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.

Overview

Animal rights is the concept that all or some animals are entitled to possess their own lives; that animals are deserving of, or already possess, certain moral rights; and that some basic rights for animals ought to be enshrined in law. The animal-rights view rejects the concept that animals are merely capital goods or property intended for the benefit of humans. The concept is often confused with animal welfare, which is the philosophy that takes cruelty towards animals and animal suffering into account, but that does not necessarily assign specific moral rights to them.

Related Topics:
Rights - Moral - Capital goods - Property - Animal welfare

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The animal-rights philosophy does not necessarily maintain that human and non-human animals are equal. For example, animal rights advocates do not call for voting rights for chickens. Some also would make a distinction between sentient or self-aware animals and lower life forms, with the belief that only sentient animals, or perhaps only animals who have a significant degree of self-awareness, should be afforded the right to possess their own lives and bodies, without regard to how they are valued by humans. Others would extend this right to all animals, even those without developed nervous systems or self-consciousness. They maintain that any human or human institution that commodifies animals for the purposes of food, entertainment, cosmetics, clothing, scientific testing, or for any other reason, infringes upon their fundamental rights to possess themselves and to pursue their own ends.

Related Topics:
Philosophy - Rights - Voting rights - Sentient - Nervous system - Consciousness - Human - Food - Entertainment - Cosmetics - Clothing - Scientific testing

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Few people would deny that other great apes are highly intelligent animals who are aware of their own condition and goals, and can become frustrated when their freedoms are curtailed. In contrast, many other animals, like jellyfish, have only extremely simple nervous systems, and are little more than simple automata, capable only of simple reflexes but incapable of formulating any "ends to their actions" or "plans to pursue" them, and equally unable to notice whether they are in captivity or free. By the criteria that biologists use, jelly fish are undeniably animals, while from an animal-rights perspective, it is questionable whether they should not rather be considered "vegetables". There is as yet no consensus with regard to which qualities make a living organism an animal in need of rights. The animal-rights debate (much like the abortion debate) is therefore marred by the difficulty that its proponents search for simple, clear-cut distinctions on which to base moral and political judgements, even though the biological realities of the problem present no hard and fast boundaries on which such distinctions could be based. Rather, the biological realities are full of complex and diverse gradients. From a neurobiological perspective, jellyfish, farmed chicken, laboratory mice, or pet cats would fall along different points on a (complex and high-dimensional) spectrum from the "nearly vegetable" to the "highly sentient".

Related Topics:
Great apes - Jellyfish - Biologists - Abortion - Neurobiological

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