Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Incremental Extension of Rights Fails
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Incremental Extension of Rights FailsINCREMENTAL APPROACH TO EXTENDING ANIMAL RIGHTS NOT WORKABLE Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 55 According to political theorist Robert Garner, Regan’s philosophy is an ‘absolutist approach’ in that he recognizes that rights theory requires the immediate and total abolition of all animal exploitation. Garner recognizes, however, that the rights theorist is not necessarily committed to this state of affairs. He states that Regan acknowledges that rightists ‘can support a gradual program but each step must, in itself, be abolitionist’. Garner doubts that this approach is workable. For example he argues that ‘surely there is much that can be done to improve the lot of animals short of abolition of a particular practice.’ More to the point, however, Garner argues that the incremental rights approach, which requires abolitionist steps, might work in the context of particular practices involved in vivisection (for example, an abolitionist step would be the elimination of toxicity tests altogether), but ‘this position does not regard reforms to animal agriculture as acceptable because, whatever the methods used, killing animals for foods continues.’
Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Rain Without Thunder, p. 184* Given that rights theory seeks as its long-term goal the abolition of institutionalized exploitation, can the individual, as a macro matter, advocate for incremental eradication of property status, or is the only legitimate incremental approach public education about the need to abolish immediately the use of animal products on the micro level and to demand complete and immediate abolition on the macro level? In the abstract, it would seem that pursuit of incremental steps toward eradiating property status would be acceptable. Upon closer examination, however, a central concern of rights theory militates against this conclusion. I have argued that using welfarist reform to achieve the eradication of property status cannot work as a structural matter because these reforms assume property status and reinforce it, and, by definition, property cannot have interests that are not expendable. Welfarist reform, however, is problematic for another reason. Regan’s primary objection to animal welfare is that even if it did reduce animal suffering (an empirically dubious point in its finest moments), it would still be immoral because it fails to respect the inherent value of the animal. When animal advocates argue, for example, that laboratories ought to be required to provide psychological stimulation for laboratory primates, they accept the proprietary relationship between the laboratory and “its” primates, and that position is problematic particularly for those who claim to accept rights theory. The rights advocate believes that the primates have the moral right today to be liberated from property status and that the continued institutionalized exploitation of the primates violates those moral rights. For the rights advocate to regard as acceptable a reform that supposedly reduces suffering for primates used in experiments is tantamount to the advocate’s ignoring the status of certain subjects-of-a-life today in the hope that the welfarist reform will lead to something better for other subjects-of-a-life tomorrow. This situation is problematic for rights theory for all the reasons that cause Regan to devote a major portion of the The Case for Animal Rights to a critique of theories, such as utilitarianism, that are focused around precisely these sorts of trade-offs. For the welfarist, who may believe that humans have rights but certainly believes that animals do not, these sorts of trade-offs do not crate a theoretical problem, because a central tenet of welfare though is that animal inte4rets can be traded away against a net gain for animals generally. For the rights advocate, however, whatever other nonbasic rights animals possess, they certainly possess the basic right not be treated exclusively as means to ends, the right to have their inherent (as opposed to instrumental) value recognized and respected and protected under the law. And they possess this moral right whether or not the legal system recognizes it. This right is violated by the instrumental treatment of animals, notwithstanding the assumption underlying welfarist reforms that the status of animals as property is legitimate. Incremental Extension of Rights FailsFRANCIONE REJECTS THE NOTION THAT APES DESERVE RIGHTS MORE THAN OTHER ANIMALS Gary Francione, Professor of Law at Rutgers. “An Interview with Professor Gary L. Francione on the State”. Friends of Animals 2002 http://www.friendsofanimals.org/programs/animal-rights/interview-with-gary-francione.html Yes. In 1993, I wrote an essay entitled “Personhood, Property, and Legal Competence” which was included in The Great Ape Project and I was one of the original signatories of the Declaration on the Rights of Great Apes. I was the first legal theorist to propose a theory of legal personhood for the great apes. But I was very careful in my 1993 essay to make the point that although the great apes were very similar to humans, that similarity was sufficient for their being legal persons but was not necessary. That is, I argued that the only characteristic that is required for personhood is sentience. If a nonhuman can feel pain, then we have a moral obligation not to treat that nonhuman exclusively as a means to our ends. If that being has other interests, then we ought to respect those interests as well, but a theory of rights should not be connected to this additional set of interests beyond sentience. To put the matter another way: just because a cow does not have the same cognitive characteristics as does a chimpanzee does mean that it is OK to eat cow any more than the fact that the cow may have different characteristics from a fish mean that it is OK to eat the fish. This is a central point in my newest book, Introduction to Animal Rights: sentience is the only characteristic that is necessary to have the right not to be treated as a thing or as property. Jane Goodall is currently urging that African people eat goats instead of chimpanzees. Why? Because chimpanzees are more “like us” than are goats? This makes no sense to me and Goodall’s position is the antithesis of the animal rights view. 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