AT: “All Humans Have Potential for Autonomy and Reasoning”

AT: “All Humans Have Potential for Autonomy and Reasoning”

“POTENTIAL” FOR HUMAN CAPACITY AMONG MARGINAL HUMAN CASES DOES NOT JUJSTIFY DISTINCTION WITH GREAT APES

Daniel A. Dombrowski, 1997, Babies and Beasts: the argument from marginal cases, p. 148-9

If it is wrong to test the effects of toxic gas on a severely retarded human being, is it not also wrong to do these things on an animal with equivalent or (in the case of great apes) higher mental capacities: Some might claim at this point that infants have at least the potential for rationality or autonomy and that marginal cases would have had these potentials were it not for their tragic condition, but that animals, including the great apes, have no such tragedy. Evelyn Pluhar asks some interesting questions regarding this claim: “What moral weight could thwarted potential have on such a view? Does one’s degree of moral significance increase depending on how close to personhood one was when misfortune struck? Does a human damaged as a three-month-old fetus count for less than a child who became brain-damaged after birth? At what point, if any, does a victim of thwarted potential gain a right to life? Perhaps only if he or she had achieved personhood, then tragically lost it?” Pluhar is distinguishing here between a strict potentiality view and a gradualist potentiality view, and she rightly thinks that both are inadequate. Both views have this defect: they can at most allow ascribing a right to life to a nonperson who once was a potential person or potentially rational or autonomous. Those who were conceived without this potential (say, by having defective genes) have no such potential to thwart. Perhaps it will be objected at this point that a human nonperson has a “species potential” that the animal nonperson does not have (accepting for the moment the questionable assumption that great apes are not persons). Pluhar’s response to this objection is crucial because it focuses attention on the question-begging character of much opposition to AMC: “Tempting though this line of argument may be, we cannot use it support speciesism, for it assumes the very point at issue. According to speciesism, membership in a species where personhood is the nor m is morally relevant. We cannot establish this conclusion by asserting that nonpersons belonging to species where personhood is the norm are thereby more morally significant than nonpersons who are in the normal range for their species. This argument is plainly circular. Thus, however it is interpreted, the thwarted potential argument fails to support any speciesist conclusions.”

AT: “Animals Do Not Have Souls”

Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 15-6

Also, the soul issue isn’t relevant to basic rights. Why on Earth (or beyond) would it be more justifiable to inflict suffering and death on someone who doesn’t have a soul than on someone who does? (In earlier eras, Christians frequently tortured or killed humans in an alleged effort to save their souls).

Anyone who believes that an afterlife compensates humans, but not nonhumans, for undeserved suffering should find nonhuman suffering more appalling than human suffering. Anyone who believes that only humans experience life after death should find nonhuman death more tragic than human death. The soul criterion makes no sense.

AT: “Rights Require Capacity to Enter into Contracts”

Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 16

Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 16-7

Laws restrict human behavior. Animal rights advocates want laws that will prohibit humans from exploiting and otherwise harming nonhumans. They don’t seek to protect nonhumans within human society. They seek to protect nonhumans from human society. The goal is an end to nonhumans’ “domestication” and other forced “participation” in human society. Nonhumans should be allowed to live free in natural environments, forming their own societies.

The laws that currently oppress nonhumans are contracts among humans. No speciesist argues that those laws should be void because nonhumans had no part in framing them.