Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
No Moral Obligation to Animals: Wild Animals
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No Moral Obligation to Animals: Wild AnimalsNO MORAL OBLIGATION TO WILD ANIMALS Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 378 I believe that wild animals, considering as individuals, are valuable in an important sense, but that in most situations they are not morally considerable to humans. Individual animals are valuable to humans – they are often valued aesthetically and sentimentally, for example – but they do not exist in a relevant moral sphere for us. Let me explain this assertion, because it is sure to be controversial.
Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 379 It is clear that animals have varying levels and acuities of experience including varied levels of self-awareness. But it is equally clear that the experience we share carries with it both a striving to perpetuate that experience and the inevitability of diminution in some situations, and certain death in the long run. Ontological goodness, and grades of it, correspond to the strength and vitality of the experience of individual organisms. But this ontological goodness does not in itself entail moral goodness or moral obligations to interfere to protect it. Humans cannot and ought not to accept responsibility to avoid deaths of individual animals in the wild. Building on Donnelley’s distinction between ontological and moral value, I suggest it is not this content of animal experience but the context in which we encounter it that determines the strength and type of our obligations to animals and other natural objects. The content of the experience of some animals is surely rich enough to make killing feral goats on an island to protect the indigenous plant communities there, even though I have no doubt that the individual goats have a greater ontological value than the plants. Ontological value is morally relevant in some situations – as when animals are in captivity – but it is morally irrelevant in the wild, because the maintenance of the animal’s wildness (appropriate behaviors in a wild context) prohibits our manipulating that experience. The forbearance we exercise here is very similar, psychologically and perhaps morally, to the attitude of wise parents who, after the time of maturity, let their children live their own lives.
Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 383 The more we meddle in the daily lives of wild animals, the more we accept moral responsibility for the consequences of our actions in their individual lives. The context in which we interact with domesticated animals implies a contract to look after them. No such contract exists with wild animals; for this reason, we have no moral obligations to individual members of wild species who remain in their natural habitat.
Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, “THE AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS”, March 2003, http://www.communalism.org/Archive/5/aar.html It is nevertheless essential to face such misgivings squarely, in the hope of provoking a more thoughtful debate on the merits of animal rights. I view animal rights thinking as a specific kind of moral mistake and a symptom of political confusion. Much like its ideological cousin, pacifism, the political and moral theory of animal rights offers simple but false answers to important ethical questions. At the risk of collapsing competing versions of animal rights theory into one monolithic category, I would like to consider several of these questions from a social-ecological perspective in order to show why much of the ideology of animal rights is both anti-humanist and anti-ecological, and why its reasoning is frequently at odds with the project of creating a free world. (3) THEIR KRITIK OF SPECIESISM RESULTS IN ANTI-HUMANISM AND CRUSHES THE SOLVENCY OF RADICALISM AND HOPE Peter Staudenmeir, human rights advocate and philospher, “THE AMBIGUITIES OF ANIMAL RIGHTS”, March 2003, http://www.communalism.org/Archive/5/aar.html Rightly rejecting the inherited dualism of humanity and non-human nature, animal rights philosophers wrongly collapse the two into one undifferentiated whole, thus substituting monism for dualism (and neglecting most of the natural world in the process). But regressive dreams of purity and oneness carry no emancipatory potential; their political ramifications range from trite to dangerous. In the wrong hands, a simplistic critique of ‘speciesism’ yields liberation for neither people nor animals, but merely the same rancid antihumanism that has always turned radical hopes into their reactionary opposite. Treating Animals Differently Not Akin to Racism and/or SexismSPECIEISISM NOT AKIN TO SEXISM AND RACISM Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 64 But I do not agree with any of these things under the compulsion of philosophical arguments. And I disagree that we have a duty to (the other) animals that arises from their being the equal members of a community composed of all of those creatures in the universe that can feel pain, and that it is merely “prejudice” in a disreputable sense akin to racial prejudice or sexism that makes us discriminate in favor of our own species. Singer assumes the existence of the universe-wide community of pain and demands reasons that the boundary of our concern should be drawn any more narrowly: “If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.” That is sheer assertion, and particularly dubious is his further claim that (the title of the first chapter of his book) “all animals are equal,” a point that he defends b y arguing that the case for treating women and blacks equally with white males does not depend on the existence of factual equality among these groups. But the history of racial and sexual equality is the history of a growing belief that the factual inequalities among these groups are either a consequence of discrimination or have been exaggerated. Wise wants to argue similarly that the cognitive differences between people and chimpanzees have been exaggerated, but Singer declines to take that route—rightly so, if my criticism of Wise’s approach is sound
Richard A. Epstein, Professor of Law, University of Chicago, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 151 It follows therefore that we should resist any effort to extrapolate legal rights for animals from the change in legal rights for women and slaves. There is no next logical step to restore parity between animals on the one hand and women and slaves on the other. Historically, the elimination, first of slavery and then of civil disabilities to women, occurred long before the current agitation for animal rights. What is more, the natural cognitive and emotional limitations of animals, even the higher animals, preclude any creation of full parity. What animal can be given the right to contract? To testify in court? To vote? To participate in political deliberations? To worship? ANALOGY TO THE EMANCIPATION OF SLAVES INAPPROPRIATE – NO CLEAR END GOAL IN SIGHT FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 56-7 There is a related objection to his approach. He wants judges, in good common law fashion, to move step by step, and for the first step simply to declare that chimpanzees have legal rights. (This corresponds to the cauistic method of doing moral philosophy). But judges asked to step onto a new path of doctrinal growth want to have some idea where the path leads even if it would be unreasonable to insist that the destination be clearly seen. Wise gives them no idea. His repeated comparison of animals to slaves and the animals rights cause to the civil rights movement is misleading. When one speaks of freeing slaves and giving them the rights of other people, or giving women the same rights as men, it is pretty clear what is envisioned, although important details may be unclear. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People set out on its campaign to persuade the Supreme Court to repudiate separate but equal, it was pretty clear what the end point was: the elimination of official segregation by race. After that was achieved, other race-related legal objectives hove into view, but the campaign’s proximate goal was at least clear. But what is meant by liberating animals and giving them the rights of human beings of the same cognitive capacity? Does an animal’s right to life place a duty on human beings to protect animals from being killed by other animals? Is capacity to feel pain sufficient cognitive capacity to entitle an animal to at least the most elementary human rights? What kind of habitats must we create and maintain for all the rights-bearing animals in the United States? Should human convenience have any weight in deciding what rights an animal has?
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