded by us.