Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
AT: “Animals Can’t Demand Their Own Rights”
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- AT: “Animals Lack Level of Sentience Sufficient for Ethical Concern”
AT: “Animals Can’t Demand Their Own Rights”HIERARCHICAL BASIS OF OPPRESSION NECESSITATES HUMANS TO MAKE THE DEMAND FOR INCLUSION OF NONHUMANS Steven M. Wise, Professor Animal Rights Law at the Harvard Law School, 2000, “Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals” Questia p. 13-14 Aristotle forged many intellectual molds in science, ethics, taxonomy, politics, psychology, and philosophy. Some were not broken for hundreds, even thousands, of years. One of them was the syllogism. He virtually invented it ("Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal"). Whether intentional or not, Aristotle's own place on the Great Chain of Being illustrated a syllogism. It was this: "Greek males occupy the top rung of the Great Chain of Being; I am a Greek male; therefore I occupy the top rung." Over the centuries, it generalized to this: "Only groups to which I belong occupy the top ring; I belong to those groups; therefore I occupy the top rung." It has remained in constant use in determining who has what rights. We'll call it "Aristotle's Axiom," and it is an axiom because no one ever, ever, assigns a group to which he or she belongs to any place in a hierarchy of rights other than the top. Mel Brooks nicely summarized Aristotle's Axiom in his movie The History of the World, Part One: "It's great to be the king!"
Daniel A. Dombrowski, 1997, Babies and Beasts: the argument from marginal cases, p. 144 The great apes are, like children and people with a mental handicap, unable to claim their due. Yet it seems to me that they should receive their due, even if what they are due is in some ways below that of normal adult human beings. Remember that Regan holds the basis for this desert to lie in inherent value, a view that he expresses quite clearly and without G.E.Moore—like mystery: “It remains to be asked…what underlies the possession of inherent value. Some are tempted by the idea that life itself is inherently valuable. This view would authorize attributing inherent value to chimpanzees, for example, and so might find favor with some people who oppose using these animals as means to our ends. But this view would also authorize attributing inherent value to anything and everything that is alive, including, for example, crabgrass, lice, bacteria and cancer cells. It is exceedingly unclear, to put the point as mildly as possible, either that we can have a duty to treat these things with respect or that any clear sense can be given to the idea that we do. More plausible by far is the view that those individuals who have inherent value are the subjects of a life—are, that is, the experiencing subjects of a life that fares well or ill for them over time, those who have an individual experiencing welfare, logically independent of their utility relative to the interests or welfare of others. Competent humans are subjects of a life in this sense. But so, too, are those incompetent humans who have concerned us. Indeed, so too are those incompetent humans who have concerned us. Indeed, so too are many other animals: cats and dogs, hogs, and sheep, dolphins and wolves, horses and cattle—and, most obviously, chimpanzees and the other nonhuman great apes.” Surely the great apes qualify as being subjects of a life with individual experience welfare. This is not obvious to some perhaps because (as Rollin argues, echoing Clark) it has only recently been noticed that certain human beings are subjects of a life: women, blacks, homosexuals, native populations, the insane, the handicapped, and so on. One major step toward extending the franchise to the great apes is taken when it is noticed that there exists no good reason not to extend it, “that there is no morally relevant difference between humans and animals which can rationally justify not assessing the treatment of animals by the machinery of our consensus ethic for humans.” In addition, Rollin, like Clark, is comfort able with the Aristotelian notion that each animal has a telos that can be more easily thwarted if basic rights are not extended to help them. Perhaps it is not part of a chimpanzee’s telos to comprehend English, but the fact that a ten-year-old chimpanzee can comprehend it better than a two-year-old child indicates that the chimpanzee’s telos must be rather sophisticated. AT: “Animals Lack Level of Sentience Sufficient for Ethical Concern”SHOULD PRESEUME THAT FARM ANIMALS CAN FEEL PAIN AND SUFFER Joyce D’Silva, Chief Executive of Compassion in World Farming, 2008, The Future of Animal Farming: renewing the ancient contract, eds. M. Dawkins & R. Bonney, p. 40 The truth can perhaps best be found in our own common sense – and in our hearts. If behaving towards farm animals with understanding and compassion is too hard to swallow, then I think we can at least agree to give them the benefit of the doubt in how we treat them. Let us assume that they feel pain and can suffer both physically and psychologically. Let us make this our premise when we design new systems and breeding methodologies. Let the well-being of the animals be our guide.
Bernard E. Rollin, Professor of Philosophy, Colorado State University, 1995, Farm Animal Welfare: social, bioethical, and research issues, p. 38-9 The common sense of science’s claim that one cannot know animal mental experience is bad philosophy. The same positivism that would exclude talk of animal consciousness from science would also exclude talk of an external world that exists independently of perception, talk of minds in other human beings, and the knowability of the past. Evolutionary continuity and neurophysiological and behavioral analogies across species favor the claim than animals experience pain, and the fact that the failure to feel pain is biologically disastrous in human beings so born or suffering from such conditions as Hansen’s disease is ample evidence that animals also feel pain and do not merely exhibit pain mechanisms and responses. In addition, although we cannot directly perceive thoughts and feelings in animals, we cannot directly perceive quanta and black holes either, or, for that matter, minds in other humans; all are postulated theoretical entities that are presumed to exist because they provide us with the best explanations for certain phenomena and enable us to predict features of those phenomena.
Bernard E. Rollin, Professor of Philosophy, Colorado State University, 1995, Farm Animal Welfare: social, bioethical, and research issues, p. 39 The key point for our purposes, however, is the incompatibility of the denial of animal consciousness and feeling with research into animal welfare, research demanded by the emerging social ethic we have detailed. Ordinary common sense now not only takes it for granted that animals can feel pain, distress, fear, anxiety, pleasure, boredom, happiness, and other morally relevant modalities of mutation; it now cares about that morally, and cares a great deal. Thus, any research undertaken as part of the attempt to meet social concern about farm animal welfare must accord not only with such social moral concerns but also with the ordinary commonsense view that animals can experience the morally relevant modalities of consciousness. Any attempt to deny this fundamental commonsense dictum is likely to destroy the credibility of the research as a vehicle for finding solutions to social concerns about animal welfare. As both Ian Duncan and I have forcefully pointed out, mental states and feelings are everything to welfare—even such physical interests as food and water are important essentially because their thwarting results in suffering (a state of consciousness).
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