More than Life: Human Dignity and the Problem of Rights

Revista Brasileira de Direito Animal, 2017

The idea that animals are not be made to suffer has a long tradition in human history, but the idea that animals have actual rights conflict with the interests of people is fairly new and controversial. Among the contemporary perspectives, the Martha

2015

A frequented instance of the recent discourse on the animal rights is the topic of bull fi ghts. Th e aim of my contribution is to off er an analysis of a similar debate on bull fi ghts one hundred years ago, in Budapest. In the beginning of the 20th century several “road shows of Spanish toreros” had been organized in Central Europe, off ering an opportunity to meet the new needs of mass entertainment and the idea of animal rights. By my analysis, the argumentation for animal rights in these debates was based on an analogy between the “dignity of the animal beings” and he “dignity of the human beings”, rooted in a naturalised anthropology of the late Continental positivism. At the end of my paper, I will mention a parallelism between this old philosophical background and the new concept of embodied mind.

2021

Article published in the Michigan State International Law Review.

Religion and Public Policy: Human Rights, Conflict, and Ethics, edited by Sumner B. Twiss, Marian Gh. Simion, Rodney L. Petersen, 2015

I draw upon the work of David Little in this essay and contend that insofar as his "logic of pain" grounds a conception of universal human rights, so it can be extended to ground a conception of nonhuman animal rights. Note: this chapter appears in a festschrift honoring David Little

Focus: Tierversuche / experimenTaTion animale / animal experimenTaTion suggested the extension of the original plebiscite's proposal for protecting human dignity; usually commissions draw narrower limits than plebiscites suggest. But in this case, they were convinced that human dignity could only be protected in the fields of biomedical technologies by taking into account basic research on animals, plants and microorganisms, too. The fact that biological unity of living entities enables the transfer of scientific methods and data between plants, animals and human beings challenged the legislator to take a biocentric perspective. With this background, in May 1992, the term «Würde der Kreatur» found its way into Art. 24novies Paragraph 3 SFC (today Art. 120 SFC adopted in 1999) in the following section: «Art. 120 Non-human gene technology 1 Human beings and their environment shall be protected against the misuse of gene technology. 2 The Confederation shall legislate on the use of reproductive and genetic material from animals, plants and other organisms. In doing so, it shall take account of the dignity of living beings [«Würde der Kreatur»] as well as the safety of human beings, animals and the environment, and shall protect the genetic diversity of animal and plant species.» 2 This citation from the English translation of Art. 24novies Paragraph 3 // Art. 120 SFC from the governmental homepage leads into the focus of this paper. A lthough it says that «English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation. This translation is provided for information purposes only and has no l egal force» 3 , it remarkably interprets «Würde der Kreatur» as «dignity of living beings». Obviously, the governmental translator wanted to avoid the religious term «creature». We will have to come back to this point. In the meantime, I prefer to use the original German term «Würde der Kreatur» in order to prevent premature judgments before having developed the problems-not only with regard to the word «creature», 4

European Journal of Sustainable Development, 2018

The concept of "right" differs from country to country in terms of its limitations; however, there are several rights which have the characteristics of immunity all over the world. When assessed in this context, there are fundamental rights of which violation are considered to be crimes against humanity such as the right to life and the right not to be tortured. Nevertheless, it is seen that universal principles in crime have not become valid since the victim of violations in question are the animal but not the people. Considering this reality, approaches proposed to animals which form one of the weakest rings of life and their rights need to be examined within the context of the birth and development of the animal rights movement. But, it is still known that some countries and sectors should cover a lot of ground in protection of animal rights, although a tough struggle has been given in the historical process. In the matter of improving this though processes by which animal have had unrecoverable damage, policymakers and individuals have great responsibility. This article, which details the major areas in which animal rights have been violated, was written in order to raise awareness of the animal's living conditions, its impact on ecology and the sanctity of its right to life.

The concept of human dignity is widely used in contemporary ethics and law as a foundational criterion for moral reasoning. Nonetheless, the concept has recently received criticism from various quarters. Some of this criticism has come from representatives of the animal liberation movement. The concept of human dignity is accused of underpinning an ethics that is anthropocentric and speciesist. That is, human dignity is said to be used as the basis of an ultimately unjustifiable attribution of intrinsic moral worth only to human beings and to lead, consequently, to a detrimental prejudice against other species.

In the following paper I critically review and compare Robert Garner's recent rights-based approach to justice for animals with competing accounts by Martha Nussbaum focused on individual capabilities and species norms, and by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka focused on citizenship theory. What does it mean to say that the status and treatment of animals is an issue of justice and why must this feature in a theory of (global) justice that is meant to contribute to the solution of urgent practical problems? I take the question of whether animals place significant moral demands on us as settled in the affirmative. I argue that animal rights are a matter of justice that must be covered by any substantive theory of global justice. In light of my critical survey of these innovative new political theories of animal rights I ask how animals might be included in global justice theory and how their inclusion might significantly enrich and inform global politics.

Although the idea of dignity has always been applied to human beings and although its role is far from being uncontroversial, some recent works in animal ethics have tried to apply the idea of dignity to animals. The aim of this paper is to discuss critically whether these attempts are convincing and sensible. In order to assess these proposals, I put forward two formal conditions that any conception of dignity must meet (non-redundancy and normative determinacy) and outline three main approaches which might justify the application of dignity to animals: the species-based approach, moral individualism and the relational approach. Discussing in particular works by Martha Nussbaum and Michael Meyer I argue that no approach can convincingly justify the extension of dignity to animals because all fail to meet the formal conditions and do not provide an appropriate basis for animal dignity. I conclude by arguing that the recognition of the moral importance of animals and their defense should appeal to other normative concepts which are more appropriate than dignity.