Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Animal Rights Bad – Feminist Kritik of Rights Discourse
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- Animal Rights Paradigm Counterproductive – Entrenches Speciesism
Animal Rights Bad – Feminist Kritik of Rights DiscourseANIMAL RIGHTS ENTRENCH PATRIARCHAL NATURE OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS Tom Regan, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, North Carolina State University, 2001, Defending Animal Rights, p. 53 According to the criticism I have in mind, Narveson, Frey and Jamieson are correct insofar as they hold that there is something seriously mistaken in the view that nonhuman animals have rights. But they are mistaken when it comes to explaining why the idea is ill grounded. The fault likes in the very idea of the rights of the individual. This idea, these critics allege, is symptomatic of a deep, systematic prejudice that has distorted Western moral and political thought down through the ages. That prejudice is patriarchy, understood as what is expressive of male bias. Paradoxoical though it may seem they claim that what is fundamentally wrong with the idea of animal rights is that it encapsulates male bias. Before moving on to explore this criticism (which for brevity’s sake I term “the feminist indictment”), three preliminary points merit attention.
Helena Silverstein, Professor, Lafayette College of Government and law, 1996, Unleashing Rights: law, meaning and the animal rights movement, p. 62-3 Relying on rights language is also important for a movement that has been traditionally associated with emotionalism and sentimentality. Rights language provides the power of reason in contrast to an appeal to the emotions. Although the animals rights movement combines the emotional appeal with an appeal to reason in order to increase its persuasiveness, it is the balance between these appeals, using rights as the balancing mechanisms, that is significant. Thus, movement literature works on human feelings by showing pictures of horribly abused cats, dogs, and monkeys – “cute” animals – that outrage our emotional sensibilities. At the same time, movement literature works on human rational abilities by invoking rights terminology and explaining that oppression of animals is akin to oppression of humans. RIGHTS DISCOURSE EMPLOYS DUALISMS Helena Silverstein, Professor, Lafayette College of Government and law, 1996, Unleashing Rights: law, meaning and the animal rights movement, p. 93-4 Marti Kheel, economist scholar and activist in Feminists for Animal Rights (FAR), voiced this common critique, arguing that rights are “dualistic.” Rights are “part of the competitive world view. You have a right to something against somebody.” Likewise, Lauren Smedley, another activist in FAR, elaborated this critique in clear terms. According to Smedley, rights are:
[Susanne, lecturer in English at East Anglia University, “Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism . . . or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity,” in Animals & Women, ed. Carol J. Adams, p. 330-34] However, to me the problem seems less that feminist or animal rights approaches that implicitly rely on speciesism universalize, generalize, or stereotype animals, than that the basis on which they wish to secure the rights of women and now of animals is no different from that on which they were previously denied. That is to say, the same hierarchy of categories is presupposed, only the boundary of those included in the group with rights is extended “downward” along the ladder, shoring up a different dichotomy as the crucial —that is, exclusionary — boundary. The idea of the ladder of categories — of the “objective” classification of given, “natural” species —remains unquestioned and unchallenged, in the interest of those who see the chance of being adopted into the top class. Equally unchallenged is the power of the original group that sees itself at the uncontested top of the ladder, arrogating to itself the right to classify and to decide over the rights of others — the epitome of the speciesist paradigm. Thus white men, in their endeavor to buttress white male supremacy, used to draw the line defining “human” — and thus “rights” —between(among others) whites and blacks as well as between men and women, on the basis of an alleged natural and evolutionary hierarchy that placed both the race of black people and the sex of women on a stage of development below that of white men and hence closer to “the animals.” In turn, the struggles for the emancipation of black people and of women in the U.S. in the nineteenth century led to various proposals of how the crucial boundary should be reshuffled: should it run between whites and blacks, including white men and women and excluding blacks (men and women), or between men and women, including white and black men and excluding (black and white) women? 15 Both black men and white women had something to gain (though it never was equality) depending on how the line was drawn; but white men’s membership and their power to classify and to grant rights was unaffected either way, as was the certain exclusion of black women, their assured position below any boundary. The eventual emancipation of both black people (men and women) and women (black and white) in Western societies may have led to their inclusion in the category of humans, even of citizens, yet without either group having become equal to the white men who previously occupied that category exclusively. The boundary of inclusion/exclusion has been shifted “downward,” yet the idea of a hierarchy of categories and the supremacy of the group at the top has been left unshaken. The ladder of categorization (and subcategorization) continues to exist, both within the category “human” and outside of it. Hence to speak of “humans and the other animals” so as to signal the inclusion of humans among the animals — in the interest of promoting animals into the class of those deserving rights — equally leaves the hierarchy intact, shoring up instead the dichotomy between animals and nonanimals. As we know, the boundary between what we consider to be animal life on the one hand and plant life on the other is less “natural” and less clear-cut than we would like to think and these categories tend to imply, as is the dividing line between living and so-called dead matter. But we need not even go that far “down” the ladder to see that what is at stake is not equality, that the crucial boundary still exists, and the question simply is at what precise point it shall for now be fixed. The zoological — and archetypally speciesist — subdivision of animals into different species has led animal rights advocates to do with animals what on the level of humans we are trying to overcome: to affirm and maintain an evolutionary hierarchy and to grant rights to some and not others on the basis of zoological differences — say, to primates but not to worms. Or to wild animals, perceived as “natural” animals, but not to farm and domestic animals, seen as “subanimals” (see Karen Davis’s article in this volume). The zoological classification, however, is less biological than biologist, including factors concerning the animals’ lifestyles, habitats, and political history — that is, criteria concerning the sociopolitical coexistence of animals and humans. Although the perspective of classification masquerades as the “objectivity” of no standpoint at all, 16 it reflects the human-subjective — that is, speciesist — standpoint: crucial principles of evaluation and hierarchizing are the animal species’ alleged similarity with or difference from humans (the evolutionary order), their usefulness to humans, complemented by traditional human (male, white, etc.) sympathies (or antipathies) for particular species (see Diane Antonio on wolves in this volume). That is to say, the subjective norm of valuation is incorporated within the very objects being constituted, even as the scientific subject disappears from its object-science. The specific criteria by which it has been proposed that rights should be granted or withheld are either the animals’ ability to feel pain (sentience) or to lead a life “worth living” 17 — both being judged by a jury of self-appointed, white, human, scientific experts. Not only is sentience more likely to be perceived the more the animals’ expression resembles human expression, but such expression tends to be tested in response to human infliction of pain, thus revealing the real objective behind the withholding of rights from animals, namely that humans may abuse animals. Similarly, assessing whether another’s life is worth living involves recognizing factors dear to the judges: consciousness (long considered to be the defining characteristic distinguishing humans from animals), intelligence (ditto), and moral agency, extended by Tom Regan to include the passive experience of so-called “moral patients.” 18 The proposal that rights should continue to be withheld from domesticated or farm animals shows up the fundamental cynicism behind “scientific” rights discourse: the disastrously violating — “inhuman”(!) — conditions that humans impose on farm animals are acknowledged not in order to change them, but in order to disqualify the animals from rights, as though these conditions were objective factors of biological capacity — the kind of life of which these animals are capable. As is well known among critics of Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, the latters’ consideration of “the differences” among animals (and humans) as well as of their alleged capacity to lead lives “worth living” — also measured as “objective” capacities of the “objects,” while excluding the social and political construction of living conditions — has led them to reshuffle the ladder of rights at the bottom line: not just so as to include some animals but so as to exclude simultaneously some humans — be it at the level of eugenic breeding (selective aborting) or “euthanatic” killing. 19 What masquerades as an antispeciesist defense of (some) animals in fact is a form of superspeciesism, redefining a superrace of the “healthy” and “whole” with lives “worth living.” Similarly, the pseudo-objective “classes” (or “races” or “species”) of people whose rights were up for discussion in the “civil societies” of the West over the last few centuries were classes of “domesticated” — farm, factory farm, factory, plantation, and domestic — people: slaves (having been literally factory farmed and bred), peasants, domestic servants, workers, women, and black people (former slaves). Similarly, in Western European societies today, it is migrant workers, however settled, whose political rights are still being debated — that is, whether they should be granted any or continue to be deprived of them. In other words, “species” or “kinds” of people are not only defined by those at the top of the human hierarchy, but defined specifically in terms of their usefulness to and usability by them. Who shall be considered for rights at all, and hence by what criteria rights are to be granted or withheld, was and still is defined by white, male, property-owning, expert citizens, who also judge the candidates’ ability to fulfill these criteria — be it women’s or black people’s ability to think politically and to hold political office, or migrants’ ability to assimilate sufficiently and embrace the national political and cultural concerns of the country. 20 What we consider to be the speciesist paradigm has never been the simple binary opposition between “humans” and “animals,” but the complex interaction of speciesism, racism, sexism, classism, nationalism, etc., which crystallizes a narrow yet historically changing group of masters who give themselves the name “human.” The zoological (including the racist) continuum of classification blends with the classist instrumentalization of those classified, with the sexist division thrown in as and when required. Whether the criterion for animal rights now be sentience — judged not only from a human point of view, but from that of white Western scientific experts — or a life worth living, judged by a similar selfappointed assembly of human experts, these approaches to animal rights or animal liberation have nothing to do with challenging the power hierarchy: they simply aim to adjust some positions in the middle, leaving the hierarchy as such intact, above all leaving the position of judgment unchallenged. It is not speciesism that is being challenged, but merely the content of the categories constituted by speciesism. Even the most radical animal rights position, which would grant rights to all species of animals, is no different in theory from that which denies such rights: not only does it need the crucial boundary shored up between animals and nonanimals (or animals that qualify and those who do not), but it continues to arrogate to itself the right to grant rights. Neither does it help if we speak of intrinsic value: value is a fundamentally relational category, which implies the possibility of a lack of value as well as a subject defining and recognizing that value. The very project of granting and extending rights is fundamentally speciesist, exempting the human agent and judge into the category of subject ruling over an object world. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.43 Mb. Share with your friends:
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