Sentience Insufficient to Necessitate Rights

Cognitive Capacity Does Not Necessitate Rights Extension

Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 56

How convincing is his analysis, if we set to one side the criticisms of it that I have made thus far? The major premise presents the immediate difficulty. Cognitive capacity is certainly relevant to rights; it is a precondition of some rights, such as the right to vote. But most people would not think it either a necessary or a sufficient condition of having rights. Wise does not take on their arguments or, more to the point, their intuitions—for his major premise is itself an intuition and so he needs to give a reason for ignoring strongly contrary intuitions. Many people believe, for example, that a one-day old human fetus, though it has no cognitive capacity, should have a right to life; and the Supreme Court permits the fetus to be accorded a qualified such right after the first trimester of pregnancy, though the cognitive capacity of a second- or third-trimester fetus is very limited. It is difficult for Wise to resist the fetal analogy, because he thinks that a one-day-old infant has rights, even though the one-day-old infant has little greater cognitive capacity than the infant had a fetus a few hours earlier. Wise’s lack of concern with destroying a “conscious” computer is a further indication that he does not take the idea that rights follow cognitive capacity seriously. Most people would think it distinctly odd to proportion animal rights to animal intelligence, as Wise wishes to do, implying that dolphins, parrots, and ravens are entitled to more legal protection than horses (or most monkeys), and perhaps that the laws forbidding cruelty to animals should be limited to the most intelligent animals, inviting the crack, “They don’t have syntax, so we can eat them” And most of us would think it downright offensive to give greater rights to monkeys, let alone to computers, than to retarded people upon a showing that the monkey or the computer had a larger cognitive capacity than a profoundly retarded human being. Cognition and rights deservedness are not interwoven as tightly as Wise believes, though he is not, of course, the first to believe this.
DIFFERENCES IN RIGHTS AND TREATMENT SHOULD NOT BE BASED ON SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATIONS OF INTELLIGENCE*

Marc Bekoff, Professor of Biology, University of Colorado @ Boulder, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 120*

Lesley J. Rogers & Gisela Kaplan, Professors of Neuroscience and Animal Behavior, University of New England, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 193

We have presented evidence that current research into higher cognition of animals, and hence their degree of awareness, is in its infancy. A handful of species have been researched in depth, and current findings would suggest that many more species might be found to have exceptional cognitive abilities, if we only looked. Drawing a line and giving animal rights to a select few on the grounds of higher cognition, for instance, cannot, at this moment in time, be based in scientific facts because too few are at hand, that is, decisions at the policy level are undersupplied by scientific information.