Animal Rights Arguments Julia Kirby Consulting author: Holly L
When is this important? THW Ban medical testing on all animals, certain animals THW assign right X to animal X (assign basic rights of freedom to chimps and dolphins) THW Abolish animal rights legislation
Opposing animal rights Deny their moral framework You can just be very pragmatic (don’t care if monkeys are suffering as long as cancer research is being done) We won evolution, etc.
Why are people different? If you can establish the grounds for granting a right then you can say that people uniquely have that or animals share it as well Eg: capacity for pain, consciousness, ability to communicate, sophisticated social relations, etc. Ex. We would assign to chimpanzees freedom from captivity and experimentation because we can prove that they feel sadness and loneliness in the same way humans do there is the same harm
Pain Animals can feel pain Can animals be conscious of pain or is this a physical impulse like you might see in a plant? All we can judge by is their behavioural responses – we can’t know if they have the same mental processes of pain as we do
Pain II “animals feel pain” Same nerves, same brain chemistry response, behaviour – we can do scientific tests that can tell us as much as we can ever know about other human beings If we discount it because we don’t “know their minds” we can also discount other people feeling pain for the same reason
Pain is Bad It is a universal harm that pain be felt in this way You can choose to apply a utilitarian calculus to this if you want – either on balance it’s ok if the animal suffers because of x benefit, or this suffering is of so great a magnitude that it is never justified
Speciesism Speciesism involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership. – wikipediaspecies You can assert that it is morally wrong to harm animals similar to how it is morally wrong to harm other human beings – simple genetic differences are not good grounds for this distinction
humanism Any criteria that you can identify for giving rights to humans always has an exception Eg ‘ability to understand the right’ does not apply to people in comas, babies, people with serious mental disabilities Justifications for things like racism come from this kind of ‘quantitative’ criteria (historically bs like brain size)
humanism If you want to defend it, you can use the ‘risk’ and empathy argument People who do meet the criteria understand that they might one day be in a coma or were once babies etc., so feel that these rights should be extended to those kind of exceptions No one will wake up a dolphin (probably) The harm in having no criteria is losing the meaning or value of the right
Practical arguments Most of these fall on the side of no animal rights Easy ones: medical testing and the horrible consequences for humanity of not being able to test drugs on animals Talk about penicillin, etc, and that artificial methods are not yet well developed or effective enough
Practical arguments Evolutionary justifications: humans won evolution and built or civilization on the use of animals, and should continue to do so – have no overriding moral obligation
Practical arguments A good one FOR animal rights is Empathy People empathize with animals naturally (we think they’re cute, it’s instinctive to a lot of people not to harm them) This is not a coincidence Harming animals normalizes violence – this is bad for people and society. (first sign of a serial killer is that they start killing animals)
Practical arguments It would be bad and sad for people who empathize with animals to see them mistreated – we aspire to a more caring society over all and this is an important step in developing those kind of standards Harming the person in a coma may also have practical advantages but this doesn’t justify it – we also feel bad
Conclusion Establish a framework for when we assign rights and why Criteria like ability and awareness