Animal Rights: Rational Thought

Sam Black PHIL 120: Animal Rights

Framing Question: The Nazi ‘researchers’ are at it again. A badly brain damaged human being subject A -- an adult with the permanent mental capacity of a one year old -- appears on your computer screen. He is thrashing around, spilling things, smearing food over his face, playing with the contents of his diaper, etc. ‘We will make him very uncomfortable, cutting down his food, refrigerating his room, depriving him of sleep,’ the Nazi-researchers convincingly say, ‘unless you push the button that kills subject B.’

Q1: Will you push the button if: i. Subject B is 5 rabbits ii. Subject B is 2 dogs iii. Subject B is a trained chimpanzee with the language and cognitive skills of a human three year old (e.g. a cue card vocabulary of several thousand words).

Q2. If the capacity for “rational thought” is the basis for the right not to suffer, then does A have moral rights at all?

Q3. If the capacity for “rational thought” is not the basis for moral rights, but the capacity to feel pain is, then is favoring to A over B (in i, ii, and iii) like ‘racism’?

Q4. Could ‘membership in the same species’ be the basis for moral rights? Suppose the human species splits, and homo canuckus emerges. Most members of canuckus are dumb, but the occasional canuckus is an Einstein and has the mental capacities of a 5 year-old human being. Does the fact that A is a member of your species mean that you should favor A over an Einstein specimen of homo canuckus?

Q5: If individual animals have moral rights like all human beings, then is it permissible to eradicate 20 members of an invasive species (e.g. rats) when they overrun 2 members of an endangered species (e.g. rare birds)?

Q6: If animal species have moral value – that is not reducible to the rights of their individual members -- then is it morally permissible to: eradicate some sub-species (e.g. mosquitos that carry malaria); or to favor the preservation of charismatic species (e.g. lions over a rare variety of beetle)?

Tom Regan: ‘The case for Animal Rights’

Thesis/Conclusion: (SAR) the strong animal rights position. Def’n SAR: Animals have moral rights and those rights have equal weight to the moral rights of human beings.

This does not mean that animals have the exact same rights. Non-human animals don’t have a right to freedom of expression. But they do have rights not to be used as a mere means to the ends of others e.g. a right not to be killed for the sake of a good outcome (like feeding humans).

Regan -- Some Practical Implication of SAR: a. Total abolition of the use of animals in science b. Total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture c. Total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping of animals
Simply minimizing animal pain does not go far enough.
The correct response in (a)-(c) does not depend on whether ‘human being’ is substituted in place of ‘animals’.

The Argument for SAR: 1. Moral Rights. The best moral theory is ‘rights-based’. (It holds that people have rights that are basic or not derived from other sources like a social contract, or the principle of utility. Moral rights trump other objectives like happiness, the common good, etc.) 2. The Basis for Moral Rights. The property that grounds moral rights is a lowest-common denominator or LCD property: a property that is common to all members of the human species, like sentience. 3. Many non-human animals are sentient (have the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, other experiences). 4. It is wrong to make any distinctions between members of the class of being that possess the property that grounds rights. 5. Therefore, all sentient creatures have moral rights with ‘equal weight’ to human rights.

The Arg for (1): Moral Rights Regan provides a brief criticism of some rival moral theories, like contractarianism. Utilitarianism is criticized on the ground that it treats people like ‘receptacle for pleasure’. ‘Utilitarianism has no room for the equal moral rights of different individuals because it has no room for their equal inherent worth’. You don’t have worth, only your ‘feelings’ do.

Taken literally this is untrue since utilitarians hold that we ought to aim for producing the greatest good for the greatest number of humans (or sentient creatures). They count each person as an equal.

The Arg for (2): The Argument from Marginal Cases: If the basis for having rights is not a lowest common denominator property then some human beings (people lacking higher cognitive powers) lack moral rights (e.g. Subject A). It is counterintuitive that some humans lack rights. Therefore, the basis for moral rights is an LCD property, like sentience.

The Arg for (3): many non-human animals are sentient Some philosophers might argue that only humans experience pain. But that’s counterintuitive since pain and pleasure signals are nature’s way of giving animals the incentives they need to take necessary means to reproduction. It’s difficult to take seriously the suggestion that higher mammals do not feel pain.

In support of (4): ‘speciesm’ It is ‘blatant speciesm’ (Regan) to grant that some animals have the relevant property that grounds moral rights and fail to respect their rights.

What’s so bad about Specieism?: An Argument from Analogy The analogy for ‘speciesm’ are the kinds of racism that holds that Race A should have more Rights than Race B while failing to identify a morally relevant property in support of that difference.

II. Carl Cohen: species membership is a morally relevant property.

Thesis: humans have moral rights, and a weak principle of beneficence applies to other animal species that lack capabilities for practical reason. (Structurally Cohen’s position resembles views, like Arthurs’, which hold that there’s a difference between foreigners and compatriots: full rights under distributive justice for compatriots and a weak principle to help foreigners.)

It’s OK to use animals for scientific research b/c animals do not have moral rights and medical research provides clear benefits. But steps must be taken to minimize pain to animals.

The Argument: He agrees with Regan that morality is based on rights. He disagrees with Regan about the basis for moral rights: claiming that their ground is the possession of capabilities for practical reasoning. He claims that all members of a species (e.g. Homo Sapiens) have the same moral rights as any other member of that species. He therefore defends what he calls ‘speciesism’.

III Discussion

The issues can be boiled down as follows:

1) If the basis for moral rights is an inclusive property, then non-human animals possess moral rights. 2.a) If the basis for moral rights is an exclusive property (e.g. rational capacities) that distinguishes the human species then some human beings lack moral rights. 2.b) Unless it is also true that all members of the same species should be treated as if they possessed the capabilities of the elite or the average members of that species. This favoritism has to be justified.

Some Responses: 1. Concede that while not all human beings and all non-human animals lack moral rights, they should be protected because cruelty affects our psychology. Kant uses this same argument to claim that the cruel treatment of non-human animals is wrong.

2. Vindicate Specieism: Is favoritism and partiality always a bad thing? Parents and children do it. Citizens do it. If the aliens instruct us to harvest human beings, perhaps we’d be justified in favoring other humans.

3. Endorse Regan’s conclusion

IV Individual Animals vs Animal Species

Elliott Sober, “Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism” Sober’s argument: Def’n Environmentalism: the view that ecosystems should be preserved and that the grounds for their preservation are independent from whether each person wants them preserved, or would pay or vote for their preservation.

Thesis: 1. His negative thesis: various attempts to justify environmentalism fail and they fail because they adopt an individualistic conception of what is valuable. 2. His positive thesis: environmentalism can be justified if we adopt a ‘holistic’ conception of value. The relevant holistic conception is plausible provided it is adopted alongside an individualistic conception – with the result being a pluralistic conception of value.

Two Kinds of Value
According to individualistic conceptions of value: The value of an outcome or state of affairs is the sum of the individual values it contains. Values are individual if they comprise the welfare of individuals and no individual’s welfare is necessarily connected to the welfare of another individual.

Ex: for utilitarians, the value of all outcomes may comprise the sum total of the individual human pleasures it contains, or the sum total of the satisfied human desires it contains. While a parent’s welfare may in fact be connected to the welfare of their child and vice versa, that connection is not necessary. It is possible that parent and child may cease to derive pleasure from each other, and may come to detest one another.

According to Holistic Conceptions of Value: The value of an outcome or state of affairs comprises the satisfaction of some relation. A relation is a property that is necessarily shared by two or more members.

Ex: parent and child – outcomes are more valuable to the degree that the relation P (parents care for their children) obtains (Sober) Ex: works of art – outcomes are more valuable to the degree that relation A (rare and original paintings are preserved even if the works of more prolific artists perish) obtains. Ex: the environment – outcomes are more valuable to the degree that relation E (rare and original ecosystems are preserved even if common species and systems perish) obtains.

1. The Negative Argument – Why Individualistic Value Does not Support Environmentalism 1. A Animal Liberation does not Support Environmentalism i) The value of ecosystems can’t be derived from the value or welfare of its sentient members – since many features of ecosystems are not sentient (trees, marshes, etc) ii) Animal liberation does not explain the distinction b/n preserving wild but not domestic species – that matters to environmentalists. iii) Nor does it explain the case for preserving rare species.

1.B Ignorance Arguments: These hold case for preserving the natural environment is that we don’t know what it’s future worth will be. Arguments of that kind are often made by appealing to the medicinal value of plants. But Sober claims that if we are genuinely ignorant of the value of ecosystems then we don’t have enough information to justify saving them. Elsewhere he makes the same argument against Pascal’s Wager. SB: the argument depends on the view that we are totally ignorant about the likely future value of the environment; whereas, we seem to have some evidence for believing that species will yield useful genes.

1.C Slippery Slopes It’s sometimes argued that if one species can be killed off then there is no principled reason to defend any species since there are no morally relevant differences.
Sober notes that slippery slope arguments are often used by friends and foes of abortion.
Ex: if it’s permissible to kill a fertilized egg, then it must also be permissible to kill all human life.

Sober discounts these arguments – pointing out that we don’t believe there is no distinction b/n a bald person and a hairy person.

1.D The value of ecosystems can’t be explained by appeal to preserving their natural function or state.
Sober argues that Aristotle’s notion of a natural function has no place to play in Darwinian biology. There is no natural state for ecosystems; but merely new opportunities and niches to be exploited.

He rejects value monist proposals according to which either ecosystems or humans are the only thing that is valuable. He ridicules those environmentalists that downplay the importance of human life, or recommend that humans be permitted to perish if they wander out into the wilds (Hardin).

2. The Positive Proposal: He claims that the value of animal species is aesthetic value (like works of art). He explores a theory of aesthetic value which is: i) Non-anthropocentric – it denies that human beings are the only things that have value. ii) Holistic – it denies that individuals (whether they are humans, animals, or plants) are the only things that have value. Some value is relational or constituted when relations obtain such as: the relation in which humans contemplate or interact with nature; the historical relation that is constitutive of authenticity [and not just current time slice ‘wildness’]; or relations among animals and plants – as found in ecosystems. He thinks that this conception of value is plausible in purely human contexts e.g. it is valuable when a parent loves their child. iii) Anthropomorphic – he thinks that values depend for their existence on the existence of humans or intelligent beings. (So nothing would be lost if the last man destroyed art or an ecosystem.)