AT: “Animals Lack Rationality”

AT: “Animals Lack Rationality”

Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 126-7

Although Bentham explicitly rejected the position that, because animals lack characteristics beyond sentience, such as self-awareness, we could treat them as things, he maintained that because animals lack self-awareness, we do not violate the principle of equal consideration by using animals as our resources as long as we give equal consideration to their interests in not suffering.

Bentham’s position is problematic for several reasons. Bentham failed to recognize that although particular animal owners might treat their animal property kindly, institutionalized animal exploitation would, like slavery, become “the lot of large numbers,” and animals would necessarily be treated as economic commodities that were, like slaves, “abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor.” Moreover, Bentham never explained how to apply the principle of equal consideration to animals who were the property of humans. But most important, Bentham was simply wrong to claim that animals are not self-aware and have no interest in their lives.

Steven M. Wise, Professor Animal Rights Law at the Harvard Law School, 2000, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” Questia p. 141

Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 45-6

But just because law is so parochial, we mustn’t think human intelligence is the only intelligence. Intelligence is a complicated concept that intimately relates to an ability to solve problems. Biologist Bernd Heinrich says “we can’t credibly claim that one species is more intelligent than another unless we specify intelligent with respect to what, since each animal lives in a different world of its own sensory inputs and decoding mechanisms of those inputs.” Dolphins expert Diana Reis argues that intelligence cannot properly be conceived solely in human terms and condemns any assumption that “only our kind of intelligence is ‘real intelligence.’” We mustn’t think human self the only self or human abilities the only important mental abilities.

AT: “Animals Lack Capacity for Moral Reasoning”

H. Lyn White Miles, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee @ Chattanooga, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 53-4

In fact a problem for those who require reflective self-awareness or full rational faculties (or the potential thereof) for personhood, or only the most extensive altruistic social behavior, is that there are several categories of human that do not meet this definition. Sociopaths, who can feel compassion for themselves but not for their victims, are self-reflective, but have not internalized a sense of cultural morality; they are familiar with the culture’s morality, but their personal morality is purely egocentric. Severely mentally handicapped individuals and people who have extensive brain damage are not always self-reflective, yet we would consider them to be persons and protect them under the law. We excuse children and mentally impaired people from adult responsibility, but we maintain that killing them (unless it is officially sanctioned by the state) is murder because of their ‘potential’ to have full human faculties, which may never be realized. Ethically speaking, enculturated apes are analogous to children.
USING “MORAL CAPACITY” TO JUSTIFY RIGHTS ENTITLEMENT IS IMMORAL

Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 26

Of all the supposed reasons for denying rights to nonhumans, the most hypocritical is the claim that humans are morally superior. People who argue that only humans are sufficiently moral to deserve rights demonstrate their own immorality. They selfishly seek to keep speciesist abuse legal.
CAPACITY TO MAKE MORAL CHOICES NOT NECESSARY TO DESERVE EQUAL MORAL CONSIDERATION

Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy Monash University, 1995, Animal Liberation, p. 225

(Now, someone is sure to say, I have admitted that there is a significant difference between humans and other animals, and thus I have revealed the flaw in y case for the equality of all animals. Anyone to whom this criticism has occurred should read Chapter 1 more carefully. You will then find that you have misunderstood the nature of the case for equality I made there. I have never made the absurd claim that there are no significant differences between normal adult humans and other animals. My point is not that animals are capable of acting morally, but that the moral principle of equal consideration of interests applies to them as it applies to humans. That it is often right to include within the sphere of equal consideration beings who are not themselves capable of making moral choices is implied by out treatment of young children and other humans who, for one reason or another, do not have the mental capacity to understand the nature of moral choice. As Bentham might have said, the point is not whether they can choose, but whether they can suffer.)