Animal rights

File:Great Ape Project logo.jpg

The logo of the Great Ape Project, which is campaigning for a Declaration on Great Apes. [1]

Animal rights is a philosophical concept in Bioethics that considers species other than human beings as bearers of rights and so as part of the same moral community as human beings. This means that animals should have their basic interests considered in an equal manner as human beings, which would require humans to avoid animal exploitation in activities such as medical experimentation as well as food and clothing production. The fundamental philosophical question regarding animal rights in bioethics is whether animals should have rights, and if so, what are the parameters of those rights.

Animal rights is also considered to be a socio-political and even a legal movement. For example, some countries have passed legislation awarding recognition of animal rights. In 2002, Germany recognized animals as right-bearers in their constitution . Also, the Seattle-based Great Ape Project, founded by philosophers Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, currently campaigns for the United Nations to adopt a Declaration on Great Apes, which would see gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos included in a "community of equals" with human beings, extending to them the protection of three basic interests: the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.

While the socio-political and legal animal rights movements are fascinating, animal rights is fundamentally a philosophical debate because the concept of a right is a moral concept and so belongs to Ethics. Thus there will be a brief history of the debate over animal rights among philosophers and then a synopsis of the three major positions on animal rights in bioethics.

History of the concept

The Great Chain of Being, the heirarchy of all forms of life, including angels. From Didacus Valades' Rhetorica Christiana, 1579

Some ancient Greek philosophers, such as Empedocles (495-435 B.C.E.)—the creator of the doctrine that everything is composed of earth, air, fire, or water (Parry 2005)—and Eudoxus of Cnidus (395-337 B.C.E.)—a student of Plato (429-347 B.C.E.) and the first Greek to mathematize planetary orbits—argued for vegetarianism as a dietary restriction due to strong beliefs in the reincarnation of human souls into animals after mortal death. In fact, Porphyry (243-305 C.E.)—a neo-Plationistic philosopher from Phoenicia—has record of Dicaearchus (350-285 B.C.E.)—a student of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)— saying the following about Eudoxus, “he not only abstained from animal food but would also not come near butchers and hunters” (Huffman 2006).

One might suspect Pythagoras 570-490 B.C.E.—an Greek philosopher and discoverer of the Pythagorean Theorem—urged respect for animals because he also believed in a human reincarnation similar to Empedocles and Eudoxus. However, according to Aristotle, “the Pythagoreans refrain from eating the womb and the heart, the sea anemone and some other such things but use all other animal food” (Huffman 2006). The latter suggests that Pythagoras forbade eating certain parts of animals and certain species of animals, which is consistent with contemporaneous Greek religious rituals instead of a vegetarian philosophy (Huffman 2006).

In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals had no souls, did not think, and could therefore be treated as if they were things, not beings. Against this, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, in the preface of his Discourse on Inequality (1754), that man starts as an animal, though not one "devoid of intellect and freedom." However, as animals are sensitive beings, "they too ought to participate in natural right, and that man is subject to some sort of duties toward them," specifically "one [has] the right not to be uselessly mistreated by the other."

Contemporaneous with Rousseau was the Scottish writer John Oswald, who died in 1793. In The Cry of Nature or an Appeal to Mercy and Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals, Oswald argued that man is naturally equipped with feelings of mercy and compassion. ^{[citation needed]} If each man had to witness the death of the animals he ate, he argued, a vegetarian diet would be far more common. The division of labor, however, allows modern man to eat flesh without experiencing what Oswald called the prompting of man's natural sensitivities, while the brutalization of modern man made him inured to these sensitivities.

Later in the 18th century, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, argued that animal pain is as real and as morally relevant as human pain, and that "[t]he day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny." Bentham argued that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, must be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If the ability to reason were the criterion, many human beings, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things, famously writing that:

Also in the 18th century, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that animals have the same essence as humans, despite lacking the faculty of reason. Although he considered vegetarianism to be only supererogatory, he argued for consideration to be given to animals in morality, and he opposed vivisection. His critique of Kantian ethics contains a lengthy and often furious polemic against the exclusion of animals in his moral system, which contained the famous line: "Cursed be any morality that does not see the essential unity in all eyes that see the sun." ^{[citation needed]}

The world's first animal welfare organization, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was founded in Britain in 1824, and similar groups soon sprang up elsewhere in Europe and then in North America. The first such group in the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was chartered in the state of New York in 1866.

The concept of animal rights became the subject of an influential book in 1892, Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, by English social reformer Henry Salt, who had formed the Humanitarian League a year earlier, with the objective of banning hunting as a sport.

By the late 20th century, animal welfare societies and laws against cruelty to animals existed in almost every country in the world. Specialized animal advocacy groups also proliferated, including those dedicated to the preservation of endangered species and others, like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), that protested against painful or brutal methods of hunting animals, the mistreatment of animals raised for human food in factory farms, and the use of animals in experiments and entertainment.

History of the modern movement

The modern animal rights movement can be traced to the early 1970s, and is one of the few examples of social movements that were created by philosophers, and in which they remain in the forefront. In the early 1970s, a group of Oxford philosophers began to question whether the moral status of non-human animals was necessarily inferior to that of human beings. This group included the psychologist Richard D. Ryder, who coined the phrase "speciesism" in 1970, first using it in a privately printed pamphlet to describe the assignment of value to the interests of beings on the basis of their membership of a particular species.

Ryder became a contributor to the influential book Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans, edited by Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch and John Harris, and published in 1972. It was in a review of this book for the New York Review of Books that Peter Singer, now Ira W. DeCamp Professor ofBioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, put forward the basic arguments, based on utilitarianism, that in 1975 became Animal Liberation, the book often referred to as the "bible" of the animal rights movement.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the movement was joined by a wide variety of academic and professional groups, including theologians, lawyers, physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, veterinarians, pathologists, and former vivisectionists.

Other books regarded as ground-breaking include Tom Regan's, The Case for Animal Rights (1983); James Rachels's, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990); and Steven M. Wise's, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (2000).

See Also

• Bioethics

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Huffman, Carl. (2006). [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/#PytWon/

“Pythagoras”], The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

External Links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on The Moral Status of Animals
• Philosophy Talk episode on Animal Rights

General Philosophy Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Philosophy Talk

Credits

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