Non-Human Rights

In Defense of Animals.
by Peter Singer.
Basil Blackwell. 224 pp. $16.95.

To the numerous “liberation” movements of our times—including the black, chicano, women’s, and gay-liberation movements—another must be added that is active not on behalf of any purportedly disadvantaged class or group of people but on behalf of animals. The major theorist of this “animal-liberation” movement is Peter Singer, a professor of philosophy at Monash University in Australia and the author of the movement’s seminal book, Animal Liberation, published in 1975. In this latest volume, which he edited, Singer brings together fifteen essays by philosophers and movement activists on the subject of animal “rights.”

The first and most interesting section of the book is devoted to arguments in favor of according moral standing to animals. The remainder of the book features essays describing a variety of activities which offend animal-rights advocates and which outline the strategies (some quite violent) recently used by some activists to further their cause.

The first essay, “The Case for Animal Rights,” by the American philosopher Tom Regan, states that the goals of the animal-rights movement are “the total abolition of the use of animals in science; the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture; and the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping.” In Regan’s view, all of these activities are morally repugnant because they violate the principle of according inherent value to every “sentient being.” Regan asserts that “all who have inherent value have it equally, whether they be human animals or not.” The adoption of Regan’s position would abolish any moral distinctions between animals and human beings.

Singer is not so absolutist. He states that the “animal-liberation movement . . . is not saying that all lives are of equal worth or that all interests of humans and other animals are to be given equal weight, no matter what those interests may be.” For example, he admits that killing a fish is morally not so reprehensible an act as killing a human being. But, he adds, animal liberationists are “saying that where animals and humans have similar interests—we might take the interest in avoiding physical pain as an example, for it is an interest that humans clearly share with other animals—those interests are to be counted equally, with no automatic discount just because one of the beings is not human.”

The positions presented by Singer and Regan are by far the more seriously and rigorously argued in this volume. Their fellow essayists for the most part make appeals to sentiment or occupy themselves with polemical diatribes against a variety of activities which they consider violative of the presumed rights of animals. Unless we are persuaded that animals do have rights, the points made by these essays are moot.

_____________

Regan believes that “the fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us. . . .” His argument for the inherent value of animals is an extension of the Kantian moral notion that rational beings should not be treated as means to our satisfaction but as ends in themselves. To Regan, animals “must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with inherent value of their own.” How do we determine inherent value? Both he and Singer believe that the paramount quality is the ability to feel physical pain. Distinctively human characteristics such as language usage, culture-building, or the ability to make and keep promises are dismissed by them as morally irrelevant considerations. After all, we treat very young children and mentally deficient adults with moral respect, so rationality and the ability to use language cannot be the basis for claiming a superior status for human beings.

Such arguments by Regan and Singer can easily be seen to be nonsense. We do, in fact, limit the rights and responsibilities of mentally impaired adults and young children. For example, they cannot vote or enter into contracts, and, in the case of mentally deficient adults, they are often confined to institutions where their behavior can be supervised; nor do we punish young children or mentally deranged adults for crimes they commit. Clearly, then, we do take mental abilities into account when making moral decisions on what rights will be accorded to human beings.

Singer and Regan point to the fact that even though children and mentally retarded adults do not meet our usual standards of rationality for moral consideration, we do not sanction killing or performing laboratory experiments on them. This observation is far less morally telling, however, than they suppose. The reasons we treat young children and mentally retarded adults with moral consideration are complex, but they include our deference to the feelings of their family members and, in the case of children, their eventual status as rational beings. Animals do not and cannot share those uniquely human attributes upon which our ethical theories are grounded.

One particularly disturbing aspect of Singer’s and Regan’s arguments is their facile equation of “speciesism”—the assertion of a superior moral status for human beings—with racism. Racism denies moral treatment to beings who are not merely capable of feeling physical pain, but who share distinctively human characteristics; the comparison Singer and Regan draw totally misses the point of why racism is a moral evil.

In sum, despite Singer’s and Regan’s claims to the contrary, we accord moral respect to human beings and not to animals because unique human attributes make our experience of the world quite discontinuous from that of animals. (Human beings alone, for example, are capable of being disappointed by a broken promise.) The ability to feel physical pain is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for granting moral consideration to a being. We act morally toward other human beings not just because they are human beings like us, as animal-rights advocates assert, but because they are themselves capable of moral choice and action, something that even animal-rights activists do not claim for animals.

None of this means, of course, that human beings can do whatever they like to animals, or that there are no prudential arguments for preserving the natural environment, including a diverse population of animals, for the benefit and enjoyment of ourselves and our posterity. But the contention that animals have inherent rights is empty.

_____________