Animal rights

Animal rights, or animal liberation, is the movement to protect non-human animals from being exploited by humans. It is a radical movement, insofar as it aims not merely to attain more humane treatment for animals, but to include many animals within the moral community — that is, all those whose basic interests (for example, in not being made to suffer unnecessarily) ought to be given the same consideration as our own similar interests. The claim, in other words, is that non-human animals must no longer be regarded legally or morally as property, or treated merely as resources for human purposes, but should instead be regarded as persons. To this end the movement advocates that many animals be given legal rights to protect their basic interests.

Criticism of animal rights

Apart from the difficulty mentioned above posed by defining the lower boundary - between animals and organisms undeserving of rights - objections fall into two main categories. Critics of animal rights include those who reject animal liberation entirely, and those who advocate animal liberation but reject animal rights as its basis.

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Those who reject animal liberation commonly do so on the grounds that only moral agents can have moral rights and be members of the moral community. Unless one is a moral agent, the argument goes, one cannot claim rights for oneself or be held accountable for respecting the rights of others. Hence, while there may be good reasons to treat animals humanely (out of compassion or out of respect for the wishes of other humans), it makes no sense to ascribe rights to them. Animal rights however counter this saying many humans (infants and the severely mentally handicapped) are not moral agents and still have moral rights. Those who deny full moral standing to animals on the basis of mental capacity must deal with the so-called "argument from marginal cases" for animal liberation, which points to the fact that there is an overlap in capacities between (some) humans and (some) animals. Carl Cohen attempts to meet the issue of marginal cases by basing the claim to moral standing on "kind"; thus, mentally deficient humans merit rights simply because they are human and therefore members of a group that typically does exhibit moral agency. Cohen has in turn been criticized on the basis that the notion of "kind" is unclear. http://courses.ats.rochester.edu/nobis/papers/cohen-kind.html His position could be taken to imply that while a human being with the mental capacity of a mouse has full moral standing, a mutant chimpanzee with an I.Q. of 150, who regularly contributed articles on philosophy to Wikipedia, would have no rights whatever. A different approach is that of philosophers in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, like Jan Narveson and Peter Carruthers, who see morality as a contract among rational, self-interested agents. According to this view, because animals cannot be rational contractors, their interests are protected only insofar as human contractors desire. (Hence the protection afforded to most dogs and cats but not to pigs and cows.) Infants and mentally handicapped humans are protected by being written into the moral contract by the rest of us. Yet another approach to this problem is to bite the bullet and admit that infants and disabled have no moral rights. Some philosophers, notably Peter Singer, have take up this position.

Related Topics:
Moral agents - Peter Singer

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Roger Scruton, in Animal Rights and Wrongs, has used an argument based on a Kantian outlook which restricts animal rights only to those animals which are kept in human custody, which Kant believed was primarily for the benefit of the moral sensibilities of humans. We do not have a duty of care to wild animals, so that wild animals have no greater status than wild plants, which may be worthy of respecting because they are beautiful or interesting or a valuable part of the ecosystem, but that is all. Fox hunting is permitted, but factory farming is not. Some accuse Scruton of hypocrisy here, as he rejected Kantian ethics in his book "The Meaning of Conservatism", but is happy to use the system when it produces a conclusion he favours.

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The animal-rights position is also criticized by some who favour animal liberation. Although he is often called the father of the modern animal-rights movement, Peter Singer actually rejects the notion of moral rights. As a utilitarian, he prefers to talk in terms of the equal consideration of interests. Those feminist philosophers who favour animal liberation tend to believe that the concept of individual moral rights reflects a historical male bias toward rationality and autonomy, a bias that ignores the role that personal relationships, emotion, and caring ought to play in an adequate moral theory. Ecofeminist Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, attempts to show a linkage between the ways that animals and women have been viewed, and to show that meat-eating has reflected a cultural male bias. In contrast, Kathryn Paxton George has argued that the ideal of veganism is based on the biased idea of male physiology as the human norm, and ignores the nutritional needs of girls and women. http://tinyurl.com/d2egj

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Some criticisms of the animal rights movement take the form of parody, positing a "vegetable rights" movement. http://www.peva.org/

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