Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
AT: “Animals Lack Capacity for Moral Reasoning”
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- AT: “Humans Possess Intrinsic Value that Distinguish Them From Animals”
- AT: “All Humans Have Potential for Autonomy and Reasoning”
AT: “Animals Lack Capacity for Moral Reasoning”MANY ANIMALS DEMONSTRATE MORE MORAL BEHAVIOR THAN MANY HUMANS Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 27 Many humans routinely abuse other humans as well. Child abuse, spouse abuse, and other forms of intra-human violence are widespread. Who’s more moral: the rapist who leaves his victim to die or the dog who fetches help for the victim? Many nonhumans evince more goodness than many humans.
Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 28 In experiments by psychologist Stanley Milgram, human subjects were told to give a man an electric shock every time that he answered a question incorrectly. Subjects faced no penalty if they refused to comply. Nevertheless, the majority pressed switches signaling increasingly powerful shocks, even after the man had started to plead and scream. Unknown to the subjects, the electrical shocks were fake. In similar experiments using rhesus monkeys, the shocks were real. Monkeys learned to pull chains for food. Then one of the chains was linked to a shock generator. Now, in addition to releasing food, this chain would inflict an electric shock on another monkey, visible in an adjoining cage. To get adequate food, a monkey to needed to pull both chains. Unlike Milgram’s subjects, the monkeys were forced to choose between equally grave alternatives: shock another monkey, or go hungry. Most monkeys went hungry. Apparently unwilling to risk giving even a single shock, two stopped pulling either chain and went completely without food—one for five days, the other for twelve. In the human experiments, most subjects believed that they were inflicting pain on a man guilty of nothing worse than incorrect answers. In the monkey experiments, humans robbed innocent beings of their freedom, deprived them of food, and subjected them to electric shocks. In contrast, most of the monkeys showed altruism, at considerable expense to themselves. Who’s consciously moral?
Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 28 Even if no nonhuman were capable of self-conscious morality, what difference would that make? Many humans—infants, sociopaths, adults with severe mental disabilities—aren’t capable of self-conscious morality. That doesn’t entitle us to deprive them of basic rights. AT: “Humans Possess Intrinsic Value that Distinguish Them From Animals”APPEAL TO “INTRINSIC DIGNITY OF HUMANS” AS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST ANIMAL RIGHTS IS A PHILOSOPHICAL COP OUT Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy Monash University, 1995, Animal Liberation, p. 239 The truth is that the appeal to the intrinsic dignity of human beings appears to solve the egalitarian philosopher’s problems only as long as it goes unchallenged. Once we ask why it should be that all human beings – including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest—have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals. In fact, these two questions are really one: talk of intrinsic dignity or moral worth does not help, because any satisfactory defense of the claim that all and only human beings have intrinsic dignity would need to refer to some relevant capacities or characteristics that only human beings have, in virtue of which they have this unique dignity or worth. To introduce ideas of dignity and worth as a substitute for other reasons for distinguishing humans and animals is not good enough. Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments.
Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 32 Human newborns, fetuses, even ovums, sometimes have legal rights. This might have something to do with autonomy. They may not have it now, but it’s believed they have the potential. And if they have the potential, the viewpoint holds that we should treat them as if they had autonomy now. But the potential for autonomy no more justifies treating one as if one had autonomy any more, and probably less, than does one’s potential for dying justify that one should be treated as if one were dead. Philosopher Joel Feinberg thinks allocating rights based on potential is a logical error. Potential autonomy gives rise to potential rights. Actual autonomy gives rise to actual rights. The potentiality argument moreover fails to explain how common law can grant dignity-rights to adult humans who never enjoyed autonomy, and never will. Isaiah Berlin wrote, “If the essence of men is that they are autonomous beings…then nothing is worse than to treat them as if they were not autonomous, but natural objects, played on by casual influences at the mercy of external stimuli.” The same is true for any being who meets the requirement for practical autonomy. She is entitled to liberty rights. Because much of the world, certainly the West, links basic liberty rights to autonomy, and because autonomy is often seen as the foundation of human dignity, in Rattling the Cage, I called basic liberty rights “dignity-rights.”
Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 123 As I demonstrated in chapter 5, new-speciesist rationales for favoring humans and the nonhumans who most resemble them are unfair and logically inconsistent. Because much suffering isn’t directly related to understanding, the extent to which a particular individual possesses the understanding of a normal adult human is “beside the point,” Steve Sapontzis notes. The law prohibits the torture of humans because they can suffer, not because they have language (some don’t) or are rational (I often feel that most aren’t). Other animals do reason, including in humanlike ways, but neither physical nor psychological suffering requires human-like intelligence. Beatings hurt and hunger aches whatever an individual’s IQ. Most animals will suffer from imposed immobility. Social animals will suffer from isolation. Curious ones will suffer from monotony. Suffering matters, whoever is doing the suffering. And thought and perception matter, whoever is doing the thinking and perceiving. Each sentient being represents a mental world. Any form of consciousness should suffice to confer legal personhood.
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