Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Animal Rights Unnecessary: Can Meet Moral Obligations Without Rights
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Animal Rights Unnecessary: Can Meet Moral Obligations Without RightsCIVIL-RIGHTS APPROACH FOR EXTENDING ANIMAL RIGHTS FLAWED—PROPERTY APPROACH BETTER Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 58-9 There is a sad poverty of imagination in an approach to animal protection that can think of it only on the model of the civil rights movement. It is a poverty that reflects the blinkered approach of the traditional lawyer, afraid to acknowledge novelty and therefore unable to think clearly about the reasons pro or con for a departure from the legal status quo. It reflects also the extent to which liberal lawyers remain in thrall to the constitutional jurisprudence of the Warren Court and insensitive to the liberating potential of commodification. One way to protect animals is to make them property, because people tend to protect what they own; I shall give an illustration later. So Wise is another deer frozen in the headlights of Brown v Board of Education. He has overlooked not only the possibilities of animal-protecting commodification but also an approach to the question of animals’ welfare that is at once more conservative, methodologically as well as politically, but possibly more efficacious, than right mongering. That is simply to extend, and more vigorously enforce, the laws that forbid inflicting gratuitous cruelty on animals. We should be able to agree without help from philosophers and constitutional theorists that gratuitous cruelty is bad—condemnation is built into the word “gratuitous”—and few of us are either so sadistic, or so indifferent to animal suffering, that we are unwilling to incur at least modest costs to prevent gratuitous cruelty to animals; and anyone who supposes that philosophers and constitutional theorists can persuade people to incur huge costs to protect the interests of strangers is surely deluded. Wise gives vivid and disturbing examples of cruel treatment of chimpanzees but it is mistaken to think that the best way to prevent such cruelty is to treat chimpanzees like human beings. The best way is to forbid treating chimpanzees, or any other animals with whom we sympathize, cruelly. If that is all that, in the end, “animal rights” are to amount to, we don’t need the vocabulary of rights, which is then just an impediment to clear thought as well as a provocation in some legal and philosophical quarters. ETHICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS CENTERED AROUND ANIMAL RIGHTS INEFFECTIVE WAY TO REDUCE THEIR SUFFERING Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 66-7 What is needed to persuade people to alter their treatment of animals is not philosophy, let alone an atheistic philosophy (for one of the premises of Singer’s argument is that we have no souls) in a religious nation. It is to learn to feel animals’ pains as our pains and to learn that (if it is a fact, which I do not know) we can alleviate those pains without substantially reducing our standard of living and that of the rest of the world and without sacrificing medical and other scientific progress. Most of us, especially perhaps those of us who have lived with animals, have sufficient empathy for animals suffering to support the laws that forbid cruelty and neglect. We might go further if we knew more about animal feelings and about the existence of low-cost alternatives to pain-inflicting uses of animals. It follows that to expand and invigorate the laws that protect animals will require not philosophical arguments for reducing human beings to the level of the other animals but facts that will stimulate a greater empathic response to animal suffering and alleviate concern about the human costs of further measures to reduce animal suffering. If enough people come to feel the sufferings of these animals as their own, public opinion and consumer preference will induce the business firms and other organizations that inflict such suffering to change their methods. In just the same way, the more altruistic that American people become toward foreigners (for example, the impoverished populations of the Third World), the greater the costs that they will be willing to incur for the benefit of foreigners. Animal Rights Unnecessary: Can Meet Moral Obligations Without RightsFOCUS ON MORAL ARGUMENTS UNDERCUTS POLITICAL SUPPORT FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS AGENDA Robert Garner, Professor of Politics, University of Leicester, 1996, Animal Rights: the changing debate, ed. Robert Garner, p. 126 There is no doubt that the animal protection movement can be a more effective campaigning force. Ryder for instance, point to the constant need for a well-argued and balanced case when seeking to persuade decisionmakers and the wider public. In addition, a theme of this book has been the importance of linking animal protection with other issues such as public health and the environment. As Stallwood argues, this would be a means of mobilizing the widest possible support. Too often, though, neither of these factors are present. It would be wrong to single out the animal protection movement for exclusive blame here but it is true that the overly moral and confrontational stance of many animal rights campaigns does hinder the development of a case which will be persuasive to the widest number of constituencies. HUMANCENTRIC APPROACH TO ANIMAL WELFARE MORE APPEALING Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 70 The approach that I am urging, the humancentric, takes account of such things as worry about leveling down people to animals, people’s love of nature and of particular animal species, and people’s empathic concern with suffering animals (feeling their pain as our pain). The approach, which draws sustenance from the statistics that I quoted earlier from the Department of Agriculture, assigns no intrinsic value to animal welfare. It seeks reasons strictly of human welfare for according or denying rights to animals, and focuses on the consequences for us of recognizing animal rights. Those consequences are both good (benefits) and bad (costs—a word I am using broadly without limitation to pecuniary costs) and can be either direct or indirect. A direct humancentric benefit of giving animals rights would be the increase in human happiness brought about by knowledge that the animals we like are being protected. There is nothing surprising about human altruism toward animals. Remember what I said earlier about the dependence of early man on animals. The relationship with animals which that dependence established was not primarily about kindness, but one of use. As our dependence on animals declined, however, our empathy with animals could stand free from any felt need to kill. If the current regard for animals on the part of members of the animal rights movement seems sentimental, we should remind ourselves that the sentiments are in all likelihood the expression of an adaptive preference that we acquired in the ancestral environment.
Richard Posner, Federal Circuit Judge, 2004, Animal Rights: Current debates and new directions, eds. Sunstein & Nussbaum, p. 51 There is growing debate over whether to recognize “animal rights”—which means whether to create legal duties to treat animals in approximately the same way we treat the human residents of our society, whether, in effect, animals, or some animals, shall be citizens. I shall argue that the best approach to the question of animal rights is a humancentric one that appeals to our developing knowledge and sentiments about animals and that eschews on the one hand philosophical argument and on the other hand a legal-formalist approach to the issue (an approach that turns out, however to have distinct affinities with philosophical analysis.)
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