ANIMAL RIGHTS? NO, HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY

Theories of rights are many and engaging in a detailed discussion of those theories is beyond the scope of this essay. However, here we shall start with the views of the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes, which informed attitudes towards animals well into the 20th century. Descartes based his rights arguments on cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am 1. Therefore consciousness and thought were central to his views on humans and animals. In part five of Discourse on Method published in 1637, he examined the nature of animals and how they were distinguished from humans. Mind, for Descartes, was not part of the physical universe; it was a separate substance and a link between humans and the mind of God. This link to God i.e. mind was unique to humans and non-humans had no mind and therefore no link to the mind of God. 2 His views suggest that the use of language is a sign of rationality and only beings that possess minds and souls are rational and argues that animals do not have immaterial minds or souls and are therefore not rational. It therefore follows that animals do not have sensations like pain, thirst or hunger. Animals for Descartes, were therefore nothing more than a "complex automata" and the squeals of pain, were mechanical reactions of the animal to external stimuli and not evidence of any sensation of pain. Humans on the other hand have minds or rational souls hence their capacity to use language and feel sensations like hunger, thirst and pain and this justifies their entitlement to holding rights. Furthermore, philosophers such as Locke and Grotius attached great emphasis on the ability of humans to reason, which for them justified their equal access to rights. However, the basis proposed by Descartes, Locke, and Grotius and defended by modern philosophers such as Georodie Duckler is being increasingly questioned. Questions are being asked about the moral standing of animals and whether their interests should also be considered. Amongst the commentators who have increasingly questioned the justification for focusing exclusively on human interests to the exclusion of all other species is Peter Singer who has attacked the basis of the theories of natural law. Singer is an advocate of utilitarianism and in Animal Liberation Movement, he refers to the proposals of equality of consideration by many philosophers, but points to their failure to recognize that this principle also applies to members of other species and not only humans. 3

Between the Species: An Online Journal for the Study of Philosophy and Animals, 1993

Published on Medium, 2019

Right from the 70s that environmental ethics gained its academic status, there had been two predominant contrary modes of thinking about the environment; viz: on the one hand, what obligations and responsibilities do humans have towards the environment in order to ensure the well-being of humans inhabiting it? And on the other hand, what moral obligations do humans have towards environmental entities themselves? This ideological division can be captured as a fight between anthropocentric environmentalists and their 'extensionist' counterparts. With regard to the ideological divides between the cohorts of anthropocentrism and extensionism therefore, and in particular response to the issue on whether humans have moral obligations to nature and non-human living beings, I argue that humans have ‘moral obligations’ only to beings in their own moral community (i.e. humans), and are required to extend ‘moral empathy’ to beings in other moral communities. The separation between ‘moral obligation’ and ‘moral empathy’ here was established by challenging two age-long views in environmental ethics; viz: that only humans have intrinsic worth, and that all intrinsically worthy beings demand equal moral worship.

A number of theories have been put forward from the days of the pre-Socratic philosophers through modern times attempting to determine how the relationship between the animal species and the human species ought to function in regards to how humans treat animals. These theories have generated numerous ideas, but often rely on claims that animals are living creatures and thus deserve a set of rights, or, that animals are an inferior species to humans but are living creatures capable of feeling pain and thus a superior human species has a duty to keep the pain inflicted upon animals at the lowest level possible it not eliminate it all together. In this essay, I will argue that neither a rights based approach nor a duty to the animals based approach to how humans ought to treat animals are correct, but that humans possess a duty to our humanity to treat animals in a way that is commensurate with how we treat fellow humans. I will distinguish the difference between animals and humans regarding each set of species capabilities of performing moral actions and explain why these differences disqualify animals from being owed a set of inherent rights. I will then offer a thought experiment, "how we treat non-moral agents" to show how even without providing creatures capable of moral actions a set of inherent rights humans still have a duty to ensure animals are not mistreated. This duty will challenge the idea that we have a duty to animals for animal's sake, and I will show why a duty to animals for humans will still allow for animals to be treated in ways humans would not wish upon other humans. I will then put forward my theory on why humans owe it to humanity to treat animals with a basic respect.

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 2020

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2013

Broadview Press, 2009

Can animals be regarded as part of the moral community? To what extent, if at all, do they have moral rights? Are we wrong to eat them, hunt them, or use them for scientific research? Can animal liberation be squared with the environmental movement? Taylor traces the background of these debates from Aristotle to Darwin and sets out the views of numerous contemporary philosophers – including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Anne Warren, J. Baird Callicott, and Martha Nussbaum – with ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to eco-feminism. The new edition also includes provocative quotations from some of the major writers in the field. As the final chapter insists, animal ethics is more than just an “academic” question: it is intimately connected both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to pressing current issues such as food shortages, environmental degradation, and climate change.

The emergence of an ecological consciousness is not in itself enough to resolve the issue of our treatment of non-human creatures. An ethical principle of a non-exploitative, sustainable civilization is the right of all sentient beings to exercise their natural powers in pursuit of their flourishing as individuals. To this end, this essay articulates the “vital-needs rights view” as a philosophical basis for reconciling animal rights with the satisfaction of human vital needs. The vital-needs rights view supports a defensible environmental ethic. Only by ascribing rights to sentient animals can an environmental ethic avoid an unacceptable degree of anthropocentrism. This is because only a rights-based environmental ethic can prohibit humans from significantly interfering with sentient animals where human vital needs are not at stake. Further, a rights view that permits significant interference where this is required for the satisfaction of human vital needs avoids problems that would otherwise plague a rights view. This rights-based environmental ethic suggests an alliance of animal rights with ecofeminism and with deep ecology, and necessitates an understanding of the connections among vital needs, capitalism, and environmental degradation.

One of the key moments in Being and Nothingness (1943) comes early when Sartre describes waiting for his friend Pierre to show up at the café where he is seated. Sartre is in the process of describing an account of "absence," a subsidiary aspect of his greater inquiry into the problem of nothingness: what it is, what it isn't, how to account for it, how to give it meaning, and so on. In the hands of Sartre, not to mention Heidegger, the metaphysical problem of nothingness (as well as absence, lack, silence, negation, death,…) takes on a decidedly existential and phenomenological bent. Pierre's absence is tangible throughout the café, but nowhere particularly evident. What if this approach to absence and nothingness, which is admittedly humanistic and anthropocentric at its origin, is reconceived with respect to our thought about species extinction? In this paper I consider the plights of endangered species and species extinction -plights that are increasingly prevalent, shockingly so, within our Anthropocenic era -from an existential and phenomenological point of view. To do so I draw intermittently from Sartre, Blanchot, Heidegger, and Levinas, in order to begin formulating a condition that sees the shared and entangled lives of human and nonhuman animals, to say nothing of plants as well, as being towards extinction. Rather than the singular and supposedly unique human condition of Heidegger's being-towards-death, what might have we to learn from a life condition that sees us all as being-towards-extinction? Une approche antispéciste des droits des animaux / An Antispeciest Approach to Fundamental Rights Résumé: Partant des grands principes de justice (le principe d'égalité voulant que les cas similaires soient traités de manière similaire; la notion de droit fondamental, qui repose sur celle d'intérêt; puis le principe de l'égale considération des intérêts auquel mène le principe d'égalité), je soutiens la nécessité morale d'octroyer aux êtres sensibles nonhumains les droits juridiques les plus fondamentaux : (1) le droit à l'intégrité physique, (2) le droit à la vie et (3) le droit à la liberté. (1) De nombreux animaux nonhumains sont des êtres sensibles et tous les êtres sensibles ont, par définition, intérêt à ne pas souffrir. Pour cette raison, ils devraient jouir du droit à l'intégrité physique.