Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Should Recognize Animal Rights
Download 1.43 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Should Reject Property Status of Animals
Should Recognize Animal RightsASSIGNING LIBERTY AND EQUALITY TO NON-HUMAN ANIMALS IS THE STRONGEST GROUND TO SECURE DIGNITY RIGHTS Steven M. Wise, Professor Animal Rights Law at the Harvard Law School, 2000, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” Questia p. 79-80 The thinking component of Western law has led to wide agreement on core values and principles. Liberty and equality are preferred over unfairness, invidious discrimination, and arbitrary restraints. The dignity-rights of nonhuman animals should be derived from these same principles and values and in the same ways. This is not just because it is the strongest ground for securing the dignity-rights of nonhuman animals, though it is. It is not just because both reason and fairness demand it, though they do. Arbitrary refusals to extend dignity-rights to those who would be entitled to them, if only they were human, looses a virulent injustice upon beings entitled to justice. Their awful irrationality, arbitrariness, and invidiousness undercut the foundations of our own fundamental rights.
Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 123 By definition, sentient beings experience. The capacity to experience should confer legal rights because that capacity creates a need for protection. Given humans’ propensity to needlessly harm other animals, nonhumans need legal rights to protect them from humans. For example, they need rights to life and liberty.
Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 42 The rights/welfare issue has, however, gone in a most peculiar direction in recent years. On one hand, many in the animal protection community appear to regard the rights/welfare distinction as involving a tedious and irrelevant philosophical distraction in light of the perceived inevitability of animal welfare and the supposed utopian and unrealistic nature of animal rights. On the other hand, many who support animal exploitation seem not only to recognize the philosophical, political, and economic relevance of the distinction but also to understand that animal rights is a concept that poses practical and immediate threats to at least some forms of animal exploitation.
Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 124 The right not to be treated as the property of others is a basic and different right from other rights we might have because it is the grounding for those other rights; it is the prelegal right that serves as the precondition for the possession of morally significant interests. The basic right is the right to equal consideration of one’s fundamental interests. Therefore, the basic right must be understood as prohibiting human slavery, or any other institutional arrangement that treats humans exclusively as means to the ends of others and not as ends in themselves. EXTENSION OF EQUALITY PRINCIPLES TO ANIMALS MEANINGLESS IF THEY ARE STILL REGARDED AS PROPERTY Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 125 Animals, like humans, have an interest in not suffering, but, as we have seen, the principle of equal consideration has no meaningful application to animal interests if they are the property of others just as it had no meaningful application to the interests of slaves. The interests of animals as property will almost always count for less than do the interests of their owners. Some owners may choose to treat their animals well, or even as members of their families as some do with their pets, but the law generally will not protect animals against their owners. Animal ownership as a legal institution inevitably has the effect of treating animals as commodities. Moreover, animals, like humans, have an interest in not suffering at all from the ways in which we use them, however “humane” that use may be. To the extent that we protect humans from being used in these ways and we do not extend the same protection to animals, we fail to accord equal consideration to animal interests in not suffering. MUST ABANDON “PROPERTY” STATUS TO TAKE ANIMAL INTERESTS SERIOUSLY Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 108 When it comes to other animals, we humans exhibit what can best be described as moral schizophrenia. Although we claim to take animals seriously and to regard them as having morally significant interests, we routinely ignore those interests for trivial reasons. In this essay, I argue that our moral schizophrenia is related to the status of animals as property, which means that animals are nothing more than things despite the many laws that supposedly protect them. If we are going to make good on our claim to take animal interests seriously, then we have no choice but to accord animals one right: the right not to be treated as property. Our acceptance that animals have this one right would require that we abolish and not merely better regulate our institutionalized exploitation of animals. Although this is an ostensibly radical conclusion, it necessarily follows from certain moral notions that we have professed to accept for the better part of 200 years. Moreover, recognition of this right would not preclude our choosing humans over animals in situations of genuine conflict. EQUALITY PRINCIPLE MEANINGLESS IF ANIMALS RETAIN PROPERTY STATUS Gary Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 122 The problem is that, as we have seen, there can be no meaningful balancing of interests if animals are property. The property status of animals a two-edged sword wielded against their interest. First, it acts as blinders that effectively block even our perception of their interests as similar to ours because human “suffering” is understood as any detriment to property owners. Second, in those instances in which human and animal interests are recognized as similar, animal interest will fail in the balancing because the property status of animals is always a good reason not to accord similar treatment unless to do so would property owners. Animal interests will almost always count for less than one; animals remain as they were before the nineteenth century—things without morally significant interests.
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:
|