There Are No Animal Rights

As environmentalism has recently gained a louder voice in both the arts and politics, animal rights have also naturally become a focal point of debate. Utilitarianism is the ethical methodology many animal rights activists have supported. Utilitarians argue that animals are members of the moral community because they have the capacity to feel pain. According to Shafer-Landau (2018), “Utilitarians claim that, among these [other] alternatives, the capacity to feel pain is better than any other as a membership test for the moral community” (p. 133).

The problems with utilitarianism remain embedded in claims about animal rights as well. Not only is utilitarianism often inapplicable in many cases (because it has the limitation that utilitarian values cannot be measured accurately in complex or conflicting situations), but under utilitarian principles animal experimentation can also be justified, since animal suffering may produce greater happiness for members of the moral community. This problem arises from treating the capacity to feel pain as a necessary condition for qualifying as a member of the moral community. If our understanding of technology, chemistry, and biology improves and, as a result, we discover ways to kill animals painlessly, then the amount of suffering produced will be 0, while the happiness gained through consumption or experimentation will yield a net positive utilitarian value. This could lead to the conclusion that experimenting on, torturing, and consuming animals is morally justified, a position I do not think animal rights activists would defend. Moreover, under this kind of membership test for the moral community, even if animals are recognized as members, “marginal humans”—those with physical disabilities or lower intellectual capacity—would inevitably end up excluded from the moral community.

Even while acknowledging these challenges to utilitarianism, one can still offer a rebuttal. Some philosophers argue that as living beings, or as moral patients, animals still should not be consumed or used as experimental subjects. Regan (2004), comparing humans and animals, defines both as living beings that must be granted rights that deserve protection, such as the right to life. Rule utilitarians argue that moral rules must be taken into account in determining what the best action is. Animal experimentation or consumption may generate greater happiness in utilitarian terms, but we must still ask whether the moral rule permitting it is ethically justified. One utilitarian argument defending this position is the Argument from Marginal Cases, which highlights “marginal” persons such as those who are comatose, mentally ill, or children who are not yet morally or rationally mature. If it is immoral to experiment on and harm marginal humans, they argue, then the same standard should be applied to animals. In his article “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases,” Norcross (2004) uses this argument to show that rational capacity or intelligence cannot justify the moral permissibility of consuming animals.

I will emphasize that what distinguishes humans from nonhuman beings, including animals, is not reason itself but the disposition that grants us the potential to make moral and rational judgments. Within neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, there are contrasting views on whether morality is simply a product of adaptation and natural selection or part of our intellectual endowment. As Kitcher (2011) argues, “The complex and cumbersome peacemaking of our original humanity was replaced by a new mechanism that could operate in a variety of contexts on principle, and that could cope in advance rather than merely respond. That mechanism is essential to what we think of as ethical practice. I shall call it the capacity for normative guidance” (p. 69). Put simply, through evolution humanity acquired a unique disposition that enables us to make the normative judgments that make ethical standards possible.

Marginal humans possess the disposition necessary for the potential that enables them to practice ethical judgment. The fact that a marginal human is injured or immature does not deprive that person of this potential and disposition. By contrast, animals simply do not possess this disposition by nature. An athlete who had the potential to become a world-class soccer player but suffered a serious injury is still a member of the soccer world, whereas someone who lacked that potential from birth is not. Therefore, the test for membership in the moral community should be possession of the relevant disposition, not whether one currently has the situational capacity or rationality to exercise moral judgment. If animals were to undergo a similar process of natural selection, acquire the disposition for normative judgment, and appeal for their rights through that faculty, then they would become members of the moral community.

References

Kitcher, P. (2011). The ethical project. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Norcross, A. (2004). Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases. Philosophical Perspectives, 18.

Regan, T. (2004). The case for animal rights. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Shafer-Landau, R. (2017). The Fundamentals of Ethics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Original title: 동물권은 없다

Author: Seon-min Lee

Date: 2020-01-08

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=16&idx=22266