Animal Rights Strategy Fails – Will Never Gain Acceptance by Public or Leaders

Animal Rights Strategy Fails – Will Never Gain Acceptance by Public or Leaders

Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 31-2

However, now we have briefly addressed the question of the moral purpose of rights-attributions, it is possible to go on to ask further questions about how far, under various actual or possible conditions, the attribution of rights succeeds in achieving that purpose; whether that purpose is itself made necessary only because of alterable social conditions; and whether some other set of moral concepts might not serve the subjects of rights-attributions better. The supporters of rights for animals have generally hoped that the moral authority of the idea of human rights could be drawn upon and extended for the benefit of nonhumans. Understandably, they have been less concerned with addressing the long tradition of radical criticism of the discourses and practices of rights in the human case. Understandable though this is, I shall argue that it is mistaken. More specifically, the liberal-individualist concept of rights which Regan adopts is open to a number of powerful objections, many of which apply equally or even more strongly when that concept is applied across the species-boundary.

Animal Rights Strategy Fails – Systemic Bias Proves Inadequacy of Rights

Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 42

If judicial attitudes reflect society’s, most judges believe their health or the health of their families and friends may depend, in part, upon the use of nonhuman animals in biomedical research. They probably eat animal flesh, drink animal fluids, wear animal skins and fur, take their children to circuses to enjoy the “performances” of captive nonhuman animals, hunt them, and participate in some of the numerous ways in which society exploits nonhuman animals. Judges have a personal stake in the outcome of cases that decide whether nonhuman animals have legal rights in much the same way that judges of the antebellum American South had personal stakes in the outcome of slavery cases. They will inevitably be biased, and their biases will just as inevitably infect their decisions.
NEGATIVE RIGHTS INSUFFICIENT TO PROTECT INTERESTS OF NONHUMAN ANIMALS

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 307

In the human case, the capabilities approach does not operate with a fully comprehensive conception of the good, because of the respect it has for the diverse ways in which people choose to live their lives in a pluralistic society. It aims at securing some core entitlements that are held to be implicit in the idea of a life with dignity, but it aims at capability, not functioning, and it focuses on a small list. In the case of human-animal relations, the need for restraint is even more acute, since animals will not in the fact be participating directly in the framing of political principles, and thus they cannot revise them over time should they prove inadequate.

And yet there is a countervailing consideration: Human beings affect animals’ opportunities for flourishing pervasively, and it is hard to think of a species that one could simply leave alone to flourish in its own way. The human species dominates the other species in a way that no human individual or nation has ever dominated other humans. Respect for other species’ opportunities for flourishing suggests, then, that human law must include robust, positive political commitments to the protection of animals, even though, had human beings not so pervasively interfered with animals’ way of life, the most respectful course might have been simply to leave them alone, living the lives that they make for themselves.

David Nibert, Professor of sociology, Wittenburg University, 2002, Animal Rights/Human Rights: entanglement of oppression and liberation, p. 245

Observing the incongruity between hopefulness for liberation and justice with the actual nature of corporate capitalism, sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “Liberals have always claimed that the liberal state—reformist, legalistic, and somewhat libertarian—was the only state that could guarantee freedom. And for the relatively small group whose freedom it safeguarded, this was perhaps true. But unfortunately that group always remained a minority perpetually en route to becoming everyone.”

Animal Rights Strategy Fails – Non-Rights Discourse More Effective

Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 40-1

However, there is a sound point to be made here. It is that good moral reasoning cannot of itself produce right action: for this to happen, actors may act morally because they want to do what is morally right, or they may act morally because that is what they would wish to do independently of moral considerations. Also, a variety of different moral considerations might each produce grounds for the same action. So, accepting that the purpose of the philosophy of animal rights is to protect the interests, or well-being of nonhuman animals, it may be that this purpose may be served by other means than action motivated by reasoned conviction that animals have rights. In particular, transformed social relations between humans and animals in the direction of eliminating the kinds of institutionalized “reification” and “commodification” I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, might be expected to facilitate more benign and compassionate moral sentiments. In such a transformed context, the need for moral or legal regulation, whilst still present, would be far less pervasive.
MORAL DISCOURSE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN EXTENSION OF “RIGHTS” TO PROTECT INTERESTS OF “DOMESTICATED” ANIMALS

Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 37-8

For now, however, my task is to try to draw some lessons from the foregoing discussion of the radical critique of rights as it bears on the question of the moral standing of nonhuman animals. To do this, I shall start with a provisional distinction between animals in the wild and those which are in some way or another bound up in human social life. I shall consider the latter first. Since it seems unlikely that any of these are capable of full moral agency, it makes no sense to attribute what I have called “self-determination” rights to them. Since these animals, or, more generally, their ancestors, have been removed by human social practices from their ‘natural’ habitats, it is these same human social practices and relations for their well-being. The presupposition of a ‘negative’ liberal concept of rights, that the right-holder can be assumed capable of autonomously securing its well-being so long as it is not interfered with, is simply absent in these cases. Where animal-involving practices by their nature harm the interests of animals in ways that cannot be morally justified, then there is a duty to transform or abolish those practices. Where the practice is one within which the animals can flourish, then the obligation on the relevant human agent is a positive duty to act for that end. In either type of case, it seems unlikely that a concept of “basic” rights will be sufficient.
STRONG PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR ANIMAL “RIGHTS” IS REALLY SUPPORT FOR HUMANE TREATMENT

Donald G. Lindburg, Zoology Society of San Diego, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 472-3