Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights

**Should Not Recognize Animal Rights**

No Moral Obligation to Animals

Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 64-5

I feel no obligation to defend this reaction, any more than I do to prove that my legs remain attached to my body when I am asleep, or for that matter when I am awake. My certitude about my bodily integrity is deeper than any proof that could be offered of it to refute a skeptic. Likewise the superior claim of the human infant than of the dog on our consideration is a moral intuition deeper than any reason that could be given for it and impervious to any reason that anyone could give against it. Membership in the human species is not a morally irrelevant fact, as the race and gender of human beings have come to seem. If the moral irrelevance of humanity is what philosophy teaches, so that we have to choose between philosophy and the intuition that says that membership in the human species is morally relevant, philosophy will have to go.

Moral intuitions can change. The difference between science and morality is that while it has never been true, whatever people believed, that the sun revolves around the earth, morality, which as a practical matter is simply a department of public opinion, changes unpredictably; there are no unchanging facts to anchor it. Someday we may think animals as worthy of our solicitude as human beings, or even more worthy. But that will mean that we have a new morality, not that philosophers have shown that we were making an erroneous distinction between animals and humans all along.
CAN’T GENERALIZE ABOUT ANIMAL RIGHTS – WHAT THEY ARE DUE DEPENDS ON THEIR SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP TO HUMANS

Ted Benton, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 38

In determining what might be meant by ‘interests’ or well-being for nonhuman species, it obviously will not do simply to extrapolate from the human cases. If we accept, for the purpose of the present argument, that the point of moral regulation is to secure individual well-being, then the content of this notion must be specified differently to take into account the species-specific requirements for each mode of life. In the case of domestic social animals, most notably pets such as dogs, at least some of the social needs of the animal are met through learned adaptations to human social norms. This implies that, if humans have obligations to secure the well-being of such animals in their charge, that responsibility includes responsibility for emotional and social well-being, beyond ensuring that the animal is fed and watered.

For other species, such as sheep and cattle, which, under traditional forms of husbandry, retained much of their pre-domestication forms of social life, the responsibility is to provide the conditions for those patterns of social life among the herds themselves to be maintained. This moral requirement would rule out intensive rearing regimes, but would not, as in the case of Regan’s rights theory, of itself rule out animal husbandry as such. However, the forms of animal husbandry which would be acceptable on this more socially-informed view of ‘vulnerability’ rights would be ones which also acknowledged the wider biophysical conditions of the mode of life of social species; that is their habitat requirements are to be understood as central to any full understanding of their well-being.

Kyle Ash, lobbying strategist at the European Environmental Bureau, 2005, Animal Law (INTERNATIONAL ANIMAL RIGHTS: SPECIESISM AND EXCLUSIONARY HUMAN DIGNITY,) 2005 (lexis)

21 Ruth Cigman claims that "death is not, and cannot be, a misfortune for any creature other than a human." n99 Cigman refutes that nonhumans should have even a basic right to life based on the following. The "range" of suffering is greater in humans. Humans have a greater capacity to desire not to die. Behavioral expression in humans indicates more profound mental experience. Loss of opportunities for accomplishment in life by humans is greater upon dying. Nonhumans blindly cling to life, while humans want to live because they value life. Therefore, nonhumans do not have a right to life, because of their incapacity to have categorical desires. Finally, she states that though "all human beings are human beings" is a tautology, it is a useful one.