Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Ethical Justifications Against Animal Rights Wrong and Outdated
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- Descartes Indicts
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Ethical Justifications Against Animal Rights Wrong and OutdatedMANY LAWS EXIST TODAY ARE LEFTOVERS FROM AN OLDER TIME – NONE MORE UNJUST THEN THE THING-HOOD OF NON-HUMAN ANIMALS Steven M. Wise, Professor Animal Rights Law at the Harvard Law School, 2000, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” Questia p. 24-25 Law--good, mediocre, and bad--tends to survive, borrowed from one age by another. This borrowing of law, whether consciously or unconsciously (as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the great American judge believed), has long been the primary workaday business of lawmakers. 4 Professor Alan Watson, an expert in comparing the law of different legal systems in different ages, tells us that "to a truly astounding degree the law is rooted in the past." 5 This makes sense. Borrowing law is simpler than constantly beginning anew. It provides continuity and stability. But when we borrow past law, we borrow the past. The law of a modern society often springs from a different time and place, perhaps even from a culture that may have believed in an entirely different cosmology or belief about how the universe works. 6 Legal rules that may have made good sense when fashioned may make little sense when transplanted to a vastly different time, place, and culture. Raised by age to the status of self-evident truths, ancient legal rules mindlessly borrowed may perpetrate ancient injustices that may once have been less unjust because we knew no better. But they may no longer reflect shared values and often constitute little more than evidence for the extraordinary respect that lawmakers have for the past. 7 Early this century, the philosopher George Santayana famously claimed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 8 Every legal rule has its tangled history. Sometimes that history has nothing to do with whether a borrowed law is just in a new and different context. Holmes explained that often "(s)ome ground of policy is thought of that which seems to explain it and to reconcile it with the present state of things: and then the rule adapts itself to the new reasons which have been found for it, and enters on a new career." 9 But this is not always so. Sometimes a rule does not embark upon a new career at all but becomes an anachronism stubbornly holding out in defiance of modern sensibilities. Whole books about these leftover laws have been written to amuse us. We think it's funny when a law enacted at the turn of the last century still requires someone to walk in front of an automobile with a lantern to warn unwary horsemen of its approach. We may be less amused to learn that other laws demand a belief in God in order to hold public office. Few legal rules are as doddering, or as unjust, as the legal thinghood of every nonhuman animal. Some untangling will be necessary to spur its overdue reconsideration. 10 Like Theseus in the palace of the Minotaur, we will follow its winding thread through the labyrinth of legal history. It will lead us to the most ancient legal systems known. Descartes IndictsDESCARTES’ VIEW THAT ANIMALS CAN BE TREATED HOWEVER WE WISH NOT WIDELY ENDORSED Cass Sunstein, Law Professor, University of Chicago, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 5-6 If we understand “rights” to be legal protections against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial. Of course some people, including Descartes, have argued that animals lack emotions and that people should be allowed to treat them however they choose. But to most people, including sharp critics of the animal rights movement, this position seems unacceptable. Almost everyone agrees that people should not be able to torture animals or to engage in acts of cruelty against them. And indeed, state law includes a wide range of protections against cruelty and neglect. We can build on state laws to define a simple, minimalist position in favor of animal rights: The law should prevent acts of cruelty to animals. Cohen IndictsCOHEN’S LIMITATION OF RIGHTS TO THOSE OF THE SAME “KIND” ILLOGICAL Steven M. Wise, animal rights attorney and law professor, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 543-4 Probably the strongest argument that just being human is necessary for the possession of fundamental equality rights ha been offered by Carl Cohen, who has argued that at least moral rights should be limited to all and only human beings. “The issue,” said Cohen, “is one of kind” (Cohen 1986, 866). He acknowledges that some humans lack autonomy and the ability to make moral choices. However, because humans as a “kind” possess this ability, it should be imputed to all humans, regardless of their actual abilities. But Cohen’s argument can succeed only if the species, H. sapiens, can nonarbitrarily be designed as the boundary of a relevant “kind.” That is doubtful. Other classifications, some wider, such as animals, vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes, and at least one narrower—normal adult humans—also contain every fully autonomous human. As well as being logically flawed, Cohen’s argument for group benefits is normatively flawed. It ‘assumes that we should determine how an individual is to be treated, not only the basis of its qualities but on the basis of other individuals’ qualities.’ Rachels calls the opposing moral idea ‘moral individualism’ and defines it to mean that ‘how an individual may be treated to be determined, not by considering his group membership, but by considering his own particular characteristics’. It is individualism, and not group benefits, that is more consistent with the overarching principles and values of a liberal democracy and that has the firmer basis in present law. 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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