Ethical Justifications Against Animal Rights Wrong and Outdated

Ethical Justifications Against Animal Rights Wrong and Outdated

Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy Monash University, 1995, Animal Liberation, p. 238-9

This result is not what the egalitarian philosophers of that period originally intended to assert. Instead of accepting the outcome to which they own reasonings naturally pointed, however, they tried to reconcile their beliefs in human equality and animal inequality by arguments that are either devious or myopic. For instance, one philosopher prominent in philosophical discussions of equality at the time was Richard Wasserstrom, then professor of philosophy and law at the University of California, Los Angeles. In is article, “Rights, Human Rights and Racial Discrimination,” Wasserstrom defined “human rights” as those rights that human beings have and nonhumans do not have. He then argued that there are human rights to well-being and to freedom. In defending the idea of a human right to well-being, Wasserstrom said that to deny someone relief from acute physical pain makes it impossible for that person to live a full or satisfying life. He then went on: “In a real sense, the enjoyment of these goods differentiates human from nonhuman entities.” The problem is that when we look back to find to what the expression “these goods” refers, the only example given is relief from acute physical pain – something that nonhumans may appreciate as well as humans. So if human beings have a right to relief from acute physical pain, it would not be a specifically human right, in the sense Wasserstrom had defined. Animals would have it too.

Faced with a situation in which they saw a need for some basis for the moral gulf that is still commonly thought to separate human beings from animals, but unable to find any concrete difference between human beings and animals that would do this without undermining the equality of human beings, philosophers tended to waffle. They resorted to high-sounding phrases like “the intrinsic worth of all men” (sexism was as little questioned as specieism) as if all men (humans?) had some unspecified worth that other beings do not have. Or they would say that human beings, and only human beings, are “ends in themselves” while “everything other than a person can only have a value for a person.”

As we saw in the preceding chapter, the idea of a distinctive human dignity and worth has a long history. In the present century, until the 1970s, philosophers had cast off the original metaphysical and religious shackles of this idea, and freely invoked it without feeling any need to justify the idea at all. Why should we not attribute “intrinsic dignity” or “intrinsic worth” to ourselves? Why should we not say that we are the only things in the universe that are intrinsic value? Our fellow human beings are unlikely to reject the accolades we so generously bestow upon them, and those to whom we deny the honor are unable to object. Indeed, when we think only of human beings it can be very liberal, very progressive, to talk of the dignity of all of them. In so doing we implicitly condemn slavery, racism, and other violations of human rights. We admit that we ourselves are in some fundamental sense on a par with the poorest, most ignorant members of our own species. It is only when we think of human beings as no more than a small subgroup of all the beings that inhabit our planet that we may realize that in elevating our own species we are at the same time lowering the relative status of all other species.

Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 34