Recent concern about the way humans treat animals has spawned a powerful social and political movement driven by the conviction that humans and certain animals are similar in morally significant ways, and that these similarities oblige humans to extend to those animals serious moral consideration, including rights. Though animal welfare movements, concerned primarily with humane treatment of pets, date back to the 1800s, modern animal rights activism has developed primarily out of concern about the use and treatment of domesticated animals in agriculture and in medical, scientific, and industrial research. The rapid growth in membership of animal rights organizations testifies to the increasing momentum of this movement. The leading animal rights group today, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), was founded in 1980 with 100 individuals; today, it has over 300,000 members. The animal rights activist movement has closely followed and used the work of modern philosophers who seek to establish a firm logical foundation for the extension of moral considerability beyond the human community into the animal community.
The nature of animals and appropriate relations between humans and animals have occupied Western thinkers for millennia. Traditional Western views, both religious and philosophical, have tended to deny that humans have any moral obligations to nonhumans. The rise of Christianity and its doctrine of personal immortality, which implies a qualitative gulf between humans and animals, contributed significantly to the dominant Western paradigm. When seventeenth century philosopher René Descartes declared animals mere biological machines, the perceived gap between humans and nonhuman animals reached its widest point. Jeremy Bentham, the father of ethical utilitarianism, challenged this view and fostered a widespread anticruelty movement and exerted powerful force in shaping our legal and moral codes. Its modern legacy, the animal welfare movement, is reformist in that it continues to accept the legitimacy of sacrificing animal interests for human benefit, provided animals are spared any suffering which can conveniently and economically be avoided.
In contrast to the conservatively reformist platform of animal welfare crusaders, a new radical movement began in the late 1970s. This movement, variously referred to as animal liberation or animal rights, seeks to put an end to the routine sacrifice of animal interests for human benefit. Inseeking to redefine the issue as one of rights, some animal protectionists organized around the well-articulated and widely disseminated utilitarian perspective of Australian philosopher Peter Singer.In his 1975 classic Animal Liberation, Singer argued that because some animals can experience pleasure and pain, they deserve our moral consideration. While not actually a rights position, Singer's work nevertheless uses the language of rights and was among the first to abandon welfarism and to propose a new ethic of moral considerability for all sentient creatures.
Animal rights activists dressed as monkeys in prison suits block the entrance to the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC, in protest of the use of animals in laboratory research. (Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.)
To assume that humans are inevitably superior to other species simply by virtue of their species membership is an injustice which Singer terms speciesism,an injustice parallel to racism and sexism.
Singer does not claim all animal lives to be of equal worth, nor that all sentient beings should be treated identically. In some cases, human interests may outweigh those of nonhumans, and Singer's utilitarian calculus would allow us to engage in practices which require the use of animals in spite of their pain, where those practices can be shown to produce an overall balance of pleasure over suffering.
Some animal advocates thus reject utilitarianism on the grounds that it allows the continuation of morally abhorrent practices. Lawyer Christopher Stone and philosophers Joel Feinberg and Tom Regan have focused on developing cogent arguments in support of rights for certain animals. Regan's 1983 book The Case For Animal Rights developed an absolutist position which criticized and broke from utilitarianism. It is Regan's arguments, not reformism or the pragmatic principle of utility, which have come to dominate the rhetoric of the animal rights crusade.
The question of which animals possess rights then arises. Regan asserts it is those who, like us, are subjects experiencing their own lives. By "experiencing" Regan means conscious creatures aware of their environment and with goals, desires, emotions, and a sense of their own identity. These characteristics give an individual inherent value, and this value entitles the bearer to certain inalienable rights, especially the right to be treated as an end in itself, and never merely as a means to human ends.
The environmental community has not embraced animal rights; in fact, the two groups have often been at odds. A rights approach focused exclusively on animals does not cover all the entities such as ecosystems that many environmentalists feel ought to be considered morally. Yet a rights approach that would satisfy environmentalists by encompassing both living and nonliving entities may render the concept of rights philosophically and practically meaningless. Regan accuses environmentalists of environmental fascism, insofar as they advocate the protection of species and ecosystems at the expense of individual animals. Most animal rightists advocate the protection of ecosystems only as necessary to protect individual animals, and assign no more value to the individual members of a highly endangered species than to those of a common or domesticated species. Thus, because of its focus on the individual, animal rights can offer no realistic plan for managing natural systems or for protecting ecosystem health, and may at times hinder the efforts of resource managers to effectively address these issues.
For most animal activists, the practical implications of the rights view are clear and uncompromising. The rights view holds that all animal research, factory farming, and commercial or sport hunting and trapping should be abolished. This change of moral status necessitates a fundamental change in contemporary Western moral attitudes towards animals, for it requires humans to treat animals as inherently valuable beings with lives and interests independent of human needs and wants. While this change is not likely to occur in the near future, the efforts of animal rights advocates may ensure that wholesale slaughter of these creatures for unnecessary reasons that is no longer routinely the case, and that when such sacrifice is found to be necessary, it is accompanied by moral deliberation.
Resources
Books
Hargrove, E. C. The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate. New York: SUNY Press, 1992.
Regan, T. The Case For Animal Rights. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
——, and P. Singer. Animal Rights and Human Obligations. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.
Singer, P. Animal Liberation. New York: Avon Books, 1975.
Zimmerman, M. E., et al, eds. Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights To Radical Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993.
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