Animals Lack Ability to Participate in Asking for Rights

Animals Lack Ability to Participate in Asking for Rights

Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 30-1

So, whilst animals may not be eligible as rights-holders in all of the respects in which (human) moral agents are, and there may be problems in connection with the social relational conditions of rights for them, there are still good reasons for holding that animals are not ruled out from the status of rights-holders by their substantive natures. It is at this point in the argument that the other questions I posed earlier become pertinent. What is the moral purpose of rights-attribution, and why do individuals stand in need of rights? If we agree with Regan and the tradition of rights-theory upon which he draws, then the answer to the first question is that rights afford protection of the basic interests, or welfare of the rights-holder. On this supposition, the answer to the second question must be that the bearers of rights require them because they are vulnerable. To say this much may be enough of an answer in the case of “passive” rights. However, for moral agents, their capacity for self-definition and self-determination implies that what counts as their welfare cannot be fully known independently of their own active participation in defining it. Moreover, the social movements which the supporters of animal rights usually use as analogues provide evidence that recognition and preservation of the powers of self-definition and self-determination are likely to figure centrally as elements in the substantive views of their own welfare which they advance as rights-claims.

Rights Demands Responsibilities

Donald G. Lindburg, Zoology Society of San Diego, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 474

Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 30

A second set of problems in the way of attributing rights to nonhuman animals has to do with the absence of any relational element in Regan’s ‘subject of a life’ qualifying condition. A thorough going communitarian moral theorists would hold that animal rights are an absurdity, since to be a right-holder is necessarily to be a member of a human community whose normative order assigns both rights and responsibilities. But this communitarian view of rights faces the difficulty that it cannot readily make sense of the critical role of rights as moral claims on communities to revise their existing normative structure in favor of universalistic standards. This is precisely the aspect of the historical role of rights-claims that advocates of animal rights seek to draw on.
EXTENDING RIGHTS TO ANIMALS UNDERCUTS NOTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

Kyle Ash, lobbying strategist at the European Environmental Bureau, 2005 Animal Law (INTERNATIONAL ANIMAL RIGHTS: SPECIESISM AND EXCLUSIONARY HUMAN DIGNITY,)

9 At its inception in medieval Europe, modern secular law was considered, like its ecclesiastical predecessor, an imperfect effect of a divinely rooted natural law that was also subject to conscience and reason. n31 John Austin equated natural law to "Divine laws, or the laws of God, [or] laws set by God to his human creatures ... ." n32 He said, furthermore, that some of God's laws were promulgated and others not, but that we nevertheless were bestowed with reason to discover this "natural religion" in its entirety. n33…Mill analyzed the concept of divinely rooted natural law as it pertains to the creation of legal rights subsequent to comprehending moral rights. He said that people appear to have a disposition to see obligatory morality as a "transcendental fact," even objective since it cannot be interpreted. n34 If morality could be interpreted or created through human reason, there would be less incentive to be obedient. If a person were to realize that restraint is entirely a matter of her own conscience, a self-imposed feeling, she may come to the conclusion that her moral obligation ends as soon as she finds it inconvenient.

Sentience Insufficient to Necessitate Rights

Richard A. Epstein, Professor of Law, University of Chicago, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 154

Yet there’s the rub. Once that concession is made, then the next question is: Do we really think that suffering is the only criterion by which rights are awarded after all? It does seem troublesome—nothing is fatal in this counterintuitive metaphysics—to assume that animals are entitled to limited rights on a par with humans while denying that they are moral agents because they are incapable of following any universal dictates. And do we attach any weight to the unhappy fact that these animals are themselves imprinted “speciesists” in that they have instinctively different relationships with members of their own kind than they do with members of prey or predator populations? The test of sensation cannot generate a clean account of legal rights for animals.
SENTIENCE INADEQUATE – CAN’T REDUCE WHAT IS MORALLY RELEVANT TO HUMAN EXISTENCE AS PLEASURE AND PAIN, HUMAN & ANIMAL SUFFERING NOT NECESSARILY SIMILAR IN KIND

Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 22-3

It is therefore, not surprising that the utilitarian tradition has taken the lead in advocacy of a positive moral standing for nonhuman animals. Its moral theory is, so to speak, less metaphysically demanding than its main rivals. But the utilitarian tradition faces serious problems quite independently of its application to animals. Among the more commonly advanced criticisms, at least two might be thought actually less pressing when the theory is applied to nonhumans. The first of these arguments is that what is morally important in human life cannot be reduced to pleasure and pain. Some pleasures may be deemed good, others evil, while pain may be suffered for fine or noble purposes. Whilst there may be substantive moral disagreement about these judgments, it is clear that the relation between good and evil, on the one hand, and pleasure and pain, on the other is a contingent one. Similar considerations apply to ‘preference utilitarianism”: what is good is not necessarily what is preferred, neoclassical economics notwithstanding.

A second long-standing objection to utilitarianism is closely related to the first. It is that the qualitative focus of the doctrine limits its capacity to acknowledge qualitative differences among pleasures, or preferences. Different pleasures differ not just in amounts—intensities, durations, and so on, but also in kind, or quality. How many bars of a Mahler symphony are equivalent to a good meal? Since the possibility of subjecting pleasures, pains and preferences to moral evaluation, and to qualitative discriminations seems to be closely bound up with the culturally mediated, or formed character of human experience, it seems that these two objections are effective against utilitarianism solely in its application to the human case. So far as animals are concerned, perhaps the utilitarian identification of the good with an optimal ratio of pleasure to pain is more plausible than the same doctrine applied to humans. But to argue in this way would be to undermine the utilitarian case for animal liberation. For the doctrine to succeed in including nonhumans within the sphere of moral concern, it has to be supposed that human suffering and animal suffering are similar in kind, that each counts equally within the utilitarian choice.