Animal Rights Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The idea that animals have rights develops almost solely within Wester n intellectual traditions. Vegetar ianism based on respect for animals in non-Western cultures was almost always based on religious asceticism. Philosophical vegetarianism seems first to have appeared in classical Greek thought with the quasi-theological work of Pythagoras and the neo-Platonists, Plutarch, and Porphyry. Throughout ancient antiquity and the Middle Ages, however, Western philosophy and theology, under the influence of Aristotle and the Bible, assumed that animals existed for the convenience of humanity. Although heretical sects like the Jewish Christians in the early church and several Manichean movements in late antiquity and the Middle Ages were vegetarian, they sought purification of the human soul rather than the welfare of animals. The Protestant Reformation gave greater recognition to the earthly suffering and future resurrection of animals, especially in the more radical sects, which were particularly strong in England. This new sensitivity to animals, along with Enlightenment humanitarianism and Romantic naturalism, prepared the animal welfare movements of the nineteenth century.

Bernard Mandeville, Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and other figures of the Enlightenment advanced the ideas of compassion and sympathy that brought them close to animal rights. Indeed English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, counting only aggregates of pain and pleasure, famously said “. . . the question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” But like all the major writers of this period, Bentham the radical was too much a prisoner of deeply embedded custom and tradition to carry thoughts like this through to a logical conclusion (i.e., principled vegetarianism). In the nineteenth century, some transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau moved to principled vegetarianism and a more general respect for animals and nature.

The modern theory of animal rights, as well as the movement to secure them, really begins with the 1975 publication of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. Singer, himself a utilitarian, systematically worked out the full implications of Bentham’s thought on animals: If every sentient individual is to count as one, then the suffering of a nonhuman animal counts no less than that of a human. The interests of animals must thus be accorded equal respect. Not to do so is specieism, a term that Singer popularized, holding that the modern movement for liberation focused until then on racism and sexism should extend also to the liberation of animals from specieism. Singer reviewed at length the horrors of factory farming and the torments of animals in biomedical research, all but a tiny fraction of which he showed to be pointless, repetitious, or misleading. For factory farming, Singer’s remedy is vegetarianism. For the evils of research, limit animal testing to what is truly urgent. His test for urgency is whether the experimenters would be willing to take human infants of six months or younger and mentally defective adults as the subjects of their experiments. Such entities, Singer holds, have no more preference for life than animals.

The great alternative to Singer and utilitarianism is the rights approach, the classic text for which is Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Regan begins by observing that no responsible thinker has ever held that we may treat animals in any way we please and then elaborates on the full meaning of that common intuition. He dismisses as inadequate the idea that cruelty is to be ruled out merely because of its alleged “indirect effect” in hardening human hearts in their treatment of each other. Utilitarianism is excluded also because it treats individual sentient beings as mere receptacles for units of utility, which may then be abstracted and aggregated and can thus sacrifice justice to individuals to maximize an aggregate. Respect for animals as individuals requires taking each subject-of-a-life as a locus of “inherent value” or subjectivity and recognizing that this inherent value is equal for every subject-of-a-life. This rights approach goes beyond Singer’s utilitarianism in admitting no exceptions to vegetarianism and condemning all experimentation on animals as inherently wrong and unnecessary in the long run. Although Regan confines full subjectivity to mammals of a year or more in age, he admits that the circle of rights may be extended, and other theorists have done so.

More recently Christine M.Korsgaard has argued that humans cannot value their own sensible nature without valuing that of animals as well. Julian H. Franklin has deepened the foundations of the rights position by showing that Kant’s categorical imperative logically includes all sentient beings among its beneficiaries, not only humans, even though rational beings alone are subject to its obligations.

Bibliography:

Franklin, Julian H. Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Regan,Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: HarperCollins, 1975.