Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
AT: “Animals Lack Empathy”
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- **Answer To: Problems with Recognizing Animal Rights**
- Slavery Abolition Proves Obstacles to Animal Liberation can be Overcome
AT: “Animals Lack Empathy”NON HUMAN ANIMALS DO EXHIBIT ALTRUISM Bryan G. Norton, professor of philosophy, science and technology, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary essays in the philosophy of conservation biology, p. 386 Field studies of social behavior of wild animals of course reveal behaviors very analogous to altruism, but our reluctance to say unqualifiedly that such behavior is voluntary (a requirement that is currently at issue) causes us to pause before calling it truly altruistic. But when the dominant male in a gorilla band stays behind and sacrifices himself in order to protect the band from poachers, the analogy seems strong and we have no problem seeing the heroism involved; nobody would quarrel, I think, with calling this animal altruism. Further analogous behavior can be recognized in far less complex creatures than gorillas; army ants sacrifice themselves by the thousands by marching into a stream to create a bridge of dead bodies for their advancing comrades behind them.
Animal Rights Can Be Recognized in Pragmatic MannerMUST BALANCE ABSOLUTE MORAL IDEALS WITH PRAGMATIC STRATEGY Kim Stallwood, PETA, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 201 The task of the animal advocacy movement is to challenge the cultural, political, and scientific assumptions of speciesism through the pursuit of a strategy that balances a utopian vision of animal liberation with a pragmatic political agenda for achieving rights for animals. If successful, this strategy will achieve two goals: The community of [human] equals will be extended to include all nonhuman animals, and nonhuman animals will be accorded under the law the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.
Dale Jamieson, Professor of philosophy, University of Colorado @ Boulder, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 224-5 One source of our resistance may be this: we are unsure what recognizing our equality with the other great apes would mean for our individual behavior and our social institutions. Would they be allowed to run for public office? Would we be required to establish affirmative action programs to compensate for millennia of injustices? To some extent, this unclarity comes from the narrowness of our vision, and to some extent because there are significant questions involved that cannot be answered in advance. Humans often seem to have failures of imagination when considering radical social change. A world without slavery was unfathomable to many white southerners prior to the American Civil War. Life without apartheid is still unimaginable to many South Africans. One reason we may resist radical social change is because we cannot imagine the future, and we fear what we cannot imagine. ANIMAL LIBERATION ADVOCACY DOES NOT REQUIRE AN “ALL-OR-NOTHING” APPROACH Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Rain Without Thunder, p. 161-2 I have been unable to find anyone who argues that the animal rights advocate is somehow committed to violent revolution. Robert Garner argues that rights theory can support “extreme forms of direct action in defense of animal rights,” although “Regan himself fails to draw the revolutionary conclusions that appear logically to follow from his philosophical arguments.” Instead, Regan extols “the virtues of Ghandian principles of non-violent civil disobedience,” which Garner pejoratively likens to threatening to scream until one makes oneself sick. But Garner does not argue that rights theory compels any particular “extreme forms of direct action,” and he fails to explain why Regan cannot carry forward revolutionary conclusions in a nonviolent manner. In any event, I do not thing that anything about the macro component of rights theory clearly requires the individual to seek social and legal change that will lead to the abolition of all animal exploitation, although the micro component does direct the individual not to participate in those institutions of exploitation. Indeed, some of the reasons Regan gives in support of Ghandian nonviolence may be reasons against any incremental action that includes violence against humans or nonhumans, or even against property crimes that do not involve removing animals from harm’s way.
Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 44 The idea of granting proportional liberty rights accords with how judges often think. They may give fewer legal rights to a human who lacks autonomy, but they don’t make her a thing. A severely retarded human adult or child who lacks the mental wherewhital to participate in the political process may still move about freely. Judges may give narrower legal rights to her. A severely mentally limited human adult or child might not have the right to move in the world at large, but may move freely within her home or within an institution. Judges may give parts of a complex right (remember, what we normally think of as a legal right is actually a bundle of them). A profoundly retarded human might have a claim to bodily integrity but lack the power to waive it, thus being un able to consent to a risky medical procedure or the withdrawal of life-saving medical treatment. Slavery Abolition Proves Obstacles to Animal Liberation can be OvercomeTHERE WERE PRACTICAL PROBLEMS WITH ABOLISHING HUMAN SLAVERY AS WELL—DIDN’T JUSTIFY ITS CONTINUATION Paola Cavalieri & Peter Singer, Editor Edica & Animali and Professor of Bioethics @ Princeton, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 310 Finally, we cannot ignore doubts about the practical feasibility of the project, and the concrete implications of admitting chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans into the community of equals. Quite novel problems are likely to arise, but they will not be insuperable, and as we overcome each one, we will reveal the spurious nature of the alleged obstacles to overcoming the boundaries between species. In fact, difficulties also occurred in similar situations involving humans, but this was no reason to abandon the overall plan of emancipation. Readers will not need to be reminded that the liberation of American slaves after the Civil War was not sufficient to achieve equal civil rights for them. Instead, a new set of obstacles to equality arose, some of which were overcome only by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, while others remain a problem today.
Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 239-40 The obstacles to basic legal rights for any nonhuman animal, physical, economic, political, religious, historical, legal and psychological, that I set out in Chapter 2 are major and real. But despite the blindness of even our greatest citizens, these obstacles have been hurdled before, at least with regard to humans. The most significant example is the abolition of human slavery, within decades after the American Revolution. “Considering that slavery had been globally accepted for millennia, it is encouraging that people were able to make such a major shift in their moral view, especially when a cause like abolition conflicted with strong economic interests,” David Brion Davis has written. “We can still learn from history the invaluable lesson that an enormously powerful and profitable evil can be overcome.” Then we will have taken the first and most crucial step toward unlocking the cage. Judges must recognize that even using a human yardstick, at least some nonhuman animals are entitled to recognition as legal persons. 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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